The Disaffected Lib Mk. II

  Good on the Goog.  Google Earth has added a feature, Timelapse , that allows users to see the effects of climate change over the past 40 years. The tool takes the platform's static imagery and turns it into a dynamic 4D experience, allowing users to click through timelapses that highlight melting ice caps, receding glaciers, massive urban growth and wildfires' impact on agriculture. Timelapse compiles 24 million satellite photos taken from 1984 to 2020, an effort Google ( GOOG ) said took two million processing hours across thousands of machines in Google Cloud. For the project, the company worked with NASA, the United States Geological Survey's Landsat program — the world's longest-running Earth observation program — the European Union's Copernicus program and its Sentinel satellites , and Carnegie Mellon University's CREATE Lab , which helped develop the technology behind Timelapse. To explore Timelapse in Google Earth, users can type any location into th...

  Remember, it's US News and World Report's pick. But, hey, we're Number One, we're Number One . Somehow that doesn't sound "Canadian." Then again, south of the border, guess what they're flogging as a cure for Covid? Yeah, bleach . Apparently if you drink enough, it'll solve all that ails you The appearance of a new marketing push out of Miami by peddlers of the bleach “cure”, often referred to as “miracle mineral solution”, or MMS, signals the FDA’s uphill struggle in trying to control the potentially lethal trade. Since the start of the pandemic, the federal agency has been clamping down on fraudulent products which claim to treat or cure Covid-19. It has also been using its enforcement muscle to move against chlorine dioxide dealers. Last August, the FDA arrested Mark Grenon and his four sons, who were among the most prominent “miracle” bleach peddlers in the US. Members of the Grenon family claimed to be “bishops” of the Florida-based Genesi...

Poor Erin O'Toole. Having to come up with a carbon cut policy when the very idea is deeply unpopular with his party faithful. So, what was Captain Bland to do? At the end of the day he took the Liberals half-baked carbon tax proposal and pared it back. A quarter-baked carbon cut proposal. Scheer Genius. If the Coronavirus pandemic has taught us anything it's that political solutions to medical/scientific problems don 't work. Trudeau's carbon tax is spawned in politics and O'Toole's is just Trudeau-Lite. Great day to unveil this stroke/infarction of Conservative genius. Wonderful timing. The same day as a  report accuses the Trudeau government of doling out $18 billion a year in fossil fuel subsidies .  A new report concludes that the federal government dropped close to $18 billion in subsidies and other forms of financial support on the fossil fuel industry last year — despite the federal Liberals' stated desire to move the country to a post-carbon economy....

  As far as the European Union is concerned, Pfizer has the best Covid-19 vaccine coupled with a demonstrated track record of reliability .  The EU has endorsed mRNA technology vaccines as superior to the others such as AstraZenica and Johnson & Johnson. AstraZeneca was supposed to be the workhorse of the EU's vaccine drive this year — a cheap and easy-to-transport shot to break the pandemic's back. Yet, the EU said that out of 120 million doses promised for the 1st quarter, only 30 million were delivered, and, of the 180 million expected, now there are only 70 million set for delivery in the 2nd quarter . Because of that shortfall, the EU has come under crushing pressure as, even though it it is a major producer and exporter of vaccines, it cannot get its vaccinations even close to the levels of the United Kingdom and the United States. EU Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said Pfizer-BioNTech “ has proven to be a reliable partner. It has delivered on its commi...

Erin O'Toole is an utter failure.  Such is the verdict of former Canadian and disgraced life peer, Lord Conrad of Piddle Puddle . Connie laments that the last truly successful Tory leader was Brian Mulroney who delivered back-to-back majorities. As it turns out, Lord Black doesn't think much of the rest, Harper included. Methinks his IBS is acting up again. Since it is the Conservative party, it naturally provides the electoral home for those who espouse conservative values. But instead of defending this as policy, the Conservatives endlessly fritter and agitate between easily caricaturable and ineptly formulated positions on fringe issues such as abortion, gender, exotic environmental matters and Indigenous questions, and allow the Liberals to run up and down their backs in hob-nailed jack-boots masquerading as the party of contemporary liberal enlightenment. The result is that the Conservatives are perceived as “harsh,” as was said of the unexceptionable budget that was used...

 

Economist James Galbraith, son of legendary Keynesian economist John Kenneth Galbraith, says the United States will face a "do or die" moment as the nation emerges from the Covid 19 pandemic. Either the U.S. jettisons neoliberalism or face becoming that dogma's ultimate victim. ...bringing back demand for industrial, retail, and commercial office building construction will be harder, if not impossible, since there is ample excess capacity available and the pandemic has taught society how to work and shop from home. Global demand for the United States’ advanced product sectors—think aircraft or oil field services—is also likely to remain depressed. Meanwhile, an infrastructure package, if enacted, will indeed create a certain type of engineering, construction, and machinery job, but it will not reemploy the millions of services and office workers who have been wiped out by COVID-19. The problem of arrears in the vast pre-pandemic mountain of U.S. household debts will be f...

  America's Old Testament Taliban , a.k.a. Christian evangelicals and fundamentalists, are finally losing ground. But they won't go without a fight. Just 47% of the US population are members of a church, mosque or synagogue, according to a survey by Gallup , down from 70% two decades ago – in part a result of millennials turning away from religion but also, experts say, a reaction to the swirling mix of rightwing politics and Christianity pursued by the Republican party. Gallup began asking Americans about their church membership in 1937 – and for decades the number was always above 70%. That began to change in 2000, and the number has steadily dropped ever since. Some of the decline is attributable to changing generations, with about 66% of people born before 1946 are still members of a church, compared with just 36% of millennials. Among other groups Gallup reported, the decline in church membership stands out among self-identified Democrats and independents. The number of De...

If you listen closely enough you might hear the faint thunder of their footsteps even from half a world away. What you're hearing is the telltale sound of the Migration Planet and it will soon get a little louder, a little clearer, a little nearer. Our leaders will struggle with this new normal. Even the best intentioned will be confounded. There's an excellent chance that, before long, we will see things, we will do things that today would shock our conscience. Half the world sees countries like ours as their lifeboat. Those manning the oars will be rowing for all they're worth to avoid the boarders.  Aviva Chomsky writes Joe Biden is truly on the horns of a dilemma . Joe Biden entered the White House with some inspiring yet contradictory positions on immigration and Central America. He promised to reverse Donald Trump’s draconian anti-immigrant policies while, through his “ Plan to Build Security and Prosperity in Partnership with the People of Central America ,” restorin...

There are some Liberals who see Jean Chretien as a great man, one of Canada's finest prime ministers. I liked Chretien but 'great'?  I associate Mr. Chretien with three things - scandal, especially the Sponsorship Scandal that served as Stephen Harper's springboard to power; a Quebec sovereignty referendum that Chretien took for granted and damned near lost; and the utterly boneheaded decision to pay good money for castoff submarines mothballed (after just 3 years in service) for many reasons by the Royal Navy. I like to think of the subs as Chretien's Folly. We bought four of these 1990-vintage Upholder class boats after a Brit deal to unload them on Pakistan fell through. They look like real submarines only way shorter. They were supposed to be a great deal but only proved the adage about "penny wise, pound foolish." They're unreliable, outdated, fraught with defects and bleed the Canadian navy budget just tied up at dockside (where you'll find t...

  For generations, centuries, the horse and oxen were the muscle of agriculture. They ploughed the fields, harvested the grain and delivered the crop to market. For their time (and they had a good run) they were the most efficient means of cropping, from start to finish. They could do work that humans could not do and that meant the farmer could tend larger farms and deliver food to the markets. Then came the Industrial Revolution launched with the development of coal-fueled, steam engines that, in turn, gave way to petroleum, first in boilers and then, in refined form, in internal combustion engines that could power cars, trucks and, perhaps more importantly, tractors. Tractors meant a farmer could buy his horsepower in a can and, with it, plough far more land than ever before, sow and harvest the land mechanically and get the crop quickly to market.  The farm horse was obsolete. Redundant, it disappeared, its place often marked by empty stables in the barn. What shall be nex...

  Like it or not (and there's no reason to like it), we're not going back to something we might recognize as "normal." Similar, to be sure, but not the same. We are undergoing a broad-spectrum paradigm change. We have launched our species - and every other form of life - out of the Holocene and onto the Anthropocene. It's the only time a species has changed the Earth, moved it into a different geological epoch. Wild, eh?  We're changing but mainly being changed. The longer you've been around the more change you've witnessed, the less reliable notions of normalcy have become. We have changed culturally, socially, politically, industrially, climatically. We have voraciously exploited change as an engine of growth.  Change has been the status quo since the Industrial Revolution. Much of the change came in some form of growth. The harnessing of fossil energy has fueled more growth than any other factor. We needed a growing population to exploit bountiful, ...

  Remember this time last year when we were shocked at the plight of nursing home patients dying from Covid-19?  Oh boy, that was just the worst. Things were going to change for sure, you betcha. Among our peer nations, Canada clings stubbornly to the worst record for nursing home deaths . Yes, we are the worst, the bottom of the lot. We were last year. We still are today. The worst. Now, as the country seems poised to plunge into a third wave with far more lethal variants of the coronavirus, we learn that we did as poorly in the second wave as we did in the first.  The study [by the Canadian Institute for Health Information] found that the proportion of deaths in nursing homes represented 69 per cent of Canada's overall COVID-19 deaths, which is significantly higher than the international average of 41 per cent. In Canada, between March 2020 and February 2021, more than 80,000 residents and staff members of long-term care homes were infected with the coronavirus. Outbrea...

What does it mean when your political philosophy depends on self-serving opinion at odds with fact?  An article in Scientific American warns of the rise of "antiscience" birthed among America's radical right and now going global, a movement that's already claiming thousands of lives.  Antiscience is the rejection of mainstream scientific views and methods or their replacement with unproven or deliberately misleading theories, often for nefarious and political gains. It targets prominent scientists and attempts to discredit them. Now antiscience is causing mass deaths once again in this COVID-19 pandemic. Beginning in the spring of 2020, the Trump White House launched a coordinated disinformation campaign that dismissed the severity of the epidemic in the United States, attributed COVID deaths to other causes , claimed hospital admissions were due to a catch-up in elective surgeries , and asserted that ultimately that the epidemic would spontaneously evaporate . It a...

  What is America? What will America be in 10 or 20 years?  The United States is a country undergoing rapid change and, to some extent, dragging the West along with it. Its government is deeply dysfunctional, presided over by a "bought and paid for" Congress. The vaunted democratic republic has become a transactional democracy, another term for oligarchy. In some ways the US seems to be following a form of governance that plagued Rome in the final two centuries before its fall. Dwight Eisenhower, before leaving the White House, warned the American people to be wary of the emerging "military-industrial complex." In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing ...