Category: Life

The gist of this article is that I believe that the United States is not only trying to annex Canada, but that it has partially succeeded.

Americans choose dictatorship

Come the 2024 US election, it was already well-known that Donald Trump aspired to be a dictator. Americans voted the serial rapist and convicted fraudster in power anyways. For reasons that will fill future history books, the majority were okay with his failed coup, his pronouncement that he would just be a dictator on “day one“, his deference to despots Putin and Kim Jong Un, and his call to end free and fair elections.

What was less clear at the time was that he would seek to end Canada’s democracy too.

Republicans implement dictatorship

As soon as Trump took office, Republicans started implementing the dictatorship.

The Congress and Supreme Court relinquished all their power to Trump, ending the system of checks and balances.

Then the administration took over government agencies by replacing qualified public servants with the dictator’s most shameless sycophants.

With regulators and agencies now corrupt, the administration was able to shut down much of the free press. They defunded public broadcasters PBS and NPR. Billionaire media moguls carried out the agenda on the private side, killing freedom of the press at everything from 60 Minutes to The Washington Post.

That enabled the regime’s ethnic cleansing campaign. Immigrants got the worst of it as the dictatorship incited hate with shameless lies including that they were eating people’s pets. They opened a network of concentration camps and began to fill them, while the secret police killed observers.

Also in the crosshairs were trans people. Parallel relentless attacks against trans people by the regime and state Republicans resulted in 400,000 internally displaced refugees.

To oppress potential opposition, the dictatorship also deployed the military to cities that were deemed to have voted for Republicans in insufficient numbers.

Finally, like all dictators, Trump has made it clear he won’t leave after his term is up. And why would he when he’s been able to wield the presidency to enrich himself to the tune of billions of dollars.

The dictatorship targets Canada

The first real signs of the regime’s desire to annex Canada came during a meeting between Justin Trudeau and the soon-to-be dictator at the latter’s Mar-A-Lago palace in December 2024. There Trump suggested Canada should be a US state.

A month later Trump said his administration would use “economic force” to take Canada while sharing maps of a conquered Canada.

Canadian officials, waiting for sanity to return, passed the threats off as a joke. What they didn’t realize then was that the regime had purged the voices of reason.

For the next year and a half, the regime and the US ambassador to Canada would continue to openly communicate its intent to conquer Canada.

The US shifts from annexation talk to action

Believing that a divided Canada would be easier to conquer, the regime held covert talks with Alberta separatists and offered $500M in material support. They also backed far-right fringe groups that had terrorized Canadians.

Carrying out the threat of using economic force, the regime ripped up the trade deal in CUSMA that Trump had signed and previously called the “fairest, most balanced, and beneficial trade agreement we have ever signed“. They slapped 50% tariffs on Canadian goods and vowed to crush Canadian industry. The regime was open about what would stop this economic onslaught: Canada becoming a US state.

The dictatorship attacked Canada’s sovereignty other ways too. Framed as negotiations to end the American tariffs, the regime demanded the removal of some laws in Canada that had been beneficial to Canadians. Prime Minister Carney obliged. Then they demanded Canada surrender its trade with other countries to the US. Here, Carney did not acquiesce.

America also found novel ways to take bits of Canada. The regime renamed Lake Ontario to Lake America. American companies were happy to assist just as they had been with helping end freedom of the press.

It will get worse

What’s stands out to me is that there is no meaningful opposition to this in the United States. Oh sure some Democrats feign indignation on television or on Twitter, but then that’s it. They don’t offer any actual resistance.

I don’t think they recognize that they’re in the early stages of a dictatorship. I think they assume it would feel different if they were. They don’t appreciate how dictatorships work their way from outsiders in. How the changes happen little by little.

I think this denialism is also a problem in Canada too. I hear this refrain of waiting it out until the next election and I think that is a gamble. There is a risk that this moment where these parties feel most powerless ends up being the time when they had the most. They’re assuming that the next election will be free and fair while Republicans openly engage in voter suppression.

The regime abetted by its political, media, and billionaire backers will only get more bold. They’ve already succeeded in taking a little bit of Canada for itself and they will not stop until they get it all.

The least we can do is acknowledge the reality of our predicament.

I started this blog before Facebook, Instagram and Twitter were founded. In those days, if people wanted to find out what you were up to they went to your blog. I had a small readership of friends plus some acquaintances from the hacking scene.

Social media getting everyone to go to a single site/app for their updates and my changing interests decimated my readership. I don’t know how many regulars are on here anymore, maybe two.

I’ve seen this blog cited in papers, news articles, social media posts, and a book – so I know that I have a bit more irregular traffic. But my point is that the days of this being a little blog with other little blogs out there, kind of like how people digest zines now, are over. This is a relic of a time that is no more.

And that’s okay. I still write.

I do it because for all the self-censorship I still do, it’s as close to an archive of my life as there will ever be. I’ve run this site since I was a teenager, and my life literally flashes before my eyes on here.

I continue to write not for the benefit of others but my own.

Enter AI

Every word on his site has been shaped by who I am and how I see the world. My essence is not on here but its fingerprints are.

Enter AI and specifically large language models (LLMs). These have taken over the world since going mainstream in 2022. Four years later, and now half of new articles on the Internet are AI generated. At my company, the CEO used AI to compose a “heartfelt” email about the recent mass lay-offs, but it’s used everywhere else internally as well.

Large language models are word prediction machines. A person provides a prompt and it uses statistics derived from the world’s written content to come up with what words are likely to follow in a response.

It’s an impressive technical achievement. But it’s incapable of two things: emotion and art.

Emotion because the selected words are merely the statistical distillation of books and whatever else these AI companies fed its models. There is no genuine human connection or feeling.

That’s why the CEO’s email was so problematic. In a moment that required a bit of humanity, where staff felt disposable, he delegated the task of appearing empathetic to a machine incapable of it. A toaster would have been better, because at least its silence would have been honest.

In much the same way, AI is incapable of making art. It can produce a convincing facsimile. But does not experience anything new and is incapable of original thought. The ingredients of humanity’s greatest artists are absent. AI then is merely a derivative works machine. Art exists to communicate something about ourselves but AI can only emulate its aesthetics.

Much like the CEO’s plagiarized email could only emulate the aesthetics of being heartfelt. The humanity was in the one thing he did not communicate: the prompt he supplied the LLM.

Back to the Blog

The reason I’ll never use AI – in the 2026 sense of the word – on this blog is because it would defeat the purpose of its existence: to share the way that I am different with you. An LLM would dilute that. There is nothing that it could add that would be worth reading.

I create what I wanted to read myself, and I don’t want to read (or watch or listen to) AI slop.

I think there is a place for this automation in other domains such as finding cancers, translating for tourists, helping people code, car safety mechanisms, etc.

But it has no heart and therefore no place by mine.

I just turned 41.

I’m the age my parents were after having me “late in life”. My brother is eighteen years older than me. At this point in her life, I would have been six for my mom and a toddler for my dad.

By the age I am now, my one sister owned a home, was married, and had two children. My other sister lived in multiple countries and had three teenagers.

My peers at work, including those years younger, are married, own homes, and have children.

Forty-one.

(more…)