Your middle-of-the-week introspection ...
At least nine people were killed and more than 900 injured Wednesday by a powerful earthquake in Taiwan that damaged dozens of buildings and prompted tsunami warnings that extended to Japan and the Philippines before being lifted.
Officials said the quake was the strongest to shake the island in decades, and warned of more tremors in the days ahead.
"The earthquake is close to land and it's shallow. It's felt all over Taiwan and offshore islands," said Wu Chien-fu, director of Taipei's Central Weather Administration's Seismology Center.
Strict building regulations and widespread public disaster awareness appear to have staved off a major catastrophe for the earthquake-prone island, which lies near the junction of two tectonic plates.
Wu said the quake was the strongest since a 7.6 magnitude struck in September 1999, killing around 2,400 people in the deadliest natural disaster in the island's history.
Japan's Meteorological Agency put the earthquake's magnitude at 7.7, while the the United States Geological Survey said the quake — which hit just before 8 a.m. local time — had registered a magnitude 7.4. The USGS put the epicenter 18 kilometers (11 miles) south of Taiwan's Hualien City, at a depth of 34.8 kilometers.
Three people among a group of seven on an early-morning hike through the hills that surround the city were crushed to death by boulders loosened by the earthquake, officials said.
Separately, a truck driver died when his vehicle was hit by a landslide as it approached a tunnel in the area.
The government put the number of injured at 946.
The proles don't deserve pensions. Letting them manage their money and save some of it would make them human. That is simply not what the government does:
Pensions for retired MPs averaged $77,900 last year, an increase of nearly 10 percent since the pandemic, says the Treasury Board. Pensions are indexed to inflation to “cover increases in the cost of living.”
We don't deserve Trudeau.
Let us send him to Colorado to repay this favour:
In the latest indication of the increasingly porous and chaotic Canada-U.S. border, a Colorado official was recently allegedly recorded attempting to empty out a homeless shelter by offering to send residents “to the Canadian border.”
“You don’t have to walk anywhere, we can buy you a free ticket. You can go to any city. We can take you up to the Canadian border, wherever,” Andres Carrera, a “newcomer communications liaison” with the City of Denver, was recorded telling arrivals at a migrant shelter.
After explaining that Denver already has “too many migrants” and that resources are sapped, Carrera ends his speech by asking, “Okay, who wants to travel to different cities where there is more work?”
This idiot who bragged about letting unvetted migrants into the country to show up Trump:
“PM Trudeau says immigration to Canada has “grown at a rate far beyond what Canada has been able to absorb,” adding that “temporary immigration has caused so much pressure in our communities,” in relation to housing”**
The partial reversal comes as his polling numbers crash because he has been importing roughly one million people per year — or roughly three migrants for every Canadian birth. That massive inflow is roughly twice the per-person inflow engineered by President Joe Biden and his pro-migration deputies.
His flood of migrants is boosting the country’s stock market as it suppresses wages, spikes inflation, makes homes unaffordable, deters marriages and births, creates homeless encampments, and also fuels civil strife.
Justin should stop trying to win back votes with money he doesn't have, contrition he doesn't feel and promises he will never keep.
He should simply let the Chinese cheat for him.
We don't have to trade with China:
Independent MP Han Dong (Don Valley North, Ont.) yesterday admitted foreign students attending school out of town voted in his 2019 Liberal nomination. Dong dismissed the incident as commonplace though his own campaign manager questioned Chinese teenagers’ eligibility to vote: “Do you accept that would be an outrageous intervention by the People’s Republic of China in our democracy?”
**
A delegation of five MPs and senators, most of them on friendly terms with Beijing, visited China, meeting officials of the unelected National People’s Congress and other state institutions.
At the head of the Canada-China Legislative Association group was co-chair Han Dong, an independent MP and former Liberal who was thrust into the heart of allegations about Chinese interference in Canada. Dong has strongly refuted charges that he was financially assisted by Beijing when first elected and secretly advised a Chinese diplomat in Toronto on how to handle the “Two Michaels” affair.
His group, along with Canada’s ambassador to Beijing, calls such trips a chance to improve the countries’ rocky relationship, address human rights and expand business ties with Canada’s second-biggest trading partner. The association has visited China numerous times.
**
Erin O’Toole’s Conservative Party was never told its candidates were targeted by foreign agents, the China inquiry learned yesterday. One confidential memo said offshore money was “funneled to preferred candidates” deemed pro-China: “Would information of this nature have been useful to your Party?”
**
Liberal MP Ken Hardie (Fleetwood-Port Kells, B.C.) yesterday said he privately contacted the Canadian Security Intelligence Service following his 2021 re-election regarding allegations of pro-Liberal interference by foreign agents. The China inquiry yesterday disclosed names of 13 ridings including Hardie’s that were allegedly targeted by Beijing. Others include seats held by two former cabinet ministers and the current chair of the Commons foreign affairs committee: “I asked for a meeting with CSIS.”**
The dissonance is strong with this one:
The Chinese government insists that its booming organ transplant industry grew legitimately, and all organs are donated voluntarily. It has increasingly hosted events to boast its gigantic organ transplant industry. In December, for example, China hosted two events on “organ donation” associated with its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China’s global plan to use predatory loans to influence poor nations.
In its report on Sunday, the Global Times claimed that 6.7 million people in the country have registered to donate their organs in the event of an untimely death and that many enthusiastically participated in memorial services on Saturday for organ donors.
As ghoulish as a father begging the court not to kill his autistic daughter.
Canada is not a fair-weather friend.
It is simply not a friend at all:
The Trudeau government’s message to our Middle Eastern allies is clear: Canada is a fair weather friend. Stand with us at your peril, because when you’re in the crosshairs, we’ll be too busy polishing our image and playing domestic politics to notice your plight.
Canada made a mockery of not one, but two Middle Eastern allies in the same week — Israel publicly, and the Iraqi Kurds quietly. Make no mistake: the damage we are doing to our friends in the region is catastrophic.
It’s a far cry from the “whole-of-government approach to the Middle East” that Ottawa has touted. The Trudeau government is simply ad-libbing its way through international crises — and Canada’s allies are paying the price.
This isn’t just a failure, it’s a disgrace. It’s a shameful chapter in Canada’s history that reveals a frightening truth: our commitments are as shallow as the political gains they secure. When the chips are down, when our allies face existential threats, Canada’s support is nowhere to be found.
The March 18 circus in the House of Commons over an NDP motion that fundamentally altered 50 years of Canadian foreign policy toward Israel is hard proof.
In a display that could only be described as political theatre at its most bewildering, the governing Liberals, in a last-ditch effort to curry domestic favour and prevent a public rift in their caucus, stitched together a hasty pact with the NDP.
It wasn’t strategic foreign policy, rooted in vision or morality. It was opportunistic improvisation, with the gravitas of Canadian foreign policy seemingly scribbled on the back of a napkin in the process.
This Israel:
On a Sabbath morning, three Islamic terrorists invaded the Israeli village of Adora located in the Judean Mountains in the rebuilt vicinity of a city dating back to the reign of King Solomon.
The Jihadists had carefully picked the Sabbath morning when many of the men and some of the women would be praying in the synagogue. To fool what few families were at home, they wore the uniforms of Israeli soldiers as they entered their houses.
At the Shefi family home, Jacob Shefi, a policeman, was in the synagogue and his wife Shiri was in the bedroom playing with their three children, 5-year-old Danielle, 4-year-old Uriel and 2-year-old Eliad, when.one the terrorists burst into the bedroom.
Danielle had wanted to go to the synagogue, but her mother insisted on doing her hair first.
Shiri told the children to hide under the bed and covered them with her body as the terrorist opened fire. Wounded, she still managed to force the door closed as the terrorists continued their rampage across the village. Uriel and Eliad were wounded, but Danielle, hiding under the bed, was dead.
Jacob Shefi, running home at the sound of gunshots, thought the terrorists were soldiers and asked them what was happening. They shot at him and he ran to a house nearby to find a gun. When he saw his wife again, she told him, “they murdered our daughter.”
Danielle Shefi was one of 4 people murdered in the Adora attack, including Katia Greenberg, a Russian immigrant and mother of 3 who worked with the disabled, Yaakov Katz, a Soviet dissident physicist, who left the USSR with Reagan’s help and was working on laser technology, and First Sergeant Arik Becker, a 22-year-old reservist who was killed trying to stop the attack.
It was the spring of 2002 and such Islamic terror atrocities still had the power to shock the world. Or those parts of it that were not the media which headlined the story as, “Palestinian Gunmen Kill 4 Israeli Settlers in West Bank.” And Danielle Shefi became just another “Israeli settler”.
“Anyone capable of looking a 4-year-old boy and a 5-year-old girl in the face and then shooting them is not human,” Jacob Shefi told the press. “Danielle, who never hurt anyone and who was taught to love and respect all human beings, Jew or Arab, was murdered in her parents’ bedroom – which for her should have been the safest place.”
**
Every Israeli woman who is being held captive by Hamas in Gaza is being sexually abused, freed hostage Mia Regev said during an emergency debate in the Knesset's Committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality on the situation of the women hostages.
Regev, who was freed during the hostage deal between Israel and Hamas in November, said that it was "unbelievable" that the Knesset was planning on going on recess on April 8 for over five weeks.
"Every day, there is an emergency and every minute counts. What will the women do there? What will the rest of the captives do there?" Regev said.
Canada was happy to abandon Israel to people who did things like that.
Where are the parents? Who would give a kid an expensive toy? Why don't schools simply disallow such toys in the classroom? Who is monitoring students' use of computers?
This is where it gets tricky. The school boards — Peel, Ottawa-Carleton, Toronto, and Toronto Catholic — claim the tech firms “negligently interfered” with the board’s statutory duty to “promote the education and well-being of the student population within their constituent jurisdiction.”
What that means is that they claim the tech firms used exploitative business practices and flooded the market with products that are addictive and unsafe because they harm brain development, sleep patterns, attention span, and behaviour regulation. They claim the tech firms “engineered products and design features to manipulate brain neurochemistry” to induce excessive, compulsive and addictive use. They claim the tech firms created a “social-validation feedback loop” that exploits the developing chemistry of the teenage brain to keep it in a “hyper-focused” and “near hypnotic” state, in part by using the “well-known psychological tactic” of the “Intermittent Variable Reward,” which induces craving and anticipation by strategically spreading out the most engaging videos or content. The result is to push teenagers towards more extreme content and more intense engagement, which can be monetized for advertising.
It's not hard.
It's like any other toy.
Take it away.
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