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donald trump

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

May 21st, 2026
by Craig.
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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.

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It’s just hilarious …

May 20th, 2026
by Craig.
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… that JD Vance can stand up in front of the world and claim, “We’re not in a forever war,” three months into American’s supposed three-day war on Iran! This is why MAGA Americans continue to believe that the war is over, because all they watch is Fox News, which dutifully parrots any utterance by the trump regime and Dear Leader trump! As long as the regime in Iran is in power and the Strait of Hormuz, an “international waterway”, is blocked, controlled or managed by Iran, the war is still on and trump is losing!

So sad, too bad, you should have thought it through.

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:

  1. 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”.
  2. 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.
  3. Enough with the “card” analogies. Yes, you can hold as many Uno cards as you want; nobody wants to play with you.
  4. 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!

Thank god Pierre Poilievre is not our prime minister!

Jan 21st, 2026
by Craig.
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After watching Mark Carney’s speech yesterday in Davos, I am so thankful that PP is not our prime minister! There is no way he has the intellectual capacity to play on the world’s big stage with the big boys he’d have to deal with. Not a hope in hell! He’d just embarrass us and himself, and we’d be the 51st state by the weekend, or a weekend sometime last year.

Buy Swedish fighters!

Nov 19th, 2025
by Craig.
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I was marvelling at the news a few days go that the Ukrainians had placed an order for a number (it’s not important what it is) of French fighter jets recently. They probably made that decision in a week or two, less time than it take for me to decide which shade of blue to pick for my bedroom paint job. It’s amazing how a war can focus your abilities.

As opposed to Canada. When I came to Canada in 1979 they were using the CF-101 Voodoo, and they ordered the CF-18 the next year. For what seems like every day since — 45 years! — we have been talking about a government procurement process to acquire a new fighter aircraft to replace the CF-18, which have cobwebs on them by now.

Now we have an American president next door who doesn’t like us, and we on the southern border are expecting their tanks to roll across the border any day now, and yet they still expect us to buy their F-35s! WTF?! If we’re expecting our former friends to invade us, to make us their 51st state, why would we buy armaments from them! We might as well buy MiGs! To top it off, it has been alleged that if the Americans deign sell us F-35s, they will come with features disabled and the ability for the Americans to make them flying bricks at will.

But the Swedish Saabs are supposedly “old”; they’re not as modern, as cool, as the F-35s will be when they come roaring across the border to bomb us Canadians back to the Stone Age.

Quite frankly, speaking as a pilot, I’d sooner pit my wits in a Saab against a video-game-playing kid in an F-35.

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.

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:

  1. 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.])
  2. 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

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.

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