"CONSCIOUSNESS IS AN EMERGENT PROPERTY OF THE SPIRIT OF GOD (?) WITHIN US!"
No, the US is turning into the next Mexico. It has far too many people to be the next Canada, not to mention far too many murders and too many gun fatalities.
It also doesn’t have universal health care insurance, which is pretty much the minimum criteria for a first world country these days, and its educational system isn’t really up to Canadian standards, so it is back to the third world for the USA.
By J :
Anybody who questioned the importance of the ability to move energy within our own borders should take a long look in the mirror right now.
MichiganGov. Gretchen Whitmer’s bid to shut down Enbridge’s Line 5 to score points with environmentalists in her state has brought into sharp focus what that means for Canada.
The threat to Central and Eastern Canada is forcing virtue-signalling green politicians to fight for the 68-year-old pipeline. They’ve had to join forces with western premiers to take on this threat that could cut half of Ontario and Quebec’s oil and natural gas supply.
If this goes through, it will mean the immediate loss of tens of thousands of jobs across Canada with increasing losses in the oilpatch.
It will be a crippling blow to the economy.
It would decimate critical supplies, like jet fuel for Pearson International Airport, and cause fossil fuel prices to skyrocket, costing people more at the pumps or to heat their homes — if they can get the gas at all.
Malcolm Bird, an associate political science professor at the University of Winnipeg, said if the pipe is turned off, it will be Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s biggest crisis. At least, it will underscore a massive failing of Canada’s energy strategy that the West has been screaming about for a generation.
“It illustrates in a very tangible way what sovereignty really means,” he said. “If you have a pipeline going through a foreign country that you’re really, really dependent on, you don’t have full control over that pipeline.”
Trudeau has done everything he can since gaining power in 2015 to hammer the oil and gas sector, from cancelling pipelines, torquing legislation and implementing prohibitive taxes on industry and the public. Even the one pipeline still on life support to improve our access to tidewater has been fraught with continued legal battles, environmental red tape, failed consultations and has had to be revived several times.
What these sycophants have forgotten is we are nowhere near a position to actually cycle off oil and gas. Not even close from a technological standpoint, a replacement standpoint or an infrastructure standpoint.
Regardless of what Trudeau or his acolytes say, pipelines are still the safest, greenest and most efficient way to move oil and gas. We are also still entirely reliant on the product it moves.
Trudeau has continued in his failure to understand the need for energy independence within our own borders and not leave our future in the hands of foreign governments.
Former Conservative leader Andrew Scheer, for all his many failings, actually had a reasonable solution in his last election: Create of an energy corridor tying the country together.
While this idea died with Scheer’s political career, it should be given more than a revisionist thought now.
“It certainly lays bare . . . the fact we don’t have that and there isn’t a Canadian-owned, Canadian-controlled set of infrastructure,” said Bird. “If we’re going to keep our country effective and active and a cohesive whole, we need infrastructure to do that.”
This goes beyond moving energy throughout the country. We are a fractured nation, regardless of insinuations of COVID bringing us together. In the 21st century, this could be critical to stitching us back together as previous national infrastructure projects, such as building the railroad to the west or constructing the Trans-Canada Highway, have done.
Trudeau needs to learn from this. The East needs to learn from this. I’m not holding my breath. It would take incredible political will and spine to do, something seriously lacking for years.
But we need a legitimate solution to selling off control of the energy we produce and rely on just so we can claim some imaginary moral high ground.
Allan:
As a Canadian who liven in LA from 2001 to 2010, I only went as I was offered my dream job. Though I returned to Canada voluntarily. I had a NAFTA listed skill and I was able to move there very easily. Most Canadians do not because their life is just as good in Canada. There is no pressing need for them to move there as they will not see any improvement in their lifestyle. Plus, for Canadians who do not have a NAFTA listed occupation immigration to the USA is no easier than for anyone else.
As well, while I made more money in the USA, the far higher cost of my medical care (I was in my 50s) ate up almost all the extra money I made. I merely went for the really interesting job and the nicer winters.
I came back for family reasons and because the first-ever job in the Vancouver area that was almost my dream job came open. I made a little less but saved it by paying next to nothing for medical and paying less for rent and using way less fuel in much shorter commuting.
Really Americans. Your country is pretty decent but in many ways, Canadians feel on average that Canada is better. The news that comes out of the USA (We get all the major US channels) scares most Canadians and lately, the leadership of the US makes us feel unwelcome.
Jimmy Mack
Dear Friends, I got this in the mail today and I just don't know HOW MUCH to send them!{sic} 😏
***
Friend,
Joe Biden and the Left-wing MOB are an embarrassment to this country.
Do you want to know who warned you about the insanity of Biden’s radical Administration?
If we want to have any shot at getting the liberal Democrats OUT of office so that we can regain our Republican Majority, then we need to take action NOW. Not tomorrow, not next week, BUT NOW.
I’ve spoken with Kevin McCarthy, and he’s agreed that ALL GIFTS made towards our monthly fundraising goal will be 200%-MATCHED. This offer is only available to you for the NEXT HOUR, so you need to act fast.
Do you know who’s counting on you to step up at this critical time and Save America?
SUPPORTER: Friend
200%-MATCH: NOT USED
DEADLINE: 1 HOUR
President Joe Biden had to sign an executive order to control some types of guns since nobody in congress seems to have the urge to do something about it.
Guns are a national pastime in the States as this graph shows!
I signed up for all sorts of different newsletters and junk mail so every day I get stuff that gives me a window into what the politicians in the States and Canada are up to!
I was, however, surprised to get a letter from Matt Gaetz..., but it just goes to show how desperate and devoid of any shame or morals these characters are!
***
They are coming for me:
Patriot,
A brand-new smear campaign has been launched against me, but I am fighting back to expose the truth.
The far-left New York Times has been publishing salacious allegations against me in an attempt to end my career fighting for the forgotten men and women of this country.
But the truth is, the mainstream media is publishing lies to try to take me down while covering up real scandals like Hunter Biden’s deals in Ukraine and Governor Cuomo’s assault against seniors in nursing homes. It is a shame that the Left tries to drag my dating life into their political attacks, but it’s no surprise - when your ideas suck, you have to stoop this low.
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The next few weeks will be a terrible time to live in the north-east United States since God is about to unleash a plague on the Republicans for their evil ways!
For 17 years, cicadas do very little. They hang out in the ground, sucking sugar out of tree roots. Then, following this absurdly long hibernation, they emerge from the ground, sprout wings, make a ton of noise, have sex, and die within a few weeks. Their orphan progeny will then return to the ground and live the next 17 years in silence.
Over the next several weeks, billions of mid-Atlantic cicadas will hear the call of spring and emerge from their cozy bunkers. This year’s group, born in 2004, is known as Brood X. They’ll start their journey to the surface when soil temperatures reach around 64 degrees Fahrenheit.
Fortunately, as you can see from the map, there will be no cicada's in Canada as the Customs Services closed the entire border and wouldn't let them into the country!
A recent essay in a prominent right-wing outlet gives an unusually clear window into the modern right’s anti-democratic worldview.
Guest Post by Zack Beauchamp:
The right-wing rebellion against American democracy is often subtle, expressing itself through tricky changes to election law without a full-throated acknowledgment of what lawmakers are actually doing. But sometimes, the mask slips — and someone in the conservative movement openly tells you what’s really going on.
One such slippage took place last week when the American Mind — a publication of the Claremont Institute, an influential conservative think tank based in California — published an incendiary essay arguing that the country has already been destroyed by internal enemies.
“Most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term,” Glenn Ellmers, the essay’s author, writes. “They do not believe in, live by, or even like the principles, traditions, and ideals that until recently defined America as a nation and as a people. It is not obvious what we should call these citizen-aliens, these non-American Americans; but they are something else.”
These seditious citizens are opposed, according to Ellmers, by “the 75 million people who voted in the last election against the senile figurehead of a party that stands for mob violence, ruthless censorship, and racial grievances, not to mention bureaucratic despotism.”
If Trump voters and conservatives do not band together and fight “a sort of counter-revolution,” then “the victory of progressive tyranny will be assured. See you in the gulag.”
What exactly this counter-revolution entails is unclear, but Ellmers has some tips. “Learn some useful skills, stay healthy, and get strong,” he writes. “One of my favorite weightlifting coaches likes to say, ‘Strong people are harder to kill, and more useful generally.’”
Ellmers’s essay has been widely discussed in American media and intellectual circles, due to its bracing honesty about the modern right’s worldview and the prominence of the outlet that published it. Claremont is an influential institution of the right; one of its publications, the Claremont Review of Books, published the notorious “Flight 93” essay arguing that the 2016 election was a choice between Trump and national extinction. (“2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die,” that essay declared in its opening line.)
In the post-Trump era, the type of hard-right politics preached in Claremont publications “is simply conservatism writ large,” as Jane Coaston writes in a Vox essay on the California right. They’ve become the intellectual organ of Trumpist conservatism — an organization whose mission looks more and more like manufacturing an intellectual justification for the GOP’s right-wing populist.
The rhetoric of national emergency and decline that you hear in Claremont publications permeates mainstream GOP rhetoric. Minutes before the January 6 assault on Capitol Hill, former President Donald Trump told his assembled supporters that “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” In a 2019 speech, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) warned that “we have come again to one of the great turning points in our national history, when the fate of our republican government is at issue.” In a 2020 Facebook post, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy declared that “Democrats want to defund, destroy, and dismantle our country.”
As absurd as it may seem, Ellmers’s essay should be taken seriously because it makes the anti-democratic subtext of this kind of conservative discourse into clearly legible text. And it is a clear articulation of what the movement has been telling us through its actions, like Georgia’s new voting law: It sees democracy not as a principle to respect, but as a barrier to be overcome in pursuit of permanent power.
Inasmuch as there is a central argument in Ellmers’s piece, it is this: The label “conservative” no longer accurately captures what the American right should be about. This is because “conservatism” implies preserving or protecting something already in place, when in fact America is so hopelessly corrupted that there’s little worth saving.
“The US Constitution no longer works,” Ellmers writes. “What is actually required now is a recovery, or even a refounding, of America as it was long and originally understood but which now exists only in the hearts and minds of a minority of citizens.”
Many traditional conservatives, in his mind, are blind to this fact. Trump’s victory represented the true people rising up against an establishment that was unwilling to openly state how precarious the country’s situation is:
Trump’s main failing, on Ellmers’s telling, is not that he was destructive — but that he was too ignorant and poorly advised to attack the right targets.
“As if coming upon a man convulsing from an obvious poison, Trump at least attempted in his own inelegant way to expel the toxin,” Ellmers writes. “By contrast, the conservative establishment, or much of it, has been unwilling to recognize that our body politic is dying from these noxious ‘norms.’”
Ellmers is not all that interested in the mechanisms of how and why the country has become so broken. He doesn’t really explain in any detail the nature of the nefarious forces that have polluted most American minds; he rails against “the progressive, or woke, or ‘antiracist’ agenda that now corrupts our republic” and takes it as a given that his audience will agree that this threat is apocalyptic.
He is more interested, instead, in rallying the forces of Real America against enemies he describes in strikingly dehumanizing terms.
“If you are a zombie or a human rodent who wants a shadow-life of timid conformity, then put away this essay and go memorize the poetry of Amanda Gorman,” Ellmers writes. “Real men and women who love honor and beauty, keep reading.”
Ellmers is hardly the only person on the right to see the opposition in a starkly negative light. A February poll found that a solid majority of Republicans, 57 percent, preferred to describe Democrats as “enemies” rather than as the “political opposition.” One of the central attitudes underpinning democracy — that sometimes the other side wins, and that’s okay — is buckling on the right.
“Not for the first time in our nation’s history, if this state of affairs continues force may be embraced as the only alternative when reason fails,” Ellmers writes. “We must fervently hope that things will change before they become violent. But if the clueless attitudes of our sclerotic elite remain unaltered, it is not hard to see what’s on the horizon.”
If the extremism of Ellmers’s essay strikes you as similar to what you’ve heard from authoritarian political movements of the past, you’re not alone.
John Ganz, a perceptive critic of American conservatism, recently wrote that Ellmers’s essay should properly be termed “fascist.” Excommunicating a large percentage of the population from the body politic, describing once-idyllic society hopelessly corrupted by the forces of change, describing one’s enemies as animals or diseases, invoking the threat of physical force in a political context — these are all historically hallmarks of fascist rhetoric.
This analysis holds despite the fact that Ellmers speaks in a democratic idiom, portraying himself as a defender of the American democratic tradition against its enemies. Ganz notes that calls to restore “freedom,” “liberty,” and even “democracy” were used by fascist intellectuals and movements in interwar Germany, France, and Italy because they were culturally powerful — a way of recruiting the people to one’s way of thinking by speaking their language.
“In the US context it also makes sense that the reactionary mind would inevitably mythologize a ‘truer’ version of our republican and democratic traditions as the author does in this piece, because those are the basic symbols of our political tradition,” he writes. “In the French context, many fascist and para-fascist groups declared fealty to the ‘republican’ tradition, which is as nearly predominant in that country as it is in our own.”
One does not need to go to Europe to see political oppression defended in democratic terms. In 1963, Alabama Gov. George Wallace delivered an inaugural address in Montgomery, casting the South’s long tradition of oppression of African Americans as integral to southern freedom:
Ellmers’s essay is in line with this tradition, identifying freedom as a right that only a certain section of the population deserves. Those outside of it, either because they come from the wrong background or think the wrong way, have no just claim on our political system. When they wield power, it is by definition oppression.
In some ways, this is the central animating idea of the broader conservative movement in America. Ellmers is a radical who sees himself as opposed to “establishment” conservatism, but in reality, many on the broader right share a more attenuated version of his worldview — and pursue the disempowerment of their political opponents.
The implications of Ellmers’s worldview are chilling. In a January 2020 essay, he predicted — more in sorrow than in anger, of course — that a civil war is coming.
Barack Obama’s 2008 victory, and the attendant talk of a coalition of minorities and young voters creating a “permanent Democratic majority,” helped spread anxieties about declining electoral power on the political right. After the 2010 midterm elections, which swept Republicans into power in statehouses across the country, they acted — drawing gerrymandered maps and passing laws, like voter ID, seemingly designed to suppress Democratic-leaning constituencies.
The state-level Republican lawmakers were often quite honest about their aim of locking Democrats out of office.
“I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats,” former North Carolina Rep. David Lewis, who chaired the state’s recent redistricting committee, once said. “So I drew this map in a way to help foster what I think is better for the country.”
The January 6 attack on the Capitol was a pure expression of Ellmers-ism, a violent lashing out against a system that conservatives believe to be fraudulent and corrupt. The new round of voter suppression bills represents the more subtle 2010 variant of Republican anti-democratic attitudes: that the system can be rigged such that the Democratic threat is locked out of power for good.
There are at least eight proposals from Republican lawmakers in state legislatures around the country to seize partisan control over electoral administration. One of the most egregious examples, in Georgia, was passed into law last week. More broadly, there are over 250 state bills under consideration that would curtail voting rights in one way or another.
That these proposals are justified in the language of “restoring confidence” in elections and “preventing fraud” does not make them actually defensible in democratic terms — anymore than Ellmers’s thinly-veiled pining for a civil war is “democratic” because he wants to wage it in defence of a warped conception of liberty.
In a sense, Ellmers is right that America’s political system no longer works. He’s just wrong about who broke it — and why.
Politicians in the United States are too stupid to realize that the 60% rule to pass legislation in the U.S. Senate is not the problem. (Or they are deliberately blind.)
The problem lies in the fact that legislators are voting the party line instead of voting their conscience and since the Republican party is currently corrupt, unethical and unscrupulous there is not much chance of getting anything done since the Hard Right is intent on opposing anything put forward by the Democrats no matter what it is!
This has been Republican party policy since the Obama administration when there was a "nigger" [sic] in the White House, and it doesn't seem to be changing anytime soon.
Perhaps the only remedy for the United States is to start a third party called the "Independents!" or the "Libertarians" at the Federal, State and Local levels!
The way I see it anyway!
Well, the main difference was that, at the time of that unfortunate disagreement in 1776, Canada was majority French and Catholic, and the 13 American colonies were English and Protestant, and they really did not think the same. Also, Nova Scotia, the 14th colony was not really that disgruntled with England but severely P.O. with US raiders on its coastal villages, and Newfoundland, the 15th colony was too far away to care and more interested in fishing.
Thus the future Canada declined to participate in the rebellion process. The future United States sent that great American patriot, Benedict Arnold, to encourage them to join, but he somewhat failed in that process after his troops ran out of money and started stealing supplies.
After the American Revolution, there were huge numbers of American refugees who fled the US, called the “United Empire Loyalists” who settled the land in Canada and created two new provinces, but they supported the king and were totally offside with the American Dream, as were the French Canadians, who didn’t want to speak English or be Protestant.
For some reason Americans thought these people would side with them in 1812 when the US invaded Canada, but Canadians disagreed and shot the American invaders instead.
This seemed to come as a total surprise to the Americans.
Thus, Canada continued on its way in a totally non-revolutionary, can’t we all be friends way. When the country of Canada was created in 1867, after that even more unfortunate disagreement in the US called the Civil War, Canada’s motto was “Peace, Order, and Good Government” which is thoroughly different from the American ideals, such as everyone needs to carry a gun to protect themselves from the government, and everyone is equal except poor people and the descendants of slaves.
David Moe
