Chuck Bathurst

What a long strange trip it’s been

[Bloomberg @business]

Canadians support Mark Carney’s management of the economy, even though he’s presided over the worst first year of growth for a prime minister since at least 1963, a poll showed. https://t.co/XtHIBvReFl

[Dennis Molinaro 牟丹尼 @Dennismolin11]

WSJ: Carney 'pushed for Europe's de-Americanization.' A Canadian PM spending his capital to turn Europe against Washington? Whatever that is, it won't go over well.

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

🇬🇧 THEY TOLD YOU A STORY. 🇬🇧

Colonisers. Slavers. Oppressors. And you were supposed to feel ashamed.

Not for what you done... But for WHO YOU ARE. 🇬🇧

So we tested it. Britain wrote everything down, so we opened the books. 📖

Turns out fewer than 1 man in 10 could vote in the year Britain banned the slave trade. No woman could. Your ancestors could hang for stealing a sheep, get shipped across the world for petty theft, or go down a mine at 8 years old. In Manchester, the average age of death in a labouring family was 17.

They weren't running the slave trade. They were underneath it too.

Which is what makes what happened next worth knowing.

In 1772 an enslaved man named James Somerset walked free from an English court, because English law couldn't hold a slave.

In 1791, 300,000 families just stopped buying slave sugar. No march, no riot, just a decision made at 300,000 kitchen tables.

In 1792, 519 petitions carrying 390,000 names hit Parliament, most signed by people who couldn't vote themselves.

In 1807, Britain banned the trade.

Then the slave owners sent Britain a bill for the 800,000 people they still held. 💷 £20 million. About 40% of the entire government budget at the time.

The Treasury says it wasn't paid off until 2015. So if your family paid British tax before then, they helped buy 800,000 people their freedom.

From 1808 the Royal Navy spent 60 years hunting slave ships at sea: 1,600 stopped, 150,000 people freed, and 1,600 British sailors dead, mostly of disease, buried thousands of miles from home. ⚓

In 1816 they ended two centuries of Barbary corsairs enslaving Europeans.

In 1896 a war that lasted 38 minutes ended slavery in Zanzibar. 🇹🇿

Almost every country on Earth outlaws slavery today.

That fight was paid for largely at British expense, by British hands.🇬🇧

So why haven't you heard any of this?

Because within living memory, someone rewrote the story. You got taught the crime. Not the cure.

The powerful exploited the world. They exploited their own people first. It was those people who ended slavery. 🇬🇧

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

History got rewritten once, in living memory, by no one who was ever named or held to account.

We are ordinary people doing what ordinary people have always done. Opening the books. Refusing to look away.

This is how we fight back. Fact by fact. Story by story. Name by name.

We are the home of British heroes. There is a place for you in it.

If you can afford to support what we do: https://t.co/rih7iKwnvf

Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧

[Matt Alexander @RealMattA_]

The Liberal Canadian government is considering taking legal action against Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn users who are considered to have spread, “False and misleading information.”

Here you go, Canada.

Freedom of expression is only an idea, in Canada.

LOST FREEDOM FILES # 5220

[Tristin Hopper @TristinHopper]

Any cursory examination of the Carney government's actual policy quickly leads one to conclude that it's essentially a Ponzi scheme. Every "trade deal" or "national strategy" or "memorandum of understanding" is ... nothing. There's nothing in them. It's just a Dilbert cartoon.

[Chuck Bathurst @chucksb]

@Lowetide Terry Fox is an inspiration to many Canadians, including those in Ottawa in 2022. @Lowetide, you have been a source of reason and decency for me for in a crazy world. As you know there is always more angles to any narrative that is fed to the masses.

[T.D. Leaker @TdLeaker]

(The 🍓🍓🍓🤣 at the end)…

Karen earns $995 today.

Before she sees a penny, roughly $533 disappears in marginal federal and provincial income tax.

She fills her tank. Another $15.75 in fuel taxes and HST.

She buys a pack of cigarettes. About $10 goes to taxes.

A $20 bottle of wine to take the edge off? Another $3+ in taxes and levies.

Dinner? $3.90 in HST.

Every single month she quietly pays HST on her phone, internet and streaming services. She pays $6,000 a year in property tax just to continue living in a home she already bought with after-tax income. Part of every insurance premium is insurance premium tax. Hidden in almost everything she buys are corporate taxes, commercial property taxes, development charges, licensing fees and tariffs that businesses simply pass along in the price.

She books a vacation. Airport Improvement Fees. Security charges. More taxes.

She invests what’s left. If it grows, she pays capital gains tax. If it pays dividends, she pays dividend tax.

Then one day Karen dies.

Her family discovers there isn’t technically a “death tax” in Canada—but her estate is treated as though she sold almost everything the moment she died. Capital gains become taxable, final income tax is due, and in Ontario her estate pays probate fees before her family receives what’s left.

Karen’s money was taxed when she earned it, taxed while she spent it, taxed while she invested it, taxed while she owned things, and taxed one final time when she died.

But don’t worry.

Karen refuses to buy American strawberries because she’s bravely protesting the tariffs the U.S. charges on their imports.

After paying roughly $687 in taxes and government fees on a $995 workday, she’s finally taking a stand against someone else’s tax policy. 🇨🇦💪

[Sovey @SoveyX]

“Creep” by Radiohead is the only song I know that got sued for copying, then accused someone else of stealing the exact same melody they stole.

1974: The Hollies release “The Air That I Breathe.”
1992: Radiohead drops “Creep.”
Radiohead gave them songwriting credit.
2017: Lana Del Rey drops “Get Free.”
Radiohead’s says that sounds just like “Creep.”

Listen to these lines yourself:
The Hollies: “Sometimes, all I need is the air that I breathe…”
Radiohead: “When you were here before, couldn’t look you in the eye…”
Lana Del Rey: “Finally, I’m crossing the threshold…”

This is how music has always worked. Artists hear something they love, it lives in them, and it comes back out as something new.
Inspiration leaves fingerprints.

Sometimes the remix beats the original. Sometimes the original beats the remix.

I like all three.
Play them back to back and tell me you don’t hear it. 👇🏻

[Stephen Punwasi 🏚️📉🐈☃️ @StephenPunwasi]

Protected B is 🇨🇦’s security level for documents that cause “serious harm” to gov if made public.

Interesting level for a regulator explaining inflated appraisals & weak home sales to banks, eh?

🇨🇦’s not bailing out a few developers. It’s bailing out the whole system. 🧵👇

[Julian Assange @ImJulianAssange]

Canada is no longer a Free Market Economy, Mark Carney’s economic strategy is a shift from traditional free-market principles toward "economic nationalism" and state-directed capitalism. Corporatism is deeply associated with fascism, serving as the core economic and political framework for fascist regimes. Canada is fast becoming a Fascist Regime.

[Rothmus 🏴 @Rothmus]

The open society and its enemy, Soros.

While he named his Open Society Foundations after Karl Popper’s “The Open Society and Its Enemies,” his project stands as a philosophical inversion of everything Popper defended.

Popper’s open society rested on critical rationalism, the recognition that no one possesses final truth, that institutions must remain open to criticism and piecemeal reform, and that democracy functions as a method for removing rulers without bloodshed.

He rejected historicism, the belief in iron laws of history that justify sacrificing present generations for a utopian future, and warned that such thinking inevitably produces closed, authoritarian societies.

Soros has repurposed the label to advance a grand project of engineered demographic transformation.

Through mass immigration, multiculturalism as official policy, and diversity mandates that prioritize group identity over individual merit and assimilation, his foundations actively dissolve the cultural continuity and social trust that make rational criticism and incremental change possible.

Popper understood that openness requires a stable framework, a shared language of reason, basic cohesion, and institutions citizens feel they collectively own.
Soros treats those foundations as obstacles to be overcome in the name of an abstract, borderless openness.

The concrete results are visible. Parallel societies that operate under different norms, public spaces where debate on the scale and selection of immigration is treated as illegitimate, and the rise of identity based hierarchies that close off dissent in the name of equity.

These are certainly not expansions of the open society, but new forms of closure, tribal in character, enforced through institutional capture rather than overt dictatorship, yet hostile to the very critical spirit Popper placed at the center of civilized life.

Philosophically, Soros replaces Popper’s falsification and humility before reality with a new historicism, the conviction that global multiculturalism and open borders represent inevitable moral progress, and that resistance from actual existing communities constitutes the new enemy.

The machinery funded in the name of openness does not test its own assumptions against evidence, it suppresses the questions.

Those who still value the ideal of an open society should read Popper on their own terms.
They will find that Soros has not extended the open society, but has supplied its most sophisticated contemporary enemies.

[Nico Lagan @RealNicoLagan]

Canada's New Social Media Ban is NOT About Your Children | Here's What They're NOT Telling You

Canada just announced the Digital Safety Act — a social media ban for anyone under 16.

Most Canadians think this is about protecting children. It isn't.

To enforce a social media ban, every single Canadian will have to prove their age by attaching government-approved ID to their social media accounts. That's not child protection. That's a digital ID.

And once you're verified on one platform, that verification follows you everywhere — linking every account you own under your real identity.

But it gets worse.

This isn't a standalone policy. This is the missing piece that connects Bill C-9, C-22 and C-8 into a complete surveillance and censorship system.

Bill C-9 defines what you can and cannot say online. Bill C-22 forces platforms to save your data for up to one year. Bill C-8 gives the government the power to cut you off the internet entirely.

The digital ID created by this social media ban is what connects all three.

And they're selling it to you as child protection.

Don't be fooled. All these bills are interconnected — and this is the last piece of the puzzle.

https://t.co/8fky3EXQmF

[MindPatternHQ⚜️ @MindPatternHQ]

Jung said:

«What you resist not only persists,

but controls your life from the shadows.»

Most people pretend they want less

because wanting more feels dangerous.

Thus the mind remains divided.

[Jesse Michels @AlchemyAmerican]

🚨BREAKING: A cognitive scientist from MIT has mathematically proven that evolution guarantees we see zero percent of true reality, that most consciousness in the universe exists without a body, and that non-human intelligences with a wider window on reality than ours can reach in and manipulate it the way a programmer manipulates a video game.

Donald Hoffman (@donalddhoffman) is a cognitive scientist at UC Irvine who has spent 40 years building a mathematical theory of the observer. His work was cited by John Wheeler in the "It From Bit" paper. He studied under Marvin Minsky at MIT, spent two decades secretly meeting with Francis Crick to study consciousness, and has nine specific mathematical conjectures on the table that would derive general relativity, quantum field theory and the Big Bang from a single framework. The top high-energy physicists in the world, Nima Arkani-Hamed and Nobel laureate David Gross, are already saying spacetime is doomed. Hoffman thinks he knows what replaces it.

This interview is the first time he has publicly laid out what his mathematical model explains about alien life, embodiment and the structure of reality.

It already derives time dilation and quantum wave functions directly from differences in observer window size. Physics has spent a century failing to solve the measurement problem because it has been looking in the wrong place. The observer has to come first, and no physicalist framework can get you there.

A consciousness with a larger observer window has access to the underlying structure of our reality in ways we can't perceive or counter. A craft going Mach 40 instantaneously in our headset could be a leisurely maneuver in theirs.

The implications for UAP and alien life are immense.
Embodiment, being locked into a body with fingers and toes as your only interface with the world, is a probability zero anomaly in the full space of possible minds. He also says current large language models are dumber than cucumbers. His new framework, the recursive trace logic, is a completely different architecture, and some of the biggest names in frontier AI have already come to him about it.

The framework has no ceiling, and the implication is a single unified consciousness exploring itself through an unbounded number of perspectives, each one capable of waking up.

Death, in this framework, is just the closing of an icon on the desktop.

Full conversation is live now.

[Founder Mode @Founder_Mode_]

Rick Rubin on why "less is more" is harder than it sounds:

"If you're stacking a lot of things on top of each other, each one of those things becomes less important. So if you have 10 things, each one of them is one-tenth as important as one by itself."

That's why reducing is harder than building.

Rick explains: "If you're making something and you want the least amount involved, those things have to be really critically curated because they're doing the work of everything and nothing is hidden."

Then he gives the example that makes the whole idea land... Guitars.

"A lot of recordings are made where a guitarist plays and then they double it and triple it and they create this wall of guitars. And when there's a wall of guitars, you hear guitar, but you don't hear someone playing guitar. You just hear guitar. It becomes more generic."

The alternative is the version most producers won't commit to:

"When one person plays it and you can hear their fingers on the strings, it's got more personality, it's more human. And I tend to look for those things where the singular essence shows through."

The lesson sits underneath almost everything Rick has made.

Stacking is safer. Doubling and tripling hides the player, smooths the edges, and lets you avoid choosing.

But it also strips out the thing that makes the work feel like it came from a specific human being.

The personality lives in the parts you can hear fingers on, the parts that weren't covered up.

Less is more, but only if you're willing to do the harder work of curating ruthlessly enough that every remaining element earns its place.

[Chuck Bathurst @chucksb]

@DangerousThinkg Things that make you go hmmmm

[The Carney Files 🇨🇦 | Sourced @TheCarneyFiles]

Jason, you’ve been on this longer than most, but don’t you think it’s time ALL Canadians to be looped in? 👀

Let me break this down in plain English so EVERYONE can understand what’s happening to their money 🇨🇦

Here are the bills being passed by your government — and what in means for you:

📜 Bill S-206 — a national framework for Universal Basic Income for every Canadian over 17.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer estimates the gross cost: $107 billion.

Canada's total federal liabilities are already at $2.182 trillion. Per-person federal debt: $56,432.

Canada's finances have deteriorated faster than any other G7 country.

So where does the money come from?

📜 Bill C-15 gives the Bank of Canada regulatory control over every stablecoin issuer in the country.

📜 Bill C-22 forces telecom and internet providers to store metadata on every Canadian for up to a year. No warrant required.

📜 Bill C-8 lets a single minister cut off your phone and internet — no judge, no trial, no notice.

Digital money + digital surveillance + digital kill switch.

Three separate bills. One architecture.

🇨🇦 And the man pushing all of it through Parliament will personally choose the next Governor General — the only person who signs these bills into law.

Every claim sourced. All on the public record. 🧾

We give Canadians the receipts they haven't seen yet.

Follow if you think the government needs to be held accountable 🇨🇦 🫡

[Julian Assange @ImJulianAssange]

Canada Says Its Gold Is Traceable and Clean. So We Traced It.
We ended up in a Colombian mine controlled by a drug cartel.

https://t.co/842QN5mWJe