- The Kinew government says they have plans, to be revealed in tomorrow's budget, that they say will justify their request for an exemption to the federal carbon tax. We'll have to see how that goes.
- Speaking of the carbon tax, countrywide protests against it are scheduled to start today. There's something kind of ironic about their choice of a date... or maybe it was intentional. When the Tories' campaign against the tax uses terms like "so-called experts", they're not going for your vote or mine, they're going for people who hate expertise on "principle". People who are ignorant, and proud of it. One can't help but think of the story (perhaps apocryphal) of how US Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson was told by a supporter, "Mr. Stevenson, you have the support of every thinking American". Stevenson supposedly replied "That's not enough, ma'am, we need a majority". Pierre Poilievre is going for the votes of the kind of people who would kick off their protest campaign on April Fools Day, and it's likely to pay off for him.
- Donald Trump's criminal trial for the hush money allegedly paid to Stormy Daniels begins later this month.
- Far-right extremists and their fellow travellers are trying to create a parallel economy, or as they call it a "freedom economy", because they think the established banks and e-commerce platforms are too woke.
- Several American and European investigative journalists have come to some conclusions about "Havana syndrome". Whereas the conclusion from US officials a year ago was that this was not something inflicted by a foreign adversary, and a recent report found no sign of physical harm to the patients (which would lend support to the mass hysteria theory), this report draws connections to Russian intelligence. Certainly this does have a ring of plausibility.
- AI is becoming sufficiently widespread that it's creeping into almost everything. That might be OK if it were reliable, but it isn't. It even poses problems for further developments in AI (and our control thereof), since as AIs are trained on text found on the internet, they will encounter more and more text that was produced by AIs in the first place.
- Former Winnipeg city councillor Bill Neville has died. He was a "conservative" of a sort that most present day conservatives would not recognize as one of their own; as a friend of his said, he "was part of a political culture that seriously valued forethought and moderation". The conservatives of today would consider forethought and moderation to be an affront to their freedumb.
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