By Dinnertime Yesterday I Was Ready To Run From The Dipper Tent Screaming...

DuplicityTimesMendacityEqualledClarklandia

SquaredVille


By dinnertime yesterday I was ready to run from the Dipper tent screaming.

And then I saw this...

Good grief.

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Clearly, the Dipper braintrust has doubled-down on the fact that people like me and mine have nowhere else to go. Unless...

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Hot Take Time Machine...The Ron Gets Even More Obvious Than Usual.

RingLardner

HeAin'tVille

The old sportswriter, Ron Obvious of Globe Harbour, already has his take on the B.C. provincial election call up and running.

Here is the lede:

On the same day it was revealed that B.C. now has the highest per capita number of COVID-19 cases in the country, Premier John Horgan called a snap election.

That’s either chutzpah or stupidity. Maybe both...

And here is the kicker:

...(Horgan's) performance as both NDP Leader and Premier since then has been impressive. He has given the party a foothold on power it hadn’t had since the 1990s. But this election call is a gamble that could jeopardize the New Democrats' time in government and have a deleterious impact on Mr. Horgan’s legacy.

All the rest is nothing but filler just in case you were worried you missed something over at BellGlobeTSNEverythingElseLegacyMedia that you and 5,100,000 of  5,120,184 British Columbians didn't know already.

OK?

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Who is this imposter, anyway?....After all, everyone knows the real Ron Obvious once already took a bite out of Chichester Cathedral.

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Election A-Go-Go...Looks Like They Didn't Take That Drive Through The Woods After All.

OhMeOhMy
OhVille


From the new leader of the BC Green Party:

Obviously, a 'meeting' with Mr. Horgan was not enough.

Instead, she and he could have taken a leisurely Friday afternoon drive through the woods, with the top down, taking the back road between ridings while they ironed things out using proverbial hammers and tongs...

Seriously, kinda/sorta.

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On the plus side, at least now we will no longer be inundated with the neverending 'Will-he-or-won't he?' specu-talk in every corpMedia organ grinder monkey outlet in the province.

Then again, it will likely only switch to endless bleatings of 'Will the strate(r)gy backfire on the Dippers?'

I guess we're going to find out.

And soon.

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Your Morning Audio...When Musical Worlds Collide.

 

Link

Jason Isbell is a guitar player, songwriter and singer who grew up in Northern Alabama. He is also one of the last, best things about the Twittmachine.

Lisa Christiansen is the traffic and music reporter on the local Lotuslandian CBC Radio One afternoon drive time show. She also does all kinds of things music bizzy around Vancouver and across Canuckistan.

Bigger E. knows them both. One musically, one literally, kinda/sorta...

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Plastics Are Made From Oil And Gas...Everything Else Is Public Relations.

BanningSingleUseBagsWillNotGetIt

DoneVille

Don't know about you, but in our house we do our best to recycle pretty much everything, including all that plastic that just about everything that is packaged comes in or is lined with.

So.

As long as we are recycling all that, it's not so bad that we use it, right?

Wrong.

...(The American) EPA used data from the American Chemistry Council and the National Association for PET Container Resources to measure the recycling of plastic....(T)he amount of recycled plastics is relatively small—3.0 million tons for a 8.4 percent recycling rate in 2017...

Hmmm...

If less than 10% is being recycled, where is all that plastic going?

Well, it most often either burned or dumped in landfills, often overseas:

And what isn't dealt with in those two ways inevitably makes its way into the ocean.

So.

How did we get bamboozled into believing that plastic recycling matters?

A joint effort by NPR and PBS' Frontline has gotten to the bottom of it.

And it turns out that it is exactly for the reason that you might  have already surmised...

...NPR and PBSFrontline spent months digging into internal industry documents and interviewing top former officials. We found that the industry sold the public on an idea it knew wouldn't work — that the majority of plastic could be, and would be, recycled — all while making billions of dollars selling the world new plastic...

{snip}

... (Plastic) industry companies spent tens of millions of dollars on (misleading) ads (that plastic recycling programs were working) and ran them for years, promoting the benefits of a product that, for the most part, was buried, was burned or, in some cases, wound up in the ocean.

Documents show industry officials knew this reality about recycling plastic as far back as the 1970s...


Imagine that!

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Uh Oh...

NewLeader

New ApproachVille

It looks like the Green Party's new leader, Ms. Furstenau, has not yet taken that drive through the woods with Mr. Horgan, top down, to hammer out that deal that we were talking about/hoping for the other day...

Link

Hmmm...

Does this signal that we are one step closer to a fall election?



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And why, exactly, am I receiving Email requests from individual Dipper candidates asking for donations specifically for nomination contributions?

Here's the link to the Green Caucus' statement.

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What's Next....?

Link

Gosh, what's next...

Activist judges?

Community organizers?

Horgan actually hates lacrosse?

Sheesh.

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Your Morning Audio...Do Right, Right Now.

SavingTheCoalition
InAConvertibleVille

Sonia Furstenau, the new BC Green Party leader, is not Andrew Weaver.

But.

Instead of going to a game, maybe she and John Horgan can take a nice long drive with the top down through the hills of southern Vancouver Island this weekend so that they can hammer out a deal that is beneficial to all.

If not, I fear we will have provincial election in the next few weeks.

Anyway, the theme of the difficulty of doing the right thing, right now, is embodied in an old Gillian Welch song that has been stuck in my head for awhile now....

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Gosh, do they even make EV rag tops?


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Herd Mentality.

That'sANiceLittleCitizenry

You'veGotThereVille

The president of the United States held a town hall yesterday that was covered, straight-up, by one of the major American television networks:

...At the ABC town hall, the president also said the virus would “go away”, with or without a vaccine. This would happen because of “herd mentality”, he said. It is unclear whether he meant herd immunity, because he repeated the phrase several times.

“It would go away without the vaccine, George,” he told ABC journalist George Stephanopoulos. “With time it goes away. And you’ll develop like a herd mentality. It’s going to be herd developed, and that’s going to happen. That will all happen.”...

Now, of course, the outrage is being directed at the gaff as is inevitably the case in our gotcha! world.

But.

Clearly, Mr. Trump was signaling that he and his are, indeed, doubling down on the herd immunity strategy just in case his now railroaded and warp-speeded FDA does not approve a vaccine before November 3rd.

Which means that he is willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of his fellow country people in the name of a political fall back strategy.

Seems to me that is a much bigger story than a gaff.

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The Deep(ly) Fascistic State.

Warp
EverythingVille

From Sharon LaFranerie at the 'failing' New York Times:

The top communications official at the powerful cabinet department in charge of combating the coronavirus made outlandish and false accusations on Sunday that career government scientists were engaging in “sedition” in their handling of the pandemic and that left-wing hit squads were preparing for armed insurrection after the election.

Michael R. Caputo, the assistant secretary of public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, accused the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of harboring a “resistance unit” determined to undermine President Trump, even if that opposition bolsters the Covid-19 death toll.

Mr. Caputo, who has faced intense criticism for leading efforts to warp C.D.C. weekly bulletins to fit Mr. Trump’s pandemic narrative, suggested that he personally could be in danger from opponents of the administration. “If you carry guns, buy ammunition, ladies and gentlemen, because it’s going to be hard to get,” he urged his followers...


I mean, who needs Q when you've Caputo.

Meanwhile, very serious USian pundits everywhere, like, say, this one, continue to play the electoral horse race game straight-up as if nothing truly unusual and/or destructive is going down.

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The Keef Report....The Revenge Of Shawnigan Lake.

HaveMemory,WillUse
ItVille


Remember this from early 2016?

More than 500 people gathered at Shawnigan Lake on Vancouver Island on Wednesday morning to raise awareness about the effects of dumping allegedly contaminated soil near the community's watershed.

The province has granted a permit to allow the dumping of salt water dredgings from Port Moody into a quarry near the Vancouver Island lake. But thousands of people in the area north of Victoria rely on the watershed for drinking water.

"We want people to understand this is not an NIMBY issue. This is a contaminated landfill that got approved without going through the government's own process," said Shawnigan Lake regional director Sonia Furstenau...

And, remember how the Keef responded to a righteous local citizen uprising backed by a then little known regional director:

Well, it would appear that our favourite TeeVee political pundit man has been proven wrong.

Again.

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And how, specifically, was the good Mr. Baldrey already wrong about this thing originally back in the pre-2017 provincial election day?... Well, this.

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COVID-19...The Rise Of Potemkin Regulatory Agency Villages.

PayAttentionToAllThePresident'sMen

BehindThatCurtainVille

David Gorski is a medical doctor and cancer research scientist in Detroit Michigan.

As such, I know his research work professionally.

I also know his work in the blogosphere, where he often battles medical pseudoscience and quackery of all kinds at the 'Science-Based Medicine' website.

To be clear, Gorski has proven his bonafides, to me at least, in both realms, many, many times.

Today, he has decided that Americans and, by extension, Canadians as well  (given that we've already  placed vaccine orders with American firms), cannot trust the CDC and the FDA when it comes to all things COVID-19:

"...Now that we’re around the six month anniversary of the first lockdowns to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, I saw a story over the weekend that led me, at the risk of being too “political,” to ask a very disturbing (to me) question: Can we still trust the CDC and FDA (and other federal agencies, like the NIH, ostensibly dedicated to upholding policy based on good science)? Although the answer is still yes for most topics, for COVID-19 increasingly the answer is no. I fear that the list of topics on which the CDC and FDA can no longer be trusted will only grow if Donald Trump is reelected and that, even if he isn’t, some of the changes weakening the firewall between political appointees and the career scientific personnel of these agencies might be permanent and difficult for a President Biden to reverse..."


Gorski, as he always does, then lays out the evidence, in detail, to support his conclusion.

He then goes on to point out that even big Pharma, which often rails at all things regulatory, is concerned:

"...So unusual is the pressure for a vaccine coming from this administration that even big pharma is pushing back, with nine drug companies, three of which have COVID-19 vaccines nearing completion of their phase 3 trials, signed a joint pledge:.."

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Importantly, and obviously, vaccine efficacy and safety are not problems that can be solved by pundits, pols and/or ad-makers seeking to maintain their political savviness while they simultaneously attempt to shift public opinion a degree or two before November 3rd.

OK?

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The Keef Report: Wagging The Lagging Indicator's Tail...Again.

AllYourLaggingIndicators'R
HimVille


Remember when the good Mr. Baldrey said this a few weeks ago?

Well, today our man from the snowy globed TeeVee found a brand new comparator and said this:

Which is all fine and good if you want to ignore curve position and rates of change, etcetera.

However, if one focuses on how our hospitalizations have changed since our active cases started to rise sharply once again, there is the following to consider:

OK?

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As always, previous Keef Reports can be found...Here.

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Your Morning Audio...Youth Is Not Always Wasted On The Wrong People.

NoCornInThis
CapraVille

What does the old guy on the porch yelling at young George Bailey and Mary Hatch about how youth is wasted on the young have to do with a kid from Chicago that has just been 'discovered' by Kris Kristofferson?

Well, hit the triangle below to find out - and then get the bonus of having Bigger E. do her thing...

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By the way, that old guy on the porch, Dick Elliot, would re-surface 15 years later as Mayor Pike on the Andy Griffith Show...Imagine that!

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It Ain't He, It Ain't He, He Ain't No Unfortunate Son

IronyIsDeaderThanADiscarded
BoneSpurVille


Mr. Trump went to Michigan for a potential super-spreader event yesterday.

And when he arrived, someone thought it would be a good idea to play John Fogerty's ode to privilege in war time...

  

“Fortunate Son” plays as Trump de-planes, an entry for the “nobody listened to the lyrics” hall of fame. pic.twitter.com/fJBPI7CxGQ

— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) September 10, 2020

Suckers and losers, indeed.

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