Quebec’s 2022 election and climate change

CBC News reports:

Legault’s growing number of supporters endorsed, instead, his politics of the status quo.

This is a politics of more tax cuts aimed at the broad middle class and of docile environmental policies, of investments in elder care and the odd quarrel with Ottawa.

…

But Québec Solidaire, the progressive party that had hoped to emerge as the alternative to the CAQ, vowing urgent action on climate change, only mustered 15 per cent of the vote on Monday. That’s about how it fared last time. It finished the race with 11 seats — one more than in 2018.

Princeton divesting

Princeton is not only divesting but ‘dissociating’ from fossil fuel corporations:

Divestment is a decision to refuse to invest in a company or set of companies and entails the sale of all securities associated with a company, including both direct and indirect investments, and precludes the repurchasing of those securities.

Dissociation means also refraining, to the greatest extent possible, from any relationships that involve a financial component with a particular company. It includes no longer soliciting or accepting gifts or grants from a company, purchasing the company’s products, or forming partnerships with the company that depend upon the exchange of money.

Every highly reputable school that acts makes it easier for others to say yes and harder to justify continued fossil fuel investment.

Satellite to satellite espionage and warfare

One inescapable but confounding element of trying to understand politics, international relations, and history up to the present day is that we don’t have access to what governments are doing in secret. We will need to re-write the history of these times decades from now, if circumstances and freedom of information laws permit historians to learn about the skullduggery of this era.

One potentially important example is happening now in space. Satellites have become crucial to everything from time synchronization for high precision activities to navigation and communication. They also can’t really be hidden. Perhaps there are satellites with optical stealth that are hardly or never visible, but even top secret spy satellites of the conventional design can have their orbits determined by civilians with stopwatches and binoculars.

That is why we know that Russia, among others, has been experimenting with satellites that approach others and can potentially disrupt or destroy them, or monitor their activity. An article on China’s program includes the intriguing phrasing: “non-cooperative robotic rendezvous” between spacecraft. Russia’s Cosmos 2542 is known to have approached USA 245: an American spy satellite believed to be one of the largest things in space.

One can only speculate on how such capabilities are influencing world politics and the unfolding of events.

COVID: fall 2022

Here we are:

And where we have been:

One data point to add to the galaxy thereof: at today’s science forum at Massey College, among the people sitting at the front the ones wearing masks along with me included the college’s chair of science and an Order of Canada-winning astrophysicist.

Switched to a safety razor

Sometime around late elementary school or early high school I got my first razor as a gift: a Gillette Mach 3 using cartridge blades. I used those more or less exclusively until I began using Harry’s catridge razors in Ottawa or maybe early in my Toronto time around 2012. One lesson I did learn in the UK and used subsequently is that shave oil (like King of Shaves) works better with just a few drops than covering your whole face in foam — plus you can always see what you are doing and thus avoid acne.

About a week ago, something set me off reading reviews and watching videos about safety razors: a style that used double-edged (DE) razor blades, dates back to the early 1900s, and was popularized by WWI. I think it might have been annoyance about how, if I don’t shave for a few days, cartridge razors get instantly clogged up betweeen the blades.

I ordered a Merkur 38C, made in Germany, from the House of Knives in BC because I was worried that the same product from Amazon was likely to be counterfeit. I got 10 Merkur blades, 100 Astra blades, plus two shaving creams (Harry’s and Creamo) and a shaving soap (Proraso).

I got the soap and a basic boar brush a day before the razor, so I tried it with my catridge razor. There is no question that warming your face with hot water and then applying shaving soap with a brush feels excellent on its own, and makes shaving with whatever tool closer, better-feeling, and safer.

With the safety razor, shaving with both cream and foam was surprisingly painless and easy after what all the videos prepared me for. I found no trouble identifying the right angle to let the weight of the razor do the pulling, and I don’t think I came close to cutting myself in any trial. The results are also noticeably noticeably closer: one day after a safety razor shave it feels about as close as one minute after a careful cartridge razor shave with oil.

I still need to obtain or make a sharps bin or ‘blade bank,’ but, despite reading about how many DE safety razor users change blades every time, I have been finding them more than good enough for at least 3-4 shaves.

In the last few years, I have mostly fallen back to shaving every 2-4 days and semi-periodically growing a beard for a week or two. In part I think that’s because of the not-so-satisfying experience of those cartridge blades. The last time I bought a set of Harry’s blades, it was $40 for 16 blades in May 2021. During the first 1-3 uses, they have an effortlessly sharp and clean feeling which feels like how shaving ought to work. However, in less than a week I can feel them starting to pull rather than cut hairs, and leaving behind most of the hairs they cross on each path. Anything but the brand-new-blade feeling isn’t the best shaving experience, and even those three sharp shaves feel a little frustrating because they mean I just threw a blade cartridge away and because I know the new one won’t last long.

I know part of it is just new toy enthusiasm, but since getting the Merkur I have felt a bit disappointed that only one shave a day is required — and would have to be foregone for several days to get long stubble for a DE blade versus cartridge comparison. I’ll report back if I do manage to slash my face open, or if this new toolset becomes entrenched as my long-term default.