Quotulatiousness

September 8, 2025

Ancient Historian Reviews Monty Python’s Life of Brian | Deep Dives

History Hit
Published 1 May 2025

In this new video, classicist Honor Cargill-Martin delves into the iconic Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Is it historically accurate or is it a very naughty film?

00:00 Intro
00:53 Judea A.D. 33
01:55 Colosseum?
06:56 People’s Front of Judea
10:28 “What have the Romans done for us?”
16:05 Roman Grafitti
19:44 Hypocaust
23:30 Biggus Dickus
28:42 “Crucifixion?”
30:37 “… release a wrong doer from our prison”
32:09 “I’m Brian!”
(more…)

September 3, 2025

Dad’s Army caricatures capture life in Britain today

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Humour, Media, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At The Daily Skeptic, Guy de la Bédoyère wonders why everything in modern Britain emulates an episode of the 70s sitcom Dad’s Army:

Dad’s Army, a BBC sitcom that ran from 1968 to 1977, starring Arthur Lowe as Captain Mainwaring, John Le Mesurier as Sergeant Wilson, and Clive Dunn as Lance Corporal Jones.

There are plenty of natural laws, but here’s one unique to Britain:

    Every organisation, committee, scenario, initiative and government-backed and corporate project in Britain will inevitably degenerate into a scene from Dad’s Army.

That of course is the celebrated sitcom Dad’s Army, based on the world of Britain’s Home Guard in the Second World War, which ran for nine series in the 1970s. Every character is caricature, and sometimes not even as much as that.

Just think about it. Captain Mainwaring, the prickly bank manager and obsessed with status – the ultimate incompetent management figure, forever frustrated by his own paltry military service in the Great War and now strutting around like a dumpy cockerel as commanding officer of the platoon.

Sgt Wilson, a complacent, dozy and lazy member of the establishment, effortlessly imbued with a sense of privilege and world-weary detachment. Persistently given to undermining Mainwaring.

Lance-Corporal Jones, the panic-stricken jobsworth stifling initiative at every turn and floundering haplessly around to demolish every project with his matchless ability to overcomplicate anything and everything. He has a special skill for wasting inordinate amounts of time with ludicrously impenetrable explanations, usually based on fantasy.

Private Frazer, the miserable doom-laden pessimist and undertaker, forever raining down scorn and stirring up opposition and discontent in the ranks, his own ambitions in the platoon thwarted.

Private Walker, the skiving skimmer who dodged regular military service. Forever on the take but essentially harmless and even with some good characteristics.

Private Godfrey, the embodiment of the well-intentioned but largely hopeless pensioner whose presence relies usually on everyone else. Constantly called away to relieve himself.

Private Pike, the idiotic mummy’s body excused military service. Today he would have a certificate excusing him from any form of employment for anxiety, ADHD and anything else his mother or the system could come up with.

Then there’s the ARP Warden Hodges, whose sole purpose in life is feuding with Mainwaring, finding fault with the platoon’s men and triumphantly announcing their infractions. Hodges is the confrontational and dispute-loving trade union leader to Mainwaring’s shambolic management. His only mission in life is to create conflict and throw his weight about.

To these we can add various other characters, all comic figures (like the vicar and the verger) but essential props that amplify the authenticity.

The reason the sitcom lasted so long is very simple. Every single organisation in Britain is in home to some of or all these personality types, whether it’s the parish council, a local arts society, a corporation or the government.

Almost every problem the Home Guard platoon is confronted with results in bickering, chaos and wasted time, based mostly on posturing, obstinacy, incompetence, obsession with status and a lack of foresight, common sense and lateral thought. If the outcome is a good one, it’s invariably the result of chance.

Sounds familiar? It doesn’t matter what you think about the boats, climate change, the welfare state or the NHS. Every one of Britain’s current problems is being dealt with as if each was an episode of Dad’s Army.

Update, 5 September: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substackhttps://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

August 31, 2025

Andrew Doyle’s The End of Woke

Filed under: Books, Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Critic, Titania McGrath reviews The End of Woke, and nobody should be surprised that it isn’t a rave review, although there is some raving:

Renowned grifter Andrew Doyle has written another “book” called The End of Woke. It’s the most repugnant piece of tripe ever to reach the printing press. It’s ignorant, ill-formed and offensive in the extreme. I have absolutely no intention of reading it.

Not content with his previous fascist manual Free Speech and Why It Matters, Doyle in his new book challenges ideological dogma on both the left and the right. It is laughable that he believes that anyone would be interested in such an approach. Imagine being so insecure in your belief-system that you would be open to persuasion and debate.

Doyle is a reactionary monster with a sub-zero IQ, one who is so unenlightened that he does not seem to realise that “liberal values” and “free speech” are Nazi dog-whistles. Having skim-read the blurb of The End of Woke, I’ve gleaned that Doyle supports outmoded and frankly immature notions such as “tolerance” and “liberty”. And he has a head like a cube (see above).

It was to be expected that bigots would approve of this book. The “comedian” Jimmy Carr called it “thought-provoking and entertaining”. The white male author Michael Shermer said it was “a magisterial read”. And that evil cisgender demon Julie Bindel wrote in The Critic that it was “the best work yet by the creator of genius parody Titania McGrath”.

What Would Donald Sutherland Say About This? – Blooper Reel

Filed under: History, Humour, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 30 Aug 2025

People think that we’re perfect hosts, almost robotic in our perfection in our task of presenting history. Well, that is true. We are perfect. However, there are some people out there that look just like us, and they screw up all the time. Here’s a chance to see them in action.
(more…)

August 25, 2025

Defending your life against an intruder can get you charged in Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Terry Burton‘s satire-that-is-too-close-to-being-true:

A Recent Case in Ontario

An Ontario man recently had the unthinkable happen: he defended his home. Unfortunately for him, this occurred in Canada, where the laws surrounding self-defence have taken a dive off the deep end of “wokeness”. The police, after deep reflection (and a healthy dose of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion training), chose to charge the homeowner and not the intruder. Why?

Let’s break down the madness.

How a Home Invasion Might Go in 2025 Canada:

Homeowner (middle-class taxpayer, not currently oppressed):
“Hello, sir. You appear to have broken into my home and possess a 7-inch knife. May I inquire about your intentions?”

Intruder (career criminal with a social media following):
“I’m just here to grab some electronics, steal your monies, and stab someone if they resist my incursion. It depends on my mood. Don’t profile me.”

Homeowner:
“Of course. My apologies. Would you like a latte while you loot my home? Oat milk? Almond? I don’t want to assume.”

Intruder:
“You’re a colonialist bigot for offering me food.”

Homeowner:
“Understood. Legally, I’m only allowed to resist you in proportion to your level of violence — yet to be ascertained, as determined by a tribunal of academics who’ve never been in a fist fight. That means if you punch me, I can … maybe glare at you. Anything more, and I’m the criminal.”

But what if the homeowner fights back?

In this case, the homeowner managed to grab a knife and defend himself. The intruder was injured — tragically — during this altercation. So naturally, the police arrived and did what any reasonable, DEI officer was instructed s/he must do:

They charged the homeowner.

The intruder? Off to the hospital, flowers sent courtesy of the Canadian taxpayer, and full support from victim services (taxpayer funded). (Yes, really.)

Reasons Police and Prosecutors Declined to Charge the Intruder (some say over-the-top satirical conjecture by the author):

  1. Mental illness – A catch-all excuse for immunity.
  2. Homelessness – Makes all actions justifiable, including assault.
  3. Drug addiction – A disease, not a crime, apparently.
  4. Identifies as female – We must respect self-identification, even during felonies.
  5. Arrested 55 times, 20 for B&Es – Systemic failure, so we shouldn’t blame him again.
  6. Member of a marginalized group – Intersectionality shields all.
  7. Single-parent upbringing – Automatically voids criminal responsibility.
  8. Not yet a citizen – A conviction could hinder his application; we, the state machinery that is, must protect him.
  9. Linked to child porn – But not convicted, so hands off.
  10. Terrorist affiliations – Political beliefs are personal.
  11. Anti-Semitic – But it’s culturally complex, they say.
  12. Illegally entered Canada – A paperwork issue, not a crime.
  13. Gun and drug trafficking – He’s an entrepreneur, really.
  14. Anti-Christian – Expressing a valid worldview.
  15. Anti–Rule of Law – Which now appears to be mainstream.

The Verdict?

The homeowner is:

  • Charged with attempted murder.
  • Convicted of using “excessive force”.
  • Sued in civil court by the intruder.
  • Ordered to surrender his house and retirement savings.

The intruder is:

  • Awarded the home he broke into.
  • Given legal permission to rent the house back to the homeowner’s family.
  • Allowed to visit the property at will.
  • Celebrated in local media for “surviving trauma”.

What Happened to Common Sense?

It died somewhere between Bill C-18, Bill C-63, and the idea that your lived experience matters more than actual law. In a country where, in some jurisdictions, whistling at night is outlawed, but breaking into homes is a misunderstood cry for help, we’ve lost the thread entirely.

When defending your family is labelled aggression, and violating someone’s home is rebranded asocial protest, Canada ceases to be a democracy and becomes a farce.

August 18, 2025

QotD: Dostoevsky’s Demons can be read as “one long, savage parody of Fathers and Sons

Filed under: Books, History, Politics, Quotations, Russia — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

To understand what happens next [in Dostoevsky’s Demons], it helps to have read some Turgenev. His most famous work, Fathers and Sons, is of a piece with the most lurid boomer fantasies. The basic plot is that there are some genteel Russian liberals, good New York Times readers, people with all the right views. Their kids come back from college and are espousing all this weird stuff: stuff about white fragility and transgenderism and boycotting Israel, stuff that makes their nice liberal parents extremely uncomfortable. But it’s okay, you see? The kids magnanimously realize that their parents were once cool revolutionaries too, and the parents make peace with the fact that the kids are just further out ahead than they are, and everybody feels good about themselves because if the kids have seen far, it’s only by standing on the shoulders of giants. The important thing to understand is that everything about this plot is identity validation wish-fulfillment for the boomer liberal parents (like Turgenev himself). It’s the political equivalent of that YouTube genre where Gen Z Afro-American kids rock out to Phil Collins.

The macro-structure of Demons mirrors this so closely, you can almost read the book as one long, savage parody of Fathers and Sons.1 The sunny opening section is a satire of the boomer liberals, and the big vibe shift part way in is their kids coming back from college. But that’s where things go off the rails. In this book, the next generation shares their parents’ anti-religious and anti-monarchist attitudes, but unlike in Fathers and Sons, the kids in Demons are disgusted by the hypocrisy and cowardice of their genteel liberal parents, and eager to plunge Russia into a hyper-totalitarian nightmare. The exact contours of that nightmare are something they frequently argue about and change their minds over, but they can all agree that it will need to begin with an enormous mountain of skulls, and that their town is as good a place as any to start.

Dostoevsky’s other works put individuals front and center, his stories have unbelievably rich characterization (Nietzsche once said that Dostoevsky was the greatest psychologist to ever live), because for Dostoevsky the very highest stakes, the most important questions in the world, were about the damnation or salvation of individual souls. But Demons is different: here the characters all blur together, their names are disgorged to you in a never-ending torrent, and only a few of them are distinctive in any way.2 How could Dostoevsky think these people don’t matter? It’s because they aren’t real people anymore. It’s because they’re possessed. Their brains have been scooped out and all you can see in their eyes is a writhing mass of worms. Their ideas and ideologies have hollowed them out and are wearing their skins as suits.

But what if the ideas don’t matter either? It’s easy to interpret the second half of Demons as a novel of ideas, but it really isn’t. Your first clue is that the ideas are just so goofy. There’s one guy who thinks that by killing himself he will become God (don’t ask, it’s Dostoevsky, man). Another has written a book with ten chapters, explaining how “Beginning with the principle of unlimited freedom I arrive at unlimited despotism”, and proposing a method of brainwashing for reducing ninety percent of humanity to a mindless “herd”. Yet another thinks that everything can be solved by killing one hundred million people, but laments that even with very efficient methods of execution this will take at least thirty years.3 My own favorite might be the guy who refuses to explain what his system is, but just smugly declares that since everybody is going to end up following it eventually, it’s pointless for him to explain it.

John Psmith, “REVIEW: Demons, by Fyodor Dostoevsky”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-07-17.


  1. Further evidence for this reading: the book contains a character, the great writer “Karmazinov”, who is a straightforward expy of Turgenev himself.
  2. That said if you do need to keep track of them, this alignment chart made by some genius on the internet is a pretty handy guide: link.
  3. This one probably seems less funny after the 20th century than it did when Dostoevsky wrote it.

July 8, 2025

“One of the problems with being a writer is that all of your idiocies are still in print somewhere”

Filed under: Books, Economics, Humour, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At the Foundation for Economic Education, Itxu Díaz considers the work of P.J. O’Rourke:

Though P.J. O’Rourke passed away three years ago, his sharp wit and defense of freedom continue to resonate in a world still tempted by interventionist solutions. Reclaiming his work is more vital now than ever. What he told us through laughs and jabs in recent decades has proven to be one of the sharpest diagnoses of the dangers of postmodern left-wing ideology — and one of the most inspired reflections on why we must root our societies in individual liberty, private property, the free market, and the Judeo-Christian values that shaped the West for centuries.

Progressives want bigger government, and often conservatives don’t want it as small as we ought to like. O’Rourke knew all too well that the larger the state grows, the smaller individuals become. He devoted much of his work to explaining this in a way anyone could understand — even those not particularly interested in politics. His words resonate today in a new light, and fortunately, they remain easy to access: the Internet is full of O’Rourke’s articles, and all his books are still in print. The ideas, the jokes — the profound, the outdated, and even the ones that haven’t aged all that well — are still out there, waiting to be discovered by any digital wanderer with a sense of humor and a thirst for sharp thinking. It’s almost frightening to realize that some of O’Rourke’s tech-related jokes would go completely over a Millennial or Zoomer’s head today. And it’s even more pitiful to think that some of his old comments would be cancelled in today’s dull, hypersensitive postmodern world. Perhaps it’s because, as he once said, “One of the problems with being a writer is that all of your idiocies are still in print somewhere”. Incidentally, that’s where O’Rourke found his only point of agreement with environmentalists: “I strongly support paper recycling”.

The hippie student he was in the ’60s lost his enthusiasm for leftist ideas the following decade, as soon as he got his first paycheck from National Lampoon: a $300 check that filled him with joy — until he was told $140 would be deducted for taxes, health insurance, and Social Security. That day, he got mad at the government, and the grudge never faded. Before that, while still sporting what he called “a bad haircut” — think John Lennon’s worst style — he’d decided to tell his Republican grandmother he’d become a communist. Her response threw him off: “Well, at least you’re not a Democrat”.

O’Rourke was never one to romanticize his drug-fueled college days. “Oh God, the ’60s are back,” he wrote. “Good thing I’ve got a double-barreled 12-gauge with a chamber for three-inch magnum shells. And speaking strictly as a retired hippie and former beatnik, if the ’60s come my way, they won’t make it past the porch steps. They’ll be history. Which, for God’s sake, is what they’re supposed to be.”

From his time as editor-in-chief of National Lampoon in the ’70s, we got his account in The Hollywood Reporter, “How I Killed National Lampoon“. The job was a blast, but the environment was hell: “Having a bunch of humorists in one place is like having a bunch of cats in a sack”. As a satirical war correspondent covering every late-century conflict, O’Rourke filled countless pages describing the struggle to find a damn glass of whiskey in the burning countries at the “end of history”. His last dangerous assignment was in Iraq. “I’d been writing about overseas troubles of one kind or another for twenty-one years, in forty-some countries, none of them the nice ones. I had a happy marriage and cute kids. There wasn’t much happy or cute about Iraq,” he wrote in Holidays in Heck.

June 11, 2025

These Romans are crazy – in praise of Asterix the Gaul

Filed under: France, History, Humour — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 30 Dec 2024

Today we look at the Asterix comic books — fun tales of indomitable Gauls and their fights with Julius Caesar’s Romans.

May 19, 2025

Best of Cunk on Shakespeare – Part 1

Filed under: Britain, History, Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Philomena Cunk
Published 20 Dec 2023

Are you saying I’m a liar?

Sharing all things Cunk – a fictional character from Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe, Cunk on Britain, Cunk on Shakespeare and Cunk on Earth – Portrayed by the incredible Diane Morgan.

December 31, 2024

QotD: Pre-revolution Russia satirized by Dostoevsky

Filed under: Books, History, Quotations, Russia — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The opening of Demons tries to fool you into thinking it’s a comedy of manners about liberal, cosmopolitan Russian aristocrats in the 1840s. The vibe is that of a Jane Austen novel, but hidden within the comforting shell of a society tale, there’s something dark and spiky. Dostoevsky pokes fun at his characters in ways that translate alarming well into 2020s America. Everybody wants to #DefundTheOkhrana and free the serfs, but is terrified that the serfs might move in next door. Characters move to Brookl … I mean to St. Petersburg to start a left-wing magazine and promptly get canceled by other leftists for it. Academics endlessly posture as the #resistance to a tyrannical sovereign (who is unaware of their existence), and try to get exiled so they can cash in on that sweet exile clout. There are polycules.1

As the book unfolds, the satire gets more and more brutal. The real Dostoevsky knew this scene well — remember he spent his early years as a St. Petersburg hipster literary magazine guy himself — and he roasts it with exquisite savagery. As a friend who read the book with me put it: the men are fatuous, deluded about their importance, lazy, their liberal politics a mere extension of their narcissism. The woman are bitchy, incurious about the world except as far as it’s relevant to their status-chasing, viewing everyone and everything instrumentally. Nobody has any actual beliefs, and everybody is motivated solely by pretension and by the desire to sneer at their country.

But this is no conservative apologia for the system these people are rebelling against either, Dostoevsky’s poison pen is omnidirectional. Many right-wing satirists are good at showing us the debased preening and backbiting, like crabs in a bucket, that surplus elites fall into when there’s a vacuum of authority. But Dostoevsky admits what too many conservatives won’t, that the libs can only do this stuff because the society they despise is actually everything that they say it is: rotting from the inside, unjust, corrupt, and worst of all ridiculous. Thus he introduces representatives of the old order, like the conceited and slow-witted general who constantly misses the point and gets offended by imagined slights. Or like the governor of the podunk town where the action takes place, who instead of addressing the various looming disasters, sublimates his anxiety over them into constructing little cardboard models.2 If there’s a vacuum of authority, it’s because men like these are undeserving of it, failing to exercise it, allowing it to slip through their fingers.

All of this is very fun,3 and yet not exactly what I expect from a Dostoevsky novel. It’s a little … frivolous? Where are the agonizingly complex psychological portraits, the weighty metaphysical debates, the surreal stroboscopic fever-dreams culminating in murder, the 3am vodka-fueled conversations about damnation? Don’t worry, it’s coming, he’s just lulling you into a false sense of security. After a few hundred pages a thunderbolt falls, the book takes a screaming swerve into darkness, and you realize that the whole first third of this novel is like the scenes at the beginning of a horror movie where everybody is walking around in the daylight, acting like stuff is normal and ignoring the ever-growing threat around them.

John Psmith, “REVIEW: Demons, by Fyodor Dostoevsky”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-07-17.


    1. In an incredible bit of translation-enabled nominative determinism, the main cuckold is a character named Virginsky. I kept waiting for a “Chadsky” to show up, but alas he never did.

    2. Look, the fact that he’s sitting there painting minis while the world burns makes the guy undeniably relatable. If you transported him to the present day he would obviously be an autistic gamer, and some of my best friends, etc., etc. Nevertheless, though, he should not be the governor.

    3. For some reason, there are people who are surprised that Demons is funny. I don’t know why they’re surprised, Dostoevsky is frequently funny. The Brothers Karamazov is hilarious!

December 25, 2024

James Lileks on Christmas traditions

Filed under: Food, Humour — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

My family doesn’t have a lot of traditions that have carried on, although we do still do our big family get-together at our house on Christmas Eve, so I guess that counts. Here’s James Lileks‘ take on the tradition question at this festive time of the year:

Christmas gifts under the tree.
Photo by Kelvin Kay via Wikimedia Commons.

There are two views of Christmas traditions.

1. They are the jewels of the past, polished by time, handed down from loving ancestors whose memory we e’er keep warm and and alive when we do as they did, eat as they ate, and raise our new wine in the glasses of yore. Thus do civilizations maintain, and remember.

2. Traditions are the cold hands of the dead past punching through the coffin-lid of yesteryear and bursting up through the loam to reach out and smother the newborn ideas of today, because that’s not how Grandma did it.

I’m very much in the first camp, stamping around like Tevye in the opening number of Fiddler on the Roof. But I share his perplexity some times. Why do we do this? I don’t know. I don’t know why we always had Swedish Meatballs on Christmas Eve. Perhaps that was Grandpa’s favorite, and my Mom made it after he passed to remind herself of him. If so, cool; my daughter, who never met the old man, experiences a little of the remarkable old farmer – especially since I insist that she wash it down with a warmish Grain Belt and smoke an Old Gold afterwards.

“But I don’t want to! They smell and they make me cough!”

“It’s tradition. Your grandfather would be delighted to know you enjoy the rich, apple-fresh flavor of an Old Gold.”

Ahhhh, kids, it’s hard to get them interested in history. Even harder to get them to knock the ash in the coffee-cup saucer. My point is that we are not having Swedish Meatballs this year, because Daughter wants to make some German dish. It’s a roll of pounded meat layered with mustard and pickles. (Not to be confused with the German meal of mustard and pickles wrapped up in hammered meat; that one has more syllables.) I have never been impressed with German food, but this dish has the promise to provide a piquancy missing in Swedish meatballs, which seem like something that answers the question “what if the telephone dial tone was a flavor?”

December 12, 2024

CHEVROLET with Cartoonist Rube Goldberg: Something for Nothing (1940)

Filed under: History, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Charlie Dean Archives
Published Aug 27, 2013

Cartoonist Rube Goldberg creates a little animation to explain how fuel is converted to power in the modern automobile engine.

CharlieDeanArchives – Archive footage from the 20th century making history come alive!

December 8, 2024

How it started – Blame Canada. How it’s going – Annex Canada?

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Humour, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post, Tristin Hopper has some fun imagining what the Dominion of Canada would have written in its diary over the last week after President-elect Donald Trump joked about making it the 51st state:

TUESDAY
Don’t get me wrong; annexation would be thrilling. What could be naughtier than abolishing the world’s longest undefended border? Or getting a Chik-Fil-A in all 10 provinces? Or watching CNN as a swing voter, instead of just as a voyeur. Or screaming “I know my rights!” at a cop and having it mean something.

Who among us doesn’t want to lock up serial child molesters in a Supermax instead of sending them to a healing lodge? Or strap a revolver to one’s belt just to see what it would feel like to be an armed citizen at the mall. Or go to a store that sells booze, cigarettes, firecrackers and shotguns all in the same place.

I’m not ashamed to say it all gives me goosebumps. I’ve resented you, looked down on you, claimed to hate you, but I’ve never said I wasn’t attracted to you.

WEDNESDAY
And the lifestyle benefits; my god. A four-lane interstate to Alaska. Flyovers at CFL games that consist of an entire formation of fifth-generation fighters, instead of just a search and rescue helicopter. Hell, maybe they wouldn’t even *be* CFL games?

A dollar that’s worth … a dollar, rather than 60 cents. Books that can be purchased at the actual price, instead of the “in Canada” price. Productivity and per-capita GDP to burn, and all with lower taxes.

The thought is always there. Every time I’m clipping coupons or subsidizing some foreign automaker just so they’ll build me a battery plant, there’s always that weak moment where I think, “You wouldn’t need to be doing any of this if you’d just let America take care of you.”

THURSDAY
And yet, even when I lay out all the material benefits of statehood, I know it’s not for me.

Snoop Dogg has a net worth of $150 million. You know what his favourite snack is? Hard-boiled eggs like his mom used to make. You can offer me the world, but it’s not what I know.

I like giant monopolistic, uncompetitive corporations. Sure, my cell phone bills are high and my butter doesn’t spread at room temperature, but at least the logo on the package never changes. I like government programs that offer me benefits in theory, even if not in practice: I can’t find a family doctor or a daycare spot, but I can dream. I like making unrealistic international pronouncements, because no one would ever expect me to back it up with aid or military force.

December 1, 2024

“Fellow Canadians, forget your dire financial plight … it’s only a ‘vibecession'”

Tristin Hopper imagines what Chrystia Freeland might be confiding to her diary after she blithely assured struggling Canadians that no, really, everything’s just fine and dandy and you’re being deceived by “bad vibes”:


Screencap from a CPAC video of Chrystia Freeland speaking.

Monday

As a former journalist, I am fully aware of the awesome power of the press to distort and pervert reality. Here we all are in 2024 Canada. There is food. There is shelter. There is breathable air. The vast majority of us will go through the rest of the fiscal year without being stabbed on public transit.

And yet, to hear the misinformation and disinformation trafficked by the media, you would think we live in some kind of violent, economically depressed hellscape.

Well, this kind of mendacity has consequences: A nationwide hysteria of bad feelings and negative energy. A fanatical devotion to bad vibes in the face of all evidence to the contrary. I don’t purport to know how to cure such irrational malaise, but I will be very surprised if $250 each and some tax-free liquor and Christmas shopping doesn’t do it.

Tuesday

Donald Trump’s threat of 25 per cent tariffs is easily the most serious challenge I have faced as Canadian finance minister. The United States is our largest trading partner, and the suspension of free trade across our shared border would invite economic ruin the likes of which we’ve never seen.

Worse, Trump is immune to our usual strategies. We suggested sending his tariff threat to committee, or having it reviewed by a Crown inquiry, but neither offer was accepted. Rather, they want us to stem the tide of illegal migrants using Canada as a base to enter the United States. They are under the impression — let’s call it “bad vibes” — that this is a problem.

But let nobody say that the integrity of our trade flows are not my department’s top priority. As such, we are immediately introducing a one-time bursary of between $150 and $240 paid to any resident of Canada who can prove they have not attempted illegal entry of the United States within the past 12 months.

October 31, 2024

Nine Types of Trick-or-Treat Houses

Filed under: Humour, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

It’s a Southern Thing
Published Oct 23, 2018

Halloween is coming. Which one will you be?

#SoTrueYall #itsasouthernthing

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