Monday Post

Slowly wanes the month of August... (sigh)...


Alberta faces a deficit of $5.9 million that will worsen because of low oil prices:

Alberta's finance minister says the province is on track for a record $5.9-billion deficit this year as the oil crunch hits families and businesses.

And Joe Ceci says the worst may not be over if low oil prices persist and the province continues in recession.

"If current conditions continue, the final deficit will be in the range of $6.5 billion," Ceci said Monday as he released first-quarter figures for the 2015-16 fiscal year which began April 1.

Alberta is in the hole it's in because the recently elected Premier Rachel Notley imposed stupefying taxes on the oil industry. The impact of the fall of global oil prices was coincidental.



Of course, it's ridiculous:

New Brunswick's restrictions on citizens bringing alcohol into the province from elsewhere in Canada are "ridiculous," Conservative Leader Stephen Harper said on the campaign trail Monday.

Harper was in Ottawa responding to a question about whether Canadians should face legal sanctions for bringing alcohol across provincial borders.

"My personal view and the view of our government is that's ridiculous," he said.

Last week in Campbellton, retiree Gerard Comeau stood trial in provincial court on a charge of violating the New Brunswick Liquor Control Act.

The law limits a person to bringing a maximum of 18 bottles or cans of beer, and one bottle of wine or liquor into New Brunswick from another province.

Comeau was bringing 14 cases of beer and three bottles of alcohol into New Brunswick from Quebec when he was stopped in an RCMP enforcement operation.

Harper said the federal government has brought in legislation to make it easier to move alcohol between provinces.

However, he said similar legislation is required at a provincial level, and while some provinces have done so, he urged all provinces to adopt the legislation.

A decision in Comeau's case is not expected until the spring.

It all boils down to the money the government can steal from one taxes and monopolies. Lower the taxes and cut out the monopolies.

But that would just make sense.



Shelters don't end domestic violence; laws do:

Tom Mulcair has announced measures aimed at ending violence against women.

The NDP leader committed Monday to restore the shelter enhancement program scrapped by the Conservative government, saying it would have sufficient funding to ensure no woman in need is turned away from a shelter.

He also vowed to invest money in affordable housing and homelessness programs to help women fleeing violence to find a new place to live.

And he announced his intention to work with women's groups, indigenous peoples, communities and organizations to create a national action plan to end violence against women and girls, with dedicated funding and benchmarks for progress.

That's on top of Mulcair's previous commitment to call an inquiry into the nearly 1,200 aboriginal women who have been murdered or vanished since 1980. He said he would launch the inquiry within his first 100 days in office.

A report in January from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an arm of the Organization of American States, says aboriginal women in Canada are murdered or disappear at a rate four times higher than their representation in the population.

(Sidebar: yeah, about that...)

Band-aid solutions are just that: short-term wastes of resources that don't address real problems and offer practical solutions. If Mulcair was serious about this problem then he should suggest harsher laws for douchebags who beat their wives.



This seems to be a trend in Manitoba:

The director of a Winnipeg-based child welfare agency says it did not get involved in the protection of a girl who was repeatedly raped by her stepfather, and was sent home twice to recover from abortions, because it wasn't notified of the case.

"It should have been an automatic referral, so I am shocked that we did not receive this one," said Sandie Stoker, executive director of the Child and Family All Nations Emergency Coordinated Response Network (ANCR). "That's very dangerous."

ANCR said Friday after the sentencing hearing for the stepfather that the case only came to its attention after he was later arrested for an unrelated attack on the girl's best friend and her mother. At that point, ANCR got involved.

By then, however, he had repeatedly raped his stepdaughter over 26 months.

Pass that buck! 

Anything that would move parents to home-school or send their kids to charter or private schools is a sterling idea in my opinion:

Education on sexual matters is too important to be optional, according to Quebec's ministry of education.

The province is rolling out a new pilot project in which sex education, like French and Mathematics, will soon become mandatory for all students from kindergarten to the last year of high school, regardless of the religious or personal convictions of parents across different cultural communities.

No exceptions will be made.

Some wags think that without some government-funded flunkie teaching kids how to put a condom on a bi-gender-queer banana that they can't function as adults. Kids need useful skills. That's where (ostensibly) teachers come in. Who cares about the junk science of gender fluidity when one cannot read a map?

Then there are those pesky parents who insist on being involved in their children's lives.

Good luck with that, Scott Walker. Let me know how that turns out:

The Canadian border got dragged into the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign on Sunday, with a prominent candidate appearing to entertain the notion of building a giant wall on the 49th parallel.

The idea was raised in a talk-show interview with Republican contender Scott Walker, who after being pressed twice by the interviewer appeared to agree it was worth considering.

"Some people have asked us about that in New Hampshire. They raised some very legitimate concerns, including some law-enforcement folks that brought that up to me at one of our town-hall meetings about a week and a half ago," the Wisconsin governor said during an interview with NBC's "Meet The Press."

"So that is a legitimate issue for us to look at."

I won't argue that cross-border malfeasance is never possible. I just think the US has more than enough of its own homegrown problems to worry about than us.



This has nothing to do with Islam:

Police probing Thailand's deadliest bombing raided a second location and widened their search for more suspects on Sunday after a foreigner was arrested and stacks of fake passports and bomb-making materials found at a Bangkok apartment block. 

Authorities said police were monitoring about 1,000 mobile phone numbers and checking photographs used in around 200 seized passports to track down members of an unspecified group they believe orchestrated the Aug. 17 attack on a Hindu shrine in Bangkok. The bombing killed 20 people and stunned Thailand.

Fourteen foreigners, seven from mainland China and Hong Kong, were among those killed in a blast the ruling junta said was intended to cripple an already flagging Thai economy. ...

While scant progress was being made, speculation had focused on groups that could have the motive and capability to carry out the bombing.

These have included southern ethnic Malay insurgents, opponents of the military government, foreign militant groups and sympathizers of Uighur Muslims. Thailand forcibly repatriated more than 100 Uighurs to China last month, prompting international outrage.

Many of the minority Uighurs from China's far west have sought passage to Turkey via Southeast Asia.

And now, languages that are the hardest to learn.

Take up the challenge.

Saturday Night Special

Because Rex Murphy:

The Duffy lemon has been thoroughly squeezed and the pips have squeaked their last. It’s been in the media blender so long — 45 days of trial, months and months of saturation media coverage — that there’s now not even a scent, a mist, of juice left. The pulp has been utterly mashed, even the peel riven to its constituent atoms. When the trial does resume in November it will offer more reminiscence than revelation. This lemon is done.

Lullabies to sleep with one eye open:

In Russia, it’s a wolf that’s going to get you off the edge of your bed and drag you off into the woods.

Sleep sleep sleep
Don’t lie too close to the edge of the bed
Or little grey wolf will come
And grab you by the flank,
Drag you into the woods
Underneath the willow root.

Yes, I gathered that:

Trudeau’s plan calls for spending in three areas, public transit, social infrastructure and green infrastructure. Most of the things he is promising to spend federal tax dollars on fall well outside of federal jurisdiction. ...

Friday Post

Stay loose...


Lots going on at the Fur.


It's not the first time a disabled person was screwed over by the religion of peace:




This will be quite embarrassing for some:

The federal government posted a surplus of nearly $1.1 billion for June — half a billion less than in the same month last year when the surplus was $1.6 billion.

The surplus came as the federal government’s revenue increased by $600 million to $24.3 billion for the month.

Excise taxes and duties were the source of most of the revenue growth.

Federal program spending increased by $1.6 billion from a year ago to $21.3 billion in June.

The universal child care benefit was responsible for most of the spending increase, which was partly offset by a $500-million decline in public debt charges, which fell to $1.9 billion.

Because an insanity plea might set the bugger free:

Still dressed in his orange, prison-issue jumpsuit, Chiheb Esseghaier attacked the hospital lunch with gusto. He ate each part in turn. He dug into the butter with his fingers. He saved two sugar packs for last. And then, obsessively, neatly, he cleared away the crumbs.

As he ate, Esseghaier spoke, through tangled beard and missing teeth. His body stank. His words weren’t always clear. But he was open, eager to talk, and he said many things.

He was convicted in March in a terror plot that was less foiled than it was stillborn. With an accomplice, Raed Jaser, he conspired to cut a hole in a railway bridge in southern Ontario. The two never came close to pulling it off. Jaser dropped out of the plot long before they were even arrested. 

But the men were tried nonetheless and found guilty on a host of terror-linked charges this spring. In June, as part of his sentencing process, Esseghaier spent four days in a Toronto hospital with a forensic psychiatrist. In their 15 hours together, Dr. Lisa Ramshaw watched him eat and pray. She saw him leave the bathroom — water dripping from his hair — after an elaborate cleansing routine. But mostly, she asked questions and listened. ...

At the end of the four days, and after consulting a host of trial transcripts and interviews, she came to a stark conclusion: Esseghaier, the man touted on his arrest in 2013 as a ringleader and terrorist recruiter, was suffering from a psychotic disorder, she wrote in a report to the court, and was most likely schizophrenic.

He was delusional and believed that his soul would be taken to God when he was 33, like Jesus, and that the other prisoners weren’t prisoners at all, but filmmakers “colluding with the officers to make a movie about him.”

Wednesday, Esseghaier and Jaser are due back in court for a sentencing hearing. Both face the possibility of life in prison.

But Ramshaw’s report now hangs over the process. It raises questions not only about the sentencing, but about the trial itself, about the decision to allow Esseghaier to defend himself, to try the two men together, and the thorny legal issues that arise when a man’s sanity comes into question this late in the process.

The report raises broader questions, too, more fundamental ones, about terrorism and insanity and justice, and whether any of us should care, given what Esseghaier tried, however ineptly, to do. He is insane, in other words, of that there’s little doubt. But whether that should matter at this stage is a much trickier question.

Well, it is said that housework can be a work out, so....

A national newspaper’s website is in hot water after penning an article claiming that not doing enough housework is making women “fat”. 

The Mail Online article, analysing the results of a study saying that a lack of chores is fuelling the obesity crisis has got people pretty angry – and it’s easy to see why. 

The article implies that women are putting on weight because “labour-saving” devices such as microwaves and dishwashers are keeping them less active.

And now, things you might not know about Charlie Parker:

In a 1954 radio interview, Parker explained that he “put quite a bit of study into the horn” in those early years: “In fact the neighbors threatened to ask my mother to move once when we were living out West. She said I was driving them crazy with the horn. I used to put in at least … 11 to 15 hours a day.”

Practise, practise, practise.

Mid-Week Post

The epicenter of the week...


Lots going on at the Fur.

 
A disgruntled former employee of a news station in Virginia shot and killed a reporter and her cameraman during a live report and then posted the video of the act on his Facebook page. He is now dead:

Two television journalists were killed during a live broadcast in Virginia on Wednesday, shot by a suspect who was a former employee of the TV station and who called himself a "powder keg" of anger over what he saw as racial discrimination at work and elsewhere in the United States.

The suspect, 41-year-old Vester Flanagan, shot himself as police pursued him on a Virginia highway hours after the shooting. Flanagan, who was African-American, died later at a hospital, police said.

The journalists who were killed were reporter Alison Parker, 24, and cameraman Adam Ward, 27.

Both journalists were white, as is a woman who they were interviewing. The woman was wounded and was in stable condition, a hospital spokesman said.

Social media postings by a person who appeared to be Flanagan indicated the suspect had grievances against the station, CBS affiliate WDBJ7 in Roanoke, Virginia, which let him go two years ago. The person also posted video that appeared to show the attack filmed from the shooter's vantage point. 

Flanagan sent ABC News a 23-page fax about two hours after the shooting, saying his attack was triggered by the June 17 mass shooting at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, the network said. Nine people were killed, and a white man has been charged in that rampage. 

The network cited Flanagan as saying he had suffered racial discrimination, sexual harassment and bullying at work. He had been attacked by black men and white women, and for being a gay black man, he said. 

"The church shooting was the tipping point ... but my anger has been building steadily," ABC News cited the fax as saying. "I've been a human powder keg for a while ... just waiting to go BOOM!"

(Sidebar: oh, please...)

Cue the usual whinging about gun control, motives, why adults shouldn't be held responsible for their actions because their feewings were hurt ect.

 
James Holmes has been given a life sentence:

The man who unleashed a murderous attack on a packed Colorado movie theatre was ordered Wednesday to serve life in prison without parole plus 3,318 years — the maximum allowed by law — before the judge told deputies, "Get the defendant out of my courtroom, please."

The gallery applauded the remark by Judge Carlos A. Samour Jr. as he gaveled the hearing to a close, ending a grueling three-year wait to see the gunman brought to justice. Survivors, relatives and a handful of jurors who were in the courtroom cheered and then hugged prosecutors and law enforcement officers. Some wiped away tears.

Samour ordered 28-year-old James Holmes to serve 12 consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole, one for each of the people he killed in the July 20, 2012, attack on a crowded movie theatre.

He then added another 3,312 years for 70 convictions of attempted murder, and six years for an explosives charge.

"The defendant does not deserve any sympathy," the judge said. "And for that reason, the court imposes the maximum sentence it can impose under the law."

Samour handed down the sentences after a withering condemnation of Holmes as an angry quitter who gave up on life and turned his hatred into murder and mayhem against innocent victims and hundreds of their family members.

Dubbed the "Dust Lady" after emerging from the destroyed World Trade Centre, Marcy Borders dies at age forty-two:

A woman whose photograph became one of the iconic images of the 9/11 attacks has died of stomach cancer aged 42.

Marcy Borders, who was pictured covered in dust fleeing the World Trade Center in 2001, was diagnosed with the disease in 2014 which she claimed was caused from inhaling toxic air from the attack.

"I definitely believe it because I haven't had any illnesses," she had told NJ.com. "I don't have high blood pressure ... high cholesterol (or) diabetes."

Ms Borders had started a new job just one month before the attack and had arrived late that morning. After fleeing the building covered in dust she was grabbed by a man who led her to safety.

The picture of her covered in dust was taken by photographer Stan Honda of Agence France Presse and published in newspapers around the world and before her identity was revealed she became known simply as "dust lady".

In 2011 she told the New York Post her life spiralled out of control after the attacks.

"I didn't do a day's work in nearly 10 years," she said. "By 2011 I was a complete mess. Every time I saw an aircraft, I panicked. If I saw a man on a building, I was convinced he was going to shoot me."

Some pundits think the federal election in October should focus on women's issues.

I think that's a fantastic idea. 

Let's ask Justin Trudeau why he admires a totalitarian state that allows abortion for unborn female babies and then infanticide or if he thinks that the Chinese's using North Korean women as sex slaves is a non-issue.

Let's ask Thomas Mulcair if it would be cheaper to let women stay at home with their kids rather than a boondoggle of a daycare plan.


Also: that's what Justin Trudeau does:

Canada's once-popular opposition Liberals, who are trailing in third place ahead of an Oct 19 election, shifted their fire to the first-place New Democratic Party on Wednesday as the two center-left rivals battle to defeat the ruling Conservatives.

And now, this is the best cake ever:

For A Tuesday

Always something to talk about...

 
Former Prime Minister Paul Martin does the counting for Justin Trudeau:

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau is pouncing on Tom Mulcair's pledge Tuesday to balance the budget if elected prime minister — by saying the NDP leader is choosing austerity over jobs.

"Why does he want to take billions of dollars out of the economy in a recession, and what public investments will he be cutting to do that?" Trudeau told supporters at an event tonight in Brampton, Ont., alongside former prime minister Paul Martin.

If there is anyone who knows how to handle money, it's one of the very scandal-ridden Liberals who put Stephen Harper into power in the first place.



Is the reason for China's stock market crash to hide its fuzzy figures?

But noted China pundit and author, Gordon Chang, has been expressing stronger skepticism for months. 

Chang was recently in Hong Kong, where he says he spoke with “an individual very close to influential people in Beijing.”

“He told me that they were privately saying that the Chinese economy was growing at a 2.2 percent rate, well below the 7 percent that Beijing has claimed for the first and second quarters,” Chang said.

Chang contends that official economic data does not give a picture of 7 percent growth, pointing to indicators including rail freight (down 10.1 percent in the first two quarters), trade volume (down 6.9 percent), construction starts by area (down 15.8 percent), and electricity (up by just 1.3 percent).

“When you look at this data, it makes it very hard to get to 7 percent,” Chang explains. “Many people say manufacturing is no longer the heart of the Chinese economy, rather services. But even the services sector, according to the Bureau of Statistics grew at 8.4 percent in the first half. I can believe that, but how do you get to 7 percent GDP when your manufacturing sector is basically at zero?”

Speaking of China:

A U.N. panel of experts said that a major Chinese state-owned arms supplier sold more than $20 million of weapons to South Sudan's government last year, several months into the country's deadly internal conflict. ...

The U.N. Security Council is now considering a U.S.-drafted resolution that would impose an arms embargo on South Sudan if its government doesn't sign a peace deal within days.

It's not a win if North Korea's backer still sits on the UN security council.

Withdraw from the UN today.



Oops:

Russian president Vladimir Putin has decreed that all Russian casualties “in peacetime” be a state secret. In addition to criminal charges arising from divulging state secrets, families risk losing pensions and lump-sum payments if they reveal that their sons were killed in Ukraine. Mothers of soldiers’ associations have been branded “foreign agents” for collecting data on Russian casualties. Dissident Boris Nemtsov was murdered shortly before completing his study of Russian casualties in Ukraine. Russian civil rights organizations, working against the fog of official resistance, could confirm only several hundred battlefield deaths.

Business Life (Delovaya Zhizn) reports on markets, finance, entrepreneurship, finance, and leisure, scarcely an outlet for sensational information. Its innocuously entitled “Increases in Pay for Military in 2015,” however, reveals what appear to be official figures on the number of Russian soldiers killed or made invalids “in eastern Ukraine.” Russian censors quickly removed the offending material but not before it had been webcached by the Ukrainian journal Novy Region (New Region).
“Compensation of military personnel taking part in military actions in Ukraine in 2014-2015.” In addition, the Russian government, in a decision about the monetary compensation of military personnel taking part in military action in eastern Ukraine, approved compensation for families of military personnel who were killed taking part in military action in Ukraine of three million rubles (about $50,000). For those who have become invalids during military action, the compensation is one and a half million rubles (about $25,000). A payment of 1,800 rubles is envisioned for contract “fighters” for every day of their presence in the conflict zone. In all, as of February 1, 2015, monetary compensation had been paid to more than 2,000 families of fallen soldiers and to 3,200 military personnel suffering heavy wounds and recognized as invalids...

If there is anything wrong with baseball great Curt Schilling's tweet, it's the numbers.

In the 1933 election, the Nazi Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or the National Socialist German Workers' Party) received over forty-three percent of the national vote. Six years later, that governing party plunged the country into a war it could not and did not win.

In 2013, a poll conducted by Pew Research Centre found that large numbers of Muslims favoured making Sharia law the law of the land, the highest percentage being in Iraq at ninety-one percent and the lowest percentage being in Azerbaijan at eight percent. 

Eighty percent of London Muslims support ISIS.

Twenty-seven percent of British Muslims sympathised with the motives to kill Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and staff.

In 2001, nineteen men killed nearly three thousand people. 

Last year, one twenty-eight year veteran was run down and killed by one Muslim convert. Another Muslim convert killed a sentry guarding the National War Memorial and then stormed into the House of Commons. He was later taken out by the Sergeant-at-Arms.

In France, one man with a loaded Kalashnikov tried murdering passengers on a train before being stopped by American and European citizens. 

Well, it looks like all that was wrong was Schilling's math. 



God, these people are just disgusting:

Instead of condemning the documented and illegal harvesting and selling of body parts from babies aborted at Planned Parenthood centers in the U.S., a Canadian-based Planned Parenthood is using the scandal to raise money for its operations.

“Planned Parenthood Ottawa is suffering,” the organization’s president Lauren Dobson-Hughes posted on its Facebook page on the weekend. “You’ve heard of the recent attacks on women’s healthcare in the States, but we’re feeling the impact too.”

 There must be absolutely no switch in their heads that warns them shamelessness will be tolerated by no one. 

As one can see here. 



It's time to check which country one is in:

While parishioners praying on a public sidewalk in front of St. Patrick’s Basilica during Sunday’s Capital Pride Parade were told to go inside the church to avoid confrontation, St. Joseph’s Catholic parish had a delegation marching in the parade. ...

But their intention to be a public witness was thwarted, according to Pacheco, when St. Patrick’s rector Father Bosco Wong, encouraged by parish council member Sheila Jones, told the group to pray inside the church.

After confirming with Wong that this was a direct order, Pacheco decided obedience trumped all, and asked his people to comply, writing on his blog: “We were there to pray in reparation to Our Lord,” he wrote, “but also for the misguided and hurting souls who were seduced into the lie of the homosexual lifestyle.”

An estimated twenty people chose to remain outside.

But Father Wong told LifeSite News his chief objection was that Pacheco’s group stood with their backs to the Pride participants. “To me personally, that gesture is a weapon to judge and to accuse. ... It invites someone who is in the march who might not be as balanced to do something irrational.”

“I was not opposed to them praying the rosary,” Wong said. He also stated he didn’t know the group was coming, and that he had a responsibility as the rector to protect his church. “I just don’t want to create an incident where the basilica will be violated.”

If you cave in, Father, that won't make them like you and you're certainly not standing against evil.



And now, in this election, there is only one leader one can count on:

He even looks like a leader.    (source)

Sunday Post

Three Americans are praised by anyone but Obama because they subdued a would-be terrorist when the Europeans decidedly failed:

The three American friends who helped foil a mass shooting on a packed high-speed train on its way to Paris started the trip in a different car, they said Sunday, underlining how narrowly their triumph could have been a tragedy.

**

President Barack Obama praised the passengers who subdued the gunman, according to a White House statement. U.S. officials will stay in touch with French authorities about the investigation.

(Sidebar: Fort Hood.)

**

Train staff on board the high speed train which was the scene of a suspected Islamic extremist attack yesterday have been accused of barricading themselves in their staffroom and locking the door, leaving passengers to fend for themselves.

Two other men were also injured and are being rewarded for their bravery.


The would-be terrorist denied that he was a jihadi and so do the Europeans:

A gunman who attacked passengers on a high-speed train in France two days ago is "dumbfounded" at having been taken for an Islamist militant and says he only intended to rob people on board because he was hungry, his lawyer said on Sunday.

**

French anti-terror investigators on Sunday questioned a Moroccan man accused of a foiled attack on a crowded train, but he insists he was only trying to rob passengers, a lawyer said.

(Sidebar: yeah, that's what he was doing.)



How is that degrading thing going?

Syria's head of antiquities was quoted as saying the temple was blown up on Sunday. The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that it happened one month ago.

IS took control of Palmyra in May, sparking fears the group might demolish the Unesco World Heritage site.

The group has destroyed several ancient sites in Iraq.

IS "placed a large quantity of explosives in the temple of Baalshamin today and then blew it up causing much damage to the temple," Syrian antiquities chief Maamoun Abdulkarim told AFP news agency.

"The cella (inner area of the temple) was destroyed and the columns around collapsed," he said.

 
The Italian navy rescued 4,400 would-be immigrants:

The Italian navy organised the rescue of around 4,400 migrants in waters off the Libyan coast on Saturday, prompted by requests for help received from nearly two dozen boats, in one of the biggest multi-national operations so far.

Italy's coast guard said in a statement on Sunday that it had coordinated rescue efforts involving numerous vessels, including a Norwegian and an Irish ship as part of the European Union's Triton rescue mission.

Europe is struggling to cope with a record influx of refugees as people flee war in countries such as Syria.

The migrants were travelling aboard inflatable dinghies and overcrowded boats, the coast guard said.

The Mediterranean has become the world's most deadly crossing point for migrants. More than 2,300 people have died this year in attempts to reach Europe by boat, according to the International Organisation for Migration.

 
Now send them back.

(SEE: France, train, shooting, terrorism)



Talks resume between the two Koreas after North Korea attacks its southern neighbour:

Senior officials from North and South Korea on Sunday were in their second day of marathon talks meant to pull the rivals back from the brink, even amid reports of unusual North Korean troop and submarine movement that Seoul said indicated continued battle preparation.

Prediction: after South Korea gives North Korea what it wants, it will be attacked again in a few months.



Another one?

An explosion at a chemical plant in eastern China killed one person and injured nine others, a state news agency reported Sunday, less than two weeks after a similar disaster at a chemical warehouse killed 123 people.

The explosion occurred just before 9 p.m. Saturday in Zibo, a city southeast of Beijing in Shandong province, the Xinhua News Agency said. It said firefighters put out the resulting fire just before 2 a.m. Sunday.

One person working at the facility was killed, Xinhua said. It said the cause of the blast was under investigation.

Either Chinese factory workers are some of the most stupid people alive or someone is hiding something.



Speaking of explosions:

An explosion rocked a warehouse at a U.S. military base in Sagamihara, Kanagawea Prefecture, but there were no reports of injuries, Japanese fire officials said on Monday. ...

NHK said earlier the Sagami General Depot was used to store petroleum products and ammunition.

Also:

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s visit to the disputed Northern Territories is forcing Japan to return to square one in its diplomatic efforts to invite President Vladimir Putin to Tokyo later this year. ...

The Russian Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, released a statement on Aug. 22 condemning Japan’s protest of Medvedev’s visit.

“Japan has made it clear that it opposes the universally accepted understanding on the consequences of World War II even when the 70th anniversary of the war's end, which is important for the international community, was approaching,” the statement says.

According to sources inside the Japanese government, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe reached an agreement with Putin for Kishida to visit Russia from Aug. 31, during their telephone conference on June 24.

Executives of a dozen of major Japanese corporations planned to accompany Kishida, and expectations were also high among Russian officials for closer economic cooperation between the two countries.
But since mid-July, the Kremlin has orchestrated a series of “provocative actions,” said a senior Foreign Ministry official.

Russian Cabinet members have visited the Northern Territories in succession, culminating in Medvedev’s visit, which Japan repeatedly requested that he desist from, so that Kishida's visit could proceed.

A source close to Abe said, “Russia wanted to put it to the test whether Japan is serious about proceeding with the territorial negotiations while maintaining sanctions against Russia (over the Ukrainian crisis).”

Meanwhile, a senior Foreign Ministry official said Japan has no intention of terminating talks with Russia and will negotiate with the Russian side for a summit between Abe and Putin on the sidelines of international conferences from autumn.

Still mad over that Russo-Japanese War, eh?



This can only happen in Ontario:

A pair of Ontario teenagers will soon be collecting thousands of dollars after their employer fired them for observing a religious holiday.

The province's Human Rights Tribunal ruled that vegetable grower Country Herbs discriminated against the young siblings on the basis of their creed.

The tribunal heard and accepted evidence that the teens, identified only by their initials, provided several weeks of notice that they planned to take the day off to celebrate a holiday that was important to their Christian Mennonite faith.

Only the 16-year-old sister H.T. was scheduled to work that day, but both she and her 14-year-old brother J.T. were fired immediately after she failed to report to work.

Country Herbs argued that it dismissed H.T. for not complying with its attendance policy, but the tribunal ruled that the company made no effort to work with her to accommodate her religious beliefs.

And now, a purring cat noise generator and other noise generators to satisfy the tastes of a discerning listener.

Video Number Eight

In this video, a Stem Express employee jokes about receiving an intact dead baby:



Video number seven can be see here.

Videos one through six can be seen here.


Protests against Planned Spare Parts Parenthood have taken place in over three hundred cities.


Cecile Richards is a day-walker.

Iran Will Provide Its Own Photos of Its Nuclear Plants

In 2008, Obama promised to meet Iran without pre-conditions.

His administration has since brokered a deal that is more than favourable to Iran.

The deal gets worse the more one eventually hears about it:

Separate arrangement II agreed by the Islamic State of Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency on 11 July 2015, regarding the Road-map, Paragraph 5

Iran and the Agency agreed on the following sequential arrangement with regard to the Parchin issue:

1. Iran will provide to the Agency photos of the locations, including those identified in paragraph 3 below, which would be mutually agreed between Iran and the Agency, taking into account military concerns.
2. Iran will provide to the Agency videos of the locations, including those identified in paragraph 3 below, which would be mutually agreed between Iran and the Agency, taking into account military concerns.
3. Iran will provide to the Agency 7 environmental samples taken from points inside one building already identified by the Agency and agreed by Iran, and 2 points outside of the Parchin complex which would be agreed between Iran and the Agency.
4. The Agency will ensure the technical authenticity of the activities referred to in paragraphs 1-3 above. Activities will be carried out using Iran’s authenticated equipment, consistent with technical specifications provided by the Agency, and the Agency’s containers and seals.
5. The above mentioned measures would be followed, as a courtesy by Iran, by a public visit of the Director General, as a dignitary guest of the Government of Iran, accompanied by his deputy for safeguards.
6. Iran and the Agency will organize a one-day technical roundtable on issues relevant to Parchin.

What in this deal indicates that Iran is going to be absolutely co-operative at a moment's notice?


Obama was twice elected despite his overtures to mad Islamist states.

To this day, he remains unimpeached or ousted.

Thursday Post

Always something going on...



Greek Prime Minister Alex Tspiras resigned after yet another bailout for the broke country:

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras resigned Thursday and called early elections, hoping for a new, stronger mandate to implement a three-year bailout program that sparked a rebellion within his radical left party.

In a televised address to the nation, Tsipras said his government had got the best deal possible for the country when it agreed to an 86 billion euro ($95 billion) bailout from other eurozone countries.

The rescue was all that kept Greece from a disastrous exit from the euro but came with strict terms to cut spending and raise taxes — the very measures Tsipras had pledged to fight when he won elections in January.

His U-turn in accepting the demands by the country's creditors led to outrage among hardliners in his Syriza party, with dozens voting against him during the bailout's ratification in parliament last week, which was approved thanks to support from opposition parties.

Tsipras has insisted that although he disagrees with the conditions of the bailout terms, he had no choice but to accept and implement them to keep Greece in the euro, which the vast majority of Greeks want.

After firing on South Korea, North Korea is aghast that its southern cousins would retaliate:

North Korea has fired a shell across the border into South Korea, prompting Seoul to respond with artillery fire, according to reports.

The North is believed to have been aiming at a loudspeaker in a border town that has been blaring anti-Pyongyang broadcasts recently, South Korean media said.

In response, South Korea fired tens of 155mm artillery rounds at the location where the shell came from, the country's defence ministry said.

The South's military is currently on its highest state of alert.

North Korea has threatened military action if South Korea continues with the broadcasts, calling for them to be stopped within 48 hours.

 
President Park, offer a bounty on one man: that fatso in Pyongyang. After that beached whale is harpooned and dragged through the centre of town, things will be a lot easier.



A girl who murdered her family and whose name can't be revealed will soon be released to society:

A woman who was 12 when she helped murder her family because they disapproved of her relationship with an older man is preparing to live a "real life in the real world" when her sentence ends next spring.

The woman, who is now 21 but can't be named under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, was convicted along with her then boyfriend of killing her mother, father and eight-year-old brother in the family's Medicine Hat home in April 2006.

Her 10-year youth sentence expires May 7, 2016, and she continued on her path toward freedom Thursday when a judge removed her weekday curfew. Her curfew on weekends was removed at an earlier court date.

(Sidebar: curfew? Well, that will show her.)

We don't have a justice system. We have a legal system.



What? Healthcare isn't free in Canada?

Canadians may like to believe they have access to free health care, but a new report squashes those illusions.

An average Canadian family pays $12,000 per year for health care insurance and those costs have nearly doubled in the last decade, according to a Fraser Institute report.

“Contrary to the way we find (health care insurance) is characterized, it isn’t free,” Bacchus Barua, co-author of the study said.

The think-tank found that health care insurance costs for all Canadians increased by 48.5 per cent to an estimated $8,205 from $5,527 in the last decade.

Health care insurance costs are also rising 1.6 times faster than the average Canadian income, the report says, leading Barua to have an issue with the system.

“When health care insurance is growing faster than income, it’s an indication you can’t sustain it,” Barua said.

 
Does anyone wonder how this inadequate marvel of medical bureaucracy works?

Tax dollars. That's how.

And when you throw an annual pile of cash at civil servants, damn, if they're not going to be inefficient about things.



Oh, dear. This must be embarrassing:

In Winnipeg on Wednesday morning Trudeau unveiled a plan to allow workers in industries that fall under federal jurisdiction to ask for flexible work hours. He says this will help with work life balance.

I don’t know many people opposed to the idea of flex time or helping employees achieve work life balance but what Trudeau is proposing is simply putting into law that you can ask, not that you will get.

Here’s how part of the exchange went down as reporters asked Trudeau about the new “right” he wants to grant workers:

REPORTER: So if I’m a night shift worker, under your plan…if a Liberal government is elected….if I’m working night shifts, I can request to my employer that i don’t want to work a night shift any more, they have to make that change?
TRUDEAU: No, this plan is about respecting the fact that the way Canadians work is changing and the way that Canadians live is changing. And by putting in a formal process where an employee can request a shift in their hours or shift in their work conditions of their employer, and the employer has to respond to that.

So you can ask and your employer can respond by saying yes or no. Let me fill you in on something. That already exists. Any employee can ask for flex time, I know workers in countless industries that have it. Many people do not get to have this arrangement though because of the type of job they have.

 
And everyone is worried about Harper.



Average Russians feel the pinch as Putin ignores sanctions levelled against him because of his incursions into Ukraine:

Russians are experiencing the first sustained decline in living standards in the 15 years since President Vladimir Putin came to power. The ruble has fallen by half against the dollar, driven by the plunging price of oil, the lifeblood of Russia’s economy. As a result, prices of imported goods have shot up, making tea, instant coffee, children’s clothes and back-to-school backpacks suddenly, jarringly expensive.

Making matters worse are the retaliatory bans that Russia placed on food imports after the United States and the European Union imposed sanctions for its actions in Ukraine, a policy that took a turn for the weird this month when the government destroyed thousands of tons of what it said were illegally imported foodstuffs including cheese and peaches.

You know what to do about him, друзья.

Also: today marks the anniversary of when the Soviet crushed the Prague Spring (yet another one of communism's many atrocities):





And now, where's my cat? Oh! Here he is!

In the photo, a black and white cat blankly looks out a window while perched next to a Missing Cat poster of said blank-looking cat in the identical pose, taped to the window.

(source)

Mid-Week Mellow

Time to chill....


Batman pancakes are real:

Your pancakes are missing something—they don't have the bat symbol branded into them. Luckily, there are two cafes in Malaysia that have all the DC comics-themed food you could want. From Batman pizza to Wonder Woman burgers, they will feed your comics appetite.

These novel cafes are now in Kuala Lumpur and Johor, Malaysia, with another being planned for Singapore. They're owned by JT Network and are officially licensed to sell DC Comics merchandise.

The cafes are completely decked out in superhero decor. The menus look like comics books, the food has superhero symbols on it, and the chairs are spray painted with bat symbols. There are blue Superman ice cubes served in Superman glasses. Even the fruit is cut into tiny bat shaped pieces.

Hungering for justice and snacks are two different things.

That's not a sword:

A store owner in Pittsburgh turned the tables on two masked teens on a mission to rob the store Friday night. ...

One of the men pulled out a foot-long machete and demanded money, but the store owner pulled out his own, bigger sword and chased the duo out of the store.

 

 

Who thought ukiyo-e was dull?

these images, now known across the world, are recognized as static scenes, but a japanese artist who works under the name segawa thirty-seven has activated the stationary scenery though animation. a series of gifs bring hokusai’s compositions to life, some with quirky additions like spaceships, aliens and laser beams, others more whimsically animating slowly-moving kites and a slight breeze.

Ladies and gentlemen, Yvonne Craig: