“China eats weird animals disease”

The deposition of Canada’s prime minister is unlikely to be so sanguinary as the Ceaușescus in Romania. But it will be no less definitive.

As I write, Canadian police, many dressed in military garb and supported by armored vehicles and snipers(!), are moving in to enforce several court orders and demands of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Ontario Premier Doug Ford, and others that the “Freedom Convoy” of Canadian truckers stop blocking the Ambassador Bridge, the major artery between the United States and Canada, and disperse. Some of the protestors are leaving while many others are standing their ground.

Will the heavy hand of the state succeed in crushing the protest? In the short term, perhaps.

The US media are shamefully smearing the ‘Freedom Convoy’ as a far-right menace.

By now, most Americans have heard of the truckers’ actions happening north of the border. Based on lurid descriptions of the protests from the US media, they could be forgiven for thinking these protesters are a small bunch of nasty thugs and Nazis who must be put down immediately. Indeed, it seems American reporters and commentators have decided to project all of their hatred of Trumpists and deplorable workers generally on to the Canadian truckers.

Let’s examine Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s statement yet again on Friday that “politicians don’t direct police in a democratic society,” which is nonsense.

If that was true, the police would be a law unto themselves, which is what happens in dictatorships.

Two members of the military’s elite special forces unit are under investigation for their alleged involvement in the convoy protest in Ottawa, according to a statement from the Department of National Defence.

Maj.-Gen Steve Boivin, commander of the Canadian Special Operations Forces Command, said the first case came to the attention of senior leaders on Feb. 1, and the other on Feb. 10.

Both members were already in the process of being released from the Canadian Armed Forces and were supporting the protest “in some form or another,” he said.

The approach to medical information increasingly taken by authorities and the media is damaging to public health and scientific inquiry.

Imperial County, California, a poor, largely Hispanic agricultural region in the southeastern corner of the state, has been hit hard by Covid-19. By the end of January, according to the New York Times’s Covid-19 database, Imperial County had suffered 845 Covid deaths, or 4.7 per thousand inhabitants—a rate almost 80 percent higher than the U.S. average. The case fatality rate in Imperial County is 1.44 percent, the second-highest in California—and was significantly higher, 2.10 percent, at the end of October 2021 before the Omicron wave.

The OPP says the aim of an officer going to the door of a farm in Peterborough County was merely to try to keep things “safe and lawful.”

Responding to a Saturday column on a woman named Nadine Ellis-Maffei being surprised to see a cop knock on her door with advice on how to act at the Freedom Convoy, the OPP said it was merely doing its policing duties.