Argus

Our oil and gas sector accounts for approximately 26% of Canada's total, which itself is roughly 1.5% of world emissions. Basic math then says we're looking at about 0.35% of world CO2 emissions. Trudeau will hobble our economy in order and infuriate resource provinces in order to do little more than virtue signal. Notably, world leaders clapped politely, but no one else made a similar offer. Other world oil gas and coal producers are ramping up production as world prices spike, eager to pull in billions and billions of dollars. Trudeau will just borrow more money instead. And if Alberta and/or Saskatchewan wants to separate, well who cares, it's not like they're important anyway since they don't vote Liberal. Canada will impose a hard cap on emissions from the oil and gas sector, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Monday at the COP26 summit in Glasgow. Calling the promise "a major commitment" that should inspire other resource-rich countries to dramatically curb their own emissions, Trudeau said Canada is prepared to limit the growth of one of the country's largest industries to help the world hold the global average temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius. "We'll cap oil and gas sector emissions today and ensure they decrease tomorrow at a pace and scale needed to reach net-zero by 2050," Trudeau said during his two-minute speech in front of other world leaders gathered in Scotland. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-cop26-cao-oil-and-gas-1.6232639?utm_source=ground.news&utm_medium=referral

A recent poll in the US shows a growing inclination to accept political violence on the part of those who consume right wing media. FOX viewers are more likely to believe that things are so horrible violence is justified, and One America views are even more likely to accept the need for political violence to 'put things right'. We can see this here on this site, where people who used to be simply conservative are now raging, froth-at-the-mouth, card-carrying loonies obsessed with loving Trump and hating Biden. The poll from the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute paints a troubling portrait of a growing segment of the public that is increasingly unmoored from reality as it embraces conspiracy theories about child abduction and stolen elections. It found a deep divide between those who trust right-wing media outlets and the rest of the nation — and even a divide between those who trust Fox News and those who trust outlets like One America News Network and Newsmax. The poll found about 3 in 10 Americans, 31 percent, believe the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, including two-thirds of Republicans and a whopping 82 percent of those who trust Fox News more than any other media outlet. Among those who trust far-right outlets like One America News Network and Newsmax, 97 percent say they believe the election — which even Trump’s own cybersecurity and election security officials agreed was the safest and most secure ever conducted in the United States — was stolen. https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/579160-stunning-survey-gives-grim-view-of-flourishing-anti-democratic-opinions?utm_source=ground.news&utm_medium=referral

Not to mention the issue of violence, which keeps rearing its head. In a recent poll a almost a third of Republicans believed that violence was now needed due to how horrific the Democrats are. https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/579160-stunning-survey-gives-grim-view-of-flourishing-anti-democratic-opinions?utm_source=ground.news&utm_medium=referral

Hard to do this without border controls. For example, Democrat controlled states impose some gun control while Republican states have almost none. This makes it difficult for the Democrat states to keep weapons, including automatic weapons out of their states. There is also the problem in America that the more rural states with lower populations have a disproportionate amount of impact at the federal level. This is a known feature of the US constitution, but it doesn't work as well when the two populations - rural wester/southern and urban north and west, despise each other because they're operating from entirely different information sources.

As a law and order commiserative, I approve of this.

I don't like it either. If I wanted to give to this charity I would've done so. process my payment so I can leave.

Southland was one of the most realistic cop shows on TV. This scene recreates an actual event where a nut walked into a police station and started shooting.

The problem is that since the Liberals have had years to stack the courts with progressive ideologues the outcome of any such case is fairly obvious.

Really? We seem to be? What are the indications of this. Because I think Ayaan Hirsi Ali follows this sort of things more closely than you do and seems unconvinced.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali points out what most conservatives already know. The biggest allies of Islamism in the west are the progressives. They're also the biggest obstacle to reforming and modernizing Islam. Part of this defeatism has been dominant since I fled Somalia as a teenager. Islamism, in essence, is a political philosophy, one that is rooted in jihad but seeks to describe how society should be run. It is more than an irrational and violent ideology: it is an attack on liberalism itself. But for the past three decades, the West’s response has been one of cowardice masked by arrogance. We needn’t fight back; it’s much better, we’re told, to stay quiet in the hope that, one day, those who hold competing ideologies will come through and see things from our side. Evidently, it is not working. More concerning, though, is the rise of a new type of defeatism — this time disguised as a progressive form of self-flagellation. Imagine you are a young British Muslim. At school and university, you’re repeatedly warned about Britain’s colonial roots; that the country your parents fled to, in the hope of escaping persecution and anarchy, is the cause of it all. And then you’re told: don’t worry, it’s not your fault. You are merely a victim; evil white people are all to blame. This dispiriting approach to education, which has taken hold on both sides of the Atlantic, is often justified using the rhetoric of “equality” and “diversity”. In practice, however, I suspect it is more helpful to view it in the context of something called “dawa”. In Arabic, the term simply denotes a centuries-old, non-violent call to Islam — though in practice, it has become a tool used by Islamists to encourage Muslims to embrace their extreme ideology and disavow the West. More often than not, this is achieved by branding Western society as ungodly and sinful, as something that needs to be either reformed or destroyed. In other words, you have two choices: either come and join us, or we’ll need to wage a holy war. https://unherd.com/2021/10/progressives-are-a-gift-to-islamism/

India just took delivery of its newest destroyer type this week. Three more are expected to be delivered by 2025 Meanwhile, Canada's first ship is finally, hopefully going to be started around 2024, with the first delivery sometime after 2030, and the last one around 2040.

I was born a Canadian. You came here voluntarily and we generously let you in and let you become one and if it's not good enough for you then go home.

Oh for Gods sake. You nutcakes have a dozen topics already to whine about vaccines. Do you have to bring the whining over to every damned topic?

Well, you can always go back to your home country since you hate this one so much.

I don't always agree with Conrad Black but on this one I definitely think he's on track. Trudeau's moronic flag at half staff gesture was typical at first, all style without substance. But in lieu of anything else he's kept it permanently at half staff for months now with no indication it will ever change. This is confusing foreigners, as Black points out, something I hadn't really considered. The most frequent opening conversational gambit that I encountered during the past three very social weeks in the refreshingly mask-free, socially undistanced city of London, was the question of why the Canadian flag on top of Canada House in Trafalgar Square appeared to be permanently at half-mast. I had the heavy duty of conceding that it was part of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau‘s endlessly protracted act of national self-humiliation and confected grief over the history of the white man’s treatment of Indigenous people in Canada over the last 500 years. The many informed people whom I encountered in London could not be described as a broadly based and deeply enthusiastic group of admirers of Justin Trudeau as a leader and clear champion of the Canadian national interest. In general, in my experience, he is seen in Europe, as in the United States, as the chic and dapper bearer of a name well-known in Canada, who deserves the credit due to being a consecutive election winner in a G7 country, but is nevertheless seen as a feckless and rather superficial posturer. Like most people when absent from the country where they reside, I always do my best to put Canada‘s case forward as persuasively as I can to doubting foreigners. My explanation for a permanent flag in official mourning over the Canadian High Commission in the greatest public square in Britain was greeted with universal, and not always polite, incredulity. It is a challenging posture to try to defend. For reasons that he will perhaps someday make clear, Trudeau has taken it upon himself to go to unheard of and absurdly histrionic lengths to propagate the historic fraud that Canada should be permanently ashamed of its treatment of the native inhabitants of the land. https://nationalpost.com/opinion/conrad-black-lowered-flags-are-a-symbol-of-a-nation-in-decline

Came across this in the Globe this morning. Apparently a lot of top journalists in the US have left their jobs and are now publishing for-pay newsletters on a place called substack, and making good money at it too. They say the major media has become too stratified, too restrictive of what can be said or covered, captured by the woke mob with Twitter being the real editor. For instance, in Freddie deBoer’s top-ranked media post, “It’s All Just Displacement,” the journalist makes the argument that the media is in crisis. He writes that against a grim economic backdrop – the collapse of the media’s old business model, the decline in circulation and revenue, eroded pay, worsening working conditions, mass layoffs and accelerated job competition – all non-conservative professional media outlets have been captured by a fringe, far-left ideology that originated at elite American universities and spread through social media. “Those politics are obscure, they are confusing, they are socially and culturally extreme, they are expressed in a bizarre vocabulary, they are deeply alienating to many, and they are very unpopular by any definition,” the long-time leftist writes. “The vast majority of the country is not woke.” Or as Barry Weiss writes about the New York Times. Bari Weiss left The New York Times in the summer of 2020, with a widely circulated resignation letter that charged the paper with failing to learn the lessons of the 2016 election – “lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society.” She argued the paper had become a performance space for predetermined narratives, with Twitter acting as its ultimate editor. “A new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.” https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books/article-how-the-subscription-newsletter-service-substack-is-changing-the/

The Fall of Civilizations. This is from a series of documentaries I hadn't even known existed. In this episode it tells the story of the many bronze age nations and great cities around the Mediterranean which were all destroyed or collapsed at the end of the Bronze Age. Fascinating stuff, and far better than anything you're ever likely to find on television networks like the so-called History Channel. And one thing watching these tells you is how fragile civilization can be, even for great empires which have lasted centuries.

I have posted multiple cites over the years from demographics experts, statisticians and economists saying that immigration is not going to have significant impact on an aging population or a declining birthrate. Further, growing an economy by adding people does nothing useful for the people already there. It doesn't make their lives better or richer. The government makes it almost impossible to get statistics on temporary foreign workers but as far as I've been able to determine the vast, vast majority have absolutely nothing to do with agriculture. They work in restaurants and bars, as well as technology companies, doing their part to keep wages low (Canadian wages have stagnated for decades). I'm okay with foreign agriculture workers because that sort of job isn't something you can entice people to do even with higher wages. But almost every other job is simply a matter of employees not wanting to pay higher wages. And they need housing, hundreds of thousands of cheap apartments. Which we're not building because government fees, regulations and delays make it unprofitable to do so. Yes, they actually are. https://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/douglas-todd-canada-has-abandoned-middle-class-says-b-c-s-former-top-civil-servant https://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/douglas-todd-immigration-may-lift-economy-but-not-peoples-wages-plus-other-economists-lessons https://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/douglas-todd-alas-immigration-wont-replace-canadas-aging-workforce https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/bissett-immigration-policy-is-out-of-control-and-needs-an-overhaul

Wages have been stagnant for about 40 years, which not coincidentally is about when they started to jack up the amount of immigration. Wages are controlled by supply and demand, except where you have government unions. With a continuing stream of desperate people coming in eager to work for low wages, employers have no reason to ever raise them. And I include not just immigrants but the temporary foreign workers as well as the 600,000 foreign students are in Canada were allowed to work part time. As for housing, well you got that 600,000 foreign students looking for cheap housing plus half a million or so of various types of temporary foreign workers also looking for super cheap housing. Then you've got 400,000 new immigrants a year, +tens of thousands of refugee claimants almost none of whom will ever be deported regardless of whether or not their claims are ever heard or ever turned down. That means we need to be building a lot of new housing and were not. Why aren't we? In large part because the provincial and municipal governments have placed an enormous amount of red tape in front of developers while adding heavy fees, taxes and delays for various types of studies and hearings before they get permission. I read somewhere that the developer buys a parcel of land to build housing on has to wait something between five and 10 years before getting permission. A study by the CD Howe Institute a couple of years ago found that government fees, regulations, and delays add something like an average of $230,000 to the cost of each new housing unit. On top of that, the various laws and regulations and rent controls which impact the profitability of landlord's means not as many are bothering to get into the business. So if you want to do something about the shortage of housing while at the same time raising wages... Cut back on temporary foreign workers, students and immigration.

And were your grandparents illiterate rural third world farmers unfamiliar with the roman alphabet?