The Monopoly on Suffering

Part and parcel of the post-modern Western world is the victim status coveted but not really merited by many. Throw a rock (not literally) and one is likely to hit a person who themselves or their near and/or distant relations have suffered in some way, shape or form. North America is crammed to the rafters with such poor, huddled masses. Given the opportunity to live in freedom, the poor became well-off and the huddled stretched their arms as far as they could. But there will always be those who did not succeed in any measure not because of some real state-sponsored unfairness but because thriving did not suit them. It became easier for them to blame others for their short-comings. They even had help pointing the fingers. This extended blame game resulted in some kow-towing and some welfarism but never in the realisation of the human potential. Why try to live in dignity when one can simply blame others for their problems?



The Attawapiskat First Nation Reservation is the most recent example of decrepitude and victim status declaration in a history of decrepitude and victim status declaration.



The latest:

Opposition MPs urged the prime minister Wednesday to go see for himself the realities of life on a Northern Ontario reserve struggling with a housing shortage.

Stephen Harper said he's sending the auditors.

The federal government has taken control over public funding out of the hands of Attawapiskat and ordered an audit to find out where federal money spent in the Cree community has gone over the last five years and why it hasn't help ward off the housing crisis residents now face.

"The government has invested more than $90 million in this community and the results are not acceptable," Harper said.

"We are going to take further measures to ensure better outcomes."

The Opposition demanded a more humanitarian — and human — response, calling for both a short-term and long-term plan to address the reserve's needs.

"An entire Canadian community living in Third World country, that's what we see right now, in the Arctic cold," NDP Leader Nycole Turmel said.

"The prime minister should go and see by himself. You should sleep in a shack with a sleeping bag. You'll see the sleeping bags provided by the Red Cross is not the solution."

I don't know how sleeping in a shack will help but perhaps Miss Turmel might enlighten the rest of the white liberal world by doing so and reporting her experiences. It will be like an "Occupation" all over again. After all, it was privileged white people like herself who put aboriginals on northern ghettos (or "reservations") that ultimately served to isolate them and allow them to maintain aspects of cultures that are antediluvian and - in some respects- a form of apartheid. This separation of people is on its face racist and regressive as it robs Canadian aboriginal people the free access to education, jobs and social and cultural opportunities. Assimilation or acclimatisation is (or at least should be) expected of ALL citizens so that we may have consensus and harmony. Did we not expect the Chinese workers in the nineteenth century to learn English? We sure did and I'm sure their descendants benefited from that.  Racism of lowered expectations - the "noble savage" living in his tar paper shack as is his cultural wont- just boggles the mind.



Back to Attawapiskat....



If the Canadian government invested $90 million in a town of 1300, how did it all go to hell? Perhaps just handing out money to people who cannot (or will not) care for new homes is a bad investment. In a country where educational and professional opportunities are open to all (especially so with "affirmative action"- the racism of lowered expectations in the workplace), how do people fall through the cracks?



Jump to North Korea.



Korea was divided in half (North and South) in 1945. Prior to that, Korea was annexed by Japan under which the Korean people were brutalised. North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950 and ceased somewhat in 1953.  Flash-forward fifty-eight years and one sees that while North Korea is still languishing under a communist dictator, South Korea thrives as a First World nation.


As of 2009, 2,952 North Koreans sought refuge in South Korea where a sort of "right of return" is granted (as of this year, 175 North Koreans sought refuge in Canada). Integrating North Koreans into South Korea is a lengthy and difficult process, especially considering the political and academic realities of the refugees. Having lived under a communist dictatorship and having little or no English-speaking or computer skills, it is difficult for North Koreans to acquire gainful employment. Added to this, many North Koreans have mental or physical health issues. The South Korean government has set up transition programs like Hanawon to help them and offers them ₩20 million to resettle and ₩320,000 monthly ($17, 882.39 - $285 CDN respectively). Often, however, many North Koreans are not treated equitably by their southern cousins, another impediment to living successful lives.



Further:

For decades after the 1950-53 Korean War, the South saw just a trickle of arrivals from its impoverished hardline socialist neighbour. In recent years, there has been a steady stream.

Of the 23,700 to arrive since 1953, some 10,000 came in the past four years.

All new arrivals must spend three months in the Hanawon government resettlement centre, where they get job training and learn basic survival skills -- such as how to buy a subway ticket or use a credit card.
They also get financial and housing support upon leaving.

"They get education at Hanawon for three months, but many times that's not enough because the system is so different in the South," said Ma Soon-Hee, who herself fled the North.

"Adjusting to the capitalist system is the most difficult. Defectors often have a hard time understanding that they have to work hard to earn more, and that people get different levels of salaries."

Some people who left family in the North sometimes say they think of going back because they feel lonely and find it hard to make a living in the South, she told AFP.

"Life can be hard for people who were allotted food, work and money for their entire lives in the North... the freedom they get after coming here can be tarnished by harsh reality," Ma said....

A July report from the International Crisis Group think-tank starkly spelt out the problems, saying almost refugees fail to integrate or thrive.

New arrivals on average were significantly smaller, worse educated, less healthy and less likely to have useful skills, but must adapt to a country where credentials and networks are essential to find jobs.

Coming from a country where an all-powerful bureaucracy makes almost all life decisions, they "describe a bewildering rush of modernity, consumption and choice that rapidly overwhelms them", the report said.

Yet, if governmental or populist support was found lacking, North Koreans opened their own businesses .  The unemployment rate in South Korea is currently at 3.3 percent (the unemployment rate for North Koreans is at 9.2 %). Many are willing to take blue collar jobs as they are the easiest to secure.



By no means am I attempting to paint the North Korean defector situation as rosy. However, the desire to succeed is there. How is it that a defector who has known only a life of deprivation in a totalitarian state and struggles to survive in a capitalist one has more drive than a citizen who has known only the largesse of a state willingly duped into guilt?



Listen to the voices of optimism:

Twenty-three-year-old Hana Shin (not her real name) came directly to Yeomyung from China about a year ago, where she became a refugee after her entire family died of disease in North Korea while she was still a teenager. Eyes watering at the memory of her parents and sighing that she lives alone in a small apartment in Seoul, she is still optimistic. 

"In North Korea I was locked in, I was brainwashed," Shin said, echoing the sentiments of most of her peers." Now I can get the education I want." 

Prior to arriving in the South, the recently-orphaned Shin had tried to scratch out a living selling fruit, moving around from rented room to rented room and facing constant harassment from North Korean police who would confiscate her fruit as unlawful capitalist contraband. 

Deprived of a way to make a living, she eventually migrated to China with two friends, but ended up wandering around the border area in search of food, sometimes camping out, until being taken in by sympathetic ethnically Korean Chinese. 

In spite of her bleak past, the well-dressed and jeweled Shin possesses that sassy liveliness that is so South Korean, laughing while saying that she likes speaking Korean with the handful of foreign volunteers, describing their rudimentary language skills as 'kwi o wo yo," or "cute." 

While my interpreter was on a break, Shin and I stood near a world map tacked to a wall in the school's small lounge. Pointing to several countries in succession - France, Germany, Australia and others - I asked her in my passable but very basic Korean, "ka bonjok isoy yo?" meaning "have you been there?" She answered no, but plans to visit a good number of countries once she gets a job - something unthinkable just a few years ago, when she was focused only on survival.

....

Defying the trend and societal prejudices, a small but increasing number of defectors are not only aspiring to higher-paid employment but to one day own their own business. Merry Year Foundation (MYF), a non-profit body set up in late 2007 with a mission of providing micro credit loans and building social enterprises, is helping them realize that dream.

“I want to one day set up my own business to help other new defectors settle in the South,” said a 45-year-old male defector who asked to be identified by his surname Cho and works at Mezzanine Ecowon, a small manufacturing company established with the help of the foundation.

Some people are thrown a bone and can make a life for themselves. Others are thrown the meat and let it rot.



(Muchas gracias)

Tuesday Post

A lot to say today.


Yahoo News gets it wrong again. A protest is an act of organised disapproval, the subject of which is clearly defined. What is going on in Iran is mob rule:

Iranian protesters stormed two British diplomatic compounds in Tehran on Tuesday, smashing windows, torching a car and burning the British flag in protest against new sanctions imposed by London....

Several dozen protesters broke away from a crowd of a few hundred outside the main British embassy compound in downtown Tehran, scaled the gates, broke the locks and went inside.

Protesters pulled down the British flag, burned it, and put up the Iranian flag, Iranian news agencies and news pictures showed. Inside, the demonstrators smashed windows of office and residential quarters and set a car ablaze, news pictures showed.

Putting aside the great international and diplomatic import of this event, one must ask why a news agency soft-pedals the truth. One is not being objective in calling aggravated arson "a protest".



Mass-murderer Breivik is considered insane:

Confessed mass killer Anders Behring Breivik belongs in psychiatric care instead of prison, Norwegian prosecutors said Tuesday after a mental evaluation declared him legally insane during a bomb-and-shooting rampage that killed 77 people.

The court-ordered assessment found that the self-styled anti-Muslim militant was psychotic during the July 22 attacks, which would make him mentally unfit to be convicted and imprisoned for the country's worst peacetime massacre.

The report, written by two psychiatrists who spent 36 hours talking to Breivik, will be reviewed by an expert panel before the Oslo district court rules on his mental state.

Their conclusions surprised many outside experts and contrasted with earlier comments by the head of the review panel, who told The Associated Press in July that it was unlikely that Breivik would be declared insane because the attacks were so carefully planned and executed.

But prosecutors insisted the psychiatric report describes a man living in a "delusional universe" — a paranoid schizophrenic who's lost touch with reality.

Surprise, surprise.



Nigeria votes against gay "marriage". No word on whether or not Michael Erickson will shake down the Nigerian government for money or demand re-education.



Related: Michael Erickson helped pen the controversial TDSB sex education program.



Somewhat related: 


When a child begins acting out with age-inappropriate heterosexual behavior, the first suspicion is molestation.  When a youth begins calling him or herself "gay" and reveals early sexual experience, why are we not asking that same question?



Indeed. We are glossing over possible abuse because we are afraid of a pack of perverted cause-mongers. Western civilisation has certainly hit a low point.



Listen to the experiences of a teacher who worked on a reservation in northern Ontario and then read this utterly fantastic article on why throwing vast sums of cash at aboriginals is as effective as building a sand castle to thwart the deadly fury of a tsunami.



A taste:

How much “free money” are we talking about? John Duncan, the Conservative government’s Minister of Aboriginal Affairs, issued a defensive press release in the wake of the “scandal;” amidst the requisite jargon about “complex challenges” and “working closely with the community,” the Ministry couldn’t resist slipping in the following factoid: Since 2006, his department “alone has provided approximately $80 million to Attawapiskat First Nation, which does not including funding the community will receive this fiscal year.”

According to the 2001 Census, the population of Attawapiskat was just under 1300 people. That means one federal government ministry gifted the community with over $61,000 for every individual on the reserve.


That sure would buy a lot of toilets. So where are they?

Let's recap. Eighty million dollars has been given to the Attawapiskat First Nation Reservation since 2006 and yet there is no functional plumbing (but, seemingly, a surplus of working big-screen televisions).



What would happen if the government of Canada just stopped giving money to these reservations? Discuss.



Could you imagine?



An amazing article on how Obama's attempt to screw Canada only hurt the US.



Now the UN is mad that Syria tortured and murdered children.



(Imena, Imela and Dalu)



Have a very Star Wars Christmas.

Sunday Post

Could the system have saved the Shafia girls? Probably. But consider how cowardly the authorities are in abhorring murder:

The “system” did not kill the Shafia sisters. If prosecutors are correct, and their midnight drowning was in fact a mass execution, the girls perished because their parents and their brother are “honourable” people. They are dead because they were beautiful and bold and very much Canadian, a combination that so disgraced the good Muslim family that nothing short of their corpses could reverse the shame. The “system” did not dump them in the Rideau Canal.

But it didn’t exactly run to save them, either.

As a jury in Kingston, Ont., is now hearing, detectives, teachers and child welfare authorities knew full well that the Shafia home was a toxic pit of abuse, fear and borderline enslavement. One of the doomed sisters fled to a women’s shelter. Another told a police officer, point blank, that her dad threatened to kill them. Yet another tried to do it herself, popping a pile of pills in a failed suicide attempt. “I want to die,” Sahar Shafia, then 16, told her vice-principal. “I’ve had enough and I want to die.”


At last count, five different members of the “system” have provided evidence of what they saw in the weeks and months before the girls died—and what they did (or didn’t do) in response. Although some of those witnesses fought back tears during their testimony, not a single one expressed regret or remorse. None of them said that if they had a wish, it would be to go back in time and do something more.

And there you have it. Four people are dead and all one can say was that, at best, procedure was followed. It's bad enough that "honour killings" are considered politely "inappropriate" but that the mechanisms the Western world uses to help the defenseless were barely utilised says as much about us as it does the murderers. One hand washes the other. We dare not offend, we dare not challenge and we look the other way.


There is NO Arab Spring and this will not end well:

Morocco's moderate Islamist PJD party won the most seats in the country's parliamentary election, final results showed Sunday, in the latest sign of a resurgence of faith-based movements since the Arab Spring uprisings.


The victory for Morocco's Justice and Development Party came a month after Tunisia handed power to a previously-banned party of moderate Islamists. Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood is also expected to do well in an election starting Monday.

Watch this shakedown. That is exactly what this is. Watch and ask yourself why we let total morons and crybabies have such a hold over society.







Michael Erikson is the limit. He truly is. He is not challenging the ad by highlighting pertinent passages of the curriculum in refutation. He is demanding that the ad be removed, he is demanding money and forced re-education of people he considers to be in opposition of him. Make no mistake. THIS is a shakedown. Had this been about deliberate misrepresentation or the propriety and necessity of curricula or even human rights, no one would have made the demands he did. This shakedown couldn't be more transparent. It is this fascism AND idiocy that has to be challenged by every thinking, feeling human being. If this brain-trust gets away with this, it opens the door to every idiot criminal and politically correct thug out there to rob, silence and persecute every citizen for any reason at all.


Because he's Rex Murphy:

To be a serious Christian in modern Western culture is to be the favoured easy target of every progressive thinker and every half-witted comedian. It is to have your sensibilities and your deepest beliefs on perpetual call for taunts, mockery and desecration. At a time when all progressives preach full volume for inclusivity and sensitivity, for the utmost care in speech when speaking of others with differing views or hues, Christians, as Christians, are under a constant hail of abuse and disregard. There is nothing too low or too vulgar....

There was another example in the now nearly defunct occupy movement. In Vancouver they lit a "sacred fire" on the lawn of the art gallery - I think the "sacred flame" itself was kept in an oil drum (a curious temple, but leave that go). When the Vancouver fire brigade arrived to put it out, there being bylaws about fires in public places, there were ululations of the most ferocious kind accusing the firemen of committing a grave offence against native spirituality.

Meantime, overseas, their occupy brethren in London were found to be defecating (I could use the vulgar term here as it so matches the act, but let us retain some respect) within - not on the steps or in the precincts, but within - St. Paul's Cathedral. St. Paul's - in ancient times the cathedral where John Donne preached, where Lancelot Andrews, one of the fathers of the King James Bible, was dean, a cathedral arguably second in importance in Christianity only to the Vatican - treated as a sewer.

A report for the cathedral summed up the mischiefs and abuse: "Desecration: Graffiti have been scratched and painted on to the great west doors of the cathedral, the chapter house door and most notably a sacrilegious message painted on the restored pillars of the west portico. Human defecation has occurred in the west portico entrance and inside the cathedral on several occasions."

In short, they turned St. Paul's Cathedral into a public toilet and used its sacred walls as a crude bulletin board. However, there was no vast outcry at the appalling disrespect, the deep contumely such acts represent. Put out a "sacred fire," set in the first place mainly to provoke, and it's shock and petty scandal. Defecate in St. Paul's, and I'll bet this is the first time many reading this have heard of the outrage.

(hat tips)



And now, some cute animal friends.

Advent

There was the true light, even the light which lighteth every man, coming into the world.

(John 1:9)

What Do You Want for Christmas?

If there is anything I can't stand (well- there are a lot of things I can't stand) it is someone trying to ruin Christmas for others because he is an enormous douchebag. Sometimes, he will attempt some sort of hugely vocal and visible stunt to show everyone how superior he thinks he is.


Case in point:

Adbusters, the Vancouver-based magazine that inspired the worldwide Occupy movement, has a new target: Christmas.

Calling its campaign OccupyXmas, the anti-capitalist magazine is calling on consumers to buy nothing for Christmas this year.

“Occupy gave the world a new way of thinking about the fat cats and financial pirates on Wall Street,” Adbusters says on its website. “Now let’s give them a new way of thinking about the holidays.”

The launching pad for the new campaign is “Buy Nothing Day,” which falls on Nov. 25 in the United States — so-called Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year in the U.S. — and this Saturday, Nov. 26, in Canada and the rest of the world.

“We will have a big blast on those two days,” Kalle Lasn, Adbusters’ co-founder, said in an interview Tuesday. “But the big difference this year will be that the campaign will continue right through the whole Christmas season.”...

Christmas, Lasn said, has been hijacked by commercial forces. “It’s been an empty, soulless kind of ritual that very, very few people enjoy. This is a chance for us occupiers to take Christmas back and have a bit of fun and remind people that Christmas can be a helluva lot more than just shopping and Black Fridays and maxing out on your credit card.”

 

 

(more commentary here- with thumbs up to all)

If we were, as a society, to return to the proper roots of Christmas, it would involve a great deal of penance, personal reflection, selflessness and thanksgiving (along with appropriate feasting and giving), some things an "Occupy.." douchebag wouldn't understand. After all, if he is not spearheading a happening, it's not fun for him. In fact, a lot of things aren't fun for the would-be Marxist/leftist/p.c. thug:

[Christmas] has been an empty, soulless kind of ritual that very, very few people enjoy.
The miserable bastard can speak for himself. I'm planning a great holiday.
The phrase is quite telling in that it illustrates the fact that the left is merely a secularised form of Puritanism/Calvinism. Needless to say Calvinists have never been desperately keen on Christmas. Jacobins, Roundheads, Occupiers and the like all hark back to some pre-lapsarian utopia of which they are the Elect representatives. The rest of us all need a good cleansing or maybe just a slap.
H.L. Mencken nails them: Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
Lasn's view of Christmas (and capitalism) in a nutshell.

Too true.


But not to worry, Mr. Lasn. There is a way to make this work in your favour:

Good idea. In fact, here’s an idea for cutting back on shopping this Christmas. It’s something I’m launching now with absolutely no forethought. I’m calling it DeOccupyXmasList.  It’s really simple. Here’s the plan. 

If you have an occupier in your life, scratch them off your Christmas list. That’s it. Your holiday shopping has now been de-occupied. Wasn’t that easy?

Remember, they don’t want anything this year. No new video game consoles or games. No iPhones or iPads. No new cameras or laptops. No cashmere sweaters or hipster hats. No gift certificates to the local head shop and absolutely no cash. Save your filthy capitalist lucre and help your son, daughter, niece, nephew or smelly friend be true to their revolutionary ideals. It’s a win-win scenario.

Perfect. Why spoil the meaning of the "Occupy..." movement by getting gifts, O Principled Ones?


Don't reach out this Christmas. For the perpetually spoiled and smelly Marxist-in-name-only, it's the best gift you can't give.

Giving Thanks

Even God's creatures are grateful.

Thanksgiving

(for the Americans)

God gave a Loaf to every Bird --
But just a Crumb -- to Me --
I dare not eat it -- tho' I starve --
My poignant luxury --

To own it -- touch it --
Prove the feat -- that made the Pellet mine --
Too happy -- for my Sparrow's chance --
For Ampler Coveting --

It might be Famine -- all around --
I could not miss an Ear --
Such Plenty smiles upon my Board --
My Garner shows so fair --

I wonder how the Rich -- may feel --
An Indiaman -- An Earl --
I deem that I -- with but a Crumb --
Am Sovereign of them all -- 

 

("God gave a Loaf to every Bird" -  Emily Dickinson)

Mid-Week Post

So many things to talk about.


Medvedev promises to target the US' missile shield if the US stands up for itself does not explain its full intentions:

Russia threatened on Wednesday to deploy missiles to target the U.S. missile shield in Europe if Washington fails to assuage Moscow's concerns about its plans, a harsh warning that reflected deep cracks in U.S.-Russian ties despite President Barack Obama's efforts to "reset" relations with the Kremlin.

President Dmitry Medvedev said he still hopes for a deal with the U.S. on missile defence, but he strongly accused Washington and its NATO allies of ignoring Russia's worries. He said Russia will have to take military countermeasures if the U.S. continues to build the shield without legal guarantees that it will not be aimed against Russia.

The U.S. has repeatedly assured Russia that its proposed missile defence system wouldn't be directed against Russia's nuclear forces, and it did that again Wednesday.

"I do think it's worth reiterating that the European missile defence system that we've been working very hard on with our allies and with Russia over the last few years is not aimed at Russia," said Capt. John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman. "It is ... designed to help deter and defeat the ballistic missile threat to Europe and to our allies from Iran."

The last sentence reveals Russia's true designs regarding this threat. If Russia cannot control the globe, it will at least back a thorn in the US' side, particularly one in the Middle East.



Just as Obama is no friend to Canada, Russia is no friend to the US.



The Supreme Court in British Columbia upholds the ban against polygamy:

Polygamy remains a crime in Canada, B.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert Bauman ruled Wednesday. In his ruling, Bauman said the law violates the religious freedom of fundamentalist Mormons, but the harm against women and children outweighs that concern.

Polygamy is an outdated and cruel practice. It was designed to confine wealth and property to one individual. I don't know what bent the more freaky individuals who would like to see the ban lifted have on this and I hope their intentions are never entertained. Now, if we can just restrict marriage to one man and woman because we know that has worked for millennia.



Somewhat related: watch how a reasoned discussion (with evidence) about same-sex adoption devolves into a shouting match by people who think squishy feelings are better than logic.



Tangentially related: social services do not protect women from honor killings. 



No doubt tired of the stench, authorities move in on"Occupy Toronto": 

Police and city officials swept through the downtown Occupy Toronto encampment Wednesday, clearing out tents and other structures to enforce an eviction order protesters had defied for two straight nights.

As city workers hauled loads of trash, wooden pallets and assorted camping gear into waiting trucks, St. James Park slowly began to re-emerge from the cluttered tent city that has stood for five weeks. Police expect to clear the park by the end of the day.

A few hundred people remained in the park, as well as 15 tents; the vast majority of tents, structures and debris were now gone. But the biggest question mark remained over a group of protesters in a gazebo, who have rejected police demands to leave.

Protesters chanted, beat drums and hurled insults at police, but the threat of physical violence that hung heavy when officers first arrived on scene in the pre-dawn hours had not materialized by early afternoon.

One woman was apprehended for trespassing but quickly released; another five were taken into custody during the city’s attempt to take down a structure containing the camp’s “sacred fire,” but were also expected to be released shortly afterward.

Thank you, Santa Claus! (or bright green frog)



Related: Union leader Sid Ryan walks away from Jacqui Delaney. Snap... to Sid Ryan.



Suck it up, CBC.



The reason why the CBC (and other government bodies) get away with the crap that they do is because Canadians - the same ones who would scream at the Tim Horton's girl about their inadequate double-doubles- would never demand accountability from the aforementioned bodies. Some jackanapes is arrogant with YOUR money. Do something about it.



Yes, Michael Moore, apologise to the Chinese now.


(Thanks a bundle)


And now, a good dog.

An Open Letter from China to Michael Moore

Dear Fat American,


Forgive the lack of an honorary title in our address to you as "Michael Moore" is rather difficult to pronounce in Mandarin and - to be blunt- you are what we said you are.


Normally, Japan is the one writing these letters to us about something or another. We're never really sure because don't always read all of them. God, those guys never shut up about stuff!


Anyway, we were trying to find our way around the Great Firewall of China when we came across this:

“This wasn’t a demonstration of 30,000,” Moore said. “This wasn’t a large encampment of 200 tents in Portland. This was just 11 students in a not very well known UC campus. And the images of this have resonated around the world in the same way that the lone young man standing in front of the tanks at Tiananmen Square resonated.”

Whoa! Hyperbolic much?! Yeah, we'd say!


Dude, were you ever in Tienanmen Square? Scratch that. Do you even know where China is or have a non-unionised worker of Chinese extraction?


You'd have a lot in common with our late Mao. You both have big girths, big mouths and an incredibly big taste for being raging liars.

Where's our freedom, you fat pig?!

When these dirty, lazy Americans were sprayed, was it with gun fire? How many are dead now? Were they sent to labour camps? Were they not allowed to exercise their rights to free speech in the most annoying manner possible?


If none of these things happened, then this pepper spraying is as iconic as getting a raccoon out of your yard (you know- the really big one in Torch Lake).  WE suffer (ed), not your pampered little fans (the ones you have left) so don't draw parallels between what happened at Tienanmen Square and California to bolster that smelly hippy fest of an Occupy movement. It embarrasses us both.


Some people fade away with grace. Give it a try.


And don't hit the buffet table on your way out.


Yours,


China

An Open Letter from Japan to North Korea

Hi, guys!


We just wanted to talk you about your rather boorish behaviour at the World Cup qualifier the other day. You know, when you did this:

Japan's national anthem was roundly booed by a seemingly capacity crowd in Pyongyang Tuesday as the former colonial power took on North Korea in a dead rubber World Cup qualifier.

Live television footage from the hermit nation showed tens of thousands of North Korean fans at the Kim Il Sung stadium booing loudly as the Japanese national anthem was played ahead of the match.

Talk about rude! We don't recall doing that to you before the match. It's called class and you don't have to have it air-lifted in by South Korea.



And, really, a country that has been kidnapping our citizens for years should hardly take it upon themselves to be so dastardly and coarse.

Remember her?

Anyway, we'll be absorbing this rudeness over a full meal and we suggest- if it is ever possible- you do the same.

This tastes rich and freedom-y.

Yours' in Blue Samurai,


Japan

Mid-Week Post

For some reason, the "occupiers" have either returned or were never forced out. Why?

Occupy Wall Street protesters hope to rebound on Thursday with a march on the New York Stock Exchange to show their battle against economic inequality still has life after they were evicted from a nearby park.

Most rallies by the two-month-old movement have numbered in the hundreds of people in New York but protesters and city officials expect thousands of demonstrators to pour into the Wall Street area from 7 a.m. to try to stop workers from getting to their desks in the financial district.

It will be a test of whether Occupy Wall Street and the loose-knit global alliance it inspired will flag or grow after police cleared a camp of hundreds of protesters from Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan on Tuesday.

The first sentence of this article exhibits the same kind of childish bias that one often sees in the popular press. The article writer has not only taken a side (therefore chucking away objectivity) but has also painted the "Occupy..." events as ones having a legitimate and well-defined purpose.


Like "no snitching":

Crime in Occupy Wall Street's encampment Zucotti Park might be worse than the public realizes. According to The New York Post, crime at the park, which included a homeless man allegedly pulling a knife during an argument as well as claims of sexual assaults, is so out of control many protesters have resorted to a "stop snitching" rule. In fact, reports The Post, one NYPD officer said, that much of the crime goes unreported as a result. “What’s happening in there is staying in there," said the New York City cop. 

Similarly, Occupy Baltimore protesters reportedly passed out pamphlets telling demonstrators not to report sexual assaults to police. After receiving much criticism, Occupy Baltimore later revised their policy but, according to the Baltimore Sun, the policy still does not encourage involving law enforcement after a sexual assault happens within the Baltimore occupy encampment.  

Occupy Wall Street's security team has been at odds with organizers for quiet some time. The night before New York City occupiers marched on Times Square, OWS security volunteers complained to OWS organizers that only a handful of OWS security individuals were keeping watch of the entire park and working 30 hours straight with no relief.

The security team said that Occupy Wall Street had a 1 percent crime rate and too many OWS protesters were just "sitting there doing [their] thing" and "not doing [their part]" to help with security.

OWS security seems to be fighting an uphill battle, as the General Assembly within OWS apparently thinks a priority for the security group at OWS is to be renamed and not rough up disruptors within Zucotti Park. 

"Because this is such an inclusive society, that we’re creating here... that we’ve evolved into, or that we were from the beginning, it draws everyone. It draws everyone, except maybe the super-rich. So when it draws everyone, you’re dealing with everyone’s conditioning...everyone’s f****d up conditioning," OWS facilitator John Friesen told me last week.

"Everyone’s like, ‘I’m out for me and myself.’ You know that kind of instinct and people are unruly and people are violent and people make threats. So that debate has been going on between people on the security team, which people want to be renamed the ‘de-escalation team.’There is 'peace keepers'. There is 'mediators,'" Friesen said. 

Utter hogwash.


The more plausible reason for the eruption of crime of all sorts is that self-serving, self-important, over-privileged, largely white, affluent and completely insincere people think they can do whatever they like and have been allowed that indulgence by weak-willed politicians and drooling media. How long has this "occupation" gone on? How many rapes, thefts, threats, drug overdoses, insults and acts of violence have there been?


(gracias, El Barto and SDA)




If the anti-bullying groups have such a stranglehold foothold in schools, what are they going to do about this?

Asian Americans endure far more bullying at US schools than members of other ethnic groups, with teenagers of the community three times as likely to face taunts on the Internet, new data shows.

Policymakers see a range of reasons for the harassment, including language barriers faced by some Asian American students and a spike in racial abuse following the September 11, 2001 attacks against children perceived as Muslim.

"This data is absolutely unacceptable and it must change. Our children have to be able to go to school free of fear," US Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Friday during a forum at the Center for American Progress think-tank.

The research, to be released on Saturday, found that 54 percent of Asian American teenagers said they were bullied in the classroom, sharply above the 31.3 percent of whites who reported being picked on.

I realise anti-bullying has a gay monopoly but surely there is some sort of ribbon or something for this.


Vaguely related:

Japan's national anthem was roundly booed by a seemingly capacity crowd in Pyongyang Tuesday as the former colonial power took on North Korea in a dead rubber World Cup qualifier.

Live television footage from the hermit nation showed tens of thousands of North Korean fans at the Kim Il Sung stadium booing loudly as the Japanese national anthem was played ahead of the match.

Bad form, North Korea. Bad form.


The parents of a disabled girl find out she is being tormented by her teachers:

The parents of a 14-year-old special-needs student in Ohio say they hid a recording device on the girl to prove a teacher and school aide were bullying her.

Media outlets report the parents complained to school officials last year about the alleged bullying in the Miami Trace district, about 50 kilometres southwest of Columbus.

Then the parents secretly recorded audio of the instructors.

In the recording, the aide tells the girl she's dumb and says: "It's no wonder you don't have friends. No wonder nobody likes you because you lie, cheat."

The district superintendent tells the Washington Court House Record Herald that the aide resigned.

The Ohio Department of Education decided to suspend the teacher's licence for a year unless she completes special training.

"Special training" nothing. Her behaviour is nothing short of disgusting. I wouldn't be surprised if the union thwarted the much-needed firing with the promise of "special training". Anyone can fake sincerity and re-education, on principle, is just wrong. If one really wants this woman to learn her lesson, fire her.




And now, some cool stuff:  a robotic bear that slaps you when you snore, a man who knows how to bounce back, and a man who delivered candy.

The Party's Over

Oh Grover, the "Occupy" crowd isn't for you!

At least, it should be:

A Toronto judge has postponed the eviction of Occupy Toronto protesters while he rules on constitutional issues raised by applicants for an injunction against city bylaw officers.

Ontario Superior Court Justice David Brown said everything at the St. James Park protest site must remain the same until his decision is made, no later than 6 p.m. on Saturday.

“I think the most appropriate way to balance the interests of all concerned is to maintain the status quo for a very short period of time,” Judge Brown said in granting a temporary stay of the eviction notice. He will hear arguments on Friday. 


Noting the city’s concern that the camp could swell in the interim, Judge Brown also ordered that no new tents be erected, adding the stay was “not an invitation to crank up the intensity of the protest.”

The move ended a tense day at the park in which bylaw officers plastered the downtown tent city with eviction notices and expectations rose that the police would soon follow.

(Sidebar: you can't be evicted if you are squatting in a public area, scaring both the children and small business owners and raping people.)


No. These people have had their opportunity to rape, scream out obscenities and excrete in the park protest and now that time is over. They can leave before the first snows send them back to their affluent lifestyles. Their Marxist camping experiment is over.



Giuliani would have had these guys gone ages ago:

Police wearing helmets and carrying shields evicted protesters with the Occupy Wall Street movement early on Tuesday from the park in New York City’s financial district where they have camped since September, dismantling their tent city and arresting about 70 people.


Authorities declared that the continued occupation of Zuccotti Park — which had become a sea of tents, tarps and protest signs with hundreds of demonstrators sleeping there — posed a health and safety threat.

Police spokesman Paul Browne said that about 70 protesters were arrested in the park during the nighttime operation for defying orders to leave and several more were arrested nearby, although most left voluntarily.


About a dozen protesters had chained themselves together and another two had chained themselves to trees before being cut loose and removed, Browne added.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg defended the move to evict the protesters and tear down their tent city.

“Unfortunately, the park was becoming a place where people came not to protest, but rather to break laws, and in some cases, to harm others. There have been reports of businesses being threatened and complaints about noise and unsanitary conditions that have seriously impacted the quality of life for residents and businesses in this now-thriving neighbourhood,” Bloomberg said in a statement.

Bloomberg is the reason why New York can't have nice things.




Michael Moore tries to explain why he's not a douchebag:

Michael Moore has a lengthy justification for his wealth on the web site he uses to sell his books, films and himself.

It’s called “Life among the 1%“, a group of which Moore has been claiming he’s not a member. In it, he seems to confess that, yes, he is a rich guy after all. But not like other rich guys. He’s a rich guy who comes from a working class background, who scraped and scrambled for his money, and who cares.When he sold his first documentary, he recounts, he was paid $3 million and immediately shared the good news “with a group of factory workers, students and the unemployed in the middle of the downtown of my birthplace, Flint, Michigan.”...

Not everyone on the list of the wealthiest is a generous creator of jobs, but many are. And they don’t leverage their own prosperity the way Moore does, using his political leanings as a come-on to peddle more books and other products. Moore’s web site is a canny capitalist marketing tool, weaving in updates on the travails of the OWS crowd with promos for his latest appearances and warnings that time is running out to get a signed first printing.

Compared to many of the 1% he spends so much denouncing, Moore has little to brag about. Though he does own a big house on a lake in Michigan, which is a long way away from Flint.

Now that one thinks of it, aren't celebrities the "1%" the Occupests (TM) have been clamouring about? They produce nothing of any value, for which they are paid obscene amounts, and butt in when no one wants or needs the uninformed opinion. Where is the "Occupy Hollywood" movement? Where are the drum circles and the revolutionary lentil-eatings? Come on, "Occupy..." guys, get cracking on those one percent celebrities.




Thank you, thank you, thank you:

So the next time some horn-rimmed slack-shouldered left-wristed snark-monster dribbles that they represent the compassionate, caring, and pro-human side of the political spectrum, remind them of all the inhumanities perpetrated by the blind adherents to Mr. Marx’s Gospel of Universal Love.

Remind the world’s naïvely utopian “fellow travelers” of how Marx endorsed “revolutionary terror” and Engels gleefully foresaw “the disappearance from the face of the Earth…of entire reactionary peoples” and how Lenin called for “ruthless extermination” of “ideological enemies” and how Trotsky said “We have to run a hot iron down the spine of the Ukrainian kulaks” and how Mao said “Deaths have benefits” because “They fertilize the ground.”

Remind them of the Soviet Union’s unsung horrors—the emaciated children of the Holodomor and the mass murder in Katyn Forest, and the million or so executions during the Great Terror and gulag workers forced to eat their own feces and their skulls squeezed with iron rings and NKVD officers good-naturedly referring to their practice of shooting prisoners in the back of the head and watching their blood swirl down the drain as “wet work.” Remind them of the hundreds of thousands of clergy beaten and tortured to death, crucified on gates and left in the cold to freeze into ice columns. Refresh their recollection about the stranglings and the machine-gunnings and the interrogations and the mental torture and the electric shocks and the tens of millions ground into oblivion in the state psychiatric hospitals and Siberian slave camps. Remind them of the engineered mass famines where peasants reverted to cannibalizing their own infants.

Remind them of the 20-40 million Chinese peasants who starved to death when Mao stubbed his toe during his Great Leap Forward, of the Cultural Revolution where “enemies” were paraded, taunted, and thrashed to death in public. Of Red Guardsmen randomly selecting “black elements” to pounce upon and club to a paste. Of “enemies of the people” being mobbed, set ablaze, and bludgeoned with cold steel shovels. Of “class enemies” having their organs cut from their bodies while they were still alive, then eaten in psychotic “human flesh banquets” of class-war triumphalism. Of the estimated 20 million who perished in the forced-labor camps of Chairman Mao’s workers’ paradise. Of re-education, forced confessions, and threats—all in the name of vague humanitarianism and eternally unverifiable delusions of socially enforceable equality. 

NEVER let them forget.

People just don't understand (or want to understand) what a total bloodbath communism is/was. Any Che Guevara t-shirt-wearing moron wouldn't last five minutes in North Korea. If these useful idiots couldn't stand not getting cell phone service in Pyongyang, something tells me they would think the killing fields of Cambodia would super-suck.



Michael Coren interviews Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a Hamas leader and former undercover spy for the Israeli internal security service. It's an amazing interview. Do watch it.


(hat tip)




This is kind of neat.

Monday Post

Some quick thoughts.


Obama was never a friend to Canada. Do you believe it now?

Nebraska and TransCanada Corp reached a deal Monday on finding a new route for the stalled Keystone XL pipeline that would steer clear of environmentally sensitive lands in the state.

Under pressure from green groups, the U.S. State Department ordered the company last week to find a new route for the line in a decision that set back the $7-billion pipeline project by more than a year — until after the U.S. presidential election.

The pipeline would deliver 700,000 barrels a day of crude from Alberta’s oilsands to refineries on the Texas coast. But environmentalists strongly oppose the project, because of the route, concerns about spills and carbon emissions from production of oilsands crude.

In the deal with Nebraska, the state would pay for the new studies to find a route that would avoid the Sand Hills region and the Ogallala aquifer, which provides water for millions in the area....

The news came as Premier Alison Redford of Alberta was in the U.S. Monday, saying that a “more sophisticated” approach is needed on selling the pipeline in the U.S., one in which the province will stress its work on environmental stewardship and renewable energy.

Still stinging from the Obama administration’s decision last week to delay the project until 2013, Redford said it’s clear Albertans are being hurt by the province’s image in the U.S. as the Texas of the north.

“My point is that it’s not only about trade. Even if your objective is to ensure there is greater economic development or greater opportunities . . . you don’t get there by coming and banging your first on the table and saying, ‘Boy this makes good business sense,’” Redford said during the first day of a two-day U.S. mission. “It has got to be a more sophisticated conversation.”

The Alberta premier said she wants to “tell the story about what Alberta is actually doing” on energy policy — including investing in renewable energy and carbon sequestration projects.

“It’s not to meet a particular agenda on oilsands in order to ensure everyone decides that oilsands . . . matters more than anything else to Alberta.”

Redford was to meet Monday night with Republican House Speaker John Boehner — who has been a strong supporter of the Keystone XL project — and has meetings planned Tuesday morning with several other members of Congress. She will travel later Tuesday to New York.

“I am not here as the premier of Alberta to lobby particularly for this (Keystone XL) project,” she said. “So I have not sought out meetings with political leadership who are opposed to this project for the purpose of trying to convince them they should be supportive of this project.” There is a tendency in the U.S. — and in parts of Canada — to think of Alberta exclusively as a producer and marketer of oilsands, Redford said.

“It is not who we are, and we will be telling a much different story.”

This pipeline means jobs and security, particularly for Alberta which is why Alison Redford should be a honey badger about this or leave office. The talk of giving China oil is just wrong-headed as that octopus doesn't deserve our oil so that it may continue being the aforementioned octopus.


It's like he wants to be convicted:

Shafia, his second wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya and their oldest son Hamed may not have been the sharpest knives in the drawer — even after their arrests on July 22, 2009, as they sat in a police car waiting to be driven from Montreal to Kingston, they couldn’t keep their lips zipped — but they surely rank among the cruelest.


Once, for instance, Yahya appeared to be minimally ruing the deaths of her two youngest daughters, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13.

“I know Zainab was already done,” she said flatly of the 19-year-old who had run away two months before her death, “but I wish two others weren’t.”

That mild hint of regret or self-doubt launched Shafia into one of his most vicious screeds.

“No, Tooba, they were treacherous,” he snapped.

“They were treacherous. They betrayed both themselves and us. Like this woman standing on the side of the road and if you stop the car, she would go with you anywhere.”...

Collectively, the conversations show a shattering lack of any emotion other than rage at the girls for dishonouring the family name. Any suggestion of kindness or empathy is reserved for the surviving children — there are but a few of these — or for themselves, as when Shafia carried on about how much the parents had done for their children.

Because very few here have the intestinal fortitude to tell those from emotionally retarded cultures that killing one's daughters is wrong, let's take a moment to do so now. Not all cultures are equal. This might sound painful to hear but it's true. Any culture that sees women as chattel who can be killed for some ridiculous reason as "honour" is an emotionally backward one and we should be able to say it and qualify it by punishing those who would murder their female relatives.



Throwing money around and white guilt are not effective methods of keeping aboriginal students in school or producing results:

As the federal government’s Aboriginal Affairs department shifted its efforts to boosting First Nations’ businesses, child rights advocates criticized Ottawa’s funding for schools on reserves, alleging officials are shortchanging First Nations youth.

While Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Duncan announced new federal funding to aboriginal businesses in Ottawa Monday, critics released a new report calling on the United Nations to review Canada’s treatment of aboriginal children who are forced to attend schools in “deplorable conditions.”


Each child on a First Nation receives between $2,000 and $3,000 less a year than children at other Canadian schools, say the authors of a shadow report to Canada’s recent submission to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child.

They say the disparity has led to a lack of resources for aboriginal students, affecting everything from libraries and computers to issues such as overcrowding and declining graduation rates.

I once lived in a northern town with an aboriginal majority. No one went to the school library unless they were forced to and never used the books for anything other than scribbling on or ripping out the pages. School equipment was routinely destroyed or stolen. Parents often didn't care. The parents who did care made damn sure their children never mouthed off to the teachers but these were few and far in between.


Change the culture, change the outcome.



A frightening report:

First is the burgeoning illegal trafficking in human organs where people are prepared to pay handsome black market prices for a no-questions-asked kidney, liver, or heart. Unscrupulous middlemen prey not only on the potential recipient, but also on the poor and vulnerable who are often cheated out of organs for a pittance. Nowhere is this practice more odious than in China, where organs are harvested from the corpses of freshly killed prisoners and sold to recipients anxious to survive at any cost. Legal regulation may lessen the demand for available organs but is also likely to drive unethical procurers deeper underground....

Another more chilling alternative has been offered recently by several Belgian doctors attempting to increase the number of organs available for transplantation: Harvesting the organs of euthanized patients. Euthanasia is legal in Belgium and most often occurs in the patient's home. However, the Belgian doctors saw an opportunity to determine the exact moment of death, thereby providing optimum conditions for removing the euthanized patient's organs. They describe in detail their procedure from admission of the patient about to be euthanized, how the living patient was medically prepared for organ harvesting after death, how the patient was killed and how the organs were removed by a waiting surgical team in an operating theater adjoining the death room. It's a clinically grizzly read, made all the more chilling by the assurance that the euthanized patients had agreed to have their organs harvested after being killed. Whether this can be classified as an act of altruism on the part of the patient is debatable.

My God, the humanity! The snowmen humanity!

Even More

Also, let us remember the veterans whose kindness to the furriest among us is also noteworthy.


The "Occupy..." London crowd has hit a new low:

ANTI-CAPITALIST protesters outside St Paul’s Cathedral demanded a free box of poppies from the Royal British Legion to distribute around their camp.

Their request, turned down by veterans who were turfed off their usual spot outside the cathedral, came on the same day two soldiers collecting for the appeal were allegedly jeered by protesters and called “baby killers”.

Former soldier Stephen Newson, who is manning the poppy stand near the camp, said: “It was shameful [to be called baby killers] but the squaddies showed restraint and ignored them.”

Royal British Legion veterans were already furious with the Occupy London protest because they said it had robbed the poppy appeal of thousands of pounds.

The legion can make up to £100,000 a year by the St Paul’s front steps, which attracts crowds of tourists. 

Since they were forced by the St Paul’s campsite to move to the side of the building, takings have plummeted. To rub salt in the wound, the camp is said to be getting up to £1,000 a day in donations from passers-by. 

Mr Newson, 51, who was hurt in the IRA Regent’s Park blast in 1982, said “This is hitting us hard.

“The stand at the front of St Paul’s has been a focal point for collections for years.” 

He claimed one of the protesters’ legal representatives asked him for a free box of poppies to distribute in the camp. “It was outrageous,” he said. 

“They have kicked us out of our usual spot but want free poppies to make it look as though they are supporting the appeal.” 

Yesterday a camp spokesman denied asking for free poppies and said the “baby killers” comments were unlikely to be made by official Occupy London protesters.

Calling this disgusting slur an audacity doesn't even cover it. These "baby killers" are the reason why these "Occupy..." dirtbags aren't speaking German right now.


Or maybe they want to speak German.....?


Nope. We won the war and we're glad we did.


Remember this guy?  It seems to have some civility and humility into these kids:

An Ontario man who received a letter from kids after not handing out Halloween candy got the belated treat he was looking for - an apology from the person who wrote it....

Good.


Moving on....



He's not helping his defense:

A man accused of killing his three daughters and one of his two wives told a police interrogator that he dearly loved his dead children, but they were liars, court heard Wednesday.

Mohammad Shafia, 58, is on trial — along with his wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41, and son Hamed, 20 — charged with four counts each of first-degree murder. They have each pleaded not guilty to killing three teenage Shafia sisters and Shafia's other wife in a polygamous marriage.

The jury in Kingston, Ont., watched video Wednesday of the police interrogation of Shafia — conducted in Farsi and translated into English — the day after he, his wife and his son were arrested in July 2009.

He tells the interrogator his life has been ruined by the deaths of his children and Rona Amir Mohammad, whom he calls his cousin, and that his kids were "pure and sinless."

"Swear to God I loved them with my heart," Shafia says. "I wish God would have taken my life and spared their lives."

But, he says, they were liars.

"They told a lot of lies...They had said something like that, 'My dad is beating me,'" Shafia says. "If, for example they were going somewhere, they didn't say the truth. They are lying."

The only child who doesn't lie is Hamed, Shafia says.

Hamed and his parents are accused of killing his three sisters Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, along with Shafia's other wife, Rona Amir Mohammad, 50, who were found dead inside a submerged car on June 30, 2009, in the Rideau Canal. The family was heading home to Montreal from a trip to Niagara Falls, Ont., when they stopped in Kingston for the night and staged the deaths to look like an accident, court has heard.

 Of course his co-accused isn't a liar. The hand that washes the other, ect.


This guy isn't just backwards and proud; he's stupid.



Unbelievable:

The Toronto District School Board is threatening action against the Ontario PC Party after the party targeted the board’s mandatory “anti-homophobia” program in a flyer during last month’s provincial election campaign.


In an October 24th letter to PC leader Tim Hudak, TDSB board chair Chris Bolton claims the flyer included “inaccurate and misleading comments” about the curriculum and wrongly alleged that the board was keeping it “secret from parents.”

The curriculum, which begins discussing homosexual families in kindergarten with books like “Gloria Goes to Gay Pride,” and aims to transform students into social activists by the end of high school, explicitly forbids parents from opting their kids out of the controversial classes and advises schools not to alert parents in advance.

People who plan on mind-raping children are in no position to throw the law book at others. Silence (for these yahoos) is the best defense against parents taking action en masse against the perverts who drum garbage into impressionable children's minds which is why this action is going ahead.



Just as unbelievable: 

A Kansas judge has thrown out 49 of the most serious felony and misdemeanor charges in the country’s first criminal case against Planned Parenthood, after it was revealed that key evidence in the case had been destroyed. However, 58 criminal charges related to unlawful late-term abortions will still move forward.


The dropped charges related to allegations that Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri had failed to keep proper patient records, and then forged records when they were requested during the investigation into the abortion provider....

Planned Parenthood responded to the news by calling it “a significant victory” in a press release.

No, it's not a victory; it's a convenient escape from justice.


Some good news:

Two weeks ahead of Thanksgiving the Christmas wars for 2011 are already in full swing after Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker restored the name of the state’s ‘Christmas’ tree after it spent 25 years as a ‘holiday’ tree.

The governor made the change without fanfare by simply referring to the evergreen as a Christmas tree in a Tuesday press release announcing that local youth would help decorate the tree in the state’s capitol rotunda.

But his spokesman reportedly confirmed that the change was deliberate.  “It’s a Christmas tree.  In all honesty, I don’t know what more to say about it,” spokesman Cullen Werwie told the Associated Press.

The 30-foot-tall Christmas tree had gone by that name from the time it was first erected in 1916 until 1985, when the government yielded to secular claims that the name effectively endorsed religion.

The Madison-based Freedom From Religion Foundation has slammed the governor’s decision, calling it an offensive “snub” to non-Christians.

I think this is a victory for common sense. For what other holidays do we have decorated trees? Who, aside from white liberal atheists or squeamish political correctness activists, has a problem with Christmas and its customs? At what point do we set aside a custom or event to appease a minority? The whole thing was such a farce that a child could see through it.




Trust me- there are days I wish I could refer to this.

Remember

Even our most sincere gestures and words can only amount to a small fraction of the thanks deserved.

Mid-Week Post

The chasm of the work week but not a bad one.


A memory project puts Korean War veterans' experiences online:

After 60 years, stories of heroism and horror from the Korean War are being retold for posterity. The Forgotten War is being remembered.

A new project is recording the recollections of Canadian Korean War veterans for posting to an online audio-visual archive.

It's the brain child of the Historica-Dominion Institute, which earlier completed a similar memory project for Second World War vets.

The institute's Jeremy Diamond says the Korean conflict of 1950-53 was long overshadowed in the public mind by its far-larger predecessor.

"This is really the Forgotten War," he said in an interview. "This is a war that people don't talk about nearly as much as they do the Second World War.

"It's really skipped over in a lot of classroom lesson plans and curriculum."

Canada sent about 26,000 people to the Korean War, far fewer than the 1.1 million Canadians who served in 1939-45.

I had the great pleasure of meeting both a Canadian and a South Korean war veteran and let me tell you their experiences are incredibly fascinating. Sadly, the Korean War is not over and is still in living memory. Nothing must be forgotten.



Someone whose vocabulary doesn't extend beyond "buttercup" can't tell the difference between the nineteenth and the twenty-first century. Discuss.



Look- a withering counter-argument to the backlash against Islamism:

You never heard of the Crusades???

Resolved: a person who uses the Crusades in the preceding manner is as equipped to refute, excuse or apologise for the many, many, many crimes of Islamism as someone who uses John Lennon's "Imagine" in some futile attempt at wit, which is to say, not mentally equipped in the slightest. Discuss.


Finally:

Time appears to running out on Canada’s Occupy movement, with cities across the country moving to crack down on the tented sites as the demonstrations approach the one-month mark.

While demonstrators in London, Ont., were the first to be forced out of the site in that city on Wednesday, a B.C. Supreme Court judge adjourned an injunction application to clear out the Vancouver site, but placed restrictions on protesters until the matter is heard next week.

Now get rid of the rest of them.


If this story does not make you misty-eyed, you are a bad person.