Canadian Wine Is Cheaper in America — Even With a 50% Tariff.

Researched and written by ChatGPT

Canadians are constantly being told how damaging American tariffs are to our businesses.

So explain this.

Ron Kubek, co-owner of Lightning Rock Winery in Summerland, British Columbia, recently laid out what happens to one of his bottles of rosé.

His wholesale price: $20.

The United States has now imposed an additional 50% tariff on certain Canadian alcoholic beverages, effective August 22, 2026. That adds roughly $10 to Kubek’s $20 bottle.

Price after the U.S. tariff: about $30.

Now send that same Canadian wine to Ontario.

Kubek says its LCBO wholesale price becomes $38.17.

In Quebec, through the SAQ: $43.66.

Read that again.

A Canadian wine can enter the United States carrying a 50% American tariff and still have a lower wholesale price than it does in Ontario.

How?

Ontario's own LCBO documents provide a pretty good explanation.

Beginning April 1, 2026, the LCBO's wholesale markup on wine between 7.1% and 18% alcohol is 68% of landed cost.

Then there are additional charges and HST. The LCBO itself describes its pricing formula as:

landed cost + wholesale markup + applicable charges + deposit + HST.

That 68% Ontario markup alone turns a $20 cost into $33.60 before the remaining charges and HST are added.

Kubek's reported $38.17 Ontario wholesale price suddenly isn't mysterious at all.

So What Are We Actually Protecting Canadians From?

Foreign tariffs?

Or our own governments?

Because while politicians warn Canadians about Americans making Canadian goods more expensive, we have constructed our own system in which a bottle produced in British Columbia can cost substantially more to enter the Ontario market than it does to cross an international border carrying a punitive American tariff.

That's not American policy.

That's Canadian policy.

And perhaps Canadians deserve a much more honest conversation about why we are told to fear trade barriers erected by other countries while enormous government-created barriers remain standing right here at home.

The numbers aren't conspiracy theory.

They're published.

And once again, the story we've been sold looks considerably different when somebody actually checks the receipt.

                                                                            

Walmart and the Opioid Epidemic: That’ll Be $50 Million, Please. Your Dollar Is Your Conscience.

 Researched and written by ChatGPT

Walmart has agreed to pay $50 million to settle a U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit alleging its pharmacies illegally filled thousands of opioid and other controlled-substance prescriptions.

And the details are ugly.

According to the DOJ, Walmart’s own pharmacists repeatedly warned the company about doctors they believed were operating as “pill mills.” Those warnings included thousands of refusal-to-fill reports. Yet the government alleged that Walmart’s corporate compliance team continued allowing prescriptions from some of those prescribers to be filled.

The DOJ says pharmacists encountered glaring red flags: dangerous drug combinations, repeated high-dose opioid prescriptions, early refill requests and prescriptions written by already-suspect doctors. The original 2020 lawsuit alleged Walmart’s conduct contributed to the opioid epidemic and involved hundreds of thousands of Controlled Substances Act violations.

Perhaps the most revealing detail comes from an internal email quoted by the government. Rather than spending management time analyzing pharmacists’ refusal reports, a Walmart compliance director reportedly described “driving sales and patient awareness” as a better use of their time.

On August 28, 2026, Walmart settled the federal case for $50 million without admitting liability. It must also strengthen monitoring of controlled-substance dispensing and establish a hotline for reporting suspected illegal dispensing.

And this isn’t Walmart’s first enormous opioid settlement. In 2022, the company agreed to pay roughly $3.1 billion to resolve opioid claims brought by states and local governments.

For years we were told the opioid catastrophe was about irresponsible patients, crooked doctors and street dealers.

Turns out there were some very large corporate cash registers in the middle of it too.

                                                                            

Dr. Meryl Nass Wouldn’t Toe the COVID Line. So Maine’s Medical Board Ordered a Psychiatric Evaluation.

 Researched and written by ChatGPT

You really couldn’t make this stuff up.

Dr. Meryl Nass, a Maine physician with decades of experience and no prior disciplinary history, became one of the doctors who openly challenged the official COVID narrative, questioned public-health policy, and prescribed treatments including ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine when much of the medical establishment had decided those drugs were apparently too dangerous to even discuss without clutching its pearls.

And what did Maine’s Board of Licensure in Medicine do?

Among other things, it ordered her to undergo a neuropsychological evaluation by a Board-selected psychologist and suspended her medical licence.

Because nothing screams “science” quite like responding to professional dissent with, essentially, “Perhaps you need your head examined.”

That psychiatric-evaluation order has now come back to bite them.

In October 2025, Maine Superior Court vacated the order, finding it “arbitrary and capricious.” Then, on August 20, 2026, a federal judge allowed important portions of Nass’s civil-rights lawsuit against members of the medical board to move forward.

And the judge’s comments are worth reading carefully.

Chief U.S. District Judge Lance Walker noted that there was apparently no evidence that Nass suffered from drug abuse, alcohol abuse, or a physical condition that impaired her ability to practise medicine. So why, exactly, was a psychiatric evaluation necessary?

That leaves an awfully uncomfortable question hanging in the air.

Was the Board suggesting that her opinions themselves were evidence of some kind of mental condition?

Or, as Judge Walker put it, was the Board simply “making an example out of Dr. Nass”?

That is a hell of a sentence to find in a federal court ruling about a medical regulator.

Walker went further, writing that a medical licensing board had “no need to conduct itself in this manner at all,” and that imposing an unsupported psychological evaluation without ordinary judicial protections “simply ought not occur, ever.”

Ever.

Which feels fairly definitive.

Now, before the fact-check brigade reaches for smelling salts, this does not mean Dr. Nass has won every part of every legal fight connected to the case. Some claims were dismissed, others remain alive, and Maine’s disciplinary proceedings involved allegations beyond her public disagreement with COVID policy.

But the psychiatric-evaluation episode stands on its own, and it should bother people regardless of what they think about ivermectin, vaccines, lockdowns, masks, Anthony Fauci, or anything else from that deeply normal and completely non-hysterical period of recent history.

Because the issue here is bigger than Meryl Nass.

If a physician challenges prevailing medical orthodoxy, the proper response is evidence, debate, peer disagreement, professional review, and transparent due process.

It is not: “Maybe she’s crazy.”

That is not science.

That is institutional power protecting itself.

During COVID, we were endlessly told to “trust the science,” as though science were a priesthood delivering commandments from a mountaintop rather than a method built around questioning, testing, arguing, revising, and sometimes discovering that yesterday’s certainty was wrong.

Doctors who stepped outside the approved script were mocked, censored, investigated, threatened professionally, and in some cases treated as though dissent itself were proof of incompetence.

Meryl Nass’s case gives us a rather ugly glimpse of what that mindset can look like when bureaucrats have regulatory power behind them.

The most important phrase to come out of this case may be the simplest:

Dissent is not a diagnosis.

And no medical board should ever be allowed to pretend otherwise.

                                                                                    

The Allison Inquiry: Canada’s Vaccine-Injured Are Going to Parliament Hill

 Researched and written by ChatGPT

September 8–11, 2026. Parliament Hill. Ottawa.

Four days have been set aside for something that should have happened years ago:

Listening to Canadians who say they were injured by COVID-19 vaccines.

The Allison Inquiry, chaired by Member of Parliament Dean Allison, will hear testimony from Canadians who have experienced vaccine injuries themselves, as well as family members speaking about injuries suffered by loved ones.

And it will be broadcast live from Parliament Hill.

This matters.

Not because the Inquiry has already decided what happened.

In fact, quite deliberately, it hasn't.

According to its official Terms of Reference, the Allison Inquiry is not tasked with making findings of fact or reaching conclusions. Its stated purpose is much simpler:

To provide a neutral forum where Canadians can tell their stories and where lawmakers can listen.

The Inquiry is also explicitly non-partisan. MPs and Senators from all parties are eligible to participate.

Think about how remarkably modest that request actually is.

Listen to them.

For years, Canadians were told that vaccination was something we did for one another. We heard phrases like protect your community, do your part and we're all in this together.

Well, if someone was harmed while doing what society asked them to do, surely we're all in this together doesn't suddenly expire.

Whatever your opinion of the COVID vaccines, mandates, politicians, pharmaceutical companies, public health agencies—or the entire pandemic response—people who believe they were injured deserve to be heard.

That shouldn't be controversial.

Canada even has a federal Vaccine Injury Support Program, which by its very existence acknowledges a basic reality: although serious vaccine reactions are considered uncommon, vaccine injuries can occur.

So why should discussing those injuries be taboo?

Why should the people living with them be treated as though acknowledging their existence somehow threatens everyone else's medical choices?

It doesn't.

You can believe vaccines have benefited people and believe people injured by them deserve recognition, investigation, treatment and support.

Those positions are not mutually exclusive.

Perhaps one of the most important parts of the Allison Inquiry will therefore be the simplest: putting human beings back into a discussion that has too often been reduced to statistics, slogans and political camps.

More than 50 witnesses are expected to testify over the four days.

Real people.

Real families.

Real stories.

Some may be difficult to hear.

Hear them anyway.

The Allison Inquiry takes place September 8, 9, 10 and 11, 2026, beginning at 8:30 a.m. Eastern, and the proceedings are expected to be livestreamed.

The organizers are also encouraging Canadians to contact their Members of Parliament and ask them to attend.

Maybe do that.

And then watch.

You don't have to prejudge the testimony.

You don't have to agree with every witness.

You don't even have to agree with the people organizing the Inquiry.

Just listen.

Because after everything Canadians were asked to endure and sacrifice in the name of protecting one another, surely we can spare four days to hear from some of the people who say they were hurt along the way.

The Allison Inquiry
September 8–11, 2026
Parliament Hill, Ottawa

Official Allison Inquiry website

Listen. Investigate. Ask questions.

Canadians deserve that much.

                                                                                

What Is the Enuma Elish?

 Researched and written by ChatGPT

The Enuma Elish is an ancient Babylonian creation story, written in Mesopotamia and preserved on seven clay tablets in cuneiform. The surviving version is usually dated to the late second millennium BCE, although parts of the tradition may be older.

Its name comes from the opening words, Enuma Elish — “When on high.”

The story begins before the world as we know it exists. There are no cities, no land, and no humans. Instead, there are primordial waters represented by divine beings: Apsu, associated with fresh water, and Tiamat, associated with salt water and the chaotic sea.

From them come generations of gods.

Conflict follows.

Eventually the younger god Marduk battles Tiamat, kills her, and uses her body to construct the ordered cosmos — forming the heavens and the earth. Marduk then becomes the supreme god of Babylon.

Humans are created afterward, in part to perform the labour and service previously expected of the gods.

That last point is especially interesting because the Enuma Elish comes from the same broad Mesopotamian cultural world in which some of the earliest biblical traditions later developed.

There are noticeable echoes between Mesopotamian creation stories and Genesis: primordial waters, the ordering of chaos, the division of the waters, the creation of the heavens and earth, and finally humanity.

That doesn't mean Genesis simply copied the Enuma Elish. It does mean Genesis did not appear in a cultural vacuum.

Long before the Hebrew Bible was compiled, people in Mesopotamia were already telling elaborate stories about creation, divine beings, cosmic waters, humanity, and humanity's relationship with the gods.

And those clay tablets survived.

Which makes the Enuma Elish a fascinating piece of the much older world sitting behind the biblical stories most of us were taught as children.

                                                                               

Autophagy: Your Body Has Its Own Recycling System

 Researched and written by ChatGPT

Every so often, a health claim goes viral that sounds almost too good to be true.

“Japanese scientist wins Nobel Prize for proving fasting makes the body eat damaged cells.”

That version isn't quite accurate.

But the actual science may be even more interesting.

In 2016, Japanese cell biologist Yoshinori Ohsumi received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering key mechanisms behind autophagy — literally, “self-eating.”

Autophagy is one of the ways cells clean house.

Damaged proteins, worn-out cellular components and other material can be enclosed, broken down and recycled. The resulting building blocks can then be reused by the cell.

The Nobel Committee describes Ohsumi's work as helping explain how cells adapt to starvation and infection, while also providing clues to diseases involving cancer and neurological dysfunction.

Nobel Prize: Yoshinori Ohsumi and autophagy

So Where Does Fasting Come In?

When nutrients are plentiful, cells operate largely in growth-and-storage mode.

When food disappears for a period of time, the metabolic environment changes.

Insulin falls. Stored glucose begins to be depleted. Fat increasingly becomes fuel and ketones begin rising.

And nutrient deprivation is one of the signals associated with increased autophagy.

That connection has been demonstrated extremely well in animals and laboratory models.

Humans have been harder to study because you can't exactly remove bits of people's organs every few hours to see what their cells are doing.

Interestingly, that is beginning to change.

A 2025 randomized human study involving 121 adults found evidence that intermittent fasting combined with time-restricted eating may increase autophagic flux in humans after six months.

That is considerably more meaningful than simply assuming that what happens in mice must happen identically in us.

Human autophagy study — PubMed

When Does Autophagy Start?

Here's where the internet gets way too confident.

You will see charts claiming:

12 hours — autophagy begins
18 hours — strong autophagy
24 hours — deep cellular cleanup
48 hours — stem-cell regeneration

Human biology does not work according to a universal stopwatch.

The metabolic shift toward using fat and producing ketones begins after a period without food. A major review in the New England Journal of Medicine notes that ketones begin rising in humans roughly 8–12 hours after fasting begins, although this varies considerably.

NEJM: Effects of Intermittent Fasting on Health, Aging, and Disease

That does not mean an autophagy switch suddenly flips at hour twelve.

Autophagy is occurring in our bodies all the time. Nutrient deprivation can alter and increase the process, but scientists still don't have a precise universal fasting time that produces “maximum autophagy” in humans.

How To Try Time-Restricted Eating

You don't necessarily need heroic three-day fasts.

A far more practical approach is simply extending the natural overnight period when you're already not eating.

For example:

12:12

Finish eating at 7 p.m. and eat breakfast at 7 a.m.

That's an easy starting point.

Then perhaps:

14:10

Finish dinner at 7 p.m. and eat again at 9 a.m.

Or:

16:8

Eat within an eight-hour window — perhaps 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. — and consume no calories during the remaining sixteen hours.

Johns Hopkins discusses 16:8 as one commonly used form of intermittent fasting.

Johns Hopkins: Intermittent Fasting

Water, plain tea and black coffee are generally used during fasting periods because they contribute little or no food energy.

And longer isn't automatically better.

Johns Hopkins specifically cautions that 24-, 36-, 48- and 72-hour fasts aren't necessarily more beneficial and can become dangerous.

What I Find Fascinating

We tend to think of eating as supplying the body with everything it needs to repair itself.

But biology appears to have another mode entirely.

Periods without incoming nutrients tell cells:

Stop building for a while.
Use what we already have.
Recycle what isn't working.
Adapt.

That makes evolutionary sense.

Humans didn't evolve with breakfast at eight, snacks at ten, lunch at noon, snacks at three, dinner at six and something crunchy while watching television at ten.

Periods without food were normal.

Modern life has made constant feeding normal instead.

Autophagy doesn't prove fasting cures cancer, prevents dementia or magically reverses aging. Those claims run considerably ahead of the human evidence.

But it does demonstrate something rather remarkable:

Our cells aren't passive structures waiting for medicine to repair them.

They contain ancient systems for maintenance, recycling, adaptation and survival.

Sometimes biology apparently needs something from us that costs absolutely nothing.

A little time without food.

                                                                               

A Prayer For Us Now.

 Written by me.

Where does "racism" come from?

I think it's manufactured by our govts and control measures. 

Right now, racism is being developed in the minds of those who see the truck drivers smuggling everything from drugs to people.  

It's being developed as we see cities with ample workforce hiring people from other countries.  

It's being developed by cultures clashing against one another.  

We are here, now.  

I struggle with this as you know.  

But I must hold to the truth that all of this is bieng done TO us for disunity.  

Even the illogical bits where we're celebrating gender differences while welcoming those in faiths who do not abide anything outside the "binary".  

Chaos is their goal. 

I ask Source to help me realize that people are being played here. 

I ask Mary to wrap us in love.

I ask Mariam to wrap us in bravery. 

I ask Yeshua to wrap us in light.