Your mid-week moment of silence ...
Let's put it another way - they are not considering shutting it down yet:
The White House pledged to discuss a key pipeline that carries Canadian crude through Michigan with the northern neighbour, stressing the U.S. isn’t considering a shutdown of the conduit the state’s governor wants shuttered.
Also:
“We proceeded with this project in a rigorous manner, with a step-by-step approach,” Quebec Energy Minister Jonatan Julien said, as reported by the Montreal Gazette, our sister paper. “It’s clear a referendum that calls into question, in a retroactive manner, all the permits we have obtained with our partners is unusual.
“The project must go ahead because we have all the authorizations to proceed. We are not going to demobilize our resources. We are on the ground and working.”
How many times have companies in Alberta filled out the paperwork and endured the long, rigorous process just to get one shovel into the ground, only to be shut down by you, Quebec?
**
Canada produces its own petroleum and natural gas. It has about 10.4% of the world's oil supply (a supply Justin sorely wants to keep in the ground). Alberta is the country's largest source of fuel.
The province of Ontario has a ten cent per liter excise tax (federal), thirteen percent sales tax on all goods and services, a fourteen-point-seven provincial fuel tax and $2.0465/GJ (7.83 - cents/m3) provincial and federal carbon levies. As of this writing, gas in Ontario is 143.8 a liter.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford says his government will meet its promise to cut gas prices by 5.7 cents before the next budget.
Thanks, Doug. That helps.
But you are already Justin's lapdog, Jag:
NDP leader Jagmeet Singh poured ice cold water on rumours of a possible deal between his party and the Liberals saying any formal coalition is a non-starter.
“There is no discussion at all of a coalition and that is a firm no for me. There’s not going to be any coalition at all,” Singh said speaking to reporters on Tuesday.
Then call for a no-confidence motion.
I dare you.
Aboriginal leader$ hope to have a private talk with Pope Franci$ during the papal vi$it to Canada:
The Catholic Bishops of Canada says 25 to 30 Indigenous people will be meeting with Pope Francis at the Vatican in December.
The delegates will include elders, knowledge keepers, residential school survivors and youth.
(Sidebar: that actually read knowledge-keepers.)
Your corrupt government and you:
A federal department knowingly tried to breach an international treaty to award a six-figure contract to a favoured supplier, says Procurement Ombudsman Alexander Jeglic. Emails uncovered during an audit showed staff in the Department of Citizenship knew they were breaching NAFTA rules: “You cannot structure a procurement to avoid obligations under the North American Free Trade Agreement.”
If you ever believed that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was about ensuring (not giving) rights to Canadians, give your head a shake:
These last two years has lead millions of Canadians to understand that we don't have rights, just promises and privileges.
— Efron Monsanto 🇨🇦 (@realmonsanto) November 4, 2021
It's just a piece of paper that has failed us during some of the worst times in our history. We deserve better. https://t.co/m6z1ahhQc1
Imagine a virus so deadly that you can fire people at will and test a hastily developed flu shot on children without knowing what it will do to them:
Military who decline to reveal their vaccination status are threatened with discharge effective Monday though 95 percent are already immunized, says General Wayne Eyre, acting chief of defence staff. The threat follows successive audits confirming Canada’s military is chronically short of recruits: “There is no point in us having a target of 68,000 and continuing to be 4,000 people short.”
**
Over 900,000 U.S. children aged 5-11 are expected to have received their first COVID-19 vaccine shot by the end of Wednesday, White House COVID-19 coordinator Jeff Zients said, as the governmentramped up vaccinations of younger children.
The United States on Wednesday began administering Pfizer/BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine to children ages 5 to 11, the latest group to become eligible for the shots that provide protection against the illness to recipients and those around them.
These flu shots:
Most vaccines — against polio, smallpox, measles and other diseases — prevent infection and spread. But not COVID-19 vaccines. Now that the battle is against the delta variant, they’ve become disease-tamers rather than infection preventers. ...
The groundbreaking findings in Lancet show that fully vaccinated people who came down with COVID infected others in their household at the same rate (about 25%) as unvaccinated people did (about 23%). The vaccinated had just as much viral load in their upper respiratory tract, making them just as contagious.
The British researchers also found that vaccinated people were only somewhat less likely to contract the virus (25%) compared with the unvaccinated (38%). That conflicts with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data showing the vaccinated are far less likely to contract COVID.
I'll just leave this right here:
Sorry, forgot to mention that this punk is the CEO of the company who pled guilty to multiple felonies for lying. They also paid out the largest health care fraud settlement in history. Mr. Bourla, while your money may buy you the ability to manipulate the weak-minded at the NIH, CDC & FDA, as well as allow you to join hips with the fake news media, we know what you are and aren't backing down an inch. Your products are defective and kill people.**
Twenty-five years ago, Pfizer sent a team to Kano, Nigeria, during a meningococcal meningitis outbreak. They conducted an "open label" (unblinded) clinical trial involving 200 children, half of whom were given Pfizer's new antibiotic Trovan and half of whom received the gold standard treatment, ceftriaxone. Watchdogs noted that Pfizer used substantially lower doses of Trovan to rig the trials in favor of Trovan.
At the time of the Kano trial, Pfizer was pushing for approval from the Food and Drug Administration of their latest potential billion-dollar cash cow for pediatric use. Eleven Nigerian children died, five after receiving Pfizer's product and six after receiving lower-than-normal doses of the older drug.
Pay close attention, parents. A Washington Post investigation reported that one 10-year-old girl suffering from meningitis was not taken off experimental Trovan and given standard, proven treatments by Pfizer's clinical trial operators -- when it was clear that her condition was deteriorating. One of her eyes froze. She lost strength and then died. A Nigerian doctor who supervised the studies for Pfizer admitted that his office had "backdated an approval letter" for the human trials, which "may have been written a year after the study had taken place." Informed consent was undermined by language and education barriers.
One outraged African newspaper demanded that the government "tell us whether our children were used as guinea pigs and, if so, who committed such criminality and who is liable." After years of protracted litigation with the pharmaceutical behemoth, Nigerian families reached a $75 million out-of-court settlement sealed with a confidentiality clause. ...
Find out more about why Pfizer paid the largest fine for health care fraud in American history ($2.3 billion) in 2009 to resolve allegations that it illegally caused false claims to be submitted to the government and paid kickbacks to health care providers to induce them to prescribe their products.
Learn more about the nearly 3,000 people who developed suicidal thoughts and severe psychological disorders after taking Pfizer's smoking cessation drug, Chantix. Pfizer paid out nearly $300 million to settle those cases. Or the nearly 10,000 women who won claims of $1 billion after developing breast cancer linked to Pfizer's Prempro hormone replacement therapy.
**
A federal court has rejected Pfizer’s PFE, 3.50% claims against the government in a case with major implications for drug pricing.
The pharmaceutical giant’s lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, filed last year, sought a legal green light for proposed programs that would help cover co-pays for Medicare patients prescribed the cardiovascular drug tafamidis, which Pfizer priced at $225,000 a year.
In an opinion issued Thursday, Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil of U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York denied Pfizer’s request for a ruling that the proposed programs would not violate anti-kickback laws.
Federal anti-kickback laws generally prevent pharmaceutical companies from offering anything of value to induce Medicare patients to take their drugs. Pfizer’s lawsuit was a challenge of federal policies that prohibit drugmakers from giving Medicare beneficiaries direct copay assistance and limit their ability to provide that assistance through independent charities.
Pfizer is not as lucky as the unaccountable public health officers in Canada, however:
While these public health authorities obsess exclusively over the pandemic and vaccination, their abstract decrees touch on virtually every system of Canadian state and society — education, business and the economy, non-COVID-related health care, institutions and the social fabric connecting tens of millions of Canadians.
But what, with respect, does the medical health officer of Toronto, Peel, York or even Ontario know about education? Zero. What does he/she know about business? Zero. What does he/she understand about what is happening, at the coalface, to our children, whose learning is constantly destabilized (or collapsed outright), whose access to sport and music is regularly threatened or blocked, and whose ability to dream of a bright future in this wonderful country is crippled by medical-scientific authorities that have not cared a whisker for their well-being and preparation in nearly two years?
These same medical-scientific authorities now come bearing pediatric vaccination as their great gift to the children they have ignored and instrumentalized. Not a single one of these patently mediocre authorities has, outside of slogans, smiles and tweets, given a full, intelligent articulation of the case for hastily vaccinating our youngest, the risks of such vaccination (let us not pretend or deny), or the rewards of tomorrow (what are they?).
Also:
Christina Hartmann Benz, 51, has been charged with one count of gains benefit by fraud after her supervisor observed her inserting a vaccine needle into the teenager of a friend on Sunday without dispensing the vaccine, the Sydney Herald reported .
**
My conscience will not allow me to take the easy route of following the crowd and just “doing the right thing and taking the jab,” particularly for a disease with such a low probability of death for well over 99 percent of the population and for which the vaccines appear not to materially prevent infection or inhibit the ability to pass on the virus and infect others.
For me, there appears absolutely no reason to overlook the use of fetal cell tissues in testing and/or the development of the available vaccines, regardless of whether the actual abortion happened decades ago (which is morally irrelevant when Christ is outside of time) or the contested circumstances surrounding the abortion of the relevant baby and motives of the participants. My chance of dying or even being hospitalized from COVID-19 is extremely low, and there is little to no evidence that my chance of infecting anyone when I catch COVID-19 will be materially reduced by me taking the vaccine. So why take a morally-tainted vaccine, particularly when in doing so I will be giving a green light for further use of fetal body tissue for society’s “needs”?
**
Several border-town mayors on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border held a virtual news conference on Monday morning to call on Canada to nix its pricey COVID-19 test requirement for fully vaccinated travellers.
The event was held on the same day the U.S. finally reopened its land border to fully vaccinated recreational travellers, after 19 months of closure.
But the border-town mayors said they aren't fully celebrating just yet, because a big obstacle for travellers still remains: when entering Canada, they must take a molecular test — such as a PCR test — which can cost hundreds of dollars.
"Now there's a pathway to cross, yet that pathway is dampened by an unreasonable and costly requirement for a PCR test to return to Canada," said Drew Dilkens, the mayor of Windsor, Ont., which borders Detroit.
"This PCR test requirement is a hard stop barrier for families to reunite except for the wealthiest of Canadians, and that is unfair."
Do you know what really hurts?
Watching taxpayer-subsidised drug-users further throw their lives away by stabbing the aforementioned taxpayers who had previously stepped over their supine and vomit-covered bodies that morning:
Drug overdose deaths in British Columbia are running at their highest rate ever recorded, the B.C. Coroners Service said yesterday. New figures on fatalities follow cabinet polling on Canadians’ support for decriminalizing narcotics: “Stakeholders are saying criminalizing personal drug possession is hurting not helping.”
Also - other "we're not going to make it as species, are we?" news:
In shocking new research spotted by Sapien Journal, scientists found that children are surprisingly terrible at identifying where certain kinds of meat come from. Alarmingly, nearly 40 percent of children interviewed for the research believed that hot dogs come from plants — and more than 46 percent thought french fries were a type of animal. A shocking 41 percent were unable to correctly pinpoint that bacon comes from an animal.
**
The changes Moreno embraced are part of a growing trend in which educators are moving away from traditional point-driven grading systems, aiming to close large academic gaps among racial, ethnic and economic groups. The trend was accelerated by the pandemic and school closures that caused troubling increases in Ds and Fs across the country and by calls to examine the role of institutionalized racism in schools in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd by a police officer.
Removing any metric of judging a student's performance is as injurious as telling him that he is a victim and always will be and that making something of himself only conforms to the imaginary oppression he has been told exists.
It's racism of lowered expectations and another reason why teachers are distrusted.
**
Quebeckers need the government to hold their chubby, little hands:
Municipalities may restrict fast food restaurants under zoning bylaws, the Québec Court of Appeal has ruled. The decision came in the case of a Montréal borough that sought to limit the number of drive-thru restaurants in the name of promoting healthy lifestyles: “Most of these establishments mainly offer food and beverages whose nutritional value is generally low.”
People will drive a little further to get that junk food because they lack the will-power to eat a piece of fruit.
Merci for nothing.
I'm sure Russia truly cares about this instability:
The European Union accused Belarus on Wednesday of mounting a "hybrid attack" by pushing migrants across the border into Poland, paving the way for new sanctions against Minsk in a crisis that threatens to draw in Russia and NATO.
Russia took the rare step of dispatching two nuclear-capable strategic bombers to patrol Belarusian airspace in a show of support for its close ally. NATO signalled its backing for member state Poland.
Migrants from the Middle East, Afghanistan and Africa trapped in Belarus made multiple attempts to force their way into Poland overnight, Warsaw said, announcing that it had reinforced the border with extra guards.
Russia has met a crisis it didn't want to exploit.
Anti-semitism is alive and well in Europe:
British ministers on Wednesday condemned what they described as the intimidation of the Israeli ambassador in London by pro-Palestinian protesters who booed and shouted at her as she left a university after a debate with students.
U.S. consumer prices accelerated in October as Americans paid more for gasoline and food, leading to the biggest annual gain in 31 years, more signs that inflation could stay uncomfortably high well into 2022 amid snarled global supply chains.
Inflation pressures are also brewing in the labor market, where an acute shortage of workers is driving wages higher. The number of Americans filing claims for unemployment benefits fell to a 20-month low last week, other data showed on Wednesday.
But high inflation is eroding the wage gains, adding to political risk for President Joe Biden, whose approval rating has been falling as Americans grow more anxious about the economy. Broadening inflationary pressures could also complicate the Federal Reserve's communication. The Fed last week restated that high inflation is "expected to be transitory."
Cambodian officials have been blacklisted by the Americans:
The United States on Wednesday blacklisted two Cambodian officials, accusing them of planning to profit from construction work at Cambodia's biggest naval base, where Washington has expressed concern about China's military presence.
What? Did the Vietnamese realise that they could get paid real money for this?:
Taiwan's Pou Chen Corp (9904.TW), the world's largest manufacturer of branded sports footwear, is facing a labour shortage and manufacturing disruption in Vietnam, threatening its plan to return to full operation this month.
Taiwan prepares for a possible attack from China:
Taiwan has laid out its asymmetric warfare strategy to counter a potential future Chinese invasion, with a focus on using small, mobile weapons such as mines and speedboats to neutralize Beijing out at sea.
Human rights watchdogs are worried that the Chinese communist regime is ramping up its crackdown on Christians throughout the communist country.
Recently, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) raised the alarm about new measures adopted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The new authoritarian laws titled the Measures on the Management of Religious Clergy include demanding sanctioned churches to pledge full support to the CCP and a ban on house churches.
“The new Measures expand an invasive and comprehensive system of control and surveillance on clergy,” a USCIRF report reads.
“Article 3 of the Measures requires clergy — among other demands — to support the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) rule, the Chinese socialist political system, and the CCP’s ‘sinicization of religion’ policy, effectively imposing a political test to ensure clergies’ loyalty to the CCP.”
The laws are an attempt to tighten control of China’s five sanctioned religious groups which include the Buddhist Association of China, the Chinese Taoist Association, the Islamic Association of China, the Protestant Three-Self Patriotic Movement and the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association.
All other religious activity outside of those bodies will now be banned and is punishable by the state.
"Chunky" is one way of putting it:
Researchers were astonished recently, while reviewing footage, to spot a male great white shark with such extraordinarily girth.
The largest and fattest white sharks are females, especially during pregnancies. (They can measure nearly 20 feet and weigh 5,000-plus pounds.)
The accompanying image was captured by the Cape Cod-based Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, which commented this week on Facebook:
“There are some sharks that make our data team stop and take a double-take. One of our data team members was analyzing GoPro footage, they came across this very chunky, male, white shark.”
Be angered at the one who starts a war but not the one who finishes it:
It’s not just the First World War, of course. Every November 11 we remember later conflicts too: The Second World War, Korea, peacekeeping, Afghanistan. And heed George Fraser Macdonald, who fought in Burma in 1945, that “the size and importance of an action is no yardstick of its personal unpleasantness.”
Let us also remember earlier battles, won and lost, celebrated and forgotten, without which there’d have been no freedom to defend in 2001, 1939 or 1914. Like Badon Hill, an improbable Romano-British victory against Anglo-Saxon invaders in a war whose ultimate disastrous end seemed to spell the coming of the final darkness. Or those who rallied to Alfred of Wessex at Egbert’s Stone in 878 to fight Danish invaders, and held that torch aloft. ...
Nor because it was futile. As Eowyn says pointedly “The women of this country learned long ago, those without swords can still die upon them.” And Tolkien’s inspiring “fantasy” epic reflects his own service on the Somme, from the “White City,” a chalky redoubt in the Lancashire Fusiliers’ trench lines, to “By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.”
War is dreadful. Physically uncomfortable when not crippling or lethal, mentally shattering, a hellish manifestation of something profoundly askew in human nature. Yet we rightly honour those who, from time immemorial, in places large and small, answered the call anyway, knowing the only thing worse than a battle won is a battle lost.
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