i'd just like to remind everybody that afghanistan has one of the largest mineral reserves in the world and that the chinese are intending to leverage it.

that's reversible.

with minimal effort.

the only prime minister i would give absolute power to is optimus.

and the only prime minister i would take directions from is the prime directive.

i'm more concerned about carney's apparent authoritarian streak. he didn't want to be finance minister, he wanted to be prime minister. he has to be the boss, in control, but it seems to be more about his ego.

he's probably better off as a bankbencher economic advisor, but he wouldn't do it, because it's all about him and his legacy.

he can't break things the way biden did, and he does legitimately know what he's doing on monetary policy. yet, when people seek absolute power like carney is, it's almost always a good idea to stop them from getting it.

"handling" trump is not the right approach.

the right approach is adapting to trump. 

personally, i would argue that that is the one issue where carney is clearly best qualified, by a large margin. it's everything else that i don't like about carney, and which i'm far more concerned about, given that trump has 2 years max and carney might be in office for a while.

https://calgaryherald.com/opinion/columnists/bell-who-can-handle-trump-sure-as-hell-not-mark-carney-says-danielle-smith

i haven't seen any good polling on the liberal leader vote, and the process appears to be fairly shady.

neither carney nor freeland were remotely impressive in the debate.

don't be surprised if there's a surprise.

there's some articles up suggesting trump wants to invade canada for the reasons putin invaded ukraine, which would be difficult to defend against a strong analyst. is canada inviting chinese troops into the country?

but, the history is the other way around. canada is not a lost province of the us; the us is a lost province of canada. the united states declared independence from canada in 1776.

maybe, one day, we'll get them back.