Beavers are noble animals- industrious, family centered, and capable of improving their environment for their own benefit. They may not get the young man's blood boiling like a fearsome predator, but they build rather than just rapaciously consume. It's one of the less obnoxiously rotten symbols and humiliations the modern Canadian state subjects it's people to IMHO.
That good point about the grizzly (or polar bear) not being on your flag is made all the more poignant because the enormously retarded and terrified California has a grizzly flag, even though the species hasn't been there for more than a century.
I loved your thread on the Canadian flag, heraldry and especially the illiberal founding of Canada. As a Catholic American, I've not quite come to terms with the liberal, Enlightenment founding of the country I love, but the Founders were giants of their times.
I do hope both America and Canada can be liberated from the globalists and I am just as optimistic for Canada as for America. After all, it was the Canadian truckers who broke the worldwide spell of Covidism.
The Liberal enlightenment foundations of America are to a certain degree more rhetoric than actuality. Librarian had a good essay on that yesterday. There's a prominent reactionary strain in American political thought which has been largely deemphasized during the postwar era.
The most liberal part of America's founding was when Washington refused to become the rightful king. It would've shut out the screeching crazies like Thomas Paine, possibly permanently. Everything else is downhill from that inflection point.
Memories of the great flag debate some 60 years ago have faded, but not my distaste for the dominant color - RED!!! As all freedom lovers are keenly aware red is an angry color, favoured by tyrannical communists world-wide. History has shown the LPC as led by then Lester Pearson are still hardcore Communists at heart. A pox on their houses. <sigh>
I share your distaste for red flags and I have never been happy that in America red is the color assigned to us on the right. It’s a commie color. The left is red, the right is white.
Grating poppies, tulips & roses, detestable raspberries, strawberries & cherries, let alone the horrors of a split watermelon. The Red hot chili peppers are definitely not on my Christmas list, nor rubies.
There's something uniquely suspicious about a monarch butterfly floating off into a red sunset.....red sky at night, red sky in the morning.....a pox on both their houses!
Now that Carney is threatening to grant citizenship to the Chinese military, I assume Trump and Rubio have penciled in our Canuckistan Invasion right after we liberate Iran from being an evil Islamic theocracy to becoming a super peachy keen Islamic not-theocracy, so there's a good chance there will be a new flag (at least for Alberta) coming sooner than later, either with the stars & stripes or the hammer & sickle.
John, I've shared your "Amelia Sans Merci" piece many times and everyone agrees it is pure kickass. Considering your massive output of previous articles, everybody has plenty of older articles to read or re-read while you recharge.
Cheers, man. Glad you enjoyed the Amelia piece. It did numbers.
I doubt Alberta is quite at the point of separation, assuming polls can be trusted (a big and possibly questionable assumption, I know). Numbers can change, though...
Not sure Trump will wait for Alberta to set things up, if they drag their feet. The common thread through all his actions appears to be hostility to the European Globalist establishment, which long reconquered the US institutions (not people) from within, bragged openly of doing so for Canada, and tried their best (!?) to Lincoln Trump himself in-between lawyers and rifling through his wife's underwear.
You don't do that to an old, mean, rich New Yorker with concern for his family legacy. He will continue to do as much damage as the President of the United States can do to the structural elements of the old order, and a very old load-bearing element of that is Canada. MAGA comes with an asterisk, and the subtext reads "the rest of the world is not America".
While Carney has positioned his government to welcome professional assistance from the PRC as a new cadre of officers, he's also positioned Canada to print visas like mad to suddenly-out-of-work Ukrainians with very interesting tattoo collections and a strong dislike of US fecklessness. Again.
Canada is to be plundered of any value and left in every way as the Ukraine of North America. A tar baby for America. And I think Trump knows this.
Whenever someone bleats about how things started going wrong when Trudeau the Younger began prancing around on Parliament Hill, I point out it was Pearson who, while in a minority gubbermint, instituted the Canada Pension Plan, Universal Healthcare, the Canada Students Loans Programs and other socialist nonsense with the eager help of eugenics fan Tommy Douglas. Pearson also started the Inquiries which led to the rest of the socialist programs put in place by Trudeau the Elder like Status of Women, Official Bilingualism, Multicultural Madness etc.
On an unrelated note, I know we share similar taste in literature, John. After years of talking about it, I've finally started writing again. Would you be open to looking over a chapter of fantasy work and giving me feedback? If so, please DM me.
1. You guys had better get mobilized or Carney will have you flying the EU flag.
2 As to your leadership problem, you should get Ted Cruz to come back. He was born in Canada, Alberta I think. He is weak tea compared to the new leadership emerging on the Right down here but he is way better than anything you have up there that I know about. I think he is more Canadian than Carney.
3. You gave the read to comment ratio at substack but I would be interested in the paid subscriptions to comment ratio. Besides providing support to worthy people one of my reasons for subscribing is to comment.
4. I have noted the long silences followed by a flurry of interesting stuff. That is the way that creation works, at least for me.
1. We must give up Canadian sovereignty to the EU in order to prevent it being taken by the US. Or something.
2. A bunch of us are discussing this in private. As things stand, The Guy has not yet emerged on the board. All we can do in the meantime is prepare the ground.
3. Paid subscribers are of course the rarest treasure. About 2.5% of my subscriber base; others are higher, probably because they paywall.
4. Yes, exactly. I've always been bursty. Flurries of activity followed by long stretches of quiescence. Like a cat or a ferret.
I don't know... beavers have a fearsome bite. Sure, polar bear will kill you but it's such a huge predator it's kind of a given. A beaver is for the making of food, clothes and ladies' perfumes.
Same as with pigs. I can tell you. I'd rather get bitten by a dog or a wolf than a pig. A canine will make a wound - a pig will shear off and swallow a chunk of whichever part it puts the bite on.
Let's have the full quote in all its tea-stained teeth glory:
"And when you got your six pieces, you gotta get rid of them, because it's no good leaving it in the deep freeze for your mum to discover, now is it? Then I hear the best thing to do is feed them to pigs. You got to starve the pigs for a few days, then the sight of a chopped-up body will look like curry to a pisshead. You gotta shave the heads of your victims, and pull the teeth out for the sake of the piggies' digestion. You could do this afterwards, of course, but you don't want to go sievin' through pig shit, now do you? They will go through bone like butter. You need at least sixteen pigs to finish the job in one sitting, so be wary of any man who keeps a pig farm. They will go through a body that weighs 200 pounds in about eight minutes. That means that a single pig can consume two pounds of uncooked flesh every minute. Hence the expression, "as greedy as a pig".
You’ll find your groove, John, no worries. As you noted from your trip to the gym, physical exertion is an excellent ignition source for torching cobwebs.
Hope you get out of the winter funk soon. Been pretty sunny on the Not So Wet Coast so far this year.
Like your friend in education I have gone from public school teacher to private educator (with a 15 year pit stop teaching in South Korea). Going back to the beginning of my career (1990) I have never liked a large amount of administrators so now I Iove being away from them.
Lastly, love the flag (Maple tree fan), and really like beavers. One of the few things I love about Canada is nature and clean air.
Way too many middle aged AWFULs (affluent white female urban liberals).
Funny story: the CBC ran a news story where they were interviewing Canadian Revenue Agency employees about their strike. One woman in a mask outdoors said she was fighting to keep working from home. Why? Due to a banana allergy, and she was worried that co-workers would eat bananas at the workplace.
Regarding Pearson and the flag, long ago I saw a video clip of him speaking at a Legion just prior to its introduction - Pearson served in the First World War - and when he starts to speak on the matter he is booed and jeered *relentlessly*, to the point where he just stands there, silent and dumbfounded. Think about that: a room full of surviving WW1, WW2 and Korean War veterans just wailing on a *sitting Prime Minister*, in 1965. This was considered absolutely shocking and I don't know if that was ever commented on or if the clip still exists. It gives you some idea of the notion that - I think it's you who coined the term - that post-1965 Canada was essentially a Colour Revolution launched against its own people and history.
Even myself, as child of immigrants to this country, I prefer to say "Dominion Day" and would much rather see the return of the Red Ensign (at least Ontario still has a diluted version of it, although if the NDP ever get back into power expect to see a Tim Walz-like conversion of the flag to a Somali-Trans-Chinese-Indian-Abbo mishmash atrocity).
It's to the discredit of that generation that they limited themselves to jeering. They seem to have thought that they could shame the shameless. Of course they couldn't, hence the top down cultural revolution.
The Canadian military should have launched a coup.
My patience has thus far been rewarded, and with the best predictor of future performance being past performance, it stands to reason that staying the course will yield great results as usual, so no gripes there, publish precisely when he means to and all that.
There's also only so much someone can say on so many different topics at a given time, there's plenty of room for new things to be said about new things, but its pre-requisite that those things then be new. Sometimes events just need time to play themselves out, before shifts and results in courses can breed fertile ground for new mental/potential territory to map out.
Terrible to hear about death in the family, hope things have gone as smoothly as can be expected given the circumstances, and that everyone involved is on the mend emotionally.
Lastly, regarding drafts and potential articles, I'll say the same I did to Yakubian Ape recently: some of those backlog drafts are probably more worthy of posting than you think, or at least let on. "Oh no this article is only deeply insightful, thoroughly excellent, and perennially relevant. It isn't even a tone-setting, mind-expanding, 12/10 discourse-quake. I'm literally shivering in my audience boots. that's it boys pack it up unsub un follow L ratio. Its beyond joever, billions must wallow in the slop, just as Parvini foretold." Maybe that's a bit hyperbolic, and of course they're a reserve to be called upon for valuable additions to other points being made in better articles etc., but ehh, B-sides from Barsoom when?
You make a good point. Honestly one of the issues is that if a project lingers too long I tend to lose enthusiasm for it. ADD and all, getting distracted by shiny new objects...
Even sans ADD (I think) I can understand the allure of the shiny new thing. I could be arguably working on a project I’m tinkering with right now, but here I am, clacking away at new thing bc thanks to the wonders of industrial marketing, human psychology has now taken the animate form of a cruel, bitterly laughing dark god.
"What the hell, John, it’s been over a month since your last essay, and you’re fobbing us off with a low-effort promotional notification?" Your words not mine, I enjoy the read when you do the write whenever you do.
I would like to see my neighbor to the southeast, Canada, get it's act together. Shucky darn, same for the U.S. and the western world in general. I'm of an age though where I've very little skin left in the game so other than wish you well and hope for the best, oh well....
It's a warm day here now (Translating it into Canadian; -12° C.) though we do expect it to cool off a bit by next Thursday, -34° C. , the snow' 29 inches deep in my yard (OOPs!, 74 cm, Canadian.). & again I quite enjoy the read when you do write!
Around -51° C. is the coldest I've dealt with. It's been quite a few years since I've seen it that cold, I'm happy to say, -& no I don't credit Anthropogenic Climate Change for said blessing.
For metabolic and neurological reasons I don’t understand, my winter lethargy here in frozen Chicago has started in November and abated in February for the past three decades. My guess is that two months after solstice and the end of arctic temps, increasing temps and solar output are flipping the neuro switches out of hibernation mode. I don’t even mind snow past this point in the season. Tulips may be less than a month away. Re. flag-even as an American kid in the ‘70s and ‘80s, the Canadian flag struck me as dumb, especially after seeing cool provincial flags with traditional elements, e.g. the UJ in the BC flag. It belongs in the fire with the new Minnesota flag.
No worries about your publishing -- I'd much rather get infrequent good stuff than regular slop :-)
Cheers, man
Beavers are noble animals- industrious, family centered, and capable of improving their environment for their own benefit. They may not get the young man's blood boiling like a fearsome predator, but they build rather than just rapaciously consume. It's one of the less obnoxiously rotten symbols and humiliations the modern Canadian state subjects it's people to IMHO.
I hear you, but this is a bit like Ben Franklin proposing the noble turkey as America's national bird, in preference to the rapacious eagle.
I can't help but wonder if we had the used the turkey, if we'd still have a Republic instead of an empire.
That good point about the grizzly (or polar bear) not being on your flag is made all the more poignant because the enormously retarded and terrified California has a grizzly flag, even though the species hasn't been there for more than a century.
A grizzly would really be more appropriate to Washington.
Wales has a dragon on its flag. Not a country known for its military exploits, in recent years at least...
thus the bear is perfect for California's flag, because it stands for something once great that has been lost in time.
Sorry to hear of the death in your family.
I loved your thread on the Canadian flag, heraldry and especially the illiberal founding of Canada. As a Catholic American, I've not quite come to terms with the liberal, Enlightenment founding of the country I love, but the Founders were giants of their times.
I do hope both America and Canada can be liberated from the globalists and I am just as optimistic for Canada as for America. After all, it was the Canadian truckers who broke the worldwide spell of Covidism.
The Liberal enlightenment foundations of America are to a certain degree more rhetoric than actuality. Librarian had a good essay on that yesterday. There's a prominent reactionary strain in American political thought which has been largely deemphasized during the postwar era.
The most liberal part of America's founding was when Washington refused to become the rightful king. It would've shut out the screeching crazies like Thomas Paine, possibly permanently. Everything else is downhill from that inflection point.
Memories of the great flag debate some 60 years ago have faded, but not my distaste for the dominant color - RED!!! As all freedom lovers are keenly aware red is an angry color, favoured by tyrannical communists world-wide. History has shown the LPC as led by then Lester Pearson are still hardcore Communists at heart. A pox on their houses. <sigh>
Red and white are Canada's heraldic colors. Also, the OG flag was much redder.
I share your distaste for red flags and I have never been happy that in America red is the color assigned to us on the right. It’s a commie color. The left is red, the right is white.
Red is the color of blood. It was here before commies used it, & it will be here after their religion moves on to its' next form.
Grating poppies, tulips & roses, detestable raspberries, strawberries & cherries, let alone the horrors of a split watermelon. The Red hot chili peppers are definitely not on my Christmas list, nor rubies.
There's something uniquely suspicious about a monarch butterfly floating off into a red sunset.....red sky at night, red sky in the morning.....a pox on both their houses!
Now that Carney is threatening to grant citizenship to the Chinese military, I assume Trump and Rubio have penciled in our Canuckistan Invasion right after we liberate Iran from being an evil Islamic theocracy to becoming a super peachy keen Islamic not-theocracy, so there's a good chance there will be a new flag (at least for Alberta) coming sooner than later, either with the stars & stripes or the hammer & sickle.
John, I've shared your "Amelia Sans Merci" piece many times and everyone agrees it is pure kickass. Considering your massive output of previous articles, everybody has plenty of older articles to read or re-read while you recharge.
Cheers, man. Glad you enjoyed the Amelia piece. It did numbers.
I doubt Alberta is quite at the point of separation, assuming polls can be trusted (a big and possibly questionable assumption, I know). Numbers can change, though...
Not sure Trump will wait for Alberta to set things up, if they drag their feet. The common thread through all his actions appears to be hostility to the European Globalist establishment, which long reconquered the US institutions (not people) from within, bragged openly of doing so for Canada, and tried their best (!?) to Lincoln Trump himself in-between lawyers and rifling through his wife's underwear.
You don't do that to an old, mean, rich New Yorker with concern for his family legacy. He will continue to do as much damage as the President of the United States can do to the structural elements of the old order, and a very old load-bearing element of that is Canada. MAGA comes with an asterisk, and the subtext reads "the rest of the world is not America".
While Carney has positioned his government to welcome professional assistance from the PRC as a new cadre of officers, he's also positioned Canada to print visas like mad to suddenly-out-of-work Ukrainians with very interesting tattoo collections and a strong dislike of US fecklessness. Again.
Canada is to be plundered of any value and left in every way as the Ukraine of North America. A tar baby for America. And I think Trump knows this.
no need to wait for separation, we can use all of Canada
Whenever someone bleats about how things started going wrong when Trudeau the Younger began prancing around on Parliament Hill, I point out it was Pearson who, while in a minority gubbermint, instituted the Canada Pension Plan, Universal Healthcare, the Canada Students Loans Programs and other socialist nonsense with the eager help of eugenics fan Tommy Douglas. Pearson also started the Inquiries which led to the rest of the socialist programs put in place by Trudeau the Elder like Status of Women, Official Bilingualism, Multicultural Madness etc.
On an unrelated note, I know we share similar taste in literature, John. After years of talking about it, I've finally started writing again. Would you be open to looking over a chapter of fantasy work and giving me feedback? If so, please DM me.
Pearson was wretched, but honestly Diefenbaker was not much better. Destroying the Arrow was unforgivable.
Go ahead and DM me.
DM sent.
1. You guys had better get mobilized or Carney will have you flying the EU flag.
2 As to your leadership problem, you should get Ted Cruz to come back. He was born in Canada, Alberta I think. He is weak tea compared to the new leadership emerging on the Right down here but he is way better than anything you have up there that I know about. I think he is more Canadian than Carney.
3. You gave the read to comment ratio at substack but I would be interested in the paid subscriptions to comment ratio. Besides providing support to worthy people one of my reasons for subscribing is to comment.
4. I have noted the long silences followed by a flurry of interesting stuff. That is the way that creation works, at least for me.
1. We must give up Canadian sovereignty to the EU in order to prevent it being taken by the US. Or something.
2. A bunch of us are discussing this in private. As things stand, The Guy has not yet emerged on the board. All we can do in the meantime is prepare the ground.
3. Paid subscribers are of course the rarest treasure. About 2.5% of my subscriber base; others are higher, probably because they paywall.
4. Yes, exactly. I've always been bursty. Flurries of activity followed by long stretches of quiescence. Like a cat or a ferret.
I don't know... beavers have a fearsome bite. Sure, polar bear will kill you but it's such a huge predator it's kind of a given. A beaver is for the making of food, clothes and ladies' perfumes.
Same as with pigs. I can tell you. I'd rather get bitten by a dog or a wolf than a pig. A canine will make a wound - a pig will shear off and swallow a chunk of whichever part it puts the bite on.
Bones included.
Pigs are absolutely horrific animals. Never get on the bad side of a man who owns a pig farm.
Let's have the full quote in all its tea-stained teeth glory:
"And when you got your six pieces, you gotta get rid of them, because it's no good leaving it in the deep freeze for your mum to discover, now is it? Then I hear the best thing to do is feed them to pigs. You got to starve the pigs for a few days, then the sight of a chopped-up body will look like curry to a pisshead. You gotta shave the heads of your victims, and pull the teeth out for the sake of the piggies' digestion. You could do this afterwards, of course, but you don't want to go sievin' through pig shit, now do you? They will go through bone like butter. You need at least sixteen pigs to finish the job in one sitting, so be wary of any man who keeps a pig farm. They will go through a body that weighs 200 pounds in about eight minutes. That means that a single pig can consume two pounds of uncooked flesh every minute. Hence the expression, "as greedy as a pig".
You’ll find your groove, John, no worries. As you noted from your trip to the gym, physical exertion is an excellent ignition source for torching cobwebs.
It is that.
And I'm not particularly worried. I've always been very bursty.
Hope you get out of the winter funk soon. Been pretty sunny on the Not So Wet Coast so far this year.
Like your friend in education I have gone from public school teacher to private educator (with a 15 year pit stop teaching in South Korea). Going back to the beginning of my career (1990) I have never liked a large amount of administrators so now I Iove being away from them.
Lastly, love the flag (Maple tree fan), and really like beavers. One of the few things I love about Canada is nature and clean air.
Admin have become a plague.
Way too many middle aged AWFULs (affluent white female urban liberals).
Funny story: the CBC ran a news story where they were interviewing Canadian Revenue Agency employees about their strike. One woman in a mask outdoors said she was fighting to keep working from home. Why? Due to a banana allergy, and she was worried that co-workers would eat bananas at the workplace.
Condolences on the death in your family.
Regarding Pearson and the flag, long ago I saw a video clip of him speaking at a Legion just prior to its introduction - Pearson served in the First World War - and when he starts to speak on the matter he is booed and jeered *relentlessly*, to the point where he just stands there, silent and dumbfounded. Think about that: a room full of surviving WW1, WW2 and Korean War veterans just wailing on a *sitting Prime Minister*, in 1965. This was considered absolutely shocking and I don't know if that was ever commented on or if the clip still exists. It gives you some idea of the notion that - I think it's you who coined the term - that post-1965 Canada was essentially a Colour Revolution launched against its own people and history.
Even myself, as child of immigrants to this country, I prefer to say "Dominion Day" and would much rather see the return of the Red Ensign (at least Ontario still has a diluted version of it, although if the NDP ever get back into power expect to see a Tim Walz-like conversion of the flag to a Somali-Trans-Chinese-Indian-Abbo mishmash atrocity).
It's to the discredit of that generation that they limited themselves to jeering. They seem to have thought that they could shame the shameless. Of course they couldn't, hence the top down cultural revolution.
The Canadian military should have launched a coup.
Hey what about that fiction?
My patience has thus far been rewarded, and with the best predictor of future performance being past performance, it stands to reason that staying the course will yield great results as usual, so no gripes there, publish precisely when he means to and all that.
There's also only so much someone can say on so many different topics at a given time, there's plenty of room for new things to be said about new things, but its pre-requisite that those things then be new. Sometimes events just need time to play themselves out, before shifts and results in courses can breed fertile ground for new mental/potential territory to map out.
Terrible to hear about death in the family, hope things have gone as smoothly as can be expected given the circumstances, and that everyone involved is on the mend emotionally.
Lastly, regarding drafts and potential articles, I'll say the same I did to Yakubian Ape recently: some of those backlog drafts are probably more worthy of posting than you think, or at least let on. "Oh no this article is only deeply insightful, thoroughly excellent, and perennially relevant. It isn't even a tone-setting, mind-expanding, 12/10 discourse-quake. I'm literally shivering in my audience boots. that's it boys pack it up unsub un follow L ratio. Its beyond joever, billions must wallow in the slop, just as Parvini foretold." Maybe that's a bit hyperbolic, and of course they're a reserve to be called upon for valuable additions to other points being made in better articles etc., but ehh, B-sides from Barsoom when?
You make a good point. Honestly one of the issues is that if a project lingers too long I tend to lose enthusiasm for it. ADD and all, getting distracted by shiny new objects...
But you make a good point.
Even sans ADD (I think) I can understand the allure of the shiny new thing. I could be arguably working on a project I’m tinkering with right now, but here I am, clacking away at new thing bc thanks to the wonders of industrial marketing, human psychology has now taken the animate form of a cruel, bitterly laughing dark god.
The shiny distraction is actually something of a problem, as it can make it difficult to sustain concentration on larger, more meaningful projects.
"What the hell, John, it’s been over a month since your last essay, and you’re fobbing us off with a low-effort promotional notification?" Your words not mine, I enjoy the read when you do the write whenever you do.
I would like to see my neighbor to the southeast, Canada, get it's act together. Shucky darn, same for the U.S. and the western world in general. I'm of an age though where I've very little skin left in the game so other than wish you well and hope for the best, oh well....
It's a warm day here now (Translating it into Canadian; -12° C.) though we do expect it to cool off a bit by next Thursday, -34° C. , the snow' 29 inches deep in my yard (OOPs!, 74 cm, Canadian.). & again I quite enjoy the read when you do write!
-34, my God. I've only felt that when windchill is factored in.
Around -51° C. is the coldest I've dealt with. It's been quite a few years since I've seen it that cold, I'm happy to say, -& no I don't credit Anthropogenic Climate Change for said blessing.
Now that will put hair on your chest.
Is it colder than Mars. And why does Canada oppose global warming.
For metabolic and neurological reasons I don’t understand, my winter lethargy here in frozen Chicago has started in November and abated in February for the past three decades. My guess is that two months after solstice and the end of arctic temps, increasing temps and solar output are flipping the neuro switches out of hibernation mode. I don’t even mind snow past this point in the season. Tulips may be less than a month away. Re. flag-even as an American kid in the ‘70s and ‘80s, the Canadian flag struck me as dumb, especially after seeing cool provincial flags with traditional elements, e.g. the UJ in the BC flag. It belongs in the fire with the new Minnesota flag.
I don't think there's much of a point in fighting the seasons.
I'll try to make it
(And I'll actually be at this one lol)
Awesome!