Your middle-of-the-week black smoke ...
Yes, the conclave has begun.
Will there be a return to orthodoxy?:
With the proclamation of extra omnes (“outside everyone”) on the afternoon of May 7, the thick wooden doors of the Sistine Chapel were closed and guarded at every entrance by Swiss Guards while the 133 cardinal-electors began the process of choosing the new pope and leader of the universal Catholic Church.
Seated at rows of tables beneath the gaze of Michelangelo’s powerful image of the Last Judgment, before any further discussions or the expected first casting of votes (called the scrutio), the cardinal-electors will listen to a meditation from 90-year-old Capuchin Cardinal Raniero Cantalamessa, the former preacher of the Papal Household for 44 years.
According to the rubrics for conclaves, Cardinal Cantalamessa — selected last week by the College of Cardinals — should preach to the electors on the very serious nature of their task and the necessity that they act with right intention, doing their best to carry out the will of God, and willing the good of the whole Church, to elect the next Roman pontiff.
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Catholic cardinals will sequester themselves Wednesday behind the Vatican’s medieval walls for the start of a conclave to elect the 267th pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, a successor to Pope Francis who died in April at the age of 88.
The 133 cardinals from 70 countries will be locked inside the Sistine Chapel, where they will vote in secret and silence, a process designed to be both contemplative and free from outside interference. They will surrender their cellphones and airwaves around the Vatican will be jammed to prevent them from all communications until they find a new leader for the 1.4 billion-member church.
Back to more domestic matters:
U.S. President Donald Trump yesterday said Canada will “have to be able to take care of itself economically” without free trade. Trump made the remarks after bantering with visiting Prime Minister Mark Carney about statehood: “That’s just the way it is.”
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At a meeting in the White House with the president, Carney smiled happily when Trump talked about winning the election for him. When the topic of Canada becoming the 51st state was raised, Carney declared that would never happen (would any prime minister of Canada have said any less?)
But when the president talked about shutting down the Canadian car industry and refusing to buy our steel and aluminum, the prime minister was silent. No push back. No standing up for Canadian interests.
Gone was Carney’s fiery rhetoric from the campaign trail and in its place was the mild-mannered, tranquil banker.
No one should expect the prime minister to be rude, dismissive or combative when meeting the president (even if on the campaign trail that’s exactly how Carney behaved.)
But neither should the prime minister be so passive and meek. During the meeting, Trump forcefully laid out his economic vision, no matter the obvious harm caused to Canada and no matter that the prime minister was sitting next to him.
Trump clearly has a liking for Carney, but pleasing the president may not get the results Canada expects or wants.
The meeting began on friendly terms and, for the most part, was affable.
When Trump congratulated Carney on his win, he added, “I think I was the greatest thing that happened to him.”
And he’s right.
Time and again during the election, Carney brought up Trump as the bogeyman who would devour Canada and only he could stop him.
“We are facing the biggest crisis of our lifetimes,” said Carney during the campaign. “Donald Trump is trying to fundamentally change the world economy, the trading system, but really what he is trying to do to Canada, he’s trying to break us, so the U.S. can own us. They want our land, they want our resources, they want our water. They want our country.”
It was the kind of belligerence that heightened the fear of too many Canadians.
When the issue of the 51st state was brought up at Tuesday’s meeting, Carney said, “There are some places that are never for sale.”
But Canada was never for sale, a point Trump acknowledged during the meeting. “It takes two to tango,” said Trump, and Canada was never going to be a dance partner.
“I have a lot of respect for Canada,” said Trump, who may never give up his pipe dream of a united North America, but we are foolish to give it any more credence than that.
Yet Carney duped people into buying into the threat, that our very sovereignty was at stake.
Yep.
Gullible Canadians bought into this torrent of fear-mongering and will soon pay the price.
Also:
At first glance, it might seem counterintuitive that the United States—a nation that has achieved energy dominance through the shale oil revolution—still imports vast amounts of crude oil from its northern neighbor. America has transformed from a country struggling with energy deficits into a net petroleum exporter, yet it continues to rely on Canada for over 60% of its oil imports. This reliance has only intensified in recent years, highlighting a crucial but often misunderstood element of global energy economics.
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The Leger survey conducted for the Association for Canadian Studies (ACS) ahead of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s first in-person meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House on Tuesday, found that a majority (52 per cent) of respondents agree that “it is no longer safe for all Canadians travelling to the United States.” Slightly more (54 per cent) don’t feel welcome anymore. Less than a third of Canadians (29 per cent) said they disagree that it is no longer safe and 27 per cent said they still feel welcome. In both cases, 19 per cent said they don’t know.
Keep in mind that these may be the same pu$$ies who believed that an invasion of Canada by the US was imminent, so ...
Why would Americans want to visit the land of smug anyway?
Your wasteful, inept and deceitful government and you:
Auditors are faulting a $157 million military contractor for poor service. The contractor is a former subsidiary of Brookfield Asset Management previously chaired by Prime Minister Mark Carney: “This had a negative impact on Canadian Armed Forces morale.”
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Let's take a look at the paperwork on this:
First Nations utilities are so inadequate more than a third of Indigenous people on-reserve use bottled water to brush their teeth, says a report by Indigenous Services Minister Patricia Hajdu’s department. Cabinet had promised to eliminate all boiled water advisories by 2021: “One in five judge the water to be less safe to drink than it was five years ago.”
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A new federal program promising honesty in contracting will “promote ethical business practices,” says a Department of Public Works briefing note. The initiative followed the ArriveCan scandal that saw two federal managers suspended, a leading contractor raided by police and a $59.5 million charge for taxpayers: “The trail behind you is deleted.”
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It’s that the federal bureaucracy in this country has grown enormously in size and cost in the last decade while becoming enormously less competent. The government, a term meaning not the incumbent cabinet and perhaps its parliamentary supporters but the entire machinery of the executive and judiciary as well as the legislature, doesn’t work well at all anymore. It can put out press releases and spend money, but it increasingly cannot implement programs no matter who they are or what they say. ...
I do not know how much thought Mark Carney, his colleagues, or indeed Pierre Poilievre and his have given to the question of why our once relatively efficient public service has ceased to work. They certainly didn’t give it much attention during the election, except the bit where the Tories sneered that government was broken and the Liberals sneered that such talk was borderline treason. But since the Liberals won, it’s now their problem.
And ours. Because if nothing works, nothing is going to work.
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Why would Canadians fight or or even believe in a place like this?:
The Department of Canadian Heritage paid $50,000 for a schoolchildren’s video depicting settlement of the Prairies as an exercise in anti-Black bigotry. The point was “educating Canadians about disinformation,” said a project summary released through Access To information: “The Canadian government did not want them.”
Way to brow-beat children, guys.
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Just two days following the federal election, the Canadian Journalism Collective (CJC), which oversees the distribution of government-mandated media funding from Google, released a list of outlets that received millions of dollars.
The decision to wait until after the election has raised concerns about transparency, given that the funds were distributed to media outlets during a campaign where recipient media organizations had a major financial stake in the election due to a reliance on subsidies distributed or mandated by the Liberal government.
In an April 30 news release, the collective said it was publishing the list as a way to reaffirm its “commitment to transparency.”
“Today we show our world-leading model in action, ensuring Big Tech compensates news media for their journalism equitably and fairly across Canada’s news ecosystem,” said Sarah Spring, executive director of the Canadian Journalism Collective. “It’s a historic investment that is empowering a broad range of voices, and setting new democratic precedents in media funding and transparency.”
The list includes 108 media outlets that received a total of $22,193,608.09 in funding as of April 23.
Media outlets will receive a total of $100 million annually from the collective, to be paid in installments.
The news release says the collective was set up to support “equity,” and promote “sustainability” in media and has a mandate to support “a vibrant, innovative and independent news ecosystem for all Canadians.”
News that Canadians do not watch.
The government can't even meet people where they are to deliver their lies and tongue-baths.
According to the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) — the federal agency responsible for compiling and reporting standardized health data across Canada — Alberta reported a total of 133 late-term abortions in the 2023-2024 year.
The numbers are shocking — and they should be.
But they are real, documented, and officially reported by the government’s own data agency. Of those 133 late-term abortions, 28 babies were born alive after the procedure. Yes, born alive. ...
A major 2024 Quebec study covering more than 13,000 second-trimester abortions (15 to 29 weeks) gives some insight. Of these, 48 percent were due to severe fetal anomalies. Five percent were due to maternal emergencies — cases where the mother’s life was at risk.
But nearly half, 47 percent, were done for “other reasons:” personal, social, or simply unspecified.
Though these figures come from Quebec (no comparable study exists for Alberta,) there’s no reason to assume the pattern would be dramatically different here. More than one in ten of those Quebec abortions resulted in a live birth. Last year in Alberta it was one in five.
This is not rare. This is not a fluke. This is a known, repeated outcome — and it’s happening here, in Alberta.
Even desperately wanted babies, born as micro-preemies — babies delivered before 23 weeks — face a similar medical abandonment. Alberta applies a cutoff: no active care, under formal Alberta Health Services policy. Babies who survive abortion face a parallel neglect — not because of a written rule, but because current clinical practice does not require intervention.
Yet some of these babies could survive with care. In Ontario, doctors and parents decide. Globally, advances in medicine keep pushing back what’s dryly called the “age of viability” — some babies now survive when born at 21 or 22 weeks and go on to live a normal life. But not in Alberta.
And behind all this stands a grim national reality: Canada is the only democratic country on earth with no laws regulating abortion at any stage, for any reason. There are no gestational limits. No reporting requirements. No protections. Not even North Korea can say that.
Global hot-spots and their potential to bring trouble here:
Israel, according to this official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private diplomatic talks, was irked by the unexpected news — particularly because the Houthis have continued to launch attacks on Israel proper and other Israeli targets.
On Monday, Israel conducted a wave of strikes on Yemen’s Hudaydah Port in retaliation against the Houthis, who fired a ballistic missile that struck near Israel’s main international airport.
Dan Shapiro, former U.S. ambassador to Israel during the Obama administration and liaison to Israel on Iran during the Biden administration, called Tuesday’s deal “a win.”
“Still need to end Houthi attacks on Israel, or on their broadly defined ‘Israeli shipping’ interests—often ships with no actual connection to Israel,” Shapiro wrote. “The Israeli strikes on Yemen in recent days, coordinated with the United States, may need to be repeated.”
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“As of today, it’s 21, three have died,” Trump said of the hostages being held by Hamas, noting until recently it had been 24 people believed to be living. He did not elaborate on the identities of those now believed to be dead, nor how he had come to learn of their deaths. “There’s 21, plus a lot of dead bodies,” Trump said.
One American, Edan Alexander, had been among the 24 hostages believed to be alive, with the bodies of several other Americans also held by Hamas after its Oct. 7, 2023 assault on Israel.
The president’s comments came as Israel approved plans on Monday to seize the Gaza Strip and to stay in the Palestinian territory for an unspecified amount of time, in a bid to recover the hostages and try to fulfill its war aims of destroying Hamas.
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India fired missiles into Pakistani-controlled territory in several locations early Wednesday, as the overall death toll increased to 31 people in what Pakistan’s leader called an act of war. India also claims there are casualties from Pakistani fire in the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir.
India said it struck infrastructure used by militants linked to last month’s massacre of tourists in the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir. At least seven people died in Indian-controlled Kashmir from artillery exchanges.
Pakistan said at 26 people died in the missiles strikes and five from artillery exchange along the Line of Control that separates the two countries in Kashmir. It said another 5 were killed in artillery fire near the Line of Control.
Finally, something uplifting:
Nagasaki was a traditional center of Japanese Catholicism (and martyrdom) and had been for centuries when it was struck by the second atomic bomb on Aug. 9, 1945. The city was not the prime target that day. But cloud cover over the city of Kokura shifted the targeting such that “Fat Man,” a plutonium-based implosion-type nuclear weapon, was dropped by the B-29 “Bockscar” and detonated near Nagasaki’s Urakami Cathedral. The cathedral — the largest Catholic church in East Asia at the time — was filled with worshippers going to confession to prepare for the Solemnity of the Assumption on Aug. 15. Some 8,500 of Nagasaki’s 12,000 Catholics died that day or shortly thereafter. Somehow, one of the two cathedral bells survived the blast, and when a new Urakami Cathedral was built in 1959, the surviving bell was installed in one of the church’s two new towers. Thanks to the Nagasaki Bell Project, a second bell, modeled after the original, will be installed before the 80th anniversary of the bombing: a gift from America to Japan, and from Catholics to Catholics. The Latin inscription on the bell, cast in the Netherlands and prepared for installation by the McShane Bell Company near St. Louis, is a prayer of reconciliation and hope:
“I sing to God with a constant ringing, in the place where so many Japanese martyrs, with honor, have worshipped — and have, by their example, called their brothers and sisters and their descendants to the fellowship of the true faith and of heaven.”
There is not a lot going right in the world today. Those wishing to participate in something truly life-affirming and good can contribute to the Nagasaki Bell Project here.
Please do.
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