What has happened to America? You decide.
Saturday, January 16, 2021
Thursday, January 14, 2021
Our Own Rudy Guiliani
I'm sure I am but one of millions who have followed the antics of Rudy Guiliani, deriving bittersweet amusement from his addled but staunch defence of his master, Donald Trump, who has reportedly now turned against his lapdog and is refusing to pay his legal bill.
Standard operating procedure in Trumpland.
But Canadians envious of the dark comic relief afforded by the hapless Giuliani need not despair. As Bob Hepburn writes, we have our own version in Canada: Conrad Black.
Not to be outdone by Giuliani, Black has in recent weeks kicked up his loud, long-held support for Trump and now ranks among the president’s most fawning loyalists.
Like Giuliani, the former Canadian business mogul and ex-U.S. convict has appeared on American talk shows spreading the same conspiracy theories and misinformation about the election, including discredited allegations of widespread voter fraud on the part of Democrats.
Stunningly, in the aftermath of last week’s riots on Capitol Hill, Black continues to heap praise on Trump.
He insists on conservative talk shows that Trump did nothing wrong in the lead-up to the Capitol Hill insurrection, that the rioters “were not Trump supporters” and that top Republicans who are now distancing themselves from Trump are “repulsive” and “disgraceful.”
For years, Black has stuck with Trump, from sex scandals to dog whistle appeals to white supremacists. He capped it with a 2018 book titled “Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other.”
And Black has reaped a rich reward for his sycophantic servitude.
Trump pardoned him in 2019. Black was convicted in 2007 of fraud and obstruction of justice and served 3½ years in a Florida prison before being released and deported to Canada.
In 2020, Black continued to fawn over Trump, writing last month in The Hill, a top U.S. political website, that Trump’s record in office “has been a tour de force.”
Shamelessly, and without any apparent moral or intellectual (despite his propensity for pretentious language designed to hide his paucity of real thought) compass, Black has supported the risible Trump fantasy that he lost the election, and even worse, mocks the seditious events last week at the Capitol building.
On Jan. 6, the day of the riots, Black retweeted a Twitter post that appeared to mock the damage and frightened lawmakers. “The damage to the Capitol was really quite shocking,” the retweeted comment read. “Very disturbing picture below showing that plastic water bottles were littered on floor of Capitol, rather than being properly placed in recycling. One can hardly blame congressmen for abandoning premises.”
Trump has had a series of lapdogs before and during his presidency. It is to our shame that some of them (are you listening, Brian Mulroney?) have been Canadian in origin.
Wednesday, January 13, 2021
Der Speigel And Donald Trump
The following was sent to me by a friend:
No American president has been more incendiary than Donald Trump. He has been the subject in recent years of 28 DER SPIEGEL cover stories. Many featured the work of illustrator Edel Rodriguez. The covers were often criticized as being exaggerated. Here are the most important ones.
As you will see, each of the covers represent an aspect of Trump that the world, much to its dismay, has come to know. You can see the full array of them, with links to cover stories, by going to their website:
DER SPIEGEL, Issue 45/16 (Nov. 5, 2016)
"The Next President: The Script of a Tragedy"
All of which goes to show that a picture is indeed worth a thousand words.
Sunday, January 10, 2021
Be Careful Who You Associate With
Thanks to the salamander for alerting me to the following story.
Randal Lane, the chief content officer and editor of Forbes has a warning for all companies: Be careful who you hire. Avoid anyone who worked for Trump, especially his many press secretaries:
In this time of transition – and pain – reinvigorating democracy requires a reckoning. A truth reckoning. Starting with the people paid by the People to inform the People.
From Day One at the Trump White House, up has been down, yes has been no, failure has been success. Sean Spicer set the tone with the inauguration crowd size – the worst kind of whopper, as it demanded that people disbelieve their own eyes. The next day, Kellyanne Conway defended Spicer’s lie with a new term, “alternative facts.” Spicer’s successor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders lied at scale, from smearing those who accused Trump of sexual harassment to conjuring jobs statistics. Her successor, Stephanie Grisham, over the course of a year, never even held a press conference, though the BS continued unabated across friendly outlets. And finally, Kayleigh McEnany, Harvard Law graduate, a propaganda prodigy at 32 who makes smiling falsehood an art form. All of this magnified by journalists too often following an old playbook ill-prepared for an Orwellian communication era.
Lane's message is a simple but powerful one: Reward egregious dishonesty at your peril:
Let it be known to the business world: Hire any of Trump’s fellow fabulists above, and Forbes will assume that everything your company or firm talks about is a lie. We’re going to scrutinize, double-check, investigate with the same skepticism we’d approach a Trump tweet. Want to ensure the world’s biggest business media brand approaches you as a potential funnel of disinformation? Then hire away.
Lane ends his editorial with a timely reminder about healthy democracies:
… as Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, in a thriving democracy, everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts. Our national reset starts there.
It is an observation that all of us would do well to always remember.
Saturday, January 9, 2021
Friday, January 8, 2021
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.
Wednesday, January 6, 2021
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.
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