Tuesday, September 24, 2024

No Country For Anyone

In two weeks, the Israelis will observe a grim milestone.

It will have been a year since Hamas terrorists poured into Israel and killed and kidnapped Israeli and other citizens.

For some reason, this has not sparked outrage:

Canada abstained today from a high-profile United Nations vote demanding that Israel end its “unlawful presence” in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank within a year.

Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations, Bob Rae, told the assembly the motion was too one-sided to support, though he said Ottawa agrees that Israel is illegally occupying Palestinian territories.
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This morning’s non-binding vote passed 124-14, and Canada was among 43 abstentions.
The State of Palestine brought the motion to the UN General Assembly, and Israel says the vote amounts to “diplomatic terrorism.”
The resolution is based on a July ruling by the International Court of Justice, which condemned Israel’s rule over lands it captured in 1967 by force, saying this violates international laws.
Last December, Canada stopped its decade-long policy of backing Israel in almost any United Nations vote over concerns about the lack of progress toward a humanitarian ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas.
**
On October 7, Israel was attacked in an unprecedented massacre by Hamas terrorists. Under international law, specifically Article 51 of the UN Charter, nations have an inherent right to defend themselves when subjected to armed attacks. Yet Israel continues to be disproportionately targeted at the UN.
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In 2023 alone, the United Nations General Assembly passed 14 resolutions condemning Israel — double the total number of condemnations of all other countries combined, all while overlooking major global human rights violators, such as Iran, Venezuela, China and Saudi Arabia. Countries like North Korea and Syria faced just one resolution each.
This is part of a broader trend where Israel has been systematically singled out. Between 2015 and 2022, the General Assembly passed 140 resolutions against Israel — more than twice the number passed against all other countries combined. The irony here is glaring: a country defending itself against terrorism is repeatedly condemned, while states that commit egregious human rights violations remain unscathed by the UN’s criticism.​ ...
Especially disappointing is Canada’s decision to abstain from Wednesday’s vote, rather than take Israel’s side, which represents the moral high ground. Experience tells us that you know who your true friends are during tough times — not when the going is easy.
Canada’s abstention represents a concession to the Palestinian lobby in this country and a stab in the back of its longtime friend and ally. But should we be surprised? This week, Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani met with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Ottawa — despite the fact that Qatar is one of Hamas’s biggest benefactors.
In this upside down story, Canada seems to have more sympathy for Hamas these days than for its longtime friend and ally. How sad.

 

What can one expect from a country proud of its Nazi-hiding present?

**

As a member of Israel’s peace movement, I have always believed that strangers can become partners. On October 7, my belief was shaken to the core when my 84-year-old mother, Ditza, was kidnapped from her home in Kibbutz Nir Oz.
Scenarios played out in my head, over and over, about who had seen fit to kidnap my mother and where she was being held. I imagined her in a deep, dark tunnel, with angry, armed young men lurching out from the shadows.
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But it turned out that my mother had not been held at gunpoint in Gaza by a gang of fanatical young men. Instead, as she revealed after she was released on Nov. 28 in the hostage deal, Hamas had handed her off to a man named Abed. Abed had kept my mother locked in a small room of his home, with little food and no access to medication for almost two months. He told my mother that he was a teacher at an UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees) school. A perfect stranger, instead of becoming one of this war’s angels, Abed ended up as just another of its many demons.
It emerged that my mother was not the only hostage who had been kidnapped or held captive by UNRWA employees, but the ties between the agency and Hamas go much further than kidnappings alone. Weapons, tunnels and server farms were found in and underneath UNRWA facilities.
 
An announcement on the website for the Palestinian General Delegation to Canada, which represents the interests of the Palestinian Authority (PA), the governing body in the West Bank, is currently inviting people to sign up for the program via a Google form.
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The message, originally posted in Arabic and translated using Google, urges Gazan students in Canada to “register their data as soon as possible” to facilitate distance learning.
Shimon Koffler Fogel, president and CEO of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), criticized the curriculum for indoctrinating youth into hating Israel, Jews and the West.
“This curriculum has been widely condemned for spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories and hate, rejecting a two-state solution, and inserting examples of violence into subjects like science and math,” Fogel told National Post in a statement.
“Supporting newcomers and refugees is an integral part of Canadian values — but allowing hateful curriculum to be taught on Canadian soil is blatantly inappropriate.”

 

What Canadian values would those be, Mr. Fogel?

If "inappropriate" (not immoral) is the strongest word that can be conjured for this, then the battle is lost. 



Why we need to abolish teachers' unions:

Parents have reported that a contingent of Toronto school kids were taken by their teachers to a downtown political protest on the grounds that they were going on an Indigenous-themed field trip.
A smartphone video posted on social media showed several dozen students aged 12 to 14 being ushered through a crowd chanting “from Turtle Island to Palestine, occupation is a crime.”
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“At a (Toronto District School Board) sanctioned field trip,” read a caption by Maya Fitzpatrick.
A parent, identified as Melissa, called into AM640 to describe accompanying the field trip. Melissa said teachers dismissed letters from parents saying the excursion was “not a good idea,” and emphasized that children were being taken to a “gathering.”
“I’ve been to many protests in my life, and if this was not a protest I will eat my hat,” Melissa said in an interview with Toronto Today host Greg Brady.


I'll take genocides that aren't happening, Alex.



Meanwhile, Israel is pounding Lebanon, just one of its many hateful neighbours out to destroy it.



We Don't Have to Trade With China

It's not like it's helping us:

(Sidebar: this Hong Kong.)
The publisher of the fiercely independent, pro-democracy Apple Daily newspaper — effectively shut down by the government three years ago — owns hotels in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., and has a twin sister and other family members here, son Sebastien noted this week on a stopover in Toronto. Sebastien himself says he has fond memories of visiting Canada as a child. This is where he learned English and attended summer camp in Ontario cottage country.
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But instead of fleeing the enclave when Beijing imposed a widely criticized national security law (NSL), arrested pro-democracy politicians and otherwise clamped down on free-wheeling Hong Kong, the elder Lai decided to stay.
The tycoon hoped to spare the paper’s journalists persecution by offering himself up as the face of Apple Daily, says Sebastien.
“He stayed to act as a lightning rod for these people. He knew that the Hong Kong government wanted heads, so to speak, or people in prison,” the son said in an interview.
“On one hand, I’m incredibly proud of him. I can’t really imagine how hard it is, the strength it takes to do this for 30 years, when you could very well argue that he could have had a much more comfortable life just bending the knee.”
The result of Lai remaining was shocking, but somewhat predictable. The publisher was arrested when 200 police officers raided Apple Daily in 2020 and has spent most of the last four years in prison, the most prominent victim of the crackdown. He’s in the midst of a trial on charges under the national security law, though it appears his chief offence was merely to loudly criticize Hong Kong’s rulers.

 

Kind of like here.

**

Chong’s testimony that the person approached him about a year ago puts the timeline around the same time as when the Foreign Interference Commission was about to begin.

Commissioner Marie-Josée Hogue, in an interim report published in May, said interference had not impacted the overall results of the elections, but it could have played a role in some individual ridings. Hogue also identified China as the main culprit.

**

Chinese government officials tried to influence Canadian MPs to vote against a 2021 motion condemning China’s genocide of Uyghurs and even looked to build “profiles” on certain parliamentarians after the vote.

That’s according to a summary of intelligence by Canadian security agencies and departments that was tabled at the Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference (PIFI) on Wednesday.
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The document reveals that People’s Republic of China (PRC) officials made “initial” efforts to influence an unspecified number of MPs to vote against the motion recognizing the country’s treatment of its Uyghur and other Turkic Muslim minorities as “genocide.”
The motion ultimately passed unanimously in the House of Commons. But after the vote, the document states the PRC began efforts to “build profiles on a number of MPs” who supported the motion.
“This research may have informed the PRC’s decision to impose economic sanctions on some of those MPs or may have informed other actions,” reads the unclassified summary of intelligence produced for the inquiry.
Those were just some of the examples of suspected or confirmed foreign interference efforts by China against Canadian MPs brought up during Michael Chong’s testimony on Wednesday.
The Conservative MP also revealed that in October last year he was approached by an individual in the street offering him “political support, assistance with elections, and political advice here on (Parliament Hill),” he told the inquiry.

 

 

Perhaps you would like to detail the plans that got you released, hhhmm?:

Canadian Michael Kovrig and his girlfriend were walking home from dinner on Dec. 10, 2018.

They lived in Beijing, where Kovrig, a former diplomat, worked at an independent global think tank. As they took the final steps into their apartment, they were swarmed.

“I was grabbed out of the blue by about a dozen men in black. They stuffed me into a car and took me to a secret black jail and then proceeded to interrogate me relentlessly and hold me in solitary confinement,” he told Global News, sharing his story of incarceration and the aftermath.

The sit-down interview comes three years after he was released following 1,019 days in a Chinese detention cell. Kovrig is now sharing his story for the first time, including details of his two-and-a-half-year incarceration and meeting his daughter following his release.

He spoke of finding strength from the letters and cards he received from ordinary Canadians, and he warned Canada and its allies about the need to take foreign interference seriously.

 

Oh, that will never happen, sir:

Last Friday, Azam Ishmael admitted that he had not read the commission’s first report, detailing how China manipulated the 2019 Liberal nomination race in Don Valley West. That’s the riding where the Chinese consulate in Toronto paid for buses to ferry international students to vote for their preferred candidate, Han Dong, threatening them with visa revocation if they did not comply. That report noted that CSIS briefed a Liberal party representative with secret-level clearance several weeks after the nomination meeting, who then briefed the PM the next day.
While Ishmael, who became national director in 2017, said he has secret clearance and participated in the briefing, he told the inquiry — with a straight face — that until he was questioned by the commission, he hadn’t heard  that buses had been paid for by the People’s Republic of China, that the students had been told they could lose their visas if they didn’t vote for Dong, or that many students lived outside the riding and were ineligible to vote there. Ironically, in his initial interview by the commission in March 2024, Ishmael recommended that, “Caution should be taken when discussing potential foreign interference in Canada’s elections and democratic processes because sowing misinformation and/or distrust is easy and can effectively undermine an otherwise robust system” — one so robust that he apparently didn’t know what was going on in his own party.

 

 

In Canada, we call slave labour the TFWP:

Canadian border officials have intercepted more than 50 shipments of materials they suspected were made with forced labour, but most were ultimately let into the country and U.S. legislators say Canada needs to do more.

A group of U.S. legislators has called on Canada, the U.S. and Mexico to act to ensure goods made with forced labour, especially by Uyghurs in China’s Xinjiang region, don’t end up on North American shelves.

U.S. senators Jeff Merkley and Marco Rubio, alongside congressmen James McGovern and Chris Smith, wrote a letter to Trade Minister Mary Ng and her Mexican and U.S. counterparts calling on all three countries to take more aggressive action on slave-made goods.

(Sidebar: this Mary Ng.)

The U.S. legislators worked together to pass the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), which has U.S. Customs assume that goods made in the Xinjiang region are made with forced labour unless there is proof to the contrary.

In their letter to Ng, the group asked her to consider similar legislation in Canada.

“The UFLPA was created as a response to the government of the PRC’s policies of severe repression against Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples, which includes mandating that these people perform involuntary labor, in gross violation of internationally recognized human rights,” they wrote.

“This horrendous behavior has not abated. The law was also born out of a recognition that an additional enforcement mechanism was needed to ensure that U.S. agencies were able to comply with laws that prohibit import of goods made with forced labour.”

**

Green technology supply chains are tainted by slave labour, the Commons trade committee was told yesterday. Chinese concentration camp inmates are forced to mine lithium and manufacture solar panels, one witness testified: “Uyghurs are being used as a source of slave labour.”

 Do the Swedes use Uyghur forced labour?



Don't let some kid's death ruin trade for us, Chinese minister asks Japan:

China’s top diplomat has urged Japan to “calmly” handle last week’s fatal stabbing of a Japanese schoolboy in the Chinese city of Shenzhen and “avoid politicizing or exaggerating the issue,” as Japan’s foreign minister demanded Beijing deal with “unfounded and malicious anti-Japanese” social media posts.

Beijing has been trying to prevent the stabbing of the 10-year-old boy, who was attacked on his way to a Japanese school, from spiraling into a wider diplomatic row between the Asian powers, characterizing it as a lone act and downplaying the political implications.

“China will investigate and handle the case of the attack on a Japanese student in Shenzhen in accordance with the law, and will, as always, protect the safety of all foreign citizens in China,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry quoted Wang Yi as telling his Japanese counterpart, Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa, during their 55-minute meeting at United Nations headquarters in New York on Monday.

Japan’s Foreign Ministry said that Kamikawa had “strongly demanded” that Beijing offer a clearer explanation of the facts surrounding the stabbing, including the motive behind the attack, while strictly punishing the perpetrator, who was arrested at the scene. The Chinese side has yet to offer details of the attacker’s motive.

Kamikawa also heaped pressure on Beijing to crack down on internet posts targeting Japan — though Chinese authorities are reportedly already censoring at least some online content that could stir up anti-Japanese sentiment.

“Malicious, anti-Japanese social media and internet posts, including those related to Japanese schools, are directly linked to the safety of children and are absolutely unacceptable,” Kamikawa said. “They must be thoroughly dealt with as soon as possible.”

The top Japanese diplomat also urged the neighbors to “work earnestly to improve the situation by squarely facing issues that serve as obstacles to the bilateral exchange," according to the Japanese Foreign Ministry.

The meeting followed similar talks between State Minister of Foreign Affairs Yoshifumi Tsuge and Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Sun Weidong in Beijing on Monday.

Although Beijing has claimed the attack was not politically motivated, it occurred last Wednesday — the 93rd anniversary of the Mukden Incident that led to Japan’s invasion of Manchuria. The anniversary is traditionally seen as a day of humiliation for Chinese, something the country’s ruling Communist Party has emphasized under its patriotic education system.

The boy’s murder was also the second violent incident targeting Japanese school students in China in less than three months. On June 24, a man attacked a Japanese school bus in the eastern city of Suzhou, killing a Chinese bus attendant who attempted to protect the students and injuring a Japanese woman and child.

 


Wednesday, September 18, 2024

Mid-Week Post

Your pre-autumn spin-of-the-week ...

 

For some reason, Justin's hubris and complete inability to do anything right now grates on people, not like it should have in 2013:

Cabinet yesterday expressed shock and surprise over the loss of a must-win Liberal byelection in the Prime Minister’s hometown. Justin Trudeau and 15 cabinet ministers personally canvassed in the Montréal riding of LaSalle-Émard-Verdun: “We need people to understand.”

 

I think people understand that things are now too expensive and that their frat-boy prime minister would rather blame everyone else for these predictable failures: 

It’s not me, it’s you! If you’re wondering why the Liberals lost this week’s byelection in the supposedly safe seat of LaSalle—Émard—Verdun, just ask Prime Minister Justin Trudeau: 
“We need people to be more engaged. We need people to understand what’s at stake in this upcoming election. Obviously, it would have been nicer to win and hold Verdun, but there’s more work to do and we’re going to stay focused on doing it.” 
 
Words, words, words.
What Justin will never admit is that people, even in his own party, have grown tired of his failures. He chooses to blame other for not giving him what he wants.
It takes a special kind of narcissist to blame everyone other than himself for his shortcomings (I am being charitable here). Such a person is unfit to lead.
Further:
Actually, people fully understand what’s at stake in the upcoming election. The LaSalle byelection was about Trudeau, the St. Paul’s byelection was about Trudeau, and the general election will be about Trudeau. Voters don’t want four more years, or even two more years of him. It’s been fun, please exit the ride now sir, your time is up. 
Trudeau’s hubris helped sink his party in LaSalle even before the race began. He hand-picked his candidate, Laura Palestini, big-footing aspiring party nominees who were already working the riding, and who loudly complained about it. Then 52 Liberal staffers refused to volunteer because of the Liberals’ position on the Israel-Hamas War, and worse yet, sent a letter to Trudeau about it. Next, Trudeau’s national campaign director quit and a Quebec MP publicly called for him to step down.  
None of these things help win votes. And none of these things happen if a leader has the respect of his party.  
Meanwhile, the Bloc Québécois benefitted from the rise of Parti Québécois fortunes in the province. They also mined the newfound clout the Bloc has in Ottawa since NDP leader Jagmeet Singh ripped up the party’s Supply and confidence agreement with the Liberals. Bloc leader Yves François Blanchet promised to deliver for Quebec by holding the Liberals to ransom — and now he has one more foot soldier to do it. 

 The votes weren't for confidence in the NDP or the Bloc but a repudiation of Justin:

Just as with Toronto-St. Paul’s, the loss in LaSalle-Émard-Verdun was particularly scary to Liberal insiders because of where it happened. Even in some of the Liberals’ most dire opinion polls of the last 12 months, the party was usually slated to continue winning seats in Montreal. As with Toronto, the Quebec metropolis has represented the country’s most reliable base of Liberal support ever since the Trudeau government took power in 2015.

These same dolts will prop up the Liberals once more when the non-confidence motion comes around:

Poilievre promised he would bring such a motion at the first chance he had, after the NDP ended its supply-and-confidence deal with the Liberals earlier this month.
It now appears that chance will come on Sept. 24.
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Opposition parties can introduce motions, including those declaring non-confidence in the government, on specific days designated in the House of Commons calendar.
The number of opposition days and which party they go to is determined at the start of a session, and the actual days are scheduled by the government.
During a meeting of House leaders on Tuesday, the government told the other parties that the first of five opposition days for the Conservatives this fall will be next week.
That means a debate on the Tory motion is likely to happen Sept. 24 and the vote would be the following afternoon.
The schedule for next week will be confirmed in the House of Commons on Thursday.
Poilievre brought a non-confidence motion in March, asking opposition parties to join him in triggering a “carbon tax election,” but the NDP and Bloc Quebecois joined the Liberals in voting the motion down.
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh has said that without the supply-and-confidence deal his caucus will take each vote as it comes. He has also repeatedly said Canadians have lost faith in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberals.
 
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh confronted a gaggle of protesters on Tuesday after one of them was heard to call him a “corrupted bastard.”
Accompanied by a staffer, Singh was walking towards the West Block of Parliament, tailed by two men recording him from cell phones.
“Are you voting non-confidence today?” asks one. “Corrupted bastard,” says another.
The latter comment prompts Singh to stop and turn around, saying, “You want to say something?”
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“Who said that? You got something to say?” adds the NDP Leader as he approaches the pair.
One of the men, dressed in a light-blue shirt and a bandanna, replies, “I didn’t say corrupted bastard … somebody behind me said that.”
Singh then turns his attention to a man in a Toronto Maples Leaf hat and wearing a T-shirt reading, “Unmuzzled Unmasked Unvaccinated Unafraid.”
Stooping slightly to meet the man’s eyeline, Singh asks, “Was it you?”
“No,” replies the man, who has busied himself with his smartphone.
“You sure?” says Singh, prompting an, “If it was me I would admit it, buddy.”
The party leader then takes a step forward towards the man, asking again, “Was it you or not?” yielding the reply, “If it was me I’d admit it.” The man in the Maple Leafs hat then offers, “It was the gentleman behind me, I guess.”
After unsuccessfully asking the man to point “the gentleman” out, Singh then lifts a finger to the man’s face saying, “You’re a coward; you’re not going to say it to my face.”
 
Step away from your bodyguards then, Mr. Rolex.

 

 

Mark Carney is another one who should never helm this country's economy:

Foster notes that “Carney has been a prime pusher of ‘net-zero,’ the notion that climate-related human emissions must be entirely eradicated, buried or offset by 2050 if the world is to avoid climate Armageddon.”

A central aspect of the “net-zero” agenda is the rapid phase out of fossil fuels. Clearly then, his agenda poses a threat to Alberta’s economy and prosperity. Despite the fact that Carney grew up in Edmonton, he doesn’t demonstrate much concern for this province.

Carney’s emphasis on fighting climate change leads Foster to quote the famous American writer H. L. Mencken as saying that: “The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-front for the urge to rule.”

That statement applies in this context because the “Carney-backed agenda is not predicated on working through democratic institutions but on circumventing them.”

More particularly, “Carney’s plan is to control the global economy by seizing the commanding heights of finance, not by nationalization but by exerting non-democratic pressure to divest from, and stop funding, fossil fuels. The private sector is to become a partner in imposing its own bondage. This will be do-it-yourself totalitarianism.”

Indeed, in a country dominated by policies designed to alleviate climate change, citizens will have less choices (consider the current war against single-use plastics,) less transportation (e.g., no more gasoline cars,) less meat (cattle release carbon emissions, after all), and less conveniences in general, but more poverty (due to deindustrialization.)

As Foster notes, Carney’s ideology embraces what libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek called the “fatal conceit” of constructivist rationalism: “the belief that the largely spontaneous institutions of the market order should be rejected in favour of more deliberately planned arrangements.”

That is, give the government enough power, and central planners can arrange society — by force — into something much better than the supposed anarchy of a free society.

 

Um, tyranny.

 

 

Justin has doubled the national debt:

Pop the champagne! It’s now official. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has doubled the federal debt. It took nearly two dozen prime ministers and a century and a half for the federal government to rack up $616 billion in debt, which is where the total stood before Trudeau’s first year in office. But less than a decade later, on Aug. 30 of this year, the debt has officially doubled to $1.232 trillion. That’s according to calculations done by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation based on annual debt increases outlined in the government’s latest budget.

The Trudeau government’s debt binge has had, and will continue to have, a material impact on Canadians’ lives.

We all want to leave our kids and grandkids a bright financial future. But a baby born today is already on the hook for about $30,000 in federal government debt. That debt may never fully be paid back: Canada’s federal debt has never been zero, though at times it has been very low. But even if it’s entirely rolled over and not a penny of it paid back, the debt will generate continuing interest payments, which means higher taxes for future generations unless future governments cut spending and run surpluses.

In this regard, the future looks bleak. New data from the Parliamentary Budget Officer doesn’t see a balanced federal budget until 2040. That would mean another $296 billion added to the debt between now and then — even assuming the government introduces no new spending and the economy grows for 16 years straight.

The federal government’s debt interest charges already cost taxpayers more than $1 billion every week. The government now wastes more money servicing the debt than it sends to the provinces in health transfers. Paying debt interest takes every penny collected from the GST.

 

The economy has regressed from the wallet outward.

YAY! 



But consider the voters blocks:

This low-wage labor comes at a high cost for those Canadians trying to enter the labor market, however. Employers use TFWP as a business model, pricing out unskilled domestic workers. What does this look like in practice? Your local restaurant hires foreigners, leaving your teenaged kid without summer work, without employment experience, and eventually, living in your basement. It is also bad for the foreign workers. I know from experience that, in many cases, they are effectively paid below minimum wage, because they are forbidden from taking breaks, they work unreasonably long hours, and they live in employer-owned accommodations while rent is deducted from pay. This is tantamount to indentured servitude. A recent United Nations report exaggerated when it included the TFWP among modern examples of slavery, but only somewhat.

 

I wouldn't say somewhat. 



We don't have to trade with China:

The federal agency that investigates election infractions found insufficient evidence to support suggestions Beijing wielded undue influence against the Conservatives in the Vancouver area during the 2021 general election.

 

Rather, no one wants the evidence found.

**

MPs are vulnerable to electronic surveillance by foreign agents, the chair of the Commons national defence committee said yesterday. Testifying at the Commission on Foreign Interference, Liberal MP John McKay (Scarborough-Guildwood, Ont.) said Chinese hacking of his own cellphone may have exposed contacts he built up through nine terms in Parliament: “Maybe I am just being paranoid.”



Tell me again that these people are not delusional bullies:

Calgary transgender activist Victoria Bucholtz made a spectacle at a public meeting she was in with Alberta Independent MLA Jennifer Johnson (Lacombe-Ponoka) after she refused to recognize transgender women as women.

 

But they aren't. 

 

 

It's called grooming:

With the help of a teacher in York Catholic District School Board (YCDSB), her parents were kept in the dark about her use of “they/them” pronouns and a new masculinized name in the classroom. Only in June 2022 did her parents learn what was quietly going on in school. When they objected and asked school leaders to include them in conversations about their daughter, the school called the Children’s Aid Society (CAS), which investigated the family.
In December 2023, Julie detransitioned after realizing she’d been swept up in a social fad that overlooked her underlying mental health issues. Now, her family is raising the alarm about the power schools have to keep parents in the dark.

 

 

 

The courts are setting a dangerous precedent where express wishes can be over-ridden and property dispersed because they and not the owner says so:

A B.C. Supreme Court judge found that family assets weren’t evenly distributed after the death of Yat Hei Law, the mother of Ginny Lam and William Law. Under the will, about $2.9 million was left to the son, $170,000 to daughter ...

It's called communism.



Speaking of communists:

If Kamala had truly become a prosecutor to protect women and girls, she was doing a poor job of it. A 10% increase in rapes was bad enough, but the numbers were even worse in context.

In 2010, when Kamala first ran for attorney general, there had been 8,325 rapes in the state. By 2016, when Kamala was fighting to take Sen. Barbara Boxer’s seat, there were 13,695 rapes.

This was not a 10% increase, but a shocking 64% increase.

Kamala, who claimed to be crusading for women, had presided over the single largest increase in sexual assaults on women in the state in a generation. The 34.87 per 100,000 statewide rape statistic people put Kamala’s California well above the national average of 29.6.

Why was California so bad for women under Attorney General Kamala Harris?

Kamala Harris did not become a prosecutor to protect women, but to protect criminals. The 64% increase in rapes on her watch was a symptom of that larger problem. Alongside notorious Soros DAs like George Gascon, she led a rebrand of soft on crime policies as ‘smart on crime’. This would also become the title of her book arguing for keeping many criminals out of prison.

Among other things, ‘Smart on Crime’ meant cutting quick and easy plea deals while working as the DA in San Francisco to maintain the appearance of the high conviction rates that she would cite when running for attorney general. The plea deals that her office later cut statewide, including for her political ally Mayor Bob ‘Filthy’ Filner, cooked statistics by raising conviction rates and lowering prison populations to create the illusion that pro-crime policies worked.

By the time Attorney General Kamala Harris was ready to move on from the Senate, arrest rates had fallen to their lowest point since 1969 while violent crime soared. Even as violent crime rates increased, arrests continue to fall with catastrophic results for public safety in the state.

Did Kamala actually have any special feeling for women who had been sexually assaulted?

Proposition 57, one of the pro-crime propositions that ended public safety in the state backed by key donors who would prove crucial to her political career, offered a painfully stark choice.

The pro-crime proposition granted early release for criminals convicted of a crime not officially listed as a “violent felony.” That included not only many violent criminals, but also some rapists who committed different kinds of sexual assaults including ‘rape with a foreign object’.

Attorney General Harris had become notorious for abusing her position to write heavily distorted summaries for pro-crime propositions. And Proposition 57 was no different. The debate over Prop 57 provided Kamala the opportunity to stand with her pro-crime backers or with women.



And now for something completely interesting:

“We know that inbreeding reduces genetic diversity in a population, which can be detrimental to their ability to survive if it occurs over a longer term.”

Unlike modern humans, who are more connected, the results from analyzing Thorin “supports the notion that social organization of Neanderthals was different to early modern humans,” said Sikora.

There is evidence of early modern humans in Siberia “forming so-called mating networks to avoid issues with inbreeding, while living in small communities,” said another researcher from the University of Copenhagen Tharsika Vimala.

But that behaviour was not found among Neanderthals.

“This is some of the evidence that we were looking for and needed to figure out how likely this hypothesis of them going extinct because of their isolated lifestyle is,” said Vimala, adding that more genomic data is needed to “paint a better picture of their history.”


The same people who had music, roasted their food and had funerary rites.

But I digress ...


Tuesday, September 17, 2024

There Are No Settlers, Only Citizens

There are people who built Canada.

There are people who work everyday to provide for themselves and their families.

Then there are those who see currency in collective brow-beating so as to guilt and minimise those who worked and continue to work to keep this country afloat.

I thought that disparaging other ethnic and racial groups was supposed to be a bad thing:

Although the term ostensibly divides between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians, most people use it as shorthand for “white.” It seems to be a way to talk about white people without explicitly referencing skin colour. It lets people attribute a whole slew of negative traits to one made-up cultural group — heaping all the worst aspects of Canada’s past onto currently existing people who happen to have the wrong skin colour.

Mostly this goes unsaid except when someone like the Anishinaabe writer Drew Hayden Taylor riffs on the term. He’s written about settlers a number of times and offers alternatives terms like “people of pallor,” or those who are “pigment denied.”

In one of his columns, he went through the words some of his Indigenous friends have for white people, such as a Lakota term that translates as “greedy person,” and the Mohawk phrase, “white foam people” — as in the foamy scum that forms on the top of lakes and rivers. ...

Most activists who are keen to talk about settlers and settler colonialism go out of their way to exclude non-whites. Don’t worry, they say, groups who are usually said to be “marginalized” — Black Canadians, recent immigrants, etc. — aren’t really settlers.

The pro-Palestinian lobby has adopted similar language — using a simple binary of oppressed and oppressor and mapping it onto the Middle East conflict. All you need to do is call the Israeli state an example of settler colonialism and you have all the answers. You know who the good guys are and who are the bad. Hint: the good guys aren’t the settlers.

That’s because the settler identity is also as much about a moralizing religious feeling as it is about race. To call yourself a settler is to awaken to a new faith. You embrace a new guilt-ridden sense of the country. It’s a modern hair shirt, a masochistic label by which you can do penance. By calling yourself a settler, you’re renouncing your privilege and announcing to everyone: “Don’t worry, I’m one of the good ones.”

The intellectuals who write books on the subject insist that you should feel “unsettled.” It’s right there in book titles, such as “Unsettling the Settler Within.” It’s hard to find a more Christian title than this — albeit in a seemingly secular fashion.

Canadians of previous generations used to spend a lot of time worrying about original sin — of how to overcome what the religious used to call the “taint,” and then turning to God for help. In the case of settlers, it’s the same thing under a new secular guise. Forgive me world, I am a Canadian of the wrong ancestry. Help me decolonize myself.

The effect is to divide Canadians into those who belong and those who don’t. It’s a citizenship test that so-called settlers need to write again and again — constantly professing their lack of belonging in order to appease the original sin of colonialism in the hope that someone, maybe even themselves, will allow them to belong.

So what are we talking about when we call ourselves settlers? It sure looks like we’re adopting a form of racism that wants to hide its worst aspects by steeping itself in moralizing self-flagellation. It’s a myopic way of picking out the worst aspects of the Euro-Canadian past and refusing to put them into a wider context. And don’t overlook the heavy dose of self-interest that’s often mixed into the moral righteousness.

This is an example of what Rob Henderson calls a “luxury belief.” That is, it’s a belief that gives status. It provides cultural and moral cachet. People have always tried to set themselves apart by their moral beliefs — by the way in which their heightened sense of right and wrong sets them apart. Self-confessing as a settler who wants to do better now does the same thing. By renouncing and denouncing their cultural past, self-professed settlers try to gain cultural prestige in the present.

Overt acts of racial discrimination are supposed to be illegal in Canada, yet the race-based settler moniker is spreading. Although I guess if you’re going to take it on yourself, there’s only so much anyone else can do.

 

Why don't people take their self-hatred and their grift elsewhere?

We don't need it here.