Give Castro some credit, not just a knee-jerk reaction

Fidel Castro has finally shuffled off his mortal coil, and Justin Trudeau is in the doghouse for finding some nice words to say about the dead guy. Ah, politics.
Trudeau, like pretty much every other political leader the world over, was obliged to make some kind of statement on the death of a major statesman, and, like it or not, that's what Castro was. Personally, I thought his statement was pretty reasonable and appropriate:

"It is with deep sorrow that I learned today of the death of Cuba’s longest serving President.
"Fidel Castro was a larger than life leader who served his people for almost half a century. A legendary revolutionary and orator, Mr. Castro made significant improvements to the education and healthcare of his island nation.
"While a controversial figure, both Mr. Castro’s supporters and detractors recognized his tremendous dedication and love for the Cuban people who had a deep and lasting affection for 'el Comandante'.
"I know my father was very proud to call him a friend and I had the opportunity to meet Fidel when my father passed away. It was also a real honour to meet his three sons and his brother President Raúl Castro during my recent visit to Cuba.
"On behalf of all Canadians, Sophie and I offer our deepest condolences to the family, friends and many, many supporters of Mr. Castro. We join the people of Cuba today in mourning the loss of this remarkable leader."

Problem is, saying anything remotely nice about an avowed and unrepentant communist is just not done in some political circles. So, Mr. Trudeau was piled on by most conservative Canadian politicians, almost the whole US Republican machine, Margaret Wente (obviously), and even the Globe's Editorial. God, even the usually sober and measured Guardian got in on th act.
But it should be mentioned, before all proportion is lost in the ensuing hysteria, that many other world leaders also made largely positive and respectful statements on Castro's death, including the UN Secretary-General, most presidents of Latin America, and the presidents of the EU, China, Russia, Spain, France, South Africa, India and, yes, the USA.
Castro was a "controversial figure", as Trudeau himself admits, and his democratic failings and civil rights abuses are well-known and reported ad nauseam in thr media. But they do not necessarily have to preface every comment made about the man. Neither do we need to dance in the streets with the Cuban exiles of Miami.
And, just for good measure, neither is it reasonable to characterize pre-revolutionary Cuba as some paragon of wealth, commerce and development, as many anti-Castro partisans (and, once again, the Globe and Mail's editorial team) often insist. In fact, Cuba under Batista was a US colony in which (in the words of one Globe letter-writer) "American-owned plantations and businesses raked in huge profits using cheap labour working in slave-like conditions". The mafia controlled Havana's drugs, casinos and brothels, the government at all levels was hugely corrupt, the police force brutal and repressive, and the regime almost totally indifferent to the education, medical care, housing, social justice and economic opportunity of its people. It was a revolution waiting to happen; Castro was the man who made it happen. Yes, the revolution, like so many others before it, went astray later, but at least give the man some credit where credit is due.

Big news: smoking is bad for you

My last post (forgive the unintentional pun) was about someone killing themselves, and coincidentally so is this one. A new study in the USA has confirmed, in unequivocal and all-too-graphic statistical terms, what most sensible people already knew: smoking is bad for you.
The study concluded that almost 29% of all cancer deaths in the USA are attributable to smoking (23% in women and 34% in men). So, not only is smoking bad for you, it's VERY bad for you. And this does not include deaths from various other diseases that are often linked to smoking. Nor does it include deaths from second-hand smoke, pipes, cigars, e-cigarettes, etc. Also, the data depends on self-reporting, and so could well be understated.
An estimated 8 million premature deaths have been prevented by tobacco control efforts, and yet such controls in some parts of the country remain quite weak: only about a third of US states prohibit smoking in public places; no state fulfilled the WHO's recommenderecommendation for a75% tax on cigarettes; only 7% of states provided comprehensive coverage for smoking cessation treatments under Medicaid; etc.
Geographically, the numbers are highest in southern states like Kentucky, Arkansas, Tennessee and Louisiana, where the vast majority of American tobacco is grown, where tobacco controls are weaker and cigarettes cheaper, and where there is economic and commercial pressure in favour of the industry.
The writing is on the wall, people; all you have to is read it and act upon it.

Would you kill yourself for the environment?

This is the first post I have made which has both Environment and Religion as category tags. I read in The Guardian today that a young man in southern India has become perhaps the first voluntary martyr to the cause of environmentalism. Many people have died over the centuries due to environmental degradation, and others have been killed as a result of their environmental beliefs. But this is the first time I am aware of where someone has taken their own life in the cause of the environment. It is a disturbing development.
Jawahar Kumara, a 19-year old from the small town of Thanjavir in Tamil Nadu, was found drowned in the local canal, having left a suicide video on his phone, explaining his actions, thus:

"I am sacrificing my life in the hope that it will trigger serious concern about plastic use in India. Since all of my peaceful means of protest failed, I’m forced to choose suicide. To save the lives of millions of people affected by toxic plastic, I don’t think it’s wrong to kill myself."

The young man was an ardent environmentalist, as well as a deeply religious person, and he had already gone on a hunger strike and threatened to throw himself off a building if his environmental grievances were not addressed by his local government. His grievances were to do with the excessive and polluting use of plastic, and particularly of plastic bags, in India. Basically, he killed himself over plastic bags
Now, India does have a plastic bag problem. Having arrived late on the plastics scene, with the economic liberalization of the 1990s, its use of plastic since then has been increasing dramatically, by about 10% a year. National and state-level actions to control the problem have been less than robust and policing of new policies is almost non-existent. Perhaps the most effective activity has been to rope in India's informal army of waste-pickers or "rag-pickers", who salvage items from landfill sites for recycling (as a result, India's recycling rate is around 60% compared to 22% worldwide). But, in the scheme of things, the country is still not a big plastics consumer, using less than 10kg per person annually, as compared to 45kg in China and a whopping 109kg in the USA.
So, yes, this is indeed a fight worth fighting, but not something that should be inspiring people to kill themselves over. These kinds of extreme religious tactics are just not appropriate for environmental protests.

The Facebook effect in a post-truth world

A lot of ink and pixels have been devoted to the allegations that fake news and misinformation of Facebook and other social media sites may have swayed the recent US election Trump-wards, and that this may have been the first (but probably not the last) "post-truth" election.

Much has been made of the fact that Oxford Dictionaries have made "post-truth" their word of the year, as though this is in some way significant or even prophetic. Post-truth refers to circumstances where objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than emotional appeals, and you can see how this has become a buzz-word in a year of Brexit and President Trump.

But back to Facebook.

It has long been the known that social media (and Facebook in particular) s rife with false news (either deliberately or accidentally so). What has changed more recently is the extent of the influence that social media has over the perceptions of the general public. Studies suggest that nearly two-thirds of American social media users - and, let's face it, that's most people these days - get the vast majority of their news directly from that social media.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg insists, somewhat disingenuously, that 99% of the content reported on Facebook is "authentic" (as opposed to factual), and that he finds it "extremely unlikely" that false news on Facebook has been instrumental in influencing the American election one way or another. In fact, he has specifically denied that Facebook helped Trump win, calling such accusations a "crazy idea". But then he would say that, wouldn't he? Zuckerberg says that Facebook is working to identify and flag false news, although he is right to point out that this is a tricky line to walk and that Facebook staff should not be seen as, or be involuntarily put in the position of being, "arbiters of the truth". And certainly fact-checking everything that appears on the site does appear to be just impractical.

Part of the problem is that Facebook's News Feed service is specifically designed to show people the kind of news it thinks they want to see, creating a kind of "filter bubble" which merely serves to reinforce a person's views without exposing them to any alternative or contradictory viewpoints. What an individual ends up seeing (and believing) depends, to a large extent, on their friends and what they choose to share, which just exacerbates both confirmation bias and the so-called "backfire effect".

So, as a result, we have seen fake video of Democrats stuffing votes into ball at boxes, stories accusing the Clintons of murder, stories claiming that Barack Obama is a Muslim, false claims that popular black actor Denzel Washington has praised Trump, etc, etc. Hilary Clinton connected to a pedophilia and child sex trafficking ring, anyone?
And there is some evidence that, for whatever reason, these kinds of sensational fake stories are actually shared more on social media than other, more mundane, factual claims. One analysis by Buzzfeed News shows that the top fake news stories during the election generated significantly more engagement on Faceook (in terms of shares, reactions and comments) than the top real news stories from 19 major news outlets combined.

So, did Facebook influence the US election? We will probably never know. But it does seem likely that the inexorable rise of fake news has at least increased the political polarization and confusion in a fraught and hotly-contested race.

Obama bans Arctic oil drilling

In a final sally before bowing out President Obama has blown one last resounding raspberry at President-Elect Donald Trump by banning drilling for oil in the pristine waters of the Arctic.
As part of the US federal government's land and ocean leasing program, the move has been praised by environmentalists, but will only serve to irritate Trump and his fuel cronies. Technically, Trump could reverse the ruling, but the poor economics and high risks of Arctic drilling will probably be enough to deter fossil fuel companies anyway. For example, the Anglo-Dutch oil company Shell spend over $7 billion in exploration costs in the oil-rich waters off the Alaska coast, before finally abandoning the project this last September.
The Bureau of Ocean Energy management, which manages the leases of oil drilling projects, has also put the Atlantic out of bounds good future development, although it has opened up new areas of the Gulf of Mexico, which is the current epicentre of offshore oil development.
This latest announcement is just one more of what Trump describes as "Obama-Clinton roadblocks" to large-scale fossil fuel development and, as such, is to be commended.

Selfie deaths on the rise

I was just reading about a guy who died when he fell into a hot pool at Yellowstone National Park earlier this year. He and his sister were apparently looking for an illegal place to soak, mainly for the thrill of the selfie opportunity, and the whole grisly event was recorded on his sister's cellphone. The guy completely dissolved in the acidic hot pool before his remains could be recovered.

This led me to another article which tells me that the number of people who die each year while taking selfies is increasing precipitously. The first known selfie death occurred in March 2014, but since then there have been 127 deaths attributable to selfies, 15 in 2014, 39 in 2015, and 73 in just the first eight months of 2016. 76 of these deaths were in India (where taking dangerous selfies on and around trains is all the rage, and is even considered romantic for some reason), 9 in Pakistan, 8 in the USA, and 6 in Russia. Most of the deaths, other than the train ones, were a result of falling from a great height (e.g. cliffs, towers, buildings, etc), although several of those in the USA and Russia involved guns and other weapons.

It seems there is a whole subculture of people who take selfies in dangerous situations in order to bolster their social media profiles, and such individuals may accumulate thousands of followers (before they die, presumably). Check out some of the examples on this page.
And you thought that regular selfies were pretty sick...

What is the likelihood of Trump being impeached?

Due to the vagaries of the American electoral system, it seems we are democratically stuck with Donald J. Trump as the leader of the so-called free world. So, many people are thinking outside the box for ways in which we might legally get rid of the guy. And perhaps the most likely of these unlikely possibilities is impeachment.

Allan Lichtman, the Washington professor who has successfully predicted every US election since 1984 (including Donald Trump) using his historically-based "13 keys to the White House" system, also made another prediction about Trump, this one not based on any complex historical system but on his own gut feeling: "I'm quite certain Trump will give someone grounds for impeachment, either by doing something that endangers national security or because it helps his pocketbook." Many other people, including filmmaker Michael Moore, have also predicted that Trump is likely to do something that might lead to grounds for impeachment sometime before the end of his term of office, and probably sooner rather than later. Even Rush Limbaugh was predicting, some time ago now, that the Democrats would be "talking impeachment on day two, after the first Trump executive order".

So, what is involved with a presidential impeachment, and what is the likelihood of it happening any time soon? Impeachment of a president requires that they commit treason, bribery, or "high crimes and misdemeanours", the latter in particular being a woolly and ambiguous phrase that is open to a variety of interpretations. Here are a few areas where Trump's political, business and personal life might come into play in this context:

• the ongoing legal allegations regarding Trump University (among other things it is alleged that unqualified instructors were personally hired by Trump, and that the "university" is not actually an accredited educational program);
• conflicts of interests in his cabinet (Trump loyalists like General Mike Flynn and Rudy Giuliani, both highly tipped for prominent positions in the Trump hierarchy, are both subject to conflict of interest allegations recently, and Trump's move to include his son-in-law Jared Kushner in his administration, and granting him the highest security clearance, could well be against federal anti-nepotism laws, as could his plans to involve more of his adult children);
• sexual assault allegations (Trump is currently facing at least a dozen sexual assault and harassment accusations, and facing legal action over such allegations could open up the possibility of impeachment proceedings);
• conflicts of interest from his business dealings (having his children run his intricate, extensive and highly-complex business empire in a "blind trust" is at best unconvincing);
• his dealings with Vladimir Putin and Russia (there are already some shady undercurrents to Trump's reliance on Russian investors and his undisguised admiration for Putin, as well as the apparent Russian tampering in the election process itself, and who knows where these might lead);
• possible crackdowns on the media (Trump has already broken protocol over his dealings with the press, and he makes no secret of his antagonism towards it, but these are not actually criminal actions - yet);
• any new shocking revelations or transgressions that come to light in the future (the possibilities are limitless).

Now, the problem is that Congress is the body that needs to call for, and to actually hold, hearings for impeachment, and both the Senate (narrowly) and the House of Representatives (more robustly) are currently controlled by the Republicans. So, Trump would have to seriously piss off his own party to lead them to resort to this dramatic step. Having said that, many Republicans are already seriously pissed off with him, and the likelihood of further pissed-offness is well within the bounds of possibility. So, impeachment remains a tantalizing potentiality.

The Pandora's Box of Americam racism

In case you were thinking that all that talk about Donald Trump's election win lifting the top off a Pandora's Box of racist and sexist attitudes and actions was just hyperbole and rhetoric, think again. Already, just days after the election, there has been a spate of racist and anti-Semitic incidents across the USA, more than 300 according to the Southern Poverty Law Centre. And these are just the ones that have been reported and garnered some media attention

They include:

• Vandalization and "Trump Nation Whites Only" graffiti at the Episcopal Church of Our Saviour in Silver Spring, Maryland, as well as at other churches nearby.
• Swastikas daubed on doors in a residence where several Jewish women live at the New School, New York City, as well as in a residence at the State University of New York at Geneseo (accompanied by the word "Trump").
• A swastika and "Make America White Again" graffiti on a softball dugout at Wellsville in upstate New York.
• The word "Trump" scrawled on a Muslim prayer room at New York University's Tandon School of Engineering.
• Swastika graffiti and the words "Heil Trump" at the University of California at San Diego.
• Black students at the University of Pennsylvania were included in on a racist GroupMe message from "DaddyTrump", that included violent threats against blacks, racial slurs, a calendar invitation to a "daily lynching" and old images of African-American lynchings.
• Threats to a female Muslim students at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, demanding that she remove her hijab or be set on fire.
• Students at Royal Oak Middle School, Michigan (Grades 6-10) chanting "Build that wall!" during their lunch break.
• Racist graffiti and hashtags, including "#GoBackToAfrica", "#MakeAmericaGreatAgain", "#WhitesOnly", "#WhiteAmerica" and "#Trump", at Maple Grove Senior High School in Minnesota.
• Threats and intimidation of a Muslim student at San Diego State University, including mentions of Trump and of the student's traditional clothing.
• "Black lives don't matter and neither does [sic] your votes" graffiti on a wall in Durham North Carolina
• Graffiti spray-painted in a window in Philadelphia, including "Sieg Heil 2016" and "Trump" with a swastika in place of the "T", as well as more racist graffiti nearby.
• Social media photos of a black doll being hung circulating at Canisius College in west New York state, with a connection being drawn to "Trump fans".
• A Twitter video of a student at Shasta High School in Redding, California, handing out "Deportation" notices to other students of a variety of ethnicities (he though it was "funny").
• Physical and verbal abuse (including use of the N-word) of a black student at Baylor University, Texas (although it was heartening to see that 300 students then turned up to escort the student to her next class).

A longer, more up-to-date, and even more depressing, list is available at Fusion.net, but I just haven't the heart to detail any more examples here.

Set against that are a couple of incidents, in Connecticut and Chicago, where Trump supporters were attacked. But the writing is quite clearly on the wall (so to speak): many people see Trump's election as carte blanche (so to speak) to make their ugliest attitudes public.

And Trump's rather lame response to all this activity? On a 60 Minutes interview, he said: "If it helps, I will say this, and I'll say it directly into the camera: 'Stop it'." Ouch.