Friday, June 28, 2013

Friday Freakout


Someone will turn one hundred and forty-six on Monday.


Section 13 is gone.




Why Celebrity Apartheid Week matters:

‘Almost all of my best friends are gay’; Alec Baldwin’s wife defends ‘queen’ slur

  
Hollywood is expected to play a role in ObamaCare's rollout, with several celebrities being asked to promote the already passed legislation in the months to come and industry players potentially adding pro-ObamaCare plots into their stories.
 Now that industry types have read some of the fine print, they're realizing Obama's health reform may chase productions out of the country.

We can't all be criminal masterminds:

A Southington, Conn., man who allegedly stole a woman’s clutch wallet in Dorchester left his birth certificate and a letter from his mother behind at the scene of the crime, making him an easy target for police, the Boston police said today.

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Mid-Week Mellow





Having missed a meaningless milestone because they had to either stop the Nazi war machine or keep the homefront going, two seniors are crowned prom king and queen at a Saskatchewan retirement home:



A Saskatoon senior's home organized an event Tuesday night to set things right.

A high school prom, complete with music was held at the Preston Park Retirement Residences.

"I joined the British Air Force when I was 16," Terry England explained. "[We were] supposed to be 18, but I lied about my age. So, didn't get a prom."


I’m sure they slow-danced to this.




And a dog pushing a puppy in a shopping cart and some other things because- why not?





Mid-Week Post



All in a day’s work…



A group of protesters who had been blockading an Enbridge pumping station in Ontario since last week has been charged after police moved in Wednesday to remove them from the property.

Hamilton police said protesters were given 24-hours notice to leave after Enbridge obtained a court injunction Tuesday, and 18 protesters were arrested when they refused to leave the station. 

Police spokeswoman Debbie McGreal-Dinning said 13 men and women, between 19 and 25-years-old, were charged with trespassing. Four protesters were charged with mischief and one other with breaking and entering with intent to commit mischief.

She said all were being released after they were processed.


I insist they stand for their principles and block this pumping station in January.




The debate about a gender-neutral national anthem has been on hiatus for the past couple of years — at least in the public sphere.

But an Ottawa-based non-profit group wants it back on the national agenda.

Informed Opinions — a social enterprise gender equity group — has produced a new YouTube video promoting the idea.

In their 2010 throne speech, the Harper Conservatives suggested the change to the national anthem: They wanted to amend the phrase "in all thy sons command." The Prime Minister's Office quickly withdrew the idea citing that Canadians overwhelmingly told them they like the anthem as is.

Shari Graydon, founder of Informed Opinions, argues that the complaints came from a very vocal minority.

"They got backlash from the Conservative base and that was probably predictable," she told Yahoo! Canada News in a telephone interview.

"But the Conservative base is not the majority of the population of the country."


(Sidebar: and neither are you.)

Some fast facts about “O Canada”: was composed by Calixa Lavallee with words written by Adolphe-Basile Routhier, two French-Canadians, in 1880. It was first sung in Quebec before the more popular English translation by Robert Stanley Weir was performed in 1908. It was approved as the national anthem in the year of Canada’s centennial in 1967. It was officially adopted on July 1st, 1980.

Ladies and gentlemen, the national anthem.




Former Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty returned to the political battlefield on Tuesday, tasked with answering questions from a commission investigating the costly and politically opportune gas plant cancellations.

He did that, sure. Although maybe not to the degree the opposition-led commission would have preferred.

But the real fireworks came when McGuinty dismissed the affair as partisan gamesmanship, waxing poetic about the state of politics in Canada and citing ancient Roman statesman Cato the Elder for some reason.

"We need to understand this exercise for what it truly is. It is not a genuine effort on the part of the opposition to seek out the truth. They are partisan," McGuinty said of the commission during a post-appearance press conference.

He added later: "I'm not looking for votes now. I think it is important to talk about these things."


There are 585 million reasons why everyone in Ontario cares about the deleted e-mails, you dolt.


 



We saw the future of the Obamacare death Panel when Kathleen Sebelius denied ten year old Sarah Murnaghans a lung transplant before a Judge overturned the decision.  Sarah Palin’s observations about how the Independent Payment Advisory Board would work as a death panel can no longer be debated.  Sarah Palin was right on Obamacare having a defacto death panel in 2009.

David Rivkin and Elizabeth Foley in a recent Wall Street Journal article demonstrated  how this board will ration health  and care but noted, “The ObamaCare law also stipulates that there “shall be no administrative or judicial review” of the board’s decisions.  Its members will be nearly untouchable, too.  They will be Presidentialy nominated and Senate-confirmed, but after that they can only be fired for “neglect of duty or malfeasance in office….  The IPAB’s godlike powers are not accidental.  Its goal, conspicuously proclaimed by the Obama administration, is to control Medicare spending in ways that are insulated from the political process.”  Sarah Palin was right about the Death Panel and I suspect as one pundit recently noted; we would be better off with a President Sarah Palin.




Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard was ousted as Labor Party leader Wednesday by her predecessor, Kevin Rudd, in a vote of party lawmakers hoping to avoid a huge defeat in upcoming elections.
Whillickers! 



The ballot took place three years and two days after Gillard ousted Rudd in a similar internal government showdown to become the country’s first female prime minister. She lacked Rudd’s charisma, and although many Labor lawmakers preferred her style, her deepening unpopularity among voters compelled a majority to seek a change ahead of elections that are set for Sept. 14 but could be held in August.
Artist's rendition of the ousting. I believe Gillard is the one with the powerful tail.


On June 25, 1950, the Chinese and Russian-backed North Korea attacked its neighbour to the south. On June 25, 2013, cyberspace on the Korean Peninsula went dark:


Several North and South Korean websites that went offline on a war anniversary remained shut down Wednesday, a day after what Seoul partly blamed on a hacking attack.

The shutdown appeared to be less severe than one in March, and some government and private sector sites were operating again.

The main page of the presidential Blue House was restored, but websites for the prime minister's office, the science ministry and South Korea's spy agency remained offline. The conservative South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo was back online.

North Korea's national airline, the Rodong Sinmun newspaper, the North's official Uriminzokkiri site and Naenara, the country's state-run Internet portal, had been shut down Tuesday, and all but Air Koryo were operational a few hours later.

Seoul blamed hacking for the shutdown of the South Korean sites, and National Intelligence Service officials said they were investigating what may have shut down the North Korean websites. North Korea has not commented.

The shutdowns occurred on the 63rd anniversary of the start of the Korean War, which both countries commemorated. They also are preparing for the 60th anniversary of the end of the fighting July 27, a day North Koreans call "Victory Day" even though the Korean War ended in a truce, not a peace treaty.


There’s that wordrestiveagain:


Riots in a restive far western region of China on Wednesday killed 27 people and left at least three injured, state media said.

The official Xinhua news agency said knife-wielding mobs attacked police stations, a local government building and a construction site Wednesday morning in a remote town in the Turkic-speaking Xinjiang region.

The unrest in in Lukqun, a township in Turpan prefecture, left 17 people dead, including nine policemen, before police shot and killed 10 rioters, the agency reported. Xinhua cited officials with the region's Communist Party committee.

Xinjiang is home to a large population of minority Muslim Uighurs but is ruled by China's Han ethnic majority. It has been the scene of numerous violent incidents in recent years, including ethnic riots in Urumqi in 2009 that left nearly 200 people dead.


Obama is a piece of shtako:


As Egyptians of all factions prepare to demonstrate in mass against the Muslim Brotherhood and President Morsi’s rule on June 30, the latter has been trying to reduce their numbers, which some predict will be in the millions and eclipse the Tahrir protests that earlier ousted Mubarak.  Among other influential Egyptians, Morsi recently called on Coptic Christian Pope Tawadros II to urge his flock, Egypt’s millions of Christians, not to join the June 30 protests.

While that may be expected, more troubling is that the U.S. ambassador to Egypt is also trying to prevent Egyptians from protesting—including the Copts.  The June 18th edition of Sadi al-Balad reports that lawyer Ramses Naggar, the Coptic Church’s legal counsel, said that during Patterson’s June 17 meeting with Pope Tawadros, she “asked him to urge the Copts not to participate” in the demonstrations against Morsi and the Brotherhood. …

So why is the Obama administration now asking Christians not to oppose their rulers—in this case, Islamists—who have daily proven themselves corrupt and worse, to the point that millions of Egyptians, most of them Muslims, are trying to oust them?

What’s worse is that the human rights abuses Egypt’s Coptic Christians have been suffering under Muslim Brotherhood rule are significantly worse than the human rights abuses that the average Egyptian suffered under Mubarak—making the Copts’ right to protest even more legitimate, and, if anything, more worthy of U.S support.




Monday, June 24, 2013

It Came On A Monday

Kittysaursus thwarted the attack on Tokyo.

Residents of Calgary are cleaning up after an epic flood that is not at all due to the myth of global warming nor is it a matter of fun:

As Medicine Hat braced for the flood bearing down on the city, receding waters in Calgary allowed 65,000 flooded-out residents to return home — revealing a staggering toll of a deluge that swallowed up stretches of road, lifted CTrain rails and left piles of debris in its wake.

Well, that's understandable:

Alberta Premier Alison Redford on Monday promised C$1 billion ($950 million) in initial funding to help pay for damage caused by major flooding this past weekend, and said the oil-rich province would no longer be able to balance its operating budget this year.


Lauren Broten resigns:

After nearly 10 years as an MPP, Liberal cabinet minister Laurel Broten is leaving politics.

Broten, Ontario's intergovernmental affairs minister, announced Sunday in a release that "it is time for me to look forward to the challenges of the next chapter in my career."

The MPP for Etobicoke-Lakeshore said she told Premier Kathleen Wynne she will step down as of July 2. She and her family will move to Halifax.


Let's abolish teachers' unions:

The Ontario English Catholic Teachers Association sent out an e-mail this week urging the province’s Catholic teachers to support a campaign promoting “safe abortion” and accusing the Vatican of furthering the plight of women targeted by sexual violence.

If these yahoos would be honest for once and admit that the only reason why they went into teaching in the first place was because that it was an easy profession to enter, further facilitated by being nominally Catholic and sufficiently liberal and because of mafia-like unions accountable to no one, then the healing can begin.

Imagine a world with real educators and not a lazy, mouth-breathing ideologue in sight.

Zen Cat is at peace with this and still ends up being more Catholic than OECTA.

Americans are living from paycheque to paycheque:

Roughly three-quarters of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck, with little to no emergency savings, according to a survey released by Bankrate.com Monday.

Fewer than one in four Americans have enough money in their savings account to cover at least six months of expenses, enough to help cushion the blow of a job loss, medical emergency or some other unexpected event, according to the survey of 1,000 adults. Meanwhile, 50% of those surveyed have less than a three-month cushion and 27% had no savings at all. 

(Gracias)


Related: the same man who has no feeling for the people who elected him and would not help his hospitalised nephew has also estranged his deadbeat father's former countrymen:

In Kenya, the native country of Barack Obama’s father, Kenyans are furious that Obama has eschewed visiting their country while he is traveling through Africa. Obama’s June 27th trip includes visits to Senegal, South Africa and Tanzania.

Wow. You guys really thought Obama cared about you?


She said whaaaaaaat?!

When Madonna came under criticism in a weekend interview with "Good Morning America," for using guns in her stage performances she answered, "The thing is, guns don't kill people, people kill people,"

Over at the Fur: Turkish Muslims in Germany demand that references to the Turkish massacre of Armenians be erased from textbooks, a professor with a pack of cards that all say: RACIST is just a moron with a pack of cards that all say: RACIST, there is no reason to give weapons or any support to monsters like these.


And now, S'mores hot chocolate. Enjoy.

 

Friday, June 21, 2013

Friday Freakout

Time to let it all go....


Did this person with "no real political agenda" travel to the countryside without a guide? I bet he didn't!

Canadians are full of themselves and North Korea is a hellhole.


I would play with these high-heels everyday.


Chicken parm meatballs. That is what I have to say.


A dizzying display of what appears to be gingerbread houses but aren't.


Classical statues in jeanwear.

 

Friday Post

For the first day of summer...

Three people are dead and one is missing in what is being described as the one of the worst floods Alberta has seen:

Three people are dead, another is missing, and tens of thousands have been forced from their homes in Calgary and throughout the rest of southern Alberta over the past 36 hours, with more being evacuated from Medicine Hat, as swollen streams and rivers overflowed their banks, some with so little warning that residents had no choice to flee to the roof of their house to await rescue.

Twenty-six communities along the Bow and Elbow Rivers in the city of Calgary were evacuated on Thursday, displacing an estimated 75,000 people from their homes in anticipation of flooding in the city, and more evacuations are taking place today as the entire downtown area suffers power failures.

Residents woke this morning to find several areas of the city under water as it is believed that both rivers crested either overnight or this morning, and more rain is on the way.

Related: being prepared for situations such as these.

Also: Saint Gregory Thaumaturgus is the patron saint invoked against floods. In case you were asking.


Are they aware that there is severe flooding out west?

Members of Canada's First Nations community are staging a full-court press for respect on Friday, marking National Aboriginal Day with marches and demands for reconciliation with Ottawa.

Sorry. The question should have been: do they care that there is severe flooding out west? Is everyone supposed to stop and listen to their problems again? Try owning their problems and their own property, or getting rid of the Indian Act.


To be filed under - INSANE IDEAS:

A group of soldiers are preparing for their deployment to Egypt with riot training on post. 

They're planning ahead for violent protests or riots and the possibility of protecting the country's border with Israel.
 **

A bipartisan group of senators, including Republicans Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and Tom Udall, plus Democrat Chris Murphy – has introduced a bill to cut off Defense Department and intelligence agency funding for operations in Syria.  Humanitarian aid would not be affected.  This would effectively checkmate President Obama’s plan to arm the Syrian rebels.

(Sidebar: this wouldn't be necessary if someone wasn't planning on giving weapons to the rebels.)

As Afghanistan’s democratically elected president, Karzai may at the very least expect to be involved in any discussions relating to his country’s future. He is also within his rights to object to the Taliban naming their office in Qatar, where the negotiations are due to take place, as the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan”.
The country Karzai governs is no such thing and his government has committed itself to a pluralist society, rather than one based on the narrow strictures of Sharia. The Taliban have even been allowed to fly their own flag over the building. Such is Obama’s desperation to reach a deal with the Taliban before the last American combat troops return home next year, that he is prepared to go to the most extraordinary lengths to tempt them to the negotiating table – even if it means alienating a key White House ally. ...

The only commitment the White House could evince from the militants in their official statement was a pledge that the “Islamic Emirate never wants to pose harm to other countries from its soil, nor will it allow anyone to cause a threat to the security of countries from the soil of Afghanistan”.

As for its attitude towards a ceasefire, within hours of the statement, four American soldiers had been killed by a Taliban attack on Bagram air base. There will, of course, be those who argue that, after the 3,000 Nato fatalities (including 444 British dead and hundreds more wounded) suffered during the past decade, the US should not be talking to people who have the blood of western soldiers on their hands. However, any chance America had of defeating them on the battlefield and forcing them to submit to its terms, vanished the moment Obama, with David Cameron’s active encouragement, opted for a policy of cut and run, thereby handing the advantage to the Taliban.
**

The Philippine government said on Friday it hoped to resume talks with Muslim rebels early next month to kickstart negotiations for a peace settlement that looked to have stalled in recent months.
**

NARAL tempts Netroots Nation with pro-choice candy


**

In September of 2012, a thirteen-year-old girl from Elwood, Indiana was overpowered and raped by her seventeen-year-old neighbor and became pregnant as a result. Her abuser was found guilty of molesting her and two other child victims and faces sentencing this week. The girl, now fourteen, chose to carry the baby to term and is due in early July. ...

Earlier this month, Planned Parenthood of Indiana weighed in on the tragic Elwood story via their official Facebook page. Planned Parenthood of Indiana posted a link to an article in the Indianapolis Star about the rape in Elwood along with this insightful comment: “As this article notes, heartbreaking stories like this are all too common in Indiana, which ranks second in the number of teen sexual assaults. Comprehensive sex ed can make a difference in preventing sexual assaults.”

 (Sidebar: also to be filed under- SICK, CHILD LURING)


Interns are normally unpaid but this is Gawker, so....

Gawker is the latest media company to be sued by its former interns.

Bloomberg reports that three former Gawker interns filed suit against the company in a Manhattan federal court Friday. They allege that they worked at least 15 hours a week writing, researching, and promoting articles for Gawker's sites for no pay.


(Gracias)