The Trudeau government tells the Canadian Senate, “Because, reasons!”

The New Neo Posted on by

The Canadian Senate is deliberating the extension of the Emergencies Act activation that the House has already approved. As part of that process, debates are ongoing.

I have almost zero doubt that the Senate will be going along with the House. The body is dominated by Trudeau supporters, for one thing. But I thought I’d highlight something that emerged during the questioning of the government’s representative Marc Gold:

The senators got down to the basic question of why do you need it if the protesters are no longer camped outside of Parliament and there are no longer any blockades? What’s the point besides a huge power grab by Justin Trudeau?

They also wanted to know what intelligence or data they were basing their request for the Act on, to begin with. The government never provided that information to the Parliament. The government representative said they made the decision based on intelligence they “couldn’t share.”

“‘What is equally clear, as we all know, and as I stated in response to an earlier question, that I cannot share, and the government cannot share and should not share the intelligence that it may have received that helped inform their decision,’ he continued.”

Just trust us; we are asking for dictatorial powers for a really really good reason that must remain secret even from you, the legislators. That’s extraordinary, and no member of the legislature ought to accept it. But it’s almost a certainty that they will, they will.

And of course, as pointed out in the first paragraph of the above quote, there is no longer even the supposed (albeit extraordinarily weak) justification presented by the blockade and the demonstration. That’s why Trudeau’s government must invent a secret justification That Cannot Be Told. And that reason is expected to last a long time, because you just never know when those awful white supremacist Nazis will decide to demonstrate again.

It is impressive in its audacity. But for quite some time now the left in the West has realized that there is a distinct lack of courage and/or will and/or numbers on the part of its opponents in political life, and that dedication to the protection of liberty seems to have waned remarkably even in the general population. They feel an urgency to take advantage of this moment in time and this opportunity.

Spambot of the day

The New Neo Posted on by

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So that’s where my fastidious facts went.

On Biden’s weakness: Putin isn’t Corn Pop

The New Neo Posted on by

The money angle on Putin and Ukraine:

Before Biden became President, the U.S. was energy independent and an exporter of energy. [Biden lowered] American production and remov[ed] Trump’s restrictions on the Nordstream natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany. His policies made other countries more reliant on Russian gas…[g]iving Putin leverage on other countries such as Germany and doubling the price. All that extra money went straight into Russia’s pockets. Those new profits helped Russia raise the funds to continue Putin’s dream of the greater Russia of the USSR.

On top of the higher prices and the increased dependence on Russian energy, the mishandling of the Afghan withdrawal and removing some of the Iran sanctions showed Biden to be a weak President. Putin is no idiot. All of Biden’s flawed policies and feeble foreign policy made the Russian president understand that if he was ever going to get Ukraine back in Russia’s clutches, this was it.

This seems pretty obvious.

How far this will go – whether it will be resolved at the last minute and both sides declare victory – I’m not sure. However, I assumed when Biden was elected that this sort of thing was going to be happening. Biden would be continuing Obama’s policies, only making it worse because we’re that much farther along on the leftist continuum and Biden is obviously confused and feeble.

More:

The White House has already ruled out sanctions on Russia for recognizing the autonomy of Donetsk and Luhansk and the peacekeepers seem to fall within the “minor incursion” parameters that Joe Biden established in January. I don’t know what level of risk the Ukrainians are willing to take by accidentally, or not, killing Russian troops. I’d just note that under the UN “peacekeeping” definition, both sides have to agree to a ceasefire before deployment. That hasn’t happened in this case which leads one to believe that the primary purpose of the Russian troops is to get some of them killed. So we haven’t seen the last of this melodrama.

Richard Fernandez writes:

Putin has created an “invasion-in-being.” In naval warfare, the analogous concept of a “fleet in being” is a force that projects menace without ever leaving port. Were it to fight it might lose and no longer influence but while it remains in port, one is forced to guard against it…

…[T]here is no way of telling whether this or that stand-to is the real thing because to be credible, it must always be potentially real…

Being an ex secret policeman, Putin knows much of his menace comes from unpredictability. The public can tolerate ordinary police because they know what the rules are and do not anticipate a midnight knock on the door. As with secret police, Ukraine and the Western public don’t know what the rules are. They are hanging on the caprice of a seeming madman, who curiously keeps going to the brink without crossing it for good reason; if he actually invades in a recognizable way the uncertainty is removed and the West knows what to do about aging overreaching dictators who’ve started something they can’t afford. By preserving ambiguity Putin has Biden spellbound, on the one hand reportedly convinced it’s on.

“Peacekeeping” forces? Whatever Putin calls them, what will they actually be doing?

On the other hand, Biden seems to think Putin can still be talked out of it. The wires announced a breakthrough summit brokered by French President Emmanuel Macron in which “President Biden has agreed ‘in principle’ to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the near future, provided Russia has not invaded Ukraine, the White House announced.” Taking all the elements together it seems, according to a former White House adviser, that “ultimately Putin wants some kind of deal. They think Biden is the kind of president who could actually make a deal. Trump never could.” Perhaps Putin’s first choice in the Ukraine crisis was always a deal.

Who knew the White House had such a sense of humor? “[Putin thinks] Biden is the kind of president who could actually make a deal. Trump never could.”

Not the kind of deal Putin wanted, anyway.

Canada’s Parliament votes to extend the Emergencies Act for 30 days

The New Neo Posted on by

The vote was mostly along mostly party lines. The “yeas” represented the same coalition that gave Trudeau his last two wins. What’s more, I believe the majority of the feedback they’re getting from Canadians is supportive as well, because the measure “restores order.”

Trudeau will be further emboldened by this action.

It’s especially sad as well as outrageous that some of those who voted for the measure think the measure is wrong:

It passed because it ultimately became something of a confidence vote and they didn’t want to have to hold another election. So some of the people who voted said they were against the passage of the Act but were voting for it for that reason. Even the guy from Quebec who had chaired the Liberal caucus but quit that over how Trudeau had been dividing the country, Joel Lightbound, voted to approve it for that reason, despite saying he did not believe the threshold was met for the Act.

Principles? What are those?

[NOTE: The issue still needs to be voted on in the Canadian senate, but apparently that body is mostly Trudeau-supporting and so it is expected it will pass handily.]

Tyranny creep: Canada and elsewhere

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter John Tyler asks:

There never is a shortage of jack-booted enforcers to impose a government’s will upon the citizenry.
This time Canada is the venue.

So, ladies and gents, what is about the Canadian personality or culture that enables a Trudeau (or a Putin, Bidet , Maduro, Castro, Hitler, Stalin, et. al.) to impose draconian measures to assert total control; eh?

I’m not sure whether John Tyler actually thinks there is any special characteristic of “the Canadian personality or culture” that predisposes it to this, or whether he’s being sarcastic and echoing things that have been said about Germans (or other ethnic groups or cultures) during and after World War II. But I’ll tackle the question.

As previously discussed, there may be some things about Canadians that have enabled what’s been occurring there lately: their reputation for politeness, their history of not having had a revolution against the British, and the influx of American Tories escaping from our own revolution several centuries ago. But although perhaps that gives Canada a slight edge in the race to the tyrannical bottom, I don’t think it matters nearly as much as the nature of tyranny itself in our modern internet age.

Tyranny sometimes announces itself with a bang, but more often it’s a whimper. Something that most people don’t even notice can be a turning point.

For example, Canada has hate speech laws. These are always a step towards tyranny, and a particularly “soft” one that most people may not recognize as such. After all, what decent person can be against hating hatred? (Note the ironic contradiction there). But a person can certainly dislike the sentiment expressed by someone while defending that person’s right to say it without fear of being charged with a crime. In fact, that used to be a mainstream idea taught to all children in the form of, “I may not agree with you or like what you’re saying, but I defend your right to say it.”

The left used to champion that thought when they were the ones whose rights it defended, but once the left got in the driver’s seat it was flipped to: “hate speech is violence.” The left is patient, and has been working for most of my lifetime and even earlier in Western countries in order to finally reach a tipping point in various powerful institutions in those countries. The most important of those institutions has always been education, because once leftist doctrines and teachings have replaced the old-fashioned sort based on natural rights and liberty, the ground has been prepared for the tyrannical takeover. That takeover needn’t be obviously harsh. It can be accomplished through a series of subtler steps over time – and then the sudden shift to more hardball tactics such as what we’re seeing now in Canada’s state of emergency.

Do the people of Canada realize what’s happening? Some must, and some of those approve of it. After all, order has been restored. Those pesky white supremacist [sic] truckers who wanted to disrupt the wonderful Canadian social order have been put in their place. And for some of them, “their place” is prison without bail, as well as a frozen bank account. The terrible terrible crime of which they’re guilty? “Counselling to commit mischief.”

I submit that any country or province or state that has criminalized “counselling to commit mischief” is already lost, whether the citizens of that place realize it or not.

It’s a failing to which all humans, in any country, are susceptible. Yes, some are more susceptible than others, but all are vulnerable because of human traits we share. That’s why liberty and its value must be guarded and nurtured and taught and demonstrated to every generation.

As the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky’s masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov said (in this passage he is addressing Christ, who has returned to earth):

Oh, never, never, will they learn to feed themselves without our help! No science will ever give them bread so long as they remain free, so long as they refuse to lay that freedom at our feet, and say: “Enslave, but feed us!” That day must come when men will understand that freedom and daily bread enough to satisfy all are unthinkable and can never be had together, as men will never be able to fairly divide the two among themselves. And they will also learn that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, miserable nonentities born wicked and rebellious. Thou has promised to them the bread of life, the bread of heaven; but I ask Thee again, can that bread ever equal in the sight of the weak and the vicious, the ever ungrateful human race, their daily bread on earth? And even supposing that thousands and tens of thousands follow Thee in the name of, and for the sake of, Thy heavenly bread, what will become of the millions and hundreds of millions of human beings too weak to scorn the earthly for the sake of Thy heavenly bread?…In our sight and for our purpose the weak and the lowly are the more dear to us. True, they are vicious and rebellious, but we will force them into obedience, and it is they who will admire us the most. They will regard us as gods, and feel grateful to those who have consented to lead the masses and bear their burden of freedom by ruling over them–so terrible will that freedom at last appear to men!

Why Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergencies Act is illegitimate, and why Parliament may vote for it anyway

The New Neo Posted on by

I was going to write a post about the topic that’s the subject of this post, but it would have taken me quite some time to study the wording of the Act and the wording Trudeau’s government employed when it claimed the right to use it. Instead, I happened across this rather short video in which Bruce Pardy, who is a professor at Queen’s University, explains it clearly and succinctly. So I’ll defer to him:

One of the points I was planning to make, and one that Pardy covers, is how the pernicious “words are violence” managed to morph from the confinement of the absurd “logic” of the leftist academy into the real world of politics and to restrict people’s ability to live in liberty.

Trudeau is bold and shameless. His claim that the truckers and their supporters are white supremacist haters was never supported by facts, but that didn’t stop him because he always knew it was a necessary claim to make in order to seize enormous powers. I believe this was part of his plan from the start, and he used January 6th as the template and then extended it even further.

Tonight the Canadian Parliament will be voting on the Act’s use by Trudeau [emphasis mine]:

MPs will vote on the motion Monday at 8 p.m. ET, and it is expected to pass with the joint support of the Liberals and NDP. The Bloc Quebecois and the Conservatives are against it.

Trudeau’s government is a minority government, formed by a coalition of those first two parties: Liberals and NDP.

If the motion fails, the invocation of the act and its extraordinary powers will be struck down. If it passes they will remain in place until mid-March at the latest.

MPs have been debating the measure since Thursday morning, though the 15 hours of debate planned for Friday were cancelled due to safety concerns as police moved in to remove protesters still blockading the streets outside…

…Ontario Conservative MP Marilyn Gladu said on Twitter Sunday the Liberals should rein their use of the act back in now that the demonstrations appear to be over.

“If it was just about clearing the blockage and not about a power grab and government overreach, the Liberals would rescind these measures,” she said.

…Regardless of what happens with the vote, there will be an inquiry to review its use. A report must be tabled in both the House of Commons and the Senate by next February.

The Senate must also vote on the act’s use, but debate has not started yet in that chamber.

My sense is that the majority of Canadians favor its use. Canada would rather have “order” than liberty. I’m saying this not just because of the polls, but from a perusal of a lot of Twitter comments from Canadians profusely thanking both Trudeau and his deputy prime minister Freeland for “restoring order.”

Of course, that may not be the true picture, because many of the people who are against it may be too frightened to openly declare their position at this point. That’s how tyranny works to stifle dissent.

Presidents’ Day poetry

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Today is Presidents’ Day, and this is a repeat of a previous post.]

I’m not that old, but pedagogical practices in my youth seem absolutely archaic compared to whatever passes for education these days. For starters, we had Washington’s Birthday and Lincoln’s Birthday, and they were on their actual real birthdays: Lincoln on February 12, and Washington on February 22.

Two days off! But they didn’t necessarily fall on Mondays; they fell whenever they fell, and sometimes – alas – they fell on a Saturday or a Sunday.

We also had to memorize terrible patriotic poetry back then, and lots of it. When I say “terrible” I’m not referring to its patriotism, I mean that it just wasn’t very good poetry. I suppose kids weren’t supposed to care about that aspect of it. Also, in those days I was very quick at memorizing poetry and so those early poems have tended to stick. Therefore I have a relatively large load of memorized doggerel to draw on.

One of those poems was about George Washington. To give you an idea of the flavor of what I’m talking about, it started this way: “Only a baby, fair and small…” and then filled the reader in on all the stages of Washington’s life, verse by verse. I had never looked it up online and was skeptical that it could be found, but voila! Here it is; isn’t the internet great?

And I now present it to you as an example of what the New York City schoolchild used to have to memorize and recite. I seem to recall this was in fifth grade:

Only a baby, fair and small,
Like many another baby son,
Whose smiles and tears came swift at call,
Who ate and slept and grew – that’s all,
The infant Washington.

I’ll let you go to the site and see it for yourself. The next verse is for the schoolboy Washington, then we have the lad Washington, then finally man/patriot and a lot of generalities with the only specifics being “surveyor, general, president.” Why so much emphasis on Washington’s boyhood I don’t know; maybe to go with the cherry tree story. But still, at least we were taught to think highly of Washington.

And Lincoln had a poem for memorization, too. It was a better effort than the Washington one, I think, although still not very good and rather creepy at that. I see now that the poem was by Rosemary Benet, apparently the wife of Stephen Vincent Benet.

I have no idea why the poem they had us memorize about Lincoln was not about his accomplishments at all, but rather about the mother who died when he was nine years old. In the poem, she comes back as a ghost and inquires about him. But here it is:

If Nancy Hanks
Came back as a ghost,
Seeking news
Of what she loved most,
She’d ask first
“Where’s my son?
What’s happened to Abe?
What’s he done?”

“Poor little Abe,
Left all alone.
Except for Tom,
Who’s a rolling stone;
He was only nine,
The year I died.
I remember still
How hard he cried.”

“Scraping along
In a little shack,
With hardly a shirt
To cover his back,
And a prairie wind
To blow him down,
Or pinching times
If he went to town.”

“You wouldn’t know
About my son?
Did he grow tall?
Did he have fun?
Did he learn to read?
Did he get to town?
Do you know his name?
Did he get on?”

The urge that rose in me was to shout, “Yes, YES, don’t you know?” into the void.

Instead of that one, we might have been asked to memorize this poem – or at least the very last part of it, which I’ve always liked:

And when he fell in whirlwind, he went down
As when a lordly cedar, green with boughs,
Goes down with a great shout upon the hills,
And leaves a lonesome place against the sky.

Or what about this old chestnut by Walt Whitman? Schmaltzy, but it still gives me a little shiver when I read it:

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) The Lia Thomas story is one of the best examples of the insanity of our age. I have no trouble with voluntarily calling Thomas “she” if that’s what she wants. But she should never be competing against biological women in a swimming competition. She was a fair but nothing-special college swimmer when she competed as a male, but she’s cruising to victory in the women’s field, hardly seeming to need to even put out much effort.

If you click on that link, you’ll see some photos that illustrate the advantages of a male body (which is what she has, having gone through male puberty quite some times ago) in that sort of sport and in fact in most sports. That’s why we have male and female categories that are separate, something like weight classes in boxing.

Here’s one of those photos of Lia Thomas:

(2) Another fake hate crime.

(3) Meanwhile, enemies take advantage of Biden’s weakness. I say “weakness.” But actually, it might just be the natural and purposeful continuation of Obama’s foreign policy. Actually, I’d say it’s both.

The Iran deal redux.

(4) The latest Ukraine/Russia news:

The Kremlin, in a statement, said Russian President Vladimir Putin in the “near future” will recognize the independence of the Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic regions in eastern Ukraine.

“Today, the leadership of the DPR and LPR received appeals to recognize their sovereignty in connection with the military aggression of the Ukrainian authorities, massive shelling of the territory of Donbas, as a result of which the civilian population suffers,” the Kremlin statement read, repeating claims of military aggression that Ukraine has repeatedly denied and disputed.

“With all this in mind, the President of Russia said that he intended to sign a corresponding decree in the near future,” the statement read, adding that the “President of France and the Federal Chancellor of Germany expressed their disappointment with this development.”

The CDC and misinformation

The New Neo Posted on by

The CDC withholds some statistics because it’s afraid the information will be turned into disinformation by the readers.

Now, there’s a great way to gain people’s trust: withhold information because you think they’re stupid.

The funny thing – I mean the sad thing – is that many people have rightly come to distrust the bobbing, weaving, cagy, withholding, mind-changing, perhaps-colluding-with-China CDC, and that this distrust is partly what leads these people to interpret each nugget of CDC’s information in the worst possible light. And yes, some of these people don’t understand statistics and misinterpret the significance of what they’re reading; that’s true for the public in general, pro-CDC and con-CDC. Statistics are inherently difficult and research on human subjects is especially difficult to interpret, and it takes a lot of math and logic to understand.

But if the CDC had been straight with us from the start, I think things would have been a great deal better.For example – I was thinking today about how, at the beginning, we were told to wash our food and/or the plastic containers it came in, and to let paper packages sit somewhere for a day or so without using them. A lot of people never did that – too much of a pain in the butt – but many did.

I did it for quite some time, waiting for further word from the CDC about whether it was necessary. I was expecting some research and a big announcement, but it never came. By the fall of 2020 you could find articles like this that said “You don’t need to bother anymore – probably.” But I recall that you had to search for the information and the news didn’t reach a lot o people. Somewhere along the line I had stopped on my own; just got tired of it and by then the huge scare at the beginning had mostly died down. How many continued with the virtually useless and yet tremendously annoying task?

And of course the CDC’s near-constant do-si-do-ing around masks was a huge generator of distrust, as is the “from COVID versus with COVID” death statistics controversy.

So if the CDC is so very wary of people receiving or generating misinformation/disinformation, why has the CDC itself put out so much? That question is a variation on the old fools/knaves theme, and your answer depends on whether you think the CDC is composed of fools, knaves, or both, and how much you think their COVID reaction has to do with The Great Reset.

Notes from Chairman Trudeau

The New Neo Posted on by

From the mouth of Justin Trudeau, December of 2020 [emphasis mine]:

India has denounced Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s “ill-informed” remarks regarding an ongoing farmers’ protest in India’s capital.

Mr Trudeau and Conservative opposition leader Erin O’Toole both made comments this week expressing concern over India’s response to the demonstrations.

“Canada will always be there to defend the right of peaceful protest,” Mr Trudeau said on Monday.

Thousands of farmers have travelled to Delhi to protest agricultural reforms.

I’m afraid “always” doesn’t mean what we used to think it did. Of course, when politicians say it, the listener needs to take it with a grain of salt. And when Justin Trudeau says it, it has no meaning at all.

Ah – but it’s not peaceful protest when the protest is against something Trudeau himself has done, and when a couple of (possibly astroturfing) protestors among many thousands display a Nazi symbol. Then it justifies a harsh crackdown.