Math

Much has been written about the government of Ontario’s plan to decolonize Grade 9 math in the name of social justice. It is a stupid idea for any number of reasons. Apparently, math as currently taught is too objective which means that it excludes other ways of knowing. And so on.

In the great sorting hat of modern society, math, because it is objective and only partially language based has always been a route forward for immigrants of all hues for generations. You might not speak English very well, but quadratic equations, trigonometry and algebra don’t care. With some hard work, even if your English assignments were terrible, the Vietnamese kid or the Sri Lankan or Filipino student could get an “A” in math and often do well at physics as well.

Being a math nerd is the least discriminatory niche in a high school ecology.

I was never much good at math. In Ontario I would have been decolonized twice because I took Grade 9 math twice – once during regular term and once in the summer following Grade 9 because my parents recognized that my barely passing the first time was going to be a problem going forward. I stumbled along for two more years. In those years I managed to acquire just enough math to be able to understand and enjoy Physics 11 and Physics 12 (both taught by the single best teacher I ever had, R.A. Nordman.) (Later I learned a lot of statistics as an adjunct to a thesis I was trying to write. The thesis came to a sad end when my advisor said, “Oh, that should not be a problem, all you need are a couple of simultaneous differential equations.” I was cooked.)

The kids who were “good at math” generally went the STEM route in university, we math under achievers went off to the Arts or, sadly, the Faculty of Education where we were rarely troubled by math again.

“The education minister’s spokesperson Caitlin Clark told The Toronto Sun that the new curriculum reflects a changing world.

“We are taking action to ensure all children, especially those facing barriers to success, have meaningful pathways to quality learning, graduation, access to post-secondary education and good-paying jobs,” she said.”

This is reminiscent of the Indiana State Legislature attempting to fix the value of π at 3.2. There may be all sorts of good jobs which do not need a strong grasp of math but there are no jobs where a decolonized version of the subject will give you an edge.

But I may be looking at this through the wrong lens. A more imaginative lens would note that a) there were only so many “good-paying” (yes, the construction does grate but it’s a quote) jobs, b) certain, preferred, racialized groups were not getting an equitable number of those jobs because c) those jobs had the racialist requirement of a grasp of Grade 9 math which, d) was so racist that the preferred racialized groups were doomed by the system to fail. Take down the systemically racist hurdle of the current Grade 9 math curriculum and replace it with “anti-racist, anti-discriminatory learning environments” and “infuse Indigenous knowledges and perspectives meaningfully and authentically into the mathematics program.” Problem solved!

Or something like that.

In fact, all that this sort of nonsense ensures is that smart (and better off) parents – white, black, Asian – send their kids to private school or homeschool them or pay for after school tutoring. When the pure public school victims of this posturing arrive as undergraduates – courtesy of whatever diversity initiative is available – they will have no chance at a STEM education. There is no “Indigenous knowleges” based calculus or computer code or algorithmic logic. In short, the Ontario public education system is rendering its students, apparently all its students, unfit for the modern world.

And, of course, like most such programs the real beneficiaries are those, often already privileged, kids whose parents are able to pay for the Kumon classes or, well, in my case, summer school. The public school victims might get a job as a diversity hire, but someone has to actually write the code, calculate the stresses, figure out the odds and mine the data – and that someone will have a pretty solid grasp of Grade 9 math.

One Size fits All

Lauchie Reid: Hyacinths and Thistles. All images courtesy of the artist.

I got into a Twitter fight last night with a person – I think female but can’t tell for sure – who tweeted that she did not want to be in crowded indoor spaces with the unvaccinated and that they should stay outside like smokers.

I suspect we will hear a lot of this sort of thing over the next few months as COVID wanes and the vaccinated become a majority because it is not enough to be “protected”, the vaccinated seem to need to be isolated from the unvaccinated. Thus the call for vaccine passports and vaccinated only events.

The logic of this seems to rest on the idea that the “vaccine” is not 100% effective in preventing infection or transmission of COVID. What it does confer, apparently, is a reduction in the severity of the symptoms of COVID in the event that the vaccinated person is unlucky enough to catch the virus. You can see the problem, essentially a vaccinated person may be at the same risk for infection as an unvaccinated person and at the same risk of transmitting the bug as an unvaccinated person.

Now, frankly, I don’t think we have enough data one way or another on the vaccine’s efficacy in preventing infection or transmission – the early data seem pretty encouraging on the vaccine’s reducing the severity of the COVID symptoms and the mortality numbers are falling encouragingly. But separating the vaccinated from the unvaccinated is not at all obvious based on what we know so far.

My Twitter gal did not like that position at all and was eventually reduced to calling me “selfish” for not a) getting jabbed, b) for suggesting that there was no logic in separating people who could be infected and who could transmit the virus but who had the prospect of a better outcome if they did from people who could be infected and who could transmit the virus and only had a 99.9% chance of full recovery.

The COVID conversation usually comes down to people’s perception of the risk COVID presents. The vast majority of people who contract COVID feel badly for a few days and are done. Death from COVID is largely confined to people over 80 with one or more co-morbidities. At a clinical level doctors are becoming much, much better at treating the symptoms of COVID. This is not contested information. The daily statistics show much better outcomes for hospitalized patients. Even the “variants of concern” do not seem to have increased the lethality of COVID.

So a risk calculus with respect to the vaccine needs to begin with assessing an individual’s likelihood of a fatal outcome if he or she were to contract COVID. A 99.9 percent survival rate if you are under 80 and are not significantly compromised is a reassuring place to start. Does it make sense to take a new and untested vaccine to improve those odds? (And before we get into the weeds on testing, the vaccines all are being used based on an Emergency Use Approval which is not at all the same as the full testing which drugs typically undergo. That testing is ongoing and will be completed in late 2022 or early 2023.)

As I have consistently written about COVID, you have to manage your own situation which means being aware of and assessing what your life holds by way of risk. First off, do you live in an area with high rates of infection? Do you interact with strangers on a regular and continuous basis? What is your general health status? Do you get outdoor exercise? Individuals can assess these factors for themselves.

Against your personal risk profile when you are looking at “the jab” you would normally take the advice of the medical community which, in turn, would rely on the peer reviewed results of the drug testing the jab is undergoing. But those results are not yet available. Even the mid-term effects of mRNA based vaccines are more a matter of conjecture than evidence.

So the calculation is not so straightforward. As I happily say when asked, “Not yet, I’m in the control group.”

Which brings us back to “selfish”. I assess my personal risk of contracting – much less dying from – COVID as very close to zero which has meant I have been in no hurry to get jabbed. But my Twitter pal seems to think that is selfish. Somehow, my not being jabbed is going to…what? Make her jab less effective? Nope. Destroy herd immunity? No, at worse it may reduce herd immunity infinitesimally but there is very little evidence either way. Prevent her from feeling confident in enclosed crowded spaces? Maybe, but not at all my problem. Prevent the great re-opening? Possibly. The re-opening is a political decision and various politicians have come up with various metrics – case numbers, outbreaks, hospitalizations, first jab percentages, full jab percentages – to give the appearance of science to a purely political decision. Again, not my problem and not part of any rational, personal, risk calculation.

I suspect that the woman on Twitter was, in fact, driven by the very basic human tendency to want others to do what you are doing. When people are terrified, and COVID and the mass media have scared the Hell out of people, they want the security of the group. When the politicians, media and public health officers all say, “Everybody needs to get the jab,” it is much easier to go along with the crowd. Part of going along with the crowd is trying to herd dissenters into the ranks of the righteous. If they won’t be herded then, well, they’ll have to be ostracized.

The good news is that, as COVID fades, so will the zealous. As the threat recedes the urgency of the group think will diminish. As normal returns, attempts to separate the vaccinated sheep from the unvaccinated goats will lose their moral force.

My Twitter friend will have to find something else to be indignant about.

Victoria Day

The Young Queen

Victoria Day began as a celebration of Queen Victoria’s birthday and an even louder celebration of the British Empire and Canada’s place within it. Bands, patriotic addresses, dances and teas were held in gratitude for Canada’s essential Britishness. The long Victorian era of Peace, Order and Good Government, the old flag and the old Queen underpinned the astonishing rigor with which Canada was first settled and then made into an economic powerhouse.

Underlying all that was a sense that the government, at a federal and provincial level had the peace and prosperity of Canadians as its singular priority. While there were better and worse politicians, the apparatus of state, of the Courts, of the military, of the schools and universities was dominated by men who aspired to public service for mainly honourable reasons. If a man sufficiently distinguished himself in the public’s service and kept his personal life free of scandal, he might, in time, expect a knighthood or at least a CBE.

The thing that was striking about this WASP ascendency was just how capable it was. Railways were built, banks founded, canals dug, mines and mills tore wealth from the hundreds of thousands of acres of wilderness. Ranches and wheat farms, vast fisheries, and, eventually, steel mills and implement manufacturers and a host of other factories were concieved of and executed by these men.

For the modern sensibility the fact they were all men, all white, almost all – to one degree or another – Protestant is more than a little problematic. They were undoubtably racist, certainly sexist and not at all interested in being “inclusive”. But that took nothing away from their general competence and overall trustworthiness. They would debate particular policies from tarriffs to banking regulation to immigration to relations with “the Mother Country” and the rather doubtful Americans; but they framed their debates in terms of what was best for Canada. They certainly did not always “get it right” but it was not for want of trying or good will.

A great deal has changed in Canada since our Victorian gentlemen first celebrated their Queen’s birthday. Massive, non-British immigration, the political awakening of French Canada, two world wars, the end of the British Empire, votes for women, communications, transportation and medical revolutions: really, the invention of the modern world.

The idea that Canada is for every Canadian and should not be run by an male Anglo elite began its march through the institutions during Pierre Trudeau’s tenure. The visible symbols of the monarchy, the flag, the coat of arms on the mailboxes, God Save the Queen as a second national anthemn, Dominion Day all were replaced or simply forgotten.

A brighter, less traditional, Canada with a logo for a flag, community mailboxes, a national anthemn with constantly changing words and “Canada Day” replaced the dated echos of an Empire which no longer ruled the waves. More fundamentally, Trudeau with his brilliant Chief Clerk of the Privy Council, Michael Pitfield, set about to replace the old ways of governing Canada.

The clubish conception of government by a vetted, trusted, mandrainate of gentlemen who had been similarly educated, had often served in the military and who were, by the standards of their peers, “sound” was replaced with a meritocratic, competitive, civil service designed to explicitly include French Canadians and women from the outset. The old system of regionally based political leadership was replaced with a Prime Minister’s Office which bypassed those regional potentates and dealt directly with the Premiers and, more importantly, with now increasingly professionalized provincial public services.

This transformation of Canadian governance was cemented with the Elections Act which formallized the power of a recognized party leader to authorize (or not) candidates running for that party and, of course, by the adoption of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Elections Act changes eliminated competing centers of political power within political parties at the federal level. The Charter gave a structure to arguments about personal versus governmental rights and powers.

From the Trudeau/Pitfield perspective the great stumbling blocks to modernizing Canada were the old fashioned, decentralized, mechanisms of the 19th century. The whole idea of a federal cabinet minister being power in his own right or a provincial premier defying Ottawa was contrary to the centralizing tendancies of the modern managerial/bureaucratic state. The Elections Act centralized political power in the hands of the party leader, the Charter was more subtle. Here power was, apparently, given to individual Canadian citizens but that power could be used to assert rights against both the federal and provincial levels of government.

This past 18 months we have had the opportunity to see how well the new system works under stress. Frankly, I am deeply unimpressed.

One thing you could count on with the pre-Trudeau establishment was a level of individual competence. Influential Cabinet Ministers and senior civil servants were not the products of political accident or random encounters at college. You did not get close to power without a resume of accomplishment. This is, rather obviously, no longer the case.

More importantly, the old guard regarded character as important as educational accomplishment or experience. People who lied, pretended to know more than they did, or were otherwise less than honest – the word “sharp” was not one you wanted said about you – made very little progress politically or within the public service. It was informal but it was effective. (It was also, by intention, exclusionary.)

The performance of the Prime Minister and the Cabinet Ministers directly responsible for Canada’s COVID reponse at the federal level has been pathetic. At no point has the PM effectively taken charge. At no point has the public health advice been anything but lame and confused. We may have achieved diversity and inclusion in our federal Cabinet but it has come at the cost of competence.

The provinces have been little better. The patchwork quilt of lockdowns, school closings, travel restrictions, mask mandates, strangely prioritized vaccination regimes and the abandonment of the elderly in long term care facilities all suggest that the provincial public health officials and the politicians they advise have no clue what to do.

The use of Emergency Orders to impose restrictions which are constitutionally impugnable is the exercise of power without any real responsibility. (The fact that when these restrictions are constitutionally challenged the cases are, for the most part, quietly dropped by the Crown says a great deal. The fact that at no point has any level of government presented evidence going to the question of “demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society” is even more telling.)

The crusty old Victorians and their successors, swept away by Trudeau pere‘s re-invention of Canada, would, I suspect, have done at least as well as our woke technocrats. Likely better as they would have looked past “the models” and noticed that the elderly were dying in droves. Addressing that problem early and effectively could have kept the COVID death numbers down. So would closing the borders.

I can’t imagine that a Mackenzie King or a C.D. Howe would have pinned all hope on an undiscovered vaccine without also assigning “top men” to investigating treatment protocols. Nor would there have been any shilly shallying about lockdowns: either there would have been a strict lockdown or none at all.

May 24th has become the weekend to open up the cottage, perhaps display a Canadian flag and have several Canadian beers. It is no longer a celebration of Queen Victoria or Canada’s British heritage. It would be lovely to think we are abandoning the old traditions because the modern world is a great deal better. But it isn’t.

Trends, Narratives and Imagination

Conventional conspiracy theory – a term invented back in the 1960’s to discredit people who did not take the Warren Commission findings in the Kennedy assassination as gospel – usually posits a shadowy cabal of connected people driving towards a nefarious goal. The red yarn comes out and everything becomes connected. Implicit in any conspiracy theory worth its salt is a directing intelligence, either a mastermind or an occult group.

I’ve always been a conspiracy skeptic simply because I don’t believe that more than three or four people can keep a secret. Plus, there are usually non-conspiracy explanations for the phenomena a conspiracy theory seeks to explain.

People are more than happy to place the “Great Reset” as the pivot point around which everything from COVID-19 lockdowns, to the grand debasement of the West’s currency to the assorted questions surrounding election integrity. It is just vague enough to serve as the fulcrum for pretty much any occult explanation of daily events. And I think it is nonsense.

In place of a grand design, I see tens of thousands of minor decisions which all trend in the same direction without any need for central co-ordination. The central narrative of the COVID-19 phenomena, from the initial panic at the prospect of hospitals being overwhelmed, to the assorted public health measures – social distancing, masks, school closures, travel restrictions, general “stay at home orders”, lockdowns and curfews – to the drive towards universal vaccination, have all been largely good faith attempts to deal with a nasty virus. At each stage, all over the West, politicians deferred to public health officials who, in turn, looked to “science” for clues as to how to flatten the curve.

As we went along the public health narrative gradually became the only acceptable narrative. People who suggested that lockdowns might be doing more harm than good or that COVID was not spread from surfaces or that treatments should be looked at along with vaccines were marginalized. Now, no one person or entity was responsible for this; rather, a group consensus in favour of the public health narrative became overwhelmingly dominant.

Politicians and the media were heavily invested in this public health narrative. The narrative was enforced by everyone from Facebook and Twitter taking down messages suggesting alternatives, to Youtube flat out removing any content which suggested things like “treatment” with Vitamin D or ivermectin. The mechanism for narrative enforcement was very simple – if you said or wrote anything which was not in line with the CDC and or WHO you were promulgating “misinformation” and big tech had an obligation to avoid giving a platform for “misinformation”. (Never mind that the CDC and WHO have been wildly inconsistent in their recommendations.)

Once the “public health, no effective treatment, only vaccine will save us” narrative was in place there was a noble cause case for good information “hygiene”. People who raised questions could conveniently be dismissed as “anti-vaxers” or “covidiots” and their views and medical experience debunked by citing the lack of double blind, peer reviewed, studies. Again, no one had to direct the media or big tech or the political class to stick with the narrative. The arc of the COVID story was set as soon as the WHO declared COVID a pandemic which would only end when vaccination had created herd immunity.

The key piece to all of this is “science”. Assorted boffins modelling exponential growth (a bad thing) which could only be countered with a certain set of policy responses drove the conversation. If you think lockdowns are a bad idea or are unwilling to wear a mask outdoors or fail to use the hand sanitizer you are against “science” and thus indifferent to the horror of exponential growth.

The fact that the “science”, particularly the models, has been wrong as often as it has been right is relegated to the margins. The fact that there are scientists who dissent from “the science” is largely unreported. The fact that there are doctors who are having success with treatment regimes remains obscure.

The good thing about “science” is that it is never “settled”. Quite recently the CDC quietly admitted that it was extremely unlikely for COVID to be transmitted by surface contact. A small thing perhaps but the beginning of the end for the hygiene theatre we have been going through for a year. Other chinks in the “science” are emerging. It really does appear that COVID numbers follow the seasonal cycles other upper respiratory viruses do. The arrival of Spring along with increasingly widespread vaccination seems to be reducing cases and the severity of those cases.

Unfortunately, the public health narrative got in the way of a number of things which could have reduced mortality. The actual testing of ivermectin as a treatment and Vitamin D as a prophylactic have been, at best, haphazard. (Not to mention a suite of steroids and anti-biotics which have shown some promise.) Training staff to deal with ICU surges apparently was lost in the shuffle. Paying close attention, at a very granular level, to where and how infections occur may have happened but it has not been part of the public conversation.

As a matter of human nature, it is a lot easier to take on one, cohesive, narrative than it is to deal with two or even three concurrent stories. However, that is why we have political leaders. People who are supposed to look at the whole board rather than a small section of it. In the face of COVID, with few exceptions, our political leaders failed to look at anything other than implementing the public health/mask mandate/lockdown/vaccinate narrative. It was a costly failure of imagination.

Vancouver Notes

The Old Station – back in April, it was, perhaps, twice as busy yesterday.

I popped across the Strait a couple of days ago to see my older son and do a bit of business. I had not been in Vancouver since January.

It was a beautiful day, a tiny bit of fog but it burnt off.

It is difficult to grasp, living on largely COVID free Vancouver Island, just how devastating COVID has been in other locations. Where I live we have lost some businesses but there are lots which continue. About half the people mask if they are in a store. The streets are busy.

I spent a lot of my younger life in a stretch of Vancouver known as South Granville. And that is where my son lives now. The key thing about this area is that it has dozens of low rise and some mid-rise apartment buildings. They range from a bit sad through very elegant, pre-WWII, multi bedrooms. The key thing about South Granville apartments is that they never, ever, come vacant. People know people, lists were kept by building owners and managers. Walking towards the bus on West 12th every single building had a “Vacancy” sign out.

I walked down Granville Street for a couple of blocks. This is a high end shopping area. 85% of the people on the street were wearing masks. There was about half the normal foot traffic. And, most significantly, at least a quarter of the storefronts were “For lease”. There were still plenty of stores open and the majority of them had a mask requirement for entry.

The Granville bus was empty enough that “social distancing” was not a problem. I was heading downtown and looking at the empty storefronts and the “liquidation” sales. But the shock was downtown Vancouver itself. The “Granville” entertainment (read many bars and clubs) has simply ceased to exist. There are few bars hanging on, but where there were 30 or so venues it looked to me as if there are now maybe 5. Vancouver has always had a homeless population and, sadly, a population of street addicts. When I was a kid there would always be a few of these people at the south end of Granville street. They largely disappeared after about 2000 as the area gentrified. Now they are back.

Going all the way downtown three things hit me. First, the absence of people. Noon, on a sunny, warm, October day normally would see hundreds of people on the streets, grabbing lunch, doing a bit of shopping: yesterday there were, at best, dozens. Second, the number of storefronts for lease and businesses which are no longer there. At a guess, a third of the businesses which lined Granville and Pender and Howe are gone. The third thing which struck me was the absence of “international students”. There are, or were, dozens of English language schools downtown – actually a little east of where I was – and part of the fun of downtown was seeing gaggles of students. They stood out against the ranks of the office workers. While there were only a few office workers, there were no foreign students at all.

At noon I turned up at a restaurant at the corner of Howe and Hastings. I waited outside for my lunch partner. I could see the restaurant owner hovering at his door. This is a restaurant where, normally, you pretty much have to line up for a lunch table. It was empty and stayed empty through our lunch.

After lunch I headed off to the old station. I always have a cigarette on the plaza just before the entrance to the station. It has a grand view of the mountains but also of the bright reddy orange cranes of the Port of Vancouver. On a sunny day the plaza will usually have a couple of hundred people having lunch or just sitting in the sun. It is a favourite spot for tourists to take pictures. Yesterday there were less than fifty (likely less than thirty, I didn’t count) people all well distanced. There were no tourists.

I walked down to the trains. Again, usually, there is a steady stream of people coming and going even at 1:00. I passed exactly one person coming up from the trains and the great hall of the station was, effectively, empty. As were the train, the bus and the return ferry.

Overall, while it was great to see my son and one of my favourite CEOs, it was the most depressing trip I have ever taken. I could not have imagined Vancouver on a sunny, warm, October day being dingy, but it was. Storefronts are the multi faceted eyes of a city. When they are dark, the city is dark at noon. People, in their thousands, are the life blood of a city. Without people a city, even a beautiful city like Vancouver becomes pale and anemic.

British Columbia has done well through COVID. We’ve done it without lockdowns or mandatory masking but not without huge costs. Most of those empty storefronts were occupied by businesses which are not coming back. The absent foreign students and tourists will only return slowly, if at all. The empty offices may very well stay empty either because the jobs they contained will vanish or because staying at home during a pandemic makes a lot of sense and COVID seems far from over.

In one way, Vancouver is better off than most cities because “downtown” is mixed use. Lots of people live in the condos which surround the business district. That will keep some of the businesses alive. But that is the only encouraging thought I had. No office workers, no foreign students, no cruise ship passengers, no tourists: it is difficult to see how Vancouver will ever recapture the vibrancy, the sheer vigor, it had when I was spending time there last fall.

Wonderful, complex things like cities and downtowns are also fragile. You cannot shut a city down without there being short and long term damage. Nor, I suspect, is there any good way to “restart” a city. You can rebuild a city after an earthquake or hurricane, but restarting is a very different challenge. Especially if the “shut down” was largely voluntary, as it was in Vancouver.

Whether COVID simply dies out or a vaccine is produced or therapeutics are invented which allow the thing to be controlled is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the healing of the city. What has been lost along with the businesses and the tourists, is a sense of trust and optimism. Those will take much more than an end to the pandemic to restore.

Dog Days of Summer

My friends back East are gently broiling in temperatures not seen since my 94 year old mother was a girl. No AC then, but no idiots or Liberals telling you that the heat was caused by CO2. Judging from the ever reliable Twitter just about no one is actually buying that nonsense.

Twitter is covering itself in glory on other fronts. Having banned Megan Murphy for daring to report on the chap who wants his testicles waxed and is taking any number of waxing providers to BC’s Human Rights Commission in a transparent shakedown, Twitter has now banned Lindsay Shepherd for discussing Yaniv’s junk. [I note for the record that Yaniv, in full drag, has one of the most punchable fat faces I have ever seen. And, as I am quite certain he is not in the least bit genuine, I am certainly not going to use his appropriated pronouns.] Sheperd’s banning and the lifting of a publication ban on Mr. Yaniv has led all sorts of significant platforms to investigate Mr. Yaniv and to discover that he might not be a super great guy. Apparently, he has a rather greater than normal interest in how very young girls handle menstruation. Nice work Twitter.

Then, in the last few days, Twitter has been playing silly buggers with the hashtag, “TrudeauMustGo”. It was trending, then it wasn’t, then some dimwitted Liberals and CTV decided that it was being promoted by “bots”, then it came back to trending and now, last time I looked, it’s gone.

And, just because it can, Twitter floated the idea that it might be a good idea, in Canada, to allow people to remove replies to their tweets. The replies would not be deleted. They would simply not be visible on the same page as the tweet itself. Twitter got ratioed hard on this looney idea. My own sense is that this came up because poor Cathy McKenna is butt hurt that her prodigious climate change bad, carbon tax good Twitter output attracts nothing but negative, fact-based, replies. As Climate Barbie has announced she has no time for political adversaries who deny climate change is real, eliminating replies to her fact-free tweets would free up a lot of staff time.

Possibly the best news Andrew Scheer has had in some time is that the “Brain of Justin” and Twitter hate monger, Gerry Butts is back (assuming he ever left) advising youngish Mr. Trudeau. The Libs had made a good deal of progress in burying the SNC Lavalin interference with justice scandal. Now Justin has brought back Butts who is on record as saying, and I will provide full context,

“When Butts and Telford suggested seeking legal advice to review the SNC-Lavalin decision, Prince told them it would inappropriately interfering in the decision. “Jess, there is no solution here that doesn’t involve some interference,” Butts told her, according to text message transcripts from Wilson-Raybould.” national post

If we had an independent media in Canada, that quote would be hung around Justin’s neck from now until a) the election, b) Butts leaves any position, formal or informal, of influence. Unfortunately, as Andrew Coyne (quite clever except about Trump when derangement makes an ugly appearance) points out, we no longer have an independent media. We have a media which is looking desperately to be bailed out by the Federal Government. And the legacy media is intent on excluding dreadful upstarts like Rebel Media or the Post Millennial so an “independent panel of experts” is setting the criteria for “what sorts of publications should be accredited as Qualified Canadian Journalism Organizations” and what, exactly, a journalist is. (Extra points if you are in JT’s Chief of Staff, Katie Telford’s Op-Ed go to Rolodex.)

$600 million for legacy media and $1.2 billion for the CBC and, I suspect, the Libs will think they have pretty much sewn up positive media coverage for Justin. If only. Here is a little experiment: take a stroll through a shopping district or mall (thank you air conditioning) and look at people having coffee. Are any of them reading newspapers. The old style, printed on paper, newspapers? If so, is that person over or under the age of, say, forty? Let me know if you spot one. Most of us get our news from the internet. We might read the National Post online, but we will also have the opportunity to read The Rebel, Post Millennial, Spencer Fernando, Blazing Catfur and CEO.CA and literally thousands of other outlets.

Legacy media may limp along for another few years but, to quote Coyne,

For an industry whose chief shortage is less cash than credibility, this is a dire turn. The mere prospect of government funding has already opened us to accusations, on any occasion we are less than critical of the government, of singing for our supper. And not entirely without cause: whatever our claim to impartiality in other matters, there is no doubting our views on the supper. national post

With the arrival of federal government subsidies the legacy media will become even more identified with the interests of the Liberal Party (if that is possible) and even less reliable. It’s ability to decide what is and is not news, already under attack will be destroyed. After all, when the “gatekeepers” are paid by the Federal Government it is reasonable to suppose that they take dictation from Katie Telford and the PMO. Not all the time and not all that directly, but Certified Canadian Journalists are bright enough to know who is buttering their toast.

So are we.

 

 

Ha, ha, ha

Of all the silly wastes of time in my week “recycling” rankles most. What does it say about the wealth of a nation that it is mandatory to sort your garbage? It is “only ten minutes” is ten minutes too long for a task which is largely pointless.

Confirmation of recycling’s pointlessness is given in abundance in this global news article. Essentially, China (and the rest of Asia) have ceased to take our “recycling”. Which leaves recyclers with nowhere to sell or even give away what is actually garbage. And I was delighted to discover that my suspicions of the Chinese “recycling” were correct.

“For years, Canada shipped roughly half of its recycling exports to China with the belief it was all being transformed on the other side of the Pacific.  

“It’s since come to light that, in fact, what they were doing was mining out the valuable materials, and they were, in large part, burning the low-valuable materials” global news

The blue boxes, the sorting, the nasty labels pointing to your sorting failures all turn out to be a total waste of time.

Nothing but virtue signalling.

Could have

Joe Biden, at 78, is taking the last run.

He may very well win the Democratic nomination. Nate Silver thinks his numbers and support profile looks good.

Timing is, however, everything. Had Biden run last time he would likely have beaten Trump simply because he was not Hillary and no one actually hates him. But he didn’t.

We are in for a year of really nasty campaigning in the clown car which is the Democratic nomination. Biden, and the rest of them, will go negative early and often and The Donald will egg them all on. The poor person who emerges as the candidate will have been savaged by their own party. And every bit of it will be kept in the GOP oppo files.

I was somewhat sorry to see Biden come into the race. He has earned a graceful retirement and now he is going to be shredded by very nasty, very toxic, people who are not grateful for his service. He will almost certainly lose despite using a base pleasing lie (Charlotteville) to kick off his campaign.

He’s too white, too male and too old to satisfy the 2020 Democratic Party.

Which is a bit sad but also more than a little real.

Terrorism

A horrific shooting has occurred at two mosques in New Zealand. It looks like 40 people were killed and at least twenty more badly injured.

Much as it would be comforting to think that it was done by someone “mentally ill” it seems to have been a carefully planned, viciously executed attack by a single, or perhaps group of, nasty white extremist(s). Terrorism plain and simple, no excuses, no BS about “root causes”.

And, for God’s sake no candles, flowers and teddy bears. Murder is murder, terror is terror and there is no reason at all to minimize it or pretend that one more chorus of “Imagine” will heal the innocent worshipers who were killed, their families or their community.

It is very early in this story but it is absolutely essential that the terrorist(s) be interrogated and whatever support they may have had brought to account.

Terror is terror. Its perpetrators are evil regardless of their religion, ethnicity or politics.

French Police vs. Yellow Vests

This is interesting.

The Yellow Vests are, ostensibly, protesting Macron’s imposition of higher fuel taxes in the name of CO2 reductions and the Paris Accord. However, while there is a strand of the protest which is really just people who like throwing rocks and lighting fires – apparently from both sides of the political aisle with more than a few of France’s increasing immigrant population taking advantage of the chaos – the bulk of the protestors seem to be the French version of deplorables. Working and lower middle class people from the provinces and the outer suburbs who have been steadily falling behind economically.

Historically, the French have been very good at organizing strikes and protests and the French police have become very good at breaking up such demonstrations.

But what this video shows is the French police “standing down”. Taking off their helmets. The crowd applauds and breaks into La Marseillaise.

Will the Yellow Vests bring down Macron? While I devoutly hope they do they will not do it on their own. However, if the police down tools that would be a different situation altogether. Of course, there would still be the Army; but how reliable the Army would be is an open question.

The one thing which the Yellow Vests need to keep their effort going is continued large numbers of non-violent protestors. This weekend there were fewer than last weekend. Christmas is coming. The point about street protests is they succeed when they are massive, they fail when people stay at home.