Trump's claims about Chinese wind power are WAY off

President Trump is still droning on in his speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, as I write this, already well over his allotted time. And, as expected, there's a lot to take exception to.

Just to take one example of his well-documented habit of citing "alternative facts" (aka "lies"), Trump was on his familiar hobby horse, criticising wind turbines, specifically Chinese wind turbines. He suggested that, although "China makes almost all of the windmills, and yet I haven't been able to find any wind farms in China".

Well, I guess he didn't look very hard. China is host to 11 of the largest 12 land-based windfarms in the world, headed up by Xinjiang Hami Wind Farm and Gansu Guazhou Wind Farm, which are an order of magnitude bigger than windfarms elsewhere in the world.

And China produces more wind power than any other country - a huge 992 terawatt hours in 2024. Second? The USA (despite Trump's best efforts to hobble the industry), which produced less than half as much.

Much else that Trump said during his rambling speech was misleading or just plain wrong. But Chinese wind power was definitely the wrong hill to choose to die on.

Carney should avoid Trump's "Board of Peace" like the plague

Hard on the heels of his provocative, inspiring and distinctly critical speech at Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is apparently seriously considering joining Donald Trump's "Board of Peace", which is supposed to help bring about a just and lasting peace in Gaza (and maybe elsewhere).

While the end goal may be laudable, Carney should have nothing to do with this latest Trump vanity project. The UN did endorse the idea, but what has ultimately emerged is a far cry from what was promised and voted on, in a classic bait-and-switch move by Trump. Indeed, the Board's charter doesn't even mention Gaza!

Just look at the other members of this invitation-only club thus far: USA, Belarus, Azerbaijan, United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Vietnam, Kazakhstan, Hungary, Argentina, Armenia, and of course Israel (yes, the fox is expected to regulate the hen coop). It's a strange assortment of (mainly authoritarian, as it happens) states. Putin has apparently been asked, and is maybe thinking about it, as are Egypt, Turkey, Thailand, Germany, UK, Paraguay, India, China, Ukraine, Kosovo, Slovenia and Croatia. France's Emmanuel Macron has, sensibly, already summarily refused to be involved in such a group, as have Sweden and Norway.

Mr. Carney should certainly not even consider paying $1 billion to become a "permanent" member of the Board, rather than just a three-year member. (How ridiculous is that? Just how long is Trump planning on stringing this out? What is the money for?). And, thankfully, it seems like he is not thinking about it.

But Carney should follow some of the more sensible countries in not touching the Trump-led Board - what The Guardian calls his "imperial court" - with a bargepole.

Carney outdoes himself at Davos

Well.

Mark Carney just made the speech of his life - "the most important speech in Canadian history", if you believe the National Observer - and you can watch it on YouTube, or read it here. It earned a rare standing ovation at Davos.

Appearing at the Davos World Economic Forum, his 16-minute speech - which he actually wrote himself, no professional speech-writers here - laid out Canada's way forward as a middle power in a post-Trump world. And, while he never actually mentioned the word "America", "USA" or "Trump" once, it was very clear what he was talking about.

"The old order is not coming back", he intoned. "We should not mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy. But from the fracture, we can build something better, stronger, and more just." There were many more quotables: "The end of a nice story and the beginning of a brutal reality"; "We're in a rupture, not a transition"; "When rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself"; "The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must"; "To hope that compliance will buy safety - it won't"; "If you are not at the table, you are on the menu"; "This is not sovereignty, it is the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination".

Referencing Thucydides and Václav Havel, Carney did indeed outdo himself. Yes, there was some bull in there too. For example, the claim that Canada has the "most educated population in the world" - where did that come from? And asserting "sustainable development" as one of Canada's core values is a bit strong coming from a man who has spent the last year walking back much of Canada's sustainability.

But kudos to Carney for a strong showing from a man who sometimes comes over as a bit "blah".

Spoof headlines or real?

Some of the headlines in today's paper looks like spoofs or satires, something The Onion or This Hour Has 22 Minutes might have come up with.

• Military models Canadian response to hypothetical American invasion
• Canada weighs sending soldiers to Greenland in face of U.S. threats
• US President ties Greenland threats to Nobel snub
• Trump invites Netanyahu to join his Board of Peace

Unfortunately, they are all too real. As a Globe and Mail editorial put it: "It is a time of unthinkable things, that move from impossibility to improbability to reality with disorienting and alarming speed".

Maybe cows are not all stupid

If you thought that cows were pretty stupid, well, you're probably right. But maybe not AS stupid as you thought.

It turns out that cows have joined the relatively exclusive club of tool-wielding animals, in the company of humans, chimpanzees, crows, and maybe humpback whales.

And before we get too excited, it's really only Veronika, a 13-year old Swiss Brown cow that lives on a farm in Austria, essentially as a pet. Veronika, over the years, has perfected her technique of using sticks or brushes to scratch herself in various places. It's not much maybe, but it's enough to get some animal behaviourists quite excited.

All those other cows? Yeah, pretty stupid.I 

The search for an Alzheimer's cure takes a different path

Oodles of money has been pumped into Alzheimer's Disease research over the years, and all we have to show for it is aducanumab, a controversial monoclonal antibody that targets amyloid plaques in the brain (approved on an accelerated schedule for use in the US, but not approved in Canada). The drug had inconsistent and contradictory clinical trial results, and faced significant debate over its effectiveness and widespread hesitation by doctors. Ultimately, it was withdrawn by its manufacturer, Biogen, when they realized they couldn't make any money from it.

Much of the difficulty in making any headway against Alzheimer's is because, thus far, the understanding that Alzheimer's is largely caused by clumps of a protein called beta-amyloid in the brain. This has been the conventional wisdom since the finding was published in a 2006 paper, and that is where almost all the effort towards a cure has been directed. Unfortunately, that paper was found to be based on fabricated data, and was retracted in 2024. Nearly 20 years wasted.

Since this retraction, research has opened up somewhat. Promising research right here in Toronto looks at beta-amyloid proteins not as a destructive abnormally-produced protein, but as part of the brain's immune system. The brain has its own immune system, just like the rest of the body and, when it encounters bacteria or trauma, it fights back, using beta-amyloid as a key contributor. Because the fat molecules making up the membranes of bacteria are very similar to the membranes of brain cells, the beya-amyloid can end up attacking the very brain cells it is supposed to be protecting, leading to chronic progressive loss of brain cell function, i.e. dementia.

This makes Alzheimer's (the most common type of dementia) not so much a disease of the brain as a disorder of the immune system within the brain, or an autoimmune disease. We do have steroid-based therapies against other autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis. But this kind of therapy will not work for the brain, but targeting other immune-regulating pathways in the brain may lead to new and effective treatments for the disease.

Either way, though, the search for a cure is pretty much back to square one.

The US wind industry overcomes the MAGA blowhards

As has been reported repeatedly, here in this blog and elsewhere, Donald Trump (and, by extension, his administration, which blindly and unquestioningly follows whatever he says) hates wind turbines, particularly offshore wind turbines. He calls them "losers" and "the scam of the century". No-one is quite sure why he hates them so much - his convenient "national security" argument is far from convincing - but there are theories. 

Anyway, in pursuance of this irrational hate, Trump has issued several edicts banning various wind farm developments off the east coast of America, including some that were all but complete. The states and developers involved have taken recourse to the courts to try to rectify this, and to recoup some of the billions of dollars they have already sunk into these projects.

And they are winning.

Three separate federal judges, including one appointed by Trump, have ruled Trump's decrees illegal and allowed construction to resume on windfarms off the coasts of New England, New York and Virginia.

So, despite Congress stopping incentives and the Republican administration imposing a variety of roadblocks in the way of permitting, the wind industry persists against all odd

What does MAGA really believe about DEI?

An article on Martin Luther King Day includes a quote from a Trump White House spokesperson: "Everything President Trump does is in the best interest of the American people. That includes rolling back harmful DEI agendas, deporting dangerous criminal illegal aliens from American communities, or ensuring we are being honest about our country's great history."

Now there are any number of things wrong with that quote, both in principle, and in the practical way in which those beliefs are being acted on. But the thing that really stood out for me was the use of the word "harmful". In what way is the pursuit of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) considered actually harmful by the MAGA crowd?

Here's what MAGA believes about DEI, gleaned mainly from an AI query and a CNN article:

• DEI actively disadvantages White people and men, attempting to solve past discrimination by creating new forms of discirimination.
• DEI leads to hiring or promoting less qualified minority candidates, shifting the focus from merit to identity.
• DEI fosters resentment and focusses on differences, creating divisions, and turning people into victims and oppressors.
• DEI is redundant in today's post-racial world, where significant racial equality has already been achieved.
• DEI programs are costly, ineffective bureaucracies, filled with activists rather than genuine problem-solvers.
• DEi policies violate constitutional rights, particularly for educators and students, promoting specific ideologies and stifling free speech.

Of course, a lot of these points are merely twists on the arguments for DEI. And I do believe that they are, by and large, "straw men" arguments (intentionally misrepresented propositions), and that a good proportion of the people espousing them just don't like Black people. But I have no proof of that :)