The Ontario PC government recently announced public funding will be used at four private health clinics for hip and knee replacements. There will be $125 million set aside over two years to pay for an estimated 20,000 orthopedic surgeries at Academic Orthopedic Surgical Associates of Ottawa, Richmond Hill’s Schroeder Ambulatory Centre, Toronto’s OV Surgical Centre and Windsor Orthopedic Surgical Centre.
In these dilapidated French villages and towns you also notice the number of A Vendre (For sale) signs. As I previously noted about the Islamisation of German towns and cities, you get a distinctly uncomfortable sense of something slowly dying – though compared to northeastern France, rural Germany looks like one of those merry medieval scenes by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
Michel Houellebecq, the famed novelist and bête noire of the French Left, wasn’t lying about the state of rural France. I have walked through a sizeable chunk of the country’s north-east thinking: this is what the slow version of civilisational collapse must look like.
The region suffered from being on the front line of two World Wars. But as Houellebecq describes in Serotonin, Submission and Atomised, it’s also been let down by political elites in Paris and Brussels who have laid waste to local farming with policies favouring globalist trade and foreign markets. Hence the posters on village billboards showing a bare-breasted Marianne once again leading the storming of the Bastille, this time beneath the title “FREXIT”.
Declan Bigras of Aylmer, Que., joined air cadets when he was 13 because he dreamt of flying fighter jets. While he got onto wait-lists, he wasn’t selected for that highly competitive program. But he did rise to second in command of the 211 Squadron in Ottawa.
It was the best five years of his life, Bigras said.
Now, at 19, he’s intent on joining the Canadian Armed Forces. But it’s taking some time. With the permission of his parents, he tried to sign up two years ago when he was 17.
I bet they fast track cross dressers though.
OTTAWA – Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand is affirming Greenland’s sovereignty as Washington again says it wants to annex the self-governing territory of Denmark.
Anand spoke Tuesday with her Danish counterpart Lars Lokke Rasmussen and says she conveyed “Canada’s support for the fundamental importance of respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
NOW – Trump: "We need Greenland for national security… We have to have it!" pic.twitter.com/obsImNZwfk
— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) December 22, 2025
Unlike Dickens’s famous miser, they’ve spent billions on philanthropy—but ignored the disastrous effects their efforts have had on poor and working-class people.
In his preface to “A Christmas Carol,” Charles Dickens expresses the hope that his “little book” would “not put my readers out of humor with themselves.” But he obviously wanted to induce soul-searching in some readers: the wealthy businessmen indifferent to the plight of the poor. And in some ways, he succeeded—the book was an instant best-seller and helped popularize philanthropy during the Christmas season. But the basic problem hasn’t gone away.
We still have Scrooges this holiday season, and the wealthiest of them—George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, and Tom Steyer—have inflicted far more suffering on the poor than Scrooge ever did to Bob Cratchit and the working class of his day. These billionaires may not seem like Scrooges, given their extensive philanthropy, but that’s only because most readers today don’t understand exactly where the original Scrooge went wrong.
We understand these impulses because they are within each of us.
Set due east from the bright lights of Rockefeller Center and the charming windows of Saks Fifth Avenue, Bergdorf Goodman, and Tiffany & Co., John Cheever’s “Christmas Is a Sad Season for the Poor” orchestrates a quiet yet bruising confrontation with the moral and spiritual decay of the holiday season. Cheever’s prose — tenaciously passive, quietly merciless — gradually develops like a grainy darkroom negative, slowly tightening its focus to reveal the dark underbelly of Christmas, inside a luxury Sutton Place high-rise and, later, a dank tenement on the Lower East Side. It’s a long cab ride from a wistful Bing Crosby Christmas, but when you arrive home, you’ll be sharpened and sober, and a bit more wary of the season’s traps.
New Yorker link – Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor
Welcome everybody! Tomorrow is the Big Day add a link in the comments to your fave carols and they’ll be played Christmas Day.
From Osumashi
From testsubjectx1
From Norman in New York
From PA Cat ~ Johnny Cash’s version of “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.” Longfellow wrote the words in December 1863 during the Civil War, when he was nursing his wounded son, a lieutenant in the Union Army. There are two stanzas in the original that are omitted when it is sung as a carol; you can read the full text here.
From LittleRed1
From Surele Surele
From X — Formerly IB_Joe
From Malcolm Y
From Seaoh
“We have signed agreements with investors regarding a new TikTok U.S. joint venture, enabling over 170 million Americans to continue discovering a world of endless possibilities as part of a vital global community,” TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew reported in a memo to employees on December 18.
In response to intense American pressure, ByteDance, the privately owned Chinese company that owns TikTok, agreed to spin off TikTok’s U.S. operations.
According to Chew, the joint venture, named TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, would be “majority owned by American investors, governed by a new seven-member majority-American board of directors, and subject to terms that protect Americans’ data and U.S. national security.”
The racial reckoning of the COVID era saw Canada grapple with its checkered past — a process that led to statues of some foundational figures being removed, in some instances by force.
Five years on, there’s a growing movement to restore some of what was taken down in that tumultuous period. The campaign, led by politicians past and present, historians and members of the public, is focused on bringing back some of those monuments, in particular ones of Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, which have all but disappeared from public spaces.
All his desecrated statues should be repaired and restored to their rightful places and to hell with the race baiting scum.
Vice President JD Vance had two choice words for racist troll Nick Fuentes and others like MS NOW host Jen Psaki, who have made revolting comments about the second lady: “Eat s–t.”
“Let me be clear. Anyone who attacks my wife, whether their name is Jen Psaki or Nick Fuentes, can eat s–t,” Vance told UnHerd in an interview published Sunday.
“That’s my official policy as vice president of the United States.”
Canadians continued to take fewer trips to the United States in October, according to the latest data, which mirrors recent monthly data suggesting the trade war and U.S. tariffs have left a sour taste.
Statistics Canada reported on Monday that in October, there was a 26.3 per cent drop in Canadian residents returning from trips to the U.S. compared with one year earlier.
Every time you think the Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor story must have finished, there is another twist.
The latest batch of documents from the Epstein files includes emails that could further damage his reputation.
Or perhaps his reputation is already at rock bottom and this will only reinforce existing negative impressions.
Thanks to Andrew and Charles the Monarchy will fall especially as the family’s wealth is made transparent.
