It has been more than 24 hours since trump was sworn in as president of the USA, and he has still not ended Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
First promise broken, a million more promises to break. What a joke.
american politics
I think Pete Hegseth reads my blog
It’s almost as if Pete Hegseth read my post “America and communism” in November and decided to prove I’m right. Seriously. Is there any other way to explain how he claimed, as reported by CNN on 12 December 2025 (when I initially started to write this piece), that “policies allowing gay people to serve openly in the US military [are] part of a ‘Marxist’ agenda to prioritize social justice over combat readiness.” I mean … wow!
Look, I couldn’t give a flying fandango (from a professional point of view) who someone decides to have sex with, as long as they show up for their job and do it well. And, as I admitted in the “America and communism” post, I’m not intimately familiar with all of the writings of Karl Marx — on whose writings Marxism is based, in case that’s not obvious — but I have access to things called “search engines”. So I searched for “marxism homosexuality” and I was led to a number of articles. (You will be too, if you follow that link.) One of them was a “Washington Post” article entitled “Communist states have sometimes been havens for LGBTQ rights” where the author (Samuel Huneke) states:
Sexuality was not a preoccupation of communism’s earliest theorists. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who penned “The Communist Manifesto” in 1848, had little to say on the topic. What they did was contemptuous.
I suppose it’s possible that Marxist thinkers since Marx and Engels have modified Marxist thought since the mid-1800s, so I shouldn’t be too hard on Mr. Hegseth, but what evidence do I have that Hegseth even knows who Karl Marx is, never mind that he knows anything about Marxist thought?! None, that’s how much.
And further opportunity to evaluate Hegseth’s thought process, and the thought process of trump and his transition team, comes in the CNN article:
In a comment to CNN, a Trump transition spokesperson declined to say what specific policies Hegseth might pursue as secretary of defense, including whether he would reinstate “don’t ask, don’t tell” or implement changes to current standards.
Of course not. It’s not as if taking over the leadership of the US Department of Defence requires much forethought and planning. That’s for amateurs.
Like President Trump, Pete wants to see the U.S. military focus on being the world’s strongest fighting force – not on cultural and social issues. Bottom line: If you can meet the standards, you can serve,” the spokesperson said. “But given the threats we face, our priorities shouldn’t be lowering standards and wasting taxpayer money to meet arbitrary social quotas – our priorities should be readiness and lethality.
Right, one’s readiness should be compromised by changing everything the previous administration changed to change the previous administration’s changes. Wha…?
The policy [the ban on transgender individuals serving openly in the military] was reversed under Trump, with then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis implementing a 2018 policy barring those diagnosed with gender dysphoria from serving, except in limited cases. President Joe Biden repealed the Trump-era ban in 2021.
Again, it’s time for musical policies. The music is playing, now everybody switch policies!
Speaking on “the Ben Shapiro Show” in June, Hegseth criticized a military ad campaign featuring a soldier with two lesbian mothers, calling it emblematic of a larger shift toward individualism in military culture.
Yes, we don’t want to encourage individualism in American culture, it just doesn’t exist out in the wild. Hey, I do get that individualism within the military is not necessarily desirable — unless, of course, it’s some individual carrying out some heroic act like storming a machine gun nest — but I suspect that the “military ad campaign featuring a soldier with two lesbian mothers” was for recruiting purposes, not purely military purposes. Coincidentally, recently I was looking up something about pedantry and I came across this definition or explanation:
Pedantry and mastery are opposite attitudes toward rules. To apply a rule to the letter, rigidly, unquestioningly, in cases where it fits and in cases where it does not fit, is pedantry … To apply a rule with natural ease, with judgment, noticing the cases where it fits, and without ever letting the words of the rule obscure the purpose of the action or the opportunities of the situation, is mastery. –George Polya, mathematician (13 Dec 1887-1985).
Further, from Hegseth:
It was stuff like, ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ which was their immediate target, right? Right out the gate, we need to change that and – say what you want about what about that, people are passionate on that issue. But it was most centrally, uh, demonstrated with women in combat this idea that there’ll be gender neutrality and selection.
Again, there’s a new sheriff in town, and this sheriff will be targeting “woke”. Anyone with their eyes open and tuned into the world will be shot. We don’t need that shit.
Idiots.
Karl Marx (John Jabez Edwin Mayall, PD) and Pete Hegseth (cropped, [Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0])
OMG, the entire continent of North America is a joke!
(OK, sorry, I had to start two blog posts with “OMG” just to show that Canada isn’t the only basket case on the continent. And I apologise for excluding Greenland, Mexico and the Caribbean from the definition, but I’m sure that in this case they won’t complain!)
USA
All I’m going to say about the USA though is that their “experiment with democracy” isn’t going so well. I’m not even referring to their electing an admirer of dictators and “strongmen” who is expected to turn his back on the rule of law; I’m referring to their inability to manage to govern their country without facing a government shutdown, seemingly every few weeks but in reality it seems to be every couple of years. I mean, I understand that the legislative side of the government needs to vote money for the administrative side of the government to be able to do the jobs defined by the legislative side of government, but really? I suppose the United States does have a record of slavery — which is the only way to describe being forced to show up to work for no pay cheque (“check” to you Americans) — so what’s the big deal with bringing it back temporarily every few years? I don’t get it.
And after 248 years — almost a quarter of a millennium — why not “experiment” with the executive side of government? This notion of a president and a vice president is so old-fashioned, so the administration-elect is experimenting with a new triumvirate: I’m not sure how to characterise it, as it seems to be rather unofficial at the moment, but it looks like it goes something like this:
- Super (unelected) president: Elon Musk
- President: donald trump
- Vice president: JD Vance
Or maybe it’s like this:
- Unelected president: Musk
- Vice president: trump
- Tea boy: Vance
(South Africans [including Musk] and southern Americans will nod their heads sagely at my thinly veiled racist term for Vance, which is entirely appropriate for the take-over of America by the citizen of the Third World country to which I’m referring. [And yes, you can quibble with me on my definition of the “Third World” here too, but since 1994 South Africa has been clamouring at the door of the club.])
So cute! He thinks he’s steering!.. (Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal-Constitution. I went to their website to try to find appropriate licensing and attribution information, but they blocked me.)
Canada
The turmoil in Canada continues as well!
- First of all, the antiquated electoral system of this country means that I will *GUARANTEE* that next year we will be bowing and scraping to Prime Minister Pierre Poilievre. Anyone — including Justin Trudeau! — who thinks otherwise is clearly smoking something very potent. I was talking to someone today who suggested that if the Liberals get a new leader they might do a little better than if Trudeau was leading them, but in my mind that may mean three seats instead of two. The coming defeat of the Liberals will rival or perhaps even outshine John Turner’s in 1984.
- I have no doubt that perhaps, back in the day, Trudeau may have had a vision for where he wanted to lead the country, but it’s as plain as the nose on my face that today he is only thinking of himself. If he is indeed “reflecting” on his future as has been suggested, somebody also needs to suggest he give Joe Biden a call to get a lesson on humility and thinking of his country first. Of course, that didn’t work out too well for Biden and his party, so I suspect that Biden is the last person Trudeau will call for advice. Or maybe Trudeau is hoping for a snow storm this Christmas or over the New Year, and he will take a walk in said snow storm in the same way that his daddy did in 1984.
- I rarely agree with anything Poilievre says, but how can one disagree with his current characterisation of the Trudeau government as a “chaotic clown show”? Someone on the CBC’s “At Issue” panel (probably Andrew Coyne) described the new cabinet, shuffled yesterday, as “Fanatics, loyalists and members of the prime minister’s wedding party.” Of course, the deliverer of the “clown show” remark then made it clear that the clown show will continue when he becomes prime minister because he also suggested that if he writes a letter to Santa Claus (or the governor general) he could get his Christmas wish of becoming prime minister sooner! God help us all.
- To me the Trudeau government has become like that old, second-hand car you used to own. It’s completely unreliable, you know that the chances of it failing to get you to work tomorrow morning are far greater than 50%, but you somehow think that you can will it to get you there! Sound familiar?!
But the main issue I want to get to that has been bothering me for months now is all of the idiots who keep uttering the name Christy Clark as a possible successor to Trudeau! What are you people smoking?! (Sorry for all the marijuana references, but we’re talking about politics after all!) Yes, she was the leader of the BC Liberal Party, but the BC Liberal Party was a liberal party in name only! I distinctly remember Raef Mair questioning Gordon Campbell on this issue during an interview on Mair’s CKNW talk-radio programme many years ago, when Campbell became the leader of the BC Liberals, or was running to be. Mair asked Campbell to define “liberalism” with reference to the name of his party, and Campbell simply couldn’t do it! Mair may have been a bit of a pedant in that moment, and perhaps the definition of liberalism has changed over the centuries — or maybe it comes down to the different definitions of “freedom” that those on the left and right sides of the political spectrum use — but the fact of the matter is that in the years since Campbell became the premier (followed by Clark) up until the party folded earlier this year, the BC Liberals were — as described in the Wikipedia article on the party that replaced it, BC United:
conservative, neoliberal, … occupying a centre-right position on the left–right political spectrum … a “free enterprise coalition” [drawing] support from members of both the federal Liberal and Conservative parties … the main centre-right opposition to the centre-left New Democratic Party …. Once affiliated with the Liberal Party of Canada, the British Columbia Liberal Party became independent in 1987.
Their name reminds me of something my Grade Seven teacher (Mr. Cuttel) told the class one day, that he found it ironic that countries in the world that were widely known as being anything but democratic seemed to like using the word in their names to cover up their lack of democracy, e.g., German Democratic Republic (East Germany), Democratic Republic of the Congo, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea), etc. Perhaps the BC Liberal Party was using that logic!
If you don’t live in BC and just can’t quite grasp the nomenclature, I strongly recommend you read the CBC article “Why the B.C. Liberals are sometimes liberal and sometimes not“, with a video with excellent (i.e., corny) sound effects by Richard Zussman, who now reports for Global BC. It’s really not that difficult; as illustrated above, people can call their countries whatever they want, and those countries are named by political leaders who lie just as much as political leaders everywhere on the spectrum.
If Clark even runs in an expected leadership race I’ll be surprised, but if she does and wins, I’ll be handing in my licence to run this blog.
BC’s Liberal Party does not equal Canada’s Liberal Party (CBC)
Updated, 2024-12-22: Some minor changes (mostly formatting), plus added the screenshot of the CBC video to which I link. Also, apparently this is the third post title I’ve started with “OMG” recently! All because of politicians!
Updated, 2024-12-26: Added Mike Luckovich’s very appropriate cartoon from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, along with an explanation of how I tried to access their website to obtain appropriate licensing and attribution information, but that their website blocked my computer’s configuration. Kinda defeats the purpose of having a website, but what can I do?
The hilarity (not!) of donald trump’s childish remarks
One thing I have noted for years is the habit of many people on the right to make every argument personal and to resort to name calling. This is particularly illustrated by the juvenile known as donald trump, whose name I refuse to spell with initial capital letters because he doesn’t deserve even that much grammatical respect.
His latest tact of referring to the country of Canada as the “great state of Canada” — as Americans are wont to do when referring to their states grandiloquently — was mildly amusing the first time if only because we ourselves often refer to ourselves as the 51st state, but with the second and subsequent repetitions it just became moronic. Hey don, you might have got a chuckle the first time (and the second time when you placed a Swiss mountain in Canada), but we’re all yawning now.
But with respect to calling people names, your moronic reaction to the resignation of Canada’s finance minister is beyond the pale. First of all, I realise that you have absolutely zero respect for any woman other than for her purpose of having a pussy to grab, but characterising her (and even having an opinion on her domestic actions) as “totally toxic” because she did an excellent job of representing her country (not sub-national state) of Canada in trade negotiations with your country just rings of your being a well-documented poor loser. Non-Americans are often told by you and your acolytes to STFU and keep our opinions of America and American politics to ourselves, so I suggest you take your own advice.
The Great State of Canada is stunned as the Finance Minister resigns, or was fired, from her position by Governor Justin Trudeau. Her behavior was totally toxic, and not at all conducive to making deals which are good for the very unhappy citizens of Canada. She will not be missed!!!
Fuck you, you piece of shit. I can guarantee that this citizen of Canada is very happy that we are not governed by the likes of idiots like you.
trump this, tariff that
I’m not a big fan of Ontario premier Doug Ford, and I realise I’m just one of the peanut gallery baying for blood that will cost everyone on both sides of the border, but yeah, fuck trump and his tariffs, so cut off the Americans sponging off of Canada for their electricity!
Story: “Ford threatens to cut off Ontario’s energy supply to U.S. if Trump follows through on tariffs“.
Borders work both ways; if trump is whining about drugs and illegal aliens getting into his country, it’s not Canada that is letting them in, it’s America’s own bloody Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection! Duh!
Breakdown of the Rule of Law in the United States of America
Tattered American flag
What we’re seeing down in the good ol’ U.S. of A., with Joe Biden pardoning his son, is a classic example of unintended consequences and the down side of the reason that all of trump’s supporters love him: his inability to think before he opens his big yap. Many people seem to consider it somehow endearing that a politician can talk just as freely and openly as a drunkard down at the pub, but anyone with a brain knows that just about anything they say “after a few” down at the pub cannot and should not be counted on in the morning.
And yet, trump can barrack out the word “tariff” and all of his acolytes cheer as if they even know what the word means, never mind how tariffs would affect their grocery bills, making the inflation they blame on Biden (but which is worldwide) look like child’s play.
This is what I see as having happened in this case:
- 2020: trump pardons (among other people) the convicted felon (Charles Kushner), pardon my redundancy, who is the father-in-law of his daughter, Ivanka, as well as a bunch of his other supporters who have broken the law to support him.
- 2021: trump sets his private army of ne’er-do-wells on the US Congress in attempts to hijack the counting of votes of the Electoral College and (seemingly) have his Vice President (Mike Pence) and Speaker of the House (Nancy Pelosi) assassinated. They fail.
- 2024: The United States Supreme Court (SCOTUS) rules that the President of the United States (POTUS) is immune from prosecution, which means the action to try and convict trump of treason in the case of the January 6th self-coup attempt essentially comes to a grinding halt. (How an attempt at a coup can be considered an “official act” is beyond the understanding of my miniscule intellect.)
- 2024: trump is elected President of the United States, again, to the dismay of over 50% of the population of the United States.
- 2024: trump nominates Kash Patel — who has made far-ranging promises that echo trump’s promises of revenge and retribution, completely contrary to the ethos of the Rule of Law — for the post of Director of the FBI. Oh, and he also nominates said convicted felon, Charles Kushner, to the post of Ambassador to France.
- 2024: Biden sees what is coming down the pike and, despite previous assurances that he would not pardon Hunter Biden, decides to do so because it has become clear to him that there’s no way Hunter will be treated according to the Rule of Law under which Joe previously promised not to pardon him. So what we have here is one President flouting the Rule of Law (even if pardons are, technically, legal) to combat the entirely predictable flouting of the Rule of Law of an incoming president.
- 2024: Predictably, trump and his cry-baby supporters cry foul.
And, of course, as about a million other people have noted, now that a convicted felon has been allowed to run for and win the office of President of the United States, why should there be fetters on the activities and freedoms of other felons? Why incarcerate them? Why prevent them from holding certain jobs, like ambassadorships? Why prevent them from voting? And why conform to various other laws and norms and follow the Rule of Law?!
As I said to someone recently, the maxim that “crime doesn’t pay” is sure taking a hit these days, especially from the “royalty” that are running the United States!
America and communism
United Socialist States of America flag (Samdir3 CC BY-SA 3.0).
The way that Americans seem to have a penchant for labelling anyone they disagree with — particularly Republicans labelling Democrats — as “communist” has always troubled me. The problem is ignorance. A good friend of mine — a former resident of the United States — who is well educated in this area says that he won’t talk to anyone about communism unless they have read all of a reading list by authors such as Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, etc. I don’t remember the full list, but I myself have not met the prerequisite. Among them I vaguely recall “Das Kapital” by Karl Marx. At best I have read a number of excerpts of a few of the texts in my friend’s list from text books from a college political science course.
But today, in 2024, I am stunned by the extent to which right-leaning American politicians are siding with former communists, particularly one vladimir putin. You may have heard of him: he started the first war in Europe since the end of World War II in 1945 by sending Russian troops to invade Ukraine, troops that were immediately defeated in their push for Kyiv. The current American president-elect — donald trump — and his nominee for the cabinet position of Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, both (by all accounts) support putin, and trump claims that he plans to end the war within 24 hours of taking office, if not before! It is widely expected that he will do this by denying any further military assistance to Ukraine and twisting the arm of Volodymyr Zelenskyy (president of Ukraine) into ceding Ukrainian territory to putin.
To someone whose country’s west-leaning government was abandoned by the United States of America to the communist terrorists — supported by the Soviet Union and China — against which we fought in the 1970s, this actually shouldn’t be surprising. So welcome to the club, Mr. Zelenskyy, the club of people that have been fighting on the side of America and to bring the freedom of the West to your country, but in whose faces America has spat.
But is this really surprising behaviour by a president-elect who has nominated an anti-vaxxer as the Secretary of Health, and a suspected criminal as the Attorney General?!
OMG, I’m stunned
Tattered American flag
Despite the supposed neck-and-neck polls, I didn’t think it was conceivable that a nation that bills itself as the smartest, richest and most successful could actually vote in a potential (probable?) dictator and an actual convicted felon. Under normal circumstances I’d say, “Thank the gods for term limits,” but that may be the smallest thing he will change, if predictions are correct. If I was Liz Cheney right now, I’d be very concerned for my safety.
But what I’m not surprised about is that Americans, once again, gave a female candidate the heave-ho. Other countries have been electing woman politicians as president and prime minister and whatnot for years, but America stubbornly refuses to join even the 20th century, never mind the 21st. Listen, I don’t think anyone should vote for a woman (or anyone else) just because of what she (or he) has between their legs but, my god, I just don’t get it. What is with these people?!
It’s actually a good thing that I am in the process of winding down my business, because it’s time I closed my accounts in that shithole, about-to-be-third-world country. That will make two Third World countries I’ve pulled out of this year! I have just a couple of months to whip around and visit what few friends I have there before I close the border to myself for at least four years.
Abandon Harris ’24
Yesterday evening I watched a CBC news story that focused on ex-Palestinians (and Arabs in general) in Michigan who have mounted the “Abandon Harris ’24” campaign, which aims to ensure that Kamala Harris is not elected president of the United States in their election next month. I did a web search and it turns out that this is actually a national movement.
I am blown away by how short-sighted these people are. One Muslim woman said, “If the consequence is a trump presidency, so be it.” I wonder if she has thought this through. Given the incredibly anti-Islamic stands that trump has taken, and given the extent of his fascist statements about mass deportations and turning the United States military on its own citizens (naturalised and not) or “the enemy within”, what makes her so sure that she will not be on the first boat or plane of deportations if she helps him win?
Also in the piece a Muslim or Arab man was interviewed outside either a mosque or perhaps some sort of Islamic cultural centre. He was standing in front of a green awning marked, “WOMEN ENTRANCE”, and in the background was another green awning; there was no way to see what kind of entrance that one was, but I can only assume it was the “MAN ENTRANCE”. I’m well aware that Muslims don’t allow men and women to mix — just like other religions based on the stone-age teachings of one prophet or another — but this interview was obviously conducted in the “free” United States of America! I am an immigrant myself (just not to the United States, thank the gods and my parents) and if I had behaved the way these Palestinians are behaving — including fostering sex discrimination — I myself (and my family) would probably have been deported!
It is people like these — who bring their country’s problems with them when they emigrate/immigrate — that give us immigrants a bad name.
Passion
For many years I’ve been told — mostly through reading, but also in person — that passion is the key to advancement and success. If you’re not passionate about something, you’re not going to succeed at it, or at anything else. In fact, if you’re not passionate, you might as well pack up and go home. Just resign yourself to a life of failure.
That advice my be well-meaning, but it’s rather depressing, especially for someone who doesn’t wake up in the morning and jump out of bed passionate about diving into a bowl of cornflakes and washing it down with a glass of orange juice, and heading off to their job … the same job they had yesterday, and the day before that and the year before that too!
It really struck home for me when I was reading an article: “Inside the exclusive world of Supreme Court clerks driving America’s legal controversies“. In that article I see a bunch of passionate people, and I see the root of much of the discord in American society. If I’ve been learning anything over the years it’s that passion may be the key to advancement and success, but it also creates fundamentalists and extremists. If you’re passionate about your belief that people of the same sex having sex with one another are “opprobrious”, guess what? You’re going to stop at nothing, in your passion, to ensure that they be stopped from doing so! And guess what? If you’re going to do that you’re going to run into and make enemies out of passionate people who want to have sex with people of the same gender! And if you’re passionate in your belief that Jews should be eradicated from the face of the planet, guess what? Do I really need to pull out that example of where passion can lead, both in the 1940s and in October last year?!
Bingo! Passionate sides at war with one another for the rest of time.
Something that also struck me in this article was that, apparently, some of the judges on the American Supreme Court in 1978 thought that racism would be a thing of the past twenty-five years hence, by 2003. It’s stunning to me that the apparently highest minds in that land actually thought that millions of years of human nature — and hundreds of years of American history! — would suddenly reverse itself within one generation! But beyond those millions of years of human nature lies “passion”. If you’re a passionate supremacist of any colour — White supremacist, Black Supremacist, etc., both “-ists” — what logic is going to convince you to tone down your passion and stop being a racist? Pretty much exactly none! After all, you’re passionate, and nobody with passion just gives up their passion because some idiot with an “agenda” came by and tried to use logic on you! “I have to show my fellow racists (‘passionatists’?) how passionate and committed to the cause I am by sticking to our mantra!”
So with what do we replace passion? I don’t think it’s really reasonable to suggest that if you’re just moderately interested in something, keep at it, slog through it, you’ll become successful at it. Yup, doesn’t quite ring true. On the other hand, we can’t all become successful billionaires (society’s objective barometer of success) because we’re passionate about something, because there will likely always be someone who is just that tiny bit more passionate than you, and he/she gets the top job, or a higher position on a list of rich people.
We all know passionate people. They’re a hoot at a party, going on and on about their passion. Actually, they’re probably not at parties, unless their passion is parties! But such people don’t fit into general society, which is why they’re (again) not generally at parties. But society needs positively passionate people; I don’t think I really need to pull out any examples, but we can all think of them. As much as I can’t stand the idea of “Swifties”, they exist because of a passionate person named Taylor Swift. (Or is she? To be honest, I don’t really know. Is she passionate about being a good singer? Does anyone know a Swiftie to ask?) But yeah, society would be a black hole if there were no positively passionate people.
The point is that passion isn’t always positive, and people who vaunt passion as the key to advancement and success need to realise that it also creates division in society. So, like many things, it ironically needs to be touted in moderation. Perhaps truly passionate individuals can’t be moderate — and nor should they, if their passion is positive — but people who claim that you cannot succeed in life without passion need to find something else to harp on about and write different books, or their books and mentors in general should counsel passionate people to think things through a little more carefully.