Enjoy an extra bit of Halloween tonight.
Saturday, October 31, 2020
Thursday, October 29, 2020
And the Rest of It
We may never know the true motive:
A knife-wielding attacker shouting “Allahu Akbar” beheaded a woman and killed two other people at a church in the French city of Nice on Thursday, while a gunman was shot dead by police in a separate incident.
At around 9 a.m., a man armed with a knife entered the church and slit the throat of the sexton, beheaded an elderly woman, and badly wounded a third woman, according to a police source.
The sexton and the elderly woman died on the spot, the third woman managed to make it out of the church into a nearby cafe, where she died, Estrosi told reporters. None of the victims has so far been named. “The suspected knife attacker was shot by police while being detained. He is on his way to hospital, he is alive,” Nice’s mayor Christian Estrosi told reporters.
“Enough is enough,” he added. “It’s time now for Franc eto exonerate itself from the laws of peace in order to definitively wipe out Islamo-fascism from our territory.”
France is well beyond that point, Monsieur Etrosi.
India doesn't have the hesitance or the naivety Canada does when it comes to China:
Two days of meetings by the top US and Indian diplomatic and defense chiefs in New Delhi underscored a desire for growing military cooperation driven by mutual distrust of China.
Deadly clashes between Indian and Chinese troops over a disputed border region have given the Pentagon fresh fuel to draw Delhi closer, as it seeks a coalition to counter what the US sees as the rapid expansion of China's military presence across the Indo-Pacific region.
In two days of talks on Monday and Tuesday, couched as the third annual 2+2 discussions, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper agreed to share with India geospatial satellite and sensor intelligence.
They laid the groundwork for more military exchanges and cooperation on cybersecurity and space, as well as increasing arms sales, the US particularly pressing India to buy US F-18 fighter jets for its navy.
Also - why hasn't she been sent to the US yet?:
A border officer who assisted in the three-hour detention and examination of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou before her arrest at Vancouver’s airport two years ago says collecting phone passcodes is routine during secondary examinations of foreign nationals.
Wow. People totally have a handle on this coronavirus:
Sinai wasn’t the only lab in that position. Hospital and public health labs submitted a budget proposal outlining the anticipated surge and the money needed to deal with it sometime in either late spring or early summer, said one source with deep knowledge of the system. But it wasn’t approved until after the second wave hit in the autumn. “Heels were dragged,” the source said. “And that’s awful. Because it’s not a light switch. You don’t just say, ‘Great, I’ve got the money. I can increase the diagnostic testing capacity.’ It doesn’t work like that. It takes about two to three months.”
The province has since taken steps to cut the number of tests coming in, but the backlog, while it lasted, took a brutal toll on Ontario’s COVID fight. “As recently as two weeks ago, we were getting less than 20 per cent of positive cases reported to us within 24 hours from the labs, and less than 50 per cent of cases reported to us within two days,” said City Councillor Joe Cressy, who chairs the Toronto Board of Health.
At that speed of return, the testing system was all but cosmetic. It was like giving a virus that doesn’t need any kind of edge a 50-metre head start in a 100-metre dash. “To put it simply, the combination of insufficient testing, coupled with delays in lab reporting, significantly constrained our ability to do contact tracing and our collective ability to prevent a significant second wave,” Cressy said.
The Scarlet Mask
To say Ontario PC MPP and Parliamentary Assistant Sam Oosterhoff was stupid for posing for a photo with more than 40 relatives at a Niagara banquet hall is a bit redundant.
To claim, as the NDP and Liberals did, that it is the same or worse than a teacher going to school while sick and refusing to wear a mask is ridiculous.
Yep.
This is merely a cheap shot at a well-liked MP who, for a few moments, didn't wear the Garment of Social Piety that was once an object of scorn, something the chief public office wants down the memory-hole.
Did everyone forget the crappy and partisan way in which the federal government contributed to the deaths of over ten thousand Canadians?
I guess so.
Trudeau Waits For Orders In the Event of Trump's Re-Election
The indecisive puppet will not know what to do if Trump should permanently withdraw the US from the WHO:
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will speak with the European Union's President of the European Council Charles Michel and President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen this morning via video conference.
The trio will discuss their commitment to international cooperation ahead of the US presidential election, particularly through strong support of the United Nations and World Health Organization.
From the Most Corrupt Government Ever Re-Elected
"Transparency!" they insisted:
Canada’s chief public health officer yesterday in an official report on the pandemic deleted all references to garbled advice on masks. Dr. Theresa Tam as late as April 3 claimed there was no evidence masks protected Canadians from Covid-19: “It is absolutely mind-boggling.”
The Public Health Agency in a January 29 briefing note advised Canadians traveling in pandemic quarantine zones in China not to wear a mask despite local mandatory mask orders. Dr. Theresa Tam, chief public health officer, for weeks told the public masks were pointless and risky: “You have to be careful you’re not putting your finger in your eye.”
**
Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien spent four years and assigned seven investigators to a cursory review of a privacy complaint, records show. The complainant, a retired policeman, described Therrien’s office as slow and dysfunctional: ‘If I conducted investigations the same way they did I would have been charged.’
**
Accountability! They tried that in the movies and it didn't work:
Cabinet cannot risk censure for concealing We Charity documents for fear of losing control of Parliament, a Liberal MP said last night. MP Julie Dzerowicz (Davenport, Ont.) made the remarks as Liberals continued a three-week filibuster against disclosure: “It’s unpredictable.”**
Labour Minister Filomena Tassi yesterday rewrote rules to save federally-regulated employees from having to get a doctor’s note in claiming unpaid sick leave. Tassi did not comment, but acknowledged in a regulatory notice that employers protested the change: “Of course we believe Canadians are honest.”
Chinese Groups Are Proud of the Role Their Real Country Played In Dividing Korea
I notice how these passport-holders will not utter this in Seoul for some reason:
A group of Chinese-Canadian associations are marking the 70th anniversary of the Korean War by publicly condemning the United States and its allies, including Canada, as aggressors and imperialists while lauding China for fighting alongside North Korea.
More than 26,000 Canadians in the army, navy and air force served in the United Nation-authorized military campaign to defend South Korea from China-backed North Korean forces in the early 1950s. The war claimed the lives of 516 Canadians, whose chief adversaries were Chinese and North Korean troops.
Statements praising China’s role in the Korean War from five Chinese-Canadian organizations were recently posted on WeChat, the popular Chinese-language social-media platform. Apptopia, a firm that tracks mobile services, said WeChat has been downloaded 265,000 times in Canada in 2020 alone.
The quotes appeared as part of an article posted by the Come From China News WeChat account in Ottawa.
“Seventy years ago, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army and the Korean people fought together to resist the invasion, took the initiative to attack and achieved victory! Let us remember this great victory,” wrote Tracy Law, a Vancouver financial adviser and president of the Guangzhou Fellow-students Association of Canada and president of the Guangdong Chinese Chamber of Commerce of Canada.
David Bercuson, a University of Calgary historian who wrote a book on the Korean War, said celebrating China’s role in the Korean War is akin to glorifying Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939.
He said it’s particularly offensive because South Korea would be living under a communist dictatorship today if it weren’t for the actions of the United States and allies including Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.
The United States did not start the war. North Korea, with the approval of China and the Soviet Union, did he said.
“If we had not stopped the North Koreans and the Chinese from taking over South Korea, then South Korea today would be part of North Korea.”
Chinese-backed North Korea invaded the south on June 25th, 1950.
Chinese (most of whom were not even properly armed by the communist government they praise) and North Korean troops put five hundred and sixteen Canadians in their graves so that the people of South Korea could live and eat freely.
Today, North Korea is a Third World dictatorship whose dynastic tyrant pays tribute to his Chinese financiers while his own people endure oppression.
THAT is what the passport-holders whose very presence in Canada cheapens Canadian citizenship, its sovereignty and Canada's role in this wretched stalemate celebrate freely in a country whose puppet not only praised China but lets it run its business in Canadian borders.
This sickening display of historical revisionism in favour of an authoritarian state could only be possible when Canadians not only forget who they are but forget why their sovereignty is important.
Those passport-holders who see Vancouver as Plan B for when China eventually goes kaput are not Canadians in any real sense.
Canadians Want More Immigration Says Propaganda Poll
This survey is based on telephone interviews conducted (via landline and cellphones)with 2,000 Canadians between September 8 and 23, 2020. A sample of this size drawn from the population produces results accurate to within plus or minus 2.2 percentage points in 19 out of 20 samples. …
Perhaps the most striking aspect of this latest trend is that it has taken place all across the country and among all demographic segments of the population; in some cases especially so where opinions about immigration have been the least positive, including Albertans and Canadians with lower levels of education and income, as well as supporters of the federal Conservative Party. While divisions remain along regional, generational and political lines, in some cases these have diminished over the past year. This suggests that whatever fault lines may continue to divide Canadians, immigration is now less likely than before to be among them. What lies behind this growing public support for immigration and refugees is not immediately apparent from the survey data itself. It may be in part a response to the pandemic (e.g., a “we are all in this together” reaction). It could be a reaction to the alarming political instability south of the border in the USA (“we are not like them”). And it may reflect a solidifying public consensus that Canada’s economy (and one’s own livelihood) depends on making space for newcomers, especially this year when the economy needs all the help it can get.
(Sidebar: for a conclusive and unbiased poll, it sure does list some rather obvious partisan bogey-men like Alberta, the Tories and the good, old US of A.)
Yes, about that:
New data suggests that Canadians are feeling skittish about any future increases in immigration levels for the next 12 months.
Fifty-two per cent of those polled by Leger and the Association for Canadian Studies want to see the currently low levels of immigration maintained for at least a year.
**
For example, a recent telephone survey of 1,320 Canadians by the federal immigration department revealed by Blacklock’s Reporter, found a strong minority of Canadians surveyed — 41% — think the Trudeau government’s target of allowing 341,000 immigrants into Canada this year is too high.
Slim majorities agreed that “immigrants need to do more to integrate into Canadian society” (51%) and “Canada should focus on helping unemployed Canadians, rather than looking for skilled immigrants for our workforce” (52%).
That doesn't sound like a font of unquestioning support for a socially mandated platitude.
Consider this: Canada has the highest unemployment rate of any G7 country. Much of the country is in some form of lockdown. One-third of Canadians may never recover financially from this lockdown. Schools are operating at half of the capacity at best. With what money or jobs (aside from a handful of menial and low-paying jobs) would these people be provided for? How would a lottery system, touted to reunite people with grandparents who have not paid into the system but will benefit from it, make Canada a more of a functioning democracy than allowing in skilled workers who are financially capable of caring for themselves and are less likely to be socially or culturally at odds with the existing population?
I'm sure someone will answer those questions eventually.
Wednesday, October 28, 2020
Mid-Week Post
Three more shopping days until Halloween ...
As of this writing, there have been 10,001 deaths in Canada due to the virus originating in China. Canada's mortality rate stands at 4.5% whereas the American mortality rate stands at 2.6%.
But Orange Man double-plus-ungood ... or something.
In a real country, a wimpy snowboard instructor's thinly-veiled threat to cancel Christmas would have been met with a profound force of national will.
 |
| Oh, look! War didn't deter people from having Christmas. |
Oh, so there is a reason why public documents pertaining to the prime minister and his family and a fraud masquerading as a charity were blacked out:
The country’s top public servant is offering to testify about controversial redactions to some 5,000 pages of documents the government released on the WE Charity affair.
Ian Shugart, clerk of the Privy Council, made the offer Tuesday in a letter to the House of Commons finance committee. ...
In his letter, Shugart says he and his colleagues would be pleased to appear at the committee to explain their decisions.
The committee had demanded that the documents be turned over without redactions and that it be left to the parliamentary law clerk, Philippe Dufresne, to decide whether anything needed to be blacked out to maintain personal privacy or cabinet confidences.
Nevertheless, when the documents were turned over to the committee in August, large chunks had already been blacked out.
In letters to the committee at the time, Shugart and other senior public servants explained the redactions were to maintain personal privacy and cabinet confidences and to delete portions of records that had nothing to do with the WE Charity affair. Indeed, Shugart argued that the unredacted records included cabinet confidences that would normally have been blacked out.
However, Dufresne told the committee that it was not up to the public servants to decide what to redact.
“The House and its committees are the appropriate authority to determine whether any reasons for withholding the documents should be accepted or not,” he wrote in a letter to the committee.
“One such measure is the committee’s decision to have my office make the necessary redactions to protect personal information and the public servants providing assistance in this matter.”
Also:
Children raised money meant to build schools in Africa while WE paid for luxury accommodations for Sophie Trudeau and dished out hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees to Justin Trudeau’s mom and brother. WE also amassed a multimillion-dollar Toronto real estate empire.
The Liberals cancelled the nearly 1 billion dollar summer job program that WE was contracted to administer after allegations of conflicts of interest with the Prime Minister and his family.
Rebel News has filed access to information requests into school boards all across the country about their dealings with WE. Exclusive documents provided to Rebel News by Calgary Board of Education indicate WE programming infected 18,000 schools.
Many of our requests for information are still outstanding and pending.
However, the Vancouver School Board has indicated that WE is blocking the release of their data in an email from the board’s Advisor of Freedom of Information and Privacy Compliance ...
Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau is rebuffing a New Brunswick charity's request that he refund a $20,000 speaking fee after the fundraiser he headlined last year proved to be a "huge disappointment.
(Paws up)
It’s not shocking that Trudeau didn’t want to analyze the party results in public but the idea that the Liberals would automatically cruise to an easy majority if we were to have a pandemic campaign must now be challenged.
Conservative candidate Julius Tiangson came within 701 votes of winning in York Centre. Green Party leader Annamie Paul may not have been as close but her 32.7% of the vote clearly shows an interest in her as a progressive alternative to the Liberals.
In the campaign a year ago, the Liberals eked out a minority government, winning more seats even though they took 220,499 fewer votes across the country than the Conservatives. Despite what should have been a humbling experience, Trudeau has continued to try and govern as if he has a majority and that the opposition doesn’t count.
On Monday, voters in two Liberal strongholds reminded Trudeau that they still have him and his party on probation.
I thought that it was the RCMP's job to arrest people no matter who may be around them:
The RCMP officer who arrested Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou three hours after she was detained at Vancouver’s airport says he didn’t arrest her sooner out of respect for the jurisdiction of Canada Border Services Agency.
Const. Winston Yep testified in B.C. Supreme Court Tuesday in the extradition case of Meng, whose lawyers are trying to show her arrest two years ago was unlawful and she should not be extradited to the U.S. on allegations of fraud.
Tuesday’s news is just the latest blow Calgary in general, and downtown Calgary in particular, has faced. Adam Legge, the president and CEO of the Business Council of Alberta, said the downtown vacancy rate is close to 30 per cent, and any further reduction will mean fewer downtown workers frequenting small businesses such as restaurants and dry cleaners in the city centre.
“Any time we see layoffs of that magnitude, there’s a concern for a whole host of things, including the livelihoods of those affected and what it means for a downtown that is already struggling,” Legge said.
Never forget who wants Alberta's industry dead.
We haven't prevented more killing fields. We simply tolerated them in one place:
One interviewee stated that in Pyongyang from 1985 to the mid-1990s, every Sunday, one or two persons would be executed by firing squad and occasionally by hanging, usually in the local marketplace. Although the family of the person executed would often be present at executions, they were not allowed to collect the remains afterwards. The interviewee reported once seeing a body left hanging for 3-4 hours after the execution for public display by the Ministry of People’s Security (anjeonbu/안전부; currently, inmin boanseong/인민보안성). As the leader of the local People’s Unit (inminbanjang/인민반장) at the time, the interviewee also reported that in the early 1990s, the chilling pronouncement from Kim Jong Il (who was soon to become his father’s successor), became the norm nationwide: “Let’s hear the sound of guns”. It was reported that from that time there was a notable increase in public executions, where even “starving people who stole corn from farms were shot”.
In Japan, people are troubled by youth suicides but in Canada, we barely put the brakes on killing anyone:
The number of people who died by suicide per population of 100,000 came to 3.1 for those under 20 in Japan in 2019, rising 0.3 percentage point from the previous year to hit a record high, a government white paper showed on Tuesday.
The suicide rate for all age groups, meanwhile, decreased for the 10th consecutive year to stand at 16.0, the lowest level on record dating back to 1978, according to the white paper approved at a Cabinet meeting on the day.
The total number of people who took their own lives in the country in 2019 dropped 671, or 3.2%, to a record low of 20,169, also down for the 10th straight year.
Still, the overall suicide rate stayed relatively high in Japan, compared with other advanced economies.
**
There are three known cases of doctor-assisted death in federal corrections — including two carried out in the community — and each one raises questions around consent, choice and dignity, federal correctional investigator Ivan Singer said in his 2019-20 annual report tabled in Parliament Tuesday.
The report said his office found a series of errors and delays and the misapplication of law and policy in the two cases it reviewed.
That included one case involving an individual Zinger described as "a non-violent recidivist" serving a two-year sentence, which is the minimum for a federal sentence.
Zinger said he has "no doubt" the procedure itself was carried out professionally and according to the law. His review focused on whether there were "more humane alternatives" for managing the inmate's terminal illness after he was denied parole.
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