Links - 3rd February 2024 (2 - Palestine/Middle East Peace)

Meme - "Palestine Jihad Facts
"Slaughter Jews whever you find them. Their spilled blood pleases Allah, our history and religion." - Amin al-Husseini, 1929
In post-war historiography Palestine Jihad founder and leader Amin al-Husseini, a strong Nazi ally who provided Muslim SS-soldiers to Hitler, was often seen as an architect of the Holocaust, emulating the Ottoman genocide of Armenian Christians in 1915"

Meme - *Iceberg*
UNDER OCCUPATION. POOR AND OPPRESSED
ALLIED WITH RUSSIA IRAN AND CHINA. NAKBA
MAJORITY SUPPORT FOR HAMAS. COUNTLESS OF SUICIDE BOMBINGS. HAS DEATHSENTENCE FOR LGBT. 80% SUPPORT OF THE 7/10 MASSACRES
MASSACRED EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN VILLAGES THEY CAPTURE. SOLD THE LAND TO JEWS, THAN TRIED TO TAKE IT BACK IN WAR. PAY FOR SLAY. IRANIAN AND RUSSIAN PROXY.
THEIR FOUNDER OF STATE WAS A NAZI COLLABORATOR. REJECTED 5 DIFFERENT 2 STATE SOLUTIONS, OFFERED NONE. TRIED TO TAKE OVER JORDAN
NEVER IDENTIFIED AS 'PALESTINIAN' BEFORE 1967. DESTROYED LEBANON. NAME INVENTED BY THE ROMANS, CAN'T PRONOUNCE THE 'P' IN 'BALESTINE'
ONLY INVENTION IS THE SUICIDE VEST. CONVERTED WATER PIPES DONATED BY THE EU INTO ROCKETS
HOLDS THE WORLD RECORD FOR MOST PLANE HIJACKINGS. SUPPORTED SADDAM HUSSEIN WHILE TAKING REFUGE IN KUWAIT. FARFOUR THE MOUSE"

Farfour the Mouse (Tomorrow's Pioneers) - Loathsome Characters Wiki - "Farfour (فرفور) is a costume-based character who was the first recurring co-host in the infamous Palestinian propaganda children's show Tomorrow's Pioneers. He was universally hated worldwide for several reasons... Farfour cheated on his final exam because "the Jews destroyed his home and he left his notebooks there", which teaches children to blame Jews for everything... In the season 1 finale “Farfour and The Jew”, there’s a scene where he is beaten to death by an actor portraying an Israeli government official, after he refused to give the latter the documents given to him by his grandfather and referring to the Israelis as “despicable terrorists”."

Meme - "There Has Never Been a State of Palestine Version 2.0
Abraham and his family, the Hebrew ancestors of the Jewish People, migrated from Mesopotamia into the land of Canaan, in approximately 2000 BCE. Next there was the Confederation of Twelve Tribes of Israel. Next there was the Kingdom of Israel. Next there was the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Next there was the Babylonian Empire. Next there was the Persian Empire. Next there was the Empire of Alexander the Great. Next there was the Hellenistic Seleucid Empire. Next there was the Jewish Hasmonean Dynasty. Next there was the Roman Empire. In 135 CE, to erase memory of the Jews, Romans renamed the land "Palestine" after an ancient enemy of the Jews - a people of Greek origin called the Philistines. Next there was the Byzantine Empire. Next there was the Sasanian or Neo Persian Empire. Next there was the Byzantine Empire, again. Next there was the Umayyad and Fatimid Empires. Next there was the Frankish and Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem. Next there was the Ayyubid Dynasty. Next there was the Mamluk Sultanate. Next there was the Ottoman Empire. Next there was the British Mandate for Palestine. Britain reused the name Palestine when given authority over the land in 1920, after WWI. Next there was the Rebirth of Israel. Jews went back home to join those already there, to rebuild their homeland and establish the modern State of Israel in 1948 CE. #PallywoodMitzvahMedia"

Visegrád 24 on X - "Palestine is the only country in the world that never existed before its occupation."

Meme - Wheat with shallow roots: "ARAB COLONIZERS"
Native grass with deep roots: "JEWS"

The insidious hatred that spawned the Holocaust and Hamas' pogrom - "nobody in the Allied nations openly rejoiced when images of Nazi death camps were made public, but some of Hamas’ “progressive” allies in the West jubilantly celebrate the terrorists’ evil deeds. Cornell University professor Russell Rickford, for example, told a pro-Palestine rally he found Hamas’ pogrom “exhilarating” and “energizing.” The loathing of Jews among the Palestinian people did not begin with Israel’s occupation of Gaza following the 1967 war.  In 1961, during Egypt’s Gaza-occupation tenure, Martha Gellhorn, an outstanding war correspondent, spent time touring Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Gaza, culminating in a 17,000-word article, “The Arabs of Palestine,” in The Atlantic... they were exposed “to the full and constant blast of Egyptian propaganda.… And having been so devastatingly beaten by Israel again, in 1956 … it only makes the orators more bloodthirsty.” The residents hated Jews and believed all manner of conspiracy theories about them. One kindly schoolteacher told Gellhorn he believed the partition plan (the UN’s 1947 offer of two states, one for Jews, one for Arabs) was a good idea. Astonished, Gellhorn reminded him that the Arabs had rejected the 1947 offer of a state, instead gambling on a winner-takes-all war to finish off the Jews, and lost. He conceded that was true. So she asked, “Now you say that you want to return to the past; you want partition.… If you had won the war, would you now accept partition? Would you … allow the 650,000 Jewish residents of Palestine — who had fled from the war — to come back?”  He unhesitatingly responded, “Certainly not. But there would have been no Jewish refugees. They had no place to go. They would all be dead or in the sea.”  From this exchange, Gellhorn said she realized she had “the missing clue” as to why, although she liked individual refugees she met, she could feel “no blanket empathy” for the Palestinians: it was the consistent absence of empathy in her subjects for anyone else’s suffering.  “It is hard to sorrow for those who only sorrow over themselves,” she writes. “It is difficult to pity the pitiless.” Not all Germans supported the Nazis, but enough Germans did to open the gates of hell. Similarly, not all Palestinians support Hamas, but enough Palestinians do to rattle them. (Indeed, a greater percentage of Palestinians support Hamas than Canadians who supported the Liberals in the last election.)"

Meme - "Muslims send 1.8 billion daily prayers to destroy Israel.
15 million Jews have 187 Science Nobels prizes.
Calculate who is making a difference for humanity."

Hussain Abdul-Hussain on X - "Rashid Khalidi is the most prominent Palestinian-American. He is friends with Barak Obama and teaches history at Columbia. I've read all his writings since I was in college. I used to subscribe to his position, until I grew up. I'd be happy to debate Khalidi one day, if he thinks an immortal like him should debate a mortal like me.  Until that happens, I watched his most recent interview (90 minutes), and this statement of his caught my eye: "[Jews] who came didn't come to live with the residents of the country [Ottoman provinces, then Mandate Palestine]. They didn't come to live with the Arabs. They didn't want to learn Arabic or take the citizenship."  I've always been a proud Arab. One day, during the peak of the Syrian revolution against the Assad tyranny, I was moderating a panel for Syrian opposition speakers. One of them, an Assyrian, said "Syria was designed for the Arabs only and never treated us as citizens with equal rights. The name of the country is the Syrian Arab Republic. The official language is Arabic. The national anthem says that Syria is the Den of Arabism, and from us came the Walid [Islamic conquest general Khalid Ibn Al-Walid] and the Rashid [Baghdad Islamic Caliph Haroun Al-Rashid]."  That was the first time that I noticed that Arabism was neither neutral nor secular. Arabism is cultural heritage. Islam is even a narrower identity than Arabism. Neither can serve as a national identity.    Assyrians are mostly Christians who speak Syriac, a Semitic language older than Arabic (it is believed that Syria is named after their civilization). To them, Arab Islamic conquests decimated their culture and homeland. The Arab and Muslim majority of Syrians wants Assyrians as citizens, but Arabized and preferably Islamized. This is is exactly what Khalidi wants Jews who moved from Europe to Palestine to have done: Learn Arabic, become Arab, not have your own national state with your own Jewish heritage.  Many years later (after moderating the panel with the Assyrian Syrian), I read some of the debate of the Jewish Enlightenment, Haskalah. Iraqi Jews debated whether they should learn the revived Hebrew or stick to their Arabic tongue. The argument for Hebrew and against Arabic won. Arabic-speaking Jews said that they disliked when their names were Arabized (Musa instead of Moshe for Moses). Jews also did not appreciate praying in one language and living their lives in another, arguing that their youth were not using Hebrew outside of religious service, and hence that threatened millennia of their written and oral heritage and tradition.  But here you have Khalidi, a prominent historian, blaming Jews -- without blinking -- for not Arabizing. And he's being generous here. When you add the Palestine emblem (Dome of the Rock) and Basic Law (Arab Palestinian people is part of the Arab nation, Islam is the official religion and a source of legislation), you will further understand why non-Arabs and non-Muslims -- including Jews, Christians, Druze, Kurds, Copts and others -- want their own states. Arab countries, including Palestine, were conceived as monolithic Arab and Islamic, and never tolerated the existence of other identities.   At the London Conference in 1939 (when Britain abandoned Jews in favor of Arabs), the Jews proposed to the Arabs a binational state, with each community practicing autonomy. The Arabs refused, and told Jews that they can live in Palestine as an Arabic-speaking religious minority, like Jews were living in Iraq.   And Khalidi talks for 90 minutes, about history and the inevitability of the end of Israel, but never notices why Israel MUST exist: As long as Khalidi and the Arabs and Muslims cannot offer multi-ethnic, multicultural, tolerant societies and countries based on liberty and equality, non-Arabs and non-Muslims have every right to demand their own sovereign nations. Israel MUST exist."

Israelis in Berlin fear losing a safe haven as anti-Semitic acts rise : theworldnews - "Anti Zionism is quite literally what Judaism asks of Jewish people. It’s also quite harmful to them because it pedestalises them and contributes to harmful stereotypes. No one deserves an ethno state, especially with the way Israel was born and is maintained. The only reason it exists is because white Christian nationalists hate Muslims more, not because they see Jews as human or sympathize with their struggle."
Israelis in Berlin fear losing a safe haven as anti-Semitic acts rise : theworldnews - "I love how you Judeophobes will take the skepticism about Zionism that exists within the Hasidic world and try to reduce Judaism down to it. Never mind that Hasidim is an almost exclusively Ashkenazi movement that accounts for less than 5% of world Jewry, that Hasidim sects are nom-Zionist, but only the Satmar and Neturei Karta are actively anti-Zionist. Just go ahead and accept that you hate 95% of Jews including almost all of the Sephardic and Mizrahi ones. You're all so transparent it's almost hilarious."
Israelis in Berlin fear losing a safe haven as anti-Semitic acts rise : theworldnews - "Dont tell them about the Druze, Bedioun, Arab and palestinian israelis lmao"

Meme - Fatima @fatimasal82: "Get in losers, we're going to #FreePalestine"
Ben Bankas @BenBankas: "She can't even free her hair"

Visegrád 24 on X - "BREAKING: The Islamic regime in Iran tonight killed one of Iraq’s richest men, Peshraw Dizayee, by firing 2 ballistic missiles from Iran at his home in Erbil, Iraq. His wife and another 2 relatives were murdered too. He was targeted facilitating trade with Israel"

Robert Nicholson on X - "People in the streets yelling about colonialism, unaware that Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq were created by the same process that created Israel"

leekern on X - "Today a Palestinian made a decision to get a knife (but obviously Palestinians are tragic angels who have no choice to do anything - everything is Israel’s fault)  Then that darling angel made the decision to drive to Ra’anana in Israel  Then that darling Palestinian who is incapable of making decisions or taking personal responsibility had no choice but to stab a woman  Then they had no choice but to steal a car and run over women and children and kill a 70 year old woman  Then they had no choice but to steal another car and run over more people  Just another tragic tale of Israel’s brutality - forcing angelic Palestinians to do things they don’t want to do and which they have no personal decision making over"

Hussain Abdul-Hussain on X - "It does not matter who Palestinians are or who they ever were. What matters is what Palestinians want to be or can ever become.  If #Israel disappears tomorrow and the Jews give the keys to Palestinians, what do you think will happen next? You think Palestine will be a country remotely as organized or advanced as Israel? The answer is a resounding no.  To imagine Free Palestine, look at the Houthis, at Hezbollah, at Iraq. Free Palestine will be a dumpster ruled by a bloody charlatan and his militia. Women will be forced to cover (almost the case now), women who engage in sex out of wedlock will be killed (honor crime). LGBTQ will be killed. Anyone with a different opinion about anything will be beaten, prisoned, or killed. In the summer, Hamas beat and tortured dozens of Gazans who protested poverty and hunger. A guy who criticized Mahmud Abbas died under torture. Hamas Sinwar's claim to fame is his first crime using his kufiyyah to strangle a Gazan he said was a collaborator with Israel (because why court and justice?).   There is not a single indication that Palestinians ever managed, or ever will, a semi-decent, quasi-functioning state. Their demand for the destruction of Israel and their whining for being everlasting victims is the only thing they can do, and they do it to deflect attention away from their own failure.   To be fair, not only Palestinians don't know how to build a state: The Lebanese, the Iraqis, the Syrians, the Iranians too do not know how to build or manage modern states. That's why they envy and hate Israel and blame its success for their failure."

Jason Curtis Anderson on X - "“When we finally deal that final blow to destroy Israel. When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism.” -Manolo De Los Santos speaking at The People’s Forum in NYC."

Kiyah Willis on X - "According to the left:  “Women’s rights are human rights” unless those women live under Islamic theocracy  “Believe all women” unless those women are Israeli   “No human is illegal” unless the person is Jewish  “Words are violence,” but terrorism is not  Not letting men in women’s restrooms is “genocide,” but Hamas saying they'll repeat October 7th until they kill all Jews is not  The freedom to choose your career in a capitalist society is “slavery,” but the Houthis forcing people to work against their will is not   Idk what dictionary they're using, but the goal of their language and slogans is to emotionally manipulate you, not to communicate reality  Don't let them gaslight you"

How Houthi rebel attacks in the Red Sea threaten global shipping - "The Houthis say their strikes are directed at boats with Israeli interests, and that the attacks will continue until Israel ends its war in Gaza. But in practice, the Houthis have targeted ships indiscriminately, experts say."

5 Things to Know About the Houthis, Their Attacks on Israel and the U.S., and Their Treatment of Yemen’s Jews - "The Houthi movement's ideology is deeply rooted in antisemitic, Islamic fundamentalist, anti-American sentiment, as reflected in the slogan on its flag: “Allah is great, death to the USA, death to Israel, curse the Jews, victory to Islam.” This extremist stance aligns with Iranian interests and suggests a broader objective of promoting Iran’s radical Islamist revolution throughout the Middle East. The Houthi rebels in Yemen have been associated with antisemitic rhetoric and actions, raising concerns for the country's tiny remaining Jewish community. While the majority of Yemen's Jewish population, which once totaled 50,000, had left decades ago, the small amount that has remained has come under increasing persecution which started under former President Ali Abdullah Saleh but intensified under the Houthis, including the imprisonment of Levi Marhabi, who has been held by the Houthis since 2016, according to a United Nations report released in 2022. Additionally, the Houthis have also targeted other religious minorities, including Christians and members of the Baha’i community."

روني الدنماركي on X-  "I didn't want to entertain this whole "Houthi slavery" nonsense, but it's been going for far too long that I feel compelled to address what is always omitted: Historical context and socioeconomic nuance. Yemen is an incredibly poor country, and has been so for most of its modern…"
Daniel Friedman on X - "Look at the mental gymnastics required to maintain the belief that the medieval terrorist fanatics who own human beings, shoot missiles at civilian vessels and fuck children are actually the good guys. It takes real dedication to hate Jews, the West and civilization this much."
Wilfred Reilly on X - "Leftists are literally defending slavery because edgy "non-white" people are doing it. #ahmad_c_calhoun"
Joshua Davis on X - "The left really went from “Black Lives Matter” to “slavery can be excused in pursuit of anti-Zionism” in less than 4 years."
Wade on X - "Leftists when there's like 4 neo Nazis in an Eastern European country: the SS battalion known as "Ukraine" belongs to Russia
Leftists when the terrorist militia allows slavery: okay so technically it's de facto slavery not de jure and if the west invested in the country..."
Weird. When it comes to slavery in the US, no "nuance" is acceptable

SuperGayBiscuit #gaysforisrael🏳️‍🌈 on X - "Houthi terrorist- bomb ships and threaten the free trade route.
US/UK- gives multiple warnings to stop.
US/UK- attacks Houthis.
Terrorism supporting idiots in Montreal- Yemen is brave! Call an emergency rally in a Canadian city!"

Houthi supporters hold Nazi salute, chant anti-America, anti-Semitic slogans in video - "A video surfaced online reportedly depicting supporters of the Iran-backed Houthi militia performing the Nazi salute and shouting anti-America and anti-Semitic slogans.  “Death to America. Death to Israel. Curse the Jews,” a mob of Houthi militiamen is seen chanting while doing the Nazi salute in the video... Dozens of videos have surfaced in recent years with Houthis blatantly expressing anti-Semitic and anti-American rhetoric during ceremonies, military recruitments, and other large gatherings and events... Iran backs the Houthis in their war against the internationally recognized government and supplies the group with weapons, and has trained the militia in manufacturing weapons."
They didn't get the memo that they were anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic

Curbing Houthi Attacks on Civilian Ships in the Bab al-Mandab
From 2018. It's amazing they knew Israel was going to commit "genocide" in Gaza, and decided to attack shipping first to stop them

Yemen’s Houthi-controlled areas see dramatic rise in child marriages
From 2017

Yemen's Houthis accused of committing 'genocide' with blockade on key district
From 2021

The last Jew of Yemen is being tortured by the Houthis and must be saved - "As Jews around the world prepare for Yom Kippur, the last known Jew in Yemen will be forced to observe the holy day alone in an Islamist dungeon.  For the past seven years, Levi Marhabi has been held hostage by the ruthless and fanatical Houthi rebels who control large swathes of Yemen... Marhabi is the last known living heir in Yemen to a once-vibrant Jewish community that dates back at least 2,000 years and possibly traces its origins to biblical times."
From September 2023

Visegrád 24 on X - "BREAKING: Anti-Israel protesters react to the airstrikes against Yemen by gathering at Times Square in New York City, chanting: “UK and US go to hell”"
When you just hate your countries and the West

Fatah: Condemning Abbas's Antisemitism 'consistent With Zionist Narrative' - "Fatah lambasted an open letter signed earlier this week by over a hundred Palestinian academics, activists and artists based around the world as "the statement of shame."  The intellectuals' letter was released after footage surfaced that showed Abbas asserting that European Jews were persecuted by Adolf Hitler because of what he described as their “social functions” and predatory lending practices, rather than based on the Nazis' racial theories. “Their statement is consistent with the Zionist narrative and its signatories give credence to the enemies of the Palestinian people," said the secular nationalist Fatah party.   Fatah officials added that the signatories “mouthpieces for the occupation" and “extremely dangerous.”  The chorus of indignation casts light on the Palestinians' complicated relationship with the Holocaust."

Visegrád 24 on X - "Is Egypt’s border wall “inhumane”, “silly”, “ridiculous”, “ineffective”, “expensive”, “racist” and “islamophobic”?"

The real reason Israeli soldiers don’t rape Palestinian women - "The newspaper Makor Rishon writes about a recent study by researcher Tal Nitzan and published by the Hebrew University’s Shein Center for Social Studies. According to the study, the reason Israeli soldiers refrain from raping Palestinian women in the occupied territories is not because the soldiers are more humane. In fact the opposite is true–Nitzan claims Israeli soldiers don’t rape because they have been taught to dehumanize Palestinian women. Nitzan also maintains that soldiers don’t want the Arab population to increase through pregnancies as a result; according to Nitzan that would be considered an ason leumi–a national tragedy. The Israeli Sociology Association awarded the report a mark of excellence... Nitzan notes that the Israeli army is the only one not to commit mass rapes when it occupies another country.  Somehow I doubt that Nitzan would praise Israeli soldiers if they were in the habit of raping Palestinian women."
We are still told that Jews all push a left wing agenda around the world - except in Israel, because they want to destroy other countries. And let's not forget Haaretz and other left wing Israeli people and organisations

Opinion: Why so many Americans are misapplying ‘settler colonialism’ to Gaza - "Many college students are taught that American society is the product of “settler colonialism” — a history of conquest and exploitation. In this simplistic framing, the plight of the Palestinians is just one more example of the familiar evils of settler colonialism. For those who see the conflict through this lens, the founding of Israel is treated as the equivalent of the European colonization of the Americas. The Gaza war is better understood as a conflict between two competing nationalist projects than as a case of settler colonialism. There are a number of inconvenient historical truths that complicate the “settler colonialism” narrative. It is a conflict in which each side — with good reason — sees itself as an embattled and threatened minority. The Palestinians are vastly outmatched by the powerful Israeli security forces, but Israel lives in the shadow of the Holocaust and is outnumbered 50 to one by its Arab neighbors across the wider region. The Palestinian side starts the historical clock with the 1917 Balfour Declaration, when the British foreign minister promised the Jews a homeland in Palestine. Or they go back to the founding of Israel in 1948 and the nakba, the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians. For Jews, history does not begin in 1948, or 1917. Zionism was not a product of the British empire. It was born in Vienna, Vilnius and Lviv. It was a response to the realization that there was no place for Jews, assimilated or not, in the Austrian and Russian empires. The word pogrom comes from Russian and entered the English language in the late 19th century with reports of state-sponsored killing of Jews in the Russian empire. The word genocide was coined during World War II by Raphael Lemkin, a Jew from Galicia, where more than 100,000 Jews were killed in pogroms in 1921. The founding of Israel should also be seen in the context of state-building and ethnic cleansing throughout the region. Alongside the Palestinians expelled from Israel, there were 900,000 Jews driven from their homes in Arab lands in the mid-20th century. As recently as 1991, 14,000 Ethiopian Jews, fleeing famine, were evacuated to Israel. Egypt and Jordan occupied Gaza and the West Bank, respectively, from 1948 to 1967 and were indifferent to Palestinians’ rights. Another problem with the settler colonialism narrative is that it treats each side as a monolithic actor, playing the role of colonizer and victim, respectively. In reality there is a diversity of ideas and interests in both the Israeli and Palestinian camps. The tragedy of the past 30 years is that moderates on both sides, interested in making a genuine peace, have been repeatedly outflanked by radicals screaming that compromise means betrayal. This process of “ethnic outbidding” can be seen in many conflicts, from Bosnia to Northern Ireland... The pro-Palestinian left on American campuses seems to oppose Israel making peace with its neighbors on the grounds that it is not connected to the creation of a Palestinian state. I was shocked to hear a Palestinian professor argue in a Zoom lecture that the more civilians that are martyred by Israel, the closer they will be to liberation. The Hamas strategy seems to be working, with mounting global condemnation of Israel’s assault on Gaza and a surge in support for Hamas among Palestinians. Hamas gets support from Iran, Turkey and Qatar. But the moderate Arab countries fear Hamas more than they fear Israel. That’s why the Arab League was unable to come up with a joint statement at its October 21 meeting in Cairo. None of this is to excuse the mass killing of civilians in Gaza or the occupation regime in the West Bank — a literal case of settler colonialism. But peace will only be possible if we recognize that there are legitimate grievances on both sides. It is not a struggle between right and wrong, between good and evil, though partisans often frame it in those terms... Students and faculty on American universities should be working together to help forge a solution, and not using the conflict to open a new front in the culture wars and to score points against their political opponents in the US."
If the Palestinians want more civilians "martyred", the left should cheer this rather than condemn it
The left's "solution" is to destroy Israel. Good luck with that

Average trans woman vs Average terf / Jon Money being a TERF / Being left alone

"*Ugly trans woman imagining*: Kaylie Mars @KaylieMars: "been sayin this
Average trans woman *pretty*
Average terf *ugly*"

"Ancho Buflosay: Hill: Jon Money was a terf. You cannot socialize someone to be a different gender it is a belief only terfs have.  There are social constructs around gender, but gender itself is innate. That’s why transgender people have gender identity, they are identifying as their innate gender which is different than than what society attempted to socialize on to them.  You all shout Jon Money as this gotcha to trans people, but when you do, it shows me that you have no idea what gender is, social constructs, or gender identity.  Please, do more research."

Gay couple holding hands with one leg each in air: "We just want to be left alone."
Straight couple with kid, with FTM with a leashed human dog and drag queen reading beside them: "Same."

Links - 3rd February 2024 (1 - Justin Trudeau)

GOLDSTEIN: Size, cost of civil service out of control under Trudeau government, report finds - "The Trudeau government has increased the size of the federal public service by 37.9%, or almost 100,000 additional employees, since coming to power in 2015...  As of March 31, 2023, the total number of federal employees reached 357,247, the study says, marking the biggest staff increase since 1984... the federal government now has nine employees for every 1,000 Canadians... “Since the Trudeau government came to power, there has been an unprecedented expansion in the size of the bureaucracy,” said study author Gabriel Giguere, public policy analyst at the MEI. “The government seems to have lost control of government growth.”... While part of the increase in the size of the public service was due to the pandemic, the MEI study said, “it is not the primary factor explaining the increase in the number of federal employees. “The rate of growth in the federal workforce was already high in 2019 (the year before the pandemic began) and this has been sustained right through 2023, at a pace unmatched at any point in the preceeding 40 years.” “Given such a large increase in the size of government, one might expect Canadians to see a significant difference in the quantity and quality of federal services, but this has not materialized,” Giguere said. “The growth in the federal workforce under the Trudeau government has broken with the restraint that characterized governments of the previous 40 years.”"

Opinion: Ottawa’s debt interest has nearly doubled in just 2 years - "When interest rates were still historically low in 2021, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland claimed “it would be shortsighted” not to make “investments” and borrow money to pay for new spending. What was really shortsighted, it turns out, was not seeing that interest rates would spike starting just a year later. Since fiscal year 2021-22 federal debt interest has nearly doubled — from $24.5 billion to $46.5 billion . In the fiscal year now coming to a close Ottawa will have spent almost as much on debt interest as on the  Canada Health Transfer ($49.4 billion), which goes to the provinces to help fund health-care services. It will have spent half again as much on interest as on the Canada Child Benefit and national daycare combined ($31.2 billion). It’s a similar story in the provinces. Debt interest costs have grown markedly since 2020, albeit less than they have in Ottawa. This fiscal year the B.C. government is paying more in debt interest ($3.3 billion) than it collects from its provincial carbon tax. Ontario will spend more on interest ($13.4 billion) than on post-secondary education. And Quebec’s interest costs ($9.9 billion) currently exceed everything it gets via the Canada Health Transfer... Unfortunately, only New Brunswick and Alberta plan to run balanced budgets this year even though balance would be well within reach for the other eight provinces."
This left winger told an elderly food delivery driver that he had people voting Conservatives to blame for his inadequate pension, because low taxes means inadequate pensions. He then scoffed when I pointed out that the Liberals were piling on mountains of debt but pensions were still "inadequate". Also it's weird how the Liberals being in power for 8 years still results in pension inadequacy

Federal government consistently spends beyond high spending targets - "If the Trudeau government is notable for planning astonishingly high levels of spending, it’s equally notable for overspending beyond its original plans. At all times—when they first took office in 2015, in the pre-pandemic years, and now—the Liberals have consistently raised their spending targets, then spent more than targeted. Begin at the beginning. Inheriting a projected balanced budget in 2015, the Liberals proceeded to spend federal finances into deficit in the 2015-16 fiscal year (ended March 31, 2016)"
Clearly, it's Harper's fault!

Justin Trudeau says he won't slash government spending - "Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he doesn't believe in slashing federal spending to please business groups or opposition Conservatives, raising questions about how his Liberal government would meet its own goal to cap annual budget deficits in the coming years... the Business Council of Canada wrote to Trudeau last week to warn that it believes the government's failure to restrain spending — along with policy delays on clean technology tax credits and accelerated reviews of major development projects — is undercutting Canada's economic growth. In that letter, the council argued the government's goal to cap deficits is "just not credible" because of its track record of spending growth. The target, it said, "implies spending cuts of at least $12 billion per year," or increased federal taxes, to attain. Robert Asselin, the Business Council's senior vice-president of policy and a former adviser to Trudeau and former prime minister Paul Martin, said Trudeau's comments Tuesday raise new questions about whether the government is serious about its own fiscal goals. "The government doesn't seem to understand their own target," Asselin said, arguing failure to adhere to it — after the major increases in spending of recent years — would risk signalling to markets that Ottawa can't be relied upon to take debt and deficits seriously. That, in turn, could lead to higher debt payments that gobble up an increasing share of public dollars, he said... the New Democrats are demanding the government pass legislation to create a universal single-payer pharmacare system. The Parliamentary Budget Officer reported last fall that such a program could cost more than $11 billion in the 2024-25 fiscal year alone, depending on how the new spending would be shared with the provinces"
Maybe the plan is to destroy the economy so when the Conservatives take over, they will be blamed

NDP should leave Trudeau’s sinking carbon tax ship - "Prime Minister Justin Trudeau seems ready to captain the carbon tax down to the polling depths, but New Democrat Leader Jagmeet Singh might want to ask his caucus whether they want to go down with it.  Sixty-two per cent of Canadians don’t want a carbon tax, according to a recent poll from Spark Advocacy.  Singh’s federal NDP poll numbers aren’t faring any better, where they sit under 20 per cent support. Even among private-sector union workers, the NDP trail the Conservatives by 15 points.  Could it be that ordinary Canadians, from young professionals to pipe fitters, don’t support a tax that makes it more expensive to drive to work, stay warm and buy groceries?...  Singh could oppose carbon taxes outright. And he can make that opposition clear early in 2024 before Trudeau cranks up the carbon tax again on April 1...   According to the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO), that carbon tax rate will cost the average family up to $911 a year, even after rebates. Those who think it would be sacrilege for New Democrats to repudiate carbon taxes have forgotten the party’s high-water mark.  “The well documented reality is, the NDP has opposed a carbon tax in the past and continues to do so now,” the NDP said in 2012, when it eclipsed the Liberals to form the Official Opposition.  Here’s what former NDP leader Jack Layton had to say about carbon taxes: “Canada is a cold place and heating your home really isn’t a choice. We shouldn’t punish people, and that’s what a carbon tax does.”  Singh could also oppose the second carbon tax, which Trudeau buried in fuel regulations last year.  The government’s own analysis shows the second carbon tax will “disproportionately impact lower and middle-income households” and “households currently experiencing energy poverty.”"
Garnet Leavoy on X - "NDP has gone from a party working for those in the ditch to working for the rich"
This won't stop the credulous who deny that the NDP is overtaken by modern left-wing politics instead of being a working man's party

Kelly McParland: Liberals may wish they'd stuck with electoral reform - "Federal Liberals took a stab at reform in the early days after their 2015 victory, but retreated when voters didn’t favour their preferred alternative. Looking back, they might wish they’d persevered. Given the current state of the polls, their best hope of holding office beyond the next election might be some power-sharing smorgasboard pitting Liberals, New Democrats, Greens and perhaps an independent or two against the currently popular Conservatives. Addressing his flight from reform just a year after taking office, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau maintained it was no longer necessary because the Liberals were so popular. “Under Mr. Harper, there were so many people unhappy with the government and its approach that they were saying, ‘We need electoral reform in order to no longer have a government we don’t like.’” If the popularity of the government is the criterion by which the need for change is judged, it’s worth noting that 58 per cent of Canadians today say they disapprove of the job Trudeau’s doing. The prime minister is far less popular today than Harper was then: according to an Abacus poll his approval rating stands at 25 per cent, compared to Harper’s 39 per cent a year before the 2015 election (which, it must be noted, he lost). Nonetheless, precedent suggests that abandoning a system under which Canada has thrived for almost 160 years remains a bad idea. If the uncertainty and disruption that often haunts coalition regimes was limited to remote, unimportant states, there might be little need for concern. Unfortunately that’s not the case: Germany has for years been the essential member of the European Union, a stable, prosperous and sensible state that acted as the glue able to hold together the framework of a rickety 27-country political union. Today it’s a mess. Since the retirement of Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2021 the three-party coalition that took her place has stumbled from gaffe to gaffe. A mass protest by farmers brought central Berlin to a standstill Monday. Striking transit drivers last week shut down service for three days. Germany is back to burning coal to get it through the winter, having misguidedly shut down nuclear plants in anticipation of gas supplies from Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Most critically, in November a $90 billion plan to use leftover COVID money to finance an ambitious climate scheme was ruled unconstitutional, killing a scheme that was at the heart of the coalition’s very existence. The ruling left the three-party government — typical of the sort of mish-mash that oftens comes with proportional representation — struggling to justify its continued hold on power... As a rule, Canadian governments fall when voters weary of their accumulated record, not from any single mistake, or because a minor coalition partner senses its chances are better if it jumps ship... The future may be getting too close for comfort for the Liberals. If they start talking about electoral reform again, you’ll know they no longer believe they have a chance of winning without it. Which is another mark against it. Elections don’t exist to reward failing governments by letting them hang onto the power they so badly mishandled when they had it."

The most ridiculous travel advisory in Canadian history - "Canadians are clearly becoming more frustrated with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. What makes it worse is that his ineffective policies and mediocre leadership have turned Canada into an embarrassment on the international stage... Global Affairs Canada decided to warn the LGBT community against possible discrimination they may face in the United States... they’ve faced real hardship, hatred and violence for having a different sexual orientation. The 1969 Stonewall riots. Gay bathhouse raids. Jail sentences for gross indecency, as the poet Oscar Wilde faced in the late 19th century — or the alternative of chemical castration, as Alan Turing opted for in 1952. Murdered on the streets in North America and different countries around the world. In light of this difficult history, does anyone really believe that most LGBT Canadians will be frightened to go to the U.S. because several states decided against placing gender pronouns on bathroom doors, among other things? The sad thing is, some of you probably do... During a July 11 visit to Calgary’s Baitun Nur Mosque, Trudeau tried to whip up paranoia and division in Canada’s Muslim community by claiming that “people on social media, particularly fuelled by the American right wing, are spreading a lot of untruths about what’s actually in the provincial curriculums.” The PM’s focus was on LGBT content in Alberta schools. That’s a remarkably similar theme to the travel advisory warning, wouldn’t you say? And, before long, they’re likely going to try to blame it all on Poilievre and the Conservatives, who they’ve attempted to link to Trump and the so-called American “far right” without much success."

Trudeau government to spend nearly $10M to support unemployed youth in Iraq - "The announcement was made in Windsor due to its large Iraqi community"

Opinion: Do the Liberals even understand what a conflict of interest is? Does a fish know it’s wet? - The Globe and Mail - "The thing about all these scandals is that they did not seem, for the most part, to stem from a desire for personal gain or a conscious intent to break the rules: Even in the matter of SNC-Lavalin, those involved seemed somehow to have persuaded themselves they were colouring within the lines.  Rather, what appears to have been at work is a kind of vast unawareness, a genuine cluelessness that anyone could find the promiscuous commingling of interests on display – political, personal, business, bureaucratic – objectionable. That does not make it better; if anything, it makes it worse. Crooks at least know what laws they’re breaking.  Certainly it is more intractable. It is the consequence of decades of Liberal hegemony, not only political (since 1891, the federal Liberals have won two elections in every three) but more broadly. Liberals, and liberals, are so dominant in our politics, and in the little worlds that revolve around politics – the bureaucracy, the courts, the universities and, yes, the media – that I think it really is difficult for them to imagine that there exists a world outside their own, except in some vague theoretical sense.  Add in the thousands of activist groups the party has taken care over the years to cultivate with public funds, or the immense archipelago of subsidies to businesses large and small across the country, the whole apparatus of Liberal clientelism, and you have a whole agreeable universe of Liberaldom, a cosmos of comity. A person could spend their whole career inside without ever encountering an unfriendly face.  Thus if they reward or are rewarded by or otherwise are too close to their friends, it is not because they are Their Friends, since as far as they can tell there is no other kind of person. To ask, do Liberals understand conflict of interest, is to ask: Does a fish know it is wet?"

Eric Lombardi on X - "Canada may actually have a lower Real GDP Per Capita by the end of 2024 than in 2015. Even though we nearly doubled the national debt. And the cost of rent and housing has doubled. Truly a lost decade for Canada. It’s not Covid. It’s failed political leadership!"
If you think this has anything to do with Trudeau, you're a conspiracy theorist who's fallen prey to misinformation
Leaders are only responsible for failures when they're not favored by the left

Trudeau's progressive agenda has been tried and found wanting - "On a number of big-picture issues—economic stagnation, global isolation, national attenuation, and urban disorder—the government’s ideological agenda has failed according to its own terms. The promise of progressivism has run into the powerful headwinds of reality.   The Trudeau government’s overemphasis on equity isn’t a new path to economic growth. Its feminist foreign policy isn’t a substitute for hard power. Disproportionately targeting the country’s richest province isn’t a source of national unity. Decriminalizing drugs and generally adopting a sociological view of criminality isn’t how we secure safe communities. We’ve witnessed the full unfolding of progressive ideas into public policy and Canadians are generally dissatisfied.  The disappointment was on display this past November in Montreal where leading progressive thinkers and politicians from around the world convened to assess the state of their global political movement. The conference’s message and mood were understandably less assured than in previous years.  The Global Progress Action Summit, which drew high-profile figures such as current British Labour Party leader Keir Starmer and his predecessor Tony Blair, former Obama Administration national security adviser Ben Rhodes, former British and Canadian central banker Mark Carney, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, has in past years seen progressives come to Canada in search of ideas and inspiration. This time however felt different. The conference was marked by a tacit sense that the vision of a new, durable political consensus has failed to materialize. Progressive aspirations have instead been met by a powerful combination of uncompromising facts and mounting public opposition.   Canada has been at the centre of progressive politics for nearly a decade. One may even argue that it has served as a laboratory for the experimentation of progressive ideas in practice. Due to a combination of ideological and institutional factors, the Trudeau government has been the fullest expression of progressives’ ambitions to translate their ideas and values into a governing agenda... He was seen by many as the “progressive heir” to Barack Obama who publicly endorsed him in his two subsequent election campaigns.   Prime Minister Trudeau was well positioned to go far beyond President Obama’s more constrained progressive agenda. Canada is generally more left–wing than the United States, so he started with a political centre of gravity tilted in his favour. He also had a large parliamentary majority, so he faced far fewer institutional constraints to pass and implement his policy priorities. And after nearly a decade of Conservative government, Canadians wanted change and the then-43-year-old prime minister was keen to give it to them... our current political moment has striking similarities to the early 1980s. The prime minister’s father then led a government that was animated by its own ideological ambitions. He was cool, smart, and determined to do things differently. Progressivism appeared to be on the ascendancy.   Yet its manifestly poor outcomes—including Canada’s isolation around the world, rising threats to national unity, the onset of a national malaise, and a sustained period of economic stagnation—had the opposite effect. They eventually ushered in a conservative policy revolution led by Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney which included free trade, privatization, and comprehensive tax reform.   As we enter 2024, one gets the sense that we may be on the cusp of another rightward shift."
Of course, we still have left wingers calling the Liberals conservative or centrist. But left wing policies keep leading to failure, and left wingers keep claiming the problem is they are not left wing enough

Trump is more popular among Canadians than Trudeau - "Canadian young people seem to like Trump even more than their U.S. equivalents... The Spark Advocacy results would seem to jibe with a growing body of evidence that young Canadians are stampeding toward the Conservatives... The usual explanation for this is economic... Canadian young people may well be leaning to Trump for the same reason the former president still commands immense cult status in the United States: a generalized lack of trust in the establishment.   On this point, a March poll from the Angus Reid Institute may provide some insight.  Canadians were asked some general impressions about the state of the country, and on virtually every point young people emerged as the demographic most likely to say that Canada was unsafe, unprosperous and had a broken governmental system."

Terence Corcoran: It's time for the abdication of King Trudeau II - "Through more than eight years since Justin Trudeau named his first Liberal cabinet on Nov. 4, 2015, Canada’s economic and social trajectory has been steadily downward, a trend that was entirely predictable.  I can say this … because I predicted it... In 2015, 30 cabinet ministers were appointed, each handed a detailed “ mandate letter ” filled with broad instructions and micro directives personally signed by the Monarch. Over the years followup directives were given to ministers in a cabinet that now holds 39 members, each now attempting to carry out hundreds of top-down dictated policies, ranging from $1-trillion national industrial strategies to nit-picking interventions.  The average mandate letter lists about 10 specific instructions to each minister, which means the King has concocted somewhere between 300 and 400 detailed directives on how to run the Canadian economy. A typical example is this nonsensical 2021 letter instructing the housing minister   to “require landlords to disclose in their tax filings the rent they receive pre- and post-renovation and to pay a proportional surtax if the increase in rent is excessive... Fraser is new to the royal circle of central planners driving the Liberal economic machine, a troika of ministers who believe that they, rather than individual and corporate participants in a market, can successfully marshal government power to achieve social and economic goals:  Steven Guilbeault, François-Philippe Champagne and Jonathan Wilkinson. As minister of environment and climate change, Steven Guilbeault’s royal mandate letter includes more than 50 bullet-point directives, including: “Work with industry, labour and other stakeholders to develop a regulated sales mandate that at least 50 per cent of all new light duty vehicle sales be zero emissions vehicles in 2030 as an interim step toward achieving Canada’s mandatory target of 100 per cent by 2035.” In recognition of his role in driving Canada downhill, Guilbeault was  named 2023 Policy-maker of the Year — by Heather Exner-Pirot at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute — for his “ruthless, reckless and damaging” central planning activities. In 2023 alone, Guilbeault has “advanced four sector-destroying policies, as part of the government’s much derided ‘pancake’ approach to climate policy: stacking increasingly suffocating and incompatible regulations on Canadian industry.”

Trudeau erasing Canadian history to achieve his post-national vision - "Many Canadians now appreciate the full context of Justin Trudeau’s comment back in 2015, when he surmised that Canada would become the “first post-national state.” Having just become Prime Minister of the country, Trudeau stated in that often-quoted New York Times interview, “There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada” when it comes to our national identity.    Perhaps Trudeau was off-side to say that in 2015, however, as a result of his systematic approach through the last eight years, PM Trudeau and his political operatives have effectively been erasing Canadian history to achieve his post-national vision...   “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” – George Orwell  From 2015 through to today, the overarching narrative of the Trudeau government is a woke progressivism that projects western culture as a hierarchy of power, one of oppressors and the oppressed. This woke world view is guilt-based, where success is achieved through force, and authority is undeserving.   In the last eight years, Canadians have been re-educated to understand our country is founded on genocide, theft, racism and oppression. It is therefore inappropriate, indeed unacceptable, to honour our forefathers’ achievements and their mores, traditions, and identifying symbols.   And in reconciling the darkness of our country’s past, the Trudeau government has set about to enlighten Canadians with a corrected record of cultural and societal legacies, one in which generations of “settlers” have no legitimate right to their accomplishments and should only harbour shame for past faults. The Trudeau government’s purposeful revisionism of the country’s history has been unabated. There are many recent instances to cite. For example, on the eve of King Charles III’s coronation, the government issued a media statement that the image of the royal crown was to be redrawn with the cross and fleur-de-lys removed from Canada’s heraldry, replaced with a stylized snowflake and maple leaves. Canadians were also informed that there would be no further reference to the “United Kingdom” and “Defender of the Faith” in the title of our Canadian monarchy.   Similarly, this spring the government unilaterally announced it had redesigned the Canadian passport. The documentation was to be stripped of the historical images of the Fathers of Confederation, the Vimy Ridge memorial, the Famous Five, Champlain, the Northwest Mounted Police, the Stanley Cup, the Bluenose, and the Houses of Parliament. Even the most celebrated person in recent history – the beloved Terry Fox — was erased from the passport. In place of these iconic Canadianna images, the passport is to feature watermark pictures of a narwhale, Canada goose, a squirrel eating a nut, a man raking leaves, maple syrup, a barn, etc.   In the last few years Canadians have witnessed a series of acts that are cancelling recognition of our country’s history within the public forum. There has been a rash of statutes defaced and toppled – from Sir John A Macdonald to Egerton Ryerson to Queen Victoria. Some statues – like those at Queen’s Park and at the National Capital’s airport – have been quietly removed and put into storage for “safe keeping.” Canada’s first Prime Minister has had his name erased from schools, roads, and even at the aforementioned Ottawa airport.   John A Macdonald has also been taken from the country’s currency. Recall a few years ago the government announced it was redesigning the country’s bills and that the first alteration was to remove PM Macdonald, replaced by…. (Can you tell me who is now on the $10 bill – without looking? Okay, now look. Who is she?)   In 2019, the federal cabinet issued a directive to review and revise more than 2,100 historic plaques and monuments nationwide to address concerns of the Canadian legacies of “colonialism, patriarchy and racism.” Parks Canada oversaw revisions that “address conflict and controversy” and “power dynamics”; “confront the legacy of colonialism and its impact on Indigenous peoples”; stress “inclusiveness”; and focus on “diversity of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability and religion.”   In this same period, Canada’s chief archivist purged more than 7,000 webpages on the Library and Archives Canada website, including those referencing PM Macdonald, Egerton Ryerson, and the War of 1812. It was explained that this was done to correct the government’s account of the country’s history, expunging documents “outdated and redundant” or that “may offend people.”   On a related matter, perhaps the greatest affront to the country and its people is the Trudeau government’s intent to amend the Citizenship Act so that new Canadians will be permitted to swear their oath of allegiance online with a tick of a box. To add insult, as Blacklock’s Reporter reveals, upon completing the form on the government website immigrants will be mailed a memento maple leaf pin – made in China... Contrary to PM Trudeau’s contention that Canada has no national identity, Dr. Milke identifies the core essence of Canada is found in our regard for individual rights and freedoms, the worth of the individual, rule of law, capitalism, and democratic government.   In an insightful True North interview on the Andrew Lawton Show, Dr. Milke observed, “The point about history in a liberal democracy is that you build on the sacrifices and successes of the past, you don’t deny the wrong things that have happened in the past…. To take a simplistic view of history is to miss the full breadth and depth of human beings, and their age and ours.”   As Milke, Bowler and many others will argue, a people’s national identity is forged in the country’s history and with its peoples’ traditions and mores. No doubt, this is the very reason why the Trudeau government goes to such a great length to erase Canadian history and denigrate the country’s past accomplishments.   Bowler summarizes this idea succinctly, “A person without roots, without a memory, without a story can be easily influenced and cause no trouble to the authorities. A nation without a common history in which citizens can take pride cannot long survive.”"

Trudeau’s Christmas Gifts to Canadians: Unaffordable Housing, Inaccessible Health Care, Out-of-Control Immigration and Sagging Productivity - "Government-sector job growth dwarfs private-sector job growth across Canada, found that governments added far more employees than the private sector in all ten provinces between February 2020 and June 2023 – a period spanning from just before the pandemic set in, across the hard times of Covid-19, and onward for a year after it faded. During this time, the number of government jobs increasing by 11.8 percent compared to just 3.3 percent in the private sector – a whopping total of 446,000 government bureaucrats added... Canada’s immigration policy should be (but isn’t) considering two stark realities: a serious housing shortage/price crunch and a disintegrating health care system. Both situations – it’s no exaggeration to call them crises – are getting worse every day. While some housing markets are plagued by chronically slow construction, a lack of home building isn’t the main culprit. Last year actually saw a new national record set for housing starts at 320,000 units. Yet even that is far less than what’s needed to house our surging population...  “Historically high immigration levels will push up demand and drive up housing prices and rental rates across the country.”  While this seems to have all escaped the notice of Trudeau, even some of Canada’s elite are starting to catch on. Last week Tiff Macklem, the hapless Bank of Canada governor whose dithering helped heighten Canada’s pandemic-induced inflation to crisis levels, noted in a speech at Toronto’s Royal York Hotel that, “Canada’s housing supply has not kept up with growth in our population, and higher rates of immigration are widening the gap.”... more than 17,000 Canadians died while waiting for surgery or diagnostic scans in a one-year period straddling 2022-2023. Second Street’s figure is based on a series of Freedom of Information requests. It was an increase of 64 percent since 2018 and a five-year high. Because many provincial health authorities provide incomplete data, Second Street believes the true figure is actually much worse: nearly 31,400 preventable deaths. The deceased victims had waited as long as 11 years for treatment... And yet, incomprehensibly, the Trudeau government decided 2022 was the time to bring in nearly 1.1 million newcomers, and vowed to continue immigration flows at similar rates for years. And, as I pointed out near the end of this recent article, the published immigration figure is on top of 550,000 student visas and 600,000 work permits for temporary foreign and “international mobility” workers. Many of these workers are semi-skilled or completely unskilled and go straight to work in fast food or other low-paid services. How could any sane government follow such a foreseeably disastrous path?... Now, our unprecedented housing crisis has resulted in even job-holding and fully functional Canadians camping long-term in vehicles and tents. Fellow citizens are suffering and dying on health care waiting lists while being forbidden to access private care by federal legislation (and some provincial policies), with Canada’s courts often siding with government when challenged. And yet the Trudeau government has reconfirmed an immigration goal of half a million permanent residents with no lessening of non-resident immigrants that together will add another 1 million-plus newcomers in 2024... Adding to these self-inflicted wounds, our country now faces economic stagnation... “Longer term, the OECD projects that Canada will rank dead last amongst OECD members in real GDP per capita. Without fundamental changes, Canada’s standard-of-living challenges will persist well into the future.”... A report last year from the CD Howe Institute, Decapitalization: Weak Business Investment Threatens Canadian Prosperity, points out that the invested capital per worker, key to a country’s ability to produce goods and services, “has been weak since 2015” – the year the Trudeau government came into office. “Before 2015, Canadian business had been closing a long-standing gap with the U.S.,” the report states, before warning, “Since 2015, the gap has become a chasm.” The report’s ominous conclusion: “Having investment per worker much lower in Canada than abroad tells us that businesses see less opportunity in Canada and prefigures weaker earnings and living standards.” The stark reality is that those millions of hopeful immigrants entering Canada will find a country not only unable to provide health care and housing for its citizens and temporary residents, but also with a diminishing overall standard of living. And a national government that doesn’t seem to care."
If you ruin the country when you're in power, when you lose the election as you know you will, you can blame the new government to try to get back into power

Links - 2nd February 2024 (2)

Meme - *Supermarket Aisle sign*: "breakfast. soft drinks. chips"

Ian Miles Cheong on X - "Drill is not “just music.” It is a cancerous culture that celebrates crime and it is responsible for the propagation of criminality throughout inner cities."

Andy Ngô 🏳️‍🌈 on X - "A Banksy art piece was taken less than an hour after being installed in the black neighborhood of Peckham in London. The local council has reported the missing artwork to police. Art experts estimate the piece could be worth hundreds of thousands."

Breanna Morello on X - "Why are U.S. Capitol police opening satellite offices around the country?  I asked USCP to provide me with data that justifies this—they won’t.  Speaker Mike Johnson’s office doesn’t want to talk about it.  The only explanation is that they’re the only agency that isn’t subjected to FOIA requests.  So transparency is optional."

Meme - "My roomate sucedded in giving himself autobrewery syndrome by booting yeast
So for the past 2 weeks my one roomate. Our attic one that seems to always do dumb shit, has been using a enema system to suplant brewers yeast into his colon in hopes of giving himself autobrewery syndrome. Which is where the body produeces its own ethanol for one reason, metabolic issues, or another, shoving yeast up your ass. Well now he is drunk Cant eat breat or any sugar or he gets smacked. And he forgot how much gas yeast makes. He shit himself today. All his shit is apparently like fire. Well its full ofof alchohol so no shit. And his head hurts. Im about ready to get the land lord to kick him out. He has run off naked on pcp, stole datura seeda thinking they were morning glory seeds, and now made himself into a brewery."

Earliest Mickey Mouse in public domain as ‘Steamboat Willie’ loses copyright - The Washington Post - "Mickey Mouse’s iconic status — and considerable value — made him the face of efforts to extend and protect copyrighted material, if for little reason beyond being even more broadly recognizable than Jazz Age authors and composers.  Disney also has a reputation for its intense legal vigilance when it comes to protecting its properties — what Wos calls “an ironic twist for Disney, which built their empire on public-domain fairy tales” such as Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. Jenkins calls that dynamic the “love triangle” among Disney, its Mickey protection efforts and its savviness with adapting nonprotected works... So what might be fair game for those looking to adapt Legal Mickey, who still bears more than a little resemblance to present-day Mickey?  Take Mickey’s early dance style, which is jaunty and “a little more awkward,” vs. his later fluid moves, Jenkins says. “These are the kinds of generic character traits that are not subject to copyright protection. These are isolated, uncopyrightable features of later iterations.”  Also not eligible for copyright, she says, is simply having your anthropomorphic mouse character talking in a high, squeaky voice: “What do you think it is going to sound like — Barry White?”"

Thread by @718Tv on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "If poverty leads to crime, then how come Appalachia has a lower crime rate than the national average?  Let's take a look... What comes to mind when you think of the word "poverty"?  Now remove subsidized vouchers paying for modern forced Central Air (HVAC) with which to set at 85F in the dead of winter paid for by tax payers, running water and electricity. Add stoves that run on wood or coal for heat. No government supplied vouchers are sent to Appalachian families to burn said wood either. Don't cut wood = no heat  Not many Section 8 vouchers either for that matter in this neck of the woods. No WIC checks, no EBT cards either. Owsley County, Clay County, Knox County and McCreary County in Kentucky. Or Wilcox and Sumter County in Alabama. Or Quitman County in Mississippi. All synonymous with "slow motion catastrophe" and "entire communities disintegrating" but no one ever talks about it.  I always wondered where the reflexive disdain for "white trash" comes from, it often comes from people who've never hung out or partied with them... Truly, if anything is systemic, it is the living Hell that make up the lives in Appalachia. RW culture war guys don't like to talk about it cause they're poor. LW culture war guys hate them cause they're white and mock them in ways that defy proper description. Discussing places like Appalachia (or the Ozarks, for example) invoke grinding poverty on American soil so hardly anyone does it. Class is an underpinning of culture yet avoided by the right and grossly misunderstood on the left but through a lens of hating white people. The Mennonites have done more to alleviate the suffering here than the Federal Government and never asked for anything in return. Think about that for a moment. Moonshiners? Sure. Criminals? Of course, they're everywhere. Hilljack scrappers tearing copper wiring out of buildings before the sun comes up? Yup. And yet there is an astonishing lack of gang activity from the people living here, and the crime rate is below the national average. Interestingly enough, there are non-whites who live in abject misery that left wing of culture war avoids mentioning entirely. Indian reservations are home to astonishingly fucked up living conditions. Guess they better start transitioning to get some eyes and ears on them, too. In a more developed form, the culture of poverty explanation also informs J.D. Vance’s argument in Hillbilly Elegy, which he describes as a book about a “culture that increasingly encourages social decay” in the context of regional economic decline. Others suggest the “resource curse,” or the idea that places with a lot of natural resources are likely to be poorer because resource industries, like coal mining, dominate the local economy and prevent other economic sectors from growing. Just like swaths of the third world"

Rolf Degen on X - "The proportion of psychologists who identify with social psychology - which stands at the center of the replication crisis - is dwindling, while cognitive neuroscience is experiencing a meteoric rise."

Tech startup is finding success in the U.S. after it was shunned by Toronto - "After being pretty much outright banned in Toronto, the tech startup that caused a stir here has now migrated to the United States.  People were bemused and sometimes upset by the little pink robots nicknamed Geoffrey that roamed the streets delivering for company Tiny Mile in Toronto, and the concept was soon stopped in its tracks here in Canada.  The Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance called for robots like Geoffrey to be banned from public spaces in a 2021 brief that said such technology "creates a substantial and worrisome new disability barrier impeding people with disabilities in their safe use of public sidewalks and other paths of travel."  Though there was pushback against them being removed from Toronto sidewalks, by this point you won't see any pink androids rolling around these parts.  Now, they've opened up in Charlotte, North Carolina and Miami, Florida and they've been getting a warm welcome."
When you hate innovation

Man survives lightning only to suffocate to death when villagers treat his injuries with cow dung - "Binod and Gokula Podh, who lived in Pamara village in the Sundargarh district of Odisha state, had been to the market when they were hit on Sunday evening.  Villagers tried to help the pair by embracing a superstition and putting a heap of the animal dung on Binod's body... Instead of helping the stricken man, this suffocated him and within several minutes Binod stopped breathing. It was later reported he died from asphyxiation... This is not the first time Indian villagers have used cow dung to try and help people who have been hit by lightning.   In June 2018 people from the district of Rayagada in the state of Odisha put dung and mud on 32-year-old Sankara Bisoi and 45-year-old Biswanath Majhi.  The two villagers were buried for around 30 minutes before a health worker found them and called for an ambulance.  Mohan Bisoi of Kanjangmandi village said:' 'Cow dung and mud paste therapy is an ancestral practice of healing lightning victims.'... in May 2017 a young boy from Sana Litipuli village died when his relatives covered him in cow dung, reports OdishaSunTimes.  His family had covered him in the manure for 40 minutes and hoped that he would recover from his injuries.    The boy's two friends who had also been struck by lightning were taken to hospital and survived the incident."
Time to decolonise medicine and embrace traditional knowledge

Two Men Have Been in Jail for 45 Days for Saying Cow Poop and Piss Can’t Cure COVID - "police forcefully took a journalist and an activist from their homes and threw them in prison.   They’ve been in jail since. Their crime? Facebook posts that criticised Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party for recommending cow dung and piss as cures for COVID-19.   In India’s Manipur state – a sparsely populated region about the size of New Jersey – police came at night to arrest political activist Erendro Leichombam...  police barged into the home of journalist Kishorechandra Wangkhem to arrest him, too... One complaint alleged that the Facebook posts “deliberately and wilfully insulted and outraged religious feelings and sentiments” of BJP workers and family members of the deceased... anipur Chief Minister N Biren Singh told reporters that freedom of speech and expression, although protected under the Indian Constitution, cannot be misused. “In cases where security and public order is violated, the law will automatically take its course,” he said."
An appropriate response to offending religious feelings and racism! As Amos Yee's case shows, if you know posting it will offend religious feelings, that means you are committing a crime by doing so

TIL that Jennifer Pan, under intense pressure to succeed, deceived her parents for over a decade, leading them to believe she was a successful pharmacist, despite not graduating high school. When her lies unraveled, she arranged for her parents' murder. : todayilearned

ICBC vehicle insurance allowed with no driver's licence? - "When a B.C. man received his 21st impaired driving conviction, he did not have a valid driver’s licence. He did, however, have an insured vehicle.  In August 2022, Roy Heide's blood alcohol level was two times over the legal limit. He was arrested after a motorcycle crash in Abbotsford. His passenger on the bike suffered serious injuries and Heide tried to flee the scene.   On Dec.18, 2023, Heide pleaded guilty to impaired driving, driving while disqualified and driving while prohibited.   “What's incredibly concerning is that this conviction represented Mr. Heide's 21st conviction for impaired driving, which is believed to be the single most conviction for impaired driving offences someone has received in Canadian history,” says Const. Art Stele, a spokesman for the Abbotsford Police Department.  At the time of his arrest, Heide was a prohibited driver in B.C., yet he was the registered owner of a motorcycle"

Meme - "Sinkies no longer able to afford third world Brides The Independent Singapore: In case you missed it: "Now I don't even qualify for Vietnamese wife as Matchmaker sets $4,800 monthly income requirement for potential suitors of a Vietnamese lady,' the man wrote"

Effects of state-level policy changes on homicide and nonfatal shootings of law enforcement officers - "This research indicates that three-strikes laws increase the risk of fatal assaults. RTC laws are not associated with increased risk of assault. Missouri's PTP repeal may increase the risk of non-fatal handgun assaults."
If you know you're going to go in for a long time if you're caught, you might as well escalate to reduce the risk of getting caught

Pippin Tries To Watch The Rings Of Power - YouTube - "Pippin takes Gandalfs iPad and uses his Amazon Prime Video subscription to watch the highly criticized Lord Of The Rings series, The Rings Of Power. He soon regrets this decision"

Meme - "Home Alone
Home Alone 2: Lost in New York
Home Alone 3
Home Alone (HD)
Home Alone: The Holiday Heist
Horny Moms Home Alone With Their Dildos"

Meme - "I love ripping the fishnet stockings off the slooty little oranges"

Meme - TOMB RAIDER @kala2k7: "can we please stop acting like CoD Lara Croft is a goddess when she's a massive insult to fans
*pretty, busty Lara Croft*, *ugly, flat Lara Croft*"

Fiona Daly on X - "I just overheard a woman say she uses her boyfriend's laptop to Google Christmas presents she wants so that he gets targeted ads. Communication in the digital age: a love story."

Free Speech Concerns Raised After College Chancellor Fired for Making Porn - "The firing of University of Wisconsin-La Crosse Chancellor Joe Gow over his involvement in pornographic videos has sparked free speech concerns.  UW President Jay Rothman announced Gow's firing on Wednesday, writing in a statement that his "abhorrent" actions "subjected the university to significant reputational harm." The Board of Regents voted unanimously to terminate Gow as chancellor, but the university did not offer specific details about why he was fired.  Gow believes he was fired after it was discovered that he and his wife, Carmen Wilson, a former professor at UW-La Crosse, produced and appeared in pornographic videos, he told the Associated Press. The couple starred in a YouTube channel titled "Sexy Healthy Cooking" in which they cooked meals with adult film actors. According to AP, their biographies on Amazon, where they have published several books, contained links to a pornographic website."

Meme - "TTSH Lasik doctors all wearing specs
Clin Assoc Prof Heng Wee Jin
Dr Fam Han Bor
Adj Asst Prof Tan choon Hwal Johnson
Dr Lau Koon Hin, Alex"

Meme - "I'm reading Japanese reviews of baldur's gate 3 and most of them are positive, but the negative ones are funny because they're all shocked that there is no grind, choices matter, and you have to actually role play in an RPG"

Thieves stole computers from Epstein PR guru before docs were released - "Michael Sitrick, of A-list global crisis PR firm Sitrick & Company, said crooks burglarized his company’s offices in a four-story Brentwood building on Jan. 2, but batted down any connection between the break-in and this week’s unsealing of nearly 900 documents from a since-settled 2015 defamation suit by alleged Epstein vic Virginia Giuffre... Sitrick said the thieves only stole computers that were used by employees in the accounts’ payable, and pointed out that other companies’ offices in the building were also broken into on Tuesday, he added.  He also said neither his private office nor his assistant’s were tampered with.   “If the thieves were after anything related to Epstein or anyone else, how can one explain why my office was not broken into?” he said, adding that there weren’t any documents at his office connected to Epstein."

Jean-Luc Brunel dead - Disgraced Epstein 'pimp' was in single cell and NO cameras recorded his prison 'suicide' - "JEFFREY Epstein pal Jean-Luc Brunel's death was not caught on camera and he was in a single occupancy cell at the time, sources said.  Brunel died in circumstances eerily similar to his paedo friend Epstein as he also hung himself in prison while awaiting trial for sex crimes."

Meme - "NO LISA NOOOO *Lisa Simpson on flying Stephen Hawking wheelchair*"

Meme - Stephen Hawking: "YOU ARE ALL JUST JEALOUS I WAS GETTING MORE NUDE MIDGET ACTION THAN YOU"

Singapore kills a Chicken to Scare the Monkeys - "On July 23, 2021, an article appeared in the Tokyo-based English-language weekly Nikkei Asia Review, calling attention to the Singapore government's handling of so-called KTV lounges, alleging that decades of institutional failures in dealing with what the article called "organized crime cartels” were running what amounted to illegal brothels, which were responsible for the widespread spread of Covid-19 among the lounges’ patrons.   The result was astonishing. The story got an unheard-of 1.5 million hits from amid Singapore’s 5 million-odd population virtually from the moment it was uploaded, and far more than Nikkei had ever scored on a Singapore story, by a factor of thousands. As most Singaporeans know, the KTV lounges have been an embarrassment to strait-laced Singapore for decades, widely regarded as an unregulated hotbed not only for the coronavirus but as places where prostitution flourishes openly as authorities have long looked the other way.  The article appears to have generated absolute fury at the very top of the Singapore government, particularly in the office of law minister K Shanmugam. Singapore's answer to the story, which was written by a 28-year-old security analyst named Andy Wong Ming Jun, wasn't long in coming. Indignant articles appeared calling the Nikkei article “full of inaccuracies” and justifying the government’s control over the lounges and pointing out, among other things, that “Singapore has laws against organized crime, money laundering, and trafficking-in-persons” that keep the lounges squeaky clean.  The government apparently didn’t turn to the courts for defamation, as usual when deeply offended although officials in Singapore’s Tokyo embassy relayed a threat to throw Nikkei's entire business operations out of the country, reliable sources say, not just Nikkei Asian Review. Wong is now in the UK, writing his master’s thesis and counting his scars, and unlikely to ever return to the city of his birth absent a political revolution. In the aftermath of the publication of the article in Nikkei Asia Review, he says, his life has been taken apart in stunning fashion, to the point where his professional and social life in Singapore have been ruined and he's been forced into exile.  According to his account, as well as news reports and court records made available to Asia Sentinel, Singapore mounted an attack on him that can only be described as unprecedented. It extended even to the consulting firm boss he was working for, who will remain unnamed, but who was blackballed from Singapore by his industry and political contacts, who “implied because they questioned his judgment in hiring a Singaporean who turned out to be a political critic.” The owner of the firm was forced by circumstances to close his consultancy and leave Singapore. Three days after the article appeared, Wong and three others were arrested and charged in court with possessing or transmitting obscene materials through a Telegram chat group in an affair that had occurred 20 months before and seemingly gone dormant. Wong has repeatedly been identified as a ringleader of the group in state media reports and social media chatter as allegedly possessing vast amounts of porn on his iPhone and on his computer although in court documents he was identified as only a member of the chat group, which had 25,000 members.  Never mind that according to the Straits Times, 90 percent of teen boys and 47 percent of teen girls in a survey acknowledged viewing pornography. (Downloading such materials, however, is an offense.)... Andy Wong is in company with victims of Singaporean government vindictiveness going back to four decades to the days when opposition leader Joshua B Jeyaretnam was persecuted falsely for irregularities in his party’s financial books. More recently the targets of government wrath have included citizen journalists Terry Xu and Ai Takagi, critic Roy Ngerng, cartoonist Leslie Chew, blogger Alex Au and many opposition politicians who have ended up in court facing charges and crippling fines after they called attention to alleged shortcomings in the Lion Republic.  Human rights lawyer M. Ravi was recently suspended from practice for five years for criticizing government vindictiveness against one of his clients who was on death row. He had previously also represented Alan Shadrake, who was jailed for more than five weeks in 2010 for his criticism of the death penalty in Singapore with his book Once A Jolly Hangman. This process was described earlier at length in a 2017 Human Rights Watch report titled “Kill the Chicken to Scare the Monkeys: Suppression of Free Expression and Assembly in Singapore, which said that “those who criticize the government or the judiciary, or publicly discuss race and religion, frequently find themselves facing criminal investigations and charges, or civil defamation suits and crippling damages. Peaceful public demonstrations and other assemblies are severely limited, and failure to comply with detailed restrictions on what can be said and who can participate in public gatherings frequently results in police investigations and the threat of criminal charges.”  More recently, just last week Amnesty International charged that officials are “continuing to silence human rights defenders and other critics ahead of upcoming elections, subjecting “well-known activists and critics of the government to further investigation and harassment…solely for freely expressing their views and opinions.” The prime minister Lee Hsien Loong’s ’s own brother Lee Hsien Yang and his wife, Lee Suet Fern, have been forced to leave Singapore under threat of government action after warring with Hsien Loong, as Amnesty International reported... “So, what do you do when you can’t take down a message online? You destroy the person who said it. You shoot the messenger with any convenient weaponized leverage within reach That's what happened to me,” Wong said. “An immediate campaign of character assassination was initiated against me by Singaporean state media, calling my article full of falsehoods and inaccuracies. Shanmugam even went on record in the news and televised parliamentary sessions denouncing me and calling me out as a fraud with an axe to grind against the government.”   This was a sitting law minister actively interfering with public comments on an open case, despite also stating in a 2016 Law Bill that “Persons in court cases should not face prejudgment by the media or by the public, in a way which whips up sentiment and creates a real risk of interfering with their trials.”  The wheels of justice spun fast. Barely a weekend after the publication of the offending Nikkei article, the Singapore Police acted on Wong’s dormant porn possession charges. He and the three other unrelated suspects were ordered to Tanglin Division police headquarters on July 26 – three days after publication.

Czech saboteurs in World War II - "Elmer Bendiner was a B-17 navigator during WWII. He tells the story of a bombing run over Kassel, Germany, and the unexpected result of a direct hit on their gas tanks. “Our B-17, the Tondelayo, was barraged by flak from Nazi antiaircraft guns. That was typical, but on this particular occasion our gas tanks were hit. Later, as I reflected on the miracle of a 20 millimeter shell piercing the fuel tank without touching off an explosion, our pilot, Bohn Fawkes, told me it was more complicated. On the morning following the raid, Bohn asked our crew chief for that shell as a souvenir of our unbelievable luck. The crew chief told Bohn that, in addition to that shell, another 11 were found in the gas tanks. Eleven unexploded shells where only one was sufficient to blast us out of the sky. It was as if the sea had parted for us. A near-miracle, I thought. Even after 35 years, this awesome event leaves me shaken, especially after I heard the rest of the story from Bohn. Bohn was told that the shells were sent to the armorers to be defused. The armorers told him that Intelligence had then picked them up. They couldn’t say why at the time, but Bohn eventually sought out the answer. Apparently when the armorers opened each of those shells, they found no explosive charge. They were clean as a whistle and just as harmless. Empty? Not all of them! One contained a carefully rolled piece of paper with a scrawled message in Czech. The Intelligence people scoured our base for a man who could read Czech. Eventually they found one to decipher the note. It was amazing! Translated, the note read: “This is all we can do for you now. Using Jewish slave labor is never a good idea.”"

Sydney Metro: From North Sydney to Barangaroo in under three minutes - "Within about 15 seconds, the computer-driven train accelerates from a standstill to a speed of 100km/h under Sydney Harbour, whisking its small group of passengers from a massive new underground station at North Sydney to Barangaroo in three minutes. Two minutes later, the train pulls up at another new station at Martin Place in the CBD.  The journey will become a reality for tens of thousands of commuters each day from the middle of next year when the ribbon is cut on Sydney’s first rail line under the harbour, helping overcome the natural barrier separating the CBD from the north and shaking up the city’s public transport system."
Progress!

‘This is the world’s slowest train:’ This B.C resident took a trip on the GO in Toronto and it didn’t go well - "“It’s a train, why are we going so slow? Are we waiting on traffic?.” he asked.    He goes on to say that the ride wasn’t comfortable and that it took an hour and 40 minutes to travel 45 kilometres.   “Why would anyone want to commute this way? Could have rode a bike in quicker time than that,” he continues.   Barber also said that people would rather sit in traffic than use a train that’s going the same speed...   Barber even compared Toronto’s trains to the ones in China and claimed the differences were day and night.  “300km/h through the countryside and it was so smooth my tea didn’t even vibrate,” he explained.  Barber also pointed out the comfy chairs that can recline in order to nap and the major leg room available between seats...   “The [GO] train is the worst experience you can have in Canada,” one user wrote.  “Most people in Canada don’t realize how far behind we are in the world right now,” another said."

Metrolinx needs to communicate better about Ontario Line construction, councillors say - "Walied Khogali Ali, co-chair of the BOLD Community Coalition, told the meeting that the coalition is concerned about the Ontario Line's impact on parkland and it would like to see more details on Metrolinx's plan for the development of public spaces once the line is built... BOLD, which stands for Build Ontario Line Differently, has talked to Metrolinx officials and explained how the line will impact communities through regular meetings, he said. "We can't do this work if we don't trust each other and work with integrity. We care about the same things," he said. Coun. Paula Fletcher, who represents Ward 14, Toronto-Danforth, said the Pape and Danforth intersection will a "difficult intersection in general" as work continues in the area. She's said she's concerned about people losing their homes in an area north of Gerrard Street East, adding one rooming house has already been emptied already due to construction. Fletcher also expressed concerns about trees that will be removed... the transit agency is working to track and report on employment targets for historically disadvantaged and equity deserving groups, Indigenous and Black communities"
Why public transport is so expensive and takes so long to complete in North America

Biden and the Border

Commies still insist that there is no left wing country in the US, as if open borders, obsessing over race and sex, and pumping kids full of experimental hormones and sterilising them aren't left wing positions:

KanekoaTheGreat on X:

🚨NEW - House Speaker Mike Johnson delivers first floor speech on border catastrophe, accusing President Biden of intentionally creating a "clear and present danger to our national security."

"Since I was elected Speaker less than 100 days ago, more than 700,000 illegals have been welcomed into our country illegally by the Biden administration.

American schoolchildren have been forced into virtual schools so migrants can sleep in their school buildings.

Korean War veterans have been booted from nursing homes that were sold to house migrants.

Our streets are being flooded with fentanyl. Hundreds of thousands of children and adults are being poisoned and losing their lives. Vulnerable children and women are being exploited and trafficked by cartels.

Since President Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas assumed office, there have been more than 7 million encounters with illegal aliens just at our southern border alone.

35 of our 50 states, including my home state of Louisiana, don't have a population that large.

More than 300 individuals who are on our terror watchlist have been apprehended on the southern border.

The frightening question is, how many have entered undetected?

We know there are at least 1.8 million gotaways that have escaped.

Understand that the situation at our border presents a clear and present danger to our national security, and it demands that it be addressed.

FBI Director Christopher Wray told the Homeland Security Committee in November that these gotaways are a great concern for the agency, and all 56 of our Joint Terrorism Task Forces are trying to identify who these people are.

We don't know how many terrorists are inside our borders.

We do know that fentanyl is pouring into our communities like an open sewer.

Right now, the leading cause of death of death in America for Americans aged 18 to 46 is fentanyl poisoning.

To make matters worse, we've learned that the Biden administration is now simply just releasing 85% of the illegals who come across that border right into the country.

For reference, by the way, in 2013, the Obama administration detained 82% of illegal aliens. How do we go from detaining 82% to releasing 85%?

It only happens if this is by design. It only happens if it's an orchestrated intentional effort by the administration to do exactly that, and that is what the evidence shows.

Earlier this month, I released a memo documenting 64 specific actions that the Biden administration has taken to undermine our border security and to promote the mass release of illegals and dangerous persons into our country.

The very first day President Biden walked into the Oval Office, he revoked Executive Order 9844. Do you know what that did?

It ended the construction of the border wall that Congress had already paid for. Everybody has seen the images of the materials out there rotting in the sun. Why?

Because Joe Biden decided unilaterally that he didn't want a wall.

In February 2021, the administration stopped applying Title 42 expulsions to children and incentivize by doing that incentivize families to send unaccompanied children through Mexico under the watch of cartels and traffickers.

Since then, the administration admits to losing track of more than 80,000 unaccompanied children somewhere in the US.

We don't know where they are. Have they been put into trafficking rings? We know that some of these kids are being trafficked for free labor and being forced to do things that are too appalling for us to articulate on this floor.

Everybody here knows that's happening, and we're not demanding the President stop it? He can. He has the power to do it.

In October 2021, the Biden administration revoked the migrant protection protocols that had been instituted under President Trump.

That's the policy that we all know colloquially as Remain in Mexico. The Remain in Mexico policy kept asylum seekers in a safe haven third country while they were seeking asylum in the United States.

Do you know why that works magically so well? Because it sent a message around the world that you shouldn't pay your life savings to a cartel to traffic you through Mexico and drop you over the US border because you're not going to be dropped over the US border.

The word goes out on social media to countries all around the world. They are not going to let you in.

Man, is that the most common sense rule you've ever thought of? President Biden doesn't agree because he stopped it. He issued an executive order to stop that common sense rule.

A senior border patrol officer told us on that trip to Eagle Pass that if President Biden, by the stroke of a pen, would issue an executive order today to just simply reinstate Remain in Mexico, they think that would stop the flow by 70%.

One stroke of the pen by the President. He does not seem to care.

I told President Biden this myself on multiple occasions, most recently, a couple of weeks ago on the phone, I read him the law that says that he has all this authority, but he refuses to act.

And even that's even despite court orders, by the way that instructed the administration to reinstate the institute remain in Mexico while the litigation was going on. You know what they did? They ignored it.

The Biden administration is actively incentivizing illegals to come to the United States. We have laid out the welcome mat. We told everybody around the world, come on, you know what? The US taxpayer will take care of you.

It's costing the American people billions and billions and billions of dollars to provide for people who are intentionally breaking our laws, billions and billions of dollars to house them and educate them and clothe them and take care of them. Why should we bear the burden when they break our laws?

In January 2023, the Biden administration expanded the use of the Customs and Border Patrol One App so illegal aliens could just make appointments and then be released immediately right into America's interior.

Guess what? 95% of all illegals who simply scheduled appointments through the app were released right into the United States. That's right.

All you have to do is just download the app because they all have smartphones, make an appointment, and the President of the United States will release you into a network of NGOs who will put you on a plane to the destination of your choice.

Without identification, by the way, while Americans are waiting in line to get through TSA. All on the dime of the American taxpayer.

In December 2023, CBP recorded more than 302,000 encounters, almost double the population of my hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana. In just one month 302,000 people just walked right into the country.

I could go on and on about the 64 actions we've documented that President Biden has specifically taken to open our border wide up, but it's crystal clear his policy choices and Secretary Mayorkas refusal to comply with the law are driving this border catastrophe.

They have chosen disorder and chaos for us rather than securing the homeland. They've ceded the homeland to cartels and traffickers.

In the Del Rio sector alone in Eagle Pass, Texas, the cartels are making an estimated $3.5 million dollars a day trafficking human beings into our country. Do the math.

They are making billions of dollars a year trafficking undocumented children and victims into this country.

The Department of Homeland Security has effectively become a taxi driver to just help traffickers complete the last few miles of their human smuggling operation, and they're making billions of dollars in the process.

It's absolute madness, and it is dismantling the safety of our communities. More than half a million known criminals and illegal aliens are in the US in our communities, free to re-offend and victimize American people.

When we were at Eagle Pass in the Del Rio sector earlier in January, they told us that 60 to 70% of the people coming across the border right there at that epicenter are single adult males. They're military-aged.

These are not huddled masses of families seeking refuge and asylum. These are people coming into our country to do only God knows what.

The Biden administration is allowing it, and we've noted that they are coming from adversarial nations and from terrorist regions. We have no idea what they're planning.

But in fiscal year 2023, border patrol encountered illegals from 170 different countries, including hundreds from Iran and Syria, thousands from Russia, and tens of thousands have come in from China. Tell me that's not dangerous?

Law enforcement and intelligence leaders are warning us that we may very well suffer a preventable terrorist attack here in the homeland if we don't immediately secure that border and remove these dangerous terrorists from inside our borders.

I read the black letter law to the President of the United States on the phone about two and a half weeks ago. I said, Mr. President, it says very clearly that you have all the tools and the executive authority necessary to reverse the catastrophe that you have created. He has those tools right now, and he has since day one.

We have to decide if we believe in the rule of law or not. We have to decide if we're a sovereign nation or we're not. I believe that border security is part of our solemn obligation to safeguard the well-being of our citizens and uphold the principles that define who we are as a nation.

A weak border weakens America, and a strong border is good for America, and a stronger America is good for everybody around the world. And everybody in this chamber should acknowledge that.

Just as we lock our doors at night to protect our homes, we secure our borders to protect our homeland. And my friends, that is our sacred obligation."