UNEXPECTEDLY: Canadian Parliament Votes to Extend Emergencies Act for 30 Days.

The Canadian House of Commons voted Monday night to approve a 30-day extension of the Emergencies Act, which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently invoked for the first time since its passage in 1988 to quash the trucker blockade in Ottawa protesting the cross-border vaccine mandate.

After hours of debate, the vote on the “motion for confirmation of the declaration of emergency” passed along partisan lines, with 185 members voting “yay” and 151 members voting “nay.” The vast majority of Liberal and New Democratic Leader party members voted to extend the law, and the vast majority of Conservatives and the Bloc Québécois voted to suspend it.

The law has been exercised to remove vehicles from the city center and to cut off the financial resources of demonstrators. That has included freezing the bank accounts of those directly and marginally involved in the protest including some citizens who’ve donated sums in the ballpark of $50, as well as monitoring financial transactions. Now that convoy leaders and other participants have been arrested, and the encampments largely dismantled, Conservative MPs have criticized the Emergencies Act as unnecessary and an abuse of authority, the National Post reported.

As of Monday, Trudeau suggested the vote on the law in the chamber was effectively a vote of confidence in his administration, meaning that if the parliament had revoked the measure, his government would resign and an election would be called to replace it.

Meanwhile: New York Times reporter stands by her account of gunpoint arrests in Ottawa.

Narwhal climate reporter Fatima Syed, who is also the Vice President of the Canadian Association of Journalists and host of the Canadaland podcast The Backbench, called the Times story “embarrassing and wrong.” Journalists from The Globe and Mail, Global News, and more also criticized the Times, some demanding a correction.

“Maybe leave the gossip to the “professionals”,” remarked society writer Shinan Govani.

Yet truckers were indeed arrested by police in Ottawa at gunpoint, says New York Times reporter Sarah Maslin Nir, who shares a byline on the contested piece with colleague Natalie Kitroeff.

“We saw these [arrests] transpire first hand,” Maslin Nir told Canadaland via Twitter DM, “and in addition have multiple interviews from people this happened to, including David Paisley, quoted in the article…what really is blowing my mind is the wave of JOURNALISTS saying we didn’t see what we saw.”

Maslin Nir referred Canadaland to a video of police officers with military assault rifles, one of them raised, entering the structure in which Paisley said he was arrested by an officer who aimed a rifle at his chest.

Just think of the Canada’s MSM as Trudeau’s operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.

HEH:

UPDATE: A friend texts: “Did anyone think sending Kamala Harris to Europe was supposed to work? Medium is the message, yo.”

PARTS OF AMERICA STILL WORK: SpaceX successfully launches 46 Starlink satellites from Florida.

OPEN THREAD: Tear the roof off the sucker.

JEFF DUNETZ: How Joe Biden Created The Ukraine Crisis.

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

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

Russia’s past performance is no, err pretty consistent, actually:

PUTIN IS A PUTZ: Russian ASAT debris creating “squalls” of close approaches with satellites.

HMM: Physics Breakthrough as AI Successfully Controls Plasma in Nuclear Fusion Experiment.

I’D COMPLAIN TO THE UN HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION, BUT I’M SURE IT APPROVES: Canada’s increasingly autocratic government.

Related: The tyranny of high-status opinion: How the woke left wrote the script for the Canadian state’s tyrannical assault on the protesting truckers. “At first glance, it looked like one of the strangest, most incongruous moments of the great trucker uprising of 2022. There were the truckers and their working-class allies, in Ottawa, loudly agitating against Justin Trudeau’s vaccine mandates, when a bunch of hyper-woke, definitely not working-class counter-protesters rocked up to rail against this horn-honking throng. And what did they chant, these painfully PC counter-protesters? ‘Trans rights are human rights’, that’s what. As clear as anything, these supposed leftists, seemingly horrified by the sight of working-class men and women fighting for their rights, engaged in arguably the most striking non-sequitur of the 2020s so far – they brought transgenderism into an issue that has nothing whatsoever to do with transgenderism. . . . And yet, at another level, at a deeper level, this weird, disjointed counter-revolt against the ‘revolting’ truckers actually makes sense. For what we had here was the shrill, noisy reassertion of high-status opinion against the supposedly low-status demands of the truckers for more freedom and better working conditions. This was the correct-thinking set staking its moral authority over the irritated truckers; the upper-middle-class guardians of approved ‘progressive’ thought pushing back against a pesky, old-fashioned, grassroots demand for liberty and respect.”

Plus: “In fact, it goes even further than this. These counter-protesters, whether wittingly or not, were marking out the truckers as ‘problematic’, as bigots, as real-life Emmanuel Goldsteins deserving of the most severe forms of condemnation and even punishment. They were putting a target sign on the heads of these unpersons, signalling that they are fair game for shame, censure and even police repression and assault. The counter-protesters, for all their self-indulgent fantasies of radicalism, were behaving as the running dogs of the Trudeau regime. Trudeau had already branded the truckers as ‘transphobic’ – and also Islamophobic, homophobic and anti-black – on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. And these ‘trans rights’ counter-protesters were essentially doing Trudeau’s bidding, obediently echoing the vile anti-working-class prejudices of the Canadian state, as they hollered at these working-class protesters: ‘Trans rights are human rights!’ They were publicly declaring that the truckers are thoughtcriminals, possessors of dangerous, bigoted thoughts, and thus they may be crushed. And lo, they were.”

IT’S COME TO THIS: ‘Party drug’ test strips may help prevent fentanyl overdoses.

HOW IT STARTED:

How it’s going: Ukraine crisis: Putin orders Russian ‘peacekeepers’ into eastern Ukraine.

MARK JUDGE: Mark Judge: Tomorrow Started: Record Store Day, Modernism and R.E.M.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Child molestation charges for former Chattanooga Charter School of Excellence teacher. “Deborah Cooper McCarty is charged with child molestation, enticing a child, obscene phone contact and sexual assault. The arrest report says McCarty had phone sex with a girl under the age of 16, ‘with intent to arouse or satisfy the sexual desires of said accused and child.’ It also says McCarty eventually invited the girl to her home in Rock Spring, Georgia, where she molested her. The report says this continued over a period of 8 months last year.”

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Left-wing Green group that targeted Keystone pipeline plagued by accusations of ‘white supremacy culture.’

350.org, a left-wing green group focused on grassroots efforts to fight climate change, is being plagued by accusations of “white supremacy culture” within its own organization despite efforts it claims to have undertaken to increase diversity amongst its staff, as well as the climate change movement.

According to Politico, 350.org, which was largely responsible for the staunch opposition by climate change activists to the Keystone XL pipeline, “struggled to overcome its founding by a group of white people” when it followed efforts to hire more people of color with mass layoffs and increased workloads amid financial struggles.

The struggles for the group began in 2019 when executive director May Boeve announced an increase in the annual budget to an amount more than the organization had ever raised in a single year. Included in the new budget were plans to hire nearly 130 new employees.

The plans eventually broke apart with the organization failing to meet the required financial needs, which led to a fallout that included “mass layoffs, departures, exhaustion, distrust and a protracted labor battle.”

A restart of the pipeline, a public apology by Biden, and a return to $2.00-a-gallon gas is the only solution to this omnipresent racism.

WELL, OF COURSE. BLUE STATES ARE RACIST STATES. FPC: California’s Proposed Gun Control Schemes Are Modern Day Jim Crow Laws.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: CNN Stopped Reporting On Its Favorite Boogeyman and the Reason Is Hilarious. “It’s difficult to say whether the change is funnier than it is pathetic or the other way around. Maybe by the end of this column you can tell me.”

TOP SELLER: TurboTax Deluxe 2021 Tax Software, Federal and State Tax Return with Federal E-file [Amazon Exclusive] [PC Download]. #CommissionEarned

POVERTY AND OPPRESSION WERE NEVER SEXY: Making Socialism Sexy Again: New York Magazine Honors ‘Our First Female Wunderkind.’

THE BANALITY OF GENIUS: Notes on Peter Jackson’s Get Back.

When we meet Lennon in Get Back, he is in a fallow period, which has a dampening effect on his all-round confidence. Although, hang on a minute: can we really say a man is in a creative trough if, just a matter of months ago, he made Dear Prudence, Julia, Happiness Is a Warm Gun? When he is in the midst of creating Don’t Let Me Down? Perhaps it depends on who he’s sitting next to. In January 1969, Lennon seems like he’s drying up, and to an extent is drying up, because his primary creative partner is on a hot streak of epic proportion. McCartney apparently only has to sit at the piano, pick up a guitar or just allow his mind to wander, for songs to come surging through him. Months after Blackbird and Hey Jude, we now get Let It Be, Long and Winding Road, Get Back, Golden Slumbers, Two of Us, Oh! Darling, and more. Perhaps the question is not why Lennon is in a creative slump, but why McCartney isn’t.

Towards the end of the 1960s Bob Dylan and The Beach Boys were in states of disarray, creative outputs stuttering, minds and bodies giving out. Meanwhile, The Beatles increased their rate of production, making a double album in 1968 and two albums in 1969 (about three weeks after the end of these sessions they were back in the studio for what became Abbey Road). The engine of the band throughout this period was the relentlessly fecund McCartney. We ought to sympathise with Lennon. Yes, we can blame his drug-taking, but imagine being in his position: a tired genius whose closest collaborator is hurling down thunderbolt after thunderbolt from the top of a mountain, pausing only to ask, so what have you got?

McCartney’s creative collapse after the Beatles broke up is almost enough to make on believe the nutty “Paul is dead” conspirators of 1969-1970 — he never would again reach the sustained brilliance he was channeling from 1966 to 1969.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW (CONT’D): A Billionaire Astronaut Is Working with SpaceX To Launch the First Private Spacewalk.

SUNLIGHT IS THE BEST DISINFECTANT: Minnesota college cancels no-whites-allowed luncheon after College Fix report.

HUH. LAST WEEK SHE DENIED IT EVER HAPPENED: Okla. Dem Candidate Abby Broyles Says Mixing Someone Else’s Sleeping Pills with Liquor Made Her Go On Boozy Racist Tirade Against Kids.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Virgin Galactic will fly you to space for the price of a house.

SNOWFALLS ARE JUST A THING OF THE PAST: Fierce Cold Wave Sweeps East Asia, Chinese City Sees First Snow Since 1893; + “Dangerously Cold Temperatures” To Hit U.S. And Canada.

On my airline’s advice, I just bumped up my Wednesday morning flight to Tuesday afternoon.

OLD AND BUSTED AT THE WAPO: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

The New Hotness? “As mask mandates fall, more and more people will be forced to do their own balancing of risks and benefits.”

Whatever happened to “my body, my choice?”

THEN: ONLY CONSPIRACY THEORISTS THINK MASKS ARE BAD FOR CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT.

NOW: CDC quietly lowers the bar for early childhood speech development. “For the first time in decades, the CDC has changed many of the recognized milestones for childhood development in terms of speech and cognitive functions. These markers are considered important in terms of recognizing when children aren’t progressing quickly enough, suggesting the potential need to determine if some sort of impairment is being observed and if the child may require greater medical attention. The curious thing about the changes instituted by the CDC is that in a majority of the cases, they have lowered the standards rather than raising them. . . . It’s hard to ignore the growing body of reports showing that childhood development has been suffering as a result of various COVID protocols, raging from ‘virtual learning’ environments to forcing children to wear face masks.”