Mid-Week Post

Rich, filling and with no after-taste....


The Northern Gateway pipeline has been approved after a four year-long review:

The federal government approved the Northern Gateway project Tuesday, a confirmation that had already riled pipeline foes before the decision was announced.

Natural Resources Minister Greg Rickford's announcement opened Round 2 of what will become a lengthy legal skirmish with some aboriginal bands and environmentalists threatening to disrupt the $7-billion project.

The pipeline had already won the first round: approval in December from the National Energy Board and Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency after 18 months of public hearings.

Regulators imposed 209 conditions on builder Enbridge before shovels break ground on the twin 1,177-km pipeline from Alberta to the BC coastal municipality of Kitimat, where super-tankers are to ship diluted bitumen to Asia.

The pipeline is still subject to two hundred and nine conditions, as well as absurd oppositions that propose no feasible alternatives or economy-boosting solutions.

Canada is a resource-rich country. It is disastrous not to rely on these resources for our own and for others' benefit. Anyone who proposes not to do so is mad.


I'm sure e-mails on government servers get lost all the time:

The agency revealed Friday it had lost two years of potentially incriminating e-mails from Lois Lerner, the former IRS official who has been at the center of the investigation, and on Tuesday, the House Ways and Means Committee found that five more IRS employees had also lost e-mail correspondence.

It's time for some prison sentences.


Two hundred and seventy-five troops against the al Qaeda offshoot, ISIS, just won't cut it:

President Barack Obama told Congress on Monday the United States was deploying up to 275 military personnel to provide support and security for U.S. personnel and the country's embassy in Baghdad after militants seized control of the north of the country.

Much like anything he has done, this proposal is window-dressing from a president who prefers to golf rather than do anything constructive. The situation in Iraq is well out-of-hand. At this point, it is Iran versus a handful of Middle Eastern oil magnates still standing. The entire region is a hot zone.

Time to hit the links.


We don't have to trade with China:

A cheap brand of Chinese-made smartphones carried by major online retailers comes preinstalled with espionage software, a German security firm said Tuesday.

G Data Software said it found malicious code hidden deep in the propriety software of the Star N9500 when it ordered the handset from a website late last month. The find is the latest in a series of incidents where smartphones have appeared preloaded with malicious software.

The Chinese government continues to crackdown on Christians:

Chinese authorities completed their task of removing yet another cross from a church today, nearly a week after a group of Christians tried to stop the government's anti-church campaign.

As The Telegraph’s Tom Phillips reports from Shanghai, on early Tuesday morning a red cross was removed from the top of Guantou church, located in Wenzhou, a city known as "China’s Jerusalem." Last Wednesday, members of the church successfully stopped a demolition crew from removing the cross, but it was removed with a crane in secret this morning, according to Zheng Legou, a local church leader who spoke with Phillips. 

There are more than 67 million Christians in China, according to the Pew Research Center, but a Chinese official for religious affairs said the spread of the religion was “too excessive and too haphazard” in an address to Communist Party members. 

This morning’s action has renewed fears that China is cracking down on mainstream religion as Christianity moves across the country. In April, authorities razed an entire megachurch in Wenzhou, which is known for its large Christian population, and in March 2013, the Zhejiang government launched a three-year “Three Rectifications and One Demolition” campaign to “rectify” and destroy what they considered to be “illegal structures.” The United States' Congressional-Executive Commission on China released a statement on June 6 saying the program “contravenes international norms and Chinese regulations governing religious affairs.”

But... but...

Pope Francis strongly condemned “gender ideology” in a private conversation with Austrian Bishop Andreas Laun earlier this year, the bishop related in a recent essay.

In doing so, the pope follows in the footsteps of his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI. Nearing the end of his pontificate, the pope emeritus spoke twice about gender ideology as “a negative trend for humankind,” and a “profound falsehood,” which “it is the duty of pastors of the Church” to put the faithful “on guard against.”

Bishop Laun, auxiliary bishop of Salzburg, wrote about the words of Pope Francis in March in an essay for the German Catholic news publication Kath.net. Bishop Laun told LifeSiteNews that he met the pope briefly on January 30 as part of the Austrian bishops’ ad limina visit, a meeting with the pope that bishops must do every five years.  Laun added that he was the last of the bishops to speak with the Holy Father. 

“In response to my questioning, Pope Francis said, ‘Gender ideology is demonic!’” Laun wrote in his essay, adding that the pope was not exaggerating in his comment.  “Indeed, gender ideology is the destruction of persons, which is why Pope Francis was justified in calling it demonic,” he said.

It is refreshing to hear the gurgling sounds of American leftists and anti-Catholics (both equally stupid) choking on their own delusions. If anyone was expecting this pope to be to the far left, it is wonderful to disappoint them.



This should be mandatory reading material:

2. WE ARE A NATION OF IMMIGRANTS
 
No, we’re not. We’re a nation of citizens. This country was built on legal immigration, and the ones who made it through learned the language and assimilated. Many didn’t get in. Today’s scenario is 15 million illegals ridiculing those of us who played by the rules. My green card took 15 years to get and I brought a ton of jobs with me. The Statue of Liberty doesn’t say “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, and all their relatives.” 
Oh, and don’t give me that old “They’re doing jobs Americans won’t do” line. They’re doing jobs Americans won’t do—for that price. In Canada, there are no Mexicans and the landscaping still gets done. We use teenagers....

6. WOMEN MAKE LESS THAN MEN
Obama Tweeted this old wives’ tale recently. Does anyone in the White House have a fucking computer? Women choose to make less than men because they’d rather be at their daughter’s piano recital than stay at the office all night working on a proposal. When they don’t have kids, they actually make more than men. If women were cheaper labor, we’d hire them as often as we hire illegal aliens.
On The Independents recently, Jill Filipovic told me that resumes with female names do worse than the same ones with male names. I’m willing to accept that, but it’s not prejudice. It’s postjudice. Employers have noticed their male employees are more likely to stay at the office all night working, even when their daughter does have a piano recital.

7. PRO-LIFERS ARE SEXIST
Most women are pro-life. To ignore their rights while touting abortion is sexist. Also, gender-based abortion is becoming more popular. We’ve seen how that goes for women in China. It ain’t pretty. So stop using abortion rights as some kind of proof there’s a war on women when the opposite is true. ...

10. CHRISTIANS ARE ANTI-SCIENCE
Maybe one in ten Americans believes the earth is only a few thousand years old, and most of those people are old ladies and dirt-poor farmers. They’re not shutting down schools and canceling Cosmos. The other 90% of us are totally okay with the big bang theory. Even the pope supports it. We understand there’s evolution and an incredible universe. We just think God is the one who set the whole thing up. 
Also, if you love science so much, stop refusing vaccinations for your kid. You’re literally making us sick....

 

Read the whole thing. Myths that are trotted out are begging to be dispelled.

And now, as majestic as they may seem, leave the bears alone: