Mid-Week Post

Your pinnacle of reason ...



The most transparent government wants everyone to know that it's back:

The Trudeau government is formally offering helicopters, transport aircraft and a 200-strong rapid-response team of soldiers for UN peacekeeping — though it will be months before Canadians know when and where they will go.

Wow.

That's really making people shake in their boots.  Nothing says don't mess with Canada like "So the exact where and when is going to take a little bit of time to work out".

How decisive and self-possessed! And prudent, too. Let Trudeau spend a whole bunch of cash that isn't his on something he is not even sure about.

The upshot of this is this: thirty-nine percent of Canadians are so mentally stunted that they should be forced to wear helmets for their own safety.


Also:

Canada is turning to the North American Free Trade Agreement in its bid to stop U.S. duties on Canadian softwood lumber.

Good luck with that. If Trudeau doesn't turn up, it may work out for Canada.


And - why do people pay so much for oil? Because people are stupid enough to do so:

The number one reason for high Canadian gas prices, by a long shot, is taxes. Road tax, carbon tax, federal excise tax, GST, HST and, in some cases, a municipal transit tax. Metro Vancouver, for one, keeps its SkyTrains running with a 17 cent per litre municipal gasoline tax. According to the Washington, D.C.-based Tax Foundation, the highest gas taxes in the United States are in Pennsylvania, where the total government take on a litre of gasoline is equivalent to $0.26 CDN. Compare that to Montreal where drivers are paying $0.32 per litre in federal excise tax, provincial fuel tax and local transit tax. And that’s before the 15 per cent sales tax.

What is the true meaning of the niqab? Subjugation of women by emotionally retarded men and silly puffy white liberals.

But don't take my word for it. Just as the Shafia women, Aqsa Parvez and women who are burned with acid for not wearing any head-covering:

As was widely anticipated, Quebec’s Bill 62, banning face cover in the realm of public services, will be legally contested: by an individual niqab-wearing woman, supported by the CCLA and the National Council of Canadian Muslims. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is considering how his government too may “weigh in” on the challenge. ...

(Sidebar: let him also weigh losing Quebec in the next election.)

That there are relatively few niqabs in Canada is neither here nor there as a matter of principle. It seems to me strange and hypocritical that we see no problem in repressing even infrequent messaging associated with racism. But, fearful of being perceived as Islamophobic, we won’t endorse action against messaging that emblemizes gender apartheid.

Because it is easier to let bad things happen then endure some poorly thought out words and attacks from some self-loathing prats who really have no idea how the world actually is.




An ISIS spin-off promises blood for Christmas:

The Wafa' Media Foundation last week released a PR poster titled "The Specter of Terrorism," stating in English, "You will pay very expensive price for your war on Islam." The message added: "We will take revenge for the blood of Muslims on your land, we will kill the young before the older watch this."

Why not just vapourise these people? What do we need them for?




Try as they might, the conductors of one of the worst show trials in this country still can't get traction for M 103. It's like the ovine masses refuse to bleat less:

The next speaker was my friend, Yasmine Mohammed, another Canadian of North African Arab heritage. She was born in Canada in a strict Islamic environment but has today stepped back from the faith.

Mohammed introduced herself to MPs on the committee with these words: “I was born and raised in Canada. I both attended and taught in publicly funded Islamic schools in Canada. I wore a hijab from the age of nine in Canada. And later, when I was forced into a marriage with a Jihadi, I wore a niqab, here in Canada as well.”

Getting straight to her point, Mohammed said: “M103 is doing the exact opposite of its intent. Rather than quelling bigotry, it is feeding the fire because it includes the word “Islamophobia” that is not about protecting people — Muslims — it is about protecting the ideology — Islam.”

She addressed the fear of Canadians whom, she acknowledged, have “been naturally uneasy and suspicious about how a so-called peaceful ideology (Islam) could be spilling so much blood.”

Then she told her story. It moved even Liberal MPs who, for the most part, have insulted Muslims who have opposed M103 before the committee.

Mohammed said: “But to people like me, people with backgrounds in the Muslim world, this is blase. 

We have been dealing with Muslims killing in the name of religion for 1,400 years. We are accustomed to Islamists, like the Muslim Brotherhood, and Jihadis like al-Qaida and ISIS.

“I was married to a member of al-Qaida. I had his baby. None of this is a mystery to me. None of this is new.”

Later, not one Liberal or NDP MP asked her a single question. It was as if she had never been there.

Just a reminder: when Iqra Khalid was the president of the Muslim Student Association at York University, she put out a book advocating wife-abuse.

Carry on.


Vaguely related - those who have lived under totalitarianism know whereof they speak:

Do you millennials enjoy having electricity on demand to charge your devices? Then you would hate Action “O.” Action “O” stood for “Oszczednosc,” which translates to “Savings.” Poland’s communist government would notoriously turn off electricity to various areas of the city to “save” energy.

They had an interesting system which they described as “customer oriented”: they would turn the electricity off for one minute and turn it back on for five minutes as a warning that a shutoff was coming. You had exactly five minutes to find your matches and candles, because after that electricity would shut off for several hours.

If that wasn’t bad enough, we suffered under a shortage of matches.

Read the whole thing. 

Teaching special needs students is incredibly challenging. One must be realistic: a disabled child is so called because there are things he or she cannot do. Equality here cannot mean treating him or her as one would anyone else but affording him or her the dignity and respect he or she is owed as a person. Failing to teach such children is not treating them with respect. Keeping them in a classroom with the other students is paying lip service to a platitude and neglecting one's profession to every student. However, it is clear that schools are doing what they often do - going through the motions instead of finding a solution or simply refusing to teach the child in question because the school does not have the means. Parents would have the means but people like Kathleen Wynne apparently know better or something: 

Jeremy Piper of Quispamsis says there's nothing inclusive about an education system that restricts his nine-year-old autistic son Alex to 30 minutes of class time per day.

Piper says the Department of Education has failed to equip its teaching staff and schools to support students with special needs and he's convinced the students are paying the price. 

"They don't have the resources," Piper said.

"They don't have the training. They don't have the experience. And they won't make themselves get it."

Piper was reacting to what he describes as his son's suspension on Nov. 2 from Quispamsis Elementary School over a series of violent outbursts, including one that may have caused serious injury to Alex's educational assistant.

"This is their solution — send him home, don't deal with it."

Piper, a 40-year-old Mountie who describes himself as evidence-driven, said the school has refused to provide him with the incident reports that led to Alex getting "kicked out."

On Nov. 6,  Alex was allowed to return to school, he said, but only from 8:15 to 9:15 a.m. and only 30 minutes of that time is in the classroom, Piper said.

"The first 25 minutes are outside time and 'soft entry,' they call it," he said.

"Then he has three 10-minute classes. Then he goes home. They consider that education, I guess."

Piper said that until this month, Alex had no history of violent outbursts and had been going to school full time, with very few issues.

And now, the hardest and easiest languages to learn.

There's a reason why most American students start with French or Spanish as a second language. These romance languages are somewhat similar to English and require (relatively) less time to learn than most.