The Missing 'Why' Of The Trump Slump.

WildHunter'sCircusCircusStory
GoneBadVille

Another day, another story on how the policies of Mr. Trump have led to a significant tourism slump in the United States.

This one is from the Associated Press that starts like this:

Tourism in Las Vegas is slumping this summer, with resorts and convention centers reporting fewer visitors compared to last year, especially from abroad, and some officials are blaming the Trump administration’s tariffs and immigration policies for the decline.

The city known for lavish shows, endless buffets and around-the-clock gambling welcomed just under 3.1 million tourists in June, an 11 per cent drop compared to the same month in 2024. There were 13 per cent fewer international travelers, and hotel occupancy fell by about 15 per cent, according to data from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority...

The piece then moves on to the 'who'.

As in who is responsible:

...Mayor Shelley Berkley said tourism from Canada -- Nevada’s largest international market -- has dried up from a torrent “to a drip.”..

And then, ultimately, the story gets  to the anecdotal 'why':

...Travel agents in Canada said there’s been a significant downturn in clients wanting to visit the U.S. overall, and Las Vegas in particular. Wendy Hart, who books trips from Windsor, Ontario, said the reason was “politics, for sure.” She speculated it was a point of “national pride” that people were staying away from the U.S. after U.S. President Donald Trump said he wanted to make Canada the 51st state.

“The tariffs are a big thing too. They seem to be contributing to the rising cost of everything,” Hart said...

Now, I have no doubt that national pride and tariffs are factors.

But.

To carry on with the anecdotes for the moment...

Many folks I know including, especially, friends with more pigment in their skin then mine, have mentioned that a major reason they are not travelling south across that 'artificially drawn line' is because they don't want to be hassled, have their devices scanned, be detained, or worse.

In other words, many Canadians are not willing to put themselves in harm's way just so they can buy cheap gas and/or gorge themselves at the Circus Circus buffet.

Assuming, of course, that the latter is still a 'thing'.


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Earworm in the sub-header buried deep in the desert sand?...This!



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The Monetary Madness Of Mayor Sim.

CryptoTown

ByThePoolVille


From the inimitable Lotusland watcher Mike Howell, now writing for Business In Vancouver:

Mayor Ken Sim continues to make his rounds as an advocate for bitcoin and is scheduled to be a featured speaker at a two-day conference this weekend at the Vancouver Convention Centre...

{snip}

...The mayor’s participation in such conferences and being a guest on various podcasts stems from a motion he successfully presented to city council in December 2024.

His motion directed staff to explore options to make Vancouver a bitcoin-friendly city by undertaking a comprehensive analysis of the potential to integrate bitcoin into the City of Vancouver's financial strategies.

That would include, but not be limited to, accepting taxes and fees in bitcoin.

The mayor has also called for the potential conversion of a portion of the city’s financial reserves into bitcoin “to preserve purchasing power and guard against the volatility, debasement and inflationary pressures of traditional currencies.”...

And when the bloom comes off the pyramidal-shaped the bitcoin rose, errrrr, tulip?

Well...

If we lose our civic shirts in the collapse, at least we may still be able to heat a local body of water:

...This weekend’s conference also features a segment titled, “heating Kitsilano pool with bitcoin mining.”

Sim has shown interest in the topic, with him recently posing in a photograph posted via the X social media platform with staff at Mintgreen, a Canadian cleantech company specializing in heat recovery from bitcoin mining...

Sheesh.


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The Railway Men Who Financed Gordon Campbell's Government Before And After It 'Leased' BC Rail.

SaleNotSale
999YearsVille

In the wake of the news that CN Rail has decided to let go of a stretch of track that once ran BC Rail trains before they it was leased to CN by Gordon Campbell, and currently runs the rolling hotels of the super-fine Rocky Mountain Railtours, we take you back to a post from the ancient times, otherwise known as 2010.

****

In recent posts we have established that two of British Columbia's private Railway Tycoons,  David McLean of CN Rail and Peter Armstrong of Rocky Mountaineer Railtours each gave, either personally, or through their companies, at least $250,000, each, to the BC Liberal Party of Mr. Gordon Campbell since the latter became leader way, way, way back in 1993.

And, on the flipside, both private Rail Tycoons have done very well, indeed, in the wake of Gordon Campbell promise-busting dismantling of a very public Railway soon after he became the Premier of British Columbia in 2001.

Specifically, with the destruction of a 90 year-old statute that required BC Rail to run a public passenger service, followed shortly thereafter by the tainted/not tainted/sale/not sale of BC Rail to CN Rail, Mess'rs McLean and Armstrong ultimately came up aces by any and all financial measures one could choose to use and/or trumpet.

But here is something that most folks, even those who have been paying attention (including, initially, myself) may have missed.

Which is the fact that when Mr. Armstrong's Rocky Mountaineer/Great Canadian Tours private passenger business started rolling down the formerly public BC Rail tracks it was NOT Gordon Campbell's hand-picked 'executives' of the doomed Crown Corporation that Mr. Armstrong ultimately had to negotiate with to get the deal done.

Instead, it was David McLean and CN Rail:*

...In September 2004, Canadian National Railway Co. announced (Peter Armstrong's) Great Canadian had been selected to operate tourist trains on its newly-acquired British Columbia Rail routes...

Which is somewhat ironic, given Mess'rs McLean's and Armstrong's willingness to bankroll the efforts of Mr. Campbell from the very beginning, don't you think?

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We're back in the present now...The bolded bit, above, is from a November 2004 post from the late great PublicEye Online whose proprietor was the now academician Sean Holman...There is a whole lot more info on 'historical' Railgate players there for those of you who are interested...




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The Ties That Bind.

ProspectThis

CaribooVille


What with all that is going on in the world these days, I had completely missed the following as reported by Jennifer Thuncher in the Squamish Chief back in mid-July:

The Canadian National Railway Company (CN) has declared its plan to decommission part of its railway line from north of the railyards in Squamish through to 100 Mile.

The railway is mandated to release its railway line plans to the government and the public, which it did on July 11.

Its three-year plan shows it'll decommission its “Squamish subdivision” of the railway line heading north of the District of Squamish to Lillooet—from mile marker 43.00 through to 157.60.
CN also released its intention to decommission the line from mile marker 157.60 to 257.00, which is on the Lillooet subdivision of the line that stretches past 100 Mile...

Gosh.

Didn't that stretch of track used belong to an outfit that we, the people of British Columbia once owned?

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Image at the top of the post?...This.

Subheader?...This.




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What Doesn't Happen In Vegas...

BringOutYour
ElviVille


From Michael Sainato writing in yesterday's edition of the Guardian:

The Trump administration’s immigration policies are affecting workers and driving, in part, a decline in tourism, including international tourists, to Las Vegas, according to workers and the largest labor union in the state of Nevada...

{snip}

...Canada is Nevada’s largest international market. Flair Airlines, a Canadian airline, reported a 55% drop in passengers compared to last year. Air Canada reported a 13.2% drop in passengers from May to June this year to Las Vegas, and one third lower compared to last year...

And it's not just happening in Nevada.

The following is from Juliana Kim of the recently defunded NPR:

...The drop in international tourists — and particularly from Canada — has also been felt in New York City, Cape Cod, and across California. The World Travel & Tourism Council in May said that the U.S. is on track to lose $12.5 billion in international spending this year...

So, how are the fine folks who are trying to run a tourist industry that is being ruined by the whims of an authoritarian regime bent on bullying their neighbour to the north into economic submission dealing with this?

Well...

In Las Vegas, this is where the Elvis impersonators come in, at least according to a slightly stale report from the local Fox5 TeeVee affiliate:

...During the NHL playoffs, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority coordinated with WestJet to provide free drinks and snacks to travelers from Edmonton. Showgirls and Elvis welcomed passengers upon arrival...

That may have worked for a few thousand rabid Oilers fans in the throes of a play-off run-induced stupor.

As for the rest of us?



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The Harvard Crimson And The New York Times Each Have Their 'People'.

HopiumOverHarvard
DissipatingVille


As we noted last week, the student newspaper at Harvard, the Crimson, have three 'people' who said the following:

Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 has told faculty that a deal with the Trump administration is not imminent and denied that the University is considering a $500 million settlement, according to three faculty members familiar with the matter.

The University is seriously considering resolving its dispute with the White House through the courts rather than a negotiated settlement, Garber said, according to the three faculty members...

Now, today, in an example of big time journalistic one-upmanship, the New York Times have four 'people' of their own who say something completely different:

Harvard University and the Trump administration are nearing a potentially landmark legal settlement that would see Harvard agree to spend $500 million in exchange for the restoration of billions of dollars in federal research funding, according to four people familiar with the deliberations...

All of which got me thinking about something the movie version of Ben Bradlee once yelled fifty years ago about a very different story that involved a then unnamed deeply throated fellow who turned out to be a former protege of one J. Edgar Hoover:

'GOD DAMMIT! 

WHEN IS SOMEBODY GOING TO GO ON THE RECORD ON THIS STORY?!'

****

With all that said, it is worth noting that  the original 'Harvard will soon cave' angle on this story came, allegedly, from unnamed 'people' inside Mr. Trump's White House, errrrr...Golden Palace:

...(Harvard President) Garber, in a conversation with one faculty member, said that the suggestion that Harvard was open to paying $500 million is “false” and claimed that the figure was apparently leaked to the press by White House officials...

Sheesh.


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Is This Woke?

ScooterAndThe
BigManVille



'Born to Run' turns fifty this month.

Personally, I'm surprised that a certain 200 day old dictator has not yet sent in the National Guard to clear both Thunder Road and Jungleland of undesirables.

Or some such thing.



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The Waning Influence Of The Weasel Worded.

AllThePresident's

TacoMenVille


Remember this, from back in January?

Fox News star Jesse Watters said on Tuesday night that Canadians should see it as “a privilege to be taken over” by the United States, especially since “everybody in the world wants” to be an American citizen...

It set off a multi-cycle media firestorm that was ridden by opportunists on all sides, including the good Mr. Ford of the Universe, Centre of.

Well.

That was then, and this is now:

Fox News host Jesse Watters stirred up controversy on Thursday (Aug 7th) after floating the idea of a "mostly peaceful invasion" of Canada, which Trump slammed with tariffs earlier this year, prompting online backlash...

But, here's the thing.

The bit above comes from the lede of a piece from a click bait-laden media organ grinder called the 'Daily Express, US' and pretty well nowhere else in the entire Googleplex except for a carbon copy in something call the 'Latin Times'.

Which means that, in this case at least, no news really is a good thing.

OK?


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In case you were wondering...The uber-accomplished Mr. Watters made his bones doing the bidding of the super fine Bill O'Reilly...Imagine that!


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Blame Mitzi!

ManningTheManosphere
SansPrestonVille


Mitzi Shore did not start the infamous Comedy Store in Los Angeles.

Instead, she won the place in lieu of alimony when she divorced the club's co-founder Sammy Shore.

By the time Marc Maron washed ashore at the Store in the late 1980's the young whipper snappers pictured above with Ms. Shore had already cashed their hard won cheques and moved on to bigger and better things.

Meanwhile, Maron quickly fell in with madman Sam Kinison's entourage and it wasn't long before he was forced to leave town in the throes of a cocaine-fuelled psychosis that just about did him in.

By the early '90's son of a preacher man Kinison was dead just as Maron was drifting into New York's alternative comedy scene.

I first became aware of Mr. Maron in the mid-aught's when he turned up as 'progressive' Air America radio's morning man. When that, and his personal life fell through, Maron moved back to Los Angeles and kept trying, and mostly failing, at both radio and pseudo-online audio projects before he and his soon-to-be ever present collaborator Brendan McDonald stumbled on the long form podcast thing way ahead of just about everyone else in 2009.

Sixteen years and more than sixteen hundred episodes later Maron recently announced that he and McDonald are calling it quits, all of which has Maron reminiscing:

...When I was at The Comedy Store losing my mind I was one with the place. I was all in. I lived there. I was a true believer in the power of the place and the system Mitzi Shore had created. I always felt there was a dark energy there that went back to the beginning of modern show business. My mind was generating its own mythos about good and evil and the place that Mitzi, with all her mystical powers, was overseeing. I believed that the beginning of the apocalypse would start in Hollywood. I had full concepts of how. I believed I was in a struggle between good and evil that was universal and my time spent there with Kinison, a true power of megalomaniacal darkness, was informing my prophecy in progress. All I knew, in my psychotic state, was that Mitzi, The Comedy Store, and some of the comics that came out of there were essential in the final unfolding. Crazy, right? But…

The two people that revolutionized the podcast medium and unleashed its potential on the world were me and (Joe) Rogan.

Both of us of products of The Comedy Store and Mitzi’s system.

Do with that what you will...

Imagine that!

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Hopium Over Harvard?

TruthOrSpin
VeritasinessOnTheCharlesVille

From two student writers, William Mao and Veronica Paulus at The Harvard Crimson, dateline yesterday:

Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 has told faculty that a deal with the Trump administration is not imminent and denied that the University is considering a $500 million settlement, according to three faculty members familiar with the matter.

The University is seriously considering resolving its dispute with the White House through the courts rather than a negotiated settlement, Garber said, according to the three faculty members...

Hmmmm...

University policy being 'leaked' by insiders.

Now, why would that kind of thing be going on?

Well...

...(Harvard President) Garber, in a conversation with one faculty member, said that the suggestion that Harvard was open to paying $500 million is “false” and claimed that the figure was apparently leaked to the press by White House officials...

Sheesh.


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Of course, if an institution with the resources and endowment of Harvard caves, that's pretty much it for an independent academy in Mr. Trump's America...



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Canuckistanian Corporate Cretinism?

Label

BabelVille


By now you've probably heard of, if not read, Simon van Zuylen-Wood's piece, which is very long and heavily laden with anecdotes,  in New York Magazine titled 'The Canadians Are Furious'.

The subtitle is: 'Trump accomplished what was once considered impossible: Our northern neighbours have united against us.'

Here is one paragraph that caught my eye:

...In grocery stores, Canada-affiliated products had been demarcated with red maple-leaf insignia — an official act of solidarity that complemented the consumer practice of flipping U.S. products upside down to make them easier to avoid...

Sure thing.

But, to quote the good Docktor Thompson quoting T.S. Eliot's 'Hollow Men':

"...Between the Idea and the Reality … Falls the Shadow...”

And, when it comes to the little red maple leaf insignia thingies, it turns out that we may have our very own hollow men lurking in the grocery aisle shadows.

...CBC News visited grocery stores operated by Sobeys, Loblaws and Metro in downtown Toronto this month and found similar issues among both bulk and prepackaged produce. At each store, one or more country-of-origin shelf signs in the produce section stated the accompanying product was a "product of Canada" or Mexico, but the product's sticker or packaging said it was a "product of USA."

And it's not just produce. CBC News also found questionable Canadian signage for more than a dozen other types of products at the Sobeys store, including imported raw almonds promoted with a red maple leaf symbol and a "Made in Canada," declaration... 

Imagine that!


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Does Canada Have A Burgeoning Brownshirt Problem?

KinderGentlerActive

HandVille


The following is the lede from an excellent investigative journalism piece from the CBC's Eric Szeto, Ivan Angelovski, Christian Paas-Lang, Grant LaFleche and Jordan Pearson:

In public parks, gyms and martial arts clubs — where children take classes — some of Canada’s most notorious white supremacists are preparing for violence.

The members of these fight clubs, known in white nationalist communities as “active clubs,” are hiding in plain sight. As part of their recruitment and online propaganda, they post videos of their training sessions, taking care to hide their faces and obscure their locations...

So.

What are these super fine folks really up to?

Mack Lamoureaux, who has long written about extremist groups, starting with VICE and now with the anti-extremist think tank  Institute for Strategic Dialogue, spoke about this with Frontburner's Elaine Chau yesterday:

ELAINE CHAU: Active clubs are known for kind of using the popularity of MMA to reach out to potential recruits and such, right?

MACK LAMOUREUX: Well, I think they took inspiration from the last wave of extreme right groups, which would have kind of been the far more militant groups like The Base or Atomwaffen Division -- the ones that have been involved in pretty, um, extreme levels of violence -- and they decided to soften it. They decided to have a huge focus on esthetics and propaganda, as opposed to, I mean, this hyper-focus on violence. And so they leaned into mixed martial arts. They leaned into propaganda. And that's more or less what this entire active club network revolves around. They film themselves training. They make snappy edits about it. They host large fight tournaments. They even have, um...

ELAINE CHAU: Activewear.

MACK LAMOUREUX: Yeah, they have activewear. They have merchandise. "Fascist Lululemon," one person once described it to me. So it's a lot more softened than the last wave of kind of extreme right organizations that we've seen pop up. And that has been something that has worked to their benefit.

Gosh.

Can the rise of uber active Trad-Fash groups, and the reality TeeVee shows based on them, be far behind?

Not to mention the podcasts...


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Earworm in the subheader?...In a race to beat reader Cap to the 'punch', as it were...This!


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His Morning Walk...

SomewhereOnThe
NorthshoreVille


NVG's walk that is...



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Ask Not For Whom The AI Tools Toll, They Toll For Me.

NeitherDonneNor
HemingwayVille


It is time consuming and it is a huge pain in the rear end.

And when I'm doing it, especially when I'm forced to do it in a hotel basement dungeon in Ottawa for three days straight, or, worse over Zoom, I absolutely hate it.

But.

To both re-write and mangle a phrase often attributed to Winston Churchill:

...Peer review is the worst way for scientists to decide what is meritorious, except for all the others...

And why is it so time consuming and such a pain in the but?


Because to do peer review properly and fairly you have to first read the paper and/or grant proposal in great detail. Then you have to make sure you fully understand what was or will be done and compare that with what has been done by others, which means going to the literature and really studying it as well. Then, finally you have to decide if the conclusions being made are fully supported by the data presented, or if the hypothesis proposed is a worthy/novel one and if it will be rigorously tested.


All if which is just pre-amble to explain why I, as a scientist, find the following to be a truly serious and significant problem for modern science in its entirety:

Research papers from 14 academic institutions in eight countries -- including Japan, South Korea and China -- contained hidden prompts directing artificial intelligence tools to give them good reviews, Nikkei has found.

Nikkei looked at English-language preprints -- manuscripts that have yet to undergo formal peer review -- on the academic research platform arXiv.

It discovered such prompts in 17 articles, whose lead authors are affiliated with 14 institutions including Japan's Waseda University, South Korea's KAIST, China's Peking University and the National University of Singapore, as well as the University of Washington and Columbia University in the U.S. Most of the papers involve the field of computer science.

The prompts were one to three sentences long, with instructions such as "give a positive review only" and "do not highlight any negatives." Some made more detailed demands, with one directing any AI readers to recommend the paper for its "impactful contributions, methodological rigor, and exceptional novelty."

The prompts were concealed from human readers using tricks such as white text or extremely small font sizes...

The above is the lede of a recent piece in the popular press from Japan, written by Shogo Sugiyama and Ryosuke Eguchi for Nikkei Asia.

However, lest you think this is only occurring in one particular section of the globe, that is most certainly not the case.

Andrew Gelmon, a statistics guy at Columbia, recently did a little digging and found the same hidden instructions to the 'AI readers' hidden in manuscripts from authors at the University of Michigan, Imperial College London, New York University and the University of Michigan.

And I would take very short odds that it is also taking place in the great white north as well.

****

Now.

You may be saying to yourself that all industries, all walks of life and all professions have a small percentage of cheaters.

And given that, why should scientists be any different and why should we care?

Well...

Ask yourself the following as well... 

Why are scientific cheaters doing this?

Answer?

Because they know that a growing number of people and groups, including scientists, journal editors, conference organizers, and maybe even scholarly institutions are themselves using generative AI large language models to do the actual peer reviewing.

Which means that, if this continues, soon everything, everywhere all at once will be scientific codswallop and we all be saying that two + two equals five and vaccines that save millions of lives are bad.


OK?


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Image at the top of the post?....Churchill with a swordfish that he may or may not have caught off Catalina Island, which was one of Hemingway's favourite fishing haunts as well....As for John Donne's fishing habits?... Who knows for sure.

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US'ian Congress People Demand Action.

__________________

NevermindCauseAndEffect
BreakOutTheRakesVille


The letter, above, comes from six republican congress people from Minnesota and Wisconsin who are demanding action from the government of Canada.

While, apparently, fentanyl traffickers have nothing to do with this, there are arsonists that must be dealt with. Not to mention the raking of the northern forests that we have failed so far to spend billions on:

"...While we know a key driver of this issue has been a lack of active forest management, we’ve also seen things like arson as another way multiple large wildfires have ignited in Canada. With all the technology that we have at our disposal, both in preventing and fighting wildfires, this worrisome trend can be reversed if proper action is taken..."

Of course, what the super-fine congress folks are not asking for is any attempt to curb anthropomorphic climate change that is a major cause of the number, intensity and severity of these fires.

In fact, as noted by Oliver Milman writing in the Guardian, all six US'ian congress people who are signatories to the letter  recently voted to accelerate fossil fuel emission-driven climate change:

...(A)ll of the authors of the letter (to the Canadian ambassador) – (Tom) Tiffany, Brad Finstad, Tom Emmer, Glenn Grothman, Michelle Fischbach and Pete Stauber – voted for the so-called “big, beautiful” Republican spending bill that, among other things, slashes support for renewable energy and provides new incentives for the production of fossil fuels...

Imagine that!

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