Pope Francis, despite being the head of worldwide Catholicism, always seems to be apologizing for the faith. In Malta, that apology extended to hiding the cross from illegal Muslim aliens. This act of Christian cowardice was more poignant than usual, given that Malta, in the mid-16th century, was the site of one of the Catholic world’s bravest and most successful stands against Islam’s push to take over Europe.
The death, destruction, and displacement resulting from Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine are gruesome enough to evoke a question that deserves to be asked: Could this have been avoided?
The navel-gazing, second-guessing, and blame peddling of recent weeks have centered on the late 1990s expansion of NATO to include former Warsaw Pact states, and the alliance’s 2008 Bucharest “open door” declaration acknowledging Georgia and Ukraine’s aspirations to join it in the future. Vladimir Putin’s response? By late summer 2008, Russia had occupied disputed territories with Georgia, and in 2014 it infiltrated and seized Crimea from Ukraine. Now he has taken Ukraine’s ethnic Russian-populated Donbas region and a land bridge to Crimea along the Black Sea.
The apocalyptic language of United Nations alarmists is back.
The 2,913 pages of the United Nations’ “Climate Change 2022” report make clear only that nothing is clear. Written in the incomprehensible language of climate science, there are only two things that are easily understood: the word taxes, which appears 270 times, and the word costs, which appears 1,585 times.
A mass shooting that killed six people and injured 12 in Sacramento last weekend predictably provoked immediate agitation for stricter gun control, including policies that seem utterly irrelevant to the facts of the case. That’s a familiar pattern in the gun policy debate, which consists largely of reiterating previous proposals in response to mass shootings, regardless of whether those ideas have anything to do with the most recent example.
The Sacramento Bee described the weekend’s apparently gang-related violence, which began around 2 a.m. Sunday in a downtown area where nightclubs had just closed, as “the worst mass shooting in city history.” The Los Angeles Times says “the shooting was California’s single deadliest in 2022,” although “there have been worse in the last year.” While these incidents supposedly underline the need for gun control, they simultaneously cast doubt on that argument, since California already has the strictest gun laws in the country.
Alice Walker, the author of The Color Purple, has been disinvited from a book festival when the organizers discovered her long history of antisemitic remarks about Jews and Israel, the Jewish state that she often compares to Nazi Germany.
I always knew it would start with sport.
Back in 2018, when the obvious fallacies of gender ideology made me feel merely puzzled as opposed to completely enraged, a friend of mine went to the Commonwealth Games. He’s a sportswriter, and a few years younger than me and so – adhering to the generational divide on this issue – he disagreed with me about gender. He thought I was too rigid in my belief that changing gender is not the same as changing sex, which I maintain is impossible. He also thought my fears that males would disproportionately benefit and potentially exploit from the blurring between gender and sex were overblown. Stop being so binary, daddio, we’re all fluid now!
Germany as a prototype:Christian symbols disappear as Europeans discard them, but there is no vacuum. Islam takes their place.
Cologne Cathedral, known as the “German Rome”, is the landmark of the city and has been declared a World Heritage Site since 1996. It is one of the most visited places in Germany and one of the most important in Christianity (it was visited by Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI). The first stone of the cathedral was laid in 1248. On old black and white photos you can see how the towers of the cathedral protrude from the rubble of the historic center completely destroyed during the Second World War.
Now the city of Cologne is deleting the iconic cathedral from its new logo. “My 92-year-old mother is stunned, my 11-year-old son is crying and my friend in London doesn’t understand it,” writes sculptor and painter Cornel Wachter.
Both the Putin regime and woke Westerners are addicted to branding their opponents ‘Nazis’.
Woke Westerners had a field day when Vladimir Putin criticised the attempts to cancel JK Rowling. This was proof, they said, that Putin is anti-woke, and therefore that anti-woke people in Britain and the US are his bedfellows, whether they realise it or not. There was a grim irony to this smearing by association, to this nonsense claim that anyone who thinks it is wrong to hound, demonise and threaten the likes of Rowling for stating biological facts is basically in the same moral camp as Moscow’s warmonger-in-chief. Which is that if anyone in the West is borrowing from the Putin playbook, it isn’t the critics of wokeness – it’s the intolerant left itself.
Even a truncated Russian Federation has four times the pre-war population of Ukraine. It enjoys well over 10 times the Ukrainian gross domestic product. Russia covers almost 30 times Ukraine’s area.
And how does Ukraine expel Russian troops from its borders when its Western allies must put particular restrictions on their life-giving military and financial aid?
#Ukraine: Footage from #Mariupol showing a Ukrainian BTR-4E APC attacking two Russian T-72 tanks from the rear with a 30mm cannon. Apparently, both tanks received serious damage. pic.twitter.com/7ecGv5AwkK
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) April 7, 2022
A budget for an uncertain world – Geopolitical risks puts economy at risk
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland on Thursday presented a much more prudent budget than anticipated because of “uncertainty” in then world.
The Liberals cut back on some of their many campaign promises last fall and will not meet NATO’s defence targets in order to provide a declining debt-to-GDP ratio.
The federal deficit is now at $52.8 billion for 2022-2023, slightly less than expected in last fall’s economic update at $58.4 billion. Even though the government benefited from an additional $14.3 billion dollars thanks to inflation and high prices generating revenue in taxes, Freeland chose to stay nimble and not spend all of the extra money in the government’s coffers.
The Geico insurance company on Thursday canceled a company event with Linda Sarsour, a prominent pro-Palestinian activist who has been widely accused of antisemitism, after backlash from Jewish groups.
“We apologize to our employees, customers, and others for our initial plan to invite Linda Sarsour to speak at our internal event,” Geico said in a statement.
To me this perfectly illustrates the truth of the “diversity” con.
Sarsour is a known crank. I believe she was chosen by design not by accident.
The European Union nations have agreed to ban Russian coal in the first sanctions on the vital energy industry over the war in Ukraine, but it has underlined the 27 countries’ inability to agree so far on a much more sweeping embargo on oil and natural gas that would hit Russia harder but risk recession at home.
The coal ban should cost Russia 4 billion euros ($4.4 billion) a year, the EU’s executive commission said. Energy analysts and coal importers say Europe could replace Russian supply in a few months from other countries, including the U.S.
WW II was won by buying oil & gas from the Axis
Nope. We are not in this together. Men and women are different. We will never be the same pic.twitter.com/SJLdmIVkIQ
— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) April 6, 2022
Philadelphia’s progressive district attorney Larry Krasner has let violence and mayhem run unchecked in the City of Brotherly Love. Elected on a platform of de-prosecution and decarceration, Krasner has instituted policies that have contributed to the city’s setting a new annual record for homicides, with 562 killings in 2021, and murders are still on the rise in 2022. Carjackings also have been spiking, with 224 in 2019, 409 in 2020, and 840 in 2021. Meantime, Krasner keeps letting criminals walk and has even expanded his program of non-prosecution to include firearms offenses, in the belief that such prosecutions are unjust and racially discriminatory.
How the FBI took down “Cyclops Blink,” a Russia state botnet infecting network firewalls.
The FBI remotely accessed and disinfected US-located devices running a powerful new strain of Russian state botnet malware, federal authorities said Wednesday. Those authorities added that the Kremlin was using the malware to wage stealthy hacks of its adversaries.
The infected devices were primarily made up of firewall appliances from WatchGuard and, to a lesser extent, network devices from Asus. Both manufacturers recently issued advisories providing recommendations for hardening or disinfecting devices infected by the botnet, known as Cyclops Blink. It is the latest botnet malware from Russia’s Sandworm, which is among the world’s most elite and destructive state-sponsored hacking outfits.
