It's a close one, today, folks

It's really a toss-up as to what was the dumbest, most offensive sentence in this morning's Montreal Gazette.

Reading the opinion section, I was certain this was going to be the winner:

"The modern [Quebec] independence movement was born in Montreal's bilingual francophone intellectual community, inspired by hearing Martin Luther King and Gandhi speak about freedom, justice and liberty" - Georges Boulanger, "Pauline Marois and her problem with English," B7

Because, you know: MLK, Gandhi, Levesque.

But then I read this bizarre statement in the book review section, and was no longer so sure:

"I'd like to think of this as high praise and not offence: I don't think it's a book a woman could have written." - Kirk LaPointe, in a review of Charles Brock's Beautiful Children, I9.

What on earth is that supposed to mean??? In the reviewer's defense, he also praises Don DeLillo, the single worst author in human history, so he can't really be taken all that seriously, he probably doesn't even know how to read and is just one of those illiterate guys artfully bluffing their way through life. Come to think of it, that could make a pretty good story - the illiterate book reviewer. Not all that implausible, either.

Faced with no choice but to open this rag every morning, I sometimes wish I couldn't read!

You don't say!

How economically illiterate do you have to be to write about economics for The Montreal Gazette? I mean, seriously, is there some sort of test involved and anyone who can correctly chart a supply and demand graph is immediately fired? I ask because today's huge, front-page headline story is about the nefarious scandal that, and I kid you not, companies pass along the cost of higher taxes to consumers via higher prices. Apparently, these evil corporate fat-cats are greedily unwilling to go bankrupt and, perhaps even more chillingly, unable (unwilling?) to print their own money, insisting instead on prying it from our very hands.

Here's the story. The first three paragraphs are worth quoting in full:

"Quebec energy consumers - not just energy producers - are the ones who will end up paying for the province's new green fund. The bills are in the mail.

It wasn't supposed to be this way: When the provincial government imposed the country's first carbon tax last fall, it wanted producers to pay.

But just as oil refiners have already done, Gaz Métro started passing on the cost of the carbon tax this month."

Now, say what you will about a carbon tax, that's not the issue here; my focus is on how economically clueless you would have to be to be surprised that taxes on businesses get passed on to consumers. I mean, we're not talking advanced econometrics here, this is plain-as-day common sense. And yet, the front page story, the huge font, and "It wasn't supposed to be this way." Not to mention the reaction from confused, betrayed voters like Leonard: "They said consumers would not pay for this - and now here we are, paying for it." Incidentally, Leonard, if you're reading this, there's this bridge I've been just itching to get off my hands, call me.

Thank goodness for Pascal D'Astous, who, unlike many of his fellow Quebecers, is apparently not retarded:
"Pascal D'Astous, a spokesperson for Béchard, said yesterday the government never intended to compel companies alone to pay for the green fund.
'How could we ever have such a mechanism?' he asked.
'We're in a market economy. We could never prove whether or not the carbon tax was or was not part of their prices.'"

Oh, Pascal, you cold-hearted bastard, I think I love you.

Avant-garde is one way to put it...

I did not know about this. Married women in Quebec are legally forced to keep their maiden names! Chalk another one up to the Charter of Human Rights. You know, Quebecois human rights, like the right to protect your worthless, low-class, Elvis-impersonating, speedo-wearing, illiterate 'culture' by banning English stop signs, or the right to walk around wearing a Nazi uniform during WWII and then get elected prime minister.

My favorite line from that story? "'It's like collective amnesia,' she said of young women who want to go back to using their husbands' names. 'They have benefited from the struggles of their mothers and grandmothers.'" Yes, because we know that if there's one thing radical Quebec university professor feminists value, it's tradition.

Oh, and please feel free to add your own woman's-right-to-choose joke, we all know how important that surely must be to Prof Langevin.

The Wrong Way

What amuses me most about Hillary's baby bonus scheme is that, even for such blatant political bribery, it's too understated. Hillary should take a page from Duplessis. He never bribed voters - he outright threatened them! He told them, to their faces, that if they didn't vote for him he would make sure that no new road, bridge, or school ever got built in their town. And it worked! So, Hillary, as far as the nation's newborn go, should get less charitable and more Biblical. And the Republican candidate should promise, if elected, to make it his sworn goal to personally tase every single college student who didn't vote for him. After all, why simply mock their paranoia when you can also capitalize on it? Now that is my kind of politics.

Hey, It Could Be Worse

Relapsed Catholic links to the news that Ontario will be sending free copies of An Inconvenient Truth to all of its public schools. Before anyone starts harping on how cruel and abusive it is to feed this fearmongering, dishonest propaganda to impressionable young kids, an anecdote: my Grade Five French teacher fell ill one week, and the substitute couldn't speak French, so she figured she would just show us a movie for a couple days. The movie? Poltergeist. (I mean, what was she thinking?) I must have had nightmares for a month. So, compared to that, I think it's fair to say Al Gore is child's play. Um, no, not that (though the resemblance is uncanny), you know what I mean.

Besides, if Ontario's required curriculum is anything like Quebec's, trust me that the kids are a lot better off sleeping through Gore's dull slide-show than actually having to pay attention to their teacher's state-mandated p.c. babble. I went to one of the best private schools in the province, but even there they were required to follow the government plan for certain subjects, and boy could you ever tell the difference between the free-thinking classes (World History) and the state-controlled ones (Canadian History). Canadian History, by the way, was actually Quebec History - or, to be precise, Why English People are Stupid and Evil and Have Inferior Sauces (... and yet still managed to oppress us for 200 years). My classmates and I got the last laugh, though. Our teacher never read our homework assignments, he just checked to see if the lines in our workbooks were filled in. So we all got together and wrote incredibly vulgar stories about him and his wife in our workbooks, turned them in, and got full marks. Good times, good times.

The Dark Knight Returns

First comic book I've read in over a decade. And it's less comic book than an excuse for merciless anti-liberal satire. In other words, I loved it. In brief: Batman goes around attacking vicious criminals, while liberal television commentators and famous therapists argue that the criminals are simply misunderstood, are nothing but innocent victims, can easily be rehabilitated, etc. It's mostly very broad satire, such as a scene when the mayor, rather than execute a monstrous criminal leader, decides to negotiate with him and is murdered within moments. There were some subtler moments, like the panel depicting the "Arkham Home for the Emotionally Troubled" (fans know the original name of the Asylum is the Home for the Criminally Insane). Even subtler is the panel right next to that one, my favorite image in the book: in the hallway of the Asylum, which houses all the most degenerate psychopaths in the world, there is only one forbidding sign, and I'll bet you can guess what it is.

All in all, though, a very depressing read. It was written more than twenty years ago, yet very little has changed. Things have probably gotten worse. I know that almost every time I go back home, there's a story about some child rapist or murderer who gets a five year sentence and is out after two on good behavior (good behavior in jail? well, duh - there aren't any nine-year-old girls to rape in prison). In one case last year, a man brutally raped a 14-year-old girl, bashed her head in with a rock, and left her for dead in the St. Lawrence River. Only by a miracle did she survive and manage to swim to safety. The prosecutors asked for ten years. The judge, displaying extreme coldheartedness, sentenced him to eleven. He only had to serve seven - not bad for rape and 'attempted' murder. There was an uproar in the aftermath of the sentence. It was reviewed, and the reviewer deemed the judge made the right decision, since the rapist had no prior history of sexual assault and was not a demonstrable risk to society (I swear I'm not making this up). Of course, it then turned out that, yes indeed, he did have a history and had sexually assaulted three other young girls. For these new charges, the prosecution asked for, and the judge granted, three years in jail - to be served concurrently with his other sentence. In other words, three more victims, not one extra day. And, as that article notes, if he behaves nicely in prison, he could be free after just two years. Anyway, sorry I'm getting carried away here, but I just wanted to show that The Dark Knight Returns is, these days, probably less satire than documentary.
Among the liberal elite, in his comic as in our lives, rapists and murderers receive sympathy and understanding; shunning is only for those who fight back. Oh, and of course, those who smoke.

p.s. no, i'm not demanding that the castrations begin immediately. baby steps, baby steps. a little deterrence might not be a bad place to start.

p.s. Jonah Goldberg promised some thoughts about this, I hope he comes through.

UPDATE: I forgot to add that Miller also makes a lot of fun of Reagan, which is why I wrote that the comic is anti-liberal, since it's not exactly conservative.

Only in Quebec

So the government announced it is partnering with private contractors to build the new hospital in Montreal, and they actually had to send out a spokesman to make the case for why private builders are more efficient than public workers. I heard him on the radio earlier today, so this isn't quite verbatim, but he was saying that a contract with a private builder can be very effective because if he does not meet the terms he will lose money, and "money can be a strong incentive." Money an incentive? Ya think? Only in Quebec does the government have to actively make the case to convince its subjects that, yes, people will work for money (and the occurence is so rare around these parts, I doubt if many will believe them).

"We are a community

and if one of us is hungry
we are all hungry."

That's an excerpt from a poem written by one of the idiot hunger strikers. Some follow-ups: if only one of you has to be hungry for us all to be hungry, then aren't there ten hunger strikers too many? And does the reverse hold true - can I negate your hunger strike by eating a whole lot and making us all full?

I'll post more about this after I finish up a paper, but for now I just want to say that I do in fact support the hunger strike. Same reason I've become a Quebec seperatist over the years: good riddance. I only wish that more economically illiterate, self-righteous morons would volunteer to starve themselves to death. Well, I'd prefer if they just killed themselves quickly, without all the emails, the drumming, the chants, and the poems, but I guess we have to take these things one step at a time.


UPDATE: Roger Kimball echoes my support!