Ha! Ha! HA! EH!

Well, sure it's amusing when a small Quebec town plays havoc with the Canadian social conscience and the sensitivities of the multi-culti sob sisters.

But, here's the real story behind the scenes ... they're more than half serious.

Just Google "sharia Ontario". Even the Liberals in Ontario couldn't justify the insanity, but that was only a little over a year ago. It's been going on since ... wait for it ... 1991!

It isn't really all that funny, as Margaret Wente explains:

[...] Sharia law in Canada? Yes. The province of Ontario has authorized the use of sharia law in civil arbitrations, if both parties consent. The arbitrations will deal with such matters as property, marriage, divorce, custody and inheritance. The arbitrators can be imams, Muslim elders or lawyers. In theory, their decisions aren't supposed to conflict with Canadian civil law. But because there is no third-party oversight, and no duty to report decisions, no outsider will ever know if they do. These decisions can be appealed to the regular courts. But for Muslim women, the pressures to abide by the precepts of sharia are overwhelming. To reject sharia is, quite simply, to be a bad Muslim.

Ms. Arjomand's cellphone is constantly ringing — with calls of support, or calls for help, or updates on various crises. A client of hers has just that day died of cancer, leaving behind a nine-year-old daughter. The husband was brutally abusive, and now the dead woman's family is terrified that he's going to take the daughter, who was born in Canada, and go back to Iran. Ms. Arjomand has been trying to get Children's Aid to intervene.

In the burgeoning Muslim communities around Toronto, it's customary to settle family disputes internally, by appealing to an imam or an older person in the family. "I have a client from Pakistan who works for a bank," Ms. Arjomand tells me. "She's educated. She used to give all her money to her husband. She had to beg him for money to buy a cup of coffee. Then she decided to keep $50 a month for herself, but he said no."

They took the matter to an uncle, who decreed that because the wife had not been obedient, her husband could stop sleeping with her. (This is a traditional penalty for disobedient wives.) He could also acquire a temporary wife to take care of his sexual needs, which he proceeded to do. Now the woman wants a separation. She's fighting for custody of the children, which, according to sharia, belong to the father.

The law permitting a sharia court was passed in 1991, when Ontario sought to streamline the overloaded court system (and save money) by diverting certain civil cases to arbitration, including arbitration conducted on religious principles. Jewish courts have operated in the province this way for many years. "People can agree to resolve disputes in any way acceptable," said Brendan Crawley, a spokesman for the Ontario attorney-general. "If they decide to resolve disputes using principles of sharia and using an imam as an arbitrator, that is perfectly acceptable under the arbitration act."

[...]

My bold.

Of course, the Jooooos started it.

Anyway, what's really interesting in the National Post article is ...

... Fo Niemi, executive director of Centre for Research-Action on Race Relations in Montreal, called Herouxville's code of standards "an irrational reaction to a legitimate social concern." He said he fears other municipalities will follow suit if political figures do not step in to calm people's anxieties. "People have a right to feel insecure, to feel frustrated, but some of the incidents have been blown out of proportion," he said. "It's spinning out of control, and of course the song by the police officer doesn't help."

A spokeswoman for Quebec's Immigration and Cultural Communities Minister, Lise Theriault, said yesterday the Minister would not comment on the Herouxville code. "We don't want to throw oil on the fire," she said.

Jean Charest, the Premier, called it an isolated incident and said he does not expect others to follow Herouxville's lead. "I think Quebecers will continue to discuss these questions, as they always have, in a spirit of tolerance and dialogue," he told reporters. ...

Some people have no sense of humour.

Jeff, at least, has a grasp on reality.

Tell us what you really think ...

before you die. 'Cause, after that, your kids can erase it ....

Family left to weather Saltzman's Internet storm
MICHAEL VALPY With a report from Dawn Walton in Calgary

TORONTO -- Percy Saltzman, the much-loved TV weatherman, had a dark side. He was a rowdy blogger.

His Internet journal was little known until after his death [ed. a week ago] Monday at the age of 91, at which point, as word got around, the number of hits on the site mushroomed to thousands daily from a handful.

His two sons, Paul and Earl, who acquired the intellectual copyright to the material after their father died, almost immediately had the more salacious bits removed, including Mr. Saltzman's rather detailed description of his interest in bare female bodies and his sexual difficulties with their mother, Mr. Saltzman's late first wife.

Also removed was his raging criticism of granddaughter Devyani Saltzman's 2005 book, Shooting Water: A Memoir Of Second Chances, Family, And Filmmaking, which he characterized as "riddled with gross distortions," "a farrago of misinformation," gratuitous, snide, and presumptuous rot that left his reputation "forever splattered" with "mud."

[...]

and a columnist can make s**t up.

And while many families worry about young children posting inappropriate material on the Internet, there is a new phenomenon of so-called silver surfers perhaps displaying cognitive conditions that may lead to loss of inhibition in behaviour. ...

RIP Percy. We heard you.

Well ... I'll be brain-fagged ...

Take that, Urban Dictionary.

Wooo Hooo !!!!!!!!!!

** sigh **

Cry me a river ......

Outrageous!

Top of the fold and half the front page today in the Ottawa Citizen is a simpering BJ on a serial criminal (not to mention a full page 5 dedicated to the "Legend of Paddy Mitchell") :

Last wish was to be closer to family ...Cancer claims life of criminal who carried out more than 100 bank heists

[...]

Patrick "Paddy" Mitchell, 64, the notorious Ottawa bank robber serving a 30-year sentence in the United States, died of lung cancer yesterday morning at about 8:30 a.m.

The leader of the Stopwatch Gang -- a group that carried out more than 100 bank robberies in the 1970s and 1980s -- died alone in a prison hospital in Butner, North Carolina, more than 2,000 kilometres away from his family.

It was the one thing he dreaded most.

"He just wanted to be near his family, near us," said his older brother, Pinky Mitchell, 73, who received the call from the prison chaplain telling him his brother had died. "We did everything to try and get him back here. He was my little brother."

"The biggest thing he wanted people to know is that he wasn't a bad person," said his son, Kevin Mitchell, 44, who spoke to his father 11 days ago. "He sounded really good."

"I just wish he would have led a different life."

Paddy Mitchell went from an Irish kid who grew up on Ottawa's scrappy Preston Street to become one of North America's most successful bank robbers, landing himself at the top of the FBI's most wanted list and stealing more than $10 million along the way.

[...]

"Our No. 1 rule was: nobody gets hurt," he wrote. "You want to know the greatest thrill in the world? It's being back at an apartment after a successful job, counting the money."

[...]

For years at a time, he would stay a step ahead of the law, often changing his appearance, dying his hair, using wigs, and even going so far as to have a face lift and a forehead lift.

Mr. Mitchell's current wife, Imelda, and son, Richard, live in the Philippines, where Mr. Mitchell spent five years at a mountain villa under a false identity until U.S. authorities began to close in. He eluded them, leaving three hours before they came to arrest him.

It wasn't the first time he'd narrowly avoided capture. Once authorities stormed one of his safe houses only to find his spaghetti sauce still cooking on the stove, but not the man himself.

But his luck ran out just weeks after he left the Philippines. He was arrested for the last time in 1994 after a bank robbery in Southaven, Mississippi. It was a sloppy job, he later said, and he pulled it off alone, getting caught the moment he walked out of the bank.

Soon the only thing Mr. Mitchell had left to hang onto was his reputation as a gentleman bandit, for he never squeezed the trigger.

[...]

It was his only connection to the outside world and it prompted him to not only write a self-published biography, but he had his family keep a blog on the Internet, where he wrote about his life in prison, and more recently in a U.S. prison hospital. He also wrote a book, This Bank Robber's Life: The life and fast times of Patrick "Paddy" Mitchell.

[...]

In a blog posted Jan. 2, 2007, he wrote this reply to a comment: "Some people are happy with the status quo; one wife (no girlfriends), a couple of children, a model house in the suburbs, a nine to five job ... I had all of those, but I didn't go home after my nine to five job.

"I wanted to go out with the boys for a beer, then to a fancy restaurant, then go to the horse racing track (with a good looking blonde on my arm)... and I couldn't afford any of those things earning a few hundred dollars a month. I didn't have the education nor the intelligence to get and do all of those things honestly, so I chose a different crime. Well, I almost succeeded.

[...]

The 'Gentleman' Bank Robber Citizen crime reporter Gary Dimmock corresponded regularly with Paddy Mitchell and remembers his friend as the sort of criminal you couldn't help but admire -- a man who said he was so lonely in prison he would cry himself to sleep.

Good riddance.

Jackasses. Who the f#*! is editing this rag?

Keep your enemies close ...

Well, maybe not this close.

Via

"Iraq economy roars despite woes" ...

NEIL REYNOLDS Globe and Mail [subscription required]

OTTAWA — More than U.S. troops are surging in Iraq. As the international edition of Newsweek magazine reported at year-end, the Iraqi economy is expanding at a rapid rate: "Civil war or not," writer Silvia Spring says, "Iraq has an economy and -- mother of all surprises -- it's doing remarkably well." Amid anarchy and savage violence, Iraq's construction industry is booming.

Retail and wholesale trade sectors are thriving. Real estate prices are soaring -- up by several hundred per cent in the past couple of years. Iraqi oil production (at two million barrels a day) approaches Venezuelan production (2.4 million barrels a day) and could easily double in the next few years. On average, Iraqis earn 100 per cent more, in real terms, than they did under Saddam Hussein.

Public opinion surveys indicate that Iraqis are now, in economic expectations, at least, expansively optimistic.

Newsweek describes Iraq's economic revival as a product of "vibrancy at the grassroots." Three years ago, Iraq had 8,000 registered companies. Last year it had 34,000. Two years ago, Iraqis owned 1.4 million cellphones. Last year, they owned 7.1 million. (Iraqna, the country's leading mobile phone company, reported revenue of $333-million [U.S.] in 2005, $520-million in 2006.) Baghdad now has five times as many cars as it had before the war.

Global Insight, the economic research company, puts Iraq's GDP growth for 2005 at 17 per cent and for 2006 at 13 per cent. "The U.S. wanted to create the conditions in which small-scale enterprise could blossom," the magazine quotes Jan Randolph, head of sovereign risk at Global insight's office in London. "In a sense, they've succeeded."

None of this lessens the horrors of the savage insurgency in the infamous Sunni Triangle. But none of it warrants suppression of Iraq's economic boom, either, yet it remains an "invisible" story, as Newsweek puts it, in most international coverage. Take unemployment as a single example. Are Iraqis underemployed? Inefficiently employed? Dangerously employed? Absolutely. But are 50 per cent of Iraqis unemployed -- or indeed, as some reports have it, 70 per cent? Newsweek itself says that Iraq's unemployment rate "runs between 30 per cent and 50 per cent." Yet this kind of guesswork was disproved in mid-2005 when a comprehensive research study, using International Labour Organization definitions and standards, put Iraq's unemployment rate at 10.1 per cent.

In an assessment of Iraqi unemployment for the U.S. Congress, Rand Corporation researchers declared that bloated estimates of Iraqi unemployment were "seriously flawed," that the country possessed "an economically active, albeit poor, male citizenry." The report calculated the labour force participation rate for Iraqi men at 69 per cent. (By comparison, the rate for Canadian men is 73 per cent.) The participation rate for Iraqi women, however, was 13 per cent -- a similar percentage, the report noted, "to the participation rate [for women] in all of the Arab countries of the Middle East and North Africa."

Contrary to the TV image of Iraqis men loitering around the wreckage of bombed cars, the Rand report described an enterprising people with an almost heroic work ethic. By far, it observed, most Iraqis were self-employed in private sector work, many holding more than one job. "The problem in Iraq isn't unemployment," the report said. "It's poverty."

Eighteen months later, there's more money, more merchants, more motion. The Newsweek report describes the same entrepreneurial spirit that the Rand report identified -- but portrays a nation on the move: "Roadside bombs account for fewer backups than the sheer number of second-hand cars that crowd the nation's streets. Cheap Chinese goods overflow from shop shelves, and store owners report quick turnover. Ordinary Iraqis are not short of cash [and] they are now spending."

You can credit, in part, L. Paul Bremer, the onetime U.S. administrator in Baghdad who deftly imposed a flat-rate tax of 15 per cent on personal and corporate income in 2004. (Saddam Hussein's rates had reached 75 per cent.) You can credit, in part, the maligned Iraqi government, which has endeavoured, slowly and awkwardly, to liberate the country's highly centralized, bureaucracy-bound economy. (The ousted Baathists -- Arabic for "Resurrectionists" -- were, after all, national socialists.) Among all these liberal, market-driven reforms, the most important has been Iraq's cautious momentum toward world market prices for gasoline and diesel fuel.

A year ago, Iraq still sold gasoline to Iraqis for a penny a litre. Smuggled into Turkey, the penny-worth of gas became an asset worth a dollar, producing a hundredfold return. The long lineups for gas across Iraq became an apparently permanent symbol of the country's inability to pump enough gas for its own consumption. By some estimates, the gas price subsidy, along with the corruption it induced, cost Iraq as much as 40 per cent of its oil production and more than 10 per cent of its entire GDP. But criminal profits, as much as righteous profits, can drive economic growth.

Iraq now has its domestic gas price up to 14 cents a litre. It still has a way to go.

Other Links ...

Bill's INiraq.

"HOW IRAQIS SEE W'S NEW PLAN ... GREAT RELIEF - AND SOME CONCERNS"

"Getting Iraq to Work"

Capt'n Ed: "... the Arabs want us on that wall -- in fact, they need us on that wall."

"HOME ALONE!!"

"Mysterious Mummies: A dried corpse from the Chachapoyas culture of AD 900 to 1500 is displayed in the Museum of The Nation before an exhibition in Lima, Peru. A tall, fair-haired race also known as the Cloud People, they posed their mummies in lifelike postures. Some believe they were originally Europeans."
© The Ottawa Citizen 2007

Last!

Since this has been linked everywhere I can think of, I might as well join the fray. It is pretty funny. I saw the original ... unfunny.

GI Jovial

For more Sunday smiles, see the rest ...

Won't be long now ....

said the monkey as he backed into the lawnmower ....

"Court has created the mother of all parent traps"
John Robson, The Ottawa Citizen

You thought I was kidding. On Sept. 6, 2003, when this newspaper endorsed homosexual marriage, I wrote a column ending "Beware: Those who call for nonsense will find that it comes." And now a court says a child can have three parents ... and counting.

The decision strikes me as revolutionary. For starters, it makes polygamy all but inevitable. For if marriage, as two people of opposite sex, can be dissolved by any court and reconstituted as two people of any sex, and if parenthood, as up to two people, can be dissolved and reconstituted as three (or more), how long before a judge says all a child's parents can be married to each other, especially if they all live together?

[...]

As for nonsense, what does it even mean when a court says you can now have three parents? Did no child have three parents until Tuesday? Or have people always had groups of dads and we never noticed? At bottom what is law? Does it create facts, or merely recognize them?

[...]

The problem is not that this ruling gave a child a second "mother." For better or worse gay marriage did that. The intolerable novelty here is that the court did so without delisting the original father. Allowing parents to multiply raises enormous practical problems of child support, access and so on. But behind them lurks a question of principle: Is it really true that you can have more than two parents at one time?

If so, everyone who ever lived, loved and raised a family misunderstood the word "parent" from the dawn of time until light shone down from the bench on Tuesday. Which is what Canadian law now says.

So beware: Nonsense is not just coming. It's here.

This is no surprise ...

"Iran's Secret Plan For Mayhem"

So ...what else is new ...

You Should Be a Science Fiction Writer

Your ideas are very strange, and people often wonder what planet you're from. And while you may have some problems being "normal," you'll have no problems writing sci-fi. Whether it's epic films, important novels, or vivid comics... Your own little universe could leave an important mark on the world!

What Type of Writer Should You Be?

For the manly man ... 2

They grows 'em really large in Texas.

For the manly man ....

They grows 'em large in Texas.

Bareblogging .... again!

BRIAN J. LOWRY, associate professor, Department of Chemical Engineering, University of New Brunswick:

" ... As part of a course in numerical methods that I teach, I have students plot out temperature data from Environment Canada over the past century. One of the cities is Iqaluit, and the plot is entirely anomalous (among the 14 centres used for the assignment), showing a clear and fairly steady drop in temperature over most of the past 50 years, to the tune of 2 degrees Celsius. It's entirely possible that the Iqaluit-based government of Nunavut is basing its decisions on its own correct observations of a locally cooling climate."