Quotulatiousness

October 13, 2022

Are we to believe that Prime Minister Trudeau lied about the Freedom Convoy? To the fainting couches!

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Some recent revelations show that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was … less than perfectly honest … about the intelligence reports he was receiving about the Freedom Convoy:

It has now been revealed that statements by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau associating the “Freedom Convoy” with Nazism were unfounded, according to Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) documents published by Blacklock’s Reporter.

On January 31, 2022, Trudeau conflated support for the “Freedom Convoy” with “Nazi symbolism” in his first press conference addressing the massive anti-mandate demonstration that captured the world’s attention in the first two months of the year.

Trudeau also stated at the time that he would not meet with the truckers because of their supposed “hateful rhetoric” and “violence towards citizens”, behavior he consistently implied was a core aspect of the movement’s strategy to put an end to COVID jab mandates nationwide.

Contradicting Trudeau’s characterization, the now-revealed documentation from CSIS, dated February 2 – just two days after the prime minister’s initial comments – explain that the protest was predominantly comprised of “patriotic Canadians standing up for their democratic rights” and not of those holding extremists beliefs.

Detailing how the presence of bigoted imagery is “not unique” when it comes to large-scale protests, CSIS also noted that the presence of swastikas on some flags was “not necessarily to self-identify as Nazis but to imply the Prime Minister and federal government are acting like Nazis by imposing public health mandates”.

It was therefore the conclusion of CSIS that while some attendees had manually added swastikas to flags, it was to associate Trudeau with Nazism as a statement of their opposition to the ideology.

Two weeks after the CSIS report was produced, Trudeau doubled-down on his conflation of the Freedom Convoy with Nazism, accusing the Conservative Party of Canada, and in particular Jewish MP Melissa Lantsmann, of standing “with people who wave swastikas”.

October 12, 2022

Medically assisted suicide in Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Law — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Common Sense, Rupa Subramanya discusses how quickly MAID (Medical Assistance in Death) became a commonality in Canada:

Toronto General Hospital in 2005.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

When we think of assisted suicide or euthanasia, we imagine a limited number of elderly people with late-stage cancer or advanced ALS in severe pain. The argument for helping them die is clear: Death is imminent. Why should they be forced to suffer?

In 2015, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that assisted suicide was constitutional. In June 2016, Parliament passed Bill C-14, otherwise known as the Medical Assistance in Dying Act. MAiD was now the law of the land. Anyone who could show that their death was “reasonably foreseeable” was eligible. In this respect, Canada was hardly alone: The Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, Australia, and New Zealand, among others, allow assisted suicide. So do ten states in the U.S.

In 2017, the first full year in which MAiD, which is administered by provincial governments, was in operation, 2,838 people opted for assisted suicide, according to a government report. By 2021, that figure had jumped to 10,064 — accounting for more than 3 percent of all deaths in Canada that year.

There have been a total of 31,664 MAiD deaths and the large majority of those people were 65 to 80 when they died. In 2017, only 34 MAiD deaths were in the 18- to 45-year-old category. In 2018, that figure rose to at least 49. In 2019, it was 103; in 2020, 118; and in 2021, 139.

Today, thousands of people who could live for many years are applying — successfully — to kill themselves.

Indeed, in some Canadian provinces nearly 5 percent of deaths are MAiD deaths. In 2021, the province of Quebec reported that 4.7 percent of deaths in the province were due to MAiD; in British Columbia, the number was 4.8 percent. Progressive Vancouver Island is unofficially known as the “assisted-death capital of the world”, doctors told me.

Why the dramatic increase? Over the past few years, doctors have taken an increasingly liberal view when it comes to defining “reasonably foreseeable” death. Then, last year, the government amended the original legislation, stating that one could apply for MAiD even if one’s death were not reasonably foreseeable. This second track of applicants simply had to show that they had a condition that was “intolerable to them” and could not “be relieved under conditions that they consider acceptable”. This included applicants like Margaret Marsilla’s son, Kiano.

In 2023, those numbers are almost certain to rise.

Next March, the government is scheduled to expand the pool of eligible suicide-seekers to include the mentally ill and “mature minors”. According to Canada’s Department of Justice, parents are generally “entitled to make treatment decisions on their children’s behalf. The mature minor doctrine, however, allows children deemed sufficiently mature to make their own treatment decisions.” (The federal government does not define “mature”, nor does it specify who determines whether one is mature. On top of that, the doctrine varies from one province to another.)

Dr. Dawn Davies, a palliative care physician who supported MAiD when it was first conceived, said she had “tons of worries” about where this might lead. She could imagine kids with personality disorders or other mental health issues saying they wanted to die. “Some of them will mean it, some of them won’t,” she said. “And we won’t necessarily be able to discern who is who.”

Hugh Scher, an attorney advising Margaret Marsilla, told me: “While other countries have explored extending assisted suicide to minors, those governments have insisted on substantial safeguards, including parental notification and consent. Canada is poised to become the most permissive euthanasia regime in the world, including for minors and people with only psychiatric illness, having already removed the foreseeability of death or terminal illness as an essential condition to access euthanasia or assisted suicide.”

October 11, 2022

Quebec politics explained (in Quebec!)

Filed under: Cancon, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

J.J. McCullough
Published 9 Oct 2022

Politics in Canada’s French province. Thanks to Bespoke Post for sponsoring this video! New subscribers get 20% off their first box — go to https://www.bespokepost.com/jj20 and enter code JJ20 at checkout.

My election watching buddy Sisyphus55: https://www.youtube.com/c/Sisyphus55
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Looking for a full definition of “Two-Spirit” is a fruitless task

Filed under: Cancon, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Quillette, Jonathan Kay tries to find a satisfactory definition of the term “Two-Spirit” but despite his best efforts comes up empty:

On August 28th, Justin Trudeau’s government announced “Canada’s first federal 2SLGBTQI+ action plan: Building Our Future With Pride“, which was described as “a whole-of-government approach to achieve a future where everyone in Canada is truly free to be who they are and love who they love”. One aim of the $100-million plan, the government explained, is to convince Canadians to adopt the term “2SLGBTQI+” in place of “LGBT” — on the basis that 2SLGBTQI+ “is more inclusive and places the experiences of Indigenous 2SLGBTQI+ communities at the foreground as the first 2SLGBTQI+ peoples in North America”.

The two characters given pride of place, “2S”, signify “Two-Spirit”, a term that’s been a form of self-identification among Indigenous North Americans since the 1990s. But the descriptor doesn’t appear to be in wide everyday use outside Canada. And so non-Canadian readers will sometimes ask me to explain its meaning — at which point, I have to admit that I can’t. And I’m hardly alone: While most Canadians know that the “Two-Spirit” category is connected to Indigenous identity in some way, there’s an unspoken rule against requesting more specific information.

Last week, the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO), the province’s elementary-school teachers union, published what the authors present as a primer on Two-Spirit identity, a document written in close consultation with 2S-identified Indigenous people. Since the report’s target audience consists of workaday teachers who educate young students, I imagined that Niizh Manidoowag: Two-Spirit might finally provide me with a straightforward explanation of what the 2S identifier actually means.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t. In fact, one of the main themes of the 32-page document is that the task of defining the Two-Spirit concept is (quite literally) beyond the powers of Western language and epistemology. And in any case, the category is almost completely open-ended: The act of proclaiming oneself Two-Spirited could be a statement about one’s gender, or sexual orientation, or both, or neither. Or 2S can be a statement about one’s politics, spirituality, or simply one’s desire to present as “anti-colonial”.

According to the ETFO report, there are only two non-negotiable elements of a Two-Spirited individual—both of which are spelled out multiple times in the document, and in bold letters. Neither rule is concerned with sex or gender, but rather with race and political orientation: To be Two-Spirited requires (1) that you are Indigenous; and (2) that you are engaged in a “decolonizing act of resistance”:

    There is no one way to prescribe usage of the term [Two-Spirit] … There is no one way to define the term Two-Spirit. Two-Spirit people and their roles predate colonial impositions, expectations, and assumptions of sex, gender, and sexual orientation. Where colonial worldviews often frame concepts as linear, compartmentalized, categorical, and hierarchical, Indigenous worldviews tend to be understood as non-linear, reciprocal, (w)holistic, relational, and independent of Eurocentric perspectives and framings. As such, identifying as two-spirit is a decolonizing act of resistance in and of itself.

The term Two-Spirit was first popularized in 1990, at an inter-tribal Native American/First Nations gay and lesbian summit in Winnipeg, and is derived from the Ojibwa words Niizh Manidoowag. By one account, delegates were looking for a term that would “distance Native/First Nations people from non-Natives, as well as from the words ‘berdache‘ [a European term suggesting deviancy] and ‘gay'”. But lore has it that the true originator is a Fisher River First Nation woman named Myra Laramee, who experienced a vision of the world as seen “through the lens of having both feminine and masculine spirit”.

On the surface, that sounds like what today might be called “non-binary”. But that analogy fails on a fundamental level. The idea of gender identity relates to the (perceived) nature of oneself. Two-Spirit people, on the other hand, are described in the ETFO report as possessing a savant-like power (or “lens”) that channels truths about the nature of the external world.

The Two Spirit concept is also entirely distinct from run-of-the-mill gender dysphoria. In everyday progressive gender parlance, it is typically insisted that trans women are just like other women. Two-Spirited people, by contrast, are presented as an entirely unique specimen whose arrival within traditional Indigenous societies was “celebrated” — “highly valued” “gifts” who “possess the best of both gendered identities”.

A tribute to the F-101 ‘Voodoo’ Fighter

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Matsimus
Published 4 Jun 2022

The McDonnell F-101 Voodoo is a supersonic jet fighter which served the United States Air Force (USAF) and the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF).

Initially designed by McDonnell Aircraft Corporation as a long-range bomber escort (known as a penetration fighter) for the USAF’s Strategic Air Command (SAC), the Voodoo was instead developed as a nuclear-armed fighter-bomber for the USAF’s Tactical Air Command (TAC), and as a photo reconnaissance aircraft based on the same airframe. An F-101A set a number of world speed records for jet-powered aircraft, including fastest airspeed, attaining 1,207.6 miles (1,943.4 km) per hour on 12 December 1957.[1] They operated in the reconnaissance role until 1979.

Delays in the 1954 interceptor project led to demands for an interim interceptor aircraft design, a role that was eventually won by the B model of the Voodoo. This required extensive modifications to add a large radar to the nose of the aircraft, a second crew member to operate it, and a new weapons bay using a rotating door that kept its four AIM-4 Falcon missiles or two AIR-2 Genie rockets hidden within the airframe until it was time to be fired. The F-101B entered service with USAF Air Defense Command in 1959 and the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1961. US examples were handed off to the USAF Air National Guard where they served until 1982. Canadian examples remained in service until 1984.
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October 10, 2022

Chinese Warlords and the Royal Canadian Navy – WW2 – OOTF 028

Filed under: Cancon, China, Germany, History, Japan, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 9 Oct 2022

In today’s episode of Out of the Foxholes, we discuss the role of Chinese warlords played in the war against Japan, while also shining a bit more light on the Canadian Navy and its impact on WW2.
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Janice Fiamengo on the #MGTOW affair – “In short, men who ‘go their own way’ have decided that they need women even less than the mythical fish needed its wheeled transport”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Recently, much impassioned wailing and howling has been directed at new Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre for his media team’s use of the notorious, misogynistic, coded-hate-speech metatag #MGTOW on postings to social media. Janice Fiamengo calls out the bold hypocrisy of most of the critics:

Remember “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle?”

Popularly credited to feminist icon Gloria Steinem, the slogan embodied the insouciance and independence claimed by Second Wave feminists. Women could get along just fine without men (though not without their tax money, as it turned out — more on this later) and lesbian feminists like Adrienne Rich (in “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”) explicitly called on all women to withdraw their caring from men as an act of female solidarity.

Nice, eh?

Anyone who objected to the anti-male rhetoric was dismissed as an apologist for patriarchal oppression (“Do you have a problem with equality?”), and generations of young women were given the message that wanting to love and be loved by a man was a betrayal of the sisterhood. What else was one to make of Professor of Law Catharine MacKinnon’s claim, in her 1989 essay for the journal Ethics, that “The major distinction between intercourse (normal) and rape (abnormal) is that the normal happens so often that one cannot get anyone to see anything wrong with it” (p. 336-337).

For decades, feminists in Canada have been given a free pass to vilify men as a group. In 1978, women’s groups held the first “Women Reclaim the Night” march in downtown Vancouver. It was a raucous, aggressive, property-destroying affair culminating in the symbolic murder of a stuffed male “Rapist” mannequin who was “literally stomped to shreds” by woman warriors.

[…]

So it is rather rich, now, five decades into the feminist revolt, to see pundits and political commentators huffing and puffing in outrage about MGTOW, dubbed a “misogynist men’s rights movement” or a “far-right misogynistic online movement”, and calling on newly-minted Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre (who, alas, seems eager to oblige) to disavow them. MGTOW stands for Men Going Their Own Way, and it was a happy day for the mainstream feminist-left when Global News allegedly discovered that Poilievre’s team had tagged many of his videos with the acronym.

The hypocrisy is off the charts.

It’s doubtful that any of the commentators getting on their high horses knows anything about MGTOW except the hysterical nonsense feminists have cooked up. MGTOW is not an official movement, far less an “organization”, as Poilievre mistakenly called it. It has no recognized leadership, no designated spokespersons, no political program, no lobbying power, and no public presence. It is not actually interested in “men’s rights” except to point out that men don’t have any. It has no philosophical connection with incels. It is basically a loose (mainly online) affiliation of men who have decided to check out of women’s lives.

Aren’t feminists always saying that they want men to stop dominating them, subjugating them, pestering them, harassing them, controlling them, and making them uncomfortable? That’s what MGTOW are all about.

October 8, 2022

Faint glimmers of hope for Canadians’ “right to repair”?

Michael Geist on the state of play in modifying Canada’s digital lock rules to allow consumers a tiny bit more flexibility in how they can get their electronic devices repaired:

“The Self-Repair Manifesto from ifixit.com ‘If you can’t fix it, you don’t own it’. Hear, hear!” by dullhunk is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Canadian anti-circumvention laws (also known as digital lock rules) are among the strictest in the world, creating unnecessary barriers to innovation and consumer rights. The rules are required under the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Internet Treaties, but those treaties leave considerable flexibility in how they should be implemented. This is reflected in the countless examples around the world of countries adopting flexible anti-circumvention rules that seek to maintain the copyright balance. Canada was pressured into following the restrictive U.S. approach in 2012, establishing a framework is not only more restrictive than required under the WIPO treaties, but even more restrictive than the U.S. system.

One of the biggest differences between Canada and the U.S. is that the U.S. conducts a review every three years to determine whether new exceptions to a general prohibition on circumventing a digital locks are needed. This has led to the adoption of several exceptions to TPMs for innovative activities such as automotive security research, repairs and maintenance, archiving and preserving video games, and for remixing from DVDs and Blu-Ray sources. Canada has no such system as the government instead provided assurances that it could address new exceptions through a regulation-making power. In the decade since the law has been in effect, successive Canadian governments have never done so. This is particularly problematic where the rules restrict basic property rights by limiting the ability to repair products or ensure full interoperability between systems.

The best policy would be to clarify that the anti-circumvention rules do not apply to non-infringing uses. This would enable the anti-circumvention rules to work alongside the user rights in the Copyright Act (also known as limitations and exceptions) without restricting their lawful exercise. This approach was endorsed by the 2019 Canadian copyright review, which unanimously concluded:

    it agrees that the circumvention of TPMs should be allowed for non-infringing purposes, especially given the fact that the Nintendo case provided such a broad interpretation of TPMs. In other words, while anti-circumvention rules should support the use of TPMs to enable the remuneration of rights-holders and prevent copyright infringement, they should generally not prevent someone from committing an act otherwise authorized under the Act.

The government has not acted on this recommendation, but two private members bills are working their way through the House of Commons that provide some hope of change. First, Bill S-244 on the right of repair. Introduced by Liberal MP Wilson Miao in February, the bill this week passed second reading unanimously and has been referred to the Industry committee for further study. The lack of a right of repair exception in Canadian digital lock rules has hindered both consumers and Canadian innovation significantly, leaving consumers unable to repair their electronic devices and farmers often locked out of their farm equipment. After farmers protested against similar copyright restrictions, the U.S. established specific exceptions permitting digital locks to be circumvented to allow repair of software-enabled devices.

Given the impact on consumers, the agricultural sector, and the environment, a provision that explicitly permits circumvention for purposes of the right of repair in Canada is long overdue. Indeed, such an approach is consistent with the 2019 copyright review recommendation:

    Recommendation 19

    That the Government of Canada examine measures to modernize copyright policy with digital technologies affecting Canadians and Canadian institutions, including the relevance of technological protection measures within copyright law, notably to facilitate the maintenance, repair or adaptation of a lawfully-acquired device for non-infringing purposes.

October 7, 2022

The “two movies on the same screen” effect: most Canadians see impending collapse but our “elites” think everything’s peachy

Tara Henley contrasts the reality many Canadians are facing day-to-day with the out-of-touch “laptop elites” who, as a class, did great through the last two and a half years and who have no clue at all why anyone would see the state of the country as anything like a collapse:

Pierre and Ana Poilievre at a Conservative leadership rally, 21 April, 2022.
Photo by Wikipageedittor099 via Wikimedia Commons.

There has been much discussion lately about the state of our nation — and whether or not we, as a society, are in decline.

Former journalist and Justin Trudeau speechwriter (and current Substacker) Colin Horgan published a provocative essay at The Line last month, arguing that our country is vulnerable to extremists who believe that “the current system of liberal democracy is inherently corrupt and corrupted, verging on collapse, and that, in the extreme, its downfall can and should be hastened by acts of violence”.

Horgan worries that Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre — who’s been actively speaking to this ambient vibe of distress and dissatisfaction — could accelerate such destabilization.

Poilievre does not say extreme things, Horgan concedes, but Poilievre’s message is “still poison” because “what he telegraphs is the vision of a social order at a tipping point, with the suggestion that it can be easily pushed over”.

In short, Poilievre has tapped into “an Internet language of decline”.

There’s a thriving cottage industry in the Canadian legacy media doing everything they can to tar Poilievre as a Canadian Hitler and to continue the re-typing and re-phrasing of government talking points for the mass market. The government subsidies to “approved” media outlets will help keep the lights on a bit longer as they continue to lose audience share — and trust.

Our quality of life has been eroded for some time now. Wages have been stagnant for decades. Precarious work is the order of the day, both for the working class and professionals. Rents and property prices are through the roof; according to the Globe and Mail, since 2000, domestic home prices have increased by 420 percent. Inflation is high. Gas is expensive. Food costs are up. We are coping with a crisis of social isolation. Our opioid epidemic rages on.

Meanwhile, pandemic policy has benefited the laptop class and harmed the most vulnerable among us. (See lockdowns and school closures, for starters.)

Indeed, there has been extreme winners and losers during the COVID era, which saw a massive transfer of wealth upwards. Billionaires in this country, in fact, saw their wealth increase 68 percent during the pandemic.

Should we be surprised that those on the losing end are expressing their frustration?

[…]

Things have only gotten worse as the pandemic has dragged on and citizens have been hit with high inflation and rising interest rates (while also staring down other looming financial catastrophes).

According to an Angus Reid poll out this week, nine out of ten Canadians have cut their household budgets due to inflation and high prices. And 46 percent of Canadians say their personal finances are worse off now than they were at this time last year.

But if the material conditions in this country are dire, so too is the national mood.

In fact, there is a gaping wound at the centre of our national psyche.

Essential workers have laboured throughout the COVID crisis, endangering their health and that of their families, in order to keep society running. In return for their heroic efforts, the unvaccinated among them — many of whom previously contracted COVID and have natural immunity — have seen themselves ostracized and smeared as racists and misogynists. Their fundamental values have been mocked in the public square, and their basic rights and freedoms, including freedom of expression, have been compromised. Some have lost jobs, social lives and more for declining vaccination.

To comprehend the human toll this has taken, one need only look to the grassroots #TrudeauMustGo campaign on Twitter.

The consequences of vaccine mandates should have been covered in great depth by our national press. But instead, the Canadian media largely fell down on this story, often generating coverage that uncritically reproduced the Liberal party line.

Trust in the Canadian news media is now at its lowest point in seven years.

And judging from the reader mail I get, the Liberals’ decision to turn vaccine mandates into a wedge issue has had significant social consequences — tearing apart families, communities, and workplaces in ways that may take years to recover from.

All told, what we are witnessing is not merely a state of decline. It is a form of collapse. A collapse of the social contract. A collapse of the expectations we grew up with — that if you worked hard and respected the law, you could have a home, a family if you chose, and, crucially, a say in our democracy.

What we are living through is a collapse of life as we knew it in Canada.

What was once a stable, prosperous, diverse democracy is now a nation divided, rife with fear and anger, and financial and social instability.

Not only has our Prime Minister failed to grasp this, but he’s actively stoked tensions.

October 2, 2022

“We are governed by a transnational criminal enterprise”

Elizabeth Nickson on the deliberately created web of disasters the entire western world faces thanks to our governments’ allegiance to philosophies promulgated by organizations like the WEF:

We are governed by a transnational criminal enterprise.

What are you doing about it?

One sentence caught my attention in Giorgia Meloni’s speeches this week. She said that most insulting thing for her and other Italians, was the EU’s order to erase all references to Christianity, Christmas and Christ from all government documents by Christmas (ironic) of 2022.

This is another of those blows from the One Worlders that feels like someone is stepping on your heart and pressing down. I may not be a church-going Christian, but it defines me like almost nothing else. It is my history, my literature, my culture, my ethical standards, my everything. Christianity defines the western world, it is an activist faith, it orders a congregant to spread goodness wherever he or she goes. Erasing it is a crime similar in effect as the death camps of which our leaders dream. It destroys the ground of our being.

And then I think of my father. Look at this photograph. As a teen, he was very much like the kids of today, self-involved, vain, a girl magnet like his great grandson, Bryson, who never sees a girl who doesn’t interest him. But he was one of the few fully adult men I have known. I want to say only, but I’ve met thousands of men and know few of them as well as I knew him.

It wasn’t until long after my father’s death that I discovered that he was at the tip of the spear of the British Army as they landed at D-Day, pressed forward into France and then into Germany. The Canadian Army, the fourth largest standing army in the world in 1945, had a reputation of brutalism like no other army, famous for it in WW1. This was in part because it was built – as was Canada – by some of the fiercest medieval clans in Europe. Just before James 1 murdered the British border clan heads, Elizabeth I said that with 10,000 such men, James could topple any throne in Europe. Canada attracted those clans, the climate, the terrain was the roughest in the world, and only they could conquer it. And in 1943, they formed an army like none other.

Being his child, I can grope myself into what he was feeling during those two years under remorseless fire, on the ground, buried into caves on the Rhine that last winter, responsible for hundreds of men. He woke up every day for two years, with death certain. I have his Book of Common Prayer. It is swollen with use, especially the prayers for the dead he read over the bodies of his friends. After the war he was put in charge of a Nazi camp and told to “sort those people out”. Kind of like a desert in hell, I would think.

His faith carried him through those years. He was welded to it by the time it was over, although he never proselytized, it was just part of him. Christianity acts, with good men, as spur and comfort. It informed every ethical decision he made. After the war, he came home and worked, fighting unions that destroyed the textile industry in Quebec, trying to keep his factory going in the face of actual bags of burning shit thrown at our house. He retired at 55 with a non-compete clause and spent the rest of his life in charity, working for free. He ran in succession one enterprise after another. His entire life, all of it, he used his spare time to work in the community. Three meetings a week, no matter what. He knew where every sparrow fell in the country village I grew up in, and in the city to which he retired. And if he missed one, his uncles, aunts or cousins picked them up and set them right. It was how they lived.

That used to be a requirement for adulthood. He learned it from his family who came to the New World in 1630, and who all, to a man or woman, worked for free in whatever village or county they found themselves in, making sure everyone was all right. In the towns and cities they settled, across the US and Canada from 1600 to 1945, you were only considered an adult if you rolled up your sleeves and worked for other people in the place that you lived, without being paid, and without expecting praise.

If you didn’t do that work, you were considered a baby that everyone else had to carry. You were made to feel that.

It was that above every single other thing, that made the US and Canada the magnet it is for every other race and country in the world. Self-government by adults. And by the way, for the race-hustlers, they were officers on the Underground Railroad, when it wasn’t popular to be on the side of people of color. They married into Indian bands when it was absolutely beyond the pale.

The boomer generation abandoned that task, and the devolution of the culture was swift. The left creates jobs by creating bureaucrats and the responsibilities that used to be held in common, solved in common, done for goodness alone, are now done for money and benefits by people who generally do not live in the regions they supervise. They have screwed up everything because they can’t make decisions because they have no courage. And they have no courage because they have no ethical standards. Their only standard is whether it increases their own comfort. And that of maybe two other people. To whom they are related.

The only thing they create is debt and obstacles to growth. Aside from technical/engineering standards, (which are being broken) everything they do, can be done by citizens acting in concert.

Our disengagement led to our current economic catastrophe, like nothing else. It is the reason the globalist criminals were able to take over. It is why we now sit in danger of nuclear war.

September 30, 2022

Witness about to testify on Bill C-11? Time to break out good old Parliamentary bullying and intimidation tactics!

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s had to believe, but the Liberal government continues to defy expectations in their continued mission to prevent public participation in political processes, as Michael Geist documents here:

“In the east wing of the Centre Block is the Senate chamber, in which are the thrones for the Canadian monarch and consort, or for the federal viceroy and his or her consort, and from which either the sovereign or the governor general gives the Speech from the Throne and grants Royal Assent to bills passed by parliament.”
Photo and description by Saffron Blaze via Wikimedia Commons.

The Senate Bill C-11 hearings have provided a model for the much-needed, engaged, non-partisan inquiry that was largely missing from the House committee’s theatrics in which the government cut off debate on over 150 amendments. But this week those hearings attracted attention for another reason: serious charges of witness intimidation and bullying by government MPs, most notably Canadian Heritage Parliamentary Secretary Chris Bittle (yes, the same Bittle who last month suggested I was a racist and a bully for raising concerns about Minister Pablo Rodriguez silence over Canadian Heritage funding of an anti-semite as part of its anti-hate program).

The Globe and Mail reported late on Tuesday night that Bittle – together with his colleague, Liberal MP Lisa Hepfner – had sent a letter to the Lobbying Commissioner to seek an investigation into the funding of Digital First Canada, a group representing digital first creators. The letter may have been shopped around to other MPs as Liberal MP Anthony Housefather has told the Globe he did not sign it. DFC’s Executive Director, Scott Benzie, had appeared before the Heritage committee months ago and Bittle used his time to focus on the organization’s funding. Leaving aside the fact that government MPs reserve these kinds of questions only for critics of Bill C-11 (there were no similar questions this week from Ms. Hepfner to the Director of Digital Content Next, whose organization supports Bill C-18 and counts Fox News among its members), the timing of Globe story was incredibly troubling. The Lobbyist Commissioner letter was apparently filed nearly two months ago and Benzie had been assured that he was compliant with the law. Yet the story was presumably leaked to coincide with Benzie’s appearance before the Senate committee last night.

The letter and leak smacked of witness intimidation and bullying with the government seeking to undermine critics of the legislation hours before a Senate appearance. Indeed, the entire tactic felt like the policy equivalent of a SLAPP suit, which are used to intimidate and silence critics through litigation. By the end of the day, the tactic had clearly backfired on Bittle and the government. Conservative MP John Nater filed a point of privilege in the House of Commons, arguing that Bittle had attempted to intimidate a Senate witness.

    I rise on a question of privilege, for which I gave notice earlier this same day, regarding the conduct of the member for St. Catharines, who attempted to intimidate Scott Benzie, a witness appearing before a committee of the Senate studying Bill C-11, an act to amend the Broadcasting Act and to make related and consequential amendments to other acts, as reported yesterday by the Globe and Mail.

    While I appreciate that this attempt to intimidate relates to proceedings of a Senate committee currently studying Bill C-11, the culprit in this case is a member of the House, and that same witness appeared before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage during its deliberations on Bill C-11, an appearance where Mr. Benzie, no doubt, first established himself as an undesirable witness for the government on the merits of Bill C-11.

The government response was surprisingly muted with MP Mark Gerretsen simply asking for a couple of days to formulate a response, perhaps recognizing that defending Bittle would mean defending the indefensible.

September 28, 2022

Pemmican: History’s Power Bar

Filed under: Americas, Cancon, Food, History, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 27 Sep 2022
(more…)

September 27, 2022

Is Kayla Lemieux the leading edge of LGBT tolerance or a “dude gaming the system”?

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Health, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Back on September 16, I posted a link to the then-breaking story of the teacher in Halton whose prosthetic breasts had poked into news headlines everywhere: “This is either the teacher of the year (come on, you know that’s inevitable because reasons) or someone doing an epic physical and psychological parody of our culture right now.” It’s nearly two weeks later, and we’re still not really clear on which of those two possibilities is closest to the truth. At PJ Media, Athena Thorne is making a case for the epic prank case:

There is the most titillating rumor being bandied about the interwebs right now. And while it may or may not be true, it’s certainly food for thought. It concerns “Kayla Lemieux”, the infamous trans-woman shop teacher at Oakville Trafalgar High School (OTHS) in Ontario, Canada.

An anonymous poster on an online forum recently made a claim about Lemieux’s shop class back when “Kayla” was still Mr. Kerry Luc Lemieux. The post reads:

    This dude is gaming the system. An anon here yesterday was in this dude’s class. This teacher was almost fired for ‘toxic masculinity’ last year, as well as not embracing woke culture. He’d drop redpills to his class, such as how silly gender neutral bathrooms are. The school board hates him.

    He’s now upping the ante to exploit the very clown world the school and society itself created. His long game is most likely to get fired, and then sue for discrimination. There is no other explanation… No better way to troll clown world than to become an over-the-top caricature of a woman.

File this allegation under “Huge if True” (lol). Imagine for a moment that the anonymous person is telling the truth. If that is the case, then this teacher is the greatest hero the sane world has fronted yet.

If Lemieux is indeed pranking the school board, then he is a genius. When images of the trans-busty high school shop teacher began spreading like wildfire online, the outrage was swift and formidable. OTHS and the Halton District School Board (HDSB) went on the defensive — and it quickly became evident that they had painted themselves into a corner with their mindless commitment to “inclusion”.

“We are aware of discussion on social media and in the media regarding Oakville Trafalgar High School. We would like to take this opportunity to reiterate to our community that we are committed to establishing and maintaining a safe, caring, inclusive, equitable and welcoming learning and working environment for all students and staff”, said OTHS in an email sent to parents and obtained by feminist news site Reduxx.

September 26, 2022

Canada, a confessed “ongoing” genocidal state, has no moral grounds to criticize China, Russia, or Iran

In Quillette, Jonathan Kay expresses his frustration as Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau’s performative moral posturing and virtue signalling for his globalist comrades comes back to bite him in the ass … again:

Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.

… [Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi] also threw in an attack on Canada’s treatment of Indigenous peoples, declaring that “bodies of hundreds of children were discovered in mass graves in a [former residential] school.”

The issue of supposed unmarked Indigenous child graves dominated the Canadian media in the latter half of 2021. But as I reported in Quillette several months ago, no “mass graves” were ever found. In fact, even the Indigenous groups that initially reported ground-penetrating radar (GPR) survey results consistent with the possible presence of unmarked burial sites weren’t talking about “mass graves”. Rather, the invented mass-graves claim was popularized by a badly botched New York Times May 28th, 2021, story written by reporter Ian Austen. (For a definitive debunking, see Terry Glavin’s account in Canada’s National Post).

In the 16 months that have passed since the unmarked-graves story broke in late May 2021, not a single body has been found, nor any human remains. And so even the less sensational allegation that 215 individual unmarked child graves lie buried under the grounds of a former Indigenous residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia, now seems doubtful. Nor have bodies or human remains been recovered at any of the other former residential-school properties where GPR surveys were conducted.

Yet that didn’t prevent Prime Minister Justin Trudeau from lowering flags on Canadian public buildings for more than five months, nor from speaking publicly as if bodies were already being dug up. And aside from the National Post, not a single major Canadian media outlet has admitted its role in feeding the unmarked-graves social panic that exploded last year, and which often included lurid speculation that the supposed grave sites not only contained the remains of Indigenous children, but that these children had been murdered through methods worthy of a horror-movie plot.

Given this, what can Canadian public figures say to Raisi now that he’s throwing spurious moral equivalences into our faces? Nothing. In making the false claim that “bodies of hundreds of children were discovered in mass graves in a [former residential] school”, the man is merely reading our own officially sourced misinformation back to us.

This isn’t the first time that Trudeau has managed to maneuver Canada into this kind of mortifying position vis-à-vis the world’s tyrants. Last year, when Canadian lawmakers voted to denounce China’s treatment of Uighurs in western Xinjiang as a form of genocide, Trudeau and his Cabinet abstained. The suspected reasons for that move were complex. But they included the fact that Canada was, by its own description, morally compromised on the genocide file: Back in 2019, Trudeau had explicitly acceded to the (absurd) claim that Canada, too, was guilty of “genocide” — this one against Indigenous women. Indeed, according to the official report that precipitated Trudeau’s mea culpa, this supposed Canadian genocide remains ongoing.

September 22, 2022

Waking – or shaking – NATO’s freeloaders (like Canada)

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Europe, France, Germany, Italy, Military, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

CDR Salamander has a proposal to encourage cheapskate freeloaders like Justin Trudeau’s Canada (although it didn’t start with him … Canada has been freeloading militarily since the early 1970s) to take on more like a fair share of NATO’s needs:

So, what did you wake up to?

    President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday ordered Russia’s first mobilisation since World War Two and backed a plan to annex swathes of Ukraine, warning the West he was not bluffing when he said he’d be ready to use nuclear weapons to defend Russia.

    In the biggest escalation of the Ukraine war since Moscow’s Feb. 24 invasion, Putin explicitly raised the spectre of a nuclear conflict, approved a plan to annex a chunk of Ukraine the size of Hungary, and called up 300,000 reservists.

This should not be a shock to anyone. If it is, perhaps you should consider investing your time in cat-blogging.

It should bring to the front that NATO can no longer allow unserious nations to play like they are anything but security free-riders. They need to contribute their fair share or pay some consequence. Alliances have benefits and responsibilities. You should not have one without the other.

While percentage of GDP is an imperfect measure of contribution, it is better than all the other ones. It is as simple benchmark of national effort.

As these are the best numbers we have, let’s look at 2021 and then forward.

It is amazing that after all Russia has shown Western Europe — both of its nature and the nature of modern warfare — that so many of our NATO allies continue to slow walk defense spending, doing the very minimum to be a full and fair partner in the alliance.

Russian victory — however they define it — or Russian defeat — however Ukraine defines it — will not change the geography or nature of Russia. She is not going anywhere.

So, what’s to be done to encourage nations like Canada to put up or shut up? This might help:

“Out years” are where dragons live, so anyone not on guide-slope to 2%+ by the end of 2023 – when one way or another the Russo-Ukrainian War should be over – will find someway to not get there in a wave of excuses and bluffing.

We should call their bluff.

As such, and this is generous, we need to finally pursue PLAN SALAMANDER for NATO “Flags-to-Post” that I first proposed almost six years ago.

    In NATO, General and Flag Officer billets are distributed amongst nations in a rather complicated way, but this formula is controlled by NATO – and as such – can be changed.

    Entering argument: take the present formula for “fair distribution” and multiply by .75 any nation that spends 1.5% to 1.99% GDP on defense. Multiply by .5 any nation that spends between 1.25% to 1.499%. Multiply by .25 1.0% to 1.240%. If you fall below 1%, you get nothing and your OF5 (Col./Capt) billets are halved.

    1.25x for 2.01%-2.25%. 1.5X for 2.26%-2.75%; 1.75x for 2.76% -3.0%. 2x for +3.01%.

The math gets funky when a lot of people get over 2%, but we can refine it later. Doesn’t cost a penny and will unquestionably get the attention of those nations. Trust me on this. By January 1st, 2024 no more excuses. A small and symbolic punishment, but a good start that may be all that is needed. This is not the second half of the 20th Century any more.

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