For A Monday

Ah, the waning days of summer...



A merry Jan Sobieski Day to all y'all.  Without him, there would be no Chopin, Joseph Conrad, Marie Curie, Karol Wojtyla or Europe.

We know this guy.

You're welcome, world.





It's 2016 and that is why women sit away from the men:

Yes, the Liberals are very clear on women knowing their place.






The Ontario Liberals promise (read: lie) to remove HST from staggeringly high hydro bills and offer more day-care places for women forced to work to pay for those hydro bills:

Promises to knock the provincial sales tax off electricity bills and create 100,000 new child care spaces anchored the Ontario government’s throne speech delivered Monday — pocketbook pitches intended to life the governing Liberals fortunes.

Also: alright, who did you vote for?

Annette Riley dreads opening her hydro bill each month, afraid it means she will have trouble putting food on the table for her two kids.

She's one of thousands in Windsor-Essex — and across Ontario — who say they can't cope with hydro costs in the province.

"It's a struggle every day," Riley said. "I just dread getting the hydro bill in the mail every month. I just get caught up and then I have another bill I need to pay. I just try to get ahead and I can't."

Canada's unemployment rate stands at seven percent.

Canada may make it easier for temporary foreign workers to get permanent residency and eventual citizenship, Immigration Minister John McCallum said on Sunday.

This is the government people voted for.


The one you voted against:

There are lessons for all political leaders, at all levels of government, in these speeches today. Politics was his calling, craft and profession. And he was a master. Despite the ups and downs of his career and the all too frequent moments when Canadian unity was tested, Sir Wilfrid Laurier never lost his faith in Canada and her peoples.

Harper actually wrote that. No one helped him and no adoring popular press fawned over his simple praise.

But, hey! Who needs a literate prime minister anyway?


After all, literacy and critical thinking sooner rock a boat that will be pitched on her side in good time:

There have been rare moments of clarity since 9/11. One of them took place 10 years ago, when, on Sept. 12, 2006, Pope Benedict XVI delivered a magisterial address at the University of Regensburg. It was there that, as professor Joseph Ratzinger, he had begun a lifetime of examining the relationship of faith and reason: reason purifies faith of superstition and fanaticism, and faith broadens the horizons of reason to address the most fundamental questions of life. In the course of that lecture, which was mostly occupied with the loss of confidence in reason in Western thought, Benedict addressed the combustible issue of Islamic violence. Combustible issues are, well, combustible, and in response, the streets of various Muslim cities were inflamed.

Yet Benedict’s address brought more light than heat. He acknowledged that jihadi terrorists were making a theological claim: that somehow the violence they visited on their targets — Muslims first, but also Christians, Jews and often victims chosen indiscriminately — was pleasing to God and in accord with the divine will. Jihadist violence, Benedict recognized, was not an exclusively religious phenomenon, or even a principally religious phenomenon. But it was, at least in part, a religious phenomenon and therefore it required, in part, a religious response.

Benedict asked whether religious violence had its origin in our understanding of God. If God is pure power, a sovereign will to which we must submit, then it is possible that he could command anything, even violence in the name of faith. Contrariwise, if God is not only will, but also truth, then what he commands must be in accord with reason. Therefore, it would be contrary to God’s will to spread the faith by violence, as faith must always be a free act. In his Regensburg address, Benedict traced how this had been worked out over centuries in Christianity, with both successes and setbacks, and suggested that the Muslim world had a similar task before it.

After the easily inflamed had moved on to other supposed provocations, the response to Regensburg was gratifying from many leading Muslim scholars, more than 100 of whom took up the conversation with Benedict by means of an open letter. Even more remarkable was the fact that king Abdullah of Saudi Arabia made an unprecedented visit to Benedict at the Vatican the following year and, in 2008, hosted an inter-religious meeting that included Christians and Jews. Given that such a remarkable meeting would be illegal in Saudi Arabia, the king arranged for it to be hosted by the Spanish crown at the royal palace in Madrid. ...

However, some key voices reject the premise that there is a theological dimension to jihadist violence at all. U.S. President Barack Obama has refused to concede that Islamist violence — even the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq & the Levant — has anything to do with Islam, even in part. It’s an odd line of argument — that the causes of Islamist violence are to be found in radical politics, nationalism, economic stagnation, foreign domination, in everything but the most deeply held convictions rooted in religion.

Pope Francis is closer to the Obama line than that of Benedict, also arguing that there is no distinctively Islamic dimension to jihadism. Fifteen years after 9/11, the scourge of jihadist terror has encircled the globe. But 10 years after his speech at Regensburg, Benedict’s arguments still need a wider hearing, even in Rome.

Because Rex Murphy:

Trudeau has the gift of turning truisms into life-rafts. Who else could find political buoyancy in the puckish outburst of “it’s 2015.” Or the amusingly Liberal self-regarding “Canada is back.” Or the zesty gush of “it’s not who we are as Canadians.” The prime minister’s mind is a hospice for terminally exhausted platitudes and cliches on life-support. These and similar nuggets of Trudeauian wisdom give glibness a bad name.

Even Hillary Clinton's health doesn't want her to be the president:

Hillary Clinton falling ill Sunday morning at a memorial service on the 15th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks will catapult questions about her health from the ranks of conservative conspiracy theory to perhaps the central debate in the presidential race over the coming days.

It is only a conspiracy if one had not noticed her declining health. How long has she been suffering the flu anyway?





Wasn't I saying?

President Obama is expected to veto a bill Congress approved without objection that would allow families of the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to sue the Saudi Arabian government, a White House spokesman said Monday.

Also:

A moment of silence remembering the September 11 victims at a Pentagon memorial service began early in order to accommodate a restless President Obama, a Department of Defense official told The Daily Caller.

There is your president, Americans. Petty and awful in every respect.






I find this doubtful:

South Korea has already developed a plan to annihilate the North Korean capital of Pyongyang through intensive bombing in case the North shows any signs of a nuclear attack, a military source in Seoul said Sunday.

“Every Pyongyang district, particularly where the North Korean leadership is possibly hidden, will be completely destroyed by ballistic missiles and high-explosive shells as soon as the North shows any signs of using a nuclear weapon. In other words, the North’s capital city will be reduced to ashes and removed from the map,” the source said.

China would never allow South Korea to vapourise the capital of its vassal state. South Korea would have tried that before had China not been so supportive before, during and after the war that divided the one Korea.





And now, the nurse on the receiving end of a celebratory kiss on V-J Day has passed away:

(Sidebar: by the way, "iconic" is a word so over-used by the intellectually lazy popular press that it has almost completely lost its meaning.)

The woman dramatically kissed by a sailor celebrating the end of World War II in Times Square in an iconic photograph seen around the world has died. She was 92. Greta Zimmer Friedman’s son says his mother died Thursday at a Richmond, Va., hospital of what he called complications from old age.

(Merci to all)