Planet of the Humans

Finally got around to "Planet of the Humans," and I think it's the most consequential thing that's ever had Michael Moore's name on it.

I watched it because I chanced across this story. What a disappointment it was to read about how hard one of my heroes, Naomi Klein, worked to have this doc go away.

But I guess that's the way it goes, now that the billionaires make the rules. You can either cave and join the billionaires, as Naomi has done, or you can toil in obscurity. 

Luckily, Moore retains enough schlep, at least for the time being, to get this film out, regardless.

The very thought that we can enjoy infinite economic growth on a finite planet is bogus on the face of it. That fact should be even more obvious in this time of pestilence. It takes a lot of money to convince the public that things can be otherwise.

What a tragedy that so many environment groups and progressive thinkers have fallen for the money.

Bibi bans protests to stop spread of disease and anarchy

 The only democracy in the Middle East just imposed some none-too-democratic restrictions on personal freedoms in an attempt to curtail the spread of both the pandemic and anarchy, which have been growing in lock-step.

The anarchy manifests itself primarily through protests in front of the home of The Greatest Leader Since Moses, where assorted malcontents have been agitating for the demise of the Prime Minister's long, long political career. They wave rude slogans like "Hail to the thief," and "Crime Minister," alluding to the alleged crimes that have made it all but impossible for Bibi to take a well-deserved retirement for fear of losing his parliamentary immunity from prosecution.

The new regulations will confine Israelis to within 1km of their homes. Netanyahu anticipates that few of the anarchists live in his immediate neighbourhood, so hopefully he can look forward to some peace and quiet on the weekend... and perhaps it may slow down the virus as well.

Two birds with one shot!

America's "democratic process" even more embarrassing than expected

 Canada's state propaganda network, the CBC, set aside an entire evening to cover the Trump-Biden debate tonight. That in and of itself gets my dander up. Like, that's why we support CBC with our tax dollars?

That quibble aside, the debate itself was utterly cringe-worthy on every conceivable level.

If you take a few steps back and consider the big picture, there's not a lot of daylight between the two parties on any substantive issue.

That is why it is a triumph of epic and even historic import that the folks who own our information infrastructure have convinced a goodly slice of the populace that THIS IS THE MOST CRUCIAL ELECTION IN THE HISTORY OF DEMOCRACY!!!

I would say the most embarrassing part of watching democracy at work in the Exceptional Nation is the realization that this spectacle is the model they're relentlessly imposing on the rest of the world.

But, as a tactic to keep the rabble riled up against one another, I'm guessing our masters have scored a great success. 

War-mongering in the modern age

 Check out this nifty bit of propaganda at Fox News.

By golly, they got some new-fangled AI artillery systems with a new and improved "kill web!" That's right! And they need a whole lotta computer coders and science geeks to make this shit work!

There's a reason you read this shit on Fox and not on the other guys. 

Fox is the last refuge of "patriots." 

The other guys are embarrassed to admit they're American, although, in my opinion, for the wrong reasons. They think America's greatest shame is Donald Trump.

They need to dust off their Abu Ghraib photo albums. 

It's considerate of the military to clue us in on the great new scientific advances the coders and computer scientists are bringing to the kill web. It helps draw the eye away from the fact that "the most powerful military machine in history," complete with lots of coders and STEM grads, are getting the bum's rush out of Afghanistan at the hands of illiterate goat herders armed with WWII era weapons.

Covid, riots, catastrophic wildfires... and now for the brain-eating amoeba

 Boy, God been testing America, ain't He?

First He causes Satan to posses that ZZ Ping fella over there in China, and, whoopsie, here comes the China virus.

Then He uses His vessel George Floyd to open our eyes to the pandemic of systemic racism. That got the cities burning nice, but then He sent a plague of lightening strikes to set the forests of the west ablaze.

And just the other day He put His vessel Greta back in the headlines to remind us we're all gonna die soon if we don't get off the fossil fuels this week.

I would argue that America is dazed, punch-drunk, confused, and could clearly use some down time, but no!

Just as you were wondering what the fuck is gonna blow up next, here comes the BRAIN-EATING AMOEBA!!!

La la la la la-la-la-la

 If you came up in the era of Iggy, that might mean something to you.

If not, never mind.

As far as I know, Iggy is still at it, still doing the odd tour now and again, even though he has reached a stage of life where he should probably keep his shirt on.

Go Iggy!

Wolfgang and Witzke

 I was taking a bit of a detour down memory lane this evening, and I landed on "Wolfgang and Witzke."

Witzke was a guy who got off the boat and done good. He got into the mink-pelt harvesting. Had a place up near Fergus where he had multiple mink sheds.

He also had a day job, director of "research and development" at a local outfit where they made electrical switch-gear, the heavy-duty stuff you see on hydro poles.

I landed a job at the joint, welding in their fab shop, which was tucked away way in the back, because those aren't the first employees you want folks to see when they're coming through for the client orientation tour.

Wolfgang was my cousin. He'd failed two grades in public school, and the aunties had pretty much voted him as most likely to pursue a career in the military. As a private.

Wolfgang had other plans. I used to smoke weed and drink beer with Wolfgang and his brothers. Wolfgang gradually eased himself out of the glamorous pot-head lifestyle.

A high-school drop-out, just like me and his brothers, and with a pregnant girlfriend, Wolfgang finished his high school diploma via correspondence courses. Then he got into the engineering co-op stream at University of Waterloo, while his brothers and I were still smoking dope on the factory roof.

Fast forward a year or two, and cousin Wolfgang gets a co-op placement with Witzke, our Research and Development guy, who as far as I've ever been able to ascertain, had absolutely no qualifications for that job whatsoever.

Wolfgang's next co-op placement was at Imperial Tobacco, known far and wide as the best gig in town. 

Long story short, Wolfgang and his engineering degree went a long way at Imperial Tobacco. The guy is only a year older than me but beat me to retirement by ten years. Ya, the guy the aunties thought might have a nice career as a grunt in the military.

As for Witzke, after the bottom fell out of the mink-pelt market and his employer closed shop, I don't know what happened.

Two Kenworths and a Peterbilt

 Remember the Anita Krajnc case from a couple of years ago? That's the woman who got famous for giving the pigs a last sip of water on their way to the bacon factory.

To a point, I get where she's coming from. There's absolutely no defence for the inhumane practices of factory farming. None.

This crossed my mind the other day as I was chowing down on my "Big Breakfast Special" at the Teviotdale Truck Stop. The special is where you don't have to choose between the bacon and the ham and the sausages. 

No Siree! You get all of them! Plus a generous helping of honest-to-God stove-top home-fries!

Just outside the window there's three tractor-trailer units loaded with pigs. They're on their way to see Anita and get that last drink of water.

At the nearest table to us in the socially distanced seating arrangements were three Mexican dudes. How do I know this? They looked like Mexicans and they spoke Mexican, that's how.

My dining companion makes the observation that what we're eating probably came through here a few days ago.

That's the thing. I believe factory farming is morally repugnant. But I love my Big Breakfast Special. I think that's called cognitive dissonance. There's quite a lot of that in my world, and probably in yours too.

We got through breakfast and were enjoying a breath of fresh air in the parking lot. The Mexicans came out shortly after. Turns out they were the guys piloting the livestock trucks. 

And what beautiful trucks they were! Two new Kenworths and a Peterbilt, with ulta-deluxe and ultra-large sleeper cabs...  which I'm guessing served as the living quarters for these temporary foreign workers. 

At least a little attention has been drawn to the experience of Canada's migrant workers, thanks to Covid. 

When you get right down to it, factory farming can't function without those temporary foreign workers. 

Talk about a double dose of cognitive dissonance!

 

An open letter to Putin; this is how you silence critics

 Hey Vlad!

Agent Neumann here. Vlad, you gotta lay off that Novichok shit. It obviously doesn't work. And what's up with sending Navalny to Deutschland for treatment? Are you serious?

Mr. President, please read this carefully. This is how you silence your critics. No fuss, no muss, no air ambulance to Berlin. No lurid headlines in the global press. 

Obviously, Vlad, our team has a way to go before we silence our critics as efficiently as the capitalists do.

In solidarity,

Agent Neumann

Mittens; from NeverTrump to aiding and abetting...

 I see where the Mittster is all aboard for squeezing a Republican nominee onto the Supreme Court before the election... just in case. 

Which is quite a turn about for the democratic republican from Massachusetts. Or at least formerly from there. As he's returned to his roots he's also taken a hard turn rightwards. 

But maybe not. Mittens has fooled us before, and he's very well capable of fooling us again.

Look for a Trump SCOTUS nominee that even OAC can approve of. 

 

RESIST THE SCREEN!

I've had my own screen-resistance program going on. 

Had breakfast with my old pal Kipling at the Teviotdale Truck Stop, which hasn't happened since The Pestilence descended. Chatting with the server, she says at half capacity her boss can barely cover overhead.

Bad time to be in the restaurant business. Good time to be retired with a pension. Best of all, between the drive to Teviotdale and back, not to mention the actual breakfast, I got away from the screen for pretty much half the day!

Kipling and I were congratulating ourselves over the fact that we're able to get together for breakfast decades after we were independently voted "most likely to die before 30" in our respective high schools. No shit. Look it up in the yearbooks if you don't believe me.

Just to clarify about Kipling, he's got more than a touch of the Trump Derangement Syndrome. Not saying he's for Biden, but he hates Trump. It's a real eye-opener for him to listen to his clients down there.

"They think that asshole walks on water!"

 Kipling is one of these rare fucks who, not only does he beat every longevity prediction, but life keeps getting better and better. The Canada-US border is closed, but due to the Department of Homeland Security stamps on his paperwork, he gets to sashay back and forth across the 49th like covid wasn't even a thing.

And two weeks of quarantine when you cross that border? Not when you've got the blessing of the DHS!

That's all a hundred times more interesting than anything I would have seen on my screen had I not made the effort to head out for breakfast.

Managed to keep the resistance going most of the afternoon, too. Instead of burying my face in the laptop, I spent a few hours watching the birds at the feeders and the geese coming and going from the wheat field on the other side of the creek. And the farmer coming and going with his manure spreader... In fact, his trips back to the barnyard for another load pretty much coincided with my trips to the fridge to get another beer.

What to make of that?

Well, nothing if you can't drag yourself away from the computer.

 

 

About those Trump boaters

 If you're not up on the Trump boat parades, search that on YouTube. They're everywhere.

The thing that strikes me is that a lot of these folks seem to defy the media stereotype of "Trump's base." Generally speaking, life doesn't gift you a fifty foot SeaRay as a reward for being a moron.

For these folks, who are bright enough to know that Trump is full of shit most of the time, their Trump support is not about Trump. It's about giving the finger to an establishment elite they feel are out of touch with the America they live in. That would be the elite at the helm of virtually all cultural institutions, from the academy to the media to Hollywood and beyond.

Saw a T-shirt the other day; TRUMP 2020  Because FUCK YOU again.

Trump boaters vs. Biden voters...  I'm with Michael Moore on that one.

Bullsh@ttin' Bill still golden at NYT

 I look forward to my Sunday Star. Not only is it half the price of a Saturday Globe and Mail, it comes with a dollop of big-league journalism in the form of The New York Times International Weekly at no extra charge! I especially look forward to their Opinion and Commentary section, just to see how many fresh ways they can come up with to tell us that their president is a despicable a-hole.

The highlight yesterday was Bret Stephens' recycled op-ed from Sept. 5, "US should pass a Navalny Act." This would be an upgrade of the Browder-driven Magnitsky Act, and would serve as a response to the alleged poisoning of Alexei Navalny. As you recall, that's where Putin's minions gave Navalny's tea a spritz of the deadly nerve agent Novichok. Then, when the deadly poison failed, they shipped Navalny to Germany for treatment.

I'll reserve judgement on the plausibility of that scenario, but confess I am inclined to think that if Putin really wanted him dead, he would be. Stephens has no such reservations, and reveals that he personally came up with the idea of a Navalny Act, and that when he ran it by Bill Browder, "... he jumped at the possibilities."

I'll bet he did! While it's not acknowledged in North American media, Browder's star has been in decline elsewhere. Here's Denmark's Berlingske on Browder. Here's an insight into Browder's recent brouhaha with Germany's Der Spiegel. 

European journalism clearly holds itself to a higher standard than does The New York Times.

KOREAN EXTORTIONIST DEMANDS $7.35 FOR SATURDAY GLOBE & MAIL!!!

 Holy shit. I remember when I lived just off Exhibition Park in Guelph, and a kid down the street left the Globe and Mail on my porch every morning, every day of the week including Saturday, for considerably less than that.

I've become acclimatised to the $6.20 he's been horning me for the last couple years. Today I drove the ten miles to town, parked in front of the Korean's, donned my mask, and in I go.

I grab a paper, leave $6.20 on the counter, and I'm outta there.

They tackle me in the parking lot as I'm demasking.

"Price go up! Price go up!" they keep shouting at me.

They drag me back in the store by the ears, one on each side. Now they don't even care about the mask, the hypocrites.

They shake me down for another loonie and three nickels.

Does head office even know about this?

And the worst part was there wasn't a darn thing in that entire paper worth reading.

Authorities investigating unexplained leakage of Great Lakes water

 By the looks of things around the harbour, the water level in Colpoy's Bay has gone down about a foot and a half over the past few days. A foot and a half across 23,000 square miles of Lake Huron is an awful lot of water gone in a very short time.

It's been a cool week with lots of precipitation, so we're not talking about a sudden evaporation event. The only way the water level can go down that much that fast is if it's deliberately released.

Which raises a question; why wasn't it released months ago before high water levels inflicted millions of dollars of damage on shoreline communities?

On guard against the Yellow Peril

 Since becoming the Globe and Mail's chief China hand five years ago, Nathan VanderKlippe has evolved into one of the most prolific China bashers in Western media. Just this week he scored a front page in Friday's paper, with two full pages continued inside, followed by two more full pages in Saturday's edition.

VanderKlippe's analyses follow a familiar script; China as the rogue authoritarian outlier vs. the "liberal democracies," known in some circles as "Uncle Sam's Club." This formulation is somewhat awkward so long as Donny J. remains putative leader of the "free world," but like responsible journalists throughout the liberal democracies, he clings to the hope that things will get back to "normal" after November 3rd.

After five years of relentlessly smearing China, VanderKlippe makes the unastounding observation that Canadian public opinion has "...badly soured on China." 

Well whadya know! 

Newspapers still have the ability to shape public opinion!

Behind all the sturm & drang, however, there is also a sliver of good news. This quote is from the concluding paragraph of Friday's opus:

None of that, however, precludes the regular function of trade between Canada and China, which is up this year despite the pandemic and the continuing tensions.

Got it? 

In spite of the litany of human rights abuses we accuse the Yellow Devils of on a daily basis, behind the headlines it's business as usual!

The fine art of engineering pandemic hysteria

 Media have been bombarding us with scare stories over the ever-up-ticking case numbers. The reason "case" numbers are everywhere is that they're about the only numbers going up as this pandemic slowly fizzles out.

Another number that's been consistently on the increase is the number of daily tests, but good luck finding those numbers. Unlike the daily case numbers, the daily test numbers are generally well hidden. This government website tells you how many tests were done the previous day, but where is the running total over time? 

Here are two snapshots that contrast how the disease has changed over time.

From mid-April to the first week of June daily covid deaths in Canada averaged over 100 per day, and daily tests averaged around 20k per day. As even Donald Trump has noted, when you do more tests you get more cases. But does that mean the pandemic is worsening?

Yesterday, Canada completed over 67k tests, and if that's in the ballpark of the recent daily average, it's safe to say that testing has gone up by about 300%. Since the last week in July, daily deaths in Canada have held steady in the single digits.

Conclusion: In spite of being bashed over the head with the latest scary case numbers every time we look at the news, the reality is that this disease was at least ten times deadlier three months ago than it is today.

Normally, that would be considered good news.

Instead, politicians everywhere are threatening us with tighter restrictions and fresh lockdowns. When the disease was at max lethality, you could cheerfully shop Walmart without a mask. Now that it's more or less run its course, questioning mandatory masking marks you as a scofflaw "a few fries short of a Happy Meal," as Premier Ford put it yesterday.

As I've maintained from the outset, the Great Pestilence of 2020 has been 1% virus and 99% politics.

Dink around a little now, or dink around a whole lot later...

 I'm going through the twice-a-year "rearranging of the parts vehicles" this week, which is a semi-religious ritual right up there with Christmas and Easter for many in the hillbilly regions.

Not that there's much of a point, but when you get down to it, that can probably be said about a lot of rituals. 

It does however give the Farm Manager some hope that I am doing something with that junk, as she likes to frame it.

The Subaru fired up after only half an hour on the battery charger, which led me (quite prematurely) to think I was heading into a productive day.

Due to not having an extension cord long enough to reach the F-150, I figured I'd wire it up to the Sub to get it going. Got things hooked up and got a few promising noises out of the Ford. Let them sit another fifteen minutes with the Subaru idling while charging up the truck battery. Tried her again, and... oh so close! Just didn't catch.

So I sat in the Subaru and gave it a little throttle, hoping to send a few more amps to the truck, when suddenly there was a thunking noise and the motor stopped dead. That's when I remembered that the Sub had been running low on oil and I'd meant to top it up before running it again. That's what you call an "oh shit" moment.

Well, I guess I'll let the Subaru cool down and assess the damage later, and in the meantime I'll see if I can splice together that extension cord I ran over with the lawnmower last summer. No point buying a new one if you can fix the old one, and that'll give me enough cord to get the battery charger hooked up to the truck.

Of course, then I couldn't find my wire strippers. Normally, when I don't need them, I'll see them several times a week, but I don't pay attention because I'm not looking for them. Checked the basement, the kitchen, the attic, the garage, and the barn. Nothing. So I set to patching up my extension cord with a pair of side-cutters and the same manicure scissors I use to trim the buds on the pot plants.

Figuring this operation could take some time, I hooked the battery charger to the Pontiac Torment, which I had cleverly positioned within one extension cord length of an electrical outlet back in the spring. Both the Torment and the Subaru are only here because I had balked at what I was offered for them as trade-ins. You know how that goes... "what, I've got twenty grand in that piece of shit and you're gonna offer me a thousand bucks?!"

Ya. It's worth at least two...

Both those vehicles could and should have been traded when I got the Toyota, but I'd been car shopping for a week and I was fed up. After having two brake jobs done on the Subaru in under 10,000 kilometers, the brakes didn't work. The fluid goes somewhere. You start off strong and after a few miles the brakes go away. I knew a can of brake fluid woulda probably got me safely to the Toyota dealership, but I was done dinking around.

That was a year and a half ago.

Countdown to re-up for lockdown

Have you seen those case numbers! Hitting new highs all over the place!

All the "chief-medical-officer" types are signalling you gotta be vigilant. You bet!

Vigilant. That's the signal you're gonna be seeing way more cases, 'cause when you're vigilant, you see more stuff!

How could it be otherwise?

Then you're gonna get even MORE CASES OH MY GOD WE GOTTA SHUT IT ALL DOWN AGAIN!!!

Trust me, that's where we're headed.

The reporting on this pandemic has been, from before the beginning, heavily skewed towards sensationalism and fear-mongering. "Case numbers" without context are meaningless, and there can't be an editor anywhere who doesn't know this, but how often do news platforms provide any context whatsoever for their always-dramatic case numbers? 

How many people did you test today?

How many of those cases had symptoms?

How many of those cases were admitted to hospital?

They're keen to tell us that there are more cases among the young, but where's the data about how many of those new young cases are serious and how many aren't even noticed by the "cases" themselves?

If nothing else, this is a flagrant example of journalistic malpractice. And while we've become inured to sloppy, irresponsible journalism, I think we're plumbing new depths in this time of pestilence.

The ghost of Derrida haunts The Machine

By dint of circumstance, I used to fraternize with a crowd where advanced degrees in "the arts and humanities" were wildly over-represented, at least when compared to the folks in the local pub.

Not that you couldn't get these folks to the pub. 

Deconstruction was heavy in the air. You had to know the right names to drop. Paul deMann was my fave till it came out he was a Nazi collaborator. Far from being a flavour of the month that would soon disappear, deconstruction and/or post-modernism (and I couldn't tell you the difference to save my soul) hung around.

It was great fun to imagine, or try to, that absence was indeed the highest form of presence.

But hey man, it was just a mental game! It was a bunch of elitist twats having a lark!

Forty years later, look at your screen. You thought absence being the highest form of presence was clever? 

Ha! 

How about humanitarian war? Billionaires for social justice? Peaceful riots...

The dude abides.

M I N D F U L L N E S S

 It's been a crazy time, these past few months. Between The Virus and transitioning into "retirement" and getting to know various optometrists, ophthalmologists, and eye surgeons better, I hardly know which end is up anymore.

While all that shit is going on, life continues. My mother-in-law passed away. My daughter got married...

So I've been seeking solace in this "mindfulness" thing. Focus on the moment you are living right now. What's positive about it and what's not. Change what you can and hope for the best, but live as though this is the most important day of your life.

Which it is, of course. 

Part of the deal is stepping back from this all-ensnaring techno-succubus you're reading this on. If you're not careful, aware,... dare I say, "mindful," you can get lost in there and never find your way out.  

That's why I parked the laptop for the afternoon and sat out on the stoop. 

Birds galore. The geese are still doing their practice formations. The mourning doves don't let the blue jays bully them off the feeder...

Took a hike down to Gowan Lake. That's an hour and a half round trip through the woods and the forest air... nothing like it on your laptop.

Give it a try.

Pot-addled hillbilly almost gets woke

Been trying to make sense of this "systemic racism" stuff.

Even though we got all kinds of laws criminalizing racial discrimination, you've still got Blacks wildly over-represented in prison and in obits when somebody succumbs to police brutality. There's obviously a problem there. Is it the system? 

Another place Blacks are wildly over-represented is in the ranks of millionaire professional athletes. Is this the other side of the "systemic racism" coin?

Did you see how the fans reacted when the NFL tried to weasel in a little wokeness before the Texans-Chiefs  game last night? 

Sport is potentially a way to unite people. Why not let it do that, instead of poisoning sport with partisan politics?

Covid scepticism gaining legitimacy

 Here's a chap with the temerity to suggest that the Covid pandemic is fake. I know from my travels that there are many such chappies and chapettes, but they normally don't get write-ups at CBC news. What makes this particular chap noteworthy is his position as a chemistry professor at the University of Waterloo.

And if that's not enough succour for the pandemic deniers, note the topics of the last two Munk Debates Podcasts. Last week featured a debate about the merits of the Swedish model (no lockdown, no masks, no cratered economy). This week the discussion was around whether the scientific community has overreacted to the threat of the virus.

The fact that these questions are being debated on an establishment forum like the Munk Debates tells me that the One True God of covid group-think is running into some headwinds. 

May the non-believers thrive and prosper!

Jeff Rubin and me

 I've never met the man, so it came as a shock when reading a half-page interview with him in today's Globe and Mail to see how many of my ideas he's borrowed. Like the idea that "free trade" screwed the working class, for example. Then again, maybe he came to the same conclusions from his post as chief economist at CIBC as we shop-floor folks arrived at via lived experience. 

All those shops I spent time in during the 70's and 80's are long gone; Dayton Steel, Budd Automotive, General Electric, Dresser, Kearney-National, Frankel Steel, all gone to warmer climes with lower wages. When the big push was on to rewrite the Canada-US free trade deal to include Mexico, corporate media was saturated with feel-good nonsense about the unbeatable combination of Yankee know-how, Canadian resources, and cheap Mexican labour creating an epic triple-win.

The men and women on the shop floor didn't buy the bullshit. You'd have to be a raving racist to assume that only the shit jobs would be going to Mexico, as if our stupid brown brothers south of the Rio Grande were not capable of building anything we could build here. We knew ALL manufacturing jobs were at risk. We were right.

Rubin mentions Magna as an example. Before NAFTA was signed, Magna had one plant in Mexico employing a few hundred people. Today this "Canadian" success story has over two dozen plants and 30,000 employees in Mexico. That's 30,000 less jobs in Canada, but it's good for Canada from the point of view of Magna shareholders, and that's the point of view reflected in national media.

It's been a long and anguished downward spiral for Canadian workers ever since. The big employment news today is that Amazon is opening two more warehouses in Ontario. Big whoop! When they opened one in Ajax a few years ago PM Trudeau was on hand to thank the company for bringing "600 good jobs that will strengthen the middle class."

Bullshit! 

$14.50/hr. was a good middle-class wage in 1986. In 2016, not so much. 

I'll give Rubin the last word; 

"...in most of the post-war period, having a job was an exit from poverty. Now it's a gateway into poverty."

Shame!

Steve Nash gets woke

 I see where Steve Nash has fessed up to his White Privilege. I always thought there was a wiff of White Privilege behind his career. How else would a guy 6'2" get into the NBA?

There you go; White Privilege! 

But that's not what Steve was talking about. No, it's about his coaching gig. Seems he took the Whites Only fast-track to a head coaching job, which he obviously did.

So here's what bugs me about this. Steve, just like that school board superintendent who apologized for her white privilege a couple of years ago out in BC, is willing to spew a little woke-speak, but he won't follow through by doing the right thing. And if his remarks are even remotely sincere, renouncing his privilege has to mean declining the job, if it means anything at all.

Do the right thing, Steve, or live with the shame of being just another virtue-signalling hypocrite. 

Julian who?

 Julian Assange's extradition hearing resumes today. The result is a forgone conclusion. Assange will be packed off to the US where he will spend the rest of his life in the most solitary of solitary confinement in the most maximum of maximum security prisons. 

Given what's at stake for journalism, you'd think that our top journos would be all over the story. Instead, there's a virtual news black-out. Not a peep about it in today's Globe and Mail. The CBC is marginally better, with a single anonymous AP story which helpfully informs us "Assange's legal troubles began in 2010, when he was arrested in London at the request of Sweden, which wanted to question him on allegations of rape and sexual assault..."

No, I'm afraid that's fake news. Assange's legal troubles began when WikiLeaks released the infamous "collateral murder" video. That's when the world got to see US war crimes up close as a couple of America's Top Guns yukked it up while machine-gunning unarmed Iraqi civilians from their Apache helicopter.

That was Assange's crime; exposing US war crimes. It's not that Canada's corporate journalists aren't aware of this. Their silence is due to the fact that they like their corporate paycheques and wish to keep them coming.

That's how "press freedom" works!

Does BLM matter to black people?

 Flush with corporate cash, Back Lives Matter has become a contender in the world 'o social justice do-gooderism. 

What troubles me is how few black faces I see at BLM events. There's generally more white folks than black folks. And when peaceful protests go non-peaceful, it's almost always white people instigating the violence.

Almost makes you wonder if the movement has been co-opted...

But thankfully, the engines of empire continue to chug reliably along even while the body politic is ripping itself to shreds. America is on the cusp of civil war, but that won't slow down the slew of fresh sanctions on the likes of Lebanon and Iran and China, and anyone else who raises any objection to being ruled by Washington.

But why not.... when you're fomenting violence all over the world, a little trouble at home shouldn't come as a surprise.

The main concern, from the perspective of America's billionaire oligarchs, the same guys who have bought the political system and own the information infrastructure, is that the profits to be made from all this violence, both at home and abroad, accrue to them.

The Crad Kilodney of the internet?

Got a comment the other day referencing Ian Brown's recent Globe and Mail story about Crad Kilodney, and suggesting Kilodney and I are kindred spirits.

The Farm Manager made the same suggestion when Brown's article first came out, and I can see the resemblance. Kilodney was an outsider (of sorts) who never tired of pissing into the wind. Back in the day he was a fixture in downtown Toronto, trying to make a living hawking his self-published books, and apparently he somewhat succeeded in that mission. I used to have friendly enough exchanges with him, but must admit I never made a purchase.

That said, I'll also admit that tackling a book-length project is well beyond my ken. I'm pretty much tuckered out after an 800 word rant. Nor do I aspire to "make a living" by my writing, which is a lucky thing for me, as it would be a meagre living indeed.

On balance, I think he's probably more of a spirit guide than a kindred spirit.


Long live the contrarian ranters!

How to grow pot in your kitchen garden

Back in the spring I planted a few pot seeds in the kitchen garden. These were seeds that were, in theory, sterile.

Here's what happened.

Would somebody please take the Novichok away from Putin

That paranoid dictator Putin is at it again. This time the victim is the leading anti-Putin dissident in Russia, Alexei Navalny. They're not kidding when they say Putin is paranoid. Navalny polls at about a 2% approval rating, and still the paranoid Putin needs to rub him out.

Here's what I don't get. Before the Skripal affair no-one had ever heard of Novichok. Suddenly there it was, one of the most lethal chemical weapons in the arsenal of the Soviet Union. A military grade nerve agent, super highly deadly. So far Putin has used this super deadly weapon three times. On Skripal, his daughter, and now Navalny.

All of them are alive.

OK, so maybe it's not that super deadly...


Maybe Navalny just came down with a bad case of covid.

Macron gives up saving France, will save Lebanon instead

Finally acknowledging that the French are beyond redemption, Jupiter has thrown in the towel. He will henceforth focus His attention on countries where His efforts are more likely to be appreciated, like Lebanon, and perhaps Mali as well.

Who can blame Him? The Yellow Vesters have been poking sticks in the spokes for what, three years now? The ingrates have no clue how good they have it. Maybe they should move to Lebanon if they hate their country so much.

The Algerian hordes in the banlieues are even worse. You'd think the brown bastards would be grateful to live among the civilized, but noooo... Perhaps they can be given tickets to Mali if they miss Africa so much.

And if that's not enough, the irascible racists at Charlie Hebdo just announced an anniversary reprint of their famed "Blasphemous Cartoons of The Prophet" edition, which could set off a bigger explosion than what thirty tons of ammonia nitrate just did in Beirut.


So goodbye and godspeed, Macron... just make sure you take the unctuous imbecile BHL with you. There can be no redemption for France so long as that charlatan haunts the corridors of power.