Mid-Week Post

A merry Chuseok to all y'all.

Some 230,000 cars have left Seoul as of 2 p.m., according to Korea Expressway Corp. (KEC), with another 270,000 expected to be added to that number by midnight.

"The number has been constantly increasing since noon and it will reach its peak at around 7 to 8 p.m. when most travelers hit the road after quitting time," a KEC official said, asking not to be named.

The total number of vehicles using the highways throughout the country is expected to reach about 4.6 million on Tuesday, according to KEC.

The estimated number of travelers during the holiday period hovers around 37 million in total, according to the Korea Transport Institute.

South Korea: come for the traffic, stay for the pie.

Speaking of the Korean Peninsula...

Floods in North Korea that have left hundreds dead or missing are the "worst disaster" to hit the country since World War II, state media said on Wednesday.

The official KCNA news agency did not give exact numbers of those killed or unaccounted for, but a UN report said 138 people have died and 400 are missing after torrential rains caused devastation in the country's far north.

And yet...

North Korea's nuclear test site is ready for at least three more blasts at any time, and the communist nation could conduct one to mark next month's anniversary of its first nuclear test, a US expert said Tuesday.

Oh, dear. PM Hair-Boy is in a spot of bother:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visited a gender-segregated mosque Monday morning whose imam is a member of a group considered a terrorist organization abroad.

Samy Metwally, the lead imam at the Ottawa Muslim Association, is a “a member of the International Union for Muslim Scholars (IUMS)”, according to the mosque’s website. In 2014 the United Arab Emirates placed the group on its list of designated terrorist organizations.

“IUMS was founded by Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s leading ideologue and a notorious figure who, among other accomplishments, was for many years banned from entering France and endorsed the murder of Israelis,” ...

None of this is at all surprising. Trudeau has a history of supporting Islamists and glossing over their acts of thuggery.

And none of that was ever hidden from the electorate that put him and his backers into office.





Alexandre Trudeau, who worked with the Iranian government to develop and refine its nuclear program propaganda, believes that Canada has lost its "unique voice":

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s brother Alexandre says Canada has lost its unique voice in the world and fallen into the role of a “confused follower nation” — but building a unique relationship with China could help fix that.

Only CBC could give air time to such a quisling.

This country didn't just vote in Justin the woman-hater. They voted in his family, too.





The hydro rebate is a permanent thing, says known liar:

Under the plan, the government will remove the provincial portion of the harmonized sales tax from hydro bills.

When asked how long the rebate will last, Wynne told Metro Morning Tuesday that the change is a permanent one.

The head of the International Monetary Fund believes that Canada's economic policies, the ones that have the average Canadian family spend more on taxes than on living expenses, should be duplicated around the world:

Lagarde also applauded Canada's economic policies, which include promoting international trade and infrastructure spending as ways to boost growth.

"And I really, very much hope that Canadian economic policies can actually go viral and that this energy and this passion for openness can be sufficiently contaminating, including in European Union," Lagarde said.

Yes, about that: 

In our haste to “stimulate” the economy, we run the risk of wasting tax dollars if we build poorly designed or unnecessary infrastructure as well as bid up the cost of building. Moreover, haste increases the odds of situations such as Ontario’s Nipigon Bridge where key components on Canada’s vital east-west highway link have failed after only several months of operation and the expenditure of millions of dollars. That such expenditures will be financed by a debt burden to be borne by future generations adds to the problem.

And let one not overlook the monumental failure that was the EU.





Anyone who believes that the government alone should control health-care clearly has had no need of it for an extended period of time:

Far from being an example of something gone wrong, this is actually a fine demonstration of how a hybrid private-public model can work well. As Howard Anglin from the Canadian Constitution Foundation explains elsewhere in FP Comment, clinics like the Cambie centre take hundreds of patients off the waiting lists of B.C. hospitals, opening up beds and saving the province money. If Day wins his case, private clinics could also make use of doctors who are otherwise prohibited from performing more than their government-dictated allotment of publicly funded surgeries. Sure, maybe one of every hundred, or every thousand Cambie clients ends up with complications that puts them in the hospital anyway. But that still seems like a lot better deal for taxpayers — and other patients forced to wait for the public system — than if all of them did.

Relieving waiting times should seem like a good idea to bean-counters who are willing to concede that the publicly-funded healthcare system should not put a stranglehold on the patient's health and his willingness to do something about his injury or illness.

But those bean-counters don't exist.

The prohibition of private clinics is a political decision, not a practical one. Think of how each tax dollar is spent on a bloated public service sector and then think of how many medical professionals could be hired if that sector was pared to down to something manageable and sane.





Sit back and watch the train wrecks:

The report, acquired by the Ottawa Citizen’s Kathryn May, is exactly what Justin Trudeau’s Liberals didn’t want to hear. It confirms all the problems the Conservatives tried to address, and were trashed for. It offers remedies that are even starker than the Tories introduced. It underlines the huge cost of not acting, and the enormous savings to be had from showing some leadership. It also carries the prospect of open war with the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, which thinks that worrying about the cost of an obsolete service is all a load of hooey.

**

The Canadian Union of Public Employees is suing the Ontario government over the sale of Hydro One, the province’s electricity transmission monopoly.

But... but... polar bears are going extinct!

A team of Russian weather experts claim that their station on an ice-covered Arctic isle is “besieged” by polar bears, according to a report by Russian news agency TASS.

The five researchers charged with staffing the outpost on Troynoy Island say that there are about 10 adult polar bears as well as cubs circling their base. A female polar bear spends nights perched outside the station’s windows, making it dangerous for the scientists to exit. They have reportedly run out of flares and have lost at least one of their dogs to the Arctic beasts.

Pope Francis finally condemns Father Jacques Hamel's murder as a satanic act:

Without formally canonizing Hamel, on Wednesday morning Pope Francis said that the French priest—who was killed in July by Islamic terrorists—is in heaven, noting that “all martyrs are blessed (beati),” a technical term the Catholic Church uses for those who have been “beatified” or declared to be in heaven. ...

“Today there are Christians murdered, tortured, imprisoned, slaughtered because they do not deny Jesus Christ,” he said.

Francis said that Father Jacques Hamel “is part of this chain of martyrs.”

“Christians who suffer today because they will not deny Jesus Christ—whether in prison or by death or torture—they show how cruel this persecution is. And this cruelty that demands apostasy—we say the word—is Satanic.”

The Pope went on to propose what a marvelous thing it would be if all religions could together proclaim: “Killing in the name of God is Satanic.”

Francis words seemed aimed particularly at the Islamic terrorists who kill in the name of jihad, and claim to be accomplishing the will of Allah.

Father Jacques Hamel “was slain on the Cross,” Francis said, “just as he celebrated the sacrifice of the Cross of Christ.”

This good, humble man, who was always trying to make peace, “was assassinated as if he were a criminal,” Francis said. “This is the thread of Satanic persecution.”

Even as he was accepting his martyrdom at the altar, Father Jacques “did not lose the clarity of accusing and clearly saying the name of his murderer, and he said clearly: “Be gone, Satan!”

“He gave his life for us. He gave his life so as not to deny Jesus,” the Pope said, while simultaneously accusing the author of his persecution: “Be gone, Satan!”

(Sidebar: the writers at Breitbart do not understand Catholic issues, like how saints become saints, for example. Many comments also reflect a shocking lack of knowledge about Catholicism.)





And now, the HMS Terror, one of two ships on Sir John Franklin's ill-fated expedition to cross the Northwest Passage, is believed to have been found:

On Monday morning, British newspaper the Guardian reported that the ship, which was abandoned in sea ice in 1848 during a failed attempt to sail through the Northwest Passage, was found "in pristine condition" in Nunavut's Terror Bay, north of where the wreck of HMS Erebus — the expedition's flagship — was found in 2014.

The crew of the Arctic Research Foundation's Martin Bergmann research vessel found the shipwreck, with all three masts standing and almost all hatches closed, on Sept. 3.

"Resting proud on 24 metres of water, we found HMS Terror — 203 years old, it is perfectly preserved in the frigid waters of the Northwest Passage," Arctic Research Foundation spokesman Adrian Schimnowski says in the video.

A statement issued Monday afternoon by Parks Canada said the organization "is excited about the reports of the discovery of the wreck of HMS Terror."

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Stan Rogers.