I’ll settle for fines being substantially bigger than the profit obtained from the crime.

It’s specifically affecting people in certain areas of NB. Far more likely the cause is tied back to Irving in some way.

Espedair Street is great. Touching, poignant, and often laugh out loud funny.

To my great shame, I still haven’t read The Crow Road. That’s one I’ve been meaning to get around to for a while.

Iain Banks has some absolute bangers.

Espedair Street: “Two days ago, I decided to kill myself.”

Crow Road: "It was the day my grandmother exploded.

Genuinely one of the greatest opening lines ever written.

“The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts. The most obvious part was a hollow, echoing quiet, made by things that were lacking. If there had been a wind it would have sighed through the trees, set the inn’s sign creaking on its hooks, and brushed the silence down the road like trailing autumn leaves. If there had been a crowd, even a handful of men inside the inn, they would have filled the silence with conversation and laughter, the clatter and clamor one expects from a drinking house during the dark hours of night. If there had been music…but no, of course there was no music. In fact there were none of these things, and so the silence remained. Inside the Waystone a pair of men huddled at one corner of the bar. They drank with quiet determination, avoiding serious discussions of troubling news. In doing this they added a small, sullen silence to the larger, hollow one. It made an alloy of sorts, a counterpoint. The third silence was not an easy thing to notice. If you listened for an hour, you might begin to feel it in the wooden floor underfoot and in the rough, splintering barrels behind the bar. It was in the weight of the black stone hearth that held the heat of a long dead fire. It was in the slow back and forth of a white linen cloth rubbing along the grain of the bar. And it was in the hands of the man who stood there, polishing a stretch of mahogany that already gleamed in the lamplight.”

Also, the back of the book summary for Name of The Wind deserves mention too, because it’s literally just a quote from a little way into the book, and it’s absolutely incredible;

“I have stolen princesses back from sleeping barrow kings. I burned down the town of Trebon. I have spent the night with Felurian and left with both my sanity and my life. I was expelled from the University at a younger age than most people are allowed in. I tread paths by moonlight that others fear to speak of during day. I have talked to gods, loved women, and written songs that make the minstrels weep. My name is Kvothe. You may have heard of me.”

My wife is in the CAF, and when she heard about Sunak proposing this brain dead idea from our family in the UK, her first reaction was that nothing would fill her with more dread than the idea of working alongside a group of people who absolutely do not want to be there.

The idea that you could even get a draftee through the modern CAF’s training processes is laughable. I don’t think the average person has the slightest clue what it takes to be something like an Infanteer. The course has a 60% injury rate… As in 60% of each platoon will be injured badly enough that they’re taken off course and have to retry. It took my wife two attempts, and that was doing well. Some people at Meaford were on their fifth or sixth. She’s still waiting to find out if she has permanent nerve damage in her toe from one of the defensive exercises where she spent eight hours in manning a machine gun nest at night, lying in a puddle of water, in sub zero temperatures.

The nightmare they put you through on DP-1 is designed to weed out anyone who does not absolutely want to be there with a passion verging on insanity. Nothing is more important than knowing, with absolutely certainty, that the people standing next to you are just as dedicated as you are. That you can depend on them to stand with you, fight with you, and drag your ass out of there if things go really bad.

And we already know how to fix our recruitment; it’s the onboarding process. They recently opened up eligibility to people on PRs, and they got enough qualified applicants to completely fill our manpower shortfall. A year later all of them were still waiting for their security check and medical, and most had dropped out of the process because they couldn’t keep waiting. That’s why we have a recruitment crisis. People want to serve, but no one can wait a year to hear back from a job interview.

Well, that and the fact that members literally can’t afford housing next to the bases they’re assigned to because military housing is desparately underfunded and the civilian housing market is an investment portfolio for the rich.

Or maybe, just a crazy idea, the government could provide for people’s basic needs so that no one has to worry about dying alone on the streets when they’re too old or infirm to usefully participate in the endless meatgrinder of capitalism.

“Retailers say organized crime is to blame.”

It’s not, but they’ll say it is.

“nonlethal”

Less lethal. The correct term is less lethal. There’s no such thing as a nonlethal weapon. Pepper spray and tazers can be lethal under the right circumstances. “Rubber bullets” are rubber coated 25mm rounds that have been deemed sufficiently safe when bounced off of the pavement into a person’s legs (and even then can cause serious injuries); they’re not remotely safe when fired directly at a person’s head, which is what cops often do with them.

Whenever you hear the word “nonlethal” used to describe a weapon, always remember it is only ever “less lethal.”

If I exit my bedroom through the window I fall to my death. Not sure how that helps me in a fire.

This is the giant gaping hole in the entire theory, yes.

The same when when they walk into a court and think that if they recite certain special magic phrases the judge just has to hand over authority to them. Like, buddy… Your premise here is that the court secretly know they’re refusing to follow the rules and if you just call them out on it they’ll throw their hands up and say “Ah, you got me!” Why? If this really is a giant conspiracy that the entire government is in on, then who is going to stop them? They can still just throw you in jail anyway, because they control all the levers of state power.

Arguably, it’s blessing they don’t see it this way, because if you buy into all the shit they’ve bought into, the only real logical response is violent revolution.

But it works on SovCits because a) they’re self-selected for gullibility, and b) their individualist, hardcore libertarian mindset makes them incapable of comprehending any problem that cannot be solved by individual action. Overthrowing a corrupt government is the kind of collective response that they simply cannot conceive of working.

So it must be possible to hack their way out of the system by cleverly reciting the special mantra that only they know because they’re so clever and special. It’s the only thing that fits with their individualist fantasy of simply opting out of every social contract / construct.

This will not be comforting to the vulnerable people who will inevitably be hurt by Pollievre’s government.

Unfortunately way too many people don’t know that tax filing companies are now required to offer a free tier product for basic tax returns in Canada.

https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/e-services/digital-services-individuals/netfile-overview/certified-software-netfile-program.html

And yes, I agree that’s its stupid we have to file at all. In the UK it’s only needed if you’re claiming itemized deductions.

“Noncombat.” Its a training mission.

We’ve been running training missions with the Ukrainians since before the war started. The only question is whether to actually run those missions in Ukraine, or in a third party country like Poland or the UK. The army and the government are constantly assessing that based on the current state of the war. Running missions in Ukraine reduces the amount of time that Ukrainian soldiers have to spend away from the fighting (as well as imposing some logistical difficulties) but it also exposes our soldiers to somewhat more risk if the battle lines move suddenly, so they’re weighing those factors against each other.

You’re going to get real lonely real fast if you think that supporting Ukraine and being a leftist are mutually exclusive.

Ask yourself this: Does standing up for an imperialist, autocratic fascist really align with my progressive ideals?

Just because he hates America, doesn’t make Putin your friend. And Putin’s people have gotten very good at spreading their propaganda through far left spaces, because they know how desperate people are in these spaces to latch onto anything that smacks of American Imperialism.

And to be clear, America is an imperialist power. No one is questioning that. But you have to look at the facts of the situation, not just reflexively assign heroes and villains based on your pre-existing feelings.

Every country has a right to its sovereignty. The “NATO question” is a Russian lie (they never brought it up when they annexed Crimea, their recent actions have actually pushed more countries into joining NATO including ones on their border, and Ukraine actually did offer to make never joining NATO a condition of peace but the Russians refused because they had no real interest in that), but even if it wasn’t it still wouldn’t justify invasion. Ukraine has the right to negotiate whatever treaties they want, because that’s their right as a sovereign nation. By the exact same justification Russia could have invaded Canada to prevent us from joining NATO.

If the US (or Canada) invaded a country to stop them signing a treaty, would you feel that was fair and justified, or would you consider it another example of Western imperialism?

Officers get chatty. Soldiers hear things through the grapevine. But also, most rank and file are 18 year olds fresh out of high school, so they don’t always have the best judgement when it comes to understanding what they’re hearing, or separating fact from fiction.

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More builds won’t solve anything until we get investors out of housing.

Sounds to me like the fines need to be bigger.