(it tolls for thee)
The Ontario PCs say
that they've uncovered internal emails, amid 20,000 documents released last
Friday, that show that premier Dalton McGuinty's key advisers used that code
name as a means to hide the true cost of nixing plans to build a generating
station in Oakville.
According to the Toronto Star,
there was even one email from the Ministry of Energy asking government
officials to stop emailing about the Mississauga plant closure last Fall.
"There is to be
no email traffic on this issue," said the email.
"This is a
campaign announcement not a government announcement."
The cancellation of
the two plants is expected to cost taxpayers upwards of $230 million and has
been the subject of a contempt motion in the legislature with the opposition
parties contending that the closures were politically motivated.
If I thought I would be run out of office, I would resign and prorogue the provincial legislature, too.
The U.S. diplomatic
mission in Benghazi, Libya, actually served as a meeting place to coordinate
aid for the rebel-led insurgencies in the Middle East, according to Middle
Eastern security officials.
Among the tasks
performed inside the building was collaborating with Arab countries on the
recruitment of fighters – including jihadists – to target Bashar al-Assad’s
regime in Syria.
One must re-visit the vice-presidential debate in which Biden stated that aid was going to "moderate elements" to fight al-Qaeda in Syria.
That is not the case:
“Most of the arms shipped at the behest of Saudi Arabia and Qatar to
supply Syrian rebel groups fighting the government of Bashar al-Assad
are going to hard-line Islamic jihadists, and not the more secular
opposition groups that the West wants to bolster, according to American
officials and Middle Eastern diplomats,” the Times reports.
(with an enormous thumbs-up to
1389)
Related: if there were any doubts concerning accused murderer Nidal Hasan's intentions when he killed
fourteen people at an army base in Fort Hood, Texas,
this will put them to rest.
The complete list of
faltering or bankrupt green-energy companies:
- Evergreen Solar ($24 million)*
- SpectraWatt ($500,000)*
- Solyndra ($535 million)*
- Beacon Power ($69 million)*
- AES’s subsidiary Eastern Energy ($17.1
million)
- Nevada Geothermal ($98.5 million)
- SunPower ($1.5 billion)
- First Solar ($1.46 billion)
That’s just in the billions.
If a private company won't touch this "energy" source (or won't touch it without subsidies), you can pretty sure it's rubbish.
Obama’s stunning lack of leadership fuels this catastrophe. Budgets
are key to controlling spending.
Nonetheless, while the Republican House
of Representatives has passed two budgets, Obama has permitted the
Democratic Senate to violate the 1974 Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act
by refusing to endorse any budget whatsoever. Like an equatorial
backwater patrolled by feral chickens, the United States of America has
not adopted a budget since April 29, 2009.
Even worse, Obama has not exercised enough muscle to earn even one congressional vote for his latest budget. It failed unanimously, with every
voting House and Senate member, Republican and Democrat alike, giving
his blueprint a thumb down. The House killed Obama’s proposal 0–414. The
Senate followed suit, 0–99. That Obama could not convince even one
of Congress’s 535 members to support such pivotal legislation
represents a canyonesque low in presidential ineptitude. How appropriate
for a man who has driven America off a cliff, and still floors the
accelerator as the nation speeds toward the jagged rocks below.
Obama also inculcates a culture of spending. If he tightened his
belt, and demanded accountability among federal employees, Washington
might emulate his model. Instead, the bacchanal roars on. Among infinite
examples of this obscenity:
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) gave an Idaho company $300,000 to promote caviar consumption.
The National Science Foundation shelled out $350,000 to study whether golfers might putt better if they imagined that the holes on courses were larger than they actually are.
USDA “invested” $2 million to launch an internship program. And then it hired precisely one intern. This breathtaking sum included $192,500 to house that intern.
Obama has expanded the Lifeline program, which now gives poor people
free cell phones. While the program started under President Reagan,
Obama has exploded Lifeline’s budget 107 percent — from $772 million in 2008 to $1.6 billion today.
“Keep Obama in president [sic],” one Lifeline beneficiary enthused last month. “He gave us a phone. He gonna do more.”
Romney is utterly correct in saying the US cannot afford four more years of Obama.
The revolutionary
Cuban leader Fidel Castro has suffered a massive stroke and has only weeks to
live, a doctor has claimed.
Jose Rafael Marquina
said the 86-year-old was in a vegetative state and is 'moribund' at a house in
western Havana.
The left are allegedly holding a vigil.
Rowan Atkinson is
demanding a change in the law to halt the ‘creeping culture of censoriousness’
which has seen the arrest of a Christian preacher, a critic of Scientology and
even a student making a joke.
The Blackadder and Mr
Bean star criticised the ‘new intolerance’ behind controversial legislation
which outlaws ‘insulting words and behaviour’.
Launching a fight for
part of the Public Order Act to be repealed, he said it was having a ‘chilling
effect on free expression and free protest’.
He went on: ‘The clear
problem of the outlawing of insult is that too many things can be interpreted
as such. Criticism, ridicule, sarcasm, merely stating an alternative point of
view to the orthodoxy, can be interpreted as insult.’
The utter idiocy of arresting a sixteen year old boy for holding a sign or a man who joked about a gay horse must baffle some but what should be worrying is the right of discourse and expression being frittered away for not not even flimsy reasons. I cannot even call them reasons, not in the strictest sense of the word. They are trifles at best. We are limiting the mind, catering to the intolerant, dragging ourselves back into the Dark Ages.
A group of young
people shouting, “Where are the priests? We’re going to burn them at the
stake,” attacked the Mary Help of Christians Salesian School in Merida, Spain,
leaving one teacher wounded.
According to the Salesian Press Office in Spain, the incident occurred at 1:20
p.m. local time on Oct. 18, when “some 100 young people entered the premises of
the Mary Help of Christians Salesian School in Merida.” Nearly 1,000 K-12
students attend the school.
“Custodial workers and some teachers at the school tried to stop the group, but
10 of them were able to gain entrance to the school building, shouting insults
against the institution, pushing staff members who were in their way and
attempting to disrupt the normal school day,” the Salesians said.
Principal Marco Antonio Romero told the newspaper El Mundo that the young
people’s intention was to pull down the crucifixes. “More public education and
less crucifixes,” they shouted.
The attackers carried flags from the Spanish Civil War, shouted insults at the
teachers and professors and tried to steal several laptop computers from
classrooms, the newspaper reported.
The red, yellow and dark purple flags were the same ones used by the Republican
faction, left-wing radicals and anarchists during Spain’s bloody, anti-clerical
conflict that led to the deaths of thousands of priest, seminarians, religious
and laypeople between 1936 and 1939.
During the attack on the school, one teacher suffered minor wounds while trying
to keep the young people from entering her classroom.
This is the left and this is what they stand for.
The West sighed in
relief when Rimsha Masih, the 14-year-old Christian girl arrested in Pakistan
on August 16 for allegedly burning pages of the Quran, was finally
released. Yet the West remains clueless concerning the graphic
abuses—including rape and murder—Christian children in Pakistan routinely
suffer, simply for being Christian. Consider two stories alone, both of
which occurred at the same time Rimsha’s blasphemy ordeal was making headlines
around the world.
On August 14, another
Christian girl, 12-year-old Muqadas Kainat (which means “Holy Universe”) was
ambushed in a field near her home in Sahawil by five Muslim men who “gang raped and murdered” her. At the time, her father was at
a hospital visiting her sick mother. He and other family members began a
frantic search, until a tip led them to the field where his daughter’s body
lay. The postmortem revealed that she had been “gang raped and later
strangled to death by five men.”
Police, as usual, did not arrest
anyone. As a Salem News report puts it, “Complicating matters is the fact that several
Christian girls in this remote area have been raped and forced to both marry
into the Muslim community and abandon their own religion, human rights groups
report. … [T]here is a history in this part of Pakistan according to the
Christian community, of local authorities failing to investigate cases of rape
or other violence against Christians, often for fear of influential Muslims or
militants.”
Women in binder costumes will protest outside of Pakistani embassies any day now.
So what about these reports? They could simply be false — the product
of rumors, disinformation, or a combination of both. The RFA report is
particularly difficult to reconcile with the imagery. Either or both
reports may be based on a misunderstanding, such as the closure of
another camp in the area that shut down, although this seems unlikely.
The RFA report of a camp with 30,000 inmates would suggest that we’re
talking about a very big camp, and no other camps in this area are
nearly as big as Camp 22. It’s significant here that local inhabitants know exactly what Camp 22 is,
and what happens there. The regime may have simply moved in new people
to replace the ones who lived there before. It’s possible that these
new workers aren’t prisoners, but merely citizens relocated from other
places, but then how did the crops get planted and tended as Camp 22,
having been cleansed of its work force, shut down for good during the
planting season? The extrinsic evidence fails to corroborate the latest
reports; however inconclusively, it also refutes them in part. I’ve
reached out a few people who may be in a position to probe for more
information.
All foreigners visiting North Korea are assigned guides. This is
nominally said to be for the provision of information, but also serves a
surveillance purpose.
However, the warning is disguised as being for the benefit of national
security. According to the source, “The lecturers put it like this:
‘foreigners are envious of our ideology and will try to undermine it,’
and emphasize that ‘we should not communicate with them because they
could be enemy forces in disguise trying to attack our socialist ways
and spread bad ideas.’”
The source continued, “The lecture material even said, ‘Chinese people
bring things like processed ham to eat, but that doesn’t suit our race
and will upset our stomachs and lead to ill health.’” However, he
pointed out, “There is already plenty of Chinese ham in the market, so
I’m not sure who they think is going to believe that.”
Propaganda - it just doesn't work.
Former abductee Kaoru
Hasuike has written a book that reveals the despair he went through during his
24 years trapped in North Korea, and how his family inspired him to keep
living.
Monday marked 10 years
since Hasuike and four other abductees returned to Japan. The book, titled
"Rachi to Ketsudan" (Abduction and Determination), was published by
Shinchosha Co. Wednesday.
Hasuike, 55, was
abducted by North Korean agents on the beach of Kashiwazaki, Niigata
Prefecture, in July 1978. At first, stricken with fear and bewilderment, all he
could do was scream, "Let me go home!" As it became clear there was
little chance he could return home, thoughts of suicide crept into his mind.
Detained in a
so-called guesthouse in a valley, watched by security guards and surrounded by
barbed wire, he was shown anti-Japan movies by North Korean officials who
served as supervisors and instructors. Hasuike was forced to read a collection
of papers written by Kim Il Sung, the founder of North Korea.
Hasuike said he found
a glimmer of hope amid this despair in May 1980 when he got married to Yukiko,
who was abducted with him. They eventually had a daughter and a son. "The
children became our reason for living," Hasuike said.
Hasuike and his wife,
56, even lied to their children that the couple were "Koreans who returned
from Japan," so the children would not suffer discrimination in the
future. The children were strictly taught North Korean etiquette. When they
turned 6, the children were taken to a dormitory about 150 kilometers away.
At the time, many
North Koreans were starving to death due to severe food shortages. Corn was the
staple food at the children's dormitory. When they returned to the dormitory
after spending a summer vacation at home, Hasuike made them take soybeans
because he was concerned about whether they were getting enough nutrition.
"Make sure you eat five or six soybeans twice a day after counting
them," he told his children.
Hasuike, who was
involved in translation work, was torn while he rewrote Japanese newspaper
articles in Korean.
Usually,
abduction-related stories were blacked out. But one day, he accidentally came
across a photo that was not censored. The photo was for a story on the
formation in Japan of an association of abductees' relatives in March 1997.
In the photo, his
father was tightly holding a portrait of Hasuike from his high school
graduation album. His father's hair had thinned. Standing behind him was
Hasuike's mother, who wore a tense expression. "They're alive,"
Hasuike recalled thinking.
When he didn't turn
up, they feared the worst.
But 18 hours after he
was last seen, Kyle was discovered safe and sound in a creek -- along with a
mini expedition: His four puppies had "kept him warm overnight" in
the woods until their barks gave up their location.
