[Other voices:] The Terrorists of Khalistan: Canadian Politicians Are Still Dancing with the Ghosts of this Independence Movement.

The first few minutes of this video are, admittedly, rather boring, however, if you either fast forward or endure, the ensuing anecdotes about daily life during the period of the insurgency (circa 1988 to 1993) are extremely important and interesting.

He explicitly compares the effects of the social control exerted by "the men with AK-47s" to the Taliban, e.g., threatening (and later shooting) a school teacher to try to compel the female students to wear more conservative uniforms (although the style of dress reflects a Sikh tradition, in this case, rather than an Islamic one).

The extent of the ignorance of Canadian politicians in getting entangled with the Khalistan independence movement is unproven and unknown —and I do not here mean the politicians of any one party only, but all Canadian politicians in general since 1984. The attitudes of those who were not ignorant may be more difficult to understand than those who were.

LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6mm-woNAy8

I note for the record that the original title of the video I'm linking to was, Row over Diljit Dosanjh’s Satluj, Khalra, and the bloodied years that took Punjab there[.] This is an unbelievably boring title that likely would have led to the video being ignored.  

[Other voices:] The Demographics of the Deficit: America's Aging Population and Impending (Public Sector) Bankruptcy.

IMO, you can start playing the tape right around the ten minute mark: the preamble about America's "remarkable experiment" bringing "freedom to the world" for "a quarter millennium" is difficult to endure, not to mention the anecdote about his adopted son, but he proceeds to make some important points about "basic math" (in his own idiom) soon thereafter.

This is David Schweikert of Arizona. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Schweikert

Despite claims about tax cuts, he argues, the percentage of the economy harnessed by taxation has not declined: the debt crisis is caused, on the one hand, by excess spending but, on the other, by excessive numbers of the elderly and the declining numbers of the young —his emphasis on this latter point is rare.

[11:10] Next year, we're going to have fewer under 18 than we had 20 years ago, and double the number [of people] 65 and up, but are we allowed to actually say that?  It's not personal!  It's not actually [a matter of] Democrat [vs] Republican, it's just math!

LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMzESl-J6Mc 

MKULTRA: the Tyranny of Scientific Certainty.

LINK: https://youtu.be/szOiGOziFRA

Aaaaaaaand here's the link to MKULTRA hearing from a few days ago in the American House of Congress, i.e., the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, specifically: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpQulJS-R50

Writing comedy is for intellectuals pretending to be idiots: stupid people shouldn't even try.

I will make an effort to avoid posting each and every "short" as a Patreon update…

…this one is only two minutes long…

however, in this case, I'm aware that most people will see the video without seeing the title (if they see it at all) on youtube.

The title, alas, is an important part of the package here.

LINK: https://youtube.com/shorts/PEIeAqu-a4Y

Vegans: We Lost the War.

I'm not anti-immigration: I'm anti-religion. #nihilism

This video is under three minutes long (and is therefore "a short", in Youtube's hierarchy of categories) but it occurs to me that I should post is here, separately, in part because it directly pertains to the informal article I wrote a few days ago, And, in politics, when men become tired of talking they become dangerous.

LINK: https://youtube.com/shorts/28xHVEoUoc4

The same video was posted to my Monolingual Polyglot channel under a significantly different title: there are over 100,000 muslims living in the city of Helsinki alone, perhaps 140,000 in Finland as a whole. There are certainly more than 15,000 speakers of Somali languages in Finland now; I cannot find a source for the claim that this number exceeds 23,000 or 28,000 —but these claims are bandied about the internet. The future of Islam in Finland is now an extremely contentious question but —of course— I am not willing to counterpose Christianity to Islam, I am instead trying to clearly counterpose atheism to all religions.

And this was discussed at greater length in my video Islamophobia is Doomed: the Critique of Mass Deportation as a Moral Cause.

Talking to Josh Menchions: a productive area of negotiations.

This linked-to article, here, will give you some sense of why nobody wants "to stand up to" this guy, no matter how despicable he may be, no matter how many enemies his defamation campaigns (and his "career" of petty conniving against comedians) may earn him: although his comedy constantly addresses the fact that he's an object of pity, he doesn't realize that this same pity conceals the extent to which he's despised. Or, at least, it allows him to deceive himself: he is, in fact, a rare example of someone far more hated than I. And for worse reasons, of course.

I was not exaggerating when I said that people warned me about him on the very first day that I arrived in this city, and I am not exaggerating when I say that other comedians told me that Josh had made their lives miserable, however, they are all willing to suffer in silence while this guy plays his self-appointed role as the king of comedy. And, again, we all know why: pity, a slow poison endured by both the poisoner and the poisoned.

—————

Dude, you should hear Melissa's side of the story.

Chris gets on stage and says terrible things about his ex-wife.

You never hear his ex-wife's perspective.

Chris isn't banned from the club.

Luke makes jokes about his ex-girlfriend.

You never hear his ex-girlfriend's perspective.

Luke isn't banned from the club.

You've banned me from these two clubs because of a story you made up in your own head, and it just isn't true.

Melissa doesn't blame me: Melissa doesn't think I did anything wrong.  And she uploaded both YouTube videos in which she's speaking alone,

and also YouTube videos in which she's talking to me, AFTER the breakup.

I don't think Chris or Luke (or Mav) are gonna do a podcast with their ex-girlfriends the way I did, bro.

E.M.

—————

[I am omitting his reply, out of some strange sense of chivalry.]

—————

Okay, cool:

problem solved.

If that's your story, there's clearly no reason for any hostility or conflict between us.

See you tonight at the club.

E.M.

—————

[Again, I am omitting his replies here. It should be intuitively obvious that they contributed very little to the conversation.]

—————

So what do you wanna do tonight?

You want to drink a cup of coffee sitting at the same table and actually get to know me?

Or do you wanna act like we're enemies for no reason at all?

Yeah, dude, I've had positive feedback from many comedians who appreciated my filming short clips of them: they say things like, "Oh, great, can you send that to me, I'm gonna post it on my Instagram?"

Some asked me if I'd captured a good moment of them after a set.

Many comedians here actually do regard filming from the audience positively, and they've told me this: they like the fact that they'll get free promotion and reach a few more viewers.

If you have a house policy that nobody should be filming, fine: I'll put the camera away, and it's done.  No reason for any conflict.

Nobody has ever said that to me before, but I can totally understand the policy: if you don't want people to have their phones out, let them know, or let me know, and I'll follow the rules.

You've never said that to me before, but now, all of a sudden, it's an excuse to ban me.

You and I have no reason to be enemies: I don't think you're stupid enough to believe stories made up about me and my ex-girlfriend, Melissa...

when (1) you've met Melissa, and (2) you can hear her attitude in any podcast or video, any time (unlike Chris's ex-wife, unlike Luke's ex-girlfriend).

You're creating a conflict out of nothing.

E.M.

Esoteric. Occult. Even spiritual. Nihilism.

This was stated in response to my newly minted maxim, "But there are no lessons of history. There is only history."

Cf. "What I do is esoteric: I don't explain anything to anyone." https://a-bas-le-ciel.blogspot.com/2026/06/what-i-do-is-esoteric-i-dont-explain.html

And, in politics, when men become tired of talking they become dangerous.

Many years ago I observed that Joe Biden's policies, once elected, could be described as "Hyper-Trumpian" (or, perhaps, as "Hyper-Trumpism") —and we now see a similar pattern amongst the opponents of Donald Trump in Canada. Under several different headings, Canadians are implementing policies that are more Trumpian than Trump himself.

You may well say, "Canada has not yet had dead bodies in the street as a result of immigration raids, as the Americans had in Minneapolis." Indeed, not yet. The removal of "more than one million Indians" from a country the size of Canada could entail many brutal episodes of the Minneapolis sort. Or, instead, there may be no expulsions at all, entailing a different kind of scandal.

How we ended up with the headline number being one million rather than two million, I cannot say: "According to data from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada or IRCC approximately 1,053,000 work permits expired by the end of 2025 and another 927,000 will do so in 2026." [I am quoting Anirudh Bhattacharyya, as published in the Hindustan Times, Dec 31, 2025.] Perhaps the reasoning behind using one million as a round number is that roughly half of these two million immigrants are migrants from India, specifically?

The actual numbers of people being expelled are rather smaller: 1,712 Indian citizens were deported from Canada in the first three months of 2026, reportedly. This is in the context of an overall decline in the country's population of 55,000 during the same three months, reportedly attributable to both these declining numbers of immigrants and also the inclement contrast between the number of births and the number of deaths this year.

If we set aside distinctions of mere rhetoric and rationalization, what is the difference between current Canadian and American policies on ecology and the environment? On the gas and oil industry? And, finally, on the topic of immigration?

The consequences of what Canada is now doing under these (Trumpian) headings are immediately palpable.  Many, many other promises will remain as abstractions on a chalkboard for decades —perhaps forever.  Immigration may not seem like an important policy in principle, but its importance is exaggerated in practice because so many other political principles have no practice at all.

Here is the National Post presenting you with a series of salient graphs and statistics: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/canada-immigration-data

I am not the sort of imbecile to say, "This is the meaning of the word Liberal, therefore, if your party is called the Liberal Party, this is what your political promises and policies must be." I am a nihilist who sees in words something less than an imperfect tool made to imprecisely express culturally conditioned meanings —less, not more. And, unlike Plato, I cannot imagine anything profound in the gap between the imperfect use of words and our supposedly perfect intended meanings: I find nothing there to be believed in. However, the meaning of the word Liberal has now changed —suddenly— for reasons that nobody is willing to talk about. And, in politics, when men become tired of talking they become dangerous.

Is Bad Writing Better than No Writing at All?

Link to the video on my (still obscure!) creative writing channel, From Ink to Inc. = https://youtu.be/9hBxBy1nnQs

Link to the video on my (still obscure!) autobiographical channel, à-bas-le-ciel = https://youtu.be/aVUpaEKRwsw

House of the Dragon Season 3, Episode 2. Yes, that's William Shakespeare in the thumbnail. You're lucky I didn't include Seneca. #hotd #asoiaf #hotdseason3 #season3 #s3 #grrm #gameofthrones For those who don't know, "ASOIAF" = A Song of Ice and Fire, a broader category (of books) that includes both House of the Dragon and Game of Thrones.