Do Canadian Political Parties Have A Platform? Three proclaim it and three don't bother.

I've been to the website of the six Canadian political parties looking for "Platform".

The Conservatives, the NDP and the Bloq don't bother mentioning they even have a platform. 

The Liberals, the Greens and the Peoples Party have one and make it sound like it matters.  See the screen shots and "click to embiggen".

Link to conservative.ca

Link to the Bloq Quebecois

Do they stand for anything? Your time and money accepted.

Link to NDP.ca

The next three promote

their platform:

Click here for the Liberal Party link

Click here for the Green Party link

Click here for the link to both pages
for the People's Party of Canada

If there's chicken in the soup, it's called chicken soup. COVID deaths are over-counted.

Scare stories aplenty say coronavirus deaths are under-counted.  Evidence  and common sense point the other way.    One example: The San Diego County Supervisor says they only had "six pure, solely coronavirus deaths"  out of 190 recorded coronavirus deaths as of May 13.

Chicken  soup

1.  If there's chicken in the soup, it's called chicken soup. It's called chicken soup even if there are more veggies than chicken and the chicken was just powder in the broth.   The same happens with COVID deaths.  Doctors will often be right.  (It was the chicken in the chicken soup the mother-in-law made).  What goes on the death certificate will often be wrong.   Any death with the virus detected or antibodies to the virus detected, goes on the books as a COVID death.  Yet, as you know, many people have mild infections and the presence of antibodies in the general population runs possibly fifty times higher than the rate of hospitalizations.  This is just common sense. Many will die that have the virus incidentally or as one more stress among many.

Chicken soup

2.  It's complicated.  A seriously ill person has a lot of systems failing and generating symptoms.  A skilled physician can still just be guessing.
3.  A bump in deaths today means a dip later.  This is no excuse to belittle current deaths of the elderly.  Most deaths are people who were at risk of dying in the very near future.  Someone in a hospice with three weeks to live, will be called a COVID death if she tests positive near her death.  The deaths have been moved forward weeks or months and the patient was expecting to die soon.  This troubles me less than deaths of people who'd normally live another ten years.
4.   Hospitals have a financial incentive to over count.  The CARES act gives a 20% funding bonus for COVID related treatment, at a time when hospitals are in financial crisis because other services have been cut back or suspended.
5.   Some see the pandemic as an opportunity to gain power for socialist agendas and find it helpful, not that people died but that the stats say a lot of people died. Fearful voters allow their freedom to be replaced by benevolent paternalism.  I am sure this influences the reporting but not the treatment.  "To make things look a little bit worse".
6.   Birx of the CDC says she thinks about 25% of the deaths are over counts that mix case counts with death counts, a result of CDC's antiquated accounting system.
7.   New York City is the death epicentre.  NYC policies and their infectious subway have an outsize effect on US statistics.

This post builds on a good article by John Lott at Townhall.com which has supporting links to CARES, Dr. Birx and more.

KINSA, And The Health Weather Map Of The USA. Yes, There Is One.

The health weather map of the US from Kinsa is the twenty first century I've been waiting for. People that bought the digital thermometer use an auto app sending data to Kinsa where a map is daily generated of all 2000 counties.  Go to healthweather.com

"Kinsa’s illness signal consists of data from over 1,300,000 thermometers with 60,000-160,000 readings driving our signal every day."

It defaults to a guesswork map of atypical fever reports they think are attributed to coronavirus.  The drop down window (upper right) gives three more views.
"Atypical"  "Trend  and  "Observed".  These three don't involve guesswork. The color tells you how it compares for the same season other years.
What's stunning is that levels of fever are low or way below average everywhere now.
A lot of fevers that aren't coronavirus-linked are way down.

This county map is of all fevers in continental USA.  Possibly as low as it's ever been for mid-May..
A guessed-at map (C.Atypical)  shows where coronavirus may be raging but it is a coloured
subset of this greyed one.

You'd be crazy not to try home schooling young kids. Lessons from the lockdown.

Sam Sorbo's opening point in Jan Jekielek's interview is, "Don't feel inadequate".
If you made it through high school you can surely impart something to a third grader. Or if you think your own education was wasted, why would you send your youngster where you went?

The persuasive and beautiful author's words, transcribed from the American Thought Leaders video,  2:20 to 3:25

I immediately began launching a series of videos that I call the Accidental Homeschooler to encourage parents because a lot of parents feel completely inadequate. They’re just not up to the task. And that’s sad for me. I don’t think that that should be the case. And the more that I thought about it the more I realized that it is the case that we feel inadequate because that is the way we have been educated to feel. And in fact I would say that we haven’t so much been educated as we’ve been schooled. So you know a parent says to me, “Oh I can’t do it, I can’t home school because, you know, I just don’t even know how”. And I say to them, “You went through high school, right?” “Yeah, I’ve gone through high school”. “And yet you feel unqualified to teach a third grader? I mean you must then question your education. How effective is your education if you’re not able to impart the things that you learned? And then, if in fact you say, No my education was awful, why would you consign your child to the same system that arguably is worse today than when you went to school?

She realized that when she was helping her kid with homework at the end of the day when everybody was tired, she was doing homeschooling.

Pool Noodle Keep-Your-Distance Hats On The Patio? You Can't Make This Stuff Up.

The Cafe Rothe in Schwerin, Germany re-opened its patio Saturday.  Customers wear pool noodle hats.   You can't make this stuff up.  Story distributed by CNN.

SIdney Has A Corona Lockdown Crooner

Every day for the past month, he's crooned from his drive for an hour.  His audience is whoever cares to stop, not that he waits for you to show. 

About one thirty in the afternoon he brings the amp and cordless mike to his property line and begins to sing in a rich and lazy style.  First Avenue in Sidney gets this treat or otherwise for about an hour.  What are YOU doing to make the home stays worthwhile?

Remy Sings: "It's Illegal To Go Surfing, In The USA".

I Vote For Democracy. Experience shows we vote in four more governments at the same time.

We are governed by more than democracy and its votes.  There are four other votes.
In the democracy, our vote is small but has the same weight as any other vote.
.

Benevolent dictatorship
now applied to a pandemic

Our experience as infants is with benevolent dictators. Parents note our vote but the vote has no rights to  prevail.  Because we are dependent, this works astonishingly well.

Our experience in social media and groups is that shaming from high-status members shapes our decisions.  We have a vote but choose to cancel our own vote to keep status and avoid shame.

Our experience in the markets is that people with the most money have the biggest vote.  We may both wish a Lamborghini but in the markets, our vote is quantified in dollars and the higher number prevails.

Our experience with contracts is that we will sell our vote to receive a benefit.  This can be taking on a mortgage or agreeing to work for someone.  We vote to enter the contract, but surrender the right to leave until we have fulfilled some promise.

All five systems of government co-exist.

Currently, the infant model of benevolent dictators prevails.  People with big hats in Government and Health have been centre stage telling us what to do for two months but the spotlights are moving towards other figures now entering the scene.

Democracy:  All votes the same value and non-negotiable.  An honor system with checks.
Infancy:  Vote over-powered by certain others at will.
Status:   We override our own vote.
Market:   We compete to put our vote over the top.
Contract:  We sell our vote for a benefit.

CCP Calls Trump And Pompeo "Enemies of Mankind".

The China narrative is curated with almost iron-clad control.  The CCP secretary has okayed calling Trump and Pompeo "Enemies of Mankind".  See banner photo from May 14.  Remember when the curtain goes up in China, what you see is what the playwright put there.  Kyle Bass reports.

We have a stage in America too but cranks and the odd patriot get to wander on and off-stage too.

Remember the 2019 call for a People's War.

Beijing calls for a “people’s war” against Washington’s “greed and arrogance,” according to reports. “The most important thing is that in the China-US trade war, the US side fights for greed and arrogance … and morale will break at any point.

Contrast that with President Trump's approach, that he expects the Chinese leader to do what's best for China.

Too Quick To Re-Open. Let Me Explain That.

"Too slow to close" is the first outrage voiced by the left.

"Too quick to open" is the second outrage voiced by the left.

This is not about health. 

The correct translation is:

To slow to expand the role of government.

To quick to shrink it..

There's no contradiction. The same principle is applied in different settings.




Update:  This sounds about right:

Geomagnetic Superstorms More Common Than You Think. The 1921 Storm You DIdn't Hear About Was As Big As The 1859 Carrington Event.

It began on May 12, 1921 when giant sunspot AR1842, crossing the sun during the declining phase of Solar Cycle 15, began to flare. One explosion after another hurled coronal mass ejections (CMEs) directly toward Earth. ... pens in strip chart recorders pegged uselessly to the top of the paper....And then the fires began. Around 02:00 GMT on May 15th, a telegraph exchange in Sweden burst into flames. About an hour later, the same thing happened across the Atlantic in the village of Brewster, New York. Flames engulfed the switch-board at the Brewster station of the Central New England Railroad and quickly spread to destroy the whole building....  On some telegraph lines in the USA voltages spiked as high as 1000 V.
During the storm’s peak on May 15th, southern cities like Los Angeles and Atlanta felt like Fairbanks, with Northern Lights dancing overhead while telegraph lines crackled with geomagnetic currents. Auroras were seen in the USA as far south as Texas while, in the Pacific, red auroras were sighted from Samoa and Tonga and ships at sea crossing the equator.

They found some old magnetic chart recordings that did not go offscale when the May 1921 CMEs hit....The storm attained an estimated maximum −Dst on 15 May of 907 ± 132 nT, an intensity comparable to that of the Carrington Event of 1859,” they wrote in their paper.

The expanded story with newspaper clippings from the day are at Spaceweather.com 
Update:  I see they picked it up from WattsUpWithThat.

Coronavirus Freed Our Inner Tyrant

At American Thinker,

"When the coronavirus landed on our shores, communist China came with it. We have become part of a mass scale human experiment in government control and it turned out that stripping away our freedom wasn’t all that difficult. Under the guise of concern for our health and well-being, tyrants came out of the woodwork."

Bringing enlightened leadership to the locals who,
at first, go along obsequiously.
(Jose Garnelo 1892)

 Carol Brown expands the thought: "Our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, and our lives are being destroyed as the left solidifies and expands their oppressive powers. We’ve been herded around like cattle, threatened, isolated, confined, silenced, and arrested."

This is true enough but the inner tyrant can be found left, right and centre. Some of this traces to our family structure where as infants we experienced being tightly managed.

I close with the C.S. Lewis quote:

"To be "cured" against one's will":

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience".

“

Best Big Picture Weather. Dynamic Display Options Include Thunderstorms, Waves, And The Whole World If You Zoom Out;

This Ventusky weather site is the twenty first century I was promised.

Drill down

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You get this at other sites too.

The specialist can drill down.  The merely curious can study home territory or scan the world in seconds. 









The left side tool bar is extensive.
The view can be customized in more ways than a gelateria will sell you iced cream.

Today's electrical action

Watch a doctor explain covid-19 to medical people.

It's 90 minutes university-level and it's complicated.  The news we've been reading is like a sandbox toy compared to the suite of Craftsman tools presented in this illustrated lecture by Dr Seheult  at medcram.com    You can sign up for a free view.  This is the latest as of April 30.   When you know more, you still won't have easy answers.  But you will be informed.

Progressive Intellectuals

A quote from The Centurions by Jean Larteguy: 

"They were always obsessed by their own problems; they listened in raptures to the beating of their heart; anything served as a pretext for them to probe their souls in order to produce a spate of words"

Mac supports Windows

Why not give convicts masks instead of releasing them?

We can still be friends

Quotable:
Saying "We can still be friends" is like your mom telling you
that your dog died and saying, "You can still keep it".

College Tuition: More money chasing the same goods

Did you hear about college educations getting better and better?  Neither did I.  From the Spectator's article on "Covid College" (lessons learned):

"Only a fool pays the full price for a second-rate product. Only a fool believes real-world contact can be delivered secondhand by Zoom. Our colleges may teach the higher foolishness, but the cost of higher education — ahead of inflation every year since 1980, and devalued accordingly — is a lesson in popular credulity."

The cost of education has gone up far faster than inflation.  But it hasn't got better.  The money pumping it up is going to go somewhere else after the Covid experience. The classes disappeared into the ether but the money kept going into the hole where they used to be.      This is inflation but not across the whole market, just in the college market.  It's unstable and will correct towards a mean.