For A Monday

Plenty of things happening ...



Dismayed at not being able to fleece the working masses, those who would not define the middle-class walk back from their "taxing everyone back into the Stone Age" scheme and live to try again another day:

On Monday, at Stouffville’s (crucially) family-run Pastaggio restaurant, reporters wanted to talk to Finance Minister Bill Morneau. It made sense. He was there. He and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau were there to announce a nine per cent small business tax rate by 2019, down from 10.5 per cent currently, as part of a highly technical and controversial package of proposed changes to Canada’s tax code. You know — finance minister stuff.

Moreover, Morneau has been in the news for his “French villa controversy,” which is a terrible thing for a politician to have a controversy about. (He owns it with his wife, via a holding company. He forgot to disclose its existence.) More recent strange news: even as he ministered Canada’s finances, Canada’s finance minister had not placed his considerable financial holdings in a blind trust.

But when the first reporter up to the mic asked to address her questions to Morneau, Trudeau puffed out his chest. “I’ll take ‘em,” he told her, oozing smarm. “You’ve got an opportunity to chat with the prime minister.”

A second reporter asked for Morneau. Responded Trudeau — bewilderingly, obnoxiously: “You have to ask the question of me first, because you get the chance to talk to the prime minister.”

Morneau did eventually get to defend himself on the question of his assets: he said he told the ethics commissioner everything and followed her advice. It’s not a great defence. Mary Dawson’s not a great ethics commissioner. But it’s exactly the one Trudeau offered on Morneau’s behalf before ceding him the podium. Why not just let the guy talk? Farmers and doctors and Italian restaurant owners might not much like Morneau these days, but he’s less likely to jam his foot in his mouth than Trudeau.

Also:

The finance minister is under fire for not disclosing to the ethics commissioner the private company that owns his family’s villa in France.

It's a set-up that gives Morneau’s family a tax advantage with regard to inheritance.

Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson apparently knew of the villa, but not of the private corporation.

(Sidebar: this Mary Dawson.)


And:

On Monday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Finance Minister Bill Morneau suddenly, magically announced small business tax rates would drop to 9% from 10.5%.

Magically, because in 2016 Morneau insisted he was locking in the higher rate for the foreseeable future. What changed?

It’s pretty obvious. A summer of discontent.

The change wasn’t made for sound public policy reasons (though we believe lowering taxes is almost always sound public policy) or because the Liberals have grown suddenly adverse to taxes.

No, they found a political way to deal with the blow back they’ve been receiving on a whole slew of tax policy screw ups.

Maybe the Liberals need extra money to pay for more wreathes to commemorate our war dead or better monitoring of that financial black hole known as the "First Nations".

How can coffers be filled with things like accountability or wreathes?




If immigration is meant to supply Canada with the best and the brightest then revert to the old scheme of vetting for skills:

The Liberal government is finalizing its 2018 immigration plan, aiming to strike the right balance amid a global migration crisis, a surge in illegal border-crossers and persistent labour gaps across the country.

Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen recently wrapped up cross-country consultations and is preparing to table the annual immigration levels in the House of Commons by the Nov. 1 deadline

As he sets next year's target for the number of newcomers allowed into the country, the government's goal is to attract top talent in a competitive global market while reuniting families and offering refuge to people displaced by disaster and conflict.

"Canada's immigration system continues to be based on compassion, efficiency and economic opportunity for all, while protecting the health, safety and security of Canadians," reads a statement from Hussen to CBC News.

"Canada's system of immigration has been recognized internationally as a thoughtful, responsible approach that takes into consideration the need for more immigrants while balancing our fiscal and global responsibilities."

Conservative Immigration critic Michelle Rempel said the government has so far failed to develop a sound strategy to ensure immigrants help fill labour gaps in certain sectors and in remote and less populated parts of the country.  

"There are some bigger policy questions around how the government is incenting people in high unemployment areas to be matched with existing work, and how the government is going to seek to pull people that are coming into the country, new Canadians, instead of becoming isolated in small pockets in major urban centres, how perhaps those streams could be used to bolster immigration needs in areas of high demand in the country, where people aren't settling," she told CBC News.

(Sidebar: because urban centres vote Liberal.)




North Korea rattles its sabre - again:

North Korea warned countries at the United Nations on Monday in a statement: don't join the United States in military action against the Asian state and you will be safe from retaliation.

The caution was contained in a copy of North Korean Deputy U.N. Ambassador Kim In Ryong's prepared remarks for a discussion on nuclear weapons by a U.N. General Assembly committee. However, Kim did not read that section out loud.

"As long as one does not take part in the U.S. military actions against the DPRK (North Korea), we have no intention to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against any other country," according to Kim's prepared remarks.

"The entire U.S. mainland is within our firing range and if the U.S. dares to invade our sacred territory even an inch it will not escape our severe punishment in any part of the globe," the statement read.

Perhaps Kim Jong-Un does not realise that without China's generous support, it could not be a global Scrappy-Doo.

Known sex abusers dig in for one last push in Raqqa:

The last of the few dozen ISIL holdouts inside the terrorist group’s de facto capital in Syria were mounting a final stand on Sunday, after a stream of militants surrendered under a deal brokered by local officials.

A U.S.-backed alliance known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, said that 275 militants had left Raqqa’s city centre, along with their families, and that they would be interrogated and sent to court if they were suspected to have participated in killings.

Also - ignominious ends for ISIS child-rapists:

The ISIS once drew recruits from near and far with promises of paradise but now bodies of terrorists lie in mass graves or at the mercy of wild dogs as its "caliphate" collapses. Flies buzz around human remains poking through the dusty earth in the Iraqi town of Dhuluiyah, 90 kilometres (55 miles) north of Baghdad, at a hastily-dug pit containing the bodies of dozens of ISIS terrorists killed in 2015.

"They should have ended up in the stomachs of stray dogs," local police officer Mohammed al-Juburi told AFP. "We buried them here not out of love but because we wanted to avoid diseases."

Furious over a Kurdish referendum for an independent state, Iraqi forces seize Kirkuk:

Iraqi government forces captured the major Kurdish-held oil city of Kirkuk on Monday, responding to a Kurdish referendum on independence with a bold lightning strike that transforms the balance of power in the country.

Before I continue with the self-pitying squatters and their complaints-du-jour, I would like to start with Ibn Warraq:

An obsession with conspiracies leads to fatalism, a refusal to take charge of one's own destiny or to take responsibility for the manifest backwardness of one's own culture.

(Warraq, Ibn. Why the West Is the Best. Encounter Books, 2011. pg. 159)

And now:

A preschool English teacher was told to remove her hijab if she wanted to be hired by a school in Kuwait. The 23-year-old applied for a job in Kuwait’s the English Playgroup. After an interview, she received an email from a school official saying that her new job depended on whether she was OK with teaching without a hijab on.

**

Somali-Canadians left reeling after a bomb blast killed hundreds in Mogadishu over the weekend are calling for Canada to offer help to those affected by the horrific attack. ...

"Our prime minister has made a statement, and I think the statement is good, but not what we need at this moment," Ibrahim said in an interview on Monday, adding that the federal government should be helping get the wounded out of Mogadishu and into places where they can get adequate medical treatment.

(Sidebar: I thought that Canada was their country now. I guess not.)




It doesn't matter what anyone says at the show trial M-103 committee because its conclusion has long since been decided:

A big problem is the standing committee hasn’t clarified the term Islamophobia in the context of M103. Liberal MP Iqra Khalid, who crafted the motion, could have clarified the term but has neglected to do so.

The supporters of the motion claim that the commitment to avoid bigoted judgments is non-binding. However, many fear that it is merely a precursor to a bill condemning Islamophobia, which is a very nebulous notion.

I consider equating Islamophobia with anti-Semitism highly flawed. In committee, I will argue that the two are fundamentally different, are used in very different contexts and would also have completely different ramifications in the context of M-103.

Khalid has used the condemnation of anti-Semitism as a pretext to push for a similar response to what she considers Islamophobia.

Khalid's anti-Semitic co-religionists are more than happy to equate anti-semitism with their faulty notions of persecution of Islamists because it furthers an end.  For Miss Hassan, this article is a futile gesture and her belief that this motion is unpatriotic or un-Canadian is incredibly wrong-headed.  Why allow one religion (and a despotic one at that) be permitted to establish a blasphemy law and then Sharia over a country the foundations of which are entirely anti-thetical to that of a theocracy similar to Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, states that would otherwise have failed had the West never existed?
 

Also - this must be embarrassing:

A former lawyer for the Alberta Human Rights Commission has failed in his efforts to sue Sun Media over an allegedly defamatory column by Ezra Levant.

The suit has been thrown out of court for delay. Nothing has happened on the file since Sun Media filed its defence three years ago, although there are related defamation suits that remain active.
The litigation relates to comments Levant made in 2014 on The Source, his show on the defunct Sun News Network, and a column in Sun newspapers headlined, “Next stop, crazy town.”

In that column, Levant harshly criticized the actions of the Alberta Human Rights Commission and some of its employees, including Arman Chak, by reference to some of his previous writings about Bangladesh, Pakistan and Israel.

“The crazy keeps going down. You’ve gotta get out your shovel and dig to get to the crazy that’s underneath the crazy,” the column reads.

The saga of the disgraced movie producer, Harvey Weinstein, and his several foot-in-mouth apologists who knew of and tolerated the open secret of his abuse of young actresses for years (in the years he was successfully bringing in cash) slogs in with the absurd and the contrarian:

Alleging U.S. “rape culture” caused the Hollywood sex abusescandal, UK news site the Independent has claimed that only Islam can provide the answer to preventing violence against women.

 
(Sidebar: insert own Islamists and Western feminists commentary here.)


**

Mayim Bialik is responding to the criticism she is facing over an article she wrote about the allegations against Harvey Weinstein, insisting her words were taken out of context.

The Big Bang Theory actress wrote a New York Times article titled Being a Feminist in Harvey Weinstein’s World on Friday after more than 30 women came forward with allegations of sexual harassment and abuse against Weinstein.

In the article, Bialik wrote about her strong feminist stance and appeared to suggest she is “overlooked” in sexual harassment situations because she does not adhere to the classic standard of beauty in Hollywood.

“As a proud feminist with little desire to diet, get plastic surgery or hire a personal trainer, I have almost no personal experience with men asking me to meetings in their hotel rooms,” she wrote. 

“Those of us in Hollywood who don’t represent an impossible standard of beauty have the ‘luxury’ of being overlooked and, in many cases, ignored by men in power unless we can make them money.”

The 41-year-old also explained she makes choices she finds to “self-protecting and wise” to avoid any inappropriate situations.

“I have decided that my sexual self is best reserved for private situations with those I am most intimate with,” she wrote. “I dress modestly. I don’t act flirtatiously with men as a policy.”

“I am entirely aware that these types of choices might feel oppressive to many young feminists,” she added. “Women should be able to wear whatever they want. They should be able to flirt however they want with whomever they want. Why are we the ones who have to police our behavior? In a perfect world, women should be free to act however they want. But our world isn’t perfect. Nothing - absolutely nothing - excuses men for assaulting or abusing women. But we can’t be naive about the culture we live in.”

After the article was published, many people took to social media, including Patricia Arquette, accusing Bialik of victim blaming.

There is no excusing the fat slab of piggery that is Harvey Weinsten and his various pedophilic defenders but how many of his victims who have come out of the woodwork and the slow-to-judge-but-quick-to-pontificate friends in show biz could have turned on him and the other offenders ages ago but sat on it because he was a cash-cow? How is Miss Bialik's commentary (aside from her delusional ideas that feminism still means Susan B. Anthony and Jane Austen) "victim blaming" (victims no one cared about until now, one might add)? In what industry is debasement of a person and allowing one's self to be debased for profit standard? Would the likes of Emma Thompson excuse this sort of behaviour in any other professional environment?

There is so much wrong about this entire fiasco and so much blame to go around. Had any of the parties involved had shame, they would slink into obscurity.

But, you know, money and such.