Wednesday, May 25, 2022

Mid-Week Post


 

Your mid-week call to return to Jesus ...

 

... because we need it:

The 18-year-old gunman who slaughtered 19 children and two teachers at a Texas elementary school barricaded himself inside a single classroom and “began shooting anyone that was in his way,” authorities said Wednesday in detailing the latest mass killing to rock the U.S.

Law enforcement officers eventually broke into the classroom and killed the gunman, who used an AR-style rifle. Police and others responding to Tuesday’s attack also went around breaking windows at the school to enable students and teachers to escape, Lt. Christopher Olivarez of the Texas Department of Public Safety said on NBC’s “Today” show.

Olivarez told CNN that all of the victims were in the same fourth-grade classroom at Robb Elementary.

The killer "barricaded himself by locking the door and just started shooting children and teachers that were inside that classroom,” he said. "It just shows you the complete evil of the shooter.”

 

And before everyone screams about more gun control, to wit:

A school security guard injured at least 39 people in a knife attack at a kindergarten in southern China on Thursday morning, state media reported. The motive remains unknown.

The attack was an eerie throwback to deadly attacks at schools in China over past years that prompted security upgrades and that authorities have blamed largely on people bearing grudges or who had unidentified mental illnesses.

The local government in the Guangxi region’s Cangwu county said 37 students and two adults suffered injuries of varying degrees in the attack.

Chinese state media identified the attacker as a security guard at the school surnamed Li. The suspect had been detained while an investigation was underway, they said.

State broadcaster CCTV said 40 had been injured, three seriously, including the head of the school, another security guard and a student.

In earlier attacks, a woman wielding a knife injured 14 children at a kindergarten in the western city of Chongqing in October 2018.

Almost 20 children were killed in school attacks in 2010, prompting a response from top government officials and leading many schools to add gates and security guards.

Chinese law restricts the sale and possession of firearms, and mass attacks are generally carried out with knives or homemade explosives.

** 

The 30 year-old once worked at a care center for people with mental disablities southwest of Tokyo. 

Uematsu admitted stabbing to death 19 disabled people and injuring 24 others at the Yamayuri-en residential buildings in July 2016. Many of the victims were killed as they slept.

He reportedly told the court the victims were "a burden to society" and killing them would be good for society.

 

(Sidebar: why does this sound familiar?)

** 

The defining image of contemporary Canadian maleness is not M Lépine/Gharbi but the professors and the men in that classroom, who, ordered to leave by the lone gunman, meekly did so, and abandoned their female classmates to their fate -- an act of abdication that would have been unthinkable in almost any other culture throughout human history. The 'men' stood outside in the corridor and, even as they heard the first shots, they did nothing. And, when it was over and Gharbi walked out of the room and past them, they still did nothing. Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer from an excess of testosterone.



Speaking of cowards:

 

The coward who used his own kid to hide behind as he ran from a grassroots popular movement (which would not have sprung up had he not been such a tyrant in the first place and forced everyone to lock down) decided a Zoom call would be better to deliver his blithering address (as opposed to jet-setting everywhere or even eating luxurious food while babies go without formula) because he is a lying, hypocritical, racist piece of garbage.

He feels quite at home with the hypocritical elites who party it up and decide the fate of billions in Davos.

What happens when the old stock who loved the Trudeau dynasty are gone?

Voters blocks.

It's part of what keeps the gangrenous Liberal Party around. 

It's as repellent as the artificial francophonie class and the grievance industry of which this wretched creature is part. 


 

This country desires tyranny and corruption:

A cabinet bill detailing legal grounds to search travelers’ cellphones and laptops may lead to political witch hunts, says a Liberal-appointed senator. “Travelers could be targeted for phone and computer searches based on their political views,” Senator Paula Simons (Alta.) said yesterday: “It will put the privacy rights of thousands of Canadian travelers in real jeopardy.”

**

Liberal MPs have blocked disclosure of cabinet documents detailing Canadian diplomats’ hurried flight from Afghanistan aboard half-empty military aircraft. MPs on the Commons Special Committee on Afghanistan successfully filibustered a motion to compel release of the records: “We need this.”

 

At least they were saved.

** 

Cabinet is invoking confidentiality in refusing to detail actual cash payments to individual publishers under a $595 million press bailout. Newspaper executives mandated to help cabinet design terms of the bailout in 2019 agreed to conceal payments: “They chose the people they wanted to get the answers they wanted.”

**

“Bill C-11 is not an ill-intentioned piece of legislation, but it is a bad piece of legislation. It’s been written by those who don’t understand the industry they’re attempting to regulate,” Morghan Fortier, CEO of Skyship Entertainment, told the House of Commons heritage committee.

(Sidebar: oh, it is ill-intentioned.)

“It doesn’t understand how the platforms operate.”

One of the goals of the legislation is to impose “discoverability” of Canadian content by having the CRTC require platforms to promote content from Canadians. Critics have argued that pushing content to viewers who aren’t interested in it will actually harm its creators, because the algorithms will penalize content that viewers don’t interact with.

Fortier said the focus of creators is global. “We’re the highest-viewed channel in Canada, but Canada is three per cent of our overall revenue, and that’s not because of anything other than just sheer population size,” she explained. “So in order for these platforms to actually operate successfully, global discoverability is the key for a lot of these content creators.”

 

Those will be but two causalities of this disastrous bill. 

More:

Ottawa is pursuing different pieces of legislation to regulate the internet, one of which intends to extend the government’s oversight of traditional broadcasting to the digital sphere and its platforms. While the government has said user-generated content will be exempt, the chair of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) said on May 18 that it won’t.

“As constructed, there is a provision that would allow us to do it as required,” CRTC chair Ian Scott told the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage. ...

University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist, a critic of the bill, said that many concerns about C-10 “remain intact.”

“While the section 4.1 exception for user content was reinstated, the addition of section 4.1 sub 2 and 4.2, which together provide for the prospect of CRTC regulations on user content, were added,” said Geist, a Canada Research chair in internet and E-commerce law.

“The bottom line is that user content is treated as a program and the CRTC is empowered to create regulations applicable to programs that are uploaded to social media services.”

Geist said no other country in the world regulates user content in this manner and those sections should be removed from the bill.

Morghan Fortier, CEO of Skyship Entertainment, also pleaded for the removal of section 4.2, which she said “hands sweeping power to the CRTC to regulate the internet use of everyday Canadians and small businesses like mine, who are not even associated with broadcasters.”

Skyship produces online content for children such as the popular Super Simple Songs series, which has amassed over 1.3 billion views, Fortier said.

“If you don’t remove that section, you’re asking Canadians to just trust you that you won’t misuse this far-reaching law and that future governments won’t misuse it either. Thousands of Canadian small business and digital content creators deserve far more consideration than that,” she said.

 

The bill is designed to block out existing content and ultimately stop it altogether.


Also:

Millions of students in Canada and around the world had their personal information sent to advertisers and data brokers when governments made an abrupt switch to online learning during the pandemic, according to a new report that reveals safety gaps in educational technology.

The Globe and Mail collaborated with 12 other media organizations to access data and findings from Human Rights Watch (HRW), which alleges online education platforms in 49 countries actively or passively infringed upon children’s rights by collecting and sharing their personal information, such as their locations and web browsing histories. This investigative collaboration was co-ordinated by the Signals Network, a French-American non-profit organization that supports whistle-blowers.

The findings, which were provided to The Globe ahead of a public release in June, included data on nine virtual learning platforms used in Canada: CBC Kids, Math Kids, ABRACADABRA, LEARN, Active for Life, Mathies, Prof Multi, Storyline Online and Storyweaver. All of these platforms were promoted by the Quebec government through L’école ouverte, a web portal that contains recommendations for educational tools. One of them, Mathies, was directly developed by Ontario’s Ministry of Education.

 

 

The convoy is a now a permanent bogey-man for the left in this country:

An Ottawa judge has decided that “Freedom Convoy” organizer Tamara Lich will remain released on bail while awaiting trial.

 

 

 It's not easy being "green":

Chevy Bolt battery life in cold weather is the focus of a class action lawsuit filed in Canada by a Bolt owner who claims the cars lose a third of their range in cold weather.

The lawsuit alleges the cold Canadian climate is no place the for 2017-2019 Bolt electric vehicles advertised as having a range of 383 km (238 miles) on a full charge.

According to the General Motors class action, the automaker concealed from Canadian consumers the impact the cold has on battery range, leaving the plaintiff and other Bolt owners afraid of driving their cars in the winter.

** 

We could bike people to the hospital!:

At an all candidates debate two weeks ago, Granville Anderson said high gas prices might help get people out of their cars.

“Maybe that’s a silver lining and that may allow people to think outside the box and say maybe I better look at seeing if I can ride a bike to work or buy an electric car,” Anderson said on the issue of higher gas prices.

Later in the debate he again said that high prices might force people to change.

“I think the price could be a lot lower than it currently is. But again, I said that may allow us to think twice and probably find another mode of transportation,” Anderson said.

**

Why not always, Pierre?:

Conservative leadership candidate Pierre Poilievre is calling on the federal Liberal government to scrap taxes on gasoline temporarily as Canadians grapple with eye-popping fuel prices ahead of the busy summer driving season.


 

Congratulations, Poland. You're number one in the eyes of self-centred Canadians with inferiority complexes: 

A 2022 Leger survey for the Association for Canadian Studies shows that Poland was ranked first by Canadians when asked which countries were viewed most positively.

 

Don't tell them that your native-born pontiff helped overthrow communism, though.

 

 

We don't have to trade with China:

Tens of thousands of seemingly hacked files from China’s remote Xinjiang region provide fresh evidence of the abuse of mostly Muslim ethnic Uyghurs in mass detention camps there, which included a shoot-to-kill policy for escapees, according to a report from a rights group.

** 

China wants 10 small Pacific nations to endorse a sweeping agreement covering everything from security to fisheries in what one leader warns is a “game-changing” bid by Beijing to wrest control of the region.

 

 

Oh, give it up, Nancy:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., on Tuesday questioned whether a San Francisco archbishop who said he would deny her Communion over abortion rights was using a double standard by allowing politicians who support the death penalty to receive the sacrament.

 


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