i don't watch tv. i have no idea what this is.
but i suspect it's just confirming what every american already knew, which is that all canadians are gay. right?
is there an american hockey player on the show yet? i bet he knows the ten commandments.
Wednesday, January 28, 2026
i want to walk back something i said about the gst rebate the other day because i appear to have been mislead.
the initial reports said the gst rebate would increase by 25% for the next four years.
what that usually means is 25% per year for the next for years. for me, that would be:
(540*1.25^4 - 540) = (1318.36 - 540) = 778.36
778.36/4 = 194.59, and that's almost back to where the carbon tax rebates were, at around $200/quarter.
i therefore suggested the gst rebates were replacing the abolished carbon tax rebates, which were abruptly taken away without compensation, which was extremely harmful to almost all low income canadians.
however, that appears to not be what the government intended. rather, they appear to be using confusing language, and apparently meant that they are going to increase the amount once by 25%, and take it away after four years. that would amount to an extra (540*1.25-540) = $135/year over the next four years. quarterly, that would be $33.75 per check for the next four years, and then that will apparently disappear, as well.
i understand that it's an hst rebate, so it's intended to return the amount of taxes i paid on groceries. for myself, because i actually buy food when i'm at the grocery store, i pay essentially no taxes on groceries. food is not taxed in canada. the only item in my normal diet with hst added to it is doritos. the items that i would buy at a grocery store that are taxed are thing like toothpaste and shampoo, and when you add it up entirely, i probably make money quarter over quarter on the gst rebate.
but this does not come close to replacing the carbon tax rebate checks, or the increasing amounts that ow income canadians were set to receive from it in upcoming years, and the government disappointingly still has no plan put forward to replace those quarterly subsidies.
i qualified for the dtc, and i have been able to replace that lost subsidy with the cdb, and then some. i also qualified for the cohb. overall, i'm better off than i was last year, as i found ways to compensate.
many canadians did not and i am still looking to this government to explain how it intends to compensate low income canadians for the ghosted carbon tax rebate checks.
the reality is that anybody anywhere in the anglosphere who has studied the issue formally in any abstraction would know that it was settled british law to let the french settlers keep their culture and any dickhead or asshole british administrators trying to force english culture on the french would have actually probably gone to jail. it's not exactly common knowledge, but it's not exactly esoteric wisdom, either.
the reality is that while carney likes to cite rudimentary sources like thucydides (i read that in first year classics, too. greek civ 101.) in a pretentious way that is intended to make him look smarter than the average bear and smarter than he actually is, any actually educated person would realize that the two speeches, at davos and in quebec, actually both demonstrate deep levels of ignorance regarding the issues he's actually dealing with today, which are not homo economicus.
the reality is that if you were listening to carney speak carefully, and you actually understood what he said, you know he mostly made a fool of himself. the reality is he's been continually doing that for well over a year. he sounds smart, if you aren't, but what he actually is is overwhelmingly pretentious. he's actually continually thoroughly demonstrating that he's in way over his head and has no idea what he's doing or what he's talking about.
there's been a lot of attempt to study the way that economists think because it seems to be drastically different than the way almost everybody else thinks. the homo economicus syndrome is a manifestation of sociopathy in the form of a personality disorder. mark carney would seem to be a prime example in demonstrating the sociopathic symptoms of homo economicus syndrome, which uniquely presents in economists.
i have in the past suggested watching the corporation to understand mark carney.
i did not previously know the role that francis bacon played in developing the common law of conquest, as it was used in canada, and elsewhere in the british empire. i was taught the common law of conquest in a 3rd year university course on indigenous law in the process of getting my third degree at carleton, in sociology of law. they put down the law in a textbook format, attributed it to blackstone, stated it, said it was based on roman law, and didn't get much more into it than that.
so i just learned something, myself.
i slept briefly this morning, for about an hour, with a pair of jeans on. i was exhausted from sitting up for a long time to eat and just wanted to stretch out and i nodded off. i got up to defecate and was awake. i'm fairly sure i did not have any holes or rips in these jeans when i went to sleep and do recall looking at one of my knees some time last night, because i had to bend down to pick something up. i noticed when i got up that i had what looks like bite marks and scratch holes in both of my knees.
i was not bitten through my jeans.
i tend to sleep in the fetal position and that is bad for pants. but these jeans weren't just ripped from wear. there are puncture holes on both of the knees.
there is still absolutely no trace of them in here. but i'm a little worried.
i don't have any food for them to eat in the basement and thought i had chased them out of here for that reason. i imagine they have very poor bowel control and that if i can't find anything it's because they aren't here.
i also want to point something out about what carney said the other day in quebec, given that quebec nationalists did not like it very much.
it's certainly true that carney's speech was remarkably naive. carney framed the relationship between canada's french and english as being some kind of historic anomaly of tolerance and enlightenment. the quebec nationalists jumped at that to point out centuries of assimilationist policy.
in fact, it's worth pointing out that the english did not do anything novel in quebec at all, but rather followed very clear existing british imperial precedent. the actual law in place in the british empire at the time, which the british empire applied all over the world, was that when you conquer a people in tact, you have to allow them to keep their own laws, language and religion. that wasn't something uniquely canadian, the british applied that rule everywhere, to everyone, and the british precedent actually came from roman law, as brought into the british system via common law. the romans allowed conquered people to keep their culture, so long as they paid their taxes. the issue was placed before the english judiciary, who studied it, and adopted the roman position.
there is nowhere in the broad british empire where the british conquered a people and enforced their language or laws on them. in india, for example, the local legislature only governed british settlers. the local indians were allowed to keep their laws. but, eventually, they opted to reform their system to adopt a legislature.
now, it's true that some random brits have run their mouth off over the years.
but quebec still has civil law, still speaks french and still has more catholics than protestants, even as it has moved towards a policy of secularism after the quiet revolution. canada has broadly followed the british imperial law, rooted in roman law, and allowed quebeckers to maintain their culture.
the truth is that donald trump, who has publicly repeatedly claimed he doesn't believe in climate change at all and suggested it's a chinese plot, is now essentially imagining effects of climate change in the near future that will require centuries to arrive at. donald trump didn't listen to the scientists when he was denying climate change, and his perception of how the arctic is going to open up is now rooted in fantasy, not science.
the science suggests that it may be the case that the north pole might be ice free for a week or two in the summer by 2060. the polar regions would continue to freeze in the winter. i am not aware of any predictions of the northwest passage actually opening up year round at all. there are some suggestions that it might be open for four months some years some time in the 2100s. it's about a 2 month journey through the passage, so even a four month time window is barely usable, unless you want to winter on the other side. projections for a truly usable northwest passage are so far in the future, and would require so much unchecked global warming, that they're barely worth contemplating.
the reality is that the shipping lanes are not opening up and that, even in the worst case scenarios, it's going to be at least 100 years before this is even worth seriously talking about.
what does that actually mean, though?
it means a shipping lane full of dangerous ice bergs and unpredictable weather events. if the passage is three weeks slow in opening, or freezes over six weeks early one year due to weather, you could lose billions of dollars. nobody is going to rely on that any time in the near future.
there are real ramifications of climate change on shipping that the science supports, like an ice free, year round great lakes shipping route. hudson bay may become accessible year round.
but the reality is that the giant arctic ice sheets are not going anywhere for many decades or centuries to come - not even in worst case scenarios, which climate activists still hope to prevent.
if the idiot savants running nato continue to argue that a peace agreement with russia must include nato "peacekeepers" in ukraine, which is the outcome that russia invaded to prevent, then the russians will have no alternative but to continue to grind the ukrainians down until they get to the dnieper, even if it takes 20 years.
my packaging doesn't have a size, but i'm underestimating. these pitas appear to be 7" across, each.
the area of two 7" inch pizzas is calculated as:
2(π*(3.5)^2) = 24.5π.
the square root of 24.5 is a little less than 5. so, two of these things is equivalent to a 10" pizza made by a dishonest cook trying to rip you off a half inch, which is probably all of them.
i would split the recipe up, but the point is to make as much as i can get out of a can of tomato paste, and that's two medium pizzas, apparently.
my pizza is a little different this time, but it's a constant that, while the recipe makes 4, i can only eat two at a time. i haven't measured these but they're perhaps 4-5" pizzas. it's two small pizzas, but two very small pizzas. but also two very loaded very small pizzas.
- put the bacon on first
- chop one large green pepper into four parts and cut each one into small bits, and put them in small bowls
- chop up roughly a third of a fresh pineapple into chunks
- grate an entire block of mozarella cheese
- put four greek pitas on baking trays. i have two on a cookie tray, one on a pizza tray and one in a square casserole dish
- you may want to put olive oil on the pitas first
- on each pita, sprinkle: (1) dried dill, (2) basil, (3) oregano, (4) thyme
- also put hot sauce on it
- when the bacon is done, transfer it to a plate to let it cool, slightly
- note that i cook my bacon in olive oil margarine. so the remaining grease has bacon grease, olive oil and canola oil. rub that on your pitas with a small spoon to create a kind of pesto.
- rub the tomato sauce on over that
- then put the green peppers, pineapple, bacon, olives and whatever else
- put the cheese on
- bake
- cut four avacodo halves up into small chunks and put them into four small containers
- put a small amount of diced garlic in each container
- when it comes out of the oven, put the avocado/garlic topping on
- but a tablespoon of nutritional yeast (with b12) on it
- use more hot sauce
- slice it into four
- if you can lift this with your hands, congratulations.
- the pita will crisp up, but it should be pretty loaded
- you are probably better off using a fork
it's still not clear what this is, but the large amount of indigenous american items (avocados, green peppers, avocados) suggest it may be some kind of loaded quesadilla, as much as anything else. it's a franco-greek-mexican-italian pizza-like thing.
Tuesday, January 27, 2026
yeah, i'm zonked.
i've been sleeping for days. i've been through two boxes of kleenex. i'm totally dehydrated.
if i did pick something up at the doctor's office on wednesday, i can understand why they were there.
but, if that's the case, it should pass in the next day or two. if i'm still sick on monday, i'm going to need to get to a doctor.
no signs of bubos or bleeding. my eyes look normal. i think it's a bad cold or covid.
i'm going to make some more pizza and go from there. i hope to have my head cleared in the next 24-48 hours, or i'm going to get worried.
how can i make sense of this?
it might be that "moderate" regional actors, like egypt, who have been critical of the new regime in syria, which is clearly a fascist government, are concerned that they might destabilize their own countries. egypt doesn't align well in the normal islamic theocracy v democracy spectrum in the middle east. egypt is a totalitarian, mostly secular state that is most likely to be destabilized by islamists and would observe their rise in syria or palestine with extreme caution.
graham may be pulling somewhat of a cato in seeking to divide and conquer a little, and that's standard american policy, in a way that might escape trump or go over his head.
it is not in america's interest to have a strong islamist state in syria or to continue to allow the turks to devolve back into ottoman authoritarianism. if this is graham's way to get that across, i have to agree with him, which doesn't happen too often.
legislation with teeth to protect the kurds would apply to syria, turkey, iraq and iran.
america's new friends don't seem to be very good friends.
but america is not a good friend, and donald trump is a very bad friend.
so, you know. you get what you deserve.
the reason that the turks and saudis are both dead-set on this, despite both being in a longstanding cold war again iran, is that they worry that the precedent will be set against them. and they're right.
i don't think that torpedoing khamenei's residence is going to topple the regime. it might, maybe, moderate it. he's a fucking stubborn old man and his time to die is already past.
i don't think removing mbs in saudi arabia would help either, as he actually appears to be more moderate than the older generation, which is still technically in charge. mbs is but a mere prince. he might even still get snubbed. it happened to bandar bush.
i do think that taking erdogan out would be helpful to the turkish people, but i don't think that's on any table except the anarchist's table, and that table is not invited to the white house.
could you imagine the germans or the danes or the french denying america access to their air space? the turks are even in nato.
with friends like these, who needs enemies?
this would be a complete nightmare scenario. we'd be forced to adopt widespread market economics and would cease to be canada. we'd might as well let the americans conquer us.
canada's population should be relatively small to maintain our social services and way of life - it should be in the 30-35 million people range. there are already too many people here, and the government should already be trying to reduce the population.
that didn't happen. it's 19:00 and i've been sleeping soundly since 5:00.
while the officers did have grounds to use non lethal force, and had justification to arrest him for physically resisting, and, if i was there in the crowd, and i knew he had a gun, i'd be happy to see him go away, there were no grounds to repeatedly shoot him with intent to kill at short range, and kristi noem's description of the events has no reflection on reality. and this is not the first time.
she should resign or be fired.
Monday, January 26, 2026
i slept all day again.
i'm sneezing every few minutes and i'm exhausted. my head is throbbing. but i think i'm awake for the first time in a few days. i'm congested, but i'm not swollen, and i'm not bleeding. it seems to just be a really bad head cold.
i ate some oranges to use them and to wake me up. there's nothing quite as delicious as fruit when you're sick and i do have extra oranges because they were on sale. i bought about 20 oranges for $3; in fact, it was about 40 oranges for $6. i'll be eating pizza for the next 7-10 days but i'm gong to wait until the morning or maybe until the evening. i may eat a few more oranges instead. oranges are a staple in my salads, so i can never have too many, but i'm happy to have them now, too..
i'm going to get some tylenol, brush my teeth and make some coffee.
i think i can get my bed set up in here tonight and get back to work.
i am also in favour of government directing increases in greenhouses, to boost what anarchists call "food sovereignty". i would prefer to see direct investment rather than tax cuts, but i want to give the state a hint about this.
this was actually one of the very few policies brought in by stephen harper that i supported, and you might want to take note of carney once again copying harper. but, harper was right about this. here in southern ontario, greenhouses provide stability for year-round growing seasons, and there was a brief period where you could buy gorgeous locally grown hydroponic tomatoes, peppers and strawberries here in windsor, for cheap.
then they legalized marijuana.
i bicycled from windsor to leamington once a few years ago. amherstburg is less than an hour on a bicycle, but leamington was a full day ride, both ways. i did get back into town before the sun came down. you can smell the marijuana production coming into town from about 10 km away, and the stench overwhelms the whole town. perhaps the residents have gotten used to it, like those who live by niagara falls are used to the sound of the rushing water.
to my dismay, i slowly started seeing the affordable local hydroponic produce disappear. it's obvious that what happened is that virtually all of the greenhouses switched to marijuana grow-ops instead. a few weeks ago, i was not even able to find tomatoes in my grocery store at all, here in what, until recently, was called the tomato growing capital of the world. i had to go to walmart and buy tomatoes imported from mexico.
if you want the greenhouses to grow food and not drugs, you need to write the policies with this understanding in mind and with the realization that there may simply be little you can actually do to get independent growers to grow food instead of drugs, besides growing it under direct state control.
i think that a crown corporation for greenhouse production of produce, specifically, would be the best way to approach this. the government should mandate certain nutrient proportions in the slurry to ensure the food is legitimately healthy, as well. plants absorb what you give them, and you can pump a plant up with almost anything, if you give it to it at the root.
the other issue is labour. i don't have anything against mexicans, exactly, but i don't like the idea of importing mexican slaves to work in greenhouses. this government has made a lot of ai and should realize that robotic fruit pickers are now a thing that exists in reality.
it would be massively beneficial for canadians for the canadian government to eat the capital costs in purchasing this means of production, and holding it in public hands. if we are to have collective ownership of the means of any production, robot fruit pickers in state owned greenhouses is the best way to start.
otherwise, you should be prepared to deal with (1) the reality that drugs are more profitable than food and (2) issues with importing labour to do the work.
again with the competition. always with the competition. there he goes again about the competition.
i'm a poor canadian with an education. you should ask me.
in fact, the carbon tax credit/rebate was extremely useful to me as i spend $0 on gas directly, due to not having a car, and the inflation was mostly not being caused by the carbon tax directly, although the increases in gas prices coming from global instability did lead to increases in fertilizer prices, and that was a major cause of the inflation. some people claim that grocery stores are just being greedy, and there are specific items sold in grocery stores that get insanely marked up for huge profits to compensate, but actual food is practically sold at cost in canada. the factors driving inflation in food (specifically. just food.) are due to production costs, not greed. but if your favourite pre-made chocolate cake at loblaws is 4x as much as it was five years ago, or your brand name detergent is 5x as much, that's how they compensate and pull in these crazy profits.
shifting the carbon tax rebate to the gst refund, without levying a carbon tax in between, will at least make up for that lost income, which very low income canadians will find very helpful. some conservative called it "chump change". well, it's easy to say that when you're not very poor, but that chump change could be the $50 of pasta you need that month. this is responsible in that sense, as it's targeted towards low income groups that need it, should not be inflationary and was, i always argued, the value of the carbon tax in the first place. i never expected that the carbon tax would reduce carbon use. when faced with a high gas bill, canadians will choose to pull their kids out of hockey, or reduce discretionary spending, instead of address the gas bill. there are ways around high energy costs that don't require "innovation", and taxes are never going to "spur innovation", but canadians are so culturally tied to using gas as a way of life that they won't think to do it, even when faced with steep increases in costs. canadians are trained to tighten their belts during down periods in order to pay the bills, and that's what we saw.
in order for the carbon tax to do what it was supposed to do, it would require huge amounts of social conditioning to get people to think differently about their spending decisions. canadians are famously socially liberal and fiscally conservative and trained for that belt-tightening, rather than to innovate or look for ways around high bills. at best, they might try to reduce usage, but that's not the point of the tax. we've had a problem in canada of finding the right policies but refusing to do good implementation because the government constantly argues that the market will figure it out.
no. the. market. won't. figure. it. out.
so, when we rolled out heroin decriminalization, we abandoned the portugese model that it was supposed to be built on and instead brought in this market libertarian pipe dream and watched it blow up in our face. when we increased immigration through the roof, we just flew them in and dumped them on the street, rather than spend to build the integration services, because that's what the market is for. when we brought in a carbon tax, the government avoided talking about it, in the mistaken belief that it would just work, and the market would figure it out, when the government should have been running constant ads everywhere explaining what it was and how to adjust. no, don't pull your kids out of hockey. get a hybrid instead. etc.
for now, this replaces the income subsidy that the very poor had come to rely on in the face of the coincidental brutal inflation because they don't burn gas directly, and which was abruptly taken away from them. that shouldn't have happened; there should have been a plan to transition. but if they're fixing it, great. that takes us back to where we were last year, at least.
as for the cost of groceries, people should make more of their own food, to start. there's a connection between healthy eating and affordable eating. unfortunately, in both canadian and american society, the more wealthy eat better and pay less, and the less wealthy tend to eat worse and pay more. there's a problem of education underlying this, tied into class and tied into lifestyle.
if you want to stick it to loblaws, don't buy that premade cake. buy some produce instead.
apparently, this is actually something mice do when they're courting, is leave nesting gifts. i don't imagine the rodent is quite that confused, but it's still a known act of affection.
a mouse would like my diet.
a mouse would like the pizza. right?
there was nothing left out for them to get at, but if they smelled it and/or watched me make it, it could conceivably want to hang out.
if it stays in the wall and eats roaches, whatever. but if it's going to crawl into my bed and make me sick, that's not cute, and it has to go.
if the mouse was a pet, it might have slept on beds? i dunno. mice are smart animals, and they apparently have long memories. if i'm right, the mouse seems to be crawling up in bed with me when i'm sleeping and leaving me items it thinks belong in a nest, like leaves and insulation, apparently as some kind of gift.
it's easier to want to kill them when they're making you sick, and if this is the source, i have to kill it. but i also want to understand this.
i still can't find any clear evidence of rats or mice in my apartment directly, but i'm again finding some odd suggestions that there's something in here.
the animals in the ceiling are roof rats. that's clear at this point. i also think there's at least one house mouse around somewhere, but it's very elusive.
as mentioned, i was cooking with pineapple last night and i have a virus, or something. i am noticing two thing waking up:
1) while i was careful to clean it up before i went to sleep, i found a cm^2 sized pineapple leaf beside me when i woke up.
2) the used kleenexes were on the other side of the room, under the table
i suppose it's possible that i might have kicked one of the used kleenexes when i got up to urinate and i might have accidentally got the little bit of pineapple leaf in my hair when i was cooking, but this isn't the first time that i've woken up with the perception that a mouse is trying to befriend me for chasing off the rats, although i'm not sure what it's eating down here if that's the case, besides maybe bugs.
i don't want to nest with the mouse, but if i can't find a reason to get it out of here, i'll leave it alone, especially if it is eating insects.
i wouldn't normally make pizza. i like pizza, certainly, but pizza is junk food and something i will order and have made for me. i'm the same way with hamburgers. i will make myself lots of things, but i will order pizza.
however, they gave me a small stack of tomato sauce when i was at the food bank last fall because it was piling up. nobody wanted it. so i grabbed it, and i'm going to make "pizza" with it.
my dad used to make these cheeseless mini pizzas on english muffins that were extremely italian - they had no cheese on top, but were rather loaded with basil and oregano on top of the sauce, and something on them like olives or tomatoes and often chopped ham. they were really english muffins baked with tomato sauce and topped with pesto. this is something approaching traditional italian pizza rather than the franco-american pizza we eat today in north america. his third wife had an aversion to cheese and would get upset even watching somebody else eat it, so there was no cheese on anything he made (these mini pizzas, spaghetti, penne, whatever), unless i put it on when i ate the leftovers. all leftovers went to me, because she wouldn't eat leftovers, either; she insisted on only eating prepared food, and would just throw out whatever wasn't eaten, if nobody would stop her. dad would shrug off the cheese, but he couldn't accept the food waste, and i was happy to eat the leftovers as it gave me the ability to schedule eating when i wanted to - after school, in the morning or, sometimes, at 3:00, when i came in from somewhere, and was watching rereuns of star trek. her aversion to leftovers meant there was always something in there to microwave when i came home, even if i didn't come home for supper that night, or even if they brought something back from a restaurant, and that was actually very helpful to me, as a young person. you would need at least four, sometimes eight, of these mini pesto pizzas on english muffins to fill you up, as a meal. he'd make like 50 at a time and leave what was left in the fridge for me, and sometimes i'd eat them for a week at a time.
so, this is an idea i'm familiar with and have eaten a lot of. however, it's because of that that i'm going to address some of the defects with these mini pizzas i grew up on.
i did not know until recently that the words pita and pizza are actually the same word. so, i'm going to one up him a little on making this out of thick greek pitas, like this, and not out of english muffins:
but what i see is a small premade pizza dough, and that makes sense, because pizza and pita are the same word, and that is exactly what it is.
i am going to go through one can of sauce per meal and we'll see how many that is but i imagine it will be two or three. i bought a stack of them pre-made in the bread section at walmart and it should be enough to get through the sauce, i think.
when i buy a pizza, i don't order it with pesto and tomatoes, although i do like the ham and olives. depending on how much i want to spend and what i feel like, and what's on sale (2 or 3 toppings), my usual pizza toppings are, in hierarchy:
core, always:
- bacon
- olives
first add:
- pineapple
second add:
- extra cheese (but it usually doesn't count)
third add:
green peppers
i will put hot sauce on the pizza when available and, if i take it home, will prefer to make my own dipping sauce out of frank's + caesar.
i have all of these ingredients and will be using all of them, along with the following toppings on the cheese:
- avocado
- garlic
- oregano, thyme, basil
- nutritional yeast
i think we know how to make pizza, it's the ingredients here that are unusual:
- make the bacon first (don't fully cook)
- slice fresh pineapple, green peppers
- grate cheese
- start with the greek pitas
- put the sauce down, add hot sauce to tomato sauce
- rub some of the bacon grease around the edges of the pitas
- add green olives, bacon, pineapple, green peppers and anything else (grilled chicken, perhaps, but i'm not adding that ingredient)
- add cheese
- bake
- chop avocados, garlic while baking
- add avocadoes, garlic, spices, nutritional yeast, hot sauce to top of pitas when they come out
- slice them in four
there won't be crusts here, but if i want a dipping sauce, i'll mix frank's and caesar dressing together to make it.
update: i can get four pizzas out of one can, but it's too much. i used the following proportions:
- one can of sauce
- four greek pitas
- one large green pepper, in total
- about a third of a fresh pineapple
- four slices of bacon
- one block of mozarella, but this was maybe too little
- two avocados (one half on each pizza)
i still have two of them in the fridge.
c'est bien, mais c'est pas la pizza. i don't know what this is. if i put chicken on it, it might almost be a pizza souvlaki. the pitas actually do bake up like a pizza. is it a pizza beavertail? a pissaladere with pineapple? i dunno, but it's pretty good.
i don't know what i'm sick with, but i am sick.
there are rats in the ceiling. i do not believe they're down here. at all. i've seen no sign of them down here. no droppings. nothing chewed through. no food missing. there are clear entry points, and i'm working to identify and block them, but they don't seem to be coming down here. i think it's a combination of the facts that (1) i leave the lights on at night, (2) i'm usually awake at night, (3) my food is very well stored and (4) the main floor tenants turn the lights off at night, sleep all night and leave their food out. maybe they'd come down here if there wasn't so much easily accessible food upstairs. so, the rats are nesting in the ceiling and eating out of the upstairs kitchen, which is on top of my bathroom. i can hear them up there every night.
while i don't think they're down here, they are clearly directly above me, and they are urinating and defecating in the ceiling, and i can smell it. i've had stains coming down from the ceiling, and both food and droppings coming from holes or gaps in the ceiling, which i'm trying to find and cover up.
i'm consequently a little concerned about leptospirosis. about 95% of people survive leptospirosis. roughly. however, unlike covid, it doesn't target the elderly. being young and healthy is not going to help you against this one. it's a gamble with no clear way to predict the outcome. i would generally avoid anything with a 5% likelihood of death. that's too risky for me.
what i have is an upper respiratory infection, and it's pretty brutal, but i don't have signs of leptospirosis, yet. no blood shot eyes. no bleeding. no gastrointestinal concerns, besides a little heartburn. no jaundice. i have sore sinuses, but no headache, exactly. i want to keep an eye on this but i just don't have symptoms, or at least not yet.
right now, it looks like i must have picked up a flu or covid on wednesday when i went to an appointment. i woke up with a sore throat on thursday and started getting a runny nose on friday. i blew a lot of virus out of my nose over the weekend, but it's actually running clear tonight.
i am noticing that gurgling with high flouride toothpaste is helping with my throat, which is concerning as it suggests i'm killing bacteria in there. it's also one of those bugs where you feel better when you go to sleep and worse again when you wake up. viruses generally work the other way around. so this is making me a little concerned.
i know the symptoms to look for. the best thing i can do is keep an eye on it and call my doctor if i think i'm showing signs of more severe disease. i would want to get an anti-biotic to kill the bacteria. right now, if it is a bacteria from the rats, it's manifesting as a flu. and i was in a doctor's office with sick people the day before i got sick, albeit briefly.
i was never vaccinated for covid. i had some technical concerns with the type of vaccination being used, and i calculated that i just didn't need it. i am in a demographic with a 99.99% survival rate. i figured my immune system could handle the challenge. i don't know how true it really is, but i imagine our immune symptoms are stronger when they get more practice. i would have gotten vaccinated for something more scary, but i just was not afraid of covid, and i don't think the data suggests i should have been. further, i actually think i got covid before the pandemic started, at a plaid concert in detroit in late 2019. i may have carried it from detroit to toronto, when i went to file court documents there. i was never tested for antibodies. i did test clear of covid in 2021 when i went to get my orchiectomy, also in toronto. if that was the case, i had an early strain, and it may have been a little different than the pandemic strain, but i did not get substantively sick during the pandemic at all, and i may have never come across it. it's likely i'd get sick if i caught a recent strain.
but i can smell fine.
so i'm going to hope it's a flu and not a bacteria from the rats.
i'll also keep an eye out for bubos and you can be sure i'll be at the er if i see any swelling at all.. right now, i'm not swollen, at all. bubonic plague is actually easily treatable if you catch it early, but they might have to burn the city block down if they find it here.
i made a choice on thursday that i felt shitty enough to sleep it off before i focused on the court documents. i had to make that choice - i could try chugging coffee and hope it wakes me up and struggle through it, or try to sleep it off and get to work on it after, with the hope i'm more productive if i do. i decided to try to sleep it off. i consequently lost thursday, friday and saturday.
i was feeling good enough to get to work on saturday night, but right when i was about to start, my air purifier fell off my box spring, landed on my chromebook (it's ok), bounced off of it and knocked over a giant glass beer mug *full* of coffee. the mug is ok. by the time i got a towel, the coffee had created a mess on my mattress and box spring that had to be addressed by cleaning it.
i haven't set up my bedroom yet. the kitchen, bathroom and laundry are each mostly set up, but everything is still in boxes in the living space, the in-unit garage is empty and the other areas are full of storage items. i'm waiting on the weather, i'm waiting on the drug dealers to get evicted and i'm waiting on finishing the court documents. my mattress is on the floor. it's fine for now, but the spill required me to move some things, and it made sense to clean the floors and set a few things up, given i'm sick.
- i got a lot of dust off the floor. no signs of rodents in here.
- i also blocked off two obvious rodent holes, which i don't think have been used in here recently.
- i also sealed all the baseboards with caulking, which was to block off a draft
- i was able to glue the bottom leg on one of my tables, which had broken off in the previous move. it's fine.
it's ridiculously cold out and the caulking instantly helped. i hadn't initially noticed the draft in the floor. i was focused on the draft around the windows and actually surprised by the lack of one but couldn't figure out why the temperature in here dropped so fast without constant heat. that seems to be it.
unfortunately, the box spring took the brunt of the spill and absorbed enough of it that i was going to have to let to dry. i think i can get most of the discolouration out with dish soap, but i just wasn't getting anywhere, until the moisture evaporated. so i stopped early in the morning to eat my last caesar salad (for now, i'm out of kale) before switching to mini pizzas for the next week to eat up the tomato sauce i got from the food bank last fall, i feel asleep mid morning, got up to finish my salad and fell back asleep. i woke up without a sore throat today, but with a sore upper nose (nasal cavity). i've been sneezing a lot, but it's been clear snot since i cleared the last bit of yellow when i first woke up. that's a definite change from the gobs of yellow yesterday.
i still have to clean my box spring and set my bed up before i can get back to work, but it's time to eat again, so i'm going to make some of these pizzas. this is a new recipe so i'll go to a new post.
Sunday, January 25, 2026
right.
so, the repeated shots at close range are clearly unjustified. it's excessive force, and the officer should be charged with and tried for murder and go to jail for the rest of his life.
however, given that the guy got into a fight with a handful of cops (he seems to have been trying to prevent somebody from getting arrested, which he shouldn't have done. he should have kept filming and offered it as evidence.) and had a gun on him, the officers had grounds to use some amount of force, such as shooting him in the leg, in order to stop him from resisting. the officers knew he had a gun. he brought a gun to a protest. why? did he have explosives? other weapons?
there is no justification to shoot him repeatedly in the head, but there is justification to use force, and he should have been arrested and charged. he cannot help his friend by getting into a physical altercation with police. that won't prevent his friend from getting arrested. he can only put himself in danger and can only irrationally break the law. if he thinks his friend is being arrested for civil disobedience, and thinks it is illegal, the best way he can help is to document it for his friend's defence.
being a cop is hard. that's not an excuse, and this cop needs to go to jail. but this is not the same thing as what is happening in iran, at least not yet.
the number of dead civilians is continuing to rise and it's becoming clear that the iranians killed more of their own people in a week than the israelis killed in gaza in a year of the recent war there, and the numbers of dead in iran are continuing to climb.
newest estimates suggest the number of dead over a week this january is pushing 40,000.
still no comment from the western fake left, who have no solidarity with leftist comrades in arms, but restrict their solidarity to right-wing rapists and thugs that want to create a society similar to the one in iran, due to being heavily propagandized by islamist state media from the middle east. it's sad and disgusting.
the americans won't do with iran what i want done or what the democratic opposition wants done, but this regime will not fall without an army being raised to topple it, and the idea that there could be anything worse than the status quo in iran is stretching credulity.
let me soberly ask michiganders - not something i've done often in michigan, which those who know me will testify to - to weigh the facts in front of them.
trump wants to put a 100% tariff wall over the detroit river. you know what that's going to do.
given that fact, are you not better off in canada?
pierre trudeau did flirt with non-aligned status, and canada was certainly the most independent member of nato. but we were never fully non-aligned, and it would have been suicide to become non-aligned or leave nato.
there's actually a little irony here.
every time i hear trump say "you'll see" or some variant of it when asked a question, what i hear is "just watch me".
ok, here's some al from chicago. he can be a part of the united states of canada if he wants, too.
canadian news is keying in on that familiar phrase uttered by carney: it's a new world order.
what carney actually seems to want is the old world order in the sense that he wants to bring the cold war back. he claims we're not going back to a post-war order. i think he's wrong, but if bush was declaring a new world order on the collapse of communism that did away with global superpowers in favour of us hegemony, and most of the west went along with it, carney's proposed new world order, full of superpowers fighting and "middle powers" seeking a third way through non-alignment, actually looks a lot like the old one and that is consistent as much of the anglo-american elite never really accepted bush' new world order in the first place, was disinterested in being reprogrammed to fight terrorism and just kept fighting the communists through the post cold war period. i've remarked before that while my heart is in gen x, and i am the last gen xer, i realize that the anti-soviet propaganda pushed down on gen x from every direction, except punk rock, was so immense that we will need to wait for gen x to overturn before the west can let go of the cold war, and it's 2026 and we're still suffering through what must be the last of the boomer presidents. we haven't even got to gen x yet.
so, you can meet the new order. wrong band. it's the same as the old order. wrong song.
wrong square.
wrong date.
Saturday, January 24, 2026
jokes aside.
the idea that canada can just build a protective igloo across the border and go it alone isn't some kind of noble defiance. canada is not some righteous path in a sea of corruption. canada's as bad as any other capitalist actor, and in many ways we are worse. we will not survive.
churchill had his ass handed to him and needed help not just from the americans but from the soviets. his speeches of defiance were delusional hogwash. britain was on the brink. and he was a piece of shit, anyways.
if you want a history lesson, you might study the punic wars, or the trojan wars (as they've come down to us) or, yes, the peloponnesian war, too. you might look at the mongolian conquest of china, or of the collapse of the roman empire. there are tactics to use to get inside the larger, more powerful actor and eat away at it from the inside. the chinese infested the mongolian horde and came out in control of it. roman culture emerged in tact after the german invasions.
if canada wants to seriously survive, rather than carry out a performative form of "survival", it needs to leverage the allies it has in the united states, and it has a lot of them, and it has a lot of leverage.
i think any smart person will concede that merger is inevitable, as a merger of the north and south of china was, or a merger of italy and germany was, or a merger of scotland and england was. if we want our culture to survive and prosper in lieu of theirs, we need to approach the merger with an upper hand, and not run from it, or try to avoid it. if we do that, we will just be wiped out.
this is the right way to do this.
canadian sovereignty is stupid. trump's a dipshit, but this is inevitable, and he's catalyzing an eventuality. the question is whether we're going to merge in a way in which we have the upper hand and make america more canadian, or the other way around, and i vote for canadianizing america. so, if trump is going to insist on being an assface, let's get this started.
as chicago will be a part of the new united states of canada, let's quote al to start.
no, not that al from chicago.
the other one.
if trump wants to place a 100% tax on 15% of american goods, many of which are completely inelastic or at least have low elasticity, because there are no comparable substitutes and perpetual demand, he should go for it. let's see how that works out for him.
it makes no sense whatsoever to retaliate, except via the export taxes i've been pointing to since this started.
canada should place an export tax of 100% on all items that trump tariffs.
well.
if the argument is that he was simply defending his right to walk around with a gun, i wouldn't accept that. i would support the police shooting people walking around with weapons in public and would not support the idea that that's some kind of right. that's utterly retarded.
they might have perhaps shot him in the leg, instead. it seems like this was probably overkill, and the last several years of events in minnesota suggest there's a systemic problem in the police force in minnesota.
but i would, in principle, support shooting at people at protests with guns, and i would support that as a protester. it's not something that's ever come up here, but if i showed up to a protest group and there was a guy with a gun, i'd be on the other side of the square. i wouldn't go anywhere near him, wouldn't talk to him and would want him to go away. this guy showed up to a rally prepared for a war. that's not to say that the united states won't get to civil war in time, but it's not there, and i'm certainly not in support of people trying to get there.
the difference between the united states and iran is pretty overwhelmingly clear. in a democratic society, all civil disobedience should be non-violent. americans don't need to use violence to tear down a dictatorship and create a democracy, they have a system to work in. it's hard, but americans have what the rest of the world is fighting for, and there's no justification to use force when you lose an election and don't get what you want.
when donald trump goes to europe, he sees plain and modest buildings built for utility, while wealth is distributed more fairly to people. when donald trump goes to the middle east, he sees immense disparities in wealth, and ostentatious towers built of gold. therefore, the middle east is a rising society because it builds towers of gold on the backs of it's people, and europe is on the brink of collapse because it does not have these displays of wealth, and instead has better wealth redistribution.
the role that the united states has played in building and maintaining this order appears to be lost on him, as are the lessons of the revolutions of the past. more gold towers equals more success, and a higher likelihood of success in the future.
as a leftist, i'll happily take the mistake and call on the forces of democracy and liberation to take advantage of it.
there was a time after world war two when the united states understood that it had to occupy germany and japan, and then korea, and then poland, not in order to "protect them", but in order to subjugate them and force them to submit to american hegemony, because allowing them to rebuild and remilitarize posed not just a substantive threat to american security but the greatest threat to it. it was also calculated that forward positions in europe and asia would help contain eurasian powers, but this was secondary to the need to occupy and control america's enemies, which were germany and japan. the united states was aligned with both russia and china in world war two.
that correct thought process is no longer being considered by the pentagon, which is now concerning itself with resource extraction in the western hemisphere, in an attempted return to the distant past, which will fail on it's own accord. it is instead encouraging it's enemies to arm themselves so america doesn't need to "protect" them, as though they were there out of the goodness of their hearts, and not as occupying and pacifying forces, with the purpose of subjugating them.
instead, america seeks to align itself with the "rising powers" in the middle east, which are, in truth, the society that is on the brink of actual civilizational collapse. they are not following russian propaganda, they're being led by the arab lobby and easily distracted by the display of gold and outward wealth. but this distribution of wealth is false, as it reflects decisions in washington to buy oil from the middle east and increase european reliance on american defence systems. the europeans can defend themselves, but the muslims cannot.
what america is going to learn very quickly is that if it allows europe to "defend itself", it will immediately reassert itself as a threat to us interests and that if it gets out of the way in the middle east, the society will almost instantly collapse. the united states is not holding europe together, but it is propping up dictatorships in the middle east. this is the opposite of their calculations. germany does not need the united states to protect itself from russia, but saudi arabia does need the united states to protect itself from it's own people.
as a secular leftist, i'm interested in this outcome. the world will be better off with a stronger europe and a weaker middle east. the mistake of america's stupid right will be of the benefit of the global left.
as for the pacific, i don't imagine the united states is going to actually withdraw from japan and, so long as it remains in japan, it will retain a deterrent.
Friday, January 23, 2026
i also want to tell the turkish government that they have a lot of arrogance and no grounds or right to tell english-speakers how to spell the name of their country in english. the english believe in democracy, sultan erdogan, and we will determine our own spellings, not you.
but, if you'd like, i can reciprocate by suggesting the following spelling of canada in turkish:
siktir git
the composition of the board of peace is mostly not important, as everybody is going to vote the way trump tells them, which is why they're there.
i think that gaza needs local government, not an international oversight body.
however, who has a real role in an international oversight body like this board of peace?
- egypt, obviously
- israel, obviously
- the british have a role to play due to the british mandate and the suez canal
- the french should purposefully not be invited as they have no role to play in gaza, in lebanon, in syria or anywhere else in the middle east
- no other western european country should be invited
- the united states needs to be on the board
- canada should not be invited
- no country in latin america, and especially not nazi-aligned argentina, should be invited
- iran should be invited in principle, but an iranian opposition group should represent them, not the current government
- greece should be invited
- italy should be invited
- turkey should be invited
- these are the four stable historical powers in the region
- jordan should be invited
- lebanon should be invited
- syria should be invited in principle, but a syrian opposition group should represent syria, not the current government
- saudi arabia should be invited in principle, but an opposition group should represent them, not the current governent
- no other arab country should be invited
so that is:
- the governments of the united states, egypt, israel, the uk, greece, italy, turkey, jordan and lebanon and democratic opposition groups representing the iranian, syrian and saudi arabian governments.
fwiw, trump is objectively correct in his statements about afghanistan.
the nato and un mission, which canada joined in the un capacity first and the nato capacity second, was not intended as an offensive mission to wipe out the taliban so much as it was intended to hold the capital and rebuild the government. the problem that the un sought to address was not the elimination of the taliban but the absence of a government in kabul. it was primarily a peacekeeping mission.
there were combat missions under american direction but they weren't the reason that most countries went to afghanistan and many were reluctant to participate in them.
while the terrain is difficult, and that was a reason that many countries were reluctant, it is unlikely that the taliban could have withstood a direct, full assault by nato countries, and many observers pointed that out at the time, with comments like that nato is fighting with one arm tied behind their back. one justification i heard by nato at the time was that nato found it more useful to study the taliban by intercepting their communications with the intent to subvert and co-opt them than it did to just blow them up.
there was no proxy group like the kurds in the region to do the heavy fighting on the ground.
that doesn't mean people weren't maimed or injured in the defensive capacity, but the fact is that they weren't there to conquer the country, and that is why they didn't.
i've been sick this week with an upper respiratory infection that has hurt enough to knock me out. it's freezing outside, and the tenants directly above me seem to have a weird aversion to indoor heat, so i've had to compensate with indoor heaters. they do finally have the heat on and my heaters wouldn't work very well otherwise, but they are also exactly what i need to sleep the virus off.
i don't understand this idea of turning the heat down to sleep. at all. when the temperature falls below 20, it jolts me awake like a splash of cold water, and especially when it's dry. i find it impossible to sleep in low humidity. i sleep better when the temperature is above 25 and the air is a little moist, which it is because they keep trying to cool it down upstairs. i kind of like this.
so, i'm feeling a bit better.
i have some work to finish this weekend and should get back to normal life next week, although i'll need to wait for the cold snap to pass before i'm able to do anything at all.
as i stated before, canada really has a claim to all of the louisiana purchase, and anywhere else where there were french settlers, although we might face some resistance down the mississippi.
once we do regain control of major french canadian colonies like detroit, chicago, saint louis and nouvelle orleans, we can rename the gulf of mexico to the gulf of canada and shut down the refineries on the river and the wells off the coast.
what about the other states?
- michigan's productive capacity would be incredibly useful to canada and something that should be a strategic objective for ottawa, especially if canada seeks to move past the carbon economy. i think michigan would be the most likely state to immediately vote to join canada, if offered. almost everybody i've spoken to in detroit would rather be canadian.
- annexing minnesota, wisconsin and illinois would give canada stronger control over the great lakes, which are likely to increase in value due to climate change. the northwest passage will probably never happen, but year round shipping through the st lawerence seaway is a realistic outcome of climate change.
- vermont and new york would give canada control of major financial institutions and global governing bodies
- cascadia would give canada control of the the entire western seaboard, and allow it to enforce a total tanker ban and other environmental protections all the way down, as well as give it complete control of trade in and out of asia
see, i think we're doing this wrong. the federal government is trying to focus on "national unity".
if the americans are going to go after alberta like this, why shouldn't canada go after california/oregon/washington, michigan, minnesota, illinois and new york?
they can have alberta, as far as i'm concerned. alberta is just slowing us down with backwards politics and last century technology.
i'm strongly in favour of the united states of canada. let's do it.
rich people can be stupid if they want. if there's no tariffs, that should force grocers to cut prices on imports to move them at cost or less, which is good for poor people.
so, buy canadian if you want - it'll both make american imports cheaper and boost the cpi, which will increase the minimum wage.
the basic reality is that contemporary global capitalism creates winners and losers and the gazans are amongst the biggest losers in the world. when you lose economically, it generates xenophobia and hatred towards the "other", which you blame for your own failures. in this case, it's the muslim failure to adjust to modernity that causes them to lash out at the jews for beating them at everything, over and over again.
that's clear enough, but decades of losing means that the hatred in the palestinian population is so deep that it's become cultural. they've repeatedly elected xenophobic groups that want to destroy the winners with bombs and guns and they've been repeatedly blown up in response, but they won't accept the simple empirical reality that they're losers and they've lost.
now, the world wants to give them "independence", as though that means something in the global economy. it doesn't. it's stupidity. but it's the stupidity of the insistence on independence that will force them to continue to lose, and they will continue to lash out at the world around them so long as they continue to lose.
kushner can build as many towers as he wants, but what he needs to do to stop the local population from blowing them up is give them jobs, first. what gaza needs more than anything else is jobs. and if they won't do that, or concede they can't, the only solution is to replace them.
where trump is right in principle about gaza is understanding that they need development, not aid. fascism breeds on desperation. so long as gazans have no way to survive but via handouts, they will look for somebody to blame, and hamas will find recruits. the economy here is not an afterthought to peace, it's a precondition for it; it's less about stopping the war to create investment and more about creating investment to end the war.
the problems are with the actors on the ground. it's the palestinians themselves that are going to prevent this from happening.
first, you need to blow up the handouts industry. investors and corporations that profit off of foreign aid seek to maintain dependency, and it's the dependency that's the colonialism, to the extent it exists. you need to get them out of there.
second, is finding a market for the local economy. it's too small to be self-sustaining. if gaza is to make something, who buys it? when john kerry took a look at this, he tried to convince israel to buy the stuff, but they wouldn't. israel wanted to make it's own stuff and didn't see a role for the palestinians in performing labour. there are too many people there to survive solely in hospitality and tourism. who buys it? egypt? europe? it's not clear that there's a clear market that can sustain the region. gaza has not historically been a state, it's historically been a province, and the basic dollars and cents of what the region can and might produce as an autonomous region are daunting. the premise of gazan autonomy is economically dubious to nonsensical.
third is dealing with the reality that the palestinians are going to accuse anybody building large towers in the region as being "agents of babylon" and "zionists" and start blowing them up. the heartbreaking reality is that the loudest opponent to gazan reconstruction in the way imagined will be the palestinians themselves, and they will declare war on the construction industries for being satanic, jewish and unislamic.
this is the reason many voices have tried to point to the need to de-nazify palestine as a prerequisite for any workable solution short of an eventual islamo-fascist theocracy. trump is claiming he's going to "wipe out" hamas if they don't disarm. he's right, but good luck with that. is he going to flood the tunnels? bomb them with bunker busters? israel's been trying to figure this out for years.
nobody wants to deal with the facts on the ground, which are that the people that live there want to kill everybody and erect a fascist theocracy. it's hard to see how trump's plan is going anywhere without starting with an actual genocide first, in ways israel never truly considered. and, this might be one of those rare historical examples where wiping a people out is justified and the best course of action.
Thursday, January 22, 2026
carney has struck me as an insider from day one, because he is, and i've long had a feeling he's really working for washington. beneath the scary rhetoric about fighting the confederation of jesusland is the reality that he's slashing the public service. he comes on tv and tells you he's here to save you, then goes back to his office and signs your death warrant.
if you read into the timing of the plains of abraham story, it makes you wonder what his point was. is he actually trying to break it to canada that we're getting conquered and we need to cooperate?
if so, i think the analogy is deeply flawed. but, after watching a cbc panel while i was eating a salad, i wonder if that's what his point really was.
canada is a broken confederation of goofy provinces. ontario should be at least three, probably more like five, districts. quebec wants to be it's own country, but 60% of it is indigenous. the french part of quebec should be it's own district, and the rest of it should be split up. bc doesn't make any sense at all. we've got all of these inuit provinces.
we're really due to completely rewrite the whole thing anyways.
completely redistricting canada into smaller states would be good for canada.
let's do it.
it's a fair bargain, right don coyote?
you will more than double your territory.
the least you can do is concede a third of the senate.
i don't think we'd be asking you to double your senate, but if we're 60% of the size of the combined country, why shouldn't we expect 60% of the senate? 30%, at least for now, is a good deal.
how many states should canada add to the union?
we are a bigger country, geographically.
- nova scotia
- new brunswick
- prince edward island (it's like rhode island.)
- newfoundland
- labrador
- nunatsiavut
- nunavik
- nunavut
- inuvialuit
- northwest state (great bear state?)
- yukon state
- lower canada (quebec city state)
- upper canada (ottawa/kingston state)
- gtha state. golden horseshoe state?
- montreal state
- south detroit state
- a cree state for the rest of quebec and parts of ontario
- superior state for thunder bay
- huron state for sudbury
- red river state for winnipeg
- churchill for northern manitoba
- saskatchewan (southern ridings)
- desnethe (north saskatchewan)
- calgary state
- edmonton state
- fraser state (vancouver)
- okanagan state
- vancouver island
- northern british columbia
that's an additional 58 senators, at least.
you should make washington dc, puerto rico, cuba and the bahamas states while you're at it, so it's a full third.
canada and the united states are interdependent on each other. it's true that canada relies on america to buy exports, but it's also true that large swaths of the united states rely on canada for the same reason. if canadians eat a lot of american food, american farmers rely on canadian fertilizer, and on the canadian export market.
it is blatantly stupid for either country to deny this interdependence, or act like either country could thrive independently of the other.
but that's just the point. if you drop the stupid nationalist rhetoric and the idiotic competitive machismo, essentially all of the few concrete reasons why canadians may want to remain canadians are strengthened by joining forces with allies in the united states - the healthcare model, the abortion funding, the more selective immigration model, the social assistance payments, etc. we are more likely to maintain, strengthen and expand these concrete benefits of canadian citizenship by building alliances with populous american states on our borders than we are by getting into stupid wars of conquest or competition.
there are more americans that want to be canadian than there are canadians that want to be american and the best and most effective way for us to maintain the concrete differences that define our superior quality of life is by recognizing that fact and working to take advantage of it.
it's increasingly appearing as though mark carney is a dangerous idiot that's going to get us all killed.
we've gone from sleeping with the elephant to punching the elephant in the trunk. it's not smart.
the idea of two independent countries on this continent is likely unsustainable, in the long run, and the question is not whether we integrate, but how we do it. in the long run of history, neither canada nor the united states are nation states. these are both transient entities to advance british colonialism, and neither will have long histories or distinct cultures that are entered into the annals of history. future historians may talk of the period where the british colonies were divided by in-fighting, and they may even describe how the british empire moved it's capital from london to washington, as it was swallowed by it's more powerful colony.
to the extent that there are differences between the north and south of the british colonial project, they are better addressed via different political parties, and not through the folly of false nationalism or through the stupidity of civil war. i'm not about to die for the profits of the bourgeoisie.
only the chinese benefit from dividing and conquering the british colonies.
it's been clear for many years, although many people in the west don't want to admit it, that the function and purpose of the third world war, which will be a proxy war that will draw in actors from across the world, is going to be to topple the theocratic governments in the middle east, before they pose a threat to the safety and freedom of people living in the rest of the world. actors in the west fighting against this are fighting against global progress, and fighting against western civilization, which the theocracies in the region seek to destroy.
this is the oldest struggle on earth.
and the sides are shaping up.
greenland was actually fairly wealthy in the late dark ages. it made immense wealth exporting walrus tusks to northern europe. the king of norway at the time was consequently very aggressive about enforcing taxation, and there is evidence of the greenlanders refusing to pay their taxes back to bergen, which was where the king of norway lived at the time, and of the king getting pushy in demanding payment.
the question of religion also exists. the original norse settlements followed traditional norse religious practices, descended from indo-european belief systems. christianity is a primarily semitic religion, although the sky god in judaism is...it's weird. semitic religions are not supposed to have dominant sky gods. that's an aryan religious characteristic. yahweh is oddly like zeus, or, more relevantly, the iranian equivalents. much of the symbolism in judaism seems to have been lifted from the religion of zoroastrianism during the reign of cyrus. this curious similarity between semitic christianity and the sky gods of european indigenous culture may have been a factor in the norse substituting yahweh for odin, in the end, as that kind of identification of local and foreign gods was common. the english word for german, for example, comes from the roman identification of odin with hermes. the french called it allemagne after a specific tribe, but the english called them "the worshipers of hermes". the germans called themselves deutsche, which in english only really exists as the word "dutch". the french celts would worship greek gods. and etc. it's not that weird for the norse to have combined the religions and, certainly, northern european christianity is deeply syncretic, and has major contributions from the indigenous germanic religions.
the fact that greenland was settled by people that worshipped odin at almost exactly the same time that norway was undergoing forced christianization from the top down suggests that some number of people that did not want to convert must have fled, and there is a written record of this happening in iceland, which saw a population spike by norse pagans after the violent introduction of christianity in the north, which was a long and violent process that had initially started under the rule of charlemagne in northwestern europe. the fact that william the conqueror was actually sent to england by the pope to overthrow the semi-pagan saxon kings is not widely acknowledged or talked about by english historians, but it is certainly true. the norman invasion of england was actually somewhat of a crusade against the saxons, who had been wiped out on the continent by charlemagne centuries earlier.
historians tend to argue that it doesn't make sense to think that the vikings would have abandoned greenland for north america because it would have cut them off from norway, but i think that misunderstands the context. i can think of two good reasons why the greenlanders may have not wanted norway to find them:
(1) the king wanted his taxes, and kings can get pushy about demanding taxes. it is entirely plausible that the settlers wanted to seek a way to avoid paying taxes back to norway, by making themselves hard to find.
(2) the king was sending christians to greenland and building churches and expecting the people to convert. i don't have any evidence one way or the other, but it's reasonable to expect that a large number of these settlers would have opposed this and sought to flee from it.
(3) another issue is the plague in europe, which happened at about the same time as the greenlanders disappeared. one way to avoid the plague ridden norwegians would have been to get up and disappear.
the fact that the greenlanders disappear at about the same time as the plague is tied into the fact that the norwegian capital, bergen, was essentially destroyed by the disease. the norwegians just didn't have time for greenland. the settlers might have taken the opening as an escape mechanism.
while the norse had a name for baffin island and for labrador, the official position is that there's no evidence of viking settlement in hudson bay. i would actually consider it extremely unlikely that any northern seafaring civilization could go to baffin island and not go to hudson's bay. that stretches credulity. but nobody's found it yet.
i strongly believe it's there and that archaeologists will eventually find settlements along the coast, dated to the years c. 1200-1600.
so, what happened after that? why didn't europeans find them during colonization?
there's some possibility that they actually did.
dna tests on groups in the region, like crees, suggest they're overwhelmingly r1*, meaning they descend from steppe warriors that invaded europe in the neolithic. there have been some awkward attempts to suggest there were european migrants to north america around that period, but they aren't taken seriously. it's generally accepted that it's a result of smallpox followed by colonialism, and that the reality is that the indigenous population was taken over by settlers from the inside. but the historical evidence we have for this doesn't suggest that is likely. it's a "no other option" hypothesis that doesn't sit right.
the other possibility is that the high r1* component in cree populations is due to viking admixture.
and, for all we know, they might have been eaten by polar bears when they tried to move south, into regions where there are more bears.
some settlements need to be found to prove this and i think they're there, but they have eluded archaeologists, who are also not looking very hard. i think they ought to be, because i think they're there, and they mostly left to evade paying taxes to a distant king with a weird new religion and a strange, frightening disease.
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