One Dollar Each.

ThisIsTheModernWorld

We'reLivingInVille

Last week we mentioned the following Tweet, posted by someone who bought one of Mr. Musk's blue checkmarks (since removed) for their PharmaCo parody site:

This spawned first joy and then an angry backlash against the real PharmaCo when folks learned it wasn't true.

As a result the real company apologized:

What the real company did not do was apologize for the exorbitant price it charges patients, especially American patients, for its insulin-based products:

...A 2018 study from BMJ Global Health estimates the cost to produce a vial of insulin from between $2 for regular human insulin to less than $7 for newer analogs, like the Lispro analog Eli Lily produces. The list price for that analog is $274.70 per 10 mL vial...

{snip}

...The RAND Corporation 2018 study demonstrated that the cost of insulin to diabetics in the U.S. is generally five to 10 times higher than in the other OECD countries (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development). Where the 2018 average price per vial was less than $10 for other OECD patients, it was just under $100 for U.S. patients...

However, in the wake of the false parody tweet the CEO of the real company, Mr. David Ricks, did say that they were doing their best to make things better:

“It probably highlights that we have more work to do to bring down the cost of insulin for more people...{snip}...We’ve done tons of things, but it obviously hasn’t penetrated the clutter. We’re obviously not the only insulin company. But the tropes go on."

Tons of things?

How about trying to emulate one really big thing that happened almost one hundred years ago:

...On January 23, 1923, an American patent on both insulin and Toronto’s method of making it was awarded to Banting, Collip, and Best. For $1.00 to each, the three discoverers assigned their patent rights to the Board of Governors of the University of Toronto. The application had stressed that none of the other researchers in the past had been able to produce a nontoxic antidiabetic extract. A patent was necessary to restrict manufacture of insulin to reputable pharmaceutical houses who could guarantee the purity and potency of their products...

You read that correctly.

The discoverers of insulin sold off their patent for one dollar, each, to make sure things were done properly for patients.

In other words...

No need for 'tons' of anything whatsoever.

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Phone-A-Fy!

ItsAllInYourHead

MrTweedyVille

Apparently, everyone is out to get the gazillionare:

Elon Musk has accused Apple of threatening to remove Twitter from its App Store without giving a reason to the social media platform.

Twitter’s new owner also said the iPhone maker had stopped advertising on Twitter, prompting him to ask if the tech group hated free speech.

Musk revealed the potential App Store ban in a series of tweets on Monday. He tweeted: “Apple has also threatened to withhold Twitter from its App Store, but won’t tell us why.”...

So.

What will the leader of the Muskian Free World do if what he, himself, has prophesied comes to pass?

Why,  just like he once did with flame throwers and tunnel borers, the good Mr. Musk says he will make his own phone for the truly devoted:

But here's the thing.

That has been tried before by those herding the flocks of the freedom aggrieved that Mr. Musk is now courting and it did not turn out so well:

The 22 year-old self-proclaimed "Bitcoin millionaire" Erik Finman in an interview with The New York Times described smartphones as "the ultimate political tools. Everyone has one in their pocket." His brand new Freedom Phone promises to prioritize "free speech and privacy"above anything else. You might assume that the Freedom Phone follows the trend of phone-makers like Apple that use software updates to make it harder for companies to track you. Finman's initial announcement for the Freedom Phone was followed swiftly by security concerns raised by numerous publications and privacy experts...

{snip}

...If you're looking for a phone that protects your privacy, look elsewhere. The Freedom Phone raises a lot of red flags. Initially the phone was supposed to run software called Freedom OS, which Finman claimed protects your privacy. It had an "uncensorable" app store called the PatriApp store that claims to feature apps banned by Big Tech. In the announcement video, Finman shows off a phone that is powered off and looks similar to a budget Chinese phone that sells for one-quarter of the Freedom Phone's $500 price...

Imagine that.

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Subheader?....Chickens running.

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Road Regrets (D. Mangan Cover)

BricksOn
BricksVille


It's not just what Mr. Mangan makes, it's also the way he makes it.

He also has a great Substack too.

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Image at the top of the post and subheader?...See a recent post from Mangan in response to a question about one of his recent lyrical phrases.

This is one of those 'when in doubt Capo VI'  'wedge' songs for me...Bigger E. who should have no regrets, road or otherwise, will understand...As for littler e....Who knew she would turn me, the old guy, onto a pretty brilliant re-do of an old Nick Hornby (musically-adjacent) saw set where bricks are.

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Speechify!

HollowedOutBeThy
NamePartDeuxVille


It appears that a whole bunch of Mr. Musk's top revenue generators in birdland have flown the coop, as reported by Halisia Hubbard of NPR:

Half of Twitter's top 100 advertisers appear to no longer be advertising on the website. A report from Media Matters for America states that these 50 advertisers have spent almost $2 billion on Twitter ads since 2020 and more than $750 million just in 2022. 

Seven additional advertisers have slowed their advertising to almost nothing, according to the report, which was published on Tuesday. These companies have paid Twitter more than $255 million since 2020...

And why have the advertisers done this?

Fear of a massive backlash from the howling bowels of Wokeistan?

Perhaps.

Fear of their money vaporizing without a trace as the entire coop goes up in flames?

Maybe.

But it looks like the whole 'freedom-to-buy-blue-checks-and-say-whatever-you-want' within the coop's algorithm amplification machinery can have real world consequences:

...Eli Lilly and Co. stopped showing ads on Twitter the day after an account impersonating the pharmaceutical company — complete with a purchased blue check mark — posted, "We are excited to announce insulin is free now."

Eli Lilly asked Twitter to take it down, but the tweet remained up for hours, because the platform's staff was stretched thin due to recent layoffs and resignations. The tweet garnered hundreds of retweets and thousands of likes, and Eli Lilly's stock soon took a dive...

Imagine that!

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Image at the top of the post....Best and Banting...True innovators whose story is really something.

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Projectify!

HollowedOutBe

ThyNameVille

From that very fine fellow who seems to induce a quasi-religious fervour in a goodly portion of his (alleged) one hundred and eighteen million followers:

Sure thing.

Except for, you know...

Data:

...We provide quantitative evidence from a long-running, massive-scale randomized experiment on the Twitter platform that committed a randomized control group including nearly 2 million daily active accounts to a reverse-chronological content feed free of algorithmic personalization...

{snip}

...Our results reveal a remarkably consistent trend: In six out of seven countries studied, the mainstream political right enjoys higher algorithmic amplification than the mainstream political left. Consistent with this overall trend, our second set of findings studying the US media landscape revealed that algorithmic amplification favors right-leaning news sources...

And who wrote the study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in December of 2021, quoted from above?

Woke academics hiding high atop a social science tower made of pressed ivory soap suds?

No...

Mercenary trolls housed in a Soros-funded bunker deep beneath Left Blogistan?

Not them either...

Because, actually...

It was researched and written by folks from Twitter itself (mostly):

Imagine that!

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Voting For The Bluest Of Programs In A Deep Red State.

We'reNotInKansasAnymore

ThomasFrankTurnedInsideOutVille


The voters of South Dakota might never elect a Democrat to a state-wide office ever again.

However they will happily ignore the blather of the Republican officials they have elected and vote for a big government democratic program that helps them and theirs:

South Dakota voters on Tuesday approved a measure to expand the state’s Medicaid program under the Affordable Care Act.

The program, which takes effect in July and is expected to cover more than 40,000 people, passed with about 56 percent support.

The Republican-controlled state, where lawmakers have long resisted Medicaid expansion, is the seventh in the last five years to do so at the ballot box...

Imagine that!



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Thomas Frank wrote the book 'What's the Matter With Kansas' awhile back in which he asked why folks in that fair state appeared to keep voting against their own best interests over and over and over again.



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Of Mice And (Not) Men.

NeitherLenny
NorGeorgeVille


There is tag line that is often used derisively to comment on over-hyped biomedical research reports of a pre-clinical nature.

That line is:

"...In mice."

The point being that early stage biomedical research has not yet been demonstrated in humans where the ultimate result is often very different or, most often, not as impressive in real world conditions where all extraneous variables cannot be tightly controlled for.

Which, of course (institutional PR machinations aside), is actually the way things should work in that first you must demonstrate proof-of-principle with pre-clinical experiments, many of which are often carried out in mice, before you can even start to think about moving on to clinical testing where the first hurdle is safety followed by accuracy and efficacy.

In the case of the Theranos debacle, the details of the pre-clinical work are, to put it charitably, fuzzy. More importantly, the folks running the place never demonstrated any clinical safety, accuracy or efficacy, whatsoever.

In fact, when it came right down to it the Theranos braintrust, as the courageous whistleblower Erica Cheung detailed, deliberately masked safety concerns, inaccuracies and lack of efficacy by removing and/or ignoring data generated by their 'technology' that they did not like (or did not match that produced by proven machines).

Ultimately, the result was the following:

...“There were over a million (blood) tests that patients had which were fraudulent”, said Eric Topol, a cardiologist and founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute (La Jolla, CA, USA), where he is a professor of molecular medicine. “That is the most egregious part.”...

These fraudulent tests led to real world/real patient consequences, a small sample of which were detailed at the trial of Elizabeth Holmes:

...During the 15 week trial, 29 witnesses took the stand, but only three were patients or doctors. Two witnesses testified about getting Theranos tests that incorrectly detected HIV/AIDS and prostate cancer. A third person testified that a Theranos blood test she took at an Arizona Walgreens pharmacy showed a high level of a hormone indicating she was having a miscarriage. When the test was repeated twice by a different laboratory, the results showed that her pregnancy was still viable...

Now.

It is important to understand that Ms. Holmes', who this week was sentenced to serious jail time, was not officially convicted of defrauding or harming patients.

Instead, she was officially convicted of defrauding a bunch of rich people that she bamboozled into investing shovels full of money in her fraudulent company with its fraudulent technology that should have never been used for real world patient diagnostic purposes in the first place.

Personally, I choose to recognize the 'unofficial' verdict based on the defrauding of the real world patients.


________
Personally, I also found all the media reports that pegged this as a 'Silicon Valley story' where it was common to 'fake it till you make it' extremely egregious. This was not first faking and then ultimately making  a better way to stream a movie or book a vacation home. This was about patient diagnosis where fakery cannot ever be tolerated.

Ms. Cheung's story is a truly amazing and even more truly courageous one...Tyler Shultz, who was the grandson of one of the rich investors, also did the right thing. However, given his family situation Mr. Shultz was never left hanging over the edge like Ms. Cheung was, especially when the Theranos-hired lawyers and PI's started to come after them for speaking the truth.


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(Not So) OK, Boomer (Anymore).

Traps'RUs

HobbesianVille

In my opinion, one of the more insightful columnists writing about the passing parade in greater Lotuslandia is Jody Paterson.

A couple of weeks ago Ms. Paterson's blog came back to life and, most recently, she wrote about how her generation, which is also mine, has no stories about how bad things were in their youth.

You know, those stories about playing hockey with frozen hunks of dung and/or going to school in a shoebox.

And why is that?

Because, as Ms. Paterson points out, we who grew up on the tail end of the post-war boom actually had it really, really good back in the days of yore:

"...It struck me the other day that the Boomer generation that I'm part of just might be the first generation in Canada whose own stories will instead be of how good they had it compared to their grandkids. 

Let me tell ya, kid, back in my day we had houses for people. We didn't even have a word for homelessness, and you camped for fun, not because it was that or nothing. We burned through natural resources like there was no tomorrow. (Turns out that last part was true.) 

Back in my day, we made real money, and if we hit a bad spell, could fall back on employment insurance that actually covered most of a person's bills. We had doctors. Weather was just weather, not an ominous portent of end of days..."

I would add that we of a certain age also had a good post-secondary education available to us at a cost of almost nothing at all.*

The larger point?

There really was a concerted class levelling that went on in these here parts back in the '60's and '70's that expanded possibilities for everyone.

Which brings me to a recent piece in Jacobin by David Moscrop, whose stuff I also have a lot of time for, about how the majority of Canadians these days don't trust, essentially, anyone:

"...Beyond political and media institutions, social cohesion is also thin in Canada — and trending downward. In March, Ipsos found that “only 30% of adults say most people can be trusted against 70% who believe that you can’t be too careful dealing with people.” Once again, the data is conditioned by education and income level — those with more education and income trust one another more..."

So.

Why is that (part deux)?

Well, Mr. Moscrop, who is a young guy, thinks that in large part this is because folks today have lost or will never see any of those nice, and truly important, things that we Boomers had when we were young:

"...Polite Canadian society encourages the wringing of one’s hands about low trust. It makes for good columns and think pieces, fascinating TV and radio, and endless polls and reports. Evidently, all of this fretting is for nothing, because the arc of trust is bending toward its antithesis despite the consternation of elites. It’s not surprising. The market economy and class are rarely discussed when trust is the topic of conversation, even if everyone will skirt around the issue that plainly sits right in the middle of the room. Come on, people. It’s a class issue. It’s an economic issue. And the origin of low trust, and thus its deleterious manifestations, is a political failure by those who run government and shape the economy. The origin of low trust is decades of capitalist depredation and the thinning out of the state in such a way that working people have been left to fend for themselves in a Hobbesian state of struggle..."

I, for one, think he just might be right.

______

*Longtime reader EG and I have discussed this point before...My first year as an undergraduate student cost me $540. As a result, those of us who went to school at that time could quite easily finance university with summer jobs alone or, at worst, with small student loans that didn't cripple us financially until we reached middle age or beyond (the latter was C.'s situation).

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COP-27...Look Under The (5th) Big W.

It'sAMadMadMad

MadWorldVille


From George Monbiot's lede, in the Guardian, on the failure of the recent COP-27 meeting to do anything whatsoever:

...So how have heads of government chosen to use this miracle (of life on earth)? ...

{snip}

...They have chosen to do nothing. Nothing that has a realistic chance, in this contest of probabilities, of changing our trajectory. They had a choice at the Cop27 meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh of defending the habitable planet or appeasing their sponsors. 

They went with the sponsors...

So.

Given all that.

And given that, as Mr. Monbiot points out, it has been going on like that for the last fifty years straight, it's pretty hard not to ask yourself why.

As in...

Why does this keep happening?

Well, how about this?

There are more than 600 fossil fuel lobbyists at the Cop27 climate conference, a rise of more than 25% from last year and outnumbering any one frontline community affected by the climate crisis.

There are 636 lobbyists from the oil and gas industries registered to attend the UN event in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. At Glasgow, the figure was 503, which outnumbered the delegation of any single country. This year the only country with a larger delegation is the United Arab Emirates, hosts of Cop28 next year, which has 1,070 registered delegates, up from 176 last year...

In other words the lunatics, errrr, 'sponsors' are running the asylum.

And, of course, it is in their best interests that the quo stays status as long as carbonly possible.

______

Re: Header...The five 'W's' of journalism are who, what, when, where and why...

As for the image at the top of the post...That's the gang looking for the pot of gold under the 'Big W' in 'It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World'

And, while Canada may not quite be the UAE when it comes to rolling around in petro dollars 24/7, we, too, took our share of 'sponsors' along for the ride.


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O'Brien's Nocturne (M. Ward Cover)

 

1989 was a very good year for C. and me.

One thing I don't mention in the bit of blather after the tune was that it was also around this time that we got hooked on minor league baseball, thanks to all those free tickets that Stu Kehoe gave out, which stood us in good stead a few years later when we began our adventures in America...

It's The Ratings, Stupid.

 

While Gil Scott-Heron may have been right about the revolution not being televised, that does not rule out the stupid.

Being televised, I mean. 

Especially if said stupid garners big time ratings.

To wit, here is the Washington Post's Margaret Sullivan writing about why cable news in general, and CNN in particular, couldn't lay off the stupid back in the salad days of golden escalator rides, if not showers:

Just a few years ago, CNN seemed intent on giving Donald Trump as much help as possible for his (2016) presidential run.

The network obsessively covered the candidate’s raucous speeches in the Republican presidential primary. It treated his campaign like entertainment, rather than a prelude to autocracy. It ran chyrons like “Breaking News: Standing By for Trump to Speak” over footage of an empty stage and hired Trump loyalists such as Corey Lewandowski and Kayleigh McEnany as talking heads to boost his reputation...

{snip}

... (Then CNN boss Jeff) Zucker and Trump shared a common goal: TV ratings.

Trump, quite accurately, has called himself a “ratings machine.” The endless media attention he has commanded is a testament to that.

And Zucker? A former NBC executive once called him a “ratings whore.” A reporter who worked for him at CNN put it more genteelly, telling New York Times columnist Ben Smith that ratings were always the executive’s “North Star.”...

And it wasn't just the cables who were hooked on the money that Trump's ratings while spouting the stupid would make for them. It was the network's too as the late, great Eric Boehlert noted at the time (i.e. the spring of 2016):

...CBS executive chairman, president, and CEO Les Moonves recently insisted the Trump campaign "may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS," adding, "Donald's place in this election is a good thing."....

****

But that was then and this is now.

From Digby, writing about how the cable networks dealt with a particularly stupid announcement earlier this week:

...The hand-picked Mar-a-Lago crowd was straining to stay engaged as Trump rambled on. First CNN cut away and then Fox News followed suit — MSNBC didn’t cover it at all — switching to their pundit panels even as he was still talking. That was when we finally got a glimpse of how this pseudo-event was going to be received by the media...

Hmmmm...

One can only wonder if Mr. Trump will take this latest development as a sign that the only way to get those ratings and networks back on his side is to ratchet the stupid up to, say, infinity.

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HST Sunday...Bunglers, Swine Or Both?

YouMoveLikeACat

MartyVille

"There are a lot of people in this country - editors, congressmen and lawyers among others - who like themselves a lot better today for the way they reacted when the Watergate octopus got hold of them.

There are also a lot of people who got dragged down forever by it - which is probably just as well for the rest of us, because many of them were exposed as either dangerous bunglers, ruthless swine or both..."

Fear and Loathing In Washington: The Boys in the Bag.

Rolling Stone #164, July 4, 1974.

****

First, from the inner sanctum of the intellectual, hard-headed heart of the Murdoch family's media empire:

Second, from American conservatism's longtime media apologist-in-chief:

______

Subheader?...My favourite line from the bungled, but most certainly not dangerous 'Where The Buffalo Roam' wherein Thompson says it to the Wenner stand-in, played by Bruno Kirby, after yet another prank by the former that freaks out the latter.

Why no link to the Thompson piece still wholly owned by Jann Wenner?...Well, it turns out the king of the ten percenters has decided to put most of HST's stuff behind a paywall...Personally, I was more than happy to use that as an excuse to rifle through my dog-eared copy of 'The Great Shark Hunt'  (with the Bank of America ATM slip book mark, circa 1994), to find the above quote.



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Wheat Kings (Tragically Hip Cover)

Late breaking story on the CBC:

..."Even if David became prime minister, the day that David dies, the first line of his obituary is going to be 'David Milgaard, who spent 23 years in prison for a wrongful conviction and later went on to become Prime Minister"...

Sadly, Mr. Milgaard passed away earlier this year and his wrongful conviction and longterm inprisonment was, indeed, the first line of his obituary.

Still, it was good to read in pretty much every single one of his obits that Mr. Milgaard built a good life for himself and his loved ones despite all that we did to him.

Here's Gord Downie's lyrical and the band's musical version of Mr. Milgaard's story, written and first recorded thirty years ago now (which is really, really hard to believe)...

 

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Image at the top of the post?...The greatest junior hockey line I ever saw, the Brandon Wheat Kings' Ray Allison, Bill Derlago and Brian Propp, from back in the days (i.e. the late '70's) when I was still really paying attention.

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We Are All Frances McDormand Now.

There is a scene from that ode to the 1970's, 'Almost Famous' where Frances McDormand, playing young William's Mom shouts, 'Don't Do Drugs!' to comic effect.

Why comic?

Well, back then recreational drug use really was not a super big deal.

How do I know this?

Because, while I was no young William/Cameron Crowe, I too was a kid coming of age in the 1970's.

Of course, that would all gradually change as the kids and the idols of that age got older and, for some of them at least, excess and addiction gradually took hold.

The point is, though, that none of my friends went to a party on a Saturday night took something that somebody gave them in the heat/fun of the moment, and keeled over dead.

That is not the case now. 

And it's not just the fentanyl.

The following is from a recent piece in The Tyee by Moira Wyton:

...Data released today (Nov 7th) by the BC Coroners Service shows the toll of an increasingly contaminated drug supply that makes it nearly impossible for anyone to know how much and what they are taking.

At least 81 per cent of samples contained fentanyl, an opioid up to 100 times as potent as heroin, which began to take hold in B.C.’s criminalized drug supply in 2015. Extreme fentanyl concentrations have contributed to 16 per cent of deaths in the last year, compared to 8 per cent pre-March 2020.

Fentanyl’s even more potent analogue, carfentanil, has contributed to 79 deaths this year, and 190 the year before.

More and more benzodiazepines, a class of sedatives that don’t respond to naloxone, are present in the drug supply, making poisonings more likely to be fatal and more difficult to reverse when combined with opioids. Since July, the benzo analogue etizolam has been found in 38 per cent of samples, and contributed to as many as 55 per cent of deaths in some months.

While the drug supply and resources vary across the province, the crisis continues to affect every community in B.C...

Ms. Wynton's piece is mostly focussed on the need for a safe supply for the folks that are in the throes of addiction which is something I very much agree with.

However, in addition, me I'm planning to make like Frances McDormand every chance I get when it comes to my own kids and all the kids I work with that like to go out and have fun with their friends on a Saturday night.

OK?



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Who's Happiest About The Red Wave That Wasn't?

AllTheirCrazies'RBelong
ToThemVille


So.

Who's happiest about the fact that the US Republicans made historically low midterm gains?

How about Dark Brandon, who certainly out did Obama given that Barry O lost 60, plus, house seats in his first midterm election?

Of course....

Or, how about people who actually care about what happens to other people as well as what happens to them and there's?

Even more, of course.

But what about the crazies in the Republican caucus who will now be able to run around stomping their well-shod feet and screaming like a mini-army of Joe Manchins on speedballs demanding the fealty of whomever finally becomes their own Ghost-of-a-John-Boehner house leader?

Well...

...Some House Republicans, like Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., are “just as happy with a slim majority” because it would benefit them, Politico reported.

“I mean, look at what Joe Manchin has done in the Senate as the one deciding vote, right? I would love for the Massie caucus to be relevant. If there’s a one seat majority, my caucus has one person. It’s me. So I can decide whether a bill passes or not,” Massie told the outlet. “I’d be the wrong guy if you’re trying to find somebody who’s heartbroken that we don’t have a 40-seat majority.”...

And whadd'ya know...

The foot stomping of the hopped-up mini-me's trying to force star chamber hearings on, say, vaccinations, has already begun...

_____

Hey!...Good news on the local bloggodome front...Jody Paterson is back!


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The Chasming.

Who'sWedging

WhoVille


No matter what happens with the US'ian midterm election returns you're sure to be reading all sorts of aftermath stories noting that the American populace is more divided than ever.

Heckfire.

Sulzberger family sinecure David Brooks even did his best to get out in front of this colour-free big media wave to come when he slipped stuff like the following into his New York Times column late last week:

"... America has riven itself into two different cultures. It’s very hard for the party based in one culture to reach out and win voters in the other culture — or even to understand what people in the other culture are thinking.

As I’ve shuttled between red and blue America over decades of reporting on American politics, I’ve seen social, cultural, moral and ideological rifts widen from cracks to chasms..."

But here's the thing.

Like many a never Trumper who, starting in January of 2017, suddenly saw the light when it comes to the divided state of the American body politic, the good Mr. Brooks didn't always do what he's doing now.

In point of fact, Mr. Brooks once wrote stuff like the following, over and over and over again, for William Kristol in the Weekly Chasm Maker Standard, pre-Trump and Tea Party, in this specific case 2003, when a super-fine fellow named Bush stood on an aircraft carrier off of San Diego and declared the mission in Iraq accomplished:

"...My guess is that the Bush haters will grow more vociferous as their numbers shrink. Even progress in Iraq will not dampen their anger, because as many people have noted, hatred of Bush and his corporate cronies is all that is left of their leftism. And this hatred is tribal, not ideological. And so they will still have their rallies, their alternative weeklies, and their Gore Vidal polemics. They will still have a huge influence over the Democratic party, perhaps even determining its next presidential nominee. But they will seem increasingly unattractive to most moderate and even many normally Democratic voters who never really adopted outrage as their dominant public emotion..."

Put that in your once-a-week appearance forever (no matter how many wedges he has driven into cracks to create chasms) PBS Newshour pipe and smoke it!

______

If you would like to learn just how far down the depravity curve Mr. Brooks and his ilk have slid, Driftglass is the guy for you...

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The Shape Of Things To Come...

ABetterCityForWhom

ExactlyVille

The new mayor and council of Vancouver were sworn into office earlier today in, as long term city watcher Raymond Tomlin noted, "the luxuriously comfortable and city-owned Orpheum Theatre".

Mr. Tomlin also noted that, "Monday afternoon’s festivities (were) an ‘invite only’ affair".

Furthermore, according to the invite itself, the dress for the event was "business attire".

Hmmmm...

Comforting (for) the luxuriously comfortable, perhaps?

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When The Skies Of November Get Gloomy

FellasIt'sTooRough

ToFeedYaVille

One thing that never changes for me is the fact that in mid-summer, when everything is wide open, bright and easy, I can never imagine it ever being grey, wet, windy and winter.

Heckfire. Two weeks ago I couldn't imagine it ever being winter.

But the weather has changed, as has the time, and winter is most definitely almost here.

****

Growing up in a mid-sized city on the edge of the rain forest winter for me essentially meant a change in sports, road hockey in the dying light, and, occasionally, soaked socks.

As for the danger lurking in gale force winds, maybe once in awhile there would be a trip on the ferry when things got a little rough.

But for my Dad, taking all those trips on tow boats up and down the coast, I can only imagine how many times a cook had say it was too rough to feed the crew - and all that entailed.

Anyway, here's a cover of Mr. Lightfoot's ode to the wrath of November gales on the Great Lakes...

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Big story by Jim Rutenberg in this weekend's New York Times Magazine all about how it was Mr. Putin's plan, right from the start, to have his good friend Mr. Trump and a cowed Republican Party first split and then neuter Ukraine, effectively satelliteizing it forever...Will this, and all that has followed, including Mr. Putin's continuing attempts to annex Ukraine by force, not to mention his efforts to disrupt the world's political and economic order, matter one bit come Tuesday's US'ian midterm elections?...Sadly, I fear not...


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