Monday Post

One hundred years ago today this man was born (source)

Moments after taking off, a member of the Snowbirds was killed after ejecting from her plane:

Capt. Jenn Casey, a public affairs officer with the Canadian Forces, died in the incident, the Department of National Defence said Sunday night.

Capt. Richard MacDougall, the pilot of the aircraft, was being treated for his injuries that the Snowbirds said are not life-threatening. ...

Video posted to Twitter by 610 AM in Kamloops appears to show two Snowbirds taking off from Kamloops Airport.

One of the aircraft subsequently climbed into the sky before rolling over and plunging to the ground. The video appears to show at least one person ejecting from the plane before it disappears behind a stand of trees and an explosion is heard.

The Snowbirds were deployed nation-wide as an attempt to distract people from the nearly three months long lockdown. This comment says it best:

I’m just going to come out and say it — as much as we love and honour the Snowbirds as a Canadian icon, the tour always seemed to me to be a distraction from the incompetence of this government; a self-serving exercise in feel-good Liberal branding as they spend us into bankruptcy. Today’s crash stands as a terrible metaphor, a smoldering exclamation point on the shit show that is Justin Trudeau. What a damned waste.

A damned waste, indeed.

Watch as this tragedy falls down the memory-hole, never to re-emerge. Anyone attempting to address it will be branded as a villain.

Just watch.


Also:

The Snowbird plane that crashed in British Columbia on Sunday was 60-years-old and due to be replaced before Justin Trudeau cancelled the purchase. 

In 2012, then Prime Minister Stephen Harper spent $755 million in order to replace the Snowbird jets. This move was cancelled in 2018 by the Trudeau government who instructed that the planes should keep flying until 2030.

As a result of this, some of the aircraft were over 60-years-old with "significant concerns" over the safety of the plane.

Make no mistake: Justin meant what he said in 2013, meant to replace the US with China as a major trading partner and meant to run interference for China since it spread the coronavirus all over the world. The mouth-noises made now are purely for optics. Just watch as Justin et al apologise for China at every turn:

Geneva-based diplomats from Canada, Australia, France, Germany, New Zealand, Britain, Japan and the U.S. issued the demand orally in a May 7 meeting with two other senior WHO officials, with the envoys from Washington and Tokyo taking the lead. ...

While Canada does not recognize Taiwan’s sovereignty, it does maintain trade and cultural relations, and Foreign Affairs Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne has said the island’s presence as a non-state observer at this week’s meetings would help the pandemic fight.

(Sidebar: this Francois-Philippe Champagne.)


The US withdrew funding from the WHO. When will Canada puts its borrowed money where its mouth is and defund the WHO. It doesn't matter if it offends China because the truth is far more important, right?

For Canada, no:

This China:

Three Chinese internet activists have disappeared and are believed to have been detained by police. They have reportedly been charged with preserving articles that were removed by China's online censors. Chen Mei, Cai Wei and Cai's girlfriend went missing on April 19.

A few days earlier, Beijing police formally arrested retired professor Chen Zhaozhi for "picking quarrels and provoking trouble" in a speech about the pandemic. The former Beijing University of Science and Technology professor had posted comments online, including that "Wuhan pneumonia is not a Chinese virus but Chinese Communist Party virus". In addition, Wang Quanzhang, a Chinese human rights lawyer, who ended his prison sentence after more than four years for "subversion against the state", immediately after leaving the penitentiary, was placed in "quarantine", meaning under arrest. ...

A Chinese citizen journalist, Li Zehua, recently reappeared after having vanished two months previous, while investigating the Wuhan coronavirus cover-up. The Chinese regime made him tame and silenced him. In contrast to the tone of his reporting from Wuhan, Zehua's new video shows him heaping praise on the regime that detained him:

"Throughout the whole process, police officers acted civil and legally, making sure that I was resting and eating well, they really cared for me, I had three meals a day, felt safe with guards, and got to watch the news every day."

His video shows the tragic consequence of China's repression.

In his pre-arrest reports from Wuhan, Zehua had a far more aggressive tone against the authorities:

"I don't want to remain silent, or shut my eyes and ears. It's not that I can't have a nice life, with a wife and kids. I can. I'm doing this because I hope more young people can, like me, stand up."

These Chinese journalists know that the price will be terrible. Beijing just sentenced a journalist, Chen Jieren, to a 15-year prison term for "vilifying the Chinese Communist Party" after state media released his "confession". China, the world's largest prison for journalists, has been accused of now having entered a "total censorship era".

The "patient zero" of this Chinese repression was Dr. Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist, who was the whistleblower for Covid-19, and who died, purportedly of the virus, at the age of 34. First, was detained by police in Wuhan for "spreading false rumors" and, for telling the truth, forced to sign a document that he had "told untruthful information online." Hours after state media reported Dr. Li's death," noted Physicians for Human Rights, "official censors scrubbed the Chinese Internet of any mention of his passing without explanation."

Another doctor from Wuhan, Ai Fen, head of the emergency room at Wuhan Central Hospital, was apparently also one of the whistleblowers, who had "sounded the alarm" about the virus on December 30, 2019. Ai Fen was "disappeared" after criticizing the censorship concerning the epidemic. "If I had known what was to happen, I would not have cared about the reprimand. I would have fucking talked about it to whoever, where ever I could", she said. She has not been seen or heard from since early April.

(Sidebar: are those "conspiracy theories", Patty?)

**

Oh, I'm sure!:

China pledged to make its coronavirus vaccine a global public good once one is available, with President Xi Jinping seeking to defuse criticism of its response to a pandemic that has killed more than 315,000 people around the world.

Who wouldn't want that washer fluid in their veins?

I'll wait for the American or Israeli vaccines.


Speaking of Israel:

China's ambassador to Israel was found dead in his home in a Tel Aviv suburb on Sunday, an Israeli police spokesman said.

He did not comment on the cause of death of ambassador Du Wei, who was 57 years old and became ambassador to Israel in February, according to the embassy's website.

I wonder if all of those old-stock and special-needs people who voted for either Trudeau ever realised that they were replaceable means to an end?:

“Immigration will absolutely be key to our success and our economic recovery…We continue to rely on immigration, it will be an economic driver and this will be the North Star of our policy going forward,” said Mendicino. 

It will likely be difficult to convince Canadians facing an unemployment crisis that we should be pleased about resuming the plan to welcome one million new immigrants within the next three years. It’s likely we will soon be facing heavy government messaging trying to convince us of the economic virtues of immigration. When they do, we should have an understanding of the facts.

Mendicino and other immigration enthusiasts often cite Canada’s aging population as the reason why higher immigration levels are required. For Canada’s population to replace itself, we would need a total fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman, but this figure currently sits at 1.54. Canadians are having fewer children, which has caused concern that we will not have enough future workers and taxpayers to fund our social programs. Thus, many proclaim that immigration is the only answer.
As Minister Mendicino said in March, “immigration is the only solution.”

Just call it what it is: replacing old Liberal voters will new ones. People will still vote for you anyway.




Oh, please! This is Canada! These kids need the Andrea Giesbrecht treatment. That's the Canadian way!:

A B.C. doctor is stressing that new mothers do have a safe alternative if they believe they are unable to care for their child.

It comes after Coquitlam RCMP confirmed that someone abandoned an infant in a Port Coquitlam townhouse complex Saturday afternoon.

Dr. Geoffrey Cundiff was instrumental in spearheading the Angel's Cradle program at St. Paul's hospital a decade ago.

"B.C. and Canada have a very strong social safety net, (so) I think many of us think we don't need alternatives, but the fact that there are babies abandoned in the community are a testament to the fact that we are not meeting all of the needs of women whoa re in dire straits," Cundiff told Global News.

The cradle provides an anonymous bassinet where new mothers can leave an infant that they do not believe they can care for. An automated system alerts nurses at the hospital, who will take custody of the child until the Ministry of Children and Family Development can find a suitable family to foster or adopt the baby.

The mother is permitted to leave with no questions asked.

"As long as they're healthy, there are no questions asked, no one stops them, they can leave," said Cundiff.

Cundiff said babies that are abandoned in the community often do not survive.

Last month, a newborn baby was found dead in a portable toilet at Main and Hastings streets in Vancouver.

Back in 2018, a newborn died after being found abandoned in a dumpster in Mission, B.C.

"We need to make people in the community aware (of the Angel's Cradle) so this doesn't happen in the future," said Cundiff.

That's interesting:

Children with a “strange” inflammatory condition, that doctors feared was linked to Covid-19, are often not testing positive for the virus, the chief scientist of the World Health Organisation (WHO) has said.

Last week a 14-year-old boy with no underlying health conditions became the first British child to die from what is thought to be Kawasaki disease.

Symptoms of the syndrome include swollen blood vessels, fever, rash, red eyes, dry or cracked lips or mouth, redness in the palms and on the soles of the feet, and swollen glands.

The rare syndrome is believed to be an overreaction of the immune system to infection and there have been a cluster of cases in south-east London.

Any organisation that requires such a caveat needs to have its funding pulled pronto:

Pro-life groups in Ecuador say that United Nations aid to combat the coronavirus pandemic should not require access to abortion as a condition for assistance.

The double whammy of trouble for Japan and the virus China inflicted on it:

Japan’s economy sank into a recession last quarter that’s likely to deepen further as households limit spending to essentials and companies cut investment, production and hiring to stay afloat amid the coronavirus pandemic.

**

Catholic aid groups in Japan are struggling to continue their charity work for refugees and other foreigners in vulnerable situations as donations have dwindled, affected by the coronavirus pandemic.

“If we continue like this, foreigners who depend on donations will have nowhere to turn,” said Atsuko de Vizcardo Matsuura, a 56-year-old who works at Sinapis, an aid group created in 2002 by the Archdiocese of Osaka for immigrants facing issues such as domestic violence or difficulties stemming from not having residency status.

The coronavirus' forgotten victims:

The number of people in need of help with basic necessities in Iraq, already in the millions, is expected to rise greatly in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a Catholic priest working in the country.

“The COVID-19 outbreak in Iraq and the mitigation measures imposed by public health and security authorities have had ramifications on almost all aspects of public and family life and disrupted the economy,” Fr. Joseph Cassar, S.J., said during a press conference May 15.

**

As schools in Chad remain closed due to coronavirus pandemic restrictions, teachers from the Jesuit Refugee Service are conveying safety measures to prevent the spread of the virus in local communities.

I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to distribute holy water that way:

Photos posted on social media by the St Ambrose Church show the Reverend Timothy Pelc shooting water into a car window as it stopped by the steps of the church. He wore a mask, face shield and rubber gloves as further precautions against spreading the coronavirus.

There is a Vulcan saying: one man can summon the future.

When Karol Wojtyla became the first non-Italian pope in four hundred years and the first Polish pontiff in October 16th, 1978, Poland and eastern Europe had thirty-three gruelling years under communist oppression. Today, Saint John Paul II is hailed as a sort of Moses, a "liberating restorer" in a time that sorely needed liberation:

Yet, from the first moment on, John Paul II aroused new enthusiasm for Christ and his Church. His words from the sermon at the inauguration of his pontificate: “Do not be afraid! Open, open wide the doors for Christ!” This call and tone would characterize his entire pontificate and made him a liberating restorer of the Church. 

Also:

The Polish bishops’ conference is encouraging the faithful to participate in a social media campaign to mark the 100^th anniversary of the birth of Pope St. John Paul II on Monday.

Pope St. John Paul II was born Karol Wojtyla on May 18, 1920, in Wadowice, Poland. In 1978, he made history as the first non-Italian pope in over 400 years. Pope St. John Paul II is credited with helping bring about the fall of communism in his native Poland. He was canonized as a saint in 2014.

Archbishop Stanisław Gądecki, the president of the Polish bishops’ conference, encouraged Catholics to share their memories and witness of how the saint had influenced their life and faith on social media using the hashtag #ThankYouJohnPaul2.

Gądecki encouraged Catholics to post photos and videos to honor the saint’s legacy.

“In this way we can express our gratitude to Pope John Paul II, for what he has brought and brings to our personal, family and social life, for all the meetings we had with him, in which we had the opportunity to participate, for his words, which we remember the most, for the inspirations he has evoked and continues to evoke in us,” Gądecki said. 

“We can also publish the memories associated with him. In this way, we will also tell about St. John Paul II to the young generation which did not have the opportunity to get to know the Pope more closely, but is so much present in social media.”