Gavin Newsom goes full Michael Bloomberg: California Set to Ban Skittles & Other Candy Over Health Concerns
Reality bites
When pandemic measures began mandating restaurant closures and the segregation of businesses into “essential” versus “non-essential” enterprises, we were assured that this could never be a long term problem because the economy would “recover”. In reality, recovery is starting to look an awful lot like recession.
Bankruptcy filings in food services have spiked 116 per cent since 2022, according to Restaurants Canada. It says about half of restaurants are unprofitable right now, compared to only 12 per cent before the pandemic.
Restaurants Canada is calling on the federal government to extend the CEBA repayment deadline. The program offered interest-free loans of up to $60,000 to small businesses and not-for-profits. The deadline to pay back loans is Dec. 31, 2023.
Restaurants Canada estimates 20 per cent of its members won’t be able to pay back the loans by deadline.
Wasted money
If you’re interesting in buying some trash, Naomi Klein’s latest book is all set up for pre-ordering. I imagine there will be little difference between it and her other disconnected, rambling word salads.
It’s official: my new book comes out September 12. It braids together memoir, political reportage, and cultural analysis into what I am told is a pretty wild ride.
Planning for chaos
So the federal government believes it is not only necessary but worthwhile to regulate the internet? They used to claim such authority due to the supposedly “limited” nature of the airwaves, but when it comes to an information firehose piped into your computer or smartphone from all over the world, that argument is more than a little harebrained.
Streaming platforms will have to promote Canadian and Indigenous films and television shows not only in Canada but around the world under the new federal online streaming law…
Nonetheless they’re pressing ahead, even if they don’t really understand what it is they are supposed to regulate.
The regulator also says it intends to explore what constitutes a “social media service,” to help it develop a clear understanding of which “online undertakings” fall within its jurisdiction under the new law.
Another win for Elon
Buried in a self-serving bromide salad regarding press freedom one finds a reluctant admission: the CBC just can’t quit Twitter.
Today, we will resume some activity on a handful of umbrella Twitter accounts, including @CBCNews, but we will significantly reduce our overall Twitter footprint and continue to assess the platform against our strategy.
Buyer’s remorse
If the federal government has its way, these folks won’t be the only disappointed car buyers in Canada, especially after 2035. Undoubtedly we’ll be told not to worry since “technology always improves”. As demand is forced to rise by virtue of legislation, $72,000 won’t come close to a standard purchase price in 2035.
Fleming said before buying an all-electric Volvo C40 Recharge, he checked the vehicle’s range, which was advertised as 364 km on a full charge.
Fleming says he made the $72,000 purchase in November and that it wasn’t long after that he and his wife became concerned about the distance the car was travelling on each charge.
“We are only getting about 225 km per charge – nowhere near what they’re advertising,”
The road to nothing
If anyone senses that the environmental movement excels at perpetually shifting goalposts, here’s more evidence. It appears that every ban on one alleged environmental injustice simply creates another environmental hazard, which in turn requires another ban. In the future, maybe your Big Mac could be placed in one hand and a pile of fries in the other. Will customers just guzzle pop from a common tap? Who knows at this point.
“We absolutely need to shift away from using plastics as much as we do, but trading in plastic pollution for deforestation and forest degradation is not the answer,” Canopy founder and executive director Nicole Rycroft told CTV News. “We really need to make sure we do not create another environmental disaster.”
With the ban, single-use plastic consumption is starting to wane, but in many cases those products have been replaced by paper alternatives. Rycroft points to grocery stores, now providing paper bags at checkout, as an example of that.
The Worst Person in America
Randi Weingarten is a truly horrible, arguably evil person. She accepts zero personal responsibility or legal accountability for what she has done. A long prison sentence would be just the start of what she deserves.
Updates:
- My apologies re the link. Now fixed!
- This video from the National Education Association tells you everything you ever need to know about teachers unions. h/t Political Junkie
Foreign investors begone!
It was the elder Trudeau who instituted the Foreign Investment Review Act which was thankfully jettisoned during the Mulroney years. Fast forward to the present era, and we now find the current leader of the Conservatives agreeing with Trudeau the younger that it should at least be resurrected on an ad hoc basis.
Why is a party allegedly dedicated to a free market economic system suddenly embracing this kind of mercantilist thinking? This is supremely ironic for a man who is campaigning on removing “gatekeepers” from the economy.
Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservative party, is calling for the federal government to block Glencore Plc’s bid to buy Canada’s largest diversified miner, Teck Resources Ltd., adding yet another political voice against the potential takeover.
Under FIRA, foreign investors were at least well aware of the hurdles they faced when trying to invest capital in Canada. Now, the hurdles are invoked on a whim and can apparently come from any political direction.
Remain In Your Pods, Eat Your Bugs
And await further instructions.
The spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria poses a major threat to global health and food security as the use of antibiotics continue to grow. And now, a team of researchers from Quebec and France say bacteria with antibiotic-resistant genes can even spread through the clouds.
The study, published last month in the journal Science of The Total Environment, looked at samples taken from clouds at the Puy de Dôme summit, located 1,465 metres above the ground atop a dormant volcano in central France.
Analysis of the samples found anywhere between 330 to over 30,000 bacteria per millilitre of cloud water, with the average being around 8,000.
Rewriting history
Normally I would suggest reading a book as opposed to judging it according to a review, but in this case I would have to admit that it’s probably not worth whatever the bookseller wants for it.
It’s one thing to claim that your pandemic strategies were undertaken with good intentions, but to not even acknowledge some obvious falsehoods that affected the decision making process takes dishonesty to a whole new level.
To recap, Deborah Birx—the woman who did more than almost any other person in the United States to promote and prolong COVID lockdowns, and attempted, with the support of mainstream media outlets, to silence anyone who disagreed with her—tells us in 2022 that she’d been inspired in her work by images that were widely known to have been faked (as if the real images of old age homes in Italy and elsewhere weren’t bad enough) before the lockdowns even started.
That’s Chapter 1.
She also admits that her guidance regarding the maximum allowable size of social gatherings—10 people—was arbitrary, because her real goal was zero—no social contact of any kind, anywhere…
Collectivist thoughts
I’m frankly amazed that Tyson even agreed to be on Del’s show, but this is a revealing exchange nonetheless.
Tyson doesn’t seem to understand a very basic point: the purpose of the scientific method is not to “produce consensus” but rather to discover the truth.
Neil deGrasse Tyson on Why Certain Medical Experts Were Silenced During the COVID Pandemic
"I'm not interested in medical pedigree. I'm interested in medical consensus and scientific consensus…The individual scientist does not matter."@delbigtree @neiltyson @HighWireTalk… pic.twitter.com/DBeVbfSYln
— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) April 6, 2023
Entire interview here.
Recycled politicians
In other news, former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is gearing up for a new role: spouting bromides and promoting a veritable blizzard of non-concepts. Hard to say, though, if that’s actually anything new.
“The Christchurch Call is a foreign policy priority for the government and Jacinda Ardern is uniquely placed to keep pushing forward with the goal of eliminating violent extremist content online,” Hipkins said.
Protest abatement strategy
Some people you don’t like are protesting a little too much? No problem! Hit them in the pocketbook!
It’s a wonder we don’t hear calls for an invocation of a state of emergency and bank account seizures. But I’m sure someone will get around to that eventually.
Ontario’s NDP urged the government Tuesday to create community safety zones that would protect drag artists and LGBTQ communities from harassment and intimidation at their performances.
The bill would allow the attorney general to temporarily designate addresses – such as where a show is taking place – as community safety zones, and anti-LGBTQ harassment, intimidation and hate speech within 100 metres would be subject to a $25,000 fine.
Ominous Parallels
Bill Maher provides some timely criticisms of the current woke revolution in this enlightening and humorous clip.
“The problem with communism and some very recent ideologies here at home is that they think you can change reality by screaming at it; that you can bend human nature by holding your breath. But that’s the difference between reality and your mommy.”
“Yesterday I asked Chat GPT “Are there any similarities between today’s woke revolution and Chairman Mao’s cultural revolution of the 1960s?” And it wrote back “How long do you have?””
Crisis Factory
We’ve all heard the term Military Industrial Complex, but economist Peter St. Onge has come up with a new term for the actions of central banks as they vainly attempt to “manage” the economy: the Crisis Industrial Complex.
In essence, the Fed plays venture capitalist to the crisis industrial complex. Financing each crisis in that vulnerable early stage when voters might not be up for paying $14 trillion to run around Afghanistan, or $7 trillion to pay people not to work, or the $50 to $90 trillion — not a joke — they want for a New Green Deal.
This bridge financing is important in that start-up stage of a new crisis, when the product’s not off the ground yet. Like offering a free trial to get somebody to subscribe, it has to be free long enough for the parasitic supporting infrastructure of academics, activists, media, and crony companies to build up, to metastasize. That venture stage manufactures the consensus, identifies and censors the dangerous conspiracy theories, keeps the money flowing to the opportunists who will sustain it as a permanent parasite.
I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords
Here's a good example of why AI will be made illegal. Notice ChatGPT leaves out of its answer Trump's quote "…peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard today."
Far more dangerous than TikTok. pic.twitter.com/s6i1UZablF
— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) March 27, 2023
If It Wasn’t For Government
It’s Trump’s fault!
Predictably, the failure of Silicon Valley Bank has triggered the usual chorus of cries that “deregulation” is the culprit. In other words, investors just had too damned much freedom, presumably, to commit financial suicide. In some circles, this goes as far as to name Donald Trump as the orchestrator of the collapse.
The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and other similarly sized banks in recent days has put a spotlight on Congress’s 2018 bipartisan banking deregulation law, which was signed by then-President Donald Trump.
I have yet to see one solitary explanation of what regulatory measure would have prevented the collapse, other than to have impossibly perfect foresight. No one can yet explain what kind of hedging mechanism would have worked in this case or by what means. After getting the smear campaign out of the way, the author can’t answer these questions either and basically throws in the towel:
It’s not clear that more oversight would have foreseen those problems and mitigated SVB’s risk exposure. But it probably wouldn’t have hurt.
Tax me harder
Rather than reconsider the usefulness of skyrocketing borrowing for Covid stimulus, overpriced pipelines, battery plant subsidies and a war in the Ukraine, among many other programs, the federal government seems intent on making sure that productive individuals pay far more tax than they already do.
If these measures don’t trigger a recession, nothing will.
If enacted, this could bring the top combined marginal tax rate, once provincial tax is factored in, to approximately 56 per cent in British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia, and to 57 per cent in Newfoundland and Labrador.