I just returned from a half-day road trip. We tanked up twice and, both times, we headed for the building attached to the gas tanks. There, we had clean restrooms (complete with toilet paper) and, if we so desired, access to a bit of food and drink, too. Not great food and drink but, when you’re tired, hungry, and thirsty, good enough. All those things are lacking when you’re hanging out for an hour at a roadside charging station for your EV, and EV drivers are not happy. Heh.
This week, the trial of Canada’s two main leaders of the trucker protests began. The lead prosecutor has argued that Tamara Lich and Chris Barber “crossed the line” and “committed multiple crimes” while insisting that this trial will not be about the truckers’ political views. The pair face charges including mischief, counselling others to commit mischief, intimidation, and obstructing the police. They face a maximum of 10 years in prison should they be convicted.
From schools to prisons, our state is crumbling
I’ve always suspected that Europeans are incapable of understanding South Africa, the strange and complicated nation where I was born and often return. At bottom, the issue is this: how can people so accustomed to safety, stability and a well-functioning state really grasp the nature of a place where none of these things can be taken for granted?
On August 29, a CNN headline went viral: “Two men in Uganda are facing separate charges of ‘aggravated homosexuality,’ an offense punishable by death under the country’s controversial new anti-gay laws.” The clarifying community note attached to the tweet provided important context: “One man is accused of having a sexual relation with a disabled man, the other of a sexual act with a 12-year-old child. Both are charged with ‘aggravated homosexuality,’ defined as same-sex relations with someone who is HIV-positive, a child, an elderly person, or disabled.”
Consider the difference between the narrative provided by CNN and the reality behind the headline. Now consider the fact that the mainstream press has been doing this for years—and the impact that has had on the public perception of many issues. They’re doing this to us on purpose.
The only religion whose clerics have set out rules governing sex with animals.
Apparently unable to find someone of his own species for a late evening date, a migrant in Germany entered a stable in the town of Birkenmoor at night and raped a pony. A surveillance camera caught the whole episode, though the malefactor has not yet been caught.
Those who see low-dollar shoplifters as 21st-century Jean Valjeans should realize that theft is not necessarily a nonviolent crime and that low-value theft losses can inflict severe damage on those with modest incomes.
You could blame Victor Hugo. In 1846, the French novelist observed a young man being arrested for holding a loaf of bread he stole.
Deeply touched, he fashioned his novel “Les Misérables,” published in 1862, around the character Jean Valjean, who is imprisoned for 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread and pursued relentlessly after his release by Inspector Javert.
Frail and fading in his suburban Paris home, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the 95-year-old patriarch of France’s hard right, could not have been cheered by the family news this week.
His granddaughter Marion Maréchal has returned to front-line politics and taken up arms against the party of his daughter Marine Le Pen at the head of a rival right-wing outfit in elections to the European parliament.
The most important Hollywood person at the Toronto International Film Festival this weekend is not a director, actor, studio executive or high-powered agent: it is one unassuming labour expert who no one outside of the entertainment industry has likely ever heard of.
On Friday, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the national executive director and chief negotiator for the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) arrived at TIFF to participate in a live discussion about the strikes tearing the industry apart. His attendance puts a spotlight on not only critical issues affecting entertainment workers in the United States but also Canada – he’ll be staging a joint rally with members of the Alliance of Canadian Cinema Television Radio Artists (ACTRA) on Saturday in solidarity with that union’s 500-plus-day battle with the Institute of Canadian Agencies.
Not impressed frankly, I think the writers and actors have lost to the studios.
If it lasts till the new year bet on a deal little better than what they currently have.
QUEBEC CITY—Two decades after he helped merge warring factions of federal conservatives into a new party, former Progressive Conservative party leader Peter MacKay went back before party members Friday urging them to maintain a united front.
Voicing his confidence in Pierre Poilievre’s leadership, and also lavishing him with praise, MacKay said in Poilievre he sees the opportunity for the party to build another new coalition of conservatives.
But to take back government also requires the current coalition to stick together, he told the Conservatives’ policy convention Friday.
Kerry Lemieux has proven one thing: The emperor that is Ontario’s education system has no clothes.
The system is a joke, a self-parody, a stereotype of woke culture and all that is wrong with it.
“You can be straight and still be attracted to trans women because trans women are real women and saying otherwise is transphobic” pic.twitter.com/WoYjgEMbpd
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) September 8, 2023
When our national media don’t like where a narrative is going — as in anyone assuming Joe Biden is an eager participant in Hunter Biden’s influence-peddling — they repeat a mantra about “no evidence.” Biden’s critics have “no evidence” of a Joe-Hunter corruption connection.
But when they like a narrative — like arrogant white imperialist Catholics in Canada were so hostile to “indigenous peoples” that they committed a genocide — somehow, no evidence is required. The wilder, the better. In 2021, a Native Canadian tribe claimed that “ground-penetrating radar” found 215 bodies near a residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. Within a week, Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau ordered flags across Canada to be flown at half-staff for all the allegedly murdered children
Look at this nasty grostesque troon with me, arrogantly babble on about not liking his female professor.
Share my pain. Thank you. pic.twitter.com/ddYFfki2nS
— TroonyToons 💜🤍💛 (@troonytoons) September 8, 2023
There’s fevered speculation about inside jobs or state actors involved in the HMP Wandsworth prison break by terror suspect Daniel Khalife. But as police close in on Richmond park, whether he’s found cowering in a ditch or at a press conference in Tehran, this dramatic escape reveals just how close we are to a full blown crisis across our prison system.
Wandsworth has been failing in plain sight in front of helpless officials at the Ministry of Justice for years. Repeated inspections have revealed squalor, overcrowding and chronic staff retention problems with young, inexperienced officers out of their depth. Writing about another filthy jail recently, Chief Inspector Charlie Taylor, rapidly running out of superlatives for crisis, correctly said that dirty and uncared for jails were a proxy for far more serious problems. At Wandsworth, summed up by recent prison leaver Chris Atkins as ‘chaos run by schoolchildren’, all the ingredients for this week’s catastrophe were there already, without the James Bond flourishes.
Our well-intentioned government—named the “Good Intentions Paving Company” by financial analyst James Grant—always seems to find itself scrambling to explain how its latest scheme for a better world has delivered us into an even lower circle of hell. Bureaucrats to the core, they’ve even developed a one-step procedure for dealing with this task: blame it on the people. The term “white flight” is a product of this procedure.
A principal benefit of this system is that the Paving Company doesn’t have to ask people—in this case, the whites who took “flight”—why they fled. It must be because they were fleeing from nonwhite people, and fleeing from nonwhite people is racist. Why would you bother consulting racists about their motives?
