Psychological Weapons Testing: "The Battle for the Mind of North America"
What do The Odyssey, Nickelback, and the Films of David Cronenberg have in Common?
“After all, there is nothing real outside our perception of reality…Is there?
You can see that can’t you?”
-“Videodrome” (Dir. David Cronenberg)
“When you understand a species' art, you understand that species.”
-Timothy Zhan, “Heir to the Empire”
The Land of Mind-Rape and Honey
Canada is/was a nice enough place to visit or grow up… several large nice cities surrounded by tons and tons of quaint and cute functional “Mainstreet USA” style quirky little towns.
But when you scratch at the surface there’s something profoundly deeply wrong with Canada. You can feel it. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work... when you go to church... when you pay your taxes.
and the Canadians are quite pleased to tell you just what that thing is:
America.
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Funnily though, when you ask what Americans have done to them or what is wrong with America, they’ll tell you things about moral degeneracy and perfidy of Americans… no different than what the American elite and the US Government expresses about it’s own populace.
For reference: Canada is a vassal of the US.
It has been since the 1960s when the British lost the Suez Crisis and the American Deep State backed “Multiculturalism”, an end to “God Save the Queen”, Legalized Sodomy, ended prayer in public schools, Demilitarized Canadian Education (which til the 60s included rifle practice, marching, and survival training)… and oh ya a New flag.
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Canada’s entire culture, defined by being British, Imperial, warlike, frontier Militiamen (Indeed Canada’s 1950s culture in many ways resembled Washington’s and Jefferson’s colonial American culture more than America did)… was ripped out in the course of a decade… Quite Intentionally and by design.
Indeed Canada was the testing ground for the Global American Empire’s psychological cultural program.
To get a feel for just HOW aggressively Canadian culture was purposefully ripped apart… I encourage you to flip through the various programs for “Empire day in the Schools of Ontario” up on archive to see English Canada’s actual natural culture. (I will be writing about this in more detail in another piece.
And Please Note: The British did nothing comparable… the “Narnia” age of Canada coexisted with The Fabians, George Bernard Shaw, and the basically open communist treason of the actual British Aristocracy.
This was immediately ripped out by State-Department’s assets like Pearson and Trudeau in the 60s and 70s in favour of “Multiculturalism”.
How does the one Canada: Royalist, Militaristic, Patriotic as Can Be, defined by the 3 institutions of Church, Militia Armory, and the oldstyle Highschool ruthlessly enforcing standards… More akin to Cadia from 40k than a 21st century country… How did it transform into the modern Canada within living memory?
How do you destroy the entire culture of a country and replace it with an entirely new culture in front of it’s population’s very eyes… without resistance and without protest?
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Well that’s the problem that was solved here.
Canada was the testing ground for all of the American Government’s cultural occupational weapons it would go on to use on Europe and on its own people.
Terms like “melting pot”, “racism”, “tolerance”, “the open society”… These of course has all been coined by American Jewish and Communist activists (“Racism” specifically is a Trotskyist doctrinal term of art propagated by Trotsky’s personal pamphlets, and you should call any “Conservative” who ever uses the term a Communist traitor).
However it was in Canada that top down US foreign policy institutions first applied the current model to a country which they had conquered without a war.
Indeed when one looks into “Denazification” in Germany or the US occupations of France, Italy, or Japan you find little to no overlap between the language, structure, and even values of the “Democratic”, “antifascist”, and “Peaceful” occupational ideology and modern Globohomo.
Whereas in Canada the US occupational ideology EXACTLY resembles modern globohomo. From the outset.
Pierre Trudeau’s first major political moment was the 1967 decriminalization of homosexuality.
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Canada’s greatest film is indeed exactly about this dynamic.
“Television is Reality. And Reality is less than Television”
A million essays could be written on David Cronenberg’s 1983 film Videodrome.
I’ve written on it before… And I’ll write on it again:
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It is maybe the most daring cyberpunk movie ever made.
It is the greatest Toronto Film ever made.
And it is the great Canadian film…
Indeed it set the tone for almost all subsequent Canadian horror like American Mary, Pontypool, Screamers, Possessor… All revolving around high concept alienation, manipulation, and illusions of language and flesh. Memetic warfare.
A nebulous genre I call “McLuhan Horror” for reasons you will see.
And what’s more it is the Great Internet movie… Despite not featuring anything related to the internet at all.
Rather the same way the internet has really destroyed existing American culture, political institutions, social feedback loops, and existing generational power structures… Videodrome is about how old Canada was consciously destroyed via Television.
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James Wood plays Max Renn the head of CIVIC-TV, a fictionalized version of real life Toronto television executive Moses Znaimer (yes he, like Cronenberg, is of the tribe of Moses), who was the head of the Canadian television station CityTV.
Max and his team intercept a pirate television broadcast of what appears to be a pornographic BDSM signal, that might be a snuff film… And this drives Max on a quest to hunt down and find the Signal the “Videodrome” signal, because he wants to license the violent pornographic program, for public broadcast over the airways.
This might sound odd… License a porno for live public broadcast? But the real life Moses Znaimer had already done this, CityTV’s late night “Baby Blue Movie” block had been broadcast since 1972 and continued until 2008, sending out softcore porn and erotica, with films and series such as: Beverley Hills Bordello, Camille 2000, Deviant Vixens, Pleasure Palace, and The Best of the New York Erotic Film Festival… broadcast to anyone with a bunny-ears television set.
However this is merely the setup…
Nicki : Got any porno?
Max : You serious?
Nicki : Yeah. It gets me in the mood.
[looks through cassettes]
Nicki : What’s this? “Videodrome”?
Max : Torture. Murder.
Nicki : Sounds great.
Max : Ain’t exactly sex.
Nicki : Says who?
Max in the course of his quest, and in his capacity as a Television Exec goes on a TV talk-show where he encounters the trippy figure Nicki Brand (Deborah Harry, Blondie), a call in talkshow host who does bizarre psychological exploitation programing… Whom I’m almost certain is based on real life 1980s Toronto TV/Radio personality Ziggy Lorenc, a MuchMusic (Canadian MTV) VJ, who wrote her monologues and interludes between songs, segments, and commercials seemingly with the goal of causing you to doubletake that you might be having a hallucinatory stroke, that the TV is talking to you personally and having a grossly inappropriate and intimate crisis of identity, or wonder that the Crew forgot they were recording.
Sortof over-intimate anti-punchlines designed to create the most awkward silence imaginable. Very Anticipatory of Sam Hyde and other anti-comedians.
Is this good entertainment? Well you’re looking at the TV now aren’t you? You’re gonna remember the Ad that this smash cuts to.
Remember… All hipsterism originates in Canada. All of it. Your twee early 2000s folk band that made the transition to sea shanties in the 2010s are all just imitating Neil Young, Stan Rodgers, and Gordon Lightfoot. And they got their sensibilities from Stephen Leacock in the 1910s.
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But also on that interview Max meets media Professor Brian O’blivion…
A direct basically explicit Analog for real life legendary Toronto media Professor Marshall McLuhan who coined the phrase “The Medium is the Message” in his 1964 book Understanding Media. (Yes this Phrase does aptly apply to the new Canadian Flag of the same year)
O’blivion however, does not appear on the television interview. He refuses to appear on Television.
Instead he broadcasts himself to a local TV Set in the studio so that he might avoid appearing on television… except on television.
This is of course very in line with the creepy parts of Marshall Mcluhan’s own work on the interaction of identity, perception, mass media, crowd dynamics, industrial reproduction of images…
Indeed every line of McLuhan’s 1967 documentary “The Medium is the Massage” (not a typo, a pun) takes on a horrifying and terrible double meaning almost 60 years later in the second half of the 2020s with Corporate, Globalist, and State backed Legacy Media and the Rise of equally, though more subtly, manipulative social media.
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Max’s quest to find the Videodrome Signal leads him to hunt down Dr. Brian O’blivion in the flesh… There’s just one problem.
Brian O’blivion’s dead. He’s been dead since before the story started.
He keeps on appearing on television through a seemingly bottomless archive of video records and lectures sent out by his daughter Bianca.
Much as Marshall Mcluhan had died in 1980, but continued to appear on Canadian TV in various reruns and re-aired lectures well past 1983 and the release of Videodrome… saying creepy things about the immortality and power of media from beyond the grave.
“At the end he was convinced that public life on television was more real than private life in the flesh. He wasn’t afraid to let his body die.”
Bianca actually runs a “mission” a sort of “Safe Supply” Halfway house or Methadone Clinic… whereby the homeless and various junkies can get their fix… of Television.
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It is then that Max finally meets Brian O’Blivion.
Via hallucinations.
O’blivion reveals that the Videodrome signal both Max and Nicki have seen is in fact a weapon.
That viewing it permanently damages the mind causing hallucinations, mental derangement, permanent loss of inhibitions, Brain tumors, and stranger permutations of flesh (It is a Cronenberg film)… However even here O’Blivion is creepily hinting at other things…
O’Blivion (or Max’s hallucination of him) believes that it was not the Tumor which caused the hallucinations but rather the inverse. That Videodrome is in-fact a new stage of human evolution, and that via Videodrome he had accessed a deeper level of the memetic and media world… A concept that would be called the “digital world” decades later. But here is creepily more menacing as a concept, because it is not an aspect of machines but rather human minds.
That Videodrome is the beginning of a “New Flesh”.
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Of course none of the surviving non-hallucinating experts on Videodrome believe this, rather they treat it as a weapon… And use it to program Max into a sort of Golum, an MKUltra “Manchurian Candidate” assassin that they might use him to kill his partners at CIVIC-TV and secure political, media, and electro-magnetic control over Toronto for wider weapons testing of the Videodrome signal on a captive civilian population.
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Have I mentioned thus far that Canada was one of the real life testing grounds for MKUltra?
That being outside America, it was ideally suited for torturous chemical and psychological experiments on non-consenting mental patients over the course of 20 years.
Indeed many of these stories were declassified and reported just before Videodrome started shooting.
Psychological Warfare:
Or How Toronto Conquered the World
We must leave of the story of Videodrome there…
What will Max do or become?
Will the Golum Max rebel against his new masters?
What is this “New Flesh”?
Watch the Movie!
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I come from a 19th Century Country. Canada. And this gives me a great advantage when looking at the 20th Century.
-Marshall McLuhan
But for our purposes the core concepts: that new mimetic, psychological, sociological, and media based weapons and modes of warfare have been in constant development throughout the later half of the 20th century and still are being developed… Is I think almost undebatable…
And that the place they are tested first and perfected is English Canada. More often than not Toronto.
The Canada/US Border has indeed been the cutting edge of global Psychological Warfare since General Brock got The American General hull to surrender Fort Detroit to an inferior fort without firing a shot in the war of 1812.
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Indeed Canada’s Original pre-Suez culture was itself much of a Psyop, a conscious design of the British Empire to militarize British North America and resist US cultural and geopolitical hegemony.
But why is it still a ground for Psychological warfare? Why Toronto?
For the same reason so many of the core MKultra trials were preformed in the English parts of Montreal.
Because US intel agencies, carve outs, and political actors have legal and political cover to run experiments in Canada. If the CIA gets caught screwing with Canadians… What’s Ottawa going to do? Is the Prime Minister going to chase them to Langley, Virginia?
Are they going to be to be called in front of joint sessions of the Canadian Parliament?
If a US intel agency decided to screw with Americans, or American culture, or American politics… And it were to go horribly wrong or backfire, Congress could call the individual agents and department heads involved before hearings, the department itself could be disbanded, hell they could be tried and imprisoned…
You do that in Canada however, and technically you didn’t do it the US… Intel agencies GET to screw with foreigners. That’s their job.
They can perfect techniques, try out new things, and experiment at their leisure a short 10 hour drive north of NYC or Washington…. And if it blows up horribly or causes the opposite of the intended result? who cares? That’s Ottawa’s problem. Let them deal with the fallout, it’s contained.
It’s exactly just far enough away… And yet everyone speaks unaccented American English, all the amenities and lifestyle conveniences are the same as any American city, and all the sociology and political behaviour is close enough as makes little difference.
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As soon as you understand this you start to understand some bizarre things that would be otherwise inexplicable.
For example… The great meme wars of the 2010s…
I can never keep the timeline straight.
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People will tell me that GamerGate started in 2014, or that #MeToo was 2017.
And I’ll recoil from them…
Because I could have sworn #Metoo happened in 2011 and the very classroom friends and I debated it in… or that GamerGate was 2012?
It actually took this happening a few times for me to remember/realize that…
No it wasn’t called “#MeToo” in 2011… It was Called SlutWalk.
And it wasn’t called “Gamergate” in 2012, and the world wasn’t reacting to the perfidy, lies, and manipulations of Zoe Quinn…
But instead everyone was reacting to Canadian-American feminist Anita Sarkeesian who started her “Feminist Frequency” while at York University near Jane and Finch.
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From my perspective, in the schools and campuses of Toronto Ontario, from about 2011 to 2020 it was really a non-stop blur of shockingly heavily funded Feminist, Anti-Racist, LGBTQPALPHABET+, activists with non-stop infinite funding at all levels of institutional power… And every individual leg of it predicted what would happen next.
All the Culture warriors of the era, Jordan Peterson, Lauren Southern, Stephan Molyneux, were all Torontonians, and Stephen Crowder was veteran child actor from Canadian Children’s programing. Gavin McGuiness was one of the founders of the Montreal based magazine VICE and lived in Toronto at the time.
The radical overrepresentation of Torontonians in the early culture war industry isn’t an accident.
Toronto is ground zero for basically every political cultural trend, because it’s used as a test ground for psychological warfare and social engineering. And as a result the first place to develop immune responses.
SlutWalk resembled the rhetoric of MeToo so closely, because SlutWalk was where all the cultural and institutional forces and maneuvers were perfected on small scale beforehand.
“Because it’s 2015” Was a Justin Trudeau line before it was a PC principle line on SouthPark.
I heard it in 2013 “Because it’s 2013” when he was touring University Campuses trying to gin up buzz for his leadership campaign for head of the Liberal Party.
The Globalist Iron Governing principle: “Diversity is our strength”… Is the official motto of the City of Toronto. Adopted in 1998.
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Indeed my explanation… That Toronto is the testing ground of the Global American Empires cultural and political maneuvers and psychological operations… Is far more grounded and less Grandiose than the alternative…
That Toronto is just quietly the real political-cultural center of the Anglosphere, and all the trends the rest of the English speaking world thinks is something organic to them or their culture… Is in fact an unoriginal import they got from some Toronto Hipsters they subconsciously imitate. but all but the best of them are not hip or sophisticated enough to know the cultural and ideological origins of their inferior derivative iterations.
The Toronto Film Scott Pilgrim vs. The World Is treated as some patient ZERO plague-rat for Hipsterdom and female promiscuity. “In 2008, a women having 7 Evil Exs was considered an absurdly high number” As the meme says… However the Scott Pilgrim Film was not patient Zero.
Scott Pilgrim was the adaptation of the fictionalized biopic comic-book Scott Pilgrim, that started in 2004, and was about the author’s arrested-adolescence in Toronto in the 90s hanging out with garage bands (this is why all the video-game references stop at the PlayStation 1, that wouldn’t become a reddit manchild aesthetic choice until later). And the band of the film? Ramona Flowers?
Its Emily Haines of Metric. She’s Patient Zero. She’s was Bryan Lee O’Malley crush/friend he wrote Scott Pilgrim tacitly about.
(This is 2006. The Song was written in 2003).
The Entire 2010s was a Toronto export. Indeed, you look closely and you see that the entire Hipster movement was a stew of weird cultural cancers, Weaponized-Memetic-Brain-AIDS, and McLuhan Psyop Horror That’s been stewing in post-Suez Upper-Canada for decades.
Indeed you can find specific Toronto precedents and antecedents to Haines in figures like 1980s Martha Johnson of Martha and the Muffins or later Molly Rankin of Alvvays.
Or Put otherwise: Toronto Hipsters are the real cynical sophisticates and you Brooklyn transplants are braindead posers.
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I mean that’s certainly what us Hipsters in Toronto think… and I find myself struggling to resist my flannel/skinny jeans/beanie (toque) instincts that would have me come to the smug conclusion… (Hipsters just dress like Canadians… that’s hipster attire… Hipsters are just American-to-Canadian Transexuals)
But those are the real alternatives.
Either we posit that Toronto and English Canada more generally is the natural testing ground for the American empire’s psyops and Cultural warfare upon the nations of the western world, and the natural place to develop immune responses first…
Or we posit that there’s something so innately culturally important, sophisticated, urbane, well-read, and media sophisticated about Torontonians and the wider Laurentian world that extends across Ontario to English Montreal, that their small municipal Neuroses wind up inflecting the entire culture of the anglosphere by the sheer force of their worldly cosmopolitan sophistication.
(I think some poor Albertan just threw up in their mouth a little).
But the core conclusion is that whenever we see odd double events… Matrix style Deja Vu where world historical cultural trends that Shake America, the wider Anglo-sphere and ultimately “the West”, that all seemingly all have bizzare weird precedents in Toronto… (Even the Railroading of Derek Chauvin for the death of George Floyd, something you wouldn’t normally think could have a Canadian precedent, was precedented by the Shooting of Sammy Yatim, and how that was used to crush the institutional power of Toronto police and establish lawyer/social worker rule over the city)
That we should conclude there are major institutional and cultural forces using Toronto as a testbed for future Psychological and Culture-War fuckery.
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There’s a lot of other things like this… and documenting it all would take several more essays (I need to eventually write about the first hipster).
But once you notice the patterns suddenly you see them elsewhere and can judge future political/psychological events by them.
For example:
Cast Study 1: “Everybody hates [insert target here]”
The Canadian/Albertan band Nickelback was maybe the biggest Band in the world in the Mid-2000s. Selling more than 50 million albums at the last moment that was really possible. Getting more airplay than a lot of the most famous bands in history… Quite arguably overplayed… But their blend of rock, grunge, metal, and country was inoffensive in basically any market in the world… and wasn’t preaching anything or really trying to offend sensibilities, generate controversy, or grate on anyone (something you can’t say of most genres).
A Band that should have really kind-of disappeared into the background of world music discussion. It had a mall-dad/sports-bar sensibility.
Indeed the origin point of Alberta… The most “Country Music” part of the world that’s not in America was almost certainly part of it’s appeal. A Sub-urban/Ex-Urban/ Rural cultural nowhere that was a bit too obscure to make people arround the world feel it wasn’t their backyard.
And then it became the most hated band in world history.
“Everyone hates Nickleback”. Famously.
There are dozens and dozens of documentaries and video-essays on specific case study.
Hatred in a way almost no band before or since has ever gotten. And it wasn’t organic.
Legacy Music Magazines, establishment comedians, primetime comedy shows… The Exact same people you now expect to lie about absolutely EVERYTHING. All spontaneously united in one unanimous voice declared Nickelback the worst thing ever.
This is really weird. This does not happen.
Usually if a band or actor or other entertainment act is hated, it has either had a series of scandals, the core personality has said something about gays or jews, or it actively cultivated the hate as part of it’s brand… like Insane Clown Posse.
That the industry and media would just suddenly turn on a multi-billion-dollar entertainment property organically out of “taste” or “preference”… is basically unheard of for the same reason we’d never expect all the entertainment magazines and media companies to suddenly all speak out in hatred of the Marvel Cinematic Universe with one voice, or all suddenly decide that liking Taylor Swift made you a fat ugly loser.
These are some of the industry’s biggest ticket items, the revenues for the companies are insane, and rocking that boat too hard is going to get your career torpedoed by corporate who probably has relationships with the property you’re damaging.
Someone had to decide this messaging press was going to happen. That someone had to be pretty high up. They had to have more influence than a multibillion dollar entertainment property.
And as soon as you start thinking that big and that influential you have to think political, or national.
But why Nickelback? They aren’t political?
No they’re not. They were merely inoffensively popular. Indeed they didn’t even really have scandals.
The only thing that was going against them was that they were white men. They were heterosexual. And they were Canadian.
This made them perfect for a Psyop weapons test… A sort-of benchmarking exercise for the amount of media messaging and social control that could be effected against the public’s own revealed natural market preference.
Every band is from somewhere, and if you had targeted say The Dropkick Murphys of Boston, or Jimmy Buffet of Florida, you might have stirred up a big hornet’s nest really fast... People are really attached to their hit local bands. It could have political implications.
But all of American media targetting Alberta’s biggest success story? Who cares?
Any potential political fallout is contained.
Indeed, when you put it that way, this is one of the few really big bands or properties of any scale you could ever do this to… Do this to Taylor Swift and it might start a gender war. Do this to Jennifer Lopez or Oprah and it might start a race war.
But if you needed to test how much buy-in you could get from a Democratic public for pure compliance, off of messaging alone… how easily you could make them hate white men who had done nothing and were otherwise popular, attractive, and embodied a tough rustic spirit… without being attached to any specific region or location.
Nickelback was the perfect contained test target. They had even avoided politicizing themselves.
Indeed reading the Wikipedia page… The big years for Nickelback hate starting were 2010 to 2013… The exact years that SlutWalk, Anita Sarkeesian, and all the early 2010s 4th wave political correctness culture-war maneuvers were being tested in Toronto.
And the lesson was clear: Yes, you could make a completely random innocent group universally reviled for no reason whatsoever except the status anxiety of a bottomless mushy middle of people doing what other people were telling them, and performatively hating lest they be thought uncool, retrograde, or low-status.
Ie. Exactly what would be tried on every single group of dissenters for the next 15+ years.
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The only problem is… The test ended too soon. They didn’t observe the after-effects. That just like Wokeness’ attacks on right wingers and young white men in the 2010s. Nickelback’s fandom hardened and became radicalized by the experience of universal hatred… They’re still going strong today off the fanatical loyalty this engendered in their fans.
And remarkably they did it by not flinching and not second guessing themselves. Somehow the 200th corporate executive to get cancelled still plays the apology and appeasement game after decades of seeing that not work out for others and get them cancelled and destroyed…
But Nickelback was amongst the very first to be targeted by these techniques and methodology, by paid off early-2010s magazine influencers and TV personalities… And they never thought to rebrand or change their sound, or “Update for modern audiences” in response to the hate.
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Nickelback was the Test case for every cancelling, ten-minute hate, and 2010s online Magazine hate-fest “Takedown”… Every Mother Jones Hatedown… They were the first most aggressive test case.
And they survived it.
By being true to themselves… By looking at their photographs, and reminding themselves what they really are.
Case Study 2: Canadian Lockdowns
Canada is known for a few things… Innovative and Technocratic governance is not one them.
Canada is generally run by incompetent clowns. Indeed Canada’s most famous innovations are weird nightmarish stop-gap measures like MAID or Mass-Indian Immigration whereby the Canadian elites cover up their mismanagement in things like healthcare by implementing Euthanasia to relieve wait-times… Or propping up their catastrophic housing bubble by importing mass of the third world to brute force enough of a housing shortage that Boomer home-prices won’t drop.
So it’s really weird that CANADA would be the first country to implement an Mandatory COVID Tracking App “ArriveCan” for international travel.
Indeed Canadians themselves (contrary to Americans who were keen to tell us that we had surrendered our freedom just like our guns, which no Canadians have surrendered) were not really shocked at all when the App didn’t work, there was no enforcement, not another country on earth enforced it (so effectively there was no barrier to leaving the country) and had no way to enforce the mandatory “quarantine” on Canadians returning from abroad who had left the country without getting vaccinated or getting the app.
Having travelled internationally unvaccinated during the “ArriveCan” days… I can tell you border guards were more embarrassed and kindof relieved when you showed up without the app… That the protocol for not having it was simpler than having to actually wrestle with the app that didn’t work.
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So why was Canada leading the charge on this? Well the opposition will tell you it was Liberal money laundering (which yes) but it was almost certainly just another case of Canada being the testing ground for Washington’s global controls and psychological policies…
Thus why every “western” regime freaked out at the Trucker Convoy and all Abandoned COVID and Lockdowns in unison that the policy had failed so spectacularly it somehow escaped the Canadian testing ground and Truckers from Alberta and Timmons were now Blockading one of America’s most vital trade arteries at the Ambassador bridge.
If Canadians had not pushed back at lockdowns and the ArriveCAN app that did not work and was not enforced, and employer mandates that as far as I can tell no one was actually ever fired for…
Would these policies have been expanded to countries whose governments could have built an App?
And Yes I’ve Written on the Trucker’s almost total victory and the timeline of events before:
Are You Noticing Patterns?
A Mysterious full court press media?
Activity well beyond natural funding and economic interest?
Bizarre choices double and tripled down upon?
Activity the complete opposite of Natural Pre-media Opinion?
(Canada was hyper-British and nationalistic, Nickelback was Huge, Everyone thought Covid was just a cough before “2 weeks to slow the curve”)
A test environment/case-study that DOES NOT MATTER to world leaders… but acts as a proxy for their propoganda power to act on things that do matter?
Have these Canadian case studies reminded you of anything?
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Have we seen something like this recently?
The Odyssey is About Iran
Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey started filming in August 2025.
One month after after the 12 Day War between Israel, the US, and Iran.
Indeed its pre-production started November 2023, one month after the Oct 7th attack on Israel.
And it is releasing immediately in the sensitive moment of July 2026 where a new escalation is being weighed.
Considering that this is a “novel” film (No existing franchise) and a financially risky venture… Which is weird to say for the most important story in western civilization… These surrounding events are almost certainly vital to the fact that it got it’s 350 million dollar budget.
Indeed most US blockbusters that release around wars have some propaganda purpose or value.
Think of how tightly the first Michael Bay Transformers acted as a US Military propaganda piece or the political military importance of 300 as an archetypal “West vs. East” story to understand how intimately tied to US Foreign policy Hollywood’s big masculine movies are.
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The Odyssey is maybe the most important war story in this respect…
And so they cast a Black woman as Helen of Troy and Eliot Page as Achilles? Sorry “Sinon”.
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I think this was a benchmarking exercise.
The Odyssey is a parody of a woke movie. These choices are the choices you’d see in a South Park version of the story.
They were gathering social media and box office test data to see if they did a full legacy media push… If they faked the Rotten Tomato scores, had all their bought social media accounts spin it, buy out empty movie theaters (this is documented… People buying tickets to what on the seat reservations looked like sold out shows, only to show up and the theater was empty)…
How much buy-in could they get? How much narrative control could they wrangle?
Trans Achilles? Black Helen of Troy?
It’s a perfect “turd sandwich”… And exactly the kindof safe, politically contained, tertiary concern that would make a great benchmarking exercise for the Israeli/US Military’s control over public perception.
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Indeed to a MAN all the influencers who were pushing that the Odyssey was “not that bad” or “actually pretty good”, were all the influencers who push for Israel.
Ben Shapiro, Bronze Age Pervert, the OSINT people, Conservative Media, Various “Christian” influencers…
All the openly paid for Likud party affiliates… Who would normally jump at the opportunity to say “Achilles is not a biological female”, “Helen of Troy was not Black”, “Fairness in women’s sports” and other nothing culture war nonsense to win points with their conservative audience… Then sell them Israel’s foreign policy on a platter or try to finesse their audience into being neutral on foreign policy…
BAP had previously attacked the Emily Wilson TRANSLATION of the Odyssey, that Nolan’s Version is based on, as woke and Feminist… And Yet here BAP is defending the vastly more woke Nolan Adaptation as NOT WOKE…. A film With a black Helen of Troy with a noticeably scarred and disfigured face.
Meanwhile EMILY WILSON HERSELF publicly criticized the film and Bemoaned how antithetical to the values of Homer the film was.
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What is going on!?
You expect it to be the reverse. Indeed everything BAP has ever posted about Homer would lead you to expect that he would be ripping Nolan apart and Wilson defending it as an achievement of feminism.
Why is this?
Well Costin Alimaru (BAP) is a Romanian Jew deeply personally attached to Benjamin Netenyahu’s Likud party, and Israel in general… this has been known for some time.
If this was a benchmarking exercise to see how powerful their propaganda control is and how effective their playing both sides and controlling their own opposition is for shaping American opinion… Well BAP is one of the assets they’ve developed specifically for this purpose. Same as Ben Shapiro whom most naive conservatives would have expected to oppose the woke Odyssey movie… Then go back to advocating war in the middle east.
Instead here Ben Shapiro (a Jew) is arguing that Nolan’s Odyssey is actually not a woke Subversion, but a Christian Subversion! And so all his fans should go see it:
Different arguments for different audiences… But Shapiro and BAP are playing the same game trying to increase the likelihood their audience will see the film.
In the exact same manner that both would argue for an escalated Iran War and for young Americans to volunteer or “do their part” if drafted to die in Iran. They’d use different arguments for different audiences… But the the goal would be the same.
So who’s buying up all the empty audience seats for screenings of the Odyssey to try to trick you into going?
Israel, and probably the US Military.
Nolan and the Studios get told they have a guaranteed hit, they just have to make it as offensively woke as possible so the US can benchmark their ability to get Americans to take a bite of the turd sandwich.
This is why the financing makes no sense on the Odyssey, as I’ve written about.
This is why Nolan was given 20% off first dollar revenue for he and his wife in spite of a Woke-Dyssey not seeming anything like the kind of money maker it’d need to be to justify that… This is why the Actors almost certainly got their own points off revenue… Despite on paper this meaning that the film needs to make 4-8 times it’s budget to pay off the investors after advertising, theater cut, and the sweetheart deal given to the “talent”.
This is why Donald Trump and Republican Congressmen have said NOTHING about the film even to meme on it… Despite this type of Hollywood culture-war nonsense being EXACTLY the kind of distraction they’d usually be jumping for joy to make a news cycle out of and show their Fox News watching constituents that they’re on their side… without actually holding anyone accountable, reigning in any spending, or trying anyone for treason.
How much discipline do you think it takes for Trump NOT to tweet “Truth” about this?!
Why isn’t he.
.
Because this is a benchmarking exercise. This is their trial run for a ground invasion of Iran.
A test case to use all their propoganda tools and see what impact they can have
If they can make you take a bite of this Turd Sandwich, they can make you take a bite of Iran.
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That peak 2010ish insufferable David Miller anti-Mel Lastman mayoralty was like this brief flash of lightning before the emergence of Rob Ford, "I have enough to eat at home", and then followed by an avatar of what *should* have been the pre-1964 Upper Canada: John Tory. Olivia Chow is kind of a nostalgia mayor for that crowd.
I think now all those Metric fans from that 2006 video either moved to Bolton and Keswick because they're sick of evading Uber Eats biomass drivers, or are divorced and had to downsize to shoebox condos near the subway and are *finally* finishing their PhD's in political economy at....York, or whatever the hell Ryerson calls itself now.
CityTV is utter dreck, Znaimer content to make bank with his Zoomer Boomer porn only with lifestyle threads about Muskoka cottages rather than blowjobs in '78 Camaros.
Fascinating thesis about Toronto, I learned a lot. But what about Nirvana and Seattle in the early 1990s?