Deer Park

Well. Holy shit.

The Times of India put it well today:

” Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau’s visit was a disaster that has little parallel in India’s recent diplomatic history “

They’re calling for a ‘reset’ in the relationship. You know, like after a divorce.

To be impartial, here are 2 good summaries from the respectably lefty Washington Post:

Justin Trudeau’s India troubles are rooted in Canadian minority politics

and

Trudeau’s India trip is a total disaster — and he has only himself to blame

They’re angry here. I took down a post I blogged last night quoting an Indian anonymously from my WhatsApp group because it was inflammatory. They’re specially angry because it insults their intelligence and came across as patronizing, as well as complete insensitivity to their primary political issues.

A reminder. Here’s an IQ distribution chart:

So (1.324B * .0214) India has almost as many people with an IQ of 148 (or greater) as the whole population of Canada.

So running afoul of that is extremely easy if you’re a very dim bulb, or a progressive. But I repeat myself.

I don’t blame this idiot completely. He’s not calling the shots

This is what I’m waking up to, again, this morning in India. The press is full of it

My Bangladeshi businessman friend, the British team doing outsourcing, my guide Debjani, the hotel staff, everyone. They all know. It’s the front page story. And here I am, bad timing, not for the first time.

Exactly the same as when I was in Myanmar before this, and Trudeau sent a Rohingya crisis delegation, and everyone knew and was embarrassed about that blundering interference too.

Or a few miles further east in Vietnam, the same month, when they messed up the APEC summit so badly they had to send a damage control team to Tokyo afterwards to try and repair the damage.

The common thread? Elitist pig-ignorance. The insane Canadian progressive left are following me around the world. Help.

(Until recently I’ve avoided blogging politics. But as the culture war becomes close-to-terminally extreme there’ll be the odd odd thing that strikes me and I’ll blog it. The posts will be marked with an @ so you can skip them, like this one.

I was catching up on pieces in the Intercept, a highly respectable lefty site run by Glen Greenwald. Unreasonable lefties and righties are a dime a dozen, so easily ignored, but you wouldn’t expect anything insane to appear (on the right) in the National Review, so I was very surprised at this in the Intercept, on movies and toxic masculinity.

Here’s the piece

Here’s the asshole author

Oh lament, brave Ulysses! You were wrong, all along!

LOL

(Anyway, beside his main point, his prime movie argument is willfully blind to the greater ‘masculine toxicity’ of the Taliban. He’ll give them a pass, progressively, ‘all things’ considered)

So this morning I had a scare. The indicator light on my Indian dongle was blinking red (false alarm.) Which was exactly why I bought a second one, in case shit happens, you know, dump a beer over it.

So check out the below. The Jio Indian dongles cost 2400 rupees each, $46 CDN.

I got the round one first, 350GB SIM card for 7200 rupees, $140 CDN. The other was 750GB SIM card for 10,000 rupees, $195 CDN (I could be here for a long time, or not, and wifi is essential to me, and power is freedom and now I have more than a terabyte over 2 devices), so if you go the more efficient route, data cost me

26 cents per GB

But there’s more: Jio plans at this link. Rs 1000 (rupees) is $19 CDN. You’ll see their best plan is considerably cheaper than what I paid!

Anywhere in the huge country, covered, apparently. It was everywhere in Nagaland, which is India’s equivalent of our Yukon.

I have a friend who is never wrong on the facts and he says Canadian data is the most expensive in the world.

Sure, I understand there are infrastructural cost differences, and we’re a big country, and I know little about the industry, but surely the extremely obvious first step is shuttering the CRTC and deregulate. But that would be so unCanadian: we love the regulations that protect us from ‘something’, you know, the imaginary boogieman that invariably fails to appear other than in the self-serving narrative of leftist hacks.

Why is this an issue to me? I don’t care, I can afford the typical Canadian extortion. But I have 3 kids and data cost is a line-item in their monthly budget and it shouldn’t be.