it felt good to get some exercise in some warm weather today; it's been far too long. and, i am now hungry...

i looked at three bicycles today, and bought the third one. this is copied from the kijiji ad, and is the exact bike:

it's actually quite similar to the one i left in detroit, but it's maybe an upgrade all around: thicker tires, better gears, better brakes. i just need to get the seat up a tad, and it's going to ride like a dream.

$40. cad.

and, that's my new detroit bike.

i'll say this again: if there's something i've posted somewhere that you're confused by, please feel free to bring it up, and i'll try to make sure you understand why you're confused about it. i can only do so much to help you understand, but i can at least clarify any misconceptions you might have, if you're specific enough about the point that you've misunderstood.

test

i don't seem to receive text messages any more, either.

the mailto:deathtokoalas feature appears to have stopped working.

or been intercepted.

frustrating....

test

to state it tersely: what trudeau has done is brought back the house of lords. and, he's supposed to be a whig, too; it's quite shameful, really.

and, now we're going to have to abolish it.

this may seem like a strange debate outside of canada.

our bicameral legislature isn't modeled after the body in the united states, but is rather a direct evolution of the british system. so, we have a house of commons - a parliament - and something we call a "senate", which is really a house of lords. for decades, the house of lords came into disuse, reduced to patronage appointments for political expediency. and, it is true that it was a waste of money, but this was a minor concern in the larger scheme of things - reducing it to patronage appointments at least prevented it from being used to overturn the will of the house, which is the actual expression of democracy in the country.

the conservatives used to argue for an elected senate, but they haven't done that in a while. it is very quintessentially canadian of me to oppose this proposal, which is generally denigrated across the spectrum as an americanizing policy. our entire system of government was designed to try and prevent the gridlock that exists in the american system. i know that americans love their checks and balances in order to prevent tyranny, but, standing in canada, i'm willing to finger your broken system of government as the root cause of most of your social problems. i don't want to create a system where one house is fighting against the other all of the time. so, i am opposed to an elected senate for the reason that i don't want the gridlock and inefficiency inherent in the american system.

further, abolishing the senate would eliminate the only check that we have. we don't want the senate to actually do anything, except when it has to do something. again: this is very canadian of me.

but, a tanker ban is hardly the kind of pressing concern that needs to trigger an undemocratic seizure of the state, and an oil industry lobbyist is hardly the correct vehicle to overturn the democratic will of the country. the danger of maintaining the senate, always abstract and distant when it was kept in disuse, has now been made apparent and obvious, and freethinking peoples that uphold the primacy of the popular will must mobilize to prevent the country from falling further into tyranny.

the senate wasn't broken before, but it is now.

it must be abolished.

i used to argue that the senate wasn't broken, and there wasn't a need to fix it.

i have been starkly critical of trudeau's reforms, arguing that they were going to bring about a constitutional crisis, and lead to a need to make more dramatic changes. we've been slowing moving to this point....

as of this day forward, i am now officially aligning with the ndp on the senate: i am in favour of complete abolition.

this is not the kind of thing that happens in a democracy, it is the kind of thing that happens in a country like iran.

i am deeply embarrassed by what just happened.

what this is is a constitutional crisis.

nobody voted for this woman, and her undemocratic exercise of power flies in the face of everything that this country's democratic traditions stand for.

i would call on paula simmons to resign immediately, and for the trudeau government to immediately reverse all of the undemocratic reforms that have led to this disastrous outcome for canadian democracy.

she has not just broken the senate, she has broken her own dignity, and the country's own self-worth. congratulations canada: you're a backwards, despotic country with an unelected ruling class.

bravo.

https://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/no-i-havent-broken-the-senate/

if the rules are changing from global governance back to empire again, canada is going to need to shift from the role of arbiter to the role of agitator and provocateur - or lose it's sovereignty to a more dominant power, of which there is only one serious competitor.

i want to be clear: we can't accept this new new world order, whether it's being pushed down from the south or from the east. canada was a prime author of the rules-based system that came out of world war two, and as a part of the coalition that won the war, we helped write the rules in our favour. our sovereignty is a corollary of this; we will lose it if we return to an age of empires.

but, we have to understand it before we can react to it.

it does not appear as though the government has clued in yet, and it had better catch up pretty quick.

china does not interpret canada as a sovereign country, but rather as a client state of the american empire. they would expect us to conduct our relations through washington - just as they would expect washington to conduct relations with the chinese clients through beijing.

a regional governor does not meet with a foreign emperor; that would be inappropriate.

in fact, the chinese no doubt view the mere act of sending a delegation as insolent and worthy of punishment. if tibet or hong kong were to send a delegation directly to washington (that boat has already sailed in taiwan), the chinese would no doubt punish them for it.

china is an empire with imperial ambitions, and sees the world as empires with imperial ambitions do.

so, what does canada do? this is the old, hard problem in canadian politics: how do we balance our sovereignty with our geography? in the case of countries with different ruling philosophies, careful balancing acts are required and necessary. i think it should be clear to everybody that this isn't possible in the chinese case, as they are making a point to interpret us as a province.

canada tends to prefer discourse to conflict, but if the chinese get their way then we become a state. it's hard to see how there's any room for compromise.

the actual reality is that canada is probably better off cutting it's losses and trying to cause problems on china's periphery by creating stronger alliances with the koreans, the vietnamese, the japanese, etc. so long as the chinese insist that we are an american client that must communicate with them through washington, we should do what we can to increase the independence of the countries on the chinese periphery, and insist that we do not need to go through beijing to get to them.

but, the canadian government is delusional if it thinks there is any future of normalized relations between canada and china. they don't see us as an independent actor, and we're not in their sphere of interest or their sphere of influence - and this is the language being used by the chinese and americans right now, as they carve up the world without us.

we're not invited.