Monday, June 20, 2022

Today's News: About authoritarianism

Over the last several days, I have seen a number of tweets and comments about authoritarianism as people try to understand what happened with everything from Jan 6 Insurrection to the FluTruxKlan, and what's coming up. 
Here's a roundup - 

First, Lindsay Graham has said some remarkably stupid stuff over the years, but this one takes the cake: Moving on to our very own Canadian authoritarian wanna-be, I think Poilievre's war room has finally figured out what his message should be -- keep saying "freedom" over and over, whether it makes any sense or not:
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Sunday, June 19, 2022

Today's News: Pride parade again

Today was Saskatoon Pride parade day - thousands lined our streets, in spite of the heat, for our first parade since 2019:
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Saturday, June 18, 2022

Today's News: A tangled ball of string

The LA Times has a major article describing the gang of third-raters, rubes, grifters and gullibles who were trying to overturn Biden's election. 
First, it's all just one big tangled ball of string -- the same bunch of fellow travellers keep turning up through all sorts of Trump Administration scandals. For example: 
...Some of the key players in the group were already working together in New York City before the election to crack the laptop of Hunter Biden, son of the Democratic nominee, said former Overstock.com Chief Executive Patrick Byrne, who was a major funder of the effort ...[and] was in an intimate relationship with Russian agent Maria Butina, who was convicted in the U.S. in connection with Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. 
Yes, there's Russia again -- if you look into anything connected to the Trump administration, Russia always seems to show up, like a cat sneaking in through any opened door.
Second, they actually did have a strategy to try to overturn Biden's election -- to prove the voting machines of key counties were corrupt, and to convince state lawmakers the election results were so tainted that they needed to reject state results: 
...they planned weeks of lawsuits, attempts to access voting machines and ways to persuade lawmakers to reject key state election results, driven by a frantic mission whose goal was to keep then-President Trump in office after an election he lost. .
..Some said they believed Trump’s months of claims that he could only lose if the election was stolen, others cared less about politics and were already convinced that fraud tainted all American elections.
Ultimately, they produced a report that supposedly wrapped it all up, with the goal of convincing Republicans in Congress on Jan 6 to either return the election results to the states, or to themselves accept alternate slates of Trump electors.  
The final Hail Mary was to get the presumably Trump-supporting Supreme Court to end the Jan 6 certification - a plan that did not succeed when Nancy Pelosi carried on immediately after the riot, and the Republican senators were unable to delay the vote. 
Also, and I believe this was key, Antifa DIDN'T SHOW UP so there were no bloody clashes in the streets which would have justified Trump declaring martial law and shutting down the certification. The goal on that day was to delay the certification and throw everything into chaos:

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Friday, June 17, 2022

Today's News: Remember remember....

It doesn't quite scan like "Remember remember the 5th of November", but remembering Jan 6 2021 is now a cottage industry in the United States and the Jan 6 Committee hearings are getting more fascinating with every passing day. 
Today we found out how Trump kept himself surrounded by third-raters who would promote his fantasy that the election had been stolen. And who still promote it. 
But Vice President Mike Pence knew in December that Biden had won the election and he also knew that the Vice President did not have the authority to reject or change the American election results after states reported them. (Why he didn't announce this in December is a question asked by MSNBC tonight too.) 
We also found out that during the Jan 6 insurrection, Pence and his family and staff were within 40 feet of the protestors who wanted to "hang Mike Pence". Luttig was the conservative judge that W thought about nominating to the Supreme Court but then he picked Alito instead. What a loss that was to America! So then Tom Nichols decided to start a meme: And there are now hundreds of tweets in the series.
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Thursday, June 16, 2022

Today's News: Some comments on the passing scene

Just a bunch of observations today on the passing scene.

First up, interest rates. And I do mean up.
Now, perhaps there is a problem with the conventional wisdom that raising interest rates will stop "inflation". The problem is - maybe it won't.
As Atrios (economist Duncan Black) describes it: 
A problem at the moment is the conflation of "increases in the Consumer Price Index" with "inflation" and they aren't precisely the same thing. At least, the theoretical concept of "inflation" which economists think about when they are lost in their models is not identical to this, especially over the not-very-long-term.
Supply chains bottlenecks, energy price spikes, and various monopoly power pricing are not "inflation" as imagined by economists. If it isn't essentially "too much money sloshing around" then "less money sloshing around" is not the solution. 
Inflation as currently experienced by consumers is not the "inflation" that is solved by jacking up interest rates and driving people out of work, and in fact this solution is likely to exacerbate the problem in addition to creating additional economic misery. 
 Good job, everyone, as usual. Now you can move on to the next disastrous idea while blaming (spins wheel) trans people. 
Second, conspiracy theories. 
I saw some tweets yesterday from Abacus so I looked up the data. It isn't pretty. 
They recently published three articles about "Trust & Facts: What Canadians Believe"
- almost half of those interviewed think "much of the information we receive from news organizations is false.”  And they also don't believe what the government tells them either.
- a significant percentage believe in political, economic or racist conspiracy theories. 
- and a smaller percentage believe in Covid conspiracy theories. 
Here are some charts: 





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Wednesday, June 15, 2022

Today's News: "You can't handle the truth!"

Here's one thing I noticed today -- because Trudeau has Covid and has to appear on video in the Commons, he doesn't get interrupted by hecklers as much, and he can actually make his points without interruption. So, silver lining...
Here is Dale Smith's summary of today's Question Period back-and-forth. Canadians know the truth of the convoy insurrection, we know who had our backs and who did not, and we still support the Emergencies act: 
While in isolation for his COVID diagnosis, the prime minister pledged to appear virtually, and all of the other leaders were present for a change. Candice Bergen led off, script in front of her, and she went on a paean about telling the truth—which is rich coming from her—and demanded that the prime minister have Marco Mendicino step away from his job. Justin Trudeau, by video, read a list of people who stated at the time of the occupation that their powers had been exhausted, which is why they invoked the Emergencies Act. Bergen outright demanded Mendicino’s resignation, and Trudeau reminded her police should not be able to grant themselves emergency powers, which is why government invoked the Act to give them powers that he listed. Bergen again demanded Mendicino resign, and Trudeau said that this was about the Conservatives trying to hope people forgot their support for the occupation. 
Here's some clips:
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Tuesday, June 14, 2022

Funny stuff

Just a random collection of funny stuff tonight 

So who knew there could be TWO ranked bulldogs in North American Diving Dogs? But here is one of them, Chewy! When you open the tweet, make sure you also click on the Alt text to read it too. 

 And speaking of "diving"... Twitter is weird sometimes! Here is some excellent news!
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Monday, June 13, 2022

Today's News: Update on the Russia Ukraine War

I haven't seen as much about the Russia Ukraine War lately. So tonight I wanted to highlight 
some recent tweets and articles to summarize the situation:
One interesting tweet I saw today was this estimation of just how large this war is Based on the numbers in this tweet, the Russia Ukraine War "active hostilities" line is the equivalent of the distance from Winnipeg to Calgary.  Its "frontline" in total would stretch from Winnipeg to Vancouver. 
That is a huge distance for military forces to try to cover, even if each army has more than a hundred thousand troops. 
Here is a lengthy thread from Mike Martin which summarizes the important conflicts in the war now:
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Sunday, June 12, 2022

Today's News: Remembering what happened

Revisionism about the convoy insurrection:
Remember Canada 5 months ago? The Convoy Insurrection destroying Ottawa's downtown, border blockades messing up trade, protestors fanning out across the country to block nurses and doctors from going into hospitals, thousands of counter-protestors risking street fights, a spreading contagion of trucker blockades all over.  It was madness and it needed to stop. 
The Emergencies Act was what did it. 
So now here we are 5 months later. And we are seeing bad-faith attempts to gaslight Canadians, to establish a revisionist history that minimizes the emergency we were facing, that pretends everybody was acting all calm and reasonable and willing to compromise, that denies the seriousness and the danger Canada was in.  The last refuge of a scoundrel is when the media starts talking about optics -- because they cannot identify any actual malfeasance or misconduct, because Trudeau and Mendicino didn't actually do anything wrong. 
So before I get into today's tweets, I just wanted to post a few photos from last February -- remember these? 
I must admit that until I hunted these photos down, I myself had forgotten about some of the more bizarre happenings around the convoy insurrection - case in point, the protests at hospitals - how stupid was that?








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Saturday, June 11, 2022

Two solitudes


Justin Ling's column today made this observation about the Jan 6 hearings "We're trapped in a 
What’s novel and disconcerting is the degree to which an emerging far-right ecosystem tooled itself into a totally insulated rapid response organ. A real-time streaming funhouse hall of mirrors....
What is big appears small. What is small appears big. Everything is warped and reflected into infinity. But perhaps the single most significant change we’ve seen over the past year is the total decoupling from quasi-mainstream networks and platforms into something wholly separate.
A key component of Donald Trump’s 2016 election effort was speaking to the masses on Facebook. The core way he diffused his message as president was on Twitter. Fox News, even if it was sycophantic to the administration to the extreme, at least existed as part of the mainstream news ecosystem.
Last night’s committee hearings showcased the degree to which this new alternative system is fully operational. Revolver News and The Gateway Pundit are now fully normalized as respected news sources (they are not.) Politicians like Gatez and Taylor-Greene can count on huge numbers as they begin livestreaming, doing instant commentary on the hearings. Telegram channels give you the requisite clips from the right sources, so you don’t even need to run the risk of turning on the TV and experiencing an uncomfortable opinion. The sheer number of platforms — to continue my list from above: Odysee, Parler, Bitchute, Frank Speech, and more — gives the illusion of choice, diversity, and multiple perspectives. In reality, they’re all rowing the same direction.
This is full-service disinformation.
This isn’t thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands — we are talking about millions, maybe tens of millions, of people entering this hall of mirrors and refusing to leave.
This is, in a word, very bad.
This reminded me of the 1945 Hugh MacLennan novel Two Solitudes - this title phrase describes the social and cultural isolation, a chasm of communication, between French Canada and English Canada 
in the first half of the 20th Century.  And his articulation of this distance helped to wake up Canadians to understand how distorted our nation had become, and how necessary it was that people of good will from both sides take steps to change things. 
Thus in the 1960s and 1970s in Canada we experienced the Quiet Revolution in Quebec, the English Canadian commitment to bilingualism and biculturalism, a significant increase in French Canadian participation in the federal politics, repatriation of the constitution, the charter of rights, and so forth.  Though our nation also endured the FLQ and the October Crisis, in the end, it worked - Canada did 
not shatter, though it came close.
I think the same problem is happening now between left/progressive people and right/conservative people - to a significant degree now in the United States and also now to some extent in Canada, we again have a society with Two Solitudes. 
A significant proportion of the 70 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump in 2020 evidently 
no longer seem to feel any sense of patriotism or purpose or common cause or even common humanity with the 80 million Americans who voted for Joe Biden.   
I don't know where this will end, or how. But it could be, in a word, very bad.
Here is the beginning of CBS News correspondent Scott MacFarlane's tweets describing what has happened to some of the insurrectionists seen in the video last night. Many of them have been jailed 
for a year in pre-trial detention. Its worth reading the whole thing. And here's another one worth reading:
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Friday, June 10, 2022

Today's News: Carnage. Chaos. Criminal.

Wow, did you see this tonight? It was an inexcuseably long time coming - 17 months! -  but Trump is finally being called out directly and in detail, for fomenting insurrection on Jan 6 2021. Some key moments in tonight's hearing: I've said it before and I'll say it again: Antifa performed an outstanding service to America that day by NOT showing up. 
Instead of violence in the streets, which would have justified a declaration of martial law and shutting down the certification, America saw the attempt to overthrow their government, and their shock gave Congress and Pence the fortitude to finish certifying Biden's victory. 
And that brings me to these funny side notes:
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Thursday, June 09, 2022

Animal crackers

Busy day today so just some funny animal tweets to enjoy: The giant one at the end is particularly startling!
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Wednesday, June 08, 2022

Today's News: News from all over

First, in Canada, the Mass Casualty Commission into the 2020 Portapique massacre is continuing with RCMP testifying today. 
Here's the worst of it: as shown in Tim Bousquet's hearing coverage this morning, RCMP seemed overly focused on crafting Perfect Tweets to warn Nova Scotians about Wortman's murderous rampage -- they were afraid that trigger-happy Nova Scotia yahoos might shoot at real RCMP vehicles, and that chatty cathys might pester 911 with trivialities. So RCMP PR staff were hyper-concerned about getting every detail precisely right regarding the replica RCMP car before sending out the news. Also, chain of command delays. Also, nobody understood how to use the Alert system. Also, nobody thought to issue a Shelter In Place warnings by local radio or TV ... When this is over, I don't think there will still be any mystery about why the federal and provincial governments seemed reluctant to hold this inquiry.

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Tuesday, June 07, 2022

Today's News: Lest We Forget

Follow this tweet thread for some sad photos of the brave Canadian boys who lost their lives fighting in D-Day 78 years ago. They were all so young:
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Monday, June 06, 2022

Today's News: Just a few odds and ends

Just a random collection of news tonight. 

First, from Uvalde: 
The more the media tries to dig into what happened in Uvalde, the less it makes sense. 
It is beginning to remind me of the confusion around the Portapique massacre, where 22 people died and where, among other questionable judgement calls, RCMP did not even issue an Alert Ready to warn the community during the hours these shootings were happening.  At least Canada responded by banning 1,500 assault-type weapons, and a Commission is now trying to investigate what happened, though it has been difficult. 
The inexplicable cowardice of Uvalde police cannot be explained: In other news, American politics:
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