"Scumbag" Sid Ryan, leftist anti-Semites, and vicious Islamofascists converged on Toronto's Dundas Square yesterday

Blogwrath has the scoop

University of Ottawa's Miserable Socialist Student Union takes on Doofus Party Animals

As Henry Kissinger said about the Iran-Iraq War, it would be nice if they could both lose. (Although if I had to pick a side in this battle of the dimwits, I'd easy take the party animals who, unlike the socialist union creeps, at least have a sense of humor.)

SFUO vice-president Nicole Desnoyers said the SFUO was "concerned and very disappointed" after watching a video — created by and posted by Aficionado Studios to promote its 2014 event in the Ottawa area — that she says "promotes excessive consumption in every way." 

"I mean, the video is just excessive binge drinking, excessive drug intake, and we also see this video place women in very dangerous and hyper-sexualized situations, which is the exact opposite of the work that the student federation has done, especially over the past year around rape culture," Desnoyers said.

See also: Margaret Wente -  The escalating war against campus ‘rape culture’

Today's Darwin Award Winner

I guess there are parts of China where they don't teach chemistry.

Palestine House "retired terrorist" not so retired - calls for all-out violence

Issam al-Yamani, an Executive Director of Palestine House in Mississauga and a member of CAIA’s Coordinating Committee, called for launching a third Palestinian Intifada (meaning violent uprising) in Palestine and the Diaspora, implicitly also in Canada.

As an amusing aside, an article about al-Yamani's deportation hearing reported the "Court heard how Mr. Al Yamani is a changed man since coming to Canada; living here has made him "multicultural" and he now rejects violence "even under the rules of war." "

Funny how when he's not in front of a judge, he isn't so unsupportive of violence.



h/t Sassy

Maximum Restraint

h/t Reader at BCF

Plus, the Palestinians' perfecting the craft of using children as human shields:

Stoner vows to get even with Conservatives by getting people who would never vote for them to not vote for them

As a matter of principle, I don't think the government should have handed "Prince of Pot" Marc Emery over to the Americans, and I support legalized marijuana. But I doubt the influence Marc Emery wields is enough to get a dog catcher elected, and the kind of idle threat he's making suggests there's still a lot of THC in his system.

"The whole thing is nonsense. I should never have been turned over to the U.S. government," said Emery, a fervent Liberal supporter, already fired up for next year's general election.

"My own government betrayed me and I'm going to wreak an appropriate amount of political revenge when I get home and campaign against the Conservative government," said Emery.

Today's Two Must-Read Articles on Gaza

Thomas Sowell in National Review:

...If you want to minimize civilian casualties, then minimize the danger of war, by no longer coming to the rescue of those who start wars. 

Not only was Israel attacked by vast numbers of rockets, but it was also invaded — underground — through mazes of tunnels. There is something grotesque about people living thousands of miles away, in safety and comfort, loftily second-guessing and trying to micromanage what the Israelis are doing in a matter of life and death. Such self-indulgences are a danger, not simply to Israel, but to the whole Western world, for they betray a lack of realism that shows in everything from the current disastrous consequences of our policies in Egypt, Libya, and Iraq to future catastrophes from a nuclear-armed Iran.

Those who say that we can contain a nuclear Iran, as we contained a nuclear Soviet Union, are acting as if they are discussing abstract people in an abstract world. Whatever the Soviets were, they were not suicidal fanatics, ready to see their own cities destroyed in order to destroy ours.

As for the ever-elusive “solution” to the Arab–Israeli conflicts in the Middle East, there is nothing faintly resembling a solution anywhere on the horizon. Nor is it hard to see why.

Even if the Israelis were all saints — and sainthood is not common in any branch of the human race — the cold fact is that they are far more advanced than their neighbors, and groups that cannot tolerate even subordinate Christian minorities can hardly be expected to tolerate an independent, and more advanced, Jewish state that is a daily rebuke to their egos...

And from Sayeh Hassan in The Ottawa Citizen:

...The Hamas Covenant states that all of Palestine (in which it includes Israel) must be governed under Sharia Law and cannot be ceded to a non-Islamic state. Article 13 of the Covenant further declares: “Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement … There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through jihad.”

Imagine how these words read to Gazans who want nothing more than for their children to enjoy peace, prosperity, and the everyday benefits that come with liberal democracy. Further consider how this rejectionist language (and the violence it inspires) undermines Palestinian moderates who have eschewed violence and embraced the path of negotiations with Israel.

After Israel evacuated its citizens and soldiers from Gaza in 2005, Hamas was able to seize control of the territory in less than two years. How long would it take an emboldened Hamas, with Iranian backing, to do likewise should Israel withdraw from the West Bank? Such a prospect is as much a threat to Mahmoud Abbas and moderate Palestinians as it is to Israelis.

Many who have watched the conflict over the past few weeks have made the fundamental error of viewing it as a national struggle between Israelis versus Palestinians. In reality, an extremist segment of the Palestinian leadership – Hamas along with other terror groups – has effectively hijacked the Palestinian national movement in the name of Islamism...

20 Palestinians murdered on Monday - but western leftists are fine with it because...

Hamas did it. So we won't see a single Islamist or western useful idiots like the morons from the "Canadian Peace Alliance" complaining at all about these intentional murders:

Hamas shot some 20 Palestinians on Monday night for protesting against Hamas for the massive destruction inflicted on their neighborhood in Shejaia by the IDF in the past weeks, Channel 10 reported on Tuesday.

UN Official finally admits Hamas is using Human Shields

Deadmau5 cruising with Rob Ford

Turkish Women Protest Deputy PM's No Laughing Comments

ISTANBUL — Hundreds of Turkish women posted pictures of themselves laughing on Twitter on Wednesday to protest against comments by Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc who had urged women not to laugh in public to “protect moral values.”

Melda Onur, a lawmaker from the main opposition party CHP said on Twitter Arinc's comments portrayed laughing as a dishonorable act and left women exposed to violence.

Opponents accuse Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's government of ruling in an increasingly authoritarian manner and meddling in people's private lives, which has long been a source of conflict between the country's secularists and Erdogan's conservative supporters.

The Toronto Police Services Board will not renew Chief Blair's contract

Chief Bill Blair will not stay on as head of the Toronto Police beyond next spring, according to a statement published by the board Wednesday. 

The Toronto Police Services Board has decided not to renew Blair's employment contract. His last day in office will be April 25, 2015.

plus more HERE 

The Toronto Star's pathological anti-Israel bias

It's inconceivable to me how someone who isn't either mentally ill or a complete moral degenerate could favorably compare the terrorists of Hamas to the Jews who were facing extermination by the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto. To do that would require willful blindness to the fact that Hamas, like the Nazis, are fanatically devoted to committing a genocide of Jews.

But that comparison is exactly what readers of The Toronto Star were treated to last week in a column by Gabor Mate "M.D."

I've put the M.D. in quotation marks because, though he adds it after his name, it appears Mr. Mate is not licensed to practice medicine in his home province of British Columbia.  Maybe that has something to do with Mate's having treated people with illegal drugs. Though not a psychiatrist, it hasn't prevented him from presenting himself as an expert while pushing crackpot theories about the mind and behavior, and being treated as a guru by the gullible.

A Psychology Today article about him says that Mate has described Attention Deficit Disorder as being one of his own maladies. The inability to pay attention would explain a lot about someone stupid enough to put in print:

The Palestinians use tunnels? So did my heroes, the poorly armed fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto. Unlike Israel, Palestinians lack Apache helicopters, guided drones, jet fighters with bombs, laser-guided artillery. Out of impotent defiance, they fire inept rockets, causing terror for innocent Israelis but rarely physical harm. With such a gross imbalance of power, there is no equivalence of culpability. 

The intellectual vacuity of the sick moral equivalence exhibited by Mate in his editorial is astounding. The Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto used tunnels for survival - to escape and smuggle in food. The Hamas tunnels Israel is currently trying to eradicate were built to launch attacks intended to murder and kidnap Israeli civilians. Only a moral insect would equate them. As to an "imbalance of power," there was also an imbalance of power during the Second World War between the Allies and Japan, who committed mass atrocities and crimes against humanity. Were they ethical equals? Should the US only have "proportionally responded" to Pearl Harbor?  If dunces like Mate had their way, we might still be fighting World War II. Actually, I take that back. If dunces like Mate had their way, we probably would have lost.

Hezbollah flag at
Toronto's al Quds Day

Overt support for terrorism at
Toronto's al Quds Day

It's hardly a surprise to those familiar with the biases of the Toronto Star that a column by such a person, and such comparisons would be on their pages. That newspaper has come to be called The Red Star and al Starzeera for a reason. Its editorial and feature writers are like a who's who of Canadian far left hysterics. Rick Salutin, Linda McQuaig, Heather Mallick, Haroon Siddiqui. Antonia Zerbisias, Thomas Walkom - The Star is, as one Toronto blogger wrote, an elephants' burial ground for leftist dinosaurs.

But still there used to be some measure of integrity and credibility to its news reporting which it had managed to maintain as somewhat distinct from its editorializing.  Now at The Star, the pretense to credibility has fallen aside.

I was at a pair of demonstrations about the current conflict between Israel and Hamas at Queen's Park last weekend, an anti-Israel one on Saturday and a pro-Israel one on Sunday. They could not have been any more different in tone, behavior, speech and content. But you would never know that if you had to rely on the Toronto Star's coverage.

The Star's sanitized al Quds Day coverage

The anti-Israel one was the annual Khomeinist al Quds Day rally, an event founded by Iran's late Ayatollah Khomeini to rally Muslims to the cause of the destruction of Israel. The anti-Israel demonstrators carried flags of listed terrorist groups like Hezbollah, they called for the genocide of Jews, and the speakers endorsed the killing of civilians. A Jewish organizer of the large pro-Israel counter-protest was attacked and assaulted by the pro-Palestinian mob, with a five minute melee ensuing. It would have been impossible to miss any of that if you had been there and it would be dishonest of any responsible media not to report it. Yet that is precisely what the Toronto Star did in its coverage, even failing to mention the term al Quds Day in its report, referring to it in the headline as "Gaza, Israel supporters rally at Queen's Park."

The pro-Israel protest the day after was like being in a different world. It was peaceful, friendly, and almost celebratory. While the speakers at Saturday's al Quds Day included discreditable, notorious hatemongers like Zafar Bangash and Ali Mallah calling for armed "resistance," the speakers at the pro-Israel rally included two sitting MP's, John Carmichael and Mark Adler, and a young Israeli woman who spoke of her mother, a physician, half of whose patients were Palestinians from Gaza. There were no calls for killing or genocide. The only disruption was when a minor scuffle broke out when one of about five anti-Israel protesters who showed up screamed hateful slogans while waving a swastika at the Jews.

The Star's biased, slanted version
of the pro-Israel demo

But the Toronto Star's report deceitfully, almost maliciously, characterized the pro-Israel rally as violent, though the scuffle was so small and so brief, it went unnoticed by all but a few of the attendees. Instead, The Star was fixated on giving the anti-Israel extremists prominence, particularly featuring a fanatic by the name of Yves Engler who showed up to hurl abuse at the pro-Israel demonstration.

The Star's David Rider reported that "Engler, an atheist from B.C. who said he has no ties to the conflict, called the event 'a pro-war rally dressed up with lots of talk about peace.' "

If The Star's reporter, or one of its fact-checkers had bothered to spend about 10 seconds doing a Google search, they would have instantly learned that Yves Engler, who "has no ties to the conflict," is a hard-core anti-Israel zealot who has written books accusing the Jewish state of apartheid. Another five seconds of looking would have showed them that Engler was removed from office as Vice President of Concordia University's student union for disrupting a speech by Israel's current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Which doesn't exactly sound like someone "with no ties to the conflict."

The type of reporting The Star is providing makes it seem like it is more interested in being the print edition of the depraved, neo-Marxist, anti-western propaganda webzine rabble.ca than in honest news reporting.

If so, that's its own business.  But in a business where integrity and honesty is critical, it's no surprise Toronto Star readers are abandoning it in multitudes in search of reliable, truthful journalism.

York Centre MP Mark Adler speaks at pro-Israel rally

"Bubbles and dancing for peace" at pro-Israel rally

Keren Zeitlin spoke of her mother treating injured Palestinians from Gaza

Blatant lying loses family its citizenship — but earns them a $63K bill from Canadian government

Ottawa has stripped a Lebanese family of their Canadian citizenships — and handed them a $63,000 bill — after they were caught blatantly lying about living in Canada, part of a government crackdown on bogus citizens that could extend to thousands of cases.

The family — a father, mother and their two daughters — signed citizenship forms claiming they lived in Canada for almost all of the previous four years when they really lived in the United Arab Emirates, a fact even posted online in the daughters’ public résumés on LinkedIn.

The bold nature of the fabrications — that successfully won them citizenship in 2008 and 2009 — and their attempts to fight Ottawa’s decision brought rebuke from both the government and the Federal Court of Canada: not only have their citizenships been revoked, but they have been ordered to pay all of the government’s $63,442 in legal bills.

Teachers' Union says Campbell Brown Is Too 'Pretty' to File a Lawsuit That Would Make It Easier to Fire Lousy Teachers

The nonprofit advocacy group, Partnership for Education Justice (PEJ), just filed a lawsuit with the goal of making it easier to remove lousy teachers in New York. The filing comes on the heels of last month's landmark Vergara decision, in which the California Superior Courtstruck down five statutues that protect teachers in the Golden State from being fired...

...Former CNN anchor Campbell Brown, who is the founder of PEJ, announced the case yesterday on the steps of New York's City Hall...

...teachers unions and their defenders are reacting to the lawsuit (which has been rumored for a while) and to Brown's new career as an education reformer. It's ugly. Here are some highlights:

• “[Campbell Brown] is a good media figure because of her looks, but she doesn’t seem to know or understand anything about teaching and why tenure matters," education activist and historian Diane Ravitch told The Washington Post. "I know it sounds sexist to say that she is pretty, but that makes her telegenic...

MORE

Top Secret Hamas Command Bunker in Gaza Revealed and why reporters won’t talk about it

 

The idea that one of Hamas’ main command bunkers is located beneath Shifa Hospital in Gaza City is one of the worst-kept secrets of the Gaza war. So why aren’t reporters in Gaza ferreting it out? The precise location of a large underground bunker equipped with sophisticated communications equipment and housing some part of the leadership of a major terrorist organization beneath a major hospital would seem to qualify as a world-class scoop—the kind that might merit a Pulitzer, or at least a Polk.

So why isn’t the fact that Hamas uses Shifa Hospital as a command post making headlines? In part, it’s because the location is so un-secret that Hamas regularly meets with reporters there. On July 15, for example, William Booth of the Washington Post wrote that the hospital “has become a de facto headquarters for Hamas leaders, who can be seen in the hallways and offices.” Back in 2006, PBS even aired a documentary showing how gunmen roam the halls of the hospital, intimidate the staff, and deny them access to protected locations within the building—where the camera crew was obviously prohibited from filming . Yet the confirmation that Hamas is using Gaza City’s biggest hospital as its de facto headquarters was made in the last sentence of the eighth paragraph of Booth’s story—which would appear to be the kind of rookie mistake that is known in journalistic parlance as “burying the lede.”

But Booth is no rookie—he’s an experienced foreign reporter, which means that he buried the lede on purpose. Why? Well, one reason might be that the “security sources” quoted whenever the location of the Hamas command bunker is mentioned—which, as evidenced by this 2009 article by the excellent and highly experienced foreign correspondent Steven Erlanger of the New York Times, happens every time there’s a war in Gaza—are obviously Israelis, not members of Hamas. It might be hard to believe the Israelis, the simple logic might run, since they obviously have an investment in arguing that Hamas is using hospitals and schools as human shields.

The Israelis are so sure about the location of the Hamas bunker, however, not because they are trying to score propaganda points, or because it has been repeatedly mentioned in passing by Western reporters—but because they built it. Back in 1983, when Israel still ruled Gaza, they built a secure underground operating room and tunnel network beneath Shifa hospital—which is one among several reasons why Israeli security sources are so sure that there is a main Hamas command bunker in or around the large cement basement beneath the area of Building 2 of the Hospital, which reporters are obviously prohibited from entering.

More HERE 

h/t Kathy S

Some funny new Old Spice commercials

Oh, Crud! Crad is gone!

Crad Kilodney was a strange fixture of my teenage years. He used to hang around on Yonge Street selling his self-published "Rotten Canadian Literature." I never picked up any myself but came along with a couple of friends who would. Crad was strange and vaguely ill-tempered, but smart and interesting and it was somehow reassuring in an odd way to see him doing what he did.

I hadn't thought about him in years, but Legion of Decency recently noted his passing. You should read the whole article because it notes some of the clever tricks Crad played on Canada's literary "establishment":

But the other day at the dog park, folks were talking about a funny local obituary and somebody asked if I’d read the one about some writer with a really odd name who used to sell his own books on the streets of Toronto.

And I immediately knew that we had lost Crad Kilodney.

I don’t know if the people of Toronto or any in its communities of writers marked Crad’s passing. But for me it marked the end of an era that probably ended quite some time ago.

It’s always been tough to get past the Gatekeepers and carve out your own space in the creative industries. Many with talent die without succeeding. Some instinctively realize the struggle is a dead-end path and pave a road of their own.

Crad Kilodney was of the latter group.

You can also read more about Crad at the website for the University of Toronto's Thomas Fisher Library

Jon Voight Slams Obama, Kerry At Pro-Israel Rally

See also: Seriously, what is John Kerry doing?

Canada's Green Party President doesn't want to destroy Israel - party rank and file (and leader) go apeshit

It's not easy being Green

Since the NDP has been led by Thomas Mulcair, he has shifted their middle east policy to a more reasoned one, advocating for a two-state solution, but recognizing that Israel has both a right to exists and a right to defend itself from terrorists. Sensing that they may have a shot a forming the government during his lifetime, and for the sake of his party's credibility, Mulcair has (mostly) muzzled the anti-Semitic hard left in the NDP that would like to sea Israel become part of the Islamic Caliphate.

But that doesn't sit well with those determined anti-Zionists in the NDP who despise Israel because it's a modern, pro-western, capitalist country filled mostly with Jews.

That's where Green Party leader Elizabeth May sees some room for growth. May is an unprincipled clown who has tried to play both sides of the coin on the Israel/Palestine issue before, and actually lied about an interview she had given to Jewish Tribune writer Joanne Hill on the subject. The Green Party's dismal electoral performance seems to be the motivation behind its leader and sole MP reaching out to those who want to destroy Israel.

May recently publicized a statement of hers where she said, "I condemn Hamas as a terrorist organization for sending missiles into Israel, but the Israeli retaliation and the invasion of Gaza violates international law and humanitarian norms, and any Prime Minister of Canada worth his or her salt would say that as a friend and ally of Israel, “you’ve gone too far - you must move to peace talks."

Translated, that means, 'I think Hamas is really bad, but Israel is even worse for having the outrageous nerve to defend itself instead of just letting its citizens get slaughtered. Because that would be the polite thing for Jews to do. Oh, and they should immediately make peace with the terrorists who keep refusing ceasefires and are explicitly devoted to the genocide of all the Jews on earth."

Thanks Elizabeth, that helps let people know where you stand. Until you smell a possible vote if you were to completely change your position.  May's statement came out just after a recent blog post by Green Party President Paul Estrin called "Why Gaza makes me sad," in which he acknowledged that the plight of Gaza is not the fault of Israel, but because it is subject to a brutal, repressive terror group that has invested all its energies into subjugating its own people and trying to kill Israelis.

That didn't sit well with the Greens at all. May distanced herself from Estrin immediately. As for the party rank-and-file, they have picked up their pitchforks and solar-powered torches and want to compost Estrin for the temerity of calling a terrorist a terrorist and his saying Israel has a right not to let all its people be annihilated.

It's not that all of this matters very much, since no one takes the Green Party of Canada seriously. Thanks to its being led by Elizabeth May, that state of affairs for the Greens will continue for a long time.

Mark Steyn on Western Ayatollahphilia

...A third of a century back, BBC TV had a comedy show called "Not The Nine O'Clock News", starring among others Rowan Atkinson (of Blackadder, Mister Bean et al). One week, Pamela Stephenson sang a song called "Ayatollah, Don't Khomeini Closer". If memory serves, the lyric was by Richard Curtis, who went on to films such as Four Weddings And A Funeral, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones' Diary and Love, Actually, and who married my old "Loose Ends" pal Emma Freud; and the music was by Howard Goodall, to whom I have a certain antipathy because back when I badly needed the money Channel 4 fired me from a telly gig and got Howard in instead. But, personal bitterness aside, Goodall and Curtis did a rather good job with the Ayatollah Khomeini song. I always liked this quatrain:

Though you are stubborn as a mule
I want you to be my man
I may be in England
But my heart's a hostage in Iran...

"Ayatollah, don't Khomeini closer..." You could do numbers like that 34 years ago because you could assume that almost everyone watching thought Iran's leader was a barbarian nut rather than a pin-up for your drawing room.
Can you still do satirical songs about Khomeini on the Beeb? Or do too many viewers have framed photos of the great man on their mantle? In the intervening years, the Ayatollah has come a lot closer. In Canada, short of delivering the Throne Speech inside the building, he can't get much closer: he's proudly on parade at the legislature of the Dominion's most powerful province - and nobody minds.

Report: North Korea threatens nuclear strike on White House

A senior North Korean military official on Sunday threatened to launch a nuclear strike on the White House and Pentagon, according to Agence France-Presse.

"If the US imperialists threaten our sovereignty and survival ... our troops will fire our nuclear-armed rockets at the White House and the Pentagon — the sources of all evil," Hwang Pyong-So said in a speech in Pyongyang during a military rally. 

Hwang is director of the military’s General Political Bureau.

He said North Korea had been provoked by a series of recent military exercises conducted by the United States and South Korea...

Rob Ford Comes Out On Top (Again) at Tonight's Debate in Toronto

You want to know one of the signs that Rob Ford is going to be re-elected?

Because real people, not the Toronto Star and Globe and Mail pseudo-intellectuals whose faces have a permanent sneer caused in part by the bugs up their asses that are eating their way up to their brains, but real people like him.

And do you know how you can tell that? Because when he's out in public, real people approach him and are happy to see him. That stands in stark contrast to Olivia Chow, whose handlers have to work hard at the difficult task of corralling anyone willing to have their picture taken with her. It's then Chow, not the accessory in the photo, that sends out those photos through social media to try to create the illusion that she is popular.

Part of Ford's success is that is talks to people instead of down to them, as his opponents do.

I watched some of the mayoral debate tonight. The four challengers were packed together and literally sat apart from Ford. But it was the mayor who again topped his rivals, even winning over an audience in a part of town that is less attuned to him than the outer suburbs. Chow, as usual, came off as an out-of-touch, confused halfwit totally in the pockets of the municipal unions. She repeated her idiotic line about not being willing to extend the successful privatization of garbage that Torontonians west of Yonge Street enjoy to the city on the east side of that dividing line. Her fatuous reasoning is that she wants competition. But for anyone who isn't an idiot, competition would mean allowing all qualified competitors to compete. For Chow that means that her civic union buddies have the exclusive right to keep the east side of Yonge Street.

John Tory, without actually saying it in those words, was essentially trying to sell the unconvincing narrative that he's Rob Ford without the crack. But Tory, an honest, decent guy, is also Rob Ford without the determination to get things done. Tory is an inveterate compromiser likely to compromise the city to a standstill and has no real voter base, no charisma, and probably lacks the ability to get elected.

Frankly, I don't even know why David Soknacki and Karen Stintz are still in the race, unless they're being paid by Rob Ford to bleed votes away from Tory and Chow.

"Sock Puppet" Soknacki is a leftie's idea of what they would like a conservative to be, meaning he's basically useless to everyone. Tonight he tried to defend his record as David Miller's Budget Chief. Now those four words, "David Miller's Budget Chief," are enough reason for the average Torontonian to want never to see Soknacki hold elected office again.

As far as Karen Stintz's performance goes, I think she should ask whoever she paid $4500 of taxpayers' money for voice lessons to refund it back to the City budget. She is a terrible, artificial-sounding public speaker. Not quite as artificial as Chow, I'll grant you, but that's like saying vomit is nicer smelling than feces. Stintz had to remind the voters of her name, which was probably a waste of time, since if her name is still on the ballot come October, no one will pay any attention to it then either.

Ford was the only candidate who was convincing about being willing to go all out to make sure taxpayers aren't reamed by the unions and special interests like we were under David Miller. There's another city union contract coming up next year.  Ford got a great deal for the City with the last one and it was fair to the City's unionized workers. No one, and I mean no one, even among Ford's enemies, believes that anyone but he would have been able to strike that deal. And no one really believes that any of Ford's challengers would be able to strike another like it.

So for those people who thought the circus might be leaving town soon,  you might want to bear down, because there's a great chance you'll be looking at Ford more years.

Ryan Bellerose:This Is an Interesting Time to Be Indigenous

...indigenous people are winning, not because we suddenly have all regained our ancestral lands and removed the colonising occupying forces, but rather, because we are able to openly speak and teach people the truth without repercussions. Even 30 years ago this was impossible. For some of us it’s never been about “getting rid of white people” but has only ever been about protecting the things we hold sacred and inviolate, protecting our lands and waters for the future instead of raping them for quick cash.The fact that we are alive, that we and our cultures are still here, is a win; and the fact that we are starting to get the word out, that’s a win, too.

It’s an interesting time, because for the first time, people are able to read and learn things about the world for themselves and no longer have to take someone else’s word or accept someone else’s interpretation. For instance, for more than 67 years the indigenous nature of the world’s first example of an indigenous peopleretakingtheir ancestral lands was recast (by colonialists) as a colonialist experiment. They denied the history, the anthropology, and the genetics that showed they were lying; but because the average person had limited access to knowledge, they managed to convince many that Israel was created by white Europeans who stole “Arab land.” However, like any other lie created in darkness and ignorance, it simply doesn’t hold up when brought into the light of day. I believe the reason they have done this is that they didn’t want other indigenous peoples seeing the possibilities before them, because once the precedent is set, it becomes a possibility instead of a pipe dream. Now that the indigenous nature of Israel is better – if still incompletely – understood, the colonialists are changing their tune. Now we hear, “But if it wasn’t for the colonialists, Israel wouldn’t exist.” Still, we see efforts to delegitimise what the indigenous Jewish people managed to accomplish with very little assistance. If you belong to an indigenous people, you understand what a huge deal it is for a displaced people to return and retake control of their sacred sites and ancestral lands; I have always believed that in some form or another it should be every indigenous people’s goal.

This is also an interesting time because now, in addition to Israel, other indigenous peoples have been successful at promoting their struggles – and some have even managed to start turning the tide. North Americans speak up and speak out against the desecration of our sacred sites and burial grounds, and the destruction of our lands and waters; and while there were always a few who spoke up, their voices were until now drowned out and marginalized. Today, I see non-Native people pick up the banner and walk beside us; and while we obviously have a long way to go, the fact that it’s even in the public discourse shows real movement.

It’s interesting, because in Mexico the Zapatistas have been defeated militarily; however, they achieved control over their education and have moved forward at an astonishing rate and are closer now to a state with self-determination than they have ever been before. They have come to understand that violence in today’s world cannot achieve the same things that education and intelligence can.

It’s interesting, because in the past few years in the Middle East we have seen polarisation and the rise of extremism, while at the same time we see fights for independence and freedom. While many people felt that radical Islam was ascendant, I watched the rise of the Kurdish people with quiet optimism. You see, the Kurds in the majority are fairly moderate Muslims. I believe this may be in part because they were forcefully converted, but also because they are an indigenous people who has never quite forgotten their indigenous history...

Read it all HERE

Boycott this, anti-Israel douchebags!

The first picture of Wonder Woman from Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice has just been released.

Wonder Woman is being portrayed by Israeli actress Gal Gadot, a former Miss Israel who served two years in the Israel Defense Forces. And she is hot. And she has spoken up in favor of Israel and against the cowards of Hamas who hide behind women and children.

So that means all the scuzzy hate slime who have it in for Israel will have to give the action-packed blockbuster series a pass, or else it would violate the Jew-hating anti-Israel BDSM campaign.

But don't worry, pro-Hamas scum, it's not like you don't have your own super hero to adore. You can always jerk off to Jihad Girl...

Family Guy meets The Simpsons - the extended trailer

Rick McGinnis' old pictures: Mickey Rooney

...Mickey would answer a few questions, move to a different part of the room, put on and take off a hat or a blazer, and I'd squeeze off a few frames as he moved. As the afternoon wore on, the huge glowing TV in the other room providing a soundtrack of soaps, it occurred to me that Mickey really didn't want us to leave. 

He was once the biggest star in the world, and a man who'd blown through nearly $80 million dollars by the time his career cratered after the war...

15 Seconds

Sex Trouble: Queer Studies Gurus Worry That Disney Movies Are Making Girls Heterosexual

In his post, Robert Stacy McCain attributes the following to "feminists," but that's not really fair. The people he is quoting and referring to, like Judith Butler, are nutcase Queer Studies academics and hard-core, radical feminist/ anti-capitalist crazies. I expect they are upset that Disney is making kids little capitalists too:

Jasmine was a victim of Aladdin’s magic patriarchal carpet.

Is your daughter a victim of male oppression? Blame Aladdin – as well as The Little Mermaid, Pocahontas, The Lion King and Toy Story 2.

Disney cartoons and other G-rated children’s movies are full of “gendered sexuality,” subjecting women to the male “objectifying gaze,” as “heterosexuality is constructed through hetero-romantic love relationships as exceptional, powerful, magical, and transformative.”

These were the conclusions of Women’s Studies professors Karin Martin and Emily Kazyak in their 2009 research paper, “Hetero-Romantic Love and Heterosexiness in Children’s G-Rated Films.” The sociologists examined “all the G-rated films grossing $100 million dollars or more between 1990 and 2005″ and found that these movies convey what feminists call “heteronormativity”:

Heteronormativity includes the multiple, often mundane ways through which heterosexuality overwhelmingly structures and “pervasively and insidiously” orders “everyday existence” . . . Heteronormativity structures social life so that heterosexuality is always assumed, expected, ordinary, and privileged. Its pervasiveness makes it difficult for people to imagine other ways of life. . . . Anything else is relegated to the nonnormative, unusual, and unexpected and is, thus, in need of explanation. Specifically, within heteronormativity, homosexuality becomes the “other” against which heterosexuality defines itself. . . .

Heteronormativity regulates those within its boundaries as it marginalizes those outside of it. . . .
Heteronormativity also rests on gender asymmetry, as heterosexuality depends on a particular type of normatively gendered women and men.