Portrait of the current president of the United States. The medium used is one I have concocted from water and horse manure, which seemed appropriate considering the subject.

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In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury imagined book burning to keep knowledge from the public. In 1984, George Orwell imagined records disappearing into a memory hole so power could control the past. Anthropic had a different motive, but its method belongs in a dystopian novel: destroy physical books and lock their contents inside a corporate system the public cannot inspect.

Anthropic called the operation Project Panama. An internal planning document called it an effort to “destructively scan all the books in the world” and told employees not to discuss it outside Anthropic. Within about a year, Anthropic spent tens of millions of dollars acquiring millions of books.

Vendors removed the bindings, cut the pages, scanned them and sent the remains for recycling. The files entered Anthropic’s private library as material for its AI models. Each physical copy disappeared from circulation and could no longer be read, lent, donated, resold or preserved.

In June 2025, a federal judge ruled that converting legally purchased books this way qualified as fair use. Anthropic had replaced each physical copy with one digital copy and had not shared or sold the file outside the company. A separate $1.5 billion settlement, approved in July 2026, covered digital books Anthropic downloaded from pirate libraries.

ISBNdb now markets purchases of 1,000 to 1 million books to AI developers. It promotes books published before 2022 because their human writing is uncontaminated by AI generated text. It offers confidentiality and admits that book destruction creates a public relations problem.

Some booksellers report sudden orders for hundreds of obscure and out of print titles. They suspect AI buyers, but anonymous purchases make those suspicions difficult to prove. Scarce copies could disappear into private databases without the public knowing who bought them or what was destroyed.

Orwell’s Party destroyed records to control the past. Anthropic destroyed books to improve a product. The motives differ, but Anthropic’s process still shifts power from accessible physical evidence to an institution that controls the archive. The public cannot inspect Anthropic’s library or trace Claude’s answers back to the books that shaped them.

AI developers value older human books because AI generated writing is polluting online training material. They are consuming human culture to escape the contamination their own products created. The memory hole has a scanner now, and it belongs to a private company.

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Indigenous knowledge from 1,400 years ago is helping Peru confront drought. More than 1,400 years ago, Indigenous people in what is now Peru learned how to turn a mountain into a reservoir. High in the Andes, they built channels of stone and earth called amunas. The name comes from a Quechua word meaning to retain.

During the rainy season, the channels divert water from streams and spread it across porous hillsides. The water sinks into the soil and travels through cracks in the rock. The mountain then releases that water weeks or months later through springs and streams. Water that arrived during the rainy season becomes available when communities need it during the dry season.

Scientists tested one surviving system near the community of Huamantanga. They placed a tracer dye into an amuna and monitored springs farther down the mountain. Traces appeared between two weeks and eight months later. The average journey underground lasted 45 days. Researchers calculated that restoring similar systems across key areas supplying Lima could delay 99 million cubic metres of water each year. That could increase dry season river flows by an average of 7.5 percent.

Lima is a desert city of more than 11 million people. It depends heavily on water from the Andes, where shrinking glaciers, changing rainfall, and rising demand are increasing pressure on limited supplies. Communities in the upper Rímac basin are now restoring the amunas with support from scientists, engineers, and conservation groups. Since 2016, five communities and Aquafondo have rehabilitated 86 kilometres of channels.

Monitoring estimates that these restored amunas help move more than 15 million cubic metres of water underground each year. Local committees maintain the channels and preserve knowledge passed down across generations. Modern science is measuring a system Indigenous communities understood centuries ago. Climate adaptation is often presented as a race to invent new technology. In Peru, part of the future is being secured by restoring knowledge that has survived for 1,400 years.

Let me know what you think of this story.

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I did not think there was a billionaire as unlikable as Elon Musk, but this guy just might be. Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke, worth an estimated US$11.4 billion, recently said that people with guaranteed pensions should become dependents and lose their vote. He argued that people with a stake in the future should decide instead. Under his logic, anyone paying zero income tax would receive zero votes, while people paying between $1 and $100,000 would receive one vote. The number would rise to five votes for anyone paying at least $500,000. He also described Toronto town hall participants as retired, unemployed, unemployable, and useful idiots.

Longtime residents of the tight knit, historically artistic community of Wychwood Park in Toronto have described Lutke and his billionaire tech bro friends as detached and slightly disturbed, comparing them to a nest of raccoons that had taken up residence in your yard. Populism frames politics as a struggle between ordinary people and a powerful elite. Right wing populism usually defines that struggle through culture and national identity. Left wing populism defines it through class, wealth, and corporate power.

Billionaires become its clearest targets because extreme wealth creates extreme influence. Billionaires can finance political movements, employ lobbyists, own media outlets, and secure access to governments. Global billionaire wealth reached $18.3 trillion in 2025. Oxfam estimates billionaires are 4,000 times more likely than ordinary people to hold political office. Tobi Lütke just showed us why the left wing populists are correct. Many of the problems we are facing today are because of guys like this. It is really no different than an aristocrat with contempt for the commoners.

Left wing populists argue that billionaires already possess excessive political power, but Lütke wants to give wealthy people even more. Someone should remind Tobi that historically, when the wealth gap became too extreme and the ruling class refused to compromise, the commoners resorted to violent revolution. I am thinking about the French Revolution in 1789 and the Russian Revolution in 1917. He should be reminded that there are way more of us than there are of him and his raccoon tech bro buddies.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

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In current political debate, defenders of capitalism often attack social democrats, branding them as communists and warning that their ideas threaten freedom and prosperity. This raises a question worth sitting with. What would those same voices make of the philosophies held by Indigenous nations such as the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the Mi’kmaw Nation?

It is vital to establish that these are living communities today. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy currently includes the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora Nations. Their foundational values run counter to the core tenets of capitalism.

Capitalism is an economic system defined by private ownership and the pursuit of profit. It relies on a reality where individuals and corporations control resources rather than the public. Private property grants the legal right to own, control, and accumulate assets. The primary force of the system is the profit motive, and every decision about production, investment, and distribution is calculated to maximize financial gain for the owners. In the end, capitalism organizes society around the steady accumulation of wealth.

These Indigenous nations practice a disciplined foresight. The Seventh Generation value is rooted in the oral constitution of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. This principle instructs leaders to weigh not only the present but the generations to come, including those whose faces are yet beneath the ground. Chiefs consider how present choices will affect descendants who have yet to be born. The world is treated as something borrowed from future generations.

The principle of Netukulimk is a central Mi’kmaw value meaning to take only what you need. It means using the bounty of creation to support the individual and the community without jeopardizing the integrity, diversity, or productivity of the environment.

These teachings connect present choices with obligations that extend beyond the people making them. They demand that we leave descendants clean water, stable ecosystems, living cultures, and meaningful choices. A system built on accumulation sits in direct tension with a philosophy that treats excess as a threat to communal survival. One system promises endless extraction. The other tries to ensure there is still a world left to inhabit.

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The founders of the US Constitution actually predicted this vulnerability. In Federalist No. 10, James Madison warned that the greatest threat to a republic was “faction,” meaning a group of citizens becomes so consumed by a common passion that they destroy the permanent interests of the community. The founders deeply feared direct democracy because they knew it allowed charismatic demagogues to bypass institutional guardrails by appealing directly to public emotion. They would view the election of Donald Trump twice as a total failure of the checks and balances they designed.

The core problem America faces today is structural instability. When Joe Biden was elected, the world treated Trump’s first term as a temporary aberration. The fact that Trump won a second term proves that every four years, the world now expects a potential Trump 2.0, or someone worse. Even if a reasonable President wins in 2028 and begins to restore international agreements, world leaders know that four years later, Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, Elon Musk, or Donald Trump Junior could take power and tear everything down again.

In 2022, 83 percent of Canadians considered the United States a reliable partner. Today, only 35 percent do. Canadians now view China more favorably than the US.

For those of you who did not vote for Donald Trump, you should put a Canadian flag on your luggage when you travel the world. If you did vote for Trump, was this what you expected?

Let me know in the comments.

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In 1874, British Columbia made it illegal to light the fires that had protected the land for thousands of years.

Long before Canada built a system for fighting wildfire, First Nations were lighting small ones on purpose. Knowledge holders chose the place, the season and the weather. The flames cleared dry vegetation, fed the soil, opened travel routes and improved berry patches and habitat for deer, elk and moose. They also broke the land into patches, so a later wildfire had nowhere easy to run.

The Bush Fire Act ended that in British Columbia. It arrived a decade before the federal ban on the potlatch and served the same purpose. Both removed ceremony and pressed Indigenous people toward assimilation. When Banff was created in 1885, the federal government forcibly removed Indigenous peoples from the park and kept fire off the land for almost a century.

The fuel stayed. It is still there, and the climate is getting hotter.

Canada has started to reverse this. Parks Canada returned fire to Banff in 1983. Gitanyow and Xeni Gwet’in are burning again. But British Columbia burns about 10,000 hectares a year. New Jersey burns more.

Sometimes the right fire has to come before the wrong one does.

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When governments know something causes harm, why does change take so long?

The world is on fire. The climate is obviously warming. Yet governments keep investing in pipelines.

Cigarettes are a useful case study.

In 1950, major studies linked smoking to lung cancer. Britain’s Royal College of Physicians warned the public in 1962. The US Surgeon General concluded in 1964 that smoking caused lung cancer and chronic bronchitis. In 1981, studies linked secondhand smoke to lung cancer. In 1986, the Surgeon General concluded that involuntary smoking caused disease, including lung cancer, in healthy nonsmokers.

Everyone knew by 1950. But Canada didn’t ban smoking on flights of two hours or less until 1987, and smoking wasn’t banned on international flights until 1994. Broad bans covering workplaces, restaurants and bars didn’t arrive until the 2000s. Ireland introduced the first comprehensive national workplace ban, including pubs, in 2004.

It took five decades for governments to ban something they knew was killing people.

Tobacco companies were the reason for the delay. One infamous industry memo said, “Doubt is our product.” They funded scientists and front groups, attacked credible studies, lobbied politicians, and recruited hospitality associations to warn of lost jobs and closed businesses. They promoted smoking sections and ventilation as reasonable compromises that left workers exposed. Their goal was to make delay look responsible. In 2006, a US federal court found that major cigarette companies had fraudulently denied dangers they understood.

Momentum finally grew when secondhand smoke was reframed as a workers’ rights issue rather than a private choice. Health groups, unions and local governments built coalitions. Had that framing come sooner, the bans probably would have too.

We’re watching the same playbook with climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change produced its first assessment in 1990, after Exxon’s own scientists had produced accurate warming projections. Fossil fuel interests have since financed misinformation and lobbied against climate policy, exactly as the tobacco industry did.

And here we are, 36 years later, and the world is burning.

Perhaps the answer is that climate activists need to treat this as a human rights issue. A warming planet isn’t an abstract environmental concern; it’s a threat to the right to life, to health, to food, water and shelter. Framed as private cost or consumer choice, action stalls. Framed as a violation of basic human rights, it becomes something governments can be held accountable for. The tobacco fight was won on those terms. The climate fight can be too.

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Plans to build the world’s first commercial octopus farm in Gran Canaria, Spain, have been scrapped, in a major victory for octopuses and the global animal welfare movement.

Plans by Spanish company Nueva Pescanova to farm one million octopuses per year were leaked in 2023, sparking widespread concern among scientists and animal welfare organisations.

Octopuses are highly intelligent, curious and solitary animals, making them fundamentally unsuited to intensive farming. Confining them in crowded, barren tanks would inevitably compromise their welfare, while the proposed production system raised serious concerns about breeding, high mortality rates, the absence of humane slaughter methods and the environmental impacts of farming a carnivorous species that relies on wild-caught fish for feed.

Eurogroup for Animals, Compassion in World Farming, AnimaNaturalis, INTERCIDS and Aquatic Life Institute continuously called for plans to be halted, highlighting its potential impacts through evidenced reports on the immense welfare and environmental risks of farming octopuses. Eurogroup for Animals coordinated its network on scientific advocacy, legal action and public mobilisation, engaging national and EU policymakers on the issue. Meanwhile, momentum grew internationally, with a number of US States introducing a ban on octopus farming.

While this is a significant milestone, it does not mark the end. As other companies continue to explore octopus farming, there is an urgent need for the EU to introduce a ban that prevents similar projects from emerging in the future, ensuring that these sentient invertebrates remain protected.

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Brazil is not allowing American officials into the country because it thinks Trump is trying to interfere in its presidential election.

On July 24, Brazil denied visas to Assistant Secretary Riley Barnes and Deputy Assistant Secretary Samuel Samson. Brazil said that the delegation intended to cast doubt on Brazil’s electronic voting system before the October presidential election.

Jair Bolsonaro was subsequently convicted of plotting to overturn his defeat and is serving a prison sentence of 27 years. Doesn’t that sound an awful lot like Donald Trump? Too bad he’s not in prison.

Flávio Bolsonaro has revived doubts about the voting system. Trump’s playbook declares voting systems vulnerable, invokes foreign manipulation and portrays election officials as conspirators. Trump is hoping you’re stupid enough to believe that when he loses, the system is rigged. When he wins, the system is fair.

Fascist leaders have historically attacked confidence in elections, portrayed democratic institutions as corrupt and treated only their own victories as legitimate.

Should Canada follow Brazil’s lead and deny entry to officials from the Trump administration who might be here to influence what’s going on in Alberta

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