Canadians cry – “More punishment, please!”:
Taxpayers have paid pandemic relief to five banks operating in Canada including branches of the state-run Bank of China Ltd. The Prime Minister’s Office did not comment: “It’s not good news for anyone if local businesses have to close shop.”
Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson for the first time acknowledges climate change programs will see Canadians pay higher net costs for fuel. Wilkinson also called the carbon tax a “carbon tax,” a phrase never used by his department: “Politicians have an obligation to the public to tell them the straight goods.”
The Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan has called for cooperation for power saving as the supply-demand balance becomes tight amid a cold snap hitting the country.
The industry group said Sunday on its website that it wants customers to cooperate for efficient power consumption by continuing to use heating equipment amid the cold wave while curbing the use of other electric appliances.
Electricity demand for heating has been increasing recently as cold weather continues to hit many regions of the country. In seven regions, mainly in western Japan, on Friday, maximum power demand surpassed the levels believed to be seen once in about 10 years, the federation said.
Meanwhile, there have been days when the amount of electricity generated with solar energy dropped due to bad weather, according to the group.
In a move that surprises exactly no one, just like a useless prime minister’s son getting to play at his dad’s former desk:
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un consolidated his grip on power at the party congress Sunday, where he was elected general secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea.
His predecessors all held the title, while his late father, Kim Jong-il, was named “eternal general secretary” in 2012 when Kim Jong-un succeeded him.
“Kim Jong-un has reshaped the party leadership, as guided by ideologies shared by Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, and put forward policies for North Koreans,” according to the resolution adopted at the congress.
Experts said Kim, who has been chairman of the State Affairs Commission since 2016 following four years of being first secretary, was seeking unrivaled power.
“Kim wants to see an indisputable one-man rule, so he threw out the chairmanship because it did not make him stand out among other party chairmen,” said Cheong Seong-chang, senior research fellow at the Sejong Institute.
“The title is a clear sign of being ‘first among equals,’” said Shin Beom-chul, director of the Center for Diplomacy and Security at the Korea Research Institute for National Strategy.
Other experts said the change was foreseen given that Kim has repeatedly sought to portray himself as a leader who “serves the people.”
“Being secretary rather than chairman portrays Kim as less authoritarian,” said Kim Hyung-suk, who was South Korea’s vice unification minister between 2016 and 2017.
Meanwhile, Kim Yo-jong, Kim Jong-un’s sister whom South Korea’s intelligence agency described as the regime’s “de facto second-in-command,” was not promoted. She remained a member of the Central Committee and was not included in its Politburo.
Like in the press gallery, for example:
While stopping short of demanding that Chinese propaganda outlets like Xinhua and the People’s Daily be required to register as foreign agents, O’Toole expressed his disappointment that they have been accredited by Ottawa’s Parliamentary Press Gallery.
O’Toole also vowed to cancel all remaining joint exercises with China’s People’s Liberation Army.
(Sidebar: yeah, whatever, O’Toole.)
Make no mistake who owns Canada and who sold it out.
I know that it’s Jonathan Kay but just read the whole thing:
Canadian political neuroses are never more evident than when some political cataclysm unfolds in the United States, such as Wednesday’s mob assault on the Capitol in Washington, D.C. When news first breaks, the initial response on social media typically presents Canada as the respectable teetotaller living upstairs from a pair of boozy rageaholics having their nightly punch-up. But then, like clockwork, there comes a second wave of commentary, this one insisting that we are, in fact, fully complicit in America’s sins. “As Canadians, we shouldn’t be smug,” read one viral Tweet on Wednesday. “What’s happening in the (United States) could easily happen in Ottawa. White supremacy and white supremacists call Canada home, too.” …
Racism is a real problem in all countries — including Canada and the United States. And it will never be completely eradicated because human brains are wired for tribalism. But as anyone who’s actually bothered to look at U.S. voting data knows, the 2020 election actually featured a welcome narrowing of racial voting differences: Despite his often genuinely racist rhetoric, Trump picked up voter share among non-white voters, as compared with 2016, while losing a large portion of his white base. Moreover, as numerous experts have argued convincingly (including Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who I don’t think has yet been cancelled for white supremacy), the Trump phenomenon maps pretty well onto the areas of the United States that have been decimated by outsourcing, automation, income inequality and downward mobility. These root causes don’t excuse racism or mob violence. But it’s worth noting that they’re exactly the sort of issues that leftists (including those at the Star) once used to care about, before they realized they could earn more hand-clap emojis by tracing every spasm of political discontent to this or that Protocol inscribed by the Elders of Whiteness.
What Mr. Kay fails to realise is that Donald Trump is not and never has been a racist in any form sensible people would recognise. Such a slur was used as a cudgel to make him less palatable and we all know it.
Black Americans are not children who need coddling. They voted for Trump for the same reasons any other American would: he was a populist who promised and delivered employment, an issue I’m sure not even Big Tech could de-platform from recent memory.
It’s that time of year!
The famous Christmas carol thread is now open!
Advent and Hanukkah selections are also most welcome.
Let’s keep things heavy on the whimsy and light on the angst.
The first selection, “Il Est Ne, le Divin Enfant”:
From Billy HW:
From James Kimball:
From LauraS:
From UNcommunist:
From Brett_McS:
From bargogx1:
From Reader:
They may evict Trump from the White House, though the Texas lawsuit against evident election irregularities in four states under cover of dubious COVID-related executive orders and questionable legislation, is a good deal more serious than the Trump-hating media admit. The Democrats are now a hodgepodge of miscellaneous Trump-haters and far leftists who played footsie all summer with well-organized and heavily armed rioters masquerading as civil-rights crusaders. Their platform is far too socialistic for the American public, they are unlikely to win the Senate, almost certain to lose the House of Representatives in two years, and Biden is a spavined old milk-wagon horse who couldn’t lead America across the Brooklyn Bridge. His running mate, Kamala Harris, is an authentic leftist, but she’s no world-beater either, though she may well finish Biden’s term. The presumptive Democratic administration is already shaking; half of Biden’s cabinet nominees will not be confirmed by a Republican Senate and most are tainted by the failures of Obama. The criminal investigations of Biden’s family are already very serious and were banned from the media and social media during the campaign and dismissed as Russian disinformation. The revelation that one of the chief congressional hyenas of Trump impeachment, Rep. Eric Swalwell, had an intimate relationship with a Chinese spy is a piquant expose of his sanctimonious hypocrisy.
The Biden administration, if it takes office at all, will be a clangorous “Gong Show.” Either Trump, or a Republican approved by him and continuing his policies, will be the Republican candidate in four years. Then we will have the final round in this battle for the political soul of America. What we are hearing now is the Trump-hating goose cackling too loudly and too soon.
House of Commons business looks set to grind to a halt until at least late January after Liberals and Conservatives failed to agree on measures to keep open a virtual parliament.
New hybrid rules that combined video-conferencing and in-person sittings were agreed to in September but expired Friday, when the Commons rose for a Christmas break.
Far more Liberal donors have been appointed or promoted as judges than donors for other parties since Justin Trudeau was elected, a new tally shows, despite the prime minister’s promise to use a merit-based system.
In total, about 28 per cent of federal judicial appointments or promotions under Trudeau have been people who solely donated to the Liberals in the past, compared to four per cent who were solely Conservative donors and one per cent who were solely NDP donors. A further seven per cent had donated to the Liberals and at least one other party.
Ezra Levant and his rambunctious Rebel Media have done Canadians a service, with merit aforethought. Our foreign affairs ministry did Levant a service, unwittingly, by answering an access to information request and forgetting to black out the embarrassing bits. The documents confirm that Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, at the two-year mark of their hostage taking in China, are getting no service at all from the highest levels of our diplomatic bureaucracy. …
The diplomats simply don’t get that this is about what China did unlawfully to the Two Michaels, not about what Canada did lawfully in arresting Meng. It seems superfluous for the PLA to send spies to Petawawa when its propaganda runs rampant on the senior floors of the Pearson building.
The bureaucrats, always punctilious in writing about “Ms. Meng” cannot bring themselves even to mention the Two Michaels by name, referring to them only as “consular cases” as if this might be a dispute about pork tariffs or a lost shipment of peaches, rather than kidnappings.
Canadians owe a debt of gratitude to that GAC functionary who “forgot” to black out the memoranda before sending them to Rebel Media. There were no national security secrets, just the secret attempts by our diplomatic high command to compromise our military secrets and degrade our dignity, quailing before tyranny and not lifting a finger for the Two Michaels.
Also:
The Liberal government was dismayed when the Canadian military cancelled winter exercises with China’s People’s Liberation Army, according to top secret documents published Wednesday. …
One of the concerns from the U.S. related to “undesired knowledge transfer” from Canada to China.
A February 2019 memo to Ian Shugart, deputy minister of foreign affairs, reads, “Should Canada make any significant reductions in its military engagement with China, China will likely read this as a retaliatory move related to the Meng Wanzhou case.”
The memo also said that if DND/CAF cancelled other events there should be “careful communication strategies” to avoid it being linked to the Meng case.
(Sidebar: I call bullsh–. The Chinese have no intention of releasing those two men and the Trudeau hand puppets don’t want to upset their Chinese bosses.)
Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun has warned that the recent arrest of Jimmy Lai shows a rise in “political intimidation” against journalists in Hong Kong, part of a systematic erosion of basic freedoms, including religious freedom, by the Chinese government in recent months.
On the night of Nov. 3, tens of thousands of absentee ballots for Fulton County, Georgia, were counted at the State Farm Arena’s vote-tabulation center in Atlanta. In recent days, the fog of incomplete and conflicting information provided by interested parties has begun to clear.
Also – The Band:
