Daily Round Up

I know the writers and community at Jezebel are, shall we say, disturbed?

"So, on the one hand you've got an American doctor and politician who thinks that most vaccinations "ought to be voluntary." And then on the other you've got ISIS who is making sure people aren't going to contract polio.

On Vaccinations: Terrorist Organization > American Senator."

Like I said. Mentally disturbed; intellectually deficient; morally bankrupted.

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Stay classy Quebec.

Let's get one thing straight. This has nothing do with 'protecting' the French language (some call Quebec French a mere dialect) and everything to do with showing 'who's boss'.

“If I'm talking to a colleague and they're English and we're just talking about what happened the (previous) day, I'm not going to speak French to them,” she says. “ It's way too weird.”
The hospital told CTV Montreal that it is only following the law, but not everyone agrees about what the law requires.

Under the Quebec law known as Bill 101, French is the mandatory language of the workplace.
However, lawyer and Bill 101 expert Eric Maldoff says the law makes no mention of rules around oral communication between two English speakers.

No shit. It's outrageous. Nowhere in Canada - shoot, even the USA where ignorant Quebec nationalists are so fond of chastising - do institutions or companies make people go through this.

Know why? It's an attack on freedom of expression. That runs against all we stand for.

Had it happened, not only would Canadians react in disbelief, but Quebecers would be the first to demand action. Apparently, they can do what they want over here though.

Back in the day, that piece of shit Bill 14 whipped up by piece of shit people would have forced me and my sister to communicate in French.

Think about this for a second. Think. What images does this conjure up?

If they actually believe it protects and enhances it, then they be woefully misguided.

What else is new in Quebec?

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Weaker growth and stagnation didn't stop the President from stating in his SOTUA the economy was back and from proposing tax hikes and spending in his budget.

Does he even want a budget passed?

Mindless austerity? More like mindless progressive derp.

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Congressman Alcee Hastings called Texas a 'crazy state' the other day.

The same Hastings who was a judge on the take and was busted by the FBI. His sorry ass should be in the can. Instead Floridians voted him into power.

Sometimes I do wholly believe we get the governance we deserve in the West.



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This again?

An Ontario MP is looking to bring back the long-form census.

He wants to remove the threat of jail time (gee, thanks) but leave the fine in. Which of course, if you don't pay may end up in jail time anyway.

That's my problem with mandatory, intrusive government data collection. They already know more than enough about us mostly through our taxes. 

Sorry they don't know more details about where we shop and how we eat in order to know how to allocate subsidies (end of the world?) but some of the questions are simply private for  people.  

Keep it voluntary.

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How well do Canadians know their constitutional history. Not well. 

So. Will Rick Mercer be 'Talking to Canadians?'

Nah. Doesn't fit into the nationalist mythical narrative that Canadians are 'smarter'.

•Only 9% of Canadians surveyed knew that the Charter does not include protection for private property.

No bigee it's not included. It's only the cornerstone of what constitutes a free people.

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On the balance, despite the play call,  the Patriots played better and were deserved champions.

They are by far the gold standard by which all franchises are measured at the moment. 

And they're not done I reckon.

Oh. About the deflated balls nonsense.

The Kahn Academy explains it using the Ideal Gas equation. 

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Speaking of the Super Bowl won by the Patriots 28-24 over the Seahawks.

Here are a couple of stats courtesy of Harvard Sports:

SEA was second in the league in power situations, getting stuffed just 17% of the time. Lynch converted 17 of 20 3rd/4ths & short this year.

The Pats allowed opponents to score 81% of the time in power situations (runs on 3rd/4th & 2, or within 2 yds of goalline). Dead last in NFL.

Whatever. Without that fluke catch they're not even in a position to score. More importantly, Butler read the call and made a great play. He wanted that ball. Had he not, the Seahawks probably win. Simple as that.

Brady had 139.9 passer rating on the two comeback drives: 13-15, 121 yds, 2 TD, 0 Int


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Staying on theme. Football is a dying game; at least as we knew it. Concussions certainly play a factor. You don't see these sorts of hits by Jack Tatum of the Raiders anymore:

Once upon a time, receivers had to be aware of safeties and cornerbacks lacing into you.

Reminds me of a story. In a game of tackle football, I was an intended receiver in what turned out to be an incomplete pass in the end zone. When I walked back to the huddle, my friend told me 'you're very lucky. Don had you lined up but he held back for some reason. Lights. Out.'

I shutter to think. Don was a mean truck who took football seriously.

I have no idea why he decided to pull back. But I remain happy about his decision.

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About that 'emerging permanent Democrat majority'.

"John Judis, co-author of the 2002 book The Emerging Democratic Majority, now says that majority has come and gone. That’s the thesis of his important National Journal article “The Emerging Republican Advantage.”

"...I have argued that Hispanics and Asians have entirely different heritages and sets of experiences from blacks and also that they are considerably less Democratic than black voters and that the “non-white” classification is misleading, since both of these growing groups have been voting considerably less Democratic and less reliably Democratic than blacks, whose numbers are not increasing significantly as a share of the voting population. It's not inevitable that the "non-white" vote will always remain as Democratic as it was in 2008."

"...Largely missing from Judis’s otherwise fine article is analysis of public policy. If most voters believed the stimulus package had really stimulated the economy, if they believed that Obamacare would provide real health care security, if they believed that the Obama Democrats’ big government policies were making them and their country better off — why then the Democratic majority that emerged in 2006 and 2008 would have persisted for at least a little longer and Obama might not have been the only president in American history re-elected with a popular vote percentage lower than the one he won four years before. Instead, I think the programs of the Obama Democrats have pushed more Americans to believe that, as I put it in the lead sentence of a Washington Examiner column last May, “Gummit don’t work good.”

Now we see Obama and left-wing Democrats calling for an expansion of government and significantly higher taxes. That, even more than demographics, looks to me like the current emerging Republican advantage."

And as I've said at the time when it first was uttered (and believed by the thoughtless base), the problem with such a silly assertion is that it assumed humanity is immutable; that we live in a zero-sum fish bowl. In such a belief system, creating equations, carrying the '1s' and making predictions thereafter seems so simple - especially when you want to believe your side will be in power, like, forevah!

But we're not predictable and things change. Shit happens.

And look how fast the shit happened.

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"Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro orderedthe arrest of executives of one of the country’s largestpharmacy chains for allegedly creating shortages of everythingfrom diapers to heart medicine.

Price regulators made a surprise inspection at a store on Sunday and opened a case against Caracas-based Farmatodo C.A., which operates almost 200 drug stores across Venezuela and Colombia, the company said in a statement published by Maracaibo-based newspaper Panorama. Police then invited executives of the company to give statements, the company said."

Paging Sean Penn. Paging Mr. Penn.

Oh. Right. They did it on purpose because capitalism.

Quite the socialist shithole run by socialist shitheads Venezuela is at the moment.

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Climate system change protestors and activists are nut jobs.