Thursday Post

A controlled burn has kept a wildfire back in northern Alberta:

The fire-threatened town of High Level in northwestern Alberta says a successful controlled burn has been carried out to help keep a raging nearby wildfire at bay.

A statement on High Level’s website said the burn — to eliminate fuel the blaze could feed on — was done Wednesday afternoon south and west of the community as part of efforts to contain the out-of-control fire.

How could this possibly go wrong?:

It is difficult to know where to begin to deplore the process by which the federal government will decide which media organizations to subsidize and which not to. So let’s start with Unifor’s involvement.

“Unifor?” you may ask. “The flamboyantly anti-Conservative labour union?”

Indeed. The mega-union representing 315,000 workers across the country, including a large percentage of anglophone Canadian journalists at legacy media outlets — and also autoworkers, because that totally makes sense ...

— will nominate one of eight people to an “independent panel of experts.” The panel will decide the criteria for divvying up tax breaks adding up to some $600 million in public funding. ...

But Unifor is the union that turned nakedly partisan during the 2015 election campaign, fundinglie-filled attack ads against Stephen Harper’s Conservatives and mortifying many journalist members whose credibility depends on their perceived political independence. More recently, Unifor’s executives have collectively styled themselves “Andrew Scheer’s worst nightmare,” eliciting more futile pleas from journalists to shut up.

Also - "transparency" is transparency:

The entire text – and there’s a lot of it – is made up of sentence after sentence of borderline meaningless bureaucratic jargon. Like this: “This plan reflects our commitment to a partnership-driven approach to build innovation ecosystems in Canada and deliver simpler, more efficient and more coordinated supports to firms at all stages of growth and Canadians at every stage of their lives.”

It goes on and on like this. You’ve got to bring out a magnifying glass and play detective to find the few sentences that contain actual content.

Liberal events always seem to be rife with violence and shouting:

A 74-year-old woman was knocked to the ground by a police officer during an anti-pipeline protest on Wednesday.

The dramatic incident, which was captured on camera by CTV Vancouver, happened outside a lunchtime Liberal fundraiser attended by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

In the video, the woman is seen approaching a uniformed police officer and another man dressed in a suit. The woman appears to shove one of the men, and is then forcefully pushed backwards, falling to the ground.

**

Inside, the prime minister found himself in a terse several minute long exchange with a Tsleil-Waututh Nation member, Will George, who accused him of being a “liar and a weak leader.”

“How dare you bring that through our waters, those are our spiritual highways. You have no right to do that to us,” George said.

Trudeau responded by arguing that not all First Nations are opposed to the project.

One might be tempted to not pick sides in debates like this and simply let them eat each other but this must be pointed out: if Justin really gave a sh-- about pipelines, he would have built one. As that is not going to happen, his off-script remark is as hollow as his skull.

One will simply watch his precious carbon tax get repealed in Alberta, the province he hates so much that he can taste it.


Vaguely related: Justin apologises to a dead chief but not to the veterans he has made a career of screwing over.




Is Australia's election of a much-derided political party a harbinger for Canada's Liberals?:

Australians have enjoyed 27 consecutive years of economic growth. Despite climate concern, voters feared Labor’s policies would jeopardize that streak and chose the alternative. Is it likely that Canadian voters put less weight on jobs and prosperity than those in Australia?

I believe if anything will turn the tide against Justin it won't be because he is morally and practically incapable of leading the country but because taxes will make the cost of living too high for even Canadians to tolerate. Canadians vote with their stomachs and I don't think that trend will change in the near-future.




The biggest concern of an aging population:

Canadians are increasingly concerned about how to pay for the care of aging baby boomers — and fearful that seniors will have to pay out of their own pockets, according to a survey commissioned by the Canadian Medical Association.

Not to fear. The swamped medical bureaucracy has a solution:

Three years after assisted death became legal in Canada, the medical community is debating a provocative question: should organs be removed from consenting euthanasia patients while they’re still alive?

Some say changing the rules would allow people choosing an assisted death to donate as many organs as possible — in the most optimal condition possible — because blood and oxygen would continue to flow through vital organs until the moment of retrieval.

Under this scenario, people granted an assisted death would, with their full knowledge and consent, be transported to an operating room, put to sleep under general anaesthesia and their organs removed, including the heart and lungs. Death would follow removal of the beating heart. Under so-called “euthanasia by organ donation,” the act of organ donation itself — not a lethal injection or a doctor-prescribed, life-ending dose of barbiturates — would be the mode of death.

Organ donation after euthanasia is already occurring, legally, in Canada. About 30 people who have died by “medical assistance in dying,” or MAID, since the law decriminalizing the act was passed in 2016 have consented to donate kidneys or other organs. In Ontario, 168 more have donated tissues such as corneas, skin, veins, tendons and ligaments — tissues that don’t require the same conditions as organs to survive and can be taken up to 24 hours after death.

However, under the long-standing “dead donor rule,” organs can’t be procured until donors are declared dead  — typically, five minutes after the heart has stopped beating — and the organ retrieval itself can’t lead to the death of the donor.

Does anyone remember when people warned that euthanasia would be a slippery slope and they were laughed at?




It is said that the greatest trick the Devil can play on people is convince them that he does not exist.

Case in point:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is at long last talking tough with China, we’re told. Not only that, but there’s a senior Canadian parliamentarian in China, right now, talking tough about the arbitrary imprisonment of diplomat-on-leave Michael Kovrig and entrepreneur Michael Spavor and about Beijing’s sudden embargo on billions of dollars’ worth of Canadian canola exports.

The evidence for the amusing claims about Trudeau’s tough talk is a single milquetoast discombobulation the prime minister offered to reporters on Tuesday after touring an aluminum plant in Sept-Iles, Que. “China is playing stronger, making stronger moves than it has before to try and get its own way on the world stage and Western countries and democracies around the world are pulling together to point out that this is not something that we need to continue to allow.”

Indeed:

And now, it’s so pathetic that a former Canadian Ambassador to China Guy Saint-Jacques says China wouldn’t even pick up the phone if Justin Trudeau called:

“Nobody in the Chinese government wants to meet with a Canadian minister or special envoy — even if the prime minister were to phone [Chinese] President Xi Jinping, he would not take the call,” Saint-Jacques said.”

This China:

In its reliance on mass detention, the Communist Party of China (CPC) has followed the Soviet Union’s example. But, China’s concentration camps and detention centres are far larger and more technologically advanced than their Soviet precursors, and their purpose is to indoctrinate not just political dissidents, but an entire community of faith.

**

Escaping North Korea’s authoritarian regime comes at a high price. The perilous journey through China is especially punishing for many women and girls, who are forced to sell their bodies in their attempt to reach freedom. Some 60% of female North Korean defectors in China are trafficked into the sex trade, according to a new report from the U.K.-based Korea Future Initiative, with about half of those forced into prostitution and others sold into marriages or forced to perform cybersex acts for online viewers.

**

A chemical banned around the globe for the last 30 years has made an unfortunate resurgence. And all signs, in a new study, point to China as the culprit.

In the 1980s, countries came together to sign The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, a landmark treaty designed to halt and reduce the production of chlorofluorocarbons (CFC), chemicals used in fridges and foams that had the side effect of tearing through the Earth’s ozone layer.

The Montreal Protocol has been signed by 197 countries around the world, including Canada, the U.S., and China. As the ozone layer in our upper atmosphere slowly depleted — letting in an increasing amount of the sun’s ultraviolet rays — the protocol contributed to a significant reduction in harmful CFCs, which then allowed for a slow healing of the damaged ozone layer.

That is until last year, when scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association found that global emissions of Trichlorofluoromethane (CFC-11) have actually been increasing since 2013.

The increase implied that someone was secretly violating the Montreal Protocol. But the limitations of measuring devices meant the location of the polluter could only be traced to somewhere in east Asia.

Now, in a new study published in Nature on May 22, scientists from the University of Bristol, Kyungpook National University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that between 40 and 60 per cent of total global CFC-11 emissions originate from eastern China.

People are shocked that a communist regime that starved its people, helped create a dictatorial vassal state south of it, massacred students in Tienanmen Square, has suppressed all political opinion and harvested the organs of religious believers (or does that only matter when they are Uighurs? Never mind.) is totalitarian?

Really?




(Merci and kamsahamnida)