Friday Post

Aaaahhhh, the week-end ...




Here I invoke William Tecumseh Sherman:

I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are. If I killed them all there would be news from Hell before breakfast.

This famous Union general called put the popular press ages ago:

Ford’s strategy will be to go directly to the people as much as possible – whether it’s in person or via social media. This is increasingly the path to victory. It’s less and less about winning the air war – getting the most and best coverage in newspapers and on radio and television. Ask any winning campaign of late – from Trudeau to Trump – and they’ll agree.

No doubt my media colleagues understand all of this as well. So why the fuss? We can chalk it up to a few things: slow news day, typical media navel-gazing and – here’s where things get interesting – the anti-Ford bias that’s already caked into their coverage.

Whenever I’m asked about liberal media bias by disaffected news consumers, I explain that it’s not so much that they’re fully for or against one candidate or another. It’s just that they’re naturally predisposed to viewing liberals in a more positive light than conservatives, such that it’s more difficult for them to see things in a neutral fashion. (Case in point: The Ottawa bubble has, to their credit, finally figured out that Trudeau’s progressive schtick is a smarmy ruse. It just took them two years longer than the rest of us to get there.)

Hence why right after Doug Ford won the leadership we saw all of these headlines predicting the doomsday things he was going to get up to and how he’s just a repeat of Trump. It was not only lazy journalism but most of it ranged from baseless to flat-out lies. It’s an example of how their first inclination is to reach for any conceivable negatives, which is of course the opposite of their response to a liberal victory.

I'm quite sure the popular press can make up things without being so near to Doug Ford.


Also:

Matching Wynne’s spendfest is out of the question. Why expect voters to replace one drunken sailor with another? Ford’s known views echo the Harris years — balanced budgets, a better business climate, a war on waste — but in the decades since, “progressives” have successfully demonized the lexicon of government to the extent that any attempt at covering costs without going into debt is tarred as “austerity,” which is synonymous with “evil.”

It’s hardly worth the effort, if you ask me. Trying to slap together an extravagant cure-all will only condemn Ford to playing a game whose rules work against him. Rather than trying to outbid the Liberals, he’s better off capitalizing on the natural advantage he already enjoys, i.e. that he’s not Kathleen Wynne, the PCs aren’t the Liberals, and a Tory government would not continue down the dangerous and risky path to which Wynne has committed her party.

 
This must be embarrassing:

Cabinet Ministers Tracy MacCharles and Michael Chan, as well as MPP Grant Crack, parliamentary assistant and chair of the Standing Committee on General Government, have announced they’re bowing out just two months before the June 7 provincial election.

Liberals prefer punish Christians for raising the abortion issue:

The Charter was not written by this prime minister’s father to stifle opponents of abortion or frustrate free speech and facilitate the antics of street thugs discriminating against Caucasian Christian Canadians. The federal government cannot dictate values but it can and should do all it can to encourage elemental freedoms and to ensure that officially enunciating freedoms does not degenerate, as it did at Wilfrid Laurier, into the suppression and demonization of decent people exercising freedom of expression, which everyone in this country has taken as their birthright for more than 250 years.

No, Mr. Black, the Charter is toilet paper and the truncheon with which to bludgeon the Canadian public. Pierre's son has taken that rag to its logical conclusion.




It's just money:

Near midweek, the announcement came that his government would fund, by nearly $300,000, research into the deepest and most unsettling riddle of our entire national life: Why is our Canadian oil and gas sector falling behind? The fate of the Franklin expedition, which troubled us for so long, was just a Cracker Jack puzzle compared to this conundrum. ...

(Sidebar: no, Mr. Murphy, the Franklin expedition was meant to solve one of the longest-standing mysteries in this country's history. This gas study is just wasteful pig crap.)

So, with all this, all this — the government onside, hollow regulations, a fake carbon tax, an emasculated energy board, the prime minister’s unheralded support for the oilsands and the pipelines, environmental groups at home and out of country so reasonable and tame — what, possibly, can it that’s be holding the Canadian oil and gas sector back?

We’ll solve the question of what was before the Big Bang before we have the slightest idea of what it is that’s handcuffing the oil and gas industry.

And if it takes a mere $300,000 to shed some light, just a little beam, a sparkle on this mystery, it’ll be the best $300,000 this government could ever spend, unless it’s on another glorious trip to India.

The money-laundering makes it official that Canada is a banana republic:

Canada's banks provide almost 45 per cent of the suspicious transactions reports received annually, each of which Fintrac says "can potentially provide tremendous intelligence value." Almost 126,000 such reports were received in 2016-2017 from all sectors.

Fintrac spokesperson Jamela Austria said that in 2016-2017 the agency abandoned its technical audits of banks and others in favour of broader assessments of "overall effectiveness in complying with their legal obligations." The change in approach for these examinations prevents a direct comparison of that 67 per cent performance with previous years.

The children are the future ... or some such thing:

A total of six teens are facing charges in connection with an alleged human trafficking incident east of Toronto.

Durham regional police say they first arrested two teens in February after they allegedly coerced a 16-year-old girl into going to a Whitby hotel in order to provide sexual services to a potential customer.

Police allege the girl was sexually assaulted at the hotel and reported the incident.

Also - the best way to deal with this is simply to withdraw money:

Amid demands for the event’s pre-emptive shutdown, Queen’s Principal Daniel Woolf, in an act requiring more courage than it should, stood firm, dismissing “blanket calls for censorship … as anathema to scholarly pursuit.” Woolf’s rare demonstration of backbone from within the typically cowardly bureaucracy of Canadian academia, can be credited for the lecture proceeding, beset as it was by, to use Peterson’s invocation, “the barbarians at the gate.” Professional security prevented the mob from taking the event by storm, forcing them to settle for chanting profanities while banging on and ultimately smashing the stained-glass windows of Queen’s historical Grant Hall.

The intervening erosion of free speech has been gradual and largely imperceptible. While we yet remain some distance from things getting truly Orwellian, we are decidedly closer to 1984 today than we were in 2006.

Who would steal puppies? :

Three unweaned puppies stolen from a New Brunswick farm have been returned safely to their owners.

RCMP say the puppies were located with the help of the public and returned home unharmed.

Canada under Justin and his Chinese backers is hardly a bastion of freedom of expression and transparency but it's not like Russia can boast, either:

The Trudeau government’s attempts to silence Russian statements is un-Canadian, and it won’t work in the long run, says one of the Russian diplomats booted from Canada.

Kirill Kalinin, press secretary at the embassy in Ottawa, confirmed in an interview that he is one of four Russian diplomats told to leave Canada. He has been accused of being involved in an effort last year that outed Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland’s Ukrainian-born grandfather, Michael Chomiak, as a Nazi collaborator.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Wednesday the Russians had tried to undermine Canadian public opinion, citing the campaign aimed at Freeland.

“We all can remember the efforts by Russian propagandists to discredit our minister of foreign affairs in various ways through social media and by sharing scurrilous stories about her,” Trudeau told journalists, when asked for details about the removal of the Russian diplomats.

But Kalinin, who sent photos and links to the stories about Freeland’s grandfather to Canadian news outlets, said the material was already in the public domain, thanks to the work of Ukrainian Canadians who objected to the man’s Nazi past.

That must be embarrassing ... for Chrystia Freeland.


I'll just leave this here:

At the age of 32, Pierre Trudeau accepted an invitation from the Soviet government to attend a 1952 propaganda conference with an “economic agenda.” The other five members of the Canadian delegation included prominent members of the Communist Party of Canada. It was there that he remarked to the wife of U.S. chargé d’affaires that he was a communist and a Catholic and was in Moscow to criticize the U.S. and praise the Soviet Union. The U.S. State Department assessed Trudeau’s allegiances, noting that he evinced “an infantile desire to shock.” Canadian diplomats assured the Americans that Trudeau did not possess much common sense.

After being labeled a communist in his home province, Trudeau worried how this could derail his plan to run for public office someday. When Trudeau sought permission from the Church to sue his accusers, the bishop replied that given Trudeau’s writings, “I hesitate to consider this libel.”

I believe it is a given that North Korea is duplicitous and is using the upcoming summit as a stalling tactic:

North Korea could have the technology to hit the U.S. with a nuclear missile by as early as July 23, a top British military official warned.

British Defense Minister Lord Howe informed British lawmakers in January that North Korea could have the technology to launch a nuclear strike against the U.S. in around six to eighteen months. The report containing these assessments was released Thursday, and a British military official told Business Insiderthat he stands by January’s assessment.

The assessment was made public as President Donald Trump prepares to speak with North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un in May. It is unclear exactly what will come out of the meetings. Trump’s stated aim is that North Korea denuclearize entirely, a goal many experts believe will be almost impossible to achieve. Pyongyang’s nuclear program offers the rogue regime leverage with which to negotiate, experts note. 

"One of the clear reasons North Korea wants to talk to America now is that it feels it is working from a position of strength. Kim has declared Pyongyang's nuclear program as 'complete' which could mean that the north has all of the necessary components, at least on paper, to hit the U.S. with a nuclear weapon in a very crude format,” Harry Kazianis, director of defense studies at the Center for the National Interest, a public policy think tank in Washington, D.C., told Newsweek.

“If that is the case, it would make sense why Kim is offering talks now--and why he will drive for a very, very hard bargain--if talks even happen in the first place,” Kazianis added.

Also -  just as Bibles and flash drives are sent into North Korea, perhaps something similar can happen for China:

China appears to have banned the bible from being sold online or in large book stores, as Beijing and the Vatican negotiate a historic agreement.

Had this been Canada, she would be running the place:

Former South Korean president Park Geun-hye was Friday sentenced to 24 years in prison – effectively for the rest of the 66-year-old’s life – after being found guilty of charges including bribery, coercion and abuse of power.

The heavy sentence completed the sensational fall from grace for a political princess who became South Korea’s first female leader, but then went on to become its first president to be impeached when she was ejected from office a year ago.

(Paws up)