Posts Tagged ‘Canadian Trucker Protest’

Dave Barry’s 2022 Year In Review

Sunday, January 1st, 2023

Happy New Year, everyone!

As is now tradition, we turn over our 2022 review duties to the capable hands of Dave Barry.

January

The national mood is gloomy, and it’s taking a heavy political toll on President Biden, as voters increasingly question whether he is up to the job of leading the nation, or for that matter finishing his sentences.

According to the polls, the two biggest concerns of the public, by far, are the pandemic and the economy. Consequently Congress is focused, laserlike, on: the Senate filibuster rule. This is a legislative tactic that is evil when the other side uses it but good when your side uses it. At the moment the Democrats want to change the rule, so of course the Republicans, led by Sen. Mitch “I am smiling, damn it” McConnell, are opposed to changing it, which means Washington is consumed by a bitter, vicious, nasty, name-calling battle pitting the Democrats against Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who are also Democrats.

In the end, as is so often the case with these burning issues that consume the nation’s capital, nothing happens, which is the whole point of the constitutional system of checks and balances put into place by the Founding Fathers, all of whom — and this is a testament to their wisdom and foresight — are dead.

Meanwhile the national debt, for the first time ever, creeps over $30 trillion, which is more than the entire U.S. economy is worth. Fortunately this is nothing to worry about. Forget we even brought it up.

February

There is trouble in, of all places, Canada. The news up there is that the capital city, Ottawa (from the Algonquin word “adawe,” meaning “Washington”) is besieged by a massive protest convoy of trucks, clogging the streets, honking horns, blocking traffic and making it impossible for anybody to get anywhere. Granted, this is the situation pretty much every day in, for example, New York City, but apparently in Canada it is a big deal. As tensions mount, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, in a controversial move, invokes emergency powers enabling the government to freeze the protesters’ access to beaver pelts.

Ha-ha! We are poking some good-natured fun at Canada, which is actually a modern nation and an important trading partner that we depend on to supply us with many vital things. Celine Dion is only one example. In all seriousness, the Canadian trucker strike is a significant event that raises some important issues, which everyone immediately stops caring about because of the situation in Ukraine.

Ukraine is a nation that, through poor planning, is located right next to Russia. This is unfortunate because Russian President Vladimir Putin, a man who relaxes by putting kittens into a food processor, has long wanted to establish closer ties with Ukraine, in the same sense that a grizzly bear wants to establish closer ties with a salmon.

On Feb. 24 the Russian army invades Ukraine. Everyone assumes the Russians will easily prevail, but the Ukrainians put up a surprisingly strong resistance (we are using the term “resistance” in the sense of “physically fighting back,” as opposed to “tweeting defiant hashtags”). Most of the world rallies around the underdog Ukrainians and their charismatic president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a former comedian and actor who is basically the opposite of Vladimir Putin. (Although to be fair, if Putin did comedy, he would kill.)

March

In economic news, inflation continues to worsen despite intensive efforts by the Biden administration to explain that it is caused by Vladimir Putin, corporate greed, covid, supply-chain issues, global climate change, the filibuster rule, the murder hornets and various other factors totally unrelated to any policies of the Biden administration.

April

Elon Musk says he wants to buy Twitter for $44 billion, which works out to one dollar for every apocalyptic tweet emitted about the sale by alarmed verified Twitter users who are deeply concerned about the precedent of allowing billionaires to buy major media platforms, which have traditionally been small mom-and-pop operations like The Washington Post and Facebook. Another verified concern is that Musk favors “free speech,” which we are putting in quotation marks because although it sounds good — Free speech! — if everyone is allowed to have it willy-nilly, the public could be exposed to misinformation that has not been verified by the verifiers, as opposed to the current situation, in which everything on Twitter is 100 percent accurate.

Meanwhile, for a few exciting hours, a trending topic on political Twitter, which we swear we are not making up, is “testicle tanning.” Don’t even ask.

May

Meanwhile parents scramble desperately to find baby formula amid a shortage that has left U.S. store shelves bare, although there are plentiful supplies abroad. In an emergency effort reminiscent of the legendary Berlin Airlift, the U.S. government provides temporary relief by using an Air Force transport plane to fly 35 tons of American babies to Germany. The operation is deemed a success, although, as an official noted, “afterward we had to burn the plane.”

The war in Ukraine continues but receives less and less coverage in the United States as Americans turn their attention to the historic Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard defamation trial. At issue is Heard’s 2018 Washington Post op-ed alleging that Depp, once the embodiment of cool in the role of dashing pirate Captain Jack Sparrow, has developed a case of face bloat and currently looks, quote, “like the owner of a struggling water-bed store.”

June

Johnny Depp wins his historic defamation lawsuit, with the jury ordering Amber Heard to repay the 783 billion person-hours the American public wasted watching the trial. The verdict unleashes a wave of thoughtful media think pieces the likes of which the nation has not seen since Will Smith slapped Chris Rock.

In economic news, Americans grow increasingly alarmed as the price of a gallon of gasoline and the value of the average 401(k) plan rapidly converge from opposite directions. For its part, the White House is growing increasingly irritated by the way people keep whining about soaring inflation and the collapsing stock market and the possibility of a recession while ignoring all the positive economic accomplishments that the Biden administration has achieved despite the efforts of Vladimir Putin, who — WHY DO PEOPLE KEEP FORGETTING THIS — is the cause of everything bad.

July

In financial news, Elon Musk announces that he no longer wants to purchase Twitter and will instead use the $44 billion to buy two Springsteen tickets.

Snip.

As the month comes to a close, the economy dominates the news with the Commerce Department reporting that the U.S. gross domestic product shrank for the second consecutive quarter. Traditionally this has meant that we are in a recession, but President Biden reassures the nation that it actually is not a recession, for reasons clearly stated on the teleprompter.

September

As Russian forces suffer mounting losses in Ukraine, an increasingly desperate Vladimir Putin, in what observers say is a clear violation of international law, annexes Connecticut.

In a legal development that causes widespread swooning on MSNBC, New York Attorney General Letitia James files a lawsuit accusing Donald Trump of falsifying business records, issuing false financial statements and failure to pay $327 million worth of parking tickets. Just for fun, Trump declares that he’s guilty, while the Democrats call the lawsuit a politically motivated witch hunt. Everyone enjoys a hearty laugh before order is restored.

On a sadder note, the world mourns the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the beloved monarch who reigned over the United Kingdom during its transition from the center of a vast global empire to a popular tourist destination roughly the size of a pickleball court. She is succeeded by her 143-year-old son, King Charles the Uncomfortable, who will be officially crowned next year in a traditional British ceremony-gasm featuring numerous horses.

In response to yet another viral TikTok “challenge” video, the Food and Drug Administration issues an urgent bulletin stating that people who eat chicken that has been marinated in NyQuil “probably deserve to die.”

October

The national debt creeps up by yet another trillion and now exceeds $31 trillion, but again this is nothing to worry about because it has absolutely no economic consequences. We don’t know why we even bother keeping track.

Speaking of money: Elon Musk announces that he has decided to buy Twitter after all, because the only Springsteen tickets he could get for $44 billion were “way the hell up in the balcony.”

Snip.

Abroad, Liz Truss resigns as prime minister of the United Kingdom after a turbulent term lasting a little under 14 minutes. She is replaced by Rishi Sunak, whose name can be rearranged to spell “Is A Hunk, Sir.” In China, President Xi Jinping wins an unprecedented third term when delegates to the Communist Party congress unanimously elect, after careful consideration, not to die.

November

As the historic midterm elections approach, with the fate of democracy hanging in the balance, verified blue check mark media personalities on Twitter focus with a ferocious intensity on the single most critical issue facing the nation, if not the world: the status of verified blue check mark media personalities on Twitter.

The problem is that Elon Musk intends to charge people $8 a month for a blue check mark, which would mean any nonelite rando could get one, which would be a blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Twitter Verification Clause. Some verified users go so far as to declare, on Twitter, that they are seriously considering leaving Twitter, although it is not immediately clear what they would do with the extra 14 hours per day.

Read the whole thing.

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Posted in Budget, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Media Watch, Military, Republicans | 1 Comment »

LinkSwarm for February 25, 2022

Friday, February 25th, 2022

Ukraine fights back, Biden isn’t going to do jack about it, Kyle Rittenhouse is going to sue everyone, inflation soars, the Canadian “emergency” is ended, disaster looms for Democrats, and Ilhan Omar gets an unusual challenger. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Ukraine forces have retaken Antonov International Airport, AKA Gostomel, AKA Hostomel.

    While reports of the battle are confused and preliminary, it appears that Ukrainian forces counterattacked, shot down some Russian helicopters, and have so far been able to prevent the Russians from landing reinforcements. Initial claims that the Russian force at the airfield had been “destroyed” were later clarified; it now seems that the battle at Gostomel is continuing. It’s easy to understand how crucial this battle is, simply by looking at a map. If the Russians could gain control of the Gostomel airfield, they could score a quick knock-out of the Ukrainian capital as part of what is being called their “decapitation” strategy.

    Russian news services are claiming they’ve taken the airfield, but that may be stale news or propaganda.

  • There are conflicting reports whether the the Antonov An-225 Mriya (the largest aircraft in the world) stationed there has been destroyed or not
    

  • Ukrainian forces take up positions in Kiev. Also: “Reports that the Ukrainian military has delivered a strike on a Russian airfield in Millerovo, Rostov Oblast have now been confirmed.”
  • Chuck DeVore: “Has Putin Miscalculated His Ability To Take Ukraine Swiftly?”

    The invasion of Ukraine by the armed forces of Russia at Russian President Vladimir Putin’s orders marks the first time since 1945 that Russia has engaged in a conventional war with a near-peer nation.

    Ukraine isn’t restive Warsaw Pact nations, it isn’t Afghanistan, it isn’t Chechnya, it isn’t Georgia, and it isn’t Crimea.

    The conflict launched by Putin is on a far grander scale than the invasion of Crimea in 2014, launched as Ukraine’s last pro-Russia president, Viktor Yanukovych, was driven from office in a popular uprising.

    Putin, by choosing to reach beyond the ethnic-Russian majority separatist provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk in the Donbas Basin, has decided to end the independent, Western-looking Ukrainian government of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and install a pro-Putin quisling.

    And while the fog of war, some deliberate mis-and disinformation operations by the combatants, and the far-from-perfect filter of Western media leaves much unknown at this time, what is known is that Zelenskyy is still in power a day after the Russian offensive. Further, the Ukrainian military appears to be taking a toll on the Russians invading from three sides: south across the Pripyat Marshes from Russian satellite Belarus; west from Russia, including Donbas; and north from the Black Sea in the region of Odessa and Transnistria, a Russian client breakaway state in Moldavia.

    Modern conventional war is extremely difficult to do well. Imagine being a conductor of an orchestra, all while the audience was lobbing soccer balls at you and your musicians as you perform J.S. Bach’s Chaconne in D — that’s modern warfare. Putin is attempting a highly complicated operation over large distances in the face of a determined foe. Further, he’s doing so with an army largely composed of conscripts serving for only one year.

    Since Putin has decided to oust the Ukrainian government, this means that every day Zelenskyy remains in office is another day that adds to Ukrainian national confidence to resist — and another day that Putin looks to have miscalculated.

  • White House claims Russian forces are 20 miles outside Kiev.
  • Tweets from the war zone:

  • Both the EU and the Biden Administration offer sanctions they admit will not do Jack Squat.

  • But the UK is Freezing Putin assets…assuming he has any.
  • Holy Fark is this unbelievable incompetence and naivete:

  • Taiwan joins sanctions against Russia, including their semiconductor industry. I don’t know if any fabless Russian chip design company gets their chips fabbed at TSMC, so I’m not sure how badly this hurts their economy in the long run.
  • “You Can Thank Environmentalists for the Invasion of Ukraine.”

    It is the West’s wacko environmentalists who handed Russian President Vladimir Putin the leverage and money to invade Crimea in 2014 and Ukraine this week.

    Without these wackos, Putin would be just another gangster in charge of a crumbling country, and maybe one on the verge of a revolution to depose him.

    But the facts are the facts are the facts, and the facts are these… Thanks to the West’s environmentalists, those smug greenies who are more concerned with carbon output than world peace, this gangster controls much of the energy going to the European Union (E.U.).

    Thanks a lot, Greta…

  • A great mystery:

  • Enjoy these cringy social justice takes on Ukraine.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
    

  • Biden is demonstrably more hostile to American oil and gas companies than he is to Russian companies, having frozen oil and gas leases despite a court order otherwise.
  • Thanks to Biden’s inflation, the cost of everything is going up. “70 percent of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.”
  • Due to either bad polling or raw panic among his party, Canada’s Justin Trudeau rescinded his Emergencies Act declaration.
  • Matt Taibbi on Canada’s dangerous new dystopian powers:

    Fellow former finance reporter Chrystia Freeland — someone I’ve known since we were both expat journalists in Russia in the nineties — announced last week that her native Canada would be making Sorkin’s vision a reality. Freeland arouses strong feelings among old Russia hands. Before the Yeltsin era collapsed, she had consistent, remarkable access to gangster-oligarchs like Boris Berezovsky, who appeared in her Financial Times articles described as aw-shucks humans just doing their best to make sure “big capital” maintained its “necessary role” in Russia’s political life. “Berezovsky was one of several financiers who came together in a last-ditch attempt to keep the Communists out of the Kremlin” was typical Freeland fare in, say, 1998.

    Then the Yeltsin era collapsed in corrupt ignominy and Freeland immediately wrote a book called Sale of the Century that identified Yeltsin’s embrace of her former top sources as the “original sin” of Russian capitalism, a “Faustian bargain” that crippled Russia’s chance at true progress. This is Freeland on Yeltsin’s successor in 2000. Note the “Yes, Putin has a reputation for beating the press, but his economic rep is solid!” passage at the end:

    It looks as if we’re about to fall in love with Russia all over again…

    Compared to the ailing, drink-addled figure Boris Yeltsin cut in his later years, his successor, Vladimir Putin, in the eyes of many western observers, seems refreshingly direct, decisive and energetic… Tony Blair, who has already paid Putin the compliment of a visit to Russia and received the newly installed president in Downing Street in return, has praised him as a strong leader with a reformist vision. Bill Clinton, who recently hot-footed it to Russia, offered the equally sunny appraisal that “when we look at Russia today . . . we see an economy that is growing . . . we see a Russia that has just completed a democratic transfer of power for the first time in a thousand years.”

    To be sure, some critics have lamented Putin’s support for the bloody second war in Chechnya, accused him of eroding freedom of the press…and worried aloud that his KGB background and unrepenting loyalty to the honor of that institution could jeopardize Russia’s fragile democratic institutions. But many of even Putin’s fiercest prosecutors seem inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the economy…

    Years later, she is somehow Canada’s Finance Minister, and what another friend from our Russia days laughingly describes as “the Nurse Ratched of the New World Order.” At the end of last week, Minister Freeland explained that in expanding its Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) program, her government was “directing Canadian financial institutions to review their relationships with anyone involved in the illegal blockades.”

    The Emergencies Act contains language beyond the inventive powers of the best sci-fi writers. It defines a “designated person” — a person eligible for cutoff of financial services — as someone “directly or indirectly” participating in a “public assembly that may reasonably be expected to lead to a breach of the peace.” Directly or indirectly?

    She went on to describe the invocation of Canada’s Emergencies Act in the dripping-fake tones of someone trying to put a smile on an insurance claim rejection, with even phrases packed with bad news steered upward in the form of cheery hypotheticals. As in, The names of both individuals and entities as well as crypto wallets? Have been shared? By the RCMP with financial institutions? And accounts have been frozen? As she confirmed this monstrous news about freezing bank accounts, Freeland burst into nervous laughter, looking like Tony Perkins sharing a cheery memory with “mother.”

  • Angeleno’s tax dollars at work:

  • China is getting a good return on its investment in the Biden clan: “DOJ shuts down China-focused anti-espionage program. The China Initiative is being cast aside largely because of perceptions that it unfairly painted Chinese Americans and U.S. residents of Chinese origin as disloyal.” We can’t let national security stand in the way of political correctness…
  • The Covid-theater crazies are about to throw in the towel.

    In what may be remembered as one of the greatest miracles of all time, it seems that an upcoming American election cycle is set to put an end to the great COVID pandemic in regions that have been clinging to “mitigation” tactics despite them being proven ineffective long ago. What science couldn’t do for blue state governors, politics is about to. Meanwhile, much of the rest of the country has already adopted an “endemic” approach to COVID. In my Indiana community, for instance, school systems have been in-person and maskless for well over a year.

    A combination of experience and common sense led local officials to recognize that while COVID was a serious virus, and an often-times unpleasant condition to endure, we just weren’t experiencing the kind of mortality rates or critical hospitalizations that would require the suspension of normal life. If I was guessing, I would say that there are more counties, cities, and communities in the United States like mine than not.

    While mainstream media may be drawn like a moth to the bright lights of urban areas with all the restrictions, mandates, and panic-fueled policies enacted there, most Americans have been “living with” the virus for a long time now.

    In fact, if my community is any bellwether for the nation, most Americans are already wondering why anyone is still attempting to take a non-endemic approach at this point. The virus has proven itself to be, like all other viruses, prone to seasonal surges that are largely unaltered by our theatrical mitigation techniques. Not that anyone with their head screwed on straight ever thought there was value in wearing a porous cloth mask while standing up at a restaurant, then taking it off while sitting down, but the comical nonsense of mask histrionics is now widely appreciated as a goofy spectator sport. Behold:

    So silly. And so as opinion polls continue showing that an ever-increasing number of Americans are infuriated by this nonsense, and that they are done with all the aggressive pandemic restrictions that proved unnecessary a long time ago, a public pivot of massive proportions is underway amongst the political class.

    Whether it’s big blue state governors like California’s Gavin Newsom hilariously announcing that he will be transitioning his state to the country’s first “endemic” virus policy – meaning they’re going to start doing some things that Texas, Florida, South Dakota, Indiana, and so many others have been doing for over a year – or whether it’s blue city school boards like San Francisco’s being recalled by angry voters for their abusive and needless shutdown and masking policies, it’s clear where we’re headed.

  • Despite that, the midterm news for Democrats is not good.

    Democrats know that they should be preparing for a brutal showing in this November’s midterm elections. Glenn Youngkin’s victory in the Virginia gubernatorial race last year — and, more to the point, the substance and style of his successful campaign — were the first sign of it.

    But the hits have kept on coming. In San Francisco last week, two progressive parents succeeded in their campaign to oust three school-board members for being . . . too progressive. Irked initially at how long it was taking for area schools to reopen for in-person learning during the pandemic, these two single parents did some digging and discovered even more to be upset about: an enormous budget shortfall, an intensive campaign to rename dozens of school buildings, and the replacement of a merit-based admissions program with a diversity-minded lottery, among other issues.

    Suggesting just how central education has become to politics, San Francisco’s intensely progressive mayor, London Breed — who last fall violated her own mask mandate at a concert and defended herself by saying she was “feeling the spirit” — endorsed the school-board recall effort.

    “My take is that it was really about the frustration of the board of education doing their fundamental job,” Breed said after the results were in. “And that is to make sure that our children are getting educated, that they get back into the classroom. And that did not occur. . . . We failed our children. Parents were upset. The city as a whole was upset, and the decision to recall school-board members was a result of that.”

    San Francisco–based writer Gary Kamiya suggests in a piece for the Atlantic that the results of the recall seem to confirm the conservative narrative. Kamiya writes that conservatives have argued “that the Democratic Party is out of step not just with Republicans, but with its own constituents. . . . Progressives rejected such conclusions, insisting that the recall was simply about competence and was driven by an only-in-San-Francisco set of circumstances.” Kamiya concludes that the best way to read the outcome is “closer to the conservative view.” “At a minimum,” Kamiya writes, “the recall demonstrates that ‘woke’ racial politics have their limits, even in one of the wokest cities in the country.”

    Over in Texas, meanwhile, failed Senate candidate and failed presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke is gearing up to become a failed gubernatorial candidate, too. Running against incumbent Republican governor Greg Abbott, O’Rourke was most recently seen trying to pretend that he isn’t a fan of radical gun-control measures.

    Asked about the promise he made during his run for president that he would “take away AR-15s and AK-47s,” O’Rourke attempted a hard about-face.

    “I’m not interested in taking anything from anyone,” he said. “What I want to make sure that we do is defend the Second Amendment. I want to make sure that we protect our fellow Texans far better than we’re doing right now. And that we listen to law enforcement, which Greg Abbott refused to do. He turned his back on them when he signed that permitless-carry bill that endangers the lives of law enforcement in a state that’s seen more cops and sheriff’s deputies gunned down than in any other.”

    As Charlie Cooke has noted, this is utter tripe. It also isn’t working. The latest poll of the race from the Dallas Moring News has Abbott up by seven points, 45 percent to 38 percent. O’Rourke himself remains underwater with voters: Only 40 percent view him favorably, while 46 percent say they have an unfavorable view of the candidate.

  • Republicans win a Jacksonville City Council race:

  • Speaking of Florida:

  • A nice guide to recent incidents of election fraud.
  • Texas sues ATF over silencers.
  • Denounce antifa violence at a leftwing think tank? You know that’s a firing!
  • Kyle Rittenhouse is finally ready to sue, including lawsuits against Whoopi Goldberg and Cenk Uygur. I hope he bankrupts anyone who called him a white supremacist.
  • Former Houston Rockets draft bust Royce White is running for Congress as a Republican against “Squad” member Ilhan Omar. Hopefully he can be on the campaign trail more than he was on the floor for the Rockets…
  • Another day, another hate crime hoax.
  • Commies gonna commie:

  • There’s a huge fight going on between Qatar Airways and Airbus over quality control issues. Boeing may be the beneficiary.
  • It takes under 20 seconds for the Lock-Picking Lawyer to defeat the mailbox lock the government requires you to use.
  • A long, detailed look at what Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary shows us about The Beatles creative process. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Uncomable Hair Syndrome.
  • “Massacre As Great White Shark Allowed To Compete In Women’s 500 Freestyle.”

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    Posted in Communism, Democrats, Economics, Elections, Foreign Policy, Guns, Military, Regulation, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | No Comments »

    Jordan Peterson Wants You To Wake Up

    Tuesday, February 22nd, 2022

    The idea of a Jordan B. Peterson music video sounds like an idea that might be wall-to-wall cringe. But this is actually a pretty effective ditty that combines early Kate Bush with The Wall-era Pink Floyd.

    “Wake Up: Dedicated, under the current unfortunate conditions, to the Prime Minister of Canada, the Right Honorable Justin Trudeau. “

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    Posted in Regulation, video | No Comments »

    Am I Paranoid Enough?

    Monday, February 21st, 2022

    Though quite jaundiced and cynical about the “good intentions” of our national and international elites (political and otherwise), I’ve tried to avoid buying into conspiracy theories about a “great reset” being planned for us by Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum. But now come news that Justin Trudeau wants to make all the “temporary” expanded financial surveillance powers permanent.

    As all eyes were trained on the aggressive police sweep of the Ottawa trucker convoy this week, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau’s administration was quietly moving to implement a sweeping expansion of surveillance power at the federal level.

    The Trudeau government’s financial war against the truckers has been covered at length. But one underreported aspect of this broader assault on Canadian civil liberties is the effort to bring crowdfunding and payment service providers — two of the most prominent routes for financial transactions on the Internet — under the permanent control of a centralized government authority.

    In a February 14 news conference, Canadian finance minister Chrystia Freeland said that the government was using the Emergencies Act to broaden “the scope of Canada’s anti-money-laundering and terrorist financing rules so that they cover crowdfunding platforms and the payment service providers they use.” That broadened power requires all forms of digital transactions, including cryptocurrencies, to be reported to the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Center of Canada. (I.e., “Fintrac”). “As of today, all crowdfunding platforms and the payment service providers they use must register with Fintrac, and they must report large and suspicious transactions to Fintrac,” Freeland said. She justified the move as a way to “mitigate the risk” of “illicit funds” and “increase the quality and quantity of intelligence received by Fintrac and make more information available to support investigations by law enforcement.” Trudeau, standing behind Freeland at the press conference, nodded his head in agreement.

    Freeland said the trucker convoy, which had assembled to protest coronavirus restrictions, had “highlighted the fact” that digital assets and funding mechanisms “weren’t captured” by the Canadian government’s pre-existing surveillance powers. As a result, she said, “the government will also bring forward legislation to provide these authorities to FinTrac on a permanent basis.”

    That seems an awful lot less like an emergency measure to deal with honking truckers and more like a naked power grab to further the building of a sinister, ubiquitous surveillance state, doesn’t it? It’s the sort of thing that makes accusations of trying to impose a Chinese-style social credit system on western democracies a lot more credible, doesn’t it?

    It doesn’t help that Schwab dresses and talks like a supervillain.

    And it also doesn’t help that Trudeau is in fact a member of the World Economic Forum, as is Chrystia Freeland.

    James Lindsay has a long thread on Schwab’s book The Fourth Industrial Revolution, his sweeping vision of “a technological fusion of the ‘physical, digital, and biological worlds,’ which is creepy transhumanism under their direction.”

    And then there’s this:

    Is all this just paranoid pattern-matching confirmation bias? Possibly. Let’s hope so. It probably is crazy to ascribe every baleful trend of recent memory (social justice, creeping authoritarianism, tranny madness, rising crime, pedophilia among left-wing elites, media insistence that ordinary people need to start eating bugs, etc.) to one grand conspiracy. It’s paranoid to ascribe every problem to a single malevolent actor. There are always going to be competing agendas by competing power players. It’s a mistake to assume that all the bad guys, from Schwab to George Soros to Bill Gates to Xi Jinping, are on the same team, working with each other. That way lies madness.

    But there sure seems to be a whole lot of something going on.

    Oh, and Biden just extended the Flu Manchu emergency declaration for another year.

    Am I paranoid enough?

    Edited to add: AP says that the “age of consent” pic is fake.

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    Posted in Communism, Foreign Policy, Regulation, Social Justice Warriors | 10 Comments »

    LinkSwarm for February 19, 2022

    Saturday, February 19th, 2022

    Justin Trudeau’s storm troopers start arresting peaceful protesters, he wants to kidnap the children and dogs of free Canadian citizens who dared to bruise his fragile ego, Texas sends more lawsuits flying, and another case of Sudden Epstein Death Syndrome. It’s the Friday Saturday LinkSwarm!

  • The crackdown comes.

    Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau cancelled parliamentary debate today as federal police began arresting protesting truckers and confiscating vehicles. Trudeau did not want to face government while the operation to break the back of the freedom protestors begins.

    Early this morning, federal police assembled a convoy of heavy tow trucks to begin the operation. The identities of the tow truck companies were masked by painting over the logos to avoid retaliation. RCMP and Ottawa police then brought in Armored Personnel Carriers (MRAP’s and APC’s) to support the operation.

    Media were told to leave the enforcement zone to help hide the optics of heavily armed RCMP tactical units, and they began breaking the windows of the trucks and forcibly removing the truck drivers. For the same reason, popular social media YouTuber’s, who had been broadcasting livestreams, were arrested as the operation began.

    

  • They’re also threatening to take children from protesting parents. “Just imagine the uproar that would ensue if Trump had taken children from Black Lives Matters protesters.”
  • They’re also threatening to take protestor’s dogs.
    

  • The Canadian Civil Liberties Unions has awoken from its slumber to file a lawsuit over Trudeau’s Emergencies Act.
  • “When Fascism Comes To America, It Will Look Like Justin Trudeau’s Canada. Trudeau’s dangerous not just because he’s abusing Canadians, but because he is providing the wish list for crackdowns by Democrats in the U.S.: Every single bank, credit union, investment broker and insurance provider in the country has been deputized to figure out if they have a blockader as a client, and to immediately freeze their accounts if so.”
  • “Ottawa Mounted Police Charge Horses Into Crowd, Disabled Elderly Woman Using Walker Trampled.”
  • Additional commentary:


    

  • The real terrorists Trudeau isn’t arresting. “Axe-Wielding Activists Cause Millions In Damage, Attempt To Torch Pipeline Workers.”
  • Public sector unions want a law to control everything.

    The Chicago Teachers Union provides a real-world example of what happens when a government union has too much power.

    CTU has gone on strike three times in three school years. In the latest work stoppage, over 330,000 schoolchildren missed five days of school. Parents were notified of the walkout after 11 p.m. on a school night, leaving them just hours to develop a back-up plan after the union decided not to show up.

    This shut-down follows the 2020-2021 school year, when Chicago Public Schools was fully remote for most of the year, rolling out hybrid options starting in February 2021. All told, Chicago students had gone 17 months without fully in-person education by the time they started the current school year Aug. 30, 2021.

    And students’ academic achievement suffered for it. One example: On the SATs, there was a 6.1 percentage point decrease in the number of Chicago students at least meeting standards in math – and a drop of 6.7 percentage points for the same category for low-income students – in 2021 compared to 2019.

    But CTU’s political muscle – and their willingness to flex it – could become the blueprint for schools and government at all levels if Illinois’ powerful government-sector unions get what they’re asking for at the polls in November. They want an amendment to the Illinois Constitution that would give unelected government union bosses more power than state law or the people elected to represent residents’ best interests.

    Snip.

    Amendment 1 is billed as a right-to-work ban in a state that already doesn’t allow right to work, but it’s much more than that. It would give unions a “fundamental” right to organize and bargain over wages, hours, working conditions, economic welfare and safety at work – i.e., virtually anything – and explicitly prohibit lawmakers from ever interfering with or diminishing those rights.

    Unions would be able to demand anything during negotiations and go on strike to get their demands met. Resulting contracts would carry the weight of the state constitution. Lawmakers wouldn’t be able to restrict what unions can negotiate or limit when they can go on strike without running afoul of the state constitution.

    What’s more, lawmakers would never be able to repeal a little-known Illinois provision that allows many union contracts to override conflicting state and local laws and regulations.

    Known in legal parlance as a “supercedence clause,” the practical effect is that a union will be able to rewrite laws it doesn’t like just by negotiating a contrary provision in its contract. If the employer doesn’t agree? The union goes on strike. And government officials’ hands will be tied.

    That includes laws in place to protect children.

    A provision requiring “background information” on employees of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services – the department charged with protecting children who are reported abused or neglected – could be contradicted in the union’s contract with the state.

    So could the provision prohibiting employment of “sexually dangerous” persons.

    

  • Judicial Watch files a lawsuit to obtain records of CIA contacts with Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann. The ripples from the Durham probe revelations continue to spread.
  • Speaking of lawsuits: “Attorney General Ken Paxton, alongside the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) on behalf of Congresswoman Beth Van Duyne, sued the Biden Administration for its illegal mask mandate for airlines and airports.”
  • Paxton and Texas also sued Facebook over facial recognition. “Facebook unlawfully captured the biometric identifiers of Texans for a commercial purpose without their informed consent, disclosed those identifiers to others, and failed to destroy collected identifiers within a reasonable time.”
  • “San Francisco police linked a woman to a crime using DNA from her rape exam, D.A. Boudin says.” Though the charges were dropped, this seems like not only a clear Fourth Amendment violation, but an absolute abuse of trust. “Sure, just give your DNA to the government! There’s no way they would ever abuse that!” Can you believe that Soros-backed Boudin is the subject of a recall petition?
  • Joe Biden has nightmare low approval rates in battleground states. Including -26 in Georgia.
  • More on the same theme:

  • Let me see if I have the timeline on this story correct: 1. Leftwing racial justice activist Quintez Brown attempts to assassinate Louisville Democratic mayoral candidate Craig Greenberg, and 2. He’s almost immediately bailed out for a paltry $100,000 by #BlackLivesMatter? How often is bail set so low for attempted political assassinations?
  • “Biracial GOP Candidate Rips CRT in Front of North Carolina School Board.”

    CRT got blown away by a massive truth bomb dropped by North Carolina dad — and local GOP candidate — Brian Echevarria at his school board meeting on Monday.

    “As a parent, I speak to other parents,” he told Cabarrus County School Board members, “And there’s a few things we don’t want.”

    “I’m biracial, I’m multilingual, I’m multicultural. The fact is in America and North Carolina, I can do anything I want — and I teach that to my children. And the person who tells my little pecan-color kids that they’re somehow oppressed based on the color of their skin,” he justly insisted, “would be absolutely wrong and absolutely at war with me.”

  • Amazon suspends #BlackLivesMatter from its charity platform.
  • Another day, another leftwing activist exposed as a pedophile.
  • “Illegal Aliens Ran Sex-Trafficking Ring in New York City, Using Minors From Mexico.”
  • Speaking of pedophilia: “Alternatively described as Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘best mate’ and ‘pimp’, Jean-Luc Brunel, a former French modeling agent who has been imprisoned since 2020 on charges he aided Epstein’s sex-trafficking enterprise, has committed suicide in his cell.” I think we’ve seen this movie before, and we didn’t believe the ending the first time…
  • New York City Democratic mayor Eric Adams fires over 1,400 city employees over their refusal to bend the knee to his vaccine mandate.
  • Speaking of Adams: “I want to discuss the new fuckface mayor of New York City that replaced the old fuckface mayor.” The mayor that wants to force employers to enforce vaccine mandates also wants them to force workers back to their NYC offices.

    What’s in it for those businesses that now realize that three hundred thousand dollars a month in office space “We don’t need it anymore.” What’s in it for those employees that figured out that they can have homes that are two or three times the size for half as much money and not have to deal with a commute every day? What’s in it for them?”

  • With oil prices up, so are U.S. rig counts, up to a four year high.
  • America’s electric grid is less stable than it was 20 years before.
  • U.S. sells 250 Abrams tanks to Poland in a deal worth $6 billion.
  • Levi’s brand ambassador turns down $1 million severance package because she refuses to stop talking about the need for school choice.
  • The Critical Drinker is not impressed with the teasers from Amazon’s Lord of the Rings. You can’t retcon it into generic diversity because “you don’t get to make that choice because you didn’t write Lord of the Rings.”
  • New Bloom County animated TV show in development for Fox. I view this with more trepidation than hope. There’s about a 95% chance the screw it up, and if they don’t, there’s a good chance Fox will cancel it anyway, since that’s their MO…
  • P. J. O’Rourke, RIP. I reviewed Holidays in Hell for Reason back in the day…
  • Also RIP: Col. Gail Halvorsen, the “Candy Bomber” from the Berlin Airlift.
  • In 2017, a pilot aborted takeoff after V1, the inflection point for when a safe abort was still possible. “Still traveling at 100 knots, but decelerating rapidly, the plane rumbled across the grass overrun area, plowed over the airport perimeter fence, struck a raised embankment, lost its landing gear, crossed a road, and ground to a halt straddling a ditch.” Post-incident analysis showed why that was the right call. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • “Godzilla’s Jewish Hollywood Friend.” Now, with that excuse, here’s a picture of a Bob Eggleton painting I actually own.

  • Tippi Hedren beware:

  • “Canadian ATMs Now Asking Your Political Views Before Allowing You To Withdraw Money.”
  • Extra-fluffy mop:

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    Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Military, Regulation, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, unions, video | No Comments »

    Trudeau The Thieving Bully

    Tuesday, February 15th, 2022

    Justin Trudeau, the prick that keeps pricking, has decided that the risk of him looking impotent is such an astounding threat to the nation that it requires invoking the never-before-used Emergencies Act to end the vaccine mandate protests.

    The Emergencies Act gives powers to the federal government:

  • the ability to “regulate or prohibit public assembly that may reasonably be expected to lead to a breach of the peace, travel, or the use of property”
  • the ability to “designate and secure protected places”
  • the ability to “assume the control, restoration and maintenance of public utilities and services”
  • the ability to “authorize or direct the provision of essential services and the provision of reasonable compensation”
  • the ability to “impose on summary conviction a fine not exceeding $500 or imprisonment not exceeding six months or both, or on indictment, a fine not exceeding $5,000 or imprisonment not exceeding five years, or both, for any breach of an order or regulation”

    • Trudeau has to meet with his provincial cabinet. Then he will release a proclamation.

    As soon as Trudeau invokes the Emergencies Act it will go into effect. However, Parliament must receive a motion for the emergency within seven days.

    The motion for the emergency must survive the House of Commons and the Senate. If it does not then it will end.

    Which of these limited powers is Trudeau invoking first? None of them. He’s using it to track and steal the money of people who dare to disagree with him.

    Canada Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Finance Chrystia Freeland has announced the government is broadening the scope of the country’s anti-money laundering monitoring and terrorist financing laws to cover crowdfunding platforms and the payment service providers they use.

    “These changes cover all forms of transactions, including digital assets such as crypto currencies,” she announced during a press conference on Monday night.

    “The illegal blockades have highlighted the fact that crowdfunding platforms and some of the payment service providers they use are not fully captured under the proceeds of crime and terrorist financing act.

    “Our banks and financial institutions are already obligated to report the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada or FINTRAC. As of today, all crowdfunding platforms and the payment service providers they use must register with FINTRAC, and they must report large and suspicious transactions to FINTRAC.”

    How quickly government power went from “We’re only taking money from druglords and terrorists” to “We’re tracking all transactions of peaceful protestors.” Imagine if the U.S. government announced it was going to freeze the bank accounts and impound the cars of everyone marching in Selma. That’s what’s going on in Canada.

    All over a vaccine mandate that was never enacted into law by Canada’s parliament.

    It may be time for all Canadians, not just those involved in the protest, to get their money out of Canada.
    

    Trudeau’s actions are so extreme that both the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the Toronto Star have condemned him over it.

    A few more tweets:

    Dark times for Canada.

    Darker still if Canada lets Trudeau get away with it.

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    Posted in Regulation | 3 Comments »

    Satyagraha, Eh

    Sunday, February 13th, 2022

    Satyagraha, in addition to being my least favorite of Philip Glass’ early operas, is Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violent resistance to political repression. We’re seeing an excellent example of it being deployed up in Canada, as the trucker protest against Justin Trudeau’s vaccine mandates continues.

    Here’s an example of the philosophy in action:

    Veterans have reportedly joined the protest, forming lines between police and truckers.

    Evidently the Ambassador Bridge linking Detroit and Windsor, Ontario has been cleared but access to the bridge is still blocked.

    The primary roadblock to solving the crisis remains Justin Trudeau.

    Instead of treating the truckers as fellow citizens who have a valid, or at least reasonable, complaint about a relatively unimportant policy that the government vacillated on prior to its implementation, the establishment and center-left in Canada have reacted to them with outrage and contempt.

    They are agents of malign foreign influence or white nationalists. They must be fought on the beaches and the landing fields.

    Snip.

    Justin Trudeau speaks as if an enemy horde has descended that must be resisted in another Battle of Maldon. “I want to be very clear — we are not intimidated by those who hurl abuse at small business workers and steal food from the homeless,” he said. “We won’t give in to those who fly racist flags. We won’t cave to those who engage in vandalism or dishonor the memory of our veterans.”

    In this, he engaged in classic nutpicking, focusing on a few instances of misbehavior to tar the entire group. It’d be hard to come up with a better expression of the high-handedness that has characterized pro-restriction officeholders and public-health experts during the pandemic than Trudeau’s sneering attitude toward the protestors.

    Canada has been a relative monolith on Covid. Conservative officeholders have been broadly willing to go along with lockdowns and mandates. There has been no Ron DeSantis. Nor is there any conservative alternative media in Canada (with a few exceptions) to give a platform to dissenters from the Covid orthodoxy — the positive coverage of the truckers, for instance, has mostly been emanating from the United States.

    Surely, this is why the truckers have taken on such an outsized significance.

    In representing such a high-profile break from the Covid consensus, they have given conservative politicians permission — or affirmatively pressured them — to begin to back off restrictions. Already, the conservative leader who lost to Trudeau last year and is a relatively conciliatory figure has been dumped and will likely be replaced by a more combative alternative. Alberta and Saskatchewan have moved this week to lift various Covid restrictions.

    The truckers are another sign of the class inversion in advanced Western countries. The Left continues to shed working-class voters and gain college-educated voters and the well-coiffed Trudeau, fully attuned to haut progressive sensibilities, is the perfect paladin for the upper-middle class. On the other hand, the right is doing the opposite and sees blue-collar virtue in the truckers to whom it once would have felt no natural connection.

    One hopes that, on the ground, the whole episode doesn’t have an ugly end.

    Trudeau should give the truckers their victory on the vaccination mandate. His government, which already backed off on it once only to re-embrace it, can easily back off again. It’s not as though this was a law passed by parliament. It’s a unilateral, arbitrary rule of the sort that proliferated throughout the pandemic. And no one can seriously believe Canada is going to suffer a renewed Covid surge based on roughly 10 percent of its truckers not being vaccinated.

    The idea Trudeau should give in only works if you assume that he’s actually working for the best interests of Canada and Canadians. The stubborn resistance to a return to normalcy on the part of left-wing politicians across the globe suggest that another agenda is at work.

    Liberal comedian Bill Maher, whose diet seems to incorporate ever-more redpills these days, says Trudeau is starting to sound like you-know-who:

    Fact check: Trudeau was never a cool guy.

    Will the Canadian political establishment force Trudeau to blink, or is he going to push the crisis to bloodshed to make truckers bend their knees to the state?

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    Posted in Regulation, video | 2 Comments »

    Scenes From The Trucker Revolution

    Saturday, February 5th, 2022

    Started working on a short post that became too long a post to finish today. So enjoy some video from Canada’s Trucker Revolution:

    Instapundit also has an interesting article up: The workers of the world finally had an uprising and the left hates it.

    So we’re finally seeing a genuine, bottom-up, working-class revolution. In Canada, and increasingly in the United States, truckers and others are refusing to follow government orders, telling the powerful that, in a popular lefty formulation, if there’s no justice, there’s no peace.

    Naturally, the left hates it.

    For more than a century, lefties have talked about such a revolt. But if you really paid attention, the actual role of the working class in their working-class revolution was not to call the shots — it was to do what it was told by the “intellectual vanguard” of the left.

    A working-class revolution led by the working class is the left’s worst nightmare because the working class doesn’t want what the left wants. The working class wants jobs, a stable economy, safe streets, low inflation, schools that teach things and a conservative, non-adventurous foreign policy that won’t get a lot of working-class people killed. It’s not excited about gender fluidity, critical race theory, “modern monetary theory,” foreign adventures and defunding police.

    Worse yet, a huge part of the lefty self-image revolves around feeling superior to the working class and openly expressing disdain for it. One need spend only a few minutes tuning into left media like NPR, CNN or MSNBC to hear the disdain for working-class Americans, inhabitants of “flyover country,” people who live in the middle of nowhere.

    So naturally, the idea that those people might be staging a revolution is intolerable.

    The idea that the wrong kind of people might be demanding freedom is simply intolerable to the left.

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    Posted in video | 1 Comment »