Mid-Week Post

Your epicentre of the work-week ...




Oh, dear:

Hurricane Irma is just starting its passage across the Caribbean but, judging by the first reports and images emerging on Wednesday, the destruction is already serious. 

The Category 5 hurricane hammered the northern end of the Leeward Islands overnight, hitting Antigua and Barbuda, where a NOAA weather station reported a 155 mph gust before failing Wednesday morning, according to forecasters. 

The eye of the hurricane passed over St. Martin around 8 a.m. this morning and began to impact Anguilla. It was closing in on the U.S. Virgin Islands on Wednesday afternoon. 

Images posted on social media from St. Martin showed massive flooding, submerged and overturned cars and destroyed homes, with doors ripped off their hinges.

Everyone, get out alive.




It is being reported that North Korea is moving an ICBM to its coast:

North Korea has reportedly moved an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) towards its west coast, as the US said Pyongyang was "begging" for war.

North Korea had been spotted moving a rocket that appeared to be an ICBM towards its west coast, South Korea's Asia Business Daily, citing an unidentified source, reported on Tuesday.

The rocket started moving on Monday and was spotted moving only at night to avoid surveillance, the report said.

 
If so, Japan et al need military deterrents as of yesterday.


Also:

Analysts peering at satellite images of North Korea after the latest nuclear test reported Tuesday that they had spotted many landslides and wide disturbances at the country’s test site, in the North’s mountainous wilds. Tunnels for the nuclear blasts are deep inside Mount Mantap, a mile-high peak.

“These disturbances are more numerous and widespread than what we have seen from any of the five tests North Korea previously conducted,” three experts wrote in an analysis for 38 North, a website run by the U.S.-Korea Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

Early readings from global networks that monitor shock waves suggest that the nuclear blast on Sunday had a destructive power equal to 120,000 tons of high explosives. If correct, that is roughly six times more powerful than the North’s test of September 2016, and eight times larger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

 
A study conducted by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has been halted after parts of it suggest that Obama (and his infamous "red line") was in part responsible for Syrian atrocities:

According to a publicity email sent by the Museum, the study was set to be launched at an event at the US Institute for Peace in Washington, D.C., on September 11 and was overseen by a former US intelligence and national security official under Obama, Cameron Hudson, now director of the Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide. The paper argued that “a variety of factors, which were more or less fixed, made it very difficult from the beginning for the US government to take effective action to prevent atrocities in Syria, even compared with other challenging policy contexts.” Using computational modeling and game theory methods, as well as interviews with experts and policymakers, the report asserted that greater support for the anti-Assad rebels and US strikes on the Assad regime after the August 2013 Ghouta chemical weapons attack would not have reduced atrocities in the country, and might conceivably have contributed to them.

The intervention of the Holocaust Museum in a hot-button political dispute—and the apparent excuse of official US government inaction in the face of large-scale mass murder, complete with the gassing of civilians and government-run crematoria—alarmed many Jewish communal figures. “The first thing I have to say is: Shame on the Holocaust Museum,” said Leon Wieseltier, the literary critic and fellow at the Brookings Institution, who slammed the Museum for “releasing an allegedly scientific study that justifies bystanderism.”  ...

Some Jewish communal leaders suggested both privately to Tablet, and in conversations with board members and staff at the Holocaust Museum, that the Museum’s moral authority had been hijacked for a partisan re-writing of recent history, and alleged that the museum had absolved the Obama administration of any moral or political error in its response to mass atrocities in Syria. At least one of the architects of the Obama administration policy in Syria, former deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes, was appointed to the museum’s Memorial Council during the closing days of the Obama administration. The Council also includes Obama NSC alumni Grant Harris and Daniel Benjamin. Other Obama NSC alumni, including Hudson and Anna Cave, have joined the Museum’s staff.

(Sidebar: this Ben Rhodes.)


If true, there can be no justification for this deliberate omission of history. It is akin to Walter Duranty's outright denial of starvation in Ukraine.




Trudeau to hand over Canada's economy to the Chinese communist government Canada to sign trade deals with China:

While all eyes are on NAFTA, Canada is trying to move quickly on trade in the Asia-Pacific, with decisions on a China free trade agreement and an updated TPP coming this fall.

While Trudeau's inherited wealth is guarded, he expects everyone else to "pay their fair share":

It’s one thing to spend down political capital. All governments do it, sooner or later. It’s quite another thing to squander it.

And that’s exactly what the Liberals are doing in the name of closing tax loopholes for incorporated professionals and small businesses, including family farms.

The Finance Department sparked a wave of anger with a discussion paper in mid-July about a proposal to end “income sprinkling” to family members, passive investment in stocks and real estate, and converting income into capital gains. “We’re consulting about closing unfair loopholes,” Finance Minister Bill Morneau tweeted last week.

The proposal has detonated a tax revolt and sets up a fractious fall sitting of the House. Since the discussion paper’s release, the opposition Conservatives have heard about almost nothing else in their summer rounds, while Liberal MPs admit they’ve been getting an earful. They gave Morneau an earful of his own in a conference call last week; in a late set-up, he was set to meet with small business owners in Vancouver today.

The internal blowback is such that that the proposed tax reforms will be the topic of conversation at the Liberal summer caucus Wednesday and Thursday in Kelowna, B.C. While Prime Minister Justin Trudeau maintains the government “will make no apologies” for the proposal, the Liberals need significant wiggle room.

The man-child who couldn't identify the middle-class when he was being handed his dad's former job now cannot identify with them. Forty-two percent of people in Ontario live from paycheque to paycheque (in all fairness, they did vote to be treated this way, so ...). When are people going to wake up and realise that this generated class warfare is nothing more than a smokescreen for a corrupt and incompetent government?


Also - maybe people should be done with Catherine McKenna:

“What I want to see out of Canada,” O’Toole said, “is less of the virtue-signalling type of approach where we put the centrepiece of Justin Trudeau’s image-building – the gender-equal cabinet, the reconciliation -- they’re all important but this is an economic trade agreement.”

That set off McKenna, who tweeted, “Ensuring NAFTA is not a race to the bottom on the environment isn’t virtue signalling. #CPC just doesn’t get it #environment #economy.”

She followed that with: “And so done with ridiculous language from #CPC like ‘virtue signaling’. We will continue to stand up for Canadian values at home and abroad.”

McKenna posted more tweets and a longer rant on her Facebook page, concluding with: “If anyone needs more evidence that Andrew Scheer’s Conservative Party is still Stephen Harper’s party, look no further than this first interview given by Scheer's newly-minted Foreign Affairs lead. It is telling.”

A spokeswoman for Trudeau told CP McKenna’s Facebook post was, “the official government response to O’Toole.”

That’s alarming, because in it McKenna made the common error of attributing specific weather events to man-made climate change.

This, of course, is part of the fiction Trudeau is anxious to maintain, that his carbon pricing plan (i.e. raising our cost of living) will somehow have a salutary effect on forest fires in B.C., flooding in Windsor, and hurricanes like Harvey and Irma.

McKenna came closest to reality when she said the environment and economy can’t be separated.

True, although not in the way she meant, which was that the Liberals, unlike Conservatives, care about both.

The real reason the environment and economy can’t be separated is that Trudeau’s national carbon pricing plan is a bad economic policy masquerading as an environmental one.

Weariness is often mistaken for tough talk with this party.



If one is throwing money at a problem, it's probably because expecting some work and actual results would mean a loss of votes from one of the most powerful unions in the country:

Now comes word from the Fraser Institute that these poor (and deteriorating) academic results in Grade 6 math and Grade 9 applied math and literacy are occurring despite substantial increases in education funding by the Liberal government under Wynne and her predecessor, Dalton McGuinty.

In addition, the cost of public education in Ontario has been steadily rising while enrollment is dropping.

The Fraser study found between 2005-06 and 2014-15, public spending on education rose from $19.5 billion annually to $26.6 billion, a 36.6% increase.

Adjusted for inflation, per student spending rose from $10,762 annually in 2005-06 to $13,276 in 2014-15, a 23.4% increase.

And yet during the same period, enrollment in Ontario public schools dropped by 5.4%, declining from 2,118,546 in 2005-06 to 2,003,238 in 2014-15.

One of the main factors driving up education costs, the Fraser Institute reported, has been a huge increase in the provincial contribution to teacher pensions, which rose from $740 million in 2005-06 to $1.53 billion in 2014-15, an increase of 106.8%, or 8.8% annually.

That means Ontario taxpayers have literally been paying more for public education over the past decade and getting less, considering both declining enrollment and that EQAO test scores have been on the decline for years.

There are any number of problems in North American schools. This is just one of them.




And now, a cat crossing the street:

(Merci)