What's the truth behind the fabled "seventh wave"?

As I sit watching the waves on a beach at the less trendy end of Grand Cayman, I got to wondering about the truth about the mythical (pr perhaps not) "seventh wave".

The truth, as these things usually turn out, is complicated.

The short answer is that the old saw is nonsense: ocean waves are generated by the wind way out to sea before they crash onto the beach, and the wind is capricious and unpredictable. Why then, should we expect waves to be regular?

However, once a few waves get going and begin to feed off and amplify each other, they do become a bit more coherent and regular, and in practice they do tend to form packs or groups of between 12 and 16 waves, with the biggest waves in the centre of the pack. So, the group of waves typically goes from small to big and back to small again, with the largest wave of the group right around number seven or eight.

However, that does still mean that the largest waves only occur every 12, 14 or 16 waves, not the 7 of folklore. Sorry.

And just while we are about it, why do waves break anyway? Waves out at sea are caused by the wind imparting its energy and friction to the waves it comes into contact with. But waves out at sea usually don't break - they just cause bigger and bigger swells.

When the waves approach a coastline, though, the water is shallower and there is less water to draw up into the wave. At the same time, there is more friction acting on the bottom of the wave (where it meets the seabed) than there is at the top. So, the bottom is slowed down more than the top until eventually the top of the wave kind of overbalances and topples over itself due to the force of gravity. This is what we see as the wave breaking. So, there you go.

Essential reading about how the world is sleepwalking into fascism

I have been making my way through Carol Off's excellent 2024 book, At a Loss For Words: Conversation in an Age of Rage. 

It is ostensibly a book about words and how they have been changed, redefined and weaponized. But it is also a pretty comprehensive (and rather depressing) look at how the alt right has become such a force in Canadian, American and worldwide politics, and how the Overton window has been shifted so far to the right that outright fascist views are being openly espoused by mainstream politicians.

Along the way, she looks at Donald Trump, Pierre Poilievre, SteoehnHarper, Viktor Orban, Vladimir Putin, Radovan Karazdic, Ron DeSantis, and several lesser-known, but equally influential and blameworthy, names like Arthur Finkelstein, Christopher Rufo, James Buchanan, Leonard Leo and Tamara Lich, not to mention a cornucopia of well-funded, largely secretive, organizations whose single-minded purpose is the imposition of anti-woke autocratic rule and the permanent destruction of caring liberal democratic governance.

The book is replete with literally hundreds of interlinked anecdotes about how the extreme right has employed disinformation, exaggeration, doublethink, and outright barefaced lies to achieve its ends, and how successful it has been at it. "Dystopian" and "Orwellian" don't even cover it. So confident are they that they make little or no attempt to dissemble, and there is oodles of publicly-available evidence of their Machiavellian machinations.

The chapters are named after words that have been co-opted by the hard right in many different countries: Freedom, Democracy, Truth, Woke, Choice, and Taxes. But what Ms. Off does really well is outline how interconnected the right is throughout the world, and how they learn from each other, sometimes indirectly, but often surprisingly directly, to an extent that the left has never been able to. 

Clearly, the hard right, and in many cases - let's not beat about the bush - openly fascist, regimes see their opportunity, their moment in history, like at no other time since the 1930s and 1940s.

It's only when you read all of this, together in one place, that you realize the enormity of what is going on under our very noses. It makes truly scary, but essential, reading.

Do we really need a purpose in life?

Interesting article in Psychology Today, not a publication I often read, about whether we really need to have a purpose in life.

Sounds a bit heavy perhaps, but I've always thought that having a purpose in life, and  constantly searching for a "meaning" of life, to be overrated, just a back door into the dead end of religion. Personally, I don't feel the need for a meaning to my life, or a purpose to it. I'm here and it's quite nice, and that's just fine for me. But lots of people agonize over it, and the lack of it leads many people into mental health problems. So, you could argue that often it is this need for meaning and purpose that CAUSES mental illness.

The article outlines the way in which wanting and having a purpose in life helps many people become successful, happy members of society. But if it turns out that they change their minds about that purpose they have set for themselves, that's when the stress and anxiety clicks in. And if someone feels they need a purpose and don't find one, they too turn stressed, depressed and worse.

Better, then, not to go there at all, it seems to me. Just live your life, be nice to people, try to leave things a bit better than you found them (or at least not worse), and just enjoy it. I know I am perhaps in an enviable position, born into the western world, well-educated and not short of money, so maybe I have a rosier outlook than many. Personally, I blame religion for much of that obsession with meaning and purpose, but then I tend to blame religion for many things.

COVID-19 update (yes, COVID-19)

Remenber COVID? Yup, still with us.

The latest Health Canada update of the status of respiratory diseases indicates that the COVID positivity rate has decreased a bit, but that some 4,000 people have been hospitalized for COVID since the end of August, of which 285 required intensive care. This is obviously much fewer than at the pandemic's height, but it is far from insignificant.

The stat that really stood out for me, though, was that there have been 750 deaths from COVID since August, compared to 43 deaths from flu, for example. So, to say that COVID has become just like the seasonal flu bug is far from the truth. I'm wearing a mask when we fly south later this week.

Does Trump really not understand how tariffs work?

It's no secret that Donald Trump loves tariffs. "To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff, and it's my favourite word", he said in a Bloomberg interview (and many other times). I wonder if he knows that "tariff" actually comes from an Arabic word, via Italian. Probably not.

I wonder though if it's possible that he doesn't actually understand how tariffs work. He must have had economists explain it to him, surely, and economists agree that tariffs are costly and would not generate the benefits that Trump claims for them. 

However, as he reiterated during his inauguration, Trump appears to believe that imposing tariffs on imports benefits Americans financially: "Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens". 

Except that's not how tariffs work, as any economist could tell him. A tariff levied on imported goods is borne by the domestic company that imports the goods, not the foreign company that exports them. That company would then charge consumers more to compensate - few, if any, companies will voluntarily take a hit to their bottom line and NOT raise consumer prices - making the goods more expensive for (in this case) American consumers, increasing inflation in the process.

For good measure, the USA already has a very similar example of the ill-advised imposition of tariffs from nearly 100 years ago, from which to learn. In 1930, under President Herbert Hoover, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act imposed 20% tariffs on a broad spectrum of goods, against the advice of hundreds of American economists, employing broadly similar arguments to Mr. Trump. Unfortunately, we know how that one turned out. It triggered a global trade war and retaliatory tariffs, the stock market crashed, US exports fell by two-thirds, unemployment tripled, inflation spiked, and the 1929 recession tipped into a full-blown depression. Oops.

So, what gives? Did Trump manage to find an economist that would tell him what he wants to hear, rather than the truth? That's certainly plausible, but weird. Maybe he just doesn't understand what he's being told, or just prefers to "go with his gut"? Also plausible, but also weird. 

I'm not really expecting Trump to re-evaluate his gut feeling; that's not the way he rolls. But it will be interesting to see just how badly it goes.

What is an executive order and why is it even legal?

Donald Trump is expected to sign a record-breaking 100+ executive orders on his first day as President ("Day 1", as he would have it). He had them all ready and waiting. Here's a quick summary of the main ones, and it makes for some scary reading. During his first term he signed more executive orders than any other recent president; his second term is likely to blow it away. A particular attraction for him is that there is little to no oversight from Congress, and he gets to feel like a bona fide dictator.

But what is an executive order anyway, and why are they allowed? An executive order is basically a legally-binding written order by a president which does not require congressional approval. Their authority comes from Article II of the Constitution - "The executive power shall be vested in the President of the United  States" - although this is so vague as to be almost useless as a guide.

Almost all US presidents use them - Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton particularly liked them, although even they can't hold a candle to Franklin D. Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Calvin Coolidge, whose use of them numbered into the thousands. Donald Trump REALLY likes them.

They can be used for relatively minor things, like establishing a new national holiday or renaming the Gulf Mexico, or much more substantive issues like nationalizing an industry or instituting mass deportations or mator trade tariff changes. increasingly they are being used to reverse an executive order of a previous President in a potentually unending back-and-forth.

Technically, Congress can pass a law to override an executive action (although the President may be able to block that), and technically their legality can be reviewed by the Office of legal Counsel (which doesn't always happen) and they can be reversed by the courts if they are illegal or unconstitutional. But in the main, a President's executive orders stick, at least for a few years.

It seems ridiculous to me that such a powerful and essentially unregulated political tool can reside in theg hands of a single individual. An unscrupulous or mentally unbalanced president could enact all sorts of petty or dangerous laws (sound familiar?) with impunity, contrary to the wishes of the governing party or Congress in general, and certainly against the will of the populace. 

How is this democratic? A loose cannon like Donald Trump could bring in all sorts of wacky rules to the detriment of the country, and indeed of the whole world, without any congressional agreement or legal regulation (especially given the tame Supreme Court Trump has engineered, the generally pro-Trump Republican majority in Congress, and the fact that he has surrrounded himself with a cabinet of fiercely loyal acolytes, regardless of their experience in their jobs, or lack thereof). 

I'm not aware of anything even remotely similar to this system of executive orders in other jurisdictions like Canada or the UK.

Turns out, most Americans disagree with Trump's policies

Here's a conundrum. Most of the people who voted Donald Trump into power don't actually agree with his policies. So, if they didn't vote for his policies, what did they vote for? His charisma? His brotherley love vibes? A chimera?

A recent survey for Associated Press/NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows that:

• Only about 4 in 10 support mass deportations of immigrants whichever not been convicted of violent crimes, and a larger proportion oppose it.
• Almost half of American oppose imposing tariffs on all goods imported into the USA, and only 3 in 10 support it.
• Only 2 in 10 support pardoning those charge in the January 6th 2021 riots, and 6 in 10 oppose it (only 4 in 10 Republicans suport it).
• More people (about 4 in 10) oppose increasing drilling on federal lands than support it (just over 3 in 10).
• About half of Americans oppose taking the US out of the Paris climate agreement and only 2 in 10 would support it.
• Substantially more people support Biden's expansion of protections for LGBTQ+ students than support Trump's plan to eliminate protection for trans students.
• About half of Americans oppose Trump's plan to raise, or even eliminate, the government debt ceiling, while only a quarter support it.
• Just about the only thing that Americans agree on is eliminating income tax on tips (over half, compared to 2 in 10 opposed), but that was something that Democrat Kamala Harris campaigned on too.

So, why did they vote for Trump, again? Mass hysteria? Overcome by emotion, tired of logic and reason? By mistake? Well, they're stuck with him now. And so is the rest of the world.

Retaliatory tariffs may not be the way to go for Canada

With Donald Trump's threats of 25% tariffs hanging over us, Canadian politicians, economists and businessmen are arguing among themselves over the best retaliatory tariffs to levy back against our largest trading partner, the USA. But everyone seems agreed that retaliatory tariffs are in fact the way to go, indeed the only possible way to go.

What if they weren't? I know it's economic heresy, but I can't help wondering whether we have fully thought this through. And finally I came across another heretical article in the Globe and Mail asking the same question.

Many commentators have leveraged the 2018 experience, when Trump levied tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum exports and Canada hit back with a tit-for-tat retaliation, resulting in the American tariffs being lifted and new agreement struck on steel and aluminum. But it didn't have to end that way, and there is no guarantee that it would end that way a second time, particularly when dealing the ever-mercurial Trump. And we still ended up with a worse deal on steel and aluminum than we started with. The Globe article offers some alarming counter-examples from recent years.

Trump just uses tariffs of this sort as a bully tactic, just one part of his weird negotiating technique. If we retaliate, we hurt our own economy even more, just as the American economy is hurt by Trump's tariffs. Do we really want to voluntarily saddle ourselves with this double whammy? Nothing we do to America has the power to hurt them anything like as much as we are hurt ourselves, despite what a belligerent Doug Ford says. I'm sorry, but we are not going to somehow bring American to its knees.

Maybe we just need to ride out the Trump years, much as we rode out the COVID pandemic, by strengthening our social safety net and rebuilding our infrastructure, as the article suggests. (Trump is a pest very similar to a nasty virus). It won't be easy or cheap. But if we impose retaliatory tariffs, we would still have to ride it out, in addition to the harm it does to our own economy. 

And, of course. there is no guarantee that any of it will change Trump's mind one iota. Trump doesn't really understand tariffs very well, despite it being the main single plank of his plan for economic trade. He seems to think that tariffs are paid by the other country (Canada, Mexico, China) and that they represent basically free money for the US. (In fact, American tariffs are paid by Americans, as people hav been telling him for years.) But Trump is not a logical being. What he is is vindictive, and our tariffs may well invite more (and potentially worse) retaliatory retaliations.

Israelism - another side to the story of Israel

I finally got around to watching Israelism, a hard-hitting documentary about indoctrination and misinformation about Israel among American Jews.

Subtitled "The Awakening of Young American Jews", the 2023 film didn't really tell me anything I didn't already know because I have read around the subject, although I'm sure it will be a shocking eye-opener for a lot of people.

It looks in some detail at the way in which young Jewish people in America are fed a very one-sided and often false story about the creation of Israel, the way Jews are treated, and how the state of Israel is a paradise for Jews. It explains how well-funded this movement is, and how young impressionable American Jews are being indoctrinated and even recruited into the Israeli army.

It also shows that there is a whole cohort of young American Jews who are questioning this indoctrination, and visiting Israel and Palestine personally to see for themselves. They come away with a very different impression - a place where Palestinian lands are illegally settled by a rapacious Israeli political machine and fanatical fundamentalists, and Palestinian people are subjugated and oppressed in an apartheid system at least as brutal and absolute as anything in 20th century South Africa.

This has led to a plethora of activist groups in America of Jews opposed to the politics of the Israeli state, and supportive of Palestinian freedom and human rights. These groups are being routinely harassed and threatened online and in person by angry Zionist elements, and subjected to regular death threats, but they are bravely persisting because they have seen the injustice and feel they cannot remain silent.

The film makes no secret of the fact that there is indeed a burgeoning antisemitic movement in America (and worldwide) as the far right gains a foothold and unquestioningly pro-Israel populist politicians and demagogues proliferate. But it makes the point that, notwithstanding, the propaganda we are being fed about Israel remains wrong, and that criticizing Israel is not in itself antisemitic, as we are also told.

The documentary was produced before the October 7th 2023 incursion by Hamas and the bloodbath in Palestine that ensued in its wake. Perhaps not surprisingly, after the attack and the start of the war in Palestine, there was a concerted effort to get the movie banned on the grounds that it is antisemitic - it's not, and the movie itself explains why it's not.

It should be required viewing, but so entrenched are the pro-Israel views of many people, Jews and non-Jews, that I don't hold much hope that it will change many minds.

Why has US banned Red 3 and Canada hasn't

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has just banned a food additive known as Red 3, on the grounds that it has been shown in animals studies to cause cancer. The synthetic food dye, which colours candies, drinks, cosmetics, even some medications, a lurid cherry-red colour, has also been banned in Europe, Australia and New Zealand. It was banned in cosmetics in the US as long ago as 1990.

And yet, FD&C Red No. 3, or is perfectly legal in Canada. So, what gives?

It turns out it's all about legal niceties. There is a legal provision in the USA that obliges the FDA to ban food additives found to cause cancer in either humans or animals. The Canadian rules only operate if a substance is found to be dangerous for humans.

You might think the American law is superior and we, here in Canada, should just ban the stuff anyway. But the two US rat studies that led to the ban found that Red 3 caused cancer in lab rats with a "rat-specific hormonal mechanism" that does not exist in humans. So, the effect of the additive on rats would almost certainly not translate into humans.

Canadian scientists agree that "evidence demonstrating human safety concern is lacking", and that "there is actually no evidence at all that it would be a danger in cosmetics". Consequently, there are some limits on how much of the food colouring can be used, but no ban. Moreover, a joint UN/WHO committee in 2018 looked at studies involving both humans and animals and found no safety concerns for the dye as a food additive.

That's not to say candies containing Red 3 will do you any good. Personally, I would steer well clear of anything coloured radioactive scarlet. And, a note to manufacturers, there are perfectly good natural dyes out there (beet juice extracts, anthocyanins extracted from berries, etc) without having to resort to synthetic crap just to sell a few more units.

Doug Ford looks to beat the Underhill Balance Theory

I hadn't really noticed it, but apparently there is an unwritten rule in Canadian politics that whatever Camada votes federally, the province of Ontario votes the opposite. It even has a name, the Underhill Balance Theory, after Frank Underhill, a political scientist who noticed the phenomenon way back in the 1940s.

And it does seem to work. In the heyday of the federal Liberal Party after the Second World War - Mackenzie King, Louis St Laurent, Lester B. Pearson, Pierre Elliott Trudeau - Ontario elected a series of Conservative Premiers - George Drew, Leslie Frost, John Robarts, Bill Davis - as a kind of balance.

When Conservative Brian Mulroney came to power in Ottawa in 1984, Ontario responded by voting in first Liberal David Peterson, and then NDP Bob Rae. With federal Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chrétien came Conservative Ontario Premier Mike Harris. When Conservative Stephen Harper replaced Chrétien federally, Ontario turned back to the Liberals with Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne. And with Justin Trudeau in Ottawa, of course, came Doug Ford in Toronto.

So now, as a new federal election looms, which the Conservatives are widely expected to win handily, Doug Ford - who is apparently also considering calling an Ontario election, even though he has a strong majority, good polling results, and more than 16 months before the next scheduled election! - must have the Underhill Balance Theory at the back of his mind. 

Indeed, it could well be a major reason why Ford wants to bring an Ontario election so far forward: to lock in the Conservative administration in Ontario notwithstanding a potential Conservative federal government, to break the Underhill jinx (as Ford might see it).

Top Liberals distance themselves from the carbon tax

We know that the Conservative Party of Canada opposes carbon taxes, and intends to end them the moment they get their hands on some power. God knows, Pierre Poilievre says "Axe the Tax!" at the start of every sentence he utters. You feel like saying "Gezundheit!" back to him each time.

It now looks like the Liberal Party of Canada, which brought the tax in, is going the same way. Both of the likely Liberal leadership candidates are now making noises along those lines. Chrystia Freeland, long a staunch Liberal climate warrior, is standing on a platform that specifically calls for the scrapping of the consumer carbon tax (although not the industry one). Even Mark Carney, the UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance, is starting to distance himself from the Liberals' carbon tax policy.

I guess climate change measures don't win votes any more. The Liberals (and, I'm guessing, even the NDP, as we will probably see when election platforms are unveiled later this year) are trying to out-Tory the Tories. Sad.

UPDATE

Mark Carney, who these days is looking like the front-runner for the Liberal Party leadership, has firmed up his plans to scrap the consumer carbon charge if he is elected. He says that the policy is too divisive, and that many Canadians perceive it as having a negative effect on their households. 

Well, if the problem is one of perceptions, fix it: explain that they are not worse off for the carbon tax because there is an off-setting rebate that sees most most people actually benefit financially from the policy. Don't just cancel it - that's political nonsense. 

So, now no-one is willing to defend the carbon tax, once the flagship of the Liberal plan to fight global warming. And yet all the reasons that were once  put forward for it still apply. Climate change is still going on, you know; it didn't stop because some people feel, for whatever reason, worse off, or because Donald Trump was elected in America.

And so much for Poilievre's "carbon tax election" - he's going to have to come up with a new three-word slogan now.

A moth that build a log cabin

There are some pretty strange critters out there with some pretty bizarre habits. But a new one to me is the Bagworm Moth (Psychidae), whose caterpillar saws little twigs and sticks and builds them into miniature log cabins for themselves.

Neat, huh? The log cabins are even mobile and move around with the caterpillars. The logs are held together with silk that the caterpillars produce, and they actually build the edifice on their own backs.

Interestingly, only the males of the species transform into adult moths. The females stay in a mature larval state, and never grow wings and legs like the males. The males only live for a few days after mating, although the females live longer while her duties call. The eggs stay safe and warn in the log cabin, while the females tend them. 

Cool.

Is Marco Rubio an elf?

I've never really noticed before but, hey, is Marco Rubio, likely Secretary of State-to-be, is he an elf? A goblin, perhaps?

I've never noticed those ears, but they are huge, and yes, distinctly pointy.

Stephen Harper stands up for Canada

It's pretty rare that I agree with anything that Conservative ex-Prime Minister Stephen Harper says. But strange times make for strange bedfellows, as they probably say.

In comparison to some of the garbage spewing from Donald Trump's mouth, Harper sounds eminently sensible and positively statesmanlike. In particular, his responses to Trump's recent drivel concerning US-Canadian relations on an American podcast were right on the nail.

He started off thumping the tub a bit in response to Trump's threats to use "economic force" to make Canada into the 51st state: " We are Canadian, not American, and we want to be friends, not, as they say, annexed."

But some of his responses to Trump's more specific grouses were better. To Trump's assertions that the US is subsidizing Canada and that it does not need Canada's exports anyway, Harper pointed out that, "It's true that Canada presently has a modest trade surplus with the United States. The reason we do is because you buy so much of our oil and gas." Well, duh!

Furthermore, "Maybe Canadians, if Mr. Trump feels this way, should be looking at selling their oil and gas to other people. We certainly have always wanted to do some of that - maybe now's the time to do it." And because we sell to the US at discounted prices, "In fact, you buy it at a discount to world markets. It's actually Canada that subsidizes the United States in this regard".

On illegal immigration from Canada to the US, Harper say, "There is no migrant flow happening from Canada to the United States of any significant numbers, and I'm going to tell you right now, drugs, guns, crime, most of those things flow north, not south. A lot more flows into Canada from the United States than flows out of it." Quite.

Canada's reliance on US military protection? "When we talk about subsidizing Canadian defense, I don't know what he's talking about. We have a shared defense of North America, and the United States does that because it's in the vital interest of the United States." Pow!

Trump's claim that he helped push out Justin Trudeau? "Whether or not we have Mr. Trudeau as our prime minister is our choice as Canadians. You know, we don't tell you whom to elect as president of the United States ... This is not Mr. Trump's decision. It's the decision of Canadians." 

And finally, if Pierre Poilievre is elected as Prime Minister: "If the United States actually threatens the sovereignty and independence of Canada, Mr. Poilievre will be forced to take a very different approach to Canada's place in the world." Right on!

I never liked Stephen Harper, either the man or his politics. But there he was, in Trump's own house, doing a pretty good job of standing up for Canada. Granted, it's easier because he is no longer in government, and can afford to make himself objectionable. But good job, I say.

Musings on the state of the world (and my place in it)

I was just thinking - in an absent, abstract sort of a way, during one of my many sleepless nights - about the state of the world. And it's not good, obvo.

The Four Horsemen are abroad (conquest, war, famine and death, if you are counting), and quite possibly the Antichrist. Perhaps the Four Horsemen could be re-cast slightly for the modern day as War, Plague, Ignorance and Right-Wing Populism, but you get the idea. And the Antichrist? That would be Donald Trump, enabler-in-chief of many of the ills besetting the world today. The Gates of Hell are open, and the demons are loose.

As we register the hottest year ever (yet again!) and swathes of America are burning in the middle of winter, political leaders - and a frightening number of regular folks who sleepwalk along with them like rats with the Pied Piper - are assuring us that we don't need to do anything about it. Even as we speak, climate change policies are being dismantled, subsidies for clean energy and sustainable tech disbanded, fossil fuels given a new lease on life.

Companies are rewriting their rules on diversity, equity and inclusion, even on telling the truth, because, with Trump in charge, they don't need to think about such things. Hard-fought rights, achieved through decades of slow, painstaking effort, are being abandoned overnight. Truth, respect and common sense have never been so imperilled and devalued. 

It seems like Trump, Musk and the MAGA crowd are redefining social more and economic expectations everywhere, and right-wing populist acolytes in other countries (Poilievre, Farage, Meloni, Orban, Wilder, Le Pen, Modi, many others) are calling the shots, suddenly lent legitimacy by the hateful rhetoric and thoughtless policy-making of Trump and his lackeys.

The Overton window has lurched to the right in an unprecedented manner (unprecedented since the 1930s anyway). For the right wing, almost nothing is off the table, nothing considered too extreme. Even progressives are making pronouncements that would have been unimaginable just a few short years ago, walking back policies they once saw as essential, incontrovertible, in the face of the anti-woke backlash. And it has happened so fast, it has almost happened while no-one was looking.

All of this is going on at the same time as power-mad war-mongers like Putin and Netanyahu hold sway, and autocratics like Xi make their subtler moves to mould the world in their favour. Coincidence? I guess so, or maybe each leads the others on, in a kind of feedback loop.

Maybe it is the inexorable back-and-forth swing of history. Maybe it is merely the influence of one particularly forceful demagogue, who will fade into senescence and obscurity in just a few short years. Or maybe it is the new paradigm that we need to come to terms with and accommodate. 

I would hate for the latter to be true, though. I'm an older guy, and I feel pretty powerless and discouraged. I just feel like crawling into a shell and waiting it out. The older I get the more cynical I become about the world and the people in it. 

But I have to believe that a new generation of idealists is growing up, incensed at the direction the world is going, and the alarming way it is wobbling on it axis. I was once that idealist, although it seems like a very long time ago that I had the energy. 

Maybe this is just me capitulating and throwing in the towel. But I feel like all I am able to do nowadays is to just live as exemplary a life as I can, in my own middle-class white-guy way - drive my electric car, keep my solar panels clean, buy carbon offsets when I fly, donate to charity, try to be nice to all people most of the time, follow the rules if they seem sensible. I know it's not really enough, but I live in hope that some saviour, some anti-Trump, will lead us out of this soon.

The 1.5°C global temperature threshold has officially been exceeded

Well, we all knew it, but now it's official: 2024 was the hottest year on record and the first year to exceed 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels (which is usually taken as 1850-1900). The dreaded 1.5°C threshold enshrined in the Paris Accord has therefore been passed, and it continues to increase with no sign of a slow-down. Paris Climate Agreement bye-bye.

A couple of graphs from Europe's Copernicus Project paint a stark picture. The first one shows the not-so-slow-and-steady increase of global average surface temperatures over and above pre-industrial levels for every year since 1967. The second one shows five year averages all the way back to 1850.

It makes sobering viewing. Unless, of course, you just don't care, which seems to be the position taken by an increasing umber of populist governments, and the people who vote for them.

Trump politicizes California's fire disaster

As Los Angeles and environs suffer from unprecedented winter forest fires - currently at least 10 dead and over 10,000 buildings burned down, with no end in sight - Donald Trump has decided to weigh in with his explanation of it all.

Apparently, it's not due to Santa Ana winds and climate change at all, it's all due to Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom and his misplaced concern for a small worthless fish.

You see, according to Trump, there is a mysterious "very large faucet" somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, that would allow millions of gallons of "excess" water to flow down into California from Canada and the north of the US, but Governor Newsom ("Newscum", as Trump insists on calling him, in his usual pre-school manner) refuses to sign a "water restoration declaration" that would allow this because he is unduly concerned about an endangered fish called the delta smelt. "He is the blame for this".

If all this seems improbable, that's because it is in fact a load of old cobblers. As Oregon's state climatologist says, "There is indeed no such diversion system, and none has been seriously proposed that I am aware of".

So, Trump has basically made something up (or someone has made it up for him, let's not give him too much credit!) in order to politicize a natural disaster that he should be expressing concern over. This is who you have elected, America.

UPDATE

Others in MAGAland have chosen to blame the fact that LA's fire department is run by women, who, presumably, are too dumb to carry out such a responsible job. (Trump will probably amplify that too when he finds out about it.). According to another MAGA commentator, it's even worse: the fire department leaders are not just women, but lesbians!

Fire chief Kristin Crowley is indeed a woman, but only 3 of the 12 top officials in LAFD are female (I have no idea if they are lesbians, but maybe!), so it's a bit of a stretch, to say the least. As to why a woman would not be able to do the job perfectly well is not explained, apparently being axiomatic for many of the post's readers.

Not to be outdone, of course, Elon Musk had to make his opinion known, and his take is that it is all those black firefighters and California's woke DEI policies that are to blame. *sigh*

Donald Trump Jr.'s considered opinion is that the fires are down to woke California's support for Ukraine. This might sound like a particularly difficult logical deduction, but Trump Jr. can do that kind of extreme mental gymnastics.

California did indeed make some donations of firefighting equipment to Ukraine back in 2022, but no-one else has managed to make the quantum leap of logic to connect that to the current extreme forest fire situation. Well done, Donny.

Los Angeles' fire chief has specifically said that equipment is not the issue, although personnel to use the equipment maybe is. And, more to the point, no firefighting equipment or personnel would be sufficient to deal with fires of this magnitude.

In fact, there are now so many weird far-right beliefs being disseminated that Governor Gavin Newsom has had to create a whole website with which to refute them. How much time and effort gets wasted by these clowns, who seem to have nothing better to do than to make stuff up!

So, are carbon taxes actually working in Canada?

Here's an interesting article on the effectiveness of carbon taxes and cap-and-trade schemes. Some are arguing that the days of carbon taxes are over, mainly because people (read "Conservatives") don't like paying taxes (even if they receive a rebate to make it income-neutral). Even some progressives are seeing the writing on the wall and starting to look into alternatives. Hell, even Mark Carney is saying that the carbon tax has "served a purpose up until now".

What the article shows is that, yes, carbon taxes and cap-and-trade are effective, but maybe not as effective as we once thought. Canada's greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions HAVE fallen since 2005, but only by about 0.4% a year on average. We need them to fall by about 4.5% a year to achieve our targets by 2030, about ten times the current rate.

Drilling down, British Columbia was the first jurisdiction in Canada to establish a carbon tax (2008). As the graph below shows, its GHG emissions did indeed fall for a while, but then started to increase again (with a dip for the pandemic) and, by 2022, they were only about 1% lower than when the carbon tax was started 14 years earlier.

Quebec introduced its cap-and-trade program in 2013. It too saw a slight reduction in GHG emissions for a few years (see graph below) before they started to climb again, dipping during the pandemic, to end 2022 just 1.25% lower than in 2013.

Ontario only had a cap-and-trade system for a year or so in 2017 before Doug Ford closed it down, and the federal carbon tax only took effect in 2019, just before the pandemic. What the graph below shows, though, is that Ontario's GHG emissions have been steadily decreasing since 2005 anyway (shutting down its coal plants helped with that), and the cap-and-trade and carbon tax have made little to no difference. Between 2005 and 2019, Ontario's GHG emissions fell by 19%, but since 2019 they have gone up slightly (except for a slight dip during the pandemic).

All in all, this is not particularly impressive, it has to be said. So, what does the article suggest to allow us to up our game? Given that the rich contribute much more to our GHG emissions than the poor, the author proposes a much more progressive income-tested carbon tax, along with regulatory changes and increased incentives to switch to renewable energy. 

Hmm. I guess I'm on board with that, in principle at least. Just how do we push such a scheme through, though, during the current backlash against all things environmental, and when we are staring down the barrel of four years of "axe-the-tax" Conservative rule in Canada, and slash-and-burn Trump just across our southern border? That's not so clear.

Meta cancels fact-checking because truth is no longer a cultural norm

Meta (i.e. Facebook) has just announced that it will stop any fact-checking it used to do on Facebook posts. 

Well, that's convenient. CEO Mark Zuckerberg makes no secret of the fact that this move is precipitated by the election of one, Donald Trump, to the US presidency. He referred to Trump's election as "a cultural tipping point towards prioritizing, once again, speech". 

Well, speech has always been a priority, as far as I know, as has free speech (which is presumably what he actually means). But the tipping pointing in question is really accurate free speech, true speech. Trump, of course, does not like fact-checking because his approach to politics relies on lies, and lots of them. Zuckerberg also calls the move getting "back to our roots around free expression", whatever that might mean.

Mr. Zuckerberg, it seems, is quite content to sway whichever way the political winds blow, truth be damned. He says that the current Meta system of fact-checking moderators (brought in in 2016 to try to stem the tsunami of untruths let loose before and after Trump's last election) is prone to too many mistakes and biases. So, his solution is not to improve it, but to get rid of it completely, replacing it with an X-style system of "community notes", where individuals can point out factual errors (in their opinion) but the original post stays, however erroneous. Because that's free speech, don't you know? And look how well it's working on X...

Zuckerberg was never the most upstanding or ethical of individuals - his pursuit of money was always top of mind - but this move shows his true colours, currently red. It's just one more alarming portent of just how bad a second Trump administration can get, for the USA and for the world.

To further curry favour with Trump, Zuckerberg has specifically ruled that Meta users will be allowed to call LGBTQ people "mentally ill", a move that has sparked a backlash within the organization, and widespread condemnation without. Still, some people will be happy, and those are the people that Zuckerberg cares about (at the moment anyway).

This is all part and parcel of the more general American corporate trend away from DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) in hiring and employment practices, that has really gathered steam since Trump's election. It's almost like all these major companies were just going along with all that woke nonsense for a while, and now see that the wind is blowing from another quarter and are more than happy to get back to money-making with all those ethical hurdles removed. 

Meta, Amazon, Walmart, McDonalds, and many of the major banks and financial institutions have all walked back their DEI commitments recently, in what is one of the most blatant and unabashed corporate about-faces I can ever remember. They accompany their moves with some likely-sounding (but devoid of actual meaning) bafflegab, like "shifting legal and policy landscape", "winding down outdated programs and materials", "mitigate bias for all, no matter your background", etc. But you can almost see them grinning and rubbing their hands in the background.

Justin Trudeau's legacy

As Justin Trudeau hands in his resignation letter, what will he be mostly remembered for? I'm sure there will be many such analyses of Trudeau's legacy in the press in the days to come, but CityNews offers one early list:

• Legalizing cannabis - a promise kept, but probably not a defining moment.
• Reneging on election reform - he expressed his sadness for not having pushed through the proportional representation reforms he promised us (although he had plenty of opportunity while the Liberals had a majority government).
• Indigenous reconciliation - much more remains to be done, but Trudeau has "done more to improve the quality of life for First Nations than any other prime minister" according to AFN National Chief Cindy Woodhouse.
• Canada Child Benefit - the new non-taxable income-dependent benefit went a long way toward reducing poverty in the country.
• Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act - a much-needed revenue-neutral carbon tax, and the first time a Canadian leader put their money where their environmental mouth is (although, paradoxically, it is now probably the main single reason for the Liberals' current unpopularity, even if it was a popular move at the time).
• COVID pandemic measures - not a bad job of handling an unhandlable situation (even if some Western truckers didn't like the vaccine mandates, they saved countless lives).
• NAFTA re-negotiation - he and his team made the best of a bad deal, as he did in more general terms in handling the unhandlable Donald Trump.

All in all, not a bad resumé, really. To this one might add: the establishment of a gender-balanced cabinet, "because it's 2015" (although it wouldn't last); the welcoming of tens of thousands of Syrian and Afghan refugees; enacting access to medical assistance in dying (MAID); unflagging support and aid to Ukraine in its existential war against Russia; $10-a-day subsidized childcare; important first steps on comprehensive dental and pharmacare. Yes, he lost his way towards the end, but this is nevertheless an impressive list of achievements

Other, less generous, commentators might try to pin inflation on him, as Pierre Poilievre does, but they know in their hearts that it was not due to specific Trudeau policies (the rest of the world also experienced the same thing). Necessary pandemic stimulus, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, global supply chain problems - there are many elements to the spike in inflation (now largely under control after central bank interventions), but Justin Trudeau is not personally responsible for the fact that things cost more now than they did a few years ago.

Nor is the country "broken" after 9 years of Trudeau, as Poilievre has managed to persuade many Canadians. Canada actually came through a particularly challenging time in pretty good shape, all things considered, and better than many other countries. I don't think Poilievre could have done much better, however much he blusters.

Immigration? Trudeau has always been gung-ho on immigration, and indeed it has been our saving grace in the face of a naturally-shrinking population, whatever the Conservatives might tell you. Maybe the temporary foreign workers program and the international student population has been mismanaged and ballooned out of control, but large cuts to immigration to pacify Conservative xenophobes is not the solution.

And all those scandals? They don't really amount to a hill of beans in the scheme of things. If youthful blackface, the SNC Lavalin/Jody Wilson-Raybould and WE charity pseudo-scandals, and holidaying with the Aga Khan is as bad as it gets, things could be much worse. We Canadians tend to agonize over these things.

So, yes, Trudeau should have resigned much earlier, for the good of the country he claims to love so much; like so many other leaders, he overstayed his welcome. But his administration has been far from disastrous, and he has achieved much that he - and the country - can be proud of. Just watch Pierre Poilievre try his damnedest to undo as much of it as possible.

Trudeau finally announces resignation - much too late to be helpful

So, finally, Justin Trudeau has announced that he will resign his position as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, and therefore as Prime Minster of the country.

After months of pressure from his own caucus, who see his unpopularity as a millstone around the Liberal Party's neck (and a hindrance to their own re-election chances), he has done with his "reflecting on his future", and concluded that he has none. 

Supposedly, he wanted to make the announcement before the Liberal caucus meeting later this week so that it would look like he resigned on his own terms, and was not pushed out by disgruntled members of his own party. Except that everyone already knows he was - his caucus has made no secret of their feelings for many months now.

Unfortunately, his resignation comes much too late. Everyone else except Trudeau knew that he should have gone a year ago. The Liberals are now 25% behind the Conservatives in the polls and, although a replacement for Trudeau might help that a bit, there is no way they can make up much ground before an election is called, which will come just as soon as the Conservatives (and the NDP for that matter) get another chance to engineer a confidence vote.

However, that won't happen until the end of March at the earliest, because Trudeau also prorogued Parliament until March 24th. All parliamentary activity, from the progress of existing bills to committee work to in-house debate, will therefore cease for the next two-and-a-half months. Much important legislation in progress is now dead in the water, including a bill to ensure clean drinking water in Indigenous reserves, and a federal tax credit to support clean energy investment by provincial power utilities and Indigenous corporations, among others.

And, of course, there will be no confidence votes either. This will buy the Liberals some time to elect a new leader (maybe - that would be a record short period for choosing a new party leader). But it will also mean that the country is rudderless and unprepared for the accession of Donald Trump in the USA on January 20th, and any wacko politics he introduces in his first few weeks. And there will be many, not least the potential imposition of a 25% tariff on all Canadian imports, as Trump has repeatedly threatened.

How will we deal with that? Do we have to wait until April for a Canadian response? If Trudeau had resigned a year ago, when the writing was already on the wall, a new leader could be already in place and ready to deal with anything that America throws at us. Instead, we are going to end up with Poilievre here (eventually) and Trump there, a perfect storm of populist craziness.

And, in the meantime, as Trump assumes almost unlimited power in America, with Canada apparently firmly in his sights, we have ... nothing. No Prime Minister, no functioning government, and a bunch of cabinet ministers squabbling among themselves over who should replace Trudeau, with the added wildcard of potential replacements possibly having to resign their cabinet positions in order to even stand. 

Trudeau, in his hubris, has thrown his party, the country, and all those "hard-working Canadians" he professes to love so much, under the bus. He should have resigned a year ago, but not now. If anything, it would have been better for him to stay on than to land us in this predicament at this particular juncture. If only he could have taken a leaf out of New Zealand's Jacinta Ardern's book. Oh, Canada!

An unremarkable champion

The "sport" of darts has always been popular in Britain, partly because, historically, it's something that Brits have actually been able to win at. It's never been a "cool" sport though, and newly-crowned (British) world champion Luke Littler is the epitome of uncool.

He may look about 30 but, at 17 years old, Littler is not even old enough to drink in a pub. While littler [sic] than some past champions, he is still a big guy with that pallid, unhealthy, overweight look that darts champions have always rocked. And he is painfully awkward in interviews.

When I think back to the great (British) darts champions from when I was growing up in England - men like Erik Bristow ("The Craft Cockney"), John Lowe, John Wilson ("Jockey"), Leighton Rees, Phil Taylor ("The Power") - they were larger-than-life characters, oozing not exactly charm but rather a kind of sleazy, world-weary notoriety. (They were all Brits back then, too; it was only in the 1990s that the Dutch, Australians and Canadians began to compete at the top levels.)

Littler, though, just comes across as the guy next door, a totally unremarkable Mr. Average, so uncool he's cool again. His nickname "Luke the Nuke" seems more like sarcasm than a reflection of his personality. But he sure throws a mean darts game. And, at 17, he has decades ahead in which to establish himself as the GOAT.

The world's loudest bird

You might get annoyed by noisy crows of seagulls at times, but think yourself lucky you don't live in the Amazon rainforest where you might wake to the dulcet tones of the white bellbird.

This bird has been recorded at 125 dB - about the equivalent of a pneumatic drill - and not much more euphonious either!

How bad is Toronto's traffic really?

I keep hearing that Toronto has some of the worst traffic congestion in the world, certainly in North America. This seems to be due to a traffic survey by navigation company Tom-Tom, which shows Toronto at third worst in the world after only London and Dublin, and much worse than American cities like New York, which only ranks 20th in Tom Tom's analysis.

Well, I can believe it, from my own personal experience of driving around in recent years.

However, Inrix's Global Traffic Scorecard seems to tell a very different story. According to Inrix, a traffic data analysis and management company, Toronto's traffic ranks 17th worst, which is still not great, but significantly better than American cities like New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Miami and Philadelphia. It also shows Toronto's traffic on a gradual improvement curve over the last few years, which seems kind of hard to believe.

So, what are we to believe? Maybe it doesn't really matter. The point is, we shouldn't even be in the bottom 50!

UPDATE

An updated report by Tom-Tom puts Toronto at No. 95, better than London (#5, i.e. fifth worst), Dublin (#10), New York (#25), and even most other major European cities - Barcelona (#21), Brussels (#30), Rome (#35), Athens (#37), Vienna (#38), Paris (#45), Berlin #49), etc. It's not even the worst in Canada, with Vancouver appearing at #69.

So, yes, bad, not not THAT bad.

Two very different reactions to the New Orleans terrorist attack

It comes as no surprise, but Donald Trump has failed badly once again, this time in his reaction to the horrendous mass murder on the crowded streets of New Orleans on New Year's Eve.

While Joe Biden - senile or not - gave a compassionate, measured and factual statement on national TV about the incident, Trump made a post on his tame mouthpiece Truth Social, saying among other nonsense, "This what happens when you have OPEN BORDERS, with weak, ineffective, and virtually non-existent leadership".

Unfortunately, the perpetrator of the attack, one Shamsud-Din Jabbar, is an American citizen, born in Texas, and even served in the US military for years. Immigration, then, let alone illegal immigration, didn't come into it.

Trump obviously did exactly what Joe Biden warned against, and jumped to conclusions. He probably saw a foreign-sounding name, or saw a picture of a swarthy, bearded guy, and didn't bother listening further. He was more interested in scoring cheap political points, regardless of accuracy or decency.

And this is the guy that a majority of US adults voted into power. Shame on them.

Does drinking more water actually bring health benefits?

We're always being told to drink more water, that its health benefits are myriad and self-evident. But there's a surprising dearth of hard scientific evidence to support that.

One recent meta-study tried to summarize and quantify the health benefits of drinking more water. The results are inconclusive at best.

It seems like drinking more water before meals (i.e. filling up stomach before food) can help with weight loss, which makes sense, although not very much. Also, increased water intake helps reduce the incidence of kidney stones, which also make sense. 

However, other purported benefits, like reducing blood sugar and headaches and UTIs do not seem to have any evidence behind them. For example, those blood sugar studies that do show improvements may just reflect blood hemodilution (literally, a watering down of the blood), or come as a result of lower food intake, and some studies actually show an increase in blood sugar. Any improvement in headaches and urinary tract infections as a result of higher water intake turn out to be not statistically significant. Overactive bladders, obviously enough, worsened after increased water consumption.

All in all, it seems like the health benefits of increasing your daily water intake have been somewhat overstated. It's not going to do you any harm, generally speaking, but don't expect any life-changing improvements.

Thailand's sustainable fireworks display

Happy New Year!

I see that Thailand is ringing in the new year with a big fireworks display in Bangkok which it is touting as "sustainable" and "eco-friendly". Sustainable fireworks? Really?

Apparently, these fireworks are produced, in partnership with Japanese pyrotechnics master Okushi Yashimasa, using Thai sticky rice (I kid you not!), which they say reduces the carbon dioxide emissions and creates less smoke. It all sound a bit improbable to me, I have to say. 2025's first act of greenwashing?

Furthermore, the fireworks display is presented in "six acts", with titles like "Vibrant spectrum of Thai wisdom", "Luminous jewel of Thai heritage", etc. Talk about pretentious!

It all looks very pretty (you can see highlights on YouTube). But it does just look like every other fireworks display you've ever seen.