not one canadian should die defending a pile of rocks for a multinational corporation.
why don't we sell it back to england?
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.
Wednesday, January 21, 2026
it turns out justin trudeau was also at davos, although i'm not sure why he spoke, or who wanted to listen.
my only question is this: who is a less attractive accessory, yoko ono or katy perry?
he really went down a league or two. his ex-wife makes katy perry look like a teenage girl. but, that's the point, right? nobody took trudeau seriously when he spoke, and this is why. he just got demoted to the minor leagues.
maybe the two of them can sit down and collaborate on some way to simultaneously write music and policy intended for an over 18 demographic.
listen.
i'm 5' 10", but i'm also swedish. in many places of the world, 5' 10" is tall. in sweden, it's actually roughly average, and maybe a little short.
my parents were both 5' 8', with my mom being slightly taller. my dad was from central europe - franco-italian in culture, with at least one miqmaq ancestor, but actually halstatt celt in genetic origin, which is austrian in today's terms. in fact, he died in his late 50s, but he looked like donald trump did/does in his 70s. but in my mother's family, the women, excluding my mother, are all 6' 2" or 6' 3". we would always be the shortest, by far, in a family get together. my aunts are both well over six feet, my grandmother is roughly 6 feet and my grandfather is about 6' 5". i have a full sister that's about an inch taller than me, and is very proud of it (because i'm about 4 years older).
it must be the swedish genes, right?
in fact, that's bullshit. we thought height was genetic because of mendel and the peas and the dominance and the ... , but we know now it's wrong. height is almost entirely plastic, and the actual reason that swedes are taller and italians are shorter is that swedes eat mostly fish and italians eat mostly grains. it's 99% diet. throughout history, the nomads were taller and bigger and stronger than the farmers simply because they ate better. and, in fact, they had bigger brains because they ate better, too. the barbarians were actually physiologically smarter than the settled peoples. that's why they won all the wars.
the actual startling, somewhat disgusting truth is that women have tended to be shorter than men because boys have been given more to eat. families have historically chosen not to feed their daughters sufficiently, because they were less valuable and not worth the resources. that is why women have tended to be shorter and why changes in culture to view boys and girls equally have resulted in the elimination of this falsely observed sexual dimorphism. it's not dimorphism at all, it's malnutrition.
if you're a grown woman today and you're 5' 2" or something, it's because you didn't get enough to eat growing up. you should be taller than that, but your growth was stunted by a poor diet as a young child. it might have been because your parents were poor and chose to feed your brother instead because he was more valuable, it might have been because they were conditioned not to feed you so you wouldn't get fat and it might have been because you were trained to choose to eat less and starve yourself. but you are short because you were stunted. you were malnourished, so you didn't grow. it's not genetics and it's not gender.
Tuesday, January 20, 2026
we know that there were norwegian settlements in greenland from about 1000-1250, but also that it was inhabited entirely by inuit from 1450-1700. the danes should be seen as colonizers, like the english and spanish and french. modern law would argue that if the greenlanders never signed any sort of a treaty, and were never conquered, then it would follow that the land legally belongs to the inuit and not the danes and the danish clam is full throated settler colonialism, in the 21st century.
i can find no evidence of a treaty between the danes and inuit, which would make the colonial danish occupation of greenland illegal under modern international law. the danes would be required to transfer large sums of money to greenland in compensation, and they would retain full sovereignty to make decisions, as they may.
the americans should keep that in mind if they want to build a serious relationship with the inuit on greenland. so should canada.
if you think wyoming is over-represented, note that there are 60,000 people in greenland and 600,000 in wyoming.
i wouldn't imagine anybody wants to make greenland a state.
so, who will pay for medicare in greenland?
these are the kinds of things people will actually care about. if trump is serious, he should have a plan for these kinds of concerns. greenlanders will not want to lose their healthcare.
the population of greenland is about 60,000 people and the truth is that they're not danes or norwegians, they're mostly inuit.
i would certainly defer to the inuit to maintain their autonomy, but, as a canadian, i know that the inuit aren't actually really that concerned about autonomy, per se. the inuit are themselves relatively recent migrants to north america, having moved there from northern russia, across the north pole, in recent decades. the ancestors of today's inuit continue to live in northern russia and are ethnically closely related to siberians and mongolians. they did not cross through beringia 20,000 years ago. but, like most indigenous groups in canada, and like their siberian and mongolian cousins, they don't have clear concepts of land ownership, nationality, statehood or property. these are nomadic hunters that "govern" themselves in tribal councils. they're like big families out in the woods without state oversight.
i would call on the united states to explain what they mean, exactly. i would suspect any polling done heavily weighted the danish colony and not the inuit groups. the inuit should be presented with a draft first, and asked to analyze it, before being asked to make a decision. i would suspect that they may have little concrete opposition, once it is explained.
what would the inuit want?
- they would want the americans to clean up their garbage
- they would want the americans to leave them alone
are the americans proposing statehood, like hawaii, or incorporation as a territory, like puerto rico? are they proposing senate seats and elections to the house of representatives, with a governor? or are they proposing virtual autonomy, with an american military occupation? because that's already the case.
i don't think that this is decision is denmark's, i think it's greenland's.
rather than cyber rattling, trump should put together a clear proposal and put it directly in front of greenlanders. it's hard for them to accept or reject a proposal that is abstract and doesn't exist.
mark carney is the wrong leader at the wrong time.
no, the solution to the problems facing canada is not more free market capitalism, and the premise that it is is retarded.
but carney only speaks for his party, which is the elite - the canadian oligarchs - that american integration would effectively wipe out, and in that sense he's right. to the average canadian, this doesn't fucking matter. this issue only matters to the rich, and it's only the rich that carney speaks for.
the rest of us are just cannon fodder to protect the passive income sources of the canadian oligarchy, which is organizing to send us off to die in a stupid, foolish war to protect their private property and their revenue streams.
canadians need to wake up and realize that the biggest threat to their freedom is their own government, which is going to slaughter us at the alter of finance capital, if we let it.
if you, as a canadian, are legitimately fearful of america, and truly want it to change, then let me tell you that the pen is mightier than the sword, here.
america will change via democratic elections eons before it changes by military force.
canada's best tactic to maintain our way of life is to infiltrate their democracy and change it from the inside.
i have no interest in fighting a guerrilla war against the united states like i'm some dirty islamofascist nazi and would be more likely to blow up a canadian police station if it tried to conscript me to fight it. i would tear down the statue of terry fox before i signed up to fight for it.
if the united states ever tried this, it would quickly adopt our health care model, because canada would provide the tipping point necessary for the united states to get to single payer. there is no abortion law in canada, and i would suggest that canada would provide the numbers necessary to pass federal legislation legalizing abortion in the united states. there's some other things that canadian voters would change about how the united states works and probably not much that the united states would change about canada or about being canadian. canada would benefit from more selective immigration, although i need to point out that canada doesn't have a porous border like the united states and the opposite would actually happen, as canada already has more selective immigration, but less aggressive enforcement. the best outcome would be to combine american enforcement with the canadian points system. ultimately, removing the problem of free market healthcare protected by the american border by removing it from the map would be a net asset for canadians, and i don't otherwise know why else most canadians would even give a fuck if we're americans or canadians.
i ultimately don't care about flags and anthems and hockey teams, although a us-canada hockey team would be unbeatable. i have no particular attachment to the word canada or the maple leaf and i don't care about maintaining stasis in global borders, which i think is naive and stupid. i am an advocate of the continuation of history; we're not done evolving or changing yet. we still have communism ahead of us in history, and then all the borders have to go. i would rather focus on changing the united states from the inside using democracy than on fighting some kind of stupid war against it.
the claim appears to have been made by the danish prime minister.
i suppose it might have been mistranslated, as meaning "since 800 years", as since 800 CE. that would rely on the norwegian claim. it's still not really right.
there was a political union in the late 14th century called the kalmar unon that included all of the norse speaking areas (sweden/norway/denmark/scania, plus colonies in finland and the baltics, iceland, parts of the uk, greenland and wherever else the norse had settled in north america, but not including normandy or england) and eventually, through many incarnations, became the rump state of denmark. denmark is a rump state that is directly descended from this union, while the other countries broke away to declare independence or got conquered by somebody else. however, europe had lost contact with greenland by this time, and we know today that they were no longer there.
it's not clear exactly what happened to the settlements, with theories ranging from being wiped out by a tsunami to escaping to canada to joining the inuit. there has yet to be any convincing evidence of norse settlement found in hudson's bay or the great lakes, but that does nonetheless seem to be the most likely theory.
the specific number of 800 years is just wrong. potential dates denmark could use are:
- erik the red, c. 1000 (founded norwegian settlements)
- kalmar union, c. 1400 (union of denmark and norway, but the settlements were gone)
- hans egede, 1721 (date of existing danish settlements)
none of them are 800 years.
i would suggest that the correct date is 300 years and that the danish colonization of greenland is not different than european colonization anywhere else in the western hemisphere and subsequently is subject to the monroe doctrine.
there's a media claim that greenland's been a part of denmark for 800 years. 800 years! that's since 1226.
unfortunately, for denmark, it's not true, nor do i know where the date of 800 years comes from. it's hard to even make sense of. there were no europeans in greenland, recently, until 1721, when a danish expedition was sent to find a lost norwegian settlement. while that is still 300 years ago, it's worth pointing out that jamestown was founded in 1607, quebec city was founded in 1608, new york (as new amsterdam) was founded in 1624, boston in 1630, montreal in 1642, philadelphia in 1682 and detroit in 1701. the danish were actually late to american colonization.
now, it is true that there was an older norwegian settlement there, founded around 1000 and certainly long gone by 1226. but it's also true that there were no europeans in greenland between the collapse of the norse settlement and the danish colonization in the 18th century.
i have no idea where the claim that greenland has been a part of denmark for 800 years comes from. it's just clearly wrong.
Monday, January 19, 2026
The union, which held a rally to denounce the cuts last week, said in a news release that it’s demanding the government explain why experienced public servants are facing waves of workforce reductions as outsourcing spending reaches record highs.
because it's not about saving money. if they wanted to save money, they would do the opposite, which would be to abolish outsourcing. the reason public service costs have increased is that they're handing out lucrative contracts to pr agencies and hr firms, who get paid 2-3x as much as unionized workers do, particularly in management.
what it's about is privatizing the public service so that political parties, which are now organized like private corporations, are able to hand out political favours and cushy contracts to donors and allies. it's about ensuring that the party can turn the day to day running of the country into a means of rewarding those close to it and punishing those opposed to it.
this isn't how a democracy or a democratic society functions. one of the primary characteristics of a democracy in the modern era is a strong and independent public service, which runs the country independently and is sheltered from political corruption by an inability of the ruling party to control or alter work contracts based on obedience to party dictates. a state where any labour, but particularly public service labour, is controlled by the ruling political party is a characteristic of fascism, and the kind of thing you tend to mostly see in extremely corrupt middle eastern countries, which canada is essentially in the process of converting itself into.
what's going on here is not conservative cost-cutting, it's typical backroom deal liberal corruption. they're trying to make that kind of corruption systemic and endemic. it's time for a change in government. canada's greatest strength is it's independent public service, and the country will be left in ruins if the ruling party declares war on it, because that's not going to be an easy fight.
the idea is not that the liberals want to save money, it's that they want to be able to make hiring people conditional on obedience to the party, and they want to get rid of career employees that have no allegiance to any one party.
heil carney!
while trump is obviously wrong about greenland, he's got 2.5 years left in power, maybe less, and greenland is simply not a cross of rocks that europe should die on. nato needs to avoid destroying itself over what will in the end be an irrelevant detail. historians will laugh at europe if it collapses over this.
the iranians are blaming israel for the protests.
we talk a lot about orwell in the west, and sometimes it's an analogy, but it's largely hyperbole.
as much as i want to stand with the people in the street yelling, it is not just likely but probable that the protesters were coerced on to the streets by undercover agents with the explicit intent to slaughter them.
that is right out of 1984. not hysterically. but literally.
protect your freedom judiciously.
it's fragile.
america really has been moving backwards since clinton.
clinton I - the apex of american civilization (1992-1995)
clinton II - reversal through bush I
bush II - reagan redux
obama - carter/ford
trump I - nixon
biden - lbj
trump II - jfk, starting with the reverse assassination
2028-2036 - eisenhower?
2036-2040 - truman?
are we going to get a new fdr in 2040?
Sunday, January 18, 2026
my understanding is that the kurds, who can defend themselves, are withdrawing in self-restraint. they're looking for dialogue before they react. if they have to, they can try to move back in, but their decision to do so will be connected to demographic considerations and not to maximizing surface area.
that's smart on it's face.
unfortunately, i do not believe that the syrian government is acting independently of american military command and would expect that if the nazi syrian government is moving to take control of territory, it is with american approval, and no american mediation is coming.
this article, for example, is utterly brutal. it's interesting that trump is using the "sick man" language because this is straight late ottoman propaganda.
it would indeed be expected that the arabs in the area would be annoyed by a kurdish military presence, as these were the nazis that supported the jihadist groups in the first place. the kurds have indeed put a lot of people in jail, for the reason that they are jihadist terrorists. they operate large prisons of isis collaborators.
the narrative present in the cnn article is something like german citizens complaining that the allied occupation is rounding up all of the nazis and putting them in jail. why can't they leave germany to govern itself in peace? what has germany ever done to it's neighbours, anyways? right?
if you understand american foreign policy, and how it uses media to confuse people and manufacture consent, this kind of propaganda shouldn't be surprising to you. but i still find this article to be galling and unnerving in it's contempt for truth and decency.
in fact, if you understand the history of the region, you know that the arabs are recent migrants into it, and that they were resettled by the ottoman turks during a period known as the armenian genocide. the indigenous peoples of the area were assyrians, armenians and kurds, many of them christians. the turks tried to wipe them out and replace them with arabs because they weren't muslim enough or muslim at all. by acting as though anybody should give a fuck about these colonizing arab groups, that slaughtered the indigenous people of this region to enforce their religion on them, a process which isis was essentially continuing, the tone of the article is fully upholding the validity of that historical wrong. the ongoing genocide of the indigenous peoples of the upper euphrates-tigris valleys and their replacement by muslim arabs is one of the most brutal issues of our time and something that the west has been fully complicit in.
i've been critical of obama, as many leftists were, but his policy in upper mesopotamia is one of the few things he got right. the americans finally stood up to the systemic genocide carried out by muslims on the indigenous population. but trump seemed non-committal and biden completely reversed the policy. now, here we are - the united states is openly aligned with isis and complicit in the ongoing genocide (which is about to ramp up) and cnn is posting propaganda about it to convince you into supporting it.
the western propaganda around syria is exceedingly thick, but it's easy to get through it if you understand what's happening.
i'm going to summarize what actually happened in syria over the least 25 years, first. i've done this before.
- many years ago, syria and iraq were governed by the same political party, the ba'ath party. this was a secularist party that adhered to something called arabic socialism, which was socialism with arabic characteristics. it was aligned with the soviet union.
- we know what happened to iraq's ba'ath party, but the ba'ath party continued in syria until the dictator there, who was pretty bad but not as bad as saddam hussein, died and was succeeded by his son
- the actual dictator assad had two sons. one was groomed for power, and he was pretty brutal, and this story would be different if he had taken over, but he died young. instead, power passed to the second son.
- the second son was an eye doctor in britain and had married a british woman he met in britain. they had to bring him back from britain.
- in some ways, this second son was nothing more than a powerless figurehead, and not any sort of dictator at all. the actual power was in the junta, and the continued to act as a branch of moscow's military command structure. during this period, syria was essentially a client state of russia, with little autonomy, and where the decisions were made in moscow and enforced by the junta. the younger assad was trotted out to wave to the crowds sometimes.
- however, assad was also a democratic reformer. despite western claims otherwise, russia is in fact a democracy, it's just an extreme democracy. it's a democracy with extremely real choices. we may have a hard time understanding that here in western democracies, where the parties are all the same. in russia, a democratic transition would not be a meaningless change of which party is in power; in russia, you have broad, important choices to make between toryism (that is what putin is. he's an old tory.), communism or fascism. as it does elsewhere, washington supports the fascist parties in russia, then accuses the russian government of stifling dissent when it jails the fascists. what russia does not have is a liberal democratic party with any serious support as that ideology remains unpopular in russia. there is an overwhelming tory consensus there, and liberal democrats often have to vote for the tories to block the communists, who remain the only serious opposition group. the russians don't like supporting authoritarian regimes because it makes them look bad, but they do it.
- assad was correctly seen as a weak ruler by the surrounding countries, particularly the saudis and the turks. turks and arabs don't like each other very much and don't have a direct border anywhere in the region. syria is a buffer state between turkey and saudi arabia.
- the saudi theocracy does not want democracy on their borders because they see it as a threat to their own system of government and consider it to be "western colonialism". they will routinely send in armed thugs to destabilize any sort of democracy in the arab world. they don't want it taking hold anywhere.
- that is what started the war in syria. first, the younger assad scheduled a referendum to chart a democratic transition in syria, with russian encouragement. then, the saudis sent their goons in to try to stop it. the turks moved in to block the saudis, and everything imploded from there.
- the younger assad was initially trying to realign syria with nato but, due to saudi opposition, he had to realign closer with moscow, and then everybody except the russians wanted assad out.
- eventually, a functional coalition between the russians and kurds largely defeated the saudi-backed thugs. the americans have taken credit for this but, as was the case in world war two, it was actually the russians that won the war, and it's still not entirely clear what side the americans were even really on at all.
- that left assad in control of damascus with russian support, the kurds in the north, a small american force in the south (that appears to have been helping isis more than hindering it) and some remnant turkish backed jihdist groups that almost everybody, apparently including the syrian military, had forgotten about and wasn't taking seriously.
- then the turkish-backed jihadists launched a sneak attack about a year ago, with apparent american support, that succeeded in taking damascus by surprise. this did cut the saudis out, at first glance, as fighting isis remained the pretext for american involvement.
- since then, this turkish-backed nazi/jihadist government has both identified itself as a stronger american proxy and taken steps to re-align itself with the saudis
- the result is that the jihadists have essentially won the war in syria and are now in control of syria
- as would be expected, they are carrying out ethnic cleansing against the same minorities that isis targeted
- after a few years of propaganda training through us media, including trying to generate empathy for "isis wives", who should be summarily executed with no sympathy at all, the americans are now openly supporting the jihadist groups under an apparent promise that they'll share the oil wealth if they take control of it.
- but this is not so much a switcheroo so much as it was kind of what was always going on. the americans were always supporting the jihadists, and the goal was always to replace assad with the jihadist groups. the kurds were always a temporary ally acting in their own interests and everybody always knew that. but the turks managed to chase the saudis out, so now it's turkish groups and not saudi groups.
- now that the jihadists are in control in damascus like ankara, riyadh and washington all wanted, they are chasing the kurds out, as was always the plan.
for many years, canada listed the pkk as a terrorist organization and not only did not have the irgc as a terrorist organization but even allowed canadians to send money to the irgc if they wanted. this was an utterly embarrassing and horribly backwards foreign policy position. in recent years, the government has finally listed the irgc as a terrorist organization, after it shot down a plane with hundreds of canadians in it. that's what it took; our government took no action against the irgc when it was slaughtering it's own people to govern a large country out of the back of a koran, but it finally acted when they shot down a civilian airplane, to our embarrassment and our deep shame.
to this day, the largest terrorist attack in canada was by khalistani extremists. today, these same extremists and terrorist groups actually have privileged access to both of our major political parties and the sitting liberal government has gone out of it's way to protect khalistani terrorists from being held accountable by the indian government. it's deeply embarrassing.
then, we wonder why the world thinks it can push us around.
while the irgc is now a terrorist organization, as it should be, the pkk also remains a terrorist organization in canada. the pkk has never launched any sort of attack on canada or canadian interests, and has in fact been a staunch ally in the fight against isis, which canada was involved in. this needs to be immediately reversed, so that canadians can send money to kurdish freedom fighters in iran to help topple the fascist regime there.
Saturday, January 17, 2026
this is the only workable solution to the iran problem, but they don't have machinery - planes, tanks, etc. the kurds can fight one on one with the best of them. we know that. they have the right ideology; they believe women are people, for example. but they will need air support, eventually.
even if the kurds can kind of cut the irgc off a little, for now, that could potentially liberate a few regions, and if they can generate autonomy, they could set up a parallel state with parallel institutions. that's the right approach in the long run.
parachuting in the shah isn't going to help anybody except british petroleum, and even they probably don't get that name drop, because it was so long ago. the shah was the tool the west used to counter the last real revolution in iran; the last time iranians had a taste of freedom, the shah was how we got rid of that. if the republicans start seriously dangling the shah over iran like a sword of damocles, all bets are off.
but the kurds are a revolutionary socialist group and they will liberate areas and fight for peoples' freedom. they are worth having solidarity with, and they are the right way to actually have an actual revolution in iran.
it won't help.
the next assahola in line is apparently his son, if he can fight off some other pile of assaholes that all want to be the grand poo-bah.
iran needs systemic overthrow.
the kurds in the mountains are the best solution. they're armed. they can actually fight. they won't just get mowed down. but they need air cover.
all of these people saying "but there's no day after" are dead wrong. there's a potent army waiting for the signal. the best comparisons really are the french and spanish revolutions, and we don't want them eventually getting slaughtered by the red chinese army.
mark carney has a full time job.
so long as he still wants to be prime minister of canada, he should not be accepting requests to join the transitional government in gaza and, in fact, that would appear to have been somewhat of a trick appointment by donald trump. it both places canada subservient to american hegemony and labels carney as a palestinian sympathizer, which will not help him electorally. in canada, anybody that stands up for palestine at all instantly loses their seat. i don't know if it's in reaction to the extremist protests we've been seeing here or if it's more deep-seeded, but identifying yourself as pro-palestinian is just about the best way to lose an election in canada, at almost every level of government. it's consistent. this is an underhanded insult.
the opposition should correctly make a big issue out of it and even try to topple the government over it.
conversely, if this scheme is to have any prospect of success, it will require focused people to actually run the place. gaza needs a functioning government, not a board of oligarchs.
Friday, January 16, 2026
china is not going to replace the united states, for canada, and i certainly hope that nobody is imagining that they will.
however, the reality is that moving in lockstep with the americans on auto manufacturing at the expense of farming isn't helpful. and they don't want our dirty oil.
the chinese have taken the idea of electric cars seriously because they wanted to skip a step. now, as a socialist, i know that this skipping steps bullshit is a bad idea. but the focus has jumped them out ahead of the united states on a key technology that's going to define the upcoming decades and centuries.
right now, it's still a small market in canada.
we want them to make the cars here.
Thursday, January 15, 2026
it's divide and conquer. it's the oldest tactic out there.
when the vikings came down from the north, what did the pope do? the answer is he gave them swords and told them if they converted to christianity then they could find great riches by fighting the arabs.
that's how europe liberated the parts of it that muslims had conquered.
christians and muslims killing each other off is a good thing. let them slaughter each other. i don't have a side in that conflict; i want them both to cease to exist. it's easier than having to fight either of them, separately, ourselves. so, it follows when i see muslims killing secularists, my instinct is to support sending christians to fight the muslims. if the result is more dead christians and less dead socialists, that's a definite net benefit for western society.
that has nothing to do with why i opposed invading iraq. i've been over that.
that's right.
the great delusion in exporting oil to china is not comprehending that china is moving on past oil, while america remains lost in the backwardsness of a petroleum economy.
the only major economy that we're going to sell filthy tar sands oil to is the united states. nobody else wants our filthy, stinky, dirty oil.
hopefully, the chinese knocked some sense into carney. nobody will ever knock any sense into danielle smith.
- there's no market
- because there's no market nobody wants to pay for the pipe
- if we do this ourselves, it's going to cost billions, and we'll just end up dumping it into the ocean
alberta needs to get a new economy and move on and stop dragging the rest of us back into the 20th century.
instead of bombing the fascists in iran for slaughtering civilians, trump is threatening to slaughter civilians, himself.
see, this has always been my greatest fear: that the muslims and christians stop killing each other and unite to start killing socialists, instead. any sort of detente between the republican party and islamic fascism is western culture's worst nightmare.
Wednesday, January 14, 2026
right now, protesters in iran should be focused on storming and taking over prisons, like this one:
don't kill the ayatollah in a strike.
let the protesters capture him and hang him on a crane.
they're not shooting a few people. it's not a bad apple in the police force. it's not an accident. it's the systemic targeting and mowing down of "apostates" and "anarchists".
they need to take over the jails.
the word "iran" is a transliteration of an ethnic designation that iranians call themselves. there is no correct spelling, other than one we decide, by converting their alphabet to ours. but the iranians never wrote much. at the height of the iranian empire, they mostly wrote in aramaic, and later on actually wrote a lot in greek, which is weird because the greeks were their enemies.
the iranians call their country arya.
iranians call themselves aryans.
iran and aryan are exactly the same word - etymologically, functionally, literally. they mean exactly the same thing.
this is the reason the germans were obsessed with conquering iran in world war two. they sent special designations to persia and afghanistan. they were trying to break through the urals for liebensraum, but they were actually trying to get to iran.
the iran=aryan equation is not a debate. this is basic fact; nobody will argue about this. the use of the word aryan in archaeological texts was initially borrowed from iran and only co-opted by race theorists later on. it's literally the same word. however, linguists will get very mad at you for suggesting that eire - the word the irish use for ireland - is the same word as iran, but their arguments don't held up. for example, they argue that the roman word for the island was hibernia. but that's like saying that mexico couldn't be the indigenous name for mexicans because cortez called them indians.
i think it's probably correct to point out that the irish and iranians basically use the same word for themselves - eire in ireland and arya in iran - as evidence of the indo-european migrations. these two groups are retaining an ancient self-designation in the furthest reaches of their ethnic expansion, the westernmost extent and southernmost extent.
what i'm getting at is that iran is not a "middle eastern country" in the way that iraq is and trying to draw any sort of parallel between iran and iraq is ignorant. iran is not arab, and they have resisted islamization for centuries. the iranians are not a distant, foreign culture. iran, like russia, is a fundamentally european civilization, on the outskirts of europe's geography. you should think of them as being more like us and less different than us.
europe fought a 1500 year war against christian colonialism and won.
iran has been fighting a similar war against islamic colonialism since the 7th century ce, but they have not won yet, and my solidarity is firmly with the secularists on the ground that are waging the long war to reassert iranian indigenous sovereignty in the face of islamic imperialism and arabic colonialism.
so, here we go.
the arab funded western media and saudi dominated press, which treats al jazeera like an independent source rather than state funded media by a brutally oppressive regime, is going to try to convince you that removing the nazis from power in iran is going to lead to something "worse".
well, it might. in fact it probably will. but when it does, it will be because america put it in place, not because the iranians want it (similar to what just happened in syria. you may criticize assad, and i would suggest you're empirically wrong, but the nazis that the turks put in power under american direction are infinitely worse, except thsat they do what we tell them, now. it's a brutal dictatorship and an american client. that's what we want. it's not what they want. and now we're deporting secular syrian refugees to go home to face the niqab, because it's safe to live in a theocratic fascist state, so long as they don't host russian naval bases anymore.).
the actual truth - and you will not see this in any media, anywhere. there will be a conspiracy of silence about this - is that underneath the state-mandated clothing requirements, the vast majority of iranians are basically white europeans. they speak a european language. they held to indigenous european religious practices longer than europe did. but they've been battling a centuries long attempt by arabs to colonize them and convert them to islam. this is very, very different from iraq, which was at one point sumerian, but eventually became the centre of semitic civilization, and the alpha-culture of arabic history. iraq and iran are not sister societies on the same side of history, they are bitterly sworn enemies that have been at war for millennia. iraq has been trying to colonize iran since the start of islam, and iran has been viciously resisting the whole time.
it is for that reason that the saudis want to install their own government, and if they succeed then it is true that the government will probably be worse than the existing one. but this is like the pope installing puppet kings in versailles, while the people storm the bastille. biden would 100% support the saudi puppet king. trump is a loose cannon. the next republican will snap back into place. this might actually be a short time window.
we need to understand that the people in iran are trying to storm their bastille. they are trying to overthrow their theocracy. they want secularism and they want democracy. if we help them, the outcome will be good for everybody everywhere, including iranians, and certainly including jews.
...well, that is, everyone, except the saudis, who will now have that functioning democratic society in their region that they have been trying to prevent for eons and that might succeed in absorbing the kurds where any arab state would fail.
and, by extension, except for washington because washington's most important ally in the region is the saudis and washington primarily follows saudi direction in the region. the jews do the dirty work. the saudis make the decisions.
do you know anything about the spanish revolution? americans and brits and franks and people from the colonies went there to fight the fascists. they pleaded with the british, and they pleaded with the americans, for help, and nothing ever came. capital decided that the fascists in spain were preferable to the revolutionaries. in the end, they were massacred by stalin.
i am not an isolationist, i am a revolutionary socialist. i support global revolution everywhere all the time, including here. i am not opposed to intervening in iran. the iranian government needs to be overthrown. but i understand the reality of the forces aligned against the iranian people, and the american state is not on their side, even if you or i are.
the hard part is understanding that trump is their best hope and that when this time window closes, it's back to theocracy in iran, potentially for decades. they will not overthrow this regime without outside help and no conventional american decision maker will choose secular democracy over a fascist client state.
Tuesday, January 13, 2026
i've always absolutely hated birthdays, and absolutely hated birthday parties. i didn't want to be the centre of attention. i didn't want to be special. i wanted to blend in with the furniture and for my family to fuck off and leave me alone.
i have pictures of me at birthdays when i was under ten, and i'm frowning or crying in all of them. i really hated it. i found it traumatic to be expected to interact with all of these people i mostly didn't like.
as i grew older, i wouldn't celebrate anybody's birthday, or religious holidays, or hallmark holidays, or calendar events or anything. starting around the age of 13 or 14, i would lock myself in my room on every possible event - other people's holidays, my holidays, whatever. family would come over, and i would wait inside until they left, and come out after dark to get leftovers. it didn't matter what the event was.
i've never had a lot of friends, but nobody ever knew when my birthday was, because i never had birthday parties. i wouldn't even tell anybody. i didn't want anybody to know.
i'm 45 today and i still hate birthdays and i still want people to go away and fuck off.
Monday, January 12, 2026
the ai moral panic is going to continue for a while.
don't be like alex jones, fake leftists. please.
you will, though. because what we call progressives today are five years away from becoming exactly what we called conservative 100 years ago, conservatives have become liberals and the left has completely evaporated.
but if you're a capitalist bastard, don't let your greed make you complacent.
it's a matter of time before the left returns from the ashes, to rise like a phoenix from the ashes of capitalism, and stripped of it's corruptions and impurities. the death of the contemporary left, globally, just means that when it returns it will have no baggage left to deal with, no confusions, no co-opted structures, to start. it will begin anew.
go throw the chip in the lava pit, progressives.
the world will move on without you.
what tech companies are trying to market as "artificial intelligence" is really just a server side search engine. it's a more powerful search algorithm that uses much more connected and integrated sets of data. but what's happening is essentially that each of these companies is independently mirroring the web - the same way the internet archive (the wayback machine) has been doing for years - and then conducting search algorithms on the archived data. this is more powerful and allows for more developed outcomes, but it isn't anything fundamentally different than searching.
i actually took graduate level courses in ai in university when i was studying for a computer math degree. i know what i'm talking about. that journalist over there probably doesn't, and neither do you.
what we call ai is not cognition, it's a decision tree. you train a program to search a database for information. when you train it, you get it to follow paths along a directed graph (that's the math used, graph theory; that's a technical term, directed graph), which is no different than a rat learning how to navigate through a maze. while a rat demonstrates some level of intelligence, the algorithm uses statistics and shortest path algorithms to guess at outcomes. over time, the program remembers the short cuts and goes back to the same places, but it's still not fundamentally different than searching. it's fancy searching. searching 3.14. whatever.
it follows that when some company's ai throws back child porn, it's doing so because somebody searched for it and it follows that going after elon musk for this is equivalent to going after google for somebody using google to search for child porn. google/twitter may bear some minimum level of responsibility for not filtering results, but the process of censorship is very fraught with peril for free speech.
the culprit that the law needs to go after is the person searching for the child porn, not the algorithm that performed correctly when asked to search for the child porn.
there's an anecdote i heard in a hitchens speech many years ago. i don't know it's accuracy, but it doesn't matter.
Dr. Samuel Johnson, author of the first great dictionary of English language, was visited by a delegation of respectable ladies of London.
“Dr Johnson,” they said, “we congratulate you for omitting all indecent or obscene words from your dictionary.”
“Ladies,” said Dr. Johnson, “I congratulate you for looking them up.”
the canadian liberal party, which is just copying the canadian conservative party at this point, wants canada to be just like venezuela. and mark carney and danielle smith are going to end up like maduro and his wife.
i don't really care about the well being of canada's political class, but are we going to let them drag the rest of us down with them or are we going to rise up and put an end to fossil fuel extraction for good?
selling oil to china will not create "prosperity", it will create sanctions and war.
Sunday, January 11, 2026
i purchased groceries on friday, enough that it should last me for the rest of the month.
i need a new blender.
for now, i'm going to continue to eat through the rest of the food bank food, and get through that broccoli soup a little later. one of the things they gave me was a package of smoked meat, that's been in the freezer for a while.
i bought a number of items explicitly for this that i don't eat a lot of but that i like and consider junk, like dill pickles. i enjoy the dill pickles, but they're just empty calories. they're going to be eaten in my tomato sandwiches and my caesar salad, but i needed them for the smoked meat sandwiches.
i bought a loaf of french sourdough, as well. these are the big loaves, so that you cut one piece in half to make both sides of the sandwich. i'll use the rest of it for my french broccoli soup.
- i took four of the middle pieces out and cut each in half, and toasted all of them
- two of the slices were put aside to eat with margarine only
- two were for thick smoked meat sandwiches
- i put the smoked meat in the microwave, covered, and zapped it for 33 seconds five times, waiting for a small time frame in between.
- i put four pieces of bacon on the stove
- the sandwich is built as follows:
- sourdough bottom
- caesar dressing
- smoked meat
- yellow mustard
- dill pickle
- monterrey jack
- bacon
- cheddar cheese
- frank's
- sourdough top (with more mustard)
i'll have that with a tall glass of orange-grapefruit juice.
i'm not a jew. i don't care if it's kosher.
Saturday, January 10, 2026
yeah, i would be strongly opposed to this.
it's an overreach of state power to tell private lenders what rate of interest they can charge. these are private contracts and people enter into them freely of their own will. restricting interest rates is islamic fundamentalism, and it reeks of anti-semitism. it should be rigorously opposed by everybody interested in freedom.
the actual result of a policy such as this is that emergency loan services will go out of business, taking away a service that people sometimes rely on and need. these loans will continue to happen, but they'll happen under the table, with more severe outcomes for people that can't pay the debts. lending out money to high-risk people at 10% interest will no longer make business sense, and the businesses will stop doing it. the result is not a decrease in interest rates, but a decrease in access to lending.
you want to continue to legalize and regulate high interest lending so it can be overseen by law enforcement, not drive it underground and make it worse by trying to ban it.
the state might step in and provide high risk loans at low interest if it wants, but it wouldn't have to interfere in private decisions made by consenting adults in order to do it.
they're not going to get support from the united states or europe, who are too busy jerking off arab princes.
the kurds, once again, offer the only hope for peace, stability and democracy in the region. my solidarity is with the coalition developing to overthrow the neo-nazi government that's recently taken over syria, with nato and specifically with turkish backing.
the iranian regime doesn't care about the well-being of the people protesting on it's streets. they're a bunch of apostates. they'll mow them down with machine guns before they meet their demands, or accede any power to them.
it's important that the protesters continue to broadcast to the world that they want a revolution, but they're largely wasting their time, on their own accord. there is no path to peaceful change in iran.
the question as to whether it's in us interests to intervene or not is an open question and i acknowledge i will not like the outcome, but this regime isn't going to be dismantled from the inside. overthrowing this regime will require the intervention of outside actors, and the use of violence.
the american tactic of generating unrest and provoking instability to topple governments without the use of military force requires some concept of democratic functioning in government as a prerequisite in order to be successful, even if the protests can get to critical mass. in the 21st century, critical mass will merely result in massacres and slaughter. populations cannot defend themselves with rifles against drones and tanks.
this tactic did not work in venezuela because the class divisions in the society were too deep for bourgeois support to get to critical mass, and there was simply no way to provoke enough unrest to topple the government, without first addressing the material conditions of workers, which workers understood would dramatically worsen in a return to banana republic economics and bourgeois democracy.
this tactic will not work in iran because the government would be just as happy to slaughter the apostates and do away with them than listen to them, anyways.
i want to be clear.
the correct way for new york city to deal with explicitly pro-hamas/pro-nazi protesters is not with a police response or with tepid political "condemnations". this is new york city. the correct way to approach this is to mobilize on the ground and brutally, viciously beat the shit out of them on the street - to cut them down in public and show the world that nazis are not welcome on the streets of new york, and this is what happens when nazis go there and try to set up.
you don't deal with these people by being nice to them.
you have to bludgeon them. you have to cut them down.
i've read a fair number of attempts to deny that the romans named the region after the greek philistines.
but, in fact, in much of the sources an f is used instead of a phi. the word used in much of the roman and later arab writing is filistin, which became φilistine and then palestine, in english. most languages still retain the soft 'f' rather than the hard 'p'.
there was a greek tribe called the philistines, of which palestine is etymologically derived from, living in the region as well. the philistines entered the region around they year -1200, in a migration referred to in historical sources as the invasion of the sea peoples. the philistine migration is recorded in ancient egyptian sources, and their greek ancestry has been upheld by recent dna tests. they are actually spoken of quite widely in the hebrew bible and their presence on the coast is also recorded in greek sources, like herodotus. it was the aryan greek philistines that wittle semitic david confronted with his slingshot (in the myth/legend recorded in the hebrew bible).
the philistines lived on the coast and had a string of cities there from the bronze age collapse to the eventual conquest by alexander, when they were absorbed into the new greek kingdoms in the region (the ptolemids and seleucids). they had a very big influence on the region, including influencing the religion in the generally-thought-to-be-arab enclave of petra, who worshipped a sky god named "dyushara", a clearly indo-european name that is linguistically identical to greek zeus or latin deus.
modern palestinians are descended from classical period hebrew groups, not the ancient greek philistines. you can find the odd blonde palestinian, and while they might imagine they have crusader ancestry, they're probably actually dragging around philistine dna. there was also a group that lived just outside the region, in the desert, and was called arabs by the roman and greek sources, but they weren't the same people that invaded it in the 7th century. those people that invaded are called saracens in the roman sources, are described as being "as black as the night" and migrated north from yemen. arabs were light skinned, like the jews were. the romans said the saracens were from arabia, as that is where they entered the empire from, and it took some time for the romans to understand what the fuck was actually happening, in terms of a migration event from yemen taking place. the muslims record this in their own history, as well. for the first several centuries, the roman sources actually consider islam to be a christian heresy by the desert nomads, related to the monophysitism of the egyptians. and, islam does consider jesus to have been human, like the heretical monophysite christians in the area did.
the romans did not imagine the term philistine. it was already there, and is in fact embedded in the hebrew mythology, itself. the jews were there (at least after cyrus), but the maximum extent of israel, which is something described in the oldest part of the hebrew bible, was not always reality. it's not like the romans just renamed the current state of israel to palestine. in fact, there was a historical division consisting of a north and south area, and that goes back to the assyrians, and is also noted in the hebrew bible, as well. the size of the hebrew state grew and shrunk over time as different people came in and out of the area, and the ability of the jews to project power and put vassals under their control increased and decreased; sometimes, the jews exerted authority over the other tribes, and sometimes those tribes exerted authority over them. the map wasn't set in stone by a dictate of god in the bronze age, held in place for centuries and then uprooted by the romans, like ultra-orthodox jews today would have you believe; maps are constantly changing things, in perpetual flux and evolution. history exists.
i don't know enough about classical period pottery to know who made this, but finding it somewhere in the south of the levant does not automatically make it jewish. there was a greek tribe in the area for essentially the entirety of the biblical narrative (which is a nationalist mythology and not history) and they left plenty of their own garbage there. there were also other west semitic groups, like phoenicians. an expert would be able to tell if the pottery was greek or semitic by examining it closely and the idea that it could have been "syrian or philistine" is entirely in the realm of plausibility.
the artifact should be labelled by the group they think made it and an expert should be able to determine that.
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