Fresh new Epstein scandal discovered in Michigan

Ho-hum... another posh private school for the children of folks who think for $80k their kids will escape the depravities of the public ed system, only to have them buggered and abused by Epstein & Company. Here's a quote from Jeffrey Epstein that's worth a momentary ponder:"Many members of the global super-elite have helped me to understand their world and some have become friends." Well, did they ever! And now, thanks to some intrepid investigative journalism at the New York Times by reporter Graham Bowley, even more Epstein Evil has come to light. Here's what got me sniffing the air for the wiff of conspiracy theories. While the above quote could very plausibly be an Epstein original, it actually comes from Chrystia Freeland. Yes, Epstein and Freeland both mixed freely among the global elite, Chrystia as a self-confessed small-time anti-Russia spy and A-list journo (top gun at Reuters), and Jeffrey as the most prolific pedophile and sex trafficker in known history. Oh, and by the way, by far the most consequential spy for Israel since Jonathan Pollard. Jeffrey's and Chrystia's paths must have crossed many times while they inhabited the same milleu. In fact, he variously swindled, promoted, partnered with,mentored,advised, sued, or defrauded many of the name's dropped by Freeland in her bountifully footnoted memoir of that time in her life, yet no reference to Epstein? Maybe after he gets to the bottom of this Michigan outrage, that NYT reporter can look into this. After all, Graham Bowley remains married to Ms. Freeland... maybe they can collaborate! I see a Pulittzer Prize ahead!

How Canada stands up to Donald Trump

This is a reprint of a story first published six years ago. Back then our leader was the one-time high-school drama teacher, the haircut that walks like a man. Today our leader is one-time elite global banker, the urbane technocrat who wowed the world with his defiant Davos speech. The six-year-old piece is fresh as this mornings's news headlines for one reason; our approach to Trump has not changed one iota. Lots of feisty op-eds and political grandstanding, but behind the curtain, strictly business as usual. Its hard to keep your elbows up when your pants are around your ankles.******** neumann's blog Sunday, October 4, 2020 How Canada stands up to Trump Canadians generally and Canadian media in particular have an ingrained antipathy toward Donny J. We are, after all, a sophisticated, educated, and morally superior nation, and Trump is...well, just so darned yucky and gross. Today, Jaime Watt's column in the Sunday Star is titled "Trump is running against democracy." Who can even imagine such a thing! Trump is so yucky and gross he is running against the very democratic ideals that make civilization possible. Star columnist Vinay Menon, meanwhile, advises his (presumably Canadian) readership to "seek out the remarkable healing power of Biden," although evidence that Biden has "healed" much of anything in almost a half century in politics is threadbare at best. While these A-list Canadian pundits are polishing our smug and sanctimonious superiority complex, the Royal Canadian Navy was, for the fourth time in four months, sending a warship through the Taiwan Strait. While Canada is blessed with an abundance of coastlines, none of them are anywhere near China, so it's not as if we're over there "defending our interests." No, what we're doing is "standing with our allies" in a signal to the commies that we're a vital part of the coalition of "liberal democracies" ever anxious to keep the Yellow Peril in check. The leader of the "liberal democracies," also known variously as "the free world," the Nations of Virtue, or simply Uncle Sam's Club, is of course America's Donald J Trump. One could question just how sound America's claim is on either liberalism or democracy, but aside from the ubiquitous Trump bashing, these questions don't come up. It's as if our pundits believe that America was that "shining city on a hill,"right up until January 20, 2017, when the light of freedom was suddenly snuffed. If we all wish hard enough, perhaps it may flicker back to life after November 3rd, when we can once again huddle under Uncle Sam's skirts without embarrassment. In the meantime, our allies UK and US, sail through the Taiwan Strait on a regular basis, and it is imperative that we "stand with our allies," the same "liberal democracies" currently busying themselves with destroying Julian Assange in revenge for exposing their war crimes. Here's the problem; talk is cheap. It costs nothing to write anti-Trump op-eds. On the other hand, it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per day to sail a Halifax-class RCN frigate through the Taiwan Strait. And our frigate fleet is getting long in the tooth. We need to upgrade the fleet if we are to continue standing with our allies. To that end, Canada is forging ahead with plans to build 15 state-of-the-art frigates at a cost of 45 billions. The lead contractor is US military supplier Lockheed Martin. For all our Trump-bashing and anti-American posturing, it is clear that, virtue-signalling aside, Canada's ruling elite remains as desperate as ever to ingratiate themselves with the Big Dog, regardless of who sits in the Oval Office. They remain American Empire Loyalists to the core.

Mothers and beer

Back when I was a teen living under my mother's roof, she had concerns about my beer consumption. In the first place, as a pious Christian woman, the fact her underage teen son could get his hands on the devil's brew pointed to the overal disintegration of society. Not only that, but once her boy had tasted beer, cigarettes and gambling and loose women couldn't be far behind. Well, I generally missed out on the loose women, to my chagrin, and gambling is one vice that I never heard calling my name, but she wasn't wrong about the smokes. And the crazy thing is, now that Mutti is in her nineties and I'm in my seventies, she's more worried than ever about my beer consumption! Obviously, I stayed ahead of the devil's brew long enough to have a career and raise a family, but by God, have things ever gone off the rails since I retired. I suddenly come down with a gluten allergy. Yup, bread and beer are suddenly verboten! Try telling that to a guy who has lived his whole life on bread and beer! I have to say, for all my adult life, I'm sure I never met a sandwich I didn't like. That got Mom overly interested in my diet, so when the next turd dropped into my retirement punch bowl, ie the alleged "congestive heart failure" business, she was primed to unleash a generous dose of motherly love. Long story short, now that I'm an invalid, or if not quite yet, soon, wouldn't it be smart, before you're completely incapacitated, to sell your place way up there and move closer to your family? I don't know Mom... In the first place, once I'm completely incapacitated, I can't imagine it's gonna be you changing my adult diaper. Secondly, it's getting easier to find gluten-free bread and beer. Just today I had a lovely Reuben on gluten-free Pumpernickel from the Boone bakery, and I've been washing it down with a four-pak of Ancestral brand organic quinoa beer, which comes from a brewery not 100 km up the road in Barrie. Anyway, liebe Mutti, the world is becoming a better place,at least for the gluten-free! Looks like I'm gonna try to make a go of it here, at least for the time being. (And in case anyone thinks I'm abandoning my 90-something Mom, know that of her five children, none of the others live more than ten minutes away.)

Canadian Museum of Human Rights still wallowing in petty political squabbles

In the quarter+ century since Izzy Asper first proposed a Museum of Human Rights for Winnipeg, I've often poo-pooed the idea. Seems kinda smug and pretentious. Relegating human rights to a museum doesn't bode well for human rights, in my view. As I predicted, planning for the project was soon mired in endless squabbling between various interest groups over who deserved more floor space. The rancour continues to this day. While the planning team was able to mollify, at least somewhat, the Ukrainian and Jewish lobbies, they left many others disgruntled. One of the groups that felt excluded were Arab-Canadians. They were finally thrown the bone of a temporary exhibit commemorating their expulsion from their homes on the creation of Israel. This has riled up Canada's Jewish lobby. Today, CBC informed us that Gail Asper, Izzy's daughter and Chair of the Asper Foundation, was resigning, because the Nabka exhibit would not have been to her father's liking, and since her family had once put in $20 millions in seed money CBC obviously figures she has a point. Here's a few things CBC doesn't mention. While Izzy Asper's fortune may have provided the first 20 mil, the federal government spends more than that every year just to keep the lights on in the joint. Another thing CBC neglects to mention is that serious museums world-wide are managed by professional curatorial staff, not by the children of wealthy donors. Not that these visionary donors have been able to see their vision through. Izzy Asper was riding high in those days. He was on Forbes Billionaire List!... but not for long. Izzy's master stroke was to pay Conrad Black $3+ billions for his portfolio of money-shredding media properties!(probably the last time in his career Conrad walked away from a deal with the satisfation that he'd totally pantsed the guys on the other side of the table). In 2002 Asper sponsored a cross-Canada speaking tour for The Greatest Leader Since Moses. He was and his children remain outspoken promoters of Netayahu's Greater Israel project, which ultimately demands the expulsion of the remaining non-Jewish population of Palestine. Alas, Izzy's golden age as a billionaire media mogul was short-lived. By the time Canwest's 4.5 billion market cap was down to twenty bucks (and I'm talking market cap here, not share price) Izzy's vanity project had long transformed into a goverment project, with somewhere in the range half a billion in taxpayer funds to date. In one of my early posts on this farce, I positted that Winnipeg, which was at the time the child povery capital of Canada, would at least now have a venue to which Winnipeggers could take their hungry children and show them they don't have it too bad after all.

Not all genocides are equal

Back in April of 2022, our government passed a resolution declaring Russia's full-scale and totally unprovoked invasion of Ukraine a "genocide." And what a genocide it's been. Five years on, multiple Ukrainian news outlets reported,early in June, that child deaths in the war had passed 700. The nation was in mourning. While even one child death is of course one too many, let's try to get some perspective here. More than four years after Ottawa declares a genocide in Ukraine, child deaths pass seven hundred? Israel blew through that threshold within the first two weeks of their war on Gaza. The child deaths are in the tens of thousands, yet our political establishment dare not utter the word "genocide?" What are they afraid of?

Reality preps rude surprise for Trump regime

Pretty much the entire planet sees by now that the Emperor be buck-naked. The towelhead scum, to paraphrase the leader of the liberal-democratic world, have done stole the Strait of Hormuz, and won't hand it back, even though we've totally destroyed their entire military infastructure many times over. So, what to do when you've won a historic victory, the likes of which the world has never seen, and the fuckers you just decimated for the nth time are still blithely firing missiles through your imaginary air defenses every day? That's a conundrum the world truly has never seen before, especially the Western World. Sure, it took us twenty years and trillions of dollars to lose to the Talibs, but this is an entirely more spectacular scale of humiliation for the American Empire. If America's flailing military efforts are not embarrassing enough, the duct-tape, baling-wire, and bullshit that keeps the bankrupt US economy afloat are becoming hard to ignore. Thanks to a few brave souls like Gary Marcus and Ed Zitron, the massive hoax that is the "AI boom" is coming unglued, and there goes at least a trillion USD worth of haircuts to the biggest names in global finance. What's that gonna do to Donny's 'hottest economy in the world,' where fully 40% of the heat was being generated by a massive hoax? While I generally try to avoid any engagement whatsoever with AI, it's hard to avoid. I asked Google today if the ChatGPT-Huggingface story was a hoax. The first thing that comes up is of course Google's AI summary. The first line of the AI summary reads "The ChatGPT story was not a complete hoax," how reassuring! At the end of the summary, there is the ever-so-helpful reminder that AI makes mistakes, in other words, it's prone to making stuff up and it's best to check its results... more reassurance! Between the military fiasco on one hand and the economy swirling round and round in the big white telephone, Donald J Trump is cementing his place in the history books!

Doo-doo just keep gettin' deeper... and deeper and de..

After a quiet day at home, spent mostly on the stoop, watching the turkey vultures soar, I opened my laptop and checked out the latest news. OH! MY! GOD!!! No matter where you look, it's nothing but bad news all over every channel! A little war here, a little genocide there, and that's enough to stoke fear galore. And that's exactly what our thought-leaders intend. Spread the fear thick enough and long enough and eventually you'll have people clamouring for warships and submarines and fighter jets! No point investing in health-care, education, or housing when our entire way of life is under threat.