Canada Week: Are They Talking About Us?

(Short Hills- Ontario)

Yes they are:

With hundreds of reporters from around the world in Ontario to cover the G8 and G20 summits, the average Canadian might wonder: What are they saying about us?

While the majority are focused on the key issues brought up by their own leaders, it's inevitable a little commentary on the host country sneaks into media reports.

In the English media at least, it looks like the Brits want to be more like the Canadians, on the subcontinent the Indians are awed by fortress Toronto and the Americans, well, they're just taking it all in.

The G20 was a fiasco riddled with violence, England- which used to own two-thirds of the world- has taxes so high and a standard of living so low that not even the Chinese want to live there, India has smog so thick one could cut it with a knife and the US... well... whatever problems Canada may have, we're not in Obama's America for which we can thank God every day.

Further:

Some members of the Russia media also weighed in on summit security, particularly the cost.

News agency Ria Novosti notes that the 2009 U.S. G20 summit cost US$18 million, while Canada's pricetag for the meetings was well over $1.1 billion.

"Thus Canada will spend 51 times more than the US did just a year ago to protect G8 leaders from Canadians," the agency writes.

"Canada must be a very dangerous country for world leaders."

Russia is a dangerous country for... well... everybody.

The CHUDS

Really. They are:

Police have arrested four people after witnesses saw them emerge from a manhole near the G20 summit security zone early this morning.

A spokeswoman for the Integrated Security Unit said the safety of international leaders at the summit was never at risk.

But workers are welding shut more manhole covers that lead to "underground infrastructure" as a precaution.

Details of the charges against the four are not yet available.

City crews and police are checking the underground system of sewers and access tunnels but police maintain there is no danger.

Infiltrating the sewer system is a popular tactic by anarchists, and crews welded shut manhole covers in the summit district in the weeks leading up to the G20.

I was quite certain these anarchists were filthy gutter creatures, given yesterday's mayhem, and now I have proof.


The anarchists are a part of a grave problem. The G20/G8 never solves anything, its leaders (ie- China) are corrupt, the police are useless (though I find they have extraordinary reserves of patience when dealing with morons), David Miller is both weak AND stupid, the media invariably sides with the anarchists provided they don't burn their cars and now the anarchists- the very meaning of cowardly thugs- just top this fetid sundae like a rotten cherry. Not one of these "protesters" is brave enough to challenge real bullies like China, Cuba, Russia or Islamofascists. Indeed, these morons even side with them for whatever perverse reason one can think of. Instead, they smash the windows and cars of innocent people just trying to make a living. The point is clear and it's not a good one.


How about a little experiment? Let's test the courage and convictions of these "brave" souls. Why don't the Jew-hating Queers Against Israeli Apartheid invite Muslim groups to march with them? What? Homosexuals are hanged in Iran? No wonder they attack Israel, Christians and other safe targets!


Are the eco-activists willing to travel down to the Gulf of Mexico and clean up spills? Plant trees? How about stand in front of the Russian consulate and ask them about metals pollution or about oil spills and hydro-electric dams that kill huge scores of fish? Granted, Russian crowd control involves beatings and wrongful arrests but it's edgier than screaming about natural oil deposits in Canada. Nope? Okay. Just thought I'd ask.


Ah! How about China's many, many human rights abuses? Is anyone willing to pay a North Korean defector's airplane ticket to Canada so that he or she can talk about his or her experiences in the Chinese-backed hellhole north of the US-protected First World economic dynamo? I realise that's a lot of coin to come up with but a bake sale sponsored by the Global Committee for Action Against Capitalism and Aggression Against the Brown People Who Made My Shoes and Che Guevara T-Shirt should come up with part of it. Who's game? Anyone?


I guess it's just easier to smash windows than it is to do some actual work.

Speaking of Thugs...

Look at these morons.

The people in this picture are identified as Harsha Wahlia and Syed Hussan. They’re “environmental activists.” They’re promoting their cause by giving the finger to some Toronto cop who’s doing his best to ignore them (and doing a pretty good job of it, it appears.) Most people are happy to have the cops around. They don’t make the rules, they just enforce them. So giving them the finger achieves nothing, other than to make the “activists” look like morons. Which Harsha and Syed pretty succeed at. Ask yourself: Are you really going to embrace a cause backed by two people who can’t think of any other way of communicating their message than to stand in the street and give the finger to a bored cop?

So when these two twits go back to their squatters' village or suburban retreat or wherever they make themselves as useless as possible, this cop gets paid enormous amounts of overtime. For having to deal with these losers, those are tax dollars well-spent.

The Inmates Run the Asylum

A tiny sub-culture in a now virtually abandoned city (because of thugs) has allowed an even more perverse sub-culture to march along providing it doesn't violate the city's anti-discrimination laws (which never made sense, anyway). Corporate sponsors could back out but why do that?

Yeah, it's Friday.

The Forgotten War

(a memorial at the DMZ)

The Korean War, precipitated by the splitting of Korea at the thirty-eighth parallel and continuously backed by both China and Russia, is often called the forgotten war. With none of fanfare the Second World War had, this ongoing conflict in a nebulous Asian region appears unglamorous and without a clear objective. Today, many South Koreans fear an East/West Germany scenario should there be a dramatic regime change and no one is willing to punish China's toy dog, North Korea, for anything it has done.


There is nothing forgotten about this.


Here is rare footage of the Korean War.


In other news, many young South Koreans are very stupid:

Although 70 percent of the South Korean public believe North Korea was behind the sinking of the Navy corvette Cheonan, the proportion is only 60 percent among people between the ages of 20 and 40, a survey suggests.

Marking the 60th anniversary of the Korean War, the Ministry of Public Administration and Security conducted a poll of 1,000 middle and high school students as well as adults about their attitudes to national security and found that 75.4 percent of adults and 73.4 percent of teenagers believed North Korea was responsible for the sinking in March.

The poll shows that younger Koreans, especially those in their 20s, are suspicious of accusations against North Korea. When asked which country they did think attacked the ship, only 64 percent of them said it was North Korea. Some 5.6 percent said the U.S. and some even pointed to Japan (3.3 percent) and China (1.9 percent). Twenty-five percent said they didn't know.

Seriously- what the hell? What are the parents teaching them? What are the teachers telling them? Maybe a better question to pose to these adolescents is what the cell phone coverage is like in North Korea. That should hit them right where they live.

Revisiting

Yesterday's post concerning the apologetic tone of a certain Toronto Star writer and his horrid article still has me thinking.


How low will we set the bar for humanity in terms of morals, values, erudition, even physicality? Jim Coyle's article is just one example of that. We take lax (read: lazy attitudes) regarding sex, gluttony, drunkenness and various vices believing we are base animals incapable of handling or conquering bad habits. Human beings are extraordinarily flawed creatures but we also managed to invent the wheel, discover penicillin, sail to the New World, put a man on the moon, pen marvelous poetry and rock out to "Jet Airliner". How bad could we be? Even my pessimism and cynicism cannot ignore these achievements. With time, however, we've gone out of our way to devolve, especially culturally.


How is it that we can forgive, excuse, what have you, the barbaric practice of "honour killings"? whether one wishes to believe it or not, "honour killings" occur more in Muslim, Sikh or Hindu communities than anywhere else. Aqsa Parvez was a Muslim girl of Pakistani descent killed by father, Muhammad, and her brother, Waqas. Indeed, assaults and murders based on ridiculous notions of honour are quite common in Pakistan. Yet, if one were to speak plainly about this, one would be accused of racism and met with absurd assertion that these kinds of crimes occur in all strata of society in equal or next to equal measures.


Really?


In 2009, in Pakistan, "... 1,401 women were murdered during 2009. Out of these, 647 were murdered in the name of “honour”, while 757 were killed for other reasons."


In Kurdistan, "...there were 407 reported offences, beheadings, beatings, deaths through "family problems", and threats of honour killings."


And in Canada:

Dr. Amin Muhammad is a psychiatrist at Memorial University in St. John's, N.L., who is currently working on a report for the federal government about honour killings in Canada. He said there've been 13 such cases in the country since 2002.

Are there then enormous swaths of Japanese Christians refusing to learn English and disemboweling their daughters according to some weird interpretation of bushido? Obviously not. I wouldn't, however, be surprised if some jackanapes invented some middling and completely asinine scenario such as that. Anything would be better than pointing out the elephant in the room with the words : KILL YOUR KIDS scrawled on its gray, wrinkled side. These red herrings are essential in the topics of cultural relativism and apologetics.


Back to Jim Coyle and his reprehensible article. Surely man, in his flawed and limited psyche, possesses both common sense and a moral compass. This is why he doesn't care about Latin Masses or the influx of Thai food places. Neither of these things are harmful. In fact, they perform useful services. One feeds the soul and the other feeds the body chicken penang. How does "honour killing"- one of the biggest oxymorons ever- serve a purpose? It doesn't. It's a barbarous act and one doesn't have to have "cultural sensitivity" to see it. How forgiving would cultural apologists be if there were Japanese Christians disemboweling their daughters or Norwegian Lutherans chaining their daughters in closets? I argue not at all. Not even the sallow skin of the Japanese immigrant would deter the skin colour fetishists because the aforementioned Japanese immigrant accepts Jesus as his Saviour. Of course, Japanese Christians and Norwegian Lutherans don't do any of those things. Whatever their faults may be, they would be roundly criticised for them by people obsessed with white guilt and fear that legitimate criticism are unacceptable in a society that makes multiculturalism a virtue even though they understand their culture or others very little.


The root of this cultural apology row is not simply just race or creed but- as I said before- devolution. We've devolved. We've set the bar low for everyone. A student doesn't have to study because he'll be passed through the system, anyway. It's good for his self-esteem. A person with poor eating habits doesn't have to be reminded that his gorging is unhealthy and just gross. Let's accept his gluttony. We don't want to hurt his feelings, anyway. So, to, with the immigrants whose complete refusal to accept that killing is wrong or learning and understanding the national language and customs are integral for his life in a country he chose to enter. Forget that learning the language would be beneficial all around. Let's just assume he can't do it.


That's why it's called racism of lower expectations. Never mind that there have been immigrants that muddled through with for more difficulty and far less resources than now. Let us pat ourselves on the back and allow unthinkable things because we are either too lazy, neurotic or scared to expect what we've come to expect from ourselves and others before.


Let's push that proverbial bar back up.

Various Things

A sports-related note:

Afghanistan is not likely to compete in a World Cup any time soon but its women's side trains fiercely in the heat, wearing headscarfs, track suits and long sleeves that cover everything except hands and faces.

Wearing shorts in Afghanistan is taboo. A few of the more daring players have swapped Muslim veils for baseball caps as they train next to the NATO headquarters in Kabul, nerve centre of a nine-year fight against the Taliban....

Teammate Khalida Popal calls football "a passion" but a struggle for women, who were forbidden from sport and all public activities, including going to school, under the 1996-2001 Taliban regime.

"It's hard to play football here," she explains. Aged 20, she is one of the oldest players in a young Afghan team. She watches recruits shooting at the goal, clad in T-shirts bearing the image of President Hamid Karzai.

"Some families refuse, they say this is not for girls," she says. "Others don't like it that we go abroad without our families."

In 2007, the women's team started to travel, playing in Germany, Jordan and Pakistan.

"Sometimes, it just makes me cry. You have to fight to continue to play. It's just like the Americans who fight against the Taliban," she says.

Under the post-Taliban Afghan constitution, women are equal to men and a handful have competed in overseas competitions, mostly in martial arts events.

But women's groups say they remain the most marginalised and underprivileged group in the country, subject to violence and discrimination in the name of Afghan tradition. The war is another hindrance.

In the middle of training, the team suddenly races for the stands as -- without warning -- two US helicopters prepare to land on the pitch.

"Normally they warn us, but this time they've forgotten," says Wali, bending over to protect herself from the powerful downdraft as a Black Hawk has just set down on the grass.

Due to safety concerns in Kabul, where Taliban suicide attacks are on the rise and where facilities are few, women play on ground attached to the general headquarters of the 142,000-strong foreign military in Afghanistan.

When the aircraft take off, training can resume.....

Something to think about when one hears blather about no funding for women's sports or why Afghanistan is a lost cause.

Ezra Levant (sans cape) turns the blinkers on what many would or should believe is unthinkable. Would anyone excuse Karla Homolka or Paul Bernardo for murdering Tammy Homolka? How about excusing the murder of Aqsa Parvez by her own father and brother?:

How do you feel? How do you feel about a repulsive excuse for humanity like Jim Coyle telling you that the murderers are full of love? And that their deliberate, calculated murder of Aqsa was a "crime of passion", the only time the word crime is used. And that this was not a morally reprehensible act, but a "tragedy". That's just a step over from the word "accident", isn't it. A bridge collapsing is a tragedy. Not a cold-blooded murder.

Would Coyle dare write this way about Tammy Homolka? Of course not. Even the craven Star would not publish such a desecration. And if, by some fluke, it had gone to print, he'd be fired the next day.

But not so for defaming the memory of Aqsa Parvez. Why? Is the murder of a brown Muslim girl less odious than the murder of a white Christian girl? That's pretty much Coyle's argument, actually. He's racist. Here's the rest of his column, this time with no words changed:

They need to understand how generation gaps exist at the best of times, in the best of families – and how wide one might be between a 57-year-old father and 16-year-old daughter.

They need to understand how profoundly disorienting is the experience of immigration – the risk taken, the price paid by someone moving to the other side of the world, almost always in the interests of the next generation.

The stakes are huge, just like the aspirations, just like the certainty of divided loyalties and conflict to come.

It's for their perennial resonance that stories of the intergenerational culture clash are so frequently retold – in recent times in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake, in Bend it Like Beckham, in a library's worth of stories of shtetl Jews arriving in America.

Most of the time, compromises made, the story works out. Occasionally, it even inspires art, brings out the best in us.

And sometimes, the worst.

Can you believe this disgusting man, comparing Aqsa Parvez's murder -- an "honour killing" because she refused to dress like a chattel owned by the males in her family -- to the heartwarming, light-hearted culture clashes in Bend it Like Beckham or Yiddish stories?

Honour killings? It's a problem every immigrant has! It's part of the great American dream, really!

Other than the 3% of Canadians who are Aboriginal, the rest of us are immigrants or children of immigrants. Have you ever heard of this sort of honour killing before, in our nation's 400-year history?

Or Coyle's claim that the 41-year age gap between father and daughter was the cause?

Is he serious?

Jim Coyle and the Toronto Star are racist. Abiding honour killings is racist. It's sexist. It's anti-feminist. It's precisely the thing the Star claims to be against. But they're not. They'd rather be politically correct than stand up for the rights of women and children.

They'd rather be politically correct than stand up for secular values like gender equality.

They'd rather be politically correct -- and for Aqsa Parvez to be dead -- than to offend Parvez's murderous brother and father.

Damn right.

Rather than demand or even expect for anyone to find the murder of one's offspring to be abhorrent, the Toronto Star's Jim Coyle excuses the crime of killing Aqsa Pervez as just a cultural hiccup, something terrible native-born Canadians just can't understand:

They need to understand that family violence is unique to no time, no place, no culture, no religion.

They need to understand that crimes of passion are called that for a reason. They happen in intimate relationships, between the closest of people, in the places where love is fiercest and fears most great.

What a total fool. There was nothing passionate or caring about the deliberate murder of a teen-aged girl and he should damn well know it.

What is it that Mr. Coyle thinks Canadians should understand? What should we as Canadian citizens get that the "poor" Parvezes already do? Does he truly think that no other immigrant has ever experienced some difficulty relocating yet- surprise, surprise- has not killed his children? Either Mr. Coyle thinks nothing of killing in general or thinks that killing is just dandy in certain immigrant circles because "those people just don't know any better".

As Mr. Levant pointed out, Jim Coyle and the rag he works for would gladly moil in the racism of lowered expectations rather than grow a spine and call out the sickening tribalism for what it is. It is hardly ethno-centric to expect that people, particularly immigrants, think that killing innocent teenagers is repulsive- unless, of course, the political spectrum to which Mr. Coyle belongs think that immigrants just aren't up to the task of being good people. It must totally shock cultural apologists to learn that many immigrants have gotten by quite well without infanticide. Maybe Mr. Coyle could explain that in his next article.


Interesting:

The mummified remains of a noblewoman from the 16th century were discovered at a construction site in Osan, Gyeonggi Province. The Seogyeong Cultural Properties Research Institute said Thursday the mummified body of a woman from the Chosun Dynasty and 10 artifacts including a white porcelain pot, wooden comb and a chignon ornament have been found. "The structure and style of the grave and clothes suggest the body was buried in the mid-1500s," said Kim Woo-lim, a museum official in Ulsan.

Dressed in burial clothes, the mummy measures 154 cm in height, the average height during the Chosun Dynasty. The upper part of the body is so well preserved that the skin texture and teeth can be seen. The lower half of the body has decomposed slightly.

A banner covering the coffin shows that the woman was the wife of a military officer. Kim said the discovery will offer invaluable insight into the lifestyle of the period. It dates back to a similar time as the mummified remains of a mother and daughter discovered in Paju, Gyeonggi Province eight years ago.

When one thinks of mummies, one doesn't always think of South Korea. Or... at all. I find this stuff quite interesting.

Also fascinating:

Vatican officials unveiled the paintings Tuesday, discovered along with the earliest known images of the apostles John and Andrew in an underground burial chamber beneath an office building on a busy street in a working-class Rome neighbourhood.

The images, which date from the second half of the 4th century, were uncovered using a new laser technique that allows restorers to burn off centuries of thick white calcium carbonate deposits without damaging the brilliant dark colours of the paintings underneath.

The technique could revolutionize the way restoration work is carried out in the miles (kilometres) of catacombs that burrow under the Eternal City where early Christians buried their dead.

The icons were discovered on the ceiling of a tomb of an aristocratic Roman woman at the Santa Tecla catacomb, near where the remains of the apostle Paul are said to be buried.

Rome has dozens of such burial chambers and they are a major tourist attraction, giving visitors a peek into the traditions of the early church when Christians were often persecuted for their beliefs. Early Christians dug the catacombs outside Rome's walls as underground cemeteries, since burial was forbidden inside the city walls and pagan Romans were usually cremated.

The art that decorated Rome's catacombs was often simplistic and symbolic in nature. The Santa Tecla catacombs, however, represent some of the earliest evidence of devotion to the apostles in early Christianity, Vatican officials said.

"The Christian catacombs, while giving us value with a religious and cultural patrimony, represent an eloquent and significant testimony of Christianity at its origin," said Monsignor Giovanni Carru, the No. 2 in the Vatican's Pontifical Commission of Sacred Archaeology, which maintains the catacombs.

I remember seeing the catacombs when I was in Rome. An entire culture thrived literally underground. It is hard for us to imagine but is still quite thrilling to discover.


In sad news, Edith Shain, the nurse in the iconic VJ Day photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt, passed away at age ninety-one.

In the News

I'm sure people in Ontario and Quebec are wondering what the hell happened over an hour ago.


But not even an earthquake can deter groups of largely upper-middle-class white yahoos and their theatrics:

Protesters covered in fake blood and oil “walked right through the earthquake” that hit downtown Toronto on Wednesday afternoon, carrying on with their march against global mining, said Sgt. Tim Burrows.

Upwards of 100 protesters, who began their march at Alexandra Park at 11 a.m., continued their walk along University Avenue near College Street just as a 5.5-magnitude earthquake shook the streets at roughly 1:45 on Wednesday afternoon.

Carrying signs that read ‘Keep the oil in the soil, and the coal in the whole,’ the protesters “walked right through the earthquake as if nothing happened,” said Sgt. Burrows, of the G8-G20 Integrated Security Unit.

Sgt. Burrows said the protest, which promised on a Facebook page to “expose the institutions most responsible for the environmental and social impacts of Canada’s extractive industries both at home and abroad,” was peaceful and was being monitored by police as it continued its way through the downtown area.

It's a good thing they are not letting a seismological event or common sense stop them from ruining life for everyone in downtown Toronto. They are a determined bunch. And selfish. And clueless. And narcissistic. And, no doubt, unwilling to roll up their sleeves and do some actual work or point fingers at real tyrants like those in China, North Korea or Cuba.


Uh-oh:

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said he would call a leadership ballot for Thursday after a challenge by his deputy Julia Gillard, backed by disgruntled government members fearing electoral defeat later this year.

Ms. Gillard, 48, would become Australia’s first female leader if she topples Mr. Rudd, but a Gillard government is expected to differ little in substance from one led by Mr. Rudd.

Mr. Rudd said on Wednesday he was confident he would win the vote but Australian media websites and analysts immediately started writing his political obituary.

Again, uh-oh (emphasis mine):

U.S. President Barack Obama fired his top Afghanistan commander on Wednesday over inflammatory comments that angered the White House and had threatened to undermine the war effort.

Calling it the “right thing for our mission in Afghanistan,” Mr. Obama relieved General Stanley McChrystal of duty and replaced him with his boss, General David Petraeus, in a bid to show his strategy would not be disrupted.

Mr. Obama had summoned Gen. McChrystal to the White House from Afghanistan to explain remarks he and his aides made in a Rolling Stone magazine article that disparaged the president and other civilian leaders.

Bull. General McChrystal made Obama look like a fool (not too hard a thing to do, actually), hence, the firing.



Some good news:

The final two accused in the “Toronto 18″ terrorism case have been found guilty by a Superior Court jury.

Asad Ansari, 25, and Steven Chand, 29, were on trial for participating in a terror cell that plotted to storm Parliament and detonate truck bombs in downtown Toronto.

Chand was also found guilty of counseling the commission of fraud for the group’s benefit.

A poll that makes little sense:

It is their prime minister’s centrepiece initiative in the upcoming G8 meetings, but most Canadians aren’t standing behind their leader on the issue, results of a poll released Wednesday suggest.

Some 56% of Canadians do not agree with Canada’s current position of not funding abortions as part of an international maternal-health initiative, the Ipsos Reid survey conducted for Canada.com found.

“It’s very close,” said John Wright, senior vice-president of the polling firm. “This is an issue that has very strong opponents, and very strong proponents.”

About nine million children under the age of five in poor countries die each year from easily treatable causes such as malaria, pneumonia and lack of nutrition, according to the United Nations. The international organization’s statistics also show that 99% of the more than 500,000 women who die each year from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth live in developing countries.

That's not what most of the comments suggest:

Why should the Canadian taxpayer pay for abortions in countries where many abort a baby because they want a boy instead of a girl? Unfortunately, we have no choice here in Canada but to pay for those who live an immoral lifestyle and use it as a means of contraception. So thank-you that is quite enough.

*

I don't know where these poll figures came from, but I am highly skeptical that the majority of Canadians are in favour of our country funding abortions in third world countries. We send an enormous amount of aid and supplies to these countries every year - not to mention doctors and volunteers. Why should our government now be under pressure to start funding abortions in these countries? I am all in favour of offering reasonable assistance to less fortunate nations, but where does it end? Why don't we instead focus our energies on putting pressure on the corrupt, dictatorial governments who run these nations to start taking better care of their population, through education, better health care and housing.

*

Too bad they can't poll un-born Canadian children, or for that matter the aborted ones ... an overwhelming majority opposed? * This whole debate is truly insane. If people want funding for abortions, or any other cause, they can donate the money themselves. On what principle does the government confiscate my earnings to pay for programs such as this?

*

Except for these morons:

I agree with A BIT OF THE TRUTH. Everything Harper does is concerned with getting more votes. He supports war in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. He supports Israel. He does things right wingers and Christian Zionists would do. Harper and I are like oil and water. We are so different in our views. But, if you say you are for war to advance the lives of the people in the Middle East, then why not spend money to advance the lives of the women in the world? If it can be proven that abortion is of some benefit to some woman somewhere then why would you oppose the idea? Based on principles, I mean. Why is one form of killing justified, while another is not?

*

Seems to me it's better to do what you can to keep the growth down than to add unwanted kids to the mix in overpopulated countries. Look at how Canadian crime statistics plummeted twenty years after abortions became widely available. I'm all for motherhood -- if the mother wants the kid.

Yeah, I know. I saw self-serving statements from selfish and clearly clueless people, too.

(sigh)

Earthquake

In a strange turn of seismological events, Ontario and Quebec experienced a 5.5 earthquake:

A strong earthquake shook Ottawa and Montreal in eastern Canada on Wednesday, forcing office workers out onto downtown streets in the nation's capital.

The US Geological Survey reported the temblor of a magnitude of 5.5 hit the Ontario-Quebec border area at 1741 GMT, rattling downtown Ottawa shortly after midday.

The USGS said the epicenter was 61 kilometers (38 miles) north of Ottawa.

AFP journalists witnessed walls in downtown office buildings shook for several seconds. Cracks appeared in the Parliamentary Press Gallery building in Ottawa, and outside. Some people appeared shaken up, but unhurt.

Not to cause a panic but some good ideas to have should an earthquake occur.

How Awesome South Korean Cheer Squads Are

We are nothing compared to these kids. Nothing!

Some footage of VJ Day in Hawaii. Interesting.

North Korea and the World Cup

I'm not going to lie to you. I know and care as much about sports as I do about the eating habits of cave-dwelling insects. This, however, struck me:

How do you solve a problem like North Korea?

On the one hand, the team representing Kim Jong Il's brutally repressive state is providing one of the World Cup's most interesting storylines. Not much is known of this team; unlike the other 31 nations competing in South Africa, North Korea and its players are seen little outside of their international appearances.

Their "star" is striker Jong Tae-se, the North Korean "Wayne Rooney" (perhaps not the most flattering of comparisons anymore). Jong was born to South Korean parents, currently living in Japan. This is a player who cries during the DPRK anthem yet enjoys expensive shoes and cars in a foreign country. He is likely a source of profound fascination for his infinitely less-fortunate teammates, who must return north of the demilitarized zone, and is just one example of the sometimes bizarre and contradictory nature of this squad.

In a sense, North Korea is an underdog's underdog. It has evoked memories of the North Korean wonderteam at the 1966 World Cup. It has a bizarre fan from Portsmouth who travels to all its international games. It trained in a public gym in Johannesburg ahead of the Brazil match because of lack of funds for facilities. And, his team two goals down to one of the best sides in World Cup history, a hitherto unknown Ji Yun Nam managed to score a memorable goal against five-time winners Brazil. If you're going to ironically support a weird but "plucky" nation at this World Cup, North Korea will be your first choice.

I do feel badly that (aside from playboy Jong Tae-Se) even though the North Korean team (at least some part of them) play for the love of the sport, they will no doubt be eliminated from the games and return to a hellish existence under the fat, blood-stained hands of Kim Jong-Il. However, just as we should not have legitimised China's getting the summer Olympics, we should not treat North Korea as some kind of athletic curiosity. As I said before, there must be some part of the North Korean players that loves soccer and plays for the thrill of it. There is also the ugly official party line of representing and supporting a regime as awful as the North Korean one.

How curious that the World Cup is played in a country that was anathema in sports circles because of the ugliness of apartheid. Where has the courage of convictions gone?

Point Proven

Without even trying, "The Daily Show's" Samantha Bee completely cements my belief in proper Catholic education.


By taking her foot out of her mouth, she has removed any doubt how completely clueless, ignorant, shallow and vapid she is.

Daily Show joke-correspondent Samantha Bee was interviewed on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross on June 2, as she and Gross giggled over The Daily Show's pro-abortion joke at the last GOP convention, what Gross said was "interviewing people, trying to get them to say the word 'choice,' which you thought had basically been eradicated from their vocabulary." Then, after discussing Bee's teenage habit of stealing cars and selling them and having wild parties, they turned to how it is "pure pleasure" to mock the Catholic Church:

GROSS: You've done a sketch or two satirizing the Catholic church and the pope. And you went to Catholic school...

BEE: I did.

GROSS: ...which you write about in your memoir. So is it hard to satirize the church and the pope having gone to Catholic school?

BEE: Oh heavens no. I'm a lapsed Catholic, Terry, a terribly lapsed Catholic. So it is joyful for me to do that. (Laughter) That is pure pleasure for me, I will say. In fact, I'm working on a piece right now that is related to the Catholic Church and it's fascinating to me. I don't have any of that Catholic guilt. I've worked my way through that. There's none of that left.

Where do we start?

It's probably not a good idea to point out other's failings, real or imagined, when one stole cars and sold them. Just saying.


Lapsed Catholic? This little bit of identity crisis gets more laughable as the article draws on. As is discussed later on in the article, Samantha Bee is as Catholic as... well... nothing, really. She claims to have gone to a "progressive" Catholic school but makes no mention of anything resembling a Catholic upbringing (indeed, her father was an atheist and her mother was wiccan). I think many parents expect faith to somehow be magically imparted on their kids, just like manners and reading skills. Wrong.


Miss Bee (in the emphasized quotes) laughs at the "pure joy" of mocking the Catholic Church. As a stooge for Comedy Central, one can see the absurdity. This is the same Comedy Central that caved to Muslim pressure during the "South Park" fiasco. Comedy Central's credibility, at this point, is gone. We know they'll bend with the right pressure so any attempt to be "edgy" by mocking Christians or Christianity in a country with assured freedom of expression is no great sacrifice on their part. Perhaps Comedy Central would like to send Miss Bee to Pakistan for "Mohammad's Laugh Riot Show"? Come on, Comedy Central and Samantha Bee. Where is your courage? Stand in the middle of Islamabad and tell jokes about how whacky Islam is. There is your edge!


We know that is never going to happen. Miss Bee's "joy" is easy because she knows for a fact she is allowed and able to do what she does without reprisal. She is as fearless as the little brat in a department store screaming for a toy knowing full well her mum can never punish her in front of annoyed and puzzled onlookers.


Catholic guilt? This is a misunderstood concept bandied about by lapsed Catholics and others who have zero idea of what the word actually means or entails. If you feel guilt (let's say from stealing cars and selling them), it is because you have done something wrong. Shame, on the other hand, is neurotic.

GROSS: Now you write in your memoir that your Catholic school was considered a progressive Catholic school. What did that mean?

Ms. BEE: It was a progressive Catholic school. We did not, you know, we had Seder meals and those, those adorable traditions from other religions and we just learned about other religions and other cultures and that was just an important part of our -- when we took, we had to take a religion course, of course. But it wasn't just our religion. It was quite inclusive and we didn't have to do -- we didn't wear uniforms and we had to go to church occasionally but it wasn't a huge part of our curriculum. And we didn't have big gory Jesuses everywhere. They were monochromatic so you couldn't see the blood dripping from the wounds of Jesus. (Laughter)

And here is the crux of what is wrong with contemporary upbringing in Catholic circles. First of all, despite one' s fervent wish for "progressive" to mean "open-minded" or "free", there is nothing progressive about political or social progression. The support for Islamofascist causes or "climate change" without reviewing pertinent scientific data isn't progressive but knee-jerk blindness. As the case may be here, the idea of "progressive" education extends to a kind of cultural dilettantism, a tremendous faux-pas committed by those with little understanding of the entirety or complexity of an issue, person or thing. Is the Seder- an important Jewish custom- "adorable"? Is that how other cultures and religions are seen in "progressive" circles- as quaint, cuddly customs that "those people" take part in? That kind of thinking sounds rather stunted to me. Perhaps it has not occurred to "progressives" that people live a certain way and there is nothing "adorable" about it. If Miss Bee did fully participate in the Seder, then should she have not had a better understanding of the Passover, of Christ's Last Supper (now seen in the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist) or His bloody sacrifice? She gleefully describes the absence of "gory Jesuses" in her school. That's gratitude for you.


The whole ideas of duty and faith are as foreign to Miss Bee as they are in a good deal of Catholic circles. Church is just a building, not an institution established by Christ. For what, then, do the nominal Catholics live for? Is it the lovely Gothic surroundings fit for wedding pictures or the candy handed out to children on Easter Sunday or the convenience of employment? What? If they veer more towards secular humanism, then shouldn't the alleged altruism of humanism tell them that using an institution for photos, candy or a job is wrong?


As I said before, it is easy. Dabbling in something one doesn't understand is as easy as mocking it. This comment attached to the article said it best:

This version of the Catholic basher is so shallow. They mock something they are to busy sneering at to even understand. It is sad that even though introduced to the faith they have failed to dig much deeper than the funny hats. Forgive them , they don't know what they are missing. Like St. Paul's proverbial confrontation with the Lord , if they knew the mystery of the Presence , they would be startled into blindness or hopefully just silent awe.

Amen.

Happy Father's Day

...because it's not like you're going to open your own jar of pickles.

In Case We Forgot....

Though the currently much-maligned BP CEO took some time off to watch his yacht sail (he's a big-wig. What else is he going to do?), the Chosen One went golfing, among other things.

And let's not forget the money he took from BP.

You know, just to keep things in perspective.

Various Things

To finish a week....

Finally: (emphasis mine)

Three men — including two in their 50s — have been arrested in the investigation into the firebombing of an uptown Ottawa bank last month.

In the Friday morning raids, Ottawa Police arrested one man downtown, and a second at his home in nearby Stittsville, Ont. A third man in his early 30s has also been picked up. His name is Matthew Morgan-Brown, of Ottawa. He is a well known activist. He was arrested before the 2007 Montebello summit and charged with assaulting police. He was also arrested in 2004 for vandalizing downtown buildings during an antiwar protest.

Claude Haridge, 50, of Stittsville is in police custody, charged with arson and mischief. Days after the firebombing, which was filmed and posted online in a “catch-me-if-you-can” video, the 50-year-old accused was arrested in an unrelated investigation. In that probe, the accused firebomber was charged with careless storage of ammunition.

The 58-year-old accused is Roger Clement a retired federal public servant, is also in police custody and charged with arson. Detectives believe he rented a 2010 SUV, which was used as the getaway car.

The licence plate of the truck was caught on security video, which led detectives to check rental car records.

The Citizen has learned that Clement used his own credit card and driver’s licence to rent the truck.....

The “homegrown terrorists” have said they firebombed the bank because it sponsored the Vancouver Olympics, which they say was staged on stolen Indian land.

Brilliance and terrorism never mix, apparently.

It took twenty-five years but an inquiry into Canada biggest terrorist attack has yielded some official answers*:

The behaviour of those who booked the tickets and checked the bags should have sounded alarm bells, the report found, but in accordance with the "customer service mentality" that governed at the time, airline staff were not instructed to watch for signs of harmful intent. An anti-sabotage measure called "passenger-baggage reconciliation," which matches passengers with their bags to prevent unauthorized luggage from being place on board, was not used -though it could have prevented the tragedy. "Canadian airports were plagued by a lax security culture," the report found, noting restricted areas were not adequately protected, personnel who screened luggage were not properly trained, and individuals with known associations to Sikh extremist groups had access to highly sensitive areas at the Vancouver International Airport. "Air India ought to have known that the security measures it was using were inadequate to prevent a bomb being placed on its aircraft," the report noted.

I find it extraordinary that no one said anything (or, if they did, it was not heeded) about unaccompanied baggage. It is also extraordinary that areas which should have been secure were completely unguarded.

Further: (emphasis mine)

The report concluded government agencies possessed significant pieces of information that, taken together, could have demonstrated the extreme risk to Flight 182. Yet the process of sharing information between government agencies, including CSIS and the RCMP, was "wholly deficient," the report found. A CSIS surveillance team that watched Sikh extremists conduct a test explosion in Duncan, B.C., in June 1985, failed to include that information in a threat assessment provided to the RCMP and Transport Canada. The RCMP, in turn, "failed to identify, report and share threat information," including a Telex message warning of the possibility of bombing with time-delayed devices that same month. "Excessive secrecy in information sharing prevented any one agency from obtaining all necessary information to assess the threat," the report found....

The RCMP often discounted intelligence leads prematurely, the report found, if those leads failed to conform to the force's primary theory of the case. One suspect, for example, was ruled out because observations of his hair two years after the bombing did not match an imprecise composite sketch of the suspect who had checked the luggage. The RCMP prematurely dismissed source information based on preliminary assessments of credibility, the report found. And by failing to appreciate the continuing threat of Sikh extremism or sources' fear of co-operating with police, "the RCMP often alienated sources, including sources who had previously been willing to speak to CSIS, because of the manner in which it treated them." The RCMP also failed to protect witnesses, the report found, including Tara Singh Hayer, whose name appeared on a "hit list" and who was ultimately murdered....

CSIS frequently failed to disclose information relevant to the RCMP's criminal investigation in a timely fashion, or when it did, critical details were missing. "CSIS was mesmerized by the mantra that 'CSIS doesn't collect evidence,' and used it to justify the destruction of raw material and information," the report stated. CSIS erased tapes of coded conversations that may have related to the bomb plot and destroyed notes from sources related to the Air India disaster, compromising the prosecution. On the RCMP side, police failed to make either a verbal or a written request to preserve the tapes until months into the investigation, when material was already removed. It cannot be determined what information was lost due to the tape erasures.

Unbelievable. If I didn't know better, I would suggest that the RCMP and CSIS made it their mission to screw up this case from the word go. Why legitimate threats were ignored and why evidence was destroyed is beyond me.


(*Note: there is a marvelous book out by Kim Bolan which details the tragedy of Air India Flight 182 and is worth a read.)


Excuse me if I don't believe her:

A woman who drowned her four-year-old daughter in a bathtub six years ago told a Toronto court yesterday she hoped to have children in the future -- then walked out a free woman.

"I still want to have a baby. I won't kill another baby," said Xuan Peng, 38, in between sobs after she pleaded guilty to manslaughter.

Peng was sentenced to five years in prison. Since she had already been in pre-trial custody for 30 months, Peng was given two-for-one credit for time served and was released yesterday afternoon.

She was originally convicted of second-degree murder in March 2008 and was sentenced to life in prison with no eligibility for parole for at least 10 years. The conviction was quashed and a new trial ordered last December, when it was revealed Superior Court Justice Mary Lou Benotto erred in her instructions to the jury.

In a statement of facts submitted to the court, the prosecution and the defence agreed to a manslaughter charge and the lenient term noting the significance of Peng's bipolar disorder when coupled with raising an autistic child.

There are several things wrong with this. Canadian courts have been particularly lenient when it comes to parents killing their disabled children. By doing so, they've assigned a value to those particular children's lives. The system fails to adequately address difficulties families have when dealing with disabled children (just ask Dalton McGuinty). Asia, in particular, is extremely wanting in care for the mentally ill:

Asia's mental health is, more than ever, in a perilous state. The Global Burden of Disease study commissioned jointly by the World Bank, the World Health Organization (WHO) and Harvard University predicts that by 2020 depression will be the leading cause of disability in Asia, measured by the number of years a person lives with a debilitating health condition. Already, mental illnesses account for five of the 10 leading causes of disability in Asia, including disorders such as depression and schizophrenia. That's a bigger health burden to the continent than cancer. A WHO study found that as many as one-quarter of all Indians currently suffer from some sort of mental illness. The region also boasts some of the highest suicide rates in the world. In China, for instance, suicide is the No. 1 cause of death among those aged 18-34, according to the Beijing Suicide Research and Prevention Center. At least 250,000 Chinese have killed themselves each year since the mid-1990s.

Yet only a small percentage of these troubled individuals ever seek help—or even possess the opportunity to do so. In Asia's most developed countries, ordered, Confucian cultures are loath to confront mental illness. Its victims commonly endure workplace discrimination, receive scant family support and feel obliged to hide their symptoms for fear of unsettling the people around them. Du Yasong, a psychiatrist at the Huashan Hospital in Shanghai, estimates that as many as one-third of all people who go to general practitioners in China are actually suffering from mental-health problems expressed psychosomatically through symptoms such as headaches or insomnia. Yet 95% of those with depression in China are untreated, according to Ji Jianlin, a medical professor at Shanghai's Fudan University who advises the central government on mental-health policy. Japan has the highest number of hospitalized, mentally ill patients in the world, yet psychiatry is still considered a crackpot discipline by many doctors there. "There is so much stigma when it comes to mental health," says Osamu Tajima, a leading psychiatrist in Tokyo. "The perception that it's a personality weakness prevails not just among 'normal' people. I've heard many doctors tell patients to stop complaining and tough it out."

Even when the severity of the problem is acknowledged, treatment is hampered by a disastrous lack of resources. This is especially true in Asia's poorer countries, where conditions for the mentally ill are often horrific. Many patients are locked up in hospitals no better than prisons. At the Panti Bina Laras Cipayung mental-health center in east Jakarta, just 10 minutes off a modern expressway, the air is thick with flies and the stench of feces. Originally intended for 200 patients, the government-run facility is crammed with 305 inmates. Most are naked, some are shackled or chained to window bars. Others, emaciated or showing oozing lesions, curl up on the soiled floor of the latrines. A doctor stops by the center only once a week for two to three hours; he has numerous other similar institutions to attend to. Though the center's number of patients has nearly doubled since 1996, its funding has not increased because of the weak economy—less than $1 is spent on each patient per day.

Miss Peng is going back to China where mental illness is ignored AND they drown baby girls.
This won't end well.

No:

John Oakley is seriously entertaining the question of whether Canadian judges should give those who commit "honour" killings a break because they have different "cultural practices" and may not be aware of our norms and laws; defence attorney Lawrence Ben-Eliezer thinks judges should take these differences into consideration because we have "multiculturalism".

Not just unthinkable but- as many have put before me- "racism of lower expectations". Why expect an immigrant to learn and conform to the practice of NOT killing one's offspring? As much as the West has embraced a culture of death in all its forms, other parts of the world have had it embedded in their culture for centuries. Statistically, so called honour killings occur more in Muslim, Hindu or Sikh circles than in other circles. Is the horrific practice still going to be carried out though far from the cushioned environs of their apologists? One hopes not.

Funny pic.

Tuesday Post

It's been a while...


Confirming what we already knew:

North Korea is a failed state, unable and unwilling to feed its own citizens. It is a rogue state, perpetrating crimes against humanity upon its own citizens. It also practises what is essentially criminal sovereignty whereby it organizes such activities as drug trafficking, counterfeiting, money laundering and cigarette smuggling, while using the tools of the state to perpetrate these schemes abroad. And China, as its master, invariably utilizes the activities of this "mad dog," forcing South Korea, Japan and America to turn to China, begging that North Korea be put on a leash.

China is the problem, not the answer, as George Jonas pointed out. Therefore we need a paradigm change in dealing with this issue. Under the circumstances, the international community has a responsibility to intervene to protect the North Koreans suffering under the Dear Leader. The world must act to prevent any acts of violence, including the proliferation of nukes.

The world should demand that China take responsibility for North Korea, rather than beg it for a favour. China wouldn't listen to the begging; it would to the legitimate demand.

Perhaps the players on the world stage would do well to brush up on their history before June 25th. China backed and still backs North Korea.


Yet another Khadr we should keep out of Canada:

The partially paralyzed son of the late Canadian al-Qaeda associate Ahmed Said Khadr has been arrested in Toronto for alleged sexual exploitation of a minor.

Abdulkareem Ahmed Khadr, 21, was arrested 10 days ago by Toronto Police and is scheduled to appear before the Ontario Court of Justice on July 15.

"He has been charged with sexual assault and sexual exploitation," Constable Tony Vella, a police spokesman, said on Monday. The alleged victim was a minor but is now 18 years of age, Const. Vella said.

Even confined to a wheelchair, he manages to be both a menace and drain on civilised society.


This wouldn't be a problem if we admitted that: (1) honour killings are horrible and not at all acceptable, especially in the Western world; (2) honour killings are the results of morally and emotionally backward cultures; (3) official multiculturalism has no mechanisms for dealing with crimes as horrid as this:

Shortly after 8 a.m. on Sunday, after returning to her family home from a night out, Ms. Ebrahimi was attacked with a knife and suffered serious stab wounds to her head, face, shoulder and arm. On Monday, her mother, Johra Kaleki, appeared in Quebec Court on charges of attempted murder and assault in what the Crown is treating as an honour crime.

Who will miss this mongrel when he is gone?

Fidel Castro provoked a sharp rebuke from Israel yesterday as the former Cuban president said in a statement issued at the United Nations that Israelis hated Palestinians so much they would like to send them to the gas chambers -- just as the Nazis exterminated Jews in the Holocaust.

The remarks came as Israel's Cabinet approved an internal inquiry into its deadly raid last month on a Gaza bound aid flotilla after saying it feared a UN-proposed international probe would be biased.

Not me.


As of this posting, North Korea is losing fantastically to Brazil. It is Brazil and North Korea is a corrupt dictatorship which deprives its citizens of protein and other necessities of life.

Now, watch a cat fight with a box.

Yet Another Post

In case everyone forgot, Israel is not China which sends back North Koreans, nor is it Pakistan (emphasis mine):

Pro-Palestinian activists vowed yesterday to break the Gaza blockade and said another ship was already on its way.

"This disaster with the Israeli commandos has just made us more determined to reach Gaza," said Audrey Bomse, a spokeswoman for the Free Gaza Movement, one of the organizers of a fatal flotilla this week that ended with nine deaths when Israeli soldiers launched a pre-dawn raid on a ship.

She said the *MV Rachel Corrie should be near Gaza by the end of the week.

But Israel was adamant it would not let any ships through. "We will not let any ships reach Gaza and supply what has become a terrorist base threatening the heart of Israel," deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai told public radio.

Early on Monday, Israel stopped a flotilla of six ships bound for Gaza. But when Israeli commandos boarded the lead vessel, the Mavi Marmara, violence erupted, ending with the death of at least nine activists....

Israel insists the boarding would have been peaceful if the commandos had not been attacked by dozens of club-wielding activists on the Marmara, which carried most of the passengers.

As Israel and those behind the aid flotilla continued to trade blame, the UN Security Council condemned the storming of the fleet....

The United States raised objections during the Security Council talks to tougher language sought by Turkey, the Palestinians and Arab nations, including a call for an international investigation into the incident....

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for Israel to be punished for its "bloody massacre" and urged international sanctions against its "lawlessness."

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said Israel "did not have the right" to raid the fleet in international waters, Cuba denounced the "criminal attack" and Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez condemned the "brutal massacre."

Nicaragua suspended diplomatic ties with Israel in protest, President Daniel Ortega's office said.

Where were Castro, Chavez and Ortega when North Koreans were shot at by the Chinese?

Oh wait...


(*Note: the ship was named after some American idiot who was hardly Tiananmen tank-guy.)


Living in ethnic enclaves leaves immigrants who come to Canada as adults feeling a weaker sense of belonging to this country, new research suggests.


Well, duh!


What an indictment of Trudeauian multiculturalism. All cultures are equal in Canada, a land where official bilingualism is enforced and paid for by tax dollars. Canadians feel a sense of pride when hearing that they represent successful multiculturalism. They can finally let go of that white guilt publicly-funded activists drone on about. However, "feeling" multicultural isn't the same as "being" multicultural. If one thinks they are cosmopolitan and politically aware, especially if they aren't, they don't have to engage newcomers to Canada. And if all cultures are equal in stature and form, where is the onus on a newcomer to adopt a common language or take part in long standing national traditions? What we've practiced is illusory and isolationist. We feel great because we eat Thai food once a week and never encourage an allophone to speak English or take part in Canadian life, isolating both him and us at the same time. We can't learn about his culture if we never speak or look at him, can we?


Further:

Canadians are almost evenly split on whether residents of the country share a "common culture," says a new national survey exploring perceptions of social cohesion in Canada.

But respondents' doubts about our national sense of togetherness don't translate into a strong belief that Canada's distinctiveness is being destroyed by the U.S. cultural juggernaut.

Barely one-third of the 1,500 people polled for the Montrealbased Association for Canadian Studies expressed the view that Canada and the United States now share a common culture.

Instead, "globalization" was seen as a bigger impediment to creating a unified, pan-Canadian identity, with about 40% of respondents seeing the international phenomenon as a key obstacle to creating a common national culture.

The survey shows about 70% of French-Canadian respondents felt Canada does not have a single, shared culture.

More surprising, perhaps, is that about 50% of English Canadians and allophones felt the same way.

Maybe if we focussed on what made Canada unique rather than worry about what the Americans or multiculturalists think, we could sort it out. We've been a country since 1867. We have to get our act together some time.

And even further:

The Toronto Police Service is revamping its communications policy to ensure the use of "appropriate human rights themed language," and hopes to have guidelines for officers ready by the fall.

That's good because Chinese parents looking for their Chinese child don't need anyone *ragging on them for their Asian ancestry.

(*Note: it is custom in many Asian countries for women to keep their family or maiden name. This custom in multicultural Canada was something of a mystery, hence, some hurtful reports.)


This is why political correctness is a moral evil. It interferes with common sense. Of course it is counter-productive and wicked to use racial slurs but it is not wicked or counter-productive to identify a dangerous person or a missing child.

Just my thoughts.

A Post, For It Is Tuesday

What kind of peace activists hit a trained soldier with metal bars and then throw the aforementioned soldier overboard?






Nominal Catholics are the hypocrites Jesus warned us about, be they well-paid civil servants or American politicians whose wide gaze is reminiscent of a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming car:


(WARNING: Please turn from your keyboard to prevent vomitus from soiling and ultimately ruining it.)

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) says she believes she must pursue public policies "in keeping with the values" of Jesus Christ, "The Word made Flesh."


Pelosi, who is a Catholic and who favors legalized abortion, voted against the ban on partial-birth abortion that was enacted into law in 2003.


At a May 6 Catholic Community Conference on Capitol Hill, the speaker said: “They ask me all the time, ‘What is your favorite this? What is your favorite that? What is your favorite that?’ And one time, ‘What is your favorite word?’ And I said, ‘My favorite word? That is really easy. My favorite word is the Word, is the Word. And that is everything. It says it all for us. And you know the biblical reference, you know the Gospel reference of the Word.”

Who does Mrs. Pelosi think she is fooling? Seriously? How does her muculent pandering, blasphemy and outright refusal to adhere to the Church's God-guided principles better serve the Christian electorate? Is the reference to the Logos an effort to forget how slimy she is because it's not working on me.


For Ezra Levant (the awesome one):

So what do we have here?

The obvious: Anti-Christian bigotry remains an acceptable form of intolerance in Canadian politics, and this bigotry has infected the parties of the left.

The mainstream media, and indeed the rest of the political establishment, ignores or even approves of this (CBC's Evan Solomon being a noteworthy exception).

Like Marci McDonald's book about Christians, Mr. Duceppe's comments are error-ridden and hysterical. For example, Duceppe implied that the meeting was for Conservatives only. But one of the MPs who attended is Mario Silva -- a Liberal MP who just happens to be gay. Lemme guess: That just proves how diabolical Opus Dei's master plan must be!

It's one thing for Messrs. Martin and Duceppe and Ms. Mc-Donald to dislike Christians. But what's new -- and disturbing -- is that this once-passive intolerance is becoming active: There is a concerted effort to name Christians and drive them out of office, to delegitimize the very idea of Christians participating in public life.

It's an attack on Canada's pluralism and religious freedom. It's unfair and it's un-Canadian. We'd never accept it if it were targeting any other religious group. So why is it OK to pick on Christians?

Indeed. Let the pundits be bold and substitute the word "Christian" with "Muslim", "Mohammad" or "gay" and see what happens. This has nothing to do with legitimate criticism or even occasional and tiresome rudeness but hitting a soft target because one can.


Let me stress- there is NO Illuminati, shadow government or right-wing Christian conservative conspiracy. Sometimes a white whale is really just a white whale.


Jesus and Ezra Levant- a tag-team of awesomeness.


Thousands of francophones across Canada are believed to have taken part in a co-ordinated attempt to manipulate the 2006 Census in order to guarantee federal funding of programs for French speakers.



Okay. Now let's use public money to make the lying parties learn- oh- Korean. Why not? It's a lovely language with a simple alphabet. Then tack on Russian grammar which I can personally attest is like driving nails into one's head. Don't get me wrong. Russian, too, is a lovely language, but the grammar will kill you, as surely as the Kursk (blame Putin for that one if you want). My point is that if the rest of Canada has to pay for linguistic and cultural minorities, we should be able to waste their time and cause them great consternation. But really- learn Korean and Russian. It's time you did something for you.


South Korea goads North Korea in some fashion:

South Korea staged war games near the border with North Korea yesterday as tensions continued over the North's sinking of one of its warships, the Cheonan, with the loss of 46 lives. Thousands of South Korean troops took part in the military exercise to thwart a simulated attack by North Korea along a river just south of the border. The show of military strength included about 50 tanks and armoured vehicles, which crossed a floating bridge backed by dozens of attack helicopters and self-propelled guns. Numerous countries have condemned the North for the sinking in the Yellow Sea, one of the worst military attacks on the South since the 1950-53 Korean War.

If they really want to goad North Korea, nuclearise and threaten to fire-bomb Beijing.


If I may take but a fragment of this article:

At a press conference last Wednesday in Quebec City, Cardinal Marc Ouellet of Quebec City and Archbishop Terrence Prendergast of Ottawa spoke about the need for governments to lend a hand to pregnant women who want to have their babies. How completely radical.

There are private citizens who do help pregnant women in need, whether they are finding clothing or apartments. In short, these private citizens are doing what a nanny-state won't do.

Just my thoughts.