the blog quebecois

Mark Steyn's losing it, losing it, I tell you. This could be the opportunity I've been waiting for
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I just got the chance today to read some pieces I downloaded a couple of weeks ago, and I saw this in The Washington Times from August 11 [link seems to have expired]:

Because I'm an adopted New Hampshirite, people keep asking me what I think about the gay bishop. Once upon a time, the most famous symbol of Vermont manhood was the Old Man of the Mountain, the Great Stone Face, whose profile God and nature had etched onto the cliffs high above Franconia Notch in the White Mountains. But, after centuries of keeping a watchful eye on us, he came crashing down in an almighty rock slide a couple of months back. So now the most celebrated symbol of Granite State manhood is the Great Gay Face, the Rev. Gene Robinson.

Right. Now what's wrong with the above paragraph? (Apart from the puzzling reference to Vermont -- as far as I know, the Old Man of the Mountain, the good Rev., and the Granite State appellation all belong to New Hampshire. Steyn's too smart to make that kind of mistake, so I'll blame it on some copy editor somewhere down the line.)

Incredibly, Steyn missed a chance to deploy one of his patented puns! Incroyable!

So as a public service I will repair this oversight:

Once upon a time, the most famous symbol of Vermont manhood was the Old Man of the Mountain, the Great Stone Face . . . So now the most celebrated symbol of Granite State manhood is the Old Man of the [drum roll] . . . Mountin'

[rim shot]

Bwhahahahahah!

Oh, man. Sometimes I just slay me!

Well, I thought it was funny, anyway.

I was going to poke fun at this ridiculous Eric Margolis column, but Bob at Let it Bleed beat me to the punch. Good thing, too, because I'm seriously pressed for time today. So go read it already.

I like to start the week off with a nice story that renews your faith in humanity and puts a chuckle in your throat and a spring in your step.

But I couldn't find one, so this will have to do:

A REPORTER sent to do a story about a baby squirrel stood on the fluffy creature by mistake and killed it.

Inka Blumensaat wanted to tell how a pet cat had saved the orphaned squirrel by adopting it as her own.

But the friendly rodent jumped on her leg as she filmed her report and she panicked and trampled it underfoot,breaking its neck.

Heike Reher, whose cat adopted the squirrel in Lubeck, Germany, said: 'The reporter started leaping about like a mad woman. She squashed the squirrel completely."

Via A Welsh View

I actually did a double-take when I ran across this headline at Bloomberg.com:

Specter Urges Delay in Replacement of O'Connor at Supreme Court

I could explain why it struck me as funny, but then you would be laughing at me, not with me.

(I've really got to come up with some shortened title for these. Acronym? NYWBSOTC?)

The BBC:

The BBC News website's World Affairs correspondent, Paul Reynolds, says the survey shows a degree of optimism at variance with the usual depiction of the country as one in total chaos.

The findings are more in line with the kind of arguments currently being deployed by US President George W Bush, he says.

However, our correspondent adds that critics will claim that the survey proves little beyond showing how resilient Iraqis are at a local level - and that it reveals enough important exceptions to the rosy assessment, especially in the centre of the country, to indicate serious dissatisfaction.

Interviewers found that 71% of those questioned said things were currently very or quite good in their personal lives, while 29% found their lives very or quite bad.

When asked whether their lives would improve in the coming year, 64% said things would be better and 12% said they expected things to be worse.

However, Iraqis appear to have a more negative view of the overall situation in their country, with 53% answering that the situation is bad, and 44% saying it is good.

But they were more hopeful for the future - 69% expect Iraq to improve, while 11% say it will worsen.

In all, 1,711 Iraqis were interviewed throughout the country in October and November 2005.

When asked to choose a priority for the new government due to be formed after this week's elections, 57% wanted to focus on restoring public security.

Removing US-led forces from Iraq came second with 10%, while rebuilding the country's infrastructure was third.

I don't know much about the internal politics of the BBC, but it seems that its coverage on Iraq has become more balanced in recent months. This story has the usual qualifiers and hedging and "experts say" but there's no denying it's substantially positive.

Look at those last numbers -- 57% wanting greater security; 10% insisting the Americans leave. That barely qualifies as random statistical noise; but be assured the CBC, which sees incipient civil war in every carbomb, every noxious minor cleric, will never mention it.

I ran across this piece by Peggy Noonan the other day and meant to link to it, but other stuff came up and I forgot about it. Today I was reading Kathy Shaidle's blog. She'd seen the column too, and the same paragraph had caught her eye:

But one senses the people who run the Times now are not so much living as re-enacting. They're lost on the big new playing field of American media, and they're reenacting their great moments--the Pentagon papers, the Watergate days. They're locked in a pose: We speak truth to (bad Republican) power. Frank Rich is running around with his antiwar screeds as if it's 1968 and he's an idealist with a beard, as opposed to what he is, a guy who if he pierced his ears gravy would come out.

I'm not exactly sure what she means by that, except maybe that Frank Rich is a meathead.

Whatever. It made me laugh out loud. The lady can certainly turn a phrase.

Ezra Levant:

Maria Minna called on [Wajid] Khan to resign, calling Khan's appointment a "slick, sick, calculated move" by Harper, an assessment shared by Hedy Fry. Minna worries that if Khan is allowed to attend Liberal caucus meetings, he might be a spy for Harper.

"How can I express myself on Lebanon when somebody preparing a report for Stephen Harper is listening in on what I have to say?" There's no evidence Harper, with the entire foreign policy bureaucracy at his fingertips, is aching to find out what the brain trust of Minna and Fry have to say on the complex subject of the Middle East, but let the woman have her conceit.

there are some things you can`t cover up with lipstick and powder
i thought i heard you mention my name
can`t you talk any louder

elvis costello

Oh, this is hilarious.

Newsbusters provides a transcript.

Via small dead animals

The CBC's gone off the deep end. They've actually put out a transcript of it. I guess they're proud of their efforts. They shouldn't be.

Last night's Sunday spent over half its broadcast -- at least 30 minutes -- airing a sympathetic and utterly credulous report on 9/11 conspiracy theorists.

The majority of it was spent interviewing the likes of Dylan Avery, responsible for Loose Change, and David Ray Griffin, who brought his expertise in theology to the matter. If watching Evan Solomon give these characters a warm tongue-bath strikes you as nauseating, fear not: Solomon's cynical instincts were in fine form when talking to Lee Hamilton, co-chair of the 9/11 Commission:

Hamilton: Look, you�ve obviously gone through the report with a fine-toothed comb, you're raising a lot of questions - I can do the same thing...

Solomon: Yeah..

Hamilton: ..all I want from you is evidence. You�re just citing a lot of things, without any evidence to back them up, as far as I can see.

Solomon: No, I'm just asking why they weren't -

Hamilton: I don�t know the answer to your question.

Solomon: I guess part of the reason is..

Hamilton: I cannot answer every question with regard to 9/11. I can answer a good many of them, but I can't answer them all.

Solomon: I guess, Mr. Hamilton, I don�t think anyone expects you to have all the answers...

Hamilton: Well, you apparently do, because you have asked me questions of enormous detail from a great variety of sources. You want me to answer them all - I can�t do it.

Hamilton was trying to point out to Solomon that investigating conspiracy theories was not the Commission's mandate; it was to establish a timeline for the attacks and evaluate the responses from government agencies. He might as well have been speaking to a wall.

There was one other interview, a long and interesting one, with Jim Meigs, the editor-in-chief of Popular Mechanics, which put out an article (recently expanded into a book) that comprehensively rebuts the conspiracy-mongers point-by-point.

Meigs appeared, though, only in three or four short segments of the program. I don't seem to recall this section making it to air:

And if you're doing a responsible report on this, you really need to challenge the Loose Change film-makers on their selective use of source material, and go back and check the sources for every claim they make, and talk to the witnesses. What we did again and again in this book is go back and talk to people whose original interview are quoted over and over again by conspiracy theorists. Every single one of them told us their quotes were taken out of context, that was not what they said, not what they meant. And they're heartsick at seeing their words being misused to mean something directly opposite of what their intention was at the time.

Because I suspect the interview won't survive for long on the CBC's website, I've copied it in full and reprinted it in the extended entry.

I do have one question, apparently unthought of by the tinfoil-hat brigade and their enablers in the media: Do you really think that a government both ruthless and brazen enough to orchestrate the murder of thousands of its citizens in broad daylight would hesitate for an instant to snuff out inconvenient craphounds like yourselves?

Better get an intern to start your car in the mornings, Solomon.

Reuters:

Pham Xuan An, a Vietnamese spy who worked for Western news media in Saigon during the U.S. war in Vietnam, died on Wednesday after a long illness, a government official said. He was 78.

"He died this morning," said the official by telephone in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, where An had been admitted to a military hospital with emphysema.

An was considered the dean of Vietnamese journalists working for Western news media while also doubling as an undercover agent for communist North Vietnam. He worked for Reuters in the 1960s, with the New York Herald and the Christian Science Monitor.

He was Time magazine's last reporter in Vietnam when the communists took Saigon on April 29, 1975 from the U.S.-backed South Vietnam government. [emphasis added]

plus c'est la meme chose.

Film at 11.

Usually the trickiest part of writing a good news story is its opening sentence, which should contain as much information as possible while engaging the reader's attention:

The most important structural element of a story is the lede -- namely contained in the story's first sentence. Lede (pronounced /lid/) is a traditional spelling, from the archaic English[1], used to avoid confusion with the printing press type formerly made from lead, or the typographical term "leading".[2] The lede is usually the first sentence, or in some cases the first two sentences, and is ideally 20-25 words in length. This makes writing a lede an optimization problem, in which the goal is to articulate the most encompassing and interesting statement that a writer can make in one sentence, given the material with which he or she has to work.

Then again, sometimes the story just drops in your lap:

A jazz musician was injured Friday after jumping from a burning motor home driven by a one-time roller skating stripper from Lodi.

Via Dave Barry

Christian Science Monitor:

By now, almost everyone in America has heard of Jena, La., because they've all heard the story of the "Jena 6." White students hanging nooses barely punished, a schoolyard fight, excessive punishment for the six black attackers, racist local officials, public outrage and protests - the outside media made sure everyone knew the basics.

There's just one problem: The media got most of the basics wrong. In fact, I have never before witnessed such a disgrace in professional journalism. Myths replaced facts, and journalists abdicated their solemn duty to investigate every claim because they were seduced by a powerfully appealing but false narrative of racial injustice.

A report by a local journalist that will further erode your trust in the MSM. If you had any left, that is.

The Brevard County doctor who was arrested for groping a woman while dressed as Captain America with a burrito in his pants will not go to jail.

You gotta admit, the burrito was an inspired touch. Still, it comes in second to this intriguing, sex-and-violence-packed opening from early 2007:

A jazz musician was injured Friday after jumping from a burning motor home driven by a one-time roller skating stripper from Lodi.

The link is still good, if you want to know . . . the rest of the story.

Jonathan Kay:

Mallick was a smart hire for the Star. Not only is is she getting people talking, she’s also a high-profile pick-up for a newspaper obsessed with "diversity." (Earlier this month, Star public editor Kathy English wrote a cringingly politically correct article lamenting all the "old white men" in the newsroom. "Ensuring that the Star reflects Toronto’s diversity is the responsibility of the entire newsroom," she wrote. "It is achieved in the sources we cite, the people we photograph and the way we play the news.") Yet, I can’t help but wonder how long it will be before Star writers get bored with the three, interrelated obsessions that infuse almost all of Mallick’s writing: (1) feminist self-pity; (2) a curdled hatred of the men (always white, often poor and unlettered) who allegedly scheme to oppress women; and (3) a creepy fascination with male sexual dysfunction, which she imagines to be the cause of everyone’s sorrow, metaphorically or otherwise.

So once again, it is left to a humble blogger to ask the question on everyone's (except for this humble blogger's. I can't speak for all of you sickos, though) mind: The pearls. What's with the goddamned pearls? Does she wear those things everywhere?

In the shower? On the toilet?

While doin' the (shudder) nasty? (Which summons up an equally unpleasant thought -- with whom? Who is the unfortunate tasked with servicing the Mallickosaur?

Judging by her writing, she seems quite lustfully enamoured with some poor sod named Rob Ford. If anyone can get a message to him, it should be: "Flee, Rob! Flee!")

Instead of dwelling on this image, let me propose a more congenial theory: As Mallick seems to have had her pearl fetish from birth, if not before, it may well be that she is simply paying homage to the graceful Kayan (known also as Padaung) women of Thailand. Like them, her neck muscles have atrophied from disuse; should the necklaces be suddenly removed, her massive ('cause it has so many words in it) skull would flop around uncontrollably, possibly incurring a fatal cervical injury in the process.

You see what can happen when we go to "Our Happy Place"?

Glad to see that journalists the world over are living up to their usual lofty standards:

On a trade mission to Brazil this week, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper reportedly engaged in some undiplomatic behavior, according to a report in Brazilian newspaper Folha.

Though diplomats in both countries denied the report, the article started conversations across North and South America.

Folha reported that Brazilian president Dilma Rouseff asked official speeches and toasts to take place after a lunch with Harper Monday. Harper, however, reportedly had a different idea. He wanted the speeches to happen before lunch, and Folha says he locked himself in the private bathroom of the foreign affairs minister until he got his way.

Harper's officials denied the report, calling it “ridiculous tabloid journalism.”

The original article, through Google's rather fractured translation:

The Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, has caused constraints in Brazilian diplomacy on Monday, demanding a change in the ceremony and only go to the salon for lunch with the President after Rousseff met.

The speeches and toasts are common in this type of event can be both before and after lunch. Dilma prefers it that later, but Harper made sure they were done before the guests start eating at the meeting yesterday. He did not explain why.

He had already angered aides and diplomats at the presidential palace, telling reporters that Canadians speak there, breaking the rule that such interviews always occur in the Foreign Ministry.

As the Brazilian side denied the request, Harper has reached the Foreign Ministry, for lunch, showing bad temper and demanding the reversal of the freebies. Then locked himself in a private Minister Antonio Patriota, while waiting for an answer.

Stunned, Brazilian diplomats did not know what to do if you meet a desire of the Brazilian President or surrendered to the whim of the Canadian visitors.

Only when we have confirmed that he would be met is that Harper went to Brasilia room where the banquet took place, with palm heart salad, guinea hen and "pineapple delight". Toasts are made with wines.

Although the Canadian Embassy to say surprised by this release, confirmed the story with Sheet diplomats who were at lunch and in solidarity with the grief of the ceremonial colleagues to resolve the impasse.

The lunch was scheduled for 13h, and the agenda of the next president was the possession of former Foreign Minister Celso Amorim as new defense minister, who was back in the highlands.

Yep. These ladies have got a bright, bright future with the CBC.

Some vapid metrosexual (it isn't clear whether it's a he or a she; but it's definitely 100% dick) named Alex (ironically) Manley, has its eye on Heather Mallick's job:

The whole ‘Movember’ thing is cute and all, but can we stop and be real about it for a second? Movember is a movement to celebrate North American guys not practicing basic facial hygiene for a month in order to raise money towards saving a group of extremely privileged people—themselves.

Yes, if Movember was to raise money for people in third-world countries, for illiterate people, or homeless people, or for anything but what it is—which is privileged guys pretending they have it as hard as people with real problems—then it might come close to approaching something vaguely resembling worthwhile.

You'll be happy to hear that it's undergoing the equivalent of a Roto-Rooter rectal exam in the comments.

Via Stephen Taylor

It felt like someone had thrown a lit match in there. I began hopping around and breathing in the rapid, short puffs I'd learned in birth classes, so long ago, before I realized I didn't need to breathe like that if I took the epidural.

I could really use a frikkin epidural right now.

The burning didn't let up. How long was I supposed to leave it there?!

I waited. And waited. If this was supposed to get me in the mood, it wasn't working. It did get me lying down though, because both standing and sitting proved to be excruciating.

Gradually I felt... what? A small buzz? Certainly a definite, if slight, lightheadedness. Maybe it was the onset of toxic shock syndrome. Or intoxicated shock syndrome...?

I normally don't link to the Huffington Post, but I'll have to make an exception for Danielle Crittenden's brave experiment.

It's science, dammit!

Ooh, sounds even worse than Tar Sands, doesn't it?

Fear not, it's only my attempt at rebranding Thomas Mulcair by plugging his name into Wordsmith.org's Internet Anagram Server. I found these in the first thousand listed, but I really wasn't looking too hard:

Claim Sham Tour
Charisma Moult
Atlas Chromium
Macho Muralist
Samarium Cloth
A Clam Humorist
Charisma Lot Um
Racial Hums Tom
Casual Moth Rim
Aha Commit Slur
Marital Scum Oh
Sharia Cult Mom
Salami Chum Rot
Amoral Cum Shit
Imam Roach Lust
Imam Lotus Arch

There's another 62,000 of them, so there might be a real zinger buried in there if you'd care to go looking.

Is this from The Star or . . . The Onion?

The Star and the Mayor have a long-running feud. And the Mayor has had security incidents at his home before, including one that led to an arrest. There have been assorted death threats. With all of that in mind, the Star probably should have reconsidered its plan to send a reporter, at night, to walk the fence of the Mayor’s private home. The telling point here isn’t that the Mayor blew a gasket — he does that sometimes — but that it was his neighbour who saw the reporter taking photos and raised the alarm. The Toronto Star might be able to convince people that the Mayor lost his cool and overreacted. But the fact that other people, who aren’t public figures and aren’t locked in a feud with their paper, also found the reporter’s presence disturbing is something that the Star should consider. It’s unlikely they’re the mood to now, having battened down all the hatches, but going forward, guys — if old men in their homes see your reporter and are alarmed by his presence, that might be a sign you’re being a tad aggressive.

I guess this is what passes for news these days. I'm waiting for the 13-part blockbuster series on the recarpeting of his rumpus room. Should be good for a few National Newspaper Awards, at the least.

The Gazette apologizes for inappropriate comments posted on Twitter Thursday night by one of its reporters. The Gazette’s social media policy clearly states that all journalists should conduct themselves in a manner that does not compromise themselves, their colleagues or the newspaper.

The Gazette takes all breaches of ethics very seriously.

Hey, it's not his fault. He's already burned out three of those no!no! depilators.

There might be hope for the future in chemotherapy. I've heard that it just melts that excess body hair away.

It's a good thing she doesn't have a vicious streak. Unlike some people we could mention.

Via BC Blue

This was featured on the front page today.

National Post:

It took just a handful of nuts to pry wide open discussion about the GOP’s so-called problem with race at this week’s Republican National Convention.

Outrage, mainly from Democrats and liberal-leaning media outlets, flowed forth after two unruly convention goers tossed peanuts at a black CNN camerawoman during the pageantry and jeered, “This is how we feed animals.”

Mitt Romney’s team took pains to vehemently denounce it telling the National Post, “The incident was extremely inappropriate, it was ugly and despicable and has no place whatsoever within the Republican party and should not be a part of our political discourse.”

So cut-and pasteth our journalette, who finds it slots neatly into her world view. And where did it come from?

PJMedia:

Two incidents happened yesterday at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida:

1. Mia Love, an African-American Republican woman, gave a speech and received loud cheers and a standing ovation from almost every single one of the thousands of white Republicans in attendance.

2. Two bozos, of unknown identity, “threw peanuts” at an African-American woman camera operator for CNN, while purportedly saying “This is how we feed animals,” and were ejected from the convention.

Furthermore, there is video proof that the first incident (the standing ovation) happened; while the only evidence we have for the damning details of the second purported incident (at least as of the time of this writing) is the word of a partisan left-wing blog.

Just think of it: Thousands of people there, with thousands of cameras and smart phones, and nobody thought to record it for posterity, not even the alleged "camera operator." What are the odds?

Andrew Breitbart offered to donate $100,000 to the United Negro College Fund for anyone who could provide video or audio evidence of similar slurs directed at members of the Congressional Black Caucus who decided to crash a (Tea Party?) demonstation in Washington about a year and a half ago. The offer still stands, as far as I know.

Shame on the National Post for printing this. Even the CBC had the sense to leave it to one of their bloggers (about midway down the page.)

Mark Steyn:

The author Hedegaard is one of the few Danes who is a certified racist, as he some years ago was fined by a High Court for having stated in a blog interview that Muslim fathers rape their children. He was later acquitted by the Supreme Court.

That last sentence negates the ones above. There is no conviction for "racism": Both it and the fine were quashed, reversed, overturned, kicked into the garbage can by the supreme court. The prosecution was outrageous, and some sense of what Denmark's most eminent jurists made of it can be deduced from their decision to revoke his conviction 7–0. What sort of reporter writes that "the author Hedegaard is one of the few Danes who is a certified racist" ("papper på att han var rasist")? Even in an ever more absurdly over-credentialed world, the Danish state is not yet handing out certificates for racism. Whatever a "certified racist" is, Lars remains, as far as the Danish legal system is concerned, fully uncertified.

I have read the "papper på att han var rasist" line in a couple of dozen Swedish media outlets now without being able to find a name appended to the piece: It's just an un-bylined wire story that appeared everywhere. But I wonder about the furtive anonymous man who wrote it, and the agency managers who sent it out to their clients, and the editors who read it through and printed it unchanged. I would wager that all of them are considerably younger than Lars, and so marinated in the state ideology that they can barely comprehend that free societies should not have a state ideology. And so what matters to them about this story is not that in liberal, progressive Scandinavia writers are threatened with death but that writers should not be holding these opinions in the first place.

If this is how it goes when Sweden's Muslim population is 5 percent, what will it be like when it's 10 or 15? "You can't live your life that way," Lars told Douglas Murray in The Spectator. "If every time you sit down to your computer to write something you have this idea in the back of your head, 'I may be killed if I write this,' then of course you won't be as good as you could be. You've got to distance yourself from fear if you want to be a true writer."

Last year at the European Parliament, I had the honor of presenting Lars with a "Defender of Freedom" award, and noted that journalists congratulate themselves on their "courage" endlessly, far more often than soldiers or firemen do. But on the rare occasions they're actually called upon to show any, they shrink and shrivel: "All your liberal friends who went to the PEN dinners and bored the pants off you with that bit of apocryphal Voltaire — 'I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it' — all fall utterly silent. C'mon, nobody's asking you to defend anyone to the death. A mildly principled tweet would do. A tepidly supportive fax."

But no. Too much to ask.

As I said, Lars is 70. But I would rather have him fighting my corner than the young, self-neutered eunuch-men of a cowed media, watching the lights go out on free speech and slipping easily and painlessly into the accomplices of thuggery.