Mark Osmond

Husband, Father, Son & Ordinary Canadian

[Mark Osmond @MarkEOsmond]

Perhaps stupidity played a role... but... more likely narcissism has taken hold and good character has fled out the window.

[Epoch Health @epochhealth]

Twenty years ago, a blood pressure of 150 over 90 got you told to exercise more and cut the salt.

Then the line dropped to 140. Then 130. Now it sits around 120.

Nothing changed about the human body. Only the number changed.

"You would not believe how often they move the goalposts."

That's Alan Cassels, a health policy researcher who has spent decades tracking how disease definitions get written and who writes them.

"When you lower the level at which you start treating someone, or telling someone that they're ill or potentially ill from high blood pressure, you expand the massive pool of people that become patients."

And the line only ever moves one way. They never redraw a definition in a way that shrinks the pool.

Cholesterol is the cleanest example.

"Just by lowering the level at which we would consider high cholesterol to be a condition, overnight, they would expand the number of Americans who would be treated for cholesterol lowering drugs by 25 million people."

Cassels says the Canadian diabetes guidelines carry conflict-of-interest disclosures that run 15 or 20 pages.

"The pharmaceutical companies are very good at putting their own people on guideline committees."

You are not diagnosing more disease. You are manufacturing more patients.

[Бианка @BiankaB12]

One of my longest-standing arguments is that we are not living in Orwell’s 1984, where truth is centrally suppressed and censored by force (that’s former communist societies, modern-day China, Russia, North Korea).

We are living in something much closer to Huxley’s Brave New World.

The truth is not hidden - it is almost always readily available. But it is buried beneath an industrial quantity of noise: propaganda, outrage, half-truths, conspiracy theories, influencer theatre, algorithmic rage bait and an endless stream of content designed not to inform us, but to keep us emotionally stimulated.

The modern information system does not need to censor the truth when it can simply drown it in noise.

A fact no longer has to be disproven - it only has to be surrounded by a hundred competing claims, stripped of context and nuance, turned into partisan ammunition and pushed into the same feed as celebrity gossip, memes and 15 second videos engineered to deliver the fastest possible dopamine hit. By the time the truth reaches us, it appears as just another piece of content competing for our attention.

That is the more sophisticated form of control: not preventing people from knowing, but exhausting their capacity to care.

Orwell feared a world in which people would be deprived of information. Huxley feared a world in which they would be given so much distraction, stimulation and triviality that they would lose the desire to seek it.

The defining struggle of our age is therefore not simply between truth and censorship, but between truth and indifference.

[Mark Osmond @MarkEOsmond]

It is empty virtue signalling spoken by hypocrites who would be the very last in line to return the land they are sitting on to the people they believe are the rightful owners. They are trouble makers who possess no soundness of mind and are completely bereft of wisdom.

[Western Standard @WesternStandard]

Give your thoughts on the practice of land acknowledgments.

Fill out the survey below!

[Mark Osmond @MarkEOsmond]

Was Joe Biden a lying bastard? Was Barack Obama a lying bastard? Is Mark Carney a lying bastard? Or, is that description only reserved for Trump? There are a lot of politicians and leaders both past and present imbued with that serious character flaw. Some just more sly about it.

[Warren Kinsella @kinsellawarren]

He's a lying bastard, but if it's in any way true that Canada chickened out, Carney is going to wear it. #cdnpoli

[Dr. Dawn Michael @DawnsMission]

💔 They stole my husband from me — and they did it behind closed hospital doors.

I was in the hospital on the same floor as my husband during COVID. They wouldn’t let me see him. Not once. I couldn’t hold his hand. I couldn’t kiss him goodbye. I couldn’t tell him I loved him one last time.

They gave him Remdesivir. That drug killed him. He didn’t die from COVID, he was killed by a deadly hospital protocol — the same protocol that was forced on so many others. Alone. Isolated. Medicated into the grave. And the worst part?
Remdesivir is still being used in hospitals today.
No one has been held accountable.
No one has paid for the pain, the grief, the families destroyed.

Brave nurses who were there are finally speaking out. They’re telling the truth:
Patients weren’t just dying of a virus.
They were being killed by the protocols — Remdesivir, ventilators, and the cruel denial of visitors and real treatment.

Ventilators became the new gas chambers.
It was protocol murder inside those hospitals. No bodies piling up in the streets.
The deaths happened quietly, behind locked doors, away from the people who loved them most.

We need more healthcare workers to come forward.
The silence has protected the guilty for long enough.

If this happened to your husband, your wife, your mother, your father, your child — speak.
Share your story.
Demand the truth.
Demand justice.

Our loved ones deserved better than to die alone, pumped full of poison, while their families were kept away like criminals. We will not forget.
We will not stay silent.

[Barbara Oneill @BarbaraOneillAU]

😷 Feeling a cold creeping in?

🤧 A cold isn’t just bad luck—it’s caused by a viral infection that inflames your respiratory system. 📜 Symptoms like:

- Runny nose & congestion
- Sore throat
- Sneezing & coughing
- Fatigue & muscle aches
…happen because your immune system is working overtime to kick out the virus! 🦠

🔬 Why does it work?

- Ginger: Anti-inflammatory, boosts circulation, and warms the body from within 🌶
- Cloves: Powerful antimicrobial properties, numbs sore throats, and reduces coughing 🌿
- Hibiscus: Loaded with vitamin C, fights infections, and supports hydration 🌺
- Lemon: Alkalizes the body, breaks up mucus, and delivers an extra vitamin C boost 🍋
- Honey: Soothes the throat, reduces coughing, and has antibacterial properties 🍯
- Garlic: A natural antibiotic that helps fight off infections 🧄

📜 Ingredients for a Single Serving:

- 1 cup water
- 1 peppermint tea
- 1 tsp fresh grated ginger
- 2 whole cloves
- 1 tsp dried hibiscus
- Juice of ½ lemon
- 1 tsp honey
- ½ clove of garlic, crushed

[Mark Osmond @MarkEOsmond]

We know, or at least we should know, where hatred in human beings can lead. Human history is replete with examples of where it can lead. The question we should be asking much more often is where does the hatred in human beings come from. We analyse the symptoms but not the cause.

[Imtiaz Mahmood @ImtiazMadmood]

Standing inside the gas chamber at Auschwitz is something I’ll never forget.

Looking at these walls, knowing what happened here, is difficult to put into words. Places like this remind us why history must be remembered and why future generations should never forget where hatred can lead.

[Mark Osmond @MarkEOsmond]

The American founding fathers understood something even deeper that rarely ever gets mentioned in these discussions: namely, the role of morality and religion in keeping human nature in check and thus helping preserve the abundant freedoms built into the system they created.

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

The Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment – the real antidote to Rousseau and Voltaire

The French Enlightenment and the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment happened simultaneously, in the same century, reading the same books, arguing about the same questions. They reached completely opposite conclusions. One produced the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution. The other produced the guillotine. This is the most important civilizational fork in modern history.

1. The French Enlightenment begins with the assumption that human beings can be improved by reason – that if you strip away the corrupting institutions of Church, tradition, and inherited authority, the natural goodness underneath will organize itself into a just society. This sounds like progress. It is a fantasy with a body count. Every attempt to implement it has required, at some point, a Committee of Public Safety to handle the people who turned out not to be naturally good enough.

2. The Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment begins with the opposite assumption: human beings are what they are, not what they could be if properly enlightened. Hume grounds morality in human nature as it actually operates – sympathy, habit, sentiment, the slow accumulation of social trust. Smith shows that self-interest, properly channeled, produces collective benefit without a planner. Neither man is building a utopia. Both are building with the actual material available.

3. Burke is the direct refutation, written in real time. He published Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790 – before the Terror, predicting it precisely – because he understood that institutions are not obstacles to human flourishing, they are its precondition. They contain accumulated wisdom — the knowledge of the dead — that cannot be recovered once destroyed. Pull society apart to improve it and you don’t get the General Will. You get Robespierre.

4. The American founders read Burke, Hume, Smith, and Montesquieu – the Frenchman who looked at England and understood what France was missing. They built a system that takes human nature as given — self-interested, power-hungry, tribal — and constructs institutions to contain those tendencies rather than assume they disappear once the right people are in charge. Checks and balances are not a design flaw. They are what you build when you don’t believe in philosopher-kings.

5. 1776 versus 1789. Same Enlightenment, same century, same vocabulary of liberty and reason. One produces a constitutional republic that has survived two and a half centuries of stress, civil war, and upheaval. The other produces, in sequence: the Terror, Napoleon, 1848, the Commune, and eventually — via Marx, who was a Frenchman in spirit if not in birth — the entire catastrophe of the twentieth century. The difference was not intelligence or intention. It was the starting assumption about human nature. Get that wrong and everything that follows is wrong with it.

6. The guillotine is not the Revolution’s failure. It is its logical conclusion. If man is naturally good and the system is corrupt, then whoever seizes the system in the name of natural goodness is licensed to do anything. The General Will cannot be wrong. Those who resist it are not opponents – they are enemies of nature itself.

7. The real antidote to Rousseau and Voltaire was never a better French philosopher. It was a different civilizational tradition – one that builds with human beings as they are; that treats inherited institutions as repositories of wisdom rather than obstacles to progress; that distributes power rather than concentrating it in whoever currently claims to know the General Will. That tradition was built in Edinburgh, London, and Philadelphia. It is currently under sustained assault — from exactly the same ideas, in exactly the same form, with exactly the same confidence — that Burke watched demolish France in 1789. He was right then. He is right now.

[National Post @nationalpost]

Carney may lead the Trump ‘resistance,’ but Canadian casualties are mounting, writes John Ivison.

Canada is embroiled in trade talks that have the potential to be existential to the country’s future prosperity https://t.co/2NKn2STFPx

[Peter Clack @PeterDClack]

Australia is quietly committing to a staggering $7 to $10 trillion 'capital reallocation' by 2050 to chase Net Zero and become a 'Green Hydrogen Superpower.'

That amounts to a jaw-dropping $303,000 per capita gamble — conducted with zero formal democratic mandate from the Australian public.

Australia's vast, proven energy reserves of coal, gas, oil and uranium are being sidelined for what currently amounts to one man's pipe dream. Green hydrogen relies on highly complex technology that still can’t reliably power a mid-size bulldozer, let alone sustain a national electricity grid.

The scale of this domestic sacrifice makes no mathematical sense on a global stage. Australia produces less than 1.1% of global CO₂ emissions. China alone accounts for 30% and the top 10 emitting nations generate 70% of all human-derived CO₂. Local economic self-harm won't shift the global dial.

Between its extensive coastal 'blue carbon' sinks (seagrass/mangroves) and vast, carbon-neutral desert interior, Australia's actual CO₂ footprint is microscopic.

This isn't a rational energy transition — it’s a massive structural handover of national wealth to a global 'green' bureaucratic narrative.

[Andrew Lawton @AndrewLawton]

JUST IN: Canada Post, which lost $1.57 billion last year, says it paid out $30.8 million in management bonuses last year.

Despite the CEO agreeing at committee to break down how much of that went to executives, Canada Post has buried executive bonuses in the aggregated number.

[Isaac @isaacrrr7]

El diablo ha muerto

El comandante de Hamás, Walid Haniyeh, quien asó a dos bebés judíos metiéndolos en un microondas el 7 de octubre y asesinó a una mujer tras violarla, ha muerto en una operación de inteligencia. Se escondía haciéndose pasar por barbero.

[Mark Osmond @MarkEOsmond]

Excellent Marty.

[Martyupnorth®- Unacceptable Fact Checker @Martyupnorth]

Here are 10 common words/phrases in job titles that often signal low-productivity, bureaucratic, or performative roles. The kind that create reports, host meetings, and justify their existence through metrics no one actually uses.

Sustainability: Sustainability Officer
Spends 40 hours a week calculating our "carbon footprint" while flying business class to climate conferences. The company’s actual emissions go up 12% but we hit our recycled coffee cup target, so… promotion time.

Compliance: Global Compliance Manager
Professional checkbox ticker. Makes sure we have the right forms signed in triplicate so we don’t get fined for the thing we were already doing anyway. Zero value created, maximum anxiety generated.

Diversity (or DEI): Head of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
Turns hiring into a rainbow spreadsheet. When metrics slip, they just lower standards and call it “progress”. The engineering team mysteriously gets slower every quarter.

Equity: Equity and Belonging Strategist
Ensures no one feels uncomfortable… except the people actually doing the work who now have to attend mandatory struggle sessions. Merit is so 2015.

Inclusion: Director of Inclusive Culture
Organizes potlucks where everyone brings food from their heritage and then writes a 47-page report on how it advanced psychological safety. Productivity remains unchanged.

ESG: ESG Integration Lead
The person who makes PowerPoint slides explaining why losing money on purpose is actually smart long-term strategy. Investors pretend to care, stock price pretends to react.

Wellness: Employee Wellness Coordinator
Schedules yoga classes during crunch time and sends passive-aggressive emails about using your 17 mental health days. Burnout solved by adding another meeting.

Engagement: Employee Engagement Specialist
Runs surveys asking “On a scale of 1-10, how connected do you feel to our mission statement?” Then creates action plans no one reads while real problems fester.

Outreach: Community Outreach Manager
Shows up at local events with branded tote bags and selfies, calls it “stakeholder synergy”.
Zero revenue, maximum LinkedIn likes.

Officer (when attached to anything non-revenue):
Chief Impact Officer or Chief Harmony Officer
Highest paid person with “Chief” in title who produces nothing measurable. Their entire job is existing at conferences and vaguely gesturing at “positive change”. The annual report’s participation trophy.

Bonus pattern recognition:
Titles heavy in "Coordinator," "Strategist," "Facilitator," "Ambassador," "Catalyst," or "Transformation" in non-technical contexts are also strong red flags.

If the role’s success is measured in “awareness,” “conversations started,” or “frameworks developed,” you’ve probably found a professional meeting attendee.

Real companies make money by building, selling, or operating things. Everything else is overhead. Some of it necessary, most of it optional theater.

What's the most bullshit job title you've come across.

[Dr. Eric Berg DC @dr_ericberg]

Apply these 19 healthy habits today for your best health yet:

1. Only eat when you’re hungry.

2. Only drink when you’re thirsty.
Over-consuming liquid dilutes electrolytes, especially sodium, which can cause dehydration.

3. Carbonated water is more hydrating.

4. Find the diet that works best for you.

5. Practice intermittent fasting.
Intermittent fasting allows your body to recycle damaged proteins, create new tissues, clean up pathogens, and eliminate bacteria, viruses, and mold.

6. Stop snacking between meals.
Snacking keeps insulin high. Stopping snacking can significantly improve your health, even if you don’t change your diet.

7. Lower your carb intake.
The most important thing to look at when reading a label is the carbohydrates. You should consume no more than 30 grams of carbohydrates per day.

8. Request a fasting insulin test.
A fasting insulin test can help you prevent diabetes before it becomes a problem.

9. Test your vitamin D levels.
You need at least 10,000 to 20,000 IU of vitamin D per day. Magnesium is vital for proper vitamin D function.

10. Get plenty of potassium.
You need 4700 mg of potassium per day. Potassium calms the nervous system, lowers blood pressure, and increases energy.

11. Avoid synthetic vitamins and look for high-quality, nutrient-dense supplements.

12. Red meat is the most nutrient-dense protein, vital for health and well-being, energy levels, and healthy blood sugars.

13. Counter past antibiotic use with a homemade probiotic mixture to help restore your gut microbiota.

14. Overtraining can deplete your testosterone. Rest is vital to achieve muscle growth and to keep your hormones balanced.

15. Take vitamin B1 if you stray from your healthy diet.

16. Choose a natural source like beef liver or liver supplements if you need more iron.

17. Focus on exercise for age-related atrophy.

18. Take 50,000 to 100,000 IU of vitamin D before surgery.

19. Invest in a good water filter to remove forever chemicals from your drinking water.

Dr. Eric Berg, DC, not MD; information only

[Roman Baber @Roman_Baber]

This morning I wrote to Minister @melaniejoly demanding that she release a full copy of the ISED Memo and publicly reject the litigation strategy proposed.

Canadians should not be placed in legal jeopardy for exercising free speech!

[Mark Osmond @MarkEOsmond]

At its core... it's probably just another more official form of empty, vacuous, virtue signalling; accomplishing nothing of real value or worth other than creating another layer of bureaucracy so the administrative class can feel good about themselves.

[Martyupnorth®- Unacceptable Fact Checker @Martyupnorth]

This Harper-Era act is probably one of the most damaging in Canada right now.

The Federal Sustainable Development Act is costly bureaucratic theater. Passed in 2008, it forces a Federal Sustainable Development Strategy every three years, plus departmental plans, advisory councils, and endless reports. Departments divert staff, time, and money to alignment exercises, consultations, and vague targets that parliamentary reviews and the Environment Commissioner have repeatedly called unmeasurable, unimpressive, and ineffective—often just repackaged announcements.

The Act is a bunch of expansive, ideological, "sustainability" principles that prioritize precaution and equity over economic reality, spawning layers upon layers of overhead with weak accountability and marginal results.

Anyone on LinkedIn with the word "sustainable" in their title is probably a result of this act.

Canadians pay for this performative process across government. It takes away focus from real priorities like affordability, practicality, and growth.

I say repeal or radically simplify it: scrap the ritual documents and return to targeted, evidence-based policy.

Future generations need competence, not more paperwork.

[Barbara Oneill @BarbaraOneillAU]

Walking decreases cortisol.
Hugging decreases cortisol.
Gratitude decreases cortisol.
Laughing decreases cortisol.
Being kind decreases cortisol.
Meditating decreases cortisol.
Time in nature decreases cortisol.
Helping others decreases cortisol.
Slow breathing decreases cortisol.
Limiting phone use decreases cortisol.