Your middle-of-the-week post for the rest of the year ...
Justin has never worked for his wealth. He inherited it. As no one in this country will hold him to account, he can blow through troughs of printed cash without consequence. It doesn't help that a kindergarten child can do math better than he can.
The idiots who think that this coming year will be better than the last aren't hungry enough.
They will be:
Remember back during
the 2015 election when then-candidate Justin Trudeau promised to tax the
rich to pay for a bit of federal infrastructure stimulus and some tax
cuts for the middle class?
“I’m asking those with the most to do a
little bit more to help those in Canada with less,” Trudeau repeated in
ads and on the hustings.
Six years into the Liberals’ tenure, we finally have a firm picture of who Prime Minister Trudeau believes are Canada’s “rich.”
Apparently,
it’s everyone making over 40 grand. According to the Canadian Taxpayers
Federation (CTF), all Canadians making over $40,000 in 2022 will pay
more tax than they did in 2021.
Since
Trudeau promised to make only the rich pay and to spare the middle
class, we have to assume he thinks everyone over $40,000 (about $19.25
an hour) is rich. A fat cat. Moneybags. A plutocrat.
According to
the CTF, the feds’ basic personal exemption will increase this year.
That will save most taxpayers $89 – enough for a delivery meal while
bingeing some mediocre streaming content – but that trivial tax cut will
be more than offset by increases to a host of other taxes and premiums.
Employment insurance contributions for workers are going up by $63 in the coming year. Meanwhile, CPP premiums are rising $333.
And the federal carbon tax is going up – again – on April 1.
It’s
not a big jump this time, just one cent a litre on gasoline. But since
Canadian drivers use about 40 billion litres a year, that works out to
another $400 million being transferred from you to them. That’s in
addition to the $4 billion Ottawa is already squeezing out of drivers
via its “carbon pricing” scheme.
Put
just those three higher taxes – EI, CPP and carbon – together and the
average Canadian making over $40,000 is going to fall behind nearly $400
in the coming year.
And that’s before we figure inflation into the calculation.
Rising
prices, which are in large part caused by federal government
overspending and overborrowing, are likely to eat away another $600 to
$1,200 next year in increased grocery bills, mortgage payments,
transportation costs and higher prices for entertainment and clothing.
How can that be the Trudeau government’s fault?
Well,
if you pay millions of Canadians more money not to work than they were
making at their jobs (which is what CERB did during the pandemic for
over half of recipients), then you end up pumping billions of extra
dollars into the economy in a short period of time.
Since there were no more goods to buy than before (there might even have been fewer), the extra money drives up prices.
Similarly
when government borrows too much, it competes with businesses and
consumers for loans, which drives up interest rates. That increases
businesses’ cost to make things and consumers’ cost to buy things.
It’s clueless fiscal management, which has become a hallmark of the Trudeau government.
He never hid his communist leanings. His associations are a new level of questionable. He won't retire until his pension comes through or the Chinese tire of him. Even after the country is beyond ruined, it still won't dawn on his voters blocks what dreadful errors in judgment they made.
On the one hand, Canadians don't care who threw who under the Red River cart but on the other museums are happy to remove entire swaths of history from their exhibits because of colonisation or something:
An Association for Canadian Studies (ACS) and Leger poll, which surveyed
1,547 Canadians through a web panel from Dec. 3 to 5, found that of all
respondents, 65 per cent are very or somewhat proud of Canada’s
history. Meanwhile, 29 per cent said they were not very proud or not
proud at all.
(Sidebar: twenty-nine percent, leave.)
**
The demolition contracts have already been signed. Starting on Jan. 2, crews will start
taking crowbars to life-sized dioramas of a Peace River homestead, a
salmon cannery, a Vancouver Island coal mine and HMS Discovery, the
flagship of British explorer George Vancouver.
Most notable of
all, crews will be ripping out Old Town, the museum’s walk-through
recreation of a B.C. community at the Turn of the Century. Lining a
model street paved with authentic wooden cobblestones are a Grand Hotel,
a blacksmith shop, a movie theatre screening Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold
Rush and a railway station where special effects are used to simulate
the arrival of trains.
By mid-2022, the only exhibits left unscathed at the Royal B.C. Museum will be its second-floor natural history galleries.
“Decolonization of the museum’s galleries is important and long overdue,” was how acting CEO Daniel Muzyka announced the demolitions in early November.
What harm could erasing history do?
Also:
Russia's Supreme Court has ordered the closure of International Memorial, one of Russia's oldest human rights groups.
Memorial worked to recover the memory of the millions of innocent people executed, imprisoned or persecuted in the Soviet era.
Formally
it has been "liquidated" for failing to mark a number of social media
posts with its official status as a "foreign agent".
That designation was given in 2016 for receiving funding from abroad.
But
in court, the prosecutor labelled Memorial a "public threat", accusing
the group of being in the pay of the West to focus attention on Soviet
crimes instead of highlighting a "glorious past".
What will the Russian courts say next? That Putin has every right to invade Ukraine?
Today in "let's stop pretending that this was about a virus" news:
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is
finally withdrawing the PCR test for COVID for it is seriously flawed
and is incapable of distinguishing between the COVID and influenza
viruses.
**
Fifteen bodies were examined (all died from 7 days to 6 months after
vaccination; ages 28 to 95). The coroner or the public prosecutor didn’t
associate the vaccine as the cause of death in any of the cases.
However, further examination revealed that the vaccine was implicated in
the deaths of 14 of the 15 cases. The most attacked organ was the heart
(in all of the people who died), but other organs were attacked as
well. The implications are potentially enormous resulting in millions of
deaths. The vaccines should be immediately halted.
**
Lists of studies proving the (in)efficacy of masks.
**
It's called blinking:
Yesterday, Quebec Health Minister Christian Dube announced some
health workers who have tested positive for COVID-19 will be allowed to
stay on the job. He said the move is necessary to keep the health-care
system operational, and the decision would be made on a case-by-case
basis under certain conditions.
Quebec reported 12,833 new cases and 702 hospitalizations, with 15 more deaths linked to the virus.
Manitoba
and Ontario have said they are considering similar measures to avoid
overwhelming their own health systems. Manitoba reported 825 new cases
and five deaths yesterday, while Ontario reported 8,825 new infections.
Oh, so firing nurses who refused to take these flu shots is now considered a bad idea.
If these people are crawling with this flu (a cold, according to some), then hiring them back is counter-productive, yes? Rather like repeating the same disastrous actions again and again.
If I were the nurses, I would demand a raise in writing to be given on the first day back to work, regardless of how long or short their shift is.
After all, being thrown under the bus is a precarious thing.
Also - this is a backdoor to let in nurses of whatever quality than training nurses in Canada or accepting nurses with similar skills and qualifications from the US or Commonwealth countries:
Seeing a wave of enthusiastic aspiring nurses is a silver lining to
the dark cloud of a profession stretched to the limit amid COVID-19,
said Doris Grinspun, CEO of the Registered Nurses' Association of
Ontario.
It is the best of times — "because any new nursing
graduate will have a spot," Grinspun said — and the worst, noting that
Canada lacks thousands of qualified nurses.
(Sidebar: nurses were fired because they refused the shot. Fatigue had nothing to do with it.)
**
It probably doesn't help that you let the government boss you around:
Italian restaurant and club owners are seeking urgent government support
due to increased cancellations prompted by a surge in coronavirus
infections, they said in a statement on Wednesday.
The anti-Semitic Emerald Isle:
The Irish Parliament, on the night of May 25, 2021, staged a "legal
Kristallnacht" against the nation of Israel. Following an avalanche of
vituperative anti-Israel and anti-Semitic diatribes by members of the
Dáil Éireann (lower house of Parliament), its members voted unanimously
to discuss a motion on whether or not Ireland should support BDS
(Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) legislation to try to strangle
Israel economically. Ostensibly, the BDS movement's goal is to shift
world opinion to declare that Jewish settlements in the
historically-named areas of Judea and Samaria are supposedly illegal
seizures of Palestinian Arab land. In truth, the principal and outspoken
objective of Palestinian organizers of the BDS movement is the destruction of Israel.
Disturbingly, the May 25 motion was fully supported by at least two
of Ireland's leading NGOs sponsored by the Irish Catholic Church: Sadaka
and Trócaire. Pro-BDS Sadaka,
in particular, makes no pretense about being bitterly opposed to
Israel. Even more shocking was that fully a third of Irish members of
parliament of voted to expel
Israeli diplomats from Ireland. Sein Fein ("Ourselves Alone"), a
democratic socialist party and that won the most votes in Ireland's 2020
parliamentary elections, has been spearheading the increasingly
anti-Israel orientation of Ireland's foreign policy.
We don't have to trade with China:
China will take "drastic measures" if Taiwan makes moves towards
independence, a Beijing official warned on Wednesday, adding that
Taiwan's provocations and outside meddling could intensify next year.
**
Hong Kong pro-democracy media outlet Stand News shut down on Wednesday
after police raided its office, froze its assets and arrested senior
staff on suspected "seditious publication" offences in the latest
crackdown on the city's media.
**
Sometimes we bring heartache on ourselves:
Despite the outward allegiance to Xi and the Communists, the country’s rising middle class is westernized,
individualistic rather than collectivist, intent on having fun and
stocking up on all the latest consumer gadgets, instead of sacrificing
and laboring in the cause of Communism.
The falling marriage and birth rates are the obvious symptom of China’s new social feminism.
Marriage licenses have fallen to a 13-year low
and the birth rate has hit a 43-year low. With only 12 million babies
born in 2020, the old mathematical joke about the Marching Chinese now
falls flat. Like the rest of Asia, China is aging, and its workforce is
falling by 0.5% a year.
China's 1.3 birth rate looks worse than those of America or Europe, but unlike them, the Chinese birth rate isn't being artificially inflated with a huge population of immigrants.
While
the Communist leadership has tried to apply economic fixes to a social
problem, a recent survey in one rural area found that only 60% of young
women wanted to get married while 82% of men did. The combination of an
aspiring professional female workforce with the sex-selective abortion
caused by the one-child policy has made China’s gender relations
uniquely horrible.
In America, as in most first world countries, women are more interested in marriage than men.
The reversal of the gender stereotype in China is a tribute to how the
country’s toxic mixture of traditionalism, Communism, and consumerism is
playing out in its dysfunctional society. ...
Communist China’s history is one of
grandiose planned efforts that blew up in the party’s face. One of its
worst famines occurred when Mao decided to have the populace wipe out
all the sparrows, leading to an infestation of insects that the sparrows
had kept in check. Such subtle checks and balances pervade the natural
world and human society, but the Marxist view of the universe is
incapable of taking into account the complex and paradoxical nature of
reality.
Mao’s inability to grasp the nature of the sparrow, the
imminent obstacle in the ecosystem, is nothing compared to the inability
of his successors to understand the relationships of men and women.
Human nature, always elusive to ideologues, has brought down every
Communist plan for world domination before, not through force of arms,
but the hubris of its miscalculations.
Xi believes that China’s
Communist regime is different even as demographics are undoing his
mandate of heaven. While this century has been heralded as belonging to
China, studies suggest that China's population will drop by 50% by 2100.
While 732 million may be nothing to sneer at, much of that will consist
of its rapidly aging elderly population.
Now enter North Korea:
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un praised outgoing Chinese Ambassador
Li Jinjun for helping to improve relations between Pyongyang and
Beijing, state media reported on Thursday, as the envoy left office
after seven years in the post.
Kim's comments were conveyed to Li
by Choe Ryong Hae, a top official in the ruling Workers' Party of Korea,
state news agency KCNA said. Li also met with North Korean premier Kim
Tok Hun, KCNA reported.
"Kim Jong Un highly praised the ambassador
for successfully assisting several DPRK-China summit meetings over the
past seven years, making much effort to develop the friendly relations
between the two parties and the two countries and sharing bitters and
sweets with the Korean people," Choe told Li, using the initials of
North Korea's official name.
Kim is very satisfied that the North
Korea-China relationship has entered a "fresh heyday" under the
leadership of the ruling parties in each country, Choe said.
With profuse thanks for keeping Kim's fiefdom afloat, the latest scion of the Kim dynasty can pedal through a pointless confab about North Korea's dismal economy.
Also, if you can trade with China, banking with its political prisoner-executing neighbour should pose no moral quandary:
According to a Treasury release,
the settlement was reached between TD Bank and the Department of the
Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), related to the
bank’s violations of North Korea Sanctions Regulations and the Foreign
Narcotics Kingpin Sanctions Regulations.
The bank agreed to pay $115,005.04 to settle “two separate matters
involving apparent violations” of the two sanctions regulations.
“In the first matter, [TD Bank] processed 1,479 transactions
totaling $382,685.38 and maintained nine accounts on behalf of employees
of the North Korean mission to the United Nations without a license
from OFAC,” the announcement said. “In the second matter, TDBNA
maintained two accounts for more than four years for a U.S. resident who
was listed on OFAC’s list of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked
Persons.”
Both violations, per the report, entailed “multiple sanctions
compliance breakdowns,” although OFAC concluded that the violations in
question were “voluntarily self-disclosed and were non-egregious.” In
addition, OFAC determined that no managers or supervisors knew about the
transactions, the transactions “would likely have been licensable under
existing licensing policy,” and OFAC has determined that the bank has
taken steps to address and stop the conduct.
The North Korean sanctions were violated when the bank, over a nearly
two-year period between 2016 and 2018, processed nearly 1,500
transactions totaling $382,685.48, on behalf of five people who worked
for the North Korean mission to the UN, without obtaining a proper
license from the Treasury’s OFAC.
TD Bank personnel did not properly list “North Korea” as the
country in their files for these accounts, often stating “Korea” or
“South Korea” or leaving the field blank. Also, those people were never
flagged in the system, because the bank was relying on a Politically
Exposed Persons (PEP) list supplied by a vendor that did not include the
North Korean individuals.
Twenty years for nothing:
Hours
before Kabul fell to the Taliban on Aug. 15, the Afghan Air Force was
melting down. Instead of unleashing air attacks against advancing
insurgents, some airmen were fighting each other.
At
the Kabul airport, some Afghan Air Force personnel guarding the
airfield tried to force their way onto a military helicopter preparing
to lift off, according to the Afghan Air Force pilot flying the craft
and two other people familiar with the incident. The chopper’s
destination was across town, but the guardsmen were convinced it was
leaving the country and were determined not to be left behind, the pilot
told Reuters. Another guard, trying to stop them, pointed his gun at
the cockpit.
Bedlam
ensued. Shots rang out. Bullets pierced the helicopter. Debris and
metal flew, injuring the pilot and another airman on board; both
required treatment. “My face became full of blood,” the pilot said.
Afghan
President Ashraf Ghani fled the country later that day, hastening the
collapse of the U.S.-backed government faster than even the most
pessimistic defense analysts had predicted. Within hours, the Taliban
stormed into Kabul, triggering a chaotic American evacuation that has
damaged the presidency of U.S. leader Joe Biden.
The
melee involving Afghan Air Force members ahead of Kabul’s fall hasn’t
been previously reported. Reuters also learned exclusive details from
airmen and former Afghan officials who participated in the secret
operation to fly Ghani and his entourage to neighboring Uzbekistan on
Aug. 15, and the role the chaos at the airport may have played in the
timing of his departure.
Damn you, global warming!:
Environment Canada says all of Alberta and most of British Columbia
and Saskatchewan, along with parts of Manitoba and Ontario are under
extreme cold weather warnings.
It says the wind chill can range between -40C and -55C in Edmonton and Calgary.
It
says arctic outflow winds and low temperatures have also been forecast
for much of British Columbia with the mercury dipping to near or below
-20C.
Environment Canada says cold, arctic air remains entrenched
over western and central Saskatchewan with wind chills of up to -45C.
According
to The Weather Network, a temperature below -51C has been recorded in
Canada — in Rabbit Kettle, Northwest Territories — for the first time
in eight years.
The agency says extreme cold could persist into next week.
On Christmas Eve, Deadmen Valley in the Northwest Territories recorded
a brutally cold temperature of -45C and the only place that was colder
was Jakutsk, Russia at -48C at 4:00 p.m. EST. In fact, the bone-chilling
air that sent temperatures tumbling so low in Deadmen Valley originated
in Russia before it migrated over the North Pole.
**
And now for something completely different:
Undisturbed for three millennia, the last unwrapped
pharaonic mummy has given up secrets to the modern science of computed
tomography. A new scan reveals an amulet over the heart of Amenhotep I, a
girdle of 34 golden beads at his lower back, and evidence that his
earthly remains were damaged and fixed up by ancient Egyptian priests
four centuries after his death in 1504 BCE.
