Canada Week: Canada Day Eve

One hundred and forty-nine years ago, when the four provinces that comprised the Dominion of Canada were finally joined, none of the parties ever envisioned the country becoming morass of corruption and complete idiocy.


Cases in point:


The Americans stupidly gave Obama a total of eight years - two four-year terms - to destroy their country and Canada's political elite gush that they would like four more years of unemployment, empowerment of mad theocratic states like Iran, American embassies destroyed and diplomats murdered, uncontrolled immigration and racial strife:

It's not every day that the crowd's reaction to a speech becomes a story — yet Canadian politicians might have achieved just that with their rapturous response to U.S. President Barack Obama.

At the daily White House briefing Thursday, a presidential spokesman was asked about Canadian MPs' boisterous applause and playful campaign-style chants of "Four more years!" as the soon-departing president addressed Parliament.

"I noticed that," Obama spokesman Josh Earnest replied.

"I'm sure that he did (too)."

(Sidebar: yes, I bet he did, lick-spittle.)

But who is more stupid: the politicians or people who vote for them?

Discuss.




Had this been a Christian college, this sort of thing would be all over the news:

This week, in a series of videos, I’ve been sharing details surrounding a story we’ve uncovered out of Fredericton High School in New Brunswick.

After receiving a tip -- alleging Syrian migrant men in their twenties are attending a Canadian school, hitting on fourteen-year old girls, and demonstrating aggression towards their younger male peers -- we filed a freedom of information request.

We received over 2700 pages of teacher email interactions, student surveys, and relevant staff materials from Fredericton High School.  ...

It’s been four days since we first aired our story. We’ve begged our friends in the mainstream media to school us before tonight’s show. These are organizations with hundreds, if not thousands of employees — many, with resources right there on the ground in Fredericton.

As of this evening, not a single Canadian media organization picked up our story.

And this is why people would rather go to other sources for news and why major news agencies belong in the dustbin of history.

Enormous amounts of praise for Faith Goldy for having the gumption to follow this thing through and letting those who will listen be aware. People who genuinely want to be a part of civilised society don't intimate and threaten others.




One promise Trudeau was sure to keep:

A Canadian court has overturned the approval of Enbridge Inc's (Toronto:ENB.TO - News) Northern Gateway oil pipeline, adding another steep obstacle to a project fiercely opposed by environmentalists and many aboriginal groups.

The Federal Court of Appeal ruled in a 2-to-1 decision released on Thursday that the government had failed in its duty to consult with aboriginal groups on the project and sent the matter back to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's cabinet for a "prompt redetermination."

Oh, surely, he'll give an opinion of swift approval of pipelines that provide much needed jobs and energy.

 
Stick a fork in Ontario:

Ontario announced Wednesday that it will introduce gender-neutral driver’s licences and health cards beginning early next year.

In 2017, people will be able to select M (male), F (female) or X (gender-neutral) for their identification cards issued by the province.

The move follows another that began June 13 when Ontario began issuing health cards that didn’t show a person’s sex or gender on the front. Cardholders will receive a new card that doesn’t indicate a sex designation the next time their Ontario health card is renewed. A new card can be issued earlier through Service Ontario.

“The Ministry of Transportation is considering ways to reduce the risks and impacts that the holder of a gender-neutral licence may face,” the policy announcement said. “This includes working with law enforcement agencies and licence-issuing authorities across North America to raise awareness about the changes to the Ontario driver’s licence.”

Public consultations will be launched this summer to develop policies on the collection, display and use of sex and gender information on government forms and products, the announcement said.

When this comes into effect, I am going to demand that they list me as a helicopter and then, after they've gone through the trouble of printing up a card, I will throw it back and tell them to change it again.

It's my right!



 NAFTA benefits those who would exploit cheap Mexican labour:

Canada, the United States and Mexico on Wednesday mounted a fierce defence of free trade, vowing to deepen economic ties despite an increasingly acrimonious debate about the value of globalisation.

#Canexit




But doesn't killing these guys off show everyone how weak they are and thereby make them win?

U.S.-led coalition aircraft waged a series of deadly strikes against Islamic State around the city of Falluja on Wednesday, U.S. officials told Reuters, with one citing a preliminary estimate of at least 250 suspected fighters killed and at least 40 vehicles destroyed.

That sound you hear is Sir John A. MacDonald spinning in his grave.

You don't say:

An openly gay YouTube star claiming to be the target of a hate crime may have faked his own assault.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said Tuesday that Calum McSwiggan’s claims of assault were unsubstantiated and that he injured himself in prison after being arrested on suspicion of vandalism.

Canada Week: Mid-Week Post

 Your Prairie provinces of the work-week....



Go to the Fur. You know you want to.




The death toll from a terrorist attack in Istanbul now stands at forty-one:

Turkish authorities combed through video and witness statements Wednesday following an assault by three suicide bombers at the country’s largest airport, seeking to reconstruct an attack that killed at least 41 people and threatened to plunge Turkey into deeper uncertainty.

The death toll included 23 Turks and 18 foreigners, including at least five from Saudi Arabia and others from nations ranging from Tunisia and China, Istanbul’s governor’s official said. The Istanbul governor’s office said more than 230 people were wounded.

It is believed that ISIS is responsible.




If Mexicans are seeking asylum in Canada (vote-stealing Trudeau is more than happy to waive visa requirements), then why hasn't anyone pointed out what a human-rights nightmare Mexico must be to President Enrique Nieto?

As the federal government works on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's commitment to lift visa restrictions for Mexicans visiting Canada, two people living in Gatineau say the current process is inconvenient and humiliating.

The visa restrictions came into effect under the Conservative government in 2009 after asylum claims from Mexico almost tripled from 2005 to 2008, reaching 9,511 in 2009.

After the visa restrictions were put in place the number of claims dropped drastically, to 1,349 in 2010, and the vast majority of asylum claims from Mexico were rejected.

The visa issue has been a long-standing irritant in Canada's bilateral relationship with Mexico, with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto's government pushing hard for a resolution.

(Sidebar: how "humiliating" is it to stay in Canada?)

Teachers in a public school in New Brunswick plan a segregated prayer room for unco-operative students:

In their emails between themselves, teachers admit the Syrian students have some “cultural confusion” over gender roles — but they’re set on carrying out some of the practices that led to such confusion in the first place.

And when it comes to the male migrants at Fredericton High, a refusal to Canadianize seems to be an all-to-common theme.

Scores of emails between teachers indicate an unwillingness of the migrants to so much as attempt to speak English.

Other migrants interrupt the teachers, overpowering them by speaking to the whole class in Arabic.

Because the best way to manage a difficult situation is capitulation.

The full report on this is tomorrow.




Oh, Idle No More... it's like you don't want to get a clue:

Thus it’s purest irony that Idle No More, comprising those who meet all UN-approved specifications for indigeneity themselves, have offered full-throated support to Palestinians, whom they perceive as brothers-in-arms against colonial oppressors. In fact, it is the Jews who meet internationally endorsed measures of authentic indigeneity, while the Palestinians (a people literally 60 years old) do not.

If one was insistent that, even as a member of nomadic tribes, one was indigenous to the area, one could do better than choosing Jordanians who lob missiles at a far more sane and powerful enemy.




After the release of the most recent report on Benghazi, the Pentagon releases a key witness to the committee investigating the attack:

Members of the House Select Committee on Benghazi are slated to question a crew chief Wednesday who was stationed in Europe on the night of the Sept. 11, 2012 attack. The interview will take place one day after the committee published the highly-anticipated findings from its more than two-year investigation.

Again - why hasn't Obama been impeached?


Also - Obama screws up a simple handshake.

To be fair, the other two helped screw up, too, so...




Did Obama miss a chance to sanction Kim Jong-Un?

As of the time of this post, there are still no human rights sanctions against a single North Korean official. As bad as things may be in any of the aforementioned places, are they worse anywhere than in North Korea?

The Chairman of the U.N. Commission of Inquiry that investigated human rights abuses in North Korea has said that “the gravity, scale and nature of these violations reveal a State that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world” and described the abuses there as “strikingly similar” to those perpetrated by the Nazis during World War II. …

Seeking to rectify this outrage, this year, Congress passed a law that gave the President 120 days to submit a report on human rights abuses in North Korea, along with a list of those responsible. The provision requires the President to make specific findings with respect to Kim Jong-un’s individual responsibility. Those found responsible must then be designated under section 104(a) of the law, which freezes their assets and threatens secondary sanctions against those who transact with them. The 120 days ran out on June 11th.

Even before the law passed, the administration could see the overwhelming bipartisan support for human rights sanctions and began hinting at imposing them. It still didn’t act, but after the law passed, it began dropping increasingly strong hints that it would finally impose human rights sanctions on top North Korean officials. North Korea’s latest missile launch now gives the White House new impetus to increase pressure on Pyongyang, as if that impetus was lacking after the U.N. Commission released its report.

According to rumors circulating in the press and in human rights circles, the President will finally sanction “about ten” top officials of the North Korean government today. [Update: Now we know that Monday wasn’t the day. Watch this space.] The rumor I heard last week is that His Porcine Majesty Kim Jong-un, the morbidly obese despot who rules over millions of malnourished and stunted children, will be among them.

(Kamsahamnida)





New documents catch former IRS head Lois Lerner in the act of breaking the law:

“It took an organization over 50 months of investigation and multiple lawsuits to get clarity on the IRS’s own compliance with the rules it enforces against others,” says Dan Epstein, the executive director of the Cause of Action Institute and a former attorney for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. “The IRS, in the midst of its political targeting of groups engaged in policy advocacy, was engaging in the disclosure of millions of records aimed at ginning up prosecutions of these groups without going through the legally required channels.”

A prisoner tunnel from the Nazi era was found in Lithuania:

In a Lithuanian forest, an international research team has pinpointed the location of a legendary tunnel that Jewish prisoners secretly dug out with spoons to try to escape their Nazi captors during World War II, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced Wednesday.

The tunnel, located in the Ponar forest, known today as Paneriai, outside of the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, is the site where some 100,000 people, including 70,000 Jews, were killed and thrown into pits during Nazi occupation.

And now, a happy dog because happy dog:

Canada Week: The Softening

Developing...



It is reported (as of this writing) that fifty people are dead in Istanbul when as many as four suicide-bombers detonated their vests after a shoot-out:

A senior Turkish government official has told The Associated Press all initial indications suggest the Islamic State group is behind the attack at Istanbul's Ataturk airport.

The official also said nearly 50 people were killed in the attack Tuesday at the airport's international terminal and as many as four attackers may have been involved.

More to come. 

The Parliamentary Budget Officer warns what adults already know - that the government's spending is out-of-control: 

Canada’s total government spending is now on an unsustainable path, according to an independent watchdog.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer said Tuesday that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has used up some of the federal government’s room for new spending and tax cuts that could be managed while maintaining the current debt-to-GDP ratio.

Canada’s provinces and other sub-national governments, however, are struggling. A commodities slump and rising health-care spending has worsened their outlook, which was already on an unsustainable path.

Total government sustainability has swung from net even last year to negative 0.6 per cent of gross domestic product — or roughly $11 billion in unsustainable spending annually. Trudeau’s push into deficit financing and reversal of a planned cut to seniors’ benefits are eating up room that balanced out the dour sub-national outlook.

You voted for it, Canada.




Canada lifts visa requirements for Mexicans:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canada would lift its controversial visa requirement for Mexican visitors before the end of the year, while Mexico said it would end long-standing restrictions on Canadian beef imports.

Because one voters block is not enough.




When will Arabic become the third official language?

Mahmud Kahwaji passed his road test on Monday in Sussex in his second attempt.

"I am very happy," said the Syrian refugee.

Kahwaji said he would usually call other people when he wanted to go somewhere but now he can travel alone.

Zakaria Al Sabagh is another refugee and also passed his road test Monday.

"I need to get a car now and take my family touring to see Canada everywhere and I need to find a job," said Al Sabagh. "I need to start again with my life."

Kahwaji and Al Sabagh are two of several Syrian refugees who already have licences despite not fully learning English yet.

The province offers the written test translated in Arabic and allows a translator during the road test.

The decision to offer the tests in Arabic was made in December by the province.

There is (or was) a reason why the language of majority had to be learned by new immigrants. Now that it's okay to live in culturally and linguistically separate enclaves in one country (that word is used in its loosest sense), the multicultural mosaic can grow and grow!



Speaking of mosaic....

There is more.


As is expected, the stupendously delighted people of New Brunswick get to watch as the powers-that-be contort themselves into unbelievable knots to either ignore hat is going on or excuse it.

My money is on the linguistic gap no one is in a rush to close.



Also: why Western feminists don't fight for Muslim women.




Wynne shuts up parents of autistic children restores some funding for autistic students:

Ontario is restoring some funding for kids with autism age five and older who were removed from a wait list for intensive therapy.

The Liberal government had announced that as part of a new Ontario Autism Program it would stop funding Intensive Behavioural Intervention for kids over four, instead transitioning them to what officials are calling a flexible service.

The government gave parents of children removed from the wait list $8,000 to pay for therapy during the transition period to the new program, but it wasn’t due to roll out until 2018 and parents said that money would only pay for, at most, a few months of therapy.

After a public outcry, the government is announcing today that those parents will be given direct funding – in successive payments of $10,000 – to pay for therapy until their child has a spot in the new program, or if they prefer, access to less intensive services funded by the government.

The government is also speeding up the transition to the new program, with a goal of implementing it in June 2017.

This should come as no surprise:

The federal government has identified a potential source of cash to help pay for Canada’s mounting infrastructure costs — and it could involve leasing or selling stakes in major public assets such as highways, rail lines, and ports.

A line tucked into last month’s federal budget reveals the Liberals are considering making public assets available to non-government investors, like public pension funds.

The Liberals are robbing the very people who plugged for them.

How delightful.




Again - what is the purpose of these forced parades?

I wonder if I’ll live to see gays apologize for violating other people’s rights to privacy and free association, simply for refusing to bake a cake or go along quietly with transgender bathrooms or whatever the next “Salem, not Selma” fad turns out to be. 

I do know there isn’t an annual parade for Emanuel Jaques.

And anyhow, “when you speak to any gay man in Toronto about the case, the first thing they say is the boy was no saint.”

Read the whole thing.

The Benghazi report has been released and it is as damning as when Obama first let J. Christopher Stevens die in Libya:

The following facts are among the many new revelations in Part I:

• Despite President Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s clear orders to deploy military assets, nothing was sent to Benghazi, and nothing was en route to Libya at the time the last two Americans were killed almost 8 hours after the attacks began. [pg. 141]

• With Ambassador Stevens missing, the White House convened a roughly two-hour meeting at 7:30 PM, which resulted in action items focused on a YouTube video, and others containing the phrases “[i]f any deployment is made,” and “Libya must agree to any deployment,” and “[w]ill not deploy until order comes to go to either Tripoli or Benghazi.” [pg. 115]

• The Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff typically would have participated in the White House meeting, but did not attend because he went home to host a dinner party for foreign dignitaries. [pg. 107]

• A Fleet Antiterrorism Security Team (FAST) sat on a plane in Rota, Spain, for three hours, and changed in and out of their uniforms four times. [pg. 154]

• None of the relevant military forces met their required deployment timelines. [pg. 150]

• The Libyan forces that evacuated Americans from the CIA Annex to the Benghazi airport was not affiliated with any of the militias the CIA or State Department had developed a relationship with during the prior 18 months. Instead, it was comprised of former Qadhafi loyalists who the U.S. had helped remove from power during the Libyan revolution. [pg. 144]

So the White House would rather focus on a video than flex its military muscle.

Why haven't the Americans impeached this man? Why?

But... but... Vladimir Putin is our friend!

Russian intelligence and security services have been waging a campaign of harassment and intimidation against U.S. diplomats, embassy staff and their families in Moscow and several other European capitals that has rattled ambassadors and prompted Secretary of State John F. Kerry to ask Vladimir Putin to put a stop to it.

(Sidebar: I'm sure he will, John.)
 
Once a KGB agent, always a KGB agent.




Despite the hysteria, the world will go on:

Is it any wonder that citizens of one of the greatest and strongest nations in human history would recoil from an international order that was proving mainly that it could enrich an elite without seeming to lift a finger to preserve the nation’s core values and traditions — the very things that had made it great and strong? Is it any wonder that citizens of other great countries are —wondering what loyalty they owe to that same elite? 

 

This allegiance to the failed experiment that was the European Union is a sort of emotional and political stunting that belies the intellectual bearing those who whine about Brexit pretend to have.

 

 
A pig is genetically more similar to a human than an ape but I'm sure people have thought that through:

“Asking why an archaic human isn’t evolving from gorillas today is like asking why the children of your cousins don’t look more like you,” said Matt Tocheri, an anthropology professor at Lakehead University and a researcher in the National Museum of Natural History’s Human Origins Program. “Those creatures have been on their own lineage for 10 million years. You can’t go back up that lineage and back down again.”

Even if chimpanzees could suddenly develop the traits of an Australopithecus, they probably wouldn’t want to.

It’s easy to think about evolution as a linear, progressive drive toward greater and greater complexity, something that started with single-celled amoebas and ended with us. But evolution doesn’t have a destination, and even if it did, humans are certainly not it. In many cases, evolution tends to favor simplicity above all else. That’s why creatures that live in caves lose their eyes, and whales – who are descended from terrestrial mammals – have almost no leg bones. Not even intelligence is sacred: sea urchins, which have no central nervous system, evolved from an ancestor with a brain.

“Evolution is about survival under particular conditions, and random mutations,” says Nina Jablonski, a paleoanthropologist at Penn State. “There’s a big element of chance and certainly no element of direction. … Living things are just trying to adapt to the contingencies of life in their environment.”

And yet...

By the turn of the twentieth century, Darwin's Theory of Evolution was already falling out of favour as an explanation for evolution. With good reason. There were two very big holes in the initial theory. One was the explosion of life forms in the early Cambrian period. This seemed to happen with no transitional forms of life leading up to these species. The other was heredity. Darwin proposed that with the natural variations that occur in populations, any trait that is beneficial would make that individual more likely to survive and pass on the trait to the next generation. If enough of these selections occured on different beneficial traits you could end up with completely new species. But Darwin did not have an explanation for how the traits could be preserved over the succeeding generations. At the time, the prevailing theory of inheritance was that the traits of the parents were blended in the offspring. But this would mean that any beneficial trait would be diluted out of the population within a few generations. This is because most of the blending over the next generations would be with individuals that did not have the trait. Mendel had the answer to Darwin's problem. Traits were not blended, but inherited whole. And according to Mendel's laws of inheritance, a trait that might disappear in one generation might reappear in the following generation. Mendel's laws of inheritance was combined with Darwin's original theory to give us our modern Neo-Darwinism.  

When people speak of evolution, do they speak of the theory as it has evolved over time, or Darwin's theory, imperfect but sufficient for people who would rather close their minds than examine the entire issue?

Carry on.




If I were to see snow in July, would that be global cooling?

Leading climate doomsayer Michael Mann recently downplayed the importance of climate change science, telling Democrats that data and models “increasingly are unnecessary” because the impact is obvious.

And now, cool off with facts about gelato:

Although we don’t know the exact origins of gelato, ancient peoples in China and Egypt added fruit and salt to snow to make a primitive cold dessert. Ancient Roman emperors reportedly ate similar desserts, and this type of dessert is one of the myriad of culinary inventions that Catherine de' Medici is credited (rightly or wrongly) with bringing from Florence to Paris upon her 1533 marriage to the future King of France. But the lack of milk (Italians had used water instead) meant that early gelato more closely resembled sorbetto (a.k.a. sorbet).

(Merci beaucoup)

Canada Week: The Metal Woodwind Instrument

How is everyone's Shark Week going?

Your summer reading.



Only one in four Canadians support NAFTA:

Only a quarter of Canadians polled say NAFTA has benefitted Canada– roughly the same portion, at 26 per cent, as those who say the deal has hurt the country, according to a new public opinion poll from the Angus Reid Institute. ...

The Canadian government says it has unequivocally benefited from NAFTA. Its foreign affairs website shows total Canada-US merchandise trade more than doubled between 1993 and 2014, while trade with Mexico jumped over sevenfold. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told CNBC in March that “trade is ultimately good, not just for our countries, but for our businesses and our workers” and said reopening NAFTA, a Trump promise, was not a “real issue.”

But Canadians have a mixed view, with 34 per cent saying the deal should be renegotiated, according to the poll. The most likely to favour renegotiation are Canadians 55 and older, the poll states, with 46 per cent of men and 44 per cent of women in that age range choosing this option. Young Canadians, meanwhile, are largely unsure.

Kurl said there was a high level of ambivalence or lack of awareness of NAFTA and its complexities. “Canadians are not particularly engaged,” she said. “Is this a condemnation of the trade deal, or is this kind of a shrugging of shoulders?”

The poll also asked Canadians what their priorities were for the summit. The issue of NAFTA itself and other trade issues topped the list at 20 per cent, with security issues winning another 20 per cent. Climate change was next at 17 per cent, while immigration and border controls were down the list at only nine per cent.

However, when the poll whether Canadians supported removing their country’s visa on Mexicans, respondents were divided. Just over a third of Canadians, 36 per cent, support lifting the visa, while 37 opposed the idea and another 27 per cent were unsure.

If Canadians don't like NAFTA, they are not going to like removing visa restrictions, which the Canadian government has promised to do.




Sarah Palin criticised Obamacare's panel for treating or not treating elderly patients and was ultimately proven right. Her commentary on appointed (not elected) officials in Brussels in a world that still hasn't defunded the UN isn't that outlandish:

On Friday, the former Alaskan governor and 2008 vice presidential candidate congratulated the “smart Brits,” likening the June referendum to the Declaration of Independence. After all, as she noted in a Facebook post, the citizens of the U.K. may have avoided nothing less than the end of the world.

Palin, a Donald Trump supporter, applauded the Leave voters for outfoxing “globalists” who would bring about an “apocalyptic One World Government,” she wrote on Facebook. That is because the European Union, in her words, is a “One World Government mini-me.”

Or Duterte can just wait for China to finish off the Philippines:

The Philippine president-elect said Monday he would aggressively promote artificial birth control in the country even at the risk of getting in a fight with the dominant Catholic church, which staunchly opposes the use of contraceptives.

Yeah, whatever, tough guy.


Also - we can't all be Antonin Scalia:

On Monday, the Supreme Court struck down a set of Texas restrictions that shuttered half the state’s abortion providers, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg used her concurring opinion to blast a key argument for the state’s tighter regulations — that terminating a pregnancy in a clinic is dangerous.

What a moron.

How the hell did someone like her get to sit on the Supreme Court?

Oh, heavens to Betsy:

As one researcher noted, “[m]any state health departments are able to obtain only incomplete data from abortion providers, and in some states, only 40 to 50 percent of abortions are reported.”

Likewise, the count of maternal deaths from abortion is based on death certificates, but medical studies have documented the inaccuracy of death certificates. As researchers have noted, abortions “cannot be linked to other sources of health data such as birth or death certificates, thereby making precise calculation of mortality rates or subsequent birth outcomes impossible.”

Consequently, the assertion that “abortion is safer than childbirth” is completely untenable. It’s based on a comparison of the official published abortion mortality rate (approximately 0.6 deaths per 100,000 abortions) and the official published childbirth mortality rate (approximately 6 deaths per 100,000 births). This comparison is completely misleading. A former director of the CDC, Dr. Julie Gerberding, acknowledged that the two rates are measured differently and should not be compared.
In contrast, most states link birth and death certificates, which means that childbirth deaths are more accurately monitored. The count of abortion deaths only includes direct deaths, while the count of childbirth deaths includes direct and indirect deaths (like homicides and suicides while pregnant), thereby inflating the childbirth death count.

The national system for counting childbirth deaths is thorough and long-standing, while there is no national system for counting abortion deaths based on legally mandated reporting. A handful of undiscovered abortion deaths in any state would affect the abortion morality rate significantly. In June 2011, for example, the Chicago Tribune reported that six abortion deaths and 4,000 injuries in Illinois abortion clinics had never been reported to the Illinois Department of Health.

In contrast to the United States’ dysfunctional system, there is a growing body of international, peer-reviewed medical studies from dozens of countries finding long-term increased risks to women from abortion. Maternal mortality studies from Scandinavian countries with superior abortion record keeping collection and reporting systems have found a higher rate of abortion mortality than childbirth mortality. Similarly, recent studies from Ireland, Mexican states and Chile — which prohibit abortion — have found positive women’s health trends despite the legal prohibition of abortion, including a study from Mexico published in February in the British Medical Journal Open.

Alright- who did the pollsters ask?

Almost eight years after electing a black president, vast majorities of blacks and Hispanics think President Barack Obama at least tried to make race relations in the United States better, according to a poll released Monday.

Stick a fork in the US. It's done.




A story that disappeared as quickly as a case of bullying and a disappeared newspaper article did:

One of the primary things I was taught in journalism school is to never assume you know the truth about any given incident unless you witnessed it with your own eyes. But police are not denying that a sexual assault occurred, nor are they denying that the trio of males aged 14, 10, and 7 hailing from Sudan and Iraq were involved in filming an incident wherein an allegedly mentally disabled five-year-old white girl was found naked and covered in urine. ...

The most telling phrase in the entire sickening brouhaha comes from the landlord who evicted the families of the alleged perps from the apartment complex in question:

[The] events of recent days have focused our collective attention on the complexities of living in a culturally diverse society.

This, then, is the essence of multiculturalism: A trio of underage presumed refugees from Islamic countries strip a five-year-old white girl naked and film it while peeing in her mouth. In response, ideologues from all sides warp the narrative to suit their emotional needs.

 

If distorting or inventing facts around an actual incident is disgusting, what would one call sweeping the entire incident under the rug and then projecting a paper-thin facade of political multiculturalism?

And now, happy accidents:

In 2009, Mas Subramanian, a materials science professor at Oregon State University, was running experiments designed to create new materials for electronics. During those tests, he and his team hit on a more unexpected creation in the form of a vibrant new color. Called YInMn blue, the pigment will finally be available to artists and manufacturers later this year through an agreement with the Ohio-based Shepherd Color Company ...

Canada Week: Sunday Post

 
Stand for the national anthem before the Liberals trot out someone else who will get rid of it completely.




Speaking of stamping out countries...

Still smarting over the vote to leave the European Union (one can thank the functionally illiterate Millennials for that), the drive for a new vote may have found some steam:

An online petition seeking a second referendum on a British exit from the Europe Union has drawn more than 1.6 million names, a measure of the extraordinary divisiveness of Thursday's vote to leave the 28-nation bloc.

Yes, about that:

Most people do NOT want a second Brexit referendum despite more than two million people signing a petition calling for one, a Sunday Mirror and Sunday People survey has revealed.

Half of all Brits said they believe the result of Thursdays EU referendum should stay and the UK should leave.

In a poll of 1,069 British adults aged 18 and over taken yesterday, just 39% said they felt a second referendum should be held.

The truth is that the EU did not work. Now, it is very possible that other countries will follow suit and who could blame them? Appointed officials in Brussels deciding other countries' every move cannot be better than open agreements on travel and trade.




Speaking of trade:

Britain's high commissioner is open to signing a free trade deal with Canada now that the United Kingdom has opted out of the European Union.

Howard Drake said Britain will go it alone on trade agreements after the Brexit vote, adding the U.K. will not cease to be a trading nation after it pulls out of the EU.

Look - if we don't want the Americans coming here, you're not welcome, either:

When elections don’t go a certain way in the U.S., many voters inevitably utter the slogan, “I’m moving to Canada.”

Britons on social media also took up the refrain after the result of the U.K. referendum became clear last night.

 
You lost, "Remain" Britons. Deal with it.




A real leader criticises PM Trulander for butting into something he cannot possibly comprehend:

In an interview with The Globe and Mail, Nigel Farage, the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party, also took a shot at Canada’s Mark Carney, saying the Bank of England Governor may have to resign for becoming too partisan during the campaign, which ended with 52 per cent of Britons voting to leave the EU last week.

“I’m afraid that the whole international political community rallied to Mr. Cameron and the status quo,” Mr. Farage said in an interview on Sunday referring to Mr. Trudeau who was one of many world leaders who supported Britain staying in the EU.

He added that Mr. Trudeau would have never endorsed Canadians giving up similar powers under the North American Free Trade Agreement.

“I mean I’d love the Canadian prime minister to tell you guys that you’ve decided to make Nafta a political union, and that you are going to transfer all Ottawa’s authority to someone else, that you are going to have foreign courts overruling you,” he said. “How long would you last? A day? A week? And yet that’s what the Canadian prime minister was effectively recommending to us. I wonder sometimes whether foreign leaders genuinely understand what the European Union is.”

What Trudeau lacks in competence and class he makes up for in arrogance. Having been raised in affluence and under the occasional wing of a philandering communist who did not move Canada into the direction of republicanism but away from Britain, Trudeau finds it easier to react than to understand why over fifty percent of British voters might want to leave (what cannot be stressed enough) a failed experiment.

What would his anti-British father say?

Should Sweden and Denmark vote to leave the European Union, will PM Trulander pout some more?


Also:

Nepalese government officials are seeking answers as anger grows over the deaths of 13 Nepali guards who worked for the Canadian embassy in Kabul and were shuttled back and forth in one of the most dangerous cities in the world in an unprotected minibus.

Please, Nepal. Look who runs Canada now. The man has mittens sewn into his clothes. He believes that killing terrorists makes them win, I swear to God.




While everyone was deathly worried about what Brexit might mean, Fallujah was liberated from ISIS:

A senior Iraqi commander said the city of Fallujah was “fully liberated” from ISIL on Sunday, after a more than monthlong military operation.

Iraqi troops have entered the northwestern al-Julan neighbourhood, the last area of Fallujah to remain under ISIL control, the head of the counterterrorism forces in the operation, Lt. Gen. Abdul-Wahab al-Saadi, told The Associated Press.

Al-Saadi said the operation, which began in late May, “is done and the city is fully liberated.” The Iraqi army was backed by U.S.-led airstrikes and paramilitary troops, mostly Shiite militias.

“From the centre of al-Julan neighbourhood, we congratulate the Iraqi people and the commander in chief…and declare that the Fallujah fight is over,” he told Iraqi state TV, flanked by military officers and soldiers. Some of the soldiers were shooting in the air, chanting and waving the Iraqi flag.

Oh, dear:

A documentary on the life of a North Korean girl and her family has unintentionally exposed the secret inner workings of the country after outtakes of the film was smuggled out.

‘Under the Sun’ was supposed to be a propaganda film about a young girl happily growing up in the Kim Jong-un’s childrens’ union.

In snippets of the documentary, the girl, Ri Zin Mi, can be seen practising for festivals in tribute to former leader Kim Jong-il as well as at school, home and her parents’ work.

However, as the film crew and its Russian director, Vitaly Mansky, quickly discovered what they were being asked to film was all an illusion -the young girl became part of the North Korean system in front of their eyes.

“It was completely fake,” the film’s producer Simone Baumann told CNN.

“They would come to the scene, and would tell the people what they had to do, where they have to sit, how they have to sit, how they have to smile, they would tell them what they have to say.”

In the vision, the young girl can be seen being tucked up into bed by a group of her minders, while in other scenes thousands of flowers put on a stadium stage to mark festivities were soon after collected and put into bins.

The filmmakers also captured a group of North Koreans appearing to push a bus along a road and children shivering in classrooms.

While the North Korean authorities ultimately scrapped the original project after viewing the outtakes, a camerawoman copied everything filmed and kept it on two memory cards.

“The camerawoman is very brave. She put (the memory card) in her trousers when she went to the toilet. They gave one of them (the cards) to the North Koreans, and the second one they took with them,” Ms Baumann said.

After leaving North Korea the filmmakers decided to use the footage to create their own behind-the-scenes project. ‘Under the Sun’ debuts at US and European film festivals this month.

That must be embarrassing for the North Korean propaganda department. They still labour under the misconception that no one knows that North Korea is a Third World craphole headed by the only fat man in their country.



Why Ted Cruz should still be running for president:

Sen. Ted Cruz is calling out the Obama administration for its plan to “give away control of the internet to foreign countries.”

President Barack Obama’s administration is working to hand over management of names and IP addresses to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a global stakeholder group that includes countries like Russia, Iran and China — who don’t recognize the U.S.’s First Amendment.

Well, this must be embarrassing:

Sara Farsakh created quite a stir last month when she and her friends filed a lawsuit against a California restaurant, Urth Caffe in Laguna Beach, claiming the establishment discriminated against them because they’re Muslims.

Urth Caffe policy limits diners to 45 minutes at high-demand tables during busy hours; Farsakh and her friends — who were wearing Muslim headscarfs — were asked to leave their table. ...

But after their lawsuit was filed, Urth Caffe indicated it planned on countersuing — and it has made good on that promise.

Attorney David Yerushalmi of the American Freedom Law Center, which represents Urth Caffe, told LawNewz the co-owner of the restaurant, Jilla Berkman, is Muslim and many of her customers are Muslim or Arab.

“This lawsuit claiming religious discrimination is a fraud and a hoax on the courts and the media,” Yershalmi told LawNewz in a statement. “It is nothing short of an abuse of process to extort public apologies and other accommodations from my client, Urth Caffe.”

Yerushalmi noted in a court document filed Wednesday that there was “an underlying agenda for this litigation that has nothing to do with justice,” LawNewz reported, adding that Yerushalmi characterized Farsakh as a college-aged activist who “self-promotes her involvement in radical organizations.”

And now,  dips.

It's Sunday. Eat outside.