Links - 5th April 2026 (2)

‘Frightening’ Paddington Bear puppet must be destroyed, his owners demand - "A “frightening” Paddington Bear puppet used on the Spitting Image must be returned to the character’s owners or be destroyed, court documents claim. StudioCanal, which makes the Paddington films, and Paddington and Company are bringing legal action against Avalon, producer of the puppet-based satirical series, at the High Court in London... The court was told that a puppet with bulging, bloodshot eyes or dishevelled fur is called Paddington, who is said to be from Peru, and references marmalade. “The Avalon puppet depicts the Paddington character with a frightening demeanour,” barrister Tom St Quintin continued in the document. Mr St Quintin claimed that the episodes show Paddington as a cocaine user, with one of the episodes also depicting the bear as a cocaine smuggler, an alcoholic and a user of heroin, while another shows Paddington “as a promoter of gun sales and sex robots”. Three episodes depict Paddington as a user of “coarse language”, the barrister added, with each episode said to use an accent for the puppet that mocks Peruvian people... Spitting Image co-writer Al Murray previously told the Radio Times that he and fellow writer Matt Forde were “baffled” by the legal action. He said: “It’s a very Spitting Image thing to do – to take someone and say: ‘Hey, maybe they’re the opposite.’”"

Cooking is dying out. This is why it matters - "Sainsbury’s, it should be said, was ahead of the curve on this. In 2018, it changed to “touch-free” packaging to allow millennials (37 per cent of whom were apparently “scared of handling raw meat”) to slide the chicken from package to pan. “These bags allow people, especially those who are time-poor, to just ‘rip and tip’ the meat straight into the frying pan without touching it,” the supermarket announced at the time. You will feel the effects of this hands-free approach at the till. Chopped onions are £1.35 for 400g, whereas on the opposite shelf, loose onions cost £1.05 per kilogram. A pre-seasoned bird in a bag is £5.30/kg, a regular chicken £3.98/kg. And if you want to eat something homemade but bypass some of the cooking bit, you can. Anything you once needed to cook – high, low, complex or commonplace – can now be purchased either partly or entirely ready made. They have boiled the eggs for you, mashed the potatoes, chopped the broccoli into florets, grated the cheese, and done the first 10 hours of cooking on the pork shoulder – you will just need to slide the tray into the oven and finish it off for 20 minutes. In short, you just need to find the right shortcut. There is an unavoidable conundrum buried in there, though. Rachel Sugar, writing in The Atlantic about the tyranny of what she called “the dinner treadmill”, said it best: “The thing about dinner is that you have to deal with it every single night.”... you wonder if we haven’t lost some important life skills. Along the way, between the air fryers and the meal kits and the dinner “hacks” we are constantly being sold, have we become a nation that is simultaneously obsessed with food and doesn’t know how to cook it?... “almost 30 per cent of Britons admit to trying to pass off supermarket meals as their own cooking”. These days, we seemingly can’t get enough of cookbooks, and yet, in an increasingly saturated market, they often struggle to sell. In 2022, Sunday Times research found that while more than 5,000 cookbooks were released in the UK in 2020, only 556 sold more than 100 copies. The books that now get the most buzz tend to be miles from Delia Smith’s fabled Complete Cookery Course, with its brisk, reliable instructions on how to boil an egg... The appetite for food shows is still there, but the people who watch them are surfing YouTube, not turning on BBC Two at 7pm. Meanwhile, Waitrose’s most recent annual food and drink report heralded “the death of the recipe”, and noted both a rise in “scratch cooking with shortcuts” and “restaurant-quality dining at home”. Ready-made sauces and marinades were popular again, with restaurants from Wagamama to Michelin-starred Gymkhana, and chefs such as Yotam Ottolenghi launching ranges of sauces. “Pre-prepared proteins” such as marinated tofu and “easy to cook” joints of meat were proving popular, as were “flavoured butters, premium jarred beans and instant noodles”. Customers want to cook – 55 per cent said they would opt for a home-cooked meal over a takeaway. They just need some of the work to have been done for them... On TikTok, videos of people explaining how to make “cloud coffee”, pancake cereal and nutritionally boosted lunch bowls are popular. They might teach you how to “fibremaxx” some pasta but not how to season it properly. If image or eccentricity are prized over flavour and usefulness, how many skills are being acquired? “We’ve skipped over the basics and gone from your parents’ kitchen table to complicated TikTok trends, and in between, no one taught me how to sweat an onion,” says Poppy, 25, who admits that when she has guests over: “It doesn’t matter how it tastes, it’s more about how it looks.”"

Ludwig Wittgenstein by Anthony Gottlieb: 5-star review (aka "Why Wittgenstein disagreed with everyone (including himself)") - "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus... is essentially a treatise on the limits of language, which, Wittgenstein argues, is useful only for the stating of facts. It follows that a great deal of what we say is literally meaningless. When we talk – as we so often do – about moral issues, matters of religion or questions of aesthetics, we’re using language on stuff it’s simply not equipped to deal with. We are, according to Wittgenstein, talking nonsense. And that “we” includes philosophers – for they deal not in empirical statements (as scientists do), nor in tautologies (as mathematicians do), but merely in pseudo-problems engendered by the ineluctably slippery confusions of language. It should be said that Wittgenstein was none too happy with this. Unlike the logical positivists, a bunch of naive scientistic luvvies who believed that the Tractatus was the final word on everything, Wittgenstein didn’t think that the only things that matter are what we can talk about, rather what we can’t. For all its minatory sound, the Tractatus’s closing line – “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” – isn’t a cry of triumph but a howl of anguish: philosophy ending not with a bang but a whimper... One of history’s most tormented homosexuals, Wittgenstein was a tormentor in his turn. Like Kenneth Williams, he was in the habit of proposing to women while being adamant that their marriage would be chaste. Nor were things easier for the invariably young men he loved, not least because he never told them he loved them. Wittgenstein said that David Pinsent, the dedicatee of the Tractatus, “took half my life away” when he died in a flying experiment a few months before the end of the Great War. Yet “there is no sign”, says Gottlieb, “that Pinsent was aware of such feelings… or that he felt them himself”... for a man who argued that ethics can’t be meaningfully discussed, he spent an awful lot of time haranguing people moralistically. Norman Malcolm complained of “his tendency to be censorious”. Georg von Wright, one of Wittgenstein’s literary executors, said that talking with him “was terrible… like living through the day of judgment”. To be sure, the person Wittgenstein was always hardest on was himself. Thoughts of suicide were rarely far from his mind. More than one of his friends was made to listen while he read out a list of his lies and sins. And years after beating his pupils at a primary school in Austria, he returned to apologise to them individually. On his deathbed, he exclaimed: “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.” Maybe so, yet you close this wonderful biography thinking that the linguistic philosopher JL Austin summed him up best: “Poor old Witters.”"

Uber, Lyft spent millions pushing for NYC congestion pricing —and stand to make killing - "Uber and Lyft poured millions of dollars into efforts to legalize congestion tolling — and they stand to be among the biggest winners. Uber spent $2 million alone from 2015 to 2019 to promote congestion pricing, roughly $1 million of which went to some of the city’s top lobbyists... both and Uber and Lyft have continued to hire top lobbyists to help persuade key state and city officials to approve the controversial levy, including Gov. Kathy Hochul and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, records show. It’s unclear how much the companies spent lobbying for congestion pricing because the lobbyists hired worked on multiple issues, and officials records don’t break it down. The ride-share companies declined to provide The Post a breakdown — or even an estimate — of its lobbying expenses. Lyft — which also own the CitiBike program — has also directly contributed to pols who have been pushing the polarizing scheme. Lyft poured over $125,000 into state campaigns since 2020 – including $18,500 the past four years to Hochul, who pushed it forward after a brief pause near the election, records show. It also donated $10,000 in 2020 to then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who backed congestion pricing when he was in office but now wants to hit the brakes on it. It’s been money well spent. The growing industry — which got a huge boost last year when the city lifted a cap on how many for-hire vehicles can be on the road — stands to make a killing because the new surcharge is both cheaper than the $9 fee private vehicles will pay to enter parts of Manhattan, and the $2.90 straphangers pay to take subways and buses, critics say. The ride-hailing services will be slapped with an additional $1.50 surcharge for Manhattan trips below 60th Street. But the additional costs will be passed on to customers — just like a similar $2.75 “congestion fee” on all trips below 96th Street authorized in 2019. “This is corporate greed at its worst,” said Councilman Robert Holden (D-Queens), who opposes congestion tolling. “These companies will stop at nothing to rewrite the rules in their favor while leaving chaos in their wake.” The new tolls fit “right into” Uber and Lyft’s “business model to charge a premium for access to the scarcest street — those in core Manhattan” – and its customers will benefit from faster service with less cars on the street, said Nicole Gelinas, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute... Susan Lee, one of the plaintiffs in a slew of lawsuits seeking to stop the congestion tolling, blamed the for-hire industry for “pushing” congestion tolling and flooding city streets with its roughly 100,000 vehicles — causing much of NYC’s gridlock. “If the motivation is to incentivize people to take mass transit, then the new fee for for-hire vehicles should be equivalent to” the $2.90 cost for a bus or subway ride,” Lee said.

Letters: Why does 'Buy Canadian' exclude 'Buy Alberta (oil)'? - "Industry Minister Mélanie Joly’s efforts would be better served if she were to dedicate her energies to persuading Prime Minster Mark Carney to unshackle Canadian businesses rather than trying to persuade pension fund managers to invest in shackled Canadian businesses. Someone should explain to Minister Joly that her time would be better spent increasing the appeal of (and returns from) investing in Canada rather than attempting to steer pension fund managers on how and where to invest. Professional managers of these critical funds welcome investing advice from politicians like Trey Yesavage would welcome pitching advice from Margaret Atwood."
"The debate about speed cameras would be enriched by more knowledge. Everyone agrees with the objective of a speed-enforcement policy: safety for all concerned. How speed limits are determined is the issue. Transportation engineers should tell us how they determine reasonable and appropriate speed limits; in many locations, it feels like they could safely be higher than now. And, perhaps, the cameras could be calibrated for different limits at different times based on a risk assessment for accidents — for example 3 p.m. versus 3 a.m. Such an approach would result in fewer people believing that speed cameras are used as a cash grab. Evidence would indeed show that they grab the dangerous drivers only."
"Most Ontarians are not against speed cameras, they are upset at “cash cow” implementations. The avowed purpose of speed cameras is to force drivers to slow down to reduce accidents — not fill the municipality’s coffers. Instead of banning the cameras, Ontario should make the cameras more visible: put a flashing “here’s your speed” sign with a very visible “speed camera ahead” image some distance before the camera, and give drivers a 10 per cent margin of error. Anyone who failed to slow down and who exceeded the posted limit by 10 per cent would deserve to get a ticket."
Left wingers hate cars, so they love speed cameras

United flight attendant arrested for tapping someone on the shoulder - "The Cayman Airways worker was reportedly speaking loudly on her phone in French while waiting for the bus to arrive... Fleischmann told her to “close your mouth” before the bus arrived, which she perceived as rude and possibly racially insensitive. “He said it’s my last week here. Trump is gonna deport me,” the woman told police. “I was like, ‘Are you racist? Why are you bothering me?’” The situation escalated once both were aboard the shuttle, with Fleischmann admitting in the body‑cam footage that he tapped the woman on the shoulder while asking her to stop speaking loudly. He also allegedly threatened to ensure she was fired from her job. “She calls me a racist over and over and over,” Fleischmann told officers just before he was due to board a United flight. “She flips me off with her fingers, she tells me to go f*** myself, and I said, ‘All we need is quiet in the shelter.’” “I did turn around and put my hand on her shoulder, and I said, ‘Can you please stop?’ And that was the only time I touched her,” he continued. One of the officers then explained to Fleischmann that under Florida law, any intentional, unwanted physical contact can legally constitute battery. “That’s technically a battery, just so you know,” the officer said about the alleged incident. The officers proceeded to arrest Fleischmann on a misdemeanor battery charge and removed him from his flight... prosecutors in the State of Florida ultimately dropped the case on May 16, formally abandoning the charges."
It's racist to tell people off for speaking loudly. Time to force more people to use public transit as anyone who doesn't is a selfish asshole

Can Bollywood Survive Modi? - The Atlantic - "Its films have always celebrated a pluralistic India, making the industry—and its Muslim elite—a prime target for Narendra Modi."
From 2021

The Great (Fake) Child-Sex-Trafficking Epidemic - The Atlantic - "In some ways, this is just the most recent expression of a fear that has been part of the American landscape since the early 20th century—roughly the moment, as the sociologist Viviana Zelizer has argued, when children came to be viewed as “economically useless but emotionally priceless.” As in previous moral panics, messages about the threat of child sex trafficking are spread by means of friendly chitchat, flyers in the windows of diners, and coverage on local TV news. But the present panic is different in one important respect: It is sustained by the social web... The phenomenon suggests the possibility of a new law of social-media physics: A panic in motion can stay in motion... Her volunteer chapter claimed that “upwards of 300,000” children are victims of sex trafficking in the United States every year. All over the country, well-meaning Americans are convinced that human trafficking—and specifically child sex trafficking—is happening right in their backyard, or at any rate no farther away than the nearest mall parking lot. A 2020 survey by the political scientists Joseph Uscinski and Adam Enders found that 35 percent of Americans think the number of children who are victims of trafficking each year is about 300,000 or higher; 24 percent think it is “much higher.”... When today’s activists talk about the problem of trafficking, knowing exactly what they’re referring to can be difficult. They cite statistics that actually offer global estimates of all forms of labor trafficking. Or they mention outdated and hard-to-parse figures about the number of children who go “missing” in the United States every year—most of whom are never in any immediate danger—and then start talking about children who are abducted by strangers and sold into sex slavery. While stereotypical kidnappings—what you picture when you hear the word—do occur, the annual number hovers around 100... There is a widely circulated number, and it’s even bigger than the one Laura Pamatian and her volunteer chapter publicized: 800,000 children go missing in the U.S. every year. The figure shows up on T-shirts and handmade posters, and in the captions of Instagram posts. But the number doesn’t mean what the people sharing it think it means. It comes from a study conducted in 1999 by the Justice Department, and it’s an estimate of the number of children who were reported missing over the period of a year for any reason and for any length of time. The majority were runaways, children caught up in custody disputes, or children who were temporarily not where their guardians expected them to be. The estimate for “nonfamily abductions” reported to authorities was 12,100, which includes stereotypical kidnappings, but came with the caveat that it was extrapolated from “an extremely small sample of cases” and, as a result, “its precision and confidence interval are unreliable.” Later in the report, the authors noted that “only a fraction of 1 percent of the children who were reported missing had not been recovered” by the time they were counted for the study. The authors also clarified that a survey sent to law-enforcement agencies found that “an estimated 115 of the nonfamily abducted children were victims of stereotypical kidnapping.” The Justice Department repeated the study in 2013 and found that reports of missing children had “significantly decreased.”... even fleeting moral panics can have lasting consequences. The white-slavery panic of the early 1900s led to the passage of the Mann Act—a law that criminalized transporting across state lines “any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery.” It was wielded against Black men who traveled with white women, and later against sex workers who were accused of trafficking themselves. The 1980s hysteria about child sex abuse preceded the Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act, which made sharing child-sex-abuse material over a computer illegal, but also broadened the list of crimes for which the government could obtain wiretaps. Today, the difficult problem of child-sex-abuse material on the internet is being offered as a rationale for law enforcement to obtain backdoor access to encrypted communication, or for Congress to obligate social-media companies to constantly surveil their users’ posts and private messages... this panic may not soon recede. There are too many issues on which Americans can’t agree, such as how (or whether) to manage a deadly pandemic and how (or whether) to confront racism. But one type of justice isn’t complicated, and one definition of freedom is clear. If children are disappearing from all over the country, how could we possibly think about anything else?"
Plus a common definition of trafficking doesn't need to involve kidnapping but can be consensual

New Zealand volcano owners' conviction over deadly eruption quashed - "The owners of a New Zealand volcano that erupted in 2019, killing 22 people, have had their conviction over the disaster thrown out by the country's High Court. Whakaari Management Limited (WML) was found guilty in 2023 of failing to keep visitors safe and fined just over NZ$1m ($560,000; £445,000). They were also ordered to pay NZ$4.8m in reparation to the victims. However, following an appeal, the High Court ruled on Friday that the company only owned the land and were not responsible for people's safety... High Court Justice Simon Moore said on Friday that while WML licensed tours of the volcano, there was nothing in these agreements that gave the company control of what was happening on the island day to day."

Akon City: Wakanda-style $6bn project abandoned by Senegal - "Plans for a futuristic city in Senegal dreamt up by the singer Akon have been scrapped and instead he will work on something more realistic, officials say. "The Akon City project no longer exists," Serigne Mamadou Mboup, the head of Senegal's tourism development body, Sapco, told the BBC. "Fortunately, an agreement has been reached between Sapco and the entrepreneur Alioune Badara Thiam [aka Akon]. What he's preparing with us is a realistic project, which Sapco will fully support." Known for his string of noughties chart hits, Akon - who was born in the US but partly raised in Senegal - announced two ambitious projects in 2018 that were supposed to represent the future of African society. The first was Akon City - reportedly costed at $6bn (£5bn). It was to run on the second initiative - a brand new cryptocurrency called Akoin. Initial designs for Akon City, with its boldly curvaceous skyscrapers, were compared by commentators to the awe-inspiring fictional city of Wakanda in Marvel's Black Panther films and comic books. But after five years of setbacks, the 800-hectare site in Mbodiène - about 100km (60 miles) south of the capital, Dakar - remains mostly empty. The only structure is an incomplete reception building. There are no roads, no housing, no power grid. "We were promised jobs and development," one local resident told the BBC. "Instead, nothing has changed." Meanwhile the star's Akoin cryptocurrency has struggled to repay its investors over the years, with Akon himself conceding: "It wasn't being managed properly - I take full responsibility for that." There had also been questions over whether it would even be legal for Akoin to operate as the primary payment method for would-be residents of Akon City. Senegal uses the CFA franc, which is regulated and issued by the Central Bank of West African States (BCEAO), and like many central banks has expressed opposition to cryptocurrency. The plans for Akon City had been sweeping. Phase one alone was to include a hospital, a shopping mall, a school, a police station, a waste centre, and a solar plant - all by the end of 2023. Sitting on Senegal's Atlantic Coast, Akon's high-tech, eco-friendly city was supposed to run entirely on renewable energy. But despite Akon's insistence in a 2022 BBC interview that the project was "100,000% moving", no significant construction followed the initial launch ceremony."
Damn colonialism!

JD Vance’s silence is allowing the oldest hatred to take root - "The Groypers are not yet a popular movement in Britain, but given the way cultural trends spread from America, they may be spread here soon. It was not so long ago, after all, that we stared in horror at films of fentanyl addicts, rigid and bent double by the drug down-town in American cities. Now we see them in British streets. Taking their name from a fat internet meme which is a variant of Pepe the Frog, the Groypers are young, overwhelmingly male, ultra-Right keyboard warriors who promote white nationalism, sometimes in the name of Christianity. They are 100 per cent devoted to destroying, not building. Anti-Semitism is at their core. They are fantastically unattractive, but that market is nowadays not as niche as it should be. At any one time in a free country, there are always such pitiful groupuscles around, but it is part of the unforeseen consequences of the online age that they can sometimes hit the big time. This seems to have happened among young Maga Republicans. The conservative cultural commentator, Rod Dreher, recently wrote that 30 to 40 per cent of Washington conservative “Zoomers” are Groypers. So they start to have political salience... All this reminds me of what happened on the Left in Britain not so long ago. As leader of the Labour Party from 2015-20, Jeremy Corbyn gave free rein to anti-Semites. No one ever established that he was personally anti-Semitic, but his extreme ideology put blinkers on his capacity to see what was surrounding him. In the old phrase, there were, for him, “no enemies on the Left” (and there were Muslim votes for the asking). Since Israel was and is, in the eyes of the Left, the tool of capitalist America and white imperialism, Corbyn thought they must be good socialists. So they simply couldn’t be Jew-haters, could they? At the time, it may be recalled, Sir Keir Starmer kept pretty quiet about all of this from inside Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, only assailing the anti-Semites when he had won the leadership. Possibly J.D.Vance admires his tactics... Possibly, too, the Right is jealous of the success of the implicitly anti-Semitic Zohran Mamdani in winning the New York mayoralty. The militant American Right often seems to imitate the militant American Left"
Ironically, the Jews are hated for similar reasons as white people. So right wing anti-Semites aren't doing themselves any favours

She bought a colorful vase at Goodwill for $3.99. The rare piece sold at auction for $107,000 - "This image provided by Wright Auction House shows a vase by Italian architect and designer Carlo Scarpa which was part of his Pennelatte series in the 1940s. Jessica Vincent purchased it at a Goodwill store outside Richmond, Va., in June for $3.99. It was sold through the Wright Auction House in Chicago on Wednesday Dec. 13, 2023, to a private European collector for $107,100."

How Will France Deal With an Outdoor Smoking Ban? - The Atlantic (aka "When a Nasty Habit Is Part of Your National Identity") - "Russians have their vodka. Americans have their McDonald’s and AR-15s. Japanese have a concept called karoshi, which apparently means “working so hard that you die.” Every self-respecting nation has a fatal habit that helps define it—a guilty pleasure its citizens indulge in despite the scoffing of foreigners, and because doing so almost proves that their identity is worth dying for. The French—Sartre and Bardot and Gainsbourg and Houellebecq—have their smoking... What was most alluring about cigarettes, besides the notion—okay, the fact—that I looked cooler holding one casually between two fingers, was the quality of time that opened up in the space of a smoke. It’s been a while—maybe 20 years—since I’ve touched a cigarette, but what I still remember, more than the nicotine, is the sensation of pressing “Pause.” For the few minutes it took a cigarette to become ash, I had nothing to do but enjoy the silence or the chat I was having outside a bar. These moments of idle nothingness—or acute presence—are a source of nostalgia for me in part because they belong to the aimlessness of youth, and because our phones have since become a constant portal to somewhere else. But they also make me wistful because this sense of time out of time feels so very French. Think of the languidness of a French meal, with its aperitif, entrée, plat, fromage, dessert, café. Or the nation’s incredible shrinking workweek—now 35 hours, by law—in favor of more leisure time for love affairs and philosophical debates. Or the month of August, when no one is around. Or strikes, when everything stops. Or the years it takes to make good cheese and wine. Or that glorious description of the concept underlying the country’s internet-privacy laws: “the right to be forgotten.” This whole cultural preference seemed to have been hand-rolled into every cigarette... For the French, I always sensed that smoking, even when its dangers were well known, was almost an illustration of existentialism. The act seemed in some way to distill the central idea of that most French of philosophies: True freedom is terrifying because it means taking responsibility for every single choice we make. But not taking responsibility is worse—it is to live in bad faith. Smoking, that controlled flirtation with death, is the perfect test of this proposition. You know it’s bad for you; you do it anyway, fully aware that you are taking your fate in your own hands. Maybe this is also why the cigarette has always signified rebellion—especially for women living in cultures bent on circumscribing their choices. Even as our cultural mores and our health standards evolve, the cigarette retains this symbolic power. A blueberry-flavored vape (currently exempt from the new law) could never carry all this meaning... A little less than a quarter of the country’s population takes a drag every day. And young French people, thankfully, are not buying my romanticism"

Boys Will Be Boys

Squirrelly Girl | Facebook

Can I confess something? In my 37 years of life I have never, not once, heard a single man use "boys will be boys" as an excuse for bad behavior. Not once, not ever, not in the wild. And when I do hear it, it's for things like:

 

• Kids rolling in mud like happy little gremlins

• Husbands building backyard siege weapons

• Grandpa telling fart jokes with his buddies

• Brothers wrestling over absolutely nothing

 

Innocent, a little chaotic but ultimately harmless. But then, as one does, I hope on over to ye 'ol interwebs and find discourse after discourse, article after article, feminist blog after feminist blog claiming every man on earth uses this phrase to excuse everything from mild harassment to straight up rape.

 

Where? Where are men saying this? I asked that once and do you know what I was told? "Well, my friend Stacy says her dad said it the other day and then my other friend Patricia, her roommate's cousin Steve said it after his girlfriend told him she didn't like how he wouldn't stop touching her even after she told him to stop."

 

Ah, I see. So you yourself have never heard a man say it, you've just heard or been told by other women that they've heard or been told men say it. Gotcha. Alert the media folks, we've officially found the bigfoot of bad male behavior. Time to send out search parties, National Geographic and a camera crew of broke college kids using Kaden's dad's old camcorder. I'm sure we'll find the footage later.

 

It's a myth, using "boys will be boys" as an excuse for bad behavior — it's a damn urban legend. We've got whole blogs dedicated to fighting windmills because some woman somewhere once told her friend over a cup of ridiculously priced coffee, "My college roommate's best friend's cousin's lab partner once heard a guy say boys will be boys after he did something bad."

 

Meanwhile real men are just trying to barbecue and mind their business.

 

Ladies, have we ever considered maybe, just maybe, the issue isn’t that men are saying it but that we keep telling ourselves and the rest of the coven that men are saying it; creating a moral panic around what is essentially a rumor!?

 

Don Quixote would be proud of us, that's all I'm saying. I, however, am unimpressed.

 

#telephonegame #boyswillbeboys #rumorhasit #ladiesplease

As usual, left wingers keep lying to try to manifest reality. 

Links - 5th April 2026 (1 - Euthanasia in Canada)

More than 16,000 people chose MAID in 2024, but deaths 'stabilizing' (aka "More than 16,000 Canadians died by MAID in 2024 — 5% of all deaths in Canada: report") - " The United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities earlier this year called on Canada to repeal the 2021 law that expanded MAID eligibility to people whose deaths aren’t reasonably foreseeable out of concerns that people with disabilities are seeking MAID due to “unmet needs, a systemic failure of the State party,” according to a meeting summary."

Seeking death due to loneliness — inside Canada’s new MAID figures - "one in every 20 Canadian deaths is now due to assisted suicide... Canada has likely already surpassed the Netherlands as the world capital of assisted suicide As per the new report, Canada is second only to the Netherlands in terms of the percentage of overall deaths attributable to assisted suicide. In 2023, about five per cent of Dutch deaths were due to euthanasia, just ahead of Canada’s 4.7 per cent. But as detailed below, Canada’s growth rate is way higher than the Netherlands. The Dutch took 22 years to reach five per cent, compared to just seven years for Canada... Quebec accounted for a remarkable 36.5 per cent of all Canadian MAID deaths in 2023, despite representing less than a quarter of the national population. This easily makes it the world’s most euthanasia-heavy jurisdiction. Quebec’s 5,601 MAID deaths in 2023 represented 7.2 per cent of the province’s total deaths — about one in every 14. B.C. is not far behind; MAID now represents 6.1 per cent of all deaths in that province. For the first six years of legalized MAID in Canada, the rate of deaths grew by at least 30 per cent per year. This was the fastest and most sustained growth rate of any assisted suicide regime in the world, and it utterly blew past official expectations. As recently as 2018, Health Canada is on record as estimating that MAID provisions wouldn’t exceed 2.05 per cent of total deaths — a ratio that has now more than doubled. The new report shows that 2023 was the first year in which MAID deaths didn’t soar by the usual 30 per cent — but they still grew by 15.8 per cent. These remain wild numbers by international standards. In the likes of Switzerland or Belgium, for instance, euthanasia percentages have plateaued at around two per cent of total deaths — and there are some years in which the number of euthanasia deaths actually goes down. Even at 15.8 per cent growth, Canada is still well within a streak of soaring euthanasia cases unlike anything ever seen before. When applying for MAID, patients are asked to detail all the types of suffering they’re experiencing in order to determine if their condition qualifies as something “grievous and irremediable” — and thus eligible for death. Health Canada’s report reveals that 47.1 per cent of non-terminally ill Canadians who applied for MAID reported “isolation or loneliness” as one of the causes of their suffering. This was significantly higher than the number of terminally ill applicants who said the same (21.1 per cent)... just under half of all Canadian MAID cases (terminal and non-terminal) indicate that they want an early death in part lest they become a “perceived burden on family, friends or caregivers.”... This report is the first to count “non-verbal” requests for MAID as an official request. In prior years, you actually had to fill out a form before Health Canada would record that you’d officially made a request for a premature death. But now, any “intentional and deliberate request” is counted, presumably even if it’s just a “can I have MAID?” query lobbed at the nearest hospital worker. “This approach is expected to better capture more subtle demonstrations of interest in MAID,” it reads. The report notes that this change may result in the number of “rejected” MAID applications seeming inflated. But even then, in 2023 there were 15,343 MAID provisions against 915 requests deemed ineligible. So for every 17 MAID requests, there’s one rejected application. And even a rejected application is not necessarily a barrier to obtaining MAID anyway; the Canadian system allows a patient to simply travel to a new jurisdiction and try again."
Clear proof that loneliness is deadly and kills! Obviously the cause of death was loneliness, not euthanasia. And if you don't allow lonely people to be killed, this increases the "stigma" of mental health, which needs to be normalised

Canada Leads World in Organ Donations from Euthanasia - "A study published in the December 2022 issue of the American Journal of Transplantation finds Canada leading the world in harvesting organs from those who received medical assistance in dying... A longtime opponent of any form of euthanasia, Scheidl said it reminds her of suspected organ harvesting of executed prisoners in places such as the People’s Republic of China. “I think people are concerned," she said. "I know transplant teams would want to make sure that individuals who were euthanized were not coerced.”"

Great Canadian Moose on X - "CANADA IS PROOF THE WORLD CAN BE KIND, DIVERSE, AND BREATHTAKINGLY BEAUTIFUL ALL AT ONCE…"
One third of Canadians fine with assisted suicide for homelessness - "One third of Canadians fine with prescribing assisted suicide for homelessness. Roughly the same number told a poll they were fine with approving MAID for someone whose only affliction was poverty... Starting in March 2021, Canada became one of only a handful of countries to legalize assisted suicide even in instances where a patient does not have a terminal illness. Ever since, a Canadian can be approved for MAID simply for having a “grievous and irremediable medical condition.”... 20 per cent of respondents were fine with MAID being handed out to anybody for any reason. In other words, one fifth of respondents agreed with the sentiment “medical assistance in dying should always be allowed, regardless of who requests it.”   Notably, these most absolutist supporters of assisted suicide were pretty evenly distributed among age groups, regions and even political demographics... an Angus Reid Institute poll similarly found 61 per cent of Canadians favouring the country’s current MAID regime.   Canadian comfort with MAID may explain why it so quickly has become more widespread and liberalized than in almost any other jurisdiction offering legalized assisted suicide.   Canada is notable for its relative lack of checks on the procedure: MAID can be approved and administered by nurse practitioners whereas most countries require the approval of a physician. Canada is also experiencing a skyrocketing rate of MAID deaths well beyond anything experienced abroad."

Canadian man is denied surgery, instantly receives application for 'assisted dying' - "A Canadian man seeking surgery for a workplace-related injury was denied, while forms for requesting ‘medical assistance in dying’ were immediately granted to him.  The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition (EPC) republished the shocking story, originally posted at Canadian veteran Kelsi Sheren’s personal blog. The man in question believed the Canadian healthcare system would offer him ‘medical assistance in dying’ (MAiD) before agreeing to surgery, and he was correct. He received the forms for MAiD immediately and was denied surgery...   Unfortunately, this story is not rare. Live Action News has reported how other Canadian citizens, including veterans, have been refused government assistance for corrective surgery and equipment needed for day-to-day living, and instead have been offered assisted suicide...   Veteran Mark Meincke related how a caseworker thrust the idea of assisted suicide on him. “I was asking for a completely separate service and supports for neurological injuries and [the caseworker] said, ‘Oh, just by the way, if, up the road, you have suicidal thoughts… [MAID is] better than blowing your brains out against the wall,’” Meincke said.  Canadian journalist Sheila Gunn Reid followed a 2,200-page paper trail from the Veterans Affairs Ministry documenting veterans’ cases, and found that caseworkers repeatedly suggested MAiD to ailing veterans. Veteran Affairs Canada covered up the cases when they caused a scandal.  “Nearly a dozen veterans experiencing acute post-traumatic stress disorder or asking for aids to daily living to deal with their service-related injuries came forward over recent years to say that their Veterans Affairs Canada case workers suggested a medically assisted death to them,” Reid reported...   Sheren wrote about how this is true in Canada. “MAID was sold to the public as a lie[;] it was supposed to be a compassionate choice available to people facing unbearable, incurable suffering — never a convenient alternative to providing actual medical care. Yet, it is now dangerously obvious that it has become a shortcut for a strained healthcare system drowning under financial and staffing pressures.”"

Family of woman forced to transfer facilities for medical assistance in dying takes case to court - "The case was brought by the family of Samantha O’Neill, a woman who had to endure what her family says was a painful transfer from St. Paul’s Hospital to a hospice administered by Vancouver Coastal Health in order to receive MAID."
Family of woman forced to transfer for medical assistance in dying takes case to court : r/canadanews
Of course, left wingers want to defund any religious organisations which don't want to kill people, and others want there to be no religious hospitals. If you don't want to be forced to kill people, that's Theocracy

Full article: When Death Becomes Therapy: Canada’s Troubling Normalization of Health Care Provider Ending of Life - "Undeniably, a strikingly higher number of people die with direct health care provider involvement in Canada’s euthanasia regime, euphemistically termed “Medical Assistance in Dying” [MAiD], than under a California-style assisted suicide system. Daryl Pullman (Citation2023) rightly identifies several key reasons: the fact that in about all cases it involves a lethal injection by health care providers, rather than assisted-suicide with self-administration of medication; the law’s vague and broadly interpreted access criteria; “acquiescence and […] indifference of federal and provincial authorities, the courts, and medical associations”; and, briefly mentioned, the failure to treat ending of life as a last resort (Pullman Citation2023). Particularly the last points are worth exploring further since they are likely among the key reasons why Canada’s regime results in substantially higher percentages of euthanasia deaths even when compared to the few other liberal euthanasia regimes, and with an accumulation of reports of arguably troubling practices. These points are also connected to the law’s origin in constitutional litigation, which has had a remarkable impact on the Canadian debate and policy."

Disability & MAID: Three-in-five concerned lack of adequate care may push vulnerable to consider assisted dying
Damn religious extremists!

Canadian doctors reveal regret over euthanizing patients who were simply obese or poor - "A doctor in Ontario wrote in his patient’s report that while the man had a severe lung disease, what drove him to euthanasia was ‘mostly because he is homeless, in debt and cannot tolerate the idea of (long-term care) of any kind.’  In another case, a doctor expressed their conflict at providing euthanasia to a patient simply because she was obese and depressed. Meanwhile, an elderly woman wanted to die because she was struggling with the grief of losing her husband. An Associated Press investigation that involved obtaining internal data from the provincial government in Ontario revealed dozens of online posts by doctors on public forums.   Doctors provided the AP with messages shared on the private forums for assisted dying specialists on the condition of anonymity.   The messages came from doctors who both performed euthanasia and assessed people who requested it.   Many said they were uncomfortable with ending the lives of non-medically vulnerable people.   Others felt conflicted about providing euthanasia to people not suffering from terminal illnesses, but those experiencing grief or being obese. One Ontario doctor who spoke with the AP revealed that their patient had severe obesity and depression, saying she felt like a ‘useless body taking up space.'  She had withdrawn from activities and social life and said she had ‘no purpose,' according to the doctor who reviewed her case.   While she was not actively dying, doctors said euthanasia was warranted because obesity is ‘a medical condition which is indeed grievous and irremediable.’  Meanwhile, a woman in her 80s petitioned for assisted death after losing her husband, sibling, and cat in a six-week period, according to AP reporting.  On top of that, she was on dialysis, an exhausting tri-weekly procedure that has someone hooked up to a blood-filtering machine for about four hours at a time.  But the official who reviewed her request said it had nothing to do with a medical condition - but rather it was because of her grief. Because she had lost her support system, doctors said her suffering was permanent and thus approved her request... Alex Schadenberg, director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, says ever-more people are approved for euthanasia even when they suffer from nothing more than 'frailty' and other seemingly benign conditions... As part of its investigation, the AP obtained a copy of a classified report written by Ontario's Ministry of the Solicitor General which acknowledged past mistakes it has made implementing its expanded MAiD law. One of these 'lessons learned' as the document puts it, was a case involving a 74-year-old blind patient with high blood pressure, a history of stroke, and other health issues.   The man was interested in MAiD due to his vision loss and lack of hope that it would improve.  The official report identified three instances where legal safeguards were not followed: no specialist in the patient's nonterminal condition was consulted, discussions about alternatives to euthanasia were limited, and the procedure was scheduled to fit the spouse’s preferred timing. Another non-terminal patient euthanized was Rosina Kamis, 41.  Ms Kamis had been facing eviction, needed a crowdfunding site to help pay for food, and was afraid that she would 'suffer alone.'   She also feared being institutionalized, and saw MAID as 'the best solution for all.'   She suffered from leukemia, but her condition was not terminal. She told her attorney that she was experiencing 'mental suffering,' not physical. The 2021 expansion of the law made it legal for people like her who are suffering from grievous and irremediable medical conditions but whose death is not imminent to qualify for MAiD.  Ms Kamis was approved for MAiD and chose to die on September 26, 2021, the date of her ex-husband's birthday. She passed away in her basement apartment after a doctor gave her a lethal injection. Another Canadian, Lee Landry, 65, told officials overseeing his petition in 2022 that he 'doesn't want to die' but has applied for MAiD because he can't afford to live comfortably. A doctor has given one of two signatures to allow it.   Mr Landry uses a wheelchair and has several other disabilities that mean he is eligible for MAiD, including epilepsy and diabetes. But until recently, he was able to live comfortably, sharing his modest home in Medicine Hat, Alberta, with his service dog.  Changes to his state benefits when he turned 65 in May meant his income was cut and he's now left with around $120 per month after paying for medical bills and essentials. He also faces homelessness. Mr Landry is awaiting the decision of a second doctor who has assessed his eligibility. If that doctor rejects the application, Mr Landry says he will simply 'shop' around for another who's prepared to sign off on his death - something that's allowed under Canada's assisted dying law.   And in 2023, Tracey Thompson, 55, from Toronto, also applied to be euthanized after long Covid left her jobless and in constant pain... she hasn't been able to work and has run out of her savings. She also has no family to speak of and has lost all her friends.  Now, Ms Thompson is seeking to end her life through Canada's assisted dying program, widely considered one of the most permissive in the world... While doctors are ethically tied in knots about the number of patients they’re seeing die whose deaths were not otherwise imminent, human rights advocates argue the law that restricts MAiD for people who are severely mentally ill is ‘discriminatory.’ Dying with Dignity, an end-of-life advocacy group, is asking lawmakers quash the mental-health exclusion.  But, medical professionals have written on forums that the cause of disenfranchised and mentally ill people seeking euthanasia was not hopelessness but rather a lack of sufficient government safeguards... many experts in Europe worry Canadian officials are pushing the boundaries of what is ethically acceptable.  Theo Boer, professor of health care ethics at Groningen University in the Netherlands, told the AP: ‘Canada seems to be providing euthanasia for social reasons, when people don't have the financial means, which would be a big taboo in Europe.  ‘That may be what Canadians want, but they would still benefit from some honest self-reflection about what is going on.’"
The "myth" of the slippery slope strikes again

Private forums show Canadian doctors struggle with euthanizing vulnerable patients - "experts tasked with delivering euthanasia to people who aren’t dying have called it “morally distressing” and say the legal provisions are too vague to be protective, obliging doctors and nurses to at times end the lives of people they believe might otherwise be saved.  “I don’t want (euthanasia) to become the solution to every kind of suffering out there,” a physician wrote to colleagues on one of the private forums...   Unlike many other countries, Canada doesn’t require that patients exhaust all medical treatments before seeking death...   Doctors and nurses “do not treat MAiD as an option of last resort,” said an August report published by the Christian think tank Cardus.  The nonprofit organization Inclusion Canada regularly hears from people with disabilities who are offered euthanasia, including one disabled woman whose physiotherapist suggested it when she sought help for a bruised hip, said executive vice president Krista Carr.  “Our response to the intolerable suffering of people with disabilities is: ‘Your life is not worth living,’” she said. “We’ll just offer them the lethal injection, and we’ll offer it readily.”...   Cases of homelessness appear regularly and spark some of the most heated debate...   Experts not linked to the forums said that while doctors and nurses need private space for discussion, the lack of transparency about controversial cases is alarming.  “The question about who gets euthanasia is a societal question,” said Kasper Raus, a researcher at Ghent University’s Bioethics Institute in Belgium. “This is a procedure that ends people’s lives, so we need to be closely monitoring any changes in who is getting it.  “If not, the entire practice could change and veer away from the reasons that we legalized euthanasia.”... in Ontario, more than three quarters of people euthanized when their death wasn’t imminent required disability support before their death in 2023...   Poverty doesn’t appear to disproportionately affect patients with terminal diseases who are euthanized, according to the leaked data. And experts say no other country that has legalized euthanasia has seen a marked number of deaths in impoverished people...   She predicted legal consequences if officials introduce more safeguards for euthanasia: “We’ll just be back in court with somebody saying, ‘You interfered with my basic human rights.’”"

Assisted dying ‘abused’ in Canada, admits group that helped legalise it - "members of the British Columbia Civil liberties Association (BCCLA), the group that spearheaded efforts to legalise assisted dying, have raised fears the practice is being “abused”.  Staff members also fear disabled people in Canada are being coerced by doctors into choosing to end their lives.  It comes as data revealed by The

Telegraph last week showed those on lower incomes who were offered the scheme were more likely to opt for it... they spoke of a patient who had been approved for assisted dying on the grounds of suffering from hearing loss.  On the same call, it was claimed some medical colleges in Canada had been advising against referring to MAiD on patients’ long-form death certificates, in a move which could distort the true numbers of people using it. One staff member admitted feeling “very uncomfortable” about the group’s previous campaigning on assisted suicide.  Speaking on the call, one of the two current BCCLA employees said: “It is the social and material aspect of [patients] disability and how that isn’t supported and how that’s treated in the community that’s creating intolerable conditions.  “In my view, that’s not proper,” they said, adding that healthcare providers should not raise the subject of MAiD with patients as “it’s far too easy for that to become coercive”... Canadian medical and legal experts have warned that opening the door to assisted dying could lead to the limitations on who is eligible being stripped away. “One of the most worrying aspects of the Canadian experiment is it shows that once you start legalising, there is a risk that a significant number of physicians normalise this practice,” said Trudo Lemmens, a professor of law at the university of Toronto who has testified before Canadian parliamentary committees on the introduction of assisted dying.  “It’s like putting fuel on the fire. I’m not sure it can be easily contained,” he continued.  “Once it’s implemented, there will be advocacy groups pushing for further expansion, and I see that already in the English debate.”  In a poignant example of how the vulnerable are being targeted, The Telegraph earlier this month revealed how a grandmother suffering with breast cancer was offered assisted dying by the very doctors who were about to give her a life-saving mastectomy... The Telegraph also spoke to another patient, Roger Foley, 49, who lodged a legal complaint after being offered assisted suicide four times... “Are they going to have the same passion to support vulnerable people to live as they had in the past to let them die?”... At the time, Carter’s lawyer Joseph A Arvay of the BCCLA argued that the risk of people unnecessarily ending their lives through an assisted dying scheme was negligible."

Meme - Cam Dabby Drip Drop: "Finally seeing commercials with all white people again"
End Wokeness @EndWokeness: "Canadian retailer Simons promotes assisted suicide in new ad campaign:"
Oddly, another version of this got blocked but yet another didn't

Meme - Yuan Yi Zhu @yuanyi_z: "As @AlexanderRaikin  pointed out, BC also has a billing code for MAiD visits to children between the ages of 0 and 1, which is illegal under existing legislation ($45,87)."
Alexander Raikin @AlexanderRaikin: "Is British Columbia ready for infanticide? Well, it already mapped out the payment schedule for it."
Left wingers were very upset about abortion trigger laws, but of course it's good to be prepared to euthanise children. Which some would call literal infanticide, but of course they're far right conspiracy theorists spreading misinformation

We were promised MAiD would be rare. Instead, Canadian euthanasia deaths are soaring - "When the Supreme Court of Canada decriminalized euthanasia and assisted suicide, it tasked Parliament to create “a stringently limited, carefully monitored system of exceptions.” Instead, within a decade, Canada created the world’s largest and fastest-growing euthanasia program... This rapid growth rate is a uniquely Canadian problem. While the number of euthanasia deaths is increasing in every jurisdiction that legalized permissive euthanasia, no other jurisdiction has ever seen such a rate of growth in euthanasia, especially not so soon after legalization.  It took the Netherlands, the first country to effectively decriminalize euthanasia in 1981 and to formally legalize it in 2002, 32 years for it to become the only jurisdiction in the world where more than 3 percent of total deaths were caused by euthanasia. Not even next-door Belgium, which legalized euthanasia two months after the Netherlands, has ever passed the 3 percent threshold.  But then Canada legalized euthanasia. It took Canada just six years after legalization to cross the 3 percent threshold. In the seventh year, Canada crossed the 4 percent line. By the time we receive the latest year of mortality data for 2023, if current trends hold, Canada is set to pass 4.7 percent of total deaths to be caused by euthanasia. Proponents of MAiD frequently claim that these numbers were expected. Stefanie Green, the president of the Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers, for instance, claimed two years ago in a parliamentary committee that “data to date suggests that the expected number of Canadians are accessing and receiving MAID.”  Yet the reality is that no one expected this increase. Not the courts, who believed it would be limited, nor the lead lawyer for the plaintiff in Carter v. Canada who argued that it would only be a “last resort.”  Not the New England Journal of Medicine, which predicted in 2020 only 2,000 deaths annually (it was 7,511 MAiD deaths that year). Not Health Canada, which predicted in 2018 that Canada’s “steady state” of MAiD deaths would be 2 percent of total deaths, and even when Health Canada doubled its estimate in 2022, it predicted that Canada would reach 4 percent only in the 2030s—instead of just months after. Not the Trudeau government, which continues to maintain that MAiD is only for those “where everything has been tried,” as then Minister of Justice David Lametti testified, or for those who “have tried everything imaginable to address their suffering,” as claimed Ya’ara Saks, then parliamentary secretary to the minister of Families, Children and Social Development. Not the Canadian Medical Association, which believed euthanasia would be only appropriate for “rare occasions.”  Not even the critics. Bioethicist Margaret Somerville testified to the Special Joint Committee on Physician-Assisted Dying on February 4, 2016, that she estimated that there could be “between 11,000 and 12,000 Canadians being killed by lethal injection” every year if Canada followed the Belgium and Netherlands model—although “I could almost not believe it when I worked out those figures.” It was intended to shock the committee, yet in 2022, we have already surpassed Somerville’s worst-case estimate. MAiD is simply no longer exceptional or rare. Canada now serves as an international clarion call for what happens when governments prioritize an assisted death over an assisted life—as even supporters of euthanasia abroad distance themselves from Canada’s MAiD program.  It is a scandal, it seems, everywhere but here at home. In terms of funding, we simply prioritize death care over health care. The facts speak for themselves... while wait times for medical care have been increasing to all-time highs, the median number of days for MAiD, from request to death, is disturbingly short. Not even COVID-19 increased wait times for MAiD. The median number was only 11 days in 2022; the previous year it was nine days."