Posts Tagged ‘Canadian Emergencies Act’

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.”
  • 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. “

    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:

  •