The Great Barrier Reef is alive and well: Go and see it for yourself.
The first part of that is true. The second part is tongue-in-cheek, as very few of us will be diving on the Great Barrier Reef anytime soon. Besides, it is beneath the surface and considerably larger than Texas so you would need to be in the water every day for a very long time to verify its alleged demise. As it turns out, virtually all the doomsday narratives promoted by today’s alarmists fit this pattern.
On Tuesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Ingraham Angle,” World Health Organization adviser Jamie Metzl criticized the organization’s investigation into the origins of the coronavirus for not taking a serious enough look at the possibility of an accidental lab leak and saying that “the actual investigation was done by Chinese authorities. And so, the W.H.O. investigators were basically receiving reports from the Chinese officials.”
Bing Su, a Chinese geneticist at the state-run Kunming Institute of Zoology, recently inserted the human MCPH1 gene, which develops the brain, into a monkey. The insertion could make that animal’s intelligence more human than that of lower primates. Su’s next experiment is inserting into monkeys the SRGAP2C gene, related to human intelligence, and the FOXP2 gene, connected to language skills.
Has nobody in China seen Planet of the Apes?
Or maybe they have. “Biotechnology development in China is heading in a truly macabre direction,” writes Brandon Weichert of The Weichert Report in an article posted on the American Greatness website.
Bruce Springsteen was arrested for DWI and reckless driving in his home state, it was revealed Wednesday — days after he appeared in a much-hyped Super Bowl commercial for Jeep.
The “Born to Run” icon, 71, was busted Nov. 14 at Gateway National Recreation Area in Sandy Hook, New Jersey, a spokesperson for the National Park Service said.
In each warm body it infects, the virus behind Covid-19 has the potential to change. It can become more deadly, more transmissible or more resistant to the vaccines on which we are all pinning so much hope. Mercifully, the biology of Sars-CoV-2 means that such changes happen slowly and almost always fail to catch on.
But mutations, like pandemics, are a numbers game. Every new person infected provides another opportunity for the virus to adopt a new form. So far, Sars-CoV-2 has infected at least 106 million people worldwide and taken on many thousands of mutations. Most of those changes are slow and inconsequential – evolutionary dead ends that nobody will ever realise existed. But, in some people, the virus hits the jackpot.
Back in June, Quaker Oats announced that it would retire the Aunt Jemima brand for its pancake mix. In so doing, they’re erasing a bit of American history that wasn’t offending anyone and had some key supporters.
I trusted Aunt Jemima.
It is now clear that Canada is dramatically behind the rest of the developed world in immunizing its citizens against COVID-19.
One quarter of Israel is now fully vaccinated, and the U.K. has administered 13 million doses. But in Canada, procurement issues and late deliveries have effectively stalled our vaccination program after only one million doses; roughly the amount of shots that the United States administers every 16 hours. It’s now estimated that Canada will not achieve widespread vaccine coverage until mid-2022, nearly six months after the same goal will have been met by the United States, the U.K. and the E.U.
American social-networking company Twitter announced on Wednesday its financial results for the fiscal year 2020, saying it recorded a net loss of $1.136 billion against net income a year earlier.
According to the company, “2020 net loss was $1.14 billion, representing a net margin of -31 percent and diluted EPS [earnings per share – Ed.] of -$1.44. This compares to 2019 net income of $1.47 billion, representing a net margin of 42 percent and diluted EPS of $1.87.” Both periods were affected by non-cash, tax related adjustments, it said.
Celebrity detractors of Donald Trump are taking to Twitter to cheer the start of the former president’s Senate impeachment trial on a charge of inciting insurrection, with many calling for a swift conviction.
Actress Alyssa Milano was among those who ridiculed Trump’s lead defense attorney Bruce Castor, who argued on Tuesday that it was unconstitutional to hold a trial after Trump left office.
Ontario is reporting 1,072 cases of #COVID19 and over 52,500 tests completed. Locally, there are 393 new cases in Toronto, 196 in Peel and 125 in York Region.
As of 8:00 p.m. yesterday, 412,119 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been administered.
— Christine Elliott (@celliottability) February 10, 2021
Majority of Canadians say governments should have acted faster amid COVID-19: Ipsos poll
A majority of Canadians believe that governments should have acted sooner to reduce the number of coronavirus cases in the country, according to new polling from Ipsos.
Roughly 63 per cent of Canadians, or just shy of two-thirds, said that governments should have put the hammer down sooner with stricter measures including travel bans, curfews and lockdowns, in a bid to slow the spread of the virus.
The head of Canada’s spy agency said today Canadian companies in almost all sectors of the economy have been targeted by hostile foreign actors — and named Russia and China as two of his main sources of concern.
“The threat from hostile activity by state actors in all its forms represents a significant danger to Canada’s prosperity and sovereignty,” said David Vigneault, director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, in his first public speech in three years.
“Our investigations reveal that this threat has unfortunately caused significant harm to Canadian companies.”
Russia and China are certainties but how could he forget to include Trudeau’s Liberals?
If you’d asked me to identify which major European country was seeing powerful intellectual and political forces attacking woke racial ideology and the American campuses pushing it, I would have guessed Poland or Russia. Nope, it’s a country American conservatives generally mock and resent: France. The very same France that conservatives regularly deride as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” picking up a line from The Simpsons that was popularized by Jonah Goldberg (who has since gone full NeverTrump).
Former GOP Congresswoman Michele Bachmann slammed vindictive Democrats and ripped into the mainstream media for the “absolutely sick” way the U.S. Capitol riot has been covered.
The former Republican lawmaker from Minnesota told guest host Mark Steyn on “Fox News Primetime” on Monday that the media has been on a mission to destroy the “legacy” of former President Donald Trump and his supporters and that Democrats are engaging in “bad political dinner theater” with their second attempt to impeach him.
Periods of society-wide threats are danger-times for rights. Anxious populations tend to accept restrictions on liberty which would be strongly resisted at other, more peaceful, moments. During the “War on Terror” which followed the 9/11 attacks, detention without trial, mass surveillance and torture were authorised by liberal democracies. We may be seeing that dynamic repeated today, as the legally enforced social-distancing restrictions put in place to slow the spread of Covid-19 raise some of the most difficult questions in modern times about life, liberty and the basic tenets of democracy.
Captain Sir Tom Moore is a national hero. Not only for serving our nation in the Second World War, but also for his courageous efforts to raise over £30million for the NHS in the run-up to his 100th birthday, during the first lockdown. It should come as no surprise, then, that when a contrarian clerk in Holy Orders dismissed Moore’s efforts, it would cause a bit of a ruckus. In fact, the more cynical among us might even say that was the point. Insulting the memory of a national treasure before the release of your new book is certainly one way of raising your profile.
