This is what the world needs right now: the "perky" new Kardashian-owned SKIMS Nipple Bra, a full-cup silhouette bra with added built-in nipples, so that "no matter how hot it is, you'll always look cold".
Thanks, Kim Karshashian. Finger on the political pulse, as always.
It was probably to be expected, but that ol' AI has already played an outsized role in the Israel-Hamas conflict.
Artificial intelligence is starting to affect the news we see and read to a substantial extent, and sometimes in rather unexpected ways. AI-generated images and deep-faked videos are doing the rounds of social media sites. Some are more obvious than others, but many are even slipping though the net of available detection tools.
Even more hard to manage, there are plenty of pictures and video footage out there that is actually authentic (verified by major networks or internet companies or initiatives like the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity and other AI specialists and disinformation researchers), but that is being questioned by political activists and factions for their own purposes, to deliberately muddy the waters or to bolster their own propaganda efforts.
The mere possibility that AI fakes are circulating is enough to cause people to dismiss genuine images and video, to poison the well, so to speak. This is particularly the case on the less reliable platforms like X (Twitter), Truth Social, Telegram and Reddit, where several political figures and media outlets have been accused of using AI-created content to manipulate public opinion, even when they actually haven't.
It's an easy way to score cheap political points, and we are almost at the stage where such claims are unfalsifiable. A study by the New York Times showed that deepfake detection tools are at best spotty, with some real photos being identified as inauthentic, and some obvious AI creations labelled as authentic.
The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (a rather awkward moniker) and Google believe the only way forward is the identification of the source and history of media files, although even watermarks can be faked or removed nowadays.
And you know it's just going to get worse. What a world we live in!
A long article in the Globe and Mail about Canada's immigration policy is food for thought. I am never going to agree with author Konrad Yakabuski's political stance, based on prior experience, but he has some interesting points to make.
It has - quite suddenly, it seems to me - become acceptable in Canada to talk about immigration being too high. The country has always had a pretty liberal view of immigration, and immigration as a policy has always been a popular one. To say that the country was built on the backs of immigrants is even truer here than in many other countries that may claim that. But the question remains: how much is too much?
Most of those who are arguing that immigration under Justin Trudeau's Liberal government has got out of hand still believe that we need some immigration, just that the recent levels are unsustainable. And, for the first time in generations, a majority of the population is starting to agree. While a Nanos poll conducted in October 2022 concluded that 69% of Canadians supported the then current levels of immigration, a similar poll in September 2023 showed a huge turnaround with more than half of Canadians believing that current immigration projections are too high. Separately, Environics polls also show a dramatic increase in Canadian who think that immigration is too high, from 27% last year to 44% this year.
Now, the main reason for this turnaround is not so much anti-immigrant sentiment and xenophobia than it is the nationwide housing and housing affordability crisis, and the general insecurity brought about by high inflation and economic uncertainty. But many see high immigration as a large part of the reason behind this uncertainty.
In fact, it's probably just a small part of it. A failure to invest in machinery and technology and a general productivity deficit are probably more to blame, combined with external factors like wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and an aggressive geopolitical stance by China. Our productivity is just not growing fast enough to sustain our standard of living. But, in times of uncertainty, immigration is an easy target to blame.
And it is a fact that, although Canada's GDP has been rising in this era of record immigration, GDP per capita has been falling, and we have not been keeping pace with other developed counties with less ambitious immigration policies. The OECD recently ranked Canada dead last among its 38 advanced country members in terms of its potential GDP per capita growth by 2030.
All that being said, immigration, even if we need it to compensate for falling birth rates and an ageing population, does seem to be poorly managed at the moment. The Comprehensive Ranking System, the points system used for decades to identify promising immigrants to Canada based on language ability, education, skills, job experience, etc, has been degraded of late, and often all but ignored (a score of 75 out of a possible 1,200 now suffices in some cases, rather than the 400-500 levels traditionally required).
And any consideration of our "absorptive capacity" - the ability of the country to accommodate an influx of new Canadians from the point of view of infrastructure, labour markets, housing, education, etc - also seems to have been unlinked from immigration policy since the 1990s, despite being a central plank of governments since the immigration boom after the 2nd World War
It is certainly hard to see how the Century Initiative - the push to increase Canada's population to 100 million by 2100 - could be a practical proposition. With a population newly arrived at 40 million just this year, the country already seems to be creaking at the seams. Although we have plenty of space, new immigrants do not want to live in no-name towns in the middle of the Prairies or Northern Ontario; they want to live in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, where the potential good jobs are. The more I think it it, the more the prospect of a Toronto with a population of 33 million (as projected by the Century Initiative) is hard to imagine. Indeed, it's hard to see what the point of such a massive population would be, although current immigration levels put us on track for just such a population.
In addition to the immigration of permanent residents, we seem to have lost complete control over the growth in the number of temporary residents entering the country as low-wage workers and students (this has surged by 46% in the last year alone), and over how many of them remain in the country after their temporary visas expire. Statistics Canada is in the process of revising its methodology for counting temporary residents, and the government has recently announced plans to better control the numbers of overseas students (controversial plans, it must be said) in an attempt to address the housing shortage.
Some researchers have even thrown doubt over the ability of immigration to slow the ageing of our population. There may be a short term advantage, but immigrants age too and eventually retire. They also tend to bring their spouses and, later, their ageing parents and other family members, under a rather liberal family reunification program. Once again, family reunification is a commendable goal, but it also has a knock-on effect that may have been unanticipated.
I'm all for "doing the right thing" and taking in large numbers of refugees from the more war-torn areas of the world. I'm also conscious that the Liberals may be going all out on immigration while they are in a position to do so, because they can see a time coming soon when a much less open government is in power. But there is a risk that, in trying to do too much too fast on immigration, it causes a backlash. And we seem to be seeing the start of just that.
There's am anecdote in the paper about Indigenous playright Cliff Cardinal being asked to do a land acknowledgement before the performance of one of his plays, to which he responded,"I hate land acknowledgements - I find them so goddamn patronizing. I'm afraid that people of money and privilege hear a land acknowledgement, nod solemnly in approval, and then wait patiently for their show to begin."
He apparently then waffled on for 90 more minutes about the emptiness of land acknowledgements, and people never did get to see the play. Maybe some patrons found this fascinating, but I for one would have been well and truly pissed off, and probably asked for my money back.
Anyway, the point is: Indigenous land acknowledgements are contentious, not least among Indigenous people.
If you've been to any kind of event any time in the last 10 or 15 years, you will almost certainly have sat through one. But these days you also get them on websites, as part of email signatures, before business meetings and council sessions, in movie theatres, law courts, before sports events, and in many other places.
They have been used among Indigenous nations since time immemorial, but they started becoming common in settler society in about 2010, at least among the more politically correct organizations. They went mainstream in 2015, after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's report and calls to action, and particularly after the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls of 2016-9.
And they do serve a purpose, as this article, among many others, argues. They are an act of reconciliation and decolonization, at least to some degree, and they can make people think about their relationship with First Nations, the Métis and the Inuit while doing everyday things, at least to some degree.
But, because they are so ubiquitous, and because we are all so used to them - remember the FIRST time you heard one? - they lack the impact they once had, and have become somewhat performative, tokenized and ritualized, an empty exercise in checkmark-ticking and brownie point-scoring. I have experienced some quite imaginative versions of late, as organizations desperately try to keep them interesting and engaging (although often this just makes them long).
Increasingly, Indigenous commentators are questioning their value, Mr. Cardinal being just one, perhaps extreme, case in point (or maybe his was just an extreme example of an attempt to make them interesting and engaging).
Some see them as a bare minimum but insufficient on their own. Some get annoyed if pronunciations are botched, or complain that some acknowledgements mention the name of the same nation multiple times under different names. Some see it as a performative sop, and a claim to be doing something without having to do something. Some say that if a person has to read it, they are not thinking it or feeling it. Some say that the very use of the phrase "I acknowledge" is all wrong in the first place. Some say that to give an acknowldgement in the past tense is just another tool of continued colonialism. Some say that there is no point is acknowledging anything if there is no intention of giving the land back.
Certainly, you can't please all the people all the time. But are land acknowledgements pleasing ANY people? I think so, but any pleasing is borderline, and maybe it is just a matter of time until land acknowledgememts are all but useless. What will we do then?
There is a long centre-page article in the Globe and Mail today about innovation, and how Canada is not doing it.
I don't intend to go into the details of it all, but I was admittedly taken aback by a couple of the graphs that show Canada's expenditure on research and development (R&D) compared to our economic "peers" (or maybe we should say "aspirational peers"), which show us languishing way down below the likes of USA, South Korea, Japan, EU, and indeed the whole of the OECD, whether on a percentage-of-GDP or per capita basis.
Just one point to note: this cannot be pinned onto Justin Trudeau (Take note, Mr. Poilievre) - it has been happening at least under the last few governments, of different colours and ideologies.
Another rather alarming statistic in the article, from Statistics Canada no less: fewer than 2% of Canadian businesses incorporate R&D into their business strategies. I'm not sure quite how they can actually measure that, but if it's true, then it's a damning victory of short-term profit-based thinking over long-term planning.
Yet another prominent Canadian First Nations personality is under suspicion of being less Indigenous than they say, a Pretendian not an Indian. This time, it's the turn of national icon, Buffy Sainte-Marie.
This particular hatchet job, so to speak, does not come at the hands of some uppity Indigenous researcher or activist intent on racial purity or identity politics; this is a result of a CBC investigative journalist piece on The Fifth Estate.
I'm not going to go into the details, other than to say that the Piapot First Nation in Saskatchewan is resolute in standing by her - and that should be the end of the story, shouldn't it? "She spent time in her community", says the band's acting chief. But others do not want to let it go, incensed that she should claim to have been a victim of the Sixties Scoop when she might not have been.
Why are these people intent on tearing down every successful First Nations personality they can? Shouldn't they be doing everything they can to protect them, to build them up, to celebrate them? Why did CBC ever think it was a good avenue to explore? Is it about ratings, profile? Who really cares if she was born in Massachussetts? That her name is actually Beverly Santamaria? She has been a staunch defender and advocate for Canadian Indigenous people for many decades, and that must count for something.
Indigenous people don't have that many icons or successful role models they can look up. Can we not leave them the ones they do have. Grey Owl, Joseph Boyden, Michelle Latimer, Vianne Timmons, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, and now Buffy Sainte-Marie? It's one thing saying things like, "The truth will set you free", but sometimes an inconvenient truth may be better uncovered, or at least ignored, in the interests of the common good.
An interesting vote just happened in the United Nations General Assembly. On a vote for a ceasefire in Gaza, as opposed to a temporary "humanitarian pause". 120 countries voted "for" and only 14 "against". The rest (45) abstained.
UPDATE
I should probably be more careful in my sources. The Messenger has now changed their article to read "humanitarian truce" rather than "ceasefire". The actual UN resolution calls for a vote on an "immediate, durable and sustained humanitarian truce". This is rather confusing language, somewhere between the generally-recognized designations of "ceasefire" and "humanitarian pause".
The Messenger gets a Mostly Factual review on Media Bias/Fact Check, which is probably not good enough. Although, to be fair, they did at least change the wording in the body of the article, even if not in the headline. And Israel's response to it still talks about a ceasefire: "We reject outright the UN General Assembly despicable call for a ceasefire".
It's interesting to see just who voted "against". There was Israel, of course, and there was the USA, which supports everything that Israel does, no questions asked (as I have investigated previously). Other than that, it's a rather motley collection of small states of little or no account, mainly from Eastern Europe and the deepest Pacific Ocean: Austria, Croatia, Czechia, Fiji, Guatemala, Hungary, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, and Tonga.
Canada abstained, which is maybe a surprise, given Justin Trudeau's pro-Israel rhetoric and Canada's tendency to move in lockstep with the US. (A Canadian-led attempt at adding in an amendment to the vote to condemn the "deliberate cruelty" of Hamas' initials attacks, to "unequivocally reject and condemn the attacks", and to call for the "immediate and unconditional" safe release of all hostages, was roundly defeated.) Australia, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Sweden, the UK, and Ukraine also abstained, along with some other less influential states.
Everyone else voted for a ceasefire, including most of the Middle East (predictably), most of Africa, but also China, France, and a surprising number of other European countries. Here is the full list:
The federal Liberal government has walked back parts of its carbon pricing inititative, one of the main planks in its climate policy. It's a relatively minor walk-back in the scheme of things, but it still muddies the waters on what was a relatively clear and commendable policy, and it lays the government open to allegations of regional favouritism.
For a period of three years, it is pausing carbon pricing on home heating oil, one of the dirtiest fuels in use (and therefore incurring a higher carbon price than other fuels), and one much more widely used in Atlantic Canada than anywhere else. It is also increasing the quarterly carbon pricing rebates for these households, and making it easier and cheaper (essentially free for families making at or below the median income) for them to switch to more environmentally-friendly electric heat pumps.
So, you can see where the government was going with this - to encourage fuel oil users to switch to heat pumps - but what a mixed message it sends! Wouldn't it be better to encourage low-carbon heat pumps while punishing heavy carbon-emitters, rather than rewarding them? Isn't that the whole point of an escalating carbon tax? Environmental groups are incensed at this watering down of a key climate program. They see this as the first step on a slippery slope towards more exemptions.
As it coincides with a bunch of polls out of Atlantic Canada showing the Liberals suffering politically in the wake of the imposition of the carbon tax there, and as the wily Pierre Poilievre has been sniffing around the region in recent months looking to capitalize, this has a very bad look for the Liberals.
And anyway, rewarding people for using the dirtiest fuels possible can't possibly be a good move, whatever the theory behind it may be. The whole idea behind a carbon tax is that the polluter pays, and the bigger the polluter the more they pay. I'm fine with subsidized heat pumps, but encouraging fuel oil use? No thank you.
UPDATE
And now - go figure! - other Conservative premiers are demanding relief from the carbon tax. Who saw that coming? And of course, never one to miss a trick, Pierre Poilievre. Trudeau has made a rod for his own back, and, frankly, I don't have a lot of sympathy.
It's when it reaches the biting point and starts to hurt that a carbon tax actually becomes effective, and starts to change people's attitudes and behaviours. Trudeau's actions have thrown all that away, and just raised resentment instead. He has possibly just sounded the death knell of the whole carbon tax experiment.
In the process, he has set one region of Canada against another, threatening what little is left of our national unity too, AND opened the door to the raging bull that is Pierre Poilievre at the next election (or even before). A revolt within the Liberal caucus itself may be brewing, and it has prompted former Liberal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna to publicly call the government out and to suggest that they actually reverse this ill-advised carbon tax exemption while there is still time (a tough and embarrassing call, but better than living with the alternative). Ex-Bank of Canada governor and potential future Liberal leader (here's hoping!) Mark Carney has also strongly criticized the decision.
All in all, this was Trudeau's single worst decision, among many. His credibility is now toast. Good job.
