Mid-Week Post

Merry Pi Day!

 
There are no Liberal voters in Belgium so ... :

High-ranking Belgian officials are playing down a perceived snub of the Belgian king and queen by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as the royal couple spends the week on a state visit to Canada.

Belgium’s deputy prime minister, who is also foreign affairs minister, says a meeting between Trudeau and the royal couple would have been preferred.

 
The thing is there are Liberal voters who really don't see how unprofessional, petty and sociopathic Justin actually is.

Wow.


 
Justin throws his favourite country under the bus in order to deflect the vote-crushing anger of steel-workers worried about American tariffs:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canada could use tariffs to fight any “increased pressure” of steel dumping into Canada aimed at circumventing new U.S. restrictions.

The tariffs Donald Trump unveiled last week could prompt steel to be shipped instead through Canada to skirt the levies, Trudeau said Tuesday at an ArcelorMittal Dofasco plant in Hamilton, Ontario. The prime minister is touring aluminum and steel production facilities, pledging support for workers after the U.S. president exempted Canada and Mexico from the protectionist measures.

“We are alert to that, we are working with partners in industry, with our American partners, to ensure that does not happen,” Trudeau said of so-called transshipment. “We have a whole suite of tariff and countervailing duties that are at our disposal to move forward and ensure that we are not accepting in unfairly produced or sold steel.”

Yes, about that:

On September 12, 2016, the Canada Border Services Agency (“CBSA”) initiated an antidumping investigation against fabricated industrial steel components originating in or exported from China, South Korea, the United Kingdom, Spain and the United Arab Emirates.  A subsidy investigation was also initiated in respect of China. The complaint was filed by Supermetal Structures Inc. (Lévis, Québec), Supreme Group LP (Edmonton, Alberta) and Waiward Steel LP (Edmonton, Alberta).

Clearly, there are things going under the radar, but hey! Smoke and mirrors, right?







Without those foreign funds, Justin would have to get a real job:

The Liberal government is looking at changes to the controversial rules governing how foreign funds can wind up influencing Canadian elections, but the Conservative Senator who’s been sounding the alarm over the issue is skeptical that it’ll be in place before the 2019 election.

Senator Linda Frum’s Bill S-239 seeks to amend the Canada Elections Act to prohibit registered third parties from at any time accepting “a contribution for any purposes related to an election if the contribution is from a foreign source.” Right now, foreign entities are legally allowed to give untold sums of money into registered third parties that have an explicit goal of influencing the outcome of our elections. The only provision is the funds must be received six months before the writ is dropped.

“Once the funds are mingled, it’s the Canadian organization’s funds,” former Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand explained at a November 2016 Senate committee hearing.

While Doug Ford promises to scrap the sex education program co-developed by convicted child pornographer, Ben Levin, Kathleen Wynne supports it:

Critics who claim parents weren’t consulted during an update of Ontario’s sexual education curriculum are wrong, Premier Kathleen Wynne said Tuesday as she defended her Liberal government’s modernization of the lesson plan, which newly elected Tory leader Doug Ford has pledged to scrap if he wins the province’s spring election. ...

“It’s just not true,” she told reporters at an event in Toronto. “Parents were consulted. Psychologists, psychiatrists, police, people who live in communities and are concerned about the safety of young people were consulted.”

Yes, about that:

It would be nice if parents upset about Ontario’s new sex-ed curriculum, including those keeping their children out of school, could rely on at least one thing Premier Kathleen Wynne’s government is telling them. But they can’t.

Wynne said her government consulted widely with parents about the contents of the curriculum. It did not.

We now know, thanks to a freedom of information request made available to the Toronto Sun, that more than half of the 4,000 parents — one from every elementary school — the government says it consulted with via an online survey, never responded to it.

Well, Wynne is a known liar, so ... :

The premier was categorical. She made a definitive link between Tory carbon tax opposition and public sector jobs cuts. She said those plans “will” put jobs at risk, and lead to other cuts.

Based on what?

A speculative magazine article in Maclean’s.

The 40,000 job cut figure comes from a recent opinion piece in the magazine by Mike Moffatt, an assistant professor at Western University’s Ivey Business School and a director of research and policy at Canada 2020.

Canada 2020 is a left-wing, “progressive think-tank” that Maclean’s itself in a 2017 article described as having a “symbiotic relationship with the Liberal Party and the Trudeau government.”

Might not be the most objective perspective on Ontario PC policy intentions.

I guess someone owes a certain reporter and a certain heckler an apology:

In a statement posted to the NDP website, Singh defends his decision to attend a June 2015 rally in California — an event billed as a commemoration of Sikhs who died during an invasion of the Golden Temple in Amritsar in 1984, but which was also a show of support for Sikh separatism.

Why would someone who claims to be Canadian support Sikh separatism?




An American judge did not believe convicted terrorist's claim that he was a peaceful man who rejected violence and then sentenced him to forty-five years in prison:

Former University of Manitoba student Muhanad Mahmoud al Farekh, convicted by a jury last September of conspiring to kill American soldiers in a bomb plot, tried to convince a federal judge in Brooklyn, N.Y., Tuesday that he was now opposed to violence.

“Violence — especially when it is inspired by religion — is foreign to everything I believe in,” he wrote in a letter read aloud by his lawyer.

But U.S. federal prosecutor Richard Tucker told the court that al Farekh, 32, a U.S. citizen born in Houston, Texas, was “unshakably committed” to violent jihad and should be sentenced to life in prison, Reuters reported.

Faced with these competing arguments, U.S. District Court Judge Brian Cogan handed down a sentence of 45 years, saying that while al Farekh did not appear to have fully accepted responsibility, neither was he “totally devoid of humanity.”

Oh, I would say that he is, your Honour.


 

Oh, Abe, Abe, Abe ...

Can't you see that you are being sucked in? :

The government plans to explore the possibility of a summit between Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as it considers adopting a new way of dealing with Pyongyang, government sources said Tuesday.

The decision came after Abe and other officials were briefed by Suh Hoon, one of the South Korean envoys who spoke with Kim in breakthrough talks in Pyongyang last week.

While the Abe administration has long advocated a cautious stance in holding dialogue with North Korea, it now anticipates there is a fresh chance to make progress toward resolving the issue of North Korea’s abductions of Japanese nationals in the 1970s and 1980s, the sources said.

“If we’re to resolve the abduction issue, direct dialogue with the top — Mr. Kim Jong Un — is essential,” a source at Abe’s office said.

History does not bear you out, sir.




There is a "South Park" joke in here somewhere and I am struggling to find it:

The London District Catholic School Board (LDCSB) is being asked to consider changing a secondary school mascot.

The Diversity, Inclusion and Anti-Oppression Advisory Committee brought the request forward, suggesting that the Catholic Central "Crusaders" adopt a new moniker.

Committee chair Rifat Hussain told 980 CFPL that the mascot references the Crusades, a series of holy wars fought in the Middle Ages.

"It's still a part of history that's not pretty," said Hussain.

No, it isn't.


Case in point:

Crusades, military expeditions, beginning in the late 11th century, that were organized by western European Christians in response to centuries of Muslim wars of expansion.

** 

Historical facts demonstrate that most of the conquered cities and regions accepted the last of the three options set forth in Sura 9:29 and enforced by the later MuslimCrusaders: fight and die, convert, or pay the jizya tax. They preferred to remain in their own religion and to pay the tax. However, people eventually converted. After all, Islamic lands are called such for a reason ...

Perhaps the school should just keep the mascot and set the record straight.

Books are important.

Re-tracing Alexander Mackenzie's route across the country:

In the summer of 1789, Alexander Mackenzie and his companions—five hired voyageurs and two of their wives, plus the great Chipewyan chief Awgeenah, with his wives and hunters—embarked in a flotilla of three canoes, launching from modern-day northern Alberta. Mackenzie was a fur trader in search of a water route to Asia, and he carried a speculative map that showed a river connecting the heartland of North America to the Pacific Ocean. If he was able to confirm this interior Northwest Passage, and develop a new trade route to China, Mackenzie would be a mercantilist hero and rich beyond his dreams.

Mackenzie’s expedition was the first recorded descent of the massive river that now bears his name. In order to write a new book on Mackenzie, I retraced his route down that river, the second largest in North America, paddling my own canoe 1,125 miles from Great Slave Lake to the Arctic.

 
Seven years after a catastrophic earthquake destroyed many towns along the northeast coast of Japan, many have rebuilt their shattered lives and businesses. Note the lack of rioting and dithering:

 
In economies like this, one has to hustle:

Like one Vietnamese Scottish Fold, who ironically is named “Dog”, that has been making the rounds on the Internet for his grouchy face and adorable costumes. His owner is Le Quoc Phong, a fishmonger who hopes Dog’s status as the most stylish cat in the neighborhood will pull in more customers to sample fresh seafood.

 
Ladies and gentlemen, Stephen Hawking:

In 2002, he said he wanted the formula for Hawking radiation to be engraved on his tombstone.

The letters S and A represent entropy and the black hole’s area, respectively. According to IFLScience.com, “the remaining letters are constants of the universe; k is the Boltzmann constant, c is the speed of light, h-bar is the reduced Planck constant, and G is the universal gravitation constant.”