A blog about my personal thoughts and opinions on culture, world politics and daily life. Also included will be various articles I find interesting and would like to share with the world.
If you are in Alberta, I suggest writing: 1) Your local MLA. 2)
Kaycee Madu. 3) Jason Kenney. Let each of them know you are
displeased with this. If you are a UCP member/voter, include those
details as well.
I live in Alberta. I’ll be contacting officials this week in regards to this. I have also sent an email to editor Matt Gurney at the National Post requesting coverage of this. Matt is also responsible for contacting 17 other columnists and contributors.In the email I provided a written summary and implications to the topic at hand and included a link to this video. This is serious and I encourage other Albertans to not just bitch and moan, but actually contact your officials as Ian mentioned.
As I listen to this, I am envisioning every officer having the same powers as Judge Dredd from the movie with the same name.
This sounds like a cop wrote the law
We are now post rule of law in Canada. People need to wake up to the
reality of the tyranny we are now under. This is late 1930's Germany and
only going to get worse in the new year!!!
Pay them if your guilty == AND == Pay them if you're innocent
Police become judge, jury and executioner. Reminds me of East Germany a few decades back.
On a plus side, the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms is a NonProfit designed to fight for our freedoms.
It's been awhile since my last post. Here is an interesting article showing that the pandemic response is curated by politicians and a cabinet of ministers that remain faceless. I'll cut and past most the article here in case it gets taken down from the CBC News website.
Secret recordings reveal political directives, tension over Alberta's pandemic response
Recordings provide rare glimpse into relationship between civil servants, political officials
On the morning of June 4, a team of Alberta civil servants
gathered — as it had nearly every day since the COVID-19 pandemic began —
to co-ordinate the province's response to the crisis.
A few
minutes into the meeting in a boardroom in downtown Edmonton, Chief
Medical Officer of Health Dr. Deena Hinshaw weighed in.
The
cabinet committee, to which she and the group reported, was pressuring
her to broadly expand serology testing, which is used to detect the
presence of COVID-19 antibodies in the blood.
The problem was
that the tests had limited large-scale clinical value and Hinshaw
believed it would overestimate the virus's presence in the population.
"Honestly,
after the battle that we had about molecular testing, I don't have a
lot of fight left in me," Hinshaw said during that meeting. The province
had introduced rapid molecular testing kits at the start of the
pandemic to help testing in rural and remote communities. The recordings
reveal some tensions about that decision.
"I think we need to
draw on our experience from the molecular testing battle that we
ultimately lost, after a bloody and excruciating campaign, and think
about, how do we limit the worst possible implications of this without
wearing ourselves down?," Hinshaw said.
A few weeks later,
Health Minister Tyler Shandro and Hinshaw announced the province would
pour $10 million into targeted serology testing, the first in Canada to
do so.
The
level of political direction — and, at times, interference — in
Alberta's pandemic response is revealed in 20 audio recordings of the
daily planning meetings of the Emergency Operations Centre
(EOC) obtained by CBC News, as well as in meeting minutes and interviews
with staff directly involved in pandemic planning.
Taken
together, they reveal how Premier Jason Kenney, Shandro and other
cabinet ministers often micromanaged the actions of already overwhelmed
civil servants; sometimes overruled their expert advice; and pushed an
early relaunch strategy that seemed more focused on the economy and
avoiding the appearance of curtailing Albertans' freedoms than enforcing
compliance to safeguard public health.
"What is
there suggests to me that the pandemic response is in tatters," said
Ubaka Ogbogu, an associate law professor at the University of Alberta
who specializes in public health law and policy.
Premier Jason Kenney declared a second state of public health emergency on Tuesday. (Jason Franson/The Canadian Press)
"The
story tells me that the chief medical officer of health doesn't have
control of the pandemic response [and] tells me that decisions are being
made by persons who shouldn't be making decisions," said Ogbogu, who
was given access by CBC News to transcripts of specific incidents from
the recordings.
"It tells me that the atmosphere in which
decisions are being made is combative, it is not collaborative and that
they are not working towards a common goal — they are working at
cross-purposes."
Ogbogu has been a staunch critic of the UCP
government. In July, he publicly resigned from the Health Quality
Council of Alberta, citing the potential for political interference in
its work due to amendments to the Health Statutes Amendment Act.
Shandro did not respond to an interview request.
In
a brief emailed statement that did not address specific issues raised
by CBC News, a spokesperson for Kenney said it is the job of elected
officials to make these sorts of decisions and he said there was no
political interference.
Hinshaw also did not respond to an interview request.
But at the daily pandemic briefing Wednesday, as the province announced its 500th death,
Hinshaw reiterated her belief that her job is to provide "a range of
policy options to government officials outlining what I believe is the
recommended approach and the strengths and weaknesses of any
alternatives.
"The final decisions are made by the cabinet,"
she said, adding that she has "always felt respected and listened to and
that my recommendations have been respectfully considered by policy
makers while making their decisions."
Secret recordings reveal tension
The
recordings provide a rare window into the relationship between the
non-partisan civil servants working for the Emergency Operation Centre
and political officials.
The EOC team, comprised of civil
servants from Alberta Health and some seconded from other ministries,
has been responsible for planning logistics and producing guidelines and
recommendations for every aspect of Alberta's pandemic response.
The
recordings also provide context for the recent public debate about the
extent of Hinshaw's authority to act independent of government.
Even
if Hinshaw had the authority to make unilateral decisions, the
recordings confirm what she has repeatedly stated publicly: she believes
her role is to advise, provide recommendations and implement decisions
made by the politicians.
At
the group's meeting on June 8, the day before Kenney publicly announced
Alberta's move to Stage 2 of its economic relaunch plan, Hinshaw
relayed the direction she was receiving from the Emergency Management
Cabinet Committee (EMCC). That committee included Kenney, Shandro and
nine other cabinet ministers.
"What
the EMCC has been moving towards, I feel, is to say, 'We need to be
leading Albertans where they want to go, not forcing them where they
don't want to go,'" Hinshaw told the group.
The
recordings confirm what Hinshaw has repeatedly stated publicly: she
believes her role is to advise, provide recommendations and implement
decisions made by the politicians. (Jason Franson/The Canadian Press)
Hinshaw
said she didn't know if the approach would work, but they were being
asked to move away from punitive measures to simply telling people how
to stay safe.
More of a "permissive model?" someone asked. Hinshaw agreed.
"I
feel like we are starting to lose social licence for the restrictive
model, and I think we are being asked to then move into the permissive
model," she said. "And worst-case scenario, we will need to come back
and [be] restrictive."
Soaring COVID-19 rates in Alberta
As
a second wave of COVID-19 pummels the province, an increasing number of
public-health experts say Alberta long ago reached that worst-case
scenario.
The province has passed the grim milestone of more than 1,500 new cases reported in a day. To date, 500people
have died. Intensive care units across Alberta are overwhelmed, with
COVID-19 patients spilling into other units as beds grow scarce.
On
Tuesday, after weeks of pleading from doctors, academics and members of
the public for a province-wide lockdown, Kenney declared another state
of public health emergency.
However,
he pointedly refused to impose a lockdown, saying his government
wouldn't bow to "ideological pressure" that he said would cripple the
economy. Instead, he announced targeted restrictions, including a ban on
indoor social gatherings.
WATCH | Premier Jason Kenney announces new pandemic restrictions:
Alberta bypasses lockdown with new COVID-19 restrictions
1 day agoVideo
2:36
Alberta
Premier Jason Kenney bypassed a renewed lockdown as part of new
COVID-19 restrictions, despite having more COVID-19 cases per capita
than Ontario. Restaurants and retail can stay open with reduced
capacity, though indoor private gatherings are banned and the school
year has been altered again. 2:36
Kenney repeated many of the comments he made on Nov. 6.
Even
as Alberta's case count grew so high that the province could not
sustain its contact tracing system, Kenney rejected calls for more
stringent measures and downplayed the deaths related to COVID-19.
"What
you describe as a lockdown, first of all, constitutes a massive
invasion of the exercise of people's fundamental rights and a massive
impact on not only their personal liberties but their ability to put
food on the table to sustain themselves financially," Kenney said.
Kenney said it was projected, back in April, that COVID-19 would be the 11th-most common cause of death in the province.
"And so currently, this represents a tiny proportion of the deaths in our province."
High evidence threshold for restrictions
A
source with direct knowledge of the daily planning meetings said the
premier wants evidence-based thresholds for mandatory restrictions that
are effectively impossible to meet, especially in an ever-changing
pandemic.
As of Wednesday, no thresholds have been designated publicly.
The
source said Kenney's attitude was that he wasn't going to close down
anything that affected the economy unless he was provided with specific
evidence about how it would curtail the spread of COVID-19.
"This
is like nothing we have ever seen before. So [it is] very, very
difficult to get specific evidence to implement specific restrictions,"
said the source who, like the others interviewed by CBC News, spoke on
condition of confidentiality for fear of losing their job.
Another
planning meeting source said "there is kind of an understanding that we
put our best public health advice forward and that Kenney is really
more concerned about the economy and he doesn't want it shut down
again."
The recordings suggest a desire by Health Minister Tyler Shandro to exert control over enforcement of public health orders. (CBC)
CBC
News also interviewed a source close to Hinshaw who said she has
indicated that, eight months into the pandemic, politicians are still
often demanding a level of evidence that is effectively impossible to
provide before they will act on restrictive recommendations.
The
source said Hinshaw suggested politicians "have tended to basically go
with the minimal acceptable recommendation from public health, because I
actually think if they went below — if they pushed too far — that she
probably would step down."
Ogbogu said it is clear politicians,
who are not experts in pandemic response, are not focusing on what
matters most to public health.
"The focus needs to be on the disease, on how you stop it," he said. "Not the economy. Nothing is more important."
'I may have gotten in trouble with the minister's office': Hinshaw
The
government has often used Hinshaw as a shield to deflect criticism of
its pandemic strategy, suggesting she is directing the response. The
government has at times appeared to recast any criticism of the
strategy as a personal attack on her.
At her public COVID-19
updates, Hinshaw has refused to stray from government talking points or
offer anything more than a hint of where her opinions may diverge.
Behind
the scenes, however, there were clearly times when Hinshaw disagreed
with the political direction — although it was also evident the
politicians had the final say.
In April, for instance, the government introduced asymptomatic testing in some parts of the province, and later expanded it.
Hinshaw
told a May 22 meeting she had unintentionally started a conversation
with Kenney in which she expressed concern about the value of
large-scale asymptomatic testing as opposed to strategic testing.
Kenney in turn asked for a slide presentation that would detail the pros and cons of each approach.
"I
didn't intend to have that conversation, so I may have gotten in
trouble with the [health] minister's office today about that," Hinshaw
said at that meeting.
The presentation, she said, would include
"how expensive it is to test people when we don't actually get a lot of
value, to go forward with a testing strategy that we can stand
behind. So we will see if the minister's office will allow us to put
that [presentation] forward," Hinshaw said.
The premier, she said, had asked for the presentation for June 2.
But she cautioned the team, "Not to get all of our hopes up or anything."
A
week later, Hinshaw publicly announced the province had opened up
asymptomatic testing to any Albertan who wanted it. At a news
conference, she said that given the impending Stage 2 relaunch, it was
an "opportune time" to expand testing.
'They don't want us to enforce anything'
The recordings suggest a desire by Health Minister Shandro to exert control over enforcement of public health orders.
Alberta
Health Services (AHS), the province's health authority, is responsible
for enforcing public health orders. It is supposed to operate at arm's
length from government.
On June 9, the same day Kenney announced
the Stage 2 economic relaunch, Hinshaw told the EOC meeting Shandro's
office wanted to be informed how AHS would consult with "us" before
taking any action on COVID-19 public orders.
Alberta
Health lawyers, working with the EOC, were responsible for writing the
Stage 2 relaunch order that would outline restrictions on businesses and
the public.
Hinshaw said she needed to verify with Shandro's
office, but she thought "they don't want us to enforce anything. [They]
just want us to educate, and no enforcement."
But the group's chief legal advisor was adamant.
"Under
no circumstance will AHS check with the political minister's office
before undertaking an enforcement action under the Public Health Act,"
he said
Hinshaw said Shandro's office wanted AHS to check with her first, so she could report back to his office.
The
legal advisor challenged that, saying AHS was supposed to check with
Hinshaw and a colleague "with respect to prosecutions, not enforcement
generally.
"So what is going on?" he asked.
Shandro's office was "mad that AHS has enforced things like no shaving in barber shops," Hinshaw responded.
Hinshaw
said all local medical officers of health and environmental health
officers were already expected to tell her and the team about any
impending orders or prosecutions.
But a week later, a senior
health official told the meeting AHS was "struggling about what they
should be doing" regarding enforcement.
The official said AHS had been told: "Don't turn a blind eye but don't issue any orders.
"And
then come to us, and if push comes to shove, I think it will be up to
the ministry to figure out if we are going to do something."
Ubaka
Ogbogu, an associate law professor at the University of Alberta who
specializes in public health law and policy, said 'the atmosphere in
which [COVID-19] decisions are being made is combative, it is not
collaborative and [politicians and health officials] are not working
towards a common goal.' (CBC)
In
mid-September, CBC News reported that AHS had received more than 29,000
complaints about COVID-19 public health order violations since the
beginning of April.
A total of 62 enforcement orders, including
closure orders, were issued in that period. As recently as last week,
AHS has said that "every effort" is made to work with the public before
issuing an enforcement order.
'Uphill battle'
In
private conversations as recently as this month, Hinshaw has
characterized her interactions with Kenney and cabinet as difficult,
said a source close to her.
"I would say that she has used the phrase 'uphill battle,'" they said.
The
source said Hinshaw has been understanding of the reasons for the
difficulty, "which I think we both see as being rooted in a completely
different weighting of the risks of the disease and the risks of, for
example, public-health restrictions."
Hinshaw, however, "did allude to some of the meetings as being very distressing."
But the source said Hinshaw worries about what could happen if she leaves her role.
"She
sees her position, optimally, as trying to do the best she can from
inside. And that if she wasn't there, there would be a risk that things
would be worse in terms of who else might end up taking that position
and what their viewpoint was on the best direction."
Ogbogu, the
health law expert, said that while Hinshaw may be well-meaning, her
willingness to allow politicians to subvert her authority is ultimately
undermining the fight against COVID-19.
If the government is not
following scientific advice, if it is not interested in measures that
will effectively control a pandemic that is killing Albertans, then
Hinshaw "owes us the responsibility of coming out and saying, 'They are
not letting me do my job,'" Ogbogu said.
"And if that comes at a risk of her job, that is the nature of public service."
At
the planning meeting on June 4, a civil servant told the team there was
concern the province wasn't giving businesses much time to adjust to
shifting COVID-19 guidance.
"I've been advocating everywhere I can to move it up, and they moved it back," Hinshaw replied.
"So you can see I have a lot of influence," she said sarcastically. "But I will keep trying."
In 1840, Edgar Allan Poe described the ‘mad energy’ of an ageing man
who roved the streets of London from dusk till dawn. His excruciating
despair could be temporarily relieved only by immersing himself in a
tumultuous throng of city-dwellers. ‘He refuses to be alone,’ Poe wrote.
He ‘is the type and the genius of deep crime … He is the man of the
crowd.’
Like many poets and philosophers through the ages, Poe
stressed the significance of solitude. It was ‘such a great misfortune’,
he thought, to lose the capacity to be alone with oneself, to get
caught up in the crowd, to surrender one’s singularity to mind-numbing
conformity. Two decades later, the idea of solitude captured Ralph Waldo
Emerson’s imagination in a slightly different way: quoting Pythagoras,
he wrote: ‘In the morning, – solitude; … that nature may speak to the
imagination, as she does never in company.’ Emerson encouraged the
wisest teachers to press upon their pupils the importance of ‘periods
and habits of solitude’, habits that made ‘serious and abstracted
thought’ possible.
In the 20th century, the idea of solitude
formed the centre of Hannah Arendt’s thought. A German-Jewish émigré who
fled Nazism and found refuge in the United States, Arendt spent much of
her life studying the relationship between the individual and the polis. For her, freedom was tethered to both the private sphere – the vita contemplativa – and the public, political sphere – the vita activa.
She understood that freedom entailed more than the human capacity to
act spontaneously and creatively in public. It also entailed the
capacity to think and to judge in private, where solitude empowers the
individual to contemplate her actions and develop her conscience, to
escape the cacophony of the crowd – to finally hear herself think.
In 1961, The New Yorker
commissioned Arendt to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi SS
officer who helped to orchestrate the Holocaust. How could anyone, she
wanted to know, perpetrate such evil? Surely only a wicked sociopath
could participate in the Shoah. But Arendt was surprised by Eichmann’s
lack of imagination, his consummate conventionality. She argued that
while Eichmann’s actions were evil, Eichmann himself – the person
– ‘was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous.
There was no sign in him of firm ideological convictions.’ She
attributed his immorality – his capacity, even his eagerness, to commit
crimes – to his ‘thoughtlessness’. It was his inability to stop and
think that permitted Eichmann to participate in mass murder.
Just
as Poe suspected that something sinister lurked deep within the man of
the crowd, Arendt recognised that: ‘A person who does not know that
silent intercourse (in which we examine what we say and what we do) will
not mind contradicting himself, and this means he will never be either
able or willing to account for what he says or does; nor will he mind
committing any crime, since he can count on its being forgotten the next
moment.’ Eichmann had shunned Socratic self-reflection. He had failed
to return home to himself, to a state of solitude. He had discarded the vita contemplativa,
and thus he had failed to embark upon the essential
question-and-answering process that would have allowed him to examine
the meaning of things, to distinguish between fact and fiction, truth
and falsehood, good and evil.
‘It is better to suffer wrong than
to do wrong,’ Arendt wrote, ‘because you can remain the friend of the
sufferer; who would want to be the friend of and have to live together
with a murderer? Not even another murderer.’ It is not that unthinking
men are monsters, that the sad sleepwalkers of the world would sooner
commit murder than face themselves in solitude. What Eichmann showed
Arendt was that society could function freely and democratically only
if it were made up of individuals engaged in the thinking activity – an
activity that required solitude. Arendt believed that ‘living together
with others begins with living together with oneself’.
But
what if, we might ask, we become lonely in our solitude? Isn’t there
some danger that we will become isolated individuals, cut off from the
pleasures of friendship? Philosophers have long made a careful, and
important, distinction between solitude and loneliness. In The Republic (c380
BCE), Plato proffered a parable in which Socrates celebrates the
solitary philosopher. In the allegory of the cave, the philosopher
escapes from the darkness of an underground den – and from the company
of other humans – into the sunlight of contemplative thought. Alone but
not lonely, the philosopher becomes attuned to her inner self and the
world. In solitude, the soundless dialogue ‘which the soul holds with
herself’ finally becomes audible.
Echoing Plato, Arendt observed:
‘Thinking, existentially speaking, is a solitary but not a lonely
business; solitude is that human situation in which I keep myself
company. Loneliness comes about … when I am one and without company’ but
desire it and cannot find it. In solitude, Arendt never longed for
companionship or craved camaraderie because she was never truly alone.
Her inner self was a friend with whom she could carry on a conversation,
that silent voice who posed the vital Socratic question: ‘What do you mean when you say …?’ The self, Arendt declared, ‘is the only one from whom you can never get away – except by ceasing to think.’
Arendt’s
warning is well worth remembering in our own time. In our
hyper-connected world, a world in which we can communicate constantly
and instantly over the internet, we rarely remember to carve out spaces
for solitary contemplation. We check our email hundreds of times per
day; we shoot off thousands of text messages per month; we obsessively
thumb through Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, aching to connect at all
hours with close and casual acquaintances alike. We search for friends
of friends, ex-lovers, people we barely know, people we have no business
knowing. We crave constant companionship.
But, Arendt reminds us,
if we lose our capacity for solitude, our ability to be alone with
ourselves, then we lose our very ability to think. We risk getting
caught up in the crowd. We risk being ‘swept away’, as she put it, ‘by
what everybody else does and believes in’ – no longer able, in the cage
of thoughtless conformity, to distinguish ‘right from wrong, beautiful
from ugly’. Solitude is not only a state of mind essential to the
development of an individual’s consciousness – and conscience – but also
a practice that prepares one for participation in social and political
life. Before we can keep company with others, we must learn to keep
company with ourselves.
"Studies have shown that social rejection of any kind activates the same
pain pathways in the brain as physical pain, meaning there’s a
biological link between rejection and pain."
Our
family is Spanish and Italian and has studied this very subject for
over a century now. The term definitely comes from the "sangre azul"
phrase used by the Spanish after the Moor invasion of southern Spain,
starting in the 700's. The royal nobles of Spain fled to the north and
regrouped with several others in order to later fight off the Moors. The
royals hated the Moors so much that they went out of their way to keep
out of the sunlight and keep any trace of dark skin off of them. It
wasn't so much that the Spanish were racist against what we call
"blacks" nowadays or in the manner of how we perceive racism due to the
American Civil War. It just so happen to be that the Africans (later
called Moors) were dark skinned - something which the Spanish came to
loathe after the invasion. They made it a point to work and live mostly
in the dark, via candlelight or indirect light. With less sunlight, the
veins did appear more blue through the pale skin, something which the
other European nobles noted and were impressed by - hence coining the
term "blue blood" as a literal translation from the Spanish "sangre
azul." The silver theory is definitely something that has come up and
has been discussed but has never been studied enough (in a clinical
manner in regards to this subject) to say if, indeed, it caused it.
Though, it is extremely probable and very likely because the Spanish
were very fond of silver and did use it daily which would absolutely
cause an ionic transference of sorts. Today, we simply translate "blue
bloods" to royalty or "old money" as well as nobility. The Spanish were
just extreme when it came to this area of history.
