They Can No Longer Pretend.

TheEasternEdgeOf

TheMediterraneanSeaVille



Today, November 20th, 2024, one of the 15 members of the UN Security Council vetoed a permanent ceasefire and hostage release resolution in Gaza.

That one member was the United States.

Therefore, it is clear that the Biden Administration, which is now completely free of the bounds of electoral uncertainty, can no longer pretend that it is committed to having the killing stop and the hostages released.

According the Guardian, U.S. deputy ambassador to the U.N.  Robert Wood says it's all about the 'compromise language' put forward by the U.K. that didn't make it into the resolution that resulted in the veto:

...“We regret that the council could have incorporated compromise language the UK put forward to bridge the existing gaps ... With that language, this resolution should have been adopted,” Wood, the US envoy, said following the vote...

But here's the thing.

The U.K., which, like the U.S., is a permanent member of the Security Council, ultimately voted in favour of the resolution.

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Ballistic Clones Of Cy.

TheOldsYellingAt
(FastMoving)CloudsVille


Look.

It was pretty darned windy last night as, as Keith noted, the barometric pressure changed abruptly.

Trees did come down and power was lost.

But why, suddenly, must we all become 'fraidy cats because of something dubbed by the hype-makers as a 'bomb cyclone'.

After all, wasn't this really just a pretty good winter storm that, as of the moment (i.e. Wednesday lunchtime), has pretty much blown itself out?

Heckfire.

Even the BBC had to go all the way to Seattle to find a tragic fatality. Although, to be fair, we're not sure if they also went to Nanaimo to check on the status of e.a.f.'s roof.

Meanwhile...

As can be seen in the image above, it appears that GarFish got to the power line trail before me this morning and used the mechanical scissors on his E-bike to clear the way.

Selah.



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My (Late) Morning Ride.

Hogan'sHeroes
PatchesVille


There was a lot of snow on the mountains over in that slanted, northern-most part of Lotusland this morning, presumably dropped by last night's storm that also washed the flotsam and jetsam of the Grey Cup revelry into False Creek down at sea level.

Unfortunately, because I had to rush down into the bowels of the hospital-industrial complex first thing this morning for a thesis defense, I didn't get a picture of those mountains (although I'm sure NVG was walking all over them!).

Later, as the noon o'clock hour approached, I was riding my way up onto the pointy grey plateau and what did I see in the shadows but little patches of the white stuff, one of which is pictured above.

Winter, such as it is in these parts, is on us my friends.

And what would be the point of this little F-Troop-listed 'Blog of the Olds' if we didn't discuss the obviousities of the weather occasionally.

OK?

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Subheader?...Pretty much every time LeBeau, Newkirk and/or Carter, etc.,  popped the lid on a tunnel and poked their heads out before heading off into town to do pretty much whatever they wanted there would always be little snowy patches, just like the one shown above, scattered about on the ground...Apparently, it was always just about, but not quite, winter at Stalag 13.

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Pure Joy On A Sunday.

This was filmed on Hollywood Boulevard in 1964.

Watch it right through till the end - you won't be sorry. 

For littler e., the part you will dig starts at 2 minutes 50 seconds.



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The guy who made this, John Harris, used to get his young friends together on weekends, when they weren't engaged in their day jobs,  to make little movies like this... One of Ms. Garr's day jobs at the time was background dancing in crappy Elvis movies...Like Ms. Garr, Mr. Harris, who later moved to the Monterey Peninsula and became a movie theatre impresario, also died recently.

One can only wonder if Ms. Garr had a premonition about the 'Guaranty Building' whose front door she slams forcefully at the beginning of the video...Why?...Because much later it would become part of L. Ronnie Hubbard's posthumous. real estate empire.

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He's A Sawmill Worker For F*ck's Sakes.

ThinkI'llPickUpThePhone
AndBuyYouOneToCallYourOwnVille


Go read Beer on Horgan.

Now.



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Crap.

 

I sure am glad to hear that, in the end, he got back to Victoria where he belonged to be with all of those who meant the most to him.

****

More, later, including a story of how the then young Horgan once good naturally called this not particularly proficient lacrosse player 'Chicken Legs' a very long Braefoot/Stevenson double park time ago.

(it's a descriptor that's still pretty much true, by the way, no matter how much bike riding I do)

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Their Own Reality.

TheAftermathCtd

RealityInterruptedVille


The above is from the fine folks at Ipsos via Mike the fellow biologist:

I bring it up in the here and now to give reader E.E. their due regarding their take on how things got this way:

...Blame it on a decaying American educational system and 40 years of Reganomics, and the decline of the middle class, especially in the USA...

E.E.'s comment is backed by a quote from way back in 2002 that was never quite confirmed to have come from Bush the Younger's chief propagandist Mr. Karl Rove:

"(W)hen we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do"

The point?

They, meaning all manner of Republicans, not just the Trumpian manosphereisterians of the moment, started building this thing that that destroys people's ability to view reality for what it actually is a long, long time ago.

OK?


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And, yes, I did go to that very fine ear worm in the kicker, above.


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The Revenge Of The Yutes!

TheAftermathCtd
YouthIsWastedOnTheWrongPeopleSometimesVille

It turns out that it's not just the olds hooked on Rupert Murdoch's propaganda channel, or worse, who are the entire problem.

And/or suburban soccer moms.

What it's all about this time, Alfie?

The youth:

I mean, just look at those shifts. 

And while young men shifted 28 points to Trump since 2020, young women moved 14 points that way as well.

It's got me wondering if, perhaps, this has less to do with Mr. Rogan's podcast and more to do with the Covid generation getting its revenge on the world.

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Subheader's ear(ish) worm?...This!


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We're Still Waiting...

TheAftermath

CorporationsArePeopleMyFriendVille

I don't know about you but, personally, I'm still waiting for the puffed-up punditry down south, and that includes those superfine never Trump Republicans at the Bulwark, to open up the memory hole in the back of their collective heads and pull out the following, written by West Wing guy Aaron Sorkin on the OpEd page of the New York Times back in July:

...The problem in the real world is that there isn’t a Democrat who is polling significantly better than Mr. Biden. And quitting, as heroic as it may be in this case, doesn’t really put a lump in our throats.

But there’s something the Democrats can do that would not just put a lump in people’s throats with its appeal to stop-Donald-Trump-at-all-costs unity, but with its originality and sense of sacrifice. So here’s my pitch to the writers’ room: The Democratic Party should pick a Republican.

At their convention next month, the Democrats should nominate Mitt Romney...

I mean, can't you just imagine good old Tim Miller and/or David Brooks feasting on that one?

To which I would answer now, just as I screamed at the Sulzberger family's pixel screen back in the summer...


Jeb!


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Subheader?....This.



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The Once And Future Silkiest Of Roads.

It'sAlwaysTwentyMinutesToNine

SomewhereVille


The lede of the latest from the world's pre-eminent Brooksologist, Driftglass:

A few years from now when the New York Times building lies in ruins, you will still find Mr. David Brooks there, sitting amid the rubble like Mrs. Havisham, wearing tatters, keeping himself warm by burning remaindered copies of The Road to Character and offering to trash "the Left" for the price of a meal, a first-class Acela corridor train ticket and a $60 glass of top-shelf airport scotch.

Mind you, he will reassure you, his condition is temporary. On his uppers only due to mistakes that will no doubt be rectified soon. Sure, things look a little bleak now. And, sure, Mr. Brooks' "teevee" appearances are now limited to sitting next to a discarded Amazon shipping box with the words "Meet the Press" scrawled on the side and fielding "questions" from a potato Brooks calls "David Gregory", but this is all just a misunderstanding. A glitch in the Beltway matrix. Just as soon as No Labels or the McCain/Lieberman party get back on their feet, and the Sulzberger family finishes up their vacation at whichever reeducation camp they've been assigned to, and that sweet-sweet Third Way money starts rolling, Brooks will be right back in the clover ...

Go read it all in its searing Swiftian satirical splendour...Here.

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The Band Wore Blue Shirts...

  ...And The Music Played On.

It was not a great morning for C. 

She had to be up early to take a sedative before I drove her down to the off-hospital, West Broadway Medical Industrial Complex located in Lotusland Central for some oral surgery.

All went well and she is now upstairs snoozing while various and assorted pharmaceuticals wear off.

Me, I booked off work for the occasion and am now down in the Subterranean Homesick Blues Room (i.e. the basement) trying to get caught up.

Truth be told however, especially given what happened last night and all that will soon follow, it was good to be out and about with all the other folks scurrying about getting on with their lives this morning.

As for the aftermath? 

I'm avoiding it all for the moment waiting for the sturm, drang and cacophonous clanging of the newscycle to dissipate before the real analysis begins.

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Earworm in the header?...This!

And, if you really want to be blown away by The Man (in blue) shown above...This.

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All Gone To Look For America.

WeHaveNeverHitchhikedTo

SaginawVille

I have a confession to make.

Which is that I have something in common with Elon Musk.

Because, like Mr. Musk, I went to the United States on a student(ish) visa back in the go-go 1990's.

According to a trio of investigative journalists at the Washington Post, Musk ignored a major stipulation of his visa and never actually went to school, in this case graduate school in Palo Alto. Instead, Mr. Musk helped start a company called Global Link, which later became Zip2. Initially, pre-universal search engine, the company sold businesses a service that would give them an online presence. In 1999, just before the first the dot-com bubble burst, Zip2 was gobbled up by Compaq for 300 million dollars. At that time, the immigrant from South Africa, who was not, to the best of anyone's knowledge, eating the pets of Silicon Valley, made a cool 22 million.

I went to America on the reverse brain-drain ticket, which was a J-1 visa designed to lure STEM-types trainees to the country, many of whom stay legally afterward. I was a post-doctoral fellow at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory which is perched above the University of California campus about half-way up the East Bay Hills. Initially, I was involved in a kind of public/private scientific partnership with a now famous pharmaceutical company that survived the bursting of the first biotech bubbles back in the 1980's. I worked feverishly on the project when I first got to the new lab in Berkeley and everything was set to really get rolling after a big Friday afternoon meeting about six months into my tenure. The following Monday my boss got a call from the company saying that they had decided to go 'in a different direction' and the project was dead. So much for curiosity-driven research.

In the end, the science part of my time as a post-doc worked out well enough that I got a few serious job offers, the best of which was to return to Lotusland, which we did a few years before Mr. Musk cashed in for the first time. 

Just as, and perhaps more, importantly than the science stuff, the life thing really worked out well when C. and I lived in Berkeley. It was a truly exciting place to be at the time and we made many wonderful friends. We also had the first of our two wonderful kids, then tiny, now Bigger, E., and we  came to love America and it all it can, and quite often does, stand for.

Here's hoping all of that has a chance to continue.

For America, I mean, come Tuesday...

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While I was really, really steamed at the time, it turned out to be a stroke of luck that the original post-doc project was killed by the company...Why?....Because it never would have worked...We were chasing after something in the soups produced by tumour cells that doesn't exist!...And just in case you might be, for some crazy reason, remotely interested in what we're chasing these days there's...This.

Image at the top of the post...At the infamous UC Berkeley Sather Gate with the two E's on a visit back to town a bunch of years after we left for home.

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Falcon's Ghosts Haunt Rustadville.

From Rob Shaw, breaking away from the herd while writing for Glacier Media:

...In Richmond-Steveston, the Conservatives refused United candidate Jackie Lee. He went on to garner 2,354 votes as an independent, undercutting the less-impressive Conservative candidate Michelle Mollineaux and handing the riding to the NDP’s Kelly Greene by 484 votes.

Same thing in Vernon-Lumby, where United candidate Kevin Acton, the mayor of Lumby, pulled in 4,266 votes, knee-capping Conservative Dennis Giesbrecht and giving the riding to the NDP’s Harwinder Sandhu by 477 votes...

Now, of course, it was Mr. Rustad and his minions who rejected Kevin Falcon's ghosts of the Soccer Party past who, if they had been taken on in those two ridings, could have flipped the entire election result.

So, what does the good Mr. Rustad have to say about it all?

Here's more from Mr. Shaw's piece...

...“There was a lot of people that were dissatisfied (with Falcon’s decision) and wanted to carry on with the fight,” said Rustad. “It's unfortunate.”...

Unfortunate, indeed, for the denizens of grammar-challenged Rustadville.

As for the rest of us?

I beg to differ.

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In British Columbia 45% Wins, And Wins Often.

NoLeaderNoProblem
1952Ville


If you have been perusing British Columbia's punditland since Election Day you will have often read about how poorly David Eby did and how lucky he is to still be Premier.

Case in point, the following from Rob Shaw writing in various and sundry Glacier Media print organs:

Imagine attending your own funeral when suddenly — miraculously and inexplicably — you jolt back upright amongst the living. That’s a bit like being a BC New Democrat these days. The party lost its majority government on election day, faced the prospect of either being out of office entirely or grovelling to the two BC Greens for votes, and then abruptly regained its lifeline in Monday’s final count process to emerge with its majority intact...

{snip}

 ...More than half the voters did not support Eby or the BC NDP in the election. He lost numerous ridings and cabinet ministers. The province is badly divided after a brutal election. Is he the premier to bridge the growing gap between rural and urban B.C.?...

But did Eby really do so poorly with voters, overall, compared to previous BC NDP winners?

Well.

Rather than just prattling on with further fuzzy and thoroughly non-productive pundit parrot talk, why don't we have a look at the actual  numbers...

1972 - Dave Barrett's NDP wins a solid majority with 39% of the popular vote. WAC Bennett's Socred's lost when they only garnered 31% of the vote due, at least part, to the siphoning of 19% by David Anderson's Liberals.

1991 - Mike Harcourt's NDP wins an overwhelming majority with 41% of the popular vote. Rita Johnson's Socred's reach the end of the road when they get only 24% thanks in large part to the 33% garnered by Gordon Wilson's Liberals.

1996 - Glen Clark's NDP wins a close one, with a majority, due to the efficiency of the Dipper's 39% of the popular vote. Gordon Campbell's re-branded Liberals garner 42% of the vote and lose, given that Jack Weisberger's one-hit Reform wonder likely swiped more of their 9% share of the vote from the Liberals than Gordon Wilson's flash-in-the-pan PDA swiped from the NDP to garner their measly 6% vote share.

2017 - John Horgan's NDP forms a minority government with 40% of the popular vote together with Andrew Weaver's Greens, who hit their high water mark at 17%. Christy Clark's Liberals, who actually won the most seats, were ultimately the big losers despite the fact that they also garnered 40% of the vote.

2020 - The big one. Horgan 2.0 wins a massive, Harcourt-like NDP majority with 48% of the popular vote. Andrew Wilkinson's Liberals garner 34% and Furstenau's Greens slide slightly to 15%.

2024 - David Eby's NDP wins his squeaker majority with 45% of the popular vote. John Rustad's Conservatives lose with 43% of the vote as Furstenau's Greens wither down to 8%.

My point?

David Eby just won a greater share of the popular vote than any other BC NDP premier in history except for John Horgan 2.0.

As for the crack, bolded above, from Mr. Shaw about how poorly Eby did because 'more than half' of British Columbians did not support him?

If you go all the way back to 1952 only one BC Premier, ever, won a majority of the popular vote.

And that was Gordon Campbell in the most unusual, and exceptional, clock-cleaning that was 2001. 

To be absolutely clear here, this includes Wacky Bennett, who did not top 50% in any of his six majority wins in a row that spanned from 1953 to 1969.

Interestingly, in every single one of his victories, and that includes his party's pre-majority minority win in 1952, Wacky was greatly assisted by vote splitting, most often due to a significant percentage of folks pulling the lever for the Liberals.

So...

Stick that in your puffed-up pundit pipe and smoke it!



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It turns out that, in that 1952 election, the Socreds formed their minority government, with 30% of the vote, when they made WAC their leader AFTER the election. Just imagine how different this province might be today if the CCF, then led by Harold Winch, pictured above, third from right, who won 34% of the vote, had not been ambushed by Liberal leader 'Boss' Johnson's preferential vote machinations that year.


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Under The 'O'...Number 47.

ThisAin'tNoBingo

ThisAin'tNoFoolingAroundVille


From Elections BC, Monday at 6:00 pm:




And it looks like Chad Skelton's modelling was correct.

Because...

In the end the flipper was Surrey - Guildford:

There will likely be judicial recount in S-Guild as well as in Kelowna Centre where the Con lead is now down to 38 votes. Mr. Skelton also called that one correctly as coming close but not quite flipping.


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There are no longer any issues in the initially concerning ridings of Juan de Fuca and Surrey-Centre where both Dippers pulled away nicely during the mail-in and absentee counting.

Mangled Earworm in the subheader?....Most definitely...This!

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