Monday Post

A merry Рождество to all y'all.

Oh, my ... Are they still mad?:

“Crazy Trump, don’t think that everything is over with my father’s martyrdom,” she said in the televised address.

**

Iraq’s parliament called on Sunday for U.S. and other foreign troops to leave as a backlash grows against the U.S. killing of a top Iranian general, and President Donald Trump doubled down on threats to target Iranian cultural sites if Tehran retaliates.

This Qassam Solemaini:

Targeting of diplomatic compounds, Part I: Soleimani went after American civilians, too, and anyone associated with them in his twin bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, killing 224 innocents, mostly Africans who either worked at the facilities or were passers by. 4,000 more were injured. Al Qaida got most of the blame, but Soleimani was the state sponsor for al-Qaida, giving it its start ...

Quelle surprise: 

Iran said Sunday it would no longer abide by any of the limits of its unraveling 2015 nuclear deal with world powers after a U.S. airstrike killed a top Iranian general in Baghdad, ending an accord that blocked Tehran from having enough material to build an atomic weapon.

Now this is interesting:

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has vanished from public view since an extraordinary session of the Workers Party Central Committee came to a close on Dec. 31.

State media reported last week that Kim paid his New Year's respects at the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun in Pyongyang, the mausoleum of regime founder Kim Il-sung and his son Kim Jong-il, but published no pictures.

There is speculation that he has gone to ground since the U.S.' assassination of Iran's top military commander by airstrike on Jan. 3.

**

Saudi Arabia‘s foreign minister said on Monday the kingdom does not want to see further escalation of tensions in the region at a “very dangerous moment,” following Friday’s killing by a U.S. drone of Iran’s most prominent military commander.

Why, if I were of a cynical mind, I might think that the countries' despots fear being eliminated as messily as a half-brother was at an airport in Malaysia.

 

 

Also:

 

North Korea is suffering from a serious shortage of electricity and food, affecting even the privileged residents of Pyongyang, according to sources. 

 

What else is new?

I'm sure this was nothing:

French police on Sunday shot and wounded a man who had rushed towards a group of policemen with a knife shouting “Allahu akbar” (God is greatest) in the eastern city of Metz, local officials said.

Had that been Canada, it might have just occurred to the authorities to maybe look into him, possibly:

A complaint over the RCMP’s role in the arrest in the United States of a Toronto-area ISIS recruit has been referred to Canada’s new national security review agency, handing its members a challenging case early in their mandate.

A copy of the complaint obtained by Global News alleges Abdulrahman El Bahnasawy was “entrapped” by the FBI with the help of the RCMP, which was aware of his history of mental illness and addiction.

“Both agencies knew of his mental health problem and so entrapped him online, taking advantage of his unstable mental health, while he was manic and on the waiting list for mental health treatment,” the complaint alleges.

(Sidebar: aren't they always mentally ill?)




Justin would never irritate his Chinese bosses:

For years now, some experts have claimed the downfall of Canadian tech giant Nortel was in part caused by espionage and cyber-attacks involving China and Huawei. Since then, the United States, Australia and New Zealand – our Five Eyes intelligence allies – have effectively banned Huawei to one degree or another and the United Kingdom is still making up its mind.

Last month, opposition parties got together to vote against the Liberals in support of a plan by Conservative MP Erin O’Toole to create a special committee to look into our relationship with China. ...

Let’s think of this as a national unity project that is about putting Canada first. Right now, there is justifiable cynicism that the Liberals will do what it takes to stand up to this authoritarian superpower that currently has us up against the ropes.

It would be a powerful moment if Trudeau proved us wrong. The question is whether the cabinet has the ability to say those two simple words: Ban Huawei.

Justin doesn't unite. He divides and flakes off on holiday.


Also:

Hong Kong authorities activated a newly created “serious response” level as fears spread about a mysterious infectious disease that may have been brought back by visitors to a mainland Chinese city.

Eight possible cases have been reported of a viral pneumonia that has also infected at least 44 people in Wuhan, an inland city west of Shanghai, about 900 kilometres (570 miles) north of Hong Kong.

Why does this sound familiar?:

Fort McMurray saw about eight times more foreclosures on homes in 2019 than in 2015, new numbers from the province show.

In the 2015-16 fiscal year, there were 26 foreclosure statements of claim in Alberta's oilsands capital; in 2018-19, there were 220, according to data from Alberta Justice and Solicitor General. In the current fiscal year, there were 219 claims to the end of November.

A drop in property prices and increase in insurance costs since the 2016 fire have put pressure on homeowners in the town. Many homeowners bought when prices were much higher and there were abundant jobs in the oil and gas industry.

But the work has disappeared, household incomes have dropped and many are walking away from their homes to seek opportunities elsewhere.

Oh, yes:

Trudeau argued the NEP would pave the way for Canada to become self-sufficient in energy. How so? By forcing Albertan producers to sell domestically at a deep discount to world prices and allowing Petro-Canada an advantage in purchasing producing assets. Self-sufficiency would protect Canada from the volatility of the international oil prices so the logic went. Furthermore, Eastern Canadians would then be able to buy oil at below-market rates, and the federal government would have a view into an industry dominated by foreign owned petroleum companies.

Economic disaster quickly followed. Alberta’s unemployment rate shot from 4% to more than 10%. Bankruptcies soared 150%. A housing crisis ensued resulting in values collapsing 40% in both Edmonton and Calgary. As Libin notes, “it would take office landlords a decade to work off the glut.” Alberta’s government plunged into significant debt levels.

Ted Byfield, founder of the now defunct Alberta Report, was quoted as saying “there was an enormous amount of pain everywhere, Alberta was very much a small-business province. Behind the big oil companies, there were thousands of little people..all this was just brought to a crashing halt.”

Former premier Ralph Klein, who was mayor of Calgary at the time, said “thousands of people lost their jobs, their homes, their businesses, their dignity. Some took their own lives.”

Evict? No, cops should be "evicting" them:

Canada’s multi-billion LNG Canada project is facing fresh trouble, as work on a key artery linking the export facility near Kitimat, B.C. to natural gas resources in Dawson Creek area is being halted by First Nations groups.

Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs, representing all five clans of the Wet’suwet’en Nation, said over the weekend that they issued an eviction notice to the Coastal GasLink pipeline company, which is building the $6.6 billion project.

LNG Canada, which is also under construction, is said to be the largest private sector investment in Canadian history, with a price tag of around $40 billion and is being developed by a Royal Dutch Shell-led consortium. The project will export Canadian natural gas to Asian markets.

The First Nations’ move comes after the B.C. Supreme Court sided with the company and granted access to areas covered by the injunction at the end of December. The decision did not spell out what the RCMP can do to enforce the injunction but police have been heavily scrutinized over the past year for enforcing a previous injunction granted by Justice Church against Coastal GasLink protestors.

Wet’suwet’en says Coastal Gaslink violated its law of trespass, bulldozed through its territories, destroyed its archaeological sites, and occupied it land with industrial camps.

“Private security firms and RCMP have continually interfered with the constitutionally protected rights of Wet’suwet’en people to access our lands for hunting, trapping, and ceremony,” the First Nations said.

Coastal GasLink reported that its personnel discovered that trees had been felled making a key road impassable, which is “a clear violation of the Interlocutory Injunction as it prevents our crews from accessing work areas.”

“We have reached out to better understand their reasons and are hopeful we can find a mutually agreeable path forward,” the company said. “To that end, we are requesting to meet with Unist’ot’en and the Hereditary Chiefs as soon as possible. Over the past year, Coastal GasLink has repeatedly requested face-to-face meetings with the Unist’ot’en and the Office of the Wet’suwet’en but these requests have either been ignored or rejected by these groups.”

This needs to be repeated because the irrational eco-evangelists who take their cues from ludicrous scolding brats without science degrees rather than accept the plain truth that arsonists set fires in an arid country with a history of wildfires and have since caused twenty-four deaths (and think of all that carbon!) and that carbon dioxide (also known as plant food) is not a pollutant nor a culprit in these disastrous walls of flame that are consuming the Australian countryside. 

It also must be shouted from the roof-tops that science is no more at odds with religion (or vice-versa) than English composition is with chemistry. Science explains the physical world and religion explains theological matters. It's all perfectly fine. Whoever is hung up on someone's reading a religious text and keen on pitting a discipline that they don't understand just to make themselves appear wise and gain social standing among people just as daft as they possesses a sort of emotional retardation that hinders true progress.

But I digress:

A Canadian climate scientist who called on her Christian colleagues to help in the fight against climate change, says the crisis is “loading the weather dice against us.”

The article is couched to present Christians as backward. If only a voice in the wilderness could make them see reason!

Could the bribed press sink any lower than printing this dreck?

Oh, it will try.