O! Canada! Plus,
We still need a shadow cabinet, plus music.
O! Canada!
Canadians are growing anxious about our mad king’s escalating animosity toward their country. Americans are too: a majority of us oppose Trump’s approach toward our mostly nice neighbors, and the related issue of his tariffs on everybody. He’s getting low marks on both the economy and foreign policy.
Should Americans take the regime’s official animosity toward Canada as serious? Well hell yes; as everyone with a brain and a pen has noted, the dictator-in-waiting has cleared the grounds of anyone who will say him nay. He has threatened Canada with economic ruin if they don’t capitulate, and he has said a U.S. recession would be fine, really, indicating he’s willing to sacrifice the peasants, our own economy and the stock market to an economic war.
Does Trump really believe the U.S. would emerge from a major recession stronger and shinier than ever? Well, that is what he would like to happen, so that is what he believes. He clearly views the Panama Canal and Greenland as revenue boosters that would mitigate any economic pain, which is at least in part why he wants to add them to the U.S. territorial portfolio, and Canada’s substantial GDP would be a lovely topper.
So yeah: he may not have a plan, but he has a fixation, and his fixations often enough become reality, as witness his political success and the increasing lawless regime which he incessantly foreshadowed during the past eight-plus years and over which he now presides.
All of this suggests Canada has good reason to worry; a further indication is that the U.S security services have begun abusing Canadian citizens at the borders. The country has seemingly staunch allies in the E.U., who collectively have an economy the equal of the U.S., but they have their own concerns that could fragment support for the frozen North.
Buy Canadian.
We still need a shadow cabinet
A bit more than a week after Trump assumed control of the government, I suggested that we need a shadow cabinet composed of leading Democrats with specific portfolios, along the lines of how the U.K. opposition parties operate.
Plainly spoken. This has no doubt occurred to leading Democrats; one suspects the prime suspects have neither acted upon or publicly advanced the idea because they distrust one another’s ambitions, a suicidal fault not in our stars at this point in our history.
The virtues of having specific, accomplished spokespersons with expertise in specific policy areas are obvious: instead of fragmented Democratic responses to particular offenses against civil society perpetrated by the regime, we would have a single, go-to voice for the press to call on in answer.
I bring this up today because the regime have announced their intention to gut the EPA’s research division.
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to eliminate its scientific research office and could fire more than 1,000 scientists and other employees who help provide the scientific foundation for rules safeguarding human health and ecosystems from environmental pollutants.
As many as 1,155 chemists, biologists, toxicologists and other scientists — 75% of the research program’s staff — could be laid off, according to documents reviewed by Democratic staff on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.
. . .
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has said he wants to eliminate 65% of the agency’s budget, a huge spending cut that would require major staffing reductions for jobs such as monitoring air and water quality, responding to natural disasters and lead abatement, among many other agency functions.
That sounds awful! How nice if we had somebody to address in plain language how this massacre of science and responsibility would affect not just the low-income and minority communities who will as usual get hammered the hardest—among the reasons the regime are attempting to erase those people from the national consciousness—but everybody who isn’t living in a biodome.
On a related note, the regime hustled the leadership of the U.S. Institute of Peace, a private nonprofit operation established by congressional mandate 50 years ago, out of their offices effectively at gunpoint.
“DOGE just came into the building — they’re inside the building — they’re bringing the F.B.I. and brought a bunch of D.C. police,” Sophia Lin, a lawyer for the institute, said by telephone as she and other officials were being escorted out.
. . .
Musk representatives arrived on Monday afternoon in a black S.U.V. with government plates and were escorted by what appeared to be private security who arrived in separate vehicles and were dressed in street clothing.They tried one entrance, but could not seem to find a way inside and instead circled the building before getting back into the S.U.V.
. . .
After several minutes, two lawyers for the institute emerged from the building and approached the vehicle. What followed was a window-side negotiation: Mr. Musk’s representatives in the car, including a man who identified himself as Mr. Jackson, the State Department official and newly installed agency president, appeared to ask the lawyers to get in.“I mean, I don’t know where you’re going to take us,” Ms. Lin said, declining.
Fucking hell. Lawyers are afraid of getting abducted by the regime. Explaining what this says about the myth of a functional republic would seem like an important function of a designated Democratic anti-fascist spokesperson.
I know I’m fantasizing.
Music
The Bats, Free All the Monsters, “Free All the Monsters;”
Shuggie Otis, Freedom Flight, “Freedom Flight.”
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Be well; take care.