Numerous Narratives 🍁

Atomic essays, mini explorations, and a digital garden of diverse ideas – welcome! This is my space for creative experimentation, a place where fiction and reality collide. You'll find reflections on everything from economics and politics to culture and technology, alongside the development of my novel and nonfiction projects. My tools of choice? Of course Linux, Standard Notes, Manuskript, and the secure writing environment of theQuill.app. The views shared here are entirely my own and do not reflect the opinions of my employer or any organizations I am affiliated with. My perspectives may evolve over time as I strive to maintain an open mind. This blog offers a snapshot of my thoughts at specific moments, capturing ideas that resonated with me then. Please note that some older posts may no longer align with my current views. - - -

President Trump’s Trade Policy

April 1, 2025•593 words

"What protectionism teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war." ~ Henry George "We shouldn't be putting tariffs on anything. That hurts working men and women in US. What we should be doing is making our manufacturing more competitive." ~ Rick Santorum "Tariff policy beneficiaries are always visible, but its victims are mostly invisible. Politicians love this. The reason is simple: The beneficiaries know for whom to cast their ballots, and ...

Trump Tariff Day Coming To All Countries Soon

March 31, 2025•181 words

"Liberation is the path of transcendence. Manifestation is the path of immanence. Both lead to the same place: the divine." ~ Anodea Judith "The greatest force of personal liberation is the decision to widen our circle of compassion, moving from focus on self to focus on service." ~ Marianne Williamson "The liberation of language is rooted in the liberation of ourselves." ~ Mary Daly "As history has repeatedly proven, one trade tariff begets another, then another - until you've got a full-bl...

How Did China Become The World Leading Manufacturing Superpower?

March 31, 2025•440 words

"Products made in China are cheap through the exploitation of the workforce. Every time we shop, we are driving the nail further into the coffin of American manufacturing jobs." ~ Joe Baca "We've lost an edge that we used to have in scientific innovation applications to goods to be sold. In many ways, that is also changing in the electronic field. Almost all of the materials that we use now are of advanced technology, I have an iPad and also an iPod, both of which are made in China. Although w...

Canada is An Extremely Stable Governance Country

March 29, 2025•180 words

"The reality of Canadian history is that we've been willing to do the important things the world demanded of us: fighting in World War II, in Korea, in the Balkans, where we were involved in offensive military operations, and in Afghanistan, where we have made disproportionate contributions." ~ Chris Alexander "There are two miracles in Canadian history. The first is the survival of French Canada, and the second is the survival of Canada." ~ F. R. Scott Canada is a highly stable geopolitical...

Canadian Universal Access to Healthcare versus American Unequal Access to Healthcare

March 29, 2025•510 words

"I will sign a universal health-care bill into law by the end of my first term as president that will cover every American and cut the cost of a typical family’s premium by up to $2,500 a year." ~ Barack Obama "America must deal once and for all with an utterly irrational health care financing system that allows private interests to make billions in profits from the pain and suffering of their fellow citizens. America is the only country in the industrialized world that does not provide tax-su...

Trump Officials Testify In March 25, Senate Hearing After War Plans Revealed To Journalist In Signal Group Chat

March 28, 2025•1,532 words

"You can't come up against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept the risk. If they want to get you, over time they will." ~ Edward Snowden "Everyone should understand that when they add their friends to Facebook, they are doing free work for United States intelligence agencies in building this database for them." ~ Julian Assange "Intelligence agencies keep things secret because they often violate the rule of law or of good behavior." ~ Julian Assange "There is thus ...

Dark Power of Tribalism and the Nature of Civilization

March 27, 2025•443 words

"Tribalism never prospers, for when it does, everyone will respect it as a true nationalism, and no-one will dare call it tribalism." ~ Ernest Gellner "Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience." ~ Christopher Hitchens Human history is competing tribes, with survival, power, and dominance driv...

USA: Nationalism with Factional Ultranationalism

March 26, 2025•519 words

The holiness of the kingdom of God must be preserved. If Jesus refused to acknowledge and fight for Israel as God's favored nation- even though it was the one nation in history that actually held this status at one time- how much more must his followers refuse to acknowledge and fight for America as God's favored nation" To say it another way, if Jesus was committed solely to establishing a kingdom that had no intrinsic nationalistic or ethnic allegiances- not even with Israel- how much more sh...

Globalists & Nationalism

March 24, 2025•1,005 words

We see threats to liberal democracy coming from lots of directions. We have to create something new, a common response, because in so many places - the UK, France, Germany - ultranationalists and the far left threaten the free market and liberal democracy. Garry Kasparov "The difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does; the first attitude creates a feeling of respo...

Zelensky & Globalists In A State Of Political Agony

March 23, 2025•518 words

"The leading student of business propaganda, Australian social scientist Alex Carey, argues persuasively that “the 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy." ~ Noam Chomsky "Americanism not globalism will be our credo as long as we are led by politicians who will not put America first, then we c...

The Positives Of Oligarchic Rule

March 22, 2025•784 words

The inability to grasp the pathology of our oligarchic rulers is one of our gravest faults. Chris Hedges Democracy appears to be safer and less liable to revolution than oligarchy. For in oligarchies there is the double danger of the oligarchs falling out among themselves and also with the people; but in democracies there is only the danger of a quarrel with the oligarchs. No dissension worth mentioning arises among the people themselves. And we may further remark that a government which is co...

Modern Oligarchies

March 22, 2025•291 words

"To consider judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions is a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy." ~ Thomas Jefferson "The real difference between democracy and oligarchy is poverty and wealth. Wherever men rule by reason of their wealth, whether they be few or many, that is an oligarchy, and where the poor rule, that is a democracy." ~ Aristotle "When economic power became concentrated in a few hands, then poli...

Recipe for Democracies Tipping Towards Autocracies

March 20, 2025•287 words

"Every dictatorship has ultimately strangled in the web of repression it wove for its people, making mistakes that could not be corrected because criticism was prohibited." ~ Robert Kennedy "The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not." ~ Christopher Hitchens "I have often thought that if a rational Fascist di...

America At A Tipping Point: Autocracy

March 20, 2025•694 words

"Autocracy cannot do without its twin agents: a hangman and a priest, the first to suppress popular resistance by force, the second to sweeten and embellish the lot of the oppressed with empty promises of a heavenly kingdom." ~ Vladimir Lenin "I would have to point out in the strongest terms the autocracy of the Liberal structure and the cowardice of its members. I have never seen in all my examination of politics so degrading a spectacle as that of all these Liberals turning their coats in un...

Populism & Popular Sovereignty

March 18, 2025•487 words

"If you wish the sympathy of the broad masses, you must tell them the crudest and most stupid things." ~ Adolf Hitler "Political populism always poses a great danger because it disorients people, creates excessive expectations or, on the contrary, prioritises objectives that are clearly not priorities or are simply impossible to achieve." ~ Vladimir Putin "As a rule, [populism] is done for the sake of political expediency by those who do not care about the consequences, who do not think even ...

Denial of Sovereignty

March 18, 2025•485 words

"Respecting the sovereignty means preventing coups, unconstitutional actions and illegitimate overthrowing of the legitimate government. All these things should be totally prevented." ~ Vladimir Putin "The purpose of the United Nations should be to protect the essential sovereignty of nations, large and small." ~ Nikita Khrushchev "We believe that big nations should not bully smaller nations, and that the sovereignty of nations must be respected. And we have long urged that disputes be resolv...

Dostoevsky’s Concept of the Sublime

March 17, 2025•461 words

"Leave those vain moralists, my friend, and return to the depth of your soul: that is where you will always rediscover the source of the sacred fire which so often inflamed us with love of the sublime virtues; that is where you will see the eternal image of true beauty, the contemplation of which inspires us with a holy enthusiasm." ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau "Word-work is sublime... because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference-the way in which we a...

Sublime Is An Experience That Exceeds Ordinary Human Scale

March 15, 2025•464 words

"Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt" ~ Immanuel Kant "Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics are not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything, will really ...

What is Not a Nation-State, According to Trump?

March 14, 2025•450 words

Nation state as a fundamental unit of man's organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state. Zbigniew Brzezinski The competitive nation-state system, with all its capacity for good and evil, is spreading in the Third World and is transforming that world. Robert Gilpin Globally, as the nation-state becomes increasingly less mea...

Will Canada Become the 51st State?

March 13, 2025•356 words

"In 10 years, this sleepy Canada will be ripe for annexation - the farmers in Manitoba, etc., will demand it themselves. Besides, the country is half annexed already socially - hotels, newspapers, advertising, etc., all on the American pattern." ~ Friedrich Engels "There are probably 400 to 500 people, water protectors, north of the 1889 boundary, that was the result of an illegal annexation of treaty territory by the United States against not just the Standing Rock Nation, but the entire Lako...

America's Existential Threat is Not Canada

March 12, 2025•548 words

I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably that. So we need to be very careful...With artificial intelligence we're summoning the demon. ~ Elon Musk We, the great American nation, decided that we've got 138 military bases around the world and we've now figured out that we can buy these drones from the Israelis, and we've decided that the way to proceed is to use this new technology to go and kill ...

Is Zelenskyy a “Walking Dead” President?

March 11, 2025•455 words

"I used to think that the causes of war were predominantly economic. I came to think that they were more psychological. I am now coming to think that they are decisively "personal," arising from the defects and ambitions of those who have the power to influence the currents of nations." ~ B. H. Liddell Hart "The failure to dissect the cause of war leaves us open for the next installment." ~ Chris Hedges "The best defence of peace is not power, but the removal of the causes of war, and interna...

NATO, USA - UK, & The Ukraine Proxy War

March 11, 2025•381 words

"White House and State Department foreign-policy experts are overwhelmingly directed towards military and diplomatic issues, not development issues." ~ Jeffrey Sachs "We are not at war (except with our own demons)." ~ Jeffrey Sachs "Tax the rich. End the wars. Break the power of lobbies in Washington. These are the demands of Occupy Wall Street. They are very important. The US corporations dominate Washington. The big oil companies, Wall Street banks and the military-industrial complex - they...

America's Relative Decline

March 9, 2025•593 words

"For most of the history of the American empire, government has been a tool for preserving and furthering the power and might of white male corporate elites." ~ Cornel West "We better rethink the position of the United States in the world and whether we want to be an empire. Being an empire puts all of us in jeopardy. The American Empire, while it was just wreaking havoc on other nations, didn't bother us." ~ Howard Zinn "The American empire should be destroyed." ~ Aleksandr Dugin "The Ameri...

China 100% Tariffs Against Canada

March 9, 2025•725 words

The really big problem with China is that there are the unfair trade practices, like currency manipulation, illegal export subsidies and the theft of intellectual property, but then there's also things that the WTO doesn't cover that it should, which is the use of sweat shops and pollution havens. ~ Peter Navarro Any time you read that your government is erecting tariff barriers, supporting threatened industries with subsidies, or interfering in any way with free trade between individuals or n...

Counterintuitive Thinking

March 7, 2025•797 words

Counterintuitive actions prove we can trust real knowledge and do the opposite of what we feel makes sense. ~ Penn Jillette Counterintuitive action makes a fellow feel smart. ~ Penn Jillette As counterintuitive as it seems, generosity begins wherever you are. It is important to make generosity a priority. ~ Andy Stanley Real life does not come naturally. It is counterintuitive. It is a skill we have to learn. That's because the way to real life is not something we get, but something we give....

Trump's Worldwide Tariff Strategy: A Self-Inflicted Economic Catastrophe

March 6, 2025•1,111 words

"Thanks to economists, all of us, from the days of Adam Smith and before right down to the present, tariffs are perhaps one tenth of one percent lower than they otherwise would have been. And because of our efforts, we have earned our salaries ten-thousand fold." ~ Milton Friedman "Tariffs that save jobs in the steel industry mean higher steel prices, which in turn means fewer sales of American steel products around the world and losses of far more jobs than are saved." ~ Thomas Sowell "As hi...

Trump's Economic War on America, Canada, Mexico, European Union, and China

March 5, 2025•729 words

The combat of WAR and an economic WAR have a lot of similarities. You do have to be skilled, aggressive, know your enemy and your strong attributes and limitations. Both skills are needed although one may be more natural. ~ Richard Marcinko To me, the economic war with China is everything. And we have to be maniacally focused on that. If we continue to lose it, we're five years away, I think, ten years at the most, of hitting an inflection point from which we'll never be able to recover. ~ Ste...

Coercive Economic Diplomacy & Tariff Blackmail From An illiberal Trump Administration

March 4, 2025•706 words

"Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men." ~ Milton Friedman "One who uses coercion is guilty of deliberate violence. Coercion is inhuman." ~ Mahatma Gandhi "Coercion created slavery, the cowardice of the slaves perpetuated it." ~ Jean-Baptiste Rousseau "Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, ...

What are Some Causes of Pushing Nations to War While in an Economic War?

March 3, 2025•505 words

"The world has never been as divided as it is now, what with religious wars, genocides, a lack of respect for the planet, economic crisis, depression, poverty, with everyone wanting instant solutions to at least some of the world's problems or their own. And things only look bleaker as we head into future." ~ Paulo Coelho To me, the economic war with China is everything. And we have to be maniacally focused on that. If we continue to lose it, we're five years away, I think, ten years at the mo...