Covid strikes researchers in remotest place on earth!

Polar researchers in Antarctica have contracted COVID-19 despite being fully vaccinated and living miles from civilization. Two thirds of the 25 staff based at Belgium’s Princess Elisabeth Polar Station have caught the virus, the Le Soir newspaper reported, proving there is no escape from the global pandemic. The outbreak took hold despite all staff passing multiple PCR tests, quarantining and living in one of the most remote places in the world.

The situation has echoes of the plot of John Carpenter’s 1982 horror classic The Thing, which was advertised on posters with the warning “man is the warmest place to hide.”

In Cape Town they quarantined for 10 days and took another PCR test. A further test was needed when leaving for Antarctica and a final one five days after that. One person tested positive seven days after arriving at the station on Dec 14. The individual was placed in isolation but tests revealed two others had caught the virus. All three left the station on Dec 23 but the virus has continued to spread. (The Telegraph)

That just about wraps it up. I can’t think of a better way to sign off 2021 than to share this Antarctica story. If Covid can strike down scientists in the most remote region on earth, then it’s time to face it. It’s gonna get us all eventually. Get used to the idea of riding through a bad flu for a couple days and hopefully not being one of the unlucky who ends up in hospital. What’s the point of introducing more vaccine into your system when the virus is always a step ahead? Governments the world over keep moving the goalposts and changing the rules. It is obvious that everybody is flying by the seat of their pants. Nobody has a clue how to beat Covid! When it can do what it did to people who are arguably the smartest and most careful in the world, then how are you and I going to avoid contracting it? Covid is here to stay. Feel fortunate that it morphed into the more virulent but less catastrophic Omicron. Maybe herd immunity will be the only thing that ends up saving humanity. God save us all!

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Burn 2021 and celebrate your moment!

Here we are. The final day of 2021. And a good riddance! If ever there was reason to celebrate anything’s passing, it is this. There are so many things that went wrong in 2021, that it will need a full page to list them all for the bonfire. That’s the annual tradition here, compile a list of all the things you want to forget and throw them in the fire. It’s a kind of purging. I won’t share them with you because lots of items are quite personal, and I’m not yet ready to share those things with my readers. I’m sure you all have similar items you want to toss as well. You don’t need a huge bonfire either, a candle will do. But make your list and get ready to kiss it goodbye. Believe me, it works, a kind of catharsis. As for making resolutions, if it works for you go for it! My philosophy provides that nobody cares what you are going to do, tell them about what you did! Share your accomplishments after the fact. In the meantime, go about your business, accept that Covid is here forever, sooner or later we shall all be struck, but it will be a milder form and not debilitating like the first and second waves. Thank God, or whatever your deity is, that you are alive to celebrate the passing of 2021and entry to a NEW YEAR!. Happy New Year and have a great pandemic day y’all!

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Feel good Christmas story.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/video?clipId=2351343&playlistId=1.5722618&binId=1.810401&playlistPageNum=1&binPageNum=1

A feel good Christmas story. Enjoy it and forget about the Pandemic for a minute!

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Holy s..t! Covid is unleashed!

Ontario labs processed 67,301 tests in the last 24 hours, which the Ministry of Health said generated a record positivity rate of 30.5 per cent. Do the math. 13,807 new cases. And that is just the officially logged ones from swab tests. How many others are testing positive with home tests??!! Health experts have said that Ontario’s high case counts in recent days are likely an underestimate given the scarcity of PCR tests provincewide.

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I’m still negative! (for Covid)

Tested on:

28-Dec-2021 (Reported: 29-Dec-2021)
35 BRIDGE STREET, UNIT 1, PICTON, ON

Negative (COVID-19 RNA test)

• Your results were negative for the COVID-19 virus

So that’s a relief, for me. Where will this Pandemic bring us in 2022? It seems to be that for all the vaunted vaccines and precautions we have all been taking, the world is worse off today than it was 2 years ago. Living in cocoons and having social engagements with the voices in our heads does not seem like a healthy way to live. Is that our fate? Distance greetings to friends and neighbors? Panic attacks if somebody gets closer than 6ft? Carrying QR codes so the state can monitor our whereabouts? So now I hide away until mid January, when my so-called booster shot is scheduled. And who’s to say that will be any more effective, since SARS Cov-2 morphs every few months into more and more virulent forms. It’s a shit show and you better have your shovel handy. Have a great Pandemic day y’all!

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Some reflections on cancel culture in language.

2021 brought all sorts of new demands about how we’re supposed to talk and what words we’re allowed to use. Prominent trans activist Florence Ashley opined in June that we should all be careful not to use male and female terms when discussing our dogs and cats, because “gendering animals serves to normalize bioessentialist conceptions of gender. When we gender animals, we forget that sex is assigned. We begin to believe that sex is literally *in* the body.” (Imagine thinking such a thing!) And just this month, we learned that Ontario’s public service has compiled a list of discouraged terms that includes “pipeline” (offensive to Indigenous people, apparently) and “low-hanging fruit” because (and I am not making this up) “though there is no direct connection, the term can be problematic for those who witnessed lynchings.” A separate list created by CBC Ottawa in recent works similarly warns of “words and phrases you may want to think twice about,” including “spooky,” “lame,” “brainstorm,” and “grandfathered,” all for reasons that are too ridiculous to repeat. (NP)

I’m glad I have several hard copy dictionaries on the shelf. With all the scrubbing of culture, it will soon enough be impossible to find words on the interweb. Words which were simply words will in future, as are so many already, be scrubbed into the trashbin of history, forever consigned to darkness. Have a great Pandemic day y’all!

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It’s now fact. Russia is a dictatorship.

In a terrible year for human rights in Russia, beginning with the imprisonment of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the closure of International Memorial stands out for its ruthlessness.

Founded in the late 1980s by Andrei Sakharov and other Soviet-era dissidents, the group took the new freedoms offered under Mikhail Gorbachev and used them to reveal raw truths about the fate of millions of victims of Stalin’s repressions. It was a poignant symbol of Russia’s new openness, but for many the meaning was anything but abstract: Russians discovered the tragic fates of their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents after decades of secrecy and official cowardice.

Memorial’s closure is also a potent symbol – one of Russian civil society being dismantled at lightning speed. Its leadership had hoped that public support, including from prominent Russians such as Gorbachev, would stay the Kremlin’s hand. Or that closing down an organisation dedicated to uncovering Soviet atrocities would be a step too far, even for Vladimir Putin.

But on Tuesday, almost exactly 30 years after the Soviet Union was dissolved, a judge showed otherwise.

“When Russia chose to take a democratic, legal path forward, I couldn’t in my darkest dreams have imagined that everything would eventually start going in reverse,” Nikita Petrov, a historian and researcher who helped found Memorial, told the Guardian last month. “Probably I was naive then.”

It is not hard to see how Putin, mired in historical conflicts over Crimea, Nato expansion and the fall of the Soviet Union, the second world war and more, sees investigation of Soviet history as a threat to national security. He is far more interested in perceived historical injustices committed against Russia than in the uncomfortable truths dug up by Memorial during the organisation’s three decades of work in the Russian archives.

“Our country needs an honest and conscientious understanding of the Soviet past; this is the key to its future,” the organisation wrote in a statement after its liquidation.In place of Memorial, which spoke out eloquently and aggressively about mass atrocities, the state is creating a more manicured and careful presentation of the deaths of millions, one that condemns their deaths more than their murders, identifying victims but not their killers.The Russian government would like to portray Memorial’s closure as a simple, bureaucratic extension of its “foreign agents” laws. But on Tuesday a prosecutor in court made the political motive explicit, saying in an impassioned speech that Memorial was “mendaciously portraying the USSR as a terrorist state”.

“Why should we, the descendants of the victors, have to see the vindication of traitors to their homeland and Nazi henchmen?” the prosecutor asked. A lawyer for Memorial said it reminded him of a 1930s show trial.

Memorial’s leadership has said it is useless trying to understand which of the government’s red lines it crossed to prompt the authorities to shut it down. Some believe it has to do with its archival and historical work on Soviet terror, others with its support for political prisoners such as Navalny.

Yet the truth is that Memorial has continued to do what it did since day one, while it is Russia that has changed again, perhaps ending a brief window when it would tolerate an independent reckoning of its past.

“It speaks to the fears of the government that it is no longer willing to tolerate the honest accounting of its conduct that Memorial provides,” said Kenneth Roth, the head of Human Rights Watch. “If that mirror is too awful to look at, the answer is to change the conduct, not to shatter the mirror.” (Andrew Roth)

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Vaccine still better than no vaccine.

Further to my yesterday post that questioned the wisdom of mRNA vaccines, here I go flipping to the pro side today. I suppose our reactions are no different than governments that flip back and forth in their messaging, one day providing message A, and the next day a complete reversal. These graphs, (hope you can understand them, my photoshop skills are low grade) were in the latest Economist. It shows a stark contrast in death rates between vaccinated and non vaccinated people. But the weird thing is this. These are deaths for non-Covid related issues! The first graph shows average death rate per 100 people per year. P for Phizer, M for Moderna and N for non-vaccinated. The second graph breaks down the death rate by race. H for Hispanic, W for white, B for black, A for Asian. Begs the question. What other miracle defenses are the mRNA vaccines providing? So today I’m back to supporting the vaccination drive. If only we had more health care workers to do the jabs. Let’s hope that the new technologies being pursued in the realm of dry vaccine dispensers is making progress. There is one company that seems to be well on the way to finding a solution, Rapid Dose Therapeutics (DOSE). Check it out.

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Drake hands out stacks of cash for Christmas!

It was a very merry Christmas for some Torontonians who happened to be on Drake’s route Saturday. The generous rapper is already an icon in the 6ix but he’s now a legend after he drove around the city handing out stacks of cash to random residents.

A video surfaced today of the Raptors’ global ambassador sitting in the backseat of a car, reportedly the Certified Lover Boy’s Maybach, being chauffeured around Toronto, wishing lucky strangers a Merry Christmas while handing over some bundled bills.

In the video, posted by @raptvcom, Drake has just handed a wad of what appear to be $20 bills to a woman who is heard saying, “Oh my God, this is crazy,” while another man says: “Thank you, bro. Appreciate it guys, take care.”

Drake waves and tells them to “be safe,” as his driver pulls away from the curb.

The caption of the video gives a shoutout to Drizzy: “Giving away racks for Christmas. Life’s f***ing unreal man. Legend of the city.”

It is unknown what neighbourhood Drake was feeling generous, how many stacks Drake doled out or just how much is in each stack. But there’s no denying the thickness so it’s safe to say it was a lot. If you happen to be in Toronto to celebrate New Year’s, perhaps Drake will make a return trip to the streets. You never know, he may be making this an annual holiday tradition.

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Vaccine efficacy drops to 15%!!

I was just watching the good old cbc news and the news bar at bottom just flashed something from the ontario science council. They now submit that the vaccine efficacy has dropped to 15%. Not quite believing my eyes, I rewound the item and sure enough it’s what I read. That is exactly what they now say. So this much applauded mRNA that provided me with up to 90% efficacy has now plummeted to 15%??!! And I’m the guy that believed this would revolutionize the world, possibly give us a cure for cancer. Anybody else out there see this? Because if that is true, it begs the question. Why should I keep getting booster shots if the efficacy drops off all the time? What’s the point of feeling semi-safe when you are out and about, when pubs and other social settings are so constrained by capacity rules that it negates the entire social experience. Even fully vaccinated I only have up to 90% chance of staying out of the hospital. Am I willing to run that 10% risk? It makes one wonder if the entire vaccination freight train is just a ploy of big pharma to keep us coming back while they jack up shareholder value. Is this going to be our new normal, queue up to get an appointment for a booster, in the meantime hide away at home because your old vaccine shots have so degraded, it is now dangerous to go outside. I tell ya, those anti-vaxxers are starting to look just a little bit less lunatic.

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