Dispatches from the Canada-US Trade War
Wow!
We learn that Howard Lutnick threatened to send US troops across the Canadian border "by sundown" if we didn't back down. The threat was made over the plan to retaliate over arbitrary tariff with an energy surcharge. Canada must be ready for all threats from the USA. youtube.com/shorts/EKjjV...
— Charlie Angus (@charlieangus104.bsky.social) October 12, 2026 at 12:47 PM
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I believe this is true
I did not know our Canadian pucks were so unique@mark-carney.bsky.social Mark Carney is psycho-engineering a whole country to build a cohesive fighting unit to take back Canada from the US. Creating a new patriotism for a country that hasn't existed for many years.
— Gerry Dunn (@ballydunn.bsky.social) October 10, 2026 at 9:51 AM
At your local rink or in the Stanley Cup Final, you’ve seen Inglasco’s pucks on the ice. They’re the NHL’s exclusive puck supplier, and they’ve been based in Sherbrooke, Québec, for more than 50 years. So remember: behind every puck drop and every goal, is a little bit of Canada.
— Mark Carney (@mark-carney.bsky.social) October 10, 2026 at 5:57 PM
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Meanwhile, Canada and Stelco may be duking it outInternational Trade Maninder Sidhu is in India this week as the two countries look to reach a free-trade agreement by the end of the year.
— CTV News (@ctvnews.bsky.social) October 12, 2026 at 4:45 AM
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— @KatyET www.abresistance.ca (@katyet.bsky.social) October 12, 2026 at 2:35 PM
On a side note, here's a good zinger about PoilievrePresident of United Steelworkers Local 1005 says Stelco's American owners are trying to use layoffs to get Ottawa to accept a deal with the U.S. that will likely "hurt Canadians overall."
— Hamilton Spectator (@thespec1846.bsky.social) October 12, 2026 at 12:34 PM
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Signs of the Apocalypse - a regular round-up of the crazy stuff happening down south
What a ridiculous weekend this was.
Then Trump announced he was buying some diesel. From Russia.I don’t think this is how the world works.
— Ron Filipkowski (@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social) October 12, 2026 at 4:42 PM
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...He’s not allowed to do this: Sanctions preventing purchase of Russian oil are law, not a choice on Trump’s part. But under Trump laws are suggestions at most, so it might happen anyway. In any case, the main lesson here, as Phillips O’Brien explains, is that Trump isn’t even hiding the fact that he is supporting Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine.
But being a nerdy economist, my first printable reaction to the announcement was, 300,000 tons??? That’s a bit over 2 million barrels. America consumes approximately 4 million barrels of distillates — diesel (mostly) and heating oil — every day.
So Trump is betraying an embattled democracy, demonstrating our faithlessness to the whole world, seriously damaging whatever is left of America’s leadership in the world, for the sake of maybe 12 hours’ worth of diesel. Really?
Of course, Trump and those around him don’t care about the national interest. But I would strongly guess that they didn’t do the math, that 300,000 tons sounded like a lot to them and that they had no idea that it was trivial for an economy the size of America’s. I might add that this is general issue with Trump: he often touts trivial policies as major achievement, and it often seems obvious that he has no idea how big America and the world are.
Arithmetic, I guess, suffers from Trump derangement syndrome....
People are noticing what Trump is actually doing"The 2.25m barrels of diesel Putin offered Trump will have zero net impact on the world price of diesel. But accepting them will collapse the US-led sanctions regime on Russia—and align Trump with Putin against Ukraine's attacks on Russian energy production..." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/1...
— Rachel Maddow (@maddow.bsky.social) October 11, 2026 at 12:09 PM
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Canada condemns Trump's "deal" with Russia over diesel products. #Canada #cdnpoli
— Scott Tribe -A proud "Ketchup Chip Nationalist" member (@stribeprogblog.bsky.social) October 11, 2026 at 1:06 PM
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By Monday Trump was whining about how terribly he is being treated by the meanie mediaSo if Russia is funding Iran. And Trump is paying Russia for diesel. Is Trump funding Iran’s war against America?
— Peter Alexander (@peteralexandertvs.bsky.social) October 11, 2026 at 9:03 PM
By Monday evening Trump was scampering for coverTrump defends buying diesel fuel from Russia
— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes.bsky.social) October 12, 2026 at 8:19 AM
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Whatever Russia thought they could get out of this deal, its not happening for them, because Zelensky isn't stupidThe Moron and Lunatic in the White House has now declared China and Russia aren’t helping Iran, and that if they were, “we would know about it very fast.” We do know. His own Defense Secretary told senators they are. Trump's covering for Putin and Xi as they help Iran kill American service members
— MeidasTouch (@meidastouch.com) October 12, 2026 at 8:50 PM
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— JeffTrnka (@jefftrnka.bsky.social) October 12, 2026 at 1:09 PM
Ukraine just nuked Russia's influence on the US elections in three weeks. They damaged or destroyed three of Yandex's (their Google) data centers. More to come? That brought Russian bot traffic down to almost zero. Details at tcps-blog.com/ukraine-figu...
— securityman.bsky.social (@securityman.bsky.social) October 12, 2026 at 10:07 PM
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Zelensky recognizes that "Russia is a gas station with an army" is a 20-year-old view. Nowadays Russia is out of gas; they are a bot farm with an army. Also, some bad news about the army...
— Pavel (@spavel.bsky.social) October 11, 2026 at 7:08 PM
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— WomenRiseUp2026 (@womenriseup2026.bsky.social) October 12, 2026 at 2:32 PM
— Xela Hart (@xelahart.bsky.social) October 11, 2026 at 6:19 AM
Moving on, this made me feel sick.
Here is an excerpt from the Guardian story about this vile study.RFK Jr is funding a grotesquely unethical study on newborn babies in Guinea-Bissau; ethicists, pediatricians, clinical trial experts, & infectious disease experts are calling this horrific trial The New Tuskegee. It is unethical to withhold a life saving intervention from half of newborns FFS.
— Prof Gavin Yamey MD MPH (@gavinyamey.bsky.social) October 8, 2026 at 9:20 AM
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A controversial research trial that will withhold hepatitis B vaccines from some African newborns was given approval to move forward this week.This seems to be the direction America is going now
It is a central part of the vaccine vision for Robert F Kennedy Jr, the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and a longtime vaccine opponent.
...Kennedy “wants to make it so we don’t use a birth dose here in this country,” said Paul Offit, an infectious disease physician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “That’s the goal.”
Kennedy would never be able to do the trial in the US because of its significant ethical concerns, Offit added. “He’s taking advantage of a developing country … Is it because children in Africa are more expendable than children here?”
Danish researchers plan to enroll 14,000 infants in Guinea-Bissau in the trial, giving the hepatitis B vaccine to half of the babies at birth and withholding it from the others for the first six weeks of life.
... This study will focus on vaccination and mortality, as well as outcomes such as skin conditions and neurodevelopmental conditions. “The main problem of this trial is that you have some very well-known bad diseases that you can protect with this vaccine,” Støvring said. “And what they then want to study is something highly speculative – in a situation where WHO and others are saying that you should give this vaccine at birth, period.”
When asked about the study in a Thursday briefing, an official with the Africa CDC, which has opposed the trial, said there were “ongoing discussions” between the US and Guinea-Bissau and more details would be shared shortly. Guinea-Bissau planned to begin vaccinating all newborns against hepatitis B in 2027, but they pushed the campaign back to 2028.
Kennedy and the Danish researchers were “taking advantage of that delay in practicing standard care to put these children at risk unnecessarily”, Offit said. “What a terrible thing to do. What a horribly unethical and cruel thing to do.”
— 1kr5ur43m.bsky.social (@1kr5ur43m.bsky.social) October 12, 2026 at 1:15 PM
And on a lighter note - the stupid, it burns!
A Republican PAC spent nearly $25,000 running ads to help Sen. Susan Collins in Portland. Wrong Portland. They’re inept at everything. Portland, Oregon, that is. Not Portland, Maine. www.nbcnews.com/politics/202...
— Hoodlum 🇺🇸 (@nothoodlum.bsky.social) October 12, 2026 at 5:22 PM
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8 comments:
Seeing as how Carney took an energy surcharge off the table right quick, I guess Nutlick's threat to send in the Marines worked. So much for not caving to US pressure tactics.
Carney has also said that Canada can be relied on to stick to its agreements. So this applies to our energy deals too.
Canada violated agreements with every retaliatory tariff. Why take our biggest stick off the table? The normal posture is all options remain open. In other words, bring it!
Most of the stuff here about Russia is really stupid. Sorry, but it is. When the enemy has been identified, it is apparently the duty of all patriotic citizens to pretend the enemy is both all-powerful and all-pathetic, both infinitely nefarious and infinitely stupid, about to conquer all of Europe but helpless without a data centre. And of course everything they do and all their motivations are evil, while everything we do is and always has been perfect, at least within any frame of reference related to the enemy, even if we know better the rest of the time.
So. Russia is obviously not a "gas station with an army" or a "bot farm with an army", it's moronic talk. Russia has always had a fairly solid manufacturing economy; it fell apart in the 90s but gradually got put together again under Putin, and since the war began it has grown considerably as the Russians were forced into an import substitution war economy (and war economies are of necessity somewhat socialized).
Meanwhile, first you quote Rachel Maddow pretty accurately IMO saying "The 2.25m barrels of diesel Putin offered Trump will have zero net impact on the world price of diesel. But accepting them will collapse the US-led sanctions regime on Russia—and align Trump with Putin against Ukraine's attacks on Russian energy production..."
And then you say
"Whatever Russia thought they could get out of this deal, its not happening for them, because Zelensky isn't stupid"
Um, no, I think they thought they could get what Rachel Maddow said, out of this deal, and they're getting it. I'm sure Putin was pretty sure Zelensky wouldn't stop attacking refineries, why would he? But he also knew that the deal would cause Zelensky to piss Trump off and in turn probably reduce American aid to Ukraine even further. And Ukraine is not fighting this war with their own economy, they're fighting it with the US and EU economies, so any piece of that you can cut off is, from the Russian perspective, good. All that for hardly any diesel!
Vladimir Putin is an intelligent man, certainly much smarter than Trump, and he played him.
As a side note, it remains true that while it was Putin's choice to start the war, NATO did pretty much everything they could to precipitate it, refused for years on end to negotiate any kind of security agreement with Russia despite Russia trying and trying and trying, and NATO leaders went on record saying that the Minsk agreements between Ukraine and the Donbass were, from their point of view, always just a stalling tactic to buy time to build up Ukraine's armed forces for an attack--so, negotiated in completely bad faith the whole time.
I don't know what I would have done if I were Putin, but faced with the prospect of a NATO country right next to Moscow, armed to the teeth, due to an American-backed coup in that country some years previously, with NATO clearly wanting to dismember Russia if they possibly could . . . the national security need to stop that from happening would be VERY strong. I might well have felt that, if I wanted there to still be an independent Russia in a few years, I had no choice but to start that war. And nobody who demonizes Putin has ever been able to articulate to me what they would have done in his place. That question ALWAYS gets sidestepped. Nobody wants to think about it.
Well I've never heard a justification for Putin's attack on Ukraine except for his Greater Russia megalomania - which is actually what Trump wants for the US too. Ukraine and NATO were no threat to Russia as long as Russia wanted peace. It is a defensive alliance, for the last 80 years. Putin wanted Trump to bully Ukraine into stopping the devastating drone attacks but Zelensky won't do it.
Of course you've never heard it. Because media in the West steadfastly avoids passing on almost anything Putin or Lavrov say, unless they can find a bit to cherry pick. Not to mention what certain top international relations scholars and diplomats said even well before the war started. Not your fault you never went looking.
OK, to start with, whatever else it may be some of the time, fundamentally NATO is and always has been an anti-Russia military alliance. So, back up for a moment to when the USSR was falling apart. That could have gone quite differently. One thing that happened to keep it peaceful was, the US promised Russian leaders when the Berlin Wall was falling that they would not extend NATO further east than Germany. Well, foolish of the Russians to believe it, but the point is their willingness to stay cool was in part based on the idea that NATO was not going to come after them. So then NATO systematically incorporated more and more countries to the East, with Russia protesting vociferously every time, even under Yeltsin.
But even after a lot of that had happened, in the early 2000s Putin wanted to be friends--he asked more than once to join the EU, and once even to join NATO, figuring I suppose that if Russia was IN NATO, NATO members would no longer be a threat to Russia. But all these advances were rebuffed.
It was only sometime in the later 2000s that NATO was ready to start taking in countries that had actual borders with Russia. The Americans started "Colour Revolutions" in the region and did other monkeywrenching to arrange friendly governments that would be anti-Russia and go for NATO membership. There were a lot of foreign policy types talking about encircling Russia and dismembering it, hopefully without even a shooting war because they weren't sure how to separate Russia from its nukes. At the same time, there were various pushes to try to get a nuclear shield that would allow the US and the West to attack Russia without having to worry about nuclear retaliation--that was the point of W. Bush ripping up the ABM treaty. And of course, the 90s economic "shock treatment" (which caused HUGE levels of death and poverty) and the US election meddling to re-elect Boris Yeltsin so it would continue, seem to have been designed to cause Russia to disintegrate. Anyone watching all this from the Russian side would have to figure "they're out to get us." I mean, they had MUCH more reason to fear the US and NATO through this whole time than, say, Canada has to fear the US now. If I don't think we're being paranoid, it would be strange to pretend Russia had no reason to fear. And of course Russia IS fairly paranoid in part because unlike us, lots of Russians remember being invaded and the rest have tales from their parents and grandparents--20 million dead in an invasion that came through Ukraine.
So OK, then NATO tried for Georgia, but by that point Russia's strength had somewhat recovered and in 2008 they did a short sharp war that showed they could have just taken Georgia, and withdrew. Talk of NATO membership ended in Georgia.
Putin and Lavrov at around this point started talking more and more often about finding some kind of grand, long term security bargain for Russia and Europe that would ensure security for all sides. Upon being ignored, they also began a military buildup; at one point when Russia had designed some new weapons that would be VERY difficult for any anti-missile system to defend against (hypersonic missiles among other things), Putin said frustratedly "You did not listen to us then, you will listen to us now!" He was wrong, the West still didn't listen, but it shows that much of the point of the military buildup was to get enough leverage to be taken seriously in negotiations.
Then the US spent, according to Victoria Nuland's bragging about it, billions of dollars to pull off a coup in Ukraine in 2014, for the purpose of getting Ukraine to join NATO. The new regime was so ham-fisted and violent and overtly anti-Russian not just in terms of the country but the language and ethnicity, that after a couple of pogroms the Eastern chunk of Ukraine, which is mostly ethnically Russian and mostly speaks Russian, tried to separate. So then you get this civil war, with Russia helping one side and NATO helping the other, which the Kiev side failed to win twice. Somewhere in here, the Donbass voted to join Russia, and Putin REFUSED. He was still trying to solve the situation with diplomacy, still acting as if he believed that, perhaps not the US, but Europe at least, might want to deal in good faith and get peace. So you got the Minsk accords and then the Minsk II accords, which involved both sides not attacking each other and the Donbass region remaining part of Ukraine but gaining some autonomy, thus allowing them to retain control over things like language education rather than having their language outlawed. The Ukraine side never really followed the accords but kept on shelling cities through the whole supposed truce, over time killing thousands of civilians that way. And it turns out that the Europeans had never intended the accords to bear fruit. The idea was to arm Ukraine heavily, train their troops, bankroll the expansion of their army, and then start the civil war again, rolling over the Donbass irresistibly this time, and then the reunited Ukraine would formally join NATO and a very important domino would have fallen.
Even as this plan was clearly getting closer to being put in motion, Putin and Lavrov were trying to do diplomacy. Putin was trying to normalize diplomatic and commercial status with Europe, trying to sell them more natural gas via the Nordstream II pipeline. And, he and Lavrov kept on emphasizing their opposition to Ukraine in NATO and talking about creating a long term continental security arrangement. Everyone blew them off; I remember the tone of news articles at the time being somewhere between dismissive and gloating--something along the lines of Putin only wanting something like that because we have him on the run and sanctions are going to kill his economy any day. I often think that the one thing that made Putin conclude that was it, there was no chance of any kind of serious deal was when Germany tore up the Nordstream II deal on the eve of turning on the taps. It was after that, shortly before Russia actually attacked Ukraine, that Putin said if the problems could not be resolved through diplomacy, Russia would have to take "Military-technical" measures. Again, nobody listened and everyone talked about how it was Ukraine's right to join NATO if it wanted to. There is now significant evidence that a number of senior policymakers in NATO countries hoped Russia would attack. They thought Russia was weak, that their economy would collapse under the much stronger sanctions they would put in place after such an attack, that Russia would run out of everything and lose the war and be badly weakened, and a bunch of Ukrainian lives were a small price to pay. As is typical in war, the outcome hasn't really been what ANYBODY involved hoped for.
Quite early in the war, there were negotiations which could have ended the war with Ukraine effectively declaring neutrality. Boris Johnson met privately with Zelensky and persuaded him not to go for it.
Here are some quotes on the subject of Russia's position on Ukraine and others becoming NATO members:
George Kennan, 1998: "'I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely . . . . Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are."
Madeleine Albright, 2001: "Russian President Boris Yeltsin and his countrymen were strongly opposed to enlargement, seeing it as a strategy for exploiting their vulnerability and moving Europe's dividing line to the east, leaving them isolated."
William J. Burns, then U.S. ambassador to Russia, 2008: "Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin's sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests."
It is very understandable, but to me frustrating, that most people just don't know any of this history because the facts are insufficiently rah-rah for them to be told.
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