News roundup, 27 Nov 2024

- Justin Trudeau has agreed to an urgent meeting with provincial and territorial leaders to discuss the looming tariffs that Donald Trump has vowed to impose on Canada, though it's not clear what they're going to be able to do about the situation. Doug Ford is particularly worried, given Ontario's dependence on the American export market. Ford described the proposed tariffs as "like a family member stabbing you right in the heart"; it's kind of telling that Ford thinks of Trump as being like a family member.

- The Ford government has passed Bill 212, the legislation best known for limiting the ability of cities to build bike lanes. Other provisions in the bill have not received as much scrutiny - notably the fact that it removes environmental and other safeguards that might stand in the way of building a new freeway the government is planning.

- The Manitoba Nurses Union is hoping for a return of the weapon detection system that was tested in the emergency room at Health Sciences Centre this past summer, and is calling for it to be used at all entrances to all hospitals. The union's president, Darlene Jackson, says that nurses are reporting "escalating violence" in ERs around the city, and that this is driving people out of the profession.

- Brazil's former rightwing populist president Jair Bolsonaro has been charged with plotting a coup d’état following his electoral defeat in 2022. We'll have to see if the Brazilians do a better job of dealing with this situation than the Americans have.

- Farmers in Arizona are suffering the effects of subsidence as a result of excessive groundwater pumping, but they sure as heck aren't going to accept any kind of rules to manage the problem. Because rules are for dem big city libtard ay-leets, I guess.

- Anger over Jeff Bezos' interference in the editorial policy of the Washington Post in order to block the publication of an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris has led some book lovers to seek an alternative to Amazon-owned Goodreads. One beneficiary of this is a site called The StoryGraph.

- With the pending closure of supervised consumption sites in Ontario, someone has gone around putting up these posters that purport to be from the provincial health department, pointing out where the drug consumption will be relocated to by this move.

News roundup, 10 April 2024

- The City of Winnipeg is still considering the possibility of a pedestrian scramble somewhere, though probably not at River and Osborne thanks to the report that concluded that the price of pedestrian safety could be as much as 30 extra seconds on suburbanites' commute. On a related note, at a meeting of Winnipeg's Standing Policy Committee on Public Works yesterday, Mark Cohoe, executive director of Bike Winnipeg, was presenting on behalf of the organization regarding the proposals for the intersection of Osborne and River when Transcona councillor Russ Wyatt showed up late and berated Cohoe and other delegations, calling them "bike Nazis". The organization is outraged, and is calling for Wyatt to be removed from the committee. Based on that and other aspects of his character I have to assume that if he follows through on his threat to run federally in Elmwood-Transcona he'll run for the Tories.

- At Manitoba's largest hospital, University of Manitoba medical and nursing students have better security than working nurses at the same institution. The security guards employed by the university are equipped with batons and pepper gel, but those employed by the hospital itself (e.g. in the emergency room) are not. The nurses' union is naturally lobbying for changes following a number of incidents including the stabbing of a security guard in February; the union wants weapon scanners and armed security. Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara says that the training of additional security is a top priority but is uncomfortable with some aspects of the union's demands, saying "Some people maybe feel nervous or anxious or have a reaction based on their trauma when they see people who look like security or look similar to police". Now the minister is not wrong about that, however in order to properly evaluate this it's necessary to also factor in the fact that some people may be made more comfortable, especially given what's been going on there of late, and to choose a course of action that leads to the lowest overall amount of anxiety - not that it's necessarily easy to do that, of course.

- In the US, a federal court has upheld the right of California to set its own emission rules that are stronger than federal standards, following a challenge by several Republican-held states.

- Toronto is now less affordable than New York City or Miami. At the same time, commercial landlords are freaking out about the high vacancy rate for offices in the city. It seems to me that the second problem could be turned into a solution to the first, although converting an office building to an apartment building isn't always easy.

- Arizona's Supreme Court has reinstated an 1864 law that outlaws abortion in nearly all cases. You might expect Republicans to be rejoicing at this, but in fact they're freaking out, with even Sen. Kari Lake having suddenly changed her mind on the merits of this old law. Trump also says that the law goes too far. Of course in Trump's case it's likely partly because he's no doubt been spared huge amounts of money in child support payments by the availability of abortion, but the fact that there's going to be a referendum on abortion in the state in November probably has a lot to do with it too, given the potential increase in Democratic turnout that could result. The fact that shortly before the court ruling a Republican legislator brought in a delegation to pray and speak in tongues probably doesn't help their image either.

- Parks Canada is considering a temporary ban on boating on Clear Lake in Riding Mountain National Park in order to limit the spread of Zebra Mussels. The premier is uncomfortable with that due to the popularity of the lake, but it seems like it may be a necessary evil to protect the lake.

- There was a big spike in Google searches for the phrase "my eyes hurt" following Monday's eclipse. Whether this is a result of people actually damaging their eyes from not following precautions, or just psychosomatic pain due to people second-guessing whether their precautions were adequate, is not clear.

In case anyone doubted that teabaggers could be dangerous...

I think it's safe to assume that the shooter isn't a Democrat:

An outspoken Democrat congresswoman was gravely wounded after an assassin opened fire with an assault rifle at grocery store in Tuscon, Ariz., on Saturday.

At least six others were injured in a burst of gunfire in what may be the first shooting of a federal politican since former president Ronald Reagan was shot two decades ago in Washington, D.C.

Gabrielle Giffords, 40, an Arizona congresswoman, was shot at close range in the head, according to eyewitnesses. She was greeting constituents at a grocery store. Some of her aides were reportedly among those wounded.

From the Globe. The shooter has apparently been captured alive, so we should know more soon. This is a huge escalation, but it's not really novel; Giffords has been targeted by teabaggers before:

Last March, vandals stoned the front of Ms. Giffords' Tuscon office – one of several Democrat storefronts attacked – when at least 10 members of Congress reported death threats and attacks over the contentious health care reform bill that was the centerpiece of Mr. Obama’s first two years as president.

The question is, how much longer will this go on?

Edited to add: There's a bit more information now. It seems that a total of 18 people were wounded in the shooting, several fatally, including a US federal judge as well as a nine year old child. There's some information about the suspect as well:

Giffords's assailant was last night named as a 22-year-old Afghanistan veteran Jared Lee Loughner. He was described by witnesses as a young white man who looked like a "fringe character", clean shaven with short hair and wearing dark clothing.

Sounds a lot like Timothy McVeigh actually. PTSD and inflammatory rhetoric can be a bad mix it seems...

US Southwest could face catastrophic drought

Nothing is certain in this business, of course, but some fear this is what's on the way:

U.S. researchers shows that the American southwest could experience a 60-year stretch of heat and drought unseen since the 12th century.

Researchers at the University of Arizona examined studies of temperature changes and droughts in the region over the past 1,200 years and used them to project future climate models in the hope that water resource managers could use the information to plan ahead.

An examination of the past, through human-kept records but also via rings in the cores of trees that can show periods of wetness or drought, showed that dry spells of earlier centuries were much worse than any we have seen in modern times.

From the Montreal Gazette. The thing is, those areas are strapped for water now owing to the huge demands of agriculture, not to mention the golf courses and swimming pools that litter that part of the US. Even now there are fears of Lake Mead drying up, for instance. What would they do? Desalination might help, but it is extremely expensive in terms of money as well as energy, and given that California and Arizona, at least, are badly strapped for cash, how are they to pay for something like that? Will private money be forthcoming? If not, the next few decades could see a massive displacement of people from those areas. If nothing else, one could relish the irony of Arizonans wanting to move somewhere for a better life and being hated as job-stealing outsiders...

The right doesn't want to be confused with facts

There's a couple of stories out today that support this thesis. First of all, you may have heard that Arizona's controversial immigration law is needed to stop the rampant crime that those dirty Mexicans are importing. The state's governor, Jan Brewer, alleges that they're finding headless corpses everywhere. But what's really going on?

The Arizona Guardian Web site checked with medical examiners in Arizona's border counties, and the coroners said they had never seen an immigration-related beheading. I called and e-mailed Brewer's press office requesting documentation of decapitation; no reply.

Brewer's mindlessness about headlessness is just one of the immigration falsehoods being spread by Arizona politicians. Border violence on the rise? Phoenix becoming the world's No. 2 kidnapping capital? Illegal immigrants responsible for most police killings? The majority of those crossing the border are drug mules? All wrong.

This matters, because it means the entire premise of the Arizona immigration law is a fallacy. Arizona officials say they've had to step in because federal officials aren't doing enough to stem increasing border violence. The scary claims of violence, in turn, explain why the American public supports the Arizona crackdown.

Source (h/t Blaque and Pensito). So in other words, it's a big lie.

My second example comes from our very own Stockwell Day, who is trying to justify his government's tough-on-crime stance using dubious claims about Canada's crime rate:

Although the official crime rate is going down, a senior Harper government minister says there is reason to disbelieve the statistics and spend billions of dollars on new prisons: an “alarming” increase in unreported crime.

Stockwell Day’s argument is based on a Statistics Canada survey, conducted like a large poll, which showed a slight rise in unreported crimes – though the increase was in property crimes and petty theft, not violent crimes. And the survey was conducted in 2004 – an ironic twist given that Mr. Day made his case only minutes after he maintained that the long-form census is not very reliable because it can be as much as five years out of date.

Mr. Day, the Treasury Board president, is not the first tough-on-crime Conservative politician to disbelieve the official statistics on reported crimes. Senator Pierre-Hughes Boisvenu said last month that “someone, somewhere, is manipulating the numbers.” The latest Statscan figures, released last month, show the number of crimes reported to police dropped 3 per cent last year, and was 17 per cent lower than in 1999.

But Mr. Day also argued that a tough-on-crime agenda is needed to keep dangerous criminals off the streets and deter them with stiffer punishments. The Harper government has dismissed arguments that tougher sentences alone won’t dent crime rates, but now finds itself defending a multibillion-dollar prison-expansion program when crime rates are falling.

From the Globe. Trouble is, there's more crime on TV than ever, as the news outlets trip over each other trying to cover every lurid detail of every crime that happens anywhere on the planet. Now I won't deny that there's a certain fascination with some of those stories, but when the news is dominated by this stuff it can skew the public's perception of crime rates. And unfortunately, right wing politicians love this stuff.

Arizona is even worse than we thought

If you thought their immigration law was bad enough, check this out:

An Arizona elementary school mural featuring the faces of kids who attend the school has been the subject of constant daytime drive-by racist screaming, from adults, as well as a radio talk-show campaign (by an actual city councilman, who has an AM talk-radio show) to remove the black student's face, and now the school principal has ordered the faces of the Latino and Black students to be changed to Caucasian skin.

From the Huffington Post.