Wrapping up the week by waiting for the next one

This week seemed like one of those "Waiting for Godot" weeks -- everyone is waiting for the Quebec election on Monday, the Nobel Peace Prize announcement next Friday, the Alberta "referendum on a referendum" on October 19, the BC election on October 23, and finally the US Mid-Terms on November 3. Lots of speculation all over about what will happen, who's on first, and so forth. 

In the meantime, we just have to wait:

Holy shit, I can’t even imagine the fury if PM Carney wins TIME’s Person of the Year & a Nobel Peace Prize. The Wrath of Con will be felt around the world. #FuckTheFelon

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— YukonCorneliusJack (@yukoncorneliusjack.bsky.social) October 2, 2026 at 12:22 PM

Dean Blundell writes:

Donald Trump wants a lot of things in this life. Greenland. A third term. A ballroom with his name on it. To hide from the Epstein Files and all the raping. Canada as the 51st state. But nothing, and I mean nothing, burns a hole in that man’s tiny shrivelled heart quite like the Nobel Peace Prize and Time’s Person of the Year. He has whined about the Nobel for years like a kid who didn’t get picked for dodgeball. So you can imagine how the week is going in the Oval Office now that a soft-spoken Canadian central banker with the charisma of a well-ironed dress shirt is suddenly the guy the world is betting on to win both.
Oh, this is going to be fun.
Here’s what happened. On Monday, Mark Carney briefly became the favourite to win the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize on Kalshi, the American prediction market, with traders putting his odds at 14%. The odds bounced around after that, because that’s what gamblers do, and nobody outside the Norwegian Nobel Committee actually knows who’s on the shortlist. The announcement comes October 9 in Oslo. But the fact that a Canadian prime minister is even in the conversation, in the same year Trump has been slapping 50% tariffs on our steel and banning nearly a billion dollars’ worth of our products, is the funniest thing to happen in global politics since Rudy sweated hair dye on live television.
And it gets better. Over on the Time Person of the Year markets, Carney sits second, behind only New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Which means the two people most likely to win Time’s favourite magazine award are a Muslim democratic socialist from Queens and the prime minister of the country Trump keeps calling a state. You could not write this better if you tried...
...So why does the world love Mark Carney?
Because he did the one thing almost no other leader on the planet had the stones to do. He said no. While leaders in Europe and Asia were sprinting to Washington with gift baskets and deals and flattery and gold-plated whatever, Carney stood at a podium and told the truth. In January at Davos, with Trump chasing Greenland and threatening tariffs on everyone with a flag, Carney got up and said the old world order wasn’t coming back. He called it a rupture, not a transition. And then he said the middle powers of the world, the Canadas and Germanys and Japans and Australias, should stop getting picked off one at a time and start standing together. The room gave him a standing ovation....

Signs of the Apocalypse - a regular round-up of the crazy stuff happening down south

Overheard Trump's voice (as I clicked to make it go away) saying that where he goes to campaign they win and where he doesn't they don't, and I realized that's part of why he's campaigning in safe red districts. He wants credit for the wins and no blame for losses. It's about his ego, not the party.

— Khashoggi's Ghost (@urocklive1.bsky.social) October 2, 2026 at 6:45 PM

Trump's economy in two headlines.

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— Hillary Rodham Clinton (@hillaryclinton.bsky.social) October 2, 2026 at 8:47 AM

Trump was interviewed by Time magazine this week, and it was a mess

This is unreadable. He’s incoherent. I don’t think he successfully stated a single fact, answered a single question, or provided a single example of any point he wanted to make. Not that it was clear what points he wanted to make—because he was incoherent.

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— Seth Abramson (@sethabramson.bsky.social) October 1, 2026 at 7:44 PM

If you can't bear to read the transcript, Lawrence O'Donnell gives the highlights (or lowlights, I guess)

MS NOW's Lawrence O'Donnell analyzes Donald Trump's TIME Magazine interview filled with falsehoods potentially fueled by three things: Donald Trump's stupidity, his need to lie pathologically, and his apparent declining mental state... youtube.com/shorts/RX9Bj...

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— pissed-off-g.bsky.social (@pissed-off-g.bsky.social) October 2, 2026 at 9:12 PM

Heather Cox Richardson describes the interview this way:

...Time magazine today released a “lightly edited” transcript of an interview their senior political correspondent Eric Cortellessa and editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs conducted with Trump at the White House on September 28.
The interview reveals a man unable to answer questions coherently, obsessed with his architectural projects, consumed by his own fantasy of himself, and angry at the media that he feels mistreats him. He does not appear to be a well man.
He complained bitterly that the three Supreme Court justices he appointed “voted against me too often,” and suggested he expects “loyalty” from them. Asked about the national debt, which just passed $40 trillion, he blamed Biden for it, although Trump by himself has added $11 trillion to the debt in his time in office. He insisted he will change the name of artificial intelligence to “super intelligence.” Once again, he claimed that the economic growth created by AI will pay off the debt.
Trump refused to rule out using the Insurrection Act before the midterms, demolishing the Kennedy Center, or “annihilating” Iran. He talked about designating the Oval Office a national landmark so no one can alter the changes he’s made to it, covering it in gold frippery.
Despite having hit new lows in his job approval ratings, he claimed: “I would beat anybody running today by 20 points. Your numbers that you have are fake. The pollsters are corrupt. They’re almost as corrupt as the writers.”
“I have the highest of IQs. I have the highest. I’m fine, and I understand that stuff. You know, my uncle was at MIT for 41 years, and you know, I’m a—I believe in genetics, frankly, and I understand. I understand it much more than I think any president would, because I do have an ability on this. I have an ability on those things that were the new frontiers.”
“Here we are doing this. You haven’t asked me one f*cking positive question. All of this. What about this? What about that? What about that? What about this? All negative.”
Aaron Rupar of Public Notice recommended “people read this to get a sense of the president’s grave cognitive impairment.”

And here is a fascinating review of the Trump photograph taken for the Time article:

This is a work of photographic genius that deserves to go down in the annals of history. I’m an art historian with a PhD (yes, really) so it’s one thing I do know something about. Let’s start with the framing. Dan Winters has positioned his subject lower than the lens. At a basic level it’s diminishing the man… no small thing for someone so obsessed with his height. But it’s bigger than that. think about all the portraits you know of Great Men (they are almost always Great Men). Statues are set on plinths. Above eye level. So you look up at them. Or famous images like Washington Crossing the Delaware. Or Napoleon Crossing the Alps. We look up at the figures at the centre of the composition. They’re the embodiment of leadership. We are inspired to believe. To follow. Now, look at the photo. We are looking down at the subject. His mouth gapes. He’s as lost and directionless as a toddler in a crowd who can’t find his mum. Or, more aptly, a patient in a dementia ward. Now, look again. It’s the eyes that strike you the most. That’s because the photographer has chosen a very shallow depth of field, which means the pinprick focus on the eyes casts the rest of the subject in a hazy wash. Even the American flag pin on his lapel. His one “mission”… leading the nation… is, symbolically, completely unfocused. None of this is an accident. Winters made conscious choices when he framed this portrait and chose the settings on his camera. And the colour saturation. None of the garish, highly saturated red, white, and blue. Or the glitter of gold. We’re looking at a president who has just wandered out of a crypt. He is a spectre wrapped in parchment-thin, ashen skin with a waft of gossamer-thread hair atop a papery scalp. He’s a phantasm with sawdust in his veins and a handful of dust where a heart should be. But, back on those eyes. If the eyes are, indeed, the windows to the soul, then this man has none. I’ve included a self-portrait Rembrandt painted in 1669, close to his death. The difference between the two men is stark. Rembrandt captures all the same marks of aging. But he looks to the viewer. He’s confronting eternity and his inevitable demise with acceptance, resignation, and, perhaps, some humour. Trump is lost. Stumbling towards the abyss. It’s a message conveyed by the out-of-focus background as well. Trump is wandering through a misty haze. Where is he, even? Who the fuck can tell? He certainly can’t. There’s no colour. No sunlight. No life. Just pinpricks of light reflected back from the soulless, senseless, rheumy, red-rimmed eyes beneath hooded and desiccated lids. They say “I am lost. I am confused. I am not long for this world.” The self-portrait of Rembrandt was one of his last. If what is captured by Dan Winters is to be believed, the same may be said of this masterpiece.

- Meaghan Wilson Anastasios

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Get your gag reflex under control before you read these

Send Stephen Miller to The Hague.

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— Spokane Rising (@spokanerising.com) September 28, 2026 at 10:37 PM

Scoop: At a secret meeting this summer, an aide to Stephen Miller laid out Trump administration's plan to make it easier for states to round up and institutionalize mentally ill homeless people — by pushing a drastic policy change that would weaken the rights of millions of disabled Americans.

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— Mike Hixenbaugh (@mikehixenbaugh.com) October 2, 2026 at 11:55 AM

Dispatches from the Canada-US Trade War
I don't think we have ever had a prime minister who knows more about economics and investment than Mark Carney. Every time I listen to him, I learn something and I understand it too


Two comments tonight about how Canada is regaining its independence from the US.
Kevin Boucher writes Build Better Roads Canada didn't build its dependence on the U.S. by making bad decisions. It built it by making easy ones. If we want different outcomes, change the incentives.. It is a lengthy piced so here is just a short excerpt

...For decades, that north-south integration looked like efficiency.
Then an American president decided to use it as a weapon.
The tariffs. The 51st-state talk. Trade talks switched on and off at will. Trump didn’t have to create Canada’s dependency. It was already there. He just showed us what it looked like when someone decided to treat a captive customer as leverage. And Canadians did what I did with that service department.
Fine. We’ll go somewhere else.
Nobody passed a law telling Canadians to stay out of the United States. They just did. Statistics Canada counted 29.1 million return trips from the U.S. in 2025, down 25.4 per cent. And border crossings probably understate it. A University of Toronto study using cell phone data found Canadian visits to U.S. metropolitan areas were down about 42 per cent.
But Canadians didn’t stop travelling. Trips overseas rose 9.2 per cent to 14.2 million, and a lot of people went somewhere in Canada. In 2025, Canadians spent $81.3 billion travelling in their own country, up 8.7 per cent from 2024. Destination Canada called it a record-breaking summer, with tourism spending spread across the country in a way it described as unprecedented. Atlantic Canada posted some of the strongest growth anywhere.
Here’s the part I like. Spending on trips to other provinces grew faster than spending on trips within people’s home provinces. Canadians weren’t just staying home. They were going to see the rest of the country. Someone who went to Newfoundland because they were pissed off at Trump might go back because they discovered they love Newfoundland. The original reason fades. The new habit stays.
Captive only works until it doesn’t.
...The prime minister and the federal government control real levers: tax policy, spending, transfers to provinces, infrastructure money, procurement and federal approvals. None of those can order a business to invest in Canada or a province to drop a barrier. But all of them can change what makes sense to do. And that looks like exactly what Mark Carney is building. ...

And Fun Tom makes this point:

🔴 That quote, famously linked to Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto regarding the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, can so too be applied in reference to CANADA today: “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve”. 🍁 . The bold strategy to protect our country has been made clear: ◾️ We are going to build a STRONG, diversified economy that nobody can mess with or threaten. ever again. ◾️ We are going to build new trade relationships with credible and dependable partners, and make Canada the trusted hub of global trade. ◾️ We are going to build an independent and sovereign nation where the freedom, security and way of life of Canadian families can never be threatened again. This is what the Liberal Government is working hard towards... The accepted mission. . Canada will do this responsibly. But we will leverage EVERY economic advantage that we hold, to secure a prosperous future for our people. We are a nation at war with demented forces that wish to annihilate our economy and jobs, so that they can annex us. That will never happen.

- Fun Tom

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