The Shafia murder trial has returned a verdict, and to no great surprise the jury has found Mohammad Shafia, 58, his second wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 42, and their son Hamed, 21, guilty of four counts of first-degree murder. They now begin a long, and we hope a horrible, next part of their life behind bars.

Much has already been written about the Shafia honour killings, but the ugly argument about culture clash has barely been allowed to surface. Though media publish the facts of the case and invite commentary, they are quick to delete and close commenting when Canadians begin to express their feelings. In that way the truth remains largely hidden, and that’s not a good thing for Canada because we desperately need to discuss it.

What sort of people are we letting into Canada that would consider doing such a thing? Is this the sort of Canada we want in the future? And if not, why are we not doing more to stop these kinds of people from bringing their warped, twisted sense of morality with them?

A few people have said that these sorts of immigrants should leave their barbaric views at home where it belongs. But even that opinion is a relativist one. Why should the third world be subjected to this kind of misogynistic tyranny? Is it ok to murder your family members for honour provided you’re beyond the borders of Canada?

There’s an even more unsettling thought to this case. In the rare instances in which a Shafia-type family actually acts on their barbaric ideals, how many find more non-violent means to coerce their family members in complying with their dishonourable notions of honour? How many women are abused behind the smiling, glossy-coloured magazine faces depicting Canada’s multicultural mosaic?

What’s more disturbing than the fact that there are people who would do this to their own daughters, is that such people who harbour such views even want to live in Canada. One is reminded of our most infamous Canadian family of convenience, the Khadrs, who immigrated here in order to exploit our own freedoms and generosity and use it against us. The Shafias are little different than the Khadrs.

For unless you despise Canada, why would you act so contrary to its nature? Why would you even want to come to Canada, where women are free to choose their own mates and make their own decisions in life, unless you intend to somehow change it?

Nobody wants to stop and think about immigration and the shifting demographics for fear the discussion is inherently racist. We are rapidly shifting from a Christian nation of European descendants, to one that is populated by South Asians, North Africans and people from the Middle East. That is a fact that is objectively neither good nor bad. The question one should ask next is whether there are negative consequences to these changes, and if so, what are they?

Well, the most obvious one is staring us in the face. If there are Islamic zealots in our midst, is it likely that the sort of incidents like the Shafia murders would become more common as we invite immigrants from Islamic countries? Or is this merely an aberration in a statistical average in which most Muslims follow the spirit and the letter of the law?

Who knows? But what is clear is that these new cultures have, in certain parts of Canada, decided to make their customs welcome. There are examples of Muslim women creating women-only swimming classes and salons and classrooms. This segregation may have a superficially friendly explanation, but it demonstrates a disinclination to conform to Canadian customs and modern attitudes.

Some people don’t seem to care about how Canada changes, since our nation relies on immigration for population growth, and hence can only become the face of those we allow in. And if that means a new majority decides to make certain customs and traditions a Canadian staple, so be it. This would be not unlike the sort of attitude that led to entire streets in France becoming impromptu prayer mats five times a day. And if that’s the sort of Canada you want, then by all means let’s not have a discussion about any of this.

If, however, you prefer that the country retain the sorts of values inherited by our founding European, Christian forebears, it would behove us to have a frank talk about who’s arriving at Pearson International Airport every single day, and what they’re bringing with them.

Vancouver displaced Sydney as the least-affordable housing market after Hong Kong among large English-speaking cities, as home prices rose faster than incomes, a study of 325 metropolitan areas worldwide showed.

The median home price here is now 10.6 times greater than the median pretax household income. Is it possible there’s a correlation here?

* * *

The UFC website was hacked today over the company’s public support for SOPA and PIPA, the unpopular anti-piracy legislation that went to defeat in Congress last week. The site was down for a few hours and redirected to the hacker’s website which featured a Hitler-type figure and a rap song about Obama.

No idea what the retaliation might be from the UFC, but they have fought hard against piracy of their live pay-per-view events and downloading of their material, as well as removing copyrighted material from YouTube. The internet terrorist organization anonymous has promised reprisals against large social media organizations in the coming days.

* * *

This is how I feel when driving. Every single day.

There was a segment on CBC National News yesterday about a mother of a Grade 2 French Immersion student with a peanut allergy who had been bullied in a rather unusual manner. No, he hadn’t been pushed, pulled or otherwise tormented in the way we might remember from our own time in grade school. This bully used a form of psychological warfare against the nut allergy victim.

According to the story, the bully went up to the peanut sufferer and whispered in his ear that he had rubbed nut residue on his clothing. The boy went home in a panic and told his mother what had transpired. The mother became alarmed and alerted the proper authorities. They conducted an investigation and confirmed the bully had said these horrible things, but there was no evidence nut residue had actually been rubbed on the unfortunate child.

And that’s about it. Other than an interview from some psychologist who opined that the incident was one of “assault” and a CBC reporter reminding us the child couldn’t be charged with said assault because he’s all of eight-years-old, that was the entire news report.

What’s amazing isn’t just the fact this story made the news, since the CBC has a proclivity for dredging the mundane. But the idea that a Grade 2 student making an idle threat about nut residue, that may or may not have existed in the first place being worthy of some kind of alarm-raising outcry, is disturbing.

Is this what the world has come to in the modern day of bubble wrap parenting? That some peanut allergy kid with a high level of gullibility has been “assaulted” because he was forced to endure the uncertainty of whether his clothing might be infected? I must say, I don’t have a great degree of confidence in the child’s intelligence since the invisible nut residue didn’t generate an allergic reaction before he had time to run home to mommy.

The post-bullying world we live in is cultivating these gullible momma’s boys by the millions. Whereas in my day one might handle this incident by bloodying the offender’s nose, we’re now teaching our children to be paranoid snitches. Now that the schoolyard fight has been removed from the equation, running to teacher or mommy is really the only option anyway.

It’s not that I’m insensitive to the genuine danger of peanut allergies. It’s the typical overreaction to the smallest incidents that is a symptom of a generation of parents who are micromanaging children’s behaviour to the point where we’re actually depriving them of solving their own problems.

In our desperation to avoid having our children experience the same horrible things we did, we rob them of an essential human experience. No, Johnny, don’t hit Simon. Work out your differences verbally. Well, it’s impossible for 8-year-olds to articulate emotions and desires, which is why children used to have a variety of methods to assert dominance in the nuanced power structure of prepubescent interpersonal relationships.

For those lacking wit or craft, there was the fist. For those lacking strength, there was deviousness and manipulation (the peanut allergy bully). And for those lacking both, there was charisma. We’ve reduced this now to a one-size-fits-all method in which we expect the power structure to be neutral, making everybody into the same nervous, paranoid easy marks that they are.

If you have a pack of dogs, you accept the fact that one dog will assert a level of dominance and each subordinate dog will find a place in the order. It’s only at the dog park that you see humans attempt to assert a neutral and artificial concept of equality. Children are a lot like dogs, since they lack the capacity for mature reasoning, empathy and respect, so they find other ways to create a hierarchy.

And adults, neurotic as we are, have destroyed that, all because we’re militantly fearful of having our children experience anything unpleasant. (Ironically, the segment preceding this one on the CBC was all about having children wear helmets while sledding).

There are genuine cases of bullying that still exist, though they’re rare and exist at the more mature grades. When a child decides to terrorize a large group of kids physically or emotionally, it’s something that should be addressed. But I haven’t seen any child like that in primary school. What I’ve seen is a fanatical attempt to push adult values on undeveloped minds by academics who obviously don’t remember what it was like to be a child.

The first time I realized anti-bullying had overreached its authority was when my six-year-old son was suspended from school for chasing a girl threatening to kiss her. He was suspended for sexual harrassment. The sick and perverted part of this is that the principal was inserting an adult desire that was impossible for my child to possess. He didn’t want to kiss the girl for sexual reasons. He didn’t even want to kiss her. He just enjoyed the way the threat made the girl fearful and exploited it to the fullest benefit.

As we grow up we learn all sorts of interesting and important ways to manipulate people. And let’s face it, the kids who learn how to push the buttons and get other children to do what they want aren’t the bullies. They end up being your bosses and your corporate owners. The passive, fearful child who runs to authority for protection will learn nothing. Except that solving problems with other people requires going to a person with greater power.

I don’t really believe bullying is as large a problem as we’ve made it out to be. What we have is a new generation of parents who want their children to grow up in a tolerant, pain-free, emotionless world. It’s a fantasy that doesn’t exist, so they’ve created rules and guidelines and PAC committees to enforce their delusions. All to the detriment of the next generation.

By now many people are likely aware of the comments made by NDP leadership hopeful Thomas Mulcair about his pride in being a dual French and Canadian citizen, mainly because of the ensuing comments from Prime Minister Stephen Harper. In his most classically irreverent “just visiting” manner possible, Harper indiscreetly took a shot at Mulcair by stating his Canadianness greatly exceeds that of Mulcair’s.

“Just to be clear, these cases have come up in the past, and obviously it’s for Mr. Mulcair to use his political judgment in this case. In my case, as I say, I’m very clear. I’m a Canadian and only a Canadian.”

On the surface it might seem innocent enough. He was asked a question by the media, who are wont to stir the pot whenever the opportunity arises, and the Conservative leader obliged to take the spoon and furiously stir. But as we’ve learned over the years that the highly intelligent Harper has been a politician in this country, nothing he says or does can really be described as innocent.

This is a man for whom the word “relax” has no meaning. Scarcely a year since winning a majority government in Ottawa, the Conservatives have been busy running attack ads on enemies who are largely powerless, frustrating them in the House of the Commons at every opportunity, and continuing to the fundraise, presumably in the hopes that when the next election comes along they can destroy all traces of political opposition in Canada.

Harper is a shrewd and remarkable man, for he’s able to play on divisive issues with unparalleled talent. He deftly turned aside support for Michael Ignatieff by preying on issues largely irrelevant to his competence. He suggested Ignatieff was too aloof, an erudite intellectual taken to long absences from Canada, a country he could hardly understand or have any love for.

And it worked, in part because it did bother Canadians to think that Ignatieff had spent so many years outside of Canada. There was a genuine agreement that he had returned to Canada not for public service, but to lead the country. While some would rightly say that’s a laudable thing, others would say it was presumptuous and elitist.

But let’s not lose sight of the issue here. Harper criticizes a great deal of things in Canada that he makes no real attempt to change. The best example of this might be the Senate. But he does this purely for political gain. So when he was asked for his opinion on Mulcair, realizing the man could become the next NDP leader presented the irresistible chance to plant a seed of doubt in the minds of Canadians, and the groundwork for a smear campaign at a later date.

Having said that, Harper doesn’t say or do something unless he’s relatively convinced it’s going to resonate with Canadians. And to tell truth, the fact Canada has dual citizenship allowances is something that bothers a lot of people. Note that Harper would never seek to challenge the law itself, removing the right to hold two citizenships, since that doesn’t serve his political aims.

At the heart of every citizen of a country is a patriot, and we like to believe we love our country. Those Canadians who immigrated here from other countries were never forced to give up their old loyalties and swear allegiance to one land. Some believe that’s a strength, but I think many people, the people who might vote for Stephen Harper, find it a little bothersome. Not so much for the ordinary citizen, since our country is made up of many naturalized citizens, but for those who would lead us and speak for us.

There’s a reason that a rule exists that the President of the United States must be born on American soil to serve in office. It’s because people believe that loyalties can be divided, particularly if a person was born and grew up in another country. The idea that the leader serves only one people is a comforting one.

But even that isn’t the point of the Harper-Mulcair milieu. Stephen Harper isn’t Canadian by choice as he suggests. He was born here, just as I was, and so naturally he’s a Canadian and only a Canadian. What else could he possibly be? It’s meaningless for Harper to state an obvious fact. It would be more impressive if he had been born in Kenya and then renounced his Kenyan citizenship and stated his one true loyalty is Canada.

For Mulcair, there’s no genuine fear that his loyalties are divided. The term “Canadian of convenience” doesn’t apply to him. It applies to those citizens who might live abroad, but still return to Canada once in a while to keep their affairs in order, perhaps take advantage of health care or some other universal service. Or the ones who become Canadian suddenly when their country is besieged by war or natural disaster. Then they become Canadians in a hurry.

If anything, Mulcair is a Frenchman of convenience, becoming a dual citizen for the same reason many Canadians do. They keep some of the perks and benefits of membership. Hey, if you could get a free passport to the United Kingdom, wouldn’t you take one?

In the end, both politicians were just playing politics. Mulcair was appealing to his multicultural NDP base, while Harper was appealing to his. And citizens, dual citizens or otherwise shouldn’t really care one way or another.

An article in the National Post today highlights an issue in North America that grows larger by the day. It’s called sex-selective abortion, or otherwise known as gendercide, one of the reasons that large portions of Asia are imbalancing the natural male to female ratio by killing female fetuses. And the immigrants from countries that practice this atrocity constitute the two largest ethnic groups coming here: Chinese and Indians.

We’ve known about gendercide for a while now, but largely ignored it because the practice was being done outside of Canada. Things that happen beyond our borders bother us less than when they happen in our own backyard. But the idea that Asians are coming here to perform sex-specific abortions isn’t just something that can be ignored. Particularly when it begins to affect us because of our need and craven desire to treat all cultures equally.

Canadians, as much as we are changing each and every year, have traditionally had no history of sex-selective abortion. When technology came along that enabled us to determine the sex of a fetus, we accepted the technology as a boon to society, not as a tool to end the life of girls. And while it can be said that abortion has a solid history of practice in Canada, it has never been due to cultural hangups about the relative value of women in our society.

The concept of murdering women is morally repugnant in Canada, and so should be the concept of aborting female fetuses. It should make us feel the same revulsion we have for the Taliban murdering girls or enslaving them behind shrouds. Gendercide could very well be the 2010′s version of the outcry of gender apartheid a decade ago in Afghanistan and other parts of the world that do not accept the concept of egalitarianism.

But what I cannot accept is a notion that all Canadians should be treated with the same sort of inherent mistrust when it comes to ultrasounds. We’ve already been through this with terrorism. Where one specific demographic has had a prolific history of terrorism, we have taken to suspecting the 99.99 per cent of Canadians who are not terrorists. The lengths to which we have been inconvenienced in order to provide a preposterous appearance of not racially profiling has resulted in the most inefficient, intrusive and invasive way of travelling possible.

Similarly, a large percentage of Canadians have no chance of being sex-selective abortionists. However, it’s fair to say that this percentage changes on a daily basis as thousands of new Asian immigrants come to North America every single day, some of them harbouring backwards cultural hangups that are incompatible with our own culture. It is within the identified demographics from the article of people from India, China, Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines that we should be looking to target this problem.

There’s nothing racist or discriminatory about this. There is no rational reason for refusing to tell Canadians who are not of Asian descent the sex of the fetus since it’s reasonable to expect the fetus isn’t in danger. A blanket ban on all Canadian women is the same useless and failed approach used against terrorism, and all it’s going to do is piss everybody off.

There may be another way. Perhaps when a parent is apprised of the sex of a fetus, that doctor is legally obliged to inform abortion clinics of the decision with the name of the mother. Or perhaps a mother could sign a legal document swearing they will not abort the child after learning the sex. Although based on Canada’s nebulous abortion laws, or lack thereof, I could foresee the clinic going ahead with the abortion anyway. After all, these places are designed to put the woman’s choice ahead of all other issues, even if that choice is culturally reinforced by a patriarchal society that dominates and subjugates women.

Regardless of how it’s achieved, the idea that “policy would require the understanding and willingness of women of all ethnicities” is insulting to the vast majority of ethnicities that don’t practice this barbarism. In the same way that the politically correct are careful not to offend anybody by painting too broadly with the same broad brush, it’s extremely offensive to be equally suspected of wanting to abort your child for cultural issues that aren’t your own.

Ironically, although this issue is less about abortion itself and more about cultural gendercide, social conservatives might find themselves tempted to support a politically correct blanket ban until seven months, knowing that the greater goal of preventing as many abortions as possible is more important than the inconvenience it might serve to non-Asians.

But that sort of thinking has to be rejected. No matter where you stand on the abortion issue, the more morally repugnant act is surely the selection of an entire gender for eradication. This is a disgusting, offensive extermination of girls in the womb based on the belief that boys are more valuable in a society than girls. It must be stopped, and that cannot happen by simply closing our eyes and treating the problem as a generic one like the common cold.

Ever since I can remember, I’ve had hallucinations in that fleeting state between sleep and consciousness, before full lucidity has kicked in and I’m aware of who I am or what I’m doing. Most people take a few tenths of a second for that process to take place as the eyes flutter open, make out familiar shapes in the darkness, send signals to the brain to interpret the information, and then return a verdict. I’m in my bed, sleeping next to my wife and I’m looking at the draperies.

But more often than not my brain works a little different than most people, for before my brain can wait for my eyes to adjust to the vague shapes before interpreting its surroundings, it decides to fill in the information for me. That’s when I see shapes moving in the darkness, figures standing in the doorway, spiders crawling across the ceiling, or sometimes snakes rushing toward my face. These waking hallucinations even have a name. Hypnagogia, the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep.

The immediate imagery can be unsettling or even frightening. The appearance of a door opening or closing turns out to be nothing more than the brain anticipating movement from an object not in transition. The shadowy figure in the doorway turns out to be the background shadow of the hallway. But the rushing objects or spiders can be startling because one is pushed quickly into wakefulness with the belief one is under attack. Although spiders appears to be the most common hallucinatory phenomena, my experience has shown these figures can be anything, including the belief invaders are in the house prowling around.

The rapidity with which the brain invents a false scenario is impressive. I have rolled onto the floor, rushed to shut a door, or put my hands out as though to block an attack. The only comfort in these episodes is that the mind is still so transitionally inclined to either wakefulness or sleep that after mentally reassuring there is no danger, the brain seems able to easily slip back into sleep with no ill after effects. By morning it’s usually be forgotten.

I suppose the first time I became aware my hallucinations were real is when I would sit bolt upright in bed and ask my wife why there were hanging cages in our room. I don’t remember what the cages look like or why they’re hanging there, but my wife tells me she would reassure me there were no cages and I would go back to sleep. After I became consciously aware of my hallucinations, I began to remember having them, even though the details of each episode remain elusive.

Hypnagogia is similar to, but not to be confused with, the more terrifying sleep paralysis, which my wife experienced in her early twenties. Physiologically, the paralysis occurs as a natural part of REM sleep, however it is the body that shuts down while the mind remains awake. During this time the paralysis is usually, and understandably, accompanied by either terrifying audio or visual hallucinations, or a perceived sense of impending danger, such as the presence of a person standing nearby just out of peripheral sight.

I’ve never experience paralysis, and as a phenomenon goes it’s apparently so rare that one can only expect to experience it once in their lifetime, if ever. The condition I have, however, seems to be recurring enough to be deemed frequent, as it happens several times per week. What this suggests to me is that my body doesn’t shut down properly and remain shut down for the full eight hours of sleep.

What I suppose fascinates me about this condition is that for a few moments my brain sustains the perception of a reality unfolding that is dreamlike in nature. It is a waking dream, in that my first instinct is to react to the false stimuli my eyes are receiving. I have sometimes wondered what is the longest period of time I have been under misapprehension before I was able to figure out what’s really happening.

This condition highlights the fact that the brain goes into a “low power” mode during sleep, much like a computer, and in the same way it requires a quick reboot. Have you ever woken up in your bed in a state of panic, wondering who the person is sleeping next to you, where you are, and what you’re doing there? I can recall distinctly feeling a fear, even if it only lasted for one second, of not remembering who is sleeping next to me. Naturally, I remember it’s my wife, as it has been for nearly 20 years.

I believe also that part of the fear of Hypnagogia is due to a primal instinct in man of sleeping in the wild and being ready for attack. A person usually wakes up in a feeling of comfort or security, but the disorienting feeling caused by Hypnagogia evokes a primitive fear of persecution from the natural world or spirits. In those fleeting moments the brain isn’t able to compute rationally, leading the person to allow instinct to take over.

I don’t have any intention of going to a doctor or anything. It’s a harmless quirk of my nature and I don’t remember most of the episodes. What about you? Do you have any sleeping quirks?

I drive roughly 140 kilometres a day to work round-trip. I also have a car that’s entering 15 years of service. Needless to say it isn’t great on the fuel efficiency, which means I’m forced to go to the gas station frequently, sometimes on concurrent days. I don’t enjoy spending hundreds on gasoline every month, but it’s a reality which I’ve come to accept.

While I’m driving these 140 kilometres every day I have a great deal of time to listen to the radio. Most of the time it’s music, but inbetween songs there are the ads. I tune most of these out, but one in particular got my attention the other day. It went something like this: If you’re in the market for a luxury hybrid SUV at z price that’s more than reasonable, we’ve got vehicles starting from as low as $38,000.

A luxury hybrid SUV. What the hell does that even mean? What’s the point of having a hybrid SUV? So you can be at once selfish and selfless? So your car can be one those sight-obstructing eyesores on the highway, but not at the expense of mother nature? So you can sit on heated leather seats while you save the planet?

After all the political gobbledegook about global warming and the crying and shrieking about excess and waste and the need for better fuel efficiency and a change of our lifestyles from consumption to sustainability, the best they can come up with is a carbon tax on my fuel purchases and a hybrid no working man can afford. Thanks, guys. Nice work. Why don’t you offer home energy retrofits for $110,000 to save 40 cents a week on electricity while you’re at it. Oh, you already are? Carry on then.

After all the blustering and blubbering from the environmental movement, where is the working man’s affordable hybrid? The bare bones, stripped down, basic, no-frills version I can afford so I, too, can feel smug about my contribution to the planet’s well-being? Does it start at the ultra-low price of half my annual salary?

The thing is that I think we all know the charade is over. Nobody cares about energy efficiency beyond how it relates to the bottom dollar. Not unless you can afford to care about it. But it isn’t as though there’s some kind of magic fuel source or alternative mode of transportation sitting there, waiting for schleps like me to take advantage. No, we’re basically being incentivized against using gasoline without a viable alternative. I’m not going to bicycle 140 kilometres to work, and I’m certainly not going to be able to afford that more than reasonable luxury hybrid SUV. Which means I’ll continue to fork over hundreds in gasoline expenses every month, of which the government gets their public transportation and carbon taxes.

People don’t want your bare bones, stripped down, basic economy car hybrid anyway. That much is clear by the return of the market demand for F150s and SUVs again. So, without a free market demand for small cars equipped with hybrid technology, the car companies are smearing lipstick on their oversized SUVs and calling them environmentally friendly. Despite all the hemming and hawing about needing to change people’s habits by pushing them to buy more fuel efficient cars, all that’s really been done is some minor tweaking and catering to the mainstream.

If the governments of the day were really serious about radically changing the automotive industry overnight, they’d incentivize hybrids to the working class by offering subsidies on the economy models. But we all know how that turned out south of the border. It didn’t, because there wasn’t any demand for it. Government interference in the market resulted in a push for people to buy something nobody wanted to buy. So instead you wound up with dealers selling electric powered golf carts under the subsidization program and getting away with it.

Look, I don’t care if I can’t afford a hybrid, and I’ll even stop whining about the commercials. Just so long as we drop all the pretenses about wanting to save the environment and scrap the carbon tax. Scrap these bogus and half-hearted efforts to make the appearance of caring, and just make gasoline as affordable as possible for people like me who wince when we pull into a gas station.

If and when a cheaper, alternative fuel source and car comes along for the masses, then you can start taxing gasoline into oblivion.

I can’t think of anything more appropriate to sum up this slobbering suckupfest to the life and times of a murderer, terrorist and a war criminal, than the following screenshot:

Whatever truth that the commenter imparted to gain the “thumbs up” from the 76 per cent of people who voted was apparently not truthful enough for the CBC, who not only deleted the comment, but appears to have deleted all and any comments that were approved of by the majority of the readers. Because you know what they say at the CBC, the customer is always wrong.

These, apparently, were allowed to stay. Probably because they reaffirm the main basis of truth the CBC operates under, which is that Canada is inhabited by a land of racists:

Well, uh, you see, Neoriel, the reason this young man is being villified, as it were, is that he’s an admitted murderer, a terrorist and a war criminal. Glad I could clear that up for you.

Photo: Getty Images

This incident probably flew under the radar of most people who aren’t MMA fans, but noted Lightweight UFC fighter Jacob Volkmann recently lost his job teaching high school wrestling for comments he made about Barack Obama following a recent victory against Efrain Escudero at UFC 141.

Volkmann, who runs a chiropractor practice, said the following to UFC commentator Joe Rogan:

“Obama needs a glassectomy. Ask me what a glassectomy is, Joe,” said Volkmann.
Rogan obliged.
“It’s where they remove the belly button and put a piece of glass in there so you can see what you’re doing while your head’s up your ass,” said Volkmann.

This comment has since led to an action taken by his part-time employer. Via Twitter, he announced: “Was put on administrative leave from coaching white bear lake high school wrestling for my joke. Unethical!”

Volkmann has repeatedly picked fights with Barack Obama, originally receiving a visit from the secret service for a joke he made about fighting the president in an MMA match. Following his post-fight joke (which fell flat among the apolitical MMA fans), he said he’d like to “take (Obama) down and submit him. I would make it a very painful submission… a kimura or arm bar – try and rip it.”

Although he’s clearly been provocative in his comments, is it really fair that the high school suspended him? On what basis did they suspend him? Apparently it wasn’t because anyone complained, but because of guilt by association. They didn’t want to be seen endorsing someone who endorses violence against the president.

I think they’re making much ado about nothing. If free speech is a first amendment right, it doesn’t make sense for that right to be limited by targeting a person’s livelihood. And even if we agree that employers have certain rights to prevent an employee from misrepresenting their views, a simple disclaimer from the school stipulating that they don’t endorse or recommend his views should suffice.

Your thoughts?

These poor bastards didn’t have the green thing either.

The most annoying thing about human beings is that we have a ridiculously short lifespan from a cosmic perspective, and an even shorter memory. This gives us the habit of thinking that every important event that will happen is likely to take place in our lifetimes, the most important time in all of history. And although we’re too advanced to believe in celestial deities anymore, we’re still fairly gullible when it comes to falling for the hell fire. Hence the reason we’re able to simultaneously mock the Mayan calender for ending in 2012 while in all seriousness predict cataclysmic climate change will end life on earth. We’re wonderfully naive like that.

What’s equally as annoying is that we, the twenty and thirty-somethings of planet earth, actually believe we’re the first people to conceive of the problems we face today, and thanks to our enlightened way of thinking we have time to fix them all. It is therefore the responsibility of every young person to undo the great damage done by our thoughtless and careless parents and grandparents, who selfishly ravaged the great blue planet of her beauty in the name of heedless progress.

I think it’s fairly commonly told to young people today, particularly by environmental movements like the David Suzuki foundation, that old people are responsible for the state of the world as it is today, and that only they can prevent these fuddy duddies from continuing to poison the planet. But educating these bewildered aged citizens of our society to do the simplest things, such as observing Earth Hour or putting empty milk jugs in the blue box, is a great burden for the young.

Indeed, just trying to get them to bring reusable grocery bags would be a great accomplishment. To wit:

In the queue at the store, the cashier told an older woman that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren’t good for the environment. The woman apologized to him and explained, “We didn’t have the green thing back in my day.”

The clerk responded, “That’s our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment.”

He was right — our generation didn’t have the green thing in its day.

Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were recycled. But we didn’t have the green thing back in our day.

We walked up stairs, because we didn’t have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn’t climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks. But she was right. We didn’t have the green thing in our day.

Back then, we washed the baby’s diapers because we didn’t have the throw-away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up 220 volts — wind and solar power really did dry the clothes. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that old lady is right; we didn’t have the green thing back in our day.

Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house — not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana. In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn’t have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used a wadded up old newspaper to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap. Back then, we didn’t fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn’t need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity. But she’s right; we didn’t have the green thing back then.

We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull. But we didn’t have the green thing back then.

Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn’t need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest pizza joint.

But isn’t it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn’t have the green thing back then?

Well, thank goodness we have the iPad generation to help you understand the error of your ways.