A Timely Reminder

George Carlin died in 2008, but the following could have been performed last night. Although some of the language is coarse, it somehow seems entirely appropriate:

Bravo, Jerry Brown

While Donald Trump is content to call climate change a hoax, his withdrawal from the Paris Climate Change Accord does not mean that others are just throwing up their hands in exasperation or surrender. The West Coast seems particularly resistant to backward thinking and, no doubt, California Governor Jerry Brown is joining a long list of White House enemies in making this announcement:

On Thursday evening, Governor Brown will mount a new challenge to the administration on climate change. In a videoconference address to a global citizen festival in Hamburg, Germany, where President Trump and other officials will negotiate wording of a statement on the Paris climate change accord, Governor Brown will issue a sweeping invitation to a global “climate action” summit meeting in San Francisco.

“Look, it’s up to you and it’s up to me and tens of millions of other people to get it together to roll back the forces of carbonization and join together to combat the existential threat of climate change,” Brown will tell the thousands of people expected to attend the festival. In the message, a preview of which was provided by aides, he will invite “entrepreneurs, singers, musicians, mathematicians, professors” and others who represent “the whole world” to the September 2018 conference in San Francisco.

“Yes, I know President Trump is trying to get out of the Paris agreement, but he doesn’t speak for the rest of America,” Brown will say in the video. “We in California and in states all across America believe it’s time to act.”

Here is what Brown had to say a few months ago about Trump's retrograde vision:

Look At This, Please

Click here for a story I think we all should read.

Meet Leah Denbok, a 17-year-old photographer from Collingwood, Ont. In the past three years, she's walked the streets in her province in Toronto, Barrie and Kitchener, as well as in New York City, capturing the lives of the homeless with her photos.

Along with her father Tim, the pair offer $10 to each person for permission to tell their stories.

"With my book, I'm trying to portray two goals," said the teen photographer. "First of which is to shine a spotlight on the plight of homelessness, and second, I'd like to humanize homeless people because so often they're seen as subhuman individuals."

If you follow the above link, I think you will agree that Leah has succeeded on both counts.

Trump Can Dish It Out

But can he take it?

Truly, Profoundly Disturbing

I have just finished reading a long article in National Geographic, one that, without any use of hyperbole, should disturb all of us deeply and profoundly. But thanks to our capacity to ignore anything that disturbs our worldview, the article's dire warning will likely provoke little concern and no alteration of our bloated, cossetted and unsustainable lifestyles.

The following video summarizes the situation well, but following it I am including some excerpts from the article, although I do recommend taking some time to read the entire piece carefully.



The problem, of course, is earth's warming temperatures, but those rising numbers are much greater in Antarctica, where the ice shelves that hold in the glaciers are melting at unprecedented rates:

Why should we care about Antarctica ice melt? Antarctica's ice shelves are disintegrating and the glaciers behind them are flowing faster into the ocean. This could spell disaster for coastal areas around the world, and scientists are in a race against time to understand how it's happening. Sea levels around the world could rise by 14 feet if all of the ice melted just on West Antarctica.

Large swaths of West Antarctica are hemorrhaging ice these days. The warming has been the most dramatic on the Antarctic Peninsula, a spine of ice-cloaked mountains that reaches 700 miles up toward the tip of South America. Catching the powerful winds and ocean currents that swirl endlessly around Antarctica, the peninsula gets slammed with warm air and water from farther north. Average annual temperatures on its west side have risen nearly 5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1950—several times faster than the rest of the planet—and the winters have warmed an astonishing 9 degrees. Sea ice now forms only four months a year instead of seven.

The ice shelves, Fricker says, “are the canary in the coal mine.” Because they’re already floating, they don’t raise sea level themselves when they melt—but they signal that a rise is imminent, as the glaciers behind them accelerate. Fricker and her team have found that from 1994 to 2012, the amount of ice disappearing from all Antarctic ice shelves, not just the ones in the Amundsen Sea, increased 12-fold, from six cubic miles to 74 cubic miles per year. “I think it’s time for us scientists to stop being so cautious” about communicating the risks, she says.

The video, along with the above three excerpts, are merely the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. Yet the signs are clear, ominous, and accelerating. I have little doubt that the predicted flooding cataclysms will occur much faster than mid-to-late century. Indeed, before my time is up, I fully expect the apocalypse to be well underway.

We Are Not Amused

Like schoolchildren exchanging a lewd jest, Charles and Camillia just couldn't contain themselves as they listened to a demonstration of throat singing in Iqaluit. The first 15 seconds of the video fully capture their disgraceful deportment. Significantly, it has not been widely reported.

Wonder how the monarchists will spin this:



One can only ardently hope for the continued health and longevity of the Queen.

A Reflection On Canada Day

Most people who have lived in this country for any amount of time, I suspect, would agree that Canada is the best place in the world to be a citizen. While we often take much for granted, I am sure that, like me, the majority have a deep and abiding respect and love for the land that we call home. It's just that we are a quiet people, content in the knowledge of our strengths (and well-aware of our weaknesses), without a deep compulsion to brag about our good fortune.

Rick Salutin, reflecting on our country while watching people waiting for appointments or loved ones in the atrium of Toronto Western Hospital, observes a core value that makes us what we are:

What unites people there, waiting for their appointments, or for those they’ve brought to appointments? Neither health nor sickness, though most don’t look too fit. It’s something else: none is worried about how they’ll pay for it.

Absence of money anxieties is the unifying factor. Could this also be what unifies the country, as it does the atrium? Frank Graves of EKOS research found it so recently: far atop a list of sources of Canadian identity, leaving the anthem, the flag, and Mounties in the shade, was medicare.

While flag-waving and other patriotic gestures and symbols are on the decline, there is something deep and abiding that unites us as a country.

Nation states were always at their best a way for humans to embrace their common destiny: that we are social beings despite pretensions to splendid individualism (“I’m a loner, eh?”). Boiling the solution down till little but medicare remains at the bottom of the pan, reduces the concoction to a bold, unique minimum.

Which brings me back to the people hanging in the atrium at the Western, looking ethnically and multiculturally diverse but not particularly feeling the diversity because they’re all Canadians brought together by the Canadian way of dealing with the basic stuff of life and death, and forestalling the latter, as much as possible, for the former: Not through some abstraction like Canadian niceness, but by their commitment to pay their taxes, assuring that everyone else there needn’t worry about money while awaiting the good, or bad, news.

Americans are great at waving the flag and boasting that they are "the greatest country on earth." Yet they are now in the process, should the Senate bill pass, of ultimately removing over 35 million of their fellow citizens from health care coverage while the same bill also cuts a tax on investment income for people earning $200,000 or more. One could perhaps draw an inverse relationship between mindless jingoism and quality of life.

We, on the other hand, are a proud but quiet, even subdued nation. And for some very, very good reasons....