Wednesday, October 05, 2016

Mid-Week Post

 

Twenty-six more shopping days until Halloween... 



Belgian police officers were stabbed in what is being called a terror attack:

Two police officers have been stabbed in Brussels in a possible terrorist incident, Belgian prosecutors say.

One officer was stabbed in the neck and another in the stomach, while a third officer who arrived at the scene in Schaerbeek district suffered a broken nose, Belgian broadcaster VRT reports.

The attacker was shot in the leg and taken away by ambulance.

Authorities have named the attacker as "Hicham D", 43, of Belgian nationality.

Belgian media report that Hicham D is known to Belgian police and is believed to have links to jihadists who travelled to Syria to fight. He also served as a Belgian army officer until 2009.

"We have reason to believe that the incident was a terrorist attack," a spokesman for the Belgian federal prosecutor's office, Eric Van Der Sypt, said.

 


Indiana Governor Mike Pence comes off as the winner in last night's vice-presidential debate:

It seemed clear that Kaine had come armed with pre-planned zingers that mocked Trump, with varying degrees of zing.

“Do you want a ‘You’re hired’ president under Hillary Clinton, or do you want a ‘You’re fired’ president, under Donald Trump,” Kaine said.

Pence mocked that: “You used that a lot, and I think your running mate used a lot of pre-planned lines.”

Not everyone can be on-point and original, Tim.




For some reason, the Colombians don't believe a single thing FARC has to say:

Nearly all the polls in Colombia were predicting the peace pact with FARC would pass. Nearly all the press – except for la pasionara of anti-communism, Mary Anastasia O’Grady of the Wall Street Journal – fell for it. Ms. O’Grady, a shoe-leather reporter whose head is of legendary hardness, grasped that the government had poured billions of pesos into a propaganda campaign in advance of the referendum. It urged Colombians to say yes to a peace that they knew was wrong. The president said that a no vote would mean the country was going to war.

It turns out that the courageous Colombians were prepared to risk war over a false peace. President Santos had vowed that in any deal there would be no impunity for war crimes and that FARC would be required to make reparations. Yet neither of those promises were kept in the deal presented to voters. The enemy was allowed five years of negotiations while holding child soldiers and girls kept as sex slaves. The idea of lustration, like the war crimes trials we held at Nuremberg, appears to have been laid aside as if none of the crimes mattered, as if all were morally equivalent.



It's like he wants to mess things up for the Philippines:

Philippine leader Rodrigo Duterte told President Barack Obama "you can go to hell" in a speech Tuesday that was his strongest tirade so far against the U.S. over its criticism of his deadly anti-drug campaign, adding that he may eventually decide to "break up with America."

God willing, Obama might go to prison one day and you may prefer the other guy.

Just saying, Rodrigo.




PM Hair-Boy needs more friends to take with him on taxpayer-funded trips:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has quietly laid the groundwork to expand the size of his cabinet by as many as three ministers.

It’s a move the opposition said requires more explanation from the government about appropriate use of funds. Ministers earn about $250,000 a year and are allocated significant staff and other resources.


When will Maryam Monsef be fired?



Speaking of liars:

Ontario’s Liberal government is in a spat with the auditor general over accounting practices that would affect the province’s deficit by $1.5 billion.

The government says auditor general Bonnie Lysyk is taking issue with their pension asset accounting, though it says these are rules that have been used for the past 14 years.

The issue is with the accounting of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union Pension Plan and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, which are jointly sponsored with the government.

The government says the plans have a surplus, but the auditor general says that should not be on the province’s balance sheet.

Under that accounting, Ontario’s deficit for 2015-16 was $5 billion, but under the government’s accounting the deficit would be $3.5 billion.

The audited public accounts are supposed to be tabled 180 days after the end of the fiscal year, which was Sept. 27 this year, but that deadline was missed because of the dispute with the auditor.



Was it something they said?

Students, faculty and administrators gathered at the University of Calgary on Tuesday to condemn anti-Muslim posters that were plastered around the campus overnight.

About 40 posters were discovered in various locations by morning, and the university was asking people to turn in any others that are found to campus security.

"To see something like this is truly disturbing," university president Elizabeth Cannon said. "It makes me personally very angry."

The university has involved Calgary police, who are investigating, Cannon noted.

"But really, we're here today to support our Muslim students," she said at a midday gathering outside the MacEwan Student Centre.

"It really is a community coming together and saying the University of Calgary is strong and we respect one another, regardless of where you come from."

People at the gathering wrote messages of support and tolerance on posters of their own, some hanging notes from tree branches on heart-shaped pieces of paper with comments like, "You are a valued member of our community."

The removed posters included wording such as "Dear Muslims ... F--k your Quran" and "go back to the monstrous s--t holes you come from."

Useful idiots have been standing with the perpetually aggrieved masses since nineteen hijackers made craters in various points along the Eastern Seaboard. 

The last nerve of the larger population has finally been irritated and is now screaming at people who enjoy sticking a proverbial thumb in the eye of the populace

Are the posters that unexpected and disturbing?

I find honour killings and Jew hatred disturbing.



I find the events at the University of Calgary a form of juvenile backlash that has been a long time coming. It's not disturbing but the rush to mollify unsmiling anti-semites is.

Perhaps the useful idiots might leave heart-shaped messages that read: "You are a valued member of our community... as long as you don't wear a black bag over your head, don't hate the Jews, don't behead priests and don't kill your daughters."


Western University has come out swinging against what it calls a “repugnant” misuse of the Black Lives Matter slogan that was shared online over the weekend, when defiant students held a homecoming bash.

Black Lives Matter should be maligned, belittled, laughed and marginalised as much as possible. It's a racist organisation of loud and violent little people who can't read statistics.

Oh, and they just invite parody.



Remember this when one extolls the dubious virtues of a poverty-making carbon taxes (which no one wants) or "green" energy that is neither cheap nor effective:

The Australian Energy Market Operator’s preliminary report into the recent South Australian blackout reveals that the primary reason for the total loss of power was a sudden reduction in wind power being fed into the electricity network, according to free market think tank the Institute of Public Affairs.

“The Preliminary Report makes it clear that while the weather was responsible for multiple transmission system faults, the blackout did not occur until after the sudden loss of 315 megawatts of wind output at six separate sites over a six second period,” said Director of Research Brett Hogan.
“The South Australian Government and the renewables industry can no longer credibly argue that the reasons for the fault relied solely on the weather. Images of downed pylons do not tell the whole story.”

“In simple terms, the wind increased and some transmission lines went down but electricity generation continued. It was only the as-yet-unexplained reduction in wind farm output which overloaded demand on the interconnector with Victoria, causing the whole network to seize up.”

“Gas generation continued through the storm and the transmission line faults as did supply from the interconnector. Importantly, it was also the Torrens Island gas-fired Power Station that was used to re-start the electricity network later that evening.”

“When you rely on the weather to generate electricity, and the weather turns bad, then you shouldn’t be surprised when your electricity system in turn cannot cope.” “While renewables may very well have a place in our future energy needs, their uncontrolled rollout, powered by federal and state government subsidies is starting to do Australia damage.”

Also:

In 2015, Tides paid US$21,000 to Earth Ways for re-granting to Observer Media, US$20,000 for “media reporting” and US$1,000 “in honour of Linda Solomon.” Solomon is the founder and editor-in-chief of the National Observer and CEO of The Observer Group. She’s also the sister of Joel Solomon, a former employee and chairman of The Tides Foundation. ...

Given that the National Observer is partially funded by Tides, it bears mention that Tides is by no means an impartial bystander in the campaign against Alberta oil. In fact, Tides is the funding and co-ordination juggernaut behind anti-pipeline activism. Totaling US$35 million, Tides made more than 400 payments (2009 to 2015) to nearly 100 anti-pipeline groups. Without all that Tides money, pipeline projects would not be facing well-organized opposition.

If Tides funded activists to act as honest brokers, that would be fair. But that’s not what Tides does. Tides funds The Tar Sands Campaign, an international effort that aims to embarrass Canada, deter investment and stigmatize Alberta oil as the poster child of dirty fuel. The goal of this campaign is nothing short of stopping the export of Alberta oil by pipeline, rail and tanker.

Tides launched The Tar Sands Campaign back in 2008 with funds from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and other U.S. donors.  At first, the main intermediary funder was Tides but in 2012 that changed as some U.S. donors shifted to the New Venture Fund, based in Washington, D.C.

Like Tides, New Venture operates a “donor-advised fund” that receives and re-grants money, keeping the original donor anonymous. One of the activists associated with New Venture Fund is Tzeporah Berman, who now co-chairs the Alberta NDP government’s Oil Sands Advisory Working Group.

The Alberta NDP government that tanked Alberta's economy and wants the federal government to bail it out. THAT Alberta NDP government.

It also jacked up the minimum wage, as if that is going to help.




The only thing is that it does not keep with the Narrative in that it's only a baby if one cannot return the baby shower gift:

This fall, MPs will be debating Bill C-225, a private member’s bill that addresses gender-based violence by protecting pregnant women who have chosen to carry their child to term.

While many MPs have expressed support for this common-sense proposal, others have levelled criticisms. Some of the most common criticisms are: it’s unconstitutional; it conflicts with the Criminal Code; we don’t need it because it’s already a crime to harm a pregnant woman; it will undermine abortion rights; it will cause women to be prosecuted for harm they cause to their own fetuses; and we can’t make it a separate crime to harm or kill a preborn child because a woman and her fetus are one.
Yet these criticisms have all been debunked in two constitutional opinions, provided by a team of lawyers and advisors to the Supreme Court of Canada with extensive experience in constitutional law. 

There is no constitutional issue with this bill. If we make it a separate crime to cause the death of a woman’s preborn child while committing a criminal offence against the woman (which is what C-225 does), we are recognizing that the offender did something wrong in causing that preborn child’s death — a death the woman clearly did not consent to.

How, then, can a vocal minority continue to use excuses, like those cited above, to oppose a law that would protect a woman’s choice to carry her preborn child safely to term and that would hold a third party accountable for intentionally causing the death of a woman’s child against her will — especially when this law would have absolutely no legal impact on abortion, but would merely protect women who face violent crime while pregnant? Abortion is something a woman chooses. Choice is the key. And choice is supposedly what the pro-choice philosophy is all about.

No, the pro-abortion philosophy is about death. Let's be candid. We've come too far to pretend that pro-abortion ideologies are libertarian and exempt from scientific or logical scrutiny.




Who watches the watchers?

The ancient ruins of Palmyra are still being plundered by looters, under the watch of the Syrian and Russian forces that captured the city from ISIL earlier this year, archaeologists claim.



And I thought Obama was supposed to transmit friendship to Putin:

President Vladimir Putin on Monday suspended a Russia-U.S. deal on the disposal of weapons-grade plutonium, a move that comes amid escalating tensions over Syria between Moscow and Washington.



College students iz dum:

In academia, which produces our cultural elites, Shakespeare has become a lightning rod, a focus for the culture wars. Unlike the old “bardolators,” my generation’s teachers, who regarded Shakespeare as the master, with the scholar’s job to reveal his perfection, postmodern theorists see Shakespeare as a tool of the power elites of Elizabethan England, and the scholar’s job to “interrogate” the insidious cultural hegemony disguised as aesthetics.

An entire generation of literature students have studied Shakespeare’s works (when they study him at all) through the lens of theories that are antagonistic to the concept of art for art’s sake: deconstruction, postmodern Marxism and postmodern Freudianism. Literary academics privilege writers who speak for oppressed voices of class, race, gender and ethnicity. In many English departments, theorizing has replaced reading Shakespeare, or even seeing his plays enacted.

If the Stratford Festival were under consideration today, it is probable that the culturati reviewing the idea would reflexively take a dim view of celebrating even this most brilliant of dead white males, and the idea would die, untimely ripped from its proposer’s womb (sorry, Bard).

(Sidebar: never mind that Shakespeare was a more subtle commentator on contemporary issues than "white privilege is bad, mmkay?")


**


This:





We can't all be Nobel Science prize winners.




But... but... patriarchy!

LeanIn.Org teamed up with management consulting firm McKinsey & Company to conduct the “Women in the Workplace 2016” report. They collected 132 companies' pipeline data and surveyed more than 34,000 employees about their career opportunities and goals.

Many of the findings are similar to insights culled from other workplace studies (for example, women do in fact ask for raises, but are less likely to receive them). But the Women in the Workplace study also revealed that only 40 percent of senior female managers said they wanted a top executive job, in contrast with 56 percent of men.

When asked why they don't want to be a top executive, 42 percent of both women and men said "I wouldn’t be able to balance family and work commitments." Their opinions differed, however, when imagining the experience of being at the top. A third of women, compared to a fifth of men, said they didn't want the pressure that comes with a top-level job. And only 43 percent of women, compared to 51 percent of men, believed becoming a top executive would "significantly improve their ability to impact the business." According to the report, this may be because "women may not think their ideas and contributions carry the same weight as men’s."




And now, animal facts because animals:

A GRIZZLY BEAR'S BITE IS STRONG ENOUGH TO CRUSH A BOWLING BALL.

Not a good bowling companion.


(Merci)


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