For a Monday

Lots to talk about ...




There is a Les Miserables joke in here somewhere and I'm struggling to find it.




For the premiers of any province to even meet with Justin, whose record of arrogance and rewarding sycophancy is matched only by his equally disgusting dad,  is to acknowledge him as some sort of leader which everyone (by now) should know that he is not.

Case in point:

President Donald Trump did not know about plans to arrest a top executive at Chinese telecoms giant Huawei in Canada, two U.S. officials said on Thursday, in an apparent attempt to stop the incident from impeding crucial trade talks with Beijing. ...

Meng's detention also raised concerns about potential retaliation from Beijing in Canada, where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sought to distance himself from the arrest.

"The appropriate authorities took the decisions in this case without any political involvement or interference ... we were advised by them with a few days' notice that this was in the works," Trudeau told reporters in Montreal in televised remarks.

(Sidebar: that sweet moulah depends on a shut mouth and a co-operative government.) 

China, the human-rights abusing nation that it is, is livid that the dual citizen Meng is treated with due process in Canada and demands that she be released.

Whatever. 

Also:

Said Harper, “These are organizations, ultimately tightly tied to the Chinese security apparatus, and we think there are some real, serious issues there. The United States is encouraging Western allies to essentially push Huawei out of the emerging 5G network, and my personal view is that is something Western countries should be doing in terms of our own long-term security issues.”

**

A blast from the past:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is being urged to gather security agencies and top policy makers to determine the security threat and economic cost of transferring Canadian intellectual property to Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies.

More on Justin's failed attempt to bring the premiers to heel:

The agenda for the First Ministers meeting ignored those key issues, and was instead an effort to promote what the government has ‘already done.’

In short, it was about ignoring the real issues, and giving Trudeau a free campaign advertisement.
But the Premiers aren’t having it. The objections were strongest from Alberta and Ontario, with demands to put the oil crisis and the carbon tax on the agenda.

Yet, it shouldn’t even have come to this.


Trudeau and the feds should have put those key issues on the agenda to begin with.

So why didn’t they?

It’s because Justin Trudeau and the Liberals are afraid of confronting the damage they’ve done, and are doing, to the country.

If anyone can prove a time when Justin fought for something without elbowing a lady in the chest, feel free to prove it.


Justin doesn't fight. He backs away, he whines, he blames an he waits to be congratulated (SEE: bribe, press, $595 million). For him to have addressed the pressing issues routinely ignored during the meeting would mean that he would have to listen, consider his options and offer solutions.

When has anyone seen him do that?




Who said that Justin isn't a vindictive money-waster?:

For the first time in a decade Ontario will not receive an equalization transfer from Ottawa, prompting the province’s finance minister to join calls for the federal government to review how the program is set up.

(Sidebar: why not review why it exists in the first place?)

**

The Saskatchewan Court of Appeal has granted Alberta’s United Conservative Party intervener status in the upcoming court case challenging the constitutionality of the carbon tax. ...

The Liberal government opposed the UCP’s application, though, with Department of Justice lawyers arguing in a legal brief filed with the court last week that “its interest in this Reference is speculative and its intervention would not assist the Court in considering the legal issues; it would transform the Court into a political arena.”

A convicted and unrepentant terrorist has asked for a passport to go to Saudi Arabia and he'll damn well get it, too:

Former Guantanamo Bay detainee Omar Khadr wants to be granted a Canadian passport to travel to Saudi Arabia and permission to speak to his controversial sister.

Khadr, who is now 32, will be back in the Court of Queen’s Bench in Edmonton Thursday to apply for changes to his bail conditions which were imposed while he appeals war crime convictions by a U.S. military commission.

Also - if Ralph cannot put his girlfriend in a spa, Ralph can at least make things easier for her convicted child-killer boyfriend:

Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale says he will examine the transfer of Victoria Stafford's murderer Michael Rafferty from a maximum-security prison to a medium-security facility — a review that will take place just weeks after Rafferty's accomplice Terri-Lynne McClintic went back to a prison from an Indigenous healing lodge.

"I will examine the facts of this case to ensure that all the proper rules and procedures have been followed and that Canadians are safe," Goodale said in question period Monday in response to Conservative MP Candice Bergen.

Bergen had asked whether Rafferty was behind bars or "in a cushy healing lodge somewhere in the woods."

Rafferty was sentenced to life in prison in 2012 in the kidnapping, sexual assault and first-degree murder of Tori Stafford. He and McClintic abducted her from outside her school in Woodstock, Ont., in 2009, assaulted her, and beat her to death with a hammer.

Rodney Stafford, Tori Stafford's father, wrote in a raging Facebook post that he'd learned Monday of Rafferty's transfer, saying he only received the information because he requested it.

"It has come to my knowledge as of today that Michael Rafferty — the man responsible for all actions the day of April 8th, 2009. The abduction, brutal rape, murder, and concealing of evidence, was transferred from his maximum security facility to a medium security facility in March!" Stafford wrote in the post, mainly in capital letters.

And - who is going to arrest these child rapists?:

On Facebook, the Pakistani-Canadian described himself in a recent post as a “Mujahid residing in Dar al Kufr” — a jihadist fighter in the land of disbelief.

But more than two years after flying back to Toronto and telling reporters he had served in the brutal ISIS police in Syria, he has not been arrested.

“No kafir can touch me,” he said in a recent text message to a former friend, who shared it with Global News. Kafir is an Arabic term for nonbeliever.

The government was to respond Tuesday to a House of Commons motion that called for “a plan to immediately bring to justice anyone who has fought as an ISIS terrorist or participated in any terrorist activity.”

Although introduced by the Conservative opposition, the Liberals and NDP supported the Oct. 22 motion, which specifically urged action against those “who are in Canada or have Canadian citizenship.”

Justin told a veteran and his fake leg that he was asking for more money than what his wasteful government was prepared to give. Then he refused to update the weapons soldiers need to kill terrorists with.

Well, the army does not like him:

The Liberal Party of Canada has cancelled plans to host a fundraiser with Justin Trudeau on a Canadian Forces base, an event that might have run afoul of military rules around political events.

The Liberal Party had planned to hold the Dec. 19 fundraiser at the Vimy Officers’ Mess in Kingston, according to information posted on the party’s website. The waterfront facility is regularly rented out for private events such as weddings.

In this case, staff were not aware of the political nature of the meeting at the time of the booking, said a spokesman for CFB Kingston. Tickets for the event cost up to $400.

Sure, sure ... 

Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper did not withdraw Canada from the UN and now our sovereignty will pay the price:

All treaties, all international agreements, erode sovereignty to a degree and some are more welcome than others.

Does Scheer have a point?

Absolutely — one he explained in his news conference.

“There’s many examples where agreements and pacts and accords signed onto are used as justifications for rulings in our own courts,” Scheer said.

On this, he is absolutely correct.

Nazi-Buttsy does not like this one bit:

Here’s what Gerald Butts – who says what Trudeau is really thinking – posted on Twitter:

“This is a flat-out lie being spread by the far-right in Europe, the alt-right in North America, and now the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada.”

One would think that someone in the Liberal Party would tell both Justin and Buttsy to shut it or they will hand Scheer a victory.



Speaking of Nazis:

Sanity has broken out, however briefly, in Ottawa. After nearly a year of protests from religious groups, the federal government has finally changed the eligibility requirements for the federal summer job funding program to what they should have been in the first place. Projects and jobs receiving funding must not “advocate intolerance, discrimination and/or prejudice,” and they must not “actively work to undermine or restrict a woman’s access to sexual and reproductive health services.”

Simple. Clear. God only knows why it was so hard. The goal is, and always was, to prevent public money from flowing to organizations the Liberals consider villainous — chiefly anti-abortion groups. The logical course of action was to prevent money from going to such groups. Instead the government demanded an applicant attest that “both the job and my organization’s core mandate respect individual human rights in Canada, including the values underlying the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms,” and including “reproductive rights.”

Justin and his Nazis don't speak for me, Chris.




The Nazi book-end:

A recent Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation survey found that 51% of American millennials would rather live in a socialist or communist country than in a capitalist country. Only 42% prefer the latter. Twenty-five percent of millennials who know who Vladimir Lenin was view him favourably. Half of millennials have never heard of Communist Mao Zedong, who ruled China from 1949 to 1976 and was responsible for the deaths of 45 million Chinese people.

The number of people who died at the hands of Josef Stalin may be as high as 62 million. However, almost one-third of millennials think former U.S. President George W. Bush is responsible for more killings than Stalin. By the way, Adolf Hitler, head of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, was responsible for the deaths of about 20 million people. The Nazis come in as a poor third in terms of history’s most prolific mass murderers. According to professor Rudolph Rummel’s research, the 20th century, mankind’s most brutal century, saw 262 million people’s lives destroyed at the hands of their own governments.

Trust millennials who have never had to wait in breadlines to advocate this sort of thing.

When anti-communism was cool and hip - Prague Spring in 1968.

From Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whom these youthful brain-trusts have never even heard of:

It was Dostoevsky, once again, who drew from the French Revolution and its seeming hatred of the Church the lesson that “revolution must necessarily begin with atheism.” That is absolutely true. But the world had never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized, and tenaciously malevolent as that practiced by Marxism. Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot. ...

For a short period of time, when he needed to gather strength for the struggle against Hitler, Stalin cynically adopted a friendly posture toward the Church. This deceptive game, continued in later years by Brezhnev with the help of showcase publications and other window dressing, has unfortunately tended to be taken at its face value in the West. Yet the tenacity with which hatred of religion is rooted in Communism may be judged by the example of their most liberal leader, Krushchev: for though he undertook a number of significant steps to extend freedom, Krushchev simultaneously rekindled the frenzied Leninist obsession with destroying religion.

But there is something they did not expect: that in a land where churches have been leveled, where a triumphant atheism has rampaged uncontrolled for two-thirds of a century, where the clergy is utterly humiliated and deprived of all independence, where what remains of the Church as an institution is tolerated only for the sake of propaganda directed at the West, where even today people are sent to the labor camps for their faith, and where, within the camps themselves, those who gather to pray at Easter are clapped in punishment cells–they could not suppose that beneath this Communist steamroller the Christian tradition would survive in Russia. It is true that millions of our countrymen have been corrupted and spiritually devastated by an officially imposed atheism, yet there remain many millions of believers: it is only external pressures that keep them from speaking out, but, as is always the case in times of persecution and suffering, the awareness of God in my country has attained great acuteness and profundity.

It is here that we see the dawn of hope: for no matter how formidably Communism bristles with tanks and rockets, no matter what successes it attains in seizing the planet, it is doomed never to vanquish Christianity.

 
Remove God, replace Him with one's self and then anything is possible, except for His ultimate dissolution.




Ladies and gentlemen, Mrs. Helen Klaben:

When Ralph Flores crashed his single-engine plane in the Yukon wilderness on a snowy afternoon in February 1963, the force of the landing knocked his only passenger, Helen Klaben, out cold for half an hour. She woke to the sight of blood streaming from gashes on the pilot’s head, mouth and chin; it pooled on the map she’d been holding in her lap.

Klaben’s right foot was stuck between her seat and the door. She could already tell that her left arm was broken. As she assessed the grim particulars of the wreck, she saw on the plane’s thermometer that the chill outside had dipped below -40 C.

Sitting in the bush, Klaben summoned the thought that ended up carrying her through the next seven frigid and painful weeks.

“Hey — I’m alive!”

Klaben, the New York woman whose incredible story of survival without food or emergency gear riveted the North American public when she and Flores were finally rescued after 49 days from the makeshift campsite where they’d sheltered amid the trees, died on Sunday in Palo Alto, Calif., after a long illness. She was 76.