american politics

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

May 21st, 2026

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

We’ve all be bombed back to the Stone Ages by trump

May 10th, 2026

by Craig.

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I had given up on giving donald trump free air time. You just can’t keep up with all of his outrages. One minute he’s killing American citizens who disagree with him, exercising their Second Amendment right to “keep and bear Arms”, and the next minute he’s telling the Iranians that they had better behave, according to his un-stated rules, and not execute their citizens. (Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!) Of course we all know now what his implied threat was, as his gunboats steamed towards the Iranian coast. But he was all 100% bluster, because he already knew that he was going to take action against Iran, but he only had enough balls to bomb them; the lily-livered American government doesn’t have the cajones to put boots on the ground, and really put their money where their mouths are.

And so today the Iranian citizens — the blameless men, women and children in the street — are all worse off, getting “bombed back to the Stone Ages”, while trump boasts that he has effected “regime change” because he (and the Israelis) has killed some of their leaders, while the regime — “the organisation that is the governing authority of a political unit” — is still well in place keeping the populace down.

First of all, let me state that, of all the people I don’t want in possession of nuclear weapons, it’s an autocratic, theocratic (of any religion!) regime, so good on you donald trump for finally doing something about it. But for the last 47 years, people have been doing something about it! Just because you have a different idea of what should be done, doesn’t mean your idea is better. As could have been expected and probably was expected by people who have been closer to and more involved in this situation than you have been over the last half century, America is back in a completely foreseeable position, and the Iranians don’t really care. They spent a decade at war with Iraq and know what it means to have their entire society neck-deep in war. Been there, done that. You, on the other hand, haven’t been neck-deep in war for 80 years (you were born after World War II), and even then you (America) showed up late after the Europeans had been doing all the heavy lifting for a few years. That’s why some of us can’t believe you’re complaining about Europe not wanting anything to do with your war/tantrum after only a couple of months, when you didn’t even have the courtesy to consult them or your Middle-East allies.

But trump can’t think past five minutes from now. He goes on about the fact that he’s “the first American president” to put his money (although he doesn’t have any) where his mouth is and actually do something, by pulling out his guns and sending the boys and girls (barely adults) of the American military as cannon fodder to their deaths. Except, that’s not quite true because, as I said, the lily livers in the American government (foremost among them tough-talking Pete Hegseth) didn’t send anyone into the fray of battle, as they eventually did in World Wars I and II; they just sent a few airmen in their air-conditioned cockpits to press a few switches to drop a few bombs. Granted, he’s been successful so far, with “only” 15 American combatants killed, and 538 wounded. Congratulations! There’s “only” 15 lives been lost; I’m sure those families don’t mind you killing their loved ones, not to mention the thousands you’ve killed in Iran, Lebanon and elsewhere.

This little “excursion” — which sounds a lot like putin’s “special military operation” — has been going on since February, over two months now. I go back again to my statement that trump can’t think five minutes into the future (he has the attention span of a gnat); the consideration that he can’t think five minutes ahead, never mind two months, might be why no American president has ever decided to use military force on Iran! Imagine that! Here we are, two months in, and we’re two months into one of America’s notorious quagmires (after he swore off foreign wars), and donald trump has, effectively, bombed all of us back from the Space Age to the Stone Age. Although I’ve been thinking about this post since at least January — to use myself as an example of being affected by trump’s short-sightedness, despite the fact that I am nowhere near Iran and not (thankfully) an American citizen — I was just forced to cancel a short trip to Ireland for a school reunion. I’m pretty bummed about it, because they only happen once a decade, but I don’t want to be stuck in Ireland for an indefinite period of time, which has a chance of happening if you take as long to resolve the Iran war as your country took to skedaddle from Afghanistan. (That’d be two decades, for those of you who had forgotten.)

There’s so much to cover here, but I’ll try and summarise to some extent, in sort of chronological order:

NATO: It’s so obvious to all of us that attended history classes, that you were out back smoking with the boys while you were supposed to be in class with us. NATO is a ***DEFENSIVE*** alliance; they are not there to do your bidding whenever you feel like attacking someone you don’t like! There is no obligation on the part of any NATO member to join in on one of your unilateral American operations (which the Iranians have called “adventurism”), especially when you haven’t even had the courtesy to talk to them about it in advance! They didn’t “fail” your dumbass test! They didn’t even know about your test any more than someone watching the news already did! Claiming after the fact that it was a test that they failed miserably is the most asinine and juvenile statement ever made by a so-called “world leader”.
Also for those of us who have at least perused a few of the pages (and even pictures) is history books can see the startling similarity between the Communist “Red Scare” (led by the American Joseph McCarthy) and today’s Islamophobia (led by donald trump), the “least racist person in the world”. There is not an Islamist behind every tree or under every bed.
Enough with the “card” analogies. Yes, you can hold as many Uno cards as you want; nobody wants to play with you.
We’re not impressed with how many agreements you tore up to get yourself into a worse situation than you were in before you started bombing Iran. I mean, really, that statement tells us more than anything. A couple of months ago the Strait of Hormuz was open, and now it is closed, and you have no workable plan to reverse that situation … because, as I said before, you can’t think five minutes ahead.

The only good I can see coming from this situation is that all the poor people in America, that you allegedly love so much, are not going to be happy with $6-a-gallon gas when it comes time to vote in your midterm elections.

We have a majority government in Canada

Apr 14th, 2026

by Craig.

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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!

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.

Dictators meet in Anchorage, Alaska, nothing happens

Aug 16th, 2025

by Craig.

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The world’s press has spent the last few days, and today (Friday here) in particular, trying to make a “nothingburger into filet mignon”, as one commentator said. Anyone with a brain knew well in advance of today that nothing substantive was going to happen without the presence of Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the summit, especially as trump wants so desperately to be seen as a friend of the enormously popular (excuse me while I retch) putin. After absolutely nothing happened except that putin got to ride in The Beast and watched a brief personal airshow, they both jumped in their planes and burnt a few more holes in the atmosphere to fly back to opposite sides of their continents.

All that I really saw was that the world’s most powerful dipshit and wannabe dictator spent the day sucking up to the world’s current biggest war criminal … who, I will point out, was not arrested when he landed, but this is no surprise given that the United States refuses to become a party to the International Criminal Court (ICC), has been aggressive towards the ICC and has hosted other war criminals in the past.

In fact, it was just two dictators getting together for lunch; trump probably asked putin for advice on getting away with sending troops into his capital city!

But maybe we’ll never know what they talked about because, other than admitting utter failure to negotiate a peace deal (certainly not why putin was there), both sides have refused to say anything. So in the absence of any information we’re left to wonder if the world’s two super-dictators have cooked up some sort of deal where they both get richer and the little guy (Ukraine) gets shafted.

It was just a typical “nothingburger”! Nothing else to be said!

I’d like to get away from trump, literally and blog-wise, but … there’s Pete Hoekstra

Aug 15th, 2025

by Craig.

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The latest idiot to raise my ire is his ambassador to Canada, Pete Hoekstra, who has pissed me off in at least two ways recently:

As I’ve said before — although I can’t speak for all Canadians, but this certainly applies to this Canadian — I am not boycotting travel to the United States where I regularly used to spend thousands of dollars a day (pardon my extreme exaggeration) because I am “punishing” Americans because I don’t like their choice of president. I am simply covering my ass because I don’t want to be caught up in some dragnet of an ICE raid of the day and dumped in jail in the southern United States because I am a foreigner. I’ve given examples for why I, as a law-abiding person, have a reasonable fear of that happening to me. There’s no way I am crossing the border until 21 January 2029 … under the assumption that trump doesn’t somehow change the constitution to allow himself to run a third time. (God, I hope he doesn’t live to see the end of his second term, never mind run for a ~~third~~ fourth time! [Sorry, fourth term; I forgot that he failed in his second attempt.])
Now he (Hoekstra) is going on about how Canada is the party that has “pulled the rug out” from under the United States as far as tariffs and CUSMA are concerned! Hello! Did you ever watch one of your boss’ campaign speeches, in particular the one where he announced that he had discovered the word “tariff” and what a wonderful word it was/is? Are you aware that he does not know the difference between a “trade deficit” and a “subsidy”? Have you ever heard him refer to Canada as the “51st state”? Have you ever heard him whine about now “nasty” (a word you’ve used in the same vein) Canada and Canadians are? Sure, maybe you can look at that as all in good humour, but if we had the might and started referring to the US as our “cherished” eleventh province, I’m pretty sure you’d lose your sense of humour (humor) pretty quickly. So fuck you. It’s blatantly obvious to any onlooker who started this bullshit.

If you want to whine about where you find yourself because of your boss upending the entire world order, foisting the cost of tariffs on American consumers and turning decades of economic integration between our countries inside out, don’t blame Canada. We’re just spectators in this farce you and your boss have created. Having just scanned your Wikipedia article, you sound like more of a dipshit than a “diplomat” should be, but that doesn’t surprise me.

I’ll have more to say in the very near future about how you’re fucking up Ukraine as well.

News round-up, late May 2025

May 22nd, 2025

by Craig.

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The media doesn’t seem to get why Canadians are not crossing the US border

I’ve watched yet another sob story on the news about some small business just across the border in the US who are missing all of the business that Canadians bring with them across the border, and I just don’t get it.

I am one of the Canadians who used to cross the border about once a month, and I do not any more. However, I don’t cross not because I refuse to support a country or its president who talks of annexing us and imposes tariffs on us; I do not cross because if I do I will be a foreigner in their land, and the American government and its employees have shown a categorical dislike of foreigners. I do not want to be on the receiving end of that “categorical dislike”, whether it’s from a CBP employee, a Border Patrol agent or even a local sheriff!

I don’t make this statement based on hypothetical conjecture, I base it on real cases, one in which a Canadian was detained at the southern US border while she was applying for a renewal of her work visa, and then kept in custody for eleven days. One example of this insanity is all I need, no matter how it may have come about, the border at which it happened, and no matter how it may have ended — reasonably well for the Canadian after a couple of weeks in Third World-type detention! There’s even a case of a Canadian, who is a veteran who served the American forces, being deported, not to mention of the spouses of trump supporters being deported! My god!

And then, at the US’s northern border, there are so-called “random” searches being made of travellers (including American citizens, presumably) before they get to the Canadian border — so-called exit/outbound inspections! People love to say that, “If you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about or fear.” It’s an old trope, and it’s 100% true, but OK, I’ll just randomly pull you and all of your friends over next Saturday afternoon in your neighbourhood and we’ll see how much you object to that! Besides the fact that a twenty-minute trip across the line can turn into a few hours — or days if you’re really unlucky — nobody likes to be treated like a criminal for no apparent reason. That’s not part of the freedoms on which Canada and the United States are founded; it’s a symptom of a “police state”, no matter what excuses the American government gives (through one of its many police forces, of course) about how such random searches “[make] our community safer”. Yup, police states are very safe, unless you happen to make an enemy of a police officer or have anything to say about the current dictator.

I want to make clear that I don’t believe I have anything to fear — legitimately, if you don’t count my railing against trump on this blog — in crossing the US border; I’ve never been denied entry and, other than a grand total of two speeding tickets, I have never broken any laws in the United States. However, the experiences of the people above, who had less reason than me to fear the American government, give me even more reason to fear the American government and a complete lack of desire to turn one of my twenty-minute trips across the border into a two-hour (at best) ordeal. No thanks. I feel for the American businesses in border towns like Blaine and Point Roberts, but their solvency is not worth my freedom, even for five minutes, and the Canadian media needs to get over this claim that we’re not crossing the border because we’re trying to punish Americans.

It might be useful to note that academics who are avoiding travel to the United States are also not doing so to inflict punishment on mom-and-pop American businesses, they’re doing so to protect themselves from the excesses of xenophobic American government officials.

Pierre Poilievre got CHANGED!

I realise I’m a bit late in getting to this, but I find it hilariously ironic that the constituents of the riding in which Pierre Poilievre (leader of the Conservative Party) ran in the last (2025) federal election took his policy of “CHANGE” so literally and seriously, that they voted to change their representative in parliament, away from him and to the Liberal candidate for the second time since Confederation. So the leader of the Conservative Party doesn’t even have a seat in the House. Of course, some Conservative MP is going to give up his seat so that Poilievre can get into the House of Commons, despite that fact that he’s been rejected by the public. If that isn’t hypocritically going against the will of the people, I don’t know what is.

But Poilievre was voted out for personal reasons; nobody likes him! And he’s not prime-ministerial material! I really think you’d be hard-pressed to find many Conservatives who likes his style or approach, and yet Conservative MPs will all belly up to the bar and claim that he, their leader, needs to muscle out some other MP (who will be rewarded down the road with patronage, of course) to be allowed to run in a by-election to get back into the elitist boys’ club against which he rails at every opportunity he gets. His two-facedness is just beyond belief.

I think the House of Commons will be far better off without him, but it’s a shame that the will of the people will be overthrown by the constituents in a “safe” Conservative riding in Alberta.

Ramaphosa and trump

Ramaphosa and trump in the Oval Office.

In other trump news — we can’t get away from him — he tried to ambush Cyril Ramaphosa, president of South Africa, in the Oval office yesterday. However, the thing that really pissed me off was that the media — including the BBC and CBC — just piled on top of what they described as his long-debunked claims of a “White genocide” in South Africa. “Long-debunked”? That’s news to me. The systematic killing of White farmers in South Africa has been documented for a long time, many years. Sure, we can all debate whether or not the South African government is involved in said genocide but, other than the police force’s dragging their feet on the investigating of the perpetrators, I don’t believe anyone is actually accusing the South African government of being involved. If it’s questionable, my feeling is that the investigation is still open, and it may be years and generations before we know the real truth.

So as much as I do not want to be seen as someone who will pile onto one of trump’s misinformation/disinformation bandwagons, I think he does have a point about the prolific murders of White South African farmers that is still an open question.

US aid to Israel versus US aid to Ukraine

It blows me away how disproportionate the military aid from America is between Ukraine and Israel. I’m a former supporter of Israel — although I still think they deserve more support than their enemies — but I think they’ve ridden and taken advantage of the Holocaust bus / gravy train for too long now. There’s no doubt that Hitler’s crime against the Jews in World War II is, and will remain, a black mark on world history that will exist forever, but that was almost a century ago now, and punishing Palestinians is not quite the same as going back in time and punishing the Nazis, despite the horrific attack on Israel by Hamas on 7 October 2023.

But my point in this post is not to get into the middle of that millennia-long conflict. The conflict in which I’m really interested is the one that started in 2014 when Russia began their destabilisation efforts against Ukraine. This was, essentially, the revival of the Cold War and the Russian imperialist agenda by vladimir putin, but either trump is all in favour of putin’s revival of Russian imperialism, or (as I’ve said before and will undoubtedly say again) he skipped out of all history classes in school and has no idea what’s going on. He certainly seems to have no idea that putin is playing him like a fiddle, promising peace one minute and then withdrawing that promise the next as he bombs more innocent civilians.

Since trump came to power for a second time, he has overloaded the Israelis with weapons and done all he can to withhold weapons from Ukraine in their existential fight against Russia’s invasion. That anyone in a war with Russia has to beg for military assistance from anyone in the West boggles the mind of anyone who lived during the Cold War (especially in one of countries in which the Americans and the Soviets fought one of their proxy wars), since the Americans adopted the Truman Doctrine in 1947. However, as I’ve said many times in this blog, trump didn’t read a single line of history is his very limited education, and so has absolutely no reason to be concerned about Russia (and especially putin) and his megalomaniacal ambitions. So he doesn’t care a whit about the Ukrainians, trying to work his infamous “art of the deal” on them instead, stripping them of their natural resources to a greater extent than Germany was stripped of theirs after World War II. It boggles the mind!

History will not smile on donald trump, especially if he helps putin “win” his war at the bargaining table.

This reminds me that I have been sitting on a piece I’ve written (but not fully completed) about Western companies (like Cadbury, owned by the American company Mondelez) continuing to do business in and with Russia despite the world’s sanctions against the country. I need to cut that piece off and publish it. That said, I have boycotted Mondelez products — and a huge number of others — since I found out years ago that they’re supporting Russia in their killing of Ukrainian civilians.

I took a break from the news

Apr 24th, 2025

by Craig.

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I was on holiday for three weeks in February and March. At home I have a routine of watching, listening to and reading the news, but when I’m on holiday (especially out of the province and country) that obviously goes out the window. The only item of international news that really came to my attention during that trip was the despicable way in which the leader of a country at war (and who had been invaded by a hostile foreign force, to be clear on how the war started) was treated by the leader of a country that isn’t, but was supposed to be an ally against a common foe, America’s traditional enemy of Russia. Those countries are Ukraine and the United States respectively, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy and donald trump respectively. It blew my mind. Shortly afterwards I was sent the following — obviously (and sadly) — doctored video of the meeting.

I say “sadly” because the dickhead trump deserves someone standing up to him forcefully like that, but I appreciate the situation Zelenskyy is in. I don’t envy him.

But besides that one issue, I had a great, relaxing holiday, with family (including new family) and friends, apart from the eerie feeling that I was missing something.

And I’m back, which means I’m back to blogging, after taking a break for several weeks after returning — apart from the emergency post I had to do a few days ago about how democracy was cast aside in Canada by the Leaders’ Debates Commission. I have a backlog of things about which to pontificate, so here we go.

How should I vote in the Canadian election?

After swearing that he was the guy to take on the Conservatives and Pierre Poilievre in the next election, Justin Trudeau finally read the writing on the wall and quit as leader of the Liberal Party. Until then I had predicted that the Tories would wipe the floor with the Liberals and win a majority government. In fact, I also predicted that the Liberals would be reduced to rump-party status. That was as obvious as the nose on my face, as anyone who has watched Canadian federal elections would note, so I’m not suggesting that I’m particularly astute. Trudeau, with all of his learning at the knee of his father, was unbelievably short-sighted to have ignored said writing on the wall but, even more importantly, he was derelict in not seeing the writing on the southern wall, that being that donald trump would be (and then was in November 2024) elected president of the United States and that we’d be in a trade war on day one! I mean, yes, how could any reasonable person have predicted the extent of it — especially considering we were and currently are in a free-trade agreement with the United States! — but with such a controversial president on the doorstep of the White House, we all knew well in advance of 20 January 2025 that Canada needed a new government with a new prime minister to take on the incoming bellicose American government, and Trudeau let down the country by not stepping aside weeks or months earlier.

And thanks to the fact that the new Liberal Party leader is a serious person — the former head of the banks of Canada and England, as opposed to a former drama teacher who always seemed as if he was competing in a speech-giving contest — the fortunes of the Liberal Party have done a U-turn! If they hold out until the election at the end of this month, that will be good for Canada. I don’t know how anyone can take seriously a career politician who sounds like donald trump’s clone — and I’m not just taking that opinion from the Liberal Party election advertising, I’m taking it from how Poilievre has always been known as the Conservative Party’s “pit bull” in the House of Commons — or who won’t take questions from anybody but hand-picked journalists who are fed questions by his handlers. (Have you seen how Poilievre so rudely handles journalists that step out of line and out of his cage?!) Canada would be in a world of hurt if he becomes prime minister.

And about his “pen” of hand-picked journalists at his press conferences, announcements, rallies, etc. We’ve seen at least one try to push the boundaries of their limits, and he branded her a “protestor”! There was anther time when journalists tried to shout out follow-up questions, and they were drowned out by their handlers who erupted into applause specifically to drown them out! These are people employed by the media to elicit information from people who want our votes! So they are effectively telling Canadians, “We don’t want to hear any questions from you. It’s just your job to do what we, the Conservative government/party, tell you to do. Without any questions, follow-up or not.” Even if I supported any of Pierre Poilievre’s policies, that behaviour right there would make me withdraw my vote. It’s arrogance in the extreme.

But back to my heading: How should I vote? Back before I grew a brain, I voted Conservative in my first election in 1988, when Brian Mulroney continued as prime minister, and the election issue was Free Trade with the United States. But since that election my knowledge of and thinking about Canadian elections have changed significantly. Let me fast-forward to 2015, when Justin Trudeau promised that the 2015 election that he won would be the last Canadian federal election run using the first-past-the-post method; that’s the foremost issue on my mind when I vote now, in both Federal and Provincial elections. As such, I now vote for underdog parties, simply as a statement of my dissatisfaction with our current electoral system. That means that I vote for the Green Party or the NDP. I know that neither will win the election, so in the current election, we won’t have either Prime Minister Jagmeet Singh or Prime Minister Elizabeth May (or that other Green guy whose name I can’t remember). I have no idea how many people vote as I do, but pretty much every vote of mine since 1988 has been a protest vote that is slightly more acceptable than spoiling my ballot. Do I really want the NDP or the Greens to govern this country? No, probably not to be honest, but I would like to cast my vote for a winning party for a change.

But Canada is in a trade war with the United States now. Thankfully it’s not — yet! — a military war of force, aggression, destruction, violence and death, but frankly I’m not convinced it won’t turn into one, given trump’s ridiculous rhetoric about making us the 51st state, and his generals’ apparent willingness to fall into line and follow “dear leader’s” orders. I have no desire to be dominated by the USA politically or militarily any more than we already are culturally, so I want to vote for the best candidate for the job of keeping us from becoming that way, whom I consider to be Carney. It’s certainly not Poilievre and, as I said, there is no way that Singh or May are going to become prime minister, so what do I do? There’s the old adage that one should vote for the best candidate in their riding — not the prime minister, for whom we don’t get to vote directly — but I’ve always had an issue with that suggestion because it’s ignoring the bigger picture — that will have a greater effect on our lives — for local issues; an MP or MLA is not a “governor” in any way. That’s why I won’t vote Conservative, because a local MP’s job will just be to provide excuses when I write to him or her with complaints about their government’s policies I won’t like.

So it means that I will likely vote Liberal for the first time in my life. Hopefully I’ll be able to go back to my protest votes in future elections, until someone with a pair of balls — male or female! — changes the federal electoral system to some form of proportional representation. But for now, we’re at war, and I believe we need to vote for a wartime government.

Who’s right? Right? Left? trump? The world?

In the last year or so, I have been in debate with an Irish school friend of mine, and a Canadian MAGA supporter friend of mine who lives in the States. My old Irish school friend seemed to be a level-headed person; I should have seen the writing on the wall, though, as he’s a gay guy who, if half of his fellow travellers had their way, would have him strung up! How a gay guy like him can be so far right I don’t know. But, you know, there’s more to him than his sexual orientation, so I figured it would be good to compare notes on issues as and when they came up.

Sadly, the guy can’t get past the platitudes and catchy sayings of the right. He doesn’t present any thoughtful defences of his political opinions.

The last straw came for me shortly after the American election in 2024. I wrote something brief about my unhappiness with the results, and that it blew me away that North Americans (including Canadians!) consistently vote against female leaders — as opposed to places like the UK, India, Israel, etc. — who have (among others) had female heads of state, and that we (in Canada) would have to live next door to “this piece of shit for another four years.” He wrote a short reply — it is SMS (short message service) after all — that included the observation, “And a cute VP as well!” I then sent him a lengthy six messages in reply that (I felt) focused on issues, except that I ended with, “And finally, it’s sad that your biggest positive statement about trump’s win is that you have a hard-on for the VP. FFS. I can guarantee it’s not mutual!” He replied with, “Not my biggest positive statement, just a bonus 😋”.

And that has been it! I can’t debate based on that crap.

I will probably look him up next time I am in Ireland and we’ll go for a pint, but I have to say that my opinion of him has dropped significantly after that exchange, sadly. 🙁

Similarly, with my MAGA friend. This is a person who, before she left Canada, went on about how the Liberal Party, the New Democrat Party (the NDP), the Bloc Québécois and the Green Party with their combined majority in Parliament used their power — as is defined and allowed by the Westminster System of government — to threaten to vote non-confidence in the minority Conservatives to topple the government. She described this as a “coup”, despite the fact that it was anything but considering the government was a minority government voted into power by a minority of voters! And this despite the fact that she was apparently a political science major in university! This “coup” bullshit was typical (at the time) of the crisis, peddled by both the Conservative Party and Stephen Harper (who would immediately lose power if the majority of parliament voted non-confidence in them), and the far-right minority fringe! I never called her out on this bullshit, because our friendship was worth more.

So recently I couldn’t avoid poking the sleeping bear; I had to ask her about this “51st state” crap, and about trump’s tariffs on Canada that go against the spirit, if not the letter of the free-trade agreement between Canada and the US.

This is what I asked:

I have a question for you. It’s a serious question; I’m not baiting you or anything else negative.

What do you — as a Canadian, an immigrant in the US, and someone who has made a conscious decision not to become an American — think of trump’s attacks on Canada and his wanting to make us the 51st state?!

This was her reply:

Uggg. So many ask me this. I absolutely HATE 51st State like ALL Canadians do. However, it is a fact Canada charges US exorbitant tariffs for dairy et al… See photo below. I don’t believe he wants to annex Canada, but the tariffs have to be equalized. No one publishes what Canada charges. You know I don’t want to become American. Never will. Trump has a point about Canada not paying ita [sic] fair share to Nato and the fact US defends Canada by location proxy.. [sic] I honestly don’t believe he wants to take over Canada like Hitler. I think he wants a FAIR partnership and right now it’s not fair. Love me or hate me.

So she’s against the 51st state crap; I completely disagree that he doesn’t “want to take over Canada like Hitler” (she brought up a Nazi, not me) but I know I can’t prove that. (Just before he invaded Ukraine, putin and his foreign minister went to great lengths to claim that Western conjecture that Russia was building up troops on Ukraine’s border was just that, provocative conjecture. And then he invaded.) After that she just copied and pasted a screenshot of some text message with a list of Canada’s existing tariffs on American goods and services, the first third of which are, admittedly, high because (as is not noted in the misinformation) they’re subject to supply management! As I noted in my reply, it’s no secret that trump doesn’t like supply management, but it in itself is not the issue, trump’s tariffs are the issue! So the screenshot relies on the fact that the first third of the list — five of fifteen products and services — look bad, despite the fact that their levels are due to an unrelated issue.

What followed were more copied and pasted trump talking points — most of them lies, or based on lies or his complete lack of understanding of history and economics — and links to Fox News. There wasn’t a single point made by her that actually argued a point in favour of trump’s actions that I could address. And if I did, she’d just send another trump talking point or a link to Fox News! It’s maddening, but this is the modus operandi of the right. They think it’s all “common sense”, and if you disagree you’re either a communist or you don’t have any of their vaunted “common sense”.

So, no joy there either. I’m starting to think that the people I know on the right are incapable of debate. I’ve certainly struck out on these two far-right friends. But here’s part of my point: I don’t know where, on the political spectrum, most of my friends lie, and I get along just fine with them without knowing! I believe that I can get along with anyone no matter where they are on the political spectrum, but if you want to talk politics you have to have a brain and be able to discuss the details of policies, not just repeat slogans and tell me you have a thing for one leader or another. And I don’t care if you’re left or right, but if you support a moron like trump who is single-handedly turning the world upside-down with no plan presented for his endgame — other than, laughably, to “Make America Great Again” — how can you seriously support his policies?! If you know his plan and you believe it can have whatever results he says they will achieve, then great! But please share that information with the rest of us, just not in the same manner as his blonde bimbo press secretary Karoline Leavitt who, like Sean Spicer, thinks that every question is hostile, and has to be answered as if she’s conducting an assault on enemy territory.

When I finally recognised that our “debate” — which clearly wasn’t a debate at all — was going nowhere, I suggested we end it:

I don’t see this discussion between us being resolved to the satisfaction of either of us, so I think it’s probably best we end it. As I said before, it’s not likely we’ll know the real outcome before 15 or 20 years from now.

(I had suggested earlier that it would take three or four presidential terms before we’d see whether or not trump’s actions were correct … which, I suppose, are only twelve to sixteen years, not fifteen to twenty.)

The last word from this friend, after I made numerous points and questioned the validity of trump’s actions based on his egregious lies and ignorance which she countered with trump sloganeering and links to Fox News, was, “We can agree to disagree.” Normally I would support that conclusion, but in order to “agree to disagree” both sides have to present reasoned arguments, not political slogans, lies, misinformation and disinformation. That really pissed me off, so much so that I just did not reply. If I do, the friendship will very quickly be over.

Last point on this MAGA friend: Apparently, because of her support for trump, she claims to have lost a number of friends. I don’t know if it’s two or two hundred, but the number does seem to be significant, at least in terms of percentage. One is significant in my mind, and I say that as someone who has lost a few friends and family members over the years, because of their stupidity. (And I say that based on neutral, third-party opinion, including the opinion of the court.) But if we’re both still alive in fifteen or twenty years, we’ll see who was right in 2025. The dickhead trump certainly won’t be alive in fifteen or twenty years, and hopefully the rest of the Republican Party will have grown balls by that time and come to their senses.

Travel to the United States

The last time I crossed the American border — which is only a few kilometres south of me — was on 19 January 2025, the day before trump was inaugurated for the second time. I and hundreds of thousands of Canadians won’t cross the border again until 20 January 2029 … assuming trump doesn’t break more laws and more parts of the US Constitution to give himself an unconstitutional third term. (Or does the same putin/medvedev switcheroo that they did.) I do this despite the fact that California Governor Gavin Newsom and Palm Springs Mayor Ron deHarte have begged and pleaded for Canadians to return. I can’t speak for other Canadians, but I am not forgoing travel to the United States because I am “punishing” America for trump’s tariffs, but because, as a foreigner in their country, I won’t feel safe! Even if I just cross the border for twenty minutes to top up my gas tank! I love travelling all over the world, and I’ve been to countries where I wasn’t sure I was welcome, but I’m not taking that chance in America right now. America and trump are even musing about deporting American citizens to foreign jails! If they are willing to deport citizens, why in god’s name would I take the chance of being a foreigner in their country?!

Well, I won’t. The States have already jailed an innocent Canadian while she was at a border crossing dealing with her existing work visa, so that’s all of the examples I need right there. I told my MAGA friend above when I went to visit her and her American husband over the 2024/2025 New Year, that I would not cross the border again until trump was gone. I have some business accounts down there, but I will, in due course, close them from Canada. There just isn’t a hope in hell I’ll cross that border again until Americans and their alleged commitment to democracy have secured their country from dictatorship. I also make this statement based on the number of foreigners who have tried to enter the country legally and have been barred because they expressed opinions contrary to trump, which I have done numerous times in the past on this very blog and will no doubt do numerous times in the future!

I’m sure I’m on a list somewhere; I just don’t also want to be on the six o’ clock news.

That’s enough for now. I need to post this before the election on Monday and I will need to cover my other points some other time.

This is why professionals with more than “common sense” are hired to do accident investigations

Feb 8th, 2025

by Craig.

Comments are off for this post

While perusing trump’s Bullshit Social (aka “Truth” Social) feed the other day when writing that gargantuan post about how and why he is so wrong on the subject of tariffs, I couldn’t help but notice two of his posts about the 2025 Potomac River mid-air collision between a US Army Black Hawk helicopter and an American Eagle aeroplane. They are classic examples of why qualified, professional investigators are required to be allowed to do their work before any bullshit artists (aka, politicians) should say anything.

The first, posted on 29 January 2025, the very day of the crash:

donald trump, Bullshit Social post, 2025-01-29.

The airplane was on a perfect and routine line of approach to the airport. The helicopter was going straight at the airplane for an extended period of time. It is a CLEAR NIGHT, the lights on the plane were blazing, why didn’t the helicopter go up or down, or turn. Why didn’t the control tower tell the helicopter what to do instead of asking if they saw the plane. This is a bad situation that looks like it should have been prevented. NOT GOOD!!!

Where do you start with this one?!

“The airplane was on a perfect and routine line of approach to the airport.”: Wow, and he didn’t even know the race or gender of the pilot at that point when he described its approach as “perfect”.
“The helicopter was going straight at the airplane for an extended period of time.”: Yeah, you can see that on video after the crash with circles around the aircraft involved, but that wasn’t what either pilot saw.
“It is a CLEAR NIGHT”: Clearly trump is not a pilot. Not only does he not know the first thing about flying, he certainly doesn’t know anything about flying at night, so his focusing on it being a “clear night” is absolutely useless.
“… the lights on the plane were blazing …”: Of course they were … if the aircraft was flying towards you, or the camera that took the footage you saw. Clearly that’s not what the helicopter pilot saw.
“… why didn’t the helicopter go up or down, or turn.”: (Questions generally call for a question mark.) But good question, don! I wonder if that might be the focus of a professional investigation! Thanks for giving us a reasonable list of the helicopter pilot’s options.
“Why didn’t the control tower tell the helicopter what to do instead of asking if they saw the plane.”: (Again, question mark?) How do you know that anyone in the air traffic tower saw either aircraft and could tell, from their vantage point, that a collision was imminent? In air traffic control once a pilot tells a controller that he sees an aircraft he is supposed to avoid, the onus for their separation is taken away from the controller and assumed by the pilot. Oh, you didn’t know that? Then shut the fuck up! Professional investigators doing professional investigations and writing professional reports know this. Mere mortals sitting on the toilet in the White House do not, and so should not comment on things about which they are ignorant.
“This is a bad situation that looks like it should have been prevented. NOT GOOD!!!”: Thank-you Captain Obvious! What would we do without people like you so well-endowed with common sense?!

The second was posted two days later:

donald trump, Bullshit Social post, 2025-01-31.

The Blackhawk helicopter was flying too high, by a lot. It was far above the 200 foot limit. That’s not really too complicated to understand, is it???

“… by a lot.”: Your first grade English teacher could have done a gooder job teaching you English. Maybe he or she was a DEI hire.
“That’s not really too complicated to understand, is it???”: First, congratulations on all of the extra question marks. They pretty much make up for your forgetting to use them in your previous post. So yes, good point, so we’ll immediately fire the professional investigator now since you have clearly cracked the case.

This is a textbook example of why crash investigators — like the ones at DCA after the crash appearing before the press — go to great lengths, as they always do, not to prejudge the investigation’s and the report’s conclusions.

This is also a textbook example of why you cannot trust anyone who claims they have common sense, and who also claims that he’s the “least racist person in the world”.

american politics

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

We’ve all be bombed back to the Stone Ages by trump

We have a majority government in Canada

Free speech in the United States of America

“Prove me wrong”

Dictators meet in Anchorage, Alaska, nothing happens

I’d like to get away from trump, literally and blog-wise, but … there’s Pete Hoekstra

News round-up, late May 2025