WildPath

I don't know how likely it is PP will get elected, but it scares the hell out of me that there's a chance someone like him will be the leader of Canada. Even that Canada would flirt with that type of leadership.

My grandpa did snow clearing for the city way back. During a snowstorm he would log an insane amount of hours. Work super long shifts (I think even up to 20 hours), go home for a 2-4 hour sleep and get back out. Of course he'd get paid pretty good overtime for working so many hours. I remember seeing a cheque he kept from a big snowstorm (I'm guessing 70s). I have two degrees, he didn't finish elementary school. His cheque was bigger than what I was making about 10 years ago when I saw his cheque and that's not even taking inflation into account.

Maybe I'm wrong, but this seems about the best time for Finland to join NATO. Russians are already fighting a war they had tons of time to prepare for, but obviously didn't do a good job. They are somewhat weakened and I can't imagine they'd be able to put together a solid plan of attack for Finland without considerable time, especially while under increasingly harsh sanctions. It seems like Russia's invasion of Ukraine has really backfired. Instead of weakening NATO, it has done the opposite. More nations are now looking to NATO for protection as they realize what happens without it. The nations currently in NATO have strengthened their bond and defenses more than I can recall as well.

Sometimes I just wonder if everyone around the table laughed when someone suggested they say they tell the press they have improved the data released by only letting people know what is relevant. I'm sure there were people around the table that scoffed and thought Manitobans are never dumb enough to believe that, but I guess consensus thought they could hide data and convince Manitobans it was better that way. I'd think its obvious to just about everyone that they are deliberately hiding data in order to hide how bad of a job they're doing and prevent their reputation from going down even further. To think they can fool Manitobans shows just how poorly they think of us. They have the information and are trying to convince us that its better we don't have it despite how that may affect our health-related decisions and knowledge of how bad our hospital situation is. But our Minister of Health is planning 'couch visits' with her constituents (yes, literally bringing a couch around with her so people can meet with her in parks) 😆 - Couching health-care criticisms - Winnipeg Free Press

Manitoba keeps the size of COVID outbreaks at personal care homes under wraps | CBC News "On Wednesday, Stefanson planned to announce $15 million in new provincial funding for personal care homes at River Park Gardens, a seniors' facility in Winnipeg's Royalwood neighbourhood. The event was moved to the Manitoba legislative building because of a COVID-19 outbreak at the home. The province informed the media of the venue change one hour before the scheduled announcement. The severity of this outbreak is unknown, because the province no longer discloses how many people are infected at care homes."

Again you're being too kind. Like they care if we thrive or not. There is a concerted effort to hide valuable information from us in order to make them look better and get on forgetting Covid exists. Not sure if I hope this or not, but it would be pretty deserving to have one of those in power who have decided to withhold information get a really bad case of Covid. Somewhat concerned about the reports of younger kids with lingering symptoms with my baby. I remember reading from Mayo Clinic that kids under 1 are in the same risk level as 40-50 year olds (could be wrong, but its close to that at least). Hope all your kids make a full rebound quickly.

Not to mention the highest incarceration rate in the world! 6 times what our incarceration rate is in Canada! That stat would look even worse when incarcerations are broken down by race and poverty levels. But private prisons are good money there, so they need customers. Incarceration Rates by Country 2022 (worldpopulationreview.com) North Korea holding strong with 0 people incarcerated...

The thinking goes - if we had fires and floods in the past, there's no way they could be caused by humans in any way. We see this logic in "the earth has always gone through periods of warming and cooling - this isn't caused by humans" Unfortunately people in power use this to prevent efforts to help with climate change. Really low-level thinking that I'm pretty sure is intentionally blinding at times (people cling to beliefs when reality means they have personal responsibility and their way of life needs to change) and is definitely used as propaganda.

She is great. Someone else posted something in here from her before, I think it was about the wackiness of the convoy. Unfortunately the ones that really need to come out with a speech like this, people like Bergen, Bernier, Pollievre, etc., will not do it. Hearing it from a senator nominated by Trudeau will just add to the paranoia.

Salvadoran President Bukele's Latest Bitcoin Venture Is Another Distraction (foreignpolicy.com) Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s experiment in making Bitcoin an official national currency alongside the U.S. dollar, which has been the currency since 2001, has not gone well. But when a con artist’s grift starts to fall apart, he knows to move onto the next one fast. The same goes for fast-talking presidents.

Side note - Strong recommendation for 'Finding the Mother Tree' by Suzanne Simard for insight into how forests should be managed and some fascinating info on trees communicating with one another. Sounds out there, but I am somewhat in the field and its not. But it is a compelling read. Also, the left in Canada becoming the radical left was my laugh of the day. Another example of how beliefs espoused by politicians can become accepted as fact.

I agree to some extent, but I also think they influence beliefs of people rather than just reflect the beliefs of people. When people see our official opposition saying things like 'dictator' I'm worried more people will think that is a credible belief. I'd like nothing more to see the party crash and burn, but I think they are doing a lot of damage along the way. Trumpism in the United States made anti-democracy and racism acceptable, I'm worried we may be going down that path thanks to a spineless CPC party and populists like Pollievre.

That party needs to publicly denounce stuff like this for any hope of credibility. They've gone so far off the deep end and I'm concerned they're dragging down a section of people who vote conservative no matter what with them. There's people who believe this garbage BECAUSE they hear it from the politicians. Unfortunately they won't denounce it, at least not as strongly as they should. For god sakes, they've embraced Bergen of all people as their interim leader and Pollievre is a front-runner for next leader. I saw this tweet recently which sums up how I feel right now: The very sad state of conservativism in Canada 2022. Jason Kenney, Scott Moe, Doug Ford, Pierre Poilievre, Candice Bergen: This is their best. Their very best.

This is my thinking - it could be intentional or pure Russian incompetence. But it seems like killing someone with poison is pretty hard to screw up.

But was about the other poisonings? Skripal & Navalny for example. Seems obvious to me that it was an attempt on their lives, not sure why it didn't succeed.

Honest question. Why are so many victims not dying when they are poisoned by the Russians? It seems like a pretty easy thing to get the dosage right to kill someone, you don't really have to worry about dosing too much. Is the intent just to scare? Skripal, Navalny, Abramovich....

Again, it doesn't need to evolve all 3 (severity, transmissibility, vaccine resistance). Any one of the 3 could put us in a much worse place and hoping that it evolves less severity is not a great strategy according the the author. Again, if evolution would have stopped with Delta and we never would have got Omicron, we would be in a much better place. And that was from an evolution that was, thankfully, less severe. The article itself is from Nature which is highly respected and the author is a world leader on virus evolution. I think he's rightly concerned about how we are assuming endemic means Covid is petering out and coming to an end and is tempering that lazy optimism he sees. I think it is natural to really hope everything is good and will only get better. I had more or less that view when we were really rolling out vaccines and it seemed like everything would be normal again. Unfortunately the virus evolved (with less severity no less) and the situation changed for the worse.

I think the lazy optimism part is about getting rid of all restrictions and assuming everything will be okay as well as assuming we will mutate our way out of Covid and be done with it. I've mostly had the assumption that every subsequent evolution will be less severe, which according to the author who is a professor of viral evolution and genomics at Oxford, is not the case. After reading the article, I'd say the next evolution of the virus is likely to be even more transmissible, more likely to evade vaccines and if this is combined with increased severity, we are in big trouble. There's a big difference between a more severe strain of the virus and wiping out all life on the planet. Any one of the 3 - increased transmission, increased vaccine evasion or increased severity is a bad outcome. Assuming each evolution of the virus will be better on all three fronts is lazy optimism. We'd be in a much different place if Omicron never evolved, despite the decrease in severity.

"There is a widespread, rosy misconception that viruses evolve over time to become more benign. This is not the case: there is no predestined evolutionary outcome for a virus to become more benign, especially ones, such as SARS-CoV-2, in which most transmission happens before the virus causes severe disease. Consider that Alpha and Delta are more virulent than the strain first found in Wuhan, China. The second wave of the 1918 influenza pandemic was far more deadly than the first. Much can be done to shift the evolutionary arms race in humanity’s favour. First, we must set aside lazy optimism. Second, we must be realistic about the likely levels of death, disability and sickness. Targets set for reduction should consider that circulating virus risks giving rise to new variants. Third, we must use — globally — the formidable weapons available: effective vaccines, antiviral medications, diagnostic tests and a better understanding of how to stop an airborne virus through mask wearing, distancing, and air ventilation and filtration. Fourth, we must invest in vaccines that protect against a broader range of variants." COVID-19: endemic doesn’t mean harmless (nature.com)

Trump was a visionary - "we only have a high amount of cases because we test for it." Finally the prairie provinces are catching on - take away the data and people can't assess whether you are doing a good job or not.

Even NDP is hardly relevant outside of Winnipeg and the north. A legit third party holds any government accountable. They can't push through policies without having consensus. We are seeing what that means on the federal level right now. If the provincial PCs needed to play nice with another party we would have seen a much different government the past few years. On the other hand, I agree, vote splitting could majorly suck with a third party that is left of centre and potentially rolls out the red carpet for an incredibly unpopular PC party. That would mean they could cozy up even closer to their rural right wing base than they already have. I would argue that on many platforms the provincial liberals are even more left-leaning/progressive than the NDP. It seems like a lot of provincial voting goes by voting against a party that horrifies you and that really sucks.

Yeah, the vote splitting would suck, but having a legit third party and less majority governments would be so much better for Manitobans. The way the PCs have behaved the last few years with no way to reign them in is disgusting. The way they tabled the hidden bills and just tried to push through extremely unpopular legislation was undemocratic. NDP have also had issues with majority governments.

Say more. You mean in terms of likelihood to split the vote in other ridings if the Liberals establish themselves more?

I think Dr. Horton was also referring to national and global leadership when she was talking about failure of leadership at all levels of government. From what I've read, the CDC set a really low bar when Covid first came out. My memory on this is a bit fuzzy, so feel free to correct me, but when they first brought Americans back from the Covid cruise ship in Japan, they refused actively refused testing and mitigation measures in hopes that it would just go away. From what I have read, many health agencies and governments followed their lead and this led to it getting out of hand really quickly. The information I got is from experts interviewed in Michael Lewis' book on the pandemic response. The outright suppression of knowledge of Covid in China would also be an example of horrible leadership that may have saved us from a worldwide pandemic. In respect to Manitoba, we consistently had a buffer in Covid waves. For some reason we were behind other areas of the country while local doctors and experts warned it would come to Manitoba and we needed to be proactive with restrictions. We never were. Coming to mind is Pallister's cancelling Christmas speech that was lauded in other places in the world, but was criticized in Manitoba because we were asking for proactive restrictions that may have prevented "Cancelling Christmas." I understand your point that in many respects we weren't all that different from the rest of the world. Compared to some of the Republican-run states, we had extreme restrictions. Unfortunately I think we've seen a bit of a race to the bottom, especially lately, in terms of who will open up the economy first. Manitoba also has a population that has been a lot more in favour of restrictions than our prairie neighbours to the west or places in the US. One of the reasons Stefanson and Pallister have/had such low approval ratings is because the people of Manitoba have wanted more restrictive measures or at least more proactive measures to prevent harsher restrictions when it is too late. (There are definitely other reasons for low approval ratings as well - see defending residential schools and the response to the death of Krystal Mousseau for example) We've seen how our leaders optimism/indifference played out for other Covid waves we have had - we'll see if the optimism of our leaders will finally work out in our favour in the next months.

I recently read Gulag Archipelago and a book about the siege of Leningrad. I'm noticing a ton of similarities between Stalin and Putin. That's not good. I can't imagine Stalin with nuclear weapons and social media.