The emperor’s new carbon credits

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 218 Comments

For a small country, Denmark sure attracts a lot of attention. A Chicago Muslim, David Headley, was recently arrested at O’Hare International Airport en route to Copenhagen to kill the commissioning editor and artists of the Danish Muhammad cartoons. Alas, a far bigger group flying in to Copenhagen for a massive suicide bombing were permitted to board their flights: these were the jet-setting bigwigs of the climate-change circuit en route to Denmark to blow up the global economy and individual liberty in order to get back to paradise and enjoy their reward of 72 virgin-growth forests.

Both the radical Islam of David Headley and the Church of Settled Science of David Suzuki seem almost parodic responses to the hollowness of the modern multicultural West and the search for alternative, globalized identities. Indeed, it is hard to say which is wackier. Take Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Prince of Wales. One’s a millenarian apocalyptic loon, and the other’s president of Iran. On balance, widening the streets of Tehran for the imminent return of the Twelfth Imam seems marginally less deranged than insisting the planet is doomed in 96 months unless humanity abandons the evils of capitalism and “the age of convenience.” (This from a man who has never drawn his own curtains.)

Ah, well. When I compare the eco-cultists to the humourless fanatics of the jihad, I get barraged by stern emails denouncing me as a “denier.” Apostate! And Mr. Suzuki wants deniers jailed. Call the Inquisition! Continue…

What signal does Barbie’s burka send?

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, December 10, 2009 at 8:00 AM - 160 Comments

The other day, George Jonas passed on to his readers a characteristically shrewd observation gleaned from the late poet George Faludy: “No one likes to think of himself as a coward,” wrote Jonas. “People prefer to think they end up yielding to what the terrorists demand, not because it’s safer or more convenient, but because it’s the right thing . . . Successful terrorism persuades the terrorized that if they do terror’s bidding, it’s not because they’re terrified but because they’re socially concerned.”

This is true. Resisting terror is exhausting. It’s easier to appease it, but, for the sake of your self-esteem, you have to tell yourself you’re appeasing it in the cause of some or other variant of “social justice.” Obviously, it’s unfortunate if “Canadians” get arrested for plotting to murder the artists and publishers of the Danish Muhammad cartoons, but that’s all the more reason to be even more accommodating of the various “sensitivities” arising from the pervasive Islamophobia throughout Western society. Etc.

Yet this psychology also applies to broader challenges. By way of example, take a fluffy feature from a recent edition of Britain’s Daily Mail: “It’s Barbie in a Burka,” read the headline. Yes, as part of her 50th anniversary celebrations, “one of the world’s most famous children’s toys, Barbie, has been given a makeover.” And, in an attractive photo shoot, there was Barbie in “traditional Islamic dress,” wearing full head-to-toe lime-green and red burkas. At least, I’m assuming it was Barbie. It could have been G.I. Joe back there for all one can tell from the letterbox slot of eyeball meshing.

Continue…

The ‘science’ of global warming

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, December 3, 2009 at 10:00 AM - 341 Comments

“The gravest challenge that we face is climate change . . . Every one of our compatriots must feel concerned”—Nicolas Sarkozy, president of the French Republic;

“The climate crisis threatens our very survival”—Herman Van Rompuy, “president” of “Europe”;

“We cannot compromise with the catastrophe of unchecked climate change”—Gordon Brown, prime minister of the United Kingdom;

“Generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children . . . this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal”—Barack Obama, president of the United States.

The science is so settled it’s now perfectly routine for leaders of the developed world to go around sounding like apocalyptic madmen of the kind that used to wander the streets wearing sandwich boards and handing out homemade pamphlets. Governments that are incapable of—to pluck at random—enforcing their southern border, reducing waiting times for routine operations to below two years, or doing something about the nightly ritual of car-torching “youths,” are nevertheless taken seriously when they claim to be able to change the very heavens—if only they can tax and regulate us enough. As they will if they reach “consensus” at Copenhagen. And most probably even if they don’t.

How did we reach this point? Ah, well. Like the proverbial sausage factory, you never want to look too closely at how the science gets settled. The other day, a whole bunch of electronic documents most probably leaked by a disaffected insider from the prestigious Climatic Research Unit at Britain’s University of East Anglia were posted online. Given that the CRU has conceded their authenticity, they provide a fascinating glimpse at the science underpinning the calm measured statements of Sarkozy, Brown, Obama, and wossname, the Belgian bloke—as well as of Kyoto, Copenhagen, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the “carbon credits” scam, the U.S. “cap and trade” monstrosity and every other major “climate change” boondoggle this century. They confirm what the soi-disant “skeptics” have long known:

1) The Settled Scientists have wholly corrupted the process of “peer review.”
Phil Jones, director of the CRU, writing to Michael Mann, creator (le mot juste) of the now discredited “hockey stick” graph, about two academics who disagree with him:
“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow—even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
Professor Mann on an academic journal foolish enough to publish dissenting views:
“Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.”
Professor Jones’s reply:
“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”
And you’ll be glad to hear they did!

2) The Settled Scientists have refused to comply with Freedom of Information requests by (illegally) deleting relevant documents.
Phil Jones to Michael Mann on Feb. 3, 2005:
“The two MMs [McKitrick and McIntyre, the latter the dogged retired Ontarian who runs the Climate Audit website] have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the U.K., I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone.”
And, indeed, the CRU subsequently announced that they had “inadvertently deleted” the requested data.

3) The Settled Scientists have attempted to (in the words of one email) “hide the decline”—that’s to say, obscure the awkward fact that “global warming” stopped over a decade ago.
Phil Jones, July 5, 2005:
“The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. Okay it has but it is only seven years of data and it isn’t statistically significant.”

4) The Settled Scientists have tortured the data into compliance with political requirements.

From the computer code for one of the “Mann” models:

“Plots (1 at a time) yearly maps of calibrated (PCR-infilled or not) MXD reconstructions of growing season temperatures. Uses ‘corrected’ MXD—but shouldn’t usually plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures.”

Yet perhaps the most important revelation is not the collusion, the bullying, the politicization and the evidence-planting, but the fact that, even if you wanted to do honest “climate research” at the Climatic Research Unit, the data and the models are now so diseased by the above that they’re all but useless. Let Ian “Harry” Harris, who works in “climate scenario development and data manipulation” at the CRU, sum it up. Mr. Harris was attempting to duplicate previous results—i.e., to duplicate all that science that’s supposedly settled, and the questioning of which consigns you to the Climate Branch of the Flat Earth Society. How hard should it be to confirm settled science? After much cyber-gnashing of teeth, Harry throws in the towel:

“ARGH. Just went back to check on synthetic production. Apparently—I have no memory of this at all—we’re not doing observed rain days! It’s all synthetic from 1990 onwards. So I’m going to need conditionals in the update program to handle that. And separate gridding before 1989. And what TF happens to station counts?

“OH F–K THIS. It’s Sunday evening, I’ve worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I’m hitting yet another problem that’s based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity, it’s just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they’re found.”

Thus spake the Settled Scientist: “OH F–K THIS.” And on the basis of “OH F–K THIS” the world’s enlightened progressives will assemble at Copenhagen for the single greatest advance in punitive liberalism ever perpetrated on the developed world.

Back in the summer, I wrote in a column south of the border:

“If you’re 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you’re graduating high school, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade. There has been no global warming this century. None. Admittedly the 21st century is only one century out of the many centuries of planetary existence, but it happens to be the one you’re stuck living in.”

In response to that, the shrieking pansies of the eco-left had a fit. The general tenor of my mail was summed up by one correspondent: “How can you live with your lies, dumb­f–k?” George Soros’s stenographers at Media Matters confidently pronounced it a “false claim.” Well, take it up with Phil Jones. He agrees with me. The only difference is he won’t say so in public.

Which is a bit odd, don’t you think?

Phil Jones and Michael Mann are two of the most influential figures in the whole “climate change” racket. What these documents reveal is the greatest scientific scandal of our times—and a tragedy. It’s not just their graphs but their battle lines that are drawn all wrong. Science is never “settled,” and certainly not on the basis of predictive models. And any scientist who says it is is no longer a scientist. And the dismissal of “skeptics” throughout the Jones/Mann correspondence is most revealing: a real scientist is always a skeptic.

It may well be that Warmergate has come along too late. I won’t pretend to know the motivations of Jones, Mann and their colleagues, but judging from recent eco-advertising their work appears to have driven worshippers at the First Church of the Settled Scientist literally insane. A new commercial shows polar bears dropping from the skies onto city streets and crushing the cars below. To those of us who still quaintly recall 9/11, it evokes grotesquely those poor souls who chose to jump from the Twin Towers and die in one last gulp of air rather than perish in the fireball within. But who cares? Their plight is as nothing next to that of the polar bear. Why are they plummeting to their deaths from the heavens? As the ad explains, “An average European flight produces over 400 kg of greenhouse gases for every passenger. That’s the weight of an adult polar bear.”
Oooookay. It’s A Warmerful Life: every time they call your flight, a poley bear loses its wings.

Some in the political class go along because it’s too much effort to resist. A few are presumably true believers. But what a lot of the rest like about “global warming” is the “global” bit: you can’t do anything about it at town or county or even national level. No, sir, we need a “global” response. Fortunately, as Herman Van Rompuy, “president” of “Europe,” puts it: “2009 is the first year of global governance.”

That’s great news, isn’t it? I would urge the delegates at Copenhagen to listen to the experts and issue a comprehensive statement fully reflecting the rigorous scientific evidence. Here’s my draft:

“OH F–K THIS.”

Major Nidal Hasan had an enabler

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 1:10 PM - 255 Comments

Ever since this magazine attracted the attention of Canada’s “human rights” regime, defenders of the system have clung to a familiar argument. In a letter to Maclean’s, Jennifer Lynch, Q.C., Canada’s chief censor, put it this way:
“Steyn would have us believe that words, however hateful, should be given free rein. History has shown us that hateful words sometimes lead to hurtful actions that undermine freedom and have led to unspeakable crimes. That is why Canada and most other democracies have enacted legislation to place reasonable limits on the expression of hatred.”

“Hateful words” can lead to “unspeakable crimes.” The problem with this line is that it’s ahistorical twaddle, as I’ve pointed out. Yet still it comes up. It did last month, during my testimony to the House of Commons justice committee, when an opposition MP mused on whether it wouldn’t have been better to prohibit the publication of Mein Kampf.

“That analysis sounds as if it ought to be right,” I replied. “But the problem with it is that the Weimar Republic—Germany for the 12 years before the Nazi party came to power—had its own version of Section 13 and equivalent laws. It was very much a kind of proto-Canada in its hate speech laws. The Nazi party had 200 prosecutions brought against it for anti-Semitic speech. At one point the state of Bavaria issued an order banning Hitler from giving public speeches.”

And a fat lot of good it all did.

Continue…

Johnny Mercer, Moon River and me

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 10:00 AM - 60 Comments

We’re after the same rain-

bow’s end

Waiting round the bend

My huckleberry friend

Moon River and me . . .

Where is Moon River? Everywhere and nowhere. But, if you had to pin it down, you’d find it meandering at least metaphorically somewhere in the neighbourhood of Savannah, Georgia. At one point, the town’s most celebrated musical emissary was Hard-Hearted Hannah, the Vamp of Savannah. But then the American Songbook’s huckleberry friend showed up: John Herndon Mercer, born in Savannah 100 years ago, Nov. 18, 1909. The family home, the Mercer House, is the setting for the most famous book written about Savannah, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and Clint Eastwood’s film made the connection even more explicit with an all-Mercer soundtrack: Kevin Spacey singing That Old Black Magic, k.d. lang Skylark, Diana Krall Midnight Sun, and Clint himself taking a respectable thwack at Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive. Continue…

Spare me the therapeutic platitudes

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 1:30 PM - 100 Comments

As readers may recall, a few weeks ago I was invited to testify at the House of Commons about the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission. While in Ottawa, I stayed at a certain local hostelry that shall be nameless (the Château Laurier). I don’t like to complain. Seriously. I do so much of it for a living that I resent giving it away for free in private. But my room was unsatisfactory in many basic respects, and, a few days after I drew them to the attention of the gal at the checkout desk, an email arrived from the Assistant Manager, Housekeeping, which I quote in full:

“I would like to extend my thanks for bringing these issues to our attention. We truly appreciate Guest feedback, as it enables us to learn and grow from difficult experiences and truly strive to improve the overall Guest experience. Continue…

No one saw Barack in the balloon?

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, November 5, 2009 at 12:00 PM - 72 Comments

On the day America went Balloon Boy crazy, I chanced to be on the radio, appearing live coast to coast on The Hugh Hewitt Show. And, as the Balloon Boy was the hot breaking news, Hugh asked me about it. “I don’t know what to say,” I said, “except it’s one of those peculiar and potentially tragic and instantly horrifying combination of circumstances.” If I sound a bit vague, well, that’s the idea. I’d gotten the gist of what was happening a couple of minutes before I went on air, but these days I’m wary: almost any “human interest” story turns out to be interesting for an entirely different set of reasons from the initial ones—the shocking “hate crime” the victim turns out to have perpetrated on himself, etc. So simply out of a sense of self-preservation, when I’m told that a six-year-old boy is sailing through the skies in a balloon, I try to suppress the urge to demand mandatory pilot’s licences for kindergartners or making helium a prohibited substance.

So Hugh moved on to Afghanistan and the economy and other peripheral matters, and a couple of minutes later broke in with the news that the boy had been found safe and well. He wasn’t in the balloon at all. “Thank God,” I said, still wary, “but you know, there are a lot of law enforcement people, there have been a lot of people who have been sitting around at airports waiting to scramble into planes, and at the end of the day, this kid is likely to have cost authorities some significant six-figure sum.” Continue…

Gullible eager-beaver planet savers

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, October 29, 2009 at 1:00 PM - 208 Comments

I’m always appreciative when a fellow says what he really means. Tim Flannery, the jet-setting doomsaying global warm-monger from down under, was in Ottawa the other day promoting his latest eco-tract, and offered a few thoughts on “Copenhagen”—which is transnational-speak for December’s UN Convention on Climate Change. “We all too often mistake the nature of those negotiations in Copenhagen,” remarked professor Flannery. “We think of them as being concerned with some sort of environmental treaty. That is far from the case. The negotiations now ongoing toward the Copenhagen agreement are in effect diplomacy at the most profound global level. They deal with every aspect of our life and they will influence every aspect of our life, our economy, our society.”

Hold that thought: “They deal with every aspect of our life.” Did you know every aspect of your life was being negotiated at Copenhagen? But in a good way! So no need to worry. After all, we all care about the environment, don’t we? So we ought to do something about it, right? And, since “the environment” isn’t just in your town or county but spreads across the entire planet, we can only really do something at the planetary level. But what to do? According to paragraph 38 on page 18 of the latest negotiating text, the convention will set up a “government” to manage the “new funds” and the “related facilitative processes.” Continue…

San Francisco has to pay for its sins

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, October 22, 2009 at 3:00 PM - 69 Comments

Seven and a half years ago, a girls’ school in Mecca caught fire. Many of the pupils were able to escape the burning building, but unfortunately they ran straight into the hands of the mutaween, Saudi Arabia’s “religious police,” who flayed them for having fled the conflagration without first putting on their head scarves and then drove them back to die in the flames. Fifteen schoolgirls perished—for being “immodestly” dressed. Remember that story? Robert Ferrigno does:

“The upper windows of the madrassa blew out, glass shimmering as it fell through the air. Five girls clustered on the outer balcony, far above the street, raising their arms to the sky, howling, their white night clothes billowing up past their knees . . . Continue…

Thinking about the old Ignatieff

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 2:40 PM - 95 Comments

In Ottawa on Monday, I kept getting asked—including by three stray passersby on Wellington Street—what Beatles song Michael Ignatieff should sing. Oh, come on, you don’t really need a professional for this, do you? Help! Yesterday (All my troubles seemed so far away). The Fool On The Hill. Hello, Goodbye. Get Back (to Harvard and a little light BBC hosting) . . .

I wasn’t really in the mood to pile on Iggy, poor chap. I was in town to testify to the House of Commons Select Committee on Justice and Human Rights about the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission’s assault on individual liberty and freedom of expression. And, mainly because I’ve been yakking about this subject for a couple of years now and have pretty much exhausted my stock of free-speech quotations from Milton to Salman Rushdie, just for variety’s sake I decided to cite Michael Ignatieff to the committee. I was talking about the assertion by Chief Censor Jennifer Lynch that, Canada’s constitution notwithstanding, there is “no hierarchy of rights,” only a “matrix” in which “freedom of expression” has to be “balanced” by modish group rights and collective rights. And I responded with a blast of Professor Ignatieff: Continue…

Hell, Britannia, you’re just nasty

By Mark Steyn - Wednesday, October 7, 2009 at 3:40 PM - 111 Comments

Earlier this week, David Cameron, the British Conservative Party leader and probable next prime minister, was “cleared” of “breaching” “the broadcasting code” by the country’s TV and radio regulatory authority, Ofcom. Back in July, Mr. Cameron had been appearing on the morning show at Absolute Radio, a national rock station, and had, apropos the political class in general, observed that “the public are rightly, I think, pissed off.” To a question about why he was not using Twitter, the Tory leader replied, “Too many twits might make a twat.”

“That seemed to go okay,” reckoned Cameron as he left the studio. “Apart from the language,” responded his press secretary, Gabby Bertin.

“Oh, yeah, ‘pissed,’ sorry about that.”

“No, it was the ‘twat,’ ” said Ms. Bertin.

“That’s not a swear word,” insisted the heir to Thatcher, Churchill, Lord Salisbury and Disraeli. My dictionary says:

“noun [origin unknown] (1656): VULVA—usually considered vulgar.”

On the other hand, an Ofcom report from 2005, Language And Sexual Imagery In Broadcasting: A Contextual Investigation, is more ambivalent, concluding only that “twat” is “very polarizing . . . offensive especially to British Asian females and some women from other groups, but many especially men think it is an everyday word.” Continue…

The case for the seeing-eye horse

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, October 1, 2009 at 12:50 PM - 105 Comments

What’s new in the exciting world of Canadian “human rights”?

Well, the other day Kelly Egan of the Ottawa Citizen reported the story of a gay bed-and-breakfast owner allergic to dogs who got hauled in for “mediation” by the “Human Rights” Tribunal of Ontario after he turned away a blind man with a Seeing Eye dog. Douglas McCue, 68, of the CornerStone B & B in Perth, Ont., suffers from acute sinusitis aggravated by exposure to canines. Ian Martin, a blind diabetic, responded with a lawyer’s letter and a demand for compensation that started at two grand and quickly escalated into five figures. Continue…

Dislike Obama? You must be racist.

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, September 24, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 427 Comments

A year ago, in the final stretch of the U.S. election campaign, I would find myself in New York or Los Angeles or points in between and asked for my thoughts on who would win. I usually answered “John McCain,” more in hope than expectation: I’ve no use for the soi-disant “maverick,” who was a catastrophic candidate, but in those heady days between Sarah Palin’s boffo convention speech and McCain’s characteristically inept response to the economic meltdown there was briefly a faint chance that the Alaskan governor might yet save the Republican party from its rendezvous with destiny.

And at that point the worldly liberal Democrat who had sought my views would nod thoughtfully and agree: yes, McCain would win. Not because of Sarah Palin. But because Americans were too racist to stomach the thought of a black man in the White House. Continue…

It took a while but Section 13 is dead

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, September 17, 2009 at 7:40 AM - 161 Comments

“Nice to see you all,” said Athanasios Hadjis, the Canadian “Human Rights” Tribunal’s vice-chair (i.e., judge), as he surveyed his courtroom in Ottawa last year. “More of an interest than there was before.”

Indeed. The packed benches that greeted him were a rare sight at a CHRT trial, and especially at the Marc Lemire trial, where the prosecutors—the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission—had demanded that everyone other than them be banned from the courtroom, including the defendant, who would be graciously permitted to watch proceedings by video. That doesn’t sound quite like the right to confront your accuser in open court. But hey, given all the other safeguards of Canada’s judicial inheritance the Dominion’s “human rights” regime trashes, what’s one more faggot on the bonfire of liberties?

Judge Hadjis was, by that stage, in the fifth year of the Canadian state’s investigation of Marc Lemire, webmaster of freedomsite.org and accused Section 13 hate-monger, and appeared from my seat in court anxious to throw the book at him. “We’re done,” he said at several points during the day, swatting aside some intervention or other. Jurisprudentially, Judge Hadjis was outta there and eager to add Mr. Lemire’s scalp to the CHRT’s trophy room. In that long ago spring of 2008, the rules were very simple: under the Canadian “Human Rights” Tribunal, to be accused of a Section 13 thought crime was to be convicted. In the entire history of Section 13, every defendant brought before the CHRT had been found guilty. It would be unfair to compare this to the justice systems of Saddam Hussein or Pol Pot, since even those eminent jurists felt obliged to let someone off once in a while just for appearances’ sake. Only in Canada was a 100 per cent conviction rate merely reassuring proof of the Dominion’s humane progressive commitment to “human rights.”

Continue…

No wonder the Kennedys hated him

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, September 10, 2009 at 5:20 PM - 35 Comments

Dominick Dunne died the day after Ted Kennedy, and so his passing went all but unnoticed, coming as it did just as the American media’s week-long orgasmic frenzy of Camelotian prostrations and ululations was getting into gear. Dunne would have accepted the black jest of bad timing, albeit with regret. The Kennedy family blames him for the present woes of their cousin, Michael Skakel, currently banged up in the big house for a long-ago murder of a 15-year-old girl who had the misfortune to live next door. “Dominick Dunne,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told New York magazine, “is a pathetic creature.”

“I don’t give a f–k about what that little s–t has to say,” Dunne responded. “That f–king asshole.” Continue…

Your family is being watched 24-7

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, September 3, 2009 at 3:20 PM - 131 Comments

To passing tourists, catching yet another government poster apprising you of electronic surveillance looming in the distance, the initials “CCTV” can be oddly reminiscent of “CCCP,” the Cyrillicized abbreviation for the U.S.S.R. CCTV is the United Kingdom’s ubiquitous acronym. Nobody needs to be told what it stands for. It accompanies you as you make your way to work, whether by car, bus, train, or taxi. And it’s there waiting for you at the end of your shift, as you go to buy your groceries or head to the movies. Last year, when David Davis resigned from the shadow cabinet because of the remarkably bipartisan insouciance about the “erosion of fundamental British freedoms,” he said there was “a CCTV camera for every 14 citizens.” The British, according to another well-retailed line, are apparently the most video-monitored people in the world other than the North Koreans. In an aside in his new novel The Defector, the American author Daniel Silva lays out the background:

“ ‘So how are the British so certain about what happened?’

“ ‘Their little electronic helpers were watching.’ Continue…

Do you notice anything shrivelling?

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, August 27, 2009 at 10:20 AM - 305 Comments

The other day CTV reported the astonishing statistic that in the whole of Canada there are just 33 sperm donors. That seems awfully low for a nation of 30 million people. Three sperm donors per province plus one per territory? Surely we can do better than that. All hands on deck!

Ah, but it’s not as simple as that. Apparently, the 2004 Assisted Human Reproduction Act makes it illegal to pay donors for sperm. I mean, it wasn’t even the usual Canadian Wheat Board-type racket whereby you’d only be able to sell your seed to the Canadian Sperm Board at a price agreed upon by representatives of the federal-provincial Semen Commissions. Instead, they just nixed the whole deal, and, once Johnny Canuck found out he wasn’t going to be remunerated, virtually the entire supply dried up. Continue…

What made Budd Schulberg run

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, August 20, 2009 at 10:40 AM - 65 Comments

In 1939, a 24-year-old Budd Schulberg was writing a film called Winter Carnival, set at his alma mater, Dartmouth College. The producer Walter Wanger informed him that the screenplay needed work, and they were bringing in Scott Fitzgerald to improve it.

“I thought it was a joke,” recalled Schulberg, “like saying, ‘Leo Tolstoy.’ And I said, ‘Scott Fitzgerald—isn’t he dead?’ ”

Not formally. But he was doing his best. And a legendary bender of a weekend in New Hampshire while “researching” the film ended Fitzgerald’s participation and, to all intents and purposes, his career. Continue…

We can’t talk about immigration

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 4:00 PM - 180 Comments

Christopher Caldwell’s new book is called Reflections on the Revolution in Europe. And, if you don’t quite get the Burkean allusion, his subtitle spells out his real concerns: “Immigration, Islam and the West.” Given my own obsessions in recent years, you’d expect me to be favourably disposed to it. And I am, my enthusiasm only slightly tempered by the instant conventional wisdom that, if you’re only going to buy one Islamophobic Euro-doom-mongering diatribe this summer, Caldwell’s is the sober and respectable one, in striking contrast to certain others we could mention. “Unlike [Oriana] Fallaci and Mark Steyn, Caldwell does not rant or sneer,” writes Matt Carr of Britain’s Institute of Race Relations. Caldwell, says The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan, is not a “Steynian hysteric.” Oh, dear. I think I prefer the droll Irish commentator “P O’Neill”: “Someone has to say it,” he smirked. “Caldwell is the thinking man’s Mark Steyn.”

But enough about me. On to the book . . . actually, hold on a minute. One more thing about me. Let us put Islam aside for the moment, as my views have been well aired in these pages, and consider the author’s other theme. As it happens, for all his non-ranting, non-hysterical sobriety, Mr. Caldwell is somewhat more “extreme” than I am on immigration. For a notorious blowhard, I can go a bit cryptic or (according to taste) wimpy when invited to confront that particular subject head on. On the CBC last year, I was tap dancing around various socio-cultural generalities when the host, George Stroumboulopoulos, leaned in in that way he has and cut to the chase: “You mean [pause and knowing glance to camera] immigration?” Continue…

Uncle Walter: not so sadly missed

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, July 30, 2009 at 10:30 AM - 125 Comments

On the face of it—and on the face of them—Michael Jackson and Walter Cronkite would not appear to have much in common. Cronkite was (all together now) “the most trusted man in America”; Jackson was the least trusted child-man in America, at least to any parents whose ambitions for their kid extend beyond a $30-million out-of-court settlement. But, for those members of the Jackstream Media hoping to eke out one more week of prostrations and ululations for their Gloved One, Cronkite’s death served as a kind of intervention. For, if there’s one thing the press love more than a celebrity cut down in his prime(ish), it’s the opportunity for self-validation that the passing of one of its own affords. The media’s sense of proportion is never more out of whack than when bidding farewell to some iconic figure from its glory days, and one had high hopes that the eulogies for Cronkite might surpass the impressive new records in risibility set by the coverage of Washington Post doyenne Kay Graham in 2001: “The Most Powerful Woman In America,” “The Most Powerful Woman In The World,” “America’s Queen,” “Kay’s Amazing Grace,” “Oh, Kay,” “Special Kay”. . .

No “Kay. Why?” oddly enough. There was an element of triumphalism in all this: Mrs. Graham was a central figure in what the J-school bores regard as American journalism’s finest hour—Watergate. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive! A mere eight years has passed since Kay Graham’s death, but the smug complacency that characterized her eulogies was noticeably absent from Cronkite’s, which mostly read like obituaries for an industry. It’s sunset, and it’s no longer bliss: the heir to Cronkite, Katie Couric, is the champion limbo dancer of evening-news ratings; the New York Times, the oracle from which all three network newscasts take their cue, is now junk stock. It turns out Walter Cronkite and Michael Jackson have quite a bit in common: both performers peaked circa 1980, and did very little these last two decades. In that sense, they belong culturally to the same generation. They represent the zenith of a shared, universal popular culture: Jacko’s Thriller was the biggest-selling album of all time ever; Cronko’s newscast was the most-watched in America. Barring dramatic and severe government control of technology, no CD and no news show will ever be that big again. And, when you think about it, millions of teenagers going out and buying the same slickly manipulative pop record is less weird than millions of grown-ups agreeing they’ll all get their world view from the same source. But (all together now, again) “that’s the way it was” back in the days when ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post functioned as a co-operative monopoly. Continue…

One flap of a Butterfly’s wings . . .

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, July 23, 2009 at 3:40 PM - 88 Comments

It’s not entirely clear what the naked Russian lady was referring to when she asked, in heavily accented English, “Would you like it?” But I doubt James Hudson was expecting “it” to include the highly graphic filming of the encounter and its subsequent posting on the Internet under the title “The Adventures Of Mr. Hudson In Russia.” Mr. Hudson was in Russia to serve as Britain’s deputy consul-general in Ekaterinburg, but his starring role opposite and under two local hookers brought an end to his tour of booty . . . er, duty: one portly bespectacled chap from Whitehall with his dressing gown hanging open quaffing champagne with a pair of Urals slappers going through the motions with all the flair of the mechanical hare at an East End greyhound track.

You’d think in a hypersexual age even the FSB (successors to the KGB) who are alleged to have set him up would have no use for anything as quaint as a Cold War “honey trap.” At a time when men can be women and parade down Main Street subsidized by municipal taxpayers (at least in Canada), surely life is all honey, no trap. But out there on the diplomatic circuit it’s a different world, and for an enterprising intelligence agency, the lonely wallflower at the embassy ball is still a reliable way to access your enemy’s secrets. As it happens, Mr. Hudson’s career self-detonated only a few days after the death of one of the most famous honey traps of the postwar era, the Chinese opera singer Shi Pei Pu. Continue…

Why do you leave the one you love?

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, July 16, 2009 at 2:00 PM - 175 Comments

To mark Dominion Day (as you’d expect a squaresville loser like me to call it), the New York Times asked 11 Canadian expatriates to write on “what they most miss about home.” The cutting-edge funnyman Rick Moranis riffed on toques and beavers and the lyrics of God Save the Queen, raising the suspicion he’d simply recycled his beloved Dominion Day column of 1954—which is not just environmentally responsible but very shrewd given New York Times rates for freelance contributors.

But thereafter the expats got with the program. The musician Melissa Auf der Maur, after years in the “American melting pot,” pined for “the Canadian mosaic.” But the great thing about the Canadian mosaic is that it engages in “a national conversation about literature like a big book club,” so the bookseller Sarah McNally said she missed “the pride and simplicity of a national literature, which probably wouldn’t exist without government support. We even have a name, CanLit, that people use without fearing they’ll sound like nerds.” Continue…

The fat cats vs. Blazing Cat Fur

By Mark Steyn - Wednesday, July 8, 2009 at 11:30 AM - 88 Comments

The other day Iris Evans, the finance minister of Alberta, gave a speech to the Economic Club of Toronto. And right at the end she suggested that parents ought to be prepared to make some economic sacrifice in order to be at home with their young kids. “When you’re raising children,” she said, “you don’t both go off to work and leave them for somebody else to raise.”

For some reason, David Swann, the Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, felt this warranted an official statement from him. Can you guess what it said? Okay, stand well back:

“If she really said these things, she must apologize. If she doesn’t apologize, the premier must fire her,” said Mr. Swann. “These are truly outrageous claims. I have never been as stunned by the sheer arrogance and ignorance of the Tories as I am today.” Continue…

Name the date, Jennifer. I’ll be there.

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, June 25, 2009 at 8:55 AM - 91 Comments

Last week, I wrote about the neo-nationalist and quasi-fascist parties elected to the European Parliament. When a political movement calls itself, as in Bulgaria, the Attack Party, one naturally expects to hear the martial drum of approaching jackboots. But, in western Europe and in North America, the reality is that fascism pitter-patters in on cashmere slippers, smooth, unthreatening and beguiling as it gently ushers us ever deeper into Soft Despotism (to use the title of Paul Rahe’s new tome) or (to take Kathy Shaidle’s and Pete Vere’s book) The Tyranny Of Nice.

And so it is that the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission, after lying low during the worst year-and-a-half in its existence, now feels it safe to poke its head above the parapet. A year ago, at the height of publicity over its investigation of Maclean’s for publishing an excerpt of my book, the CHRC sought to get itself off the hook in the traditional manner: commission a report. They signed up professor Richard Moon, who’s no pal of mine and is distressingly partial to state censorship. Yet, amazingly, his findings, published at the end of last year, recommended the abolition of Section 13—not, alas, on the grounds that this abominable “law” licensing ideological apparatchiks to police the opinions of the citizenry is at odds with eight centuries of Canada’s legal inheritance, but on the narrower utilitarian basis that in the age of the Internet Section 13 is unenforceable.

Continue…