Canada’s new Liberal party leader supports torture
Canada has chosen a new Liberal party leader following on the disaster that was Stephane Dion. Michael Ignatief, a former Harvard professor of human rights and former member of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, was recently anointed to lead the Canadian Liberal party to the next election by any means possible, including torture.
Here’s a link to a 2005 article by Mariano Aguirre detailing some of Mr. Ignatief’s reasons on why torture is so much more preferable than any other method for igniting the fires of democracy around the world.
The world no sooner gets rid of one by free elections, and another pops up to parrot the idiocy. I suppose Canadians must now prepare to be picked up off of their cold winter streets and rendered to a vacation spot of their choice in a warm climate, where brutality and torture come highly recommended by Mr. Ignatief. After all, winter is now upon us in this northern clime, and a warm-weather respite is well-deserved by all.
Let’s hope that the Canadian electorate has the common sense, come their next Federal election, to show Mr. Ignatief where to shove the eternal sunshine of his spotless mind.
2008: Will it never end?
A leap second will be added to the last day of 2008 to ensure that atomic clocks “keep up” with the slowing of the earth’s rotation.
Canadian winter sour grapes make ice wine
The Parliament of Canada has been prorogued — i.e., the current session has been discontinued or suspended — by the Governor-General. Unlike the tin-pot dictatorship described as Canada by some media asshats and assorted members of the official opposition, Parliament will continue in January under Prime Minisiter Stephen Harper, at which time all elected representatives will have a chance to defeat the government in a House vote. Democracy lives. So much for a crisis in a frozen teapot as presented by Canadian mainstream media. The media will have that time to anoint a new leader for themselves, since they have such an extreme dislike for Mr. Harper.
Thanks to thetyee.ca, here’s an explanation of how Parliament works:
Canadians never vote directly for a “government.” Instead, we elect a member of Parliament in our local constituency. It is only after 308 individual MPs have been chosen that the process of forming a government begins.
The Constitution Act of 1876 doesn’t even mention the prime minister or political parties. MPs are everything.
How MPs organize themselves is entirely up to them. This is why two MPs are able to currently sit as independents; there could just as easily be 308 of them. Most MPs have organized themselves into groupings known as parties. This simplifies the process of forming government but doesn’t change the constitutional pre-eminence of individual MPs.
There is just one basic requirement: The government must at all times enjoy the confidence of the majority of MPs in the House of Commons.
By unwritten constitutional convention, the Governor General calls upon the leader of the party with the most MPs and asks him or her to try to form a government that enjoys the confidence of the House. When that party holds a majority of the seats, the result is a foregone conclusion. This gives rise to the illusion that parties win the “right to govern.” But they just get to try to form a government first, and happen to have enough seats to deliver.
Things are different when no party emerges from the election with a majority. Again, the Governor General calls upon the leader of the party with the most MPs and asks them to try to form a government that enjoys the confidence of the House. To obtain that confidence, the newly designated “prime minister” must persuade MPs from other parties to provide their support. If he or she fails, it is open to another party (or parties) to indicate that they can get the job done — whereupon the Governor General will let them try.
Since the 308 individual MPs whose preferences drive this process are directly elected by Canadians, all of this is entirely democratic. — thetyee.ca, Michael Byers
Harper’s biggest problem is the Canadian media, who have a strong dislike of how he deals with them. He plays his cards close to his chest. There are no leaks to media favourites to get out the party line, such as there were under previous governments. This eats at them like a bout of listeria from their favourite deli sandwich, resulting in their characterization of him as confrontational and deceptive. Of course, through transference, the opposing parties have picked up on this line and have adopted it as their crie de coeur, resulting in a dog-chasing-its-tail routine that is quite amusing.
The new darlings of the Candian MSM are the Liberals, the New Democratic Party, and the Bloc Québecois, who, in the media’s collective mind, must be the annointed alternative to Canada’s existing government. The trouble with that is that Canada can’t afford to have them. Fortunately for all of us, the media doesn’t govern, although it likes to think it does.
Dear Québec
Go.
Yours truly,
Canada
The citizen of France who would be king
Canadian politics and the Parliamentary system can be quite amusing.
Presently, following an October election, Canada has a newly chosen minority government in Ottawa. Not happy to have been left out of the proceedings, two parties who were not elected to form the government have chosen to get together in erstwhile “band of brothers” mode and defeat the government elected by the people. Not having enough seats in Parliament to do this on their own, the two parties have chosen to include a Québec separatist party in the agreement to support their merry band.
The leader of the “coup” will be a man who is a citizen of France. If that isn’t enough to gall anyone — sorry, Charles — the man who would be king was soundly defeated in the recent election. Having had his ass handed to him, this doofus has previously announced his intent to resign as the loser leader of his loser party in May of 2009.
Allow me to summarize, if you will. The governing party defeated all others to form a minority government. Those who were defeated have chosen to oust the newly elected government and thus take over governing themselves, with a leader who is a citizen of France. They will do this with the support of a Québec-only separatist party.
Most Canadians are upset with the proceedings as they have been occurring, so it should be interesting to see if there will be much interest in the House during the next roll call of votes. Personally, I can’t see the erstwhile band of brothers doing anything more than making fools of themselves, but I’ll just have to wait and see. Were this just about anywhere else in the world, Canada would now be in the midst of a bloody revolution, but fortunately for all, that’s not the case.
In the meantime, it’s business as usual for everything else, while the Canadian MSM gnashes its teeth and trys to convince us all how everything is going to hell in a handbasket. Good luck with that.
The blame game
Author’s note: I once read a study that pointedly admitted that only 10 percent of Americans know the name of the country on their northern border. You can see the country from Alaska. Any guesses as to what that country might be? (Unfortunately, I can’t find a link to the study.)
Canada has become a haven for terrorism, according to Bert Tussing at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania:
“The threat along the northern border, while far less publicized, is nevertheless cause for concern — perhaps equal concern, perhaps greater.”
Mr. Tussing’s concern for the Canadian border is even greater than the concern he has for the Mexican border. I don’t see how that’s possible, given that the illegal immigrant sieve, known to America as the Mexican border, is impossible to plug, no matter what America pretends to do in its continued feeble attempts at stemming the tide. To America, illegal immigrants cannot be terrorists. Those illegals entering the U.S. from Mexico come for a better life, not to plan and execute terror attacks. Perhaps the Army War College should launch — if you’ll pardon the pun — an inquiry into determining how many of those millions of Mexicans are terrorists from somewhere else. Does anyone, anywhere, actually know?
* crickets chirp *
I didn’t think so.
Canada’s immigration and refugee policy is cause celebre for the concern, according to Mr. Tussing, and other, more well-known ignoramuses in America. There are still Americans who believe that Canada was the source of the 9/11 terrorists. How in God’s name that became a truth is entirely unknown, but given the American media’s constant parroting of Administration talking points and lies, I suppose its not unusual. For the ignoramuses among us, the terrorists were mostly Saudi — you know, from Saudi Arabia — and three other Arab countries. Fifteen hijackers obtained their visas for travel to America in Saudi Arabia, no questions asked. That’s why America invaded Iraq, remember?
No mention is ever made of who lets these terrorists into America from wherever they might launch themselves. It does occur to me that all of the blame just might rest with the U.S. Customs and Immigration Service, the U.S. Border Patrol, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (long live Der Homeland!), and various and sundry other American agencies and councils that operate in secret and are paid trillions of dollars to prevent such incursions.
Touched as I am by America’s concern for who Canada lets into its own country, I think America should take a long and hard look within its own borders first. I’m not optimistic that will happen anytime soon, given America’s penchant to blame almost any other country first for its problems around the world.
The greater concern for the border-watchers should be for the hundreds of thousands of Canadians who enter into the U.S. for the sole purpose of spending money whilst escaping something known as the extreme Canadian winter. There’s no telling what those mostly white, Canadian-born, winter-escaping extremists might foment. (They’re called snowbirds, by the way.)
Here’s a link to mindless rambling on about American border security and foreign terrorists on foreign soil. Can anyone give me the name of any country that has secure borders? I mean really, immigrants washing up on Florida soil from Cuba probably pose just as great a threat, but no one makes headlines over an insecure Florida border. Perhaps they come for the waters.
Buy nothing day
Today in Canada, and tomorrow in 63 other countries around the world, is Buy Nothing Day. It began in Canada in 1992 as a small protest against raging consumerism. In 1997 it was moved to the day after American Thanksgiving — known as Black Friday — for reasons which I believe are quite obvious. Black Friday in America is known as one of the busiest retail days prior to Christmas.
I concur with the premise of Buy Nothing Day. Notwithstanding the encouragement of the various leaders around the world to buy, buy, buy us out of the current “recession”, I will do nothing of the sort. I’ll be leaving it up to others to entertain the economic juggernaut currently unleashed upon an unsuspecting world.
WordPress is getting a tad tiresome
I had a new implementation of WordPress installed on a motorcycle site, which was previously written in html. I wasn’t aware of any problems with the WordPress visual editor until I encountered it on the new site. I did a search and was able to come up with quite a few solutions, but none of the solutions worked for me — or for many others, it seems. No big deal. Find a thread, post a question, and someone will eventually come up with something that works.
It would appear that some of us have touched a WordPress nerve, thus we have this:
and here’s a general rant to those of you that are whining that your threads arent getting replied to (ive seen like 7-8 in the last 4 hours) — its a fucking holiday in the US (where 90% of us live), and some people dont spend them online. Im ONLY here because Im working. Get a grip — your dumb little “i cant get my adsense to show up” or your “i want an archives page” crap isnt more important than someone spending a damn holiday with their family, and away from a bunch ingrates that cant use a search box. FFS, most of you dont even say please, or thank you.
Go here if you want to see the thread. I’m the guy with the palm tree in my avatar.
As a result of this, I have decided to leave my site in html and remove WordPress. It looks much better the way it is, and editing the html is a breeze for me.
Thanks, but no thanks, WordPress.
Furthermore, I get absolutely no spam on the site since it’s in html. It’s not a high-traffic site, but it does get three to four hundred hits a month, purely for the technical articles.
And whooami, male or female WordPress goowill ambassador that you are, you’ll find sympathy in the dictionary, somewhere between shit and syphilis.
Now for the history lesson
You knew it was coming, right?
The “it’s a fucking holiday in the U.S. of A.” that whooami makes reference to is called Thanksgiving. It’s celebrated in the U.S. as a time when invading religious zealots gave thanks to the native North American population for letting them come ashore, bringing religious fervor, pestilence, slaughter, mass displacement and ownership to an otherwise pretty satisfied people as a whole.
Outside of North America, I can’t think of one other country or nation that celebrates Thanksgiving. Certainly not Mexico or Central America, where visitors from Europe (for you geography-challenged Americans, that’s a continent, not a country) brought disease, more pestilence, religion-induced slaughter, and conquest to a civilization that was more than a little advanced. Obviously, Europeans (people living on a continent, not a country) don’t celebrate Thanksgiving.
South America (another continent, consisting of many countries) doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving. Nor does Asia, Australia, Africa, the Middle East and on and on and on. So basically, we have a country of 330 million people, far outnumbered by the remainder of the known world, completely in ignorance of the other six billion scattered here and there on the globe.
Oh well, it was ever thus.
Promise
Jack Kennedy held out the promise of a new generation of enlightenment, but he didn’t get to finish the deal. His untimely demise, 45 years ago today, shocked and saddened us all. Whether for good or bad, his legacy lived on for too few years under another administration’s hopes and dreams.
Now, a new administration has presented us with a promise of hope during a much-different time. While there may be very few parallels to be drawn between the Obama and Kennedy administrations that are appropriate for today, I for one do believe that the beginning of a new era of enlightenment has taken hold. Only time will tell whether I am right or wrong.
Hope springs eternal.
Motorcycle riding blues upside
Yes, there will be an upside: plenty of low-mileage motorcycles with a for sale sign on them.
However, don’t rush out with an eye to buy immediately. Wait until all those people that bought their motorcycles as an investment — and there are plenty — start to realize that a motorcycle isn’t actually an investment. Used prices will tumble faster than Ashley Dupré.
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