Too Soon?

 You decide:

The Mike Harris Abomination

 

Those who live in Ontario and are of a certain age will remember the disaster that was the Mike Harris premiership. Yet despite all the damage he did to this province, (and continues to do as the Chair of Chartwell which, by the way, is rewarding its investors handsomely while presiding over a multitude of deaths in its homes), he has been awarded an Order of Ontario.

To say that this appointment has met with controversy is to understate the resulting outrage. For example, almost 68,000 have signed a Change.org petition to stop this betrayal of all who suffered under him.

And, as always, Toronto Star letter-writers have not held back. June Mewhort of Woodville, Ontario writes:

Mike Harris receiving the Order of Ontario is a slap in the face for Indigenous people in Ontario. It is also a slap in the face to all Ontario educators, all Ontario nurses, all Ontario single moms and all Ontario municipalities.

Municipalities are still struggling with the egregious downloads the Harris government burdened them with.

And now, we have the long-term-care debacle. It was Harris who opened up the LTC arena to private consortiums and he became a beneficiary of his own legislation by becoming chair of Chartwell.

This awarding of the Order of Ontario to this man is the Progressive Conservatives rewarding a man who has done nothing positive for this province.

Doug Ford is stroking his back for future favours.

Wasn’t Harris also the politician who sold Highway 407?

It is unconscionable that he be given this prestigious award.

Peter Voth of Ajax, Ontario reminds that some things are unforgivable:

 The article about Mike Harris being appointed to the Order of Ontario dealt mostly with his connection with private long-term-care homes, but he should be denied the appointment simply based on his record as premier.

In a time when statues of Sir John MacDonald or Egerton Ryerson are questioned, why is Harris even considered for an appointment for anything?

Ask the citizens of Walkerton, or the First Nations of Ipperwash.

What about the stripping of the school curriculum, and the removal of the word “environment” from those documents? What about the hospital closures? What about the downloading of our secondary highways to the regions and the confusing renaming of roads across the province? What about the famous strategy to “create a crisis” in education (to use the words of John Snobelen, Harris’s education minister)?

Harris wasn’t called “Mike-the-knife” for nothing.

Perhaps we should build a statue of him so that we can rip it down the next day.

We live in a time when public morality seems to be but an increasingly quaint notion. Mike Harris's 'reward' is just another sad illustration of this. 

Time For Some Sober Second Thought

 

A recent poll shows that about half of all Canadians are ignoring the Covid guidelines telling people to socialize only with those in their own household:

A new survey suggests nearly half of Canadians visited with family or friends over the winter holiday period.

The Leger/Association for Canadian Studies poll found 48 per cent of those surveyed visited with people outside their households, compared to 52 per cent who said they did not.

Public health officials had pleaded with Canadians to sharply limit their contacts during the holidays to avoid massive spikes in COVID-19 cases.

But it appears something gave for Canadians, said Leger vice-president Christian Bourque.

“Usually we Canadians are sort of much more, I would say, disciplined when it comes to going by what governments are recommending in terms of our behaviour, but over the holidays, apparently, it was sort of tougher on Canadians,” he said.

A study from Korea suggests that it is more than time that such people give a sober second thought to their recklessness. It is a story that suggests the easy transmissibility of the virus and calls into question whether the two-meter social distancing guidance is adequate

Dr. Lee Ju-hyung has largely avoided restaurants in recent months, but on the few occasions he’s dined out, he’s developed a strange, if sensible, habit: whipping out a small anemometer to check the airflow.

It’s a precaution he has been taking since a June experiment when he and colleagues re-created the conditions at a restaurant in Jeonju, a city in the southwest of South Korea, where diners contracted coronavirus from an out-of-town visitor. Among them was a high school student who was infected with the coronavirus after five minutes of exposure from more than 20 feet away.

It appears the culprits here are being indoors with others and airflow.

Linsey Marr, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Virginia Tech who studies the transmission of viruses in the air, said the five-minute window in which the student, identified in the study as “A,” was infected was notable because the droplet was large enough to carry a viral load, but small enough to travel 20 feet through the air.“‘A’ had to get a large dose in just five minutes, provided by larger aerosols probably about 50 microns,” she said. “Large aerosols or small droplets overlapping in that gray area can transmit disease further than one or two meters [3.3 to 6.6 feet] if you have strong airflow.”

Lee, a professor at the Jeonbuk National University Medical School who has also been helping local authorities carry out epidemiological investigations, went to the restaurant and was surprised by how far the two had been sitting. CCTV footage showed the two never spoke, or touched any surfaces in common — door handles, cups or cutlery. From the sway of a light fixture, he could tell the air conditioning unit in the ceiling was on at the time.

Lee and his team recreated the conditions in the restaurant — researchers sat at tables as stand-ins — and measured the airflow. The high school student and a third diner who was infected had been sitting directly along the flow of air from an air conditioner; other diners who had their back to the airflow were not infected. Through genome sequencing, the team confirmed the three patients’ virus genomic types matched.

Clearly, there is still much to be learned about Covid-19. Those who think they know it all and conduct themselves blithely may not live to regret it. 

A Timely Reminder

 With the travel circuit as busy as it is, now is a good time to remind each other that our political 'leaders' have advised all Canadians to avoid unnecessary travel:

Nothing Seems To Deter Him

 The him here, of course, would be Donald Trump who, true to form, will never accept the fact that he has been voted out of office. Despite failed efforts at promoting outrageous claims of voter fraud and bogus lawsuits being filed and rejected, the Orange Ogre is still clinging to the delusion that he can remain president.

As reported in News and Guts, the Washing Post writes of an extraordinary call Trump made to Georgia's Secretary of State, Brad Raffensberger:

In the call, Trump urges the fellow Republican to “find” 11,780 votes to overturn the president’s defeat in the state. The Post writes:

The Washington Post obtained a recording of the conversation in which Trump alternately berated Raffensperger, tried to flatter him, begged him to act and threatened him with vague criminal consequences if the secretary of state refused to pursue his false claims, at one point warning that Raffensperger was taking “a big risk.”

Throughout the call, Raffensperger and his office’s general counsel rejected his assertions, explaining that Trump is relying on debunked conspiracy theories and that President-elect Joe Biden’s 12,779-vote victory in Georgia was fair and accurate.

You can listen to excerpts of that call below:

It would seem you can take the Donald out of the White House, but you can't take the Don out of the Donald.

 

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A Warning From The WHO

 I doubt there is anyone amongst us who doesn't wish this pandemic were over. The cost in lives, health and jobs has been unprecedented in modern times. Yet to think that the vaccines, remarkable achievements that they are, will end all of our Covid-19 troubles, is akin to wishful thinking, as the following video attests.

Looking At Ourselves In The Mirror

If you have access to the New York Times, there is a piece well-worth reading by Michael Benson. Entitled Watching Earth Burn. it includes photos of our planet taken from three weather satellites in geostationary orbit high above the Equator. These photos attest to the ravages of climate-change induced wild fires plaguing the world, although Benson does not ignore human-caused destruction, as in the ravages of the Amazonian rainforest where, thanks to 

the rapacious policies of President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, predatory agricultural, logging and mining interests had set his country ablaze. By late September the already hellish 2019 escalation in deliberately set forest fires had been exceeded by 28 percent, with more than 44,000 outbreaks recorded in the Amazon and Pantanal this year.

The entire article makes for grim reading, and is a cogent reminder of just how late in the day it is for mitigating the worst of  the damage threatening the very existence of our species and countless others with whom we share the earth.

Yet the piece ends on a cautiously optimistic note:

If the war has started and we’re losing, what can we do about it? Or to put it another way, what would I like to see happen over the next year, even if I won’t yet be able to observe it directly from my Olympian perch among the satellites?

Actually, our response to the pandemic already suggests the way forward. Faced with an existential crisis of a scale not seen in living memory, we deployed the planet’s best minds, funded them well and turned them loose on the problem. They in turn were able to draw on a wealth of prior knowledge about how viruses infiltrate our bodies, and three decades of hard-won experience in learning about and finally creating RNA — purpose-built synthetic copies of a natural molecule integral to our genes — devised to prompt an immune response within our cells. This paid off spectacularly. And all this was accomplished in record time — months instead of the previous standard of a decade or more.

We need to follow this immediately with another sustained global effort. Imagine what human ingenuity could produce if unleashed in comparably coordinated, well-funded fashion on the climate crisis. The good news is that, as with the new RNA vaccines, we have significant prior research to draw on. It covers carbon-neutral power production, energy conservation strategies, carbon capture and sequestration, global reforestation and an intercontinental effort to build a high voltage, DC power network 40 percent more efficient than AC and thus able to compensate for the daily fluctuations in wind and solar power systems.

In short, we need an all-hands-on-deck fusion of the Manhattan Project and the Marshall Plan, only this time funded by all of the world’s major economies and led by the largest: the United States, the European Union and China.

Time is obviously short, but as I commented on Marie's blog entry about the existential threats we face, human beings seem much more able to respond to acute threats than long-term ones. If we cannoit change that propensity, there really is little basis for hope.