1. Meet some more people who believe that, in religion, there must always be compulsion.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/why-you-should-be-worried-about-a-new-trump-appointed-commission-you-probably-haven-t-heard-of-opinion/ar-AA1IfTTD

2. A science fair about things that won't be learned.

https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/science-fair-congress-canceled-grant-funding

3. Not only are we dealing with wildfires up here at home at the insistence of the fossil fuel industry, certain members of the US Congress are bashing us while Trump's making annexationist noises...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/canadian-wildfire-smoke-ruining-americans-summer-1.7580738

4. Coal Taurozzi, the last of the Parliament Hill Cats, is no more. :-(

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/last-parliament-hill-cat-dies-1.7580650

5. Our chartered banks can be mean at times. One of the latest cases in point:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/rbc-bank-investigator-scam-1.7577770

Apparently, there's a mass dismissal of workers in the works this weekend.

So you might want to heed Allison Gill's advice in the link below before reading any of your office e-mail.

No joke.

https://www.muellershewrote.com/p/attn-hhs-employees

Not my neighbourhood. Friends live there, so I've been worrying a bit for them.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/tornado-ottawa-barrhaven-july-13-1.6905782

https://www.chch.com/ontario-to-stop-free-covid-19-rapid-test-program-in-pharmacies-grocery-stores/

https://twitter.com/allisonjones_cp/status/1667186535647567874?s=20

We need to push back on this, and now.

(Update 10 Jun 2023: I just e-mailed my MPP Stephen Blais about it!)

Danielle Smith and the self-described United Conservative Party are going to war against the Canadian constitution here. Whether they believe that of what they're doing or not.

I am minded of Timothy Snyder's 17th piece of advice from On Tyranny...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/alberta-premier-danielle-smith-sovereignty-act-1.6668175

sabotabby and james_davis_nicoll - among others - have already noticed this on their own accounts.

https://www.ola.org/en/legislative-business/bills/parliament-43/session-1/bill-28

Noting this in the opening text of the legislation:

"The Act provides for new collective agreements. The central terms for those collective agreements are set out in the Schedule. The Act requires the termination of any strike or lock-out and prohibits strikes or lock-outs during the term of the collective agreement.

The Act is declared to operate notwithstanding sections 2, 7 and 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Act will apply despite the Human Rights Code.

The Act limits the jurisdiction of the Ontario Labour Relations Board, arbitrators and other tribunals to make certain inquiries or decisions. It also provides for there to be no causes of action or proceedings against the Crown for certain acts. Certain proceedings are deemed to have been dismissed.

The Act provides for regulations, which may be retroactive. Regulations providing for transitional matters will prevail over the Act in the event of a conflict."

Meanwhile, over at Twitter:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/twitter-to-start-layoffs-on-friday-internal-email/ar-AA13IGgO

I'm wearing purple today, because it's been noticed that Ford's developed Putinist Colour Revolution Allergies.

I'm watching the Day 2 testimony of Catherine McKenney and Mathieu Fleury at the Public Order Emergency Commission's hearings into the Convoy Siege of Ottawa as I type this. Playing catch-up is what I'm doing.

Chilled anew at the dysfunction - accidental in places, intentional in others - that enabled this three-week siege of Centretown and Lowertown. Fleury and McKenney describe a horror and a threat that was both loud and quietly creeping. Friends of mine who live and/or work in those neighbourhoods, strangers as well, affected in an ongoing series of not-so-micro-aggressions. The theft of so many national symbols in service to a crime against the residents and workers, and a worse crime being demanded of the Senate and the Governor-General via that "Memorandum of Understanding".

We are not done with this, because the people who organized it are not done making plans to harm the rest of us. These hearings are needed, in part, for that reason.

I'm seeing this from multiple credible sources in science fiction and fantasy fandoms.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/harris-de-lint-recovery-fund

I am NOT living under "martial law", as the American far-right "news" services would have their audiences believe.

A friend pointed out this article in The Daily Beast tonight.

Long story short, it's about concerns about political polarisation as an addictive force getting in the way of properly dealing with the COVID-19 Pandemic and the Climate Emergency.

I say that addiction is being actively encouraged and enforced by elements of the new fascist international in order to entrench their preferred people in power in dozens of nations across the planet. Solving either crisis properly means throwing away their current "advantages" against human civilization.

Anyway, it may be that the sabotage-by-addiction hasn't fully taken hold, not in the degree intended yet. Pointing to evidence of that...here's the Yale map the article talks about:

https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data/ycom-us/

And I have a problem with this assertion by Thor Benson: "But those initiatives won’t go anywhere if the next president simply reverses them like the previous one did—and they will have no qualms with doing so if half the country gives their consent."

Half the country? (In this case, the United States.)

All the Wrong People need is 25-30 % of their country to actively go along and to keep at least half the total population from showing up for any side(s). That much, I'd already seen during the Stephen Harper years here in Canada. And the Republicans seem all too keen to keep taking advice from Harper in his current International Democrat Union chairmanship role.

(I do wonder what he really thinks of Trump: useful idiot, or someone more dangerous than planned?)