Be as shame if… something were to happen to it.

Blacklocks- More than 800 depositors have been “de-banked” nationwide in the past five years

My guess is there’s multiple factors at play here. But cost of living is certainly a big one.

National Post- Canada’s birth rate has dropped off a cliff (and it’s likely because nobody can afford housing)

Statistics Canada confirmed last week that 351,679 babies were born in 2022 — the lowest number of live births since 345,044 births were recorded in 2005.

The disparity is all the more notable given that Canada had just 32 million people in 2005, as compared to the 40 million it counted by the end of 2022. In 2005, it was already at historic lows for Canada to have a fertility rate of 1.57 births per woman. But given the 2022 figures, that fertility rate has now sunk to 1.33.

Good interview on a wide range of topics.

Gord Magill brings us up to date on Trudeau’s political prisoners.

Condemnation was swift—hence Trudeau’s apology. But what everyone missed about this deeply embarrassing episode is the irony, for Trudeau has a penchant for seeing Nazis everywhere except right under his nose. The same Justin Trudeau who took part in a standing ovation of an actual Nazi in Canada’s House of Parliament allowed hard-working Canadians to be roundly smeared as Nazis for simply disagreeing with him politically during the Trucker’s Freedom Convoy.

Toronto Sun;

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has launched an $8-million national ad campaign urging Canadians to protest Ottawa’s plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions from Canada’s electricity sector to net zero by 2035, saying it will lead to skyrocketing energy costs and blackouts.

The rest of Canada should listen, especially provinces such as Ontario, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, which would be particularly hard hit, along with Alberta.

In the early 1990s, I had been a member of the EPA panel charged with evaluating the evidence for an association of passive smoking with lung cancer. It was clear that the leadership of the committee was intent on declaring that passive smoking caused lung cancer in non-smokers. I was the sole member of the 15-person panel to emphasize the limitations of the published studies—limitations that stemmed from the rudimentary questions used to characterize exposure. Many members of the committee voiced support for my comments, but in the end, the committee endorsed what was clearly a predetermined conclusion that exposure to secondhand smoke caused approximately 3,000 lung cancers per year among never-smokers in the United States.

This is where things stood in the late 1990s, when I was contacted by James Enstrom of UCLA. He asked if I would be interested in collaborating on an analysis of the American Cancer Society’s “Cancer Prevention Study I” to examine the association between passive smoke exposure and mortality. I had been aware of Enstrom’s work since the early 1980s through the medical literature. We were both cancer epidemiologists interested in lung cancer occurring in people who had never smoked, and we had both published numerous studies documenting the health risks associated with smoking as well as diet and other behaviors. In addition, Enstrom had begun his collaboration with the American Cancer Society with Lawrence Garfinkel, the vice president for epidemiology there from the 1960s through the 1980s. Garfinkel was one of the advisors on my (later published) master’s thesis on the topic of lung cancer occurring in never-smokers, which I completed at the Columbia School of Public Health in the early 1980s.

From his work, I had a strong impression that Enstrom was a rigorous and capable scientist, who was asking important questions. Because I had been involved in a large case-control study of cancer, I welcomed the opportunity to work with data from the American Cancer Society’s prospective study, since such studies have certain methodologic advantages. In a case-control study, researchers enroll cases who have been diagnosed with the disease of interest and then compare the exposure of cases to that of controls—people of similar background, who do not have the disease of interest. In a prospective study, on the other hand, researchers enroll a cohort, which is then followed for a number of years. Since information on exposure is obtained prior to the onset of illness, possible bias due to cases reporting their exposure differently from controls is not an issue.

After several years of work, our paper was published by the BMJ on May 17th, 2003, addressing the same question Takeshi Hirayama had posed 22 years earlier in the same journal: whether living with a spouse who smokes increases the mortality risk of a spouse who never smoked. Based on our analysis of the American Cancer Society’s data on over 100,000 California residents, we concluded that non-smokers who lived with a smoker did not have elevated mortality and, therefore, the data did “not support a causal relation between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality.”

The publication caused an immediate outpouring of vitriol and indignation, even before it was available online. Some critics targeted us with ad hominem attacks, as we disclosed that we received partial funding from the tobacco industry. Others claimed that there were serious flaws in our study. But few critics actually engaged with the detailed data contained in the paper’s 3,000 words and 10 tables. The focus was overwhelmingly on our conclusion—not on the data we analyzed and the methods we used. Neither of us had never experienced anything like the response to this paper. It appeared that simply raising doubts about passive smoking was beyond the bounds of acceptable inquiry.

The response to the paper was so extreme and so unusual that it merits a fuller account, which I will offer below.

Grab a coffee.

Biden’s latest verbal mistake comes a week after he was ripped for inferring that African American and Hispanic workers don’t have “high school diplomas.”

This evening we learn about the Fur Wars in Canada.

Your best recent tips are appreciated.

Two years ago, I made the prediction there wouldn’t be a print newspaper in Canada in four years. Well, here we are, where Metroland, sister company to the Toronto Star filed for bankruptcy, laid off 2/3 of its staff, and ceased printing. What’s left will be strickly online. Hmmm, wonder why?

Here’s the Globe and Mail’s story (paywall). It notes more than 70 papers are done print. Here’s Metroland’s link to their brands.

In a related note, Pipeline Online is just two weeks shy of its second anniversary. Working in newspapers was like being a crewmember of the Titanic. It was just a matter of time before the thing went under. And thus, going on my own, being master of my own destiny, was necessary.

(From Kate: You need to add a “Support Pipeline Online” link to your website header, Brian. And you folks with ties to the energy industry, especially in SE Sask, should consider advertising. Use it or lose it!)

This evening we present a super rendition of Waterloo Sunset by The Kinks.

Your best tips of late are always appreciated.

I was previously unfamiliar with the concept of bra euphoria.

Hey, it’s a thing. And, it seems, a mixed blessing.

A sweet tune for a Saturday evening.

#BREAKING: Burning Man Festival Declares National Emergency as over 73,000 Campers are trapped Urged to Shelter in Place Amid Flooding Crisis

#Blackrock | #Nevada

Currently, more than 73,000 festival attendees and campers are trapped with no access in or out of the… pic.twitter.com/gMxoFiFKdm

— R A W S A L E R T S (@rawsalerts) September 2, 2023

From the comments: “Burning Man was founded on principles of self-reliance, self-expression and decommodification. Money largely isn’t exchanged during the event, and organizers rely on participants to build and deconstruct the city each year in an effort to leave no lasting effect on the ecologically sensitive area.”

Tonight, we present a 1967 hockey film.

Your best tips are welcome!

What better song to start off this new month than September by Earth, Wind, and Fire.

Do share your best tips, please.

It has become a tradition for me to play this song before returning after a long journey. While my flight from Heathrow to Boston today isn’t exactly “home”, my adopted country of America definitely is. It has been an amazing time to be away, and a privilege to have worked remotely out of 10 European countries over 46 days, It also will be so wonderful to return to “normal” life again too.

Your tips, please, your tips!

Yes, we’re aware that clicking on the comments currently delivers a “page not found” link. It’s being worked on.

This area of Nevada has treacherous heat. People backed up on these roads with children and animals in their cars could be in a life-threatening situation with no services for miles. These climate clowns are dangerous.

This is the way to deal with them.pic.twitter.com/QK4Xa2oV93

— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) August 28, 2023

Longer version here.

Was Spengler Right After All?

According to Spengler, writing during the Great War, one should not see Europe or the West in ‘Ptolemaic’ terms as being the centre of history, and other cultures as orbiting around it. As Copernicus had done in astronomy, removing the centrality of the earth, the same had to be done with Western culture.

Moreover, he claimed, every culture has a unique ‘destiny,’ and all of them display developmental phases of life and death, just like living beings. Nor did he see European culture as being anything exceptional; in fact, at the time it was already in the declining phase of ‘civilization,’ instead of the earlier, vigorously creative stage of ‘culture’ that reached its apogee during the Enlightenment, and like all other cultures, would eventually perish.

Interestingly, Spengler noted that, during the creative ‘cultural’ phase, ‘spirituality’ occupied a prominent place, while the time of decay was marked by rootlessness and world-weariness among people, and by the dominance of machine organisation – the latter feature echoed by Max Weber, who famously wrote about humanity being imprisoned in an ‘iron cage’ of mechanisation.

It is not difficult to perceive in contemporary world (and not only Western) culture similar characteristics of cultural alienation and the predominance of machine culture, increasingly manifesting itself as the valorisation of AI. But instead of the cultural forces highlighted by Spengler, just over a hundred years after the publication of his epochal work it would turn out that a comparatively small group of individuals, motivated largely by financial and economic considerations pertaining to the possibility that they might lose their grip on power, would be instrumental in precipitating a catastrophic, controlled collapse of Western society, but also the rest of the world. Should their attempt be successful, a global collapse would be unavoidable.