Put on your Big-Boy Pants, Good Citizen

The shine is off. The Pollyanna set of the pro-life movement will be disappointed again by Canada's Prime Minster Harper, like Americans may be who hoped in Palin.



But we have made an oracle of a whoremonger, and we are fools to persist. Rather, let this be for us inoculation against what liberalism may yet infect our minds.

Do not look to the State. It is only a procurer; a pimp. A pimp purloins one to pander to another; it is not there for leadership. Don't look to it for answers.

Instead, let us remember, what we do not solve ourselves will not be solved. What culture we do not make will not be made. If we find public opinion to be misguided, we must be for it a guide. The State is not there for leadership.

It will not cure your ills. It will not keep you safe. It will neither educate your children nor care for your elders. It will not feed you. It will not clothe you. It will not be your guide.

Freedom beckons. Put on your big-boy pants, Good Citizen, and look to yourself.

200

This is my 200th post. To celebrate, everywhere you go today, try pronouncing "Iraq" and "Italian" with a long -i- sound at the beginning.

Enjoy the response.

If you are in San Francisco, New York, or Toronto, please leave a comment here to say how it went.

Concealed Carry, Freedom

The guy who got tossed from the Conservative Party of Canada for being conservative, writes:

Gun control: It doesn't work. There is no research that proves it does. The facts are clear, it increases crime. Simon Fraser University professor Gary Mauser finds that a year after the British obediently surrendered 160,000 legal handguns, London muggings were up 53 percent, gun murders up 90 percent and robbery up more than 100 percent. By the year following, annual gun crimes overall had risen 39 percent.

This pattern has continued. The rate of violent crime in England and Wales is more than double the United States. It is now more dangerous to walk the streets of London than New York.

On top of that, British Olympic shooting teams are now forced to practice their sport in another country! This is doubly absurd, for it discourages establishing positive role models for how firearms should be used.

In contrast, during the last decade, violent crime has dropped 40 percent in the United States as the number of firearms and states with concealed carry permits have increased.

How long can democracy survive under the current thought? Because, in the end, gun control, public schools, and public healthcare, anti-tobacco laws, and Human Rights Commissions all come back to the same stunningly illiberal idea: ordinary people can't be trusted to make the right decision. The State will do it for you.

They're even regulating your cable T.V. package. Or did you choose the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network yourself?

So why are we having an election? If you can't even be trusted not to shoot the coffee girl when she gets your order wrong, how can you possibly be clever enough to choose a government?

So, how long can democracy survive? Not long, I say. Let's just see.

White Liberal Guilt

On the topic of Compulsory Displays of Mass Public Grief for Events I did not Attend and Concerning People I have not Known...

I don't feel guilty about the Holocaust, and really, I'm not losing any sleep over Slavery either.

When I said so, someone got upset. Apparently I'm a bad guy, since his grandfather was at Auschwitz.

So I said, "No kidding?! Mine too! Mine was the chap in the Canadian uniform who volunteered to be there getting shot at".

I was kind of making it up. Anyway it could have been true. I think he got my point.

How to: Smoke a Pipe. Secunda Pars

Below is the second part of my primer on pipe smoking. The following is offered in response to the queries raised in response to the first part, found here.

It is possible that the foregoing sentence does not, in fact, make sense. It is not alone here.

The point anyway is that between the first bit and this bit, there was an whole other letter, to which this is the response and to which you, Dear Reader, aren't privy. I didn't write it, so I don't mean to publish it. Anyway it doesn't matter. Enjoy this one if you will, or if you can. If you prefer, don't enjoy it. It is largely the same to me.


Tipple is not a gay word. Don't be ridiculous.

Don't inhale. You'll die on the spot. It's not the point anyway. You can get plenty of nicotine and cancer in your mouth and on your tongue.

I'd like a tweed hat. But I'm afraid a lot of the hip youngsters are wearing them these days and I'd be mistaken for one. On the other hand, I am surely deluding myself when I say I could be mistaken for a hip youngster. At any rate, it would be contrived and if I'm going to be contrived I don't like to be obvious about it.

I smoke too fast, so I couldn't say how long between puffs except to say more time than I leave. Keep it lit is all. If you make of it too much science you'll lose the art. That would be a terrible shame. It is such a beautiful thing.

If you lose the art you'll lose the purpose. The art is the purpose.

Use a lighter if you will. Purists won't. I have, in the wind. I take the position that it's better to light with a lighter than not to smoke at all. But lighters are difficult, since like ballpoint pens they're meant to be used one way up and not the other. Pipe lighters are available. Matches are better. See losing the art; above. Paper matches will do in a pinch but wood matches last longer and are more likely to get the whole bowl lit on one match. Also, see losing the art; above. Use wooden matches, mate.

No, I should not have been British. If that were so, the Almighty would have seen to it that I was, you filthy blasphemer.

Anyway if I was, I'd probably not be spending the evening smoking a pipe but instead vomiting in the streets amongst young, and not-so-young women, in knicker-showing miniskirts who would probably be pleased to have me father for them another bastard child the better for them to suckle at the teat of the bloated Tony Blair State.

What a dirty shame he's become, on conversion. Thank you, no, I prefer to admire from afar what once was England. See losing the art; above. Also, it consoles me some about the state of my beloved, beleaguered Canada. Also, your position on whiskey troubles me.

How to: Smoke a Pipe. Prima Pars

Because a primer on pipe smoking is not so easy to come by, because it may be useful to you, Dear Reader, but mostly because it amuses me, I reproduce below the slightly-edited for some semblance of clarity first of two pieces of private correspondence on the topic.


But do not fret if certain sections are not so clear. It was, after all, private, and only half of the discussion is here. The other correspondent, if it helps to know, is English.

For a superlative meditation on pipe smoking, I refer you to Poo, Tobacco, and the Wisdom of Burt Bacharach.





Pipe Tobacco! Now there's a topic worth discussing.

Many packs will designate themselves "aromatic" or "English," or that's how they do it here. For all I know, you there will be calling it "French" or "Italian" or "Bangladeshi". English doesn't smell so nice, but is said to taste better. Aromatic is said not to taste as good, but is the smell people think of when they think of pipe tobacco. The theory of it is to get one balanced between English and aromatic for your preference, to make it smell nice for your curious onlookers, and taste nice for you.


I smoke aromatic. I don't notice a difference with the taste and besides, the smell of the lovely billows is mostly what I'm in it for anyway. That, and the pleasant head-rush I sometimes get. Mostly I buy buttered rum, sometimes whisky. I've never had cherry or vanilla, although I like the smell of vanilla. How it smells in the pack unlit is a good indication of how it will smell burning.


Keeping it lit. Pack it well. Not too tight. Springy. Fill it a pinch at a time. Keep the pipe in the pouch as you fill, so you don't lose it all on the ground. Pack down each pinch, but don't push hard. It should still be loose enough that you could compact it a lot more, but so there's not any great empty spaces. Springy like, I dunno, the pad of your thumb. If you pack it too tight, it's just harder to light.


To light it, hold the match an eighth of an inch over the surface of the tobacco and draw through it. The flame is pulled down into the tobacco when you draw. Use wooden matches and out of the wind. Move the match around over the surface in a little circle as you draw, so you light the whole top. It'll make an impressive amount of smoke at first, but don't be fooled. It might not be lit yet.

When it goes out you have to tamp it down again before you relight.

You keep it lit by smoking evenly, draw at a pace, longish draws or repeated quick puff puff puffs. If it's going out too much for your liking, smoke faster. Also, a little trick is to cup your hand over the top to close off the top of the pipe, and draw through that. This causes a harder draft, since the air's got to get through the little amount of space not sealed off by your palm. The harder draft fans the coal, and gets it going hotter.

Alternately, some pipe smokers become quite used to lighting repeatedly. If it gets uncomfortably hot for your hand, you're smoking too fast and risking a burnout hole in the pipe.

The black goo that forms around the bowl of the pipe is a good thing. Don't scrape it all off, but keep it thin. I was going to say as thick as a dime. You don't have dimes. Maybe half or a little more than half as thick as a penny.


If your pipe gurgles as you are drawing, it's because you're drooling down the stem as you smoke. They sell tiny wire baskets to put in the bottom to keep the tobacco out of your drool, but why not just try not drooling instead? It's gross.

Celsius 911*

As I do with anniversaries of events I did not attend and concerning people I have not known, I have forgotten again to blog on the anniversary of September 11th.

But of course it is a sensible thing to keep track of history and learn your lessons from it. From the events of September 11, 2001, we learned, for instance, that the religion of the individuals involved in blowing up buildings was a matter of pure coincidence, that they might as easily have been Free Methodists, and that they just didn't understand their very-peaceful religion to begin with anyway.

One hopes anyway that this year were dispensed with the Compulsory Displays of Mass Public Grief. I wasn't paying very close attention.

God Bless America.


*This post, so-titled, in compliance with the regulations of the Ministry of the Imposition of Senseless Weights and Unpopular Measures Canada.

Carbon Tax, Foxy Palin, Moonbat Imaginarians

Since few anywhere are talking about actually important issues, the Canadian election is duller than the American one simply because they have Sarah Palin and Sarah Palin is foxy.

But the Canadian election is the one here, so it seems worth thinking at least a little about.

One party proposes to replace the income tax with a carbon tax. Though I don't subscribe to this theory of the Moonbat Imaginarians concerning the Really Bad Awfulness of Carbon, I am inclined to support such an idea anyway.


The income tax proposes that since you have produced something, the State will have it. It has no legitimate claim to it, and no useful purpose for it, but the State will confiscate it anyway.

The income tax leads the good citizenry toward thinking that productivity, being punished, is best avoided. The State, as conceived in the socialist car wreck of Canada, owns everything, from your goods to your labour, to your mind.

But the much more honest carbon tax proposes that if you are even well enough only to exhale, the government will have its share.

And I am all for truth in advertising.

Potato Salad, Handguns

Though witnesses say it was not a handgun used to shoot a Toronto schoolboy today, David Miller, like a vapid whack-a-mole, popped up to call again for a handgun ban.

He does this because he doesn't care about actually solving the problem. If a child choked to death on potato salad, David Miller would propose a handgun ban.

He would say, like he did today, that if only handguns were banned, "we would see many fewer incidents like this" tragic salad mishap.

49

Toronto's 49th murder victim of 2008 was shot and thrown from a moving Lexus onto Canada's busiest highway.

Inasmuch as the absolute order of events has not been determined, neither has the precise cause of death.

While it is a certainty that the victim enjoyed an unspecified number of bullet wounds, the more immediate cause of his demise may well have been a jarring eighty-miles-per-hour conk on the noggin.

The matter is not clear.

As such, Toronto's Lord Mayor David Miller, obviously inspired, set aside his usual call for a handgun ban in favour of "an all-out ban on carrying silver-plated pistols in champagne-coloured Lexuses with dem big ol' after-market rims".

Police caution that the killing may not be gang-related.

No gold teeth were recovered at the scene.

Gilles, Silas, I'm just saying.

Gilles Duceppe, a Canadian politician who matters very little, has issued a statement about a certain Conservative Party candidate standing for election.

This candidate, it seems, is a member of Opus Dei.

Gilles is all upset because apparently Catholics don't embrace diversity quite like modern Quebeckers. Quebec is about tolerance, which is why Gilles won't stand for any Catholics holding public office. Pluralism is important to Gilles.

And no, this fuss hasn't got anything to do with the rumour that Gilles himself is an Albino Assassin Opus Dei Monk.

How dare you even suggest it?

Now that's more like it.

I let the raccoon (see here) go.

Clinging to Guns and Religion

I cotched me a coon.

No, not like that. Gracious me. No need to call in the Human Rights Commission.

A raccoon.

I've been trapping cats in my garden because the worthless bureaucrats will charge me if I shoot them.

Shoot cats, that is, not bureaucrats. Bureaucrats are bad, but there's simply no proportion in shooting them.

When I drop a cat off at the S.P.C.A., the clerk asks if I mean to trap feral cats. Why of course, I say, what on earth else would be in my garden? Pets, I say firmly, are kept indoors.

But I think this fellow will make a fine hat and I wouldn't want a hole in the pelt anyway.

I've learnt a lesson. Shooting is only usually the answer. I feel a good Democrat today.

Taxing tobacco will shortchange kids

Too bad the article's not as funny as the headline:
Taxing tobacco will shortchange kids

Modern Methods

According to a poll of Canadian parents, public schools in this country ought to be teaching

"more of the essential core knowledge required for life," including subjects "for the times that we live in."

In response, Ontario has adjusted its curriculum.

Spelling, grammar, arithmetic and other outdated subjects have been removed in favour of courses in "Filing a Human Rights Complaint," "Cashing a Government Cheque," and "Coping with Obesity".

You Might Be a Trad...

if you have a scapular tan.

Safe Schools

School officials are calling a stabbing at a Hamilton, Ontario high school "isolated incident".

"We have a very unfortunate situation. But Delta is a safe school".

Because as news articles note, the traditional initiation includes beating, but almost never stabbing.