Wednesday, January 01, 2020

Mid-Week Post




Merry New Year!




Not all is quiet on New Year's Day:

(Sidebar: maybe this. Maybe.)

Thousands of Hong Kong residents took to the streets Wednesday for the city’s largest antigovernment protest in weeks, hoping to inject new momentum into a monthslong movement that has seen violent clashes and many arrests.

Wednesday’s protest is only the second large-scale demonstration to be authorized by the police since voters in November overwhelmingly elected pro-democracy politicians to neighborhood offices. That vote, a stinging rebuke to Communist Party officials in China, ushered in the longest period of relative calm since the city was first convulsed by protests in June.

More than 6,000 people have been arrested since the demonstrations began over legislation, since scrapped, that would have allowed extraditions to mainland China. The protests have since expanded to include a broad range of demands for police accountability and greater democracy.



If one were of a skeptical nature, one might suppose that Mr. He's research was bunk and therefore embarrassing to the Chinese establishment at home and abroad. This is, after all, the country that steals organs from political dissidents. What modicum of human decency could they be referring to?:

He Jiankui, a Shenzhen researcher who drew widespread condemnation when he revealed his experiment last year, will also have to pay a 3 million yuan ($430,000) fine, said a report from Xinhua News Agency, citing the verdict of a court in the southern Chinese city.

Two others who assisted him were also sentenced. Zhang Renli, a researcher at the Guangdong Provincial People’s Hospital, received a prison term of two years and Qin Jinzhou, a researcher at the Shenzhen Luohu Hospital Group, received a term of 18 months, suspended for two years.

The verdict is China’s first public statement on the fate of He, who disappeared from view after his 2018 experiment sparked a global backlash. His work to edit the genes of embryos to make babies who are resistant to the virus that causes AIDs was sharply critiqued by the international scientific community as an abuse of new gene-engineering methods that are still not fully understood.

He’s experiment — which took place in near secrecy and was revealed only after twin baby girls were born — also ignited concern that China is not properly regulating its ambitious researchers in its push to become a global leader in science and medicine.

The Xinhua report said that in He’s experiment, for which he recruited couples with HIV who did not want to pass the disease to their offspring, two women became pregnant and three gene-edited babies were born. The trial proceedings were not made public to protect the identities of the children and their parents, said Xinhua.

The court found that He and the two others had forged ethical review documents and used “impersonating and concealing tactics” on unsuspecting doctors to complete their experiment, said the report.

In the wake of the controversy, China said earlier this year that it would more strictly control clinical trials involving gene-editing and other experimental life science technologies. Researchers will now require approval from the highest level of government before they can do such work.



Judicial activists don't have to be coerced by China to rule contrary to reason and common law. They do that already:

Not only did Beverley McLachlin get her first taste of being a part-time judge in the territory in recent weeks, she did it as a protest movement of historic proportions swirled around her. That movement is aimed in part to defend the legal system from Chinese interference.

But McLachlin said her initial experience on Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal left her convinced the body is immune to such outside pressure, and unlikely to suffer “deterioration.”

This Beverly McLachlin:

She made waves with a 1985 judgment she wrote while on the Supreme Court of British Columbia, ruling that adults accused of sexually assaulting children can use consent as a defence, provided they were not in a position of authority ...

As a B.C. Court of Appeal judge, she wrote well-regarded decisions defining the Charter’s right to equality. She saw the law as an “organic” entity that grows and transforms in keeping with the evolution of societal views — known as the “living tree” doctrine. McLachlin saw this conception of gradual, tempered growth as quite different from the sort of judicial activism that had angered opponents of judicial power since the 1982 enactment of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

McLachlin revealed the core of her judicial philosophy in a lecture she delivered at the University of Saskatchewan in 2001, observing that courts can justify making substantial changes to the law if, in doing so, they are reflecting clear changes in social values. Even then, she cautioned, courts ought to embark on these changes only when legislators have failed to address an underlying, pressing problem.

She was notable for her unwillingness to intrude on government budgetary priorities. In a 2004 case known as Auton v. British Columbia, for example, she ruled that it would not be unconstitutional for British Columbia to discriminate against autistic children by failing to provide them with intensive behavioral therapy.

**
The retiring chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada will get just over $270,000 per year from the government for the rest of her life

An order in council posted on October 26 sets out the annuity for Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, who is set to retire on December 15 after a 36-year judicial career, 17 years of which were spent as the top court’s lead judge. 

The order “grants to the Right Honourable Beverley M. McLachlin an annuity of $270,266, commencing on December 15, 2017 and continuing during her life.”

A Liberal through and through. 




North Korea is preparing "counter-measures" against the US:

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has called for active “diplomatic and military countermeasures” to preserve the country’s security in a lengthy speech at a key political conference possibly meant to legitimize major changes to his nuclear diplomacy with the United States.

Once again - don't trust North Korea. 




A chilling archive of the IRA's plethora of murders:


It has long been known that alleged agents or informers were often killed by the Provisional IRA, but the newly declassified documents include fresh details about those killed between 1978 and 1994.

During “The Troubles,” the government did not usually confirm whether those killed were informers.

“In a number of cases, persons murdered by the IRA have not been informers,” the official record, found in the archives, says.

“Furthermore, in other cases alleged informers have had to leave Northern Ireland at a moment’s notice and start a new life elsewhere, knowing that they can never return to their homes without facing the prospect of torture and murder, possibly having to cut off their links with close family members in order to avoid the risk of their new location being revealed.”

Informer or not, many of those named in the newly opened archives were dumped near the Irish border after being shot in the head.




Greta Thunberg (daddy's little money-maker) does not have a script to confront Donald Trump would not speak with Donald Trump:

Greta Thunberg said she would not have wasted her time talking to Donald Trump about the dangers posed by climate change at a United Nations summit.

Girl, please. Everyone knows that you are a fraud. 




Australian skies are red due to fires that are still burning:


Australia’s wildfire crisis intensified on Tuesday as coastal towns across the southeast caught ablaze, forcing thousands of stranded tourists and locals to seek refuge on beaches.

Thick black smoke billowing from infernos in Victoria and New South Wales states turned the morning sky pitch black or choked the coastline in a haunting red haze. Two people were killed as a fire ripped through the small community of Cobargo, taking the death toll since the devastating fire season began several weeks ago to 12. Five others are missing.

There’s no end in sight to the emergency as strong winds fan flames, wreaking havoc in popular tourist spots such as Batemans Bay during the peak summer holiday season.




The hatred that liberals dare not name - ever:


Anti-Semitic attacks are on the rise around the country, leaving Jews and their communities feeling frightened and unsafe. In New York City, anti-Semitic crimes have jumped 21% in the past year. According to the Anti-Defamation League, there were 1,879 incidents of anti-Semitism in the United States in 2018, including more than 1,000 instances of harassment. The 2019 figures are expected to meet or exceed that number.



This year, Canadians are going to get the government they richly deserve good and hard:

Association president Jack Jedwab notes Pierre Trudeau was chosen by respondents in parts of the country key to current prime minister Justin Trudeau’s electoral successes.

“Justin Trudeau, who in many ways articulates the key pillars of his father’s vision … is today popular with the same constituents as his father is in the survey,” Jedwab says.

I'll just leave these right here:

When Trudeau came to power in 1968 under the slogan Just Society, he found the fundamentals of the Canadian economy in solid shape. Our dollar was strong and stable, unemployment hovered around 4%, the books were balanced, the economy was booming, and the federal debt represented about one-quarter of our economy (Flaherty’s long-term target).

Trudeau‘s first significant socialist salute was the 1971 Unemployment Insurance Act. The period of qualifying work was reduced by 73%, the benefits increased by 65%, and the benefit period extended by 40%. Turning seasonal employment into year-round income, at ski hills around the country exuberant youth began sporting t-shirts pledging their affinity to the “UIC ski team.”

The number of UI claimants doubled overnight. Provinces designed short-term work programs to get people off provincially financed welfare — to make them eligible for federally financed UI.

Trudeau’s folly, experts concluded, caused unemployment rates in Canada to rise by between two percentage points nationally and up to four percentage points in Atlantic Canada. Thus did Canada began to seriously underperform our major trading partners.

**
While some Canadians feared Pierre Trudeau as a peacenik and pacifist in 1968, when faced with the kidnapping of a British diplomat and a Quebec cabinet minister in October, 1970, he proved to be the exact opposite: an authoritarian and political opportunist.

Rather than protect civil liberties, as was his expressed passion, during the October Crisis 500 people were thrown into jail without being charged, 10,000 homes were searched without a warrant, and press censorship was the rule of the day.

Like this:

Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault’s mandate letter includes regulations targeting the removal of illegal online content “harms such as radicalization, incitement to violence, exploitation of children, or creation or distribution of terrorist propaganda.”


Heritage minister Steven Guilbeault’s mandate letter
Firms such as Facebook or Twitter would be required to remove such content within 24 hours or face punishment.

If that seems a bit vague, it is because the definition of “illegal content” is not yet set, but according to iPolitics, Minister Guilbeault has said he will be meeting with Justice Minister David Lametti to clearly define it.


And this (an oldy but a goody):

Tal also chalks up a big part of the gap to taxes, which account for 30 per cent of gross income in Canada compared to 10 per cent in the U.S. The discrepancy is mostly explained by the higher level of government-provided services in Canada.

“Growth in gross income in the U.S. rose roughly at the same rate as net income. At the same time in Canada, net income rose more slowly,” he wrote.

“We estimate that the impact of faster-rising taxes and other transfers to governments [such as CPP] in Canada have accounted for close to one-quarter.”

These kinds of taxes: 

When Finance Minister Bill Morneau introduced a motion earlier this month to keep the Liberals' election pledge to cut income taxes for the middle class, he called the measure "significant" and said it would impact 20 million Canadians.

But most Canadians would have to study their pay stubs very closely after Jan. 1 to detect that tax cut and other changes to deductions that arrive with the new year. And unless they live in Alberta, they may not notice this year's tax changes at all ...

**
The basic amount most Canadians can earn tax-free is going up on Jan. 1, resulting in slightly lower federal income taxes.

How slightly lower?

**

The federal carbon tax comes into effect in Alberta on Wednesday, but the provincial government insists it’s nowhere near done fighting against the Liberal attempt to cut down emissions, saying Albertans voted against the tax in the election last spring.





 And now, look forward to a whole year of wacky barely-holidays:

January 18: National Thesaurus Day

British lexicographer Peter Mark Roget—who is most famous for publishing The Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases (a.k.a. Roget’s Thesaurus) in 1852—was born on January 18, 1779. As such, this is a day to honor, celebrate, extol, laud, praise, revere, salute, etc. his contributions.



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