An election in a sovereign democracy should be more than a toy for the nation’s leader, and the inner circle of advisers who make up his court, to play with.
It should be something far more than the outcome of raw calculation by the two or three “heavies” in the back office of what advantage it might produce for the “boss.” And, not incidentally, guarantee their tenure as shamans of the PMO.
President Donald Trump sent a message of support and criticism to mark the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
“For the great people of our country this is a very sad day,” Trump said at the start of the minute-and-half long video shared online. “September 11 represents great sorrow for our country.”
20th Anniversary of September 11th Address from President Donald J. Trump pic.twitter.com/u9IVTMTI5b
— Taylor Budowich (@TayFromCA) September 11, 2021
911 will never be forgotten. We hope. The lessons it should have taught us are being lost thanks in no small part to an elite bent on civilizational murder, ours not theirs. The MSM and our political class sings their song at every opportunity – Islam is the religion of peace. The smart money knows it’s not no matter how many Magic Totem Malala’s they trot out.
I remember where I was. The first reports I heard spoke of a “small plane” crashing into the World Trade Center. I made my way to a nearby hotel and picked up a corporate rep for the software I sold and we headed to Vancouver’s airport for a meeting with a client.
That meeting never happened. On our way into the airport traffic had already backed up. The only things moving were the Black SUV’s, all unmarked that roared past us.
Soon we learned the airport had been closed down and on our way out, still lacking details, we marveled at the number of passenger jets being “parked” side by side.
At a nearby hotel we stopped for coffee and watched CNN as events unfolded. I still remember the stricken faces of the American’s I spoke with. Bewildered shock and anxiety overwhelming us all.
Fast forward a decade and Kathy and I were off to attend the 10 anniversary of 911 in New York. The pic above is one I took from West Broadway.
911 was for me a painfully significant eye-opener to the wickedness of this world if not a watershed moment in my life. For Kathy it marked the dividing line that spawned the woman so many of us came to admire, an event that blessed us all.
Kathy and I made the pilgrimage to Manhattan for the 10th. We attended the SIOA rally featuring Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, Ezra Levant and many others as featured speakers. It was a passionate event well attended and well worth the trip to NYC alone.
Kathy and I stayed at the Wall Street Inn, a boutique hotel near to the anniversary memorial grounds. Kath was great at picking hotels, we enjoyed our stay and Kathy loved nearby Stone Street, essentially an open air restaurant featuring multiple establishments and good eats.
It was a whirlwind of activity and I remember how tired we both were but we never stopped. We didn’t have clout to enter the official seating area so we gathered as so many others to pay our respects in the surrounding streets. And this gave rise to Kathy’s encounter with the execrable “Westboro Baptist Church” protesters and the memorable photo below of Kath flipping them the bird as they walked past. Moments afterward she attempted to trip one of the Westboro loons who made a snide comment. He was a pretty big guy too. That’s my gal.
It may seem a bit off to speak of good memories from attendance at such a sad memorial but they are my history with Kathy and sacred for that. Here’s Kathy and Terry Jones, I recall how pleasant he was to chat with and how charmed he was by Kathy.
I still chuckle at Kathy naming this “Doggie Of The Cross”. He was the companion of the street person who carted the cross around, guess his owner was getting a coffee.
A few have remarked that Kathy’s service was scheduled for September 9th at 11 am – 911. The choice of that time and date was entirely accidental on my part and frankly I did not note its significance as I busied myself with arrangements.
On reflection I suspect this was Kathy’s hand at work. Perhaps reminding us to pick up the torch.
She was always one step ahead me. Good on ya Shortcake.
A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman has mocked the US and the chaotic collapse of the Washington-backed Afghan regime they left behind, as he shared footage of Taliban soldiers using captured aircraft as a swing.
On Thursday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian posted a video on his Twitter account, claiming Afghanistan was the “graveyard of EMPIRES and their WAR MACHINES.” As highlighted by the outspoken Foreign Ministry diplomat, the video shows Taliban troops tying a rope to the wing of a captured aircraft and using it as a swing.
Conservatives dump Toronto candidate over Islamophobic tweets
Her former riding seems pretty much out of reach for the Con’s no matter who they ran if the last results are anything to go by.
Ontario reports 857 new COVID-19 cases, 15 more deaths
Ontario reported more than 800 new COVID-19 cases for a second straight day and 15 more deaths.
Provincial health officials logged 857 new coronavirus infections, up from 848 on Friday but down from 944 a week ago.
COVID-19 testing not an effective alternative to mandatory vaccines, experts say
Experts say that regular testing for COVID-19 is not an effective alternative to mandatory vaccinations to prevent the spread of the virus.
Testing as an alternative to mandatory COVID-19 vaccines has appeared in policies across the country for a number of settings.
Ontario has allowed COVID-19 testing as an alternative to mandatory vaccines at high-risk environments, such as hospitals and schools, while Carleton University in Ottawa, Ont., and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver have also allowed testing rather than vaccination.
I’m double jabbed mixy matchy style which means I am a prisoner unable to travel abroad to many if not most jurisdictions. My choice. Whether you are or not is your business not mine.
A nonprofit faces a reckoning over its involvement in Andrew Cuomo’s wrongdoing
Eva Longoria. Shonda Rhimes. Jurnee Smollett. Ashley Judd.
Those names might sound like the makings of a new Netflix original drama, but they’re actually just a few of the Time’s Up board members who have agreed to resign in the aftermath of the Gov. Andrew Cuomo sexual harassment scandal. Time’s Up, a charity organization founded on the back of the #MeToo movement ostensibly to assist women in fighting sexual harassment in the workplace, wound up in the Cuomo story for all the wrong reasons.
A Google employee program claims that America is a “system of white supremacy” and that all Americans are “raised to be racist.”
Technology giant Google has launched an “antiracism” initiative that presents speakers and materials claiming that America is a “system of white supremacy” and that all Americans are “raised to be racist.”
I have obtained a trove of whistleblower documents from inside Google that reveal the company’s extensive racial-reeducation program, based on the core tenets of critical race theory—including “intersectionality,” “white privilege,” and “systemic racism.” In a foundational training module called “Allyship in Action,” Google’s head of systemic allyship Randy Reyes and a team of consultants from The Ladipo Group train employees to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities, and then rank themselves on a hierarchy of “power [and] privilege.” The trainers then instruct the employees to “manage [their] reactions to privilege”—which are likely to include feelings of “embarrassment, shame, fear, [and] anger”—through “body movement,” “deep breathing,” “accessing [their] ‘happy place,’” and “cry[ing].”
American higher education is getting exactly what it asked for.
There’s a famous scene in the classic Matt Damon/Robin Williams movie Good Will Hunting in which Damon, a prodigious working-class young mathematics expert from South Boston, is in a confrontation with a Harvard student over, naturally, a girl.
That scene came to mind as the subject of America’s decline in higher education came to prominence. The Wall Street Journal this week had an article detailing the rather precipitous decline over the past five years in male enrollment at colleges and universities around the country. The numbers are quite stark …
Deep links with Pakistan will open the door to terrorists
The restoration of the Taliban-Qaeda regime in Afghanistan is a terrorism threat to the whole world, but Britain has some unique vulnerabilities, as MI5 Director general Ken McCallum warned today.
The jihadist army that just captured Afghanistan is part of a broad, transnational network controlled by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Britain has long been a node in this ISI network. Masood Azhar, an ISI operative and United Nations-listed terrorist, toured Britain in 1993, fundraising and recruiting for the Kashmir jihad, while laying down local networks to continue the job. Some of these networks later defected to the Islamic State.
New documents reveal how leading scientists manipulated the truth
There are many things we still do not know about the origins of this pandemic — including the central issue of whether it began with natural spillover from animals or some kind of laboratory incident. But we do know one thing now beyond debate: speculative “gain-of-function” experiments on mutant bat viruses were taking place in Wuhan laboratories.
On 9/11, the world was shown, in one horrific, indelible image, precisely what Islam is all about. Today, to write the previous sentence is to be guilty of Islamophobia. How did that come to be? It began in the days after 9/11 itself, when George W. Bush – by repeatedly insisting that the cause of the jihadists had nothing to do with Islam – effectively ruled out of bounds any criticism of that religion, or any honest education and open discussion about it. Instead, Bush – who had gotten it into his head that all religions are basically good, and who was manipulated by advisors who wanted to project American power in a part of the world about which they knew very little – used 9/11 as an excuse to rein in Americans’ civil liberties and go nation-building abroad. It was a massive folly, doomed to failure. Why doomed? Because Islam is utterly irreconcilable with American-style freedom and incapable of reform, at least not without a far more aggressive effort than America was willing to commit to. Unlike America, moreover, Islam has a long memory. Muslims recall their forebears’ foiled attempts to conquer the Christian West at Tours in 732 and Vienna in 1683; the attacks of 9/11 were part of a history of such actions that goes back to Islam’s earliest days. Yet few Westerners know about this history or are aware that 9/11 was part of it.
A West that thinks it deserves to be attacked cannot defend itself.
As the 20th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, we are being confronted once again, on news broadcasts, in documentaries and online, with that footage. With the images of those planes striking the Twin Towers, of survivors covered in blood and dust, of heroic first responders saving the lives they could amid unimaginable carnage. It still shakes us to this day. But amid all the acts of commemoration and remembrance one thing risks getting lost. That in the wake of that act of barbarism, an attack not just on New York and DC but on the West and what it stands for, there were many members of the British intelligentsia who, after the dust settled, were struck with more or less the same thought: maybe America brought this on itself.
As President Joe Biden launches via executive order a sweeping vaccine mandate for all federal government workers, and now a brand-new initiative for private-sector mandates, the issue has once again risen to the forefront of the national dialogue.
United Airlines, for example, recently became the first U.S. airline to mandate COVID-19 vaccination for all its employees. United Airlines’ mandate takes effect on September 27, and it might augur a broader trend: A poll conducted last month by insurance and advisory firm Willis Towers Watson, for example, suggests that 52 percent of private-sector employers surveyed expect to have a workplace vaccine mandate by the end of 2021. As Biden’s brand-new announcement of a Department of Labor rule for private-sector vaccination requirement now makes clear, that poll was prescient.
Ivermectin causes sterilization in 85 percent of men, study finds