About Carney

Éric Blais at the Toronto Star (gift link) tut-tuts about Carney-mania

…Maybe “he owns this party” is a feature, not a bug, when the alternative is paralysis in the face of an unprecedented external threat.
Perhaps. But that’s precisely the argument Americans made when they decided that Trump’s norm-breaking was a necessary corrective. Strongman politics feels exhilarating when the strongman is yours. The trouble starts when the vigilance stops — when “he’s right about everything” becomes the operating assumption rather than the proposition to be tested.
Americans gave up that vigilance when they re-elected Trump. Canadians should not make the same mistake with Carney, however competent, however necessary, however decent the man may be.
Canadians didn’t reject personalism. They just told themselves a story about why their version of it is different. …

Evan Scrimshaw contrasts Carney’s progressivism with Trudeau’s:

….The reason Carney doesn’t anger me like he does some progressives is because I understand that for all the good vibes of the Trudeau playbook, he ran a government that was in many ways unacceptably flawed. His immigration policy suppressed wages, fucked the housing market, and caused a spike in youth unemployment, all because he didn’t have the balls to tell Lululemon no when they wanted cheap labour. While I’m grateful for many parts of that government’s agenda, Carney is here because Trudeau-ism was a failure, and the country knew it.
The dumber parts of this country’s commentariat will spend all of Tuesday deliberately missing the point, but Carney is not continuity Trudeau, and that’s what Terrebonne just voted for. They aren’t too stupid to see the failures of the Liberals, they’re smart enough to see the difference between two very different types of Liberals. Far from an indictment of the people, it is the greatest compliment we can pay them that they didn’t succumb to the intellectual laziness of assuming that just because the party name is the same, everything else is. Mark Carney’s life in political office has been a bet on the idea that the Canadian people deserve more credit than the commentariat, and the most feeble-minded of their expectations, think they do.
That Carney can’t speak French very well is the clearest example, but Carney’s success in Quebec is because Quebecers are serious people ready to step up in a serious time. As a Canadian, I’m proud of Quebecers for not being what others assume of them….

Leni Spooner at Between the Lines Canada writes about how the government could be undermined with a “fabricated” Carny.

… A fragile minority government negotiating under external pressure is, from a certain perspective, already partially neutralized. Its time horizon is short. Its ability to commit is limited. You don’t need to defeat it. You just need to wait it out.
A majority government with a stable parliamentary base is a different kind of problem. It can make decisions and sustain them. It can absorb a difficult news cycle without collapsing. It can negotiate from a position that doesn’t expire. A minority government can be waited out. A majority has to be actively discredited. That is why the pressure won’t ease now that the threshold has been crossed. It will intensify.
Poilievre’s “backroom deals” framing in the hours after the results came in is the early domestic signal of what that looks like. Floor crossings are a legitimate subject of democratic debate — and a routine feature of Westminster parliamentary democracy. But framing them as betrayal rather than as the exercise of individual parliamentary conscience that Westminster tradition has always recognized is something different. By-elections are direct democratic contests. Framing both as illegitimate is the same playbook as the content farms, applied at the level of official opposition rhetoric. The goal is identical: generate enough confusion about the legitimacy of the result that the government spends its political capital defending its right to govern rather than governing.
Two earlier pieces in this newsletter documented how that confusion gets manufactured and distributed — the AI-generated content farms, the fabricated headlines, the algorithm that rewards alarm over accuracy. This is the most urgent instalment: the fabricated Carney — hostile, illegitimate, anti-American — is going to get louder, not quieter, precisely because the real Carney now has the parliamentary ground to stand on.
…Mark Carney is not the person the content farms have been describing. He is careful, consistent, and on the public record. The Davos transcript is available from the World Economic Forum, or here from Between the Lines Canada coverage. The bridge conversation is in mainstream news coverage. The gap between the documented record and the fabricated version is wide and measurable.
He now leads a majority government. That changes what Canada can do at the table — every table. It does not change what the pressure campaign will attempt. But it does change how much that campaign has to work through to reach its intended effect.
The fog will get thicker….

About Elbows Up
I Fucking Love Australia writes about how Canadians are quietly bankrupting American tourism one roadtrip at a time:

…New data from Statistics Canada dropped this week and if you’re the kind of person who enjoys watching a bully get quietly, methodically, financially destroyed by people who are too polite to scream at him but absolutely not too polite to empty his pockets, then pour yourself a drink because this one is delicious.
Canadian road trips into the US are down 35% on March 2024. Not 3.5. Thirty-bloody-five percent. More than a third of the most common form of Canadian visitation has evaporated. Air travel from Canada to the US is down 14% year-over-year. Nearly a quarter of Canadian travellers have cancelled previously planned US trips entirely. Not postponed. Cancelled….
In 2024, Canadian tourists pumped $20.5 billion into the US economy. They were the single biggest source of international visitors, about 1 in 4 of every foreign traveller who set foot in America. The US Travel Association had modelled a hypothetical 10% decline and came up with $2.1 billion in lost spending and 140,000 hospitality jobs gone.
The actual 2025 decline was 22%. More than double the hypothetical. That’s roughly $4.5 billion in lost visitor spending. In one year. And 2026 is running hotter. Double-digit declines in January. Double-digit in February. Cumulative two-year drops above 30% every single month with no sign of reversing.
This is not a blip. This is a structural, generational realignment of Canadian behaviour driven entirely by one man: a haunted Big Mac in a suit who thought he could slap tariffs on his closest ally, threaten to swallow it whole as a 51st state, humiliate its Prime Minister on the world stage, and that Canadians would just smile politely and keep spending their money in Florida.
Mate. Have you met Canadians?
These are people who will drive an extra 45 minutes in a blizzard to avoid giving business to someone they don’t like. They have the memory of an elephant and the patience of a glacier. They do not forget. They do not forgive. They just quietly, methodically, take their wallets elsewhere and never mention it again….
The most powerful economic boycott in modern history is being conducted by people in sensible parkas who say sorry when you bump into them. They’re not angry. They’re not loud. They’re just gone…

About Trump
As Trump’s war posts grow more hysterical, the Iranian embassies around the world are trolling Trump all the time:

Jeff Tiedrich

the past 72 hours have been a pretty wild ride, haven’t they?
let’s recap: Donny’s despot bestie Viktor Orbán got his ass kicked sky-high in Hungary. Donny’s clownshoes negotiating team shit the bed in their peace talks with Iran. Donny then stamped his feet and threatened to blockade the already blockaded Strait of Epstein™ until he turned blue in the face — blockadepalooza! Donny managed to insult another woman reporter. he also insulted Pope Leo. His Popeness then sniped right back at Donny.
then there was that whole day-long escapade where Donny posted some bugfuck AI slop of himself tarted up as Jesus, and then — shocker of shockers! — got dogpiled by his own normally-loyal evangelicals, who were outraged that Dear Leader would ever do such a thing, causing Donny to delete the post and try to pretend it never happened….

Even the New York Times (gift link) is finally admitting that Trump is nuts:

…The public focus on Mr. Trump’s state of mind, goes further than with almost any past president. “Other than Nixon, there has never been this level of concern over time,” said Julian E. Zelizer, a Princeton historian and editor of a book on Mr. Trump’s first term. Indeed, the   situation today eclipses even Nixon. Unlike in the 1970s, “so much of this is playing out in public,” especially with social media and cable television, Mr. Zelizer said. And, he added, “as a president who naturally disregards any guardrails or sense of decorum, Trump feels much freer, even than Nixon, to unleash his inner rage and to act on impulse.”
In his second term, Mr. Trump seems even less restrained and more incoherent at times. He uses more profanity, speaks longer and regularly makes comments rooted in fantasy rather than fact. He keeps saying that his father was born in Germany when in fact he was born in the Bronx. He repeats an invented story about his uncle, an M.I.T. professor, telling him about teaching the terrorist known as the Unabomber.
He wanders off into odd tangents — an eight-minute ramble at a Christmas reception about poisonous snakes in Peru, a long digression during a cabinet meeting about Sharpie pens, an interruption of an Iran war update to praise the White House drapes. He has confused Greenland with Iceland and boasted of ending a fictional war between Cambodia and Armenia, two countries separated by nearly 4,000 miles. (He evidently meant Armenia and Azerbaijan).
Even before lashing out at Pope Leo XIV on Sunday night, and then posting an image of himself as a Jesus-like figure before deleting it, Mr. Trump had shocked many with his outbursts at critics. He accuses those who anger him of sedition, a crime punishable by death. He claimed bizarrely that the Hollywood director Rob Reiner, who was allegedly stabbed to death by his son, was killed “due to the anger he caused” by opposing Mr. Trump. When Robert S. Mueller III, the former F.B.I. director and special counsel, died, Mr. Trump said, “Good, I’m glad he’s dead.”
In recent days, he declared that “Iran’s New Regime President” was “much less Radicalized and far more intelligent than his predecessors.” Except that Iran’s new president is the same as the old president. There has been no change in presidents. Mr. Trump may have meant the new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, but he is considered even more hard-line than his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in the war.
One difference from the first term is that there are few if any advisers like Mr. Kelly who consider it their responsibility to keep Mr. Trump from going too far. “When he does what he does, everyone around him keeps their eyes to the floor and says nothing,” Mr. Zelizer said. “Unlike the first term, they don’t even seem to maneuver behind the scenes to stop him.”

About Iran

No. 1 at Gold and Geopolitics writes about the blockades

Two blockades now sit on top of each other in the same 33-kilometre waterway. Iran has been running one since the start of the war. The US just stacked a second one on top, targeting Iranian ports specifically, as of 10 AM Eastern on Monday. The president wants you to believe this is checkmate. The Foundation for Defence of Democracies wants you to believe Iran folds in 13 days.
I’ve been covering this war daily since it started. The Bretton Whoops, Straight to Brrrr, and 20-something wrap-ups.
I’ve watched every escalation get framed as the move that finally ends it.
This one is no different in that respect.
But it is different in another, and it took me a while to put my finger on why: this is the first time the US has voluntarily made the problem worse in order to claim it’s making it better….

Paul Klugman writes about how the Iran war will benefit China

….the China-led energy future will arrive ahead of schedule thanks to the debacle in Iran.
Soaring oil and gas prices, combined with the threat of shortages, have driven home the riskiness of relying on fossil fuels…
Trump’s decision to counter Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz by blockading the Strait of Hormuz surely adds to the perception that relying on U.S. oil and LNG, which is what countries will have to do if they don’t turn to solar and wind, isn’t safe. Who can guarantee that an erratic America won’t try to weaponize other countries’ dependence on our energy?
So Trump’s adventurism in Iran has sparked a global rush to invest in solar power, wind power, and the batteries that make renewable energy work 24/7.
And where will the world procure most of the renewable energy equipment it seeks? From China. China is the workshop of the world. Its manufacturing sector is larger than those of the U.S., Japan, Germany and South Korea combined.
While China is strong in many industries, it is utterly dominant in electrotech, the cluster of industries — solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and electric vehicles — at the heart of the renewables revolution. Or as the Wall Street Journal puts it, China’s “green industrial complex” rules. China accounts for more than 80 percent of global production in all these sectors with the exception of wind turbines. In the wind turbine sector, China’s share is “only” 60 percent because Europe retains a significant role….

Two weeks ago, Krugman also shared this useful map, from JP Morgan — taking into account the oil deliveries that were already on the way before the Feb 28 blockade began, this map shows the dates that oil deliveries will stop – Africa April 1, Asia April 3, Europe April 10, North America April 15, Australia April 20

In her post tonight, Heather Cox Richardson summarizes Trump’s impact on the world economy:

…Data released today show that wholesale inflation has risen to 4%, the highest annual rate in three years. Today Marta Pacheco of EuroNews reported that the last of the vessels that left the Strait of Hormuz before the U.S. and Israel struck Iran have reached Europe. Analysts expect a new surge in energy prices. In Talking Points Memo today, David Kurtz points out that the economic mess in which the U.S., and the world, finds itself is entirely Trump’s fault. The trade wars, unjustified war in the Middle East, and attacks on U.S. science, universities, and immigration that are throttling economic growth are all a product of Trump’s personal choices….

About other interesting stuff

Hamilton Nolan at How Things Work writes about politics:

….You see a homeless person on the street. Is that person your brother? Then it goes without saying that you need to do what is necessary to help him. You need to figure out how to house him and take care of his needs and give him a path back to a decent life. You need to figure out how to create the infrastructure to accomplish those things. You need to build an agency to do so, and staff it, and tax the public to pay for it. Thus politics are produced from a simple starting point of love. If you start from the opposite point, the politics write themselves as well. That homeless person is a possible threat. He might steal and he is dirty and you don’t want to see him. You have to build a police department and a jail and tax the public to pay the cop to pick the guy up and put him in a cage. Both of these paths follow naturally from their origin.
Politics can be intricate and confusing and riddled with personality clashes and egos and demands to reconcile competing claims of necessity. It is worth, sometimes, taking a breath and remembering why we believe the things we believe, why we feel that it is worth doing the things we do. Center yourself back on your basic guiding belief and the cacaphony of politics will quiet down and the questions will answer themselves….

Culture Explorer writes about character:

The hardest test of character is not whether a person knows right from wrong. It is whether he can keep living by that knowledge when the surrounding world begins to reward betrayal.
That is the moral pressure at the center of Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons and George Orwell’s 1984. Both works ask whether a person can remain good when the surrounding order rewards obedience, punishes honesty, and slowly makes inner compromise feel practical. Both answer that question through a man placed under pressure. Thomas More is asked to bend his conscience to the needs of the Tudor state. Winston Smith is asked to surrender his judgment to a regime that wants to control thought itself. The difference between them matters, but the core issue is the same. Goodness survives only if a person will not betray what he knows to be true….

James Lileks writes about how awful weed smells:

…Now you can smoke weed so potent it makes you look at your palm for six hours, and it’s okay because it’s legal, but if you torch a Lark you’re a degenerate.
Yeah but it’s better than alcohol! Hah: no. I can have a wee dram of a fine whisky crafted on a windswept spit in Scotland, and no one walking down the hall thinks “a muskrat has been rutting in the garbage chute.”…

Mike Sowden at Everything is Amazing writes about trees:

….The woods I visited the other day were ancient – that term in Britain that designates woods that are at least multiple centuries old. In this case, there are archaeological sites going back to both the British Iron Age and Bronze Age, which means at least 3,000 years, and at another site a few dozen miles away there are flint artefacts dated to over 14,000 years old.
That’s a lot of archaeology in a small area, and the locations of sites usually have something to say about access to raw materials, so I bet these woods have been useful for a long time – and also the coast, which is only a few miles away.
From what I can gather, almost all the trees are three varieties: Elm, which is Ulmus minor; Ash is Fraxinus excelsior (what a great name that’d make for a spell), and Larch, which is Laris decidua.
Most of those trees are older than me, and some of them even look it – Ash and Elm can grow for 300 years, Larch for 600, so maybe a few of these trees could have been alive at the time of the Aztecs, or before Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press.
This is one of the great gifts to us humans from trees – their incredible age. Not to get all spiritual about this, but I bet you’ve experienced something like this around trees – that weird relief creeping into your bones, making you feel that yes, some of all this confusing, infuriating awfulness in the news will pass at some point to be replaced with hopefully something a bit better, and in the meantime, like trees, we can just look for a way to sink our roots a bit deeper so we can stand our ground to get through it. Trees can be very reassuring metaphors of that process.
But there’s also what trees become, if they’re given enough time….

Alex Wakeman at The Works in Progress Newsletter writes about cabbages:

…Wild cabbage is unassuming: some untidy leaves and a few thick, coarse stems on the browner side of purple that poke out from the soil. Nothing about it looks appetizing.
Nevertheless, many cultures have recognized something special in this plant. By selecting plants with denser layers of leaves, ancient people created modern cabbage and kale. Others bred for the inflorescence, a dense bundle of small flowers that forms the head of cauliflower and broccoli. By favoring large, edible buds, thirteenth-century farmers living around modern day Belgium created Brussels sprouts. Under different selection pressures, Brassica oleracea has become German kohlrabi, or Chinese gai lan, or East African collard greens.
… Since the 1920s, scientists have worked to understand how Brassica oleracea was domesticated and to deepen our knowledge of evolution and artificial selection.
By combining modern genetics, genomics, and molecular biology with linguistic, historical, and sociological sources, researchers are now beginning to develop conclusive answers….

Hana Lee Goldin at Card Catalog writes that Google has a secret Reference Desk

…There used to be a professional layer between most people and raw information. Librarians, researchers, editors, fact-checkers: people whose entire job was to understand how information was organized, who produced it, what motivated them, and where the gaps were in any given source. You didn’t need to think much about any of that, because someone else already had.
That layer has largely dissolved. Search engines replaced the card catalog, algorithms replaced the reference interview, and AI summaries are now stepping in where a librarian’s judgment about source quality used to sit. What’s been left in place of all that professional mediation is a search bar and the assumption that you’ll figure it out.
The tools [in this article] don’t fix that problem, but they change your position within it. Every technique here is a version of the same underlying move: being specific about what you need and deliberate about where to look for it. Most people were never taught to approach search that way, because the assumption has always been that it’s simple enough not to need teaching. But the same move works everywhere information is organized: library catalogs, academic databases, legal repositories, government archives.
Search syntax is just the entry point. What’s underneath it is a way of thinking about how knowledge is structured and who controls access to it — and that transfers to every tool you’ll use after this one….