The blessings of moving to Amish country

I wrote about the sub $200k residential listing in Teeswater the other day. A roof and a yard and so affordable almost anybody can buy it. What affordability crisis? What I neglected to mention was the many strategic benefits of moving to Mennonite country. The southern reaches of Grey and Bruce counties, most of Huron and a good part of Perth counties, plus most of Waterloo Region, have multiple old-order Amish and Mennonite communities. In trying times, these are the best neighbours you could ever wish for. When the day comes that one of our tyrannical authoritarian adversaries unleashes a cyber-attack that collapses the power grid, where do you want to be? In a 22nd floor condo in downtown Toronto? Or down the road from a guy who’s never been attached to the grid, whose children sell farm-fresh eggs, fresh-baked pies, vegetables, and farm-made summer sausage at the end of their lane (no Sunday sales, thank you very much)? I stopped in at one of those places, just outside Teeswater, because they had summer sausage on offer. The twelve year old kid asks me if I want a full one or a half. Gimme the big one, I said. The kid disappears in the back room and comes out with something that resembles a fence-post. We did some quick renegotiating. I settled for half of a quarter of the fence-post. My old pal Jim Lippert, may he rest in peace, used to be a auto-shop teacher at the same institution of learning where I was a welding teacher. We used to car-pool from Walkerton to the high school in Owen Sound. He lived in the country and had a side-gig raising chickens, that dropped enough eggs that he supplied several local restaurants. When the laying hens wore out, he’d swap them to an Amish family for a stack of fresh-baked pies. We’d drop off three dozen hens on the way to work, and pick up half-a-dozen pies on the way home. By then every one of those hens was cooked, dressed, and pickled. Like most old-order families, these folks also ran a home business in addition to farming their 100 acre spread. In this case, a sawmill. Lippert was close enough to these folks that he felt comfortable taking me around back to see the operation for myself. In one of my past lives I used to do maintenance welding at sawmills on Vancouver Island, so I know from sawmills. I’d never in my life seen anything like I saw in Zook’s back yard. The biggest draught horse you’ve ever seen in your life is walking around in circles all day, attached to a giant wheel that in turn drives innumerable shafts and pulleys, which in turn drive, among many other things, a saw blade that would be at home in any industrial West Coast sawmill. Zook’s workforce seems to be mostly barefoot teenage boys in straw hats. Zook’s operation ain’t gonna miss a beat when the grid goes down. I rest my case.

Affordable housing

Don’t you love those real estate ads that start with “ideal for investors and first-time buyers?” They’re admitting right off the tee that they’re pitting first-time buyers against somebody looking to expand their “portfolio.” Of course they are. They’re paid by the home-owner to get maximum price for their property. Whether it goes to a family starting out or some guy buying the 17th income property for their portfolio isn’t their concern. My dear father, who was in the business for about a hundred years, liked to say; “if somebody bought it, it was obviously affordable.” Hard to dispute that. And there’s a lot more affordable real estate out there than people realize. Problem is, there’s a huge cohort who have convinced themselves they need to be in the GTA. Alrighty then! You can settle for $2000/month for a basement studio, or look a little further afield for affordable housing. I keep an eye on the market around here, and there’s a habitable place on offer right now in Teeswater for under $200k. Definitely a starter, but a roof and 66x132 of real estate. That’s a mere two hour commute to the GTA! Invest a sliver of your accommodation savings in a Tesla twin-motor, and you can probably cut that commute time in half! And here’s a current listing in Owen Sound, two hours out of the GTA. A 19th century townhouse that would be a million in downtown Guelph and at least two million near downtown Toronto. In downtown Owen Sound, a short walk from the waterfront and the farmer’s market, you’re under 300k. Back in the day, people used to go to where the jobs were. That’s how my clan got to Canada, and that’s why we have Newfies clear across the land. Today, there seems to be an expectation that everyone is entitled to a cozy life wherever they please. Who’s going to break the news to the Gen Zs and the millennials that things don’t work that way?

Woke CBC snubs wheelchair athlete

I was curious how things went down at the Boston Marathon. Not that I’m a runner, but I know at least a dozen people who have at one time or another made it a bucket list thing to run the Boston Marathon. By and large I’m not crazy about those people; they mostly come off as snobbish and condescending towards non-runners. Anyway, it’s always interesting to see if maybe a Canadian made a good showing. I scan the men’s results. No Canucks in the top ten. I scan the women’s results. No Canucks in the top ten. I scan the wheelchair results. Holy heck, we got us a Canadian on the leaderboard! Josh Cassidy! A 39 year old wheelchair athlete who has competed for Canada in so many elite events I’ll just refer you to his Wikipedia page. This is a dude who won the wheelchair at the 2012 Boston Marathon! And the 2010 London Marathon! At 39 years old, he finishes in the top ten! That’s a story! So here’s the main page CBC story on the Boston Marathon. The top two Canadians in the women’s category used to run on back roads around Thunder Bay! They arrived at the finish line 15 minutes after the winner. Ok, but so what? Why is this the CBC’s Boston Marathon story? Doesn’t the 8th place in the wheelchair cat trump being 15 minutes behind in the women’s category? I am truly confused by CBC’s diversity policies. Granted, there apparently weren’t any trans or non-binary folks to write about, and all concerned are, unfortunately, white, but focusing on two able young women at the expense of a 39 year old dude in a wheelchair strikes me as both ableism and ageism. Explain yourself, Brody!

Mass graves discovered at Gaza hospital after retreat of "most moral army in the world"

Most moral army in the world? That pungent flower of PR supremacy is wilting fast. Most of us who follow these things are so relieved the face-off between Iran and Israel has been tamped down, at least for now, that we’ve almost forgotten Gaza. But the genocide continues. The death toll has passed 34,000. Gazans, especially the youngest and most vulnerable, are starving to death - if they live long enough. And let’s not be deluded about why they are starving. The food that would prevent their starvation rots in tractor-trailers that sit at the gates of Gaza, while Israel slow-walks aid via 1001 petty obstructions. Al Jazeera is the only major news source available in the West that reports out of Gaza without Israeli censorship. That’s why you can’t hope to be reliably informed if you limit yourself to BBC/CBC/CNN/MSNBC/Fox. The “mighty Wurlitzer” of American Empire propaganda ensures we see only the side of the story that is convenient to the Empire. The story we were treated to today was that Israel’s retaliation against Iran demonstrated Israel’s strategic dominance. The Iranians were cowed into standing down, and global nuclear war was averted. Whew! Here’s a more plausible scenario. While we were told the first Iranian direct attack on Israel in history was an abject failure, the reality seems to be somewhat different. We were told 99% of incoming was taken down by a combination of Israel and its allies. We now know some missiles got through the various defences and hit at least three strategic military targets. That was a wake-up call for at least some of the senior IDF guys who don’t pull their strategies out of 3,000 year old religious texts. That’s why Israel’s response was, in the words of Itmar Ben Givr, Minister of National Security and far-right religious nutter, “lame.” It’s comforting that their are some sane folks left at the top of the IDF. Whether they can prevent the Greatest Leader since Moses taking the country into the abyss remains to be seen.

Why we can't build sh#t

For well over two years, Canadian officials, from the PM to various senior ministers to the top guns in the Canadian Armed Forces, have been blowing smoke up Zelensky’s arse about standing with Ukraine for as long as it takes with whatever it takes. The pathetic reality is, aside from words of encouragement, we ain’t got nothin’ in quantities that will make a difference, and we can’t produce anything because we’ve spent the past fifty years destroying our own industrial capacity. Compare that to what we used to be capable of. During the WWII, Canada built over 4,000 naval vessels in five years, with a population of roughly a quarter of what we have now. Contrast that to our current shipbuilding prowess. In 2008 the federal government announced a plan to replace the Halifax-class frigates built in the ‘80s and ‘90’s. It’s now 2024 - WWII could have been fought three times over in that span! How many of the new ships have been built? Why, none, of course! And don’t get your hopes up about seeing any until at least the mid 2030s, more likely the 2040s - if we’re lucky. So what went wrong? There’s a fascinating essay on view at The Atlantic right now, exploring the demise of Boeing. The iconic American company has gone from the pinnacle of the global aviation industry to a laughing stock whose products have become know for dropping random parts from 30,000 feet, or worse. Jerry Useem pins the blame on how finance capital has gradually subsumed the economy. Old-school industrialists like Walter Chrysler, Henry Ford, and Bill Boeing eventually were supplanted by a managerial class that put quarterly profits above any and all other considerations. That was part of a broader shift in societal attitudes. In the ‘50s the US had a top marginal tax rate on high earners of 90%. Seems outrageous by today’s standards, but there were jobs aplenty, people who worked in factories could afford to buy houses and cars, and rich people were still rich, although not by the obscene standards that prevail today. Manufacturers took pride in building stuff that worked well and lasted. In those days the guy who designed a washing machine that lasted twenty years was celebrated. Today the ethos is; only an idiot would build such a thing when you can push a new one on the consumer every five years. The old-timey “social contract” was jettisoned along the way. Employers were responsible only to their share-holders and had no obligations whatsoever to the communities they operated in. “Free trade” ramped up the disintegration. Why pay a worker in Guelph twenty bucks an hour when a peon in Guadalajara will do the job for twenty bucks a week? Along the way the working classes were bamboozled into believing our “dirty industrial jobs” would be replaced by some “new economy” that would “lift all boats,” as the experts assured us. We’re still waiting. War on unions became a fashionable thing. Thatcher took on the mine-workers. Reagan fired the air traffic controllers. Peter Pocklington destroyed the union at Gainers. In every case the destroyers were celebrated in the pages of our leading media organs. Fuck the workers - they’ll drink themselves to death soon enough! Fast-forward to the here-and-now. Zelensky’s standing at the door with his begging bowl. The war we goaded him into has, at horrific costs in human lives, demonstrated the bankruptcy of our new and improved economic model. The Russians alone have greater industrial capacity than the combined West. The $90 billions congress just approved isn’t going to Ukraine; it’s going to the US military-industrial complex, there to be pissed away on $6k artillery shells the Russians produce for $600, and their North Korea allies for even less. That, in brief, is how we got here. The lesson is this; countries that deindustrialize would be wise to avoid industrial-scale warfare.

How to tell when we hit Peak Woke

You’ve probably seen this story. Dude in Ontario comes to the realization that he’s actually not a dude, but not a woman either. He’s non-binary! That’s not the first time somebody couldn’t make up their mind, but here’s why this story made the news. Ontario’s public health plan, OHIP, covers transition surgery. Whether your looking for a vaginoplasty or an addadictomy, OHIP’s (ie the taxpayer) got you covered. Sounds plenty accommodating to me, but get this; Dude wanted the vaginoplasty, but also wanted to keep his penis, just in case! OHIP balked. This was a bridge too far, even for the wokees at OHIP. OHIP does not fund “experimental” procedures. Hence the court action. I thought this story so out there I didn’t comment on it the time. It just begs for ridicule. The jokes are so obvious… double dipping… having your cake etc… having it both ways… No, best just to ignore it. Meanwhile, Dude is off in Texas having his dreams come true. Apparently OHIP will pay the tab after all. Human rights! Today I’m having lunch with a guy who survived prostate cancer. “My doctor at Sunnybrook, a top-shelf surgeon, wanted to try an innovative procedure. OHIP ruled it “experimental. I’m not a wealthy man, and I had to pay $23,000 out of my retirement funds because OHIP refused!” You can see why he’d be pissed off! If society is not yet at “peak woke,” you just gotta pray we’re getting really close.

Why I'd rather watch the birdfeeder than the budget speech

I used to care, but things have changed. Mostly what’s changed is once you’ve heard a certain number of these, like a half-century’s worth, you begin to discern a pattern; nothing ever turns out! And it’s never the fault of anyone in Ottawa! This year’s budget was focused big time on housing. In 2015, the year Team Fluffy was first elected, there was a best seller out on the Canadian housing crisis. It was a real and visible thing in 2015. The Liberals spent the next eight years turbo-charging the crisis with the most counterproductive policies imaginable. Idiocies abound. Conestoga College over a few years went from having a few hundred foreign students to 30,000. The temporary foreign worker program expanded from it’s origins of bringing in cheap labour for Canadian farmers, to bringing in cheap labour to staff Tim Hortons franchises. And for years, Team Trudeau maintained a pathway to paradise open at Roxham Road for the convenience of anyone from anywhere with the initiative to make it that far. All these people have to live somewhere! Until about six months ago, making that observation got you branded a racist xenophobe. When the political consultants and pollsters suddenly realized three-quarters of voters now met that definition, the Liberal Party took notice. Hence the sudden compassion for the millions of Canadians priced out of the housing market, largely by government policy! I whole-heartedly applaud any initiative to build affordable housing, but if the last fifty budget speeches are anything to go by, don’t get your hopes up.