"Chris" "Caple" 🇨🇦🥌🦫🎸🎶

Just so we’re keeping score & everyone understands where we are now: you live in a country where there are two tiers of citizenship, the government is sending people to concentration camps, the president sets the policies of elite universities, & there are security checkpoints in the capital city.

When checkpoints go up it’s a very very clear sign that you are living in a police state.

Trump is pushing to see what he will be allowed to do just as he has in California and other places.The republicans intend to invade and control as much of the country as possible not by ballot but by bullet.

We were within inches of a vaccine for several cancers, flu, the cold. Inches.

Dolly Parton has sent my daughter a new book every month for years as she does for thousands of children. She help fund the development of the Covid vaccine. She’s not a billionaire. I think as non wealthy people it’s hard to even imagine how much billionaires *could* be doing with their money.

What’s craaaazy to me is that a Minnesota state rep was ASSASSINATED and nothing even remotely close to this happened there

I just can’t find the humor in the false fear generated by Republicans in DC because it’s not sincere and it’s not really funny, it’s their way of saying that Black people don’t belong in society, that Black people are inherently unsafe, and that it’s worth using violence to segregate us.

I mean yes yay let's do everything that we possibly can to nonviolent American fascism out of existence but what's the backup plan if that doesn't work.

I'm a 50 year old normie pacifist who abhors weapons and violence and I'm sitting up here in Canada wondering at what point it would make sense to start getting firearms training.

bsky.app/profile/lowr...

New Zealand woman and six-year-old son detained for three weeks by Ice in US enduring ‘terrifying’ ordeal Sarah Shaw, who has a US visa and lives in Washington state, was detained after attempting to re-enter US from Canada

This is appalling. Civilized countries look at us and are rightly horrified that this idiocy and cruelty is sanctioned by--encouraged by--our government.

(I originally wrote "Other civilized countries look at us..." But do we any longer count in their ranks?)

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/a...

“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”
—Hannah Arendt
h/t Paul Krugman

Defund the National Post and Postmedia The people behind the National Post have become a propagandists for genocide, so and traitors to Canada’s Fourth Estate. Defund Postmedia.

"Canadians need to cancel the National Post. In an era when conservative-leaning journalism is racing to the bottom to become far-right propaganda, Postmedia has set a new standard for debasing themselves. They are traitors to Canada’s Fourth Estate."

An editorial by @taylornoakes.com.

Literally the Führerprinzip.

bsky.app/profile/jame...

White House Announces Comprehensive Review of Smithsonian Exhibitions

again, what is interesting to me about this stuff — beyond the obvious fact that what trump wants is propaganda — is that it is grounded in a political theory which holds trump to be the sovereign will of the nation, who can impose his demands on every aspect of the nation's society

Opinion | Jay Bhattacharya: Why the NIH is pivoting away from mRNA vaccines As a vaccine for broad public use, mRNA technology has failed to earn the public’s trust.

I cannot emphasize enough that the playbook being used against mRNA vaccines (and vaccines in general) is IDENTICAL to the playbook used to restrict voting rights after the 2020 election: actively sow public distrust, then cite the distrust you sowed as an independent reason for your desired policy

Weirdly this doesn't mention that the woman Trump put in charge of reviewing the Smithsonian is his Florida criminal defense attorney who didn't like some of the museum's exhibits when she visited after the inauguration so she convinced Trump to sign an executive order putting her in charge

Scams And Bribery Are Becoming the Foundation of Our Economy It's bad and you should be alarmed.

The extent to which the American economy is being transformed into a machine for scams and outright bribery should be spoken about more directly.
www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/scams-and-...

61% of Everyone Who’s Starved to Death in Gaza Over the Past 22 Months Died in the Past Three Weeks Read that again.

This is an indelible moral stain on all the nations that still refuse to intervene to stop it. Including Canada.

________
61% of Everyone Who’s Starved to Death in Gaza Over the Past 22 Months Died in the Past Three Weeks open.substack.com/pub/zeteo/p/...

Israel marked this journalist a “terrorist” because he cried on camera at Israel’s starvation of his people.

And then they killed him.

And if you pay taxes in the US, your politicians made you fund this abject evil.

BREAKING: Israel Killed Al Jazeera Journalist Anas Al-Sharif Journalists in Gaza continue to be murdered in record numbers, while Western media outlets and reporters show little or no outrage.

Israel has killed 240+ journalists. People who'd cover a strike that killed their kids and go on to cover the next strike, in the pursuit of convincing the world to act, of the hope of tomorrow being different.

How many more murders will it take for the mainstream media's cowardly fever to break?

The American President is trying to take over Canada so maybe not so disproportionate

The FDA Let Substandard Factories Ship These Medications to the U.S. ProPublica identified more than 150 products that were exempted from import bans since 2013. Our list provides the names of the drugs or ingredients and their manufacturers, many of which are no longe...

NEW: In June, ProPublica reported that the FDA has given more than 20 foreign factories a special pass to send drugs to the U.S. even though they were made at plants the agency had banned.

Today, we’re publishing a list of those exempted drugs.

Neal Stephenson is one of my fave sci-fi authors - or has been, historically. A writer who'd seemed anti-authoritarian to his core. He's also close buds with many of the tech elite, including Bezos. It's depressing that he's said nothing as said elite has abandoned democracy and turned full fascist.

A photo of three novels by author Becky Chambers sitting on a cafe table in a bookstore, with well stocked bookshelves visible in the background.

Stopped by the delightful @joiedelivresmtl.bsky.social earlier this evening and picked up three novels by a new-to-me author: Becky Chambers, who, sensibly, is not on social media.

Fascism is a kind of word-magic backed by state violence. Fascists constantly say things that aren't true and then threaten, torture, and kill people until the majority are too terrified to do anything other than affirm the lies or just stay silent and compliant.

bsky.app/profile/atru...

You are not going to out "tough on crime" fascist Republicans. Because they don't actually care about *crime* - they care about racism and power.

One man, the son of Holocaust survivors, said, “People being kidnapped without arrest warrants, without trial, without recourse, by the president of the United States’s ICE armies ... We are not headed toward an authoritarian fascist government; we are already there.”

trib.al/f5JzLeJ

the only thing i'd add to this is that mainstream political media is very much taken with the idea that trump is some incarnation of the national spirit. it shows up everywhere and is used to explain his political success.

if you took a partisan congressional majority from the 1880s and plopped it into the present, it would look at the size of california and immediately turn it in to six states. "surprise, we have 10 new senators now."

Imagine being so wedded to a certain style of horse-race political analysis that you "nothingburger" away the very likely possibility that the current President of the United States *raped children* and is using the vast and powerful apparatus of the government he controls to cover it up.

As a DC resident I do feel that the city has been overrun by "violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals" and I would like them to leave the White House and stop destroying the federal government.