Bye, Bye Acadia

It pains me to read that there are so few people willing to call a spade a spade. Reversing the declining "francophone numbers" within the province cannot be attained by using bullshit slogans and analysis. The decline of Acadia is real. If the Acadian Society cannot understand that an Algeria immigrant speaking French will never be an Acadian, then all hope is lost.

Telegraph Journal: Steady erosion in francophone numbers

OTTAWA - New Brunswick, Canada's only officially bilingual province, is nearly one-third francophone for - for now, that is.

But will it still be in a generation or two?

Don't count on it.

New Brunswick had the largest drop in francophone population of any province between 2001 and 2006, losing 4,000 residents whose mother tongue is French.

[...]

The Acadian Society has persuaded Business New Brunswick Minister Greg Byrne, who is responsible for the Graham government's population growth efforts, to strive to maintain the province's linguistic balance as it boosts immigration.

Byrne has raised in Ottawa the need for federal funding to help.

Landry says a francophone presence in New Brunswick that becomes, over time, diminished in numbers and weaker is "not inevitable."

But he argues that turning things around may well take a multi-pronged strategy - of francophone immigration, economic growth in francophone areas to retain residents and a campaign to market French schools and education, among other things.

"There needs to be a major effort," he said.

[...] ed: emphasis added

These well meaning people need to learn history, Acadian history. I suggest they begin by reading Longfellow's Evangeline. Although it is a work of fiction, it does help explain the fabulous culture that was created in Acadia.

If Acadia is to survive, French speaking Acadians need do one thing - have babies. Anything else will facilitate an even more rapid decline and erosion of francophone numbers.

I also might suggest Acadians revisit their local Catholic Church. Once upon a time the Church did help build and protect Acadian culture. Oh yeah, and stop listening to the left-wing progressives, they are the ones' destroying Acadie.

Au Revoir L' Acadie

When I first read the article "Quality of life is a big seller: Business Minister sells the good life in Ottawa and Montreal" in the November 16th Telegraph Journal I bookmarked it for a later response. Aside from the silly sales pitch about bringing home ex-pats to New Brunswick where job seekers will find the province is run like a private club with strict membership requirements, the real story is that the New Brunswick government believe its responsibility (and the responsibility of the federal government) is to ensure the province remains linguistically balanced.

Here is the context:

[Telegraph Journal November 16, 2007......]

[Greg] Byrne, who is both minister of Business New Brunswick and the man in charge of the Population Growth Secretariat, didn't come to Ottawa solely in the hope of luring ex-patriates and newcomers to the province.

He also pressed Immigration Minister Diane Finley for some of the tools to help him in his task.

Byrne and Premier Shawn Graham have argued that as the country's only officially bilingual province, with a population that's nearly one-third francophone, New Brunswick needs extra funding from Ottawa for immigration.

"We need additional resources to target francophone immigrants," said Byrne, referring to both recruiting them and to helping them integrate.

"Otherwise, we would lose our linguistic balance and that's a concern."

Byrne said he pointed out to Finley that the federal government has an obligation under legislation protecting minority language rights to strengthen the province's francophone minority community.

Byrne got no firm commitment from Finley, but said "it's an issue we're going to continue to raise and be very aggressive on."

[...] ed: emphasis added

I have a few questions:

1. Should the government recruit French speaking immigrants from Africa, Asia, Europe, Middle East and elsewhere and integrate them into the Acadian culture with the hope of maintaining the current linguistic balance?
2. Would immigrants without an Acadian genealogy become Acadian by the fact that they are French speaking?
3. If Acadians haven't produced enough babies to replace themselves, is it the responsibility of federal and provincial legislation to protect Acadians with an immigration plan that brings in foreign born citizens to help protect the "linguistic balance" of the province and thereby protect a linguistic minority?

I believe the Minister is being frivolous and irresponsible. Of all the things that should concern the government - encouraging more babies - the last thing should be a formula for immigration that would maintain a false linguistic balance.

Acadian culture may be dying at the hands of a self-inflicted liberal mentality, but it is not proper for government to get involved by trying to advance French speaking immigrants who may or may not embrace Acadian culture.

Either someone IS Acadian or they are NOT.

WANTED: 500 Assholes

Art is the eye of the beholder? Or is it art is in the eye of the asshole?

Rubbish is the new art form. If the artistic expression doesn't include piss, nudity or shit then the artist is prudish or repressed by Christian fundamentalists.

NationalPost:

"Newfoundland comedian Mary Walsh is hoping St. John's City Hall will give her a break and allow her to round up hundreds of nude bodies to pose for a film shoot on the city's waterfront. "I hope there won't be a big incident," Ms. Walsh told CanWest News Service. "We can't really afford people's bails." Ms. Walsh announced on CBC Radio on Thursday that she is looking for 500 volunteers to pose in the buff. If the project does go ahead, the volunteers would meet early on Dec. 15 and disrobe at a nearby art gallery. They would keep their boots on, Ms. Walsh, pictured, said, and head to the water's edge. The shot will only be of their backsides. "We won't be shooting people's dangly bits." The footage will be used in a film paying homage to New York photographer Spencer Tunick, who is best known for his shots of naked bodies in public places."

Personally, most of what passes as art today looks like dangly bits of shit to me.

The Sleaze Reaches Deep Into The Liberal & NDP

Once in awhile during the day, I will check out the "news" at news 88.9. Their "Maritime" morning host is Torontonian Andrew Kristol, a man who frequently sounds like a pervert while he shares his brand of anti-Bush and anti-Americanism. The afternoon "news" is devoted to 'harmless' host Tom Young who usually sounds ill prepared to interview anyone over the age of 18. Most of Tom Young's approach to news interviews is to let his guests use the talk show forum to spread incompetence, sleaze and irrelevance.

NDP champion Pat Martin was on Tom's show the other day. According to Pat Martin, the Mulroney-Schreiber "affair" was worse an issue than the sponsorship program. The Pat Martin ilk seem to believe that suitcases of cash used to fraudulently fund the 1997 and 2000 election campaigns was not as big a deal compared to Mulroney receiving cash payments for "undefined" work. Yep, Tom Young let Pat Martin get away with that outrageous comment.

Liberal Robert Thibault was on Tom's show several times. Thibault is the Nova Scotia Liberal MP who slandered Brian Mulroney on Mike Duffy's CTV program while using his parliamentary immunity to further spread sleaze and fictitious innuendo. Thibault's latest afternoon news interview demonstrated, once again, that Tom Young allows his "guests" to say anything about anyone without demanding any facts or any tough questioning from the host himself. Thibault wants an expensive public inquiry (at taxpayers expense) that will offer nothing more than a platform for liberal incompetence. It's unbelievable to listen as a journalist (so called) allows his program to become hostage to official Liberal Party sleaze and innuendo.

Although I don't pretend to be a fan of former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, I feel tremendous sympathy for the man because I believe he is a victim of Liberal, NDP and media sleaze. All three federal opposition parties and the exempt media are so terribly incompetent and morally corrupt that all they can do is reach out of the gutter and grab for victims to devour using parliamentary privilege. It's sick!

L. Ian MacDonald, another fine Quebec based journalist, nails the sleazy group of liberals with this column: Smearing Mulroney - And The Companies He Serves

Some excerpts:
[...]

By way of illustration, consider Monday's question period, when the Liberals asked five consecutive questions concerning Brian Mulroney's corporate directorships, and whether those companies and their principals had benefitted from his connections with the present Conservative government. Every one of these questions was asked under the blanket of parliamentary immunity. Not one of them could be repeated outside the House of Common without triggering lawsuits from individuals and corporations concerned for their reputations.

For openers, there was Liberal MP Scott Brison asking about whether Quebecor Inc. obtained any inappropriate advantage in the government's decision to favour more competition, and new entrants, into the wireless spectrum auction.

Brison asked whether the Conservatives' previous industry minister, Maxime Bernier, "was shuffled out because he refused to give a billiondollar taxpayer gift to help out Brian Mulroney's company" (Mulroney is chairman of Quebecor World Inc.).

He added: "How could the minister say no to manufacturing, auto and forest workers, who are losing their jobs, and say yes to a billiondollar taxpayer gift to wealthy Canadian media families? Do you have to hire Brian Mulroney to set up meetings for you just to get some help from the government?"

And what is Quebecor? Only the largest newspaper group in Canada, the largest French-language television network in the country and the second-largest printing company in the world. The company is publicly traded but controlled by the Peladeau family, whose founding father, Pierre Peladeau, was one of the great Quebec business visionaries. His son, Pierre-Karl, has built a national company with international reach.

Who is Scott Brison to be slagging Quebecor and the Peladeaus? The same Scott Brison who sent e-mails after a Liberal Cabinet meeting to his friends on Bay Street assuring them they'd be happy with the Martin government's policy on income trusts. The same Scott Brison who, as a Progressive Conservative, went to Mulroney's home to seek his advice and accepted two major donations from Mulroney for his 2003 PC leadership campaign.

more smut:

Then, John McCallum, the Liberal finance critic, asked about Mulroney's relationship with a Wall Street firm: "Mr. Speaker, Mr. Mulroney earned $100,000 a year for his work with the Blackstone Equity Group. Upon being named a director last June, he was given 10,000 deferred restricted common units of Blackstone, which became publicly traded last June. Blackstone is seen as a likely suitor for large-and mid-size Canadian telecom companies. Can the government tell the House if Mr. Mulroney or any agent working on his behalf made representations to the government on Blackstone's behalf ?"

This is called the drive-by smear. What is Blackstone? Only the largest private equity firm in the world. Its CEO, Steve Schwarzman, has been featured on the cover of Fortune as the king of Wall Street. And McCallum, as a former chief economist of Royal Bank, knows perfectly well the impropriety implied by his question.

more smut:

Then, Liberal Marcel Proulx, noting that Mulroney was a director of Cendant Corporation and Trizec Properties, asked if Mulroney or any representative had been in touch "with the minister of public works, his parliamentary secretary or the Cabinet minister regarding Cendant Corporation or Trizec Properties, or any other transaction that could have been profitable for those businesses?" The insinuation was about government leases in office buildings. This just in: Barrick Gold sold Trizec a year ago, and Cendant has been broken up.

Moving right along, Liberal agricultural spokesman Wayne Easter wondered if the government's "obsession with destroying the Canadian Wheat Board will destroy farmer marketing power, but a fractured market of wheat and barley sellers will be a huge benefit and financial windfall for grain companies such as Archer Daniels Midland. Brian Mulroney serves on the board of ADM, and according to media reports, ADM pays him $200,000 a year in cash and options. He has shares worth about $3-million. Has Brian Mulroney or any representative had discussions with any minister?"

What is ADM? Only the largest company of its kind in the world. Its founder, Dwayne Andreas, is one of the most respected business leaders in America.

Finally, Liberal MP Maria Minna asked the following: "Brian Mulroney is on the board of Barrick Gold Corporation. According to media reports, Mr. Mulroney owns stock options in the company valued at US$3.7-million. Recently the prime minister added side trips to Chile and Tanzania to promote Barrick, despite the environmental and human rights controversies that dog the company internationally. Will the government release the details of any dealings the government has had with Mr. Mulroney or his representatives concerning Barrick?"

And what is Barrick? A Canadian world champion, the largest mining company in the world. The chairman, Peter Munk, is among the most generous philanthropists in Toronto.

What have any of these companies or their leaders done to deserve this? Nothing.

Liberals, and their media friends, are sleazy all the time.

"France stunned by 'Islamic' savagery"

The following news story should be required reading by all persons working in Foreign Affairs and with Immigration Canada. To ignore the message (Islam is Savage) is a betrayal of Canada.

TimesOnline (UK):

IN retrospect, it was not a good idea to have left his pistol at home. Called to the scene of a traffic accident in the Paris suburbs last Sunday, Jean-François Illy, a regional police chief, came face to face with a mob of immigrant youths armed with baseball bats, iron bars and shotguns.

What happened next has sickened the nation. As Illy tried to reassure the gang that there would be an investigation into the deaths of two teenagers whose motorbike had just collided with a police car, he heard a voice shouting: “Somebody must pay for this. Some pigs must die tonight!”

The 43-year-old commissaire realised it was time to leave, but that was not possible: they set his car ablaze. He stood as the mob closed in on him, parrying the first few baseball bat blows with his arms. An iron bar in the face knocked him down.

“I tried to roll myself into a ball on the ground,” said Illy from his hospital bed. He was breathing with difficulty because several of his ribs had been broken and one had punctured his lung.

His bruised and bloodied face signalled a worrying new level of barbarity in the mainly Muslim banlieues, where organised gangs of rioters used guns against police in a two-day rampage of looting and burning last week.

Not far from where Illy was lying was a policeman who lost his right eye after being hit by pellets from a shotgun. Another policeman displayed a hole the size of a 10p coin in his shoulder where a bullet had passed through his body armour.

Altogether 130 policemen were injured, dozens by shotgun pellets and shells packed with nails that were fired from a homemade bazooka. It prompted talk of urban “guerrilla warfare” being waged on French streets against the forces of law and order.

By the end of the week an extraordinarily heavy police presence in Villiers-le-Bel, where most of the rioting took place, appeared to have halted the violence: on top of public transport strikes and student protests against his reform plans, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, could not afford a repeat of 2005, when a similar incident involving the deaths of two youths provoked the worst French urban unrest in four decades.

Things were so tense in the suburbs, however, that the riots could easily erupt again with the prospect of deaths on either side setting off a much greater explosion and, conceivably, the deployment of the army to keep peace.

“Given the weapons being used, it was lucky that nobody was killed,” said a policeman. Nearby were the charred remains of the local constabulary. The nursery school was burnt down. So was the library.

Rioting two years ago was widely regarded as a protest against poor housing, racial discrimination and unemployment of up to 40% in the grim housing estates surrounding most big French cities.

But “Sarko” dismissed suggestions that nothing had been done to improve the situation, referring to the “Marshall plan” for the banlieues being drawn up by Fadela Amara, his urban development minister.

At the same time he argued that, far from reflecting difficult living conditions, the violence was a result of the “thugocracy” of the suburbs, where drug-trafficking criminals held sway.

“We shouldn’t try to excuse the inexcusable,” said the president in a television address to an anxious nation on Thursday, ridiculing the left’s vision of rioters as “victims of social injustice”. He pledged that those who fired at police would be tracked down, one by one, and tried on charges of attempted murder.

[ read the rest]

But, don't worry, it couldn't happen here, could it?

AIDS - More World Class Bull Shit

Listen to the usual left wing liars and all you get is obfuscation and bullshit. In fact, listen to any person who advocates a "progressive" agenda, and all you get is deceit.

From Townhall: AIDS: The Questions They Won’t Ask

As another World AIDS Day dawns this morning, prepare for the usual media blitz of stories designed to promote more spending on failed approaches to HIV/AIDS, and more bashing of the Bush Administration despite increases in spending by the billions each year.

Here are some of the questions that the media probably won’t ask the professional HIV/AIDS lobby, which grows ever fatter while the human tragedy rises:

• What have American taxpayers gotten for the $20 billion per year (and rising) government spending on HIV/AIDS?

• What has happened to the more than half a billion condoms that the United States taxpayers have distributed to Third World countries during the past seven years, even while the media have attacked the Bush Administration’s emphasis on abstinence?

• Federal funding for HIV/AIDS has increased dramatically every year since 1993, yet the number of new infections has not declined. Why do we spend more money every year on prevention programs that have failed to prevent new infections?

• Why do billions of dollars continue to flow to organizations and programs that have been a colossal failure by any yardstick?

• Why does the government spend far more on AIDS than cancer or heart disease, which each kill more than 10 times more people annually in the U.S.?

• After 25 years, why don’t the AIDS experts even know how many people are really infected? Just last week, UNAIDS admitted it had overestimated the global numbers by millions and CDC is expected to announce that it undercounted the number of U.S. cases by tens of thousands.

• Why is the onus on potential victims to take personal responsibility for having “safe sex” instead of the people who are already infected with HIV/AIDS, as is the case with other medical epidemics?

• Why are health officials in major cities like Washington, D.C., Chicago and San Francisco allowing the reopening of gay bathhouses, which facilitate the promiscuous sex that fuels the epidemic?

• With CDC statistics showing that HIV/AIDS in the United States is still astronomically higher among men who have sex with men (MSM), why are AIDS officials getting away with saying all Americans are equally at risk?

• Why have most of the media ignored studies, such as one in the American Journal of Public Health in June 2003 about a program among African-American female adolescents that reported that “17.8 percent of the adolescents acquired an STD despite 100 percent condom use.”

• With the District of Columbia this week reporting the highest per capita HIV/AIDS infection rate in the nation following years of condom promotion, why is the city planning to hand out at least 3 million condoms annually by 2009?

• Why does D.C. have 9 percent—nearly one in 10—of all U.S. pediatric AIDS cases, when the District has a population of only 580,000 in a nation of more than 300 million people?

Stephen Manning of the Associated Press reported that last statistic but offered no insight into why. But he did follow it up with this:

“Despite the virus’s reputation as a scourge of homosexual male populations and intravenous-drug users, the biggest percentage increase in HIV cases since 2001 came from heterosexual contact. The number of women living with AIDS has grown 76 percent over the past six years.”

The increase in cases among women and even children is real and alarming, but it’s not the whole story. The AP article ignores these points from the D.C. report:

• “Between 2001 and 2006, MSM sexual contact was the most common mode of transmission reported among newly reported AIDS cases.”

• “Between 2001 and 2006 among persons living with AIDS, the highest number of cases was consistently among those attributed to MSM sexual contact, followed by heterosexual contact and IDU [injection drug users].”

• “Males made up greater than 70% of all cases living with AIDS, consistent with national trends.”

When AIDS reporting leaves out key facts like these, news consumers can’t be faulted for thinking that homosexual behavior no longer poses any greater HIV risk for males. Or that we just need to spend more on “safe sex” programs to make it all go away.

A congressional staffer on Capitol Hill who has been studying the AIDS issue for more than a decade told the Culture and Media Institute:

“The media, with the notable exceptions of the Washington Post and Boston Globe, tend to dumb down the issue to two things: lack of money, and lack of support for harm reduction programs, like condoms and needle exchange.

“There have been a number of really good articles in the Globe and Post in recent years. Some good scientists have been working behind the scenes to get the truth out. The reality is the science doesn’t matter to the approach the government takes. Politics has always dictated the response to this disease, and science is twisted and bent to fit an agenda rather than adjusting the agenda to match up with the science.”

A June 22, 2003 Boston Globe article by staff writer John Donnelley, “UN report adds to a condom debate,” began this way:

“A draft report for the UN's AIDS agency has found that even when people use condoms consistently, the failure rate for protection against HIV is an estimated 10 percent, making them a larger risk than portrayed by many advocate groups.

“The report, which looked at two decades of scientific literature on condoms, is likely to add fuel to a heated political battle on U.S. policy in fighting AIDS in the developing world.”

One would think a 10 percent failure rate against a 100 percent fatal disease would continue to make news, but the stat has disappeared into a media black hole.

Likewise, the media decline to dig deeply into alleged success claims for needle-exchange programs. All three leading Democratic presidential candidates have pledged to increase federal money for needle giveaway programs, yet reporters seem to lack curiosity about whether these programs actually work. Absent from most coverage are embarrassing facts like the following, related by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) in the September 2005 edition of Drug Watch World News:

“In 1998, Vancouver, Canada introduced a needle exchange program (NEP) in an effort to control high rates of HIV/AIDS among injection drug users (IDUs). Today, Vancouver boasts the largest NEP in the Western Hemisphere.

“The city distributes over two million needles every year; local organizations distribute thousands of needles every day; and syringes are available over the counter at pharmacies. Unarguably, nowhere in North America are clean needles more accessible.

“When its NEP was established, HIV prevalence in Vancouver was one to two percent among the city’s 6,000 to 10,000 IDUs. While the expectation was for needle distribution to decrease HIV rates, the opposite has occurred. HIV rates have soared, and so has the number of drug abusers in the city.

“Today, there are an estimated 12,000 IDUs in the Vancouver area, and about 40 percent of the city’s IDUs have HIV. As a result, Vancouver has earned another not so boastful distinction – having the highest HIV infection rate of any city in the developed world. Furthermore, more than 90 percent of the city’s IDUs are estimated to be infected with another blood borne disease, hepatitis C.”

When you tune in to the networks or your local newspaper, see how many questions are being asked that would shine a light on the longstanding “safe sex” approaches to HIV/AIDS.

The main question should be: Why are we throwing billions of dollars at the same old approaches? It can’t be “compassion,” because it’s not working.

Robert Knight is director of the Culture & Media Institute at the Media Research Center.

Yep, the "progressive" ilk have more "success" to add to their wasteful agenda.