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Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
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Latest atmospheric CO2 data
CO2 levels above 280 ppm are not natural
Current Items of Interest

  1. COVID-19 Death Numbers: I'm not trying to be alarmist here, but it seems that some "death numbers" are always higher than others . Some friends are quick to blame "political bias" but it seems to me that "collection methodology" along with "source size" and "bureaucratic distance and size" all play a roll (meaning that the lower numbers will eventually "catch up"). Lately I have been using the numbers from worldodometers.info for no other reason than "they are collecting stats on every country in the world" -SO- "might not have any political bias". Their deaths-by-country stat is somewhat shocking with USA-deaths much higher than they should be (no country deserves this)
  2. So Ontario Premier "Doug Ford" says ranked ballots are bad for democracy
    https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/ontario-moves-to-axe-ranked-ballots-from-municipal-elections-1.5770209
    Wow, Doug Ford does not remember that it was a modified ballot system that allowed him to become leader of the Ontario Progressive-Conservatives over Christine Elliot (she had the popular majority "by ballot").
  3. It is Ottawa, not Beijing, which initiated "hostage diplomacy". (triggered when Canada backed Donald Trump's illegal sanctions against Iran which Huawei legally ignored) As a former member of the Canadian Forces, I’m appalled by Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan’s lack of judgment. On Oct. 7, 2020, during a widely-reported panel discussion hosted by Slovakian think tank Globesec, he claimed that China was engaged in “hostage diplomacy.” It’s frightening that the minister cannot distinguish between the actions of his own government and those of China. I wish to remind him that, on Dec. 1, 2018, his government acted upon a request of the Trump Administration to arrest Meng Wanzhou, CFO, Huawei Technologies. The U.S. indictment was approved by a New York State Court on Aug. 22, 2018, and the U.S. tried unsuccessfully following that date to pressure dozens of countries, through which Meng travelled, to arrest her. Every single country refused until Meng arrived in Vancouver on Dec. 1, 2018, and Trudeau slavishly acceded to the “urgent” U.S. extradition request. Developments following Meng’s arrest confirm her arrest was politically motivated. On Dec. 6, 2018, Trump declared he might release Meng if he secured a favourable trade deal with China. He also told John Bolton that Meng was “a bargaining chip” in his trade negotiations with China. In fact, in “The Room Where it Happened,” Bolton reveals that Trump privately gave Meng Wanzhou the nickname, “the Ivanka Trump of China,” a moniker indicating Trump understood he was asking Canada to take a high-value hostage in the person of Meng Wanzhou to be leveraged against the People’s Republic to get a trade deal favourable to the U.S.A. So, it was the Trudeau government, which first initiated “hostage diplomacy” in relation to China. Following the arrest of Meng, the Chinese government arrested Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig on espionage charges. While I have no opinion on the justifiability of the charges against the Two Michaels, I believe the fraud charges against Meng are unwarranted. After all, they arise from Huawei’s alleged dealings with Iran, in violation of U.S. unilateral sanctions against that country. In the first place, the U.S. unilateral economic sanctions against Iran are illegal. According to the UN Charter, only the UN Security Council has the authority to impose coercive economic measures against member states. And all those UN-approved measures against Iran were lifted in the JCPOA (Iran Nuclear Agreement) which came into effect in 2016. When Trump abrogated that agreement in 2018 to the chagrin of the entire world, Trudeau’s government also expressed regret. It stated it hoped that the other parties to the JCPOA would continue to honour its provisions. In effect, then, Meng, a Canadian permanent resident, has violated no Canadian law. She’s being held under house arrest by the Trudeau government for violating a U.S. sanctions regime on Iran that no other country in the world recognizes. This bizarre situation is termed U.S. “extraterritoriality,” where the U. S tries to enforce its domestic laws on other countries. Canada should not play along! The arrest and extradition proceeding against Meng have contributed to deteriorating Canada-China relations. At various times following Meng’s arrest, China, which is Canada’s second-largest trading partner, banned importation of Canadian canola, pork, and lobsters. Since livelihoods of thousands of Canadian farmers and fishers depend on the export of these products to China, they were severely affected. Thirty per cent of Canadian exports go to China, but Canadian exports only account for less than 2 per cent of China’s imports. So the potential of even more harm is possible. In addition, the promising Chinese-Canadian collaboration on a COVID-19 vaccine collapsed. Canada and its people paid dearly so far and gained nothing from the Trudeau government’s decision to hold Meng as a hostage for the U.S. in its trade negotiations with China.
    Henry Evans-Tenbrinke (2020-10-16)
  4. Huawei CFO Dealt Fresh Setback in Fight Against Extradition
    https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/huawei-cfo-dealt-fresh-setback-in-fight-against-extradition
    (Bloomberg) — Huawei Technologies Co. Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou failed to convince a Canadian judge to grant her access to confidential documents pertaining to her extradition fight. Meng has pressed for additional disclosure about the circumstances of her arrest at Vancouver’s airport on a U.S. handover request in December 2018. She argues her arrest was unlawful and that her extradition case should be dismissed. In August, she sought an order from the Supreme Court of British Columbia to force the Canadian government to authorize full access to documents she said had been redacted or withheld arbitrarily. Canada argued that divulging them would violate confidentiality agreements with clients and third parties.
    comment: So let me get this straight: someone appearing before a Canadian court can be denied information to defend themselves just by Canada citing confidentiality agreements with clients and third-parties? What about the rights of the accused?
  5. Canada's ban on single-use plastic Under the newly-unveiled list of single-use plastics being banned in Canada, plastic grocery bags, straws, stir sticks, six-pack rings, cutlery and food containers made from hard-to-recycle plastics will be out of use nationwide by the end of 2021.Environment and Climate Change Minister Jonathan Wilkinson announced the federal government’s next steps towards its plan to achieve zero plastic waste by 2030.“When a ban comes into effect, your local stores will be providing you with alternatives to these plastic products,” Wilkinson said, adding that he knows it’s hard to come back from a trip to the grocery store without single-use plastic products, especially food packaging, but that “has to change.” According to the federal government, Canadians throw away three million tonnes of plastic waste a year, and only nine per cent of that gets recycled, and about one-third of the plastics used in Canada are for single-use or short-lived products and packaging, including up to 15 billion plastic bags used every year and close to 57 million straws used daily.
    https://www.ctvnews.ca/climate-and-environment/canada-banning-plastic-bags-straws-cutlery-and-other-single-use-items-by-the-end-of-2021-1.5135968
    https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/news/2020/10/canada-one-step-closer-to-zero-plastic-waste-by-2030.html
    comments:
    1. Canadians throw away 3 million tonnes of plastic each year but our target is 2030? I know we can do better. How about going for the jugular here: "Let's develop a method to safely burn what we cannot bury". I know this will release additional CO2 which is why plastic, when it is sold, must also incur a carbon-tax
    2. Some people claim that we cannot cut back on plastic use during the COVID-19 pandemic. Well think about this for a moment: Planet Earth has been in the middle of a plastic-waste pandemic for 30-years (which is why tropical islands are seeing plastic washing up on their shores -AND- huge gyres of plastic are rotating in our oceans). Humanity should be collectively ashamed that we have allowed the fossil fuel industry to do this for so long.
  6. This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to two scientists who transformed an obscure bacterial immune mechanism, commonly called CRISPR, into a tool that can simply and cheaply edit the genomes of everything from wheat to mosquitoes to humans. The award went jointly to Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens and Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, “for the development of a method for genome editing.”
    https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/10/crispr-revolutionary-genetic-scissors-honored-chemistry-nobel
  7. Julian Assange. There are a lot of things to dislike about him but that does not mean anyone should cheer his current treatment in a British court. Why did the judge bar NGOs, like Amnesty International, from covering this spectacle while limiting the number of public spectators to 5? And why are witnesses for the prosecution not allowed to be cross examined while this luxury is not afforded to witnesses for the defence? And why are big newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post (to only name two of many) not covering of this travesty of justice?
    On Contact: Chris Hedges interviews Craig Murray
  8. Memristors act like neurons
    https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/27550/20201002/scientific-breakthrough-memristors-act-neurons.htm
  9. Welcome to Bell Canada's technological archives
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnNfwuN9Hgg
  10. New Dark Age: Is Technology Making the World Harder to Understand?
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNMvYxJZgsU 28-minute video
  11. How a Plan to Save the American Power System Disappeared due to actions by the Trump administration
    https://www.invw.org/2020/08/20/who-killed-the-supergrid/
    https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/08/how-trump-appointees-short-circuited-grid-modernization/615433/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
    quote: At a moment when Europe, China, and others are racing ahead with advanced long-distance energy-transmission technologies, grid experts say that technology has gone nowhere in the United States—thanks to a failure of leadership in Washington. comment: so it appears that the Trump administration will do anything to save the coal industry even if it means diverting billions of your dollars to do so
  12. What Hiroshima teaches us about coronavirus and the future of humanity
    ON 6 AUGUST 1945, a nuclear bomb was dropped on the Japanese port city of Hiroshima. Three days later, Nagasaki suffered the same fate. Three-quarters of a century on, the full human toll is still unclear. In Hiroshima alone, some 75,000 souls were obliterated instantly, with many more deaths in the following months and years. As we remember those who died, we might also usefully cast a wider view: on what the bombings meant for humanity, for our relationship with technology and for our perception of what we now call existential risks, those that threaten to irrecoverably damage our potential or extinguish us as a species. Humans have probably talked about the end of the world for as long as we have talked. It is a common part of mythology, giving a sense of structure to history: there was a beginning, we live in the middle and there will be an end. But existential risks were, by and large, not practical matters until this technology proved that humanity possessed the technology to permanently alter planet Earth. This also includes "global warming" and "plastic pollution" to only name two problems of many.
    Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24732940-100-what-hiroshima-teaches-us-about-coronavirus-and-the-future-of-humanity/
  13. My Two Cents Worth on "America, China and COVID-19" :: Any person, politician or not, who claims that China created COVID-19 or manipulated the COVID crisis to create an economic advantage for China is either deranged or deluded. Were mistakes made by lower level officials in Wuhan? Definitely. But errors happened, not because the decision makers were Chinese, but because they were human. The fact that China published the genetic sequence within four weeks at the end of January surely has to count for something positive. As I type this, the COVID-19 death count in the USA has passed 234,000 lookup and some stuff I'm reading/hearing/watching sounds like the USA is heading into a cold-war with China. The problem with cold wars is that they can accidently escalate into hot wars ( the Spanish American War and the Vietnam War immediately spring to mind; " yellow journalism" and "jingoism" are usually a prerequisite). Before you jump the lets-blame-china bandwagon ask yourself "how many American's have died of antibiotic resistant disease in the last 50 years?" Why? The majority of anti-biotic resistant diseases in humans can be traced back to North American livestock operations where animals are packed together in close proximity (or on top of each other in the case of chickens) then fed antibiotics to prevent a disease. Now even though the USA is supposed to be a free country, Ag-gag laws exist which prevent citizens from even photographing the inside of North American livestock operations -OR- publishing them.
  14. Officially, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization of 1949) requires member countries to spend 1% of their annual GDP to purchase military arms for themselves so they will be able to contribute to "collective self defense" (the original threat was Joseph Stalin and his USSR). Despite the fact that the USSR ceased to exist in 1991, NATO members in 2014 agreed to increase spending to 2% of GDP by 2024. comment-1: the combined military spending of all NATO members constitutes over 70% of the global total and many people wonder if this is desirable or sustainable (think about that during your Christmas quiet time). comment-2: The USA and Canada also contribute to NORAD (North American Air Defense)

    Meanwhile, the EU ( European Union) requires that member countries contribute 2% of GDP to peaceful R&D (Research and Development) and this got me thinking: One organization supports the creation of weapons of defense (which could also be used offensively; witness the recent aggressive action of NATO member "Turkey" against the Syrian Kurds) while the other is committed to the peaceful exploration and sharing of scientific knowledge.

    I think it is safe to say that military spending shifts the emphasis from "R" to "D" but people today forget that World War 2 was won by the countries with the smartest research scientists. Everyone knows that creation is more difficult than destruction but most rational people would agree it is worth the effort. Perhaps humanity's future would be better off if half the money allocated to military spending was diverted to scientific research. Perhaps this could be written into the next NATO agreement.  comment-3: it was candidate Trump who, in March 2016, declared NATO as expensive while obsolete. Perhaps now is the time to get rid of it.
  15. Commenting on Huawei: It appears to me that people in the west only support capitalism when the west wins. When a Chinese company, like Huawei, becomes the next Nortel, then ridiculous conspiracy theories are invoked. IIRC, Huawei was one of many companies that bid on the sale of intellectual property, as did Apple, Google, Blackberry and others. Huawei was not one of the winners which forced it to increase its own R&D operations (estimates put Huawei R&D in 2019 at a massive 40% of net income). People claim that Huawei steals IP (intellectual property) but this ignores the fact that many experts agree that Huawei is 19-24 months ahead of everyone else on 5G. Anyway, western companies accuse each other of the all the time of IP theft. For example, Apple is constantly in court for stealing IP (witness Broadcom and Qualcomm). Other western companies are no better (Apple has sued Google; Facebook is currently suing Google). The CEOs of these western companies justify this by saying "this is just the way business in done".

    On a related note, Huawei telephone hardware is nothing more than a special-purpose programmable computer made in China which is almost always installed along with a CISCO firewall. Firewall transactions are almost always logged and monitored so someone would need to show me proof that data packets were seen going back to China (or show how packets could flow from China back to the west for any nefarious purpose). On top of all that, Apple manufactures their equipment at Foxconn in China. This is the same place where Microsoft manufactures the Xbox One and Sony manufacturers the PlayStation4. HP desktops are manufactured by Megatron in China. So why is Huawei being singled out? Shouldn't Trump block the imports of all these companies as well? Heck, many of these consumer and small business appliances are seldomly protected by firewalls.

    I think it was Deng Xiaoping who once said "The Middle East has its oil, China has rare earth". Since modern electronics is dependent upon rare-earth materials then it should be no surprise that Chinese-made electronics is much less expensive. Speaking of Deng for a moment, in 1985 I was attending school in Boston where it appeared to me that Chinese students were everywhere. Apparently, Deng had sent 1.3 million Chinese students to the USA to receive a top-quality western education paid for by China (one of my more-gifted Chinese classmates was accompanied by "two minders" who were there to ensure that he returned to China). Unlike Mao, Deng saw great value in education and realized that this was the best way forward for China. Thirty five years later, China has moved more than 350 million Chinese citizens from poverty into the middle class. This number is greater than the current population of the USA so is it any surprise that China is doing well? Meanwhile, there is a movement in the west to label "an educated person" as "an elite". It seems to me that the world has flipped.
  16. Now here's a smart idea. The European Parliament (EU) just voted to end daylight savings time in 2021
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/27/world/europe/daylight-savings-time-european-union.html
    https://www.npr.org/2019/03/27/707179979/european-parliament-moves-toward-ending-daylight-saving-time
    The main reason given was that Europe's closest trading partners, China and Russia, do not shift their numerous number of time zones, and having Europe change its clocks twice annually was bad for business between all. But as a computer programmer and system admin, I can tell you that not having your computer systems change their internal clocks is a huge advantage.
  17. Our culture is awash in lies, dominated by streams of never ending electronic hallucinations that merge fact and fiction until they are indistinguishable.  We have become the most illusioned society on earth.  Politics is a species of endless and meaningless political theater.  Politicians have morphed into celebrities.  Our two ruling parties are, in reality, one party - the corporate party.  And those who attempt to puncture this vast, breathless universe of fake news, designed to push through the cruelty and exploitation of the neoliberal order, are pushed so far to the margins of society, including by a public broadcasting system that has sold its soul for corporate money, that we might as well be mice squeaking against an avalanche, but squeak we MUST
  18. A conservative friend of mine was fond of asking me political questions (I am a centrist) then would cut me off mid-sentence before I finished answering because he did not value my (just begining) response. Apparently he was the only conservative amongst his family of brothers, sisters and parents but had no problem thinking he was right while they were wrong. How could this be? This thought rattled around in my mind until I stumbled across a book titled The Republican Brain which was positively reviewed by liberals and conservatives alike. The book contains several points which I will pass along here:
    • Size differences in two brain structures, the amygdala (larger in conservatives) and the anterior cingulate (larger in liberals), bias human perspective of the world. Therefore ...
    • Conservatives see most issues as "black and white" while liberals see "shades of gray"
    • Conservatives play politics as a team sport so will almost always "vote their party" while Liberals will split their vote choosing alternate parties (now you know how Trump got in)
    • Conservatives (larger amygdala) are more fearful of others so are more easily encouraged to vote for POPULIST issues like "building the wall" or BREXIT (funny point: Britain had the lowest number of Syrian immigrants but apparently the highest political reaction against them)
    • Since conservatives only see things as black and white, they try (and sometimes succeed) in converting liberals over to their way of voting. It seems to me that the reverse never happens
Continued here: Index Part-2 (more sciency, while less newsworthy, stuff)
"2001: A Space Odyssey"
A mysterious monolith awakens the imagination of humanity's distant ancestors.
A second monolith awaits humanity's giant leap to the moon. And in orbit around Jupiter,
a third monolith beckons humanity to transcend beyond the limits of of body and machine.
Click: 2001: A Space Odyssey @ Wikipedia

"a Feynman Diagram"
Feynman Diagram (animated) Feynman Diagram (static)
"All forces in the universe are mediated by particle exchange"
This "Feynman Diagram" (of electron repulsion) depicts the movement of two electrons (1 to 3 and 2 to 4) in space and time. A virtual photon transfers energy between them (5 to 6) causing them to repel each other.
To learn more:
1) brief explanation
2) detailed explanation
Legend: Y-Axis (up-down) is time while X-Axis (left-right) is space

Neil Rieck
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Yes, this is the old "Laptops and Lederhosen" site

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  • Humanity's coming Dark Age
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  • Thomas PaineThomas Paine (1737-1809) wrote about many modern topics including " the importance of the separation between church and state" and " racial equality" (he proposed "abolishing slavery" 100 years before Lincoln). The following three titles are a "must read" for all modern citizens:
  • Adam Smith (1723-1790) was a self titled "moral philosopher" who developed economic theories with the intent of redistributing wealth to workers who were about to be displaced by the industrial revolution. Anyone reading Smith's books will come to the conclusion that American capitalism is based upon a synthesis of Adam Smith and Charles Darwin (survival of the greediest). Many things Americans attribute to Adam Smith are not found in his books (the 'invisible hand' is mentioned only once in a revised edition of WoN). What would he think about hedge funds and activist investors?  
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