Mid-Week Post

Fourteen more shopping days until Halloween ...



On March 10th, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell made the first telephone call in human history.

In 1923, the Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded to Frederick Banting, CH Best, James B. Collip and JJR Macleod for their discovery of insulin.

In 1992, Roberta Bondar became the first Canadian woman in space.

In 2018, Newfoundland and Labrador, the province with the highest unemployment rate (so far), leads the country in having the cheapest legalised marijuana.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is what devolution looks like.



The devolution of Canada would not be possible without the unthinking support of ignoramuses who vote for trash like this:

Letts has Canadian citizenship because his father is Canadian but he has no connection to this country other than some vacation visits.

So why is foreign affairs reaching out to him?

That is what Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer wanted to know in the House of Commons on Tuesday. He didn’t get much in the way of answers from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Remarkably, Trudeau had to read his first answer to Scheer directly off of a briefing note provided by staff. He didn’t answer the actual question but he read his lines like a good actor.

Trudeau also used the term DAESH instead of ISIS, a true politically correct move, all the while saying that he would not play politics with this issue.

The PM was asked five times, once in French and four times in English to explain why he was trying to bring a British Jihadi to Canada.

He never gave an answer.

Instead he accused the Conservatives of playing politics, of distorting facts and of trying to stoke fear and division.

Let me be clear.

The Conservatives did not distort any facts here.

Andrew Scheer asked the government time and again to explain why they reached out, proactively, to invite a British Jihadi to Canada.

The morally repugnant assistance aside, why doesn't Justin just answer Scheer's questions? Why doesn't he refute the charges with verifiable facts? Why does he refer to the returned ISIS criminals as "foreign fighters" when before he regarded them as Canadian?

One can conclude that Justin is a cowardly piece of crap, an incompetent jackanapes and a beneficiary of a nepotistic system.

It says volumes when he is still supported by voters who have seen him disappoint the country time and time again.

How can anyone vote for someone is morally and intellectually bereft and do so for tribal reasons? This isn't a sign of moral or political superiority. It is a sign of mental and moral weakness.



It's just money:

The Canadian oil and gas sector is in a holding pattern in which spending and production growth can’t occur until new ways to get products to export markets are found, according to CIBC analyst Jon Morrison.

The steep discounts being paid for Canadian heavy and light oil production compared with U.S. benchmarks won’t end soon and that means there’s no money for producers to increase their drilling budgets, he said in a report released Tuesday.

The report bodes poorly for Canada’s energy services sector as the industry enters the winter drilling season, its traditionally busiest time of the year as frozen ground allows more access to backcountry sites.

**

The Senate Committee on Banking, Trade and Commerce released the results of a months-long study on business competitiveness, which included several recommendations to improve Canada’s business environment. The first involved an ambitious and broad-based overhaul of Canada’s tax regime, among other strategies like securing new trade ties and untangling Canada’s overlapping regulatory structure.

“A revamp of Canada’s system is not only long overdue but now urgently needed,” the report said. It also called for “immediate changes” to Canada’s “burdensome” tax system to bring relief to business owners.

Using Trump to sell "climate change":

He’s wrong to suggest the scientific community is substantially split. Scientists from around the world wrote the recent report, and it was unanimously accepted by government representatives around the world, including in the United States, said Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald, a lead author of the report.

Yes, about that:

In the strict sense, the 97% consensus is false, even when limited to climate scientists. The 2016 Cook review found the consensus to be “shared by 90%–100% of publishing climate scientists.” One survey found it to be 84%. Continuing to claim 97% support is deceptive. I find the 97% consensus of climate scientists to be overstated.

**

Whistleblowers now know they will no longer be silenced.

Dissenters from the climate change orthodoxy soon learned that, if they refused to recant, they stood to lose their jobs, their funding, and their reputations. They also learned the corollary: to get hired, to get funded, to get promoted, they needed to produce the science the authorities wanted. Governments annually spent billions of dollars on climate change research, virtually all of it commissioned to prove that the science was settled — that man-made climate change represented an existential threat to the planet.

None of the billions spent on research amounted to anything — none of the models proved reliable, none of the predictions were borne out, none of the expected effects materialized. The Arctic ice cap hasn’t disappeared, polar bear populations haven’t declined, hurricanes haven’t become more common, malaria hasn’t spread, temperatures haven’t continued to climb. What did materialize was fraud after fraud.

**

Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.”

But ... but Singapore!:

The Trump administration has insisted that it will not lift sanctions on North Korea, currently at unprecedented levels, until Pyongyang agrees to completely dismantle its illegal nuclear weapons program and proves that it has irreversibly done so. The government of communist dictator Kim Jong-un, aided by allies in China and Russia, has instead demanded that the United States lift some sanctions as North Korea issues concessions at their leisure.

The Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) expressed its impatience with Washington yet again on Tuesday, according to South Korean news agency Yonhap.

“If the U.S. intends to be stubborn in its sanctions, which means to continue to pursue hostile policy, is the Singapore Joint Statement which promised to end the extreme hostile relations between the DPRK and the U.S. and to open up new future of any worth?” the newspaper asked.

That sounds terribly familiar:

In 2004-05, as the six-nation talks are held intermittently, North Korea continues missile testing. As would become a pattern, Pyongyang offers to curtail its work in exchange for aid while also citing concerns about hostile action from the United States. 

With the talks in abeyance in 2006, the North steps up its missile testing and accuses the United States of being a nuclear menace, drawing a warning from President George W. Bush. 

The sixth round of the talks open in February 2007 and North Korea promises to shut its nuclear reactor in exchange for fuel oil. It later demands the United States release $25 million in frozen funds, which it gets in June, clearing the way for another round of talks a month later. 

A North Korean pledge to disclose all its nuclear activities by the end of the year goes unfulfilled.

Also:

Latvia is looking into connections between several unnamed local lenders and a Turkish company sanctioned by the U.S. for attempting to supply North Korea with weapons and luxury goods.

It doesn't help that Moon is running interference for North Korea:

Moon’s government began a campaign against “fake news” this month after social media users derided Prime Minister Lee Nak-yon for being a “commie” after visiting the stilt house of Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam and calling Ho, believed to be responsible for millions of deaths, a “great” leader. Since then, South Korea has demanded that Google take down videos on YouTube that Seoul deems “fake news,” all unfavorable commentary on the Moon government.

Conservatives in South Korea have repeatedly expressed concerns that Moon’s new policy violates the freedom of speech of Korean people. That concern appeared even more acute this week after Seoul banned a journalist of North Korean origin from covering a meeting between North and South Korean officials in the border town of Panmunjom, claiming that his presence there would cause “safety” issues despite his status as a South Korean citizen.

South Korea’s JoongAng Ilbo reported on Tuesday that Justice Minister Park Sang-ki issued a press release ordering “prosecutors to crack down on fake news and track whoever was responsible for its production and distribution.” The new rules allow prosecutors to seek criminal complaints against individuals they believe responsible for “fake news” without any individual levying a complaint against them.

The order did not provide a clear definition of what the South Korean government considers fake news. The Justice Ministry did promise to compile and distribute examples in the future, however, to local authorities throughout the country to help clarify who they should target. The main initiative against “fake news” is scheduled to occur on the internet, where social media has enabled average civilians to speak openly about politics in a way that has caused Seoul consternation.

“Fake news,” the Justice Ministry insisted in its release, “threatens the sphere of democratic public debate.”

Censorship threatens the sphere of democratic public debate.

Why not talk about Moon's silencing of North Korean defectors? What does that do to public debate?