Canada’s 4,000-mile border with the world’s most powerful country, what Prime Minister W.L. McKenzie King described to General Charles de Gaulle in 1944 as “an overwhelming contiguity,” has generally been a veritable blessing. To the best of my research, Canada is the only country in the world that has had land borders with other countries for over 200 years that has not been invaded in that time (I consider the U.S. Civil War an invasion of the Union). And on the two prior occasions when we were invaded, the Americans were in the first case conducting what is generally reckoned to be a just revolution against oppressive colonization (though it is massively romanticized and George III hideously defamed in American mythology). The second invasion, the War of 1812, was an American response to outrageous provocations by the British. We only survived that brush with pre-national extinction because of the loyalty of the French-Canadians, the generalship of Isaac Brock and the fortuitous incompetence as a war leader of President James Madison, one of history’s great lawgivers, as the chief author of the Constitution of the United States, though he was.
Author: Blazingcatfur
Look to the Media for Greatest Scandal of Our Lifetime
According to a headline in The American Conservative, it was “The Greatest Scandal Of Our Lifetime.”
How could you not want to read on? What could it be, this epic scandal? Russian “collusion”? “Spygate”? The Mueller probe? Hunter Biden’s influence peddling? The stolen election? Chinese spies? Watergate?
Rather disappointingly, it was none of these. R.J. Quinn, the article’s author, had instead picked out as “the greatest scandal of our lifetime” the decision by governments across the world to shut down much of their economies as a prophylactic against the coronavirus. He believes—and I agree with him—that the shutdowns produced catastrophic effects for millions of people that made the cure worse than the disease whose spread it was meant to prevent.
CDC Reports Largest Number of Drug Overdoses on Record
After declining in the previous year, drug overdose deaths in the United States rose 18 percent in the 12-month period beginning Jun. 2019 and ending May 2020. According to the CDC, drug overdose deaths were already on the rise in 2019 but accelerated during the early months of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.
Dr. Jill v. Dr. J – There are doctors, and then there are doctors.
The soon-to-be First Lady going by the moniker “Dr. Jill Biden” catalyzed a gendered controversy over credentials not witnessed since a swarthy gentleman under demon makeup and upon platform boots insisted that women call him Dr. Love.
“Any chance you might drop the ‘Dr.’ before your name?” Joseph Epstein petitioned her in the Wall Street Journal. “ ‘Dr. Jill Biden’ sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic. Your degree is, I believe, an Ed.D., a doctor of education, earned at the University of Delaware through a dissertation with the unpromising title ‘Student Retention at the Community College Level: Meeting Students’ Needs.’ ”
‘Does my family need to take the iodine pills:’ mistaken Pickering nuclear alert sparked panic, confusion: emails
Last January’s emergency alert sent in error about an incident at the Pickering Generating Station sparked a flurry of panicked messages from nearby residents wondering if they should swallow their radiation-blocking iodide pills and a lengthy game of hot potato among energy workers about what happened and who would correct it.
Hundreds of pages of email exchanges from that morning obtained by CTV News Toronto through access to information legislation show mass confusion over who sent the errant alert, which lasted through the morning and involved cabinet ministers and the Secretary of Cabinet.
Wokestradamus? Parody Twitter account ‘Titania McGrath’ perfectly predicted the latest social justice battles
‘Titania McGrath’ doesn’t exist, and is a creation of Spiked columnist Andrew Doyle. Yet her Twitter account, which parodies and ridicules modern society’s obsession with political correctness, has fooled the unaware before, even earning a ban from Twitter after a biting send-up of critical theory in which she argued doctors were “bullying and dehumanizing” sick people – i.e. “those who do not conform to their perceptions of “‘wellness’” – and thus medical science should be banned as an oppressive, cisnormative, patriarchal construct.
737 Max: Boeing ‘inappropriately coached’ pilots in test after crashes
US Senate investigators say that Boeing officials “inappropriately coached” test pilots during efforts to recertify the company’s 737 Max aircraft.
The planes were grounded in March 2019 following two deadly crashes.
Investigators accused Boeing and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) officials of “attempting to cover up important information”.
Boeing said it was reviewing the findings and took them “seriously”, while the FAA defended its conduct.
Are There Anti-Semitic Tropes in Obama’s Memoir?
Writing in The Australian, economist Henry Ergas noticed something in Obama’s memoir that has so far been ignored by the mainstream media. Or perhaps it was just never seen before because, really, how many people who bought Obama’s absurd book (which is only the first volume of his presidential memoirs) actually read the thing?
Mike Pompeo: ‘We can say pretty clearly’ Russia was behind hack of US agencies
Mike Pompeo has become the first member of the Trump administration to blame Russia for wide-ranging hacks of US government agencies and private companies.
“This was a very significant effort,” the secretary of state told rightwing talk radio host Mark Levin on Friday night. “I think it’s the case that now we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians that engaged in this activity.”
On Saturday, Pompeo announced the closure of two US consulates in Russia at which activity had already been curtailed, due to Covid-19.
Teaching Hate: The Seattle school district claims that the U.S. education system is guilty of “spirit murder” against black children.
Seattle Public Schools recently held a training session for teachers in which American schools were deemed guilty of “spirit murder” against black students. The United States is a “race-based white-supremist society,” the training instructed, and white teachers must “bankrupt [their] privilege in acknowledgement of [their] thieved inheritance.”
According to whistleblower documents I’ve obtained from the session, the trainers begin by claiming that the teachers are colonizers of “the ancestral lands and traditional territories of the Puget Sound Coast Salish People.” Then, next to an image of the Black Power fist, they claim that “the United States was built off the stolen labor of kidnapped and enslaved Black people’s work, which created the profits that created our nation.”
UK: Mutant Covid ‘is spreading 70% faster’ – but is no more lethal
The new mutant strain of Covid is spreading 70% faster than any other form of the virus, Boris Johnson has told the nation.
The prime minister said the strain could increase the UK’s R Rate by 0.4 as he announced brand new ‘tier four’ restrictions for London and the south-east this afternoon.
The festive bubble policy across tiers one, two and three has also been dramatically scaled back, with rules allowing three households to mix now restricted to Christmas Day only.
China: The Conquest of Hollywood
In October, for the first time, China overtook North America as the world’s largest film market. “Movie ticket sales in China for 2020 climbed to $1.988 billion on Sunday, surpassing North America’s total of $1.937 billion, according to data from Artisan Gateway. The gap is expected to widen considerably by year’s end,” wrote The Hollywood Reporter on October 18. “Analysts have long predicted that the world’s most populous country would one day top the global charts. But the results still represent a historic sea change”.
Redacted Information in Dominion Audit Report Shows Races Were Flipped: Analyst
The analyst who led the forensic audit of Dominion Voting Systems in Michigan said on Friday the information state officials pushed to redact shows that the outcomes of races were changed.
“The original report had log evidence that we published in the report to show exactly what we did and exactly the findings. Now, those did ultimately get redacted. And so now, the complaint is ‘well, but there’s no real proof and Dominion says ‘no, these things can’t be done,’” Russell Ramsland Jr. said during a virtual appearance on Newsmax’s “Greg Kelly Reports.”
Caliphate: NY Times loses awards for Islamic State podcast over false reporting
The New York Times has returned an award and had another withdrawn after it found discrepancies in its podcast on the Islamic State group.
After a two-month investigation, the newspaper said the podcast, Caliphate, failed to meet its editorial standards.
In the 2018 series, Shehroze Chaudhry, one of its central figures, claims he travelled to Syria and joined IS.
But the Times said on Friday that it found “a history of misrepresentations” about his involvement with the group.
Leader of grooming gang that preyed on school girls freed after just eight years
The ringleader of a grooming gang who trafficked school girls as young as 13 into prostitution has been freed from prison after serving just a third of his sentence.
Ahdel ‘Eddie’ Ali, 32, led a sex gang with his brother Mubarak – known as Max- which targeted up to 100 vulnerable young women in Telford, Shropshire between 2006 and 2009.