ok, not full, not full like an august 2am Egmont Milky Way but Harrison Lake (33km³ lake volume!) will do, on stolen and occupied Stó:lō lands
Author: Stephen
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canadians are nice, but not kind (Tim Hortons version…)
nice is when we pretend to be good people, but deep down our racist, colonial, genocidal blood festers
kind demands authenticity that we mock with “nice,” and it enhances human dignity
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DL-Loodgz41
heres a cool video about a pay-it-forward chain at timmies
great ad concept, mostly because it perpetuates the mythology
most comments are heartwarming, naturally
then there’s this:
i love me a good canada
i haven’t seen it tho
the c/a/n/a/d/a project is vile, but we can make something better
reconciliation is fake because we skipped the truth
anyyyyy day now we can start embracing truths and build a real place that doesn’t depend on the false comfort that comes from racism
one of the many ironies of this place is how timmies is a mairikkkan company now and this particular racist talks about the staff, not the ownership
someday can be today!
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slapp suits are vile, and a sign of a decaying, fascist and feudal society
when billionaires, capitalists, fascists and corporate imperial feudalists want to shut you up, slapp suits are handy
whenever you see them, just know that a free, democratic civil society is 37 hit points lower
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paying off your home? don’t. just don’t.
I actually started looking to buy in DC back in 2014, and I thought the pricing was crazy. It’s only gone up exponentially since then.
I just could never wrap my head around owning a million-dollar one-bedroom or two-bedroom condo. Why would you want to do that? It just means you’re going to have to continue working forever until it’s paid off.
most places in canada don’t have real estate that rise by 4-15% each year like in hot markets like vancouver in the BeforeTimes. for some people in some years, their home appreciates more than the income they made as a human being working a job.
it’s the rising land value from a high-demand location. we know this because mobile homes are subject to entropy and depreciate annually, as would any physical structure. even a house.
many people maybe can “pay off” a house then have no housing costs beyond taxes and upkeep, etc. but if you don’t ever pay off your mortgage, you’re a failure, even if your home grows in value by 20-300% over the time you own it. and really, why pay off a home when its growth is higher than the mortgage? and why beat yourself up because you never get to have a “burn the mortgage papers” party.
but since so many people can’t even get into the housing market, our high-demand areas have added systemic anxiety.
if you own a home in such places, the idea of ever paying it off may seem idiotic.
instead we have learned to get a down payment [way too often from a wealthy relative dying [“wealthy” includes people who bought real estate decades ago for less than $100k and sold it for millions more recently]], then we pay down the mortgage to build equity, never burn the mortgage, sell the place, maybe see an appreciation in the land–or not, then take the equity and buy something different/smaller/bigger/whatever, depending on the stage of life we’re in.
but a massive number of people can’t ever get on this treadmill.
north america is scam. a “buy real estate with no money down” infomercial of grifters and “presidents.”
i love reading stories of americans emigrating to other countries and never paying off their rapacious student loans. education should be free, not just k12, luckily many european countries have figured this out. north america? barf.
@usa.mom.in.germany is also a treat to watch. plus, socialism!
and the clip at the top?
mairikkka and canada [to a lesser degree] are increasingly fascist, imperial, colonial and neoliberal. these are not new things here, as we’ve been such things for a long time; now it’s just accelerating.
sooooo many countries approach life differently, and people should consider leaving, as these 2 north american countries slide further into slime.
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gaza as gentrification+?
compiling a list of the most vile gentrification+ projects of homo sapiens, inspired by the sickest consulting manoeuvre I’ve seen this year.
- Gaza, particularly 2023+
- “north america ” 1492+
- what else?
Grim truth!
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you have always had the machete, 2021
[i’m in this weird space of decoupling from the broligarchs. one phase of this is retrieving my poetry that exists only as instagram stories. this annoys me, nevertheless I persist]
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revolution, now would be good
I expect most of us* in “north america” didn’t expect to have to fight a moronic murderous fascist regime in our lifetimes.
Still, here we are. It’s a bit startling but who the fuck cares.
Roll up your sleeves!
That is all.
*Us, especially socio-economically and politically privileged cishet straight white dudes…oh wait, let’s start with: 25% wealth tax/year, dropping to 5% when they’re down to $78m
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the bc government needs to steer leffffft, fast!
privatizing public transit and offshoring industrial capacity? #elbowsup demands more.
why aren’t we contracting in privatized public transit that uses shitty European multinational companies to provide shitty service to vulnerable citizens?
here’s a 3 post thread on why.
why aren’t we building ferries here? like we used to?
here’s a 3 post thread on why. (ok, this thread got big…)
greed, stupidity, lack of vision to think and act 1-7 generations ahead?
a BC HandyDart rider and driver
this is NOT the BC government’s industrial procurement policy, but it reflects the same principles
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a Katrina Davis celebration page
today, she dropped a piece…writing…The Consulate
her narrative range is so expensive
you particularly see it when you go from reading one of her pieces in the substack, to her standup:
she also likes doors a lot, but they’re ephemeral because really they’re just in her instagram stories
then you go back to her substack again, because fuck yeah
she makes the drawings too!
you’ll get it (more) when you read today’s piece
also, #canadaisfake
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how about walking 4km into the ocean
…looking south, east and north
during covid lockdown I spent a lot of time at Iona Beach, especially when the Vancouver beaches were closed
we walked out to the very end of the causeway for the first time this weekend
i always felt like it would take 8000 hours, but it was a blip of time
the ocean–and deep talks–have a way of warping time
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first friday of summer 2025
unceded Squamish lands, colonial dundarave, “west vancouver”
no smoke, no sunburn
the tide is suuuuper low…
And some people teamed up with gravity for some play…
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Things I know: most of us…
- …feel more alone than we are
- …are hubs/locuses of various communities of people who depend on us, usually to degrees where they don’t let us know how critical we are to them
- …are lacking explicit validation and calibration
- …have been struggling more than we let on publicly [and to a large extent with various friend/family groups], with the decade, the pandemic, the fascism, the climate breakdown, idiotically hot summers and fires that will only get worse, the wars and invasions and genocides, the uncertainty of the long-range future, let alone the rest of this decade—in which most of us are taking nothing for granted.
- …don’t know that most of the people in our lives/circles would step up to do a bit, once or sporadically or regularly, or a lot more when we’re thin and lacking capacity, even though we’re reluctant to ask; asking builds richer, thicker networks, brain cells, axon-dendite connections
the stellar sea lions know these things
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corporate media? yeah, they hate public healthcare, duh!
hey, what Canadian Health Coalition ad about public healthcare did canadian tv commercials shit their pants about, and NOT air?
yeah, this one. pass it on!
#cdnpoli #bcpoli #canlab #Medicare #healthcare
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sea2sky travels
the trees can be all encompassing
sometimes the Porteau Cove stellar sea lions…are off on a jaunt
the whistler train wreck and grafifiti exhibit!
…and the Cheakamus River races…
apparently we are required to pose?
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mark carney: carny mentality on genocide
The easiest way for a conservative to get elected, is to run as a liberal.
And it’s clear that while we have known him to be a neoliberal economist, he is also a neoconservative imperialist.
The two-state rhetoric in occupied Palestine has never been so weak as right now.
NeoCons, like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, and Carney, are all about 21c global imperialism.
Neoliberals are big fans of some or all of the 10 elements of the Washington Consensus, including small government, and lower/no taxes for the rich.
Many NeoCons are NOT neoliberals because like most right wing presidents and PMs in the last few generations, they love ballooning the debt by huge spending AS increases in the military, and public spending on shit like Big Carbon.
Neoliberals also blow up the debt too, then gaslight us all by saying they don’t, but centrist/left governments do…when the data literally says the opposite; and the centrists, leftists and media NEVER call out those lies with obvious, simple charts showing the right wing parties blow up the debts.
Now, carney is an uber neoliberal, with a PhD in neoliberal economics, and he’s fighting off the USA and the newest framing of its fascism, pushing for closer trade and military security with the EU…allllll while Bills C2 and C5 get rammed through, so the c/a/n/a/d/a project gets to fuck over consent/consultation with Indigenous people, and fuck up provincial regulatory power that keeps someone from some province with really shitty training in their healthcare field, gets to work in YOUR province, where training and safety and training standards are much higher [that’s is what they mean by getting rid of internal trade barriers: a race to the bottom].
And the genocide.
And 2state fuckery.
And more genocide.
And more spending on funding and arming the zionist genocidal state of israel.
So, watch Gilmore’s clip above and just sink into the fuckery that we get with the carney.