Norman Spector- One of the key recommendations to come out of the Firestorm 2003 report was for communities to create wildfire-protection plans to reduce risk in and around their communities. Once the plans were complete, they could apply for funding from the province. Continue reading
Where Giants Walked
Paul Cooper’s Fall of Civilizations: How everything they told you about Easter Island was wrong (1.5 hrs).
In this episode, we take a look at one of archaeology’s most enduring puzzles: the mystery of Easter Island. Find out how this unique community grew up in complete isolation, severed from the rest of the world by a vast expanse of ocean. Discover the incredible story of how it survived for so many centuries, and examine the evidence about what happened to finally bring this society, and its statues, crashing down.
“The hospital was called ‘Killer King’ in 1977”
To better understand the phenomenon of institutions crumbling (while crushing innocents) under the weight of their own incompetence, look no further than the sordid tale of “Killer King” hospital.
Built on a foundation of affirmative action, it was finally closed when it devolved into a butcher shop of medical malpractice. You won’t be surprised to learn that community activists denounced those who tried to do anything as racists.
Why care about merit? What harm is there in affirmative action programs that reward the less qualified?
Here’s the story of the Martin Luther King Jr/Drew Medical Center (King/Drew) in Los Angeles, which operated from 1972 to 2007.
Or as patients called, it “Killer King.” […]
Patients would come in with minor medical issues and end up dead.
Locals would run away from ambulances in order not to be brought to Killer King.
Police officers had an understanding that if their colleagues were shot, they would not allow them to be taken there.
It’s long and sordid.
“an invented term with a bogus pedigree”
The ‘two-spirit’ identity is based on a crackpot rewriting of Native American history.
The term two-spirit was first formally endorsed at a conference of Native American gay activists in 1990 in Winnipeg in Canada. It is a catch-all term to cover over 150 different words used by the various Indian tribes to describe what we think of today as gay, trans or various forms of gender-bending, such as cross-dressing. Two-spirit people, the conference declared, combine the masculine and the feminine spirits in one.
From the start, the whole exercise reeked of mystical hooey. Myra Laramee, the woman who proposed the term in 1990, said it had been given to her by ancestor spirits who appeared to her in a dream. The spirits, she said, had both male and female faces.
Incredibly, three decades on, there are now celebrities and politicians who endorse the concept or even identify as two-spirit. The term has found its way into one of Joe Biden’s presidential proclamations and is a constant feature of Canadian premier Justin Trudeau’s doe-eyed bleating about ‘2SLGBTQQIA+ rights’.
Read the whole, ridiculous thing.
Jevons Paradox
“Every molecule of fossil fuel produced worldwide will be burned by somebody somewhere, and local efforts to restrict consumption merely relocate the enjoyment of that privilege.”
Prior to the widespread proliferation of the steam engine, mining for coal was back-breaking work. The industry relied on human and animal strength, with laborers using primitive tools, to extract the stuff from hand-dug mineshafts. The work was as dangerous as it was dirty, and fatalities were commonplace. Then, a revolution unfolded. A step-change improvement to existing steam engine design, engineered by James Watt, allowed miners to leverage machinery such as pumps, hoists, and ventilation systems to alleviate significant portions of direct human effort. Pumps that used Watt’s engines were particularly effective at draining water from deep mineshafts, making vast and previously inaccessible coal reserves economically viable. The genius of his invention was in delivering far more work per quanta of fuel.
What did these advances in energy efficiency do to the demand for coal? Did society limit itself to doing the same amount of work as it had done before, just more economically so? Quite the contrary.
This is a good one, worth sharing around. More discussion here.
The Sound Of Settled Science
Men are from Mars, Octopi are from Venus.
In 2023, despite our advances in technology, the ocean remains as mysterious and impenetrable as ever. So it’s both surprising and unsurprising that scientists have now found underwater ‘cities’ constructed by one of the ocean’s most alien-looking inhabitants: the octopus.
It’s been understood for some time that octopuses are intelligent animals, and they are thought to have roughly the intelligence of a three-year-old child.
There’s something about their bizarre, fluid forms which captures human imagination, and they may even have some understanding of anatomy.
If you get the chance to watch the documentary “My Friend, The Octopus”, take it. (Sorry — correct that to “My Octopus Teacher“. Thanks, dizzy!)
Conspiracies aplenty
If you go by what the leftist corporate media are saying, conspiracy theories are the exclusive province of conservatives. Jump into the “rabbit hole” of residential school controversy, however, and conspiracy theories abound.
Not one reporter even thought to ask questions such as “If 215 children had disappeared at the school, why is there no historical record of even a single Kamloops indigenous parent – or any parent anywhere in Canada – claiming that their child had failed to return from school?”, “Where is your evidence of murderous priests, nuns and secret burials?” Why are you not releasing the radar operator’s report, that you promised to release?” or Why are the RCMP refusing to investigate what indigenous leaders are calling a “crime”, and why are the RCMP refusing to properly secure what indigenous leaders are calling a “crime scene” and do at least basic excavations?
“I did my best, I took every pill, every day. …”
“You have taken too much of those medicines for too long. Things are bound to go sideways.”
Grim reading, this took a lot of courage.
New Mexico doesn’t want spent nuclear fuel
There’s a lot of talk about nuclear these days, but not so much about what to do with the spent fuel. Both Canada and the US still haven’t built final, permanent repositories. And New Mexico, it turns out, doesn’t want to be home to one.
By the way, there’s still a lot of potential with spent fuel. It can be reprocessed and used again in special reactors. Some people don’t think it’s that big of a problem, because with reprocessing, you can use it again and again.
Life, Liberty and The Pursuit of Dopamine
The Nazis are coming?
Having read a lot today about the kerfuffle that Christine Anderson’s visit to Canada seems to have caused, I decided to have a closer look at what is allegedly some sort of neo-Nazi organization. There’s probably no better place to start than the actual platform of Alternative for Germany. Judging by the comments on social media, my guess is that most critics have never actually read that platform.
The party’s commitment to free market principles is a pleasant surprise coming from a European party, although that message gets muddled and watered down with support for UBI and a minimum wage. While they’re not classical liberals, the term “Nazi” seems to be a gross exaggeration.
Government should serve its citizens, and not vice versa.
Therefore, only lean government is good government. Govern-
ment should merely provide a framework within which its
citizens can thrive. A constant and often ideology-driven
expansion of government functions has reached financial
and practical limitations, and is a threat to the fundamen–
tal rights of freedom of its citizens. Government has taken
on too many tasks. There is a need to focus on four classic
functions performed by government: domestic and foreign
security, justice, foreign relations, and financial administra–
tion.
Newfoundland will continue to get screwed by Quebec for another nearly 2 decades, just watch
Story: Ahead of Quebec premier’s visit, provincial panel recommends new Churchill Falls deal
The notion that Quebec will change this deal one minute before 2041 is laughable. Quebec locked in a fixed price, with no escalator clause for inflation, in the early 1970s. And then they were able to extend it until 2041, despite Newfoundland’s protests to the Supreme Court of Canada, which backed Quebec. It is perhaps the most lopsided, unfair deal in Canadian history. Quebec gets rich, Newfoundland starves.
Churchill Falls Hydroelectric Generating Facility, with 5,428 megawatts capacity, has more power generating capacity than the entire province of Saskatchewan, combined, if every single coal and gas turbine, every wind turbine are running at 100%, and every solar panel is entirely lit at noon. If Newfoundland actually got a fair deal from its power sales over 50 years ago, it would not have been a have-not province for the last five decades. However, numerous court cases, up to the Supreme Court of Canada, have locked Newfoundland into the deal until 2041, selling power to Hydro Quebec for $2 per megawatt-hour. In New York (which buys power from Hydro Quebec), “Higher fuel costs have led to higher average wholesale electricity prices as well. In February 2022, the average year-to-date wholesale electricity cost was $118.36/Megawatt-hour (MWh), according to NYISO data.” Where do you think they buy wholesale power from?
Postcard From Africa
Ken Opalo- Three Billion Africans, How demographics will shape African states’ economic and political futures
For much of history the continent of Africa has been largely underpopulated. For example, it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that the entire region’s population surpassed Europe’s (see below). Now the region is in the middle of a demographic boom that will see its population double over the next 50 years to more than 3 billion. By 2100 half all humans being born will be African. It is not an overstatement to claim that the world’s demographic future is in Africa.
Honey, I Finished The Internet
Statistical magic
One can reasonably expect that government statisticians on both sides of the border are using the same methods to determine job creation numbers and employment levels, so it would be wise not to buy into the Canadian numbers either.
Specifically, full-time employees dropped by 1,000 workers while part-time workers rose by 679,000 (month-over-month). The total gain in all workers for the period was 717,000. Moreover, the overall trend since 2021 is one in which growth in full-time work in general is falling—and turning negative in some months—while part-time employment represents most of the growth.
But why is it that we keep hearing about how there is so much job growth? Those “good” numbers are based mostly on a separate job survey which looks only at the number of jobs created, as opposed to the number of employed persons. This means a large number of part-time jobs could be created, with few new employed persons, and this could be reported as robust job growth.
Yes, I’ve Been Reading Scientific American
In a shocking twist, the risk of injury while playing a contact sport disproportionately affects those who actually play it.
YES
As an HVAC repairman, my Ford E250 work van was most obedient in reverse, and a cruise ship in forward.
The UNPROFOR Cables
The established mythos of the Bosnian War is that Serb separatists, encouraged and directed by Slobodan Milošević and his acolytes in Belgrade, sought to forcibly seize Croat and Bosniak territory in service of creating an irredentist “Greater Serbia.” Every step of the way, they purged indigenous Muslims in a concerted, deliberate genocide, while refusing to engage in constructive peace talks.
This narrative was aggressively perpetuated by the mainstream media at the time, and further legitimized by the UN-created International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) once the conflict ended. It has become axiomatic and unquestionable in Western consciousness ever since, enforcing the sense that negotiation invariably amounts to appeasement, a mentality that has enabled NATO war hawks to justify multiple military interventions over subsequent years.
However, a vast trove of intelligence cables sent by Canadian peacekeeping troops in Bosnia to Ottawa’s National Defence Headquarters, first published by Canada Declassified at the start of 2022, exposes this narrative as cynical farce.
Flashback: We bombed the wrong side
Sanctions for some…
As any student of history would know, sanctions typically leak like sieves. That’s why a war strategy based on them is likely to go nowhere.
While Japan has joined other western allies in sanctioning Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, the Asian nation has stopped short of taking strict measures on oil and natural gas. The government has said that Russia’s Sakhalin-2 export project is a key source of Japan’s liquefied natural gas supply, and the production and import of its oil is required for stable operations.
A Special Day for Canada’s Dear Leader
I was going to stay away from all things political today but given whose birthday it is, this had to be posted today!
h/t ‘Reader’