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Archive for August, 2011


“How did you deal the last eight years of your service being called a demon, a devil, Darth Vader, the most divisive?”

Part of it, frankly — some of the comedians at night — was pretty good. Pretty funny, that is. I got as big a laugh about it as anybody.

I remember Darrell Hammond on Saturday Night Live portraying me as a one-man Afghani wrecking crew living in a cave outside Kandahar, Afghanistan. I had on my chest a built-in machine that made me invisible to radar and brewed coffee.

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Bill C-51 would chill free speech in Canada — and PM Harper doesn’t seem to care

Terry Heinrichs:

However, the Canadian government is currently considering a bill which would amend the hate speech section of the Criminal Code in ways that expand the reach of the Act and give the government greater power over the content of what Canadians may say. 

One amendment would add “national origin” to the list of “identifiable groups” which would then read: “any section of the public distinguished by color, race, religion, national or ethnic origin, or sexual orientation.”  (…)

The “national origin” amendment simply adds another basis for grievance to an already expansive collection.  For example, referring to Germans or Poles as “Krauts” or “Polaks,” or saying that “the French are “surrender monkeys,” could earn the person who utters such words a visit from the police. 

And don’t think that because everyone has a race, sexual orientation, and national or ethnic origin, if not a religion, that the act will apply across the board.  Not a chance. 

The Canadian Supreme Court has narrowed the application of an “identifiable group” to cover only those who could be considered “disadvantaged.”  For the Jews and Yanks among us, this means Palestinians and Pakistanis, not Israelis or Americans.

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My NEW Showbiz Assassin column is now up at Pajamas Media!

It’s the sadly obligatory “What is up with Jim Carrey??” edition, with bonus stuff on a black stand-up comic’s anti-Mexican rant; Will Farrel’s next bigoted movie; why Dennis Miller is my favourite talk radio guy, and more.

Check out this week’s Showbiz Assassin here!

 

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Maya Angelou: Dr King’s own words make him sound like ‘arrogant twit’ or something

The fallout over Dr. King statue thing continues.

Yahoo!News:

Poet and author Maya Angelou says a recently unveiled monument to civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. is inscribed with a quote taken out of context that makes the reverend seem “arrogant.”

“I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness,” the inscription on the 30-foot-tall statue of King reads.

“The quote makes Dr. Martin Luther King look like an arrogant twit” (…)

Angelou was on a committee of historians who helped choose the inscriptions, and the memorial’s chief architect, Ed Jackson Jr., said that she didn’t attend any of those meetings.

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It’s a black thang: new pro-life campaign targets African-American hair salons

Black women obsess about their hair the way white women obsess about their weight.

As well, the barbershop and hair salon rank just under church as their main meeting places and “conversation pits.”

So black pro-lifer are taking their message where their listeners are:

According to the organizers of the “Samson Project” – named for the long-haired Nazirite of the Old Testament – over 1,000 people committed to watching their DVD, and talking about abortion’s tragic impact on the black community in their shops.

***
Thanks to this obsession, black people don’t know how to swim and are often obese black hair is big business. It is no surprise that the first African-American millionaire was “Madam” Walker.

However, that isn’t always a good thing — look out for the “weave mobs”:

The break-in at Angie’s Beauty Supply and Salon in the 1100 block of Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard in southwest Atlanta was the latest in a string of smash-and-grab burglaries where thieves stole hair extensions.

Burglars drove a Jeep Grand Cherokee through the front doors of the store as well as a iron security gate, doing extensive structural damage to the business, which is in a strip shopping center near Joseph Lowery Boulevard.

Once inside, they made a beeline for the wall where high-dollar “Indi Remi” hair weaves were displayed.

UPDATE — Abortion: is it all bad…?

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‘Kathy Shaidle is a national treasure…’

says Paul Tuns:

…because she simply cannot tolerate bullshit.

***
Alas, I can’t take credit for the line he highlights; it came from a gun writer for Human Events.

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Insane Clown Posse suddenly hip now that they’ve worked with… Jack White? (language warning)

So bite me.

PS: great stuff — LANGUAGE WARNING — about marketing, career development, hard work and fandom by three experts:

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Ingenious: new Pulitzer-winning play retells ‘Raisin in the Sun’ — from the whites’ point of view

I can’t believe this even got staged, let alone won a Pulitzer. The whites must be REALLY nasty, then.

Steve Sailer writes:

The most relevant, though, is Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 Broadway smash, A Raisin in the Sun. Hansberry based it on her family’s famous NAACP-backed lawsuit Hansberry v. Lee that supported their efforts to buy a house in an all-white Chicago neighborhood she calls “Clybourne Park.”

Raisin is now a standard on school reading lists. Yet after years of living in Chicago, Norris, a Jim Carrey lookalike, asked himself:

” …what if we turned the story around and told it from the opposite angle, the angle of people like my family, the villains, the ones who wanted to keep them out?”

Thus, the first act of Clybourne Park is set in 1959 in the house at 406 Clybourne St. that Hansberry’s heroes are trying to buy. Norris has Raisin’s bad guy, Karl Lindner, try to protectively purchase the house not just from the black family moving in, but also from the white family moving out. (…)

My late in-laws owned a two-flat in Chicago’s working-class white Austin neighborhood. When middle-class black families much like the Hansberrys started to move in during 1967, their less liberal neighbors told them to Sell Now. They vowed to stay and make integration work.

Unfortunately, underclass blacks quickly drove genteel blacks out.

After their small children were mugged three times on the street, my in-laws finally fled in 1970, having lost half their house’s net worth.

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‘Karl Marx was among England’s top 2% of income earners…’

Paul Tuns notes:

 and he wrote Das Kapital without stepping into a factory.

***
Also? Much of the basic arithmetic in Das Kapital “proving” this or that theory is flat out wrong.

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Lost films: ‘London After Midnight’ (1927) should really be #1

Thanks to TCM, I’ve seen a number of Lon Chaney silents. A case could be made that he is the finest movie actor of all time. There are probably a few film buffs who wouldn’t hesitate to literally kill someone to get their hands on one copy of London… And I would probably watch it — feeling maybe a little bit guilty, mind — if they did.

Inexplicably absent from the list is Greed, the complete 6- and/or 10-hour version of which is lost.

Von Stroheim was the victim of many studio “edited versions” of his pictures, leading him to utter one of my favorite insults, this time regarding The Merry Widow (1925):

“The man who edited my film had nothing on his mind but a hat.”

It is especially effective if you imagine von Stroheim (an Otto Dix painting come to life) actually saying it, which is easily done if you’ve seen Sunset Blvd. (1950)

 

 

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New York: Fifteen Muslims arrested in riot over Playland Park safety rules

Today in Belligerent Muslims of North America!

Earlier, a park cashier told a Journal News reporter that a woman wearing a hijab either pushed or hit a ride operator who forbade her from going on the ride.

She said a police officer tried to restrain the woman and the woman’s husband took offense, at which point a multiple-person fight broke out.

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‘Julie Burchill on being hated, a career in journalism and performing monkeys’

A five year column at The Guardian newspaper ended in acrimony in 2003 – Julie says she was outraged to be offered a sofa in place of a pay rise and maintains fellow writer Barbara Ellen had a similar experience.

“Instead of offering me a rise at The Guardian, they offered me a new sofa. Barbara Ellen is also one of the few people who was working class in origin and didn’t go to university. Then I found out they had offered Barbara a kitchen, so while Polly Toynbee and her ilk get paid in actual money – we weren’t worthy of money. We were worthy of a fucking sofa. I didn’t feel rage to myself, but when I found they had done what they had done to Barbara Ellen, I was so fucking cross. There is no other way I can interpret this, we were the only people working at the newspaper who hadn’t been to university and weren’t middle class women.”

The Times then took her on and paid her “double the money” …

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