if this is what they think, it's not going to work.

there is not a single senate seat likely to swing to the democrats. conversely, there's several likely to swing to the republicans and trump is replacing dissenters in his own party with loyalists.

american voters are primarily concerned about immigration right now. that's the primary ballot question. they don't care about canada. worse, many of the house seats are not in play due to gerrymandering. the united states does not have an independent redistricting process like canada, it's a politicized process.

these tariffs are not on necessities, it's mostly on luxury items. they might cause some inflation, but not much and certainly not enough to make a dent. it wouldn't matter if they did.

the most likely outcome right now is that the republicans will gain seats in the senate, and trump will have an easier time controlling it.

america is not going to save itself.

https://www.thestar.com/news/analysis/mark-carney-is-putting-canada-on-the-ballot-for-the-us-midterms/article_6991f285-a2c1-4f2a-8ae2-cf4f544c1e61.html

the media's take on el nino continues to be extremely annoying. it's a hidden rejection of climate science masquerading as real science that is mostly pseudo science.

in fact, the direction of legitimate, actual scientific research and study into the enso over the last 20 years or so has been to conclude that it's effects have been overstated and it has far less of an effect on the overall global climate than previously thought. what they're calling the super el nino is an effect of climate change converging with the solar maximum, and not a cause or driver of climate at all.

the weather where i am, at the southern tip of the great lakes basin, and the point where the midwest meets the atlantic coast, and not far from the mississippi drainage region, has in recent years seen it's weather largely defined by an unusually warm atlantic ocean, which has had the effect of blocking weather patterns moving from west to east and pushing them up further north. they keep calling for rain here and the rain keeps moving north and missing us. this is because the atlantic coast's influence is becoming stronger, as the boswash region sinks into the ocean and we get physically closer to the coastline.

if the atlantic stays warm, there should be few to minimal effects of el nino here this year at all, and the direction of the developing scientific consensus - which is that el nino is an effect and not a cause - will continue to strengthen itself.

https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/products/ocean/sst/anomaly/

i think they have a public responsibility to release the text.

this "we don't negotiate in public" bullshit needs to stop. you'd better fucking start negotiating in public, because negotiating in secret is fascist and undemocratic.

the liberal party is famous for it's shady backroom deals, and it's made a virtue out of a valid criticism of how it operates.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/conservatives-details-canada-us-trade-deal-9.7317541

i think canada should have one of these, targeted at the us.

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

why do you think milk is good for you, as an adult?

the fat? the protein?

milk is intended for infants. it's kind of psychotic that we would drink the milk of a different species, as an adult. it's kind of gross, even, and a good percentage of humans actually get sick when they try.

no.

the only reason that cow's milk is good for you at all is that it's fortified.

unfortified cow's milk is a high fat, high protein junk food.

i took my first vitamin e this morning. is it possible my vitamin e is low?

well, when they cut it out of the margarine, they removed the only stable source in my diet. i get some e from red peppers, kiwis, avocados, sunflower seeds. but, to meet the rdi without the 50% i used to get from the margarine would require consuming an unhealthy amount of calories. i'm not meeting it, with certainty, and am not sure how i could. i can say that.

due the removal of vitamin e fortification from a number of items out of absurd concerns about "over-fortifcation", i would consider it virtually impossible for a person to meet the rdi for vitamin e from food in canada today without becoming obese in the process. i might suspect vitamin e deficiency is going to become a serious problem for young people in canada over the next decade and result in unnecessary health care costs that could be resolved by returning to fortification in margarine and dairy.

the major symptoms of deficiency are dry skin and peripheral neuropathy, which is a component of the hemiplegic migraines i've been getting for the last ten years. the migraines initially went away after i added fortified nutritional yeast to my diet (i assigned that to boosting my b12), but have come back since they cut the vitamin e from the margarine.

given my absorption problem, yes, it's possible that i have a vitamin e deficiency.

i used to take a pill called menoprim made by a company that disappeared 2-4x a day that was great because it had a reasonable amount of vitamin e - 50% of the rdi. it also had a ton of b6, magnesium, calcium and phyoestrogens from soy, black cohosh, dong quai, red clover and other plants. it wasn't powerful enough to transition me, and i stopped when i went back on estrogen, but i found that a combination of menoprim, wild yam and saw palmetto was enough to keep me looking effeminate. maybe it was a placebo, and i was just noticing natural variation and the fact that i never went through puberty, but the pictures i have of me from 2005-2008, when i was on herbs and not estradiol, are in truth as good or better than the ones after 2009. the vitamin e, though, was definitely good for my skin and hair.

i probably should have found a secondary low dose of e a long time ago.

it's possible that what happened in 2016 is that my vitamin e stores finally ran out and i started to get migraines from it. i was taking the menoprim from about 2005 to about 2012, when the company disappeared. the store i bought it from said the phone number was out of service.

this was the product:

i would not want to take it now because it might block the estrogen i'm on.

but i do think it was an excellent vitamin e supplement and i should have replaced that source of vitamin e years ago. i have now.

if trump succeeds in breaking nafta, it will be up to the next administration to replace it with something. 

canada does have a substantive task, here.

it needs to convince the united states that it benefits from an open trade agreement more than it benefits from a shift towards autarky. 

there are benefits to canada from walking away from nafta in the sense of abandoning the non-trade aspects of the deal. most of the criticism of nafta had to do with the rights it gave to american investors to block sovereign canadian decisions. nafta has prevented us from doing a lot of the nation building projects we wanted to do, and it might have in the end cancelled a lot of these projects carney is pointing towards because it blocks government subsidies. nafta might cancel that pipeline through bc, if somebody wants to use it that way.

squirming out of those restrictions and starting over with a bilateral fta that is not all of these other things but just an fta - and a second bilateral fta with mexico - is potentially a better future in the long run. but we'll have to convince them it's worth it.

to the extent that canada creates retaliatory tariffs, those tariffs should be very carefully and thoughtfully crafted and bounced off multiple people in and out of government to ensure they aren't dumb and be chosen based on their efficacy. they should not necessarily be dollar-for-dollar.

there may not be enough to rationally respond to to get to dollar-for-dollar and that's ok.