🇨🇦 Derek

STEM, astronomy, horticulture, photography, media survival, abbreviations, INPO

[🇨🇦 Derek @otpbdh]

Reuters: Rare earth metals "export controls cover all countries, not just US".

China hits back at US tariffs with export controls on key rare earths https://t.co/F74oXzLK5R

[Amber Mac @ambermac]

This #Ontario obsession with alcohol everywhere is a bit much amid so many more serious issues like healthcare and education.

What's next? We change our license plate slogan from A Place to Grow to A Place to Drink.

[🇨🇦 Derek @otpbdh]

West Ottawa, just felt an earthquake about 12:37 lasting about 10 seconds. Wall and table shaking but pretty minor. @BlacksWeather

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

USA – Just Another Country Every Ally Gone. Every Bridge Burned.

For decades, the alliance had a problem member. Everyone knew it. The country that invaded Iraq on a lie, tanked the global economy in 2008, and elected its own demolition crew in 2016 and again in 2025. The others adjusted. Covered for it. Kept showing up. You don't abandon a friend just because he occasionally drives into a ditch. You wait until he drives into yours.

Then Trump made it simple. The friend who had always been difficult had finally done something unforgivable. The room went quiet. And then everyone moved on.

America was never strong alone. It was strong because it sat at the center of the most sophisticated network of power ever assembled. British diplomats carrying influence into Canberra and Wellington. French connections opening doors across Africa and the Middle East. Norwegian and Greek shipping moving a third of the world's cargo. German engineering. Japanese capital. South Korean semiconductors. Canadian stability. Australian intelligence. Dutch and Belgian ports as the gateway to 750 million consumers. Danish and Italian naval presence across two seas.

Every one of them a multiplier, lifting Washington into rooms it could never have entered alone. It was not one football team. It was hundreds of teams, running the same plays, on every field, simultaneously. Trump dismantled it the way a bored child dismantles a Lego set. Not to build something else. Just to watch the pieces fall.

What is left is 340 million people staring across the Pacific at 1.4 billion. China did not need to do anything during the Iran war. It watched. It waited. It took notes. While Washington burned its relationships one by one, Beijing made calls, signed deals, and let the silence do the work. Silence, it turns out, is a remarkably effective foreign policy.

The allies are not mourning. They are discovering something they perhaps always suspected: that Washington was often the ceiling, not the floor. The ally that needed managing. The friend whose chaos you had to absorb before you could get anything done. Turns out the meeting goes faster when he's not in the room.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said it plainly: "The old relationship we had with the United States is over. It's clear the US is no longer a reliable partner." At Davos he told world leaders the scaffold of American power was being abandoned. "Friends," he said, "it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down."

Germany said the war had nothing to do with NATO. France blocked arms flights. Spain closed its airspace. Italy denied landing rights. Poland kept its missile batteries home. Kallas delivered the European verdict: "This is not Europe's war. No one wants to actively get involved." Which, translated from diplomat into English, means: absolutely not.

Starmer condemned "regime change from the skies." Sanchez accused Washington of playing "Russian roulette with the destiny of millions." Macron said: "When we want to be serious, we don't say each day the opposite of what we said the day before." Coming from a Frenchman, that is essentially a controlled demolition.

These are the countries that sent their sons to the Gulf in 1991. That stood in line at NATO headquarters on September 12, 2001. They know what the alliance was. They have decided, with remarkable calm, that they are better off without the version currently on offer.
This is what it looks like when an alliance leaves one of its own members behind.

Professor Robert Pape put the result plainly: "Iran is far stronger than it was 40 days ago. It is in control of 20 percent of the world's oil. It is now an emerging fourth center of power." Washington went to war to prevent exactly this outcome. It succeeded, just not in the way it intended.

One country launched a war alone, begged Pakistan to broker peace talks, and came home empty-handed.

French Senator Claude Malhuret said it on the floor of the French Senate, viewed millions of times across the world: "Washington has become Nero's court, with an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers and a buffoon on ketamine in charge of purging the civil service." Americans flooded his inbox asking why it had to be a French politician to say what nobody in Washington would.

A year later he corrected himself. Nero's court was too dignified. "I was wrong. It is the Court of Miracles." A medieval Parisian slum where criminals and thieves pretended to be something they were not. He listed the cabinet: an anti-vaxxer and former heroin addict as Secretary of Health, a climate denier running environmental policy, an alcoholic television host handed the world's most powerful military, a Qatari lobbyist as Attorney General, a Putin admirer as National Security Advisor. Then he cited a Turkish proverb: "When a clown moves into a palace, he does not become king. The palace becomes a circus."

Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Trump had Truth Social and a golf cart. He posted images of himself as Jesus on Easter Sunday, then deleted them before breakfast. Threatened to erase "a whole civilization," then teed off by Monday morning. At least Nero stayed in Rome.

A country so institutionally broken that it took a French senator to say out loud what every American already knew. Congress watched. The Republicans said nothing, because nothing pays better than silence. The Democrats couldn't find their spine. The entire apparatus of the world's oldest democracy stood on the sidelines while one man helped himself to powers the constitution told him he couldn't have.

Either everyone in that building has decided this is perfectly fine. Or they've concluded it's already too late.

Either way, the word for that is not democracy.

The White House became the circus.

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

Too on point not to share, “Aussie reply to Trump rant about NATO not being there for us.

Mate. You run a country with 600,000 homeless people sleeping on the street tonight. A country where 40% of adults can't cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money. A country where insulin costs more than a car payment and people are rationing it to survive. A country where medical debt is the number 1 cause of bankruptcy. A country where women are dying in hospital car parks because doctors are too scared of abortion laws to treat a miscarriage.
You lock up more of your own citizens than any nation on earth. More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea. The land of the free has 2 million people in cages, and a quarter of them haven't even been convicted of anything. They're just too poor to make bail.
Your life expectancy is going backwards. You're the only developed nation where that's happening. Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba's. Your kids do active shooter drills between maths and English while you sell the gunmaker's stock to your mates.
Your minimum wage hasn't moved in 15 years. You've got teachers working 2 jobs and veterans sleeping under bridges and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that didn't attack you.
And you’ve got a convicted felon, adjudicating raping, paedophile protecting, porn star shagging insurrectionist running the biggest dumpster fire war campaign since the Taliban thanked you very much for losing again.
And you're calling Greenland poorly run?
Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world. Nobody goes bankrupt there because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because their insurance said no.
"NATO wasn't there when we needed them." When exactly was that, champ? September 11? Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU. Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU. Australia wasn't even in NATO and we still showed up. For 20 years.
And you pulled out at 2am without telling anyone and left them to deal with the mess.
So maybe before you start calling other countries poorly run, have a look at your own backyard, you spray-tanned aluminium siding salesman. The only thing poorly run in this picture is your fucking mouth. Credit (borrowed from) Jim Scroggins - original author 📷 unknown”

[Ron Filipkowski @RonFilipkowski]

So far, Vance’s foreign policy record is yelling at Zelensky for not thanking Trump enough, campaigning for AfD in Germany and Orban in Hungary, getting rejected by the Pope on his invite to the US, and failing in the Iran negotiations.

[Jo @JoJoFromJerz]

This is an absolutely INSANE thing to say out loud. We killed their leaders in the middle of negotiations because we didn’t like the way they negotiated?!?!

[🇨🇦 Derek @otpbdh]

AWACS aircraft 81-0005 flew over Ottawa, Canada September 16, 2025. This same aircraft was recently destroyed at the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia during a missile and drone attack. @karenmccrimmon

Aircraft track screenshot from @flightradar24.

[🇨🇦 Derek @otpbdh]

This, now destroyed E-3G Sentry AWACS aircraft, registration 81-0005 has an Ottawa connection, making a flyby visit last September 16, 2025. According to Air & Space Forces Magazine, multiple services members were injured in the March 27 missile and drone attack in Saudi Arabia.

[🇨🇦 Derek @otpbdh]

This, now destroyed E-3G Sentry AWACS aircraft, registration 81-0005 has an Ottawa connection, making a flyby visit last September 16, 2025. According to Air & Space Forces Magazine, multiple services members were injured in the March 27 missile and drone attack in Saudi Arabia.

[OSINTdefender @sentdefender]

Pictures show the total loss of 81-0005, an E-3G “Sentry” Airborne Early Warning and Control (AEW&C) Aircraft with the U.S. Air Force’s 552nd Air Control Wing based out of Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma, following yesterday’s Iranian ballistic missile and drone attack on Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. The strike appears to have purposefully targeted the most important part of the E-3, that being rear of the aircraft which holds its rotating radar dome, containing several sensitive instruments including antennas for the E-3’s AN/APY-2 Surveillance Radar System.

[OSINTdefender @sentdefender]

Pictures show the total loss of 81-0005, an E-3G “Sentry” Airborne Early Warning and Control (AEW&C) Aircraft with the U.S. Air Force’s 552nd Air Control Wing based out of Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma, following yesterday’s Iranian ballistic missile and drone attack on Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. The strike appears to have purposefully targeted the most important part of the E-3, that being rear of the aircraft which holds its rotating radar dome, containing several sensitive instruments including antennas for the E-3’s AN/APY-2 Surveillance Radar System.

[Karen McCrimmon @karenmccrimmon]

This is an important thread. Thank you @JohnPasalis

[Ted Hsu @tedhsu]

Shredded. Redacted. Deleted.

Over the past year, @fordnation has kept MPPs away from Queen's Park, cut debate short on key legislation, passed a bill which allows the government to override any law without guardrails, gave your money to his insiders, and taken over school boards. Now his proposed changes to freedom of information laws will make sure his secrets stay hidden.

This isn’t what democracy should look like. Don’t let Doug Ford convince you it is.

[Gianl1974 @Gianl1974]

You see folks, as far as I can tell, from the outside, this is what it looks like: America has elected a man who talks and behaves like a megalomaniac, and the rest of the planet is supposed to just trust that he won’t completely lose his grip on reality and drag us all into catastrophe.

You want to steal Greenland.
You want Cuba to “make a deal before it’s too late”.
You talk about bombing or invading Mexico.
You kidnap a President and knock off the peoples oil in Venezuela.
You joke about annexing Canada like it should be a shopping centre car park you can just claim because you feel like it.

Do you have any idea how insane that sounds to the rest of us?

This isn’t tough talk. This isn’t strategy. This is a deeply unstable old man threatening sovereign nations like he’s flipping over a Monopoly board because he’s losing. This is not normal behaviour. This is not leadership. This is not strength. This is a walking, talking international crisis.

And Americans, this is where it comes back to you. Not just MAGA, not just the people who voted for him, all of you. Because when the President of the United States starts talking about kidnapping leaders, annexing countries, and issuing ultimatums like a mob boss, the rest of the world doesn’t get a vote. We just get the consequences.

You don’t get to shrug and say, “Well I didn’t vote for him.” That might fly at a dinner party, but it doesn’t fly when nuclear powers are watching this circus and recalculating their own red lines. This is your system. Your presidency. Your responsibility.

From the outside, it looks like America lit the fuse and then wandered off while everyone else stands around the bomb wondering who’s going to cut the wire.

And let’s be brutally honest. This man is nearly 80. He’s frail. He’s clearly deteriorating. He is not some long term visionary playing chess. He’s at the end of his lifespan and acting like nothing matters after him. That is the most dangerous type of leader there is. A man with nothing to lose and an ego that demands constant feeding.

Why should the rest of the world pay for that?

Why should families in Europe, Asia, Australia, South America, anywhere, have to worry about war, trade collapse, energy shocks, or global instability because America couldn’t get its own house in order?

This is not about left or right anymore. This is about basic sanity. This is about stopping a psychopath before he does something irreversible. Because once a war starts, once a country gets invaded, once alliances fracture beyond repair, you don’t get a reset button.

So yes, this falls on Americans. You got the world into this mess, and you damn well better roll your sleeves up and get us out of it. Impeach him. Remove him. Contain him. Do whatever your system allows, but do it fast.

Because the rest of us just want to live our lives, raise our families, pay our bills, and not wake up one morning to find out World War Three started because an unhinged old man wanted to feel powerful one last time.

This isn’t funny anymore.
It isn’t theatrical.
It isn’t tolerable.

Get this lunatic under wraps before he ruins it for everyone.

[Flavio E. @FlavioEvan]

Ok @PierrePoilievre, since you like stories, let's recap: The facts clearly show massive, active investments across the North, including specific operational hubs in Whitehorse, Yukon. We can look past the online rage bait and examine the real details of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s comprehensive Arctic plan.

🇨🇦 SECURING CANADA’S ARCTIC: A NEW ERA OF ACTION 🇨🇦

Both Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau failed to secure Canada’s Arctic and modernize NORAD.

❌ Stephen Harper promised three heavy armed icebreakers and a deepwater naval port at Nanisivik. He ultimately scrapped the ships and downgraded the port to a seasonal refueling station.

✅ Justin Trudeau announced a $38.6 billion NORAD commitment in June 2022. ❌ He spread this funding over a massive 20 YEARS period, severely delaying immediate, concrete action.

Prime Minister Mark Carney is treating Arctic security with the seriousness it requires. In his first weeks in office, his government immediately expended $6.5 billion to advance the Arctic Over the Horizon Radar system.

On March 12, 2026, Carney announced the immediate deployment blueprint for the remaining $35 billion from the 2022 NORAD pool:

• $32B for military base upgrades in Yellowknife, Inuvik, Iqaluit, and Goose Bay.

• $2.67B for Northern Operational Support Hubs in locations like Whitehorse and Resolute.

🚧 New 2026 Real Initiatives

Carney also announced new civilian and dual use infrastructure projects. The Major Projects Office will fast track these initiatives to accelerate construction:

• Mackenzie Valley Highway: Construction begins this summer to connect Wrigley to Inuvik.

• Grays Bay Road and Port: A 230 km all season road and new deepwater port in Nunavut.

• Arctic Economic and Security Corridor: A 400 km all season road through the Slave Geological Province.

• Taltson Hydro Expansion: Adding 60 megawatts to double NWT hydro capacity.

• Civilian Airport Upgrades: $294 million for the Rankin Inlet and Inuvik airports.

📈 Combined Total Investments

These combined commitments represent nearly $49 billion in active, rolling investments for Northern security and infrastructure.

#cdnpoli #ArcticDefence #NORAD #NorthernCanada #Infrastructure #Yukon

******
Sources:

• Department of National Defence: Canada's NORAD Modernization Plan Framework (June 2022).

• Prime Minister's Office: Official Press Release on Arctic Defence and Infrastructure Blueprint (March 12, 2026).

• Major Projects Office: 2026 Northern Infrastructure Fast Track Initiatives.

• Parliamentary Budget Officer / Historical Defence Reports: Status of Nanisivik Naval Facility and Polar Icebreaker Procurement (Harper Era records).

[Chris Murphy 🟧 @ChrisMurphyCT]

It’s crystal clear now that Trump has lost control of this war. He badly misjudged Iran’s ability to retaliate. The region is on fire.

1/ I’m going to explain to you in this🧵what I’ve learned - in part from closed door briefings - about the four biggest current crises.

[Marlee Matlin @MarleeMatlin]

Our film, CODA, came to the attention of everyone because of Sundance. And Sundance happened because of Robert Redford. A genius has passed. RIP Robert.

[Raphael Rashid @koryodynasty]

1/ A repatriated Korean worker from the Hyundai-LG battery factory secretly wrote a detention diary about their 7-day experience in ICE custody in Georgia. The worker says ICE officers mocked them with words like as "North Korea" and "Rocket Man" despite holding a business visa.

[Barry Hunt @BarryHunt008]

Good News!

Canadian Standards Association (CSA) has called for universal respirator use in healthcare settings & when performing patient care outside of healthcare settings (eg – in the home) in the latest edition of CSA Z94.4, Selection, use and care of filtering respirators.

[Peggy Blair @peggy_blair]

Here is a reality check about what Canadian authors actually earn and about the Canadian publishing industry because I think the public has some huge misconceptions about what even a bestseller means. 1/

[🇨🇦 Derek @otpbdh]

@BlacksWeather It was exciting to see this lenticular-type cloud form briefly around 6:30 pm over Ottawa. Hope you had a great Canada Day.

[🇨🇦 Derek @otpbdh]

Doug Ford operates similarly.

[😱 Scary Larry 😱 🇺🇦✊🏻🇺🇸🗽 @aintscarylarry]

This video is the best explanation of how the MAGA cult came into being that I’ve ever seen. Watch every second of it.