Political deep integration continues apace. The Liberal government is in the process of passing an extraordinary piece of legislation, C-23, which effectively cedes Canadian sovereignty to U.S. border officials.

The Donald's pick to fill the current vacancy on the Supreme Court of the United States is Neil Gorsuch. He is a constitutional originalist.

That means he interprets the U.S. Constitution according to its original meaning. I haven't gone deeply enough into the man's beliefs to determine whether he is among the minority of originalists who look for the drafters' intent, or, instead, is a textualist who goes by the original plain-language meaning of the Constitution as understood at the time it was written.

Both propositions, of course, are a nonsense.

Until very recently, electoral politics has been a contest of façades, rhetorical and visual simulacra competing with other ones. Somewhere underneath it all, real flesh-and-blood people are straitjacketed in talking-points and boilerplate, forming over them like a full-body mask.

This is such a commonplace that no one questions it. We expect it. Even those of us who like to get at the root of things -- literally, radicals -- find ourselves quite at home in this discursive world of the anodyne, the commonplace, the glib and thoughtless formulation. We, too, share in the babbled, incoherent language of somnambulists, and speak it too often ourselves.

Disclosure: I'm now a septuagenarian. Sounds better in Latin.

The odd thing is, I don't feel it. Not a bit. So when I first encountered ageism, I went into denial. Or laughed as though it was a joke.

But it isn't. Ours is one of the few human societies in which the default position for age is disrespect. You have to earn your stripes all over again. You either become invisible, or are too often shrugged off with amused or not-so-amused contempt.

"He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it." - George Orwell, "Shooting An Elephant"

Much has already been said on the Boyden scandal, more than likely too much. I would be foolhardy indeed to attempt to recapitulate the eloquence of indigenous writers and scholars like Hayden King, and will not make any such attempt here. Instead, as a white, relatively comfortable Canadian, I'd like to come at the issue tangentially: in particular, regarding the question of identity itself.

A tragic story out of Ottawa -- and the carrion-eaters are already out in force.

The Liberal government, trying to recover from Minister Maryam Monsef's astonishingly bumbled performance in the House of Commons last week, has decided to seek a little consultation camouflage, using an online survey that has already been roundly mocked for its heavy-handed tendentiousness.

"Evidence-based policy" is a cant phrase that has been around for a while. I first heard it used -- repeatedly -- at Justin Trudeau's coronation in Montreal in 2012. It was clearly a term that was intended to set the Liberals off from the Conservatives, who governed in the teeth of evidence, facts, logic and science.

But once in power, this fresh new approach to governance was not to be. Climate change? Here are a couple more pipelines. And mind your manners, Injuns—we've got police and the military to sort you out if need be, and you've seen that movie before.

"Trump's election is going to be the biggest 'fuck you' ever recorded in human history -- and it will feel good....He is the human Molotov cocktail that they've been waiting for, the human hand grenade that they can legally throw into the system."

-- Michael Moore

Last night I learned a lesson. And I now have questions about everything I have lazily taken for granted over the decades of my life, both political and personal.

I think Moore got it right several months ago, but it runs much deeper. Not everyone who voted for Trump was financially ruined by free trade and Wall Street. Not all of them were racist and sexist hooligans.

The woman being brutalized by America's finest in the photograph is an elderly person holding a prayer staff. Local authorities claim that she was brandishing a gun. She is one of a number of "water protectors" who have been protesting the laying of an oil pipeline that threatens the water supply of the Standing Rock Lakota and Dakota reservation. (A brief background to the conflict may be found here.)