Wednesday, December 16, 2020

Mid-Week Post


 

Nine more reflecting days until the end of Advent ...

 

People chose a snowboard instructor over a trained economist and they're fine with it:

Last Friday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that his federal carbon tax, challenged in court by three provinces, would increase. This was no small tax hike, this was taking the federal carbon tax from $30 a tonne to $170 a tonne.

It’s also exactly what Trudeau promised not to do before the last election. Questions from the media allowed to quiz him? Zero.

That was zero on Friday and zero on Tuesday when the PM held another news conference, this one after releasing a video announcing that he was using the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to act fast on climate change. ...

Worthy of a question? I’d think so. Then again, I haven’t been able to ask Trudeau questions in months.

He’ll take questions from student newspapers but his office has blocked me no matter how often I call in. Maybe they’re worried I’d ask about his comments to the UN.

I’d also think the fact that the government swore up and down that they weren’t going to increase the carbon tax after last year’s election and that if they did, it would be after negotiations with the provinces would be worth a question.

** 

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he hopes there will be good news before the New Year for the families of two Canadians arbitrarily detained by Beijing for more than two years.

 

(Sidebar: two years of the Vichy government doing nothing.)


 

** 

Announcing his new plan for getting to net-zero on carbon emissions, Justin Trudeau told Canadians: “If we trust scientists with our health, as we do,  ...

Hence a video moving around on Twitter of the two doctors bantering just before their news conference was to begin.

What they didn’t realize is the microphones were already turned on and their private conversation was anything but.

“I don’t know why I bring all these papers. I never look at them,” Yaffe teased.

Williams talked about what is believed to be the COVID-19 numbers and asks did she “really say that?”

Yaffe chuckles and then says, “I just say whatever they write down for me.”

They both laugh and it sounds like Williams agrees.

Oops.

 

... then we must also trust their research and their expertise when it comes to other existential threats. And that includes climate change. There is no vaccine against a polluted planet. It’s up to us to act. Because there is a real cost to pollution. We’re paying the price already with record storms, wildfires, floods, and heat waves, which all carry real economic costs and real risks to our health. We chose to get straight to work on cutting pollution.” ...

Has Canada experienced record heat waves? Yes. In the 1930s and 1940s. The Climate Research Branch of the Meteorological Service of Canada published these trends in the Journal of Climate and stated, “No consistent trends are found for the higher percentiles of summer daily maximum temperature, indicating little change to the number of extreme hot summer days.” The data shows that minimum temperatures have increased, which increases averages, despite no increase in maximum temperatures. Is it time to have running fact checks on Trudeau just like they had on Donald Trump? It seems so.

Before the prime minister gets “straight to work” on economy-toppling policies to combat this existential threat, he should put some trust in scientific data and get his facts straight.

**

The top donations to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s local riding association came almost entirely from British Columbia in 2016. Eighty-three per cent of contributions for $15,000 — the maximum amount allowed at the federal level — came from out of province. That’s pretty much the exact opposite of how most riding associations raise funds.

**

The Department of Industry pressed for the purchase of $200 million pandemic ventilators that federal health managers didn’t want, according to internal emails. The sale by Thornhill Medical of North York, Ont. was personally endorsed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau after an unidentified official told health staff they were “too fussy.”



Also in "Oh my God! They're insufferable!" news:

Below are literal quotes from the ad, and links provided by the Canadian tourism website's guide to the ad.

An ad supposedly about Tourism, and how "NICE" Canada is, by which they mean Canada is nothing but leftwing political agenda items and virtue-signalling.

NICE is for a moment, putting down your dystopian novel, In a Muskoka chair,

Opening your eyes knowing this world can be NICE.

The link at "dystopian novel" goes to a Wikipedia entry for Canadian sexual-dystopian writer Margaret Atwood, who wrote the Karen Science Fiction book The Handmaid's Tale.

Which is really just 50 Shades of Gray for feminist Karens who want to get off on sexual domination but want to pretend they're Fighting the Patriarchy while flicking their beans.

Do they really think that people make vacation plans based on visiting the place where The Handmaid's Tale was written?

Who the FUCK would do that? How insane would such a hypothetical person have to be, and how insane are Canadian bureaucrats to think that this is a big draw?

 

(Sidebar: insane? Try colossally stupid.)

What?! The f---?!

 

 

The best press a government can buy:

A Montréal daily La Presse is the first newspaper in the country to be officially endorsed by the Canada Revenue Agency. Tax managers called La Presse a “qualified Canadian journalism organization,” a designation required for any publisher seeking taxpayer subsidies. La Presse had no comment: “It is a terrible concept.”

 

We don't have to trade with China:

The Department of Foreign Affairs ignored warnings for a background check on a China security company named a federal contractor, records show. “I am really concerned,” a procurement officer wrote weeks before the department approved a $6.8 million standing offer for Nuctech Company Ltd., partly owned by state-run China National Nuclear Corporation: “Are the facilities not secured?”

**

For the first time we not only have evidence of Uighur forced labour in manufacturing, in garment making, it’s directly about the picking of cotton, and I think that is such a game-changer.”

 

I'll just leave this right here:  

Chinese textile firms are increasingly using North Korean factories to take advantage of cheaper labor across the border, traders and businesses in the border city of Dandong told Reuters.

 

Also

Correspondence between Hunter Biden and CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming from 2017 shows President-elect Joe Biden's son extending "best wishes from the entire Biden family," and urging the chairman to "quickly" send a $10 million wire to "properly fund and operate" the Biden joint venture with the now-bankrupt Chinese energy company.

The $10 million transfer to the joint venture was never completed.

 

 

You don't really think that these suggestions will ever be taken seriously, do you?:

A Massive Tax Cut for working class and middle class Canadians.

...

Eliminate the Carbon Tax

...

Cut the GST

...

Expand The Canada Child Benefit

...

The Canada Prosperity Dividend

...

Reduced Immigration Levels

...

Small Business Tax Holiday

...

Increased Enforcement against Illegal Offshore Tax Havens

...

Balanced Government Spending

...

Slashing Foreign Aid, Redirecting Spending Towards Canadians

...

Targeted Tariffs

...

 


B@$#@rds:

If someone who has tested positive for COVID-19 commits suicide, the Ontario Ministry of Health will record their cause of death as COVID-19.

As of Sunday, December 13, Public Health Ontario counted 140,181 cumulative cases of COVID-19, and 3,949 deaths.

“As a result of how data is recorded by health units into public health information databases, the ministry is not able to accurately separate how many people died directly because of COVID versus those who died with a COVID infection,” Ontario Ministry of Health Senior Communications Advisor Anna Miller said to True North in an email.

“A death that occurs in an active case of COVID-19 is counted as a COVID-19 death.”

 

Is it because despondent people offed themselves because of the lockdowns or this beefs up the numbers? Help me out.


Also:

The Public Health Agency worried it didn’t have enough body bags for pandemic victims after failing to stock up on masks and other medical supplies, according to internal emails. “It is a somber but necessary part of pandemic planning,” wrote staff: “Do we need special ones to deal with people who died from Covid-19?”

 

 

What did these guys do before someone else built water filtration plants for them?:

Consider what non-Indigenous Canadians do. I live in a rural area. There is no municipal water service. Attempts to drill a well were unsuccessful when the parish house was built 40 years ago. So the parishioners installed a cistern in the basement to collect rainwater and snow melt — an environmentally friendly measure built decades before such things were trendy.

For four decades, there has been water aplenty for the resident pastors. A few hundred dollars pays for an ultraviolet filter, which keeps the water clean.

There are millions of Canadians who live in rural areas where there is no municipal water connection. They check out water options before they buy or build, and find solutions that they can afford. It is quite common, actually. Clean drinking water in Canada is not hard to get.

What might be the difference for Indigenous-Canadians? It must be that they are so remote. A cistern system requires a water truck to be available to make deliveries when and if it ever runs dry. How would that work at the ends of the earth?

As the Post’s editorial put it, “Many of these projects present unique challenges. Heavy equipment can only get into some remote villages by ice roads that are only accessible for short periods. Others sit on beds of granite, which is incredibly costly to tunnel through. Many are in remote areas of the country where contractors are in short supply.”

Perhaps. But consider the Wahta Mohawk First Nation in Ontario, for which five years and $2 billion were not sufficient to get the job done. There are 200 people on the reserve, which is so remote that a major freeway runs through it.

You may recognize the name. A land claims settlement back in 2003 permitted the closure of the “Wahta Gap,” eight kilometres of Highway 400 that now run through the reserve. If it is possible to build a major highway through the Muskoka region, it ought to be possible to get some clean water in there, no? How many remote million-dollar cottages lack clean water?

 

 

Why, this doesn't sound suspicious at all!: 

A man who’s made a living developing fraud detection algorithms has discovered a curious phenomenon: Counties that started using Dominion Voting Systems machines have on average moved by 2 to 3 points to the Democrat presidential candidate from the Republican compared to counties that didn’t adopt the machines.

The difference persisted even after he controlled for a number of factors, including county population and various demographic characteristics.

“I recommend we audit the machines,” he concluded.

**

A group of Republicans in Pennsylvania on Tuesday has again urged the U.S. Supreme Court to take up their lawsuit that challenges the 2020 election results in the state.

The nation’s top court had previously rejected the group’s request for immediate injunctive relief to block Pennsylvania from taking further steps to certify the 2020 election results. At the time, the group’s lawyer, Greg Teufel, said the case was not over because his clients were planning to file a formal petition to ask the court to review the lawsuit, which they hadn’t filed the first time.

The lawyer filed a petition for a writ of certiorari on Dec. 11, docketed by the court on Dec. 15, which argues that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was wrong when it dismissed their case because the justices thought the plaintiffs filed their case with unreasonable delay.

“This Court should not turn a blind eye to unconstitutional election laws that permit massive vote dilution and have a significant impact on election outcomes, as the Pennsylvania Supreme Court did,” the petition (pdf) states.

The case at hand—cited as Kelly v. Pennsylvania—argues that Act 77, a law that made voting by mail without an excuse legal in Pennsylvania, was enacted in violation of Pennsylvania’s constitution. The state constitution, the plaintiffs argue, prohibits absentee voting in Pennsylvania except for four limited circumstances.

The lawsuit alleges that the state law is “another illegal attempt to override the limitations on absentee voting prescribed in the Pennsylvania Constitution, without first following the necessary procedure to amend the constitution to allow for the expansion.”


 

Who does this remind you of?:

A new paper in the scientific journal Personality and Individual Differences posits a Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood (TIV), an archetype defined by several truly toxic traits: a pathological need for recognition, a difficulty empathizing with others, feelings of moral superiority, and, importantly, a thirst for vengeance.

 

And now for something completely different:

Ontario Provincial Police officers who attended a single-vehicle collision in North Grenville, just south of Ottawa, found an unusual culprit with their paws on the wheel: the family dog.

The incident occurred Dec. 9, when officers responded to reports of a car in the ditch. Not only was there a car in the ditch, there was also a “pug-like dog” in the car.



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