farming is one of the highest intensity forms of carbon pollution and one of the industries that most needs to innovate ways to reduce it's carbon use. farmers need to find ways to reduce their carbon footprint, and that is imperative. i thought the conservatives liked free markets and policies designed to stimulate innovation?

there is some irony, here; i support the carbon tax as a means of wealth redistribution, but i never expected it to actually be successful in stimulating innovation. polievre's demagogic grandstanding is merely demonstrating how free market policies like carbon taxation don't work in incentivizing behaviour. 

where does this party stand in the spectrum, today? they remind me of the racist american populist and progressive movement of the late 19th century, which organized through the racist democratic party in the solid south and was old tory in ideology, which is authoritarian right-wing but collectivist in a religious sense and not at all pro-market. the party is increasingly reverting to it's roots as a christian progressive farmer's union. are there still funny socred economic ideas floating around in the reform party?

what a carbon tax can do and will do if left in place long enough is make existing solutions (that are currently less cost effective) more attractive, and make more polluting solutions less attractive. that is not innovation, but it might reduce carbon footprints nonetheless. if farmers are complaining that the tax is making them make hard decisions that means the policy is working to the extent that it ever could and the government should stay the course.

farmers need to make different choices and need to change how and what they produce.

climate change denial is the new slavery.

---

it might have seemed odd to many to watch the conservative party win power in 2006 by promising a series of social welfare handouts, but that's because they didn't fully grasp that the conservative party was actually the rebranded social credit party and not the old tory party.

we used to have an actual conservative party in canada, but it was wiped out in the 1993 election and never recovered.

as it is, our conservative party in canada is weird; it's a christian progressive party with very weak free market or libertarian tendencies that has a lot of ideas that are hard to place on the existing spectrum.

i'm not exactly a buddhist. i'm an atheist, and i think for myself.

however, my views on sexuality are very similar to buddhist views on sexuality and i think that western views on sexuality are broadly unhealthy and a major factor in the widespread depression that westerners experience. our sex-obsessed culture is what drives us insane.

my celibacy is by choice, and is desired by me. i have better things to do than waste my time having sex.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism_and_sexuality

the polling for donald trump in the republican primaries is what you expect to see in a fascist country, where people tell the pollsters what they want to hear instead of what they truly think. putin consistently gets 80%+ approval ratings; the polls are sound, but the people are afraid to tell the pollsters what they really think. the same thing remains true to this day in iron bloc countries like slovakia that really shouldn't have those kinds of issues anymore.

trump was a mistake, in the sense that nobody actually wanted him. he came up the middle in a crowded primary that didn't have an acceptable candidate. i will not let you forget that trump was elected republican candidate primarily to stop ted cruz, who was seen as a right-wing extremist; trump was the closest thing to a moderate in the field.

the same problem remains. if you thought cruz was too right-wing, desantis is no answer for you. everybody knows that chris christie is a loser. and, then there's the brown girl; why isn't she running for the democrats?

trump has no opponent.

a strong moderate could have beaten trump very easily, but it's too late now; he's functionally running unopposed. at least he won't catch covid on the campaign trail from a jail cell.

but, don't be surprised if his support is 20-30% lower than the polls are putting it at when the real numbers come in. i don't think trump is as scary as some would claim, but that enforced groupthink in trumplandia is not healthy for american democracy and leaves the country vulnerable to the potential of electing an actual fascist.

in fascist america, president elect you!

peel, york and durham should just be amalgamated into toronto.

halton should be left for the next round.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-government-transition-board-peel-dissolution-cost-tax-increases-1.7049940

well, it would expand the city's tax base by going after all the wealth that's fled the city.

creating safe zones for civilians is exactly what israel should not do because it is well understood in advance that hamas will hide in the safe zones.

israel needs to rely on it's substantive intelligence to hit actual targets and kill actual bad guys and civilians need to take some responsibility in being proactive about getting out of the way. i understand it's a small space and that's hard, but it's how it is.

if you are a civilian in gaza, you should be seeking to find somewhere that is isolated to hide in, not going to civilian safe zones, refugee camps or un food distribution zones. hamas will get there first, and you'll be entering a target zone. it is safer for you as a citizen if there is a lack of governance and a lack of social cohesion; seek out small, autonomous collectives that hide in the cracks in the system, instead.

this is unfortunate, but it's real; there is little that israel can do to protect civilians when hamas makes blending into civilian populations and hiding in safe or non-combatant zones a central part of it's strategy. it's impossible to follow the rules when your opponents flaunt them, and the blame for this should be put on hamas, not on israel.

i can't comment on individual examples of vengeance or insubordination in the idf, which should be condemned when or if they are found.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/israel-hamas-war-truce-ends-buffer-zone-1.7047324

Israel said it had recalled a team from Qatar, host of indirect negotiations with Hamas, accusing the Palestinian faction of reneging on a deal to free all the women and children it was holding. 

it is predictable that they would not let the women they impregnate via raping them leave, as they would then become their property, under islamic law.

what naomi and others miss is that if you let people with anti-semitic biases engage in a process that is legitimate on it's face, it becomes anti-semitic. my experience with "progressive" activists in canada is that most of them really don't like jews very much. i have one jewish ancestor 200 years ago, and it's better if i don't tell people about it, because once i do i get labeled as a jew and marginalized. it really does affect people's perceptions.

spraypainting slogans on a storefront is pointless vandalism, but if they wanted to get their point about this fund across without being labeled nazis, they should have chosen their words more carefully. if it sounds like a nazi and acts like a nazi, most people will decide it's a nazi; and, frankly, the truth is that it probably actually is one, too.

naomi's concern should be about nazis co-opting the action she feels is legitimate, however pointless the action might have been.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/antisemitism-anti-israel-indigo-1.7046501

the bill c-18 deal just signed by google is not what was legislated. the legislation calls for google to make bilateral agreements with independent news organizations in order to allow them to appear in google's search results, which forces google to pay for a service it provides to news organizations for free. the actual agreement has google pay into a fund that is distributed to news organizations.

as a distant observer, my concerns were with free speech advocacy and academic freedom, which were under attack by the initial legislation. i opposed the legislation for those reasons. this agreement changes my concerns, but they do remain.

if i were google, i would want to ensure that a healthy news industry existed in canada and i would also want some influence over the news in exchange for my contributions to it's stability. that actually places google in a position where it will gain undue influence over news organizations due to the fact that it's paying them, as a result of this government dictate. it is not healthy for democracy in canada for a large corporation like google to have a cartel-like influence over the entire journalism industry, but that is what we should expect as an outcome from this agreement, the google news industry cartel that oversees google news content and which has a near monopoly on news access in canada.

i liked google's aggregate because it wasn't integrated. i may need to look elsewhere.

roger was syd's friend; he cared about him, and wanted the best for him.

syd was lucky to have friends that cared about him.

they should really make a movie about syd and roger. it would be quite touching.

can we get this in ontario, too, and enforce it on my landlords?

https://bc.ctvnews.ca/b-c-files-application-for-canada-s-first-unexplained-wealth-order-minister-1.6669214

i would support this.

i'd also like to see substantive increases in tuition for international students; it should be prohibitively expensive to come to canada to study. we shouldn't have international students treating this exemption as a backdoor through the immigration system, and in the process competing with the working poor and disabled for resources. going to a different country to go to school should be reserved for the wealthy and those who are poor and can get substantive scholarships.

we have a serious housing availability problem in canada and we will need to take drastic steps to address it.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/with-canada-set-to-reimpose-cap-on-working-hours-international-students-worry-about-paying-for-tuition-living-expenses-1.6669889

i actually don't support a two-state solution in gaza and i've been clear that i don't for a long time. the two state solution is actually a pro-israel position because it solves the demographic problem by expelling the palestinians.

i do not support the idea of the nation-state, in broad terms. the abolition of nationalism is one of the defining ideas on the actual, real left; an immediate way to identify a fake leftist is to observe their nationalism or listen to them speak about "national liberation struggles". such divide and conquer, bourgeois posh is not leftism at all.

no; i support the global emancipation of the nationless working class, via their seizure of the means of production, and the systems of oversight around it.

in the levant, a two-state solution is a regressive idea that sets the clock back. the ottoman empire was intentionally dismantled and cut into small pieces by the british and french in order to prevent it from being threatening; two states in such a small region, as defined by ethnicity, and fighting about and over it, is merely being controlled by anglo-american imperialism. rather, i support an integrated single nation state where all citizens have equal rights and where palestinian and jewish workers understand that they should not fight amongst themselves because they are in solidarity with each other against the bankers and bourgeoisie.

in such a framework, hamas is merely a mafia group of thugs that needs to be dismantled and imprisoned.

the byzantine term for the tactic of divide and impera was "barbarian management strategy". the byzantine empire almost always had a Bureau of Barbarian Management, which was designed to produce policy that would generate quarrels between the barbarians. this was a well paid position in the bureaucracy. the logic was that the barbarians were less threatening if they fought each other instead of the romans, and that actually worked in preventing collapse for centuries, until constantinople got sacked by the french, who were invited in.

generating an ethnic conflict between the arabs and the jews, then monophysites and...jews, would have been exactly what the bureaucrats at the bureau of barbarian management strategy would be paid to do.

you think i'm joking. i'm not.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_Barbarians)

in fact, the leaders of the barbarians mostly understand this; i'm actually explaining exactly what the theocratic despots in iran meant when they called the united states the great satan and israel the little satan. the context is generally not explored, but it was actually a discussion of divide and impera, via barbarian management strategy. i wouldn't expect to find those terms anywhere outside of a history book, and you'd have to even go back quite a ways at this point. i have found them used by a respected historian named jb bury.

you can look all this up.

i'm surprised by the results of the referendum, but the university should accept the views of it's students. the university is the student body; democracy should prevail.

....and then the university should analyze it's admission policies, because it should be embarrassed that this happened.

i would call on the mcgill student union to run a parallel referendum asking the school to cut ties with people, corporations and institutions that are complicit in genocide, settler-colonialism, apartheid, or ethnic cleansing against native americans.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/ssmu-mcgill-safeguard-order-palestinian-policy-1.7037113

it makes sense for the canadian government to invest in industry.

it doesn't make sense for it to do so by giving out subsidies to private industry.

some percentage of public control over the factory should have been a pre-condition for the subsidy and would have allowed the state to veto this. as it is, this is what happens when you hand out money to industry without conditions attached to it.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/nextstar-battery-manufacturing-electric-vehicle-korean-windsor-1.7040936

i haven't been to ottawa in a long tme.

this is utterly horrific.

i don't like this in principle, but the underlying reality is that canadians have a tendency to see doctors for issues that are very minor and could be dealt with by a nurse (or a smart friend) and the truth is that this is badly clogging up the system. we also tend to go to emergency for non-emergency situations very frequently.

the existing alberta government is not in the right ideological place to set up a more efficient system, and is consequently defaulting to the inefficiencies of market capitalism in how it approaches a product that demonstrates clear and overwhelming market failure. it is predictable that the result will demonstrate the consequences of engaging with market failure. however, i actually think that a centralized bureaucracy that directs patients to nurses instead of to doctors when the issue is appropriately sent to a nurse rather than a doctor (and vice versa) would be an excellent way to manage resources. this would be better done through expanded centralized hospital care and not through independent private clinics, but there is a kernel of a good idea that addresses a real root cause that seriously needs to be addressed in this confusion.

canada is experiencing a market failure in it's delivery of healthcare because it has experimented with mixed economic models in delivery. in order to more efficiently manage resources, it needs to stop experimenting with free market delivery and reverse course by aggressively centralizing the distribution of services.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-primary-health-care-nurse-practitioners-1.7039229

this is not an advisable tactic. the issue is legislative, and what the individual wants exists in ontario, by legislation. i picked "female" on my card, but i could have picked x. there is also an option for x on driver's licenses, but i don't have one of those.

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/montrealer-vows-to-continue-hunger-strike-for-x-gender-on-quebec-health-card

i want to post my updated caesar salad recipe, and challenge you to actually finish the salad - if you can handle the consequences of it. regularity is important.

- 80 g kale

- 1 big avocado, soft but green, not rotten or goopy. chopped.

- 1 big lime or 2 small ones. chop the fruit, and then dice the pith and peel into small spice-like fragments.

- 1 very big clove of garlic or 2-3 small cloves. chopped.

- 1 tbsp cumin

- 1 tbsp sunflower seeds

- 1 tbsp hemp seeds

- 1 tbsp nutritional yeast (with b12!)

- 1 tbsp paprika

- 2 slices of bacon, chopped

- 2 pieces of fresh brown bread (whole wheat, including the germ), chopped

- 60 g of retinol-fortified cheddar cheese

- a lot of frank's hot sauce

- 1 cup (250 ml) of sugarless, flavourless fortified soy milk

- 1 tbsp of olive-oil margarine, fortified with vitamins e & d

- a swirl or more of store bought caesar dressing, altered to taste (i use soy-based pc caesar)

did rosa parks ever comment on seating in airplanes?

she'd have to sit at the front of the plane, right?

this dumb idea of a charter of rights for airplane flyers won't go away in canada, so fine then let's go with it. the primary issue of concern should be that class levels of seating should be abolished in an equitable and classless society, and people should have a right to sit where they want on the plane.

do it for rosa.

birth control is healthcare; this should be covered. male birth control options should be covered, as well, which currently includes a surgical procedure and a pill in final clinical testing.

https://www.cp24.com/news/ndp-pushing-for-ontario-to-become-3rd-canadian-province-to-offer-free-birth-control-1.6657725

these are the pics i can currently find from 2022:

nov, 2022:

oct, 2022:

may, 2022:

april, 2022:

march, 2022: