Merry Christmas, if you’re into that sort of thing!

Hello.

Nice to read you, David. Hope your recovery is going well and that no other problems pill up during it.

I read an article about the presence of Chelsea Manning at a rally of your old friend Cernovitch. She said that it was to confront and gather intel about them, and i do not see why i should not believe her. But some personnalities seem to fear that she fells for the alt-right, Assange-style.
Does anyone have more information about this ?

Have a nice day.

Thank you for the article, Ariblester. It covers the event with more precision than the one i have read.

A woman, an investigator, and a quest for justice in China

In this Dec. 18, 2017, photo, Chinese labor activist Hua Haifeng watches as his daughter walks through the gates of her school on the outskirts of Xiangyang in central China’s Hubei Province. Apple Inc. and Ivanka Trump’s brand both rely on Chinese suppliers that have been criticized for workplace abuses. But they’ve taken contrasting approaches to dealing with supply chain problems. When Apple learned thousands of student workers at an iPhone supplier had been underpaid, it helped them get their money back. After three men investigating labor abuses at factories that made Ivanka Trump shoes were arrested last year, neither Ivanka Trump nor her brand spoke out. (AP Photo – Mark Schiefelbein)

China Labor Watch was closing in on factories that made Ivanka Trump merchandise, including Ganzhou Huajian International Shoe City Co. . . .

China Labor Watch ultimately sent two men to work undercover. The group obtained a video of a manager berating a worker for apparently arranging shoes in the wrong order.

“If I see them f—ing messed up again,” the manager yells, “I’ll beat you right here.” Another worker was left with blood dripping from his head after a manager hit him with the sharp end of a high heeled shoe, according to three eyewitnesses who spoke to the AP.

The Huajian Group, which runs the factory in Ganzhou, denied all the allegations as “completely not true to the facts, taken out of context, exaggerated.” In April, China Labor Watch laid out its initial findings in a letter to Ivanka Trump at the White House.

She did not respond.

http://enews.earthlink.net/static/1719736684/harvest_xml/NEWS/img/20180124/c9b85c19-d7ba-4f55-a675-7fce4d70fe40.jpg

http://enews.earthlink.net/article/top?guid=20180124/c9b85c19-d7ba-4f55-a675-7fce4d70fe40

There’s an article on ROK at the moment. It’s about how to avoid bad martial arts training. In fairness a lot of the advice is pretty spot on.

One bit is about “flashy techniques”. The author of the article says you should question whether a technique would work against someone who knew what they were doing. I’d wholeheartedly endorse that; but then he manages to put his own creepy spin on it.

Simply ask yourself, “Would these techniques work on a trained fighter?” Or hell, ask yourself, “Would these techniques work on a 15 year old girl that was actively resisting assault?” If not, look elsewhere for training.

It perhaps says something about the ROK demographic that their primary concern for martial arts techniques is whether they would be effective in overpowering a 15 year old girl whom you were trying to assault. Charming.

Some interesting comments from Doonesbury’s “Say What?” section….

“Does the applicant speak English? Can they support themselves and their families financially? Do they have a skill that will add to the U.S. economy?”
— WH adviser Stephen Miller, whose grandmother arrived in the U.S. in the early 1900s speaking only Yiddish, according to the Resistance Genealogy project

“We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”
— Rep. Steve King, whose grandmother arrived from Germany at the age of four

“So Dan, let’s say Victor Scavino arrives from Canelli, Italy, in 1904, then brother Hector in 1905, brother Gildo in 1912, sister Esther in 1913, and sister Clotilde and their father Giuseppe in 1916, and they live together in New York. Do you think that would count as chain migration?”
— #ResistanceGenealogy founder Jennifer Mendelsohn to chain migration foe and WH director of social media Dan Scavino

… “…yeah, but we’re white, we’re here, they’re not white and we don’t want ’em here….” (/s)

Jennifer Mendelsohn from a CNN piece “resistance geneology”

Remember the Iranian protests, that were talked about for a day or so then never mentioned again because the Orange one having sex with a porn star is far more interesting?
Lawyer who took off her hijab in protest goes missing in Iran

@Skiriki

Doubled his weight in 9 days? That is seriously good going! 😀

So I wake up this morning and take the elastic off the ol’ Toronto Star and the front page reveals this:

https://www.thestar.com/news/queenspark/2018/01/24/tory-leader-patrick-brown-denies-allegations-of-misconduct.html

Patrick Brown resigns as PC leader amid sexual misconduct allegations

The paper then received my full mouth of Diet Pepsi.

Ontario politics is irksomely murky at the best of times, even for somebody as politically plugged in as me, a guy who lives in the capital of the province. I was in elementary school during the Rae years, when the nominally left-wing New Democratic Party took power following decades of Tory rule and a 5 years Liberal government that fell after the failure of the Meech Lake Accord and a cratering economy. In an echo of what happened when Bill Clinton came into office in the States, Bob Rae enacted a policy of austerity on the civil service in response to the budget shortfall, which was wildly unpopular and resulted in the unpaid “Rae Days” off, which were essentially days off of school because the teachers couldn’t work. By the time of the next election, Rae’s unpopularity allowed the reactionary Harris Tories to sweep into power and “Mike the Knife” set to work punishing welfare recipients, cutting taxes and downloading all the costs to the municipalities. Amidst the turmoil of the ’97 “Megacity” merger of Toronto, the local school board was in flux, with a slew of teacher and support staff strikes over the next five years as the newly-formed Toronto District School Board grappled with the unions during contract negotiations.

Practically set up to fail, the trustees were stripped of their power to set the budget and the Harris government appointed a stooge named Paul Christie to slash the support budget right when I was a senior in high school. Secretaries and social workers were laid off, after-school programs disappeared and when Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals took power in 2003, I was already in university and no longer witness to the TDSB’s decline. While I voted for McGuinty, I was dismayed to see he maintained the staff reductions. Regardless, my experience with seeing the pisspoor treatment of teachers that I cared about by the Harris Tories poisoned me against the Ontario PC Party for the decade to come.

All that said, Dalton McGuinty was a weasel whose cronyism and opportunism led to a gas plant cancellation scandal that cost taxpayers billions and left him skulking out of Queen’s Park, pitchforking current Premier Kathleen Wynne into the position to clean up his mess. I personally think that Wynne has done as good a job as anybody could given the extent of McGuinty’s fuck-ups, but her privatization of Hydro One left a bad taste in my mouth despite voting for her government in the last election. Still, with the NDP’s rightward lurch and knowing what Harris’ protege’s in the PC party would do, I voted for her with gusto.

The personal animosity towards Wynne is what confounds me. As of December of last year, she has the lowest approval rating of any provincial premier at 20%. In April, it was as low as 12%. I can think of only four reasons why this is the case:

1) If I were charitable, I’d say it was because she was part of McGuinty’s cabinet in a government that is now 15 years old and despite basic managerial competency (most of the time), has made some fundamental missteps.

But more likely:

2) She’s a woman.

3) She’s openly gay.

4) Isn’t “bangable”, to use the parlance of the modern douchebag.

Needless to say, this shakes up an election season only four months out. I will likely end up voting Liberal this time (I quite like my local MPP) and while anything can happen in four months and despite her unpopularity, I can’t see the Tories rebounding from this in time.

So yeah, Ontario politics. *sigh* You know as great as Toronto can be, I still get the sense that the small-c conservativism of the descendants of United Empire Loyalists and the fatuous Family Compact still pervades the province. You can still see it in the pages of the Globe and Mail (which still employs serial plagiarist Margaret Wente to my bafflement). Even our provincial flag was essentially a middle finger to the national Maple Leaf flag adopted in 1967.

Ah well, at least the resentment towards Quebec seems to have cooled in the past generation….

@Skiriki: could you post some pictures of Big Boi here, or at least the Twitter feed URL again? I don’t want to search the thread…

their primary concern for martial arts techniques is whether they would be effective in overpowering a 15 year old girl whom you were trying to assault

I don’t think ROK can produce an article that doesn’t at some point include a reason for or method of abusing women, but that is ghastly – he is acknowledging that he might like to assault teen girls, and that his readers might like to assault teen girls, and are learning martial arts is partly so that they can more effectively assault teen girls.

The adolescent girl thing might be casual hyperbole…but discussing martial arts in terms of assaulting people? Really?

I do like to post the odd nice thing, and this one is a very odd nice thing, thanks to the unlikely chain of circumstances involved.

@Kat

So . . . a lie that is both taken out of context and an exaggeration?

Sounds like satire!