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It tells you everything you need to know about this messed up country, that the bill to allow "gender variant individuals" to use whichever public washroom/change room they "identify" with is heading into final reading in Parliament, and could be law within a few weeks.
Meanwhile, the bill to allow fathers equal parenting rights in custody cases in family court is stalled until at least the fall, when it will just enter the debate stage.
Most mornings I pack 6 school lunches. 1 cream cheese bagel or croissant in a Ziploc bag, a handful of baby carrots in a Ziploc bag, slices apples dredged in lemon juice in a Ziploc bag, two-bite brownies in a Ziploc bag, and a fruit cup or pudding with a disposable plastic spoon. I used to even send a juice box or disposable juice bottle, until I figured it would be less expensive to use jug juice and refillable bottles. That was an economical decision. The rest of the choices are motivated by expense and time constraints.
I expect my children have all been summarily labeled offenders in the first degree for some time now, by the eco-tyrants in their classrooms…
A couple in Laval, Que., has sparked a fierce debate over how far schools should go to teach children about environmental responsibility after their six-year-old son was shut out of a kindergarten draw to win a stuffed animal because he had an environmentally unfriendly sandwich bag in his lunch box.
Marc-Andre Lanciault said he hadn't heard of the school's draw or any environmental policy until his wife, Isabel Theoret, was making their son Felix a sandwich and he begged them not to put it in a plastic bag.
"He said, 'No mommy, you can't do that. Not a Ziploc,' " Mr. Lanciault said.
Through tears, the boy told his parents that the school had held a draw to win a stuffed teddy bear and only children who didn't have any plastic sandwich bags could enter.
I’ve already made the school resoundingly aware of how I feel about the nauseating bacterial science project that comes home under the “boomerang” lunch project (where children bring their lunch garbage back home). Do you have any idea what a pudding cup looks like when it’s been baking in a thermal lunch bag all day? Imagine the frantic reports that would be made to various agencies if it was me who forced my child to traipse back and forth to school with festering food garbage in their backpack!
On a day when we have all the children, I routinely run our dishwasher on an average of 3 times a day. If I migrated to the so-called “sustainable” containers (ie. Tupperware) that the school encourages, it would add at least one more load each day. Don’t tell me that is more “environmentally responsible” than a handful of Ziploc bags. And even if it was, tough! I already have enough work to do, making sure 6 kids get fed and dressed and off to school in time with a healthy lunch, and I already do enough dishes.
What would motivate the poor and under-educated to work and strive to improve their fortunes, if they didn’t have the greener pastures on the other side of the street to look to..?
In a first for Ontario, a Niagara-area school opening this fall will only admit low-income students whose parents don’t have a college or university education.
While raising concerns about stigmatizing poor children, the board has approved the initiative saying the current system doesn’t serve them well and that similar U.S. schools have proved successful.
If you insulate them from seeing or experiencing uneven or disadvantaged circumstances, how would they even know there is more to be had out there?
If just one "yob" gets a gun muzzle to the face, ten other "yobs" will think twice next time.
Just sayin'.
Where 3 masked thugs can firebomb your house in the middle of the night - with you in it - but you are the one facing charges...
The incident began six years of trouble for Mr. Thomson that culminated early one Sunday morning last August when the 53-year-old former mobile-crane operator woke up to the sound of three masked men firebombing his Port Colborne, Ont., home.
“I was horrified,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know what was happening. I had no idea what was going on.”
So Mr. Thomson, a former firearms instructor, grabbed one of his Smith & Wesson revolvers from his safe, loaded it and headed outside dressed in only his underwear.
“He exited his house and fired his revolver two, maybe three times, we’re not sure. Then these firebombing culprits, they ran off,” said his lawyer, Edward Burlew.
His surveillance cameras caught the attackers lobbing at least six Molotov cocktails at his house and bombing his doghouse, singeing one of his Siberian Huskies. But when Mr. Thomson handed the video footage to Niagara Regional Police, he found himself charged with careless use of a firearm.
The local Crown attorney’s office later laid a charge of pointing a firearm, along with two counts of careless storage of a firearm. The Crown has recommended Mr. Thomson go to jail, his lawyer said.
Pencils, pens... or even bleeding edge laptop computers... do not write lyrical poetry. Parachutes... even negligently packed... do not smash the life out of innocent, random people. Cars... even rip-snorting 400 horsepower street racers... do not chase down pedestrians like panicked bunnies... and guns... even the dark & dastardly Glock... do not foment murder.
So instead of trying to divert all the attention here to an inanimate object... be it a length of pipe, a snowplow, or yes... even a handgun... perhaps you could explain, how not discussing letting obviously mentally defective people with flagrantly violent ideation carom consequence-free throughout the larger field of folk is some sort of inconsequential side-issue.
Amen brother.
But the lunatics no longer need to take over the asylum. Most of them never end up seeing the inside of it anyway...
In 1950, a person who was behaving oddly stood a good chance of being hospitalized. It might be for observation for a few days or a few weeks. If the doctors decided that this person was mentally ill, they would be committed, perhaps for a few months, perhaps longer. Hospital space was always at a premium, so generally, if someone was kept, there was a reason for it. The notion that large numbers of sane people were kept for no reason just has not survived my research efforts.
Brings to mind, the senseless bloody murder of Tim McLean. And the shockingly bucolic treatment granted to his killer - a man who violently stabbed a total stranger, sawed off his head and shovelled bits and pieces of the body down his gullet during a 4-hour standoff with police.
When officers arrived they found Joshua Dexter Watson, 24, of Knoxville dead from multiple wounds administered by a .357-caliber revolver belonging to the homeowners, DeBusk said. . . . Watson has a criminal history that began even before his 18th birthday, records show. He was facing a charge of aggravated robbery in 2004 before he turned 18. After that, Watson racked up dozens of charges, including drug possession, theft, evading arrest, reckless driving and violation of probation for the aggravated robbery conviction, records show.
Manzer has been charged with possessing a weapon for a purpose dangerous to the public peace after he went out to help a neighbour dealing with three young men who were spotted trespassing in his Burton neighborhood late one night in March.
[..]
Manzer, who took restricted firearms training during his time in the military, said he knows he can't use potentially lethal force to protect property and kept the gun pointed at the ground throughout the brief incident.
"I wasn't out there to take the law into my own hands. I never left my property," said Manzer, who said that between November and March, residents of his small neighbourhood had to contend with break-ins to sheds, thieves rummaging through parked cars and vandalism ranging from damage to Christmas decorations to uprooted fruit trees.
"I yelled at them and said everyone be quiet and I told my wife to call 9-1-1."
He said he watched as his neighbour rounded up three strangers - all of whom looked like adults but turned out to be minors.
With the situation under control, Manzer, shirtless in the minus-13 degree night, went back inside and locked up his gun before hading back out.
He said Mounties arrived on scene 15 minutes later, took the three youths into custody and confiscated a near-empty liquor bottle.
When a Mountie showed up at his door six days later on Good Friday, Manzer assumed they were coming to take a statement.
Instead, he was arrested in front of his wife and kids. Then the Mounties seized his shotgun and hunting rifles.
The neighbour who nabbed the youths was also arrested and told he was being charged with assault.
I know where I'd rather live.
And I like to think I'm a "good mother", but at no point have I ever even considered there would be an appropriate situation to put a pillow over one of my children's faces.
A maternal flaw for which my children are utterly grateful. Or so they told me this morning, when they heard about this woman's madness.
When will they be sending a bill to the "government" of Saudi Arabia, for the additional security implemented in the US ever since 16 of their citizens lit a few fires of their own?
In fact, it's not out of line to bill them for the clean up, too, I guess.
I strongly suspect the furor is the whole point.
Our reaction makes that point far more eloquently than any bonfire could ever do. The bad guys are taking notes and you can be sure they don't include brownie points for cultural sensitivity.
Maybe the judgment the pastor is looking for is not on them, but on us.
*****
Christianity has its fair share of kooks who use offensive stunts and fiery rhetoric to get attention and extend the reach of their message, but they truly are the fringe of the faith. That’s why people like Fred Phelps and Terry Jones can only muster crowds the size of a regional Bridge club.
One look at Islam tells us, as far as furtherance of the faith and public image goes, the fringe are the ones truly in charge. Pick any prominent Muslim leader and quotes can be attributed to him expounding on the virtues of child marriage, giving parameters on the proper ritual for sex with goats, and calling for the righteously violent slaughter of just about everyone else. And they’re not just talking about it, but making it happen whenever they get the chance.
From “uncovered catmeat” Hilali, to Abu Hamza, Mullah Omar, Ayatollah Khomeini or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, none of these are marginalized fringe characters. They are all prominent, influential figureheads of a faith which holds violent oppression and submission to god as its primary tenets.
I challenge anybody to find me Islam’s Billy Graham. There simply isn’t one and if there were, he would either be leading prayers at a mosque in goat-hump nowhere, or in an Iranian prison.
Islam is a world-wide Jonestown phenomenon. The radical element is the faith and your average “moderate Muslim” has more in common with the Kool-Aid guzzling kooks than with any typical Catholic or Protestant quilt-maker.
Dispensing with the delusional caveat that the radicals in Islam are just the fringe would be our first major victory in this war. Right now, it’s the ground on which we teeter, on the verge of the abyss.
Some would say that trivializing the deliberate murders of thousands of innocent people -- by equating them with the procrastination or apathy of someone who doesn't bother to make provisions for their own health -- would be somewhat in bad taste.
Apparently, some would not...
