the media is suggesting that the backwards, barbarian houthis have somehow managed to drag themselves out of the caves for long enough to launch some kind of substantive offensive in the south of yemen. there does appear to be something afoot but the narrative's not being accurately reported.

- the saudis shot down a plane with some houthi dignitaries on their way back from iran. this appears to have been an entirely unprovoked attack. it's something israel might do, but israel is capable. what's relly being exposed here is that the saudis are utterly useless as allies and more of a liability than an asset in terms of military partners.

- the houthis reacted.

- the saudis contacted the pentagon and said "we can handle this" and launched an offensive.

- to the great embarrassment of the saudi forces, they were defeated by a group of cave-dwelling barbarians, despite having modern us-built equipment. analysts have been saying for years that the saudis don't know how to use us weapons. exactly.

- so, the saudis contacted the americans and asked for backup, who said "well, you picked a fight with somebody a tenth of your size, and you couldn't finish it. why would we come to our rescue? next time don't pick a fight.". they also offered them intelligence....which is what they give the israelis and all the israelis need, because the israelis are competent.

so, what should the yankees do, here?

step one is acknowledging that the saudis are a major problem. trump is a stubborn old man and he's going to dig in, and it's probably not the right answer, but he's nonetheless basically right. trump will try to sell them more military hardware and tell them to deal with their own problems themselves. 

however, the saudis need to get trained in how to use this hardware or the hardware needs to be taken away from them. it's a major liability to have all of this expensive hardware sitting in the desert, with nobody that knows how to use it. if you thought losing bagram in afghanistan was a catastrophe, the fall of riyadh - which would be a good thing for the region in the long run - would be potentially far worse. worse, the days of the americans being at their beck and call are over, but the culture in the region is going to give the saudis difficulty in understanding that. the saudis are hierarchically superior. they pay people to do what they want. they don't work for things themselves. that might cause them to lose weight! trump may be an anomaly in the long run in terms of telling them to fuck off when they start barking orders, but there needs to be an exit strategy. the saudis are not good allies. that's the takeaway.

but somebody is going to have to step in. these half-evolved primates need to be obliterated. they can't sit there and keep lobbing missiles.

i'm going to call on the turks to deal with this, if the british and french won't. they have a history in the area as well as naval forces in it and they benefit from keeping the straight open.

yikes.

prepare the babooshka.

go invest in teaching your own women how to read.

keep your money out of canada. it's not welcome here.

do you want to get up and go to work every day to bankroll some arab sheikh's palace?

fuck that.

i'd rather burn the factory down and tell the arab sheikh to go fuck himself and shove his "investments" up his dirty ass.

what's the point of building projects if canadians don't benefit?

i don't want my labour to go towards funding trust funds in other countries. that's a system i'd rather boycott and fight to tear down than participate in.

if the choice is between building projects that benefit foreigners and not building anything at all, i'd rather choose not building anything at all; i'd rather stay home, i'd rather fight against it than for it.

as for me, i haven't invested any of the $26,000 in my rdsp (22,000 was transferred in by the government in february). i was not expecting the attack on iran - nobody was - and the markets are...

i'm not a swashbuckling investor. i'm not going to glue myself to the ticker. i never imagined myself with an investment portfolio. but the government created this opportunity for me and i have it. i couldn't turn down $22,000 for free. but i ultimately have better things to do than be an investor. i don't want to spend my time obsessing over money.

there's another roughly $13,000 for free coming in february, so long as i get that $4000 in. that's another $17,000.

so i will have $43,000 - roughly - in a money market rdsp - uninvested - in early feb 2027. i need to invest about half of it before may.

i will not invest in oil. it's a non-starter.

but i waited because i wanted to better understand what's going on. if i thought the return of trump would be good for the market, i think i was wrong. the slow reversal of quantitative easing has been bad for markets and trump hasn't succeeded in reversing the fed's direction because he keeps putting conservatives in place, then wonders why they don't act like liberals. trump is not a fiscal conservative. ironically, the markets would likely do a lot better, even if it's a giant bubble, if trump installed himself as fed chair. he wouldn't abide by republican fiscal policy, he'd act like an obama or clinton appointee. that's not a policy proposal. i'm looking for ten years and then to get out so i don't care if it's a bubble, i care if the bubble is going to pop. but trump isn't getting what he wants (it's his own fault), and all that's happening is political fighting. i'm too risk adverse for this.

i'm looking at buying bonds, right now. the direction carney is heading in is suggesting to me that that's the better idea, right now.

when a salesperson tries to sell you fdi as economic sovereignty through a shit-eating grin and a spate of bad hockey analogies, he is trying to sell you a bridge full of used cars. this is horribly dishonest on behalf of mr. carney.

canada needs to wise up and realize they've been sold a bad deal that's going to get worse.

we need to shake off the dazed confusion that carney's trade war distraction is creating and start to get a better understanding of what these policy shifts mean in terms of how much control we have over our own resources and our own economic future.

https://www.canadianaffairs.news/2026/06/05/is-carneys-foreign-investment-push-in-canadas-best-interests/

trudeau did adjust to the nixon shock by trying to mitigate it but the shift from public to private lending was too much to control, in the end.

we've been here before. this is a return to harperism and all of the same threats that harper posed to the country's stability, it's sovereignty and it's resilience. we need to mobilize against carney the same way we mobilized against harper.

https://www.policyalternatives.ca/news-research/april-2006-selling-off-our-country/

instead of using government finances to develop resources for the benefit of canadians, mr. carney wants to sell canada off by the dollar to the highest bidder, which will often include state institutions in horrible countries in places like the middle east. this is modern colonialism, and canada is being colonized for the benefit of foreign investors in foreign lands.

the result is that canadians will work for foreign capital, as slaves to foreign investors, and the profits will get extracted from the country, leaving us with nothing to show for the hard work we did. canadians will have their natural resources stolen from them, while an international elite of global capital gets all the profits. canadians will not get any of the profits, and will not be able to reinvest them in anything.

this economic model should be rejected. canadians should oppose governments that facilitate foreign investors buying out the country and should instead support local government funding (via loans from the bank of canada) to develop the resources on behalf of canadians, and ensure canadians own, operate and benefit from them. i suspect that this is what most canadians thought they were voting for. i don't think many canadians voted to end the economic relationship with the united states and replace it with a neo-colonial relationship with despotic arab oil sheikhs in qatar and the uae.

i would call for a confidence vote and for the opposition to properly explain what is happening. i am confident canadians will reject these ideas, once they are honestly explained to them, which carney has not done. carney has been exceedingly dishonest and is not a trustworthy actor. canadians demonstrated their naivete in trusting somebody that showed up from outside the country with an apparently pre-determined set of goals. this was a tremendous mistake. carney is not here to save us, he's here to destroy us.

the most egregious consequence of american hegemony was the collapse of bretton woods and the subsequent rise of private lending in replace of public funding, on the demand of the americans, who were trying to prevent their dollar from collapsing in the oil embargo. trudeau caved out of fear of consequence, and he wasn't wrong, but the results have been devastating for wealth redistribution in canada. it's been trickle-up, and trickle-out, ever since. if american hegemony is ending, the first thing we should do is abolish private lending, and return to public funding for infrastructure. but carney doesn't want to reverse american hegemony, he wants to reinforce it. he's not upset at the hegemon for being the hegemon, he's upset at the hegemon for not being the hegemon. he wants a return of american hegemony, not the overthrow of it.

carney's rhetoric about independence and control is complete bullshit. he's using a phony war with the united states as smoke and mirrors, as a distraction, in order to sell us off to the highest bidder, and we will lose control over everything when he does. his definition of "success" will come at a high benefit to foreigners in europe and the middle east and at a severe loss to canada and canadians.

i would rather be invaded by the united states than sold off to the middle east and would welcome the americans in as liberators if it comes down to it. carney's proposed solution is worse than the problem.

https://globalnews.ca/news/12057479/mark-carney-investment-summit-protests/

if mr. carney, or his wife, want to go back to europe, they should resign and go. 

we can put a sign that says "just visiting" on his empty seat in the house, until they call a byelection.

does mr. carney's wife want to go home, now?

is that it?

it's a shitty reason to ruin a country.

i'm confused.

if canada joins the eu, as a full member or an associate member, despite obviously not being a european country, or having a european population, or even having european culture or institutions, it would then accept the terms of trade with the united states that the eu accepted, which was an across the board tariff. further, the europeans would also demand the end of supply management in dairy, which is one of the points holding up the ceta.

in fact, trump's concerns are almost exactly the same issues the europeans (particularly the french) have been bringing up for years.

so, the end results would be:

- we'd have to make the same concessions trump is demanding

- we'd have infinitely worse terms with the united states, and become a junior partner in a us-mexico relationship

the mexicans would get everything. we'd get nothing.

this doesn't seem to be about trade.

it seems to be about carney's identity as a white person.

the eu should comprehend that it's dealing with an unstable person in mark carney and walk away. it should also remind mr. carney that several member states have yet to ratify ceta because they have substantive concerns with canadian trade practices.

unlike the americans, the europeans don't use rbst. but they won't accept our beef, either. there's some pretty hard blocks in ceta and it's not likely to get resolved soon.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/article/carney-pushes-idea-of-making-canada-associate-member-of-eu-wsj-reports/

my kelp came in yesterday and i took my first 1/4 this morning. so let's update this again:

pills

- vitamin b-complex and c pills are being cut in 4 and taken every six hours (00:00, 6:00, 12:00, 18:00).

- 100 iu of vitamin e at 0:00 on mondays, wednesdays and fridays, with sunday left optional.

- minimum meal at 3:00 on days where i did not have a part of a scheduled meal at all on the previous day. move to 9:00 if 3:00 impossible.

- 160 mcg of iodine with unmeasured levels of epa/dha as kelp at 6:00 every day

- 1000 iu of d at 12:00 every day

- 1 tbsp of flax in water at 15:00 (1.7 of ala) every day

- 2500 iu of vitamin a at 18:00 every day

- 800 mg of elemental calcium after meals

- i'm deciding not to take pills for vitamin k. 

- note that i drink at least 250 ml of soy and 4 mini cups of coffee a day and usually closer to twice that, constant consumption.

minimum meal

a stainless steel mixing bowl with:

- 3 tbsp of raw, unroasted, unsalted, hulled sunflower seeds (longstanding)

- 3 tbsp of hulled hemp seeds (longstanding)

- 3 tbsp of chia seeds (bought, added)

- 3 tbsp of wheat bran (longstanding)

- 3 tbsp of soy lecithin <------not yet

- 30 g of all bran (longstanding)

- 1 tbsp of paprika (longstanding)

- 1 tbsp of ground cumin (longstanding)

- 1 tbsp of dried oregano (longstanding)

- 2 cloves of garlic (longstanding)

- 1 beet (longstanding)

- 1 avocado (longstanding)

- 50 g broccoli (longstanding)

- dried dill, caesar, hot sauce, nutritional yeast for flavour (yeast does have some b vitamins still) (longstanding)

with

- one banana (longstanding, bought)

- one orange (longstanding, bought)

- two pieces of untoasted quinoa-flax bread with canola-olive hummus (longstanding)

- one tum (longstanding)

this altogether has

- around 1000 mg of sodium. ish. which is a decent minimum meal amount.

- 180%+ rdi for magnesium

- 160%+ rdi for phosphorus

- some sulfur in the garlic, broccoli

- 110%+ of the rdi for potassium

- 120%+ rdi for calcium

- 210%+ of rdi for manganese

- 30+ mg of iron (elemental) (300% of a 10 mg rdi but i have absorption issues and need it)

- 195%+ of rdi for copper

- 125%+ of rdi for zinc

- 125%+ rdi for selenium

- 110%+ rdi for molybdenum (not including the high amount in soy milk that isn't bioavailable)

- 106%+ rdi for iodine

not measured:

- boron

- fluoride (windsor's water is back to being fluoridated, that should be fine)

- silicon (several of my pills have silicon, which is not a nutrient, but which clears harmful aluminum by binding to it)

- chlorine (i should get enough in the city water in windsor)

- chromium (trace from mixing bowl)

- nickel (trace from mixing bowl)

+

- 175%+ of the rdi for choline (960 mg) & an additional 100% in the form of betaine (550 mg).

- some inositol and salicylic acid in the orange

- extra food-based vitamins (carotenoids, b vitamins, a little c, some d, a fair amount of e and some k)

- 12+ g of omega-3s

- 23+ g of omega-6s (< 2:1 ratio)

- minimal saturated fat for absorption (some in the dressing, avocado, soy lecithin)

- 55+ g of mostly complete protein, which is about right on the rdi for my weight, maybe a little more. i would prefer to barely meet the rdi or just miss it for protein. excess protein is hard on your body and stored inefficiently as fat. high protein diets are stupid.

- some carbs. whatever. carbs aren't worth measuring.

- substantive fibre. also not worth measuring.

- low glucose

- it's all stored the same way. your body uses less energy to process carbs and more energy to process protein but it does the same thing with excess amounts of them, which is store it as fat. what i'm more interested in is the fact that flax, hemp, chia, soy, quinoa and in fact also sunflower are all complete proteins and have all 9 essential amino acids, although the sunflower seeds are low in lysine (and high in vitamin e, selenium, omega-6s). i'm not aiming for a protein salad, but this would be pretty effective if i was.

this is inevitably going to end up being a vehicle for mr trudeau to demonstrate how absurdly ignorant about everything he really is, absent filters from the party.

the cringe that keeps on cringing is unfortunately likely to get a lot worse.

trudeau's basic political positions and intuitions are firmly on the right of the political spectrum. this could get confusing, for some people, but i welcome it as overdue.

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/justin-trudeau-says-new-production-company-aims-to-change-minds

to get back to parity, you'd be looking at needing something like $150/barrel, adjusted for inflation.

it's currently less than $100, in adjusted dollars.

in the modern economy, inflation is caused primarily by increases in capital inputs, which would also include taxes, tariffs, labour costs and energy prices, in addition to more traditional fluctuations in the price of inputs. for that reason, the primary cause of the last round of inflation was energy prices. that's why the inflation-adjusted price of oil is almost flat, despite it seeming like oil rose steeply.

you can walk away with the understanding, if you didn't already know it, that the cad/usd exchange is pegged to the inflation-adjusted price of oil in usd, but that steep spikes in either direction in the price of oil tend to get blunted by the exchange rate. a 70% crash in the price of oil might only be a 20% crash in the cad, while smaller fluctuations are matched in the exchange rate more closely. you'd consequently need both a steep and a sustained hike in oil (adjusted for inflation) to actually get the cad up.

i apologize if my lack of precision in previous posts created confusion, but the people nitpicking me are dubious sources of information with ideology issues that you shouldn't take seriously.

just a reminder that $110 in today's currency (usd) is about $60 in 2000 dollars and about $77 in 2013 dollars. there's been a lot of inflation.

conversely, the exchange rate (cad/usd) is a ratio so it is not altered by inflation.

currency is not a real market. all currency trading is manipulation. the idea that you can increase or decrease the value of a currency by buying more or less of it is the same right-wing error in logic that leads conservatives to argue that printing money creates inflation (which is an error. money creation does not lead to inflation.). this is the kind of flunkie economics that you frequently hear from conservatives running for office, but that has no empirical basis and is essentially never repeated by academics. that paper by milton friedman was withdrawn but conservatives never got the memo, or don't seem to care.

printing money does not lead to inflation, and buying up a specific currency does not drive the value of it up. it's the same flunkie right-wing mistake frequently made by ignorant conservatives that think they understand economics and don't understand economics at all. 

while it is true that an extremely disciplined market might in theory not follow price signals, most trading is done by large institutions. in fact, most trading is done by software and is increasingly done by ai. it's actually quite predictable and increasingly so.

for oil to be selling at $110 dollars in 2013 dollars today, it would need to be to be upwards of $160. for it to be selling at $110 dollars in 2000 dollars, it would need to be over $200.

i found this chart of oil prices adjusted for inflation, and you can see that oil prices are nowhere near their peaks when the cdn dollar was close to parity with the usd. in fact, the value of oil as adjusted for inflation has actually decreased recently. this is a reflection of how much inflation has occurred since the pandemic, which itself was a result of hikes in the cost of oil. 

for that reason, oil prices have a kind of moderating effect. you might be annoyed that the price of gas is rising, but when you compare it total inflation and the value of the us dollar, it tends to be misleading as to where the actual objective value of things is headed. 

narratives by fake leftists (who are actually conservatives pretending to be left-wing) that the iran war increased the price of oil are in truth actually false, when the price of oil is properly adjusted for inflation. these people are not good sources of information and should not be trusted at face value. you need to fact check what they're telling you very carefully. the us dollar has been falling over the same time period (relative to the euro), so it cancels out in terms of real value and in terms of international currency. but these two things (inflation-adjusted price of oil and usd) are deeply interconnected, it's a kind of feedback loop.

this is a chart of the usd/cad exchange rate and it follows the inflation-adjusted oil chart very closely. that is, the shape of it, not necessarily the peaks.

but i'm not showing you anything that a professional wouldn't tell you is obvious.

it's only the market fundamentalist right-wing conservative flunkies, and their fake left progressive wannabes, that would challenge the point to begin with by citing simplistic mathematical models (you see these models in economics 101 and if you had a good prof she told you they're bullshit and told you not to take them seriously on the first day of classes) as predictive and by ignoring the empirical facts which show that they aren't. the connection between oil and the cad is common knowledge.

i'll reiterate that a market doesn't automatically have to follow price signals, but it will, and it's more predictable now than it ever has been due to the large volume of trading done by software and ai for big funds and whatnot. it would take an unrealistic amount of volume for a bad actor to get in there and fuck with it. it's almost impossible.

there's consequently little threat of the us fed manipulating canada's currency. the theory that the flunkies are promoting is fringe and debunked. that would not work.

steep hikes in the price of oil - adjusted for inflation - would do it, and not much else would.