@TedSumAtHome
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Lawyer and humble student of history. Advocate of freedom and democracy.
Vancouver, British Columbia
Joined April 2020
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Ted 🇨🇦🇺🇦 retweeted
It is cognitive warfare. And if you don't want to turn your children into dummies, you will keep your children out of TikTok.
Italy's defense minister says there's a reason TikTok isn't available in China, even though a Chinese company built it.
Guido Crosetto said this on September 17 at a maritime forum in La Spezia. The Chinese version of the app, he said, shows kids studying, playing sports, and helping at home. The version sold abroad shows "stupid dancing" and "idiotic pictures." He keeps his 13-year-old daughter off it.
ByteDance runs two separate apps. Douyin is for China. TikTok is for everyone else. They use different servers and different moderation rules. Foreign TikTok was never launched in China and is blocked there.
Douyin is not all homework. It has dancing and livestreams too. But it operates under Chinese rules on minors, including daily time limits, and its content has to fit official guidelines. The result is a feed that pushes "positive" material for young people at home, while the global feed is tuned for whatever goes viral.
Crosetto framed this as part of cognitive warfare, conflict fought on harmless-looking platforms.
Fermi’s Paradox may have been solved.
Ted 🇨🇦🇺🇦 retweeted
Canada has a decent shot at weathering this storm.
That's because most of us, like these honourable people, are willing to put politics and ideologies and rivalries aside to do the right thing for our country.
It's something we used to call the public interest.
Something bigger than ourselves. – at Ajax, Ontario
Liberals done much damage to our economy since 2015 but I give credit where it is due. Carney gets it. Our sovereignty is on the line. We need to pivot & strengthen our economic independence. This is a great speech & a major step in the right direction. Much more likely to come
Mark Carney: "To our American friends, we will always be neighbours and Canada will continue to be the U.S.'s most important partner in many key areas. When those opportunities return, Canada will be an even better partner, stronger, more resilient, more independent, ready to advance our mutual economic and security interests."
Ted 🇨🇦🇺🇦 retweeted
10 years of the Trudeau LPC gov't caused irreputable damage to the country. Canada has gone from being one of the world's top-five happiest countries a decade ago to falling outside the top 20, despite remaining one of the wealthiest nations on earth. I like the changes being made by Carney, but he has a tough job ahead of him repairing the damage done over the past decade.
Ted 🇨🇦🇺🇦 retweeted
Stephen Harper: "It is clear that the current U.S. administration views our level of economic integration as incompatible with our separate sovereignty. Thus, to maintain that sovereignty, we must pursue diminished reliance upon the United States."
Ted 🇨🇦🇺🇦 retweeted
So darned refreshing to have a federal minister stating the obvious: what we Albertans have been saying forever.
Finally someone is listening!
A lot more work to do, but boy this is nice to hear! 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
P.S. Eat your heart out, Stephen Guilbault!
Hodgson: [Conventional energy] pays for our healthcare. It pays for our dental care. It pays for our $10 a day daycare. It pays for our pharmacare.
Reporter: But it pollutes.
Hodgson: Done properly, it reduces overall global emissions.
Ted 🇨🇦🇺🇦 retweeted
Exactly. In the eyes of the free world, he has committed no crimes, but in the eyes of an autocratic government and all its lackeys, he was and is a threat for speaking for freedom and democracy.
Ted 🇨🇦🇺🇦 retweeted
Let me introduce you to a brave hero from my country, Iran.
She was 16 years old. Just a girl. And on the streets of Iran, she did something braver than most people do in a lifetime: she took off her hijab and burned it in public. Right in front of the regime. Right in front of the world.
That was her crime: civil disobedience. A teenage girl refusing to obey men who claimed authority over her hair, her body, her life.
Her message spoke for millions of Iranian women:
To every man who rules over women in the name of religion, honor, or culture: We do not obey you. Your laws were never made for us.
This is what real power looks like: unarmed, unafraid, unbowed.
For that defiance, she was arrested. Her family says she was tortured and killed after falling into the hands of security forces. The Iranian authorities denied responsibility and gave a different account of her death.
Her name was Nika Shakarami. She was 16.
Now ask yourself: How many women in the West know her name? How many know what she risked for a freedom they have never had to fight for?
Say her name: Nika Shakarami.
Ted 🇨🇦🇺🇦 retweeted
Whenever new sanctions are announced, you can only wonder why they hadn’t been in place for years already and how many lives might have been saved. The situation now is far more urgent. Send weapons, send interceptors, send Taurus.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is preparing to blame Russia for the attempted drone attack in Leipzig and announce "extensive" sanctions, in what would mark a serious hardening of Berlin's posture toward Moscow.
politico.eu/article/friedric…
Ted 🇨🇦🇺🇦 retweeted
Fear of Vladimir Putin going fully rogue has paralysed the West for long enough, writes Radek Sikorski economist.com/by-invitation/…
Ted 🇨🇦🇺🇦 retweeted
Let me get this straight: Donald Trump is sucking up to Kim Jong Un, a brutal dictator who runs one of the world’s most repressive regimes, holds tens of thousands of political prisoners, and has supplied Putin with millions of artillery shells, ballistic missiles, and thousands of troops for his war against Ukraine while the president has essentially declared economic war on Canada, one of America’s closest friends and allies.
Canada fought beside us in two world wars, Korea, and Afghanistan; sheltered Americans after 9/11; and helps defend our continent every day through NORAD. Our economies are profoundly intertwined, with nearly $3.5 billion in trade crossing our border every day, supporting millions of jobs and deeply integrated supply chains. And beyond all that, Canadians and Americans are bound together by generations of family, friendship, travel, education, sports, music, movies, books, and a vast shared culture.
This is nuts.
How did America’s friends become our enemies and our enemies become our friends?
Every American should reach out to your elected representatives demanding change and reach out to your Canadian friends to express friendship.
Ted 🇨🇦🇺🇦 retweeted
It's correct that unilateral tariffs corrode trust, but the reality is more contradictory still: Washington is not building an anti-China bloc only badly, it is not building one at all.
Allies are being asked to lock in a posture the US refuses to lock in. The national security strategy does not even name China as a competitor, let alone anything else, but allies should, and Greer said in April that the President seeks stability, not a confrontation, while the two sides agreed in May to set up boards identifying tariffs to be lifted and possible areas for PRC investment in the US. That last item is the opposite of perimeter-building.
The Agreements on Reciprocal Trade bind signatories into anti-China supply-chain constraints, enforced by the standing threat of new US tariffs, a threat actually made concrete when USTR opened Section 301 investigations into the very countries that signed. Canada, which followed Washington into a trade war with Beijing in 2024, and still maintains tariffs against Chinese steel transshipment, has been hit with 50% tariffs anyway.
The result is a hub-and-spoke structure in which allies are asked to lock in a posture the US itself keeps transactional and reversible. But going back to unilateral tariffs; Xi does not need to split the West; the tariff regime is doing it for him.
The US wants a more unified anti-China economic perimeter, but its unilateral use of tariffs against Canada weakens the trust required to build one. The dispute is thus a preview of the broader Cold War 2 problem: the US can pressure allies to decouple from China, but it cannot reliably build a durable unified bloc if participation depends on permanent vulnerability to US unilateral economic coercion.
Ted 🇨🇦🇺🇦 retweeted
“We are not experiencing an “AI Jobs Shock”. At most, we are experiencing a reduction in hiring by executives who do not understand the technology but who have absorbed vibes that there will be a real-soon-now “AI Jobs Shock”. Where do these vibes come from? From a combination of grifters seeking money, and madmen hearing the voices in their heads of a forthcoming Digital God”.
Brilliant quote from @delong’s newsletter.
Ted 🇨🇦🇺🇦 retweeted
Another day, another war crime from Putin. This monster has acted with impunity for years. We need to ensure the Ukrainians have what they need to beat him once and for all.
kyivpost.com/post/82709?utm_…
They will print and run inflation hot. Nominal growth can be produced at the expense of purchasing power.
“It's the signal that they are willing to administer yield suppression that matters. “ Precisely. For now and some time to come. But eventually it will require notably more.
If the Treasury is willing to tolerate higher inflation and a lower dollar they can administer pretty much any 30 year rate they want. (Within 100bp of here at least). They have the levers they need. They just need the will to manage the consequences. 14BN over the next few months is obviously not the point. That doesn't matter at all. It's the signal that they are willing to administer yield suppression that matters.
Next step would be either extending and expanding the buyback or decreasing or eliminating certain auctions or both on the QRA on 11/4. Will they? Depends when and if the bond market is willing to test them and if they have the will to suffer the consequences
Ted 🇨🇦🇺🇦 retweeted
Little reminder for Europeans: The cost of deterring Russia after a possible Ukrainian defeat is a multiple of the cost of sustaining Ukraine now, which is the argument that keeps failing politically despite being arithmetically obvious.
Ted 🇨🇦🇺🇦 retweeted
Niall Ferguson, Historian: What we’re seeing now is that global authoritarian axis has formed — Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea.
This axis is essentially Chinese-led because China is by far the largest player. China has been crucial to Putin’s war in Ukraine.
It would've been very hard for Putin to sustain war effort without very large flows of dual-use goods into Russian economy from China.
Russians got Shahed drone design from Iranians, then adapted it in order to fire them at Ukrainians.
Russians have certainly been sharing technology with Iran. Iranian missile program is essentially a Chinese operation.
All the inputs for Iranian missiles are coming from China. So this is a global authoritarian axis.
They’re ideologically very different, but they have a common interest, which is in undermining international order.