Monday, October 31, 2016

Monday Post



Merry Halloween!



Results!

I’m pleased to announce that The Rebel is expanding coverage of the United Nations.

We’re going to send a team of four reporters to another UN conference — their nanny state conference being held next month in New Delhi, India.



Frustrated at not being able to limit where people can purchase alcohol, medical wags warn about possible cancer risks that strangely went un-uttered when the LCBO was running things:

As grocery stores across Ontario begin stocking their shelves with beer and wine, the province's cancer agency is raising a red flag about the risks of alcohol consumption, warning increased access could also come with increased rates of the disease.

Dr. Linda Rabeneck, vice-president of prevention and cancer control with Cancer Care Ontario, warns that while the sale of wine in several grocery chains may be convenient, alcohol remains a cancer-causing carcinogen. Since research shows that the more access to alcohol you have, the more you consume, the cancer agency is concerned that will mean cancer rates won't be far behind.

The warning comes as 70 grocery stores across the province move to make wine available on store shelves as part of a plan to eventually allow 300 stores to do the same. Beer and cider will eventually be sold in up to 450 stores across the province.



Oh, heaven's to Betsy! The throwing under the bus is in progress:

Huma Abedin, the trusted aide at the centre of the Hillary Clinton email storm, spent the weekend holed up at her New York apartment, far from her troubled boss.

Speculation mounted that Clinton would be forced to sack Abedin or at least distance herself from her long-standing confidante in order to quell the storm surrounding the latest episode of the email scandal.



 
Of all the things that could affect the aboriginal community - living in northern ghettos where educational and professional opportunities are so few and let's not forget unaccountable band chiefs - the most pressing thing is Halloween costumes:



Really?

Well, the joke is on these morons because they're out $1500.


Also:

In fiscal 2015, indigenous affairs let more than $1 billion go unspent. The money it gave back represented 11 per cent of the more than $8 billion it had been given by Parliament to improve the lives of indigenous Canadians. The department has said the bulk of previous lapses were the result of land claims that did not get resolved in a given budget year.



In other crybaby news:

The latest harassment comes after student organizers of the upcoming talk by scholar Christina Hoff Sommers put up roughly 50 flyers promoting the event on four different campus buildings at Columbia University and Barnard College earlier this month. Nearly all were torn down within 24 hours.

Since then, the organizers replaced the originals, posting roughly 75 flyers throughout the Columbia and Barnard campuses. That prompted another series of bizarre reactions from peers.

Five or six flyers at Barnard College have had Sommers’ face torn or clawed off, while several other flyers were re-posted upside down in other parts of Barnard’s campus.

Later, in Lerner Hall on Columbia’s campus, two young women lurked and took pictures of student organizers as they posted the flyers, they told The Fix.

Toni Airkasinen, one of the students organizing the event, was putting up flyers in John Jay Hall on Columbia’s campus when a female student came up to her and threw a cup of cereal and pretzels at her feet, she said. The student then slowly walked away. In response, she states, “I made eye contact with her once, but was too freaked out to say anything.”


(Merci)




And now, frightening photos and the stories behind them. Enjoy.



Sunday, October 30, 2016

That's A Lot of Zeroes

Oh, heaven's to Betsy!

As federal agents prepare to scour roughly 650,000 emails to see how many relate to a prior probe of Hillary Clinton’s email use, the surprise disclosure that investigators were pursuing the potential new evidence lays bare building tensions inside the bureau and the Justice Department over how to investigate the Democratic presidential nominee.

Metadata found on the laptop used by former Rep. Anthony Weiner and his estranged wife Huma Abedin, a close Clinton aide, suggests there may be thousands of emails sent to or from the private server that Mrs. Clinton used while she was secretary of state, according to people familiar with the matter. It will take weeks, at a minimum, to determine whether those messages are work-related from the time Ms. Abedin served with Mrs. Clinton at the State Department; how many are duplicates of emails already reviewed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and whether they include either classified information or important new evidence in the Clinton email probe.

The FBI has had to await a court order to begin reviewing the emails, because they were uncovered in an unrelated probe of Mr. Weiner

The new investigative effort, disclosed by FBI Director James Comey on Friday, shows a bureau at times in sharp internal disagreement over matters related to the Clintons, and how to handle those matters fairly and carefully in the middle of a national election campaign. Even as the previous probe of Mrs. Clinton’s email use wound down in July, internal disagreements within the bureau and the Justice Department surrounding the Clintons’ family philanthropy heated up, according to people familiar with the matter.

What is shows is that (a) Hillary Clinton is unbelievably corrupt and (b) that the powers-that-be are slogging through this for appearance's sake, hoping to get as little done before the election.

That's not what you're paid for, fellas.



Also:

Nadia Murad had tears in her eyes as she described the power that individual MPs can have when they stand up to vote.

A few minutes earlier, she had watched 313 MPs vote unanimously in favour of a Conservative motion to recognize that the violence perpetrated by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant against the Yazidis constitutes genocide — and commit to providing asylum to women and girls from the persecuted minority group within 120 days.

Speaking through an interpreter last week, Murad — a 23-year-old Yazidi activist who had escaped sexual slavery by the Islamic militant group after they raided her village in northern Iraq — told reporters she felt ISIL losing power with every MP who stood up to vote for the motion. ...

(Sidebar: I would like to take this time to remind one that the Trudeau government not only called prioritising groups like the Yazidis "disgusting" but that they refused to call what was happening to the Yazidis genocide.)

Conservative MP Michelle Rempel, the immigration critic who had put forward the opposition day motion, was one of them.

For months, the Liberals had skirted her increasingly loud calls for asylum, saying they were concerned about the level of danger in Iraq and the need to work with the UN Nations High Commission on Refugees, which refers refugees for resettlement. But last week, the Liberals, Conservatives and NDP were all on the same side, backing Rempel’s motion.

“It was one of those things where it renewed my faith that Parliament can do something that resembles work,” the Calgary MP said of how she brought everyone onside. ...

(Sidebar: oh, I'm still not sold on the idea that the Parliament is a force for good. Miss Rempel.)

Rempel remembers first hearing about the plight of the Yazidis two years ago after ISIL captured the town of Sinjar in northern Iraq, forcing nearly 50,000 people to flee to a mountaintop where they were under siege for weeks.

(Sidebar: this prompted Trudeau to suggest that children fleeing ISIS needed parkas as opposed to solid action that would have prevented them from running in the first place.)

Advocacy groups pushing the Liberal government to bring Yazidis to safety in Canada have argued they had been forgotten in the efforts to make good on their promise to welcome 25,000 Syrian refugees.
Motivated in part by the mounting frustration of the Yazidi community and their supporters, Rempel convinced her Conservative colleagues to use a rare opposition day to put forward a motion on the issue.

Rempel said she then reached out to a handful of unnamed Liberal MPs she thought might be sympathetic, to see if they could suss out the likelihood of getting government support for the motion. But she said they came back with the impression it was not going to fly. ...

Meanwhile, Rempel had some quiet — and some not-so-quiet — support from Liberal MP Borys Wrzesnewskyj, who had been one of four Liberals to break ranks and vote in favour of a failed Conservative motion in June declaring the atrocities committed by ISIL to be a genocide.

(Sidebar: all four of them?) 



(Merci beaucoup)


Sunday Post



On this eve of All Hallow's Eve...



Italy is once again rocked by a series of earthquakes:


Another powerful earthquake shook Italy on Sunday, sending panicked people running into piazzas, raining boulders onto highways and toppling a Benedictine cathedral and other historic edifices that had withstood several recent quakes. There were no immediate reports of deaths.

With a preliminary magnitude of 6.6, it was the strongest earthquake to strike the country in nearly 36 years. People throughout the mountainous region northeast of Rome were still on edge after a pair of jolts last week and an August quake that killed nearly 300.

That there were no reports of fatalities was largely due to the fact that thousands had left their homes for shelters and hotels after the earlier temblors, and that large swaths of inhabited areas had been closed for safety reasons.




PM Hair-Boy signs a trade agreement with an organisation that is so pointless that people are trying to leave it:

Trudeau had initially expected to sign the deal in Brussels days ago, but the restive Belgian region of Wallonia nearly killed it because its opposition to the pact’s investor-state dispute settlement mechanism gave it a veto under Belgium’s complicated constitution.

After seven arduous years of negotiation, Trudeau joined presidents of the European Council and European Commission, Donald Tusk and Jean-Claude Juncker, and signed the massive 1,600-page pact and its accompanying strategic partnership agreement

Smoke and mirrors. It looks like PM Hair-Boy is doing something important. Instead of making a deal with the newly-existed UK, Canada (read: one segment of Canada) pursued an agreement with the slowly fragmenting EU.

What happens to the agreement if the EU crumbles?





The big problem is that no party is trustworthy enough to secure Canadians' rights and security:

Most concerning is the provision that changed CSIS from a strictly intelligence-gathering service to one with an offensive remit to physically disrupt real or perceived threats. These include not just terrorism, but threats to economic and financial stability, critical infrastructure and the security of other states.

The Liberals have vowed to rein in the disruption power, but have yet to say how. As the law now stands, if a threat disruption activity (TRA) will violate Criminal Code or Charter of Rights & Freedom rights, CSIS must first secure a Federal Court warrant authorizing the breach. 

Some experts argue this judicial control will act as oversight on the potentially dangerous, but important new law-breaking  power, one which CSIS has yet to use. (If a TRA does not violate the law or the charter – and stops short of death, bodily harm, obstruction of justice and sexual impropriety — no judicial approval is needed.)

But because the proposed committee will be a review body with no capability for anything close to real-time “oversight,”  its ability to assess the legality, efficacy and reasonableness of CSIS TRAs will be a post-mortem effort, at best.



 
Environment Minister Catherine McKenna is open for a photo shoot but not for a discussion:

McKenna sent a new invitation to potential delegates including to Ed Fast, the former international trade minister and Conservative MP, who is now the Official Opposition Critic to McKenna. You can read it below but in it, McKenna notes that there was never any intention to prevent Fast or other delegates from speaking to the media. “I understand that the media plays an important role in communicating to Canadians on such important issues as climate change,” McKenna writes.

Nonetheless, she tells Fast that he will be receiving an amended version of a “Canadian Delegation Agreement” — a new set of terms he will have to agree to if he chooses to accept the invitation to join McKenna’s delegation. (The government will cover up to $4,500 in travel and accommodation costs for those in the official delegation)

Fast, in an e-mailed response sent to McKenna’s office late Friday afternoon, notes that he did not sign any such agreement as a condition of his being part of the delegation to last year’s COP21 conference and “I have absolutely no intention of signing any document that governs my participation at COP22.”

Fast, incidentally, had not, at the time of this exchange, been provided with the amended “Canadian Delegation Agreement” so we don’t know what the new conditions are. But for Fast, it’s the principle of the idea.  “Certainly no MP should be required to submit to the authority of the Head of Delegation or have their discretion fettered,” he writes, concluding with some advice for the minister. “May I respectfully make a suggestion? Drop it. A Participant Agreement is unnecessary.”




 Because Rex Murphy:

Just who is “unsafe” here? Peterson himself, of course. When bravely and openly he went public to argue his case, a mob surrounded him, threatened him, drowned out his words with a “white noise” machine, and subjected him to a barrage of insults, slanders and pure insolence.

Were I a president of a university, and it sent out a letter of this intellectual fragility and insidious threat under the university’s imprimatur, I would see it expunged instantly, or resign for fear of disgrace by association. And were I a president, and a mob of hostile, anti-intellectual bullies harassed and threatened a professor on my campus, either the members of the mob would go, or I would. It should be as clear as that.

The older, raw, honest tyrannies told people what not to speak. But the new, wilier versions, midwifed by our famous human rights overseers, are proposing to insist on what we must speak. Here be the new axioms of our day: we own your pronouns, use no others. “He” and “she” are assault words. Freedom of speech is the life-raft flotsam of gurgling obscurantists and bigots going down for the last time.

Prof. Jordan Peterson is a brave man. Better, he is an actual, a real, university professor. May his stamina and courage hold. Parents, send your children to his classes.





Shamed into acting, the Liberals will do what they do best - lie and pretend that they intended to help the Yazidis all along:

Immigration Minister John McCallum tried to head off the embarrassment on Monday by affirming that he was committed to the Conservative motion. His officials had been poking around Iraqi Kurdistan scoping out the scene, Yazidi refugees will now be a Canadian priority, and some yet-to-be-determined number of Yazidi refugees would be brought to Canada over the next four months. During House committee meetings this past summer, the number of Yazidi refugees admitted to Canada was guesstimated by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada officials at nine. McCallum came off, at best, as an unserious person. ...

The Yazidis are an ancient religious minority of about 700,000 people, targeted for extermination by the so-called Islamic State in the autumn of 2014. The landscape of the Yazidi homelands in the Shingal Mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan is now pockmarked with the mass graves of Yazidi men. Yazidi women and girls have been enslaved by the thousands, subjected to rape and torture, forced abortions and innumerable unspeakable obscenities. Thousands of Yazidi women have escaped the jihadist nightmare, but most cower as “internally displaced persons” in Iraq, beyond the reach of the UN refugee system. More than 1,000 of the women have been taken in by Germany. Other than that, they are pretty well friendless.

The excuses persist, even this week. “It is not easy to bring the Yazidis here from the places where they are,” McCallum explained. ...

The Trudeau government and the senior bureaucrats with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, have treated the Yazidi genocide as less of a first-order humanitarian emergency and more of an inconvenience. They clutter up the Liberals’ “Canada is back” story and all its attendant preening about the 30,000 Syrian refugees who have made their way to Canada by way of an orderly UN process from refugee camps and processing centres mainly in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. ...

For one thing, last June, Prime Minister Trudeau and Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion humiliated themselves by refusing to endorse a motion tabled by interim Conservative leader Rona Ambrose condemning the atrocities committed by the Islamic State against the Yazidis as genocide. 

Trudeau and Dion insisted it was up to the UN to decide. Within days, in a grim and voluminous investigation report, the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights confirmed what anyone vaguely familiar with the Yazidi suffering had known for nearly two years: the Yazidis were being subjected to a barbarism that clearly surpassed the threshold of the United Nations 1948 Genocide Convention. Dion’s response: it makes no difference. We’re not changing a thing.

Then there’s the rather embarrassing business of the Liberals who were happy to attribute the former Conservative government’s several awkward attempts to establish a refugee priority for persecuted religious minorities from the region to the Harper government’s “Islamophobia.”
 




Will Obama insult Israel before he leaves office? Previous spite says yes:

Before the election, Obama dare not attempt this final legacy item, to go along with the Iran deal and the Castro conciliation, for fear of damaging Hillary Clinton. His last opportunity comes after election day. The one person who might deter him, points out Hannah, is Clinton herself, by committing Obama to do nothing before he leaves office that would tie her hands should she become president.

After the election,  Obama's apathy comes into full swing.





Oh, heaven's to Betsy! Things just get worse for Hillary Clinton:

Hillary Clinton’s campaign lashed out at the FBI on Saturday, saying there was no indication that a cache of recently discovered emails under review by the agency was connected to the Democratic nominee. 

**

The presidential campaign was rocked on Friday after federal law enforcement officials said that emails pertinent to the closed investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server were discovered on a computer belonging to Anthony D. Weiner, the estranged husband of a top Clinton aide.

Oh, dear...


Also:

Long story short, the Department of Justice can very well affect who our next President is. If they move swiftly to indict, or if Clinton believes she’s in trouble, she could drop out before November 8. Alternatively, if an indictment comes soon after Clinton wins the election, she could still feel pressure to step down before she takes office.





Wynne will remove the useless wind turbines when Hell experiences a blizzard:

But there is a way to reverse Ontario’s downward spiral, likely the only way that avoids a painful and protracted retrenchment — by righting the province’s power sector, the biggest cause by far of its ruin. And there’s only one way to right the power sector — by rethinking Ontario’s Green Energy Act and rewriting the ruinous contracts that are responsible for most of Ontario’s power woes.




If the UN is so appalled at Russia's alleged callousness, why doesn't it just eject Russia from its organisation?

The General Assembly voted Russia off the U.N. Human Rights Council on Friday, a stunning rebuke to the country which is increasingly being accused of war crimes over its actions in Syria.



What does All Hallow's Eve need? More cowbell.



Wednesday, October 26, 2016

Mid-Week Post

Five more shopping days until Halloween...


More strong earthquakes in Italy:

Two strong earthquakes rocked a wide area of central Italy on Wednesday, striking fear among residents rattled by a deadly tremor in August, but there were no reports of casualties.





What is Obama's legacy on the Korean Peninsula? An escalating nuclear crisis that his predecessor has to deal with:

President Obama’s North Korea legacy will be to leave his successor and our allies with an escalating nuclear crisis, a deteriorating humanitarian situation, and possibly a nuclear arms race in Asia. History will eventually rank it alongside the failure of the Green Revolution in Iran, the near-collapse in Iraq, and the Syria fiasco as one of his greatest foreign policy failures. The question now is whether he will leave his successor with the makings of a strategy to stop Kim Jong-un while there’s still time … if there’s still time.

Nope.


In true form, American intelligence chief James Clapper sounded the defeatist alarm and stated that he believes that denuclearising North Korea at this point isn't possible:

“I think the notion of getting the North Koreans to denuclearize is probably a lost cause,” Mr. Clapper said Tuesday in response to a question about whether negotiations with North Korea’s leaders could lead to a suspension of its nuclear and missile activities.

“They are not going to do that,” he said. “That is their ticket to survival.”

I'm sure he meant to say doom.

South Korea's default action is to reunify with the north, not reduce it to radioactive rubble so this paranoid raving about North Korea' s survival in the face of its southern neighbour is absurd.

A Trump administration has no real interest in the Korean Peninsula. It should and should seek to disarm North Korea or it will be the Fifties all over again.


(Kamsahamnida)






Oh, this must be embarrassing:

Sweden and Morocco donated millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton’s State Department approved policy very favourable to their governments, emails released by Wikileaks show.





Боже Мой!

Infighting among Putin’s inner circle has led to a series of disclosures over the past few months that have shined a harsh light on the private dealings of the Kremlin court — much as Hillary Clinton has endured the airing of thousands of e-mails as a result of what the U.S. calls Russian hacking of her campaign.

(Sidebar: what it calls. HA!)

As the Kremlin gears up for Putin’s last re-election bid in 18 months, anti-graft crusader Alexei Navalny has emerged as the conduit of choice for rival factions to scoop dirt on each other as they jostle to retain their fiefdoms.

While Putin has largely stayed above the fray, anonymous tips and research by Navalny’s staff of 30 have led to a string of revelations about the extravagance of some of the Russian leader’s closest allies, including a new luxury home for his premier, army contracts for his personal chef and private-jet travel for the show dogs of a top official.





I'm sure that the French are all over this:

FRANCOIS NASCIMBENI/AFP/Getty Images






Smoke and mirrors:

Ontario’s Liberal government has nixed the idea of using legislation to ban chiefs of staff and other behind-the-scenes political decision makers from attending fundraisers, as they prepare to prohibit politicians from doing the same.

The Liberals have released a list of amendments they are proposing to an election finance reform bill, which they introduced amid criticism over fundraising events that saw cabinet ministers attend private, high-priced functions with stakeholders.

Under the amendments, any members of provincial parliament, party leaders, nomination contestants, candidates and leadership contestants would not be able to attend fundraisers.

They still could attend events where the ticket price only recovers the cost of the hosting it, and could still solicit funds by mail, phone or email.

To offset the impact on constituency associations, the Liberals are proposing subsidies of $25,000 per year, divided among the parties in each riding.

Crooks to the very end.






It's all fun and games at the CBC:

A former human resources executive for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. has filed a wrongful dismissal suit against the broadcaster, alleging that senior HR staff conspired to fire her while she was on medical leave and that CEO Hubert Lacroix breached his duties in refusing to review the matter, according to court documents.
 
The suit is one of at least four pending cases against the CBC alleging wrongful dismissal, and reveals allegations of infighting in the HR department in the months following the revelations that several women had publicly accused former CBC star Jian Ghomeshi of sexual abuse and inappropriate workplace behaviour.





Basic guaranteed income targets the usual spots on the victimhood totem pole:

Some experts say basic income can fix existing holes in the system and will most benefit women in their late 40s and early 50s without dependent children, as well as adults with disabilities. Others say it will have the most impact on youth, allowing them to stay in school longer and become social entrepreneurs.

Yes, about that:

But a basic income is too costly and inefficient to act as a wholesale replacement for welfare. It is feasible only if it is small, and complemented by more targeted anti-poverty measures.

One sees these arguments in Star Trek. With replicators (and who builds, maintains and stocks these replicators?), people are free to be creative, unless the Borg is assimilating them or some other such hindrance.

Therein lies the rub.

Who would work or do anything if he didn't have to? One sees people on welfare who don't move their @$$es unless they need more snacks. Are they bettering themselves somehow? What if the replicators were broken? What if some people would rather live without them?

And there will always be scarcity. There will always be a need to acquire or replace something.

In this universe, basic income costs everyone else.






Maryam Monsef is above answering the questions of mere proles:

Monsef’s staff were essentially pre-emptively answering a question that Malcolm had not asked but which others — Monsef’s detractors, presumably — surely would: Did she have an Iranian passport which listed her place of birth as Iran? Because, of course, if she did have an Iranian passport, a major hole opens in the narrative Monsef and her supporters have used  about her arrival and eventual success in Canada as an Afghan refugee fleeing the Taliban.






B!#ch:

Stubblefield said she had sex with D.J. in 2011 on the floor of her office on the Rutgers campus in Newark. When they finished, she claimed D.J. told her: “I feel alive for the first time in my life.”

It was an incredible assertion.

D.J. likely could not have even have grasped what was happening, much less reciprocated Stubblefield’s feelings.

D.J., now 35, has cerebral palsy. Years before Stubblefield came into his life, a state doctor found that he had the mental capacity of a toddler, unable to carry out “preschool-level tasks,” according to the New York Times. He is five feet tall, non-verbal and can only walk if someone is there to balance him.

Stubblefield, 46, had convinced D.J.’s family that she could help him speak by using “facilitated communication,” a widely-discredited method of teaching people with mental disabilities how to type messages.

It took many months, but D.J.’s mother and brother eventually came to believe it was all a sham.





Because you can't disrespect a human body, let it rot or have one's waterways turn into the Ganges. That's why:

As the practice of cremation grew, so too did a few of the frowned-upon habits. Under the published guidelines, approved by Pope Francis in March, “the ashes of the faithful must be laid to rest in a sacred place.” Such places are mostly limited to cemeteries or certain church areas. “Only in grave and exceptional cases” can loved ones keep ashes in a domestic residence.






For your ghoulish delight, Camille Saint-Saen's, Danse Macabre:




The Remains of the Day

In the waning hours...


It is estimated that over five thousand Yazidis have been killed since PM Trudeau said that Yazidi children fleeing from rape and murder only to collapse from heat stroke and exhaustion needed parkas, that prioritising them for refugee status was "disgusting" and withdrawing from ISIS who regard the Yazidis as devil-worshippers:

With a freed Yazidi sex slave watching from the gallery, the House of Commons voted unanimously Tuesday to acknowledge a genocide against her people and to offer safe haven in Canada to vulnerable women and girls by the end of February.

Nadia Murad, described by the Conservatives as a victim of sex trafficking at the hands of members of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, has been lobbying MPs this week on behalf of her hard-hit fellow Yazidis.

She received an ovation from the House before MPs voted 313-0 to adopt a Conservative motion calling on the Liberal government to help her fellow Yazidis within the next 120 days.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau offered his personal assurance that help is in the offing.
 
And who is left to be saved?

Trudeau is embarrassed, not morally motivated to do this.

He is a piece of sh--.  His party is a piece of sh--.  His voters are pieces of sh--.  They presided over a holocaust (yes, I'm using that word - deal with it) as they have done with any other issue: as fat white gated urbanites and trough-gatherers who care nothing about anyone else.





Watch the train wreck:

“Sir, if you won’t turn and face me when I answer, then I will not answer,” Trudeau said politely but firmly at one point.







 Trudeau then gave the floor to one man who had hollered particularly loudly at him.
But it seems Trudeau was not the object of everyone’s ire.

One particularly angry attendee, a man who said he was  from Chatham, Ont., demanded of Trudeau: “What are you going to do about Kathleen?” as in Kathleen Wynne, the Ontario premier and a Liberal like Trudeau. The Chatham man said high electricity prices in his province were hurting workers.

Trudeau said something about division of powers, which prompted more hollering, including one who yelled, “Sound bites won’t do it.”




Canada is one nation, not several reservations that depend on the rest of society for cash. Those aren't nations. Those are leeches:

It would be unwise for the court to get out ahead of a process which I truly hope will be a process of reconciliation, which will come from nation-to-nation dealings. In a sense, the court should stand a little apart from that, always bearing in mind if a First Nation or some group of indigenous persons wish to vindicate their rights before the court, they have a right to be heard and to receive a remedy where warranted.”


This guy:

The Newfoundland case involved an attack in 1998 in which Jack sexually assaulted the victim with a beer bottle. At the time he was on probation for a previous attack against her. Jack pleaded not guilty but was convicted in 2003. ...

But in spite of those concerns, Appeal Court Justice Malcolm Rowe refused to overturn the original sentence. He noted Jerome Jack had stopped drinking, he had not re-offended and he was now the principal caregiver to his children.





Fatties don't tell me what to eat:

To a leftist activist like Philpott, health is the doorway to everything — to nationalizing whole swaths of the economy. That’s what Obamacare did. But we already have a form of Obamacare in Canada, so this is the next step.

She’s already telegraphing that she intends to treat many food items like cigarettes: Warning labels on foods she doesn’t like. And more taxes, regulations, fines and red tape for farmers and food manufacturers.

Philpott knows nothing about how food is grown or processed or sold. She just knows that she’s a doctor, so she wants to treat the entire population like we’re her patients.

And she’s a liberal, so she wants to treat the entire country’s population like were idiots.





Walking fungus, Samantha Bee, makes some crucial errors, as Mr. Steven Crowder points out:

(Sidebar: not at all safe for work, as they say.)



And then there's this.

And this.

Perhaps Miss Bee can explain what Obama twice voted against.


I bet this kid chaps her @$$:

In a few years, when people ask LynLee Boemer, “what’s your birthday?” she can reply: “Do you mean the first one?”

The little Texas girl was removed from her mother’s womb to have a massive tumour on her tailbone removed in March. She was then returned to the uterus and born again — this time permanently — by caesarean section, on June 6.




Sarah Palin was super-right:

About one-year ago, Gov. Jerry Brown signed the state’s assisted-suicide bill into law. It fully went into effect this June, with the opening of the first clinic. While there is no data on the number of California assisted-suicides, Oregon recorded over 130 last year as part of their legalized physician-assisted death program.

Now, one young mother says her insurance company denied her coverage for chemotherapy treatment after originally agreeing to provide the fiscal support for it, but indicated it would be willing to pay for assisted suicide instead.

"Assisted suicide" is a euphemism for killing people off for their hospital beds and we all know it.





Now that Jack Chick is dead, we can all go to Mass before trick-or-treating.

A Roman Cat-holic who will enjoy Halloween festivities very soon.



(Merci beaucoup to all)



Tuesday, October 25, 2016

In Other News....

When you promise a trough to the financially obese, you had better pony up:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was heckled and jeered as he took questions today at a youth labour forum in Ottawa.

Several dozen delegates at the young workers' summit turned their backs on Trudeau as he spoke while many others held signs reading "Keep the Promise."

As the prime minister took questions, he also criticized the back turners, saying he was disappointed that they appeared unwilling to listen. ...

(Sidebar: shut up, you big baby! Yes, people have the audacity to turn their backs on little, old you.) 

Trudeau was booed when he responded that precarious work — including jobs with no pensions — is now a fact of life.

(Sidebar: says the guy who has never had to work hard his entire life. Such is the existence of a trustifarian.)


Didn't Justin's handlers tell him? Surely they must know that breaking a sweat is bad for his hair?




Speaking of porkies...

A Rhode Island man is about to rue the day he decided to write into a local newspaper to express his disdain for adult women who wear yoga pants in public. Those very women he targeted are now organizing a peaceful protest — a Yoga Pants Parade scheduled to take place this Sunday, right on their grouchy neighbor’s block.
I don't think he will rue the day. In fact, I applaud him for finally calling out the vain, self-important chubbies who have no dress or common sense.

If you can't put on a decent pair of trousers as opposed to yoga or sweat pants or leggings, don't leave the house.



Now, more important things to worry about...

Users of Chinese mobile phones are expected to provide their real names during registration, and the new regulation could have an impact on how North Koreans communicate with their relatives in the South.

It's a noose being tightened.




A nurse is accused to killing eight people:

A nurse in southwestern Ontario killed eight nursing home residents in her care, police alleged Tuesday as they charged the woman with murder.

Investigators say 49-year-old Elizabeth Tracey Mae Wettlaufer of Woodstock, Ont., faces eight counts of first-degree murder in the killings, which they say took place between 2007 and 2014.

"The victims were administered a drug. We're not in a position at this time to comment further on the specifics of the drug as it forms part of the evidence that is now before the courts," said Det. Supt. Dave Truax of the Ontario Provincial Police.



Because Mark Steyn:

When I made my point in the Munk Debate, our opponents, the telly historian Simon Schama and the former UN High Commissioner Louise Arbour, thought it was an opportunity for comedy. Simon reckoned me and Nigel Farage were just "a bit sad" - losers who couldn't get any action and so got turned on by obsessing about migrant rape. This insouciance did not work out well for him.

To accord their response more respect than it merits, Louise and Simon's point was that: sure, there's a bit of child rape here and there, but what's the big deal? It's a relatively small and manageable amount.
It's not, but let that pass. That was my point: "Migrant rights trump women's rights" and "migrant rights trump children's rights" and (in some of the most grisly cases) "migrant rights trump disabled rights".

It's not that there's only three or four - or seven or twelve, or 29 or 97 or 236 or 1,768 - rapes. It's not the "small" number of cases, but the fact that, in a fainthearted age prostrate before the multicultural pieties, these "few" cases are changing us. So that the most eminent jurists in Austria feel obliged to assimilate with their invaders: hey, how was poor old Amir supposed to know the cute l'il moppet wasn't consenting to anal rape?

What motivates the likes of Louise Arbour, Simon Schama or Austrian judges: the absence of a moral standard or  fear of offending a perverted and angry mass?

Discuss.




And now, baking tips everyone can use.

What Would Jesus Do?

Vote for Jesus: a man you can totally trust
If Jesus were running for political office today, would the popular press give the Savior of mankind a break?

These satirical tweets say not:




But Jesus had them pegged ages ago:

Two men went up into the temple to pray: the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican.
The Pharisee standing, prayed thus with himself: O God, I give thee thanks that I am not as the rest of men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, as also is this publican.
I fast twice in a week: I give tithes of all that I possess.
And the publican, standing afar off, would not so much as lift up his eyes towards heaven; but struck his breast, saying: O God, be merciful to me a sinner.
I say to you, this man went down into his house justified rather than the other: because every one that exalteth himself, shall be humbled: and he that humbleth himself, shall be exalted.

It's like JC could smell the stench of leftist virtue-signalling from the first century.



(Merci)


Monday, October 24, 2016

Monday Post





Carbon taxes solve nothing but the government already knows that:

Figures will vary by household and province, but by 2022, when the tax will be a minimum of $50 a tonne, the average Canadian household could face $2,569 in new taxes. This, pro-carbon taxers insist, is necessary to reduce Canada’s carbon emissions. After all, climate change is a global issue. Surely Canadians must do their part to help solve the problem. ...

We can start with the Trudeau government’s carbon emissions target for 2030, which would bring Canada’s total annual emissions down from 748 megatonnes (Mt) this year, to 524 Mt by 2030. Assuming we can meet that target — and that’s a big assumption — Canada’s total annual emissions would drop by 224 Mt.

Now consider the biggest contributor to global carbon emissions: China. In 2014, China’s annual carbon emissions were estimated at 10,540 Mt. China is a very large and rapidly developing country. It understandably wants to focus on raising the living standards of its people. Yet, despite strong economic growth in recent decades, the country still has hundreds of millions of people living in relative poverty, especially when compared to more developed countries like Canada. Accordingly, its climate change commitments are less stringent than Canada’s: China’s existing policy will see annual carbon emissions rise to about 13,600 Mt in 2030.

Its annual emissions will thus increase about 3,060 Mt over this period, which means that by 2030, all Canada’s efforts will be cancelled out by just 27 days’ worth of China’s increased carbon emissions. Remember, this isn’t the worst-case scenario; this is if everything goes according to plan. Even if Canadians nobly “do our part” — at a cost of untold billions of dollars for millions of families and businesses — the sum of our efforts will be rendered pointless by the giant Chinese juggernaut in less than a month.

This is what happens when you don't do the math on stuff.

Not that carbon is a pollutant but I digress.





This must be embarrassing:

Chances are you have never heard of Sam Oosterhoff.

But the 19-year-old social conservative and Brock University political science student has become a key figure in Ontario provincial politics.

On Saturday, Oosterhoff won the race to become the Ontario Progressive Conservative candidate for Niagara West-Glanbrook, the territory of former PC party leader Tim Hudak.

Also - trust me- there is always someone stupid enough to vote Liberal no matter how Hillary Clinton-corrupt they are:

According to the Forum poll, only 27% of Ontarians believe Wynne will stick around to defend this record in the next election. The Liberals are badly trailing Patrick Brown’s PCs — 43% to 24% — even though most voters acknowledge they know next to nothing about the new Tory leader.

(Sidebar: he's a snake. There you go.)






The deal is over. Just burn it with fire and move on:

Veteran Liberal statesman Jean Charest, who as Quebec premier was intimately involved in the debut of Canada-EU free trade talks, says Prime Minister Justin Trudeau should pick up the phone and urge his French and German counterparts to push for a CETA resolution — because “the credibility of Europe is at stake.”

Charest, reached in London, cautioned Trudeau should wait until the time is right to “get them to step up,” however, urging a cool-down period as tempers flared in Europe Monday over a small Belgian region’s veto of the trade agreement.

“In the next few weeks, I think we’re just going to have to let things cool down. The harder we push now, it’ll just entrench the Walloons in their position. You get to the point in that dynamic where then it becomes a point of pride, their opposition becomes a point of pride,” he said.

After Canada walked out on negotiations Friday, the EU gave Belgium a Monday deadline to lend its support to CETA. But with the regional parliament of Wallonia blocking support, Belgium said Monday it wouldn’t be able to do that.




I'm sure online testing and voting will always go off smoothly:

The Ontario agency tasked with administering the first online literacy test to tens of thousands of high school students in the province last week says it was forced to pull the plug by an “intentional, malicious and sustained” cyberattack.

The Education Quality and Accountability Office said Monday the network hosting the “voluntary” online test was targeted by an “extremely large volume of traffic from a vast set of IP addresses around the globe.”

It said the impact of the distributed denial of service attack carried out by “an unknown entity or entities” was to block legitimate users such as school boards and students from accessing the test.

Most of the province’s 900 secondary schools — representing a maximum of 147,000 students — had signed up to participate in the test, which was a technical trial run before the first official test scheduled next year.



 
Do you know who might like to have had children? Reena Virk:

Despite serving a life sentence in prison for killing 14-year-old Reena Virk, Ellard is now about eight months pregnant, the Vancouver Sun has learned.

The father is a man with gang links who was out on day parole when he was allowed the intimate visits with Ellard in the spring.

Darwin Dorozan, 41, was granted full parole in August, but it has since been revoked after an alleged breach.

The Parole Board of Canada said in its Aug. 3 ruling releasing Dorozan that “there are concerns about your relationship with your girlfriend, who is pregnant.”

Ellard, 33, is not identified as the girlfriend in the documents, but Postmedia News has confirmed with several sources that she is Dorozan’s pregnant girlfriend.

Dorozan was given credit by the two-person panel for being “open and accountable about the relationship,” the parole ruling says.

But the ruling also said Dorozan “will likely face significant stress relating to the birth of your child.”

Dorozan is serving a seven-year, two-month sentence after pleading guilty in 2012 to 11 counts of break and enter and break and enter with intent. Dorozan broke into several homes in 2010 and 2011 to steal things to finance a heroin addiction, the board noted.

“Some of the residences were occupied and during a confrontation with a male victim, you sprayed him in the face about five times with bear spray.”

Ellard had three trials before she was convicted in 2005. She was first found guilty in 2000, but the B.C. Court of Appeal ordered a new trial. The second time around, the jury couldn’t reach a verdict and a mistrial was declared. She was convicted of second-degree murder after her third trial.

Though she was 15 when she killed Virk, Ellard was raised to adult court and was sentenced to life with no hope of parole for seven years.

Last May, the Parole Board of Canada denied Ellard day parole, saying that while she was finally admitting some responsibility for Virk’s death, there was “ongoing minimization” of her crime.

And the two board members told Ellard that they were concerned about her admitted drug use inside prison, as well as “your lack of insight into why you committed the murder and your sense of entitlement with respect to parole.”

Future Liberal voter.





European countries are letting people like this in by the thousands:

A migrant who raped a 10-year-old boy in a swimming pool has had his conviction overturned because the court could not prove that the child said no.

The man, identified only as 20-year-old Iraqi Amir A, violently sexually assaulted the victim while he was undergoing an integration process at Theresienbad pool (above) in Vienna, Austria, last December.

After the assault, Amir - who had been working as a taxi driver - went back into the pool and was found on the diving board when police turned up.

He told them that he had a “sexual emergency” because he had not had sex for some time, but admitted that he knew he had been wrong to do it.

Amir was found guilty of serious sexual assault and rape of a minor and was sentenced to six years in jail - but the Supreme Court has now lifted the verdict and ordered a retrial as his defence team successfully argued that there was no proof that the boy did not consent.


And yet, people like "Jackie" get more attention:

By the time Jackie spoke with reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely, she was a U-Va. junior and had for two years told friends and members of the U-Va. community that she was sexually assaulted at a fraternity party. She had also gone to Eramo seeking help. Erdely testified last week that she believed Jackie’s detailed account of the ordeal.

Jackie said during the taped deposition that she stands by the account she gave Rolling Stone and The Post in 2014 and believed it was true at the time. But she also testified that she suffers from Post-traumatic stress disorder and has memory loss and can no longer recall specific details.

In the taped testimony, Jackie said she felt pressured to cooperate with the reporter on the article and told friends that she no longer wanted to be included in it after learning that her alleged gang-rape would be central to the narrative.

Wrong.

"Jackie" was caught lying and now she is attempting to deflect the blame.


Because Mark Steyn:

Sometimes a society becomes too stupid to survive. 

Not just stupid but incredibly dull, malevolent, mediocre and prone to fits of prejudice and rage.

That's why someone can get irrationally angry at this:

Blacks riot, Muslims set bombs, gays spread AIDS, Mexican cartels behead children, atheists tear down Christmas trees. Meanwhile, those liberal Lena Dunhams in their $5,000-a-month apartments sip wine and say, "But those white Christians are the real problem!" Terror victims scream in the street next to their own severed limbs, and the response from the elites is to cry about how men should be allowed to use women's restrooms and how it's cruel to keep chickens in cages.

Madness. Their heads are so far up their asses that they can't tell up from down. Basic, obvious truths that have gone unquestioned for thousands of years now get laughed at and shouted down -- the fact that hard work is better than dependence on government, that children do better with both parents in the picture, that peace is better than rioting, that a strict moral code is better than blithe hedonism, that humans tend to value things they've earned more than what they get for free, that not getting exploded by a bomb is better than getting exploded by a bomb.

But not this:

Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant has reportedly massacred hundreds of men and boys in Mosul as fears grow that families are being used as human shields against approaching Iraqi-led forces.

The jihadist group rounded up and shot 284 men and boys before dumping their bodies in a mass grave in northern Mosul, according to CNN.

They were reportedly lined up and shot on the grounds of a former agricultural college, where young Iraqis were once taught how to grow food in their country’s punishing climate, and then buried by a bulldozer.

It's sad watching morality dissolve and replaced with @$$holes who complain about the constant gore on TV shows that they have watched from the beginning only to be annoyed when something does go their way.

Trifles offend more than lies and actual genocide.

The Earth is a sad place.





In other news, fashionably treasonous leftist dies:

Throughout the Vietnam War era, Hayden was among the most visible and outspoken American mouthpieces of the pro-Communist camp. He organized -- along with Jane Fonda (whom he married in 1973 and divorced in 1980), John Kerry, and Ted Kennedy -- an “Indochina Peace Campaign” (IPC) to cut off American aid to the existing governments in Cambodia and South Vietnam. The IPC worked tirelessly to help the North Vietnamese Communists and the Khmer Rouge (led by Pol Pot) emerge victorious.

This Khmer Rouge:

According to his testimony, prison guards at the facility would use the pliers to lacerate the inmates before pouring acid into the wounds. If the detainees passed out due to the excessive pain, the overseers would then use water to revive them.


“About 10 prisoners who were ordered to sit and watch the torture,” said Keo Chandara, reports the Cambodia Daily.

During one particularly gruesome episode, Keo Chandara said the guards hanged one prisoner by a hook through her mouth and then cut out her heart, gall bladder and liver after she was unable to answer questions during an interrogation session.




Why the First World War is important:

It’s odd to look at Great War pictures, including Canadians at Hill 70, and see that under such awful conditions, the troops often appear resolute, even cheerful. It reminds us how surprisingly well humans can respond to adversity, while failing when not being tested. And it shows that in a very real sense, the passage of time changes nothing. Indeed, if worthy deeds a century ago mean nothing today, worthy deeds today will mean nothing tomorrow and hence are futile in our own time. But we know they are not.

So we care about the Great War because it shaped the modern world. But we also care because those who fought it on our behalf did deeds that set a timeless example for us and our posterity. That is why Australians still flock to Villers-Bretonneux, why the Last Post sounds every evening at the Menin Gate and why the monument to Hill 70 to be dedicated in France next spring will draw visitors 100 years hence.

Read the whole thing.





Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Alistair Urquhart:

Alistair Urquhart who has died aged 97, was a prisoner of the Japanese from 1942 to 1945, surviving both the infamous Death Railway and the atom bomb dropped on Nagasaki; his memoir, The Forgotten Highlander, became a bestseller in 2009.


Saturday, October 22, 2016

She Who Lives By the Sword...

...dies by it.

But not according to the publicly-funded CBC:

“Once she had been kidnapped by the Taliban in Pakistan, there were many comments in the media stating quite bluntly that she deserved what she got,” Dylyn said. “I realized the truth was much more complex, that her motivations for her actions were complicated, and I wanted to explore her physical and psychological journey.”

The Taliban, for fun, used to kill women in soccer stadiums.

I'm sure that there is a complex truth behind that.


(Merci)



Don't Make Fun of the Beardy-Weirdies

They don't like it.

While no one was looking, the Liberals' trans-gender bill survived a second reading.

A bill that says everyone must conform to the madness of denying the genetics of sexual identity so that one can play dress-up or else has passed the second reading. After the third reading and after royal assent, Bill C-16 will become law.

This means one cannot point out the utter cobblers of denying the hard science of chromosomes, that even those who undergo surgery to change their external sex characteristics will still be mentally ill and probably kill themselves and that newly-coined gender pronouns are just a way to control the language.

Nor can one point out that not only do adults have the right to life, to vote and to own property,  sexual fetishists in the West are not only allowed but celebrated so this talk of discrimination against the sexual alphabet minority doesn't carry any logical weight. I mean - are people chucked off of roofs in the West?

Like this guy?

And don't get one started on those attention-seeking virtue-signaling parents who create entire mythologies around their kids who play dress-up one day and then inject them with hormones so that they can be the boy/girl/whatever-the-hell they were allegedly meant to be before deliberately shuffling off this mortal coil.

So, whatever one does, don't pay attention to what is going on around one. It could cause one to question why one's elected government is pushing the country into insanity.


Friday, October 21, 2016

It's Friday

And you know what that means...



Moving on...




Visit the Fur. You know you want to.




On October 22nd, 2014, an Islamist convert shot and killed Corporal Nathan Cirillo before bursting into the House of Commons.


He was then taken out by Kevin Vickers.


And this man:

There are days when it’s hard to be a hero. Just ask Curtis Barrett. ...

An Ontario Provincial Police report into the terror attack on Parliament Hill on October 22, 2014, concluded that Zehaf-Bibeau “presented a serious and imminent threat to the lives of all persons inside Centre Block,” including Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the entire Conservative caucus meeting in the Reading Room, just off the Hall of Honour.

The report concluded that the House of Commons’ former Sergeant-at-Arms, Kevin Vickers, and Barrett “fired their weapons and neutralized the threat.”

But while Vickers was hailed as a hero by the nation and appointed Canada’s ambassador to Ireland, Barrett’s contribution was buried, redacted and generally forgotten, leading him into a downward spiral of post-traumatic stress.

After two years, the RCMP has finally recognized the valour of Barrett, and the three other officers who walked into gunfire that day — he will receive the Star of Courage from the Governor-General at a ceremony next Friday. But Barrett’s story is a cautionary tale about how this country treats those of its sons and daughters who put themselves at great peril to keep the rest of us safe.

(Sidebar: you, sir, are a hero.)


To date, there are no plans to commemorate either Patrice Vincent nor Nathan Cirillo, both victims of Islamist terror.




From heroism to the Ministry of Cowardice:

Canada and Russia traded barbs at the United Nations on Thursday as Foreign Affairs Minister Stephane Dion led calls for an end to the bloody conflict in Syria.

Dion bravely stood by and did nothing while China's Wang Yi verbally attacked a journalist who asked China about its human rights record.


Trudeau said he would tell Putin off "to his face".


After watching Trudeau run away from reporters, does anyone actually believe that? He is a coward who refuses to protect women and children. Literally.


Watching Trudeau attempt to put on a "brave" face is like watching someone pepper PM Hair-Boy with pumpkin seeds. It's pathetic.

As pathetic as leaving EU trade talks crying or back-tracking on electoral reform after finding out that he couldn't get away with it.

Man up.




If there is anything else this country needs it's more activist judges:

Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould appointed or promoted 24 judges Thursday as she unveiled sweeping changes to the way jurists in this country are appointed.




More costs on hydro bills:

A government board has told power companies across the province that by year-end they must send customers a hydro bill every month — a change that could cost up to $10-million, and will likely show up on the bills of consumers.

People voted for this, so...





Are mass graves of elderly women also war crimes?

The U.N. Human Rights Council said on Friday it would identify the perpetrators of war crimes in the besieged Syrian city of Aleppo and launched a special inquiry into the use of starvation and air strikes there, as well as increased "terrorist" attacks.

Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, had earlier called for major powers to put aside their differences and refer the situation in eastern Aleppo to the International Criminal Court.

He said that the siege and bombing there constituted "crimes of historic proportions" that have caused heavy civilian casualties amounting to war crimes.

Zeid did not name Russia or the Syrian air force, whose jets have attacked the rebel-held districts of Aleppo for weeks, but his reference was clear.

If the UN truly felt that Russia is participating in war crimes, why doesn't it eject Russia from the organisation?





Speaking of the useless UN:

China and other countries exporting these non-essential goods are vulnerable to a global ‘naming and shaming’ campaign as well as secondary sanctions. Seoul, meanwhile, is in a much better position to push other states to enforce firmer sanctions now that it has shut down the Kaesong Industrial Park, a North–South collaborative economic project within the DPRK where the North provided workers to South Korean manufacturers. Turning a blind eye to Kaesong’s ‘forced labor’ conditions, not to mention the transfer of about US$9 million annually to the Pyongyang regime, has for years compromised South Korea’s principles. At a minimum, sanctions are a normative declaration that we are not oblivious to the North’s atrocities and that countries and firms which do business with Pyongyang are trafficking with an international pariah.

Read the whole thing.

The problem is that no one cares about the North Korean Holocaust enough to do something solid about it. When was the last time China was punished for its support of the Kim dictatorships? And Russia? North Korean workers in Russia are defecting. Even minders - the ubiquitous shadows of North Koreans everywhere - are defecting. Meanwhile, North Korea's concentration camps continue growing.

Does everyone have to defect before the world notices and cares what is going on?


(Kamsahamnida)





Also in "the UN is super-useless" news:

Though a founding member of the Justice League, Wonder Woman is receiving pushback inside the United Nations.

More than 600 UN staff members have signed an online petition calling on Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, a professed feminist, to reconsider the appointment of the fictitious superhero as its ambassador for women’s empowerment.

(Sidebar: the newest incarnation of Wonder Woman is portrayed by Gal Gadot, an Israeli actress who is proud of her service in the IDF and was roundly excoriated for it. She is also a citizen of a country the UN singles out for global punishment.)

And:

The World Health Organisation will change the standard to suggest that a person who is unable to find a suitable sexual partner or is lacking a sexual relationship to have children - will now be equally classified as disabled

This is the same WHO that thought the North Korean healthcare system was praiseworthy.




First, he wanted to break up with the US and then he didn't:

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said on Friday he was not severing ties with his country's long-time ally the United States, but merely pursuing a more independent foreign policy by strengthening relations with China.

Is the Filipino electorate having second thoughts about this guy?




This must be embarrassing:

The emails show a transition plan being worked on before the 2008 election had taken place. According to an attached memo in one of the emails, Obama was already discussing his transition to office with members of the Bush Administration, including then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, prior to the election.
What an arrogant piece of crap.




I'm waiting for artistic impressions of Baby Mohammad's head:

The Ste. Anne des Pins parish in Sudbury, Ont., says the statue, which was beheaded by unknown vandals a year ago, was recently fitted with a temporary clay head crafted by a local artist.

The new head — a placeholder until the artist can sculpt a permanent replacement out of stone — has captured the attention of many in the parish and on social media.

Some online have compared the head, with its spiky clay crown, to a character on the popular cartoon "The Simpsons" or to the infamously botched restoration of a fresco of Jesus in Spain.




An escaped gorilla goes on a bender:

His shock escape from his enclosure at London Zoo grabbed headlines last week - and now we finally know what Kumbuka did during his brief spell of freedom.

Turns out the gorilla took full advantage of his escape - achieved by slipping through two unlocked doors - by knocking back five litres of undiluted squash.





And now, a real trooper:

It’s amazing he’s alive at all – because seven-year-old Bruno the chocolate Labrador retriever spent several weeks trapped at the bottom of a well near Estevan.

Bruno the dog
Hang in there, buddy.


(Merci)