Friday, January 31, 2020

For a Friday

Quickly now ...




Britain is out of what is still a bad idea:

More than three and a half years after Britain voted to leave the European Union (EU), Brexit has finally happened.

At midnight Brussels time on Friday, British flags were removed from EU offices, and the EU flag was lowered on the British premises, marking the nation’s official departure from the EU and ending its 47-year membership.



Never forget that petty little people are tying up the government, preventing it from addressing the nation's business, because of a loss in 2016:

The Senate narrowly rejected Democratic demands to summon witnesses for President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial late Friday, all but ensuring Trump's acquittal in just the third trial to threaten a president's removal in U.S. history. But senators pushed off final voting on his fate to next Wednesday.



The business of the Canadian government is not to do everything in its power to prevent a virus that has killed 259 people from entering the country or quarantine the infected or contain it or even hold to account a government that has been less than truthful about this virus and its nature and origins from the beginning but to exert its unimpeachable power over a citizenry that knew what the government was planning and did nothing about it:

The absolute gist of the situation has only three elements. Mr. Levant wrote a book critical of the Liberal government. He advertised it via billboard and lawn signs. (For the unwary, it is a feature of publishing a book that it be advertised, and, surprisingly, even a book criticizing a government). 

Elections Canada wrote to him that he thereby “contravened the (Canada Elections) Act … having incurred over $500 on elections advertising expenses.” 

So he’s summoned, under threat of penalty, to come to Elections Canada and explain himself to two of its investigators, to tell why he did not “register” his book. Many thoughts occur. Here are a couple. 

Can anybody give the name of any other book, ever, which has been the subject of an investigation by Elections Canada? 

Is Elections Canada starved for actual work? 

Is this “investigation” (the scare quotes are necessary here) a Canadian analogue, via Alice in Wonderland and The Friendly Giant, of the American saga of “Russian collusion?” 

When will PEN Canada, defender of authors and journalists, take up the banner for Mr. Levant? 

**
I’m sure none of this will deter the prime minister’s ego-driven campaign for a seat on the UN Security Council. Besides making the already fraught Aboriginal consent issue even worse by adopting UNDRIP, he courted popularity with the UN’s notoriously anti-Israel membership by voting in favour of a motion condemning that country as an “occupying power.” Many observers believe his decision to send our troops on a high-risk and dysfunctional UN mission to Mali was another tactic to gain support for his Security Council membership.

Canadians should be outraged that their prime minister and his government hampers the country’s ability to carry out nationally important projects, betrays long-standing international allies and risks the lives of our troops to secure a powerless seat on a dysfunctional international organization.

(Sidebar: they should be but won't because pot and killing old people are priorities for Canadians.)

**
Sen. Lynn Beyak should be suspended again without pay, the Senate's ethics committee recommended Friday.

Beyak's colleagues ousted her from the upper chamber temporarily last spring after condemning as racist several letters she had posted to her website.

The Ontario senator had published letters supporting her view that some Indigenous people had had positive experiences in residential schools, which the Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded caused generations of First Nations, Metis and Inuit children to suffer abuse and alienation.

Some of the letters went beyond that, suggesting Indigenous people or their cultures are inferior.
Beyak's suspension ended automatically when Parliament was dissolved for the federal election last fall.

(Sidebar: I'll just leave this right here.)



When one's government has these as priorities, one simply cannot ask for a new government.

One is well past that point.




Canadians support abortion not because they have thoroughly considered the issue, not because they have weighed it carefully in their minds and certainly not because the act is a moral, medical, political or economic good. They support it for the same reasons that they do nothing about their totalitarian government, the carbon tax, killing the elderly and disabled and drugs - they don't care about anything else but themselves:

 A vast majority of Canadians believe abortion should be illegal in the third trimester of pregnancy, from 28 weeks onward. But if a fetus could be grown in “biobags,” how might we feel about abortions even in the second, between 14 and 28 weeks?

Why? Does the baby magically become human at that point or it's tough to kill someone whose cries in a hospital hallway could end up in a sticky legal intervention?


No comments: