Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with Prime Minister Mark Carney in Halifax on Saturday during a stopover before heading to the U.S. to meet with President Donald Trump for talks aimed at ending the Russia-Ukraine war.
Prime Minister Carney also announced an additional $2.5 billion of economic aid
Trump announces he spoke with Putin in advance of meeting President Zelenskyy
Click link for article by Ted Giola Dec 22/25
Will this be the cool new thing of 2026?
https://open.substack.com/pub/tedgioia/p/the-return-of-the-weirdo?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
“People are less weird than they used to be,” claims psychologist Adam Mastroianni. He describes this as “an epidemic of the mundane.”
The strangest thing, he believes, is absence of strangeness.
Nobody wants to make waves—or even trickles. Conformity is the flavor of the month, and it tastes the same every month.
2026 may be the year the former weirdo and cosplay conscious video personality, the Nelson Auteur, makes a comeback—(if Ted Gioia is right about weirdos returning).
You, the most blessed subscribers out there in the ether… be the judge. As a public service, our technical team here at the Court Painter studio has assembled a selected small sampling of Nelson Auteur interviews and conversations from 2012–15.
INTRODUCTION:
The Nelson Auteur was a breath of fresh air for a video cottage industry stifled by the production values, professional standards, and mega-bucks of “Big Video” and its overly skilled art college graduates—all years before the AI introduction of “Slop!”
The Nelson Auteur raised creative thievery to new heights as the central feature of his oeuvre. The markers of his auteurish ways are evident in his rapacious pillaging of others’ words, phrases, inflections, and images. He insists his on-camera performances are highly choreographed and tightly scripted, utilizing the advanced iMovie 5 edit tools to create videos for the modern world. These have been described by an unknown Calgary art celebrity-for-hire as “Exquisite miniature costume dramas for shut-ins.”
Most of the Auteur’s videos are extensively researched adaptations, swiping vocals from the flotsam and jetsam of YouTube. He took pride in his contribution to the 21st century’s celebration of unstoppable opinion and contextual distortion.
His themes take up the neglected “grand narratives” of the 21st century: blather, nonsense, stupidity, the absurd, colonized word wars, and talent in absentia. His celebration of the long-winded is a trope evident throughout his more important works.
A noted Calgary art celebrity-for-hire has been misquoted as saying, “He was never afraid to let an absence of talent get in the way of blind ambition.”
This blessed, deaf-to-criticism ambition was underwritten by a one computer production company Nelson Auteur Promotions Unlimited, established in 2012 from a third-floor walk-up on Baker Street in Nelson, B.C.
The video site went weirdly dark in 2024 after failing to work for many years.
BY JOAN BAXTER DECEMBER 18, 2025 Halifax Examiner
Article excerpt
Some might argue Carney has no choice but to accept the New Trump Order of things. That he needs to keep his head low, and eliminate programs to protect people, the environment, and climate, in his efforts to defend Canada against Trump’s rampage. They might claim this explains why Carney is leaning so far to the right, and why Canadians need to keep cutting Carney more and more slack.
But there’s another possible explanation that bears consideration.
Is Carney using the pretext and cover Trump provides to weaken the very democratic institutions and protections he is claiming to defend from the despicable despot to the south, to serve the interests of big-money players in the powerful financial, tech, fossil fuel, extractive, and nuclear industries?
Canada’s environment and climate policies – as tentative as they were at the best of times – are in tatters. It’s starting to look as if Carney has decided Canada should follow Trump’s lead and join the race to the bottom by accelerating all the activities and strengthening all the systems that are harming the planet and humanity, posing existential risks.
That is not standing up to Trump. It’s caving to him.
Canadians believed Carney when he promised to take on Trump, protect them, and defend Canada, elbows up.
That seems a long time ago now.
Court Painter called upon the resident scribe, Chatterly Hellcat Punchy Thunderstrike (ChatGPT), to pen a soliloquy-style summation of the headlines leading the news in the Great Dominion on December 16, 2025.
Court Painter inserted images from his vast wearhouse of unsold images to disturb and delight.
Alas, what age is this, wherein mere words
Are thought sufficient salves for ancient hate?
To damn antisemitism with the tongue
Is needful, yes—but emptier than breath
Unless the deed attends the pious sound.
For mark me well: this is not yesteryear,
Not fifteen’s spring, when oil was sin alone.
See Carney turn his face toward the well,
Yet lo, the people do not turn from him;
The times have shifted, and so hearts adjust.
And should the Liberals, wise in quiet craft,
Not keep Sir Pierre within their daily sight?
For oft an adversary, loud and rash,
Doth serve his foe more sweetly than a friend.
Read on, good soul, if thou wouldst grasp the truth
Of Trump’s design, the shadowed plot ahead;
What seems a boast may yet a blueprint be,
A kingdom mapped in tweets and iron will.
Consider too whom Canada shall send
To speak his mind across the southern line:
An envoy’s tongue may weigh more in the scale
Than many ministers who warm their chairs.
Drip follows drip, as water wears the stone,
So Poilievre, with each impatient thrust,
Bestows upon the Liberals a crown
He never meant to set upon their brows.
And see how awkward stands Dame Smith this hour,
Who lifts a cup to hail an MOU,
Whilst Pierre, with casual wave, doth cast aside
The pact she praises—leaving discord bare.
O politics, thou stage of clashing wills,
Where every word is seed, each pause a plot,
And players, blind to echoes of their speech,
Do write their foes’ success with their own lines.
Court Painter strumming an original ,Ode to a Pump Jack
It is gratifying to see the appeal of a musical instrument in the hands of Court Painter. Light and portable, a harmonizing instrument; easy to maintain and soothing to the three visiting newsmakers who need soothing.
The lute he finds enormously versatile, using it as a break from his onerous painting schedule to play interlude dance music… interlude popular tunes… interlude arrangements of rap music and interlude song accompaniments that he hums lustily … and interlude passemezzi (a sort of Renaissance twelve-bar blues) he loves to belt out after a few shots of courage at the local watering hole… often ending an evening plucking and riffing on “musical interludes of the most refined and expressive fantasias that haunt Court Painter’s imagined reveries and opium dreams.” (Accompanying images are not meant to illustrate opium dreams however the monotone prints are intended to transport the viewer to an experience of 17th century reality before colour messed things up.)
Court Painter & Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre seen with duelling lutes.
Court Painter & Premier Danielle Smith
Court Painter & Prime Minister Carney
Court Painter seen recently in his studio
Trump seeking to “reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine” is further evidence of his “America First” approach to foreign policy, experts and members of his administration say.
“Past administrations perpetuated the belief that the Monroe Doctrine had expired. They were wrong,” U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a speech on Saturday.
“The Monroe Doctrine is in effect and it is stronger than ever under the Trump Corollary, a common sense restoration of our power and prerogatives in this hemisphere consistent with U.S. interests.”
That strategy has been most visible in U.S. military strikes on suspected drug boats in the Caribbean Sea since September, which have killed nearly 90 people so far, as well as a U.S. military buildup near Venezuela.
Source: Global News December 8/25
On January 3, 2026 the United States invaded Venezuela and kidnapped President Maduro and his wife. In honour of this breach of international law ,US President Trump has renamed the Monroe Doctrine the Donroe Doctrine.
Big Stick policy, in American history, policy popularized and named by Theodore Roosevelt 26th US President as an update to the Monroe Doctrine asserted U.S. domination when such dominance was considered the moral imperative. The Western Hemisphere remains a predominantly U.S.sphere of influence.
Source: Britannica
Excerpt from National Security Strategy of the United States of America November 2025
The Trump Corollary
A. Western Hemisphere:
The Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region. We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere. This “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine is a common-sense and potent restoration of American power and priorities, consistent with American security interests.
