Designed To Fail

H/t Theo Moudakis

In his column today, Bruce Arthur offers the opinion that Ontario's vaccine passport is a half-hearted effort by Doug Ford that seems almost designed to fail.

...as the Star’s award-winning Rosa Saba reported in one of several essential pieces this week, existing vaccination PDFs can be altered after downloading using a rare hacking program known as … Microsoft Word. 

What about the QR code system slated to come into effect next month?

…software industry experts estimate it would take approximately four months to build an adequately secure and stable system, which is what happened in Quebec. Ontario got three weeks. And while there is a paper/PDF option in Quebec, that province built both a QR reader and a business-side system to connect data to the database, so QR codes are secure and difficult to forge. Ontario is skipping that.

Oh, and Ontario’s QR app will be, uh, voluntary.  

So after watching Manitoba create a plastic immunization card that fits in your wallet, and watching Quebec take four months to build an app that could be secure, Ontario decided on one month of easily faked documentation, followed by an option for more of the same. It’s not that this is the kind of system you would design if you knew and sympathized with people who didn’t want to be vaccinated, but it does seem like that kind of system, doesn’t it?

Hmm, is there a pattern emerging here? Well, the Premier has left little doubt where he stands.

…let me be very clear, this is a temporary and exceptional measure. We will only use these certificates for as long as they are needed and not one day longer.”

Many appear to be putting the clues together.

...some businesses are already signalling they won’t enforce the passport. At a sad, pitiable hospital protest in Toronto last week, one anti-vaxxer told me they anticipated businesses would signal to the community on the channels that anti-vaxxers use, like Telegram. And some hardcore anti-vaxxers are so feral that some restaurants closed their dining areas in anticipation of trouble.

Premier Ford likely has his eye on next year's provincial election which, in so many ways, will be  referendum on his handling of the pandemic. Given the poorly designed nature of the vaccine certificate, he is clearly hoping that his base, much of which includes the crank crowd of anti-vaxxers, will turn out in force, understanding that he has done the minimum possible to try to placate those who place a high value on public health, at the same time offering a big wink and a nudge to his 'people'.

 

 

A Message For Those Who Claim To Be Religious

 And if that doesn't convince you, perhaps this will.

This And That

Too tired to write after a night spent watching election returns, I opt for an easy way out today: the thoughts of others.

H/t David Parkins

H/t Theo Moudakis

H/t Graeme MacKay

And on a related theme …

An Inspirational Story

While I am an avid newspaper reader, much of it online (NYT, The Guardian) and one a physical journal (The Toronto Star), I limit my intake of television news to one hour per night, the local news at 6 o'clock and NBC Nightly News or Global National at 6:30. Both of the latter have in common how they end their newscasts, almost always with an inspirational story to counterbalance the day's bitter events.

Last evening the final story on Global News was especially heartening, profiling Josh Vander Vies, the Liberal candidate in Vancouver East. As you will see in the following report, his fortitude and determination would clearly make him a welcome addition to Parliament.

Please start the video at the 18:25 mark.

And Now, A Word From Lisa Simpson

 Oh, that little know-it-all.

My Sentiments Exactly

 

And in a related development, in Florida, apparently all things are possible.

All The Lonely People: Where Do They All Come From?

Before the advent of our current troubles, the Toronto Star's Bruce Arthur won widespread acclaim for his sports reporting. Since the arrival of the pandemic, however, his writing has achieved an entirely new level; his coverage of various aspects of the disease, especially the social consequences, has been superb.

In his latest column, Arthur turns his sights on the irrational protests that have been occurring outside of hospitals, some resulting in obstruction of patient and healthcare worker access. His analysis is well-worth the read.

“You’ve all got blood on your hands! You’re worse than the Nazis!” one middle-aged man yelled at the TV cameras, outside Toronto General Hospital. “You’ll have rocks thrown at you, next!” A few yelled Fake News like they were at karaoke. Mostly, they rejected vaccines. Society, too.

But at ground level there was something piteous about it, malignancy and all. The trappings of a brain-poisoned movement dotted the crowd: a couple of red Make America Great Again hats, some purple People’s Party of Canada gear, a hat from a disgraced barbecue joint. There was a one-page anti-mask, anti-lockdown, ivermectin-boosting, hydroxychloroquine-boosting pamphlet handed out that claimed a vaccine passport was the mark of the beast.

Arthur considers who is so lost as to be protesting a hospital. Some of the misbegotten, of course, are the rabid anti-vaxxers, along with rag-tag followers of the People's Party of Canada. But Arthur offers an interesting perspective about many of the others.

… most people protesting outside the hospital were clearly lost souls. One carried a giant wooden cross; one had tattoos drawn on with a marker; one had a sign that misspelled the mayor’s name as J. Tori. Some seemed hungry for confrontation that never really came, but it was largely social: they swapped conspiracy theories, or recorded one another. More than anything, they seemed lonely. But then, so do QAnon fanatics, or Trumpian rallygoers. Lonely people are easy prey for conspiracies.

One of the more rational attendees was 35-year-old Torontonian Radu Dragon, who posts videos of protests to TikTok and YouTube. A smoker who refuses to get vaccinated, he seems to have found a new fellowship.

So he comes to the protests, and the people there have replaced his former circle of friends, even dotted as it is with the paranoid, the stressed, and people who vibrate on strange, off-reality frequencies. Society has always had people like this. But if you communicate on Facebook, Telegram, Instagram and TikTok, it can become a social circuit.

And for many, there seems to be no coming back, and outreach to them will prove futile.

There is a school of thought that if only we are nicer to people who think health-care workers are criminals and vaccine advocates violate the Nuremberg Code, then they will come around.

But there is an anger out there in Canada living at the conservative end of the spectrum, as the PPC surges in the polls.

“Some of these movements are like a bug light for more radical groups,” says Amarnath Amarasingam, an assistant professor at Queen’s University who specializes in the study of extremism. “It’s not something you can just not have a police presence for, otherwise you wind up with a smaller version of Jan. 6. The vast majority of people on Jan. 6 weren’t violent, but some were.

 “A lot of these groups are getting their content from abroad as well; there’s this theory that our crazies are not as crazy as America’s. Yeah, but they’re reading American content. They’re talking to them on Facebook … these movements are transnational.

 There is an anger and misinformation virus in this country that has been encouraged by some pretend and even mainstream media, and it could absolutely eat our conservative movement. This time there was no violence, and no ambulances were blocked. Thank goodness.

Instead it was mostly a bunch of sad lonely people together on a sidewalk, loosely united in a cause, feeling like they had a purpose, and unaware, while outside a hospital filled with the truly sick, that they had become the monsters.

And it is precisely this aspect of the pandemic for which there is no real treatment available.