Monday Post

Beginning the work week…

Happy birthday, Ezra! Nine days after his Wonder Twin, Sarah Palin. 

Canada doesn't really threaten people but  it should point out in the strongest possible terms that the European Union has some blood on its hands and its facts wrong:

Canada has threatened the European Union with action at the World Trade Organization if the bloc's plan to classify oilsands crude as more harmful to the environment than other fuels goes ahead.

David Plunkett, the ambassador to the EU, wrote in a December letter to the bloc's commissioner for climate action that "Canada would not accept oilsands crude being singled out."

"Canada will explore every avenue at its disposal to defend its interest, including at the World Trade Organization," Plunkett wrote in the letter to Connie Hedegaard, dated Dec. 8, 2011.

The letter was obtained by the Friends of Europe, a non-profit think-tank based in Brussels, through freedom of information laws and given to CBC News.

Plunkett's comments are the latest in the battle over the EU's fuel quality directive, a proposal that ranks fuels based on their carbon footprint. It calculates a fuel's entire life cycle of emissions, then assigns it a number.

Under the directive, Canadian oil derived from oilsands would get a higher number than conventional oil because it uses more energy to extract and refine. The directive is part of Europe's attempts to reduce C02 emissions by encouraging the use of cleaner fuel.

Just so we're clear:

In a commentary published Sunday in the prestigious journal Nature, Weaver and colleague Neil Swart analyze how burning all global stocks of coal, oil and natural gas would affect temperatures. Their analysis breaks out unconventional gas, such as undersea methane hydrates and shale gas produced by fracking, as well as unconventional oil sources including the oilsands.

They found that if all the hydrocarbons in the oilsands were mined and consumed, the carbon dioxide released would raise global temperatures by about .36 degrees C. That's about half the total amount of warming over the last century.

When only commercially viable oilsands deposits are considered, the temperature increase is only .03 degrees C.

In contrast, the paper concludes that burning all the globe's vast coal deposits would create a 15-degree increase in temperature. Burning all the abundant natural gas would warm the planet by more than three degrees.

Governments around the world have agreed to try to keep warming to two degrees.

"The conventional and unconventional oil is not the problem with global warming," Weaver said. "The problem is coal and unconventional natural gas."

More sabre-rattling on the Korean Peninsula:

South Korea on Monday conducted live-fire military drills from five islands near its disputed sea boundary with North Korea, despite Pyongyang's threat to attack.

South Korea reported no immediate action by North Korea following the drills, which ended after about two hours. The drills took place in an area of the Yellow Sea that was the target of a North Korean artillery attack in 2010 that killed four South Koreans and raised fears of a wider conflict.

The heightened tension comes two months after the death of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. His young son Kim Jong Un has taken the helm of the nation of 24 million.

South Korean military officials said they were ready to repel any attack. Residents on the front-line islands were asked to go to underground shelters before the drills started, according to South Korea's Defence Ministry and Joint Chiefs of Staff.

North Korea's military maintained increased vigilance during the South Korean drills, though it hasn't done anything suspicious, a South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff officer said on condition of anonymity, citing department rules. He refused to provide further details because he said they involve confidential military intelligence on North Korea….

Ties between the Koreas plummeted following the 2010 shelling of front-line Yeonpyeong Island and a deadly warship sinking blamed on Pyongyang. North Korea has flatly denied its involvement in the sinking, which killed 46 South Korean sailors.

South Korean troops on the five islands fired artillery into waters southward, away from nearby North Korea, a Defence Ministry official said on condition of anonymity, citing department rules.

Residents on the islands, many of them elderly, filed into underground bomb shelters and huddled around portable heaters during the drills.

More than 1,000 people evacuated to shelters, but few came to the mainland, despite the North Korean threat, according to Onjin County, which governs the islands. Ferry services linking the islands and Incheon port on the mainland operated normally, county officials said. Officials say requests to evacuate are made each time South Korea conducts drills.

I think South Korea should test Kim Jong-Eun’s mettle to see what he is capable of. It’s quite a gamble but it is better to find out now than to find out and then do nothing about it  later (RE: Yeonpyeong Island).

Further:

North Korea's state media said on Monday its ruling Workers' Party will hold a key conference in April, the first since 2010, in which it is likely to make official the succession of power to its third generation of leadership.

The conference, to be held in mid-April, will come around the time of the centenary of the state founder Kim Il-sung's birth, which the North has planned to mark the launch of a new era as a "strong and prosperous nation."

Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha will become Saint Kateri Tekakwitha in October:

A Mohawk woman buried in Quebec will become the first Native American saint at a ceremony in October.

Kateri Tekakwitha, who spent most of her life in what is now Upstate New York, will become the first aboriginal saint when she and six others are canonized at the Vatican.

Pope Benedict made the announcement Saturday after he appointed 22 new cardinals.

Benedict had already approved miracles attributed to Tekakwitha, the final step toward sainthood. 

Known as the "Lily of the Mohawks," she was born in New York in 1656.

Tekakwitha is entombed in a marble shrine at the St. Francis Xavier Church in Kahnawake, Que….

Tekakwitha died in 1680 at age 24, and the process for her canonization began more than a century ago, in 1884.

She was declared venerable in 1943. Pope John Paul beatified her in 1980, making her the first Native American to be beatified.

Tekakwitha had a difficult life. Her mother, father and brother died of small pox when she was four years old and she was scarred by the disease.

She was taken in by her uncle and aunt and got her first knowledge of Christianity from missionaries. She embraced it with zeal after being baptized when she was 18.

Tekakwitha practiced her faith despite severe opposition and eventually fled to the area now known as Kahnawake, south of Montreal along the St. Lawrence River.

It has been claimed that her scars disappeared upon her death, revealing great beauty, and that many sick people who attended her funeral were healed. It was also said that Tekakwitha appeared to two people in the weeks after she died.

The canonization ceremony will be held Oct. 21.

Maybe he's jazzed that a Canadian will be canonised or maybe he's still stinging from accusations of his sacrilege but whatever the case may be, Prime Minister Stephen Harper expressed his happiness at the canonisation of Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is welcoming a Vatican decision to name a 17th century Mohawk woman as North America's first aboriginal saint in the Roman Catholic Church.

Pope Benedict has announced that Kateri Tekakwitha will be canonized on Oct. 21.

Tekakwitha is entombed in a marble shrine at St. Francis Xavier Mission in Kahnawake, Que.

She was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1980 in recognition of her unwavering devotion to God.

Benedict had already approved miracles attributed to Tekakwitha, the final step toward sainthood.

Known as the Lily of the Mohawks, Tekakwitha was born in 1656 in a village near Fonda, New York. She spent most of her life in upper New York state, but eventually fled to Kahnawake near Montreal to escape opposition to her Christianity.

Harper said her elevation to sainthood is good news.

"This will be a great day for Canadian Catholics and a deep honour for our country," he said in a statement.
Tekakwitha died in 1680 at age 24, and the process for her canonization began more than a century ago.

It’s not a question of home-schooling or not. It’s a matter of who:

Could such a go-it-alone ideology ever be truly progressive—by which I mean, does homeschooling serve the interests not just of those who are doing it, but of society as a whole? ….

This overheated hostility toward public schools runs throughout the new literature on liberal homeschooling, and reveals what is so fundamentally illiberal about the trend: It is rooted in distrust of the public sphere, in class privilege, and in the dated presumption that children hail from two-parent families, in which at least one parent can afford (and wants) to take significant time away from paid work in order to manage a process—education—that most parents entrust to the community at-large….

Lefty homeschoolers might be preaching sound social values to their children, but they aren’t practicing them. If progressives want to improve schools, we shouldn’t empty them out. We ought to flood them with our kids, and then debate vociferously what they ought to be doing.

If I didn’t know better, I’d say someone was trying to steer schools into one direction.

Whatever the course of a student’s academic life, it’s a matter for the parents to decide before the student is old enough to decide for him or herself. What primary, elementary and secondary schools are attended- or not- can wag pundits’ tongues but it’s all moot in the end because the aforementioned pundits are not the decision-makers, perhaps much to their chagrin.

The surge of home-schooled kids is not necessarily an endorsement of what the article-writer calls “illiberal” and “distrust” (for hackneyed reasons) but rather an indictment of public/parochial schools. Asian students out-perform Western students. Why send one’s children to schools where home-work is deemed unnecessary, agenda-driven “anti-bullying” and sex education programs take precedence over academic excellence or heavily unionised teachers rail against standardised tests or where test scores are fudged? When students who perform badly are allowed to remain, where does it leave the students who perform well? For all the attempts to remove deism from public schools, unchurched students must endure boring and non-nuanced lectures on spiritual relativism.  Home-schooling for black American families allows for a more “Afro-centric” or religious focus on their education and do so at a great social or financial cost. The impetus to actually teach students and mould them into productive members of society is so far removed from the academic mandate that’s no wonder there is “distrust”. If that bothers the more left-leaning, so be it. 

I think this example speaks volumes.


And now, a fantastic story of survival- a Swedish man was buried under snow for two months and survived.