(For American readers: Ms. Smith is the premier (think governor) of Alberta; Mr. Poilievre is the leader of the national conservative party and is currently pretending to be Alberta member of the federal parliament - in reality he's from Ottawa; it's a long story - and Mark Carney is the liberal party's prime minister of Canada)
Army brats and peak human performance
Iran
Trump, Netanyahu: for God's sake, get on with it.
One of the major problems with the original NAFTA agreement was that it didn't go far enough - trade across the Canada/US border became easier for most high value products and services but political and regulatory action intended to protect local favorites, particularly in the populous Toronto-Montreal corridor, exacerbated both the reality and the emotional content of inter-provincial trade barriers inside Canada.
Oil, Alberta, and events in Venezuela and Iran
Many people, assuming events in Venezuela and Iran end well for the people there, think that the presence of enormous and easily accessible oil reserves in those two countries bodes ill for Alberta's ability to sell its hydrocarbons on world markets. They're wrong - badly wrong.
First, it will take over a year before governments in those two countries achieve the stability needed before the risk associated with investing in either country falls to the level needed for private sector resource commitment.
I recently had the unhappy experience of having to review my understanding, or utter lack of it, of category theory. Yikes - but, with all due respect to Eilenberg et al, I'd now like to at least try to write down an appropriately childish thought about making sense of it all.
Politics:
First and foremost: the state of the world for the next two decades will be determined largely by the 2026 U.S. midterms. The people who control the democratic party certainly know their futures depend on this; Canada's Mark Carney and leaders across western Europe have bet their countries on Trump losing; and the GOP national leadership is only just starting to understand that the issues extend beyond their immediate personal agendas.
[A note to American readers: Alberta is Canada's energy province; Danielle Smith is the premier of Alberta and leader of the United Conservative Party [UCP]; Mark Carney is the Trump hating progressive prime minister of Canada; Ottawa is the capital of Canada and the people there act as if they think Alberta is a colony of rich rural yokels to be exploited at will.]
The Alberta provincial government just passed "Bill 2: The Back to School Act" to end a three week strike by Alberta's teachers. The act itself is draconian: orders the teachers back to work, establishes significant penalties for arguing with the government on it, and imposes a contract rejected by about 90% of those teachers who voted on it nearly a month ago.
My view, last year, was that the ATA [the teacher’s union] and the UCP [Conservative Alberta government] technical advisors all wanted the nastiest and longest possible strike to be followed by a poor settlement specifically and only because that would provide the maximum electoral benefit to the NDP [Canada’s leftist party].
Let's start with the elephant: referenda on independence.
In my opinion:
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