And the Rest of It

Why should anyone trust a system that gears itself against ONE presidential candidate?:

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) addressed New York business owners in a new interview and told them there was “nothing to worry about” after former President Trump was hit with a $463 million (with interest) fine and a ban on conducting business in New York for three years. He can’t even borrow money, and his sons can’t do business for two years. Son Eric is running the business in Trump’s absence.

 

If I were a business-owner, I would think twice about doing business in New York. 

The legal system in Canada is a shambles.

And that is before someone railroads it further:

The Department of Justice has surveyed Canadians’ support for a separate Indigenous court system. The initiative followed a 2021 proposal to study adoption of ancient legal practices on First Nations lands: “People think we’re a lawless, savage people and that’s not true. Our people were very highly organized.”

 

(Sidebar: uh, yeah, you are. What due process was there in the Stone Age?)

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Two former ArriveCan executives are attempting to quash a “scandalous” investigator’s report alleging criminal wrongdoing, according to Federal Court records. Cameron MacDonald and Antonio Utano, both ex-Canada Border Services Agency managers, were suspended without pay: ‘Untested accusations are of such magnitude any reader could only be left to draw the conclusion of potential criminal activity.’

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The Canada Border Services Agency last year assigned just 207 staff to criminal investigations nationwide including 48 in Greater Toronto, auto theft capital of Canada, records show. The disclosure follows a cabinet-sponsored conference on auto theft one MP dismissed as a “good photo op.”

Calling people "far-right" or some such thing only lends further credence to a cause:

Protests against the government’s immigration policy have been mostly peaceful, but some have turned violent – including in Dublin last year where riots broke out after three young children and a woman were stabbed, allegedly by a man of Algerian origin. There has also been a spate of more than a dozen arson attacks in Ireland over the past year on migrant facilities and venues wrongly thought to be housing migrants.

The Irish state last year accepted more refugees than it could accommodate, forcing the government to offer asylum applicants tents and sleeping bags as they arrived in Dublin. Since the Russian invasion, nearly 100,000 Ukrainians have also been offered sanctuary in Ireland. I spoke to one Ukrainian refugee outside of an asylum processing centre in Dublin, who told me that despite sleeping rough in Ireland, he was nonetheless grateful for refuge from Vladamir Putin’s forces in Ukraine.

The number of asylum seekers arriving into Ireland has shot up to more than 26,000 over the past two years, the highest annual figures on record, and a growth of nearly 200 per cent from 2019. Last year, most asylum seekers arriving in Ireland came from Nigeria, Algeria, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Georgia.

There are some TDs who have spoken out against “unsustainable” levels of immigration in the Irish parliament. Six of them have formed a loose coalition called the Rural Independent Group. I sat down with one of their members, Carol Nolan, to hear their side of the story. “I have never seen the feeling as strong on the issue of immigration as it is now,” Ms Nolan said. “I do feel that people will protest at the ballot box and I do feel that if the government doesn’t change direction quickly…that they will be punished.”

Ms Nolan said she felt anti-EU sentiment was being stoked by the government’s immigration policy. “There is a lot of frustration over the EU dictating everything a country should do – the numbers they should take in and so forth. So there is definitely frustration over that dictatorship as some people see it.”

Leo Varadkar’s government says it can tackle the problems around immigration with better messaging and tougher laws to censor what it deems as “hate speech”. But the Irish public say their concerns are legitimate – a view which is becoming harder to ignore as it gains political momentum. It’s beginning to look like the Irish government’s vision of an Ireland which looks more like its European neighbours is coming true – a multicultural country, ripe for a populist revolt. 

 

Is it condescending or maddening when a tone-deaf leader claims that people are ignorant of what they can see around them?

Discuss.

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When did it become ‘far-right’ to support European farmers who are fighting for their livelihoods and rural communities? If we were to believe the mainstream media coverage of the farmers’ protests, we might expect to see them marching through Berlin or Paris in jackboots rather than their working bottes en caoutchouc (Wellingtons to us Brits).

The ‘far-right’ political libel against hard-pressed farmers is really a sign of how far the EU elites have lost touch with the reality of life for the peoples of Europe. We should ignore the slurs, and get behind the fighting farmers.

The protests by angry farmers have spread across the European Union, with mighty convoys of tractors blockading roads and cities from Romania to Rome, from Portugal to Poland, from Bulgaria to Brussels and beyond.

There might be some national variations in the farmers’ specific demands. But what unites them all is opposition to the way that the EU elites are subordinating agricultural policy to their Green agenda and Net Zero obsession, leading to more hardship for farmers and higher food prices for other Europeans.

As tractor convoys blockaded German cities in January, farmers’ association president Joachim Rukwied spelt out that they were protesting not just against the government’s proposed cuts in fuel subsidies, but against an EU-wide system where “agricultural policy is being made from an unworldly, urban bubble and against farming families and rural areas.”

This week in Poland, 62-year-old protesting farmer Janusz Bialoskorski told the media that, “They’re talking about climate protection. But why should it be done at farmers’ expense?” Farmers, he pointed out, are not responsible for industrial pollution, and “nor do we fly to Davos on our jets.”

These farmers are now in the front line of a wider populist revolt, against those elitists who DO fly in their private jets to the World Economic Forum in luxurious Davos, Switzerland, where they lecture the rest of us about how to save the planet by sacrificing our living standards.

 

 

If people were true students of history, no one would have to implore for this:

Britain is estimated to have sent more than three-million Africans across the Atlantic into slavery, of whom 2.7 million survived. But it was also the country that changed course, and led the world in abolishing slavery elsewhere.

Another inconvenient truth for today’s secular society is that the major abolition leaders were motivated by their Christian faith.

Quakers led the way, holding that slavery was wrong and against God’s will: we are supposed to love our neighbour and do unto others as we would wish they did unto us, and who would want to be a slave? The Quakers, however, held no political power, not even the vote, as non-members of the Church of England. Yet they did circulate petitions and speak out against slavery.

John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, published his “Thoughts upon Slavery” in 1774, and in 1788, preached against it in Bristol, a major slave-trading port. He encouraged the (evangelical) William Wilberforce to take up the issue, and he led the push for abolition in Parliament.

Thomas Clarkson, a top abolition leader, when he was a student at Cambridge, had planned to become a clergyman, but after he won an essay contest on slavery, he decided to devote his life to working for abolition. He did research, published books and pamphlets, and travelled the country to win people over to the cause.

A third inconvenient truth might be seen in the inordinate time it took to abolish slavery and the slave trade in practice: passing a law against it in 1807 did not end the practice — too many people carried on, as there was money to be made and no penalty for breaking the law. It took an array of further laws, such as making it a crime to engage in the trade. Another law criminalized making profits from it.

In 1819, 12 years after the adoption of the law banning the trade, the British government set up a whole new sub-department in the Foreign Office, to persuade other countries to ban the trade, as well. It started small, but in time had the largest budget of any in the Foreign Office. It was not disbanded until 1882.

Yet many in Toronto, as in Edinburgh, blame Henry Dundas for delaying abolition by adding the word “gradual” into Wilberforce’s 1792 motion. Dundas argued strenuously for the need to gain the co-operation of the plantation owners. He talked with those he could and found that some were open to the idea.

Lord Palmerston, as foreign secretary, worked hard on getting other countries to join in abolition. The year before he died, he said the achievement that gave him “the greatest and purest pleasure was forcing the Brazilians to give up their slave trade,” through the passage of the Slave Trade (Portugal) Act in 1839. But Brazil kept up the slave trade until 1888.

Even Dundas, who had a much more realistic idea than Wilberforce and his supporters on what it would take to abolish the slave trade, had no idea that decades would be needed for the dream to be fully realized.

So why does Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow still rate what Dundas did as “horrific”? Wilberforce himself, and his cohort, in time went over to the “gradual” position of Dundas. In 1823, they formed the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Dominions.

When slavery itself was finally abolished in the British Empire, in 1834, the British Treasury had to compensate existing slave owners. The government had to take out a major loan, equivalent to 40 per cent of the national budget for that year. Unseemly as this was — the former slaves were paid nothing — emancipation would not have happened without it.

This is not to excuse the terrible brutality of Britain’s conquests around the world. It is to say that when a country changes course, and for decades devotes its resources to doing the right thing, we should give it credit.

 

The Russian government has been doing things like this for ages:

The brazen poisoning renewed fears that roving Russian assassins were ready to kill Putin’s critics using a nerve agent which translates as “newcomer” in Russian. Novichoks were a group of advanced nerve agents developed in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s.

The poison blocks signals from the nerves to muscles, causing bodily functions to break down. Constriction of the pupils is quickly followed, if the dosage is high enough, by convulsions, interrupted breathing, vomiting and then death due to asphyxiation or cardiac arrest.

 

 

I was assured that not allowing these Frankenstein surgeries would be detrimental:

A new study challenges the common assertion that gender-dysphoric youth are at elevated risk of suicide if not treated with “gender affirming” medical interventions. If it’s true, it ought to have a seismic impact on the accepted medical approach to gender-confused youth. 

Reported in the BMJ, the study examines data on a Finnish cohort of gender-referred adolescents between 1996 and 2019, and compares their rates of all-cause and suicide mortality against a control group. While suicide rates in the gender-referred group studied were higher than in the control group, the difference was not large: 0.3% versus 0.1%. And — importantly — this difference disappeared when the two groups were controlled for mental health issues severe enough to require specialist psychiatric help. 

In other words: while transgender identity does seem to be associated with elevated suicide risk, the link is not very strong. What’s more, the causality may not work the way activists claim.

 

A new documentary shines a light on the disabled in Japan:

With its calm and peaceful depiction of a farm where people with disabilities work, a Japanese documentary film is aiming to give audiences a look into the everyday lives of people who are often kept in the shadows.

Originally intended as a statement against an ableist-inspired killing spree in which 19 residents of a care home were murdered eight years ago, the film, "Fujiyama Cottonton," ultimately took a more sanguine approach, although director Taku Aoyagi was clear in his purpose.

"What motivated me the most to create this film was the 2016 incident at Yamayuri En," the 30-year-old director said, referring to the mass killing, one of Japan's worst mass murder cases, which targeted residents of a nursing home in Sagamihara, Kanagawa Prefecture.

Satoshi Uematsu, 34, the convicted murderer, now on death row, who was an employee of Yamayuri En, also injured 26 others in the incident — many seriously. He said at his trial that people with disabilities who cannot communicate their thoughts "create unhappiness" for others, while justifying his crime as being "useful to society."

"I felt a sense of urgency (to make the film) from the fact that death-row inmate Uematsu determined the value of human life by measuring people, and there seems to be an atmosphere that his discourse was being disseminated through society," Aoyagi said in a recent interview.

In the film, Aoyagi attempts to show audiences how people at the welfare facility live full lives by communicating with others and pursuing simple passions, just like people without disabilities do.