Mid-Week Post

The molten core of the work-week ...




What a terrible day for violence and disasters:

A blaze engulfed a 24-storey housing block in central London on Wednesday, trapping residents as they slept and killing at least 12 people in an inferno that the fire brigade said was unprecedented in its scale and speed.

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A UPS employee opened fire at one of the company's package delivery facilities in San Francisco on Wednesday, killing three co-workers and then himself as officers closed in and workers ran frantically into the streets, police and company officials said.

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A rifle-wielding attacker opened fire on Republican lawmakers at a congressional baseball practice Wednesday, wounding House GOP Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana and several others as congressmen and aides dove for cover. The assailant, prepared with “a lot of ammo,” fought a gun battle with police before he, too, was shot and later died.

Colleagues said Scalise dragged himself away from the infield leaving a trail of blood as they rushed to his assistance. He was taken to a hospital where he underwent surgery and was listed in critical condition. His office said that before surgery for a wound in his hip he was in good spirits and spoke with his wife by telephone.

The shooter was identified as James T. Hodgkinson, a 66-year-old home inspector from Illinois who had several minor run-ins with the law in recent years and belonged to a Facebook group called “Terminate the Republican Party.”

"Terminate the Republican Party", you say?

It's no "This is for Allah" but one can run with it.


When one's entire ideology is one of self-importance, vitriol and knee-jerk violence, one can only wonder why this didn't happen earlier.

Anti-social misfits always angry at something cannot be trusted with weapons. Or cars. Or anything, really.


I'm sure Mr. Hodgkinson thought himself heroic for firing on unarmed people watching baseball. After all, his side of the ideological fence believes to the bone that anyone whose opinion oppose theirs are wicked and heathenish, even dangerous. It would, therefore, be necessary to abuse and murder and not feel badly about it.


That is how dangerous it is to replace God with one's own bloated and rancid neuroses.


Also:

The extensive non-stop fear-mongering that’s been going on since the Republican primaries about all the horrific and hurtful things that the most basic of conservative policies will unleash upon the American people has paved the way for extreme reactions.

Donald Trump hates you! Republicans are going to hurt you! They’re out to do bad things to you! Watch your backs! Arm yourselves!

This isn’t just coming from fringe lunatics either. It’s mainstream.

To return to some “greatest hits,” here’s the American Civil Liberties Union posting to social media on June 1: “Pulling out of the Paris Agreement would be a massive step back for racial justice, and an assault on communities of color across the U.S.”

And don’t forget Globe & Mail columnist Doug Saunders writing on inauguration day: “If you thought you’d never see anything on TV as frightening as 9/11, this was it. But the consequences of this are far more damaging.”

If mainstream voices are arguing that Trump and Republicans are assaulting people of colour and causing more damage than 9/11, this is going to have a psychological effect on people.

It’s very similar to how the media covered Kellie Leitch’s Canadian values pitch and Andrew Scheer’s supposed hidden agenda.

The media wrote a whole whack of stories about how people on the left feared for their safety following the election of Trump. In response those on the far-left, such as Antifa extremists, began assaulting Trump supporters on the street.

They were pre-emptive strikes against rumoured violence, fabricated by an extremely biased media. This, as Davis pointed out, could have been what inspired the suspect to shoot up the baseball game.

James T. Hodgkinson, who has been identified as the shooter, was an Illinois-based volunteer on the Bernie Sanders campaign.

ISIS employs suicide vests to retake Mosul:

Dozens of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant militants wearing suicide vests penetrated Iraqi police lines in Mosul on Wednesday, police officers said, retaking ground in a large-scale counterattack and sending residents fleeing.

Starting at around 3 a.m. the militants launched seven car bombs at the front lines south of the Old City, their last remaining foothold, said Lt. Col. Hussein al-Lami, a federal police commander. Simultaneously 25 fighters wearing suicide vests attacked them from behind their lines.

The militants had snuck down the Tigris River and attacked with the assistance of “sleeper cells” which provided vehicles for them, he said.

“They attacked our forces from behind while they were fighting against the car bombs,” Lami said, adding that the militants were lashing out in their “dying breath.”

When these guys realise that Mary is one of the tribe, they are going to flip:

A Muslim Ramadan prayer service at a Catholic site in the Spanish city of Granada has spurred controversy among residents and politicians, with some calling the event “disrespectful” and provocative.

(Sidebar: I believe that was the point.)

The Muslim community in Granada observed Ramadan on Saturday evening gathering for prayer at a park called the Gardens of Triumph, which is considered to be a traditionally Catholic site. The event was sanctioned by the city and promoted with signs “Come and know Ramadan”. The mayor Francisco Cuenca also welcomed the event to promote Granada as a “city of co-existence and tolerance”. 

(Sidebar: Estupido.)

However some took issue with the location of service calling the decision to hold it at the Gardens of Triumph—the site includes a statue of the Virgin Mary—a “demonstration of clumsiness” by the government which insulted the feelings of Granadians.

Some politicians took to social media to express their outrage: “Mr. Paco Cuenca confuses tolerance and religious respect with provocation. Call for Muslim Prayers at the Virgin of Triumph ??” tweeted Congressman Luis Salvador.

Another politician Manuel Olivares took to Facebook to call the city’s decision “regrettable” and “disrespectful”. He claimed that the mayor “focuses on provoking, confronting and altering the coexistence of religious confessions”.

Some critics of the Ramadan service at the park even called for an “act of reparation” calling for Catholics to gather at the same site on Tuesday and recite the rosary.

Say it in Aramaic and Hebrew.





Trump to name Kelly Craft as the ambassador to Canada.





Oil companies increase oil production because no one cares what Trudeau is told to think:

Oil companies said Tuesday they planned to ramp up their output in Canada, throwing a wrench in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's efforts to slash greenhouse gas emissions.

Currently the world's sixth largest oil producer, Canada expects to hike production by 32 percent to 5.1 million barrels per day by 2030, according to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

The additional output will come entirely from the Alberta oil sands.

Trudeau was criticized by the energy sector this year for suggesting a need to "phase out" oil sands production, which is Canada's top single source of CO2 and its fasting growing.

"We need to manage the transition off of our dependence on fossil fuels," he said in January, two months after approving two new pipelines to the United States and to Pacific tidewater.

But the world runs on oil, stupid. 

Also:

Pressure ratcheted up Tuesday on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government to effectively deny a Chinese firm's purchase of Canadian satellite communications company Norsat, over national security concerns.

Its purchase by Hytera Communications was approved earlier this month, after a routine security analysis.

But since then, opposition parties, two former Canadian spy masters and a US congressional commission have raised concerns over the sale, which was put on hold Monday after a US hedge fund came forward with an unsolicited rival bid.

The purchase of Norsat became the main topic of discussion in parliament over the past week, culminating Tuesday with Trudeau himself rejecting criticism about his government's handling of the case and refusing to back down.

"Our national security experts assessed the deal and the technology, and concluded there were no national security concerns," he said. "We always follow the advice of our security experts on these matters.

"On top of that," he added, "we do consult with our allies, and in this case, directly consulted with the United States on this situation."

Opposition parties accused the Trudeau government of fast-tracking approvals in order to curry favor with Beijing as Ottawa looks to expand trade with China.

They called for a more thorough national security review on the impacts of the transfer of Norsat's technologies outside Canada.

"How can the prime minister claim there were no national security concerns when there has been no national security review?" asked New Democratic Party leader Thomas Mulcair, accusing Trudeau of "trying to invent a new category of careful assessment."

Beijing has said it regards national security reviews as a form of protectionism.

(Sidebar: I'll bet it does.)






Yes, she is a smug, little b!#ch, isn't she?

When you parse the painfully sophomoric, self-righteous House of Commons speech Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland gave last week that teed up Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan’s announcement the next day of tens of billions of dollars in new military spending, it basically said this:

Now that the US, unlike goody two shoes Canada, is no longer an international force for good in the world -- because under Trump Americans are becoming increasingly isolationist -- Canada has to develop its hard military power or risk being a mere “client state” of the U.S.

Or course, prior to Trump’s election, the Liberals were only too happy to be a “client state” of the U.S. -- hiding under the umbrella of U.S. military power -- considering how they gutted our armed forces whenever they were in power, right up to the time of Trudeau’s nauseatingly silly “bromance” with Barack Obama.

It’s as if Trudeau, Freeland and the Liberals can only justify spending money properly equipping our military if it’s in response to, in their minds, those evil Americans. ...

Freeland, who attacked Trump without naming him -- in other words, gutlessly -- for withdrawing from the non-binding Paris climate agreement, shouldn’t be so smug, considering Canada’s failure to live up to our non-binding NATO commitment.

Finally, what super power of the last 80 years would Freeland have preferred we share an 8,890-km undefended border with, if not the US?

Nazi Germany? War-time Japan? The former Soviet Union? The People’s Republic of China?

Because if that had been our fate as a large, sparsely-populated, resource-rich nation, Freeland wouldn’t be making patronizing speeches today criticizing the US, because Canada wouldn’t have an independent, democratic Parliament.

So please, minister, keep your patronizing smugness about our American neighbours to yourself.

Also:

When you are negotiating a free-trade agreement, it is never smart to insult your counterpart, especially if he is 10 times your size and you need the deal far more than he does. Furthermore, if you are going to make a concession, why not structure the give to get something in return, rather than provoke him into taking a harder line?

So why did Prime Minister Justin Trudeau have his minister gratuitously take on the Americans? Probably because he needed to mollify his left-leaning base, which is not keen on the military. So he blamed the policy shift on an unpopular U.S president, putting domestic politics ahead of relations with our biggest trading partner.

Does one recall this?

Hundreds of scientists stepped away from their petri dishes on Tuesday to denounce what they say are the Harper government’s sweeping cuts to research.

Flanked by supporters, the white-coated scientists marched through downtown Ottawa to Parliament Hill for a mock funeral marking “the death of evidence.”

 
Ahem:

Rodolphe Devillers, a geography professor at Memorial University in Newfoundland, said there’s a “double standard” in the way Canada approaches protected areas: where national parks are off-limits to most human activity, marine protected areas rarely are. The level of protection can also vary widely from one area to the next, he said.

“I think from a science perspective, it’s clear that the MPAs we have right now… will not bring what people expect from those MPAs. It’s not going to protect our oceans.”

The scientists want Canada’s Oceans Act amended to include a baseline of protection for all marine protected areas, and for the government to require a scientific assessment of all proposed areas.

Right now, Devillers said, scientists are consulted at the beginning of the process to develop a new protected area. But they have little say in what the end result looks like.

For instance, 80 per cent of a proposed MPA in the Laurentian Channel in the Gulf of St. Lawrence is slated to remain open to oil and gas activity, and the total area will be smaller than what was originally planned.

“We are alarmed by the lack of transparency with which some of these decisions were made,” reads the letter.

Who did you vote for, Professor Devillers?





A fifteen dollar an hour wage increase and selling off buildings are not there to inspire confidence in the country's economic prowess:

Past minimum wage increases have disproportionately impacted teen unemployment, thereby both depriving them of a stepping stone into work skills and marketability and ending their financial contribution to lower income families And, of course, there is the impact on our EI and welfare systems.

Businesses in trouble will have to compensate for the higher wages at their lowest end by preserving salary costs through lower bonuses or lower wage increases for higher earners. ‎The reality is that government policy, and in particular this one, does not increase employers’ ability to pay.

What impact will this increase have on young workers trying to get their foot in the door, to obtain valuable experience, or older workers attempting to re-engage in the workplace?

When these unintended consequences occur, as they inevitably will, it may have one other unintended consequence — a backlash against the governments by the very people whose votes they intended to garner.

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The government has sold off 29 diplomatic properties for more than $176 million since the election of the Liberal government, despite its rhetoric that Canada is “back” on the world stage.

This is not about fairness. It's about delusional men forcing people to do what they want or else:

Controversy over a female-only spa’s “no male genitals” policy has reignited debate over the rights of transgender people to access traditionally gender-exclusive spaces, even as the federal government pushes stronger protections prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity and gender expression.

The uproar over Toronto’s Body Blitz Spa prompted a flurry of complaints on social media, with longtime regular Shelley Marshall among those vowing to boycott the luxurious retreat.

Marshall says she tried to bring her transgender friend to the spa last year but was told she would only be welcome at the bathing suit-optional facility if she had undergone sex reassignment surgery.

“I didn’t want to embarrass my friend, I didn’t want to humiliate my friend, I didn’t want all this to happen,” Marshall says of not speaking out at the time. “I’m embarrassed I never stuck up for my friend.”

Toronto-based LGBTQ author Jia Qing Wilson-Yang tweeted last week that she was told not to visit the spa because they “won’t allow male genitalia.”

That followed a Facebook post by Weronika Jane who says the spa’s manager called a friend one hour before their booking “to say that they couldn’t come because they had a ‘no male genital rule.”‘

Body Blitz refused to comment on the issue, but released a statement insisting it supports the LGBTQ community.

“However, because Body Blitz Spa is a single-sex facility with full nudity, we are not like other facilities. We recognize that this is an important discussion for single-sex facilities to have and we will seek to find a satisfactory resolution,” reads the statement.

Some people found the position comforting.

The Body Blitz Spa's breathless validation of the sexual alphabet soup's preciousness is just useless. What is really funny is that the manager of the spa thought that this would protect her.

Nope.

The left is not concerned with matters of ethics or morality or pragmatism or facts. It is an ideology of self-absorption, of making one's self a godhead. Screw anyone who gets in the way.

This is why when the insane members of the left steamroll over one another, don't take sides. This sort of thing was bound to happen.





And now, not sufficiently gruff for police work, a German Shepherd is then assigned as the Official Cutie-Pie for the Governor of Queensland:

Lucky for Gavel, he had been residing in the official residence of the Queensland governor since he was six weeks old. Instead of kicking him the curb, the governor not only gave the playful and friendly pup a permanent home, but also promoted him to “Vice-Regal Dog.”

Who's a good vice-regal dog?