Making Infectious Disease Great Again...On Purpose.

StopAllTheScience

InSectionsVille

The confirmation hearings for Bobby the Younger are scheduled to take place later this week.

And yet, the following, as noted by Anil Oza at STAT News, has already happened:

A flurry of scientific gatherings and panels across federal science agencies were canceled on Wednesday, at a time of heightened sensitivity about how the Trump administration will shift the agencies’ policies and day-to-day affairs.

Several meetings of National Institutes of Health (NIH) study sections, which review applications for fellowships and grants, were canceled without being rescheduled, according to agency notices reviewed by STAT. 

A Feb. 20-21 meeting of the National Vaccine Advisory Committee, a panel that advises the leadership of the Department of Health and Human Services on vaccine policy, was also canceled. So was a meeting of the Presidential Advisory Council for Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria that was scheduled for Jan. 28 and 29...

The point is, they don't even need to install Mr. Kennedy as their codswallop spewing figurehead because the extremists are already at the helm.


_____
While the immediately scary stuff here is the halting of the vaccine and antibiotic resistance advisory committees, in the American NIH biomedical research system, 'study sections' are, essentially, the same as grant panels in the much smaller Canadian CIHR system. These study sections are where the real hard-nosed biomedical discovery funding decisions are made by scientists, not bureaucrats. Thus, the fact that the extremists are also cancelling US NIH study section meetings is really worrisome as it could a spanner in the gears of the world's biggest evidence based, scientifically driven biomedical research engine. And we already know how threatened the extremists are by evidence and science.


.

What Does Joe Rogan Have In Common With L. Ron Hubbard?

YouTreatedTheirCountry
ToAFlakeOfYourLifeVille


What does Joe Rogan have in common with L. Ron Hubbard?

Well, it would appear that Mr. Rogan's podcast thingy is a place where uber-thetans of a certain narcissitimilitudinous nature who were never nurtured go to get, well...

Clear.

That is all.


______

Earworm in the subheader?.... This!


.

Saved By The Francophone Canadian Bell!

AllThingsOldFrenchAreNotNecessarily
NewFrenchAgainVille


So.

It would appear that, according to her press release at least, Christy Clark's lousy french is a major reason that she has decided not to run for the leadership of the Canadian Liberal Party:

...While we have come a long way, in a short time, there is simply not enough time to mount asuccessful campaign and for me to effectively connect with Francophone Canadians in their
language. I have worked hard at improving my French but it’s not where it needs to be, today...

Ignoring that use of the collective noun for the moment, one can only wonder if, perhaps, all that time Ms. Clark spent working hard might have been more effective if she had actually spent it Francophone Canada rather than, you know, France:

However, fortunately (or unfortunately depending on your point of view), Ms. Clark has also assured us that this press release is  not a 'you won't have Nixon....errrr...Clark to kick around anymore' kind of a statement because:

..Friends, I will continue to fight for Liberal candidates and am deeply thankful for the outpouring of support I have received from the grassroots over the past week.

We will meet again...

Oh boy.


_______
Of course, as we have noted before, last summer was not the first time that Ms. Clark worked hard on something that may or may have not been learning french while in France.

All snark aside, if Ms. Clark were to run for the Fed Libs in the next election, is there any riding in Lotusland, Coastal Division, that she could actually win?


.

Career Opportunitist, The One Who Always Knocks.

SheDon'tWannaMakeTea

AtTheCBCVille

Nevermind the con-party membership thing for the moment.

Instead, let's consider where Ms. Christy Clark was and what was she doing when she endorsed Jean Charest for the Conservative Party of Canada leadership in August of 2022.

The following is from a piece by Lindsay Campbell in iPolitics at from that time:

...At a conference held on Thursday (in Edmonton) by the centre-right organization Centre Ice Conservatives, Clark spoke about how there’s a need for a centrist party that’s willing to unite the country and listen to the opinions of all Canadians...

{snip}

...Clark, a keynote speaker for the conference, told attendees that as politicians move toward the fringes, Centre Ice Conservatives are part of “a special kind of activism” to preserve a middle political path and “bring Canada back together.”...

And what is Ms. Clark's 'special kind of activism' bit all about?

Well.

...Though Clark said politicians, in general, don’t know how to have constructive dialogue and listen to opposing views, she specifically put (Justin) Trudeau on blast for the way he approached the convoy protests and people opposed to vaccines...

Aaahhh...

Now I get it, it's all about that third way(ish), anti-woke, compassionate centrist conservatism.

Or some such thing.

****

In addition to agreeing to be their keynote speaker Ms. Clark doubled down and became a member of the Centre Ice Conservative's 'advisory council'.

But then, about a year later in the fall of 2023, when those same fine folks first dropped the term conservative from their moniker and then turned themselves into a brand new soccer ball-free national political party called 'Canadian Future', Ms. Clark lost all courage of any actual convictions she originally had (or did not have) and was nowhere to be found.

Natasha Bulowski of the National Observer had that story at the time:

...Canadian Future will be headed by a national council with a representative from each province and territory and it intends to hold a founding convention in 2024. The Centre Ice Canadians sports a team webpage that includes former Conservative MP Peter Kent and former Conservative Senate leader Marjory LeBreton. Former B.C. premier Christy Clark was once listed on the organization’s advisory council but is no longer there and did not return a request for comment...

So, what changed such that, suddenly, Ms. Clark was once again a life long Liberal?

I reckon it just might have something to do with Ms. Clark's oft-demonstrated penchant for being a career opportunist of the highest order.

Otherwise known as being, essentially, the anti-Strummer...

______

And who started up this centrist conservative thingy in the first place?...Why, none other than a guy who was once a BC Liberal bagman and Falconator backer named Rick Peterson who later went all in with the pre-Rustadian BC Cons. 

And yes, Mrs. Griffiths, the spelling mistake in the header was on purpose.


.

What Lesson Learned, Exactly?

Lessons?WeDon'tNeedNoStinkingLessons!

PoliticalExpediencyVille


In retrospect, it looks like, perhaps, Marky Mark had a premonition (and/or an mp3 file) that set him to thinking that something was coming down the tracks Thursday:

Because, low and behold, on Friday the CBC published a wee-bit of a fact checking piece base on Ms. Clark's soon to be released national radio interview on 'The House' in which the subject of her consorting with the Conservative Party of Canada came up:

Former B.C. premier Christy Clark — who is considering running for the federal Liberal leadership — is denying that she was previously a member of the Conservative Party, despite past comments where she said otherwise...

{snip}

"I never got a membership and I never got a ballot," Clark told host Catherine Cullen in an interview airing Saturday.

"I came out and I supported Jean Charest and the reason I did this is simple: I thought it was vitally important that we stopped Pierre Poilievre."...

{snip}

..."I never got a membership and I never got a ballot," Clark told host Catherine Cullen in an interview airing Saturday.

A spokesperson for the Conservative Party refuted Clark's claims, saying they have records of Clark's membership from the 2022 leadership race.

"Christy Clark purchased a Conservative Party membership through Jean Charest's leadership campaign. That membership is no longer active," Sarah Fischer, the party's director of communications, said in an email.

When asked about Fischer's statement, Clark pushed back and insisted she had never been a member.

"Why don't they come out and show my membership or my ballot? They never sent me any of those — although I wouldn't put it past them to manufacture one of them," Clark told Cullen.

Following Clark's interview on The House, the Conservative Party provided a screenshot of a membership database that suggests Clark had membership from June 2022 to June 2023.

Clark's comments to CBC News also contradict what she had said during the time of the Conservative leadership contest...

And how did the good Ms. Clark respond?

Well.

Just as those of us who have been paying attention for the last twenty years, plus, might have predicted...

Shite, happens, indeed.

The real question, now is, what lesson did the good Ms. Clark learn, exactly?


(and please note that Ms. Clark, in the vTweet above, did not admit either that she had been a Conservative Party of Canada member or that she lied about it, multiple times, during and after a national radio interview about if and why she 'might' run for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada)


______
Tip 'O The Toque to reader Graham for the heads-up on all this yesterday afternoon....

You can, if you wish to subject yourself to it, listen to the part of the national radio interview concerned...Here...But don't complain that we did not warn you about exposing your auditory system to fingernails slowly sliding on down a blackboard for the one minute and twenty-five seconds concerned...
Post to follow?...Where, exactly, was Ms. Clark, and what was she doing, when she jumped on the Charest train back in oh so long ago 2022?

.

Sycophants on Speed Dial.

SmartLessIs
NotJustAPodcastVille


Alec Lazenby of postmedia has a piece up wherein a goodly number of  Christy Clark's former 'colleagues' extol her virtues as the potential leader of the federal Liberals.

It's a provincial story, in the classic sense, and it's really not worth the pixel ink that it's printed on.

But still, I couldn't lay off this bit:

“I think she certainly has the potential to be a dark horse in the race,” said Stephen Smart, general manager of Hill & Knowlton Western Canada and a former press secretary to Clark.

“I really think those who might dismiss her in this race out of the gate really do so at their own peril. She builds great teams around her. She has the potential to really get people on-board. She has been a member of the Liberal Party of Canada for a very long time.”

Ahhh yes...

The good Mr. Smart, the former political reporter who once ignored the conflicty position he put his employer at the time, the CBC, in, given his relationship with one of the members of Ms. Clark's team back in the day. This conflictyness was pointed out by the likes of Norm Farrell, was confirmed by the CBC's then ombudsman Kirk LaPointe, and was ultimately railed against by the likes of Keith Baldrey and other local corpMedia members and practitioners.

And then there was, once he became a full-time member of Ms. Clarks 'team', the time that Ms. Smart shut out legitimate reporters while ensuring that Ms. Clark got face time with the friendlies, all so as to make sure substance never got in way of a good old-fashioned carpool karaoke.

And, just to prove that the synergistic sycophancy never ends, please note that Ms. Smart now works for Hill and Knowlton, the big-time super-fine PR firm.

Gosh.

Now that I think of it.

Would it be unreasonable to wonder if  Mr. Smart's current employment status had anything whatsoever to do with Mr. Lazenby's story being placed in the pages of Postmedia print organs in the the first place?

______

And ya, I still have archives and I'm going keep using them!

.

Liberal Leadership Race...Last Place Horses Jockey For Position.

AndThey're
OffVille


Remember that race card from Robert 'Send Me All Your Leaks!' Fife that had the two so-called outsiders, Mark Carney and Christy Clark, at the bottom of the odds list?

Well, Evan Scrimshaw has weighed in and he thinks that Ms. Clark has the edge:

...The difference between Carney and, say, Christy Clark - both nominal “outsider” candidates - is that everybody in the party knows Clark can do the basic things of both governing and campaigning well. There is little confidence in Carney, and his Globe op-ed has gone over like a bucket of warm piss - raising more questions about his instincts...

Gosh.

Did Marky Mark get to the good Mr. Scrimshaw?


_____
All snark aside, we should probably give Mr. Scrimshaw a wee bit of a break...After all, he is an Ontarian who probably gets a good proportion of his takes on BC politics from the likes of Ron Obvious.



.

Fifeing Towards Ottawa?

Kloutish

KlubbingVille


From deep within the bowels of the FifeMaster Flash's leak-laden account of Justin Trudeau's apparent coming resignation in Sunday's online version of the Globe and (nolongerEmpire) Mail:

...Liberal candidates who are possible leadership contenders: Ms. Freeland, Mr. LeBlanc, former housing minister Sean Fraser, Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly, Innovation Minister François-Philippe Champagne, Transport Minister Anita Anand, former central banker Mark Carney and former B.C. premier Christy Clark...

The behind-the-red-curtain machinations of Marky Mark aside, could it be all that marvellous Sorbonne-assisted french that catapulted Ms. Clark up on to the bottom rung of Mr. Fife's illustrious ladder?

______

Leak-laden?...Well, given that there were five anonymous sources underpinning the Fife Master's story, how else to describe it?
Klout Klub?...This!


.

Crawling Through The Bloggodome...

IAmMyOwn
AlgorithmVille


Interesting stuff that (mostly) popped up on the Blog Crawl, which is located stage left for those of you all not on their phones,  over the last little while:


Paul Krugman Unleashed: Crypto Is For Criming.

...If you go back to the 2008 white paper by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto that gave rise to Bitcoin, its main argument was that we needed to replace checking accounts with blockchain-based payments because you can’t trust banks; crypto promoters also tend to preach libertarianism, touting crypto as a way to escape government tyranny. Now we have crypto boosters demanding that the evil government force the evil banks to let them have conventional checking accounts...

...(T)he real reason banks don’t want to be financially connected to crypto is that they believe, with good reason, that to the extent that cryptocurrencies are used for anything besides speculation, much of that activity is criminal — and they don’t want to be accused of acting as accessories...

Relevance?...The Bitcoinlandic aspirations of our current mayor Mr. Sim.

****

City Hall Watch: Local (Lotuslandian) News Stories to Watch in 2025 (the following is just one of many worth considering).

...The Broadway Plan will see more proposals coming forward that will ask for density well in excess of the maximums put in place. One example is tower proposal at 1110 West 10th Avenue that has a proposed floor space ratio of 10.1, while the maximum under the Broadway Plan is 6.5. Such changes will essentially make this plan meaningless and a “free for all”. Staff have no intention to Pause the Plan (see video of the Pause the Plan rally here)...

Relevance?...All (developmental big money) politics is local.

****

Jody Paterson's Closer Look: Lessons from the United Healthcare Murder:

...(O)f course, (United Healthcare CEO) Thompson wasn’t doing anything illegal when he ran his company hard on health-care claims. His shareholders and his big bosses might have loved him for it.

Yet millions of Americans have died, grown sicker or been bankrupted by the decisions of their health-care insurance providers. One study found that 36 per cent of the Americans surveyed had had at least one claim denied, and most of them had been denied multiple times.

What justice exists in such a system? Most companies would have an appeal process for individuals, but this 2023 ProPublica article says the appeal rate is one per cent. There’s court, but that’s money and time that few have. In truth, Americans have virtually no chance of justice against corporate decision-making around health care, yet their very lives are being ripped apart by the corporate direction being set by men like Thompson...

Relevance?...When it comes to public healthcare and justice for the public, universality matters for both.

****

A. L. Kennedy writing in the Guardian: In Hopeless Times We Can Never Afford To Lose Hope.

...Whether we dig out a new sub-basement to hell’s deepest circle (in 2025) rests partly in the hands of Elon “Space Karen” Musk, who’s busy gridlocking the US government, but will officially become the de facto Goblin King of Everywhere at roughly noon on 20 January. Thereafter, Xitter will shake off its remaining sane users and simply become a vast international Ouija board, amplifying the worst afterthoughts of the world’s worst people...

{snip}

...Our dying country and our dying world are mostly in the hands of underqualified nepo babies and grifters destined to fail upwards, abandoning every fire they’ve started, and kicking through drifts of our money like kids in autumn leaves. The future can seem bleak. And the majority can seem weak. But we’re not.

Need to know even more about survival? Drop in at a refugee support centre like the splendid Refuweegee and talk to the expats from countries other than Britain, people who have endured the unimaginable and not abandoned hope. Talk to domestic abuse survivors, to street homeless people, to people who are mocked and hated for simply existing. They’re still here – alive, against the odds. We’re all still here with an unmet obligation to help and learn from one another...

Relevance?... Self evident.

______

Image at the top of the post?...That 'Space Karen' reference, above, as public art, at the corner of 10th and Market in the City once roamed by a writer, Dashiell Hammett, whose characters would most assuredly wipe the floor of such creatures if they were around today.

.

Oligarchigal Overdrive.

DogeDiving
InTheShallowEndOfTheSelfDealingPoolVille


By now you may have heard that his most highly excellent and most exquisitely exalted US'ian government-contractor-in-chief, Mr. Elon Musk, has gone to rhetorical war against the looniest of the MAGA goonery that is calling for the mass deportation of skilled immigrants who came to the country on H-1B visas.

Ostensibly, according to Mr. Musk at least, these workers are vital to the interests of the American tech industry because:

...“The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low,” Musk wrote on X on Christmas. “If you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be.”...

But is that the real reason why companies like, say, Tesla hire huge numbers of workers through the H-1B program?

Perhaps not, as noted in an NY Times OpEd piece today by Farah Stockman:

...Most H-1B visa holders are lower-paid labor, not top talent. In May, Musk laid off more than 14,000 Tesla workers, including many H-1B visa holders. Reddit threads filled with laments by workers who had moved to the United States from India only to be let go with no warning. They were desperate to remain in the country, but because H-1B visas are owned by the employer, they had few options for doing so...

Imagine that!


.

It's The Grid Storage, Stupid.

BridgeFddlin'

WhileRomeBurnsVille

'It's the economy, stupid.'

If you are old enough, you likely remember the one liner, above, that is supposed to have, especially according to the flack who coined it, James Carville, contributed to the election of the oldest living US'ian president, William Jefferson Clinton in 1992.

But never mind the bollocks, or a guy named Ross Perot, because I figure the time has come to re-work that one liner into the snowclone that is the header at the top of this post because, according to those commie-pinko, tree-huggers at the Economist:

Energy storage for the electrical grid is about to hit the big time. By the reckoning of the International Energy Agency (IEA), a forecaster, grid-scale storage is now the fastest-growing of all the energy technologies. In 2025, some 80 gigawatts of new grid-scale energy storage will be added globally, an eight-fold increase from 2021...

{snip}

...The IEA predicts that in 2025 the combination of solar-photovoltaic generation and battery storage will be cheaper than the cost of coal-fired power in China, and new gas-fired plants in America...

And likely cheaper, too, than any of these other 'bridge' fuels we here in CanuckistanMikitaVille are constantly being told, by those who will profit most, must be extracted, shipped, exploited and burned as fast as possible before the large scale transition to renewable energy can be made economically not stupid.

OK?


.

What Fresh Hell Is This?

Enshittification
OverdriveVille


Happy New Year.

Which means that it is now the year that the worsening of all things online will continue at warped speed:

Meta is betting that characters generated by artificial intelligence will fill its social media platforms in the next few years as it looks to the fast-developing technology to drive engagement with its 3bn users.

“We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do,” said Connor Hayes, vice-president of product for generative AI at Meta. 

“They’ll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform . . . that’s where we see all of this going,” he added.

Hayes said a “priority” for Meta over the next two years was to make its apps “more entertaining and engaging”, which included considering how to make the interaction with AI more social...

Now.

I know that Norm Farrell, NVG, DS, and Dr. Beer 'N Hockey are on the level because I've actually met them, in person, in real life.

And I think I met GarFish in a past life.

And I've known Danneau, and Graham, and eaf, and EE, and TB, and Scotty on Denman, and Lew E, and Chuckstraight, and JP, and Keith, and Grant G, and just about all the rest of you who have been stopping by here occasionally since the days when AI grifterians like Sam Altman were still in short pants and/or were about to quit Stanford. Thus, I'm pretty sure you all are real as well.

But what do we do when a new commenter shows up now? 

Do we have them to send us imprints of their retinas and, maybe, cheek swabs just to be sure they're something more than neural-networked gobs of goo in the machine?


_____
Image at the top of the post?...Header originator Dorothy Parker working her typewriter far from the madding Algonquin Roundtable crowd at her farmhouse in Bucks County PA...The guy sitting by the window is not Paul Newman. Instead, it's her then husband Alan Campbell... The photo was taken in 1937, the year the two of them worked with collaborator Robert Carson to write the screenplay to 'A Star Is Born'.

Subheader?...This!...Courtesy the brilliant Cory Doctorow.


.