World

It’s difficult to get people to take the idea of Canadian world domination seriously — and I admit the notion snuck up on me too. My first inkling came last year, when I found out Toronto was on track to overtake Chicago as the city with the second-largest number of skyscrapers in North America, New York being the first. But then came the news about Kansas City Southern, at which point I realized: Canada is on the march. You’ve probably never heard of Kansas City Southern. I hadn’t either, and my knowledge of railroads — that’s what KCS is — is well above average. Here are two of the three things you need to know about it: 1) The KCS originates in Kansas City and heads south. You might have figured that out for yourself, I suppose, but railroad names can be deceptive.

Canadians pride themselves on their ultra-progressive reputation. In contrast to the gun-loving, war-mongering, big government-hating, get-off-my-lawn-you-commie reputation of Americans, Canadians see themselves as North America’s kinder, gentler half. But that smug politeness has seen us sleepwalk into an Orwellian nightmare. We have never felt much of an affinity to free speech in Canada — saying what you really think is mean and individual rights are for people who don’t have a feminist drama teacher as prime minister. So it’s perhaps unsurprising that a new bill proposing to regulate speech on the internet is being pushed by our politically center-left Liberal party.

Dear Americans, We're Canadian and, yes, we're sorry. No, this time we mean it. You likely hadn't noticed, but Canada has lost one of our greatest sources of consolation during the COVID-19 pandemic: that things weren’t nearly so bad as they have been south of our border. Even the editorial board of Canada's leading national newspaper, the Globe and Mail, acknowledges that Canada is doing far worse at managing the pandemic than the US. A smug feeling of moral superiority over Americans is a regrettable part of our national character. This attitude seemed more justified than ever as we watched the apparently chaotic early American approach to COVID. None of this is to say that any sane person took pleasure in the suffering of our American neighbors and allies.

With 40 percent of the population vaccinated, a palpable sense of normalcy has returned to America. The young are now getting their turn at the COVID vaccine and in almost every city, restaurants and bars are back in full swing. But while selfies of joyful reunions with older relatives flood social media here, in India, the picture is grim. The country reported world record-breaking coronavirus infection rates for four days in a row. Hospitals in several cities are grappling with severe shortages of beds, medicines and oxygen. For a country widely seen as the pharmacy of the world (India produces 60 percent of the world’s total vaccines), it is a sad irony that just 8 percent of its own population has been vaccinated thus far.

In announcing his decision to withdraw all remaining US troops from Afghanistan, President Joe Biden declared that 'it’s time to end America’s longest war.' The wording of the President’s announcement left little room for backtracking so his decision appears to be definitive. It’s also necessary and long overdue, if not without risk. But it will not actually 'end' the war that began just weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks when US special operations forces and CIA paramilitary units entered Afghanistan. The conflict that Americans are accustomed to calling the Afghanistan War will continue, albeit without any overt US military involvement.

After 20 years, a peak of 100,000 troops and trillions spent, the American military was unable to defeat the Taliban or even stop them from running half of Afghanistan. But that isn’t the only war America has been losing. We’re also losing the Meme Wars. That’s the lesson from a truly ghastly discovery by the intrepid reporters at VICE, who obtained 23 pages of internal documents from the Pentagon about an anti-Russia meme it deployed last October. The meme (see above) in question was created by US Cyber Command’s Cyber National Mission Force, as part of its invisible war against Russian hackers. Their goal: expose the fact that Russia has hackers (gasp!) and make them look dumb in the process.

Back in another lifetime when I was getting certified to become a yoga instructor, my teacher always asked us, ‘Is this a fear that’s keeping you alive or a fear that’s keeping you from living?’ She would pose this question as we hesitated to try a headstand or a handstand. It was a hard question to answer then. It’s even harder now, in the middle of a global pandemic when your most irrational fears could be justified. In early January of this year I was going insane. We were approaching almost a full year of lockdown here in California, the state with arguably the most stringent lockdown measures in the nation. At the time, all the restaurants were closed. You couldn’t get a haircut. Again.