Joke courtesy of New York Times:
"In Canada, did a comedian’s joke go too far?" by Dan Bilefsky New York Times, February 20, 2021
MONTREAL — About a decade ago, comedian Mike Ward, of Quebec, mocked the voice of a well-known disabled teenage singer in a standup routine, roasting him for being off-key, making fun of his hearing aid and calling him “ugly,” but he said he had defended the boy to others because he would soon die. When the teen did not die of his illness, the comedian joked, he tried to drown him.
This past week, the question of whether a comedian has the constitutional right to offend came under a national spotlight at Canada’s Supreme Court after Ward appealed a decision that the comedy routine discriminated against the singer, Jérémy Gabriel.
The case, which has grabbed headlines, is a rare example of a comedy routine becoming the subject of the highest court in the land and could have implications for free speech in Canada. Renée Thériault, executive legal officer at the Supreme Court, wrote by email that, to her knowledge, the case is “unprecedented.”
There are no stand-up comedians, or clubs, in Communist countries.
Comedy has long reflected the cultural mores of a nation, sometimes exposing the fault lines in a society and testing the legal limits of acceptable speech. Canada and countries the world over, including the United States, have come under intensifying pressure to respect minority rights, spurring a debate of where to draw the line between harmful speech and freedom of expression.
That's where the debate ends because is there is no line to be drawn if you want free speech.
In Canada, which prides itself on its humanism, Ward’s case has been particularly polarizing.
On the one side are civil libertarians and artists who argue that offensive jokes, however egregious, are protected under the Canadian constitution’s freedom of expression provision. The Supreme Court policing comedy, they say, risks having a chilling effect on artistic expression across Canada, but advocates of disability rights and some human rights lawyers argue that even comedy should have limits and that bullying a disabled teenager is discriminatory and violates the right to dignity, which is protected under Quebec law.
Gabriel has Treacher Collins syndrome, a rare congenital disease characterized by skull and facial deformities. He was born deaf and received a hearing aid implant at age 6. At age 8, he captured hearts across Quebec after singing the national anthem at a Montreal Canadiens hockey game. He went on to meet Celine Dion in Las Vegas, serenade Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican and write an autobiography.
Gabriel, now a 24-year-old political science student in Quebec City, said in an interview that the comedy routine — and the raucous laughter it provoked — destroyed his self-esteem during difficult teenage years when he was already grappling with being disabled. As a result of the routine, he said he was bullied at school and became depressed and suicidal, while his parents were crushed. He said that after his complaint against Ward, he also received death threats from the comedian’s fans.
Tragic, and yet the pre$$ has gone silent.
So who is line to sue Seinfeld?
Ward, a stand-up comic who has twice won “comedian of the year” in a prestigious Quebec comedy award show, has appeared on television internationally and is known for his trenchant comedic style. In 2008, his joke about a 9-year-old girl who was abducted spurred death threats against him.
He brought up the child sex kidnapping rings?
The Supreme Court case took root in 2010, when the comedian used his act to make fun of people in Quebec seen as being above criticism and targeted celebrities like Dion. He also targeted Gabriel and, among other jokes, made fun of his hearing aid, calling him “the kid with the subwoofer” on his head. The show was performed hundreds of times between 2010 and 2013 and disseminated online.
People in the public limelight are fodder for comedy. It's a longstanding tenant of democracy.
In 2012, Gabriel’s family complained to a commission enforcing Quebec’s human rights code, and in 2016, the province’s human rights tribunal ruled that the teenager’s dignity had been breached. Ward was ordered to pay 35,000 Canadian dollars in damages to Gabriel and 7,000 Canadian dollars to his mother.
After Ward appealed, the Quebec Court of Appeal in 2019 upheld the decision but dismissed damages awarded to Gabriel’s mother. “Comedy is not a crime,” Ward said in a statement after the verdict. A ruling is expected in the next few months in his appeal to the Supreme Court.
Ward’s lawyer Julius Grey, said in an interview that Ward’s comedy routine did not constitute discrimination. “Discrimination means depriving someone of a good or service — not laughing at them,” he said.
Gabriel countered that he was singled out for ridicule because of his disability and it had shaped his life.
“I want to move on,” he said.
So do I, and the truth is I would probably not find this guy's shtick funny.
In Canada, the Supreme Court case has alarmed the comedy world.
Sugar Sammy, a popular Canadian comedian whose taboo-busting act has included roasting ethnic minorities, among many others, said he feared a potential ruling against Ward could encourage self-censorship and even force Canadian comics to emigrate to the United States. He said he was particularly alarmed about the deadening effect on improvisation, which requires being unfiltered. In the past, his pungent satire of Quebec nationalists has spurred outrage and a death threat.
“Whether we are talking about Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor or George Carlin, the comedian’s role in society has long been to push boundaries and dare to say what people are thinking but are too afraid to say,” Sammy said. “Will I need to have my every comedy routine reviewed by a lawyer or think before every joke whether I am going to find myself in front of the Supreme Court?”
I'm wondering where he will find an audience, and the world misses Carlin and Pryor.
In the United States, Lenny Bruce was labeled a “sick comic” for his expletive-laced routines, and in 1961 he was arrested on obscenity charges in San Francisco. His defiance helped to clear the way for other iconoclastic comedians.
In France, comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala has been repeatedly charged with violating anti-hate laws. He is widely associated with an inverted Nazi salute known as the quenelle. In 2013, he lamented that a prominent Jewish journalist had not died in “the gas chambers.”
The encore ruined the whole routine.
Whose laughing now, huh?
"US deports former Nazi guard whose wartime role was noted on card found amid sunken ship" by Devlin Barrett The Washington Post, February 20, 2021
WASHINGTON — A 95-year-old former German concentration camp guard who made a new life in Tennessee was deported to his home country Saturday after an index card found in a sunken ship helped prove his Nazi ties.
Friedrich Karl Berger was deported to Germany after US authorities determined he once served at a subcamp of the Neuengamme concentration camp system near Hamburg.
The camp held Russian, Dutch and Polish civilians, as well as Jewish prisoners and political opponents from France, Italy and other countries. In the winter of 1945, according to Berger's removal order, prisoners were forced to live in "atrocious" conditions and work "to the point of exhaustion and death."
Right. They were work camps, not extermination centers.
It was not immediately clear whether German authorities would take steps against Berger. Germany dropped its case against Berger last year due to lack of evidence, but he will be questioned by German police, and new charges could be possible, according to German media.
In 1945, as British and Canadian forces approached the subcamp, Berger helped guard prisoners forced to evacuate to the main camp, Justice Department officials have said. During the brutal two-week trek, 70 prisoners died.
Hundreds more were killed when they were placed on two ships at anchor in the Bay of Lubeck in the Baltic Sea. The ships were mistakenly bombed by British warplanes in May 1945 during the last week of the war.
Oops!
Justice Department historians were able to document Berger's service at the camp in part with information from an index card found in one of the sunken ships several years after the bombing. The card summarized Berger's work in the camp system.
Acting Attorney General Monty Wilkinson said Berger's removal shows the department's "commitment to ensuring that the United States is not a safe haven for those who have participated in Nazi crimes against humanity and other human rights abuses."
Since 1979, the Justice Department has won similar cases against 70 individuals, but the pace of Nazi-era cases has slowed with the passage of time, and the department has no other such cases pending - meaning Berger could ultimately end up being the last former Nazi guard kicked out of the country.
What will the extortion racket do?
After the war, Berger emigrated from Germany to Canada with his wife and daughter, and came to the United States in 1959.
Also see:
"Israel unveiled a plan on Saturday to allow people who have been vaccinated against the coronavirus to attend cultural events, fly abroad and go to health clubs and restaurants. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the plan at a news conference on Saturday night, saying those who have been vaccinated will be able to download the “green badge” in the coming days. Israel has conducted the world’s speediest vaccine campaign over the past month and a half, inoculating nearly half of its 9.3 million people, but with the coronavirus still spreading rapidly among the unvaccinated, the country only recently began emerging from a two-month lockdown....."
Why didn't they make it yellow instead?
The above is shocking given what they allegedly went through despite having the light of God shine down on them.
Instead, they are recycling the very odious ideas they decry to use themselves.
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
This isn't funny at all:
"Canadian companies unite to start mass virus testing" by Catherine Porter New York Times, January 30, 2021
TORONTO — As frustration mounts in Canada at the leaden weight of lockdowns and the glacial pace of vaccinations, a consortium of some of the country’s largest companies has launched a rapid testing program with the aim of protecting their 350,000 employees and publishing a playbook for businesses across Canada on how to reopen safely.
The program, believed to be the first of its kind among the Group of 7 industrialized nations, has already attracted the attention of the Biden administration.
The 12 companies, including Canada’s biggest airline and grocery chain, have worked together for four months, creating a 400-page operating manual on how to run rapid antigen tests in various work settings. They began piloting the tests in their workplaces this month and expect to expand the program to 1,200 small and medium-sized businesses.
They also plan to share their test results with government health authorities, greatly raising test counts in the country and providing an informal study of the virus’s spread among asymptomatic people.
Asymptomatic people are noninfectious.
“It’s like wartime — people get together to do something that’s in the interest of everybody,” said Marc Mageau, senior vice president of refining and logistics with Suncor Energy, the country’s largest oil producer, which introduced the testing to its employees this month.
Yeah, and it is being waged on the human race!
The program faces some inherent challenges — after an outbreak last year at the White House, antigen tests became known for generating both false negatives and a false sense of security. They are also in short supply in Canada, with some experts arguing they should be reserved for schools and nursing homes rather than nonessential businesses.
They have it backwards; it's the false positives for a non-existent virus.
While vaccines are considered the world’s best weapon for defeating the pandemic, most experts believe it will take months, if not a full year, for Canada to reach vaccination levels that allow workplaces to safely return to their pre-COVID operations.
Canada is in the grip of a second pandemic wave that has driven infections to record levels and deaths to about 19,800. In response, many parts of the country are in lockdown, with restaurants, theaters and nonessential retail shops closed.
I've sen this act before.
The Canadian economy has contracted about 5% during the pandemic. Some industries, like real estate and manufacturing, have done well, but employment has plummeted at others, like entertainment and hospitality, which depend on public crowds.
“Think about downtown Toronto: No one is there anymore. Entertainment — it’s all stopped,” said Joshua Gans, a professor of strategic management at the University of Toronto who acted as an adviser on the project and is the author of “The Pandemic Information Gap: The Brutal Economics of COVID-19.” “The time has come to work out how to actually reopen the sectors that have been closed,” he said.
That's a laugh!
The companies in the consortium were brought together in the spring by Ajay Agrawal, founder of the University of Toronto’s Creative Destruction Lab, which helps science and technology startups. They were inspired by the most Canadian of muses: author Margaret Atwood.
Seriously, it's named after a neo-con warmonger creed and was inspired by the vampire writer?
The problem, the group posited, was the “information gap” — since there was no way to tell who might be an asymptomatic carrier, everyone was treated as a potential threat.
Atwood envisioned something like a home pregnancy test.
“That would be a game changer,” she said.
Time to start booing and throw some sunlight on her undead ass!
Realizing that the government was overwhelmed by the health crisis, the group decided to take on the task itself, forming a consortium led by Creative Destruction Lab.
The group focused on antigen tests because of their speed, price and utility: They can produce results in minutes, don’t require a laboratory and, in Canada, can cost between $5 and about $20, but they are less accurate, and produce more false negatives, than the gold-standard polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, tests, which can cost 20 times as much. The three antigen tests approved for use in Canada flag between 84% and 96.7% of the people infected with the virus.
The "gold standard" was never meant to diagnose infection, according to the inventor, and how many cycles did they run it?
In Britain, antigen tests used in a mass testing campaign identified just two-fifths of the coronavirus cases detected by PCR tests. For that reason, many experts in Canada and elsewhere initially argued it was wiser to expand PCR testing, but, as the pandemic stretched on and the country failed to reach its testing targets, that thinking has changed, said Dr. Irfan Dhalla, co-chair of the Canadian advisory panel on testing and screening for COVID-19, which recommended the country increase the use of rapid tests.
"A rapid antigen test is clearly better than no test at all, as long as it is not used as a free pass," Dhalla said. "Whether it's a workplace or a school, you still have to wear a mask and you still have to physically distance as much as you can."
Then WHY BOTHER with the TEST or VACCINE?
This is simply setting up the coming medical dystopia and never-ending surveillance tyranny.
Consortium members hope in the long run that the testing program will help reduce infection rates enough to permit a return to crowded restaurants and boardroom meetings, but in the meantime, they plan on using the tests as an added layer of protection — on top of wearing masks, engaging in social distancing and pre-screening employees so those with symptoms stay home. The companies in the consortium are also testing their employees twice a week, increasing the chances of picking up positive cases.
And thus drive the false fear with a spike in fake cases.
“Everyone is looking for a silver bullet. We’ve realized it doesn’t exist. This isn’t it either,” conceded Laura Rosella, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Toronto and an adviser on the project.
In September, more than 100 employees from the consortium began working together, at their companies’ expense, to draft a plan. Two retired generals volunteered to help manage logistics. In November, the group registered as a nonprofit organization called CDL Rapid Screening Consortium, with each company contributing $230,000 for operational costs.
Working in teams, the employees researched some 50 different antigen tests emerging around the world, analyzed what was needed for a screening program — from staffing to the number of gowns — and estimated the overall cost. The resulting 400-page operating manual includes everything from an example of an employee invitation to join the program and a standard consent form, to the detailed shopping list of materials required to run a program.
One hurdle has been acquiring tests. They have had to get them from the government because they are not widely available in Canada yet, and there is a great demand from schools and nursing homes. “Let’s get tests there first,” Dhalla said, referring to schools, nursing homes and essential workplaces. “As we gain experience, then we can talk about getting people back to work, where working from home is an option.”
In January, five of the companies began to pilot the program in settings as different as pharmacies and radio stations. So far, some 400 employees have volunteered, and almost 1,900 tests have been conducted. Only three have come back positive, according to Sonia Sennik, executive director of the Creative Destruction Lab and the enthusiastic quarterback of the project. “They didn’t go into the workplace and potentially spread something,” Sennik said. “We broke the chain of transmission three times.”
The entire country has been shutdown over that minuscule infection rate?
The companies have found the program reduces employee anxiety not only about coming to work, but also about returning home each day, she said.
If anything it would add to it as they fear a false positive.
“I feel relief,” said Mohamed Gaballa, an Air Canada employee who completed the test during a break at Toronto Pearson International Airport. Within 15 minutes, this popped up on email: “Your screening result is negative. You may carry on with your day.”
Oh, look, your day has been approved by corporate!
“This has been a missing piece in Canada for far too long,” said Dan Kelly, president and CEO of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, which represents 110,000 small and medium-sized businesses.
Small businesses face many more hurdles to implement a program like this, even given the leg up from a 400-page manual, he said. There is the cost of the tests, but more important, of the staff to administer them.
Kelly imagined the program wouldn’t work at restaurants and busy stores — places where unscreened customers far outnumber screened employees, unless the plan was to test them too, but, in kitchens, small warehouses, small manufacturing shops and offices, “this testing could be quite helpful,” he said.
“Under normal circumstances, the idea of small companies doing employee-based testing for anything would be a fantasy,” said Kelly, who sits on the federal government’s industry advisory group on COVID-19 testing, “but in this case, given the degree of desperation to get or stay open among small-business owners, there is a potential appetite for it.”
If an appetite for something is having it forced down your throat on the basis of a lie!
Related:
"Canada seemed to be off to a quick start. Its regulator had approved a coronavirus vaccine codeveloped by Pfizer just before the United States, and national newscasts were soon filled with images of people getting their first injections, but the hopes raised by the vaccination launch in December — buoyed, too, by news that Canada had ordered doses equal to 10 times its population — have soured. Production issues at Pfizer and Moderna, makers of the only two vaccines currently approved in Canada, have led to reduced shipments — including some weeks in which no vaccine has arrived at all, but while the disruptions have become the talk of the nation, more fundamental factors involving Canada’s strategic decisions and its production realities have always meant that the launch of vaccinations would be more of a test run than a full-on rollout. Even if Canada gets back on schedule, this nation of 37.5 million people is expected to receive just 6 million doses by the end of next month. To date, only about 1.5 million people have been injected. Updates of a global ranking of vaccinations now receive nearly as much attention as hockey scores in the Canadian media. As Britain and even the United States, despite its problems, continue to rise in the rankings, Canada has dropped well down the list, sandwiched this week between Bangladesh and Romania. The nation’s vaccine anxiety has, according to polls, led to a drop in approval ratings for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s performance during the pandemic. Nearly 60 percent of Canadians think the country should be performing better or at least as well as other industrialized nations, one poll found....."
That's not the reason Turdeau's popularity -- as if he had any -- is cratering, and I think Canadians have been soured from the start over the $camdemic, but Canada faces inherent disadvantages, too: primarily the lack of an established vaccine producer headquartered in the country and its relatively limited production capacity to make the vaccines developed by foreign companies, and thus no “home-field advantage.”
Also see:
"Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Tuesday that starting next week any nonessential traveler arriving in Canada by land will need to show a negative PCR-based COVID-19 test or face a fine if they don’t have one. Trudeau said customs officers can’t send Canadians back to the U.S. if they don’t have a test because they are technically on Canadian soil but said the fine will be up to $3,000 Canadian (US$2,370) and the traveler will be subject to extensive follow up by health officials if they don’t show a negative test. So-called snowbirds who reside in warm U.S. states part-time are included in the COVID-19 test requirement. The land border already remains closed to nonessential travelers who are not Canadian. Canada already requires people arriving by air to show a negative PCR-based COVID-19 test within three days of arriving....."
I'll bet that made many Canadians angry enough to break curfew and flee the country for good.
Speaking of curfews, I'm breaking mine by being on this blog too long today. More to follow tomorrow.
