Grigory Lukin.com

Wednesday night. Another day, another dollar. Things might be looking up at work, or not – it’s never easy to tell.

The University of Toronto is moving ahead with my educational credential assessment (ECA), the last big piece of paperwork I need for my Canadian permanent residency application. The last little piece of paperwork is the FBI background check. I got lucky: most of the local fingerprinting agencies have shut down due to covid, but one of them is still in business. If xgf feels up to it tomorrow, we’ll take an hour-long drive to Toronto to do my fingerprints, fill out the FBI form, and send it off.

There’s a hypothetical future where my PR application gets finalized within a month, and I become an official Canadian resident within seven months… A bit longer than my initial timeline, but hey, I’ll take what I can get.

The New York Times published a huge story about the White House’s shadow task force set up by Jared Kushner and staffed by “volunteers” (mostly because they were too damn unqualified to hold and official government job). Their merry band decided to reinvent the entire procurement process while also keeping a separate VIP spreadsheet and rerouting vital supplies to Trump’s friends and donors. One of the people involved finally had enough and blew the whistle. Makes one wonder how many more grifting affairs have been happening in the background, without any whistleblowers to bring them to light.

In other words, it’s just as I’d written before: the US response is being run by corrupt imbeciles, and boy-wonder Kushner (who was never elected to any position) keeps getting assigned to every initiative, overruling and replacing the actual experts who might be able to help. Meanwhile, Trump is getting bored of the pandemic (probably because he can’t bully the virus into submission), and is calling for the country to reopen. He’s explicitly stated that people will die but the “American warriors” (aka the working class) will get through it. If all of this sounds like unhinged madness from a cheap self-published novel – well, that’s just the world we live in now.

…I can’t wait to officially become a Canadian.