Fossil-fuel subsidies surged to a record $7 trillion last year as governments supported consumers and businesses during the global spike in energy prices caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the economic recovery from the pandemic.
As the world struggles to restrict global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and parts of Asia, Europe and the United States swelter in extreme heat, subsidies for oil, coal and natural gas are costing the equivalent of 7.1 percent of global gross domestic product...
To put that seven trillion in perspective...
It is far, far more more than all of the governments in all of the world spent on education last year.
It's all BC Ferries all the time for us this week...We were on the Sunshiney/Smokey Coast on the weekend for a very nice family wedding. Then, yesterday, I rented a UHaul and came over to Victoria (littler e. is coming back to Central Lotusland!)...Will be returning later today before C. and I, and the Wackadoodle II, too, come right back again tomorrow for the last long weekend and Grandpop's birthday...Our Ferry Service has taken it on the chin this summer and, while I still have an issue with how and why those Fun, Fun On The Autobahn boats were procured, I have to say that it has been smooth sailing for us so far (fingers crossed)...
On Wednesday night (August 23rd), former Fox News host Tucker Carlson interviewed former president Donald Trump on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. Now, Trump and his supporters are claiming that Carlson's video has received hundreds of millions of views on Elon Musk's social media site...
{snip}
...Trump later claimed that, at 230 million views, the Carlson video was now: "The Biggest Video on Social Media, EVER, more than double the Super Bowl!"...
{snip}
...Mashable can report that, as of the publication of this article on Thursday evening (August 24th), Carlson's Trump interview has received 14.8 million video views on X...
So.
Where does the massive, totally made-up, fudge factor come in?
...The views metric currently shown on X, displayed simply as "views," are tweet views.
This number shows how many impressions a tweet receives. An impression is counted when a user actively goes to the tweet page or when a tweet appears in a user's timeline after being retweeted by another user. Views are also counted whenever a tweet shows up on a user's timeline. As such, a single user can be counted multiple times in the view count.
On the other hand, video views, which are no longer publicly displayed on X, count the number of times a piece of media content is played on the platform —although there are a few addendums to this metric. A video view on X is counted if the media plays for two or more seconds. And, if a user attempts to scroll past a video, but more than 50 percent of the player is still visible on the screen for that time frame, a video view is still counted. Autoplays are counted as well.
To break down what this means for Tucker Carlson's Trump interview: The video itself was actually played only 14.8 million times, for at least two seconds of the more than 46-minute interview — or just over six percent of the total 236 million times someone saw the post on X...
Of course, for many of those actual 'real' viewers, two seconds with Mr. Trump and his most recent willing propagandist are more than enough.
...Something that is made to seem very grand, elaborate, or prosperous for the purposes of impressing others, but which in reality has no real worth or substance. Taken from a story about Russian minister Grigory Potemkin (1739–1791),who allegedly erected false, painted façades to mimic a thriving, successful village along the Dnieper River in Crimea to impress the visiting Empress Catherine II...
In his recent in-depth profile of Elon Musk, published in the New Yorker, Ronan Farrow describes how the good Mr. Musk's position on the war in Ukraine evolved over time until, finally...
...In (his)later tweets, Musk portrayed as inevitable an outcome favoring Russia and attached maps highlighting eastern Ukrainian territories, some of which, he argued, “prefer Russia.” Musk also polled his Twitter followers about the plan. Millions responded, with about sixty per cent rejecting the proposal. (Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s President, tweeted his own poll, asking users whether they preferred the Elon Musk who supported Ukraine or the one who now seemed to back Russia. The former won, though Zelensky’s poll had a smaller turnout: Musk has more than twenty times as many followers.)...
But.
Here's the thing.
Mashable recently commissioned an analysis of Mr. Musk's 'followers' on his X-Village Platform formerly known as Twitter:
...Of the 153,209,283 X accounts following Musk at the time the data was collected, around 42 percent of Musk's followers, or more than 65.3 million users, have zero followers on their own account. Just over 72 percent, or nearly 112 million, of these users following Musk have less than 10 followers on their account.
When it comes to content creation on the platform, more than 62.5 million Musk followers have zero tweets...
{snip}
... More than 100 million Musk followers have less than 10 tweets posted to their account...
{snip}
...Musk has recently claimed that X now has more than 540 million "monthly users." If accurate, that means more than 25 percent of accounts on the platform follow Musk. And if those numbers are inflated, it means that even a larger percentage of the entire platform follows Musk. With a huge swath of Musk's 153 million followers not using the platform or perhaps not real, it seems a good portion of X's overall user base may not be so active either.
My brother the retired fire guy and my sister-in-law the retired teacher each has one.
Mostly, they take them on trips so that they can park their camper van and use them to tour all over the place.
They love them.
****
C., my wife, has one.
Mostly she uses it to go to the market, and knitting, and various other sundry places in our part of Lotusland, travelling pretty much all the while on bike routes.
She loves it.
****
Me I do not have one.
And it is not because I would not enjoy riding such a thing pretty much everywhere.
It's just that once I get one I know that will pretty much be the end of real peddling for me.
So.
For the foreseeable future (and/or until my knees finally give out) elderly ladies will continue to blast past me going up that damnable 16th avenue hill every morning.
OK?
______
Truth be told, most mornings I actually go up that damnable hill on 12th...It's almost straight up but the trade is that it is much shorter.
Like anyone promoting a book, the general plan is to create buzz, get people talking and, hopefully, get them buying. While people might be talking about Tucker, a new biography by Chadwick Moore about former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, the buzz apparently failed to translate to book sales...
{snip}
...According to numbers provided by Publisher’s Weekly, Tucker, in its first week of release, sold just 3,227 hardcover copies...
Gosh.
Why might that be?
Well, there is the fact that the Murdoch family threw the good Mr. Carlson off their propaganda network a few months ago which just might have decreased the former bowtie guy's visibility with the MAGA-crowd he so desperately and cynically courts, full-time, these days.
And then, of course, there is the matter of how little that particular crowd actually reads.
But...
There just might be something else at work here.
Mike, our favourite microbiologist, mad or otherwise, explains:
...When conservatives in good standing publish books, conservative institutions, such as think tanks, buy a ton of copies (and give them away) to juice sales numbers. Right now, I don’t think Carlson is in particularly good standing, and so no rich foundation, think tank, or billionaire is buying a bunch of his books.
Essentially, Carlson('s biography) is competing in the market, and (it) is losing...
From the lede of David Moscrop's excellent TVO piece on the Ford government's corrupt greenbelt giveaway:
If there was ever a doubt that corruption is a constitutive element of Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government, Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk’s report into its dodgy Greenbelt dealings ought to put that uncertainty to rest. Indeed, the government is something more than corrupt. There’s corruption. There’s utter corruption. And then there’s funnelling more than $8 billion to your developer buddies and party donors through land swaps in the bright light of day and expecting to get away with it...
And how did the good premier of Ontario respond to the revelations in the AG's report?
Well...
..(I)n a Wednesday (August 9th) press conference, Ford continued to spin the plan as part of its affordability, housing, and growth plan even while he admitted the process was flawed, for which he took “full responsibility.”...
In this specific episode host Jayme Poisson talks toFatima Syed who writes for the Narwhal (and whose work on this 'story' was singled out as exemplary by the Ontario AG in her presser on the report).
****
Hey!
I realize that there has been a big blast of hot media air on all things 'The Band' in the wake of the recent passing of Robbie Robertson.
But most of that hot air was so superficial that it just bounced of the surface of the thing.
So...
If you want depth, have a listen to Andrew Hickey's fantastic podcast on the history of the group, including how they all came to be working for pretty much peanuts for Ronnie Hawkins, how legendary Canadian A&R impresario Mary Martin brought the then 'Hawks' to Albert Grossman's, and ultimately, Dylan's attention, and how the musical genre that would become 'Americana' was birthed in the basement of that big pink house in Woodstock New York,
Another fantastic anecdote from Hickey's podcast...The Band purposefully worked to make their harmonies as loose as possible so that, unlike, say, the Beach Boys and the Beatles, their individual voices would stand out rather than blend in.
And in the last two weeks I went to two rock shows.
And, truth be told, I'm pretty darned proud that it was not to see other creaking olds crank out their long, gone golden oldie radio hits.
****
It was littler e. who invited me to the first show to see three hip young kids called 'boygenius', who are hot enough at the moment that they got the Nardwuar treatment, shown above, when they came to town.
I was touched that she invited me, pretty close to the oldest guy of certain persuasion, to be there in the crowd, albeit at a safe, comfortable distance sitting out on the PNE Amphitheatre bleachers far from the truly madding crowd in front of the stage.
I cover one of the band's tunes, a favourite of mine from their pre-fame first EP times, Ketchum, ID, on this week's Sunday Set of lullaby(ish) tunes.
The second show I went to see was at the Orpheum with the whole family and two very different crowds, almost completely Venn diagram separated. One crowd was there to see the triumphant return to Vancouver by a stroke-recovered Lucinda Williams. The other crowd was there to see a gaggle of millennial Brooklyn-transplants, Big Thief.
Ms. Williams hit the stage to play brand new tunes of a rocking variety before she talked a little about the back story of 'Drunken Angel' that was based on Blaze Foley and the other outlaws of country from days of Austin Texas yore, including Townes Van Zandt, As such, another tune covered in this week's lullaby set is Townes' classic 'Pancho and Lefty.'
Cory Doctorow on how the 'bezzle' is a critical part of turning everything in our modern world to crap:
When it comes to the modern world of enshittified, terrible businesses, no addition to your vocabulary is more essential than "bezzle," JK Galbraith's term for "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it"...
Now, Doctorow was speaking of how bad businesses flourish in that portion of the embezzlement period wherein the victims have no idea what hit them.
But here's the thing...
Given that the business of many that govern us is more and more often bad business bent on turning everything to crap while they take their profits during the bezzle, consider for a moment the following from Norm Farrell:
...While Canada’s Trump-inspired conservatives can be accused of a broad range of faults, right-wing politicians in this country seem particularly smitten by crony capitalism. Premiers Danielle Smith and Doug Ford, along with avaricious associates, seem to be prime examples. Before them, we had Christy Clark and Gordon Campbell in British Columbia.
This week, Ontario Auditor General found that a small group of well-connected developers with direct access to Ford government officials could see an $8 billion increase in the value of protected greenbelt land that Ford’s government opened for development...
So.
Why does this keep happening?
Well, in the specific case of Mr. Ford's pre-mediated assistance of the greed-driven green belt dismantlers, and who is facilitating the bezzle that is helping to make it all possible without the average citizen knowing and/or even caring, Evan Scrimshaw knows what's up:
If you picked up a National Post today – a physical newspaper, not the website – do you know where you’d find the first news article about the Auditor General’s report into Doug Ford’s Greenbelt land swaps that are due to make his developer friends $8B in profit? Page 5 of the front section...
{snip}
...Oh, and on Page 9? A op-ed from “Doug Ford”, aka his staff, defending his position that this is necessary for housing, despite his own task force saying it’s not...
{snip}
...If this were one newspaper, I’d care less, but (Postmedia owns) almost every single daily in this country, and are trying to buy the Star now too. At a bunch of different stages of this the consolidation should have been stopped – when the Citizen and Gazette were sold to them, when the Sun papers were, when the Irving holdings out east were – but they weren’t. Now, we need to have the conversation we should have, but didn’t, have before.
Postmedia as a company is a failure – it keeps buying assets, stripping them to become essentially mini Post operations with a tiny bit of local news, and then finding out that nobody reads them in part because there’s no actual point to reading the Gazette if all anglo Montrealers are getting is Torontonians’ writing. In theory slashing costs at the local dailies and then pocketing the savings is a good idea, but the part they miss is that the slashed costs end up reducing readership, which means they just end up in a death spiral, propped up by Federal subsidies that clearly aren’t buying their editorial independence, as some claimed it would when they started...
Big picture moral of this and so many similar corp-gov bezzles wrapped within bezzles?
There is a long-con fusion happening here, there and everywhere between corporate and governing interests of a certain authoritarian kind that is not being actively challenged, or even acknowledged, by a neutered 'free' press.
Of course, such a fusion has long been defined.
Unfortunately, we seem to have bamboozled into forgetting it.
"Death panel" is a political term that originated during the 2009 debate about federal health care legislation to cover the uninsured in the United States. Sarah Palin, former governor of Alaska and 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate, coined the term when she charged that proposed legislation would create a "death panel" of bureaucrats who would carry out triage...
This is now (i.e. 2023)...From Gretchen Morgenson writing for NBC News:
...HCA Healthcare, the (American) nation’s largest (private, for profit) hospital chain, is highly profitable — last year it earned $5.6 billion — and its stock is a Wall Street darling...
{snip}
...Now, new criticisms are arising related to HCA’s palliative and end-of-life care for patients, according to some physicians and nurses who have worked in its facilities. They say HCA officials press staff to persuade families of ailing patients to initiate such care...
{snip}
... Although this can harm patients by withdrawing lifesaving treatments, the push can benefit HCA two ways, the doctors and nurses said, and an internal hospital document confirms. It reduces in-hospital mortality rates, a closely watched quality measure, and can free up a hospital bed more quickly for HCA, potentially generating more insurance reimbursements from a new patient...
So, there you have it.
Instead of the public program that Ms. Palin worked so hard to trash in the name of political expediency and a little fame, a private, for profit 'healthcare' entity is pushing people away from potentially life saving treatments to enhance the bottom line.
Morgenson's piece details a specific instance where a patient's Mom was relentlessly pushed to take her Covid sick daughter off a ventilator. The Mom held steadfast over many days and weeks and the daughter ultimately survived and fully recovered.
And just who is it that populates these for profit death panels that make the decisions to push people out of hospitals into hospices in the name of making money?
...At two HCA hospitals, the practice appears to be mechanized, with staff citing an algorithm used to identify patients who are most likely to die soon. This is also known as a vulnerability index, texts shared with NBC News show.
Patients ranking high on the vulnerability index become candidates for palliative care, the texts show. In one, a palliative care team member at an HCA hospital identified such a patient; “Algorithm = 97% risk of mortality today,” it said...
And, as you might expect, when asked about the algorithm an HCA spokesthingy 'declined' to comment.
Cory Doctorow has a theory as to why the bean counters, administrators, and super yacht captains are happy to let machines make the decisions:
...By using "AI" to decide when patients are beyond help, HCA can employ empiricism-washing, declaring the matter to be the factual – and unquestionable – conclusion of a mathematical process, not mere profit-seeking...
Or, put another way....
If millions of Dave's, doctors, and/or loved ones were to ask HAL to open the pod bay doors....errr...keep the patient in a hospital bed...
Why should the machine and/or Sarah Palin and her ilk even bother to listen?
If you are looking for hired bullshite of the highest wingnuttian welfare-type order you need look no further than the National Review.
OK?
_____ Phrase of the Day...."pumped-storage hydroelectricity"...Norm Farrell explains.
Subheader?....Once, a long time ago, my then editor showed up in our driveway in a 1976 Dodge Aspen and forced me to take a trip to Las Vegas to watch minor league baseball for no good reason at all except maybe to stop briefly in Visalia along the way...While we did pass through Barstow there were no bats to be seen although we did hit fungoes in the sand...
Republicans, our democracy depends on your willingness to read the Trump indictment
Please read it.
We refer, of course, to the 45-page indictment that explains exactly what Donald J. Trump did to overthrow our democracy.
It explains, in great detail, how Trump knew from his own people that he had lost the election. And how, based on claims that even he knew to be “crazy,” he tried through various schemes to stay in power anyway.
It explains, in a simple and straightforward way, what Trump did that has never been attempted by any previous occupant of the Oval Office.
Especially if you are among the nearly 75% of Republicans who according to a recent New York Times/Siena poll do not believe that Trump committed a serious federal crime, don’t you owe your country that effort?
Even if you are among those who say yes, he committed serious crimes and you’ll happily vote for him anyway, you still owe it to your country to acquaint yourself with what crimes it is that you’re willing to overlook. Virtually all of the facts set out in the document were revealed by not just other Republicans, but by Republicans appointed and employed by Donald Trump. If you don’t trust us to characterize what it says, read it for yourself...
It really is a fine chunk of editorial writing.
But here's the thing...
Actually sitting down and reading something longer than the chyron at the bottom of the non-stop screamer-casts they are addicted to just might be a wee bit of an issue for the fine folks that the KC Star Ed. Board is trying to reach.
Which, I reckon, just might be the crux of the matter.
From David Axe writing for Forbes on early this week:
A trio of civilian cargo ships—one each from Israel and Greece plus one with Turkish-Georgian registration—ran the Russian blockade in the Black Sea on Sunday and anchored at one of Ukraine’s grain ports on the Danube Delta.
Twenty-two days after Moscow canceled a deal with Kyiv—which had allowed Ukraine safely to export tens of millions of tons of grain—and then threatened to halt maritime traffic to Ukrainian ports, the world has called the Russians’ bluff...
{snip}
...(No) Russian ship intervened as the three civilian ships made their way not to Odesa, but to Izmail. Kyiv has been redeveloping its Danube ports as a wartime alternative to Odesa...
Thus, the following is not the least bit surprising:
...Overhead, no fewer than four NATO warplanes patrolled: a U.S. Navy P-8 patrol plane, a U.S. Army Challenger with a surface-scanning radar, a U.S. Air Force RQ-4 drone and an E-3 early-warning plane from NATO. None of the planes routinely carries weapons, but NATO fighters—including Italian Eurofighters and Romanian F-16s—were nearby in Romania...
And then, today came reports like the following, this one from Reuters:
Russia attacked Ukraine's main inland port across the Danube River from Romania on Wednesday, sending global food prices higher as it ramped up its use of force to prevent Ukraine from exporting grain.
The drone attacks destroyed buildings in the port of Izmail and halted ships as they prepared to arrive there to load with Ukrainian grain in defiance of a de-facto blockade Russia reimposed in mid-July...
