Your Evening Audio...Dirty Old Town (Ewan MacColl Cover)

This one popped into my head the other day while I was writing the Last Snowball post.

For me, it's all about gasworks walls...

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Image at the top of the post....The Salford Canal near where Mr. MacColl grew up.



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Twenty-Five Watergate Units.

Time

DoubleTimeTickTickTickingInTheirHeadsVille

One Watergate unit = 18.5 minutes:

...(Ms.) Woods was President (Richard) Nixon's personal secretary, the same position she held from the time he hired her until the end of his lengthy political career.

Fiercely loyal to Nixon, Woods claimed responsibility in a 1974 grand jury testimony for inadvertently erasing up to five minutes of the 18 1⁄2 minute gap in a June 20, 1972, audio tape. Her demonstration of how this might have occurred—which depended upon her stretching to simultaneously press controls several feet apart (what the press dubbed the "Rose Mary Stretch")—was met with skepticism from those who believed the erasures, from whatever source, to be deliberate.

An expert analysis of the tapes, conducted in January 1974, revealed that there were four or five separate erasures. Later forensic analysis in 2003 determined that the tape had been erased in several segments—at least five, and perhaps as many as nine. The contents of the gap remain unknown...

Twenty-five Watergate units = 7 hours 37 minutes:

...Internal White House records from the day of the attack on the U.S. Capitol that were turned over to the House select committee show a gap in President Donald Trump’s phone logs of seven hours and 37 minutes, including the period when the building was being violently assaulted, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post and CBS News...

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Image: Wikipedia.
Subheader?....This.


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Crime-Fraud Exceptional.

From Kyle Cheney et al.  in Politico:

A federal judge ruled Monday that former President Donald Trump “more likely than not” attempted to illegally obstruct Congress as part of a criminal conspiracy when he tried to subvert the 2020 election on Jan. 6, 2021.

“Based on the evidence, the Court finds it more likely than not that President Trump corruptly attempted to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021,” U.S. District Court Judge David Carter wrote.

Carter’s sweeping and historic ruling came as he ordered the release to the House’s Jan. 6 committee of 101 emails from Trump ally John Eastman, rejecting Eastman’s effort to shield them via attorney-client privilege...

From Hugo Lowell in the Guardian:

...Trump and Eastman launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election in a strategy that was unprecedented in American history, (Judge) Carter said, describing their scheme as a “coup in search of a legal theory” and directly spurred the Capitol attack....


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Re: The post header, here's the exception..."...Any legal 'communications that are criminal in themselves' (such as a fraudulent legal aid application) or are 'intended to obtain legal advice to facilitate criminal activities are not privileged'..."


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Hard-Headed But Hopeful On CASA...

WorldWeary

AntidoteVille

Greg Fingas is a lefty lawyer from Saskatchewan whose good old fashioned amateur blog 'Accidental Deliberations' pops up regularly in the BlogCrawl over on the left sidebar.

That regularity is mostly driven by Mr. Fingas' truly excellent link round-ups but he also writes free-form posts, his most recent being a hard-headed but hopeful take on the federal Liberal/Dipper confidence and supply agreement.

Here's the kicker:

...After last year's election, (Jagmeet) Singh again floated the possibility of closer cooperation, while apparently seeing it as futile to even suggest a formal confidence agreement. But even with that lesser possibility on the table, the Libs expressed at most "not a closure" in response, with nothing coming of it until talks between the leaders this year.

And lest there be any doubt, that disparity in interest in working together is all too familiar for anybody who has hoped that Libs would treat minority Parliaments as opportunities to achieve progressive outcomes. From Paul Martin sneering that Jack Layton was "two votes short" of being worth talking to, to Pierre Trudeau torpedoing a functional confidence arrangement to manufacture a majority for himself, the history of the two parties is rife with theoretical possibilities which fell victim to the Libs' hubris and/or self-interest.

Needless to say, that leaves reason for concern that the same factors will affect both the length of time the current agreement figures to hold up, and the expectations as to what will be achieved while it does. And while the points of agreement may make some major achievements seem like real possibilities, there's a lot of work to be done to keep pushing toward actually bringing them to life before the Libs decide to go it alone.

A welcome antidote to the Keef's knee jerk(ish) take, no?

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The Last Snowball.

SqueezingSparks

OutOfCoalVille


My maternal grandmother was born in Newfoundland in 1911. 

Her husband, who worked for BC Hydro down at the old gasworks on the edge of Victoria's Rock Bay, died suddenly one spring evening in 1966.

Grandpa Al was out cutting the grass at the house we had just moved into on Monterey Avenue when he had a massive coronary.

At the time Ethel, who our oldest kid Bigger E. would much later know as 'Cookie Grandma', was so dependent on her husband that she didn't even know how to write a cheque.

But soon thereafter she learned to drive the brand new push button Valiant that Al had bought the previous fall and, best of all for her grandkids, she got a job at Welch's Chocolates on Hillside near Quadra if I remember correctly.

She even kept living in the big house on Saanich Road above Swan Lake for a few more years and when we went to visit my favourite thing was to have a snowball or three that she brought home from the store.

Second favourite were the glazed donuts from Woodwards that she also always seemed to have on hand.

****

Earlier this year Bigger E. got me a sleeve of snowball's from Purdy's for Valentine's day.

Not quite Welch's because the Purdy's cream filling is a little too high class and buttery for my memory bank's absolute liking, but really good nonetheless.

And, because I have a little willpower these days (sometimes), I didn't eat the last one, pictured above, until a couple of weeks ago.

****

My Grandma passed away after a long, full life in 2001. 

One of the last things she asked me, near the end when she had finally started to lose her faculties a wee bit, was if I was ever going to finish going to school.

At the time I was just a few months away from tenure so I told her I'd probably never finish.

She smiled and said that it was OK as long as I enjoyed it.

Well, I'm not sure I enjoy my job as much as eating snowballs or glazed donuts but it's probably a reasonably close third.

Which isn't a bad way to feel about things now that I can see retirement lurking just over the horizon.

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I had been outside with Grandpa earlier on that fateful spring night but went iinside to watch Adam West and Co. do their thing....Of course, in my seven year old brain I ridiculously thought that I might have been able to do something if I had not gone in to watch what was then my favourite television program.

Speaking of Batman on the TeeVee...Here's something, I bet you didn't know...Lyle Waggoner, later of Carol Burnett Show fame, was in the running for the role of the campified caped crusader.

In the late '70's, I lucked into a summer job at BC Hydro and actually worked as a janitor down at the old gasworks for Hydro..At that time there were some offices, a warehouse, and a bus washing area down there...Because it was a union job the money was good, so good that I almost quit school when they started calling me year round to do fill-in work... I'm not sure that job would come in third behind snowball gobbling  and donut consuming if I was still doing it now. 

It was my younger brother the fireman who eventually inherited the Valiant, still in pretty good shape in, I think, the late '80's when Grandma finally stopped driving.

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Far Rightwing Pot Calls Farther Rightwing Kettle Blueist.

As Leyland Cecco reports in the Guardian, a man who has spent his entire political career playing to  a far right base wherever and whenever he can find it is shocked (shocked, I tell you!), to learn that the political party he currently leads is filled to bursting with fellow travellers who are willing to ratchet up the crazy of that very same base to eleven:

...In a leaked recording of a meeting with caucus staff on Tuesday, Premier Jason Kenney warned a far-right element – skeptical of coronavirus measures and wedded to conspiracy theories – could seize control of the party in the coming weeks as the United Conservatives hold a leadership review.

“I will not let this mainstream conservative party become an agent for extreme, hateful, intolerant, bigoted and crazy views. Sorry to be so blunt with you but you need to understand what the stakes are here,” he said, before alluding to the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory with a warning that “people who think I am involved in a global conspiracy to traffic children” would show up to vote for his removal...

Gosh.

One can only wonder if there is a reason why the good Mr. Kenney left 'misogynist' off the list, above?

...Founded by Jesuits as St. Ignatius Academy in 1855, this religious institution (the University of San Francisco) was where a young student named Jason Kenney found an education that would serve him in life—not in his chosen major of philosophy, which he would never graduate from, but in a divisive brand of politics designed to elicit outrage and headlines.

In one notable incident, Kenney seized on a conflict involving the physical intimidation by men of women who were collecting signatures for a pro-choice petition. Siding against the women, and the right to freedom of speech, a righteous Kenney turned a minor incident into a conflagration that earned national attention as he threatened to take the matter all the way to the Pope...


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David Climenhaga has more on a how a base made rabid by a constant diet of rancid, red meat couldn't have turned on a nicer, more deservingly whiney guy...

Update, Sunday: Clearly,  the bunker air is truly heavy with desperation if it turns out the leak was engineered by Mr. Kenney's braintrust.

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If He Is The Ostrich, Who, Exactly, Is The Eggman?

PhonyBeatlmaniaHasBittenTheDust

TwistedLyricsVille 

The latest on Paulie Walnuts, via the AP:

Former Trump adviser Paul Manafort was removed from a plane at Miami International Airport before it took off for Dubai because he carried a revoked passport, officials said Wednesday...

{snip}

...Manafort, 72, led former President Donald Trump’s campaign for several months during the 2016 presidential race but was ousted in August of that year after revelations about his business dealings in Ukraine.

He was later indicted on a broad array of financial crimes as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. He was convicted by a jury in August 2018 and later pleaded guilty in federal court in Washington.

Speaking of Ukraine...

Emma Graham-Harrison and Joe Dyke, in the Guardian document how Russia is using the playbook they developed in Syria in Ukraine....This is brought into stark relief by the horrible devastation shown in drone footage over Mariupol as well as first hand reports from folks on the ground.

Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat details the machinations of Mr. Putin's disinformation campaign in the Financial Times while Digby notes a specific example in that the Russian prop initiative to bring the H. Biden Biolab Laptop conflabulation to the Fox News mainstage is working...

South of the Border...

Dan Froomkin of Press Watch notes that the NY Times Editorial Board does not understand the US first amendment.

While sharp commentators like the New Yorker's Jane Mayer are spelling out the 'supreme' legal ramifications of Ginni Thomas's Emails with then Trump administration chief of staff Mark Meadows, what seems to be lost is how apparently seriously Q-Anon/Kraken conspiracies were being taken inside the actual White House in the run-up to January 6, 2021.

Mike the Mad Microbiologist explains why professional Democrats who turn their other cheeks to the most riseable of Republican smears over and over and over again are very poor at their jobs...

And In #bcpoli news...

Heavy Kevvy is doing his darndest to get the Real Estate Board of Central Lotusland on his side by hinting at a Wild West of bold, big policy changes to come...Or some such thing.

And in the 'woulda-thunk-it' department, former BC Liberal AG Geoff Plant, the very fine fellow who once told anyone who would listen, including this lowly F-Troop list blogger, that there was 'no prior inducement' in the six million dollar BC Rail deal, is back in the provincial legal trenches displaying both grace and aplomb while representing Westcoast Forest Products in the Nuchalaht First Nation's land rights claim case.

Gosh, where have we heard the name Westcoast Forest Products linked to big chunks of land and BC Liberal government mucky-mucks before?...Hmmmmm....Hang on as second while I head on over to the archives for a second...OK...I'm Back...With the...goods.

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They've Released The Tests!

Link

Here's the list of pharmacies across the province where the tests are available.

Make sure you use them right before you visit someone vulnerable due to age, co-morbidities, or immune suppression.

And, for reasons explained here, if you're visiting such vulnerable folks for more than a few hours,  test again a second time.

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Meanwhile in Canuckistanian news...

The GStraight's Charlie Smith explains why, if that CASA thingy gets Canadians a national dental care system, we'll have Lotuslandian Dipper MP Don Davies to thank for it...

Speaking of the federal Lib-Dip CASA deal, Michael Harris keeps track of the screamiest of the screamers in the Tyee...

And, just in case you missed it, as the CBC's JP Tasker reports, even perpetual Red Tory 'rena rock frontman Jean Bon Charest raised his voice while wagging a finger at the deal...

...(F)ormer Quebec premier Jean Charest, said this "coalition" is "further proof that the Trudeau Liberals govern for themselves — not for Canadians.

"They will stop at nothing to keep power, even if it means buying themselves a majority," Charest said in a statement. "Canadians deserve adult leadership, not juvenile political theatre."...

Heckfire, even the word salad wonder strained a raised hand because she had something really, really important to say in her best Arnold Horshack voice:

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And down south...

One of the prosecutors in the now collapsed SDNY case, Mark Pomerantz, explains that he quit his job in disgust because he believes the evidence the team gathered overwhelmingly points to felonies committed by D. Trump...

Can't figure out why the Republicans have been nonsensically and baselessly attempting to link Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson to child molesters during her confirmation hearing? Well, it would appear to be a play to 17th letter of the alphabet adherents. Although, in a bizarre twist, David Kirkpatrick and Stuart Thompson of the NY Times see it as a both siderish 'he said/she said' type deal in a piece titled 'QAnon Cheers Republican Attacks On Jackson. Democrats See A Signal.'   Gosh. Is reportage of this kind not part of the real problem?

Finally, just in case you were wondering what the next Fox News headline, courtesy the Russian Ministry of Defense, might be...Get ready for...'Hunter Biden's Laptop Biolab!'

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The Keef Report...Savvy Is As Savvy Does.

AllTheCynicalWorldWeariness

ThatFitsVille


As far as Keef-the-Savvy is concerned, it's all about absolute winners and losers in the political power game:

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Meanwhile, Aaron Wherry, courtesy the MoCo, gives us an actual  sober assessment of what the federal Lib/Dib 'pact' is all about and what it could/might/might not mean in terms of actual political outcomes that could/might/might not affect actual people:

...A governing party that lacks a majority of the seats in the House of Commons essentially has three options. It can attempt to form a coalition government with one or more of the other parties. In that case, the parties would share the responsibility of government, with ministers from each party sitting in cabinet.

Conversely, it can attempt to negotiate with the other parties on a case-by-case basis to pass individual pieces of legislation.

Somewhere in between those two options is what the Liberals and NDP have chosen to pursue. In a confidence-and-supply arrangement, one party agrees to vote to keep the other party in power for a certain amount of time. In return, the party in power agrees to pursue certain priorities and initiatives — typically with some concessions to the smaller party's desires....

{snip}

...The NDP will want to establish that it made certain things happen — things like expanded dental care and the foundation for a pharmacare system. But the Liberals now have some assurance of stability and some reason to believe they will be able to go into the next election with a record of having done things.

Another three years in office also ensures that the big things the Liberals have been working on — climate policy, child care — will be more established by the time any other party gets a chance to make changes...


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Jay Rosen explains the penchant of a certain segment of the pro-punditry to be seen as stylistically savvy...Here.


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What's Past Is Prologue...

FiftyPlusPoint44Percent

SolutionVille

The Past...

...By 1964 the pro-Medicare forces in the country were riding the crest of public opinion during a period when the political culture was moving to the left. The political alignment of national parties saw six years of minority governments over three elections between 1962 and 1968, and this favoured those political forces attempting to move the country in a more progressive direction. The NDP was growing and this strengthened left Liberals who argued that their party must protect their left flank. This in turn encouraged the red Tories within the Progressive Conservatives, who argued that the party must move left to remain electorally competitive. All of this was occurring during a minority situation when an election might occur at any time and no party wanted to be caught on the wrong side of a popular issue like public Medicare...


And the Prologue...

The leadership of the Liberals and the NDP have reached a tentative agreement that would see the NDP support the Liberal government to keep it in power until 2025 in exchange for movement on key NDP priorities, CBC News has learned...

{snip}

...The agreement would see the NDP back the Liberals in confidence votes. In return, the Liberals will follow through on some elements of national pharmacare and dental care programs — programs that have long been promoted by the NDP....

****

Meanwhile, as David Climenhaga points out, the near future will very likely be filled with the screamers attempting to equate the word 'coalition' with Satan's playground.

And/or some such terribly anti-democratic thing...

If the deal the federal Liberals and New Democrats seem to have cooked up to keep the Trudeau Government in power until 2025 in return for national pharmacare and dental care programs turns out to be for real, brace yourselves for a spectacular national tantrum by the Conservatives led by, well, whoever.

The new leader of the party of Stephen Harper may not have been chosen yet, but his or her reaction is a certainty. Expect to hear the word “coalition” a lot, delivered with a snarl and a curled lip.

You’ll also be hearing how a deal to maintain the confidence of the House of Commons long enough to establish some national programs of value to the Dominion is “undemocratic,” even “dictatorial,” and undoubtedly “socialistic.”

Indeed, Conservative interim leader and soon-to-be Stornoway resident Candice Bergen has already called the idea “an NDP-Liberal coalition” – note the order of the putative partners – and complained loudly that “Canadians did not vote for an NDP government.”...


Personally, just like back in run-up to national medicare days, I reckon that the harder the screamers scream the better the deals will ultimately be for Canadians.

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Subheader?...The combined percentage of Liberal/NDP votes in the 2021 federal election.

Raymond Tomlin has a great piece on how Lester Pearson worked with Tommy Douglas to start to create our national medicare system (not to mention student loan and pension plan systems)  ...Here.

And not all screamers (and those who seek to sow politically motivated cynicism) use loud voices.



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The Last International Journalists In Mariupol.

The Associated Press' Mstyslav Chernov and Evgeniy Maloletka rushed to the strategic port city of Mariupol, located between the Donbas and Crimea, on February 23rd when it became clear that war was coming.

They stayed for 20 days and documented events throughout.

Now they have been forced to flee and Mr. Chernov explains what will be lost in their (and all their colleagues) leaving:

...The absence of information in a blockade accomplishes two goals.

Chaos is the first. People don’t know what’s going on, and they panic. At first I couldn’t understand why Mariupol fell apart so quickly. Now I know it was because of the lack of communication.

Impunity is the second goal. With no information coming out of a city, no pictures of demolished buildings and dying children, the Russian forces could do whatever they wanted. If not for us, there would be nothing.

That’s why we took such risks to be able to send the world what we saw, and that’s what made Russia angry enough to hunt us down...


Chernov's words and Maloletka's images (and all of their reportage, much of which is linked to in their piece) are required reading/viewing for those looking for a disinformation-free account of what is actually happening on the ground.

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Kyiv Is Calling...The Wheat's Growing Thin.

And, just in case you were wondering, it's Jones/Simonon/Headon approved:

The Clash have given their blessing to a new version of their song London Calling by a Ukrainian punk band called Beton. Kyiv Calling, recorded near the frontline, has lyrics that call upon the rest of the world to support the defence of the country from Russian invaders.

All proceeds of what is now billed as a “war anthem” will go to the Free Ukraine Resistance Movement (FURM) to help fund a shared communications system that will alert the population to threats and lobby for international support...

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Not that it is in any way equivalent in terms of the big theme of the thing but the Strummer-penned lyric fragment in the header made it impossible not to think of this Canuckistanian wheat-flavoured tune.


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Unmitigated Mendacity.

Recognizing mendacity then...

“The rules are simple. They lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying anyway, and we keep pretending to believe them.”

Elena Gorokova

On growing up in the Soviet Union in the 1960's.

Recognizing mendacity now...

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Martin Pengelly, writing in the Guardian, has more on the 'now'....Here.

Btw...The Blogroll is back! (on the left sidebar)...Found a work-around to remove objectionable stuff...

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The Bipartisan Sunshine Protection Unilateral Disarmament Pact.

DeliberativeBody

BagVille

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Update Sunday afternoon...Reader Dan points out that this was done before, US-wide, back in licorice pizzified Nixonian end times days (1974)...People (and an actually responsive Congress) hated it so much that it was gone the following fall.

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Around here, we've been talking about permanent daylight savings time for quite awhile.

Heckfire, the provincial government even passed legislation to help make it happen three years ago.

But, as John Horgan mentioned just before this year's time change last weekend, we've been waiting for the western American states to follow suit:

While speaking at an unrelated news conference (last) Friday (March 11th), Horgan said the province is ready to get rid of the seasonal time change once neighbouring states in the U.S. change their policies too...

And then this week this happened:

Senators caught most of America by surprise on Tuesday when they unanimously passed a bill that would make daylight saving time permanent nationwide...

But here's the thing...

It turns out that the passage of the 'Sunshine Protection Act' sailed through the Senate on the wings of some sort of weird unanimous consent quirk that caught a whole lot of US'ian Senators  by surprise, including Republican Tom Cotton:

...One Senate source with knowledge of the situation said Sen. Tom Cotton vehemently opposes making daylight saving time permanent.

“No comment,” Cotton told BuzzFeed News when asked if he opposed the bill.

The source said that Cotton would have objected to the unanimous consent request, but his staff never told him it was happening.

“No comment,” Cotton told BuzzFeed News when asked why he didn’t object to the bill.

And then there was Democrat Chris Coons:

...Asked to re-create his reaction to the news, Sen. Chris Coons issued a series of shocked stammers that is impossible to phonetically translate...

So how did this happen?

Well...

...Any single senator could have blocked the daylight saving bill from passing but many didn’t know it was even happening. Sen. Rick Scott, a permanent daylight saving time proponent who signed a similar bill into law when he was governor of Florida, said he would have gone to give a speech on the Senate floor if he had known...

Gosh. 

What a way to run a country, especially when it comes to something that will actually affect everybody in it.


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Meanwhile, while Mr. Horgan is happy with this week's development in Washington, it's important to realize that this 'Act' with the bizarre Orwellian name has not yet passed the House or been signed by a wide-awake-in-the-daylight-savings-time-Delaware-sunrise light, Joe Biden.

Image at the top of the post...Sunrise over Bethany Beach, Delaware courtesy Flickr photographer Jack Slagle.

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Should We Change Our Police Act?

SomeDropsInTheBucket

AreLargerThanOthersVille

I must confess that, what with all that is going on in the world at the moment, the following story barely registered before it slid right on by:

The Vancouver Police Department has won its appeal to the B.C. government to receive $5.7 million in funding that it was denied in the city's 2021 budget.

The police board received a ruling in writing Monday from (former RCMP assistant commissioner) Wayne Rideout, (the current provincial) assistant deputy minister and director of police services, ordering the money be restored.

The board had appealed a December 2020 vote by Vancouver city council to freeze police funding in the 2021 city budget...

But then I read an opinion piece from Paul Willcocks in the Tyee that helped me understand that something considerably more important than $6 million of a total $340 million annual VPD budget  is at stake here.

Because, essentially, the way our police act is currently written means that, when push comes to shove, elected officials have no power in the ultimate decision making process machinery.

Mr. Willcocks explains:

...The Police Act says non-elected police boards don’t have to accept budget decisions by city councils. They can appeal them to the provincial director of police services — Rideout — who rules on what projects taxpayers must fund, how many new officers departments can hire and policing priorities...

But, what's the problem with that? After all, police boards are entirely qualified to overturn the decisions of city councils, right?

Well...

Mr. Willcocks further explains:

...The police boards can have up to nine members. The mayor is chair, and can only vote to break a tie. Council can name one member. And the rest are appointed by the province.

The boards — with no public accountability — hire and fire the police chief, sets priorities and the police budget. The board can consider council’s priorities or community concerns. But it makes the decisions.

And if there’s a conflict, the director of police services rules...

Gosh.

Can you imagine if we allowed armed services boards, overseen by a general, to make all the decisions about military budgets, priorities and personnel?

Or,  doctors, and...

Or, teachers, and...

Or, roadmakers, and...

Or, perhaps worst of all, cell biologists who think that all mankind would be best served if there was a PCR machine and a tissue culture incubator on every corner...

The point being that, even if folks on such boards do their best to be conscientious, there were always be concerns about cloistered thinking and potential conflicts of self-interest, not to mention concerns about a lack of democratic accountability.

Luckily, there is, as Mr. Willcocks points out, another, more balanced way to go:

...(O)ther jurisdictions have struck a better balance. Ontario gives city councils in larger municipalities the ability to appoint a majority of police board members. Disputes between police boards and councils go to the Ontario Civilian Police Commission, an independent tribunal...

{snip}

There is a chance of change in B.C. An all-party committee of MLAs has been reviewing the Police Act and will deliver recommendations for change...

Here's hoping that our democratically elected provincial representatives manage to put partisanship aside on this one and do the right thing.

OK?



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Of course, as indicated by the image at the top of the post, it is entirely possible that the illustrious cell biology board run amok would also mandate practice amps along with those incubators...

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The Not So United League Of Nations.

That was then...

On December 14, 1939, the League of Nations, the international peacekeeping organization formed at the end of World War I, expels the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in response to the Soviets’ invasion of Finland on November 30...

This is now...

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Andrew Nikiforuk, writing in the Tyee, has a great piece on the 1939 winter war and how Finland won the peace by  in the end...



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The 'Great Hoax' That's Good For Those Looking For Summer Beach Homes.

LocationLocation

LocationVille

Via Digby, the Washington Post's Josh Dawsey, writing about Mr. Trump's latest speech to wealthy Republican party donors:

"...(Trump) called global warming “a great hoax” that could actually bring a welcome development: more waterfront property..."


Meanwhile, Norm Farrell, citing a paper in the British Journal of Political Science, notes that the overwhelming majority of the scientific contrarians who formally oppose the concept of man-made climate change are not actually climate scientists:

"...Collectively, our findings show that the majority of those who signed documents that reject AGW [anthropogenic global warming] are not climate experts. As a result, these individuals lack the authority to render an opinion regarding climate change science…

{snip}

97 per cent do not meet expert criteria and are also involved with organizations and industries who make up the climate change countermovement..."


Hmmm...

One can only wonder how many of those 'contrarians' are moonlighting as vacation property real estate agents.

Or some such thing.


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Image at the top of the post?...The actual band Beach House.

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