Monday Post

Oh, my! This must be dreadfully embarrassing!:

U.S. President Donald Trump, in a call from the oval office with Mexico’s President Enrique Pena Nieto, have announced the “U.S. – Mexico Trade Agreement.”

Trump has announced that the NAFTA name will be scrapped, due to a “bad connotation” with the name.

The U.S. & Mexico reached agreement on issues particularly the manufacturing sector and the auto sector.

Now, the U.S. will use the deal with Mexico as leverage over Canada, with Trump saying Canadian-made cars will be hit with tariffs if Canada doesn’t “negotiate fairly.”

Canada had a chance but doesn't anymore.

That's what happens when one sends a snowboard instructor and journalist to do an economist's job.




To quote - "Why are we still fighting against certain veterans’ groups in court? Because they are asking for more than we are able to give right now, ...":

The Trudeau government is currently fighting Canadian Veterans in court, and we all remember that Justin Trudeau said injured Veterans were asking for “more than we can afford to give.”

**

We all remember how Justin Trudeau said injured Canadian Veterans were asking for “more than we can afford to give.”

But as people have pointed out, in 2017 the Trudeau government gave $33 million taxpayer-dollars to a rehab centre for injured members of the Afghanistan military.

 
Canadians - in this case, veterans - need to realise that Justin regards them as less than sh--. If they had any shred of self-respect, they would regard that as a grave insult and simply not vote for the man or anyone associated with him.


Also:

Jacquie Scott wonders if she had simply walked across the border illegally from New York State into Quebec whether she’d have a work permit by now.

“If my son were a refugee, he’d be treated better,” a frustrated Ms. Scott says over a coffee steps from Parliament Hill.

Scott is a mother that had to give up her career for a while to look after her high needs son. Now she is facing what amounts to effective deportation because the government won’t let her work so that she can look after her son.

Scott is from Scotland, her son Conorr Cici is born and raised in Canada.

“I don’t want benefits, I want to work,” Scott says.

As I said, Justin et al regards women like these (and veterans) as less than sh--. 

It must be a Liberal thing.

An Abacas Data poll -

- this Abacus Data:

- holds that Maxime Bernier would lead in Quebec:

A new poll by Abacus Data on the potential impact of a hypothetical Maxime Bernier Party shows it could win a substantial amount of support, appearing to take support from all parties – but particularly the Conservatives.

Abacus polled Canadians on their current party choices, and the results had the Liberals at 37%, the Conservatives at 34%, the NDP 18%.

However, with a Bernier Party included in the choices, the Liberals were at 34%, the Conservatives at 28%, the NDP at 16%, and the Bernier Party at 13%.

In Canada’s two most populous provinces, Bernier’s Party would have a particularly large impact. In Ontario, the Conservatives go from tied with the Liberals to 5 points behind the Liberals when Bernier’s Party is included.

Talk smack about him now, Andy.




Who spends more money influencing Washington? The answer may surprise you:

It's one thing to point out that Trump is going about this North Korean situation the wrong way. It is quite another when the leader of its southern cousin is losing face:

Moon Jae-in’s fortunes are also declining. That is inevitable for all politicians at the end of their honeymoons — and especially for glib ones who make grand and gauzy promises. Moon’s poll numbers have now fallen from the ionosphere. This is not to say that he’s in any real danger yet. He still has 60 percent approval and won’t face a serious electoral contest until April 2020. What’s more, most of the support he has lost has gone to the even more extreme Justice Party, not to the nonexistent center or the hapless right. But his support will continue to decline if he continues to delegate the stewardship of Korea’s economy to graduates of the Hugo Chavez School of Economics. As with Trump, Moon’s domestic troubles could have a number of unfortunate side effects beyond the misery South Koreans will consequently experience. One is that he will put even more emphasis on creating the appearance of “progress” in talks with Pyongyang. Because Pyongyang has total control over that “progress,” Moon will be even more tempted to support its most extortionate demands. 

Moon will also be tempted to censor his political opponents. Although no American journalist in Korea has bothered to report it, Moon and his confederates have a habit of suing and imprisoning their critics, including journalists, using the nation’s criminal libel laws. Recently, criminal libel has emerged as an even greater threat to South Korea’s democracy than its controversial National Security Law. Despite this, Moon has managed to fool liberal foreign journalists into believing that he’s a liberal himself, even as he increasingly surrounds himself with illiberal extremists, pursues the illiberal censorship of the media, sues and jails his critics, and silences critics of Pyongyang‘s crimes.

My God! It's like he's Justin!




North Korea has expelled a Japanese national it once held captive:

North Korea has expelled a Japanese man detained for allegedly breaking the law during a recent tour of the country, state-run media and a diplomatic source in Japan said as the two neighbors continue their hot-and-cold relationship.

This North Korea:

From a chartered bus, a sobbing North Korean woman waves goodbye to her South Korean relatives at the Kumgangsan Hotel in the Mount Kumgang Resort in North Korea on Sunday, the last day of the second round of the 21st separated families reunion. The two Koreas’ Red Cross chiefs agreed on Saturday to hold another round of family reunions as early as October.

**

"If you go to the market, you do not see many of them. Because the authorities are in control. If the children walk around the market, they are immediately caught and sent to an orphanage called a "secondary academy". If the children escape, they are immediately caught again."

 
(Kamsahamnida)




Ireland wants money for babies that were allegedly dumped:

An Irish government Cabinet minister has told Pope Francis that the Catholic Church “should contribute substantially” to funding reparations for survivors of a former church-run orphanage where a mass grave of children’s remains was discovered.

Yes, about that:

Finbar McCormick, a professor of geography at Queen’s University Belfast, sharply admonished the media for describing the children’s last resting place as a septic tank. He added: “The structure as described is much more likely to be a shaft burial vault, a common method of burial used in the recent past and still used today in many part of Europe.

“In the 19th century, deep brick-lined shafts were constructed and covered with a large slab which often doubled as a flatly laid headstone. These were common in 19th-century urban cemeteries…..Such tombs are still used extensively in Mediterranean countries. I recently saw such structures being constructed in a churchyard in Croatia. The shaft was made of concrete blocks, plastered internally and roofed with large concrete slabs.

For anyone familiar with Ireland (I was brought up there in the 1950s and 1960s),  the story of nuns consciously throwing babies into a septic tank never made sense. Although many of the nuns may have been holier-than-thou harridans, they were nothing if not God-fearing and therefore unlikely to treat human remains with the sort of outright blasphemy implied in the septic tank story.

So what are we left with? One fact seems beyond dispute: conditions in Irish orphanages up to the 1960s (when the orphanage at the center of the uproar was shut down) were positively Dickensian. Certainly the death rate at many was shockingly high. But who should be blamed? A major part of the problem would appear to have been the pervasive poverty of the time. Because they were so desperately underfunded, Irish orphanages were disgracefully overcrowded, which meant that when one baby caught an infection, they all caught it. Not the least of the hazards was tuberculosis, a then incurable disease that spread like wildfire in overcrowded conditions.

But why let facts get in the way?




And now, what patience and persistence can do:

In the end, her perseverance paid off. After 17 years of resistance, Augustine converted to Christianity under the wise instruction of St. Ambrose, bishop of Milan. Monica’s extended period of longsuffering for him matched her waiting for her husband, for whom she may have prayed for as long as 30 years.