Tuesday Post

A merry Saint David's Day to all y'all....

Why buck a trend and keep a promise?

The dollars are still being counted, but the amount of money donated by Canadians for overseas Syrian relief efforts will likely fall well short of the maximum $100 million the government had promised to match.

Saudi Arabia has money for mosques, unlike Canadians who will soon understand how crippling carbon taxes can be. Go ask it for money.


(Sidebar: feel free to ask PEI for precious carbon tax revenue, though. They did, after all, vote for it.)




Spoken like people who have never had to freeze during the winter:

Scientists have written an open letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the premiers saying that spending on infrastructure for fossil fuels may not be the most productive use of resources.

In a second letter to the ministers, a group of 50 executives from British Columbia's clean technology industry has proposed a series of multibillion-dollar incentives for what they say is Canada's next source of economic growth.

Both documents seek to influence Trudeau and the premiers as they start talks on a national climate-change strategy in Vancouver this week.

"We're trying to bring our best perspective as to what's going on in the global oil market and what are the good investments for Canada," said James Byrne, a climatologist at the University of Lethbridge.

He's one of 28 signatories to a letter from members of Sustainable Canada Dialogues, made up of 60 academics across the country representing disciplines from social science to engineering. The letter argues that oil prices have permanently changed, depressed by high Saudi production and threatened by shifts away from gas-powered vehicles.

It also points out Canada has already approved and proposed new pipelines capable of moving 2.3 million barrels of oil a day. Building those lines, as well as the oilsands projects needed to fill them, will cost about $120 billion, the letter says.

(sigh)


That $120 billion comes from private companies, not from taxpayers.

Funding wind and solar energy is inefficient.

Not only is there a pause in so-called warming but ocean acidification, the other boogey-man of so-called global warming, is greatly exaggerated:

Many early studies on OA applied treatment levels that greatly exceeded even worst-case climate change scenarios and did not report water chemistry in sufficient detail to determine if the treatment mimicked future OA-driven seawater conditions. Although most recent work has improved with respect to treatment levels, mimicking future water chemistry remains tricky.

Way to go, scienticians!



Oscar-winning "greatness" in all its stupid glory:





We have a word for that, Leonardo. It's called the chinook.




Also: from the province that let raw sewage go into the river on purpose:

National cohesion on Energy East seemed to drift further out of reach Tuesday after the Quebec government announced plans to seek an injunction against the company proposing the cross-Canada pipeline.

It's time to stop equalisation payments.

Que les salauds gèlent dans l'obscurité.




Asking the party whose cut-and-run policies are a source of fun in more head-chopping circles to be the sole arbiters of Canada's security is like asking a Yazidi child, exhausted from being run into the desert, or an Iraqi girl if they would like a parka to ward off the rape:

Opposition parties say they deserve a seat at the table as the Liberals put together a watchdog committee on national security and intelligence.

The Conservatives say the government is politicizing a process that the New Democrats say requires a transparent and independent approach.

SodaStream wants the Israeli company to secure work permits for its remaining Palestinian workforce after anti-semites force the production plants out of the West Bank:

Fizzy drinks maker SodaStream has raised the prospect of moving work back to the West Bank after the Israeli government refused to extend work permits for its remaining 74 Palestinian workers.

SodaStream, which had promoted the idea of workplace co-existence between Israelis and Palestinians, moved its plant from the Israeli-occupied West Bank to Lehavim, a town in Israel's south, in late 2014.

It made that move after heavy pressure from the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, which is opposed to Israel's policies towards the Palestinians including its occupation of the West Bank.

SodaStream said the BDS campaign had been counter-productive because of the Palestinian jobs lost. Israel contends that the BDS advocates the destruction of the Jewish state.

About 500 Palestinians out of nearly 1,200 workers lost their jobs in the move but SodaStream lobbied to keep on 74 Palestinians, many of them senior people. However, their permits expired at the end of February.

"If the administration does not solve this very quickly and doesn't allow Palestinians to get to their jobs we will bring the jobs to the Palestinians ... and we will not have to ask permission from any minister in the Israeli government," SodaStream Chief Executive Daniel Birnbaum said.

"If the Israeli government doesn't want to help then at least don't get in the way."

Soda Stream: refreshingly Israeli.

Something tells me that an insanity plea just won't work:

A Muslim woman has been arrested by Moscow police after she allegedly beheaded a four-year-old and paraded it through the streets while shouting 'allahu akbar'.

A posthumous admission to murder:

Right-to-die campaigner John Hofsess, who ended his own life Monday with the help of an organization in Switzerland, admitted in a posthumous essay published in Toronto Life that he had helped eight people end their lives.

So convinced of his total rightness, that he did not admit that before he killed himself?




China does not brace itself for anything North Korea does. It may get annoyed, perhaps even irate and worry that Kim Jong-Un's antics derail its plans, but it does not brace itself and it certainly won't brace itself for the UN:

Beijing is on alert for any angry responses from North Korea to proposed new United Nations sanctions over the North's recent nuclear test and rocket launch, a Chinese diplomat said Monday.

When other countries stand up to it, then China will brace itself.




And now, can't we all just put our differences aside and be brothers the way this over-sized dog and kitten are?