imagery of Black Hole at center of M87 galaxy

 

Mesmerizing video shows M87 black hole as nobody has seen it before

Chris Davies - Apr 14, 2021, 2:02pm CDT

If you thought the first image of a black hole in distant galaxy M87 was something special two years ago, a newly-released video pulling together the work of 19 observatories will just about blow you away. In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) captured the 25 billion mile wide black hole for the very first time, but don’t let the name fool you into imagining one telescope with an astronomer’s eye pressed to the viewfinder.

The black hole at its center, however, held onto its mysteries far longer. An example of a supermassive black hole, it forced astronomers to think laterally when they wanted to capture a picture of it: after all, black holes by definition capture light. The EHT mustered data from eight different telescopes and pooled that information to create an image of the glowing gas surrounding the ink-black maw at its center, with gravitational bending causing a shadow.

The picture made headlines in 2019, but now the EHT is delivering again with more instruments and more details. “We knew that the first direct image of a black hole would be groundbreaking,” Kazuhiro Hada of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, a co-author of a new study being published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters to describe the new data, explained. “But to get the most out of this remarkable image, we need to know everything we can about the black hole’s behavior at that time by observing over the entire electromagnetic spectrum.”

This time, 19 observatories – including five operated by NASA – were harnessed in order to give an unprecedented tour of M87 in different wavelengths of light. It relies on the fact that the black hole’s gravitational pull can create jets of particles traveling at almost the speed of light, across the whole electromagnetic spectrum. These jets spar out across the universe, spanning radio waves through visible light to gamma rays, with different sets collected by the 19 different instruments.

The video begins with the original EHT image, and then spirals out through radio telescope arrays, across visible and then ultraviolet light, and then X-rays. Finally, there’s data from gamma ray telescopes on the ground, along with NASA’s Fermi in space.

It took 760 scientists and engineers, across 200 institutions, and over the course of March and April 2017, to piece together the vast data set. It’s not just for entertainment, either, with the potential for new scientific breakthroughs to be unlocked.

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https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LY3E7uXRyls

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xwppoRFLPNo

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We have the 1st photo of a black hole. Here's how it was taken

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Observations added up to 'half a tonne of hard drives,' says physicist Avery Broderick

CBC Radio · Posted: Apr 12, 2019 4:18 PM ET | Last Updated: April 12, 2019

This is the first image ever taken of the event horizon of a supermassive black hole, captured by the Event Horizon Telescope in 2017. (Event Horizon Telescope)

Quirks and Quarks8:30Seeing the first black hole - and what we'll see next

Some have likened it to a blurry orange doughnut, but it took a team of over 200 scientists, eight special telescopes and churning through millions of gigabytes of data to capture the first image of a black hole.

Astronomers captured the image using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) — a "virtual telescope" — that produces an extremely high-resolution image by combining data from eight radio telescopes around the world. The black hole has been unofficially named Powehi, a Hawaiian name meaning "the adorned fathomless dark creation" or "embellished dark source of unending creation."

Black holes are very difficult to image, since anything that crosses a critical threshold near the black hole — known as the event horizon — gets pulled inside, even light. As a result, nothing inside the event horizon can ever be seen.

What the team captured in their picture was light from the material about to pass over the event horizon, according to Avery Broderick, a physicist from the University of Waterloo and the Perimeter Institute, who is also a member of the international EHT team.

Avery Broderick is a Canadian physicist. (University of Waterloo)

"It's a churning maelstrom of superheated plasma, hundreds of billions of degrees," he said of the matter observed around the black hole. 

It's not just the nature of the black holes that makes them difficult to photograph. Observations from multiple telescopes that make up the EHT also added up to a lot of data — five petabytes, to be exact, which translates to five million gigabytes.

Broderick spoke with Quirks & Quarks host Bob McDonald about the efforts to capture this iconic picture. Here is part of their conversation:

Tell me about the virtual telescope that you used to capture this image.

The Event Horizon Telescope is a combination of existing facilities. So we've really leveraged an enormous amount of investment over the past two decades in radio astronomy and brought them together, added specialized equipment to each of the six sites the eight telescopes are located at, so they could be brought together to form a single new instrument — and that's what the Event Horizon Telescope is.

Image taken during a time-lapse at the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in the Chilean Andes. ALMA is one of the instruments in the Event Horizon Telescope. (C. Malin/ ALMA)

We take data [from] each of these sites and then we have to bring that data physically back together at special supercomputing locations, where it gets combined to produce the information that goes into producing these images.

• Earth-sized telescope found its roots in Canada: Bob McDonald

How much data are you talking about?

For the 2017 observations, there were five petabytes. That's literally half a tonne of hard drives.

When you did finally go through all of that, what did you actually learn from this image?

Just like any other human, I see something and it becomes more real to me.

And now we can say that in a scientific sense, too. Now we have this prediction from general relativity, it's very unambiguous and that's a rare occurrence. There was really no wiggle room here.

Because we saw what we had anticipated, now we have confidence that general relativity applies not just where it makes small corrections to Newton's theory of gravity. We're seeing it where general relativity is the entire story — where gravity has run amok. And so now we've in some sense book-ended the regions where we can trust Einstein's theory.

We've opened a new window, but we're not done looking through it.- Avery Broderick

What was it like for you, since you predicted what this thing might look like, to see that it actually turned out to be what you thought?

It's a complex set of emotions. I was relieved after spending so much time that it came out to be something like we had thought — that the project has been successful and produced the images we always hoped it would.

You know, one of the great joys of being a scientist is when nature unfolds itself just a little bit to you, you're the first to see that. And then you have the privilege of going around telling the world. But there's also excitement, because this is the beginning. We've opened a new window, but we're not done looking through it.

Tell me about the black hole that's behind this image.

M87 [the galaxy] harbours a 6.5-billion solar mass black hole. That's a behemoth by any standard. Now, every galaxy has something like this. At the centre of our Milky Way is a four-million solar mass black hole. This is almost 2,000 times larger.

The black hole in the M87 galaxy produces a powerful jet of subatomic particles travelling at nearly the speed of light. In this Hubble telescope image, the blue jet contrasts with the yellow glow from the combined light of billions of unresolved stars and the point-like clusters of stars that make up this galaxy. (NASA and the Hubble Heritage Team/STScI/AURA)

So why did you choose that one as a target for the Event Horizon Telescope?

Since the telescope is looking out on the sky, we don't care if you're the largest black hole and we don't care if you're the closest black hole. You have to be large and close and the way you balance those is it's really how massive [the hole is] divided by how far.

M87 is 2,000 times more massive than the black hole in our galaxy, which is good. It's also about 2,000 times farther away. So it turns out it's about the same size as the one in our Milky Way.

But that additional mass has another effect. Black holes are in a highly dynamical region — things are swirling about them. And the time scale it takes for stuff to go around M87 is about a week, and as a result, it's stationary during the night.

We have to be looking at not black hole portraiture, but black hole cinema.- Avery Broderick

You've talked about looking at the black hole that's at the centre of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. How will that be different from the process of imaging M87's black hole?

The chief complication with the Milky Way's black hole is that it really is much smaller in mass, even though it's closer. And that means the time scales for things changing are shorter. They can be as short as minutes.

That's a challenge, but it's also an enormous opportunity. That time variability means we have to be looking at not black hole portraiture, but black hole cinema. And just as a picture is worth a thousand words, a movie is worth a thousand words 25 times per second.

That's going to give us an enormous amount of additional information that we can leverage. But it is a complication, and we are up to that task and we are embarking on it now.

The Milky Way, our own galaxy, hosts a black hole of about 4 million solar masses called Sagittarius A* in its central bulge. The EHT has targeted this black hole for imaging as well. (ESO/S. Brunier)

What's next for the Event Horizon Telescope?

I think, like so many scientists, I am in love with Einstein's theory. I think it's a beautiful theory. I'd like to see evidence for what's next.

I would like to see something that isn't predicted by general relativity. I'd like to see the loose thread that we're going to pull and we're going to unravel what comes after general relativity.

Gene-modifying technology--the good ,the bad and the unpredictable!

The Code Breaker: gene editing and. The future of the human race
-- Walter Isacson



https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-63-the-current/clip/15832908-walter-isaacson-facing-moral-questions-crispr-gene-editing

Gene-modification technollogy is "" out of. the bag" "...and like all technology has constructive and destructive potential. The negative ramifications are horrendous!
Now that chemistry has given us understanding of the genetic code at the heart of every cell, we can use our unde rd standing of molecules to alter genes and genomes and consequently synthesize whole designer biological organisms with enhanced predetermined and specifically targeted characteristics.

We have only to see the results of the ability to synthesize molecules wc h have not existed in nature. Such designer molecules have revolutionized our lives through all the miracles of chemistry (e.g. pharmaceutical medicines )...but this technology has also polluted the environment with toxic molecules that threaten life on the planet.
The negative consequences (most of wc h are unforeseeable) of creating and releasing synthetic genetically modifi ed organisms into the environment will be far ,far worse than the consequences of creating and disseminating synthetic chemicals!
The use of designer mRNA for the creation of the Cov Sars2 vaccines is an example of good use of this technology. The mRNA vaccines are saving many lives ,and are a vital tool for freeing us from this global pandemic.
However human beings should utilize this technology with extreme caution and restraint!
The genomes of existing biological organisms represent millions of years of trial-and-error evolution,. We should not meddle lightly with what nature has taken millions of years to perfect.
Gene-editing technology is already being used rampantly without adequate ethical consideration and regulation (there are thousands of examples) ...and I fear it will end up 

b iting us in the butt!


Francoise E. Baylis (Q20090252).
Baylis, F. (2019). Altered Inheritance: CRISPR and the Ethics of Human Genome Editing. Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674976719.

Wealth inequality

 

The 1% are the main drivers of climate warming!

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/26/oxfam-report-the-global-wealthy-are-main-drivers-of-climate-change.html

Inordinately high level of consumption by the 1% designated as anti-social behaviour

https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/richest-carbon-emissions-poorest-oxfam-report/

Carbon Emissions of World's Richest 1% Are More Than Double Those of the Poorest 50%: Report

A new Oxfam report shows how wealth inequality and climate change go hand in hand.

By James Hitchings-Hales

 SEPT. 21, 2020

Why Global Citizens Should Care

The UN’s Global Goals include Goal 13 for climate action. Experts say there’s just 10 years left to limit the damage caused by the increase in global temperatures — the consequences of which will undoubtedly be felt first and worst by the world’s poorest people. But a new study says that the world's wealthiest have spent the last 25 years being a huge part of the problem. Join our movement by taking environmental action here.

Whether it’s COVID-19, global inequality, or climate change — as the poorest bear the brunt of the consequences, the richest often seem to profit from the chaos.

While poor neighbourhoods are disproportionately dying from the coronavirus, the world’s richest are enjoying exponential increases in wealth. 

And similarly, the effects of the climate crisis are already being felt by the most vulnerable communities, despite such groups contributing the least to climate change. This is in stark contrast to the richest among us, according to a new report from international anti-poverty nonprofit Oxfam.

The “Confronting Carbon Inequality” report, published on Monday, found that the richest 1% of the world’s population — approximately 63 million people, just less than the population of the UK — have emitted more than twice the amount of carbon as the poorest 3.1 billion people on the planet.

The report focuses on a “critical 25-year period of unprecedented emissions growth” between 1990 and 2015 — a quarter of a century that saw the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere double. That’s more carbon emitted in 25 years than throughout the rest of history.

In that time, the richest 10% of people contributed 52% of all carbon emissions, while the top 1% accounted for 17% of the total — more than twice that of the poorest half of the human race (7%).

The research, conducted alongside the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), a charity that explores policies tackling environmental and development challenges, highlighted that annual carbon emissions grew by 60% in that timeframe.

And wound up into that growth, the richest 1% of people saw triple the emissions increase of the poorest 50% of the world. Meanwhile, a third of all emissions increases in that time came from the richest 5%.

To put this into context, the richest 10% are those that earn more than $35,000 (£27,000) a year, while the top 1% earns at least $100,000 (£78,000) annually. People within those income brackets are more likely to drive more polluting cars and take more fossil fuel-guzzling flights than those who earn less. 

“The over-consumption of a wealthy minority is fuelling the climate crisis, yet it is poor communities and young people who are paying the price,” said Tim Gore, report author and head of climate policy at Oxfam. “Such extreme carbon inequality is a direct consequence of our governments' decades-long pursuit of grossly unequal and carbon intensive economic growth.”

Related Stories

Sept. 4, 2020

France Puts Climate Action at the Heart of Its €100 Billion COVID-19 Recovery Plan

In a separate Oxfam report published on Jan. 20 this year, it was reported that the world’s 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than 4.6 billion people. 

Meanwhile, over a week before those findings were published, people in Britain had already emitted more carbon than citizens from six countries in Africa — Malawi, Ethiopia, Uganda, Madagascar, Guinea, and Burkina Faso — would across the entirety of 2020.

It speaks to a connection between wealth inequality and climate change: the further entrenched wealth inequality becomes, the more those among the richest in society will emit the carbon that creates dire consequences for those among the poorest.

The report recommends a dual approach to tackle this. First, it’s imperative that governments target the emissions of the rich to slow an ever-increasing carbon growth, especially through aviation, housing, and energy. Second, poorer communities must be urgently invested in. One cannot be fought without the other.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic has meant carbon emissions have dropped across the board, the impact on the overall state of emissions is negligible, according to Oxfam.

Instead, radical change is required — from the top of the world to the bottom. Otherwise, the richest in society will take the planet beyond the irreversible temperature increases that will cause sea levels to rise. And that’s even if every other part of society somehow reduced their emissions to zero.

Related Stories

“As Oxfam's new report shows, our current economic model has been an enabler of catastrophic climate change and equally catastrophic inequality,” said Ban Ki-moon, former secretary-general of the United Nations. “The COVID-19 pandemic provides an incontestable imperative to rebuild better and place the global economy on a more sustainable, resilient, and fairer footing.” 

He added: “Addressing the disproportionate carbon emissions from the wealthiest in society must be a key priority as part of this collective commitment.”

We hear much in current media about racism and sexism, ..but little about agism.

Elder care crisis/ "Neglected No More" by ANDRE PICARD

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-march-2-2021-1.5933097/march-2-2021-episode-transcript-1.5934381

André Picard on need for philosophical change in elder care
Guest: Andre Picard

MATT GALLOWAY: Last spring, at the start of this pandemic, a disturbing and shocking picture emerged, elderly Canadians living in long-term care were dying in alarming numbers, but it was more than the numbers. The conditions in the homes were often abysmal as well. When the military was sent in to facilities in Quebec and Ontario, they documented filth, force feeding, cockroaches, abuse and patients left in soiled diapers for hours. Here's Ontario's Premier Doug Ford in May of last year.

DOUG FORD: I think it's appalling. I think it's disgusting what has happened. Just the dignity of these patients in long-term care not being cleaned. It's so disturbing. When I read this, it was hard to get through. It was the worst report, most heart-wrenching report I have ever read in my entire life.

MATT GALLOWAY: Andre Picard knows that suffering all too well. As the Globe and Mail's health columnist, he has covered the crisis in long-term care during this pandemic and long before. And like millions across Canada, he's also felt it personally. Andre Picard's new book is "Neglected No More: The Urgent Need to Improve the Lives of Canada's Elders in the Wake of a Pandemic". Andre, good morning.

ANDRE PICARD: Good morning.

MATT GALLOWAY: I want to talk about the book in just a moment, but we are just coming up on a year of this pandemic. Where do you think we're at in the course of our journey, if I can put it that way, through COVID-19?

ANDRE PICARD: We're at a really important point where there's a lot of hope on the horizon, but there's also these potential dark clouds. You know, there's the variants. There's the people slacking off once they see people getting vaccinated. So we're at this point where we really have a chance to finally get control of the pandemic, but where we also have the risk of losing control again and seeing another wave, which I think would be even more devastating. We know that each subsequent wave is worse for a whole bunch of reasons.

MATT GALLOWAY: There has been so much angst and hand-wringing about the rollout when it comes to vaccines not coming fast enough. Are the systems in place to ensure that people can get the vaccines? It opens up in Alberta, and the website crashes. People can't get through. What do you make of how the vaccines have been rolled out now that they are starting to arrive?

ANDRE PICARD: Well, you know, it's been painful. Let's be honest, it's been difficult. But the fact that the websites are crashing, it's kind of a good sign. It shows that people understand the importance of vaccination, and they want it. And those are good things. But we have to have a little bit of patience. We have to recognize that the whole world wants these vaccines that Canadians want, too. And it's going to come slowly. We're going to have to take our turn, and we're going to have to be patient. And none of those things are easy after a year being locked up.

MATT GALLOWAY: We've been talking on the program about how to prioritize who gets the vaccinations first, who's at the top of that queue? And obviously, age is a huge concern. But there are many other groups who are saying that you need to look at those who are on the front line if I can put it that way. Restaurant workers, people working in grocery stores, obviously those working in hospitals with patients, but also teachers, for example. How should that be worked out? How do we go about figuring out who should be at the front of the queue?

ANDRE PICARD: It's never going to be done right. Let's be honest. We can't please everyone. I think you have to do the simplest way. And I think that's going by age. And the other solution, of course, is the more vaccines we have, the fewer of these discussions we have to have. But I think practically, we have to look at who has been harmed the most, who's most at risk? And that's almost strictly age-based.

MATT GALLOWAY: As we start to stand back and look at what we have learned over the course of the last year, one of the real reckonings that we have had, obviously, is what unfolded in long-term care, how surprised were you to find out what was going on in long-term care homes over the course of this pandemic?

ANDRE PICARD: Sadly, I wasn't particularly surprised. I was appalled. I was shocked, but I wasn't surprised. You know, we had created this perfect storm of conditions for the spread of the coronavirus, a respiratory virus. You know, the most shocking thing is how we didn't raise the ramparts immediately back in January, February. Because anyone with the slightest bit of knowledge about infectious disease or nursing homes would know that these are sitting ducks.

MATT GALLOWAY: Some of the reckoning is already happening. In Ontario, there's a commission in that province looking at what unfolded in long-term care. Dr. David Williams, the chief medical officer of health, says in many ways he was caught unawares by this.

ANDRE PICARD: Yeah, sort of a story that gets played over and over again. You know, we had these wonderful reports about SARS in 2003. You could literally take those reports and change the dates and change the numbers, and we could republish them. We have learned virtually nothing. So why was he shocked? Well, I guess he didn't read his SARS reports. I just can't explain it.

MATT GALLOWAY: In Quebec, the coroner has postponed an inquiry into a long-term care home where more than 40 residents died of COVID-19. There's the consideration perhaps of laying charges against the owners once that inquiry is back. What do you think will be revealed there?

ANDRE PICARD: Well, I think we'll just have the same revelations that we always get that these homes were unprepared. They're understaffed. The infrastructure is poor. The ownership was totally out of their depth. So all the things we know over and over again just get repeated in inquiries. I, for one, am sick of reading these reports because they all say the same thing, they all have the same conclusions, and we don't really act on them. So at some point,, we have to stop studying, and we have to start acting.

MATT GALLOWAY: You say in the book that COVID didn't break the long-term care system. It exposed a system that was already broken. What did COVID reveal about the state of long-term care in this country?

ANDRE PICARD: Well, I think COVID revealed decades and decades of neglect. It revealed ageism. It revealed that we don't really take older people seriously. We do see them as disposable. And then this virus just got in there and just showed how disposable they were.

André Picard on need for philosophical change in elder care That's a really bracing statement to make that... that in some ways, our society sees older people as disposable. I mean, again, in this... in the book, you say the real villain is society's profound and longstanding neglect of our elders. What's going on there? I mean, why and how could we possibly think that?

ANDRE PICARD: Well, it's... it boggles the mind. Sometimes when I was working on this, I was like, how did we ever get to this, you know? I think there's some historical reasons. We have to understand these homes have their origins in the penal system, in the jail system. These were workhouses. Until the 1960s, people had to work for their keep. I think some of it is just our society revolves around money, around the economy. Once you stop working, you become a burden. You become a cost. And that's how we treat older people. We tend to forget that they've paid in for half a century of work, and their long-term care should be essentially cashing in on your insurance. Now, the other aspect is that long-term care is not part of our health system. It's something just sort of sitting off on the side, making us uncomfortable. And ultimately, you know, we talked about neglect. We talk about ageism. I call it in the book "Elder Apartheid". Once people get old and rickety, we put them off in these homes, out of sight, out of mind, go there to die. We don't want to know anything about you.

MATT GALLOWAY: In the face of what was unfolding in the long-term care homes in this pandemic. You made a suggestion on this program and elsewhere that I think a lot of people perhaps thought was controversial at the time, saying that Canadian families, if they have a loved one in long-term care, that they should get that loved one out of the long term care home if they could, at least during this pandemic. Do you still stand by that?

ANDRE PICARD: Absolutely. I think the only regret I have is not having said it a few weeks earlier, to be honest. All the writing was on the wall in January, February about what was coming. And I could see that nothing was being done. And that... that was the reality. The reality is you should have tried to get your loved one out if you could. Now, the reality is most people couldn't. That's why they're there in the first place. But I think it had to be stated in those stark terms just to underscore just how bad things were at that point.

MATT GALLOWAY: What did you hear from family members in the wake of that comment?

ANDRE PICARD: It got a mixed reaction, like many things I write. A lot of people were very, very angry. How dare you guilt me! Nobody wants their loved one to be there in the first place. They feel guilty. I've lived this, but there is also this recognition that, yeah, you're right, I recognize how bad it is, but I don't know what to do? I'm powerless. I don't have the ability to care at home for my loved one. And that's a fundamental problem of the system, is people end up there by default because we don't have adequate home care, we don't have supportive housing, we don't have affordable housing. There's all these policy reasons that people end up in the wrong place, and family members live this, and they feel the guilt of it every single day.

MATT GALLOWAY: You write about this, but this is also personal for you. And I don't know how comfortable you are in talking about your own situation, but your father-in-law was in a nursing home. What happened last year?

ANDRE PICARD: Yeah, so I'm an old-school journalist. I don't tend to write first-person pieces, [chuckle] but yeah, I did talk about my father-in-law on Twitter. Very healthy man, 88-year-old, living in not in a long-term care home, but in a residence for seniors. So very independent, played tennis three times a week, played bridge, went to church every day. Then the lockdown came, lockdown in March. In July, he died. We kind of in the family say he died of a broken heart. He died of loneliness, of being inactive. You know, we forget that collateral damage that happened to a lot of people, that locking out of families was really, really devastating.

MATT GALLOWAY: I'm sorry for what your family has gone through. What was it like for you to see... to see that unfold?

ANDRE PICARD: Well, it was horrible, you know, and I... my family didn't suffer any more than others. Many suffered much, much more. We take some comfort in knowing that he died quickly. He had his lunch and went and sat down and died of a heart attack. If you're going to go, maybe that's the way to go. But many people just could see their family members only by Skype, or you didn't do it at all. That's way, way worse. You know, the horrors that people injured during this, I don't think we'll ever fully understand. Hundreds of thousands of people went through this.

MATT GALLOWAY: We are learning more. And I mean, again, it's to our detriment that perhaps we didn't know enough about them before a crisis like this struck. But we're learning more about the individuals who are engaged in long-term care. And one of them that you introduce us to in the book is Josephine Marquez, personal support worker. Why did you want to talk about Josephine's role?

ANDRE PICARD: The personal support workers are so essential. They help people with all the activities of daily living and all the hands-on stuff, and they're taken for granted. They're underpaid. They're overworked. This is really demanding work. Ninety per cent of that work is done by women. Almost three-quarters are immigrants or refugees - so very racialized populations. And Josephine is an example of, you know, in long-term care, there's a lot of turnover. A lot of workers come and go because it's horrible work. But she's one of the lifers. So about a third of the personal support workers are there for decades. So she has been doing this forever. And I want to tell her story as an example of how the.... the profession has unravelled over time. So she gets paid less today than she did 25 years ago because wages have come down. Her workload has doubled. The patients she cares for are very different. And yet, she's still very, very dedicated. So I want to tell the story of the mistreatment of workers through the the eyes of one worker who still loves what she does, but, you know, just is frustrated by how she's treated.

MATT GALLOWAY: How does that happen? I mean, again, it goes back to the idea of value and what we value in our society? How does it happen that the salaries of PSW have declined?

ANDRE PICARD: Yeah, it's what we value. It's who we value. You know, this pandemic in nursing homes has been this intersection of of racism, of sexism and ageism. It's been this perfect storm of all of those things. And, you know, it's racialized women caring for older people. Well, a triple ability to neglect and ignore. That... that's what we see.

MATT GALLOWAY: Eldercare is not cheap in this country. It's often very expensive if you're looking at housing a loved one in in a long-term care facility. So how do we square that? That... that... that it's expensive, but that the people who are there on the front lines doing that incredibly important work aren't making enough to make ends meet. And so they have to move from home to home, which then ends up, as we know, spreading COVID around.

ANDRE PICARD: Yeah, the money part of the equation is really difficult for people to understand. You can pay $2,000... up to 15,000 dollars a month. Most of that is for accommodation. And then the... the care portion is provided largely by government. And they're cheap. That's the reality. You get 180 dollars a day to care for a person in a home. That's the allocation to a home. And it's enough to pay a couple of hours of hands on-care, and people need a lot more. So I think we confuse that... that cost as thinking that we're paying for more care, but we're actually paying landlords for a pretty crappy accommodation in many instances.

MATT GALLOWAY: Would this change if you were to eliminate the for-profit care? This has been a lively debate. Would that change that equation, do you think?

ANDRE PICARD: You know, this is a complicated debate. We could spend an hour talking about this one. But I think the short answer is it's a simplistic solution to a complicated problem. I don't think we need for-profit care. It doesn't make things better. But I also don't think we could eliminate it overnight. It's there for a reason. It's there because governments refuse to invest in infrastructure. It's there because we don't care about the sector. And it's really dominant. So, you know, two-thirds of homes almost in Ontario are for-profit. You can't get rid of them overnight, but you can regulate better. You can improve the budgets. You know, a for-profit care and a not-for-profit home get the exact same allocation from government. The focus should be more on getting rid of what are essentially some slum landlords. There's a lot of landlords in this business who they don't really care about the care portion. They care about making money. Those are the ones we have to get rid of.

MATT GALLOWAY: So then how do you go about, as you say, fixing the system? At the beginning of the book, you say, let's fix the damn system. So given what you have seen and the fact that history keeps repeating itself again and again and again, what do we start to do to try to address the systemic issues that are in place?

ANDRE PICARD: To me, the starting point has to be philosophical. You have to have a philosophy that elders matter. Living in the community matters. And after that, once you have a political philosophy, then everything else is pretty, just, well, just doing it. It's putting into action those policies on a practical level. So don't make long-term care the default setting. Make a living at home the default setting. And then you address the practical reason. So I think where you start is you start where the biggest problems exist, and that's staffing. So we need standards of care. So you ensure that people who are in homes and people who get home care get a minimum of four hours of care every day. You know, we know that the conditions of work are the conditions of care. If workers are not treated well, they will never be able to deliver good care. So start with the workers. Then on the home side, fix the infrastructure, stop building prison-like facilities with 200, 300 beds, and put people in home-like settings. It's not much more expensive, and it's much more humane.

MATT GALLOWAY: And again, it goes back to that issue of value. Do you have to inject enormous amounts of money into the system to try to right the ship?

ANDRE PICARD: I think the answer to that is twofold. One is, yes, we have to spend more money after decades and decades of neglect, especially on staffing, to ensure that the hands-on care is there. But the other part of the equation is that we spend a lot of money now on mediocre care. If we spend that money differently, if we ensure that we get value, we can do a lot more with the money we have now. So I don't think we need countless money pouring in to fix this. We could do a lot with the budgets we have now if we spend them differently. So this argument that, oh, we can't have home care, it's too expensive, we can't expand care, you know, we can't have subsidized housing. It's expensive. Those things aren't true. We spend so much now on things that people don't want and don't need. If we spend differently, that would be a big, big start.

MATT GALLOWAY: One of the things people don't want is to go into long-term care at all. Generally, people want to age in place, as the phrase says. People point to Denmark as an example. What's happening abroad that would give us some degree of inspiration about how we could do this better?

ANDRE PICARD: Yeah. So Denmark is kind of the gold standard that everyone points to. And what do they do? They just had this philosophy, in the 1980s, they just... they saw the ageing coming. You know, this is no surprise that boomers were going to age. We kind of sat on our hands, but they said, oh, we're going to deal with this and we're going to have a philosophy that people are going to stay at home no matter what until it's absolutely unable to do so. So that's what they do. So investments in homecare, building care, homes that are very homelike, et cetera, what they've proven is it's... it's doable, it's affordable and it's more humane. The money argument goes out the window if you look at Denmark. Their system is cheaper overall than ours, and the care is superb.

MATT GALLOWAY: How is it cheaper overall?

ANDRE PICARD: Just look at the per capita spending. Canada spends more on... on health care than Denmark. And Denmark has a much wider array of services that it provides. Homecare, long-term care, a part of their public system. There's a continuity to it. You know, in Canada, you get your free hospital, you get your free doctor. Once you need to be in a home, you fall off a cliff, suddenly, you have to pay your 2,000 or 5,000 dollars a month. There's no logic in what we fund and what we don't fund in medicare.

MATT GALLOWAY: Knowing that there are 150 different reports that have laid out a lot of the steps that we need to take, is your sense that the will is there to do this?

ANDRE PICARD: I think the will is there. I think the question is, can we make it a priority? There's a will to do lots of things. And in Canada, we have difficulty making choices. We have very short memories. So I guess my biggest fear is we'll just forget what happened in lon-term care. You know, our older people are already cast aside. They're in these homes. They're forgettable, and... and we'll forget them. But I think, you know, ultimately we have to we have to give life to our values. That's what politics and social policy should be all about.

MATT GALLOWAY: Just two final things. One is, in writing a book like this, but in doing this work, personally, how does... how does something that this affect you?

ANDRE PICARD: Well, you know, I'm no spring chicken, so I know what's coming. And I want the care to be better for me. I don't want to have the same mediocre care that my parents had. I don't want my children to have to give up their lives and their careers to care for me because the system's inadequate. So all of this should be very personal for all of us. All of us are going to benefit from this. None of us can afford to ignore this because we're all going there.

MATT GALLOWAY: Andre, great pleasure to talk to you, as always. Thank you very much.

ANDRE PICARD: Thank you.

MATT GALLOWAY: André Picard is the Global Mail's health columnist, and the author of "Neglected No More: The Urgent Need to Improve the Lives of Canada's Elders in the Wake of a Pandemic". You're welcome to comment on what Andre said. You can reach us through email: thecurrent@cbc.ca. The C

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On Sunday, February 7, 2021, bill dality <
Jan 30,2021 cbcradio/daysix episode 531

Segment on , fixing long-term care in Canada:

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-14-day-6/clip/15821863-episode-531-the-meaning-gamestop-teaching-grade-1

Interview on longterm care deficiencies in Canada

These " for profit" care homes are operated not for the benefit of senior residents but for the profit of shareholders. The first loyalty of private corporations is to their shareholders!
Corporations prioritize profit over the public good.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/covid-long-term-care-canada-1.5739798

Profit above people :It is because seniors are not valued.                    Senior's lives are not important!
Long-term care is grossly underfunded in Canada.

Medical establishment makes negative assumptions about disabled person's quality of  life.      The lives of disabled and aged persons are devalued.


****************

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/15835703-common-good-or-the-value-old-age

****************

Senior care homes are inadequately funded and regulated

From: bill dality <
Date: December 10, 2020 at 3:32 PM


600 long-term care homes across Canada are reporting Covid 19 outbreaks
80% of all Covid 19 deaths have been In institutional care homes and by far the largest portion of these deaths have been In institutions operated by private,for-profit companies.

Why have senior care homes. been unable to keep residents safe?
How is it that despite every precaution and following public health directives , it is seniors in care institutions that have taken the brunt of the deaths.
How is it that despite. stringent preventive efforts the virus continues. to infiltrate these places where the most vulnerab!e population live?
The. answer is "asymptomatic carriers'"--- people who carry the virus but do not exhibit any overt. symptoms . We now know that people who show no symptoms of Covid 19 may still carry the virus and can still transmit the virus to. others. But we still don't know what percentage of the overall population are "silent carriers"..
Screening workers at these senior care institutions using Rapid Tests for the presence of antigen proteins would be a quick and effective method in identifying. asymptomatic carriers! Rapid Tests yield results within 15 minutes (instead of waiting days for results.)
Failure to implement Rapid Tests is reminiscent of the failure to mandate the wearing of masks (and failure to provide adequate supplies of masks, sanitizer and PPE for frontline healthcare worke r s)at the beginning of ,the pandemic!
Despite all the talk about ""protecting the most vulnerable", nothing has been done since the first wave to improve the understaffed, and overcrowded conditions (conditions wch existed even prior to then pandemic) in these "surplus people warehouses".(Private For-profit care home companies by definition are paying out dividends to their shareho lders !! Profits are made by shorting and underpaying staff and reducing the number of care hours each resident is allocated ! )
A cynic would say , "They don't really want to save all those "useless eaters" ".(since they already have one foot in the grave, what harm can there be in giving them a helpful little nudge?)....and besides ,identifying and removing asymptomatic care workers from the work force would .make it more difficult to fulfill the institution 's responsibility to provide basic care to. it's residents".

On a positive note, th e first doses of the vaccine will go to senior care home residents. But again a cynic would say, "the captive old people " stuck in these institutions will be "volunteered" to participate in what will essentially be a "fourth phase trial" to test it's safety and effectiveness before the rest of us receive it! (This vaccine has not been administered to this age group in the first three clinical trials.)
The Pfizer vaccine is an mRNA vaccine, and this type of vaccine has never been made and used before. How it responds in different age groups is not known.The long-term effects of mRNA vaccines are not known. There are many other unknowns.We are all going to be "guinea pigs"! It will be a massive experiment. We will learn a lot! But for now, despite the fact that the vaccine has been made in record time and it's approval has been fast-tracked, we are being asked to trust that the vaccines have been adequately tested,and the risk of taking the. vaccines is far less than the risk of not taking the vaccine and getting the virus!
In the meantime hospitalizations and deaths from Covid 19 continue to increase!!
Many people will be flouting the public health orders to stay home through the holiday season!
The case numbers in January, (after Christmas and New Year's celebrations and gatherings )will be astronomic!

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/big-spend-long-term-care-aid-dividends-1.5832941
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On Wednesday, November 25, 2020, bill dality <namtoo@gmail.com> wrote:
Numbers keep going up. (over 1000 in BC yesterday) They are not levelling off! I was out yesterday and noticed. traffic is horrendous..People are not  staying home!....and it isn't even Christmas shopping season  yet! This  doesn't look good!! People are resistant to changing their way of life.
Numbers are worst in regions where individual freedom and. the economy are  given more weight than public health (e.g. Alberta and Ontario)

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On Saturday, November 21, 2020, bill dality wrote:

Second wave

Canada facing over-capacity as Covid virus overwhelms healthcare infrastructure
Case counts surge across Canada(1100 yesterday in Alberta;1500 in Ontario).
With hospitals at capacity , Increased case counts means more deaths.



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Tuesday, October 6, 2020, 01:05:18 p.m. MDT, bill dality <wrote:



if it is true that 2/3 of all deaths in a pandemic happen in the second wave....and if the  first wave claimed 9000 deaths, then the second wave will claim 18000 in Canada for a total of 27,000 !
In the US tjese numbrrrs are 200,000 (1st wave) and 400,000 (2nd wave) fatalities!(for a total of 600,000 deaths)
extrapolating to the global effect of tthe pandemic on the human population...Covid-19 will depopulate the planet by 3 million people*!
(*to date  · More Than 1 Million People Have Died From COVID-19 Worldwide :)

Of course these numbers can be reduced if people follow public health guidance and if there is an early rollout of. a vaccine


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On Wednesday, May 27, 2020, bill dality <te:




72% of all Covid-19 deaths in Canada ocurred in senior's care homes.
Thats 5,000. seniors!

this pandemic has brought out into the open in a dramatic way the discrimination faced by old people in our society

A person's value is based upon their capacity to contribute to the economy.
People beyond their productive years are no longer valued and as "surplus people" are often warehoused in institutions called nursing homes.

Scathing report released by military about conditions in private for-profit care homes.
Military report reveals horrendous conditions exposed in longterm care homes

https://m.bdnews24.com/en/detail/europe/1756201
https://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/whats-inside-the-disturbing-report-on-ontarios-long-term-care-homes/

senior care should not be driven by the profit motive

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On Friday, May 15, 2020, bill dality <wrote:




we have to do better in caring for our elderly.

With the benefit of hindsight we can now see that Canada's pandemic preparedness was grossly deficient.
Personal protection equipment has been in short supply since the beginning of this pandemic. Demand has exceeded supply.
Covid-19 has exposed weaknesses in our healthcare system and the inadequate state of our longterm care facilities.
72% of all deaths in Canada from Covid-19 have been in elder care homes.
Personal care workers are underpaid and underappreciated.
Care homes must be stringently regulated to ensure they are adequately staffed and providing adequate care to their residents.
Care homes for the elderly must not be operated on a for- profit basis......but must be integrated into out universal Canada Health Act.


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Re: chinese owned senior homes

China profiting at the expense of Canada's seniors

https://thepostmillennial.com/watch-hajdu-refuses-to-criticize-chinese-owned-nursing-homes-in-canada?fbclid=IwAR2Yfchca1C5UdKbdWvzGvRHKZde2aPzI-xNk5EzCcoAdB1LG7nMpcfNL6I

apparently there are 22 senior homes owned by the Chinese Govt.



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Elder care should not be a money-making business!

On Sunday, April 12, 2020, bill dality < wrote:

as a society we are falling below an acceptable standard of care for our elders.The pandemic has just brought to light an underlieing situation that has existed in these seniors care homes for a long time.

It is telling that half of all the Covid-19 deaths in BC have been seniors in nursing homes!
Residents in these facilities/institutions exist under deplorable conditions--subjected to neglect and abuse.
Many of these places are private "for profit" businesses who underpay their workers and deprive the residents of adequate care.
China owns most of these private nursing homes and is profiting at the expence of our most vulnerable elders.
It is completely immoral for vulnerable old people to be exploited in this manner.
Senior's care facilities should be an integral part of our universal,
"not-for-profit" healthcare system. They should be essential services funded by taxpayer dollars.

********

31 residents die in one month in Herron nursing home in Dorva!,Quebec.The facility is owned by Katasa Group and Development, a Gatineau-based company owned by Samir Chowieri and his three daughters. The company runs seven elder-care facilities in the province.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/covid-19-private-seniors-home-dorval-chsld-herron-1.5530327

In BC, regulators overseeing the operation of several "for profit" seniors homes owned by Chinese corporation found them in violation of acceptable standards of care.
In B.C., the Anbang Insurance Group controlled 21 retirement and care homes, as well as two in Alberta, through subsidiary Retirement Concepts from 2017 until the beginning of 2018.

https://www.peninsulanewsreview.com/business/founder-of-chinese-company-behind-21-b-c-seniors-homes-gets-18-years-for-fraud/
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/selkirk-seniors-village-report-1.5394554
https://globalnews.ca/video/5055508/province-taking-over-senior-home-care

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/summerland-seniors-facility-retirement-concepts-interior-health-1.5475943

2/3 of the senior care homes in BC are publically funded but privately run

Most of these are operated by "Retirement Concepts" wch is owned by tbe Chinese government!

http://www.retirementconcepts.com/about-us/

Private companies are profit driven and place profit above the needs of residents.

The actual cost of operating such an institution is $6000./bed/ month.




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Apart from conspiracy theorists claims that Covid-19 was created in a state-sponsored laboratory for use as a weapon of war.
There are dark people among us who are thinking up ways to use Covid-19 for malicious purposes..

intentional human contamination of care facilities:
We all want to believe thst people who work in healthcare are caring,compassionate people.
But then there are people among them like Elizabeth Wettlaufer (nurse Kevorkian)who killed 12 extended care residents with insulin overdoses.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Wettlaufer

You can call them domestic terrorists, or embittered nihilists who want to cause maximum havoc in society, or just mentally disturbed persons (who have the mentality of serial killers)who have always dreamt of an effective way to get away with killing a maximum number of people.

Here's an act of sabotage I would never have thought of:
".... reports of teenagers purposefully coughing on produce bins and videotaping it have surfaced on social media.
The trouble with someone doing something stupid on social media is that it tends to catch on and spread rapidly. "

Times of crisis brings out the best, but also the worst in people!

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systemic agism or passive youthen azia

>this pandemic has brought out into the open in a dramatic way the discrimination faced by old people in our society
>
>A person's value is based upon their capacity to contribute to the economy.
>People beyond their productive years are no longer valued and as "surplus people" are often warehoused in institutions called "nursing homes".
>
>It is not just the virus that preferentially victimizes the elderly!
>
>if you are over 65 and no longer a productive contributor to the economy...Sorry,but there's no ventilator for you! The only care you can expect wkill be palliative!
>
>Medical care is already being rationed!
>
>have you noticed that all those elderly residents in care facilities who get infected are not taken to intensive care!
They are given morphine/fentenyl and allowed to die.
>
>https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8116223/Italian-coronavirus-victims-80-not-receive-intensive-care.html?ito=facebook_share_article-home-preview&fbclid=IwAR0McQgKeuC-LDCvuB4_0ZtvtnnhFZ8jiFBKrpKBC5S7ohdECMvWo1PX2_s

https://www.ktva.com/story/41952170/how-would-overwhelmed-hospitals-decide-who-to-treat-first?utm_content=buffer9a82c&utm_medium=social&utm_source=MP+facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer&fbclid=IwAR1BQI9hqTif96fchEo0P7fAOpv5dcn4Iv1bf2g2nrvP0PXebeenbobAsMMqp1sk

Are you still greedy for wealth? Then invest in bodybags and coffins!