Saturday Special

Aaahhh, the week-end ...




There is only so much heckling a pampered trust-fund baby can take:

Justin Trudeau lost his cool with hecklers at a rowdy town hall meeting in Nanaimo, B.C., on Friday, and had several removed by police.

Also:

Companies interested in the Liberal government’s planned purchase of new fighter jets have been told not to talk to journalists despite claims by federal officials the process will be open and transparent.

 
It could be because politicians lie:

In a random sampling of public opinion taken by The Forum Poll™ among 1408 Canadian voters, more than 8 in 10 (81%) say they attention to politics between election cycles, with about half of those (40%) saying they pay a lot of attention.

Read more at: http://poll.forumresearch.com/post/2824/trust-january-2017/
Copyright ©Forum Research Inc.

In a random sampling of public opinion taken by The ForumPoll™ among 1408 Canadian voters, more than 8 in 10 (81%) say they attention to politics between election cycles, with about half of those (40%) saying they pay a lot of attention. …

More than half (BTM2: 58%) say they don't trust the promises made by politicians before an election, with one-sixth (17%) saying they have no trust at all in these promises.

 

For example, budgets don't balance themselves:

“The Trudeau government took office in late 2015 and immediately increased budgeted federal program spending by $8.1 billion over the period from 2015/16 to 2019/20. Less than six months later, in its first full budget (2016), the federal government markedly increased budgeted program spending by an additional $65.9 billion over the same five-year period.”

That must be why there is no money for veterans like Brock Blaszczyk who lost his leg in Afghanistan or money for the defense budget but Trudeau does have loads for the Clinton Foundation and Hamas.




The party of perverts ejects one of its own:

A senior member of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's team has resigned from his position following allegations of improper conduct, HuffPost Canada has learned.

Claude-Éric Gagné served as Trudeau's deputy director of operations and was one of a handful of key players responsible for the Liberals' big 2015 win in Quebec. He was placed on leave in November 2017 after the Prime Minister's Office first learned of allegations of inappropriate behaviour.

Trudeau's spokeswoman Eleanore Catenaro said a third-party investigator had finished a report Friday and Gagné was no longer working for the PMO.

"Because of privacy consideration ... all I can say is he no longer works in PMO and that the investigation has concluded," she said.

(Sidebar: what? No details? No transparency?)

It's just good optics.




It's been over three weeks and Khowlah Noman, her family, the popular press and the TDSB are still liars:

The Toronto Star tried to place the blame solely on the Toronto District School Board (TDSB). They and others in the media patted themselves on the back for belatedly deciding to not use the girl’s name and to blur out her face in pictures, even though they and the rest of the mainstream media were simply closing the stable door after they already let the horse bolt. Generally, the mainstream outlets in the media were in consensus that the story had too much international appeal, and the family was willing to let the girl go in front of the camera, that they couldn’t pass up the opportunity to use the girl’s face and name. No one, except some curious writers (some would slander by calling “Islamophobes) at the Toronto Sun and myself, dared to question whether or not the girl and her brother were put up to it. The Toronto Star tried to exonerate the family by unquestioningly publishing the family’s late, vague apology and a defense of how the girl’s immigrant family didn’t likely understanding the ramifications of going in front of the media because of their unfamiliarity with the press in Canada. Never mind that the mother has been in Canada 25 years and grew up here, which she explained at the press conference. Even the National Post’s Chris Selley assumed it was just the poor girl’s mistake being blown up internationally, and that it’s best to just move on from the whole debacle.

Read the whole thing.



 
Moscow does not believe in tears, or in summary executions of its pilots:

A Russian pilot who ejected from his fighter jet after it was shot down in northwestern Syria on Saturday was killed by militants after he landed alive on the ground and resisted capture by an al-Qaida-linked group, Syrian monitors and a Syrian militant said.

 
It seems not everyone is thrilled by the propaganda piece that the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics obviously is:

Conservative civic groups held a massive rally Saturday against North Korea's participation in the PyeongChang Winter Olympics, with some members burning North Korea's flag and photos of the North's leader Kim Jong-un.

Uh-oh. This doesn't look good:

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will ask South Korean President Moon Jae-in for support in evacuating Japanese citizens if a contingency breaks out on the Korean Peninsula, government sources said.

What makes Abe think that South Korea might be safer? I mean - try as Moon might to appease North Korea and its Chinese backer, what is to say that Kim won't hedge his bets and turn South Korea into a sea of fire, as his father once promised?




North Korea is invited to take part in the Paralympic games:

North Korea has been invited to participate in the Paralympic Games in South Korea next month, the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) said Friday. 

The IPC said that it has invited North Korea to take part in its first Winter Paralympics and offered two bipartite slots to athletes to compete in Para Nordic skiing events in PyeongChang, South Korea. 

In an inter-Korean meeting earlier this month, North Korea agreed to send a 150-member delegation of athletes, cheerleaders, an art troupe and reporters to the PyeongChang Winter Paralympics that run from March 9 to 18.

Yes, about that:

The situation began to change when Kim Jong Un came to power. Instead of deporting people with disabilities, the regime realized their utility as propaganda tools. However, the regime continues to banish individuals with mental disabilities out of fear they might 'say inappropriate things out loud.'

Culture matters:

The video shows students at the so-called "female morality school" in northeastern China getting up at 4:30 a.m. to scrub floors and being taught not to resist if their husbands beat them.

Shot with a hidden camera and posted on a popular Chinese video website , it sparked a storm of criticism of the school and highlighted complaints that the status of women is deteriorating under the rule of a Communist Party that promised them equality.

In the recording, students at the Fushun Traditional Culture School were shown being told to put aside career aspirations and, in one instructor's words, "shut your mouths and do more housework." 

One group of students was shown practicing bowing to apologize to their husbands.

"Don't fight back when beaten. Don't talk back when scolded. And, no matter what, don't get divorced," a female teacher says in the post on Pear Video, a Beijing-based online platform for short videos.

"Women should just stay at the bottom level of the society and not aspire for more," another teacher says.

Such schools appear to be growing in popularity, though it is unclear how many China has, according to researchers and women's rights activists.

 
But I thought communism was supposed to do away with that.




And now, too much Saxon violence:

Archeologists have discovered the remains of a lost army of Viking warriors in a mass grave in the English Midlands.

Known to Anglo-Saxon historians as the Great Heathen Army, they were the vanguard of the first permanent Norse invasion of Britain in the late 9th century, which eventually left them in control of much of England.

Their countrymen who had settled in Normandy in what is now France would famously later finish the job in 1066, taking all of England under William the Conqueror.

But the Great Heathen Army paid a steep price for their smash-and-grab raids against the people of Mercia, one of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, whose king they forced into exile in Paris.

After marauding around the countryside, they were eventually beaten by Alfred the Great, King of Wessex, and agreed to peace and Christian baptism. But more than 250 of them ended up in a mass grave beside St. Wystan’s church in Repton, Derbyshire, then a major royal and religious centre of Mercia, in the winter of 874.