Go back to Canada?
We don’t want him either!
Oh, (un)timely death
David Bowie, George Jonas, Alan Rickman, Brian Bedford, Robert Coates, David Margulies, John Harvard, Robert Stigwood. And those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head – the ones who have dies already in 2016.
People are saying this year is unusual, but it probably isn’t.
My Dad was a doctor. He often told us that mortality spikes at, and just after, the holidays. There were all kinds of reasons for that, he said, and all demographic groups were represented in it, except children.
“We think they hold on for their families,” he said. “And once the holiday passes, they let go.”
WSJ here, others here and here.
Happy birthday, JC
The Earthly one, not the Celestial one. Talked to him yesterday, my Mother of All Colds notwithstanding, to wish him happy birthday. Madame gave him a new pair of skis!
We talked about the state of the Canadian dollar, and what it will mean for the price of stuff like cucumbers. His advice? “Eat less cucumbers!”
Dear Kinsella kids
There will be no Spring Break in Florida this year!
Killing in God’s name
The familiar refrain of the Right goes something like this: “not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims.” It’s become ubiquitous enough that you can find it on T-shirts and bumper stickers.
A more intellectualized version of that is found in this Wall Street Journal column, by a member of that paper’s editorial board. Quote:
The mayor’s comments, so bizarre in their determined denial of the deluge of facts delivered by top police officials standing next to him, were, nonetheless, familiar enough. Americans have learned to expect, after every Islamist terror attack, lectures instructing them that such assaults should in no way be connected to Islamic faith of any kind.
If the writer was being fair, she would have acknowledged that there is a good reason for that: attributing every act of terror to an entire religion simply (a) angers and alienates adherents of that religion, the overwhelmingly majority of whom are obviously not terrorists and (b) drives some of those angry and alienated adherents into the arms of ISIS and al-Qaeda and the like, who are delighted that conservative xenophobes have volunteered to do their recruitment for them. Gratis.
Personally, I still find all of this astonishing. I find it amazing that so many have forgotten what they learned in History 101. That is, every religion always has within its ranks a few extremists or lunatics who will always pervert its scriptures to hateful and murderous ends.
I should know, I guess. I wrote two entire books about the subject. In one of them, Web of Hate, I chronicled the crimes of a gang of terrorists who carried out the biggest armed robbery in US history; who carried out multiple assassinations and bombings; who inspired the single biggest act of domestic terrorism in US history – the murder of nearly 170 men, women and children in Oklahoma City in 1994.
All of the members of that group, called The Order, belonged to a religion. It called itself Christian Identity.
After each of The Order’s crimes – and there were many – no newspaper editorialists called on all Christians to condemn Christian Identity. No politicians warned against the perils associated with admitting Christian refugees to America. No Christian babies were placed on no-fly lists because their name happened to be similar to someone else’s. No aspiring presidential candidates demanded that a wall be erected to prevent Christians from getting into North America.
The point, I guess, is that every religion has its assholes. Every religion has its killers. We Christians have ours, and the Muslims do, too.
All of this seems blindingly obvious to most people, of course. Most people are sensible and fair, and know that unfair generalizations almost always lead to trouble. All of this is common sense.
Unless they happen to write editorials for the Wall Street Journal, that is.
Low
I am in shock. What a towering genius he was. I literally can’t believe it.
For us misfits at Bishop Carroll in Calgary – for our Room 531 gang of punks, poets, artists, musicians, dancers, gays, lesbians, outcasts and drama types – this LP changed everything.
Low was it. And low is what I am, right now. I can’t believe David Bowie is dead.
He released this Friday. Gutted by this.
Catharsis vs. Cancer: Is obnoxiousness is the new charisma?
Sure. In the 2016 GOP presidential nominee race, it’s certainly that. So too the 2010 Toronto mayoralty race. The obnoxious jerk is the winner. Sure.
But what the author doesn’t answer, so much, is this: why isn’t there a similarly-obnoxious progressive standard-bearer? Is there one? (There isn’t. There hasn’t been.)
“At some point, we have to deal with the fact that there are at least two candidates who could utterly destroy the Republican bench for a generation if they became the nominee,” Josh Holmes, a former chief of staff to the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, told Politico’s Alex Isenstadt recently.
Being LOUD and MEAN and HATEFUL is certainly the best way to get noticed in the Internet Era, true. Conservatives are good at that – they are better at peddling emotion and resentments. I’ve written about that for years. And it’s why scum of the Earth like Five Feet of Hate and Amazingly Fat Cur somehow survive, too: they traffic in hate, online, 24/7.
If they want to survive, however, real conservatives need to wrestle the controls away from the extremists who want to hijack their operation and pilot it into a mirror. They need to reassert the notion that conservatism is actually about continuity, not trying to stop history.
Will they? Beats me. I’m not a conservative. And I’m precisely (and proudly) the kind of progressive that Mesrrs. Trump/Cruz/Ford hate.
But something is clearly happening within the body of the modern conservative movement. And it less resembles catharsis, and much more cancer.
“A guild of vampires”
Alan conjures up a phrase that will forever live in infamy. Here.
Newspapers living forever – thanks to the Count, mainly – not so much.
The only way to deal with email spammers
Is this. And take their kind offer to transfer you $2.5m in gold bullion, naturally.