Tuesday, April 26, 2016

Stephen Harper's former lawyer comments on the Duffy case

OpEd by Robert Staley:
Commencing in mid-2013, I represented former prime minister Stephen Harper in connection with the RCMP’s investigation of Senator Duffy.  ... Now that Justice Vaillancourt has released his trial decision, it is possible to comment publicly on aspects of the case.

... Justice Vaillancourt ultimately concluded that the Crown had not proven its criminal case against Mr. Duffy to the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard. But that conclusion should not be read as a contest between Mr. Duffy and my client, in which Mr. Duffy prevailed. My client did not, and could not, ask that Mr. Duffy be charged criminally. Nor did my client assert that Mr. Duffy engaged in criminal wrongdoing. His assertion was, and is, that the behaviour exhibited by Mr. Duffy was unacceptable. It was and is my client’s view that public office demands a higher standard than conduct that falls short of criminality.

Monday, April 25, 2016

Islamist terrorists behead Canadian hostage

Canadian hostage John Ridsdel confirmed dead:

John Ridsdel, 68, was executed Monday night by his Islamist Philippine captors, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has confirmed.

Ridsdel, along with fellow Canadian Robert Hall, was kidnapped six months ago as he vacationed on the Philippine island of Mindanao. Tuesday, it was confirmed that he was executed by beheading. ...
... Ridsdel was being held for ransom by the Islamist terror group Abu Sayyaf. ... the group’s name is Arabic for Bearer of the Sword — is considered a terrorist organization by Canada, the U.S. and many other countries. For years aligned with al-Qaida, the group ...has more recently been kidnapping people for ransom in the name of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
For the record, the words "Islamist" and "beheading" were not uttered either by Trudeau or by any major Canadian media outlet other than the National Post.

Update: Brian Lilley is "sick of the 'outrage' "

Sunday, April 24, 2016

Nuclear technology to power the world?






New reactor technology under development all but eliminates waste and safety problems of the old fission reactors.  It's actually a revival of an old idea, the molten salt reactor, by Transatomic Power:
... fueled by uranium or spent nuclear fuel (it burns waste) 

... extremely efficient fuel utilization ... reducing the total volume of waste by 96%.  ... majority of the waste ...remains radioactive for only a few hundred years, rather than hundreds of thousands of years.

... extremely safe (walk-away safe), and does not require active cooling, even in the worst-case accident scenarios.

... molten salt remains liquid at atmospheric pressure, even at the very high temperatures present in a nuclear reactor ... does not require a full containment dome ...
This seems to have a lot of potential.  False bogeyman though CO2 emissions are, Transatomic's sales pitch hypes the global warming scare as a reason to go nuclear, but that's pretty standard these days.


Sunday, April 17, 2016

Canda's first family of Marxist totalitarian "justice" and hypocrisy

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

An equally just critique may be made of a certain Leap-authoring social justice activist. So it is fair, I think, to borrow the rhetorical firecracker Stephen Lewis tossed at Trudeau and lob it toward his son, Avi Lewis. Here the question is: can someone with an advanced social conscience work as a “journalist” for the kingdom of Qatar, as Avi did?  ...
... what we had in Edmonton last weekend was two white, old-stock, privileged, celebrity males global-warming-splaining oil-cursed Alberta to its pioneer NDP, female premier.


Justin Trudeau: "the man of your dreams" and quantum computing guru

J.J. McCullough on "The North Koreanification of Canadian political reporting":
... the Canadian media has actually reversed the realities of the story 180 degrees. What is being falsely presented as a story of a scrappy prime minister resisting a hostile press is actually a story of a slavishly subservient press who are actively shaping their reporting to suit the government’s needs.

It is a disgrace.

Same goes for the fawning Vanity Fair:

 [via

Monday, April 4, 2016

To "save the planet" Ontario burns Norwegian wood pellets instead of Canadian coal

Except ... "wood pellets (especially those transported long distances ...) produce way more CO2 than coal."

"Hottest year ever"?

Freeze out in Northeast USA – temps in the teens overnight 
During the “hottest year ever”, we had this yesterday for the opening day of Baseball in Pittsburgh between the Pirates and the Cardinals: Pittsburgh temps in mid-30s ...
... more than 20°F below normal for April 4th around Boston. ... close to 1881 record low of 20°F ...


Friday, April 1, 2016

Catastrophic climate change policy

Clean, green and catastrophic - for the economy:
... In the wake of government action around the world, industrial plants are closing, so-called green operations are failing, prices are soaring, subsidies are rampant, jobs are being lost, competitiveness eroded and energy consumers, especially the poor, are threatened by regressive carbon taxes. ...