Wow. Shocking.

Obama to delay DADT til "further down the road". Heh.

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Randoms

Being opposed to changing the definition of marriage so that it makes gender irrelevant does not mean that you hate homosexuals. Some gays, including most who have a public voice, equate opposition to gay marriage and hatred of homosexuals, aka homophobia.

I am opposed to affirmative action on the basis of race (or anything else) and to slavery reparations for blacks. You can say that makes me a racist. Go ahead. As I have said, neither that word nor the preceding one (homophobia) has much meaning to me.

A lot of this comes down to "If you don't agree with me and give me what I want, you are evil."

Adolescent.

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Been wandering through some Vatican II-loving Catholic blogs. God, do these folks never catch on? Same old same old routines and demands and dusty ideas of "renewal", wanting to turn Roman Catholicism into the Episcopal Church and stamping their feet because it doesn't seem to want to. Dudes. 1968 was a long time ago. Give it up. You can't make Catholicism be whatever you want it to be. You lost.

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Found an old article by a Catholic theologian, taking on another Catholic theologian about homosexuality. Pretty bright, pretty civil. The writer is traditional and after doing an assessment of the various arguments pro and con, asks a interesting question: how can specifically homosexual sex acts be said to support the goals of the Catholic tradition?

Leads me to wonder about how any sexual act except penile-vaginal intercourse with ejaculation, performed by a married man and woman, could support those goals? Which raises the question of what constitutes a sexual, as opposed to a non-sexual, act? The Bill Clinton problem: when is sex sex?

So, if a married couple starts in, kissing and stroking and rubbing. And then it moves to lots of skin-on-skin contact. And then genital contact. Oral sex, say, the woman on the man. Is the oral sex wrong? What if it's stimulation without ejaculation? Does it then become foreplay, like kissing and ok? Or is it a sin? What if the man ejaculates and then after his recovery, has penile-vaginal intercourse?

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The traditional theologian notes the current Catholic morality rejects homosexual sex because it is forbidden by positive divine law, does not fulfill the requirements of natural law, breaks the gender complementarity of the act of sexual love and is not a genuine communion of self-giving persons.

We all know, I think, that marital intercourse can be an act of communion, giving and generativity. And it can be an act of disconnected duty, selfishness and manipulation. Its "saving grace" is that even in the second case, a human being can be conceived. (Hence the medieval opinion that rape -praeter naturam- is less evil than masturbation -contra naturam-, because it least in rape the aim of nature is achieved, despite the illict mode.)

The traditional theologian, even if he grants that in a particular instance sex between two men can be subjectively experienced by them as intimate communion, self-giving, even a moment divine grace --and it can, I'm here to tell you-- he does not see how the acts themselves can be read in this way. I guess we are talking here not of the kissing, the caressing, etc. as much as of those activities where there is penetration and/or ejaculation.

That's where the primary problem lies, I suspect. Where it's always been.

Even if a lot of people have found sexual intercourse between man and woman vulgar or dangerous or impure or animalistic, no one seems to find it unnatural. No one says that it is degrading to the man as a man, or denaturing to the woman.

Especially in male-male sex, the very acts place at least one of the males' nature in question.
Male sex with a woman can be situationally turned into an act of humiliation, but it is not thought to be so in itself...except insofar as women, being thought very widely to be inferior to men, are naturally secondary to him.

But for a man to be on the receiving end of anal sex or on the oral end of oral sex has been very widely thought to be a kind of humiliation specifically of his maleness. After all, who is in that position by nature? Women.

Even in societies where male-male sex is condoned, it is almost universally the case that it is arranged on an age-grade or another hierachical gradation.

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Bumper sticker mind

On my way to the Comcast store for the third time in four days to get my TV reception fixed, I drove behind a socially conscious local whose bumpers proclaimed his and/or her values.

KPFA 94.1 Berkeley

Pretty well tells you what to expect. I was not disappointed.

It will be a great day when schools have all the money they need
and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.

Some people really are too stupid to live.

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Speaking of MSM

CNN finds it necessary to debrief and explain because a reporter asked The One a question He didn't like. Oh, the humanity!

After the years of self-righteous shark-pit feeding-frenzy behavior in the White House press room during the terms of W, stuff like this makes the top of my head crack with accumulated steam.

My opinion of journalists in general continues to plummet, though how much lower it can go I can't imagine. I hope to God none of my nieces or nephew ever decide they want to earn a living whoring like this. Such crap.

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And this will help us because?

The Washington Post, a longtime Obama friend, like most of the MSM, put this graph up, based on the independent assessment of the federal budget office. It compares the Bush deficits...remember him, the drunken sailor and his treasury-draining exsanguinary Iraq adventure (which seems to have worked, btw)...to the Obama deficits.

Do you have to be an economist to have the blood run out of your head on seeing this?

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Mush

A friend of a friend is off to a seminar north of SF, put on by a group which is also advertizing the following conference:

Toward a Global Shift: Seeding the Field of Collective Change

The time is now, to join together in community, to share our dreams, celebrate and take action -- co-creating a new vision for our shared future.

• Explore the forefront of positive transformation
• Learn to co-create a sustainable future
• Gain penetrating insights from pioneers
• Engage in creative dialogue with people from all over the globe

This stuff sounds like it was put together out of a New Age text generator program.
Zzzzzzz.

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Me not alone

Writer Charles Winecoff opines on gayness, leftism and marriage.

Canada vs America

The fate of the hot dog in Toronto. An instructive tale. Not only is the hot dog unhealthy, it is "un-diverse". (God, how I hate that word in all its forms.) If it has not yet suffered so in America, it is probably just a matter of time. Nanny rules. I loathe Nanny.

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Well put

Liberals are relativists, except where white male Christian American capitalist consumer gun-owners are concerned. Good and evil (with the above exception) are social constructs and culturally-determined.

Evan Sayet, former liberal, makes a nice connection between relativism and the liberal narrative:

"if nothing is better than anything else,
then that which failed must have been victimized."

He opines that the basic conservative/liberal difference is that conservatives accept the difference between good and evil. Liberals only consider evil those who accept the difference between good and evil. And racists. White racists.

I had a friend who was a passionate uber-liberal. He was in seminary with me. He became obsessed with discovering the theoretical foundations of Church authority, the power to determine what the Church believed and who belonged to the Church. Being Catholic, all that seemed pretty obvious to me, but not to him.

Of course, he decided that no one had that power, especially the people who said they did. And as for criteria of Church membership, he came to hold quite vehemently that the Church was meant to be an inclusive community and that the only ground for exclusion was that you excluded someone else. As you can see, his relativism was driven by his moralism, a hatred of authority (although he later became a devoted supporter of his liberal bishop) and rage over the fate of the excluded.

As theology, Catholic theology, it is, well, kinda silly. But very popular among the Vatican II types (of which I used to be one, full disclosure and all), especially "feminist theologians".

Anyway, I digress. But once you become a relativist, you are a liberal.

"if nothing is better than anything else,
then that which failed must have been victimized."

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Cocolitzli

Cortez conquered the Aztecs starting in 1519. Two huge epidemics in the 1540's wiped out 80% of the native population. Eighty percent, over sixteen million people, died, leaving only two million. Demography is destiny.

It had been commonly assumed that one of the European illnesses, such as smallpox or typhus, was the killer, partly because most Spanish, priests excepted, were little affected by it. But it seems now that it was a hemorrhagic fever, like hanta, native to the New World. The outbreaks followed the same pattern as the 1993 hanta: several years of drought followed by wet weather.

The disease is called Cocolitzli.

Unsympathetic

Berkeley tree-hugger turned pro-Hamas activist Tristan Anderson is in an Israeli hospital as a result of being wounded by a member of the IDF. Note the he is being taken care of in an Israeli hospital.

You may imagine how sympathetic I am to this career pain-in-the-ass. I wonder how Hamas or Fatah or any of the other would treat an American whom they wounded while s/he was protesting against the Palestinians? Any guesses?

A note here on the ethical restraints at play when Israeli soldiers use force. They actually exist and can be enforced.

Can anyone tell me of any internal investigation about improper use of force by members of any Arab or Muslim state or non-state group in the Middle East?

Does that say something about the moral standing of the combatant groups? Anything?

And since I am in the mood, any of these "activists" who get killed there have only themselves to blame.

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Another reason

why Victor Davis Hanson is The Man.

The campaign speech Obama might have given...

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Mormons and Muslims

The HBO channel showed an episode of Big Love this past Sunday night in which a segment of the Mormon endowment ceremony was depicted. This is a very important ritual for Mormons and it is held within the precincts of a temple, where all but faithfully practicing Mormons are excluded. Although the details of the ceremony have been publicly available for some time, the LDS church holds the rites to be sacred and secret, not to be revealed to outsiders, much less witnessed or recreated.

HBO knew this, went ahead and showed the episode and then disingenuously apologized to any offended Mormons.

Mormon reaction has been to criticize HBO, some Mormons have cancelled their subscriptions. Angry, but entirely within the traditions of American civility.

I cannot help but wonder how HBO would act were the religious sensitivities at issue those of Islam.

And how Muslims would react were their now famously sensitive feelings offended? Would there be a higher level of enacted anger?

Would it be paranoid or cynical of me to opine that since the Mormons are a white, Christian and American religion, that they may be offended with impunity, but that nonwhite, foreign Muslims would have to be carefully kowtowed to?

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Irk

Two actors who really get on my nerves. A gruff masculine style is not something I have a problem with. On the contrary. But somehow these guys set my teeth on edge.

Wise words

The liberal school that attempts to fortify religion by minimizing its expression, both theoretic and devotional, seems to be merely impoverishing religious symbols and vulgarizing religious aims; it subtracts from faith that imagination by which faith becomes an interpretation and idealization of human life, and retains only a stark and superfluous principle of superstition.

For meagre and abstract as may be the content of such a religion, it contains all the venom of absolute pretensions; it is no less cursed than the more developed systems with a controversial unrest and with a consequent undertone of constraint and suspicion. It tortures itself with the same circular proofs in its mistaken ambition to enter the plane of vulgar reality and escape its native element of ideas. It casts a greater blight than would a civilized orthodoxy on any joyous freedom of thought.

For the respect exacted by an establishment is limited and external, and not greater than its traditional forms probably deserve, as normal expressions of human feeling and apt symbols of moral truth. A reasonable deference once shown to authority, the mind remains, under such an establishment, inwardly and happily free; the conscience is not intimidated, the imagination is not tied up.

But the preoccupations of a hungry and abstract fanaticism poison the liberty nominally allowed, bias all vision, and turn philosophy itself, which should be the purest of delights and consolations, into an obsession and a burden to the soul.

In such a spectral form religious illusion does not cease to be illusion. Mythology cannot become science by being reduced in bulk, but it may cease, as a mythology, to be worth having.

George Santayana
Interpretations of Poetry and Religion
1957(?)
Preface, pp vii-viii

Made me smile

The natural outcome

of multiculturalism, hate speech laws and cunning Muslims. Bnai Brith in this instance is the victim of the very process it supported. This kind of stuff goes on at American universities. How long before it infects our legal system? It's evil, pure and simple. A secular inquisition.

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Slash

Watching Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and Seann William Scott in a 2003 action flick, The Rundown. Bad boy Scott is being dragged from the jungles of Brazil back to LA by hired muscle Johnson. Mayhem ensues.

Pervert that I am, I began to muse on other possibilities. Although not a huge fan of intergenerational stuff, (these two guys are only four years apart in age), there is a big guy/smaller guy, older brother/younger brother thing there...

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Answered prayers

When I was in the seminary in Toronto, maybe 35 years ago, I was riding the subway one evening during the rush hour commute, surrounded by all kinds of people likewise wending their way back to their homes. I was feeling how separate I was from the ordinary life of the people I was supposed to be learning how to serve. I remember wanting to find a connection with them and not be one of those priests who can't imagine ordinary life.

Ordinary life.

Well, I got what I wanted.

I am approaching another birthday. More than two decades ago I left the ministry and set out on my own, with pretty well next to nothing. In the intervening years, I have had my struggles and my victories. I have done well and I have failed. I have prospered and I have been broke. I have learned what human love is and I have had my heart broken...more than once. I worry about all the things that ordinary people worry about, having become one of them.

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Holy Writ

An astonishingly prophetic piece, written in October 1923, by the famed American iconoclast and journalist from Baltimore, H.L. Mencken, 1880-1956.

Apropos, since I was chatting with a fellow non-practicing Catholic about faith, etc. We are both "religious, not spiritual." Ironically, since I used to be a preacher and a theologian, a man for whom words were paramount, it is words about religion which bore me. I could happily attend a well-done Catholic ritual, but it is when the priest opens his mouth to preach that I begin to look for drugs or an exit. The worst, and most common, tendency among preachers is cheerleading, the kind of folksy uplift which is endemic to American Protestantism and which has infected a couple of generations of the holders of the apostolic succession.

When I do go to religious ceremonies over the last several years, outside of family obligations, I go to a Gnostic temple in the South Bay. The woman who presides there, who has become a good friend of mine, has had the great sense to make her homiletic remarks before the liturgy. She can be informal, humorous, professorial, etc. as she is moved. The talk stands on its own. Then she retires, vests and returns to begins the ritual...and never bothers us again. Nor does she try to. She retires into the ceremony, allowing us to do the same.

The service, although it is deeply heretical in content, is very traditionally Catholic in form and although a lot of the music is certainly not to my taste, I can sink into the ancient archetypal stream of sacramental consciousness without fear of being offended by some joke or exhortation. Once the ritual commences, it is the Soul that speaks and responds, that moves and acts, not any individual. Balm for me. If only the orthodox clerics would learn a similar modesty and respect.

HOLY WRIT

H.L. Mencken

Whoever it was translated the Bible into excellent French prose is chiefly responsible for the collapse of Christianity in France. Contrariwise, the men who put the Bible into archaic, sonorous and often unintelligible English gave Christianity a new lease on life wherever English is spoken. They did their work at a time of great theological blather and turmoil, when men of all sorts, even the least intelligent, were beginning to take a vast and unhealthy interest in exegetics and apologetics. They were far too shrewd to feed this disconcerting thirst for ideas with a Bible in plain English; the language they used was deliberately artificial even when it was new. They thus dispersed the mob by appealing to its emotions, as a mother quiets a baby by crooning to it. The Bible that they produced was so beautiful that the great majority of men, in the face of it, could not fix their minds on the ideas in it. To this day it has enchanted the English-speaking peoples so effectively that, in the main, they remain Christians, at least sentimentally. Paine has assaulted them, Darwin and Huxley have assaulted them, and a multitude of other merchants of facts have assaulted them, but they still remember the twenty-third Psalm when the doctor begins to shake his head, they are still moved beyond compare (though not, alas, to acts!) by the Sermon on the Mount, and they still turn once a year from their sordid and degrading labors to immerse themselves unabashed in the story of the manger. It is not much, but it is something. I do not admire the general run of American Bible-searchers -- Methodists, United Brethren, Baptists and such vermin. But try to imagine what the average low-browed Methodist would be if he were not a Methodist but an atheist!

The Latin Church, which I constantly find myself admiring, despite its frequent astounding imbecilities, has always kept clearly before it the fact that religion is not a syllogism, but a poem. It is accused by Protestant dervishes of withholding the Bible from the people. To some extent this is true; to the same extent the church is wise; again to the same extent it is prosperous. Its toying with ideas, in the main, has been confined to its clergy, and they have commonly reduced the business to a harmless play of technicalities --- the awful concepts of Heaven and Hell brought down to the level of a dispute of doctors in long gowns, eager only to dazzle other doctors. Its greatest theologians remain unknown to 99% of its adherents. Rome, indeed, has not only preserved the original poetry in Christianity; it has also made capital additions to that poetry -- for example, the poetry of the saints, of Mary, of the liturgy itself. A solemn high mass must be a thousand times as impressive, to a man with any genuine religious sense in him, as the most powerful sermon ever roared under the big-top by a Presbyterian auctioneer of God. In the face of such overwhelming beauty it is not necessary to belabor the faithful with logic; they are better convinced by letting them alone.

Preaching is not an essential part of the Latin ceremonial. It was little employed in the early church, and I am convinced that good effects would flow from abandoning it today, or, at all events, reducing it to a few sentences, more or less formal. In the United States the Latin brethren have been seduced by the example of the Protestants, who commonly transform an act of worship into a puerile intellectual exercise; instead of approaching God in fear and wonder these Protestants settle back in their pews, cross their legs, and listen to an ignoramus try to prove that he is a better theologian than the Pope.

This folly the Romans now slide into. Their clergy begin to grow argumentative, doctrinaire, ridiculous. It is a pity. A bishop in his robes, playing his part in the solemn ceremonial of the Mass, is a dignified spectacle, even though he may sweat freely; the same bishop, bawling against Darwin half an hour later, is seen to be simply an elderly Irishman with a bald head, the son of a respectable saloon-keeper in South Bend, Indiana. Let the reverend fathers go back to Bach. If they keep on spoiling poetry and spouting ideas, the day will come when some extra-bombastic deacon will astound humanity and insult God by proposing to translate the liturgy into American, that all the faithful may be convinced by it.

Liberalism finally explained

While Mr. Gutfeld tries to keep the show from idling too long on partisan territory (“They get that 23 hours a day”), his own politics are fairly at home on Fox. He dismisses liberalism as

“romantic notions that are false, based on the idea of making yourself look good to other people. That’s why most men—Bill Clinton is a good example—are liberal, because they need to get laid. If you look at most left-wing guys, they’ve made a deal with the devil. They don’t really believe that shit—they’re going against their own innate nature, because liberalism is anti-man. If you believe that peace and love work, you’re not a man, because this world works on war. The only people who respect you are people who are scared of you—and that’s why Reagan was a great President. And the idea that you can negotiate with people who want you dead is a complete lie. That’s why the left is the most self-absorbed, vanity-driven enterprise. These are people who would rather feel good about themselves at a cocktail party that actually protect people’s lives. If you’re at a party and you say, ‘The war on terror is the most important thing in the world’—you won’t get a nod. But if you say, ‘Global warming is the biggest threat,’ you will get laid.”

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2 days ago

2 days ago

OTTAWA (AFP) — A Chinese immigrant who beheaded and hacked to pieces a Canadian bus passenger in front of horrified travelers was found not guilty of murder Thursday after being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

Vince Weiguang Li, 40, had been charged with murdering 22-year-old Tim McLean on a Canadian Greyhound bus on July 30, 2008.

Li had repeatedly stabbed McLean, who had been asleep on the seat next to him, sawn off his head, removed his internal organs, pocketed his nose, tongue and an ear, and taunted police and bystanders with the severed head.

Police said in court documents Li "appeared to smell, and then eat parts of Tim McLean's flesh" and "lick blood from his hands" as they surrounded the bus on a desolate highway 90 kilometers (55 miles) west of Winnipeg, in western Canada, soon after the attack.

Authorities found body parts littered throughout the bus, some in white plastic bags. McLean's eyes and a third of his heart were also missing, and it is presumed Li ate them, said a pathologist in court files, though Li denies this.

The other 35 passengers and the driver were jolted by "blood-curdling screams" and fled, said witnesses, bracing the door after their escape to trap Li inside the bus. He was subdued by police after a three-hour standoff.

Justice John Scurfield of the Manitoba Court of Queen's Bench described the killing as "grotesque" and "appalling," but ruled Li was not criminally responsible for the murder because of his mental disorder.

During a three-day trial, psychiatrists testified Li suffers from schizophrenia and did not know what he was doing when he killed McLean.

The court heard Li had auditory hallucinations on the day of the attack, that he heard God's voice telling him to board the bus from Edmonton to Winnipeg, and kill McLean.

Li dismembered McLean's body, psychiatrists testified, because he feared McLean could otherwise resurrect from the dead and seek revenge.

His mental health is to be evaluated within 90 days, the judge ordered. Thereafter, he may be released or confined to a secure psychiatric hospital for treatment.

Outside the courtroom, McLean's mother Carol Dedelley expressed her disappointment at the verdict and her fears for public safety.

"This isn't the right result," Dedelley told reporters. "Knowing that that killer might get out sometime soon is very hard."

"A crime was still committed here, a murder still occurred, and (this) ruling seems to negate that fact."

"A major illness took my son's life, and he was never sick," she said.

"Mr. Li should be held accountable for it," she said. "Whether he was in his right frame of mind or not, he still did the act. There was nobody else on that bus holding a knife slicing up my child."

McLean, according to his family, was on his way home to Winnipeg from a job as a carnival worker in western Canada, when he was attacked.

He "struggled and tried to escape" his attacker, but "eventually either fell or was thrown to the floor of the bus," said court files.

Investigators said friends described the former computer programmer who had immigrated to Canada in 2001 as having had mental problems since 2004, but said they never knew him to be violent.

Li was admitted to a mental hospital in 2005, where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia, according to court testimony.

Doctors identified his auditory hallucinations and offered him medication, but he declined treatment at the time.

"Unfortunately, he appears to have left the treatment facility without permission," the judge said.

Islam comes to Italy

Banning beauty

When my local Reality-Based friend asked me to guess where there might be a law against selling Barbie Dolls, I guess that it was some Muslim country. "Hah!", he asserted.

Turns out that in this instance it is some asshat Democrat in West Virginia.

Barbies tell girls that they have to be pretty, not smart, and so they should be banned.

I have one thing to say to the WVa "legislator": Harrison Bergeron.

And then he should be banned.


Oh, and to my RB friend, this.

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Cardinal virtue

The Cardinal of Portugal warns women against marrying Muslims.
Good advice!

Muslims, of course, are hurt.

As usual.

Poor things.

The BBC "fears" his words could promote "intolerance."

Ojala!

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What can one say?

What can one say?

Randoms

Daytime TV during lunch at home. Desperate Housewives. (I know. My testosterone level plummets.) An episode where the narcissistic model, after using the confessional to trash a nun who is trying to split up her marriage, has a catfight with her right in the sanctuary of the church.
Again, what kind of self-respect does a pastor have to allow a sacred space to be used like that?

Also, I am glad I am not black. Why? Because I would see people who looked like me being the object of endless inspirational uplift projects and tragic stories of my suffering where I was rescued thru the tough love kindness of people like Rosie O'Donnell. That'd make any black man wanna turn white.

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Boy

Jake Gyllenhaal. The boy, except for the long hair, gets better all the time.

Wow

Mark Morford, SF Chronicle columnist, he of Obama the Lightworker, continues his creepy man-crush on The One.

What is it with these guys?

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Ouch

David Kahane is taking no prisoners, wondering if Barry Hussein O is Chance the Gardener, the Manchurian Candidate or the Quisatz Haderach!

What's important is The Narrative. That's The Story that keeps getting told over and over again. Ironically, there is pretty well nothing as old as the news.

PS. Over at American Thinker, a writer points out to the electorate that Obama does not really love America like you do. True of the left. "He's just not that into you. He loves the idea of what you could become."

The Black History Month ads with Obama's voiceover show a black woman on a bus and he is saying that the great thing about America is that it can change. Which is to say, the great thing about America is not what it has been..which is pretty awful..but what it might become when it repents.

That's progressive patriotism.

And this from a man who, were he NOT half-black, would not be President.

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Prohibition redux

In the province of Ontario, the smug capital of Smugland, aka Canada, my second country, it is now illegal to smoke in a car if you have a minor in it. The police can stop you and fine you.

Now it may not be nice or wise, etc to smoke in the car with...well, anyone who is not a smoker. But is it really the proper role of the State and its Police to invade this area of human choice and behavior?

Is there any limit at all to what the State can enforce on you for your own good or to protect "the children"?

This is not a rhetorical question. On the question of alcohol, where we now only have moral rhetoric campaigns, zoning laws, increased liability for bartenders (!) and lots of anti-DUI campaigns, we once had a constitutional amendment, a frikkin amendment to the constitution of the United States forbidding anyone to drink! Remember how well that one turned out.

Since all health care in Canada is paid for by the taxpayers (ratepayers, they call them), how you conduct yourself becomes an interest of the State, no? If a smoker or a meat-eater or an obese person or a skydiver is more likely to be a drain on the already overtaxed system, is it not simply fair to the rest of the population, the virtuous, to prevent them from their bad behavior?
Why not make certain foods illegal, too? Really, I am not kidding at all.

We all know about the Muslim religious police in Iran or Arabia, the Committees for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. Laughable, no? But it they showed up here
as part of Healthy Lifestyles Legislation or Child Protection, etc...? Who would resist them?

In Marxist countries, few left now, the State owns everything. Everything. Because the State owns the means of production of goods and services. In the half-assed denial-based Marxism of the liberals, the State increasingly controls the services, which it pays for by taxing the goods.
The net result is similar. If my taxes pay for everyone's services, then shouldn't I have a say in how people live and thus access those services? If you think I am joking, have you never heard an evangelical non-smoker angrily denounce tobacco users for driving up the cost of medical care for all of us? Since we all feel that we fund the State, which provides us with so many of our essential services, then we all own the State and the State has the right to tell us all how to live.

It is an irony that Canada, with great effort and fanfare, liberated itself from any ties to Britain when it created its own Charter of Rights and Freedoms...and since then the limitations on freedom have jumped exponentially and show no sign of stopping.

De Tocqueville was right.

And what happens is the people forget a time when their behavior was not so regulated and totalitarianism comes closer. What's next, fined for smoking during Ramadan?

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