1. Chris Hedges shocker: 90% of American drone deaths are innocent bystanders
   US intelligence analyst Daniel Hale blew the whistle on drone strikes, revealing that 90% of those killed by these strikes are innocents. But Daniel Hale did not receive a metal for his bravery. Instead, he's going to receive a prison sentence, and he faces ten years.
   video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twGn_fdm8Wg
   more: https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/the-assassination-complex/
2. A new particle accelerator is being completed in Dubna, Russia, and is scheduled to be operational in 2022. This one is named NICA (Nuclotron-based Ion Collider fAсility) and is being built as a project of  JINR (Joint Institute for Nuclear Research).
   video (24-min): https://rtd.rt.com/films/russias-nica-big-bang-questions/
   
    
3. NPR radio interview with scholar Akhil Reed Amar about his new book titled 'The Words That Made Us: America's Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840' (could be "the words that made U.S.) where he argues context while criticizing the backlash after creating political parties ("John Adams" vs "Thomas Jefferson and James Madison") https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2021/07/05/words-that-made-us-scholar-akhil-reed-amar-on-how-to-better-understand-the-constitution
4. Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism (published 2021). Author, Mariana Mazzucato PhD, argues that the Apollo Manned Space program (a public-private partnership proposed by President John F Kennedy) did more to stimulate the American economy than all other activities, both public and private, including defense spending to fund foreign wars. Excerpt from page 92 (all prices cost-adjusted for inflation to 2008 dollars)

   Program	Cost in Billions
   F-22 Raptor Program	40
   Future Moon Return, NASA	80
   Apollo Program	100
   Federal Debt Interest, 2008	125
   Interstate Highway System	500
   Vietnam War	650
   Financial Bailout, 2008	700
   Iraq and Afghanistan Wars	2,400

   quote: "The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. There are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest." --- John Maynard Keyes
5. NPR radio interview with scholar Jonathan Rauch about his new book titled 'The Constitution of Knowledge' where he argues in 'Defense Of Truth' https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2021/06/24/jonathan-rauch-in-defense-of-truth
   comment: the whole program is 48-minutes but you will get the gist of it in 10-15 minutes.
6. Canadian journalist, Alex Mihailovich, reports that it is the Americans who are looking to pick a fight with China. Alex's common sense observations begin at the 12-minute mark.
   partial transcript: The question is "who is asserting their dominance here?" It is the United States that is floating their military boats next to China through the Taiwan Straights. It's the United States that just committed five billion dollars to moving military assets, including satellite systems and missile systems closer to China. It is the United States that broke its own agreement with China then sent diplomats on military planes to Taiwan, breaking the US one-China policy basically is a complete affront to China. China is not sailing boats next to Los Angeles. And everyone is talking about what China is doing. Well, yes, China is taking advantage of a very good situation [with their] Belt-and-Road initiative which is a fantastic project. And why not? Every country wants to boost its own economy. Second of all, China saw gaps. It saw gaps in places like Serbia which the west turned its backs to and then [China] jumped in. It saw gaps in places like Greece where the economy fell apart. Did the EU help? No. Did the States help? No. Who helped? China helped by building infrastructure; by building their ports; and by helping these countries. So ask people in those parts of the world what they think about China. This whole G7 push; and especially, we have to face facts here, it is the US that is pushing the G7 to push China. It seems to be a situation where the US is just very desperate and, we know empires do change and it looks like we are in a paradigm shift right now.
   question: have the Americans not learned a damned thing from history, or their 45-year cold war with the USSR, or their 19-year involvement in the Vietnam war, or their 20-year (and counting) war in the Middle East? The Roman Empire was obsessed with militarism, went broke, then collapsed from within. The US is already very deeply in debt.
   
    
7. Global CO2 levels hit a new peak of 419.05 ppm in April-2021 then increased to 419.13 ppm in May-2021
   • https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/
   • https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/data.html (data files in csv format)
   • https://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu/index.html
   comment: 419 ppm = 0.419% (seems small until you realize that it is 5 times larger than 0.08% which is the legal limit for drunk driving)
8. World’s largest-ever iceberg breaks away Antarctica (this one is the size of Puerto Rico)
   https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/20/worlds-largest-iceberg-nearly-four-times-size-of-new-york-forms-in-antarctica
9. Today I learned a new word: "COVIDIOT" which is a contraction of the words "COVID" and "Idiot" that applies to everyone who is either "vaccine hesitant" or "unwilling to acknowledge that masks and/or social distancing helped limit fatalities in all previous pandemics" or "a science denier"
   link: https://www.thespec.com/opinion/contributors/2021/05/20/the-anti-science-responses-to-covid-19.html
   comment: reminds me of that other new word "POLIDIOT" (applies to people who insist their political option is superior to science fact)
10. COVID19 and two decades of misinformation
    Misinformation 1: The Republican-dominated Congress of 1987 eliminated the FCC Fairness Doctrine citing a violation of the right to free-speech by corporations (something not intended by the founding fathers). This permitted politically-biased outlets (eg. Fox News and Rush Limbaugh) who refer to tradition news as MAIN STREAM MEDIA (might not 'alternative media' be as untrustworthy as 'alternative medicine'?) comment: Americans seem unaware of the fact that one-sided political propaganda in Germany resulted in world-war-2
    Misinformation 2: The internet (1969) enabled the world-wide-web (1991) which spawned mobile social media (2007). As the public began embracing these technologies, society has been exposed to an ever increasing amount of medical and scientific nonsense from non-experts on both sides of the political spectrum (vaccine hesitancy is one example). These technologies are also responsible for bankrupting many respectable newspapers as advertisers moved their money to the web. Because newspaper publishers could be sued under libel laws for publishing misinformation, they employed people (editors and journalists) to provide "best effort reporting" of fact-checked information. Alternative media websites only "claim to entertain" so only are much less careful.
    
    • 2019: Buzzfeed laid off 43 journalists in their own news division TO SAVE MONEY
    • 2021: Buzzfeed (now rich) took over The Huffington Post in March then immediately laid off 47 journalists TO SAVE MONEY
    The information Age: Evolution by natural selection is a scientifically proven fact. Five years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, Herbert Spencer published Principles of Biology containing the phrase Survival of the Fittest. A full year of COVID-19 deaths, combined with people still distrusting science, caused me to wonder: what will human society look like when this is over? It appears we citizens now live in the age of Survival of the Smartest (or smarter) because we need to be able to separate fact from fiction (which, many times, is just political opinion).
    You will probably die sooner if...
    
    • you have less education than doctors or scientists but think you are just as smart, or smarter
    • you think "looking up stuff on the internet" (especially without checking the author's academic credentials) is "doing research"
    • you get your information from politically-biased ALTERNATIVE STREAM MEDIA rather than neutral MAIN STREAM MEDIA. You will go to your grave knowing you were "politically right" but you will also be "dead wrong"
    comment: it is a horrible thing to contemplate but I believe the delta variant is going to kill a lot of stupid people. I also wonder how many innocent people will be included in the collateral damage. To make matters worse, those unwilling or unable to vaccinate, will be a reservoir for the evolution of the epsilon variant
11. Ontario COVID19 "ICU" Patient Numbers are too high. ICU ("intensive care unit") is a hospital bed associated with a full-time nurse and a ventilator (comment: people who lived through the Polio crisis would be more familiar with the phrase "iron lung"). On April-1, Ontario Premier (Governor) Doug Ford announced a province-wide shutdown starting April-03 because the ICU patient count was 421 but projected to hit 800 by the end of the month (the problem being that there are not 800 ICU beds in the whole province).
    • Months earlier, Sunnybrook Hospital (Toronto) began the construction of temporary facilities that resemble the TV show M*A*S*H. Photos:
      • http://neilrieck.net/images/Sunnybrook-2021-03-01.jpg
      • http://neilrieck.net/images/Sunnybrook-2021-03-10.webp
      • http://neilrieck.net/images/Sunnybrook-2021-04-16.webp
    • Daily Stats + Data:
      • https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data/hospitalizations (90% of all patients test positive for COVID19)
      • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:COVID-19_pandemic_data/Canada_medical_cases_by_province
12. Sea-level rise is rising faster: One proof of climate-change is the increasing rate of sea-level rise. Most climate-change skeptics stand down after they see the graphs showing average annual sea-level rate of rise doubling from 1.7 mm per year (averaged: 1870-1990) to 3.4 mm per year as measured by modern weather satellites. Multiplying by 100 yields 340 mm or 13.4 inches per century. But the contents of this recent scientific paper from Denmark ( https://os.copernicus.org/articles/17/181/2021/ ) are even more troubling. The first line of the abstract reads "Recent assessments from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) imply that global mean sea level is unlikely to rise more than about 1.1 meters within this century but will increase further beyond 2100". This statement infers that one meter (39 inches) is within the scope of possibility.
13. COVID-19 Death Numbers: Since the human population is now quite large (7.8 billion for planet Earth; hundreds of millions for large countries), deaths are statistically predictable from year-to-year. So when a pandemic strikes, statisticians subtract expected deaths from actual deaths to produce excess deaths. From this number scientists sample corpses to determine the how many died due to COVID-19. American numbers from here (https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m3948) show 225,000 excess deaths over 120 days which results in an average of 1,875 deaths per day. It is estimated that two-thirds were due to COVID-19 which translates into 1,250 deaths per day. (caveat: in Canadian hospitals all patient must be tested: for ICU (intensive care) patients the COVID19 rate is 90%)
    Stats Links:
    • https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ 627,000 lookup current value
    • https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html
    • https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/selected-deaths-vs-covid-19-united-states

    American COVID-19 Statistics
    Date	Deaths 'per day'	Notes
    2020-12-05	2,700	reported by NPR; now higher than excess deaths
    2020-12-08	3,100	reported by NPR; higher than deaths on  September 11, 2001
    2020-12-17	3,700	source: Johns Hopkins University; higher than 9/11
    2020-12-30	3,860	source: Johns Hopkins University; higher than 9/11
    2021-01-08	4,100	source: Johns Hopkins and NYT; higher than 9/11
    2021-01-12	4,400	source: Johns Hopkins and NYT; higher than 9/11
    Date	Total Deaths	Notes
    2020-02-29	1	COVID-19 kills one American (may as well say that this pandemic starts March-1)
    2020-04-27	58,000	COVID-19 has killed as many Americans in 2 months as died in the Vietnam War
    2021-01-14	405,376	COVID-19 has killed as many Americans in 10 months as World War 2 in 4 years
    2021-02-17	502,000	COVID-19 has killed a half-million American citizens in only 50 weeks
    2021-04-15	578,971	COVID-19 has killed 10 times more American civilians than soldiers in Vietnam

14. Friendly advice to the incoming administration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris
    Stop meddling in the affairs of other countries (you have enough problems at home).
    • Although the world admired the Obama administration, history books will always associate it with "using NATO to take down Libya" and "causing the Ukraine crisis by offering that country NATO membership". (did you learn nothing from the Cuban Missile Crisis when weapons of mass destruction were moved to YOUR doorstep?)
    • Reenter the JCPOA with Iran as soon as possible. It was the Obama administration that convinced five countries (comprising the UN Security council) to enter into an agreement with Iran where Iran agrees "to not produce weapons-grade uranium" along with "international inspection and verification". The rest of the world entered into this agreement with you, then president Trump exited the agreement in 2018 (only because he hated Obama) which left the world bewildered by your childishness. Everyone now knows that any international agreement with the USA is worthless because it may not survive the next election cycle.
    • Immediately remove all economic sanctions against all countries including Iran and Russia. This is especially important during the years of a world-wide pandemic. question: why have you imposed economic sanctions on Germany for wanting to complete a pipeline to Russia? Perhaps Germany has decided that this will result in a more-lasting peace with neighbor (wasn't international trade the main reason Americans gave in 1972 when Nixon-Kissinger opened up relations with China?) comment: I can only imagine the bewilderment of the USA if Germany were to threaten sanctions against the USA for daring to do business with Canada or Mexico.
      
    • End the seemingly perpetual war (19 years and counting) in middle-East countries like Afghanistan. Has your misplaced revenge for 9/11 not yet been satisfied? You have known for two decades that 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudi nationals so isn't your anger misdirected? Perhaps you overlooked this because it conflicts with your addiction to their oil
    • Reopen trade and commerce with your neighbor, Cuba. Everyone knows the best way to promote capitalism is through trade so why are you still sanctioning them? On top of all this you currently do not have relations with Cuba because of Trump who was (childishly) trying to undo everything put in place by Obama. When I see modern videos of Cuba's old automobiles I see a missed American business opportunity.
    • Stop the war on drugs. Just like the war on alcohol in the 1920s, your actions create criminal organizations.
      • Portugal has proved to the world that "drug use" is a health crisis, not a criminal problem.
      • If Americans choose to use drugs then it is just a sign of how bad things have gotten at home.
      • No knock warrants to catch illegal drug activity in your own county has caused the death of a lot of innocent people.
      • Remove your military presence (and FOB sites) from central American countries like Honduras. Your war-on-drugs there creates societies that are "too violent" for civilized people which results in the mass exoduses North to your southern border (the majority of people crossing your southern ARE NOT Mexicans)
    • Stay out of Latin-America. Do you not see "that your interference in their democratic processes" is no different than "the interference you claim comes to you from Russia"? I think this every time I hear you attempt to replace the democratically elected leaders in places like Venezuela. It is time for you to suspend your Monroe Doctrine of 1823. Time has moved on and so should you.
    • Tell NATO that the move to have NATO members spend "2% of GDP per year on military hardware by 2024" is a step in the wrong direction. Stay at 1% for a decade then move to one-half-of-one percent after that. Countries that prepare for war usually go to war. NATO was formed to protect Northern Atlantic countries from Joseph Stalin who died in1953. Perhaps NATO should have been disbanded back then but there was no reason to keep it after the USSR imploded in 1991.
    • Meanwhile, you already spend more than the next 25 countries combined on military defense (the ground recipients of your cruise missiles surely see this as military offense). Your country could have a nationalized health care system for all citizens if you were not already spending so much money on creating weapons of war. Is it really true that you spend 50% of your discretionary budget on the military industrial complex?
    • Why are you trying to start a cold war with China after pissing away 70 years of money on Russia/USSR? Why are you selling arms to Taiwan? I could only imagine your confusion if China attempted to sell arms to Alaska, Hawaii or Puerto Rico. You have no business interfering in Hong Kong. Stop trying to tell the world about their loss of democracy when Britain did nothing in this area for the 99 year occupation with Britain called a lease.
15. It is Ottawa, not Beijing, which initiated "hostage diplomacy".
    (triggered when Canada backed Donald Trump's illegal sanctions against Iran which Huawei legally ignored)
    As a former member of the Canadian Forces, I’m appalled by Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan’s lack of judgment. On Oct. 7, 2020, during a widely-reported panel discussion hosted by Slovakian think tank Globesec, he claimed that China was engaged in “hostage diplomacy.” It’s frightening that the minister cannot distinguish between the actions of his own government and those of China. I wish to remind him that, on Dec. 1, 2018, his government acted upon a request of the Trump Administration to arrest Meng Wanzhou, CFO, Huawei Technologies. The U.S. indictment was approved by a New York State Court on Aug. 22, 2018, and the U.S. tried unsuccessfully following that date to pressure dozens of countries, through which Meng travelled, to arrest her. Every single country refused until Meng arrived in Vancouver on Dec. 1, 2018, and Trudeau slavishly acceded to the “urgent” U.S. extradition request. Developments following Meng’s arrest confirm her arrest was politically motivated. On Dec. 6, 2018, Trump declared he might release Meng if he secured a favourable trade deal with China. He also told John Bolton that Meng was “a bargaining chip” in his trade negotiations with China. In fact, in “The Room Where it Happened,” Bolton reveals that Trump privately gave Meng Wanzhou the nickname, “the Ivanka Trump of China,” a moniker indicating Trump understood he was asking Canada to take a high-value hostage in the person of Meng Wanzhou to be leveraged against the People’s Republic to get a trade deal favourable to the U.S.A. So, it was the Trudeau government, which first initiated “hostage diplomacy” in relation to China. Following the arrest of Meng, the Chinese government arrested Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig on espionage charges. While I have no opinion on the justifiability of the charges against the Two Michaels, I believe the fraud charges against Meng are unwarranted. After all, they arise from Huawei’s alleged dealings with Iran, in violation of U.S. unilateral sanctions against that country. In the first place, the U.S. unilateral economic sanctions against Iran are illegal. According to the UN Charter, only the UN Security Council has the authority to impose coercive economic measures against member states. And all those UN-approved measures against Iran were lifted in the JCPOA (Iran Nuclear Agreement) which came into effect in 2016. When Trump abrogated that agreement in 2018 to the chagrin of the entire world, Trudeau’s government also expressed regret. It stated it hoped that the other parties to the JCPOA would continue to honour its provisions. In effect, then, Meng, a Canadian permanent resident, has violated no Canadian law. She’s being held under house arrest by the Trudeau government for violating a U.S. sanctions regime on Iran that no other country in the world recognizes. This bizarre situation is termed U.S. “extraterritoriality,” where the U. S tries to enforce its domestic laws on other countries. Canada should not play along! The arrest and extradition proceeding against Meng have contributed to deteriorating Canada-China relations. At various times following Meng’s arrest, China, which is Canada’s second-largest trading partner, banned importation of Canadian canola, pork, and lobsters. Since livelihoods of thousands of Canadian farmers and fishers depend on the export of these products to China, they were severely affected. Thirty per cent of Canadian exports go to China, but Canadian exports only account for less than 2 per cent of China’s imports. So the potential of even more harm is possible. In addition, the promising Chinese-Canadian collaboration on a COVID-19 vaccine collapsed. Canada and its people paid dearly so far and gained nothing from the Trudeau government’s decision to hold Meng as a hostage for the U.S. in its trade negotiations with China.
    Henry Evans-Tenbrinke (2020-10-16)
16. Commenting on Huawei: It appears to me that people in the west only support capitalism when the west wins. When a Chinese company, like Huawei, becomes the next Nortel, then ridiculous conspiracy theories are invoked. IIRC, Huawei was one of many companies that bid on the sale of intellectual property, as did Apple, Google, Blackberry and others. Huawei was not one of the winners which forced it to increase its own R&D operations (estimates put Huawei R&D in 2019 at a massive 40% of net income). People claim that Huawei steals IP (intellectual property) so how is it that many industry experts agree that Huawei is 19-24 months ahead of everyone else on 5G. Anyway, western companies continually accuse each other of IP theft (look at the number of times that Apple is in court for stealing IP from Broadcom and Qualcomm). Other western companies are no better (Apple has sued Google; Facebook is currently suing Google). The CEOs of these western companies justify this by saying "this is just the way business in done".
    
    On a related note, Huawei telephone hardware is nothing more than a special-purpose programmable computer made in China which is almost always installed along with a CISCO firewall. Firewall transactions are almost always logged and monitored so someone would need to show me proof that data packets were seen going back to China (or show how packets could flow from China back to the west for any nefarious purpose). On top of all that, Apple manufactures their equipment at Foxconn in China. This is the same place where Microsoft manufactures the Xbox One and Sony manufacturers the PlayStation4. HP desktops are manufactured by Megatron in China. So why is Huawei being singled out? Shouldn't Trump block the imports of all these companies as well? Heck, many of these consumer and small business appliances are seldomly protected by firewalls.
    
    I think it was Deng Xiaoping who once said "The Middle East has its oil, China has rare earth". Since modern electronics is dependent upon rare-earth materials then it should be no surprise that Chinese-made electronics is much less expensive. Speaking of Deng for a moment, in 1985 I was attending school in Boston where it appeared to me that Chinese students were everywhere. Apparently, Deng had sent 1.3 million Chinese students to the USA to receive a top-quality western education paid for by China (one of my more-gifted Chinese classmates was accompanied by "two minders" who were there to ensure that he returned to China). Unlike Mao, Deng saw great value in education and realized that this was the best way forward for China. Thirty five years later, China has moved more than 350 million Chinese citizens from poverty into the middle class. This number is greater than the current population of the USA so is it any surprise that China is doing well? Meanwhile, there is a tendency amongst westerners to label "an educated person" as "an elite". It seems to me that the world has flipped.
17. Now here's a smart idea. The European Parliament (EU) just voted to end daylight savings time in 2021
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/27/world/europe/daylight-savings-time-european-union.html
    https://www.npr.org/2019/03/27/707179979/european-parliament-moves-toward-ending-daylight-saving-time
    The main reason given was that Europe's closest trading partners, China and Russia, do not shift their numerous number of time zones, and having Europe change its clocks twice annually was bad for business between all. But as a computer programmer and system admin, I can tell you that not having your computer systems change their internal clocks is a huge advantage.
18. Our culture is awash in lies, dominated by streams of never ending electronic hallucinations that merge fact and fiction until they are indistinguishable.  We have become the most illusioned society on earth.  Politics is a species of endless and meaningless political theater.  Politicians have morphed into celebrities.  Our two ruling parties are, in reality, one party - the corporate party.  And those who attempt to puncture this vast, breathless universe of fake news, designed to push through the cruelty and exploitation of the neoliberal order, are pushed so far to the margins of society, including by a public broadcasting system that has sold its soul for corporate money, that we might as well be mice squeaking against an avalanche, but squeak we MUST
    Chris Hedges
19. A conservative friend of mine was fond of asking me political questions (I am a centrist) then would cut me off mid-sentence before I finished answering. Apparently he was the only conservative amongst his family of brothers, sisters and parents but had no problem thinking he was right (er, correct)  while they were wrong. How could this be? This thought rattled around in my mind until I stumbled across a book titled The Republican Brain which was positively reviewed by liberals and conservatives alike. The book contains several points which I will pass along here:
    • Size differences in two brain structures, the amygdala (larger in conservatives) and the anterior cingulate (larger in liberals), bias human perspective of the world.
    • Conservatives see most issues as "black-and-white" (or good-and-evil) and are more pessimistic while liberals see "shades of gray" and are generally more optimistic
    • Conservatives are more fearful of others so are more easily encouraged to vote for POPULIST issues like "building the wall" or BREXIT (funny point: Britain had the lowest number of per-capita immigrants but had the highest political reaction against them)
    • Conservatives play politics as a team sport so will almost always "vote their party" while Liberals will split their vote choosing alternate parties (not very smart in first-past-the -post)
20. Philosophical razors
    • Occam's razor: Simpler explanations are more likely to be correct; avoid unnecessary or improbable assumptions
    • Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity
    • more examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_razor
21. When I was young, everything I knew about politics and economics came from secondary school so found myself reading books recommended by others which included The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek. Then when I heard Marget Thatcher quote the book, I wondered if she was reading a different translation since her quotes bore little resemblance to the book I read (was Thatcher paraphrasing?). I recently stumbled onto this gem which was also written by Hayek which I only pass along as food-for-thought. It is titled Why I am Not a Conservative (whoa! this article is an excerpt from a 1960 book titled The Constitution of Liberty - I wonder if Thatcher knew about this)

Continued: Index Part-2 (more sciency stuff)

"a Feynman Diagram"

"All forces in the universe are mediated by particle exchange"
This "Feynman Diagram" (of electron repulsion) depicts the movement of two electrons (1 to 3 and 2 to 4) in space and time. A virtual photon transfers energy between them (5 to 6) causing them to repel each other.
To learn more:
1) brief explanation
2) detailed explanation
Legend: Y-Axis (up-down) is time while X-Axis (left-right) is space

Neil Rieck
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Yes, this is the old "Laptops and Lederhosen" site