Wednesday, December 04, 2019

Mid-Week Post

Your middle-of-the-week food for thought ...




After correctly pointing out that Justin has spent taxpayer money on jet-skis for the RCMP (the same ones who were supposed to investigate his vacation on Aga Khan's private island) and shoe polish to give him a deep African glow, anything but the amount he is supposed to spend on defense, US president Donald Trump finds himself the object of the wagging schoolgirl tongues in the bribed press and the cowardly mincers who haven't the intestinal fortitude to tell Trump what they think to his face:




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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and other world leaders have been caught on camera apparently talking candidly on Tuesday night about U.S. President Donald Trump.

Hours later, the backlash materialized.

“Well, he’s two-faced,” the president said Wednesday when asked about the video. After a long pause, he added, “He’s a nice guy. I find him to be a very nice guy.”

(Sidebar: yeah, you said that about Kim Jong-Un, too, Donald. Tell us what you really think.)

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“My view is that President Trump made his mind up about Justin Trudeau at [the 2018 G7 summit in] Charlevoix — ‘very dishonest and weak’ — and now has been confirmed in this impression because Trudeau was nice to Trump face to face and then catty about him with Macron later,” said Christopher Sands, director of the Center for Canadian Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced Studies in Washington.
 
“This is not good for their personal relationship, but the machinery of government will continue to handle most issues on the bilateral agenda for now, so there will not be an explicit price for Canada to pay now. But as we have seen with Mitt Romney and others, Trump has a long memory for slights and I expect there will be consequences down the line.”

(Sidebar: because God knows the Canadians won't stick it to him.)


Remember - Canadians voted for this. They gladly re-elected a poseur as shrinking as they.


Also - well, someone has to be the adult around here:

What received reasonable coverage this week was the meeting of the premiers, and most particularly the presence of three Conservative allies — Messrs. Doug Ford, Scott Moe and Jason Kenney — in global-warming-sleet-and-snow-wracked Toronto.

What I first observe in various press interactions with these three — it’s probably a curious word in this context — is their seriousness. They are undoubtedly pitching their provinces’ particular concerns but don’t stop there. They all display a concern for joint endeavour and common ground. They speak their various worries, without alarmism, about the current state of the country. ...

 It is premiers, particularly Ford, Kenney and Moe, who are presenting a present-day agenda, who are warning that an Ottawa-fixated, “social-justice”-oriented, identity-politics-absorbed government is badly, perilously, out of touch with the real dilemmas of Confederation. They do not speak in bumper sticker sentences. They are, to coin a phrase, the adults in the room.
Read the whole thing.




Getting good and hard the government they voted for:

The average Canadian family is expected to spend an additional $487 on food in 2020, a new report says.

Food prices in Canada are expected to rise between two and four per cent in Canada in 2020, the report released Wednesday by Dalhousie University and the University of Guelph indicated.

The 2020 forecast predicts that for the average family following Canada’s food guide, the total household food expenditure will increase to $12,667 annually.

One could bring up inflation, carbon taxes and food boards (which should have been abolished after the Second World War) but why muddy the waters with reason?




Alberta needs to rush the death of eastern Canada with a thousand cuts:

A panel examining Alberta’s role in Confederation kicked off its public town hall tour Tuesday, with many telling the panellists the province deserves a better deal — but through collaboration rather than confrontation.

More than 150 people spoke to the panellists at a north Edmonton community centre.

The speakers were given two minutes to make their points.

“Canada is broken,” said Al Romanchuk, who said he was wishing for a referendum on Albertan separation for Christmas.

A number of First Nations in Alberta, including the Treaty 8 First Nations of Alberta, have said that any move to separate would contravene their treaty rights with the federal government, and Kenney himself said separation is not a desirable option for the province.



Now one knows why Newfoundland went red:

Newfoundland and Labrador’s premier says he has ordered a review of transfers of executive-level staff as one of his cabinet ministers faces criticism over the appointment of a former Liberal staffer to a lucrative public service job.



It's called "sour grapes":

The commission that organized two leaders’ debates in the 2019 election has decided not to appeal a Federal Court injunction that forced it to give media accreditation to two right-wing online outlets, Rebel Media and the True North Centre.

Both outlets were rejected for accreditation — which allows them to cover the debate on site and put questions to the leaders in person afterward —  three days before the Oct. 7 English-language debate. A Federal Court judge granted an injunction on the afternoon of Oct. 7 allowing them accreditation.

The outlets are still seeking a full judicial review of whether the commission’s rejections were unreasonable and procedurally unfair, but the case was put on pause after the commission filed notice to appeal the injunction. With the appeal now dropped, the case proceeds again toward a full hearing, which may be many months away.

The Liberal government created the leaders’ debate commission on Oct. 30, 2018, as an independent body to organize two official election debates, and appointed former governor general David Johnston to lead it.

(Sidebar: read - it created a regulatory body to formulate a pro-Liberal opinion before the last election.)




Ontario teachers are protesting for the children ... or something:

Thousands of Ontario public high school teachers will be off the job Wednesday for a one-day strike after failing to reach a contract with the province.

The Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation confirmed the job action, setting the stage for potentially hundreds of schools across the province to shut their doors for the day.

Harvey Bischof, president of the federation, said the Ford government did not put forward any constructive proposals through the negotiation process.

As of this writing, Mr. Bischof has not agreed to take a pay-cut ... for the children.




Disabled children aren't groomed by "professionals" and that bothers the real creeps:

 A new literature review found that of 5,500 research articles on talking to youth about sexuality, only two examined the topic of communication with a focus on youth with disabilities.

I'll just leave this here:

An astonishing 17 pupils at a single British school are in the process of changing gender, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

Most of the youngsters undergoing the transformation are autistic, according to a teacher there, who said vulnerable children with mental health problems were being ‘tricked’ into believing they are the wrong sex.

Also - why would the Groper care about this?:

Pakistani investigators have discovered more than 600 girls and women across the country who were sex trafficked to China in the last two years. However, chances of convicting the traffickers remain uncertain due to pressures to maintain diplomatic ties.  ...

(Sidebar: just as they do with North Korean women.)

Many of the women who spoke to investigators described undergoing forced fertility treatments, physical and sexual abuse, and sometimes forced prostitution. One investigation report, according to AP, alleges that organs were harvested from some of the women sent to China.

 

News from the "basic dictatorship":

Scientists say a Chinese researcher’s claim to have edited the DNA of the “CRISPR babies” and immunized them from HIV has been “a deliberate falsehood”.

You don't say!

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The Trudeau government is digging for intelligence on the role Canada’s mining sector could play in providing the United States and other key trading partners with crucial minerals and metals — from cobalt to tellurium — considered building blocks of the new economy.

I'll leave this here:

Continental Gold, a Canadian mining company, won’t be Canadian much longer.

It’s being taken over by China’s Zijing Mining Group Co., one of China’s largest gold mining companies.
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Would this be the same country that allows China to buy up resources and land?:

Questions are being raised about plans to build a $1-billion, 700-km highway from Yellowknife to a proposed port on Nunavut’s Arctic coast, paid for by Canadians but which critics say would largely serve Chinese government interests.

Last week, Transport Minister Marc Garneau pledged more than $50 million to the Northwest Territories and Nunavut to study the feasibility of a highway to replace ice roads that are no longer reliable amid climate change.

While local leaders applaud the funding, critics say the largest benefit would go to a mining company, MMG, which is controlled by the Chinese government and holds several mineral deposits in the region where the highway would be built.

“It is worth flagging to people that the main beneficiary will be the Chinese government, more so than the government of Nunavut or the government of Canada,” says Michael Byers, a political science professor at the University of British Columbia who holds the Canada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law. “This is for the mining projects and nothing else.”

You could always - you know - not let the Chinese own our resources.

These Chinese:



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Only a week ago, The New York Times reported on the Xinjiang Papers, a 403-page collection of reportedly classified Chinese documents—including speeches by Chinese leader Xi Jinping and other Communist Party officials—on plans to carry out the mass incarceration of the Uyghur Muslim minority population in Xinjiang, as well as government directives instructing local officials on how to coerce Uyghur students with lies and threats. We were told by the reporters that the leak of such classified documents out of China was unprecedented.

While the world was still digesting the Xinjiang Papers, two more China-related intelligence information bombs were dropped over the last weekend.

First, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) reported newly leaked details from the China Cables. These were classified Chinese government documents, including a manual for operating the internment camps that hold millions of Uyghur Muslims and other minorities, and intelligence briefings that uncover “how Chinese police are guided by a massive data collection and analysis system that uses artificial intelligence to select entire categories of Xinjiang residents for detention.”

These leaked documents reveal “the inner workings of the camps, the severity of conditions behind the fences, and the dehumanizing instructions regulating inmates’ mundane daily routines.” ICIJ also tweeted that more than 75 journalists and dozens of media partners are working together to report on information uncovered by the China Cable.

I’m sure we will be hearing more in the coming days. The leaked China Cables, in addition to the recently leaked Xinjiang Papers, present indisputable evidence that in the Chinese Communist Party’s own words, China is committing ethnic cleansing in Xinjiang, in the most deliberate and systematic fashion.

Then, a more shocking revelation came out of Australia. Wang “William” Liqiang, a Chinese national who currently lives in Australia with his family and is applying for political asylum, reportedly told Australia’s counterespionage agency that he had been personally involved in China’s espionage activities in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and overseas.

Some of the specifics of Wang’s self-alleged activities include personal involvement in kidnapping one of five Hong Kong booksellers in 2015, infiltrating university and college campuses on foreign soil and recruiting overseas Chinese students to collect intelligence, and meddling with Taiwan’s 2018 election by “creating more than 20 media and internet companies to launch ‘targeted attacks’ and spending roughly $200 million over an unspecified period to invest in television stations in Taiwan.” In addition, Wang gave “detailed code names of covert operations and shadowy business ventures,” which amounts to China’s covert efforts to suppress democracy and human rights activities around the world.

Wang also told Australia investigators that he conducted his espionage work from a Hong Kong-based firm called China Innovation Investment Limited, which Wang identified as a front for mainland China’s intelligence operations in Hong Kong.



And now, some good news:

Pancreatic cancer, which maintains a 95% mortality rate, is resistant to all current treatments. Patients have extremely poor chances of surviving for five years after being diagnosed—and since the disease does not show symptoms until the advanced stages, it is notoriously hard to diagnose.

However, this new Tel Aviv University study finds that a small molecule has the ability to induce the self-destruction of pancreatic cancer cells. The research was conducted with xenografts—transplantations of human pancreatic cancer into immunocompromised mice. The treatment reduced the number of cancer cells by 90% in the developed tumors a month after being administered.
The research holds great potential for the development of a new effective therapy to treat this aggressive cancer in humans.



(Merci beaucoup)


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