Cream of the Crock: April 2006

Mark Steyn ...

"......With a sulky pout perhaps? With hands on hips and a full flip of the hair?

Did he get that from Churchill? "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, at least until May 15, when I have a windsurfing engagement off Nantucket." "

much more ...

UN ... conscionable

"

IAEA Report : Iran Has Defied U.N. Security Council"

"Iran to Toothless U.N. : 'We Won't Give a Damn' "

"A Loss of Hope Inside Darfur Refugee Camps "

Which is it: "Sudanese government accepts Darfur peace deal", or "Darfur rebels refuse to sign peace accord in 'joint position' ", or "Sudan Ready to Sign Draft; Rebels Unsure", or "Rebels hold out on Darfur peace"or "Sudan accepts Darfur peace deal".

Wouldn't it be swell if someone got it right for a change.

"Darfur food rations cut in half"

"Darfur's doomed peacekeeping mission"

Ah hah!

Senators wield hammer
Defending champions facing early elimination; Senators 5, Lightning 2; Ottawa leads best-of-seven series 3-1

"Finally, a helping hand for bored lonely chickens"

John Robson, The Ottawa Citizen [subscription only]

..... Not even your luggage, thanks to a Rhode Island inventor's "Fido Luggage" combining voice-recognition technology with remote control so it heels on command. Ah, the faithful suitcase, bounding down the ramp and into your lap carrying your slippers. Curiously, the Globe and Mail's Social Studies says Fido Luggage has received hostile feedback online, including "Consider what would happen if everyone had one of these." I think that would be great. While waiting for your flight you could stage mass impromptu luggage demolition derbies right there in the departure lounge.

Another critical comment was, "Man, when the machines rise up to destroy us, it's going to be pretty embarrassing to get killed by your luggage." Would you prefer some unusually clever chicken managing to turn "Poultry.Internet" on you and pecking you to death remotely in your hotel room in revenge for you never being home?

Another martyr to the march of science. Though the resulting video would be a huge hit in the vlogosphere. Especially with bored lonely chickens.

Full text ...

It's SPRING!

... and it's got bugs.

Hometown Meme

Gail has tagged me to serve up four cool things about my hometown. Since I'm not a writer, all I can do is play around with this.

In 2005, the Guinness Book of Records recognized the Rideau Canal as the world's longest skating rink.

The Canal was built c.1850 as a supply route between Montreal and Kingston, just in case EVIL America decided to invade across the St. Lawrence again. They've never recovered from their defeat in 1812. Unfortunately, they've discovered skates ... which could be a problem.

It goes without saying, then, that Ottawa is the home and birthplace of world class beaver tail. Oh, wait! That would be .... Jason Arnott is goin' down.

Ottawa was born as a lumber town, c. 1800. It does have it's charms: "Silicon Valley North"; home of the "Avro"; no industrial waste ('cept for the "Carp dump"); a government run "Experimental Farm" (which legend says used to grow quite a lot of hemp) .....

What is strange about the above correspondence, is that, in 1925, there could not have been any relationship between the names.

One can only hope this had an impact on Canuck/Amerikkkan relations :

On September 5, 1945, only weeks after the end of World War II, Ottawa was the site of the event that many people consider to be the official start of the Cold War. A Soviet cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defected from the Soviet Embassy with over 100 secret documents. At first, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) refused to take the documents, since the Soviets were still allies of Canada and Britain, and the newspapers were not interested in the story. After hiding out for a night in a neighbour's apartment listening to his own being searched, Gouzenko finally persuaded the RCMP to look at his evidence, which provided proof of a massive Soviet spy networking operating in western countries, and, indirectly, led to the discovery that the Soviets were working on an atomic bomb to match that of the Americans.

OK ... so it's not perfect.

Did I mention that Ottawa is Canada's capital?

(S+C) x (B+F) / (T-V) = your tax dollars hard at work

* S = overall shape (a ripe peach being just about right)
* C = circularity (rounder is better)
* B = bounciness (less wobble is preferred)
* F = firmness (too much push to that cushion loses points)
* T = skin texture (no cellulite, please)
Then calculate this:
* V = the ratio of one's hips to waist. Finally, do the math.

Here, here and you can bet your bottom dollar investigative reporters are all over this story. I WANT A GRANT!

"Inquiring fingers want to know"

Heh!

Bits & Pieces is an absolute must read!

"A shock into reality for France"

Keith Spicer, Citizen Special [subscription only]

PARIS - Hysterical, irresponsible and laughably, hopelessly retrograde.

Italy? No, Italians just held a peaceful, regime-changing election that proves their representative democracy works. France? Thanks to endless marches, strikes, blockades and occupations, France's leftist elites have succeeded in portraying France around the world as a mob-rule joke. Rightist leaders, indulging in daggers-drawn rivalries, legislative flip-flops and deafness to public opinion, have only enhanced this image: France is Disneyland with foie gras.

Now that, once again, the "street" has defeated an elected government (on its youth-employment law), what's the scorecard of bad and good in this unpredictable country?

The bad comes with a double history: 17th-century Jean-Baptiste Colbert's belief in state intervention in the economy, and Karl Marx's theory of class war. Result: a national religion distrusting individual initiative and presenting the state as the only salvation.

Two French institutions cause most of the damage. The most destructive is the Ministry of Education. Former Socialist minister Claude Allegre, who, like most reformers here, quickly bit the dust in 2000, called it the Mammoth, and its more than two million employees the Red Army. With self-serving policies and hyper-centralized administration, the Mammoth is viscerally hostile to change. Its ambient ideology is glorification of the state and its educational policies.

Well-taught science and math aside, curricula reek of this conservatism. Open-mindedness, experimentation and innovation are seen as dangerous. No wonder a recent poll showed 76 per cent of kids 15 to 24 wanting to be public servants. No wonder over a million of the most resourceful and talented under-35 French find opportunity abroad.

Young people here, as in other European nations, are terrified of living less well than their parents. But unlike youth elsewhere, they literally believe -- thanks to the Mammoth (and their parents) -- that the state owes them a living. Immediately and forever. A life without risk.

Like children denied expected favours, they throw tantrums -- and get away with it. France is the only country where students smash property, commit street crime and sing the Communist Internationale to defend bourgeois privilege. But they are just following the example of their elders, including many teachers.

The other immobilizing institution is the Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA). Finishing-school for the political and administrative elite (Siamese twins), ENA sends out graduates with a commendable spirit of public service. But they also come with a we-know-best smugness and only a skimpy knowledge of real-world economics.

Virtually every leading French politician and high official today is an enarque, as graduates style themselves. They all seem to be each other's old classmates. This makes for incestuous attitudes, a sameness of outlook: the state is good, and the state is us. The private sector is "capitalism" -- crass, inferior and exploitative.

At best, most old enarques are hesitant about the market economy. Post-war generations now in top jobs nearly all went for state-enterprise jobs: Air France, Electricite de France, Gaz de France, and others. President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, both enarques and supposedly moderate rightists, often sound like left-wing ideologues.

Any hope on the horizon? Lots.

The past two months of street drama may have shocked the French into at least thinking harder about how the hated market economy (36 per cent approval in France) creates jobs. Scandinavian labour solutions of "flexicurity" now get attention. The new plain-talking employers' group boss, Laurence Parisot, is building bridges to the unions -- both sides being desperate for new answers. And many younger ENA grads are looking to private industry to learn how the world works.

Even while denouncing "big capitalism" and globalization, France is brilliant at using both in its national interest. The CAC 40 Paris stock-market basket, now soaring, includes some of the best-run companies in the world: l'Oreal (cosmetics), AXA (insurance) [Ed. debatable], Alcatel (high-tech, joining Lucent), Sanofi-Aventis (pharmaceuticals), Societe Generale (banking), Schlumberger (oil and gas equipment), Saint-Gobain (building materials), EADS (aerospace and defence), Michelin (tires), and a score of others.

French business schools (INSEAD, ESSEC) and the no-nonsense Grandes Ecoles of science and technology are packed with top students who study, not demonstrate. French engineers continue to shine around the world, including in Silicon Valley.

French productivity shames most other countries. Millions of French people in small businesses fight bureaucracy to make independent livings. Millions volunteer to help society in countless organizations outside the state: Nobel-Prize-winning Doctors Without Borders, food-for-the-poor Restos du Coeur and hundreds of domestic volunteer groups prove the French don't wait for the nanny-state.

It's hard today to see a French renaissance. But it's there, in the 97 per cent of the French who didn't demonstrate these past weeks. Who didn't smash, set fires, blockade, strike or bully. With presidential candidates on left (timidly) and right (bluntly) promising real change next year, France has the fundamentals to rebound.

My bold.

France's unemployment rate is at 10% (est. 2005) and probably on the rise.

Related, and here and here .....

"....The choice belongs to France. A bold effort at renewal that could unleash the best in the French? Or a stubborn defence of the existing order that will keep France a middling world power in economic decline? The latter would inspire neither admiration, nor terror, nor hatred, nor indifference, just pity."

Size doesn't matter ..... really!

Leggo my Brego!

The end is nigh ....

Indian director hopes to cast Paris Hilton as Mother Teresa

Saintly tips from Ms. Paris Hilton On playing Mother Teresa

Top 11 Reasons T. Rajeevnath Wants To Cast Paris Hilton As Mother Theresa

Happy Easter!

Heh ...

"Obviously, the press is not trying to offend christians" ...

John Robson, The Ottawa Citizen [subscription required]

You know it's Easter when the snow melts, little coloured eggs appear, some fool kicks the Easter Bunny and the media start running what I think of as their "Was Christ a black lesbian?" features.

First off the mark was Maclean's, whose April 3 cover asked "Did He Really Die on the Cross?" It also claimed that Michael Baigent, author of The Jesus Papers, "inspired The Da Vinci Code," though a British judge disagreed. Still, he got into newspapers as well, and was interviewed on Fox News (by a guy who thought Jesus would have been "near his 70s" in AD 45), although his principal hypothesis is completely silly. He claims Pontius Pilate was in a bind after Jesus said people should pay taxes to the Romans (render unto Caesar being, apparently, not a parable but accounting advice) because the Zealots really wanted him dead and the Romans really wanted him alive.

So by pretending to kill him, Pilate satisfied the mob while by secretly not killing him he ... um ... didn't satisfy the Romans because a convincing fake execution has exactly the same public impact as a real one. But never mind. Jesus isn't God nyah nyah nyah, he went to France and had a daughter with Mary Magdalene, he had sex, we have sex, yay.

I realize the press is not trying to be offensive to Christians. After all, as they assured us while not publishing the Danish cartoons, they would never deliberately offend religious sensibilities. But if they were, this is how they would go about it.
They'd tell us that maybe Jesus walked not on water but on ice that just happened to form, just then, in a land where last time I looked the only ice outside a freezer was a skating rink in the Canada-Israel Friendship Centre. Then they'd breathlessly hype the Gospel of Judas, though if a document of this provenance appeared supporting orthodox Christian doctrine, the Judas Seminar and journalists would vote it off the island without delay. Not least because it was written years after the fact by people with an agenda, precisely as revisionists assert without ground about the canonical Gospels.

There's a lot you can say about the New Testament, and the Old. But not that either bears the stamp of imposture. It is not clear why someone would want to fake such a thing, nor how. But if they did it wouldn't look like this. A competent forger would at the very least have harmonized the two very different versions of Judas's death, one the mortal sin of suicide and the other where he just breaks gruesomely in half. Whereas any traffic cop can tell you that eyewitness accounts differ in bizarre ways.
Like a traffic accident, the story of Jesus of Nazareth continues to fascinate even those it horrifies. Which is a bit weird. Look, if Jesus didn't really walk on water, the whole story is an invention and there's no need for ice; ditto the resurrection and fables about corpse skulduggery. As for those who, claiming he was merely a great moral teacher, go through the New Testament ripping out every passage in which he claims divinity before handing you the tattered remnants and saying look he never said it, pace Damon Runyon, if it is not a fraud, it will do until a fraud comes along. But what prompts these bizarrely persistent attempts to reject the substance but cling to the illusion?

This includes all the baroque conspiracy theories that a wealthy powerful cynical Catholic Church concealed that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had children who were kings of France or Rosicrucians or space aliens or some such. It is, I suppose, possible that the Church would have both motive and opportunity to do so hundreds of years after the fact. But not in the crucial first three centuries when Christians faced ridicule and torture, which makes such theories useless to explain the central mystery.

That mystery, as C. S. Lewis said, is that Jesus was either what he claimed, or a liar, or mad. Yet the Sermon on the Mount does not reek of madness, nor does the Lord's Prayer feel like a lie. Tricky. But if you reject the third option, it is better to remain silent than talk nonsense.

If Christianity was all a big inexplicable mistake can't you just shut up about it after 2,000 years? After all, most people don't go to church nowadays and many who do might as well not bother. But whatever you do, don't talk rot -- like the authorities in St. Paul, Minnesota did who removed the Easter Bunny lest it offend non-Christians. It would be splitting hairs in the barber shop of an asylum to note that St. Paul is Christian and the Easter Bunny is not. But honestly, what sort of credulity does it take to think there's a pink rabbit with decorated eggs in the Bible?

Oh wait. Maybe it's in the Gospel of Judas. Happy Easter anyway."

Could be the "Best comeback line ever" ....

Updated: ... but apparently it's a false one. It was nice while it lasted, though.

"... a portion of National Public Radio interview between a female broadcaster and US Marine Corps General Reinwald who was about to sponsor a Boy Scout Troop visiting his military installation."

FEMALE INTERVIEWER: So, General Reinwald, what things are you going to teach these young boys when they visit your base?

GENERAL REINWALD: We're going to teach them climbing, canoeing, archery, and shooting.

FEMALE INTERVIEWER: Shooting! That's a bit irresponsible, isn't it?

GENERAL REINWALD: I don't see why, they'll be properly supervised on the rifle range.

FEMALE INTERVIEWER: Don't you admit that this is a terribly dangerous activity to be teaching children?

GENERAL REINWALD: I don't see how. We will be teaching them proper rifle discipline before they even touch a firearm.

FEMALE INTERVIEWER: But you're equipping them to become violent killers.

GENERAL REINWALD: Well, Ma'am, you're equipped to be a prostitute, but you're not one, are you?

The radio went silent and the interview ended."

Hmmmmmmm .......... caption this!

Steyn on Iran

Must read.

Bits 'n Pieces

"FREE BOB!!!" "We want the moose to be loose."
"No-Duh" science via Bourque
Of course they are, you "Anus of National Security"! They'd be criminally negligent if they weren't planning. 'Course, then you procreate the evil spawn of the foolish feeder frenzy, just as a bonus.
Definition: "sour puss"
"shriveled Sheehan-Sheen left that's in effect urging on American failure in Iraq"
"Math Games with Cockroaches" "Let's see the little buggers do fractions."
It's "obvious who will own the U.N.'s human rights agenda: Membership "shall be based on equitable geographical distribution and seats shall be distributed among the regional groups as follows: African Group 13, Asian Group 13, Eastern European Group 6, Latin American and Caribbean Group 8, Western European and Others Group (WEOG) 7." (The United States is in the WEOG group.)
Which brings us to the candidates that have put themselves forward. First out of the gate for the African group is Algeria. And throwing their hats into the ring for the Asian group are China, Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, among others. The Latins? Cuba to start." ............... "Feverish vote-swapping among regional groups is now in full swing for the secret-ballot election to the council, and one can be sure the horse trading has nothing to do with protecting human rights "..................... countries standing for election can choose to make a public pledge that they will eventually protect human rights. In the words of the secretary general, "states wishing to be elected to the new Council will put forward their pledges and commitments to protect and promote human rights. It will be up to their fellow member states to evaluate these promises." The U.N., however, for reasons that became clear as soon as the Algerians and Cubans made their pledges, has decided not to translate these pledges, but to make them available only in their original language, thus impeding evaluation of their worth. So far, only 15 of the 42 declared candidates have made such pledges. While the U.N. budget for 2006-2007 anticipates that the organization will translate 582,781 pages (one-fifth of the cost being borne by American taxpayers), the 15 pages of pledges won't be among them." My bold.