Mid-Week Post

The nexus of the work-week...


On June 23rd, 1985, Sikh extremists put a bomb in a suitcase and checked it onto an Air India flight after an unidentified man badgered a flight agent. The bomb later went off killing three hundred and twenty-nine people, two hundred and sixty-eight of them Canadians and eighty-three of them children. After much dithering and incompetence and only one of the eight suspects in this terrorist attack ever convicted, the families of the victims are still haunted by the celebration of these terrorists thirty years later:

"Does anyone — does Canada herself — remember the faces of the murdered?" asks Shipra Rana, writing from Toronto to mark the day when she lost her sister in the bombing.

Do people realize even now, she wonders, that the 329 victims were mostly Canadian citizens? And yet, Rana writes, there are people in Canada who still openly revere the men who placed the bomb.

"Today, we see such propaganda being passed around."

Then, she resorts to all-caps to convey her feelings: "NO ONE HAS THE GUTS TO STOP THEM." ...

Here's part of what she's talking about: the large poster placed outside a temple in Surrey, B.C., in honour of — yes, in honour of — Talwinder Singh Parmar.

The poster is a permanent fixture on the exterior of the Dasmesh Darbar Temple. The photograph of it was taken last Friday, June 19. To passers-by, it's just another portrait of some saintly stalwart of the Sikh religion.

Actually, about the only thing the defence, the prosecution and the judge all agreed on at the Air India trial in Vancouver was that Parmar was the mastermind of the Air India bombing.

That makes him the worst mass murderer in Canadian history, by far. And he is publicly celebrated to this day as a shaheed — a martyr — by his devotees.

Parmar was never put on trial for the massacre he designed with great care and determination. Although India had previously tried to extradite him for the murder of two policemen, Canada had refused. He settled in Burnaby, B.C., where he assembled a team to place bombs on two planes connecting with Air India flights.

The families of the victims live out the rest of their lives knowing that there will be no legal retribution for this crime. Every other Canadian must prepare themselves for the leaden reality that such a terrorist act could not only happen again but will never be avenged.

That's Canadian justice for you.



I think Justin Trudeau wants to fail:

If the Liberal Party claims victory in the next federal election, Justin Trudeau says, his government would end Canada's bombing mission against ISIS in Iraq and Syria and restore diplomatic relations with Iran, in a dramatic departure from the path taken by the Harper government on foreign policy.

Yep.

Just like his "admiration for the basic dictatorship" of China, Trudeau would attempt to restore relations with the mad theocratic state responsible for the death of Zahra Kazemi and halt the liquidation of bloodthirsty child-rapists. As if he has the ability to do anything he says. As if Iran or ISIS can be reasoned with or that American-backed Iraqi troops can be trusted to stand their ground.

One must wonder if Justin Trudeau is morally corrupt or just a moron.


Related: embattled Kurds close in the ISIS "capital":

Backed by U.S.-led airstrikes and buoyed by battlefield successes, Kurdish fighters kept up an offensive through northern Syria on Tuesday, driving Islamic State militants out of a town near the extremists' de facto capital of Raqqa.

The capture of Ein Issa came just hours after the Kurdish forces had overrun a nearby military base, increasing the pressure on the Islamic State group less than two weeks after it lost the strategically located town of Tal Abyad on the Turkish border, severing a vital supply line.

The advances by the Kurdish fighters in Syria as well as in northern Iraq has been credited largely to a high level of co-ordination between the ground forces and the nearly year-old air campaign being led by Washington against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL in English and by its Arabic acronym, Daesh.

Like Obama, Trudeau must expect the more-tanned residents of the Middle East to do all the heavy lifting he won't.

Never let a good crisis or disintegrating socialist quagmire go to waste:

Five years after Chinese home appliance maker Haier agreed to build a $912 million factory in Venezuela, its washing machines and refrigerators are almost the only ones available in the country's department stores. 

Those appliances, however, are not made in Venezuela. 

They are instead imported from Haier factories in China and paid for through an oil-for-loans deal dating from 2007 under which China lends cash and is repaid in crude and fuel. 

The cost of leaving Haier's facility idle is primarily borne by Venezuela's socialist government, because its construction was bankrolled with $800 million borrowed from China.

While most foreign firms are being battered by Venezuela's currency controls and product shortages, Chinese companies like Haier are doing brisk business thanks to cooperation deals that give them privileged access to the OPEC nation's economy but leave business risks in the government's hands. 

The Chinese loans - some $50 billion since 2007 - have shored up Venezuelan finances at a time when low oil prices have prompted default concerns and effectively shut the country out of global capital markets.

But Venezuela is struggling to make good on promises that Chinese financing would spur new industries and reduce its century-old dependence on the oil industry. 

China, on the other hand, has won a steady supply of oil for its economy and lucrative contracts for its companies to export goods to Venezuela, sometimes in the shadow of China-backed factories meant to produce those very goods locally...

Going through the faulty science of "Laudato Si":

There are many major errors in the document, but one is sufficient as it is so wrong it negates all other claims. It is in the section labeled “Pollution and Climate Change”. The title is a variation on the incorrect link made in comments by President Obama about “carbon pollution.” Carbon is a solid and CO2 is a gas. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) identifies CO2 as the major cause of climate change, not carbon. CO2 is essential to plant life directly and animal life indirectly through the production of oxygen – it is not a pollutant. The misuse of these terms indicates a lack of understanding of the science but creates confusion for political gain.

But in all this hoopla, the wags forgot this little item:

The acceptance of our bodies as God’s gift is vital for welcoming and accepting the entire world as a gift from the Father and our common home, whereas thinking that we enjoy absolute power over our own bodies turns, often subtly, into thinking that we enjoy absolute power over creation. Learning to accept our body, to care for it and to respect its fullest meaning, is an essential element of any genuine human ecology. Also, valuing one’s own body in its femininity or masculinity is necessary if I am going to be able to recognize myself in an encounter with someone who is different. In this way we can joyfully accept the specific gifts of another man or woman, the work of God the Creator, and find mutual enrichment. It is not a healthy attitude which would seek “to cancel out sexual difference because it no longer knows how to confront it”.

Oh, heavens to Betsy! What will the fluid-brains think?!



And now, nature at its cloudiest. Enjoy.