It's all relative

There's a story out there about Louis B. Mayer, favourite son of Saint John, New Brunswick, and his meeting with Albert Einstein.

Mayer had been briefed by his staff re why Einstein was famous; he'd come up with the theory of relativity.

So when they finally have a face-to-face, Mayer is alleged to have said, "hey, great to finally meet you! I've got a theory about my relatives too!"

I bring that up only because me and the Farm Manager got into a bit of a shooting match today. She'd read something on the internet about Trump going after Canada's dairy farmers.

"So it looks like your pal Trump is going after our dairy farmers," she says.

My pal Trump?

Them's fightin' words.

I owe Trump a debt of gratitude for the same reason every thinking person owes him; he deep-sixed two of America's most toxic political clans!

Beyond that, there's not much of a palship. Besides, who knows how toxic the Trump clan is gonna be. It's an open question.

Be that as it may, I passed over my initial impulse to ignore the FM's provocations and came back with, "don't worry about our dairy farmers. Trudeau already sold those guys down the river with the European trade deal."

And that's true. Under CETA the Europeans will bring an extra hundred tons or so of real European cheese into Canada every year. That's the kiss of death for pretty much every artisanal cheese-maker in the land. Who's gonna buy Canadian "Swiss" cheese at the Metro when the Swiss Swiss cheese is on for half the price right next to it in the deli counter?

Nobody, that's who.

But that's not what got her pissed. No, she's a Trudeau fan from way back. She even named one of her kids after Trudeau the elder. She didn't waste any time coming back against my Trudeau diss.

Next thing I know she's standing there with the Cooey repeater pointed in my general direction.

Ha ha! She doesn't even know how to load the thing! No worries!

"Just back off on Justin," she says.

"Ha ha..." I rejoinder.

She pulls the trigger.

Holy shit! That just missed my head! Did I leave a round in there the last time I was ground-hog hunting?

I made a break for the stairs and retrieved the old Browning side-by-side out of the dressing room.

This is dicey. I've got the advantage in fire-power but that side-by-side is overkill when you're having an indoor gun battle.

Put a .22 slug through the wall and you can patch up the damage with a dollop of drywall mud.

Loose a couple rounds from the Browning, and holy shit!...

You pretty much have to hire in a contractor to fix the damage.

And that's never a good idea. They've always got nosy questions... "so how did you manage to accidentally discharge your shotgun twice while walking down the stairs?" Next thing you know the cops are there enquiring about gun permits.

That kind of thing.

So I knew it was time for de-escalation. Talk her down instead of take her down. After all, in spite of these occasional gun episodes me and the Farm Manager don't actually want to harm one another.

We engage in a protracted debate about the pros and cons of "free trade."

We both heard Dominic Barton on Michael Enright's show last week. Dominic was all about how great "free trade" is and what a great contribution temporary foreign workers are making to the economy.

I knew I could use this avenue to smooth over my Justin diss. "You know," I said, "Irving doesn't really need to hire tree cutters from Romania. They could just pay a decent wage and the local folks would be all over it."

"And maybe if the lobster processors on the East Coast paid a living wage, they'd find help at home too."

She was warming up. Realized I hadn't intended a personal insult on Trudeau the younger.

"See, it's all relative. Eleven bucks an hour may be a shit wage in Canada, but get a guy out of Romania or Bulgaria, or even better, Somalia, and eleven bucks an hour is golden!"

It's all relative.

And that's why temporary foreign workers are so beloved by Canadian employers.

Times haven't changed, but Donald Trump sure has

I was looking for something else when I came across this post  from almost a year before the election.

Yup, a year before the election Trump was standing tall against Adelson and Netanyahu.

No wonder so many gullible rubes bought the bullshit!

What a difference an election victory makes.

Israel just announced 15,000 new builds for Jews only in East Jerusalem.

What do you imagine the guy who stood up to Sheldon and Bibi on the campaign trail will have to say about that, now that he's the President?

Kissinger? Hey, maybe for $100,000.00 we can entice him to the Munk Debates

In some bizarre way I kinda admire the old war criminal.

It's about longevity, not politics.

He's been a happening dude on the world stage since what, the Nixon era?

I've read he's feeding strategic advice to Trump.

He's gotta be at least 100 years old.

I guess killer instincts don't have a stale-date.

And if nothing else, Kissinger was blessed with an abundance of killer instincts.

Good news for war crime fanboys in Toronto

My Globe and Mail informs me this morning that "prominent Toronto philanthropist" Peter Munk has donated five millions in pocket change to ensure that the "Munk debates" outlive him.

This will allow Toronto to survive as a "hub for intellectual discussion." It's not clear if writer Luke Carroll actually spoke with Munk or debate chair Rudyard Griffiths, or if he's just working from a corporate press release, but the thought that Toronto needs Munk's money to foster some vague sense of intellectual maturity is truly beyond hokum.

Munk's money will allow this staged pseudo-intellectual media event to continue paying the speakers fees demanded by "some of the world's most prominent thinkers."

Like Tony Blair and Henry Kissinger?!

Get the f*ck outta here!

The only speech I'd ever want to hear from either of those blood-drenched war criminals will come from the prisoner's docket at the ICC.

Silver linings and the Ontario Basic Income

Been giving some thought to the recently rolled out pilot project for the Ontario Basic Income. There's a lot to be said for the concept, which essentially gives $17,000/year to EVERY Ontario resident age 18 or over, regardless of need, means, race, creed, etc.

All well and good. There is in fact a lot to be said for it, and one day soon I'll say it. But for now, consider this:

You're a parent who spawned a batch of millennials. Three or four or five maybe. Due to your inattention to the gathering storm of video addiction, you didn't notice WTF was going on till you woke up one day and realized that you had three or four or five twenty-something gamers living in your basement while you go to work every day.

They can't hold a job long enough to collect EI.

They don't qualify for welfare because they live under your roof.

They're a complete drag on your finances and your life...

Well, put your suicidal thoughts aside!

Those losers in your basement just became a profit centre!

Do the math.

If you've got one millennial living downstairs your up seventeen thou.

If you're a staunch Catholic or Muslim and have five or more of the useless shits living in your downstairs, you're up 85 big ones or more!

Thank you Kathleen!

Mind you, I guess there's always the chance they'll pool their resources and buy a condo or something...

At least they'll be out of your house.

If a dude done this he'd be on the cover of the Rolling Stone

He'd also be voted guitar player of the year.

But when a woman does this, you'll find her album in the remainder bin.

Go Jo!

How do you solve a problem like Erdogan?

Spring has sprung and the air is thick with booga-booga.

The world is awash with bad guys. Who will threaten America's security next? We're fighting off despots and evil-doers on all sides... Assad, Putin, those towel-heads 'o terror in Iran, the nut job in North Korea. What is poor Donald to do?

Meanwhile, on the fringes of Europe, an even greater despot than any of the above gets a free pass. Why? Because in spite of everything, Erdogan's Turkey remains a NATO stalwart. Remember NATO? That combine of anti-communist nations bound together by our shared values?

Shared values like freedom and democracy and a free press and all that shit?

All long gone in NATO stalwart Turkey.

Where is the outrage?

Where is the armada (powerful) steaming towards Turkey's shores?

Not happening is where.

The current hit-list for the Masters of Empire looks something like this, in order of importance: Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, Iran.

Turkey doesn't even make the long list, never mind the short list!

So how do you solve a problem like Erdogan?


What problem?

Hats off for Pirsig

In the seventies I made half a dozen trips to the west coast and back, ostensibly to find Fame and Fortune, both of whom, for better or worse, successfully eluded me.

On one of those trips I hitch-hiked through Washington, Idaho, Montana, and North Dakota. When I happened upon Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance a couple of years later I realized that I'd travelled many of the roads that Robert Pirsig and his son had explored on the motorcycle trip documented in the book.

Coincidence? Sure, but at the time I thought not. Instead, I felt it gave me a certain mystical affinity with Pirsig.

I subsequently read and re-read Zen every few years. Pirsig mastered the trick of convincing the reader that something could be and not be at the same time. This was years before the Derrida crowd enshrined absence as the highest form of presence, and I truly believed he was onto something. Can't say I ever figured out what it was, but...

Zen is one of the books you have to read if you want to get a handle on the American zeitgeist circa those two or three post WWII decades before the great unravelling of America began in earnest. Ginsberg, Kerouac, Keysey, Burroughs, and McLuhan would pretty much round out your required reading on that file. Ya, they're all dead white guys now, but they were very much "happening" then.

From the first time I read the book I knew some day I'd want to carve those roads on a motorcycle trip with my own son. He's a man now and will have to supply his own motorcycle, but I'm still good to go.

What do you think, dude?

We'd have Robert M. Pirsig watching over us.

Would you like fries with your liver and onions?

No I wouldn't.

I'm not a big fan of the long drive to the city and back. Promised myself a good feed of liver and onions at the Steeles Deli, where they've long claimed to have the best liver and onions in town, as compensation for the aggravation.

So we get Junior out of res at Margaret Addison Hall on Charles in the heart of downtown, up to his summer place at Younge and Steeles, and we pop over to the Steeles Deli, me and the Farm Manager and four of our five juniors and a couple of add-ons.

I know what I want, and I'm literally drooling in anticipation. When it's my turn to order I say liver and onions.

She says, how do you want it?

I say, on the light side.

She says, and what kind of potatoes?

Totally redundant question. There's only one kind of potatoes you have with liver 'n onion, and if you're reading this blog you already know.

Mashed potatoes.

She says, we're out of mashed, would you like fries with that?

Huh?

What the hell goes on here?

Best liver 'n onions in town but you're outta mashed potatoes?

Sorry, but that simply does not compute.

Fries? With liver and onions?

NO!

A thousand times no!

I'm the kinda guy who took decades coming to grips with the fact that pineapple on pizza is socially acceptable... but fries with your liver and onion?

No way Jose.

So I had a Reuben instead. Mediocre at best. I swear the sauerkraut came out of a jar.

By then my tablemates were gushing over their matzah-ball soup, and I didn't want to ruin the mood, so I made do.

Meanwhile, I've got the cell-phone addicts at the table furiously googling election results from France. Seems almost seven million voters opted for communism and a strategic alliance with Venezuela. Good showing but not quite enough.

France is going into the run-off with a choice between a rabid racist and a guy who met his wife when he was fifteen years old... and she was his teacher!

Not that there's anything wrong with that...  although I do imagine it would raise eyebrows at the College of Teachers were such an outrage to unfold here. In France it's never even qualified as a scandal.

Go figure.

But the highlight of our lunch date was when one of the add-ons, a guy who is just wrapping a Doctor Phil in Chem at U of T, googled the listing for the place he's been renting a basement apartment in for years. His landlady done put the place on the market just this week.

Even though it's a little threadbare, he figured a million and a half.

I figured, threadbare or not, if it's within a comfy bicycle ride of UT, it's probably over two millions.

They found the listing.

His landlady is asking 3.49 million for a tear-down that might have fetched 500 thou ten years ago.

Wynne and Tory have no clue.

Why I drag my feet

I drag my feet over all kinds of shit.

Just as a for instance, I've had my doctor hounding me about a colonoscopy for years. Ain't gonna happen. There are just some things you don't have to know. If my bowels are indeed consuming themselves from the inside out, what good does it do to know this?

Sure, you could "take measures."

That tends to involve hugely invasive medical procedures that will a) make the payments on my doctor's BMW for several years, and b) completely destroy my quality of life.

So I'll take the quality of life, and the quality of mine is pretty damned good, thank you very much.

Just this afternoon me and the Farm Manager were sitting out in front of the barn, out of the wind. Every now and then a car goes by, but most of the time all you hear is the wind in the trees and the birds singing to one another.

Once in awhile an airplane flies over. I've used the Flight Tracker website enough now to know roughly where they're coming from and where they're going.

The northwest to southeast flights are usually heading to Toronto from points west in Canada.

The southwest to northeast flights are usually heading to Europe from somewhere in middle America. From Chicago to virtually any European destination takes you right over Falling Downs. So does Los Angeles to Zurich or London. Those are the ones where you wonder who's on that airplane.

It's not just passenger jets flying over. This afternoon I saw a red-tail hawk swing by with a couple of small birds in hot pursuit. They were mightily pissed, and Mr. Hawk was doing his best to evade them, without a lot of luck.

Quality of life.

Not much in my Globe and Mail today. Paul Waldie brought me up to speed on that French election. Apparently the far-left fringe candidate Melenchon is a communist and wants to align France with Venezuela. That's the take on the French election from Canada's newspaper of record.

I pity the poor folks who rely on the Globe for their news. They don't actually send Waldie to Europe to "research" this shit, do they? That was about as lame a take on the French election as anyone could possibly imagine. An unpaid intern with an interest in politics could easily put together a more informative article from a computer terminal in their local public library in Toronto.

If you want some insight into the election in France, don't read the Globe and Mail, read this instead.

Chloe is the real reason I drag my feet. She's the cat I got out of the clinic where Karla Homolka worked. She's got to be twenty years old by now. She has outlived all the dogs we've ever owned; Buddy, Charlie, Gus, Roxy, Peaches... and she's on track to outlive the two hounds at Falling Downs today, Boomer and Lucy.

For the first fifteen years of our life together she studiously avoided me. The last few years she's really warmed up, to the point where she follows me around from morning till night. She's literally under my feet every moment of the day.

I drag my feet to avoid stepping on her.

Tomorrow we're off to the city to move Junior out of residence at U of T. He's studying economics...

Where did I go wrong?

Wynne and Tory discover Toronto housing bubble

And by golly, they're taking some serious steps to lance that beastly bubble!

What a pair of imbeciles!

Seems the Mayor of Toronto and the Premier of Ontario were pretty much the last two people in Canada to notice. It's been topic number one around office water-coolers and company picnics and at cocktail parties from Thornhill to The Beaches for the better part of the last decade. Hilliard Macbeth wrote a book about it three years ago. Alas, the market has ballooned at least another 50% since then.

Thank God our political masters are finally on top of this housing crisis!

Good things will surely follow...

Or not.

Happy Easter!

Sorry Mom, I didn't make it to church this year. Didn't make it to synagogue for Passover either, if that's any consolation. My God-fearing agnosticism is multi-confessional.

I did however find time to go out to the garage and tinker with the Ninja. She's purring like a kitten and waiting for her spring ride, just as soon as the weather clears up a little.

The big news this Easter weekend was the Tax March. That's the latest spasm of the anti-Trump movement, die-hard Hillary fans who have yet to concede last November's election.

Come on folks - even Fareed Zakaria acknowledges that those 59 Tomahawks have rendered Donny J Presidential!

Yup, he's got blood on his hands. That's what America looks for in a leader.

What caught my eye in the news coverage of the Tax March was the logos of Dem Party astro-turf outfits all over the place.



If you think that tax march was some kind of grass roots thing that just happened, think again. Go to taxmarch.org and check out their partners page. Holy cow, that page could keep a Soros-is-the-antiChrist conspiracy theorist busy for months!

What baffles me is that all these groups are invariably described as "leftist," yet they've all been co-opted by the Democratic Party. I'm a long-term observer of US politics, and I'd have to say I didn't notice much of a leftward tilt under eight years of Obama... nor under eight years of Clinton, for that matter.

Mind you, I'm a long-time small "c" commie and what I understand by the word "leftist" may mean something else. I suppose you could be relatively leftist as long as you only compare yourself to those to the right of you on the political spectrum, but has there been anything to the right of the Democratic Party in the last twenty years? At a minimum the label should imply the prioritisation of the interests of working people over the interests of capital.

Maybe this watering down of labels and their meanings is all part of the long term bamboozlement of the working class in America. Kind of like how "red states" means Republican states. In the rest of the world the colour red is unambiguously associated with the political left. Only in America has that been successfully turned upside down.

With the Ninja shaking off the winter hibernation the only vehicle in the fleet still giving trouble is the little Ford 4x4. A friend was telling me the other day that could be stale gasoline. After all, it's been parked in a snow-drift all winter.

Possibly, but the Mustang 50 was parked one snow-drift over and took only a half hour on the battery charger to come alive. The Ninja wasn't fired up once all last year, so the gas in the tank is two years old and I've got it running.

Can't be stale gas.

I think that almost universal ignorance of what is "left" is what allowed Donny J to waltz away with Hillary's election. That MAGA schtick worked wonders for a class of marginalized Americans who wanted so desperately to believe that the ersatz billionaire was going to set things right for them. Little did they realize...

But here's the good news. Trump tapped into massive voter disaffection with the political establishment. So did Bernie. Both men eventually sold their supporters down the river. Those people are still there, and there's no reason to think most of them, both the Sander's supporters and people who voted for Trump, are going to be anything other than pissed off when the 2020 White House contest gets serious.

With the right candidate, maybe then Americans will get the change they can believe in.

I picked up that Ninja for cheap just a few weeks before my 60th birthday. I was in denial. That old chestnut about how inside every sixty year old there's a sixteen year old wondering what the fuck happened is truer than true.

So I bought a motorcycle. Next sunny day I'll take her for a blast around the block, which happens to be a ten mile loop with a lot of long straightaways. Spring ain't truly sprung till you get that first rush of 90mph wind through what's left of your hair...

Happy Easter!

Justin's pot plan

Sure enough, Justin is gonna make sure his Bay Street buddies win big on legal pot.

But it looks like they're gonna leave a few crumbs on the table for us plebes.

With a bit of judicious pruning, that one metre tall pot plant can be two metres wide and give you at least a pound of bud.

Times four, that's still a viable cottage industry. At least so long as you don't get greedy...

Shredding stereotypes

If you grew up in the time I grew up in you've got your guitar heroes.

Page. Clapton. Joe Perry maybe.

Check this out.

This woman knocks all those guitar heroes off the stage...

Go Leafs go!

The Leafs made their long awaited playoff debut last night in typical Leafs fashion... losing after being up two.

That's quite the accomplishment for the most expensive front office in the NHL.

Looks like the Babcock rebuild is about the same as the Burkie rebuild which looked pretty much the same as every rebuild we've been treated to since 1967.

What they can't figure out in Toronto is that it's not the front office that wins hockey games.

Taming Trump

Donny J built his 2016 election victory on the back of wanton assholery.

There can be no doubt about that.

But he won.

Where to from here?

We've got the latest Clintonesque bombing of Afghanistan.

We've got Donny J regurgitating Hillary's anti-North Korea bromides chapter and verse.

As in he's gonna bomb the shit outta them...

Donald J Trump had a very short war with the "Deep State."

Donald lost.

We're all gonna pay.

It's full speed ahead for the neo-con agenda.

Where to buy cheap real estate in Canada

New Brunswick.

Well on the way to becoming Canada's poorest province.

Also home base for Canada's richest family. (Irving, regardless of what Forbes says.)

Coincidence?

When I lived there twenty-five years ago the place was jumping.

Now it's just kinda twitching once in awhile.

But mark my words; it's coming back.

That's why you should buy now.

You can pick up a nice duplex in downtown Saint John for around a hundred thou. Pay cash, let the rental cover the expenses, and live free!

That place would be two million in Toronto. How badly do you need to live in Toronto?

And go a few miles out of town and you can get a decent shack with waterfront on the Saint John river for under a hundred. The Saint John is one of the great rivers of North America. Saint John riverfront can only go up in value.

Forget Vancouver.

Forget Toronto.

Take a look at New Brunswick.

Spring's sprung

Me and the Farm Manager were sitting on the front porch this afternoon, enjoying the warm weather, when the first guy of the season in bicycle pants rode by.

A sure sign that spring has sprung. There's a cycling club in Owen Sound that has the road in front of Falling Downs as part of their regular 50k loop. These folks always remind me of the punchline to one of Jeff Foxworthy's jokes; "if Burt Reynolds can't get down that river a Frenchman in bicycle pants doesn't stand a chance."

Too bad I can't remember the joke that was the punchline to...

I actually did a lot of cycling in my time. Back in my U of Goo days I used to pass cars coming down the Gordon Street hill. No bicycle pants, no helmet, just a Raleigh 18 speed weaving in and out of traffic after a Sociology of Poverty class and a four hour stint at the campus pub.

Those were the days!

But these days are pretty good too.

Just yesterday I put the canoe in across the road and paddled my way down to Bass Lake. That's a small lake by local standards, but it houses a few dozen cottages and a trailer park. Shame about the trailer park. You'd be hard pressed to find a cottage on that lake for under 400 thousands, but you can rent a trailer site for a hundred bucks a month. On the same lake.

Go figure.

They don't call it a "trailer park," of course; it's a "holiday resort."

Sure it is!

That Bass Lake canoe trip only happens in the spring, when the water's high. In another month I'll be able to walk down the Indian River in rubber boots and reach Bass Lake without getting my socks wet.

Nothing much in my national newspaper of record this weekend. Marcus Gee had a nice take-down of Richard Florida. He was a hot commodity a few years back when U of T hired him. An apostle of intelligent development I suppose you could call him.

Not sure what that means. I've bumped into more than a few folks in that business in my time, and none of them were stupid.

Short-sighted? Greedy? Selfish?

Maybe... but stupid?

Nope.

So Florida is having second thoughts about the thesis that brought him fame and fortune and a tenured post at U of T. Gather up all the young creative disrupters you can and turn them loose on your town. Great things will happen!

Mostly what's happened is the young creatives can no longer afford to live in Toronto.

So it was a beautiful canoe trip. You don't really get into cottage country till you're three quarters of the way down the lake. There was still spots of snow on the ground here and there and I set out a little apprehensive; after all, the historical record of me and canoe trips would suggest there's at least a 50/50 chance of ending up in the drink.

Thank goodness I beat the odds yesterday. The water was really really cold and I couldn't find a life-jacket anywhere.

Doug Saunders had a bit of a mystifying opinion piece in the paper, all about George Soros. Here's the head-scratcher that caught my eye; "One of Europe's most important higher education institutions, Central European University..."

Huh?

CEU was founded twenty-five years ago and has less than 1500 students. We're talking about Europe here. Universities are hundreds of years old and have tens of thousands of students. By what metric might CEU be considered one of Europe's most important higher education institutions?

Come on, Doug. You destroy your own cred with that kind of hyperbole.

But I suppose it can be deemed important in the context of writing hagiography for Soros. CEU is a Soros project from end to end, and Doug's opinion piece this weekend was determined to show the old greed-bag in a good light.

Soros is certainly an interesting character study. On the one hand, he lobbies for higher taxes on billionaires like himself. On the other, he's not shy about availing himself of every tax dodge he can.

On one hand he likes to portray himself as a victim of Antisemitism.  In Israel he's widely considered one of the greatest Antisemites of the modern era.

Soros has partnered for many years with the National Endowment for Democracy, the US government funded "NGO" working non-stop to make the world safer for Soros-style financial looting. By and large it's a strategy that has worked well.

There's the odd hiccup, however. Hungarian president Oban for one has seen through the "open society" schtick, as in being "open" to world class billionaire currency speculators like Soros doesn't necessarily mean good things for the man or woman on the ground in Budapest. Hence the squabble over Soros U.

At no point does Saunders address the obvious elephant in the room; billionaires just have too much money. Whether it's the Koch boys spreading Tea Party goodness or Soros pushing his "open society" agenda, a little tweaking of the tax code would go a long way toward cutting out this foolishness.

We live in messed up times. Former Soros business partner and fellow billionaire, current POTUS Donny J did a 180 on US foreign policy the other day because he saw some "beautiful babies" die on TV.

The Tomahawks were in the air before you could ask for an independent  investigation into that alleged war crime.

It's all too much for me. I think I'll just sit tight and plan my next paddle.

Some thoughts on Toronto's housing crisis

I was reading in my G&M today that the median household income in Toronto is seventy-eight thousand and change.

Meanwhile, the average price of a house has now passed a million bucks.

The affordability crisis has been brewing for years, but it wasn't till this week that Mayor Tory gathered up federal and provincial pols for a sit-down about what to do about the crisis.

Luckily for us, they came up with a plan.

They're gonna study it!

That is so Canadian, eh? We don't even expect our various levels of government to solve problems anymore. As long as they're studying the problem they get a free pass.

PM Justin got elected a year and a half ago on a promise to legalize the weed 'o wisdom. Is it legal yet?

No. They have to study the matter a bit more.

The federal government (ie Justin) has been underfunding First Nation's education for as long as we've had education. They continue to underfund it by about 50% compared to what provincial school boards get. What are they doing about this blatantly racist legacy?

They're studying it, of course.

So don't get your hopes up about any resolution to Toronto's housing crisis...

They'll still be studying it a hundred years from now.

59 Tomahawks prove Trump's a team player after all

There's a new tone all around the MSM today. Hey, maybe Donny J is not in Putin's pocket after all!? (although I did notice that a handful of your more implacable warmongers in the American political firmament are pouty that the Ruskies were afforded a heads-up re the 59 incoming - guess they'd rather skip the foreplay and go straight to nuclear Armageddon.)

All the important leaders in the Nations of Virtue were quick to offer Trump props on a job well done; Merkel, May, Hollande, Netanyahu.

Shares of Tomahawk manufacturer Raytheon got a Trump bump today, as investors bet that this opening volley of 59 portends great things for the future.

Saudi Arabia, the foremost ISIS/Daesh sponsor, thanked Trump, as did spokesmen for the terror outfits themselves.

Even Canada's lovable mop-topped hippy-dippy peace-loving PM Justin is all-in for America's unprovoked and completely illegal attack on yet another predominantly Muslim nation.

Amazing how such a diverse cast of characters can come together in praise of US aggression!

The unexpected blessings of spring cleaning

The Farm Manager has been on the nag for a couple of years about me clearing the shit out of the dressing room that I never wear. So the other day I got to it, just out of respect for the FM if nothing else.

I think the dressing room was originally considered the sixth bedroom in this hundred year old farmhouse. We don't actually get dressed there; it's just where we hang our clothes. While it's a bit cozy as a bedroom, it makes for a pretty generous walk-in closet, which, practically speaking, makes it a hoarders paradise.

I've got suits in there I haven't worn in thirty years. I've got a 35 year old pair of red and white Nike high-tops that are probably worth more than my truck. I've got a pair of blue suede Harts that must be worth more than the Nikes... or at least would be if anyone collected Harts.

Made right here in Canada. New Brunswick, if I'm not mistaken.

I lived in New Brunswick for a spell. It was the best of times, and it was the worst of times. But that's another story.

This story is about clearing out the walk-in closet.

I got a full garbage bag's worth of shirts I never wear. They'll be heading to the Sally Ann Boutique.

Then I got into the tweet jackets. I'm a sucker for tweed jackets. You can be kitted out in the most vile attire; sweat-stained tee, ripped jeans, filthy runners; but throw a tweed jacket over that mess and they let you in anywhere!

Alas, I've accumulated more tweed jackets than I have occasion to use. Three or four had to go. Before dropping them into the Sally Ann bag I rifled through the pockets. Lots of semi-used kleenex, a few pens and receipts and business cards from folks I'm never gonna do business with. A kippa, probably from a funeral, because that's the only time I wear one.

Then I reach into the inside breast pocket of the forth tweed jacket and pull out a bag of weed.

Holy shit!

Where did that come from?

Pop culture's puppeteers step in cowpie

If you read this blog you've probably got at least a whiff of sympathy for the thesis that "popular culture" is a manufactured product designed to keep the ignorant masses ignorant while amusing them to death, so they stay out of the way while the masters of the universe in DC and London and Brussels get on with the serious business of ruling the planet.

It's all part of that toxic daisy chain of infotainment-advertising-political-theatre-celebrity-look-at-me-merry-go-round that keeps us so stupefied we don't even notice what's happening in the real world. By and large it's a successful strategy.

Look around you.

But every now and then the masters reveal what a lot of blinkered fucktards they really are. How else to explain the Jenner Pepsi Commercial?

Yes, just look at that happy multi-culti throng at the demo!

While you'll never be as cool as the beautiful people, at least you can have a Pepsi.

Canada's big biz boffins show their utter contempt for Canadian workers and taxpayers

Couple of news stories caught my eye over the weekend. Seems Bombardier big dog Alain Bellemare backed away from the 50% pay hike granted to Bombardier's senior management team, not because 50% pay raises for the brain trust behind a failing company is an obscenity, but because they were getting bad press over the issue.

The rationale behind granting a 50% pay raise to the wankers who have run Bombardier into the ground is this; you have to pay top dollar to attract and retain top talent.

Huh?

Top talent?

How does it take "top talent" to mismanage a company to the point where they can't deliver streetcars to the TTC within two years of the contractual due date?

Ya, you gotta pay big bucks to keep that talent! Not to mention that C-series jet that's what... four years behind schedule and four billion dollars over budget? The C-series is the biggest boondoggle this side of the F-35. Compared to Lockheed-Martin, our Bombardier buffoons are mere babes in the woods... meaning there's probably tons of headroom left in the bamboozle-the-taxpayer file at Bombardier.

The other story came out of CIBC. Seems the bank that cleared 1.4 billions in profit last QUARTER is gonna save a few bucks by shifting Canadian call centres to India.

Of course it's got nothing to do with screwing the workers.

CEO Dodig spells it out for you; "companies that stand still don't stand the test of time."

Huh?

What the fuck is that? Keeping jobs in Canada is "standing still?"

Both these greed-bag CEOs are million-a month guys more or less. A Canadian working full time at minimum wage won't hit a million bucks even if she works from age 18 to 65.

Too bad for the workers.

At least our companies aren't standing still.

And the million-a-month CEO types aren't standing still either.