Quote of the Day: “That people on the political left have a certain set of opinions, just as people do in other parts of the ideological spectrum, is not surprising. What is surprising, however, is how often the opinions of those on the left are accompanied by hostility and even hatred.” Thomas Sowell
I haven’t read a more pathetic title in the last few weeks than “Six Dr. Seuss titles pulled from local library shelves for review”. Anam Latif tells us that they were pulled after the publisher decided that they would stop publishing them due to their so-called “racist imagery”. She tells us that: “’The books no longer serve a positive literary outcome for children,’ said Kim Nguyen, associate professor in communication arts at the University of Waterloo. These are not books that promote good values, these are books that are not useful in helping children read because of the kind of imagery in the books and the content in the books.’ “ And just exactly what are these terrible racist drawings? Ms Latif tells us that: “In ‘And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street,’ an Asian person is portrayed wearing a conical hat, holding chopsticks, and eating from a bowl. ‘If I Ran the Zoo’ includes a drawing of two barefooted Black men wearing what appear to be grass skirts with their hair tied above their heads.” Wow – I guess no one has ever eaten in a Chinese restaurant. Truly pathetic. The Mulberry Street book was first published in 1937. At the time, according to the World View website, the average life span of someone from the central region in Africa was in the mid 30’s. Did the average person at that time go barefoot and wear grass skirts? Did the average Chinese person before the WWII eat with chopsticks from a bowl? What Ms Latif should have done (of course TheRecord and their TorStar masters would have never allowed it…) was to show the coloured pictures from the six banned books and let average readers judge for themselves if these images are somehow racist. Then we can all laugh at the library staff who are paid by my tax dollars.
On the Editorial Page today, we have the fourth op-ed on the Universal Basic Income (UBI) proposal since 11 December 2020. Unfortunately, the other three articles were written by authors (two by economist Dr. Evelyn Forget) that actually made sense. The op-ed today looks to be written as a high school civics essay. It looks like Caterina Lindman is a retired actuary so I would assume that she has at least some financial common sense. But any intelligent or coherent logic is completely lacking in her op-ed today. She tells us all of the great things that a UBI would do for Canada as if we all didn’t know this. But of course, like all of the other authors on this subject at TheRecord, she neglects to mention the most important part of the policy – eliminate all other programs to pay for the UBI. But how does Ms Lindman suggest we fund the UBI you ask? Well, tax the rich of course and a 0.2% tax on financial transactions. Oh my.