Fragile Bird

Has a bill been proposed yet regarding the wall to be built at the Canadian border? Or is Canada going to pay for it?

Spocky, the only thing Spanish cities are really notorious for is pickpockets. Do be careful!

I see a court has decided the use of the Emergencies statute to clear Ottawa after their police force turned out to be so inept was not justified. I guess not enough hot tubs were brought in, and not enough people pissed on the war memorial, not enough lives were disrupted, not enough violas threatened, and the government wasn’t humiliated enough. The feds are appealing.

The story said he bought a small house outside Las Vegas, and “even if it wasn’t a mansion”, it was all his.

I just saw a story that popped up on Google, about a guy who worked at the Burger King at Las Vegas airport. Hell, he may have served me on one of the occasions we took my parents there. After 27 years of service, BK honored his years of service by giving him a goody bag with candy and pens and other such crap on it. He did a TikTok video showing the stuff. A single father with two children, he struggled to keep a roof over their heads. One of his daughters did a GoFundMe page to raise some retirement money for him, and as of the end of December $450,000 had been donated. Now, I know BK wouldn’t have given him anything remotely like that kind of money, but if his wages had been living wages maybe his life and the lives of his children would have been a lot less hand to mouth. And hey, Americans, does the IRS tax donations made on GoFundMe pages?

God bless!

A story popped up on my Google page that said the state of Virginia had been reviewing their 2020 election numbers, as Trump kept saying the results were wrong. Trump was correct. Largely due to human error programs were not properly run and guess what happened? Biden got short changed about 1648 votes and Trump got credited with about 2327 too many. Funny how consistently Trump makes accusations against other people that actually are things that he’s doing. (Not that he was responsible, it’s just funny!)

Wasn’t the weather largely to blame for the low turnout? The daytime temperatures started around -15 which is -26C, rising to maybe -8, or -22C, but with the windchill the temperatures were as low as -30, -34C. Who the hell wants to go out and vote in those temperatures?

I see the other current thread is gone, I thought the two threads would be combined. A couple of days ago the top ten coldest places in the world were all in Canada. Yesterday’s list says the coldest place on earth was a town in Siberia, but 18 of the 20 coldest places on earth were here in Canada. Number 18 was another town in Russia. These cold temperatures are ones that will kill you very quickly if you aren’t properly dressed, and will burn any part of your body not protected within a minute or two. Frostbite is seriously dangerous.

Lol, I asked a few days ago.

Parts of the North West Territories are seeing -49 today, which is -56.2 F, and with the wind chill it’s -57, or -70 F. Edmonton, Alberta saw -43 at the airport, -45 F (-50 is the crossing point for C and F), -53 with the wind chill (-63 F). A lot of flights got cancelled, the equipment was too cold to run.

Friends of mine told me that snowstorms in Wisconsin have created snow drifts as high as the street light poles. Anyone from Wisconsin here? Years ago other friends showed me pictures of the father and his son standing beside a street light, shining at their feet. New Brunswick can get a lot of snow in winter….

@Starkess I don’t think I’ll bother with trying to pick up where I left off, then. When I was listening to the book great mention was made of a certain character being missing and understood to be killed in battle, or maybe not missing just killed. The first thing that crossed my mind was, well, I guess we’ll meet them before the end of the book. And reading the first four pages of the next book I saw I was right. While it might be painful for us to read because of cliches, perhaps it will open the readers to trying other fantasy books, so some good may come out of it.

We got about 5 c of snow last night, finally the predicted storm, but damned if the temperature didn’t rise and it turned into rain. I went out at 10:00 pm and shoveled the slush so it wouldn’t turn into an uglier mess when the temperatures drop today. You could feel the cold moving in, we had nasty winds that started in the afternoon and were a sad reminder that we’re about to have a sharp drop this week. The weather changes the further north you go and the weather service has been giving snow and wind warnings for the higher ground that starts just above Toronto. Better them than us.

Lol, yes!

Er, what about the other thread I started? Combine the two?

See, you guys are saying things about Britain and slavery that I don’t think are right. I double-checked the Wikipedia article on slavery and Britain never passed any laws on slavery and courts repeatedly said slaves that landed in Britain became free. Of course Brits who returned from foreign lands with slaves tried to hold on them, but slaves that ran were usually deemed to be free. I see that for a period of time the law was “unsettled” but the courts didn’t seem to think so. What was going on in the colonies was a whole different matter. I can’t find anything that says Britain had laws about the slave trade in the colonies, but I don’t know enough about how the British ran their centuries of slave trade. They just bought slaves in Africa and took them across the ocean to the Americas? When abolition was passed in 1807 they just declared no British person could engage in the slave trade? I see the 1833 act applied to all British colonies. I don’t see any British laws of partus sequitur ventrem, just laws in colonies, particularly the US colonies. And as for fathers or mothers, I see the British common law was that if you were born in Britain you were British, no matter who your parents were. If you were born outside of Britain, both parents had to be British, until the British Nationality Act 1772, made the provision about children being British if their fathers alone were British, so it wasn’t “always” through the father.

“Oh look, what a fabulous new software system we’ve installed! Worth every penny! Turns out the Post Office is losing so much money because there are so many crooks running post offices! Hand out those bonuses, guys!”

Yes yes, US history, but Haley isn’t the child of a slave and she was born after 1868. And your Wikipedia article points to the Romans being the originators of the law, not the British. And goes on to explain the law was passed because a mixed race woman with a British father was recognized by the Virginia courts as a British citizen because her father was British. The decision was overturned on appeal, but a further appeal to the general assembly restored the original decision. That’s when partus sequitur ventrem was passed, because so many children were fathered by Europeans and Brits, problematic for the slave owners. And of course, it was the slave states that passed the law, not all US states. As for the importance of the mother, as I mentioned, that of course changed once the child was born. They then became the property of their fathers, just like their mothers. The struggle for women’s rights was the next big fight.

I wouldn‘t dwell on that British ruling as the precedent. I think that countries around the world have looked to the mother for hundreds of years, centuries probably. The baby comes out of the mother, that can’t be faked. Who the father is can be faked. After I re-read Josephine Tey’s “A Daughter of Time” for the first time since I was a teen (a wonderful book, named by the British mystery writers association as the best mystery of the century in 1999) I read a great deal about Richard III and the search for genetic confirmation of the bones, found in a Canadian, btw. They looked at a number of noble families in the UK and discovered in a couple of them “a genetic anomaly” ie the wife had an affair and that line carried on, not the expected line inherited from the Lancasters. Btw, whoever keeps calling Trump Richard III, you’re wrong. The murder of the princes has a firm grip in British lore, but lots of people realized pretty quickly it was Tudor bullshit, the likely murderer having been Henry VII, who didn’t need any rivals around to contest his throne.

It says that Haley is not eligible to run for president even though she was born in the USA, because her parents weren’t US citizens at the time of her birth. The US Constitution says the person has to be a “natural born citizen”. I looked it up to see what that means, and it means someone who didn’t have to go through a process to become a citizen ie naturalized. I have never heard that people born in the US to non-American parents have to be naturalized to be considered Americans. The site quotes somebody’s alternate interpretation as the correct one.

I had to look up the name to understand the comment. What a disgusting cover-up by the government. One of the BBC stories sets out the compensation schemes offered by the government, and some look reasonable, but I think 600,000 pounds for getting jailed, and possibly divorced and losing your family, just isn’t enough. And I’m surprised that the media in the UK haven’t focused their attention on Fujitsu, who developed the software used by the Post Office. Hopefully the inquiry that’s started will get some answers.

Just like all evil women down the centuries, she practices witchcraft! Ooooooh ooooooh scary!

You realize what this is? Avoidance of scandal after scandal being made public, endless stories in the media. Just sign here. Most people will be glad it’s over and done and won’t want to relive their pain in a newspaper story.

United has also found loose parts on the 737 MAX planes.