Friday Post

Look closely...


Police in Burnaby, British Columbia gradually move to execute a court injunction to remove activists from a Kinder Morgan work site:

Burnaby RCMP say a total of 34 anti-pipeline protesters have been arrested and charged with civil contempt since police began arresting people Thursday morning for defying a court injunction to stay clear of Kinder Morgan's work site.

Twenty-six people were arrested Thursday and eight today. ...

Kinder Morgan is proposing to bore a tunnel under the mountain for the rerouting and expansion of its existing Trans Mountain pipeline.

The company obtained a court injunction last Friday to have protesters removed from the site, but police did not step in to enforce it until Thursday morning.

Would these people "protest" against much-needed oil for free?

Since 2009, Tides has paid out $20 million to at least 70 aboriginal and green groups that oppose pipelines, including the proposed Kinder   Morgan expansion. Meanwhile, oil production in Texas has almost doubled and there’s no multi-million-dollar campaign against that.

Look at this interactive chart that details the people and organisations that have a vested interest in shutting down this pipeline.


Canadian veterans join the Kurds in their fight against ISIS:

A number of Canadian military veterans say they'll be enlisting with the growing ranks of foreign fighters who have joined the Kurdish battle against ISIS in Syria and Iraq.

Perhaps they will meet a few familiar faces and then blow them away.

Canadian Olympian Alexa Loo calls Chinese-only signs "ridiculous":

"I believe in inclusivity and as such we have to have signs that people can understand. The whole point of having a sign is that people communicate. Well, if you're not communicating in a common language, what's the point of having this sign? It's ridiculous."

"I think sometimes there is a fear around putting up an English sign, because now, there is an expectation I have to speak English, as the shop owner. And there is a real fear there if you are not comfortable operating in that language. However you are never going to get better if you don't try."

This common sense may be catching.

There is a reason why countries adopt official language laws. A common language helps eliminate the needless friction and frustration that persistence and ignorance maintain.


If the Republicans had any stones, they would start the impeachment process against Obama:

Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives on Friday sued over the implementation of President Barack Obama's signature healthcare law, according to court documents.

But of course:

In exploring what could have been done differently, the new report honed in on his mother, Nancy Lanza, who backed her son's resistance to medication and from the 10th grade on kept him at home, where he was surrounded by an arsenal of firearms and spent long hours playing violent video games. ...

"Records indicate that the school system cared about AL's success but also unwittingly enabled Mrs. Lanza's preference to accommodate and appease AL through the educational plan's lack of attention to social-emotional support, failure to provide related services, and agreement to AL's plan of independent study and early graduation at age 17," wrote the report's authors.

How many counter-productive gun control measures were entertained when the answers were apparent the entire time?


ISIS are a pack of b@$#@rds:

Sabreen is 15. When Kurdish forces protecting Yazidi towns retreated in early August, IS fighters took her to a school in Tel Afar near the Syrian border with several hundred other women. There, IS took all children between the ages of five and 10 from their mothers. When the women screamed and tried to take back their children, the gunmen fired in the air and said they would kill them if they didn’t stay back, she says.

Sabreen also ended up in Syria, in an isolated farmhouse near Raqqa.

“Lots of men used to come and look around and when they would see a girl they liked they would say ‘I want to buy that one,’” she says. “There was an emir who was taking money for the girls – $1,000 to $1,500.” Sabreen says she escaped from her Palestinian and then Saudi "owners" and is now living with an uncle’s family near Dohuk.

The uncle, Hamid, said he was sending his sons to retrieve another distant relative who is believed to be the only surviving member of her family. He raised $5,000 – a year’s income for many families here – to buy her back from Tel Afar through a middleman. 

“Suddenly you get a phone call out of the blue saying ‘We have your daughter.’ They don’t tell you their names or anything like that,” says Hamid. “Or ‘We have your girl. We want this amount of money.'”

“If you can find someone you can trust, that man goes and says, 'I want this girl to marry,' and he pays it straight to IS,” he says. “You can’t say ‘I want to buy three girls back’ – they won’t give them to you like that.”

Hamid and others said most families with missing wives and daughters were trying to raise money to buy back them back. He says they paid $10,000 for the first girl rescued in the family but that price has now dropped.

“People were willing to pay any amount of money,” says Hamid. “But now in my own family, we have about 30 girls missing. If you have to pay $5,000 for each one of them … you will not be able to buy all of them back.” 

While IS has murdered members of all religious groups during its takeover of northern Iraq and systematically stolen cash and property, it has meted out special punishment to the Yazidis – whom it considers pagans.

Bob Geldof is an idiot:

The answer to the rhetorical question posed by the Band Aid single, ‘Do they know it’s Christmas?’, is broadly yes. Christmas Day is a public holiday everywhere in Africa except Mauritania, Western Sahara, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Somalia, although countries have widely differing customs associated with the event.

Culture: it matters no matter how many stupid songs based on fiction one produces.


And now, the ever-resourceful Japanese use IKEA bed for their cats.