Failure of Imagination
We’re fighting among ourselves while our real adversary is watching with glee.
We are a vast country, but too many of us have a limited understanding of the rest of the world. We have the right to vote and freedom of speech. We can move around our country as we wish, and we with can start a company or quit a job as we desire. We get to determine who our friends are and where we spend our time. With such great freedom comes a failure of imagination. We forget that our system is special, unique, so we believe that every other country is like ours.
We have a “China Class” comprised of politicians, academics and the usual assortment of corporate sociopaths who have happily sold us out for their 30 pieces of silver.
Racist Interstate Highways?
Revamping some of the national highway system makes sense—but basing those decisions on vague notions of social justice is not the way to do it.
The Interstate Highway System, which the U.S. began constructing in the 1950s, has a complicated legacy, to say the least. Boosters see it as the greatest infrastructure program undertaken in the country during the second half of the twentieth century, connecting vast areas in new and important ways, unlocking largely untapped regions outside of cities that helped spark a new kind of middle-class living. Detractors accuse the system’s planners and builders of emptying out cities and encouraging the rise of low-density suburban sprawl. That process, critics argue, prompted “white flight” to the suburbs, while stranding poor minorities in urban neighborhoods disfigured by the highways that bisected them. To these critics, the Interstate Highway System is just another example of America’s racist past.
Years-Long Court Battle in Georgia Reveals Dominion’s Security Flaws, Weak Testing
Behind the current controversy surrounding the integrity of results from the Nov. 3 presidential election in Georgia are years of court battles over an outdated voting system and the controversial $107 million purchase of new touchscreen machines from Dominion Voting Systems in July 2019.
A review of court documents and sworn expert testimonies raise troubling questions about the Dominion voting system and its rushed implementation by the State of Georgia.
Terrorism: A Warning from Iran to Europe
Last month the trial began in Belgium of Assadolah Assadi and three other Iranians accused of planning a bomb attack in Paris in 2018. Since 2015 Assadi had been the most senior officer of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security in Europe, at the time operating under diplomatic cover at the Iranian embassy in Vienna. He is the first Iranian government official to be tried by an EU country for terrorist offences, despite numerous attack attempts on EU soil ordered by Tehran.
State supported terrorism is not just an act in itself but also an instrument of national power and coercion. Together, these plots were a malevolent message and clear threat to Europe that unfortunately have been received and acted upon as intended in London, Berlin, Paris and Brussels.
‘Suckers’: Hollywood Celebs View Trump Supporters As Gullible Fools
What’s angry, malevolent, unforgiving, verbally abusive, foul-mouthed, and fond of ranting on Twitter? If you answered a woke, leftist, Hollywood actor or director, you’d be correct.
Sweden’s New Children’s Bible Focuses on Diversity, Gender
In the new children’s Bible, which is claimed to be more in line with the original, it is not a given that man came before woman, and God is kept non-gendered whenever possible.
Raymond De Souza: “Ottawa’s secret plan to host Chinese military, while ignoring the Two Michaels, makes for chilling reading”
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.
Infographic on Election Night Events in Atlanta
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:
JK Rowling calls for civility in trans debate after ‘heart-breaking’ letters from women who regret irreversible surgery
Harry Potter author JK Rowling has appealed for an end to the “climate of fear” in the trans debate, saying she has received hundreds of “heart-breaking” letters from women who regret having gender reassignment surgery.
Rowling found herself at the centre of a storm of controversy after questioning the use of the term “people who menstruate” earlier this year.
In a new interview with Good Housekeeping magazine, the writer claimed the vast majority of letters she received in the wake of the controversy were from people who wanted to express their support for her stance.
US to Put Sanctions on China For Its Treatment of Falun Gong Practitioners
The Donald Trump administration on Dec. 10 sanctioned a Chinese official for his involvement in “gross human rights violations” against Falun Gong practitioners—a spiritual practice persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since 1999.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the United States would bar entry to Huang Yuanxiong, a police chief at the Wucun police station in Xiamen city, southern Fujian Province. The restriction also applies to Huang’s wife.
“Huang is associated with particularly severe violations of religious freedom of Falun Gong practitioners, namely his involvement in the detention and interrogation of Falun Gong practitioners for practicing their beliefs,” Pompeo said in a statement.
The sanction, made on International Human Rights Day, marks the first time the United States has punished a CCP official over their role in persecuting adherents of Falun Gong.
Calgary promises ‘escalating’ enforcement, court injunctions against anti-mask protests
People gathering to protest COVID-19 restrictions this weekend could be hit with much larger fines and court injunctions, the city’s top bylaw officer warned Wednesday.
While senior city officials said they’re still reluctant to physically prevent the weekly demonstrations from occurring, hiking fines to the maximum $100,000 and using the courts to forestall them are options.
Related… Germany notes ‘violent potential’ among anti-lockdown protesters
Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the BfV, said large turnouts of the “Querdenker” (lateral thinker) movement — seen at recent anti-Corona-lockdown protests — harbored “intensified escalation potential.”
The Cologne-based office tasked with upholding Germany’s post-war constitution told newspapers of the Funke Media Group on Thursday that this had been the case at large protests where far-right groups had urged attendance.
‘Under the rug:’ Sexual misconduct shakes FBI’s senior ranks
WASHINGTON (AP) — An assistant FBI director retired after he was accused of drunkenly groping a female subordinate in a stairwell. Another senior FBI official left after he was found to have sexually harassed eight employees. Yet another high-ranking FBI agent retired after he was accused of blackmailing a young employee into sexual encounters.
An Associated Press investigation has identified at least six sexual misconduct allegations involving senior FBI officials over the past five years, including two new claims brought this week by women who say they were sexually assaulted by ranking agents.
GOLDSTEIN: Canada’s medical wait times longest ever because of COVID-19
The COVID-19 pandemic increased wait times for medical treatment in Canada this year to the longest they have ever been in the modern era, according to a new study by the Fraser Institute.
The median wait time for treatment across 12 medical specialities was 22.6 weeks, compared to 20.9 weeks last year and the previous record of 21.2 weeks in 2017, according to the study Waiting Your Turn: Wait Times for Health Care in Canada: 2020.