Mid-Week Post

The sound of one hand clapping in the forest is kind of tricky to make.


The fatal shooting of two people in Scarborough is not surprising given that gang culture has been allowed to thrive, "brazenly" if you will:

Two people are dead and over 20 others, including an infant, were injured after gunfire erupted at a community party in Scarborough late Monday night.

Details of the event are starting to emerge from eye-witness accounts and from the Twittersphere.

Somehow I don't think Adam Vaughan's ridiculous bullet ban would have worked.



Related: family structures, poverty, crime?

Social programs are essential. But all the social programs in the world can’t make up for family disintegration. ...

Family disintegration is not a racial problem. It is an underclass problem. The evidence is plain that children born to unmarried women – of whatever race – do much worse than children with two married parents. 

They’re less likely to succeed in school and more likely to turn to violence (boys) and promiscuity (girls). The easiest way for them to feel like someone is to grab a gun or have a baby.

So by all means, let’s redevelop public housing, strengthen our policing, hire more youth workers, launch more employment programs, start more basketball programs, help young mothers finish school and teach them how to read to their kids. It makes us feel good to focus on these things because they are things we can actually do something about, and maybe they will make a difference. But let’s not kid ourselves: They’re Band-Aid solutions.

We have a million euphemisms for what’s gone wrong in our so-called “priority” neighbourhoods, a splendidly euphemistic term that has replaced “at-risk,” “disadvantaged,” “underprivileged” and “poor.” By now, it should be obvious that material poverty is not the problem – not when every kid in a priority neighbourhood has a cellphone and a flat-screen TV. Their poverty is of a different, more corrosive kind: a poverty of expectations, role models, structure, consistency, discipline and support.

Perhaps related: I'm not sure how five meters of cloth differs from country to country (and why you would give that cloth to the worst president ever) or how one can racialise math but why would this be pushed through the schools? Is there no one who feels badly for doing a phenomenally crappy teaching job and taking a salary for it? Is there any twinge of moral or occupational guilt anywhere in those overpaid and heavily-unionised bodies?

Frankly, if I was an expert Kente cloth weaver in Ghana, I’d be thinking, “Hey, how come Obama’s brother still lives in a hut? Hell, why do I still live in a hut?” (Although that presumes I was still equipped with my Western white-girl IQ, right? It’s all so confusing.)

To turn this scenario into a math problem or something like it, teachers instruct children to calculate the cost of making such a gift and to “describe the length [of the finished cloth] using standard and non-standard tools,” such as whatever the hell “a Susudua” is.

(Just a reminder: An American teacher was forced to resign after assigning math homework with slavery-themed problems. But this is different. Because reasons.)

I suppose we should feel a touch of relief that Toronto’s Africentric math problems aren’t phrased in Ebonics.

You've let the kids down, race-baiters. You need ignorance for your own ends.




Why would he want satellite technology information and why would he want to meet with the Chinese?

According to a court document filed Tuesday by private investigator Derrick Snowdy and obtained by Postmedia News, Jaffer may have used his position as a cabinet minister's spouse to obtain Canadian military secrets on behalf of the Chinese.

The claim states that in February 2010, the former MP went to China to meet with Hai Shiene Chen, a Chinese Canadian businessman involved with ties to state-owned technology companies.

According to email exchanges obtained by Snowdy, Chen and his Chinese associates had been anxious to befriend Jaffer and Guergis. During the trip, Snowdy writes, Jaffer "was hosted and socialized by Chen's associates representing state-owned technology companies."

Upon his return, Jaffer wrote to David Pierce, then the director of parliamentary affairs to then industry minister Tony Clement, with detailed questions about the Canadian government's "long-term space policy" regarding Radarsat Constellation, a high-technology earth-observation satellite being developed by MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates, with more than $500 million in federal funding.

In the email dated March 16, 2010, Jaffer, using an email address belonging to Guergis's MP account, wrote that he had "a few questions on behalf of some constituents who are friends of Helena and I."

He then asks in the email about the government's plans for the satellite program, including its sensitive "automatic identification system," a military system used to identify vessels in Canadian waters.

He's not just Kim Jong-Il's son and heir. He's now the marshal of the army:

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was named marshal of the army, the country's top military rank, in a move that adds to his glittering array of titles and cements his power in the isolated and impoverished state that has a 1.2 million strong military.

Why use the word "deniers" when the word "skeptics" is more accurate and less divisive? Oh yeah... politics:

A new analysis of 2,000 years of tree ring data has quickly made climate change deniers' list of greatest hits to the theory of manmade global warming.

The tree rings "prove [the] climate was WARMER in Roman and Medieval times than it is now," the British newspaper the Daily Mail reported last week, "and [the] world has been cooling for 2,000 years."

That and other articles suggest the current global warming trend is a mere blip when viewed in the context of natural temperature oscillations etched into tree rings over the past two millennia. The Star-Ledger, a New Jersey newspaper, mused that the findings lock in "one piece of an extremely complex puzzle that has been oversimplified by the Al Gores of the world."

However, the study actually does none of the above. "Our study doesn't go against anthropogenic global warming in any way," said Robert Wilson, a paleoclimatologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and a co-author of the study, which appeared July 8 in the journal Nature Climate Change. The tree rings do help fill in a piece of Earth's complicated climate puzzle, he said. However, it is climate change deniers who seem to have misconstrued the bigger picture. [Incompetent People Too Ignorant to Know It]

So, what exactly did the study find? Instead of using the width of trees' rings as a gauge of annual temperatures, as most past analyses of tree rings have done, Wilson and his fellow researchers tracked the density of northern Scandinavian trees' rings marking each year back to 138 B.C. They showed that density measurements give a slightly different reading of historic temperature fluctuations than ring width measurements, and according to their way of reckoning, the Roman and medieval warm periods reached higher temperatures than previously estimated.

That's significant because "if we can improve our estimates for the medieval period, then that will help us understanding the dynamics in this climate system, and help us understand the current warming," Wilson told Life's Little Mysteries.

Would this be the medieval period pro-global warming scientists thought was irrelevant?



White liberal feminism = vulgar cowardice:

Highlighting her left wing idiotology Slutwalk Founder Heather Jarvis has told the Sun  "F&ck U" according to Tarek Fatah.

I thought these guys needed government money for "health reasons" only?



Related: too pointed an argument?

Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, the Mother of a Billion Thwarted Embryos, focused on contraception rather than abortion, but her reasons for doing so would shock the armpit hair right off the shrillest modern pro-choice radical feminist. Sanger said she believed blacks were inferior and buddied up with people such as Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White Supremacy. Sanger published articles with titles such as “Birth Control and Positive Eugenics” and wrote a book called Woman and the New Race. She spoke of a “pitifully cruel sentimentalism” that forbade “the process of weeding out the unfit.”

And now, why do animal nomenclators lie to us?



(with enormous thanks)