And the Rest of It

When are we going to talk about supply boards and high taxes and inflation?:

BREAKING: Metro's response to Loblaw's price freeze:

"It is an industry practice to have a price freeze from Nov. 1 to Feb. 5 for all private labelled and national branded grocery products and this will be the case in all of METRO banners."

This is what collusion looks like...

— The Food Professor (@FoodProfessor) October 17, 2022

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Earlier this week Loblaw Companies Ltd., Canada’s largest grocery chain, admitted it took part in an industry-wide scheme to jack up the price of bread. The collusion, according to Loblaw, had gone on for more than 14 years.

Justin can appease the actual French or his Chinese bosses.

He can't do both:

Caught up in navel-gazing and living under the protective shield of the United States, Canada has allowed its military presence worldwide to wither over the last decade or so, France’s new ambassador to Ottawa suggested Friday.

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In blunt comments that he said reflected his own personal opinions, Michel Miraillet argued Canada needs to boost its defence capabilities as threats increase from the likes of China, Russia and North Korea.

Because the real problem was never the parole boards but a closed-rank police force accountable to no one:

Eleven people were killed and 18 injured during the stabbing rampage last month on the James Smith Cree Nation and in the nearby village of Weldon, northeast of Saskatoon.

Myles Sanderson, 32, the suspect in the attacks, later died in police custody.

Mendicino visited the First Nation on Monday morning and said the grief was still palpable. But, he added, there was also strength and perseverance.

“It’s going to take hope, but it’s also going to take hard work if we’re going to break the cycle,” he said.

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James Smith Cree Nation Chief Wally Burns echoed his earlier calls for Ottawa to help his community establish its own police force. He said finding solutions would be a step toward healing.

Yes, the heeeeeeaaaaallling!

It was never about a virus:

A recent study from Ireland found that babies born during the COVID-19 pandemic had “deficits” in social communication, including speech. Who would have thought that locking developing infants in their homes and preventing them from any outside-the-home interaction would end up hindering their development?

The study abstract said, “The SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic was managed with sustained mass lockdowns to prevent spread of COVID-19 infection. Babies born during the early stages of the pandemic missed the opportunity of meeting a normal social circle of people outside the family home.” The study then noted, “Compared with a historical cohort, babies born into lockdown appeared to have some deficits in social communication.”

Ireland had severely restrictive COVID-19 lockdowns, The Post Millennial noted. The lockdown measures included masking, of course. Psychology Today wrote in 2020, “An important source of information for babies from the very first days of life is human faces.” Babies are born with a preference for “face-like shapes” and prefer to look at faces rather than to look at most other things, Psychology Today wrote.

The percentage of Irish babies who can point, wave, and say a definite word dropped during the pandemic. Only 76.6 percent of infants in “the pandemic cohort” could say “one definite and meaningful word,” down from 89.3 percent. Also, 83.8 percent of pandemic-era infants could point (versus the previous 92.8 percent) and 87.7 percent could “wave bye-bye” (versus the previous 94.4 percent), the study said. The percentages come from a 12-month assessment. There was evidence of “significant differences in social communication in the [pandemic-born] cohort compared with the BASELINE [pre-pandemic] cohort.”

“Parentally reported developmental outcomes in a birth cohort of babies born into lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic may indicate some potential deficits in early life social communication,” the study said, but did warn, “It must be noted that milestones are parentally reported and comparison is with a historical cohort with associated limitations.”

A Johns Hopkins meta-analysis presented evidence in January 2022 that lockdowns were not helpful enough as a tool for mitigating the harms of a pandemic to outweigh the costs of those lockdowns. The meta-analysis said “that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, [and] they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted.”

Interesting:

A series of four studies by researchers from the United States, Chile, Australia, South Korea, Poland, Japan, Denmark, and Serbia has concluded that “[t]he motivation to care for children is consequently among the fundamental drivers of human behaviour, but its power to shape social attitudes and cognition is under-appreciated.”

The studies revealed “cross-cultural and experimental evidence suggesting that parental care motivation leads to increases in socially conservative attitudes, and that parenthood is associated with social conservatism around the globe.”

The report lends credibility to the colloquial use of such phrases as, “You’ll understand when you have children of your own,” and directly calls into question the link between conservatism and wisdom through age, versus conservatism as a result of parenthood.

Conversely, researchers noted that failure to have children necessarily leads to a greater acceptance of socially liberal or degenerate behaviors, such as support for abortion, homosexuality, sexual promiscuity, or infidelity/adultery.

The multi-study paper, entitled “Experimental and cross-cultural evidence that parenthood and parental care motives increase social conservatism”, was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B over the summer. Conclusions were drawn from a survey of 2,610 people in 10 countries and a separate study into archival data from over 400,000 individuals in 88 countries.