Thanksgiving surprises
News of a new Covid strain sent stock markets crashing on Friday. Probably good for markets to take a breather. A couple of welcome results: interest rates collapsed as well, measured by the 10 year bond in the United States.
The 10 year was off 9.9% on Friday alone, the yield down to 1.48%. That takes some short term pressure off the US Federal Reserve and other central banks. Will inflation be put on hold? On the selfish side, my pension goes up 2.4% on January 1st.
Too bad about wasting the oil reserve
Oil prices dropped $10 a barrel to $68, down 13% on Friday on the latest Covid scare. Gasoline prices dropped about 11 cents a litre in Canada, the biggest one day drop since 2009, and should drop in the United States, Britain and the EU. If gasoline prices stay down that could deflate inflation worries, though probably not for long. President Biden probably wishes he had left the emergency oil reserves in the tank. Those reserves would be eaten up in a a day or two. A symbolic gesture wasted.
The New Yorker on Organic food.
You would think the liberal (in the American sense) minded New Yorker would be in favour of organic food. But no. In a long piece in the November 15 edition of the weekly magazine says there are flaws in the way things are certified.
“It’s a huge flaw in the organic industry that the farmers pay the certifier— sometimes many thousands of dollars. The certifier has a conflict of interest, because they really don’t want to blow the whistle on a fraud,” said a man who used to work for a group that certified organic food. Organic fish? A bit of con. Fish raised in “sewer like conditions in China” are passed off as homegrown. Two of the con artists portrayed in the article went to prison.
My own experience with organic food— and we buy it in this household— has to do with a fiend’s maple syrup bush in northern Vermont. It is certified organic and to get that designation he has to follow a few rules: no lead spigots can be used to tap trees, only stainless steel ; the woods have to managed in a sustainable way; certifiers test the water used in the boiling process; there are limits on the number of many taps on each maple tree and he taps 5,000 trees. “Every two years they come and inspect the sugar bush and the sugar house,” says my friend.
When the wind blows
One of my favourite apps is something called Gridwatch. I have it set for the province of Ontario. You can see below that around noon on Friday the province was generating 96% of its energy from renewable energy, if you consider nuclear renewable, which I do. Amazing that wind is number three after hydro. I check this quite often. Solar never amounts to much. Natural gas fills in.
The app gives a breakdown of where the imports and exports of power come from. Much excess power goes to Michigan, whose charming governor, Gretchen Whitmer, is threatening to cut off a pipeline from western Canada that passes though her state then goes underwater with oil to Ontario and Quebec. Quebec sells a lot of power to Ontario when the wind doesn't blow and demand exceeds supply.
Elizabeth Holmes trial
Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her own defence this week. She hasn’t murdered anyone, unlike the two other current high profile trials that dominate cable news in the United States. She is charged with the weird American charge of `wire fraud’. In Plain English she stands accused of defrauding investors in her firm, Theranos, which had a blood testing technology. Her defence is she believed the science, or the scientists who tested the technology.
It is a trial by jury. One juror, a woman, was dismissed from the jury when the judge found out she was playing Sudoku during a long stretch of detailed, scientific evidence. Not a good thing for Holmes. Women might be sympathetic and think that Holmes is being held to a higher standard than the A type males of Silicon Valley. Another juror, A Buddhist, quit because she couldn’t find Holmes guilty if it meant she was going to prison. There are now eight men and four women on the jury.
Elizabeth Holmes is said to be a nasty piece of work who yelled at underlings and was greedy and ambitious. So? Steve Jobs of Apple, lionized in Silicon Valley and beyond, was as mean as they get, according to his biographer Walter Isaacson. He reduced an older store employee to tears when he yelled at her because he didn’t like the smoothie she made. Google `Steve Job asshole’ and you get 16.5-million results.
The tech world is filled with greedy people who started companies like Uber, WeWork and Oracle. None of them are facing 20 years in the slammer as Elizabeth Holmes is, then none of them were charged with fraud. Prediction: she will get off.
Tanks for the memories
British troops are leaving Canada after fifty years of training in the wide open spaces of Alberta. The training range there is said to be five times the size of a training ground on Salisbury Plain in England. The relatively flat fields on the Canadian prairie mimic what would have been a Cold War battle in Eastern Europe.
British tank training will now be done in Oman. Given the Ukraine/Russia mess maybe the move is premature.
British colonial troops, who first arrived with General Wolfe in 1759, left Canada in 1870, three years after Confederation.
Essay of the Week
The other day I drove past a demonstration at the Ontario Legislature of people who are anti-vax. A left wing Toronto councillor, Krystyn Wong-Tam, had to apologize after she wrote a piece in the Toronto Sun, odd choice for her, excusing people who are anti-vax. Turns out her parents refuse to get the jab. Family overrules ideology it seems.
Speaking of family, my double vaccinated stepson, Alexander Hackett, is travelling in Europe and filed the following piece to the Toronto Star, which ran on Monday, about how the French are flipping the Gallic finger to pandemic rules. Here it is.
In France, a looming fifth Covid wave is met with characteristic nonchalance
L'Hexagone is a hot mess but has its act together where it counts
Alexander Hackett
France is somehow more organized and more anarchic than other countries, all at the same time.
It's Saturday night in Paris, one of the most densely-populated cities in the world, and the metro is packed. A group of rowdy 20-somethings barge into our car, all maskless, and start singing songs arm in arm, beers in hand.
They jump up and down, jostling everyone around them. There's only so much we can do to avoid the sprays of youthful spittle. (Insert Gallic shrug here.)
To my right a dead-drunk guy with a purple face pours a little heap of white powder onto his cigarette pack and snorts it loudly in plain sight of everyone. No one bats an eye.
Ah, the City of Light. So romantic.
Anti-vaccine passport rallies continue to clog the streets in the central areas around Les Invalides and Montparnasse. Speakers shout into megaphones about "Liberticide" and urge people to "resist" any further curbs to their personal freedom.
The nation's T.V. screens are dominated by far-right troll du jour Éric Zemmour, euro-dapper and sinister in equal measures as he makes a bid for the presidency. The migrant crisis, heartbreakingly visible in the streets, adds extra complexity to the mix.
In the midst of all of this, enforcement of Covid protocols is patchy at best.
Major tourist attractions insist on seeing vaccine passports, but many cafés and restaurants don't bother or forget - the city is simply too busy. Same goes for mask-wearing. Take it or leave it, really. For some, it's political.
There is a nonchalance related to Covid at this point that can be described as either practicality or fatalism. The looming prospect of a 5th wave, announced by the media this past week, appears to leave most French people unconcerned.
"There have been different episodes," says Clara Rigaud, a PhD student in computer science at Sorbonne University. "I would say we were generally disciplined, but there is definitely some fatigue and defiance now."
Either way, it comes as something of a shock to visiting Canadians, who for the most part have duly obeyed their governments' (sometimes improvised, often questionable) regulations during some of the strictest and longest lockdownsin the Western world.
Joe Yarmush, guitarist for Montreal experimental rock band Suuns, recently wrapped up a three week tour through Europe, including a two-night stand at a club in Paris' 19th arrondissement last week.
"It's definitely more relaxed in France now," he says. "You had to be vaccinated for our show, but it was sold-out and there were 500 people drinking and breathing all over each other. There was no distancing or anything like that."
None of this is to say that France has dealt poorly with the pandemic. I would argue there is a level of pragmatism derived from a war-footing mindset not found in Canada.
There are walk-in clinics everywhere, and medical tents set up prominently in the streets. Anyone can get rapid tests and receive their results in 10 minutes, no questions asked. A nightly 6:00 pm curfew was in place for nearly 8 months.
Though cases are rising slightly once again, France, with 76% of its population vaccinated, is currently faring much better than England, Germany and other European countries.
There is a rebellious, libertarian streak to French culture that we would most often equate with red-state republicanism - a streak at odds with its image as a land of high-class refinement.
But despite the laissez-faire attitude and chaotic social exterior (by Canadian standards), the notoriously cumbersome French state has been proactive and practical when it counts.
Whatever happens next, pundits believe another lockdown is out of the question. A nation prone to philosophizing, France currently embodies the question: How do we get on with our lives?
"We are a society that always questions the government, and has strong opinions about everything," says Rigaud. "But in the end we are a société solidaire."