How Did Canadian Killer Get A Shotgun? Give Me A Break!

Canada, GUNS, Individual Rights, Jihad

As much as I love Canada—I’m a citizen—I could not live in a place that practically outlaws the right to defend life and property. Ordinary Canadian citizens are de facto barred from owning firearms. Read Second-Amendment scholar David Kopel’s account of Canada’s draconian gun laws:

… it is virtually impossible for an ordinary citizen to obtain a permit to carry a loaded handgun for self-defense. Handgun carry permits for self-protection are issued “only in exceptional cases” where the issuing officer is “satisfied” of the applicant’s need. A 600 page National Firearms Manual, prepared by the Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, provides ample reasons for an officer to accept or deny a self-protection application as he sees fit. In contrast, permits to carry unloaded, locked handguns to target ranges are readily obtainable.
… How strict the police departments are in issuing handgun target licenses varies from region to region. In some jurisdictions, a person might legally buy a handgun, but the police would hold the gun for several months, while the central government in Ottawa completed its paperwork. Only then would the police allow the gun to be taken to a target range.

Notice how law-enforcement are first to champion gun control against the populace, by using the pretext that it’ll stop criminals from arming themselves. This is the case in the US too. Currently, in Washington State, one is treated to TV footage of weepy “vaginas” (not my coinage; I’m innocent here) plumping for a ballot initiative that would, as these simpletons promise, stop violence against women. Explains Rachel Alexander:

I-594 has been cleverly drafted to sound like it merely makes small changes to gun laws, not a flat-out ban or gun registration scheme. This is why it is so dangerous. People are less likely to oppose it; in fact, polls show that even a majority of gun owners – 54 percent of the 35 percent of Washington residents who own a gun – are in favor of it.

The initiative, or so the professional criers claims, is backed by thousands of policemen.

But I digress. Gun restrictions impact the law-abiding citizen; criminals by definition are outlaws. The criminal who “ambushed the Parliament building in Ottawa” had no qualms about violating Canada’s pernicious anti-gun laws to carry out an attack on the Canadian parliament.

Still, the moron media stateside pushes more gun control in … Canada.

Wal-Mart’s Good For The Health

Capitalism, Economy, Free Markets, Labor

To ameliorate the effects of the Obamacare wrecking ball, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., is venturing into the business of providing primary health care. For $40, the price of a copay (mine are way more), “you can walk into a Wal-Mart clinic and see a doctor.” It’s “just $4 for Walmart U.S. employees and family members.”

Sandra Fluke: You can have a pregnancy test at Wal-Mart for … $3.00.

Via MarketWatch:

On Friday, a Walmart Care Clinic opened in Dalton, Ga., six months after Walmart U.S., the retailer’s biggest unit, entered the business of providing primary health care. It now operates a dozen clinics in rural Texas, South Carolina and Georgia and has increased its target for openings this year to 17. A … cholesterol test [will cost] $8. A typical retail clinic offers acute care only. But a Walmart Care Clinic also treats chronic conditions such as diabetes. (Walmart U.S. also leases space in its stores to 94 clinics owned by others that set their own pricing.)
“It was very important to us that we establish a retail price in the health-care industry because price leadership matters to us,” said Jennifer LaPerre, a Walmart U.S. senior director responsible for health and wellness, in an interview.

Let the anti-Wal Mart jousting begin.

Typically, critics of Wal Mart—for example, Marian Kester Coombs, writing for The American Conservative—will do nothing to trace the mysterious mechanism by which Wal-Mart is said to impoverish. By offering “the lowest possible prices all the time, not just during sales”? What precisely is the economic process that accounts for Wal-Mart’s ability to “expel jobs and technology from our own country”? Competition? Offering a product people choose to buy?

“Protecting the home market,” which is what TAC writer advocates, is to the detriment of consumers. It forces them to subsidize less efficient local industries, making them the poorer for it. To keep inefficient industries in the lap of luxury, hundreds of others are doomed to shrink or go under.

The writer aforementioned also froths at the mouth over “the teenage girl in Bangladesh … forced to sew pocket flaps onto 120 pairs of pants per hour for 13 cents per hour.” It sounds dreadful. However, the economic reality is this: Wal-Mart is either offering higher, the same or lower wages than the wages workers were earning before its arrival in Bangladesh. The company would find it hard to attract workers if it was paying less, or the same as other companies. Ergo, Wal-Mart is a benefactor that pays the kind of wage unavailable prior to its arrival. More material, if the entrepreneur were forced to pay workers in excess of their productivity, he would eventually have to disinvest. What will the Bangladeshi teenage girl do when that happens?

Tasteful Vs. Teletart

Aesthetics, Gender, Pop-Culture

When everywhere, on TV and in real life, badly dressed, over-exposed women and girls assault the eye—it doesn’t hurt to be reminded what class looks like. Fifty three seconds into this touching interview conducted with Kim Campbell, wife of Alzheimer’s-stricken musician Glenn Cambell, the camera pans out to reveal Mrs. Campbell’s elegant attire. She is wearing black, knee-high boots, and a long, grey, well-tailored skirt nipped in high at the waist.

Opposite Mrs. Campbell sits Fox News’ coarse-looking Gretchen Carlson. She is dressed in a cheap-looking turquoise slip hitched almost as high as her thighs. This is the standard-issue outfit (and behavior) on Fox News. Too awful.

On BBC News and RT one can still find the odd intellectual, who knows a thing or two about a topic. But in markets catering to American tastes—that includes Al Jazeera America—it’s teletarts all the way.

Ashoka (And Mother) Mukpo’s Quest For Exotica

Africa, Canada, Critique, Healthcare, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Multiculturalism

OK, I’ll say it. He’s a lily white Canadian-American with the name Ashoka Mukpo. Mr. Mukpo loves Liberia almost more than life itself. This is how his family aggrandized Ashoka’s Liberian pursuits:

Mukpo was a researcher for the Sustainable Development Institute, a Liberia-based nonprofit shining light on concerns of workers in mining camps outside Monrovia. And “was into the culture. … He seemed to have a lot of passion for it.”

(CBC)

Days before his infection with Ebola became public, Mukpo was hired by NBC as a cameraman in that country. (Wasn’t he a “researcher” of sorts?)

Instead of assuming the name of his “birth father, a prominent Rhode Island doctor,” Ashoka and brother “took the name of his mother’s first husband, who founded the Shambhala Buddhism community”—upon a cursory read of this Wiki entry, Shambhala seems like a cult of sort, primed to ensnare a certain type of westerner.

The quest for exotica trumps honoring thy father.

Throughout the interview this married couple gave Sean Hannity, Mother Mukpo came across as pretentious, uppity and worse. Ashoka’s stepfather, Mitchell Levy, seemed perfectly nice; an affable fellow.

Still, Ashoka’s mother was referred to as Diana Mukpo, and not Diana Levy. The infected cameraman’s sullen mom clearly preferred to take on the name of her former husband than assume the name of the man at her side: Dr. Levy, “director of intensive care at Rhode Island Hospital.”

Oh, Ashoka Mukpo is said by the faithful to be “a tulku, the reincarnation of a Buddhist master teacher.”

“Ashoka Mukpo (center) with his mother, Diana (third from left) and birth father Mitchell Levy (far right) during a visit to Tibet in 2002. (Konchok.org)”