News roundup, 30 May 2025

- More than 750 residents of Pimicikamak Cree Nation in northern Manitoba are still trying to find a way to evacuate. Regular flights out of the community were cancelled on Wednesday, and people have been waiting up to nine hours for a ferry to Norway House. The military has sent an aircraft to the latter community to fly as many people to Winnipeg as possible, in case the fire shifts in that direction. In Pukatawagan, the power is out and the airport has been closed. And in far northwestern Ontario, Deer Lake First Nation is also being evacuated as a fire is now within a kilometre of the community's airport, which is the only way out of the community outside of winter road season.

- Chinese researchers have made a big advance in nuclear power, having successfully made a thorium reactor that can be refueled on the fly. The advance takes advantage of abandoned American research. The current reactor is experimental, producing only 2 megawatts of power, but is an important proof of concept. And thorium is considerably more common than uranium; moreover, such reactors are much less of a proliferation risk than many conventional designs.

- The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has cancelled its strategic hurricane plan, apparently on the orders of the Trump regime. This is not as surprising as it should be, since the libertarian right that forms a significant part of Trump's base has long had a dislike for the agency.

- The US Justice Department has ordered the dissolution of an interagency task force called KleptoCapture, which was tasked with locating and seizing assets owned by drug lords, Russian oligarchs, and the like.

- The regime has cancelled more than $700 million in funding for the development of a vaccine for avian influenza.

- The boycott of the US is hitting border towns very hard indeed. It's hitting ones in the West especially hard, because much more of the crossings at those borders are discretionary, whereas crossings between Ontario and New York, say, are more likely to be for business. Some in the related Reddit thread are pointing out that a lot of these towns voted pretty hard for Trump; that isn't the case with Blaine and Point Roberts (the communities profiled in the article) but if you look at this map of presidential results by county, it tells a different story for many others.

News roundup, 22 Oct 2024

- Control over BC's legislature remains up in the air due to several recounts, but one thing that's clear - the knuckle-dragging loogans did way better than they ought to, and not just in the purely rural ares either. Several Conservatives singles out by the NDP for their extreme views won their seats, including Brent Chapman (the guy who made overtly racist social media posts about Palestinians and suggested that several mass shootings were hoaxes), Jordan Kealy (who promoted the "chemtrails" conspiracy theory), and Jody Toor (who claimed to be a "medical doctor" on the basis of a degree from a crackpot online institution in Hawaii). On a more positive note, Chris Sankey (who claimed that vaccines cause AIDS and claimed that the Jan 6 riot was a hoax) appears to have been defeated, and Bryan Breguet (who questioned the existence of anti-indigenous racism) is still awaiting the results of a recount. Nonetheless, it all brings to mind the quote sometimes attributed (questionably) to Winston Churchill, that "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter".

- Related to that Churchill "quote", Liberal MP Sean Casey, who has joined the growing ranks of those calling for Justin Trudeau's resignation as party leader, said something interesting on the subject:

Voting is an emotional exercise. It’s not based on logic. If it was based on logic and rational thinking, we’d be 20 points up, not down. But there’s been baggage accumulated. People have tuned him out.

There's definitely something to that; while "20 points up" is overstating the case given the rather mediocre performance of the government, decent people voting on the basis of reason and logic would not be going for the Poilievre Conservatives.

- In the US, the ever-gullible masses are in thrall to absurd claims about the recent hurricanes, from claims about Biden and Harris' supposed indifference to the plight of victims to the idea that some nebulous "they" (presumably including Democrats, Jews, etc) are controlling the hurricanes. Of course stuff like this is not without consequence - one man has been arrested for threats against FEMA workers (he is of course unrepentant, like most such people).

- Switzerland, despite their longstanding neutral stance, has signed onto the European Sky Shield Initiative (ESSI), which seeks to build a unified air and missile defence system across the European subcontinent. They reserve the right, however, to withdraw their participation in the event of an actual war.

- A baseless story being circulated that alleges that Tim Walz sexually assaulted one of his students seems to be getting a boost from Storm-1516, a network affiliated with the so-called Internet Research Agency and believed to operate out of St. Petersburg. They've previously circulated stuff about Kamala Harris as well; stuff like this makes claims that Russia's leaders are becoming more leery of Trump seem like wishful thinking.

- Winnipeg councillor Brian Mayes, who never met a NIMBY he didn't like, continues to cozy up to those people; he's now demanding a map of every location in the city that would be impacted by the proposed "as of right" zoning (which would enable buildings of up to 4 storeys to be constructed without a hearing as long as they're within 800 metres of a transit route).