Cranky Canuck Torontonian. Failed repeatedly to get a job as corporate philosopher. Internet smarty-pants. These opinions are mine and not someone else’s. Pronouns: it/they, or whatever else you like, but I will absolutely respect yours.
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I guess everyone on earth has to hope the US electorate is as rational about compromise candidates as that quoted below. And, of course, that the Ds don’t accidentally nominate a woman who is an imperfect candidate but who is by any measure you like vastly more qualified than the R candidate.
In the event I ever buy a phone again (and I’m not willing to swear I will), I may just ditch Apple because of the g-d autocorrect, which has become reliably worse over time. It now overrides my corrections regularly. And it replaces perfectly good words with garbled nonsense too. Mysterious.
I remember a cartoon of Andropov commenting, "This cold is killing me."
Is this really news? His breathtaking stupidity on every topic ever was on copious display for an entire term of the presidency. This is why the rest of the world believes that US citizens are themselves either evil or stupid: they put him _back_.
This would certainly fit with the universe’s apparently increasingly ghoulish sense of humour.
Cold announcement incoming.
I think the most emblematic part is that he is so incompetent that he can’t even hire a typist who knows how to capitalize in English.
Anyone old enough to remember the late Soviet period will only get worried/start celebrating when they announce that he has a cold.
I didn’t know he dictated them (I’m not surprised, it’s just the sort of minutia about that dumbass that I have resolved to avoid); but if they are dictated, what causes the Capitalization By Importance Of Word? Is it some AI experiment gone awry?
This is why nerds and privacy advocates get so worked up about data collection and retention. If you don’t have a positive need for it, don’t collect it. If the need has passed, expire it and dispose of it.
Heard what I figured was a raccoon fight outside. Just weird that there seemed to be only one voice. Normally you can hear two. About 15-20 minutes later, I started being able to smell skunk. I’m now guessing a raccoon has just learned that the skunk should be avoided.
Money saved is to redound to the benefit mostly of the wealthy in the U.S. This difference is not some picky technicality, and I’m embarrassed for @canadaland.com to be making such a willfully bad argument. It smells like clickbait and nothing more. They can do better, and have done.
Carney seems to be reasoning, probably correctly, that he has neither the political nor economic room for either more debt or a tax increase. Yet he has several expensive spending priorities. Trump’s cuts, by contrast, come from a mainspring of completely mistrusting the civil service. Moreover,
Analogies succeed or fail based on similarity and difference, and the difference in this case seems blindingly obvious, yet was left out of the discussion. The Carney plan is to make cuts in some areas to expand other areas of spending e.g. military, the RCMP, and a small trade war.
The @canadaland.com show of 22 Aug makes a comparison between the Carney gov’t announced plan for reductions in some of the Canadian federal civil service, and DOGE in the U.S. The argument is basically that each government is making possibly big cuts, and so they’re the same thing. Absurd.
Also, it’s a bad law. It generates a great mountain of data that will be poorly secured and will later be exploited somehow.
Suppose all those people really are opposed to this and are just waiting out the current personality. What do you think the odds are that the same was true of newly-Soviet citizens under Lenin? If the Party replaces the current Personality with a new one, what will they do? I say they’ll roll over.
“Vasectomy,” I suppose.
Owing to some construction, I am actually living a Stephen Wright joke: I live on a one-way dead end street. You should see the cars panic.
Your teenage son—and I say this having once been a teenage boy—probably has a better grasp of the limits of his knowledge too. This bozo is so emblematic of the Administration because he, like the rest, combines enormous self-assurance with the most abject ignorance.
Maybe the rest of the world should just close our borders to the US. Apparently they want autarky. Perhaps experience would be a useful lesson. I think while we are at it, we might want to invent a successor UN that didn’t include permanent members with vetoes.
Is it true that I put a 🇵🇸 in a skeet I get banned?
I am reading _Drawing the Line_ (about the Mason-Dixon Line) and am at a bit where the Paxton Boys were marauding Native Americans. It wasn’t an isolated event, and I think we all might reflect on it as we watch the appalling, racist, and unjustifiable actions of the USG these days. Not new.
Well, ok, but then his participation in the Populist party is something that cuts both ways. And of course, he was important in the prohibition movement and was rigidly opposed to evolutionary theory. The left came to be in part technocrats, and that _does_ likely date to FDR.
Well, maybe, but this seems to me too anachronistic, since in our terms we’d probably put W.J. Bryan on the “left” (because of his opposition to the banking and industrial interests of the country). I suspect that the very idea of L-R in our terms is trouble historically.
Sounds like just-so. The principles behind the idea of a “natural disaster” (if not that term, which I’m unable to find in a very quick look) are certainly in Aquinas. Catholic theology never had the idea that earthly fortune was a sign of the state of grace. I’m not a defender of RC church!
As if I needed more evidence that David Brooks is just not interested in reality, I see his remarks yesterday on PBS where he claims the Rs “used to be” a party that hated deficits. But when? Like, ok, sure, when the New Deal was being legislated, Bob Taft complained. But since?
Yeah, I didn’t know whether to laugh in vengeful satisfaction or cry when Boehner put out his book decrying the crazy right wingers who had so much power.
But my point is slightly different. “Centrist” means “people in the centre”. The Overton window has moved so far right, but it is not clear that the non-right end of the spectrum has moved much. Complaints about the “far left” are ridiculous. The “extreme” end in the US is right.
I think this is an anachronistic understanding of the history. In particular, it simply wipes out the history of the Progressives themselves, and it also fails to take account of how rural-urban divisions drove some of these currents.
I think matters are way more complicated with the FDR party. No question there was a left faction in the Ds then. But he was pretty solicitous of the racist stub in the southern Ds and really wouldn’t do anything to trouble them.
It was Reagan in ‘84 that really scarred the Ds. The ‘80 victory was decisive, but it was pretty close in a lot of states even though the electoral count was crushing. Also quite unclear what would have happened without Anderson. But Mondale lost as badly as McGovern. Set up the Clinton party.
…Teddy opposed Carter because Carter wouldn’t bring in universal healthcare. One of the great what-ifs of US history is what would have happened in 1980 if the party had stayed united rather than tearing itself apart as Reagan campaigned.
I think saying the Ds stopped short is too dismissive. The Dixiecrats, ahem, self-deporting from the party made a big difference, and LBJ totally seized the opportunity presented by JFK’s death and rammed through amazingly durable social legislation (some irony a war he opposed sank him). And then …
It is entirely possible to be “centrist by nature” and still think that US “centrist” politicians are crap. Since “centrist” just means in the middle, and since the U.S. right is now in Franco and Mussolini territory, centrism in the U.S. is definitionally reactionary.
Unless I very much misunderstand history, prior to LBJ (or maybe it’s Truman) the Ds _were_ that party. Or at least, a chunk of them were.
Remember that time, so long ago—the 1980s!—when the Ds were the party of lofty utopian promises?
You can make it up to him during National Brotherhood Week.
Eventually, of course, even Kissinger does.
Rachel Maddow today, if this except I just saw is to be believed, suggested that one ought to expect a big brain or plan to really wreck markets. But that assumes some Great Man theory of history. I’m partial instead to the Great Jerk theory: it only takes one to 🤬 things up.
What does it mean when people who are so plugged in still go on TV and say things like, “We’re right on the edge?” Because, I’m sorry to tell you, the edge was _miles_ back there. The car is careening down the side of the yawning Grand Canyon and a couple wheels and the hood are already gone.
I’m afraid you missed your window. Maybe, with the right amount of turnover in the House and Senate, which includes most of the D leadership (I can’t think of an exception, really), you might have a hope of undoing this if you can keep up the victories. But the Birchers planned this a long time.
I don’t think it is happening faster in the US. I think USians mostly only just noticed something that has been an open conspiracy since the 1960s at the very latest.
What is the “will” doing in that sentence? Trump has violated _multiple_ laws including the Constitution in this administration alone, the Congress has simply declined to check him, and SCOTUS is packed with hacks in the tank for whatever the New Emperor says. U.S. _is_ a failed lawless state.
There are many Canadian accidental dual nationals who, I bet, would _dearly love_ to be “denaturalized” (or really de-citizened). We’re subject to all manner of extraterritorial imposition that Americans would find deeply offensive should another country attempt to do any of it to them.
… my own advice would be to treat your domain name registrations as something quite separate from your operating environment, and register everything with an independent registrar away from AWS. This is because of mistakes people make in integrated authoritative/registration interfaces.
It’s worth noting that there are other TLDs unrelated to Google that Route 53 doesn’t support (a prominent example is ai, which is nominally Anguilla but is of course used for something else). This is the nature of the (intended to be) competitive registrar business. Given my experience, …
“Signal” is undoubtedly intended to be an adjective of “service” in the sense of something notable. I think it’s a little awkward in this case, and I also think this use of “signal” has historically been more British than American but is withering even in British English (no cites for this).
Oh. You meant registry, then, not registrar. That this distinction isn’t clear to people 25 years after it was established suggests to me that it wasn’t really that helpful.
What Google registrar? Google sold all that to Squarespace in 2023, and migration completed last year.
B-b-b-baby, we all know that the voting was in fact for “The Mary Ellen Carter”, which is why it is such a fixture at the Winnipeg Folk Festival.
This article is one that the people who are in a position to affect the current US executive branch ought to read and understand. Much of the US’s global influence is evaporating due to one favour-broke man and his approach to every other country.
How can you possibly believe that at this juncture?
And _he_ was controlled by the Soviet Union!
Naw. A whole lot of people vote for their team because they have mistaken politics for football. This is made worse by the indistinguishable difference between sports and political reporting in the US. (One hint: sports reporting has better sets.)
This is all the Internet’s fault. If everyone didn’t need a video for everything, that intern wouldn’t have misread that for “Stan”, and the rest of the Party would have been better briefed.
Sure, but were you trying to get to the destination, “Doing re-interpretive assembly of a Billy book-case on the floor of a 1972 Gran Torino at the bottom of the Niagara River”?
But did you find it, and did you see my mind there by any chance?
You shoulda been there the day I heard Elvis C. singing “Radio, Radio” over the supermarket PA. Everything went grey all at once. Skin, eyes, hair, all of it.
But in your description, “Beer & wine” isn’t what’s for sale, it’s what results. I am fully prepared to believe, however, that AB MoCoorsBev Corp has brought to market the preparation you describe as a “beverage”. So I grant the point.
I for one are glad we has AI now for to catching all the grammar mistakes.
Whole new scan on the lines, “The winds get colder/And suddenly you’re older”!
Not sure I agree it was early.
Well, there have been some. Probably not enough. I’m aware that I was a CEO (of a charity) and that there are people who would like me to go to jail.
I really really want a ban on any more Rubicon crossing. We don’t even know where the actual goddamned Rubicon was. But if the analogy means anything, the Rubicon was crossed well over 4 years ago. Ever since has just been Caesar and his army wandering about plundering.
…Poilievre is sufficiently offensive to Canadians that the moment there was a plausible alternative on offer who was not the guy everyone was tired of, the Conservative lead fell apart.
…In that sense the US is something of an outlier, it’s true. But mostly because the voting system has been systematically rigged to ensure that actual criminals can win if they’re (R). The contrast with Canada is a good one, because it turned out that even with the distortion in this system …
My point was that Trump was not really some weird outlier, but in fact a representation of the real preferences of a significant portion of the US electorate. Trump was really good luck for the Birchers, who had been trying to engineer a permanent victory for the right since (at least) Goldwater …
Why do so many Americans then keep insisting that Trump is some kind of outlier? It boggles my mind that he isn’t in jail.
Well, we can surely expect people will “negotiate” with the U.S.; but nobody will take any of it as a serious agreement. Trump actually complained that the trade deal with Canada and Mexico that _his administration_ required to be negotiated was the worst deal ever. The U.S. is not serious.
It’s great, but I must admit it’s so hard to read so many things that I recognize as, “Oh, yeah, I had managed to forget that stupid thing.”
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but everyone on earth who has been paying the slightest attention has already learned never to negotiate with the United States.
I heard there may be some gnomes that have a supply, and perhaps you hold the key to a minor ellipsis in an otherwise sound business plan.
I’m gonna go for cheese soufflé right now, I’m sorry to report.
A proposal: the United States should replace “The Star Spangled Banner” with the They Might Be Giants song “Your Racist Friend”. Two reasons: the range is one most people have a hope of reaching, and also it might bend the arc of history the right way.
Also, he says near the end, “We are at a crossroads.” But the crossroads was _miles_ ago. The abiding American belief in its exceptional nature is normally just kind of irksome even if a little endearing. But it has become outright dangerous.
Also, he says near the end, “We are at a crossroads.” But the crossroads was _miles_ ago. The abiding American belief in its exceptional nature is normally just kind of irksome even if a little endearing. But it has become outright dangerous.
The thing about “crossing the Rubicon” is that it happened _once_, and after that everything Caesar did was unlawful (until, of course, the law changed retroactively). And, of course, the Rubicon was way back there when Joe Biden won.
This. People continue to buy the comforting myth that Trump is an outlier, but he’s actually just the grossest exemplar of a conspiracy to undermine US democratic functions since at least the choice of Goldwater. The problem is that the descendants of the Birchers have been normalized.
As I’ve now said too often, democracy also dies in the harsh noon-day sun, right there in front of everyone.
I’m quite worried about this for lawyers. Law school offers almost no education in how actually to practice law. You get that articling and as a junior, ploughing through details and sifting them to match a theory of the case you’re working. But that kind of work is the best automation target.
This explains the second line in the refrain, “Punching is always a crime,” right?
To be fair, a lot of Albee’s plays seem that way. It’s part of what I find comfortable in them.
Thinking of every academic who has had to apply for grants to cover the cost of requesting and licensing images for their books with zero assistance from a publisher
This is what happens when people elect right wing governments. They go after books and libraries. www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
My father never knew what a feeling was or how to articulate it. Nor his father before him. Nor his before either, and so on down the ages. This way has brought all the glory around you see, so what need of change be there?
To be honest, I think the entire structure wrought by McGovern and co after 1968, and its subsequent evolution, is a failure, and I’d have liked the institutional party to take that lesson from ‘24 in the way the institution accepted a need for reform in ‘68. But alas.
Great. But it’s still apparent that, whatever the mechanics of the party, it is failing pretty badly to engage a really significant population that ought not to be willing to tolerate a trifecta of control by the Party of Billionaires for Elimination of the 3 Remaining Social Supports.
Speaking only for myself, (1) I live in Canada and it is already hard enough to vote here and (2) it has been apparent for some time that the interest of the DNC in what local chapters have to say if it disagrees too much with what The Leadership says is, at best, low.
My grandparents ran a fish and chip shop. The original menu (on my wall) has like 5 food items on it and one of them is pie. It is surprisingly easy to make a hash of fish and chips.
I imagine it’s Joseph Alsop.
In my particular worlds, I have always found that many people privately worry about this but they don't necessarily have the shared language and skillsets to turn those worries into improvements! It is really gratifying for me to teach engineers we can gain empowerment in this :)
There truly is _nothing_ more gratifying than giving someone the power to turn an inchoate worry into a tool of powerful analysis. Of all the weird things I ever got to do, that was the best thing.
I am so very grateful that there are still people carrying the freight of reminding us how definitions count (literally!). I remember teaching ugrads this stuff. Many had taken stats and thought they knew all about it, and were surprised they didn’t know this part.
How else you gonna stress test Bluetooth, I ask you?
It’s so costly and painful to renounce that it isn’t really an incentive anyway. Though now that the US has given up on being a stabilizer of the world economy that could change.
Well, your mouth to Trump’s ears, because there are a lot of Canadians who had the misfortune of being born on the wrong side of the border, who have never lived there, can’t vote because they’ve never actually had a US address, and yet have to file the most convoluted returns each year.
… crowd that thinks the entire edifice of the USG is illegitimate and that it all ought to go back to a 19th c. basis of funding. I’ve heard one of them occupies a white house of some sort. )
I suppose, and also of course depending on the tax treaty in effect. Still, imposing a tax on US citizens but only if they’re in the states opens the argument that they’re in _some_ state and that the government is therefore interfering in those individual states, no? (I’m alert to the …
I wonder what the idea was to fix it. My understanding is that for the income tax to be constitutional, it has to be on the basis of citizenship. If it were based on residence it would have to be a state tax (and indeed, there are state income taxes that depend on whether you live there).