From Canada to the Middle-East by way of the North Pole!

Boy have we got a "Winner of the Day" for ya today folks! 

The most popular comment ever made on the New York Times website was penned by a Calgary man. Bob from Calgary, as he is identified on the site, received some 7,040 recommendations for his comment on a 2010 column about wealth and privilege written by Paul Krugman.
The newspaper, which fields some 9,000 comments each day, says Bob's is the top post "of all time."
The runner-up, posted on a story about the mass shooting in Charleston, S.C., drew roughly 5,489 recommendations.
In his comment, Bob praises Canada's public schools, universal health care and banking system and says his tax bill is only two per cent higher than it would be south of the border.
He also says he doesn't feel Canadians are in any way less free than their American counterparts.

 There ain't nuthin like a proud Canadian bunky!

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My son just announced on Facebook that last nights earthquake in B.C. woke him up! That's nothing, when I was there on a visit in 1980 Mt. St. Helen's blew up and shook the entire house!

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Still don't believe in CLIMATE CHANGE kids?

The sun has not risen above the North Pole since mid-September. The sea ice—flat, land like, windswept, and stretching as far as the eye can see—has been bathed in darkness for months.
But later this week, something extraordinary will happen: Air temperatures at the Earth’s most northerly region, in the middle of winter, will rise above freezing for only the second time on record.
On Wednesday, the same storm system that last week spun up deadly tornadoes in the American southeast will burst into the far north, centering over Iceland. It will bring strong winds and pressure as low as is typically seen during hurricanes.
That low pressure will suck air out of the planet’s middle latitudes and send it rushing to the Arctic. And so on Wednesday, the North Pole will likely see temperatures of about 35 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2 degrees Celsius. That’s 50 degrees hotter than average: It’s usually 20 degrees Fahrenheit below zero there at this time of year.

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/12/iceland-storm-melt-north-pole-climate-change/422166/

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Well, well, it's nice to know that even ISIS has rules the average Joe, (or Mohamed) have to follow kids:

— Islamic State theologians have issued an extremely detailed ruling on when "owners" of women enslaved by the extremist group can have sex with them, in an apparent bid to curb what they called violations in the treatment of captured females.
The ruling or fatwa has the force of law and appears to go beyond the Islamic State's previous known utterances on the subject, a leading Islamic State scholar said. It sheds new light on how the group is trying to reinterpret centuries-old teachings to justify the sexual slavery of women in the swaths of Syria and Iraq it controls.
To read the fatwa, click here.
The fatwa was among a huge trove of documents captured by U.S. Special Operations Forces during a raid targeting a top Islamic State official in Syria in May. Reuters has reviewed some of the documents, which have not been previously published.
Among the religious rulings are bans on a father and son having sex with the same female slave, and the owner of a mother and daughter having sex with both. Joint owners of a female captive are similarly enjoined from intercourse because she is viewed as "part of a joint ownership."
The United Nations and human rights groups have accused the Islamic State of the systematic abduction and rape of thousands of women and girls as young as 12, especially members of the Yazidi minority in northern Iraq. Many have been given to fighters as a reward or sold as sex slaves.
Far from trying to conceal the practice, Islamic State has boasted about it and established a department of "war spoils" to manage slavery. Reuters reported on the existence of the department on Monday.
In an April report, Human Rights Watch interviewed 20 female escapees who recounted how Islamic State fighters separated young women and girls from men and boys and older women. They were moved "in an organized and methodical fashion to various places in Iraq and Syria." They were then sold or given as gifts and repeatedly raped or subjected to sexual violence.

Dos and don'ts

Fatwa No. 64, dated Jan. 29, 2015, and issued by Islamic State's Committee of Research and Fatwas, appears to codify sexual relations between IS fighters and their female captives for the first time, going further than a pamphlet issued by the group in 2014 on how to treat slaves.
The fatwa starts with a question: "Some of the brothers have committed violations in the matter of the treatment of the female slaves. These violations are not permitted by Sharia law because these rules have not been dealt with in ages. Are there any warnings pertaining to this matter?"

 

 Reuters

It then lists 15 injunctions, which in some instances go into explicit detail. For example:
"If the owner of a female captive, who has a daughter suitable for intercourse, has sexual relations with the latter, he is not permitted to have intercourse with her mother and she is permanently off limits to him. Should he have intercourse with her mother then he is not permitted to have intercourse with her daughter and she is to be off limits to him."
Islamic State's sexual exploitation of female captives has been well documented, but a leading IS expert at Princeton University, Cole Bunzel, who has reviewed many of the group's writings, said the fatwa went beyond what has previously been published by the militants on how to treat female slaves.
"It reveals the actual concerns of IS slave owners," he said in an email.
Still, he cautioned that not "everything dealt with in the fatwa is indicative of a relevant violation. It doesn't mean father and son were necessarily sharing a girl. They're at least being 'warned' not to. But I bet some of these violations were being committed."

 

Militant website via APIslamic State militants pass by a convoy in Tel Abyad, Syria.
The fatwa also instructs owners of female slaves to "show compassion towards her, be kind to her, not humiliate her, and not assign her work she is unable to perform." An owner should also not sell her to an individual whom he knows will mistreat her.
Professor Abdel Fattah Alawari, dean of Islamic Theology at Al-Azhar University, a 1,000-year-old Egyptian center for Islamic learning, said Islamic State "has nothing to do with Islam" and was deliberately misreading centuries-old verses and sayings that were originally designed to end, rather than encourage, slavery.
"Islam preaches freedom to slaves, not slavery. Slavery was the status quo when Islam came around," he said. "Judaism, Christianity, Greek, Roman, and Persian civilizations all practiced it and took the females of their enemies as sex slaves. So Islam found this abhorrent practice and worked to gradually remove it."
In September 2014 more than 120 Islamic scholars from around the world issued an open letter to IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi refuting the group's religious arguments to justify many of its actions. The scholars noted that the "reintroduction of slavery is forbidden in Islam."
Additional reporting by Ahmed Aboulenein in Cairo and William Maclean in Dubai. Editing by Ross Colvin.

 http://www.businessinsider.com/r-exclusive-islamic-state-ruling-aims-to-settle-who-can-have-sex-with-female-slaves-2015-12?ref=yfp

COMING TOMORROW:  "PROPER ETIQUETTE WHEN CHOPPING OFF SOMEONE'S HEAD!"

AND FINALLY: