Japan Calls China A Greater Threat to Itself Than Other Nations

Because it's true:

China’s growing military might has replaced North Korean belligerence as the main security threat to Japan, Tokyo’s annual defense review indicated on Thursday, despite signs that Pyongyang could have nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles.

The document’s security assessment on China comes after a section on Japan’s ally, the United States, the first time Beijing has achieved second place in the Defence White Paper and pushing North Korea into third position.

Russia, deemed by Japan as its primary threat during the Cold War, was in fourth place.
“The reality is that China is rapidly increasing military spending, and so people can grasp that we need more pages,” Defence Minister Taro Kono said at a media briefing.

“China is deploying air and sea assets in the Western Pacific and through the Tsushima Strait into the Sea of Japan with greater frequency.”

China’s Foreign Ministry expressed displeasure with the report. ...

(Sidebar: I'm sure.)

The Defence White Paper said Chinese patrols in waters and skies near Japanese territory are “a national security concern.”

The paper downgraded fellow U.S. ally, South Korea, which recently pulled out of an intelligence sharing pact with Japan amid a dispute over their shared wartime history. That could weaken efforts to contain North Korean threats, analysts said.

This China: 

Shock over a bloody mob attack in Hong Kong of a Falun Gong practitioner has rippled to New York City as nations gathered for the 74th session of the United Nations General Assembly.

At the United Nations Plaza on Sept. 25, Falun Gong practitioners held up placards and banners in Chinese and English to speak for their fellow practitioner who was seen bleeding profusely from the head the previous day. They pleaded for a stop to brutality against Falun Gong practitioners by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and for international support.

“My heart aches a great deal, I really want to tell the world’s people and to stop this persecution, so that practitioners will no longer experience any bloody incidents like this,” New York-based Falun Gong practitioner Chen Biying told The Epoch Times.

**

Olsi Jazexhi admits now he was hopelessly naïve.

The Albanian-Canadian historian doubted reports that China systematically repressed its Uyghur Muslim minority, believing the West had concocted the allegations to whip up jihadi fervour against Beijing.

So this August he joined a stage-managed tour for foreign journalists of Xinjiang province, where the minority group is concentrated.

The excursion didn’t quite work out as planned.

Olsi expected to debunk the narrative of widespread human-rights abuses. But in a strange tale of propaganda gone wrong, he instead found himself stunned by “concentration camps” where Muslims were banned from praying, forced to speak Mandarin and held for a year or more of Communist indoctrination.

(Sidebar: dude, really?)

Ending Legalised Apartheid

Maxime Bernier is hardly the first person to suggest abolishing the Indian Act, a dreadful piece of legislation that has kept aboriginals out of any place in modern Canadian society, but he is still correct:

That is our policy for First Nations. It is a principle policy. Based on principle, respect, and property rights on reserves. Our goal is, yes, to remove the Indian Act, but the challenge is, (replace it) by what after that? That’s why we’ll have consultations when we’re in government but our goal is to remove that.

We want First Nations and these people to be like Canadians on a lot of points of view. Right now, that’s not normal that they cannot have running water on reserve. We need to fix that, but it must not be imposed by Ottawa, a top-down bureaucratic decision. Our policy is based for a better future for these First Nations, at the same time respecting the treaties we signed with them.

I fail to see how pushing people into northern ghettos and pouring endless amounts of money into a hole is something one can politically or morally sustain.

It's An Election Year!

Promises, promises ...




Adam Vaughan demands an investigation into a gun-rights group's ads:

The Liberals have filed a complaint about advertising by the Canadian Shooting Sports Association during the federal election campaign.

Liberal candidate Adam Vaughan wrote Wednesday to elections commissioner Yves Cote, asking that he investigate nine online videos, produced by the association in English and Mandarin, urging gun owners to vote and warning that their right to own firearms is at stake.

The association says the ads are already running on two television networks.

I would like to ask why Adam Vaughan is trying to end private home ownership and why his boss stopped a criminal investigation into obstruction of justice in the SNC-Lavalin affair.


Speaking of which:

Andrew Scheer is promising a Conservative government would launch a judicial inquiry to find out what happened during the SNC-Lavalin affair. ...

The Conservative leader has repeatedly raised the SNC-Lavalin affair, which resulted in the resignation of two of Trudeau’s cabinet ministers, during the course of his election campaign.

Scheer also committed to introduce legislation that would let the RCMP ask the Supreme Court of Canada for access to information protected by cabinet confidence.

That must have been embarrassing:

The Liberal Party has apologized to a journalist who was booted from one of Justin Trudeau’s public rallies in Thunder Bay, Ont., on Wednesday.

Andrew Lawton, a conservative broadcaster who has worked in journalism since 2013, says despite the apology he’s still fighting to get access to the kind of media events the party has barred him from this week, and he’s at a loss to explain why he’s been targeted.

“I actually take a great deal of pride in my career, that I have the relationships I do with people of all parties. I’m not someone who does stunts, I’m not someone who disrupts events. I’m not someone who protests. I like to have an honest dialogue,” said Lawton.

Because it's an election year, the Liberals had to swallow their pride and let in citizen journalists because the regular guys could not be trusted.

That might be why people aren't like the Liberals the way they used to:

New polling suggests the Liberals lost support in the suburban areas surrounding Toronto in the wake of Justin Trudeau's blackface and brownface controversy.

The latest polling from Nanos Survey Research, commissioned by CTV News and The Globe and Mail, suggests Trudeau’s popularity in the 905 area code of the Greater Toronto Area fell by 7.3 percentage points in the past week. The 905 region represents the municipalities surrounding the City of Toronto.

Start privatising healthcare:

However, a new report shows that the number of doctors has been increasing across the country over recent years, even outpacing the rate of growth of the Canadian population. And health experts say that improving access to primary care will require complex and specific strategies not articulated so far by the Liberal proposal, or that of other parties.

The Emperor's New Socks

When as much time has been put into what some have crudely termed polishing a bit of excrescence, it really hurts the bribed hacks when they have to run interference and cover their favourite bill-paying idiot.

Case in point:

The man who released Justin's infamous blackface photos to the American press (the Canadian bribed press was too busy looking for obscure tweets) speaks out:

The source of the first public photo of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in brownface says his sole motivation in providing the image to Time was his belief the public needed to see it.

Michael Adamson says he has never been a member of a political party and did not receive any payment for providing the photograph to the American magazine.

Adamson says in a written statement that he was aware of gossip surrounding the existence of the photograph because of his position as "a past member of the (West Point Grey Academy) community."

Because of that association, he was able to provide a copy of the school yearbook to the Time reporter, Adamson says.

The revelation that Trudeau appeared publicly in blackface and brownface roiled the federal election campaign when the instances became public Sept. 19.

Adamson said he will not be making any more public comments on the issue.

Don't worry, Mr. Adamson. The bribed hacks will do all the speaking for you just as they did in hunting down the female reporter who revealed that Justin groped her.




Justin will not deny that he was born into wealth and privilege but he won't eschew it, either. If he did not have the famous name or the wealth that he did not earn, it is doubtful that he would have been vaulted into the position he now occupies.

He certainly knows how to reward those like him:

According to Statistics Canada, the highest percentage income gains are going to the top 1%, and the top 0.1%.


While the average income gain for Canadians in 2017 (after the Liberals tax changes took effect) was 2.5%, which doesn’t even keep up with real inflation, income gains for the wealthiest 1% of Canadians were 8.5%.

And for those in the top 0.1%, income gains were 17.2%.


And amazingly, for the richest 0.01% of Canadians, their income gains were up a whopping 27.2% in 2017 alone.

**

So having a slice of income the government doesn’t touch makes perfect sense. And makes perfect sense for everyone, because everyone has these basic needs. But the Liberals don’t agree. They promise to recognize the basic needs of everyone making up to $147,667 a year but beyond that they will claw back the increase in the BPA so that people making more than $210,371 a year only get the old $12,069 BPA, not the new $15,000 BPA everyone else will get.

So people lower down the income scale will get a higher basic allowance — to cover “their most basic needs,” remember — while people higher up will have to do with the existing allowance. Do they actually have lower basic needs? A lot of the rich people you see on the society pages do look very slim, some even dangerously slim. Maybe they get by on fewer calories than the rest of us. Maybe their basic needs really are lower.

The Liberal backgrounder isn’t very explicit about why they claw back the BPA. It only says it’s to make sure “the top one per cent don’t get any additional benefit.” Here’s where the idea of everything being a gift of the government comes in. If you shelter a dollar of a rich person’s income from tax — even for the purpose of allowing essential human expenditures — that will reduce the rich person’s taxes by a larger dollar amount than sheltering a dollar of a poorer person’s income from tax would do. Why is that? Because the rich person pays a higher rate of tax than the poor person. So sheltering even basic needs does provide a bigger tax reduction to rich people than poor people.

But if your idea is to shelter essential spending from taxation, that doesn’t matter. If justice requires that no one pay tax on the money they need to buy essentials, then justice requires that whatever taxes they’re currently paying on that tranche of income go to zero. People who are paying more taxes will obviously get a bigger “tax break” out of that. But, to repeat, justice is that taxes on that amount of income go to zero, so differential tax impacts shouldn’t be a problem. Richer people paying higher taxes on that basic amount were suffering a greater injustice. The end result we want is that nobody pay tax on it. If getting to zero requires a larger tax cut for rich people than poor people, so be it. Zero is what’s fair.

But in this age of government of the government, by the government, for the government, that’s not how things work. The BPA is not a tax sanctuary the government may not enter. Rather, it is a gift from the government. And in 2019 no gift can be tilted toward the top end of the income distribution. 

So under the Liberal proposal, people in the first three tax brackets get $15,000 clear to cover their basic needs, while people higher up get less than that or in fact nothing. Actually, some get less than nothing because their marginal rate goes up a tiny bit: for every dollar of income they earn they pay their regular taxes but now also lose a bit of this “benefit.”

As it happens, StatCan’s latest numbers on who pays how much income tax came out Tuesday. The top one per cent of taxpayers make 9.9 per cent of all income, it’s true, but they pay 21.3 per cent of all income taxes. By contrast, the bottom 50 per cent of taxpayers make just 17.8 per cent of all income and pay only 4.6 per cent of all income taxes. Get that? The one per cent pay more than a fifth of all federal income tax. The bottom half of tax-filers — half — pay under five per cent of all federal income taxes.

He also knows how to avoid blame:

Trudeau was recently interviewed by Dawna Friesen of Global News.

Friesen asked Trudeau, “You were found guilty twice of ethics Violations, what have you learned?”

Trudeau responded by saying “we have more to do.”

But Friesen wasn’t having it:

“We, or you? You keep talking we, but these ethics violations were you.”

Friesen summed it up perfectly.

Canadians didn’t wear blackface. Trudeau did.


Canadians didn’t violate ethics laws. Trudeau did.

**

A week into the Justin Trudeau blackface drama, there has been praise for the comments and conduct of NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh — beginning with praise from Conservative party Leader Andrew Scheer.

Singh deserves much credit for refusing to be used “as a tool in (Trudeau’s) exoneration,” as he put it. Trudeau had asked for a meeting with Singh in order to personally apologize, but Singh saw it for what it was, a desire to set a scene in which Trudeau the apparently-mortified and latterly-enlightened would take centre stage, and Singh would be there as a prop. Singh refused that scenario, and took a private call from Trudeau instead, with the press alerted only afterwards.

Of course, if Trudeau had just wanted to apologize he could have simply called Singh without announcing to the country that he desired a public meeting in which to offer his ostentatious contrition. He could have said sorry and let Singh decide how to handle it publicly. But Trudeau did not want something done backstage; he wanted the spotlight.

I really have no idea why anyone with an iota of self-respect would put up with this. It's like having some kind of reason and dignity is beneath the average Canadian. It's bad enough that a frat-boy refused to own up to his mistakes but that people let him evade his responsibility, get mired in it and then get lectured by the likes of Justin.

Wow.

We have sunk as a nation.


Also - maybe Justin can help. After all, he wore blackface, danced around like a moron in India and can't distinguish Japanese people from Chinese people:

A Japanese comedy duo apologized after reportedly making a racist quip that tennis star Naomi Osaka, of Japanese and Haitian heritage, needed to pick up some “bleach.”

The relatively unknown female comedy pairing A Masso and their management firm released the apology on Tuesday after a skit referring to the young tennis star made news.

The pair reportedly suggested Osaka needed “bleach,” and said the 21-year-old former world No. 1 was “too sunburned,” during a live performance on Sunday.

The duo — whose members call themselves “Kano” and “Murakami” — issued an apology, saying that they had been “ignorant” and “hurtful.”

“We apologize for our failure to supervise A Masso, who made remarks that entirely lacked consideration,” their management firm, Watanabe Entertainment, added in a statement.

How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Global Climate Change Warming Disaster Emergencies

Or whatever the issues are these days.

With the ever-changing titles, who can be sure?




To start off with:

(AT just published the story of Canada's Environment Agency discarding actual historical data and substituting its models of what the data should have been, for instance.)

    Now Nakamura has found it again, further accusing the orthodox scientists of "data falsification" by adjusting previous temperature data to increase apparent warming "The global surface mean temperature-change data no longer have any scientific value and are nothing except a propaganda tool to the public," he writes.

    The climate models are useful tools for academic studies, he says. However, "the models just become useless pieces of junk or worse (worse in a sense that they can produce gravely misleading output) when they are used for climate forecasting." The reason:

    These models completely lack some critically important  climate processes and feedbacks, and represent some other critically important climate processes and feedbacks in grossly distorted manners to the extent that makes these models totally useless for any meaningful climate prediction.

    I myself used to use climate simulation models for scientific studies, not for predictions, and learned about their problems and limitations in the process.

So there's that.



 
Justin is meeting with disaster-philosophers' favourite marionette, Greta Thunberg:

(Sidebar: no one forgot your blackface, Justin.)

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau said Friday he agrees with Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg that he needs to do more to fight climate change.

And he also said his party — and not the Conservative party — is best suited to do that. Trudeau met Thunberg at a Montreal hotel in advance of the cross-country marches that are expected to dominate the federal election campaign today. ...

(Sidebar: what emissions were released into the air from your incessant travel, Justin?) 

Trudeau and Green Leader Elizabeth May are joining what is expected to be the largest of dozens of marches taking place across Canada. Most of the federal party leaders are joining marchers, who are demanding cuts to greenhouse-gas emissions.

One exception is Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer, who's spending the day in the suburbs of Vancouver for an announcement and campaign stops with candidates in Maple Ridge and Richmond, but not marching anywhere. Scheer has said other Conservatives will be joining marchers.

(Sidebar: why, Andy?)

 

Asked about the Montreal meeting with Trudeau afterward, Thunberg said she tries not to "focus so much on individuals," but she added:

"He's, of course, obviously not doing enough ... this is such a huge problem, this is a system that is wrong. So my message to all the politicians is the same: to just listen to the science and act on the science."

... says the angry, troubled girl with no science degree and frowns on command.

Because it's an election year, Justin makes all kinds of promises to distract people from his three incidences of wearing blackface:

Justin Trudeau is promising that a re-elected Liberal government would pay for the planting of two billion trees over the next decade to combat climate change.

Oh, like the things that eat carbon dioxide? Those things?




Free tip, slick - if you are trying to win an election, threatening to tax people back into the Stone Age is not helpful: 

At a candidate forum, Liberal MP Rob Oliphant was caught on tape saying “the price of gasoline needs to go up.”

He added, “we need to change our attitudes.”

Also:

Consider this: Canada has the ability to get off imported oil. We produce about twice as much each day as we use. It would be difficult, but not impossible, to ensure that, as Green party leader Elizabeth May suggests: “As long as we are using fossil fuels we should be using our fossil fuels.”

Self-sufficiency would have real environmental and economic benefits. It would ensure security of supply, and bring all production under domestic regulation. We can’t control how Saudi Arabia, Nigeria or Venezuela handle their production, but an all-Canadian market would ensure every barrel had to meet domestic environmental standards.

The reason we don’t do this is largely political. It would require building pipelines that activists oppose on environmental grounds, even though the alternative, shipping crude by rail, is worse for the environment, and more dangerous. It’s also cheaper to import foreign oil, even if it’s from countries with lower environmental standards.

Since we won’t take the steps to be self-sufficient, we import oil, much of it from Saudi Arabia. The Saudis, as is well known, lack the respect for human rights that Canadians enjoy. Women are treated as second class, political dissent brings long prison sentences, torture is common, executions frequent. Journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered and dismembered for angering the Crown Prince. ...

So, here we are, determined to keep importing oil from a country whose attitudes and repressive actions we despise. A country over whose environmental practises we have no control, and which is becoming more deeply entangled with a U.S. administration headed by a president Canadian climate activists can safely be said to revile. We’d rather do this than deal with the difficulties that would be involved in ridding ourself of foreign supply. We can’t bring ourselves to face the political troubles that would arise from trying to connect oil from the West to consumers in the East. Tens of thousands support a “global climate strike” but balk at pursuing an effective means of bringing all the oil we use under our own control. “Turning off the taps” is not a realistic plan. Sorry, it just isn’t. Some day it might be, but not yet, unless students want to live in unheated dorms while studying in darkened libraries.

Soylent Green Is People

Much has been said about replacing meat with plant-based foodstuffs due to the usual fears of over-population and other bogey-men that have been predicted for decades and not come to pass.

The powers that be are still not letting up on this:

Supporters of restricting meat consumption say it would drastically reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. The agricultural industry is responsible for 11 percent of global greenhouse emissions, mostly from livestock production. A large portion of that comes from methane created by cow burps, but things like manure, fertilizer, shipping and refrigeration of meat also create a significant amount of carbon. The need for grazing land also leads farmers to destroy large swaths of forest, reducing the plants from extracting carbon out of the air.

Critics argue that eating less meat will have less impact relative to potential changes in other sectors, like the energy industry. Others argue that pushing a completely meat-free diet is unrealistic. Asking people to instead reduce how much meat they eat or replace beef in their diet with poultry can still have a substantial effect.

There's also some evidence that a zero meat diet may not reduce emissions as much as initially thought because vegetarians tend to replace the meat in their diet with other animal products like eggs and dairy.

Where can one start?

First of all, carbon isn't a pollutant:

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is not a pollutant and the global warming debate has nothing to do with pollution. The average person has been misled and is confused about what the current global warming debate is about - greenhouse gases. None of which has anything to do with air pollution.
People are confusing smog, carbon monoxide (CO) and the pollutants in car exhaust with the life supporting, essential trace gas in our atmosphere - carbon dioxide (CO2). Real air pollution is already regulated under the 1970's Clean Air Act and regulating carbon dioxide (CO2) will do absolutely nothing to make the air you breath "cleaner".
They are also misled to believe that CO2 is polluting the oceans through acidification but there is nothing unnatural or unprecedented about current measurements of ocean water pH and a future rise in pCO2 will likely yield growth benefits to corals and other sea life.
Thus, regulating carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions through either 'carbon taxes', 'cap and trade' or the EPA will cause all energy prices (e.g. electricity, gasoline, diesel fuel, heating oil) to skyrocket.

(Sidebar: which I believe is the point.)


Overpopulation and the contrived crisis of "peak oil" are also not valid concerns given that most areas of the world are not heavily populated, that better farming practices and technologies can produce and deliver food and that the technologies exist to extract, clean and use oil and gas properly with little waste.


When considering the percentage of the world's agricultural land, one must consider what part of that land is arable (to use for growing crops) and what part is merely range land (suitable for cattle to graze on). Canada, for example, has more forested land than land suitable for permanent crops yet its population certainly does not starve and it is able to export meat. The supporters of the plant-based foodstuffs also don't take into account that using all the arable land for whatever is supposed to go into these foodstuffs would not work:

"Surprisingly, however, a vegetarian diet is not necessarily the most efficient in terms of land use," said Peters.

The reason is that fruits, vegetables and grains must be grown on high-quality cropland, he explained. Meat and dairy products from ruminant animals are supported by lower quality, but more widely available, land that can support pasture and hay. A large pool of such land is available in New York state because for sustainable use, most farmland requires a crop rotation with such perennial crops as pasture and hay.

Thus, although vegetarian diets in New York state may require less land per person, they use more high-valued land. "It appears that while meat increases land-use requirements, diets including modest amounts of meat can feed more people than some higher fat vegetarian diets," said Peters.

Then there is that matter of health.

Calling this plant-based foodstuff actual food would be incorrect:

Of nearly 200 meat-free products available in Australia, some had as much as half the recommended salt intake in a single-serving, putting Australians at greater risk of heart attacks, kidney disease and stroke, officials said.

In the U.S., Burger King’s new Impossible Whopper bills itself as 100% whopper, 0% beef. The “burger” is actually an Impossible patty made mostly of soy protein, potato protein, coconut oil, sunflower oil and heme, derived from genetically engineered (GE) yeast.

Highly processed, the Impossible Burger is nothing more than fake food, and certainly not the solution to a sustainable food system.

Not that the vegetarian lifestyle is incredibly healthy for you anyway: 

Researchers who tracked nearly a quarter million adults aged 45 and older in New South Wales found no significant differences in all-cause mortality, meaning the likelihood of dying, of any death, between those who followed a complete, semi- (meat once a week or less) or pesco- (fish permitted) vegetarian diet, and regular meat eaters.

Caulfield, a Canada Research Chair in health law and policy and expert in celebrity health trends, said the study (in which he played no role) fits with an emerging body of evidence that vegetarian diets don’t reduce the risk of premature death.

If you want to eat properly, go to your doctor.

If you want to save the planet, don't listen to the hacks.