29 Replies to “Reader Tips”

  2. Should we mention that without oil, city food would be gone in about 3 days, cities would be in complete turmoil in a week and millions would be dead within the first year ? Or without oil and the more than 4000 products derived from it we would set the clock back 150 years and all industry would grind to a halt ? Billions would probably die world wide ? Nahh, what’s the sense. We all know that you can’t fix stupid.
    http://www.vancouverobserver.com/national-observer/oxford-alumni-hand-back-degrees-if-university-doesn-t-divest

  5. Thanks, Kate, for ‘Somewhere Down The Crazy River’….One of my favourites!

  8. Debit cards are a one way shove, no accounting on the back side.
    They may as well throw the money in the air
    Stigma be dammed everyone knows a welfare debit card, where is the stigma avoided
    “Meanwhile, some U.S. states have introduced laws prohibiting people from using their welfare debit cards to buy items like cigarettes, guns or for gambling. There will be no such restriction on cards issued in Ontario.”
    NO drugs! No Drugs! No Drugs! so they just convert to cash & you create a black market.

  9. Supreme Court of Canada decision on Loyola High School vs. Quebec’s Ethics and Religious Culture education program. By a 4-3 majority, the Court rules that the school’s request for an exemption order should be sent back to the minister of education for reappraisal. The minority would have granted it immediately.
    http://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/14703/index.do
    SCC: “Since September 2008, as part of the mandatory core curriculum in schools across Quebec, the Minister of Education, Recreation and Sports has required a Program on Ethics and Religious Culture (ERC), which teaches about the beliefs and ethics of different world religions from a neutral and objective perspective.”
    There is a fair amount of debate as to whether the course is taught from a neutral or objective perspective.
    SCC: “The stated objectives of the ERC Program are the ‘recognition of others’ and the ‘pursuit of the common good’.”
    The reference to the “common good” indicates that the course does not have a “neutral and objective perspective”, as this concept too has been debated. “Recognition of others” is a meaningless phrase. Everyone must respect the rights of others, including their right to hold beliefs, without respecting the beliefs themselves.
    SCC: “They seek to inculcate in students openness to human rights, diversity and respect for others.”
    These terms too are debatable, given the controversy over the kangaroo court “human rights commissions” that somehow seem to trample on true human rights while upholding fake ones.
    And where does “inculcation” end and “indoctrination” begin? If it is not up to the student or his parent(s), then it automatically veers perilously close to the latter, no matter what is being taught.
    SCC: “The orientation of the Program is strictly secular and cultural and requires teachers to be objective and impartial. They are not to advance the truth of a particular belief system or attempt to influence their students’ beliefs, but to foster awareness of diverse values, beliefs and cultures.”
    One objection to the course, as it applies to the early years at least, is that some students from religious families are still forming their own beliefs and may be confused by exposure to many others at the same time.
    And what is the teacher supposed to do if a student stands by his religious beliefs and refuses to treat other faiths’ beliefs as equally “valid”?
    SCC: “The purpose of the religious culture component is to help students understand the main elements of religion by exploring the socio-cultural contexts in which different religions take root and develop.”
    This is not neutral either. Many religions believe they are revelations from God, rather than a result of any “socio-cultural context”.
    SCC: “… the Minister can grant an exemption from the ERC Program if the proposed alternative program is deemed to be ‘equivalent’ … [Loyola requested one] … The Minister denied the request based on the fact that Loyola’s whole proposed alternative program was to be taught from a Catholic perspective [and thus not ‘equivalent’]. ”
    SCC: “Loyola brought an application for judicial review of the Minister’s decision. The Superior Court found that the Minister’s refusal of an exemption infringed Loyola’s right to religious freedom and accordingly granted the application, quashed the Minister’s decision, and ordered an exemption. On appeal, the Quebec Court of Appeal concluded that the Minister’s decision was reasonable and did not result in any breach of religious freedom. Before this Court, Loyola modified its request to teach the whole program from a Catholic perspective, and was now prepared to teach about the doctrines and practices of other world religions neutrally. But, significantly, it still wanted to teach about the ethics of other religions from a Catholic perspective. The Minister’s position remained the same — no part of the program could be taught from a Catholic perspective, including Catholic doctrine and ethics.”
    One wonders how on earth it is possible for a faith-based school to teach about other faiths “neutrally”, that is, without comparing them to its own? However, such a school has every right to teach students in whatever way it pleases, without interference of the state. Any other scenario is indeed a violation of the freedoms of belief, conscience and religion delineated in section 2 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
    One further note: Justice Richard Wagner, since appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada, was one of the three appellate court judges who overturned the trial judge’s decision. He was not involved in this SCC decision, as is standard practice in that circumstance.
    Majority decision, following, written by Justice Abella, with LeBel, Cromwell and Karakatsanis concurring:
    SCC: “Held: The Minister’s decision requiring that all aspects of Loyola’s proposed program be taught from a neutral perspective, including the teaching of Catholicism, limited freedom of religion more than was necessary given the statutory objectives. As a result, it did not reflect a proportionate balancing and should be set aside. The appeal is allowed and the matter remitted to the Minister for reconsideration.”
    One wonders why they didn’t just allow the exemption, which is what the other three judges would have done. It is difficult to determine whether the majority expects the exemption to be granted on review or whether they secretly hope the Minister does not arrive at a different conclusion. Recall that in the N. S. case regarding the wearing of a niqab while testifying in court, the trial judge did reach the same conclusion as he had prior to the issue reaching the high court.
    SCC: “… a secular state does not — and cannot — interfere with the beliefs or practices of a religious group unless they conflict with or harm overriding public interests. Nor can a secular state support or prefer the practices of one group over another.”
    More correctly, given the fundamental principle of civilization that no person can initiate the use of force (including fraud) upon another, the state cannot interfere with religious practice unless a person’s rights are being violated through coercion. A religion that advocates human sacrifices should suffer the state restraining its activities. A religion that teaches that it has an exclusive grasp of the truth should not.
    A strict neutrality to the point of obliterating all religious belief is itself as much a viewpoint as a religion, whether or not it arises from an atheist perspective.
    SCC: “The Minister’s decision requires Loyola to teach Catholicism, the very faith that animates its character, from a neutral perspective. Although the state’s purpose is secular, this amounts to requiring a Catholic institution to speak about its own religion in terms defined by the state rather than by its own understanding. This demonstrably interferes with the manner in which the members of an institution formed for the purpose of transmitting Catholicism can teach and learn about the Catholic faith. It also undermines the liberty of the members of the community who have chosen to give effect to the collective dimension of their religious beliefs by participating in a denominational school.”
    SCC: “In the Quebec context, where private denominational schools are legal, preventing a school like Loyola from teaching and discussing Catholicism from its own perspective does little to further the ERC Program’s objectives while at the same time seriously interfering with religious freedom. The Minister’s decision suggests that engagement with an individual’s own religion on his or her own terms can be presumed to impair respect for others. This assumption led the Minister to a decision that does not, overall, strike a proportionate balance between the Charter protections and statutory objectives at stake in this case.”
    As I always say, looking for “balance” is not the correct way to look at rights. The correct way is to ask which right takes precedence in what situation. In other words, understand the fact that there is a hierarchy of rights and judge what goes where, when. The point of having a Charter is not to ensure “balance” between its protections and statutory objectives, but to make sure the latter are subordinate to the former.
    SCC: “That said, the Minister is not required to permit Loyola to teach about the ethics of other religions from a Catholic perspective. The risk of such an approach would be that other religions would necessarily be seen not as differently legitimate belief systems, but as worthy of respect only to the extent that they aligned with the tenets of Catholicism. This contradicts the ERC Program’s goals of ensuring respect for different religious beliefs.”
    Now, unfortunately, the judgment goes off the rails. Religious freedom (and the broader freedom of belief and conscience) gives a person or an institution the right to teach whatever it believes from whatever perspective it wants. “Differently legitimate” is a clumsy phrase that reeks of “political correctness”. A religion does not have to respect the doctrines of other religions, only the right of their adherents to hold those doctrines. This is a crucial difference that cannot be eroded.
    SCC: “In a multicultural society, it is not a breach of anyone’s freedom of religion to be required to learn (or teach) about the doctrines and ethics of other world religions in a neutral and respectful way.”
    Yes it is. To be required to learn anything is such a breach. One aspect of freedom of belief, conscience and religion is the right to refuse to consider or even hear another person’s beliefs, if one considers it a waste of one’s time.
    I read this sentence from the Court as an intent to subordinate genuine individual rights to the problematic concept of “multiculturalism”, when this should be the other way round.
    The purpose of the state is to protect individual rights. It has a police force and a court system to perform this function. It should assume that its citizens have enough knowledge to respect others’ rights without having to “inculcate” it through a public education system in a manner that comes perilously close to propaganda, especially with the pretense at neutrality and objectivity. Separation of church and state is a valid principle; separation of school and state is equally valid, for the same reasons.
    The Court would have been best off declaring that it is not possible for the ERC program to be presented in a way that would respect freedom of belief and conscience under the Charter. But it had that opportunity a couple of years ago in the S. L. case and failed to do so.
    The minority decision was written jointly by Chief Justice McLachlin and Justice Moldaver, Rothstein concurring.

  10. Digital voice harvest:
    “LONDON (AP) — Over the telephone, in jail and online, a new digital bounty is being harvested: the human voice.
    Businesses and governments around the world increasingly are turning to voice biometrics, or voiceprints, to pay pensions, collect taxes, track criminals and replace passwords.
    “We sometimes call it the invisible biometric,” said Mike Goldgof, an executive at Madrid-based AGNITiO, one of about 10 leading companies in the field.
    Those companies have helped enter more than 65 million voiceprints into corporate and government databases, according to Associated Press interviews with dozens of industry representatives and records requests in the United States, Europe and elsewhere.”
    http://bigstory.ap.org/article/0b1bd2bbf1bf4c6ebcf47de38966bd3c/millions-voiceprints-quietly-being-harvested

  11. AGW RIP.
    Ich bin Eine Fossil fuels win. Jawohl, Hermann.
    “… they were able to draw on alternative power sources including coal, gas, biogas and hydroelectric energy pumped from storage.”
    …-
    “European power grids keep lights on though solar eclipse”
    “the unprecedented disruption to solar power from a 2-1/2-hour eclipse that brought sudden, massive drops in supply.”
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/20/us-solar-eclipse-germany-idUSKBN0MG0S620150320

  13. Mohammed’s infanticide.
    Warning: graphic.
    http://storage.canoe.ca/v1/dynamic_resize/?src=http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/2015/03/20/yemen_mosque.jpg&size=650×366&quality=85
    …-
    “Death toll rises after suicide bombers hit Yemen mosques”
    “A man carries the body of a child out of the mosque which was attacked by a suicide bomber in Sanaa March 20, 2015. At least 16 people were killed when suicide bombers blew themselves up in two mosques in the Yemeni capital Sanaa on Friday during noon prayers, medical sources told Reuters. The mosques are known to be used mainly by supporters of the Shi’ite Muslim Houthi group which has seized control of the government.”
    http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/2015/03/20/22298661.html

  14. Mohammed’s infanticide.
    http://tinyurl.com/lajn3bv
    …-
    “Death toll rises after suicide bombers hit Yemen mosques”
    “A man carries the body of a child out of the mosque which was attacked by a suicide bomber in Sanaa March 20, 2015. At least 16 people were killed when suicide bombers blew themselves up in two mosques in the Yemeni capital Sanaa on Friday during noon prayers, medical sources told Reuters. The mosques are known to be used mainly by supporters of the Shi’ite Muslim Houthi group which has seized control of the government.”
    http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/2015/03/20/22298661.html

  16. That Paglia interview was interesting on a bunch of different levels. Thanks for sharing it!

  17. nv53
    Thanks for sharing your interpretations. Always enjoy reading your thought provoking posts.
    Glenn

  18. Leftist Bloomberg emits Rot-Grün pollution.
    “Friday, however, did not look like most days, as this lightly annotated chart, … shows.”
    …-
    “Things turned out fine, with only a brief surge in the cost of electricity. Other energy sources were able to compensate without significant complications.
    But you can still see the impact of the eclipse.”
    http://media.gotraffic.net/images/i8PnoNiJcqro/v1/-1x-1.png
    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-20/look-what-today-s-eclipse-did-to-german-solar-power-output

  19. AGW RIP.
    Illegitimus non carborundum est.
    …-
    “Fossil Fuels Save Europe From Blackouts During Solar Eclipse”
    ““It would have been difficult to deal with a situation like today without conventional power plants,” Philipp Goetz, a consultant at Energy Brainpool, told Bloomberg.”
    “Friday’s eclipse caused 13 gigawatts of solar power to go offline across Germany, less than grid operators initially predicted, but that drop in power was balanced out by ramping up some idle coal and natural gas-fired power plants.”
    http://dailycaller.com/2015/03/20/fossil-fuels-save-europe-from-blackouts-during-solar-eclipse/

  21. Ripped off the others by putting his name on all the songs. Levon wouldn’t talk to him for years.

  22. AGW RIP.
    “As the following diagram depicts, there was almost no wind output from Germany’s 40 or so gigawatts of installed wind capacity over the last 36 hours. The country’s wind turbines called it an early weekend.”
    Raus mit Rot-Grün.
    …-
    “German Wind Power Goes Completely AWOL For The 11th Time This Year…Fossils, Nuclear Again To The Rescue!”
    “German wind and solar power disappeared this morning and over the last 36 hours, leaving fossil and nuclear power to step in to the rescue.
    The following chart of Germany’s energy supply and demand shows how wind has gone AWOL already 11 times since January 1:”
    http://notrickszone.com/#sthash.VKBs5Y8D.dpbs

  24. Ban UNMoon.
    …-
    “‘World’s happiest playlist’ unveiled by UN for International Day of Happiness
    CBC”
    …-
    “Vanuatu the happiest place on earth”
    “THE MOST happy place on the planet is the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, according to a radical new index published on Wednesday.” (thehindu)
    …-
    “U.N. fears ‘the worst’ after typhoon Pam batters Vanuatu”
    http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/un-fears-the-worst-after-typhoon-pam-batters-vanuatu/article23462372/

  25. An excellent article at Newswatch Canada
    http://www.newswatchcanada.ca/ concerns the activities of Islamic terrorists (and Iran specifically) in Latin America.
    If it is happening there….
    Article is :-
    “Dead Argentine prosecutor was zeroing in on terror threat to entire Western Hemisphere”

  26. Mohammed’s Days With NP: a Fellow Traveller.
    …-
    “The debate over the niqab is clearly a proxy for larger anxieties about Muslims in Canada”
    “Ishmael N. Daro: To stay silent on the niqab is to excuse a larger climate of anti-Muslim rhetoric that is becoming harder and harder to ignore” (NP)
    …-
    “Sierra Leoneans halt genital mutilation amid Ebola fears: UK minister”
    “The Ebola epidemic that has ravaged West Africa appears to have brought the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM) to a near halt in Sierra Leone, a British minister said on Friday.
    International development minister Lindsay Northover urged donors, aid agencies, campaigners and others to capitalize on the opportunity to make the break permanent.
    “We are aware that at the moment with the Ebola crisis … cutting has temporarily stopped,” Northover said.”
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/20/us-health-ebola-fgm-idUSKBN0MG2AD20150320

  28. Yes, they should hand back their degrees. Not because of any investments made by the endowment fund but because, after spending years at one of the most prestigious universities in the world, they appear to have graduated dumber than they were when they entered.

  29. It’s a Supreme Court decision, which means the issues at stake are fairly important, so they usually have a lot of angles to look at and analysis to do. They can’t be summed up in a soundbite for you. A link was included.

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