For A Monday

The story so far ...




The death toll due to floods in western Japan has risen to one hundred and twenty-six:

The death toll from torrential rains in western Japan reached 126 on Monday, and 86 people were still missing after massive flooding and landslides destroyed homes and displaced tens of thousands of people.

As of late Monday, 47 deaths were reported in Hiroshima Prefecture, followed by 36 in Okayama and 25 in Ehime.

Rescue operations by Self-Defense Forces personnel and others continued in disaster-hit areas, while the Meteorological Agency warned that landslides and flooding continue to pose a danger.

The number of casualties is expected to rise further as officials assess the damage in affected areas. 

Many people are believed to be stranded in their homes where roads have been cut off by the flooding.

Four more boys have been rescued from a cave in Thailand:

Four more of the youth soccer players trapped for over two weeks in a flooded cave in northern Thailand were brought out on Monday, an official said, bringing to eight the number extracted in the ongoing high-stakes rescue operation.

“The eighth person is out and the operation is done for today,” said Sitthichai Klangpattana, flag officer to Thailand’s Navy SEAL commander. “Four boys were brought out today.”

He didn’t comment on the health of the boys or how well the operation had gone. After Monday’s rescue effort, four boys and their coach were still inside the labyrinth cave.

Whatever one does, don't call people who sneak across the border illegally "illegal border crossers":

As noted by the CP, Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen is attacking the Ontario government for calling illegal border crossings what they are: Illegal.

“Last week a spokesman for Premier Doug Ford issued a statement describing asylum seekers as “illegal border crossers,” saying the influx has resulted in a housing crisis in Toronto and “threats to services that Ontario families depend on.

Ahmed Hussen, the federal minister of immigration, refugees and citizenship, told a news conference today in Halifax that he’s “very concerned” by the comments made by Ford and Lisa MacLeod, the provincial cabinet minister responsible for immigration. Hussen, himself an immigrant from Somalia, says Canada has a legal obligation under national and international law to give a fair hearing to refugee claimants.”

 
Ahmed Hussen also doesn't like it when you ask him about mutilating young girls. He hates that.





The current prime minister of Canada is an unqualified, pro-communist, divisive, incompetent liar and groper. As with the recent Ontario election when Doug Ford appeared the better option compared to Kathleen Wynne, Andrew Scheer doesn't have to wade through tired re-treads of past Tory ads. He just has to not be Justin Trudeau:

As we move into the sprint toward the 2019 general election, Liberal attacks on Conservative leader Andrew Scheer won’t be a carbon copy of the “He’s Just Not Ready” ad the Conservatives used to attack Trudeau in 2015. But it is likely the Liberals will play up the need for continuity and experience in the Age of Trump. The result may be shades of the campaigns run against Trudeau and his predecessor, Stéphane Dion, whom the Conservatives deemed “not worth the risk” in 2008.

We are set to witness a race to the centre between the Liberals and Conservatives. A mix of conviction and a desire to galvanize the political base — that is, to raise money — has seen the parties operating at opposite ends of the political spectrum. That is likely to end.

In a speech to his party’s convention in Halifax next month, Scheer is expected to portray his party as one of the “centre-right.”

Meanwhile, Trudeau is going to have to turn down the volume on his beloved identity politics, in part because the allegations levelled against him of unwanted touching spoil the wedge the Liberals had been planning on gender, which would have portrayed the prime minister as a proto-feminist in contrast to Scheer, whom they would cast as a far-right social-conservative extremist. The facts of the matter are still murky but there is enough ambiguity to make it risky for Trudeau to talk too much about gender equality and a zero-tolerance approach for sexual misbehaviour.

The smarter course will be to return focus to the aspirational middle class who elected him in the first place, and to talk about the issues that matter to them. Apologies to marginalized groups, compensation payments to terrorists and, unfortunately, reconciliation with Indigenous Canadians do not rank high among them.

(Sidebar: would this be the middle-class that Justin screwed over? THAT middle-class?)





Oh, Justin won't do a thing like that!:

A top Jewish organization is calling on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to use his trip to Latvia to push back against the glorification of Nazi collaborators in that country as well as attempts to deny the nation’s role in the Holocaust.

Premier Ford wouldn't have to make such cuts if Ontario teachers' unions didn't consistently vote Liberal:

Ontario’s new Tory government has cancelled a $100-million fund earmarked for school repairs this year, a cut that comes as a result of Doug Ford’s campaign promise to scrap the province’s cap-and-trade system.

School boards were notified on July 3 that the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund would be eliminated and that only work contracted on or before that date would be covered.

Oh, this must be embarrassing to British Prime Minister Theresa May:

Prime Minister Theresa May’s foreign minister and Brexit negotiator quit on Monday in protest at her plans to keep close trade ties with the European Union after Britain leaves the bloc, stirring rebellion in her party’s ranks. 


Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, the face of Brexit for many, resigned just hours after Brexit minister David Davis, emboldening some in her Conservative Party to mull a plot to unseat her less than nine months before Britain exits in March. 

Who conned who?:

Either a war or a quiet capitulation garlanded by addlebrained journalists and academics will end badly enough for us, for the 28,500 troops we have not yet extricated from Korea, and for their families. For Koreans, the Trump-Kim Pact is on course to become a historically determinative catastrophe. The sooner Trump’s cabinet convinces him that Pyongyang is reneging and making him look like a sucker and a weakling, the better off we’ll all be. Not that diplomacy itself is a bad idea, of course, but the grotesque way in which we conducted it—and larded praise on, and thus legitimized and emboldened, the most brutal despot of our time—certainly was. 

As I, too, have been saying ...


(Kamsahamnida)




Religion has survived not because its adherents reject science and reason and its detractors shout about their scientism and how dreadful they find the mere idea of God but because (well-grounded ones, anyway) religion gives its believers purpose and moral clarity that juvenile rebellion against the Almighty does not:

This is why religion has survived not only the progress of science, but also the attacks of atheists. Their arrows miss their mark, and as the dangers of religious extremism fall down the list of cultural preoccupations, so too does movement atheism.