Quote of the Day: “One of the most fashionable notions of our times is that social problems like poverty and oppression breed wars. Most wars, however, are started by well-fed people with time on their hands to dream up half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse real or imagined grievances.” Thomas Sowell
Most everyone knows that I love Sudoku puzzles. This fact means that the younger members of my extended family have very easy Christmas gifts to buy for me and hence the barrage of Sudoku paperback books on my shelf. TheRecord has a Sudoku puzzle every day on Page 2 and two puzzles on Saturday. They are rated from 1 star to 5 stars, with the easy 1 to 3 stars on Monday to Thursday, and then a 4 star on Friday and both a 4 and 5 star on Saturday. Dave Green has been supplying the puzzles to TheRecord for many years – as long as I have been doing them, I think. Now, I only do the 4 and 5 star puzzles since I find the 1 to 3 stars too simple. When I went to grab the 4 star today, I noticed that it wasn’t by Green at all since he has a very distinct and symmetrical way of organizing his puzzles. It seems that TheRcord now publishes Sudoku by “King Features” instead of Dave Green and has done so since Monday. I attempted to use the search facility to find the announcement of this change without success. The King Features puzzles are clearly not as good as Green’s. Pathetic. Every day that I pick up my paper, I ask myself: Am I getting my money’s worth from my subscription. More and more, I get back the resounding “NO!”.
If you do a google search (or in my case, neeva.com) on the effectiveness of cloth masks to prevent the airborne transmission of aerosol droplets (such as those exhaled by an infected person with COVID-19), it will bring up research that clearly indicates that cloth masks are basically useless. Some research I found here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27531371/ points to primary issue: “Our results suggest that cloth masks are only marginally beneficial in protecting individuals from particles <2.5 μm. Coronavirus is 0.125 microns.” Got that? So, COVID-19 virus is 20 times smaller than what a cloth masks can filter and it is also only “marginally beneficial” in protecting particles of 2.5 microns. So, with the science question out of the way, why is it that some institutions of higher learning are still forcing students to wear masks? On the Front Page today, Robert Williams has a hilarious article about WLU student who takes the mask mandate and using the letter of the law, wears lettuce, SCUBA masks, full WWII gas masks etc. to protest the ridiculous rules by WLU. Well worth the 4 minute read!!!
Also on the Front Page today, Terry Pender tells us that: “The lack of affordable child care forced the first Black female MPP from Kitchener Centre to announce she’s resigning her seat for a tenure track position at the University of Waterloo.” As announced yesterday, Laura Mae Lindo is quitting her position as a MPP and moving to UofW. Really??? So, seven months ago, she ran successfully for the NDP to be a member of the provincial legislature and then suddenly realized that she didn’t have day care lined up for her kid? Right. What a loser. But of course, you just don’t get a tenure track position at UofW over the weekend, now do you? This must have been months in the making. So, basically, she did absolutely nothing for Kitchener Centre in her time except pick up a pay cheque. Good riddance.
Fred Youngs, a senior manager at the CBC (wow – if there ever was a RED FLAG, this is it…) has an op-ed on the Insight Page today. He suggests that: “Poilievre’s far-right flirtations continue”. He tells us that Poilievre’s spoke at a think tank called the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. Now, I get newsletters from this group. I find that they are well thought out and well researched. If you go to their website (which Youngs fails to tell us) at FCPP.org, you will see the thousands of research papers on a huge variety of subjects. However, Youngs points to papers (none of them referenced so it’s kinda hard to find and confirm then) that mention positions that “…question the reality and validity of the horrors of residential schools.” Well, so??? Is this not something that we as Canadians shouldn’t question? The FCPP has been promoting Indigenous rights for decades. For example, under the Aboriginal Futures section of their website, they have over 740 research papers – the absolute first one in the section is titled: “Legislating Communal Native Poverty” which warns that “Legislated poverty destroys job prospects for natives.” Youngs and TorStar anti-Poilievre op-eds are now bordering on ridiculous.