The first 4 rolls of toilet paper we used during the pandemic.
I started blogging about Covid-19 on March 11, 2020. By March 19 it was clear that Toilet Paper, or the lack thereof, was big news – and creative minds were having a field day with that! I posted 51 of their TP memes (you can see them in the links at the end of this post).
March 2023 – and I’ve finally completed an epic artsy/craftsy piece (Wreath on a Roll) to memorialize the ‘Rona virus. (Sadly I have no memorial bric-a-brac for the other epidemics I have lived through: Polio 1950-1955; Asian Flu 1957-58; Hong Kong Flu 1968-1970; SARS; MERS; and Swine Flu 2009-2010)
I chose the toilet paper roll for the foundation. Special mention goes to The Car Guy (chief procurement officer) who secured a steady supply of TP, though the quality was sometimes such that ‘The Charmin Bears’ were appalled. It took me three years to collect the paper rolls (because this was a project at our Arizona Snow Bird abode and we stayed in Alberta for most of the first two years of the pandemic).
Once the foundation was secured (glue gun), I started decorating with the cheap and flimsy toilet paper. I braided it and wound it around the outside and made some toilet paper flowers
Toilet paper roll foundation and braided toilet paper edge.Toilet Paper flowers
Next, I called upon ‘Andy Amazon’ who supplied me with raw cotton balls and some seasonal decor items to add some color to an otherwise monochrome wreath.
I think it turned out pretty good!
That’s Not All! I tracked down a few more memes – turns out the internet isn’t finished with toilet paper yet!
Elon Musk has purchased the social networking service Twitter. He says he believes “free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated…”
To achieve that free speech, Musk believes he has to ‘clean house’ in terms of staff numbers, staff bias (according to Twitter’s files, in 2018, 2020, and 2022, 96%, 98%, & 99% of Twitter staff’s political donations went to Democrats) and content restrictions that affect the free flow of ideas.
Musk also believes Twitter has to be transparent about how it functions, which includes an accounting of how it operated previous to his purchase.
That ‘historical’ accounting is being released in a series of ‘Twitter Files’ which are internal Twitter, Inc. documents (screenshots, emails, and chat logs) that CEO Elon Musk released to journalists for them to present to the public. Here are their reports, with their comments in quotation marks:
Part 1: How and Why Twitter Blocked the Hunter Biden Laptop Story
Part 7: The FBI & the Hunter Biden Laptop
“October 14, 2020, The New York Post runs its explosive story revealing the business dealings of President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. Every single fact in it was accurate. And yet, within hours, Twitter and other social media companies censor the NY Post article, preventing it from spreading and, more importantly, undermining its credibility in the minds of many Americans.”
Part 2: Twitter’s Secret Blacklists “teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users.”
Part 3: The Removal of Donald Trump October 2020-January 6th
Part 4: The Removal of Donald Trump: January 7
Part 5: The Removal of Trump from Twitter
On the morning of January 8, President Donald Trump tweets twice:
6:46 am: “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”
7:44 am: “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”
Twitter executives (then banned) Trump, even though key staffers said that Trump had not incited violence—not even in a “coded” way.
Part 9: How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate
“But Twitter did suppress views—many from doctors and scientific experts—that conflicted with the official positions of the White House. As a result, legitimate findings and questions that would have expanded the public debate went missing.”
“Martin Kulldorff, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is an epidemiologist and biostatistician. He is Professor of Medicine at Harvard University (on leave) and a Fellow at the Academy of Science and Freedom. His research focuses on infectious disease outbreaks and the monitoring of vaccine and drug safety.”
More Information about the Misleading Information Policy
Twitter had a COVID-19 Misleading Information Policy (which has been removed) that stated you could not tweet that vaccines are untested, experimental or somehow unsafe or that specific groups or people are more or less prone to be infected or to develop adverse symptoms. That policy may have limited tweets about the incidence of myocarditis, even though “Based on passive surveillance reporting in the US, the risk of myocarditis after receiving mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines was increased across multiple age and sex strata and was highest after the second vaccination dose in adolescent males and young men. (Source JAMA, Jan 25, 2022). It also may have limited tweets about age and obesity even though: “More than 81% of COVID-19 deaths occur in people over age 65; Having obesity may triple the risk of hospitalization due to a COVID-19 infection.” (Source CDC)
“Trust, but Verify” – US President Ronald Regan
On December 28, 2022, Elon tweeted: “New Twitter policy is to follow the science, which necessarily includes reasoned questioning of the science.”
I see this as the next step in what Dr. Zubin Damania has been talking about for the past year or so:
This is now the prime challenge. First of all, you cannot villainize or demonize each side. You have to understand there’s going to be extremes that are crazy on both sides, but that the vast majority of people are trying to be good based on their moral matrix. So we have to, first of all, open dialogue between the sides that doesn’t involve, shaming and name calling and ad hominems and logical fallacies. We need to introspect and see our own moral matrix and bias so that we can go, okay, so when am I just feeding my own confirmation bias?… Then we need to have dialogue across these lines respectfully. And that’s what I call Alt-Middle.
– Dr. Zubin Damania –
In response to the Truckers Convoy and ensuing protests against vaccine mandates, Prime Minister Trudeau invoked Canada’s Emergencies Act on February 14, 2022. After considerable outcry, it was revoked on February 23, 2022. I suggested his use of the act made him look like a School yard bully: Bullying on the Political Playground.
Here are responses from a broad spectrum of analysts:
Andrew Scheer, former Leader of Canada’s Conservative Party, sounding more Prime Ministerial than Trudeau
Parliament is suspended! Before MPs even finish debating Trudeau’s massive power grab, the House of Commons gets shut down.
– Andrew Scheer, February 18, 2022 –
Wall Street Journal, an International newspaper
Modern liberals can hurtle from extravagant tolerance to suppression without batting an eye. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau dramatizes the tendency… Bank-account freezes weren’t necessary to clear the blockades. That required police only to arrest those blocking traffic and to requisition tow trucks (already authorized by Canada’s criminal code). The asset freezes serve not to end an emergency but to incapacitate and intimidate protesters after the fact… In December 2020 Mr. Trudeau chided India for its police response to farmers’ blockades of Delhi. “Let me remind you,” he said, “Canada will always be there to defend the right of peaceful protest.” Mr. Trudeau prattles on about rights half a world away but won’t respect them half a block from Parliament.
– Wall Street Journal Editorial Board –
Bill Maher, an American sociopolitical commentator, identifies as a liberal.
The Canada’s Toronto Sun political columnists, Lorrie Goldstein and Lorne Gunter, discuss why Bill Maher took aim at Justin Trudeau.
Joanna Williams is Head of Education and Culture at Policy Exchange in the UK
Where is the liberal outrage at Trudeau’s monstrously illiberal behaviour?
Imagine the uproar if, back in 2020, President Trump had frozen bank accounts belonging to key figures in the Black Lives Matter movement
– Joanna Williams, The Telegraph, 21 February, 2022
How the Emergencies Act was Created
I was present during the negotiations around the federal Emergencies Act in 1987. As one of two full-time lawyers at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association at the time, I witnessed firsthand how Alan Borovoy, the CCLA’s then-general counsel, managed to shape the contours of this scheme. And I saw how the end product was a carefully calibrated piece of legislation with checks at every turn.
It’s why I believe the Emergencies Act was not a legally suitable instrument for removing unwelcome occupiers on Ottawa’s streets.
– David Schneiderman, professor of law at the UofT, The Globe and Mail – It shouldn’t have been invoked in Ottawa –
David Sacks, cofounder and general partner at Craft Ventures.
Trudeau escalated things further by issuing a directive requiring financial institutions — including banks, credit unions, co-ops, loan companies, trusts, and even cryptocurrency wallets — to stop “providing any financial or related services” to anyone associated with the protests (a “designated person”).
Banks, according to this new order, have a “duty to determine” if one of their customers is a “designated person.” A “designated person” can refer to anyone who “directly or indirectly” participates in the protest, including donors who “provide property to facilitate” the protests through crowdfunding sites.
Because the donor data to the crowdfunding site GiveSendGo was hacked — and the leaked data shows that Canadians donated most of the $8 million raised — many thousands of law-abiding Canadians now face the prospect of financial retaliation and ruin merely for supporting an anti-government protest.
The fear of being ensnared in the dragnet will surely have a chilling effect on the commercial prospects of those suspected of “unacceptable views,” creating a caste of untouchables whom no one will dare to transact with or help.
– David Sacks, National Post, Trudeau creates caste of economic untouchables –
About Freezing Bank Accounts
As reports of frozen accounts linked to convoy donations continue to roll in, members of the Commons finance committee spent Tuesday afternoon questioning staff from the Canada Revenue Agency and the departments of Finance and Justice about the controversial emergency measures that allow police to lock bank accounts of those suspected of funding the illegal protests without first obtaining a court order.
“Just to be clear, a financial contribution either through a crowdsourced platform or directly, could result in their bank account being frozen?” Conservative MP Philip Lawrence asked Department of Finance Assistant Deputy Minister Isabelle Jacques.
“Yes,” she replied.
“They didn’t have to actively be involved in the protest, they didn’t have to be here in Ottawa at one of the blockades?” Lawrence asked.
“When you freeze someone’s bank account, you’re effectively removing them from society,” Lawrence said.
Rex Murphy joins Dr. Peterson to discuss the most recent actions of Trudeau’s Government
Senator John N. Kennedy is a Louisiana Republican who champions the promotion and protection of human rights. (He is not related to John F. Kennedy.)
You say follow the science, Mr. Prime Minister. Let’s follow the science. We look around. We see the omicron variant, its virulence waning. Most of us have immunity. We are either natural or we are vaccinated. So, what, Mr. Prime Minister, is your road map for getting government off our backs and allowing us to get back to normal? …Instead of saying, ‘Fair question, let’s sit down and talk about it.’ His plan for convincing the truckers that they are wrong is by saying ‘you’re a bunch of stupid idiots’.
– Senator John Kennedy, February 15, 2022 –
Most of the bullying tactics that politicians use are the very same ones that middle school and high school students use:
– Blame-shifting when they want to deflect attention away from themselves.
– Calling another person names.
– Sabotaging someone’s reputation.
– Spreading rumors or planting gossip about someone.
– Threatening others either by subtle warning to an outrageous declaration of what might happen in the future.
– Very Well Family –
Does Prime Minister Trudeau fit the Criteria of being a Bully?
– In Sepember 2021 he said, “There are also people who are fiercely against vaccination. They are extremists who don’t believe in science, they’re often misogynists, also often racists.” Compare that to the statement he made a few months earlier: “There are medical reasons, there are a broad range of reasons why someone might not get vaccinated…”
– In the past month he has said the trucker protesters were “very often misogynistic, racist, women-haters, science-deniers, the fringe.” Contrast this to a statement he made in earlier years: “Openness, respect, integrity – these are principles that need to underpin pretty much every other decision that you make.”
– He recently accused protesters at the “Freedom Convoy” of spewing “hateful rhetoric” and “violence” , despite media reports that the massive weekend rally was overwhelmingly peaceful.
– He said he would not meet protesting truckers because of their ‘hateful rhetoric’. Instead, he went into hiding, in contrast to a statement he once made: “My father raised us to step toward trouble rather than to step away from it.”
– This week Trudeau replied to comments and questions (made by a female Jewish member of Parliament) by accusing Conservative party members (and by extension her) of standing with people who wave swastikas and standing with people who wave the Confederate flag. (Yes, there were fringe minorities at the march. Organizers and leaders of the convoy condemned extremist groups, and asked that participants report lawbreakers to the police.)
– He invoked Canada’s Emergencies Act, which gives the federal government broad powers to restore order. Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland warned they can tow away vehicles; freeze truckers’ personal and corporate bank accounts; and suspend the insurance on their rigs. The government will also broaden its anti-money-laundering regulations to target crowd-funding sites that are being used to support the blockades. Compare that to this statement Trudeau once made: “One of the things with Canada is we’re of a modest enough size that we never feel that the ideal outcome of any given deal is, we win and you lose.
The most honest statement he once made, though is this:
I think it’s hard to know how one deals in situations of confrontation until you’re actually in there, so I’m not going to speculate on what I would do.
– Justin Trudeau –
Not to be outdone by the politicians, Mainstream ‘Legacy’ Media – Canada’s CBC – suggested maybe Russia is involved:
“… given Canada’s support of Ukraine, in this current crisis with Russia, I don’t know if it’s far fetched to ask but there is concern that Russian actors could be continuing to fuel things, as this protest grows, but perhaps even instigating it from from the outset,” CBC panelist Koksal said.
In this video, Benjamin Dichter, who is integrally involved in the Truckers Freedom Convey, reads a statement of the movement’s demands, who they are, and addresses what they are not asking for that has been presented by the legacy media. – Jordan Paterson –
The federal government provoked this event with its effective ban on the 10% of Canadian truckers who remain unvaccinated, by imposing a requirement that unvaccinated cross-border truckers quarantine themselves for 14 days after returning from the US (rather than undergoing 15 minutes of testing). This would limit such truckers to approximately two trips a month, which would be insufficient for most of them to earn a living. Yet these truckers essentially live in isolation in their trucks on most of their trips. There does not appear to be a lot of evidence, if any, supporting the necessity for this quarantine mandate at this late stage, and no such justification has been given. And the Prime Minister threw gasoline on the flames he had ignited by smearing all these drivers as racists.
– Andrew Roman, Is There a Legal Limit to the Disruption of Protests? –
“We want freedom,” the truckers are saying,” freedom from mandates.” It’s a very straightforward ask, but so far the truckers don’t have that freedom and so their blockade continues.
It’s hard to overstate the historical significance of what we’re watching right here. The Canadian trucker convoy is the single most successful human rights protest in a generation. If nothing else, it has been a very useful reminder to our entitled ruling class. The working-class men can be pushed, but only so far. When they push back, it hurts.
Now there is an obvious way to fix this problem. Manuel Moroun, who is the owner of the Ambassador Bridge into Michigan, just spelled it out for Justin Trudeau, who is not terribly bright. End the vaccine mandates and the bridge reopens. It’s not hard, but Justin Trudeau won’t, and he’s decided he doesn’t have to because the truckers, as he’s explained, have no legitimate complaint. They’re racists, so we’re not required to listen to them.
When you dismiss, your own citizens as racists and conspiracy nuts and try and shut them down for long enough, at some point, they are apt to revolt. Once people realize they’re citizens, not serfs, you can’t really know where things go from there.
– Tucker Carlson, February 11, 2022 –
Will Prime Minister Trudeau be able to put his Ego on a Shelf and become a Statesman?
Ceaușescu’s balcony will forever be a symbol of elite cluelessness. Even in the face of the gravest danger, a certain kind of ruler will never be able to see the last salvo coming, if doing so requires any self-examination.
Trudeau is becoming the ultimate example. Truckers last month began protesting a January 22nd rule that required the production of vaccine passports before crossing the U.S.-Canadian border. Canadian truckers are reportedly 90% vaccinated, above the country’s 78% total, a key detail that’s been brazenly ignored by media in both countries determined to depict these more as “anti-vax” than “anti-mandate” protests… When an angry convoy descended upon the capital, Trudeau dismissed them in a soliloquy that can only be described as inspired political arson:
“The small fringe minority of people who are on their way to Ottawa, who are holding unacceptable views that they are expressing, do not represent the views of Canadians… who know that following the science and stepping up to protect each other is the best way to ensure our rights, our freedoms, our values as a country.”
A near-exact repeat of the “basket of deplorables” episode, Trudeau’s imperious description of “unacceptable” views instantly became a rallying cry, with people across the country lining the streets to cheer truckers while self-identifying as the “small fringe minority.” Everyone from high school kids to farmers and teachers and random marchers carrying jerrycans of fuel joined in as Trudeau’s own words were used to massively accelerate his troubles.
The Canadian Truckers Freedom Convoy has been in Canada’s Capital city, Ottawa, since January 28, 2022. Many truckers have had enough of Government imposed mandates, whether they be vaccinations, vaccine passports, masking, curfews, lockdowns, etc. The truckers believe that the recent vaccine mandate imposed on cross border truckers by both the Canadian and American governments is not consistent with current medical science.
Only in Canada – a protest sign that starts with the word ‘Please’… it’s time to start using science and facts over fear.
Isn’t Prime Minister Trudeau accusing the truckers of doing the same thing his Liberal government has been doing to Canadians for the past two years?
Individuals are trying to blockade our economy, our democracy, and our fellow citizens’ daily lives—It has to stop,” asserts Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as he speaks in an emergency House of Commons debate concerning the ongoing trucker protests in Ottawa.
The Conservatives think the Trudeau government is the root cause of the alienation
“We are at a crisis point not only with what’s going on out the doors and across the country, but the country overall,” Bergen said Monday night. “And so much of it is because of the things that he has said and done.”
– Interim Conservative Leader Candice Bergen –
Even Members of Trudeau’s Liberals think their government’s Covid policies are increasingly questionable
Quebec Liberal MP Joel Lightbound called out Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Tuesday, accusing him of using the pandemic as a political weapon to turn Canadians against each other, adding other Liberal MPs feel the same.
Likely setting fire to his political career, Lightbound, first elected in 2015, said he was speaking for hundreds of constituents in his riding of Louis-Hebert, many of whom are vaccinated but are concerned about the imposition of poorly-explained federal and provincial public health measures that often appear arbitrary and cruel, introduced without explaining the purpose or providing the scientific data backing them.
“I’ve heard from people worried that those making the decisions seem at times to have been blind to the fact we’re not all equal for lockdowns, that not everyone can earn a living on a MacBook at the cottage. I’ve heard people worried that a few might have lost sight of the quiet … suffering of the many.”
– Toronto Sun, February 8, 2022 –
Who has been most severely impacted by those restrictions?
Who has most carried the hard weight of the COVID regime imposed by their governments and the protected class? Everyone knows the answer to that question: those in precarious economic positions, the independent, the unpensioned, blue-collar workers. Family and small business people, service employees, the staff of hotels and restaurants. The old and the very old, most cruelly those ill and in care, who were not only the most exposed and least protected, but who were cut off during their most difficult days from family contact. Anxiety was deepest, the burden greatest — as seems always the case in this world — for those least equipped to bear it.
The current protest is the marker of that unfortunate divide. A sign, too, of a new divide in our governance, where politics has swollen into a kind of moral marker, or an identity tag, where what should be simply a disagreement or an argument over this issue or that, has taken on the character of a shibboleth. Sign on here, you are good. Sign on there, you’re a wastrel and a pirate.
– Rex Murphy, National Post, February 8, 2022 –
Hockey rinks and that dangerous Bouncy Castle
As of Monday, Ottawa is still effectively in the hands of Freedom Convoy. The truckers used the weekend to further entrench their presence in the capital by erecting wooden buildings, piling up firewood , setting up impromptu road hockey rinks and even bringing in the occasional sauna and bouncy castle.
– Tristin Hopper – National Post, February 8, 2022 –
‘Disruptive and unlawful behaviour’ during ‘Freedom Convoy’ protest
CTV Ottawa issued this report on the 450 tickets the Police had issued in the first week-end of the protest. Serious stuff:
Excessive noise
Use of Fireworks
Failure to drive in marked lane
Red light violations
Driving through a No Truck Route
Seatbelt violation
Driving a motor vehicle on a sidewalk
Cellphone
Disobey sign
Improper muffler
Tint (too dark)
Obstructed license plate
Failure to produce documents
Stunt Driving (vehicle seized)
Suspended license
No Insurance
The GoFundMe Debacle – If Only the Truckers had said it was a BLM protest
Nearly $10 million had been pledged at GoFundMe to support the Freedom Convoy. $1M was released to Convoy organizers. GoFundMe then decided that the convoy had evolved into something they don’t support – a stationary protest, an occupation – and would not release any more funding. GoFundMe asked donors to submit a refund form and said that any funds not returned to donors would be donated to a charity chosen by the Freedom Convoy. After an immediate outcry, GoFundMe announced they would skip the request process and refund donors automatically.
GoFundMe says they support peaceful protests but do not support occupations with police reports of violence and other unlawful activity unless, apparently, it is under the auspices of BLM. GoFundMe supported a project in CHAZ/CHOP, a police-free perimeter that encased several neighborhoods in Seattle’s Capitol Hill district in 2020. What initially started as a local curiosity, eventually took a turn for the worse. In nine days, the area saw four shootings, two deaths, arson, and several alleged sexual assaults, not to mention damages to buildings.
Ottawa Police try to find ways to oust the Convoy that they knew (for weeks) was coming but didn’t think it was going to amount to much
The Ottawa Police Service warned on Sunday that “anyone found bringing fuel to the demonstration trucks in red zone could be subject to arrest and charges. This is effective immediately,”
– Rebecca Cohen, Insider, February 7, 2022 –
The Car Guy likes things to be cut and dried. Once the Frog in his Throat became a cough, the logical thing to do, in his mind, was to take a rapid antigen test to see whether he has Covid or not. He ordered a test kit on Amazon – it arrived in two days.
Other than the discomfort of putting a swab up his nose, the test was straight forward and fairly fast. Within 15 minutes, he had his answer. He was positive for Covid.
I didn’t bother taking the test. If I gave the virus to him, I was probably going to test negative because I am over two weeks away from first symptoms. If I didn’t have the virus then I am going to get it from him in short order. Either way, we’ll both test in about a week. If we test negative, we will be ‘good to go’ visit some of our friends who are at higher risk if they were to contract Covid.
Meanwhile in Canada
The big news in Canada is the Truckers Freedom Convoy. Canada’s Prime Minister Trudeau, the man who proudly marched with BLM in 2020, did not meet with the truckers when they arrived at their destination in the Nation’s capital. Why? He has reportedly said that the convoy members and their supporters are a “fringe minority” who hold “unacceptable views.” (He also says he has tested positive for Covid but is feeling fine. He has ‘holed up’ at an undisclosed location.)
The foundational cornerstone of liberty is the free exchange of ideas. Without that, we don’t really have liberty. And that means putting up with a lot of things you disagree with.
And here’s the great thing about freedom of expression – someone else gets to try and convince you of how wrong you are. And all the ideas get to compete. And at some point, enough people will provide enough verifiable information, that hard, irrefutable facts will emerge. But as long as nothing is ever challenged, we will never know if those “facts” are irrefutable or not.
– Regie Hamm –
This is the same Prime Minister that called a VanityFederal Election (that was midway through his term and cost taxpayers $610 million) during the Fourth Wave of the Pandemic…
Getting back to the truckers, they are equally peeved with American President Biden. Trudeau and Biden have, at this very late date in the pandemic, declared cross border truckers now have to be fully immunized. The truckers, who for the past two years have made it possible for the elitist ‘shelter at home’ people to ‘stay safe’, have decided they have had it with mandates that smack of political virtue signalling.
There are been many negative stories about the Convoy in left of centre Mass Media (and repeated in Social Media.) Here are a few excerpts of positive stories and other ideas:
… the pickings (of trucker supporter wrongdoings) seemed somewhat slim given the many thousands of people who were in attendance… This included a viral photo of a few protesters parking their cars close to the National War Memorial cenotaph — which was quickly followed by Ottawa Police assuring everyone that the drivers had promptly moved the cars as soon as they’d been asked. Much was made of a Terry Fox statue being “defaced” — until it was pointed out that the protesters had merely dressed him up in hat and flag, as part of a failed stunt to suggest he’d be on their side.
In true Canadian fashion, protesters even began policing one another’s behaviour. This included setting up ad-hoc litter patrols to clean up everyone else’s mess — leading to the unintentionally hilarious spectacle of CBC reporter Hannah Thibodeau trying to drum up outrage with a tweeted picture of neatly arranged garbage bags.
One particularly McCarthyist Instagrammer, Kelsey Grace, has been curating a published list of Ottawa businesses that are “actively supporting” truckers. The catalog of accused entities includes (and I am not making this up) a french-fry truck, a restaurant that specializes in shawarma (that favourite delicacy of all white supremacists), and a diner with a sign reading “20$ trucker special.”
But the last few days have provided an instructive spectacle — a microcosm for the larger, profoundly off-putting phenomenon by which progressives lazily default to labelling anything they dislike or disagree with as a manifestation of bigotry. We’ve been seeing examples of this for years, of course. But what took place over the weekend was unusual, as it didn’t involve any of the sacred cows (BLM and residential schools, in particular) that have otherwise served to stigmatize dissent. It was basically just a bunch of very privileged (and very white, by the way) elites loudly and unapologetically reminding us of just how deeply contemptuous they are of anyone who doesn’t read from their psalm book.
One myth that was busted right away was the striking diversity of the protestors starting with the two main organizers, Benjamin Dichter, who is Jewish and Tamara Lich, who is Metis. Far from being a uniformly disgruntled group of white Canadians, not that there is anything wrong with being that, one saw Indo-Canadians, Arab Canadians, Chinese Canadians, Black Canadians and just about every other ethnic Canadian under the sun.
People had different reasons for joining the protests. One couple from Cambridge, Ontario, whose nephew died by suicide due to depression during the lockdown, said that they were here to make their voice heard for kids, including for their daughter, who was with them, locked out of schools, physical activity and social life. Recall, as I’ve written about earlier, Canada has had amongst the harshest of all restrictions among advanced rich nations, and Ontario has been harsher on average than the rest of Canada, especially for children.
As vaccines were being rolled out, recall that surveys told us that vaccine hesitancy was highest among Black Canadians and other racialised groups that, for entirely legitimate reasons, have fraught relationships with authority. Perhaps that’s why there were so many Black Canadians at the weekend’s protest? Of course this doesn’t necessarily imply they’re unvaccinated, but certainly oppose government imposed vaccine mandates. How did elite Canadian opinion go from compassion for marginalized groups fearful to be vaccinated, toward hate and vitriol, that such people should be ostracized, imprisoned or fined, in just a few months? This increasing extremism among the ostensibly mainstream should give us reason for pause.
One of the concerns that has been expressed by many is: what are the exit conditions for ending the Covid-19 mandates? Often these have not been clearly expressed by governments. People fear that politicians will hang on to the control they have gained during Covid and will be reluctant to let it go.
The rules and regulations keep increasing every year. Rules and regulations are immortal, they don’t die. Occasionally you see some law with a sunset provision, but really, otherwise, the vast majority of rules and regulations live forever…Eventually it just takes longer and longer and it’s harder to do things. There’s not really an effective garbage collection system for removing rules and regulations. And so gradually this hardens the arteries of civilization, where you’re able to do less and less over time. So I think government should be trying really hard to get rid of rules and regulations that perhaps had merit at some time but don’t have merit currently.
– Elon Musk –
The 2021-2022 Fluronacold Racing Season has been an exciting one! Team SARSCoV is leading in points with the Omicorn1 superbuggy ahead in overall points, though Omicron2 has been moving up in the standings. Team Flu has pinned their hopes on the normally strong ACatH3N2 . Their BCat has been sidelined for most of the season. Team Cold has two strong entries, Rhino and Corona. Both Team Flu and Team Cold were more or less sidelined last year due to new restrictions that affected their ability to even race. Fluronacold officials have been under extreme pressure to reinstate all the restrictions, but there is strong evidence that the restrictions have caused some serious collateral damage…
On a personal note, I am on day 17 of ‘Fluronacold’ symptoms. (I do not know which virus I had so I made up the word ‘Fluronacold’…) I’m inclined to think my current muscle and joint aches and pains are virus related, but as I am constantly reminded by the ‘Correlation is not Causation‘ approach to life, this may not be so.
I’ve looked at the chart of ‘Fluronacold’ symptoms (below) and I have to say that my symptoms fit all the viruses to some degree and none of the viruses completely.
Musk also believes Twitter has to be transparent about how it functions, which includes an accounting of how it operated previous to his purchase.
Andrew Scheer, former Leader of Canada’s Conservative Party, sounding more Prime Ministerial than Trudeau
The Car Guy likes things to be cut and dried. Once the 
There are been many negative stories about the Convoy in left of centre Mass Media (and repeated in Social Media.) Here are a few excerpts of positive stories and other ideas:
Amusives 