Category Archives: Cultural

The values of the left

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This, picked up on Powerline, is an open letter to the editor of the Montreal Gazette following the publication of an anti-Semitic cartoon published because of the Canadian Prime Minister’s support of Israel.

This is to inform you that I have cancelled my subscription to the Montreal Gazette in protest of that disgusting cartoon your paper has chosen to publish of Prime Minister Stephen Harper dated January 21, 2014.

In a time when the Muslim world is exploding into war, mass slaughter, mayhem, fratricide, suicide bombings, persecution of Christians and gays, incitement to hatred being taught in schools, the export of terror and the spreading of fanatic Islamic ideology, your “newspaper” has chosen to seize the opportunity to denigrate our Prime Minister for his support of the State of Israel, a nation that reflects Canada’s social principles and values.

This so-called “cartoon” is vulgar in so many ways, it should be banished to the trash can of ignorance and veiled anti-Semitisim.

It portrays Israel (and the Jews as a whole) as being in control of Canada’s policies (this which is echoed and chirped by Jew haters of every stripe).

It portrays Prime Minister Harper as a passive lackey of Israel, bending to the wishes of the Jewish State.

I don’t recall seeing a similar portrayal of Barack Obama after his famous love-in speech given to the Muslim world in Cairo, back in 2009. No way would your left wing publication print such a vile representation of a statesman who quoted the wonderful contributions Islam has bestowed upon America.

I have known for many years that your paper is left leaning and have swallowed much of the biased and selective reporting, but this was the last straw for me, the lowest point.

I remember the other most vulgar of Aislin’s work back in 1982 during Israel’s defensive war against Palestinian terrorists using Lebanon as a launching pad for attacks against the Jewish state. That filthy cartoon depicted Menachem Begin as a vampire bat with fangs, flying along holding bombs in his “talons” with the caption reading “torah, torah, torah.” Pure anti-Semitic filth.

I am sure your paper would never, ever, ever, publish the Danish cartoon of Mohamed with a bomb in his turban. You wouldn’t do it because you are cowards, and engage in cowardly journalism.

You wouldn’t do it because you would be fearful of violent backlash, yet you choose vulgar cartoons insulting to the Jewish community because you know that the Jews behave in a civil & non-violent manner.

I plan on showing this shameful cartoon of Mr. Harper on social media, and will be sending a copy to Honest Reporting, Sun News Network, The Freedom Center in the U.S. AND MORE TO EXPOSE YOUR NEWSPAPER’S BIASED POLITICAL LEANINGS.

I have already sent a copy to friends, associates, colleagues and they in turn are circulating this around.

You should be ashamed to have published this trash picture of the leader of our country who has the courage, dignity, and clear vision to stand up for what is right and wrong.

From this point on, I am boycotting the Gazette and will never purchase your paper again.

You can see the cartoon at the link.

Grass makes you stupid

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obama cartoon on grass and alcohol

How many ironies can one life have. I now find myself as an anti-drugs campaigner when the evidence of the harm that mind-altering drugs is so open and shut you have to be brain damaged not to understand it. Alas, many of those who support legalisation may well be of this brain-damaged variety.

As reported by the government’s National Institute on Drug Abuse, adolescent use of marijuana does something that alcohol does not; it causes permanent brain damage, including lowering of I.Q.

No reason not to think that’s possibly also true of adults.

UPDATE: Here’s more non-news along the same lines. This is from Howie Carr in the Boston Herald:

Marijuana makes you stupid.

Nobody wants to acknowledge the obvious fact, but that’s what this whole legalization debate is all about. That’s why most of the candidates for governor, of both parties, have come out against legalization, even if they have to obfuscate why they’re opposed to the Colorado-ization of Massachusetts.

After all, the pols can’t offend that pivotal ganja-American voting bloc, assuming they can remember to vote in November.

What a voting bloc the Democrats are constructing. It may not work for society as a whole, but as long as they remember to vote should work wonders, at least for them.

Rand Paul and others on the legalisation of grass

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These are “Quotes of the Day” from Hotair discussing the use of grass. There are a few such quotes at the link, more than just the three found here. First this, which includes a quote from Rand Paul:

In June, Rand [Paul] attempted to split the difference, saying, “I don’t really believe in prison sentences for these minor, nonviolent drug offenses, but I’m not willing to go all the way to say it is a good idea either. I think people who use marijuana all the time lose IQ points; I think they lose their drive to show up for work.”…

The debate sets up a clash between two pillars of the Republican identity: morality and liberty. “They’re going to come in conflict with each other, for sure,” said Megyesy. “It’s going to be growing pains now as the Republican Party looks for its next breath of life. It’s really hard for them to say, ‘Oh, we would uphold federal law when it comes to marijuana, but push back on federal law on gun control or healthcare.’ I think there’s a big inconsistency there.”…

And then:

[T]here seems to be consensus that pot use will increase markedly, an outcome few are cheering. The logic is pretty simple: “Legalization reduces prices. Cannabis use responds to price. Therefore legalization will increase use,” Kleiman said. “Moreover, legalization improves access and reduces stigma and risk. That should encourage still more use. A 50-percent increase in use seems like a reasonable lower bound.” Both Sabet and Kleiman also spoke in grim terms about the emergence, somewhere down the road, of a marijuana industry that may well begin to act like the tobacco lobby used to, pouring money into weakening regulation and questioning science.

There was way too much giddiness in the media about the first day of legal pot selling in Colorado. Instead of all the happy talk, I think it’s time for some sober discussion and a strong dose of education about the addiction risks of smoking marijuana — particularly among young people. It may start out as a party, but it often ends up as something much, much worse.

With the grace of God, I’ve been clean and sober for over 18 years — a recovery experience that still has me going to a lot of 12-step meetings. And I hear time and again from young people coming into the rooms to get sober how pot smoking led to harder drugs such as cocaine and heroin. Now, this is anecdotal, and I am not an expert. And I will say that many people can control alcohol or pot or other drugs. But I am not one of them. And I am not alone.

Talk to virtually any professional drug counselor, and they will warn that pot is a gateway drug.

And finally this, which is the most positive among the quotes found:

I spent too many nights dealing with the stupidity and struggles of stoned bandmates in their early teens to want to follow that path. And while I dare not engage on the “gateway drug” argument, I can tell you that too many of my bandmates who smoked pot in their teens moved on to coke, acid, pills, and occasionally heroin later in life. I spent many nights dealing with their struggles, many hours helping with them through rehab, too many early mornings in emergency rooms, and in one tragic case, too many nights mourning the loss of a dear friend. But I am sure all of these life experiences with friends and acquaintances over 30 years pales in comparison of the education of kick-starting a bong in Mom’s basement while cranking up “Do You Feel Like We Do.”

But I remain defiant in my ignorance.

Unlike alcohol, pot rarely makes you an angry stoner. Unlike coke, pot rarely makes you bankrupt. And unlike heroin, pot rarely makes you dead. Nope. In my three decades or so around a multitude of pot smokers, I have found that all too often, pot just makes you dumb.

The end of civilisation as we know it

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Civilsation as we know it is always ending. But some endings look worse than others and we are in such a new world that it is hard not to be pessimistic. What is needed to keep things turning over are disappearing at an astounding rate. This is from Victor Davis Hanson in a post he titles, The Last Generation of the West and the Thin Strand of Civilization. There have been forecasts like this before, and maybe this too will pass. But it seems to me as well that we are entering a new more barbarous world about which it is hard to be optimistic. This is how it ends, that is, this is how the article ends. You can then go back and read it all for yourself from the beginning.

What do I mean about the “thinning strand of civilization”?

A shrinking percentage of our population feeds us, finds our energy, protects us, and builds things we count on. They get up each morning to do these things, in part in quest for the good life, in part out of a sense of social obligation and basic humanity, in part because they know they will die if idle and thrive only when busy, and in part simply because “they like it.”

We can stack the deck against them with ever higher taxes, ever more regulations, ever more obligations to others, and they may well continue. But not if we also damn them as the “1%” and call them the agents of inequality and the fat cats who did not build what they built or who profited when they should not have.

You cannot expect the military to protect us, and then continually order it to reflect every aspect of postmodern American sensitivity in a risky premodern world. Filing a lawsuit to divert a river’s water to the sea during a drought is a lot easier and cleaner than welding together well-casings at sea. Last week, an off-duty armed correctional officer in Fresno intervened in a wild carjacking, shooting and killing the gang-member killer and thus limiting his carnage to one death and two woundings rather than five or six killings — at the very moment Harvey Weinstein — of guns-blazing Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction fame and profits — promised to destroy the NRA. These contrasts say everything about the premodern, the postmodern and the innocent who pay the tab in-between.

Each day when I drive to work I try to look at the surrounding communities, and count how many are working and how many of the able-bodied are not. I listen to the car radio and tally up how many stories, both in their subject matter and method of presentation, seem to preserve civilization, or how many seem to tear it down. I try to assess how many drivers stay between the lines, how many weave while texting or zoom in and out of traffic at 90mph or honk and flip off drivers.

Today, as the reader can note from the tone of this apocalyptic essay, civilization seemed to be losing.

And not a whit less momentous is this, which opens an article titled, The Humanities and Us:

In 2011, the University of California at Los Angeles decimated its English major. Such a development may seem insignificant, compared with, say, the federal takeover of health care. It is not. What happened at UCLA is part of a momentous shift in our culture that bears on our relationship to the past—and to civilization itself.

Until 2011, students majoring in English at UCLA had to take one course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one in Milton—the cornerstones of English literature. Following a revolt of the junior faculty, however, during which it was announced that Shakespeare was part of the “Empire,” UCLA junked these individual author requirements and replaced them with a mandate that all English majors take a total of three courses in the following four areas: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability, and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies; genre studies, interdisciplinary studies, and critical theory; or creative writing. In other words, the UCLA faculty was now officially indifferent as to whether an English major had ever read a word of Chaucer, Milton, or Shakespeare, but was determined to expose students, according to the course catalog, to “alternative rubrics of gender, sexuality, race, and class.”

Are these not barbarians? They are, and if they are, then we all are. What will pull us back from the edge this time? More high tech than before but a Dark Age coming all the same.

Pothead jerks media

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Look at these three, icons of the right, none of whom have a thing they are willing to say about against the legalisation of grass. Perhaps the negatives are to come at a later stage but in the meantime they say nothing and behave as if they are sky high and might even actually be sky high. That I now think they are morons will just have to be how it is. The polls show 55-45 split for and against legalisation across the US. Who that 45% is and what their arguments are you would find it very difficult to discover.

Will this frazzle more brains?

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marijuana ad

Here’s the ad for Marijuana Munchies, now perfectly legal in Colorado and in Washington in a few months. And this is from the story that goes with the photo:

An air carrier is veering into a product-pitching space long dominated by late-night, fast-foodies, hinting at legalized marijuana while beckoning flyers to “get mile high.”

Spirit Airlines, playing off the approved use and sale of cannabis in the Rocky Mountain State, dangles discounted fares to Colorado where, its ad informs, “the no smoking sign is off,” nudging the content needle inside a sales niche called marijuana marketing.

To point out how this helps take the US to the opposite extreme of the Protestant work ethic, and will undermine the culture that once brought it success, makes no sense to those who count. In the ACT, it is still technically illegal but no one is arrested. In the Netherlands, they have made marijuana legal but under very restricted conditions. In Colorado, it is now freely available, pushed in a way you cannot even advertise tobacco. But we shall see how this ends up, but no matter how it turns out, I suspect the law will not be repealed and is likely to spread.

In fact, I don’t see how it can be contained. This is now in the hands of those whose aim is to further the spread of weed as fast as possible. What a thought, How legal marijuana could be the next great American industry:

As legalized marijuana sales take off in Colorado, here’s what a pot business model and mature marketplace might look like.

Twenty states and the District of Columbia allow medical marijuana—and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced a medical marijuana plan in his State of the State speech last week.

But voters in Colorado and Washington state went a step further in 2012, becoming the first in the nation to legalize small plant amounts for adult recreational use and to regulate it like alcohol. Colorado sales began on New Year’s Day. Marijuana retailers are scheduled to open in Washington state later this year.

Amid this historic backdrop, a small merchant-focused pot industry is growing, alongside forerunners to national—potentially public—cannabis companies. The legal marijuana sector could unfold and function like the beer industry, with small batch varieties nabbing market share amid larger brands.

A marijuana-led recovery, here it comes:

In a new analysis on the marijuana marketplace, San Francisco-based angel investor network ArcView Group forecasts a 64 percent surge in the legal U.S. cannabis market to $2.34 billion by 2014. The five-year national market could grow to $10.2 billion amid rising demand and potentially new state markets, according to ArcView forecasts.

It makes me laugh when the generations on the way up and in the middle of life make fun of my hippie generation when so far as I can tell, they are in every way exactly in our mould.

Parental advice and young girls

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This is one of the results of a longitudinal study of young girls in Grades 7-12 who were then re-interviewed at ages 18-26.

It was found that 29% of these students had engaged in a casual sexual relationship, which they defined as ‘only having sex’ with that person instead of dating them. The researchers found that participants who had thoughts of suicide were much more likely to have had casual sex as young adults. They also found that casual sex was linked to mental health dwindling even further. Apparently, each additional casual sexual relationship increased the odds of suicidal thoughts by 18% – well, that’s specific. While thoughts of suicide increased with casual sex, depressive symptoms did not increase.

Adult society no longer protects the young as it once did. Parents no doubt try to dissuade their daughters from certain activities that the culture lures them into. It now appears that there are good reasons for such parental advice but some things you don’t know are a mistake until that one step too far has already been taken.

From Instapundit.