The Four COVID-19 Numbers

1. Worldwide infection count
2. Local RT
3. Population immunity
4. Local cases under treatment

Worldwide infection count is the number we want to be zero for a year.  Then there's a party. That's a ways off and it's a goal of policy and diplomacy.  Don't worry about that one particularly right now.

Local RT is the transmission rate; on average, for everyone who has it, how many people catch it?  You want this number as low as you can get it.  Errors in measurement and wanting to minimize the number of cases -- every case is a chance for a new, worse, mutation -- means you should do everything you can to keep this number low.  Mask mandates, enforced mandatory quarantines, aggressive track and trace, and barriers to inter-regional movement are all important.

Population immunity is the number of people who won't catch it.  There's a statistical relationship between RT, R0, and this number; the consensus of the knowledgeable had it around 85% for the pre-delta variants.  (delta makes this number higher.  And remember that we can never guarantee an individual won't catch it, just make it less likely.)  That's 85% of the total population, fully vaccinated.  This is not a number we can reach with current vaccines, so just vaccination is helpful, but not sufficient.  We're not going to get the worldwide (or even local) infection count to zero solely through vaccination.

Local cases under treatment is the "will the healthcare system collapse?" number.  (If it does, you expect an order of magnitude more dead.)  This is the number you only care about if those responsible have made an intolerable hash of policy responses to 2 and 3.  Focusing policy on this number is an indication of complete failure.  (Also long term system damage; medical personnel take a long time to train.)

If you live somewhere the local RT number doesn't get more public attention than population immunity, or where the local cases under treatment has to be a policy consideration, you can be confident that the policy response is poor and will stay poor.  Plan on the assumption that the only things reducing your infection risk are the decisions you make.

The Fours

 It was a Medieval through Early Modern into per-Great-War fashion to list virtues.

Virtues are a lot; the point of virtues is, somewhat, that they're rare.  You can't expect anyone to be virtuous all the time, and you can't expect everyone to be virtuous.

What you can reasonably expect are the fours -- forthrightness, forbearance, foresight, and fortitude.

People who aren't consistently and reliably demonstrating the fours in their conduct are not people who should have responsibility.  Which means don't subscribe to them as much as it means don't vote for them.  It means working on your forthrightness and not making excuses for them, too.

You'd think someone would have a grasp of Parliamentary procedure who wasn't evil

To Raj Saini, MP

Hello --

There's a lot of tactful suggestions being provided.  What I want to say is "Do you job."

Bill C-12 is not what it should be; it does not go far enough, it does not do enough, it does not treat the present emergency with the urgency and terror it deserves.  

(If you don't feel terror at the prospect of breaking agriculture, you need to stop and think about it.)

But bill C-12 is something, and it's a start, and it's an acknowledgement that we need to do something now, today, not tomorrow.

Get Bill C-12 passed.

If there isn't food to eat and water to drink and places to live, nothing else matters.  All of those things are at risk from climate change, inside the lifespans of today's middle-aged voters, never mind the young.

Get Bill C-12 passed, and then get to work on more; figuring out we're all going to eat once agriculture breaks, figuring out where we're going to live (the current housing stock is close to worthless without fossil carbon furnaces, all the drainage is wrong, etc.), and figuring out how the economy is going to work once -- hopefully by sooner than 2030 -- all fossil carbon extraction has stopped.

Do your job.

Pass Bill C-12.

Graydon Saunders

Culpability for genocide, necessary changes, and reparations

To the Honourable Raj Saini,

I am distressed at the ongoing public talk of a national day of mourning for the recently found indigenous kids whose mass grave is adjacent to a residential school near Kamloops. Those are not our deaths to mourn; those children were there to die as a matter of long-held and determined policy, one recognized for its genocidal intent as it was made and as it was enacted.  Calls for an official public show of settler grief are entirely too much like a murderer demanding to give the eulogy at their victim's funeral.

The appropriate response is not some show of distress; it is to end, by whatever sufficient and immediate means comes to hand, the long-standing genocidal policies which the government of Canada continues to maintain.

That would mean, as a beginning, several obvious immediate things:

That the government of Canada acknowledge its long term culpable guilt for having engaged in genocide in the matter of the residential schools in the process of dropping its appeal at the Human Rights Tribunal. (Not sole guilt; there is plenty enough guilt to go around, and some approximation of justice or at least cost needs must be visited upon the entirety of the guilty.)

That the government of Canada comprehensively dissolve and abolish the Department of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, with the entirety of those now employed by that ministry leaving public service, never to return while their lives last.  It is clearly not possible for this department to depart from its genocidal origins, and structural reform having been found obviously and demonstrably impossible, it must be abolished.

That the government of Canada immediately make it materially established that no settler interest possesses any unilateral rights to any portion of indigenous land, any more than some other level of government could properly unilaterally occupy Queen's Park or the National Assembly.  Whatever is required of Her Canadian Majesty's treasury and armoury to promptly establish this must be expended.  (This would include an expeditious change to whatever legislation as would be required to have the courts place indigenous concerns, environmental concerns, and questions of distributed harm universally and absolutely ahead of any questions of notional economic benefit in the form of specific profits.  It's easy to profit if you're permitted to loot, yet the general cost, borne by all of us, greatly exceeds any profit so obtained.  Environmental looting is a practice we should all do well to end.)

That the government of Canada, while negotiations to establish the amounts and schedules of necessary reparations to the surviving indigenous peoples are ongoing, provide per-annum funds in the amount of one percent of the Canadian GDP to the indigenous peoples of Canada.  While it is clearly beyond the powers of the Government of Canada to provide for the living conditions of indigenous peoples however the law might oblige them, it seems plausible that many of these difficulties can be addressed directly by those indigenous peoples should such funds become available.  (Nor does it seem to me that a one percent land-rent is especially much, considering.)



This coming century shall be a grim time, no matter what we do to begin to redress our folly now.  It is still better to stop doing what we ought not to have done than to continue.

I hope and expect you will find it in yourself to be a voice toward doing what is needful.

Sincerely,

Graydon Saunders

[address redacted]