News roundup, 22 Dec 2023

- Some more goodish news on the climate front. The EPA reports that electric and hybrid vehicles have had a noticeable effect on fuel consumption. Also good news is the fact that while beef consumption is still way too high, it's disproportionately boomers who eat a lot of the stuff, meaning sheer demographics could bring a big drop in consumption in the next couple of decades.

- More promising signs that the Manitoba government is taking the housing crisis seriously. Premier Kinew is looking at ways to make it easier to expropriate vacant buildings so that they can be converted into social housing. One province over, things aren't looking so good - the city of Cambridge, for instance, has just killed a proposal to build public housing over surface parking lots, leaving the lots intact. Evidently the NIMBYs were making noises about "safety" (and we all know what they mean by that; those poors are scary after all) and the possibility that some of those people might have cars and take up parking spaces.

- The Kinew government has also announced that the search of the Prairie Green Landfill could occur before summer.

- The new Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, has announced reforms to state media, which were stacked with supporters of the previous government and largely served as propaganda outlets for the ironically named "Law and Justice Party". The country's president is a member of that party and has denounced the reforms. Poland is a parliamentary republic rather than a presidential republic like the US or a semi-presidential republic like France, so the president's opposition may not matter; on the other hand, the devil may be in the details of the constitution, so we'll have to see if the president decides he has the right to veto legislation and potentially plunge the country into a constitutional crisis.

- David Shribman draws an unsettling analogy between Joe Biden and Louis St-Laurent in his last term. St-Laurent was well-regarded as a prime minister, but the sudden wide availability of television reminded Canadians of how old he was, and his defeat at the hands of John Diefenbaker has been attributed to this. There are differences, of course, not least the fact that Diefenbaker was not a fascistic sociopathic monster. Meanwhile, actor John Schneider, best known for playing Bo Duke on The Dukes of Hazzard, has just called for Biden and his son to be executed, and the Colorado judges who made the ruling about Trump's eligibility to get on the ballot have been doxxed.

- The response to comments about the Israel-Gaza war has been severe in some cases. People who express support for Palestinians are routinely fired or face academic sanctions, ostensibly for antisemitism or promoting terrorism, while curiously people who rabidly support Israel don't have a problem. One professor quoted in the article makes an interesting point:

"Oftentimes, the thing that's being evaluated in terms of 'Did you or did you not abide by the social media policy?' is not the post itself," Nelson said. "It's often about the reception — how did people react to that post?"

This is noteworthy, since it is in keeping with one school of thought about racism in general, one especially popular in universities - that if someone perceives what you said to be racist, you have committed a racist act, no matter what you were actually trying to say. This time, though, the rule is being applied to many people who would have approved of such a rule until now, as their comments about Palestine are declared to be making Jewish students or coworkers "feel unsafe".

- Another casualty of the conflict may well be a lot of familial relationships in the Jewish community. There is a very strong generational divide in that community on the Palestine issue, one that some fear will never be resolved.

- A 63 year old woman in the Belgian town of Oudenaarde was killed and two other people were injured when a 20 metre high Christmas tree blew over in a storm.