Aunt Jemima Being Shown the Door. Uncle Ben May Be Next.

PepsiCo is removing the image of Aunt Jemima from its line of pancake mix and syrup. Fair enough. Racist overtones? Of course. When we were kids we didn't think of it that way but, yeah, it's there. Uncle Ben? Pretty much the same problem. Old black dude with balding white hair looks like he's straight off the plantation. It's time the Ben thing was ditched.

Neither of those images holds a candle to what I discovered when I moved to London in the late 60s. I was no stranger to Robertson marmalade but I had no idea about the firm's UK mascot, Golly.

The Golly character, a black-faced minstrel doll with his natty red bow tie and trousers, flowing blue jacket and distinctive yellow waistcoat, danced his way across the label on pots for the best part of a century.

The company distributed Golliwog trinkets as promotional giveaways and most people I met admitted they had these toys as kids.  Yeah, right.

Think of the Pandemic as a Fire Drill

There is a lot of knowledge to be mined from how our nations - and their citizens - responded to the Covid-19 pandemic. That knowledge could be invaluable to us in preparing for other disruptive events that loom in the not distant future.

The coronavirus pandemic is “just a fire drill” for what is likely to follow from the climate crisis, and the protests over racial injustice around the world show the need to tie together social equality, environmental sustainability and health, the UN’s sustainable business chief has said. 

“The overall problem is that we are not sustainable in the ways we are living and producing on the planet today,” said Lise Kingo, the executive director of the UN Global Compact, under which businesses sign up to principles of environmental protection and social justice. “The only way forward is to create a world that leaves no one behind.” 

Human rights were “inseparable” from dealing with climate breakdown, she told the Guardian in an interview. “This horrible racism [seen in the killing of George Floyd] is about human rights. We have to make sure that we give the social part of the agenda equal focus.”

Social equality, environmental stability and health. That sounds simple enough and yet achieving these goals seem increasingly elusive.

Social equality sounds good but it means overcoming privilege. Here's the problem.

When he died in 2008, Ted Rogers Jr., then CEO of Rogers Communications, was the fifth-wealthiest individual in Canada, holding assets worth $5.7 billion. In his autobiography (2008) he credited his success to a willingness to take risks, work hard, bend the rules, be on the constant look-out for opportunities, and be dedicated to building the business. In many respects, he saw himself as a self-made billionaire who started from scratch, seized opportunities, and created a business through his own initiative.

Rogers, of course, was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He attended Upper Canada College, picked up a law degree at Osgoode Hall, rubbed elbows with the right people. He was "in."

Now compare Ted Rogers with an incarcerated aboriginal gang member.

In some respects the Aboriginal gang members interviewed were like Ted Rogers in that they were willing to seize opportunities, take risks, bend rules, and apply themselves to their vocations. They too aspired to getting the money that would give them the freedom to make their own lives. However, as one of the inmates put it, “the only job I ever had was selling drugs” (CBC, 2010). The consequence of that was to fall into a lifestyle that led to joining a gang, being kicked out of school, developing issues with addiction, and eventually getting arrested and incarcerated. Unlike Ted Rogers, however, the inmate added, “I didn’t grow up with the best life” (CBC, 2010).

Arguably, Ted Rogers started life with a privileged "habitus."

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) defined ones habitus as the deeply seated schemas, habits, feelings, dispositions, and forms of know-how that people hold due to their specific social backgrounds, cultures, and life experiences (1990). Bourdieu referred to it as ones “feel for the game,” to use a sports metaphor.

Haven't we wrestled, or at least told ourselves we wrestled, with this for generations? How well has that gone?

Environmental stability. Our exaggerated petro-economy undermines our hopes of achieving environmental stability. What does that even mean at this point natural feedback loops, activated by man-made greenhouse gas emissions like some sleeping giant awakened, now are in play? Here I refer to the thawing of the permafrost and the release of massive volumes of greenhouse gases that, for millennia, were safely sequestered in ice or the seabed clathrates that now release CO2 plumes to the surface and onward into the atmosphere or our beleaguered forests, once massive 'carbon sinks' that are now transformed, by climate change, into 'carbon bombs.' We don't know the measure of these 'knock-on' effects or what other surprises may await.

The third element is health. Here the picture is less gloomy, at least marginally. We like to boast of universal healthcare but there's nothing universal in how it is accessed by Canadians in different parts of our country. As a rule, the further you are from the American border, the more difficulty you may have accessing healthcare facilities and providers. The further you have to travel for health services, the less likely you are to access help.

If achieving these goals domestically is difficult, achieving them on a global scale is nearly impossible. Nations vary enormously, region by region. Most of the world's wealth is concentrated in the relatively underpopulated nations of the temperate latitudes. The worst of the world's climate breakdown is experienced elsewhere, in the developing and Third World countries. I see no sign that the affluent Western world has much interest in notions of equality when it comes to the less advantaged countries.

The Empire Strikes Back

A number of police unions are responding to public hostility to cops in the wake of the George Floyd execution.

I watched a video yesterday posted by the head of the RCMP officers' union in reaction to the claims of systemic racism at play in the Mounties' ranks. My, my, you would have thought butter would not melt in their mouths.

As the Dudley DoRight spiel played out my thoughts drifted to Robert Dziekanski tasered to death at Vancouver airport by four of the red-serge boys who later concocted a cover-up only to be exposed as liars by a passerby's smartphone video. I thought of the Mounties appearing at the front doors of some law-abiding British Columbians who protested the Trans Mountain pipeline. Their message was clear - we know who you are, we know where you live, we're keeping an eye on you so watch yourself. Pure intimidation. That's Stasi-grade shit. I thought of the Mounties in combat gear with assault rifles raiding Wetsuweten protest sites manned by unarmed tribal members. I thought of the set-up job they pulled on Mike Duffy trying to bury him under 33 charges, all of which were dismissed at trial. I thought of the job they pulled on Paul Martin by alleging, in mid-election, that Ralph Goodale was under investigation. I thought of when, in February of this year, the RCMP tried to keep the media away from their Wetsuweten raids, threatening to arrest them for the crime of journalism. I thought of the Integrated National Security Enforcement Team that merged the Canadian Border Service Agency, CSIS and the RCMP into a domestic spy agency. I thought of the sexual discrimination and affronts to female members by the male-dominated RCMP. I expect if I dwell on this I'll easily pull out another half dozen "I thoughts."

Yet the union spokesman would have us believe these are a bunch of choirboys. Racism is only part of the systemic rot in the RCMP.

This nonsense is really on a roll in the States. Yesterday the New York P.D. union pushed a story about three officers who had been poisoned with bleach-laced milk shakes at a Shake Shack. Oh it was a horror story. They implied their officers had been attacked by one or more of those protest sympathizers. They were warning their members not to go anywhere alone, only to eat at restaurants they knew and trusted, to be on high alert.

The union had to backpeddle a bit when the NYPD announced today that no one had been intentionally poisoned by the staff of Shake Shack and the business about bleach was not true.

Worse yet are the shootings of police officers at BLM protest marches. The most recent happened in Las Vegas where an officer remains paralyzed from the neck down after being shot in the back of his head. Of course the cops and rightwing media depicted this as the work of antifa radicals. It turns out that extremists have been resorting to armed violence only they're rightwing extremists, the Boogaloo boys.

President Donald Trump has warned repeatedly that antifa, a favorite bogeyman, is behind the violence during recent waves of protest. But while scant evidence supports Trump’s claims, another loosely organized movement has become a prominent sideshow at nationwide demonstrations and been linked with attacks and plots to create chaos.

Adherents of the far-right movement known as Boogaloo have shown up at various protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, attempting to use the demonstrations to further their own cause and in some cases carrying rifles.
Boogaloo devotees have also carried out violent attacks against police. This week, a California district attorney said that Steven Carrillo, charged with the ambush shooting death of a sheriff’s deputy in California’s Santa Cruz County on June 6, had ties to the Boogaloo. Carrillo had written some of its slogans in blood on the hood of a nearby car before his arrest. Authorities are reportedly looking into whether Carrillo was connected to the May 29 shooting death of a security officer at the federal building in Oakland, California ― a shooting that occurred during a large protest in that city over Floyd’s killing. 

The Boogaloo movement is a somewhat amorphous anti-government community that under its umbrella includes militias, gun rights activists, libertarians and white supremacists. What they share is a core set of symbols, terms and ideology centered on the belief a second civil war is coming to the U.S., as well as a fervent opposition to the state that extends to law enforcement. 

The pushback from the cops seems hollow, laughable to some but, in societies that are becoming deeply, even dangerously divided, there's another half that buys this stuff if only because of confirmatory bias.

The current unrest is unusual in how broadly based it is. It has traction not seen in earlier protests and riots. It doesn't seem as likely to fade away as we saw in the earlier unrest.  I wonder if this has reached some critical mass in which it transforms from unrest into something more in the nature of an uprising. There is a tipping point to be sure but where does it lie?

The Boogaloo movement has been looking for a hook, something to launch their white supremacist civil war. They show up to protests heavily armed, intimidating the protesters, seemingly spoiling for a fight. At times they have gone from provocateurs to armed violence. That's a big notch up. Could there be something bigger in store, something resembling a Timothy McVeigh incident?

If tensions between the two camps escalate, I wish I knew which side the police would be on. Police unions are treating the protesters as their adversaries. It is the protesters, after all, who are driving the movement to reform policing in ways many cops oppose.

The radical right clearly has the backing of this president. He wants antifa declared a terrorist organization but not the hate-fueled clowns with the assault rifles, the people doing the shooting.

At Last, an Anti-Viral

BBC news reports that a cheap and widely available drug, low-dose dexamethasone, has been proven effective at reducing Covid-19 death rates by as much as a third for the hardest-hit patients, those on ventilators.

The drug is part of the world's biggest trial testing existing treatments to see if they also work for coronavirus. 

It cut the risk of death by a third for patients on ventilators. For those on oxygen, it cut deaths by a fifth. 

Had the drug had been used to treat patients in the UK from the start of the pandemic, up to 5,000 lives could have been saved, researchers say. 

And it could be of huge benefit in poorer countries with high numbers of Covid-19 patients. 

The UK government has stockpiled 200,000 courses the drug and says the NHS will make dexamethasone available as treatment for patients on ventilators and oxygen.

It's not a vaccine. It won't protect people from contracting the virus. It won't prevent infected people from infecting others. It will, where it's available, somewhat reduce death rates.

The Global Attack on Press Freedom

To Trump, they're the "enemy of the people." To Rodrigo Duterte, they're "sons of bitches" who are "not exempt from assassination."

A prominent Filipino journalist, Maria Ressa, has been convicted of libeling Duterte's friends and now faces up to six years imprisonment.

Maria Ressa has been accused of fraud, tax evasion and receiving money from the Central Intelligence Agency. She has been arrested twice and posted bail eight times. 

She is also the Philippines’ most prominent journalist, a Fulbright scholar, a Time magazine Person of the Year for her crusading work against disinformation, and a constant thorn in the side of Rodrigo Duterte, her country’s authoritarian but widely popular president. 

On Monday, after years of government threats and accusations, Ms. Ressa and a former colleague at the news site she founded, Rappler, were convicted of cyber libel by a court in Manila. Each was given an indeterminate sentence and could face up to six years in prison, and each was fined $8,000.

Rappler and other news organizations have doggedly covered Mr. Duterte’s war on drugs, which has left thousands of people dead and disappeared. The campaign’s brutality has drawn international rebuke. 

Mr. Duterte’s attacks have caught the attention of press freedom groups and global human rights lawyers, including Amal Clooney. 

“Today a court in the Philippines became complicit in a sinister action to silence a journalist for exposing corruption and abuse,” Ms. Clooney said in a statement. “This conviction is an affront to the rule of law, a stark warning to the press and a blow to democracy in the Philippines.”

Elsewhere in the League of Thugs.

Brazil

Journalists in Brazil are under attack from Jair Bolsonaro and his supporters. Bolsonaro is even going after Glenn Greenwald.

In a shocking attack on press freedom, the Brazil’s rightwing government announced on Tuesday it was charging the journalist Glenn Greenwald with “cybercrimes” in relation to his reporting on the Bolsonaro administration and corruption within its ranks.

Over the past year, Greenwald and the Intercept Brasil, where he is a founding editor, have published a series of explosive stories based on leaked text messages that show Moro, who was a judge at the time, closely coordinating with prosecutors during high-profile corruption trials. Most notably, Moro presided over the trial that sent Bolsonaro’s main rival for the presidency, the former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, to prison. After Bolsonaro was elected, Moro was quickly named justice minister.

It should be clear to anyone – no matter their political persuasion – that the Bolsonaro administration is taking these actions in a purely retaliatory manner in an attempt to criminalize journalism. Bolsonaro has been furious about the Intercept Brasil’s reporting for months, and the Intercept Brasil has published over 90 articles on the leaked chats and their aftermath.

Fearing attack from Bolsonaro's supporters, Brazilian media outlets are pulling their reporters from some government venues.

Verbal attacks on journalists have become a hallmark of Bolsonaro’s presidency, with Brazil’s Trump-admiring leader often egging on supporters outside his home. 

Bolsonaro’s third son, Eduardo, who is the representative of Steve Bannon’s far-right The Movement in South America – regularly attacks what he calls the “extrema imprensa” (extreme press) . 

On Monday, the president suggested Brazil’s overseas image was being damaged by a leftwing media conspiracy, after the British Daily Telegraph described him as “the man who broke Brazil” because of his handling of the Covid-19 crisis. 

"Trump suffers a lot with this,” Bolsonaro said.

Turkey

In Turkey, Recep Erdogan's attacks the media including reporters in other countries. At home he has referred to them as "terrorists."

It is difficult for journalists in Turkey to report about issues such as corruption or the government's conflict with Kurds, said Celal Baslangic of Arti TV, an independent broadcaster based in Germany. "What's most important is to resist war and campaign for peace. But, at the moment in that country, those who want peace are treated like terrorists," he said. 

Aydin Engin, a longtime columnist at the daily newspaper Cumhuriyet, had a similar opinion. He said media had not been free since the 2017 constitutional referendum, which abolished the office of prime minister and concentrated power in the presidency rather than the parliament. There is hardly a free media outlet left and the atmosphere is stifling, he said.

In 2019, Reporters Without Borders ranked Turkey 157th in its World Press Freedom Index. "The witch-hunt waged by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government against its media critics has come to a head since an abortive coup in July 2016. After the elimination of dozens of media outlets and the acquisition of Turkey's biggest media group by a pro-government conglomerate, the authorities are tightening the vice on what little is left of pluralism — a handful of media outlets that are being harassed and marginalised. Turkey is the world's biggest jailer of professional journalists."

Hungary

In Hungary, the Supreme Thug, Viktor Orban, used the Covid pandemic to pass sweeping laws that included a provision for media suppression. Speak out of line and you could wind up with five years in the slammer.

On April 30, Orbán’s Fidesz party, which already had a firm grip on many of the

country’s institutions, voted by a two-thirds majority to extend a national state of emergency over the pandemic, giving the government powers to bypass parliament and rule without checks and balances for an indefinite period. 

The new law also criminalizes the spreading of misinformation deemed to undermine the authorities’ fight against the COVID-19 virus with fines and up to five years in prison. Orbán and Fidesz have frequently used accusations of “fake news” to attack critical journalists and have built up a vast pro-government media empire to blanket the country with official messaging.

These are by no means the only countries suppressing freedom of the press. The International Press Institute has a summary of how the pandemic is being used around the world as a pretext to muzzle press freedom.  It's really quite appalling.

These same countries tend to exhibit another tendency, the corruption or hobbling of their judicial systems, especially in the dismissal or forced retirement of independent judges.

UN Human Rights Council to Debate Racism

The United Nations Human Rights Council will convene Wednesday to discuss racism and police violence. The HRC scheduled the debate at the request of the 54 nation Africa Group.

Burkina Faso on behalf of 54 African nations asked for a special debate on "systematic racism, police brutality and violence in peaceful protests" in the US. 

President of the Human Rights Council Elisabeth Tichy-Fisslberger from Austria spoke at a press conference at the UN in Geneva, the first since it shut down normal activities in March due to the pandemic. 

"We got a request from the African group to have an urgent debate in the follow up to what happened in America with George Floyd and the whole tragedy which showed the problems of racism of police violence, and the follow up to that," said Tichy-Fisslberger.

The US withdrew from the HRC on June 18, 2018, over charges of alleged bias against Israel and allegations that the body serves as a protector of rights abusers.

The gathering will probably spark some Twitter tantrum from the Cheeto Benito who holds a somewhat low opinion of these African nations and, indeed, of the UN itself. You may remember the term he used to describe them.

Where In the World Are We Going?

Legendary economist, Nouriel Roubini, warns there won't be any quick fix to the economic upheaval across the west. He figures it will be like the Great Depression - only worse.  He recently gave an interview to Der Spiegel in which he threw a wet towel over the latest optimism in the stock markets.  The markets, he says, are delusional.

The crash is even greater than it was then. It took years from 1929 until the full extent of the crisis became visible. Compared to today, it was like a slow-motion train wreck. Now the world economy has collapsed within weeks, and in the U.S. alone, more than 40 million people are unemployed. Many believe that the economy will pick up again just as quickly, but that is a fallacy.

On Wall Street, big corporations set the tone, banks and technology companies in particular. They will survive the crisis because the state will never let them go under. They will kick people out, cut costs and in the end, they will have even more market power than before. But what we here call Main Street, small- and medium-sized companies, can't do that. They just go bankrupt. I estimate that every second restaurant in New York City will have to close, but McDonald's will survive. But that's not all.

A "long hot summer" of unrest awaits America.

In the area where I live, the Bowery in Lower Manhattan, three quarters of the demonstrators are white. Many of them are young and belong to the urban "Precariat," the new underclass that has replaced the traditional working class, the "Proletariat,” in advanced service economies. The Precariat is made up of temporary workers, freelancers, people who work on an hourly basis, gig workers, contractors - even though they often have university degrees. Those who are not in regular full-time employment no longer receive state transfers after three months. These people can then no longer pay their rent and telephone bills, and electricity and water are cut off. It will be a long, hot summer.

Roubini adds his name to the list of those who believe that Trump will never leave the White House voluntarily no matter the outcome in November. America on the verge of a second civil war?

Trump does not go to the Supreme Court like Al Gore and request a recount of the votes if the election results are close in some districts. He will blame China, Russia, blacks or immigrants and act like the dictator of a banana republic. He will call his followers to arms – there are enough armed white fascists running around out there. He reminds them often enough of the Second Amendment, which allows Americans to own weapons. 

To close the interview, Roubini was asked if he saw signs of hope.

Hope? I'd have to think. It was good that the governments reacted so quickly and massively to the pandemic and its consequences. But otherwise? I fear that the 2020s will be marked by doom and disaster. Perhaps the global economy will be more sustainable afterwards. But for now, it will be gloomy.

Is 5 the New 3?

Like it or not, climate science depends heavily on computer modelling.  It's how scientists can try to predict future outcomes of changes that have not yet occurred. For example, "if CO2 levels reach X by 20X0, then surface temperatures will reach Y degrees or sea levels will rise by this amount or that."

It's a very intricate system that entails processing mountains of data with known physical principles to produce a likely range of results.

Experience shows that these predictions often are proven inaccurate. That's the good news. The bad news is that when they're shown to be wrong it is quite often because the predictions are understated.  This is one of those moments.

Recent modelling data suggests the climate is considerably more sensitive to carbon emissions than previously believed, and experts said the projections had the potential to be “incredibly alarming”, though they stressed further research would be needed to validate the new numbers. 

Modelling results from more than 20 institutions are being compiled for the sixth assessment by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is due to be released next year. 

Compared with the last assessment in 2014, 25% of them show a sharp upward shift from 3C to 5C in climate sensitivity – the amount of warming projected from a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide from the preindustrial level of 280 parts per million. This has shocked many veteran observers, because assumptions about climate sensitivity have been relatively unchanged since the 1980s. 

“That is a very deep concern,” Johan Rockström, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said. “Climate sensitivity is the holy grail of climate science. It is the prime indicator of climate risk. For 40 years, it has been around 3C. Now, we are suddenly starting to see big climate models on the best supercomputers showing things could be worse than we thought.”

The new models are coming from 'gold standard' outfits such as the British Met Office's Hadley Centre. So what were we getting wrong? It turns out to be clouds and the role they play in atmospheric temperatures.  Science had treated them as neutral, a non-factor. Now it seems they actually contribute to heating. That has sparked considerable debate.

While acknowledging the continued uncertainty, Rockström said climate models might still be underestimating the problem because they did not fully take into account tipping points in the biosphere. 

“The more we learn, the more fragile the Earth system seems to be and the faster we need to move,” he said. “It gives even stronger argument to step out of this Covid-19 crisis and move full speed towards decarbonising the economy.”

417 and Still Rising

Atmospheric CO2 levels have hit 417 ppm, the highest level in about three million years and that means the highest level in human history.

The last time the atmospheric carbon dioxide was this high, sea level was 50 to 80 feet higher than it is today and 3.6°–5.4°F warmer than pre-industrial temperatures. There is a delay in the physical response of a forced increase in carbon dioxide to temperature and sea level, meaning this acts as a benchmark for where we are likely headed into the future.

Here's the thing. Nature isn't nearly as efficient as humans at screwing everything up. We've achieved the latest record in just a couple of centuries. The natural impacts of what we've done will be unfolding for a few centuries only there's a fair chance we won't be around to see how this ends.

Think of it as an over-inflated balloon. Everyone knows it's about to burst but we just can't bring ourselves to stop blowing more air into it. And we're the most knowledgeable, affluent, powerful and technologically advanced creatures ever, the very zenith of life on Earth.  Kind of a giggle, isn't it?

“Well-understood physics tells us that the increasing levels of greenhouse gases are heating Earth’s surface, melting ice and accelerating sea-level rise,” said Pieter Tans, senior scientist with NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory. “If we do not stop greenhouse gases from rising further, especially CO2, large regions of the planet will become uninhabitable.”

We are going to see some amazing changes unfold before this decade is out.

WTF? He Said What? BoJo Defends Colonial Rule in Africa. BLM, Not So Much.

A blast from the not too distant past from Boris Johnson.

Justin Trudeau had his blackface problem. Bad, very bad. But it doesn't hold a candle to Boris Johnson's past musings about British colonialism in Africa.

Boris Johnson said colonialism in Africa should never have ended and downplayed Britain’s role in the slave trade, an article written by the prime minister while he was a Tory MP reveals. 

Critics are urging Mr Johnson to explain whether he still holds the views expounded in the 2002 piece, where he argued that Africans would not have grown the right crops for export without British direction.

“The continent may be a blot, but it is not a blot upon our conscience,” he wrote. “The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge any more.”

BoJo is virulently opposed to British anti-racism protests.

The prime minister this week argued for the retention of controversial statues of slavers and British colonialists in UK cities, which he said should stay up because they “teach us about our past with all its faults”.

In the past he argued that colonial plantation agriculture was the best thing that ever happened to Africans.

“If left to their own devices, the natives would rely on nothing but the instant carbohydrate gratification of the plantain ... the colonists correctly saw that the export market was limited.” 

Suggesting that one way to boost the economy of African countries would be for British tourists to holiday in them, Mr Johnson wrote: “The best fate for Africa would be if the old colonial powers, or their citizens, scrambled once again in her direction; on the understanding that this time they will not be asked to feel guilty.”

The shadow secretary of state for women and equalities, Marsha de Cordova, said: “Boris Johnson’s past comments are an example of why we need to educate people about the impact of colonialism.

“The legacy of British colonialism and its role in the slave trade is a scar on our society. To infer this is something to be proud of, and that African countries are worse off because they are no longer ruled by the empire, is an insult to millions.”

How Do You Score This One?

The results aren't in yet. It could be months, a year perhaps, before we have the Covid-19 death tallies but, at the moment, we know who won't be at the head of the class: Trump, Bolsonaro, Johnson.  I expect India's Modi will be rubbing elbows with those rightwing clowns before long as the pandemic lockdown is lifted while India's hospitals are already overwhelmed.

The editor of the British medical journal, The Lancet, Richard Horton, has already released a book, "The Covid-19 Catastrophe: What's Gone Wrong and How to Stop It Happening Again," that points the Reaper's bony finger directly at Boris Johnson.

He lambasts the management of the virus as “the greatest science policy failure for a generation”, attacks the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) for becoming “the public relations wing of a government that had failed its people”, calls out the medical Royal Colleges, the Academy of Medical Sciences, the British Medical Association (BMA) and Public Health England (PHE) for not reinforcing the World Health Organization’s public health emergency warning back in February, and damns the UK’s response as “slow, complacent and flat-footed”, revealing a “glaringly unprepared” government and a “broken system of obsequious politico-scientific complicity”.

As editor of the Lancet, he’s particularly aggrieved that the series of five academic papers the journal published in late January first describing the novel coronavirus in disturbing detail went unheeded.

“In several of the papers they talked about the importance of personal protective equipment,” he reminds me. “And the importance of testing, the importance of avoiding mass gatherings, the importance of considering school closure, the importance of lockdowns. All of the things that have happened in the last three months here, they’re all in those five papers.” 

He still can’t understand why the government’s scientific advisers didn’t consult their counterparts in China. The world of medicine is a small one, he says, and everyone knows the people responsible for coordinating the Chinese government’s response. 

“These are people they could have literally sent an email to, or picked the phone up to, and said, ‘Hey, we read your paper in the Lancet, can it really be as bad as that? What is going on in Wuhan?’ And if they’d done that they would have found out that this was indeed as bad as described.”

Modern governments are more attuned to monitoring the health of the economy than the wellbeing of the general public. A pretty timid bunch, all things considered, seemingly incapable of dialing down the arresting power of prudence even when an major emergency lands in their lap.

Ottawa, for example, declared a climate state of emergency one day and the very next day greenlighted a major bitumen pipeline expansion. Counter-intuitive? Ya think? The climate emergency, such as it ever was, now seems all but forgotten.

The Trudeau government may have dropped the Covid ball at the outset but nothing compared to the gross negligenc e of Trump, Bolsonaro or Johnson. Those guys have on their hands the needless and usually gruesome deaths of tens of thousands of their countrymen.

Sure, Trudeau could have acted sooner. The Liberal government could have been faster to seal our borders, that sort of thing. However it strikes me that our provincial governments bear most of the responsibility for the death tolls within their jurisdiction. Take nursing home deaths. That was a catastrophe waiting to happen, waiting for years, decades. Can't pin that on the feds. The provinces also were in charge of matters such as social distancing, quarantines, commercial property closures and such.

Some did better than others.  Compare  Alberta and British Columbia for example. They're about even in size, 5 versus 4.5 million. B.C. is a transportation hub. Vancouver airport is the second busiest in Canada (combined flights/passengers). Vancouver is Canada's busiest sea port. B.C. is Canada's gateway to Asia and the Pacific. Vancouver also links to Washington (Seattle) where there was an early outbreak of the pandemic.

B.C. was hit by Covid-19 first and experienced clusters in nursing homes. To date B.C. has had 168 deaths, Alberta 150.  B.C. has had 2,700 confirmed cases. Alberta, more than double that at 7,300. Alberta has the youngest population in Canada, 36.7 years on average, which may account for its somewhat lower fatality count. The average in B.C. is 41.4 years but British Columbia has the highest proportion of seniors of any province west of Quebec.

In other words, British Columbia, ought to have had a higher death rate than we have experienced. At roughly one-third the population of Ontario, perhaps something in the order of 800 dead. 168 dead is bad enough but, with all the factors at play in British Columbia, we've done quite well. Maybe a B+.  Alberta, a B- to C+.  Ontario, a solid D. Quebec, the country's only F. And the feds, B- to C+.

Overall, I think we've done well, provincially and federally, but we could have done better. Compared to the United States, Brazil or Britain, we've done amazingly well. Compared to New Zealand, we're looking pretty shabby.

Of course we haven't heard the end of Covid-19. It has not been wrestled to the ground and a second wave is widely anticipated.  But, long after Covid is in the medical history books, alongside SARS, we'll be dealing with the economic and social aftermath. That might be a good time to evaluate our national resilience to prepare for whatever is coming next.

I'm Not Sure How Lindsey Gets Himself Out of This One.

Since John McCain died, Lindsey Graham has spent most of his time on his knees at Donald Trump's feet. I wonder how this is going to play out with Lindsey's new master.

The best part is this isn't a Biden campaign ad. This ad is the handiwork of Republican Voters Against Trump.

Scottish Parliament Votes to Ban Exports to "Racist State."

The Scottish parliament has decided that Britain should embargo all exports of riot gear, tear gas and rubber bullets to the United States and its police agencies.

A successful motion, which was backed by 52 votes to 0 with 11 abstentions, says the parliament "stands in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and considers that the UK government must immediately suspend all export licences for tear gas, rubber bullets and riot gear to the US".

Patrick Harvie, the Green MSP who proposed the successful amendment, said the "weapons of oppression", which the UK government has granted active export licences for, were being used by a "racist state" to "brutalise marginalise communities".

52 to 0? That's crazy. 52 'yeas' to the United States being considered a racist state. 0 'nays.' Zero, nobody objecting to that designation. Maybe they should grab Trump's golf course and designate it as reparations to the families of every unarmed black killed at the hands of American cops. 

If the Temptations Want to Stage a Comeback

I believe a couple of them are still touring. They might think about updating this 1970 hit.

Sometimes It Helps to End With a Little Humour

John Oliver from October, 2017

A Cry for Help. Americans Beg Canada - Please Invade Us.

From The Daily Show

A Friend Called

An old friend called yesterday. I think she wanted an annual update on our progress along the Road to Hell. We talked about the pandemic, the George Floyd uprisings, the decline of democracy, a lot of things.  Her son-in-law and daughter being police officers, she has taken on a pretty hard-nosed, "law and order" mindset. I knew there was no point getting into it with her so I changed the subject and we moved on.

She was very worried about climate change and what awaits her grandchildren. I gave her an update on recent scientific knowledge as I understand it. She said she wants to get involved but I'm not so sure that her health would even allow that sort of thing.

I told her that a number of years ago I had joined a group from England called Dark Mountain. Discussing it turned into an opportunity to recall what drew me to this collective in the first place.

Dark Mountain is a place for climate activists, climate advocates, writers and poets and anyone who wishes to follow them, no matter the distance. What sets Dark Mountain apart from most groups is that it is expressly for those "tired of the lies that society tells itself."

It is not burdened by fanciful ideas that we are going to win this thing. No, climate breakdown has gone too far. There's no political will to change that in time and no public appetite for the difficult changes that would require. Everyone wants it fixed, sure, but almost nobody will entertain the sacrifices that would necessitate.

There is no magic wand. We don't have the will to do what must be done.

Dark Mountain is about liberating us from myths, delusions and self-deception. It's not about giving up the fight, throwing in the towel. No, not at all. It's about not wasting time on foolish hopes and dreams. Once you're freed from the delusions climate breakdown and the job ahead is so much easier to handle.

Once you're liberated from the desperation it's easier to see what is still worth fighting for. When you reach that point you can see that what we do from here on in still matters. It still matters for my friend's grandkids. It matters for your own.

We can take one of just two paths. We can't salvage for those kids the Eden-like environment and privilege we enjoyed from the 60s through the 90s. No, they'll never know that. Yet, hard as their world will be 20, 30, 50 years from now, our footprint today will be on it. We will be felt.

We can either continue to indulge ourselves, maintain the status quo, and make their future commensurately more painful, more precarious than it need be or we can start to take another path to ensure they have the best future possible. We can harm them or we can maybe, just maybe, help them a bit.  If we stop squandering time with meaningless targets and empty promises, we might buy them some time that they can put to better use than we ever will.

And that's still worth fighting for.

Henry Giroux and the Age of "Criminogenic Politics"

Criminogenic - was its das, Henry?

One of the great public intellectuals of our age, American Henry Giroux, uses the word to describe a deepening psychosis in "the age of Donald Trump." 

For Giroux, who holds the McMaster University chair of scholarship in the public interest, it's an unusually brief essay but, boy, does it pack a punch. It deserves to be read in its entirety. Brace yourself.

In its late stages, capitalism morphs into a form of neoliberal fascism. In this instance, the structural misery produced by capitalism via its destruction of the welfare state, safety net, and its growing investment in accelerating inequality and criminalizing all social problems merges with the theater of racism, racial cleansing, hyper-masculinity, ultra-nationalism, militarism, scapegoating the vulnerable, and the politics of disposability. Cruelty and hate now become a badge of honor among the financial, political, and corporate elite. One consequence is not merely a criminogenic political and economic system, but a state of barbarism that reflects a death-dealing psychosis among political leaders such as Trump and Bolsonaro. 

This is not merely a matter of the truth or morality being abandoned in the interest of producing a fascist politics, it represents the emergence of a politics that mimics the transition from the mentality of greed and the concentration of power in few hands–celebrated in the film Wall Street–to a dangerous state of mind in which violence and death become the organizing and governing principles of a society. Instead of Wall Street we get the insanity portrayed in American Psycho. Patrick Bateman has become the model for contemporary leadership under the rubric of casino capitalism. Trump with Bateman as his alter ego golfs, retweets posts filled with sexist comments about Nancy Pelosi and Hilary Clinton, discredited conspiracy theories from right-wing syncophantic media sources, and racist comments about Stacey Abrams’s appearance, all the while he is silent as the Covid-19 American death total reaches a staggering 100,000. Noam Chomsky is right in calling him a “sociopathic megalomaniac” whose only allegiance is to himself, “great wealth and corporate power.” 

As the New York Times points out, more Americans have died in the last three months than “died in the Vietnam and Korean Wars combined and nearly twice as many as died of battle wounds in WWII.” Trump responds by blaming China for the outbreak, and sending out endless tweets attacking Obama. Moreover, Trump has blood on his hands. This is evident not only his well-documented late response to the pandemic but also because of his failure to impose one week earlier a lockdown and social distancing, which a Columbia University Study, suggests would have saved 36,000 lives.[1] Trump dismissed the criticism by calling Columba a “liberal, disgraceful institution.” In addition, one wonders how many lives could have been saved if Trump had quickly put in place a federal plan to deal with the virus instead of prioritizing the needs of the economy over human life. 

Trump has cultivated a taste for savagery and defines the world in the image of his own self-interest and war. He has revived the architecture of fascism by mainstreaming its mobilizing passions. He calls people animals, his rallies have all the earmarks of the Nuremberg spectacles; he refers to the press as fake news, not unlike the appropriation of Hitler and the Nazi’s use of Lugenpresse (the lying press), as a way to discredit the oppositional media and journalists who hold him accountable; he rounds up the children of undocumented brown people and puts them in cages; he makes racial cleansing a governing principle of his administration; he normalizes lying, making it the basic rhetorical experience of our time; he amplifies the militarized discourse of fear and numbs the culture with his pervasive anti-intellectualism and control of the right-wing media as unadulterated propaganda machines. He hires white supremacists and acts like the grifter in chief in the White House. All of this points to alarming echoes of the past and the need to learn from history rather than deny it. The elements pointing to the rise of fascism in the United States are on full display, and without apology. Maybe it is time to take seriously Theodor Adorno’s warning: “I consider the survival of National Socialism within democracy to be potentially more menacing that the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy.”[2]

h/t Counterpunch.

Has Anyone Seen Chris? The Rise of Ubermensch America.

I wish Chris Hedges was still writing his column. He's made a few appearances on Twitter and YouTube but it's not the same. He's still teaching and he's doing his prison work. Apparently he will run for the Green Party in November. Not too sure what that's about.

A lot of the turmoil we're witnessing today comes pretty close to what he has foreseen. It'd be interesting to see Hedges relate these events in an essay. Oh well.

His last regular venue, Truthdig, is down. The owner went to war with pretty much everybody who wrote for the website. They went on strike. She put it into what appears to be a receivership. She's calling it a "hiatus" but there doesn't seem to be any life left in the body.

The events of the past few months, the pandemic and all the rest, have been stomach-churning for me. Then came the execution of George Floyd and the unrest that, unlike all the other killings in this same mold, became a spark that caught fire, sweeping the United States, Europe, Canada, even New Zealand and Australia. Mr. Floyd's life, it turned out, "mattered."

What bothers me most about the pandemic is how thoroughly, almost instantly, it became politicized. It was transformed into just more fodder for our already deeply malignant culture war.  A medical problem is subsumed into a political joust. Climate change. A truly existential threat not just to human civilization but most life on Earth has become a political front in the culture war. This is how we deal with the great challenges of the day. We don't. It is how we will deal with the even bigger challenges that are set to roll out during this decade. We won't. We will reduce them to political arguments and consign them to the culture war.

Democracy is an illusion. Democracy is supposed to serve the welfare and security of the people but those days are gone.

That's especially true in the United States.

Democracy in America is a smoking hole in the ground. That's not going to change even if Joe Biden unseats Donald Trump in November.  The US today comprises layers of corruption, each reinforcing the others, collectively ensuring their continuation.

America's vaunted system of checks and balances was intended to thwart any one co-equal branch of government - legislative, executive, judicial - from going rogue. The idea was that one may go bad but the other two would intervene and stop it. It never contemplated a situation where they had all been corrupted.

It began with America's thoroughly "bought and paid for" Congress. John McCain and Russ Feingold tried to arrest the corruption of big money with a Hail Mary attempt at campaign finance reform. That failed and, with it, all notion of a Congress in service to the American public was extinguished.

An autopsy on American democracy was held. It came in the form of a study out of Princeton in 2014 by professors Gillens (Princeton) and Page (Northwestern). They went back years,  poring over how Congress voted when the public interest clashed with special interests. (read the report. it's only 18 pages PDF) Their conclusion was that America had succumbed to plutocracy. Democracy was only an illusion.  That body on the slab, democracy, was dead - bled out.

The fingerprints at the crime scene, there's plenty of them.

Gerrymandering. Engineering electoral districts to favour the powerful minority over the powerless majority - where 40 per cent of the overall vote can capture 60 per cent of the districts (wait a damned second, does that sound familiar?) is a telltale of democracy subverted.

Voter suppression - knocking eligible people off voting lists, raising ID and other hurdles, a sea of technical requirements to make it all but impossible to recover legitimate votes - they've got it all.

How about some districts where there's just an unfortunate shortage of polls, in some cases so bad that you may have to wait 7 hours in line just to cast your ballot? Can you guess where that inadvertent oversight happens? Sure you can.

What about politically "groomed" courts, carefully stacked with reliable partisan judges, including the United States Supreme Court itself? Justice for all? Sure, justice for all on this side over here. Voting Rights Act? "Ka-ching" - gone.

This is the goddess, Themis, as she stands in the Vancouver courthouse. In her upraised hand she holds the scales of justice, symbolizing fairness. Over her eyes she wears a blindfold, symbolizing equality before the law. If the law isn't fair and honest; if it isn't equal, it's not justice. If it's not justice then it's injustice. Once you have a groomed judiciary all that's left is injustice. Without equality before the law and an unbiased judiciary the law is corrupted and democracy is on death watch.

Corruption is the black mold of America and it's in every wall, beneath the floorboards, up in the rafters. But what about that "fourth estate," journalism, the watchdog of government?  The media that are supposed to keep the public informed, supposed to hold the political caste to account. They've been subverted too. In a land where so many get their news from people named Limbaugh or Hannity or Alex Jones, Facebook or Twitter, the public is groomed, conditioned. All they need is a steady diet of fear, lies and persistent appeals to their basest instincts and they'll do whatever is asked of them, just as in The Lord of the Flies or Germany in the late 30s.

And this isn't just about the November elections. Would that it was. Hitler's contagion didn't stop when he dismissed the German parliament and outlawed political parties, or when he occupied the Rhineland or when he annexed Austria, anschluss, or when he dismembered Czechoslovakia in the name of lebensraum. His followers rejoiced when their armies rolled into Poland, swept through the low countries, conquered France, even poured into the Rodina, Russia.

We will all have to watch America's still embedded corruption as the state confronts what nature is bringing this decade. Sea level rise, storm surges, retreat from the sea, floods and crop killing droughts, parts of the south that become seasonally inhabitable, food insecurity, internally displaced populations requiring relocation, mass migration out of the south, Central America, fleeing destruction yet also facing destruction in their only refuge.

What will become of America, the "indispensable" nation, American exceptionalism, America the Land of Perpetual Grievance, the oligarchy, ubermensch Amerika?

Think about these things when you contemplate where Canada is heading and what forces may sweep us up in their path. We're going to need to find a spine and time is not on our side.

Milley - That Walk With Trump Was Wrong

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, general Mark Milley, says he was wrong to accompany Trump's entourage as the president staged a photo-op at a church across the street from the White House.

Gen Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, was speaking in a video for a National Defense University commencement ceremony. 

He said: "I should not have been there. My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics. 

"As a commissioned uniformed officer, it was a mistake that I have learned from, and I sincerely hope we all can learn from it." 

The general was wearing battle uniform as he walked with the president and critics said this suggested his support for the deployment of the military against protesters.

And, general Mark, you need to figure out that fat, old guys really look silly in combat fatigues.