Tuesday 9:11 PM

 Almost finished praying the sorrowful mysteries.

This morning, drove Tony to school. Then drove home. I made myself available on Twenix. I talked to someone on the Canary Islands, in Tuscany, in Genoa, in Barcelona and in Vallaodid.  2.5 hours of talking about cooking, sports, customer service, co-living, and potato omelettes.  It was a little too much. I was all talked out.

After subbing, I went to loonorama to waste time & money before picking up Tony — was in the area anyway.  I was nearby ACC North.

Harry Potter went to a magical residential school.

Quebec separatists won an election yesterday…

Sunday 6:15 AM

 Geez. Another Trump assassination attempt.  Will it change the political situation?  I doubt it.  After a few days, it will be forgotten about because of the events in Iran and people’s short attention spans.

Was it real? Was it staged?  If it was staged, its purpose would have been to rally Trump supporters and former Trump supporters around him.  I doubt that as my previous paragraph shows.

Any who. I have a 7:00 AM online class.  The assassination attempt will be a nice conversation topic.  Then I go to Mass. Hopefully, I will then arrive in Erickson by 11:00 AM.

Thursday 9:15 AM: Kind of Cold

 Yesterday, people were wearing shorts or they were in short sleeves.  Any hint of warmth, I told someone yesterday, and they want to take their clothes off. 

Today, they’re wearing toques and gloves.

With Covid over-reaction, floor crossings, pols getting into wars they had promised not to get into, and governments getting awarded with electoral success despite tanking a country, it is hard not to despair.  But the world is always going to be that way.  I’m thankful to not be in a war zone. (Although hearing that 40 or so people get arrested on a typical weekend in Brandon, it may be that the other problems of the world are coming here.)

Tuesday of the Second Week after Easter: 7:25 AM

 As I’ve been saying, I don’t know what the days will entail for me.  This morning, I was expecting to do a class with China, but I instead talked to someone in Italy. (Chalk up another country I’ve talked with.)

The state of the World and Canada? Depressing I would say. They both need to be fixed, reformed. The current systems in place are now rotten to the core.

Friday of the Third Week of Lent: 8:02 AM

 

My son Tony woke me up, around 4:00 AM, complaining of a sore neck.  I gave him some advil.

I’ve talked to Anhui province.  Later, I’ll talk to Brazil and Chile.

I’ll take my Mom shopping this aft. Tony doesn’t have school today. Professional Development Day.

No meat for me.  It’s Friday.  

To go or not to go to Friday Mass.  That is the question.

About 1.5 km’s from here, a person or persons went on a tire-slashing spree.  At least 75 cars had their tires slashed.  Who did it?  A drug addict, a homeless malcontent, teenagers having shits & giggles, or a tire company wanting business? I hope they catch the perpetrator(s).  Thankfully, I have a garage in which to park.  

—El cristiano no tiene nada que perder en una

catástrofe.

—The Christian has nothing to lose in a catastrophe.

An NGD quote.  I came across it today.  If it was a cheese stick, it would have knocked me over.  As it was, the quote hit me with the force of an anvil.  I have nothing to fear.  (Have to present it to my RCIA group).

Thanks to reading the Alec Guinness book, I am reading this Anthony Trollope novel:  The Way We Live Now.  Guinness said it was a wonderful book, and so far, in my reading of it, I am agreeing with him.  There are already passages I am highlighting.

It isn’t all bad in the world of news.  Chile has a new President who is classified as an ultra conservative Catholic.  I will have to ask my Santiago student about him. 

Wednesday of the Second Week of Lent

 Minus 13 or so out there.

Yesterday afternoon after having coffee with this guy:

I drove the KIA Sportage here;

It’s on Brandon’s North Hill.  Hanbury hill I think it is called.

I have been hired to be a sub teacher in the Brandon School Division.  I’m currently in the onboarding process.  I’m waiting on some documents.

I am reading differing opinions on whether Trump’s decision to attack Iran is justified: all from opinion makers I like. All I can do is hope that this conflict can end quickly, and the commentators who doubt the wisdom of the attack while at the same time hoping they are wrong are proven wrong.  It does seem a lot like the attack on Iraq in some ways.

Monday of the Second Week of Lent: 6:27 AM

 The morning before 7:30 AM is my favorite time of the day.  I love its silence , I can think and pray, I can be productive, and no one can put me in a bad mood.

Trump agreed to the attack on Iran.  It is, for me, the most problematic decision he has made.  I had been lead to believe that he wasn’t going to do this sort of thing. Listening to both sides; that is, to those opposed and for the attack, I don’t know which side is right.  All I can hope now is that this war ends quickly and decisively.  If it doesn’t, the world will be in an even more dire state than it is now, and the good that Trump has done will have amounted to nothing,

National Flag Day

 On X, formerly Twitter, I learned it was national flag day in Canada. That’s subject for a rant.  When I asked my son to compare the current Canadian flag with this one:

He said the one above was far more attractive.  I agree.  It has more detail.  It was the flag for which Canadian soldiers died in WW1, WW2, and the Korean War.  It was also the flag of the country to which my parents immigrated.

The current flag is really a liberal party of Canada tag and thus reminds me another national flag of a another one party state:

Furthermore, the current flag has dead shrubbery as a national symbol, and looks so 1970s..

For sure, the current flag stands out, but these days when the elite of this country are a total embarrassment, I prefer the detailed and subtle elegance of the Red Ensign.

Carney

 What civilised values is he actually defending.  Is he a Christian or a Progressive?

Freezing in the Blowing

 The feels-line should just be called wind chill factor.  The feels-like, is an environmentalist push to make the subjective objective and does not allow the individual to be free to decide.  That is the theme of Marc Carney’s book: Values.

Carney in China

 Is Carney is intelligent and malevolent  to real Canadian interests, or he is plain stupid?  Frank Vaughan, my current favorite commentator on Canadian affairs figures the former and suggests that maybe Carney is a double agent serving Trump’s purposes.  Carney’s financial holdings are in American holdings, said Vaughan.  Carney’s policies of embracing the EU and China over our nearest, biggest and best trading partner are self-destructive for Canada, thereby allowing the America’s eventual takeover of the Canadian carcass, Vaughan continues.  Carney benefits personally from that.

Is theory plausible?  The Liberal Party of Canada has been dedicated to destroying the old, legacy Canada and replacing it with something else, as long as it is the party in power running the show.  Carney could be using this LPC for his own purposes, the Canadian media and LPC voters loving whatever he does under the cover of he being a LPC PM.  Or maybe Carney is as stupid as his followers. I can’t say for sure.

So what do I think of Carney’s trip to China?  I find it funny because some have given me hell for having lived in China for twenty years and telling me what an evil dictatorship it is.  And yet what is the government of this country seemingly doing?  Embracing China.

Should Canada embrace China?  There are some things I wish we could copy from them.  Canada should disavow its liquor communism, make it viable for mom & pop shops to exist, make it easy to start businesses, really do things to encourage manufacturing, resist mass immigration, embrace conservative social morality, have a great variety of cuisine, and not hate itself.  However, there are a lot more things about China that we should reject:  their Internet censorship, their corruption, their persecution of religious minorities, their placing of party agents in every company, their massive state surveillance,  their top-down urban design, and their subsidizing of dumb industries like EVs; to name but a few.  We should deal with China as it is:  a far off dictatorship that we should be wary to be cosy with, but deal with all the same.

Do we want to have Chinese EVs in Canada?  A lot of Chinese don’t want them.  Why should Canada?

Wednesday 10:00 AM

 Here’s the daily view photo.  Snow has melted and been shoveled away.

Here are today’s video uploads:

A NGD quote video.

A driving video recorded on the weekend.

So, PM Carney wants to improve relations with China?

Another incident in Minneapolis

 Minneapolis has really gone downhill.

There was the Somali cop killing an unarmed woman who had come to him to report an incident.

There was the George Floyd incident where a combination of bad circumstances and amoral local politicians  lead to a grave miscarriage of justice.

There was the woman cop accidentally discharging her weapon and killing a man.

There was that strange serial killing spree of local politicians.

And then there was this recent ICE shooting.  I heard my first accounts of it on CBC.  Their portrayal of what happened was surely biased and false.  When the two villains of the George Floyd incident, the Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Governor Walz were allowed in clutch their pearls about the ICE shooting, I could smell a rat.  And then hearing these local Minneapolis officials wondering if the ICE agent would get a fair trial was too rich.  The CBC was lying.  Thankfully, the agent won’t be investigated by Minnesota officials.  

11th Day of Christmas 6:00 AM

 It doesn’t appear to have snowed.  But I’ll have to go downstairs to confirm.

I did some spiritual reading first.

One person I know said that the feels like number has a political motivation to make the weather seem worse than it actually is.

What to think of Trump’s actions in Venezuela?  Maduro was most certainly a bad man. Dissidents in Canada are openly hoping he would perform such a military operation against Mark Carney.  Others, of course, think Trump is being a big bad bully.  I hope this occupation of Venezuela quickly ends.  No Iraq debacle please.

Meanwhile, overnight on WeChat:

Virden

 

As I arrived in Virden:

It’s no burden to be in Virden.  What a place!  Nice people! 

Slow day.

A 70 click drive from Brandoon.

At the Battle of Virden in WW1. hundreds of thousands were killed.

Trump has conquered Venezuela.  Donroe Doctrine.

The people at the Virden Home Hardware were very kind.

Virden, I have been told, has oil.  Maybe it should separate from Canada.

8th Day of Christmas: A wise man

 A wise man is a very rich man.

A rich man is not necessarily a wise man. 

Case in point: Mark Carney.

8:22 AM: Scatter Brained

 Later than usual for me to be doing my first view photo of the day.  What can I say?  I’m a little scatter brained this morning.

I am going to have to repair the charging port on my Iphone this morning.  I will need it to work starting on the 28th.  If I stayed at home all the time, I could kept my phone charged using the wireless charger I have; but, I have to be on the road for hours at a time and so that wouldn't be good.

I was on a chat channel in Rednote, a Chinese social app, this morning.  My mic was suddenly blocked by the platform.  I am not sure what I had said to have this done but it is not the first time.

So i said that Trump was wrong to have made the social media post he did about Reiner's death.  Nothing Trump said in the post was incorrect, but it could have been said at another time.  But i have learned that it turned out that Reiner had wished publicly for the Trump's potential assassin to have been successful, and for Trump's head to have been in the right position to have been fully impacted by the bullet.  No one on the progressive, liberal TDS side was clutching their pearls about that.  Still, two wrongs don't make a right.  

What happened to my beard.  I bought a train trimmer and  i ,put it on the wrong setting.  I trimmed off more than I wanted to, but it will grow back, so fear not.

1984

 The novel was a warning, not an instruction manual.

Wednesday 9:06 AM: Blizzard coming!

 Another new-old sensation for me to re-experience: a blizzard.  I’m am giddy at the prospect.  Needless to say, my son is hoping to experience his first snow day in Canada.  He had experienced this in China, but for far less snow.

After Bondi, I have had some people tell me they don’t like Muslims as a group and wonder why so many western countries’ governments have let them come into their countries. I heard a story of a French Jew who moved to Israel because France had become incredibly unsafe for them.  The reaction of the Left to the massacre has been dumb, seemingly hunkering down on a failed policy of theirs.

Trump’s reaction to Rob Reiner’s death was not good.  Granted that Reiner had been incredibly and unfairly hostile to Trump and it could be argued that Reiner should have spent more time helping his son instead of obsessing about politics, Trump looked incredibly petty with that social media post.

In China, to have longer holidays, they make people work on Saturdays and Sundays preceding the holiday; in Chile, I learned that to have longer holidays, they have workers work an extra hour a day in the period preceding the holiday.

I took this video after having dropped my son off at school:

Monday 5:47 AM: Shocking News

 

Tony & I got haircuts last night.

When I woke up this morning, I read that Rob Reiner had been murdered.  I went to X for confirmation and reaction.  People, made the point that while they despised his politics, they liked his work.  They even complimented for not having celebrated the murder of Charlie Kirk.  It is a shame that everything has to be so politicized.

I then prayed to the father, son, and Holy Ghost.

I then extended my Duolingo streak.

I then took the above view photo before rushing downstairs to pee.

The temperature;

The high is too warm for December.