Fauci Backs Investigation into Wuhan Lab Leak, But Stands by Animal Host Theory

Jenni Fink 

NEWSWEEK

5/28/2021


Because knowing the origin of COVID-19 could help prevent future outbreaks, Dr. Anthony Fauci, America's top infectious disease expert, said he supported investigating multiple theories as to where the virus came from, and that includes speculation it came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Once considered a fringe theory that appeared to put undue criticism on Chinese scientists, the possibility that a lab in Wuhan was the starting point for the pandemic is gaining traction. President Joe Biden asked the Intelligence Community to redouble their investigative efforts and the group has not eliminated the lab from a list of possible origin points.

Fauci came under criticism recently for telling National Geographic in May 2020 that the lab leak theory was a "circular argument" and the nature of the virus points to it being naturally occurring. He told SiriusXM's The Joe Madison Show he stands by the belief that it's "much more likely" that COVID-19 was natural and not the result of the Wuhan lab.

"But we can't say that for 100 percent certain," Fauci added. "For that reason, this hypothesis that it might have leaked out of a lab is something that you want to see if you can investigate that in a fair, unbiased, scientifically sound way."

Since the start of the pandemic, people have raised concerns about the world's ability to trust information coming out of China and its ability to be transparent about the outbreak. Censoring medical professionals who raised the alarm early on only magnified concerns and while the Wuhan Institute of Virology has said none of its staff have been infected, which would mean the outbreak couldn't have started in the lab, some aren't willing to take the lab at its word.

Fauci separated Chinese scientists from the government and told Madison that in his experience working with scientists in China they've been "of good faith."

China vehemently denies that it's been anything less than transparent and that the Wuhan lab was the source of the pandemic, often pointing to a report a team of researchers published in March. The report, co-authored by 25 scientists who visited China earlier this year as part of a World Health Organization-led mission, found the virus being naturally occurring was the most likely scenario and the lab leak theory was the least likely.

However, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the WHO, identified shortfalls in their ability to conduct their research and advocated for additional investigations. While the team was leaning toward the belief that the virus jumped from an animal to a human, Ghebreyesus said they didn't make a definitive conclusion about the source of the pandemic.

Some scientists feel the world may never know the true source of the pandemic, but identifying how it began could be beneficial in preventing future outbreaks. If an animal is the source of the outbreak, it would be advisable to invest financially in tracking people who work in close proximity to animals to identify pathogens with pandemic potential before they spread.

"We should be doing better surveillance in animal populations that pose a risk of being the origin of a new pathogen. Our next crisis is already on the planet, but the pathogen has yet to make the jump," Jon Andrus, professor of global health at George Washington University, previously told Newsweek.

Fauci stressed to Madison that it's important there are "lessons learned" from the current pandemic, including how it began.

Related Articles
China Says U.S. Turning 'Blind Eye' to WHO's 'Official Conclusion' on Lab Leak Theory
Scientists Who Doubt Wuhan Lab Theory Still Back Natural Occurrence After Renewed Calls to Probe COVID Origin
Timeline of What Dr. Fauci Has Said About the Wuhan Lab and COVID's Origins

How Jewish is Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah?’ A Forward investigation in 9 verses




How Jewish is Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah?’ A Forward investigation in 9 verses

PJ Grisar May 23, 2021

Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky/Getty I...

I
Our story, like its subject, starts in several places.

The balmy parapets of Jerusalem, where David gives into temptation. The third-row pew of a Montreal synagogue, where the shul president’s son learns about the Bible’s most calamitous affair. A movie theater in Mohegan Lake, N.Y., where a 10-year-old Jewish boy watches a movie called “Shrek” and hears plaintive piano while an ogre surveys his ransacked swamp, catching a glimpse of his reflected face in shattered glass as these words play:

I heard there was a secret chord
That David played and it pleased the Lord
But you don’t really care for music, do you?

I was that 10-year-old kid, hearing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” for the first time, and wondering what it had to do with the giant green guy I’d been watching for the past hour.

Like most people, I haven’t been able to escape the song, an infectious melody with cryptic verses and a simple chorus of a sacred word and too many covers to name. In some ways, as the poet sang, it doesn’t matter which you heard. Not because all versions were created equal, but because in two decades the song has become so pervasive as to signify nothing and everything.

A case in point: Just a few months after the Republican National Convention featured two unauthorized versions of “Hallelujah” set to fireworks, gospel singer Yolanda Adams performed a version approved by Cohen’s estate on the eve of President Biden’s inauguration, as part of a memorial to 400,000 dead of COVID-19. Both uses, played mere feet from each other on the National Mall, seemed to hit the wrong note.

The song is too accepting of fallibility to champion Trump. It’s too sexual to mourn the dead. It’s too Jewish to work as a Christian-inflected hymn. But like the story of David, the tune means so much to so many, that it’s hard to pin down a single interpretation. Online, debates about its meaning take on a Talmudic intensity.

I wanted to understand the song — what Cohen meant by it, and if that meaning was lost to other musicians. I needed to know Cohen’s spiritual biography. I had to find out how the song worked in synagogues or at klezmer festivals, in Hebrew and in Yiddish. I wanted to know what the song meant in the modern state of Israel and what it had to do with the Bible figures it winks at. In short, I needed to know if the song, perhaps the most misunderstood popular work of the last 40 years, was truly Jewish and what, if anything, that means for its status as a global anthem. Does its popularity mean that Jewish thought has gone mainstream, or, as the critics trumpet, that many interpreters simply don’t get what the song’s really saying?

To try to figure it all out, I talked with the man who wrote the book on “Hallelujah.” I chatted with Cohen’s rabbi, his cantor and his manager. I spoke with songwriters who adapted it for Jewish venues and faith leaders who use it as liturgy.

I found in “Hallelujah” a song that draws from Kabbalah, the Psalms and Hasidic thought. It is a manifesto of a man whose life was spent appealing to, and wrestling with, the absolute, and touching the mundane with the divine. It is the living text of a new Psalmist, who birthed a melodic prayer used in synagogues — but who never meant for it to be heard in those sacred spaces. “Hallelujah,” with its layered contradictions, is a mark of Cohen’s spiritual consistency, and finally, his work as a Jew hoping to comprehend a holy, broken world. But before it became all that, it was yet another struggle to find the right words.

II
A Baffled King Composes “Hallelujah”

Alan Light first started thinking about “Hallelujah” when he heard it as part of Kol Nidre services at Beit Simchat Torah, a progressive synagogue in midtown Manhattan. When I asked if the song was Jewish, Light, author of 2012’s “The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley and the Unlikely Ascent of ‘Hallelujah,’” resisted a simple answer.

“This song has permeated the world and people’s lives and their own experiences in such a way that pretending this song is about this specific thing — we’re not there anymore,” he said.

How the song rose, from an obscure, synth-heavy track on Cohen’s 1984 album “Various Positions,” proves “Hallelujah” can’t be confined to any one meaning or definitive version. As outlined in Light’s book, soon to be a documentary film, its journey was a group effort: an act of collage in which Cohen’s original was soon surpassed by other, sparer interpretations.

To begin with, “Various Positions” was a tough sell. Columbia refused to even release it, leaving the job to independent label Passport. Few reviews of the album mentioned the first song on the second side: a strange, pseudo-gospel composition with a decidedly gospel-sounding title.

Bob Dylan was the first to recognize the song’s promise, playing “Hallelujah” on two occasions on the 1988 leg of his “Never-Ending Tour.” Some time before that, the Prophet of Hibbing and the Prince of Bummers from Montreal were having coffee in Paris. Dylan asked how long it took Cohen to write it. Cohen lied and said two years — in actuality, it took around five.

While there are four verses in the cut on “Various Positions,” Cohen wrote about 80 for the song, originally titled “The Other Hallelujah.” Describing his process, Cohen once conjured an agonized picture of a supplicant before his muse. He was in his underwear at the Royalton Hotel, banging his head on the floor, saying “I can’t finish this song.”

And he was never done fine-tuning it. The lyrics suggest Cohen’s hesitation when putting the song together. Instead of narrative unity, there are fragments of scene and sentiment, all connected by the word “Hallelujah,” which comprises the chorus and the final word in each verse. The word is a Hebrew compound of “Hallelu” (praise) and “Ja” (God), in a command form. In the Bible, it’s most frequently found in the Psalms attributed to David.

The song begins with David, the “baffled king.” But Cohen’s pronouns are slippery and his subject changes. The first verse mentions David’s playing, which placates the Lord — either the tempestuous King Saul or God — and a “you” who doesn’t care for music. In the second stanza, the “you” appears to be David, seeing a woman bathing on the roof, as he did Bathsheba. But then, in the second half of the line, the “you” appears to allude to Samson, tied to a kitchen chair as Delilah cuts his hair.

The biblical archetypes suggest tragic sexual encounters — or, in the case of David, Cohen’s own affair with a married woman. But the song then departs from biblical imagery, moving on to accusations of blasphemy, introducing the idea of a “holy or the broken hallelujah.” Finally the speaker laments his inability to please that ever-shifting “you” — then, ultimately, shrugs it off.

Cohen had second thoughts about the song’s biblical references, leaving them out in concert and using unrecorded verses in their stead. But for all of his tinkering, he ended his live versions like this: “Even though it all went wrong/I’ll stand before the lord of song/with nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.” The words, an exaltation in surrender to the world in all its contradictions, were key to the song’s message.

“It’s a rather joyous song,” Cohen said on the release of “Various Positions,” and, he argued often, a secular one. He wanted to push the words of praise back to Earth, “to indicate that Hallelujah can come out of things that have nothing to do with religion.”

But when the Velvet Underground’s John Cale was preparing to sing the song for “I’m Your Fan,” a 1991 album of covers made by notable Cohen admirers, he rejected some of the unused lyrics because they seemed too religious — or at least too Jewish.

“Some of them, I couldn’t sing myself,” Cale told the Boston Globe of the countless alternate verses Cohen faxed him. “Some of them are about Yahweh, about religion, and reflecting Leonard’s background.”

It’s tempting, but probably a mistake, to use this remark as evidence of the song’s Jewishness. For all the variations of “Hallelujah,” those other words were never recorded, and it was Cale’s new, intimate arrangement that would make the song an anthem.

III
A Cold, Broken and Tragic “Hallelujah”

In the early ‘90s, Jeff Buckley, son of folk singer Tim Buckley, was cat-sitting for a friend in Park Slope. One day he discovered “I’m Your Fan” in her record collection and heard Cale’s “Hallelujah.” Scored to urgent piano, it was an unfussy lover’s lament, with dark meditations on solitude, good and bad sex and the bitter lessons of a doomed relationship. With alternate verses supplied by Cohen, and no cheesy choir, this version sounded nothing like the original — but then, Buckley, like so many others, had never heard the original. Music history might well be different if he had.

The just-emerging Buckley started playing the song at gigs, ending as Cale did, not with the joyous “nothing on my tongue,” but with “It’s not a cry you can hear at night/it’s not somebody who’s seen the light — it’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah!”

The song’s meaning shifted. It had a sexier edge and a more tortured conclusion with a new brand of vulnerability. Cale’s world-weary delivery and Cohen’s arch humor (“You said I took the name in vain/I don’t even know the name/And if I did, well really, what’s it to ya?”) were gone, replaced by what Buckley called the “hallelujah of an orgasm.” That eroticism was trapped forever on Buckley’s album “Grace,” where the track begins with an exhausted exhale.

Light says the difference in the versions was inevitable: Cohen recorded the original when he was 50; Buckley was 27 — and wouldn’t make it past 30.

After Buckley drowned on May 29, 1997, his “Hallelujah” accrued the air of the sacrosanct. The song was further tethered to tragedy a few years later, when it became the unlikely backing track for 9/11. As Light’s book recounts, VH1 played Buckley’s “Hallelujah” under a hastily-assembled tribute video made of on-the-ground footage of New York after the attacks. The footage played constantly that September of 2001.

Soon the song appeared in montages of crisis and uncertainty on network TV shows, boosted by the appearance of Cale’s version in “Shrek,” a national calamity and Sony’s eagerness to license it. Next it showed up in singing competitions and, owing in part to its religious-sounding refrain, weddings and funerals. It’s now in the repertoire of every kid on YouTube and every busker with a street corner, each with different variations and, with each reorganization, a different takeaway. Paul Simon told Light that Cohen’s song had supplanted “Bridge Over Troubled Water” as a multi-use standard. Despite the objections of many tired listeners, nothing yet has toppled “Hallelujah.”

Last year, a doctor in Cincinnati sang it to COVID patients as they left the hospital. When Italy was on lockdown, the song was heard from the balconies. “It still fulfills these people,” Light said.

It’s hard, and perhaps cruel, to quibble with those who find their own deep, adaptable meaning in the song. We are squarely in the realm of death of the author. But how Cohen lived, and chose to die, tells us where the song came from, and what Cohen wanted it to say.

IV
READ THE REST HERE
How Jewish is Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah?’ – The Forward

KD LANG DOING HALLELUJAH

RIP

BEGAN WITH CBC RADIO THEN TV

Canadian actor Paul Soles, Voice of Spider-Man in 1960s Animated Series, Dies at 90

HE WAS A GREAT VOICE ACTOR

Reid Nakamura 

 28/5/2021

Paul Soles, the voice actor who starred in the original animated "Spider-Man" series in the 1960s, has died at the age of 90.

© TheWrap paul soles spider-man

The news was announced by Soles' manager, Angela Wright of Edna Talent Management, in a Facebook post Friday. "Paul Soles was truly a Canadian treasure," Wright wrote. "He lived a long life with so many adventures along the way. RIP."

According to an obituary in Canada's The Globe and Mail, Soles died in Toronto on Wednesday, May 26. No cause of death was listed.

A JEWISH CANADIAN SPIDEY
Soles voiced the title character in ABC's animated "Spider-Man" series, which ran for three seasons on ABC and in syndication between 1967 and 1970. Soles starred alongside Bernard Cowan, Paul Kligman and Peg Dixon.

He also voiced Hermey the misfit elf in Rankin/Bass' stop-motion "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" special in 1964. His other voice acting credits include "Rocket Robin Hood," "King of the Beasts," "The Marvel Super Heroes" and "The King Kong Show."

In 1978, Soles hosted the short-lived late-night talk show "Canada After Dark" for CBC Television. He also served as a longtime co-host on the network's newsmagazine series "Take 30," alongside Anna Cameron, Adrienne Clarkson, Mary Lou Finlay and Hana Gartner.

WIKIPEDIA NEEDS UPDATING

Paul Soles - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Soles

Paul Robert Soles (born 11 August 1930) is a Canadian character actor, voice actor and television personality. He led the voice cast in such series such as The Marvel Super Heroes (1966), voiced the title character in Spider-Man (1967), and portrayed Hermey in the 1964 television special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer; Soles is one of the last surviving participants of the special's voice cast. Soles …

• Acting roles
• Voice work
• Television hosting
• Documentary producer
• Family
• External links

Soles is widely known as the voice of Hermey the misfit elf in Rankin/Bass' Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer from 1964. He went on to voice Bruce Banner the alter ego of the Hulk and his friend Rick Jones in the 1966 Incredible Hulk animated series from The Marvel Super Heroes program. He also voiced fellow Marvel superhero Spider-Man in the original animated television series

Wikipedia · Text under CC-BY-SA license

GLOBE AND MAIL OBITUARY

Paul Robert SOLES
1930 2021

PAUL ROBERT SOLES Born in Toronto, August 11, 1930, to Arthur L. Soles and his wife Lillian (née Goodfellow) they of Polish/Lithuanian Jewish ancestry. 

Died in Toronto May 26, 2021. 

Predeceased by his younger brother Bill and sister-in-law Marg, he leaves his baby sister Ruth-Ellen, nieces Liane and Alison, Heather and Sandra, nephews Richard, Allan and Brian, wife Jean (née Allan), son Jonathan and daughter-in-heart Jarah. 

He will be remembered as a charming, magnanimous, principled man, a creative and versatile performer and a proud Canadian.

 It was the titans of radio who first fired his imagination and he set out to emulate them from an early age. Committed to the highest standards throughout his 70 year career he remained the consummate professional wholly dedicated to his craft, but by nature he tended undeniably towards mirth. 'He who laughs, lasts' was an oft repeated aphorism.

 He delighted in cracking people up on air and off and was a terrific joke-teller, an impressive mimic, accent man, public speaker, story-reader, announcer, host, emcee, compare. Warm and gentle with an easy going manner he enjoyed the company of others as much as his own. Thoughtful and inventive he possessed a quiet strength and a deep well of emotion. 

A talented and hard-working person he often cited good fortune as the sole reason for his success, but the truth is he loved what he did and it showed. A champion debater and Army Cadet RSM at Vaughan Road Collegiate he dropped out of UWO after third year, following stints at CHLO and CKEY, to work full-time at CFPL radio, transitioning to TV at its inception in 1953. 

Commissioned as a Pilot Officer in the RCAF Auxilliary at Station Crumlin he spent 1956-57 running the radio station at 3 Wing, Zweibrücken, Germany and travelled with the Flyers hockey team as their play-by-play man.

 1962 he returned to Toronto, married a first generation Scottish-Canadian girl from southwestern Ontario, began a 16-year run on CBC's 'Take-30' and started a family. 

er cherished turns during the CBC-TV years were the 1966 Goon Show-like summer replacement sketch comedy series Charlie Had One and This is The Law, 1971-1976. Best known today for portraying Hermey the Elf in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964) and Peter Parker and his crime-fighting alter ego in the 1967 cartoon Spider-Man he worked extensively in every medium, his favourites being radio drama and live theatre.

 His career took him all over the world but he happily spent the bulk of it in Canada, treading the boards of virtually every major theatre in the land. 

He performed on and off Broadway and headlined theatrical tours across Canada and the US. Among his many memorable dramatic performances three stand out: the lead in the Canadian premiere in 1987 of 'I'm Not Rappaport'; the first Jewish Canadian to play Shylock in the 2001 production of 'The Merchant of Venice' at the Stratford Festival and the Dora-nominated role in the 2005 two-hander 'Trying'.

 A multiple award nominee he won three: best supporting actor, Six Characters in Search of an Author, 1960 Dominion Drama Festival; best supporting actor in a dramatic series, Terminal City, 2001 Genies; best actor in a digital series, My 90-Year Old Roommate, 2017 Canadian Screen Awards. 

Beyond work and family he had three life-long passions: sports cars, music and flying. A racing nut he drove the winning foreign entry in the American International Rally (1959) speaking only German and passing himself off as a factory driver from Mercedes in a zero-mileage model W120. 

A bigtime jazz fan, particularly of the big-bands, he was a fixture at clubs on both sides of the border and he forged friendships with a number of performers.

 An aviation enthusiast and pilot he owned two RCAF primary trainers, first a Fleet 16-B Finch open cockpit biplane acquired to barnstorm across the continent as part of The Great Belvedere Air Dash of 1973 and later a DeHavilland DHC-1 Chipmunk. He was a performing member of the Great War Flying Museum (Brampton), an air show participant for 20 years and a perennial volunteer for the Canadian International Air Show. 

He did not go gentle retaining to the end his ability to uplift. When asked "how are you doing?" he replied "I make a living". 

A celebration of life will be held at a date TBD. 

In lieu of flowers please donate to an organization dedicated to theatre, comedy or jazz or to one that supports such artists. 

Remembrances and condolences would be welcome online at legacy.com/obituaries/theglobeandmail.

Trans Mountain pipeline begins construction of tunnel in Burnaby, B.C.


BURNABY, B.C. — Construction has begun on the 2.6-kilometre tunnel in Burnaby, B.C., for the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project.

 Provided by The Canadian Press

The company says in a news release the work on the tunnel connecting the Westridge Marine and Burnaby terminals began Wednesday.

It says the start of construction of the tunnel represents one of the major components of the expansion project in the Lower Mainland and is expected to take a little over half a year to complete.

The tunnel construction began after a year of preparation and more than six years of planning, design and regulatory processes.

Trans Mountain says the tunnel will be more than four metres in diameter and have three delivery pipelines to load vessels at the Westridge Marine terminal.

The company has said the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project is on budget and on schedule for completion by the end of 2022.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 27, 2021.

The Canadian Press

NDP team up with Liberals, promising to get its net-zero climate bill into the Senate

OTTAWA — Federal New Democrats are ensuring the survival of a key piece of Liberal legislation aimed at keeping Canada accountable to its target of achieving net-zero carbon-related emissions by mid-century.

 

© Provided by The Canadian Press

Parliamentarians are currently discussing Bill C-12 at a committee voting on a series of changes to the proposed climate law tabled late last year.

If passed, it would see Canada set rolling five-year targets to slash emissions of heat-trapping, climate-change-causing greenhouse gases, stopping in 2050.

That's when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has pledged that any pollution the country does emit can be offset by initiatives like tree-planting or captured before being released into the atmosphere.

New Democrats have criticized the legislation as lacking short-term accountability from now until 2030.

By working with the opposition party, Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said the government will accept changes to the bill, which the NDP says includes climate progress reports in 2023 and 2025, as well as an "interim emissions objective" for 2026.

"This is too important to let this legislation have no accountability whatsoever, which is what we were faced with," said NDP environment and climate change critic Laurel Collins.

"Either an empty bill, which what was initially put forward, or voting against it and having to wait for the next government to put forward something that would actually provide accountability."

"We were able to use our leverage and use the pressure that we were able to put, to ensure that we actually get a measure of climate accountability."

Among the agreed-upon changes is a 2025 review of Canada's 2030 emissions-reductions goal. Trudeau has pledged to have cut the country's carbon-related emissions by 40 to 45 per cent below 2005 levels, up from the 36 per cent track the government says the country can do under existing efforts.

"If we find that the world moves more quickly than, I think, all countries right now anticipate with respect to reducing emissions, and we find that by 2025, it looks like we can actually go farther than we have presently committed to, of course we will reflect on that," said Wilkinson.

"The reality is we've just gone through a target-setting exercise. We believe the target that we've established is a very ambitious target for Canada and our focus is going to be on achieving that target."

By accepting its proposals, the NDP has pledged to work with the Liberals to get it through the House of Commons, and into the Senate before the session concludes.

Conservative environment critic Dan Albas said in a statement that the Liberals are "rushing" the bill through its committee stage.

So far, the party voted against the bill, saying a government-created advisory body on the net-zero goal doesn't include representation from the oil and gas industry, which could be hurt by the influence of so-called "climate activists."

At least two of the advisory panellists have a background in oil and gas.

“We entered the committee process in good faith with amendments suggested by witnesses that would make the bill better," Albas said.

"Unfortunately the Liberal government and their NDP allies made a deal and are refusing to even debate or engage with any ideas from other opposition parties."

Wilkinson dismissed the Tories' critique and said its net-zero panel includes a diverse range of perspectives, including industry.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 27, 2021

Stephanie Taylor, The Canadian Press

UCP WAR ON DRUG ADDICTS 
'It is going to kill people': UCP to close Calgary's only supervised consumption site

Alanna Smith 

The Alberta government says it will shutter Calgary’s central supervised drug-consumption site as part of a broader plan to overhaul existing harm-reduction services across the province.

© Provided by Calgary Herald The Safeworks supervised consumption site at the Sheldon M. Chumir Health Centre is shown on Feb. 15, 2019.

A plan to close the Safeworks site, inside the Sheldon M. Chumir Health Centre, and replace it with two others in the city was approved at a cabinet meeting Wednesday.

Justin Marshall, press secretary to Alberta’s associate minister of mental health and addictions, confirmed the government is “relocating” the existing site and its services.

“We will be relocating the existing supervised consumption site, which has been highly disruptive to the neighbourhood, and instead add SCS (supervised consumption services) capabilities within two existing partner organizations’ facilities situated in more appropriate locations,” Marshall in a statement Thursday.

He declined to offer specifics, including the identity of the community partners or when Safeworks will be closed.

The Beltline site has more visits than any other in Alberta, not including ARCHES in Lethbridge, which closed after the UCP pulled its funding last July following allegations of financial misconduct. Last year, 53,725 people used the Safeworks site, where clients can use substances under supervision of staff who are trained to reverse overdoses.

The pending closure comes amid an escalating overdose crisis in the province.

Alberta marked its deadliest year on record in 2020 with 1,144 opioid-related deaths — an 83 per cent increase from the year before. Numbers continue to trend upwards, with 228 substance use deaths in the first two months of 2021 alone, 70 of which were in Calgary.

The broader government plan, outlined in documents obtained by Postmedia, also includes changes for existing sites in Edmonton, Grande Prairie and Red Deer.

An AHS employee with experience working at the Safeworks site in Calgary said its closure will further harm vulnerable people, who are already at the whim of “failed” government policy to prevent overdose deaths.

“It is going to kill people. It’s going to result in parking garages, alleys and bathroom overdose deaths,” said the man, whom Postmedia agreed not to identify.

© Darren Makowichuk/Postmedia The Safeworks supervised consumption site at the Sheldon M. Chumir Health Centre is shown in Calgary on Thursday, May 27, 2021.

He said many clients won’t transition to services elsewhere because the connections and trust they formed at the former site will be lost.

“People who live in the world of addictions with mental-health concerns and experiencing homelessness, the first thing you have to do is build trust. If you’re shutting that (site) down, you’re cutting that ribbon of trust,” he said.

“How many times has that ribbon of trust been broken with our clients? And how many more times do you expect them to show up at the trough thinking ‘oh, this time I know you’re not going to?’ ”

In Edmonton, the government plans to “decentralize” sites, according to the documents. Only two of the original three sites remain after downtown Boyle Street Community Services announced it would discontinue operations at the end of April . Three men were found dead of suspected overdoses in a central park , which harm reduction advocates have linked to the closure.

There are no set plans for the overdose prevention site in Red Deer. The document said the province will “re-evaluate need for services once (a) recovery community is established.” The UCP has committed $5 million to build a 75-bed addictions treatment centre in the city.

In Grande Prairie, the government will transition the drug-use site into the Rotary House homeless shelter. The municipality is facing the highest overdose fatality rate in Alberta at 55.1 per 100,000 people, compared with the provincial average of 31.6 based on the latest provincial data.

UCP TREATS JUNKIES AS CRIMINALS 

NOT AS ADDICTS NEEDING MEDICAL ATTENTION

“Our principled approach will continue to provide services while protecting community safety,” said Marshall. 

“Our government is committed to a high quality and easily accessible system of care for both mental health and addictions that includes a full continuum of supports, including services to reduce harm.”

The latest provincial budget outlined $15.7 million to fund five supervised drug-use and three overdose-prevention sites in Alberta. Marshall said there will be “increases” in funding to support the changes but did not offer specifics.

Related
Canada’s hidden crisis: How COVID-19 overshadowed the worst year on record for overdose deaths
No update to province's plan for supervised consumption sites one year after damning report released
Less crime around Sheldon Chumir, but consumption site's fate still uncertain

Elaine Hyshka, an assistant professor at the University of Alberta’s School of Public Health, said uprooting existing supervised consumption sites in the province “defies logic” as Alberta battles one of the highest overdose death rates in the country.

“Alberta really is bucking a national trend here where we see SCS (supervised consumption services) rolling out across the country,” she said. “If anything, we need to be keeping all the SCS we have and making new ones to support other parts of our cities and our the province that could benefit from having these life-saving interventions.”

Hyshka said the province’s safe drug-use sites were implemented after a careful review and consultation process under the former NDP government. The study included analysis on the location of overdose deaths, discarded drug paraphernalia and EMS calls for service, with input from service providers and stakeholders.

“A wholesale discarding of that work is really unfortunate, because planning health systems requires evidence and thoughtful, engaged process,” said Hyshka.

The UCP released a damning report — with disputed findings — on the socio-economic effect of supervised consumption services in March last year. It has been widely criticized by academics, scientists and health-care experts.

The document’s intent was to guide decision-making on the future of existing and future supervised drug-use sites in Alberta, though it is unclear what role it played in the government’s new strategy.

In March, a spokesperson for the associate minister of mental health and addictions said there were “no updates” on the province’s plans when asked about the report.

© Darren Makowichuk/Postmedia The Safeworks supervised consumption site at the Sheldon M. Chumir Health Centre is shown in Calgary on Thursday, May 27, 2021.

Lori Sigurdson, NDP critic for mental health and addictions, said the government’s response to the devastating overdose crisis is a “tragic failure.”

“The UCP really just has their hands over their eyes. They are being blind in their decision-making,” said Sigurdson. “We know that four people a day are dying from overdose and we know that these supervised consumption sites save lives, so the government is making a huge mistake.”

After the three recent deaths in Edmonton and growing overdose rate in Lethbridge after the closure of its supervised consumption site, which was the busiest in North America, Sigurdson said she’s “absolutely” certain this move will result in additional deaths.

“The move to treatment beds and this ‘recovery model,’ as they call it, is just one component,” she said.

“But the harm reduction model, which includes the safe consumption sites, is so important. We need to support people where they are at and that’s what safe consumption sites do.”

alsmith@postmedia.com

Twitter: @alanna_smithh

Ottawa dollars can save B.C.'s old-growth forests

A coalition of conservationists is urging the B.C. government to use federal funds to end the province’s new war in the woods on Vancouver Island, protect old-growth forest and establish targets for endangered ecosystems.

Ken Wu, executive director of the Endangered Ecosystems Alliance, said Premier John Horgan should capitalize on federal funding and align with national and international initiatives to set targets to protect vital land and marine areas.

“It’s a game-changing plan,” Wu told the National Observer.

“Because the province can employ federal money to save these areas if Horgan chooses to do it.”


The B.C. government should adopt Canada’s protected areas targets, and preserve at least 25 per cent of its vital land and marine ecosystems by 2025, and 30 per cent by 2030, said Wu.

Currently, 15 per cent of B.C.’s land area is falls into legislated protected areas, compared to 13 per cent nationally, the alliance said.

The rest of the world is working aggressively to expand protected at-risk ecosystems, and B.C. should follow suit and protect its most valuable ancient forests at the same time, Wu said, particularly as the province boasts the greatest ecological diversity in the country.

B.C.’s participation is critical for Canada to meet its own national and international protected areas commitments, he added.

“Will B.C. join the North American leadership movement to solve the intertwined climate and biodiversity crisis or get left behind as an anti-environmental conservation laggard?” Wu asked.

A total of $3.3 billion to protect land and seas has been set aside by Ottawa in the latest budget, Wu said, adding $2.3 billion is dedicated to terrestrial areas.

B.C.’s part of the funding pie would likely range between $200 and $300 million, which would go a long way to protecting the province’s most valuable ancient forests.

The federal funding comes at a critical time for B.C., conservationist Vicky Husband, renowned B.C. conservationist awarded both the Order of Canada and the Order of B.C. for her work to protect old-growth over 40 years.

“Right now the B.C. government is being pressured by deeply concerned citizens across (the province) and beyond for an immediate moratorium on old growth logging of the last remaining most bio-diverse forests,” Husband said in a press statement.

“This pressure for change also includes support for First Nations who want to protect critical old growth forests in their territory.”

It’s vital B.C. dedicate a significant chunk of the funding to Indigenous Protected Areas, First Nations land use plans, and the acquisition of private lands for protection, the Alliance said.

Also, the province should support B.C. communities dependent on forestry revenue by providing financing for First Nations sustainable economic development linked to newly protected areas, incentives and regulations to grow a value-added, second-growth forest industry, and provide a just transition for B.C. old-growth forestry workers.

While federal funding won’t save all of B.C.’s old-growth, it could protect areas of concern and help end blockades and protests such as those currently underway on southern Vancouver Island and the Fairy Creek watershed, said TJ Watt, a campaigner with the Ancient Forest Alliance.

“The B.C. NDP government has just been handed the keys to ensure much of the grandest, most endangered old-growth forests in B.C. get protected,” said Watt in a press statement.

“Will they keep the door shut or let the solution in?”

Rochelle Baker / Local Journalism Initiative / Canada’s National Observer

Rochelle Baker, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, National Observer

Against Technology - 

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 The Boom, The Bust, and Neo-Luddites in the 1990s 19

Chapter 2 The Mythic History of the Original Luddites 45

Chapter 3 Romanticizing the Luddites 77

Chapter 4 Frankenstein and the Monster of Technology 105

Chapter 5 Novelizing the Luddites 137

Chapter 6 Counterculture and Countercomputer in the 1960s 173

Chapter 7 Ned Ludd in the Age of Terror 211

Notes 235

Selected Bibliography 257

Index 267

https://law.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/3397664/Jones-2006-Against-Technology.pdf

 Into the Mainstream and Oblivion”: Julian Mayfield's Black Radical Tradition, 1948-1984 

by David Tyroler Romine

Abstract

“Into the Mainstream and Oblivion” is a study of the intellectual and political biography

of the African American writer and political activist Julian Hudson Mayfield. As a member

of the black Left, Mayfield’s life of activism and art bring the complex network of artists,

activists, and political theorists who influenced the construction, tactics, and strategies of

social movements during the latter half of the twentieth century into sharper focus revealing

the ways in which black, modernist writing served as a critical site of political, social, and

cultural ferment during the Cold War. Using art to communicate ideas and arguments about

the relationship between race, gender, and political economy, Mayfield and his

contemporaries illuminate the broader influence of black writers on American culture and

politics. In addition, the state’s response to Mayfield’s life of literary activism sheds light on

the ways in which anti-communism worked to disrupt, marginalize, and dampen the effect

of challenges to white supremacy.

The project makes extensive use of archives at the Schomburg Center for Research

in Black Life in Harlem, which houses the archives of Julian Mayfield and many of his

contemporaries. In addition to these primary source documents, this project examines

government documents produced by the extensive surveillance of African American writers

by various government agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department

of State, and United States Information Agency. Finally, the dissertation has benefitted from

a close working relationship with the family of Julian Mayfield and oral histories from

contemporaries which sheds light on the complex interplay of gender and class among black

social movements during the latter half of the twentieth century.

https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/10161/17520/Romine_duke_0066D_14836.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

THE REVOLUTION WILL BE VIDEOTAPED:

MAKING A TECHNOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE LONG 1960s

Peter Sachs Collopy

A DISSERTATION

in

History and Sociology of Science

Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania

Abstract

In the late 1960s, video recorders became portable, leaving the television studio for the art gallery, the psychiatric hospital, and the streets. The technology of recording moving images on magnetic tape, previously of use only to broadcasters, became a tool for artistic expression, psychological experimentation, and political revolution. Video became portable not only materially but also culturally; it could be carried by an individual, but it could also be carried into institutions from the RAND Corporation to the Black Panther Party, from psychiatrists’ offices to art galleries, and from prisons to state-funded media access centers. Between 1967 and1973, American videographers across many of these institutional contexts participated in a common discourse, sharing not only practical knowledge about the uses and maintenance of video equipment, but visions of its social significance, psychological effects, and utopian future. For many, video was a technology which would bring about a new kind of awareness, the communal consiousness that—influenced by theevolutionary philosophy of Henri Bergson—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin referred to as the noosphere and Marshall McLuhan as the global village. Experimental videographers across several fields were also influenced by the psychedelic research of the 1950s and early 1960s, by the development of cybernetics as a science of both social systems and interactions between humans and machines, by anthropology and humanistic psychology, and by revolutionary political movements in the United States and around the world

https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3451&context=edissertations

I WAS PART OF THE VIDEO TAPE REVOLUTION WITH OUR YIPPIE GROUP IN EDMONTON WHO USED PORTABLE VIDEO CAMERA'S TO FILM MEDIA CONFRENCES ON THE FUTURE OF TV IN THE NEW ERA OF CABLE, DEMANDING FREE PUBLIC ACCESS TO CABLE FOR DIY PRODUCTIONS. WHAT CANADIANS GOT WAS A SHORT DUREE OF DIY ON CHANNEL 10 WHICH ONLY EXISTS AS A DEVOLED CABLE PR CHANNEL