Wildfires: why so many across the lake?

 

The haze was not so bad over Lake Erie yesterday, but the east coast was under an air quality alert due to the wildfires in Quebec and Ontario. John Carter raises questions about who or what caused these wildfires.  Eco-terrorists?  Canada’s deep state?  From his Substack column:

There are currently over 100 fires raging throughout Quebec and, now, Ontario. The number goes up every time I go to check Google, last I saw was around 160. The closest is just over 100 km from here.

Wildfires on this scale, at the point in the year, are in my experience unprecedented. Ten of thousands of people in outlying communities have already been evacuated. So far about 3.5 million hectares have burned.

click to embiggen or check it out at the link

As you can see, not only are we on track for the worst wildfire season on record, the temporal pattern is completely out of step with what we normally see. In every other year, wildfire season is mid-August, mid-July at the earliest. The beginning of June is unheard of.

   . . .

That leaves, as far as I can make out, three broad categories of perpetrators: a foreign state actor; the Canadian government itself; or non-state actors.

So which is it? Mr Carter leans to the Canadian government itself, and he explains why.  But he concludes with a reasonable disclaimer:

I want to finish by emphasizing that neither I nor anyone else I know has any proof that these wildfires are caused by arson, or if so that this arson is the result of self-inflicted damage by the Canadian state. That is all pure speculation based on the highly anomalous behaviour of the wildfires (a large number starting more or less simultaneously two months earlier than normal), along with the known policy vectors of the current ruling class, and the demonstrated tendency of that ruling class to ‘make their own reality’, so to speak. This is the same ruling class, remember, that blew up the NordStream pipeline and then pretended Russia did it. They’re not above committing acts of terrorism on a vast scale if they think it will benefit them. With the reputation they’ve made for themselves, it’s easy for many of us - certainly for me - to believe that they would do something like set an entire country on fire purely to spook the populace, and that is perhaps the grimmest comment possible on the times in which we live.

Read his column here.

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Erasing the borders

 

This blog has been posting some of the more disturbing examples of America's self-inflicted wounds, the result of a government-gone-rogue engaged in deliberate destruction.  Yesterday, the subject was homelessness - by design.  Today, Frank Miele at Real Clear Politics has another example:

North America Goes South: The Plan To Dismantle USA

People are starting to realize that the collapse of the American border is not an accident. It can’t be. When the vice president of the United States says the border is “secure” at the same time that illegal border crossings have surged to more than a million a year, then one of two things must be true.

Either the vice president and the rest of the Biden administration have to be delusional, or they are lying. And while there is plenty of evidence that President Biden is cognitively challenged, there is no reason to believe that he or his handlers are out of touch with reality.

So they must be lying. But why? A lie is usually told to cover up some kind of bad behavior, some unacknowledged guilt or secretive misdeeds. Yet if there were an ulterior motive behind the Democratic policy of importing millions of unvetted immigrants into the interior of the country, what could it possibly be?

Unfortunately, there was no way to determine what the Biden administration was up to – until now. Two weeks ago, we learned that Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken is actively engaged in a campaign to break down all barriers between the United States and Mexico. In other words, the huge influx of Mexicans and other foreigners across the U.S. border is just the first stage in a globalist effort to blur the lines between not just the United States and Mexico, but also Canada.

It’s called the North American Union, and the idea has been around for three decades. I wrote about it extensively between 2006 and 2008 when President George W. Bush was pushing it. . . .

It goes back further than that.  The rest of Mr Miele’s report is here and it cites chapter and verse.

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We Will Delete You

 

  Image credit: Babylon Bee

Michael Young is a visiting fellow at the Center for Renewing America. His article in Tablet Mag explores the hazards and risks to our freedoms in the age of Big Tech and consolidated banking systems.  It’s not pretty, and he concludes:

What happens when a government is no longer required to do the very difficult, friction-filled work of finding people, writing tickets, arresting them, charging them, granting them due process, obtaining convictions, and jailing the guilty? When the government can bring a person’s practical participation in society to a standstill with the push of a button, it becomes silly to even talk about individual rights or due process. In the face of this new kind of push-button power, exercised at the whim of the governing party with zero legal oversight, individuals can simply be deleted from the system—even if, technically speaking, they are never charged with or convicted of a crime.

. . .

A deeper concern is what happens when private institutions like corporations, universities, and media exercise the same power without even the pretense of accountability. If the large financial institutions want to, they can act as gatekeepers to society and would be held accountable only by the market, to which they also hold the keys. Given that institutions are heavily dependent on each other, if the institutions that hold important positions in the global financial web decide to freeze someone out, they can do so with the push of a button. Worse yet, we can imagine a scenario in which a system of freeze-outs could be automated based on people’s credit scores, purchasing histories, political donation patterns, key words in social media postings, carbon footprints, or political activism. It’s not hard to imagine a situation in which a citizen of a democracy wakes up one day to find themselves unable to participate in the digital economy, where almost all financial transactions take place, due to an automated system which flags them as being undesirable in some way.

Corporations and government have always exercised tremendous power, of course. Government has a monopoly on the use of force, using the policing powers to enforce laws. Corporations have always exercised enormous power via market share, advertising, lobbying, and other financial instruments. But never before have they been able to lock ordinary citizens out of social participation with the flip of a switch.

This push-button tyranny is real, and it represents a greater abuse of power than any that has been exercised before within the boundaries of liberal democratic government. It is new, it is breathtaking, and it is very dangerous.

Read the entire article here.

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Mark Steyn on Russia's invasion of Ukraine

 

Sundance at Conservative Treehouse has posted a few scary observations on what we are witnessing overseas.  Today, he links to a video of Mark Steyn’s GB broadcast, with this intro:

The first white horse, pestilence (virus); the second red horse, war (Ukraine); the third black horse, famine (fertilizer shortage); and the final horse, death.

Stunningly, in this monologue Mark Steyn takes a tour reminding viewers of the past two years of western government action, while connecting the corporate mandates from the World Economic Forum.  That outline is brave considering the mention of the totalitarian shift amid New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Europe and the United States when attached to the WEF is normally a third rail of discussion.

However, Steyn doesn’t stop at pointing out the hypocrisy of the collective west in their current drumbeat against Vladimir Putin; instead, he takes the last few years, puts in a deep breath, and then connects it… to the world’s most popular history book.

Followed by the video.  Steyn's take-away is that Putin is invading Ukraine to destroy . . . America and the west.  After the video, Sundance offers his conclusions; click here.  

RELATED:  Brandon Smith at NOQ on an imminent false flag cyber attack; click here. 

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The Government From Hell

 

David Solway at PJ Media is writing about Canada, but his words apply to America today as well:

. . . The fact is that the government from hell is working to transform a democratic nation into a police state and normalize totalitarian rule without having to mobilize the military and scramble its jet fighters. It moves subtly, insidiously, through legislation, decree, deception, legal subterfuge, financial penalties, and targeted defamation. It divides a country into sectarian belligerents, employs tested techniques of misinformation and disinformation, prevents the free expression of opinion (Bill C-11), and impoverishes and segregates its perceived adversaries. It manipulates a strategy of covert control which, in the long run, may be more effective than overt physical repression. It doesn’t need tanks; a few RCMP horses will do. Slander and sanctimony are excellent weapons.

The truckers were never a menace, bore no resemblance to the volley of epithets hurled against them: white supremacists, racists, misogynists, antisemites, and the like. A Liberal MP is convinced that “honk honk” is code for “Heil Hitler.” Reviewing Paul Gottfried’s must-read Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade in American Greatness, Christopher Zeeman writes, “Organizing a state around a nonexistent threat is a novel approach to governing…the lack of proof is confirmation that they must redouble their efforts to thwart the threat”—a threat, be it said, not to the nation but to the impious power of the managerial elect. In other words, our political elites must conjure their enemies in order to maintain their own compromised existence. The dumbing down of a supine population, still wearing their badges of conformity across their faces, completes the task.

Of course, as noted, there will be the inevitable casualties. The truckers who protested the draconian and useless vaccine mandates have been crushed and their lives ruined. And the majority of Canadians do not care. Some believe the truckers got what they deserved, gloating over the misfortune of their betters. Others do not give them a second thought. The feeble-minded claim to be suffering from “phantom honking.” Some hover over the top like a helicopter pilot surveying rush hour traffic and move on: nothing very significant to see here. Their sympathies go out to the Ukrainian victims of Russian aggression. The victims of government oppression in their own country are an afterthought. Stupefying indifference to the fate of their nation is the order of the day. The government from hell remains solidly entrenched. . . .

Mr. Solway’s entire column is here. 

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Julie Kelly on political retribution: Canada and America

 

Julie Kelly has been exposing the unlawful incarceration without due process of the January 6 “insurrectionists.”  Here’s a short extract from her report at American Greatness:

. . . As freedom-lovers justifiably recoil at Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s crackdown on vaccine mandate protesters, Americans worry the same sort of political retribution could happen here. I’m sorry to report, it already has.

The scenes from Ottawa are matched or surpassed by the images here, including thuggish cops attacking January 6 protesters with mace and explosive devices. The difference? Instead of mounted police trampling a woman, ours merely shot and killed one woman and beat up a few more.

What the Trudeau regime is now unleashing against the truckers and their supporters has been underway in America for more than a year. Using January 6 as a pretext, the Biden regime is brandishing its authority to crush political dissent. Now, it appears Trudeau and his apparatchiks are stealing the U.S. Justice Department’s playbook of power and pain. 

The comparisons are stark.  . . .

Plenty more here. And it is not pretty.

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Here comes the American truckers' People's Convoy UPDATED

 

Image via Bizpacreview

Terresa Monroe-Hamilton reports at BizPacReview:

As an American “People’s Convoy” takes shape following in the footsteps of Canadian truckers, a political action committee has partnered with truck convoys across the nation to travel to Washington, DC in protest of COVID mandates and overreach by the federal government.

The Great American Patriot Project sent out an email blast on Wednesday urging supporters to join, volunteer for, or donate to the American Truckers Freedom Fund. The email asserts the truckers “represent a movement of peaceful, non-violent Americans from all walks of life who are dissatisfied with the unscientific, unconstitutional government overreach in regards to mandates.”

“It’s time for #AmericanTruckers to stand with truckers all over the world. Don’t be afraid to #HonkHonk. Everybody loves #FreedomHonks,” the PAC proclaims on its website.

The “People’s Convoy” is gaining steam along with other movements and thousands, if not millions, of Americans are supporting them in one form or another. Routes for the convoy include starting points in Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio, and Fresno, California. The trek will culminate on March 6 in Washington, D.C. A congressional welcome committee is set to meet with the convoy and discuss policy changes according to the organizers.

. . .

The “People’s Convoy” is set to depart in late February and travel to the nation’s Capitol. . .

Great to see that Cleveland is on the route, so northern Ohio patriots can cheer on our truckers.  Will post details ASAP.  Full Bizpac article is here.

RELATED bad news from Canada: 

Trudeau Crackdown Against Trucker Protest Begins – Cancels Parliament Debate as Jackboots Begin Arresting Protestors and Removing Trucks

UPDATE:  Is there more than one Freedom Convoy going to DC?  Here's information at The Right Scoop about a California-to-DC convoy, scheduled to arrive March 1 for the State of the Union address.  I'll keep looking . . .

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Freedom Convoy: The Meme

 

PowerLine’s “The Week in Pictures: Keep on Trucking Edition” has so many funny memes and headlines, it was difficult to choose.  Here’s one:

 

But go here for all the rest of them.

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Truckers have done this before ~ UPDATED

 

I don’t usually link to articles at National Review Online, as many contributors have too often veered off course for those with conservative values.  However, today, Michael Brendan Dougherty puts the truckers’ Freedom Convoy in Canada in an historical perspective, and it may be cause for a bit more optimism.  Here’s a start:

When you look up at Canada and see truckers — most of them independent owner-operators of their rigs — suddenly coalescing into a powerful protest movement, making the government afraid, complaining of inflation, and getting condemned by the Teamsters, you have to realize it’s all happened before.

Truckers have done this before. Throughout the 1970s, trucker strikes in the U.S. led to snarled traffic for days and weeks in the American Midwest. Truck driver J. W. Edwards felt squeezed by the ongoing energy wars, which were raising gas prices, forcing truckers to stop constantly to only half-refuel, and cutting into what was a modest, but steady, living. Edwards stopped in the middle of I-80 in Pennsylvania, got on his CB radio, and started explaining to other truckers listening in that he’d had it. Within an hour, hundreds of other big-rig drivers joined him, idling their vehicles and putting Pennsylvania’s main interstate into paralysis.

Over the next few days, truckers shut down traffic across ten states, trying to flex their muscle and let the federal government hear their anger on the policies of fuel rationing and reduced speed limits that were costing them their way of life. Along the way, there were confrontations with police and the National Guard. Soon independent truckers began forming political groups, such as the Unity Committee, that could be present at negotiations with the Department of Transportation, or the Fraternal Association of Steel Haulers, which directly challenged the Teamsters, which at the time had over two million members. Deals with the government were cut to get the trucks moving again, but further strikes of independent truckers took off in 1979, again over speed limits and on the Carter administration’s preference to allocate diesel to farmers over long-haul truckers.

And now it’s happening again.

. . .

Full article is here.

UPDATE 4:15pm:  Conservative Treehouse reports:

Ontario Comrade Doug Ford Promises to Crush the Rebellion,
Declares State of Emergency,
Announces Unilateral Orders
 to Target Noncompliant Truckers with Arrest,
$100k Fines and License Revocation

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Can Politicians Quit the Power Habit?

 

Richard Fernandez raises a timely question, and one that puts the Western world at a crossroads.  The column is at PJ Media; here are some extracts:

Can Politicians Quit the Power Habit?

… By declaring vaccine petitioners a “small fringe minority of people who are on their way to Ottawa, who are holding unacceptable views,” Trudeau turned a public health issue into political dynamite. It’s a classic case study on how to escalate a problem into a crisis, turning an issue of lifting restrictions on a fading epidemic into a referendum on civil liberty and prime ministerial leadership. By declaring vaccine petitioners a “small fringe minority of people who are on their way to Ottawa, who are holding unacceptable views,” Trudeau turned a public health issue into political dynamite. It’s a classic case study on how to escalate a problem into a crisis, turning an issue of lifting restrictions on a fading epidemic into a referendum on civil liberty and prime ministerial leadership. 

. . .

For some, an end to the pandemic signals the closing of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to remake the world. As the Socialist Equality Party (Canada) writes: “The so-called Freedom Convoy is a far-right rabble… spearheaded by fascist activists who have assaulted homeless people and workers trying to enforce anti-COVID measures and brought guns and other weaponry into downtown Ottawa.”

. . .

When the history of the Covid-19 pandemic is written, the names of many drugs — Paxlovid, fluvoxamine, sotrovimab — will be mentioned. But the account will be incomplete if the distorting effect of the most powerful and addictive drug of all, political power, is omitted. The public, out of fear, gave politicians enormous power. What we’re about to see, the world over, is whether they can take it back.

Mr. Fernandez’s full column is here.

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Make Canada Great Again

 Seen at PowerLine's "Mid-Week in Pictures: Convoy Edition":

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Socialists Condemn Workers Of The World For Uniting

 

You have nothing to lose but your chains!  The Babylon Bee strikes again:

OTTAWA—Socialists around the world are condemning the trucker freedom protest in Canada as the working class unites to defend their human rights. 

"When workers of the world unite against overbearing government mandates, that's literal fascism," said a sobbing socialist Prime Minister Justin Trudeau from deep within his top-secret bunker underneath Washington, D.C. "True, compassionate socialism is when the government partners with private corporations to force experimental drugs on the populace and threaten their very livelihoods if they don't. Everyone knows that."

According to sources, socialists were initially thrilled by the trucker convoy, as they had mistaken it for a bread line. To their dismay, they soon found out that it was a toxic freedom march organized by the working class against the Canadian bourgeois. 

. . .

Read the rest here.  Good fun. 

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Winning on trade

art credit: moziru.com

News Gingrich’s latest message includes a short summary of President Trump’s trade deals:

The breakthrough in trade negotiations with Mexico is, to use one of President Trump’s favorite words, huge.

Most of the so-called experts had said the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) couldn’t be renegotiated. They insisted Trump had offended Mexicans so much with his harsh language that the Mexican government wouldn’t come to the table. They asserted building the wall would alienate the Mexican leadership. They were just plain wrong.

President Trump’s progress on NAFTA sends five big signals:

1.    Making good on a big, disruptive pledge that set his 2016 campaign apart from every other candidate, President Trump kept his word and is forcing a difficult negotiation toward success.

2.    President Trump proved, once again, that tough language and tough negotiating can actually lead to breakthroughs. Unlike most politicians, Trump is willing to endure heat to achieve success.

3.    As a result of his seriousness on trade, other countries are now approaching Trump about trade negotiations (note German Chancellor Merkel’s call this week for trade talks).

4.    Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tried to be clever when he ambushed and attempted to embarrass President Trump during a press conference at the G7 Summit in Canada. Trudeau is now discovering that Trump has a good memory. Canada now has virtually no leverage in trying to play catch up with the U.S.-Mexico negotiations.

5.    The Trump Administration’s continued attention to economic matters – despite the liberal media’s daily efforts to get him and his team off balance through dishonest reporting and smear stories – is paying off. The average American sees the economy getting better and better. And the average American increasingly thinks the success is due to President Trump.

Mr. Speaker’s full message is posted at Fox here.

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Invasion: Mega Carp Are Coming. So are killer shrimp.

Did anyone watch the SyFy Channel’s mega-hit, Mega Piranha?

(YouTube image)

Even if Great Lakes predatory invaders are too small to eat a helicopter, they are still a real threat. From PJ Media:

Bighead carp — a member of the Asian carp family that can fly through the air and grow as long as 60 inches and as heavy as 110 pounds, just two inches shorter and 15 pounds heavier than former child star Mary-Kate Olsen and her billionaire twin sister, Ashley — is just one of the invasive species worrying people who fish for fun or profit on the Great Lakes.

And there’s plenty of profit to be made on the Great Lakes if only from the $7 billion a year fishing industry.

But now a new critter has been added to the list of invasive species doing damage by natural resources officials in the states and Canadian provinces that surround lakes Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie and Superior.

It is much smaller but no less ugly, and it comes by its nickname because it is just as hungry.

The killer shrimp (scientists call it: dikerogammarus villosus) is an inch of pure hunger and fury that chews up and eats anything without a spine that is its own size.

Nick Popoff, the aquatic species and regulatory affairs manager for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, told PJ Media killer shrimp are aggressive little predators with sharp, serrated mouths that shred their prey and could completely alter the food chain in the Great Lakes.

. . .

As scary as the prospect of killer shrimp bottom feeding their way through the waters of the Great Lakes seems, it is the Asian carp that first rattled the invasive species alarm bells in nine states and two Canadian provinces.

Asian carp jump out of the water, seem to fly through the air, smashing hard into whatever or whomever is in their way, and they love to eat.

. . .

Photo: cleveland.com

. . .

Asian carp DNA was discovered in the Wisconsin waters of Lake Michigan in 2013, and a live carp was caught in Flatfoot Lake near Chicago, located next to the Calumet River, which feeds directly into Lake Michigan.

A December 2013 joint Army Corps and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service report showed that fish were moving through the electronic barrier in the Chicago Waterway meant to serve as Lake Michigan’s last line of defense against the carp.

In 2012, the electronic barriers temporarily malfunctioned, leaving the Great Lakes unprotected from infestation.

“Right now there are 180 invasive species and growing. Great Lakes fishing can’t afford another one,” Captain Denny Grinold of Fish “N” Grin Charter Service in Grand Haven explained. “If they go the way the sea lamprey did, they will destroy the fisheries.”

Canada is scared, too.

. . .

The Army Corps of Engineers has tried a variety of measures to beat the Asian carp from water cannon to electric fishing, but recommended in June the construction of permanent barriers that would cut off Lake Michigan from Chicago’s waterways, which seem to be a breeding ground for the carp.

But that won’t happen quickly or inexpensively. At a bare minimum, it’s an $18 million plan that would take 25 years to finish.

[By which time the invasion will already be complete.]

Critics say the barrier plan is also inadequate because it doesn’t take into account other waterways that feed into the Great Lakes.

. . .

Could Killer Shrimp-Nado, the Movie be next?

“Maybe you should call the SyFy Channel on that,” Popoff said.

More like Mega-Carp-Nado. Read the rest of the report here.

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