Has-been actor Jim Carrey makes come-back as political pundit

I guess it's really really tough to give up your fifteen minutes. So while it's been a few years since Carrey rocked the box office, he's rocking the world 'o punditry on pretty much a daily basis.

I especially like this insight; "from Shining City to Evil Empire in 500 days."

Huh?

I'm not disputing the Evil Empire part...

It's just that I have a lot of trouble remembering the "Shining City on a Hill."

Was that when America did this?



Or this?



Or this?



C'mon, Jimbo, 'splain to us again about that "Shining City On a Hill."


Sorry Dude; America has been an evil empire for a lot longer than 500 days.

Here's a conspiracy theory for you

I call it the Intelligent Dandelion theory.

I figure the grass-seed cartel, in cahoots with Monsanto and the Chinese lawnmower manufacturers, have developed an intelligent dandelion. When it senses the lawnmower approaching, the intelligent dandelion will lie down. Sometimes for a few hours, sometimes for a day or two.

But then they get up again!

Yup, within a day or two of cutting the grass, your lawn looks like you don't even own a mower.

This insight came to me whilst I was fiddling with assorted lawnmower parts on the front stoop. My piece-of-shit mower, barely into its third season of grass-cutting, puked out the string you pull to start it.

Now, we all know about planned obsolescence...

What, you got two full years out of that thing? Excellent!

Buy a new one!

Well, I'm not falling for that crap. How hard can it be to replace a piece of pull-cord?

As it turns out, a lot harder than you'd think. They've got the tiniest springs and gizmos and whatsits in there. Half of them are held in place by gravity, which is fine till you take things apart and turn them upside down. Then you've got a random rainshower of mechanical miscellany falling to the ground.

But I persevered! Took an hour and a half, but I can start that piece of shit again, and that recoil spring pulls the string in far enough that I can restart it - not as far as it used to, but what the hell.

The lawnmower starts!

Canada unveils Feminist Pipeline Policy

A message from The Honourable Jim Carr

Minister of Natural Resources

Peace and prosperity and abundant cheap energy are every person’s birthright. Today, as Canadians, we have a great opportunity to help the people of the world’s developing countries join the global middle class and the multilateral system that supports it.

It is worth reminding ourselves why we step up—why we devote time and resources to foreign policy, trade, defence and development: Canadians are safer and more prosperous when more of the world shares our bitumen and our values.

Those values include feminism and the promotion of the rights of women and girls.

It is important—and historic—that we have a prime minister and a government proud to proclaim themselves as feminists. Women’s rights are human rights. This includes sexual and reproductive rights—and the right to access safe and reliable fossil fuels. These rights are at the core of our foreign policy and our pipeline policy.

I am delighted to announce that we are launching Canada’s first Feminist Pipeline Policy,  which targets gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls. We are positioning Canada at the forefront of this global effort. This is a matter of basic justice and also basic economics. We know that empowering women with affordable fossil fuels, overseas and here at home, makes women and girls and the LGBTQ2 community more prosperous.

Now is the time to rise to the great pipeline challenges of this century. Our job today is to preserve the pipelines of previous generations and to build on them, twin them, extend, and expand them.

Only then can the women and girls of the world be assured of the prosperity that pipeline contractors too often take for granted.

Funerals

Seems you go to more of them as you get on in years.

Shit, I can recall going decades without attending a funeral!

No more. Today we went to Una Dennison's funeral. I think we met her once; at her grandson's wedding.

But we're tight with the family; hence, we had to go.

Una had quite a life. Came from a tiny village in Quebec. Overcame adversity again and again. Never complained, always persevered. They don't make 'em like that anymore.

Una may have gone to her reward, but her great-grand-kids stole the show with their antics on the carpet of the funeral home.

And that's how it goes... you bid farewell to the elders as a new generation rises up.


Let's just hope they do a better job of stewarding this planet than our generation did.

Why Jews matter and Indians don't in the best democracy money can buy

Native Americans and American Jews each account for about two percent of the US population.

Why is it, then, that American Jews have an outsized voice in American politics, and American Indians have practically no voice at all?

It's because this is the best democracy money can buy.


When's the last time you read about an American Indian making a multiple-million dollar contribution to some aspiring political candidate's PAC?


Case closed...

But doesn't it warm your heart to know that this is the best democracy money can buy?

POTUS Donny J gifts presidential pardon to Jack Johnson; could Leonard Peltier be next?

Everything old is news again!

Folks have been lobbying the Oval Office for well over half a century trying to get a presidential pardon for Jack Johnson, with no results. You'd think the first black president might have had a soft spot in his heart for the first black heavyweight champ, but apparently not.

But today Donny J done the deed!

Is this because Mr. Trump likes black folks more than Obama did?

Of course not!

It's because this particular black dude has a white A-list Hollywood star advocating for him. That's something Trump understands.

That's why I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for Peltier's pardon. Ever since Marlon Brando went to his reward, Native Americans haven't had a white A-list Hollywood star in their corner.

Elsewhere in everything old is news again, I see where the Grassy Narrows mercury poisoning scandal is back from the grave. This was a major news story from the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties, when the government of the time negotiated a settlement between the owners of the offending paper mill and the First Nations people they were poisoning.

That was the end of that. For thirty years.

But now the story is back. Looks like just because the story disappeared, the mercury in the water didn't. We "solved" the problem by ignoring it. Can't imagine we'd ignore mercury in Toronto water that long. But Grassy Narrows?..


Systemic racism doesn't get more systemic than that!

Time changes everything

You've no doubt heard that time heals all wounds.

And no doubt you've heard the corollary of that; time wounds all heels.

That came to me while I was reminiscing about Buddy, the German Shepherd I had when I lived in Durham. I grew up with dogs, and I'd had other dogs before Buddy, but Buddy was the first dog I'd been soley responsible for as an independent adult.

I used to leave Buddy in the garage during the day when I headed off to work. Spring came along, and now and then, if it wasn't forecast to rain, I'd leave him outside, tethered to the deck.

One night I came home, and Buddy was tether-free, awaiting my arrival. Also awaiting my arrival was a hysterical phone message from the neighbour behind, about how Buddy had attacked her daughter and dragged her down the street by her hair...

Well!

Without waiting to hear Buddy's side of the story, I immediately gave him a bad-dog thrashing.


On calm reflection, with the passage of time, it dawned on me that Buddy could not be guilty as charged.

Not that he wasn't guilty. I fully understand and acknowledge that he may have dragged that kid down the street by her hair... but he was just playing!

Those neighbour kids behind used to cut through my yard on the way to school. In hindsight, I should have taken that into consideration. But I didn't. Nobody's perfect.

Those kids had a good relationship with Buddy. I imagine that a couple of hours after I left for work, he was thrilled to see them coming through!

And they would have been thrilled to see him too! Possibly thrilled enough to let him off his tether.

At which point Buddy's exuberance may have got the better of him... hence that unfortunate phone message.

I thought things were OK between me and Buddy after that, and for awhile they appeared to be. I even got him little Charlie, a black lab cross, as a playmate to while away those long hours in the garage,

Then one day, when we'd taken our morning ramble through the Durham Conservation park and into the countryside beyond, Buddy disappeared.

He disappeared right around a deer yarding area, and I assumed he'd just got busy chasing deer.

I always hoped he'd come home, and he sort of did.

Three or four weeks after Buddy went missing, me and Charlie were heading off on our morning walk, and there, stretched out on the walking path right in front of us in the dim light of an early morning, was good old Buddy!

I was thrilled!

I didn't make too big a deal of it. No "bad dog" shit on account of having gone missing for a few weeks. I just let things ride.

Alas, Buddy only lasted a few more days with us; he disappeared for good the next time we passed that deer yard.

I figure that on his first awol, after getting tired of chasing deer, he'd found a local farmer who knew a good dog when he saw one, and fed Buddy accordingly.

That would have seemed a much better deal than being cooped up in the garage all day, with or without his new pal Charlie.


I think Buddy just came back to say goodbye.

Here we go again; ten dead in Texas school shooting

And once again, we have to turn the asshole who does this into some perverse brand.

Who is killer dumbfuck?

I don't care!

Nor do I need to know his name!

It's sad enough that things have come to this; where school shootings are just a fact of life.

Making the killer dumbfuck famous just encourages untold others in this fame-obsessed celebrity-worshipping culture.

Why can't media stop glorifying these assholes?

Eight things to like about the Bruce

From time to time me and the Farm Manager contemplate upping sticks and moving closer to the city where our children  live. I can look at those real estate listings for hours on end, but it only takes a few minutes on the front stoop to clear my head.

There's a lot to like about living here.

Frogs and birds. Both frogs and birds are allegedly at risk in the wider world, but they're doing just fine up here in the Bruce. Sometimes they even sing together.

Affordability. Ya, it's one thing to see a 100k Land Rover pulling a 100k Airstream trailer up the road, but that family in the ten year old Dodge van going up the road right behind it is gonna have just as much fun camping in their nine by twelve tent. A couple of high school drop-outs can still buy their own house if she makes fourteen bucks an hour at Timmies and he makes sixteen working at one of the rock quarries.

Howell's Fish. Out of the lake, into the smoker, and on your plate in under 48 hours if you get your timing right. You can't beat Howell's smoked fish.

Sullivan's Butcher Shop. According to them, you can't beat their meat, and I wouldn't want to anyway, but you can't beat their pickled beets either. And their smoked sausages are simply amazing!

Vistas. Every time you turn around, you're looking at limestone cliffs. The Wiarton Marina has to be the most photogenic marina in all Ontario.

The Wiarton marina. You can keep a twenty footer in the most photogenic marina in all Ontario for about a thousand bucks a year. Not sure what the guys with the 52' SeaRays are paying, but they get the same priceless views of those limestone cliffs.

People. The librarian at the local high school has bear meat in her freezer. Why? Because she shot it and it'll make great BBQ.

And then there's this. Yup, that's how we roll in the Bruce.


Gonna be a long time before I leave this place.

Beef farmers getting screwed

I'm not talking about feedlot operators.

I'm talking about the manure-on-their-boots small time guys like the father and son team who graze their cattle here at Falling Downs.

If you look at the price farmers get for their cattle you'll see that over the last twenty years, beef has more or less tracked the rate of inflation. The cost of inputs, however, has run well ahead of the rate of inflation, and the cost of land has gone through the roof.

A hundred acre spread like this one is going to run you at least 600k. You can graze a dozen cow-calf pairs on that while growing enough hay to overwinter them. That'll make you a tidy return, if you sell those calves off after a year, of maybe twelve thousand bucks. That wouldn't cover a minimum wage paycheque if the farmer got paid by the hour, and quite aside from that, it represents a whopping half percent return on your investment!

There should be some way of differentiating between the beef you buy that comes off feedlots and the beef you buy that comes from happy critters roaming around open meadows. I'm not sure there's any difference in the taste of the steak, but I for one feel better knowing that the animal that gave its life so I can eat had a decent one herself before it turned up on my grill.

There's a whole lot of money being made between when the farmer gets two dollars a pound for his beef cattle and you paying twenty bucks a pound to put a steak on the BBQ.

The guy with manure on his boots should be seeing a little more of that cash.

My college daze

 Oddly enough, I quite remember my college days.

This will come as a surprise to those cohorts who assumed I'd flame out soon.

I was at Outhouse College, which was an appendage of that institute of higher learning now more commonly known as Western University.

Only spent a year there, but it was an eventful year. I was simultaneously the captain AND the quarterback of the college drinking team. That's a tall order, and you can imagine the stress that involved. Nevertheless, we won a few championships that year.

I remember a few of my profs... Jeffries, McLarty, McPeck...

And this guy named Hansen, who for some reason, maybe because of his cliched good looks, was known as "Hollywood Hansen" back in the day.

Al Jeffries was a salt of the earth kinda guy. Never had any trouble with him. I learned in the fullness of time that he was on the team that vetted new admissions to Outhouse, and he'd cast the deciding vote on this candidate who was at best 50/50. Fifty percent chance of being a choice recruit; fifty percent chance this asshole would cause you no end of embarrassment.

And it's been fifty-fifty for a long time now.

McPeck was quite a guy. I think he was in philosophy. He made the headlines of the local paper because when he was out for his morning constitutional one day he spotted a couple of youngsters who had fallen into the River Thames.

He was only able to save one of them. You can imagine how that would haunt a philosophy prof for the rest of his life.

And it did.

But the real deal on McPeck was that he was a bit of an outlier at the time. Teaching "critical thinking" was a big fad in those days. McPeck had the unmitigated temerity to suggest that you'd actually have to know something before you could think critically about it.

I remember a few of my fellow students as well. There was Tanja, who came back from spring break to find her dad had been charged with attempted murder. I liked Tanja a lot, and it wasn't all about her very impressive rack. No, she was on the editorial committee for something called the "Outhouse College Arts and Literary Review," where I actually had a couple of short stories published.

And there was this Dolson guy, who I remember telling me; if the path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, I should back up a bit and find the right exit ramp...

Not sure exactly what he was trying to tell me.

But I'm still here, Mr. Dolson!

And still kicking against the pricks!...

Then there was the colleague who, on being informed that I'd invested my student loans in a place called the "Oar House," surmised that said establishment was right next door to the "air cutting place."

Sounds a bit sketchy...

We even had field trips at Outhouse! I recall a trip to the (then) new CBC HQ in downtown Toronto.

A gang of us were waiting for the elevator in the lobby. When the elevator finally arrived it could only accommodate half our crew.

As we were waiting for the next elevator, I looked around and suggested to the left-behinds that perhaps we should find a bar somewhere instead of touring that stupid CBC building. I was taken aback by the enthusiasm of my classmates for this suggestion!

Long story short, about half the class of '94 got shitfaced in downtown Toronto instead of touring the new CBC digs.

Which ultimately led to a slip of the tongue I regret to this day. Somewhere along the route back to Outhouse, I felt compelled to announce, to all aboard the bus, "hey Hansen, eat shit and die."

Needless to say, I never ever did get a reference letter from Professor Hansen.


But I've done OK.

Justin Trudeau just got a tune-up

And in remarkably short order!

At mid-afternoon today the Google news aggregator featured Justin calling for an independent inquiry into IDF use of "excessive force" at the Gaza border. The CBC had pretty much the same story on view.

That was mid-afternoon. It's now early evening, and that story has disappeared from both the CBC home page and the Google news aggregator.

Hey, those unarmed Palestinians swarming the fence are all terrorists, and having IDF snipers cut them down is just Israel defending her borders.

Who would deny any sovereign nation the right to defend its borders?


Only a dyed-in-the-wool anti-semite would deny Israel the right to defend her borders...

Go patriotic snipers!

Hiking through a riot of birdsong

Everybody knows songbirds are going extinct.

Here's a link to a story in National Geographic that proves the point. If it's in National Geographic, you know it must be true.


Except... except when I'm walking the hounds in the morning, my quiet personal thoughts are totally obliterated by the cacophony of birdsong all along our five kilometre route!

No extinction going on in these parts!

If those National Geographic writers ever strayed beyond the confines of DC, they'd realize things aren't as bad as they seem to be...

Here at Falling Downs, the songbirds are so plentiful we gotta reload the bird-feeder three times a day!


It's a beautiful thing!

Middle East problem-solving 101

What with the Trumpian relocation of the US embassy and all the hoo-ha about those brave IDF snipers gunning down unarmed Palestinians, I figure its time to root around in the archives and find us a winning plan.

We got it!

  Ya, it's been three years since the think tank here at Falling Downs came up with this insight, but one thing all great plans have in common is they stand up to the test of time.

Annexing Libya makes even more sense for Egypt today than when we originally released that policy paper. Nevermind Egypt; it makes even more sense to the rest of the world!

Think about it.

Those 2.5 million Gazans get a place to call home.

Another four million West Bankers will surely follow in short order!

Voila, the Holy Land will be totally vacated by the miscreants, and will be totally a blank slate for the Chosen People!

Isn't that what all this Middle East conflict is about? Clearing out the unchosen and moving in the Chosen?

Of course it is...


By God, I think we got us a home run here...

Just send the Nobel Peace Prize to Think Tank @ Falling Downs, c/o General Delivery, Kemble Post Office, N0H 1S0.

How to motivate a psychopath

We'll probably never know what combination of mental illness, parental neglect, substance abuse, etc, etc, motivated that wretched loser to mow down a couple of dozen pedestrians in Toronto last month. We can only speculate.

And that's what the Sunday Star did this week. He got his name splashed all over the front page by feature writer Amy Dempsey, and then got two more pages inside the first section.

Yup, whatever else he may be, he's not a nobody anymore. Canada's most popular Sunday paper made sure of that!

News value? Zilch.

Message to other budding mass murderers seething with resentment against everything and everybody? Just do it; uncork your wildest murderous fantasies and we'll do our level best to make you famous. We'll track down every friend and relative and former classmate and get them to talk talk talk, and it'll be all about you you you. Sure, you'll spend the rest of your life in jail, but your name will be a household word!


That may not be responsible journalism, but at least it'll give the circulation numbers a brief boost.

Breaking! Mueller team to probe Israeli meddling in US elections!

Just kidding folks!

You already know that neither Mueller nor his team have the slightest interest in such an investigation.

I just thought I'd put that out there, complete with the bogus "breaking" header, to see if I could bust the ceiling of three page views that my posts have been getting since Google declared war on "fake news."

Ya, even pip-squeak sites like this one got buried in that land-slide. I feel for the folks who actually try to make a living off their blogs. Like Sarah Kendzior... oh wait a minute... no, sorry, Google hasn't been messing with her...

But back to Mueller and the question of meddling in America's "democracy."

Mueller's team has been investigating Russia's "meddling" for a year and a half now. What have they found?

Facebook adverts! Yup, some devious Ruskie operatives subverted US democracy by buying tens of thousands of dollars worth of Facebook advertisements!

Meanwhile, guys like Sheldon Adelson quite openly invest tens of millions in subverting America's democracy, but that is not probe-worthy.

Why not?

Because Israel and the USA have "shared values."

That's right! Gunning down an unarmed black man in America has the same value as gunning down an unarmed Palestinian in Gaza.


Shared values indeed!

Hark, the war drums beckon!

Big Steve and a gaggle of like-minded neocon has-beens wasted no time offering Mafia Don props on a job well done.

Trump abrogates the Iran deal on Tuesday and Harper & Company have their rancid diatribe in the New York Times the very next day!

Only the greatest leader since Moses was quicker off the mark than this sorry lot; he managed to launch a major missile attack on Syria even before Harper et al launched their bought and paid for op-ed!

And who can blame him? After Trump's announcement of the US embassy move, after Trump delivers the imbecile MBS to the Israeli camp, after Trump unilaterally dumps the JCPOA agreement, Bibi obviously sees green lights all over the place.

No wonder they love Trump in Israel!

Harper is concerned that Iran "oppresses its people" and "commits violence against the people of Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon..."

Hmm... does Iran oppress its people more than, say, Saudi Arabia?

Is the war on Yemen not a Saudi project?

Has not the US committed far greater violence against the people of Iraq than has Iran?

And no one has inflicted more death and destruction on Lebanon than our good friends, the Israelis.

Even though fifteen of nineteen 9/11 terrorists were Saudis, and none were Iranian, Saudi Arabia is our ally, and Iran is the enemy?

But forget all these trifles! The free world must come together as one and teach those uppity Persians a lesson they won't soon forget.


I'll bet old Eric Arthur Blair is enjoying the greatest stiffy of his life, even though he's been in the grave nearly seventy years!

Can a newspaper be judged by what's not in it?

Took the hounds for a turn down the Bruce Trail the other side of Bass Lake this morning. Turns out the new pup is quite the water-girl. She'll fetch sticks out of the lake that the old girls turn their noses up at. They like to see a decent splash before they commit. The new girl will chase anything.

Lots of good stuff in my Globe and Mail this weekend. I see where the Trudeau gang are screwing over our PTSD-addled CAF vets by cutting back their medicinal marijuana allotment by two thirds. I thought maybe they'd make good on their promise to treat our vets with a little more respect after the lost decade of the Harper years, but it's not looking good.

Freeland's trip to Bangladesh gets lots of coverage. My sense is we're being prepped to open the refugee floodgates for the Rohingya, and why not? After all, according to Saunders' thesis in Maximum Canada, we'll be also-rans on the global stage and in the world economy till we hit that critical mass of a hundred million in population. A million Rohingya will give us a goodly boost in that direction. Let's just hope the Housing Matters crowd succeeds in it's quest to have lots more lux condos put up; we're gonna need a lot more luxury high-rise developments in our big cities to create enough trickle-down affordable housing for a million newcomers.

Made it down to the funeral on Friday. Is it actually a funeral if the guy's been cremated? Instead of a big old hardwood casket, there was just a little box with his ashes up on the altar. Saves on both wood and pallbearers, I suppose.

The deceased always prided himself on his immigrant heritage. He was from East Prussia. How fitting then that the officiating reverend spoke in a noticeably accented English, although I think it was perhaps more East Punjab than East Prussia. No matter; Werner would have been the first to point out that we're all equal in the eyes of God.

Elsewhere in the paper we've got a bit of fluff about the royal wedding and some obligatory drivel about the latest twists and turns in the saga of 45. Giuliani and Stormy Daniels figure in the reportage today. Ya, I know, but apparently it sells papers. That's the thing about Trump. A creation of the media from the mid-seventies on, anyone who follows media, entertainment, and politics will realize that the trajectory of Donny J has been a self-fulfilling prophecy for a society that has for far too long been amusing itself to death.

While Trump hasn't quite made America great again, he's sure given SNL a new lease on life, hasn't he? And I just learned today that Alec Baldwin used to be a busboy at Studio 54 back when young Trump was honing his pussy-grabbing skills at the notorious disco. Hmm...

Aside from a lengthy article about Syrian refugees in Lebanon, (a mere pit-stop on their way to Canada, I'm sure) there was utterly no news about the Middle East. Is that an oversight? A crooked cop in Hamilton gets eight feet worth of column inches and the most explosive tinderbox on the geopolitical map gets next to nothing? How can that be?

The Globe brain trust rightfully found room for a 3/4 page spread on the 75th anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. That's something we never want to forget.

But not a word about what happened in Gaza yesterday or last week or last month.

That's something we don't want to know.

Where two or three are gathered in Bakunin's name, there shalt be a police informant in their midst

Show me a gaggle of Black Bloc activists, and I'll show you some undercover cops.

That's gotta be a pretty good gig for an up-and-coming young police officer, wouldn't you think? Infiltrating one of these so-called radical groups? You know the ones; the folks who like to ride the coattails of a demo organized by someone else, and then make headlines by breaking a few plate-glass windows.

Ya, that'll bring down capitalism!

Or not... but in the mainwhile, our erstwhile undercover cops get to whoop it up with a few youthful idealists while pulling down a not-too-shabby six number paycheque, and maybe even getting lucky with some of the radical ladies.

Good work if you can get it...

Mind you, the union glaziers who'll be replacing those plate glass windows just saw their all-in pay packet bumped up to $48.84/hr last week.

That's not too shabby either!

The pursuit of happiness

On the way into town this morning to fetch my Saturday Globe and Mail, I noticed one of the neighbours has a new ATV. He's got a wee trailer hooked up to it, and he's dutifully picking up assorted debris left by yesterday's wind storm.

His yard is maybe a quarter the size of mine, and there's no reason he couldn't collect that detritus with a wheelbarrow. But no, he's got a ten thousand dollar ATV and a trailer to do the deed.

That's emblematic of the way we roll, isn't it?

Back in the day, every factory worker could afford their own little bungalow on a fifty foot lot in the city. When those post-WWII bungalows were put up they sold for under ten thousand dollars. The trend today is for the upwardly mobile to buy those bungalows for half a million, or a million and a half in many Toronto neighbourhoods, bulldoze them, and put up a three or four thousand square foot McMansion with five or six bathrooms on that fifty foot lot.

No factory worker today aspires to a detached dwelling of their own. It just doesn't happen.

Back in the fifties and sixties you could raise up a family of four or five kids in a thousand square feet with one bathroom. The folks razing those houses and putting up monster homes might have one or two children and a Filipino nanny.

Do they live happier lives than the original inhabitants of those homes?

Why alternative news websites endanger the American oligarchy

This is "world press freedom day" or some such rot. That's the occasion for the mainstream media bigs to celebrate how essential they are in maintaining our vaunted "democracy."

Needless to say, we're not celebrating alternative news sites like Counterpunch or Glenn Greenwald's Intercept or many more on the alt-news side.

They are dangerous. They are fake news. Read Counterpunch for a few weeks, and hot damn, before you know it you find yourself thinking the exceptional nation isn't all that exceptional anymore...


What could be more dangerous than that?

That's why it's so important to tweak those Google algorithms in such a way that you'll never find any news that doesn't conform to the official narrative of American exceptionalism.

How to kill a raccoon with a shovel

That's easy.

You just give it a whack on the head. And then you give it three or four more whacks on the head to make sure it's down for good.

After all, if that 'coon got within a shovel length of you... it's more than likely rabid!

Or it's a pet, which happens more and more these days.

But better to err on the safe side of a potentially rabid raccoon.

I mention this only because the Farm Manager, in her day job with the local school board, recently experienced a raccoon lock-down.

A raccoon was spotted on the playground.

The lock-down alarm went off. The kids, knowing the drill, all hid under their desks.

Then the admin team swung into action. They called the cops.

The local cops sent out their SWAT team. Wasn't long before one of their top guns had the offender in his sites. Alas, from point-blank range, he only managed to blow the raccoon's nose off.

The 'coon scampered away and took refuge up a tree. Minus half its snout.

The school remained on lock-down till the forces of law and order managed to follow the trail of blood to the sanctuary tree, a matter of several hours, whereupon the SWAT team was finally able to do what any local with a shovel at hand could have done in the first two minutes of this 'coon encounter.


As I've often said, modernity isn't all it's cracked up to be...