So one the dude-bros that Musk let back onto Twitter in November was the "social media personality" and wealthy kickboxer Andrew Tate - and it didn't take long before Tate indulged himself in needless, gratituous, misogynistic insults:
Please provide your email address so I can send a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions. pic.twitter.com/ehhOBDQyYU
For millions of people in Canada and in the US, it has been an awful Christmas - terrible weather, monster storms, no power, cancelled flights, people stuck in transit. Dozens of people have died.
The only uplifting aspect in this situation is the stories we are reading now about how ordinary people pitched in to do whatever they could -- stories of courage, resilience, and willingness to help. These people are extraordinary:
....Then, on Friday at 2 p.m., with the storm already swirling and snow rapidly piling up, making roads impassable, there was a knock at the door. Two men, part of a group of nine tourists from South Korea that was traveling to Niagara Falls, asked for shovels to dig their passenger van out of a ditch.
And so an unlikely holiday weekend began, with the Campagnas welcoming the travelers, along with their driver, as house guests....
They spent the weekend swapping stories, watching the Buffalo Bills defeat the Chicago Bears on Christmas Eve and sharing delicious Korean home-cooked meals prepared by the guests, like jeyuk bokkeum, a spicy stir-fried pork dish, and dakdori tang, a chicken stew laced with fiery red pepper. To the surprise and glee of the Korean guests, Mr. Campagna and his wife, who are both fans of Korean food, had all the necessary condiments on hand: mirin, soy sauce, Korean red pepper paste, sesame oil and chili flakes. There was also kimchi and a rice cooker.
It's the most wonderful time of the year! -- or at least, its the time when companies actually put some thought into their television ads, and when ad companies do their best work too. Here are some this year that I liked.
John Lewis & Partners is known in Britain for their Christmas ads. Here is a great one, The Beginner:
One of the lasting impacts of the pandemic, I think, will be the destruction of the "downtown office" concept as an organizing principle for cities.
Historically, it has always taken wars to get North Americans to travel -- the Civil War was the first time that significant numbers of Americans ever travelled around their own country. In World War One, we got the song "How Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down in the Farm After They've Seen Paree?" as an question of why the soldiers who had travelled overseas would ever be content with living a rural life again. Likewise, World War Two resulted in millions of Americans and Canadians travelling to places they would never have gone to otherwise, within their own countries and over the oceans.
Now, we have the aftermath of the pandemic - another kind of war, really - that showed just about everyone that we they can be just as productive working at home as we were in the office - providing that the internet is working, of course - and without the hassles of public transit, commuting, parking, office politics, lunch line-ups, crowds, somebody microwaving fish, cube farms, etc.
Three stories tonight seem to have the same theme -- that it may be the beginning of the end for Pierre Poilievre, for Elon Musk and for Donald Trump.
First, for Pierre Poilievre:
Evan Scrimshaw analyzes the Angus Reid poll tonight, comparing Poilievre at 3 months to the other Conservative leaders, and it is NOT good news for PP.
The chaos on Twitter continues -- but I am now thinking it is forcing us to think about social media in a new way. I am seeing a number of thoughtful posts lately and here are some good ones.
...it’s not just large-scale social upheaval that has been driven by Twitter. The app has, at this point, disrupted most industries. Newsrooms, Starbucks, and Amazon warehouses have unionized on the app. Studios have ousted predatory executives with a hashtag. Politicians, both left and right, have used the site to sweep elections in a flurry of shitposts and dunk-based populism. And stock markets have rallied, and crashed, thanks to ridiculous Twitter memes turned viral pump-and-dump schemes.
Twitter’s core experience has been, and still is, disruption. And we have spent over a decade trying to determine if it’s good disruption or bad, left-wing or right, progressive or conservative, but the truth is, it’s just disruption. It’s a random social chaos machine. Over the summer, as Elon Musk finalized the purchase of the site, that chaos machine was turned in on itself. The company was overrun with leaks and drama, which all became trending topics. And after Musk bought it, the company literally began livetweeting its own dismantling. Now that it has toppled itself, and all that’s left is Musk’s various whims, the manic energy of the app appears to be localized entirely inside of Musk’s brain. The man is jacked directly into the feed and it turns out the feed is screaming back at him, “you fucking suck.”
And so we all have to sit around and watch the richest man in the world process in real-time how cringe, how embarrassing, how hated he is. The joke has always been that Twitter causes “psychic damage,” but that joke is real now. Twitter is currently doing to one man’s psyche what it has done to countless societies around the world. He paid $44 billion for a website he believed was a “biological neural net,” a digital collective unconscious that he could use to take us to Mars, and it turns out that frothing Id hates him. Can you imagine how painful the cognitive dissonance must be? If people boo you and think you’re a shameless loser then what’s all the money for? Why are you sleeping in your office? If money can’t make people like you then what was any of it for?
There are many such posts out there, because this sort of thing—signals of distress that toggle between thundering proclamations of Total War and a sort of sweaty gloating—is more or less the sound that older conservatives and the people who make their living pandering to older conservatives make. There isn’t a political program to speak of, beyond some dire retributive fantasies—prosecutions, tribunals, prison camps, political murder, normal shit—buffered with ROFL emojis and opaque in-group jargon. It is not important, or anyway not very interesting, how serious these people are about this. Given how heatedly they fantasize about it in public, they surely wouldn’t have any problem with mass violence against their enemies, although they’d prefer someone do it for them. But also there is not a great deal of thought evident in it. When you hear a bunch of dogs barking, you wouldn’t assume that they’re having a conversation. They’re just doing what their buddies are doing.
Online reactionary politics is a fan community before it is anything else; as with Donald Trump, the way to tell that Musk is an active participant is how obviously starstruck he is by the corny dingbats that make up its firmament. Where Trump lived for the approval of Fox News’s glitching poreless on-air goblins, Musk has been queasily quick with an “exactly” in the mentions of various reactionary influencers: the anti-trans activist that solicits bomb threats to children’s hospitals, or the one fellow from the Koch-backed Turning Point USA organization whose face seems to be shrinking, or Cat Turd 2. If it is embarrassing to know who these people are—and it is extremely embarrassing to know who those people are—it is more embarrassing still to have mistaken these relentlessly self-serving grifters for friends.
What all of that decidedly is not, however, is mysterious. Musk’s politics, however heterodox he himself might secretly be, appear very much to be those of an extremely wealthy 51-year-old man with an entirely commonplace conservative media diet. There are only so many interesting ways and even fewer interesting reasons to adopt these politics; the most common one, which again is the one that Musk seems to have chosen, is to simply let the combined inertia of your circumstances and incuriosity back you into them. That he is now someplace so strange—winking at QAnon shit, already—seems mostly to reflect how conservative politics have moved in that direction; Musk, typically, seems not to have given any of it much thought. The extremities of his wealth and strange upbringing, and his personal peculiarities and the limits of his capacities for empathy or insight all probably played some role, but this is true of every other butthead that ever aged into reactionary politics. In time, these people realize what they actually believed all along and embrace what has always mattered most to them. In this sense, too, Musk’s little blurts of umbrage and upset are just like those of all the other reactionary pilgrims on their own lonely journeys. Separately but in unison, they slough off everything and everyone that is not them, either out of principle or pique or just because they find themselves losing interest; instead of talking to the people they used to talk to, they just shout at everyone. Twitter has always been a good place for that.
...Musk’s weird rampage does have an impact on the way the world around you exchanges information. Twitter has many levels; for some people, it’s a place to talk about oddball hobbies and exchange pet pictures. (Have you met my cat?) But it’s also an extremely valuable conduit for news, information, culture, and argument. Twitter doesn’t control the news, but it helps to shape public debate about many issues. Indeed, Musk’s entire public rationale for taking over Twitter was to preserve an important venue for free speech.
Musk’s defense of free speech is nonsense. One of the world’s richest men—who is not shy about his politics or his contempt for the free press—has reinstated Donald Trump, white supremacists, and any number of dangerous malefactors to Twitter, but he has made it clear that Donie O’Sullivan is beyond the pale. He has purchased an important and influential piece of the public square not to enhance public debate, but to punish people who annoy him....
I think he lost his cool because for more than a month, he’s been in way over his head with an impulsive purchase, his fortunes are plunging, and he got booed by a crowd of thousands of people at a Dave Chappelle performance—which, for a guy like Musk, is probably an unforgivable injury from what should be an adoring public.
But we can at least shelve all of Musk’s blather about free speech. Twitter is an important part of how we disseminate and process news, and it’s now in the hands of an irritable and unpredictable child. This is one more step in the infantilization of American life, in which we must accommodate and work around the behavior of grown men and women who not so long ago would have been pushed out of public life either by our collective political disgust or by responsible shareholders who would insist that their corporate leaders get back to work instead of making a spectacle of themselves.
Do you know what @Twitter is if it bans journalists and left-wingers? Truth Social. @elonmusk is putting on a clinic on how to lose $44 billion.
This may take you a minute but just wait, you'll get it soon:
We are starting to get into the "end of the year" takes where people are summarizing what happened this year and what it all means.
First up, a very useful summary from Timothy Snyder's Thinking About... substack: Gratitude to Ukraine:
... Americans (and many others) owe Ukrainians a huge debt of gratitude for their resistance to Russian aggression. For some mixture of reasons, we have difficulty acknowledging this. To do so, we have to find the words. Seven that might help are: security, freedom, democracy, courage, pluralism, perseverance, and generosity.
...For American policymakers and security analysts, it is literally dumbfounding that another country can do so much for our own security, using methods that we ourselves could not have employed. Ukraine has reduced the risk of war with Russia from a posture of simple delf-defense. Ukraine has reduced the threat of a war with China without confronting China, and indeed while pursuing good relations with China. None of that was available to Americans. And yet the consequence is greater security for Americans...
Snyder ends his piece with a very interesting history of the Carol of the Bells, the performance of the Ukraine children's choir at Carnagie Hall, and the deep meaning of this song for Ukraine, particularly this Christmas.
100 years after it was performed for the first time in the US, in Carnegie Hall in NYC, the Ukrainian song “Carol of the Bells” has again returned to Carnagie Hall.
Moving on, several writers have been talking this week about the Emergencies Act hearings and what they mean. I liked David Moscrop's In Defence of Invoking the Emergencies Act:
...I was in Ottawa during the occupation. Not only was I writing about it—a task that yielded endless grief and hate mail from so-called “freedom” supporters—I was living it. My apartment was a short walk from Parliament Hill and the besieged Wellington Street. It was just a slightly longer one to the neighborhoods where the occupiers were terrorizing residents.
...Society has a right to defend itself. At the time, we had no idea who was in charge in Ottawa, no idea whether violence would escalate, and no idea when the occupation would end. The occupiers were, in essence, calling for a coup. There was a log jam that needed breaking. By invoking the Act, the government seems to have done just that. And there’s evidence from Commission testimony that supports that common sense take.
During testimony Ottawa’s interim police chief, Steve Bell, said the Emergencies Act was “helpful” in ending the occupation. He cited “four key areas” of assistance, including speeding up external police support by “swearing in members” from outside of the city, lowering barriers to mobilizing tow trucks to remove the semi-trucks, and providing financial tools to investigate funding.
Bell said the “main benefit” of the Act was that it provided “a legal framework for us to be able to operating within.” In essence, the Act was a foundation. As Bell put it, “It allowed for us to very clearly articular to our frontline officers what their powers were…so that they could understand what to do and how to execute it.”
Money was essential to keeping the occupation in place. By removing or restricting funds, the government helped clear a path to end the stalemate. The Emergencies Act facilitated the rapid freezing of bank accounts associated with the blockades and occupation. It also instructed insurance companies “to cancel or suspend the insurance policy for any vehicle taking part in a prohibited assembly.” Plus, it “subjected crowdfunding platforms and payment service providers”—two of the main sources of occupation donations and funding—"to the registration and reporting requirements under the Proceeds of Crime (Money Laundering) and Terrorist Financing Act.” That measure that is now permanent.
The same characters returned to Ottawa post-occupation, but subsequent visits were met by a city prepared.
For another take, here is a useful article from Wesley Wark’s National Security and Intelligence Newsletter - The Globe gets it wrong (shock, horror) - a response to a Globe and Mail editorial demanding that the Trudeau cabinet release the legal opinion that supported the Emergencies Act.
Wark writes:
...The legal thresholds piece is not the main issue of importance to Canadians. The Globe’s call for a release of the legal advice provided by the Attorney General to the government is, at this stage, largely beside the point. The key issue is how the events of the Freedom Convoy came to be seen as a national security crisis by the government.
...five reasons were presented to Parliament to justify the finding of a public order emergency. Three of the five reasons broaden the security threat lens beyond the language of the CSIS Act—threats to economic security resulting from the border blockades; adverse effects on Canada’s relationships with its trading partners; the breakdown in supply chains. Whether it was right to broaden the understanding of threats to the security of Canada in this way is open to debate, but for the government it clearly represented its assessment of key threats on the ground.
The important thing to note is that in widening its definition of threats under the EA, the government did not cavalierly discard the CSIS Act threshold. It incorporated it. Two of the five reasons directly address the CSIS Act threshold, especially s2c) of the CSIS Act.
In a comment I made to this article, I also noted these two points:
The EA was necessary for two reasons, I think, neither of which were anticipated by the parliamentarians [of earlier years]
1. Canada needed a high profile show of force to convince American business that the border blockades were OVER! and would not be allowed to restart again
2. The banking threat - to freeze accounts, confiscate vehicles, etc - chilled the "hot-tub rock concert" party atmosphere; it intimidated not only the Ottawa truckers themselves, but also anybody across the country who had supported them. The mood changed overnight.
... really funny watching pundits who spent much of the summer proclaiming Poilievre’s inevitability suddenly claim this matters. It doesn’t, but if it makes the commentariat get their heads out of their asses it was probably a good thing.
There are two things that are both fundamentally true about Canadian politics right now – there’s a lot of activity, and almost no news....
...The Tories have the same problem they had when I coined Scrimshaw’s Paradox: any leader who gets through the membership cannot win a general election. It was true in February, and it feels true now, because the Tory members continue to elect insane nutters...
Of course, Elon Musk is still in the news. For some reason I don't understand, a throw-away comment I made about people booing Musk at Dave Chappelle's show got 4,300 "likes" on Twitter. I guess it just struck people as a good take:
You reap what you sow. Remember how surprised Trump was when he was booed at a baseball game? I think guys like Musk are surrounded by sycophants telling them how great they are & how everybody loves them, & they start believing their own press.
...at this point, I also think Musk is just a being of pure impulse. He’s essentially a flatworm with a rocket company. A naked central nervous system of raw urges wandering the halls of Twitter, asking people if they know good QAnon memes to tweet out.
Finally, here is likely the funniest academic research article I have ever read - Things Could Be Better
Abstract: Eight studies document what may be a fundamental and universal bias in human imagination: people think things could be better. When we ask people how things could be different, they imagine how things could be better (Study 1). The bias doesn't depend on the wording of the question (Studies 2 and 3). It arises in people's everyday thoughts (Study 4). It is unrelated to people's anxiety, depression, and neuroticism (Study 5). A sample of Polish people responding in English show the same bias (Study 6), as do a sample of Chinese people responding in Mandarin (Study 7). People imagine how things could be better even though it's easier to come up with ways things could be worse (Study 8). Overall, it seems, human imagination has a bias: when people imagine how things could be, they imagine how things could be better.
The article was written by this guy - Columbia Business School post-doctoral research scholar Adam Mastroianni - who also writes about the whole academic peer review process in his Experimental History substack The Rise and Fall of Peer Review:
Here’s a simple question: does peer review actually do the thing it’s supposed to do? Does it catch bad research and prevent it from being published?
You reap what you sow. Remember how surprised Trump was when he was booed at a baseball game? I think guys like Musk are surrounded by sycophants telling them how great they are & how everybody loves them, & they start believing their own press.
Technically, it was 90% cheers & 10% boos (except during quiet periods), but, still, that’s a lot of boos, which is a first for me in real life (frequent on Twitter).
It’s almost as if I’ve offended SF’s unhinged leftists … but nahhh.
You did great, chief. It's good to get outside your bubble. It definitely wasn't a huge public embarrassment that will be tweeted at you as a reminder for as long you own this site. https://t.co/i6V4UWdR9I
A billionaire desired a bird The asking price was just absurd But still he bought it, undeterred This fascist, lame, unfunny, nerd Now Nazis can get in a word And those who mock him go unheard And "free speech" is, in fact, interred 'Cause #ElonMuskIsaGiantTurd
— The Gil-Monster And Lamb Kept Time (@the_gil_monster) December 11, 2022
This is the time of year I gather cartoons and here are two that seem to represent what we went through in 2022.
First, the beginning of 2022:
And second, the end:
This is from this outstanding article by University of Waterloo statistician Bill Comeau, taking about the importance of wearing masks to combat the tridemic we are now dealing with. He concludes with these recommendations for where masks are needed most urgently now:
... the three C’s of Crowded places, Closed spaces, and Close-contact settings, and areas with greater vulnerable populations: schools, universities, public transit, congregate living, health-related settings like doctor’s offices, pharmacies, grocery stores, concerts and other mass indoor event areas, indoor weddings and funerals, and stores subject to crowding during holiday shopping season. It would be good if employers recommended workplace masking during this time as well.
For mask mandates to work, there needs to be strong and committed leadership from the top to ensure there is timely action and targeting, clear goals, transparent sharing of science and evidence, helpful public education, widespread and active messaging, and ongoing communication.
... No one step will solve everything, but as Yogi Berra might say, doing nothing accomplishes nothing.
Credit this tweet for alerting me to this article. I am glad that MedTwitter still seems to be functioning even as the rest of Twitter begins to collapse.
I don’t understand how COVID is spiking again after we’ve tried everything from pretending it’s over to pretending it never happened
Here is a photo I will never forget -- I first saw it in mid-2020, I think -- an exhausted emergency room doctor, kneeling on the floor, as he phones someone to tell them their loved one has died of Covid:
Continue to be stunned by how fast the COVID revisionism has taken root.
This happened: - Over 45,000 Canadians died of COVID - Hospitals were overwhelmed - Healthcare workers (and Canadians) stepped up - Vaccines & public health policies saved lives
We will be getting boosters and wearing masks for the indefinite future -- all the Covid revisionism and wishful thinking is not going to change that:
In the spring of 2020 most thought this would be over in 6 months. Now this. Who would have guessed . Do we just give up? Harvest the weak? Accept massive long Covid? Move on? Or do we rise to this challenge ? https://t.co/f9HO7fq6LD
Before I get into the rest of this piece, I just have to follow up my previous Tridemic post with this terrible story:
“This baby died on the floor, on the floor of the Emergency Room because there were no stretchers. When I put my dog down it sounded more ethical and beautiful than what happened to this child”
There it is. A 2 year old child at Lakeridge Hospital has CODED and died on the floor on the hospital. A 2 YO CHILD DEAD ON THE FLOOR OF AN ONTARIO HOSPITAL. Watch this clip. It’s heartbreaking. This is on Ford & Jones. https://t.co/lK3RKvn2Zo
Now that Twitter is dying, I really can't do my "From the Bookmarks" posts very well anymore.
But I have taken advantage of Substack free subscriptions to check out a bunch of substacks - I go through their sometimes-daily newsletters to gather news and views.
And yes, its sorta amusing, really, that what is old becomes new again:
Maybe with any luck they'll reinvent newspapers the same way streaming services accidentally reinvented cable
Paul Wells: Paul Wells is doing an OUTSTANDING job covering what is happening at the National Gallery lately, where four of Canada's most respected art curators were fired in November, apparently because they can't get behind a new "strategic plan" apparently drafted by an "interim" gallery director who has no actual curatorial experience.
(On a side note, one of the reasons I was looking forward to retirement was so I never had to hear the words "strategic plan" ever again - because no plan ever survives first contact with the enemy!)
What is happening at the Gallery sounds pretty bad to me. Wells reports today that Heritage minister Pablo Rodriguez is being deluged with letters from the Canadian art world - both staff unions, private art galleries across Canada, major donors, former members of the gallery's board, former curators -- all complaining about the chaos, as he reports in National Gallery of Canada: It's Unanimous:
... I am aware of no public correspondenc by anyone with long knowledge of the Gallery who supports the board or the new staff leadership.
Senator Patricia Bovey has some advice for Rodriguez. Bovey, a Trudeau appointee from Manitoba, is a former director of the Winnipeg Art Gallery and a former board member of the NGC. So she knows board responsibilities, the work of a museum CEO, and the legislative process. She’s just sitting there in the East Block waiting for someone to ask for advice. What’s her advice for Rodriguez? The prompt creation of a search committee to look for a new permanent director of the NGC. Public announcement of that committee’s members, who should include people with superb records in art history and museology.
Honestly at this point, the minister shouldn’t need to be told to do that. But Sen. Bovey has another tip: Rodriguez should meet, and publicly announce he has met, the seven former senior curators who wrote him to sound the alarm. Mostly so they’ll feel heard. Also because they are heroes of Canadian art. They include Diana Nemiroff, who co-curated the Gallery’s first major Indigenous survey exhibition 30 years ago and who literally wrote the book on women leaders of the Gallery. And Charlie Hill, who was the Gallery’s chief curator of Canadian art for 34 years and who marched for gay rights on Parliament Hill in 1971. Hill has spent his life seeking — and not shying away from — brave conversations. I remember when a minister of Canadian Heritage would have met a group like this in the first few days of a national controversy.
...The Federal Liberals are defending their least-safe Mississauga seat, won by just over 6% in 2019. If the Tories are going to win the next election, they don’t have to win this seat, and anyone who claims that a theoretical Liberal win says very much about Poilievre’s appeal is full of shit, but they need to win some number of seats kind of close to this. It’s a suburban seat, obviously, and the kind of seat where the Tories have struggled in recent years because of the Global Fucking Realignment (start the drinking game now, I guess).
My instinct is the Liberals will win it, but that it doesn’t matter. The Liberals are running Charles Sousa, Kathleen Wynne’s former Finance Minister and MPP for the seat, while the Conservatives are running a cop of seemingly limited notoriety. Byelections in recent years have been wonky...
...Poilievre has been nowhere recently and Lakeshore isn’t exactly fertile ground for Skippy’s brand of conservatism.
...A Conservative win is absolutely possible for two reasons – it’s the kind of seat that would be very close on provincial swing and byelection turnout effects are wild and can be extremely variable – but there’s nothing that makes me think that this potential result would be indicative of much....
To be entirely consistent, however, a Liberal win is nothing to write home about and shouldn’t be taken to mean fuck all for 2025.
Routine Proceedings: Dale Smith is covering the arguments between the Auditor General and the CRA over whether Canadians have really been doing so much cheating with pandemic government support funds - The Auditor-General is not Infallible:
...My bigger problem is the fact that this disagreement is somehow scandalising because we have an unhealthy veneration of Officers of Parliament and the Auditor General most especially in this country. A virtual cult has been built around them, particularly by media, who love nothing more than watching the AG go to town on criticising the government of the day, no matter which stripe of government it is, and they will uncritically believe absolutely everything the AG says because they are independent, and therefore must be inherently credible. There are similar problems with this lack of critical engagement with the Parliamentary Budget Officer (and the current one has been a real problem around that, as he picks methodologies out of thin air), and again, his word is gospel. But they’re not infallible. The previous AG ballsed up the Senate audit really badly, and it was an absolute mess, but nobody wanted to talk about it because you can’t badmouth the Auditor General. It’s like a cardinal sin in this city. And departments should be allowed to have disagreements, because the AG isn’t going to get it right every time. That’s just a physical impossibility, and we should acknowledge that fact, but as we see, when it happens, it’s like heresy. People need to grow up, and media needs to be more critical of these Officers, because media is the only check they have.
For all of their flaws, the federal pandemic support programs were both outstanding and absolutely necessary:
CERB was a new program, rolled out in 3 weeks during #COVID19, by a workforce mainly working from home. It was imperfect policy, it had holes and flaws, and was completely necessary at the time. What I am not hearing from anyone else is what their alternative would have been.
I guess they're calling it a "tridemic" now -- the triple hammer of Covid, flu and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) that is destroying our hospitals.
This time, its the children:
No children’s Tylenol, no children’s amoxicillin, urgent care waits 8+ hours, walk-in waits 4+ hours, no pediatric hospital beds available whatsoever, family doctor is booking appointments a month out, worst “tridemic” RSV/flu/COVID wave in years… Canada is not okay right now 🫠
Today, Alberta shut down its children’s respite/palliative care center, sending the sickest and dying children and their families home to fend in their own
This is so the staff can be redeployed to overflowing children’s hospitals
But we KNOW what to do to help people avoid getting sick - we just have to DO IT!
"We have all the tools to change the trajectory of this horrible situation. The only missing ingredient is courage from our leaders to be transparent about the current situation and mandate the changes that are necessary to prevent more illness and death." @SKGandhiMD#bcpoli 6/6
The enduring tragedy of 2020-21 was the deaths of millions of old people due to Covid in Long Term Care facilities across Canada and throughout the world.
And this is still happening - read this whole thread:
Did you read that? Terrified. You could not send him & it’s a heart attack and that kills him. You could send him & it not a heart attack but he brings Covid/RSV/flu back with him and it kills him and may be starts a out break at a nursing home that will cost more lives 2/
46% of Canadians have a NEGATIVE impression of the Truckers involved in the #FreedomConvoy
That is DOUBLE DIGITS over the 23% of Canadians who have a negative impression of the government for using the Emergencies Act#cdnpolipic.twitter.com/ZdApSgIkAD
This weekend there was a fascinating article in the Globe and Mail summarizing what was learned from the Emergencies Act testimony at the POEC. Here are some revelations of note:
Convoy leaders egged on the protestors but did not risk their own trucks:
...only through the inquiry did the public learn that while the leaders encouraged others to put their trucks – and therefore their livelihoods – on the line, most of the convoy leaders did not. Mr. Barber removed his truck, ‘Big Red,’ from the “red zone” after the second weekend. Mr. King left his motorhome in a “secure location” and hitched a ride downtown. Ms. Belton left her big rig at home, as did Mr. Dichter.
Stephanie Carvin, an associate professor at Carleton University and a former federal intelligence analyst, said the convoy leaders have shown – at the protests and in the inquiry – that “they see reality entirely differently.”
“They’re not delusional,” she said, but added, “I’m not sure anything would have convinced them that they were causing harm.”
Ottawa police failed:
...In an emergency situation, a police services board and a police chief are the only ones that can ask the OPP to take over when a police force is not providing “adequate and effective” policing, Prof. Kempa said. Mr. Sloly’s senior commanders believed he thought that other police services coming to Ottawa to help craft an enforcement plan illustrated a plot against him, the inquiry has heard.
Police stood by as protesters formed supply lines of fuel-filled jerry cans and indiscriminately set off fireworks near condos and office buildings. Yet Mr. Sloly testified that the chaos never met the threshold where he should have relinquished command. And then-Ottawa police board chair Diane Deans testified that she couldn’t recall if the board ever considered making a request to the OPP.
The chaos should have triggered an automatic threshold for the OPP to take control, but no such mechanism exists, Prof. Kempa said.
The Ontario government failed:
...the Emergencies Act assumes all parties do their jobs, as expected, not that the Ottawa police would be “dysfunctional” or that Mr. Ford would decide “he didn’t want to get involved and kick it up to the federal government.”
“It assumed that the Ontario government would be working and solving this and it wasn’t. So what do you do?” she said.
And Canadian intelligence agencies weren't as helpful as they could have been:
...The inquiry has heard that the protests in Ottawa and elsewhere did not rise to the level of a national-security threat, under the CSIS Act. Yet CSIS director David Vigneault testified that he recommended the act’s invocation – after receiving a legal opinion from the Justice Department that the Emergencies Act could take a broader interpretation than the CSIS Act.
On Feb. 14, about an hour before the act’s invocation was announced, Mr. Trudeau received a memo from Canada’s top public servant recommending the act’s use. A detailed threat assessment was meant to follow “under separate cover,” but it did not. Jody Thomas, national security and intelligence adviser, had sought that threat assessment earlier that day but she testified that it “fell through the cracks and we were overtaken by events.”
I'm not sure what the POEC will make of all this, except perhaps to conclude that Mulroney and Beatty were maybe indulging in a bit of wishful thinking back in 1987 when they thought the process of declaring a state of emergency would be polite, orderly, and unencumbered by bureaucratic incompetence at several levels.
Elon Musk and Matt Taibbi tag-teaming to do the most ponderously vacuous thread on Hunter Biden this side of Truth Social is like the O.J. chase if the Bronco were going 7 mph slower
so Elon Musk throws Matt Taibbi thousands of documents for the Twitter Files & Taibbi himself claims he saw evidence implicating Trump’s White House, the actual administration in power, and Taibbi decides to…dive into the Hunter Biden stuff!!
If I may do a @brianschatz: the most interesting revelation about Hunter Biden is that the wife of a Supreme Court justice was actively involved in a plot to overthrow the results of a presidential election, and that justice is going to hear cases related to that plot.
Danielle Smith’s “Sovereignty Act” has parallels in history. Known as a Henry VIII act, it allows governments to pass laws without consent of Parliament. Hitler’s “Enabling Act” of 1933 is the most extreme example. The consequences were horrific. https://t.co/14eXSaTTbu
The most useful thread I saw today, explaining what a "Henry the 8th" clause is and how it works:
By unpopular demand, a (🧵) background explainer for what a "Henry VIII clause" is (as this phrase is being bandied about a lot at the moment).#ableg#abpoli#cdnpolitics
This power, today known as a "Henry VIII clause", meant that the King, by proclamation, could make or amend laws, without having to consult or obtain the approval of Parliament.
Voters also can and should demand accountability from their representatives for the use of Henry VIII clauses, and be prepared to toss out governments that seek to abuse this power and bypass the Legislature's role.
This is why Premier Loon thinks she can pass a Sovereignty Act that will permit Cabinet ministers to change Alberta laws without having to get a vote in the Alberta legislature for them.
I don't understand why Alberta and Saskatchewan feel so misunderstood and persecuted and hard-done-by all the time.
Fact of life: Canada's population is not fairly distributed across the country and it never will be. Most of our people live in Ontario and Quebec, with several million more in Vancouver. The Prairies have just 20 per cent of the country.
Fact of life: A quarter of Canada lives here - in the Ontario Golden Horseshoe:
Fact of life: That's also where much of Canada's money is made, too - industry, banks, manufacturing, transportation, etc. -- though when it comes to the economy, this year the Prairies are actually expected to do a little better than anywhere else in the country:
Alberta and Saskatchewan, quit yer bitchin'! We're not living in the Red Wedding, no matter how much our politicians want us to trash the East. We are, actually, great places to live (for most of the year anyway) with friendly people, beautiful scenery, a terrific economy.
Please can't we just stop all this pissing and moaning and complaining?
Dear god.
“Smith has directed her cabinet ministers to look for federal "intrusions" into provincial jurisdiction, past and future, and create special resolutions that will be introduced and debated in the spring 2023 legislative session.”
…
— David Moscrop: Subscribe to my Substack. It’s fun! (@David_Moscrop) November 30, 2022
"The bill creates choice opportunities to ramp up hostilities before the provincial election set for next May 29." Ottawa has the power to disallow this bill. That's likely what Premier Smith wants. Come May 29th, she'd rather fight Trudeau than Notley. https://t.co/8WDxk9MgxR
The bill would "enable [the government of Alberta] to deem federal laws unconstitutional, allow it to make unilateral changes to provincial legislation, and direct provincial entities to ignore “harmful” federal policies."https://t.co/ajeANuNH6c
Just a reminder that Canada's first ever goal in Men's World Cup history was scored by a kid who fled a war, came to Canada as a refugee, was welcomed by Canadians, learned English, and grew up playing soccer in the snow.
Team Canada presented by @sobeys are crowned WORLD CHAMPIONS after beating Australia in the Davis Cup Finals.
Auger-Aliassime, Diallo, Galarneau, Pospisil, Shapovalov and Dancevic's amazing run in Malaga marks Canada's first ever #DavisCup Title. pic.twitter.com/1Mo1LJH27i
“Ok so there’s 3 rings for the elven kings under the sky, right? And 7 for the dwarf lords in their halls of stone. You following me?” pic.twitter.com/ZRmWeSgSKD
When I turned 70, I thought, well that’s it. I’ve had a great career, but it’s winding down.
Boy was I wrong. I found social media, and then a second wind at my sails in my 70s! I made my Broadway debut at 78, and I’ll make my London debut at 85.
I love the difference between dog and cat rescue stories. dog owners will be like oh I prepped for months and applied and had a home check then did a foster to adopt trial period and then the rescue chose me! and cat owners are like .. I found him in the trash
Hey everyone -- first of all, please forgive the lack of posts these days - along with thousands of others, I have been searching for a social media platform to keep up with the day's commentary, as Twitter continues to implode into a racist hellhole.
But the Twitter platform is miles ahead of all the other social media sits for a blogger like me - no wonder they had so many staff to keep it going. I have been using their Bookmarks, Lists, and Embed Post functions just about every day, and unfortunately the other social media sites just don't offer these features in such an easily usable format.
I am still searching -- Mastodon does have some of the twitter features, but I am still finding it too clunky to use easily. Tribel looks good but has no way to save posts so they can be retrieved later. Instagram and TikToc don't have political posts as far as I can understand them. Just yesterday I got accepted onto the Post platform, and it looks promising.
Also, a large number of the people I follow now have their own Substacks or daily newsletters so this is promising too. Many of them are navigating to the Post too, so that platform will be more useful I think.
Anyway, I will get it sorted out as soon as I am able.
Fascinating to see how Mastodon is turning into Geek Twitter, https://t.co/JXyysSIK87 into Blue Check Twitter, and Twitter into Truth Social.
In the meantime, Canadian news yesterday and today was full of the testimonies at the FluTruxKlan inquiry (AKA the Public Emergency Order Commission). Overall, Trudeau and the other cabinet ministers and PMO staff did a good job explaining why they turned to the Emergency order to resolve the crisis last February:
Trudeau faced a grueling test today. Hours of televised, public testimony on technical, difficult and extremely important issues. And he provided controlled, compelling & in-depth explanations of his every move and consideration. He didn't take a single punch. #POEC
But those hoping for a faceplant from the relevant Ministers and PM surely came away devastated. Instead, the convoy's advocates limped off looking reduced and incoherent. All week, they offered conspiracies, incompetence and heckles. And not much else #POEC
Who knows what Rouleau thinks. Who knows what he'll conclude or recommend. Those are challenges to contemplate another day. But this week was a giant landmine. And Blair, Mendocino, Lametti, Freeland, Telford, Broadhead, Clow and Trudeau all walked through unscathed. #POEC
The apex predator, one of nature's most efficient killing machines. He stalks his quarry undetected and pounces, slaying without remorse. pic.twitter.com/cTdySc8tUe
When this war is over, and Ukraine has won, I expect Ukrainians will create a mile-wide border of salted soil, so they never have anything to do with Russia ever again.
As Adam Silverman said in his Balloon Juice post last night:
I just want to take a moment and note, again, that what Russia is doing and has been doing since the start of the re-invasion, is the systemic targeting of civilians, civilian residential areas, civilian infrastructure such as power generation, power transmission, water treatment facilities, reservoirs, railways, agriculture, hospitals, schools, cultural facilities, the widespread mining of Ukrainian territory occupied by Russia, the kidnapping of Ukrainian children to Russia, the use of Ukrainian citizens as hostages, etc. The vast majority of Russia’s targeting in the re-invasion constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity. ....the news media regularly fails to make this clear.
Ukraine's retaking of Kherson is reshaping the battle front, as Kyiv's forces work to push their initiative in the south and Russia strives to redeploy withdrawn troops to Donbas. https://t.co/KTVZLQY1JE via @WSJ
BAKHMUT/1315 UTC 20 NOV/ RU forces continue costly, unsuccessful assaults on Bakhmut. Overhead imagery confirms that RU fontal attacks in the vicinity of the NE suburbs of Bakhmutske & Pidhorodne have resulted in the deaths of 100s of RU mobniks. pic.twitter.com/tIHOla4Az7
I read Silverman's account tonight expressing concerns about Russia increasing its alliances with Iran and with Syria - previously my concern was whether the Russia-Ukraine war would spread to Europe, but a spread to involve the Middle East might also be problematic.
Jens Stoltenberg, NATO's secretary general, says the alliance must prepare for a protracted conflict in Ukraine. https://t.co/2qpZEqlZsJ
Canada hosted the Halifax International Security Forum this weekend, described as the world's leading security conference for democracies:
The Forum has made a particular effort this year to bring in Ukrainians to explain first-hand the cost of the war. Forum President Peter Van Praagh points out that the hotel where the conference is happening, the Westin, actually employees about a dozen Ukrainian refugees.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has called on Canada to help spearhead a long-term peace plan with Russia, as the nearly 10-month war in Ukraine enters a critical phase with the approach of winter.
The Ukrainian leader threw down the gauntlet in a pre-recorded video address to the Halifax International Security Forum, where senior government and military officials from Canada and around the world are gathering this weekend.
Zelenskyy, whose country was invaded by Russia in February, told participants that real and enduring peace between Kyiv and Moscow will require agreement on 10 different areas.
Those include the withdrawal of Russian forces, the release of prisoners, the securing of Ukraine's nuclear, food and energy security, the restoration of his country's territorial integrity and a tribunal to hold those responsible to account.
The Ukrainian president went on to encourage countries to "choose which item you can help with," adding: "I believe that Canada, which strongly supports us, will also choose one of the peace formula items for itself and will show all strands of leadership."
Thank you Minister @AnitaAnandMP, Minister of National Defence, Canada, for making time to add material to one of the camouflage nets that will be sent to Ukraine after the @HFXforum. I appreciate everything you continue to do to support Ukraine. #HFX2022#StandWithUkraine️pic.twitter.com/6VHR7bH5V9
Canadian soldier Joseph Hildebrand (33) of Saskatchewan has died battling Russian forces near Bakhmut Ukraine, say family members. pic.twitter.com/W5fjZflTN7
