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In Canada, budget vote today. In the British system, a vote of non-confidence forces an immediate election. In the Canadian system (don't know about UK or rest of British Commonwealth) a vote against the budget is considered non-confidence. Canada has more than 2 political parties with elected members. When no party has 50% or more of the seats, that's called a minority parliament. The party with the most elected members is the ruling party, but they can't pass any bills unless at least one other party votes for their bills. This forces parties to work together... theoretically. It's messy. Canada now has 343 seats in the house, so at least 172 members must vote in favour of a bill. The speaker only votes in case of a tie. The Liberals have 170 elected members. Budget vote today was 170 in favour, 168 against. That means all Liberals voted for it, one opposition member also voted in favour, because the speaker is a Liberal. And 4 opposition members were conveniently away sick today. Currently there are no independent Members of Parliament (MPs), although the Green Party only has 1 elected MP. Yup, you guessed it, the Green party member voted in favour.

Prior to today's vote, one Conservative member crossed the floor, joining the Liberals. Before that, Liberals only had 169 MPs including the speaker.
::Edit:: I found out the Conservative who crossed the floor had wanted to be speaker. He didn't get that because his own party voted against him. The number of seats are so close that Conservatives cannot afford to lose a vote. Again, the Speaker does not vote unless there's a tie. But this one individual didn't like that. Crossing the floor can be called a "hissy fit".

Canada held a federal general election April 28 of this year. Today's vote means there won't be another election this year.

This budget is a record high deficit; only COVID years had a higher deficit. We should be paying down the debt, at least the debt incurred during COVID years. This budget is bad. The Conservative party wants an election ASAP, although they have already been making noises that another election this year would be due to Liberals. Voters don't want another election in the same year. The NDP party (extreme left-wing progressives) performed extremely badly last election, they're not in any position for another election. Were the 4 absent members theirs?

::Edit:: One NDP member abstained. One Conservative member was recorded as Nay (voting against), but then wanted to make some long speech. You don't debate during a vote. House members yelled over her. Her vote was erased. So only 2 members did not vote.

::Edit:: One Liberal member created a YouTube channel where he spoke at length against the budget. But he voted with his party for it anyway.

If he lives north of Toronto, it's not on Lake Ontario. Possibly one of the cities on the shore of Lake Simcoe.

I live in the Central time zone, same as Texas. That's one time zone west of the Eastern time zone, that covers New England and the Atlantic coast.

Moving manufacturing back to the country makes sense, but you have to be strategic. Destroying Canada-US trade does not make sense, is harmful. Move manufacturing from overseas back, don't attack Canada or Mexico.

Wikipedia: Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act
Passed in 1930. Also expected to create jobs, but had the reverse effect. One of the reasons for the Great Depression.

The Long Depression 1873-1879. This followed the Morrill Tariff (1861). But the Civil War was in there. Both a delay for the negative effects of the tariff, and contributing factor for the Depression. War causes a lot of damage.

There were others: Tariff Act 1816, 1828, 1883, 1890.
Those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it. Trump appears determined to cause another depression.

On this date in history, October 19, 1781, British General Cornwallis surrendered his army to George Washington at Yorktown. This decisive victory for American and French forces effectively ended the revolutionary war and secured American independence.

"Constitutional Republic" vs "Democracy" is playing with words, pandering to partisan politics. You should rise above that. Look what the US is supposed to be, and what it is becoming.

The US will not be a Constitutional Republic if Trump continues what he is doing now. It is becoming a fascist totalitarian dictatorship. If he can, there will be no more elections. Constitutional separation of powers has already been challenged. Courts have ordered Trump to stop deporting people nabbed by ICE. Courts have ordered individuals who have landed immigrant status, legal residents, to be returned to the US. Trump and his team have refused. Blatant refusal to comply with court orders means the Constitution no longer exists. Trump claimed he has the ability to interpret law. The Constitution says the President does no such thing, the Courts do that. Trump claimed the ability to create tariffs by executive order. The Constitution says only Congress can do that. A ruling by the Appellate Court said all of his tariffs are illegal. They gave him time to appeal to the Supreme Court, but if he doesn't do so within the deadline, Court ruling will repeal all tariffs. Now the question is whether Trump will order Border Services and the IRS to collect it anyway, even though it's illegal.

Your Constitution Republic is being dismantled quickly, as you watch.

Void: You don't understand what I said. This is the interglacial cycle. It happens every 100,000 years. There's roughly 80,000 years of ice age, followed by 20,000 years of interglacial. The interglacial is the warm period between ice ages. Then another ice age. The interglacial is not stable. There's roughly 13,000 years of global warming as the ice melts, then as soon as the peak temperature is achieved it reverses to become global cooling. So 7,000 years of global cooling. Then the next ice age begins. It doesn't start with a tall wall of ice moving across the land, it starts with snow. The snow from the last winter does not completely melt during the summer. When the first snow of the next winter arrives, some of the snow of the last winter is still there. The second summer, more snow survives to the next winter. It slowly accumulates until summer is just not warm enough to melt snow. At least at what we not consider "temperate" latitudes, the ground is covered with snow all year. Then the snow gets deeper every year. Eventually the snow get so deep that the weight of the snow crushes the snow at the bottom to become ice.

Based on ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica, if we follow the pattern of the last 3 interglacial cycles, the peak temperature will be 5°C above the pre-industrial temperature. Previous ice cores resulted in 6°C ±1.25°. But a new ice core together with better methods of analyzing have refined that. They now say 5° ±fraction of a degree. That's not contradictory, just more precise.

Milankovitch cycles control ice ages. These cycles combine to create ice ages:

• orbital eccentricity: Earth's orbit changes from nearly circular to more elipitical, then back.

• obliquity: axial tilt increases and decreases.

• axial precession: which direction does the axis of rotation point? Currently it points to the North Star, Polaris. It rotates.

• apsidal precession: the elipse of Earth's orbit precesses around the Sun.

• orbital inclination: Earth's orbit is inclined vs the invariable plane

Void: if you click the link "The Discovery" in the article you linked, it takes you to a Facebook post. That says:

This isn't the oldest human ever, it's just the oldest human in Antarctica. A date of 1819-1825 is hardly controversial. So the indigenous people of Chile had boats before European explorers arrived. Duh! How do they think Polynesian people spread across the islands of the Pacific? How do they think Australian aborigines got there? There's an increasing body of evidence that people explored the planet long before the European age of exploration. Modern humans have been on this planet for 300,000 years. What do they think humans did all that time? No, civilization is not 5,000 years old, it's much older. That's just how old written record goes. Surviving written record.

There's evidence of wheat within walking distance of Göbekli Tepe that's 22,000 years ago. People who built Göbekli Tepe were not hunter-gatherers, they were farmers. Duh! The oldest evidence of wheat is in the Levant (Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine) that is 26,000 years old. When scientists started using satellites to find archaeology sites, they found roughly 200 stone buildings in the Sahara. Not all have been explored. They're different ages, different construction styles, and different purposes. Most are not tombs. One has a painting of a lake with trees and animals, including hippopotamus. As the planet warmed out of the last ice age, north Africa warmed from subarctic, to temperate, to tropical rain forest, to savanna, to desert. Sahara started small, then grew. One radar satellite is able to see beneath the sand of the Sahara, and sees groves in the bedrock from ancient river systems. They can see how far the Sahara expanded during the past several interglacial cycles, and it's larger than today. The planet hasn't finished warming out of the last ice age. Thousands of years ago when north Africa was a lush, people lived there. When it became desert, they had to leave. That was before invention of writing, so we have no written record of those people. Warming out of the last ice age began 20,000 years ago. In the 1960s/'70s/'80s/'90s scientists believed the ice age ended 11,000 years ago. Today they consider it to have ended 11,700 years ago. That's just another digit of precision.

So a skeleton in Antarctica that's only 200 years old? Sure. I would want a more authoritative source than Facebook, but it's hardly radical.

The Guardian: Some tourists and business travelers may face up to $15,000 bond to enter US
How many Mars Society members will not attend Convention this year?

YouTube: This is why so many Americans are moving to Russia
This is a young man from the UK, living in Ukraine and reporting on the war. He visited Kursk when Ukraine occupied it. He took video while he was in Kursk. Ukraine did not destroy residential areas, the Russians did that themselves when they re-captured Kursk.

He speaks about an article in the New York Times. The article was written by someone embedded with Russian forces, and every word of the article was approved by Moscow. He reports the article is incorrect, full of Russian propaganda. For one thing, claims of what happened in Kursk are in direct contradiction to what he saw when he was in Kursk. He also points out the New York Times has a habit of this: in the 1930s they wrote an article saying how great and wonderful the Nazis were. If you've heard about the New York Times article, then watch this video.

Ps. The video starts with a report of one family: husband, wife, and children, who moved to a town in Russia setup for Americans. The Russians forced the husband into the Russian army, sent him to fight in Ukraine, right at the front line, and with no training what so ever. We can now speculate how many days before he's killed.