For most of my life, the rest of the world has viewed the US Democratic Party as centre-right on the global political scale, “Left” only in that they’re left of the Republican Party. From here, the Democrats seem pretty much unchanged (and thus less relevant). Meanwhile, the Republicans seem to have devolved from hard right globalists to proto-fascist nationalists. It is hard to see how anything good can come from this.
It also seems that a good number of Republican voters aren’t particularly comfortable with this shift. Unfortunately for the majority of American voters, party affiliation ranks up there with religious affiliation. A disturbing number of folks seem to vote not on the policy platform of their candidates, but instead on who their daddy’s daddy’s daddy voted for. A generational Republican voting for a Democrat is so radical that it’s on par with announcing they’d converted to Islam. This despite the obvious fact that the Republican party of more than a century ago has virtually nothing in common with the current incarnation.
For all it’s innumerable and increasingly obvious flaws1 there is still one mechanism for Republican voters to correct course and save the country from collapse: oust the Trump sycophants in the primaries! That’s it. Show up for the primaries, make sure the candidate that goes into an election under the Republican banner has the gumption to stand up to the wannabe fascist. Then you can vote for your daddy’s party and be true to your politico-religious traditions. Congress regains the ability to stop a President who thinks he’s a King from running roughshod over democracy, and irrational policies that harm your community while benefiting his buddies get stopped in their tracks. This is how the American system was designed but it is up to voters to ensure that the checks and balances inherent in the system actually work. Y’all might even stand a chance of returning the party to a place where calling it the Grand Old Party or the Party of Law and Order isn’t a sad, pathetic joke.
As an extra bonus, you can prevent (or at least delay) the collapse of the American Empire. So get out there and ensure that the Republican candidate is someone who says they’ll work for you, and not subjugate your interest to the whims of some deranged old fool in the Oval Office!
1. Party-affiliated judges for one. Give me a frigging break, that’s just so obviously dumb. And Sheriffs too? WHAT??
Nah, sorry. That’s not what a “community” looks like to me. Not only is Discord more like a vertical news feed, constantly scrolling with information I might care about mixed with lots more information I don’t care about, but it’s a single sign-on way of accumulating highly detailed information on what I might be interested in. It’s a data profiler’s dream, and I much prefer to be a data profiler’s nightmare.
It’s also like trying to follow all the conversations in some mega-mall’s food court. No. Just no.
So yeah, ask me again when you find something that will actually foster a community, or when after IPOs and the subsequent and inevitable enshittification process makes it too irritating to bother with. I’ll take an ugly, clunky bulletin board system over this, ten times out of ten.
I’ll say this up front: this is a self-serving plug for Celtic Brews. That said, it’s genuine.
Celtic Brews is a fantastic place to make great beer, and it’s right here in Trent Hills, in Campbellford, Ontario. It’s what regulators call a “brew-on-premise” operation. In practice this means you go in, select from more than fifty beers to suit your taste. A few weeks later, you drop in, bottle your beer, take it home, fill up a fridge (or cart away a keg, should you be lucky enough to have a keg fridge), and then happily consume it. When it’s time for more, repeat. You also need to sign an agreement that you won’t resell the beer, because regulations.
Like anything else, there are advantages and disadvantages.
Advantages
Disadvantages
Great beer made to your taste No preservatives, additives, etc. You re-use your bottles, saves waste Bottle in 500ml or 1l bottles Premium beer for about half the cost of domestic swill
Takes about three weeks Bottling takes 45 minutes to an hour You need a beer/keg fridge (no preservatives) Friends drop in more often
Now, why am I writing a post singing the merits of Celtic Brews? The self-serving part is that it’s really convenient to have them in town! They say they’re the only one in Eastern Ontario, and that means that if they ever go away, it’s going to be a long haul to the nearest alternative. That would suck.
But at the same time, they’re very good at making beer. Shawn, who took over as brewmaster a few years ago, has really worked to improve the quality and consistency of their beers. They were great before, and now they’re even better! He has also been working on some new recipes that are just as good as any craft beer I’ve had. I’ve even gotten them to tweak one of their stock selections to suit my tastes.
Now maybe the biggest drawback is the volume of beer you get. 100 500ml bottles take up most of a fridge, and that can be a problem. When I first started making my own beer, I got together with a couple of friends. This meant we could split a batch, which also means we didn’t need a dedicated fridge. Spit a batch with three friends and you have something most people can manage. Fortunately now I have a spare fridge dedicated to beverages.
And last but not least there’s the value proposition. These days, a 500ml can of premium beer is clocking in the range of $2.50 a pop, and craft beer comes in even higher. Meanwhile the same amount of bespoke beer from Celtic Brews comes in at just $1.70. Not to mention that most of the profit on that premium beer winds up in the hands of some multinational, but when you buy from Celtic Brews, most of the money stays right here.
I think you just can’t beat that. If you agree, drop in to see them at 31 Kent St., here in Campbellford. Or give them a call at 705-661-2337.
Christopher Graham, or more fully, Christopher William David Graham, posted this gem on a writer’s group, which I commented on:
The Facebook post and my comment
I did a quick search on this fellow and didn’t find much, save for some Linkedin results to posts that have been deleted. The search summaries highlight text like “ONE WORLD HYPNOSIS METAPHYSICS SPIRITUALITY”. OWHMS appears as a page there, but has no “people” and there’s no profile that matches his name and business. Pretty much all that comes up when searching for OWHMS Publishing is his website, which at this point features the image above (sans my comment) and another AI generated image with a similar message. Also of note is that OWHMS was registered as a corporation just a few months ago, on February 25, 2025.
Some time later I received this message:
Facebook Message
Speculating, my best guess is that the LinkedIn posts are gone for TOS violations. Certainly, posting this into the group that he did breaks the group rules (the post has been deleted, but there’s no telling if it was thanks to an administrator or not). If that’s the case he’s likely one of those people who either doesn’t read the rules or just ignores them. I also wonder how you can stick CCHT after your name and still be a “former Certified Clinical Hypnotherapist”. Well, hold on a second… a CCHT is a Certified Clinical Hemodialysis Technician, which is not mentioned anywhere. Whatever.
So, next I did a search for “Certified Clinical Hypnotherapist” and found the Canadian Society of Clinical Hypnosis – Ontario Division at https://csch-od.ca/. As far as I can see, this society doesn’t offer a certification program. Certainly none of its board of directors have the CCHT designation after their name, which leads me to suspect that if anything, the “former” certification was for Hemodialysis. I also found this post on “becoming a certified hypnotherapist in Canada”, which really doesn’t clear much up. Pity I couldn’t find anything equally entertaining on the PhD!
I took a look at his Amazon page (here’s a hint, Christopher: if you don’t want Amazon to sell your books, consider taking them down, maybe?) He’s got 79 titles up there, a random sampling says they contain between 64 and 500 pages. 27 of them appear to be translations, so that’s 52 separate books. With that AI image I kind of expected them to be AI generated, so I popped into a sample to check, and based on a quick scan I think there’s little to no AI involved in this relatively prolific output.
They do all seem to have a common theme of mindfulness, spirituality, etm. But based on that angry text, I might suggest he re-read some of his material. Or meditate. Or take an anger management class. Whatever.
No changes for the July 2025 slightly scary dumb password report. Another drop in access attempts this month. New and notable are a bunch of variations on “rootpassword”. I guess the script kiddies have had some luck with that elsewhere. Looks like there’s also some dumb spam bot trying to use the login form as a comment form. Duh.
Also not logged here is a big spike in attempts to hack through the XML-RPC call. I don’t have stats on those because all calls to xmlrpc.php on my WordPress sites are blocked, blocked, blocked.
I’ve replaced valid login user names with {username}, and names of the site with {site}, old compromised passwords with {compromised} and malware with {malware}. There were also a large number of seemingly random hex strings logged on one site. They’re pretty boring so I’ve collected those as one entry. If you think your username followed by a special character and a year is a secure password, you might be in for a shock. Actually, your user/site name followed by anything is a really bad idea.
These are failed password attempts across my WordPress websites. None of my sites are particularly popular. The amount of real traffic they get is small. So if you have a site and think hackers are ignoring it because few would care, think again. Every site on the net gets attacked like this. Every single one, including yours!
![Screen capture of a Facebook message from Christopher Graham, lives in Ottawa, OntarioFormer Certified Clinical Hypnotherapist, NLP practitioner, Well-Being Coach at Canadian Hypnotherapy Metaphysics Spirituality.
The message text is "[obscenity] off loser". In this image the obscenity has been masked by a red blob.](https://ambitonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Clipboard-1.jpg)
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