Saint Patrick's Week: the Pattening

"What are these doing here?"

It begins....



A car bomb in Turkey killed twenty-seven people:

A car bombing in Turkey’s capital has killed at least 27 people and wounded around 75 others on Sunday, officials said.

The blast occurred on the city’s main boulevard, Ataturk Bulvari, close to Ankara’s main square, Kizilay. It happened adjacent to bus stops near a park.

Only in Turkey....

The Turkish first lady has praised the Ottoman-era harem as an educational centre that prepared women for life, the latest in a string of controversial remarks by Turkish dignitaries on women’s roles.

The expenses of carbon taxes:

Today let’s examine some simple questions exposing the political fraud of carbon pricing as it is being implemented by most governments in Canada and around the world.

First, what does increasing government revenues and giving giant corporations billions of dollars in undeserved subsidies and windfall profits have to do with lowering greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions linked to climate change?

The answer is nothing.

That’s why everything from Europe’s decade-old cap-and-trade system, known as the Emissions Trading Scheme, to Norway’s 25-year-old carbon tax haven’t been efficient or effective in lowering GHG emissions when fossil fuels are burned for energy. ...

Given that carbon pricing raises the cost of living to the public through higher prices (cap-and-trade) and taxes (carbon tax) on almost everything, why are governments like Wynne’s and Notley’s helping corporations cope with these increased costs, but not the public which is paying for them?

In both Alberta and Ontario, the government is going to give billions of public dollars in subsidies to big businesses, supposedly to ease their transition to a low-carbon economy.

But they aren’t going to help the public do the same, other than through vague promises of introducing such things as selective energy rebates and building public transit, which are costs, not savings, because the public has to pay for them.

The real theory behind this type of carbon pricing is that if you financially punish the public enough by taking away enough of their disposable income, they will have less money to buy the goods and services that fossil fuel energy creates, thus lowering GHG emissions.

Of course, this also causes a recession.

And this is if you believe that carbon is a pollutant which it is not.

This public policy (which people voted for) is going to bankrupt them.




Trudeau gave $5-million so that brown people can be contracepted:

The Islamic State is using several forms of contraception to maintain its supply of sex slaves, the New York Times reported on Saturday, citing interviews with more than three dozen Yazidi women who escaped from the militant group.

But... but... enrichment!

While RCMP continues to investigate an altercation that ended in gunfire following a funeral at the Muslim Cemetery near Cochrane on Friday, members of Calgary's Muslim community are also wanting to learn more about the root causes of that violence.

(Sidebar: oh, I'll bet they are.)





Unlike the victim industry that craves perennial grievance-addressing, one would like to think that Holocaust survivors would rather be remembered for having survived one of the worst atrocities in human history, not as victims looking for pity:

Memory is sacred, but victimhood cannot be the foundation stone of Jewish identity. Traditional Judaism has 613 commandments. The philosopher Emil Fackenheim famously said that the 614th is to deny Hitler any posthumous victories. The reduction of Jewish identity to victimhood would be one such victory. It must not be permitted.

Speaking of victim industry...

Canada is suffering from a prolonged pandemic of moral self-flagellation promoted by hemophiliac bleeding hearts and militant native agitators. The latest outburst of it is the recent decision of the governors of Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont., to withdraw from an arrangement to erect statues of all 22 of Canada’s former prime ministers on the campus, as part of the observation of the 150th anniversary of Canadian Confederation. There is something uniquely and disgracefully Canadian about such a decision. The statues’ project, intended originally for one of the municipal parks in Waterloo, was taken up by the university when some civic opposition to it arose. As a fine bronze statue of the first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, was sculpted and unveiled, municipal opposition metastasized into the faculty of the university, which displayed academia’s usual granite-like resistance to spurious intimidation from complainant groups.

The university senate predictably folded like a $3 suitcase. It struck a special committee to go through the motions, which played its role as scripted, rejecting the statue plan altogether. Frightened puppets of the cowardice and dishonesty of the plaintiff groups, they also required the removal of the Macdonald statue.

The petition of the initial opponents of the plan claimed that “It is politically insensitive, (if not offensive) to celebrate and memorialize all Canadian prime ministers in the form of bronze statues on land that traditionally belongs to the … Anishnaube and Haudenausaunee peoples (in a) large-scale public art installation that will … transform the cultural landscape of the Waterloo campus. … It flies in the face of what contemporary universities are about.”

Oh, I'm sure I have a very good idea of what contemporary universities are all about - contemporary universities are collections of self-important blowhards who champion legless causes while stamping out any dissent or critical thinking.

How is removing a statue of Canada's first prime minister a mark of progression?

Do you see the guy on the left? I don't think the victim industry has a statue for the unknown aboriginal soldier. Why not?

Kimmie may be a loudmouth but a loudmouth with a bomb still has a bomb:

North Korea claimed Sunday that it could wipe out Manhattan by sending a hydrogen bomb on a ballistic missile to the heart of New York, the latest in a string of brazen threats.

Although there are many reasons to believe that Kim Jong Un’s regime is exaggerating its technical capabilities, the near-daily drumbeat of boasts and warnings from Pyongyang underlines the regime’s anger at efforts to thwart its ambitions.

How is that alternative plan for containing North Korea working out, West?




And now, Saint Patrick's Day cakes done right: