Is "winningest" a real word?

I still cringe when I hear news presenters use the word "winningest". Maybe I shouldn't; maybe it's just the Englishman in me (it's not a word that would be considered acceptable outside of North America).

It's pretty much only used in a sports context, but it still sounds kind of uneducated to me, even if it is widely used on major TV and radio networks. At the very least it sounds very informal, and probably not appropriate for the 7 o'clock news, in my humble opinion.

That said, it's also a pretty useful word, and a neater solution than "player with the most wins", for example. Just don't try using "winninger" - not a word.

And don't get me started on "funner"...

Ontario healthcare - crisis, what crisis?

Pretty much everyone agrees that Ontario's healthcare system is officially "in crisis:". The phrase is used by everyone from nurses to healthcare officials to opposition politicians to the press. The only people who don't use that word are government spokespeople, and most specifically Premier Doug Ford and Health Minister Sylvia Jones, the very people who most need to admit it.

Sylvia Jones in particular has been very forthright about her view that Ontario's healthcare situation is not in crisis: "There is not a crumbling system in Ontario"; "We have a very strong healthcare system"; and, most badly, "To suggest it is in crisis is completely inappropriate". Inappropriate, or inconvenient? Everyone else is calling it a crisis. What would it take for Ms. Jones to consider it a crisis, I wonder? For her, the current situation is not even "unprecedented" ("No, I'm sorry, it is not").

Well, you might say, this is all semantics. But until you admit there is a problem, solutions are not going to follow. The government has implicitly suggested that private care might be the way forward - "All options are on the table" - which has set the cat among the pigeons in a province and a country that prides itself on our publicly-funded universal healthcare (although arguably we already have at least an element of private healthcare in our system).

The one thing the Conservative government does not seem willing to do is to put serious amounts of new money into healthcare, despite the fact that Ontario has consistently been the lowest healthcare spender in the country for years. In fact, they are going out of their way to avoid increasing real spending (consider the iniquitous Bill 124, which caps nurses' pay increases at 1% a year, which, given the level of inflation we are now experiencing, is not exactly going to help our non-crisis).

And the government wonders why Ontario's nurses are leaving the profession in droves, and why well over a million citizens in the province cannot find a family doctor?

Crisis, what crisis?

Trump-backed GOP candidate loses primary, but insists she "won"

See what Donald Trump hath wrought. 

The Trump-backed far-right candidate for a Florida GOP primary lost to the more moderate incumbent. But, in true Trump form, Laura Loomer (who sounds like a WWF wrestler to me) is refusing point blank to accept the results.

"I'm not conceding because I'm a winner!", she blathers. "The reality is, this Republican Party is broken to the core ... we have further exposed a corruption within our own feckless, cowardly Republican party." "We are losing our country to big-tech election interference." Sound familiar? And, she wonders why it's broken?

Ms. Loomer is situated somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan on the political spectrum. She is an avowed and unrepentant white nationalist and Islamophobe, who appears to believe that the Buffalo supermarket shooting was a set-up by Democratic elements. She has been banned from Twitter for anti-Islamic hate speech (also familiar).

And she is, in her own words "a winner". Except that she lost. 

The heatwave / drought in China may be the worst EVER anywhere

Recently, we have become used to news reports and pictures of extreme weather, drought conditions and record-breaking heatwaves in Europe, the Horn of Africa, the American Southwest, and even Canada. But apparently, none of this remotely compares to what is happening in China at the moment.

Extreme weather historians like Maximiliano Herrera judge that the current heatwave and drought in China is the worst EVER, anywhere. Rivers and reservoirs have dried up, huge areas of crops have been damaged, areas reliant on hydroelectricity are suffering power outages, causing industry to completely grind to a halt in some areas, etc, etc. 

As Herrera explains it, "This combines the most extreme intensity with the most extreme length with an incredibly huge area all at the same time. There is nothing in world climatic history which is even minimally comparable to what is happening in China."

Wow. Quite a claim. The problem is that China has become such a pariah on the world stage that no-one really cares what is happening there.

Longtermism, a bizarre philosophy with some very influential adherents

You may or many not have come across a philosophical belief called "longtermism", a quasi-religious belief promulgated by the likes of William MacAskill, Nick Bostrom and Carl Shulman, and supported by powerful and influential figures like Elon Musk and Jason Matheny.

In a nutshell, longtermism is the idea that, in long-term future (think millions or billions of years), there will be so may digital people (think 10⁵⁸ according to one estimate) living in vast computer simulations that we have a moral obligation to ensure that as many of these people come into existence as possible. Part of that belief includes the need to colonize space as soon as possible, and to convert other planets into computer simulations for these unfathomable number of future digital beings. It sees the earth, nature and all the planets, stars, asteroids, etc, as our "cosmic endowment" to be exploited to the limit in the pursuit of this futuristic vision. Some, like Bostrom, take it even further and recommend genetic engineering for super-high IQ beings with "desirable traits".

I confess it all makes no sense to me. If you think that the future is going to be a transhuman dystopia of this magnitude, why would you feel obliged to precipitate it and bring it to reality as soon as possible? But then, who ever expected anything like logic from the likes of Elon Musk?

California is paying big money for people to dig up their lawns

In a typically forward-thinking move, California is paying people to rip up their lawns. And they are paying quite big money for it, from a base $2 a square foot to as much as $6 with local county and municipal subsidies included. Some residents with large lawns are raking in tens of thousands of dollars.

California, and much of the rest of southwestern USA, is in the throes of an unprecedented (there's that word again) climate change-induced "megadrought", and reservoirs are at an all-time low (as I have discussed previously). It turns out that lawn-watering uses up to 75% of households' water consumption in areas like California. In fact, across America turf lawns are effectively the largest single irrigated "crop", surpassing both corn and wheat, a jaw-dropping little factoid courtesy of NASA and the NOAA.

So, California is taking the bull by the horns and paying people to dig up their lawns, and replace them with drought-resistant plants like manzanita, sage and California lilac, drought-resistant grasses like deer grass, dwarf fountain grass and lemon grass, and even with just plain old mulch, cacti and rocks, with a view to saving millions of gallons of water the state can ill-afford these days.

There's undeniably a lot wrong with the state of California, but every now and then they come up with a revolutionary new policy, years or decades before everyone else, that just makes you go, " Yay, good for you!"

New Supreme Court of Canada nominee is young. But how young?

Yesterday, Michelle O'Bonsawin became the first Indigenous judge to be nominated for the Supreme Court of Canada. This is a big deal Indigenous people everywhere.

My first thought as I watched the television news coverage of the event was, "Wow, she looks young for a Supreme Court judge", and my second thought was to look up her age on the internet. Because that kind of thing is available on the internet, right? That's what the internet is FOR!

But try as I might, I was not able to find out. My first port of call was Wikipedia, which does indeed have an entry for Justice O'Bonsawin. But, while it tells me that she was born in the French Ontarian town of Hanmer, near Sudbury, Ontario, and is a member of the Odanak First Nation, nowhere does it tell me WHEN she was born. 

I found that strange, and investigated further. But it seems that the internet, with all its deep resources, does not actually know when Justice O'Bonsawin was born, nor how old she is. Which is kind of strange, no? Is she particularly sensitive about her age? Is it a state secret? Is it just that the internet and the media have not caught up on that particular snippet of information yet? Weird.

Anyway, suffice to say, she is clearly young, as Supreme Court judges go. How young? We may never know. But, just in passing, the third thought I had  regarding this nomination was: what a sweet, civilized process Canada has for new Supreme Court judges compared to the fractious, partisan American one!

The Inflation Reduction Act is a mixed blessing for the environment

The USA's long-awaited Inflation Reduction Act finally got passed, after worries that it would flounder on the floor of the finely-balanced Senate, like so many bills before it. 

Most progressives and environmentalists seem to like the mis-named bill (it's more about dealing with climate change and health care than inflation per se), even if it doesn't go far enough for many. It is hoped that the bill will kick-start America's clean energy and renewables sector, and that it will contribute significantly to the US's climate change goals. It has been called the "biggest climate investment in US history", and a "game changer". And it is true that there are many good things within the large and complex legislation, including tax breaks and subsidies for renewable energy production of all types.

But what gets lost, or at least glossed over, is the fact that there are provisions in the bill, as it was finally passed, that actively work against climate change mitigation, and for the iniquitous oil and gas industry. Specifically, it guarantees new offshore drilling opportunities in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska, something the Biden administration had strenuously tried to avoid, both from a climate change pointed view and from a general environmental point of view, as well as to ease some current federal rules that, it is argued, limit fossil fuel production. Also included are substantial tax credits for carbon capture and direct air capture technologies that some see as giving the fossil fuel industry license to continue and even expand their operations. These pro-oil provisions could "prolong the usage of fossil fuels", and particularly boost the US's fossil fuel export market.

And the reason for this apparently irreconcilable position? Well, a still-strong oil and gas lobby for sure, but mainly two words: Joe Manchin. The supposedly Democratic Senator for West Virginia (whom I have written about before, at length) insisted on this sop to the fossil fuel industry that he loves so much, and which pays him so well. Without it, he would not have voted for the bill, and it would indeed have failed. One man held the entire United States for ransom.