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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Sunday, June 05, 2022

Today's News: Why does Europe care about Putin's delicate fee-fees?

So this is discouraging news: Security analyist Michael Horowitz says: And Ukraine is winning. But I'm afraid that some in the West don't believe it -- or, perhaps, they are just swallowing Russian propaganda. Or worse, they are promoting it:
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Saturday, June 04, 2022

Today's News: 100 days

It has now been 100 days since Russia invaded Ukraine. 
The yellow markings on this map from Australian Strategic Policy Institute researcher Nathan Ruser show how successful Ukraine has been in retaking its territory from the Russian invaders. Ruser notes that more than a thousand Ukrainian settlements have been saved from Russian occupation
And here is a fascinating video:
But some pundits in the West are getting bored -- they seem to want this war to end so they can get back to planning holidays at the lake. 
We're seeing articles now like this one in today's New York Magazine: The War in Ukraine Can Be Over If the U.S. Wants It -- written by a 32-year-old journalist Ross Barkan who has never done anything except write novels and cover New York politics. He describes a three month war as "dragging on" and says Kissinger and Chomsky are merely "facing reality" when they urge the West to give up on Ukraine. 
Here's the reaction to this article from war correspondent Danny Gold, who knows Ukraine: This Atlantic article, though it also talks about a truce, makes a little more sense: Former assistant defense secretary Andrew Exum writes:
 ...the economic costs of the war are starting to seriously concern American and other Western policy makers.
...The twin pressures of an ailing economy and surging populism will be on the minds of Western decision makers as they wrestle with a war that will continue to take a toll on the world’s leading economies. 
For that reason, the conversations between Ukraine and its supporters abroad are likely to grow harder, not easier, as the year progresses. 
Ukraine will come under more pressure, and not just from Henry Kissinger, to concede some territory and allow Russia to save face. Even a hasty termination of the conflict, however, seems unlikely to arrest the world’s slide into greater economic pain.... 
 
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Friday, June 03, 2022

Today's News: Ford takes it

Ontario voters sent a message tonight, and the message was: Meh! We're good. The big news in the US today continues to be whether they can get Republicans onside in the national goal of stopping mass shooters. 
Americans may finally have reached their gag limit on guns 
Maybe this time:
Or maybe not: We'll see how the Rays react to DeSantis' blatant thuggery. 

 
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Thursday, June 02, 2022

Today's News: Birds!

Another miscellaneous collection of news items tonight from hither and yon. 

First up, birds! 
One of the people I now follow on twitter is Saskatoon's Tim Brown, who is doing a series of "Birds of Saskatchetoon" which is a portmanteau of "Saskatoon" and "Saskatchewan".  He has a blog, too - artgeekbrown. 
I love his bird artwork and how he also tells the story of how he spotted each one on his journeys somewhere in or near Saskatoon.  Here are some examples for you to enjoy:
And speaking of birds, isn't this sweet?
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Wednesday, June 01, 2022

Today's News: From all over

But really, Canadian media are just playing another version of "If it's not Scottish, it's crap". 
The proposed Liberal legislation to prevent more handgun sales obviously isn't going to solve every gun problem in Canada and the rest of North America. Therefore, argue the cynics, it is worthless and just political. 
But the thing to remember is this: 
it took more than a century for North America to create this gun culture problem -- a century marked by wars around the world, plus significant improvements in gun designs and manufacturing capacity due to billions in government armament purchases, plus the deliberate fostering of the "gun rights" legal framework in the US. 
So there will never be a single piece of legislation or even a single legislative plan that will solve North American society's gun problems. But Trudeau's attempts to limit handguns is progress, just as limiting assault rifles is progress, and improving background checks, and improving society response to red flags, etc etc. 
Inch by inch, it can be changed. 
When I was 20, nobody wore a seatbelt to drive. By the time I was 30, everybody wore them all the time. 
When I was 40, everybody smoked indoors everywhere. By the time I was 55, the only place people could smoke was outside. 
So yes, society can change.
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Tuesday, May 31, 2022

Today's News: American Grotesque


Nuts! It was simply grotesque to see Trump mangling his reading of the Uvalde victims' names, as a cowbell rang and they kept messing up the timing. Then there was the dancing. Scorch! Pow!
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Monday, May 30, 2022

Funny stuff, with dogs too

 
What a week!  
Here's some funny stuff to start the next one. With dogs too, of course:
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