Dispel the Illusion

A Catholic city councillor in Kamloops, British Columbia, who was himself the victim of the crime of vandalism due to his faith, has been forced to apologize and pay a homosexual activist couple $1000. The couple filed a complaint with the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal which was accepted and was to go to the hearing stage.

The 12-year-old actress is about to premiere on screen playing a little girl being raped by her father. This has led quite a few people to question the ethics and legality of the movie Hounddog. Alleged defenders of free speech have, predictably, replied that their opponents haven't even seen that which they are criticizing.

Well, here we are, 20-odd years later, the Reform party has come and gone, and nothing has changed. A Conservative party is back in power, largely on the strength of Western support, and again the party seems to have forgotten what it stands for - or, Westerners might say, who put it there. Only now there is no prospect of a Reform insurgency.

The top crime neighborhood in the world isn't in Sao Paulo or Lagos. It's not the Bronx in New York, or even Wedding in Berlin. It's the small city ruled by Pope Benedict XVI, which apparently sees more criminal cases per capita than any other part of the world. The Vatican's attorney general Nicola Picardi released the astounding statistic at the start of 2007: The tiny nation's justice department in 2006 had to contend with 341 civil and 486 criminal cases. In a population of 492, that measures out to 1.5 cases per person - 20 times the corresponding rate in Italy.

Sofia was born Jan. 22, 2005 - the 33rd anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion throughout the nine months of pregnancy. She could be considered a miracle baby not only because of her date of birth but because several doctors, fearing she might have a severe cardiovascular disorder, repeatedly urged her parents throughout the pregnancy to abort her. But Yvonne Alomia refused to consider abortion, despite the repeated urging of doctors, colleagues, friends and her own patients from her optometrist practice.

American talk show host Oprah Winfrey is the richest woman in entertainment, according to business magazine Forbes. Its latest poll estimates her net worth at $1.5bn (£760m), based on the $225m (£114m) she is said to earn from TV, radio, magazines and other ventures. Harry Potter author JK Rowling comes second in the list with a net worth estimated at $1bn (£506m). Lifestyle guru Martha Stewart, pop star Madonna and singer Celine Dion take the next three places.

The RCMP is taking "very seriously" a recent threatening letter signed by a group claiming to be a new cell of the FLQ, a Quebec terrorist group active in the 1960s and 1970s. The letter, dated Jan. 15, says "strategic targets of importance" will be targeted in the western, largely English-speaking part of Montreal between Feb. 15 and March 15. It mentions crowded shopping malls, bridges, rail lines, airport facilities, water supplies, municipal buildings and service stations.

Reading in Maclean's magazine about Green party leader Elizabeth May's annual Christmas party, held Jan. 6, you get the sense the world is going just a little bit nuts. As the May household doesn't abide plastic or paper cups, "drinking vessels had to be washed frequently," reports Mitchel Raphael, whose story was accompanied by a picture of a smiling guy doing the dishes. If you're an enviro-skeptic, that sets alarms ringing.

Canadian children are being exposed to far too much violence in music lyrics, video games and on television and need to be protected by laws similar to those that restrict the sale of tobacco to minors, a coalition of teachers and parents said Wednesday. The group called for age-based restrictions on music sales, similar to existing systems that prevent underaged consumers from obtaining inappropriate movies and video games.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke warned the U.S. Congress on Thursday that failure to take action soon to deal with the budgetary strains posed by an aging U.S. population could lead to serious economic harm. "Unfortunately, economic growth alone is unlikely to solve the nation's impending fiscal problems," Bernanke told the Senate Budget Committee.

Foreigners are flocking to Canada to have legal same-sex marriages, according to a new report that shows more than half of recorded gay weddings involved couples from abroad. Statistics Canada data on 2003 nuptials, which included gay couples for the first time in Canadian history, found 3.5% of the 22,000 marriages in British Columbia were between people of the same sex. And nearly 56% of those were non-residents of Canada.

Little Sisters, a Vancouver bookstore for gays and lesbians, will be at the centre of a Supreme Court ruling tomorrow on whether the government should pay the legal tab for the shop's epic fight against Canada Customs for blocking publications at the border.

The federal NDP leader left agricultural producers looking at each other in wide-eyed wonder after a speech about farm issues in which he repeatedly referred to the "SARS" crisis which affected the Manitoba cattle industry. "Another important issue is SARS," said Layton. "I was just talking to a cattle producer today who said the situation is worse now than when we were in the middle of SARS." As Layton continued his speech, Manitoba Agriculture Minister Rosann Wowchuk loudly whispered, "It’s BSE, not SARS," from her seat at the front of the audience.

untv.ca is Canada's (hence the ".ca") first internet television station, producing original content for an on-demand audience -- not to mention on-demand content for an original audience. And it’s FREE!

We are witnessing a carefully planned program of social engineering, which is being carried out by an increasingly despotic government and the internationalist thereof. The nation is rapidly being immersed in a depraved satanic system. For the government to carry out this program for the total subjugation of a once free people it is necessary to dull the senses of the people and instill in them a totally false system of beliefs. They must be dumbed down and made compliant ... If the putrescence that we are witnessing today in society is just a small sample of things to come in a new world order, we have to contemplate the future of our children and grandchildren with great anguish. But, such is the future that we build for them with our complacence and failure to deal with those who lead us down the path to destruction.

Scottish church leaders have condemned a local program handing out over 1,000 free condoms per week to children under the age of 16, saying that it makes sex as easy as having a pizza. A total of 53,638 free condoms were issued to 13 to 15 year olds in Edinburgh as part of a controversial safe sex program in the Lothians.

An Iraqi bishop has warned that Iraq is moving towards a terrible division with the US doing nothing to stop it as a spokesman for the American bishops calls on his government to end troop deployment in the country "at the earliest opportunity".

Radical measures for tackling crime - ranging from monitoring the behaviour of the mentally ill with radio chips to hormone injections for sex offenders — are to be considered by the Government in a wide-ranging policy review ordered by Tony Blair ... America is said to be "favourably disposed" towards preventing drug addiction through heroin and cocaine vaccination. It is also considering "more sophisticated" monitoring techniques, including a trial of "radio frequency identification chips" for the mentally ill.

A twin leans over and kisses the cheek of her sister in a heart-warming picture that would not be out of place in any family home. Yet these siblings are a not even born and the astonishing images have been captured on a new 'four-dimensional' ultrasound scan of the womb.

The horrific death of a dog named Daisy Duke after allegedly being dragged by a car has prompted nearly 100,000 people to call for better protection for animals. A petition lobbying for stronger federal animal cruelty laws is now destined for the House of Commons after being presented to member of Parliament Myron Thompson yesterday in Didsbury, 234 southwest of Edmonton.

Amsterdam's red light district is reportedly to receive a bronze statue dedicated to prostitutes around the world. According to the Dutch agency ANP, sculptress Els Rijerse made the statue at the request of a former prostitute Mariska Majoor, who a decade ago founded a centre on prostitution in the Dutch capital.

Embryonic screening allows couples to not only play God, but the devil. It seems some couples are moseying up to the baby menu and ordering ones heavy on the defects and disabilities. According to a recent survey of fertility clinics, four of the 190 that responded indicated they've helped families have a baby with a disability or deformity; the clinics sift through embryos, created in a lab dish, to ensure that the one to be implanted in the mother's womb carries the desired defect.

For what experts say is probably the first time, more American women are living without a husband than with one, according to a New York Times analysis of census results. In 2005, 51 percent of women said they were living without a spouse, up from 35 percent in 1950 and 49 percent in 2000.

Canada, the world's ninth-largest emitter of man-made greenhouse gases (2.1% of all emissions in 2000), faces cuts no other major industrialized (and northern) country agreed to - 6% below 1990 levels by 2012 - which the Grits had already missed by 35% when they were tossed from power a year ago ... China, the second-largest emitter (14.8%) and India, fourth-largest (5.5%), don't have to cut emissions because Kyoto classifies them as "developing" countries.

What could better reflect the collective psychosis of the American Empire than our mass obsession with the NFL? Born through violent revolution, expanded by genocide, enriched by slavery, and elevated to hegemony through imperialism, militarism, and economic tyranny, the United States, like NFL football, embodies avaricious savagery masked by a fastidiously maintained illusion of benevolent civility. Arising from the same fetid bogs of spiritual decay that spawned the American Way, the NFL reeks with the stench of corporate tyranny, patriarchy, racism, superficiality, greed, competitiveness, and materialism.

U.S. spending on health care hit nearly $2 trillion in 2005, fueled by the cost of hospital care, doctor fees and prescription drugs, government experts said in an annual report released on Tuesday. Health-care spending grew 6.9 percent to about $1.99 trillion from about $1.86 trillion in 2004, a slower pace than the 7.9 percent increase a year earlier, the report by the National Health Statistics Group found.

The fact of matter is that not everyone is losing in Iraq. Indeed, while the Bush administration’s wars of choice have brought unnecessary death, destruction, and disaster to millions, including many from the Unites States, they have also brought fortunes and prosperity to war profiteers. At the heart of the reluctance to withdraw from Iraq lies the profiteers’ unwillingness to give up further fortunes and spoils of war.

ID is a logical inference, based on data gathered from the natural world, and hence it is firmly in the realm of science. It does not rely upon the Bible, the Qur'an, or any religious authority or tradition - only on scientific evidence.

The video-sharing website most used for pop promotions, film trailers and personal "vidcasts", is set to become the next tool in the Church of England's battle to curb declining attendances. The Archbishop of Canterbury is planning to use the site to broadcast his sermons in an attempt to make the Church more relevant to the internet generation.

TECHNOLOGY which evolved from soviet spy listening devices could be used to track patients at Coventry's new super-hospital. High-tech equipment has been fitted all over University Hospital, at Walsgrave, to enable the use of devices normally used to track goods and equipment. The so-called RFID chips - radio frequency identity chips - would be inserted into the plastic wristband name tags that in-patients usually wear. And they could even be linked to patients' medical records.

On Saturday, the Toronto Star devoted the whole of its front page to "A State of Constant Dread: Poverty Today," a breathless piece of advocacy that ranks as one of the sloppiest pieces of Canadian journalism we've ever seen. The newspaper's evident goal is to promote a "national strategy" for combating poverty. But if an argument for such a campaign can be cobbled together only by nakedly misrepresenting the available data, as the Star has done, it doesn't say much for the cause. Whatever one's view of poverty in Canada, the Star's journalistic methods are an insult to its readers.

It's official: Feminism is dead. And it was a liberal who killed it ... Bill Clinton was a serial sexual harasser, but America's feminist organizations kept quiet about him for eight years. Now Barbara Boxer has made a single woman's lifestyle choice a national political punching bag. They prove the obvious: political correctness only applies to conservatives.

The Sixties generation thought everything should be free. But only a few decades later the hippies were selling water at rock festivals for $5 a bottle. But for me the price of “free love” was even higher. I sacrificed what should have been the best years of my life for the black lie of free love. All the sex I ever had — and I had more than my fair share — far from bringing me the lasting relationship I sought, only made marriage a more distant prospect.

Dioceses such as Boston, Chicago, Newark, Philadelphia and St. Paul/Minneapolis continue to have the largest ordination classes, in part because of their larger Catholic populations. When the number of seminarians is compared with the total number of Catholics in the diocese, however, a very different list emerges — one that shows that the largest number of priests per capita are coming from the Midwest and the southern United States.

The government, in partnership with the “usual suspects:” the elitist, internationalist corporate sector, the tax-exempt foundations, the Federal Reserve Bank, the educational system, the controlled media, and some important religious denominations, has year after year, consistently, worked to create an environment which keeps its citizens ignorant regarding what is really going on, thereby creating the necessary citizen apathy which allows “the usual suspects” to accomplish the dismantlement of the greatest, freest, most successful nation in the history of the world.

The questions eschew political correctness and ask Canadians to do the same. The answers reveal some unpleasant truths about ourselves and question our bragging rights as a bastion of multiculturalism.