The Death of a Queen

I was still in my teens when I first got to fly aboard the Boeing 747. I suppose that over the decades there have been countless teens who did the same only I was aboard Air Canada's first and brand new 'jumbo jet.'

I was supposed to be on a DC-8 red eye flight Toronto to Heath Row. It was lightly booked, something that happened in those days. It was also delayed and delayed and delayed. Gremlins apparently.

Airlines cared more about their paying customers back then which was probably why we were informed they were fetching another aircraft for the flight. Fine, great, whatever - let's just go.  And then it showed up. It wasn't this 747's very first flight but it was close.

So the passengers on what was to have been a lightly booked DC-8 instead boarded this cavernous beauty. The cabin crew invited us to seat ourselves and stretch out. Many of us got a row of seats to ourselves.  For a red eye, we were going to be comfortable.

And now that era ends. The Queen of the Sky will soon be no more, at least for the passenger trade. Covid-19 and the collapse of air travel is pushing her to a premature demise.  British Airways just announced it is retiring its entire 747 fleet.

There are still some 747s on Boeing's assembly line, about 16. That'll be it.  The 747-8s include two that will be the next and last Air Force One(s).  With any luck, Joe Biden will be their first presidential passenger.

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BTW, the 747 may have been the Queen of the Sky but, when it comes to jumbo jets, Lockheed's L-1011 was always the King.  The Tri-Star damned near ruined Rolls Royce but there was nothing like it.

Nikiforuk On Our Deadly Pursuit of Exponential Growth

I am tired of writing about the perils and pitfalls of  perpetual exponential growth so obsessively pursued by our political leadership. It seems so obvious that it's tempting to think of our leaders, from all parties, as deeply malevolent. So, here's the Tyee's Andrew Nikiforuk.  And Nikiforuk explores exponential growth in the context of Covid-19.

After China reported its first case in December of what was later identified as COVID-19, it took 67 days to reach the first 100,000 global cases. 

No big deal, we thought. 

It then took 11 days to make the next 100,000 cases. 

And just four more days for the third 100,000 cases. 

Now the world reports 250,000 cases every day and this pandemic has just gotten started.
When the numbers are small, we ignore them and underestimate the threat.

...Why this blindness? Humans have trouble imagining a small number becoming a tsunami. Our imaginations stop at the threshold of chaos and go blank. 

Years ago, Albert Bartlett, a gentle Colorado physicist with wild hair, tried to convince people that the greatest shortcoming of the human race was its “inability to understand the exponential function.”

...In 1999 Ray Kurzweil, a technology guru and computer scientist, invented a new expression: “The second half of the chessboard.” 

By the second half, he meant the point where exponential growth takes on a life of its own, and “its impacts become massive, things get crazy, and the acceleration starts to elude most humans’ imagination and grasp,” explained Bruno Giussani, the European director of TED, in a 2017 Edge article. 

He’s right about the exponential growth of technologies. It took the telephone 75 years to conquer 50 million people, and computers just 14 years to command the same number. But it only took Pokemon Go just 14 days to dominate the imaginations of 50 million consumers.

...About 300 years ago the human population went on an exponential ride thanks to the proliferation of fossil fuels, which allowed an increasing number of people to eat, drink and spend like kings. 

It took roughly 300 years for human population to double from 500 million to roughly one billion in 1804. It took 110 years to double to 1.8 billion. Then things went wild, taking only 60 years to hit 3.6 billion. And then just 45 years to hit 7.3 billion in 2017. 

The consumption patterns driven by nearly eight billion people have created an exponential assault on the Earth’s finite resources. 

In 1900, the globe dug up seven billion tonnes of coal, iron, fish, wood fertilizer and aluminum to keep the economy humming. By 2000, the economy consumed 49 billion tonnes of materials from the Earth. Now we carelessly extract 90-billion tonnes and plan to double that every 30 to 40 years. The global chessboard is groaning.

Exponential growth gives people two basic choices: act early or be overwhelmed. It then follows its own logic: things will initially get worse even when good actions are taken before they improve.

...In his wonderful novel on friends and marriage, Crossing to Safety, Wallace Stegner offers a more literate illustration of the power of the exponential function in our everyday lives. 

“You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.” 

Gradually, and then suddenly.

Hot Enough For Ya?

Heat could be the big environmental issue of this decade. The Earth is getting hotter. I think we all realize that. The land is getting hotter. The air is heating up. The oceans are absorbing ever more heat (remember, Newton's 2nd law of thermodynamics).  This is easy stuff. We've been using thermometers for a couple of centuries. We've been keeping accurate temperature records for about 140 years.

Heat, however, is taking on some new dimensions. Hotter air, for example, retains more water vapour. That extra humidity, the science types peg it at 14 per cent more, results in severe storm events of increasing frequency, duration and intensity. We're also getting more "atmospheric rivers." These are bands of moisture laden air that snake across our oceans and create heavy flooding when they reach land. Here on the west coast we're familiar with them. We call them the "pineapple express." Now they're showing up in other places such as the UK where the flooding can be even more devastating.

What we're getting today is abnormal. It's taking us by surprise, catching us with our pants down. The UK is a perfect example. There you'll find beautiful, quaint villages built along rivers that are now becoming seasonally inundated.

When these villages were built, flash flooding wasn't an issue. It is now.

The new heat and humidity is also taking a toll on humans. Excess heat and humidity can kill. Extreme humidity can negate evaporative cooling. You still sweat only the air is too humid to wick that moisture away.  The body begins to overheat, damaging internal organs.

The US is broken into three heat bands. The hottest begins along the southeastern seaboard to Florida and then west to the California interior. I'm not sure why the San Diego/Los Angeles coastal corridor isn't included. Within this band the heat and humidity index is being taken seriously as this University of Georgia heat chart for athletics demonstrates.

In other parts of the world, wet heat is a more sinister threat. The areas most affected are countries in the equatorial and tropical latitudes. These tend to be the poorest countries where much of the population works outdoors, usually in agriculture. Working too long in the fields can be a death sentence. Seeking shelter, however, restricts the amount of farm work that can be performed.  For people eeking out a subsistence living this can be a nightmare.

It's not only herders and farmers that are affected.  In tropical Singapore, pandemic healthcare workers are harshly impacted.

Global warming will increase the chances of summer conditions that may be "too hot for humans" to work in. 

When we caught up with Dr Jimmy Lee, his goggles were steamed up and there was sweat trickling off his neck. 

An emergency medic, he's labouring in the stifling heat of tropical Singapore to care for patients with Covid-19. 

There's no air conditioning - a deliberate choice, to prevent the virus being blown around - and he notices that he and his colleagues become "more irritable, more short with each other". 

And his personal protective equipment, essential for avoiding infection, makes things worse by creating a sweltering 'micro-climate' under the multiple layers of plastic. 

"It really hits you when you first go in there," Dr Lee says, "and it's really uncomfortable over a whole shift of eight hours - it affects morale."

And as Dr Lee and other medics have found, the impermeable layers of personal protection equipment (PPE) - designed to keep the virus out - have the effect of preventing the sweat from evaporating.

For some healthcare providers help may be on the way where it's feasible and, more critically, where it's affordable.



In impoverished regions, personal cooling systems would be prohibitively expensive for agrarian workers. There, options will narrow.

If It's a Scandal You're Looking For

If you think this "WE" business rises to the level of a scandal, you're wrong. Trudeau has apologized and let's move on.

There is another scandal involving the Trudeau government, one that's awfully horrific. It's about how Trudeau & Company have chosen to allocate their aid to the energy sector almost entirely to fossil fuel companies, giving the clean energy sector the cold shoulder.

Federal energy and environment officials were warned in late April that Canada's clean-tech sector was in danger as COVID-19 knocked the bottom out of the industry. 

Three months later, a new policy tracker on energy investments made by G20 countries finds Ottawa and the provinces have put very little on the table to help clean-tech companies directly, while targeting fossil-fuel producers with more than $16 billion in aid. 

Keith Stewart, a senior energy strategist at Greenpeace Canada, said the federal government has been "completely captured by the oil industry."

But wait. Didn't the Trudeau government proclaim we're in a climate state of emergency? Of course they did, right there on the floor of the House of Commons. Of course, less than 24 hours later they greenlighted the massive expansion of the bitumen pipeline to the west coast. And now they're snubbing Canada's fledgling clean energy industry in favour of the fossil fuelers.

The Winnipeg-based International Institute for Sustainable Development contributed to a new international energy-policy tracker, released Wednesday, which counted all the investments made by G20 countries in energy — both fossil fuels and clean energy — since Jan. 1. Across the G20, about $201 billion has been earmarked for fossil-fuel industries, and $119 billion for clean energy. 

In Canada, the difference between the two is much more stark, with $16 billion put down to support the oil and gas industries, compared with $300 million for clean energy. That includes Alberta's $1.5 billion equity investment and the $6-billion loan guarantee for the Keystone XL pipeline, and Ottawa's $750 million to help fossil-fuel companies cut methane emissions.

If you're looking for a real scandal, a betrayal of Canada and our people, look no further.

Fauci to Trump - Grow Up!

After days of sniping from Trump's White House sock puppets trying to undermine him, Dr. Anthony Fauci apparently has had enough.

“I cannot figure out in my wildest dreams why they would want to do that,” Dr. Fauci said in an interview with The Atlantic on Wednesday. “I think they realize now that that was not a prudent thing to do, because it’s only reflecting negatively on them.” 

He spoke as Trump administration officials have sought to undermine his credibility — first anonymously, over the weekend, and then out in the open. A short op-ed by Peter Navarro, the president’s top trade adviser, published in USA Today on Tuesday evening was headlined “Anthony Fauci has been wrong about everything I have interacted with him on.” Dan Scavino, the White House deputy chief of staff for communications, posted a cartoon Sunday evening mocking Dr. Fauci. 

In the interview Wednesday, Dr. Fauci called the partisan environment around the virus disturbing. 

“It distracts from what I hope would be the common effort of getting this thing under control, rather than this back-and-forth distraction, which just doesn’t make any sense,” he said.

Asked to review the government’s response to the pandemic, he said: “We’ve got to almost reset this and say, OK, let’s stop this nonsense and figure out how can we get our control over this now, and looking forward, how can we make sure that next month, we don’t have another example of California, Texas, Florida and Arizona, because those are the hot zones now, and I’m looking at the map, saying we got to make sure it doesn’t happen in other states.”

Navarro has been Trump's crazy-loyal backstabber.  It was Navarro who, according to Trump officials, was sent out in June, 2018 to attack Justin Trudeau after Trump felt slighted following a G7 meeting in Canada. Navarro said "there is a special place in Hell" for Trudeau. His attack on Fauci is just another example of Trump White House "juvenilia."

When the inevitable backlash arrived Trump moved quickly to distance himself from Navarro's smear job - again.

Some Good News - At Least It Sounds Good

Overpopulation is going to ebb faster than some had imagined. A new report by the University of Washington published in the Lancet predicts mankind will peak at some 9.7 billion in 2064 before declining to 8.8 billion by the end of the century.

The major factors in shrinking the population are widening access to contraception and improvements in educating women and girls. If those trends are curtailed, higher growth will ensue. For instance, although sub-Saharan Africa’s population is projected to soar, its fertility rates are forecast to decline from 4.6 births per woman in 2017 to 1.7 by 2100. If that decline in fertility should fail to materialise, the overall growth will be much greater. 

Christopher Murray, the director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington in Seattle, the lead author of the research, said this opened up the potential for negative consequences if governments chose coercive policies over embracing immigration. 

“The best solutions for sustaining current population levels, economic growth and geopolitical security are open immigration policies and social policies supportive of families having their desired number of children,” he said. “However, a very real danger exists that, in the face of declining populations, some countries might consider policies that restrict access to reproductive health services, with potentially devastating consequences. It is imperative that women’s freedom and rights are at the top of every government’s development agenda.”

The report (you can find it here) models three factors: fertility (including contraception), mortality and migration. It does not account for the impacts of climate change, the loss of biodiversity, species extinction, degradation of the biosphere (soils fertility, etc.), resource shortages and problems such as wars. If, as it seems, we are on a path to a 5 C hotter world, these projections could be almost meaningless.

Banksy Hits the Tube

Guerrilla artist, Banksy, has released a video showing him taking the Covid-19 fight to London's Underground. Dressed as a disinfectant crew member, he boards a car and has at it.

Krugman - How Americans Drank Away Their Children's Future

 It's hard to argue with Paul Krugman's logic on how America's leaders bungled the  Covid-19 pandemic and why its school kids will be left to pay the price.

A brief history of the past four months in America: 

Experts: Don’t rush to reopen, this isn’t over. 

Donald Trump: LIBERATE! 

Covid-19: Wheee! 

Trump officials: Here’s our opposition research on Anthony Fauci.
And we’re now faced with an agonizing choice: Do we reopen schools, creating risks of a further viral explosion, or do we keep children home, with severe negative effects on their learning? 

None of this had to happen. Other countries stuck with their lockdowns long enough to reduce infections to rates much lower than those prevailing here; Covid-19 death rates per capita in the European Union are only a 10th those in the United States — and falling — while ours are rising fast. As a result, they’re in a position to reopen schools fairly safely.

The road not taken.

...doing what was necessary to bring the coronavirus under control would have been annoying, but entirely feasible. 

But that was the road not taken. Instead, many states not only rushed to reopen, they reopened stupidly. Instead of being treated as a cheap, effective way to fight contagion, face masks became a front in the culture war. Activities that posed an obvious risk of feeding the pandemic went unchecked: Large gatherings were permitted, bars reopened. 

And the cost of those parties and open bars extends beyond the thousands of Americans who will be killed or suffer permanent health damage as a result of Covid-19’s resurgence. The botched reopening has also endangered something that, unlike drinking in groups, can’t be suspended without doing long-run damage: in-person education.

..

 We’re now facing a terrible, unnecessary dilemma. If we reopen in-person education, we risk feeding an out-of-control pandemic. If we don’t, we impair the development of millions of American students, inflicting long-term damage on their lives and careers.

And the reason we’re in this position is that states, cheered on by the Trump administration, rushed to allow large parties and reopen bars. In a real sense America drank away its children’s future. 

Now what? At this point there are probably as many infected Americans as there were in March. So what we should be doing is admitting that we blew it, and doing a severe lockdown all over again — and this time listening to the experts before reopening. Unfortunately, it’s now too late to avoid disrupting education, but the sooner we deal with this the sooner we can get our society back on track.

Re-Thinking Hydro-Electricity

Most of the electricity British Columbians use is hydro-electricity. BC has two advantages: mountains and location, namely the west "wet" coast. 

We get a lot of moisture-laden air coming off the Pacific. In order to keep heading east the clouds must lighten their load which is achieved by raining on the various mountain ranges (there's more than just the "Rockies"). 

The mountains get the rain and, because they're mountains, gravity gets involved. That's kinetic energy, the torrents that begin as rivulets and gather to become wild-water rivers that race to the sea.

Mountain valleys are also ideal for the construction of dams that store some of that water and transform it from kinetic to potential energy in sometimes massive reservoirs and artificial lakes. Those dams can then release water into long chutes where it again becomes kinetic energy harvested by turbines at the bottom. That kinetic energy is then transformed by those turbines into hydro-electricity.

There are several environmental drawbacks to dams. The concrete used in construction is, well, concrete, a major source of emitted CO2. The reservoirs destroy the ecosystems of the valleys flooded. Then there's the fish. Species such as salmon can be prevented from reaching their spawning areas. One problem is the turbine, the spinning blades of which can simply slaughter fish trying to pass through.

Necessity is called the "mother of invention." In the American context, necessity includes coming up with sources of clean-ish electricity to replace dependence on fossil-fueled electrical generation. But, what about the fish?

A California company, Natel Energy, has partnered with a Bill Gates company to produce a new, more fish-friendly turbine blade.   Natel was founded by siblings, Abe and Gia Schneider, both engineers.

“Climate change is water change,” explains Gia. “We saw an opportunity to rethink hydropower facilities with civil and environmental engineering techniques, using fish-safe turbines, machine learning and satellite imagery.” Indeed, extreme year-on-year climate variability and unpredictable rainfall will only make innovative solutions more urgent. If done sustainably, hydropower can work as a green fuel source with a number of side benefits, including flood control, irrigation, drought mitigation and water supply.

A pinwheel configuration (rather than spokes issuing straight out of a turbine’s hub) means the turbine’s blades deliver a glancing blow instead of a knife-like strike. “From an engineering perspective, a thick blade creates a pressure zone that helps shed material out of its path, almost like an airbag for the fish, so the impact is minimal,” says Abe.

Here's an example of the Natel design.

Instead of an array of thin, sharp blades - Veg-o-Matic style - the Natel design uses just a few, thick blades. The company has spent a couple of years testing the design, including developing "sensor fish" like these:

These sensor fish have been used to gauge the lethality of  conventional turbine fans and the newer design. Retrofitting new turbines on existing hydro dams is deemed prohibitively expensive but the Natel design has been engineered as a direct replacement on the existing turbine.

In Phase I, the company designed two versions of its LP turbine and was able to demonstrate a savings of 30% to 40% in the levelized cost of energy. 

The basic idea is that the new turbine’s “low-head” modular design lends itself to low-cost installation on existing dams while reducing the need for expensive new infrastructure. Phase I was promising enough for the Energy Department to chip in another $1.5 million just a couple of days ago.

The Natel blade can also be used on other sources of flowing water.

According to Natel, installation sites could include irrigation canals and ambient river currents in addition to existing dams.

As Cleantechnia.com points out, an expansion of hydro-electricity generation is inevitable across the United States were, currently, only three per cent of US dams generate electricity.

A DOE assessment found that more than 90% of U.S. dams are used for services, such as regulating water supply and controlling inland navigation, and lack electricity-generating equipment. The assessment found that existing U.S.non-powered dams could provide up to 12 gigawatts (GW) of clean, renewable hydropower capacity from 50,000 suitable non-powered dams.

Will this eliminate environmental concerns about dams? Of course not. It's no magic wand. That said it seems to be much more fish friendly and, in British Columbia, anything that can reduce stresses on our salmon stocks is worth a careful look.

High Crimes and Misdemeanors. What Just Happened?

Trump waited until Friday night to announce he had commuted his buddy, Roger Stone's, prison sentence literally on the eve of the dirty trickster's start of a 40-month prison sentence. Over the weekend Trump made a few feeble attempts to explain it all away. Sure, Stone lied to FBI investigators and, yes, Stone tried to intimidate a witness, but, in Trump's addled mind, the investigation went nowhere, there were no charges, so it was no harm/no foul.

Only there was a lot more to this commutation. Roger Stone said as much. He even put it in writing. Stone said he was going to jail because he kept his mouth shut and, for that, he deserved a pardon or commutation. The subtext was, if I wind up in a cell, I'm talking. I'll have my revenge on you, Donald J. Trump.

What we were witnessing was the absolute corruption of the presidency and it reaches from the Oval Office straight into the Department of Justice under the thoroughly corrupt attorney general, Bill Barr. This goes way beyond "high crimes and misdemeanors" of the Nixon or Clinton variety*. This reaches into felony extortion and obstruction of justice. This is jail time stuff.

Glenn Kirshner explains.

Just What is Cancel Culture Anyway?

I'm having trouble understanding the uproar over "cancel culture," whatever that is.

I do understand the scourge of intolerance. It's bad. I've read Huxley and Orwell so I have a working grasp of group think.

The letter published in Harper's warns of "a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity.

...

The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other. As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences.

Unfortunately Ms. Atwood et al don't offer specifics about how they and their fellow writers are being reined in. What are they forbidden to express? What dire fate awaits them for crossing lines? From whom?

History shows that we have freely and unrepentantly resorted to what seem to me as similar cancel culture measures in the past. One example that comes to my mind was de-nazification in postwar Germany. So odious was nazism that it was driven from the German culture, its adherents purged of office (if they weren't required for American aerospace and weapons programme purposes). Did it work? Not on its own, it didn't. There were a lot of carrots that went along with that stick and, nazism being an idea, is a stain that never will be completely erased.

Slavery and the post-emancipation repression of blacks in America was about as odious as nazism but it persisted not for a few decades but over a span of centuries.  Tearing down statues of Confederate leaders, traitors to the United States of America, that have been symbolically oppressing black Americans every day since they were installed, is not cancel culture.

No one is going to forget Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson. No one can erase the memory of butchers such as Nathan Bedford Forrest. Their names and their vile crimes are preserved for eternity in books in every library in the English-speaking world. No one is trying to cancel that miserable culture. Destroying symbols that venerate them, however, is not cancel culture.

I'm glad that Margaret and Salman and Noam were able to get their concerns off their collective chests even if they fell far short of making a persuasive case for the peril they suggest looms above us all. It is good to be reminded of the need for free speech and tolerance and we should embrace those freedoms daily.  That said I think there are many bigger fish to fry.

The Virus is Bad Enough. The Failure of Political Leadership is Even Worse.

The director-general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, seems to be taking aim directly at authoritarian leaders such as Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro for their bungling of the Covid-19 pandemic.

"My friends, make no mistake: The greatest threat we face now is not the virus itself. Rather, it's the lack of leadership and solidarity at the global and national levels." 

"This is a tragedy that is forcing us to miss many of our friends, losing many lives. We cannot defeat this pandemic as a divided world," Tedros said, his voice trembling as he spoke.

"How is it difficult for humans to unite to fight a common enemy that's killing people indiscriminately?" Tedros asked during his plea, made during a WHO meeting. "Are we unable to distinguish or identify the common enemy? Can't we understand that the divisions or the cracks between us actually are the advantage for the virus?"

Let the Whining Begin

The US Supreme Court has sent Trump into a rage.

The court ruled, 7-2, that prosecutors in New York can access Trump's financial and tax records. As for Congress getting their hands on them, that remains unclear.

Mr. Trump immediately attacked the outcome on Twitter. “This is all a political prosecution.” 

“Courts in the past have given “broad deference”. BUT NOT ME!” he wrote. 

Mr. Trump had asked the court to block both sets of subpoenas, which had sought information from Mr. Trump’s accountants and bankers, not from Mr. Trump himself; the firms have indicated that they would comply with the court’s ruling.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers had argued that he was immune from all criminal proceedings and investigations so long as he remained in office and that Congress was powerless to obtain his records because it had no legislative need for them.

Trump is now said to be mulling over creating a 3-judge United States Supreme Court of Appeals to which he'll appoint Ivanka and the Dullard Twins, Don Jr. and Ambergris to 'review' today's decision.

The good news for Trump is that, barring some surprise, the public won't get any of the details of Trump's dealings until after the election at the earliest.  Who knows? I'd bet Putin has a copy or two.

Covid-19 Should Be a Wakeup Call to Canadians

Few would dispute Justin Trudeau's statement that it will take years for Canada's economy to recover from the damage caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. That's the harsh reality of a tightly-wound, globalist economy. It's not resilient. It doesn't bounce back the way economies did before the neoliberal era. Scars take longer to heal.

What I want you to mull over is what does this mean if we don't have years to recover? What if we're hit with another, perhaps even more severe pandemic two or three years from now while we're still getting back on our feet? What if these seismic events start arriving in multiples, two at a time?

The Earth is suffering a parasitic infestation. That would be us. There are too many of us, living on average far too long, and consuming more rapaciously with each passing decade.  We need so much of the Earth's surface and its resources that we're forcing other creatures into a rapidly shrinking wilderness that cannot support their populations. Since the 1970s their overall numbers have declined by more than half.  Meanwhile species are falling extinct at rates hundreds, some think thousands of times higher than natural baseline rates.

We are encroaching on our planet's dwindling wilderness at rates that are driving the collapse of wildlife populations and the accelerating extinction of species. Climate change is another stress multiplier for wildlife. We are choking out biodiversity oblivious to the fact that we ourselves cannot survive the loss of biodiversity.

And now nature is demonstrating, once again, that the habitat we're destroying and the pressures we're putting on other species are creating the perfect conditions to trigger and spread pandemics that will destroy our civilization and claim lives on a scale we cannot imagine.  SARS, MERS, Ebola, Covid-19 may be just a dress rehearsal for a train of pandemics many experts warn we must expect in the near future.

Only a decade or two ago it was widely thought that tropical forests and intact natural environments teeming with exotic wildlife threatened humans by harboring the viruses and pathogens that lead to new diseases in humans like Ebola, HIV and dengue. 

But a number of researchers today think that it is actually humanity’s destruction of biodiversity that creates the conditions for new viruses and diseases like COVID-19, the viral disease that emerged in China in December 2019, to arise—with profound health and economic impacts in rich and poor countries alike. In fact, a new discipline, planetary health, is emerging that focuses on the increasingly visible connections among the well-being of humans, other living things and entire ecosystems. 

Is it possible, then, that it was human activity, such as road building, mining, hunting and logging, that triggered the Ebola epidemics in Mayibout 2 and elsewhere in the 1990s and that is unleashing new terrors today?

Research suggests that outbreaks of animal-borne and other infectious diseases like Ebola, SARS, bird flu and now COVID-19, caused by a novel coronavirus, are on the rise. Pathogens are crossing from animals to humans, and many are now able to spread quickly to new places. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that three-quarters of “new or emerging” diseases that infect humans originate in nonhuman animals.

There was a time when these contagions traveled no faster than the "speed of sail." They could hit one area but die out before they became pandemic.  They were much easier to quarantine. Today they travel, often undetected, at the speed of a jetliner, taking hold globally before resources can be mobilized to deal with them.

Overpopulation is an existential threat every bit as great as the climate emergency. Every existential threat hanging over mankind today is inter-related. They all trace back to one common failure - mankind's inability or outright refusal to live within the finite limits of our ecology, our planet, Spaceship Earth.

There are simply too many of us, more than our spaceship can hold and sustain. I spoke with one scientist at the Global Footprint Network about the damage we have already inflicted on Earth's life support systems. There was a time in the 70s when the planet could sustain a maximum population of 3 to 3.5 billion. Today that number is about 2 billion. As we close in on 8 billion the magnitude of our problem becomes inescapable.

There's a process underway today called "Overshoot." It's worsening by the year. This simple graphic illustrates what this is:

The red line signifies consumption. The black dotted line is Earth's carrying capacity. When consumption (per capita consumption times population) exceeds carrying capacity it begins to degrade carrying capacity until the floor collapses out from under consumption. As population numbers collapse carrying capacity doesn't rebound. It can take centuries, even millennia to recover.

A fellow blogger posted a thoughtful item today on overpopulation and both sides of what has become a hollow debate. There are those who still argue that there is no population crisis, that technology will allow us to feed billions more.  The argument is moot given powerful factors such as soils degradation and groundwater collapse, among other ways that we're ravaging our ecosystem, that are always omitted from the debate.

I would like to conclude with an inspirational call to arms about how we must come to grips with overpopulation only I think nature will attend to it long before we can do anything meaningful. It may be better for us to think defensively, focus on how we can keep the next pandemics from our borders, how we can secure our freshwater resources, ways we can bolster our food security. We don't have to wait for chaos to overwhelm us. We need to think strategically and we don't have time to waste.

Texas Joins the Big Boys' Club

The unofficial motto of the Lone Star state holds that "everything's bigger in Texas."

Texas may not quite be Number One but today it joined New York and Florida by logging a one-day total in excess of of 10,000 Covid-19 infections.

The state's record high of 10,028 new cases served as another alarming new measure of the swift resurgence of COVID-19 nationwide and the failures of the country's response. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott aggressively began one of the country's fastest reopenings in May, but reversed course last week, ordering bars closed and mandating face coverings in much of the state. 

New York and Florida are the only other states to record more than 10,000 new cases in a single day. New York hit that grim total back in April, when New York City hospitals were overwhelmed and hundreds of people were dying every day. Florida topped 10,000 confirmed cases last week. 

Texas surged past 8,000 statewide hospitalizations for the first time over the Fourth of July weekend — a more than quadruple increase in the past month.

No word yet on when Texas hopes to take its rightful place atop the podium.

What Else Did Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump Have in Common?

Wouldn't you know it? Why, Deutsche Bank of course.

New York state financial regulators slapped Deutsche Bank with a $150 million (CAD 204 million) penalty for the bank's "significant compliance failures" in its dealings with late financier Jeffrey Epstein, the accused child sex trafficker. 

Deutsche Bank failed to properly monitor Epstein's account activity, regulators said Tuesday, including processing hundreds of transactions totaling millions of dollars that should have prompted additional scrutiny.

According to the department, the bank's failings included not scrutinizing payments to Epstein’s publicly alleged co-conspirators in sexually abusing young women; payments to Russian models; payments for women’s school tuition, hotel and rent expenses; direct payments to numerous women with Eastern European surnames (which were consistent with prior public allegations of wrongdoing); settlement payments totaling over $7 million, as well as dozens of payments to law firms totaling over $6 million for apparent legal expenses for Epstein and his co-conspirators.

“It was a critical mistake, no question. Mr. Epstein should have never been our client," Deutsche Bank CEO Christian Sewing said on CNBC Tuesday afternoon, noting that the bank's escalation process did not work in 2013. “This cannot happen and must not happen. I think we are in a far better place these days.”

This is the same Deutsche Bank that became the lender of last resort to Epstein's former play pal, president Donald J. Trump.

Mary Dishes on Don

Donald Trump's niece says her uncle is not the very stable genius he claims to be.  In her new book she writes that her uncle did well on his SATs, his Scholastic Aptitude Tests, only because he paid someone else to write them for him.

It's also being reported that DJT was abused by his cruel father.

Donald Trump suffered 'child abuse' at the hands of his father Fred Trump Sr, the President's niece Mary Trump will claim in her explosive memoir 

The book claims Fred Sr 'caused [Donald] terror' and he 'suffered deprivations that would scar him for life' 

The 55-year-old psychologist also compares Donald to Frankenstein’s monster, only unlike Dr Frankenstein, he is ‘proud of his monster’ 

Mary writes that she believes her uncle is not only a narcissist, but 'meets the criteria for antisocial personality disorder, which in its most severe form is generally considered sociopathy' 

Mary reveals Donald's eldest sister Maryanne, scoffed at his presidential run, calling him 'a clown' and poked fun at his 'five bankruptcies' 

Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man is now being released two weeks early on July 14.

The 55-year-old psychologist also compares Donald to Frankenstein, only unlike Dr. Frankenstein, he is ‘proud of his monster’.

She writes: ‘He glories in its anger and its destruction and while he cannot imagine its love, he believes in all his heart in its rage. He is Frankenstein without the conscience.'

This is getting very, very creepy.

The Old Bugger Deserves What He Gets!!

Jair Bolsonaro has contracted Covid-19. About time.

"I've came back from the hospital now, I've done a lung screening, my lung is clean, OK? I went to do a Covid exam a while ago, but everything is okay," Bolsonaro said to supporters outside the presidential palace in Brasília, while urging them to keep their distance. He was wearing a mask at the time.

Last month, a federal judge in Brazil ordered Bolsonaro to wear a mask in public while in the Brazilian capital or face a fine.

Bolsonaro has taken his lead from Trump, dismissing Covid-19 as a "little flu." In the process he has led tens of thousands of Brazilians to an early grave. 

One Thing We Have Learned from Covid-19

The global pandemic should have erased any doubt that relying on government to handle crises is a lousy bet. On threat after threat what we get from our political caste is nothing short of incompetence.

Our premiers and our prime ministers had no excuse for being surprised at the plight of our nursing home inmates.  It should not have taken military medical personnel to expose the horrible conditions, the neglect and the indifference of regulators and their political bosses that cost thousands of lives.

When it comes to the far more lethal, perhaps even existential, threat of climate breakdown again incompetence rules the day. What else is it when a government proclaims a climate state of emergency one day and, less than 24 hours later, greenlights a giant bitumen pipeline?

But wait, there's more. Justin Trudeau is a self-proclaimed globalist, a devout free trader. He never talks about the threat that poses to ordinary Canadians, our society, our nation.  He just takes it on faith this is a great thing. That is also major league incompetence.

COVID-19 has accelerated a process that was well underway before it, spreading beyond U.S.-China-EU trade negotiations and into the world’s 50 largest economies. As much as many defenders of the old order lament this trend, it is as significant a shift as the dawn of the World Trade Organization (WTO) global trade era.

What we are experiencing is the realization by state planners of developed countries that new technologies enable a rapid ability to expand or initiate new and profitable production capacity closer to or inside their own markets. The cost savings in transport, packaging and security and benefits to regional neighbors and these countries’ domestic workforces will increasingly compete with the price of goods produced through the current internationalized trade system. 

The combination of high-speed communication, advances in automated manufacturing and computing combined with widespread access to the blueprints and information necessary to kick-start new production capacity increasingly makes the current international network of supply chains resemble a Rube Goldberg contraption, and it lightens the currency outflow challenge that many economies have had to deal with for the past seven decades.

If Trudeau and Morneau were capable of vision they would see the game-changing opportunity around them. They would ditch the fossil-energy albatross round Canada's neck and begin the lengthy process to liberate the Canadian economy from China and other low wage nations.

Build jobs here. Build goods here. Build resilience here instead of perpetuating vulnerabilities to unstable and sometimes capricious global markets.

Canada established the Foreign Investment Review Agency in 1973 as a result of mounting concerns about rising overseas investment, notably the domination of U.S. multinationals, in the Canadian economy. Its provisions were repeatedly downgraded as globalization pressures intensified, but its value is now being reassessed for compatibility with national health policy and resiliency in manufacturing chains. Predictably, pharmaceutical independence is high on the list.

Yeah, great. Let's produce N95 masks here in Canada to be sure but that's chicken scratch. The technology exists to produce a great many things here, to employ Canadians in the production of goods they now buy produced offshore.

This is not a fanciful idea. Nations that focus on building resilience will be much better positioned to weather the impacts of the climate crisis that are predicted to begin hitting us within the next decade. Ignoring this is not an option. It's incompetence.

When Munich Re Walks, You've Got a Problem

One of the world's biggest insurance giants, Munich Re, is pulling its coverage of the Justin Trudeau Memorial Bitumen Pipeline, a.k.a. Trans-Mountain.

Munich Re is one of a number of insurers washing their hands of anything to do with the Tar Sands and this damned pipeline.

“Munich Re has a policy on oils sands in place, covering both investments and insurance. We no longer insure the extraction of oil sands or related dedicated infrastructure on a single risk basis. And we do not invest in companies that generate >10% of their revenue from oil sands extraction.”

This is not particularly new. In February, the world's biggest investment house, BlackRock, announced it was ditching all things Tar Sandy.

“If you look at how destructive oil sands can be, there’s a very strong rationale,” Armando Senra, head of BlackRock’s iShares Americas funds, said in an interview, saying that Alberta’s oil fields, along with coal, are “the worst offenders, if you want, from a climate perspective.” 

It wasn’t just financing that suddenly seemed at risk. Some of the world’s largest insurance companies, including AXA, Swiss RE and Zurich Insurance, announced they would stop providing coverage to projects in the oil sands, which are sometimes referred to as tar sands, as well as no longer investing money in those projects. 

In December, the American insurer The Hartford said it would no longer insure or invest in companies that get more than a quarter of their revenue from oil sands or thermal coal mining. “We selected coal and tar sands because they have been identified as leading contributors to carbon emissions,” said David Robinson, the company’s general counsel.

In February we also learned that the federal government underestimated the cost of building the expanded pipeline by a staggering 70 per cent. Having already paid far above market value for the pipeline this is insult atop injury from a government that just can't bring itself to say "no."

Today's Globe and Mail reports that the Oil Patch giants are now scrambling to deal with record debts that are coming due.

The pace of restructurings and bankruptcies has been slow as banks have little desire to own assets, and as rebounding oil prices offer hope, said Alan Ross, regional managing partner with law firm Borden Ladner Gervais. 

“There’s a lot of extend, amend and pretend with respect to finance documentation,” he said. “But at some point the music will stop.”

Too many producers gorged on cheap debt to fund operations as share prices lagged and investors soured on new equity issues, Raymond James analyst Jeremy McCrea said. 

“Even if they kick the can down the road, it’s still going to be an overarching issue,” he said.

What If They Called a Convention and Nobody Came?

The Independence Day festivities are out of the way and now the Republicans have to turn their attention to where and how they'll stage the convention to annoint Donald Trump their presidential candidate in this November's elections.

It's an elaborate, time-consuming and very, very costly endeavour at the best of times. However, Trump's fetish for pomposity could be the straw that broke the GOP camel's back.

It was originally to be staged in Charlotte, North Carolina, the city where you'll find the NASCAR Hall of Fame. A lot of money was pumped into the preparations by the city, by the state and by the GOP.  Charlotte was counting on bringing at least $100 million, perhaps up to $200 million into the local economy.

There was just one snag, Covid-19, the coronavirus that's now spreading through Dixie like Sherman's march through Georgia.

Donald Trump and the coronavirus are simply not compatible. He's made a complete mess of the whole thing and now America, with five per cent of the global population, has reaped 25 per cent of global deaths and they're still on a roll.

Donald Trump doesn't like wearing protective masks. He doesn't like social distancing. He doesn't like the advice he's constantly getting from his own Covid-19 Task Force. I suppose it doesn't help that Don doesn't like reading either.

So, when  the governor of North Carolina, a Democrat, insisted that the convention would have to adhere to masks and social distancing, Trump flew into a rage and announced they were pulling the convention and moving it to Jacksonville, Florida. Trump's coronation would settle for nothing less than a free-breathing horde of acolytes standing on the convention floor, shoulder to shoulder, shedding virus like there's no tomorrow (a self-fulfilling prophesy, I suppose).

No one in the Republican party crosses Donald Trump. What Trump wants, Trump gets. Only this time there are snags. GOP fund raisers are now having to make a second round of appeals to the 'donor class.'  Jacksonville isn't exactly a rail siding town but it is a big step down from Charlotte. The money those donors delivered for Charlotte has already been spent. Oooh, ouch.

Time to stage a Trump-standard convention is running out.  When you're trying to do it on the cheap in a second-tier venue it's that much harder. I'm not sure William Tecumseh Sherman had such a daunting challenge.

Then  I caught a story last night on NPR news that, as the pandemic rages through Florida, Republican organizers may be having second thoughts. No convention. Some "call it in" sort of deal instead.

No pomp and pageantry for the Mango Mussolini? Trump humbled by the very virus he's struggled so hard to shirk? Apoplexy anyone?

Again, Really? Wexit - or the "Prairie Plug"?

Don't we have enough on our plates right now without this annoying Wexit nonsense? Apparently the folks at Abacus polling had too much time on their hands and decided to stir the dying embers.

Nationally, only 7 per cent think Wexit is a good idea. Well, duh.

That number soars to a blistering 20 per cent in Alberta where another 26 per cent say they "could live with it." The remaining 54 per cent think it's a "terrible idea." So that makes it No by a 54 to 20 per cent margin.

Normally I wouldn't pay any attention to this Wild Rose lunacy. There's just one thing. Team Wexit are pitching a fracturing of Canada at the Ontario-Manitoba border.

Wait a minute!!!

They think they're going to set up a new country, presumably governed out of Edmonton, made up of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and, my province, British Columbia.

What makes those delusional arseholes think B.C. wants in on their plan? We're not overly fond of Alberta to begin with. And why, as the most populous of their quartet of provinces, would we want to carry a disproportionate share of the clean up of a province that's one giant Love Canal?

If Alberta and Saskatchewan did vote to secede I could imagine British Columbia deciding to go it alone.  Wexit might turn into a forlorn "Prairie Plug" with the marriage of Alberta and Saskatchewan all dressed up and nowhere to go.

Manitoba would have to choose between Ontario and Canada to the east and the landlocked Prairie Plug on the other side.  Manitoba might stand to gain - big time - just not with Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Nothing Says 4th of July, 2020, Better than "March, March" - The Chicks

And, They're Away to the Racists. No, Not Racists. Races. They're Away to the Races.

Beneath the granite gaze of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, Donald Trump last night declared war.

Just as World War II was merely a continuation of the Great War of 1914-1918, Trump seems to be fueling a resumption of the still burning embers of the American Civil War. It's the white culture versus those uppity - well, you know.  The Culture War at Defcon One.

“Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children,” Mr. Trump said, addressing a packed crowd of sign-waving supporters, few of whom wore masks. “Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities.”

Jeebus, it sounds like a neo-Nuremberg Rally.  Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Fuhrer. The Bolshevik menace about to tear down the house, all that good angry nationalist stuff.

...appealing unabashedly to his base with ominous language and imagery, he railed against what he described as a dangerous “cancel culture” intent on toppling monuments and framed himself as a strong leader who would protect the Second Amendment, law enforcement and the country’s heritage.

“Most presidents in history have understood that when they appear at a national monument, it’s usually a moment to act as a unifying chief of state, not a partisan divider,” Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian, said before the speech.

Trump went on to propose a garden to showcase statues of great American Aryans leaders.

Trump announced plans to establish what he described as a “vast outdoor park that will feature the statues of the greatest Americans to ever live,” an apparent repudiation of the growing pressure to remove statues tied to slavery or colonialism.

It could have been worse. It seems no one could quite recall the words to the Horst Wessel song.

America's Reckoning

Americans have been legendary for their near religious belief in the superiority of all things American. From their Oval Office on down, generations have clung to the bizarre notion of American exceptionalism, America the "indispensable" nation while the rest of the world looked on in puzzlement. It all culminates tomorrow, the glorious Fourth of July.

Only this year is different. David Brooks writes that his fellow Americans are experiencing a badly needed moment of humiliation, a crisis of the national spirit.

A third of Americans show signs of clinical anxiety or depression, according to the Census Bureau. Suspected drug overdose deaths surged by 42 percent in May. Small businesses, colleges and community hubs will close. 

At least Americans are not in denial about the nation’s turmoil of the last three months. According to a Pew survey, 71 percent of Americans are angry about the state of the country right now and 66 percent are fearful. Only 17 percent are proud.

Americans are reacting in two positive ways. We’re seeing incredible shifts in attitudes toward race. Roughly 60 percent of Americans now believe that African-Americans face a great deal or a lot of discrimination. People have been waiting for a white backlash since the riots, or since the statues started toppling. There isn’t much if any evidence of a backlash. There’s evidence of a fore-lash. 

Second, Americans have decided to get rid of Donald Trump. His mishandling of Covid-19 hurt him among seniors. His racist catcalls in a time of racial reckoning have damaged him among all groups.

...In 1970, in a moment like our own, Irving Kristol wrote, “In the same way as men cannot for long tolerate a sense of spiritual meaninglessness in their individual lives, so they cannot for long accept a society in which power, privilege, and property are not distributed according to some morally meaningful criteria.” 

A lot of people look around at the conditions of this country — how Black Americans are treated, how communities are collapsing, how Washington doesn’t work — and none of it makes sense. None of it inspires faith, confidence. In none of it do they feel a part.
If you don’t breathe the spirit of the nation, if you don’t have a fierce sense of belonging to each other, you’re not going to sacrifice for the common good. We’re confronted with a succession of wicked problems and it turns out we’re not even capable of putting on a friggin’ mask.

Heatwaves - Hotter and Longer. The World Wilts.

Another (there have been several) study concludes that, around the world, heatwaves have become more severe in both frequency and duration.  And, as predicted by others, they're really setting in across the equatorial and tropical latitudes.

The study found the escalation in heatwaves varied around the planet, with the Amazon, north-eastern Brazil, west Asia (including parts of the subcontinent and central Asia) and the Mediterranean all experiencing more rapid change than, for example, southern Australia and north Asia. The only inhabited region where there was not a trend was in the central United States. 

Published in the journal Nature Communications, the study found a clear increasing trend in the total number of heatwave days within and across regions, and that heatwaves were getting longer across the past 70 years.

A new focus - cumulative heating.

[Cumulative heat measures] how much additional warmth there was in an individual extreme heat event beyond the traditional threshold that defined the start of a heatwave. 

The amount of cumulative intensity across heatwave seasons was found to have increased across the planet and the decades. The average increase per decade was between 1C and 4.5C (an increase of between 1.8F and 8.1F), though in some places – the Middle East and parts of Africa and South America – the rise was closer to 10C a decade.

Like earlier studies this new report appears to corroborate the central thesis of "climate departure." This is a predicted phenomenon whereby a region reaches a point at which every year thereafter, every year, will be hotter than the hottest year in the previous era. The theory of climate departure predicts this shift will spread through the tropical regions during this decade, the 2020s. It is expected to first impact Central America and parts of the Caribbean.  Since this theory popped up seven years ago I've been watching for some new science that refutes or even modulates its predictions.

For people living in the first affected areas, life could become much harder than it already is. Most of those economies are heavily agrarian. Human bodies can only take so much heat before they break down. Some warn that a farm hand's workday could shrink to just a few hours per day. The heat will also take a toll on crop yields none of which is good for areas already food insecure.

----

As I write this I'm hoping I won't need to put the furnace on today. While people in the east have been roasting, it's been cold and damp out here. The local forecast for the rest of July calls for just two days that will break 20C - and those only by one degree. Lots of cloud. The silver lining? The forest fire situation might not be too severe this year. There's something. And besides there's always August, right? Isn't that right?

Will the Third World Be Our Miner's Canary?

When it comes to the climate emergency, Canada is 'all hat and no cattle.'  We're just not up for it, not yet. Sure we talk a good game and do some gestural things here and there for appearances but, by and large, we treat it as a concern, a worry, but definitely not an emergency.

Winston Churchill defined the critical difference between a concern and an emergency when he said, "Sometimes it is not enough that we do our best. Sometimes we must do what is required."

It's easy to point fingers at Justin Trudeau or his predecessors, especially Stephen Harper. The last environmentalist prime minister Canada had was, wait for it, Brian Mulroney. Every one since BM has been a dud, Jean Chretien very much included.

In their defence, however, the public has shown little appetite for tackling the climate emergency head on. Doing "what is required" is not, for several reasons, palatable to the public. No, I think we would give that a pass and punish any party bold enough to think otherwise at the ballot box.

It's not that we aren't worried about the climate emergency. Most of us are concerned. Most of us want something done about it, just not something that costs much and certainly not something that might impact the economy and all that perpetual exponential growth stuff.

We lack motivation. Canadians are pretty good at "riding to the guns" but this threat, while probably greater than any we've ever faced, is different. There'll be no regiments mustering on some Halifax pier before sailing off to the strains of "Farewell to Nova Scotia." There'll be no Kaiser, no Mr. Hitler to defeat this time. No noble crusades.

So, what's it going to take to shift public opinion? In my humble opinion it is going to take a decade, certainly no more than two, before we're clamouring for urgent action from Ottawa and our provincial legislatures.

It's going to take a few years of watching climate carnage sweep across the Third World and the developing economies, those nations of the tropical latitudes, to remind us that this emergency is real, it is inescapable and that we're next. Someone is always next.

The downside to this scenario is that, by the time the Canadian public have their epiphany, they'll have to deal with conditions as they are then which are likely to be a good deal more challenging than they are now. There's a price to be paid by the tardy.  That's doubly true when we just keep digging our hole deeper and deeper.  Not every problem is going to be fixable forever.

Another factor is that even if climate carnage first ravages the poorest and most vulnerable countries hundreds or thousands of miles distant, we will not be immune to the knock on effects. We're woven into this tightly integrated global economy with its long supply chains. It's powerful yet it's also very brittle, susceptible to disruption. We've already seen some of that emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic. If the climate emergency destabilizes just a couple of nations critical to those supply chains, globalism could be irreparably damaged. Then what?

Texas Latest to "Mask Up."

“We are now at a point where the virus is spreading so fast,

there is little margin for error.”

Even "don't mess with Texas" governor Gregg Abbott is reversing course and mandating the use of Covid masks in most counties of the Lone Star State.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday ordered that face coverings must be worn in public across most of the state, a dramatic ramp up of the Republican's efforts to control spiking numbers of confirmed coronavirus cases and hospitalizations.

Abbott, who had pushed Texas' aggressive reopening of the state economy in May, had previously said the government could not order individuals to wear masks. His prior virus-related orders had undercut efforts by local governments to enforce mask requirements. 

But faced with dramatically rising numbers of both newly confirmed cases of the COVID-19 virus and the number of patients so sick they needed to be hospitalized, Abbott changed course with Thursday's mask order. It requires “all Texans to wear a face covering over the nose and mouth in public spaces in counties with 20 or more positive COVID-19 cases, with few exceptions."

There are some in our own ranks who, like Greg Abbott once did, dismiss Covid-19 reaction as hysteria by "Covidiots." The Americans are dishing up proof positive of how easily this pandemic can get out of control when our leaders succumb to ideological pressures. It's a medical threat. We have first rate medical experts - virologists, epidemiologists and others - who can tell us what we must do and when. As for the noise, just tune it out.

Could Trump Bail Out Before November?

I've had this hunch lately that Donald Trump may not be on the ballot in November.

The American economy is reeling. A recent poll finds that almost two-thirds of respondents hold Trump personally to blame for many Covid-19 deaths. Now Trump repeatedly shows he's lost interest in the pandemic.

A lot of congressional Republicans are facing a tough battle for re-election this year and they're worried. Trump is falling behind in many of the critical states. Biden has a solid two-digit lead in the polls while Trump is in a slump.

Throughout his life Trump has shown himself to be a survivor. He knows when to cut and run. He will throw everyone else to the dogs while he makes his escape. And it has worked.

Trump is all about "the numbers."  He's a ratings guy. It's rumoured that he's rabid about polls showing him trailing badly in the runup to November. And he knows that, if the Dems take the White House, all that presidential immunity will be gone.

I'm thinking he might just do a Richard Milhouse Nixon and pack it in. Pence will succeed Trump as president, sit down behind the Resolute desk and start signing presidential pardons for Trump and his kids as they fly south to supervise the sandbagging of Mar-a-Lardo.

Interestingly, veteran Democrat campaigner, James Carville, also thinks there's a "significant chance" Trump is going to hit the silk.

FBI Nabs Ghislaine Maxwell. Will She Sing Like a Canary?

Her newspaper mogul dad, Robert Maxwell, died mysteriously, vanishing from his sail boat at sea. Her longtime companion and confidant,  Jeffrey Epstein, died mysteriously in a New York jail cell, ostensibly by suicide.

Now Ghislaine Maxwell is going to have to face prosecution for her role in procuring underage girls for Epstein's deviant pleasures. She seemed to disappear for a while but the FBI tracked her down.

At this point the question is whether the FBI really wants Ms. Maxwell or if they have bigger fish to fry. Are they after Epstein's reputed play pals, notables such as Prince Andrew, Alan Dershowitz*, Bill Clinton, Clinton's nemesis Ken Starr, Donald Trump, and several others from the ranks of the rich and famous. 

*Dershowitz says he never had sex with Epstein's girls, just a massage, and he kept his tighty whities on at all times (eww!).

Is that $300,000 Non-Refundable?

Tory Party leadership contenders coughed up what, for Canada, is a pretty steep entry fee - $300,000. That's the kind of money you might risk for a shot to become the next prime minister only that's looking like an increasingly remote prospect these days.

The Liberals were in a state of post-election stagnation in late February and early March, averaging about 33 per cent in the polls. That's exactly where they were on election night nearly nine months ago. 

Since then, however, the Liberals have seen their support increase significantly. It has risen to between 39 and 42 per cent support among decided voters, according to a monthly average of national polls. 

The increase in support for the Liberals — which seems to have settled around 7.5 points — eight to nine months after an election is the largest for a minority government since John Diefenbaker's Progressive Conservatives surged by 11.5 points in 1957-58.

That's the only case of a minority government experiencing a larger increase in support than the one lifting up the Liberals now.

It's Tesla Time

For years, Toyota has been the most valuable automobile company on Earth.

Until now.

The most valuable auto company today is Elon Musk's Tesla Motors.

Tesla’s stock jumped to a new record high on Wednesday, giving the electric vehicle maker a valuation of more than $208 billion, which means that it is now the most valuable car company on the planet.

Tesla is also now worth more than many of its rivals combined, such as Fiat Chrysler ($20 billion), Ford ($24 billion), Ferrari ($32 billion), General Motors ($36 billion), BMW ($41 billion), Honda ($46 billion) and Volkswagen ($74 billion).

Toyota, valued at $203 billion, is still firmly in control of second place. 

Happy Canada Day, everyone!