Religion of... well... you know...

“Malmo is a lost city,” Photographer Freddy Mardell added as he said even journalists decided to leave out of fear for their own safety. One journalist reportedly said: “Staying here isn’t worth it. I’m not risking my life for this.“

"If conformity is so bad..."

"...then stop asking everyone else to conform with your deviance..."

On your marks... get set...

...GO!!!...

"Toronto’s first murder victim of 2017 was shot in the chest Sunday morning."

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UPDATE: Meet Victim #1

Police have identified the man shot and killed in Toronto’s first homicide of 2017 as 41-year-old Anthony Earl Smith.

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RELATED: What's up with Ottawa?

Canada’s capital is a small sleepy city of less than a million. Its average annual murder rate is only 10. That’s a weekend in Chicago. But last year something strange happened to Ottawa’s murder rate.

It shot up to 24 homicides.

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LAST WORD: The capricious and unknowable...

..."Will of Buddha, er... Shiva, wait... Odin, no... uh, Jesus... oh, yeah... that guy, AGAIN..."

Four soldiers were killed and 13 people were wounded in Jerusalem on Sunday when a truck rammed into pedestrians near the Armon Hanatziv Promenade.

Sigh.

Looking death right in the eye

Euthanasia used to be one slippery son of a bitch... now it's mostly about the paperwork.

"Between 1999 and 2001, I helped eight people die, including the poet Al Purdy. Now, as I prepare to take my own life, I’m ready to tell my story."

This one has a particularly personal feel for myself and Mrs Neo. Two days after Christmas 2016, a family friend, who had found out last October that she had a particularly virulent type of ALS, resolutely & unflinchingly ended her own life.

Last night, we received a last "good-bye" letter from her, delivered by one of her closest pals, thanking us for storing & looking after her beloved motorcycle until a friend picks it up in the spring.

Rest in peace, Andrea. As always, for better or worse... you did it your way.

Shshhhhh...

...nobody tell the CBC...

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RELATED: The $310 million question

Never a Mansbridge around when you need one.

Whoever exposed DNC corruption...

...be it hackers, a state actor or some random whistleblower... they deserve a medal.

Instead... Canada's national broadcaster yet again, like their MSM sisters-in-sin, is out whoring for the criminal, lunatic left.Here comes the CBC... at its Boogeyman best.

Putin and the Russian government aspired to help president-elect Trump's election chances when possible by discrediting secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavourably to him."

The release of the emails led to embarrassing media coverage for Clinton and triggered the resignation of the DNC's chief.

What was discreditable here was the conduct of Hillary Clinton and the DNC. Paying agitators to provoke violence at Trump rallies. Taking secret debate questions from news organisations. Covering up Hillary Clinton's obvious physical disability. The DNC sabotaging Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders. The list goes on.

And the CBC thinks the offense was bringing all these activities to the public's attention?

(nb. image borrowed from maggies farm)

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RELATED: Let's pull this apart...

The administration also did not mention that the election hacking occurred largely because of Podesta’s own carelessness in using his security password. Moreover, it failed to acknowledge that the Republican National Committee was likewise targeted, but apparently had enough safeguards to prevent successful entry into its records.

Finally, the administration refused to mention that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange went on the record saying that he did not receive the email trove from the Russians.

Read it all.

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LAST WORD: A lame duck's last quack

The absence of any concrete evidence in the report of meddling by the Kremlin was met with a storm of mockery on Saturday by Russian politicians and commentators, who took to social media to ridicule the report as a potpourri of baseless conjecture.

The report provides no new evidence to support assertions that Moscow meddled covertly through hacking and other actions.

No, not Pravda... this is the New York Times.

Of course Barack deserves his Nobel Prize...

...it's not like he dropped 30,000 bombs in the course of 2016... right?

"The U.S. dropped 26,171 bombs last year, 3,027 more than 2015. The majority of the bombs were dropped in Iraq and Syria."

Remember, only bomb strikes by George W. Bush cause collateral (ie. innocent children) damage.

See... I thought that California...

...was on the verge of bankruptcy...I guess I was mistaken, because obviously, no government that was in financial extremis would be so irresponsible as to put a sex change operation for a convicted murderer ahead of paying for policing, fire fighting, paramedics and education, to name but a few of their responsib... wait a freakin' penis-choppin' moment...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) -- A 57-year-old convicted killer serving a life sentence in California became the first U.S. inmate to receive state-funded sex-reassignment surgery.

The first thing I should point out here is that the photo above is purely for illustrative purposes. It is very obviously not a picture of a 57 year old convict. No doubt the state of California will be doing everything that it possibly can to protect that individual's privacy.

My concern here is not that some person, for whatever reason, has chosen to surgically alter their appearance. There are plenty of folk doing that these days, even in my neck of the woods. On Boxing Day, I was cashed out at Best Buy by a very helpful twenty-something who had hoops in his earlobes you could've tossed a shotgun shell through.

I mean, we won't even talk about the delusional mope I saw on the InterTubes who has had his ears surgically removed and face fully tattoo'd in his ongoing quest to become...and I shit you not... a parrot.

If you have a dream... and who am I to say that emulating a flying creature from a tropical rain forest isn't dreaming in colour... then by all means, have at it.

What I object to, is having you pick my pocket to realise your inner Polly.

Never mind that, in the USA, there are folk who are deprived of life-saving surgeries because they can't come up with the scratch to cover a $50,000 or $100,000 hospital invoice.

This is just wrong on so many levels.

Root Causes yet again?

Seems there's always "a community" involved...

Five people are dead and a shooting suspect is in custody Friday after a lone gunman opened fire at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport in Florida.

Video posted on Instagram appeared to show several people wounded in the baggage claim area of the terminal. One person appeared to be lying in a pool of blood with a head wound.

The airport is the 21st busiest in the United States and serves 21 different airlines.

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UPDATE: Canadian connection?

Chip LaMarca, a Broward County commissioner, was briefed on the airport shooting by Broward Sheriff’s office. He told The Associated Press by phone that the shooter was a passenger on a Canadian flight and had checked a gun.

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UPDATE2: Not Canadian at all...

ABC News is now reporting he went from Anchorage through Minneapolis to Fort Lauderdale.

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UPDATE3: Not the Alt-Right after allSantiago was definitely mentally disturbed, but if he was calling himself “Aashiq Hammad”, recording Islamic religious music online, and downloading Islamic terrorist propaganda all in 2007, 3 years before his first deployment to Iraq, what do you really think is the root cause here?

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LAST WORD: Barn empty... door firmly closed

MIAMI (CBSMiami) – Miami International Airport (MIA) and PortMiami have upped their security measures following a shooting at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport.

Remember, when seconds count... the police are only minutes away.

U.S. House of Representatives...

...bitchslaps Barry O... lines up behind Trump's Israel policy...

Lawmakers voted 342-80 in favor of the bipartisan non-binding resolution, which declares unwavering support for Israel and insists that the United States reject any future U.N. actions that are similarly "one-sided and anti-Israel."

A visibly angry House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis. opened debate on the resolution by saying that the Obama administration "abandoned our ally Israel when she needed us the most."

Look for a similar action in the Senate in the near future.

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RELATED: The real Obama legacy

Sorry, Mr. President, the world isn’t afraid of you and your empty threats. Eight years of leading from behind has left America’s standing in the world diminished, its moral authority compromised and its foreign policy in tatters.

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RELATED2: On top of a thousand domestic pardons...

The Pentagon announced the release of four Guantanamo Bay detainees to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Wednesday. Salem Ahmad Hadi Bin Kanad, Muhammed Rajab Sadiq Abu Ghanim, Abdallah Yahya Yusif Shibli, and Muhammad Ali Abdallah Muhammad Bwazir were all former al-Qaida members with a long history of terrorist activity.

Many of the detainees released under the Obama administration were deemed “high risk” and between 18 and 30 percent have returned to terrorism.

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LAST WORD: Despite the negative MSM spin...

...most reasonable people will see this as "a feature"... not "a bug"...

According to the report, transition staff issued an order requiring all politically appointed envoys — which would include Bruce Heyman, who was a key donor and fundraiser for President Barack Obama — to leave their posts by Inauguration Day, without exception.

Draining the swamp.

Silence of the BLMs

Toronto Homicide Squad calls off roundup of local farmers, hunters and sport shooters...

Winston Poyser, 24, and Shakiyl Shaw, 23, both of Toronto, were arrested on Thursday following the execution of search warrants within the City of Toronto. Poyser and Shaw are both charged with first-degree murder in Hagley’s death.

Police say that Lenneil Shaw, 23, and Mohamed Ali Nur, 18, are also being sought for first-degree murder in connection with Hagley’s death.

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UPDATE: The usual suspects

Two suspects wanted in the fatal shooting of a 17-year-old boy at a Weston Road pizza place this past fall have surrendered to police. The suspects turned themselves in sometime on Friday, less than one day after police issued a Canada-wide warrant for their arrests in connection with the murder of Jarryl Hagley.

Black Lives Matters Toronto was apparently unavailable for comment.

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RELATED: The hoodz a'hoppin' this week

Toronto police are investigating after shots were fired into a North York home on George Henry Boulevard, near Sheppard Avenue and Don Mills Road early on Friday morning.

There were people in the home at the time, but no one was hurt. Police found at least eight shell casings outside the home.

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FROM THE COMMENTS:

"No left of center political party or interest gives a damn about the true root cause of this slaughter : the toxic suicidal gangster/drug/nihilist culture that has been fed into the black community by the culture industry."

No argument here.

A syndicated TV show?

Man... I'm so old, I can remember when dolling up a 6 year old boy in dresses and bondage gear would have got you arrested.

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RELATED: If you can't get a TV deal...

...just send it out over the intertubes...

In the Facebook live video which was partially broadcast on CNN and other media outlets, a man who appeared to be white was seen sitting on the ground in the corner of a room as his attackers, at least some of whom appeared to be African-American, laughed and made comments about "white people."

A Chicago police spokesman declined to give the race of the victim or the people detained.

Of course they did.

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UPDATE: How it's done in Obama country

CHICAGO -- Four black people were charged with hate crimes Thursday in connection with a video broadcast live on Facebook that showed a mentally disabled white man being beaten and taunted, threatened with a knife and forced to drink from a toilet.

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UPDATE2: Ask the mainstream media

"CNN host Don Lemon said Wednesday evening the broadcasted torture of a bound and gagged victim in Chicago was not “evil,” adding that the suspects had 'bad home training'.”

During the same discussion, Democrat strategist and former press secretary for Bernie Sanders Symone Sanders said the attack was “not a hate crime” if the suspects were motivated by “hate of Donald Trump.”

Sigh.

Sure, Trump is pure evil...

...but a party's a party.

Of course the reality is a little different...

"This guy is interested in trying to please the people who elected him, not the urban swells who write for or read the NYT or WaPo – he knows they will never stop loathing him even if he somehow simultaneously cures cancer, brings world peace, and convinces Coldplay to disband."

The problem for the media is that Trump is gonna be Trump... regardless of how they feel.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

"Funny how this story never made it to the CBC where 52% of Canada's alleged "journalists" pick up their cheques."

On CNN, on Wednesday...

...Trump’s adviser Kellyanne Conway wished Manson a speedy recovery but acknowledged that losing him as a potential Court pick was a significant blow.

“We’re moving on, of course, but this is very disappointing,” she said. “There’s only one Charles Manson.”

Just some more of that heartwarming lefty "serial killer" humour.

I'm guessing the family of Sharon Tate is suitably impressed.

Your National Broadcaster...

...makes a single, solitary reference to "a shooting"... and nowhere uses the word "terrorism"... instead we get a litany of references to the murdered woman's personality & demeanor...

1) "very kind," 2) "always happy," 3) "outgoing, optimistic and loving," 4) "full of life," 5) "lovely person inside and out," 6) "a great mom," 7) "a great person," 8) "always a big smile."

It's a good thing she wasn't a grouch... or this would have been a one sentence article.

Remember... the CBC sucks up 1.2 billion of your taxpayer dollars every year... and this is what passes for reporting.

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RELATED: Hmmm... smells of "victim blaming"...

Apparently there's some sort of media distinction conferred on "provoked" shootings. Also.. why exactly are there so rarely media descriptions of "urban shooters?" Don't we want to catch these guys?

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LAST WORD: The Toronto "Red" Star...

...in a class by itself...

A missing verb, an extra 's' and a continued division of people into identifiable groups.

FROM THE COMMENTS:

Safety Break!!! Nobody works... nobody gets hurt...

"I don't feel that because of the fact that some people physically can't walk stairs we should refrain from designing stairs or objects like this. That is like no longer making paintings because blind people can't see them."

And...

"People in a coma are unable to use public space at all. Discrimination!"

Remember, the government...

...still has trouble delivering your mail... and that has your name on it...

“What all this reminds me of is Francis Galton and eugenics. The real criminal, in these cases, are people who are perpetrating this idea, not the people who are being looked at.”

Healthy skepticism about our political overlords is always a good thing.

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RELATED: Uncomfortable questions...

"How hard would it be for the government to figure out all of our religious beliefs – citizens and non-citizens alike — without asking?"

Worried about competing with...

...China's "economic miracle?"...

The prevailing attitude is chabuduo, or ‘close enough’. It’s a phrase you’ll hear with grating regularity, one that speaks to a job 70 per cent done, a plan sketched out but never completed, a gauge unchecked or a socket put in the wrong size.

Chabuduo is the corrosive opposite of the impulse towards craftmanship.

The "Ferguson Effect"

Here's what happens when you emasculate local law enforcement...

The interview with CBS's "60 Minutes" focuses on the 80 percent decline in street stops by Chicago police and fall in arrests this year, even as the homicide rate soars to more than 750 people killed.

It repeats a narrative that has been repeatedly told locally since Mayor Rahm Emanuel in October 2015 said cops had gone "fetal" in the face of protests about police violence.

Well, for what it's worth... the final tally was just shy of 800, but hey... who's counting?Know how many of those were killed by cops? Brace yourself, Buttercup... a grand total of 11... not quite 1.5%.

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RELATED: Or... he could just be lying...

Call it naivety, stupidity or a misreading of the situation, but Vaca said at the time he was sure they would not shoot him.

Who is gonna doubt a felon's word? Not CBS.

Happy New Year

And on the first day of 2017, I'm gonna go out on a limb and bet that Donald Trump could likely get himself elected President of Turkey, or Germany... or France... or...

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RELATED: meanwhile, back at the ranch...

The new year got off to a violent start in Toronto with two shootings and three stabbings.

Funny, that's not the Toronto I remember as a kid.