Mid-Week Post

You'd better watch out ...

A merry Saint Nicholas' Day to all y'all.



Also, Hanukkah has come early this year:

President Donald Trump on Wednesday reversed decades of U.S. policy and recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, imperiling Middle East peace efforts and upsetting Washington’s friends and foes alike.  

(Sidebar: what a ridiculous thing to say. Anything angers Islamists who use mentally disabled children as bombs. Why would this be different?)

Trump announced his administration would begin a process of moving the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a step expected to take years and one that his predecessors opted not to take to avoid inflaming tensions. 

 The tensions are for nought as Jerusalem is historically Israel's capital:

According to many scholars, there was a temple on that site for nearly 1,000 years before the Roman destruction. That would mean that for about 3,000 years, Jerusalem has been the centre of the Jewish people: a physical centre when a temple was standing, and a centre for prayer and longing from afar after the Jews were dispersed around the globe. Every year, at the very end of Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, and at the end of the Passover Seder, Jews recite, “Next year in Jerusalem.”

So why haven't other countries put their embassies there?

The reason why so many countries, like Canada and the United States, don’t have our embassies in Jerusalem is because of the Arab countries surrounding Israel. For decades the oil-dependent west has had to balance being normal, and having their embassies in Israel’s normal capital city, with the thuggish demands of oil-rich Arab dictatorships.

That's why.

Oh, why don't you just make yourself tsar and get it over with, Vlad?

Vladimir Putin on Wednesday announced he is running for the Russian presidency in upcoming elections, seeking a fourth term next year that would extend his rule to 2024.

Of course they will:

The Liberal government will block an attempt by the Opposition Progressive Conservatives to haul five senior officials before a legislative hearing for questioning about the property assessment fiasco.

Serge Rousselle, the minister responsible for Service New Brunswick, said Tuesday that the Liberals will use their majority to vote down the motion by PC Leader Blaine Higgs.

Higgs is asking the legislature to vote to summon Premier Brian Gallant's chief of staff, Jordan O'Brien, and four current or former Service New Brunswick officials to testify.

Also:

Newfoundland and Labrador’s premier has won an interim injunction blocking media from reporting on court documents in a St. John’s murder trial.

The documents relate to the trial of Brandon Phillips in the death of 63-year-old Lawrence Wellman following a botched hotel robbery in October, 2015.

Premier Dwight Ball’s daughter, Jade Ball, was dating Phillips at the time.

Ball won an interim injunction this week in the province’s Supreme Court preventing media outlets from publishing a story about the documents, pending a Dec. 19 hearing.

In a statement, the premier’s lawyer said that Ball “as a private citizen, provided information of his own accord to the police regarding a homicide” in October 2015.

The statement says the premier recognizes his actions “are now arguably a matter of public interest,” but says “as a father, he has acted to protect the privacy of an innocent person” and he could not comment further on the matter.

 
But they aren't the only ones who are corrupt:

The world is at a "pivot point" and will fail unless countries embrace free trade and elevate their citizens who have been left behind by globalization, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned Wednesday.

Trudeau delivered that dire, anti-protectionist message to a high-powered business audience at a major international conference in this bustling southern Chinese city of Guangzhou.

More:

Pursuing free trade with China and preserving the North American Free Trade Agreement are part of Canada's international mission to combat the rising tide of populism, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Tuesday.

What the hand puppet is trying to say is that China, which isn't Canada's principle trading partner, has every right to assume Canada's resources, which it desperately needs, or Canadians might just decide who to trade with and why. This self-determinism thing is simply un-Chinese. Just ask Xi.


To wit:

"Which nation, besides Canada, which nation’s administration do you most admire, and why?"

It took Trudeau a minute to consider the question.

The marketing of this event had become controversial because it suggested these ladies might want to ask what was in the e-vite like "What’s your favourite virtue?" or "Who are your real-life heroes?" Maybe Trudeau was expecting one of those. ...

"You know, there’s a level of of admiration I actually have for China because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and say ‘we need to go green fastest . . . we need to start investing in solar.’ I mean there is a flexibility that I know Stephen Harper must dream about of having a dictatorship that he can do everything he wanted that I find quite interesting."

He can't make a deal with China (or the US, for that matter) and he knows that buyer's remorse will hit him big time come 2019. So he goes back to his and dad's old standard - the "basic dictatorship" of China:

It should tell you something about just how deeply the rot has spread that the Liberal Party of Canada was well represented at the Chinese Communist Party’s three-day “dialogue with world political parties” that was wrapping up just as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was arriving in Beijing on Sunday, and that among the 300 delegates who lauded Xi Jinping’s regime “as the core in pushing forward the building of a community of a shared future for mankind and of a better world” was none other than Jean Chretien. The former Liberal prime minister is nowadays employed by Denton’s Canada LLP, the ugly little stepsister of the global conglomerate Beijing Dacheng. ...

Along with pro-Beijing lobby groups headquartered in Canada, the Chinese Communist Party’s “soft power” brokers have picked up the costs of dozens of getting-to-know-you trips to China over the years for several Liberal and Conservative MPs and senators. All by himself, John McCallum, the cabinet minister Trudeau appointed ambassador to China last year, racked up freebie trips to the value of $73,300.

But what the hell. A drop in the bucket. Xi Jinping’s increasingly imperialistic regime spends an estimated $18 billion a year on subversion and overseas propaganda, which in its Canadian content is now practically indistinguishable from the boilerplate produced by the Office of the Minister of International Trade and the Canada-China Business Council.

We are all supposed to be somehow impressed, for instance, or at least surprised, that Trudeau’s purportedly principled insistence on gender, labour and environmental provisions in a free trade agreement with China was the cause of some hullabaloo in Beijing this week. It’s a handy storyline. Even Trudeau’s noisiest critics will settle for it. What a dolt! Dolt or not, the proposition that it’s a big deal falls apart on the fiction that there is some important distinction to be drawn between proceeding with “preliminary negotiations” as expected, and advancing to “high level exchanges” on free trade instead.

Never mind for the moment that “free trade” isn’t even possible with a police state, let alone the sort that has lately rededicated itself with relish to the thuggery necessary to the enforcement of a command-and-control economy – which Xi Jinping has explicitly articulated as a matter of fundamental state policy. Trudeau can at least be confident that he can persist in his cringe-inducing infatuation with the Chinese regime, and that Beijing will continue to return the compliment with the flattery that he obsessively craves.

It's just money:

Canada is scrapping a plan to buy 18 Boeing Super Hornet fighter jets amid a deepening dispute with the U.S. aerospace company, three sources familiar with the matter said on Tuesday.

Instead, the Liberal government will announce next week it intends to acquire a used fleet of older Australia F-18 jets, the same kind of plane Canada currently operates, said the sources, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the situation.

The move underlines Ottawa’s anger at a decision by Boeing to launch a trade challenge against Canadian planemaker Bombardier Inc., which the U.S. giant accuses of dumping airliners on the domestic American market.

Today, one hundred years ago, an explosion in Halifax reduced nearly half of it to rubble:

(source)

Would this be the values of the Prime Directive, devised by that space-age UN, that was loosely observed and where replicators allegedly eliminated poverty unless the red shirt guys who stocked the replicators went on strike? Those Star Trek values?

Vulcanologist Jess Phoenix never expected to be involved in politics. Until recently her life revolved around science—traveling the world to study different volcanoes and running an educational nonprofit. But the environmental record of the Trump administration has motivated her to run for Congress. ...

She also has one advantage that sets her apart—the support of Star Trek actors like Tim Russ, Robert Picardo, and John Billingsley, all of whom have appeared in her campaign videos. “John saw the correlation between my positions about issues and the Star Trek universe,” Phoenix says, “and how the ideals of Gene Roddenberry’s future matched up with what I wanted to fight for.”

She says that as a vulcanologist, Star Trek references are a fact of life, since pretty much everyone she meets makes a joke about her studying Vulcans. Her standard response is to give the Vulcan salute and say “live long and prosper.”

“Its convenient because it’s something I actually believe in,” she says. “I do want people to live long and prosper, so I’d say it’s a pretty universally OK message.”