Whatever.com

For A Monday

2012-02-13T23:46:00.001-05:00

Starting the week off…

One would think the Greeks would be grateful:

Greece has admitted it still faces a tough job in persuading the European Union and IMF to save it from bankruptcy even after parliament approved savage extra budget cuts, provoking a night of looting and burning in central Athens.

A suspicious EU has told leaders of the two parties left in the government of technocrat Prime Minister Lucas Papademos to give written commitments by Wednesday that they will implement the pay, pension and job cuts after elections expected in April.

As parliament debated the austerity package on Sunday night, riot police fought running battles with protesters outside. By daybreak on Monday 93 buildings had been wrecked or seriously damaged in the city centre, some of them historic monuments.

Is Iran behind this?

Israel accused arch-enemies Iran and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah of being behind twin bomb attacks that targeted Israeli embassy staff in India and Georgia on Monday, wounding four people.

Tehran denied involvement in the attacks, which amplified tensions between two countries already at loggerheads over Iran's nuclear program, and accused Israel of carrying out the attacks itself. Hezbollah made no comment.

In the Indian capital New Delhi, a bomb wrecked a car taking an Israeli embassy official to pick up her children from school, police said. The woman needed surgery to remove shrapnel but her life was not in danger.

Her driver and two passers-by suffered lesser injuries.

Israeli officials said an attempt to bomb an embassy car in the Georgian capital Tbilisi failed, and the device was defused.

If so, this could be the sleeping giant attacks it has warned it would carry out.

No, give themnothing because this cycle will never end if you do:

The firstof 22 modular homes promised by the federal government to Attawapiskathas arrived to the remote northern Ontario First Nationscommunity, the Aboriginal Affairs minister's office confirmed Sunday.

Here'ssome shocking news: a new report finds major failings with aboriginal educationin Canada.

Thereport by a national panel on First Nations elementary- and secondary-schooleducation called on the federal government to set up an oversight body, The Canadian Pressreports.

Italso recommended that local organizations similar to school boards be set up.
Andit called for more money to be put into the system.

Specificrecommendations in the report, entitled Nurturing the Learning Spirit of First Nation Students,include creating a child-centered First Nations Education Act, setting up anational commission on First Nation education to support reform and improvementefforts, setting up regional organizations to provide support and services forFirst Nations schools and students, ensure adequate funding for the system andestablish a system of accounting and reporting.

Is there the drive to learn, grow and succeed? If not, you aredoing what one normally does: throwing money at the problem.

Unbelievable:

Rescuershave pulled a 5-year-old girl alive from the rubble of a house flattened by amassive avalanche that killed both her parents and at least seven of herrelatives in a remote mountain village in southern Kosovo.

Col.Shemsi Syla, a spokesman for the Kosovo Security Force, said Sunday officersdiscovered the girl when they heard her voice and cellphone. Her home wasburied under 10 metres (33 feet) of snow.

Rescuerscheered and pumped their fists in the air late Saturday as the girl was pulledout alive. A video aired on Klan Kosova TV showed rescuers covering the girlwith blankets, before she was rushed to hospital.

Thank God for that.

What hesaid:

what can Isay. While the US is making plans to colonize space, we imbeciles are breakingstatues. We deserve our misery. May God give us more.

Bingo.

What blame-games Islamists play. Everyone is at fault for theirsocio-political, cultural, mental and emotional retardation but them. Whatmisery they bring on themselves is their own doing and can be undone if theytruly wished it. How can anyone think things like this areprogressive?

WhyCelebrity Apartheid Week matters: Samuel L.Jackson has joined the ranks of the perpetually stupid:

In an interview with Ebony Magazine, actor Samuel L. Jackson spokecandidly about his support of President Obama in 2008, the New York Post reports. “I voted for Barack because he was black,”Jackson revealed. “‘Cuz that’s why other folks vote for other people — becausethey look like them.”

Right. However, there are no petiteblogging politicians. At least none that I can see. Your argument, therefore,Mr. Jackson, is invalid.

Stick to acting.

Why couldn’t Christopher Hitchens be morelike his brother?

So, it’s not a matter of children being sexualised but who sexualises them. Right. As long as we’re disgusted by the abuse ofchildren. Oh wait… these contraceptive-spewing freaks aren’t.

Americanbishops will not be moved:

Catholic bishops say they remainopposed to President Obama'splan to require insurers to provide free birth control,even if religiously affiliated employers such as Catholic hospitals anduniversities aren't forced to pay for it.

"The only complete solution to this religious liberty problem is for HHS[the Department of Health and Human Services] to rescind the mandate of theseobjectionable services," the U.S.Conference of Catholic Bishops said in astatement.

The statement, issued late Friday, makes clear that the bishops' oppositiongoes beyond the "religious freedom" dispute that had riled Washingtonin recent weeks. The government's decision to guarantee women access tocontraceptives "remains a grave moral concern," they said.

On Friday morning, Obama called Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan,the bishops conference president, to tell him of the revised rule. Initially,Dolan described the move as a "first step in the right direction."

But in the later statement, the bishops conference said it would continue toobject because of Obama's decision "to retain HHS's nationwide mandate ofinsurance coverage of sterilization and contraception."

"We will therefore continue — with no less vigor, no less sense of urgency— our efforts to correct this problem through the other two branches ofgovernment," they said.

Ionce thought Obama voted against the Born-Alive Act and passionately supportedPlanned Parenthood to secure the hardcore radical feminist vote. I waswrong. Obama's commitment to abortion goes far deeper. Limbaughnailed it: "Abortion is thesacrament to the religion of liberalism" -- a religion of which I, Lloyd Marcus, believethat Obama is a zealot.

His nameis Andrew Breitbart and he doesn’t need your DAMN pity.

Put a man’s nose to the grindstone and he islikely to go to the rooftop with a gun and protect his property.

Signs your civilisation might be crumbling: “who thef… is Paul McCartney?”

Oh, just THIS guy.

(Muchas gracias)

Some good news:

His heart was put together properly, it just didn't work normally," George's cardiologist, Dr. Anne Dipchand, told The Toronto Star. "He had very significant or severe end-stage heart failure."

He would not survive — or ever leave Sick Kids Hospital — without a new heart.

After six weeks or worrying and waiting, a small, healthy heart became available for a transplant.

Seven days later, George was discharged from the hospital and welcomed home by his parents and big sister, Elle, 3.

Dr. Dipchand believes the boy, who is thriving with his new heart, has a good chance "to live a long life."

George's parents have written a letter of deep gratitude to the anonymous family who donated their dying child's organs to their son.

Let's hope for the best.

888

2012-02-13T23:30:00.002-05:00

This is my 888th post.

Apparently, the Dutch word for 888 was used to flush out German spies during the Second World War. It was too hard to pronounce by non-native speakers. I can just imagine how that was worked into a conversation...

Johan: Say, Hans- what number comes before 889 and after 887?

Hans: (nervous sweat)

Yep, war is hell.

Saturday Night Special

2012-02-11T19:49:00.002-05:00

Happy birthday, Mrs. Palin.

On the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, no less.

Sarah Palin's awesome CPAC speech.

(Gracias)

Do you have too much to say? Say it with a cake.

And now, a dog that really, really likes baths.

Friday Freakout

2012-02-10T23:05:00.002-05:00

Happy birthday, Mr. Pasternak.

Who says love is dead? Not me. A man in a Bender mask proposes to his girlfriend in binary code.

If you've always wanted to know what Mark Twain would sound like if he was somehow blended with Dr. Zaius, you're in luck.

Holy frack! Check out this wolf and kitten.

Friday Post

2012-02-10T22:44:00.001-05:00

Quickly now...

Stephen Harper mulls ~~selling more of Canada off~~ a full free-trade agreement with China:

Last January, Eddie Goldenberg, former Chrétien chief of staff, and John Weekes, Canada's chief negotiator on NAFTA, penned a column for the Globe and Mail arguing Canada must negotiate a free-trade deal with China now or get left behind.

"The case for building a closer economic relationship with China for the long-term economic advantage of both partners is overwhelming," they wrote.

"Time is not on our side. New Zealand, Chile and the ASEAN countries have negotiated free-trade agreements with China, and Australia is currently negotiating one. Canada cannot afford to wait until everyone else has a deal. Bold political leadership is needed in both countries to work toward that objective."

David Emerson, Harper's former trade and foreign minister, told the National Post he'd love to see a free-trade deal struck with China.

"You can't sell stuff in Canada and be globally competitive. You have to open up markets and we don't have any trade agreements in Asia," he said.

"We need to have a more aggressive, collaborative relationship with China."

In less than six years, the Harper government has concluded free trade agreements with nine countries—Colombia, Honduras, Jordan, Panama, Peru and the European Free Trade Association states of Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland.

Canada has also launched negotiations on a number of trade agreements, including with India and the European Union, two of the largest markets in the world.

Even in South America, despite criticism, Harper chose economic gain over human rights in signing trade deals with countries that have dubious records.

Why would China be any different?

How many Canadian-made products can one buy in Canada or China? Compare that to Chinese-made products sold in Canada. What is the ratio? We send natural resources like wood pulp and minerals to China. In exchange, they send us things like apparel and toys which could be made safely here.

Who is getting the raw deal?

Related: what if China were to give our uranium to North Korea?

Obama still thinks Catholics are stupid:

President Barack Obama, in an abrupt policy shift aimed at quelling an election-year firestorm, announced on Friday that religious employers would not be required to offer free birth control to workers and the onus would instead be put on insurers.

But Catholic Church leaders and Obama's Republican opponents, who had railed against the Democratic president's new rule on contraceptives as a violation of religious freedom, signaled that divisions remain over the hot-button social issue.

The compromise by the Obama administration sought to accommodate religious organizations, such as Catholic hospitals and universities, outraged by a new rule that would have required them to offer free contraceptive coverage to women employees.

Instead, the new approach puts the burden on insurance companies, ordering them to provide workers at religious-affiliated institutions with free family planning if they request it, without involving their employer at all, the White House said.

"Religious liberty will be protected, and a law that requires free preventive care will not discriminate against women," Obama told reporters in the White House briefing room as he sought to put the political furor to rest.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops called Obama's move a "first step in the right direction" but said it was still concerned about the issue and would reserve judgment.

Weighing in publicly on the issue for the first time, Obama acknowledged that religious groups had "genuine concerns" about the birth control rule, but he accused some of his opponents of a cynical effort to turn the issue into a "political football."

"The result will be that religious organizations won't have to pay for these services," Obama said. "But women who work at these institutions will have access to free contraceptives just like other women."

The rule had sparked an outcry not only from Catholic leaders but from social conservatives, including Republican presidential hopefuls on the campaign trail, and had also sown dissent among some of Obama's top advisers.

Health insurance giant Aetna Inc said it would comply with the policy but needed "to study the mechanics of this unprecedented decision before we can understand how it will be implemented and how it will impact our customers."

If there is anything Obama is deft at it's self-campaigning, which is what he has been doing since he arrived in office. One might say that was all he was doing. That is unfair. He has also been playing golf.

But I digress.

Obama is good at self-promotion. If throwing a person or a group under the bus serves his purposes- in this case, Catholics and social conservatives- so be it. What he did not expect is how politically important they are to his already fragile chances at re-election. He has either completely ignored or conveniently forgotten the First Amendment and I don't think he cares a whit what the Church has to say about this. He does care about he thinks, though. If he cannot force Catholics to violate their principles for his personal beliefs, he can put the onus on insurers who would rather not have anything to do with this:

Health insurers said on Friday they feared President Barack Obama had set a new precedent by making them responsible for providing free birth control to employees of religious groups as he sought to defuse an election-year landmine.

Obama on Friday announced the policy shift in an effort to accommodate religious organizations, such as Catholic hospitals and universities, whose leaders are outraged by a new rule that would have required them to offer free contraceptive coverage to employees.

Instead, the Obama administration ordered insurers to provide workers at religious-affiliated institutions with free family planning if they request it, without involving their employer at all. Insurance industry officials said the abrupt shift raised questions over how that requirement would be implemented.

Most insurers already covered costs of contraception but Obama's plan makes them culpable. He characterised this opposition as a "political football".

Well, who threw it?

Imagine this guy on the ticket against Obama:

The U.S. safety net is the unfortunate result of liberals who believe people are selfish robots, Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) argued Friday.

West delivered a forceful rebuke of both Democrats and government programs to help the needy as he addressed activists at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

“It is the liberal philosophy not the conservative one that views humans as selfish automatons,” West said.

“Liberals worry that what’s best for the individual might not be better for the public at large,” said the Florida congressman. “But that philosophy assumes something vicious about each and every one us. It assumes we only care about ourselves.”

“For far too long we’ve allowed the other side to paint us as racist, as sexist, inhumane war mongers well today as a conservative black Republican and former solider, I’m here to set that record straight,” West said.

He told activists that when conservatives object to expanded entitlements and redistribution of wealth, they are accused of having no compassion.

“Of course we have compassion. We just don’t believe the safety net should be used as a hammock,” he said to boisterous applause.

Yep. Good times. Good times.

Mid-Week Post

2012-02-08T22:19:00.003-05:00

It's the middle of your train of thought.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper ~~is selling off Canada bit by bit~~ has signed new trade deals with China:

Nearly 20 years of negotiations on an investment protection deal for Chinese and Canadian investors has come to a close.

The prime minister says negotiations on a foreign investment promotion and protection agreement between the two countries are over.

The deal still needs to be legally reviewed and ratified by the Canadian and Chinese governments before it can come into force.

In Canada, that will include debate in the House of Commons.

A FIPA, as it is known, gives foreign investors equal footing with domestic businesses in either country and business groups had been urging Harper to wrap up talks with China in order to spur greater investment between the two countries.

Canada and China had been negotiating a FIPA since 1994, and by January 2010, a dozen rounds of talks had failed to produce an agreement.

By the end of 2010, Canadian investment in China increased by 38 per cent over 2009 levels. That same year, Chinese investment in Canada totalled $14 billion, an increase of nine per cent.

The announcement was part of a slate of deals signed between Canada and China at the end of Stephen Harper’s first day of a four-day tour through the country.

They include agreements to co-operate on energy, natural resources, education, science and technology, and agriculture.

I don't know why as Chinese tycoons are buying our oil and Chinese spies have engaged in industrial espionage for years.

Quebec is going further down the national toilet than one realised.

Sixty-three percent of Canadians feel the death penalty is sometimes "appropriate":

According to a new Angus Reid/Toronto Star poll released Wednesday, Canadians are warming to the idea of a return to capital punishment.

The survey found that 63 per cent of the 1,002 Canadians surveyed across the country believe the death penalty is sometimes appropriate.

In particular, sixty-one per cent said capital punishment, which was abolished in Canada in 1976, is warranted for murder.

Because he's Mark Steyn:

In a television interview during a visit to Egypt last week, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court seemed to agree. “I would not look to the United States Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012,” she said. She recommended, instead, the South African Constitution, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms or the European Convention on Human Rights.
As it happens, I have been on the receiving end of the “Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms,” a characteristically modish piece of Trudeaupiana foisted on the country in the early Eighties. As I wrote here:
Since this magazine and I were ensnared in the “human rights” machinery, I’ve come to regard Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms as—what’s the legal term?—oh, yeah, a worthless piece of crap.
If that’s insufficiently legalistic, I’ve also described it as “a worthless piece of junk.” By design, it excludes property rights, which Locke, Montesquieu, and other irrelevant dead guys all saw as an indispensable condition for liberty. It embeds identity-group preferences as a constitutional principle. And it empowers hack bureaucrats to determine the appropriate balance between genuine rights such as free speech and the pseudo-“rights” doled out by the state’s social engineers. It represents, as do many of the more fashionable constitutions admired in the Times piece, a precise inversion of the definition of “rights.” As I put it to one of the Charter’s many admirers:

“Rights” are not those things granted by the sovereign and enumerated in statute, but the precise opposite: They’re restraints upon the sovereign. They’re not about what the state allows you to do, but about what the state is not allowed to do to you.

Beyond tragic- the driver of a van involved in the crash that killed eleven migrant workers ran a stop sign:

A van carrying 13 poultry farm workers from South America drove right through a stop sign and into the path of a freightliner truck, police said Wednesday, citing driver error as the cause of one of Ontario's deadliest collisions.

Ten workers from the van and the truck driver died Monday after the violent impact sent the van hurtling across a lawn, trapping the dead and dying workers inside the wreckage. What was left of the truck was so mangled that it was thought at first to be a flatbed.

All of the workers — except one man originally from Nicaragua — were Peruvian, some of whom arrived in Canada days before their deaths and some of whom had well-established lives here.

The driver, David Armando Hernandez Blancas, 45, was one of the workers killed in the crash and had been in Ontario for some time, living in New Hamburg, not far from the crash site. He had an Ontario driver's licence, but not the type required to drive a van of that size, investigators said.

Of course:

The mother of the Shafia family has joined her husband and son in filing her intention to appeal her convictions on four counts of first-degree murder.

The Liberals are a weakened and paranoid party. Anyone with a conscience has no business being in its rancid ranks:

Toronto MP Carolyn Bennett, chair of the Liberal women's caucus, recalled the attempted riding takeovers in the past and said it's "worrying" to see the abortion issue being raised once again in a nomination meeting.

She pointed out that Haitas's views are contrary to a priority resolution passed at last month's convention, reaffirming women's right to reproductive health services. The resolution noted many publicly funded health institutions refuse to perform abortions and urged the federal government to financially penalize provinces that fail to ensure access.

Bennett also questioned the legality of the name Liberals for Life.

"We will speak to the leader and to the party but I don't think (Liberals for Life) should be able to portray themselves as an official branch of the party, that's for sure," she said in an interview.

What a stupid cow she is.

Related: the Susan G. Komen for the Cure "charity", recently stinging from its cut and re-attached ties to abortion provider Planned Parenthood (which doesn't provide mammograms, by the way), has cut nearly half of its funds that would go toward research. Trendy causes seem to fall into this manhole.

Obama's forcing health insurance companies to include contraception angers the Catholics who unfortunately voted him in the first time. What were you thinking?

Rick Santorum batted three for three as he took Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado. Did not see that coming. Good for him.

A Danish study finds- somehow- that post-aborted bipolar women will not end up in a psychiatric institution:

In women with a history of mental illness such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, getting an abortion does not increase their chances of landing in a psychiatric facility again, suggests a new study from Denmark.

Still, those who had an abortion had a higher overall readmission rate both before and after the procedure than women who gave birth.

Some researchers -- as well as political opponents of abortion -- have suggested that aborting a fetus can take a serious psychological toll on women, although doctors who do the procedures argue that's generally not the case.

"We're not saying that this group of women is necessarily doing really, really well. What we're saying is that the procedure itself doesn't seem to be associated with a higher risk of readmission," said Trine Munk-Olsen, from the University of Aarhus, one of the study's authors.

"It does seem to be a more vulnerable group of women," she told Reuters Health.

Munk-Olsen pointed out that her study only took into account psychiatric episodes that were severe enough to require intensive treatment, so it can't give any clues into whether abortion might have an effect on more mild depression, for example.

Feelings of sadness and loss around the time of an abortion are "temporary and appropriate," said Dr. Anne Davis, an ob-gyn at the Columbia University Medical Center in New York.

"There are going to be normal emotional reactions to that type of stress," Davis, who wasn't involved in the new study, told Reuters Health. That's not the same thing as saying women are likely to have serious mental health issues as a result of the procedure, she added.

(Sidebar: that's like saying someone is slightly off after being set on fire.)

The new data come from records of Danish women with a past psychiatric facility stay who had an abortion or gave birth between 1994 and 2007. In each of those cases, the researchers tracked the woman's chance of being readmitted for any psychiatric disorder in the nine months before the abortion or birth and the year afterward.

Of the 2,838 women getting a first abortion, 11 percent were readmitted sometime during the study. That compares to just five percent of the 5,293 women who gave birth.

However, women who had an abortion were no more likely to be sent back to a psychiatric facility around the time of the abortion or afterward than in the months before the procedure -- including before women became pregnant.

That suggests that some of these women may have in part decided to have an abortion because of psychiatric problems and related life stressors -- not that the abortion itself worsened their mental illness, Munk-Olsen and her colleagues wrote Monday in the Archives of General Psychiatry.

By comparison, rates of readmission were higher after having a baby than before in women who gave birth, peaking in the first month after their babies were born.

That's consistent with prior research, Munk-Olsen said, and may be due to a mix of genetic risks and sleep deprivation, biological changes and hormone swings that happen after childbirth.

She said that the generally higher rate of psychiatric readmission in the abortion group, up to nine months before and a year after the procedure, might explain why some previous studies have suggested abortion does increase the risk of mental health problems.

However:

Forty-one percent of women had become pregnant on at least one occasion prior to age 25, with 14.6% having an abortion. Those having an abortion had elevated rates of subsequent mental health problems including depression, anxiety, suicidal behaviours and substance use disorders. This association persisted after adjustment for confounding factors.

Women who had undergone an abortion experienced an 81% increased risk of mental health problems, and nearly 10% of the incidence of mental health problems was shown to be attributable to abortion. The strongest subgroup estimates of increased risk occurred when abortion was compared with term pregnancy and when the outcomes pertained to substance use and suicidal behaviour.

University of Oslo researchers compared 40 women who had had a miscarriage with 80 who chose to have an abortion.

Miscarriage was associated with more mental distress in the six months after the loss of a baby - but abortion had a much longer lasting negative effect.

Celebrities and a biased judge can now look down their noses at Black and Latino American Christians whose votes now do not seem to matter.

And now, a shark eating another shark.

Freaky, yet you cannot turn away.

Intelligence and Racism: How One Study Shoots Itself In the Foot

2012-02-08T01:30:00.000-05:00

First of all, human beings are complex creatures, social one minute, solitary in the next. We cannot always typify the human being, even if we can identify and articulate what we think is human nature. However, we can make some pretty spot-on educated guesses about types of people from what we observe. Chances are that a well-dressed young man or woman with a white-collar job may have fiscally conservative opinions but a hippy may not.

This study here goes out of its way to prove itself wrong.

"Bright Minds and Dark Attitudes - Lower Cognitive Ability Predicts Greater Prejudice Through Right-Wing Ideology and Low Intergroup Contact" is a study done by Gordon Hodson and Michael A. Busseri of Brock University that purports to have proven a link between low cognitive ability, right-wing ideology (read: social conservatism as one will read in the study) and near anti-social behaviour.

From the abstract: (emphasis mine)

Despite their important implications for interpersonal behaviors and relations, cognitive abilities have been largely ignored as explanations of prejudice. We proposed and tested mediation models in which lower cognitive ability predicts greater prejudice, an effect mediated through the endorsement of right-wing ideologies (social conservatism, right-wing authoritarianism) and low levels of contact with out-groups. In an analysis of two large-scale, nationally representative United Kingdom data sets (N = 15,874), we found that lower general intelligence (g) in childhood predicts greater racism in adulthood, and this effect was largely mediated via conservative ideology. A secondary analysis of a U.S. data set confirmed a predictive effect of poor abstract-reasoning skills on antihomosexual prejudice, a relation partially mediated by both authoritarianism and low levels of intergroup contact. All analyses controlled for education and socioeconomic status. Our results suggest that cognitive abilities play a critical, albeit underappreciated, role in prejudice. Consequently, we recommend a heightened focus on cognitive ability in research on prejudice and a better integration of cognitive ability into prejudice models.

Extraordinary.

It's long been speculated- and commented- that those on the conservative end of the spectrum are thicker than whale omelets but seldom, according to the authors of the study, have conservatives been subjects of cognitive ability/social views studies. Don't let the plethora of citations the Hodson/Busseri study fool you, no matter how old, disparate and abstract they are. Also, do not be distracted by the lack of definitions or accounting for cultural and educational differences. For as much as the authors of this study may wish it, the reality is that life does not represent their erroneous view. There are too many variables not considered that would serve to unravel what is disguised as a legitimate study.

What is the definition of political, fiscal or social conservatism in the US as opposed to Canada, the United Kingdom or various countries in Asia? By the same token, what is the definition of liberalism? What do the authors of the study mean by intelligence? Do they mean academic, social or cultural, political, moral or professional intelligence, all of which can be valid and independent of one another? What is the definition of racism in this study? The racism of lowered expectations, as some may argue race-based programs are? The narrow definition of racism as white-on-black racism to the exclusion of the perniciousness of other kinds of racism? Grossly unfair. What does one have to say about skepticism? Is it not an expected tool of inquiry? Where does personal, professional and moral experience and judgment come in? Where do anomalies fit in this study? Does a homosexual who disagrees with "gay marriage" have a "...greater antihomosexual prejudice..." than a self-identified liberal who agrees with it? How would Hodson and Busseri qualify the words and actions to the opposite of what they are stating?

Why did Hodson and Busseri not use Canada in their study? Why not tap into the home-field? Could they have not found similar results in the Great White North where conservatism here still means big government, big business and loyalty to the Queen but not belief in the traditional family? There is nothing like the Great Canadian Anomaly to skew the results of a study which wouldn't match socio-political reality. Yes, there are plenty of fiscally and socially conservative people in Canada. I would guess they feel slighted- or relieved- that they are not painted as clinical knuckle-draggers. What would Hodson and Busseri do with largely fiscally and socially conservative Asian countries like China, Japan, South Korea and India where education, filial piety and socio-political and cultural castes are the norm? Imagine a racially homogenous classroom where children as young as six are expected to master language skills their peers in more diverse classrooms are not. They have the cognitive abilities but will that translate into social intelligence? I don't think Hodson and Busseri answered that in their study. I'm not suggesting the worst only that the mere supposition of heightened cognitive abilities directly relating to better relationships or social views in the future might be total bunk. Or maybe not considering the need for social and academic ignorance in places like Pakistan. That is also not addressed in the study. Maybe Hodson and Busseri will get to that later.

What intelligence are the authors referring to and could it encompass many meanings? Does academic intelligence equal moral intelligence, for example? In that case, bigoted monsters like the Nazis or the September eleventh hijackers must be models of intellectual and moral excellence. This is facetious in the extreme, yes, but if intelligence is related to behaviour, one must carefully consider how it is used. Even a learned man can be evil.

What of professional intelligence? Can a man who has had no financial experience lead the free world? Apparently not. Yet even questioning this is allegedly racist. Never mind that the fortunes of two neighbouring countries relies on the economic health of the other. It is better to offer one's trust willingly, rather than have it earned, and hope for the best. After all, the less you trust people, the less you pick up on inter-personal cues, the less you accurate you are in deciphering other people's behaviours and intentions. If one thought that the hype was exactly that, then one clearly has bigger problems.

The intricacies of finance seemed to also elude the so-called "Occupy..." crowd. Percentages were never explained, nor how money, if it could be collected, would be allotted. How could a generation of university-educated and apparently liberal-minded people not be capable of basic math? They also couldn't be counted on to be respectful, open-minded, chivalrous or tolerant. If liberals were, indeed, savvy and good-natured, how does one explain the Jew-hatred, the rapes, the financial naivety and the criminal behaviour? Quite a puzzling contradiction to a study that states the more liberal-minded one is, the more trusting, open and intelligent. Or perhaps the authors of the study DO have a point but have the wrong control group.

Hodson and Busseri don't define what conservatism is to different people. A conservative in Canada isn't the same as one in the US. Politically, conservatism differs in the US and Commonwealth states. By and large, however, the major political parties in the US, the United Kingdom and Canada that identify as conservative in the modern sense tend to be slightly more financially minded and politically protectionist than liberals who tend to be the opposite. A talking point of both liberals and conservatives is the size of government with the latter group wanting to limit the size of government and emphasise private industry which would ostensibly allow for innovation. How that is taken to mean preference for authoritarianism escapes me.

Does this political conservatism or liberalism therefore translate into social conservatism or liberalism? The Republican party in the US has long been accused of being racist yet historically they have proven to be socially progressive by ending slavery. One might argue that the policies of the Democrats, on the other hand, have served only to marginalise Black Americans. Stephen Harper, a clearly intelligent and capable Conservative leader, has been hyperbolically compared to late North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il and accused of being some sort of socially conservative extremist, despite no evidence to even suggest it. According to Hodson and Busseri:

...Socially conservative ideologies have therefore been conceptualized as “legitimizing myths”...

Wouldn't calling a democratically elected leader of a liberal democracy "a dictator" be an attempt to legitimise a myth? What would be the psychological profile of a person who would make such dramatic parallels? Wouldn't it be safe to say that such a person has trust issues, an inability to pick up on personal or political cues and isn't capable of accurate assessment of facts?

One of the most comprehensive texts on the differing social attitudes and personal differences between conservatives and liberals produced is Peter Schweizer's Makers and Takers. In his book, Schweizer does not make so bold a statement as conservatives are cognitively deficient or that liberals are self-centred mental midgets but has instead compiled various studies, polls and articles that refute commonly-held misconceptions. Though intelligence quotients (or IQs) have been sometimes called "unfair", the authors of this study have no problem in using it as a measure by which the subjects are judged. Indeed, liberals have often believed they possessed the upper intellectual hand over conservatives though they could not demonstrate it, as seen in chapter six of Schweizer's book. This, among other things, are written about in Schweizer's book and offer an enlightening view of the North American political spectrum. Do read the whole thing.

I'm sure the authors of this study have not, much to their detriment. If I didn't know better, I would say that this study was an attempt to claim with some authority that anyone who identified as a conservative, particularly a social one, was intellectually and socially stunted. Allow me to be a skeptic and argue that this study is codswallop compiled for very political reasons and will be trotted out as an easy rejoinder very much the same way words like "racist", "homophobe" and "Islamophobe" are when an argument goes pear-shaped. But if one can hold a mirror to the world, one would see no truth in the study at all.

(Gracias, El Barto)

Stuff

2012-02-07T16:59:00.000-05:00

There’s quite a bit of it.

As much as Stephen Harper may be a weaselly politicalopportunist whowould gladly quash a much-needed debate, thetraitors in the First Nations are in no position to sell out their country toan octopus:

Aboriginals fromBritish Columbia have asked China's president to quiz Prime Minister StephenHarper on Canada's human rights record during his visit to the Asian country.
The Yinka DeneAlliance, a group of five First Nations that represent several thousand peoplein north-central B.C., has sent open letters to Chinese President Hu Jintao andto the Chinese media.

Maybe they can go to China themselves and be statelesspersons like thechildren of North Korean refugees whowould be shot onsight or sentback to North Korea where acertain death awaits them. It’s all nutted out. Because if anyone knowsabout human rights, it’s China. And if anyoneknows about living without government hand-outs, it’s theFirst Nations and the corrupt bandchiefs therein. Yes, those guysdeserve each other.

If I were Harper, I would play it safe and pull the ambassador out of Syria. Killing children is no problem for Bashar Assad. He may feel the same way about killing a Canadian:

The official Opposition wants Canada's ambassador recalled from Syria, but the government says he will stay in the besieged country to blast President Bashar Assad for his attacks on domestic dissenters.

NDP foreign affairs critic Helene Laverdiere urged the government to recall the envoy because she said it would send a strong message to Assad, who has waged a bloody 11-month crackdown on dissent in his country that has left thousands dead.

A Syrian military offensive against people in the city of Homs has entered its third straight day.

I do not believe the NDP have a sound reason for demanding the ambassador's withdrawal. I believe the best reason would be a safety one.

England gave us William Wordsworth,William Shakespeare and ChristopherWren. Now, it churns out total morons like these judges:

Both men pleadedguilty to possessing information likely to be useful to a terrorist. JudgePeter Rook QC sentenced Emde to 16 months imprisonment and Baum to just 12months imprisonment.

Both men have alreadyspent 193 days in custody and are to be deported after serving their sentences.Judge Rook told Baum that he had"effectively already served your sentence" while Emde will bereleased in about two months.

"Clearly thedocuments are of a kind likely to be useful to a person preparing an act ofterrorism," said the judge.

"The material,particularly Inspire magazine, makes chilling reading. Only one sentence isappropriate and that is an immediate custodial sentence.

"All terrorist offences are serious. However this falls at the lowend of seriousness. It is accepted there was no evidence to suggest that any ofthis material was going to be used for a terrorist purpose. It is accepted thismaterial was widely available on the internet."

God for Harry, ect….

Related: Elizabeth IIhas screwed others out of their place on the throne for a good sixtyyears. Good for her.

Only small peoplehate Saint Valentine’s Day. And Christmas.

Becauseshe’s Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

But a fair-mindedassessment of recent events and trends leads to the conclusion that the scaleand severity of Islamophobia pales in comparison with the bloody Christophobiacurrently coursing through Muslim-majority nations from one end of the globe tothe other. The conspiracy of silence surrounding this violent expression ofreligious intolerance has to stop. Nothing less than the fate ofChristianity—and ultimately of all religious minorities—in the Islamic world isat stake.

Readthe whole thing.

I didn’t realise you could make up words like “xeno-racism”but if you’re acompletely clueless person or a leftist lying douchebagwith sufficient self-loathing and a penchant foraccusing a certain network of terrorism all the while taking money from an Islamist group totestify on their behalf, I guess you can do practically anything.

(Muchas gracias all)

“Occupy…” is a gift that keeps on giving, as OccupyDC can attest.

Mrs. Florence Green, the last surviving WWI veteran, has passed away at age one hundred and ten.

And now, some valentine cheesecakes.

An Open Letter from Canada to China

2012-02-02T21:58:00.001-05:00

Hi, China.

It's us- Canada, your favourite trading partner and, soon, your number one source of oil.

We were bumming around the Interwebs looking for CBC porn when we stumbled on this:

China may use the upcoming visit by Prime Minister Stephen Harper to try convincing him that it deserves a more prominent role in the Arctic.

Next year Canada begins a two-year term as chair of the Arctic Council, which comprises the eight nations that ring the North Pole.

Even though it has no Arctic territories, China wants a place at that table.

Zhang Junsai, the Chinese ambassador to Canada, told a Montreal audience on Wednesday that his country should be allowed to be there.

"Of course, China wishes to be an observer," he said.

The Arctic region may contain as much as one-quarter of the Earth's untapped oil and gas, reserves that will become more accessible as temperatures rise and polar ice caps melt.

Meanwhile, China covets additional energy and resources to power its fast-growing economy and is already investing heavily in Canada's oilsands. That theme of energy exports is expected to play a central role in Harper's upcoming trip.

In his speech Wednesday to the Montreal Council on Foreign Relations, Junsai focused on bilateral relations between Canada and China, and on Harper's visit. Junsai said he believed the trip would have a very positive impact on relations.

When asked afterwards by an audience member about Chinese views on the Arctic, the ambassador noted that a number of countries were involved in the region.

"We hope that (they) solve their differences by peaceful means," Junsai added. "My understanding, not of my government, is we should have a joint scientific research in this area because a lot of things are unknown...

"We hope that the countries related should support China's request.''

Imagine our surprise when we read it.

No, really. Try to imagine our surprise.

Let's try to sort this out.

Here is a map of the world.

Who's that handsome country closest to the North Pole?

Here is a map of Canada.

And here is a map of you guys.

If there is anything we've noticed it's that you are nowhere near the Arctic.

So imagine our surprise when we read that you - in your words- "...should be allowed to be there..."

No, seriously. Try to imagine.

We can appreciate that you want oil and gas, even going so far as Sudan to get it, but if you think that simply because you want something that means you deserve it, think again.

No, really. Think again.

You have what some people call an undeserved sense of entitlement. Whether it's a product of communism, "the Little Emperor Syndrome", greed or a combination of all three, it just rubs some the wrong way. You might be able to play that game with your lap dog, North Korea, and try to appropriate South Korea's territory, history and achievements bit by bit, but we take our resources and our Arctic claims very seriously. Hell, even Denmark has a better claim than you and they are certainly not douches about it.

Come for the untapped gas reserves. Stay for the cheese.

All we're saying is be realistic.

And don't be utter dinks.

Yours',

Canada

No pandas were killed in the making of this flag. Or female infants.

Mid-Week Post

2012-02-01T18:22:00.001-05:00

For the chewy centre of the week.

Un-freaking-believable:

On Monday,Heritage Minister James Moore responded to an order paper submitted in November by fellow Conservative MP BrentRathgeber.

Rathgeber had asked the public broadcaster to disclose how much it spends oneverything from alcohol and hospitality to the salaries and expenses of its toppersonalities.

Accordingto a story at iPolitics, Moore and the CBC were short on details.

While theCBC did disclose that approximately 730 employees are paid more than $100,000 ayear, the taxpayer funded corporation won't tell Parliament who they are andexactly how much they earn.

Theirnames and precise salaries, according to the documents tabled in Parliament,are protected under Federal Privacy Act.

The onlyemployee whose salary range and expenses the broadcaster was willing to divulgewas CBC/Radio-Canada President Hubert Lacroix. The CBC said Lacroix's salary,set by the Governor in Council, was between $358,400 and $421,600 in 2011.

De-fund this. Now.

Thiswouldn’t be a problem in North Korea but it is in Canada:

The students’ union ofUniversity College London has passed a motion this week officially making the campus“pro-choice.” The motion also dictates that campus groups, including thechaplaincies, must invite pro-abortion speakers to their events in equalnumbers to pro-life speakers when addressing “terminations.”

The problem could be solved if student unions are abolishedand the money that students could use is not given to greedy little censoriousfascists.

Another problem could be solved if schoolsare strictly for academic achievements, not playgrounds for special-interestgroups populated with freaky little kids:

After Ontario’sCatholic trustees took a strong stand against homosexual activism in a newanti-bullying plan last week, Ontario’s government has slammed the planfor failing to allow for single-issue clubs for homosexual students.

“We’vebeen absolutely crystal clear that we expect students to participate in groupsand have the issues important to them talked about,” Education Minister LaurelBroten told the Catholic Register’s Deborah Gyapong on Monday.

In a Jan.25th document titled Respecting Differences, the Ontario Catholic SchoolTrustees Association (OCSTA) established a framework for student-led clubs tocombat bullying related to racism, gender, disability, and sexual orientation.

Thedocument insists the clubs remain faithful to Catholic teaching, be overseen bya staff advisor who knows and believes the Church’s teaching, and cannot engagein activism against Catholic teaching.

It comesin response to Broten’s Bill 13 (the Accepting Schools Act), which wouldrequire schools to allow students to “establish and lead … organizations withthe name gay-straight alliance or another name.”

Broten andPremier Dalton McGuinty have both insisted the bill would require schools toestablish GSAs, and Broten has labeled opponents of the bill as “homophobic.”

OCSTA’sdocument states, however, that GSAs are “not acceptable in Catholic schools.”

From thehostess with the mostest:

A HOMILYdelivered at Knock shrine by the Bishop of Raphoe, PhilipBoyce, is being investigated by the Director of Public Prosecutions following aformal complaint by a leading humanist who claims the sermon was an incitementto hatred.

The gardaihave confirmed to former Fine Gael electioncandidate John Colgan that they have prepared and forwarded a file to the DPPafter he made allegations that the address by Dr Boyce was in breach of theProhibition of Incitement to Hatred Act, 1989.

Thehomily, entitled: "To Trust in God" was delivered to worshippersduring a novena at the Marian shrine in Co Mayo last August and subsequentlyreported in the media, including The Irish Times, under the headline:"'Godless culture' attacking church, says bishop."

Mr Colgan,a retired chartered engineer and economist from Leixlip, Co Kildare, referredin his formal complaint to two key passages in Dr Boyce's homily which hebelieves broke the law.

One of thepassages referred to the Catholic Church in Ireland being"attacked from outside by the arrows of a secular and godlessculture".

A secondpassage, which was included in the complaint, stated: "For thedistinguishing mark of Christian believers is the fact they have a future; itis not that they know all the details that await them, but they know in generalterms that their life will not end in emptiness."

Mr Colgan,who was a leader in the 'Campaign to Separate Church and State' in the late1990s, said in his complaint: "I believe statements of this kind are anincitement to hatred of dissidents, outsiders, secularists, within the meaningof the [Incitement to Hatred] Act, who are perfectly good citizens within themeaning of the civil law. The statements exemplify the chronic antipathytowards secularists, humanists etc, which has manifested itself in theostracising of otherwise perfectly good Irish citizens, who do not share theaims of the Vatican's Irish Mission Church."

To back uphis complaint, Mr Colgan referred to two statistical surveys carried out twodecades apart by the Jesuit sociologist and academic Fr Michael MacGreil,entitled: 'Prejudice and Tolerance in Ireland' and 'Prejudice in IrelandRevisited' which Mr Colgan claims showed "marked prejudice by RomanCatholics and other Christian denominations against agnostics andatheists" (humanist was not an option offered to respondents in eithersurvey).

In hiscomplaint, Mr Colgan said he attributed this prejudice to "hostilepropaganda disseminated in school and chapel in the main by or for theinstitutional churches, for there is no rational or temporal reason".

This is proof that militant atheists are the newfundamentalists.

That anyone has to apologise for his views should bepersonally tiring enough, especially to the perpetually thin-skinned, but thata man of the cloth cannot deliver from the pulpit or epistle- his purview, Imight stress- what is plainly godless, ergo, atheist, just shows how far somewill go not to hear what they don’t want to hear.

Men and women died for this:

There isnot a single, public Christian church left in Afghanistan, according to theU.S. State Department.

Thisreflects the state of religious freedom in that country ten years afterthe United States first invaded it and overthrew its IslamistTaliban regime.

In theintervening decade, U.S. taxpayers have spent $440 billion to supportAfghanistan's new government and more than 1,700 U.S. military personnelhave died serving in that country.

The lastpublic Christian church in Afghanistan was razed in March 2010, according tothe State Department's latest International Religious Freedom Report. Thereport, which was released last month and covers the period of July 1, 2010through December 31, 2010, also states that “there were no Christian schools inthe country.”

“There isno longer a public Christian church; the courts have not upheld the church'sclaim to its 99-year lease, and the landowner destroyed the building in March[2010],” reads the State Department report on religious freedom. “[Private]chapels and churches for the international community of various faiths arelocated on several military bases, PRTs [Provincial Reconstruction Teams], andat the Italian embassy. Some citizens who converted to Christianity as refugeeshave returned.”

Even the Americans see where the Shafias could lead us:

Shafia'svictims were tragic figures who deserved much better. There will be more likethem in Canada if Islam becomes more and more established, if Canadianscontinue to turn a blind eye to what it really is, not to what its apologistsand adherents would have them believe it is. Perhaps the Shafia case will serveto wake Canadians up to Islam's true nature and essence and to the threat itposes to them and to take meaningful steps to overcome it.

Thankyou:

Exactly so. The default positionof pro-choicers, whether or not they frame it this way themselves, amounts to abelief that abortion is always the right choice for women who have given iteven a moment’s consideration. Once a woman has so much as considered thepossibility of abortion, any effort to change her mind – or even just to giveher more information to consider – is an attempt to limit her freedom ofchoice. A woman who doesn’t go through with her impulse to abort is a woman whohas fallen victim to some sort of pro-life plot against her rights.

Whowill make Godzilla movies if there are no Japanese left?

Japan'spopulation is expected to shrink to a third of its current size over the nextcentury, with the average woman living to over 90 within 50 years, a governmentreport said Monday.

Thepopulation is forecast to decline from the current 127.7 million to 86.7million by 2060 and to tumble again to 42.9 million by 2110 "if conditionsremain unchanged", the health and welfare ministry said in the report.

Theprojections by the ministry's National Institute of Population and SocialSecurity Research forecast that Japanese women would on average have just 1.35babies, well below the replacement rate, within 50 years.

The reportsaid that last year's earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan, which leftmore than 19,000 people dead or missing, hit average life expectancy but thatthe figure was expected to continue its upward trend.

Japan'slife expectancy -- one of the highest in the world -- is expected to rise from86.39 years in 2010 to 90.93 years in 2060 for women and from 79.64 years to84.19 years for men.

InSeptember the government announced that the number of people aged 100 or olderhit a record high for the 41st consecutive year.

The healthministry said 37 out of every 100,000 people in the country are now centenarians-- a total of more than 47,700, with 87 percent of them women. The figure wasmore than 3,300 higher than in 2010.

More than20 percent of Japan's population are aged 65 or over, one of the highestproportions in the world.

UGG bootsalong with the sloppy pony tail/head-band, puffy winter jacket and pajama/sweatpants looks should be banned for the sake of humanity:

Saywhat you will about UGG Boots (warm, fuzzy, cruel, unflattering, so 2003,etc.), they're not the biggest problem in education today.

But aPennsylvania middle school wants them off students' feet and out of theclassroom for good.

As of Monday, students of Pottstown Middle School will be barred from wearingthe fur-lined boots in classes, reports the Delaware County Daily Times.

This pastWednesday, Pottstown Middle School principal Gail Cooper sent a note home toparents stating "following several problems with these items, I havebanned the outdoor, open top boots from our classrooms."

Those "problems"? Cell phone contraband, hidden in the cozy spacebetween the ankle and boot.

School policy states students are allowed to bringtheir phones to school but they have to be turned off and kept in their lockersduring classroom time. All that roomy fur has become the perfect place tosmuggle handheld technology into the classroom.

Didsomeone say love?

Nothingsays love like a heart-themed postmark.

CanadaPost says cards sent via the Love, Sask., and St-Valentin, Que., post officeswill get special postmarks.

CanadaPost says the Love and St-Valentin post offices will postmark twice as muchmail as usual over the coming weeks.

Already,mail is coming in from across Canada and from countries such as China, Japan,Hungary, United States, Switzerland and France.

Thosewanting the special postmark in time for Valentine's Day can find out how tosend their card to the postmasters at the Love and St-Valentin post officesfrom Canada Post's website.

Monday Post

2012-01-30T20:45:00.000-05:00

There is no global warming.

The biggest news is the guilty verdict handed down at the Shafia trial.

What is (sadly) expected is the same self-pitying alleged lack of awareness from everyone's favourite victim group (not the gays this time):

The Shafia murder trial has cast a shadow over Canada's Islamic community, further tarnishing an image that has not yet recovered from the events of 911.

Muslims across the country, however, say the revelations in a Kingston, Ont., courtroom have shone a light on problematic aspects of their culture and illuminated new ways to tackle the issues.

For months Muslims say they've recoiled in horror at testimony alleging three members of the Shafia family plotted the deaths of four others in what prosecutors describe as an attempt to restore family honour.

The crown alleged three teenage Shafia sisters were killed after bringing shame upon the family by dating, shunning traditional religious garb and skipping school. The fourth victim, the family patriarch's first wife in a polygamous marriage, allegedly endured years of abuse and feared for her life in the weeks before she died.

Justice Robert Maranger, who presided over the case, noted Sunday how difficult it is to conceive of a crime more "despicable," "heinous" and "honourless."

"The apparent reason behind these cold-blooded, shameful murders was that the four completely innocent victims offended your completely twisted concept of honour...that has absolutely no place in any civilized society."

Crown attorney Gerard Laarhuis suggested the verdict is a reflection of Canadian values and ultimately a rejection of those where freedom is denied.

"This verdict sends a very clear message about our Canadian values and the core principles in a free and democratic society that all Canadians enjoy and even visitors to Canada enjoy," he said.

Rona Ambrose, Canada's minister for status of women, took to Twitter to comment: #Shafia. Honour motivated violence is NOT culture, it is barbaric violence against women. Canada must never tolerate such misogyny as culture."

While many Muslims blanch at the term "honour killing," believing it to be a misrepresentation of the faith they practice, they say the deaths of the four Shafia women reveal the need to take a stronger stand against domestic violence in the community.

Days before Mohammad Shafia, his son Hamed and his wife Tooba Yahya were each found guilty of four counts of first-degree murder, one Ontario city launched a program meant to stop such slayings from taking place in the future.

The Family Honour Project, launched by the Muslim Resource Centre for Social Support and Integration in London, Ont., is an initiative specifically targeting the sort of violence that allegedly took place in the Shafia home.

Centre board member Saleha Khan said plans for the project were afoot long before the case came to trial, but said the story has given the initiative even more urgency.

Despite the fact that honour-based violence occurs in many different cultures besides Islam, the stereotypes revived by coverage of the Shafia trial could further isolate Muslim women, she said.

"It's really turned into an us vs. them," Khan said in a telephone interview. "It's basically created that kind of divide where...now, because of the kind of savagery that's been painted on that, people who possibly would be victimized won't come forward."

Enough.

First of all, a parent who kills his or her child incurs no penalty under Islamic law:

What's more, a manual of Islamic law certified as a reliable guide to Sunni orthodoxy by Al-Azhar University, the most respected authority in Sunni Islam, says that "retaliation is obligatory against anyone who kills a human being purely intentionally and without right." However, "not subject to retaliation" is "a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers) for killing their offspring, or offspring's offspring." ('Umdat al-Salik o1.1-2).

(thank you)

Mohammad himself had a low opinion of women and it is he who is the model of malehood in Islam:

Muhammad beat his wives.
... He (Muhammad) struck me (Aisha) on the chest which caused me pain ... (Muslim: bk. 4, no. 2127)
Muhammad's companions also beat his wives and other women.
... (Umar) found the Prophet sitting sad and silent with his wives around him. ... (Umar) decided to say something which would make the Prophet laugh, so he said, "Messenger of God, I wish you had seen the daughter of Kharija when she asked me for extra money and I got up and slapped her on the neck." God's messenger laughed and said, "They are around me as you see asking for extra money." Abu Bakr then got up, went to A'isha and slapped her on the neck, and Umar did the same to Hafsa. (Mishkat Al-Masabih: vol. 2, p. 690; Muslim: bk. 9, no. 3506, Siddiqui)
Narrated Aisha: A necklace of mine was lost at Al-Baida' and we were on our way to Medina. The Prophet made his camel kneel down and dismounted and laid his head on my lap and slept. Abu Bakr came to me and hit me violently on the chest and said, "You have detained the people because of a necklace." ... (Bukhari: vol. 6, bk. 60, no. 132, Khan)
Muhammad's companions beat their own wives.
Iyas b. Abdullah reported God's messenger as saying, "Do not beat God's handmaidens;" but when `Umar came to God's messenger and said, "The women have become emboldened towards their husbands," he gave licence to beat them. Then many women went round God's messenger's family complaining of their husbands, and he said,"Many women have gone around complaining of their husbands. Those are not the best among you." Abu Dawud, Ibn Majah, and Darimi transmitted it. (Mishkat Al-Masabih: vol. 2, p. 692)
In the Qur'an Muhammad commanded that beating was part of the processfor controlling a rebellious wife.
And those (wives) you fear may be rebellious admonish; banish them to their couches, and beat them. (Qur'an 4:34, Arberry)
`Umar reported the Prophet as saying, "A man will not be asked about why he beat his wife." Abu Dawud and Ibn Majah transmitted it. (Mishkat Al-Masabih: vol. 2, p. 693)
A woman has the right not to be hit in the face.
Hakim b. Mu`awiya al-Qushairi quoted his father as telling that heasked, "Messenger of God, what right can any wife demand of her husband?"He replied, "That you should give her food to eat, clothe her when youclothe yourself, not strike her on the face, and do not revile her orseperate from her except in the house." Ahmad, Abu Dawud and Ibn Majahtransmitted it. (Mishkat Al-Masabih: vol. 2, p. 691)
The husband's right to beat his wife is Shariah law in every school of Islam.

Honour killings are well-documented:

A June 2008 report by Turkey's Human Rights Directorate says that in Istanbul alone, there is one honour killing every week and over 1,000 were killed during the last five years.

In the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, it is believed that three-four women are killed every month in the name of saving honour. The Palestinian Authority follows the Jordanian law, which gives men reduced punishment for killing wives or female relatives if they have brought dishonour to the family.

Similarly, Article 548 of Syria's Penal Code states that if a person catches his wife or sister "committing adultery (called flagrante delicto) or illegitimate sexual acts with another and if he kills or injures one or both of them", he should benefit from a reduced penalty which should not be less than two years in prison.

In Morocco, Article 418 of Penal Code grants "extenuating circumstances" to a husband who murders or injures his wife for "flagrante delicto". About 200 women are killed each year in such fashion in the country, as per private estimates.

According to IRIN, the news branch of the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, as many as 133 women were killed in the Iraqi city of Basra alone in 2006 -- of them 47 were honour killings and 79 for violation of "Islamic teachings".

Now that we have these incredibly pertinent facts in full view, let's dispense with the constant state of victimhood the Muslim community likes hiding in whenever they are caught and must face the- how shall we say?- less comfortable aspects of their seventh century culture. The coverage of the Shafias won't isolate women but bring to the fore what we have known all along and refuse to talk about- that these "honour killings" (for lack of a better term) are ugly and accepted practices and are going on as we speak. Hiding it, as Miss Khan suggests we do, isolates women from getting the help they need and keeps hidden this barbaric practice. The more we shed light on this, the more we force ourselves to admit that so-called honour killings are disgusting and the more we are likely to make (hopefully) the Muslim community face them and force them to ask what kind of lives they want to live in this (ostensibly) liberal democracy where plotting and carrying out murders is horrific. Imagine turning a blind eye to spousal abuse next door. Could we do that? Where, then, is our courage now? Perhaps we can question our cowardice and moral equivalence while we're at it.

Moving on....

PLEASE contact Vic Toews, Minister of Public Safety, and have him refuse to sign the prisoner transfer agreement that would have Omar Khadr back on Canadian soil and eventually freed.

China and Japan need oil:

The shutdown in Sudanese oil supply could drive up already record premiums on spot crude markets as top Sudan customers China and Japan scramble for alternatives even as they weigh the impact on oil flows of international sanctions on Iran.

South Sudan has shut down its oil output, estimated at around 350,000 barrels per day (bpd), as it and neighbour Sudan row over how to disentangle their oil industries, borders and debt.

Before the shutdown, China imported most of that volume, bringing in around 260,000 bpd in 2011, according to Chinese customs data. That loss, in addition to cuts China has made in imports from Iran as Beijing and Tehran bicker over contract terms, has left China looking for alternatives equivalent to around 10 percent of its imports, or around 545,000 bpd.

"It will be a challenge to try to meet the shortfall in supply due to this sudden disruption as the overall quantity is not really that small," said Victor Shum, senior partner at oil consultancy Purvin & Gertz said.

"Overall this is a tighter supply situation for Asian refiners."

The regional spot market is unlikely to provide much relief because of limited availability due to a spurt in demand from Japan for power generation after a devastating earthquake crippled nuclear facilities last year.

Japan is more than welcome to our oil because they don't do this:

Critics of the Sudanese regime contend that Chinese money is also supporting the country's military and its militia allies in Darfur. Human Rights First argues that, in return for access to oil fields to help motor its growing economy, China provides Sudan with Chinese weaponry such as assault rifles, heavy machine guns, and mortars. China not only is Sudan's largest economic partner, but also its "military mentor, advising its army and giving it guns," says the report. Citing U.N. and Sudanese government data, the report states that China sold $3 million in small arms to Khartoum in 2003; that number reached more than $55 million by 2006.

Or this:

China’s censorship system is complex and multilayered. The outer layer is generally known as the “great firewall” of China, through which hundreds of thousands of websites are blocked from view on the Chinese Internet. What this system means in practice is that when one goes online from an ordinary commercial Internet connection inside China and tries to visit a website such as hrw.org, the website belonging to Human Rights Watch, the web browser shows an error message saying, “This page cannot be found.” This blocking is easily accomplished because the global Internet connects to the Chinese Internet through only eight “gateways,” which are easily “filtered.” At each gateway, as well as among all the different Internet service providers within China, Internet routers — the devices that move the data back and forth between different computer networks — are all configured to block long lists of website addresses and politically sensitive keywords.

Or maybe this:

The diplomatic sources pointed out the possibility that the attempted export of chemical weapons reagents was conducted through China, as in past smuggling cases involving North Korea. [….] As long as Beijing does not stop neutralizing the sanctions against Pyongyang, it will be impossible to prevent arms smuggling by North Korea, the sources said,...

No blood for oil.

Visit Israel. Iraq wouldn't like it.

Because he's Ezra Levant:

And so, despite conclusive evidence of Khadr's crimes, including video footage of Khadr assembling terrorist bombs, the Obama administration offered Khadr a plea bargain. He would be sentenced to eight years for his terrorist crimes but need serve only a single year in a U.S. prison.

After that, he could be returned to Canada, where he would be eligible for full parole immediately.

That deal was accepted by Khadr on Oct. 13, 2010, but its terms were kept secret from the U.S. jury at Guantanamo Bay that still met to sentence Khadr. They handed him a forty-year sentence.

Forty years, pled down to one year. That's a 97.5% discount.

But the deal wasn't just between Obama's prosecutors and Khadr.

Canada played an essential part in issuing the get-out-of-jail-free card. Without Canada's diplomatic assurances, the promise of a transfer back to Canada, and to freedom, would have been meaningless.

Without Ottawa's nod at allowing a confessed and convicted al Qaeda terrorist back on to Canadian soil, Khadr wouldn't have accepted the plea and Obama's prosecutors wouldn't have offered it. In fact, the deal specifically promised that the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs would give Khadr a "diplomatic note" confirming their support for the plea deal.

So, Canada's Conservative government, which had for years so vigorously fought off court challenges to compel them to bring Khadr back to Canada, battling a full court press of public attacks from Khadr's personal lobby in the media, the legal profession, and opportunist politicians throughout, suddenly gave everything away in a fire sale.

Just disgusting.

Oh look- the Occupests (TM) are anti-semites. Did not see that coming.

(With thanks)

And now, a T-Rex with a lot of gumption.

Saturday Night Special

2012-01-28T21:00:00.001-05:00

Because it's Saturday.

Just when we thought "Occupy..." was now a corpse of some road-kill, the stench still lingers.

From the 1349 blog (DO check it out).

And now, gaze upon this cuteness:

Mid-Week Post

2012-01-26T01:19:00.002-05:00

Happy Robbie Burns' Day.

The Shafia defense lawyer paints his clients as victims of a "Kafka-esque scenario":

A young man accused of killing his three sisters and the first of his father's two wives is only guilty of being "stupid" and "morally blameworthy," but neither he nor his co-accused parents deserve to be in this "Kafkaesque" scenario, court heard Wednesday.

Hamed Shafia, 21, and his parents Mohammad Shafia, 58, and Tooba Yahya, 42, are on trial for four counts each of first-degree murder, accused by the Crown of murdering their four female relatives in a so-called honour killing. They have pleaded not guilty.

Hamed's lawyer told the jury Wednesday in his closing statement that the only reasonable conclusion they can come to is that the deaths of sisters Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, as well as Rona Amir Mohammad, 52, were a tragic accident witnessed by his client.

"Hamed is guilty of being stupid, morally blameworthy, but other than that, he was not responsible for the girls' death, nor were his parents and (it's) time to put an end to this Kafkaesque 2 1/2 years they've been going through since their arrest," Patrick McCann told the jury.

Really? The abused girls, who begged for help and were found with bruises on their corpses, just piled into a car and drowned themselves. Pieces of the Shafias' car headlight just happened to be at the crime scene.

Right....

This is why we peer-review science essays:

Getting a legal abortion is much safer than giving birth, suggests a new U.S. study published Monday.

Researchers found that women were about 14 times more likely to die during or after giving birth to a live baby than to die from complications of an abortion.

Experts say the findings, though not unexpected, contradict some state laws that suggest abortions are high-risk procedures.

The message is that getting an abortion and giving birth are both safe, said Dr. Anne Davis, who studies obstetrics and gynecology at the Columbia University Medical Center in New York, and wasn't involved in the new study.

"We wouldn't tell people, 'Don't have a baby because it's safer to have an abortion' -- that's ridiculous," she told Reuters Health. "We're trying to help women who are having all reproductive experiences know what to expect."

An induced abortion -- like any other medical procedure -- requires getting informed consent from the woman, said Dr. Bryna Harwood, an ob-gyn from the University of Illinois in Chicago who also didn't participate in the new research.

That means women understand and acknowledge the risks of their different options.

What makes it complicated, Harwood added, is when the law interferes and requires doctors to state information that isn't always balanced or medically sound -- usually exaggerating the risk of abortion.

The researchers on the new study combined government data on live births and pregnancy- and abortion-related deaths with estimates on legal abortions performed in the U.S. from the Guttmacher Institute, which conducts sexual and reproductive health research and education.

Dr. Elizabeth Raymond from Gynuity Health Projects in New York City and Dr. David Grimes of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Chapel Hill, found that between 1998 and 2005, one woman died during childbirth for every 11,000 or so babies born.

That compared to one woman of every 167,000 who died from a legal abortion.

The researchers also cited a study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which found that, from 1998 to 2001, the most common complications associated with pregnancy -- including high blood pressure, urinary tract infections and mental health conditions -- happened more often in women who had a live birth than those who got an abortion.

In their report, published in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology, Raymond and Grimes write that the findings aren't surprising given that women are pregnant for a lot longer when they decide to have a baby and so have more time to develop complications.

Harwood said previous studies have also shown the safety of legal abortions.

Most abortions have typically been done surgically, she told Reuters Health. But since the abortion drug mifepristone was approved for use in the United States in 2000, the number of medically-induced abortions has been on the rise.

Both methods are now considered equally safe, she said, with the main risk -- though very small -- coming from medication- and procedure-related infections.

Depending on the state, however, doctors legally must go over the risks of abortion in language that may be misleading, researchers said, with skewed lists of possible complications. Others require a 24-hour waiting period in between the counseling and the abortion itself.

Harwood said that laws regarding what's said between the doctor and a woman seeking an abortion often hamper doctors' attempts to inform patients in a balanced way.

"It is certainly an impediment to have the state dictate my informed consent process beyond the usual," Harwood told Reuters Health.

"Abortion care and pregnancy care should not really be any different than consenting people for any other procedure."

Davis agreed that state-mandated discussions have no place in abortion counseling. She said she was glad to see the new report, which helps dispel "misinformation" and "lies" about abortion risks included in some state laws -- such as the idea that abortion is linked to cancer.

Okay....

Let's first point out that Drs. Raymond and Grimes are both pro-abortion advocates. Let's get that out of the way right now.

From an evolutionary standpoint, why would the young-bearer just up and die after reproducing? Wouldn't we all be dead at some point?

What Raymond and Grimes skim over is the lack of comprehensive abortion statistics. I'll have to work with whatever abortion statistics I can find because even though some claim the debate is finished and abortion is so super safe and legal, some people go out of their way not to compile proper statistics on it. Keep in mind that in Canada, for example, many surveys on abortion have ceased, making comprehensive statistics reporting difficult. The Centre for Disease Control (or CDC) relies on whateverstatistics or reports in can compile from available information, if reported:

For each year since 1969, CDC has compiled abortion data bystate or area of occurrence. During 1973--1997, data were received from orestimated for 52 reporting areas in the United States: 50 states, the Districtof Columbia, and New York City. In 1998 and 1999, CDC compiled abortion datafrom 48 reporting areas. Alaska, California, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma didnot report, and data for these states were not estimated. During 2000--2002,Oklahoma again reported these data, increasing the number of reporting areas to49, and for 2003, Alaska again reported and West Virginia did not, maintainingthe number of reporting areas at 49.

In 2001 and 2002, forty deaths were identified as abortion-related.If abortion information is gathered infrequently, how then can Raymond andGrimes make so iron-clad a statement as abortion is fourteen times safer thanchildbirth, a statement that couldn't hold water from an evolutionary orstatistics standpoint? Did they not factor in the reported fourteen deaths, fifty-eight ectopic pregnancies and two hundred and fifty-six infections caused by mifeprostone since its approval in 2000? Did the under-reporting of four thousand abortion-related injuries and six deaths skip their notice? This blogsite here lists American abortions deaths spanning nearly a century. Did Raymond and Grimes take any of these into account, especially given how poorly regulated abortion is and the nature of the procedure itself? A sharpened (and sometimes not sterilised) object introduced to an organ normally three inches long and so close to other organs such as the bowel and the bladder can do quite a bit of damage. Did it not occur to them that black American women account for 7.50 deaths per million legal abortions?

Maternal mortality rates in the US:

Maternal deaths are those reported on the death certificate to be related to or aggravated by pregnancy or pregnancy management that occur within 42 days after the end of the pregnancy. The maternal mortality rate has declined dramatically since 1950 when the rate was 83.3 deaths per 100,000 live births; however, the maternal mortality rate in 2005 (15.1 per 100,000 live births) was 84 percent higher than the rate reported in 1990 (8.2 per 100,000). According to the National Center for Health Statistics, this increase may largely be due to changes in how pregnancy status is recorded on death certificates; beginning in 1999, the cause of death was coded according to International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision (ICD-10). Other methodological changes in reporting and data processing have been responsible for apparent increases in more recent years.¹

In 2005, there were a total of 623 maternal deaths. This does not include the 137 deaths of women due to complications during pregnancy or childbirth after 42 days postpartum or the deaths of pregnant women due to external causes such as unintentional injury, homicide, or suicide. In 2005, the maternal mortality rate among non-Hispanic Black women (39.2 per 100,000 live births) was more than 3 times the rate among non-Hispanic White women (11.7 per 100,000) and more than 4 times the rate among Hispanic women (9.6 per 100,000).

The risk of maternal death increases with age for women of all races and ethnicities. In 2005, the maternal mortality rate was highest among women aged 35 years and older (38.0 per 100,000 live births), compared to 7.4 per 100,000 live births to women under 20 years of age and 10.7 per 100,000 live births among women aged 20–24 years.

There were 4,138,349 births in 2005 in the US, with the total of maternal death rates for that year six hundred and twenty-three. Indeed, the maternal mortality rate from 1982 to 1996 was approximately 7.5 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births. Maternal mortality rates have dropped substantially from 1915 to 2003.

In Canada, one of the chief diagnoses of maternal mortality (excluding Quebec) for 2002/2003-2009/2010 was diseases of the circulatory system.

Ireland and Poland have the lowest maternal mortality rates in Europe and have criminalised abortion.

Canada and the US are industrialised nations and (excepting Ireland and Poland) have some of the lowest mortality rates in the world. Whatever maternal deaths- though tragic- do occur are chiefly due to age or some other underlying cause. The hyperbolic claims of "life-threatening pregnancies" completely miss how diagnosed and treatable many conditions are- which is why maternal mortality rates in the West are so low.

These facts are readily researchable. One can speculate on why Raymond and Grimes did not refer to them.

Abortion-related injuries are well-known, from premature babies to infertility to infection to damage of internal organs. For some reason, this was glossed over, as well.

I would throw this study in the junk science pile.

Speaking of "above the pay-grade" debates, this video sums up the State of the Union (and how rotten it has become) address:

(gracias, El Barto)

Why is something as integral and -quite frankly- as clownishly overblown as the Northern Gateway pipeline reduced to a fifteen minute session? Is that why cameras were not allowed?

"You haven't heard the last of Kim Jong-Il! I will return!" He sure did:

Paul Evans, Director of the Institute for Asian Research at University of British Columbia (UBC), seems to think that Canada stands alone in its critique of the “Dear Leader” in being one of the few countries to remind us of the tragic atrocities committed by Kim Jong Il’s regime. He must have overlooked the strong comments made by both the German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle and the Australian opposition leader Tony Abbott calling out the human rights abuses under the dictatorship of Kim Jong-Il[ii].

He also claims that Harper “violates normal canons of protocol in reacting to the death of a leader of a country with which Canada has diplomatic relations”[iii]. Canada has had no formal diplomatic relations with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea since May 25, 2010 and has since moved its Pyongyang office to Seoul. This suspension of Canada-DPRK relations came in the wake of North Korean aggression in the sinking of the South Korean naval vessel Cheonan, which killed 46 people[iv].

More importantly, Paul Evans and a number of IAR staff at UBC are members and contributors to the North Korean propaganda website, CanKor[v]. Under the section “Is CanKor for you?”, the organization queries: "Do you wish to discover the who, what, when, where, why and how that makes the DPRK the most popular whipping boy of the international community?” [vi]

The head of CanKor, Erich Weingartner, operates out of UBC’s Institute of Asian Research. He has openly admitted that he has direct ties with the upper echelons of the North Korean ruling elite and has published a set of interview dialogues with a North Korean patriotic citizen Mr. Pak, which he later admits is an alter ego of himself which he uses to express North Korean sympathies.[vii]

It’s also unclear whether UBC students’ tuitions or taxpayer dollars are sponsoring the six professors from Kim Il-Sung University who are completing MBA degrees at the University of British Columbia.[viii] In August 2011, UBC again hosted 10 North Korean scholars at a conference organized by Donald Baker, another braintrust member of CanKor.[ix] [x]

Let these admirers of the Kim dynasty starve with the masses there. I would gladly pay for a one-way trip.

(With plenty of thanks)

And now, furry feline fury at four thousand feet. Not really- it was an escaped cat on a plane.

A furry "Occupation".

Pull the String

2012-01-25T20:36:00.001-05:00

Why couldn’t AllenWest be the first black president?

Sometimes ignorance is so stupefying it must be seen to bebelieved.

Likehere:

Over the past decade,a number of academic studies have indicated a worrying and disproportionatetrend towards negative, distorted and even fabricated reports in media coverageof the Muslim community. Recent research at Cambridge University concludes that"a wider set of representations of Islam would signify a welcome change toreporting practices. Muslims deserve a better press than they have been givenin the past decade." And according to a recent ComRes poll, one in threepeople in Britain today believe that the media is responsible for"whipping up a climate of fear of Islam in the UK"….

An alternative inquiryis necessary to investigate what many regard as widespread and systematicdiscriminatory practices in reporting on Muslims and Islam in the Britishmedia. Victims – whether prominent or not – of alleged discriminatory mediacoverage have a right to have their testimonies catalogued and examinedthoroughly by credible, independent assessors. Recommendations can then be madeto improve ethical standards in the reporting of not solely the Muslimcommunity but of all sections of society.

Andhere:

Like Hindus,Buddhists, Jews, Christians, Sikhs and secularists, some Muslims haveundoubtedly been violent and intolerant, but the new exhibition at the BritishMuseum – Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam – is a timely reminder that thisis not the whole story. The hajj is one of the five essential practices ofIslam; when they make the pilgrimage to Mecca, Muslims ritually act out thecentral principles of their faith. Equating religion with "belief" isa modern western aberration. Like swimming or driving, religious knowledge ispractically acquired. You learn only by doing. The ancient rituals of the hajj,which Arabs performed for centuries before Islam, have helped pilgrims to formhabits of heart and mind that – pace the western stereotype – are non-violentand inclusive.

Where does one begin?

If reporting the numerous incidences of violence andextremism is considered “negative, distortedand even fabricated”, what would the signatories of this committee suggest?Not reporting anything at all? I’mhardly a defender of the popular press and I believe they are, by and large,cowards when it comes to factual reporting of Islamism but reporting on yet moreincidents of massbombings, suicideattacks, honourkillings and thegoings-on of tyrannical theocratic states is what they do.

Miss Armstrong’s article about the hajj is one of the mostgrotesque attempts at fluffery I’ve seen. Muslims (the ones I doubt MissArmstrong will ever write about) do practise what they’ve learned. That’s theproblem.

Thereis a reason why idolatry is a sin:

It is no simple taskto erect a statue of anybody, let alone someone who presumably requires a largestatue such as Kim Jong Il. In the South Korean city of Gumi, a mere 5m statueof former President Park Chung Hee cost 1.2 billion South Korean Won ($1.03million). Kim Il Sung’s statue in Pyongyang is 24m high. For a massive statuelike that to be erected, the foundations also need to be consolidated, then aroad must be paved to go to the area. Lighting needs to be set in place andelectricity provided all year round.

Thus, at the same time as Kim Il Sung was being publicly idolized,thousands upon thousands of people in different parts of the country werecollapsing in the streets of hunger.If Kim Il Sung’s body had been cremated and scattered at sea then the NorthKorean people would not have starved, at least in principle.

The Kim familyidolization project is not a simple comedy or a caricature, something to belaughed at like the odd behavior of an eccentric relative. North Korea cannotafford any of this, and will take the money from the people’s pockets. The opening act of the 3rd generationsuccession tragedy is beginning.

Itreminds me of someone….

(With thanks)

On A Monday

2012-01-23T23:21:00.000-05:00

Dragons are cool.

Say hay boke-mahn he pah du say oh, everyone.

Becausehe’s Salim Mansur:

The antidote tomulticulturalism is promoting Canada’s own intellectual heritage. “Liberaldemocracy itself is a culture. It’s not some fuzzy idea. It is a culture thatemanates through five centuries of historical struggle.” It places “man as themeasure of all things” and the liberal struggle is the struggle for individualfreedom, he said.

Adding to the “badlogic” that substituted group rights for individual ones was the “bad faith”approach by politicians who saw multiculturalism as a means to gain favour withhyphenated Canadians, Mansur said.

Professor Mansur hits the nail on the head.

We have been so manipulated by the idea of political multiculturalism that we cannot imagine another way to live. Already in the New World we see how different ethnic and cultural populations retained segments of their former culture all the while adopting a new national identity. In that sense, multiculturalism has worked. Political multiculturalism holds that one can be separate identity whose culture is cosidered of similar if not better value than the host one while maintaining residence in a host country. How does sharia law somehow trump English Common Law? How are the Western/Judeo-Christian values we've come to depend upon insignificant compared to the values of another country one may find discriminatory? Why is national unity too much to ask for?

Why Ronald Reagan was elected: He stated that the widely promulgated videosshowing military attacks on demonstrators and a woman "with the bluebrassiere" were all falsified.He said the soldiers were actually helping the woman re-clothe herself withwhat was provocative attire.

The other Jimmy Carter (the black one) makes a declaration above his pay-grade.

Sarah Palin rips some shreds while opining on the GOP presidential race.

Don't argue with a kingmaker.

A must-read:

Imagine a man who isthe equivalent of perhaps 100,000 Osama Bin Ladens in terms of the violence heconducted in his lifetime in the name of religion.

Know that this savageindividual had personally beheaded several hundred people and ordered thebeheading of many, many more.

Don't take my word forit. Do your own research and see that hehad people tortured.

Know that he orderedpeople to be stoned for adultery.

Consider that he ownedhuman slaves.

Note that he married a6 year old girl and consummated the marriage when she was only 9 yearsold. According to his own scriptures, hehad sex with a child.

Research if you can toverify these facts - that this man invented a religion which he spread bykilling people. He was a warmonger whoexplicitly ordered his followers to kill Christians, Jews and othernon-believers of his "religion of peace".

Note that he leftbehind a "holy book" which, if taken literally (and it is commandedthat this book be taken literally) tells his followers that men are to havedominance over women and that they can "strike" a woman if shedisobeys.

Note that where thelegal system he created is being practiced in the world, women are punished forbeing raped - often by being stoned to death or being forced to marry theirrapist.

Know that according tothis man's invented religious legal system, homosexuals are to be executed byhanging.

Note that most of thereligiously inspired acts of terrorism in the world today are done is his namein accordance with the teachings and legacy he left behind.

Look up the word"Al-Insān al-Kāmil" which means that "the person who has reachedperfection". To his 1.67 billionfollowers in the world today this man is the ideal man….
Take your pulse andsee if you are already outraged, not at the information provided thus far, butat the messenger who has presented this information.

Now chose which one ofthe following options best describes your response:

A) That is sad andheartbreaking and I am outraged that anyone would follow this person. I am willing to speak out against these andany other injustices in the world today.

B) I heard aRepublican say something like this once and all Republicans are bad, thereforeyou are bad.

C) I don't carebecause none of this affects me personally.

D) I care, but I fearalienation from my peers when it comes to saying anything about this. It seems unfair, but I don't want to riskbeing judged by others.

E) The person whowrote this blog is a bigot and an Islamophobe who should be banned from DailyKos.

Now ask yourself, do Ihave the courage and conviction to stand up for human rights even when so manypeople in my peer group are inclined to accept the tyranny of this system ofviolence and even demonize me for taking a stand?

Friday Freakout

2012-01-20T21:39:00.001-05:00

For your weekly freak-out.

HelloKitties that must happen.

Lookupon the cuteness. LOOK UPON IT!

That’sone big Koran. I could understand why someone might get angry if this one was burned.

Thou shaltnot APP.

TheHelix nebula is staring right at you.

Stuff For a Friday

2012-01-20T21:35:00.000-05:00

The story so far…

Sadly, singing legend Etta James has passed away at age seventy-three.

Byvetoing the Keystone pipeline, Obama thinks he has Canada on the ropes and has gained a voter base.

Oops:

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Friday shows that 24% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as president. Forty percent (40%) Strongly Disapprove, giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -16

TransCanada Corp may build a US$2-billionsouthern portion of its Keystone XL oil pipeline first following the initial rejection of the full-blown project, whichwould mesh with one of U.S. President Barack Obama’s goals but put it in directcompetition with another major proposal.

Possibleulterior motives?

However:

Harper? Kenney? McKay?Let’s hear the rest of the story about our would-be major oil-importers versusour natural ally to the south (currently crazied by eco-nitwits and $oro$ andObamunism), before we give in any more to folks who are stealing, buying,lying, and seeking to enslave us to their geopolitical future.

It would be more thandisappointing if Chinese Canadians– feeling a certain loyalty to theirhomeland, or a worry over racism– were to merely dismiss such concerns. Thefirst issue is Truth, and Canadian economic and political freedoms. They, inparticular, know the inside of their local mini-culture, the presence oforganized crime, or possible eco-industrials spies.

Is he right because he is Binks or is he Binks because he isright?

Anotherreason why Obama must be shown the door in the 2012 elections:

By supporting tyrantsacross the Middle East, Russia accomplishes multiple objectives. It takes a stand against the spread ofdemocracy protests, thus immunizing its own domestic scene against suchoutbursts. It destabilizes the MiddleEast, roiling oil markets and helping to fill Russian coffers with cash as theprice of crude soars. And it underminesAmerican influence, sending a clear message that if the United States does notplay ball, it will face increased terrorism and uncertainty abroad.

Russia has always positioned itself in opposition to the United States, even after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Now, it would gladly weaken the stability the US brings to the globe, something Obama cannot entirely achieve single-handedly.

Becausehe’s Father De Souza:

In China, under themassive violation of human rights known as the one-child policy, abortion isrampant. The sex selection problem has produced frightening imbalances. A 2009paper by Therese Hesketh estimated that there are 32 million more men thanwomen under the age of 20 in China. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences hasestimated that by 2020 some 24 million Chinese men will not be able to findwives. Forced prostitution, or sex slavery, is on the rise. Elderly people,often reliant upon their daughters for care, are more frequently abandoned. Itis a social catastrophe that will soon have severe economic consequences.

Yet all this has beenknown for a long while. The world has more or less gotten used to it, and it isalmost never raised as a matter of international concern. Particularly notablefor their lack of interest is the abortion-rights community in the West, whichseems willing to sacrifice literally millions of little girls in service of theabortion licence.

The editorial thatsparked this week’s debate was written by Dr. Rajendra Kale, interimeditor-in-chief of the Canadian Medical Association Journal. His editorials areexpansive in scope. He has called on all doctors to support stiffer penaltiesfor head injuries in hockey. He has argued that parking fees at hospitals arethe equivalent of user fees for medical service, and therefore contrary to theCanada Health Act. He will find that he is likely to make more progress on headinjuries and free parking than on sex selection and abortion. The world hasknown about it a long time. It just doesn’t care.

You’ll have to wade through the usual retarded crap (everything from the Church is murderous to the burning witches at the stake to women as seen as lesser beings and some amazingly "pro-choice" historical revisionist crap about Canada's founding) aboutthe Catholic Church before you get to thislittle gem:

I'm no fan of the Catholic Church but I find it rather disappointingthat so many posters here are more concerned with the fact that a Catholicpriest wrote the article than the actual arguments he makes. In civilized debate it is normally expectedthat one will avoid ad hominum attacks and focus on the points being made.

That being said, theissue of sex-selective abortion puts pro-choice people in a tough placelogically. If they argue that femalefetuses shouldn't be targeted like this, as some feminists might argue, thenthey are coming awfully close to acknowledging that some fetuses (female onesat least) have a right to life. This ofcourse is exactly what pro-lifers have argued all along although they wouldinclude male fetuses.

If on the other hand,they argue that women should have the final say as to whether the femalefetuses live or die, then they are practically admitting that female fetuseshave less right to live than male ones because they are less useful to theparents who abort them. I doubt that many feminists would be happy with thatconcept.

Why tackle the barbarity of abortion, backward misogynisticpractices, the failure of multiculturalism or even sticking to limits of thedebate when you can just attack the guy who wrote because he is a priest?That’s why this response is priceless. It addresses the troglodytes’ rabidanti-Catholicism and their failure to address the content in the article andthen proceeds to give or her opinion. But, please, antediluvian wags, focus on the man with the collar. Apparently this article is all about him.

Watch this smackdown:

There is no defending Gingrich’s personal peccadilloes but what he did in the past is not even the point. Such an initial question serves the purpose ofpainting a prospective presidential candidate in the worst possible light notbecause the electorate is truly bothered by it but because the incumbent is anincredibly weak one. This is the same tactic used on Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum and now Newt Gingrich. It's deplorable and the popular press knows it.

At least American Catholic bishops aren't afraid to put the worst president through the ringer:

The Catholic Bishops of the United States called “literally unconscionable” a decision by the Obama Administration to continue to demand that sterilization, abortifacients and contraception be included in virtually all health plans. Today’s announcement means that this mandate and its very narrow exemption will not change at all; instead there will only be a delay in enforcement against some employers.

“In effect, the president is saying we have a year to figure out how to violate our consciences,” said Cardinal-designate Timothy M. Dolan, archbishop of New York and president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

The cardinal-designate continued, “To force American citizens to choose between violating their consciences and forgoing their healthcare is literally unconscionable. It is as much an attack on access to health care as on religious freedom. Historically this represents a challenge and a compromise of our religious liberty.”

The HHS rule requires that sterilization and contraception — including controversial abortifacients — be included among “preventive services” coverage in almost every healthcare plan available to Americans. “The government should not force Americans to act as if pregnancy is a disease to be prevented at all costs,” added Cardinal-designate Dolan.

Now, if the Puritans who hate Christmas, Catholics and children would just put those things aside for a minute and explain why the Obama administration is demanding the inclusion of eugenics programs in healthcare plans.

Women and children first?

Today the wealthiest nations in human history build cruise ships rather than battleships, vast floating palaces dedicated to the good life – to the proposition that, in the plump and complacent West, life itself is a cruise, sailing (as the Concordia's name suggests) on a placid lake of peace and harmony. Since the economic downturn of 2008, the Titanic metaphor – of a Western world steaming for the iceberg but unable to correct course – has become a little overworked, the easiest cliché for any politician attempting to project urgency. But let's assume they're correct, and we're heading full steam for the big 'berg. When we hit, what's the likelihood? That our response will be as ordered and civilized as those on the Titanic? Or that we will descend into the hell of the Concordia?

The contempt for "women and children first" is not a small loss. For soft cultures in good times, dispensing with social norms is easy. In hard times, you may have need of them.

(With plenty of thanks)

Tuesday Post

2012-01-18T00:02:00.002-05:00

Whether or not...

A nation that did nothing to rescue Raoul Wallenberg has any right to punish parents who home-school their kids:

A leader of Sweden’s Liberal Party last week called for a change in the country’s social services law so that the government can take children away from home-schooling families more easily by allowing social workers to do so.

The call for the change comes amidst already stringent penalties in Sweden for home schooling. The Home School Legal Defense Association and Alliance Defense Fund have applied to the European Court of Human Rights on behalf of one family whose child was abducted by the government in 2009 and have filed a brief in a Swedish appellate court on behalf of another family fined an amount equivalent to $26,000 U.S.....

Liberal Party politician Lotta Edholm called for the change to the country’s social services law in a Jan. 10 column in Aftonbladet, a prominent Swedish newspaper. Edholm then wrote on her blog: “Today I write with Ann-Katrin Aslund on Aftonbladet’s debate page that the social services law should be amended so that social services are able to intervene when children are kept away from school by their parents—often for religious or ideological reasons.”

The statement is the most direct and serious threat to date for home-schooling families in the Nordic country, where the climate for home-schooling has continued to deteriorate. The Swedish Court of Appeal has agreed to review three different cases in which government officials denied permission to home-school.

“Parents have the right and authority to make decisions regarding their children’s education without government interference,” said ADF Legal Counsel Roger Kiska. “Swedish policy on home education is at odds with recognized international legal standards that uphold the right of parents to direct the education of their children.”

One simply cannot argue that it is not a liberal's business how a parent educates his children. For a liberal, your kids are his kids and he'll do what he damn well likes with them. I put to Miss Edholm this: if she wants the kids to join public schools, she can damn well drag each and every single one of them to school. Don't let the police and social services do her dirty work for her.

This can only happen in Nigeria:

The suspected mastermind of the Christmas Day bombing of a Catholic church in Nigeria escaped custody after being arrested in the country's capital, police acknowledged Tuesday — an embarrassment for a nation struggling to contain increasingly bloody sectarian attacks by a radical Islamist sect.

Unbelievable.

Remember: Israel is the apartheid state:

The stabbing in Gaza of a Palestinian rights activist after he exposed Hamas' contempt for its own people by using them as human shields, and after he criticized the radical Islamic group for torture, abuse and trampling free speech, should be strongly condemned by the United Nations—both as an attack on the victim’s human rights, and on the idea of freedom of expression.

Masked attackers on Friday stabbed Mahmud Abu Rahma multiple times in the back, leg and shoulders, it was revealed today.

This latest attack on a rights activist underscores Gaza's brutally enforced intolerance for any discourse other the anti-Israel mantras of Hamas, which rules the area with an iron fist.

The Palestinians would have accepted previous land/peace agreements if all they wanted was a home. Think about it.

Censorship and fanaticism go hand-in-hand:

A talk on sharia and human rights by NSS Council Member Anne Marie Waters’ at Queen Mary College, London was cancelled at the last moment because of an Islamist who made serious threats against everyone there.

The talk was due to take place on 16 January but before it started, a man entered the lecture theatre, stood at the front with a camera and filmed the audience. He then said that he knew who everyone was, where they lived and if he heard anything negative about the Prophet, he would track them down.

The man also filmed students in the foyer and threatened to murder them and their families. On leaving the building, he joined a large group of men, apparently there to support him. Students were told by security to stay in the lecture theatre for their own safety.

Jennifer Hardy, President of Queen Mary Atheism Society, who organised the event said: “This event was supposed to be an opportunity for people of different religions and perspectives to debate, at a university that is supposed to be a beacon of free speech and debate.

“Only two complaints had been made to the Union prior to the event, and the majority of the Muslim students at the event were incredibly supportive of it going ahead. These threats were an aggressive assault on freedom of speech and the fact that they led to the cancellation of our talk was severely disappointing for all of the religious and non-religious students in the room who wanted to engage in debate.”

The police were contacted about the incident.

A true religion of peace or a true progressive does not behave this way. It can't be said enough.

Watch an argument eat itself:

By making it mandatory to withhold the gender of a fetus until after 30 weeks of pregnancy, we would prevent gender from being a catalyst for abortion, because after 22 weeks, doctors only perform abortions in life-threatening situations.

While embracing culture and encouraging diversity is part of what it means to be Canadian—so too are equality and women's rights. This extreme form of sexism should not be tolerated. That being said, neither should racial discrimination—and that means the law would apply to all women, not just those of Asian descent.

"The execution of a "disclose sex only after 30 weeks" policy would require the understanding and willingness of women of all ethnicities to make a temporary compromise," wrote Kale. "Postponing the transmission of such information is a small price to pay to save thousands of girls in Canada."

I couldn't agree more. After all, who better to save the future generation of women than the current one? As women, we have a responsibility to stand up for our rights—and that means not abusing the ones we currently have (like the right to an abortion).

While it is a woman's right in Canada to continue only wanted pregnancies, exercising rights and abusing them are two very different things. Making an inherently sexist decision based on the fact that it's your right as a woman is definitely an abuse of that freedom.

Now white liberal feminists have to decide what is more important- abortion or multiculturalism. As you see from this article, they are unwilling to deliberately make that choice. They are forced- very reluctantly and as little as possible- to admit they are eliminating a human being- a female one (the male ones don't matter, I guess) - but they don't want to defend Canadian values, even making definitive moral pronouncements on cultural practices that aren't simply "unacceptable" but outright barbaric:

While embracing culture and encouraging diversity is part of what it means to be Canadian...

No, that's Trudeau's idea of multiculturalism and, as one can see, it's a horrendous failure. New World cultures are already diverse in a number of ways. If we insisted on encouraging a diversity that would eliminate female babies and eventually liberal democratic values, the writer of the above article wouldn't even have attempted to post it. If you want to stamp out female feticide and infanticide, stamp out the cultures that would allow them. Promote cultures that find these practices hideous.

But that would take courage and sense.

(Thanks)

And now, flags of the world. .... with food.

Monday Post

2012-01-16T22:29:00.001-05:00

Stuff for a Monday.

TheIlluminati, the shadow government and the Saucer People walk into a bar...

It would be fun to walk in on these group-think weirdoes inthe midst of some strategizing meeting/yoga party and spread a rumour along thelines of the Harper government Death Star will soon be operational or theant-overlords will soon be here and watch heads explode. These are thesocio-political retards that make the Canadian political scene baffling towatch.

Well, theLiberals are pretty hard to beat.

Ifrace must be an issue, why didstupid white liberals vote for an unqualified half-black man? If race must be an issue, mind.Normally, people just notice how badly their country is doing at the moment andblame the empty-suit responsible. It’s only self-loathing, self-consciousliberals who are obsessed with race. Read the article again if you don’tbelieve me.

IsObama’s enormously stupid gamble to buck Canadian oil race-based, too?

Whywas it bad to pee on the Taliban again?

Theintrepid mujahedin, showing how manly they are by outsourcing suicide bombingsto children. "Afghan boy suicide bombers tell how they are brainwashedinto believing they will survive," by Ben Farmer for the Telegraph, January 13:

The mission was as simple astouching two wires together, the little boy was promised. The resulting blastwould obliterate the American infidels – but God would spare him from the flameand shrapnel. Abdul Samat would be unharmed and free to run back to the men whohad fitted his bomb vest.
Blindfolded and rigged with hisexplosive payload, the boy, who was about 13, was driven to his target in theAfghan city of Kandahar, after being plucked from the streets of Quetta inneighbouring Pakistan. Minutes before he was due to execute the attack,however, Abdul realised the lies of his recruiters seeking to turn him into ahuman bomb.
"When I opened my eyes, I sawit was a very black thing they wanted me to do," he later recalled.
"I began to cry and shout. Peoplecame out of their houses and asked what was wrong. I showed them I hadsomething in my vest. Then they were scared too and called the police who tookthe bombs off me."
Afghan security officials say thatAbdul's story is not unusual. In the past year, insurgents have used a wave ofchild suicide bombers, some as young as 10, on the ruthless assumption thatsmall boys can pass through checkpoints and security cordons more easily thanmen.
A senior Afghan intelligenceofficial estimated that more than 100 had been intercepted in the past 12months, including 20 from the Kandahar area in the south. The insurgentsseek to exploit the innocence of their recruits and turn it into a weapon.
What theyreally want is to place NATO forces in a situation where they have to decidebetween dying in a bombing and using force to stop the bomber. The propagandamill would then say that NATO forces fired on a child.
The largely illiterate boys are feda diet of anti-Western and anti-Afghan government propaganda until they areprepared to kill, he said. But the boys are also assured that they willmiraculously survive the devastation they cause.
"The worst part is that thesechildren don't think that they are killing themselves," said the official."They are often given an amulet containing Koranic verses. Mullahs tellthem, 'When this explodes you will survive and God will help you survive the fire.Only the infidels will be killed, you will be saved and your parents will go toparadise'."

What else can one say? The enemy is that morally deficient that they would do this.

I don’t believe for one moment the popular press zeroed inon this indignity to the dead (Taliban) because it truly was outrageous or thatthey hold the armed forces to a higher standard. For years of reporting thatthe Taliban are “insurgents” fighting for their homeland instead of portrayingthem as they actually are- woman-maiming terrorists- it is hard to believeanything else other than the armed forces represent to the liberal press thestrong-arms that keep the world descending into a chaos that couldn’t becontained in one part of the world- the kind of chaos that would deprive theallegedly progressive classes of the freedoms they currently enjoy. Asformer Colonel Allen West said:

    Ihave sat back and assessed the incident with the video of our Marines urinatingon Taliban corpses. I do not recall any self-righteous indignation when ourDelta snipers Shugart and Gordon had their bodies dragged through Mogadishu.Neither do I recall media outrage and condemnation of our Blackwater securitycontractors being killed, their bodies burned, and hung from a bridge inFallujah.

    All these over-emotional pundits andarmchair quarterbacks need to chill. Does anyone remember the two Soldiers fromthe 101st Airborne Division who were beheaded and gutted in Iraq?

    The Marines were wrong. Give them a maximumpunishment under field grade level Article 15 (non-judicial punishment), placea General Officer level letter of reprimand in their personnel file, and havethem in full dress uniform stand before their Battalion, each personallyapologize to God, Country, and Corps videotaped and conclude by singing thefull US Marine Corps Hymn without a teleprompter.

    As for everyone else, unless you have beenshot at by the Taliban, shut your mouth, war is hell.

Well said.

It’s not the elimination of gender identity. It’sthe elimination of identity and empowering the mentally ill who would proposesuch a folly:

According to thematerials, male-female distinctions must be eliminated in order to"liberate" children from unnecessary stereotypes about what it meansto be male or female. To be absolutely clear, the anti-genderists are notseeking "equal rights," but obliteration of the distinctions betweenmale and female.

Readthe whole thing.

Does this mean we no longer have to fund feminist groups?

WhyCelebrity Apartheid Week matters:

Hollywood may appearto be America's main manufacturer of cultural influence, but all too often,some starlet will come forward and remind us how out of touch Tinseltown iswith mainstream America.

The latest example:actress Maggie Gyllenhaal's recent comments supporting Planned Parenthood in a Glamour magazine column. In it,she describes attempts to curtail the flow of tax dollars into PlannedParenthood's already overflowing coffers as attempts to "restrict women'saccess to reproductive health services -- things like cancer screenings, birthcontrol and abortion care."…

Using typical leftistlingo, Gyllenhaal refers to these attempts to end tax-subsidized abortions as"attacks." She then complains that "Planned Parenthood[was] the only health care provider to have been targeted ... in recent federallegislation." Perhaps she selectively forgot about the debates overObamaCare? I can only surmise that she doesn't know that PlannedParenthood was also the only abortion-provider to receive nearly half a billion dollars in taxpayer funds last year.

Yet all Gyllenhaal cansee, were Planned Parenthood defunded, is gloom and doom. And to proveit, she writes that a loss in funding would restrict "access to theservices Planned Parenthood provides," which in turn would "affect[the] millions of women" who turn "to a Planned Parenthood healthcenter at some point in [their] life."

She then doctors thenumbers to state that "more than 90 percent of these centers' services arein preventive care; 3 percent are in abortion care."

But Gyllenhaal'sliberal-party-line figures conveniently omit the fact that "abortion procedures made up 91 percent of Planned Parenthood'sservices for pregnant women" in 2010.

In other words, 91percent of Planned Parenthood's services for pregnant women resulted in almost330,000 abortions last year alone.

Gyllenhaal is just asmall example of a problem endemic in Hollywood. After all, most ofHollywood's film industry exists in an oasis of make-believe. It's afantastical place full of otherworldly sets and studios that distort reality toallow us to believe in hobbits; blue aliens; and a singing, dancing frog puppet-- a place that brings the never-was to life.

Precisely.

In a nation like Canada where morality is pretty much left to individuals, is it really surprising that some will use unfettered access to fully funded abortion to discriminate against women in a most egregious fashion?

As repugnant as the practice of female feticide is to me, I am foursquare against withholding information about the gender the unborn from pregnant women, most of whom hold healthy, moral, Canadian attitudes regarding the equality of males and females.

This smacks of penalizing the majority of families because a few have barbaric practices. We don’t outlaw marriage because some immigrants practice polygamy—nor should we.

In a nation like Canada where morality is pretty much leftto individuals, is it really surprising that some will use unfettered access tofully funded abortion to discriminate against women in a most egregiousfashion?

As repugnant as the practice of female feticide is to me, Iam foursquare against withholding information about the gender the unborn frompregnant women, most of whom hold healthy, moral, Canadian attitudes regardingthe equality of males and females.

This smacks of penalizing the majority of families because afew have barbaric practices. We don’t outlaw marriage because some immigrantspractice polygamy—nor should we.
In a nation like Canada where morality is pretty much left to individuals, is it really surprising that some will use unfettered access to fully funded abortion to discriminate against women in a most egregious fashion?
As repugnant as the practice of female feticide is to me, I am foursquare against withholding information about the gender the unborn from pregnant women, most of whom hold healthy, moral, Canadian attitudes regarding the equality of males and females.
This smacks of penalizing the majority of families because a few have barbaric practices. We don’t outlaw marriage because some immigrants practice polygamy—nor should we.
In a nation like Canada where morality is pretty much left to individuals, is it really surprising that some will use unfettered access to fully funded abortion to discriminate against women in a most egregious fashion?
As repugnant as the practice of female feticide is to me, I am foursquare against withholding information about the gender the unborn from pregnant women, most of whom hold healthy, moral, Canadian attitudes regarding the equality of males and females.
This smacks of penalizing the majority of families because a few have barbaric practices. We don’t outlaw marriage because some immigrants practice polygamy—nor should we.

(With thanks)

And now, the craziest excuses for being late.

Stuff For a Thursday

2012-01-12T21:34:00.000-05:00

Quite a few things, actually.

Trouble for those whose tears for the late ~~fat SOB dictator~~ leader Kim Jong-Il were deemed insufficient:

“authorities are handing down at least six months in a labor-training camp to anybody who didn’t participate in the organized gatherings during the mourning period, or who did participate but didn’t cry and didn’t seem genuine,” according to the Daily NK.

“The party conducted surveys to see who displayed the most grief, and made this an important criterion in assessing party members’ loyalty,” Yop wrote. “Patients who remained in hospitals and people who drank and made merry even after hearing news of their leader’s death were all singled out for punishment.”

Where are the apologists for the Kim dynasty now? If you failed to shed a tear for Jack Layton, you were branded as "heartless". If your acting skills are found to be wanting in North Korea, you'll be re-educated faster than Tracy Morgan.

Some people are just scum:

Following are excerpts from a Friday sermon delivered by Egyptian cleric Salem Abu Al-Futuh, which aired on Al-Nas TV on January 6, 2012:

Salem Abu Al-Futuh: They are doing all kinds of things so that people keep suffering. They send Christian missionaries in the form of doctors and nurses, who caress and embrace the child, like they do in the West.

They give him a very beautiful toy, and all of a sudden, they snatch it away from him. When the child screams: “Where is my toy?!”, they say to him: “Muhammad stole it from you.” Thus, from infancy, they make the child hate Muhammad. That’s what they do in Spain.

What can one say other than they are lying sacks of crap?

OPEN CHALLENGE: alright, clerics of the world. If you would just put down your Christian-killing tools for one minute (you, too, acid-throwing bigot), I would like to ask you to prove the above statements. I will gladly post the proof you provide me. It has to be independently verified and not doctored in anyway. Photographs or video would be nice.

Unwilling participants are helping gum up the works for the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline:

What exactly does a woman from Santos, Brazil, know or care about the Northern Gateway proposed pipeline project? It turns out, nothing at all.

In fact, even though Ines Gudic is listed to give an oral presentation to the panel reviewing the proposed Enbridge pipeline from Alberta to B.C., she says she knows nothing about it and never signed up to speak.

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” said the 53-year-old woman on Tuesday from her home.

“I have never heard of this pipeline and I did not apply to speak in Canada,” she said, in broken English.

That’s strange. On the federal government’s National Energy Board website, Gudic is one of a whopping 4,522 registrants who apparently applied online to make an oral application. Her name, mailing address, e-mail and phone number are included on the website.

Gudic’s daughter, Flavia, also has never heard of the pipeline, that, if approved, would ship raw Alberta bitumen to Kitimat, B.C., to be sent to Asia via supertankers.

“Maybe the environmental organizations we donate to signed us up,” offered Flavia, a 19-year-old art student.

“We donate to Greenpeace and PETA,” she said. “We care about the environment and animals, so that’s what I think happened.”

Later, Flavia Gudic mentioned that her mother also recently watched a movie online about the Spirit Bear, the white bear that lives on an island near Kitimat. She watched the film on the website of The Spirit Bear Youth Coalition, a B.C. environmental group started by Simon Jackson 16 years ago when he was just 13.

But the Gudics are not alone. Elano Ferraz, who lives in Bom Despacho, Brazil, is also listed as one of the thousands of online registrants who is booked as wanting to speak for 10 minutes toward the end of the one-and-a-half-year hearing process.

This, apparently, is considered fair play by eco-activists. I have no problem with people voicing their objections or support for the pipeline. I do object to this obvious scam.

Do note the photos showing everyone how indigenous they are. Because that has everything to do with a pipeline.

From boy-murdering to racism- the true face of Che Guevara:

It’s odd that the left, which prides itself as being a super-tolerant and racist-free bunch, continues to idolize a man who is on record for saying, “The Negro is indolent and spends his money on frivolities and booze, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent.”

Odd, indeed. If by odd, you mean obvious.

When one thinks of "Occupy...", one thinks of filth, rape and now child neglect:

A few days ago the Washington Post revealed that the occupier encampment in the city's McPherson Square has become a rat paradise because of the filth of the inhabitants in their illegal temporary home.

And into this sanitation nightmare parents left their 13month old infant alone the Washington Post reported the following day. Hearing a baby crying, occupiers notified the police. Later a man claiming to be her father returned for her. US Park Police, who are in charge of McPherson Square, described the scene where they found the little one.
"Mid 40s, rainy, onesie, alone," Schlosser said, describing the circumstances that led police to arrest the man.
The child is with DC's child protective services; the alleged father charged with attempted second-degree cruelty to children.

Yep. That's the ninety-nine percent, apparently.

I guess what happens in Canada stays in Canada:

The Harper government has served notice that thousands of same-sex couples who flocked to Canada from abroad since 2004 to get married are not legally wed.

But speaking in Halifax Thursday, the Prime Minister said the issue was not on the agenda for his majority Conservatives. “We have no intention of further re-opening or opening this issue,” Stephen Harper told reporters when asked about The Globe and Mail’s report.

The reversal of federal policy is revealed in a document filed in a Toronto test case launched recently by a lesbian couple seeking a divorce. Wed in Toronto in 2005, the couple have been told they cannot divorce because they were never really married – a Department of Justice lawyer says their marriage is not legal in Canada since they could not have lawfully wed in Florida or England, where the two partners reside.

Will no one boycott these "homophobic" countries? Or will someone point out what a three-ring circus marriage has become for special-interest groups and other overgrown children who don't understand the value the traditional family has?

Harper has shown how politically ~~cowardly~~ cautious he is.

Well, gee, Japan. What were you waiting for?

Finance Minister Jun Azumi said Thursday that Japan will cut its Iranian oil imports in line with U.S. sanctions against Tehran for its nuclear development program, although Tokyo expressed concern about the possible negative impact on the global economy from the U.S. action.

He didn't want to get sand ticks or cooties or whatever pest that is common there:

Michael Hastings’ new book, The Operators, jabs at what could be a vulnerable spot for the Obama Administration, the president’s relationship with the troops.
The book describes a visit to Baghdad:
After the talk, out of earshot from the soldiers and diplomats, he starts to complain. He starts to act very un-Obamalike, according to a U.S. embassy official who helped organize the trip in Baghdad.
He’s asked to go out to take a few more pictures with soldiers and embassy staffers. He’s asked to sign copies of his book. “He didn’t want to take pictures with any more soldiers; he was complaining about it,” a State Department official tells me. “Look, I was excited to meet him. I wanted to like him. Let’s just say the scales fell from my eyes after I did. These are people over here who’ve been fighting the war, or working every day for the war effort, and he didn’t want to take fucking pictures with them?”

Visit this site. You know you want to.

Read this. It is true that pro-life activists have gone undercover and caught Planned Parenthood facilities covering up things like child sexual abuse. I believe the tactics employed by CTV were done to discredit the pregnancy centre. Well, CTV, do your worst. You can`t cover up things like maternal mortality rates , illegal abortions being performed, lying to teen-agers and abortion-related injuries.

(With thanks enough to go around)

And now, an unusual toaster, awesome toques and super-happy-fun pools.

Mid-Week Post

2012-01-12T00:03:00.000-05:00

Some quick thoughts...

Why are foreigners dictating what we can't do with OUR national resources?

For Canadians, the public hearings into the proposed Northern Gateway project, is an important opportunity for serious stakeholders to discuss the impacts and benefits for our country of a pipeline carrying oil from Alberta to Kitimat, B.C.

For the foreign-backed Dogwood Initiative they’re an opportunity to hijack the approval process — or as Dogwood actually calls it, a chance to “Mob the Mic.”

Seriously. That’s the name Dogwood gave its campaign to sign up as many of their activists as possible to deliberately bog down the hearings process. Of the astounding 4,000 people registered to testify before the panel, Dogwood says its campaign succeeded in signing up 1,600! Forty percent of the registered witnesses are apparently being sent to the hearings by one single anti-oil organization. They’re swarming these important hearings. And Dogwood’s proud of it. The folks there are bragging about this.

But then, they had a mission to accomplish. This appears to be what they were paid to do by their foreign backers. The Seattle-based foundation started by software billionaire James Letwin paid Dogwood $25,000 to run a campaign against the “threat” of the Enbridge pipeline to the B.C. coast. Clearly the most efficient way to block this pipeline is to make sure it never gets approved — by swamping the approval process with an army of activists.

Read the whole thing.

Related: look at the crazies. There is something vaguely familiar about those signs....

(hat tip: El Barto)

Do watch.

For the record, Galen of Pergamon was the first to use catgut sutures and the Chinese, before da Vinci, built rudimentary models for vertical flight similar to helicopters.

(With thanks)

And now, gigantic dogs, big babies.