Apparently, this is what the future of pig farming looks like in China:
This 26-storey concrete block is a pig farm in the city of Ezhou in Hubei province in Central China. The owners proudly claim, "This is the tallest and largest pig farm in the world, where the breeze is cool in the summer and the air is warm in winter." Sounds nice, eh?
Boy, am I glad I'm vegetarian (and that I don't live in China).
When asked whether he thought it might be time to reintroduce controversial measures like masking mandates, an Alberta hospital doctor replied:
"They're only controversial if you don't believe in science."
Priceless.
I voted in Toronto's municipal election earlier this week, but I was in a small minority. Apparently, only 29% of eligible Torontonians voted, the lowest turnout since amalgamation in 1982, and substantially lower than the previous three elections (41%, 55% and 51% respectively).
Other cities in Ontario had even lower turnouts, including Kitchener (20%), Mississauga (21%), London (25%) and Brantford (27%).
Interviews I have heard with people who did not vote range from a feeling of powerlessness to overcome the name recognition of long-time incumbents (term limits, anyone?), to the difficulty of voting (it's really not difficult to vote, there are many options available, although Toronto should probably facilitate online voting, which is popular in many other jurisdictions), to a lack of information about who is standing and what their platforms are (there are websites, fliers, live candidate meetings - what more do people want?), to one guy who claimed he was so happy with the status quo that he saw no reason to vote (er, missing the point).
I know it is kind of hard to get too excited about municipal elections, especially when many of the mayors and councillors are so bland and unexciting. But, people, make an effort! Toronto, like many other cities, is observably falling to pieces, and still you can't be bothered to vote?
Something I heard on television last night sounded very improbable, so I went to the source, and guess what, it turns out to be true.
The Chicago Project on Security and Threats, a well-regarded think tank based at the University of Chicago, estimates, based on their demographic-matched surveys, that some 13 million Americans (about 5% of the adult population) agree that "the use of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the Presidency". And that is NOW, and it is a lot less than the 26 million Americans (about 10%) would have agreed with that eye-popping statement a year ago.
Note that this is not just people who believe that Donald Trump was cheated out of the Presidency in 2020, but people who believe that January 6th-style violence is justified in order to rectify it. Now. Nearly two years after the election. You can see why I found it improbable. What a country!
UPDATE
And, if you are still not convinced that political violence from the far right is a real prospect, look no further than yesterday's attack by a hammer-wielding neanderthal on Nancy Pelosi (or at least, in her absence, on her 82-year old husband).
And, unfortunately, violence, or at least the threat thereof, is not all on the alt-right side. Some Republican politicians and candidates have also received threat of violence and death (unless these were spoof "false flag" events, which wouldn't entirely surprise me), so it is hard for the Democrats to claim sole occupancy of the moral high ground.
Yesterday, I watched a rather depressing Economist briefing on the upcoming US mid-term elections, which merely repeated the conventional wisdom that the Democrat majority in Congress is doomed, and the right-wing Trump-loving candidates of the Republican party are in the ascendency.
No-one seriously questioned that the Republicans would regain control of the House of Representatives and probably the Senate, hence my depression. But no-one had a particularly cogent explanation for why. The conventional wisdom was again trotted out, that non-college educated white people, once the preserve of the Democratic Party, are increasingly flocking to the Republican Party, and, perhaps even more inexplicable, non-college educated Latinos (and that is the vast majority of them) are following, despite the vitriol spouted by many Trumpian Republicans against immigration, and their often racist tendencies.
But why should this be? The best analysis I can find is this article in The Atlantic, which suggests that poorly-educated people, and Latinos in particular, are inherently socially conservative by nature, and that they may be perceiving Democrats' preoccupation with issues like abortion, LGBTQ right, climate change, defunding the police, etc, as overshadowing their traditional concern for the working poor, the fight against inflation, etc, issues that rend to resonate more strongly with them.
What is interesting in the article is that, on many of those "fringe issues", Latinos actually agree more closely with Democratic values than Republican ones according to polls and studies, suggesting that they are perhaps not as innately conservative as may have been thought. And yet, for reasons unknown, they are still lapping up the Republican Coolaid.
All of which leaves me just as confused (and depressed) about this apparent swing in American politics. Maybe I will be pleasantly surprised by the mid-term election results but, if all these pollsters and pundits are right, the USA is headed back into a Trumpian Dark Age.
Elon Musk finally put his money where his errant mouth is and completed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter. Well, what's a man to do with a $220 billion fortune? In his inimitable touchy-feely management style, he immediately fired most of the company's senior execs, and there is speculation that he intends to fire up to 75% of the current staff. Well, there will be no more of all that namby-pamby monitoring and moderation of posts, will there? Anything goes now, right?
While Musk buddies like Donald Trump, Kanye West and Marjorie Taylor-Green may be raising a half-hearted cheer (not to mention a whole host of unsavoury QAnon conspiracists, neo-Nazis and COVID deniers), an awful lot of people see this as the beginning of the end for the micro-blogging site. Musk's "free-speech absolutism", and his avowed desire for a "common digital town square" may turn out to be a toxic space where most people just don't want to be. That, at least, is my hope.
There is a contingent of hard-core users out there that see this as the time to sabotage Twitter, with the goal of bringing the Musk-owned vehicle down and making it irrelevant, rather like Tumblr after Yahoo acquired it in 2013. There is a split between those that just want to abandon the site completely, and those that want to stay and make it all but unusable, and to tank its value.
It's hard to know what such people might be able to do that a bunch of ultra-right wing racists and homophobes might not already be ramping up to as we speak. Musk has already sent a placatory open letter to jittery advertisers, vowing that Twitter will not become a "free-for-all hellscape" under his watch. But I have a suspicion that Elon Musk's idea of a "hellscape" may be miles away from other people's, and many advertisers are already jumping ship.
Well, Mr. Musk, I wish you the worst of luck, and look forward to reading about the resulting "hellscape". Although I won't be reading about it on Twitter.
North Sentinel Island is a green speck in the Bay of Bengal, some 1,200 km from India, and 500 km from Myanmar. It is one of the 184 islands in the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago, governed by India, and one of the 30 or so inhabited islands in that chain. But it is the one that has resisted most strongly any attempts to make contact or impose "civilization".
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| North Sentinel Island (Wikipedia) |
North Sentinel Island is inhabited by anywhere from 50 to 500 indigenous people (no-one really knows how many), who speak their own language, known unsurprisingly as Sentinelese. They live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, spear-fishing from dug-out canoes and living in rudimentary huts, essentially unchanged since Neolithic times, and they wear no clothes.
The Andaman and Nicobar Islands have been known to European traders since the 1770s but, unlike some of the other Andaman Islands, they have always met any attempt at trade, missionary work or anthropological research with a volley of arrows. Even fishermen accidentally stranded on the island have met with an untimely death, as did an American missionary who visited the island in 2018 (despite a well-publicized ban on visits to the island for any purpose, which has been in force since 1996).
The island currently enjoys a "hands-off, eyes-off" status internationally, so that it is protected from the four Ts: travel, tours, transport and trade.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford and his former Solicitor-General Sylvia Jones are still refusing to testify at the commission examining the federal government's use of the Emergencies Act to break up the truckers' convention (the so-called "Freedom Convoy") this last February.
After initially repeatedly claiming that he hasn't been asked, Ford eventually admitted that, oh yes, he had been asked, at which point he changed tack. Now, he's claiming parliamentary privilege, a legal remedy designed to ensure that politicians are not constantly being called in to testify in court, supposedly so that they can get on with the business of day-to-day governing. It is not, however, designed to allow politicians to evade responsibility and avoid public questioning on potentially embarrassing policies and decisions.
Ford is presumably going to be sitting in court pursuant to his claim of parliamentary immunity anyway, so he may as well be sitting at the commission for a few hours answering questions about why he was missing in action during the Freedom Convoy. It wouldn't have been anything to do with his sneaking admiration for a group of rebels taking on the Liberal government, would it?
When Doug Ford finally deigned to answer one of the many questions on the subject in parliamentary Question Time, he merely read a pre-prepared speech: "This is a federal inquiry into the federal government's use of the federal Emergencies Act. From day one, for Ontario, this was a policing matter, not a political matter." All this with a supercilious and painstaking emphasis on the "federal" and "policing", as though to say, "Can't the opposition understand this?"
But, as so often, Dougie is missing the point, either deliberately or through ignorance. The commission has specifically asked for HIM to testify, on the grounds that the two lowly functionality he did provide to the commission were just not privy to many of the decisions that were made. Whether Ford himself thinks he should have been called or not is neither here nor there.
It may be a federal inquiry, but Ford can still throw light on events over which the province had some responsibility, including why the province declined to participate in no less than three meetings with the federal government and the City of Ottawa, why the province did not invoke its own Emergencies Act, and whether or not there were political considerations in the province's response to the Windsor border blockade versus the protests in Ottawa.
The inevitable conclusion to be drawn is that Ford and/or Jones have something important, or at least embarrassing, to hide in all this, something worse than all the negative attention his refusal to answer the commission's summons is creating. But that's not a reason to invoke parliamentary privilege. Justin Trudeau and Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson managed to find the time, Ford should do so too.
UPDATE
Well, it turns out Doug Ford CAN in fact hide behind parliamentary privilege. A Federal Court judge ruled that, although Ford and Jones had important relevant evidence to contribute to the Emergencies Act inquiry, and could have done the right thing by volunteering to be cross-examined, they could technically invoke parliamentary privilege in order to avoid it. Doesn't make it smell any better, though.
