Mark Steyn writes a brilliant piece on the unjust prosecution of Lord Black. Lord Black probably would have been better off making a deal, but he sought justice. Something the American justice systems seems to often lack these days.
A year or so back, in the lobby of Fox News, I was approached by a gentleman who introduced himself as a member of Conrad Black’s legal team. That doesn’t narrow it down very much. There’ve been so many of them over the years: Canadian, American, young, old, rough and ready, bespoke and urbane, incompetent and . . . well, marginally less incompetent. “Good news,” this one told me. “We’re really pleased with the way things are going on the Supreme Court appeal.”
“That’s great,” I said, forcing a smile and feeling the way the...
So it seems everything that conservatives were saying about bo is true. He is mediocre at best. he is unable to manage. he is a pie in the sky liberal. Unfortunately for bo, even liberals are having the scales fall from their eyes.
I believe it was Jean Giraudoux who first said, "Only the mediocre are always at their best."
Barack Obama was supposed to be the best, the very best, and yet he is always, reliably, consistently mediocre.
His speech on oil was no better or worse than his speech on race. Yet the Obammyboppers who once squealed with delight are weary of last year's boy band.
At the end of the big Oval Office address, Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews and the rest of the MSNBC gang jeered the president.
For a bewildered Obama, it must have felt like his Ceausescu balcony...
In a political era in which many insist that left-wing feminist groups must be funded because equality must be promoted, it may be a fair question to ask:How, precisely, does one measure women's equality.Part two of The Spartans may provide a clue.Comparing the treatment of women in Athens to the treatment of women in Sparta with the treatment of women in comparatively liberal and democratic Athens, the film reveals that women in Sparta were fed the same food as men, were educated, allowed to participate in sports and politics, and own property. In Athens, women were expected to remain largely invisible.This transformed Spartan women into highly-desired sex objects among other Greek men. Athenean women didn't seem to compare to Spartan women.But at the very heart of the superior...
Mark Steyn and Ezra once agin expose Canad's greatest supporter of state censorship, bernie farber. It's time for the Jewish community to put farber out to pasture and consolidate his organization into another usually more sane voice like B'nai Brith. farber is one of the key reasons that changes to section 13 of the thought censorship act have not been made. It;s time for that to end. Section 13.1 needs to be abolished. Indeed a good case can be mad in for Ezra's "Fire them all" when it comes to the hrc thought police.
Victim mentality
Wednesday, 12 May 2010
Yesterday in this space I noted the news that the Toronto Police now include in their official list of "hate crime" victim groups the category of "Nazi". I mostly played it for laughs ("Nazi is the new black"), since if you...
I agree with Mark Steyn, why can't they both lose? farber is one of the principal reason that section 13 of the thought police act has not been modified. It is great to watch Steyn shred him. farber is a danger to free speech in Canada and doesn't seem to be too familair with truth.
But, whether he reprinted it legally or illegally, he’s the publisher of everything I quoted. Ezra Levant, Canada’s great free speech warrior, likes to spell Bernie “Burnie”—i.e., as the most prominent supporter of Canadian state censorship, Mr. Farber is that perplexing paradox, a Jewish book burner. But in this case, “Burnie” is attempting retrospectively to burn his own book: the piece I cited is an unsigned editorial published under the CJC banner, atop a CJC assertion of copyright, with no...
In a bonus dispatch from the far side of the Blogging Iron Curtain, Robert Peter John Day leads the two most intellectually slavish Chickenwankers in shrieking and weeping over this.It's a letter to the editor suggesting that Mark Steyn be tapped to be Canada's next Governor General. It has Day's panties sufficiently in a bunch that he's calling for the National Post to "just die".First off, our three valiant Chickenwankers may be shocked to consider that, as opposed to an editorial position of the National Post, this is merely a letter to the editor.Letter. To. The. Editor.But the question of whether or not Mark Steyn should be Governor General is a little more interesting.CK, in particular, is rather candid about her views on the prospect. Steyn, it seems, couldn't represent Canadian...
Steyn has a lot to say about the environmentostalinists. All of it scathing.My favorite moment in the Climategate/Climaquiddick scandal currently roiling the "climate change" racket was Stuart Varney's interview on Fox News with the actor Ed Begley Jr., star of the 1980s medical drama "St Elsewhere" but latterly better known, as is the fashion with members of the thespian community, as an "activist." He's currently in a competition with Bill Nye ("the Science Guy") to see who can have the lowest "carbon footprint." Pistols at dawn would seem the quickest way of resolving that one, but presumably you couldn't get a reality series out of it. Anyway, Ed was relaxed about the mountain of documents recently leaked from Britain's Climate Research Unit, in which the world's leading...
Steyn agrees with me that this is probably an act of treason and jihad.A Traitor Not A Victim [Mark Steyn]Jules Crittenden on the killer within:[Major Hasan] probably deserves desertion, treason and terrorism charges if, as all indicators seem to very strongly suggest, he was engaged in jihad, from his violence-inciting, hateful rants about the Koran, his denunciation of the United States as “the aggressor” in arguments with fellow soldiers, to his shouts of “Allahu Akhbar,” to what they believe were his Internet defenses of suicide bombings, to his choice of targets, the Soldier Readiness Center at Fort Hood. If al-Qaeda is an amorphous enemy, an idea made situationally manifest by the will of its adherents, and he was in fact an adherent of its violent agenda, then he is the...
balloon boy and bo. Ever witty Mark Steyn in Maclean's.On the day America went Balloon Boy crazy, I chanced to be on the radio, appearing live coast to coast on The Hugh Hewitt Show. And, as the Balloon Boy was the hot breaking news, Hugh asked me about it. “I don’t know what to say,” I said, “except it’s one of those peculiar and potentially tragic and instantly horrifying combination of circumstances.” If I sound a bit vague, well, that’s the idea. I’d gotten the gist of what was happening a couple of minutes before I went on air, but these days I’m wary: almost any “human interest” story turns out to be interesting for an entirely different set of reasons from the initial ones—the shocking “hate crime” the victim turns out to have perpetrated on himself,...
Contentious choice between abolition and reformThe hot debate over Canada's Human Rights Commissions hasn't been particularly firey recently.That being said, if anyone can be expected to have a particularly strong opinion on the CHRC and its provincial counterparts, it's University of Calgary political scientist Barry Cooper.Cooper, whose published work -- both with and without his frequent collaborator, David Bercuson -- focuses on the politics of public virtue, seems to see the HRCs as the most utterly blatant embodiment of the embedded state. Consequently, he seems to find a great deal of affinity for the opponents of the HRCs:"For those who have never taken the time to read dry legal documents, consider that Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act declares that hate speech is...
Two of my favourite funny and insightful people. Oct 7 interview on Mark Steyn's new book, Lights out.Here is an older interview on Canadian healthcare....
I had the great honour to listen to two champions of freedom eviscerate the hrcs yesterday in Ottawa. I had a Chance to speak to both Ezra and Mark Steyn before the event. I told them of my encounter with Professor Moon on the weekend. They were both amused. I told Ezra he should debate Moon, as I told Moon he should debate Ezra. You must watch the video of the event courtesy of Mississuaga Matt.I am a bit optismitic that some of the opposition might be amenable to change. Joe Comartin asked the dynamic duo to come back and give their supporting documents. Though the opposition MPs were fairly hostile. Both Mark and Ezra told me after that they expected them to be much more hostile. One of the mps seems unaware he's a legis;ator/ he kept telling Ezra we have the Supreme Court ruling on...
Canada's too greatest champions of free speech will be testifying before a commons committee today ( Monday Oct 5, 2009 15:30-17:30). I am going to try and see it live. You can watch it on CPAC . You can see it here. It should be quite a show. I have seen both speak many times. They are passionate and very witty. Let's hope that this will help push HM Government into killing section 13.1!...
richard warman, jennifer lynch and the hrcs are now completely discredited. Section 13.1 needs to be abolished. The hrcs need to be abolished. Mark Steyn is right prosecutions under section 13.1 are dead. good.That’s the point: Marc Lemire is no threat to Canada. Whereas Jennifer Lynch, Chief Commissar of the CHRC, and her mob of statist hacks, social engineers and secret-agent fantasists are ultimately a very profound threat indeed. To survive as a free people, Canadians need the rough and tumble of honest public discourse. Instead, its “human rights” regime has, quite consciously, attempted to upgrade unfashionable opinions into illegal ones. When government bureaucrats forget they are not our rulers but our servants, that’s always a bigger problem than whatever “crisis”...
Mark Sten And Ezra Levant join my friend Wendy Sullivan on Brass Balls Radio. They are talking about the recent massive defeat for the hrc thought police. Click on the photo and download the podcast. Listen to three champions and a baby....
Mark Steyn pn the extreme left wing obamessiah....
Mark Steyn, eloquent as ever, uses STASIfer Lynch’s own words to define the offence committed by our beloved terrorist sympathizer in the Greater Toronto Area: Hateful words can harm. So if you write a piece for Maclean's quoting hateful words like "mosquito" and "sheep" you'll be investigated by three different "human rights" commissions. If you publish some anodyne cartoons in The Western Standard with accompanying hateful captions about "freedom of speech", Shirlene McGovern will haul you in for interrogation. If you're a stand-up comedian and you put down two drunk lesbian hecklers using hateful words like "drunk" and "lesbian", you'll......
In the West we have a little something we call “freedom of speech”. As a matter of fact, it’s not so trifle a thing after all, because it is one of the reasons why the West is what it is today. This freedom, as well as all other freedoms of a liberal and free society, has allowed us to evolve and live in the here and now, rather than in the Middle Ages. Limiting, stifling or hindering this right and freedom even in the slightest is nothing short of an attack on Western civilization – the kind that George Orwell......
This is a real head-scratcher. If those words had been written by the likes of Mark Steyn in one of his excellent, truth-telling books, or published in a magazine in Calgary, there’d be several applications before various provincial and the federal human rights commissions, filed by the targets of such scorn over “hurt feelings”. In his statements at the end of a murder trial for “honour killings”, Ontario Superior Court Justice Douglas Rutherford described the defendant, who had been found guilty, has having “a twisted sense of values” and clinging to a “perverted notion of honour and respect”. Let that......
Mark Steyn further exposes the pompous new naked emperor of the grits. I'm glad Steyn reminds us of he names of the poor victims of a despicable crime. If only we could forget iggy;s nameIt’s tempting to respond, “Oh, bugger off, you ridiculous poseur,” and pass on to something more rewarding, like Paris Hilton’s Twitter feed. But the sedating pretentiousness of Mr. Ignatieff’s prose style shouldn’t disguise the fact that this may be the most morally contemptible statement by a Canadian party leader since Confederation. (I’d be interested in alternative bids for that title, if you know of any. We may publish them as an anthology, although probably not a GG-award-winning one.)“Their father tried to take the sick little girls to his parents and never made it.” I wonder...
Here is a clip of Mark Steyn and Ezra on Milt Rosenberg's Show on WGN Radio. They are discussing freedom of speech. It was a great two hours. Unfortunately this is just a 20 minute clip. Something ed stelmach seems to not believe in....
Mark Steyn, the author of America Alone, which is required reading for Europeans (and Canadians, so that they can learn from Europe's mistakes), has come out with a new book: Lights Out. In 2007, the Canadian Islamic Congress brought three suits against Maclean's, Canada's oldest news weekly, for running an excerpt from Mark's bestselling book America Alone, plus other "flagrantly Islamophobic" columns by Steyn. A year later the CIC had lost all its cases and the flagrant Islamophobe had become a poster boy for a worldwide phenomenon - the increasing tension between Islam, on the one hand, and, on the......
His first piece in Maclean's in a while. Wonder when some progressive or jihadi apologist will try an hrc complaint? His first column expose the hatred of much of the environmentostalinist movement for children and themselves.Answer: motherhood and apple pie. If we didn’t have so much motherhood, we wouldn’t have all these people eating apple pies, manufactured in a plant in Guangdong and then shipped on some massive floating carbon footprint all the way to Price Chopper in Cedar Rapids. Motherhood is the root cause. As Mr. Kotler says:“You don’t need to ask what you need to do for the world. You already know.“Stop having children. It’s that easy.”It really is! So he’s calling for a five-year moratorium on having children, planet-wide. The Soviets had five-year plans but...
At first glimpse, it may seem that Mark Steyn and PZ Myers have very little in common.Mark Steyn is a cultural critic who routinely provokes Human Rights complaints and general outrage from the left side of the political spectrum.PZ Myers is a tenured biology professor and devout atheist who routinely provokes outrage from the right side of the political spectrum with his tirades against religion.Myers and Steyn couldn't seem more different. But as it turns out, these two individuals have more in common than the fact that they've attracted a similarly single-minded collection of zealous followers.As it turns out, each man has a very similar attitude toward Islam.Mark Steyn's stance on Islam has long been well known. He's an advocate of Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations theory....
As you have probably noticed, I have had a very Busy few days. I have yet to blog about my day at the Environmental Studies conference. I will have to do that later. Today was a day with Mark Steyn. As i told you yesterday I had already met Mark Steyn yetserday at the King Edward Hotel. Today Kathy , Wendy, Mike Brock and some new friends met up with Mark Steyn in the basement of Queen's Park. It was a jovial band of free speech believers and we were with a true friend of freedom.We all went to see Mark give a stellar performance in front of an Ontario legislative committee on the Ontario HRC.You can read his statement here. He was great answering the MPP Questions. The Tory MPPs get it. Especially MPP Lisa Mcleod( she is a great MPP). Unfortunately NDP MPP Cheri Denovo and the...
I attended the annual Accession day luncheon given by the Monarchist League of Canada. The guest of honour is one of my favourites, HM Minister of immigration Jason Kenney. It was a non partisan event so, I tried very hard to behave myself. I sat with HM Minister, who is a wonderful lunch companion. I also sat with several young people who are directors and supporters of the league. It was a wonderful afternoon. HM Minister gave a great speech noting his great work defending the Canadian Crown and Canadian values. The League summer intern Zach Scwartz gave a wonderful Loyal toast. I got to give a toast to the League. I pointed out that the Monarchy has out lasted Trudeau's prediction and wish that it would fade away by 4O years! I pointed out how effective the League had been in...
Mark Steyn explains how democratic pork spending is seen as a stimulus and bipartisan obamessiah politics means the GOP should be quiet.The more interviews Speaker Pelosi gives explaining how vital the STD industry is to restarting the U.S. economy, the more I find myself hearing “syphilis” every time she says “stimulus.” In late September, America was showing the first signs of “primary stimulus”—a few billion lesions popping up on the rarely glimpsed naughty bits of the economy: the subprime mortgage racket, the leverage kings. Now, the condition has metastasized in a mere four months into the advanced stages of “tertiary stimulus,” with trillions of hideous, ever more inflamed pustules sprouting in every nook and cranny as the central nervous system of the body...
This editorial appeared in the Calgary Herald ( h/tBlazing Catfur). The hrcs are backing off Maclean's and Mark Steyn, yet they are using their poisonous invective to impugn both. They have all but convicted with their words, while technically dismissing the complaints against Maclean's and Steyn. The hrc goal is clear. They want to put a chill on people who wish to discuss these matters. The hrcs are no part of the jihadi threat to Western Civilization. As Ezra says its time to Fire Them All. In the end, the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal disagreed. However, it also pontificated that Steyn's piece contained historical, religious and factual inaccuracies, relied on common Muslim stereotypes and tried to "rally public opinion by exaggeration and causing the reader to fear Muslims."So there....
The jihadi apologist el masry and his sock puppets have been defeated yet again by Mark Steyn and Maclean's. Unfortunately the rotting hrc corpse still survives to persecute another day. I am happy about the decision, but I would be happier with the abolition of section 13a. Here is reaction from the frontlines. You should all buy my friend Kathy Shaidle's book the Tyranny of Nice She explains how the hrc thought police works to destroy free speech in Canada....
Mark Steyn is back from his holidays and gives his opinion on the debate. He also thinks Governor Palin did pretty well.The problem was that it all sounded drearily senatorial. Mention any global crisis – civil war in Bosnia, genocide in Darfur, Russian aggression in Georgia, the lack of five-star restaurants in Wales – and Biden has been there, usually within the past two weeks, and always at public expense. What the American taxpayer gets for the Emir of Delaware's frequent-flyer miles is harder to discern. Biden was doing his best to turn in a decent karaoke version of Lloyd Bentsen, but, unfortunately, Palin declined to play Dan Quayle. That left Joe sounding like an ancient pol being generically vice-presidential. Sarah, at her best, sounded like the citizen-politician this...