J.J. McCullough: The North Koreanification of Canadian political reporting

...here is what actually happened.

On Friday, Prime Minister Trudeau visited the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics located in Waterloo, Ontario. After a tour, he staged a brief photo op with some scientists and gave a short speech about how his government believes in funding science yada yada. Then, at one point he said this:

“You don’t have to be a geek like me to appreciate how important this work is. Although I have to tell you, when we get to the media questions later I’m really hoping people ask me how quantum computing works because I was excited to deepen my knowledge of that this morning.”

Click here to see a link to the relevant snippet of the speech on the Perimeter Institute’s YouTube channel.

Eventually we did get to the media questions. The first one went like this:

REPORTER: Morning sir, I was going to ask you to explain quantum computing but.. [trails off as audience laughs] When do you expect Canada’s ISIL mission to begin again and are we not doing anything in the interim while we prepare?

PM TRUDEAU: ‘Kay, very simply, normal computers work by….

And that was that...

Stupid Canadian Socialist Hypocrites and their "Leap Manifesto"

It was that sweet and slightly pudgy Chinese fellow who came up with the Great Leap Forward.

That grandiose social experiment to turn China into an industrial power from an essentially agrarian country ended up costing about 45 million lives in the resulting famine. But hey, Chairman Mao never missed a meal.

Neither will Stephen Lewis miss a pension cheque if his much-loved Leap Manifesto ever comes to pass. The grand old poobah of the NDP — front and centre at last weekend’s Edmonton convention — likely bags a handful each month, courtesy of the various government troughs he’s slurped at over his illustrious career.

But that’s today’s socialist for you: as far removed from the concerns of the ordinary workingman or woman as their soft hands are from calluses...

Sanders' Lawyers Do Not Like “Bernie Is My Comrade” T-Shirts

...“As an intellectual property owner, our client is obligated to take steps to protect its trademark and copyright rights and to protect the good will built up in its name and brand,” Hawkins wrote.

Hawkins also demanded the company “destroy and/or take offline” any existing products that use the image.

Paul Levy, McCall’s lawyer, responded to Hawkins, accusing the Sanders campaign of “trademark bullying.”

In his letter, Levy wrote to Hawkins: “It is your contention, apparently, that an ordinary and reasonably prudent consumer would tend to be confused about whether it is the Sanders campaign that is promoting Sanders’ candidacy by associated him with the 19th Century theoreticians of the communist movement as well as with three ruthless Communist Party dictators.”

Levy called the contention “absurd,” adding that the Sanders campaign “cannot use trademark theories to silence members of the American public who disagree with your client’s views and oppose his candidacy.”...

You can buy your Bernie is my comrade t-shirt HERE 

Rex Murphy: Canada’s not the enemy — but don’t try telling that to Stephen and Avi Lewis

One of the more forceful lines of Stephen Lewis’s speech in Edmonton in support of the Leap Manifesto last weekend was his forceful takedown of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on the question of the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia. After complimenting Trudeau for his florid embrace of feminism, he gave a quite deft turn of the knife by asking how Trudeau the feminist could justify selling arms to Saudi Arabia, a “regime steeped in misogyny.”

It was a very good question, in that it highlights the importance of consistency when one takes ideological stands on the various principles of social justice. After all, you can’t wear the feminist T-shirt at home and traffic with misogynists abroad.

An equally just critique may be made of a certain Leap-authoring social justice activist. So it is fair, I think, to borrow the rhetorical firecracker Stephen Lewis tossed at Trudeau and lob it toward his son, Avi Lewis. Here the question is: can someone with an advanced social conscience work as a “journalist” for the kingdom of Qatar, as Avi did? I placed the word “journalist” in quotation marks because it is stressful to the mind to incorporate the words “journalist” and “Qatar” in the same sentence. We are, after all, talking about a country that once sentenced a poet to life in prison for a few bristling iambics about its hallowed leader (world scorn over the barbarous injustice eventually got the sentence commuted)...

SNL Brings Back Larry David And Elaine From Seinfeld to Shred Hillary and Bernie Debate

College makes you stupid - Part 9766

Jonathan Kay: Moving is the only hope for communities like Attawapiskat

Ontario Health Minister Eric Hoskins travelled to the troubled James Bay community of Attawapiskat on Wednesday. After speaking with community leaders and youth about the reserve’s recent rash of suicide attempts, he told reporters the situation was “deeply upsetting” — but also said Attawapiskat’s “courage” in confronting its problems left him with a sense of hope.

This is more or less how all officials are expected to react after visiting aboriginal reserves reeling from tragedy. It is not enough to lament the horrors on display. There must always be some ennobling sense of optimism that things will get better. The idea of hope — of human progress and redemption, even in the face of epic loss — is embedded in our optimistic Western liberal culture.

In fact, there is little hope for Attawapiskat. Hoskins probably knows this as well as anybody. But a Canadian politician simply isn’t allowed to speak plain truths — not on this subject. He has to pretend we can put in place some bright, shiny plan of action that will transform all our Attawapiskats into healthy, vibrant, productive communities.

This is the giant institutionalized lie that sits at the heart of Canada’s official policy toward First Nations...

This 2012 report on Attawaspikat shows some of the problems that have been ongoing at that reserve, and that our government and the natives themselves refuse to deal with:

From the BBC: What British Muslims Really Think

Chancellor Angela Merkel sells out Germany to secure Turkey's cooperation with the refugee invasion

BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany's Angela Merkel agreed on Friday to allow prosecutors to pursue a case against a German comedian who mocked Turkey's President Tayyip Erdogan, prompting accusations that she had failed to protect free speech and dividing her ruling coalition.

Erdogan had demanded that Germany press charges against Jan Boehmermann after he recited a poem about the Turkish leader in a show on German public broadcaster ZDF on March 31, suggesting he hits girls, watches child pornography and engages in bestiality.

A section of the German criminal code prohibits insults against foreign leaders but leaves it to the government to decide whether to authorize prosecutors to pursue such cases.

This put Merkel in an awkward position. She has been the driving force behind a controversial European Union deal with Turkey to stem the flow of refugees into Europe and critics have already accused her of ignoring violations of human rights and press freedoms in Turkey to secure its cooperation...

Ted Cruz talks to Donald Trump (Jimmy Fallon)

Not-ready-for-Prime Time Bernie Sanders

The Sanders campaign’s announcement on Tuesday that Simone Zimmerman would be its national Jewish outreach coordinator delighted her fellow left-wing Jewish political activists and encouraged their belief that public expressions of disgust with the Israeli government had edged into the acceptable mainstream of Democratic politics.

They might have been getting ahead of themselves.

On Thursday, Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign suspended Ms. Zimmerman, 25, after revelations that she had used vulgarities in Facebook posts about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Hillary Clinton. The suspension, hours before a Democratic presidential debate in Brooklyn, made for an embarrassing misstep for Mr. Sanders, a secular Jew who, despite having lived briefly in Israel and being the most successful candidate of his faith in American history, is being pummeled by Mrs. Clinton among Jewish voters...


See also: Bernie Sanders' Rape Fantasies 

The NDP as Animal Farm

Evan Soloman in Macleans:

...How did a party that looked so unified six months ago suddenly split so badly? Election losses do that. Inside the peloton of pundit commentary, the consensus theory is that the Liberals’ crafty tack to the left co-opted the NDP, pushing them into the more radical parts of the socialist spectrum. But riding behind that commentary group is another vaguely conspiratorial theory. This one suggests that Mulcair was never really a true believer in a socialist NDP. The former Thatcher-praising, Liberal cabinet minister was a parvenu—not, well, not pure laine orange.

When I tweeted that the NDP had an identity crisis, a party member snapped back, “Tom Mulcair was our identity crisis,” as if Mulcair had subversively duped the party into abandoning its true beliefs by promising—gasp—balanced budgets. This anti-Mulcair theory conveniently forgets that Jack Layton also promised balanced budgets and dragged the party toward the political centre. The very same people who helped Layton lead the party to its high-water mark—Anne McGrath, Brad Lavigne, Karl Bélanger—also worked with Mulcair. You have to re-read Animal Farm to appreciate how paranoid this revisionism of the Mulcair era really is...

A Satanic Passover Seder Where Munchausen Jews Will Pray For Israel's Destruction

With his facial tattoos, his deranged public ravings about the 9-11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center being an 'inside job' concocted by Jews and the US government, his bizarre conspiracy theories about Jewish and Masonic plots to control the world, his praise for Adolf Hitler, and his reference to the historical record of the Holocaust as "bullshit," anti-Israel activist Ken O'Keefe presents as a demented hatemonger. It would follow to reason that anyone with a functioning brain and a gram of integrity would keep at least a fully charged electric cattle prod's distance away from someone so toxic.

It is therefore no surprise that the fans of terrorism who run Toronto's radical left, hard-core anti-Israel bunker called Beit Zatoun would embrace a miscreant like O'Keefe.

What might be a little more surprising is that a group of Jews plan to have a traditional Passover meal, known as a Seder, in that very same hub which functions as a community center for admirers of Hitler and those who praise the murderers of innocent Jewish children as "martyrs."

Exodus tells the story of God's redemption of the Jews from slavery in Egypt and the commencement of their hard journey through the desert to The Promised Land of Israel. For millennia, Jews have remembered and celebrated that story through the Passover Seder at which the story of the Exodus is retold.

However, the collection of strange, wretched Jews who will be at Beit Zatoun's so-called "liberation seder" will not be celebrating the events which led to Israel's beginnings so much as they will be praying for the Jewish homeland's destruction.

These, of course, are not typical Jews. They are Munchausen Jews, whose attachment to Judaism is an attention-seeking posture to ingratiate themselves and gain adulation from the radical-left activist community in which they would otherwise be obscure plebeians. Like Munchausen Syndrome affects mentally ill people who feign physical sickness for attention, Munchausen Jews affect a sudden attachment to Jewish identity in order to get special notice. Under normal circumstances, their bond to and knowledge of Judaism is negligible or non-existent. But as anti-Israel "Jews," they serve a useful purpose to the extreme left, to provide propaganda cover for their Jew-hate. It's a preposterous facade, as Munchausen Jews will lend themselves out to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with genocidal antisemites like supporters of Iran's depraved Mullahs who seek to exterminate Israel.

The presence of Munchausen Jews among them doesn't make the anti-Israel far-left any less antisemitic than it did the Nazis by employing Jewish capos, collaborators in the death camps. On a moral plain, Munchausen Jews are worse than capos, since the latter collaborated with fascist murderers so that they could survive. Whereas Munchausen Jews will collaborate with anti-Israel and antisemitic fascists as a matter of ego, to boost their standing within their activist community.

Munchausen Jews have their own groups, with names like Independent Jewish Voices, The International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, and the Monty Pythonesque-sounding United Jewish Peoples Order. Indeed, as an effort to create the false illusion that anti-Israel extremism is not merely a fringe within the Jewish community, they routinely form new groups with new names.  Although a cursory look will tell you that for the most part, these groups share the same members. In fact, there may be more Munchausen Jewish organizations than there are Munchausen Jews.

Some of these Munchausen Jews are Jewish antisemties who rail against the "Jewish Lobby." Some make prima facie, deranged, Nazi-like statements, such as that Jews supported former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper so they can maintain their place in the "racial order."

These people are as representative of typical Jews as much as the Manson Family was representative of typical Californians.

Anyone familiar with the tenets of Judaism and the Bible are aware that Israel's well-being is central to that belief. Over and over again, the Bible relates stories of how God cursed and punished Israel's enemies and those agents of Satan who sought its destruction. By trying to inflict harm on Israel and by siding with those who want to annihilate it, the Munchausen Jews' anti-Israel Seder is not reflecting a practice of Judaism. From a Judeo-Christian standpoint, what they are doing is a form of Satan-worship.

Whether or not one believes in God or Satan, considering that the echoes of Hitler's praises and cheers for terrorists who intentionally slaughter Jews will still be reverberating in the walls where they will be gathered to curse Israel, Satan-worshiper seems the right metaphor for Muchausen Jews.

LSD's effect on the brain revealed in groundbreaking images

The profound impact of LSD on the brain has been laid bare by the first modern scans of people high on the drug.

The images, taken from volunteers who agreed to take a trip in the name of science, have given researchers an unprecedented insight into the neural basis for effects produced by one of the most powerful drugs ever created.

A dose of the psychedelic substance – injected rather than dropped – unleashed a wave of changes that altered activity and connectivity across the brain. This has led scientists to new theories of visual hallucinations and the sense of oneness with the universe some users report.

The brain scans revealed that trippers experienced images through information drawn from many parts of their brains, and not just the visual cortex at the back of the head that normally processes visual information. Under the drug, regions once segregated spoke to one another.

Further images showed that other brain regions that usually form a network became more separated in a change that accompanied users’ feelings of oneness with the world, a loss of personal identity called “ego dissolution”...

Jail gays, introduce Shariah: New poll claims chasm between UK Muslims & everyone else

A new ICM poll examining the attitudes of British Muslims found that a sizeable minority approves of polygamy and the application of Shariah law, while a majority believe that homosexuality should be made illegal.

“Liberal opinion in Britain has, for more than two decades, maintained that most Muslims are just like everyone else, but with more modest dress sense and more luxuriant facial hair; any differences would fade with time and contact,” Trevor Philips, who commissioned the poll as part of an upcoming documentary, writes in the Sunday Times. “But thanks to the most detailed and comprehensive survey of British Muslim opinion yet conducted, we now know that just isn’t how it is.”

Born to a family of Caribbean immigrants, Philips is one of Britain’s best-known progressive activists. He chaired the Commission for Racial Equality and its successor, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, between 2003 and 2012, and also authored a pro-Muslim report two decades ago that is credited with introducing the concept of Islamophobia into public discourse. Yet, Philips writes that he was “astonished” by the results of the survey.

“The data collected by the respected research firm ICM shows what the polling experts call ‘a chasm’ opening between Muslims and non-Muslims on such fundamentals as marriage, relations between men and women, schooling, freedom of expression and even the validity of violence in defense of religion. And the chasm isn’t going to disappear any time soon; indeed, the gaps between Muslim and non-Muslim youngsters are nearly as large as those between their elders,” wrote Philips.

Regarding attitudes towards the family, 39 percent of Muslims, regardless of gender, said that a woman should always obey her husband. In addition, 31 percent of those surveyed said that a man should be entitled to have more than one wife – a practice that is illegal in the UK. Five percent of those asked said that they sympathize with the view that women should be stoned to death for committing adultery...

Stephen Fry excoriated for making sensible comments

Comedian and actor Stephen Fry was at it again this week, inciting plenty of social media outrage when he spoke to Dave Rubin about sensitivity and sexual abuse victims, reports The Telegraph.

Criticizing those who avoid “trigger words,” Fry said, “There are many great plays which contain rapes, and the word rape now is even considered a rape.”

“They’re terrible things and they have to be thought about, clearly, but if you say you can’t watch this play, you can’t watch Titus Andronicus, or you can’t read it in an English class, or you can’t watch Macbeth because it’s got children being killed in it, it might trigger something when you were young that upset you once, because uncle touched you in a nasty place, well I’m sorry,” Fry said.

“It’s a great shame and we’re all very sorry that your uncle touched you in that nasty place – you get some of my sympathy – but your self pity gets none of my sympathy,” he continued. “Self pity is the ugliest emotion in humanity. Get rid of it, because no one’s going to like you if you feel sorry for yourself. The irony is we’ll feel sorry for you, if you stop feeling sorry for yourself. Just grow up.”...

N.B.    Fry is right about twitter:

"Let us grieve at what twitter has become. A stalking ground for the sanctimoniously self-righteous who love to second-guess, to leap to conclusions and be offended – worse, to be offended on behalf of others they do not even know."

The NDP commits seppuku by jettisoning Tom Mulcair

If Velma from the cartoon Scooby Doo was a dim-witted socialist absent any mystery-solving abilities, she could very well be New Democratic Party MP Niki Ashton.

Yet it's people like Ashton, the spectacularly stupid al Jazeera correspondent Avi Lewis, and Jack Layton's hopelessly inarticulate widow, Olivia Chow, that the NDP is now contemplating for its new head after jettisoning Tom Mulcair at their national convention.

Only one of these identical-looking women
is capable of figuring out the obvious

The removal of Mulcair is telling about just how deluded and power-hungry the NDP has become in the last few years. When the perennial third-place finisher managed to jump into second place in the 2011 election, the NDP fooled themselves into believing the reins of power were within their grasp. It didn't require someone with exceptionally good mystery-solving ability to figure out that the NDP's good fortune was a temporary fluke. They got a one-time dividend from the collapse of the Bloc Quebecois. What happened in Quebec, where the NDP picked up the majority of its 2011 gains, was that the province's voters unexpectedly switched en masse from a socialist party with Quebec independence as part of its platform to a socialist party without a regional independence platform.

Much of that was due to an equation involving the respective parties' then-leadership. The Bloc's Gilles Duceppe is an ineffectual politician and Quebec voters simply got tired of him. That was combined with the Liberals' choice of Michael Ignatieff as its leader. Ignatieff is a bright, principled man, but uncharismatic and completely ill-suited to politics. As Liberal leader, he couldn't even capture his own seat in Toronto, let alone take advantage of the vacuum created by Duceppe's dismal performance in Quebec. The Liberals sank, the Conservatives traditionally do poorly in la belle province, and the NDP's Jack Layton, a smooth-talking, smiling snake-oil salesman, became the figurehead of a default protest vote there.

That surprise, where the throwaway votes actually meant something, brought dozens of thoroughly unqualified, incompetent NDP MP's to Ottawa as Quebec's representatives. Some couldn't even speak French and communicate with their constituents. Needless to say, there was plenty of buyers' remorse in Quebec the day after the election and it was inevitable that a natural correction would occur at the next one.

The inevitable correction did come in the October 2015 Canadian election. Though he lacked his predecessor's easy, put-on smile and is less cuddly, when Tom Mulcair replaced Layton following the latter's death, he steered his party to comparatively sound, more centrist-leaning positions. It was Mulcair's intelligence and competence that almost single-handedly prevented the NDP from getting wiped off the map in October.

But that's not how his party sees it. Justin Trudeau's Liberals campaigned to the left of the NDP on a number of issues, replicating the campaign technique of one of Trudeau's mentors, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne. As she did in her province, Trudeau won a majority government, leaving NDP stalwarts to presume that if they had been more radical, they might have won.

That calculation doesn't take into consideration the fact that the Liberals were very-well financed, had a caucus comprised of many highly capable individuals, like Mark Garneau and Scott Brison, and, based on history, are perceived as being capable of governing, whereas the NDP had none of those advantages.

Many of the NDP rank-and-file had their knives out and ready to plunge in Mulcair's back from day one, as he forced them along into less extreme left positions, like removing "socialism" from the official party platform, toning down efforts to stamp out Canada's energy sector over unfounded panic about climate change, and quashing the demented anti-Israel and pro-Islamist extremism that is a facet of much of the party.

But that's all gone as of this week. The long knives finally got their wish and are set to install an extreme leftist as the NDP's next top dog.  To set the tone, they also voted to try to implement the nonsensical, Luddite, anti-energy sector, quasi-Marxist, so-called "Leap Manifesto." That work of incredible absurdity was crafted in large measure by Avi Lewis' wife Naomi Klein, an anti-capitalist fanatic whose polemical books reveal a combination of her profound ignorance and compulsive dishonesty.

Even Tabitha Southey, a left-leaning Toronto newspaper columnist, appeared shocked at the self-destructive impulse the NDP manifested by adopting Klein and Lewis' insanity, tweeting:  Seriously NDP2016? "Leap Manifesto"? Was "LeftyMcCommunistMarxface" taken?

By getting rid of Mulcair, Canada's NDP will, on a smaller scale, emulate the suicidal delusion that gave Jeremy Corbyn the leadership of the UK's Labour party; that the general populace wants to live under the uncompromising, dogmatic, antisemitic socialism of the far left.  It turns out that not only are socialists unable to learn from the decades-old history of the Soviet Union's failure, they can't even learn from the present. Labour's support in Britain has collapsed due to Corbyn and his extreme socialist policies. Neither did the NDP learn anything from the electoral defeat of some of their more prominent, far-left MP's last October, such as Olivia Chow and former Deputy Leader Megan Leslie.

Of course learning from mistakes requires a modicum of intelligence, and that's a trait the NDP, as a national political force, has never shown it possesses in great abundance.

Vegan Sexuality: Challenging Heteronormative Masculinity through Meat-free Sex

This is an actual peer reviewed study:

Abstract

The terms ‘vegansexuality’ and ‘vegansexuals’ entered popular discourse following substantial media interest in a New Zealand-based academic study on ethical consumption that noted that some vegans engaged in sexual relationships and intimate partnerships only with other vegans. At this time it was suggested that a spectrum existed in relation to cruelty-free consumption and sexual relationships: at one end of this spectrum, a form of sexual preference influenced by veganism entailed an increased likelihood of sexual attraction towards those who shared similar beliefs regarding the exploitation of non-human animals; at the other end of the spectrum such a propensity might manifest as a strong sexual aversion to the bodies of those who consume meat and other animal products. The extensive media hype about (and public response to) vegansexuality was predominantly negative and derogatory towards ‘vegansexuals’ and vegans/vegetarians. A particular aggression was evident in online comments by those positioned as heterosexual meat-eating men. In this article we examine the hostile responses to vegansexuality and veganism posted by such men on internet news and journalism sites, personal blogs and chatrooms. We argue that the rhetoric associated with this backlash constructs vegansexuals — and vegans more generally — as (sexual) losers, cowards, deviants, failures and bigots. Furthermore, we suggest that the vigorous reactions of self-identified omnivorous men demonstrate how the notion of alternative sexual practices predicated on the refusal of meat culture radically challenges the powerful links between meat-eating, masculinity and virility in western societies.

If it were April 1, you'd think I was making this up, but it's real!

h/t   Peer-reviewed

The disreputable leaders of a cult of lies - Behind the curtain of Black Lives Matter Toronto

On March 20th a group of professional protesters and student union leaders gathered followers in front of City Hall to protest an SIU ruling about the shooting of Andrew Loku. The SIU decided that the Toronto cop who pulled the trigger and shot Loku was justified in their decision. Loku was no more than three meters away from the cop charging at them with a hammer yelling “What you gonna do, come on, shoot me”.

Despite the complete absence of any wrongdoing, Black Lives Matter Toronto protesters demanded that the cop who shot Loku faces criminal charges for “murdering” him. Their speeches have accused the Toronto Police service of “conducting a genocide” against black people. Standing behind the curtains we see the exact same organizers who orchestrated the violence during the 2010 G20.

The protesters lit an illegal and dangerous open fire in the courtyard of police headquarters- an office tower in a densely populated downtown neighborhood. When cops and firefighters responded to their baiting, the protesters “resisted” in a violent scrum- children were used as human shields. A least one protester was caught on film assaulting a cop. Despite all of these facts, Toronto’s media has boldly put most of their focus on an offensive tweet by a professional protester named Yusra Khogali.

Khogali is a student at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) who is currently working towards her M.A in Social Justice Education (with collaboration in Womyn & Gender Studies). She’s one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter Toronto, and the former VP Equity for the Scarborough Campus Students’ Union. Khogali’s LinkedIn page labels her as a Spoken Word Artist who has “Lead and facilitated workshops as well as present [sic] key note [sic] addresses for numerous elementary and high schools in the GTA.”

Her tweet was uncovered by Toronto Sun columnist and Newstalk 1010 host Jerry Agar, some have labeled it as racist and violent:

“Plz Allah give me strength not to cuss/kill these men and white folks.”...

Read it all at GenuineWitty 

Examining left-wing privilege at the University of Toronto

From The Varsity:

Privilege is understood as an advantage, benefit, or comfort enjoyed exclusively by a particular individual or group. It is normally enjoyed by the most powerful and influential members of a given community, who first create an infrastructure for privilege, then use that framework to serve their own initiatives and interests.

In our campus community, who are the most powerful, influential, and privileged among us? At U of T, it is clear that left-wing students and instructors enjoy advantages, benefits, and comforts that are rarely, if ever, afforded to those who hold different political views.

If you consider yourself a liberal, progressive, or socialist, you can expect that on just about any social or political issue, you will find support from nearly all the major forces on campus, including faculty, the administration, the University of Toronto Students’ Union (UTSU), college and faculty governments, student groups, and student publications, in addition to a majority of the student body. At a selective, internationally competitive university whose mission is ostensibly boundless intellectual inquiry, why is it so hard to find viewpoints that diverge from the left-wing orthodoxy?

The answer begins in academia. According to recent research, 60 per cent of instructors at American universities identify as liberal or far-left. At U of T, over 125 faculty felt the need to join the Graduate Students Union in endorsing the anti-Israeli Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. What’s more, in addition to the employment of hundreds of left-leaning professors and TAs in notionally politically neutral departments such as history, English, and political science, there exist three programs at U of T whose mandates explicitly affirm left-wing assumptions about the world, namely equity studies, sexual diversity studies, and women and gender studies...

GE's CEO & Washington Post's Editorial Board point out some of the ways Bernie Sanders is full of shit

We at GE were interested to read comments Monday by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who told the New York Daily News editorial board that GE is among the companies that are supposedly “destroying the moral fabric” of America. The senator had been asked to cite examples of corporate greed at its worst. Somehow that got him to talking about us.

GE has been in business for 124 years, and we’ve never been a big hit with socialists. We create wealth and jobs, instead of just calling for them in speeches...

See also, from the Washington Post:

Mr. Sanders' shocking ignorance on his core issue

MORE THAN anything else, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has based his campaign on attacking Wall Street — the millionaires and billionaires who, by his telling, wrecked the U.S. economy, dominate the political system and must be brought to heel. Given his commitment to the message, you might expect he would have some familiarity with the policy details and implications.

A New York Daily News editorial board interview with the candidate proved otherwise. The senator seemed to have no idea of what reformed banks should look like, or whether he would need new legislation, even though the government under his presidency would play a central role in tearing apart these complex financial institutions.

Mr. Sanders followed the interview with what was meant to be a clarifying statement. The treasury secretary would draw up a list of too-big-to-fail banks, Mr. Sanders explained, and break them up under the authority of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. In an interview with us, Sanders policy adviser Warren Gunnels said that current regulators are not applying existing authorities aggressively enough and that Mr. Sanders would pick a strong treasury secretary with no Wall Street ties to fill in many of the details.

It’s astonishing that, on this of all issues, the campaign would need to issue a what-the-candidate-meant-to-say statement.  Even then, the campaign has left a lot of essential questions unanswered...

Bill Clinton unloads on "Black Lives Matter" protesters: "You are defending the people who kill the lives you say matter"

More HERE

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May tells Canada's Jews to F-off and die

Well, not exactly in those words, but she might as well have. May is sponsoring a petition which seeks to legitimize the antisemtitic boycott, divestment and sanctions movement that singles out Israel for unfair, unique opprobrium. It read in part, "We, the undersigned, citizens of Canada,, call upon the Government of Canada to: 1. reconsider and reverse its stance on the boycott of Israeli goods and services (BDS) i,e.: "condemn any and all attempts by Canadian organizations, groups or individuals to promote the BDS movement, both here at home and abroad"

Perhaps Ms. May can inform Canadians which other peoples' national self-determination, besides the Jews, she wants to help undermine.  Any...?

However as far as necessary petitions go, Tony Clement is sponsoring a petition by which Canadians can tell the government of the necessity to keep Iran, the world's leading state-sponsor of terrorism, on the terror list.

Lawrence Solomon: Justin Trudeau could face his worst nightmare in Ted Cruz

...In contrast to his huggy bromance with political soulmate Barack Obama, Trudeau would be matched up against a hard-edged ideological opposite his own age but with a history of jaw-dropping achievements. A legal scholar who was not only a repeat national debating champion representing Harvard and Princeton, but who also won an astonishing five times in cases argued before the Supreme Court of the United States.

In one area — the Keystone XL pipeline — Trudeau need not fear a loss of face. Although he failed to press for Keystone’s acceptance in Washington during his official dinner last month, Trudeau did publicly express his disappointment at Obama’s decision to reject Keystone last November. Cruz’s decision to approve Keystone would be an important area of agreement. But that’s pretty much where it would end.

On his signature issue of climate change, Trudeau would overnight feel marginalized as Cruz reverses every Obama climate change initiative, cuts climate change funding to NASA, universities and every other federally funded institution in the United States, and defunds the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But Cruz would go further than that.

As chair of the science panel of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Cruz grappled with the scientific arguments surrounding global warming and concluded that the current computer models used to understand global climate trends “are profoundly wrong … and inconsistent with the evidence and the data.” Cruz knows, for example, that there is no scientific consensus on climate change and that many top scientists believe that carbon dioxide is a boon for the environment. As Cruz has explained, carbon dioxide “is good for plant life,” the planet “is greener right now” than in the past, and “for the past 18 years … there has been no significant warming whatsoever.”

At international summits with his presidential and prime ministerial peers, Cruz would be able to prosecute the case against global-warming alarmism as no other leader could, although by then he may not need to. Many influential countries — the U.K., Japan and Australia among them — have already distanced themselves from the global-warming ideology; most of the rest would need little encouragement. At a future G7 meeting, if a scientifically naïve Trudeau tried to argue the case for climate change, he might well be brushed off, or even laughed off. Knowing this, Trudeau will have to swallow his pride and accept that climate change was dead as a cause du jour...

The trailer for Rogue One, the Star Wars spin-off, is now out

Transcript of Bernie Sanders' interview with the New York Daily News shows once you scratch beneath the slogans, he's an idiot

Bernie Sanders sat down with the New York Daily News editorial board last Friday, seeking its endorsement in the upcoming April 19 Empire State primary. It did not go well for the senator from Vermont.

Time and again, when pressed to get beyond his rhetoric on the evils of corporate America and Wall Street, Sanders struggled. Often mightily...

Read the full transcript HERE 

Washington Post notes Bernie understands national security as poorly as he does finance. 

See also:  Bernie Bombs in NYDN Editorial Meeting, Reveals Just How Substance-Free His Campaign Is

The M-word that went unspoken at the Munk Debate

There has been plenty of reporting on last Friday's Munk Debate about the desirability of mass migration to the west by refugees, and the debate itself is available for free online viewing, so there's no need to repeat much in the way of details of what was said.

By way of a quick summary, the pro side, that favored opening the doors widely to just about anyone who claims refugee status, was represented by Louise Arbour, who is a former Canadian Supreme Court Justice and former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the eminent historian and columnist Simon Schama. The con side was argued by the brilliantly acerbic author and broadcaster Mark Steyn and the famously forthright and witty politician Nigel Farage, who leads the United Kingdom Independence Party.

In essence, like so much else in the way of disputes over substantial geopolitical matters in our time that fall in the realm of what some call "social justice", the debate boiled down to one of emotion versus fact.

The pro side argued that accepting refugees is a matter of compassion, moral duty, and overcoming prejudice, while the con side presented fact after fact after fact that detailed the actual harm done by a significant subset of immigrants. Those facts, brutal and irrefutable, listed the increase in sexual crime, particularly rape, the inflicting of female genital mutilation, the increase in terrorism and violent acts, the homophobic assaults, and the actual ways in which women's rights are being eroded. All those effects are directly, demonstrably attributable to the accommodation of the cultural sensitivities of recent immigrants from countries from which we are now receiving refugees.

While these facts may have highlighted the actions of a minority of recent immigrants, they are facts nonetheless, and the response from Schama, and in particular, Arbour was a predictable emotional embarrassment. Since they couldn't refute the facts, the pro side resorted to personal insults, Arbour sarcastically referring to Steyn and Farage as "new-born feminists," and Schama suggesting that the con debaters were both obsessed with sex and are sexually frustrated.

Steyn's response to that attack was the most effective moment of the evening.

"I made a decision tonight that I wasn't going to do funny stuff, that I was going to be deadly serious, and I'm slightly amazed at our colleagues' ability to get big laughs on gang rape. Madame Arbour scoffs at 'the newfound feminists' over here. I'm not much of a feminist, but I draw the line at the three year-old getting raped and the seven year-old getting gang raped in a basement. And when Simon tells us we're all obsessed with sex;  maybe we don't get enough action in the Toronto's singles bars... rape is not about sex, whatever Simon may say;  rape is about power... It isn't funny!"

The scour on Arbour's face and the humiliation on Schama's revealed the depth to which Steyn's riposte had struck. While Steyn's fact-laced rhetoric had Arbour and Schama's pretense to moral superiority lying twisted and hemorrhaging on the floor, Farage delivered the coup de grace: "..We've lived through a hundred years of female emancipation and liberation and now we have the mayors of towns in Germany and in Sweden and in other parts of Northern Europe telling women not to walk out after dark on their own. And in the wake of the Cologne sex attacks, we had the mayor of that city telling women they really ought to dress differently and behave differently in public. That Simon, is what is sad, and I find the sheer hypocrisy of those of you who said you were going to defend female rights when actually you think migrant rights are more important than female rights in our community. Frankly, shame on you."

Arbour and Schama never fully recovered from that moment. Indeed, Simon Schama was embarrassed to the extent that he spent much of the rest of the evening trying to find common ground with his opponents, particularly about the fact that western democracies, particularly in Europe, have done a terrible job of assimilating Muslim migrants.

What was very surprising to me is that the primary cause of that failure of achieving Muslim assimilation was never explicitly discussed, or even mentioned during the debate.

No, that reason isn't only Islam, even though that religion does pose certain grave challenges to the west in its combined tenets of conquest, jihadism, misogyny, its often violent antipathy towards any other religion, its homophobia, and intolerance for dissent. But not all Muslims are religious and hold to those tenets, any more than you'll find most Jews refusing to turn on a light on Saturday or refuse to eat pepperoni pizza because it's not kosher.

The principal reason for the uniqueness of our inability to integrate great numbers of Muslim migrants is in large measure the west's own fault and can be summed up in one word: multiculturalism.

Islam's chauvinism combined with the moral and cultural relativism that accompanies multiculturalism have created a perfect storm of conflict that sets the stage for a maelstrom of violence and discord in countries adapting to massive Muslim migration.

Europe has been hit the hardest by its inability to assimilate large swaths of its Muslim populations while hamstrung by a political ideology that stifles criticism of that colossal failure.

Modern multiculturalism shares the same father as Canada's current Prime Minister. In the early 1970's, Pierre Trudeau ushered in a change to both immigration and Canada's national identity. Trudeau pere's policy of multiculturalism is now so ingrained in Canadians that most under the age of 40 take it to be one of the pillars of the Canada's national character. That of course is not saying much, considering most urban Canadians define their national identity in the minor ways in which it differs from America's. Similar to watching one twin brother insist he's nothing like his genetic doppelganger because of a few minutiae that distinguishes them ("He likes striped bow ties and I like polka dotted bow ties, so you see, we're nothing alike!"), so Canada, though it shares language and cultural, media, and historical influences with its conjoined twin to the south, is distinctly different in the minds of Canadians because they have a melting pot, and we have multiculturalism. Western Europe adopted Pierre Trudeau's plan with disastrous results and is only now beginning to admit its failure, possibly after the damage has become irreparable.

The multicultural approach creates a moral vacuum that attributes equal value to all cultures, and also is a bar to assimilation, since it encourages immigrants to maintain their native cultures rather than assimilate to their new homelands. During the debate, Louise Arbour insisted we should welcome the cultural changes immigrants will impose on Canada, although she was at a loss for an answer when asked by Steyn which aspects of Syria and Afghanistan's violent, homophobic, misogynist culture we should strive to make more of our own.

Multiculturalism throws more successful ideas of assimilation completely on their head. In the past, immigrants to the US and Canada would strive to adapt to, and be accepted within the establishment of their new country. Until about 50 years ago, it was that old, white, Anglo-Protestant establishment which would bar the way to entry in the upper social and business echelons for most waves of immigrants, be they from Ireland, Italy, China, or Jews from eastern Europe. Since the 70's, by conditioning Canadians to have a virtually ecclesiastic reverence for multiculturalism, in effect, there is a two-pronged attack on the values that had built up Canada since the time it was first colonized by Britain. On one front, multiculturalism teaches that all cultures are of equal value, thus diminishing the intrinsic value of Canada's culture while casting anyone trying to preserve it as a "xenophobe." On the other front, new immigrants not only have had their incentive to assimilate diminished, but they are actively encouraged to resist assimilation.

One of the reasons multiculturalism more or less worked in Canada up until now is that the countries from which Canada drew immigrants since the Trudeau 70's were not antithetical to Canadian values of tolerance, capitalism, and equality. South Vietnamese, Chinese, Jamaicans, Portuguese, Sikhs and even pre-revolution Iranians were not taught from birth to despise all westerners, and that Christians and Jews are morally corrupt, inferior infidels.

But something very different is happening in the madrassas and mosques of Pakistan, The Palestinian Territories, and today's Iran. In fact, messages of hatred for the west are frequently heard now in Canada, the US and Britain in mosques and madrassas set up by recently imported imams.  At the Munk Debate, Farage referred to a fifth column of 5000 terrorists ISIS claims to have embedded among refugees. That is a serious concern, but such concerns aren't limited to active terrorists. The term 'fifth column' may be a metaphor, but a fifth column of 5000 Muslim immigrants is literally visible in Canada every summer. Organized by anti-western adherents of Iran's depraved Ayatollah Khomeini, you can see 5000 Muslim fanatics march along Toronto's University Avenue on their al Quds Day, an annual event that expresses hatred of Western governments and calls for Israel's destruction. With its men separated from the head-to-toe covered, chador-clad women, the procession is a substantially more dour version of Thulsa Doom's death cult from Conan The Barbarian.

Naturally, terrorists and al Quds Day fanatics are not representative of all Muslim in the west. Most Muslims come here to improve their lives and that of their families. Many are exemplary citizens. Many Muslims in the west are actual heroes, like Salim Mansur, Tarek Fatah, Raheel Raza and Irshad Manji, who, at no small personal risk, speak out for free speech and individual rights with the same fervor as Steyn and Farage.

So while we should welcome immigrants in acceptable numbers, we should also screen them to make sure they are here to contribute to our society rather than to remake it as a copy of the dystopian places they left. And unless we're committed to the destruction of western culture, we should abandon the suicidal practise of multiculturalism before it completely rots the west from within.




You can read what Mark Steyn had to say about the debate afterwards HERE and HERE

Black lives matter, this group doesn’t

All lives matter. Every human life is precious and worthy of respect.

But actions and tactics based on the choices people make are worthy of criticism and opposition.

In that context, the Toronto version of Black Lives Matter (BLM) does not matter. They are a rabble resembling the Occupy Toronto group that set up camp and trashed St. James Park in 2011.

Occupy Toronto is gone and it accomplished nothing, because it really stood for nothing of substance, other than a hodgepodge of ill-defined complaints about wealth distribution.

By contrast, the complaints of Black Lives Matter do have substance, and would matter if they were presented by anyone else...

New study establishes that Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne is incompetent and a liar

TORONTO - The Ontario government's energy conservation program is a multibillion-dollar boondoggle that wastes public money and doesn't lower the cost of electricity, according to a new report by the Fraser Institute.

Authors Tom Adams, an independent energy and environmental consultant, and Ross McKitrick, an economics professor at Guelph University, contend in "Demand Side Mismanagement: How Conservation Became Waste," that Premier Kathleen Wynne's government is making outlandish claims about how much money it has saved through energy conservation that have no basis in reality.

In November 2012, Adams correctly predicted the public cost of then premier Dalton McGuinty's cancellation of two gas plants in Oakville and Mississauga would exceed $1 billion.

His estimate, based on government documents available at the time, was $1.3 billion.

McGuinty's response was: "Of course I fully reject that calculation. We're very confident that the costs are in total $230 million."

A year later, the Ontario auditor general put the cost at up to $1.1 billion...

Some Britons are upset that UK foreign aid is paying reward money to Palestinian terrorists who murdered a British woman

Two Palestinian terrorists who repeatedly stabbed a British woman in a brutal attack and killed her friend are now each receiving at least £9,000 in ‘blood money’ every year with the help of UK aid.

Kay Wilson was left for dead in an orgy of violence in Jerusalem in which Kristine Luken, an American, was killed.

The attackers were eventually caught and, after admitting their crimes, were sent to prison.

Miss Luken died from her stab wounds. Miss Wilson still bears a seven-inch scar on her stomach and, more than five years on, breathing still causes her pain.

Ms Wilson said: ‘We were held for 30 minutes at knife point then gagged and bound before being butchered with machetes.

‘I watched my friend chopped up before my eyes, and only survived because I played dead, despite being stabbed 13 times and having over 30 bones broken by the sheer force of the blows...

DUE PROCESS DENIED: Strongest Ruling Yet Against Campus Kangaroo Courts

A federal judge has given the green light to a lawsuit challenging the legality of Brandeis University’s sexual assault proceedings in a sharply worded opinion arguing that the school has tilted the process so far in favor of accusers that it unlawfully abridges the rights of the accused. KC Johnson, an expert on campus due process who made the ruling available online, highlights the following passage:

Like Harvard, Brandeis appears to have substantially impaired, if not eliminated, an accused student’s right to a fair and impartial process. And it is not enough simply to say that such changes are appropriate because victims of sexual assault have not always achieved justice in the past. Whether someone is a “victim” is a conclusion to be reached at the end of a fair process, not an assumption to be made at the beginning. Each case must be decided on its own merits, according to its own facts. If a college student is to be marked for life as a sexual predator, it is reasonable to require that he be provided a fair opportunity to defend himself and an impartial arbiter to make that decision.

The case in question—in which a student was penalized for, among other things, kissing his boyfriend without express approval—sounds particularly egregious...

Edinburgh University achieves the pinnacle of pathetic, censorious, student idiocy

A university student was threatened with being thrown out of a meeting after being accused of violating “safe space” rules - by raising her hand.

Imogen Wilson, the vice-president for academic affairs at Edinburgh University Students’ Association (EUSA), spoke out against safe space rules becoming “a tool for the hard left to use when they disagree with people”, following the incident last week.

Ms Wilson, 22, was subject to a “safe space complaint” over her supposedly “inappropriate hand gestures” during a student council meeting.

According to the association’s rules, student council meetings should be held in a “safe space environment”, defined as “a space which is welcoming and safe and includes the prohibition of discriminatory language and actions”.

This includes “refraining from hand gestures which denote disagreement”, or “in any other way indicating disagreement with a point or points being made”...

From Charlie Hebdo on the Brussels attacks: HOW DID WE END UP HERE?

For a week now, experts of all kinds have been trying to understand the reasons for the attacks in Brussels. An incompetent police force? Unbridled multiculturalism? Youth unemployment? Uninhibited Islamism? The causes are numerous beyond counting and everyone will naturally choose the one that suits best their own convictions. Law and Order fans will denounce the haplessness of the police. Xenophobes will blame immigration. Sociologists will rehash the evils of colonialism. Urban-planners will point to the evils of ghettoisation. Take your pick.

In reality, the attacks are merely the visible part of a very large iceberg indeed. They are the last phase of a process of cowing and silencing long in motion and on the widest possible scale...

Read the rest at Charlie Hebdo 

Entitled imbeciles - Toronto's professional left-wing protesters

This conversation is somewhat repetitive, but it is a perfect example of the stupidity of Toronto's professional protester class:

Mark Steyn & Nigel Farage debate Louse Arbour & Simon Schama about mass immigration to the west by refugees

Here's last night's Munk Debate - this stream will be available for a limited time, so if you haven't seen it yet (I was there and it was fun and the most heated of the many wonderful Munk Debates so far), it's well worth watching. What I found particularly interesting was not only what was said, but what was not said.  I may have more comments on this in the coming week:

Toronto City Councilor Giorgio Mammoliti rips into hypocrites who attended Rob Ford's Funeral

On Friday, Mammoliti pulled no punches in chastising a number of Toronto’s left-leaning public servants for showing respect for former Toronto mayor Rob Ford following his death last week.

In a news release titled “Dirty Half Dozen,” Mammoliti proceeds to carve into Liberal MP Adam Vaughan and five sitting city councillors who had long-standing disagreements with Ford.

“In the worst case of hypocrisy that I have witnessed,” he says, “the vermin that dwell in the underbelly of Toronto were out in full force in an exemplary display of the wickedest behaviour mankind can exhibit.”...

Ted Cruz Rickrolls Donald Trump on April Fools' Day

Happy to hear @realDonaldTrump accepted my challenge to debate one-on-one: https://t.co/mikc6fXZei

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) April 1, 2016