Today's News: Carney working, Trump flailing, Covid stories, Wildfires update

So Trump called Canadians "nasty" but Carney didn't rise to the bait.

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In fact, it sounds like Carney has decided the time is right to push Trump harder:

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The world is noticing Canada too.

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"Canada has outperformed everyone...Canada is beloved, because its policies are so reasonable to everyone else in the world. Mark Carney is someone the world knows very well, he's very reasonable...the world likes this."

As for the rest of us, I think we can continue being nasty for now.

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Trump is flailing, and failing bigly.

He has lost his war against Iran.

Apparently Oman and Iran have worked out a deal whereby ships take the Iran side into the Strait and the Oman side out.

Nice oil tanker you got there. Sure would be a shame if it hit a mine, or if someone's drone just happened to fire a missile into it. Maybe you could pay this very reasonable "environmental fee" and we could see if that might make you feel safer. www.reuters.com/world/middle...

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— Bill Grueskin (@bgrueskin.bsky.social) August 5, 2026 at 9:15 AM

as noted yesterday, Trump has now come around to treating an Iranian toll system covering the Strait of Hormuz as a given. Hard to overstate the level of strategic failure. US started the war purely as a war of choice and ends up dramatically empowering Iran and given the Iranian govt big wins.

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— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm.bsky.social) August 5, 2026 at 9:19 AM

Other Trump fails this week:
I'm pretty sure the US Constitution doesn't have a secret clause that allows the President to deny citizenship to a US-born baby whenever he doesn't like the parents.
Of course, I could be wrong....

"Sure we lost that SCOTUS case. What this executive order proposes is, what if we pretend we didn't."

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— Gary Legum (@glegum.bsky.social) August 6, 2026 at 3:12 PM

Finally, Trump has started wearing a wig and the internet is rocking with laughter.

Trump to rebrand Republicans as the Wig Party. "It's a small price toupee, I mean, to pay."

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— DrDinD.bsky.social (@drdind.bsky.social) August 6, 2026 at 8:40 AM

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And on a side note, here's the late(st) Mitch McConnell:

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We're talking about Covid again, now that Republicans are grandstanding about Dr. Fauci

 

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If you want to see something really scary, go to any social media site -- Bluesky, Threads, Substack, whatever - and search for "hospitals during Covid" or "Covid pandemic" or "Covid stories" and you will see a plethora of angry deranged posts about how Covid was a fraud, hospitals were empty, hospitals killed people so they could get paid extra for Covid deaths, the vaccines killed millions, the doctors and nurses were all lying to us - it just goes on and on.
Thousands of people are living in such a bizarre alternate reality.
But you may also be able to find some actual stories about what it was really like, those terrible months in 2020.
Here's some truth: 

This is from a doctor who was a pediatric resident at the time, Dr. Jess Andrade:

...Picture a hospital room with the door sealed shut. Inside: a girl in respiratory failure, her father standing against the far wall because that is as far away as the room allows, and two doctors in full protective gear. One of them is my attending. One of them is me, twenty-nine years old.
We intubated that patient in front of her dad. He could not step out and gather himself in a hallway, because he was quarantined in there with her.
I have thought about that man more times than I can count.
...The psychological toll was measurable, and it was measured early. A study of 1,257 health care workers published in JAMA Network Open in March 2020 found that roughly 7 in 10 reported symptoms of distress, and about half screened positive for symptoms of depression.
I am not going to tell you every policy from that era was correct. Some were not. Reasonable, credentialed people disagree about school closures, about the duration of certain restrictions, about how uncertainty was communicated to the public. That debate is legitimate and it is not mine to settle in a newsletter.
What I can tell you is what the intent looked like from where I was standing. Dr. Fauci was the voice the clinical world was listening to, and the guidance coming down was built around one goal: keep as many people alive as possible with the information available that week. Not that year. That week.
There is a difference between “we got some things wrong with incomplete data” and “none of it mattered.” Six years of hindsight has a way of collapsing those two into each other. They are not the same sentence.
I do not need you to agree about Anthony Fauci. I need you to know that behind every policy argument from that era, there was a room. And in the room there was a girl who could not breathe, a father who could not touch her, and a resident in a three week old mask trying very hard to keep her hands steady....
I am grateful to be on the other side of it. I will also never forget the worst of it, and I am not interested in pretending it was simpler than it was.
History gets written by the people with the loudest microphone. It gets lived by the people holding the stethoscopes.

Regarding Dr. Fauci and the pandemic. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. But nothing prepares you for what the first year of this pandemic did to those of us who worked inside a hospital, before there was a vaccine, before there was any real playbook, when all we had was each other and whatever we could figure out in real time. I watched people drown in their own bodies while fully conscious. Their lungs filled with blood clots and they fought for every breath while I watched doctors and nurses flip them onto their stomachs, prone, because that was one of the only things that bought them a little more oxygen. I watched teams work on a single patient for hours, adjusting oxygen levels, suctioning airways, trying every position and every ventilator setting, and it still wasn't enough. You could see the moment someone understood what was happening to them. Some of them tried to say something and couldn't get the air behind it. Then it started coming for us too. Colleagues tested positive one after another. Some got sick enough that they couldn't work for months. Some came back changed, still fighting fatigue and lung damage years later. Some didn't come back at all. Colleagues started sleeping in garages and cars and spare rooms at a friend's house because they had a parent or spouse going through chemo or a kid with a compromised immune system at home, and they couldn't risk carrying this back through their own front door. That was the trade so many people made, month after month: keep working the floor, keep saving strangers, and stay away from your own family to do it. And into all of that, we pushed brand new doctors. Medical students graduated early and got put straight onto COVID units, before they'd had a normal first year, before they'd had time to get their footing. Their first experience of practicing medicine was this. I sat with people saying goodbye to their kids over an iPad. I sat with staff who'd been steady for twenty years and watched them fall apart in a supply closet after a fourth death call in one shift. I watched a colleague's hands start shaking and never fully stop. The freezer trucks were real. They sat in our hospital parking lots full of dead bodies because the morgues were already full. Los Angelesa and Orange County ran out of room. So did San Diego. So did San Bernardino. Funeral homes couldn't keep up, so we shipped bodies out of state just to get them embalmed or cremated, because there was nowhere left here to put them. I was in those rooms. I don’t think people understand what working in a hospital during COVID, especially that first year, did to so many of us. We weren’t just witnessing death. We were holding the hands of people who couldn’t have their families beside them, watching patients fight for every breath, listening to monitors sound endlessly, and walking into the same nightmare shift after shift for months on end. The vast majority of healthcare workers who lived through that are still carrying the psychological weight of it. The trauma is so profound that, at times, it feels like brain damage. It changed how many of us think, sleep, react to stress, and move through the world. We’ve barely even begun to understand the long-term effects because so many of us never had the chance to stop and process what happened. We just kept showing up. Many of us are still living with PTSD, anxiety, depression, moral injury, grief, and memories that can be triggered by something as simple as the sound of an alarm, the smell of disinfectant, or putting on PPE. Some left healthcare because they couldn’t do it anymore. Others stayed, but they aren’t the same people they were before 2020. You can disagree with individual policies, decisions, or public officials. That’s a separate conversation. But don’t dismiss or rewrite what those of us on the front lines experienced. It wasn’t politics for us. It was real. We watched people die alone. We carried that home with us every night. And years later, many of us are still carrying it.

- Azadeh Ghafari

Read on Substack

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But it didn't get better once the vaccines came.

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hundreds of millions got the COVID vaccine and there were so few problems that the main form of criticism turned into "friend-of-a-friend" hearsay stories, so this guy can't actually cite an actual case but knows his base will think they know people who know people this may have happened to

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— Rodger Sherman (@rodger.bsky.social) July 29, 2026 at 8:56 AM

It's absolutely insane we've somehow let the Covid recriminations debate become like "why didn't we reopen in person schools before there was a vaccine" and not "why did none of the trump guys go to jail for stealing PPE from New York hospitals in March 2020"

— mtsw (@mtsw.bsky.social) August 2, 2026 at 3:35 PM

I worked for New York’s largest medical center at the start of the pandemic. There were morgue trucks on the streets. They set up emergency medical tents in Central Park. Healthcare worker colleagues died. It is horrific that RFK Jr is on national TV lying that ICUs were empty.

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— Dr. Lucky Tran (@luckytran.com) August 2, 2026 at 3:28 PM

This poll is from the end of June, 2026. This year!

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We are here as a country. Let’s get some perspective.

- Jay Kuo

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Wildfires Update

STAY SAFE BC! BCWS FIRE MAP Aug 6 2026 111:00 PM Good News: No new fires in the past 24 hours Currently: 103 active wildfires 48% uncontrolled, 21% held, 31% Under Control ORDERS: 32 ALERTS: 40 Fire Personnel: 1424 Active Firefighters Aviation: 124 Heavy Equipment: 81 Structure Protection: 427

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— Secular Moi (@secularmoi.bsky.social) August 7, 2026 at 12:00 AM

BC is getting help from around the country - and the rest of the world - as fires continue to rage across the province. 600 wildfire fighters are coming from Mexico, Australia and New Zealand. They will join personnel from Alberta, Quebec and the Yukon.

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— Tarnjit Parmar (@tarnjitparmar.bsky.social) August 6, 2026 at 3:27 PM

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The last month has demonstrated that British Columbia cannot rely on old burn scars to fight its fires or fuel treatments to fully prevent them #GlobalCarbonFeeAndDividendPetition thetyee.ca/News/2026/08...

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— Keith McNeill (@keith65.bsky.social) August 6, 2026 at 9:53 PM

A fascinating Associated Press article here about worldwide wildfire issues and trends:

...But even as wildfires in Europe and North America grow more extreme, key worldwide burning statistics are at a record low largely because Africa and Asia are controlling fire more.
Experts say these seemingly opposite trends are happening at the same time because of what humanity is doing to the planet.
“It does seem like a paradox because we’re talking increases in fires, yet the global numbers have been going down and down. But they’re both true,” said fire scientist Mike Flannigan of Thompson Rivers University in Canada...

A worthwhile read.

Finally, a couple of dog stories related to the wildfires.

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Hope Day As wildfires affect parts of Europe this week, here's a reminder of hope in action. After Chile's 2017 fires, three border collies helped scatter native seeds across burnt landscapes using specially designed backpacks. Hope protects what it loves #HopeDay #ClimateHope #GreenDoorAcademy

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— Green Door Academy (@greendooracademy.bsky.social) August 6, 2026 at 2:01 PM