Inspired by the visual language of old Ray Bradbury and Stephen King paperbacks, Justin Metz created this illustration, which may be the first cover without a headline or typography in The Atlantic’s 167-year history.
Read our October issue: https://t.co/TglGGKPjDg pic.twitter.com/veC6stuouF
— The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) September 9, 2024
A set up question goes horribly wrong.
Elton John says he "thought it was brilliant" when Trump used Rocket Man lyrics as a nickname for Kim Jong-Un.
Follow: @AFpost pic.twitter.com/9jBlyak5PO
— AF Post (@AFpost) September 9, 2024
Write-offs under a taxpayer-backed loan program for “future entrepreneurs” have cost over $45 million, says a Department of Industry audit. Best-known borrowers under the Futurpreneur Canada program include Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly’s husband: “She has recused herself from all discussions.”
The word is “extort”: Bloc Quebecois ready to extract gains for Quebec in exchange for supporting Liberals
Research out of Tufts University three years ago created the Food Compass—a new guide to what is healthy that rivals the Food Pyramid for sheer lunacy. Advising us that Froot Loops and Pringles are healthier choices than meat and eggs, the authors of that research are now promoting ESG + Nutrition, in which their Food Compass informs governments and private enterprise on how to get the population of the world to follow along.
Calgary is dumping over $500 million into electric buses.
There was supposed to be a pilot program starting in 2022 with a handful of community shuttles. The purchase was done, but they still haven’t been delivered.
Meanwhile, the city said to hell with the pilot and committed to blowing half a billion on this. They felt that they didn’t need a pilot program because it worked so well in Edmonton. This was shortly before Edmonton’s electric bus fleet fell apart.
This is the next big boondoggle folks.
When the planet won’t follow your models, model a new planet.
Our new paper published in WIRES Climate Change questions the logic and the opportunity costs of building a digital replica of the planet — inclusive of its human population. These-much hyped projects — such as Destination Earth in Europe (DestinE), and similar initiatives in the US and elsewhere — are rapidly being implemented with no serious discussion or debate of how these efforts look through the lenses of system ecology, sociology and political sciences. Better and more equitable use can be made of scarce research resources.[…]
Models exist in a state of exception, having appropriated the academic prestige of mathematics and physics while at the same time escaping the critical gaze of philosophers and social scientists, including to some extent that of the sociologists of quantification. We reached this conclusion by comparing work on mathematical models with what sociologists say about quantification in statistics, economics, algorithms and artificial intelligence.
According to our analysis, modellers have acquired a central position at the heart of the climate change discussion, and make use of this privileged state to increase their political standing and funding, putting themselves at the helm of the climate change narratives and making climate change itself into an all-encompassing meta-narrative, subsuming all ailments of humans and their planet, inclusive of wars, authoritarianism, migrations, and various forms of aggression to planetary ecosystems.
The project of digital twins represents the pinnacle of this movement.
CBC Power & Politics panelist accuses BC Conservatives of being a white supremacist organization https://t.co/42vkU9HZID
— Jonathan Kay (@jonkay) September 8, 2024
“White Fragility” author Robin DiAngelo was hoodwinked into dipping into her own pocketbook to pay reparations to a black producer in podcaster Matt Walsh’s upcoming documentary “Am I Racist?”
An undercover, man-bun-wearing Walsh, 38, goaded DiAngelo into ponying up cash to his producer named Ben to compensate for the sins of the past by first coughing up the money himself.
More here.
Anyone else notice Nina Jankowicz (disgraced would be Minister of Truth) pop up in the Tenet Media / Lauren Chen story?
Curiouser and curiouser…
Sorry, Springfield. It’s just part of the replacement process, nothing personal.
"Haitians are in the park grabbing ducks, cutting the heads off, and eating them"
Springfield resident to City Council: pic.twitter.com/aZLsOT8v2b
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) September 8, 2024
Given the evidence, Republicans should assume Penzey’s Spices contain rat feces.
Nate Silver Douses Operation Demoralize: Harris ‘on the Decline’ in ‘Key Swing State’ Polls
The Harris bounce, blown:
NEW NYT/Siena poll:
Trump 48
Harris 47The results are "largely unchanged from a Times/Siena poll taken in late July just after President Biden dropped his re-election bid."https://t.co/GU2iUWDVsB
— Josh Kraushaar (@JoshKraushaar) September 8, 2024
Julie Kelly digs deeper.
Well, this should help turn things around.
Where the foxes caper unmolested, the government packs your school lunch and the British Broadcasting Corporation has an Arabic language channel;
The BBC breached its own editorial guidelines more than 1,500 times during the height of the Israel-Hamas war, a damning report has found.
The report revealed a “deeply worrying pattern of bias” against Israel, according to its authors who analysed four months of the BBC’s output across television, radio, online news, podcasts and social media. […]
It also found that the BBC repeatedly downplayed Hamas terrorism while presenting Israel as a militaristic and aggressive nation.
It claimed that some journalists used by the BBC in its coverage of the Israel-Gaza conflict have previously shown sympathy for Hamas and even celebrated its acts of terror.
The report claims that a number of BBC reporters have shown extreme hostility to Israel, including BBC Arabic contributor Mayssaa Abdul Khalek, who is said to have called for “death to Israel” and defended a journalist who tweeted: “Sir Hitler, rise, there are a few people that need to be burned.”
It also accuses Marie-Jose Al Azzi, a Lebanese reporter, of being anti-Israel after she reportedly described the country as a “terrorist apartheid state” in a post that was subsequently deleted.
Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s international editor, is accused of excusing Hamas’s terrorist activities and comparing Israel to Putin’s Russia, while Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s chief international correspondent, is also cited for allegedly “downplaying” the October 7 attacks on Israel.
The report singles out the BBC’s Arabic channel, saying that it is one of the most biased of all global media outlets in its treatment of the Israel-Hamas conflict.
Unexpectedly.
“Go back to your Islamist shitholes”
Canadians fight back. This is awesome
H/T @neveragainlive1 pic.twitter.com/AkGsqEtNiH
— Cheryl E ️ (@CherylWroteIt) September 7, 2024
Beauty. (language advisory)
Ezra Levant reports from the huge free speech rally in Brazil;
As you may have heard, a crusading Brazilian judge named Alexandre de Moraes has been waging a secret war against Elon Musk’s social media platform, Twitter. Moraes would routinely order Twitter to suspend political opponents of the ruling president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, usually just called “Lula”.
It wasn’t just that the judge was silencing Lula’s critics, including elected political opponents and journalists. Moraes often went further, demanding that Twitter make those suspensions but ordering Twitter to keep the judge’s role a secret. A secret trial with a secret punishment. That’s against Brazilian law, but that didn’t seem to bother this judge.
And since Musk refused to comply, Moraes simply banned the entire social media platform from Brazil, silencing millions of citizens. When Musk made a fuss about it, the government went even further, seizing property belonging to other companies owned by Musk, including the Internet service, Starlink.
Time snubbed tech titan and artificial intelligence backer Elon Musk from its annual list of the “100 Most Influential People in AI” – but slapped actress Scarlett Johansson on this year’s cover.
The magazine created a composite image for its 2024 cover showing the photos of 18 AI leaders, topped by Nvidia boss Jensen Huang that also prominently featured the “Black Widow” star.
Oh look, Freeland is finally getting ahead of a story; Ottawa ties Wealth One founders to possible Chinese interference (paywalled)
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland has alleged, in documents filed in federal court, that three principal shareholders in Wealth One Bank of Canada were vulnerable to coercion by China’s ruling Communist Party and may have engaged in money laundering as part of Beijing’s foreign-interference operations in this country.
Lawyers for three of the bank’s founders went to court last year to seek a judicial review of Ms. Freeland’s April, 2023, decision to order them to divest their shares in Wealth One, a Schedule 1 bank established in 2016 that caters to Chinese-Canadian clients. A Schedule 1 bank in Canada is considered a domestic institution, not a subsidiary of a foreign bank, and is authorized to accept deposits and provide mortgages.
The businessmen had requested that the case be subject to a sealed confidentiality order and that the proceedings be held in camera, but earlier this summer, they withdrew their motion and the confidentiality order was recently lifted.
The trio’s team of lawyers had originally argued that publication of their appeal could ruin the bank and jeopardize their clients’ investment in it. Collectively they own 73.4 per cent of the bank’s common shares, according to a May, 2023, filing, where they also placed the estimated value of this stake at $94-million.
In letters to the key shareholders beginning in December of 2022, obtained from the proceedings in federal court, Ms. Freeland raised concerns that the “Chinese Communist Party and the government of the PRC may use Wealth One Bank to further objectives that are detrimental to Canada’s national security.”
She noted that China’s consul-general in Toronto had advised Chinese Canadians to bank with Wealth One, “a statement likely intended to be interpreted as a Beijing command among Canadians of Chinese descent.” Moreover, Ms. Freeland said there are grounds to suspect that the three men were allegedly involved in money laundering.
Because the trio controlled nearly 75 per cent of the bank’s common shares and are suspected of money laundering, Ms. Freeland raised concerns that they could serve as proxies to funnel money through Wealth One on behalf of the Chinese government.
The three individuals in their court filings denied the allegations made by Ms. Freeland, arguing that they were unfairly targeted “due to the rise in geopolitical tensions with China” that, they say, led to “an unwarranted challenge to their loyalties to Canada.”
@Panopticonomy – Well, my bet is that @cafreeland gave old Liberal MP Sousa @SousaCharles quick call too. You know, since he worked at Wealth One in a very senior leadership position before grabbing that MP job.