Hey Fluffy, wake up!!!

Dear Justin,

My children are smart and hard working. They were brought up right. They embrace diversity. They are tolerant out the ying-yang...

But they can't afford to live in Toronto.

Justin, Canada doesn't need a housing policy, it needs affordable housing. Your feeble excuse at making a policy, "a place to call home," is complete and utter bullshit. It has not provided one single affordable home anywhere in the land, and it's quite obviously not intended to.

Instead, your "housing policy" is about optics. I saw you on TV yesterday counselling Mike Pence on women's rights. That's very nice, Justin, but you need to know that Canadians have priorities that rise above the question of where an American woman might get an abortion.

Like having a place to live.

As I leaf through my Globe and Mail real estate section today, the lowest priced property featured is a two bed, one bath 750 foot condo that sold for over $600,000. Assuming they could cough up the 10% down, my children would be looking at a mortgage payment of over $3,000/month, plus condo fees, plus taxes, plus utilities.

My hard-working and diversity-embracing children are saddled with huge student loan debt, thanks to your failure to provide affordable education. Now they are expected to pay $4,000 a month for a place of their own? And that's a 750 square foot apartment?

That just doesn't work, Justin!

So tone down your relentless virtue-signalling. Ya, we all care about abortion rights in Louisiana. We all care about democracy in Venezuela.

But seriously, Justin, we care way more about having a roof. Please give that some attention.


Sincerely,

Neumann

Anti-Semitic health inspectors close Steeles Deli

Took a drive down to the city yesterday, the day a bunch of not very Canadian b-ball players were putting Toronto on the map, to have lunch with Junior. He's just finished his third year at U of T, and since I haven't had a face-to-face with him for some time I thought this would be a day well spent.

He lives downtown but subbed up to the Finch station, the last stop on the Yonge line. We headed for the Steeles Deli, which has for over thirty years been a haunt for the Jewish side of the family.

It was closed. We ended up having lunch at the Red Lobster on Yonge about a mile north of Steeles. That was something of a selfish decision, since Junior doesn't care for seafood, whereas I like a fix of lobster every now and again.

On the way back to the Finch subway station we stopped at Centre Park to let Boomer have a romp before our drive back to the boonies. Boomer is the last survivor of our hound pack. At fifteen she doesn't really "romp" that much, but she appeared to have an enjoyable waddle.

Across the park was a house with a for sale sign. We speculated as to what it might be worth. We guessed a million and a half to two million. We were a little light in our guesswork, as you can see in the link.

That property is obviously being marketed as a tear-down. Somebody will spend two and a half million to buy that house, rip it down, and then spend another million putting up a 3,000 foot McMansion. This has become the norm in that neighbourhood.

What's truly remarkable is that Yonge/Steeles is by no stretch of the imagination a "posh" neighbourhood. In fact, it was developed as a typical middle-class suburb, where teachers and nurses and the like might build their nests.

But Toronto is a "world class" city now. If press reports are to be believed, folks were paying up to $60,000 for a chair at last night's Raptors game.  I assume those would be the same kind of folks who pay two and a half million for a house just to knock it down and put up a new build.

I don't mean to fire up a fresh conspiracy theory here, but has anybody else noticed what's happened to Toronto housing costs since the U of T lured urban planning guru Richard Florida to town?

It's obviously his fault...


When I got home the Farm Manager was keen to hear how lunch went at the Steeles Deli. When she heard the sad news, she had an immediate response; obviously the health inspectors on the north side of Steeles Avenue are anti-Semites.

Raptor hysteria and Canada's multi-culti advantage

Nav Bhatia is getting a lot of free publicity due to his Raptor's allegiance.

That allegiance will translate into more Hyundai sales at his car dealerships.

That's not anything to get alarmed about. I recently tried out a few Hyundai products and decided to buy a Toyota instead.

That wasn't due to the Korean origin of the Hyundai, nor was it due to the turbaned promoter of Hyundai in Canada.

It was due solely to Toyota offering me a better vehicle at a price point that made sense to me.

At this critical juncture, we all need to decide if we're with the commodification of sport, or against it...

Bloody hell, am I ever against it!


But I gotta say... GO KAWHI!!!..


Go Raptors!!!

The promise of the internet and Russian election meddling

If I recall correctly, the promise of the internet, early days, was the democratization of political discourse.

Forward twenty years or so, and it's considered a verity that the current US president attained the office as the result of Russian meddling via the internet.

While actual evidence of said meddling has been non-existent, the claim has been repeated often enough to attain the status of fact. While the alleged meddling allegedly never favoured one side over the other, it allegedly sowed division in the American polity.

Ponder that for a moment.

Is divisiveness among American voters the result of teens in Montenegro running a click-farm, or is it the result of profound divisive issues within the American polity itself?

I'm going out on a limb here, but I would suggest that the divisive nature of US politics has absolutely nothing to do with alleged Russian meddling, and everything to do with the fact that the on-the-ground reality of life in America has been more divisive than anything that the allegedly Russian meddlers could conceivably concoct.

America is the world leader in the percentage of its population behind bars.

America is the world leader in arms sales.

America is the world leader in instigating wars with other states.

America has infant mortality rates and education outcomes more in line with third world kleptocracies than with other developed states.

These are all facts that the internet has allowed to spread far and wide.


Which is why the US is leading the charge to disembowel the freedom of the internet.


Too much democratization of information hasn't been good for the Empire...

Uncle Sam in checkmate - nuclear war only option

Does anybody think the US-China trade war will end well for the Yanks?

Looks to me like the society that takes a more collective approach is leaving us in the dust. China is well ahead of the US in terms of developing the next generation of high tech stuff.

But thank the Lord America has an ethos of rugged individualism and the second amendment and winner-take-all capitalism. And lots of Silicon Valley billionaires.

Trump, or whoever calls the shots down there, thought it would be clever to kidnap Meng Wanzhou, CFO of Huawei, and the daughter of the founder of the company. So they had Dumb and Dumber take her into custody on a stop-over in Canada, on the charge that Huawei was in breech of some unilaterally imposed US sanctions on Iran.

Why it's up to the US to dictate who can trade with Iran, I'm not sure. By now there's quite a few countries thumbing their noses at the Iran embargo. Russia and China fully intend to keep buying Iran's oil. So will NATO ally Turkey. A number of traditional allies in Europe, once they sort out the logistics of working around the US dominated commercial banking system, will ignore the US ultimatum.

So Bolton and Pompeo talk a lot of threatening shit. They park an aircraft carrier battle group off the coast of Iran. Are the Iranians impressed?

"They make a show of force, we just see targets," was the quote from one Iranian military official.

In Venezuela, the Empire, which has been agitating for regime change in the country for twenty years, recently ran a pretend new president up the flagpole. Nobody saluted.

Meanwhile, on the home front, the country's going down the shitter, but they don't know it, because all their news media will ever talk about is Russia and Mueller and what an asshole their president is.

Other than that, the American sheeple pretty much think everything is hunky-dory!


America has been in decline for some time. The fall can't be too far off.

Apathy Party sweeps EU elections

I've been reading coverage of the EU elections on a couple of different news sites. Seems like things went more or less to predictions - the mainstream parties lost some traction and the far right gaining some, with maybe the strength of the Green vote being the only good news.

The coverage was all about breaking down the results; how many seats this bloc or that bloc might be able to coral in the European Parliament. What they didn't mention was the largest bloc of all, the non-voters.

At 49.5% of eligible voters, the Apathy Party was the clear winner in this election. Given that the whole of Europe has had it drummed into their skulls for the last year that the "future of Europe hangs in the balance," apparently lots of folks were not convinced of the urgency of the matter.

BoJo is Trump without the charisma

What, you didn't realize Mafia Don had any? Keep an eye on Boris Johnson for a spell. You'll see what I mean.

BoJo is touted as the next PM of the UK, at least until the next election. At which point Jeremy Corbyn will most likely take the office. Neither eventuality is going to sit well with the anti-Brexit crowd.

The Brexit hysteria has been the biggest media clusterfuck after Russiagate, with the same tenuous non-grounding in reality. What's really going to happen the day after Britain leaves the EU?

Legions of paper shufflers in both the EU and the UK will have more papers to shuffle. Beyond that, precious little. In fact, there's bound to be a steep increase in employment ops for qualified paper shufflers on both sides of the Channel. This should be welcome news.

Scary stories about the Irish border notwithstanding, life will go on, just as it did after the Y2K hysteria, if you're old enough to remember that.

The EU is on the back foot for many reasons quite independent of Brexit. My father's generation, the people who endured the WW2 at ground level, naturally have an appreciation for the fact that there's been no war on the Continent for seventy-something years.

Fair enough.

But it's also true that what a lot of folks see when they look at the EU today is a bloated bureaucratic behemoth that gets its marching orders from the USA.

Chrystia Freeland welcomed ISIS terrorists into Canada

When reports of the "missing" pages of the OPCW report on the Douma gas attack first began to circulate a couple of weeks ago, I didn't want to jump the gun and give them too much credence. After all, this story seemed largely confined to RT, Sputnik, and assorted non MSM sources. It increasingly seems that in this case, RT got the story right. The New York Times and the rest of the Western mainstream media got it wrong.

By now, a number of Western journalists I respect, including Robert Fisk, Jonathan Cook, and Peter Hitchens, have seemingly corroborated the RT version.

No hint yet from the Globe and Mail, the CBC, or any other Canadian media outlets that they acknowledge being conned by the White Helmets.

And it wasn't just our media outlets who were conned. Apparently our PM and our Foreign Minister were too...

Unless they were in on the scam from the beginning.


Foreign Minister Freeland gets honorary White Helmet

I'm looking forward to an explanation from our Foreign Minister.

Nobody did satire like Binyavanga Wainaina

About forty years ago I took a course with Professor Doug Killam called Commonwealth Literature. On the syllabus were a couple of titles by Chinua Achebe. That was my introduction to African writers writing about Africa in English. It hadn't particularly occurred to me that such a thing existed.

Not only did Professor Killam know Commonwealth Literature, he in many cases knew the writers personally, and that was the case with Achebe. If I remember correctly he knew the Achebe family well enough to be invited to the wedding of one of their daughters.

The lesson that stuck with me from the course was this; not only were Commonwealth writers from Africa capable of writing in English, they excelled at it. The English language writing skills of the colonized were every bit the equal of the colonizers, and often better.

In the realm of political satire in the English language, nobody beats the work of Wainaina. Here's a wee taste, his "open letter to Madonna" from a few years ago.

Satirical brilliance of the highest order!

Shanahan gives all clear; towelheads 'o terror not planning to attack after all

The BBC has revealed that the Persians have changed their minds about attacking US interests in their 'hood. The imminent threat, passed along by Jerod Kushner's sources in the region, had pundits' sphincters palpitating in rapturous anticipation across newsrooms throughout the Western World.

Well, I guess that's a disappointment... we'll just have to go back destroying Iran the old-fashioned way; with murderous sanctions designed to make the economy scream until the wretched masses cry "Uncle," as in Uncle Sam, please save us from the Ayatollahs.

Not nearly as impressive on the TV screen as thousands of bombing runs, and it may take a little longer, but when you're the Exceptional Nation you've got God, time, and Western media on your side.

Something's got to give way eventually.

Race and class

I've always been of the mind that an unemployed black steelworker has more in common with an unemployed white steelworker than he/she does with a black social justice activist.

Nothing cures whatever latent racist tendencies might be lurking underneath more effectively than working alongside that person who might be different from you. I encountered that time after time in the various shops and factories I was employed at.

Budd Automotive was the first place I worked where there was a noticeable contingent of black folks, mostly Jamaicans. I never sensed the slightest racially tinged friction between whites and blacks. In fact, if you got to know some of these folks, you'd find they'd invariably have a line on some quality weed at a good price.

What I did notice was that there was a certain prejudice against "Pakis" in some of the shops, like General Electric, for example. I think that's because at the time, the only Pakistanis working there had office jobs and weren't on the actual shop floor.

When I moved out to Calgary, there were a handful of Paks ("Paks" is OK; "Pakis" is racist) working day shift at the shop I was at, right next to me on the hot end of an oxy-acetylene torch, who would at the end of the shift head to the CP Rail shops to work another eight hours there.

These were just hard-working folks earning their way, and every working person recognizes and respects that in the person they're working next to.


Working people of all creeds and colours have always had lots more uniting them than dividing them.

True fakery, fake truthiness, fake news, true fake news, and fake news that might be true...

I see where the White Helmets are in the news again. Well, obliquely, anyway.

As regular readers will know, I'm more than a little skeptical of the official story. You know, those plucky volunteers who work exclusively in areas of Syria held by the "rebels," meaning ISIS/al Qaeda, and their affiliates.

Ya, I'm fully aware Assad is a bad dude and all that, but...

That plucky band of Syrian volunteers was originally organized by James Le Mesurier, a non-Syrian, non-Arab, non-Muslim white guy with deep connections to the UK military. And, for "volunteers," they've managed to hoover up an incredible amount of money from the same constellation of foreign state actors who have been behind the Syrian "civil war" from even before the get-go.

So here's the latest story.  Some version of it has been on virtually every "fake" news channel on the internet (although I believe it's absent from Glenn Greenwald's "The Intercept"). This of course is where things get dodgy. How do we know what's fake news on the internet? That original Propornot disinformation piece at the WaPo, advising us what was fake and what was not, turned out to be more fake than true itself.

Our official media, on the other hand, has not even acknowledged the existence of this story.

Anyway, this alleged report from the OPCW (the folks who are charged with investigating alleged chemical weapons attacks) was allegedly deep-sixed by the OPCW itself. If that is the case, and if that allegedly quashed report is indeed the real deal, then the entire "White Helmets are heroes" narrative goes down the shitter, as does the credibility of the OPCW itself.

That would be a huge story.

The allegedly quashed OPCW report was leaked to an outfit called the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media, a bunch of mainly Brit academics who you'd think would know enough to put a comma after Propaganda. I'm not sure what their fakery rating might be, but they've done some yeoman work on the faker-than-fake Integrity Initiative (lots of initiative, a little light on integrity).

So, who/what to believe? Let me know if you figure it out.

Fast cars and why I don't care anymore

I see where somebody paid two million US$ for a Hemi Cuda.

Those cars were languishing on dealer lots in late 1970. You could find a Hemi Cuda that had been on the lot for six months and was available at a good discount.

Now they're golden.

What has changed?


I was somewhat into the muscle car culture of the era. I recall a 1964 Impala SS pulling into John's Supertest on a regular basis. Had the two four-barrels and a four speed. It was maroon in colour.

It was for sale.

Buddy wanted eleven hundred for that car. It would easily fetch $100,000 at auction today.

But, times have changed. My new Toyota has a thing that shows my fuel usage after each trip. It motivates me to go light on the gas and see if I can beat the read-out from the last trip.


Instead of bragging about doing 150 miles an hour, I'm now bragging about getting 50 miles per gallon.

Political Correctitude and Brown Sugar

Here's the lyrics to the iconic Rolling Stones tune, Brown Sugar:

Gold Coast slave ship bound for cotton fields
Sold in the market down in New Orleans
Scarred old slaver knows he's doin' all right
Hear him whip the women just around midnight

Brown Sugar, how come you taste so good
Brown Sugar, just like a young girl should

Drums beatin' cold, English blood runs hot
Lady of the house wonderin' when it's gonna stop
House boy knows that he's doin' all right
You should have heard him just around midnight

Brown Sugar, how come you taste so good
Brown Sugar, just like a young girl should

Brown Sugar, how come you dance so good
Brown Sugar, just like a black girl should

I bet your mama was a Cajun Queen,
And all her boyfriends were sweet sixteen
I'm no school boy but I know what I like
You should have heard them just around midnight

Brown Sugar, how come you taste so good
Brown Sugar, just like a black girl should

I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, wooo
How come you, how come you dance so good
Yeah, yeah, yeah, wooo
Just like a, just like a black girl should
Yeah, yeah, yeah, wooo

Brown Sugar indeed!

How is it that the Rolling Stones are never called out on their racism and misogyny?


They've become too big to call out, that's why.

More proof that billionaires have too much money

There's no doubt that the recent setbacks to Roe v. Wade in various US states can be attributed in large part to the efforts of the Bible-thumping billionaire Koch brothers, who have been pouring money into anti-abortion initiatives for years.

That's what happens when your democracy is for sale to the highest bidder. Billionaires have the resources to outbid the rest of us.

Other billionaires may have other interests. A billionaire wants the US embassy in Jerusalem in stead of Tel Aviv? Done!

Billionaires need tax breaks? Done!

A billionaire buys his way into the White House and uses the office as a draw to get the rich and powerful to stay at the hotel he owns down the street? Brilliant!

When billionaires use their money to impose their whims, it's the rest of us who pay.

Uppity third worlders no longer taking first world garbage; China to blame

There's been a lot of media hyperventilation about how the dastardly Chinese commies destroyed recycling programs in North America. The Globe and Mail's Nathan Vanderklippe has now exposed the commies as being behind the nasty garbage spat Canada is having with the Philippines.

Nathan dutifully plays his part in the media's ongoing China bashing campaign by pointing out that Duterte "escalated the dispute with Canada not long after returning from Beijing, which has itself mounted a high-intensity pressure campaign against Canada following the arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wankzhou."

Not so fast, Nathan! The garbage dispute with Canada predates the election of Duterte by a couple of years. Here's a link to a 2014 National Post story on the matter. Five years ago we assured the Filipinos that we were working on it. That was two years before Duterte was elected and almost five before Meng Wanzhou's arrest, but our garbage is still over there.

Is it possible that the government of the Philippines is just fed up with our inaction?

Making China part of this story isn't news, it's propaganda.

Conrad Black: forgotten but not gone

Both the Globe and Mail and the CBC have the happy story this morning about Conrad Black getting a pardon from Donald Trump. What particularly caught my eye was the roll-call of character witnesses who interceded on Mr. Blacks's behalf: Henry Kissinger, Rush Limbaugh, William F. Buckley, and...
Elton John!?

Huh? Which of those is not like the other ones? Do you suppose it was Elton John's word that tipped the balance? Or was the pardon granted in spite of Elton John?

Aside from having been Palm Beach neighbours, Connie and Donnie have something else in common; they were both born to great wealth and worked assiduously to squander it. Conrad seems to have been more successful in that endeavour than has Donald, but continues to live the high life thanks mainly to the largesse of the few friends who stuck by him when the going got tough.

Conrad was somewhat ahead of his time in terms of his business career. He was a pioneer in the looting of employee pension plans back in the 1980s, a practice that has since become commonplace. That episode may have earned him the opprobrium of the general public, but didn't derail his long-term campaign for a seat in the UK's House of Lords, where he remains Baron Black of Crossharbour.

Baron Black redeemed himself somewhat, at least in my eye, with how he handled his US prison term. If you look at the articles he wrote from prison, there's not a lot of woe-is-me griping. Instead, we see an actual mensch developing a surprising (for a pension fiddler) empathy for his fellow inmates.

Maybe that's what caught Elton John's eye too.

Mysteries of democracy

There was a Preem Dougie article in the Globe today about how Ford was directing various police departments to get tough on unlicensed pot shops after the weed 'o wisdom was made legal. The article correctly points out that being Preem doesn't make you commander-in-chief of every cop in the province.

Pretty sure Doug's Gang will challenge that in the courts.

When Doug had the brainwave that the best way to roll out legal weed was to hold a lottery for 25 pot shop licenses in a province the size of Western Europe and a population of fifteen millions, he didn't realize that he'd just massively incentivized anybody who could get their hands on a few kilos to open their own shop.

But Doug does a lot of stupid shit, so no surprise there.

I run into a few folks who are onboard with some of the stuff he's doing. In fact, I even agree with some of the stuff he's doing. Around here, the local Health Unit occupies a purpose-built just-for-them HQ that cost twenty million bucks. For twenty thousand feet!

And the "Health Unit" isn't the place you'd want to go if you were having an actual problem with your health, like a broken limb or a stroke or you cut off your big toe with the chainsaw or something. No, the Health Unit is about theory, not praxis.

They've got a lot of high-priced folks in that HQ strategizing how they can get the locals to eat healthier, quit smoking, get off the fucking couch and take a walk, and indulge less binge-drinking.

Oh, and cut out all that domestic violence while you're at it.

All of which are really worthwhile and admirable goals, to be sure, but I know the locals, and generally speaking, they're the kind of folks who are going to do what they do, and they're gonna even do a bit extra just to spite the $400k/year Chief Medical Officer who's telling them what not to do.

Having a $400,000/yr bureaucrat antagonise the people in a town where $40,000/yr is considered a good go is a recipe for.... getting those people to vote for Doug Ford!

I could give Doug some tips on how to save money on education too. The only idea he's had is to make classes bigger and get rid of a bunch of teachers. Here's a way better idea; make the classes smaller, but get rid of the school boards!

Every school board features a gaggle of highly educated folks who hate kids and are really happy to be out of the classroom and pull down six-number salaries. They spend most of their time coming up with excuses for why they're graduating cellphone addicts who need a calculator to do grade three math and struggle to read the instructions on a job application.

It's the teachers' fault, parents' fault, the kids' fault, technology's fault, society's fault - everybody's fault except theirs.

Get rid of them!

So ya, there are efficiencies to be found here and there, but overall, Ford initiatives tend towards the irrelevant or even the downright stupid.

Buck a beer? Irrelevant.

Bigger classes in school so kids can learn to be resilient? Stupid.

Booze in the corner store? Irrelevant AND stupid.

So how does a vindictive schmuck like Doug find himself Premier of Ontario? By winning last year's election, that's how. Ontario had just over ten million eligible voters. Over four million couldn't find the time to vote. Doug's Gang polled about 2.3 million votes.

In other words, Doug is working his magic on the strength of the votes cast by less than a quarter of the electorate.


That's not right.

Huawei or not Huawei, is that the question?

Globe and Mail reporters Steven Chase and Robert Fife have a front-pager in today's paper about the trials and tribulations of the Chinese tech conglomerate. The gist of the story is that Huawei has been loading up with all kinds of lobbyists and strategists for a full-on assault on Canadian public opinion.

The reason for that lies in the controversy over whether or not US allies should be allowed to use Huawei technology in their 5G networks. Uncle Sam has said we'd better not if we know what's good for us. Some US allies, like Australia and New Zealand, have fallen in line, while others, like the UK and Canada, are, at least for the moment, maintaining the fiction that they are sovereign nations who make their own decisions.

Being a Chinese company in the grip of the Chinese Communist Party, the official fear is that the commies are going to use their technology to spy on us. Probably true, but they're going to spy on us anyway, as are the Russians. Most of our allies will be spying on us too. That's just statecraft in the 21st century. Everybody spies on everybody.

Spying aside, there's a far more important reason why we should go slow on the 5G roll-out. Google "dangers of 5G" and over sixty million results come up. I haven't had the opportunity to review all of them, but it strikes me that the technology is a long way from having been proven safe.

The New York Times would have you believe that 5G health concerns are fake news invented by Russia's RT network. After all, Russian and China are moving ahead with implementing 5G in their own countries. Would they be doing so if they really believed it was unsafe?

I don't know, but it's hard to believe that the NYT wants us to set our public health standards at the same level as Russia and China. Does that strike anyone as a prudent strategy?

The history of technological "progress" is littered with really bad ideas that were pushed on us by people who profit from them, from thalidomide to nuclear power to fracking, which in hindsight might not have been such great ideas after all.

The sensible thing to do is to take the focus off the politically motivated Huawei hysteria and pause while we get a better understanding of the health risks associated with this technology, instead of taking the promoters at their word about its safety.

Charlie Watts coming clean thirty years ago.

A few years ago I wrote a somewhat snarky blog about Charlie Watts going bald, and implying that perhaps the Rolling Stone has had a hair transplant somewhere along the way.

That was rude of me, and I apologize.

Here's a Charlie interview with Matt Lauer.


Just amazing what you can find on the internet.

Generation reboot

I see these kids when I'm hanging around U of T with my Juniors.

There's a new generation coming up that isn't buying the proscribed bullshit.

You know; the bullshit that tells Americans they can't afford free public health care but they can spend a trillion per year on "defence."

Defence from what?

Ain't nobody gonna attack America!

There's plenty of bright young Americans at U of T for the simple reason that the extravagant fees we charge foreign students are still cheaper than what they'd pay at Yale or Harvard.

But America has become a victim of her internal (and eternal) contradictions. The deep well of liberty was poisoned with greed and hate from the very beginning.

The new generation coming up gets that.

They're not buying into the status quo.

Plagscan

I notice in the "traffic sources" file on my blogger dashboard that I've had a visit from plagscan.com. That's an outfit that sniffs out plagiarism on the internet.

As far as I can tell you have to fork out cash to use plagscan. Who the fuck would bother using it on this blog? While I'm pretty sure I've never had an original thought in my life, I'm 100% sure every blog I've ever posted is in my own words.

So what would motivate someone to check this extremely obscure blog for plagiarism?

Hmm...

Maybe it's the CIA trying to finger the foreign agents behind neumann's blog? After all, the think tank here at Falling Downs does take a dim view of that toxic virus commonly referred to as "American Exceptionalism."

Or Mossad. Ya, that's it! As far as I know, I'm the guy who tagged Bibi with the "greatest leader since Moses" label. Maybe they were just checking before my name went on a hit list?

Or maybe it was Putin. He's behind pretty much everything these days.

Or... maybe it was the legal department at the WaPo doing their due diligence before offering me Khashoggi's vacant slot?..


Gonna have to load up the vaporizer and give this conundrum some thought...

Uber is what capitalism has come to

What is Uber?

Uber is a digitally enabled end run around taxi regulation, world wide.

It's never made a profit, but it has succeeded in destroying the livelihoods of cabbies from Manchester to Manhattan to Mumbai.

By golly, that was pure poetry...

It is mind-boggling to see how their formula of piracy has lead to today's IPO, and a putative valuation of the company, which has added nothing, but subtracted so much from the common good, of somewhere around $80 billions.

There are far too many parts to that sentence. But the main point remains that Uber is complete and utter bullshit.

The folks who drive for Uber and thereby stole the legitimate cab drivers' jobs are on strike. Because they've figured out they're being screwed.

A bunch of rich people who control the Silicon Valley incubator-to-national-to-global brand pipeline are even richer today.

A lot of cab drivers are worse off. A few investor types are richer than they already were. And Uber's own workforce is on strike.

How has Uber made the world a better place?


This is what capitalism has come to.

Own a French chateau in downtown Toronto for a mere $3.8 million

I've been trying to scale back my newsprint addiction. Picking up the Globe at the Korean Extortionist's runs about twenty-five bucks a week. You'd think that would entitle you to "free" access to their on-line edition, but you'd be wrong.

The Monday to Thursday papers are mighty thin. On Friday you get the thin paper plus a real estate and a car section, for the same price as you pay for those thin papers from Monday to Thursday, so the Friday paper is, relatively speaking, a good deal.

Today, in the Friday Real Estate section, I was pleased to find a French chateau available in the vicinity of downtown, at 111 Givins St. to be precise.

I don't know what picture forms in your mind when you read "French chateau," but for me the words conjure up images of sophisticated estates surrounded by opulent gardens.

Not that I'm seriously shopping for a French chateau or anything else in downtown, but it's nice to dream...

For $3.8 million, your French chateau in downtown Toronto is parked on a twenty foot lot.

That's not a chateau, it's a new build on an infill lot.

Nevertheless, somebody will buy it, probably above list price.

That's what Toronto has become. A great place to live if you've got four million to spend on a nice house with twenty feet of frontage.


For everyone else, it's best to look elsewhere.

Who says there's no such thing as progress?

Just found out today that you can get a BBQ grill with... a USB port!

Who knew!?

More to the point, who cares? Grilling is meant to be done with a beer in your hand, not a smartphone.

Speaking of grilling, we dug the hibachi out of the garage last weekend to cook up a couple of those Better than Beef fake burgers (over actual charcoal, not wood pellets).

Were they better than beef? No, but they were damned close. In fact, if you had enough beer, you probably wouldn't notice the difference.

Would I buy them again? You bet.

Would I consider a grill with a UBS port?

No chance.

Justin sells out his father's Cuba legacy

When you see stories like this you get a sense of which direction the winds 'o change are blowin' in.

Ever to the right, that's where.

Liberal Justin is staking out turf well to the right of Conservative Brian Mulroney, who made his mark in political history by being well to the right of Trudeau the Elder.

But that was just normal. Conservatives are by definition required to be to the right of Liberals.

To see a Lib PM so far right in foreign policy as Justin Trudeau is unprecedented.


This rotten apple fell far from the tree.


Then again, I think the entire spectrum has swung to the right. I read a Scheer speech the other day wherein he promised us tighter coordination with the US military, and by the way, we'll recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

Huh?

As I said; ever to the right...

Climate change and the value of farmland

By now you've probably read about that UN report re: how a million species are at risk if us humans keep on keeping on the way we've been doing.

And there was another much-headlined report just a while ago about how we've got till 2030, and not a moment longer, to change our ways, or else really bad shit will fuck us up massively.

Ya, whatever. Call me a skeptic.


But, given that those opinions are relentlessly being foregrounded as immutable truths, there's bound to be an impact. How will this impact the price of farmland?

Around here, where the farmland is, generously speaking, sub-optimal, you'll pay roughly 3-5,000 an acre for what is essentially grazing land.

Not too far south, where the land is flatter, the soil is better, and cash cropping becomes an option, you're up to 10,000 an acre in no time.

A little south of that, folks are paying 15-20,000 per acre and still expect to make a go of it.

And they do, but they do it by strictly observing the commandments of modern agriculture.

You must scale up. A hundred acres is a hobby farm. A thousand acres is a start at real farming.

You must drench your thousand acres in chemicals to ensure the yields of your soy/corn/canola crops will suffice to pay the interest on your multi-million dollar debt.

That's exactly the model of farming that is going to fall by the wayside as consumers get educated about where their food comes from.

So that's the bad news.

The good news is that as society at large gets serious about saving this fragile planet, organic low-tech farming will blossom.

Organic farming is very labour intensive. You can expect your food to get substantially more expensive, because the days of bringing in brown people to do our harvests for slave wages is drawing to a close. Farm workers will be demanding and getting a living wage.


So what happens to the value of farmland?

Is it time to short Apple?

I posted something seven years ago suggesting the share price of Apple was a little ambitious.

At the time, Apple stock was trading at about fifty bucks. (post split $ )

Get out, I said!

You can make money shorting this, I said.

Apple closed over two hundred bucks today.


Sorry.


I sincerely hope nobody took my advice on that one.

However, I get a few right too. I recall pestering folks to buy oil futures back when it was twenty-five bucks a barrel. Then it went to what, $140 or something ridiculous?

Those few and far between people who listened to me made a killing. Unfortunately, I didn't.

I was in bankruptcy at the time. And I was too stupid to realize that you could have your left hand in bankruptcy and your right hand making a killing, simultaneously. That's a more important lesson than anything you're going to learn in business school.

My dear Tante Hilde used to have a little plaque in her kitchen; "We get too soon old and too late smart."


When I was thirty, I already knew that was true.

Today, I can taste and smell the truth of it.

Update from Hillbilly Acres

I just realized that eight of my last ten posts were about serious political shit. At least I think it's serious. But holy shit, who wants to get depressed? Maybe that's why nobody reads my blog anymore.

Just to clarify, it's not all serious politics around here. Sometimes it's just serious.

Built up our hillbilly cred a little by having the old stove parked on the porch for a week or so. Nothing wrong with it, but the Farm Manager took a shine to those induction cooktops, and before you could say "get that piece of shit outta here," the old was out and the new was in.

They say that's what keeps the economy humming; throwing out perfectly good stuff so you can buy something new. Kinda embarrassed to admit I'm doing my part.

Dragged the old stove out to the road and put a "free" sign on it. No takers yet.

At least it's not on the porch anymore.

We've solved the existential vehicular crisis with a new Toyota Rav4. The latest Ravs are about twice the size of the original ones that came out in '96, which is not surprising. The modus operandi of the car companies is, after all, to make their shit "bigger and better" every year.

I'm not sure of the "better," but they certainly get bigger.

Four days after taking delivery of the Toyota, we lost the love of our lives, our dear beautiful Phil, when she went under the wheels of the neighbour's truck on the sideroad. I was walking her at the time.

The FM holds me responsible for this. It was, after all, her rule that I always keep the dog on the leash.

Of course, I didn't. So she has a point.

Terrible as that was, it could have been worse. My old pal Susan recently lost her dog to a car, and it was actually on the leash at the time.

Imagine how that's gotta feel.

The neighbour is a dog-lover a few years older than me. Two old guys standing on the sideroad crying over a dead dog. That's a memory I'd love to expunge if I could.


But, life goes on. The Farm Manager has, in the past couple of days, started sending me pictures of rescue dogs she's found on the internet...

Life goes on.

"Free Press" can't remember who Julian Assange is

The Globe and Mail's opinion section was today given over to a celebration about how great and vital a free press is. I don't disagree with that. But I think a lot of the self-congratulatory twaddle I read there today misses the point.

In twelve pages of supposed journalism we are treated to innumerable references to Donald Trump, but one solitary passing reference to Julian Assange, and that was in the Discuss section, in an email exchange between two non-journalists. Unless there erupts a public furore over Assange's kidnapping from the Ecuadorian embassy, he's on his way to Donald Trump's USA, where he can expect to spend the rest of his life in prison.

That furore is unlikely to erupt when our "free press" refuses to acknowledge that the persecution of Julian Assange is the signal current event defining how free our free press is allowed to be, which is very free, so long as your journalism hews to approved parameters. That's why once acclaimed journalists like Robert Parry and Seymour Hersh are no longer affiliated with mainstream media; they crossed that line.

They've been reduced to writing blogs after they got carried away with "speaking truth to power."

Much is made of the fact that some thirty journalists died on the job in the past year. I think they missed a couple in Israel, but our free press misses a lot of stuff that goes on in Israel. Be that as it may, thirty is not a big number. That stat tells me that professional journalists are far more likely to die of complications from alcoholism than they are as a result of their journalism. Farmers and construction workers face far greater mortality risks than professional journalists do.

As for Trump, it should be beyond obvious that POTUS 45 doesn't actually have a lot of clout in terms of decision making in the Exceptional Nation. Generally, once Trump announces a policy initiative, the opposite happens, unless of course it's a tax break that the billionaire class can live with. Beyond billionaire-friendly tax breaks, Trump doesn't get to decide much beyond whether he'll have KFC or a Big Mac for lunch.

The stand-out story in those twelve pages was by Steve Adler, editor-in-chief of Reuters. The sub-head of his article is "Journalists must take steps to restore public trust in the work that they do."

That's exactly right. The credibility of journalism wasn't destroyed by conspiracy theorists and it wasn't destroyed by Donald Trump.

It's been eroded over a long period of time by shoddy journalism produced by professional journalists working at the most prestigious titles in news media.

Vitamin A and the triumph of political correctitude

I see where Moosehead Brewery is in deep shit re their advertising campaign for their Alpine brand.

Full disclosure here; back when I was working at the Irving shipyard in Saint John, Moosehead sponsored my slo-pitch team. We all got Moosehead ballcaps, and a couple of cases of Moosehead product would show up in our dugout every game.

I was a bit of a star on that team. I was the pitcher.

Now, I know that pitching in a slo-pitch league ain't exactly the majors, but nevertheless, I enjoyed my job.

Until the playoffs.

That's when I choked. Big time.

Those softies I'd routinely lobbed over the plate all season were suddenly going wild. As in over the chain-link fence wild.

It was truly embarrassing.

But I still have that Moosehead cap somewhere...


The Alpine brand was colloquially known as "vitamin A" back in the day, as in "let's go for some vitamin A after work."

It's universally known among the working class that begging forgiveness is a lot easier than asking permission. It had never ever occurred to me that this phraseology could be interpreted as having anything to do with getting consent for the oinky boinky...


I stand corrected.

World Press Freedom Day

My observation is that as our "free press" goes continuously downhill, the claims of that press to being some sort of bulwark against totalitarianism become ever more strident.

My Globe and Mail had an opinion piece today by some guy who once won a Pulitzer, but is today ensconced in a think-tank sponsored by the Dart Foundation.

The tax-averse Dart brothers were born to great wealth and have managed to magnify that wealth exponentially via the efforts of their vulture hedge fund that specialises in screwing over the citizens of developing nations by predatory trading in third world debt.

That's the kind of twat that passes for a defender of a free press these days.

What I didn't see much of, at least in the mainstream media outlets, was any mention of Julian Assange.

You'll recall Julian as that guy who for a brief moment in time personified the power of a free press.

Well, that seems to be over now.

Julian Assange is toast.


So is our "free press."

Joe Biden's America

Joe Biden's America is one big fat nostalgia bath.

Joe's campaign is looking for a good key.

So far he's done the "billionaires are just regular folks" shtick a couple of times. I'm not sure that's the right key for America at this point in time, Joe.

There's some interesting shit going on in the Dem party. They've got some serious anti-establishment folks rocking the boat. You know who I'm talking about.

Those are the folks that fake populist Regular Joe has been assigned to take down.

Regular Joe, middle-class Joe, lunchpail Joe... who cares?


How about we just call him Trump-lite Joe?

Trident stiffs taxpayers on $329 million well clean-up tab

Sad story in my Globe and Mail this morning about a plucky junior gas producer out in Alberta that just couldn't cope with low prices, high taxes, blahblahblah... so they've walked away from 4,700 gas wells. They've also walked away from their responsibility to decommission those wells.

The fiction that these costs will be borne by the "industry fund that is already struggling to deal with orphan wells" is just that; fiction. The Canadian taxpayer is on the hook, and were I a betting man, I would bet that the final tally will be several times the estimated $329 million.

The Globe and Mail should be naming and shaming the people behind this fiasco. Trident Exploration Corp. was acquired in 2016 by US hedge fund Origami Capital Partners. They installed a new board of directors consisting of four lawyers (including one Columbia and two Harvard grads), an MBA from Yale, an accountant, and a solitary petroleum engineer. Since 2016 Trident has been run by paper-shufflers, not oil and gas guys.

The price of gas in early 2016, when Origami would have been doing their due diligence, was lower than it is today, so that excuse doesn't wash. In fact, the only credible reason mentioned is the recent Supreme Court decision prioritising polluters' environmental liabilities over secured creditors.

This situation is crying out for a serious forensic accounting investigation. What did Origami pay for Trident? How much of that was debt and how much was equity? How much money has left Trident since the Origami takeover, and where did it go?

These and many other questions need to be answered, but the Globe and Mail lets those responsible hide behind a veil of anonymity.

Here's a link to the board of directors installed at Trident Resources by Origami in 2016. Hopefully that will give Globe reporters Jones and Lewis a starting point for researching a serious story about this debacle.

The four horses' asses of the Apocalypse

I see where the CIA's bum-boy du jour in Caracas called for a military coup yesterday. That elicited a lot of huffing and puffing from the boys above, and an anguished tweet from Chrystia Freeland, but not much by way of support from the Venezuelan military.

Here's Chrystia's tweet from yesterday morning;

Watching events today in Venezuela very closely. The safety and security of @jguaido and @leopoldolopez must be guaranteed. Venezuelans who peacefully support Interim President Guaido must do so without fear of intimidation or violence.

How humanitarian of her to call for the safety of the CIA assets calling for the coup! Alas, the majority of coup supporters already live in Miami or Barcelona, so yesterday's call for revolution ended up something of an embarrassment. From what can be gleaned on news coming out of the region, Guaido's call today for the "biggest march in Venezuela's history" is an even bigger flop.

Chrystia also made an urgent call for an emergency summit of the "Lima Group," that coalition of Trump toadies serving as cover for America's regime change operations, but that was yesterday. I have a hunch that the urgency of the matter has ebbed somewhat in the past twenty-four hours.

I think it's ironic that Chrystia spends so much time fretting about small-time wannabe fascists on the internet when she so obviously delights in the company of genuine big league fascists in real life.

They seem to enjoy her company too... I guess you could say she's broken through the ass ceiling.