The CBC has decided it is the conscience of Canada. A Toronto-centric, woke, identity politics centred conscience. Run by a woman who lives in NYC. In theory we need an independent Canadian media alternative. In practise whenever I stumble on to the CBC, I turn it off.
On school closures: BC's consistently kept the schools open. Omicron is spreading so rapidly that students may well be just as likely to get it outside school as inside school.
With widespread vaccination, the personal risk from Omicron doesn't seem as high. I'm hearing about people getting Omicron through my social network, and so far all the cases appear to be mild, fortunately. The big issues are (a) the huge strain on the health-care system from the sheer number of cases, and (b) Omicron is contagious enough that it's finding the pockets of unvaccinated people who haven't been touched so far.
Schools in Alberta and BC were delayed opening for a week to give teachers time to prepare 5 days of sub materials when and if they have to isolate. They were not sent online. A profound difference to what has happened east of Sask. I admit to not knowing the education situation in Manitoba.
A school delay means they were closed. School staff also had a 2 week break to prepare for this closure, given that the BCTF had already demanded the closures weeks before they were announced. Manitoba schools shut this week.
Saskatchewan schools did not close. And here's an interesting tidbit to note: how many schools closed during the SARS and H1N1 crisis? There were, by some accounts, over 40% of kids who got sick back then, and yet schools remained open. It's paranoia, and fear driving these closures (along with Union pressure)...not good health policies https://www.ctvnews.ca/video?clipId=2349896&jwsource=cl.
"A school delay means they were closed." Not necessarily. In the case of B.C., schools were open in the first week of January 2022 for the children of essential workers and special needs students.
That was in reference to kids in school. During the SARS Outbreak, observations were made that up to 40% of kids in their schools (Ontario) at some point were home sick, and yet their schools stayed open. That's a pretty stark contrast to what's happening today.
It could only be a "stark contrast" if you could demonstrate that school children were off sick because of SARS. You are not able to do so. By contrast, students have been off sick from school because they have contracted COVID-19.
There's a general misconception that it's only wealthy families who are bailing on the school system. This simply isn't true as research has demonstrated already that families are leaving the system because it has failed their children, regardless of their SES status ((https://www.cardus.ca/research/education/reports/who-chooses-ontario-independent-schools-and-why/). Quite simply, parents will sacrifice, and do whatever it takes for their kids to have an opportunity in a pre or post COVID world irrespective of their income level, and that's exactly what they're doing. COVID has peeled back the dysfunction of our public system but for many of us it's merely an eye roll about what we've been pointing out for years. As the editors of The Line have young kids, perhaps it might warrant a story as to what the truth is behind why enrolment levels of homeschooling and independent schools are increasing exponentially, while public school enrolment remains relatively flat...all the while education funding levels continue to increase unabated. As for the Omicron response by our political leaders, they are clearly demonstrating they have absolutely no clue what to do. We need to get on with our lives and learn to live with COVID, rather than pretend these draconian lockdowns are doing anything but continue to stoke fear and resentment amongst the general public. Perhaps this health official has said it best: "The risk to most [vaccinated] individuals right now of Omicron is very low. The risk that Omicron is causing society in terms of widespread dysfunction is very high." https://www.economist.com/united-states/in-america-the-pandemic-has-seemingly-hit-a-turning-point/21807003?utm_campaign=coronavirus-special-edition&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=salesforce-marketing-cloud&utm_term=2022-01-08&utm_content=article-link-4&etear=nl_special_4. No wonder confidence in our government leaders is at an all time low. Who can blame us?
Nailed it on both issues. The CDC has admitted that those who are vaccinated can get and transmit or spread the virus. It is not a pandemic of the unvaccinated as 81 percent of Canadian's are vaccinated with at least one shot. So what does it take to get their herd immunity? On a note, I have read that Pfizer has been ordered to release the data on the trials and studies for the mNRA vaccine in a more timely matter by the court. As it was, it would have been 75 years before we had all the information they have collected. How is it we have informed consent when not one person who has received or is being forced to receive the vaccine has any knowledge on what the studies revealed. I have been double vaccinated so I am asking for a friend.
"Shutting schools to save the elderly and unvaccinated when vaccines are widely available amounts to nothing short of an intergenerational crime at this point."
Maybe you might think about dialling back the ageism, Jen. It's getting tiresome and distracts from your commentary on real issues.
Ageism? She's calling out the politics of sacrificing our young to protect the health of unvaxxed boomers. But boomers, that Golden Generation, always got theirs at the expense of everyone else. What else is new?
Yes, it's ageism. Since older Canadians have higher rates of vaccination than younger Canadians, it’s not clear how the young are bearing the brunt of protecting society against COVID-19. By contrast, the failure of our society to create conditions in long-term care facilities that are adequate to deal with the spread of infections has resulted in the death of thousands of elderly Canadians during this pandemic.
The young are bearing the brunt of protecting society against Covid-19 by being ordered to comply with various kinds of lockdowns for a disease that overwhelmingly kills the elderly. In Alberta, the median age of a Covid death is 78. Of the about 3300 deaths in that province, 76 percent have been in people over 70.
Conversely, only 55 people under 40 in the province have died in the entire pandemic. Only three people under 20 have died.
If there's ageism in Canada, it's the older generations expecting young people and children to drop everything in a futile effort to help the elderly live forever. If we had rational lockdowns, they would apply only to people over e.g. age 65 and the rest of us would get on with our lives.
You prove my point. Older people have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19, as demonstrated the ultimate metric, i.e., they have been killed by it. You may think that lives under 40 are worth more than those over 40 but, fortunately, that's not your call to make.
The problem With that is, is that the more vaxed you are the more likely you are to get Covid. Is this the experience in Germany where cases in the state of Brennan head 800 per hundred thousand, and they also have the highest vaccination rate of the country.
I'd like to assume that you are joking. In the event you aren't, it's my solemn duty to advise you that you have fallen victim to the post hoc fallacy. Look it up on Wikipedia.
I don't think Ford ever intended to close the schools but forced with a teacher refusal to return (they say it's due to staff shortages, but given the Brooklyn work-around response to NYC mayor's decree that schools will open, I suspect the teachers in general flexed their power and said NO) he needed to save face, so he declared it himself.
He -smartly in a tactical sense- also shutdown businesses to cut off the refrain of "schools should be the last to close and the first to open" but, more importantly, plans to have businesses still closed when the schools are set to re-open. This means all focus will be on the schools/teachers when that day comes.
So the teachers will be forced to return or feel the wrath of the parents. for years to come.
"It’s traditionally been the right that has hated the CBC in this country, for reasons good and bad. The left, in contrast, has cherished it, or at least valued it. Does it still? We ask this question very sincerely. ... Is the CBC as it exists today something anyone would get fired up to defend?"
It's a good question, non-polemically put. My mother was a panelist on CBC's Front Page Challenge for years, and I've done contract work for CBC myself and enjoyed and respected the people I met there. As I've also consistently voted either NDP or Green, you might infer that I'm likely quite favourably disposed toward CBC. Yet I'm also a retired reference librarian who takes information access issues seriously. It's hard for our judgment to be more reliable than the information that informs it, and in all honesty I can no longer recommend the CBC as a reliable information source. CBC's leadership has clearly lost sight of the important difference between reporting on the culture wars and trying to win them for one side: the former is a legitimate journalistic responsibility while the latter is a task for social engineers. The merits and demerits of the social engineering impulse may be matters of controversy, but surely the unacceptability of social engineers masquerading themselves as journalists shouldn't be.
CBC isn't alone amongst institutional media entities in having taken this transparently ideological path, of course, but to the extent that the corporation's mandate entails a responsibility to reflect the concerns of as broad a range of Canadians as possible its strategic direction is puzzling and its failures of vision particularly disappointing. Like most Canadians I'm a moderate, and while I vote left I'm no more anxious to consume propaganda that pretends to speak on my behalf than its counterpart from the other end of the political spectrum. The antidote to propaganda isn't counter-propaganda but anti-propaganda, and whoever CBC thinks it's catering to with its drumbeat, one-note messaging, it isn't me. Encountering anyone else who feels CBC articulates their concerns is an increasing rarity, which gives CBC broadcasts suffused with the supposition that this is exactly what the programming is doing a sad air of unreality.
Regarding CDN politics (ignore my comment below about not following) I've wondered for a while why Canada has gone so woke. My thinking is that with Quebec out of the running it has shifted the power from there to the cities (specifically Vancouver and Toronto 416) and the. Cities tend to be very left and very woke. Now O'tooles Liberal Lite platform makes sense. Hmmm I might even vote in the next election (was seriously considering not)
Good morning and greetings from Germany where, after a rough start, the vaccination rollout is going great guns! Sooo how's things going here. Well I noticed this in the German media (link below) "Omicron spike in most vaccinated German state heralds nationwide surge". How much,
"The seven-day infection rate in Bremen stood at 800 cases per 100,000 residents on Thursday, the highest in Germany and more than double the national rate of 303, according to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) for infectious diseases."
And what is the response to this? Do you need to even ask? Mmore restrictions and talk of a 4th booster and of course next winter, more of the same. As I said at the very beginning, the pandemic will end long before the restrictions do!
Oh and while I've mostly (completely) stopped following CDN news I still subscribe to the line for, as Jen said, "an outlet for engaging, irreverent writing" and Matt and Jen excel at this!
The predictably uniform, institutional media consensus is that Omicron is a danger whose spread must be stopped, or at least retarded as much as possible, by any means necessary. Apparently, no pundit, medical expert or other potential interview subject can be found who thinks otherwise. Meantime, if there can be said to be an internet consensus it coalesces around the idea that Omicron is a blessing in disguise. A COVID variant that spreads like wildfire while causing real harm to almost no one promises herd immunity more robust and widespread than vaccines can possibly deliver, and without vaccines' downside risks. Could there be a starker illustration of the bifurcated information world we now live in? The extent to which institutional media still contrives to pretend the realm of the internet doesn't exist is astonishing in 2022, and the gulf between 'official' narratives and what people have confidence is true is equally so.
It's a rupture with important consequences for decision-making. Is vaccinating children against Omicron's supposedly deleterious effects the responsible thing to do, as institutional media insists? Or is using mRNA technology to send spike proteins coursing through young bodies an act of lunacy that not only addresses no real threat of harm but prevents children from developing lasting immunity to future threats, as dissident internet voices suggest? Ideally, we would want our experts to be on the same page with such questions; but is emphasizing or suppressing narratives according to criteria that seem transparently political and ideological, instead of guided by the demands of truth pursuit, a reliable road to meaningful consensus? How can we trust data sources that exhibit more concern for satisfying criteria of the former sort than the latter?
NB:
The path not taken that possibly (indeed probably) should have been:
Perhaps the CBC could be saved but what price salvation? When that percent of an entity has gone gangrenous it is not the practical solution. The cost involved to show only one colour on your television would never be acceptable and the remedy seems obvious. The infestation at the Ceeb seems to have reached the point of no return when even the mildly woke are abandoning ship. It’s time.
I, and 100% of my friends and family I have surveyed, consider the rapid tests being sent home next week as a kind of Education Shit Test. How badly do you want your kids' in class education to commence?
I will look at my double Pfizer'ed perfectly healthy 14 year old who wants to be a pilot and I will shove the two boxes of tests in the junk drawer. Where they will be found 3 years from now when I'm searching for a AAA. Ok, maybe I'll open one box to check if you can, in fact, produce a false positive by dipping it in beer.
It's just conservation of energy. We're basically cranking up the global thermostat.
A warm object radiates heat into space, and a warmer object radiates more. So incoming energy from the Sun warms the Earth until incoming energy = outgoing energy.
By burning fossil fuels, we're raising CO2 levels in the atmosphere, reducing outgoing energy. So now incoming energy > outgoing energy. You don't need fancy models, it's like filling a bathtub.
A visualization of what this looks like (dividing up the earth's surface into pixels, and comparing summertime temperatures to a baseline distribution of temperatures from 1951 to 1980): https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/109/37/E2415/F3.large.jpg
The CBC has decided it is the conscience of Canada. A Toronto-centric, woke, identity politics centred conscience. Run by a woman who lives in NYC. In theory we need an independent Canadian media alternative. In practise whenever I stumble on to the CBC, I turn it off.
The CBC has an audience of one, the PMOs office. That's all they care for.
On school closures: BC's consistently kept the schools open. Omicron is spreading so rapidly that students may well be just as likely to get it outside school as inside school.
With widespread vaccination, the personal risk from Omicron doesn't seem as high. I'm hearing about people getting Omicron through my social network, and so far all the cases appear to be mild, fortunately. The big issues are (a) the huge strain on the health-care system from the sheer number of cases, and (b) Omicron is contagious enough that it's finding the pockets of unvaccinated people who haven't been touched so far.
I’m not sure what you’re referring to. BC schools were closed this week.
Schools in Alberta and BC were delayed opening for a week to give teachers time to prepare 5 days of sub materials when and if they have to isolate. They were not sent online. A profound difference to what has happened east of Sask. I admit to not knowing the education situation in Manitoba.
A school delay means they were closed. School staff also had a 2 week break to prepare for this closure, given that the BCTF had already demanded the closures weeks before they were announced. Manitoba schools shut this week.
Saskatchewan schools did not close. And here's an interesting tidbit to note: how many schools closed during the SARS and H1N1 crisis? There were, by some accounts, over 40% of kids who got sick back then, and yet schools remained open. It's paranoia, and fear driving these closures (along with Union pressure)...not good health policies https://www.ctvnews.ca/video?clipId=2349896&jwsource=cl.
"A school delay means they were closed." Not necessarily. In the case of B.C., schools were open in the first week of January 2022 for the children of essential workers and special needs students.
By whose "accounts" were over 40 percent of SARS children? The median age of cases in Canada was 49.
That was in reference to kids in school. During the SARS Outbreak, observations were made that up to 40% of kids in their schools (Ontario) at some point were home sick, and yet their schools stayed open. That's a pretty stark contrast to what's happening today.
It could only be a "stark contrast" if you could demonstrate that school children were off sick because of SARS. You are not able to do so. By contrast, students have been off sick from school because they have contracted COVID-19.
As mentioned in the above comment, the vaxed are much more likely to get and spread coivd now!
There's a general misconception that it's only wealthy families who are bailing on the school system. This simply isn't true as research has demonstrated already that families are leaving the system because it has failed their children, regardless of their SES status ((https://www.cardus.ca/research/education/reports/who-chooses-ontario-independent-schools-and-why/). Quite simply, parents will sacrifice, and do whatever it takes for their kids to have an opportunity in a pre or post COVID world irrespective of their income level, and that's exactly what they're doing. COVID has peeled back the dysfunction of our public system but for many of us it's merely an eye roll about what we've been pointing out for years. As the editors of The Line have young kids, perhaps it might warrant a story as to what the truth is behind why enrolment levels of homeschooling and independent schools are increasing exponentially, while public school enrolment remains relatively flat...all the while education funding levels continue to increase unabated. As for the Omicron response by our political leaders, they are clearly demonstrating they have absolutely no clue what to do. We need to get on with our lives and learn to live with COVID, rather than pretend these draconian lockdowns are doing anything but continue to stoke fear and resentment amongst the general public. Perhaps this health official has said it best: "The risk to most [vaccinated] individuals right now of Omicron is very low. The risk that Omicron is causing society in terms of widespread dysfunction is very high." https://www.economist.com/united-states/in-america-the-pandemic-has-seemingly-hit-a-turning-point/21807003?utm_campaign=coronavirus-special-edition&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=salesforce-marketing-cloud&utm_term=2022-01-08&utm_content=article-link-4&etear=nl_special_4. No wonder confidence in our government leaders is at an all time low. Who can blame us?
I predicted this in a piece I wrote for The Line in 2020.
Nailed it on both issues. The CDC has admitted that those who are vaccinated can get and transmit or spread the virus. It is not a pandemic of the unvaccinated as 81 percent of Canadian's are vaccinated with at least one shot. So what does it take to get their herd immunity? On a note, I have read that Pfizer has been ordered to release the data on the trials and studies for the mNRA vaccine in a more timely matter by the court. As it was, it would have been 75 years before we had all the information they have collected. How is it we have informed consent when not one person who has received or is being forced to receive the vaccine has any knowledge on what the studies revealed. I have been double vaccinated so I am asking for a friend.
"Shutting schools to save the elderly and unvaccinated when vaccines are widely available amounts to nothing short of an intergenerational crime at this point."
Maybe you might think about dialling back the ageism, Jen. It's getting tiresome and distracts from your commentary on real issues.
Ageism? She's calling out the politics of sacrificing our young to protect the health of unvaxxed boomers. But boomers, that Golden Generation, always got theirs at the expense of everyone else. What else is new?
Yes, it's ageism. Since older Canadians have higher rates of vaccination than younger Canadians, it’s not clear how the young are bearing the brunt of protecting society against COVID-19. By contrast, the failure of our society to create conditions in long-term care facilities that are adequate to deal with the spread of infections has resulted in the death of thousands of elderly Canadians during this pandemic.
The young are bearing the brunt of protecting society against Covid-19 by being ordered to comply with various kinds of lockdowns for a disease that overwhelmingly kills the elderly. In Alberta, the median age of a Covid death is 78. Of the about 3300 deaths in that province, 76 percent have been in people over 70.
Conversely, only 55 people under 40 in the province have died in the entire pandemic. Only three people under 20 have died.
If there's ageism in Canada, it's the older generations expecting young people and children to drop everything in a futile effort to help the elderly live forever. If we had rational lockdowns, they would apply only to people over e.g. age 65 and the rest of us would get on with our lives.
You prove my point. Older people have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19, as demonstrated the ultimate metric, i.e., they have been killed by it. You may think that lives under 40 are worth more than those over 40 but, fortunately, that's not your call to make.
Do me a favour, go back and re-read this thread and see if it makes more sense to you the second or third time around.
The problem With that is, is that the more vaxed you are the more likely you are to get Covid. Is this the experience in Germany where cases in the state of Brennan head 800 per hundred thousand, and they also have the highest vaccination rate of the country.
I'd like to assume that you are joking. In the event you aren't, it's my solemn duty to advise you that you have fallen victim to the post hoc fallacy. Look it up on Wikipedia.
Interesting similar to correlation is not causation, can't edit but I should have added, “it seems”, as a qualifier, my bad.
I don't think Ford ever intended to close the schools but forced with a teacher refusal to return (they say it's due to staff shortages, but given the Brooklyn work-around response to NYC mayor's decree that schools will open, I suspect the teachers in general flexed their power and said NO) he needed to save face, so he declared it himself.
He -smartly in a tactical sense- also shutdown businesses to cut off the refrain of "schools should be the last to close and the first to open" but, more importantly, plans to have businesses still closed when the schools are set to re-open. This means all focus will be on the schools/teachers when that day comes.
So the teachers will be forced to return or feel the wrath of the parents. for years to come.
"It’s traditionally been the right that has hated the CBC in this country, for reasons good and bad. The left, in contrast, has cherished it, or at least valued it. Does it still? We ask this question very sincerely. ... Is the CBC as it exists today something anyone would get fired up to defend?"
It's a good question, non-polemically put. My mother was a panelist on CBC's Front Page Challenge for years, and I've done contract work for CBC myself and enjoyed and respected the people I met there. As I've also consistently voted either NDP or Green, you might infer that I'm likely quite favourably disposed toward CBC. Yet I'm also a retired reference librarian who takes information access issues seriously. It's hard for our judgment to be more reliable than the information that informs it, and in all honesty I can no longer recommend the CBC as a reliable information source. CBC's leadership has clearly lost sight of the important difference between reporting on the culture wars and trying to win them for one side: the former is a legitimate journalistic responsibility while the latter is a task for social engineers. The merits and demerits of the social engineering impulse may be matters of controversy, but surely the unacceptability of social engineers masquerading themselves as journalists shouldn't be.
CBC isn't alone amongst institutional media entities in having taken this transparently ideological path, of course, but to the extent that the corporation's mandate entails a responsibility to reflect the concerns of as broad a range of Canadians as possible its strategic direction is puzzling and its failures of vision particularly disappointing. Like most Canadians I'm a moderate, and while I vote left I'm no more anxious to consume propaganda that pretends to speak on my behalf than its counterpart from the other end of the political spectrum. The antidote to propaganda isn't counter-propaganda but anti-propaganda, and whoever CBC thinks it's catering to with its drumbeat, one-note messaging, it isn't me. Encountering anyone else who feels CBC articulates their concerns is an increasing rarity, which gives CBC broadcasts suffused with the supposition that this is exactly what the programming is doing a sad air of unreality.
Regarding CDN politics (ignore my comment below about not following) I've wondered for a while why Canada has gone so woke. My thinking is that with Quebec out of the running it has shifted the power from there to the cities (specifically Vancouver and Toronto 416) and the. Cities tend to be very left and very woke. Now O'tooles Liberal Lite platform makes sense. Hmmm I might even vote in the next election (was seriously considering not)
Good morning and greetings from Germany where, after a rough start, the vaccination rollout is going great guns! Sooo how's things going here. Well I noticed this in the German media (link below) "Omicron spike in most vaccinated German state heralds nationwide surge". How much,
"The seven-day infection rate in Bremen stood at 800 cases per 100,000 residents on Thursday, the highest in Germany and more than double the national rate of 303, according to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) for infectious diseases."
And what is the response to this? Do you need to even ask? Mmore restrictions and talk of a 4th booster and of course next winter, more of the same. As I said at the very beginning, the pandemic will end long before the restrictions do!
Oh and while I've mostly (completely) stopped following CDN news I still subscribe to the line for, as Jen said, "an outlet for engaging, irreverent writing" and Matt and Jen excel at this!
Keep up the good work guys
Rob Abroad!
The predictably uniform, institutional media consensus is that Omicron is a danger whose spread must be stopped, or at least retarded as much as possible, by any means necessary. Apparently, no pundit, medical expert or other potential interview subject can be found who thinks otherwise. Meantime, if there can be said to be an internet consensus it coalesces around the idea that Omicron is a blessing in disguise. A COVID variant that spreads like wildfire while causing real harm to almost no one promises herd immunity more robust and widespread than vaccines can possibly deliver, and without vaccines' downside risks. Could there be a starker illustration of the bifurcated information world we now live in? The extent to which institutional media still contrives to pretend the realm of the internet doesn't exist is astonishing in 2022, and the gulf between 'official' narratives and what people have confidence is true is equally so.
It's a rupture with important consequences for decision-making. Is vaccinating children against Omicron's supposedly deleterious effects the responsible thing to do, as institutional media insists? Or is using mRNA technology to send spike proteins coursing through young bodies an act of lunacy that not only addresses no real threat of harm but prevents children from developing lasting immunity to future threats, as dissident internet voices suggest? Ideally, we would want our experts to be on the same page with such questions; but is emphasizing or suppressing narratives according to criteria that seem transparently political and ideological, instead of guided by the demands of truth pursuit, a reliable road to meaningful consensus? How can we trust data sources that exhibit more concern for satisfying criteria of the former sort than the latter?
NB:
The path not taken that possibly (indeed probably) should have been:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zg1j7Zquoc
Informed consent on Omicron, and the ethics of making decisions on others' behalf:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEcu04Setns
Perhaps the CBC could be saved but what price salvation? When that percent of an entity has gone gangrenous it is not the practical solution. The cost involved to show only one colour on your television would never be acceptable and the remedy seems obvious. The infestation at the Ceeb seems to have reached the point of no return when even the mildly woke are abandoning ship. It’s time.
I, and 100% of my friends and family I have surveyed, consider the rapid tests being sent home next week as a kind of Education Shit Test. How badly do you want your kids' in class education to commence?
I will look at my double Pfizer'ed perfectly healthy 14 year old who wants to be a pilot and I will shove the two boxes of tests in the junk drawer. Where they will be found 3 years from now when I'm searching for a AAA. Ok, maybe I'll open one box to check if you can, in fact, produce a false positive by dipping it in beer.
It's just conservation of energy. We're basically cranking up the global thermostat.
A warm object radiates heat into space, and a warmer object radiates more. So incoming energy from the Sun warms the Earth until incoming energy = outgoing energy.
By burning fossil fuels, we're raising CO2 levels in the atmosphere, reducing outgoing energy. So now incoming energy > outgoing energy. You don't need fancy models, it's like filling a bathtub.
A visualization of what this looks like (dividing up the earth's surface into pixels, and comparing summertime temperatures to a baseline distribution of temperatures from 1951 to 1980): https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/109/37/E2415/F3.large.jpg