Mid-Week Post

Your middle-of-the-week snack break ...



This case and the case of an acquitted farmer in Alberta may be pointing to the legal system's growing reluctance or inability to try and punish people who use force to protect themselves and their property:

To tears of relief from one side of a small courtroom and muttered profanities from the other, a jury has acquitted Peter Khill in the shotgun-shooting death of Jon Styres.

(Sidebar: this Jon Styres.)

The verdict came early Wednesday here after about eight hours of deliberation.

Khill had been charged with second-degree murder in the Feb. 4, 2016 shooting, but jurors also could have convicted him of the lesser offence of manslaughter if they found he lacked the requisite intent for murder.

Instead, by their verdict, the jury accepted Khill’s explanation that he had shot Styres, an Indigenous man from the nearby Six Nations reserve, in self-defence.

If Khill had fired at a paler-skinned man, would that have been acceptable?




The idiots in charge do not care for parody or satire:

For about the duration of two seconds, I’d thought it was the real deal, until I took a closer look. No harm done. This is of note because it’s pretty much the same experience I had when I first noticed a Twitter account online purporting to be that of Environment & Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna.

It looked like she was going on about some environmental issue in her now typical over-the-top way and others were calling her out for it. Then, also two seconds later, I realized that despite looking very similar to the honourable minister’s actual account, this one was a parody. How did I know that? There were a number of finer points that clued me in, but the dead giveaway was it had the phrase “Parody Account” on it.

Now, some people did not cotton on to the fact this was bogus and weighed in on the account’s musings thinking they were indeed coming from the minister. That’s unfortunate… for them. They’d be well-advised to take a second look at posts before hastily responding to them. But this is about one person not embarrassing themselves by mistaking a parody account for the real deal, right?

Not so, according to the Prime Minister’s Office. Gerald Butts, Trudeau’s right-hand man, was clearly upset by the account and when he saw celebrity businessman W. Brett Wilson engaging with it thinking it was real, he waded in. “This just goes to show that even the most discerning Twitter users can fall prey to fake accounts,” Butts posted. “Jack you may want to look into this,” he added — tagging controversial Twitter boss Jack Dorsey.

And it looks like Jack did just that. Or someone at Twitter did. Either that or it was pure coincidence that the account was shut down later that day. An account that was, contrary to Butts’ statement, a clearly defined “parody” account. Not a “fake” account.

Looks like the PMO is sticking to its version of the facts, though. “Crocodile tears flowing hard tonight,” Dave Sommer, who is the deputy director of digital operations for the PMO and a former Sun News Network producer, chimed in on social media. “That was in no way, shape or form a ‘parody account’ – it was designed to impersonate & trick. Twitter takes down impersonation accounts of public figures from any party,” Sommer argued.

Perhaps because it is too difficult to understand.




Oh, that must burn:

Conservatives on the Supreme Court said Wednesday it was unconstitutional to allow public employee unions to require collective bargaining fees from workers who choose not to join the union, a major blow for the U.S. labour movement.

The court in a 5-to-4 decision overturned a 40-year-old precedent and said compelling such fees was a violation of workers’ free speech rights. The rule could force the workers to give financial support to public policy positions they oppose, the court said.

Poland has to backtrack a controversial law in which it was illegal to tie the country to the Holocaust:

When the Polish government pushed ahead with a controversial Holocaust speech law at the beginning of the year, the outcry was so swift and intense that even Polish lawmakers themselves appeared surprised. Besides Israel’s strong rejection of the Polish legislation, U.S. condemnations hit Warsaw policymakers especially hard.
 
And yet, for months, there were few signs of backtracking, even as the issue emerged as a key obstacle to Poland’s desire to bolster its security ties to the United States. But after an unexpected intervention by Poland’s prime minister on Wednesday, the law that was never enforced is now being largely walked back.

A North Korean defector relates how she was returned from China:

For many years, Heo and her husband, Choi Seong-ga, and their son, Choi Gyeong-hak, lived in relative comfort in Hyesan, near the Chinese border. Heo, a talented singer, was a professor at the city’s University of Arts. Her husband played trombone in the Ryanggang musical performance group, which appeared at regional festivals. He playfully called Heo “older sister” because she was two years his senior. She once performed in front of the North’s first leader, Kim Il Sung, who would summer in mountains near Hyesan.

During the famine of the 1990s, the family took some solace in thinking that everyone in the country was suffering. To gain a little extra money, Heo began to make home-brew alcohol from rotting corn. The profits would buy rice.

About this time, Heo’s husband stumbled across sheet music for “Danny Boy.” It became their private tune since the song was virtually unknown in the North.

“To others it probably seemed like I was living a comfortable life while there were people starving around me,” she said. “I lived alongside those dying of starvation. So I began to think, ‘How should I be living my life in this type of world?’ ”

It took a sharp turn five years ago. The Ministry of State Security asked her to monitor one of her students, a young woman who came under suspicion because of a sister in China. Heo balked.
“They tried to scare me,” Heo said. “They said, ‘Is your son more important than a student?’ ”

Heo was shaken. She pulled the student aside and suggested she try to flee North Korea. It was only a matter of time before authorities arrested you, Heo confided.

Read the whole thing.




Perhaps they remember  Kim Sun-Il:

With some 500 Yemeni nationals seeking asylum on Jeju Island, many in South Korea say the country is facing its first “refugee crisis.”

Indeed, the influx of the refugees from Yemen has triggered a fierce backlash among Koreans against immigration rules of Jeju Island, where, unlike the rest of South Korea, most foreign passport-holders can stay for a month without a visa.

Many of those who oppose the visa-waiver program say Yemenis will only “create problems” in Korea, especially against local women because “they are Muslims.”