Well, this is ridiculous. It seems that the Scripps National Spelling Bee has a rapid-fire elimination round these days. You can watch video of 12-year old winner Bruhat Soma spelling words I have never heard of like "aposiopesis", "caixinha" and "sciniph" in ultra-fast mode. 29 such words in 90 seconds, in fact.
It makes you wonder if the poor guy does anything else other than read the dictionary, but you can't help but be immensely impressed.
It seems like street drugs just keep getting stronger, more complex and more dangerous.
Long gone are the naive old days when drug users were taking more or less pure cocaine, meth or heroin. In more recent years, a whole cornucopia of new drugs have surfaced, under a bewildering panoply of different street names like bath salts, bloom, molly, flakka, krokodil, chalk, etc.
But, perhaps even more ominously, the drugs available on the street are increasingly being cut or mixed with other chemicals, first with the more potent drug fentanyl, and then with the much more potent carfentanyl. More recently, veterinary tranquilizer drugs like xylazine and medetomidine are being incorporated. All of these have made drug-taking a much more perilous and uncertain undertaking, and the risks of death have escalated precipitously as a result. (Naloxone has made a difference as an emergency overdose treatment for fentanyl, but it has no effect on chemicals like xylazine and medetomidine.)
Generally, there is no way for users to know that their street drugs are laced with fentanyl or xylazine or medetomidine, or even a combination of all three, as apparently happens.
My question, and the original impetus for my writing this post, is: why? Why would drug producers and supplier go to the extra trouble and risk of obtaining and adding in these dangerous supplements? The only possible reason I have come across is the belief of some experts that adding these sedatives may help prolong the opioid high, so that users think they are getting some "good shit".
It's hard to get into the heads of drug producers and distributors, but it hardly seems like good marketing to sell a product that kills a good proportion of their customer base. Their customer retention figures are going to take a major hit, you would think. But no-one ever said that these people are good businessmen, or even that they are thinking straight at all (given that they probably sample their own wares on a regular basis).
It's a mystery to me.
I looked at various different explanations for why mirrors seem to swap the right and left sides, but most of them made it more confusing, not less. The truth is, it's complicated. This Guardian Note & Queries article may be one of the the best resources, because it offers many different viewpoints from different people.
The short answer is that mirrors swap left and right because we tend to look at a vertical mirror on a wall. If we were to look at a horizontal mirror on the floor, then it swaps top and bottom instead. Think of looking at the reflection of mountain in a lake, for example.
The other thing at play here is our perception, and also our language. For example, if we think of absolute directions like north, south, east and west, when we point to the west, our reflection in a mirror also points to the west. But if we think in terms of relative directions like left and right, if we point to the left, our mirror reflection seems to be pointing to the right.
The operative word here, of course, is "seems", because from the mirror's point of view (think of yourself as an an ant on the surface of the mirror) you are still pointing to the left. But we tend to think of the image in the mirror as another person pointing. If we face a another person and they point, we tend to do a mental 180° rotation (as opposed to a reflection), imagining how it would be if we were in their situation. So, we talk about "my left, your right". But this in not what is happening in a mirror reflection. It is the same person, and it is still pointing the same way, be that left or right.
Another way of looking at it, which seems to make sense to some people but not so much to me, is that mirrors don't reverse images from left to right but rather from front to back. To give an example, if you point to one side your mirror image points to the same side (however you want to describe it). If, however, you point directly at the mirror, the mirror image seems to be pointing directly at you, i.e. the opposite direction. Hmm, OK.
So, clearly there is a complicated series of factors involved here, most of them cognitive and psychological rather than physical. Technically, in physical terms, photons (or rays of light, as you might think of them) from you hit the smooth surface of a mirror and reflect or bounce back rather than being absorbed or scattered. Those photons that bounce back from the mirror to the retina of your eye are what your brain interprets are being what you see (in this case a reflection of yourself). But then your brain tried to make sense if what it receives, which is the cognitive/psychological side of things as discussed above.
As always with the body and the brain, the truth is way more complicated than the appearance.
Doug Ford is on his populist hobby-horse again. It must be getting close to election time (actually, it's about two years away).
His latest wheeze is to spend $225 million of taxpayers' money on paying off The Beer Store so that convenience stores can start selling beer and wine a few months earlier than would otherwise be the case. (It was originally scheduled to happen anyway at the start of 2026, but apparently Ford can't wait that long.)
It doesn't end there, though. He is offering private sector retailers an estimated $74 million a year for a 10% discount on LCBO wine prices, a $375 million one-off payment to the Beer Store to rebate the LCBO's cost-of-service fees, and an estimated $300 million in foregone government revenue from not charging retailers a licensing fee. In fact, the opposition Liberals reckon that the whole thing may cost Ontario as much as a billion dollars.
And for what? The convenience of buying your booze at the local convenience store rather than at the Beer Store, LCBO or large supermarket? I guess many a wino may be happy (their concerned relatives less so), but I'm not convinced that they are a very valuable voting bloc.
The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto has decried the early rollout, and both the Canadian Mental Health Association and the Canadian Cancer Society point out that the number of emergency department visits related to alcohol spiked the last time access to alcohol was expanded in the province (yes, Doug Ford again).
It's not even clear that many convenience stores really want the responsibility and potential security hassles of selling alcohol. Certainly, those that do start to sell alcohol will only be stocking a small selection of fast-selling brands, and it is likely that they will mark up prices significantly compared to the Beer Store and LCBO, as much as 40-50% according to some commentators. The agreement is that at least 20% of beers should be from Ontario "craft producers", and at least 40% of wines should be local, but these will almost certainly be the biggest brands that fit the bill. Necessary delivery and recycling requirements may be enough to put many small stores off completely.
Why is alcohol such a priority for the Ford government (remember the "buck-a-beer" fiasco)? I can't help but think that a billion dollars - or even, say, half a billion - could be better spent on infrastructure, housing, healthcare, transit, anything really.
It's not that long since House of Commons Speaker Greg Fergus narrowly avoided official censure for a partisan video he put out for a long-time Liberal friend. But now he is in hot water again, although this time his apparent partisanship was not even his fault.
The Conservatives, jumping on any opportunity to stomp on the Liberals while they are well and truly down, have presented a motion to remove Fergus as Speaker, claiming that he lacks impartiality. This is after an event he was to preside over was advertised using a partisan criticism of Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre.
It turns out that Fergus knew nothing about the posting, which was actually generated by Liberal Party head office using "the auto-populated standard language we use for events on our website". The Liberal Party has already apologized for this mistake, but no doubt the Tories will try and make something out of nothing anyway, and are forcing a vote on it. Hyper-partisanship is the new normal, after all.
Two things occur to me with regard to this issue.
One, why does the Liberal Party use "auto-populated standard language" in its advertising? Is there no-one that can come up with individualized content? And does their "auto-populate standard language" have to include ad hominem attacks against the opposition, rather than something a bit more positive and edifying?
But two, and perhaps even more importantly, why is the Speaker of the House of Commons expected to be impartial anyway? He is, after all, an MP, elected for his Liberal beliefs and policies. Is he then expected to completely subsume and deny all those beliefs and inclinations once assigned the position of Speaker? He still has to somehow carry out the (necessarily partisan) duties of an elected MP in other respects.
I understand that the same would be expected of a Conservative or NDP representative in the same situation. My point is: wouldn't it be better if the Speaker of the House of Commons were a non-elected official - say, a judge or a civil servant - whose sole duty is to arbitrate the increasingly fractious legislature, with no partisan baggage to get in the way?
Otherwise, it's a bit like asking a hockey or soccer player to referee a game in which their own team is competing, and expecting them to do it impartially.
The last time I wrote about golden rice was way back in 2016, when I concluded that "it is still being tested and the non-profit institute responsible for its development fears that the modified rice does not actually grow well enough to be embraced by farmers".
Fast forward to 2024, and golden rice is still not widely accepted, and has just run up against another major hurdle. The Philippines is to date the only country to officially approve (in 2021) the cultivation of golden rice, a genetically-modified strain of rice that incorporates beta-carotene to combat vitamin A deficiency in its highly rice-dependent population.
Vitamin A deficiency is common in developing countries, where it is a leading cause of childhood blindness and "significant morbidity and mortality from common childhood infections", according to the World Health Organization, which estimates it may cause the deaths of up to 100,000 children a year worldwide. Beta carotene-infused golden rice was developed in the 1990s, as a potential solution to this, and its proponents maintain that widespread adoption of golden rice will result in saving the sight and the lives of hundreds of thousands of children, although it's modelling is not universally accepted, and seems an excessive claim in light of the WHO's figures.
But now, Greenpeace Philippines and many local farmers have just won a court of appeal case calling on the Philippines to overturn that approval, on the grounds that golden rice has not been shown to be safe. The farmers are also concerned that the "the high-value seeds that they have worked with for generations and have control over", including organic or heirloom varieties, may be sabotaged by the introduction of genetically-modified golden rice. Vulnerability pf a monoculture to climate impacts in one of the world's most climate-vulnerable countries is also a worry.
The scientists involved are incensed, and a new appeal will almost certainly be brought. But golden rice is back in the news.
My question, though, is: wouldn't it be cheaper, less controversial, and possibly even better, to make sure that those that need it have access to other foods containing beta-carotene, like good old carrots, sweet potatoes, squash and leafy greens like kale and spinach, etc. The typical western diet is quite sufficient in vitamin A-producing foods, and I'm not sure we should be encouraging Asians to stuck with their unhealthily rice-reliant diet anyway.
There have been a couple of critical articles in the Globe and Mail recently, calling out Pierre Poilievre on his duplicity, so you have to know that some serious push-back is on its way. The man hates to be criticized, and is highly adept at turning any criticism against its perpetrator. Indeed, you could call it gaslighting, but it is nevertheless highly effective.
A couple of days ago, an article by Robyn Urback called out Poilievre's hypocrisy about all the "useless and overpaid lobbyists" that should be fired and permanently done away with, because all they do is bend the ear of the Prime Minister in their direction.
Well, yes, that's exactly what lobbyists do, and I'm all actually all for doing away with them myself. But as Ms. Urback points out, Poilievre himself is a frequent recipient of lobbyists, seeing two within just a couple of days of his National Post op-ed, and many more in recent months. So, is he saying that lobbyists should not have access to Prime Ministers but Leaders of the Opposition are fair game?
And then today, an opinion piece by Sharon Proudfoot points out the extent to which Poilievre has a habit (straight out of Donald Trump's playbook, let it be said) of insisting that the Canadian press is totally corrupt and hostile to him, and deliberately supportive of Justin Trudeau's "woke agenda" (his favourite phrase, not mine).
Ms. Proudfoot recounts a whole litany of examples of where Poilievre uses his rhetorical gift to destroy a journalist's entirely reasonable line of questioning, or, even more commonly, to play the victim and portray the question as an unfair partisan gibe and a sop to Trudeau, turning the question around and scoring cheap political points of his own (and generating the social media-ready sound bites his supporters love so much). See the Trump connection here?
I'm not sure how Poilievre can argue that the Canadian press is biased against him. Have you read some of the sycophantic pro-Poilievre panegyrics in the National Post and The Sun recently, not to mention the local newspapers on the Prairies? What he means is: there are people out there who actually disagree with him, and they need to be cut down to size and ridiculed, by any means necessary, because his followers expect no less of him.
So, expect a press release sometime soon. Probably something with the words "woke" and "Trudeau" in it. Poilievre is nothing if not predictable. Depressingly predictable.
UPDATE
Yet another critical Globe article appeared a week or so later, in which Andrew Lawton deconstructs Poilievre's approach to the media, and the way he has systematically honed his media and social media presence over the years, all while portraying himself (and conservatism in general) as being unfairly targeted by a partisan Liberal-biased media machine.
It's undeniably clever and effective, despite its cynical deceptiveness. Like a certain Donald J. Trump, Poilievre has the gift of the gab and an ability to appeal to a particular segment of the electorate. Truth and authenticity never need to come under consideration.
You hear a lot about the pro-Palestine protests at US and Canadian universities being infiltrated and even instigated by outside actors, agitators and all-round ne'er-do-wells. It's a convenient way to try to de-legitimize the protests, and it comes up at almost all such protests
Frankly, I'd be very surprised if there weren't some of those. Protests and demonstration of every kind attract this kind of professional agitator/anarchist/white supremacist types - look at the Freedom Convoy and the Occupy movement, for example, and further back, the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations. But to what extent is this happening with this particular batch of protests?
The right-wing press and some Jewish outlets would have us think that the protests are not being organized and funded by concerned students and a few faculty members at all, but by some shadowy secret organizations with direct links to Hamas (or worse!). Others seem to be believe that George Soros and his Open Society Foundation are behind it all (despite Soros being Jewish and a Holocaust survivor!). The truth, however, as a CBC fact-checking mission concludes, appears to be much more banal.
Food and supplies have been donated in the main by other students, parents and local community members, although some crowdfunding campaigns have also, understandably, been hastily set up by the students.
One media commentator pointed out that, wait, all those tents look suspiciously similar, and they probably cost $400 each, so some outside organization somewhere must be bankrolling all of this. (That is the level of debate and logic we are talking about here.) In fact, those tents that were bought and not donated probably came from Walmart, which sells that same type of cheap poor-quality tent for $48 each.
In fact, there is no credible evidence of any outside funding or infiltration of the encampments, in Canada at any rate, and police have not brought any charges to that effect thus far. And the protesters themselves do in fact seem to be, well, students, in the main. That's not to say there are NO outsiders involved, but to say that the encampments are being instigated and directed by outside agitators, as a very pro-Israel friend of mine contends, is firmly in the realm of conspiracy theory.
Similar exaggerated and unfounded allegations are being levelled at the university protests in the USA, mainly as an excuse to bring in police to break them up, as in New York and LA. And, there too, it seems like the truth is that very few "outsiders" are involved, and there is no real evidence of major outside funding or core organization by non-students.
