Is This Just a Phase We're Going Through? We Need to Figure This Out. This Could Be a Matter of Life or Death.

Give credit where credit is due. The Covid-19 pandemic will probably set some record for the fastest round-the-world transmission.  There was a time when it was said that pandemics spread at the speed of sail, back in the days before fossil fuels when ships plied the oceans between relatively few ports in one place and relatively few ports in a distant destination.  Today, of course, we have jetliners ferrying passengers, cargo and viruses at speeds of 560 miles an hour from an endless number of airports to an equally endless number of destinations. It's tough to find a place you can't get to within a day, two tops. So, full marks to us for getting really, really good at transmitting plagues.

However, technology aside, it seems this stuff is old hat. The Tyee's Andrew Nikiforuk writes that this goes back at least as far as the Romans on what some claim is a 300-year cycle.  Think of it as the bottom end of the circle of life. It could also be our final warning.

The corona pandemic, a pretty mild affair in the scheme of things, is telling us that we are now in the middle of a historic cycle where hyper-connectivity combined with hyper-complexity could rapidly lead to decline, if not collapse. 

In fact, pandemics are not black swans, but predictable and natural events that often appear like clockwork in the evolution of human empires. They trigger other crises or partner up with them. 

In the process of pruning human numbers, pandemics invariably play a significant role in the disintegration of civilizations. They reveal wealth inequalities and technical fragilities. In this regard pandemics announce both the ending and beginning of things.  

Peter Turchin, a Russian historian, has long argued that civilizations expand and contract in distinct waves or what he calls “secular cycles” that last about 300 years.

...

The Roman stoic Seneca observed that things do not perish as slowly as they come into being. Instead, “the way to ruin is rapid.” And pandemics prove the point. 

But waves of disease aren’t the only horseman that take empires over Seneca’s cliff.
Cycles of global expansion also tend to be humbled by incompetent leaders, climate change (always a factor in decline), food shortages and forced migrations of people, which in turn add more fuel to pandemic fires.

... 

It can be easy in our fossil-fuelled civilization to imagine ourselves decoupled from such cycles, even history itself. We embrace the fruits of globalization while assuming we are protected by its risks because of our highly-evolved technologies. 

In fact, technology can be the fuel to set pandemics alight. The Spanish flu of 1918 offers a cautionary example. It erupted during a period of unprecedented global movement of peoples. In Europe, troops from all parts of the world (and many ravaged by gas attacks) mingled with Chinese workers building trenches for warring empires. As soldiers fought and died in those trenches, the crowded Western front helped the flu virus become more virulent.

The Plague Superhighway

Disease ecologists and other experts have repeatedly warned that unpredictable pathogens will explode from the new frontlines of globalization. As Dan Werb explained in the New York Times several months ago, the virus instantaneously exploited the rich pathways offered by global connectivity. 

At the time of the SARS outbreak, China had about 233 international airline routes. But 16 years later it offered COVID-19 nearly 800 routes. During that same period the number of Chinese travellers jumped from three million to 53 million a year. 

It is unlikely a computer could have designed a better network for rapid diffusion of a novel pathogen. Wuhan, where the pandemic began, is a major transportation hub for central China. Every year it facilitates the largest human migration on the planet as hundreds of millions of Chinese people celebrate Lunar New Year and crisscross the country in planes, trains and automobiles.

...The only way to stop a virus moving through highly-connected societies is to quickly reduce or shut down global pathways. If governments don’t act quickly and agilely, the pandemic will overwhelm them. 

The intensification of global connectivity has consequences for the survival of the species if a highly-fatal pathogen were to emerge. “With increasing transportation we are close to a transition to conditions in which extinction becomes certain both because of rapid spread and because of the selective dominance of increasingly worse pathogens.” 

Because of the increased connectedness of the world, a pandemic can’t be assessed like any other risk. “While there is a very high probability for humanity surviving a single such event, over time, there is eventually zero probability of surviving repeated exposures to such events.”

The Lethal Curse of the Neoliberal Order.

“It will cost something to reduce mobility in the short term, but to fail to do so will eventually cost everything — if not from this event, then one in the future. Outbreaks are inevitable, but an appropriately precautionary response can mitigate systemic risk to the globe at large.”

No government took the note seriously because very few elites understand what an unsafe and unpredictable world they have built for ordinary people. 

But this much is now plain. The intensification of globalized networks creates more instability, insecurity and unpredictability. Even civilizations with computers can cultivate too much complexity, peak and decline. 

Unpredictability can arrive in the form of tyrannical technologies, the cascading effects of climate change or in the form of a globe-trotting pathogens.

It's time to jettison Neoliberalism but it's time we can't afford to waste.

This modest pandemic, which will be followed by more pathogenic mischief, has reminded us that our society has entered a very dangerous phase in its historic cycle. 

Can we build a simpler society that can survive random shocks? Can we re-localize the economy, tax the rich, support small farms, simplify our brutal technologies, power down and distribute authority more evenly among local communities? 

Or do we return to “normalcy” by courting more catastrophe with accelerated globalization, sending ourselves galloping over the cliff? 

This pandemic has given us a clear historic choice: change or collapse.

America's Other Epidemic - Madness.

It's a question that needs to be asked, even if the answer is obvious. Have Americans gone crazy?

Bruce Livesey, writing in the National Observer, explores the signs of a nation in the throes of abject lunacy.

Andy Borowitz is a humourist who writes short satirical “fake news” stories for The New Yorker. When scrolling the magazine’s website, you often come across headlines for his pieces – “Trump blames plummeting poll numbers on people paying attention when he talks” or “Trump advises states facing bankruptcy to borrow millions from their Dads” – and momentarily your brain processes these as real news stories. 

And then it sinks in that it’s just another one of Borowitz’s humourous send-ups. But that second of believing the headline is real is a symptom of watching the United States descend into a surreal state of madness, where reality and fiction (and satire) have blended into a crazy mélange that defies any precedent. Sometimes it feels like we’re living through one of those 1970s dystopian sci-fi movies. 

Indeed, here’s a real headline in the Washington Post from the other day (and not from Andy Borowitz) - “Republican-led states signal they could strip workers’ unemployment benefits if they don’t return to work.” Or what about the story of a security guard shot and killed at a Flint, Michigan discount store because he asked a shopper to wear a state-mandated face mask.

I mean, that’s madness.

A people divided, at each others' throats.

Today, I don’t think a lot of Canadians are feeling envious of Americans or wish they live south of the border. The closest in Canada we’ve come to such lunacy is Premier Jason Kenney flailing away (in Trumpian fashion) at phantom enemies as Alberta slides towards bankruptcy, having gone all-in on a stranded asset no one wants.

In the U.S., though, the madness has been pushed to the surface by COVID-19, which has found a nation ill-prepared to cope with the virus, despite being a global superpower.

Now we're confronted with images similar to ones conjured by Stephen King in his novel The Stand – stories from New York of unclaimed bodies being buried in mass graves, or of up to 60 rotting corpses being discovered in two unrefrigerated U-Haul trucks outside a Brooklyn funeral home. Neighbours discovered the bodies because they could “smell death.”

Meanwhile, unlike previous crises (9/11 and the 2008-09 credit crisis come to mind), the political class has descended into partisan bickering. The Republicans, naturally, are to blame, having done everything possible to exacerbate the pandemic by initially claiming it was a hoax, refusing to give states supplies and money they need, and demanding people return to work as soon as possible.

Trump realizes the only play he has to win re-election in November is a strong economy. It’s clear he’ll risk voters lives and force them to return to their jobs before the pandemic is under control in the hopes the economy recovers in time for election day.

Institutional madness.

America has been rotting from the inside for a very long time. Don’t take my word for it. The journalist and author George Packer noted in a piece entitled “We Are Living in a Failed State” in The Atlantic recently: “when the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years.”

And esteemed Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs recently told The New Yorker: “Basically, American politics has become deeply corrupt over decades, and it became so corrupt that normal governance already collapsed many years ago. Nobody here has viewed government as actually very functional for a long time, and not because it couldn’t be. It has been increasingly designed to fail. Specifically, it’s been designed to respond to powerful lobbies that want deregulation or tax cuts or some special privileges rather than to function in a normal way… We’ve had widening inequalities and massive suffering.” 

Due to this dysfunction, America is now ground zero for the pandemic. Of the world’s 3.6 million known cases of COVID-19 (with 251,000 deaths), more than 1.2 million are in the U.S., with 70,000 fatalities. And this is only the first wave of the virus. 

Madness is caused by many things. But I would argue capitalism encourages mental illness. And no other country has bound itself more tightly to a brutal, heartless form of capitalism than America. So much so that, against all reason, it still doesn’t have a socialized health care system, which means 87 million Americans have no or inadquate medical coverage. And many of those Americans being thrown out of work because of COVID-19 are also losing their health insurance.

Capitalism breeds madness because it generates relentless stress. The stress from competition to make money, the insecurity of never knowing whether your job, company or entire industry will collapse or be moved offshore.  

Stress from not making enough money is enormous. In the U.S., almost 40 per cent of Americans don’t have enough to cover an unexpected $400 expense. By mid-March, 33.6 million didn’t have paid sick leave. The typical American worker now earns around (US) $44,500 a year – not much more than what they made in the 1970s, if adjusted for inflation. In 2018, 38.1 million Americans lived in poverty, while the wealthiest one percent control (US) $35 trillion. 

The U.S. political system and both Republican and Democratic parties have been bought by corporations, billionaires and bankers. Former U.S. President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton received vast sums from Wall Street during their runs for the White House, while the Republican Party is a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch and Koch Industries. 

All of this cash has, by design, ensured that Congress can’t govern any longer. This was seen in Trump’s impeachment hearing where, despite overwhelming evidence he’d conspired with a foreign power to meddle in this year’s election, the Senate refused to throw him out. Forget meaningful legislation on anything important. 

Hence, when COVID-19 arrived, the government was no longer functioning to properly confront the pandemic. 

Imagine living in that kind of society? You would be driven mad too.

Re-Imagining Air Travel

It's a grim time for airlines, a grim time for the entire aviation industry.

It's pretty clear that airlines played a significant role in the global spread of the Covid-19 virus. There was a time when it was said that pandemics spread at the speed of sail. Now such contagions travel at close to 560 miles per hour on routes that reach every corner of the world.

I watched a video last week by an airline pilot discussing what social distancing would look like on a modern jetliner. Unless passengers were willing to pay to be jammed into hazmat suits, social distancing would cut passenger loads to about 30 percent. Airlines need closer to 75 percent to break even.

More bad news. Quarantine. We didn't go through a month or two of isolation, social distancing, working from home and doing without our pubs and restaurants and shops so that people could freely come in via our airports and re-ignite our problems.

Tomorrow the British government is expected to announce a 14-day quarantine for airport arrivals whether visitors or returning Brits.

Boris Johnson is set to address the nation and present his roadmap out of the lockdown, and will announce the introduction of quarantine measures for people who arrive at airports, ports and Eurostar railway stations, including for Britons returning from abroad. 

People will be asked to provide the address at which they will self-isolate for two weeks upon arrival by filling out a digital form, according to a report in the Times.

Airlines UK said it had been told by government officials that the plan would be in place by the end of the month or early June. 

A spokesman for the trade body said: “We will be asking for assurances that this decision has been led by the science and that government has a credible exit plan, with weekly reviews to ensure the restrictions are working and still required.”

Will there be a return to 'normal' for the world's airlines? Can governments afford to keep airlines on life support until this pandemic is no more? What about Airbus and already-troubled Boeing?

The Moron-in-Chief Goes Full Bolsonaro

Donald Trump says the Covid-19 pandemic's days are numbered. America doesn't need a vaccine, it'll just go away. He's like that lovely chrome pinball as it bounces off the bumpers and the flippers. Always on the go, pillar to post.

Maybe it's time for a little levity. Here, from February, 2019, the Family Guy, Peter Griffin, goes to work for Trump in the White House.

Masks and Rubber Gloves are Fine But Don't Forget the Weed.

Yeah, weed. Marijuana. It might just help you fend off Covid-19.

Cannabis extracts are showing potential in making people more resistant to the novel coronavirus, says an Alberta researcher leading a study.

After sifting through 400 cannabis strains, researchers at the University of Lethbridge are concentrating on about a dozen that show promising results in ensuring less fertile ground for the potentially lethal virus to take root, said biological scientist Dr. Igor Kovalchuk.

“A number of them have reduced the number of these (virus) receptors by 73 per cent, the chance of it getting in is much lower,” said Kovalchuk.

“If they can reduce the number of receptors, there’s much less chance of getting infected.”

Employing cannabis sativa strains over the past three months, the researcher said the effective balance between cannabis components THC and CBD — the latter more typically associated with medical use — is still unclear in blocking the novel coronavirus.

I suppose it stands to reason. You're pretty safe from infection if y0u spend all day in front of the TV with a bag of chips and a box of cookies.

“The extracts of our most successful and novel high CBD C sativa lines, pending further investigation, may become a useful and safe addition to the treatment of COVID-19 as an adjunct therapy,” said Kovalchuk. 

“Given the current dire and rapidly evolving epidemiological situation, every possible therapeutic opportunity and avenue must be considered.” 

Israeli researchers have begun clinical trials of CBD as a treatment to repair cells damaged by COVID-19 by using its anti-inflammatory abilities. 

It’s thought CBD could enhance the traditional effect of steroids in such treatment of patients in life-threatening condition and also bolster the immune system. 

It’s the kind of research and his own that deserves government support in Canada, whose federal government has pledged $1.1 billion in funding for COVID-19 research said the U of L scientist. 

“Our work could have a huge influence — there aren’t many drugs that have the potential of reducing infection by 70 to 80 per cent,” he said.

Oh, Dave's not here man.

A Good First Step. Now...

Ottawa and the provinces have struck a deal to boost the pay of essential workers. Together they're going to cough up four billion dollars to top up the near-slave wages of those who change grandma's sheets and empty her bed pan.

Yet this is another example of a quick fix to an enduring problem. Government putting up money because the private sector refuses to pay its workers a living wage. We wind up subsidizing the nursing homes where our loved ones have been dying during this pandemic.

"We know, however, that once we get through this, in the months and years to come, we're also going to have to have reflections about how we manage and how we maintain our long-term care facilities, how we support essential workers who are very low paid, how we move forward as a society to make sure that our vulnerable are properly taken care of and properly rewarded for the important work they do."

What's wrong with making it easier for these workers to unionize and collectively bargain? How about giving workers the ability to invoke mandatory arbitration? Perhaps a guaranteed wage so these essential workers don't have to work two or more jobs, worsening the chance of transmitting diseases from one nursing home to another?

If we don't want ghetto economics to remain the key to private care nursing homes, that must change. If the private sector can't or won't do the job isn't it time for government to step in? They do that fast enough when it's Justin Trudeau's Trans Mountain pipeline or Jason Kenney's Keystone XL. Why can't they do as much for our elderly and vulnerable? People shouldn't be a secondary priority of their governments.

How Many are Too Many or Is It Rude to Ask?

One of the toughest parts of leading a government during this pandemic is having to make "life or death" decisions. It pits the lives of your citizens against the market imperatives of the economy.

Imposing a lockdown - social distancing, self-isolation or quarantine, closing non-essential businesses and restricting travel - is the easy part. You're more at risk of catching hell for not going far enough, soon enough, especially when Aunt Tilley dies in the nursing home.

Lifting the lockdown, that's the hard part. Everyone knows that it's going to cost lives. If you get it wrong it could be a lot of lives. If you make the call prematurely, go too far too fast, you'll catch hell from all sides.

That's a tough call, potentially excruciating for those with a strong sense of empathy. Sociopaths such as that pernicious prick in the White House or his play pals like Bolsonaro don't anguish over these decisions. They're much more worried about their personal political fortunes, the more so if they have an election looming. As Nicholas Kristof writes, when it comes to kickstarting the economy, Trump and Pence are happily flying blind.

“By Memorial Day Weekend we will largely have this coronavirus epidemic behind us,” Pence told Fox News only two weeks ago. That magical thinking seems to be shared by many politicians and investors alike.

Let’s be very clear: There’s huge uncertainty, so we need great humility in looking ahead, but most epidemiologists anticipate a long, wrenching struggle against the virus.

“If we have a big wave in the fall, it’ll make everything we’ve had so far seem not all that serious,” said Osterholm, whose infectious disease institute recently issued an excellent and sobering report about the road ahead. “But that’s the reality of this. I tell people my job isn’t to scare you out of your wits; it’s to scare you into your wits.”

A new Columbia University study suggests that we may face a rebound in deaths by late this month because of the easing of restrictions, just as a model used by the Trump administration shows deaths increasing to 3,000 daily by June 1.

“This is here to stay, in all likelihood, until we have a vaccine, and a vaccine could be a year or two away,” said Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Or it could be never.”

For Trump and Pence this boils down to electoral politics and who they'll scapegoat if it blows up in America's face. 

George Monbiot Gives Michael Moore One Upside the Head.

"Planet of the Humans" isn't Michael Moore's film. He is, however, the executive producer of the sort-of documentary and its main promoter. And he should really know better. Now George Monbiot has taken Mike to the woodshed.

Planet of the Humans, whose executive producer and chief promoter is Michael Moore, now has more than 6 million views on YouTube. The film does not deny climate science. But it promotes the discredited myths that deniers have used for years to justify their position. It claims that environmentalism is a self-seeking scam, doing immense harm to the living world while enriching a group of con artists. This has long been the most effective means by which denial – most of which has been funded by the fossil fuel industry – has been spread. Everyone hates a scammer.

...Occasionally, the film lands a punch on the right nose. It is right to attack the burning of trees to make electricity. But when the film’s presenter and director, Jeff Gibbs, claims, “I found only one environmental leader willing to reject biomass and biofuels”, he can’t have been looking very far. Some people have been speaking out against them ever since they became a serious proposition (since 2004 in my case). Almost every environmental leader I know opposes the burning of fresh materials to generate power. 

There are also some genuine and difficult problems with renewable energy, particularly the mining of the necessary materials. But the film’s attacks on solar and wind power rely on a series of blatant falsehoods. It claims that, in producing electricity from renewables, “You use more fossil fuels to do this than you’re getting benefit from it. You would have been better off just burning fossil fuels in the first place”. This is flat wrong. On average, a solar panel generates 26 units of solar energy for every unit of fossil energy required to build and install it. For wind turbines the ratio is 44 to one. 

Planet of the Humans also claims that you can’t reduce fossil fuel use through renewable energy: coal is instead being replaced by gas. Well, in the third quarter of 2019, renewables in the UK generated more electricity than coal, oil and gas plants put together. As a result of the switch to renewables in this country, the amount of fossil fuel used for power generation has halved since 2010. By 2025, the government forecasts, roughly half our electricity will come from renewables, while gas burning will drop by a further 40%. To hammer home its point, the film shows footage of a “large terminal to import natural gas from the United States” that “Germany just built”. Germany has no such terminal. The footage was shot in Turkey.

Then Monbiot comes to the film's real sticking point - overpopulation - and here I do side with Moore and Gibbs.

The film offers only one concrete solution to our predicament: the most toxic of all possible answers. “We really have got to start dealing with the issue of population … without seeing some sort of major die-off in population, there’s no turning back.” 

Yes, population growth does contribute to the pressures on the natural world. But while the global population is rising by 1% a year, consumption, until the pandemic, was rising at a steady 3%. High consumption is concentrated in countries where population growth is low. Where population growth is highest, consumption tends to be extremely low. Almost all the growth in numbers is in poor countries largely inhabited by black and brown people. When wealthy people, such as Moore and Gibbs, point to this issue without the necessary caveats, they are saying, in effect, “it’s not Us consuming, it’s Them breeding.” It’s not hard to see why the far right loves this film. 

Population is where you go when you haven’t thought your argument through. Population is where you go when you don’t have the guts to face the structural, systemic causes of our predicament: inequality, oligarchic power, capitalism. Population is where you go when you want to kick down.

Monbiot casts this as white guys trying to preserve their privilege by blaming the black and brown people of the Third World for creating too many mouths to feed.

It's not an either-or problem. We're way past that argument. To solve our problem, to avert catastrophe, you need very serious action on both over-consumption and overpopulation. There has to be a leavening. We need to reduce the global population to a sustainable level and we must find equitable solutions to resource consumption. We of the developed world have to stop consuming so gawddamn much stuff. We have to abandon rapacious and excessive consumption, putting quality of life over quantity of things. That means growing smaller and fast.

The brown and black folks of the Third World. Yeah, they've got to get their numbers down, way down.  Monbiot's "it's us, not them" argument falters on the issue of sustainability. Just a few days ago a research paper warned that much of the world, the Third World, is headed for unbearable heating, Sahara Desert-grade warming.

At that level [a global temperature rise of just 3C], about 30% of the world’s population would live in extreme heat – defined as an average temperature of 29C (84F). These conditions are extremely rare outside the most scorched parts of the Sahara, but with global heating of 3C they are projected to envelop 1.2 billion people in India, 485 million in Nigeria and more than 100 million in each of Pakistan, Indonesia and Sudan.

An "average temperature" of 29C. That's the average - day and night, summer and winter. It doesn't matter if you can tough it out for 300 or 320 days a year if you have to experience 40 or 60 days of killer temperatures, real "wet bulb 35" conditions where it gets so hot that your body can no longer cool itself and you literally bake from the inside out.

As the climate changes, deadly heatwaves that combine high temperatures with humidity so severe that the human body can no longer cool itself, could start to affect regions of the world currently home to hundreds of millions of people. That’s the conclusion reached by Columbia University’s Ethan Coffel, reported at an American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco in December. 

Coffel’s study used the latest IPCC climate projections for 2060 and found regional, relatively near-future effects from modest heating. 

This extreme humidity is less likely to occur in arid spots like Marble Bar. Coffel’s climate models suggest that there is more risk in India, West Africa, Iran, Saudi Arabia and other countries along the Arabian Gulf – environments where hot air meets very warm coastal waters.

Wet-bulb temperature is taken by placing a damp cloth over the thermometer’s bulb. Evaporation cools the bulb, the same way perspiring cools the body. As humidity increases, the cooling effect slows. For many mammals, including humans, 35 °C wet-bulb temperature is critical. 

“In theory, a 35 °C wet-bulb temperature is the point at which your sweat will not evaporate,” Coffel says.

At that point, even the fittest young adult is unlikely to survive more than a few hours before fatally overheating. But lower wet-bulb temperatures can still claim the lives of the elderly or infirm. Deadly heat waves in India and Pakistan that killed 5,000 people in 2015 only produced wet-bulb temperatures in the range of 29-31 °C, he says.

What we may be watching here is a form of tribalism emerging in the ranks of environmentalism, two camps each pointing fingers at the other. Real climate scientists know there is no either/or argument. Each of these problems, unaddressed, presents a genuinely existential threat to human civilization and most other life on Earth.

University of Hawaii's climate science prof, Camilo Mora, put the problem this way:

...the planet is limited in the amount of resources that it can produce. We already have calculated that the planet has on the order of 11 billion hectares that can be harvested in a sustainable manner. Of course we can increase the number by increasing technology, but that’s been happening for the last three decades. The worldwide population is 7 billion people, and we know that to sustain a human being you need on the order of two hectares per person. That means that the world human population every year consumes on the order of 14 billion hectares. The planet only has eleven to give to us. Every year, we consume in excess of three billion hectares.

I grew up in a country where there has been a long history of violence. We have been in war for 50 years, and one thing people don’t realize is what it means to be in a place where anyone can get shot at any moment, where people are starved to death, where there is not enough food to feed people. In the first world, people don’t know how rich they are, and they don’t realize what is happening in the rest of the world. And for me that’s a driving force. It’s scary to think about climate change because when we start damaging physical systems and the carrying capacity of physical systems to produce food, people will react to this in a terrible way. I’m telling you, I have seen it in my own country. It’s very negative the way in which people react to hunger. And that’s one of the things that’s most frightening to me with this large-scale analysis — the fact that I know we’re on our way to some very disturbing scenarios if we go down this pathway of damaging physical systems in the ways that we are today.

Damaging physical systems? Yes, even as the global population burgeons beyond Earth's carrying capacity - to the order of several billions - we're rapidly degrading our already inadequate stocks of arable land. We have all but forgotten the December, 2014 report of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization that warned most of the world's farmland will be severely degraded within just 60-years.

Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years, and if current rates of degradation continue all of the world's top soil could be gone within 60 years, a senior UN official said on Friday. 

About a third of the world's soil has already been degraded, Maria-Helena Semedo of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) told a forum marking World Soil Day. 

The causes of soil destruction include chemical-heavy farming techniques, deforestation which increases erosion, and global warming. The earth under our feet is too often ignored by policymakers, experts said. 

"Soils are the basis of life," said Semedo, FAO's deputy director general of natural resources. "Ninety five percent of our food comes from the soil."

Unless new approaches are adopted, the global amount of arable and productive land per person in 2050 will be only a quarter of the level in 1960, the FAO reported, due to growing populations and soil degradation.

This map depicts what's already going on. It shows how humans have transformed the planet. That's our doing.

For Monbiot to argue that overpopulation is off limits is no more sensible than Moore and Gibbs contending population growth, not fossil fuels, is the singular threat. You can't champion one to the exclusion of the other. A pox on both their houses.

This brings me back to my starting point. There are several ways in which mankind has ventured far beyond our planet's carrying capacity. They fall under three categories - greenhouse gas emissions, excessive consumption of resources and overpopulation. A survivable future depends on humanity finding responses to all three that bring us back within the limits of our environment, the biosphere, Spaceship Earth. We either live in harmony with Earth or human civilization faces a number of rather ugly consequences. Time is definitely not on our side.

Seven Years. You?

I was going through some papers and stumbled across my little hound's American Kennel Club registration forms. Turns out he's seven years old, going on eight. I thought he was a good bit younger than that. Time flies.

Then I realized it's been seven, going on eight years, since I was last in the United States. I went to meet an old friend, an Australian woman in Port Townsend, Washington, who breeds beagles. She had a puppy waiting for me.  I bundled the pub in a crate, drove to Port Angeles and caught the last ferry to Victoria.

I used to love visiting the States, or at least the coastal states. Many times I rode my motorcycles down the Pacific Coast Highway, down into southern California - a couple of times into southern Mexico. It's such a beautiful ride. Then I sort of went off it, back when Bush/Cheney soured my affection for that country. I did one, perhaps two rides during the Obama era but I found the country had changed. A lot of Americans sure weren't happy to have a black guy in the Oval Office. Things started turning creepy.

Since Trump's inauguration I have had no interest, not so much as a tinge, in going down there. I stay in touch with my friends in Washington and Oregon by phone.

That's my deal. What about you? Do you still "cross the line"? If you still go, where and why?

I know that I may never see America again. I used to feel connected. I had relatives there. My best friend is there. I met him when I did my undergrad in Michigan back when Christ was still a lowly corporal. Even during Viet Nam I understood Americans and I liked them. But now it's like there's an invisible Berlin Wall that divides us.

How has your relationship with America changed, if at all?

Fighting Back. Indigenous Women Embracing Self-Defence

Indigenous women get it. They're learning martial arts, determined not to become just another statistic.

Five women have gone missing in Lisa Kenoras’ community in the past five years.

Kenoras was raised in a community of 6,000 people on unceded Secwepemc land in the Shuswap-North Okanagan region of B.C. Five women, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, have gone missing in her community in the past five years. They include Caitlin Potts; Ashley Simpson; Nicole Bell; Deanna Wertz; and Traci Genereaux, an 18-year-old whose remains were found by police in 2017. 

“I feel like there were many instances where my ancestors were protecting me,” Kenoras said in an interview after the workshop at Open Space art gallery in Victoria on Febuary 17th. “I could have been that missing woman — I would have been just another missing woman in a camp, or just another young Indigenous girl beat up by her boyfriend.” 

Instead, she decided to fight back.

Kenoras attended a self-defence workshop in Lkwungen territories, in Victoria in February. The workshop was led by Shana Pasapa, a jiu-jitsu purple belt from the White Bear Nation in southeastern Saskatchewan. Pasapa teaches practical self-defense and situational awareness to Indigenous women and girls through Power Our Women (POW), a group she founded to address the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIWG) crisis.

"I left home when I was 16 and ended up in a five-year abusive relationship,” Kenoras said. 

After escaping her abusive relationship, she worked as a hairdresser and then as a dishwasher in man camps across Alberta and B.C., where she said she regularly experienced harassment. 

“In those man camps, I was isolated. I was the only young Indigenous female in a lot of places. I would have men follow me, trying to offer me alcohol and drugs or follow me to the gym,” she said. 

“The man camps just fed into my trauma.”

“You’re targeted if you’re Indigenous, you’re targeted if you’re female and you’re targeted if you’re both. That’s the plain truth,” Kenoras said, saying she could have easily been another statistic. “I shouldn’t have been here. There are many women like me that don’t make it to a place where they can tell their story.” 

Kenoras, now studying at the University of Victoria, found strength in reconnecting to her culture and advocating for missing Indigenous women. After the POW workshop, she reflected on how the skills she attained could have helped her avoid the harmful situations she experienced as a young woman. 

“If I grew up with this, maybe some things wouldn’t have happened. Maybe it would have helped train my mind and made me more aware of my reality. Maybe I wouldn’t have stayed in the five-year abusive relationship I was in,” she said.

When Lives Matter

If Covid-19 has taught us anything it's that pandemics take a terrible toll on the elderly, especially those in nursing homes. Unless...

As the coronavirus scythed through nursing homes, cutting a deadly path, Valerie Martin vowed to herself that the story would be different in the home she runs in France. 

The action she took to stop the novel coronavirus, which causes COVID-19, from infecting and killing the vulnerable older adults in her care was both drastic and effective: Martin and her staff locked themselves in with the 106 residents. 

For 47 days and nights, staff and residents of the Vilanova nursing home on the outskirts of the east central city of Lyon waited out the coronavirus storm together, while COVID-19 killed tens of thousands of people in other homes across Europe, including more than 9,000 in France. 

"I said, 'No, not mine. My residents still have so much to live for,'" Martin said in an interview. "I don't want this virus to kill them when they have been through so much." 

On Monday, Martin and 12 colleagues, who stayed in the home for the full duration, ended their quarantine with hugs of celebration and singing, and with an uplifting victory: COVID-19 tests conducted on the residents and staff all came back negative. The caregivers, who nicknamed themselves "the happily confined," left in a convoy of cars, joyously honking horns and heading for reunions with families, pets and homes.

One of the problems we've had in our nursing homes is that staff are inadequately paid. Some of them have to take jobs at more than one home. And exposed to the virus when out of the facilities, they carry it back inside with them when they report for work and then it progresses from one home to the next. All part of what Morneau calls "job churn" and the gig economy.

Good news today for British Columbia and, especially, for Vancouver Island. The province's medical officer of health, Bonnie Henry, reports just eight new Covid-19 cases since mid-March. Over that interval there have been no new cases on Vancouver Island.

Trump Shows Up, Workers Greet Him With Music.

Donald Trump and his entourage put in an appearance yesterday at a Honeywell plant in Arizona where N95 medical masks are being produced.

Team Trump decided they weren't going to wear masks as they circulated among the employees. Then this happened:

As Trump toured the factory, which is producing N95 masks for the federal government, he and other officials wore safety glasses but did not wear masks. In a clip from Reuters, at one point on the tour, workers blasted Guns N’ Roses’ cover of the James Bond theme song from Wings, “Live and Let Die.” As Trump spoke to a worker that was wearing a mask, he could barely be heard over the din as he asked how many masks were made in a day and the worker’s response is hard to discern. Afterward, Trump gave a thumbs up to the camera. A sign in the factory stated that masks were required in the factory, per CNBC.

Covid-19. Where Do We Go From Here?

“Churchill: "Madam, would you sleep with me for a million pounds?" 

Socialite: "My goodness, Mr. Churchill... Well, I suppose... we would have to discuss terms, of course... " 

Churchill: "Would you sleep with me for five pounds?" 

Socialite: "Mr. Churchill, what kind of woman do you think I am?!" 

Churchill: "Madam, we've already established that. Now we are haggling about the price”

That exchange, attributed to Winston Churchill, came to mind when I was pondering the political calculations when governments decide how and when to lift the Covid-19 lockdown.

If, here in Canada, we knew the country could return to business as usual - no social distancing, no quarantine, every business once again open, everyone back to work - but it would mean an additional 1,000 deaths our leaders might well go for it. 2,000 - I expect so. 3,000 - maybe but with a lot of feigned soul searching and deep regret, real "thoughts and prayers" stuff.

The calculus might be much different if real people, names and faces, were attached to the butcher's bill. That would be almost akin to passing a death sentence. "Yes, you guys can go back to work but Aunt Tilly here, well, she's a goner." If it was your Aunt Tilly, however, and you kind of liked her, you might not be too crazy about her taking one - the Big One - for the team.  It's got that 'sacrificing a virgin so that the gods will ensure a good harvest' tone to it.

But, of course, faceless victims are more expendable. Their anonymity greases the wheels of decision making. It reduces the equation to so much haggling in the ranks of political whoredom. In truth, would we expect anything more - or anything less?  Not so long as we don't have to see their faces, eh?

This is more than hypothetical. The powerful consensus in the medical community is that Covid-19 is not a "one and done" emergency. We have been warned, quite plainly, to expect at least one more wave of the pandemic that history has shown could be far more deadly than the first.

Next time we may not have the luxury of a month or two to watch the virus emerge and then spread from country to country before it reaches our land. Next time may be a 'come as you are party.'

Donald Trump has addressed this. He acknowledges that most doctors say it'll be back. He says that America has learned so many lessons from Round One that, if/when Covid-19 resurfaces, the US will nip it in the bud. Except that Round One isn't over. No one has rung the bell. Yet many States are starting to sound the 'all clear' and, in the process, creating the conditions needed for the contagion to grow and spread.

If the political will is too weak to continue the lockdown until Round One is over or very nearly so, how willing or reluctant will governments be to impose lockdown again if/when the virus seems to be coming for a rematch?

What's the plan? How will government respond? How long will that take? What will be expected of us? Where's this vaccine? So many questions and yet no answers.

Kindness Repaid

A group in Ireland is raising funds to provide aid to America's neglected Choctaw first nation. From the New York Times:

More than 170 years ago, the Choctaw Nation sent $170 from Oklahoma to starving Irish families during the potato famine. A sculpture in County Cork commemorates the generosity of the tribe, itself poor.

Now hundreds of Irish people are repaying that old kindness, giving to a charity drive for two tribes suffering in the Covid-19 pandemic. As of Tuesday, the fund-raiser has raised nearly $1.8 million to help supply clean water, food and health supplies to people in the Navajo Nation and the Hopi Reservation in the Southwest, according to the organizers.

Many donors cited the generosity of the Choctaws, noting that the gift came not long after the United States government forcibly relocated the tribe and several other American Indian groups from the Southeastern United States, a march known as the Trail of Tears that left many dead along the way.

“I’d already known what the Choctaw did in the famine, so short a time after they’d been through the Trail of Tears,” Sean Callahan, 43, an Apple administrator in Cork City who made a donation, said on Tuesday. “It always struck me for its kindness and generosity and I see that too in the Irish people. It seemed the right time to try and pay it back in kind.”

Gary Batton, chief of the Choctaw Nation Oklahoma, said in a statement that the tribe was “gratified — and perhaps not at all surprised — to learn of the assistance our special friends, the Irish, are giving to the Navajo and Hopi nations.”

You Liberals Will Love This

Every morning I listen to BBC's Global News podcast. Some morning it starts with a commercial aimed at Canadian listeners. This morning's ad was a spot by Amica, a Canadian assisted-living company.

The commercial had someone who sounded exactly like Justin Trudeau doing the voiceover. Exactly. The same tone, the same cadence, indistinguishable. Amica, it seems, has concluded that Justin Trudeau's voice is comforting to their target market, seniors. That voice sells.

The rest of the ad, however, was a lot like this:

Just sayin'

The Vengeful Wrath of Donald Trump

Former Trump fixer< Michael Cohen, was one of a number of inmates who qualified for early release from prison due to the Covid-19 virus. Then this happened.

Michael Cohen, former personal lawyer and fixer for President Donald Trump, was denied a promised early release from prison Friday, a day after an attorney from the Trump Organization sent him a threatening letter warning against him publishing a reported “tell-all” book before the 2020 election. 

White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany said “absolutely not” when asked at a news conference whether the White House directly or indirectly interfered in the decision to delay Cohen’s planned early released from a federal prison in New York state.

Cohen was due to be set free into home confinement Friday from the facility in Otisville because of concerns about the coronavirus spreading among inmates and guards.
He has completed a 14-day quarantine required for that release. 

But the 53-year-old ex-lawyer, who was in the midst of serving a three-year criminal sentence, was told he would not be going home on Friday to his family in Manhattan, according to people familiar with the situation. 

It is not clear if Cohen’s release, which was originally approved by the federal Bureau of Prisons, has been permanently rescinded.

Cohen’s original release date, which is possibly now his current release date, was in November 2021.

Can't let Mikey write that book, not before the election.

How Hot? Sahara Hot.

Another study confirms that global heating is coming and, for billions of us, it will be unbearable. That's billions, with a 'B'.

As our planet heads toward 3 degrees Celsius of warming, a conservative estimate, in more equatorial zones, the vast center belt of the planet, temperatures will soar an unlivable 7.5 C, as hot as the most scorched parts of the Sahara Desert.

Humanity is particularly sensitive because we are concentrated on land – which is warming faster than the oceans – and because most future population growth will be in already hot regions of Africa and Asia. As a result of these demographic factors, the average human will experience a temperature increase of 7.5C when global temperatures reach 3C, which is forecast towards the end of this century.

At that level, about 30% of the world’s population would live in extreme heat – defined as an average temperature of 29C (84F). These conditions are extremely rare outside the most scorched parts of the Sahara, but with global heating of 3C they are projected to envelop 1.2 billion people in India, 485 million in Nigeria and more than 100 million in each of Pakistan, Indonesia and Sudan.

Long before these areas see 7.5 C, they'll become uninhabitable. Most of them are agrarian societies that require many people to work outside in the sun and heat. In countries that are already food insecure these productivity losses will be devastating: ilo.org, phs.org, unu.edu.  Workers lose their ability to perform for part, if not much of the standard workday. Animals suffer from exposure to such heat. Crops wither. It's devastation that renders regions uninhabitable. These also tend to be the poorest regions where climate control - air conditioning - is unaffordable. That's not going to get better as they lose their economies.

There are always wild cards in these reports. One is timing. Since climate change studies began to flood in, one after another have been unduly optimistic. Changes we were warned might be seen by 2100 instead appeared many decades earlier than predicted. While we have concentrated on certain scientific aspects of climate breakdown, social and economic impacts and human resilience have attracted less attention. There are few historical precedents for change of this enormity.

The effects of climate breakdown on crime are rarely mentioned. A paper out of Harvard in 2012 looked only at the United States and estimated the effects of climate change over the coming century would add massively to America's crime statistics:

Under the IPCC's A1B climate scenario, the United States will experience an additional 35,000 murders, 216,000 cases of rape, 1.6 million aggravated assaults, 2.4 million simple assaults, 409,000 robberies, 3.1 million burglaries, 3.8 million cases of larceny, and 1.4 million cases of vehicle theft, compared to the total number of offenses that would have occurred between the years 2010 and 2099 in the absence of climate change.

Of course in larger nations, such as the United States, there will be big variations in climate breakdown that will be influenced by latitude, proximity to coastlines, etc. The south is expected to roast while the north merely swelters.

Climate breakdown will trigger wars of the worst kind - wars of subsistence, survival.  As Gwynne Dyer put it (I loosely paraphrase), no village no matter how peaceful will allow its children to starve before it raids its neighbours.

Then there's the problem of mass migration. Long before climate breakdown becomes a death sentence, people wanting to survive will attempt to migrate.

All of these things - crime waves and social collapse, mass migration and climate wars are very much on the minds of military planners around the world. Climate breakdown has been a central theme of the last two US Defense Department's Quadrennial Defense Reviews. The British MoD has undertaken similar studies.  The American QDRs were legislatively mandated. Since Trump took office they've been replaced by NDS, National Defense Strategy papers, and these reports are classified.

Take a Hike, Bezos

Obscenely rich Jeff Bezos thinks we'd all be better off if we just ordered our groceries online, that is to say from Amazon.  If what makes Jeff Bezos better off is any measure of making the plebs better off he could have a point. But, it's really about just making Bezos better off.

Many of us are, for the first time, ordering groceries online. That’s causing huge spikes in demand on e-commerce sites like Amazon, which has moved quickly to expand its grocery delivery services and transform Whole Foods Markets into fulfillment centers for online orders. 

But if Amazon consolidating control over yet another sector of the economy during a crisis makes you uncomfortable, Jeff Bezos would like to offer a reframe: Actually, buying your groceries online is better for the planet.

That, at least, is the striking claim made in Bezos’ annual letter to Amazon shareholders, which the e-commerce behemoth’s CEO released last month. In a section on Amazon’s climate impact, Bezos asserts that shopping online is “inherently” more efficient, from a carbon emissions perspective, than going to the store. He references a study conducted by Amazon that found that ordering Whole Foods groceries online reduces the carbon emissions associated with every item in a grocery basket by 43 percent compared with driving to Whole Foods.

Great idea. Let's put Bezos between people and their food supply. Who needs to shop local? Amazon don't. Who needs farmer's markets? Jeff says you don't. Besides, "farm fresh" is so overrated. Who needs those cashiers and clerks and the kids who carry out your groceries - the people who live in your community thanks to those jobs? And what about those pesky carbon emissions anyway. Leave that up to Jeff. He'll ship that stuff from one end of the country to a "fulfillment center" at some other part of the country and, from there, to your door. Carbon emissions? Hah, that's for losers.

Suddenly "The Terror" doesn't sound so terrible after all.

Oh yeah, Amazon sucks.

Again?

I don't know what to say, except that they need to be heard.


Tiny House Under Attack from Doreen Manuel on Vimeo.

"A Transformed and Blighted World"

Protesters in the US blocking roads and storming state houses are demanding a return to normal. No more lockdowns, no quarantine, no social distancing. Back to normal.

What if there is no prospect of going back to the way things were? What if the post-pandemic world will be vastly different and not for the better?

New York Times columnist, Michelle Goldberg, contends that Covid-19 has brought America (and the world) to the point of irreversible change.

Many of those stores will come back — some have already — but analysts predict that thousands won’t. Jobs lost to automation during this time — in warehouses and supermarkets, among other places — are especially unlikely to return. Americans, increasingly desperate in lockdown, are going to emerge from this period into a transformed and blighted world.

... 

As we approach this year’s election, we’re looking at an abyss. The question is what will fill it. Societal disaster can have horrific political consequences: Around the world, despots are using the pandemic as an excuse to grab ever more power. But the need to rebuild the country comes with opportunities.

At this point, even many Republicans acknowledge that the era of small government is over. (“Big-Government Conservatives Mount Takeover of G.O.P.,” said a recent Politico headline.) In such an environment, ambitious progressive ideas that once seemed implausible, at least in the short term, start to become more imaginable.

“I do think there’s an F.D.R. moment,” said Senator Edward Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts and co-author of the Green New Deal resolution, which calls for a huge new public works program to build environmentally sustainable infrastructure. “Like 1933 — which would be 2021 — we can see that it is now time to discuss universal child care, universal sick leave and a guaranteed income for everyone in our society.”

A progressive restoration?

Now the people celebrated as heroes are “essential workers” — doctors and nurses, but also grocery store clerks, bus drivers, meatpackers and mail carriers. There’s no guarantee that America will reward their sacrifice; even Sept. 11 emergency workers had to struggle to get the health care funding they needed.

But cultural shifts pave the way for political reform. “When little children are making signs that say, ‘Thank You,’ and taping them up in the window for the mail carriers and UPS delivery folks, the world has changed,” Elizabeth Warren told me. (Disclosure: my husband consulted on Warren’s presidential campaign.)

Warren and Khanna recently released a proposal for what they’re calling an “Essential Workers Bill of Rights,” which folds many longtime progressive labor priorities into a plan to address our current emergency. The proposal includes a mandate for free adequate personal protective equipment, hazard pay, universal paid sick leave and paid family leave, a crackdown on employers that misclassify full-time employees as independent contractors, and protections for union organizing.

If so, it will echo what happened during the Great Depression. “This is what shocked everyone,” Warren said. “All of the economists thought the Great Depression in the 1930s would be the end of unions because so many people were unemployed and there was such a large labor supply, and unionization was going down during the 1920s. But that’s not what happened. In a time of great stress, more workers decided their only chance of survival was to come together and exercise their power through a union.” 

Mass unemployment also makes some version of a Green New Deal seem like more of a near-term possibility, at least if Biden wins the presidency. During the primaries, Biden’s environmental proposals were generally more modest than his rivals’, but with the pandemic ravaging the economy he’s called for a trillion-dollar infrastructure program focused on green jobs. That’s a lot less than what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who co-sponsored the Green New Deal in the House, has demanded — but it’s more than the entire cost of the stimulus bill President Barack Obama signed at the height of the Great Recession.

But if reform is in the offing, it won't be achieved without a fight. The forces that delivered us into terminal-stage neoliberalism will try to cling to the levers of power.

The Great Recession of 2007-2008 was one seismic jolt, Covid-19 is another. There will be more. In the course of this decade we can expect more jolts - from climate breakdown, a global population already grown far beyond the planet's carrying capacity, and our relentless, rapacious exhaustion of the planet's resources. We've been warned that there are more pandemics already in the chamber, locked and loaded. We will likely see regions - equatorial and tropical - become uninhabitable. Weak nations will become failed nations with all the dangers and troubles that entails.

Trump is not Hitler But He Has a Few of the Instincts

From torchlight marches in Charlottesville to heavily armed fanatics storming Michigan's state house, Trump's stamp on America is inescapable.

Trump is a master of the "big lie" and he has groomed a significant segment of the American people to accept pretty much whatever hatred he spews. He is Lord of the Flies.

Trump's paranoid racism and xenophobia are eerily reminiscent of another creature of pure evil from another country and another time whose name rhymes with "Shitler." In some ways Trump mirrors early-onset Shitlerism.

Let's not forget that Shitler was enamoured of many things American.  He avidly consumed America's eugenics theory and used it to justify ridding his country of the infirm - the physically and mentally disabled, the infirm, anyone who could be labeled "unfit for life" or "useless eaters." He was also deeply inspired by American racism.

As race law’s global leader, America provided the most obvious point of reference for the September 1933 Preußische Denkschrift, the Prussian Memorandum, written by a legal team that included Roland Freisler, soon to emerge as the remarkably cruel president of the Nazi People’s Court. American precedents also informed other crucial Nazi texts, including the National Socialist Handbook for Law and Legislation of 1934–35, edited by the future governor-general of Poland, Hans Frank, who was later hung at Nuremberg. A pivotal essay in that volume, Herbert Kier’s recommendations for race legislation, devoted a quarter of its pages to U.S. legislation—which went beyond segregation to include rules governing American Indians, citizenship criteria for Filipinos and Puerto Ricans as well as African Americans, immigration regulations, and prohibitions against miscegenation in some 30 states. No other country, not even South Africa, possessed a comparably developed set of relevant laws.

Especially significant were the writings of the German lawyer Heinrich Krieger, “the single most important figure in the Nazi assimilation of American race law,” who spent the 1933–34 academic year in Fayetteville as an exchange student at the University of Arkansas School of Law. Seeking to deploy historical and legal knowledge in the service of Aryan racial purity, Krieger studied a range of overseas race regimes, including contemporary South Africa, but discovered his foundation in American law. His deeply researched writings about the United States began with articles in 1934, some concerning American Indians and others pursuing an overarching assessment of U.S. race legislation—each a precursor to his landmark 1936 book, Das Rassenrecht in den Vereingten Staaten (“Race Law in the United States”). 

 ...A June 5, 1934, conference of leading German lawyers gathered to exchange ideas about how best to operationalize a racist regime. The record reflects how the most extreme among them, who relied on Krieger’s synoptic scholarship, were especially drawn to American legal codes based on white supremacy. The main conceptual idea was Freisler’s. Race, he argued, is a political construction. In both America and Germany, the importance and meaning of race for the most part had been determined less by scientific realities or social conventions than by political decisions enshrined in law.

Shitler had a big fan in American industrial giant and fellow racist, Henry Ford.  Before WWII, Ford's German subsidiary published this ode in its in-house magazine.

We have sworn to you once,
But now we make our allegiance permanent.
Like currents in a torrent lost,
We all flow into you.

Even when we cannot understand you,
We will go with you.
One day we may comprehend,
How you can see our future.
Hearts like bronze shields,
We have placed around you,
And it seems to us, that only
You can reveal God’s world to us.

Gee, that couldn't been written by Trump's base. The sentiment is certainly shared.

Consigning the disabled, infirm and unproductive to his camps and ovens was labeled a policy of social hygiene. These lower orders were a drain on the nation, unfit to live. Some 360,000 were sterilized. Another 250,000 were "euthanized" - murdered.

In 1939 the killing of disabled children and adults began. All children under the age of three who had illnesses or a disability, such as Down’s syndrome, or cerebral palsy were targeted under the T4 programme. A panel of medical experts were required to give their approval for the ‘euthanasia’, or supposed ‘mercy-killing’, of each child. 

Many parents were unaware of the fate of their children, instead being told that they were being sent for improved care. After a period of time parents were told their children had died of pneumonia and their bodies cremated to stop the spread of disease. 

Following the outbreak of war in September 1939 the programme was expanded. Adults with disabilities, chronic illnesses, mental health problems and criminals who were not of German origin were included in the programme. Six killing centres were established to speed up the process – the previous methods of killing people by lethal injection or starvation were deemed too slow to cope with large numbers of adults. The first experimental gassings took place at the killing centre in Brandenberg and thousands of disabled patients were killed in gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. 

The model used for killing disabled people was later applied to the industrialised murder within Nazi concentration and extermination camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau.
It is estimated that close to 250,000 disabled people were murdered under the Nazi regime.

Trump, of course, is no Shitler. America is no late 30s Germany either.  Yet, lurking beneath the surface of today's America are similar instincts. The past offers a timely lesson of what can happen when liberal democracy entwines promiscuously with illiberal democracy, particularly when the country succumbs to a psychopath.

Vox Populi. Time to Ban Assault Rifles - Finally.

"Black Guns" gotta go. The Trudeau government is planning to ban AR-15 style rifles and four out of five Canadians think it's about time.

The Liberals first proposed such a ban on 2015 but, like so many 2015 promises, that went nowhere. The recent mass carnage in Nova Scotia seems to have been enough to revive that pledge - partly. The current proposal is a watered down version of what Mr. Trudeau promised in 2015. Now, instead of a mandatory surrender/buy back, existing black gun owners will have the option to keep their AR's grandfathered into the new law. There's something so 'Justin Trudeau' about that.

78 percent of respondents to an Angus Reid survey support banning assault rifles in Canada. The remaining 22 percent disagree. Gun owners are nearly split, 55 percent opposed to a ban.

Curiously enough, when it comes to banning handguns support drops to two in three.

This is something of a dog whistle issue. In theory, assault-rifle style weapons are no more lethal than many other firearms. It's just that they connote menace to the public but also to many of those who buy them. Why settle for grandpa's old bolt gun when you can go full Rambo? It's this mentality, on display in the freaks who carry them in public in the United States, that lies at the core of this.

I support a ban and always have and I am a gun owner. I've got a lever gun, a "cowboy gun" of the sort you'll have seen wielded by Henry Fonda or Jimmy Stewart or John Wayne in the westerns. It's safely secured and, when I do get it out it's either to go to the rifle range (now closed for Covid-19) or if I'm heading out into the bush. Its "menace factor" is about the same as Jimmy Stewart and he's long departed.