We are eight years old today!

Eight years ago, in a teeny-tiny apartment in Central Scotland, I got pissed off. I just needed to vent, and RightGirl was born.

And here we are, almost a decade later. We’ve been through a lot together, this blog and I. Trans-ocean relocation to a city of my country, but not my birth. Separation. Torture. Divorce. And good stuff, too. Relationships. Vacations. Meeting great new people - many of them my readers and commenters.

This blog has brought me to people I otherwise never could have hoped to meet. It spun off a fun and successful podcast - from the early days of podcasting, too! It has gained and lost me jobs, friends, and even family. It has brought and lost me love.

It has, in its own way, been an equalizer, shaking things in my life up and settling them down into new and better patterns. Sure, some days are hard, like when I get a death threat or a negative comment. But it’s worth it.

I get burned out and I walk away, but I come back. I always come back.

I hope you will, too. Thank you all.

From the Daily Mail

Why on earth should I pay for porn I don’t want to watch?

CBC is using tax money to stream French soft-core? Oh my.

I cannot begin to tell you the images that were conjured up in conversation over dinner last night.

For example, the cast of Little Mosque on the Prairie in a gang rape of local Christian girls, or… Bruno Gerussi and Relic…

Oh yes, let’s make a sexy time with Relic.

I’m no puritan. I love porn in all its messy, sticky glory. I just don’t think that anyone’s tax dollars should be paying for any level of it, even soft core.

On the other hand, it’s still better than most of the CBC’s programming, so I ought not to bitch.

Locked out Caterpiller workers at the Electro-Motive plant in London, Ontario are now unemployed.

They refused a pay cut (a hefty one, I admit) on their $35/hr salaries, the union balked, and Caterpillar locked them out on New Year’s Day. Two weeks ago, an assortment of parasitical union hacks protested at the plant - they were paid $40 each to do so, by the way - and today the word came down that Caterpiller was shutting down operations, likely to move to the US.

So, tell me: Is a heavy pay cut better or worse than unemployment for these workers?

Welcome to the real world, unions!

I totally blame the white man, who for years worked in laboratories to develop the formula for latex. That evil, racist pig.

A housewife died after suffering a massive allergic reaction possibly triggered by the glue in her hair extensions, an inquest heard today.
Atasha Graham, 34, collapsed after a night out dancing at a club where her boyfriend [Wait, houseWIFE? Apparently not.] was the DJ.
The hearing at Southwark’s Coroner’s Court in London heard her allergic reaction may have been caused by the glue used to attach her hair extensions - but there’s no way to be 100 per cent certain.
Home Office pathologist Doctor Michael Heath told the inquest: ‘I’ve seen cases where people using solvent to apply hair extensions has actually caused anaphylactic shock.

I demand reparations on behalf of Aboriginals, who have notoriously beautiful, straight hair that these black women are trying to emulate. Because deaths like this can be blamed on envy of shiny-haired Aboriginals, they are oppressed.

Fucking white man. It’s all Don Imus’s fault.

Further to my post yesterday about the cultural beliefs that lead to the kind of killings we saw in Kingston, Adnan Khan brings this from the Globe & Mail:

But any Muslim worth his or her salt will also need to do some serious soul-searching. For years, Muslim communities – in Canada, the U.K. and the U.S. – have approached honour crimes as something alien to Islam. They point out the obvious: Killing in the name of honour has nothing to do with their faith. And they are right, of course. They have also pointed out that many non-Muslim societies around the world tacitly condone the victimization of women to protect a man’s honour. This, they have implied, clears Muslims of responsibility for dealing with misogynist behaviour in their community.

Moral and cultural relativism. Since you have black and white guys that beat their wives, then you can’t pick on us brown guys because of our honor killings. Blah blah.

And because the Christians had the Crusades, don’t pick on us for our jihad (totally ignoring the fact that the Crusades were a response to Islamic pillaging and conquest, ahem).

And because the Westboro Baptist Church pickets funerals with a God Hates Fags message, leave us religious zealots alone in the UK (again, ignoring the fact that WBC is a) marginalized by mainstream Christianity and b) categorically NOT calling for violence against anyone, to be perpetrated by anyone except God himself).

This kind of squishy relativism is how problems get ignored and allowed to grow ever larger. Christians (and Jews - yes, especially Jews) are held to a far higher standard than Muslims, in much the same way that whites are held to a higher standard than blacks. We don’t expect anything better from you, poor dears.

Bullshit.

If you are going to live in my country, my city, my apartment building, then you have to live by the same standards and rules of society that I have to live by.

There’s a lot of debate (from the left) over whether or not what took place in a Kingston canal was an honor killing or domestic violence.

Domestic violence, the way I understand it, is one family member torturing (as in my case), assaulting or killing another member or members. The usual scenario is the father killing the mother and/or the children, or the mother killing the children (way too common).

An honor killing, on the other hand, is a family conspiracy to take the life of one or more members because of a besmirching of the family name through behavior or beliefs antithetical to what the rest of the family believes. A father and brother plot to kill a daughter, with the blessing or assistance of the mother, for example.

Which is exactly - exactly - what happened here in Canada, and has the whole world talking.

Those who dispute the semantics of the term “honor killing” are being deliberately obtuse about the culture (notice I didn’t say religion) that promotes it.

The Shafia case was about Muslims from Afghanistan, a very tribal, anti-woman region of the world. We also see such behaviors in places like India/Pakistan. Usually Muslims, but not always.

And also in Afghanistan, this lovely case of a father murdering his wife because she gave birth to not one but three worthless daughters.

Not a lot of feminism in Afghanistan!

We need to accept, as an immigrant-welcoming western nation, that some cultures/traditions are incompatible with what we hold most dear. In Canada, we don’t kill our wives and daughters for how they dress. We don’t kill our wives because they’re barren or because they care for their step children (let’s totally pretend this was a normal step-parent relationship, and not an illegal polygamist marriage). We have things in place to handle these issues - foster care, divorce, family counselling. We’re civilized. We teach our children morals as best we can to prevent bad behavior - we don’t remove their clitorises.

We love our children, even if they are girls.

(Post Script reading: Phyllis Chesler at Fox on a Turning Point for Justice)

I have a friend who cuts herself. Her arms are a patchwork of criss-crossed scars from years of self mutilation. From a distance she looks like she’d been burned, with the twisted, molten look of her flesh. From up close, you can see how much she has, at times, hated herself. Even though she’s beautiful, she has hated herself enough to make herself ugly. She feels she deserves to be ugly.

I too have gone through this phase. Briefly, leading up to the Dark Time, in 2009. I got told I “scar like a black girl,” so instead of faint white lines, I have slug-like pink worms where I hurt myself.

But at no time could I imagine my parents (should they still be with us) or my beautiful friend’s parents, handing us razor blades to cut ourselves with. In fact, loving parents (and even less-than-loving parents) would go out of their way to prevent their children from harming themselves. Why, in this day and age, a fetus is practically fitted with a helmet in utero, so as to protect it from harm in childbirth. One kid has a problem with peanuts, and the Nutzis ban PB&J for a 20 mile radius. Kids have never been so protected as in this day and age.

They’ve also never been so indulged. Junior wants pot? Let dad bring some home. Little Jane wants to fuck? Mom says do it in the house, under the loving watchfulness of the family.

And if you want to cut yourself, here’s a razor:

Six children in Britain will be given jabs to delay the puberty on the NHS because they are convinced they were born the wrong sex.

The injections - to be administered monthly - will postpone the physical changes of adolescence giving them more time to make decisions about their identity.

It will also make any sex-change operation far easier should they decide to permanently swap gender.

Where are the medical ethicists in all this? Have they been co-opted by some GLAAD-handing organization somewhere?

I cannot fathom how even the most die-hard trans-supporting people could abide by the genetic and eventually genital mutilation of children.

The decision to move within one gender or another is an adult decision, and shouldn’t even be considered in children. Let them remain asexual as long as they can, before the politics of sex consume them as it does all adults.

And more importantly, no parent should be handing their child a razor blade to self-mutilate with.

Rap lyrics performed by aspiring hip-hop artist Anthony Spencer may have shown disrespect to gang members and led to his murder on the weekend, Toronto police say.

“Disrespect is a motive for murder. I’ve seen it before,” homicide Det. Sgt. Gary Giroux told reporters at a news conference Tuesday. “If you look at Mr. Spencer’s music, it may have directly or indirectly have offended some gang members in the area. “

Those slights, he added, might not mean something to the general community, but they are significant to the gang culture.

It began as most brilliant ideas do: With beer.

Sitting around shooting the shit (with a registered weapon, naturally - this IS Canada, after all) on New Year’s Eve, we got to talking about my greatest love. My church, my home, my sanctuary - my nightmare. It too was a brilliant idea born of beer.

My whole life it had been my lover, parent, child, twin and temple. Then it

As it once was, my temple

was gone. Just ruins, which I excavated with care and store in a sarcophagus. Its demise haunts my darkest dreams. In life it was my safest place - in death my greatest demon. It was the one thing I hadn’t overcome, in a lifetime of overcoming the kind of fear and darkness a greater man would be proud to have done.

As we chatted over the foamy ale, my adventurous friend said, “Fine. We’ll go in the morning.”

Pfft. In his cups (not everyone can handle their liquor as well as the hard-drinking RightGirl), I merely smiled and nodded. Yeah, whatever. I hadn’t set foot back on holy ground since July 2004. I wasn’t about to do it the first day of the new year, with beer farts and a headache.

Alas, the crazy motherfucker was not kidding. The next morning, the first day of 2012, we hit the road to face a dragon. A really big, really depressing dragon.

As an aside, my friend has the world’s smallest bladder, so a trip that should have taken six hours took nine. Jesus.

Anyway, we were off, with me at the helm of the Dragon Slayer, as I’ve come to call his vehicle. I tend to be a bit more insistent with the gas pedal than he, and have way more snow miles under my belt (not a euphemism).

As we got closer to our destination - a place I have not taken many mortals in the past - I began to grow nervous. My breath became shallow and my pupils expanded and contracted rapidly, making the bright headlights on the dark backroads quite perilous. Only focusing on a brutal whiteout at a particularly rough patch of road kept me from having a full on panic attack. My friend suggests I caused the inclement weather, and under the circumstances, I really don’t disagree.

Finally we rounded the bend to where the greatest love of my life once stood, a living thing, breathing, until the fire consumed it. But the road was slippery, and I wouldn’t stop the car until we could safely park. I barely glanced out the side window at the new monument that now stood. My goal was the driveway of the house at the top of the hill.

“Someone is waiting for you,” he said, and as I aimed for the driveway, I saw that Mr G (my father’s best friend and my best friend’s father, all conveniently rolled into one) was out with his dog. The snow stopped as I glided the Dragon Slayer into the driveway.

I hopped out into the cool night, and Mr G’s face looked as if he’d seen a ghost. I suppose he had. After all, this was a ghost-hunting mission, was it not? And if my father’s ghost walks at all, it walks in my body, and in my face.

“You said you’d never come back,” Mr G breathed as I approached him.

“Well then, it’s a fucking Christmas miracle, isn’t it?”

We embraced, and he ushered us into his home, staying outside with his gigantic hound. The smell hit me, and I began to fall apart. That smell. The wood and carpet, the doggy scent and the G-family smell… These were the last people left alive who knew what it looked like when my smile reached my eyes. And they hadn’t seen it reach since I was seven years old. Once Daddy sold the house, my eyes died. Here were the only living witnesses that I had once been a happy child. This house - their house - had seen me happy, too.

I greeted and embraced the ageless Mrs G, who had not changed in the half decade plus since I had seen her at her mother-in-law’s funeral. Mr G and the uber-beast returned, and we all made pleasant small talk until my companion reminded me that, “We came here to do something, so put your coat on and let’s get it done.”

Several deep breaths and some panicked tears later, my coat and boots were back on and we headed out into the pristine snow. The hill was steep, and my companion lent me his arm as I navigated in my heeled city boots. Even at the height of great anxiety and crisis, I was stylish. Heh. After all, one can’t slay a dragon in any old thing. Remember Thatcher’s Birkin bags? My point exactly.

I had stopped pretending that I had any control over my emotions. I wept openly as we reached the bottom of the hill and I looked upon the new house. Inside was a happy family, backlit by a Christmas tree and a fireplace. They were innocent. It wasn’t their carelessness that led to the demise of the only thing I ever truly believed in; they had bought the property after the house was gone. Innocent.

The new house was bigger, necessitating carving out a section of the jutting bit of mountain in front in order to accommodate it. But my god - my one true god - it was breathtaking. It was good. It was, as I described it, “the most beautiful tombstone I have ever seen.”

And with that, a dragon was slain. I knew from the G’s that the family had a little girl who - when they bought the property - was about the age I had been when Daddy broke my heart. And here she was, the replacement child, coming of age in a way that I hadn’t been able to, surrounded by walls of love her parents built for her.

She had my blessing. The beautiful monument had my blessing.

We spent the night in the city. Though hospitality was offered in the woods, I wasn’t ready for that - yet. That day will come, no doubt, but after slaying a dragon, I needed a little distance.

I will return. I will go back to the people who remember my smiling eyes, to the house whose smell I grew up in, and to the woods that still hold all my secrets and sooth.

I killed a dragon. If I do nothing else this year, this decade, this lifetime, at least I killed a dragon.

Ladies’ rooms, childrens’ changing rooms… it’s never a good idea.

Toronto police are investigating reports of a male intruder in some women’s washrooms at York University.

Police say two women went into a washroom at Curtis Lecture Halls around 6 p.m. Tuesday and saw a man in a stall beside them.

They then saw the man reach under the stall holding a cellphone in his hand.

If you ever see anyone, ever, in a public bathroom (or any bathroom except theirs at home) with a camera or recording device, call the cops.

Chances are it’s a rapist, voyeur, or in the case of a school or other childrens’ restroom, a pedophile.

…I was a little girl in elementary school. I didn’t understand much about race, nor politics, nor the ways of the world. I was in first grade.

Our class was overcrowded. Our teacher was awesome though; very animated when going through our class reader. She made it fun to learn.

Because I had a stay-at-home mom who spent a lot of time reading to/with me, I was ahead of the learning curve, burning through the Dick & Jane books at a rapid clip and eventually being given third grade books just to shut me up.

One day after school I came home frustrated and threw my Mickey Mouse briefcase onto the couch. Dad asked me what was wrong.

“None of the kids can read in my class!”

He pointed out that we were 6 years old - it was going to take time.

“No, I mean, they don’t speak english, so they can’t read! It takes for-ev-er for them to read one line!”

Much of what I was saying was punctuated with a great deal of eye-rolling.

I knew, at the tender age of six, that some of us were being held back from our potential while the ESL-ers struggled to come to grips with the language. Ok, I was doing fine on my own, but there were kids in my class - english-speaking kids - who struggled with dyslexia, dysgraphia, shyness, etc, and the fact that Mrs C had to slow us all down and spend precious time on the ESL-ers meant that those other kids got shortchanged.

And it meant that the advanced kids got completely screwed. Eventually three of us were moved out of reading hour entirely and sent to Mrs B’s art class to while the time away, lest we become disruptive.

The point I’m trying to make, from the perspective of my six year old self, is that stories like this aren’t a surprise. Endless streams of immigrant kids come to the West and don’t learn even the basics of the language before they start school. Their parents can’t be arsed to speak english at home, leaving the kids at a huge disadvantage, and leading to the developmental delay of countless other children they come into contact with.

It’s easy to get all warm and squishy about multiculturalism - for which mine was the first generation immersed in it in Canada - but be selfish for a second and think of your own kid. Do you want him/her to learn to read and write? Do you want him/her to have a chance to succeed? Do you want them to have the opportunity to excel and learn to play to their strengths?

You are NOT a bad person for wanting these things! The truly bad people want everyone to stew in mediocrity.

Multiculti isn’t going to go away any time soon. No western government is suddenly going to make it mandatory for kids to learn English before they start primary school - so much simpler to leave that burden on the Kindergarten/first grade teacher. So I plead with parents to come home from work early (or better yet, have one of you stay home with the kids), turn off the TV, put down your iPhone, and teach your kids to read! Because sadly, they won’t learn in school.

Even a clever six year old knows that.

Canada tops the list of countries with inflammatory bowel disease.

D’uh.

Up until last year, the food pyramid was sucking the dick of grain farmers, and had been for almost a century. For fuck sake, feeding a cow a steady diet of corn causes its guts to ulcer, leading to the need for all those pesky antibiotics in our food. Works the same for us humans.

Add to that the fact that Canada has a fucking WHEAT BOARD - basically, a non-government body telling the government what people should be eating, and having the government enforce it for them - and I’m surprised nobody made the correlation sooner.

Look, I’m not telling you to go all Ezekiel bread and gluten free. I’m just saying have a bit of common sense and trust your gut when it comes to feeding yourself and your family.

As someone who regularly shags married men - married is my favorite flavor, actually - I am throwing my completely irrelevant political weight behind Newt Gingrich.

Why, you ask?

He’s smarter than everyone else combined. Sure he’s establishment - meaning he had rarely held a job outside of politics. So was Obama. If we’re voting for establishment candidates, I would prefer someone who has actually been around the block a few times and voted more than just “present.”

I am well aware that Newt’s past may catch up to him. We all have a past, and it eventually catches up to us. But how we handle it is what counts.

Go Newt.

I’ve been happily tucked up in farm country, trying to keep Bug and I warm in a 130 year old farmhouse. It’s 16 Deg F right now, so I’m tucked up in the narrow wooden bed with Bug, passing the time with a few thick novels that I picked up before Christmas.

Let the Great World Spin: A Novel is billed as a 9/11 allegory. A tightrope walker sets up a wire between the World Trade Towers in 1974, before they were even complete. As his story plays out above the city, others are playing out below. An Irish missionary. Bronx prostitutes. Grieving mothers who lost their sons to Vietnam. I tore through it in two days. It’s so well written, you’ll be able to actually see the characters moving before you.

I also picked up The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Help Deluxe Edition because I’ve been remiss in not reading them. Starting Dragon Tattoo this evening.

Did Santa leave any books under your tree?

Some years back, I wrote a very, very controversial post about Canada’s Native communities. I referred to incest and sexual abuse of Native children, and I was ripped to shreds by the left, the apologists and by some Natives (the only ones I really cared to hear from on the subject). Vilified. Belittled. Hated.

But I wasn’t wrong.

According to some estimates, the level of abuse in aboriginal communities is staggering.

“Sexual violence and sexual abuse in Aboriginal communities affect 75 to 80 per cent of our girls and women,” said social worker Sylvia Maracle, from the Ontario Federation of Friendship Centres.

Among non-aboriginal girls and women the rate is closer to 20 per cent.

You can hate me all you want. You can rail at me, and even blame me for the problem. Or, instead, you can call it what it is and start addressing it at the source.

I didn’t molest and rape Native children. Other Natives did that. But I’m just that much easier to hate, aren’t I?

Big stuff is happening! Big, huge!

But in the meantime, entertain yourselves with this week’s Brass Balls Radio, Horsemeat of the Apocalypse Edition.

Horsemeat, illegal immigration, and parental rights and responsibilities. Kim goes shopping in Dallas.

Brass Balls Radio – Show 114

Subscribe on iTunes

When I’m able to fill you in on the BIG HUGE AWESOME stuff happening, I will.

The recipe for my famous chili chocolate chip cookies!

Chili Chocolate Chip Cookies
1 1/2 cups semisweet chocolate chips
1/4 cup butter or margarine
3/4 granulated sugar
1 egg, slightly beaten
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp cayenne pepper

Melt 1 cup of the chocolate chips in a double boiler and set aside.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees and lightly grease a cookie sheet.
In a large bowl, cream together butter & sugar. Slightly beat egg and add to butter mixture, along with vanilla. Stir in melted chocolate.
Combine flour, salt, cinnamon, cayenne and baking powder in a separate bowl. Slowly add to butter mixture, mixing well with each addition.
Stir in remaining chocolate chips.
Bake 8-10 minutes, taking care not to burn (chocolate scorches easily).

After mixing the dough, let it set for a while. The melted chocolate can make it runny. Same goes for the baked cookies - let them set on the tray for a bit. The dough makes about 24 cookies.

I opened the mailbox today to find a bulky envelope from New Hampshire. You know what that means? It’s Christmas time again!

Every year around Christmas I get a new Mark Steyn Christmas album to help make the season jolly, and he didn’t disappoint me this year, unlike that Santa fellow who has been letting me down ever since the famed pony incident of 1980.

Making Spirits Bright will be on my CD player this weekend while I trim the tree. Thanks Mark!

I’m a big fan of scary personal trainer Jillian Michaels, of Biggest Loser fame, which is why I got her book Unlimited: How to Build an Exceptional Life.

I will admit that I was really frustrated in the first chapter or so, when it read just like that epic piece of drivel from a few years back, The Secret. Alas, due to my hero worship, I soldiered on and was glad. The chapter on forgiving yourself and others… Wow.

I’m not really capable of forgiving. I understand the theory behind it, but the mechanics of it escape me. So her chapter on it really resonated.

The book itself is about getting over your shit and empowering yourself to do better in life. But thankfully, it’s nothing like The Secret - you don’t just wish things into being. It always amazed me just how many lefty anti-god types swallowed The Secret, but would never be caught dead praying.

So here’s what I’m manifesting from Unlimited: I’m putting up links to my Amazon account here in this post, helping my readers to log on and do their Christmas shopping. In return, Amazon will thank me with gift cards for books that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford. It’s a win-win!

Unlimited: How to Build an Exceptional Life