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| A merry Saint Andrew's Day to all y'all. |
It's the last day of November and Fidel Castro, the murderer of thousands, is still dead.
Why the Trudeaus adore mass murderers:
The Trudeau flirtation with some of the world’s worst dictators cannot be explained away as youthful rebelliousness or written off as temporary lapses of judgment. John English, in his formidable first-volume biography of Pierre Trudeau, Citizen of the World, says it is “fair to ask a broader question: Was he generally too sympathetic to authoritarian regimes of the left?”
English waffles into a non-conclusion. “Trudeau was willing to give the Soviets, the Chinese, and, later, the Cubans much credit for getting their ‘social priorities’ correct. While acknowledging the limitations on civil rights in these authoritarian societies, (Trudeau) emphasized their social achievements.” In another summary, English looks at Trudeau’s fascination with Stalinism and concludes he was not a “duped fellow traveller” but someone who knew that “liberty was the most precious individual good.”
If so, why did he never repudiate his glaringly wrong-headed 1961 claims that Mao Zedong’s catastrophic Great Leap Forward counted as an international social achievement and that China as a nation that had its social priorities straight?
During his visit to China, Trudeau and other Quebec intellectuals were guests of Mao’s regime, dining in splendor and eagerly swallowing massive dollops of propaganda as they toured the country. In Two Innocents in Red China, a 1961 book Trudeau co-authored with Jacques Hebert, Communist China emerges as a global force for good. Under Communism, they wrote, the small-wage earner “is no longer just a speck of dust in the proletarian mass … The genius of Mao is to have persuaded hundreds of millions of people — by astonishingly effective methods — of the grandeur and nobility of their task.” Persuaded might not be the right word to described Mao’s methods.
Trudeau met Mao, and called him “one of the great men of the century.” Trudeau wrote of his “powerful head, an unlined face, and a look of wisdom tinged with melancholy. The eyes of that tranquil face are heavy with having seen too much of the misery of men.”
It was the face and eyes of a mass murderer. As Mao shook hands with Trudeau, millions of Chinese had already died across the country as part of a national “Superpower Programme” to industrialize and modernize China. The malevolence of the agricultural and production reforms, their cruelty and abusiveness, are documented in horrific detail by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday in their monumental book Mao: The Untold Story. The resulting 38 million deaths were what Chang and Halliday call “the greatest famine of the 20th century — and of all human recorded history.” Mao, they say, “knowingly starved and worked those tens of millions of people to death.”
Chang and Halliday singled out Trudeau’s “starry-eyed” book among other Westerners complicit in denying Mao’s atrocities. Instead of searching for the truth, Trudeau claimed to have seen the benefits of Mao’s policies. With Hebert, he wrote that “China’s methods are going to be imitated by the two-thirds of the human race that goes to bed hungry every night. And the moral indignation of the West will be powerless to stop it.”
Over the decades, Trudeau failed to acknowledge his massive lapse in judgment. In a 1997 article in Saturday Night magazine, editor Kenneth Whyte reviewed several of Trudeau’s works published during the 1990s. “Two Innocents in Red China may well be the worst book ever published in Canada,” wrote Whyte. “Certainly no significant Canadian public figure has ever been so dreadfully wrong about a major event as Trudeau was — and, perversely, continues to be — about Mao and the Great Leap.”
More than three decades later, Trudeau was still talking up the thrills Mao gave him. “There is no acknowledgement (in any of Trudeau writings) of Mao’s tyranny, or Trudeau’s error,” wrote Whyte.
Read the whole thing.
There is the face of a true believer. The elder Trudeau was steadfast in his unwillingness to see Mao or Castro's tyranny.
His son is not any different.
From Trudeau's malice to his incompetence:
Across B.C.’s lower mainland and on Vancouver Island — less so in the provincial interior — Trudeau is now accused of betrayal, of putting fossil fuel exploitation before environmental protection. That’s all on him and his government, not on Clark and her MLAs; they can be accused only of pipeline fence-sitting. That’s a win for them, given everything.
Ottawa’s decision to instruct the National Energy Board to deny another, larger pipeline proposal that would have cut through B.C. to the northern coastline was also unsurprising. The Enbridge Northern Gateway project was always considered a non-starter, even after the NEB gave it conditional approval in 2014.
Should the smaller Kinder Morgan project ever go ahead — there’s no guarantee, given the nature of the project, the legal uncertainties and the popular opposition around it — the expanded pipeline would triple the volume of Alberta bitumen to a Burnaby refinery and tidewater terminal.
More controversially, it would vastly increase the number of oil tankers already loading up with oil and manoeuvring through Vancouver’s busy Burrard Inlet, into the Strait of Georgia, around Victoria and towards the open ocean for distant Asia. The number of ships making that tricky journey would jump from the current five or so each month to 34 a month. That’s a sobering prospect.
**
Justin Trudeau’s momentous decision to approve Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline has aroused concerns that the government will now curb its enthusiasm for the Energy East project to the Atlantic coast.
Frank McKenna, the deputy chairman of TD Bank and former premier of New Brunswick, said the decision to approve Trans Mountain was “very courageous,” in the face of opposition from environmentalists and First Nations.
But he said he has been concerned for some time that what may be beneficial for the West Coast might prove detrimental to the East.
“Atlantic Canada is part of Canada, too, and right now it is totally left out of the Canadian energy mix. We want in. (Energy East) would be transformative for our region and we’ll be pushing very strongly to see the pipeline finished,” he said.
(Sidebar: and who did the Maritimes vote for?)
Don't worry - nothing will get built, but it sure looks good on paper.
Also:
Ontario’s cap-and-trade program will cost the province’s consumers and businesses $8 billion dollars in its first years of operation to get minimal greenhouse gas reductions, the auditor general said Wednesday.
In her annual report, Bonnie Lysyk said households will pay an average of $156 next year in added costs on gasoline and natural gas, rising to $210 in 2019 plus another $75 that year in indirect costs on goods and services.
The government has also earmarked $1.32 billion out of the expected $8 billion in projected cap-and-trade revenue to help offset the cost of residential and business electricity bills, but it doesn’t say how, Lysyk’s report said.
Oh, dear:
The pilot of the chartered plane carrying a Brazilian soccer team told air traffic controllers he had run out of fuel before crashing into the Andes, according to a leaked recording of the final minutes of the doomed flight.
**
Paulo Follmann made the comment during a phone conversation with The Associated Press about his son, goalkeeper Jakson Follmann of the Brazilian soccer club Chapecoense.The father says, ''The chances of surviving an airplane crash are practically zero. That my son is one of the survivors is a miracle of God.''Follmann adds: ''We have not spoken to him or received any other information regarding how serious his condition is. That is making us feel anguished.''About the same time, the hospital where the player is being treated in Colombia reported that his right leg had to be amputated. It described him as being in stable condition.
Fires have devastated the town of Gatlinburg:
In all, more than 14,000 residents and tourists were forced to evacuate the tourist city in the mountains, where some hotspots persisted and a curfew was in effect overnight Tuesday.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam, who flew in to see the damage caused by a fire he called the largest in the state in the past 100 years, said he was struck by how some buildings were burned to the ground while others — including most of the downtown entertainment cluster — were untouched.
“It just could have been so much worse,” he said.
Things have nothing to do with jihad until they do have something to do with jihad but they still don't have anything to do with jihad:
The Obama administration is warning Americans not to cast blame on Muslims after a student at Ohio State University launched an attack on innocent civilians that was likely inspired by Islamic State terrorists. ...
The attacker posted a message on Facebook that law enforcement officials have released to the public.
“By Allah, we will not let you sleep unless you give peace to the Muslims. You will not celebrate or enjoy any holiday,” he wrote before the attack. “Btw, every single Muslim who disapproves of my actions is a sleeper cell, waiting for a signal. I am warning you Oh America.”
On Tuesday, the ISIS news agency Amaq claimed the attacker was “a soldier of God,” according to the New Yorker, and might have been inspired by the Islamic State’s terrorist manual….
Also:
For a man given to fiery rhetoric and long-winded sermons, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani became oddly quiet during his last summer as the chief spokesman for the Islamic State.
The Syrian who exhorted thousands of young Muslims to don suicide belts appeared increasingly obsessed with his own safety, U.S. officials say.
He banished cellphones, shunned large meetings and avoided going outdoors in the daytime. He began sleeping in crowded tenements in a Syrian farm town called al-Bab, betting on the presence of young children to shield him from the drones prowling the skies overhead.
But in late August, when a string of military defeats suffered by the Islamic State compelled Adnani to briefly leave his hiding place, the Americans were waiting for him.
But... but... residential schools!
The report from the Northern Policy Institute looks specifically at education in the remote northern Ontario communities of the Nishnawbe Aski Nation.It offer a five-point action plan to improve high school education, including improvements to an existing nation-run “residential school” system.“The small size and sheer geographic distance separating isolated First Nations communities suggest that residential schools, in some form, will remain the most viable option for some time to come,” the report concluded.
Decades from now, there will be future victims of social experiments speaking out and wondering why no one said anything before:
Bill 28 erases the basic, core rule of our law that a person is the child of her natural parents and deletes all references to “mother,” “father,” and “natural parents” from Ontario statutes, replacing them simply with “parent.” It also removes references in some statues to persons being related “by blood,” while expanding its meaning in others to include new forms of legal family relationships that are not, in fact, blood relationships.
With natural parentage and blood relations so reduced in legal significance, it should not surprise us that the bill also moves beyond couples as the basic family unit. It removes the presumption in law that a child has only two parents and permits multiple people to enter into “pre-conception parentage agreement” (PCPA). Up to four unrelated and unmarried adults can sign a contract entitling them to be legal parents to a child without being biological parents, applying to court for declarations of parentage, or adopting.
Seriously - how much money does it take to make up fake news?
The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. has submitted a proposal to the federal government requesting $318 million in additional funding in order to allow the public broadcaster to move to an ad-free model.
Why not make one's grab for cash now? The Ever-Corrupted are in charge.
Case in point:
Ontario's auditor general says taxpayers have footed the bill for millions of dollars in government advertising that is actually partisan.
Bonnie Lysyk warned last year that changes the government made to advertising rules could see her office reduced to a rubber stamp for ads even if she feels they're partisan.
The old rules banned ads as partisan if the intent was to foster a positive impression of government or a negative impression of its critics, but the new rules say an ad is partisan only if it uses an elected member's picture, name or voice, the colour or logo associated with the political party or direct criticism of a party or member of the legislature.
Lysyk lists in her annual report today several government ads that she would have flagged under the old rules as misleading or self-congratulatory, as opposed to giving the public information.
I'm sure John McCallum thought this through:
December begins the so-called Month 13, when the government-sponsored refugee package, with its monthly living allowance, ends for many families. They either have to support themselves or fall back on provincial social assistance."I'm very thankful to the government for providing for me, but I really want to work. I don't want to depend on the government," said Ibrahim Tonbari, who brought his family of six to Windsor, Ont., one year ago.Twelve months after uprooting, the Tonbaris count their many blessings: two kids in school, a three-bedroom rented house and enough food for the family.But Tonbari, 30, is struggling to pick up enough English to secure work in the construction business.Between language classes and getting his family settled, he hasn't found a job — and there's another baby on the way.He worries but says he had little choice other than to leave Homs, Syria, behind."Everything I ever built since I was 12 — I had a home and I furnished it, and I had savings so I could start my business in Syria — it's all gone," he said.Next month, his family will have access to Ontario Works, the province's social assistance program, until Tonbari can get working.
The Chinese government destroys a Buddhist sanctuary:
Larung Gar has become one of the most influential institutions in the Tibetan world, the teachings of its senior monks praised, debated and proselytized from there to the Himalayas. In recent years, disciples have popularized a “10 new virtues” movement based on Buddhist beliefs, spreading its message across the region.
Now Chinese officials are tightening control over the settlement, in what many Tibetans and their advocates call a severe blow to Tibetan religious practice.
On a recent afternoon, workers in hard hats were dismantling cells that monks and nuns had built along a ridge. As they tossed aside wooden beams and plastic sheeting, nuns picked through rubble looking for their belongings. Men who appeared to be plainclothes police officers looked on from a bench across the street.
Also - where did Chinese girls go?
According to this article, twenty-five million women were simply not registered as opposed to being aborted or killed post-natally.
While it is very possible that most births were simply not registered, the article doesn't explain away 336 million abortions done in China since the infamous one-child policy was enforced. According to available statistics, there are 13 million abortions a year (1,500 an hour). One of the chief reasons for this is the preference of sons over daughters. From 2000 to 2014, 9,615,875 sex selection abortions have taken place in China. If the majority of abortions were done because the child was a girl and female infanticides (not recorded) are still rampant, then where did the remaining girls who didn't get killed or otherwise prevented from being go?
Even members of South Korean president Geun-Hye Park's party want to sever ties:
On Wednesday, the day after President Park’s offer to leave the fate of her presidency to the National Assembly, the Saenuri’s reformative group, often referred to by local media as the “non-Park faction,” reconfirmed its earlier plan to join the opposition in seeking impeachment.
But it also left some room for the embattled president to step down voluntarily, kindling concerns from opposition parties that the impeachment bill could falter at the last minute.
“Yesterday, the media seemed to think that the emergency committee (consisting of non-Park figures) took a step backward (on impeachment) but this is not true,” said Rep. Hwang Young-cheul, speaking for the non-Park group.
“Despite the speculated impact on the impeachment quorum, our stance (to support impeachment) has become even stronger today.”
On the previous day, Park had said that she would let the National Assembly decide the fate of her presidency.
“I shall lay my course of action, including a curtailment of my presidential term, to the decision of the National Assembly,” she had said in an unheralded address to the nation.
“Should the political circles suggest a way in which I may hand over power so as to minimize chaos and a vacuum in state affairs, I shall step down from the presidency according to the given time line and legal procedure.”
This was her third official statement since the allegations broke out in late October that her confidante Choi Soon-sil had extensively meddled in key state affairs and taken undue profits.
And now, as we slowly move towards Christmas, plan your tree-decorating accordingly:
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