But Wait! There's More!

Often, there is ...




As I said before, the problem with giving special-interest groups whatever they want is that they will never be happy. Ever. By their nature, they are perpetually miserable consumers of good will. They'll be demanding and unreasonable even if you suck up to them in the most neutered sycophantic tones.

Look:

Trudeau largely seemed to address a friendly audience — questions included, “What’s your favourite part of your day?” — before frustrations over pipelines, and the federal government’s approach to climate change and First Nations, started to boil over.

First to assail Trudeau was Will George, a member of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation.

(Sidebar: did you see that? He assailed Justin.)

“You lied about being a climate leader. You don’t build pipelines by being a climate leader,” George said.

“You want truth and reconciliation with First Nations and you get our people arrested.” ...

(Sidebar: these pipelines and these arrests. Who's funding these guys, anyway?)

Trudeau later faced a question from a woman named Tilly, who identified herself as a member of the Stl’atl’imx Nation.

“What are you going to do to stop oppressing and holding our people under your colonization,” she asked.

Trudeau responded that Canada has a “long and failed history in regards to Indigenous people,” saying it has “consistently failed as a country to live up to the spirit and intent of the treaties.”

“We have not treated Indigenous peoples as partners and stewards of this land.” ...


He started talking about how “too many Indigenous communities are existing under boil water advisories” when Tilly interjected.

“You are afraid to lose your comfort,” she said.

“No I’m not, Tilly,” Trudeau responded. ...


The pair continued to exchange words, with Tilly saying, “I don’t want to see your crocodile tears, I don’t want to see you apologize.”

She said she wanted “amends,” that she demanded it “on behalf of my people.”

Another protester yelled out, “be a man! Be a man!”

But Justin can't be a man. Already an emasculated hand-puppet, all he can do is sputter out empty platitudes he learned from well-worn flashcards.


Also - when lack of leadership and failure to inspire are evident, trot out a Trump joke. That usually deflects from what a total wiener you are:

After thanking Trudeau for coming to town and telling the prime minister “you’re welcome for the clear sidewalks, by the way,” the man, who did not identify himself by name, began, “I just want a really, really quick, really funny question . . . pertaining about Donald Trump.”

He paused for dramatic effect.

“Would it really be bad relationship advice to give you just to tell you, you know, from all of us, just push him off a cliff? We’re good.”

There was laughter and some scattered applause from the crowd. 

“Like, really. I’ll buy ya a beer,” the man continued. He concluded: “But anyways, thank you for giving me the mic. I just wanted to get that off . . . you mentioned him . . .”

Trudeau, smiling a restrained smile, responded by gently advising Canadians not to joke about such things.

“I wasn’t expecting a threat of violence against our closest ally, but uh, I, I — you know, in politics people have all sorts of opinions,” Trudeau said. “And all sorts of perspectives about who is leading at any given moment. The relationship between Canada and the United States goes far deeper than who happens to be prime minister and who happens to be president.”

To wit:

The prime minister told them he plans to run on a platform of positivity in the October 2019 election, despite what he described as the growing popularity of using division and fear for political gain.

**

In Trump’s mind, the decision to waive the sunset clause had been a generous act of reconciliation. Yet Trudeau publicly denigrated him just to score political points with Canadians.Trump was livid. 

He found it duplicitous and humiliating. Indeed, Kudlow claims Trump was even fretting that it made him look weak just as he was going to negotiate with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un.

So, Trump’s team is not arguing that Trudeau said something new or different at the press conference. Their claim is that at the bilateral meeting everyone agreed to move on, but that Trudeau then cheated on the agreement. This was the trigger for Trump’s tweets.

Push that off of a cliff, Justin.




It's hard to defend a refugee program when one of the so-called refugees allegedly kills a Canadian child:

One audience member asked him about the killing of Marrisa Shen, a 13-year-old girl who was found dead in Burnaby, B.C.’s Central Park in July 2017.

Ibrahim Ali, a 28-year-old Syrian refugee who arrived in Canada in March 2017, has been charged with first-degree murder in connection with her death.

The audience member asked Trudeau, “can you guarantee that Marrisa Shen was not killed by a Syrian refugee who came to Canada after you were elected, and if not, what in your opinion is the acceptable number of Canadian lives lost as a result of your policies on refugees?”


Trudeau responded first by saying violent crime — and what the Shen family has gone through — is a “terrible tragedy, and we have a judicial system, we have a process through which to go.”

“But the generalizations and the danger that we get in, in tying in things like immigration policies to incidents like this, is something that I don’t entirely know is helpful or useful in a diverse, pluralistic, inclusive society like ours,” he said.

Trudeau went on to say that the “safety and well-being of all Canadians is at the forefront of our responsibility as government, responsibility as a society, and we need to do everything we can to keep our children safe.
The prime minister drew cheers for that remark.

(Sidebar: but you didn't keep them safe, did you, Justin?) 



I expect Justin to be a sleazebag but surely Justin's fan-girls would be squeamish at applauding his deflection.

This is why Canada has Justin. People will excuse murder to ignore that a bad policy caused someone to die.



The only deal should be the one where all people obey the rule of law:

Hereditary leaders of the Wet'suwet'en First Nation have reached a tentative deal with RCMP, quelling some fears of escalation after police made several arrests at nearby checkpoint earlier this week.

The chiefs say members will abide by a court injunction granting the Coastal GasLink pipeline company access to a bridge that had been blocked, if RCMP agree to leave intact the nearby Unist'ot'en healing camp in northern British Columbia.

They plan to meet with RCMP again Thursday to discuss details such as retaining a gate that residents and supporters of the camp say is vital to their safety.

What bullsh--.



Indignant people stage a protest against a professor disciplined for sexual harassment:

An Ontario university has reversed its plan to let a professor who was disciplined for sexually harassing a female student return to the classroom — announcing on the eve of his first lecture that the history course David Schimmelpenninck was scheduled to teach this winter has been cancelled.

Students at Brock University in St. Catharines intended to stage a silent sit-in protest at Schimmelpenninck’s classroom door as the course got underway on Thursday after a provincial arbitrator ruled the professor, who hadn’t taught at Brock since an investigation into his conduct concluded in 2016, should be allowed to resume his regular duties.

The university emailed students in the undergraduate course, a second-year elective entitled War and Peace in the Modern Age, on Wednesday morning to inform them it would no longer be held this semester.

It should be noted that Justin intends on going to Brock University for a town-hall meeting.

I'll just leave this right here:

On Wednesday, political staff from the prime minister’s office and those of cabinet ministers attended a mandatory training session “on harassment prevention and bystander intervention.”

It comes more than a year after a top staffer in Trudeau’s office resigned amid allegations of inappropriate activity and of course about six months after Trudeau admitted to the Kokanee grope.

The students at Brock know what to do!



It doesn't look good when a cabinet member ducks out in an election year:

Scott Brison is quitting a political career he loves to spend more time with a cherished family that politics made possible.

After 22 years representing the Nova Scotia riding of Kings-Hants — initially as a Progressive Conservative MP before jumping to the Liberals in 2003 — Brison told The Canadian Press it's time for a change. He's decided not to seek re-election this fall.

He's not sure whether he'll remain a Liberal MP until the Oct. 21 vote but he will be resigning shortly from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's cabinet, where he serves as president of the Treasury Board.

(Sidebar: this Scott Brison.)



It's just money:

According to the Canada Revenue Agency’s recent preliminary statistics for 2016, individuals earning $100,000 or more in annual income (8.7 per cent of all taxpayers), pay 51 per cent of federal income taxes. The one-per-centers (with more than $250,000 in annual income) pay 20.4 per cent of federal income taxes.

Going a bit further down the income scale, the top 15 per cent of tax filers (those with individual income more than $80,000) pay almost two-thirds of federal income tax. So cutting personal taxes obviously makes higher-income Canadians better off. ...

It’s no surprise, then, that the federal Liberals won sufficient voter support for their promise to “ask the wealthiest one per cent of Canadians to give a little more” to pay for their “middle-class tax cut.” Truthfully, once in power in 2015, the Liberals didn’t really “ask”: They raised the federal top rate to 33 per cent from 29 per cent while offering a smaller tax cut of 1.5 percentage points to income roughly between $45,000 and $90,000.

**

Documents obtained under access-to-information law show the Immigration and Refugee Board drafted costing estimates in November 2017 showing it would need $140 million annually plus an additional $40 million in one-time costs to finalize 36,000 extra refugee cases every year.

That’s how many cases the board would need to complete to cut the backlog and also meet the current intake of new asylum claims.

Dammit, Moon-Moon!:

President Moon Jae-in on Thursday said that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s trip to China hints that the second US-North Korea summit is imminent and that Kim’s visit to Seoul is likely to follow in its wake.

Speaking at a New Year’s press conference, Moon ruled out the possibility of North Korea’s denuclearization and a potential peace treaty being linked to the US military presence in South Korea, Japan and the Pacific. 

Wishful thinking.



What one can tell from a person's teeth:

The accidental discovery of microscopic crystals of a rare and precious Middle Eastern gemstone embedded in the tooth of an 11th-century German nun has cast a new light on the role of women in painting medieval religious texts, a field traditionally thought to have been dominated by male monks.

The most likely explanation, according to a new scientific paper, is that this woman was a painter using an exquisite blue dye, which got into her mouth as she used her lips to twist her brush into a fine point.

“It almost looked like robin’s eggs,” said Christina Warinner of the department of archeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. She was recalling the discovery of the blue flecks in the tooth with a colleague while both were studying other aspects of the remains such as diet and disease. The teeth are part of a set of 150 or so skeletons, male and female, excavated in 1989 during renovations to a medieval monastery in Germany, which was for men most of its history, but was originally a women’s commune between about AD 1000 and 2000, likely populated with wealthy, educated, literate, religious women. ...

After consulting with a physicist, Warinner learned that the flecks contained two minerals that are only present together in lapis lazuli, a gemstone mined only in a part of northern Afghanistan, and a classic example of a luxury good in medieval Europe and Asia. It was prized for its rich blue colour, and would often be processed into a dye called ultramarine, which was used in lavish gospels and prayer books produced by hand in European monasteries.

The lapis lazuli crystals were preserved in this woman’s dental plaque, a “sticky bacterial biofilm” that builds up on teeth and can trap particles of whatever is in the mouth, from food starch to plant pollen. If it is not removed as in modern dentistry, it will calcify into a plaque, the only part of the human body that literally fossilizes during life, said Warinner.