Are we alone? These UFO researchers in Toronto intend to find out — and they want you to take them seriously

Are we alone? These UFO researchers in Toronto intend to find out — and they want you to take them seriously

Doug Buettner’s grandfather once saw a flying saucer hovering on his farm in Portland, Ore., in 1947, or so the story goes.

The cows were acting up in the field and he went to check on them. Buettner never heard the story first-hand — his grandfather died before he was born — but his mother, who said she also saw two UFOs as a teenager in a separate incident, passed the story down.

Buettner, now deputy chief scientist at a university affiliated research centre for the Pentagon, is researching UFOs intensely.

Pancake loving aliens?

(more…)

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Trump revives old tropes as he pushes warnings of ‘communist menace’ warns hoary old commie rag

Trump revives old tropes as he pushes warnings of ‘communist menace’ warns hoary old commie rag

Perhaps above all else, Donald Trump is a child of the cold war.

Three months before the US president was born, Winston Churchill delivered a historic speech in Fulton, Missouri, that ushered in a generations-long existential struggle between western capitalism and Soviet communism.

Lamenting the spread of Soviet communism across eastern Europe following the allied victory in the second world war, Churchill – by then no longer British prime minister – warned his audience on 5 March 1946 that “an iron curtain has descended across the continent”.


Communism not a menace? Who knew!

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Inside the growing vigilante movement to knock out Flock surveillance cameras

Inside the growing vigilante movement to knock out Flock surveillance cameras

The first time that “NoMark” tried to knock out a Flock camera feed, he waited an hour for the perfect moment – pacing in and out of bushes that towered over him, a few feet behind a pole holding up the device.

“I was just so nervous,” he said.

NoMark, as he’s known on Instagram, had already gained an online following of hundreds of thousands for posting videos of himself wearing a black mask and taking on small-time vigilante missions: breaking up fights outside a bar and breaking into a refinery he believed was “polluting the city real bad”. The Minnesota Star Tribune dubbed him “Minneapolis’ Batman”. He spoke to the Guardian under condition of anonymity to discuss potentially illegal acts.

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His family in India took out a mortgage to fund his tuition in Canada. Why many temporary residents ‘can’t even think about going back’

His family in India took out a mortgage to fund his tuition in Canada. Why many temporary residents ‘can’t even think about going back’

For Joyal Jose’s working-class parents in India, his tuition in Canada was a retirement investment — and a huge gamble.

His father, a farmer, and mother, a nurse, had to mortgage their family’s land to scrape together the money for his two-year social service worker diploma program at Seneca College. His graduation was delayed for one extra term because he had suffered severe depression when he first arrived in Toronto in early 2021.

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Was Britain Really the Most Evil Empire in History?

Was Britain Really the Most Evil Empire in History?

The actress Jameela Jamil recently said on a podcast that the British were “the most evil people in history.” This is the type of moral judgment that has become popular in an age that is more inclined to study the past using the values of today. Such comments get claps on social media but they do not help much with understanding history. They turn hundreds of years of political, economic, and social events into a simple story of good and evil where Britain is always the bad guy. History deserves better than slogans. If the British Empire is to be judged it should be judged as a whole rather than just by looking at its mistakes alone.

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Canada remains anti-nuke, but its potential path to the bomb is getting shorter

Canada remains anti-nuke, but its potential path to the bomb is getting shorter

For decades, Canada’s official policy on nuclear weapons has been that they shouldn’t exist, and there is no sign that principle is about to be abandoned.

But for reasons of history and geography, Canada is also one of the world’s non-nuclear countries with the easiest technical path to a nuclear weapon. And because of the particular design of its CANDU reactors, it would also be one of the countries best-positioned to produce weapons-grade fissile material without tripping international alerts — although such a move would carry huge geopolitical risks.

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A Decade After Michael Brown, Activists Still Rule Ferguson

A Decade After Michael Brown, Activists Still Rule Ferguson

Since the protests and rioting that wracked it in 2014, Ferguson, Missouri has become not one, but three things: a place, a symbol, and a machine.

The place is an ordinary suburb of St. Louis, with ranch and bungalow homes along tree-lined streets. The symbol still looms over America’s conversations about race and power. The machine is the activists, academics, and public officials who have spent a decade using the symbol to amass power and money.

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GOLDSTEIN: Why natural gas is crucial to Canada’s economic growth

GOLDSTEIN: Why natural gas is crucial to Canada’s economic growth

If Prime Minister Mark Carney is going to fulfil his promise to make Canada a conventional and green energy superpower, fossil fuels are going to be instrumental in achieving it.

Among Carney’s major economic goals are:

Doubling Canadian exports to non-U.S. markets in a decade.

Doubling Canada’s residential construction rate to 500,000 new homes per year in a decade.

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The Exploding Islamization of the West: A Conversation with Alexandre del Valle

The Exploding Islamization of the West: A Conversation with Alexandre del Valle

Grégoire Canlorbe: What do we know, please, about the Islamization of Europe?

Alexandre del Valle: The Islamization of countries such as Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, or the Netherlands has, in my view, reached a critical threshold, perhaps even a point of no return. The reasons are at once demographic, cultural, and ideological. These recent minorities have not only reached a significant numerical weight; they also have much higher fertility rates. Above all, for the past twenty years or so, there has been not only a failure of assimilation, but a form of de-assimilation among populations that, until then, had seemed assimilated.

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Canada’s got a grocery competition problem. Are local food hubs the answer?

Canada’s got a grocery competition problem. Are local food hubs the answer?

About 20 years ago, P.E.I. farmer Rose Viaene watched her husband David take their tractor out into their farm fields and destroy their garlic crop — an act of defiance born out of frustration with Canada’s large grocery chains.

Viaene said before then, their garlic was sold across Atlantic Canada, including at Sobeys and Real Canadian Superstore. But that relationship changed when grocery retailers began importing cheaper garlic from China.

The large retailers were still open to buying garlic from the farmers, but Viaene said the offer was too low — just 50 cents per pound when it cost the farm $7 per pound to produce.


Corporate concentration.

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URP: Fortune Magazine Honors Soros as ‘Most Generous Philanthropist,’ ‘Above and Beyond’

URP: Fortune Magazine Honors Soros as ‘Most Generous Philanthropist,’ ‘Above and Beyond’

Fortune magazine behaved like George Soros dumping more of his wealth than others into “philanthropy” was somehow some kind of an altruistic flex. No, we’re not kidding.

Fortune associate editor Sydney Lake beamed in a July 22 item that “George Soros never signed the Giving Pledge. He’s given away more of his fortune than the billionaires who did.”

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Liberals don’t get to define patriotism

Liberals don’t get to define patriotism

Conservatives have every right to criticize Prime Minister Mark Carney and his government, and to suggest this indicates disloyalty to Canada is absurd.

It’s to be expected from Liberal MPs (which does not mean all Liberals) who view themselves as Canada’s natural governing party, who see Conservatives as not simply wrong but evil, and that no criticism of their Great Leader is ever justified.

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