Halloween Week: It Came On A Monday!

Of course, the actual monster is Hurricane Sandy.


The real monsters.


Will Obama be a sore loser?


True co-operation:

The federal government is creating a joint fund with Israel to finance energy science and technology projects.

Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver and Israeli Energy Minister Uzi Landau say the fund will promote co-operation in advancing shared energy interests.

Canada is contributing $5 million over the next three years to support the fund.

Projects financed by the fund will mainly involve private industry, although they may also include academic partners.

The money will support scientific research partnerships looking into innovative ways to develop unconventional oil and gas resources, as well as other energy sources of interest to both countries.

Natural Resources will work with the existing Canada–Israel Industrial Research and Development Foundation, to lay out the scope of the new technology fund.

Why didn't this come out at the trial?:

When the young woman’s husband arrived at the wedding reception without any members of his family, the Shafias considered it unforgivable. It sparked a startling threat from Zainab’s brother, Hamed. “Hamed said, if I leave with you,” she whispered to her new husband, “he’s going to kill everyone here and then he’s going to kill himself.”

The threat ended the party and, combined with so much other pressure, her one-day-old marriage.



That 2009 threat is part of a previously unreported layer of violence and control that was exerted by the men of the Shafia family over the female family members. Six weeks after Hamed delivered that chilling wedding-day threat, Zainab, 19, and two of her sisters, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, along with their father’s first wife in his polygamous marriage, Rona Amir Mohammad, were murdered and dumped into the Rideau Canal near Kingston, Ont.

That lethal warning from Hamed, who was later convicted of first-degree murder along with his father, Mohammad Shafia, and mother, Tooba Yahya, is revealed in Without Honour: The True Story of the Shafia Family and the Kingston Canal Murders, a new book on the disturbing case by veteran journalist Rob Tripp.

Mr. Tripp’s painstakingly researched and vividly told account of one of Canada’s most shocking crimes portrays a calamity born of clashing cultures, an unyielding obsession with domination and control, and a reluctance by authorities and citizens to intervene in a family’s domestic affairs, in part due to excessive cultural sensitivity.

It wasn't "cultural sensitivity" that killed the Shafia women and girls. It was cowardice and cultural relativism.


Related: a true case of Stockholm Syndrome and its facilitation of cultural relativism:

Needless to say, if Nielsen had paused for just two or three minutes to provide an honest overview of Spencer’s work, the whole premise of his documentary would’ve come crashing down; it would’ve become clear to every viewer that Spencer is the very opposite of what Nielsen, and those rioters, would have us believe. Yet that wasn’t what Nielsen wanted; he wanted his viewers to see Spencer as a force for evil. And he apparently wanted them to understand, too, that those barbaric demonstrators were the Good Guys – decent, delicate souls who’d been driven to extreme conduct by a vile American provocateur. If they were capable of violence, it was violence in the name of virtue.

Another case in point:

Somalia: Young woman stoned to death for sex offence 

An even better argument against religion.

 

No.  What other religions or cultures approve and practice stoning to death, particularly for women? As the answer would leave the militant atheist bereft of a decidedly partisan plan of attack, he is reluctant to give or even think it. It's not just logical laziness that would prompt one to give such a relativist answer. It is a deliberate refusal of the truth, the truth that will one day be too concrete to ignore.

 

Apparently, watching horror movies can burn calories:

Viewers who put themselves through 90 minutes of adrenaline-pumping terror can use up as much as 113 calories, close to the amount burned during a half-hour walk and the equivalent to a chocolate bar. 

(With thanks)