IamCraig.com Rotating Header Image

politics

FIFA in Vancouver

Jun 2nd, 2026
by Craig.
Comments are off for this post

As if I don’t have enough to complain about, FIFA‘s coming to Vancouver to fuck us all up. I’m really not as much against fun as I seem, but I’ve cancelled all reasons to go into Downtown Vancouver this summer. Family and friends know this. I left the country when the Olympics came to town in 2010. I did buy a pair of red mittens from some Olympic vendor before I left (The Bay?), but that’s about it. It’s the only souvenir I have.

On the other hand, unless you consider roadwork to be “excitement”, there is no excitement around here. World Cup? What World Cup? It’s wall-to-wall roadwork to double your travel time to anywhere. Events have had to be cancelled or moved city-wide if they conflict with FIFA. Anything that FIFA could mistake for competition is not allowed, so don’t even think of putting something up that might indicate you you’re excited, because the FIFA police will make you take it down.

And if you’re the BC Sports Hall of Fame, well, you have to move out of your premises because FIFA needs them as a media centre. How fucking ironic. If you’re a sports hall of fame, you have to shut down, move everything into storage lockers and forgo your revenue during the most sports intensive time of the year because of the almighty buck. There’s nothing you can do. Propose that FIFA do something with the Hall to promote sport in BC? Not a fucking chance. What’s in it for FIFA? Goodwill with the local Vancouver sports community? How much is that worth? Unless it’s a few million dollars to contribute to Gianni Infantino’s bottom line, no thanks. Just move into a storeroom for a couple of months, don’t complain, and keep your nose clean.

And then there are the admission tickets, the last thing you can blame on FIFA. They’re reasonable, right? Because after putting Vancouverites through everything they’ve put us through and fleecing our governments, at least the ticket prices are reasonable, right? That’s the point of living here, right?

Nope, not a chance. News stories show that they’re in the tens of thousands of dollars each. A year’s salary for your average person each! For that kind of money, I’d expect a lot more for ninety minutes, and you know what I mean. I get more out of watching a local football team; I get nothing from watching Alphonso Davies, Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo, not a damn thing. Unless you want to pay me for a year at the rate at which Gianni Infantino is paid? Then I’ll be able to afford a FIFA ticket, and to pay someone to drive me down there and park the car.

I have zero respect for the Olympics, FIFA and any other massive sporting body that just rides roughshod over the locations that they pick to milk dry of our tax-payer dollars. Zero. Nada. Nothing.

Conservatives are determined not to get elected

Jun 2nd, 2026
by Craig.
Comments are off for this post
Kerry-Lynne Findlay

Kerry-Lynne Findlay.

With the election of Kerry-Lynne Findlay to lead the Conservative Party of BC this past weekend, the Conservatives have proven that they’re not serious about governing. Nobody with half a brain could have voted for her, and it’s clear that 49% of the party couldn’t bring themselves to do so. So the federal party is lead by Pierre Poilievre (who is unelectable in any normal part of the country) and now in BC we’ve gone from the party being led by John Rustad (a conspiracy theorist anti-vaxxer) to … someone who is not much better, and who is way older then her PR material hints. The NDP characterised her as “trump north”, and considering she’s just a few years behind trump, that may be true in more ways than one.

Right now Conservatives have to admit that they’re only voting for the party and what it means to them. They can’t possibly be voting for their leaders.

It’s Crow, Mr. Trump, Not Lobster

May 30th, 2026
by Craig.
Comments are off for this post

Thomas L. Friedman wrote an editorial piece in the New York Times (It’s Crow, Mr. Trump, Not Lobster) that reads like the piece I wrote on 10 May, which calls into question trump’s ability to think ahead.

I recommend you read it.

Stephen Colbert takes a final bow, as Cuba is about to do

May 24th, 2026
by Craig.
Comments are off for this post
Stephen Colbert with his 2011 Peabody

Stephen Colbert with his 2011 Peabody.

I watch very little TV (except the news), and what I do watch is because of other influence(r)s. I won’t miss Stephen Colbert‘s show one bit, but what Americans don’t realise they’ll miss is the freedom to say negative things or at least make jokes about about their leaders. How thin-skinned do you have to be, despite the fact that you are the “leader of the free world”, to use your power to make a guy (and his staff) unemployed, and then to boast about it on your Lying Social feed?!

Mark my words, Americans, you will regret this day (last Thursday). Nobody can predict what will happen tomorrow, but trump continues to chip away at freedoms you’ve taken for granted for so long, that you won’t even recognise what you’ve lost when they’re taken away because it happened to someone else, someone you don’t like. If Colbert’s mocking and calling into question certain of trump’s actions, as he did with Biden and Obama before him, don’t amount to anything in two years (November 2028), then why get so exorcised about it now? Your own constitution will achieve what all of his wannabe assassins have failed to achieve … so far. His presidency will end as scheduled and you’ll carry on.

Or will it and will you? That’s the thing we can’t predict for now. Look for action on this after your midterms, especially if they don’t go his way. You haven’t seen anything yet.

While we’re on the subject of your president’s abuses of power, I’m no supporter of Cuba. Fidel Castro’s soldiers fought against my father in Rhodesia in the 1970s. But that was half a century ago. Since then I’ve travelled to Cuba (along with a bunch of Americans on a Canadian flight), and had a long and very interesting conversation with one of those former soldiers. Despite the lies of “little” Marco Rubio, Cuba is not a “national security threat” to the US, at least, not as far as I understand that term. They possibly could be to Florida, but I’m pretty sure nobody in Washington State (or Alaska) is quaking in their boots at the very mention of the place. No, you’re very obviously going to pull a Venezuela and go in and arrest Raul Castro … because you can.

Hey, if you really have balls and want to show the American people how tough (and stupid) you are, go to Moscow and arrest vladimir putin. Piece of cake. You’ll be in and out in five minutes.

Updated, 2026-05-25: Removed someone’s name.

The impossibility of “debating” with right-wing zealots … or zealots of any kind

May 21st, 2026
by Craig.
1 comment

I’m a little depressed today. In the “old days” — I don’t even know when that was, but it was before today, before donald trump came to office — I used to have friends whose political opinions I didn’t know. I might have a general idea that Bob was a bit of a conservative and Jane leaned towards being a liberal (or vice versa) — both starting with lower-case letters you’ll note — but I didn’t know who they voted for. And it didn’t matter; Bob and Jane and I got along, laughed at each other’s jokes, partied, drank and had dinners together, liked each other’s kids, and dealt with the foibles of the day’s government, all of the things that people who like each other do together.

That seems to have changed overnight. Well, I suppose not really overnight if it can be traced back to donald trump’s presidency in 2016 (a decade ago), but it’s one of those things that you can seemingly trace back to a particular event. Maybe it goes back even farther than that to the dawn of the Internet in the late 1960s (or the dawn on the commercial Internet in the late 80’s or 90’s), or maybe to the dawn of Twitter twenty years ago, or maybe the establishment of Speakers’ Corner at Hyde Park in London in the 19th century. Those (except for the latter) were perhaps seminal moments when the vast, unwashed public suddenly gained access to a medium where they could do exactly what I’m doing now, spout(ing) their/my opinion(s).

That’s why the crazy guy you knew when you were a kid — who everybody could avoid because you all knew where his (or her) house was — now has a Twitter account and a few million “followers”, and he and they are considered a legitimate force despite the fact that they’re all just as crazy as that one guy down the street was years ago! And now, any of your friends with just slightly weak minds who are susceptible to crazy ideas because they don’t have the mental capacity think about them critically, feel emboldened enough to come out of the woodwork because, apparently, their crazy idea is shared by many others crazy people as well! I don’t blame them, because if that applied to me I’d feel empowered too, and less ashamed that, despite even our relatively small numbers, people were paying attention to us.

(As I write this, it is a nice day outside and a woman walks past my house wearing socks on her hands and a big hat. This has been happening for a few days now.)

So what does this have to do with The Donald? Why drag him into this mess? Am I not just proving that I blame everything on donald trump, even things that can’t reasonably be connected to him? Isn’t that just a little bit crazy? Maybe everyone should avoid my house too! I suffer from “good old days-ism” just as much as anybody, and I’ve only been around for about six decades, but people older than me (say, ten decades) can probably remember a time just like what I’m referring to, from which we can conclude this has happened before. So even though the dawn of donald trump is the one event of the four possibilities I’ve presented that I associate with what is happening now, I have other reasons.

I have (or had) two long-time friends who, it turns out, are supporters of donald trump. No problem; as I said earlier, I can be friends with people of different political stripes. I already complained about them (I took a break from the news) — without identifying them, of course — and disengaged from discussing politics with them. Discussions with my gay Irish friend ended on 12 November 2024 with his declaration, “Not my biggest positive statement [about how he was happy with the US’s new VP], just a bonus 😋”, and neither of us have so much as enquired about the weather in the other’s part of the world since.

On Friday, 15 November, my MAGA Canadian friend (who now lives in Texas, but grew up in Alberta) was in town and we had breakfast. When we met years ago I had no idea and didn’t need to have any idea she had conservative leanings; I have since learned that about her, but, as is usually the case, it had no bearing on our relationship until recently. Against my better judgement, I brought up politics … probably to point out that trump’s war on Iran that he declared “won” a few days later was still on and choking the world after almost three months. As was to be expected, she disagreed, and quickly pointed out that the price of gas/petrol was apparently as high under Biden as it is now under trump. (Feel free to fact-check that, but I’ve never seen prices as high as they are now in Bellingham, Washington.) Then she brought up how Fauci was a demon who created COVID, how schools are usurping parental authority, and sent me links to “support” those conclusions. However, she’s confused between “testimony” and “evidence”.

In the first case she sent me a link to an hour-and-a-half Youtube video of James Erdman III (apparently a CIA whistleblower) testifying before a Congressional hearing “alleg[ing] [a] COVID-19 coverup”. I replied, “I’m not going to watch over an hour and a half of some guy being grilled by the senate. If you have a link to a neutral website where they summarise his testimony I’ll read that.” Allegations are a dime-a-dozen, but talking about them doesn’t actually turn them into proven facts — which are much harder to come by, for obvious reasons. I explained the difference to her between “testimony” and “evidence”, and said that I was not interested in testimony, just proven evidence, if you’ll excuse my redundancy. She didn’t come up with any, or even an explanation for how the courts running a child’s life are better than a school district. I told her that what she believed in were considered to be conspiracy theories by 99% of the population. She again disagreed, and then took the opportunity to make the extraordinary claim that, “The news in Canada is so biased and censored” … ignoring the fact that I’ve lived on three continents and get my news from multiple sources in multiple countries, all of which I have sought out on the basis that they perform good journalism, which means they report facts regardless of whether their audience agrees with them or not.

Her claim that Canadian news is censored is bullshit, and comes from the fact that all she watches is Fox News, all day every day, who (when or if they even mention Canada) tell her to believe Canada censors the news. And she grew up here!

I know it’s only a sample of exactly two, but at this point I’m convinced that anybody who disagrees with my point of view, which is two MAGA supporters, are sensitive flowers who cannot and do not know how to support their points of view with fact-based arguments. While I agree with some of their conservative points of view, I definitely disagree with most of them, especially that donald trump isn’t a bad president and a is danger to world peace.

Convince me I’m wrong, but back up your allegations with evidence, not just your testimony/assertion. Comments are below.

Right-wing conspiracy.

Right-wing conspiracy

Right-wing conspiracy.

Right-wing conspiracy

Right-wing conspiracy.

Right-wing conspiracy

Right-wing conspiracy

Right-wing conspiracy.

Right-wing conspiracy

Right-wing conspiracy.

Right-wing conspiracy.

Right-wing conspiracy

Right-wing conspiracy.

Right-wing conspiracy

Right-wing conspiracy.

Right-wing conspiracy

Right-wing conspiracy.

Right-wing conspiracy

Right-wing conspiracy.

Right-wing conspiracy

Right-wing conspiracy.

Right-wing conspiracy

We have a majority government in Canada

Apr 14th, 2026
by Craig.
Comments are off for this post

As you know if you’ve read me for a while, I’m a big fan of minority governments (i.e., hung parliaments). In the so-called democracy in which we live, it’s about the only check on a government’s power that we have in between elections. I know it hasn’t worked well for all countries at all times — I am reminded of the Italians in the 1970s and what a joke they appeared to be to us uneducated youngsters at the time — but they are not universally and undeniably bad at all times.

Here in North America — currently about 4.5% of the World’s population — we’re subject to the hegemony of two national parties, the Liberals and Conservatives in Canada, and the Democrats and the Republicans in the US. Yes, here in Canada we’re “treated” to a third “major” party (the NDP [New Democratic Party]) that lost official party status in the 2025 general federal election because they couldn’t elect enough MPs to maintain what they had. But in the US, that bastion of democracy, “third” parties are a joke and never amount to anything; at least here in Canada, the “third party” (the NDP) has actually had enough support to have become the “second party”, the Official Opposition. There is now even a fourth party, the Bloc Québécois, who run candidates in only one province, and I feel should be barred from election for that very reason.

However, I wasn’t happy about the Liberals getting a minority government last year (2025), because we needed to fight back against trump, and I felt that the only federal Canadian politician with enough gravitas and experience (and balls) to do that well, was the (then) new leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, Mark Carney. As a former Conservative voter, it pains me to say that Pierre Poilievre is an absolute joke and shouldn’t even be allowed within 100 metres of the prime minister’s office. Even moreso, now that four of his MPs have crossed the floor to the Liberal Party!

But now that we’ve just had three by-elections — which were all swept by the Liberal party, now that Canadians have had a good chance to test-drive Mark Carney as our Prime Minister and seen what a joke and embarassment Pierre Poilievre has been — the Liberal Party of Canada now has a majority government. Thank god! I don’t feel that governing parties — probably especially the Liberals — should feel they have the right to run roughshod over the Opposition, but in this case, today, dealing with the piece of shit trump, the Government of Canada needs the freedom of a majority government to have the ability to get the damn work done to put trump and the Americans in their place.

So congratulations to Mark Carney and the Liberal Party of Canada! MCGA!

The CFIA has also become the poster child for giving the middle finger to the law

Nov 17th, 2025
by Craig.
Comments are off for this post
Common ostrich

Common ostrich. (Cropped and reduced, Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0)

All during the COVID-19 pandemic I sat and mocked the morons who were demonstrating in the streets against lock-downs and various other methods to control the population to reduce the spread of the disease, around the world, here in Canada, the United States, Australia, etc.

I watched the experts, who I will not demean by putting that word in quotation marks, speak sense to the masses. I decried the people who stalked doctors and nurses and other medical personnel, and besieged hospitals, in an attempt to intimidate them into stopping their vital work.

And now I’m watching the farce at Universal Ostrich Farms. As I said previously, I find it odd that I’m now apparently in bed with the same nut jobs I couldn’t believe were seemingly convinced the end of the world was near, who predicted I’d be dead with a year of the first COVID vaccine I took … five years ago.

I’m not a virologist; I will admit that up front. I believe I am a scientific and critical thinker. I don’t think that ostriches are magical animals, something that only occurred to me after reading the diatribes of a virologist. That virologist is Dr. Angela Rasmussen, who I recognised from her appearances on the TV news when she was explaining to Canadians (and anyone else who would listen) how COVID worked and why is was important to wear a mask and how to behave in groups of people to avoid transmission of the virus. She made sense to me then, so I am dismayed to learn that she is in favour of the “stamping out” policy of the CFIA (Canadian Food Inspection Agency) with respect to the ostriches.

As I said previously, “Would humanity have ever made its way out of the caves if we mindlessly executed every human that ever caught a cold?” That’s the crux of my argument against culling 400 ostriches. It’s not that I have a special bond with Speckles, one of the named ostriches; it’s that I have a bond with all … well, most … living creatures on this planet, especially those that are subject to the whims of authoritarian humans, who can decide with the stroke of a pen that 400 lives are meaningless and can be vapourised in the blink of an eye, or however many hours or days it takes to kill 400 animals. Why is life, human or otherwise, so disposable to us humans? That’s what I, and I’m sure many people, think and wonder about.

I’ve done some research on Dr. Rasmussen (which is a loaded assertion after the pandemic), which research I do for every blog post which is why I do so few of them. I am shocked at the extent to which some have gone to threaten and intimidate her. Those are the people I referred to above. There’s no excuse for that; I disagree with her, but I don’t think she should suffer the same fate as she thinks the ostriches should. I also realise that there is a huge difference between the “colds” that humans get, and “highly pathogenic avian influenza” (HPAI) that was diagnosed on the ostrich farm, so don’t bother disagreeing with me on that point.

Although it’s not the first time, I looked at her blog on Substack. The lead article there (as of 6 November 2025) is “Release The Ostriches’ Grippe“. I won’t focus on its title and the odd possessive of “ostriches”, and the use of the word “grippe” (which I had to look up, so I expect its context means more to some people than others), but when I opened it I found it odd that an “unbiased scientist” (she links to someone who goes by that moniker on her home page, so I assume she’s claiming to be unbiased herself) would open a supposedly scholarly article with, “I cannot believe that I have even used the word ‘ostrich’ this much in my life. I went into virology because I prefer studying microscopic parasites to vertebrates. I should have known better than to think I wouldn’t have to know about these terror birds. … Sometimes the hosts [of viruses] are incredibly annoying. Ostriches fall into this category.” OK, so Dr. Rasmussen has an emotional reaction to ostriches, but we’re still supposed to take her thousands of words about them at face value as being “unbiased”! So really, my emotional reaction to snuffing out 400 lives is just as valid. She goes on right after that to call the opposition to the cull “a radicalized absurdist yokelfest” after that, so she has even more biases than just the one against ostriches.

I was going to read her full article anyway, despite the fact that she goes on to demean those who disagree with the cull with more slurs. I chose a career in IT, where I can minimise my interaction with vertebrates, both bipedal and quadrupedal, but I still take interest in some of their blogs … the bipedal ones anyway. But ten days later work has overtaken me and the press has moved onto other shiny things. I’m not going to bother reading her full article because I’m sure it will be just a mean-spirited rant against the aforementioned “yokels” and anyone else who holds life to be sacrosanct. No thanks.

Updated, 2025-11-17: Immediately added that I understand the difference between a “cold” and HPAI. Also added the word “also” to the title.

“Prove me wrong”

Sep 14th, 2025
by Craig.
Comments are off for this post

If you’re going to start a conversation with, “Prove me wrong,” you’re doing it wrong. Because the phrase, “Prove me wrong,” implies that you’re opening with the statement, “I’m right, prove me wrong.” So if you start out by telling your opponent, “I’m right and, ergo, you’re wrong,” then maybe you should start with another phrase?

Just another tip in my, “How to Win Friends and Influence People” course that you can buy now for 9.99. It might save your neck. You’re welcome.

The CFIA seems to have become the poster child for anti-vaxxers

Sep 9th, 2025
by Craig.
Comments are off for this post

God forgive me for taking the side of anti-vaxxers like Tamara Lich (whose surname I pronounce like the worm I believe she is), RFK Jr., Dr. Oz and others, but I’ve re-discovered that they still exist (long after the pandemic ended and their catastrophic predictions were proven wrong) through the “Save our Ostriches” website, but politics make for strange bedfellows.

When I was in elementary school I participated in a school project which was, as I recall, an in-school version of an inter-school competition called the Young Scientists Exhibition. It was a competition to create the best project, complete with posters and all the “stuff” you could come up with to make it engaging for the people touring the exhibition — so, working models, demonstrations, etc., and ostrich scat (poop) in my case. My project, the subject of which I chose, was on ostriches. (I was a bit of an ornithologist at that age, and I thought ostriches were pretty cool birds.) That was in 1979, and I still had the papier mache ostrich my father helped me create with its welded wire skeleton and marble eyes until I finally decided there was no point in my carting it around from house move to house move in the early 2000s. But anyway, ostriches and I go back a few years.

I’ve read a lot — largely through the “Save our Ostriches” website, I will admit — about the case with the ostrich farm and the cull order issued by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. It’s hard to disagree with the assertion that the CFIA has overstepped the boundary of its authority in ordering this cull. Would humanity have ever made its way out of the caves if we mindlessly executed every human that ever caught a cold? Sure, maybe killing every single chicken in an infected flock makes some sense, but ostriches are not chickens. I’m not sure that any CFIA bureaucrats have ever seen a chicken or an ostrich outside of a picture book in their offices.

Fortunately, as of a few days ago, the Federal Court of Appeal seems to have come to its senses … for now.

Sad day in Canada

Aug 19th, 2025
by Craig.
Comments are off for this post

As was to be expected, Albertans left their brains at home when they went to the polling booths in Battle River-Crowfoot, voting, of course, for Pierre Poilievre. It’s hilarious to me that the people on that side of the spectrum who make a big deal about not being “sheep”, blindly follow their sheep herder and just vote for the party rather than for someone local who would actually have been a good representative for them in Ottawa.

This seems to have put paid to any hope that the members of the Conservative Party might treat Poilievre the same way they treated Sheer and O’Toole, booting him from office as leader of the party. The fact that he blew a twenty-somethng percent lead in the general election would spell the death knell for any other party leader, but I don’t think even the Conservatives take themselves seriously any more.

Hey, I used to be a Conservative; it’s not the philosophy I have a problem with, but my problem is with mouthy, yappy, “I’m so tough and shouty” guys like Poilievre who have done nothing for Canadians other than be shouty and yappy! How are those leadership qualities?! How does that make you the best choice to be prime minister of this country?

It doesn’t.

I was hoping that Poilievre would be defeated and then we could stop watching him rant and rave on television, and perhaps someone with a brain might take over the Conservative Party. But is there anyone with a brain left in the party? There doesn’t appear to be.

I just thank the god I don’t believe in every day that we have an adult governing this country, rather than a career politician who couldn’t feed himself if he had to go out and get a real job. He dodged that bullet yesterday.

← Earlier Posts