It Is Here

… or is it?

What would it profit Canada if China bought out its oil producers?

State-controlled CNOOC Ltd launched China's richest foreign takeover bid yet on Monday by agreeing to buy Canadian oil producer Nexen Inc for $15.1 billion, forcing Ottawa to decide whether security concerns outweigh its desire for foreign investment in its energy resources.

CNOOC, China's third-largest oil company, hopes to sell the deal to shareholders and the government with a hefty 61 percent premium to Nexen's Friday stock price. It promised to retain all employees and to make Canada home base for its Western Hemisphere operations.

To paraphrase Baron Harkonnen, he who controls the oil controls the world. Why are we selling off our natural resources to China?

Related: British Columbia Premier Christy Clarke wants to shake down oil companies for their "fair share":

Just before boarding a plane for the Council of Confederation, Alberta Premier Alison Redford held her ground against BC Premier Christy Clark's demand for a bigger piece of the oilsands pie in exchange for a pipeline path to Kitimat, B.C.  ...

BC wants a share of oil royalties in exchange for allowing the pipeline, but Redford says that won't happen.
"We will not share royalties, and I've seen nothing else proposed, and would not be prepared to consider anything else at this time," she said. "I've taken the approach that there are many ways that British Columbia will benefit from this pipeline."

Linda Gibbons is free.

From dogs to Coptic priests, things and people Muslims won't allow in their taxis:

Dr. Yassir al-Burhami, a prominent figure in Egypt's Salafi movement and vice president of the Salafi Call—the same sheikh who seeks to punish Muslim apostates, condemns Mother's Day, and advocates deceiving Israel—has just issued a fatwa, published in the "Voice of the Righteous Salaf," forbidding Muslim taxi-drivers and bus-drivers from transporting Coptic Christian priests to their churches, which he depicted as "more forbidden than taking someone to a liquor bar."

This analogy, of course, does not begin with Sheikh Burhami, but traces back to some of Islam's early giants, including Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim, who agreed that "building churches is worse than building bars and brothels, for those [churches] symbolize infidelity, whereas these [bars and brothels] represent immorality.

The logic is simple: It is better to profess Islam and be immoral, than to profess Christianity—for the latter denies the veracity of Islam, and hence is much more abominable. In this context, the Muslim who transports a priest to his church where he will preach Christianity—a message that contradicts Islam—is a terrible crime.

Minors can buy liquor in burkas, apparently:

Three liquor stores recently sold booze to a 14-year-old boy whose identity was hidden because he was wearing a full-length burka and face veil at the time, a Sun News Network exclusive has found.

 

Taking a step back:

People are used to the idea of dying in a terrible car accident or burning to death in a house fire, but mass shootings are typically a more concerning scenario and therefore perceived as a higher risk despite the facts at hand.

For example, for the United States:

100 people PER DAY die in car accidents (source).

2,640 people PER YEAR die from house fires (source).

117 people died from mass shootings… in the last DECADE (source).

From a straight analytic standpoint, there’s no reason to be concerned about mass shootings. None whatsoever. The probability that you will be involved is so small that my calculator switches to scientific notation when I try to compute it.

And:

Predictably, those who are foolish or sheltered enough to trust the government to monopolize violence decried America’s gun laws. Roger Ebert pecked out some flatulent verbiage regarding “paranoid fantasies about a federal takeover of personal liberties,” and he’s partially correct, because it appears that the United Nations is trumping US efforts to erase personal gun liberties with a bill that Obama is scheduled to sign on Friday. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg also blamed American gun laws but did not say whether he plans to get rid of his personal retinue of armed bodyguards. …

In a world where the idea of personal responsibility has been consigned to history’s dustbin, they’ve probed every possible reason for why he allegedly did it except the idea that he consciously chose to do it.

What skews the arguments for or against gun control are the hasty demands for stricter gun laws and perceived gun fanatics hiding behind every corner. If Canada already has some of the most strict handgun laws in the world, how then did thugs kill in the Eaton’s Centre and in a Scarborough neighbourhood? Perhaps an investigation into how the undoubtedly criminally-oriented obtained these guns and why they weren’t or aren’t in prison is in order.

And one can forget more social programs. If the first batches didn’t work and you can’t rely on single mummy and absentee father to do the parenting, nor can a Dr. Phil clone concoct a socially relevant scenario, you might as well conclude that the guilty party wanted to do something very, very bad. Who was going to stop him, anyway? 

Related: as opposed to the Canadian men who didn't take bullets.

In case one confused change with repressive regimes:

This may not sound like glasnost to you, but the AP’s Jean H. Lee is tweeting and filing “news” stories from Pyongyang about matters of deeper significance:  her sightings of Snoopy backpacks and Mickey Mouse sweaters. In a closed city where the elite have long had access to Sony TVs, Omega watches, and Mercedes cars, Lee concedes that these things “may seem trivial,” but then suggests that they represent “a seismic shift” in attitudes inside the regime. And while Pyongyang’s bold new summer fashions probably don’t meet the editorial standards of Vogue, Lee gives Kim Jong Un’s paramour, who may or may not still be married to someone else, the Asma Al-Assad treatment:

‘Seven months after inheriting the country from Kim Jong Il, the 20-something leader suddenly began appearing in public with a beautiful young woman. Dressed in a chic suit with a modern cut, her hair stylishly cropped, she carried herself with the poise of a first lady as she sat by his side for an unforgettable performance: Mickey Mouse grooving with women in little black dresses jamming on electric violins.

A few days later, video showed her flirting with Kim Jong Un during a visit to a kindergarten. She quickly became the subject of fervent speculation: Is she his wife? Girlfriend? A friend?’  [AP, Jean H. Lee]

This is written in a voice that would be better suited to Tiger Beat, or at best, a People magazine spread about whichever inbred, gerbil-faced British princeling brought a date to the Wimbledon after-party. Lee doesn’t tell us who this fahhh-bulous woman and the other Beautiful People wore to North Korea’s night of a thousand stars. At least that would have revealed (no, not that) the regime’s latest violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1874 to clothe the royal consort in highest fashion. The unanswered gossipy schoolgirl questions seem to be a device to spackle over Lee’s failure to even find out who this woman is.  So much for opening North Korea to the world.

Beyond these atrocities of journalistic workmanship, it must have taken extraordinary powers of compartmentalization to write that in light of what Lee knows about life beyond the gates of Pyongyang:

‘Nearly a third of children under age 5 show signs of stunting, particularly in rural areas where food is scarce, and chronic diarrhea due to a lack of clean water, sanitation and electricity has become the leading cause of death among children, the [U.N.] agency said. Hospitals are spotless but bare; few have running water or power, and drugs and medicine are in short supply, the agency said in a detailed update on the humanitarian situation in North Korea.

“I’ve seen babies … who should have been sitting up who were not sitting up, and can hardly hold a baby bottle,” Jerome Sauvage, the U.N.’s Pyongyang-based resident coordinator for North Korea, said in Beijing before presenting the report to donors.

The report paints a bleak picture of deprivation in the countryside, not often seen by outsiders, who are usually not allowed to travel beyond the relatively prosperous Pyongyang, where cherubic children are hand-picked to attend government celebrations and a middle-class with a taste for good food have the means to eat out.

Sauvage’s report provides not only further evidence of North Korea’s inability to feed its people, but also bolsters critics who say the government should be spending on food security instead of building up its military, testing rockets and pursuing a nuclear program denounced by the U.N., the United States and South Korea.’  [AP, Jean H. Lee, June 12, 2012]

I’m glad to see Lee finally acknowledge that she’s spent the last seven months staring through a soda straw pointed at a facade, yet she continues to distort the significance of what she sees through it, if only to bolster the strained case for her own bureau’s relevance.

A handful of people with purchasing power or cartoon decals is not political change. Progress, life span and life style are vastly improved in liberal democracies. Just count how many fat people there are in North Korea.

Related: the good old days of communism were nothing like this!

In 1977, the year I was born and the year my father, his mother, his aunt and many other Jews left the Soviet Union (my mother and I left in 1978), the Soviet propaganda machine began circulating a rumor. It went, roughly: life in America is so terrible that the old people eat cat food.

This was…perplexing. 

People didn’t quite get it: they have food specifically made for cats in America? What a country!

A lot of things about America remained beyond their comprehension.

A week after my father arrived in New York, he and a friend were walking around Manhattan in pure wonder. They got to midtown and stood in front of Bloomingdale’s watching well-dressed people come in and out. They discussed it amongst themselves that they would obviously have to show evidence that they had money, or proof of income, or some other paperwork to get inside. Surely this store for the wealthy wouldn’t just let them in. They watched and watched but didn’t see people getting stopped. They walked slowly through the doors and found no one gave them a second look.

There’s a feeling in America today that there isn’t equality until any of us can walk into Bloomingdale’s and buy whatever we want. The two men standing there in 1977 weren’t thinking that it was unfair they couldn’t wear the same clothes as the beautiful people around them, they were just grateful for the opportunity to try. They had left a place where that opportunity simply didn’t exist. You were born poor and you would die poor–everyone would. You could gain influence in your life and that might get you small victories–instead of being assigned to practice your profession in Siberia you might get lucky and get sent to a capital city. Perhaps you, your wife, your child, your parents and other relatives could have your own apartment, one you wouldn’t have to share with another family. Those were your wins.

Indeed:

So when the authors of this narrative accuse you of bitterly clinging to your faith and your God-given rights, it's because they bitterly cling to their faith in omnipotent government.  When they accuse you of racism, it's because they are either unable or unwilling to break free of the chains of a twisted perspective in which everything is seen in a racial context.  When they accuse you of being greedy for trying to provide for you and your family, it's because they are the greedy ones, lusting after the property and liberty of others and the power they imagine will be theirs.  When they accuse you of being a threat to society because you insist on having access to the weaponry required to protect yourself and your family, it's because they view you as a threat to a utopia in which  the government prefers to arm drug cartels over law-abiding citizens.  When they accuse of you of trying to impose your morals on others, it's because they desire to impose theirs on you whether through forcing you to subsidize the sex habits of others, or forcing you to purchase whatever product or service suits the egalitarian impulse of the moment.  

And now, some funny animal signs. Enjoy.

 

(With thanks and praise)