At Home in Hespeler

One can’t help but wonder if Mrs. Mark Steyn lets her husband win the odd fight, lest a 900-page rebuttal in 3 parts be published, highlighting the ways in which she argued illogically over the course of their marriage. Likely not, but then who’d of thought suing the guy for libel would get you one of those.

Certainly not Michael Mann.

When Mann sued Steyn, I was one of those who thought he picked a dangerous sparring partner, and having read Lights Out, his response to an action against him in Canada, I knew Steyn wouldn’t just roll over and accept what Mann was giving. He would, at the least, make it uncomfortable for Mann. After all, he took on Ryerson Journalism Professor John Miller in Lights Out, and has not been afraid to absolutely skewer the occasional correspondent to his own website, steynonline.com. Even positive reviews that dare get the name of the next Bond movie wrong get their error highlighted. So it was a good guess that Mann v. Steyn would have its entertaining moments.

With A Disgrace to the Profession: The Worlds Scientists in Their Own Words – on Michael E. Mann, His Hockey Stick, and Their Damage to Science: Volume One, he doesn’t so much a make it uncomfortable for Mann as eviscerate his. The book is 300-pages of climate scientists, physicists and others with Ph.D. after their name, speaking ill of Mann and his work. With Steyn’s witty apercus throughout, A Disgrace to the Profession reads quite comfortably, not bogging down in technical details as a book devoted to science such as this is always at risk of doing.

A Disgrace to the Profession is a comprehensive take down. Mann may have thought he could sue Steyn into silence and he was wrong. But if he thought his reputation had been given a hit by Steyn, and he could regain it through the courts, he was as wrong as he’s ever been (and as Steyn makes pretty clear in A Disgrace to the Profession, that’s saying something). Win, lose or tie in the DC courts, it seems unlikely Mann’s reputation will survive his ill-advised fight with Mark Steyn.

For certified professional guitar repair in Cambridge Ontario: Brian Gardiner Guitar Repair

Hockey, Mark Steyn Mark Steyn, Michael Mann

As Newspapers cut back, editors are one of the easy places to cut, A good editor doesn’t just correct spelling and grammar, but they cut extraneous words. If it’s repetitive or unnecessary, out it goes. Case in point, The National Post article, Rachel Dolezal’s Fall From Grace, by Robyn Ur­back,

Her self-identification as black, thus, has basically no foundation in her biological reality.

See, a good editor would have trimmed this to the more accurate: “Her self-identification as black, thus, has no foundation in reality.”

Of course what Urback is doing is, to use Mark Steyn’s phrase, “a palpable bet-hedging.” The Steyn phrase is from a piece today called Tweet of Clay, and the bit about bet-hedging is not the highlight. This line is:

More and more levers of civilization appear to be in the hands of the clinically insane.

It’s a line I use nowadays when people start talking politics. Right. left, conservative, liberal, Party A, Party B, it’s irrelevant. I let people bitch from whatever side they argue from, and eventually I say, “It’s because they’re all nuts. Every one of them is actually, literally crazy.” It never fails, whatever they are complaining about, can be explained easily by “they’re all, literally, crazy.”

The reason it works is because, I’m becoming more and more convinced, it’s 100% true. Never mind Mark Steyn’s little “bet-hedging,” he almost right: More and more levers of civilization are in the hands of the clinically insane.

for certified professional guitar repair in Cambridge Ontario: Brian Gardiner Guitar Repair

free speech, Mark Steyn Mark Steyn, Rachel Dolezal, Robyn Ur­back

Here’s a question. Why has Mark Steyn never recorded Baby, It’s Cold Outside?* In two Christmas themed albums with Jessica Martin, Steyn has covered everything from Sweet Gingerbread Man, to It’s a Marshmallow World, from Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas to Santa Clause is Coming to Town and Jingle Bells. Now with his latest CD, Goldfinger, Steyn adds Can’t Take My Eyes off You, the Very Thought of You and, implausibly, a slow jazz standard of Cat Scratch Fever (he think’s he’s got it some more, yea).

And can it be a coincidence that this CD shows up in my mailbox the same day they announce the latest Bond movie, Spectre?** His rendition of Goldfinger leads to an obvious choice to do the theme song for Spectre, and it’s not to let Madonna ruin another Bond intro. No, never mind the Mark Steyn for Senate petition that was floating around a year or so back, it’s time for a Mark Steyn for the Bond theme song movement.***

But still, Goldfinger, the seven-song CD, comes in at around 30-minutes so it seems like you could shoehorn one more in. And Jessica Martin, his favourite female foil, makes an appearance anyway, so why not drop Baby, It’s Cold Outside on to the CD? It is, after all, according to Steyn himself, the root of all Jihad. This from Lights Out: Islam, Free Speech And The Twilight Of The West, one of Steyn’s must own books:

What was so awful about Sayyid Qutb’s experience in America that led him to regard modernity as an abomination? Well, he went to a dance in Greeley, Colorado:

The room convulsed with the feverish music from the gramophone. Dancing naked legs filled the hall, arms draped around the waists, chests met chests, lips met lips…

In 1949, Greeley, Colorado was dry. The dance was a church social. The feverish music was Frank Loesser’s charm song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”… It’s a useful reminder how much we could give up and still be found decadent and disgusting by the Islamists. A world without “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” will be very cold indeed.

Wow, just think how bad the war on terror would be going if Sayyid Qutb had heard Cat Scratch Fever Mark Steyn style. So the jihadists would hate Baby, It’s Cold Outside and Steyn could add his name to what is probably the only list in the world to include Rod Stewart, Buddy the Elf and Hot Lips Page.

Fortunately we have Goldfinger to enjoy, which has plenty of it’s own abomination’s of modernity.

************************************************
Update: Dec 15

Hello to readers of Mark Steyn, who has linked here for the second time. Glad to have you stop by. A couple of notes that Steyn himself has raised.

* Last week, Mr. Steyn noted he had answered that question in his song of the week: “I gave a kind of an answer a week ago, but evidently Mr Gardiner is not satisfied.” Actually, it was not a matter of satisfied or no, it was a matter of I hadn’t read that particular article yet.

** Originally I referred to the title of the movie as Smersh. Steyn is, of course, correct, the movie is “Spectre”, not Smersh. At the time of writing the post, I was reading Ian Fleming’s From Russia With Love, in which SMERSH is heavily involved in a plot to kill James Bond. Apparently I had SMERSH on the mind. It is now corrected in the text, but noted here.

*** Let the record state, I agree with Mark Steyn (and Don Black) “that Shirley Bassey should sing them all”. However, far too often it is not Shirley Bassey, but Madonna or Duran Duran who does the theme, and a poor job they make of it too. I am merely submitting Steyn to get the gig in lieu of Ms. Bassey should she be unavailable.

************************************************

Track List

1. Cat Scratch Fever
2. On a Slow Boat to China
3. Can’t Take My Eyes Off You
4. De Quoi A-T-Elle L’Air Ce Soir
5. Roses of Picardy
6. Goldfinger
7. The Very Thought Of You

Mark Steyn Baby its cold outside, cat scratch fever, Goldfinger, James Bond, Mark Steyn, Spectre

There’s a bad novel out there somewhere that starts thus:

Like Houdini, I escaped again. I’m less optimistic than I used to be, and if my prediction of total civilizational collapse doesn’t come to pass, I’d be very happy to be proved wrong.

Mark Steyn, on the other hand, ends his new collection of his writing, The [Un]documented Mark Steyn, with more or less the above. It is much a more effective ending, and a strange book indeed that can be summed up by wishing that predictions of civilizational collapse is wrong.

More relevant perhaps, is this, from his 2008 column, The Limits:

I made the mistake of going to Europe to visit the famous banlieues of Paris and other Continental Muslim neighborhoods. And at that point… I began to see that it’s not really about angry young men in caves in the Hindu Kush; it’s not even about angry young men in the fast growing Muslim populations of the west – although that’s certainly part of the seven-eighths of the iceberg bobbing just below the surface of 9/11. But the bulk of that iceberg is the profound and perhaps fatal weakness of the civilization that built the modern world.

That’s a nice summation of Steyn’s writing since, and of The [Un]documented Mark Steyn.

The [Un]documented Mark Steyn is a comprehensive collection of Steyn articles spanning the last 20 or so years. From 9/11 to Japanese demography; Burkas to Viagra; James Bond to Doris Day, Steyn writes about it all with an eye on the big picture and humour. Total civilizational collapse has never been so much fun.

Book Review, Mark Steyn Mark Steyn, The Undocumented Mark Steyn

Re: this:

When it comes to the legal restriction of speech, or the legal coercion of dissenters, I’ll storm the barricade with Mark. It amazes me that any soi-disant free people tolerate that sort of thing.

The use of speech to criticize other speech is something else, and the distinction between state coercion and cultural coercion is one that Mark typically doesn’t acknowledge, to the detriment of his arguments…

Steyn responds:

I am sorry my editor at NR does not grasp the stakes. Indeed, he seems inclined to “normalize” what GLAAD is doing. But, if he truly finds my “derogatory language” offensive, I’d rather he just indefinitely suspend me than twist himself into a soggy pretzel of ambivalent inertia trying to avoid the central point — that a society where lives are ruined over an aside because some identity-group don decides it must be so is ugly and profoundly illiberal. As to his kind but belated and conditional pledge to join me on the barricades, I had enough of that level of passionate support up in Canada to know that, when the call to arms comes, there will always be some “derogatory” or “puerile” expression that it will be more important to tut over. So thanks for the offer, but I don’t think you’d be much use, would you?

What a pity it would be if, like McLeans before it, National Review rendered itself virtually unreadable.

Mark Steyn Mark Steyn, McLeans, National Review

… the community outreach officer tells the conservative bitch to shut up, or the rabbi gets it

York Regional Police threatened to remove a rabbi as one of the force’s chaplains if he hosted a controversial anti-Islamist speaker at his Thornhill synagogue.

Insp. Ricky Veerappan, of the force’s diversity, equity and inclusion bureau, confirmed he and officers from the service’s hate crimes unit met with Rabbi Mendel Kaplan of the Chabad Flamingo Synagogue on Tuesday.

They expressed concern about an upcoming talk to be given by Pamela Geller, a vocal critic of radical Islam…

As noted by Mark Steyn,:

When the York Regional Police Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Bureau show up thwacking their truncheons against their palms and saying, “Nice little multifaith advisory committee gig you got going, Rabbi. Shame if anything were to happen to it”, a prudent man gets the message

So the paramilitary arm of the Toronto Star (with apologies to Messrs. Steyn and John O’Sullivan) gets to decide what communities deserve outreach. I would have been much happier if the story ended with Rabbi Kaplan saying, “stick your multi faith advisory committee, I’ll take my freedom over your lousy sinecure every day of the week and twice on Saturday.” However, I can’t blame a guy for flinching when he’s staring down the barrel of a bully. In lieu of the right thing happening, second best is a new location for Pamela Geller’s speech:

Toronto Zionist Centre
780 Marlee Avenue
(Lawrence just west of the Allen Expswy.)

Tickets are $20 for general admission
$36 for reserved VIP seating.
(you can purchase tickets directly from the link above).

Meanwhile, Blazing Cat Fur has an open letter from Salem Mansur:

I am a Muslim, a tenured professor in a prestigious Canadian university, the University of Western Ontario in London. I am appalled that in this day and age we continue to hear regularly how the liberal democratic tradition of Canada and the West is being systematically shredded by institutions sworn to protect it. Free speech is the most fundamental right of a free society; constrain it, strip it, shred it, and then let us not be surprised our society will be turned into a society such as one from where I fled as a young man to find freedom in the West…

Geller herself will be on The Source with Ezra Levant today.

Mark Steyn, pimply minions of bureaucracy Mark Steyn, Pamela Geller, Radical Islam

One likes to believe in the freedom of music.

Rush – Spirit of Radio.

Early this month the website Landmark Report had a Mark Steyn/Jessica Martin Christmas CD, Making Spirits Bright, giveaway. Write us about your favourite part of Christmas (“what’s you’re favourite?” as Buddy the Elf might ask), and the top ten will win a CD. Seeing as I like to write, like Mark Steyn and Christmas is my favourite, I dutifully sat and composed a short essay on Christmas music.

I am glad to say, I won. Here’s what I wrote:

For me Christmas is about the music. All of it. The deeply religious music of the baroque, the pop standards of the post war era or the rock pop songs that have become so common. Give me a snowy day in December and a song with the word Christmas somewhere, anywhere, in it, and I am somehow moved.

“There’s something about Christmas time,” Bryan Adams sings. In what is an otherwise mediocre song, I get chills when Adams sings about Christmas. The week before Christmas my iPod runneth over with repeat playings of Debbie Gibson singing Sleigh Ride. Music I would never listen to otherwise, becomes must listen, and begins to define how I feel. I even love angry, hate-filled, right wing columnist to the world types singing about a world made of Marshmallow. Tres fromage, for sure, but somehow wonderful.

It’s not all bad, however. Besides Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man Desiring or Handel’s Messiah, masterpieces at any time of year, the popular culture has produced some wonderful Christmas songs. Whether Irving Berlin’s White Christmas or one of the many beautiful versions of Silent Night (my personal favourite), popular music has it’s moments of sublime Christmas beauty. Consider the Pogues’ Fairytale of New York, a lush piece with surprising depth; Murray McLauchlan, with Paul Hyde and Tom Cochrane, three Canadians doing the Celtic tinged Let the Good Guys Win; Heavy Metal kings Twisted Sister turning O Come All Ye Faithful on it’s head to wonderful effect.
There is something about Christmas time, something that brings the very best out of a wide variety of artists.

I could probably have gone on from there and, in truth, on rereading the essay feels unfinished. But it was good enough to get the job done, and sometimes that’s enough.

My CD dutifully arrived at the median point between when I won it, Dec 4th, and Christmas. That is to say, I’ve had it now a little over a week.

The CD itself is fun, and throughly enjoyable. As a singer, Steyn thankfully has a day job. It’s not that he’s bad, mind, it’s that the style of music usually requires better. The duo get away with Steyn’s singing because: he never takes himself too seriously; he takes the music seriously; the arrangements are excellent; so is Jessica Martin. A big part of the fun of the CD is listening to Mark Steyn have fun – you can hear the grin on his face.

Christmas is a fun light time, and this is a fun light album. It is, in fact, my new favourite.

The Freedom of Music, This Week on my I-Pod Bryan Adams, Debbie Gibson, Elf, Handel's Messiah, Jessica Martin, Jesu, Joy of Man Desiring, Making Spirits Bright, Mark Steyn, Sleigh Ride

he’s dead right.

His piece today on the Libyan embassy overrun, an act of war, not a movie protest, is brutally on the mark.

Lets make no mistake, this was an overt act of war: An embassy was overrun, it’s flag taken down and replaced, it’s ambassador kidnapped, killed and his body sodomized. Meanwhile, the president is oblivious to what’s really happening, so stuck in his own little world of delusion. On the other side of the aisle, Sen. John McCain has gone form giving his own concession speech to giving Mitt Romney’s, even though it is unasked for and unneeded.

Since the President is spending his crisis time raising money in the arts community, maybe some film maker could explain why it’s not OK to have a General call a movie maker, or the White House complaining to YouTube about a movie. If  they are having problem with the problem, they could imagine it’s a year in the future and Hollywood has produced the first Presidential assassination movie of the Romney presidency. It’d be cool if the some Admiral docks his Battleship at Sean Penn’s beach house for a chat, right?

The president, his former opponent and the criminally dishonest media need to step aside and let some adults look after this little problem. Clearly, the people charged with doing so are unable.

he's not the messiah... Barak Obama, John McCain, Libya, Mark Steyn, Mitt Romney

I asked:

Mark, I have noticed Alex(is) de Tocqueville popping up in your work lately Is Tocqueville’s work significant in After America and if so, why? Also, what works of Tocqueville’s did you reference, and what of his would you recommend?

Mark answers.

Steyn’s new book, After America: Get Ready for Armageddon hits the bookstores today. Buy yours at Steyn Online or Amazon.

While your at Amazon, you can get the Alexis de Tocqueville book that Mark Steyn recommends you read just as soon as your done with After America, Democracy in America.

Mark Steyn After America, Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Mark Steyn

Canadian pundit Mark Steyn has filled in for Rush Limbaugh for three days this week. On Tuesday he used Rupert Murdoch as a springboard for an hour on government responsibility. It was a brilliant hour of radio, where Steyn made the point that citizens and journalists are not supposed to be answerable to government, but government should be answering to citizens and journalists:

When you’re looking at government hauling up citizens and pointing the finger at them it’s the wrong way around. Citizens should be holding government to account, and what’s happening with Rupert Murdoch and the pie throwing guy and the rest of the circus in London is exactly the opposite of what a healthy society of genuine citizen legislatures and accountable government would really be doing.

If you can find Tuesday’s Rush Limbaugh Show somewhere, have a listen to the first hour. It was Mark Steyn at his best.

Meanwhile, Steyn has a new book coming out in a few weeks. After America: Get Ready for Armageddon will be released on August 8th in America and here in Canada:

From budgets to the border, diversity to disease, manufacturing to manhood, Steyn looks at the American undreaming, and provides a glimpse of the post-American world. There’s laughs along the way, and a few suggestions as to how total civilizational collapse might be avoided.

Rumour is it will be available on paper, as well as in e-book format.

Mark Steyn Mark Steyn, Rush Limbaugh

Pretty self explanatory.

Mark Steyn on Free Speech at the IPA from Institute of Public Affairs on Vimeo.

Speaking of Mark Steyn, his latest book, After America: Get Ready for Armageddon, is listed at Amazon as having an August 8 release date. Hope that proves true.

Mark Steyn After America, Andrew Bolt, Institute of Public Affairs, Lights Out, Mark Steyn

I love podcasts. I listen to radio shows from all over Canada and America depending on my mood or who he guest is. If The Fans Bob McCown is being a tool one day, I move on or fast forward to what I want, then move on.

One of my daily listens is The Michael Graham Show out of Boston. This week, he had Mark Steyn on, always a worth while listen. Here’s the audio from the show.

You can subscribe to Michael Graham’s Podcast here.

h/t @kshaidle

Mark Steyn Mark Steyn, Michael Graham

I apologize, but some times life and blogging are a bad pairing. Anything happen while I was away from my computer?

My mother came to the end of, as Ronald Reagan put it,  “the journey that will lead… into the sunset of my life.” Alzheimer’s is a nasty disease. It robs the memory first of friends, then of loved ones. It continues on to every aspect of your life, until you don’t know who you are. By journeys end your body relies on muscle memory to breathe and eat. Eventually, too, that gives way. Mom could no longer swallow, and passed away into the sunset a couple of weeks ago.

Respects may be paid with a donation to the Alzheimer’s Society, if any so chooses.

Sad news often is accompanied by some measure of it’s opposite number. So it is in this case that a band I have been working on putting together for the last year played it’s first show a couple of weeks ago. If you’ve never done it you have no way of knowing how much time is involved in getting something like this going. It’s taken a pile of my creative energy, especially the last few weeks before we played.

And finally, if this were a normal year I would be signing off for the month of July. I’m not sure I’ve done it every year, but it’s been close. Because things were so light in June, I may post the occasional thing this month, including some pictures I have ready in the hopper.  But otherwise I will be taking the usual July hiatus. Hey, if Mark Steyn can do it.

Regular blogging will resume in August.

Blog Administration alzheimer's, Mark Steyn, Mom, Ronald Reagan

it should be SteynTV.

The SunTV website has a page for recomending personalities for the new conservative news channel.

Who better than Mark Steyn? It doesn’t have to be a regular daily show, just a weekly appearance ala Dennis Miller on Bill O’Reilly’s show.

What’s needed is a campaign to get Steyn on the new channel. Click the link, let SunTV know you want to see SteynTV.

Mark Steyn Mark Steyn, SUNTV

that you subject yourself to hatred and contempt, is it still hate speech?

Dear Ms. Coulter,

I understand that you have been invited by University of Ottawa Campus Conservatives to speak at the University of Ottawa this coming Tuesday. We are, of course, always delighted to welcome speakers on our campus and hope that they will contribute positively to the meaningful exchange of ideas that is the hallmark of a great university campus. We have a great respect for freedom of expression in Canada, as well as on our campus, and view it as a fundamental freedom, as recognized by our Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. I would, however, like to inform you, or perhaps remind you, that our domestic laws, both provincial and federal, delineate freedom of expression (or “free speech”) in a manner that is somewhat different than the approach taken in the United States. I therefore encourage you to educate yourself, if need be, as to what is acceptable in Canada and to do so before your planned visit here. You will realize that Canadian law puts reasonable limits on the freedom of expression. For example, promoting hatred against any identifiable group would not only be considered inappropriate, but could in fact lead to criminal charges. Outside of the criminal realm, Canadian defamation laws also limit freedom of expression and may differ somewhat from those to which you are accustomed. I therefore ask you, while you are a guest on our campus, to weigh your words with respect and civility in mind. There is a strong tradition in Canada, including at this University, of restraint, respect and consideration in expressing even provocative and controversial opinions and urge you to respect that Canadian tradition while on our campus. Hopefully, you will understand and agree that what may, at first glance, seem like unnecessary restrictions to freedom of expression do, in fact, lead not only to a more civilized discussion, but to a more meaningful, reasoned and intelligent one as well.

I hope you will enjoy your stay in our beautiful country, city and campus.

Sincerely,

François Houle
Vice-recteur aux études / Vice-President Academic and Provost
Université d’Ottawa / University of Ottawa
550, rue Cumberland Street
Ottawa (ON) K1N 6N5
téléphone / telephone : 613 562-5737
télécopieur / fax : 613 562-5103

As Blazing Cat Fur say’s, “Maybe it sounded better in the original German?” Well they did master the concept of pre-crime.

Original h/t to Five Feet of Fury.

free speech Ann Coulter, François Houle, Kathy Shaidle, Mark Steyn