A shocking lack of sympathy: whining to my dog's vet about the horrible cold I am just getting over - the kind where dying looks like a great option and the sooner the better - "oh", she says, "a man cold". Well, a good thing my dog likes her..
Victor Orban
I want to venture a prediction: Peter Magyar will turn out to be worse for the Eurofascists (and correspondingly better for Hungarians everywhere) than Orban was. Why? because the two of them learned: from Georgia, from Romania, from Moldova, and from the Ukraine, that the people controlling the EU aren't limited by either money or morality; knew what was coming; and decided on the brer rabbit strategy with Magyar et al subbed in as a briar patch.
The draft
Ukraine has been reduced to using press gangs, and Germany now requires draft age men to get government permission to leave the country, but the whole idea that you can grab people at random and teach them to use modern equipment is so far beyond stupid that its persistence must illustrate something important.
My guess is that what it illustrates is the near total disconnect between progressive political leadership and today's realities on the battlefield - with Canada leading the way in the absurdist stakes with a plan to respond to a military emergency by arming 300,000 career civil servants. And No; I am not making this up:
Federal and provincial employees would be given a one-week training course in how to handle firearms, drive trucks and fly drones, according to the directive signed by Chief of the Defense Staff Gen. Jennie Carignan and defence deputy minister Stefanie Beck on May 30, 2025.
One week - oh, wow.
On the other hand, the idea that a nation demand public service from the young can make sense. Imagine, for example, that we went back to teaching civics (for real, not the woke/netflix version) in school. Then we could draft kids graduating from grade 12 for a year's duty in randomly allocated senior civil service and (previously elected) political positions. The kids would benefit, governance would improve, and little, if anything about the public service would change except its cost.
Carney Vs. Trump
Carney has bet the country on Trump losing the midterms because, I think, he feels himself part of the democrat/fascist family, has his own family and money safely in the U.S.; and probably even thinks his colleague Trudeau has a shot at UN leadership.
But what happens to Canada if he's wrong? if people like me get their wish and conservatives win massively in November? Carney et al are busily burning bridges to conservatives in both countries faster than the U.S. Air Force was dropping them in Iran. Canada's western provinces have the people and resources to recover once the feds get out of the way, but Ontario, Quebec, and the maritimes do not. So what happens to them?
Carney has a plan, for example, to assemble 40,000 Chinese electric car kits a year in Ontario - meaning that roughly the same number of American, Japanese, or Korean cars will not be made there; the big car companies will move remaining production to their American plants; the tax dollars being spent on this will result in higher costs for everybody right along with higher unemployment in the automotive and related industries; and, in a few years all vehicles in Canada will cost more because everything will be imported.
Carney's bet, of course, is that the democrats win the midterms, castrate Trump, and Congress forces a kind of NAFTA-2 through that gives Ontario back its American markets - ok, except that there is no plan B: if it doesn't happen the Toronto area will find itself with a million unemployable immigrants and so far behind the productivity curve that it will take fifty years to recover.
That isn't going to go well for them - and the Carney subsidized media most certainly aren't going out of their way to warn anyone of the risks here.
The Alberta independence referendum (2026)
From a summary generated by perplexity.ai:
In December 2025, Justice Colin Feasby of the Alberta Court of King's Bench ruled that a citizen-initiated referendum proposal — asking whether "Alberta shall become a sovereign country and cease to be a province in Canada" — was unconstitutional. The case was brought forward by private citizen Mitch Sylvestre under Alberta's Citizen Initiative Act (CIA).Justice Feasby found two key constitutional violations:
- The referendum proposal would end Charter rights for Albertans, since a new constitutional order cannot guarantee the same protections as the current one
- Alberta independence would sever Treaty and Aboriginal rights, as those treaties exist between First Nations and the Crown of Canada — not a future independent Alberta
- The ruling sided with the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation (ACFN) and numerous other First Nations intervenors
The Government's Counter-Move (Bill 14) In a dramatic move, Premier Danielle Smith's UCP government tabled Bill 14 the day before the ruling, attempting to retroactively remove the constitutional guardrails in the CIA that the court was ruling on. Justice Feasby condemned this, calling the legislation contrary to the principles of law and democracy and saying it was designed to "silence the court". Despite this, Bill 14 passed and removed those constitutional restrictions, reopening the door for a new petition campaign.
The April 2026 Stay (Most Recent) The most recent development is from April 10, 2026, when Justice Shaina Leonard issued a one-month stay blocking Alberta's Chief Electoral Officer from certifying the signature results for the new "Stay Free Alberta" independence petition. Three First Nations filed for judicial review, arguing the province had a constitutional duty to consult them before allowing such a referendum process, and that it failed to do so. A final decision is expected by May 2026
In reality, Canada does not have a constitution - we have something grandly called "The Constitution Act" which governments at both the federal and provincial levels freely set-aside when it suits them.
The other reality is first that this referendum gets media support because it is an obvious loser - they'll be lucky to get 20% support from people wanting to stick it to Ottawa - and, more subtly, that the lawyers claiming to represent the indians here are arguing the indians can impose their wishes on Alberta, but Albertans cannot even express an opinion because doing so might have a negative impact on treaty rights.
Wow! pretzel much? - or, more cynically, I think they're very close to admitting that federally enforced treaty rights are real while those Albertans imagine themselves to have under confederation, are not.
This referendum won't pass - but the next one, or the one after that, will - and one of the things that has to happen before one does pass is the emergence of a credible independence party willing to treat indians as fully human: as perfectly normal people who live here with the same rights and responsibilities as anybody else.
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