Bruno Gerussi's (Real) Medallion.

Where'sRelicWhenYou
NeedHimVille



A few weeks ago e. and her friend (i.e. not her sister) E. took me to a show at the Vogue.

I got there a few minutes ahead of them and thus got to stand around on Granville Street in Downtown Lotusland watching the river flow by for awhile

I found the plaque, above, in an eddy in the stream.

****

So...

Who did we go see?

Why it was Sharon Van Etten, someone whose all three of have liked for a while now for a bunch of different reasons.

Van Etten is a little like Neil Young used to be.

Not in musical substance or style but instead in the way she has to keep reinventing herself to move forward.

As such, most of her set was, to my mind at least, a somewhat bizarre simulacrum of Gary Numan and his synthesizers forever stranded on the set of the movie Cabaret.

It was interesting, but it sure was a long way from the earlier cosmic cowboy(ish) tunes of Ms. Van Etten's early period.

Here is a cover of one such tune...

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Subheader?....These guys.

Ms. Van Etten talks about the writing of the tune...Here.

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Announcing The Occupation.

WillThePeopleBe

AwokenVille


I was listening to one of my favourite podcasts the other day. It's by two smart guys who are politically aware but who mostly talk about other things that pique their interest.

Things like bird calls, geo guesser, guitar pedals, the difference(s) between lakes and ponds, and the world's most awesome skylines.

Anyway, this week, one of the pair, who lives in Los Angeles, mentioned how, except for occasional snippets on the news, he wasn't even aware of the ICE/National Guard/US Marine activities in his city.

Again, this is coming from someone who is very politically aware.

Which is why the incident with with US Senator Alex Padilla really matters.

And not just because of the outrageous actions of overzealous uniformed officers who led the senator away, forced him to the ground, and hand-cuffed him.

But because the resulting hullaballoo has ensured that everyone has also now heard the following statement by a senate-approved member of Mr. Trump's cabinet about the situation in Los Angeles:

"...We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city..."

In other words, this particular cabinet minister was announcing that the Trump administration was using the military to occupy a city where the explicit, stated goal is to destroy that city's democratically elected government.

And now every American, not just the fine folks who watch FOX News, knows of  that statement thanks to Mr. Padilla.

Which means that every American also now knows that the Trump administration is an autocracy.

Of course...

Whether every American understands what they now know is, unfortunately, another matter.

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As Long As There Are Stars Above You.

MoreThanJustPendletones

AndHamburgerStandsNowVille

Brian Wilson has died.

Ben Sisario has an excellent omnibus obituary up at The New York Times (web archive link):

..“Being called a musical genius was a cross to bear,” he (Wilson) told Rolling Stone in 1988. “Genius is a big word. But if you have to live up to something, you might as well live up to that.”...

Indeed.


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Earworm in the header?...This.


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Who Goes MAGA?

They'reOutThereHavingFun

InTheWarmCaliforniaSunVille

Who goes MAGA?

"...Sometimes I think there are direct biological factors at work—a type of education, feeding, and physical training which has produced a new kind of human being with an imbalance in his nature. He has been fed vitamins and filled with energies that are beyond the capacity of his intellect to discipline. He has been treated to forms of education which have released him from inhibitions. His body is vigorous. His mind is childish. His soul has been almost completely neglected..."

The passage above is from a famous essay that was written by Dorothy Thompson.

In August of 1941.

Given the timing of the piece, Ms. Thompson was writing about the joiners, enablers and go-along-to-get-alongers of a different, but not entirely ideologically dissimilar, group that was also identified by a four letter acronym.

In other words, at present there is nothing truly new happening under the Southern California sun.


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Subheader earworm?....This.

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The Fifty-Five Percent That ABC Vancouver Is Not Really Into.

OurPollingSays
ABCVille


From a 2023 Daily Hive piece by Kenneth Chan that itself was based on a Metro Vancouver Regional District report released that same year:

..(I)n 2021, there were 305,335 households in Vancouver, including 138,845 ownership households (45%) and 166,490 renter households (55%)...

So.

What does ABC Vancouver think they should do for renters who have, say, difficulty with their landlords?

Absolutely nothing according to a piece by Jen Schuermann who covers city hall for Rogers:

Vancouver city council has decided against bringing back an agency designed to protect renters.

Coun. Lucy Maloney’s motion to bring back the Renter Office was voted down on Wednesday.

Established in 2018, the Renter Office provided information and assistance to tenants about their rights.

In 2023, however, ABC Vancouver voted to defund the office, despite city staff recommending that the service be continued...

Quelle surprise!

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But Can He Catch A Football?

Zap!

You'reFrozenVille


It seems that a lot of folks on the progressive side of the ledger and/or Althia Raj of the Star are aghast that Mark Carney is playing footsie with our oiligarchs while introducing an omnibus 'strong borders' bill.

But what did they/we expect?

After all, as Eric Scrimshaw has pointed out, we progressives made our choice when we elected a progressive conservative/pink tory to keep the whackaloons from gaining power.

Given that, it makes perfect sense, from a hard-nosed realpolitik point of view, for Carney to cut two of the stoutest whackaloonian legs out from under them while at the same time doing what's right for stability and the business environment.

Heckfire.

If noted pink tory from days of yore Robert Stanfield hadn't dropped that football on the tarmac in North Bay Ontario in 1974 it wouldn't be a stretch to suggest that he would have espoused similarly themed pre-millennial policies back in the day.



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It turns out that the roll of film shot by Canadian Press photographer Doug Ball that day in 1974 had a number of shots of Mr. Stanfield catching the ball as well...It was the Globe and Mail that chose the dropsie shot for its front page, a decision that many folks figure caused Stanfield's demise and electoral loss to Trudeau senior that year.

Subheader?...This was a phrase Pierre Trudeau used to deride Stanfield's call for wage and price controls during the 1974 election campaign. Of course, the following year Trudeau instituted both.



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Is That A Large Language Model In Your Pants...

...Or Are You Just Happy To See (And Deceive) Me?

From the lede of a comprehensive and extremely well sourced piece by Emily Kennard and Margaret Manto published in the non-profit 'NOTUS':

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says his “Make America Healthy Again” Commission report harnesses “gold-standard” science, citing more than 500 studies and other sources to back up its claims. Those citations, though, are rife with errors, from broken links to misstated conclusions. Seven of the cited sources don’t appear to exist at all...

From the abstract of an actual peer-reviewed paper by William Walters and Esther Isabelle Wilder published in the Nature journal 'Scientific Reports':

Although chatbots such as ChatGPT can facilitate cost-effective text generation and editing, factually incorrect responses (hallucinations) limit their utility. This study evaluates one particular type of hallucination: fabricated bibliographic citations that do not represent actual scholarly works. We used ChatGPT-3.5 and ChatGPT-4 to produce short literature reviews on 42 multidisciplinary topics, compiling data on the 636 bibliographic citations (references) found in the 84 papers. We then searched multiple databases and websites to determine the prevalence of fabricated citations, to identify errors in the citations to non-fabricated papers, and to evaluate adherence to APA citation format. Within this set of documents, 55% of the GPT-3.5 citations but just 18% of the GPT-4 citations are fabricated....

In other words, if it looks like AI slop and smells like AI slop it very likely is AI slop.

As for the folks that cooked and are pushing the slop as truth?

They refuse so far to say either way according to quotes obtained by Dani Blum and Maggie Astor of the New York Times:

...Asked at a news conference on Thursday whether the report had relied on A.I., the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, deferred to the Department of Health and Human Services. Emily Hilliard, a spokeswoman for the department, did not answer a question about the source of the fabricated references and downplayed them as “minor citation and formatting errors.”...

Cue Mr. Morrison...


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Woo, All The Way Down.

Lysenkoism
UberAlles Ville


From the fine folks at Politico (who, as a result of this piece, will likely be compelled to re-start the sanewashing by this time tomorrow):

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. threatened to stop government scientists from publishing their work in major medical journals on a podcast Tuesday as part of his escalating war on institutions he says are influenced by pharmaceutical companies.

Speaking on the “Ultimate Human” podcast, Kennedy said the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association and The Lancet, three of the most influential medical journals in the world, were “corrupt”...

I mean, honestly, if this was six months ago I would think that the good Mr. Kennedy is just trolling us.

But it turns out that the latest threat from Mr. Kennedy is actually much worse than just preventing scientists from publishing in certain places.

...“Unless those journals change dramatically, we are going to stop NIH scientists from publishing in them and we’re going to create our own journals in-house”...

Why is forcing people to publish in 'in-house' journals worse than keeping them publishing in top-flight, peer-reviewed journals?

Because such in-house 'journals' are nothing more than prop shops that are driven by the opposite of rigorously generated and analyzed data.

And, as we noted a few weeks ago, Mr. Kennedy's minions have already built one of those:

A new journal co-founded by President Donald Trump’s pick to direct the National Institutes of Health (NIH) says it will “promote open and transparent scientific discourse” but is drawing controversy within mere days of its launch...

{snippety}

...The journal, which has already published eight articles on topics including COVID-19 vaccine trials and mask mandates, eschews several aspects of traditional publishing. It lacks a subscription paywall, posts peer reviews alongside published articles, and pays reviewers for their work. But other researchers have criticized the journal’s exclusivity and lack of quality control. Only members of a newly formed body, the Academy of Public Health, can submit articles, and all submitted articles are published...

Honestly.

If this happens, it will be the final nail in the coffin of the American biomedical research enterprise, an enterprise that has driven truly innovative science, world-wide, for far longer than I have been in the business.

And, just to be clear, I have been in the business for a very long time.

OK?

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Lysenkoism?...This!


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Making Honesty Not Pay.

TheNewNewDeal
ScamAroundAndFindOutVille


From a piece by Ana Swanson and Lazaro Game in The New York Times (web archive link):

As President Trump’s tariffs have ratcheted up in recent months, so have the mysterious solicitations some U.S. companies have received, offering them ways to avoid the taxes...

{snippety)

 ...Leslie Jordan, an apparel manufacturer who has been in business for nearly four decades, said fraudulent schemes were becoming “rampant” in her industry, with companies offering her and other importers clearly illegal ways to bypass tariffs...

{snippety doodle dandy}

...Ms. Jordan said the tariffs had encouraged “opportunist cheaters in both China and the United States” and put “many honest companies at a competitive disadvantage.”...

So.

What ultimately happens when every aspect of an economy becomes a scam all the way down, from top to bottom?



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Eastbound And Down...In The Scientific Bunker Again.

PeerReviewIsADishBestServed
FaceToFaceVille


Had to climb into the cigar tube, again, yesterday to head into the Eastern time zone.

Which meant that, this morning, given the time change, it was up at 4:00 am Pacific time to head down into the hotel basement bunker with fifteen other science geeks so that we can metaphorically bash each about the head as a prelude rank ordering a passel of grant applications from our fellow geeks.

The thing is, when I'm lying in bed at night in these places trying to get to sleep by 9:00 pm Pacific/Midnight local time after having already suffered through an entire day of all that stinks about riding the cigar tube on the cheap these days, I invariably come to the conclusion that I'm too old for this stuff.

But then, once we get in the bunker and the bashing/discussions begin all those science geek nerve endings get tickled such that, before you know it, the excitement begins all over again.

Why?

Because there really is a whole lot of really good stuff being done by lots of folks working in the life sciences these days - and these grants are filled to bursting with their newest/freshest ideas. It's a chance to have our best and brightest try to convince you that they can dent the universe which is something that never gets old.

OK?

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Why cigar tubing on the cheap?...Well, what do you want health charity donor dollars to be spent on - research or a little more leg room for a fine fellow like myself?

Subheader?...Since COVID this kind of thing is most often still done online...That, in my opinion, is sub-optimal as, over the two to three days that these things usually take, the collective attention often wanes online and the best decisions are not made.


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Is Something Happening Here?

He'sBeenUnderOurSkin
ForMoreThanEightYearsVille


Something seems to be happening here.

But is it the right thing?

First, there was the news that Mr. Carney has rescinded a number of the retaliatory tariffs on US'ian goods coming into Canada.

And then we heard that Carney let Mr. Trump know that we'd be kinda/sorta/maybe happy to be a part of the so-called Golden Dome.

Now, after the latest US'ian Ambassador started making noises about how we could have the lowest of the low of all the tariffs in all of the liberated lands, Mr. Carney let on that tariffs were discussed when he met with a bipartisan(ish) herd of Congress Critters, today, in Ottawa.

Imagine that!



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Of course,  the howler monkeys are gonna howl...But isn't this the thing we actually elected Carney to do?...I reckon the proof might be in the coming G7 summit pudding that will be baked in the Albertalands in mid-June.

Heckfire - I'd even be willing to take reasonably short odds that Carney will push for some sort of Resolution Dogs-type announcement in the days before the G7 meeting commences for all kinds of reasons, including the anti-successionist deflector spike-spin that would ensue for the duration...

And I would not discount that bipartisanish thing...This is something that Carney is doing that Mr. Trump is incapable of doing, except for the tragi-comic, non-congressional case of Gretchen Whitmer...Why does this matter?...Because those US'ian midterms are out there now, lurking, just over the horizon.

Good Ol' Cross Border Can-Con Earworm in the subheader?...This!

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The Enshittoscene Is Here.

BeforeNavigatorThereWas
MosaicVille


Cory Doctorow explains all in his new four part CBC podcast.

And he's bringing the receipts:

...The thesis of the series – and indeed, of my life's work – is that the internet didn't turn to shit because of the "great forces of history," or "network effects," or "returns to scale." Rather, the Great Enshittening is the result of specific policy choices, made in living memory, by named individuals, who were warned at the time that this would happen, and they did it anyway. These wreckers are the largely forgotten authors of our misery, and they mingle with impunity in polite society, never fearing that someone might be sizing them up for a pitchfork...

Give it a listen.



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Just Say No, Emphatically, To Codswallop.

TravelsWithMy(Wife's)

DogVille


Unlike Beer, I did not get up early this morning to listen to a far away soccer game on the wireless.

Instead, it was down to the river's end with the Whackadoodle II for me.

On our way home, while doing my darnedest to get the new hybrid down to 5 litres per 100 km, we listened to the most recent Front Burner podcast from the CBC.

It was about Canada's measles problem which, by official case counts at least, is actually worse than the entire United States, just in Ontario.

Host Jayme Poisson and health reporter Jennifer Yoon discussed the critical issue of declining vaccination rates with sensitivity and nuance before getting down to the crux of the public health matter - the ability of families to request exemptions such that their children can attend public school unvaccinated.

They even spoke to the Globe's Andre Picard, who has been very clear about the lack of a either a mainstream religious or philosophical basis for allowing such exemptions.

So far so good, right?

Then they played a clip of Ontario premier Doug Ford responding thusly to a reporter asking if childhood vaccinations should be mandatory for school attendance:

"...It's a good point, but how do you force someone? Do you grab their kid and start jabbing them with a needle?..."

And how did Poisson and Yoon respond to this codswallop after they had just explained that mandatory vaccinations for school attendance would work to both increase vaccination rates and prevent communicable disease spread in schools?

Did they state uneqivocally that Mr. Ford was obfuscating and risking making a dangerous communicable childhood disease that was deemed eradicated in Canada almost thirty years ago endemic once again?

Of course not.

Instead, they skated  and only tangentially discussed how there is a political element to all of this stuff.

Sheesh.

****

In retrospect, perhaps I listened to the wrong public broadcaster's offerings this morning.

The thing is that, unlike Beer, I don't actually give a hoot-in-heckfire about the fortunes of West Ham United.

Although, I must confess that I kind of like the idea of watching a soccer game in the forest of Nottingham while dodging the dastardly deeds of the sheriff.

Or some such thing.

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Hey!...I just realized how Beer's dog of yore got her name!

As for the subheader...The WII came along after the WI passed at the beginning of Covid...The WII really is C's dog, not mine.

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The Lunchtime View Outside My Office Window.

ShadesOfTheSinging
DetectiveVille


When it gets to this time of year, when everything in Lotusland is so lush and green, I find it hard to even conceive of how barren the foliage will be six months from now.

As for the rain that has arrived just in time for the long weekend?

Well, more rain today equals fewer fires tomorrow.

Hopefully.


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Subheader?...This, from Dennis Potter's masterpiece brought to lush and green cinematic life.



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More Horsemen.

MitchellHaldemanErlichmanAndColson
NoDeanVille

This follows on this morning's post about the current rider of Pestilence.

Regarding the image above...

More Horsemen, different Apocalypse.

Of course, all four of those fine pear-shaped fellows pictured above went to jail for the things they did in the name of a certain US'ian president.

If you get my historically directed drift.

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Of course, John Dean, pencilled in by Nixon to be the goatman of this particular apocalypse, spent a little time in the hoosegow as well, but by then his conscience was relatively clear.

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