In praise of elderly Jewish gentlemen who happen to have law degrees

We're delving into the archives here, and I've no idea if Uncle Sid remains among the living, but thirteen years ago he made enough of an impression that I wrote about him.

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First of all, Sid ain't my uncle.

I don't think, technically speaking, he's even an "uncle" to the Farm Manager. Maybe a second cousin once removed or something.

Anyway, I ran into Sid at the family get-together about a month back.

Usually I only run into Sid at family funerals.

So I grabbed Sid's hand for a good old farm-style handshake, "hey good to see ya Sid... I only see you at funerals!"

I should mention that Sid is 87 years old. Still goes to his office at his law practice every day. Still got all his marbles, and they're all rolling in the right direction.

I think he does real estate law mostly. You can probably do that till you're 150. After all, what can go wrong? The title searchers do the title search. The lien checkers check for liens. The legal secretaries and assorted unpaid interns do the rest.

When all those folks have done all your work, you give it the stamp of approval and off you go!

Now that's just a general rant about real estate lawyers. I don't mean for a moment to suggest that's how Sid rolls.

But Sid is one savvy dude. When I mentioned about only seeing him at family funerals he rejoinders, without a moment of hesitation, "ya I know! Everybody I know is dead!"

What a great guy to have a beer with!

Here's to ya, Sid!

How to tell when you're busting the speed limit on the Alzheimer Highway

Not that I would, personally, know anything about that, but I've heard through the grapevine one of the sure-fire symptoms is when you start doing shit you've never been known to do before. Like, just to pick a hypothetical example out of the ether,  shopping for high-end footwear.

 I gotta admit I've been somewhat infatuated with the Dayton 64 brand of late, and I'll tell you why. Thanks to a recent Globe feature on bespoke brands unique to Canada, I learned that Dayton 64s are called that because the IWA Canadian HQ was at 64 Dayton Avenue in Vancouver!

And here's why this matters to the pot-addled hillbilly. For a period of several months, I think four max, maybe four and a half, I was the shop steward at an International Woodworkers of America local in Victoria BC. As it happened, none of the older guys wanted the job, so the punk from Ontario got it by default. The punk from Ontario was soon enough embroiled in crises on all sides that had him scurry home to Ma & Pa's basement, but to this day I regard those few months with nostalgia and regret...

Not sure what that's worth... you get to a certain age and damned near everything you see in the rear-view is framed in nostalgia and regret!

And I'm not a complete stranger to Canadian-made high-end footwear. I've had a pair of blue suede Hartts forever.  I got 'em in a thrift shop for twenty bucks. There was another high-end brand also from New Brunswick that I think is still around, but their shoes are built in England now. 

But back to the Alzheimer Highway. Right now I'm looking at a vintage pair of Daytons, a wee bit scuffed up, on offer at five hundred bucks. Ya, that's three times what I've ever paid for footwear before, but hot damn...  wait a minute! That sharp-looking logger's boot may look good but it don't have so much as a steel toe! WTF? 

I couldna even wore those puppies into the IWA shop where I was the shop steward! They mighta made real boots once upon a time, but they're strictly Japan / China tourist fare today. 

See!  A guy who can figure that out still has a lot of runway left on that highway!

Remembering the fake-news fairies who brought you Malalah, Greta, and little Bana

From the archives, but near as I can tell  we're way more befuddled by the diff between shit & shinola, truth & truthiness, than we were back then!

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You gotta admit the wily Erdogan knows a good photo-op when he sees one.

If nothing else, this story proves that the roads from "rebel held" areas of Syria to the capital of Turkey remain wide open, in spite of the fact that Turkey has allegedly joined the fight against Daesh. How else to explain the fact that Bana was only evacuated out of Aleppo two days ago, on a Syrian government bus, and transferred to rebel held territory, and finds herself on The Sultan's lap in Ankara a mere 24 hours later?

That's truly amazing!

But in annals of the wily Erdogan's amazing adventures, it's par for the course. This is the guy who heads the second largest military in NATO but is conniving with Bad Vlad in all sorts of nefarious goings on in the neighborhood. He's fighting ISIS but fighting the Kurds even harder, even though it's universally acknowledged that the Kurds are fighting ISIS harder than anybody. The guy who embodies the shared values of NATO even while wreaking havoc on his Kurdish population, side-lining democracy in his own country, and jailing more journalists than any despot in the world...

Sometimes it's hard to figure out where the truthiness ends and the fake news begins, isn't it?

Remembering when ethnic jokes were funny

At least they sounded droll enough to my ear. They were largely jokes passed around amongst immigrant factory hands in southern Ontario and beyond, in the post war economy where they were crammed into factories alongside other ethnic groups they'd been locked in mortal combat with not too many years before.

The fun thing was virtually all these different ethnic groupings were white Christians. A true fact we've absolutely lost sight of is no matter how many not-whites European colonialism murdered in the roughly 500 years it was dominant, it murdered far more white Europeans! 100 million plus just in the two industrial-scale wars of the 20th century! Virtually all of them, outside the Pacific theatre, were white. Even the Jews murdered by the white Nazis were white European Jews, not non-white Arabic Jews.

The gist of this joke genre was what personality traits to keep an eye out for in case your former enemies were about to return to type. So you got a lot of stuff like never trust a German in a uniform. Never turn your back on an Irishman with a jug of whiskey. Never trust a Jew with a law degree.  Never turn your back on an Italian with a hard-on, and so forth. Over the years the oeuvre gained in specificity, so by the time we got to "beware of Greek restauranteurs with valid insurance policies," Greeks had long been considered mainstream white Christians.

Today pretty much all that stuff is "hate speech." And as we are all reminded day in and day out, there's nothing, NOTHING more corrosive than hate speech to our cohesion as a sovereign nation!

Ya, maybe. But it seems our national cohesion was far more robust before our ruling strata got obsessed with stamping out hate speech!

What up with CBC obsession over Alberta "separation" vote?

I daresay there can't possibly be  more than a tiny handful of Canadians for whom the question of a possible future referendum about a possibly even further-in-future destruction of Canada because of tomorrow's vote is something they're even aware of.  Yet for at least the past month, this vote has crowded out virtually every other issue around the country and around the world! 

Why? What is it our official government propaganda mouthpiece is trying to distract us from? What are a few issues that concern Canadians far more than the hypothetical scenario above. Hmm... how about the fact our kids can't afford homes. How about new grads struggle to find jobs, let alone start careers. Number one among pretty much all Canadians other than talking heads on CBC is the rapidly rising cost of absolutely everything. Most folks are way more interested in reducing the number of homeless in their streets than they are in what might happen in case "separatist's" win an election in Alberta twenty years down the road.

Right now I've got Cross Country Checkup in the background, and it's been one expert after another solemnly warning of the grave threat separation poses to everybody except the gay-hating racists who have been secretly promoting it, in collusion with US MAGA forces, not surprisingly. The tone is even more solemn due to the disaster at the CAF base.

News sites world wide have been reporting all day long, the explosion happened when a live-fire training exercise went awry and hit a nearby natural gas pipeline pumping station.  Still waiting for Carney's PR department to verify.

It's tits-up for Micron

Li'l Napoleon keeps plumbing new depths in the history of French presidential polling. When you listen to him, he seems to believe massive street protests are proof he's on the right track! From the looks of things, more and more folks obviously believe he is! In fact, the French masses are so impressed by their li'l emperor's sagacity they have set multiple cities alight in celebration!

CBC's coverage has been careful to stress that the massive street protests are entirely the result of  disgruntled high school students, belatedly joined by a few yellow vest types. While manifestly false, there's a reason for that framing. Canadian students are far too polite  docile to ever push back against the governments who have systematically underfunded education for the past fifty years, and besides, we never had yellow vests.

The reason a million Frenchmen and women are in the streets is because Li'l Nap has made it abundantly clear, over and over again, that in the democracy he presides over, he calls the shots, and the voters don't. Oddly enough, that's the exact message the German people are getting from Blackrock Schmertz and the Brits from the latest hapless dork who finds himself in 10 Downing. What these key NATO allies, the very like-minded democracies Mark Carney wants to hitch our wagon to, have in common is they've all announced massive social spending cuts in order to prepare their people for war with Russia by 2030. That's why France is in flames today, and unless there's  a change in course soon, the conflagration can only spread.

Which brings us back to CBC. Canada has yet to impose the draconian social spending cuts seen among our European allies, but the writing is on the wall. Thus far Carney's orgy of military spending is only in the planning stage, and we can hope the government follows through with the time-honored Canadian tradition of giving ourselves a pat on the back for a job well done, and leave it at that.

I'm not a fan of Brodie Fenlon's gang of wokies,  but they want to blame teenagers for the mayhem in France for a reason. Otherwise they might have to face the fact that voters don't call the shots in Canada either. Mark Carney at this moment has the highest numbers in the history of Canadian polling. He has announced a trillion dollars in military spending that no voters have been consulted on. If only half  those projects proceed we'll see those massive social spending cuts as surely as night follows day.

Another shady conman fools Canadian pols and CBC journalists

There's a happy happy story on view at CBC today about a brand-spankin'-new AI data centre coming to Cape Breton! Yessiree Bob, that's $10 billions of investment that'll put Cape Breton on the map, and not just any old map,  but the map of bustling high-tech hubs!

This turn-around in Nova Scotia's long history of economic decline is thanks to the visionary American-Australian venture capital veteran Trent Vichie. Vichie originally made headlines with a plan to become a major clean-hydrogen player, a venture that will pay off as soon as the next tranche of government funding arrives. Not to mention Viche's  not one, not  two, but FOUR wind farms snuggled tight between the clean hydrogen complex and the $10B AI campus! None of this stuff  is anywhere near shovel-ready but all of it has been repeatedly announced to great fanfare.

Not a venture capitalist to rest on his laurels, the industry veteran's Everwind Fuels is behind this $10B project. Not only that, but he has revealed that one of the two biggest names in AI, Anthropic, will take a twenty year lease when the project is completed several years hence.

Virtually everything in the CBC story is uncritical paraphrasing, if not straight-up plagiarizing of various Vichie-related press releases. Anyone even peripherally acquainted with what's going on in AI today would put zero stock in any claim that Anthropic will be in any position to lease anything by then, if it survives at all. Check this out.

This is an all-too-common example of so-called journalists thinking their job is done once they've regurgitated a corporate press release. How does Taryn Grant get this story when she clearly knows nothing about her topic, and worse, apparently has no interest in knowing anything about it.

Like Eliot Pence, Trent Vichie is a visionary so far ahead of his time that it takes a steady stream of government grants to keep these bullshitters afloat. As with Eliot, legitimate biz press like Forbes and Bloomberg missed their spectacular achievements over the years. A simple google of Vichies name pulls up shit like this.  Looks like his "chief of staff" at Everwind also washed his car and did the lawn. I ask you, should that not raise some questions among the politicians and CBC journalists fawning over this clown?