IN A recent article for Spiked, Brendan O’Neill refers to transgender activists as ‘jihadists’. Is he right to draw this parallel between extreme gender activism and terrorism?
The woke hatred for Israel is no longer just strange – it’s dangerous.
A tale of two massacres
Truth is the first casualty of war, they say. It’s the first casualty of virtue-signalling, too. Over the past week we have seen just how estranged from truth the West’s fashionable anti-Israel set has become. Something extraordinary happened: woke commentators and activists expressed more fury over a massacre that didn’t happen than they did over one that did happen. They made more noise over a massacre that exists mostly in their imaginations than they did over a massacre that existed in the real world, that shattered people’s lives in the most violent, horrifying and bigoted fashion imaginable. This tale of two massacres, of the real and unreal, sheds a harsh and unforgiving light on anti-Israel sentiment today.
Connecticut Parents Arrested for Letting Kids, Ages 7 and 9, Walk to Dunkin’ Donuts
“I have never felt threatened by a single person in this town until meeting those officers and the social worker.”
It was Super Bowl Sunday in February 2019. Cynthia Rivers and her husband decided that their kids, ages seven and nine, deserved a long-promised treat for cleaning their rooms: the right to walk to Dunkin’ Donuts by themselves. (Reason has changed her name to protect the family’s anonymity.)
This was in Killingly, Connecticut, a suburban town in the northeast part of the state. The Rivers’ lived near an elementary school, library, state police barracks, sidewalks, crosswalks, many Victorian-style homes, and the aforementioned donut shop. The kids gathered $7, and off they went.
Salon Comes Out in Defense of Groomers, Because of Course They Do
Groomers and others who prey on children were once so universally despised that convicted murderers and rapists stood above them in the prison pecking order. In fact, they still are. You have to go to the pages of progressive publications to find anyone who will stand up for groomers, and Salon is no exception.
UK: Why are excess deaths still so high?
Around the middle of last year, researchers in several countries started noticing something disturbing: despite the fall in Covid deaths everywhere, excess deaths (compared to the pre-pandemic five-year average) were actually rising. Even more worryingly, a disproportionate number of those excess deaths were occurring in young people. This was the opposite of what you would expect in the receding phase of a pandemic — one which had largely spared young people in the first place.
The West is doomed if it blames all its problems on Evil White Males
… But here’s the thing. The evil “whiteness” stuff is getting out of hand. Everywhere one looks there are excesses. Take the decolonised university courses that seek to purge Dead White Men (the intellectual cousin of the Evil White Male) from the curriculum. Or the obsession with toppling statues of figures such as Cecil Rhodes. That’s before we get onto the full-blown anti-white discrimination. When I attended a colourism workshop at my old university not long ago, mixed race women, including me, were prohibited from speaking on account of our “proximity to whiteness”. Even worse is the trend towards barring white people from black spaces altogether. Two Canadian theatres have sparked an outcry by limiting performances to an “all black-identifying audience”.
Now that’s desperate …
Veteran Ontario Liberals want Green MPP Mike Schreiner to be their leader
Some veteran Ontario Liberals want Green Leader Mike Schreiner to cross the floor and seek the leadership of the Grits — but he’s not interested.
In an open letter to Schreiner to be released Sunday, 39 Liberal activists plead with the Guelph MPP to consider entering their undeclared leadership contest.
“We are a group of Ontario Liberals who are deeply concerned about the state of politics in Ontario, and more broadly, about the future of our province and our country,” says the letter, signed by former cabinet ministers Deb Matthews, Greg Sorbara, Liz Sandals, and John Milloy as well as Kate Graham, who finished third in the 2020 Liberal leadership, MPP Lucille Collard (Ottawa-Vanier), and ex-leader Lyn McLeod.
Update: Green Leader Mike Schreiner now says he needs ‘time’ to think about joining the Liberals, but some call the plan ‘an insult’
Cindy Williams, ‘Laverne & Shirley’ Star, Dies at 75
Cindy Williams, who played the cheerful but demure Shirley Feeney in the popular TV sitcom “Happy Days” and its spinoff “Laverne & Shirley,” has died. She was 75.
Canadian universities conducting joint research with Chinese military scientists
Canadian universities have for years collaborated with a top Chinese army scientific institution on hundreds of advanced-technology research projects, generating knowledge that can help drive China’s defence sector in cutting-edge, high-tech industries.
Researchers at 50 Canadian universities, including the University of Waterloo, University of Toronto, University of British Columbia and McGill University, have conducted and published joint scientific papers from 2005 to 2022 with scientists connected to China’s military, according to research provided to The Globe and Mail by U.S. strategic intelligence company Strider Technologies Inc.
WTF?
What in the blue hell is happening here… pic.twitter.com/4Sc7nXfMQN
— Matt Couch (@RealMattCouch) January 30, 2023
John Ivison: Ottawa’s sole-source deal for armoured vehicles for Ukraine raises questions
The Bloc Québécois’ defence critic is concerned about transparency of a recent $90-million sole-sourced deal to supply Ukraine with 200 armoured personnel carriers (APCs).
The contract was awarded to Mississauga-based Roshel after Ukraine’s defence minister, Oleksii Reznikov, specifically requested the company’s Senator vehicle.
WTF?
This is what leftism does to you. pic.twitter.com/2bVheaA0Sr
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) January 30, 2023
The Coming “Symbolic Analyst” Meltdown
James Pethokoukis asks, “Does ChatGPT mean the Technological Singularity is near? How would we know?”
To answer the second question first, we probably wouldn’t. One of the characteristics of a singularity is that you can’t tell when you’re entering it. (And by the time you figure things out, it’s too late.) But looking at Chat GPT and the various AI Art programs that are appearing, I can’t help but see an irony: The jobs that are coming under attack first are the jobs that up to now have resisted technological replacement.
Could Adolf Hitler’s seizure of power have been prevented?
Adolf Hitler’s rise to Reich Chancellor on January 30, 1933 changed world history, yet a new Berlin exhibition imagines how things might have turned out differently.
In the early 1930s it looked as if Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party would be unlikely to ever take power.
By the autumn of 1932, the Nazis were losing support as the Depression-hit economy began to improve. In the November 1932 federal election — the last free and fair one held before the Nazis seized power — Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) won the most votes, but failed to obtain a majority, which meant he had to form a coalition amid ongoing political deadlock.
So few would have then predicted that Hitler would rise to the Chancellorship on January 30, 1933, according to Dan Diner, a German-Israeli historian, author and emeritus professor of modern history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Sixth police officer suspended following fatal beating of Tyre Nichols
A sixth Memphis police officer has been suspended as the fallout from the release of graphic body camera footage showing the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols earlier this month grows.
Preston Hemphill has been placed on administrative leave, the department said Monday.