Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Tuesday Post

Quick thoughts for Holy Week and in general.


Devolution: morons in Canada and in the US where the decline isn't just financial:


In such a world it becomes more difficult to innovate, and frankly not a priority. When I deposit a New Zealand check at my bank in Montreal, the funds are available to me within two seconds. The last time I deposited a New Zealand check at my bank in the U.S., they sent it for “collection” (an entirely artificial concept in the computer age) to Australia, and by the time it came back it had expired. They couldn’t understand why I was annoyed — c’mon, man, we were in the ballpark! To resolve the issue, I had to go to the bank president, who, on being informed of my Canadian comparison, said, “Well, you must understand smaller countries by their nature have to get used to dealing with the rest of the world. It’s different for America.” 
 

This might have been reasonable enough in 1950, when America was last man standing on a Western world otherwise reduced to rubble. But it seems an odd attitude for a country whose households are entirely filled by products made elsewhere and whose future is mortgaged to foreigners. And it made me wonder if perhaps Ferguson and I are being insufficiently apocalyptic. A gargantuan bureaucratized parochialism leavened by litigiousness and political correctness is a scale of decline no developed nation has yet attempted.




Carbon and stupidity, people. Americans don't get that Canada is its neighbour and Canada is so multicultural and cosmopolitan that they think the Eskimo the Inuit still live in igloos.


Thank you, God, that Sun TV lets Ezra Levant talk and talk. Sarah Palin's Wonder Twin deserves his own mic.


Not everyone likes Sun News, however, principally the people who like their women stupid:


I only watched a couple of minutes of Sun News today so I can’t really comment much on the content except to say it sure ain’t like anything else on Canadian TV which in itself makes me very happy.

What I did want to comment on is the snide remarks being made from Sun News’ media competitors and especially the ones which smack of being misogynistic.

CBC’s Rick Mercer“Just yesterday SUN TV’s studios was full of dry wall, today it is full of silicone”

Ottawa Citizen’s Dave Dutton“26 babe shots in intro; still awaiting actual news”

Globe and Mail’s Jeff Blair – “If the ratings are as high as the hem-lines, Sun News has a chance”

I’m not normally one to get bent out of shape over stuff like this but imagine the outcry if it was the Sun’s journalists and on-air personalities taking shots at the CBC’s Wendy Mesley or CTV’s Jennifer Ward about how short their skirts are and sneering about their boob jobs?



Tsk-tsk.


Take your "art" and stuff it:


When New York artist Andres Serrano plunged a plastic crucifix into a glass of his own urine and photographed it in 1987 under the title Piss Christ, he said he was making a statement on the misuse of religion.

Controversy has followed the work ever since, but reached an unprecedented peak on Palm Sunday when it was attacked with hammers and destroyed after an "anti-blasphemy" campaign by French Catholic fundamentalists in the southern city of Avignon.

The violent slashing of the picture, and another Serrano photograph of a meditating nun, has plunged secular France into soul-searching about Christian fundamentalism and Nicolas Sarkozy's use of religious populism in his bid for re-election next year.

It also marks a return to an old standoff between Serrano and the religious right that dates back more than 20 years, to Reagan-era Republicanism in the US.



What is worse: the incident or the padding in the article (juvenile, really)? YOU decide. Is the last acceptable prejudice anything like the religion of peace?


It's no Miss America but just as entertaining if halal TV entertainment is your bag.


(hat tips: SDA and BCF)


And now, some historical brass (or copper and silver as the case may be): recordings of trumpets from Tutankhamen's court.

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