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First, I printed a snippet from this one in my post last night, but I think it deserves more:
The Frank ConversNation
Mark Carney and the Canadian Malaise: The Grown-Up Enters the Room
The Dichotomy of the Political Establishment and the Media World vs People
We are entering hunting season — and this year, the prey is political.
It’s that predictable Canadian ritual where journalists, pundits, and partisan warriors load their rhetorical rifles and take aim at whoever happens to sit in the Prime Minister’s chair. It’s entertainment disguised as accountability, the old Trudeau Syndrome: the persistence of disbelief that any leader could act with competence or restraint.
...Carney’s critics come in two noisy varieties.
First, the Twitter revolutionaries, who treat compromise as heresy and policy as theatre. For them, moderation is cowardice, and incrementalism is a sin.
Then, the Maple MAGA crowd — the low-intellectual populists who shout “freedom” while living off the very public systems they denounce. They demand lower taxes, better services, and zero trade-offs — a fantasy menu no serious adult believes in.
They won’t like Carney because he embodies what they resent most: discipline, intellect, and calm authority....
Carney doesn’t need to charm; he needs to endure. The test of leadership today isn’t charisma — it’s competence. He will be mocked by the press, derided by populists, and misunderstood by both. Let them talk.
Because while they scream, Carney works.
And in today’s Canada, that’s the most radical act of all.
Dave and Deb / The Planet Democracy: Unfiltered North
Carney's Nightmare: China's Deal Could Save Canada's Farmers—Or Destroy Its Auto IndustrySome good thinking in all of these pieces:
China has offered Canada a way out of a trade war we never should have been in. The catch? It forces a brutal choice between Prairie farmers and Ontario autoworkers. What should Carney do?
...China has put an offer on the table. Their ambassador says if Canada drops the 100% EV tariff, they’ll drop the canola tariffs. It’s a chance to undo the damage, but it’s also a trap that pits Canadian against Canadian.
On one side: Prairie Farmers. They’re bleeding cash in a two-front trade war they didn’t start...
On the other side: Autoworkers. They argue that dropping the tariff wall overnight risks flooding the market with heavily subsidized Chinese EVs. ...They want protection to give our domestic industry a fighting chance to scale up.
Both sides are right. And that’s the hell of it. This is the price of letting another country set your foreign policy.
...This isn’t an either/or choice. The real problem was the strategy itself. Ottawa chose a big, simple wall when it needed smart guardrails. A blanket 100% tariff is a sledgehammer, not a scalpel. There is a Canadian way to do this that protects both our farmers and our autoworkers.
1. Replace the Wall with Targeted Rules: Stop using one giant tax on every Chinese EV. Instead, use internationally legal tools. If a specific company is proven to be unfairly subsidized, hit that company with a matching duty. It’s what Europe does. A system based on evidence, not blanket panic.
2. Demand Investment: If an automaker wants full access to the Canadian market, they should build here. We can make investment a condition of entry: localize assembly, source Canadian minerals, or hire Canadian workers. This protects our factories while giving consumers more choice.
3. Deliver Prairie Relief Immediately: Take the deal. The moment China lifts its tariffs, announce cash-flow support and other aid for farmers. They need certainty now, not months from now.
This approach balances everything. Farmers get their biggest market back, autoworkers get a runway to compete, and Canada finally gets an industrial strategy that serves Canadians, not Washington’s whims....
Leni Spooner / Between the Lines Canada
Cauldron of ChaosTimothy Snyder / Thinking about...
How America’s implosion of focus is reshaping Canada’s trade, politics, and priorities.
... while we’re transfixed by the glitter, something heavier is shifting underneath. The United States is being rebuilt — brick by brick, tariff by tariff — into something fundamentally different. The idea of a “normal” reset in 2028 is wishful thinking.
Change doesn’t happen in reverse; it reinvents itself.... Any future attempt to resurrect America’s generational soft power and moral authority will be the same — a reproduction, not a restoration. ...
And Canada needs to understand that truth quickly. Trump will eventually be gone, but the system he’s reshaped will not. The next administration, of any stripe, will take what advantages it can from what he built. Soft power — the kind that once defined America’s partnerships and ours — takes generations to rebuild once it’s broken, and make no mistake, it has been badly eroded.
We’re watching a new United States under construction, and pretending otherwise is how countries lose focus — or worse, sovereignty.
.... how normal the chaos has begun to feel. The endless churn of headlines has dulled our sense of proportion. A tariff doubles here, a pipeline resurrects there, a friendly Oval Office photo-op follows — and then another rupture. We react, we scroll, we move on. But the pattern isn’t random; it’s directional. The United States is deliberately redefining what power looks like, and Canada is still reacting as though we’re dealing with the same partner we’ve always known. That’s the real danger — mistaking a transformation for a phase. This is no phase.
The Truth about PanicsHamilton Nolan / How Things Work
The current « antifa » scare is an attempt at generating a panic, by people who do panic for a living and who have, unfortunately, succeeded before, at great cost to the rest of us. The price of an « antifa » panic is likely more than we can bear.
We need the truth about panics: that they are a form of deliberate politics based upon scripted lies. And we need this truth now.
...The people who took part in that roundtable at the White House are people who have taken part in and benefited from Panics. ...the Pizzagate panic, ...the whole campus free speech thing, that was an organized Panic. And many of the people who took part in this White House roundtable, so-called, were organizers of that Panic.
The panic that we're talking about now is Antifa. And it's important to see that it is a Panic.
Antifa is not really a thing in the U.S. Of course, there are lots of people who are against fascism and the right to be so. But there is no large-scale, massive, underground...organized connection between these liberal non-governmental organizations and assassination attempts. That is all made up. That is all a Panic. ... The things that people say when they organize Panics are not facts. And so it's really important that ...media cover this in a way that makes this distinction, that we recognize that we don't have to write the things that people say when they're organizing a Panic.
Just writing down their words, that's not journalism. It's not about facts. In fact, it's about fantasies.
What is a fact, though, is that people, and these people in particular, try to organize Panics. That's real. That's a fact. And that's how we should report.
Fragility Is Getting ScaryPaul Krugman
The opposite of risk management.
People who manage risk for a living know that their job is not to predict the future. Rather, their job is to be ready for the inevitable unpredictability. Strengthen defenses everywhere. Hedge your bets. Make systems as robust as possible. We will always be surprised by what the next disaster is, but we should never be surprised that there is a disaster. This is the distillation of thousands of years of wisdom—the concept of antifragility. Shit happens. Be prepared for whatever.
A remarkable thing about the Trump administration’s management of our country is the extent to which they are practicing the opposite of this maxim. Always and everywhere, they are introducing more fragility into our systems. They are making us more vulnerable on virtually every front. Their reign is chaotic, and being unable to know exactly what the worst crisis will be can leave us feeling adrift. But the most important—and disturbing—conclusion about our time is, in fact, perfectly knowable: When you make a system increasingly fragile, it is sure to break when the test does arrive.
...we are, unfortunately, under the control of a group of goons notable for their determination to make everything as fragile as possible. Systems, organizations, cultures, and institutions that may have been able to withstand literal or metaphorical storms are becoming more and more likely to crumble the next time they are tested. This is a problem deeper than surface-level partisan political disagreements. It is the result of a very long epidemic of selfishness and cowardice in public life, a hollowness at the heart of our rhetoric about democracy that has, at last, ushered in a chaos agent that will make us pay for all of it at once.
These are not the kind of wounds that are easily recovered from. This is more like aging, a deep, comprehensive process of weakening that cannot be reversed. If you read the history of America, you will be struck by how many times we have faced incredibly severe social, political, and economic crises, and how we have, gobsmackingly, pulled through them to become the richest and most dominant nation in the history of the world. In general, it is foolish and short-sighted to believe that whatever the current challenges are in our current times are sure to spell doom for the whole American experiment. Those who imagine that to be true have been wrong for more than 200 years. But, at the risk of being a fool myself, I will make one prediction: We are living through the beginning of the end of the American age of dominance. The country will survive, but our era as the world’s mighty rulers is over. We will look back on today as the time just before our wanton, excessive fragility went too far. Fragile things break. Sooner or later, they break.
This is from Jack Hopkins. It reminded me of how hard my dad worked on the farm, how worried he and Mom would get when grain prices were low, how grateful they were that my brother worked on the farm with Dad for several years while he was also at university, which Dad said made it possible for them to take advantage of a period of good grain prices after years of struggle, before Dad retired and sold the farm. It is a precarious life.How Trump Is Making China Great
Why we’re going to lose the trade war, and much more besides...There is, however, one big difference between Trump’s trade policy and China’s. Namely, the Chinese appear to know what they’re doing.
It should have been obvious from the beginning that if America were to get into a full-scale trade war with China, the Chinese would have the upper hand. For one thing, in real terms China has the bigger economy...
Furthermore, while our economies are interdependent, America is more vulnerable to a rupture than China is. True, Chinese industry has relied to an important degree on sales to the United States. But the U.S. economy is dependent on China for critical inputs, above all those rare earths. And here’s the thing: China can quickly compensate, at least in part, for the loss of the U.S. export market by stimulating domestic demand. Given time, America could wean itself from dependence on Chinese inputs — but doing so would take years.
That said, a year ago the United States still had some important advantages over China. Although China has made great strides in science and technology, America still had a commanding position, thanks in large part to our unmatched research establishment, our great research universities, and our ability — thanks in large part to the openness of our society — to recruit talent from all over the world.
Furthermore, America had allies — which, as Phillips O’Brien emphasizes, are a vastly underrated source of national power. China may sometimes make alliances of convenience, but no more than that. The U.S. could and did build a powerful alliance system, because America was more than a nation: It was an idea and a set of values, values we shared with the rest of the democratic world. And you should always bear in mind that Europe, in particular, while it sometimes acts weak, is an economic superpower in the same league as China and America.
OK, you know what’s coming: Since taking office, Trump and his minions have been systematically demolishing each of these pillars of U.S. strength....
So we may be entering into an all-out trade war with China having destroyed the non-trade advantages America used to have in the form of scientific leadership and major allies. As a result, it’s just a question of which nation can do the most damage to the other. And if those are the terms on which a trade war is fought, it’s clear who is in the stronger position. China wants access to the U.S. market, but America needs Chinese rare earths and other inputs. America is going to lose this conflict.
...But Trump decided to start a trade war, and now that it’s happening, America will take a bigger hit than China, both to its economy and to its reputation. It’s bad when the world sees you as a bully; it’s worse when the world also sees you as weak. The man who promised to make America great again has probably ended our position of global leadership for the foreseeable future.
And finally, this is hilarious:
JoJoFromJerz and The Siren / Are you f'ng kidding me?
Stupidity Officially Resigns: RFK Jr. to Assume Full Control
In Which I, Stupidity, Concede Defeat to a Man Who Debated Biology and Lost to a Placenta.
...I have been humbled. I have been out-stupided.
I have gazed into the abyss of ignorance, and it gazed back and asked for a cabinet position.
I have met my match.
And his name… is Robert Francis Kennedy Junior.
A man so magnificently, radiantly wrong that physics itself had to take a seat.
A man who looked at biology and said, “You’re not my real dad.”
A man who talks like Wikipedia after it was left in a hot car.
Now folks say, “He’s dumb.” And I say, no, you don’t get it. Dumb’s me. Dumb is when you pour Mountain Lightning into a car battery because you heard it “charges faster.” Dumb is when you use a nail gun to hang Christmas lights and end up crucifying your own face. Dumb is when you ask Siri how to spell “IQ” and she just hangs up.
But RFK Jr.? He’s different. He’s not just dumb. He’s majestic dumb. Dumb that glows. Dumb with wings. Dumb that makes other dumb look up and say, “One day, I wanna be like him.”
He’s the gold standard of “What in the absolute shit are you talking about?”
...This man has achieved a level of dumb where parasites can’t survive.
He’s uninhabitable to reason.
He’s like Chernobyl for logic.
And y’all, I’m proud.
I mean, I been runnin’ the show since the caveman tried to pet a saber-tooth tiger, but this here’s the big leagues.
He ain’t just wrong. He’s wrong with confidence.
He talks about medicine like he invented it in a shed.
He says words like “placenta” and “autism” in the same breath, and the English language just sits down and cries.
He’s so far beyond me, I can’t even keep up.
He’s like a concussion with a tan.
He’s the NASCAR of neuroscience.
He’s the holy grail of “What the hell did I just hear?”
So yeah, I’m done. I’m tappin’ out.
I, Stupidity, am officially retirin’.
I’m handin’ over the reins to the man himself — the new Sheriff of Shenanigans, the Brain Worm Wrangler, the Duke of Dumb, the PhD in WTF. The only guy who could lose a spelling bee to carbon monoxide.
He’s not my successor. He’s my evolution.
He’s what happens when bad ideas drink jet fuel.
He’s my Picasso. My Michelangelo. My Tesla coil in a bathtub.
From here on out, he’s the boss.
3 comments:
Along with Biden, Trudeau and Ford the Big Three car companies demanded tariffs to keep Chinese cars out. Now , in acts of betrayal, all three car companies are cancelling shifts, moving production out and closing factories. They should be ingnored by policy makers: they , like Trump, can't be trusted.
Framing the EV tariff as a choice between Prairie farmers and Ontario autoworkers is an oversimplification. The Prairie oil and gas industry is also not keen to see North Americans driving cheap Chinese EVs.
But now that the oil industry's chief lobbyist, Danielle Smith, has called for eliminating the tariffs on Chinese EVs, I see no reason to keep them. The more important considerations are making sure the vehicles comply with Canadian standards and that we get a share of their manufacturing.
BYD has a bus manufacturing site in Winnipeg but production has been halted because of tariffs. China sells lots of electric cars in Europe and meets stringent safety standards there.
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