Eric Eggertson

@DanielTyrie I totally agree. You're referring to Europeans who "colonized" the Americas, right? Followed by centuries of discrimination, making indigenous ceremonies illegal and forcing families to send their children to residential schools designed to destroy "the Indian in them".

I'm tired of my country being used as a safe haven for immigrants to play out their foreign ethnic grievances. These people gave no intention of integrating into our society. It's time for them to go home.

Mariupol Half a million people used to live there. They had jobs, schools, restaurants, arguments about football, bad haircuts, mortgages, annoying neighbours, birthday parties, and all the magnificent, boring, irreplaceable machinery of a normal life. Then Russia arrived. Now Mariupol is a photograph that makes you look away. Apartment blocks reduced to their skeletons. Streets that go nowhere because the buildings at the end of them no longer exist. A port city on the Azov Sea that has been methodically turned into a lesson about what happens when nobody stops a man with tanks and no conscience. Five hundred thousand people. Gone, dead, or scattered across a continent. And JD Vance is proud of that. Not quietly conflicted. Not reluctantly neutral for strategic reasons a diplomat might one day explain. Proud. Visibly, performatively, almost joyfully proud that America withheld the weapons, blocked the aid, and let the rubble pile higher while his boss complimented the man doing the demolition. The Trump administration’s Christian base has found, at last, the hill they are willing to die on. Not their hill, obviously. Someone else’s. They have decided that their defining moral achievement, the thing they will tell their grandchildren about, is that they did not help. In a just world, that would be embarrassing. In this one, they’re giving speeches about it. Mariupol had half a million people. That number is apparently not the problem. The problem, according to Washington’s proudest Christians, was being asked to care. Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

@TylerMcMurchy A couple of disconnected doughnut holes would have done the trick...

My buddy got a vasectomy so I brought him a cake.

Winston Churchill fought his depression with bricks. He'd lay them for hours at his country home in Kent. He joined the bricklayers' union. And in 1921 he wrote about why it worked. It took psychology another 75 years to catch up. He called his depression the "Black Dog." It followed him for decades. His method for fighting it back was as basic as it sounds: laying brick after brick, hour after hour. Churchill spelled out his theory in a long essay for The Strand Magazine. People who think for a living, he wrote, can't fix a tired brain just by resting it. They have to use a different part of themselves. The part that moves the eyes and the hands. Woodworking, chemistry, bookbinding, bricklaying, painting. Anything that drags the body into a problem the mind can't solve by itself. Modern psychology now calls this behavioral activation. It's one of the most-studied depression treatments out there. Depression sets a behavior trap. You feel bad, so you stop doing things, and doing less means less to feel good about. Feeling worse makes you do even less. The loop tightens until you can't breathe inside it. Behavioral activation breaks the loop from the action side. You schedule the activity first, even when every part of you doesn't want to. Doing it produces small rewards: a wall gets straighter, a painting fills in, a messy room gets clean. Those small rewards slowly rewire the brain. Action comes first, and the feeling follows. Researchers at the University of Washington put this to the test in 2006. They studied 241 adults with major depression and compared three treatments: behavioral activation, regular talk therapy, and antidepressants. For the people who were most severely depressed, behavioral activation matched the drugs. It beat the talk therapy. A 2014 review of more than 1,500 patients across 26 trials backed up the result. Physical work like bricklaying does something extra on top of this. It crowds out rumination, the looping bad thoughts that grind people down during the worst stretches of depression. Bricklaying needs both hands and gives feedback brick by brick: each one is straight or crooked. After an hour you can see exactly how much wall you built. No room left for the mental chewing. The line George Mack used in his post, "depression hates a moving target," is good poetry. The science behind it is sharper. Depression hates a brain that has somewhere else to be.

The first step toward being compassionate involves opening your heart to understand what another person is going through. Anyone who promises to be "tough on" addictive drugs is actually being tough on people who desperately need treatment and support.

The MAGA crowd in Washington has decided that since Europeans don’t sufficiently appreciate Trump, the American bases on the continent must go. This is the strategic reasoning of a man who burns down his own kitchen. American bases in Europe were never a favour. They are the logistical spine of every war the United States fights east of Gibraltar. Ramstein moves the cargo, Aviano launches the jets, Rota services the ships. Without them the Pentagon does not project power into the Middle East. It projects PowerPoint. The fantasy assumes the alternative is aircraft carriers gliding majestically into the Persian Gulf. That era is ending. A modern carrier is a thirteen-billion-dollar trophy that can be reduced to scrap by a couple of hundred cheap missiles fired from the Iranian coast. China noticed. The other fantasy is that America simply fights from home. Picture the alternative: twenty thousand transatlantic sorties shuttling spare parts, munitions, fuel bladders, mechanics and replacement pilots from Norfolk and Dover to wherever the war happens to be. A C-17 burns through roughly 35,000 dollars of fuel every hour it flies, and the round trip from the American east coast to the Gulf is the better part of a day. Multiply that by every bolt, every missile, every spare engine. The war becomes a sustained airborne traffic jam with the bill arriving by the second. So you need land, specifically land near the war. Modern combat aircraft are not Spitfires you fuel up and send off with a wave. An F-35 demands an entire Walmart of spare parts, a small city of technicians, climate-controlled hangars and a supply chain stretching halfway round the planet. Drones need operators, networks, satellites and a steady diet of components no carrier can store. Modern war arrives by container ship and lives in a warehouse. Close the bases, and Washington loses the warehouses. Lose the warehouses, and the next confrontation with Iran is either fought by phone or fought from Kansas with a flight schedule that bankrupts the Treasury before the first missile lands. MAGA thinks shutting Ramstein punishes Europe. It punishes America. Europe will be inconvenienced. America will be unarmed. And so, after a thousand insults, a thousand sneers, a thousand late-night posts about freeloading allies, Europe is quietly drafting the politest letter in diplomatic history. It thanks America for its service. It wishes the troops a safe journey home. It suggests, with great warmth, that Washington might now turn its attention to its neighbours in Latin America, where a fading superpower can busy itself with whatever a fading superpower busies itself with. Spain had its century. Britain had its empire. The Soviets had their parades. Each ended the same way: as a shadow of itself, with the historians left to argue, volume after volume, about precisely when the rot set in and why nobody noticed in time. America is welcome to join them on the shelf.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ If you like what you read, please follow Gandalv on Substack: @gandalv" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">substack.com/@gandalv

@AdamPlovie16 @MarkJCarney Your tinfoil hat is bent. Time to iron it.

@MarkJCarney The only challenges canada faces is a corrupt liberal government that wants a full blown dictatorship. You steal all our tax money and launder it to yourself in other countries. You are a traitor and that's what you will be known for.

I am very pleased to announce that, on my recommendation, His Majesty has approved the appointment of the Honourable Louise Arbour as the 31st Governor General of Canada. Across more than five decades, she gave voice to those whose dignity was denied, held institutions to account, and changed lives through her service. As Canada’s next Governor General, Louise Arbour will represent the best of Canada to our citizens and to the world — a Canada clear-eyed about the challenges we face, and steadfast in the values we uphold.

@a_millholland @nenshi I love your ironic repeated misspelling of "scandal" a_millholland! It makes your argument even more compelling. 👍

Nenshi, weekly you manufacture a crisis or a scandle in Alberta. My guess this apparent scandle was manufactured by you, the NDP and your subservient government workers Union allies. Sound far fetched? Let me guess, a radical far left NDP, Union dues paying government worker illegally accessed the data and covertly gave it to these two fringe separatist groups. Once this radical NDP insider saw the hook was set, YOU started the ball rolling with a leak to the press and a call to the RCMP. Funny thing Nenshi, unless you and the NDP use carrier pigeons for communications, there will likely be NDP digital finger prints all over this scandle. Premier Smith is correct in saying the truth will come out during the investigation. ARE YOU AND THE NDP READY FOR THE TRUTH????

WATCH LIVE: Almost three million Albertans had their personal data compromised in one of the largest data breaches in Canadian history. Survivors of abuse. Judges. Police officers. Every single Albertan is at risk. Alberta's New Democrats demand action. bit.ly/4d9oZeR

It’s official. The UCP are going all in on rigging the next election. It’s unprecedented and unacceptable. MLAs should have no part in drawing the boundaries for the seats they run to represent. We’ll have more to say soon because Alberta, we need to fight back. #ableg

Destroying the @InternetArchive's @WayBackMachine would be the equivalent of the burning of the Library of Alexandria - one of the worst losses of knowledge in history. Media giants are now threatening to do this. We can't let this happen. Pass it on.

The Man Who Gave Away Patagonia Doug Tompkins sold his stake in The North Face for $50,000.  He used the money to co-found Esprit. Then he sold that too, and did something almost no one does with a fortune: he disappeared. He moved to the tip of South America in 1990 with a theory most businessmen would find absurd. He believed the best thing a rich man could do was buy wilderness before someone else destroyed it, then hand it back to the country it belonged to. Together with his wife Kris, a former CEO of Patagonia clothing, they bought and conserved more than 2 million acres across Chile and Argentina. For context: that is roughly the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. Most of it had been degraded farmland. Overgrazed, stripped, exhausted. The Valle Chacabuco ranch alone had been one of South America’s largest sheep operations. They bought it in 2004 for $10 million, then spent another $55 million over 20 years restoring the grasslands.  Pumas returned. Guanacos returned. The land remembered what it was. The Chileans were not immediately grateful. Many locals saw it as a land grab. An American buying millions of acres and telling them to change their way of life. Some accused him of planning to split the country in two. Others claimed he was building a nuclear waste site. He kept buying land anyway. The deal his wife finalized in his name after his death became the largest-ever private land donation to a country. Over 1 million acres handed directly to Chile, triggering government protections on another 9 million. Five new national parks. Three expanded. A conservation corridor stretching 1,250 miles. He died on December 8, 2015, in a kayaking accident on a Patagonian lake, surrounded by friends including Yvon Chouinard. He had called what he was doing “paying rent for his time on the planet.” There is a certain kind of person who builds something great and then builds something greater by walking away from it. Tompkins is the rarest version: he walked away from two fortunes, bought a wilderness, and gave it to strangers. The land is still there. The sheep are gone. If this kind of story is what you read on weekends, you might belong here. Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

🇨🇦 Someone needs to write the field guide to Canadian Conservative disinformation. Not a rant. A documented playbook. Chapter 1: The Think Tank Pipeline. How Fraser Institute and MLI produce "research" that becomes Poilievre talking points within 48 hours, without a single journalist tracing the line. Chapter 2: The Expert Laundering Machine. How a Loblaws-funded professor becomes the go-to "food inflation expert" on your feed, with no disclosure and no pushback. Chapter 3: The Influencer Layer. Mario Zelaya. CarneyWatch.ca. Sites that look like accountability journalism and function as opposition research ops. Chapter 4: The Recycled Lie. The same claim, debunked, buried, resurrected, cycling through the ecosystem until it becomes "what everyone knows." Chapter 5: The Disinformation Courtroom. Small claims filings. RCMP allegations. Allegations PM Carney is planning to resurrect the Emergencies Act. Legal-sounding documents designed not to win cases but to generate headlines. This isn't chaos. It's infrastructure. Built piece by piece. Funded deliberately. Optimized over years. Canada thinks it's immune. That's exactly what makes it work. #cdnpoli #Poilievre #ConservativeDisinformation #CdnMedia #CanadianPolitics

The FBI cut the phone lines during the 1977 disability rights sit-in. Then they turned off the hot water. They locked the doors from the outside. One hundred and fifty people were trapped on the fourth floor. Half of them used wheelchairs. The government assumed they would leave. Kitty Cone was thirty-three. She had muscular dystrophy. Her muscles were failing, but her logistics were flawless. She knew how to organize people. The federal government had promised to sign regulations protecting disabled Americans from discrimination. The policy was known as Section 504. They printed the promise on paper. Then they stalled. Without a signature, it was just typography. The protesters entered the regional Health, Education, and Welfare building in San Francisco on a Tuesday morning. They took the elevators to the director's office. They brought sleeping bags and catheters. They informed the staff they were not leaving until the law was signed. By sunset, the police surrounded the exits. Kitty sat near the windows. She organized the floor plan. She assigned committees for security and sanitation. She kept her medication in a small cooler. According to federal memorandums released decades later, the strategy to end the occupation relied on medical attrition. The building was not equipped for long-term habitation. The FBI calculated that a population requiring ventilators, specialized diets, and daily medical aides would voluntarily evacuate if the environment became sufficiently hostile. They instituted a blockade. The blockade went into effect immediately. No food deliveries allowed. No medical supplies permitted through the lobby. Guards stood at the main doors checking identification. Kitty's muscles deteriorated faster under the physical strain. She couldn't walk. When the phone lines went dead, the fourth floor lost contact with the press. The government waited for the quiet. Kitty dropped to the floor. She realized the barricades were designed for standing adults. The police had blocked the hallways at waist height. They hadn't blocked the linoleum. The floors were covered in cigarette ash and spilled coffee. She dragged her body through it. She crawled under the barricades to reach the restricted elevator shafts and unguarded offices. She carried notes in her pockets. She found a single working payphone the FBI missed. She called the local news desks. She called the mayor's office. She crawled back. When her arms failed, someone pulled her by her ankles. The Black Panthers heard the news reports. They crossed the police lines with hot meals. The FBI could not stop them without a riot. They shut off the elevators, so she crawled. The occupation lasted twenty-five days. It remains the longest non-violent occupation of a federal building in American history. On April 28, the Secretary of HEW signed the regulations without a single alteration. The protesters left the building the next morning. They went back to their apartments. The Rehabilitation Act regulations laid the groundwork for every accessibility law that followed. The HEW building still stands on United Nations Plaza. The elevators run on a schedule. The doors are heavy glass. Kitty Cone: the woman who crawled under the barricades.

Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, has made the planet itself the sole beneficiary and effective "shareholder" of his company. In an extraordinary move that redefined corporate ownership, Chouinard transferred full control of the $3 billion outdoor apparel brand away from his family. He placed 100% of the company into a carefully designed structure consisting of a trust and a nonprofit organization, both dedicated to combating the climate crisis and protecting the natural world. Under this new arrangement, the Chouinard family gave up any claim to personal profits. Instead, all earnings not reinvested in growing the business—roughly $100 million each year—now flow directly to environmental causes, funding the preservation of wild lands, conservation efforts, and initiatives to fight climate change. In essence, Patagonia now exists to serve Earth as its only true shareholder, placing planetary survival above the accumulation of private wealth. The model has already delivered significant results. As of 2025, the company had channeled an additional $180 million into nature-protection projects. The structure relies on two key entities: the Patagonia Purpose Trust, which safeguards the company’s original mission and values, and the Holdfast Collective, a nonprofit that directs the profits toward high-impact environmental work. Rather than selling the business to the highest bidder or taking it public, Chouinard chose this radical path—creating what many see as a groundbreaking template for purpose-driven capitalism. Patagonia has shown that a for-profit company can become a powerful force for ecological restoration while remaining financially successful. [Chouinard, Y. (2022). Patagonia's Next Chapter: Earth is Now Our Only Shareholder. Patagonia Works]

@kaitlancollins Donald Trump posting an image comparing himself to Jesus and then taking it down says everything. This is what happens when a man wraps himself in messianic politics and a movement follows him fanatically. This is the first real pushback he has ever faced, in fact.

Iran is not defined by a regime which only exists because the CIA installed a Shah who ran a monarchic autocracy which led to the rise of religious fundamentalism and ultimately the Islamic revolution of 1979. Why did the US install him? Because the democratically elected government that ousted him in 1951 nationalised Iranian oil for the benefit of the Iranian people. Iran is NOT defined by the monsters for whom the US created a permissive environment to create a an Islamic terrorist state. The U.S. and British governments did this, NOT the people of Iran. Once we define a nation by the actions of their leaders we create another permissive environment for genocide just as we did in Gaza and now in Lebanon. Iran is a beautiful country steeped in ancient history which has seen them repel invaders time and time again. It’s estimated that just 20% of the population support the regime, yet the US and Israel has deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure. Hundreds of hospitals and schools have been destroyed as well as cultural sites and energy generation facilities. This is NOT a holy war as Trump would have you believe, it’s just another war prosecuted by greedy white men in search of geopolitical power and wealth. Just as it was in 1951 when they actively destroyed democracy to install a dictator, they think they can now deliver new regime change in installing a new monarchic leader in the form of Trump working from home to control Iranian oil. This has NOTHING to do with liberating the Iranian people, Trump is more than happy to deal with a repressive regime as long as they do his bidding and pay a licensing fee to him personally into his Qatari bank account. The problem is, he’s picked on the wrong regime. A regime able to call on centuries of lived experience of invaders. They have no intention of fighting a conventional war, for them it’s about asymmetric warfare. They can instigate attack anywhere in the world to attack American interests. They’ve just chosen not to push that button YET. Trump is out of his league and now desperate for an off-ramp. Iran are more than happy to provide one, but the cost will be crippling both politically and economically. This is the biggest political and military failure in American history. Not because the U.S. military underperformed, they have been outstanding as one would have expected. They’ve carried out their orders to the letter. The question remains however, did they carry out illegal orders? Only time will tell. There is little question that Trump as Commander in Chief, may well find himself accused of war crimes and or crimes against humanity. Once again, time will deliver a verdict on that. Every day the US remains in this war costs billions and Trump’s popularity dips ever further. He’s on political life support already, but it’s the lies that are killing him. He’s up against a smart enemy better at social media than him, who are more than prepared to wait him out, because every day he remains in this quagmire is another nail in his coffin. He’s spent his entire life expecting someone to clean up the mess he leaves behind. That’s why he’s lashing out at allies and threatening to leave NATO. He’s a man in quicksand without a plan and no exit strategy. Even when he has nowhere to turn he can’t help his self enrichment gag reflex kicking in as he considers a ‘joint venture’ with Iran to share the proceeds of tolls on ships navigating the Strait of Hormuz. He’s also embedded Kushner and Witkoff into proceedings to ensure he gets a cut of any reconstruction contracts that might arise as a result of what he’s destroyed. Just as Hitler became delusional in his bunker when it was all over, Trump is facing the same fate. The lies, the twisted narratives, the fantasy that the people believe in him is all part of a cancer that is eating him alive. When he’s gone, if America does not hunt down and jail his enablers, I fear there is no hope and no better tomorrow.

Trump in 2008: Anyone who invades the Middle East under false pretenses should be impeached. Let’s make sure it goes viral here.

The lead article in #LePoint from #France (“The Great Heist”)is an extensive investigation into the intersection of Trump’s second term and his and family’s private business interests. The report argues that the White House under Trump has shockingly been transformed into a "cash machine" for the #Trump family and their associates. Key themes of the article include: 1. The "Crypto-President": The report examines how the administration’s shift toward pro-crypto policies coincided with the launch of Trump-branded digital assets and "World Liberty Financial," alleging that regulatory decisions are being influenced by the President's personal holdings. 2. Insider Trading Allegations: Le Point investigates "troubling" market fluctuations that occur immediately following the President's social media posts or policy announcements. It suggests that a small circle of "insiders" may be profiting from prior knowledge of these shifts. 3. Real Estate & Private Clubs: The article details how foreign delegations and lobbyists continue to frequent Trump-owned properties (like Mar-a-Lago), creating a system where access to the Commander-in-Chief is effectively a commercial transaction. 4. The "Trumpification" of Washington: Beyond the money, the article describes an "aesthetic of power," where the President’s personal brand—symbolized by the gold coin shown on the cover—is being merged with the official symbols of the American state as the country approaches its 250th anniversary. The tone of the piece is highly critical, framing these actions not just as ethical lapses, but as a systematic "heist" of democratic norms for private gain.

Pete Hegseth wasn’t removed from the DC National Guard by accident. A Major General is now warning that his rhetoric and actions are putting him on a path toward war crimes—and he lays out exactly why.

Danielle Smith would never have revealed that she flew on private jets and stayed at luxury hotels, all funded by the Saudi Arabian government, if I hadn't directly questioned her about it last week. The issue isn't about the golden cat statue. It's about the Premier accepting all manner of lavish gifts from a foreign government without a second thought. Twice the corruption with none of the competence. We deserve better.