The Website of a Guy Named Craig
If you’re going to start a conversation with, “Prove me wrong,” you’re doing it wrong. Because the phrase, “Prove me wrong,” implies that you’re opening with the statement, “I’m right, prove me wrong.” So if you start out by telling your opponent, “I’m right and, ergo, you’re wrong,” then maybe you should start with another phrase?
Just another tip in my, “How to Win Friends and Influence People” course that you can buy now for 9.99. It might save your neck. You’re welcome.
God forgive me for taking the side of anti-vaxxers like Tamara Lich (whose surname I pronounce like the worm I believe she is), RFK Jr., Dr. Oz and others, but I’ve re-discovered that they still exist (long after the pandemic ended and their catastrophic predictions were proven wrong) through the “Save our Ostriches” website, but politics make for strange bedfellows.
When I was in elementary school I participated in a school project which was, as I recall, an in-school version of an inter-school competition called the Young Scientists Exhibition. It was a competition to create the best project, complete with posters and all the “stuff” you could come up with to make it engaging for the people touring the exhibition — so, working models, demonstrations, etc., and ostrich scat (poop) in my case. My project, the subject of which I chose, was on ostriches. (I was a bit of an ornithologist at that age, and I thought ostriches were pretty cool birds.) That was in 1979, and I still had the papier mache ostrich my father helped me create with its welded wire skeleton and marble eyes until I finally decided there was no point in my carting it around from house move to house move in the early 2000s. But anyway, ostriches and I go back a few years.
I’ve read a lot — largely through the “Save our Ostriches” website, I will admit — about the case with the ostrich farm and the cull order issued by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. It’s hard to disagree with the assertion that the CFIA has overstepped the boundary of its authority in ordering this cull. Would humanity have ever made its way out of the caves if we mindlessly executed every human that ever caught a cold? Sure, maybe killing every single chicken in an infected flock makes some sense, but ostriches are not chickens. I’m not sure that any CFIA bureaucrats have ever seen a chicken or an ostrich outside of a picture book in their offices.
Fortunately, as of a few days ago, the Federal Court of Appeal seems to have come to its senses … for now.
As was to be expected, Albertans left their brains at home when they went to the polling booths in Battle River-Crowfoot, voting, of course, for Pierre Poilievre. It’s hilarious to me that the people on that side of the spectrum who make a big deal about not being “sheep”, blindly follow their sheep herder and just vote for the party rather than for someone local who would actually have been a good representative for them in Ottawa.
This seems to have put paid to any hope that the members of the Conservative Party might treat Poilievre the same way they treated Sheer and O’Toole, booting him from office as leader of the party. The fact that he blew a twenty-somethng percent lead in the general election would spell the death knell for any other party leader, but I don’t think even the Conservatives take themselves seriously any more.
Hey, I used to be a Conservative; it’s not the philosophy I have a problem with, but my problem is with mouthy, yappy, “I’m so tough and shouty” guys like Poilievre who have done nothing for Canadians other than be shouty and yappy! How are those leadership qualities?! How does that make you the best choice to be prime minister of this country?
It doesn’t.
I was hoping that Poilievre would be defeated and then we could stop watching him rant and rave on television, and perhaps someone with a brain might take over the Conservative Party. But is there anyone with a brain left in the party? There doesn’t appear to be.
I just thank the god I don’t believe in every day that we have an adult governing this country, rather than a career politician who couldn’t feed himself if he had to go out and get a real job. He dodged that bullet yesterday.
The world’s press has spent the last few days, and today (Friday here) in particular, trying to make a “nothingburger into filet mignon”, as one commentator said. Anyone with a brain knew well in advance of today that nothing substantive was going to happen without the presence of Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the summit, especially as trump wants so desperately to be seen as a friend of the enormously popular (excuse me while I retch) putin. After absolutely nothing happened except that putin got to ride in The Beast and watched a brief personal airshow, they both jumped in their planes and burnt a few more holes in the atmosphere to fly back to opposite sides of their continents.
All that I really saw was that the world’s most powerful dipshit and wannabe dictator spent the day sucking up to the world’s current biggest war criminal … who, I will point out, was not arrested when he landed, but this is no surprise given that the United States refuses to become a party to the International Criminal Court (ICC), has been aggressive towards the ICC and has hosted other war criminals in the past.
In fact, it was just two dictators getting together for lunch; trump probably asked putin for advice on getting away with sending troops into his capital city!
But maybe we’ll never know what they talked about because, other than admitting utter failure to negotiate a peace deal (certainly not why putin was there), both sides have refused to say anything. So in the absence of any information we’re left to wonder if the world’s two super-dictators have cooked up some sort of deal where they both get richer and the little guy (Ukraine) gets shafted.
It was just a typical “nothingburger”! Nothing else to be said!
The latest idiot to raise my ire is his ambassador to Canada, Pete Hoekstra, who has pissed me off in at least two ways recently:
If you want to whine about where you find yourself because of your boss upending the entire world order, foisting the cost of tariffs on American consumers and turning decades of economic integration between our countries inside out, don’t blame Canada. We’re just spectators in this farce you and your boss have created. Having just scanned your Wikipedia article, you sound like more of a dipshit than a “diplomat” should be, but that doesn’t surprise me.
I’ll have more to say in the very near future about how you’re fucking up Ukraine as well.
I’m late posting this because of … excuses.
I hadn’t heard of Victoria Mboko until less than a week ago, now she is my heroine. She’s my heroine for two reasons: (a) all the bloody TV commentators who can’t/won’t pronounce her surname properly because they don’t know how to pronounce African names with successive consonants and African words in general, and (b) because she soundly beat Naomi Osaka.
As you will know if you’ve read me for a while, I am no fan of Naomi Osaka. For me she’s the female version of John McEnroe, a whiny crybaby, but the difference is that McEnroe had to have known that he was making a spectacle of himself. Per the article to which I’ve linked above, I feel that so-called professional athletes should learn, not only their sport, but also how to behave under pressure. That means not wimping out when the going gets though (the topic of the post to which I’ve linked), but also losing and winning graciously. Osaka has yet to acquire that skill, and she demonstrated that beautifully on the court with Mboko and off the court afterwards.
Hey, listen, elite athletes are getting younger and younger, which means top athletes are being evicted from their perches younger and younger and sooner and sooner! Accept it, and get over it. You’re not gonna be number one forever. Your pouty and pissed-off faces on the court and not even making an attempt to get to some balls only show how little you deserved the top spot in the first place.
Congratulations Victoria Mboko!
This won’t be an ongoing theme, I can assure you, but I did as I suggested yesterday I’d do today, which was query Duck.ai again and see what nonsense it came up with this time. As I suspected, a link to my previous post was now in the search results and the AI-generated output was totally different!
Here it is:
Dave Cooper is known for his contributions to discussions about Zambia’s history, particularly when it was called Northern Rhodesia. He has shared insights about the region’s past and its cultural significance.
Background on Northern Rhodesia
Northern Rhodesia was the name used for what is now Zambia during British colonial rule. It was established in the late 19th century and became a British protectorate in 1924. The region was rich in natural resources, particularly copper, which played a significant role in its economy.
Dave Cooper’s Contributions
Dave Cooper is noted for his historical insights into Northern Rhodesia, particularly regarding its geography and cultural history. He has shared valuable information about the region’s past, including maps and personal anecdotes from his experiences growing up there.
Cultural Significance
The area is known for its diverse wildlife and rich cultural heritage. Many people, including Cooper, have fond memories of exploring the local bush and observing various bird species. This includes references to sunbirds, which are often confused with hummingbirds due to their similar feeding habits and vibrant colors.
Modern Zambia
Today, Zambia is recognized for its mineral wealth and is home to a growing population. The legacy of Northern Rhodesia continues to influence Zambian culture and identity, with ongoing discussions about its historical significance and impact on contemporary society.
I suppose if one searched for “salt” and generated an AI answer, the results would be pretty much identical each time. I searched for my own name without any additional search terms and, as expected, the output was about some slightly better-known person than me. So I added a couple of search terms and all I can say is that the result gives a whole new meaning to the term, “ego surfing“. If you need to generate a very important-sounding résumé for yourself, this might be the way to go! In fact, post your AI-generated output on your blog, on LinkedIn and a bunch of other places and it could be the equivalent of Google bombing / link bombing.
Just don’t tell them I sent you.
Dave Cooper according to AI a day later.
Huh, interesting. I searched for Dave’s name on DuckDuckGo and decided to query their AI feature, “Search Assist”, not expecting much. These were the surprising results:
Dave Cooper was a notable figure associated with Northern Rhodesia, known for his vibrant personality and contributions to the community. He passed away on July 19, 2025, and was remembered fondly by friends and family for his unique character and love for life.
Dave Cooper’s Connection to Northern Rhodesia
Background
Dave Cooper was a notable figure who had a deep connection to Northern Rhodesia, now known as Zambia. He spent his childhood in Kitwe, where he developed a passion for exploring the local wildlife and nature.
Recent Events
Dave Cooper passed away peacefully on July 19, 2025, in the Netherlands. His life was marked by a vibrant personality and a love for the natural world. He was remembered fondly by friends and family for his unique character and the impact he had on those around him.
Memorial Plans
Cooper’s remains were cremated on July 22, 2025. In a tribute to his enduring friendships and shared passions, his ashes will be scattered in Québec, which he considered his second home. This ceremony reflects his connection to both his past in Northern Rhodesia and his later life experiences.
Legacy
Cooper’s legacy includes his love for nature and the memories he created during his time in Northern Rhodesia. His story is a reminder of the rich history and personal narratives tied to this region.
I find it interesting that this was created based on only my own personal website — where Dave is only mentioned once (making him “notable”), in his obituary yesterday — and on the Great North Road website where there is currently only a placeholder page and a link to a PDF document he created based on an original document from 1936 which, of course, isn’t about him!
I think there was a lot of interpolation by AI and, of course, some nice, trite words based on AI’s understanding of what recent death means to us humans. I wonder what the output from an AI will be tomorrow based on the addition of this string of text to its corpus. (Interestingly, Google’s search results don’t include any AI output, at least not for the same search string.)
Dave Cooper according to AI.
Dave Cooper at Cape Point in South Africa.
I have nothing better to add about Dave to the excellent obituary provided by his long-time partner Vince.
[…] ἐχθὲς μὲν μυξάριον, αὔριον δὲ τάριχος ἢ τέφρα. […] Τοῦ ἀνθρωπίνου βίου ὁ μὲν χρόνος στιγμή, ἡ δὲ οὐσία ῥέουσα, ἡ δὲ αἴσθησις ἀμυδρά, ἡ δὲ ὅλου τοῦ σώματος σύγκρισις εὔσηπτος, ἡ δὲ ψυχὴ ῥεμβός, ἡ δὲ τύχη δυστέκμαρτον, ἡ δὲ φήμη ἄκριτον˙ συνελόντι δὲ εἰπεῖν, πάντα τὰ μὲν τοῦ σώματος ποταμός, τὰ δὲ τῆς ψυχῆς ὄνειρος καὶ τῦφος […] Πομπῆς κενοσπουδία, ἐπὶ σκηνῆς δράματα, ποίμνια, ἀγέλαι,διαδορατισμοί, κυνιδίοις ὀστάριον ἐῤῥιμμένον, ψωμίον εἰς τὰςτῶν ἰχθύων δεξαμενάς, μυρμήκων ταλαιπωρίαι καὶ ἀχθοφορίαι,μυιδίων ἐπτοημένων διαδρομαί, σιγιλλάρια νευροσπαστούμενα. […]
Yesterday a drop of semen, tomorrow a handful of spice and ashes. […] In the life of a man, his time is but a moment, his being an incessant flux, his senses a dim rushlight, his body a prey of worms, his soul an unquiet eddy, his fortune dark, and his fame doubtful. In short, all that is of the body is as coursing waters, all that is of the soul as dreams and vapours […] An empty pageant; a stage play; flocks of sheep, herds of cattle; a tussle of spearmen; a bone flung among a pack of curs; a crumb tossed into a pond of fish; ants, loaded and labouring; mice, scared and scampering; puppets, jerking on their strings […] that is life.
(Marcus Aurelius (121-180 CE), Meditations [writings to himself], IV: 48, II:17, VII:3)
A Farewell to Dave,
It is with a heavy heart, but also with a sense of peace that I share the news of Dave’s passing. He died peacefully in his sleep on July 19, 2025, in Roermond, the Netherlands.
The period leading up to his death saw him grapple with dementia, an illness that is hard to define rationally. His passing was, in the words of the Stoic Seneca the Younger, a “good death.”“It is not a question of dying earlier or later, but of dying well or ill. And dying well means escape from the danger of living ill”.
(Seneca, Moral letters to Lucilius, LXX:6)
Dave was Dave until the very end: full of energy and an enigma. He wore his heart on his sleeve, misanthropic, dramatic, empathetic, generous, show-offy, difficult at times, and, above all, tremendously loving. Almost everyone I’ve spoken to since he passed said that Dave was one of a kind, and he truly was. I’ll miss him!
Dave and his friend and companion, Erik Wampler, who passed in 1996, were great admirers of the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius and the Stoic philosophy he left behind. Dave even included the above-quoted lines from Aurelius’s Meditations in Erik’s eulogy.
Funeral and Scattering of Ashes
Dave’s remains will be cremated on Tuesday, July 22, 2025, at 10:30 a.m. CET (1:30 a.m. PST).
In a final tribute to their enduring friendship and shared passions, Dave and Erik’s ashes will be scattered in Québec, Dave’s deuxième patrie. I am currently in touch with our Québec friend, Alain Durand, to finalize the details of when and where this will take place. Further information will follow. You are welcome to be there.
Staying in Touch
If you have any questions, thoughts, or simply wish to connect, please feel free to reach out to me at [my email address] or find me on WhatsApp or Signal at [number redacted].
Thank you,
Vincent,
my brother Merlijn, who made the obituary,
and my friend Ros, who edited the text.p.s. How better to remember Dave than through the music he liked.
Dave has also been memorialised on the home page of the GNR (Great North Road).
Obituary of Dave Cooper, from Vince.
I’ve watched yet another sob story on the news about some small business just across the border in the US who are missing all of the business that Canadians bring with them across the border, and I just don’t get it.
I am one of the Canadians who used to cross the border about once a month, and I do not any more. However, I don’t cross not because I refuse to support a country or its president who talks of annexing us and imposes tariffs on us; I do not cross because if I do I will be a foreigner in their land, and the American government and its employees have shown a categorical dislike of foreigners. I do not want to be on the receiving end of that “categorical dislike”, whether it’s from a CBP employee, a Border Patrol agent or even a local sheriff!
I don’t make this statement based on hypothetical conjecture, I base it on real cases, one in which a Canadian was detained at the southern US border while she was applying for a renewal of her work visa, and then kept in custody for eleven days. One example of this insanity is all I need, no matter how it may have come about, the border at which it happened, and no matter how it may have ended — reasonably well for the Canadian after a couple of weeks in Third World-type detention! There’s even a case of a Canadian, who is a veteran who served the American forces, being deported, not to mention of the spouses of trump supporters being deported! My god!
And then, at the US’s northern border, there are so-called “random” searches being made of travellers (including American citizens, presumably) before they get to the Canadian border — so-called exit/outbound inspections! People love to say that, “If you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about or fear.” It’s an old trope, and it’s 100% true, but OK, I’ll just randomly pull you and all of your friends over next Saturday afternoon in your neighbourhood and we’ll see how much you object to that! Besides the fact that a twenty-minute trip across the line can turn into a few hours — or days if you’re really unlucky — nobody likes to be treated like a criminal for no apparent reason. That’s not part of the freedoms on which Canada and the United States are founded; it’s a symptom of a “police state”, no matter what excuses the American government gives (through one of its many police forces, of course) about how such random searches “[make] our community safer”. Yup, police states are very safe, unless you happen to make an enemy of a police officer or have anything to say about the current dictator.
I want to make clear that I don’t believe I have anything to fear — legitimately, if you don’t count my railing against trump on this blog — in crossing the US border; I’ve never been denied entry and, other than a grand total of two speeding tickets, I have never broken any laws in the United States. However, the experiences of the people above, who had less reason than me to fear the American government, give me even more reason to fear the American government and a complete lack of desire to turn one of my twenty-minute trips across the border into a two-hour (at best) ordeal. No thanks. I feel for the American businesses in border towns like Blaine and Point Roberts, but their solvency is not worth my freedom, even for five minutes, and the Canadian media needs to get over this claim that we’re not crossing the border because we’re trying to punish Americans.
It might be useful to note that academics who are avoiding travel to the United States are also not doing so to inflict punishment on mom-and-pop American businesses, they’re doing so to protect themselves from the excesses of xenophobic American government officials.
I realise I’m a bit late in getting to this, but I find it hilariously ironic that the constituents of the riding in which Pierre Poilievre (leader of the Conservative Party) ran in the last (2025) federal election took his policy of “CHANGE” so literally and seriously, that they voted to change their representative in parliament, away from him and to the Liberal candidate for the second time since Confederation. So the leader of the Conservative Party doesn’t even have a seat in the House. Of course, some Conservative MP is going to give up his seat so that Poilievre can get into the House of Commons, despite that fact that he’s been rejected by the public. If that isn’t hypocritically going against the will of the people, I don’t know what is.
But Poilievre was voted out for personal reasons; nobody likes him! And he’s not prime-ministerial material! I really think you’d be hard-pressed to find many Conservatives who likes his style or approach, and yet Conservative MPs will all belly up to the bar and claim that he, their leader, needs to muscle out some other MP (who will be rewarded down the road with patronage, of course) to be allowed to run in a by-election to get back into the elitist boys’ club against which he rails at every opportunity he gets. His two-facedness is just beyond belief.
I think the House of Commons will be far better off without him, but it’s a shame that the will of the people will be overthrown by the constituents in a “safe” Conservative riding in Alberta.
Ramaphosa and trump in the Oval Office.
In other trump news — we can’t get away from him — he tried to ambush Cyril Ramaphosa, president of South Africa, in the Oval office yesterday. However, the thing that really pissed me off was that the media — including the BBC and CBC — just piled on top of what they described as his long-debunked claims of a “White genocide” in South Africa. “Long-debunked”? That’s news to me. The systematic killing of White farmers in South Africa has been documented for a long time, many years. Sure, we can all debate whether or not the South African government is involved in said genocide but, other than the police force’s dragging their feet on the investigating of the perpetrators, I don’t believe anyone is actually accusing the South African government of being involved. If it’s questionable, my feeling is that the investigation is still open, and it may be years and generations before we know the real truth.
So as much as I do not want to be seen as someone who will pile onto one of trump’s misinformation/disinformation bandwagons, I think he does have a point about the prolific murders of White South African farmers that is still an open question.
It blows me away how disproportionate the military aid from America is between Ukraine and Israel. I’m a former supporter of Israel — although I still think they deserve more support than their enemies — but I think they’ve ridden and taken advantage of the Holocaust bus / gravy train for too long now. There’s no doubt that Hitler’s crime against the Jews in World War II is, and will remain, a black mark on world history that will exist forever, but that was almost a century ago now, and punishing Palestinians is not quite the same as going back in time and punishing the Nazis, despite the horrific attack on Israel by Hamas on 7 October 2023.
But my point in this post is not to get into the middle of that millennia-long conflict. The conflict in which I’m really interested is the one that started in 2014 when Russia began their destabilisation efforts against Ukraine. This was, essentially, the revival of the Cold War and the Russian imperialist agenda by vladimir putin, but either trump is all in favour of putin’s revival of Russian imperialism, or (as I’ve said before and will undoubtedly say again) he skipped out of all history classes in school and has no idea what’s going on. He certainly seems to have no idea that putin is playing him like a fiddle, promising peace one minute and then withdrawing that promise the next as he bombs more innocent civilians.
Since trump came to power for a second time, he has overloaded the Israelis with weapons and done all he can to withhold weapons from Ukraine in their existential fight against Russia’s invasion. That anyone in a war with Russia has to beg for military assistance from anyone in the West boggles the mind of anyone who lived during the Cold War (especially in one of countries in which the Americans and the Soviets fought one of their proxy wars), since the Americans adopted the Truman Doctrine in 1947. However, as I’ve said many times in this blog, trump didn’t read a single line of history is his very limited education, and so has absolutely no reason to be concerned about Russia (and especially putin) and his megalomaniacal ambitions. So he doesn’t care a whit about the Ukrainians, trying to work his infamous “art of the deal” on them instead, stripping them of their natural resources to a greater extent than Germany was stripped of theirs after World War II. It boggles the mind!
History will not smile on donald trump, especially if he helps putin “win” his war at the bargaining table.
This reminds me that I have been sitting on a piece I’ve written (but not fully completed) about Western companies (like Cadbury, owned by the American company Mondelez) continuing to do business in and with Russia despite the world’s sanctions against the country. I need to cut that piece off and publish it. That said, I have boycotted Mondelez products — and a huge number of others — since I found out years ago that they’re supporting Russia in their killing of Ukrainian civilians.