It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Architecture can be funny. Of course, it often makes for a well-disposed butt of the joke, like when Frank Gehry is satirized on the Simpsons, but buildings themselves can be funny as well. Philosophers like Kant believed humor was in the incongruity between what is expected and what is experienced. There are all sorts of expectations placed on buildings and an infinite number of ways that incongruity might grow between those expectations and what a building actually delivers. This video explores some of the most interesting of these humorous buildings through history, from Giulio Romano’s Mannerism, to SITE Architects BEST stores, and many more. Finally, it points to some contemporary practices that deploy humor to achieve more than just a chuckle.
Architecture with Stewart is a YouTube journey exploring architecture’s deep and enduring stories in all their bewildering glory. Weekly videos and occasional live events breakdown a wide range of topics related to the built environment in order to increase their general understanding and advocate their importance in shaping the world we inhabit.
Stewart Hicks is an architectural design educator that leads studios and lecture courses as an Associate Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He also serves as an Associate Dean in the College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts and is the co-founder of the practice Design With Company. His work has earned awards such as the Architecture Record Design Vanguard Award or the Young Architect’s Forum Award and has been featured in exhibitions such as the Chicago Architecture Biennial and Design Miami, as well as at the V&A Museum and Tate Modern in London. His writings can be found in the co-authored book Misguided Tactics for Propriety Calibration, published with the Graham Foundation, as well as essays in MONU magazine, the AIA Journal Manifest, Log, bracket, and the guest-edited issue of MAS Context on the topic of character architecture.
LETS ADD THE TOBIN TAX TO THAT Global tax accord could earn Canada up to $4.5 billion per year, says Freeland
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Finance minister says Canada willing to impose digital
Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland holds a press conference in Ottawa on Wednesday, Oct. 6, 2021. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press)
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland says Canada stands to collect as much as $4.5 billion a year through a landmark deal involving 136 countries that will require the world's largest corporations to pay more in taxes.
It's the first time she's released a revenue estimate from her department since the deal was reached a week ago. It comes just as some critics of the deal are suggesting Canada would do better if it went ahead with the digital services tax set out in Freeland's April budget.
"There are still some final details being hammered out, so the numbers I'm giving you are not exact," Freeland said in an interview with CBC's The House airing Saturday.
"Having said that, the best calculation the Department of Finance has right now is that when this deal comes into force, it will be worth $4.5 billion in additional revenue for Canada every year."
Under the agreement reached at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, many of the world's biggest multinational companies will be required to pay a minimum corporate tax rate of 15 per cent in 2023.
Starting in 2024, the agreement will also require multinational companies — particularly digital giants such as Amazon, Facebook and Google — to pay taxes on profits in the countries where they are earned, even if they have no physical presence there.
Critics of the deal have argued Canada would raise more money under Freeland's proposed 3 per cent tax on revenues from those digital services. That tax, which was to kick in next year, is being put on hold as talks continue on finalizing the global deal.
Global deal the 'best outcome' for Canada: Freeland
The parliamentary budget officer estimated this spring that the Canadian tax would raise $4 billion over five years.
Freeland said the math clearly works in Canada's favour under the global deal.
"Our own calculation, which we did put into the fiscal framework on the DST, was that that would bring in about $700 million a year. So this OECD deal, just purely on the numbers, is a much better deal for Canada."
LISTEN: Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland on a major international tax deal
9:06Global tax deal dilemma
Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland explains why Canada pushed for a new global tax agreement and what effect it will have here. 9:06
Freeland said that the proposed digital services tax will be brought in, and applied retroactively, if the global deal ends up not being implemented.
"I have put in place an insurance policy for Canadians," she said. "My hope and intention — and I'm going to put my shoulder to the wheel and work really, really hard for this — is that this international deal happens because it is overwhelmingly the best outcome for Canada and Canadians."
Freeland isn't alone in praising the global deal. G20 finance ministers meeting in Washington this week endorsed it, setting the stage for formal ratification by the leaders of the world's largest economies at the summit later this month in Rome.
A raw deal for low-income countries?
"This agreement will establish a more stable and fairer international tax system," the ministers said in a media statement after their meeting.
But critics warn that the terms of the agreement will disproportionately benefit the world's wealthiest nations, where most multinationals have their headquarters.
Ian Thomson, policy manager for Oxfam Canada, said the global accord short-changes less wealthy nations.
"Low-income and middle-income countries, they need hospitals, they need stronger health systems, they need strong education systems and they need to prepare themselves for being buffeted by decades of climate change," he told CBC.
"So with all of these crises, to deny low- and middle-income countries a fair share of the global tax pie is unjust."
But Freeland and U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen insist that the deal, with its minimum 15 per cent corporate tax rate, will end what they call a "race to the bottom" driving countries to compete against each other to attract large multinationals by offering lower and lower corporate tax rates.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen speaks during a House Financial Services Committee hearing on Sept. 30, 2021 on Capitol Hill in Washington. (Al Drago/Associated Press)
"The only losers from this deal are big multinational companies who are currently using globalization and the loopholes it has created to avoid paying taxes," Freeland told The House.
"So what I would say to people is, you look at the status quo and you look at this deal. And I have not heard a single person make a compelling case that the status quo is better for Canada and Canadians than this deal, or that the status quo is better for the poorest people in the world."
Freeland was less specific when asked how the extra revenue will be spent in the years ahead.
The federal government spent massively to counter the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, racking up record deficits to help individual Canadians and businesses make ends meet.
Freeland refused to say if the extra money from the tax accord would be used to pay down debt, or if she might follow the example of another Liberal finance minister — Paul Martin — who divided budget surpluses between debt repayment and tax cuts.
"I think the approach our government is taking to the fiscal situation in Canada is to say we made a commitment in the April budget to have a steadily declining debt to GDP ratio, and we continued to show that commitment in the platform on which we campaigned," she said.
Costly commitments
The Liberal government made some expensive commitments during the recent election campaign, including a $30 billion investment in a national child care program, money for social housing and funding to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
And there's a more immediate concern. Many of the federal government's emergency relief programs, including wage and rent subsidies and the Canada Recovery Benefit, are set to expire next week.
Freeland said she's been discussing the future of those programs with economists, businesses and labour leaders as the Canadian economy shows signs of stronger growth and job creation than anticipated, despite a fourth wave of the pandemic.
"I have a stack of papers in front of me about precisely this issue," she said.
Canadians will have to wait until next week for a decision on whether some — or any — of those programs will be extended.
Sea otter populations found to increase eelgrass genetic diversity
Sea otter resting in eelgrass with eelgrass draped over its hind foot.
Credit: Kiliii Yüyan Photography
A team of researchers affiliated with a host of institutions in Canada and one in the U.S. has found that eelgrass genetic diversity increases when sea otters live in eelgrass meadows. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their study of eelgrass meadows under different conditions. Joe Roman, with the University of Vermont, has published a Perspectives piece in the same journal issue outlining the work by the researchers in this new effort.
Prior to the arrival of Europeans, the shores off the western coast of North America were filled with sea otters. Sadly, hunters drove them to near extinction over the ensuing century. In this new effort, the researchers have looked at the impact that sea otters have on eelgrass meadows when they are reintroduced by environmentalists.
Eelgrass meadows grow near the shore from the bottom of the sea to the surface. Such meadows, like coral reefs, are home to a large number of sea creatures, some of which serve as prey for sea otters. Clams, the researchers note, are especially enjoyed by the otters. The otters swim down to the seafloor, feel them out using their whiskers, then dig them up, crack them open and eat them. Prior research has shown that this activity leads to divots or bare patches on the seafloor. The researchers took a closer look at the impact of clam digging by sea otters on eelgrass meadows. Their work involved collecting large numbers of samples of the grass from multiple meadows, some of which were inhabited by sea otters and some that were not. They also noted some samples were collected from meadows where seas otters had been recently reintroduced and some were from meadows where the otters had been living for decades.
Eelgrass meadow on Calvert Island when otters were just beginning to return - otter pits are visible at the meadow-edge but later occurred within the meadow.
Credit: Grant Callegari, Hakai Institute.
The researchers conducted a genetic analysis of the grass samples and then compared them. In so doing, they found that eelgrass meadows with otters were more genetically diverse. They also found that the longer the sea otters lived in a meadows, the more diverse the grass became. They suggest that physical disturbances by predators can lead to increased diversity and more resilience in the face of changing environments.
Sea otter digging enhances eelgrass genetic diversity which can build resilience to environmental change.
Credit: Josh Silberg and Erin Foster
Erin snorkeling in an eelgrass meadow, to examine if seedlings are attached to parent plants (clones) or if rhizomes are free (result of seed germination). Credit: Carly Janusson, Hakai Institute
Sea otter digging enhances eelgrass genetic diversity which can build resilience to environmental change. Credit: Josh Silberg and Erin Foster
Erin snorkeling in an eelgrass meadow, to examine if seedlings are attached to parent plants (clones) or if rhizomes are free (result of seed germination). Credit: Carly Janusson, Hakai Institute
The aviation industry is necessary for the world we live in today, but it places a strain on the environment, thanks to emissions from petroleum-based fossil fuel.
According to a new study, we could reduce these emissions by up to 68 percent – by switching to a sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) derived from plants. Specifically, the non-edible oilseed crop Brassica carinata, a variety of mustard plant. And it could be more cost-effective than petroleum fuel.
"If we can secure feedstock supply and provide suitable economic incentives along the supply chain, we could potentially produce carinata-based SAF in the southern United States," says sustainability scientist Puneet Dwivedi of the University of Georgia.
"Carinata-based SAF could help reduce the carbon footprint of the aviation sector while creating economic opportunities and improving the flow of ecosystem services across the southern region."
Roughly 2.4 percent of all global carbon dioxide emissions in 2018 were generated by the aviation industry, according to a report by the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. A study published earlier this year found that these emissions constitute a contribution of 3.5 percent to anthropogenic climate change.
That may not seem like much, but it's growing, and worryingly fast. But carinata-based SAF is looking more and more viable.
Challenges around transitioning to biofuels include their potential to displace important food crops and questions around whether it's even possible to grow enough fuel crops at all. Where, how, and what crop is grown also has a massive impact on whether it actually ends up reducing emissions.
That said, fuel derived from B. carinata is not a brand new idea. It was developed and tested some years ago – the first jet flight on pure carinata-derived biofuel was successfully flown in 2012, but the cost was much higher than conventional jet fuel.
The new work by Dwivedi and his team was not to prove that the fuel is viable, but to estimate exactly how cost-effective and emissions-reducing it could be.
Conventional jet fuel currently costs around US$0.50 per liter. Without subsidies, carinata-based SAF comes in at around $0.85 to $1.28 per liter, the team calculated.
But governments are offering incentives for reducing emissions that were not in place in 2012, such as the Biden Administration's Sustainable Aviation Grand Fuel Challenge, which offers tax credits for a minimum emission reduction of 50 percent compared to conventional jet fuel.
When all available US credits were taken into account, carinata-based SAF costs between $0.12 and $0.66 per liter, the researchers found.
"Current policy mechanisms should be continued to support manufacturing and distribution of SAF. The Grand Challenge announced by President Biden could be a game-changer in supporting carinata-based SAF production in the southern region," Dwivedi said.
In the southeastern states, where temperatures tend to be warmer, carinata can be grown in the winter months, which is the off-season for food production. This means it doesn't directly compete with other crops. In addition, the by-products of fuel production can still be used to produce animal fodder.
It seems like a no-brainer, except for at least one problem: The US currently lacks the infrastructure for turning the crop into fuel. The feasibility of building these facilities is the focus of the team's current research, with the hope of informing decisions to be made by farmers, investors and policy-makers.
"Our results would be especially relevant to the state of Georgia, which is the sixth-largest consumer of conventional aviation fuel in the country, hosts the busiest airport in the world, and is home to Delta, a leading global airline company," Dwivedi said.
"I am looking forward to pursuing more research for providing a sustainable alternative to our current model of air travel. Carinata has the potential to be a win-win situation for our rural areas, the aviation industry, and, most importantly, climate change."
B.C. facility aims to make vehicle fuel from carbon pulled out of the atmosphere
Carbon Engineering CEO Steve Oldham holds a container of the synthetic fuel the company has produced from carbon harvested out of the atmosphere at its lab in Squamish. (CTV)
Ian Holliday CTVNewsVancouver.ca Reporter Published Oct. 14, 2021
VANCOUVER -
The B.C. government, a First Nation in the Interior and a pair of Squamish-based companies are working together on a project that they say could revolutionize the transportation industry by all but eliminating its carbon dioxide emissions.
The province is providing $2 million from its Innovative Clean Energy fund to support the engineering and design work for the project, which aims to be the world's first large-scale fuel production plant that uses carbon captured directly from the atmosphere.
Squamish-based Huron Clean Energy expects to build the commercial plant on Upper Nicola Band land near Merritt, B.C., and has entered into an equity partnership and land-lease agreement with the First Nation.
The facility - which is currently in the design phase, with construction slated to begin next year at the earliest - will use "direct air capture" technology developed by Carbon Engineering, another Squamish-based company.
When it's completed - something the project's backers hope will happen by 2025 - the plant will run on renewable energy from BC Hydro, which it will use to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Other Carbon Engineering projects remove the carbon and store it underground, but the proposed facility in the Interior will instead use more renewable electricity to electrolyze water, splitting it into hydrogen and oxygen.
The fuel plant will then recombine the hydrogen and the carbon dioxide to create hydrocarbons that can be used in place of traditional petroleum-based fuels.
According to the Carbon Engineering website, burning the synthetic fuels re-releases the carbon that was captured to make them, but adds no new emissions to the air. Beyond that, because the energy used to create the fuel is renewable, the fuels have an "ultra-low lifecycle carbon intensity."
"If we can make the fuel carbon neutral, our vehicles, our ships, our planes become carbon neutral," said Carbon Engineering CEO Steve Oldham at a news conference in Squamish on Thursday.
Oldham said the plant, once completed, would produce about 100 million litres of fuel annually - a substantial amount, but a tiny drop in the bucket compared to global oil consumption, estimated by the U.S. Energy Information Administration to be 97.47 million barrels of oil per day in 2021.
A barrel of oil contains approximately 159 litres, meaning global oil consumption is more than 15 billion litres per day, though only a fraction of that is refined into fuel.
Oldham and the other partners in the project who spoke Thursday said the Upper Nicola plant is the beginning, not the end goal.
"I'm confident that it will be successful," said Bruce Ralston, B.C.'s minister of energy, mines and low-carbon innovation.
"When it's successful, it will be something that can be replicated around the world. This is, really, genuinely, globally leading technology."
The province estimates that the facility will create 620 jobs during the design phase, 4,780 during construction and 340 long-term jobs associated with operating the plant.
Oldham and Huron Clean Energy CEO Michael Hutchison each expressed a desire to see more projects of this type constructed in the coming years, and a confidence that it would happen.
"The plant itself is a first of a kind that anybody in the world that has renewable energy can emulate," Hutchison said.
This proposed B.C. facility could make vehicle fuel out of thin air
The first large-scale facility of its kind will pull CO2 from the atmosphere to make millions of litres of hydrocarbon fuels for existing ICE engines
Author of the article: Coleman Molnar Publishing date:Oct 16, 2021
This proposed BC facility could make vehicle fuel out of thin air
PHOTO BY CARBON ENGINEERING LTD
A B.C.-based company working in collaboration with multiple coastal businesses, a First Nation in the province’s interior, and the B.C. government is hoping to develop a plant to produce a new type of vehicle fuel that could reduce CO2 emissions.
Huron Clean Energy is a Canadian clean energy company that has designs on a plant that would “produce transportation fuel out of atmospheric carbon dioxide.” It has been working with two other companies — Oxy Low Carbon Ventures and Carbon Engineering — plus the Upper Nicola Band near Merritt, B.C., where it plans to build the facility.
Hydroelectricity will power the plant’s “direct air capture,” a process of combining carbon dioxide from the atmosphere with hydrogen to create renewable hydrocarbons to replace petroleum-based fuels in existing gas, diesel, and even jet engines — all while creating up to 90 per cent fewer emissions than today’s fuels.
The B.C. government will kick in $2 million from the provincial Innovative Clean Energy fund to help with project development, which will bring thousands of temporary construction jobs and hundreds of long-term jobs to the area.
At full capacity, the facility should produce 100 million litres of fuel per year, and up to 650 million litres per year by 2030. What do those numbers mean? Not much in the grand scale of things, considering that according to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers , Canadians consume some 1.5 million barrels of oil per day (for all purposes, not just transportation). With each barrel containing 159 L, that puts Canada at 238.5 million litres each day.
Project partners hope the facility will be up and running by 2025, and that others like it will follow.
Rigged review: shameless – and dangerous – catnip for Trump’s base
Mollie Hemingway says the 2020 election ‘went terribly wrong’. In a divided America, her deeply flawed book will find readers
Rioters try to break through a police barrier at the Capitol in Washington on 6 January. Photograph: John Minchillo/AP
The state of the union is sulfurous. Donald Trump’s defeat did not change that.
More than 80% of Trump and Biden voters think elected officials from the other party “present a clear and present danger to American democracy”. Half of Trump supporters and two-fifths for Biden think secession would be a good idea.
Into the fray leaps Federalist senior editor Mollie Hemingway with Rigged, 488 pages on “How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections”.
Hemingway’s is an immovable feast. It’s about owning the libs.
“If you believe things went terribly wrong in the 2020 election, well, you’re not crazy, and you’re not alone,” she writes. “But most of all, you’re not wrong.”
In 2015, Hemingway branded Trump a “demagogue with no real solutions”. Now, like so many Republicans, she’s a fan. She discounts Charlottesville, where in August 2017 far-right marchers earned kind words from the president, as a “hoax”. She castigates those who denounce the events of 6 January this year, when Trump supporters attacked the US Capitol.
“People who call the few-hour riot at the Capitol by unarmed protesters an ‘insurrection’ are bad people who are harming the country,” she tweeted in July.
The riot was an attempt to overturn the election. Five people died, a police officer among them. Rigged is catnip for Trump’s base.
“They used Covid to rig an election,” Trump whines, in an interview. “There was nothing I could do.”
He has been singing that song since May 2020. And then there is reality: the administration’s performative nonchalance in the face of Covid undermined Trump’s chances of reelection.
That was understood by his campaign as early as spring 2020. According to Bob Woodward and Robert Costa of the Washington Post, in April Trump’s pollster, Tony Fabrizio, warned that Covid could cost the boss re-election.
“We have seen the enemy and it is us,” Fabrizio wrote. “It isn’t [Trump’s] policies that cause the biggest problem, it is voters’ reactions to his temperament and behavior.”
Hemingway looks in other directions, pointing a finger at Democratic lawyers and voters for supposedly gaming the system amid a pandemic, berating Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell for pursuing the wrong legal strategies, and ignoring comments by Bill Barr, who she interviews but who as attorney general let Trump know he had not “seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome of the election”.
It’s true that Trump might have mounted more of a fight. His campaign and the GOP had real lawyers on the payroll and Republicans were secretary of state in Arizona and Georgia. But the party had squandered the advantages of incumbency.
Trump and Hemingway both go at Silicon Valley with a vengeance, reserving a special place in hell for Mark Zuckerberg.
“Big tech got meaner, bigger, stronger, and they were crazed,” Trump says. As for Zuckerberg, he “should be in jail”. One suspects many Americans might agree.
Hemingway criticizes the Zuckerberg-funded Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) for funding election operations in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin. She contends that such private-public partnerships undermine the public’s faith in electoral integrity.
For the record, courts repeatedly denied pre-election efforts to block CTCL funding. One federal judge, William C Griesbach, a George W Bush appointee, acknowledged the “receipt of private funds for public elections may give an appearance of impropriety” – but dismissed the lawsuit.
Hemingway does not examine Team Trump’s own relationship with Facebook and Zuckerberg. In 2014, Cambridge Analytica, a now-defunct company part-owned by the Mercer family, Trump benefactors, used Facebook to illegally harvest personal data. Steve Bannon, who would become Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman, was a board member and officer. He denies personal culpability.
There’s more that Hemingway leaves untouched. According to The Contrarian, a recent book by Max Chafkin of Bloomberg News, in a 2019 meeting between Zuckerberg, Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump and Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist and Trump ally, Zuckerberg basically agreed to champion “state-sanctioned conservatism”. Zuckerberg has called the claim “pretty ridiculous”. Thiel, an original Facebook investor, still sits on the board.
It doesn’t end there. A recent lawsuit commenced by the Rhode Island Retirement System against Facebook, Zuckerberg, Thiel and his company, Palantir, alleges “significant damage” caused by the data-harvesting scandal. The suit quotes the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, Christopher Wylie, in alleging that Palantir employees “regularly worked in person, during normal business hours, at the offices of Cambridge Analytica in London”.
Back on the page, it seems Hemingway cannot resist the siren song of race. In Justice on Trial, her last book, about the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, she rubbished the legal underpinnings of Brown v Board of Education, the 1954 supreme court ruling that made state-imposed school segregation unconstitutional.
Such decisions, she wrote, “may have been correct in their result but were decided on the basis of sociological studies rather than legal principles”.
It’s a unique take, with which even Trump’s three supreme court picks would not agree. Amy Coney Barrett has called Brown a “super-precedent … unthinkable” to overrule. Kavanaugh has said the same. Neil Gorsuch concedes it was properly decided.
Undeterred, Hemingway now takes aim at the 1964 Civil Rights Act, resurrecting Barry Goldwater’s contention that it evinced “an unconstitutional usurpation of power by the federal government”. Hemingway also derides Lyndon Johnson’s support for civil rights as a blatant appeal to black voters.
In 1964, Senator Goldwater lost to Johnson in a landslide. That was the last time a Democrat accomplished that feat – or won the “white vote”, for that matter.
The news remains a battleground. Ryan Williams, president of the rightwing Claremont Institute, has made it known his mission is to save western civilization.
“We believe in truth and reason,” he recently told the Atlantic. “The question is whose truth and whose reason.”
Williams also said “a third of the country thinks the election was given to Biden fraudulently”. Hemingway is sure to find an audience.
Donald Trump is unlikely to be watching. Grisham is not the first insider to break omertà on the Trumps, who rose from running a New York real estate empire to occupying the White House, but she may well be the politico who got closest of all.
A Republican operative before Trump seized the party, Grisham was spokeswoman and confidante to Melania Trump when she became first lady. Grisham shifted to the West Wing, becoming Trump’s third press secretary, then returned to the East Wing as Melania’s chief of staff. Shortly before the Trumps left the White House, on the day of the Capitol attack, she resigned.
Now she has written a book, I’ll Take Your Questions Now. The irony of the title has been widely noted. In nine months as press secretary, Grisham did not take questions at a single White House briefing. Nonetheless, the book has generated a slew of headlines, nearly all unflattering about her former bosses.
Stories range from the salacious, Trump calling a press aide forward on Air Force One in order to “look at her ass”, to the ludicrous, as when Trump and Boris Johnson used a G20 working breakfast to discuss the strength of kangaroos.
Grisham makes clear Trump’s unfitness to be president, whether due to his terrifying temper or his ridiculous demands – such as when, she says, he ordered her to finally go behind the White House podium, to defend him in his first impeachment by “acting out” his infamous phone call with the president of Ukraine.
Grisham avoided that humiliation, she writes, by getting “one of our most reliable ‘yes’ guys in the House”, Devin Nunes of California, to read the call into the congressional record. She also exposes decay higher up in the party. Lindsey Graham, the senator from South Carolina, is “gross and tacky … a snake”. Mitt Romney, Grisham’s former boss, a pillar of anti-Trump conservatives, is ridiculed for trying to become secretary of state.
Back down the food chain, Grisham does not name the White House aide with whom she had a relationship which ended in allegations of abuse, choosing to describe him as the “Music Man”, who she says could calm Trump down by playing his favourite songs, Memory from the musical Cats chief among them. The aide is widely known to be Max Miller, who denies Grisham’s allegations – and who is now a candidate for Congress in Ohio.
Trumpworld, of course, has lashed back. Peter Navarro, formerly a trade adviser and self-appointed White House enforcer, called Grisham’s book “useless gossip”. Trump claimed Grisham was being “paid by a radical left-leaning publisher to say bad and untrue things”.
Grisham listens to Trump talk to reporters at the White House.
Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Harper Collins – owned by Rupert Murdoch – will no doubt press ahead with its sales plan. But Grisham seems to have burned bridges with the mainstream media as well as her political party. Though the Washington Post and New York Times published detailed reports on her book, she seems unlikely to be welcomed into the fold as columnist or TV pundit.
‘Dirty deeds’
Grisham resigned on 6 January, the day Trump supporters mounted a deadly attack on the US Capitol, seeking to overturn the election in support of his lies about voter fraud. She says she rejected the voter fraud argument. Politico has reported otherwise. In most eyes, either way, it was far too late to jump ship.
Eric Boehlert, founder of PressRun, a newsletter covering the US media, told the Guardian Grisham was “a legit inside source who had a position the whole time. So I think there’s a feeling like she was in the room. It’s not like hearsay.”
“[But] she’s sitting in meetings for years, writing notes to herself at night about how the president of the United States is a danger to the world and the danger to the country. If you’re gonna blow the whistle, have the courage to be a whistleblower. Don’t do it after everything is safe and he’s out of office.”
Some Trump aides who jumped or were pushed before Grisham have managed to stay in the media’s good graces, though obviously not the Trumps’.
Michael Cohen was Trump’s fixer before he flipped during the investigation of ties between Trump and Russia. He also went to prison, for crimes including lying to Congress and facilitating illegal payments to two women who alleged affairs with Trump.
Finishing his sentence in home confinement, he has become a vocal Trump critic through a book, Disloyal, a podcast, Mea Culpa, and as a voice on MSNBC. It’s quite a change for a man who once threatened journalists threatening to expose Trump’s “dirty deeds”.
John Bolton was Trump’s third national security adviser. A foreign policy hawk on the Republican right long before Trump, his time in the White House wasn’t a happy one, as Grisham recounts. Trump failed to stop publication of Bolton’s book, The Room Where It Happened, but Bolton managed to avoid testifying in Trump’s first impeachment trial. That and his presence as a media commentator, particularly over the withdrawal from Afghanistan, continues to anger many on the left.
Then there is Anthony Scaramucci, a Wall Street financier who spent 11 days as White House communications director. He stuck with Trump for a while, publishing a book in praise of the “Blue Collar President”, then broke with him. “The Mooch” retains a presence in national media.
Boehlert said: “I feel like these books are helpful in that they paint a first-hand portrait of a madman, period. And they’re helpful because they’re effective.”
But in Grisham’s case, he said, “it would have been helpful if [she] had warned us in 2017, 2018 … She had this perk job, she had access to the most elite circles on the planet. And she knew it was all wrong, and she knew it was dangerous. And now she’s cashing in on a book after Trump is in Mar-a-Lago.
“It’s not exactly a profile in courage.” ‘I looked totally incompetent’
As far as Trumpworld is concerned, Grisham’s chief crime may be to have betrayed her access, as chief of staff to Melania and press secretary to Donald, to some of the family’s most intimate moments.
In her book, she describes discovering “another piece of the puzzle that was the marriage of Donald and Melania Trump”. During a trip to France in summer 2017, she says, she stood “mostly alone” with the couple before a public engagement.
Melania Trump climbs into her motorcade wearing the infamous Zara jacket, in Maryland in 2018.
Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters Advertisement
“Mrs Trump … leaned into her husband, who whispered into her ear. A few moments later I saw them kiss each other. All of that was quite unusual; it was in fact the only time I ever saw them express any physical intimacy in public.”
Grisham also tells her version of a particularly furious media frenzy. On a trip to the southern border in June 2018 that included a visit to a detention centre for child migrants separated from their parents, Melania Trump wore a jacket which displayed a slogan: “I really don’t care. Do U?” Outrage was immediate and sustained.
Grisham blames Melania for going rogue, choosing her outfit while her closest aide was distracted. The first lady, she writes, “didn’t care about the media frenzy over her jacket, that’s for sure. Or at least she pretended not to care … But I did care, because it was my job, and, at best, I looked totally incompetent.”
Grisham now lives in Kansas, away from the Washington hullabaloo. Should she ever wish to dive back in, she may hope DC society at large responds as one White House predecessor did to her book.
Joe Lockhart, a press secretary under Bill Clinton, dismissed I’ll Take Your Questions Now in a mere five words.
“I don’t care,” he wrote. “Do you?”
ONTARIO
OPG advances new nuclear at Darlington
CNSC approves site prep licence renewal
OCTOBER 13, 2021
Clarington, ON – The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission has announced its decision to renew Ontario Power Generation’s (OPG’s) existing Site Preparation Licence for the Darlington New Nuclear Project.
“OPG has the experience and expertise to lead the way on this next generation of clean energy, and we look forward to having an SMR in place in time to help meet future energy demands. We are pleased to receive CNSC approval to take the next steps in this direction.”
Ken Hartwick, OPG’s President and CEO
This 10-year licence renewal allows OPG to do work aimed at preparing the site for construction of a potential future Small Modular Reactor (SMR), including: Excavation and grading, Installation of services and utilities for future buildings, and Construction of service buildings.
Last November, OPG announced resumption of planning activities for additional nuclear power generation – via an SMR - at its Darlington site.
An aerial view of Darlington Nuclear Generating Station. The Darlington New Nuclear site is the only site in Canada currently licensed for new nuclear with a completed and accepted Environmental Assessment. Additional generation at Darlington would ensure that reliable, zero-emission nuclear energy will continue to play an important part of Ontario’s energy mix, offering a significant solution to secure Ontario’s clean energy future, and enabling SMR deployment to provide clean, economical electricity elsewhere in Canada and the world.
To construct and operate a new reactor, further approvals, including additional CNSC licences, are required. These licences must be obtained through an extensive regulatory process, which would include the opportunity for input from the general public and Indigenous communities, as well as a public hearing.
Quick facts An SMR at Darlington will provide a new source of carbon-free, nuclear energy for Ontario’s future projected energy demand – a demand widely expected to ramp up as transportation and other sectors electrify to use Ontario’s clean power to help decarbonize the broader economy.
Ontario, New Brunswick, Saskatchewan and Alberta have signed a Memorandum of Understanding, to collaborate on the advancement of SMRs as a clean energy option to address climate change and regional energy demands, while supporting economic growth and innovation.
A Conference Board of Canada study says a 300-megawatt grid-scale SMR built in Ontario and operated for 60 years would have a positive impact on Gross Domestic Product of over $2.5 billion and create direct and related employment on an average annual basis, including:
Close to 700 jobs during project development
More than 1,600 jobs during manufacturing and construction
Over 200 jobs during operations, and
About 160 jobs during decommissioning
Quote
“Nuclear energy will play a key role in meeting net-zero goals, and SMRs are the flexible, scalable answer to some of today’s most complex energy questions,” said Ken Hartwick, OPG’s President and CEO. “OPG has the experience and expertise to lead the way on this next generation of clean energy, and we look forward to having an SMR in place in time to help meet future energy demands. We are pleased to receive CNSC approval to take the next steps in this direction.”
About OPG
As a global climate change leader and the largest, most diverse electricity generator in the province, OPG and its family of companies are helping lead the charge to a post-carbon economy.
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SMOKED PART ONE
Nearly two decades after working at a pulp mill, workers complain their health was compromised
Investigative Correspondent, W5 Published Friday, October 15, 2021
VIDEO BELOW
In 2002, the owners of the mill in Dryden, Ont. started a project to reduce emissions, but workers on the construction project complain that they were exposed to toxic chemicals that damaged their health.
DRYDEN, ONT. -- Gerald Landry always aimed to retire at 65, but at 51 years of age, he says, his body started shutting down, forcing him to quit work.
Landry blames the five weeks he spent working at the pulp and paper mill in Dryden, Ont., then owned by Weyerhaeuser, a large American forestry company.
Landry was hired to help build a recovery boiler project, which was supposed to clean the air for the town from all the odorous emissions from the mill. The irony, says Landry, is that those same emissions were blowing right into his face while on the job.
"I went out one morning and you couldn't see 15 feet ahead of you. That's how bad the smoke was on the ground."
But it was worse the higher up you went. Landry is a boilermaker: a tradesperson who cuts, shapes, and welds steel to repair metal products or build structures. He worked high up on the boiler recovery project, where he claims he was most exposed. An unpredictable south-westerly wind was part of the problem. When it blew towards the workers, he said it pushed the toxic smoke toward them and made many workers sick.
Landry claims they were forced to work in the plume.
"They really bullied us to work in the plume," Landry recalls, speaking about the contractors running the project. "It was terrible the pressure they were putting on the men".
Many former workers at the Weyerhaeuser construction site told W5 that they were unusually fatigued and some even passed out during their shifts.
Landry remembers his last day working there, when he developed chest pains. At the hospital, he claims 58 other workers from the job were also there, also waiting for oxygen. He quit shortly thereafter.
Workers like Larry Tudorachi stuck it out much longer because they desperately needed the work. The '90s were very hard in the region, with sawmills closing and mines dwindling; the resource sector was in a slump. A well-paying job close to home in 2002 was highly coveted.
"I blame myself for staying there," he told W5 in an interview, through tears. "I thought, boy, what a guy will do for a dollar."
Tudorachi was hired as a pipefitter. He recalled there were times he couldn't see his partner just ahead of him in all the smoke while working on a 20-foot pipe.
Tudorachi started to get sick as well, and began writing down his symptoms. Almost 20 years later, he lays out the crinkled pieces of paper with his notes, recording his symptoms: constant coughing, gnawing headaches, and three lost fillings, he blames on the exposure.
He described becoming exceedingly distracted and forgetting simple things like numbers. He said he still struggles with that to this day. Tudorachi had been in and out of paper mills since 1976, but says the Dryden project was different.
When the job began, he recalled, there were weekly safety meetings. But when so many workers were questioning why they were getting sick, the group meetings were cancelled.
Documents obtained by W5 through Freedom of Information (FOI) requests confirm that weekly safety meetings turned into smaller 'toolbox' meetings because a Weyerhaeuser representative says the larger group meetings "became opportunities to attack [safety consultants] and others personally."
Halfway through the project, on June 3, 2003, workers walked off the job, finally getting attention to their complaints.
Ontario's Ministry of Labour and independent safety consultants were called in to investigate. However, other than a few small exceptions, they found, "all readings for carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide and hydrogen sulphide were below detectable limits."
Still, they ordered nine additional measures to ensure safety on site, which included external hygienists to test air quality, re-training of testers already on the project, and more equipment for air monitoring. Proper half mask respirators were also handed out. Still, workers were getting sick.
"We didn't know what was going on with us. We were waiting for somebody to tell us what we were sucking up."
Tudorachi said the bosses often referred to the plumes as a "cocktail."
"We wanted to know what was in it [the cocktail]," Tudorachi said. "Because we were falling like flies. And nobody could tell us why."
There were several other walk-offs in 2003. Documents from the time, obtained though FOI requests, show page after page of workers complaining about being unwell and demanding answers from the Ontario government, safety consultants, and Weyerhaeuser.
A labour ministry representative, Doug Burke, responded in one document: "Not all gases have exposure limits, we are doing the best we can and ensuring the limits that are in place are not exceeded. There are a lot of unknowns."
Dr. Noel Kerin tried to figure out those unknowns. A medical doctor, Kerin specializes in occupational and environmental medicine, working for the Occupational Health Clinics for Ontario Workers (or OHCOW) looked at nearly 400 workers and their symptoms post-project. He found clusters of problems in the separately evaluated patients.
OHCOW's 2008 assessment of 388 workers from the Dryden mill found the following symptoms:
Note: 266 workers were smokers and ex-smokers 173 reported new onset of SOB on exertion 100 difficulty breathing
"What jumped out immediately was changes to their functioning as people, their memory. They weren't as sharp," Dr. Kerin says. He is appalled that it took more than a year to get respirators properly fitted to protect workers; though not all workers wore their half mask respirators, saying they were difficult to breathe and communicate in.
Dr. Kerin eventually diagnosed 162 of the workers with Chronic Toxic Encephalopathy (CTE). Known in the football and hockey world for traumatic head injuries, it can also be a toxic brain injury caused by repeated exposure to chemicals.
"Workers were poisoned by chemicals. That's clear," Dr. Kerin says. "The science supports that opinion and the symptoms and signs that we found and those workers further substantiated it."
Ontario's Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) did not agree. Even though it acknowledges a cohort exposure problem on its website, and compensated more than 200 people for issues like exposure, respiratory disease, and toxic effects, it ultimately rejected the CTE diagnosis.
In one workers' rejection letter, the WSIB wrote: "There is no evidence of exposure to significant levels of organic solvents to support the diagnosis of CTE."
Landry was one of the lucky ones who received some compensation, but only after three years of fighting for help and getting back pay in 2008.
Before that, he lived on his employment insurance until that ran out and had to go on welfare.
"We lost our hydro. Had no hydro or telephone my last five and a half months before I finally got entitlement from WSIB, so it puts you in a hard place," Landry said. "If I had to pay a landlord or a mortgage, I might have been out in the street, you know, living under a bridge or something." He says his marriage crumbled under the pressure.
W5 requested an interview with Ontario's Minister of Labour Monte McNaughton to understand why the ministry didn't shut down the site when so many workers were getting sick. His office never responded to that request, but a ministry spokesperson did send general guidelines about shutting down a worksite, which include "the toxicity of the airborne contaminants being evaluated, the concentration of these contaminants in the air, and the immediate hazard posed on the worker."
W5 also reached out to Weyerhaeusers' corporate headquarters in Seattle, Washington to ask about details of the construction project. Weyerhaeuser's Public Affairs Manager responded in an email saying: "Unfortunately, I do not have any information on this project since Weyerhaeuser sold almost 15 years ago. All of the relevant documents regarding its operation went to [the new owner] with the sale."
But when we followed up, to ask about the allegations of an unsafe worksite, Weyerhaeuser didn't return our repeated emails or calls over several weeks.
Ironically, Tudorachi blames himself for continuing to work on a job that was supposed to reduce pollution, but which he believes made him sick.
"The whole system is flawed. We were the sacrificial lambs. Get in there and get the job done, but worry about the safety later. Just get 'er done."
