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unhappycamper

(60,364 posts)
Mon Jan 20, 2014, 07:55 AM Jan 2014

Summer in Canada While Deep Freeze Grips US?

http://watchingamerica.com/News/230428/summer-in-canada-while-deep-freeze-grips-us/

The United States — always the United States. Could it be that the recent apocalyptic polar vortex made a strange detour in its route south from the North Pole?

Summer in Canada While Deep Freeze Grips US?
Público, Spain
By Luis Matías López
Translated By Jenny Westwell
10 January 2014
Edited by Gillian Palmer

~snip~

And Canada is no insignificant country. With an area of almost 10 million square kilometers, only Russia is larger. Its population of 35 million is considerable, though barely one-ninth of the U.S. population. Canadian statistics for quality of life, human development, citizen safety, health, education, social services, domestic solidarity and the inequality index are significantly better than those of the United States. The issue of Quebec nationalism is handled peacefully and with impeccably democratic methods. Canada’s economy might earn it a place in the G-7 and in today's G-20. It is the world’s 11th largest economy; Spain is ranked 13th.

But, sadly, Canada has the misfortune to share a border with the United States. A simple accident of geography means that, despite experiencing the same weather emergency, Canada is rendered practically invisible. And so the Spanish press — along with that of most of the world — has omitted to mention Canada in recent headlines, in a shameful display of simple-mindedness. The emergency has wreaked even greater havoc in Canada than in the United States, yet the Canadian aspect has received only minimal news coverage, if any.

What should have been the norm — publishing relevant and proportionate information on the consequences of the cold snap in Canada — was in fact the exception, such as a minor article in La Vanguardia that took up a dispatch from the EFE agency under the headline: "Canada Experiences Extreme Cold Snap with Temperatures as Low as -40 Celsius." And it is not only the media. They (we?) are legion, those who, dazzled by the empire’s brilliance, find it normal that the television news should open with images of Fifth Avenue blanketed in snow and lashed by the wind, as if it were as nearby as the Ramblas or the Gran Vía.

It is a sorry state of affairs, but we allow ourselves to be seduced by Washington’s soft power, content to suffer its influence while we support the weight of its invisible, velvet boot. We watch U.S. films and U.S. television series, we admire U.S. celebrities, we buy U.S. electronic gadgets, we buy U.S. junk food, we identify with the American way of life. We know more about Lincoln and Custer than about Carlos III and Prim, more about Route 66 than the A-3, more about the streets of San Francisco than about the streets of Seville, and more about Spielberg than Almodóvar. We catch pneumonia when the United States has a cold, we follow its foreign policy like lapdogs, we make its enemies our own, we fight in its wars.
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Summer in Canada While Deep Freeze Grips US? (Original Post) unhappycamper Jan 2014 OP
Heat from the US always sucks cold air down from Canada in the winter. dipsydoodle Jan 2014 #1

dipsydoodle

(42,239 posts)
1. Heat from the US always sucks cold air down from Canada in the winter.
Mon Jan 20, 2014, 09:36 AM
Jan 2014

Its just that this year it was compounded by the shape of the jet stream drawing down air from the "polar vortex"

The polar vortex is never not there - its a condition.

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