News roundup, 21 Nov 2023

- The new president-elect of Argentina, Javier Milei, is really big on freedom. He wants, for example, to allow the sale of babies (parental rights, ya know) and to lower the age of consent. Oh, and he's really, really big on bitcoin, and claims to have gotten his ideas telepathically from his dead dog. Of course, in Canada we once had a prime minister who spoke to his dead dog on occasion, but Milei seems a lot more dangerous than King ever was.

- The Gaza war has now killed more journalists than any war since they started counting that particular statistic a few decades ago. 

- A physician has been suspended from his role as a medical resident for pro-Palestinian posts on social media that some deemed antisemitic; one such post cited by the complainer was singled out for having a picture showing a sign with the "from the river to the sea" slogan, notwithstanding the fact that even in the Jewish community not everyone agrees that it is antisemitic. One can't help but notice that more efforts are being made to stop the use of that slogan than to stop actual antisemitism.

- The new legislative session in Manitoba has begun, and the government has introduced their throne speech. There's going to have to be some managing of expectations, since the fiscal situation apparently isn't as good as it previously appeared when the previous government was claiming a surplus. We'll have to see how it goes...

- A family who announced their intention to go car-free earlier this year has abandoned their plans due to concerns about the reliability and safety of Winnipeg Transit. This brings to mind an awkward truth. Improving reliability will likely require hiring more drivers and, equally important, retaining the ones they have. Improving safety (and the perception of safety) will likely require some measures that will make some people uncomfortable. Putting security on buses, for instance, which is apparently in the works, will inevitably be alienating to some people. The thing is, not doing so will also be alienating, and moreover will be alienating to precisely the people we need not to alienate if we want to increase ridership - namely the people who have a choice in the matter. This may sound harsh, and it is. But ultimately choices have to be made that maximize the overall good to the city as a whole, and that means putting more people in buses so that fewer of them are in cars.

- The City of Winnipeg is moving forward with plans to increase the number of trees planted, and plans to ask the province to amend the city's charter so as to enable the protection of healthy trees on private land. Because this necessarily means imposing limits on what citizens can do with their own property, it will doubtless raise the hackles of the "freedumb" crowd; hopefully the city will stand firm.

- I've always thought of cockroaches as a rarity in Winnipeg, but this is no longer the case. In the last few years their numbers have skyrocketed. Notably, seven restaurants have been forced to close due to cockroach infestations this year, compared to one in all of 2022 and none the previous year.

- Pierre Poilievre has been squawking about the fact that the new EV battery plant in Windsor could be bringing in as many as 1,600 South Korean workers. The gentleman doth protest too much, though, because a trade agreement signed by Stephen Harper, under whom Poilievre was serving, constrains the government from requiring that those jobs be filled by Canadians.

- A study by Oxfam has concluded that the richest 1% of the world's population are responsible for as much in the way of emissions as the poorest two thirds. And a new UN report has concluded that even in the best case, there is only a 14% chance of keeping warming below 1.5 °C. Which furthers a point that I've been making for quite some time, namely that some triage is going to be required. This is something that a lot of people on the left don't want to think about, but we're going to have to. Meanwhile a lot of people on the right, of course, don't want to acknowledge that climate change is real at all; Texas is rejecting a number of school science textbooks on the grounds that they have too much information about the subject. All this is especially frustrating for people like this guy who was warning about the problem decades ago.

- There were two homicides in the North End last night, one of them right around the corner from me in the same rooming house where someone else was killed in February.