Our Hottest Decade

The last decade was the hottest on record but this decade, the 2020s, is blowing the doors off it.   And, when it comes to heat, America remains Number One.

What could be the highest temperature ever reliably recorded on Earth - 130F (54.4C) - may have been reached in Death Valley National Park, California. 

Sunday's reading was recorded in Furnace Creek in Death Valley. 

Before this, the highest temperature reliably recorded on Earth was 129.2F (54C) - also in Death Valley in 2013.

The heat is expected to peak today and tomorrow but California could be in the grip of this heatwave for another 10 days.  The demand for electricity for air conditioning is already taxing the grid to its limits causing officials to implement rolling, 2-hour blackouts, to keep the system from crashing.

Last week it emerged that climate scientists were taken by surprise by the second consecutive year of tundra wildfires in Siberia.

Some regions are expected to really bake this decade including parts of South America, Central America, the Middle East and South Asia.

Heatwave duration , although increasing, has significant trends restricted to South America, Africa, the Middle East, and Southwest Asia. Significant heatwave intensity trends are non-existent for most of the globe, the exception being southern Australia and small areas of Africa and South America. On the other hand, significant cumulative heat trends are comparable in space to heatwave frequency, with mainly positive magnitudes. The largest trends are seen over the Middle East and parts of Africa and South America, where the extra heat produced by heatwaves is increasing by 10 °C/decade−1. For most other areas with significant trends, cumulative heat increases by 2−6 °C decade−1.

I find it difficult to process this information without recalling the study out of the University of Hawaii several years ago predicting that a heating phenomenon, called "climate departure," would begin setting in to the same areas as listed above starting around 2023.

In February, Bloomberg reported that the climate science community's once staid models were suddenly running read hot.

There are dozens of climate models, and for decades they’ve agreed on what it would take to heat the planet by about 3° Celsius. It’s an outcome that would be disastrous—flooded cities, agricultural failures, deadly heat—but there’s been a grim steadiness in the consensus among these complicated climate simulations. 

Then last year, unnoticed in plain view, some of the models started running very hot. The scientists who hone these systems used the same assumptions about greenhouse-gas emissions as before and came back with far worse outcomes. Some produced projections in excess of 5°C, a nightmare scenario. 

The scientists involved couldn’t agree on why—or if the results should be trusted. Climatologists began “talking to each other like, ‘What’d you get?’, ‘What’d you get?’” said Andrew Gettelman, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, which builds a high-profile climate model.

Europe has also been baking with the UK recording six consecutive days above 34 C. Germany and France have endured the same conditions. Engineers in Britain are reporting that all that magnificent Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian infrastructure is "inadequate" for the climate emergency.

Heatwaves are growing more likely in the UK, with 2020 on course to be the hottest year on record. Engineers and infrastructure experts are growing increasingly concerned that vital infrastructure – from homes and buildings to transport, water and energy networks – is unable to cope with the added strain. Several pointed to last week’s Stonehaven derailment, in which three people were killed and many more injured.

What Will They Think of Next?

For the first time in the history of the US Weather Service the agency has issued a "fire tornado" warning.

The Reno office of the National Weather Service warned Northern California of a fiery tornado Saturday afternoon that had sprung up near a large, fast-moving wildfire in the Sierra. 

That’s right: A firenado. 

It is the first known issuance of a tornado warning for the climate phenomenon since it burst into California’s consciousness during the deadly Carr Fire in 2018.

Wendell Hohmann, the NWS forecaster who penned the tornado warning said that it was the first time to his knowledge of a tornado warning of this nature. 

“It’s probably the first time it’s been issued outside of a thunderstorm environment,” Hohmann said. 

Just before 3 p.m., Hohmann, working from the Reno forecast office, observed a cloud forming in Lassen County by the 2,300-acre wildfire which started in Sierra County in the Tahoe National Forest. He and his colleagues knew it was capable of forming into a tornado and spreading fire around the area.

Here's the warning, as issued:

“The Loyalton Fire to the east of the Sierra Valley exploded most impressively this afternoon, with a very large pyrocumulus and reports of fire tornadoes.”

Has the Clock Run Out on Bill Morneau?

With Mark Carney hovering in the wings is the writing on the wall for Trudeau finance minister, Bill "Job Churn" Morneau?

There have been  a few reports of friction between the prime minister and Morneau over Canada's burgeoning deficit.

Morneau has always been true to his class. He was definitely born with a silver spoon, becoming chairman of the company his dad founded, Canada's largest HR firm, Morneau Schepell. He also served as the chairman of the right-leaning C.D. Howe Institute. All of that seemed to come shining through when, as finmin, Morneau told Canadians they had better get used to a future of "job churn" in the gig economy. It was a true "let them eat cake" moment.

For what it's worth (and that's not much), Trudeau has denied the tension claims and says he has full confidence in his finance minister.

Morneau's resistance to expensive environmental initiatives reflects his roots in Bay Street, Toronto's financial center, and a view held among right-leaning Liberals that deficits are out of control.

"The idea of greening the economy just by spending money on every project you have in front of you is not really serious," said a fifth source sympathetic to Morneau's position. 

Possible budget measures range from investments to help provinces reduce their carbon footprint, boosting research into clean technology and encouraging the construction of efficient buildings. 

"Morneau has been saying: 'We need to get a grip'. And that isn't always popular," said one of the three sources familiar with the matter.

Much as I like Mark Carney, is he the person to formulate a vision for Canada's economy in the 21st century?

Carney graduated from Harvard in 1988 with a bachelor's degree with high honours in economics, before postgraduate studies at the University of Oxford at St Peter's College and Nuffield College, where he received masters and doctoral degrees in the same field in 1993 and 1995, respectively.

His academic credentials are sterling. His grasp of  the economic impacts of climate change is excellent. He has repeatedly addressed the "Carbon Bubble" that imperils countries such as our own. That's a lot to expect of any one individual. But what about that other nemesis that confronts us, inequality?

It turns out that Carney is very much alive to the threat posed by inequality. Here are a few headlines from Carney's tenure as governor of the Bank of England.

"Mark Carney warns of the dangers of growing inequality." (2014)

Inequality is “demonstratively” growing and risks undermining the basic social contract of fairness, Mark Carney, the Bank of England governor, said on Tuesday. 

Weighing into the growing political debate on inequality, Mr Carney highlighted “disturbing evidence” of declining social mobility in advanced economies, as well as increasing strains between generations and doubts about whether today’s social programmes could be afforded for futures generations. 

These issues struck at the heart of a “basic social contract comprised of relative equality of outcomes; equality of opportunity; and fairness across generations”, Mr Carney argued.

"Mark Carney: we must tackle isolation and detachment caused by globalisation." (2016)

“From the rising spectre of global terrorism to intensifying geopolitical tensions and financial crises, for too long, for too many people, the world seems to be getting riskier,” he said in a lecture to Liverpool John Moores University.

Carney acknowledged in his speech that voters deserved a more honest appraisal from economists when it came to the real impact of changes such as globalisation and the automation of jobs. 

“The fundamental challenge is that, alongside its great benefits, every technological revolution mercilessly destroys jobs and livelihoods – and therefore identities – well before new ones emerge,” he said. 

He noted the rise in living standards around the world in recent decades and said technological progress had lifted more than 1 billion people out of poverty. But he recognised those advances had not been felt equally. 

“Despite such immense progress many citizens in advanced economies are facing heightened uncertainty, lamenting a loss of control and losing trust in the system. To them, measures of aggregate progress bear little relation to their own experience. Rather than a new golden era, globalisation is associated with low wages, insecure employment, stateless corporations and striking inequalities,” he said.

The main focus of his last speech of an eventful year, was inequality and he described current times as “the first lost decade since the 1860s”.

That's pretty progressive talk for a party that jettisoned progressive thinking in its drive to become today's "Conservative-Lites."

We are embarked on an era in which political decision-making usually fails us. The Covid-19 pandemic taught us that medical issues are best left to medical professionals. Our abject failure on the greatest threat facing the future of Canada, climate change, strongly suggests that is far too important to be entrusted to the grindstones of partisan politics. Why should mapping out a vision for Canada's economic future be left to political whimsy?

The hard fact is that we don't have leaders today of the stature of Pierre Trudeau, Mike Pearson, Wilfred Laurier or Louis St. Laurent. No, today we get the like of Andrew Scheer, Quisling Peter MacKay and the well-intentioned but feckless and less than always forthright Justin Trudeau.

S.O.S. - Save Our Soils, Save Our Souls

One of the great ecological challenges of this century will be to save our stocks of farmland from soil degradation. While the degree of soil degradation varies from country to country, even Canadian farms are not immune.

Eight or nine years ago I did a couple of online courses on global food security. I found a couple of footnoted references in the assigned reading that steered me to couple of studies by top agronomists on the subject of soil degradation. It was pretty disturbing stuff.

In 2015 these reports were digested by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) that issued a warning that the world might have no more than another 60 harvests before our soils became useless. That's a very awkward way of saying we are rapidly exhausting our productive farmland through intensive, industrial farming techniques and reliance on ever-increasing quantities of agricultural chemicals - fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. We are stripping the essential carbon out of the soil.

Look at the map above.  Start with North America. There you'll see the US and Canadian grainbelt, much of it in red, i.e. very degraded. You'll find a similar situation through Central America, India, Sub-Saharan Africa and China.

Not only are we exhausting our soils, we're also depleting the aquifers that we drained so rapaciously to support the Green Revolution. That includes America's giant Ogallala aquifer that underlies eight states that comprise the Great Plains. In 2012, Harper's magazine featured an article, "Broken Heartland: The Looming Collapse of Agriculture on the Great Plains." I don't have a Harper's subscription at the moment but here's an excerpt.  Wait, wait, wait  - I tracked down the entire article here.

This isn't a North American problem. It's a global problem. It's partly agricultural but it is also many other things such as shifting and unpredictable (unreliable) precipitation patterns, droughts and floods, groundwater exhaustion, surface water contamination and more.

Guess what? I think I know how to fix this. I think I know how to rehabilitate degraded farmland. I think I know a way to do it at no to minimal cost. It might even be profitable. It would provide a tonne of new jobs. It is scaleable and would probably work in most parts of the world. It might even allow us to rehabilitate our beleaguered forests too. It might allow us to transform what we have so far overlooked as marginal land into productive farmland. I formulated this idea over a few years. There is plenty of science that supports it.  For the past several years, I've focused on finding flaws, pitfalls showing that it might not work. I've been looking. I haven't found anything. Nothing.

What I haven't found is someone to talk to. That would be someone in government probably at an ADM level who can take an hour or so to hear me out. An agriculture/environmental person. Know someone like that? Ask him/her to contact me at this blog or parksbmw@shaw.ca. Tell them it would help if they would familiarize themselves with the Sherman tank of WWII. Don't ask me to explain.

Why am I bringing this up today?  My inspiration comes from an item on CBC's web site, "With better soil, farmers can fight climate change, make agriculture more sustainable." It's about regenerative farming and how farmland can be used to capture carbon. It's all true. Boring but true.

David Burton, a soil scientist and professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, said that over the years, intensive agriculture production methods — particularly tillage, which breaks up the soil in preparation for planting — have dramatically reduced the amount of organic matter in the soil. 

The result of less organic matter is that "the soil structure is being degraded, such that soils have difficulty holding water and resisting soil erosion, and they become less fertile," Burton said.

"That's making our agricultural production systems less and less productive, and some soils are becoming deserts and no longer able to produce food." 

In 2015, the Food and Agriculture Organization, a United Nations agency, calculated a finite number of growing seasons left if farming practices remain unchanged.

"Unless we improve our soil and soil management, we only have 60 harvests left," Burton said, referring to the UN's statement. "We'll only have 60 years to produce the food to support the world's population."

That's true, all of it. It's the model they're promoting that holds them back. There are better ways to do what they're trying to achieve.

UPDATE

To drive home how dire this predicament is, I just stumbled across a  New York Times article, "Global Warming Could Unlock Carbon from Tropical Soil."

Humble dirt could pack an unexpected climate punch, according to a new study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. An experiment that heated soil underneath a tropical rainforest to mimic temperatures expected in the coming decades found that hotter soils released 55 percent more planet-warming carbon dioxide than did nearby unwarmed areas. 

If the results apply throughout the tropics, much of the carbon stored underground could be released as the planet heats up. 

The thin skin of soil that covers much of our planet’s land stores vast amounts of carbon — more, in total, than in all plants and the atmosphere combined. That carbon feeds hordes of bacteria and fungi, which build some of it into more microbes while respiring the rest into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Many of these microbes grow more active at warmer temperatures, increasing their digestion and respiration rates.

In an attempt to forecast the future, ecologists began in the early 1990s building apparatuses to artificially heat soils. Such experiments in temperate and boreal forests have shown that carbon-rich soils almost always belch carbon dioxide when warmed. In 2016, a group of researchers estimated that, by 2050, soils could release so much of the planet-warming gas that it would be like adding the carbon emissions of a new country the size of the United States.

But that study left out the perpetually warm, mega-biodiverse tropics, where a third of all soil carbon resides.  ...For understanding soils’ contributions to climate change, the tropics “is a really important region” that “really hasn’t been studied,” said Margaret Torn, an ecologist at Lawrence Berkeley Lab in California, who was not involved in the study.

Some Good News on the Pandemic Front

The US FDA has approved a new Covid-19 detection test that is said to be less costly, fast, more accurate and, best of all, non-invasive.

A COVID-19 saliva test is being lauded by public health officials as a way for more people to get quick and accurate results in coronavirus testing, even if the patients are asymptomatic. 

The U.S. Food & Drug Administration issued emergency use authorization for the coronavirus saliva test today, Saturday, August 15, 2020. The test, called SalivaDirect, uses a new method of processing saliva samples in COVID-19 testing.

The new COVID-19 saliva test, SalivaDirect, was described as “groundbreaking” by public health officials. It is being touted as a less expensive way to test, in a less invasive manner, which also reduces the risk of contagion to medical professionals.

Researchers at Yale teamed up with players in the NBA and the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA) to develop the new coronavirus testing method, which is considered to be a breakthrough. The goal was “to study the efficacy of a saliva-based method that quickly determines if someone is infected with the novel coronavirus,” Yale said in a statement provided to USA Today in June.

The cost for tests (administered by US "for profit" labs) is expected to be about $10 each. 

You Can Ignore It, For Now, But There's No Denying It

It is increasingly hard to believe how we ignore the climate breakdown even when it's on our own doorstep.

Our federal government has proclaimed a climate state of emergency but judging by its indifference to this looming catastrophe it's obvious they're not treating it as an emergency.

This pandemic that has scythed through our economy and reshaped our very lives is the result of man-made behaviours, notably our relentless intrusion on the Earth's dwindling amount of wilderness that exposes us to viruses of which we've had no previous exposure, contagions that leave us scrambling for solutions that are often elusive.

Sea level rise is picking up steam. Some of it comes from thermal expansion. Disappearing glaciers and ice sheets add to the rise even as the loss of all that once reflective snow and ice causes the oceans and the atmosphere to warm even faster.

The Washington Post has a feature piece today on Arctic wildfires until recently considered a fluke but no longer.

The Arctic summer of 2019 was supposed to be an outlier. Featuring massive blazes in Siberia, including what scientists strongly suspected were smoldering fires beneath the peat in the carbon-rich soils of the transition zone between the tundra and Arctic taiga, last year set records for emitting planet-warming greenhouse gases via wildfires. Many scientists thought it might be a one-off, considering that computer model projections tend to show that the emergence of such extreme fire years won’t happen until mid-century. 

However, this year is proving those scientists wrong. And it raises the unsettling possibility that fire seasons that begin much earlier than average and end later — and affect delicate Arctic ecosystems — could soon be the new normal. Wildfires continue to burn unimpeded across Siberia, as they have since May, after getting an unusually early start to the fire season. A thick blanket of smoke has turned the sky a milky gray in Siberia’s cities, with some smoke making it across the Pacific into Alaska and Canada’s Hudson Bay.

The Post interviewed Mark Parrington of the EU's Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service that has been keeping tabs on what is going on across Siberia.

Looking at carbon emissions from fires in the Arctic Circle, Parrington says 2020 is already the top year even when the Jan. 1 to Aug. 11 period is considered, vs. the full 365 days for each of the other years. Last year had set a record for such emissions, with 180 megatons of carbon dioxide emitted by Arctic fires, but 2020 has eclipsed it so far, with about 240 megaton through Aug. 11. Parrington said Arctic wildfire emissions rose significantly from June into July, particularly in the northern Russia Sakha Republic, a pattern also observed last year.

Jessica McCarty, a wildfire expert at Miami University of Ohio with experience working in the Siberian Arctic, said Parrington’s emissions estimates are probably underestimates, since satellites don’t detect the heat signatures from Arctic peat fires. Such blazes smolder without open flames above the surface, consuming ancient organic matter and freeing up planet-warming gases such as methane and carbon dioxide that had been locked away. This, along with permafrost melt, acts to speed up global warming as part of a self-reinforcing cycle.

A "self-reinforcing cycle" sounds like what climate scientists in previous decades called 'positive feedback loops.'  That was the basic justification for early global warming theory. The emissions targets that were set aimed to prevent triggering natural or runaway global warming that would be entirely beyond human control.

Two decades ago the experts were warning us what might occur by 2100 if we didn't mend our ways.  Some of those dire consequences are already happening some 80 years earlier than predicted. They're here now. And we don't have a clue how we might put that genie back in its bottle.

The 2020s are shaping up to be a decade of extremely high temperatures.  The journal Nature last month published research by Berkley Earth that found some regions are in line to be savaged.

Heatwave duration (Fig. 1d), although increasing, has significant trends restricted to South America, Africa, the Middle East, and Southwest Asia. Significant heatwave intensity trends (Fig. 1f) are non-existent for most of the globe, the exception being southern Australia and small areas of Africa and South America. On the other hand, significant cumulative heat trends (Fig. 1h) are comparable in space to heatwave frequency (Fig. 1b), with mainly positive magnitudes. The largest trends are seen over the Middle East and parts of Africa and South America, where the extra heat produced by heatwaves is increasing by 10 °C/decade−1. For most other areas with significant trends, cumulative heat increases by 2−6 °C decade−1.

There's a massive wildfire down in California. Los Angeles and environs are under an "excessive heat warning" that currently extends into Wednesday with daytime temperatures ranging from 102 to 111 F.  Overnight temperatures, that many poor and vulnerable rely on for respite, "will be very warm with temperatures only lowering into the 70s." The lethality of heatwaves is a function not only of heat but duration. The longer a population is exposed to excessive heat the greater the number of victims, especially the elderly and the poor.

NPR reports that the area is experiencing "rolling power outages" due to excessive electrical usage for air conditioning. Parts of the area lose their power in 2 hour stretches to keep the grid functioning.  The situation is dire enough that Los Angeles is opening cooling centers despite concerns about Covid-19 spreading.

Why Not Just Make Them Walk the Plank?

The rightwing government currently in power in Greece is testing a new solution to unwanted refugees cluttering up its beautiful islands - haul them back out to sea.

The Greek government has secretly expelled more than 1,000 refugees from Europe’s borders in recent months, sailing many of them to the edge of Greek territorial waters and then abandoning them in inflatable and sometimes overburdened life rafts. 

Since March, at least 1,072 asylum seekers have been dropped at sea by Greek officials in at least 31 separate expulsions, according to an analysis of evidence by The New York Times from three independent watchdogs, two academic researchers and the Turkish Coast Guard. The Times interviewed survivors from five of those episodes and reviewed photographic or video evidence from all 31. 

“It was very inhumane,” said Najma al-Khatib, a 50-year-old Syrian teacher, who says masked Greek officials took her and 22 others, including two babies, under cover of darkness from a detention center on the island of Rhodes on July 26 and abandoned them in a rudderless, motorless life raft before they were rescued by the Turkish Coast Guard.

Since 2015, European countries like Greece and Italy have mainly relied on proxies, like the Turkish and Libyan governments, to head off maritime migration. What is different now is that the Greek government is increasingly taking matters into its own hands, watchdog groups and researchers say. 

For example, migrants have been forced onto sometimes leaky life rafts and left to drift at the border between Turkish and Greek waters, while others have been left to drift in their own boats after Greek officials disabled their engines.

This sounds monstrous but it's the sort of thing that some have predicted may become commonplace once climate breakdown really kicks in, perhaps over the course of this decade.  Gwynne Dyer, in his book "Climate Wars," writes of Pentagon planners tossing around ideas to prevent mass migration out of Central America seeking refuge in the United States.  Some of the technology under review is pretty gruesome such as automatic (robotic) free fire buffer zones.

What? Are You Kidding? Three Months?

Those bastards!

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, better known as the CDC, report that those who contract, survive and recover from the Covid-19 virus receive immunity.

That immunity lasts three months. That's it. Just three months.

“People who have tested positive for Covid-19 do not need to quarantine or get tested again for up to three months as long as they do not develop symptoms again,” the guidance says. “People who develop symptoms again within three months of their first bout of Covid-19 may need to be tested again if there is no other cause identified for their symptoms.” 

Other coronaviruses, including those that cause SARS and MERS, have antibodies that scientists believe last about a year. In the early days of the virus’s spread in the United States, scientists had hoped antibodies to the new virus would last at least that long.

Those words - "first bout of Covid-19" - what a bummer. Isn't one enough? How bad must your Karma be to get it twice, maybe even thrice?  (there's a word falling into 'desuetude')

A Reporter Waits Years to Ask Donald Trump "The" Question.

Huffington Post's White House correspondent, SV Date, is usually a spectator when Donald Trump stages a press conference. Trump, like his press secretaries, tend to invite questions from a select few. So when Trump called upon Date, the HuffPo scribe had just one question, the only question he will ever get to ask the Mango Mussolini.



In that moment, S.V. Date, put every reporter in the room to shame. All of them, every one, especially those who have been "the chosen ones," asking reliably softball questions of Trump, his press secretaries and cabinet officials every day.

From The Washington Post:

Dáte, a veteran journalist and author who spent more than three decades at outlets including the Palm Beach Post and the Associated Press before joining HuffPost, has been particularly aggressive in urging his colleagues to push back on Trump’s falsehoods. 

In an email to his colleagues last year, Dáte urged journalists to “be more concerned about getting lied to as a matter of course — and the American public getting lied to, through us — than about access.”

“We are attacked on a near daily basis using Stalinist language. We are called corrupt and dishonest. We are given false information from staff who often know full well that it is false.”

“I have never encountered a public official, a candidate for office, a bureaucrat, a defense lawyer or, frankly, an actual criminal who is as regularly and aggressively dishonest as the current president of the United States. And that includes a dozen years covering the Florida legislature.”

There have been many reporters who routinely challenged Trump's veracity, just not to his face. There has been a "go along to get along" attitude.

For what it's worth, even FOX News aired the clip.

There's No Going Back. We Need to Start Imagining Our Future Before Someone Else Does.

It's not that the Covid-19 pandemic is as cataclysmic as the Black Death or even the Spanish Flu of 1918. There's a good chance it won't be - BUT...

The very best minds tell us that Covid-19 is just a dress rehearsal, a glimpse into a future of pandemics and other catastrophes such as climate breakdown that will send us reeling. We're told there are other viral pandemics already in the barrel, locked and loaded. Some may be more or less transmissible that this coronavirus. Some may be more or less lethal than this coronavirus. Climate breakdown - that will come at us from a variety of directions. Sort of like being blindfolded in a boxing ring.  It will vary from region to region. It will vary by latitude, population vulnerability, resource shortages and exhaustion, a host of parameters.

We have let a lot of opportunities slip through our fingers over the past 40 years. We didn't think things through. Our leaders didn't either. They've actually gone a little mad, nuts. What else do you call someone in a position of power who still clings to the dangerous delusion of perpetual exponential growth? Justin Trudeau is an adherent. That's his orthodoxy. The Conservatives are even worse. The NDP are in that boat. (if you don't think they're total dunderheads, check this out)

Are these the people you want charting your kids' future? Is their 'vision' worth following? What about your vision?  Here's an animation from BBC to get you thinking about what kind of a society we'll need going ahead. Start thinking because - "they're" not. It might be time to imagine a "reset."

To All the Anti-Vaxxers/Anti-Maskers, This One's For You

Nursing Homes Should Be a Government Responsibility

One thing the Covid-19 pandemic has brought home is that for-profit nursing homes have proven less safe for the elderly in their care. It's not just a Canadian problem either.

From the Sydney Morning Herald.

The chances of an elderly resident contracting COVID-19 in an aged care home decreases substantially for every registered nurse employed, with even an additional 20 minutes a day per resident cutting deaths and cases by more than 20 per cent. 

A range of international studies, including one this week by the American Medical Association, revealed higher rates of COVID-19 in for-profit aged care homes and those with fewer nurses, backing up a trend in Victoria where private facilities have experienced 40 times more cases than public homes. 

On Wednesday, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews said government-run nursing homes, which have about 5400 beds, had six cases of COVID-19, a rate of about 0.1 per cent.
In contrast, there had been 1923 cases in non-government homes with 44,600 beds, a rate of 4 per cent.

0.1 per cent public versus 4 per cent private. That's 40 times higher in private, for-profit nursing homes.

In Canada, where more than 80 per cent of COVID cases were in aged care facilities, a study looking at the impact of private ownership of aged care homes said policy should be directed at funding, mandating and enforcing sufficient staffing levels. This should also accommodate the added time or safety-related tasks such as meticulous handwashing, and careful donning and doffing of personal protective equipment.

What our governments have allowed to happen cost lives and no one paid for it. What happened was as predictable as it was inexcusable.  If the private care operators were negligent, government regulators were looking the other way. And it's been going on for decades - a half century at least. I know. I reported on this in the 1970s.

Trump Rigs the November Vote

Donald Trump is, as expected, out to do whatever he can to skew the vote this November 3rd.  With the pandemic showing no sign of abating and a 'second wave' still expected this fall Trump knows that restricting the vote is critical to his chances of re-election.

Part of that means making voting harder, more onerous and more dangerous. That means ensuring that Americans don't have the option to conveniently and safely vote by mail-in balloting. What better way to pull that off but to ensure the postal service cannot receive the funding needed to accommodate mail-in voting.  From Associated Press.

“They need that money in order to have the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said on [Fox Business Network show] “Mornings with Maria,” adding, “If they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting because they’re not equipped to have it.” 

Biden’s campaign jumped on Trump’s comments, likening the president’s actions to sabotage. 

“The President of the United States is sabotaging a basic service that hundreds of millions of people rely upon, cutting a critical lifeline for rural economies and for delivery of medicines, because he wants to deprive Americans of their fundamental right to vote safely during the most catastrophic public health crisis in over 100 years,” Biden spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement.

Is America on the Verge of Insurgency?

There have been several reports lately about a mobilization underway among radical rightwing groups such as the Boogaloo Bois and other white supremacists.

An op-ed in the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, warns these groups could stage a mass uprising during or immediately after the November 3rd elections. The author, a professor from Portland, has logged 425 incidents of violence against anti-racism protesters and people of colour since the killing of George Floyd.

Most of these incidents appear to have been carried out by violent radicalized individuals with little to no specific training. However, the Portland incident fits an emerging pattern: an increasingly coordinated right-wing vigilante movement, fueled by organizers with counterinsurgency skills, committed to using their military or security forces experience against Black Lives Matter and the ever-amorphous "Antifa."

Their tactics arsenal includes the infiltration of local demonstrations as provocateurs to stir up violence, delegitimize the protests and invite a far harsher police response.

It’s not new that far-right activists inserting themselves in civil protest movements have come from military service and the ranks of the police, or that street militia actively recruit from those pools. Five years ago, the Oath Keepers, an extremist paramilitary organization drawing members form the police and armed services, did just that in Ferguson, Missouri and other places.

But now, since right-wing militias now feel that the serving U.S. president is on their team, they are refocusing their message: No longer anti-government, but anti-opposition.

As the Trump presidency brought fresh blood into the militia movement and pitched battles erupted in cities across the U.S., rural and urban groups, pro-Trump and anti-government groups began mingling and synthesizing. The Proud Boys, self-styled "Western chauvinists" with their own particular dress code and memes, started appearing in various cities in military fatigues and brandishing assault rifles.

As the COVID-19 crisis accelerated, they mobilized to "occupy" state capitol buildings, formally protesting lockdown regulations they considered a form of totalitarianism, turning out in their thousands with AR-15s and combat gear. From Washington to Michigan, Wisconsin to Kentucky, the far right found a locus point around which to organize and maneuver.

Another extremist group with a distinct iconography, the "Boogaloo boys" emerged: often heavily armed, they see their mission as accelerationists, agitating for what they see as an inevitable "Second Civil War." Some argue for left-right anti-government alliances to organize for the coming insurrection.

...

There seems no doubt that America’s far right is keying up for conflict in the lead-up and aftermath of the presidential election in three months’ time.

Unlike at any time previously, they are enabled by technology to more effectively organize locally and incite violence as a collective enterprise; they have recruited military and security force veterans; in some cases, they seem to have implicit backing from police officers themselves; they have an apocalyptic and mobilizing hostility towards "Antifa" and BLM that is no longer a fringe position on the right; and they have a president floating the idea of rejecting an unfavorable election result.

If Trump refuses to acknowledge the results, his militias are certainly prepped to come out into the streets to prevent a peaceful transfer of power – or, as the far right prefer to call it, a "Democratic coup."

The Forecast Today: Hot and Overpopulated - and Those Mice, What About Those Mice?

Wow, here's a shocker. The last decade was the hottest decade on record. Here's another shocker. By the time 2030 rolls around, the 2020s will be the new "hottest decade on record." See what you've got to look forward to?

Britain has been going through a record heatwave. Judging by the swarms crowding its beaches, it must have been hot enough to fry Covid-19 out of existence. Maybe that's just nature's way of culling the herd. Who knows?

Here's a shamelessly vulgar American comedian, Bill Burr, who argues that overpopulation is the root of all our evils or at least an awful lot of them.



Meanwhile, in other news of the Apocalypse. It's been a bad year for vast regions in Africa and South Asia as waves of locusts have devastated crops. Germany is having its own plague. Field mice.

Across Germany, the effects of a succession of dry summers and mild winters have enabled the mice – and increasingly voles – to thrive, leaving an estimated 120,000 hectares (300,000 acres) stripped bare by the rodents and now browning in the current heatwave. 

Farmers said field mice had been tunnelling under the fields and gnawing at the roots of crops for months, with the neighbouring regions of Thuringia, Saxony Anhalt and Lower Saxony the worst hit. In the central state of Thuringia, as much as a quarter of the crops are affected, with damage estimated at around €450 (£407) for every hectare of wheat. Farmers’ representatives have estimated that two-thirds of their income will be lost as a result and many said they have had to buy in extra animal feed.

A Hint of Irony?

When Deng Mabiour got his first chance to speak to the judge he said, "I'm sick. I need a doctor."

That's a bit ironic given that Mabiour is charged with killing a doctor, Red Deer physician Walter Reynolds, with a hammer and a machete.

The remand judge stood the matter over and advised Mabiour to get himself a lawyer.

Would He Dare? Would It Work? Nah.

Bloc leader, Yves-Francois Blanchet, wants Trudeau, Morneau and Telford gone and says, if they don't go, he'll try to bring down the Liberal government on a confidence motion this fall.

While his preference is to see the trio step down, Blanchet said he's prepared to table a motion of non-confidence in the government if they remain in their jobs. 

If that motion passed with the support of other parties, it would lead to an election campaign in the midst of a pandemic. 

"Which is more dangerous — the mismanagement of a crisis, or taking the time to change the people who are managing the crisis?" Blanchet said during a news conference in Ottawa on Wednesday. 

The BQ leader said he has not had any formal discussions with the NDP or the Conservatives on his plan. He said Elections Canada is preparing to hold a safe election in the event it is held during the pandemic.

Blanchet may not realize that the public can get owly if they're forced into an election they don't want. That might not be a problem for the Bloc seeing as their voter base is limited to Quebec. The other opposition parties, whose support Blanchet would require, are apt to see the calculus differently.  The Tories will still be scraping the Scheer barnacles off their keel in a bid to appear fresh and rejuvenated under a new albeit recycled leader.  Jagmeet remains in the doldrums and the NDP might be none too interested in another costly election campaign. Neither wants to be seen as the Bloc's handmaiden.

Nah, Blanchet is just looking for a little attention from the media. He's blowing smoke.

I Hate That, Despite the Lofty Promises, Canada Remains a Climate Pariah

Liberal or Conservative, it doesn't make a whit of difference which party governs. Canada remains in the grip of petro-pimps and, yes, that includes the current Liberal government.

The National Observer has an analysis piece showing that Canada, in the midst of the pandemic, is supporting fossil fuels at 10 times the G20 average.

There are rumours that the Trudeau government is on the verge of going all progressive on our arse. Yeah, right. This would be the same, progressively-inclined regime that's pushing through the massive, overpriced, no longer needed Trans-Mountain pipeline expansion even as foreign investors and energy companies are abandoning the Athabasca Tar Pits, openly declaring bitumen a "stranded asset." What's that line about, when you're trying to get out of a hole, you must first stop digging?

The world, but especially the affluent, developed nations, has a deadline coming up. We must cut our greenhouse gas emissions from all sources by half by 2030.  Canada hasn't said we'll do our part to meet that target. We're not even on track to meet Stephen Harper's promised emissions cuts.

Deeds, not words. This government got the words part right when the prime minister and his then enviromin took the floor at the 2015 Paris climate summit to boldly proclaim "Canada's back." They basked in the welcoming glory and then put that promise, like so many others, in the circular file.

This '50 by 30' business isn't some Kumbaya, feel good, deal. It is what must be done if we are to preserve a liveable world for future generations. It's as real as concrete. It is a matter of life or death, potentially for billions.

So, please, don't sit by while Justin or the Tory that succeeds him blow smoke up our backsides. There's no time for that nonsense, no time left that is. This is the time for Ottawa to show some spine, put some honesty in its promises, and, for starters, end all subsidies of every description for high-carbon, low-value fossil fuel production.

It's time to stop being a climate pariah, a global embarrassment.

A Warning from the Gods

"Whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad."

Whether the warning comes from Euripides or Sophocles is unclear but it is part of the wisdom of the ancient Greeks. It dovetails with their notions of Hubris, arrogance, and Nemesis, retribution.

Many, certainly most of us see no end of hubris in the American president, Trump. It's part and parcel of his psychopathy. No end of mental health professionals have weighed in on Trump's narcissism, his unbounded grandiosity and his sadistic cruelty.

To the world at large and most Americans, Trump's malignant character is off-putting. Yet it seems music to the ears of his flock, particularly the rightwing extremists, the worst of a very bad lot.

Trump has become identified as the fuhrer of the followers of QAnon, a group of hyper-conspiracy theorists who see the Great Orange Bloat as a latter day el Sid to put to the sword the Democratic pedophilia cabal.

QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory detailing a supposed secret plot by an alleged "deep state" against U.S. President Donald Trump and his supporters.

Q has falsely accused many liberal Hollywood actors, Democratic politicians, and high-ranking officials of being members of an international child sex trafficking ring. Q also claimed that Donald Trump feigned collusion with Russians to enlist Robert Mueller to join him in exposing the ring and preventing a coup d'état by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and George Soros. QAnon believers commonly tag their social media posts with the hashtag #WWG1WGA, signifying the motto "Where We Go One, We Go All".

According to Travis View, who has studied the QAnon phenomenon and written about it extensively for The Washington Post, the essence of the conspiracy theory is that:

"there is a worldwide cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who rule the world, essentially, and they control everything. They control politicians, and they control the media. They control Hollywood, and they cover up their existence, essentially. And they would have continued ruling the world, were it not for the election of President Donald Trump. Now, Donald Trump in this conspiracy theory knows all about this evil cabal's wrongdoing. But one of the reasons that Donald Trump was elected was to put an end to them, basically. And now we would be ignorant of this behind-the-scenes battle of Donald Trump and the U.S. military—that everyone backs him and the evil cabal—were it not for 'Q.' And what 'Q' is—is basically a poster on 4chan, who later moved to 8chan, who reveals details about this secret behind-the-scenes battle, and also secrets about what the cabal is doing and also the mass sort of upcoming arrest events through these posts."

Followers of QAnon also believe that there is an imminent event known as "The Storm" in which thousands of people, members of the cabal, will be arrested, possibly sent to Guantanamo Bay prison or face military tribunals, and the U.S. military will brutally take over the country.The result of "The Storm" will be salvation and a utopia on earth.

It's easy to dismiss QAnon as a gaggle of lunatics, just another tinfoil hat brigade. The FBI doesn't take them so lightly

An FBI "Intelligence Bulletin" memo from the Phoenix Field Office dated May 30, 2019 identified QAnon-driven extremists as a domestic terrorism threat, the first time a fringe conspiracy theory had been labelled as such. The memo cited a number of arrests related to QAnon, some of which had not been publicized before. The memo says that "The FBI assesses these conspiracy theories very likely will emerge, spread, and evolve in the modern information marketplace, occasionally driving both groups and individual extremists to carry out criminal or violent acts."

"This is the first FBI product examining the threat from conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists and provides a baseline for future intelligence products. ... The FBI assesses these conspiracy theories very likely will emerge, spread, and evolve in the modern information marketplace, occasionally driving both groups and individual extremists to carry out criminal or violent acts..."

A Guardian investigation finds that QAnon is gaining footholds outside America, including:

the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland, Canada, Australia, Mexico, Brazil, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Romania, Serbia and Slovenia. The largest international QAnon groups documented by the Guardian were German, Italian, Polish, Dutch, Australian and British.

“The response from all social platforms to the harm and threat of QAnon has been slow and anemic,” said Travis View, a researcher and co-host of QAnon Anonymous, a podcast that documents and debunks QAnon. “But Facebook stands alone in how much it has enabled this conspiracy theory-driven extremist community.”

“Not content with merely hosting QAnon propaganda, Facebook continues to recommend QAnon groups to users, essentially providing free marketing for a movement that has already inspired people to commit terrorism, murder and conspiracy to commit kidnapping,” View added.

It would be comforting to write these Q followers as a bunch of loons living in their mothers' basements and I'm sure many are. There are others who are harder to dismiss.  Here is Mike Pence yucking it up with Broward County SWAT members in 2018.

 It's easily overlooked but the guy on the left has a Q badge on his uniform.

Apparently Sgt. Patten was booted off the SWAT team after the badge was spotted, triggering a controversy. I wonder how long he'd been rocking that patch before his superiors had to act.

America Confronts its IDP Problem

IDP or Internally Displaced Population is a term that was once used to describe groups of civilians forced to leave their homes to seek refuge elsewhere in war-torn countries such as Iraq and Syria.

Aleppo, Syria is a prime example. One of the oldest cities in the world, said to date back to 5,000 B.C., Aleppo was a prime target in the Syrian civil war. The city was besieged, shelled and bombed between 2012 and 2016. Assad was notorious for blasting neighbourhoods with "barrel bombs." Many died. Many fled. Those who fled were internally displaced persons.

While civil war hasn't broken out yet in the United States, America is facing the problem of citizens, IDPs, being driven out of their homes by climate change - floods, drought, sea level rise, wildfires. Last month the U.S. Government Accountability Office released a report explaining the case for proactive measures to relocate displaced Americans.

An article in Scientific American suggests America could be looking at a migration of the sort the US experienced in the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s.

It's not just ocean communities weighing relocation options. Santa Rosa, Calif., considered retreating from parts of the wildland-urban interface after the Tubbs Fire burned much of the city in 2017. The idea lacked sufficient funding and public support, leading to other adaptation approaches, GAO said.

Since 2005, Congress has allocated nearly a half-trillion dollars in disaster relief to communities struck by hurricanes, fires, floods and droughts, according to GAO. And the pace of spending has quickened, with nearly $200 billion in taxpayer money spent since 2015. It has not been a good investment, according to GAO and other disaster experts. 

To break the budget-busting cycle of climate disaster and reconstruction, GAO said the government should assist communities in identifying options for retreat. Such work should be coordinated through a single agency or program where communities can glean sound information and advice about their options.

The report notes that indigenous and impoverished Americans are the most vulnerable and hardest hit.

There has been a flood of studies and reports recently focusing on our warming world. Some predict that certain populated regions could become uninhabitable before this decade is out. That could include parts of Central America and the Caribbean.  The New Yorker looked at the climate crisis in Guatemala and how that country is depopulating.  Honduras is similarly afflicted. The World Bank expects 2 million migrants will try to flee Central America in the coming decades. What then? Where will those people go? Many Americans are ill disposed to accommodate climate refugees and the burden of having to deal with internally displaced populations could harden existing attitudes.

Farewell America

It's human nature to think the world as you know it, as you've known it all your life, is normal.

Hey, that's all you've ever known for 40 or 50, perhaps 70 years. That's the reality for pretty much everyone born in North America (and a good many born elsewhere) in the postwar era.

It is hard to accept that what we have become accustomed to, what we have built our lives around, what many have doggedly pursued was never normal. Yet anthropologist Wade Davis has written an article for Rolling Stone that may shatter your illusions.  Davis writes that Covid-19 may be the final straw that triggers the unraveling of America or at least the facade it has hidden behind for so long.

In a dark season of pestilence, COVID has reduced to tatters the illusion of American exceptionalism. At the height of the crisis, with more than 2,000 dying each day, Americans found themselves members of a failed state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government largely responsible for death rates that added a tragic coda to America’s claim to supremacy in the world. 

For the first time, the international community felt compelled to send disaster relief to Washington. For more than two centuries, reported the Irish Times, “the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the U.S. until now: pity.” As American doctors and nurses eagerly awaited emergency airlifts of basic supplies from China, the hinge of history opened to the Asian century. 

No empire long endures, even if few anticipate their demise. Every kingdom is born to die. The 15th century belonged to the Portuguese, the 16th to Spain, 17th to the Dutch. France dominated the 18th and Britain the 19th. Bled white and left bankrupt by the Great War, the British maintained a pretense of domination as late as 1935, when the empire reached its greatest geographical extent. By then, of course, the torch had long passed into the hands of America. 

America Transformed

In the wake of the war, with Europe and Japan in ashes, the United States with but 6 percent of the world’s population accounted for half of the global economy, including the production of 93 percent of all automobiles. Such economic dominance birthed a vibrant middle class, a trade union movement that allowed a single breadwinner with limited education to own a home and a car, support a family, and send his kids to good schools. It was not by any means a perfect world but affluence allowed for a truce between capital and labor, a reciprocity of opportunity in a time of rapid growth and declining income inequality, marked by high tax rates for the wealthy, who were by no means the only beneficiaries of a golden age of American capitalism. 

But freedom and affluence came with a price. The United States, virtually a demilitarized nation on the eve of the Second World War, never stood down in the wake of victory. To this day, American troops are deployed in 150 countries. Since the 1970s, China has not once gone to war; the U.S. has not spent a day at peace. President Jimmy Carter recently noted that in its 242-year history, America has enjoyed only 16 years of peace, making it, as he wrote, “the most warlike nation in the history of the world.” Since 2001, the U.S. has spent over $6 trillion on military operations and war, money that might have been invested in the infrastructure of home. China, meanwhile, built its nation, pouring more cement every three years than America did in the entire 20th century.  

More than any other country, the United States in the post-war era lionized the individual at the expense of community and family. It was the sociological equivalent of splitting the atom. What was gained in terms of mobility and personal freedom came at the expense of common purpose. In wide swaths of America, the family as an institution lost its grounding. By the 1960s, 40 percent of marriages were ending in divorce. Only six percent of American homes had grandparents living beneath the same roof as grandchildren; elders were abandoned to retirement homes.

...Economic disparities exist in all nations, creating a tension that can be as disruptive as the inequities are unjust. In any number of settings, however, the negative forces tearing apart a society are mitigated or even muted if there are other elements that reinforce social solidarity — religious faith, the strength and comfort of family, the pride of tradition, fidelity to the land, a spirit of place. 

But when all the old certainties are shown to be lies, when the promise of a good life for a working family is shattered as factories close and corporate leaders, growing wealthier by the day, ship jobs abroad, the social contract is irrevocably broken. For two generations, America has celebrated globalization with iconic intensity, when, as any working man or woman can see, it’s nothing more than capital on the prowl in search of ever cheaper sources of labor.

...COVID-19 didn’t lay America low; it simply revealed what had long been forsaken. As the crisis unfolded, with another American dying every minute of every day, a country that once turned out fighter planes by the hour could not manage to produce the paper masks or cotton swabs essential for tracking the disease. The nation that defeated smallpox and polio, and led the world for generations in medical innovation and discovery, was reduced to a laughing stock as a buffoon of a president advocated the use of household disinfectants as a treatment for a disease that intellectually he could not begin to understand. 

As a number of countries moved expeditiously to contain the virus, the United States stumbled along in denial, as if willfully blind. With less than four percent of the global population, the U.S. soon accounted for more than a fifth of COVID deaths. The percentage of American victims of the disease who died was six times the global average. Achieving the world’s highest rate of morbidity and mortality provoked not shame, but only further lies, scapegoating, and boasts of miracle cures as dubious as the claims of a carnival barker, a grifter on the make.

...Americans have not done themselves any favors. Their political process made possible the ascendancy to the highest office in the land a national disgrace, a demagogue as morally and ethically compromised as a person can be. As a British writer quipped, “there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid”. 

The American president lives to cultivate resentments, demonize his opponents, validate hatred. His main tool of governance is the lie; as of July 9th, 2020, the documented tally of his distortions and false statements numbered 20,055. If America’s first president, George Washington, famously could not tell a lie, the current one can’t recognize the truth. Inverting the words and sentiments of Abraham Lincoln, this dark troll of a man celebrates malice for all, and charity for none. 

Odious as he may be, Trump is less the cause of America’s decline than a product of its descent. As they stare into the mirror and perceive only the myth of their exceptionalism, Americans remain almost bizarrely incapable of seeing what has actually become of their country.

America, the Cult

The American cult of the individual denies not just community but the very idea of society. No one owes anything to anyone. All must be prepared to fight for everything: education, shelter, food, medical care. What every prosperous and successful democracy deems to be fundamental rights — universal health care, equal access to quality public education, a social safety net for the weak, elderly, and infirmed — America dismisses as socialist indulgences, as if so many signs of weakness. 

How can the rest of the world expect America to lead on global threats — climate change, the extinction crisis, pandemics — when the country no longer has a sense of benign purpose, or collective well-being, even within its own national community? Flag-wrapped patriotism is no substitute for compassion; anger and hostility no match for love. Those who flock to beaches, bars, and political rallies, putting their fellow citizens at risk, are not exercising freedom; they are displaying, as one commentator has noted, the weakness of a people who lack both the stoicism to endure the pandemic and the fortitude to defeat it. Leading their charge is Donald Trump, a bone spur warrior, a liar and a fraud, a grotesque caricature of a strong man, with the backbone of a bully.

...The measure of wealth in a civilized nation is not the currency accumulated by the lucky few, but rather the strength and resonance of social relations and the bonds of reciprocity that connect all people in common purpose. 

This has nothing to do with political ideology, and everything to do with the quality of life. Finns live longer and are less likely to die in childhood or in giving birth than Americans. Danes earn roughly the same after-tax income as Americans, while working 20 percent less. They pay in taxes an extra 19 cents for every dollar earned. But in return they get free health care, free education from pre-school through university, and the opportunity to prosper in a thriving free-market economy with dramatically lower levels of poverty, homelessness, crime, and inequality. The average worker is paid better, treated more respectfully, and rewarded with life insurance, pension plans, maternity leave, and six weeks of paid vacation a year. All of these benefits only inspire Danes to work harder, with fully 80 percent of men and women aged 16 to 64 engaged in the labor force, a figure far higher than that of the United States.

...American politicians dismiss the Scandinavian model as creeping socialism, communism lite, something that would never work in the United States. In truth, social democracies are successful precisely because they foment dynamic capitalist economies that just happen to benefit every tier of society. That social democracy will never take hold in the United States may well be true, but, if so, it is a stunning indictment, and just what Oscar Wilde had in mind when he quipped that the United States was the only country to go from barbarism to decadence without passing through civilization. 

Evidence of such terminal decadence is the choice that so many Americans made in 2016 to prioritize their personal indignations, placing their own resentments above any concerns for the fate of the country and the world, as they rushed to elect a man whose only credential for the job was his willingness to give voice to their hatreds, validate their anger, and target their enemies, real or imagined. ...For better or for worse, America has had its time.

The end of the American era and the passing of the torch to Asia is no occasion for celebration, no time to gloat. ...If and when the Chinese are ascendant, with their concentration camps for the Uighurs, the ruthless reach of their military, their 200 million surveillance cameras watching every move and gesture of their people, we will surely long for the best years of the American century. For the moment, we have only the kleptocracy of Donald Trump. Between praising the Chinese for their treatment of the Uighurs, describing their internment and torture as “exactly the right thing to do,” and his dispensing of medical advice concerning the therapeutic use of chemical disinfectants, Trump blithely remarked, “One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” He had in mind, of course, the coronavirus, but, as others have said, he might just as well have been referring to the American dream.

If you're a bear for punishment, give your eyes a rest and listen as political economist, Mark Blythe, explains the damage that the neoliberal order has inflicted on us and why it stubbornly refuses to die.

A Sunday Giggle

Climate Emergency Round-Up

The climate emergency has faded from consciousness. It can't compete with the Covid pandemic, Donald Trump, the Trudeau scandal of the day, the economic collapse that half claim is a recession while the other half brand it a depression - there are just so many things, none of them particularly welcome, vying for our attention. It's hard to fault those who flee into denial or just turn off the switch especially when we keep getting told 'if you think this is bad, just wait.'

Most of our afflictions, either in whole or in part, are man-made. These viruses? They're actually a failure to socially distance humanity from our relentless intrusion on nature. We know there are countless viruses common in wildlife and yet we keep opening the door to let them in. Then, when they get in we scramble to lockdown and scramble to develop vaccines. That's clever, isn't it?

Trump and the political perversion also known as the Republican Party, that's pretty obviously man-made. Trudeau's tawdry scandal du jour, man-made. The recession/depression - the virus might have triggered it but the causes of this collapse were building for decades. This is just terminal stage neoliberalism, the end result of the economic infection caused by Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney.  Man-made. Last I checked, nature didn't teach us that the pursuit of perpetual exponential growth was a good idea.




Then there's the climate emergency. We've been stoking that fire for a couple of centuries but especially over the postwar era. Man-made. If we wanted to burn this house down we would have done pretty much what we actually did. See: The Great Acceleration. It's all there.

Just because we, especially our leaders, haven't really made climate change much of a priority over all these other problems this year, nature didn't get the message.

Just this week Canada's last major ice sheet went for a tumble. The Milne Ice Shelf lost 40 per cent of its area in just two days.  It wasn't played up much at home but it was a hot topic in other countries.

What else? Britain is enduring a protracted heatwave that's sending Brits jamming the beaches of the south, merrily shedding virus.  The Brits are bracing for a deluge. They're being warned they could receive a month's rain in a 2-hour deluge this week.

“Even in just a couple of hours we could see 80mm of rain falling. That amount of rain in a short amount of time especially when the ground is hot can lead to flash flooding,” the Met Office said, adding that the average rainfall for England during the month of August is around 70mm.

And the Brits don't even have arroyos, poor buggers. Not yet anyway.

The Americans are warned to brace for a heavy hurricane season.  Up to 25 named storms, 11 of which could be hurricanes. Brace yourselves, fellas.

Central Europe has been told it's on the path to a possible 7-fold increase in severe droughts.

Good news for BP. After reporting one of its worst quarterly results on record, BP shares climbed 6.5 per cent when the company announced it will shift from fossil fuels to clean energy over the coming decade.

Financial leprosy has broken out in the tar pits of Athabasca. After a steady departure of the world's biggest investment houses and global insurance giants, first Total and then Exxon wrote down (as in 'wrote off') their Tar Sands assets. Exxon trimmed as much as 20 per cent from the company's asset sheet. Total even used the dreaded term "stranded asset." We should have listened to Mark Carney.

Then there's a lot of really dire stuff that I just don't want to get into. We've got too much on our plates already without dwelling on what might happen by 2100.

Besides, Bootsy Collins just came up on my playlist. Bootsy. Funk yeah.

Maybe We Should Ask the Supreme Court to Decide the Face Mask Issue and the Larger Questions

If a province mandates the wearing of face masks in public during the pandemic need the public comply? Do those who reject masks have a right to refuse? Is it an absolute right or is it limited to particular circumstances? What about social distancing? Do they have a right to refuse to keep their distance from others? What about the community's rights to expect that those sharing that community not expose them to unnecessary risks to their health, their wellbeing, even their lives?

We have a Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The SCC is well accustomed to interpreting the Charter.

This is not a trivial matter. It's a matter of life or death.

In Canada's bad boy of Covid-19, Quebec, thousands rallied yesterday to protest the government's mask mandate. They trotted out the predictable claims about rights and freedoms with  heavy anti-vaxxer undertones. 

"We want our liberty. We want the right to say yes to a vaccine. We want the right to decide. It's our life, it's our bodies, it's up to us," said [Nathalie] Warren.

"I'm not OK with children going to school wearing masks, and physical distancing," said Irène Sarmiento. "It makes no sense. The children aren't to blame. The population is being abused."

There it is in a nutshell. Masks and social distancing mandates are abuse. When it comes to children returning to school, it's punishment.

There must be a way to put an end to this business, one in which both sides have an opportunity to state their case and be heard fairly. A place to put these issues to rest.

I say this bearing in mind that the coronavirus, Covid-19, won't be the last pandemic. We've been warned there are more already in the barrel, locked and loaded. There will also be other challenges to our social order from climate change that Canada is doing virtually nothing to avert. We can expect food security issues, the disruption of supply chains, heatwaves and droughts, severe storm events of increasing frequency, intensity and duration - the very same challenges that every region will experience in some form or another.

We will probably need the Charter more than ever in the decades ahead to balance rights with responsibilities as governments resort to emergency powers that must be carefully controlled. Covid-19 seems to be a perfect place to hone a new system of checks and balances for the 21st century.