Bluesky is, it has to be said, a strange, unhappy place. One where everything, but everything, is fraught, problematic and seething with complication. Including grilled cheese sandwiches and the paranormal.
What’s In A Name?
Changing place names isn’t cheap, and it’s not made any better when the new names are often jibberish. But all levels of government in Canada seem to be happy to accept this new millstone around their necks.
The replacement of Powell River is already occurring, piece by piece and without public consultation. Powell River General Hospital was renamed in 2022, followed by the school board, both replacing “Powell River” with the name “qathet,” which means “working together.” Furthermore, the regional Vancouver Island University satellite campus was renamed to “tiwšɛmawtxʷ,” meaning “house of learning,” to eliminate references to Israel Powell, a controversial colonial official.
Boutique Suffering
Because, hey, cooking is hard:
An exchange of views ensues. In which, Ms Taylor Lorenz, an “online culture journalist,” struggles with causality. Including the seemingly difficult concept that a heavy reliance on delivered takeaway, and the mindset that implies, may have some bearing on how little cash one has left at the end of the month.
You see, preparing a simple meal, even a packed lunch, is a physical impossibility for those deemed downtrodden.
So Noted
Via the comments: The ministry responsible for Nord VPN and others including Apple threatening to leave Canada is recommending you use a VPN for internet safety.
Public Wi-Fi is convenient, but using an unsecured public network can bring increased risks. Using a VPN protects your data. Learn more: https://t.co/mRdwxhria4 pic.twitter.com/02T7lXLDak
— Public Safety Canada (@Safety_Canada) May 19, 2026
So Noted
Har.
Part 2 of Bill C-22 would not create new authorities for police and CSIS. It would ensure electronic service providers have the technical capabilities to respond to court orders or warrants to get specific info to help an investigation. https://t.co/f66jEnOw93 pic.twitter.com/yPgFaIae7t
— Public Safety Canada (@Safety_Canada) May 15, 2026
Forbidden Context
You see, caring about your family, your ancestors, your lineage, your children, is “actually absurd,” apparently. And by implication, some kinds of context – where you came from, say – are to be scorned as worthless.
Circling The Drain
The first thing a business run by sane people would do when faced with torrents of red ink would be to identify the sectors with the highest costs and highest losses and cut them loose. But when you’re Canada Post, for some reason you do exactly the opposite.
“For now, people who already receive their mail via rural mailboxes will see no change,” the statement said. “These addresses are not part of the initial announcement targeting the four million addresses that still receive home delivery and will eventually be converted to community mailboxes.”
Keir Starmer’s Britain
Where the foxes caper unmolested, the government packs your school lunch and it must be stressed that these stabbings are strictly ceremonial.
O, Sweet Saint Of San Andreas
In this exclusive City Journal investigation, we contacted dozens of death-row inmates, who told us that prisoners in the state system use [taxpayer-funded tablets] to watch pornography and have explicit sexual conversations. Some prisoners, according to a former high-ranking California corrections official, use their tablets to groom minors.
Ransom Demands
I’m aware of the arguments that colonialists stole land from indigenous folks, but I didn’t know that they deserve some form of reparations for the ocean winds that we are apparently stealing as well. Can anyone make this make sense?
“We’ve seen a lot of positive momentum in advancing economic reconciliation in renewable energy projects as well as other sectors,” congress co-chair Bob Gloade, chief of the Millbrook First Nation in Nova Scotia, said in a statement.
“However, there is a lot of work left to be done. There needs to be committed focus on integration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous businesses in the offshore wind energy sector.”
Stranded Assets
Ownership without the right to sell an asset means that you aren’t actually the owner of that asset; you’re a serf.
There’s a case to indefinitely keep the Trans Mountain pipeline in government hands, possibly alongside Indigenous partners, say the leaders of its operator and financial overseer.
“It has incredible value,” said Wademan. “There’s absolutely a case to be a long term holder … I personally would love to see it owned by Canadians.”
Like Cleverness, But Less So
In the nightmare, I’m held at gunpoint and for 24 hours am forced to read aloud works of “queer theory.” I begin with W. Benjamin Myers’ thoughts on “straight and white teeth as a metaphor for a straight and White identity” – and which allegedly reveal the “uninterrogated Whiteness” of routine dental hygiene and its role in maintaining “arrogant and ignorant straight and White identities.”
While you marvel at the naff, strained metaphor – teeth-brushing as an expression of “Whiteness,” an allegedly pathological state – and the irrelevant, space-filling anecdotal rambling, and the unearned, predetermined conclusion, and the invocation of Judith Butler – this Judith Butler – do spare a thought for your gracious host. As I poke at the smouldering wreckage of academia.
Starmer’s Money Pit
Buying companies that lose well north of a million dollars a day sounds like a great economic plan.
Jingye claimed the Scunthorpe site was losing £700,000 a day and was no longer financially sustainable, ahead of the government stepping in last year. The BBC understands that the government is spending about £1m a day to keep the loss-making company going.
Brotherhood is not comrades with NDP these days
International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers respond to NDP coal position: “A deliberate misrepresentation of costs”
It turns out if the NDP wants your job to disappear, they don’t get your support. Imagine that? As in, if they want your house to lose half or more of its value, you to lose your job, and would rather spend money on gas from Alberta or wind and solar, what would you think?
—
Wait, isn’t this how it was done before?
Feds want pipeline projects reviewed by energy regulator instead of impact agency
Also
Pipeline company Enbridge unfazed by rival oil shipping projects
The City They Voted For
The Sinking Blowhard
I’ve got a better idea as to how the Ontario Tories can regain their lead: get Dougie to resign. If he still wants a career in politics, he can run federally for the Liberals. Somehow I doubt they’d want him.
Now Ontarians have both a prime minister who speaks like a Conservative (sometimes) but spends like a Liberal, and a premier who speaks like a Conservative (until recently) and also spends like a Liberal. What can Doug Ford do to reverse his drop in the polls? Maybe he could try talking — and more importantly, spending and governing — like a real Conservative.
“Tensions escalated after Carney’s Liberal government threatened Detroit automakers…”
Politico: Inside the collapse of the Canada-US trade deal
“It was an awesome meeting,” Pete Hoekstra, U.S. ambassador to Canada, recently told POLITICO.
It went so well that President Donald Trump invited Carney and his delegation back into the Oval Office to show off his White House ballroom plans, even asking the prime minister for advice on the design. The Canadians were then ushered into a nearby office and offered Trump-branded memorabilia.
Sixteen days later, the talks collapsed.
Is Our Diversities Learing?
I was in Columbus last month. We saw it. I pulled a U turn through the parking lot of a child learing center on Cleveland Ave that had few signs of life, grass growing long and trash littered all around the building. When you began looking around the area, the signs were everywhere.
As people have realized the United States government will pay them to hang out with their own families, northeast Columbus has seen its economy replaced by businesses that bill Medicaid. And Columbus, a city with the second largest Somali population in the country, has become, on the surface, the most unhealthy city on the planet.
“Well if the government is going to pay you to do it,” one home health operator told me. “People see it as lucrative, so they just jump on it.”
The new welfare queens aren’t the recipients whose low incomes qualify them for poverty programs. They’re the companies getting rich off them.
Driving down Cleveland Avenue, in less than 40 seconds you come across endless home health companies. Capital Home Health; Continental Home Health; Dynamic Home Healthcare; Ohio Senior Home Healthcare. Entire buildings throughout the city are filled entirely with what appear to be identical businesses.[…]
Pick the owner of a Columbus home health care company at random and look him up in public records, and you are likely to go down an endless rabbit hole: years of unpaid taxes and debts, sometimes criminal records, and an astonishing number of LLCs created in other industries, as if the millions they make from Medicaid are just a side gig.
Thankfully, such a thing could never happen here.
Keir Starmer’s Britain
Where the foxes caper unmolested, the government packs your school lunch and Britannia monitors the waves.
Hormuz traffic has collapsed by 90% since conflict began, with fewer than 10 ships a day now transiting the strait.
Royal Navy-led monitors report 40+ incidents, with vessels attacked, damaged, or forced to turn back.
Read more: https://t.co/WifeJgtoQN pic.twitter.com/7zB65pMGxp
— Royal Navy (@RoyalNavy) May 1, 2026
O, Great Spirit Of Cascadia
Hear my drum.
INSANE. Seattle's Socialist Mayor responds to exodus of wealth from Washington state by saying "BYE" … then laughing. We're doomed. pic.twitter.com/gP8CbPkqEl
— Brandi Kruse (@BrandiKruse) April 29, 2026