Dream globally, live locally

Me and the Farm Manager were marvelling about the many happy news stories we've heard in these dark days of fear and panic.

The monarch butterflies are making a come-back. The FM speculates that could be because the shut-down of air travel made the air better for them. Could be, but I thought the fact there's been more milkweed in the fields was responsible. Of course, those factors could be related.

And apparently those coral reefs in the south pacific are making a come-back too. The FM figures that's because the cruise ships were grounded. She could be onto something there.

At any given moment, pre-Covid, there were hundreds of cruise ships out and about, from the high seas to the great rivers of Europe to the coast of Alaska. At any given moment, there's over half a million people living on those ships.

Celebration of gluttony is one of the features of holiday cruises. There's half a million packaged vacation consumers out on the high seas, spending every waking moment at the all you can eat buffet, at least when they're not at the all you can drink bar.

That's a lot of shit and piss that's gotta go somewhere. Have those people do their eating, drinking, shitting, and pissing at home for a year and a half... the coral reefs are back!

The technocrats and billionaires who meet regularly at COP shindigs or at Davos, are more the problem than the solution. They're wedded to an economic model of perpetual expansion of consumerism. We'll be in good shape so long as everybody keeps buying more and more shit.

No, we won't. And we don't need the permission of the billionaires and their host of lackeys to take a different tack.

Just slow down on the consumption. Let's see if we can make the economy shrink rather than grow. Less plastic in the oceans. Less garbage in the landfill. 

Let's make all you can eat and drink vacation packages as stigmatising as smoking in the grocery store.

Let's grow more of our food in our own gardens.

Let's see how well we can dine while eschewing anything that arrived via air cargo. I miss shrimp rings, but local smoked whitefish is pretty good too, and there's the feel-good factor of knowing there's no slave labour in the supply chain.

Buy less.

Live more.

7 World Trade Center and Frankel Steel

Long before I was a high school teacher or a house-builder or a ship-yard worker, I served a spell at the Frankel Steel fab shop in Milton, Ontario.

During my tenure, that shop did the structural steel for a Trump casino in Atlantic City, an addition to the Toyota plant in Cambridge, and various towers in New York City.

One of those towers was 7 World Trade Center, which would get famous almost twenty years later.

Quite aside from the fame, that project was memorable because some of the structural columns were far from ordinary. Apparently the building was going up over a subway station or power station or something, and you had some really interesting stuff to figure out to make that happen. As a fitter-welder, I had to do math I’d never imagined before, just to get the angles on the connector plates right.

About a year into my stay at Frankel, an opening came up in the QC department for a welding inspector. I wrote a CWB exam and got a Level 2 Welding Inspector ticket and had the job.

I was relatively young and naive, and liked the job, and therefore tried to do it better than anyone had ever done it before.

Big mistake. To be honest, I should have known better. By that point I was well acquainted with shop-floor culture.

Doing a bang-up job resulted in me doing 3X the inspections of the guy on the opposite shift, who’d been an inspector for twenty years. Inspector was a bargaining unit job, and you simply don’t make your union brothers look bad.

That was the shop-floor code.

The head of QC, while not in the bargaining unit, may have been getting nervous that this keener was just a little too keen.

I was in the habit of leaving well-written and highly entertaining reports for the head of QC. He seemed to enjoy them. One night I left a note recommending he get lawn chairs for the welders, so they could stay out of my way while I’m doing inspections.

When I got to work at 4 pm next day, every welder on the shop floor had a copy of that hilarious note. None of them found it amusing.

I did the only honourable thing I could do at that point; fall on my sword. That was my last day at Frankel Steel.

It only occurred to me recently that there may have been more than shop-floor etiquette in play.

During my brief tenure as an inspector, I had flagged three columns in the shipping yard that were fabricated on lower grade H-beams than what the specs called for. If the engineers specify a certain sheer strength in the steel there’s probably a reason.

Those cheaper H-beams saved a lot of money. Maybe I had to go because using lower grade steel was more than an innocent mistake? 

Make the billionaires pay

How much is too much?

That’s not a question a lot of people are asking, but why not? When we’ve got more people than ever in poverty, how is it possible we have more people than ever with fortunes in the tens and even hundreds of billions?

Could there be a connection?

Of course! In case you haven’t noticed, politics has become all about the money. When the billionaire class have bought and paid for the political order, why is it considered radical to suggest they tilt the field in favour of their self interest?

And let’s face it, if we cut back a multi-billionaire to a net worth of $900 million, it’s not as if they’ll be deprived of anything. You can have a nice country estate off Airport Road, and luxury condos in Whistler and Florida, and a modest Learjet to get around, and still have $850 million to leave to your kids.

What they’ll be deprived of is the ability to drop billions into political causes.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, somebody making $15/hr is barely gonna make it to a million bucks over the course of their working life. In a political system where money = power, how much power do they have?

On the one hand, there’s nothing like capitalism to motivate you to put in 90 hour weeks in order to make your business grow. Been there, done that. We don’t want to destroy the incentive to work.

On the other, it’s impossible to deny that back in the days of the 90% marginal income tax rate, when unions still had some schlep and before multi-billionaires roamed the earth, life was better.

We need to find a fair balance.

The addicts next door

The farm next door has a little cottage on the property that the original farmer built for his son. The current owner of the place is a dentist who lives far away, and lets out both the farmhouse and the cottage.

A few years ago a new couple moved into the cottage. They pretty much kept to themselves. I respect that. It's why folks move to the country; to enjoy some peace and tranquillity.

They owned two beautiful German shepherds. In the early years those dogs and our dogs wore a trail into the hayfield chasing each other back and forth across the quarter mile or so that separates us.

But things changed. The woman left. Police were involved. Things went downhill. The dude hasn't cut his lawn the last two summers.

There's a new woman, but we seldom see her. We seldom see the dogs. They'll be out for 18 hours straight, and then we don't see them for days at a time. They are seriously neglected, and I feel sorry for them.

Word is, it's fentanyl. Makes sense. You're off on a trip and who cares if the dogs shit in the house?

I always had a pretty loose attitude towards drugs in general, but what I'm seeing here gives me pause. These people have more or less ceased to function in society, save whatever social interactions are required to get more drugs. The dentist is trying to get them out because they can't pay rent. But they can afford to be completely messed up on drugs for days at a time.

We know how this ends. I just worry for the dogs.

World braces for Trump come-back

These are bleak times for Canada. From wildfires to catastrophic floods, the truth of climate change is making us pay attention. On top of that, we’ve spent almost two years and over 200 billions fighting the killer virus that’s still killing us, only to learn there’s an even deadlier variant on the way.

So you can imagine my reaction when I opened my Globe and Mail today and read this headline; “Canada must prepare for a Trump revival.”

OMG!!!

Haven’t we suffered enough? Besides, I was under the impression the Orange Ogre had been democratically deposed a year ago.

But experts whose thoughts the Globe brain trust see fit to publish are deeply concerned. For some reason, the worst president in history remains enormously popular, (which is, among other things, a searing indictment of America’s education system.)

The experts seem to think President Biden doesn’t have a hope in hell to win in ‘24. Based on his first ten months, they may be right.

Then Trump “would renew the awful menace the world barely survived the first time. As before, he would imperil world peace, give cover to authoritarians everywhere and destabilize the rules-based international legal order.”

Luckily, the experts see a way out, and Canada can play a leading role. The world needs a new coalition of democracies that could serve as the political wing of NATO. Current international institutions like the UN are no good, because they allow non-democracies to participate.

Our new coalition will employ the same all-for-one and one-for-all strategy used by NATO. We will reward countries who play democratic ball, together. We will punish those who don’t, together.

Sounds like the “experts” are trying to breathe fresh life into the American Empire!

Another black eye for Canada's "feminist foreign policy"

As far as I could tell from the news stories, parents of school-age children across Canada were thrilled and delighted to finally be able to have their wee ones vaccinated against the covid virus as of yesterday.

As luck would have it, yesterday also marked the release of the World Health Organization’s Interim Statement on COVID-19 Vaccination for Children and Adolescents. The document weighs the various pros and cons associated with child vaccination and points out that globally, the sum total of deaths in under - 25s amounts to .5% of all covid deaths.

It also points out that the vaccines would be far more useful if, instead of being used on a low-risk group in rich countries, they were applied to high-risk groups in poor countries. The following paragraph comes from the conclusion.

As a matter of global equity, as long as many parts of the world are facing extreme vaccine shortages, countries that have achieved high vaccine coverage in their high-risk populations should prioritize global sharing of COVID-19 vaccines through the COVAX facility before proceeding to vaccination of children and adolescents who are at low risk for severe disease.

Here in one of the richest of the rich countries, once we realized Moderna had higher risk factors than Pfizer, we quickly donated our 10 million dose stock-pile of Moderna vaccines to COVAX, and, our consciences assuaged, went full speed ahead with the roll-out of Pfizer’s children’s vaccine!

While that falls short of the spirit of the WHO recommendation, who cares?!

The thinking in Ottawa seems to be, feminist foreign policy aside, those poor countries should be grateful for whatever we give them, so too bad for their at-risk women and children.

That's how we roll here in the cradle of the world's first "feminist foreign policy."

Falling in the campfire while drunk

I long believed the world could be divided into two types of people; those who have fallen into the campfire while drunk, and those who have not.

But as the numbers on the odometer of life spin by, I've come to see that binary interpretation of reality as somewhat of an over-simplification.

For instance, there is no consideration whatsoever of those who fell into the campfire while sober.

Nor is there any consideration of those who may have been drunk, but fell into the outhouse or off the balcony instead.

I suspect that by the end of the day, Darwin will have separated the wheat from the chaff, as it were.

Which kinda brings us back to the binary, I suppose. 

In which case, we need to delve further and drill down deeper, and circle around the drain for awhile, something that used to be called "participatory sociology," before it was called something else. No "science" is as desperate as the social sciences to freshen up with some jargon shuffling.

But no matter. Where others see gratuitous preening, I see opportunity. Clearly, the question of campfire drinking requires more in the way of rigorous academic inquiry. And clearly, with my in-depth knowledge of and experience in both drinking and campfires, I'm the guy for the job.

Luckily, I have recently entered that stage of life called "retirement," and faced with multiple unpleasant options, have decided this might be the time for that graduate degree in Soc. To that end, I'm looking around for a school that would have me.

I was thinking Ryerson, because they're pretty open to fresh ideas. Mind you, they seem pretty open to completely stupid ideas too, but that doesn't necessarily hurt my case.

So I'm working on a thesis proposal and also preparing multiple grant applications, so I can hit the ground running. If I can pull this off, I should be able to get enough money to study campfire drunkeness as a participant observer for at least the next three or four years.

See you round the campfire!

Only in America

The true believers still think of America as "the city on a hill."

The light unto the nations, and all that shit.

Only in America can a 17 year old kid (legally) arm himself with an assault rifle and deputize himself as a custodian of law and order.

Only in America can random miscreants arm themselves and have the full support of major media in their campaign to right historical wrongs by looting and rioting.

Only in America could the ensuing clash of moral imperatives result in a media melt-down and… more looting and rioting?

Sometimes it’s way better to live in the city down the hill.

Make Canada Great Again

One of the thought leaders at Canada’s newspaper of record has some tips today on how we can regain the swagger he imagines we once had on the world stage. Seems our allies are sniggering behind our backs at our failure to stand up to the Yellow Peril, and we desperately need to get back in their good graces.

Firstly, we need to stand strong with Taiwan, the former province of China now under threat of invasion.

That’s easy to say, but what will that look like in real life? Is there any reason to believe it’ll look better than how we stood with the people of Afghanistan against the Taliban? We and our allies were run out of that benighted land by a gaggle of semi-organized illiterate religious fanatics wielding WW2 era weaponry. The People’s Liberation Army is two million strong and is a generation ahead of us in military tech.

Secondly, we need to make “a big push to turn the QUAD - the strategic partnership among the US, India, Japan, and Australia - into QUINT, with Canada the fifth member.”

The QUAD is another of those confections baked up in Uncle Sam’s regime change kitchen. There is zero evidence that any QUAD actions or proclamations over the past few years has made any difference to Chinese policy, but for some reason our joining this ineffective coalition will get their attention? I think not.

And since we’re gonna be standing with our allies, we better stand with them in AUKUS too. When the commies realize we Canucks just turned AUKUS into CAUKUS, they’ll no doubt abandon their claims to Taiwan in short order.

Finally, and this can’t be over-emphasized, we gotta spend some serious money on our military. Look at those plucky Australians -spending 50% more of their GDP on “defence” than we do!

Oh, the searing shame of our neglectful defence spending! If only we had big cajones like the Aussies, we too could commit hundreds of billions to a made-in-USA nuclear submarine fleet…

That would no doubt make our feminist foreign policy the envy of our allies once and for all!

What are we waiting for? Let’s snuggle up closer to Uncle Sam and make Canada great again!

The guys who flunk terrorist training

There's a story in the news today about a terrorist attack in Kampala. Three suicide bombers blew themselves up and took out three people.

I don't imagine that 1:1 kill ratio is considered anything to be proud of in terrorist circles. Pretty sure that ain't gonna get you the 77 virgins. That's too bad, because these poor guys aren't gonna get another chance at the Terrorist Hall of Fame, are they?

Nobody on any side is gonna want to have anything to do with these losers in the afterlife.

Whenever they bust one of these terror cells, there's always talk about financing and training. Disrupting the finance networks is gonna strangle these terror cells, they tell us.

But seriously, how much training can it possibly take to get a dim-witted Muslim kid to put on a vest and push a button? And the finance requirements would be minimal too.

So three terrorists take out three random people somewhere over there. So what. We see stories all the time about one strategically placed suicide bomber taking out dozens, even hundreds. Those are the guys who get the 77 virgins!

The reason this is news is because it happened in Uganda, a pet protectorate of the Nations of Virtue. Seems this sort of stuff has been spreading in Africa, especially after we dispatched Wacky Ghadaffy.

Wasn't he the butt of every anti-Arab joke for 100 years. We toyed with him, ridiculed him, and eventually killed him. Along the way we forgot he was the guy who kept African migrants out of the Mediterranean, and thus out of Europe.

Ten years later, we profess shock that the chaos we brought to Libya has spread far beyond...

Wacky Ghadaffy's revenge!

There better be a stinkin' wiener in my chili dog today

A few weeks ago I wrote about a guy who retired and bought the fishing boat of his dreams, just as he found out he was facing kidney failure and also required heart surgery. I hinted Buddy would welcome a fishing buddy to help with the little things, like hooking up the trailer, launching the boat, helping him into the boat, baiting the line, landing the fish, etc...

I haven't volunteered my services yet, but a mutual acquaintance did.

Alas, the fishing trip almost ran aground on a chili dog scandal. Buddy's had a favourite greasy spoon joint up near Huntsville for decades.  No trip up north is complete without a quick stop to pick up a chili dog. Buddy orders other buddy to stop and grab them a couple of chili dogs to go.

They're heading on up the highway. As Buddy unwraps his much anticipated treat, a look of horror falls across his face.

There's.

No.

Stinkin'.

Wiener.

On.

My.

Stinkin'.

Dog!

And there wasn't. The would-be fishing buddy had erroneously ordered chili on a bun instead of chili dogs. That almost put the kibosh on the trip right there, but the cooler head prevailed. 

Next day they're heading back home. Buddy orders his assistant to stop at the chili joint again, glares at him, and in a voice brimming with menace, declares, "there better be a stinkin' wiener in my chili dog today."

Read this before taking a crap in the woods

I was out walking The Big Boy this morning. As the weather cools he's been going a little further. A couple of times I've already had him to the end of the side-road, and that hasn't happened since May. Once there's snow on the ground he'll be happily galumpping right to the end every day.

The guy across the way came by with a round bale on the front of his John Deere, heading out to the pasture where he's grazing a couple of dozen head. Ya, I know that doesn't make sense. If they're grazing, why do you have to bring them hay? Always happens the last few weeks of the season. Once the snow flies they'll drive them back to the home farm to winter.

He stops in the middle of the road and shuts off the motor, and we catch up on what's new. Last week was deer season and I wondered how he'd fared out. Pretty good, it seems. His party got three, including a 12 point swamp buck.

Not being a hunter, that doesn't mean much to me, but he seemed quite chuffed.

"I've seen it on my trail cam, but I never thought we'd get it."

Trailcam?

"Ya, a little solar-powered camera. You just spike it to a tree and you're good. I can watch it on my phone. I've seen him in the marsh across from your place, and down by Bass Lake."

So you move that camera around?

"Hell no. I got a dozen of 'em. Got them everywhere. I can see all the pastures right there on my phone, and all the deer yards too. By God, one time down where the Bruce Trail meets the north pasture, some hiker takes a crap right in front of the camera. That's way more than you need to see when your checking on your cattle, I tell ya. What an asshole. Next time somebody does that to me I'm gonna put them on the internet."

All vaccines perfectly safe, but some safer than others

As the entire world knows, Canada under PM Fluffy sports one of the most progressive foreign policies in the world. It is so progressive that it is known far and wide as "Canada's Feminist Foreign Policy."

Just to prove it, Ottawa announced multiple times in recent weeks that we're donating 10 million doses of the Moderna vaccine to poor countries, because women and girls...

Why Moderna?

Well, although all vaccines are perfectly safe, when they're not, they're more likely to be Moderna. In fact, they're so much more likely to be Moderna that at least 16 EU countries as well as Japan have discontinued the use of the Moderna vaccine!

So, what to do with our 10 million perfectly-safe-but-not-as-safe-as-the-other shots we have in storage?

Why, we'll donate them to poor countries, garner some headlines, and bask in the refracted glow of our virtue!

That's how we roll here in the land of the Feminist Foreign Policy.

Guns and ammo will trump the pandemic

True story.

Guy I know from way back drives a delivery van back and forth across the border.

Getting across that border has been dicey for the last almost couple of years.

In fact, that border’s been closed for most of the last almost couple of years.

Buddy crosses that border multiple times per week.

He’s never been vaccinated.

He’s allowed to cross that border because the paper-work for his cargo bears the Department of Homeland Security imprimatur.

His cargo?

Guns and bullets.

You wouldn’t want to interfere with the trafficking of guns and bullets just on account of some pesky virus going around, would you?

Immigrants

My parents got off the boat at Pier 21.

Dad’s first job in the promised land was shovelling coal. With a hand shovel, not a power shovel.

It was a fluke we arrived in Canada, but a well thought out fluke.

On Dad’s side, we had multiple family connections in Ohio and Illinois.

On Mom’s side, there were well established aunties and cousins in New York and New Jersey.

But we came to Canada instead.

My parents had lived the WW2 at ground level. They thought Canada would be a better bet.

They’d seen enough of war, and figured their children were less likely to see war themselves if they went to Canada rather than the USA.

And here we are.

Three generations in, the coal shoveller’s progeny are all well-established and productive citizens.

As are the third generation of the extended family on both sides of the family, on both sides of the Canada-US border.

In fact, a startling percentage of the 3rd generation seems to be enrolled in PhD programs in one thing or another.

And that, in a nutshell, is why I’m in favour of generous immigration policies.

That said, there are reasons to quibble with our current immigration regimen.

First and foremost among the quibbles; when there’s not enough affordable housing to go around for the people who already live here, what is the impact of importing ever-higher numbers of immigrants without any policies to address the acute housing crisis these people will be facing?

This policy of not having a housing policy is guaranteed to stoke resentment against immigrants.

Maybe that’s the plan.

Flooding the country with immigrants while providing no housing is a great way to stoke anti-immigrant sentiment.

The people devising these plans are keen on keeping working folks divided. 

As long as the mice are at each other's throats they'll never make common cause against the fat cats.

Blowing smoke in Glasgow

Well, time for another climate conference. This is apparently the twenty-sixth kick at the cat. 

The big dogs were all in attendance. 400 private jets, if such a thing can be imagined. There wasn't enough jet parking at Glasgow airport, so after the first few dozen, the rest had to drop their passengers and then fly empty to anywhere that had surplus jet parking available.

That's gotta be a bitch on CO2 emissions. 

And then there was roughly 25,000 wannabees, mostly hoping to tell their grandchildren they were at COP26, kinda like their own grandparents told them about seeing Elvis on TV for the first time.

The same politicians who have talked up a storm in previous climate summits were back to talk some more. Big Joe Biden popped over from the Vatican, where'd he'd just dropped in on His Holiness, arriving in a convoy of seven dozen gas-guzzling climate killing petrol-burners.

That's gotta be a bitch too.

And our own PM Fluffy was given a two-minute time slot to address the cognoscenti. Looking like a serious person in a blue business suit, he solemnly announced a cap on growth in emissions, which is almost universally being reported as a cap on emissions.

Don't forget; this is the guy who thinks you're stupid enough to believe we have to export more bitumen to fight climate change.

He's so serious about fighting global whatever, he even bought us a pipeline! 

I'm starting to think that deal was a twofer. Get a couple of billionaires out of a pickle (with an eye on future board appointments) on the one hand, and then just shut-er-down, thereby gaining a few points with the Greta Thunbergs of the world.

Anyway, what does it matter? The only thing you can be certain of with these climate conferences, is nobody ever meets their commitments.

It's all theatre.