F-35 to be combat tested in skies over Ukraine

That should be fun!

My hunch is the USAF and their NATO allies will be reverting to their tried and tested F-16s about twenty minutes into the dance.

And the dance is coming, at least if the usual US military experts and their war-mongering political shills get any traction for this absurd idea that America (and her allies) should impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine.

That would require asking the Russians to leave, as they are the ones controlling that airspace now.

Here's another hunch. Putin's gonna say nyet to that.

Then what?

HOLY ESCALATION, BATMAN!!!

Sniffing out Putin's propaganda

Not many days pass in these tense times that the CBC doesn't issue one or more stern warnings about Russia's propaganda push to brainwash us. Today is no exception. Putin's lies are everywhere. Lucky for us, elite professional fact-checkers are on the case.

Bellingcat, the collective of citizen journalists and computer nerds founded by Eliot Higgins.

Bellingcat has an origin story that gives the virgin birth yarn a run for the money. Eliot Higgins was an unemployed high school drop-out in England. He used his abundance of free time doing what a lot of layabouts do; binge watch YouTube videos.

Specifically, Eliot spent his long lonely hours watching videos from the war in Syria. Turned out he was something of a savant in the field of video analysis. Before long, he was making discoveries that had eluded the best and the brightest in military intelligence agencies across the Western world.

His career took off!

Eliot has been affiliated with the US think tank Atlantic Council since at least 2016. The Atlantic Council is funded by, among others, the governments of NATO member states Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Lithuania, Norway, UK, and the US, a gaggle of defence contractors, and Chrystia Freeland's favorite Ukrainian oligarch, Victor Pinchuck. The "honor roll" of major donors appears on page 54 of their most recent annual report.

So rest easy, folks! Independent non-partisan fact-checkers are on the job to protect you from Russian disinformation!

Putin reeling as sanctions from heck inconvenience some Russian banks

This is how their masters in the West "stand with Ukraine."

President Biden, leader of the free world, uncorks the "mother of all sanctions," but strategically omits Russia's main exports, oil and gas. Why? Because pain at the pumps would stir unrest among his populace, the vast majority of whom couldn't find Ukraine on a map and couldn't care less.

The raging chihuahuas of NATO's peanut gallery demand a ban on Russia's inclusion in SWIFT, the global interbank clearing system. Today's headlines inform us the deed is done.

Bravo!... well, not really. It's not Russia that's kicked out of SWIFT, nor the Russian banking system, but a handful of individual banks.

Oh wow! That's gonna give Putin pause...

Meanwhile, Uncle Sam's Club is promising to flood the country with lethal weapons. How those are to be delivered with Russia in control of Ukrainian airspace is a closely guarded secret. What we can be sure of is that any actual deliveries will either be seized outright by the Russians, or blown up in their warehouses.

That is of course a moot point for American arms manufacturers. There's plenty more where those came from!

And while the pundits wring their hands over the largest ground war in Europe since WWII, they should be grateful that Putin didn't take a page out of the NATO playbook, and simply bomb the country to ratshit as NATO did in Serbia over ten weeks in 1999.

 

Here's a fresh new voice in country pop you should be following

And she's from Guelph.

She went to the same high school I occasionally attended, except a while later.

In fact, she was there at the same time as my dear children, both of whom got to know her, even though my son only attended occasionally.  

Danielle Todd was my very first follower when I briefly had a twitter account. I only got up to about twelve before I got cancelled for being an asshole.

Fair enough. I only used it to spam the "experts" at the CBC and the Globe with my pithy take-downs of their moronic op-eds.

But back to that kid from Guelph who is making her mark.

Here's her latest thing.

You go girl!

Fraudster Bill Browder still a "Putin expert" at CBC

Bill Browder was one of the hyenas who swooped in on Russia in the '90s to teach the locals the ins and outs of the capitalist system. He was the front man for a couple of Israeli billionaires of shady repute, whose "Heritage Capital" took the struggling Russian treasury for billions.

Once Putin came to power, Browder was originally a fan. That changed when Putin began reining in the oligarchs and the foreign carpet-baggers. 

Things got a little too warm for the likes of Browder, and he soon enough skedaddled out of the country under a cloud of scandal.

Wanting to fluff up his PR profile, Browder retained highly-regarded Russian film-maker Andrei Nekrasov to make a documentary about how he had been hounded out of Russia by corrupt officials because he had exposed their corruption. Nekrasov, a well-know Putin critic, agreed.

Somewhere along the line, the PR project went off the rails. The Putin critic gradually came to the conclusion that Bill Browder was full of shit.

The doc that resulted, The Magnitsky Act - behind the scenes, has caused Browder no end of grief. His reputation in Europe has more or less gone down the shitter. No reputable news outlet there would call on him as a Russia expert.

But there he was on the CBC this morning, still being passed off as Putin's number one enemy.

Brodie Fenlon's team at CBC needs to take a few dollars out of the DEI training budget and put it into fact checking.

Against snowblowers

Regular readers will be acquainted with my beef with leaf-blowers.

I'd like to extend my contempt for "progress" to the snowblower.

It's easy to be seduced. I managed quite well without one for many years. But once all the neighbours had one, I'll admit, I succumbed to peer pressure.

Peer pressure will fuck you up every time.

I remember interrogating a student about why he threw his class-mates back-pack out the school bus window.

"Peer pressure, sir."

Yup, they still called the teacher "sir" back in the day, much to my amusement.

But how can you argue with peer pressure?

That's how I eventually came to spend almost three grand on a snowblower, to do the job I'd always done with a twenty dollar shovel.

Hey, if you're gonna go down conformity road, go down in style!

I've had a complete paradigm shift in how I view snow management. I think it's that mindfulness trip I've been on.

When you compare the shovel to the machine head to head, there's no doubt you get the job done faster with the machine.

You save time.

But what are you gonna do with the time you save? This is the critical question.

If you're a pediatric surgeon who can squeeze in an additional infant heart transplant with that extra time, by all means, get the machine.

If, on the other hand, that time saved is invested in playing video games or watching porn, well, give your head a shake.

Between the carbon footprint of building the infernal machine in the first place, plus operating it, you deserve to go straight to you-know-where for your climate crimes.

Spending an extra twenty minutes clearing the snow with a shovel, on the other hand, is a guaranteed ticket to heaven.

Not only that, but all that exercise is gonna give you the cardio health that'll make you live forever...

Unless you drop dead from a heart attack while shovelling snow.

When will the "allies" figure out Uncle Sam isn't worth the candle?

The current Ukraine situation was completely avoidable. 

Ukraine and its separatist regions negotiated the Minsk agreement seven years ago, in negotiations refereed by Russia, France, and Germany. It stipulated a degree of autonomy for the rebel provinces as a condition for the cessation of hostilities.

Unfortunately, although the deal was approved by the UN, it fell afoul of the folks who had engineered the coup of 2014 - the US government. 

And here we are!

The World Cop who worked tirelessly to prevent peace in Ukraine now leads the world in accusing Russia of an unprovoked attack on its neighbour! It has rallied its allies, also known as colonies, satrapies, stooges, dependencies, or flunkies, NATO and the EU, to stand strong against Russian aggression.

The European allies get to stand strong in Europe. They will make serious sacrifices. Double or treble heating bills for the average citizen. Billions of euros for the refugee wave soon to crash their borders, perhaps as large as the wave that came their way due to America's previous adventures in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. 

In the event this little war goes sideways, as wars have been known to do, Europe will be in the soup.

America, which has driven this conflict since the '90s, is leading the charge against Russian aggression. It is leading with the declaration of sanctions from hell, the mother of all sanctions, etc.

It is leading from the other side of the Atlantic, thousands of miles away from the hot war it precipitated.

While the European allies are making sacrifices, the Americans are willing to sell unlimited billions in US military hardware to the EU and our NATO allies, and of course, to the Ukrainians. Nothing like a war to goose profits at Raytheon et al.

The Americans will also pitch in by selling LNG to the allies to replace the Russian gas Putin now is free to sell elsewhere. The price will be several orders of magnitude higher than the Russian gas now sanctioned, but that's due to the free market, not US policy.

It's only coincidence that US corporations profit massively while the allies make sacrifices to preserve America's role as World Cop.

What I find utterly baffling, is why the allies refuse see that the American Emperor is buck naked?

If Uncle Sam were a proper hegemon, he'd be doing more than sanctions. Sadly, at least for the American Empire, that's all he's got.

Sooner or later,  our allies are gonna figure out they're the only thing keeping the empire afloat, and then the jig will be up.

"Fringe minority" has more support than PM Fluffy

Looks like our extra-woke leader has woked up and smelled the coffee, or perhaps the soy Espresso Borgia.

Trudeau uncorked his Valentine's Day surprise - martial law in Canada - just as the Freedom Convoy protest was fizzling out. We supposedly have checks and balances in place to prevent the unwarranted imposition of such draconian powers.

In the first place, they need to be approved by parliament. Trudeau skirted that requirement by deferring debate in the House of Commons, because while the police were exercising their new-found not-yet-approved powers, it was too dangerous for parliamentarians to go to work!

Then they need to be approved by the senate.

The House belatedly, and to their shame, approved the emergency measures on Monday. 

Also on Monday, although the alleged emergency was obviously over, Trudeau was still ramping up the booga-booga.

The terrorists may have left Ottawa, but he knew there were sleeper cells lurking in truck-stop parking lots across the nation.

Fast forward 36 hours... 

The senate is in the midst of debating the matter. It's not going well, and whadya know, Fluffy executes a complete 180 since Monday!

What changed?

As Candace Bergen pointed out, there's been a flood of international ridicule. Rex Murphy did a scorching interview with Jordan Petersen that has garnered almost two million views in days. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association announced a legal challenge.

The tide of opprobrium was washing away Fluffy's most precious dreams. Sec Gen of the UN? Boss of NATO? Head of World Bank?

No way. 

Ixnay.

Go away...

Goodbye PM Fluffy!

Hello PM Frida... let the good times roll!

After 75+ years of US occupation, is Germany about to break free?

More than 75 years after the WWII ended, there remain almost 40,000 US troops in Germany.

Why?

That question crossed my mind the other day when I saw the joint presser with Scholtz and Biden.

Stupified Joe stood there and proclaimed that NordStream 2 was done like dinner if Putin didn't behave.

Olaf was even more stupified.

What a humiliation for a head of state!

USA has absolutely no right to interfere in a commercial arrangement between Russia and Germany. 

That was a deal agreed by two supposedly sovereign states. 

For Biden to stand there and promise to destroy that joint venture if American ultimatums were not met, makes it beyond obvious that Germany is not a sovereign state.

This must come as a shock to many Germans.

For 75 years they've been kidding themselves that they and the Yanks are bosom buddies.

Suddenly, they realize they are the Untermenschen in the calculations of the Americans.

Come on, Olaf...show some spine!

Justin saves democracy!

I'll leave it to posterity to determine if PM Fluffy jumped the shark with that Emergencies Act nonsense. Strikes me as a pretty big cannon to unleash just so you can charge the terrorist masterminds behind three weeks of Ottawa gridlock with... "counselling to commit mischief?"

Seriously?

Found a succinct essay at Dissident Voice that enumerates at least half a dozen times when the Emergencies Act, or its precursor, The War Measures Act, were NOT invoked when the country faced much greater peril, from the Winnipeg General Strike to the Mercier Bridge closure in 1990.

Then again, none of the PMs in those earlier emergencies were nick-named Fluffy. Apparently this pasty-faced clown (at least when he hasn't given himself that facial with the black shoe-polish he so loves) has something to prove.

Mussolini made the trains run on time.

Justin made the air horns stop their infernal terroristic tooting.

I'm not Fluffy, dammit, I'm tough as nails!

What my sources tell me about the Ottawa protests

I hear they hired on a Toronto cop who was never gonna rise to senior management in Toronto, to be the new police chief in Ottawa, mainly on account of his rep as a bully.

I also hear that the protest movement is riddled with off-duty cops, retired cops, army reservists, retired army brass, and a goodly cross-section of ordinary Canadians.

The one thing they have in common is they are beyond fed up with being talked down to by the likes of Justin Trudeau.

Who can blame them?

Latest I heard was the loose-knit "leadership consortium" of the protest movement had agreed on Friday to evacuate the rest of the protesters.

Then the new sheriff showed up to spin headlines for the narrative managers at CBC. 

The leadership consortium was promptly taken into custody.

What the wokesters at Brodie Fenlon's woke CBC don't understand, is that even their presumed captive audience in the brown suburbs of the GTA are turning against their narrative.

Patrick Brown was briefly leader of the Ontario conservative party.

He was rail-roaded because he wasn't woke enough.

So he went into municipal politics, and became the mayor of the brownest constituency in Canada, Brampton.

Go figure!

Women without wieners lose big at Ivy League women's swim championships

But it's a bad-news good-news story...

Women with wieners are winning big!

They're all sisters in the big pink tent, right? The winners and losers cancel each other out, and everybody goes home happy!

As we all know, America is a beacon unto the universe when it comes to women's rights. First country to free our female slaves, first country to let women drive, first country to let women vote, first country with a female president, first country to send a woman to the moon...

BOO YA!!! America had been number one for women's rights for centuries!

And now, the world applauds as America sets another milestone; the complete integration of women with wieners into female sports!

USA! USA! USA!

Elite Jewish scientists and medical experts condemn Trudeau's nazi smears against truckers protest - CBC silent

Interesting story out there around a group of Jewish scientists and medical experts who have signed an open letter to PM Fluffy. Here’s a list of the signatories.

I’m no expert, but those look like serious people to me.

Here’s their letter.

Here’s a crazy thing; I can’t for the life of me find that story on CBC!

You can read all about it in Singapore or Nigeria, but the narrative mangers at CBC have deemed it too controversial for their delicate Canadian readership.

Ukraine war will determine future of humanity - expert

It’s not me saying that. I don’t even aspire to such spectacular flights of bombast.

No, it’s Israeli historian and public intellectual of the moment, Yuval Noah Harari. Yuval has obviously succumbed to the “a Russian invasion is imminent” propaganda blitzkrieg Washington has unleashed.

The current climate reminds of the ferocious propaganda assault our governments and media subjected us to in the build-up to the Iraq invasion. Remember Colin Powell waving that vial around at the UN?

In hindsight, that disinformation campaign succeeded in spite of the complete lack of evidence for the absurd claims being made. The entire free world was fifteen minutes from certain death if the evil Saddam let loose his imaginary nukes and his vast non-existent stock-pile of chemical weapons.

Fast forward twenty years, and we’ve got more or less the same crew who cooked up the disastrous Iraq war, lying their flaming pants off hoping to ignite public support for war against Russia.

Remember, this is being rolled out by America’s intellectual warrior class, the same brainiacs who spent $300 millions per day for twenty years, before being run out of Afghanistan by a bunch of illiterate religious fanatics.

These are America’s best and brightest. They have impressive credentials from the most prestigious universities. They cycle endlessly between government posts, think-tanks, academia, and media. They got to the top because America is a meritocracy, dammit!

No matter how much they get so tragically wrong time after time, being the best of the best means never having to concede your mistakes, let alone say sorry… let alone face war crime indictments or, heaven forbid, pay reparations to the many nations they have destroyed.

I agree with Yuval. The experts are ramping up the paranoia to a place where, one false move, one misunderstanding, could take us to a place where we’re all fifteen minutes from nuclear annihilation.

That would in fact determine the future of humanity.

Our only hope is that folks on the other side have a higher calibre of intellectual warrior in the room.

It's never too late for a happy childhood

Did you ever hide your weed, and then forget where you hid it?

Used to happen to me all the time. 

Pretty sure I've donated old jeans or jackets to the Sally Ann that held a pleasant surprise for some lucky thrift store shopper.

When you're young, you're hiding it from your parents. 

Then, when you get a bit older, you're hiding it from your kids.

Didn't really have any worries about my daughter, but Junior took a shine to the weed 'o wisdom at a young age, and I'm absolutely NOT in favour of 13 year olds smoking pot.

Let them enjoy their childhood a little longer.

And that's the cool thing when you hit the age where you don't have to hide your stash anymore. You're long out of your parents home, and now the kids are out of yours.

You've finally got to the place where that weed you used to hide enables the continuation of that happy childhood!

Welcome to Justin's Banana Republic

Our parliamentarians were to have spent today debating the necessity of Trudeau's declaration of a national emergency.

Unfortunately, further debate has been deferred while the police exercise the emergency powers that were under debate.

Hey... that's not how democracy is supposed to work!

Funny how the same bunch of sanctimonious twats who can't stop pontificating about "authoritarianism" when police crack down on protests in Minsk or Hong Kong, can fly into paranoid hysteria when protesters show up in their capital city!

Whaaa!!!  The fascist honking is keeping me awake at night! Where are the cops? It's an attack on our democracy! Fire the police chief! It's a terrorist attack! OH MY GOD THEY'RE WAVING TRUMP FLAGS AND SWASTIKAS!!!

ARREST THEM ALL!!!!!!

Our embarrassingly servile media unquestioningly shovels this claptrap by the bucketful. Fifty years ago, when Trudeau the Elder invoked the War Measures Act against actual terrorists, our free press gave him a very rough ride indeed. When Trudeau the Lesser aims the same cannon at Canadians who are in violation of parking bylaws, his biggest cheer-leaders are mainstream media!

We've come a long way!

A long way in the wrong direction,in the opinion of this Canadian.

Old School cattle farming

It's 8:30 and I step out on the stoop for a breath of fresh air. Up the road I see lights pulling into the barnyard where my tenant farmers overwinter a couple dozen head of beef cattle.

That's gotta be either Terry or his son, checking on the cows. It's a family operation. They own a few hundred acres, and lease a few hundred more for the pasturing season, including mine. 

The welfare of their cattle is their clock and their calendar. 

If you added up the hours they work, and calculated the net profits from their 150 head cow-calf operation, neither of them are making minimum wage.

As for benefits... har dee har har!

No pension plan.

No dental plan.

No paid sick days.

No free prescription glasses every couple of years.

No nothing!

But they keep doing it!

That's coming to an end. The last generation of pasture-raised beef farmers is running on fumes. Absentee landlords can get ten times as much rent out of cash-croppers. A little capital investment in tile drainage and a generous dose of chemical fertilizer will render many grazing lands into cash-crop lands.

There's no way the beef farmers can compete.

Your rib-eye steak in a few years will come from the same place your chicken and pork already comes from.

An industrial scale feedlot where the cattle can go from feed trough to slaughterhouse without ever being trucked anywhere.

Enjoy your barbecue!

Here's to the warf rats who shared the stage with Led Zeppelin

One of those warf rats has been the most prolific commenter on this blog.

Ken has been coping with some health challenges, from what I gather.

He's a dog guy to boot!

Here's to ya, Ken!

Pure puppy bliss

Both me and the Farm Manager grew up with dogs.

She had a pup who did the mail route with the mailman, and then wandered home.

I grew up with a series of German shepherd pups. My dear mother had always loved those dogs and went to the trouble of registering as a CKC breeder.

As much as we love all the dogs we knew before, we both love Bruno like nobody else.

He had an inauspicious start here. Rescued him from a shelter two km down the road. That wouldn't be a place an Italian mastiff would show up, but apparently he's a runt in the world of mastiff breeders, and had to be ditched.

We're more than delighted with what we pulled out of the ditch.

There were some early interactions with other dogs that did not go well. That's when I started taking the Big Boy to the Owen Sound dog park.

He managed to get on the wrong side of Cooper and Lilly in the first five minutes.

But he's been making up for that faux pas ever since.

Bruno doesn't realize he's the biggest dog in the dog park. His best pals are the wee pups like Bucky, a miniature spaniel, and Bruce, a six-week-old black lab.

Another thing he doesn't realize is he's now on the Facebook page for the local dog park. I wouldn't have known, but the Farm Manager is on Facebook, and she tells me the Big Boy is a rock star there.

Whatever. 

What I know for sure; this is the smartest canine I've ever had stewardship of. (You never actually "own" them). He's made peace with the realities of dog park life. 

And he makes me laugh out loud 100 times a day.

Good boy, Bruno!

The sweet & simple farm life

My thought process, when I fired up the Contrarian Ranter six months ago, was I wanted to separate my profound insights into global geopolitics from the pedestrian matters of where my cat shits, etc. 

I feel I've neglected the simple farm life side, so let me catch you up!

We're half way through the winter here at Falling Downs. Hasn't been too bad so far. I'm doing snow-removal with a fucking snow-scoop and a shovel, but so far, so good.

The reason I can do snow removal with a snow-scoop on a 100 yard driveway is I'm retired now. I would never have bought that snowblower in the first place, had I been retired at the time.

But that was then, and this is now.

Back then, I had to be at work at a certain time. Spending four hours with a shovel was a non-starter. That's why I forked out almost three grand for the top-of-the-line snow-blower on offer.

I had power steering and heated handgrips!

Then, when I sparked it up back when the first big snow hit, I realized that after a mere four or five, or maybe nine or ten years of service, my ultra-deluxe snow-blower suddenly has only two speeds.

Full-throttle.

Zero.

I got on that right away. The first thing I found out was the dealer where I bought the piece of shit had gone out of business.

Great! I'm now gonna have to tow my snow-blower 300km for warranty work!

That's when I said fuck it, I'll just fork out thirty bucks for a snow-scoop.

So far, that's worked out OK. 

After all, I'm retired now. Six hours shovelling snow is six hours I don't have to spend in the gym.

One of the things I didn't think about on the road to retirement, was what the fuck I was gonna do with my time. Sure, I had a huge list of shit I was putting off till I retired. Some of it I'd been putting off for ten or twenty years.

Then guess what? I retire, and I'm not in the slightest mood to do 99% of that shit I was gonna do when I retired.

Replacing the gas-line on that '06 Pontiac Torment so it would sell as a viable vehicle instead of scrap?

Sure. Probably a valid point, but I just don't care. 

Once you retire, and the government is sending you money just because you're old, you know you're in the last quarter.

Sure, you might get some penalty time, but long story short; you're on your last few laps...

Start acting like it.

Make those last laps count!

Justin lays an egg

It is by now apparent that PM Trudeau's invocation of the Emergencies Act has failed to elicit the rapturous applause he may have been anticipating. Even his indefatigable cheerleaders at CBC are having second thoughts. The tone there this morning has shifted from "do something about those horn-tooting terrorists" to "that's a pretty big stick to beat up on a bunch of bouncy-castle-packing grampas." 

The first casualty of Justin's ill-advised and self-inflicted "emergency" is Ottawa police chief Peter Sloly. It was Trudeau, not Sloly, who baited the protesters with every vile slur imaginable. It's Trudeau who insists on babbling about how we must continue to inoculate our way out of the pandemic with those "safe and effective vaccines" even as province after province is providing timetables for eliminating provincial mandates.

Almost three weeks ago the organizers of the Ottawa protest said they're not leaving until they have a timetable for the removal of federal mandates. Trudeau responded with weeks of derisive name-calling: terrorists, insurgents, occupiers, racists, misogynists, ant-vaxxers, science-deniers, etc.  You'd almost think those "F*ck Trudeau" flags got under his thin skin!

Hey Fluffy! A "leader" needs to be made of sterner stuff than that!

The name-calling didn't work. Time for plan B - drop the (rebranded) War Measures Act on the impudent low-lifes. Last time we went there was to battle an actual terrorist group that planted bombs and murdered politicians. This time it's to clear some trucks inconveniencing commuters in Ottawa.

And here we are... 

Why the Ambassador Bridge is open but Ottawa is not

As I predicted, "inconveniences" that cost rich people money can't be ignored for long in our society. Lockdowns generally inconvenienced only the peons while making the rich richer, hence no complaints from the plutocrats.

Ergo, the Ambassador Bridge is open less than a week after being shut down.

After three weeks the Ottawa occupation, on the other hand, isn't inconveniencing anyone of importance or inflicting financial pain on the rich. Dragging it out helps Justin's agenda of pitting various sub-groups of inconsequential people against one another. 

In that mission he has the full support of our legacy media. Although the protests were triggered by the federal government's incoherent, inconsistent, and manifestly non-scientific vaccine mandates (where's the science that proves unvaccinated long-distance truckers are more of a risk than unvaccinated teachers or nurses?), media immediately began a smear campaign to change the narrative.

Now the Freedom Convoy is about white supremacy and anti-semitism! Of course it is! 

If the CBC and the Globe & Mail say so, it must be true!

Resurrection shuffle: General Motors hiring in Oshawa?

My daughter bought a house in "the Shwa" four years ago. A few months later, GM announced the closure of their Oshawa plant, the community's biggest employer.

I thought, that's a kick in the teeth. She and her partner, a freshly-minted Doctor Phil in Chem from U of T, would be hard-pressed to stay above water with their new house. Millennials in their first house, they were maxed out.

Fast forward to 2022. The GM plant that was moth-balled in 2019 is building pickup trucks again. And they're hiring! In fact, they're so desperate for workers, they've got a huge "Now Hiring" banner attached to the plant that you can see from the 401!

The start rate for new hires is a tad under $24/hour. While I will denounce two-tier contracts till my last breath, even I gotta admit that's not a bad start in the modern era.

What's happened since that kick in the teeth, is that the value of a home in Oshawa has roughly doubled. The bad news is, a detached house in the 'Shwa now runs $800k plus.

The good news is, according to the numbers I just put through the TD Mortgage Affordability Calculator, a couple of kids in those starter jobs in Oshawa will qualify for a $750k mortgage. 

And while I don't want to rain on the parade... anybody who ever had to renew a mortgage at 18% knows not all dreams have happy endings.

Remember when a terrorist was a fanatic who detonated a suicide vest in a pizzeria?

Or maybe hijacked airplanes and flew them into buildings?

Or exploded busses and subways and attacked music venues with multiple suicide jihadists...?

That was the golden era of terror. 

Like journalism, terrorism isn't what it used to be.

Today, all you have to do to get your official terrorist badge, is toot your horn!

That's right!

Toot your horn in the wrong place at the wrong time, and you're right up there with the worst jihadi-al queda-ISIS-towel-head 'o terror pizzeria shoe-bombers of all time!

At least in Canada.

Trudeau to truckers: Go home or I'll call you more bad words

Setting aside for a moment the actual issues at the core of this crisis, isn't it the responsibility of the leader of the country to show leadership?

Hiding, dodging, name-calling and doubling down on an ill-advised strategy of refusing dialogue isn't a sign of leadership. It's a sign of a government seriously out of touch with what's going on in the country. There is no coherent strategy to be seen, other than plenty more of the same.

Once the border disruptions begins to bite, the PMO will be fielding calls from pissed-off CEOs who don't give a shit about Trudeau's excuses. "I don't talk to racist a-holes" may sell to the terminally woke, but ain't gonna cut it in the real world.

Part of the problem is a cultural divide. You can bet there's not a lot of folks in those trucks with four year Liberal Arts degrees. To them, a Confederate flag isn't a symbol of white supremacy, it's a symbol of the Dukes of Hazzard. The Duke boys even had Black buddies, so how the fuck can that be racist?

It's time for Mr Trudeau to show some leadership. If he's not up to the job, he needs to step down.

For the American Empire, it's now or never

May you live in interesting times, an ancient Chinese curse supposedly says.

Must be true, because we sure do!

Kinda unnerving to see all those headlines day after day, for months on end, about how Putin will, for sure, probably invade Ukraine any day now, maybe.

In the meantime, we’ll ship them hundreds of millions in missiles and small arms… don’t worry, we’re lending them the money to buy this stuff.

Not that we’re planning to actually defend the schmucks from Russia in the event our dreams of invasion come true. Are you kidding?

That’s been the US-NATO game for the past few months, and it’s no wonder the NATO allies are getting nervous. The Big Dog is in grave danger of losing a significant number of the pack. The collapse of NATO is the end of the US Empire in and of itself.

Then there’s the Iran file. We had a reasonable agreement in place to curtail Iran’s nuke ambitions, but thanks to the goading of our Israeli allies, Trump nixed that deal. The Israeli’s still love to talk about Iran being weeks from a bomb, but after saying that for thirty-plus years, they don’t even believe it themselves. Nor are they planning to do anything about it, blood-curdling rhetoric aside. Israel wouldn’t last a week if real (ie not homemade by Gaza rocketeers) missiles were incoming at the rate of hundreds per day.

Don’t forget we gotta take on China at the same time as we’re putting Russia and Iran in their place. The military-industrial sector of the economy, the folks who fund all those brilliant think tanks forever advocating more war and more weapon sales, are all in for ramping up confrontation with China. At the same time, uber-hedgies managing trillions of dollars, guys like Larry Fink, are hunky dory doing business with the commies, so don’t count on the universal support of the billionaire class.

In summary, the American Empire as we have known it is over.

Numero uno no more.

Only America's war-profiteers don’t know it yet.

They truly believe their upcoming triumph over Putin will cement their place as the "Exceptional Nation" for generations to come.

Satan's leaf rake strikes again

Further to my brilliant expose of the leaf-blower from ten years ago., I see where this tool of the Devil just took a few more otherwise innocent victims in Florida.

I use the word "innocent" with reservations. After all, nobody who owns a leaf-blower is "innocent." They've all got blood on their hands, at least metaphorically speaking.

Or not so metaphorically, in the case of Kyong Moulton. Kyong has been pushed right over the brink by this infernal technology. Her big mistake, obviously, was to buy the cursed thing in the first place, no doubt provoked by that "keeping-up-with-the-Jones's" ethos that permeates consumer culture.

In for a penny, in for a pound, as they say. Once she has the leaf-blower, she is soon engaged in a leaf-blower feud with the neighbors. They blow the leaves onto her lawn. She blows them right back! The escalation came to a head on the weekend, when Myong snapped, attacking her neighbours with, of all things, a steak knife!

So now she's in jail, and the neighbours are in hospital. I don't blame any of them...

Somewhere in Hell, Dom Quinto and Gustav Doragrip are clinking glasses and laughing their asses off.

Ottawa declares emergency after week-long terrorist attack of horn-honking

Yes, that's the language being bandied about - it's a terrorist attack! Our democracy is under siege!! Who is behind this? Putin? Trump? Joe Rogan?

The truckers’ protest against vaccine mandates has gone form “small fringe group with unacceptable ideas” to a nationwide terrorist uprising, and our legacy media and assorted spin doctors are just warming up.

Notice the not-so-subtle threat inflation in the descriptors; the small fringe of wackos has morphed into an existential threat to our very democracy in a mere nine days! As the convoys made their way to Toronto, the massive outpouring of public support put a lie to the “small fringe” theory. It’s OMG time, as in OMG it’s our own 9/11!

Bear in mind the absurdity of the mandates being protested. In Ontario, unvaccinated teachers are permitted to spend their workday in the company of children, who are not mandated either. In Quebec, unvaccinated health-care workers remain employed in hospitals and LTC homes. But an unvaccinated trucker who spends virtually their entire working life sitting alone in the cab of a truck needs to quarantine for two weeks when crossing the border? And this life-saving rule is implemented two years into the pandemic, when other countries are lifting restrictions?

I’d like to see the science on that!

Part of the reason for Canada’s incoherent mish-mash of rules is that each provincial or territorial leader has their own coterie of health and science advisers. If we ever get to the post-mortem on how governments handled the pandemic, hopefully we’ll figure out how to build a more robust national health care system that doesn’t have to re-invent the wheel thirteen times over every time there’s a health crisis.

Before we get there, though, we need to get over the current impasse. Trudeau’s handlers obviously see their confrontational approach as a vote-getter. All they really need to do is sit tight and let the media run wild with their smear campaign, and time is on their side, or so they think.

So brace yourself for an onslaught of nonsense like that floated last week in the pages of the Globe and Mail; US extremist white-nationalist truckers bringing guns to their Canadian brethren in Ottawa…

By the way, a news channel in India found some Sikhs protesting in support of those white supremacists in Ottawa.

It’s a beautiful thing!

Snowmobile trails are open

I know this because when I step out on the stoop for a breath of fresh air, in addition to the howling of the coyotes, I also hear the howling of the snowmobiles.

To be fair, snowmobiles don't howl nearly as obnoxiously now as they did twenty years ago, when you had two-stroke triples with expansion chamber exhausts splitting the heavens.

The snowmobile trail shares the Kinch Sideroad with my hiking trail. There's nothing like a hike in the pristine woods, breathing in that fresh forest air, and then eight snowmobiles go by, polluting ears and lungs simultaneously. It's a real buzz kill.

At the same time, I get the attraction. It's got a motor and goes fast. What's not to like?

I remember back in the first snowmobile wave, before there was such a thing as a trail network, taking an Arctic Cat from Guelph to Fergus, through fields and on back-roads. It was a fun adventure, and I can see where folks can get seriously caught up in it.

The real serious ones are into 300 hp mountain sleds now.

You read about them every avalanche season

Goodbye Trudeau, hello PM Freeland

PM Fluffy has painted himself into a corner. By announcing early and often that he would never countenance negotiations with those vile protesters, he’s left the door wide open to his possible rivals.

Like Chrystia Freeland.

As one of the foreign meddlers in Ukrain’s Maidan, she knows a thing or two about popular uprisings.

She knows Justin is on the wrong side of history.

She’s waiting back-stage till it’s time to roll out the right side of history.

Make no mistake; there’ll be plenty of Chrystia Freeland in your future.

She’s our next PM for sure, Nazi baggage and all.

Boat shopping in winter

I've been boat shopping for fifty years, and haven't bought one yet. The 15' Coleman canoe, under the snow at the side of the driveway, doesn't count.

Nor does that 14' Arkansas Traveller that fell into my clutches for a couple of summers. It had a somewhat temperamental 38 horse Johnson on the back. I took it for a toot around the Cargill Mill Pond, and we stalled out in the middle, which is about fifty feet from shore. Then I ripped out the pull-cord while trying to restart it.

I fixed that, after wading to shore while pulling the boat behind me with the anchor rope. Last I heard, after I lent the motor to my cousin Klaus for the back of his sailboat, it now resides at the bottom of Georgian Bay. Seems he was able to save his boat, but my outboard motor had to go. That was twenty-five years ago, and cousin Klaus hasn't ever said a word about compensation. 

What am I gonna do? Start a family feud over a sixty year old Johnson outboard?

But I digress.

There's nothing like spending a cold winter evening in front of the fire, perusing the listings at Boat Dealers dot com. on your laptop.

I like the idea of a power boat, because waiting three days for the wind to pick up seems like a very long three days.

Then again, they're talking about $200/bbl oil, which translates into a thousand bucks to fill up a 26' cruiser. That's when you become one of those people who hang out at the marina weeks on end but their boat never goes anywhere.

From what I've seen, those folks have a fair bit of fun. 

You get a forty year old 40 foot power cruiser for $40k, and it's your summer cottage. Your square footage is like a downtown condo, and the marina fees are about the same as your taxes would be on that condo. Once a year you limp your summer home around the harbour, just to prove it's a boat, and you are in fact a legitimate sea captain.

Or maybe I'll just get that 14' inflatable I can tow behind the Toyota. I hear it's a rocket when you hang a 60 hp outboard off the back. 

Police fear American insurgents with guns to infiltrate Ottawa protest

That enticing nugget of speculation can be found in the pages of the Globe and Mail today (Gary Mason p 15), so you may wish to take it with a pound of salt or two.

The thought leaders at the Globe have been mightily indignant since before the convoy left Vancouver. After all, according to them, vaccine hesitancy has always been a symptom of racism and white supremacy. When Black Lives Matter declares vaccine mandates racist, the blinkered nabobs at the Globe stay silent.

PM Fluffy, meanwhile, is doubling down on his campaign of relentless vilification of the protesters. His handlers are under the impression this is a vote-winning strategy. When, two years into this pandemic, Trudeau can still stand there and talk about the only way out is getting more people vaccinated, he's definitely not got science on his side.

"Safe" and "effective" are relative terms, of course. We're among the leading nations in terms of vaccine uptake, and we've got more covid, more hospitalizations, and more deaths than ever. Does that really strike you as a sound basis for a mandatory vaccination policy?

The folks in those trucks don't thinks so.

US sends more troops and missiles while Putin gives NATO the finger

I'm not optimistic about how this will turn out.

The Americans still talk as if they're the Big Dog who gets to boss everybody around. Look at their track record since WWII.

• fought the Koreans to a draw in a war that remains officially hot
• destroyed and lost Vietnam
• sabotaged multiple developing countries by assassinating democratically elected leaders
• destroyed multiple countries in the Middle East since 9/11
• spent twenty years occupying Afghanistan, only to leave the place worse than they found it, and hand it back to the previous owners.

With a resume like that, where do these morons get the idea they can tell the rest of the planet what to do?

But there's no stopping them. America's ruling class is so blinded by hubris they have no clue what they're doing. These are the people who spent $300 million every day, including weekends, for twenty years, trying to bend a nation of semi-literate subsistence farmers to their will.

And failed!

All of this while their own country is going down the shitter, big time, while the whole world is watching.

But now they're gonna take on Russia, China, and Iran? All at the same time?

We live in truly interesting times...

How to maintain your composure while sailing through the air clutching a bag of dog-sh!t

Weather permitting, Bruno gets a drive to the off-leash dog-park every morning. It's not so much about the exercise as it is about his social skills. He spent pretty much the first year of his life in a crate, and therefore didn't have any.

Very first time I walked him in public was out at MacGregor Point. Had him on the leash, but when he spotted a couple of hounds coming our way he went total Crazy Dog and took me with him, dragging me through the snow, hanging onto the leash for dear life. There ensued fifteen seconds of mayhem of which all I remember is a three-dog fight and the two gals walking those hounds making a bigger racket than the dogs. 

By then I'm lying in the snow, Bruno lying across my chest in contrition, trying to make sense of what just happened. One of the gals kept yelling "I'm sorry I kicked your dog," and the other one, "are you alright are you alright are you alright?" While it's not what I see when I look in the mirror, folks quite often mistake me for a senior citizen, so I suppose their concern was not unwarranted.

Wouldn't that be the dog walk from hell? Coupla gals head out to MacGregor for a pleasant hike with their canine companions, only to have their dogs attacked and then see this geezer drop dead from a heart attack right in front of their eyes.

My takeaway from that embarrassing episode was we gotta get the Big Boy some social skills.

So for the first time in my life, I sought out a dog park. We've been attending regularly ever since, except when the experts had some concerns over dog-to-human or vice versa virus transmission and the place was locked down for a spell.

And he's come a long way. He's got the butt-sniffing thing down. Whenever you arrive at the park and get in the gate, all the other dogs come over to check you out. Resembles an elephant walk at times.

Today four of his pals were waiting; Rosie, Dexter, Tilley, and Piper. They're racing this way and that. Bruno takes a time-out for a crap on the first lap. He's the biggest dog in the park and his shits are equally impressive. This is a particularly generous effort, and it's all I can do to get that bag inside out without getting any on my hands. He rejoins the pack and they resume their festivities, while I'm heading down the back straight with the bag 'o poo.

At 130 lbs Bruno doesn't have the acceleration of the little guys, but he can build up an impressive head of steam. He's a little deficient in braking and cornering though.

I turn around and see the herd heading straight for me, Bruno in the lead, Piper and Dexter hard on his tail, and while he's hurtling towards me, his head is turned and he's looking back at them...

For half a second, my head and my feet were equidistant from the ground... and then I was flat on my back in the snow, still holding that bag of dogshit in front of me.

The pack is delighted that a human has joined them at ground level, and I'm lost in a blizzard of snouts and tails and paws as everbody except Tilley tries to lick my face. Tilley, (not her real name) has a bit of a taste for poop, and she thinks me holding that bag in the air is a special game just for her. 

Lucky for me, the other parents had by then caught up and pried the dog-pile off me.

I got up, brushed myself off, put on my hat one of the parents had recovered, and walked away like I'd meant to do it, still holding that bag in front of me.

Trudeau to call on NATO to evict trucker's Freedom Convoy

The Canadian Rebellion of '22 will make it into the history books.

We’ve had rebellions before in our history. They tend not to end well for the rebels.

So what will the history books be saying about this one? As you know, the victors write the history books, so that depends. I’m inclined to consider that’s a forgone conclusion; not the rebels, obviously!

Then again…

I’m hearing there’s an issue around finding towing contractors to tow protest trucks. You can understand why. The tow-truck drivers live on the same side of the tracks as the cross-border truckers who fired up this rebellion

Failing that, the authorities could bring in Canadian Armed Forces tow trucks.

Guess who’s driving them? Kids who saw the CAF as their best bet after graduating high school. What do you think their fathers did? What side of the tracks do they live on?

See where this is going?

PM Fluffy isn’t helping himself here. This is an uprising of working-class Canadians way past sick and tired of being ignored, belittled, and talked down to.

Their prime minister refuses to talk to them and dismisses them with one insult after another. He is taking the classic authoritarian approach to dissenters; smear them fast and hard, and if that don’t work, call in the troops, but never ever actually talk to them.

Fluffy’s hands are tied, of course; how can he possibly indulge something as morally repugnant as talking to uncouth smelly working people, many of whom have bad haircuts, especially when they’re just a bunch of Jew-hating homophobic misogynists anyway?

Worst case scenario?

If the CAF fails to come through, he’ll have to call in our NATO allies to sort this out.

One way or another, you know who’s gonna win this.

BREAKING!!! Experts conclude lockdowns don't work after all

The science deniers at Johns Hopkins University are at it again. Whereas we all know, having been told so multiple times per day for two years, that lockdowns save lives, here comes some wise-guys from JHU saying not so much.

Here’s a taste from the abstract:

This meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects. They have imposed enormous social and economic costs where they have been adopted. In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.

Huh?

That’s what I’ve been saying for at least a year, when it was becoming obvious according to emerging data there was little correlation between lockdowns and mortality rates.

We’ve got a dozen “Premier’s Science Tables” in this country, plus the feds, plus big cities like Toronto with their own “Chief Medical Officers” and their own advisory tables. How could all those experts and doctors and scientists warming the chairs around all those tables get it so wrong?

So the benefits are negligible to non-existent, but the social and economic costs are incalculable, and we’ll be paying them for generations.

Good job, experts! 

An open letter to my member of parliament from a peaceable supporter of the truckers' protest

To Alex Ruff, House of Commons, Ottawa

Dear Alex,

I am a fully vaccinated resident of Georgian Bluffs. Some of my neighbours are not. Nevertheless, in the proud tradition of rural Ontario, we respect one another in spite of our differences.

A number of people from this area attended the Ottawa protest. All of them seem to have had an experience totally at odds with what was portrayed in the media. They spoke of an atmosphere of joyful excitement,  whereas the media present nothing but tales of intimidation, misogyny, racism, and hate.

Although our Prime Minister chose not to see for himself, he has concluded that, because a handful of attendees misbehaved, he can dismiss the entire protest out of hand in the most contemptuous terms.

Here is a suggestion that I hope you can bring up in parliament; point out to the PM that there were many thousands of entirely peaceful and law-abiding protesters in attendance, and he has no excuse whatsoever not to engage in dialogue with them. If he is at all interested in bringing Canadians together instead of further stoking division, he should do so.

Overall, Canada has done relatively well in pandemic management and we have a high level of vaccine uptake. Case numbers are once again in decline. Peer nations like UK and Denmark have eliminated all pandemic mandates. 

This is not the time for the PM to show us he's "the boss." 

This should be a time for healing and moving forward as a united country.

Justin's power trip is taking us in the opposite direction.

Respectfully,

Dieter Neumann

Georgian Bluffs, ON