New PM

Mark Carney has been voted in as the next Liberal party of Canada leader and will become the next PM despite having told Liberal supporters no real policy positions…  Funny because I remember Liberals complaining about the lack of policy from Pierre Poilievre but Carney well that’s ok.  To be fair the few policy positions that he has released (along with the other Liberal leadership candidates) have stolen a lot of what PP has proposed, I guess that’s ok since it’s good policy but yeah it’s kind of funny to watch the Liberals run away from everything they’ve stood for in the last 9 years.

Unfortunately Trump has shaken politics up in Canada and looks Liberal fortunes are on the rise, I certainly hope come election time people aren’t fooled by the same people who are now running on almost a completely opposite platform.

On the Conservative side, PP really needs to stop talking about the carbon tax.  You won, talk about how even without being in government, you’re able to get everyone to drop that lousy policy but talk more broadly about affordability or how the last 9 years of Liberal rule has left Canada weak and vulnerable to Trump and his antics.  Sigh what a mess but it appears team sport politics is most important and it’s maddening.

Get out of here

These types of articles drive me nuts, it’s been well known for decades that criminals get their guns from the US and don’t bother with the licensing system we have in Canada yet the only solution the Liberals ever have is banning guns from legal owners.

The data from GTA police is in line with what research has shown for many years, says Jooyoung Lee, a professor of sociology at the University of Toronto who studies the underlying causes and long-term consequences of gun violence.

“One thing we’ve known for many, many generations is that the U.S. is a global exporter of firearms and the vast majority of crime guns in Canada are originating in a very small kind of handful of U.S. states that have much more lax and porous gun laws,” he said.

Source: CBC

If our news organizations were truly objective, they’d question the powers that be why they’re enacting policy that doesn’t do anything and is all for show.

There’s no way I’m voting Liberal (probably ever again) but I take a lot of pleasure to see all the candidates in the leadership race to replace Trudeau are running as fast as they can away from his stupid policies.

Here we go again?

Saw this and makes me wonder, another pandemic around the corner?

A new bat coronavirus that has the capacity to spread to humans, similar to the one that caused the COVID-19 pandemic, has been discovered.

Source: Newsweek

Between this or bird flu I wonder what the potential for another pandemic is.  I certainly enjoyed the lockdowns and staying at home (since I’m naturally an introvert) but I doubt governments around the world can pull that off again, unless a new pandemic has a high mortality rate but maybe we’ll see a return of social distancing and masks.  I mean the latter is good if you’re sick to minimize spread but yeah I wonder what the future holds.

Still my little boy

The other day I went to back Maggie’s car into our garage so I grabbed Brandon’s jacket to use as it was the closest thing and we’re about the same size. I noticed in the right pocket there was a notebook which had some drawings in it & a pencil and in the left he had a stick (a nice one I have to admit).  All I could think of is how he’s still my little boy for now and that I wish I could freeze time like this forever.  I know he has to grow up, I’m not dreading it as I want to see what type of man he grows into but I know everyday that passes, he gets a bit farther from the little boy I remember.

Troll in chief

We really live in the best reality…  I laugh at the political commentators and politicians saying that they should do this and that to deal with or appease President Trump and to me, there’s absolutely no logic in what he’s doing.  I mean there’s a real large possibility that he doesn’t even know how tariffs work in the first place but even if he does, he’s flying by the seat of his pants here.  If we capitulate and deal with his stated goals (and when have rich people ever cared about drug users), he’ll just shift the goal posts.

The best way to deal with Trump is to appeal to his vanity, give him something small and make a big deal about it.  That’s what he wants he’s shown over and over, he cares greatly about praise and getting wins so give him something he can tell his supporters and move on.  If you give in completely he’ll just keep using the same tricks over and over again, even if we shut the border down completely, he’ll make up something else next time.

All the while, we’re stuck waiting for the Liberals to run their god damn leadership race with a government that’s in caretaker mode.  I bet JT wishes he didn’t announce his pending resignation as he was itching to run against Trump.

Leaderless

Trump becomes president again today and with a lot of vitriol aimed at Canada, I just have to say thank you to Justin Trudeau for leaving us completely leaderless at this time.  By proroguing government till late March so the Liberals can run their leadership convention, we’ve basically told Trump and his administration that they have no negotiating partner in Ottawa.  Even if the Liberals pick their leader by March 9th, they won’t have a mandate and the earliest we can have an election is May.

Just imagine how much damage can be done to Canada during that time but hey Justin Trudeau needed to cling onto power till the last second.  Whatever negative things hit Canada takes is on him and the Liberal party of Canada…  Who knew a millionaire trust fund kid who was never told no would be so incompetent.

TOUGHSOUL TF9044IR Review (kind of)

I was browsing Amazon for some random stuff and the TOUGHSOUL TF9044IR showed up on my recommended list so I took a look and man, $105 for an IR laser/light combo seemed cheap, I wanted to get some IR devices for my GSG-16, perhaps this would work out.  Thank you Amazon Prime, it got to me in 2 days from Florida and I didn’t have to pay customs. 🙂

The TOUGHSOUL (shortened to TS moving forward TF9044IR came in an non descript box with the brand’s name on it and inside was the unit itself, two CR123a batteries, M-LOK accessories and a small manual.  The TS TF9044IR is made of aluminum, has two buttons (one for the laser & the other for the IR illuminator), on one end is a battery cap and slot for two batteries and on the other were the IR is emitted from.  Overall it’s ~200 grams so it’s pretty light and has a pretty small formfactor.

As you can see next to my Steiner DBAL-A3 civilian LAM (boo, I know) it’s very small and if it’s mounted on the top rail, would not be visible to any optic you may be running.  The aiming laser is IR only so you’ll need night vision to zero the device, but that’s not too difficult as the laser is inline with the mount so the offset should be minimal and easy for people to take into account.  The illuminator is fixed so it can’t be focused and designed to be used at close ranges.

I don’t know how legitimate the IR laser numbers are on the sticker as we’ll see a bit later the laser is significantly more powerful than my DBAL-A3.  The mounting mechanism is M-LOK only and initally I wanted to install it on the left side of the GSG-16 but then it’d interfere with the charging handle and I already have a Surefire M300 on the right side.  At the moment I’ve mounted the TS TF9044IR on the bottom, may move it later but for now this will work.

I’m sorry not the best photos and even though there’s no moon at the moment, it’s still an urban area with a lot of snow cover.  When the weather is better I’ll update or post new photos of the unit in a darker area, I just wanted to get something up.  In the first two photos you can see the power of the IR illuminator, in the second photo specifically the illuminator doesn’t work well beyond the fence though again the environment is not very friendly.

The 3rd photo shows the laser (in the center), the 4th shows the dot difference between the TS TF9044IR and my civilian DBAL-A3, I don’t know if the TF9044IR is eye safe…  5th and 6th pictures show the difference between the TF9044IR and the DBAL with illuminator and with laser/illuminator on.  Note the DBAL A3 is at its widest setting and again the environment sucks for taking photos right now.  Finding a good LAM up here in Canada is difficult but there are a lot of compelling options coming to the market and some are making it up here too. 🙂

I can’t talk about how the TS TF9044IR handles recoil as my AR15s and GSG-16 are currently banned by the federal Liberal government but they should fall soon and hopefully we’ll have sensible gun laws again soon.  That’s a story for another time so the review really is incomplete but when I can shoot again, I’ll definitely talk about my experiences and if the TS TF9044IR could maintain zero.

For $105, even if it sucks I really can’t complain too much but I do have some high hopes so crossing my fingers and will keep this thing mounded on my gun till I can bring it to the range. 🙂

Quiet weekend

On Friday Brandon fell on his butt at school and has been hobbling all weekend so we didn’t really do much.  Saturday we played a bit of Pokemon Go with our local group in Oshawa, Brandon wants to get to level 50 (he’s at 47 right now) and it was a good XP grinding event. Sunday I finally lit the gas fireplace, the piezo lighter’s not working for some reason so I took the protective glass off and lit it manually with a BBQ lighter.  Other then that we hung around the house so it was pretty relaxing which is nice. 🙂

Eew!

I thought this was pretty funny, I don’t like the Liberal party of Canada or Justin Trudeau so when I saw this I kind of went WTF!

Maggie bought this measuring cup and I told her I’m going to throw it out lol.  The label is not coming off easily, this piece of junk, useless just like my PM.

Nothing will save them

I have to admit, I never thought Justin Trudeau would resign and figure he’d cling onto power till the very end but resigning because he’s lost his caucus confidence is ok I guess.  By most measurable statistics like cost of living, GDP per capital, federal debt levels, etc his tenure has been a failure and I really hope people don’t look back at this time with rose colour glasses and say it wasn’t so bad, yes it was!  Trudeau and his focus on social issues over anything of substance has put Canada in a very perilous situation and his unchecked spending (like his father, took 15 years for the federal government to get ahold of the budget) will set us back for at least a decade, if not more.

As Donald Trump gets into office, we’ll have a caretaker government with no mandate what a great position to be in.  Prorogation is till March 24th and then the feds will need to release a budget as the fiscal year ends at the end of that month, if the Liberals lose that vote the earliest we can have an election is early May.  Sigh that time can’t come soon enough.

Fuck you Justin Trudeau and I’m glad you’ve destroyed your beloved Liberal party, may it die off completely and it’s brand never be rehabilitated.