Business as usual for the Toronto Maple Leafs

As in, after fifty-plus years of missing out on the finals, this supposed hockey hotbed treats us to another frustrating finale. 

Let's face it. Front office is a bunch of good ole boy hockey insiders, the kind of guys who make sure their pals have plush sinecures somewhere in the ranks. And they do! And they have and they will, no matter how bad the team these wankers are supposedly responsible for SUCKS!!!

The beautiful thing about having a Toronto franchise, and this is why the Leafs are one of the top sports brands, with a value well into the billions, for a team that hasn't come within a sniff of the Stanley Cup for over half a century, is that Canadians are so stupid they'll boycott this run-on sentence before they boycott the Leafs!

Rise up Leaf Nation. Away with Dubas. Away with Shanahan! Off with their heads!

Paying a 300% premium for your next sofa is a small price to pay for Chinese democracy

Check out this story at CBC. What remains of Canada's furniture industry accounts for approximately 15% of the Canadian furniture market, a market share that's been sinking steadily, since it's really hard to compete with China, where everything is made by Uighur slave labour.

So the furniture lobby petitioned the government for relief. They got it!

While in normal times such a petition would have been dismissed as frivolous, these are not normal times. Indeed, we and our allies have recently concluded that China wants to rule the world. Well, not "we and our allies" so much. Probably more accurate to say we're taking our cues from our betters, as we always do, and if Uncle Sam says China is an existential threat to our way of life, well, slapping a 295% tariff on commie couches is a small price to pay to save freedom and democracy.

So when you go to Leon's next week to pick up that sectional you saw in the flyer last week for $699, and the price is $3200, don't get pissy with the Leon's staff.

Unless selfish Canadians learn to pay a little more to preserve freedom, human rights, and democracy, communism is destined to prevail.

Uncle Sam's blank cheque destroyed the Israel that might have been

The Farm Manager has family in Israel. We're not tight or anything, but she hears through the extended family grapevine that the latest round of giving the terrorists a good slap hasn't enhanced their peace of mind.

What? The terrorists can hit Tel Aviv with sewer pipe rockets ? Fuck that, we're moving back to California.

Well into the 1960s, and this may well have been delusional, but well-intentioned people believed there could be a harmonious integration of the Jewish State into the Middle East. I for one believe there could have been. Edgar Bronfman thought there could have been. Yitzak Rabin thought there could have been.

After 1973 the US money became a toxic threat to the hopes of those who believed in harmonious integration. The arrival of the Russians in large numbers in the early nineties shifted Israeli politics irreparably rightward and more rightward, to the point where Israel is today seen in most of the world as a quasi-fascist apartheid state.

Along the way, Israel has provoked war after war with its neighbours and its caged Gaza population. None of these wars have done Israel one iota of good. Instead, they have fortified the position of the most belligerent and racist segments of Israeli politics. All of these wars of choice have been facilitated and paid for by America.

America has more than enough problems to solve at home. It's time to cut Israel loose.

That's the best hope for peace in the Middle East.

Pissing with Bruno

About half an hour ago, I stepped out for a pee. Bruno joined me.

While we do enjoy the benefits of indoor plumbing here at Falling Downs, one of the big draws of country living is you can just whip it out and take a whiz off the front stoop anytime nature calls. While I'm busy with that, Bruno is busy with a leak on the currant bushes.

I zip up and sit down for a smoke.

Bruno wanders over to the fire-pit and has another piss.

Then it's over to the arbour. Another piss.

Then the sun dial. I used to have my students make sun-dials. Lots of good learning in the making of a sun-dial.

After pissing on the sun-dial, he moves on to the bird-feeder for another piss...

Truly amazing! Why can he do this, but I can't?

Maybe because he's a young hound and I'm an old man.

Woke

Not too long after George Floyd, I happened upon a conversation at CBC radio between a well-known Caribbean-Canadian academic and writer, and a marquis CBC personality, who I hadn't previously realized was Black, because, well, it's sometimes hard to tell on the radio. Not that I'd ever given the matter any thought, but what the hell, maybe my thoughtlessness is part of the problem.

CBC was in the process of re-calibrating to fully-woke mode at the time, and who can blame them? The Floyd effect was causing a lot of soul-searching in a lot of places. The white bougie decision-makers at CBC can't be faulted for trying to get in front of the wave.

I was looking forward to what these two prominent Black Canadians might have to contribute to our understanding of race relations in Canada. What I heard was two extremely privileged and successful people swap stories about the micro-aggressions they had to overcome to make it to the top.

What?

The whole world is traumatised by that iconic image of Floyd's dying breaths, and these people want to talk about micro-aggressions? She's a household name, at least in that shrinking percentage of households where CBC Radio remains the go-to soundtrack. His $200k annual salary at U of T is a matter of public record. These Black Canadians are at the very pinnacle of Canada's cultural scene. They are part of the elite. Not the Black elite or the BIPOC elite; the actual, real-world Canadian elite, and the best they can do is micro-aggressions? Maybe those aren't the people we should be consulting for insights into the state of race relations.

It's not getting any better. Remember the CBC "scoop" last fall, when we got to hear, over and over again, the hysterical "this is what BIPOC people go through every day" shrieking of a 20-something Indian (from India) woman. Her dad is a cab-driver in Halifax, and she had released the in-car audio of an abusive drunk telling him to go back where he came from.

Sorry kid. Contrary to what you learned in your social justice seminar, that's not a BIPOC thing, it's a cab-driver thing. My father had a brief stint driving a cab in his early years in Canada. His cab was shit in, pissed in, puked in, and while his English wasn't yet good enough to appreciate the nuances of the verbal abuse, being spat on is something everyone understands. He was and remains white. It's what happens when you have drunks in your cab. It's not about racism; it's about drunken a-holes.

It's not just the CBC. What were the brainiacs at The Globe and Mail thinking when they plastered a picture of 24 yo Alfred Burgesson on the front page of Report on Business? That used to be a serious space, reserved for serious capitalists who had built some seriously polluting gold mines and made some serious billions or something. And only the most seriously successful of them would dare put their feet on the boardroom table.

I've followed Burgesson a little since that came out. He's a really sharp guy who knows intuitively which way the wind is blowing. You'll be hearing his name again, as long as the white bougie management types think there's something to gain in promoting him, but please, not on the front page of Report on Business, at least until he has some business experience, or business education, or... any accomplishment whatsoever!

The virtue signalling of bougie white folks doesn't do anything to improve race relations.

 

U of T professor agrees BIPOC is bullsh!t

Sweet vindication for the pot-addled hillbilly;  a philosophy prof at U of T has an opinion piece in the Globe and Mail today that essentially reprises something I wrote a month ago, Why BIPOC is bullsh!t. Here's a quote from Professor Joseph Heath;

... the Black population in Canada consists almost entirely of immigrants and their immediate descendants.

Exactly! They voluntarily came to Canada of their own accord. Their ancestors were not brought here against their will in the holds of slave ships. They are every bit as much "settlers" in this country as are the white settlers.

Heath goes on to suggest an alternative, more "Canadian" acronym for Canada's non-white population; FIVN, which stands for Francophone, Indigenous, and Visible Minority. I believe he's partially contradicting himself by favouring the Fs over the Is, but IFVM doesn't quite roll off the tongue as easily.

As much as I appreciate the back-up, I suspect the wokesters at U of T will soon be circulating a petition to have Professor Heath tarred, feathered, and run out of town. He will stand accused of erasing Blacks from the Canadian experience.

He is not. He is merely suggesting a more appropriate acronym.

The gut-wagon

Not sure where this lurch down memory lane originated, but I got to thinking about knocking around in the Guelph-Cambridge-KW neighbourhood back in the seventies. That's when southern Ontario was still an industrial powerhouse. Decent jobs were abundant.

By decent, I mean a guy working in any of the unionized manufacturing plants, and even most of the non-union ones, could afford a house and a car and a vacation now and then. Unfortunately, we took it all for granted and it's long gone.

Most of those places had cafeterias, but quite often the cafeteria was only open during the day shift. If you happened to work second shift, which would typically look like 4 till midnight or something like that, you were out of luck.

There were often good reasons to work second shift, aside from the shift premium. In my case, as a welder, things got pretty dodgy in mid-July when the temperature outside was 90. I've never in my life seen such a thing as an air-conditioned welding shop, so second shift was the way to go.

If the cafeteria was closed, and you lacked the foresight to pack a lunch, you were left to scrabble for whatever was on offer when the gut-wagon pulled into the parking lot at lunch-time. That might not have been at the beginning of lunch, because these guys had to rush around to different worksites that shared the same half hour lunch slot. 

The fare from these mobile lunchrooms wasn't that great. You typically had a selection of plastic-wrapped sandwiches, subs, and donuts. If you wanted a hot meal there was burgers that were cooked up six hours beforehand and had been marinating under a heat lamp ever since. For drinks you could have a coffee or a canned pop. Bottled water hadn't been invented yet.

The folks who ran these trucks, and they were quite often women, had an enviable mark-up on their goods, but I often wondered what kind of living they really made. The more savvy ones would supplement their income with a weed sideline or maybe a can of beer instead of a can of pop for the right people, but I doubt they made as much as their customers.

They did have one great advantage, though. At the end of lunch, they drove away.

I had to go back to work.

Them crafty buzzards

There's been turkey vultures hanging around the barn for weeks now.  You'll often see up to a dozen sunning themselves on the roof. I suspect there's some nesting going on in there as well.

Tonight I spent some time on the stoop just watching their take-offs and landings. There was a brisk wind coming in from the NW. They do multiple passes, swooping low overhead, literally fifty feet from me. I've got thirty foot plus trees lining the driveway, and they'll weave between the trees on their next approach to the barn roof. They do multiple loops and try different routes and altitudes before finally landing. It is an absolute wonder to behold!

Beats the hell out of Netflix.

You can't always tell the winners from the losers when they're just kids

The topic of highschool destreaming is hot once again. The colleagues I left behind in the math department (good luck, suckers!) are coming to terms with that right now, as the province rolls out a new math curriculum designed to coincide with destreaming. That's where the students who actually get math were separated from the ones who didn't, and for the most part, didn't give a shit.

It has been evident for some time that certain ethnic/racial groups are over-represented in the stream of those who don't give a shit. This has repercussions down the road, because when you take the slow stream, most professional schools, be it engineering, business, law, or whatever, don't admit you.

So, you're stuck with a sociology degree from a second tier school, or, if you're lucky, you turned to something you were interested in and learned a useful trade or something. (btw, all the construction trades in Toronto are paying over $100k/ yr; how you making out with that soc degree?)

The social justice entrepreneurs have figured out that the only way to eliminate this glaring example of systemic racism is to teach the kids who like math in the same room with the kids who don't give a shit. 

And while that initiative is bound for certain failure, I do believe you can't really peg a kid when they're 12 or 13. I always figured my job as a teacher was to help the kids evolve, blossom, develop... not peg them!

In my 25 years I always taught the slow stream. Quite often the kids who didn't give a shit were extremely bright. They just weren't turned on by anything the school board was offering. I remember a goofy kid who took my welding class three or four times. Nice guy. Never finished a course. Never got a credit and couldn't care less. Had a keen interest in special effects and was trying to get a DJ career going. When he actually showed up and built out a project, I could see he had something going, but overall, I figured the folks who make the streaming call likely had him in the right place.

A few years later, I run into the guy. Hey, good to see ya, how you been?

He was just back from Europe, where he was travelling with the latest Madonna tour. With no highschool diploma, but a knack for tinkering with things, he got in with a special effects shop in Toronto. When they were hired for the Madonna tour, he was in on the ride.

The fascist affiliations of our latest "media freedom" martyr

A few years ago, when Chrystia Freeland ascended to her role as Foreign Minister, a story began to circulate about the Nazi affiliations of her grandfather.

"RUSSIAN DISINFORMATION!!!" the FM squealed.

"Russian disinformation," our media parroted.

That might have been the end of it, but somehow a gang of Putinists infiltrated the ranks of the Ottawa Citizen, and suddenly we saw this headline; Chrystia Freeland's granddad was indeed a Nazi Collaborator- so much for Russian Disinformation.

Being exposed as a liar didn't hurt Chrystia's career. She is now Deputy PM, AND Finance Minister! Draw your own conclusions about what that says about the talent pool in Ottawa.

Chrystia's former department has issued two denunciations over three days re the Roman Protasevich saga, the second being a joint press release in concert with our allies. It's pretty much what you'd expect; a declaration of our virtue in standing up for media freedom in the face of authoritarian nogoodniks like Putin and Lukashenko. Bear in mind that "our allies" are the same pack of poodles who actively connive in the silencing of Julian Assange, because media freedom, don't you know!

Well, there's a lot of media in the world, and a few of them have even done some research on the background of the "journalist" at the centre of story. Seems there's a lot more to know about the guy than what the CBC or the Globe and Mail want you to know!

Such as the fact that our media freedom martyr has serious Nazi cred, and has been on the US payroll for years! On the ground in Maidan Square for the Nuland-Pyatt "Revolution of Dignity" in 2014. On the front lines in Donesk in 2015-16. On a week-long visit to Washington, where he was feted by the State Department in 2018...

Yup, that's the kind of journalist we're willing to support!

Hallelujah! Covid beaten back! Thank God for science!

Good news, Ontario! Our case numbers are going down, down, down!

It's almost safe to open up the schools and the hardware stores! Golf courses got the green light just a few days ago. Happy days are almost here again!

(BTW, apparently Ontario was the only jurisdiction in the world that closed golf courses. Obviously our experts are a cut above the run-of-the-mill experts found elsewhere...)

To what do we owe our reversal of fortune?

Vaccines! Thank God for those super-duper miracles of science! What else could be at work? 

I can think of one thing; Ontario has quietly tapered the number of daily covid tests administered. Ontario is quite transparent about our pandemic data. I have no idea why our news media generally don't report on testing numbers; perhaps they fear such honesty would interfere with their over-arching mission of keeping the populace scared shitless.

Back in January, Ontario was routinely doing 60-70,000 tests per day. For the past week the average is under 30,000 per day. It doesn't take an "expert" to figure out less testing will result in fewer cases.

Journalistic malfeasance at its finest!

 

How many CBC producers does it take to put a 90 minute show on the radio?

This reminds me of that Newfie joke about changing a light-bulb.

I caught a bit of "Sunday Magazine" the other day, CBC's flaccid replacement for Michael Enright, the selfish bastard who put his own interests ahead of his audience. We miss you, Mr. Enright!

Anyway, David Common was the guest host, and at the end of the show, he rhymed off the producers responsible. I counted five names, plus a senior producer and an executive producer. That's a total of seven producers! Throw in their support staff, not to mention the actual journos, and holy shit, there's gotta be a cast of hundreds with their fingers in this 90 minutes of, frankly, banality.

Sort of reminds me of the head-count inflation that went on back when they volunteered me to be the official time-keeper for the school football team's home games. That meant I had to rustle up a few kids to hold the signal poles and stuff. Once the kids figured out I had the power to excuse them from class, I got real popular real fast.

Didn't take long before the pole-holders had back-ups. Then, a totally new innovation; umbrella girls, in case it rained! Yup, just in case, we soon had a team of umbrella girls excused from class for the home games. I personally needed three, because I'm a fairly large guy. The pole kids would of course need umbrella girls, as would the back up pole kids. And then of course we had a back-up team of umbrella girls, just in case.

Overall, while I enjoyed the brief burst of popularity my new position brought, I have to say I was a little disappointed. The only game when it actually rained, most of them just buggered off!

Standing with Protasevich while burying Assange

Our media are waxing indignant over the Protasevich incident. An obscure 26 year old journalist whose career trajectory has consisted primarily of toiling for US funded "news" operations in Eastern Europe was taken into custody in Belarus after his commercial flight was forced down by a Belarus fighter jet.

Viola! A new icon of press freedom is born!

So why do we celebrate free-press champion Roman Protasevich, while allowing free-press champion Julian Assange to rot in a UK prison?

That's easy enough!

Julian Assange is a fierce critic of American Empire.

Roman Protasevich is an employee of the American Empire.

"Press freedom" has absolutely nothing to do with it.

 

Fight for free speech! Stand with Roman Protasevich! Who is Julian Assange?

Check out the stomach-churning hypocrisy as free-speech warrior Rachel Maddow interviews Professor Tim Snyder re the abduction of blogger Roman Protasevich.

It's just an awful thing, isn't it, that an authoritarian state like Belarus, inspired of course by Putin and Trump, would resort to the use of force to silence its critics?

Shocking! The very foundations of the Free Word are threatened when critical voices are silenced... blah blah blah!

This is shameless ruling-class myopia on full display. The same Western democracies that have connived for over ten years to silence Julian Assange now feign umbrage over Lukashenko's attempt to silence one of his critics. 

What should be truly frightening is that vast swathes of the US pubic are so poorly informed they don't even realize when their betters are bullshitting them.

The manifold joys of ageing

A few days ago I got an email from an old friend in Calgary, recently retired. He can't sleep, feels shitty half the day, but by the way, let's hike the Bruce Trail from Wiarton to Tobermory. 

Then tonight, I had a phone chat with my old pal Kipling, who felt compelled to share in excruciatingly graphic detail how his digestive tract has been complicating his life, but by the way...

These guys are in what's called "denial."

And so am I.

Let's face it; we're getting old.

Appliances, electronics, lawnmowers... and planned obsolescence

Back in the eighties, my jerk-off brother-in-law gifted me a used lawnmower. It was a cheapo he'd bought at Canadian Tire sometime in the early seventies. I used it for another ten years before the deck rusted through to the point of making it unusable.

I'm recalling this because the Farm Manager was just on a rant about appliances. 

"Why can't they make anything that lasts even five years?"

And as we all know, if you're on five year old technology, well.... what's wrong with you?

On the one hand, you'd think that if fifty years ago we could build a lawnmower that could actually cut grass for twenty-five years, we'd be building life-time mowers by now.

But no. In fact, things have gone drastically in the other direction. In the barn I've got a Sears mower, top of the line with the exception of the self-driving feature, that didn't quite make it five years. There's also another $400+ mower with a Honda engine that died after three years (and half the price of that mower was for the Honda name!), and a couple of low-budget made-in-China pieces of shit, because if even the supposedly "quality" brands can't give you five years, what's the point?

Same goes with any household appliance. I remember my mother getting a new kitchen range about '62. It was working great well into the 80s, and was only forsaken for remodelling reasons. It still worked great after 25 years.

Tech has an even more insidious agenda, because the tech gods have the advantage of the semi-legit argument of "new technology" which the lawnmower and appliance builders don't. Their game is to get everybody on the planet addicted to smart phones and, in a perfect world (at least for the tech gods), replace them every two years or even sooner. The very idea of building a phone or tablet that can be upgraded instead of replaced is anathema to the industry.

Sure thing, and billions of "obsolete" devices are discarded every year, with scarcely a thought for the environmental impact of either the electronic garbage or the scale of rare-earth mining required to keep this tsunami of toxic waste growing.

"Planned obsolescence" has corrupted the economy to its core. The best and brightest minds no longer work to engineer products that offer long-term performance and sound value for the dollar. Instead, the best and brightest minds are hard at work to ensure the shitty shit they sell us gets even shittier going forward.

After all, what kind of capitalist with a brain in his head would build a lawnmower that lasts 25 years, when the suckers will be grateful if they find one that lasts five years?

The Black people missing from the Toronto Star's obsession with the Black experience

It's not just the Toronto Star of course, but their feature today on how 15 (yes, 15 out of what, maybe a million Blacks in Toronto?) Blacks feel about racial issues a year on from George Floyd made we wonder what Black people really think.

Because not every Black person is a community organizer or an activist or a professor, which is pretty much all I got in that Toronto Star story.

Where's the Black folks I used to work with? What do the Black welders and shipyard workers and steel-fab workers think? 

One thing I know for sure is they aren't lighting candles at their in-home George Floyd shrines.

Why can't the Toronto Star or the CBC find some space for these Black people?

Bruno's big adventure

The regular reader will be acquainted with Bruno, the silver-grey Neopolitan runt we picked up at the animal shelter down the road a few months back. Probably not the brightest dog of all time, and doesn't see very well, and occasionally attacks other dogs at random, which I think is related to not seeing very well, but he is the love of our lives.

The other day, the Farm Manager brought home eighty dollars worth of tomato cages she'd scored at curb-side pickup at Home Hardware, for the forty bucks worth of tomatoes she'll grow this year. Don't worry though; those cages should pay for themselves in just a couple of years.

Unless of course Bruno figures out a way to destroy them, and frankly, it never occurred to us that such a thing was possible.

The FM got the deluxe extra-large tomato cages and tossed them in her 10x10 kitchen garden. Naturally, Bruno had to investigate the new stuff, and wouldn't you know, he gets his head stuck up the large end of a tomato cage.

Although Bruno is a "runt," a runt Neo weighs in at a hundred and fifty pounds or so, and the sight of him trying to fight off the four-foot tomato cage that had attacked him was quite something. He raced back and forth across the yard in a mad panic, banging into various arbours, bird-feeders, plant-hangers and the like, until I was able to get close enough to pull off the offending tomato cage, at which point it was a crumpled mess of broken welds and bent wire.

But Bruno's ok now.

Canada has ordered 400 million doses of vaccine for a population of 35 million

Why? Because PM Fluffy is a belt-and-suspenders kinda guy.

That's how we roll, up here in the Great White North. Sure, that makes a mockery of our commitment to the Covax initiative we're very vocally supportive of, where the rich countries shared the vaccines with the poor countries.

As far as I know, Canada, a proud member of the G7 "richest states" club, has taken more out of Covax than it has put in.

How does that square with Fluffy's "feminist foreign policy?"

China is destined to bury us

Sleepy Joe was right to mention, in his State of the Union address that was not a State of the Union address, that China was America's number one competitor. 

Or perhaps, our "adversary."

Or, if you're following Fox or Breitbart, "the enemy."

In January of 2020 I was teaching a "Civics" class. That's a short-straw teaching assignment reserved for the malcontents who are out of favour with admin, so I taught it frequently. 

According to the official Ministry of Education documents, this mandatory course for grade 10 students is intended to inculcate "appreciation for democracy," among other things.

My class was watching China build a 1,000 bed covid hospital in a week or so.

My comment at the time was, these people are going to bury us.

True then.

True now.

American society is a fat and lazy wasteland of people who feel entitled to everything and will work for no notion of any conceivable "common good."

China follows a different philosophy.

 

Spending time

 In mid-February 2020 I had emergency eye surgery to mend a detached retina. By the time I was cleared to exit my 23 and a half hour per day couch lockdown, the first pandemic lockdown was upon us. By September I was officially retired.

Over a year later, the pandemic is still a thing, and here in Ontario the latest experts have assured us we might, if we behave, if we keep masking and social distancing, and of course get our shots, be allowed a restaurant meal or an in-person hardware store excursion by the end of June.

In the meantime it's been impossible to get anything going that looks like a retirement routine. Every time I get started - Wednesday breakfast with the retired Xerox repair guy, or Friday lunch with the local Green candidate, an occasional round of golf, a game I haven't played in over thirty years - the experts shut us down again.

Which leaves me with a lot of time to spend, which in turn has left me with the question; what's the difference between spending time and wasting time?

The internet is the greatest time-waster ever invented. It starts off every morning luring me in to check the top stories of the day. Of course, for a seasoned news junkie, that means reading multiple news sites to make sure you're covering all the angles on any given story. Up to a point, this can be time well spent. But it can also lead down the rabbit-hole of researching whatever sources are quoted and what their affiliations are. This can take hours, and the only thing that's going to come out of it, at the most, is a pithy blog post that eight people might read. Somewhere along the line, spending time morphs into wasted time.

I've been pushing back. It takes a certain amount of resolve to put down the laptop, and some days I have more than others. Bruno's been keen on getting me out for walks in the woods. There's a particularly rugged 400 acre tract right around the corner that has all kinds of trails and a couple of little lakes. While the perimeter is festooned with warnings that trespassers will be prosecuted, the owner passed away a couple of years back and the heirs are busy contesting the will, so I suspect we'll be enjoying our walks there for a few years yet.

In the last few days, as we've been getting a little more summer weather, Bruno's been letting me know he's not for long walks in the mid-day heat. I've compensated by taking up foraging in the shaded woodlot across the road. We've been cooking up fiddle-heads for a couple weeks, but they're pretty much over now. Today we brought home some wild leeks that will find their way into a delicious soup.

Spending a few hours in the cool of the forest, alone with my thoughts and my dog, and ending the day with a home-cooked meal that includes wild things, brings a level of satisfaction I've never found on the internet.

Mayor supports 2.9 million dollar tax break for Porsche dealership

Why? Watson was ready for that question. Because it will actually increase tax revenue on a long enough horizon. 

Oh fuck off! 

Seriously? It's rising tides lifting all boats and trickle-down prosperity all over again!

Let's party like it's 1978!

I'll tell you the real reason Mayor Watson is on board with the tax break. The kinds of folks who aspire to be Porsche drivers, and those who already are, will appreciate the shout-out.

And that's not a bad demographic to have in your corner at fund-raising time.

Confessions of a digital dummy

I must admit I don't have much use for internet shopping, and avoid it if at all possible.

Partly that's because you can't shop on-line without putting your credit card info out there, and it seems to me that sooner or later even the most reputable on-line vendors get hacked, and that's when you get a bill for a Bali vacation you never took. 

The other part is that it's very hard to think on-line-shopping without thinking Amazon. Don't get me started. Amazon opens a warehouse... oh, I'm sorry, a "fullfilment centre" in Brampton that'll bring 600 jobs at min wage plus fifty cents, and PM Fluffy is right there thanking Jeff Bezos for "creating solid full-time jobs that will strengthen the middle class."

Oh fuck off!

Amazon does not create jobs, it kills them. Depending on how you look at it, for every job Amazon "creates," it will eliminate somewhere between two and five in the bricks-and-mortar economy. Thanks Jeff!

So then my lawnmower goes for a shit, and we're under lock-down, and while you can go and spread your germs at Foodland or the corner store or the LCBO, you can't go into a hardware store, and until they sell lawnmowers at Foodland or the corner store or the LCBO, I'm outta options. 

I crack open my laptop and check my favourites first. I've decided to go with another push-mower. Ya, I know nobody with a lawn this size cuts it with a push mower. I'll leave the rider till after my first serious heart event. In the meantime, pushing a lawnmower around hopefully pushes that date back a bit.

My first stop is Home Hardware's website. It's my first stop because it's a Canadian company with a folksy origin story. Out of St. Jacobs Ontario, deep in the heart of Mennonite country. First time I get to their site, there's no prices on any of their stuff. I'm told to put in a postal code to get pricing.

I must have put in the wrong postal code. I know it starts with "n," but how often do I write letters to myself? By the time I went to the Canada Post site to retrieve the correct postal code (and I did have the first letter right) I never again saw the little window to enter it, even after a half hour of repeatedly trying. 

You gotta spruce up your web-page, folks!

My second choice is Canadian Tire. Still Canadian, but way more corporate. I see prices right away. I find my lawnmower. I'm ready to buy!

Alas, I'm looking for curbside pick-up, and there is nothing I can do to convince the Canadian Tire website that my nearest store is 25 km away in Owen Sound, not 600 km away in another province. 

You gotta spruce up your website, folks!

Hate to do it, but my next shot brings in the US multinational, Home Depot. Things start off promising! I can see on my laptop that the Owen Sound store has 8 of the model in stock that I want. Prices are right up front. Finally! 

I can almost smell the fresh-cut grass!

But then I hit a snag. I simply cannot find curbside pickup on the website. I call the store. The person who answers tells me she's on a "chat" and therefore cannot view her screen to direct me towards any possible link to curbside pickup.

By now I've spent three hours on-line trying to buy a lawnmower, and there is no prospect of one in my immediate future. 

The FM gets home. I spell out the situation. She gets on the computer. Within two minutes she's figured out that to find curbside pick-up at Home Depot, I have to go into my cart...

How am I supposed to know?! 

Spruce up your website, folks!

We have untold billions for war, but only prayers for peace

Things aren't looking that great in the Only Democracy in the Middle East at the moment. The Greatest Leader Since Moses is fighting for his political life, and he has made every Jew in Israel into, quite literally, a front-line soldier in that fight.

The rank stupidity of this escalation beggars belief. Yet, there are those who profit from such things. I can imagine hearts were cheered in certain investor circles when an emergency 700 millions arms deal was agreed with Israel. 

That's why they love Israel.

It's a profit centre.

Peace, on the other hand, would be a definite threat to those profits, and not only in the Middle East. 

So why would any rational hedge fund manager invest in peace?

War pays!

As thousands protest for Palestine, CBC foregrounds dozens who protest for Jewish extremism

Not sure where to go with this story.

Our deep-state masters obviously want us to cheer for Israel and hate the Palestinians. Here's a guy whose byline used to grace the pages of the Toronto Star. He fell out of favour after he began showing a tendency to favouring truth over wishful thinking.

The CBC brain trust has been caught once again with their heads up their well-padded asses, squirming in every which-way to avoid being called out on their never-ending celebration of American Exceptionalism, which manifests as Jewish Supremacy in Palestine.

If indeed the arc of history bends towards justice, the CBC is missing the story.

Every life lost in the current escalation must be attributed to one corrupt politician

I find it astonishing that there isn't more acknowledgement of how Netanyahu is engineering the current calamity for his own advantage. There have been some cursory stories in Israeli media about this situation "helping" Netanyahu (no shit!!!), but, as usual, you will never find any kind of critical thinking in US media.

As the occupying power, Israel is responsible for the goings-on throughout not only Israel proper, but the occupied territories as well, and that includes Gaza. The PM of Israel is in the position of being able to turn up the heat or turn it down. 

He's in a bit of a jam at the moment.

Let's crank the heat to eleven!

See the results live on CNN and Fox News!

Brouhaha in Boiler Hall

The high school in which I served most of my 25 year stretch was the largest in the Greywater School Board. The building had a signature architectural feature, a long hallway with a south-facing window wall overlooking a sun-dappled courtyard on one side, and the boiler room and sundry mechanical bits on the other. 

Boiler Hall was colloquially known as Perv Hall, as it was at one time a notorious venue for what we now call sexual harassment, formerly known as boys being boys. The boys habituating the hall were mostly the jock types, which included not only the usual suspects from the starting lineups of the football, basketball, and hockey squads, and their hangers-on, but also the elite junior hockey players who were only in town because they'd been drafted by the local Jr. A team.

The elite players certainly saw themselves as such, and carried on accordingly. This lead to friction with the locals, and particularly a sub-group of locals informally referred to as the "Shallow Lake Boys."

Shallow Lake is a hamlet roughly half-way between Owen Sound and Sauble Beach. It's not a college town or anything like that. It's pretty much all hard-working, hard-partying, dump-truck drivers and diesel mechanics, and the hard-working and hard-partying women who love them. It's the kind of place a caring dad spends years in the garage with his young son fixing up a 500 horse-power hotrod that'll be ready to go on Junior's 16th birthday.

The brainiacs running our Board figured the best strategy for educating our guest hockey players was to keep them together as a class, maybe on the theory that they'd bring out the best in one another. Alas, it doesn't work that way. Put twenty obnoxious and entitled elite male teens in a room together, and they don't bring out the best; it goes in the opposite direction. They get more obnoxious and more entitled, which I'm sure any seasoned educator can tell you.

 I was only favoured with "teaching" these wankers once, when their regular babysitter was away. I thought I'd take the opportunity to discuss with them the very real-life imperative to have a Plan B just in case your dreams of NHL stardom fail to come true.

Well! Did that ever piss them off!

With one exception, every single one of them absolutely knew they'd be raking in the millions sooner rather than later, so what's this shit this out-of-touch teacher is talking about?! 

That exception was Joel Ward. To the best of my recollection he's the only one out of that class who managed to make a decent career in the NHL. Most of the other guys faded out of hockey after a few years in the minor pros. When you're 29 years old and playing on the second line for the Mississippi Mud Hens for two hundred bucks a week and a free apartment, well, hopefully that's when they recalled my words of advice.

The tensions between the Shallow Lake Boys and the out-of-town Jr. A guys was building. It wasn't that both groups weren't equally vulgar in their sexual harassment, but in a high school setting these bullies were always backed up and cheered on by their tall blonde and generally very hot girlfriends. Over the course of the semester several of the girlfriends changed allegiances and became "Puck Bunnies." I think that was the straw...

While I missed the actual festivities, I heard many detailed accounts. A Shallow Lake girlfriend called a recently defected Puck Bunny a skank, a couple of would-be NHLers took exception, and, long story short, those elite athletes were given a good thrashing by the local boys.

Not too long after, the Board prioritized changing the culture in Perv Hall. The elite athletes were disbursed throughout the system instead of being grouped together. By the time I retired, Perv Hall was perv free, harassment free, and a safe place for even the geekiest and most nerdy of misfits.

I call that progress.

Canadian Armed Forces roll out Operation Get the F**k Off Her

 A too-late antidote to "Operation Honour?"

Remember that? If I'm not mistaken, Vance was the top gun when that little double-entendre rolled out. Operation On Her.

Makes you wonder how many of the top brass were clinking brandy glasses at the Officers Club over that howler!

Anyway, the latest disgrace that our armed forces face is the revelation that our top vaccine roll-out boss, Major-General Danny Fortin, is another top brass guy who couldn't keep his hands off the lady soldiers.

I don't know... 

While I have every respect for the broad outlines of the feminist project, it was always obvious that bringing the girls into the foxhole would inevitably compromise national security.

I'll leave it at that.

One bourbon, one scotch, and one beer...

Hard to argue with the wisdom of Elvin Bishop and Lonesome George.

Been there ten times over. Landlady tired of your bullshit excuses? Tell me about it!

But the thing is, at the end of the day, the landlady gotta pay her bills too. And if you ever have the gross misfortune to be, literally, down to your last paycheque and out the door you go, that doesn't generally bring cheer to the landlandy's heart.

Which is why landladys all across the land still love to rock out to Lonesome George, even as they are simultaneously quaffing copious amounts of bourbon, scotch, and beer.

 

Israel's actions in Gaza and East Jerusalem will inflame anti-Semitism in France

And in every other country with substantial Muslim immigration. France, however, is in a class by itself.

The Arab banlieues are already seething. As well, there has been sporadic street violence from other disgruntled segments of society for the past couple of years. Not that street-level resistance has had much impact on the imperious Macron thus far. However, with an assortment of high-level military types already warning of a race war, images of Israeli police attacking worshippers at the Dome of the Rock can't help but inflame the situation.

What actions will France take to tamp down the racial tension?

They will declare support for Israel's right to defend itself.

They will double down on their war on Muslims in the Sahel.

And they will be totally befuddled when Arab mobs burn down Paris.

CBC finds 17 stories more important than civil war in Israel

Check out the CBC News home page at the very moment the Middle East teeters on the brink of all out regional war. You're introduced to 17 stories before you learn that "Fighting intensifies between Israel and Hamas." 

Seven of those more important stories are covid related, because hey, if we don't beat the virus, Middle East Peace won't matter anyway.

Then there's a bit about the latest iteration of Quebec's racist language laws, and a spot on how Bill Morneau broke the law with his WE charity hanky-panky, but oh well. Bill is a well-meaning but slightly absent-minded chap who once forgot to declare a villa in the south of France as an asset when first brought into cabinet.

Besides that, we learned the CBC lost a lawsuit, a gay guy is pissed off because he's still not allowed to make blood donations, and a couple of Black kids in small prairie towns bonded over..., well, being Black kids in small prairie towns, which I suppose is a happy enough thing for them, but which I'm sceptical will win CBC a lot of eyeballs in the 18-30 demographic. Oh, and there's one actual news story; Greyhound is shutting down all across Canada.

Only then do we learn that "fighting intensifies..."

The story itself, sourced from Associated Press (because CBC doesn't do foreign bureaus anymore) is relatively even-handed, pointing out the current crisis was triggered by "heavy handed Israeli police tactics" during Ramadan. 

True enough, but we've got historical precedent to draw on as well. Every time The Greatest Leader Since Moses has his back to the wall and risks losing an election, the violence is ramped up to whatever level is necessary, up to and including full-on war, to bring about the desired result. This time, Bibi sees his options as "go big or go to jail." So lets conjure up a really big round of violence, and the land will be awed anew by the steely resolve of their great helmsman.

Right now, the IDF is massing forces for a threatened incursion into Gaza. I'm sure that's a decision made on the political side by people around Netanyahu, because actual soldiers remember how that went last time. And how long do they imagine they'll be subduing Gaza before Hezbollah is drawn in. Then we'll see which estimate of how many missiles they have is most accurate. Various former senior officers have put the number in the hundreds of thousands. Iron Dome will be depleted after the first several dozen.

But if this gambit can keep Bibi's arse out of jail, it's worth a try!

The absurdity of it all...

I recently had a reunion with an old union brother from way back in my General Electric days. That's where I learned to weld, in their heavy transformer plant on Woodlawn Road in Guelph.

That was back in the day when Guelph still knew GE as "Generous Electric." We had the distinction of belonging to one of the last overtly "communist" unions, the UEW, led at the time by CS Jackson. Whatever one may think of commies, the union made us one of the preferred places to work in town.

I left GE after a couple of years, heading out to Alberta to make my fortune, har-dee-har, but Buddy stayed with the ship. Eventually GE sold off its heavy transformer business to Westinghouse. Then the Swiss multi-national ABB took it over. Finally, the plant was closed and heavy transformers are now built in Mexico, because why pay Gringo 30 bucks an hour to run that bead when Pedro is living in Fat City at 30 bucks a day.

Along the way, the commie union was eventually absorbed by the CAW. Stuff we had was gradually lost. The definite benefit pension plan became a defined contribution plan. Two tier contracts came in. The threat of moving to Mexico was always the company's ace-up-the-sleeve in any contract negotiation.

So Buddy finds himself unemployed in his early fifties, and at the same time, his marriage goes down the toilet, and long story short, he finds himself living in public housing in his golden years.

Since I had that bumper crop of herb, and I knew the dude was a toker from way back, I thought I'd drop him off a few ounces. He was quite appreciative. I wouldn't say he's living high off the hog in his smallish single-bed flat, but he's got the basics. A kitchen, a shitter, a bedroom, and a TV that gets every sports channel in the universe. He's a happy camper.

Given the nature of my visit, he gets to talking about the smoking regs in public housing. Apparently there's no smoking in public housing anymore, but get this; the smokers who already live there are grandfathered in!

Same rules for the pot smokers. He's in a small ground-level complex with maybe twelve units total, and everybody knows who's who. Buddy tells me the new guy who moved in two months ago has to step outside to smoke a cigarette or a joint, while the old-timers are blithely blowing smoke rings out their blunts in the comfort of the indoors.

The absurdity of it all...

Bibi goes out in a blaze of glory

It was six days ago that Israel's president Reuven Rivlin decreed that opposition leader Yair Lapid would have the opportunity to form a coalition. Meanwhile, The Greatest Leader Since Moses is still in the driver's seat.

Cue the sudden rise in violence. The nation needs a strong hand at the helm, now more than ever. When have we heard this before? Every time Bibi's in trouble?

I'm sure you've noticed how things have been going downhill ever since.

Bibi is down to his last moves to avoid his corruption trial. He's going large. He's doubling down... and doubling down again.

The small change from the Gaza rocketeers isn't at issue here, although they have tragically created some rare casualties of late. What is truly remarkable is that Bibi seems prepared to keep upping the ante. 

The missile that fell a few kilometers from Dimona the other week was a message.

Medina Spirit fails drug test - is nothing sacred?

Who can even imagine that evildoers would inject drugs into a race horse just to improve their chances?

Disgusting!

Outrageous!

An abomination!

A pivotal moment for the sport of kings?

Alas, they've been pumping whatever shit they can get away with into race horses since the very first horse race, if they thought it would up the odds.

Only "news" here is that there's so many morons about who think this is news.

Today Colombia, tomorrow Newfoundland

 Just the other day I was reading one of the Globe and Mail's top guns referring to Colombia as a "successful democracy."

That's the sort of air-head reportage we've come to expect from the Globe, sadly.

Seems the people of Colombia are somewhat out of sorts with their democracy. Not that our top-drawer journalists would notice, but the people of Newfoundland might. I'm guessing the run-of-the-mall folks in Newfoundland will take to their "big reset" about as well as their peers down south.

That's where we're all headed, in case you were wondering. These staggering hundreds of billions in deficits we have incurred fighting that deadly ole virus are gonna have to be paid back, don't ya know!

And that will require much belt-tightening (ie gutting social programs all over the place but going full steam ahead on our 60 billion dollar commitment to a new warship fleet so we can "stand with our allies" as they provoke nuclear war with Russia and China), raising taxes, and selling off what's left of the public domain.

That last part could be a game-changer for the Newfies. They've got tons of assets just doing nothing. Imagine if a savvy international investor, like Sheldon Adelson for example,was to buy Gros Morne Park. Newfoundland could become the Macau of the North Atlantic in no time!

I'm hoping the Newfies will follow the example of the Colombians.

Happy Mother's Day!

Let me say right off the top what a blessing it is to have reached pensioner status and still have two vibrant parents living in their own home! Not everybody gets to appreciate that.

Today's a day set aside to honour our moms. My mom came from a pretty tough place. Before she hit her teens she'd witnessed more death and destruction than I can possibly imagine. Their village in East Prussia was one of the last to evacuate as the Red Army approached. She spent five years in a refugee camp in Denmark before she was repatriated to a part of Germany as foreign as the moon.

A few years later she had married the dashing apprentice baker who rode his motorcycle half way across Germany to woo her on weekends.

Arriving in the new land with me in her arms and my sister in her belly, she took on every challenge head on, and eventually gave birth to five of them.

As far as I'm concerned, each of the five of us are all still the people we are today thanks to the Mom who brought us up. She was a powerhouse. 

I don't know how you did it, Mom. The kitchen garden you used to keep would be considered a hobby farm today. You are an inspiration every day.

Happy Mother's Day!

 

They don't make lawnmowers like they used to

I've got nothing but good things to say about my current piece-of-shit made-in-China lawnmower. I picked it up at Home Hardware a few years ago for $199 plus tax. That replaced my previous piece-of-shit lawnmower, also made in China...

But, no more than five years into its tenure, and while the motor started first pull after the winter hibernation, today one of the wheels fell off. Well, not fell off completely, but I guess metal fatigue led to the collapse of the gusset that stabilises the wheel assembly. I was able to bend it back into its original position and continue my mission, but you can only do that so many times before the thing breaks off completely. 

So I mention to the Farm Manager that I may have to get a new mower. She says, maybe it's time to consider a ride-on.

Ya, maybe she's right. Maybe it's time. In my mind, I figure I'm saving the cost of a gym membership by pushing the fucking lawnmower around for three hours a week. 

But maybe I'm being an idiot. Maybe I should get with the modern times. Smell the coffee, as it were.

After doing some research, I found the perfect ride-on mower. As a bonus, it has a back-hoe at one end and a bucket at the other, and all that for a mere $50k! And it's not even made in China!

The FM comes back with "they've got a nice John Deere ride-on at Home Depot for nineteen hundred bucks and it's got a beer-can holder."

So does the Kubota!

The CBC's never-ending pursuit of irrelevance

As a long-tine CBC Radio listener, and I'm talking fifty years plus, I'm embarrassed every time they embark on another campaign to make themselves more "cool," or possibly hip, relevant, engaged, dialled in... whatever you want to call yourself when you want to be with the cool kids in the high school cafeteria.

That's the level of management philosophy on view at CBC these days. The high school cafeteria mentality has taken over the news room. These are folks who see their shilling for establishment propaganda as revolutionary, as long as they can squeeze in a few hours on how awful life is for the two percent of Manitobans who identify as Black.

Further on down the road of toadying to the latest whims of the PC virus, these same mostly white (am I right?) geniuses come up with the idea of hosting an evening hour of "Black" music. Because the CBC is looking to lure in the Black teens from Jane-Finch?

Sorry CBC... that ain't gonna happen. 

You've been busy alienating your traditional base while abjectly failing to make yourselves relevant to any potential new audiences. Instead, you've become a conduit for rank partisan propaganda, with the incessant anti-China/Russia/Iran propaganda peddled by our finest US-funded think tanks.

And far be it from the professional journalism practitioners at CBC to ever grant two minutes of air time to any expert with an opinion contrary to the official narrative on the great pandemic.

The CBC today is pretty much what TASS was in Soviet Russia; the state-sponsored propaganda organ. Dressing it up with an hour of Indigenous music here and Black music there ain't gonna cover the stench of our slavish devotion to American Exceptionalism.

Tech totalitarianism - are we there yet?

There's all sorts of countries "opening up" now. What's also opening up is the opportunity for Big Tech to get on top of the imminent roll-out of the universal vaccine passport. That's where the vaxxed will be afforded special privileges not available to the non-believers. Like international travel, for example, or tickets for the next Rolling Stones tour. 

The logistics of such an international tracking scheme will of course be in the hands of Big Tech, because, who else?

Society has lagged in appreciating the consequences of the massive concentration of wealth that has occurred over the past few decades. We've ceded to billionaires powers that were once the preserve of kings, despots, dictators, or from time to time, democratic governments. Jack Dorsey, accountable only to himself (oh sorry, I forgot the board of directors and the shareholders... like they matter!?), has the power to silence the president of the United States.

Billionaires like Mike Bloomberg think nothing of dropping a few hundred millions on an election campaign just to help out their favourite horse, for owning politicians has replaced owning thoroughbreds among the billionaire sporting set. 

The Koch boys have been using their largess to corrupt the judicial system for over fifty years now. 

George Soros funds innumerable astro-turf operations around the world, which oddly enough, share virtually the exact same agenda as the US state department.

Jeff Bezos, top 'o the billionaire pile for five years running, owns the most influential newspaper in the USA (only because NYT staff are now obsessed with auditioning for Jerry Springer).

I could go on, but the long and the short of it is, the billionaires now own our politics, our media, our economy, and our future.

The billionaires who own the global information infrastructure have the power to make Little Bana into a global brand overnight. They have the power to bestow a Nobel Prize on Malala. They can elevate a disturbed teen from Sweden into a global climate authority. They can turn a petty criminal and drug addict into a global icon for racial justice. 

In short, they have the power to manipulate us into hating who they want us to hate, and cheering for whomever they tell us are the "good guys."

Imagine a future in which wealth becomes ever more concentrated. That's the trajectory we're on. The tech wizards pushing for 5G aren't doing it so a doctor in Singapore can do brain surgery on a child in Nunavut; they're doing it to entrench their wealth and power.

Are we there yet? 

Who remembers newfie jokes?

Or would they be Newfie jokes now? Capitalization is everything.

Once upon a time, Canada was awash with Newfie jokes. 

How many newfies does it take to change a lightbulb? Three. One to hold the lightbulb and two to turn the ladder.

To be perfectly honest, I don't recall precisely what triggered my Newfielia, since it was well past 4:20 in the afternoon, but we were just having a discussion about what caused the extinction of the newfie joke.

The Farm Manager puts it down to political correctness.

I'm not so sure. Political Corectitude didn't really go full throttle till the advent of the internet, and especially, smartphones. 

I believe Newfie jokes were in decline long before that.

Why?

I believe it largely had to do with other Canadians, ie the rest of us, getting to know Newfoundlanders up close and personal. 

Over the years, a lot of us had the opportunity to do just that. After Joey Smallwood brought the Newfies into Canada, they were soon overwhelmed by tough times. Newfies began the exodus from their Holy Land that, after a brief respite around the discovery of oil offshore, continues to this day.

Then the cod fishery collapsed, after years of mismanagement by professional experts in Ottawa, and the outflow of Newfs doubled.

That's why there's a Newfie diaspora across this country today. The biggest Newfie social club is in Cambridge Ontario.

Back in my jouneyman welder journeying days, the four provinces I worked in I always worked elbow to elbow with Newfies. They were everywhere!

And they were the most decent of down-to-earth people. All the maudlin cliches in Come From Away are true. 

I remember when my old pal Kipling and I were heading out west to make our fortune. Kipling piled my Dart GTS into a snowbank a hundred miles east of Winnipeg, because he fell asleep at the wheel at a hundred miles an hour.

It's dead of a minus forty winter night, and two longhairs are standing beside the Trans-Canada highway, and after standing there for a lot longer than you would imagine, given the reputation of this country as a land of kind and compassionate people, what finally pulled over to give us a ride was a Ford station wagon that already had five Newfies in it.

You can almost hear their conversation.  Ay Buddy, we should pick up Buddy and other Buddy. Aw come on Buddy, we already got Buddy and Buddy and whats-his name in the back. You mean Buddy? Ya. Well fuck off then, ya can't just leave Buddy out there freezin to death...

Anyway, all the Buddies scootched over and off we went.

So, ya. Why would you want to make fun of people who treat you like that? Newfie jokes died out because once you got to know Newfoundlanders, you just had too much respect.

But times have changed. Newfoundland, or more correctly, "Newfoundland and Labrador," have sprung a fresh Newfie joke on us. You see, while the Newfoundlanders are kind and trusting people, over the years they put too much trust in the kind of slippery folks who were running the rest of Canada, those fancy MBA types with law degrees and a few years at a major US investment bank. 

Generally speaking, that's not the kind of people regular folks should put their trust in, as the Newfies have discovered to their horror.

Today Moya Greene released her long-dreaded report on the economic future of a province run into the ground by four generations of well-educated experts.

Guess what? The "Modern Monetary Theory" that allows our federal government to explode deficits out the ying-yang doesn't apply in the case of Newfoundland. Nope, the same expert class that ran the ship aground is now recommending tough love, and lots of it.

That means drastic spending cuts, drastic cuts to social welfare, in a province already beset by poverty, cuts all over the place, and of course, the situation is so dire that we'll be forced to sell off all sorts of public assets. Oh, and raise taxes!

Hey Newfoundland, the joke's on you again!

Maybe it's time to contemplate Newfoundland independence.

Ryerson University to banish statue of Nelson Mandela

Ryerson's Board of Governors promised immediate steps to cleanse the name of Nelson Mandela from it's campus. The shocking move came after researchers at Ryerson's School of Anti-fascist Fashion Studies uncovered photographic evidence disclosing the icon's previously unknown links to white supremacy.

University wokesperson Ima Winer announced the school will take immediate steps to rename the Nelson Mandela Safe Space in the BIPOC Studies building, and would remove the Nelson Mandela statue in its Freedom Square forthwith.

Ryerson School of Anti-fascist Fashion Studies to return millions to white-supremacist donors

The Board of Governors at Canada's prestigious Ryerson University has voted unanimously to return $50 million to the family of Ted Rogers after evidence emerged of the family's secret support for white supremacy.

Wonder what's gonna happen when the wokesters see these picture of Donald Trump with Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Nelson Mandela?

"Herd immunity" no big deal after all - experts

Remember back in the early months of the Covid Fever, the pursuit of herd immunity was the over-arching goal of our war with the virus? Well, fuggedaboutit! Whatever science the experts promoting that hoax were following has apparently been eclipsed by new science. 

Check out this headline at CBC News: We probably won't achieve herd immunity against COVID-19 anytime soon, but it's OK, experts say.

Yup, forget about what the CBC's experts told you last week - that is so last week, and this is a fast-moving pandemic, in case you hadn't noticed. This week's experts have done some mathematical modelling, you know, like Neil Ferguson, and whadya know, herd immunity isn't the be-all and end-all that those other experts made it out to be.

What a relief!

Not only are Canadians suffering Covid Fatigue, many of us are also coming down with a new Variant Of Concern; Expert Bullshit Fatigue. By now the average news consumer must have figured out that for every expert chosen to put in front of the TV cameras, there are other experts, just as qualified, who would happily contradict them. Deciding which experts are allowed a platform is a matter politics, not science.

The most obvious clue that Biden's election was fixed

Don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting that the Dem's dirty dealing subverted the course of US democracy. After all, "US Democracy" is to actual democratic governance approximately what World Wrestling Entertainment is to martial arts, ie a flashy but eminently fake impostor. That's not random opinion or conspiracy theory; it's the conclusion of researchers at elite US universities.

The fact that American democracy is dead on the vine makes upholding the democratic spectacle that much more important, and that's more or less what the "democratic process" has become. The people must maintain their faith in the system at all costs, hence the over-the-top hyperbole leading up to November 3. Voters on both sides were regaled with scary stories about how this was the most important election in their lifetimes because it was their last chance to either save America from a fascist dictatorship or a communist dictatorship.

In the face of such risible hokum, the poorly educated but highly excitable American public responded by allegedly voting in record numbers, and by next morning, the designated bad guy was already outraging the known universe claiming dirty deeds. Of course he was; that's what bad guys do! Just ask Vince McMahon.

It was at this point that the Dem machine, confident that they had run a squeaky-clean campaign, might have said something along the lines of, "nothing to hide here, bring on any kind of investigation you want."

That's not what happened. Instead, the entire party apparatus and the Dem-aligned media universe exploded in hysterical umbrage that the Orange Ogre, that fat, racist, Putin-loving swine, would have the shameless audacity to besmirch the integrity of the DNC!

There's your clue!

America's terminal delusion

It's ten o'clock at night and I just got in from the front stoop. The frogs in the marsh across the way are singing up a storm. I'm happy to report that frogs and songbirds are doing well in this neck of the woods.

On the other hand, there's a nuclear power plant an hour down the road, and a proposal to locate a nuclear waste dump between here and there, so hedge your bets.

While I live in an idyllic storybook landscape, with stone fence-rows out front, and a nuclear reactor out back, I can't help but think that in a worst case scenario, that nuclear plant could become a serious threat to my quality of life.

That's why I'm perturbed by the tone of Sinophobic, Russophobic, and anti-Iran propaganda that has been unleashed in Western media. You can't open your Globe and Mail without tripping over a war-mongering rant penned by somebody from a think tank with intimate ties to the war-making industry.

Buried in the midst of the cliche-ridden pile of piffle that Sleepy Joe delivered to the United States of Amnesia the other night, was the claim that America's greatest strength is the power of our example, rather than the example of our power.

Sounds good, but let's take a closer look. 

What exactly are we talking about, when we talk about the example of our power?

Americans are relentlessly bombarded with the message that their invincible military bestrides the globe unchallenged.

In reality, that invincible military is pulling the plug on Afghanistan, because after twenty years, they're finally admitting they got beat by a bunch of part-time fighters, generally goat-herders and opium farmers, who only got out their WWII era AK-47s for fighting season.

So now, the masterminds of that mission figure they want to take on Russia, China, and Iran?

At the same time?

Ya, I know it looks crazy, but the truth is there's crazy people in Washington who truly believe they can keep provoking three countries with way more kill capacity than the Afghan resistance and somehow prevail. 

What's even more scary, is that they see their "window of opportunity" only lasting so long.

Be afraid.

Don't believe the headlines; real estate is cheap and plentiful in Canada

Check out this two-bedroom charmer with ocean view out in New Brunswick, for under $100k!

Who can even imagine such a thing! Sure, in the country as a whole, the average house now trades for 700k plus, but who says you have to live in the average house?

Why not decamp to a small town overlooking the Bay of Fundy? I did a job search at the Canada Job Bank, and if you don't mind working with seniors, the local LTC home is paying their PSWs over twenty bucks an hour, and they're hiring!

There's tons of Toronto LTC homes hiring right now for wages less than that.

Twenty bucks an hour goes way further in New Brunswick than it does in Toronto.

Go east, young PSW!

Your daily dose of China hate

Here's just a small taste, to give you a sense of the flavour;

... the US and its allies must make regime change in China the highest goal of their strategy toward that country.

Wow! That's one-time UK diplomat Roger Garside promoting his latest book, China Coup: The great Leap to Freedom, in the pages of The Globe and Mail this morning.

The West's great civilizing mission lives on. Having successfully democratized Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, it's time for America and her democratic allies to move on to bigger challenges.

Mr. Garside has full confidence in this strategy, because he knows that it will have the support of China's wealthy elite. This is of course the necessary pre-condition for any of the West's adventures in democratic regime overthrow. Wealthy elites are always the prime beneficiaries of our endeavours. 

As we ramp up our provocations in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Xinjiang, let our motto be "Democracy and Freedom for China's one percenters!"