Mid-Week Post

Don't look behind you...

There is no hypocrite like a Parti Quebecois hypocrite:

The media of English Canada are to blame for pathetic, unfair coverage of the Parti Quebecois' controversial minorities plan, according to prominent Pequistes.

A former premier called the coverage pitiful. And a current cabinet minister took to Twitter to condemn it Tuesday.

The complaints about the Anglo fourth estate came amid a furor over an impending plan by the PQ government to restrict public employees' right to wear religious clothing.

In an interview with The Canadian Press, ex-premier Bernard Landry said he can't accept some of the complaints directed at the Quebecois. ...

Landry made a prediction: that the rest of Canada will one day "deeply regret" having embraced the doctrine of multiculturalism.

He says it leads to a lack of integration that harms social cohesion and, pointing to Europe, he says that ultimately risks feeding right-wing extremist politics over time.

"Multiculturalism will lead to more and more problems, like in Great Britain. In Holland, in Germany, same thing. Angela Merkel came out against this doctrine a while ago. Immigrants themselves are the first victims of multiculturalism," he said.

"In the U.S., you never see a police officer with a turban. There are things worth regulating and I hope it gets done (here).

"The rule is, when you change country, you change country. They can't expect to find everything here that they had in their country of origin. Intergration is a powerful signal that they need to adjust to a new nation.

"And the majority of them do it wonderfully."

Is this Parti Quebecois I see before me? Is a unified identity a militantly secularist Quebec identity that puts its anglophone population on hold? Put that up on an English sign and see how long it would take for the language police to tear it down. Who has been protectionist since the word go? French-Canadians. There was a time when protection of individual identities mattered but this isn't the eighteenth century and Charles Lawrence is good and dead. Secondly, political multiculturalism was Pierre Trudeau's disaster. If one remembers, he was a Nazi sympathiser, a useless prime minister who devised a stupid Charter and gave French Canada the oligarchy it now enjoys. His useless son now counts pot smoking as one of his biggest achievements. Thirdly, Quebeckers are responsible for their decline in cultural and political importance, not English Canada. Landry's are misplaced at best and stunningly hypocritical at worst.


Chief Double-Dipping-Double-Chin wins re-election:

Again, Attawapiskat finds itself in the headlines for all the wrong reasons after its band and council, led by Chief Theresa Spence, decided to proceed with elections even though no provision had been made to get the ballots of the more than 55% of band members who do not live on the reserve.

HA! I said 'election' like it was an actual democratic process or something. But, really, it was a farce.


Those who do not learn from history are condemned to re-tweet it:

‘Shut up white b*tch’: Stacey Dash quotes MLK Jr., gets attacked for ‘calling blacks negro’

Related: "the dream" doesn't refer to elected liars and thieves who lived off of their white grandparents' affluence.


A chemical substance? Like, in gaseous form?

Evidence suggests that some kind of "substance" was used in Syria that may have killed more than 1,000 people, but any military strike in response must first gain UN Security Council approval, special envoy to Syria Lakhdar Brahimi said Wednesday.

The UN is useless and toothless and any involvement in any of the crumbling North African and Middle Eastern countries will only end up in short or long-term disaster. One must walk away.


But... but... there's no sentience!

Researchers at the University of Helsinki have found that newborn babies learn and remember words that they heard repeatedly in the third trimester of their mothers’ pregnancies.

Eino Partanen and colleagues at the Cognitive Brain Research Unit of the university's Institute of Behavioral Sciences set out to discover if there was measurable evidence that memory traces are formed prior to birth.

Previous studies looked at behavioral clues to the conjecture that babies remember things they heard before birth, but Partanen and his team decided instead to test babies using EEG sensors to look for neural traces of memories that were formed in the womb. 

"Although previous behavioral observations show that newborns react differentially to unfamiliar sounds vs. familiar sound material that they were exposed to as fetuses, the neural basis of fetal learning has not thus far been investigated," the report on the study explained. 

The researchers used a group of 33 mothers in their third trimester. Half were a control group; the other half were given a recording to play to their unborn children that included the meaningless, in Finnish, word "tatata," interspersed with music. Periodically, the word would be slightly altered with a change in pronunciation, syllable stress or tone.

By the time they were born, the test babies had heard the word "tatata" an average of 25,000 times. 


When the babies who heard the recording in utero were tested after birth, the EEG scans showed a specific pattern of enhanced brain activity when they heard the word again, indicating that they recognized the word and its variations. The infants in the control group showed no change in brain activity when they heard the word. 

Moreover, the researchers were able to measure "a mismatch response" when the babies heard the altered version of "tatata," indicating they were even able to differentiate the sound of the word when it was pronounced differently. 

The researchers said this memory ability speeds up recognition of sounds in the baby's native language and can be detected as a pattern of brain waves, even in a sleeping child.

Stick it in your ears, anti-science pro-deathers.