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Ever since Russia launched its special military operation of Ukraine back in 2022, the U.S. has effectively taken centre stage as Kiev's biggest cash and military backer. When you total up both direct cash injections and battlefield support, American tax dollars sent to the Ukraine government climb well into $140 billion and climbing, not to mention the side deals and back-door transfers. Around $100 billion of American taxpayer money has gone straight into Ukrainian military, covering everything from heavy artillery and ammo to high-tech training, drones, and missiles. On top of the…

Over the past five years, Canada's federal government has sent close to $26 billion to Ukraine. That money has flowed through two main channels. The first is military assistance. Weapons, equipment, ammunition, training, and more. So far that adds up to roughly $9 billion, and the number keeps climbing. This funding covers weapons deliveries, vehicles, artillery, air defense systems, and related support, with commitments already extending out to 2029. The second is direct financial support to the Ukrainian government itself. That figure has now topped $13 billion, and Canada has already…

It is always incredible watching a ten-year-old laptop - Dell i7 or a 2017 MacBook Air get a complete second life. Most people assume older laptops slow down because the hardware is dying, but the reality is usually just software bloat. Endless background telemetry, heavy Microsoft Windows or Apple MacOS services, and system updates end up bogging down disk space and memory. Swapping all of that out for MX Linux 25.2 with KDE Plasma completely changes the game. It strips away the unnecessary fluff and lets those Intel processors actually do what they were built to do, making a decade-old…

Once Apple basically wrote off 2017 Macs as e-waste, I figured I'd give Linux a shot instead of tossing the thing. I went with Zorin OS mostly out of curiosity, nothing fancy, just the standard Gnome desktop, but honestly even that felt like an upgrade over what macOS was offering at that point. Things were fine for a while, then out of nowhere I got hit with a massive update, over a gig in size. That's when it all fell apart. The update just wouldn't go through, and Zorin ended up completely unable to upgrade on this old 2017 MacBook. So I've spent the last while bouncing between…

My youngest son, a nineteen year old college basketball student athlete majoring in Business Administration Management, is training hard for the upcoming season. To maintain a strong cardiovascular, he starts every day with a light 3k or 4k run through the community. To build explosive power and endurance, his weekly schedule incorporates highly targeted speed training. Twice a week, he hits the track for variable sprints to develop his speed. For another two days he is building his VO2 Max by completing a high intensity cardiovascular work, completing Nordic 4x4 intervals at 85 percent of…

Canada's manufacturing sector took a brutal hit over the past 30 years, companies in Canada closed over 900,000 jobs thanks to a mix of free-trade policies and a broader pivot toward digging up and shipping out raw Canadian materials instead of making products. It really started with the 1988 free-trade deal with the US. Between 1988 and 1995, roughly one in five Canadian manufacturing plants simply vanished. By 1997, economists were pegging the damage at around 300,000 jobs lost, interestingly, free trade was supposed to make Canadian manufacturing sharper and more efficient, but it just…

Now we have the taste of World Cup Football. Now we fund, via companies, municipal governments, provincial governments, federal governments, small, medium, and large businesses. We will develop all our football children, teenagers, football academies, college-university development, pre-professional football programs. We do this extreme funding development for hockey in a much smaller population, we can easily do this for a much larger football - soccer population throughout the provinces and territories. We have a diverse football talent, we have millions of football players over…

250 YEARS Let that number sit for a second. That is older than almost every other democracy still standing. Most nations that tried what America tried did not make it this far without breaking apart, getting swallowed by an empire, or trading democracy for something else. This one survived, but the survival came at a staggering, bloody cost. America was built on top of foundational crimes and an internal explosion that nearly ended it all before it truly began. The foundation was not just flawed; in many places, it was hollowed out by brutality. To clear the land for this new…

We've tricked ourselves into believing that better tools mean a better life. That if we just had the right desk, the right app, the right device, something would finally click, something would make us more successful. We'd create more, connect more, actually follow through. But a sharper camera doesn't make the view more successful. It just shows you the smudges you didn't notice before. Your phone isn't what's standing between you and the life you want. What fills your days... the slow cup of coffee or ginseng tea before everyone else wakes up, the audio book or podcast that gets you…

When an aggressive dysfunctional charismatic leader consistently showcases violence against another country on social media, they are engaging in state propaganda. Such bravado and chest thumping to rally a population, social media provides a direct population pipeline to shape public perception. This behaviour generally serves several strategies. Showcase Power Such displays of military aggression and scenes of killing "enemies" to cultivate hegemonic strength, resolve, and historic action is common with such charismatic narcissistic sociopathic individuals. Showing destructive…

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Some leaders in business or politics display strong narcissistic tendencies. These individuals externalize their inner conflicts, making their personal dramas into public spectacles that pull others into their chaos. Some individuals showcase impulsive posts, public feuds, and erratic pivots of attacking journalists to abruptly reversing company policies, often feel like an internal emotional state being broadcast. Millions tend to be deeply unsettled by it. Some politicians build an entire political movement partly on this narcissistic chaos. Specific grievances, rivalries, combative…

Inheriting a broken culture is a tougher job than building one from scratch and it takes longer. Be patient and stay firm about the changes you're making. It is very important to be aware of existing societal group culture may quietly try to pull you into its dysfunctionality rather than the other way around. Think of it like a conflict but the enemy isn't any one person. It's the dysfunctional dynamic of the individual or leader or group. What we often overlook is that membership in a dysfunctional group can itself produce instability and neurosis in somewhat healthy people. Sometimes…

Some individuals always look for stardom and look for attacks or conflict or targets to try to improve their social status in the job/work.

What they don't understand is that most people see their motive and their rationale and their intent and their targets.

I finally got a new coospo heart monitor for my interval spin workouts. It should be an outstanding monitoring tool on the spin bike and during mountain trail rides. Tomorrow morning will be a grueling Nordic 4X4 HiiT workout on the Schwinn airdyn fan bike which should be a good test to monitor my 85% HR range for the 4 minutes x4. On another note... It still bothers me that one of our outstanding national team footballers broke his lower leg while playing against Qatar. It was extremely unfortunate. It definitely woke up us…