Irwin Cotler's proposed censorship law proves he's a Liberal who doesn't believe in liberty

Watch the video above. Cotler actually wants to allow people to be prosecuted without knowing who is complaining against them in case they might be ridiculed.

Here's one of my Irwin Cotler encounters.  He really, really doesn't like free speech.

Only crazies are paranoid about genetically modified food

...for the first time this season, he had been able to stop using pesticides. This was thanks to a new pest-resistant variety of eggplant supplied by the government-run Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute.

Despite a recent hailstorm, the weather had been kind, and the new crop flourished. Productivity nearly doubled. Mr. Rahman had already harvested the small plot 10 times, he said, and sold the brinjal (eggplant’s name in the region) labeled “insecticide free” at a small premium in the local market. Now, with increased profits, he looked forward to being able to lift his family further out of poverty. I could see why this was so urgent: Half a dozen shirtless kids gathered around, clamoring for attention. They all looked stunted by malnutrition.

In a rational world, Mr. Rahman would be receiving support from all sides. He is improving the environment and tackling poverty. Yet the visit was rushed, and my escorts from the research institute were nervous about permitting me to speak with him at all.

The new variety had been subjected to incendiary coverage in the local press, and campaign groups based in Dhaka were suing to have the pest-resistant eggplant banned. Activists had visited some of the fields and tried to pressure the farmers to uproot their crops. Our guides from the institute warned that there was a continuing threat of violence — and they were clearly keen to leave.

Why was there such controversy? Because Mr. Rahman’s pest-resistant eggplant was produced using genetic modification...

Freakouts about violent video games are bullshit

Canada's Mordor of Education

Sitting like an imposing fortress built in a style that has come to be known as Brutalist architecture, the spawning ground of the policies and curriculum that form the basis of education in Ontario looms as an evil presence on a quiet stretch of Bloor Street in Toronto's Annex neighborhood.  Inside are bitter academics and angry students who are actively trying to undermine the basic values upon which Canadian society was formed.

It's the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, or as it's known by its acronym, OISE. This faculty of the University of Toronto has been the center of controversy for years. Criticism of practices there has become more intensified since 2010, when an anti-Semitic thesis produced at OISE was condemned across party lines in the Ontario Legislature.

OISE was the home of Professor Ben Levin, the architect of a highly controversial sex education curriculum which was criticized for introducing highly sexualized content to children at an inappropriately young age. Levin was one of OISE's "stars" up until his arrest for producing child pornography and counselling the sexual abuse of a minor; charges to which he plead guilty in April of this year.

So far, much of the focus related to Levin's position at OISE has concerned his role as an advisor to Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne. The question is an apt one, as Wynne has pledged to impose the same curriculum that was withdrawn by her predecessor, Dalton McGuinty, after it succumbed to widespread denunciation from parents across Ontario.

Wynne, a graduate of OISE, was Education Minister while Levin was Deputy Education Minister. A Deputy Minister is the most senior civil servant in a Ministry, usually appointed directly by the Minister, and is responsible for all the day-to-day operations and ongoing strategic development. To compare respective roles in the private sector, the Deputy Minister would be the CEO, while the Minister would be the Chairman of the Board who holds final authority and sets general direction, but has little involvement in the daily running of the organization.

In effect, Kathleen Wynne, as Chair of the Board, made Ben Levin CEO of a multi-billion dollar corporation charged with providing public education, and one of their top priorities was to teach children about anal sex and masturbation. As emails uncovered by a Freedom of Information request by The Rebel Media revealed, Ben Levin's direct involvement with the Ministry of Education and the Sex Ed curriculum continued until just a few weeks prior to his arrest.

However, apparently, according to Kathleen Wynne, pointing out any of that makes you "homophobic." That of itself is both ironic and homophobic, since the vast majority of pedophiles, including Levin, are heterosexual males expressing interest in young girls.

Between 1995 and 2005, covering most of the period since the last change to Ontario's Sex Ed curriculum, teen pregnancy rates in Ontario declined by an enormous 51.5 percent. It was the best result for any province in Canada, demonstrating that the current Sex Ed curriculum is working extremely well, despite Wynne's charge that it was not.

So if something is working that well, why do Wynne and the cohorts at OISE have the anxious, histrionic urge to fix it? One of the most telling aspects to the Sex Education controversy in Ontario is that many of the most ardent proponents of the new, contentious curriculum are childless. 

To understand the mindset, one needs to understand the culture and the overarching operational philosophy at OISE.

The culture there is one of people who identify primarily with their activism.

The school itself has programs that ostensibly are supposed to teach how to educate, but their actual stated goals are to create activists to promote very particular agendas in public schools. These agendas are rooted in Marxist theory and based in large measure upon Pedagogy of the Oppressed,  the seminal work by the late Brazilian Maoist educator, Paulo Friere. The instructors at OISE are in large measure made up of Marxists who deplore capitalism and despise the current federal Conservative government. They see most of the world's ills deriving from capitalism and what they refer to as "the patriarchy." To combat these perceived ills, they are determined to produce generations of students as soldiers to do battle against their ideological enemies.

Many, if not most who support Gay Rights and believe in the right to Gay marriage would be scandalized by OISE's twisted dogmas. Gay advocates and their supporters have long accepted the scientific evidence that sexual orientation is a predetermined characteristic. But at OISE, gender is not biologically pre-determined, but a choice.

OISE, the center of education policy planning for Ontario, actually wants people to celebrate and emulate people like David Stocker, who conducted a bizarre social experiment on one of his own children by raising it to be "genderless."

This is a place where they worship someone like the radical fanatic Judith Butler, a founder of "Queer Theory"  who thinks the terror group Hezbollah is a part of the "progressive left." The ranks of groups like the polemical nitwits of the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid are harvested from the crops at OISE.

That is the ideological foundation from which the Ontario Sex Ed and other radical components of the curriculum was derived. They operate with the goal of conditioning children to create a world as OISE wants it, where boys can choose to be girls and vice versa, and where terrorists, should they be from non-western cultures, are automatically oppressed victims. And for OISE, the earlier the age some of the surrounding aspects of sexuality can be instilled in the psyche of children, the better. Since someone has to understand sexual function in order to understand 'the oppression of a heterosexist, gendernormative society.'

Those familiar with what goes on at OISE know that Ben Levin was far from being the most radical teacher in that institution. Incredibly, only a couple of months after Levin's arrest for child pornography and exploitation, OISE co-sponsored a symposium with a keynote speaker who came to promote the theory that adult sexual attraction to children is normal.

If there ever was a place where the lunatics are running the asylum, it is the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, and that is in the most literal of terms. PhD's there have been awarded to people with severe, diagnosed mental illnesses, and many whose Doctoral theses have been barely coherent gibberish.  Armed with their OISE-provided weaponry, they then become "qualified" to disseminate their lunacy further in the guise of being "accredited experts."

In fairness, not every OISE instructor is a walking self-parody. They do have people like the brilliant Kang Lee, one of the world's leading researchers in child psychology, who is fortunate that the Institute of Child Study with which he is affiliated is separate from the main OISE campus. But far more numerous at OISE are the types like Abigail Bakan, who is the head of OISE's so-called Social Justice Education department.

Bakan is a conspiracy theorist who was a featured speaker at an al Quds Day event, the anti-Semitic 'holiday' invented by the depraved Iranian dictator Ayatollah Khomeini as a call for the destruction of Israel. That's just one example of what masquerades as "social justice" at OISE. 

Another proponent of OISE's brand of "social justice" is Sheryl Nestel, who made a preposterous claim that sounds like it could have come out of the mouth of a neo-Nazi. She alleges that Canadian Jews support Prime Minister Stephen Harper in order to maintain their place in the "racial order."

The examples of OISE's extremism are too many to enumerate in a single article. 

A Toronto blogger known as Blazing Cat Fur once received a visit from police for ironically musing that  "OISE...needs to be purged or burnt to the ground, whichever is more effective." The tragedy is that more attention was paid to what Blazing Cat Fur wrote than the depravity at OISE which caused such a comment.  The more one knows about OISE, the more it becomes apparent that is a diseased place that infects anyone inside its Brutalist walls.

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(This post is an update and compilation of some previous blog posts at Eye on a Crazy Planet.  It's also cross posted at The Rebel.Media)

Justin Trudeau wants to help corrupt union bosses remain unaccountable to union members

This Man Crush/Epic Poem Dedicated to Justin Trudeau is either Brilliant Satire or Seriously Fucking Nuts

I'm at a loss for words to describe this unspeakably weird work by one Elliott Moglica. It's either the strangest effort at satire ever, or Elliott has a photo book of Justin Trudeau with some very icky, sticky pages hidden under his mattress.

What's really a shame is that I have no idea why this guy decided to call Justin Trudeau "Proton Man," unless it has something to do with the size of his brain. I'll probably never find out :

Via Amazon.ca

Via Amazon.ca

Via Amazon.ca

Oh... and you can get your own copy at Amazon.ca. You can use it to bash yourself on the head until you either go into a coma or realize it's a good idea to vote Conservative in the next federal 

election.

h/t Blogwrath

The money you spend on this would be better used to get psychiatric help

Designer Mark Sturkenboom's "21 Grams" is a glass dildo containing the ashes of a dead person. It's storied in an exquisitely-crafted box integrating a perfume diffuser and iPhone amplifier to trigger memories of the lost loved one...

Yeah, I thought this might be from The Onion too, so I checked. It's real. Demented, but real.

h/t Sassy

Salman Rushdie slams critics of PEN’s Charlie Hebdo tribute

The good news about this item is that I now have a good excuse to publicly crap on Michael Ondaatje, since I actually read his incredibly overrated, tedious, pretentious piece of shit, The English Patient. The movie, which I was stuck sitting through was even worse. It's utter garbage that never seemed to stop stinking. I hate it even more than Elaine Benes does. 

I suppose if you want to look at it in another good news/bad news way, the good news is that Michael Ondaatje is self-cleaning. The bad news is that's because he's both a pussy and a douche:

Salman Rushdie, who spent years in hiding after a fatwa was issued against him, has spoken out strongly against the decision by six of his fellow authors to withdraw from the PEN annual gala in New York over the organisation’s decision to honour Charlie Hebdo with its freedom of expression courage award.

“The award will be given. PEN is holding firm. Just 6 pussies. Six Authors in Search of a bit of Character,” Rushdie wrote on Twitter on 27 April, having the day before told the New York Times that the authors – who include Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje and Francine Prose – were “horribly wrong”...

.@JohnTheLeftist @NickCohen4 The award will be given. PEN is holding firm. Just 6 pussies. Six Authors in Search of a bit of Character.
— Salman Rushdie (@SalmanRushdie) April 27, 2015

The "Food Babe" Is Full of Shit

I have to confess, I never heard of "The Food Babe" before today, since her entire repretoire sounds like something I don't give a shit about. It turns out she's the "Jenny McCarthy of food" and after coming across this article in Gawker, it does indeed sound like The Food Babe is giving airheaded babes a bad name: 

Vani Hari, AKA the Food Babe, has amassed a loyal following in her Food Babe Army. The recent subject of profiles and interviews in the New York Times, the New York Post and New York Magazine, Hari implores her soldiers to petition food companies to change their formulas. She's also written a bestselling book telling you that you can change your life in 21 days by "breaking free of the hidden toxins in your life." She and her army are out to change the world.

She's also utterly full of shit.

I am an analytical chemist with a background in forensics and toxicology. Before working full-time as a science writer and public speaker, I worked as a chemistry professor, a toxicology chemist, and in research analyzing pesticides for safety. I now run my own blog, Science Babe, dedicated to debunking pseudoscience that tends to proliferate in the blogosphere. Reading Hari's site, it's rare to come across a single scientific fact. Between her egregious abuse of the word "toxin" anytime there's a chemical she can't pronounce and asserting that everyone who disagrees with her is a paid shill, it's hard to pinpoint her biggest sin...

So it turns out The Wire understated how screwed up and corrupt Baltimore is

MJ Sheppard: Notes on Pandering - Who Gets What and Why

... in the huge 905 belt that surrounds Toronto, ridings change hands with some frequency, and neither Harper nor Wynne would enjoy the majorities they have today without them. Neither wants to lose those majorities because minority governments require working for a living. It isn’t enough that the federal Liberals and provincial Progressive Conservatives insist on committing suicide at every opportunity. Those voters need to be bought, and they need to stay bought. 

Look at the last several federal budgets. In almost all of them, you hear a great deal about “suburbs” and “families.” Since families don’t tend to live in condominium towers, the Harper government is essentially saying “suburbs” twice.  Traditional conservatives (as opposed to ”Conservatives”) never believed that subsidizing babysitters and children’s sports equipment was a proper function of the federal government, but Harper decided to hand those things out. Indeed, he’s spent a good deal of time and money telling you that he did.

Why is that? Because without the majority of suburban seats, Harper has no majority, and the last time he had a minority, he had to double the national debt because he was afraid of Stephane Dion. Obviously, no one wants to see (or can afford) that again. The same goes for the manufacturing sector and seniors. But you’ll notice that this prime minister has done little for rural or urban Canada. That’s because those people either already vote for him, or never will. 

That goes double for the premier. Would you want a job where you have to answer to Andrea Horwath all the time? Of course you don’t. Neither does Wynne. So if the suburbs want an LRT, an LRT they shall have, lest whoever winds up leading the Progressive Conservatives in May winds up offering them one. The rest of us should be thankful that the good people of Brampton and Mississauga didn’t hold out for a monorail because it looked cool on The Simpsons. 

Because former premier Mike Harris thought it would be an interesting experiment to amalgamate the cities, cut their funding and continue to deny them the means to raise their own revenue, Ontario’s cities (and especially Toronto) are rapidly falling apart. Everybody knows that, from the professional smart folks to the politicians. As a matter of fact, both Harper and Wynne have said so in public. 

The problem is that the ridings in downtown Toronto only vote one way, so both levels of government can safely ignore their problems...

Should comedy have boundaries?

The other day, my friend Roy Eappen sent out a tweet, or more precisely a retweet, saying, "Man Killed His Pregnant Girlfriend and Her Unborn Twins When She Refused an Abortion."   

My first instinct was to retweet it myself with the appendage, "proving there's more than one way to skin a cat."  However, showing uncharacteristic restraint, I decided not to incur an onslaught of online opprobrium. But the temptation became so strong, I felt the need to close the twitter window on my computer until it passed.

Admittedly, I'm pro-abortion rights, and can sympathize with the idea of not wanting to pay child support for two unwanted kids for two decades. Even so, you'd imagine that it would be obvious that any reasonable person, or even I, oppose murder and would have been making a joke. Furthermore, I'm an animal lover, and am unequivocally opposed to the actual skinning of cats.

So why didn't I fulfill the urge to send out my little morbid witticism of questionable taste?

Because people can't take a fucking joke anymore.

We live in times where it seems that every moron with Internet access spends all their waking hours scouring electronic media for something at which they can find an excuse to take offense. Then, they'll try to shut it down, by either a petition or some other form of social media campaign. If successful at censorship, they get to shout about their "victory" and feel a sense of power they could never otherwise achieve from, oh, say, creating something or doing something productive.

However, the biggest culprits in this trend aren't the insufferable Internet shitheads who get pleasure from shutting down free speech. It's the media companies, the academic departments, the politicians, and the rest who surrender like an Italian infantry unit at the first sign of trouble.

The appropriate, rational response to an impasse where someone wants to deny another their free speech rights because of a perceived offense is to say, "go fuck yourself." Or alternately to say, "you have every right to choose not to attend or not to listen to things you find offensive, you can insult the person whose opinion you dislike, but you don't have the right to dictate what others can choose to hear."

Which isn't to say offensive comedy can't be problematic. But in those instances, the marketplace of ideas and commerce should be allowed to take their natural course.

It's time we stopped letting sanctimonious would-be censors who troll the Internet dictate to the world what is acceptable humor. There's only one real test for a joke, and that's whether or not it gets a laugh.

The recent example of Trevor Noah comes to mind. The prospective heir to Jon Stewart's throne at The Daily Show got in hot water for a series of old tweets that were insulting to women and Jews.

Trevor Noah's crime was that his jokes about Jews and women weren't remotely funny. Sure, it's a matter of taste. But the problem when a comedian keeps making the same type of unfunny joke over and over, is that it can lead the casual observer to the natural conclusion that it's not actually a joke, and the joker is just an asshole. A case in point is the fascist, French, alleged "comedian" Dieudonne M'bala M'bala. The guy hasn't said anything even mildly amusing on purpose in decades.  M'Bala M'bala's Holocaust "jokes," along with his sincere promotions of anti-Semitic Holocaust deniers, make it abundantly clear he really does hate Jews.  Not that you can't make a living from that. M'bala M'bala has a big following among Jew-hating fascists and Islamists; not demographics generally considered to be major aficionados of comedy, but their francs count as money just like anyone else's.

Balance can be difficult, since comedy, like any other form of social satire, often needs to offend some people to work properly. Unfortunately, the politically correct, intellectually inhibiting climate we have has made contemporary comedy a challenging task.

Part of the dilemma is that identifying satire and parody has become nearly impossible.

We get to witness absurdities from requests for feminist jazz hands, because clapping could be "triggering," to a grievance filed by a transexual upset that she was referred to with the pronoun "Ms" instead of "Mx,"  to UC Santa Barbara apologizing for serving tacos during a science fiction party because it might offend illegal aliens from Mexico. We live in times, thanks to regressive leftists, where there's frequently no discernible difference between parody and reality. 

That became hilariously apparent a few days ago when the brilliant twitter satirist Godfrey Elfwick was taken as a serious "progressive," by the BBC. On a BBC radio show, the hosts had no doubt of Elfwick's sincerity when he satirically described Star Wars as racist and sexist because Darth Vader was a "racial stereotype" who listened to rap music, and that "the one main female character ended up chained to a horny space slug."

Yes, we do live in strangely ultra-sensitive times.

You can show Jesus, Moses, Ganesha, and Buddha in a graphic orgy and no one cares, but all you have to do now is draw one little cartoon of Mohammed having sex with a goat and the next thing you know, some enraged Islamic mob is trying to behead you. And the left is siding with the Islamists because the mobs of maniacs trying to murder peaceful satirists are an otherized minority, making them automatic victims, regardless of their behavior. We've gone from living in times where the political left wants gun control to where they want comic control. Remember folks, cartoons don't kill; people do. And if Islam causes enough damage to the prefrontal cortex so that a cartoon can stimulate great masses of its adherents into uncontrollable rage, maybe it's finally time to make it illegal. Or at least require an Islam license, since evidently, without proper training it can be lethal.

Perhaps the only way out of all this is to utilize the rule described by Alan Alda's character in Woody Allen's masterpiece, Crimes and Misdemeanors.  "Comedy equals tragedy plus time" may well be the rule to live by. Something that's a tragedy today can be the subject of a joke later on. 

There may be a corollary to that rule involving applying common sense and picking an appropriate setting for a joke. For example, a crack about a pregnant murder victim would be a pretty serious breach of etiquette at the woman's funeral service. But among friends at a coffee shop or bar...well..sure, it's still in awful taste, but based on a trial among a small sample audience, it appears it does get a laugh... even if it's combined with a groan.

The Allen Rule with the Klagsbrun Corollary. That could be the guideline for the future of humor. 

If you don't believe me, you can try it for yourself. The next time I write something you find offensive. just take a deep breath, hold it, and slowly count to 240,380.  By the time you're done, I'm sure whatever I wrote won't trouble you in the least anymore. 


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Cross posted at The Rebel Blogs "The Megaphone"

President Obama at the 2015 White House Correspondents' Dinner

Facts about al Qaida poster boy Omar Khadr the mainstream media doesn't want you to know

Apparent false rape allegation results in a lawsuit at Columbia University

Paul Nungesser, the Columbia University student accused of raping fellow student Emma Sulkowicz, is now suing the university for doing nothing to stop Sulkowicz's harassment campaign against him, which he claims "effectively destroyed" his college experience, reputation, and future career prospects.

His lawsuit contains a wealth of new information about the contested sexual assault, including dozens of messages establishing Sulkowicz's sexual "yearning" for Nungesser, which she sent to him both before and after the alleged incident. (Full text of the lawsuit here, courtesy of KC Johnson.)

Sulkowicz and Nungesser initially became friends at Columbia, developing an intimate relationship that involved several sexual encounters and frequent discussions of sex and relationships. Eventually, she accused him of choking, attacking, and anally raping her. Nungesser was cleared by Columbia's sexual assault adjudication process (the police later declined to pursue charges, citing a lack of probable suspicion), which prompted Sulkowicz to go public with her claims and start carrying her mattress everywhere she went as a form of protest against what she viewed as a miscarriage of justice. She became something of a spokesperson for rape victims, and was even invited to attend the State of the Union address with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York).

There were reasons to doubt Sulkowicz's claims. Reason contributor Cathy Young outlined some of them in a detailed piece for The Daily Beast. Perhaps most damning for Sulkowicz's credibility are friendly messages she sent him, and continued to send, even after he allegedly raped her...

Andrew Coyne: Stop panicking, Stephen Harper can’t control the future

I suppose we will have to revisit this issue of the strange powers Stephen Harper has acquired to rule the future. Not only does he control his own government, but in the fevered imaginings of the national press, he controls all future governments as well. (Legal scholars are divided. While it is true that governing from the grave is not expressly authorized under the Constitution, neither is it expressly forbidden.)

The first outbreak of this occult panic was over the Conservatives’ proposed balanced budget law. Never mind that the legislation, which no one has yet seen, does not actually mandate balanced budgets, it was the idea that it might mandate anything that had people up in arms. It was unclear which upset them more: that the prime minister should presume to tell future prime ministers whether they could or could not go into deficit, which made it dictatorial, or that the law could in fact be repealed at any time, which made it worthless.

The notion that it might be neither of these things — that it would remain in effect, like any law, only until it were repealed, and that, like any law, its ability to bind future parliaments consisted in the effort required to repeal it, with all of the political risks that might go with it — did not seem to occur to anyone. It was all just too frightening and disturbing...

Kathleen Wynne's budget puts Ontario on the road to economic Hell

Let's hope 2015-16, the year of China-Canada Cultural Exchange, includes them sending us funeral strippers

The 2015-2016 China-Canada Year of People-to-People and Cultural Exchanges has been launched at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver,Canada on April 13, 2015.

The opening ceremony was attended by Vice Minister of Chinese Ministry of Culture Ding Wei and more than 150 representatives from the Chinese Consulate in Vancouver, the federal government of Canada, the governments of British Columbia and Vancouver, as well as local media, business and culture associations.

"The China-Canada Year is a two-year cultural exchange program," said Ding, "There are 26 major cultural exchange projects with more than 100 showings confirmed as part of the event. These include Canada-China film and TV co-productions, friendship city exchanges, as well as mutual visits by each country's visual artists, craftspeople, performers, authors and museum exhibitions."

The China-Canada Year was initiated by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper during his last visit to China in November, 2014....

                                                                                &

In China, friends and family of the deceased may have to do without a special form of funereal entertainment: strippers.

According to a statement from the Ministry of Culture on Thursday, the government plans to work closely with the police to eliminate such performances, which are held with the goal of drawing more mourners.

Pictures of a funeral in the city of Handan in northern Hebei province last month showed a dancer removing her bra as assembled parents and children watched. They were widely circulated online, prompting much opprobrium. In its Thursday statement, the Ministry of Culture cited “obscene” performances in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangsu, as well as in Handan, and pledged to crack down on such lascivious last rites...

I'm outraged about this! If a woman is going to do a striptease in front of me, I'd hope she would have the decency to do it while I'm alive. Of course there are exceptions. 

h/t Sassy 

Facts the media aren't telling you explain why a Montreal woman was convicted for posting an Instagram picture

A Montreal woman was convicted of criminal harassment for posting a photo of some graffiti art depicting a police spokesman with a bullet in his head and blood pouring out of the gaping, presumably fatal, wound. The woman, Jennifer Pawluck, didn't create the graffiti herself, so there has been a substantial amount of shock at what, on the surface, seems like a miscarriage of justice.

However, just about all the media reports have left out significant details about the case which led to the conviction.

Ms Pawluck didn't merely post a the photo, but on her Instagram account, under her user name "anarcommie," she also tagged the photo, twice, with the name of the policeman depicted, Commander Ian Lafreniere, and she also tagged it with the hashtag #acab, which stands for "all cops are bastards." In addition, Ms Pawluck included what would appear to be her endorsement of the image by writing "okkkkkkk" and including emoji symbols of a raised fist and a clenched fist.

It wasn't just taking a picture of someone else's street art that led to Pawluck's conviction, but her own words and the implicit threats they represented. The Montreal Gazette has a more comprehensive report. But generally, media like the CBC and CTV are representing the issues in an exploitative way to whip this up as a story of suppression of dissent, when some of Ms Pawluck's other Instagram comments, like "One Cop, One Bullet" suggest something else entirely.

Australian comedian's rape joke controversy

The media has completely distorted the truth of this story in favor of the whining heckler who, I'm sure you'll be shocked to learn, is a Gender Studies student.

That of itself suggests she was only in the comedy club looking for something to get offended about. After all, everyone knows Gender Studies students have no sense of humor whatsoever.

Discussing ‘trigger warnings’ on college campuses

See also: Attack of the Leftist Snowflakes

...On college campuses across America, an army of leftist snowflakes — a generation long told they’re special, fragile, and never, ever wrong — is on the march, aiming to squelch any threatening idea that “triggers” uncomfortable thoughts. On the downside, these marauding bands have sparked an epidemic of protests, hysteria, and Nathaniel Hawthorne-style banishings. On the upside, they’re doing a heck of a job alerting the nation that a significant portion of the “leaders of tomorrow” might be one tick short of a working cuckoo clock...

Britain has a democracy problem

Newly declassified documents show Obama knowingly lied about Iran's nuclear breakout time

The Barack Obama administration has estimated for years that Iran was at most three months away from enriching enough nuclear fuel for an atomic bomb. But the administration only declassified this estimate at the beginning of the month, just in time for the White House to make the case for its Iran deal to Congress and the public.

Speaking to reporters and editors at our Washington bureau on Monday, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz acknowledged that the U.S. has assessed for several years that Iran has been two to three months away from producing enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon. When asked how long the administration has held this assessment, Moniz said: "Oh quite some time." He added: "They are now, they are right now spinning, I mean enriching with 9,400 centrifuges out of their roughly 19,000. Plus all the . . . . R&D work. If you put that together it's very, very little time to go forward. That's the 2-3 months."

Brian Hale, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, confirmed to me Monday that the two-to-three-month estimate for fissile material was declassified on April 1.

Here is the puzzling thing: When Obama began his second term in 2013, he sang a different tune. He emphasized that Iran was more than a year away from a nuclear bomb, without mentioning that his intelligence community believed it was only two to three months away from making enough fuel for one, long considered the most challenging task in building a weapon. Today Obama emphasizes that Iran is only two to three months away from acquiring enough fuel for a bomb, creating a sense of urgency for his Iran agreement...

Controversial ads highlighting Islamic Jew-hate appear on Philadelpia public transit

Earth Day reminds us to compost! Like its founder did to his girlfriend after he murdered her

...the charismatic spokesman who helped bring awareness to environmental issues and preached against the Vietnam War — and any violence — had a secret dark side. When his girlfriend of five years, Helen "Holly" Maddux, moved to New York and broke up with him, (Ira) Einhorn threatened that he would throw her left-behind personal belongings onto the street if she didn't come back to pick them up.

And so on Sept. 9, 1977, Maddux went back to the apartment that she and Einhorn had shared in Philadelphia to collect her things, and was never seen again. When Philadelphia police questioned Einhorn about her mysterious disappearance several weeks later, he claimed that she had gone out to the neighborhood co-op to buy some tofu and sprouts and never returned.

It wasn't until 18 months later that investigators searched Einhorn's apartment after one of his neighbors complained that a reddish-brown, foul-smelling liquid was leaking from the ceiling directly below Einhorn's bedroom closet...

It turns out being emotionally retarded is a requirement for being a Humanities student at Oberlin College

 

Told students that women could narrow wage gap by changing majors from, say, sociology to engineering.Room erupted.Horrified gasps & jeers.
— Christina H. Sommers (@CHSommers) April 21, 2015

Conservative feminist Christina Hoff Sommers gave a speech last night at the uber-liberal Oberlin College, where she was met with posters calling her a rapist supporter, as well as rude, immature heckling from the crowd...

...But the highlight of the event has got to be video of this announcement by two safe-space facilitators prior to the speech...

Plot to shoot Sunday churchgoers in Paris thwarted only because Islamic terrorist accidentally shot himself

...He was waiting outside for first aid when police arrived at the scene and told them he was the vicim of a criminal attack. They discovered a blood trail leading to his car, which contained loaded guns and notes about potential targets.

“Documents were also found and they prove, without any ambiguity, that the individual was preparing an imminent attack, in all probability, against one or two churches”... 

Idiot protesters at UC Berkeley set up blockade preventing students getting to class

A gang of student imbeciles at Berkeley set up a blockade preventing other students from getting to class to protest police harassment.  They called students who tried to get to class and didn't want to be forced to listen to them "entitled."

It looks like some basic lessons need to be taught to some of the morons attending Berkeley. Free speech means you can say what you like, but it doesn't mean you can force anyone to listen to you.

Canadian Security Intelligence Service head: Terrorist threat to Canada has ‘never been as direct or immediate’

As youths arrested for terrorism appeared in courts in Alberta, Quebec and the Maritimes on Monday, the director of Canada’s intelligence service testified in Ottawa that the country was facing an unprecedented terrorist threat.

“Based on service assessments, the terrorist threat to Canada’s national security interests has never been as direct or immediate,” Canadian Security Intelligence Service head Michel Coulombe told the Senate national security committee.

“In addition to complex plots involving multiple threat actors over a prolonged period, we must also be alert to rapidly escalating threats posed by individuals determined and able to act with little or no warning or support,” he said.

Canada has seen both in recent months...

Ryan Bellerose:Things Jews Are Bad At

Dear Jews. We all know that you control the media. I mean seriously, you guys are an omnipresent super-secret cabal that controls the ebb and flow of information, and yet, you do a terrible job of getting your puppets to say nice things about you. In fact, if one didn’t know better, one might thing that you didn’t control the media at all. Heck, the level of demonization you allow on your personal etch-a-sketch is either a brilliant cover, or you simply suck at twisting those little white nobs.

Israel, it’s time to drop the G word: You guys are really bad at genocide, I mean shockingly, awful at it. Any tin pot dictator of a banana stand can conduct a Genocide (sit down Kim Jong Un. You don’t even have bananas). Yet, Israel – you guys somehow manage to fail at genocide – not just fail, but spectacularly so. Everyone knows that to conduct a proper genocide, you have to drastically reduce a population using violent means. So, why is it that, during your “genocide” of the Palestinians, their population has literally (okay, figuratively) exploded six fold? Get your act together, Hebrews! This is literally the WORST GENOCIDE EVER. Its like you aren’t even trying…. Don’t you realize that you have a multitude of neighbors who you can teach you how to fill out the proper paper work? You’ve got Syria, Iraq, Iran – the list goes on.

Your ethnic cleansing? Well, that was a pretty epic fail, too. There are nearly 2 million Arabs living in Israel. Jeesh, You should just look at your annoying neighbor, the Palestinian Authority, to see ethnic cleansing done right. They have zero Jews. ZERO. And their percentage of Christians has now shrunk below 5%. Those guys can really teach you Israelis a thing or two about ethnic cleansing...

Turkey’s hidden Armenians search for stolen identity

In 1915, during World War I, the Ottoman Empire ordered a purge of the Armenian people. One and a half million were killed in the genocide. But up to 200,000 women and children survived, converting to Islam and being integrated into the Kurdish and Turkish communities. Today, their descendants are discovering their Armenian roots that had lain hidden for generations. 

A New Yorker is shocked to learn women may not like catcalls

City Hall bleeds our money away

It’s always something at City Hall isn’t it?

Social housing bosses receiving “bonuses” while low-income tenants live in squalor amid a huge repair backlog rapidly closing in on $1 billion.

Or the never-ending renovation of Nathan Phillips Square — going on right outside the front doors of City Hall — 50% ($20 million) over budget and at least three years overdue.

Or the financially troubled Toronto-York Spadina subway, which suddenly can’t be completed without an injection of $150 million more, $90 million from Toronto property taxpayers, $60 million from those in York Region.

Or another fiasco at the TTC, broken by Sun City Hall Bureau Chief Don Peat last week.

That’s that the TTC is bleeding almost $100,000 per week — $1 million so far this year — paying about 85 bus drivers to sit around doing nothing every day before going home after five hours, while earning eight hours’ pay...

Today is Harold Lloyd Day

Today is Harold Lloyd's birthday.

Lloyd (1893-1971) was one of the greatest (I think the greatest,) of the silent screen comedians.

UC Santa Cruz apologizes for serving Mexican food during Sci-Fi space alien party

With stuff like this happening all the time, I don't know how the satirical website The Onion stays in business. Moronic political correctness has eliminated the difference between satire and reality.

In today's fun example, UC Santa Cruz is making staff undergo sensitivity training because they served Mexican food during a space alien-themed science fiction party. Don't get the connection? Neither did the caterers, or the students, or anyone else until some idiot decided that it might offend illegal aliens from Mexico and Latin America.

This actually happened:

A residential college at the University of California, Santa Cruz has apologized for serving a Mexican food buffet during an intergalactic-themed party which featured spaceships and aliens.

In an email sent to Stevenson College students, Dr. Carolyn Golz, a college administration officer, said that as a result of the event, all Programs staff will now be required to undergo cultural competency training.

“Unfortunately, the program planners made a poor decision when choosing to serve a Mexican food buffet during a program that included spaceships and ‘aliens’, failing to take into account how these choices might be perceived by others,” Golz wrote in the email. “We would never want to make a connection between individuals of Latino heritage or undocumented students and ‘aliens’ and I am so sorry that our College Night appeared to do exactly that.”...

Women get ejected from Calgary Expo Comic Convention for dissenting from 3rd Wave Feminism

Like any other movement of fanatical totalitarians, Third Wave Feminists neither tolerate dissent nor do they exhibit much understanding of humor.

Yesterday, both those unpleasant factors came into play at the Calgary Expo, a large-scale comic convention.

Normally, such things were the domain of geeky guys obsessed with the strange fantasies that unfold in comic books and science fiction. But in the last couple of decades, more women have emerged as leaders in the field. More recently still, such events have become infused with movements trying to impose their versions of political correctness, and dictates of hyper-sensitivity to their own points of view at the cost of any others.

That reached a peak at Calgary Expo when during a panel discussion, one of the panelists rhetorically asked about why Men's Right's advocates became so infuriated about women's participation in comics. A woman named Alison Tieman was in the audience and asked if she could address the question as she identifies as a female Men's Rights advocate.  Tieman raised a point about "damselling," which is a term for women playing the victim to their advantage and discussed, in what the recording sounds like a very polite, thoughtful exchange, the perceptions of female and male roles in comics and different writing genres, both as characters and creators.

One of the most salient points made by Tieman, who herself is a comic book author, was, "I made the comic I wanted to see. That was what I did. I think that's the message you need to tell people. Don't say you're a victim of this culture. Say that you build what you want to see."

Evidently that was too much for the 3rd Wave Feminists on the panel and the Calgary Expo organizers, who must have been "triggered" by Tieman's assertion of self-sufficiency and statement that women don't have to revel in their own victimhood.

The panel continued, seemingly normally, but then when it was over, Tieman and her "Honey Badger Brigade" booth was ejected from the Calgary Expo for "harassment."

The website The Mary Sue published an account by one of the panelists, Brittney Le Blanc, trying to justify Tieman's ejection. But an audio recording of the panel suggests Le Blanc's account is merely a series of distortions, slanders, and smears.

Calgary Expo's censorial priggishness took an even more preposterous turn when they attempted to justify their abhorrent narrow-mindedness. The Calgary Expo censors "discovered" a fundraising web post by the Honey Badger Brigade, to seek funds to travel to the convention. In the pose, the Honey Badgers wrote:

...the Honey Badgers plan to put on a booth at the Calgary Comics and Entertainment Expo! We plan to infiltrate nerd culture cunningly disguised as their own. Each of us has been carefully crafting a persona of nerdiness through decades of dedication to comics, science fiction, fantasy, comedy games and other geekery, waiting for this moment, our moment to slip among the unaware. Once there we will start distributing the totalitarian message that nerd and gamer culture is… perfectly wonderful just as it is and should be left alone to go it’s own way. 

That’s it folks...

Evidently, Calgary Expo's organizers believed, in literal seriousness, the sarcastic joke that the Honey Badgers had spent decades crafting the persona of comic book geeks for the purpose of slipping in to a comic convention.

It's hard to imagine how anyone who isn't functionally retarded could come to the conclusion which the Calgary Expo organizers used to justify their actions by (re)tweeting it out through their account.

I've written before that I think the Men's Rights Movement is a generally silly, but harmless phenomenon. Considering some of the responses to them, I'm no longer sure of that, at least where it comes to they're being silly. The reactions they have evoked from fanatical 3rd wave feminists show that some of the issues they raise are indeed valid. Censorship and politically correct totalitarianism is neither silly nor harmless, and it needs to be fought if we want to live in a society where only the establishment's ideas are permitted.

The ugly response by Calgary Expo's organizers to the discussion at the Women in Comics panel is sad for a number of reasons. Not the least of which is that otherwise, they seem to have done a great job of putting together what should have been a hugely enjoyable event. They had stars like Neil Patrick Harris in attendance, the convention drew huge crowds, and had a fantastic parade through the streets of Calgary leading up to the expo.

Unfortunately, by this one spectacular screw-up, Calgary Expo won't be remembered for the fun it gave the overwhelming majority of its attendees, but the cruelty and censorship they inflicted on a few.