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September, 2025:

Free speech in the United States of America

Sep 18th, 2025
by Craig.
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It no longer exists.

As has been predicted by just about everyone, the fascist American trump administration régime has gone after, is going after, and will go after (as trump himself has already made plainly clear) any type of disagreement with trump. It’s a playbook we saw back in the 1930s. It’s not new; it’s shocking in the 2020s, yes, but it’s not new or unexpected.

I don’t know how the American right and their apologists can do this with a straight face. The hypocrisy is galling; it’s the very “cancel culture” of which they accuse the left … or the “radical left” as trump so eloquently keeps putting it. Whether or not there are any mergers in play is irrelevant, the Federal Communications Commission should not be, in a free country, threatening anyone. It’s the very “big government” that the Republican Party claims to be against. But the Republican Party is not in control anymore, we know that. The American Republican Party party in the 2020s has become the National Socialist Party of the 1930s. And the MAGA whiners wonder why we Canadians don’t want to cross the border?!

The crackdown on free speech continues. The “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” show used to run on the ABC network, and so does “The View”. The next morning, after “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” was suspended, the usually talkative current events panel just glossed over the topic as if it never even happened, as if American democracy wasn’t crumbling around their very ears. Whether they didn’t talk about it because they were self-censoring or because they received a sternly worded memo from ABC brass telling them not to, the bottom line is that they didn’t.

I don’t find Kimmel particularly funny. His disappearance from TV won’t affect my daily life one iota (and I’m in another country, thankfully), but I’m not on TV; I’m not on TV because nobody on the planet knows who I am or whether or not I’m funny. But Kimmel is on TV (or was) because he is well-known, and (apparently) some people think he’s funny. It’s called entertainment. If you don’t like the so-called entertainment on one channel, change the bloody channel! I don’t think any one person will find their life not worth living because any one entertainer disappeared from their list of choices, but that “any one person” needs to consider the bigger picture; it’s not just about any one entertainer.

Do I really need to remind everyone of the following admonition:

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

Apparently there are many cowards in the United States, including and especially among shareholders.

Updated, 2025-09-19: Better characterised the trump régime.

“Prove me wrong”

Sep 14th, 2025
by Craig.
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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.
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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.