I really like Lars Vilks, the much-pursued Mohammed cartoonist. I’ve had some good chat with him on Facebook, and I’d love to meet him. He’s coming to town, and on my birthday!

THIS SUNDAY: Oct 3, 2010 at 7:00 pm

Toronto Zionist Centre

*JDL* Program, THIS SUNDAY Oct 3rd @ 7:00pm will mark the 5th Anniversary of the Danish Cartoon Controversy

Please reserve your seat. Email to: toronto@ifpscanadaevents.com with your full name and full names of all those you wish to reserve a seat for. You will receive a confirmation email if we were able to reserve seats for you.

Sunday, October 3rd – Toronto http://www.ifpscanadaevents.com/toroct.html

For complete North America Program information http://www.ifpscanadaevents.com/

International Free Press Society (IFPS) Website: http://www.internationalfreepresssociety.org/

Unfortunately, it being my birthday, I plan to spend it in the Bed of Bliss™ with my gentleman and a pitcher of martinis. If last year taught me nothing else, it taught me not to make too many plans for my birthday. Very bad things happen.

So, sorry Lars. Hope you enjoy your stay.

… that Saddam Hussein was the supplier.

Think about it. Totally plausible.

A random list of things I’m pretty much sick of seeing, in no particular order. Except for the first one.

Dancing shows. Good God. So You Think You Can Dance, So You Think You Can Dance Canada, Dancing With The Stars… Go away. I am starting to understand where homosexuality comes from. I would actually prefer to be sodomized than see more dancing shows.

Monet umbrellas. Most people receive these as gifts (or as gift-with-purchase). Almost no one buys one for themselves, and if they do, they are boring and should be euthanized for the greater good. A Monet umbrella does not show that you have good taste in art - it shows that you have no imagination and hope that people think you’re highbrow, even though you are not.

Women who carry more than one purse. Seriously. Do you need a big tote, a small purse AND a gym bag? Personally, if it weren’t so uncomfortable, I’d stash my house keys in my vag and dispense with bags altogether. But if you can’t fit everything into a gym bag, you are carrying way too much shit. May I suggest a midget, to ferry your crap around for you? Worked for Anna Wintour. That woman hasn’t been seen with a handbag in decades.

Further to the above: Murses. Satchels. Any type of man-bag that a) isn’t a testicle, and b) doesn’t hold a laptop.

People studying for the citizenship test. Yeah, yeah, I know I’m eeeeevil and xenophobic, and I should be glad that my country even bothers with a perfucntionary test for new immigrants. But you know what would be really nice to see in Canada? A Canadian. I miss those.

The hefty daughters of Republican politicians. Since when did getting knocked up by the local clap dealer make one a “teen activist”? And why do we need to know about McCain’s “Dopey, Slutty Politics”? Are these the speakers of the next GOP generation? Because if they are, I want to be a Democrat.

Actually, I kinda wish they had banned recess when I was in school. Anything to not have to mingle with my peers in a social setting.

This lack of responsibility has been exacerbated by the increasing official obsession with health and safety. Even the most basic school activities, such as playground football or science lessons, are held to be full of risks.

Just like litigation, health and safety itself has become a massive and lucrative industry, drowning schools in regulation and creating a climate of permanent anxiety.

There is a strange paradox at work here. The more head teachers and education bureaucrats try to avoid litigation by taking preventative action, such as banning geography trips or competitive sports, the more they play into the hands of the lawyers and the litigants.

This is because, in effect, they are admitting responsibility for every accident, every setback, that takes place on their premises. So the ­culture of litigation creates its own self-fulfilling cycle.

Kids are wrapped in bubble wrap and have to wear helmets for the most innocuous of activities, like riding their bikes - even in the park. Parents have become so crazed about injuries and the ever-lurking neighborhood pedophile that they have stolen their own childrens’ childhood long before happenstance ever could.

Unfortunately, they’ve also stolen their adulthood, for a child that never cries becomes and adult who can’t do anything but. Unless a child falls, he will never know how to stand up and brush himself off.

No wonder our species is dying out.

Alas, I must leave to your imagination how much funnier and more satisfying this would be if Disney had demanded mouse ears.

In some ways I find it astonishing that it’s been 15 years, and in other ways it seems like decades.

Fifteen years ago today, my daddy died.

So much has happened in the years since, that it must be longer than a decade and a half. It must be 20, 25, 30 years! I’ve lived many lifetimes since I was cut from the final family tie that remained, having lost my mother at the age of 14.

Daddy did his best to be both mother and father to a teenage girl. His failures along the way were often hilarious. Dad attempted to maintain proprieties - a middle aged alcoholic living with a decadent teenage female couldn’t be too careful about boundaries - but it didn’t always work out as planned. In one amusing situation, I was breaking a fever from the flu that had plagued me for days. As I shivered in the bathroom, not sure which end of me would projectile next, I called out to Daddy, who stood just outside the door. “I think I’m going to faint!”

Unwilling to walk in on his daughter who was in various states of undress, he replied earnestly, “You let me know if you do.”

We both burst out laughing. He did come in, I did faint, but it was all good. Daddy was there.

In the years since, I have struggled with not having an immediate family member. Last week I had a mild panic attack when I signed the consent for my upcoming (read: 7 months from now) gallbladder surgery. Orphaned as a teenager and estranged from my husband, I have no next of kin. If the anesthetist fucks up, no one will be the wiser. I’ll die alone.

In the past year I have missed Daddy more than ever. All the things that happened either would not have or would have been mitigated, if I had my Daddy to run to.

I could make any mistake in the world, and Dad would be there to help me work through it. His love was truly unconditional - I know, because I tested the limits of it all the time - and I have spent the intervening years attempting to replace that love. There is no replacement for the love and compassion of a father.

I miss you Daddy.

I’ve been stuck in bed for the past three days, nursing a cold with bottles of green NyQuil and red wine. What doesn’t kill you will probably make you sleep for three days while having vivid dreams about lobsters, mining towns and Korean refugees. But I digress… In between epic naps, I’ve been reading.

What feels like chick-lit is actually the memoirs of Jen Lancaster: Former high-flying, six-figure-earning sales wunderkind, who lost her corporate job in the chaotic post-9/11 days and had to come to grips with being unemployed, broke and “overqualified.”

While I’ve never made six figures, I can pretty much identify with how expensive life in the big city can be (hers Chicago, mine Toronto), and how every job you apply for - from secretary to barista - is way beneath your skill set.

Lancaster used her unemployed time to gain 50 pounds and start a blog. Also, she’s an Ann Coulter-loving Republican. Obviously, I can identify with her! Jennsylvania was the blog she began and still maintains, and here’s the funny thing: I used to read this blog regularly, but was into my second dose of NyQuil before I put two and two together. No wonder I was getting such a great laugh out of the books!

Of her memoir series, I’ve read the first two: Bitter is the New Black : Confessions of a Condescending, Egomaniacal, Self-Centered Smartass,Or, Why You Should Never Carry A Prada Bag to the Unemployment Office, which got my attention because, while I’ve never owned a Prada bag, I’ve worn pearls in a homeless shelter; and Bright Lights, Big Ass: A Self-Indulgent, Surly, Ex-Sorority Girl’s Guide to Why it Often Sucks in the City, or Who are These Idiots and Why Do They All Live Next Door to Me?. She reported her neighbor to homeland security. Seriously. I mean, after all, “If you see something, say something,” right?

Heading out tomorrow to pick up the third in the series, Such a Pretty Fat: One Narcissist’s Quest to Discover If Her Life Makes Her Ass Look Big, or Why Pie Is Not the Answer.

You can follow Jen on Twitter @altgeldshrugged.

Warren Kinsella, who believes that Chinese people eat cats, has decided that another ethnic stereotype would be the way to go in his latest misadventure: The Rocco Rossi Campaign.

Skippy sums it all up here.

But here’s what it made me think of. Those of you who lived through the Chretien AdScam scandal might remember that Kinsella was a big Chretien man. If there was a way that Warren could emulate his political hero, he would. So isn’t it hilarious that, as the Chretien regime crumbled, Canadian conservatives came up with this little gem:

It’s nice to see Warren has a sense of humor, and is helping destroy his candidate from the inside by turning the joke around:

You can rest assured, if there’s a minority in Canada to be insulted, Kinsella will do his utmost to insult them. That’s just the kind of stand up guy he is.

The Warren Kinsella School of Politics:

1. Make your guy look like shit.

2. Something

3. Win?

UPDATE: Oh yeah, did I mention that the Libranos poster “offended” Liberal MP Joe Volpe at the time?

Most Western folk are pretty calm and rational about negotiating our way through life. We know that there’s a little give and a little take, and that patience is a virtue. We know that sticks and stones may break our bones, but burning a flag won’t hurt anyone (unless they’re standing too close to the flag when it happens).

However, our influx of “diversity” and “multiculturalism” has taught us a new trick: Scream until you get what you want, and if you don’t, then break something. That’s right: Muslim immigration to the West has taught us that to behave like two-year-olds is to win.

Take, for examples, the massive abrogation of rights of the citizenry when it comes to the feeeelings of the enemy.

Example: If you build it, they will rejoice; if you don’t, they will attack. The feelings of law-abiding Americans count for naught in the face of the Victory Mosque at Ground Zero. Mayor Michael Bloomberg doesn’t care a fig for the Americans murdered there on September 11 - but he sure cares a lot about the veiled threats from Imam Rauf and his band of merry thugs. Said Rauf in a recent appearance on Larry King (Barely A)Live: “If we don’t do this right, anger will explode in the Muslim world,” Rauf said. “… If we don’t handle this crisis correctly, it could become something very dangerous indeed.”

Example: The State of Florida wants to bill Pastor Moustache for his Koran-not-Burning shenanigans. Terry Jones wanted to burn a book - not cool, I know, but it was in protest of the above-mentioned Victory Mosque. Like burning the flag, burning a book is protected political speech under the First Amendment. A book aflame can’t harm anyone, except maybe the dude holding it. However, because Muslims are violently insane, Pastor Moustache’s life was in danger. This made it necessary for law enforcement officials to protect him. And now they’re sending him the bill, instead of sending the bill to perhaps Imam Rauf or CAIR. After all, if CAIR and Rauf are on and on about how moderate America’s Muslims are, they’re obviously lying, and should be responsible for those lies.

Example: This one is by far the worst. Cartoonist Molly Norris protested the violent outrage against Comedy Central/Viacom/South Park over an image of Mohammed by standing in solidarity with her fellow cartoonists and starting Everybody Draw Mohammed Day. So many threats were made against Molly that she withdrew the idea (it went ahead anyway) and now, after six months, she is having to change her name and go into hiding. The FBI and Witness Protection are not taking care of this; she is doing it on her own. You see, the government will not defend your rights or protect you if to do so would upset that hornet’s nest known as Islam. You’re on your own.

The Moral: So what is the moral of these stories? Terrorism works. If you can’t get every little thing you want through normal negotiations, you must blow things up and murder innocent people. Do it a few times, and then you merely have to threaten it in the future. Make sure people understand that you are completely irrational and mentally unstable. Even if your demands infringe upon the inalienable rights of others, a scared ruling class will grant your every whim in an effort to keep the body count low.

So the next time you want to remortgage your house, get planning permission for your family restaurant, or get an extension on your term paper, I suggest cutting people’s heads off or bombing the professor’s condo building. The messier the act and the more lives it claims, the more likely you will get what you want, especially if you tell people that your entire congregation will avenge any retaliation with even more gruesome acts.

Let the killing begin!

The quality of a nation’s health care isn’t just based on whether or not you get through emergency triage with chest pains (you do, and damn fast). There are also the non-essential surgeries and treatments that effect quality of life.

• hip replacement
• knee and ligament surgery (no point touting the keep fit model if we can’t fix a meniscal tear from running)
• gallbladder removal
• cataract surgery

These non-essential (in that you won’t die if you don’t get them) surgeries can seriously make the difference between being addicted to oxycontin or leading a normal life.

In October 2009 I presented with pain in my right side, which was due to a gallbladder inflammation. I have gall stones. Have, not had. Specifically, I have biliary colic. A couple of times a month this useless organ flares up and cripples me for a 5 hour joyride of unbearable pain. Back in November 2009, after all the ultrasounds had been done, my doctor referred me to General Surgery (I suspect he’s only a two-star). I waited. I waited some more. I forgot about the referral most of the time, except for the days when I would roll around clutching my side and crying. In May 2010 I received the letter from Surgery. I had an appointment! Yay!

For September, 2010.

Last Friday I saw the surgeon, and we agreed this pesky organ would have to come out. Had it been a fetus, I could have had it removed long ago, but with an actual life-altering illness, you’re kinda fucked. Anyway, I’m having surgery: In April 2011.

Before those of you in America who wish you could get everything on the taxpayer dime wax poetic about socialized health care, I suggest you think about how long you’d like to live with bad hips. Or a bad back. Or eyes with shmutz on them. Or a screwed knee. Or an organ you never should have been born with in the first place, thereby proving that evolution is totally questionable.

Thanks for clicking on ads and purchasing through my Amazon links. If you’re clickin, I can buy chicken!

I grabbed a McMuffin on my way to the office this morning, and while I was standing there, zombie-like, I thought about how McDonald’s is run.

It’s efficient, for a start. A well-oiled machine. There’s a place for everything and everything in its place. There are exactly as many people as needed there - no more, no less. One guy (or girl) runs the show, with everyone else performing their duties quickly and accurately. Everyone is paid a basic living wage, and yet they all smile when they greet you - it’s obligatory.

When mistakes are made, the management apologizes and compensates you accordingly, ensuring you’ll return despite the plethora of choices available to you. Complaints are dealt with politely and without a sense of boredom.

The end result, though not gourmet, is good enough and tasty enough to please you. It is inexpensive and lightening fast. The old adage of “you get what you pay for” does not apply; you get so much more. You get years of technological and best practice refinement.

It’s been said before that if the DMV was run half as well as McDonald’s, there wouldn’t be so many complaints.

To me, that’s a narrow vision. All government and bureaucratic agencies should be run that way. Everything from Congress/Parliament to a city-run homeless shelter. Having run the whole gamut of bureaucracies in the past year, I can see that applying the principles of McDonald’s would improve things tremendously and bring costs down astronomically. People would be satisfied with the service they receive, because they would no longer be paying exorbitant rates and receiving sub-par returns.

No, not everyone can live on $10/hr - I’m not a communist! But paying people exactly for the work they do - and no more - does not seem too much to ask. We don’t need to know our unionized road crews are getting ample breaks and orthodontic work for their kids - we need to know the roads are adequately paved in a timely fashion. A set of steps leading up to a school shouldn’t cost $200,000. Garbage collection shouldn’t be held up for six weeks over a union dispute. Nothing should require more than five pages of paperwork - nothing.

We need some mythical Kroc descendant to come and save us from ourselves.

Free Canuckistan blog has to be mirrored for now due to YET ANOTHER free speech issue

You can find it here. http://earwaxer.blogspot.com/2010/09/webelf-silenced.html

I read this article in the Christian Science Monitor (dopey faith, good newspaper) and was intrigued by what it didn’t say more than what it did.

The much-studied links between poverty and crime rates – which helped give rise to many Great Society programs – have not materialized so far in the Great Recession. Even with 15 percent of Americans now officially poor, both violent crime and property crime continued to drop in the United States in 2009, the FBI reported Monday.

The housing crash’s backwash of foreclosures and high unemployment has pushed some in the middle class and the working poor to the brink of despair and insolvency. Yet crimes reports ranging from murder to carjackings, from graft to purse-snatching, all declined during the same period, forcing social scientists to reexamine long-held assumptions about the causes of crime and how society can best battle back.

“What we’re seeing now represents a real break in pattern from past relationships between economic downturns and crime increases,” says Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri, in St. Louis. “This current recession … does place constructive pressures on those of us who study crime trends to figure out what’s happening amidst this serious economic downturn.”

Well now. What are we seeing/not seeing?

We’re seeing that the middle classes have become poor - many of them have lost everything and have had to start over again from zero.

We’re not seeing that the criminal poor were never really affected by the recession to begin with, because they had nothing to lose.

We’re also seeing/not seeing that, given the cities listed in the article, there is a high concentration of African-Americans, who make up a sizable part of the criminal class (fuck you, statistics don’t lie). Except if the recession decimated the middle class, the middle classes are largely white. So, very little change for American blacks.

Of course, no article would ever point that out. Instead, statisticians and sociologists who have focused on these numbers their entire careers are walking around pretending to be baffled, saying things like “but what I have a hard time explaining is why we would be seeing crime decreases in the Atlantas and St. Louises and other cities where … policing remains very much like it has in the past.”

Feigned ignorance.

Two great articles I found yesterday that I wanted to share.

Islam is not a peaceful religion:

I was taught in seventh grade at Owatonna Junior High School that Muslims and Christians both worship the same God. I found out that was wrong when I came across Surah 3:32: “Allah does not love the disbelievers.” However, Jesus said in Matthew 5:43-45, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.”

Islam must turn the other cheek:

Yeah, I know — all Muslims aren’t mayhem makers. But the lunatic fringe is apparently wide enough to trigger an extreme overreaction from our nation’s top offices to a silly little publicity stunt.

If Muslim sensibilities are so tender they can’t ignore the bizarre rants of an insignificant American fanatic then this is a culture with a serious anger management issue, and one the West can’t help with.

There’s no way to head-off every potential slight to Islam. Last time it was Danish cartoons, this time it’s a Pentecostal pew jumper who lays down his snakes to strike a match.

Tomorrow, an atheist in Italy may name his dog Mohammad, or a biker in Australia will have a likeness of the prophet tattooed on his backside.

The only answer is for Islam to grow up. Religion invites antagonism; get used to it.

One of the biggest draws to jihad is the poontang. Imams spend years grinding the spirits of young people into dust, telling the boys that the most furtive glance at a woman’s ankle is impure, and telling girls that to have more than her eyes showing makes her a harlot.

Once the imams have burned these lessons into the psyches of Muslims youth, the imams make a call for jihad. Die in the cause of Allah, and he will reward you with eternal virginal pussy. Night after night for all eternity, the martyr will be able to impale himself to the hilt in a young virgin - maybe as young as nine-year-old Ayesha, the child-bride of the Prophet.

Ah, what a glorious plan. Eternal rape of the unclaimed hymen.

The only downside to all this free, heavenly pussy is… well, ya gotta die for it.

If only there was some way…

A prostitution ring plotted to make up to £50,000 by selling the ‘virginities’ of young girls to wealthy Arabs, it can be revealed tonight.

A 14-year-old girl was used as bait by the gang who sent her photograph and email to a potential customer ahead of an illicit meeting at a central London hotel.

The trafficking ring transported six women aged between 17 and 22 from the North West to the capital last September to provide sexual services.

And no, I don’t mean the Catholics.

Out of Senegal (a less-shitty African shithole) comes this story of the Muslim faith:

The judge spoke quietly, and decades of custom were quickly rolled back: the Muslim holy men were to be punished for forcing children to beg.

The sentence handed down in a courtroom here last week was gentle, only six months’ probation and a fine for the seven marabouts, or holy men. Yet the result could be a social revolution, in the eyes of some commentators. By government decree, and under international pressure, Senegal has forbidden the marabouts to enlist children to beg on their behalf.

Outside the crowded courtroom, a dozen or more white-robed marabouts sat in an anxious conclave on the ground to discuss their colleagues’ predicament. More than 40 had shown up in support, and they knew the stakes. If the government here follows through, thousands of children could be released from a practice that human rights groups condemn as exploitation under the guise of education but that religious leaders defend as essential for keeping their enterprises afloat.

“Very sad, really heavy; this is a custom from our ancestors,” Chérif Aïdara, an Islamic lecturer in the group, said later. “This is how we teach the Koran.”

Really? I thought the Koran was something taught with ass in air (again, not talking about us Catholics). I thought that, like other real religions, it required a lot of reading and discussion.

I guess what it really requires is abasement for the monetary gain of the layabouts marabouts in their silk dresses.

This, in case you hadn’t put 2+2 together, is slavery. It is the exploitation of one group of people for the financial gain of another, while not giving the the first group anything tangible in return. Slavery is still practiced in Islam, to a much larger degree than it ever was among any other creed. This is Fagan, without the fun songs.

So while our current and past presidents harp on about the Religion of Peace™, I hope you, my readers, will continue to educate themselves on the abomination that is Islam.

A few final thoughts for the day.

Obama asks for tolerance toward Islam.

Remembering.

It’s what I do on this day every year, and I seek out the remembrances and reflections of others to share with you.

Here are some more:

Rick Moran at Right Wing Nuthouse can’t cry anymore.

To him I dedicate this video:

Over at the Pool Bar, What a Difference Nine Years Makes.

So here we are, nine years later and 20 months into Barack Obama’s presidency. The Obama administration is desperately trying to return to the pre-9/11 school of thought, treating global Islamist terrorism as a simple law enforcement matter. With each new attempt by radical Islamists to commit mass murder of Americans (last Christmas Day’s attempted knickerbomber, the failed Times Square bombing, the too-successful Ft. Hood shootings), we’re assured by our betters on the Left that these are just lone nutcases. They’re not really representative of Islam. It’s all cool now.

Last year’s remembrance by Mary, who explains how 9/11 unfolded while she was on a business trip to Hawaii.

Jimmie Bise remembers, but would rather read the remembrances of others.

The bells rang and the names were read again today. There will come a point when that will stop, and too many people will have moved on. However, today was not that day.

My gentleman friend sent me this article from Esquire 2003. The Falling Man.

Posted by: Right Girl Posted in September 11 No Comments »