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Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Iran Is Progressing Towards Nuclear Weapons Via North Korea


While the Vienna Nuclear Deal (VND) is focused on preventing (or at least postponing) the development of nuclear weapons (NW) in Iran, its restrictions are looser with regard to related delivery systems (particularly nuclear-capable ballistic missiles) as well as to the transfer of nuclear technology by Iran to other countries. Moreover, almost no limits have been placed on the enhancement of Tehran's military nuclear program outside Iran. North Korea (NK) arguably constitutes the ideal such location for Iran.

The nuclear and ballistic interfaces between the two countries are long-lasting, unique, and intriguing. The principal difference between the countries is that while NK probably already possesses NW, Iran aspires to acquire them but is subject to the VND. Iran has the ability, however, to contribute significantly to NK’s nuclear program, in terms of both technology (i.e., by upgrading gas centrifuges for uranium enrichment) and finance (and there is an irony in this, as it is thanks to its VND-spurred economic recovery that Iran is able to afford it)...

Monday, February 27, 2017

Poll: Americans overwhelmingly oppose sanctuary cities


An overwhelming majority of Americans believe that cities that arrest illegal immigrants for crimes should be required to turn them over to federal authorities.

The poll shows that President Trump has broad public support in his effort to crack down on sanctuary cities.

A survey from Harvard–Harris Poll provided exclusively to The Hill found that 80 percent of voters say local authorities should have to comply with the law by reporting to federal agents the illegal immigrants they come into contact with.

As it stands, hundreds of cities across the nation — many with Democratic mayors or city councils — are refusing to do so.

Trump has signed an executive order directing Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly to find ways to starve these sanctuary cities of federal funding. A Reuters analysis found the top 10 sanctuary cities in the U.S. receive $2.27 billion in federal funding for programs ranging from public health services to early childhood education...

Nigel Farage Speaks at CPAC 2017

Sunday, February 26, 2017

Meet the terrorist behind the next women’s march


Here’s the left’s next great idea for bringing down President Trump: another women’s march. Which means another public instance of Trump haters shouting slogans to one another and mistaking it for constructive politics. What progressives need to defeat Trump is outreach, but all they have is outrage.

On March 8, organizers seem to be aiming for a different vibe than the librarians-in-pussy-hats element that made the first women’s march after Trump’s inauguration so adorable.

Instead of milling around Washington, organizers have in mind a “general strike” called the Day without a Woman. In a manifesto published in The Guardian on Feb. 6, the brains behind the movement are calling for a “new wave of militant feminist struggle.” That’s right: militant, not peaceful.

The document was co-authored by, among others, Rasmea Yousef Odeh, a convicted terrorist...

Do Not Try This At Home

Conrad Black: Parliament can’t simply demand people feel good about Islam

...Islamophobia and religious and racial discrimination generally are contemptible, but they are usually not crimes, and the reasonable Muslim majority can scarcely be surprised at a tendency to regard large swaths of Islam with suspicion, when the Muslim leadership is almost mute about the mistreatment of Christian and Jewish communities in Muslim countries, and shriek like banshees at any suggestion that they are being assimilated to Islamic terrorists when their own efforts to restrain or suppress Islamist terror is so frequently sporadic and ineffectual.

I get around fairly well and I have heard nothing in this country from anyone that has been as abusive as some of the letters and emails to this newspaper two years ago when I wrote that advocates of the existence of a divine intelligence are generally successful in debates with famous atheists. I did not state any religious views of my own (though it is no secret that I am a Christian) and was pilloried by many as a superstitious idiot. But I didn’t petition Parliament or inflict myself on a Human Rights Commission. There are serious limits to what Parliament or government can do in a free country about people’s opinions. The freedoms Ms. Khalid cites include the right to think and speak negatively about other people and groups. Parliament cannot and should not aspire to turn the country into a judgment-free zone, a vast Pleasantville. Democracy is self-government and that cannot occur without the right of everyone to say and believe what they want, as long as it is not seditious, defamatory, or an incitement to illegal behaviour...

Saturday, February 25, 2017

Wayne Barrett, Donald Trump, and the Death of the American Press

...Obama didn’t kill journalism, but he took advantage of it in its weakness, because he knew the press would do anything to feel relevant again. All those 27-year-olds at the Times, the Washington Post and others hired as bloggers—“who literally know nothing,” as Rhodes told the Times Magazine—when the foreign and national bureaus were closed, they didn’t know it wasn’t OK to be a journalist and a political operative at the same time. They thought it made them more valuable, even patriotic, to put themselves in the service of a historic presidency. And they’d replaced for pennies on the dollar all the adults who could have taught them otherwise.

That’s the raw material out of which the Obama administration built its echo chamber, the purpose of which was to drown out the few remaining vestiges of journalism in order to sell the president’s policies. And there really were real journalists still putting in the hours, still doing the work, but the echo chamber, a relentless, frenzied chorus of incoherent and nearly illiterate prose, shouted them down.

Yes, it would have been nice if the American public had a chance to discuss a policy of vital importance to our national security, like the Iran nuclear deal, but the press congratulated itself for silencing those who dissented from Obama’s signature foreign-policy initiative. These weren’t simply critics or opponents of the White House, they weren’t just wrong; no, they were warmongers, beholden to donors and moneyed interests and lobbies, they were dual loyalists.

But it was all OK for the press to humiliate and threaten Obama’s opponents in accordance with the talking points provided by Obama administration officials—they were helping the president prevent another senseless war. That’s for history to decide. What everyone saw at the time was that the press had put itself in the service of executive power. This was no longer simply tilting left, rather, it was turning an American political institution against the American public.

Now with Trump in the White House, commentators on the right are critical of those angry with the press for calling out Trump on the same stuff that Obama got away with. Let’s be above it, they argue. Just because Obama did it doesn’t make it OK for Trump to do it. Fine, obviously, call out Trump—but this isn’t about playing gotcha. It’s about a self-aggrandizing press corps gaslighting the electorate. The public is astonished and appalled that the media has now returned after an eight-year absence to arrogate to itself the role of conscience of the nation.

It’s not working out very well...

Muslim organisation announces reward for beheading Tarek Fatah



A bounty amounting to slightly over the equivalent of $15,000 is being offered for the beheading of my friend Tarek Fatah by an extremist Muslim group.  Can someone point me to the religious Christian or Jewish groups that are paying for hits on people whose viewpoints they don't like in 2017.

So much for the "all religions produce extremists"  moral equivalency argument.
A Bareilly-based Muslim organisation has announced a “reward” of Rs 10 lakh to behead Islamic scholar Tarek Fatah for allegedly promoting “un-Islamic” views through his TV programme.

The All-India Faisan-e-Madina Council also demanded an immediate ban on ‘Fateh ka Fatwa’, a television programme hosted by Fatah on a private news channel.

“Tarek Fatah is conspiring to disrupt harmony between Hindus and Muslims. He is as an agent of our enemies. He must be stopped at any cost and our organisation will pay Rs 10,00,786 to any person who will decapitate him,” said Moeen Siddique, head of the council.

“He and his programme are being funded by foreign enemies of our country and the government must initiate an inquiry against him,” Siddique said.

Fateh, a Canadian national of Pakistani origin, is known for his secular views against Islamic fundamentalism...

Friday, February 24, 2017

What the Canadian media ignores about Canada’s ‘new’ refugee crisis

...For decades, Somalis have been flooding out of their country, a place so plagued by violence the Canadian government’s official tourism advice is simply “avoid all travel.” When seeking exile, many in the diaspora have favored Canada over the United States for reasons that range from family ties —  Toronto is home to a Somali community even larger than Minnesota’s — to the fact that Canada’s immigration bureaucracy is seen as more forgiving (although both countries are generally hesitant to deport anyone back to the war-torn nation).

Yet a Somali wanting to enter Canada can’t simply jump on a direct flight from Mogadishu. For many, the journey involves a long slog through multiple other countries before arriving in the United States and hopping the Canadian border in what has been described as a modern “underground railroad” of human smuggling.

Some in Canada have taken to blaming this state of affairs on the Safe Third Country Agreement negotiated by Canada and the United States in the early 2000s in an attempt to prevent “asylum shopping” — the practice of refugees traipsing around the First World for the best possible deal. Since 2004, anyone who attempts to leave the United States at an official Canadian border crossing for the purpose of making a refugee claim is told to work within the U.S. system.

This obviously offers small comfort to refugees lacking faith in that system. Yet while Canadians may sympathize in the context of a capricious president, appeals to Canadian superiority can also offer convenient cover for migrants unwanted by the United States for perfectly justified reasons — including terrorist ties and serious criminal records...

Lawrence Solomon: Americans still trust Trump more than the media—and they’re right to


...Trump’s reference to refugees in Sweden at a Florida rally Saturday illustrates why the press is so distrusted. “Trump Alludes to Terror ‘Last Night in Sweden’ That Never Happened,” ran the Vanity Fair headline. “’Last Night in Sweden’? Trump’s Remark Baffles a Nation,” said a bemused New York Times. “Trump’s invention of a Swedish terrorist attack was funny. But it likely comes from a dark place,” decided VOX. “Baffled Sweden asks Trump to explain terror remarks,” ran the Los Angeles Times.

From the headlines — literally hundreds were like these — you’d never know that Trump didn’t invent a terror attack. The press invented it by jumping to an erroneous conclusion. Trump was referring to a TV interview he had seen the previous night on Fox News that described the refugee-related crime wave that hit Sweden. The transcript of his Swedish rally-reference mentions “problems,” not terror attacks: “We’ve got to keep our country safe. You look at what’s happening in Germany, you look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this. Sweden. They took in large numbers. They’re having problems like they never thought possible.”

Why wouldn’t the press have investigated precisely what Trump meant by his reference to Sweden? Partly because journalists are mean-spirited towards Trump. They’re more interested in discrediting him than in understanding his statements. Partly because they’re lazy and subject to groupthink, lacking curiosity and parroting their collective sentiments. And partly because the press was clueless as to the mayhem caused by refugees in Sweden in recent years, because the press doesn’t report news that doesn’t comport with its narratives. Coincidentally, while the press was still mocking Trump for holding up Sweden as an example of refugee-related chaos, a riot broke out in a Muslim suburb of Stockholm when police tried to arrest a drug dealer. The press — true to form — all but ignored the riot...

Thursday, February 23, 2017

Kids pay the price of transgender politics

...Debra Soh was a gender dysphoric child. She liked trucks, not dolls. She hated being a girl. In the 1980s, the idea that a kid might transition to another sex was completely unknown. “My parents allowed me to wear boys’ clothing and shave my head, to live as a girl who otherwise looked and behaved like a boy,” she wrote in The Wall Street Journal. By her late teens, she outgrew her dysphoria. Her parents’ support, she says, “helped me work things out.”
Today, a child like Debra might be treated at a gender clinic (where the waiting lists are very long). Canada was renowned for having one of the best in the world – the child and youth clinic at CAMH, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto. The clinic’s former head, Ken Zucker, is world-renowned for his path-breaking research. Hundreds of parents – and former clients – testify to the care and guidance they received there.
But last month, the clinic was abruptly shut down, and Dr. Zucker was dismissed. CAMH, after releasing an external review of the clinic by a pair of independent psychiatrists, issued a bafflegab statement saying that not all the clinic’s practices were “in step with the latest thinking.”
In fact, Dr. Zucker was the latest victim of the raging battles in gender-identity politics. Critics say CAMH’s decision has sacrificed science to ideology, and put children on the front line. They think it’s a disaster for science, and for kids.
Dr. Zucker’s approach was to encourage children to explore different ways of gender expression. He believes that a child’s gender identity isn’t necessarily fixed in stone, and that helping him feel comfortable in his birth sex is a reasonable approach. He has never tried to steer the ultimate outcome. The research shows that most kids with gender dysphoria will grow up to become bisexual, gay, lesbian or straight adults. For some, transitioning is best, and when that’s the case, he helps them.
But that approach is now politically taboo. The activists argue that children with doubts about their gender should be automatically “affirmed” in their new gender by adults. In a society that’s squeamish about chemicals in foods, the activists want to give them drugs that will postpone puberty, start them on a lifetime of hormones and rush them into irrevocable surgery...

Mainstream media complaint: What does Trump think he's doing, communication with the public?! It's "our job" to control what people think

MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski:

How bad is Islamophobia? Someone finally asked Canadian Muslims

...Last week in the House of Commons, for instance, Iqra Khalid made several impassioned entreaties to her fellow MPs, invoking the spectre of “more than one million Canadians who suffer because of Islamophobia, who are victimized on a daily basis.” But this isn’t quite the horrible state of affairs described by Muslim Canadians when someone actually bothers to ask them.

Last April, a CBC-Environics poll revealed that Muslims in Canada are annoyed less by discrimination in this country than by all the damn snow. About a third of the Muslim respondents said the really lousy thing about Canada was the weather. Only nine per cent said it was discrimination. One of five respondents said they couldn’t identify anything about Canada they didn’t like. Eight in ten said Muslims are treated better in Canada than any other Western country.

Still, 30 per cent of Muslim respondents said that in the preceding five years they had experienced discrimination that was based on their religion, ethnicity or culture. This is not something Canadians can be proud of, and it would be well worth the time of Khalid’s proposed standing committee study to look into this closely. But it’s well shy of a million Muslim Canadians being victimized by “Islamophobia” on a daily basis...

Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Milo Yiannopoulos and the hypocrites campaigning against him



I've been reluctant to wade into the minefield around Milo Yiannopoulos' recent fall from grace over a comment he made about the hypothetical idea of sex between an adult and a 13 year old.

But there has been so much obvious distortion and propaganda deployed to exploit the controversy that I feel obliged to enter the fray.

When it comes to denouncing and exposing those who are trying to sexually exploit children, I have considerably more credibility than most people in mainstream media.

In 2013, I exposed a conference, backed by the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, aimed at teachers of young, elementary school children, which aimed to normalize the idea of adult sexual attraction to children. 

Adult sexual attraction to children is neither normal nor reasonable. The word irresponsible doesn't even begin to describe the abhorrent immorality of trying to put the idea that adult sexual attraction to children is a normal state of affairs in the heads of people entrusted with the care of prepubescents.

I tried very hard at the time to get the mainstream media to cover that conference, which had the imprimatur of influential faculties in the field of childhood education. With very few exceptions, they weren't interested. The mainstream media simply didn't want to expose a radical left wing, so-called "social justice" oriented institution's wrongdoing, since much of the media shared its agenda.

I've also forcefully spoken out against Ontario's current sex education curriculum which introduces sexualized content to children at an inappropriately young age. I spoke out about it before and during its introduction, despite the dishonest characterization of such criticism by the Premier of Ontario and others, of it being motivated by homophobia. I fully support gay rights and equality for gays. I'm against the introduction of any sexualized content for young children in school, because it is potentially psychologically harmful for those who are too young to have any comprehension of post-pubescent human sexuality. There is reason to believe that one of the goals of the curriculum is a political and social effort by the extreme left to normalize the unscientific concept of gender fluidity, which they claim can happen at any age from infancy up. Or more to the point, many of its proponents are Marxists intent on undermining the core beliefs of western, capitalist civilization. Many, but not all have that motivation, The architect of the curriculum currently in use is Ben Levin, an OISE professor who was Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne's mentor and is a convicted pedophile. Levin was convicted of trying to entice a woman to have sex with her 8 year old daughter and for having graphic, sado-masochistic child pornography.

So now we come back to Milo.

An extremely ill-advised quip Milo made about whether some 13 year olds are sexually mature enough for sex has done what leftist rioters smashing windows into fragments and setting cars ablaze could not. It's managed to get him silenced. Because of that comment, which was exploited by media and anti-Trump activists, Milo has been dis-invited from a major conference and he lost a book deal with Random House. Leftists are crowing about his fall.

But make no mistake about what happened. Milo's comment was stupid without doubt. 13 year olds aren't mature enough for sex with another adult. Not under any circumstances. I don't even think 13 year olds are mature enough to have sex with other 13 year olds. But Milo's comment was off-the-cuff by someone who himself was the victim of child molestation and who has a history of denouncing pedophiles. Milo has made it abundantly clear he did not mean what he said and has denounced pedophilia in no uncertain terms, even prior to this incident.

But take a look at those reveling in Milo's misfortune. Many of these newfound guardians of children's well-being are the same people who very decidedly say kids who are too young to walk home from school alone or make decisions about their own bedtime should be given hormone blockers because he or she thinks they're the 'wrong' gender.

The people who are outraged over Milo's brain fart about a 13 year old potentially being sexually mature are encouraging sexualized education for prepubescent children practically half that age.

I'm curious how anyone who thinks Milo inadvertently, extemporaneously suggesting a 13 year old might be sexually mature can explain their support for teaching 12 year olds about anal sex in public schools. What do they think kids will do with that knowledge? File it away for six years?

What happened to Milo has nothing to do with his comments about teenage sex and everything to do with the ideological threat he represented to the left and to the "Never Trump" movement. Because one of the things Milo did was to illustrate that support for Trump was rebellious and possibly even the New Cool.

Milo took arguments critical of the dangers of leftist campus censorship, idiotic "critical race theory," identity politics, some of the more deranged forms of feminism, and other pillars of the extreme left into the belly of the beast. Milo would venture onto college campuses and by being witty, funny, thoughtful and introducing novel ideas, he was what his opponents feared most. Milo was persuasive.

For his troubles, Milo,  a gay man with a Jewish mother who has romantic relationships with black men and Muslims. was lied about. Paradoxically, he was portrayed by dishonest and ignorant opponents as a racist, an anti-semite, and a white supremacist.

Those were lies, and it seems to me that the current campaign to destroy Milo is a campaign by the left and Republican "Never Trumpers" to get rid of a person and ideas they find threatening to the status quo.

I don't agree with everything Milo has said, and I'm not only referring to his stupid comment about teenage sexual maturity. But his is an important voice shining light on significant issues. For that reason, I hope Milo is able to overcome this controversy and his voice continues to be part of the conversation.



Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Looks like Trump was right about Sweden: Chaos as police officer says migrants are to blame for most serious crime

 

A POLICE officer who claimed migrants were to blame for most serious crimes in his city in a seething Facebook rant has sparked a political storm.
Last week Peter Springare took to social media to share his frustration as he hit out against s ipolicy, as he claimed the .

In a Facebook post, the officer, who works as an investigator for the police in Örebro, a small city in southern Sweden, admitted what he was writing was not politically correct.

He said he did not care as he would soon be retiring after nearly 50 years of service.

The former deputy chief of the serious crimes division wrote: “I’m so f***** tired. What I’m writing here isn’t politically correct. But I don’t care.

“Our pensioners are on their knees, the schools are a mess, healthcare is an inferno, the police is completely destroyed. Everyone knows why, but no one dares or wants to say why.”...

Sunday, February 19, 2017

Rex Murphy: M-103 is a political billboard. Pick a side and advertise your virtues

If the Liberals changed the wording from "Islamophobia" to "anti-Muslim bigotry" and made a mention about the right to criticize all religions and ideologies, they could win over lots of people currently opposed to Motion 103. But the Liberals' plan all along was to sow discord in the country for their political ends.

...labelling something a phobia or phobic in modern political discourse is at least as often a facile attempt to suppress arguments and shut down debates, as it is an apt and faithful description of one of the parties (that they are bigots and haters) to those arguments and debates. That is to say, it is as much, or as often, a term of artful and partisan rhetoric as it is a description of a real and prejudiced state of mind.

So with the controversy over the parliamentary motion that has wound up our political class towards week’s end, perhaps some of its energies come from the unstable nature of the term which is at the centre of the debate: Islamophobia. Simply put, the term does not have a fixed and commonly shared understanding, it is variously deployed and variously understood, and it is both a term of rhetoric and a term designating real and prejudicial animosity towards Muslims.

I would suggest that in the current dustup, most but not all of the most fervent advocates of either side are choosing the side of the coin, the shades of the term, which places them on the heroic side of the contention. The pro-Motion side quickly essentializes their opponents with the schoolyard taunt of “How can you not be against hate?” For its part, the anti-motion dervishes summon the spectre of the collapse of our free speech rights and creeping sharia. Neither side wishes to make too obvious what is in fact obvious to anyone detached from the theatrical fireworks — that it is posture politics and virtue-signalling on both sides...

Friday, February 17, 2017

MOST ENTERTAINING PRESIDENCY EVER



Donald Trump declared war on the mainstream news media, and is trying to convince the public that the media is their enemy as well.

He may be right.

Lawrence Solomon: Finally it’s safe for the whistleblowers of corrupted climate science to speak out


Whistleblowers at the U.S. government’s official keeper of the global warming stats, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), claim their agency doctored temperature data to hide the fact that global temperatures plateaued almost 20 years ago.

Can the whistleblowers be believed in this claim, originally made in 2015? And in the further claim that NOAA then rushed this doctored data into print in time for the UN’s Paris global warming summit of world leaders, to dupe any doubters that the planet was in fact overheated?

Of course the whistleblowers can be believed, and not just because NOAA repeatedly stonewalled inquiries, even failing to comply with a congressional subpoena. No one paying attention can have any doubt that the governmental global warming enterprise has been a fraud. It’s been lies from the start, starting with the very mandate of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which astonishingly ruled out factors like the sun as being worthy of investigation.

Among those astonished was the Danish delegation to the IPCC. It discovered at one of the IPCC’s early meetings a quarter-century ago that its scientists could not present their study, newly published in the prestigious journal Science, showing a remarkable correlation between global warming and solar activity. To their further astonishment, to squelch dissent the IPCC cabal set out to destroy the reputation of its chief author, falsely accusing him of fabricating data...

Thursday, February 16, 2017

Matthew Lau: The Pope doesn’t understand capitalism, but he’d definitely like Adam Smith


A defining characteristic of the current papacy is the fight against poverty, but alas, were we to take economic advice from the current Pope, the world would surely be much poorer. Good intentions unaccompanied by good knowledge make for bad advice, and unfortunately, Pope Francis has spent the first part of 2017 supplying yet more evidence that he is a poor economist.

A long-time critic of capitalism, Pope Francis spoke to members of the Australia-based Global Foundation in January to call on financial and political leaders to “to control and monitor the effects of globalization” and “correct its orientation.” He noted that following the fall of communism, then pope John Paul II “warned of the risk that an ideology of capitalism would become widespread.”

Now, laments Pope Francis, “the dangers that troubled St. John Paul II have largely come to pass.” 
In another speech in February, Pope Francis said that “capitalism continues to produce discarded people” — an ill that, according to him, is thankfully curtailed by taxes which promote “solidarity” and “mutual care.” He then told the over 1,000 listening to his address that “we must work toward changing the rules of the game of the socio-economic system.”

But capitalism, despite the Pope’s insistence that it must be dismantled, has served humanity spectacularly well. This rise in the quality and length of lives following the Industrial Revolution is so pronounced that even the wealthiest people a century or two ago would be considered wretchedly deprived compared to the comforts even most poor people in developed countries have today...

Wednesday, February 15, 2017

A leftist reporter discovers the hypocrisy of media coverage about Israel

...Writing about the attack with the detached analytical eye of a journalist, I was able to take the perspective that (I was fast learning) most news outlets wanted – that Israel was to blame for Palestinian violence. But when I learned that my friend’s friend was one of the victims, it changed my way of thinking. I felt horrible for having publicly glorified one of the murderers. The man who’d been murdered, Richard Lakin, was originally from New England, like me, and had taught English to Israeli and Palestinian children at a school in Jerusalem. He believed in making peace with the Palestinians and “never missed a peace rally,” according to his son.

By contrast, his killers ‒ who came from a middle-class neighborhood in East Jerusalem and were actually quite well-off relative to most Palestinians ‒ had been paid 20,000 shekels to storm the bus that morning with their cowardly guns. More than a year later, you can still see their faces plastered around East Jerusalem on posters hailing them as martyrs. (One of the attackers, Baha Aliyan, 22, was killed at the scene; the second, Bilal Ranem, 23, was captured alive.) 

Being personally affected by the conflict caused me to question how forgiving I’d been of Palestinian violence previously. Liberals, human-rights groups and most of the media, though, continued to blame Israel for being attacked. Ban Ki-moon, for example, who at the time was the head of the United Nations, said in January 2016 ‒ as the streets of my neighborhood were stained with the blood of innocent Israeli civilians ‒ that it was “human nature to react to occupation.” In fact, there is no justification for killing someone, no matter what the political situation may or may not be, and Ban’s statement rankled me.

SIMILARLY, THE way that international NGOs, European leaders and others criticized Israel for its “shoot to kill” policy during this wave of terrorist attacks began to annoy me more and more.

In almost any nation, when the police confront a terrorist in the act of killing people, they shoot him dead and human-rights groups don’t make a peep. This happens in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Bangladesh; it happens in Germany and England and France and Spain, and it sure as hell happens in the US (see San Bernardino and the Orlando nightclub massacre, the Boston Marathon bombings and others). Did Amnesty International condemn Barack Obama or Abdel Fattah al-Sisi or Angela Merkel or François Hollande when their police forces killed a terrorist? Nope. But they made a point of condemning Israel.

What’s more, I started to notice that the media were unusually fixated on highlighting the moral shortcomings of Israel, even as other countries acted in infinitely more abominable ways. If Israel threatened to relocate a collection of Palestinian agricultural tents, as they did in the West Bank village of Sussiya in the summer of 2015, for example, the story made international headlines for weeks. The liberal outrage was endless. Yet, when Egypt’s president used bulldozers and dynamite to demolish an entire neighborhood in the Sinai Peninsula in the name of national security, people scarcely noticed.

Where do these double standards come from? ...

Rex Murphy: Exploring the new meaning of words with our post-fact, post-truth activist warriors


...Now even in a post-fact world, it’s a exertion beyond my limits to see Justin Trudeau as a “white supremacist,”  and adding “terrorist” to the chain of abuse overloads the poor neural network altogether.  Justin Trudeau — him — a white supremacist?

“There are rooms to rent in the outer planets” sang our poet Purdy, and surely BLM’s Yusra Khogali has checked into the last and farthest out if this is what she believes. If some ordinary, what I have been calling official, politician were to make Khogali’s charge in a legislature, he, she, xe or xem would be out on their various gender-various ears, offered help, and placed on a pariah list forever.

For there are some things so far from fact-based that to give mouth to them is a signal of irredeemable intellectual distress.

There is exaggeration; there is hyperbole; there is full polemic; and there is just plain bitter idiocy. If Justin Trudeau, a one-man rainbow coalition in a well-tailored suit is a “white supremacist terrorist” then Ghandi was Hitler’s illegitimate son, and Mother Theresa was an incontinent axe murderess.

The thought balloon behind Khogali’s outburst probably went something like this: I have nominated myself the voice of a minority. That offers full and unbounded validity to all of my opinions, however scantily fertilized by research or facts. I am righteous, therefore, I am free to call any and everyone else whatever I choose to call them, regardless of how ugly, harsh and ridiculous the description happens to be. I’m an activist — truth and fact be dammed. Ergo, Justin Trudeau, the living poster face of Everyone Everywhere Is My Brother can be anathematized as a white supremacist terrorist...

Secret of the Incas

This movie, starring the great Charlton Heston, was the inspiration for Raiders of the Lost Ark



See also - the real-life perils of being a treasure hunter in the jungle 

Tuesday, February 14, 2017

Study shows that anti-Trump and Black Lives Matter protesters are actually turning people against those movements

Image stolen from BlazingCatFur
Blocking traffic, damaging property, rioting, and other forms of extreme protest behaviours can reduce popular support for social movements, a new study concludes.

The study, Extreme Protest Tactics Reduce Popular Support For Social Movements, was published in SSRN by Professor Matthew Feinberg of the University of Toronto, who told Campus Reform that he was inspired to investigate protest tactics during his tenure as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, during which time he claimed that he “went to a lot of protests.”

Feinberg said that he and his former graduate advisor at UC Berkeley, Professor Robb Willer, “were wondering which tactics would be more successful than others and which tactics could be backfiring,” and began researching the issue, eventually adding Chloe Kovacheff, a Ph.D student at the University of Toronto, to their team.

In one experiment, Feinberg and his team exposed research participants to videos of people protesting for three current social movements: animal rights, Black Lives Matter, and anti-Trump protests. Feinberg then gauged whether the type of protest tactic that activists used in each scenario had an effect on research participants’ support for the social movement.

Montreal's McGill University effectively declares itself the most antisemitic public university in North America

Igor Sadikov - proof that being a moron doesn't disqualify
a person from admission to McGill University

MONTREAL — ...after McGill University student politician Igor Sadikov last week used Twitter to encourage people to “punch a Zionist,” supporters have defended him while targeting Jewish students who support Israel.

On Monday, the board of directors of the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU), on which Sadikov represents Arts students, rejected by a vote of 5-4 a motion calling for his removal from the board.

Students attending an SSMU legislative council meeting last Thursday reported that elected representatives declined to denounce Sadikov but stood by as a Jewish member of the council was singled out for her support of Zionism...

Monday, February 13, 2017

Robert Fulford: Can Islam be reformed?

“I was a Muslim refugee once,” Ayaan Hirsi Ali declared this week in her response to President Donald Trump’s travel ban. “I know what it’s like. I know what it’s like to fear rejection, deportation and the dangers that await you back home.”

She remembers being in the Frankfurt airport in 1992, waiting for the plane that would take her to Canada for a marriage arranged against her will by her father. Something cracked, a spirit of individualism stirred within her, and suddenly she needed to escape. Somalia-born, she fled to the Netherlands, obtained asylum and learned Dutch. She studied John Locke, Voltaire and John Stuart Mill while doing a graduate degree at the University of Leiden. It was, she recently said, a journey “from the world of faith to the world of reason.” She decided that Islam is, among other things, too intolerant of free thought.

Now she’s an ex-Muslim and an articulate author. She’s also very much an American and a believer in democracy.

Probably to the surprise of her admirers, she sees good intentions in Trump’s executive order about refugees. It was clumsy and confusing but it demonstrated, she says, that Trump has a realistic view of “the hateful ideology of radical Islam” and its continuing threat to democracy. She shows no sympathy for those, like Barack Obama, who could not utter a phrase like “Islamic violence” lest he encourage bigotry.

She cites a survey showing that large numbers of Muslims in many countries believe Sharia law is the word of God and should govern where they live. Many also think Muslims who leave Islam (as Hirsi Ali did) deserve execution, that suicide bombing in defence of Islam can be justified, and that honour killing of women is not always deplorable...

Sunday, February 12, 2017

Consensual Sex is a western concept - Georgetown Professor defends Islamic rape and slavery


...“Slaves were protected by shariah (Islamic Law)” Brown stated with no recognition of the idealized legal version of slavery and slavery as it was practiced. In this version of slavery there is an omission of kidnappings, harems, armies of eunuchs, and other atrocities.

The above argument is similar to the arguments previously defeated by Muslim bloggers and activists that racism and misogyny didn’t exist in the Muslim community because there was no textual support when in fact both are rampant.

“It’s not immoral for one human to own another human” Brown stated in his clearest defense of slavery. Brown went onto state that being an employee is basically the same as being a slave and painting himself as a real romantic Brown told me his marriage was akin to slavery because his wife held rights over him. The fact that both of these arrangements can be terminated and are consensual seemed lost on the aloof academic.

“Consent isn’t necessary for lawful sex” said Professor Jonathan Brown of Georgetown University...

Time to boycott the appeasers at ‘Pride’

...In light of pride’s decision to ban police from the parade, we call on the federal, provincial and municipal governments to immediately withdraw all their financial support from this event.

The city of Toronto alone, for example, gives pride more than $1 million annually in grants, in-kind policing and city services. This should be ended immediately, given pride’s decision to ban the police.

Would City Hall, or the federal and provincial governments give money to an organization that banned Jews, Muslims, Blacks, Asians or other visible minorities from its parade?

Would they give money to an organization that, if not actively promoting hatred against such groups itself, nonetheless asks, “how high” when the promoters of division and intolerance tell it to “jump”?

Finally, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Premier Kathleen Wynne, Mayor John Tory and all federal, provincial and municipal politicians, should boycott this year’s Toronto pride parade, to register their disgust with its decision to ban the police.

Because, seriously, enough is enough. 

Our Two-Movie Reality


From Scott Adams' blog:

...If you are a Trump supporter, all you see is an example of Trump talking the way Trump always does. He bluntly criticizes everything he doesn’t like. That’s one of the things his supporters like about him. Mmm, that’s a delicious apple.

Oh, and Trump is also directionally accurate in his criticism. Even Alan Dershowitz, who is no fan of the president, says Trump would probably win in the Supreme Court on the narrow question of whether the President has the right to order the seven-country immigration ban.

And Trump is sticking to the law and preparing a legal response to the court’s action. All normal stuff. Nothing here but some normal (for him) Trump words.

But if you are an anti-Trumper, and his unexpected election sent you into cognitive dissonance, you see “So-called judge” as exactly what Hitler might say before he lined them all up and shot them. Where his supporters see a delicious apple in Trump’s hand, his critics see a gun.

But here’s the freaky part: Both of our movies are intact. In my movie, Trump took a bite out of a juicy apple. In your movie, he cocked his gun and is ready to fire. But none of these movie scenes touches either one of us, at least not yet. We are observers. I can still drink my coffee and you can still brush your teeth. At this very moment, it makes no difference to our lives that I see an apple and you see a gun – except that you live in terror and I’m having a good laugh (literally) while watching my movie...

Friday, February 10, 2017

NOW Magazine doubles down on its usual batshit craziness - accuses Justin Trudeau of being a "white supremacist"



As the person who coined the term "Prince Bonehead" for our Prime Minister, I resent having to come to his defense. But of all the things that Justin Trudeau may be, a person who believes that white people are superior by virtue of their skin color is not one of them.  Yet that's what it is now alleging of him. As is typical of idiot, OISE-left, they are too stupid to be able to differentiate skin color from culture. So they conflate Canadian cultural elements which favor the establishment with "white supremacy."

Expecting anything but stupidity and hypocrisy from NOW Magazine is a waste of time. It's an allegedly "progressive" magazine that makes a substantial amount of its money acting as a pimp for sex traffickers abusing women brought to Canada from Asia and Eastern Europe.

Were I inclined towards conspiracy theories, I'd say Canada's radical left were making themselves look insane on purpose to force people like me to come to the defense of Justin Trudeau. Or at the least, to make him look like a reasonable centrist. But I know them well enough not to credit them with that much foresight. In any case, the Conservatives are doing enough imploding right now so that Justin doesn't need that much help from the loony left.

Travel Ban Protester asked if she'd shelter a refugee: "I'm a female living alone, so I'm apprehensive"

Thursday, February 9, 2017

The American Association of University Professors is upset that students are reporting on classroom brainwashing

Riots last week at the University of California, Berkeley stopped Milo Yiannopoulos, a right-wing provocateur who contributes to Breitbart News, from speaking on campus. The violence forced the cancellation of his event and inflicted $100,000 in damage to school property, according to administrators. Then it spread to New York University, where police arrested 11 protesters who tried to halt the libertarian comedian Gavin McInnes from talking to students.

The American Association of University Professors has said nothing about this coastal turmoil. Yet it has condemned what it apparently regards as a greater threat: students who provide accurate reports on the shouted-down speakers in their auditoriums and the left-wing biases in their classrooms...

Wednesday, February 8, 2017

Majority in Leading EU Nations Support Trump-Style Travel Ban: Poll



A majority of Europeans would support a Trump-style ban on further migration from mainly Muslim countries, according to a poll of more than 10,000 people in 10 countries.

An average of 55 percent of those surveyed for London-based think tank, Chatham House, agreed that immigration from Muslim-majority countries should be halted.

The poll released Tuesday comes after a bruising 18 months that have seen a string of terrorist massacres linked to radical Islam as well as record-setting levels of migration that have created social tensions across the continent.

Majorities in all but two of the 10 countries polled supported a ban, ranging from 71 percent in Poland, to 53 percent in Germany, 47 percent in the United Kingdom and 41 percent in Spain. In no country did the percentage that disagreed surpass 32 percent.

Chatham House called the findings "striking and sobering" and said in a news release that the figures "suggest that public opposition to further migration from predominantly Muslim states is by no means confined to Trump's electorate."...

Stephen Harper: "Donald Trump is going to reverse the cornerstone of 7 decades of American foreign policy”

Tuesday, February 7, 2017

When "Social Justice Activist" becomes a euphemism for "person with mental disorder"

Uber is looking into making flying cars, and it has hired a veteran NASA engineer to help do it

In 2010, an advanced aircraft engineer at NASA’s Langley Research Center named Mark Moore published a white paper outlining the feasibility of electric aircrafts that could take off and land like helicopters but were smaller and quieter. The vehicles would be capable of providing a speedy alternative to the dreary morning commute.

Moore’s research (PDF) into so-called VTOL–short for vertical takeoff and landing, or more colloquially, flying cars–inspired at least one billionaire technologist. After reading the white paper, Google co-founder Larry Page secretly started and financed two Silicon Valley startups, Zee Aero and Kitty Hawk, to develop the technology, Bloomberg Businessweek reported last summer.

Now Moore is leaving the confines of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, where he has spent the last 30 years, to join one of Google’s rivals: Uber Technologies Inc. Moore is taking on a new role as director of engineering for aviation at the ride-hailing company, working on a flying car initiative known as Uber Elevate. “I can’t think of another company in a stronger position to be the leader for this new ecosystem and make the urban electric VTOL market real,” he says.



Monday, February 6, 2017

How the Conservatives' Underground Iranian LGBT Railroad to Canada was shut down by Justin Trudeau


Mitra’s sanctuary is a mouldy basement in Turkey’s conservative heartland. The microbiology student’s life in northern Iran came crashing down in the summer of 2014, when she was outed as a lesbian. A neighbour beat Mitra, and her parents disowned her. Like thousands of LGBT Iranians, she fled to Turkey.

The 27-year-old now works 14-hour shifts standing upright at a textile factory, before coming home to her transgender partner. The two women sleep on a folding sofa; they have just one plastic chair.

Canada invited both to start a new life 14 months ago, when embassy staff in Turkey started a third-country resettlement application. But our country has now closed its doors, effectively suspending an informal program known worldwide for bringing scores of queer Iranians to safety.

Over the past decade, hundreds of LGBT Iranians have come to Canada, mostly through UN resettlement. But this humanitarian pipeline has dried up as Canadian officials in Turkey focus their resources on bringing Syrians to Canada.

Instead of welcoming them here, Canada has told LGBT Iranians like Mitra to try moving to the US...

The Hollywood Reporter's Michael Wolff Helps Explain Why The Media Keeps Losing To Trump

Toronto: A Sanctuary for Criminals

A source reports all the accused in this matter were in Canada on temporary work visas. Toronto has confusing and preposterous "Sanctuary City" rules, by police aren't supposed to report immigration status to federal authorities unless required to under federal law. 

TORONTO - Expensive jewelry to cheap straw hats.

Those were a few pieces of swag Toronto Police recovered after busting a residential robbery gang and seizing $500,000 worth of stolen property.

An investigation dubbed Project High Class led to eight people being charged with numerous break-and-enter offences.

“These people are a highly organized ring,” said Acting Insp. Joanne Rudnick. “They were targeting high-end homes.”

Twenty-five break-and-enters were committed in the tony south Etobicoke area dating back to fall 2016...

Sunday, February 5, 2017

The Data That Turned the World Upside Down

...Remarkably reliable deductions could be drawn from simple online actions. For example, men who "liked" the cosmetics brand MAC were slightly more likely to be gay; one of the best indicators for heterosexuality was "liking" Wu-Tang Clan. Followers of Lady Gaga were most probably extroverts, while those who "liked" philosophy tended to be introverts. While each piece of such information is too weak to produce a reliable prediction, when tens, hundreds, or thousands of individual data points are combined, the resulting predictions become really accurate.

Kosinski and his team tirelessly refined their models. In 2012, Kosinski proved that on the basis of an average of 68 Facebook "likes" by a user, it was possible to predict their skin color (with 95 percent accuracy), their sexual orientation (88 percent accuracy), and their affiliation to the Democratic or Republican party (85 percent). But it didn't stop there. Intelligence, religious affiliation, as well as alcohol, cigarette and drug use, could all be determined. From the data it was even possible to deduce whether someone's parents were divorced.

The strength of their modeling was illustrated by how well it could predict a subject's answers. Kosinski continued to work on the models incessantly: before long, he was able to evaluate a person better than the average work colleague, merely on the basis of ten Facebook "likes." Seventy "likes" were enough to outdo what a person's friends knew, 150 what their parents knew, and 300 "likes" what their partner knew. More "likes" could even surpass what a person thought they knew about themselves. On the day that Kosinski published these findings, he received two phone calls. The threat of a lawsuit and a job offer. Both from Facebook...

Black Lives Matter Canada has declared SJW queen Justin Trudeau a "white supremacist terrorist."


How world leaders were duped into investing billions over manipulated global warming data


The Mail on Sunday today reveals astonishing evidence that the organisation that is the world’s leading source of climate data rushed to publish a landmark paper that exaggerated global warming and was timed to influence the historic Paris Agreement on climate change.

A high-level whistleblower has told this newspaper that America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) breached its own rules on scientific integrity when it published the sensational but flawed report, aimed at making the maximum possible impact on world leaders including Barack Obama and David Cameron at the UN climate conference in Paris in 2015.

The report claimed that the ‘pause’ or ‘slowdown’ in global warming in the period since 1998 – revealed by UN scientists in 2013 – never existed, and that world temperatures had been rising faster than scientists expected. Launched by NOAA with a public relations fanfare, it was splashed across the world’s media, and cited repeatedly by politicians and policy makers.

But the whistleblower, Dr John Bates, a top NOAA scientist with an impeccable reputation, has shown The Mail on Sunday irrefutable evidence that the paper was based on misleading, ‘unverified’ data.

It was never subjected to NOAA’s rigorous internal evaluation process – which Dr Bates devised...

Saturday, February 4, 2017

Why does ‘progressive’ Quebec have so many massacres?

...French-speaking Quebec is often held up (and certainly holds itself up) as Canada’s most essential region, home to a precious set of particularities that help make Canada the marvelous place it is. On such issues as postsecondary education, child care and (ironically enough) gun control, progressive Canadians laud its social-democratic policies as moral exemplars, and the province has played an outsize role in pushing Canadian politics to the left.

Criticism of Quebec, meanwhile, is deeply taboo. In a 2006 essayGlobe and Mail columnist Jan Wong posited a theory that Quebec’s various lone nuts, many of whom were not of pure French-Canadian stock, were predictably alienated from a province that places such a high premium on cultural conformity. She was denounced by a unanimous vote in the Canadian Parliament and sank into a career-ruining depression. The current events magazine Maclean’s ran a cover story in 2010 arguing that Quebec, where old-fashioned mafia collusion between government contractors, unions and politicians is still common, was easily “the most corrupt province in Canada.” That, too, was denounced by a unanimous vote of Parliament.

Privately, English Canadians are far less defensive. They grumble about Quebec’s dark history of anti-Semitism, religious bigotry and pro-fascist sentiment, facts which are rarely included in otherwise self-flagellating official narratives of Canadian history. They complain about the exaggerated deference the province gets from Ottawa as a “distinct society” and “nation-within-a-nation,” and its various French-supremacist language and assimilation laws, which they blame for creating a place that’s inhospitable, arrogant and, yes, noticeably more racist than the Canadian norm. And now, they have good reason to observe that the province seems to produce an awful lot of lunatics prone to public massacres, who often explicitly justify their violence with arguments of dissatisfaction towards Quebec’s unique culture...

Friday, February 3, 2017

U.S. slaps fresh sanctions on Iran over missile test

The Trump administration on Friday imposed sanctions on 13 people and a dozen companies in response to Iran's recent ballistic missile test, increasing pressure on Tehran without directly undercutting a landmark nuclear deal with the country.

Those targeted by the Treasury Department's action include various agents, companies and associates involved in procuring ballistic missile technology for Iran. Iranians, Lebanese, Chinese and Emirati individuals and companies also are now blacklisted from doing any business in the United States or with American citizens.

"Iran's continued support for terrorism and development of its ballistic missile program poses a threat to the region, to our partners worldwide and to the United States," John E. Smith, the Treasury Department's acting sanctions chief, said in a statement...

The fascists in America are the protesters rioting to stop Milo Yannopoulos from being allowed to speak



Milo Yannopoulos is a provocateur. He provokes people with ideas, and many people don't like that kind of provocation. So they lie about him and distort what he has said in order to turn as many people as they can against him and his ideas.

Milo is a gay conservative who has spoken out in favor of racial equality and free speech. He has never called for the rights of any American citizens to be taken away. But has been characterized as a "white supremacist" and far-right extremist in media such as CNN.

Some of his ideas are undoubtedly offensive to people who believe third wave feminism is a necessity of that 'cultural appropriation' is a grievous sin.

But regardless of what he says, provocative ideas belong in the sphere of public debate, and if they are bad ideas they should be countered with better ideas and logical reasoning.

That's not the approach that fascists take to dissent. Fascists will demonize their ideological opponents with lies, coerce anyone who supports those ideas, and engage in acts of brutal violence so that those who say things of which they disapprove are silenced.

The riots at Berkeley to prevent Milo from speaking there are acts of pure fascism. And the people who are cheering on the silencing of ideas they don't like in the name of "Social Justice" are as much enablers of fascism as the "social justice" advocates who created Nazi Germany.

Was ATU TTC Union leader Bob Kinnear removed from office because of his dirty tricks?

As usual, Greg at GenuineWitty does a thorough and intense amount of research and questioning on a matter of great public significance that the mainstream media is either too lazy or incompetent to conduct.

...ATU national president Bob Kinnear was at yesterday’s protest and has participated at other TTCRiders events in the past. I took the opportunity to walk up and ask him a couple of questions. I kicked-off with a simple question “don’t you think it’s a conflict-of-interest that the ATU provides financial support to the TTCRiders?” He looked at me and said there’s no problem at all.

Next, I asked him his opinion on the fact that the organization the ATU is supporting and partnering with is led by a director with a criminal history, he got a little bit jumpy and defensive but once again responded saying he didn’t see a problem with that. Finally, I asked if he wasn’t uncomfortable with the fact that Jessica Bell’s Seattle protest robbed a whole lot of union workers of a day’s pay- he stuttered at this point, declined to answer, and gave me a rather intense looking (a little bit scary) stare.

Bob didn’t seem like he was used to journalists asking him hard questions about his strange bedfellows...

Thursday, February 2, 2017

Donald Trump is doing more with tweets in 2 weeks than Obama did in 8 years of governing

Like most people, I was skeptical about Donald Trump's presidential bid when he first announced it.

It went from being considered a stunt to a potential disaster as far as I was concerned. Then I saw something happen after he became the Republican nominee. As the campaigns progressed towards election day, Trump's was conducted more professionally than Clinton's and he showed fortitude both in adversity and success, Hillary acted entitled and petulant. In adversity, she became angry and in success she was arrogant. To me, it then became clear that Trump would make a better president. Not that Trump doesn't have petulance and arrogance in abundance, but he also understood that he had to work to earn the support of voters, where Hillary appeared to be outraged that it wasn't awarded to her on a platter.

Now with the Presidency, Trump has created a lot of disruption.

Make no mistake. It's intentional, and if you want a good explanation of why Trump's doing what he is, read this article by Dilbert creator Scott Adams.

Regardless of how one may feel about him, it's indisputable that Trump is moving quickly and decisively. He's making himself clear about important issues about which Obama was equivocal and weak.

Maybe America really will become great again.








Wednesday, February 1, 2017

Ayaan Hirsi Ali talks about the attacks on her by sour Sharia fascist Linda Sarsour

White House: "As of today, we are officially putting Iran on notice"

..."As of today, we are officially putting Iran on notice," Flynn said from the White House briefing room.

Flynn did not say whether the US would take action beyond a verbal warning, and three senior administration officials, speaking on background, said Wednesday that they are still in the early stages of determining what action the US should take in response.

"We are considering a whole range of options. We're in a deliberative process," one of the officials said.

The administration is considering a range of responses to the ballistic missile test, including financial measures and economic sanctions. The officials said the administration would not take any options off the table, including a military response. They also stressed that a violation of the UN Security Council Resolution on Iranian ballistic missile activity would not impact the Iran nuclear deal.

One of the officials said Flynn's warning on Wednesday delivered from the White House -- one that might typically be issued by diplomats -- was intended to reflect "the level of importance that this administration believes this issue warrants."

Iran's foreign ministry insisted Tuesday that Sunday's missile test was "solely for defensive purposes," and not a violation of the UN Security Council resolution which bars Iran from testing "ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons."...