Meanwhile In America...Won't Someone Please Think Of The...

...Ancestors?

From Tierney Sneed of CNN:

A federal law that prohibits people subject to domestic violence restraining orders from possessing firearms is unconstitutional, a conservative-leaning appeals court ruled Thursday.

The ruling is the latest significant decision dismantling a gun restriction in the wake of the Supreme Court’s expansion of Second Amendment rights last year in the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen decision.

The 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals said that the federal law targeting those believed to pose a domestic violence threat could not stand under the Bruen test, which requires that gun laws have a historical analogy to the firearm regulations in place at the time of the Constitution’s framing.

“Through that lens, we conclude that (the law’s) ban on possession of firearms is an ‘outlier’ that our ancestors would never have accepted,” the 5th Circuit said...

As for those threatened by a firearm-fuelled escalation of domestic violence?

Well, it appears that it doesn't matter what they will or will not accept.

****

What's it all about this time Alfie?

Well, it's this Federalist Society's/current Supreme Court majority's obsession, developed as a way to suppress, and even reverse, all things progressive via 'Constitutional Originalism'.

Harry Litman, writing in the Atlantic, explains the origin story of this codswallop:

Originalism—the idea that the meaning of each provision of the United States Constitution becomes fixed at the time of its enactment—in its contemporary form traces back to the advocacy of a few conservative judges, most prominently Antonin Scalia, in the mid-1980s. At the time, it was a rebel yell. The few self-styled originalists were railing against a long line of judicial precedents, particularly a set of Warren Court rulings that they viewed as mere expressions of liberal policy preferences...

{snip}

...To understand what (Constitutional Originalism is) — and why it matters so much — begin with the two main defenses of originalism, as propounded by Scalia along with Justice William Rehnquist, Judge Robert Bork, and the core members of the then-fledgling Federalist Society (in the Reaganland-fuelled early 1980's when this was all conjured/invented). The first was the concept’s supposed determinacy. Scalia savaged various theories of what he termed the “living Constitution” as hopelessly open-ended and unpredictable. Discerning the Constitution’s original meaning, by contrast, was fundamentally a down-the-middle judicial task.

The second tenet was originalism’s legitimacy—and the illegitimacy of a “living Constitution”—as an essential corollary to the very idea of a written constitution. The point of writing the Constitution down, originalists argued, was to fix its meaning. Any monkeying with meaning thereafter is the province of the legislative branch or the popular will, and the courts’ job is to set them straight...

Sometimes one has to wonder if these fine folks will only be happy when absolutely no one but they and theirs get to do the living and dying in their town.

The town they and theirs have so hard to turn from Bedford Falls into Pottersville.

Or some such thing.



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OMG, Revisited...You Keep Using That Number.

IDoNotThinkItMeansWhatYouThinksItMeans,And...

TwoPlusTwoDoesNotEqualFiveVille

Yesterday, we noted that the Overstory Media Group (OMG), which is run by two fine fellows named Farhan Mohamed and Andrew Wilkinson, fired the reporting and editorial core of their flagship outlet, the Capital Daily (Victoria), earlier this week.

In that post we also wondered about the timing of the firings given that they occurred the day before it was announced that the majority of OMG employees had decided to unionize.

Well, now, writing in Ricochet, Ethan Cox notes that:

...OMG sources confirmed to Ricochet that three of the four fired employees were lead organizers with the union effort...

****

Earlier today, on the Twittmachine,  Mr. Mohamed wrote that he knew nothing of the unionization drive while Mr. Wilkinson indicated that he had known about the drive for months but denied that the firings had anything to do with it whatsoever:

Which, of course, is an interesting contradiction in and of itself from the two fine fellows running the company.

As for the future of Capital Daily, Mr. Wilkinson keeps saying, including to at least one irate subscriber, that everything is going to be just fine because five of nine employees are still working for the outlet:

Except, according to one of the employees that is still there, that is not the case from a daily operations point of view:

Stay tuned...

_____

And while independent media are now starting to pay attention to the story we still note the absence of corpMedia coverage...

As for the subheader and image at the top of the post... We are in no way implying that either principal at OMG bears any resemblance whatsoever to either Montoya or Vezzini...However, we really do wonder if 'five' means what Mr. Wilkinson says it means...

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Are We Moving From Vaccine Mandates Toward Luxury Vaccines?

First there was the news of the ratcheting up of COVID vaccine prices that is very likely on the way:

...Moderna’s announcement early this month that it would consider a price hike on the vaccine was inevitable. Pfizer and BioNTech had made a similar announcement last October. But Moderna’s proposed quadrupling of the price—from the current $26 per dose to between $110 and $130 per dose—is a stunning 4,000 percent increase from its manufacturing cost of $2.85 per dose...

Now, word has come, from the UK at least (so far?), that getting a COVID vaccine on the public dime will soon get harder for large swaths of the population:

Booster jabs will no longer be available to healthy under-50s from February 12 - meaning Brits have just 12 days to book a slot.

Offers of first and second doses will also be withdrawn later this year...

Now, according to the UK's Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation this is all just part of moving from a collective  pandemic 'emergency' response to a pandemic 'recovery' response:

...As the transition continues away from a pandemic emergency response towards pandemic recovery, the JCVI has advised that the 2021 booster offer (third dose) for persons aged 16 to 49 years who are not in a clinical risk group should close in alignment with the close of the autumn 2022 booster vaccination campaign...

However...

As we pivot from one type of pandemic response to another it is also worth remembering, as we noted previously, that the rich (and/or Davos Man and Woman) are not like you and me.

OK?



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OMG!

Something'sHappeningHere
WhatItIsAin'tExactlyClear


I've been quite happily consuming what the Overstory Media Group (the real, actual acronym of the post title) have been dishing out around Greater Lotusland that last couple of years, especially the work of the folks at Capital City Daily.

But then, Monday, came the news of big layoffs that have essentially gutted the that specific outlet:

Overstory Media Group (OMG) has made another round of layoffs, focused on Victoria’s Capital Daily.

 Among those caught up in Monday’s job losses were managing editor Jimmy Thomson, who’d been with the digital publication since 2020; journalist and copy editor Jolene Rudisuela; and reporters Brishti Brasu and Shannon Waters...

Interestingly, the next day, Tuesday, came an announcement that many folks working for the company have decided to unionize:

The timing has some folks wondering, including at least one of the folks that was most recently let go from Capital City, if there was something pre-emptive in the timing of the layoffs...


_____
Interestingly, the legacy corpMedia 'round here has pretty much ignored the story so far...Where's a younger (i.e. still employed) version of Rod Mickleburgh when you need him?...Looks like we'll have to wait for Jesse Brown and Co. to shake the trees to learn anything further...
Ear Worm in the Subheader?...This!...(written by Stephen Stills not about the recent events at a Canuckistanian newMedia start-up but rather about the so-called curfew/youth riots on the Sunset Strip more than fifty years ago...Oh, and just in case you were wondering, Sonny and Cher were both there, like, digging the scene man).

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New To The Blog Crawl...Cory Doctorow.

TheWordmanOf

OurDigitalAlcatrazVille

I have no idea why it took me so long to get Cory Doctorow's post-BoingBoing blog called 'Pluralistic' up on the crawl over there on the left sidebar (phone folks, you have to switch to the 'View web version' link at the bottom of the page to see that stuff).

Anyway...

It's there now and I, for one, look forward to perusing Doctorow's pretty much daily musings and link mining efforts.

Yesterday he had more, much more, on all that our federal government is paying those super fine folks like those from McKinsey and Co. to do and not do (and/or just do shabbily) so that our public service doesn't have to (and/or will no longer get to do):

...The Liberals have become embroiled in a series of scandals over the explosion of lucrative, secretive private contracts awarded to high-flying consultancy firms who charge hundreds of times more than public sector employees to do laughably bad work.

 Front and centre in the scandal, is, of course, McKinsey, consligieri to opioid barons, murdering Saudi princes, and other unsavoury types. McKinsey was brought in to "consult" on strategy for the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC), a Crown corporation that gives loans to Canadian businesses.

 While there, McKinsey performed as per usual, veering from the farcical to the grotesquely wasteful. Most visible was the decision to spend $320,000 on a livecast fireside chat between BDC president Isabelle Hudon and a former Muchmusic VJ that was transmitted to all BDC employees, which featured Hudon and the host discussing a shopping trip they'd taken together in Paris...

{snip}

...After campaigning on a promise to reduce outside consultancy, the Trudeau administration increased consultant spending by 40%, to $11.8 billion. This shadow civil service is not just more expensive and less competent that the real civil service – it is also far more opaque, able to fend off open records requests with vague gestures towards "trade secrecy."...

Imagine that!

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Virtute The Cat Explains Her Departure (JK Sampson-Fellows Cover)

LetUsRestHereLikeWeUsedTo

InALineOfLateAfternoonSunVille


John K. (then just) Sampson wrote a song cycle about/by/for a cat named Virtute over thirteen long years.

Personally, I think it is one of the greatest musical achievements, ever, by anyone who is (or once was) Canadian.

Here's my slightly warbly version of the second, most heartbreaking, tune...

______
Imagine, if you will, how flummoxed this listener was to learn that the Sampson-Fellows family doesn't even own a cat...
Image at the top of the post...Our cat, not named Virtute, getting ready for a late afternoon/setting sun ride on the ferry...

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If You Think Your Internet and Cellular Bills Are Big Now...

Third
ConclusionVille

From Konrad Yakabuski, writing in the Globe and Mail last Friday:

There are two main conclusions to be drawn from this week’s Federal Court of Appeal decision rejecting the Competition Bureau’s request to block Rogers Communications’ takeover of Shaw Communications. Neither of them makes Canada look good.

The first is that the federal Competition Act is a toothless international embarrassment, wholly incapable of stopping corporate concentration in sectors that are critical to productivity growth in the Canadian economy.

The second is that the way this country regulates telecommunications puts way too much emphasis on stability and too little on innovation...

Of course, there is a third conclusion, long ago drawn.

Which is that you and I will pay more.

A whole lot more.

As for improvements in service and innovation driven by competition?

Well...



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That Person Who Changes Your Life.

LookingDownTheBarrelOf

TheMicroscopeVille


For the last thirty years I've made my living growing microscopic clumps of cells called spheroids to help various folks test the function of genetic mutations that may or may not play a role in turning those cells cancerous.

A good example of the kind of work we do with those spheroids these days can be found here.

But it wasn't always that way.

****

Back when I was an undergrad (i.e. in the ancient times), I was lucky enough to take a course on the microscopic form and function of human tissues with a grizzled old developmental biologist named Tom Algard.

Algard was the type of guy who used to duck out of exams to practice his fly casting technique where the grass meets the woods outside the Cunningham building at UVIC. When I approached Algard to ask him for advice about graduate school he said the best thing I could do was to contact people whose papers I admired and propose the next experiments.

I took Dr. Algard's advice to heart, read a bunch of papers, formulated scads of experiments, and sent out a handful of letters.

Two people responded. 

One was a very nice fellow at Dalhousie who worked on cranio-facial development. The other was a woman at UBC who mostly cultured cervical and ovarian cells in an effort to determine the mechanisms responsible for transforming them into tumour cells. 

Dr. Nelly Auersperg also worked on more esoteric projects at the time, one of which resulted in a paper titled "Morphological and functional differentiation of Kirsten murine sarcoma virus-transformed rat adrenocortical cell lines" that was published in 1981. That paper, and the idea that the state of a cell in a tissue might influence the type of tumour it gave rise to, fascinated me. As a result, I spent the next six years working in Nelly's lab isolating sub-populations of adrenortical cells, characterizing them, transforming them with the K-Ras oncogene, and figuring out that the oncogene had very different effects on those cells as they moved from their more primitive stem state to their fully functional state.

Truth be told, separate from all high faulting' science stuff, I knew I was hooked on the entire enterprise the first time I isolated the cells, got them to stick to the bottom of the culture dish, and looked down the barrel of the microscope to see them alive and happy, filled to bursting with bright little droplets of lipid that contain the raw material they use to produce their functional product - steroid hormones (see image at the top of the post).

Working with Nelly changed my life. She was always curious, always supportive, and she always encouraged those who were lucky enough to train with her to follow their own path as long as that path was hacked out of the unknown with tools built from data of rigour.

****

Late last fall,  C. and I had lunch with Nelly with one of her old technicians. We mostly talked about our kids and her grand kids (and their kids). And then, for just a few quick minutes, the conversation turned to one of my lab's recent papers. Just like in the old days Nelly had questions, questions that got right to the heart of the matter and tested the rigour of our conclusions. To keep from boring everyone else at the table to death, Nelly and I agreed that we would get together later, separately, to talk about things in detail. Unfortunately, that conversation never happened.

Two weeks ago, Nelly passed away at the age of 94.

As one of her colleagues told me recently, Dr. Nelly Auersperg was a giant in the field. However, science was only one part of her amazing life. 

You can read more about that life...Here  and ...Here.

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The Cost Of Misinformation, COVID-19 Edition.

From the recently released Council of Canadian Academies report on healthcare misinformation:

...If those who reported believing COVID-19 is a hoax were vaccinated when they became eligible, over 2.3 million additional people in Canada would have been vaccinated, resulting in roughly 198,000 fewer cases, 13,000 fewer hospitalizations, and 2,800 fewer deaths from COVID-19 between March 1 and November 30, 2021...

Gosh.

With all the bleating and impugning that has gone since the fall of 2021, one can only wonder what the number of 'Hoaxians' among us would be now.

____

Link to the report's executive summary is...Here.

Link to a Postmedia report on the report is...Here.

Members of the panel that generated the report can be found...Here (scroll down and click on 'view full expert panel').

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All Your Immigrations Are Us.

NoManBornWithALivingSoul

WorkingForTheClampdownVille

We recently noted that the international men and women of mystery who make up the consulting firm McKinsey and Company received 100 million dollars from the Trudeau government over the past five years or so, a considerable chunk of it for their work on immigration issues.

Well.

As reader Graham noted, it turns out that these same fine folks also worked for another federal government on their immigration 'issues' as well...

The following is the lede of a piece written by Ian MacDougall that was jointly published ProPublica and the New York Times in 2019 with the apt title 'How McKinsey Helped The Trump Administration Detain and Deport Immigrants':

Just days after he took office in 2017, President Donald Trump set out to make good on his campaign pledge to halt illegal immigration. In a pair of executive orders, he ordered “all legally available resources” to be shifted to border detention facilities and called for hiring 10,000 new immigration officers.

The logistical challenges were daunting, but as luck would have it, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) already had a partner on its payroll: McKinsey & Company, an international consulting firm brought on under the Obama administration...

Interestingly, it wasn't long before the consulting company started to write its own ticket inside the Trump Administration's burgeoning immigration clampdown apparatus:

...(T)he consulting firm’s sway at ICE grew to the point that McKinsey’s staff even ghostwrote a government contracting document that defined the consulting team’s own responsibilities and justified the firm’s retention, a contract extension worth $2.2 million. “Can they do that?” an ICE official wrote to a contracting officer in May 2017.

The response reflects how deeply ICE had come to rely on McKinsey’s assistance. “Well it obviously isn’t ideal to have a contractor tell us what we want to ask them to do,” the contracting officer replied. But unless someone from the government could articulate the agency’s objectives, the officer added, “what other option is there?” ICE extended the contract...

And what kinds of things did the consultants do for Mr. Trump's clampdown on all immigration?

Well...

...The money-saving recommendations the consultants came up with made some career ICE staff uncomfortable. They proposed cuts in spending on food for migrants, as well as on medical care and supervision of detainees, according to interviews with people who worked on the project for both ICE and McKinsey and 1,500 pages of documents obtained from the agency after ProPublica filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act...

{snip}

...In what one former official described as “heated meetings” with McKinsey consultants, agency staff members questioned whether saving pennies on food and medical care for detainees justified the potential human cost.

But the consulting firm’s sway at ICE grew to the point that McKinsey’s staff even ghostwrote a government contracting document that defined the consulting team’s own responsibilities and justified the firm’s retention...

Gosh.

This sure sounds like the type of very, very, very fine folks we here in Canada would want to deal with our post-COVID and global hotspot-driven increase in immigration, visa and refugee requests in both a humane and expeditious manner.

After all, we've dealt with it all so well so far.

Not:

After applying for a tourist visa, a Nova Scotia woman is asking why she and her husband may have to wait a year for him to be approved to visit Canada.

 Mary Dahr looked up the timeline for the processing of a visitor visa for her husband, who is Cuban, two months ago. At that time, the estimated wait was 90 days.

 By the time Dahr went to put in an application, the wait had jumped to 209 days, and has since risen to a year, at 359 days.

It's an issue that continues to affect people across the country, as immigration applications of all kinds, including visitor visas, continue to be the subject of long delays...

 {snip}

...There are approximately 2.1 million applications awaiting decision by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), including close to 1.09 million that are considered "in backlog."

Betsy Kane, an immigration lawyer in Ottawa and co-founding member of the Canadian Immigration Lawyers Association (CILA), said the long processing times are a sign of a broken system.

"It's not normal to expect somebody to wait a year for a visitor visa," Kane said. "There's no excuse for that."...

Hmmmmm...

Maybe if we doubled down and threw another $100 million to the Clampdown Consultants we could get that backlog down to, say, 0.99 million.


_______
As you might expect, the International Men and Women of Clampdown Consulting Mystery are nothing if not aggressive when it comes to P.R....As such, they pushed back, hard, against the original 2019 ProPublica/NYTimes piece...ProPublica pushed back even harder, receipts in fully in hand...

Earworm in sub-header?...This.


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The Davos Man (And Woman)...They're Not Like You And Me.

 

Badges?WeNeedOurStinkingBadges!
DeactivateThisVille

Link

From the handbook of the recent big mucky-muck meeting for all the good Davos people:

As for you and me?

Just let it rip.

Literally.


______

Tip of the Toque to the alway's great link round-up from Accidental Deliberations for the heads-up...

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Weekends of Richmond Past...

AllLulu

NoLemonsVille



From reader EE on his weekends in Richmond and, occasionally, forays into greater Lotusland as a kid (in response to a post that featured balsa wood glider fun from my own childhood across the Salish sea)...

The wee balsa gliders were 5 cents, the larger ones 10 cents and with a rubber band 25 cents, from the gas station/store on number 5 road in Richmond.

The big treat was a Saturday morning shopping on Fraser St. and bread from the Wonder Bakery (with a free cookie) and lunch in the car at White Spot on South West marine, now gone.

Every three months or so, the family would venture downtown to Woodwards (the best toy department in Vancouver) and the Bay, which meant a lil suit and tie and my hair Brilcreamed back. The elevators all had young blonde teen operators and announce each floor as they manipulated the operating handles, like they were driving a train.

On the way home we would top at my Grandparents for Saturday Roast Beef, finally ending up at my uncles where i got to play with their real Lionel train. My parents could only afford a much cheaper used MARX train for me, but it didn't matter as it chugged on a little oval of track, but for me we were crossing vast mountains and small stations.

 Who needed remote cars?

While I agree that we didn't need remote controlled cars back in days of yore, I do know that my brothers and I would have gone berserk with a camera-equipped drone, especially on camping trips.

_____

Image at the top of the post is from the really, really excellent 'Richmond Archives Blog'.

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Hey, Dad!

MayYourHandsAlwaysBeBusy

MayYourFeetAlwaysBeSwiftVille


I try to reserve Friday afternoons for what a retired colleague used to call 'white space'.

For me, that means trying to spend a little time reading the science geek papers that have caught my eye over the previous week or seven purely because they're interesting as opposed to the stuff I absolutely have to read because it is directly in the lab's wheelhouse/field of study - papers like this.

Unfortunately, more often than not this doesn't happen because I'm forced frantically finish a whack of administrative tasks I've been putting off all week but which have finally caught up to me because they have deadlines that (hopefully!) haven't already passed. Today that included a couple of reference letters, a comprehensive exam report, the writing of a meeting abstract, contacting a bunch of colleagues in an effort to cajole them into visiting with an upcoming seminar speaker, and reading a thesis.

I was just settling in with the latter, mid-afternoon, when I heard a bunch of excited kid voices on the quad across the street from my office.

When I looked out the window I saw three young boys and their Dad running around going bonkers taking turns making a remote control car do flips off a make-shift ramp and manipulating a small, powered glider that would circle up for, maybe, thirty seconds before it gently depended back to the pavement.

I was immediately taken back 50 years to balsa wood and/or styrofoam glider throwing with my two brothers and our Dad. Of course, a little later when things got really fancy, the gliders had wind-up, rubber band-powered propellers and everything.

Anyway...

I wonder if today's Dad later later took his kids swimming at the Crystal Gardens and afterwards treated them to Nalley's Piccadilly Salt'n Vinegar chips from the concession stand before making a stop at A&W on the way home for a quart of brown fizzy stuff in a wax paper container pinched closed with staples at the top (so that we could have root beer floats after dinner).

Just saying.


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Government Workers, Schmirkers.

PrivatizeEverything

GrowthIndustryVille


McKinsey and Company is a 'global management and consulting' firm that sure seems to have been doing a lot of 'work' for the government of Canada  recently, as reported by Bill Curry of the Globe and (no longer Empire) Mail:

Ottawa has awarded 23 contracts to McKinsey & Company since 2015 with a total value of $101.4-million, federal officials say – a figure that is significantly higher than what has previously been revealed.

Public Services and Procurement Canada has released a statement with a new summary of federal spending with the New York-based consulting firm, just ahead of a House of Commons committee meeting Wednesday in which MPs will debate plans to hold hearings into government contracts with the company. 

According to a department spokesperson, three of the contracts were awarded through open solicitations, with a total value of $55.8-million, meaning “more than half of the total value of these contracts was awarded through competitive processes.” The other 20 contracts are described by the department as sole-sourced...

But, never mind the optics of all these contracts because, regardless, it's all great stuff, all the time, right?

Better than anything Pepsi, or Coke, and/or the folks who actually work for the government have to offer, correct?

Well...

Perhaps not, at least not always, as noted by Romain Schue and Thomas Gerbert in a recent Radio Canada report:

Radio-Canada's analysis shows that Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) has turned to McKinsey the most since 2015, with $24.5 million in contracts for management advice...

{snip}

 

...McKinsey's influence over Canadian immigration policy has grown in recent years without the public's knowledge, according to two sources within IRCC. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Both held major roles within the department during the height of the consulting firm's influence and spoke to Radio-Canada separately. 

"It was completely opaque. We asked to collaborate, to share our ideas, but it didn't work," said one source with an important position within IRCC.

"McKinsey was an idea from the government. The policy was decided for civil servants. It causes a lot of operational instability," said the second source. 

"These people, these firms forget the public interest, they're not interested in it. They're not accountable."...

Imagine that!


______
And, by the way, when Radio Canada contacted McKinsey they, who will gladly take public money to work on issues of public import, refused to comment publicly...Now that's accountability in action!


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Co-Optation Double-Down...UN Climate Change Conference (UNFCCC, COP 28).

Orwell
ShrugsVille

The next UN conference on climate change, COP-28, will take place this fall in United Arab Emirates.

If you recall, by the time we got to COP-27 last year many of the 'delegates' were fossil fuel industry lobbyists:

...There are 636 lobbyists from the oil and gas industries registered to attend the (COP-27) 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...

Well, as you may have already guessed, that was nothing.

Because this year the uber-duber big boss of COP-28 is a bonafide captain of the industry itself:

...Ahmed Al Jaber was named as president-designate of this year’s UN climate summit, COP28, scheduled to take place November 30 – December 12 in Dubai. Al Jaber is the UAE’s special envoy for climate change and also serves as the country’s Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology. He is the founder and CEO of a renewable energy firm called Masdar. But it is his role as the CEO of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), one of the largest oil and gas producers in the world, that is sparking condemnation and conflict of interest allegations...

Honestly.

Even pretending to still call this thing a 'climate change conference' is beyond double-speak.


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