Pretendian Politics: Thomas King v Jesse Wente.

With supporting roles for Michelle Latimer, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond and Buffy Sainte-Marie.

LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ1gF8sLIyU

This is one hour long so, naturally, it will be shared both on youtube and also as a podcast.

The Politics of Pretendian-ism Continue in Canada: Thomas King.

The last time I mentioned this (on Patreon) feels like a very, very long time ago.

"From 1997 to 2000, King wrote and acted in a CBC radio show, The Dead Dog Café Comedy Hour…" —it is really impossible for any of you to imagine how influential this was (1) for the Cree people and (2) for the tiny minority of white people who cared about the fate of the Cree people and their language at that time.

Radio itself, as a medium, doesn't matter in the same way anymore, but in 1997 it hadn't yet been devoured by the internet. And, of course, the very nature of that medium entailed that I knew Thomas King by his voice, only, and I never saw his face.

That show explicitly addressed the extent to which King was an outsider who struggled to find a foothold in Cree culture, in contrast to Jasper Friendly Bear and Gracie Heavy Hand, who were insouciant in their self-confidence —and who spoke English with the indescribable Cree accent that many pretendians (including Buffy Sainte-Marie) have tried (and failed) to imitate. He was presented as an indigenous person who had the advantages and disadvantages of an urban education, having assimilated into English-speaking culture and lost touch with what had presumably been —at some earlier stage— his own culture. I do not recall hearing an episode in which he discussed being (ostensibly) Cherokee rather than Cree, but I did not hear every episode, and my recollection may be imperfect.

The show was both implicitly and explicitly politically provocative, while being genuinely comedic —and, above all, warm. It was a rare example of warm, well-intentioned comedy, in an era of mean-spirited (and largely self-indulgent) satire.

The recordings of that radio show are a huge percentage of "the literature" worth talking about: it was certainly more politically significant than Wapos Bay.

Here's APTN covering the news in 5 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BynoyTD6u6w

And APTN discussing it in a roundtable format for 14 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NPiX6SJvD4

———Appendix A———

Michelle Latimer —also a proven pretendian— worked with Thomas King on the following film and —I observe— the two have offered closely parallel excuses for their pretendianism (claiming —implausibly— that they didn't lie themselves but were merely misled by lies told to them by their own parents).  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inconvenient_Indian

…aaaaaand you can see Michelle Latimer weeping on stage while dramatically making false claims about her own culture, politics and ancestry starting nine minutes and thirty seconds into THIS video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHEl-A8_2Gk

[Other voices:] Little do they realize, when the freak show is over, there will be no show at all.

The wording, in the book, is, in fact:

The younger generation celebrates the mainstreaming of the movement, failing to realize: when veganism ceases to be a freak show, it ceases to be a show at all.

I have also described this as a kind of "game show", luring in contestants just to humiliate them on camera.

There has been less and less interest in veganism for many years now, with this genre being "the sole surviving genre" of (formerly diverse, fractious and fragmentary) vegan edutainment. I cannot say that this sort of thing is popular, but there's a lot of it.

Here is "The Militant Vegan", trying to succeed playing the same game by the same rules:

https://www.youtube.com/@themilitantvegan/videos

Both of these examples happen to be women making money out of their physical appearance via internet pornography. This is a recurrent pattern (as I've observed and discussed many times) with important political implications.

Guillotines, like blue jeans, never entirely go out of fashion.

"Under the Paris Agreement [signed in 2016], Canada committed to reduce GHG emissions by 40% to 45% below 2005 levels by 2030…"

And, now, behold the chart:

https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services/environmental-indicators/greenhouse-gas-emissions.html

The measurement of megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent decreased from 747 to 682 during the Coronavirus lockdown period, approximately, and then rebounded only part of the way to the 694-to-700 range. It is impossible to say that any ecological improvement was achieved from 2005 to 2019.

Now, I ask you: is it credible to imagine that these numbers will drastically change from 2026 to 2030?

759 x 0.6 = 455 megatonnes carbon dioxide equivalent, scil. a decrease of 40% since 2005.

Of course, even if this were suddenly achieved during calendar year 2029, the total amount of carbon in the atmosphere produced during all the years leading up to 2029 would remain a problem: we're not talking about diet and weight loss here, the pollution is cumulative.

The outcomes of COP30: have you ever heard anyone even bother to criticize them?

https://www.canada.ca/en/services/environment/weather/climatechange/canada-international-action/un-climate-change-conference/cop30-summit/summary-outcomes.html

Not a single one of my viewers or listeners has asked me to comment on (or critique) the outcomes of this conference. Understandably: nobody cares.

Carbon credits are a profoundly flawed paradigm that was already tried and already failed: they were obviously flawed from the first stage of design, and only became more flawed in the process of execution, as even an imbecile like George Monbiot could figure out.

Here we are in the last few days of 2025, reading that our eminently qualified government experts still believe in "high-integrity carbon credits and increas[ing] private investment in greenhouse gas mitigation".

I will walk again… BUT IN THE MEANTIME…

The few of you who know me personally have heard me saying, again and again, "Okay, I'm leaving the first gym and I'm walking to the other gym now…" —because I was going to the gym twice a day, and I felt I'd benefit from walking in-between the two gyms. I had a period of intense exercise both before and after the surgery.

Alas, I've now had a period of time of barely being able to walk to the grocery store, and a few days (here and there) of not being able to walk at all.

Anyway, yeah, I am making the completion of the second edition of No More Manifestos my top priority… but you can also see the depth of depravity I've sunken into with both book collecting and retro video games, on my other channel…

Behold the semi-satirical masterpiece, entitled, I've got $250 to burn AND I'M ALL OUT OF MATCHES.

LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65icWhac2Co

A man should be worth more than the principles he's preached.

 Torn from the comment section.

Noam Chomsky is in Epstein's Emails for the Same Damn Reason as Donald Trump.

LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1_uwYGgbwA

You can't blame me for being ahead of my time. You can hate me, sure… but you can't blame me. ;-)

(The first minute is new… and it is only four minutes long.)

Katie Johnson Lost Her Virginity with Donald Trump.

This is a remix and re-upload with a significantly new introduction added on in the first two minutes: this one was uploaded on Nov. 15th, 2025, that one on Nov. 4th, 2020.  Five years later, and still it's news.

LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyCcD41fpKI

The sequel to this video, recorded and uploaded Nov. 17th, 2025, follows "below" on this blog (i.e., these two have not been posted in the order you might reasonably expect, under the circumstances).

Not Just Statutory Rape: Donald Trump Raped a 13 Year Old and Epstein Paid Her.

LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eUb1K8Z_3Y

A significant footnote: Katie Johnson's interview with the Daily Mail is dated November 4th, 2016 —the vote that would elect Donald Trump ensued on November 8th.

The dark ages won't end when we run out of darkness.

Torn from the comment section.

Balance tends to be an excuse for two different evils, held aloft in equal measure.

Torn from the comment section.

Who is a Jacobin and who is an Aristocrat? And which one is Napoleon supposed to be?

I am still struggling with my health, and can barely walk. NEVERTHELESS…

Here are a few new pages from the second edition: a reasonably profound critique of Christianity, en passant.

I would remind you: this is what à-bas-le-ciel (as a creative project) was originally devised for, but I never had a single colleague or contemporary from the atheist movement to work with (nor to work against, I might add).

——————————

"If you've accepted the authority of a pagan witch-doctor, learning to believe that certain gestures of his hands and certain words chanted in an incomprehensible language will have a magical effect, you can easily transfer this reverence to a Christian priest: he simply uses different words and gestures, appealing to the same basic superstition.  Transference of faith is far more simple than the transference of skepticism, as the transference of desire is easier than the transference of detachment."

"In the last few centuries, Christians of every sect wanted to imagine that their followers could instead arrive at this point of submission to the power of their rituals through reason alone, refusing to see that this use of reason undermined the faith it was meant to serve.  People who are not afraid of ten thousand tiny demons are not afraid of one god, either, because they do not need His protection against Them: the church without ghosts soon enough becomes a church without believers, as one kind of haunting relies upon the other, reciprocally.  Over a period of 500 years, the modernization of Christianity eradicated the belief in 'rival' (smaller, lower) superstitions, inadvertently destroying the basis for belief in any superstition whatsoever."

"Christianity made itself half-rational and entirely lost its magic as a result.  In training children to believe in the supposedly-rational world of Pascal and Descartes, with the monotheistic god and the Christian church as its logically-deduced leader, the modernizers of theology destroyed the basis for the whole structure of personal subjugation (to the greater whole) that they were trying to defend."

"The exceptions prove the rule: the Quakers embraced the total insanity of the crassest superstition (with every man being 'seized' by the holy spirit and becoming a prophet by virtue of having 'a seizure', speaking in tongues, etc.) and led a sincere revival that lasted a hundred years, while the rest of the Christian faith withered away.  As soon as the Quakers felt embarrassment and tried to rationalize their religion, they caught up with the decline that every other form of the half-rational religion had experienced in the same millennium."

"To be rational and reasonable seemed at first to be an ornament to the faith, but, after a few generations, the faith itself had become nothing more than an ornament of only so many sequins, worn by rational and reasonable people on only so many special occasions.  And it would be delightful to imagine that this is what destroyed the civilization of Easter Island or laid waste to the work of a dozen dynasties in Egypt, but there has never been any example of a civilization destroyed by its self-awareness other than our own.  It is a holotype: neither the decline of Confucianism nor the fall of Communism followed the same pattern.  Never once in the history of India or Arabia will you find such irony."

"It was in Europe, uniquely, for a transitional period of a few centuries, that we saw aristocrats accepting god's existence only as a theorem, 'proven' like Pascal's pontifications, explained in axioms like the philosophy of Descartes, and so on.  Whereas in Ancient Rome we could all accept the divinity of Julius Caesar after his death, and his religious status as pontifex maximus had been the least controversial thing about him while he was still alive, crucially, in our 'early modernity', our ostentatiously rational ruling class could never accept that the political power of particular human beings was 'proven' by words and gestures performed like a magician's trick on a stage.  The god of their abstract reasoning seemed to discredit his own worldly authority: their faith, arrived at rationally, discredited blind obedience to mere rituals.  The real threat to the church was not atheism but deism."

"With or without irony, aristocrats of this kind often said (or wrote) that they envied 'the pure faith' of the peasants, but even if they secretly despised it, they were alienated from it just the same.  They could speak for hours about the abstract relationship between divine creation and worldly hierarchy, but they could not sincerely say they accepted that one man would rule (rather than another) because he was rubbed with a magic ointment in a public ceremony presided over by the Pope --a ritual that continued down to the coronation of Napoleon, even though the 'Sacred Ampoule' containing the magic oil for this ceremony had been (quite intentionally) destroyed by revolutionaries just a few years before.  Both in France and England, the peasants, in their purity, believed that a king could magically cure scrofula (an infection that horribly distorts the shape of the neck, most often caused by tuberculosis) with a mere touch, even after civil wars (or, more rarely, the outright abolition and restoration of the monarchy) had demonstrated to them how new kings could be contrived --sometimes repeatedly, within living memory.  What exactly was there to be envied, for the Aristocrats who had been corrupted by a passing acquaintance with Greco-Latin literature?  If the right to rule had been revealed to be a mere ritual, the only question that remained was whether this ritual, like the king's cure for scrofula, should be regarded as real or unreal."

"If a man is genuinely terrified to eat without first getting some blessing put upon his food (warding off demons, etc.) there can be no question of axioms and proofs to substantiate the authority of the person providing the ritual; but the Christian who has accepted the supremacy of god only through Neoplatonic reasoning cannot be convinced that it would be dangerous for him to eat without getting the magic sacrament first, and in the absence of this fear (this reliance, this dependency) he will regard the authority of the ritualist as something no different from (and no more difficult to question than) the qualifications needed by an actor to perform a particular part in the theater.  Believing in reasoning leads to believing in nothing, even if the people who preach Reason themselves are the most pious victims of blind faith, like Descartes (d. 1650) and Hobbes (d. 1679) and Newton (d. 1727) and Kant (d. 1804).  All of these men believed in the same god as the Neoplatonists, but they were as modern as Machiavelli (d. 1527) in this one respect: they could not believe in the magical difference between a crown and a peasant's cap."

"If you obey only those rules you can understand, you'll be in a constant state of rebellion: every society relies upon obedience to an incomprehensible and mysterious set of rules as fragile as the Sacred Ampoules.  Rational defiance of them would be anarchy.  The ostentatiously rational aristocrats of the last few centuries were anarchists in constant rebellion against the mystique of the dark ages, although they considered themselves to be the most devout conformists within the same system of church and monarchy that they would destroy."

Political Power Doesn't Begin or End with a Ballot Box.

Talking to conservatives about climate change: these are the ostensibly respectable people you meet in the comment section below the glowing image of Jacob Rees-Mogg.

I think this is a slightly important notion: that people, for political reasons, make excuses without even understanding what it is they're making excuses for, "from a position of blithe ignorance, not knowing what evils they're making excuses for." 

And yes, I do realize I've eschewed the opportunity to say, "Political Power NEITHER Begins NOR Ends with a Ballot Box". ;-) I use that pattern of neither/nor entirely too often in the book, you know.

Being Left Wing: How Not Why.

Created in response to a question from the audience:

[J. Falcon:] I'm tired of the garden of eden, the ego trips over ineffective activism, disconnection from practical political change, economic and historical realities of the left wing I find myself stuck in... but I absolutely have no interest in joining the all meat diet, scientific racists, and shoulder pad faux-sophisticates of the right. Perhaps, if you're willing, this calls for a "Being Left Wing: How Not Why."

LINK: https://youtube.com/shorts/mjaF4NPdmRo

Ecology and Ego: Veganism and False Humility.

 

LINK: https://youtu.be/zjq2Mgyxd2Q

Ecology is the opposite of freedom: that's why it's worth fighting for.

Two new "shorts" on the crisis of ecology: the longest six minutes of your whole entire life.

1 of 2.
I don't know but I do care: the hardest thing to admit in politics.
LINK: https://youtube.com/shorts/78MetqgPdzo

2 of 2.
Ecology is the opposite of freedom: that's why it's worth fighting for.
LINK: https://youtube.com/shorts/ZDhf8NWFb0g

[Meanwhile:] Commodore 64 is Still Doomed.

I do try to keep the C64 news to an absolute minimum around here, dear reader… but…

I must mention, briefly, that attempts to revive the C64 computer brand have ended up in a court battle to determine who owns the so-called "intellectual property" in this century:

https://www.timeextension.com/news/2025/11/commodore-industries-is-trying-to-prevent-the-revived-commodore-international-from-using-the-iconic-name

Now you may complain that this is the first time I've mentioned the C64, but this is not so: just a few short years ago, à-bas-le-ciel was home to an epoch-marking video titled, The C64: Are You Wasting Your Life… YET? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Bxhhoq1SN4

The moral to the story, for me, is something quite tangential to the interest of "Time Extension" here: there are weekly C64 news shows. MANY OF THEM. On youtube, as podcasts… you name it. The C64, the ZX Spectrum, and even the Atari desktop computers all have regular news programs, 97% preoccupied with video games.

There is no weekly vegan news show. There is no monthly vegan news show.

There is no vegan news anymore.

Of course, my own interest would be in profoundly political news about veganism as a movement, but even at the shallow end of the swimming pool, we should take a moment to notice that we have neither swimmers nor sunbathers nor even water anymore.

Far be it from me to ask my audience if anyone wants to co-host such a show. Far be it from me to ask if anyone else would want to collaborate or contribute in any way. #talentisscarce

[Meanwhile:] The Utter Insanity of Right Wing Responses to Ecology.

I hesitate to use "right wing" in the title here, as Jacob Rees-Mogg has not yet "left the left" —if you're willing to categorize the nominally Conservative Boris Johnson as "left" (AND INDEED HE IS)… but, nevertheless… his taste in wallpaper and bookshelves is right wing, so that's the category I'm going to work with here…

The political position of Nigel Lawson alluded to here is that, quote, "carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that warms the atmosphere —but… the UK would be 'crazy' to do anything about it". The single sentence summary I have just quoted is from 2016, and still, it's news: https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/global-warming-climate-change-sceptic-nigel-lawson-real-humans-causing-a7307456.html

The similarity to what Charlie Kirk has so recently said (about carbon and climate change) should be self-evident, although it appears here in a different accent and cadence, presented to an audience that is neither more nor less insane: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fafp3NEZg1g

On the very definition of vegan: now more than ever…

"For me, the difference between 'vegan' and 'plant based' is not the difference between 'ethical veganism' and 'health based veganism'. Veganism proper: it's never going to be satisfied with a merely personal decision to be vegan."

Fifteen minutes from season one.

LINK: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0EwpOopH8jPRIp2Zk6Qx2X

^ I'm never going to explain anything that clearly ever again… so don't even ask. ;-)

[Meanwhile:] A myth within a myth, a cage within a cage: "high tech solutions" to climate change.

The problem is adumbrated somewhere in the middle of my (relatively) recent podcast, Youtube is dead: the lost avant garde of intellectual dissent on the internet: although right-wing propaganda on carbon relies on flagrant falsehoods, the left and center are playing an even more dangerous game —in part because their lies seem more plausible —in part because a whole generation of gormless idiots (globally) has been groomed to believe in them. Neither the electric engine nor the electric airplane can drastically reduce carbon levels, reversing climate change: veganism can.

Ironically, if you want to put a pro-China spin on this tragic tale, it would be that China (with several centuries of Buddhist, Daoist and Confucian cultural tradition behind it) could now lead the world in creating a new cultural tradition of eating drastically less meat and dairy —or none at all.

Link to the aforementioned podcast, "Youtube is dead, etc.": https://open.spotify.com/episode/6wFSB1chYtTpJmWwVuWYxr

Deprive a workman of his tools and he discovers he still has claws.

[This is, in fact, the page immediately prior to the excerpt shared on October 4th. Yes, as may be implicitly obvious, today I've gone back to the beginning of chapter 4, to make minor revisions throughout 4 and 5, again.]

Torn from the pages of the second edition.

The cardinal, of course, is willing to go much further, but having never eaten human flesh, his reasoning has more of an abstract air than the raven's speech before: "Modern humans are the masters of many tools, and yet your tools become terrible things once you've come to see yourselves as serving a role defined by these instruments.  The law creates the lawyer, and then he lives his whole life in service to the law.  'What a terrible tool!', you think, as if you could liberate the lawyer by tearing up the law.  How little you can imagine what dangerous people these same lawyers will become once you've deprived them of their law: a workman without his tools soon discovers that he still has claws."

The blue jay, hopping on his perch, now warns: "Destroy the bureaucracy, and you still have a society ruled by bureaucrats.  Destroy the belief and the believers remain."

The raven presses his old argument even further: "Even if your civilization provides nothing but a veneer painted over barbarism, you need to learn to appreciate the veneer!  You see little difference between bureaucrats and barbarian kings, but as soon as the bureaucrats return to barbarism, you'll appreciate the progress of a thousand years that dragged them down from their thrones, deprived them of their dueling swords, and taught them to care for the technicalities of the law, romanticizing the arbitrary procedures of limited government."

"Only a fool blames the highway for the brutality of the highwaymen: demolish the road beneath them, like pulling the carpets out of an abattoir, and what have you got? A gang of killers, all the same."