They walk among us.

Unconfirmed, but the occupants of the Bentley that crashed at the Rainbow Bridge are said to be the owners of Gui’s Lumber/Ace Hardware in the Buffalo, NY area. I’ll update as I work on this. Update: Confirmed.

Well, this is interesting: 2018-2021 Bentley Continental GT and Flying Spur recalled with risk of stuck accelerator (h/t Burton)

Lex Luthor, YouTube reporter.

Pegasus: Horse Breaks Loose In Cargo Hold Of Boeing 747, Forces Flight’s Return To JFK

@joe_warmington – British Police have arrested Hockey player Matt Petgrave and charged with him with manslaughter in death of Adam Johnson — developing

BBC;

Det Ch Supt Becs Horsfall, from South Yorkshire Police, said: “We have been carrying out extensive inquiries to piece together the events which led to the loss of Adam in these unprecedented circumstances.

“We have been speaking to highly specialised experts in their field to assist in our inquiries and continue to work closely with the health and safety department at Sheffield City Council, which is supporting our ongoing investigation.

“Adam’s death has sent shockwaves through many communities, from our local residents here in Sheffield to ice hockey fans across the world.”

Oh, well I guess it’s back to coal.

Nuclear power is emission-free but complex, expensive and politically fraught. In recent years, small modular reactors have been touted as the answer to those problems. In the US, NuScale Energy Corp. has been at the vanguard of efforts to build viable SMRs.

So it was a significant blow to the industry last week when NuScale abruptly canceled a deal to construct the Carbon Free Power Project, a 462-megawatt power plant slated for a Utah-based consortium of municipal utilities.

For nuclear advocates, SMRs promise atomic plants that are faster and cheaper to build than large, conventional facilities that are bespoke. NuScale is the only company to win US approval

for an advanced fission reactor design. It was widely expected to deliver the first commercial power plant using next-generation technology.

However, like many other industrial projects, NuScale’s plans were beset by delays and soaring costs. It faced rising prices for steel and other key materials, as well as higher interest rates. The final blow for NuScale came when some members of the Utah group backed away from commitments to purchase power. NuScale wanted contracts for at least 80% of the electricity, but it fell short.

Related. Trust me, this is worth five minutes of your time.

Live coverage from Ottawa: National Remembrance Day Service

Flashback: “Of all the biolabs in all the towns in all the world, she walks into a brother of a Liberal Prime Minister“.

Heh.

“There is no glass of water, there is no food, every store you can imagine was looted, it’s desperation.”

A thread here, for those without full access. Continue reading →

And then acting all surprised.

“Burns like hell, gets you out like heaven…”

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.