54° 40' or fuggetaboutit.

Since President Trump picked on PM Trudeau a few days back, the meme machines have gone into overdrive once again. 

A lot of gags hang on the idea of Trump annexing Canada, making it into the 51st state ("Gay North Dakota" etc.). Of course the New York Times, which hates Donald and loves Justin (and both his dad and his "dad"), was mad at Trump. In other news, rain is wet.

It led me to wonder -- what if, not by war but some more peaceable means, Canada did become part of the United States? What would that look like politically? Would it be good for either country?

If Canada was admitted to the union as a single gigantic state, it would become our largest one population-wise, but only barely: With 40.1 million citizens, it would just beat out California's 39.5. However, it would be able to throw its weight around in Washington, because like the Golden State it would have 52 members of the House and 54 electoral votes. 

What if we admitted the Canadian provinces and territories as 13 individual states to split its power? Then it would likely dominate the Senate with a reliable club of 26 Canuckcaucus senators. 

This could be a good deal for Canadians. All of the authority, none of the responsibility. 

Nor would it necessarily be a bad thing for the original fifty, even with Canadian socialism. 

While we may dislike all the Trudeaus here, and clearly a lot of Canada do too, somehow they kept and keep winding up at 24 Sussex. But obviously we are also very good in the USA at sending dunderheads to higher office. We used to joke about the French minority calling the shots for the vast hinterland, making them learn French, but wherever you go in the USA, for Spanish you may marque dos. Unhinged and unaccountable bureaucrats make crippling rules without warning or voter input in both nations. Is there any real difference anymore? 

Canadian Mark Steyn calls his native land the Deranged Dominion, but it was the United States legal system that served him with years of torment and a bad free-speech judgment. He probably suffered more at the hands of Americans thanks to that than he ever did in Canada, even including time spent shoveling snow. Our healthcare system is morphing into socialized misery -- or fascistic misery, with companies in cahoots with the government, and patients getting screwed. Euthanasia can't be far behind, and if the system keeps getting worse, may be welcomed. ("It beats doing all this paperwork!") So can Americans even claim to have benefits of liberty superior to those in Canada? 

I wonder sometimes. 

I wonder if we would all be one huge country now if, as could very easily have happened, the American colonists had lost or given up in the dark years following the signing of the Declaration. 

I'll end with this promise: If it all somehow does come together into the United Canadian States of America, I swear that as Prime President I will enact my goal of refusing to allow any state that does not normally and naturally get ice to have an ice hockey team in the NHL. You have my word. 

Offloading trouble.

In the final days leading up to the election, I heard several things that upon reflection made me think of the famous story by Ursula K. Le Guin called "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." The imaginative premise of the story, in brief, is that there is a city of perpetual happiness and peace called Omelas, but its happy state rests entirely on a dark secret -- that one child be held in perpetual misery and darkness. Everyone else is joyful and free, but that child must remain in a state of sheer horror or the whole thing collapses. 

What brought it to mind was that, over and over again, I would hear from citizens of this free country demanding that the government guarantee so-called positive rights -- a right to food, education, health care, housing -- rather than the negative rights of just staying out of our faces -- not interfering with speech, religion, person freedom, etc. The more I heard this, the more I got to wonder why supposed adults would expect that someone else must always be required to foot the bill for them, and in many or even most cases even to free them from the bare requirements of survival, or even the consequences of their own actions. 

For example, no authority stops someone from being irresponsible over sex. They are free to do as they like. But they also want to be free from the consequences of the behavior. Someone else must pay for the health care, the drugs, the abortion, the child care and all that entails (if they keep the baby). If not, it is unfair and shows the system is corrupt and evil. 

I've heard of no-fault divorces, no-fault insurance, and no-fault claims, but what they want are no-fault lives.

In a way, though, all of us are citizens of Omelas, in the sense that the bulk of our own citizens benefit from the work of other citizens in jobs we would never want to do. Cops, prison guards, firemen, stool sample examiners, high-rise window washers, sewer workers, nurses in Alzheimer's patient wards, teachers in bad neighborhoods, and so on. We'd rather not think about them. We worry more about the garbage than the garbagemen.  

In one way most of are and really can't help but be citizens of Omelas. That is, the reason we are free and at liberty to fight one another rather than fight other nations is because, for all its faults, we still have the finest military in the world. Most of are too old or too young or just not physically capable of going to war. Whether we like to think about it or not, our active military and our veterans have made our largely pleasant lives possible. 

They have also made us proud. They have endured and suffered, in some cases beyond most of our understanding, so that we may have a chance to be happy and free -- even free to ignore who they are and what they have given for us. 

So I want to thank our veterans on this post on this Veterans Day. They really have secured the blessings of our liberty. May God bless them and may our nation be grateful to them. 

Catching up.

Sorry I've been away from the blog. Let's get caught up, shall we? 

For those of you concerned that I was eaten by the black bear that's been hanging around -- no, it did not happen. His doctor probably warned him I was bad for his cholesterol. No new bear sightings, not since this trash can raid on October 29. Well, it was either the bear or the raccoons are getting organized. 

I was and am grateful for the results of the elections last Tuesday, although as usual New York boned up. Ludicrous nonentity Kirsten Gillibrand returns to the Senate to be Chuck Schumer's flunky. And the state assembly has pulled a fast one, getting a proposition past the voters that will open the door to all kinds of shenanigans. This is what people who did not do their homework saw on the ballot: 

Abstract of Proposal Number One, An Amendment

Amendment to Protect Against Unequal Treatment

This proposal amends Article 1, Section 11 of the New York Constitution. Section 11 now protects against unequal treatment based on race, color, creed, and religion. The proposal will amend the act to also protect against unequal treatment based on ethnicity, national origin, age, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy, and pregnancy outcomes, as well as reproductive healthcare and autonomy.  The amendment allows laws to prevent or undo past discrimination.

It passed because New Yorkers are dumb and don't read, and they saw nice words like protect and against unequal and autonomy said all right. Okay, well, who isn't in favor of protecting against unequal treatment, right? It was sold as a means of protecting abortion, which former gubernatorial candidate John Faso accurately explained was horse hockey in the Albany paper. 

Of course, what this will actually mean is, first off, boys will be walloping girls in girls' sports. But that's just the beginning. It also undermines parental authority, in opposition to existing state law. When the state takes a 10-year-old away from his parents because he wants to get his willie chopped off and be a girl and they don't want him to do that, maybe someone will point out to those parents that they should not have voted this way. 

It is literally the only proposition on a ballot I have ever seen that the archdiocese and every priest in it begged parishioners not to support. Oh, well. Vote in haste, cry your eyes out the rest of your life. 

But the rest of the nation did all right, and I am grateful to them. So let's move on to thanksgiving! 

Thanksgiving decorations are more of a thing this year, or so I notice around the neighborhood, and maybe that's not a coincidence. This house chimed in on a popular Thanksgiving meme:

Another house brilliantly stuck it to a blog post of mine from TEN YEARS AGO. Way back in 2014, I wrote:  

Christmas is green and red. Halloween is orange and black. St. Patrick's Day is green. First day of school is red and black (schools and blackboards). New Year's is white, black, and silver. Easter is anything, as long as it's pastel. I suppose it's only a matter of time before porch lights are available for all these holidays and more. But Thanksgiving is restricted to the colors of late fall, and by the end of November there are virtually no colors left. The leaves have fallen, been raked up, mulched, gone. Bare trees remain, and pine cones. Thanksgiving is brown. Who does brown lights?

Well, now they have those strip lights that can be turned to any color in the spectrum! And guess what? I found a house lit up in brown lights for the season! Very nice, and I applaud their effort and the desire to celebrate the great Thanksgiving holiday. 

I couldn't believe my brown light tirade ran a whole decade ago. But yeah, I've been blogging on this site for almost eleven years, and on another host prior to than for a couple more. Maybe that's enough out of me already. 

The path ahead.

This is a nice path. 

It's used for walking, biking, jogging -- the usual low-tech path stuff. Well made, I think, dotted with benches, running through the wooded areas of several towns. It goes almost twenty miles along the former railway line. It's popular, and it's an example of the kind of things local governments can do well. 

I can't think of a thing that the federal government has done this well in many years. Its response to Hurricane Helene is making the Katrina response look like a model of logistics and efficiency. How could it have gotten worse since 2005?

voilà

Of course, it will probably turn out that some of the funding for our local trail project came from the National Institutes of Health's American Bicycle Path Fitness Initiative, a $20 billion slush fund that donated $10,000 to the county. Who knows anymore. I just made that initiative up, but you know it sounded legit. Who cares? It's just money.

Our money.  

We've been building a lot of bike paths in America, but the actual number of bicyclists is declining. Around here we have a handful of serious bike riders, a small group of oldster bikers-for-exercise (they like to use the path), and the rest are kids, or illegals without cars, or guys who got their licenses yanked for DUI. Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, said while running for office that he was going to bike to work at City Hall, and he did -- the second day he was in office, with the cameras rolling. Since then? Well, with the weather and traffic in New York and the idiocy of city drivers and other bikers, I think he'd be a fool if he did. But I doubt he has.  

Of course the campaign statement was just posing. It's all about appearances, and to hell with appearances. Appearances are ephemera, mist on a windy morning, nothing more than the emperor's new clothes, and the emperor is not someone who you want to see naked. 

This is how we get things like this:

What's her foreign policy plan? "Friendship is magic"?

I can't forecast what's going to happen in the election, but I will make one prediction that I think is ironclad: If Trump is elected, Antifa and all the other wannabolsheviks will go back to the only things they know how to do -- throw bricks, burn things, attack bystanders. The so-called insurrection of 2021 will be nothing by comparison, but of course it was nothing compared to the human injuries and billions of dollars in damage these commie cosplayers caused in 2020 anyhow, the one Governor Walz's wife and daughter enjoyed so much. The iron fist in the sparkly pink glove.

I can't lose hope for America, but I'm certainly not as optimistic about it as I once was. I know nothing lasts forever -- but it would be nice if the world's oldest constitutional republic could show itself to be more resilient than the ancient Roman Republic, which lasted almost 500 years. We'll be halfway to that mark in 2026 and it's looking grim.

Their new slogan.

 

Vote the Fuzz Line!!

After several heavy think pieces, I need to decompress this whole blog and think of something cheerful. 

Like, the presidential campaign.

Now, I know what you're thinking. But wait. Here's my pitch. 

What do we have running this year? A feeble old crook and a man so tarnished by his enemies that it may be impossible to overcome. Plus a wacky independent with a dead brain worm and probably Jill Stein, the Harold Stassen of the Green Party.

I say: Vote Izzy. 

Yes, my dog Izzy. Why? Because he loves all Americans, not just the ones who vote for him. He really does like everybody, unlike my previous dogs, who were a bit more selective. And as I've noted before, all the people like him, unless they have an issue with dogs. That's why Izzy is America's Sweetheart. Plus, he's as handsome as you could want. Lookit dat face! 

Killer slogan

The Constitution doesn't demand that candidates for president be human. But, you may say, isn't Izzy too young? Candidates have to be at least thirty-five. 

Well, he just turned three. By normal accounting that would be twenty-one in dog years. He's a large size dog, though, so the chart runs older for him. So he's ... addition, carry the one, divide by pi ... 

All right, all right, he's just twenty-eight. Ask yourself, though: Can we really wait another four years to put this nation back on the right path? Of course not. 

Besides, lookit dat face! 

So remember, if you're not voting as I am, then just pencil in Izzy. He'll give you a lick on the nose for it! I'm not sure any of the other candidates running this year would. Well, maybe the incumbent. 

MS KMA.

When I was a kid, the schools were closed on Election Day. They were closed here yesterday. Unfortunately, unlike when I was a kid, I didn’t have the day off, and it was frustrating.

I have three big projects due at the end of the week, and one of them is particularly stressful. It’s for a prestigious publisher, and I did not do my best work for them last time. I may have been sick that week. But that’s not their problem. I got called out for it, and they didn’t send me work for months. I thought I had been moved to the naughty freelancer pile. 

After a nine-month freeze-out I was offered a shot at redemption. I already had a pile of work, but I was determined to restore my reputation. Pride? Certainly. Hubris? Well... Whatever it was, my deadlines turned into a title of a popular movie: Everything Everywhere All at Once.

And then Election Day fell. Which was fine, but I had to go to the polls twice (once to take my wife, because it was unclear that she knew the Secret Backroads Shortcut, and by the way there are two polling places closer to our house than the one to which we have been assigned). Leading up to the second trip, Microsoft decided it was the perfect day to update the laptop.

It is like a pesty salesman. 

Let's do the upgrade now.

I'm busy. Later.

It'd be much better to get this done right away.

Leave me alone.

How about now?

FINE Let's schedule it for tonight.

I set up the schedule to restart at nine o'clock in the evening. Around four thirty, it was time to take the Mrs, to the polls, and Izzy the Baby Dog as well since his attachment has gotten fierce since we lost Tralfaz and we haven't started alone-training again because he has been getting antibiotics and eye drops and eye ointment for blepharitis and conjunctivitis these last two weeks and don't even ask. So we loaded up the truck and we drove past two polling places to the stupid one we have to go to. 

When we got back about 5:30, I found out that Microsoft had apparently decided that it was just going to go ahead without me, since I'd been away from the computer and had probably knocked off for the day. Why wait until nine? I swear, as I woke the screen it asked, should we start now or reschedule? As I reached for the mousepad to stop it, it plunged into update world. OK! Silence is acceptance! Let's go!

Never change, Microsoft.

Eventually I got back to work, but of course I couldn't get as much done as I wanted after all that. Plus, I was hardly in a proper frame of mind. You know what it's like -- you've already gone way past frazzled and are edging up to psychotic when that last thing happens to make you Hulk out. Like, you finally get the dishes in the dishwasher and turn it on, thinking you won't be late for work if the traffic isn't as bad as usual, and then:

I'm not saying it's a suitable time to go William "D-Fens" Foster, but you know you'd start with the dishwasher and somewhere along the line take out the laptop as well. Well, I know I would under those circumstances.

Ejection day.

Another voter pulls the wrong lever on a Richard J. Daley
Electromagic™ Voting Machine (US Reg Pat Off)

American cities: The vote of the living doesn't always count, but the vote of the dead, 100%.