And the Rest of It

So much happening ...

 

Duterte was always mad and detrimental to the Philippines:

As the Philippines gears up for a hotly contested presidential election, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has urged the next leader to continue President Rodrigo Duterte’s China-friendly policy, saying it serves the interests of both countries.

Duterte, who took office in 2016, will step down after the May election in line with the country’s one-term limit.

Voters are highly concerned about relations with China and Beijing is watching closely for any shift in Manila’s policy on the South China Sea dispute, which has become a dangerous flashpoint in the region.

 

 

The father and the son ruined this country.

Prove me wrong:

The Charter of Rights and Freedoms he all but single-handedly created and dropped on our nation as the new “Supreme Law of Canada” on April 17, 1982, fell on our political system like a guillotine, ending the supremacy of the people in their own Parliament. With the same stroke, and because abstract terms such as “equality,” freedom,” “rights,” and so on are never self-interpreting, he set in motion a long and continuing stream of judge-made personal interpretations of those terms (themselves often conflicting), the sum of which is now described by every lawyer in Canada as “Charter law.” In effect, this is law made by unelected judges, each with his or her own personal political and moral persuasion and passion, who are never directly responsible to the people and cannot be removed by any power in the land. To this extent, and specifically because elected Parliamentarians today will not presume to create or change a law they fear might be in conflict with some principle of the Charter (OMG, what will the judges say? Will this survive Charter scrutiny?), Canada’s Parliament has been infantilized.

Most judges have taken this new quasi-dictatorial Charter role deeply to heart. One example will do. Here is the Right Honourable Madam Beverley McLachlin reflecting on her 17-year role as Canada’s Chief Justice: “My job is to think about what’s best for Canadian society on the particular problem that’s before us, and give it my best judgement …” (National Post, May 23, 2015). But that is entirely untrue. It was her job to rule on the facts of the cases before her according to the pertinent law of the land, not to ponder what’s best for Canadian society. That’s the job of the Representatives we send to Parliament. But she considered herself a progressive politician as much as a judge and ruled accordingly. Had she been of conservative temperament, she would likely have ruled another way. But either way is to be a political activist more than a judge.

The reality of such judge-made Charter law means that with one stroke, Trudeau shoved us back into the political condition under which we suffered prior to 1867. In effect, Canadians got re-colonized. Not by a foreign power, but by their own hand. Trudeau was not citing Magna Carta, Locke, Blackstone, or Burke as his intellectual teachers. No. He embraced instead the writings of the main French architect of totalitarian socialism Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the inspiration of Marat, Robespierre, and Danton—murdering revolutionists all—who justified all their actions according to Rousseau’s conception of “the General Will” (la volonté générale).

**

A recent Angus Reid poll informs us that “one-in-three Canadians strongly disapprove of Trudeau, while only 6 per cent strongly approve of him. The Liberal Party runs ahead of him.”

 

Had this been about a gay wedding cake, I'm sure it would receive more coverage:

On St. Patrick’s Day, 2018, four men waved down a rickshaw driver in a suburb of the Pakistani megalopolis of Karachi. The men, all Muslim and led by a Muslim cleric, recognized the cabbie, who happened to be a Catholic they had harassed many years prior. They pulled him out of the rickshaw, beat him almost to death, and then set fire to the vehicle, his only source of income. 

I know that Christian, whose name is Michael D’Souza. My wife and I befriended him during three years living in Bangkok, where he and his family had fled in 2012, seeking asylum and refugee status. With the assistance of some family and friends, we paid his family’s airfare when they decided, after almost a year in Bangkok’s infamous Immigration Detention Center, to return to Pakistan in summer 2017.

Michael’s story is not atypical for Pakistani Christians, who comprise less than two percent of the country’s population. Perhaps the most famous case is that of Asia Bibi, an impoverished Pakistani Christian who in 2010 was convicted of violating Pakistan’s blasphemy law and sentenced to death by hanging. It was all over a cup of water: Muslims in her village took offense that she, an unclean Christian, had drunk from the same drinking vessel as them. Only after her story attracted international attention and condemnation, including a statement by Pope Benedict XVI, was Bibi freed and allowed to flee to Canada.

Less well known is why Christians in Pakistan have become the objects of so much vitriol and violence, including a March 2016 suicide bombing at a crowded park in Lahore targeting Christians celebrating Easter Sunday, which killed 72 people. The most common explanation given, often by conservative Christians in America, is the rise of Islamic extremism, particularly the Wahhabi and Deobandi strands of reactionary Islam that originate in Saudi Arabia and India, respectively. There is certainly much truth to this. Many of the militantly conservative madrassas in Pakistan, especially in the more remote mountainous regions bordering Afghanistan, are funded by the Saudis.

(Sidebar: for further edification, do read this article on why Arabs lose wars.)

Back in the saddle again:

Chinese brokers said they expect the resumption of regular trade with North Korea as soon as Monday, after a North Korean train pulled into a Chinese border town on Sunday in the first such crossing since anti-coronavirus border lockdowns began in 2020.

"My business partner in North Korea told me on Friday that the land border will reopen to cargo freight on Jan. 17," a Chinese commodities trader in the border town of Dandong told Reuters.

"By Saturday the whole import-export community here has heard about this and people have began snapping up carriages to move their cargo over," he said.

 

 

Barely satire:

Edmina Romanov fasted all day so she wouldn’t have to worry about calories at her friend’s Communist-themed party, but it was all for naught because no food was offered at the authentic commie get-together.

“Yeah, yeah, I’ve got egg on my face,” said Romanov. “I mean not really. I wish I did. I’m so hungry.”