this is a big, positive shift and long overdue.

the lebanese have historically tried to avoid fighting with these muslim groups, and while it may have been their best choice in the dark ages, it's gotten them nowhere in recent decades.

it is great to see the lebanese take some initiative in governing themselves. as weber said, the state needs a monopoly on force.

https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20250805-lebanon-tasks-army-with-securing-a-monopoly-on-arms-in-challenge-to-hezbollah

see, i would believe that brigitte macron was transgendered if i didn't know she isn't (she has children) because she basically presents herself like a drag queen. her problem is that she's a 72 year old that has aged very poorly. her hair is awful. she has awful skin. and she wears shoulder pads, which went out of fashion before i was born.

the president of france is an odd duck. he apparently initially was dating her daughter, who is closer to his age, but started fucking her mom, instead. i could imagine how that went, initially. she's apparently ok with it now.

the ramification is that macron apparently has no plans to have his own children because he's sticking with this woman who has now aged past him and into retirement age. who am i to judge?

america is supposed to be the empire around here.

but, it's the chinese that are dividing and conquering.

up until now, the winner of a pointless war between russia and the west has been china. if the americans are extracting themselves from it and instead positioning themselves to sell arms, perhaps to both sides, they are repositioning themselves from a losing to a winning position.

my concern has been that it's impossible for america to win a war against china without russian support, and that the actual fact is that the russians want to align with the west, not with china, which is in their benefit and something they should take advantage of. we've been forcing them to align against us, and it's been shooting ourselves in the foot and not in our self-interest.

for the americans to just get up and walk away like this in a way that allows them to potentially salvage a relationship with the russians in any future chinese containment operations is making a clear choice that the russians are more strategic and more valuable allies in a war against china than europe is, even if it means europe aligns with china as a result, and potentially because the calculation is that it's inevitable that the germans are going to align with the chinese, anyways.

this isn't ideal. the ideal is that you want a western bloc that includes russia and india that can be used to contain china. this war in the middle of europe is the result of joe biden being an idiot and vladimir putin being an equal idiot and the two of them falling for the chinese bait, which worked splendidly. there was a lingering ideological position on the american right that has shifted to the democratic party since hillary clinton that the new american century had to include the destruction of russia, and they walked right into the trap the chinese set for them. the result has been disastrous for everybody, except china.

trump is probably right that the russians are the more valuable ally against the chinese. however, this doesn't need to be done so fast. there is time to salvage the whole west and prevent it from splintering or partially realigning with china.

nato was on the brink of irrelevance because it had no enemy. the enemy was in the pacific, not the atlantic. washington was trying to pivot. ukraine undid that by stoking tensions that are legitimate.

at some point, nato countries are going to need to understand that there is no value in having missiles pointed at moscow, and this kind of war is the only possible outcome of that policy. if putin is demanding that nato dismantle the missiles pointed at his heartland to stop this war so that the west can unite and focus on it's enemy, which is the east, it should do it.

i think the point the americans are making is that if the europeans want to fight the russians on this then they're on their own and will have to start buying their own weapons, and i agree with the american position and would like to see canada shift to it.

a protracted war between the eu and russia is not in the eu's self-interest and will result in radical electoral shifts across many of it's key nations.

https://www.euronews.com/2025/08/09/ukraine-and-europe-counter-russian-ceasefire-proposal-that-suggests-giving-up-territory

again, i don't think we should punish ourselves by snowing ourselves in. have you ever been to ottawa in february? i don't recommend it. i remember walking to school past 20 foot snowbanks, and it's really hard to cross the street when you can't tell if there's anything coming at you or not on the other side of the snow. it's a barely inhabitable city.

go south for the winter if you can. don't punish yourself. it's not worth it.

canada's economic and social and political response needs to be to advance our self-interest, whatever it is, and not to try to hurt the americans in retaliation. this, too, shall pass. it's a few more months, and trump is gone.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/ottawa/article/statistics-show-increase-in-canadians-travelling-to-us-from-ottawa-airport/

the news reports keep talking about a texas flood, and i just want to tell them that if you couldn't stand the weather you shouldn't be living where the sky is crying.

everybody i want to cite in this joke is dead.

canada is in many ways the last remaining colonial state, and this reflects a brutally colonial mentality.

this is why the legal process and the court system isn't a democracy, but is rather governed by principles of law. the idea of indigenous rights is not understood well by most canadians, and their legal rights and their property rights (in some cases) cannot be extinguished by plebiscite. that's what the americans did, and our rejection of that approach is a defining difference between us, and makes us superior.

it's helpful to understand where the population is, but it really has no legal relevance.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/article/canadians-prioritize-national-infrastructure-projects-over-potential-pushback-nanos/

the government should launch a bible buy-back program to get the dangerous literature off of the street. it shouldn't be burned, exactly. i want future historians to have bibles they can cite for research. the idea is that we should have an enlightenment, an awakening, where we realize that this is a shitty book with shitty morals and shitty ideas and shitty teachings and we should voluntarily just fucking get rid of it, and especially that we should keep our kids away from it. 

rather, it should be warehoused somewhere, with limited access, perhaps the same place we store guns that have been bought back. you should need to have academic credentials to get in to read it.

it could be called the "god and guns" warehouse, and funded with an lcbo down the street.