Mid-Week Post

A merry Thanksgiving to all y'all...

Not even officially president yet and Trump is already behaving like a career politician:

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump appears to be softening his tone on whether climate change is real and on his stated plans to scrap the recent multinational agreement to limit carbon emissions.

In a wide-ranging interview on Tuesday with editors and reporters at The New York Times, Trump said he would “keep an open mind” about the Paris accord, which he has repeatedly said he planned to either renegotiate or cancel if elected.

**

“I think when the President-elect, who’s also the head of your party, tells you before he’s even inaugurated that he doesn’t wish to pursue these charges, it sends a very strong message, tone, and content” to other Republicans, former Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said Tuesday.

“If Donald Trump can help her heal, then perhaps that’s a good thing to do,” Conway added, saying Clinton “still has to face the fact that a majority of Americans don’t find her to be honest or trustworthy.”

“I think he’s thinking of many different things as he prepares to become the president of the United States, and things that sound like the campaign are not among them.”

 
Unbelievable.

What did he campaign on again?





In other news, South Carolina governor Nikki Haley has been pegged for the American ambassador to the UN:

Robert Costa at the Washington Post reports that the Trump transition team is poised to announce South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley as the country’s Ambassador to the United Nations.

Maybe she will straight-up troll the UN.

Carry on, Nimrata Randhawa Haley! Carry on!





Identity politics are nothing more than primitive tribal affiliations and do not belong in the twenty-first century:

Litigiousness and racial tension, two parts of the national identity that make America less beautiful, will get worse because of this election, independent of anything Trump does in office.

Bingo.

The problem existed before Trump got into office and, because people are emotionally retarded, it will persist still until people realise that they live in a First World country that eschews bloodlines and castes and accepts that one is American (or Canadian, no matter how "post-national" some morons think the country is), a fraternal nation-state where one's ancestors are interesting footnotes, not present dilemmas.





Horrible:

The driver behind the wheel of a Tennessee school bus that crashed on Monday, killing five young children, reportedly asked the kids, “Are you ready to die?” as he sped along a Chattanooga road.

Johnthony Walker posed the chilling question seconds before the bus slammed into a telephone pole and a tree, according to a grieving mother who had three kids aboard the vehicle — one of whom was killed.

Walker, 24, was well above the 30-mph speed limit while driving the 35 5- to 10-year-olds home from the Woodmore Elementary School, crashing on a narrow road about a mile from the school, according to Chattanooga Police Chief Fred Fletcher.

One student aboard the bus told WDEF-TV that the driver “wasn’t paying attention and was going real fast.”

Walker was charged with five counts of vehicular homicide, reckless endangerment and reckless driving. He was held in lieu of $107,500 bond.

The most transparent government transparently accepts cash from Chinese businessmen:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was the top draw at a $1,500 Liberal Party cash-for-access fundraiser at the mansion of a wealthy Chinese-Canadian business executive in May. One of the guests at the event was a well-heeled donor who was seeking Ottawa’s final approval to begin operating a new bank aimed at Canada’s Chinese community.

The Globe and Mail has learned that wealthy Chinese businessman Zhang Bin who, with a partner, donated $1-million to the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation and the University of Montreal Faculty of Law weeks after the fundraiser, also attended the event. Mr. Zhang is a political adviser to the Chinese government in Beijing and a senior apparatchik in the network of Chinese state promotional activities around the world.

Chinese Business Chamber of Commerce chair Benson Wong played host to Mr. Trudeau and 32 other people at his Toronto home. Among the donors was insurance tycoon Shenglin Xian, the founder of Wealth One Bank of Canada, and several Chinese billionaires.

Thirty-nine percent of the Canadian electorate voted for this corruption. 

Other ways Trudeau is ruining the country:

**

The problem with that rationale is that such artificially induced infrastructure expansion creates a dependency by the businesses supplying the products and services to accommodate the expansion for continuous infrastructure spending. If a concrete producer needs to hire and expand to accommodate government-sponsored infrastructure, that’s a good thing, right?

Well… not if infrastructure in and of itself has zero effect on the ability of the population to increase aggregate demand for the rest of the economy’s output. All you end up doing is creating a socially privileged group who grow fat on the government teat. At the end of the day, it’s selective welfare.

But... but.... Canada's back....

New data from the Conference Board of Canada paints a potentially sombre outlook for Black Friday shopping in many parts of the country this year, due to a sluggish Canadian economy and sagging consumer confidence.

“It might be a bit of a grinchy season for Canadian retailers,” says Michael Burt, director of industrial economic trends with the Conference Board of Canada. “Consumers are apprehensive right now and retailers are seeing that first-hand.”

Overall, the Conference Board shows that consumer confidence in October experienced its largest decline since the price of oil slipped to $30 U.S. per barrel in January of this year. Particularly hard hit by this news is the province of Alberta, which recently saw its consumer confidence rating approach an all-time low.

Also:

A new report by the Fraser Institute says Canadians had a median wait time of 20 weeks this year for medical treatment — the longest yet recorded by the independent public-policy think tank.

The Fraser Institute says that 20-week wait time is double what Canadians experienced in 1993, when the organization began tracking delays for medically necessary elective treatments.

 

Does he mean it? Does he really, really mean it? 

Conservative leadership candidate Maxime Bernier is promising to overhaul CBC/Radio-Canada – an institution he says “seems frozen in time” — by cutting hundreds of millions in funding, streamlining its mandate and getting it out of the advertising market.

No one has learned a damn thing from Phoenix Sinclair or Randall Dooley:

Her name was Serenity. 

Her life and her death, though, were anything but serene.

Alberta’s Child and Youth Advocate, Del Graff, issued a review of the case of a four-year-old First Nations girl who died while in a kinship care placement. (The report gave her a pseudonym, Marie.) Graff’s review revealed that the relatives with whom the girl had been placed had been poorly trained and that the home study of their family had been cursory.

The review also found Serenity and her two older half-siblings had been left in the guardianship of this couple, despite complaints and tips about abuse. No workers had checked on the three children in the 11 months before Serenity died.

Graff’s report was disturbing enough, but it omitted medical details even more shocking.

Based on medical records obtained by the Journal, Serenity arrived at a hospital in central Alberta on Sept. 18, 2014, suffering from a suspected head injury, with “blown”or dilated pupils. She was four years and three months old. She weighed just 18 pounds, the weight of a typical nine-month-old baby.

Notes from the emergency room describe “multiple bruises all over her body, some green in colour and others purple.”

(Sidebar: the rest of the article is too horrible to read.)


**

Kent Owen Hill walked out of court a free man on Monday after pleading guilty to manslaughter and being sentenced to time served in the death of Tashina General and her unborn child.

In a fit of rage in January 2008, Hill, also known as Kent Squire-Hill, put his hands around the throat of 21-year-old General, strangling her to death outside his family home in Ohsweken, just south of Brantford, Ontario. She was about four months pregnant with his child.

He buried her in a shallow grave in bush area off Chiefswood Road, near Indian Line. ...

“He committed the murder of two people, of his own son.”

“He never went for help,” said another family member who didn’t want to be identified. “He didn’t phone anybody. He hid it for three months and put the family through extra torture.”

In a small packed courtroom with heavy police presence, Justice David Broad accepted the joint submission from the Crown and defence that Hill be sentenced to time served of eight years and seven months.

Given extra credit of at least 1.5 days for each day of pre-trial custody, as set out in the Criminal Code, Hill had served the equivalent of 15 years in jail, said the judge.

Also taken into account, said Broad, were several mitigating factors: Hill, 29, a former rising Six Nations lacrosse star, is a first-time offender with no prior criminal record; his young age; his First Nations ancestry; and that he “took responsibility for his actions” by pleading guilty and avoiding a second trial.

**

The crib in the photograph of the chaotic bedroom was empty, except for the half-empty baby bottle on the mattress and the Winnie the Pooh stuffed animal, face-down and pushed in the corner.

There was clutter and garbage on the floor. A soiled diaper sat on a shelf.

Little Ryker Daponte-Michaud died there in a painful, horrifying way, just 18 months into his life, unable to take himself to hospital to treat his burns from a cup of scalding coffee.

The days before his death in May 2014 would have been excruciatingly painful.

He died there, the Crown says, even after people told his mother, Amanda Dumont, 30, and her partner Scott Bakker, 28, to take the toddler to the hospital to get him some help.

If they had, assistant Crown attorney Elizabeth Maguire told a Superior Court jury Monday, there was a 95 per cent chance he would have survived.

The absurdity of calling a holiday by another name won't erase it from the cultural palate. It will simply multiply the number of people who think that you are a jack@$$:

Bloomington, Indiana is renaming Good Friday and Columbus Day in an attempt to be more 'inclusive'.

The two will be renamed 'Spring holiday' and 'Fall holiday', a move that Mayor John Hamilton said would “better reflect cultural sensitivity in the workplace.”

I'd like to see this guy rename Eid "That Quaint Middle Eastern Day". Does that reflect openness?





And now, a touching story for American Thanksgiving:

Last year, one of Smith's favorite calls came from a 92-year-old man whose wife had recently died. He was trying to cook Thanksgiving dinner.

"They celebrated Thanksgiving together for 60 years and they always hosted. He had never cooked a turkey, his wife had passed away, but he wanted to carry on that tradition. He had five grandkids. I was on with him for about 40 minutes and walked him through everything. He did call back afterward to let us know that it was a great day. It was an emotional call. And he was so thankful. I'm waiting for him to call back this year."

This is awesome. Thanksgiving saved.

 (Merci)