Charlie's incredible and amazing outhouse fishing adventure

Charlie is my son-in-law. He was a little on the nerdy side, but he won us over with his work ethic and his obvious commitment to our daughter. Plus, he came from a long line of Finnish-Canadians. The Finns are famous for saunas, vodka, and their enthusiasm for hard work, which is why they had such an impact on the development of the Northern Ontario communities they migrated to. We were delighted with the arrival of our first grandchild, Lilah. We were doubly delighted to see baby Lilah being table-trained with one of those spoon-fork contraptions known as a “spork.” This particular spork had been in the family for generations; a family heirloom, if you will. A couple weeks ago Lilah’s parents took her on her first camping trip. A first camping adventure with a not-quite-toddler is bound to be hectic and stressful under the best of circumstances. Which it was. But then Charlie inadvertently cranked the stress dial into the stratosphere. After washing up the breakfast dishes on their last day, he, following Algonquin Park protocols, dumped the dishwater down the nearest outhouse. A half hour later, as they were packing up, the spork was nowhere to be found. After searching every nook of the tent and every cranny of the campsite, they came to the horrifying realization that the family heirloom had gone down the shitter. Literally. They did a cursory search of the subject latrine, to no avail. They contacted the park authorities to request that the contents of said latrine be sequestered, to permit a more thorough examination in the future. Request denied. They drove home in silent despair, especially Charlie. After all, it was he who bore responsibility for carelessly tossing that spork into the outhouse. Next day, Charlie stops at the local Princess Auto, picks up a 100lb magnet, 20 feet of sturdy nylon cord, a face-shield and rubber gloves, and drives 300 km back to Algonquin. “There’d been a few layers added since I tossed the dishwater down there, so I had to throw the magnet pretty hard to get the right depth. That caused a fair amount of splatter. Thank goodness for the face-shield!” Charlie came home with the spork! And, while it was a miracle the family heirloom had been recovered, Lilah’s parents agree no sterilization regimen known to science will allow them to put that spork in her food ever again. But at least it came home. Good job, Charlie! You are truly a mensch!

After Chicago

Spent four evenings watching almost every major speech at the DNC. That’s two full 24 hour days out of my life that I’ll never get back. That’s enough hot air to relaunch the Hindenburg many times over. So what do we know now that we didn’t know before? Not much. Over four days we heard nothing about how a Kamala administration plans to address the multiple challenges facing America. Not that anyone looks to Kamala for “leadership.” She wasn’t voted in by popular demand for her fresh ideas on foreign policy or the state of the economy, after all. No, she was chosen for the “joy” factor she brings to the race. Check out this essay at CNN by John Blake; Kamala Harris is tapping into the Black Joy movement. Indeed! Who needs policies when you’ve got Black Joy filling your sails! Blake posits an interesting theory I’d not been previously acquainted with. Kamala’s propensity for inappropriate laughter is actually the manifestation of a long tradition of Black resistance to White Supremacy! Not sure about that. I don’t recall any of the giants of the civil rights movement erupting into inane cackling whenever faced with a question. But that was then, and this is now. We roll different now. Democracy is different now. Ya, those political conventions in the old days were pretty crazy. It was considered normal to go into an open convention not knowing who the candidate would be! Just imagine how inefficient that was! It’s way more efficient to just have the big donors sort things out amongst themselves ahead of time, thereby freeing up the convention itself for a nonstop orgy of cheerleading! Ka-ma-la! Ka-ma-la! Ka-ma-la! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! Say what you will about the Trump cult; the Dem cult is at least as deranged, if not more so. The signature achievement of the convention was the successful banishment of any discussion whatsoever about the ongoing US-sponsored genocide in Gaza. The Muslim population in America is growing exponentially faster than the Jewish population and will surpass it within a few years. That would be highly problematic for America’s blank-cheque support for Israel if we had a functioning democracy. Thank God the big donors have eliminated that risk! In fairness, both Joe and Kamala stressed that they have been working tirelessly to achieve a ceasefire, to get the hostages home and spare whatever Palestinian civilians aren’t dead yet. They’ve been working tirelessly on this humanitarian priority since the last ceasefire expired in November of 2023. As Uncle Tim might put it in his folksy way, “that gosh-darned ceasefire is slipperier than a greased pig at the county fair! We just can’t seem to rassle that sucker over the finish line.” And so the genocide grinds on…

Coach Walz destined to become next Border Czar

That was quite a speech Mr Walz unleashed in Chicago last night! What the party elites no doubt noticed was that, unlike their anointed one, Tim Walz has a wiff of authenticity about him. Mind you, that was an easy room for him to shine in. These are true believers who will happily applaud any inanity. Joe is one of the most consequential presidents in American history! Hooray! Joe and Kamala have worked tirelessly for a ceasefire in Gaza! Hurrah! The economy has never been stronger! Yippee! The Democratic Party is the champion of the working class! Woohoo! America has never been stronger… NATO has never been stronger… Democracy has never been stronger… U-S-A! U-S-A-! U-S-A! But alas, eventually the euphoria must end. Sooner or later the big donors, the folks who put the ‘rats’ in ‘Democrats,’ are gonna get a little nervous that Uncle Tim, America’s coach, could outshine their empty vessel, Kamala. Even though Walz and Harris were born months apart, Walz presents like an old white guy, whereas Kamala presents twenty years younger. And never forget - she is a 'woman of colour’. The Dem elite will under no circumstances allow an old white guy to show up a ‘woman of colour,’ no matter how saturated in privilege that woman’s life trajectory has been. So keep your head down, Coach Walz, or before you know it, you’ll get the border file and we’ll never hear from you again.

All aboard the Kamalamania Express!

That’s quite a love-in they’re having in Chicago this week, eh! Kamala has set the grassroots on fire! We haven’t witnessed such an eruption of authentic enthusiasm since Obama wowed the rubes with his ‘08 campaign! And the money is just pouring in! An alleged 500 millions since Sleepy Joe was switched out for Kamala by popular demand! I’m guessing the tidal wave of euphoria will bring in another half billion per month till November - more than enough to ensure a free and fair election! As the Dem base gets to know Kamala better, their love for her will only grow. Kamala fighting racism every day of her teen life coming up in the notorious Westmount High in Montreal, the toughest school this side of Compton. Kamala overcoming the grinding poverty inflicted on every child with the misfortune of having been born to a pair of university professors. Kamala dodging the rampant misogyny and sexism inflicted on any young woman entering politics by the horny old men who consider themselves the gate-keepers to the corridors of power, senior politicians like Willie Brown. Kamala fighting the good fight against anti-black racism with such fervor she got the support of most of the police unions every time she ran for public office! Ka-ma-la! Ka-ma-la! Ka-ma-la! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! Hey, if you thought America was back when Joe took office, hold onto your hat… you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!

Tim Horton University and the enshitification of the academy

Pleased to report I’m down to buying just one print copy of the Globe & Mail per week, down from six. I still crave the page-turning, but I get my fix with the $8.40 Saturday edition. Rest of the week I read it online. Given the Farm Manager’s had an online account for over a year, this move was probably somewhat overdue. So just after 6 o’clock this morning I headed into town, picked up my Globe from the Korean Extortionist, grabbed a medium dark roast at Timmies, and settled in on a waterfront bench between the marina and the water treatment plant. You gotta admit Timmies is one of the few Canadian institutions that brings Canadians together instead of tearing them apart. True, I was put off when those Brazilian hedge-fund sharpies bought the brand, but that doesn’t seem to have diminished its appeal. As I was exiting the drive-thru I had to stop for a couple of Indigenous dudes walking by with Timmies cups. I had just got cozy on that waterfront bench when a carload of Indians (the other ones) gathered round a nearby picnic table, every one of them with a Timmies in hand. Oh Canada! But I digress. I usually head to the opinion section first. On the front page I see the headline “The Ghosts of Chicago.” Cambridge University professor of American history Andrew Preston has got a full-pager and then some doing a compare-and-contrast between the 1968 Democratic party convention in Chicago and the upcoming shindig next week. In my world that ‘68 convention is generally known as the “Chicago police riot,” but no matter. I watched it on TV. My dad was happy to see the police beating the crap out of the “hippies.” For me, that event sparked a life-long interest in anti-establishment politics. Preston, in his long-winded academic way, is analyzing the role of populism in 1968 vs next week’s convention. I was OK till I ran into this; Yet disaffected working class whites didn’t all turn to Nixon. Many instead turned to Wallace, who siphoned off enough votes from both Humphrey and Nixon - across the Sun Belt of the South and Southwest but also in the deindustrializing Rust Belt cities of Northeast and Midwest… That didn’t sound right to me. Far as I know, in ‘68 American heavy industry was alive and well. There were no deindustrializing Rust Belt cities in 1968. In my recollection, deindustrialization got going in the Reagan-Thatcher dawn of neoliberalism, and kicked into overdrive with the advent of “free trade.” So I did a little research. The term “Rustbelt” was coined during Walter Mondale’s presidential campaign in 1984. That’s 16 years after the '68 Dem convention. American manufacturing employment peaked in ‘79. There clearly was no “Rust Belt” in ‘68. The other day one or another of the annual university rankings came out. The FM was pleased as could be that two of our five (both hers) have graduated Canada’s top-ranked school, U of T. That’s where Preston graduated too, and then arrived at Cambridge via Stanford and LSE. Cambridge is consistently ranked in the top five worldwide no matter what ranking outfit you look at. And Preston is so popular at Cambridge he’s not taking any more applicants to his Doctor Phil program, according to his University of Cambridge website. I, on the other hand, hold a B.A. from the University of Guelph, consistently ranked between the 450th and 600th best universities in the world, no matter what ranking outfit you look at. Academic standards clearly aren’t what they used to be. Maybe Tim Horton's should start a university.

We're all antisemites now

Maybe you weren’t paying attention when Canada adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism in 2019. That’s when criticism of Israel officially became antisemitism. Needless to say, antisemitism has been on the uptick ever since! And it’s gone stratospheric since Israel embarked on its genocidal war on Gaza. In the beginning, we wanted to give Israel the benefit of the doubt. After all, every country has the right to defend itself. But after Bibi and Gallant announced their plans to deny food, water, and electricity to the entire Gaza population, well-meaning folks, otherwise warmly disposed to Israel, started having misgivings. After all, that smelled a lot like… genocide. Six months into this war of extermination, anti-genocide protests began to pop up on university campuses. Since it is technically impossible to criticize the genocide without implicitly criticizing the state carrying it out, all these anti-genocide protests were immediately labelled antisemitic, and the antisemitic anti-genocide protesters were dealt with ruthlessly. Never again! We are now ten months into Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Who in their right mind would not criticize Israel for its genocidal excesses? For ten months we’ve heard every school and every hospital in Gaza is a Hamas command post. Yet, after destroying every school and every hospital, Israel is further than ever from achieving its goals. Instead, it has destroyed its own credibility around the world. Many diaspora Jews are disgusted and enraged by what the Jewish supremacist cabal currently in charge is doing in their name. They protest. Everybody with a conscience is criticizing Israel. They’re all antisemites!

US and Kenya keep freedom alive in Haiti

Haiti declared independence from France a mere thirty years after America declared independence from Britain, so you’d think those two fledgling republics, the first in the Western Hemisphere, would have much in common. Alas, that was not the case. That may have had something to do with the fact independent America was a slave-owning state, whereas the independent republic in Haiti was a slave state wherein the slaves had overthrown their masters. The US didn’t even officially recognize Haiti as an independent country until the southern slave-owning states quit the Republic at the onset of the civil war. Independent Haiti was not independent for long, and was crippled from the get-go by France’s demand for reparations. Gradually, “independent” Haiti became a virtual economic colony of the USA, and so it remains to this day. Meanwhile, a mere 80 miles away, exciting things were happening in Cuba, none more exciting than Fidel Castro’s revolution of 1959. While the US approach to Haiti could be characterized as benign neglect pre-’59, the Cuban revolution perked up a lot of ears in Washington. What if this commie stuff spread to other countries? And Haiti would be a prime candidate… it could be the first domino to fall! By 1962 America had imposed suffocating sanctions against Cuba. With a brief respite during the Obama years, sanctions remain to this day. Sixty plus years of sanctions have been a roaring success; communism has not spread to Haiti! Alas, democracy has not exactly taken hold either. Every time we let Haiti have an election, they elect the wrong guy! That’s why we had to take out Aristide, twice! Let’s face it; he may be a Catholic priest, but he sure talks like a commie! So here we are today. After 60 years of keeping communism out of Haiti, and imposing crippling sanctions on communist Cuba, the GDP per capita is $9500 in Cuba versus $1500 in Haiti. Cubans have 15 years more life expectancy than their neighbours 80 miles away. The literacy rate is 61% in Haiti compared to 99.7% in Cuba. Cuba has 5 doctors per thousand population vs. one doctor per 5000 population in Haiti. Thank God we saved Haiti from the scourge of communism!

CNN reports latest US mission to restore democracy in Haiti going great!

Haiti is one of those shithole countries where they just can’t get democracy right, no matter how much Canada, France, and the USA try to help them. And look how we help; that Aristide fellow got himself democratically elected not once, but twice! That’s why Haiti is doomed. They just don’t know enough to elect the right candidate. Twice we had to remove the democratically elected Aristide in order to allow true democracy to flourish. How is such a thing possible? I figure the problem is that Haiti doesn’t have a resident billionaire class. Their super-rich tend to prefer Miami or Montreal or Switzerland. That’s why their attempts at democracy repeatedly fail. Look at the greatest democracy in the world. USA has the most billionaires anywhere, which is why their democracy functions like a well-oiled machine. If Haiti had a responsible billionaire class, Aristide would still be a country priest in some God-forsaken rural parish, and some Juan Guido-type character acceptable to Canada, France, and above all, the USA, would be leading a prosperous democracy! Anyway, it’s not too late to turn Haiti’s ship of state around. True, things have really gone down the shitter since the failure of the last Haiti salvation mission, which, instead of bringing democracy and prosperity, brought only a cholera epidemic thanks to the saviours shitting in the drinking water. This time the Kenyans are in charge! Yup, Uncle Sam saw things were going seriously askew in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, and lobbied desperately for some vassal state to step in and restore order. Both Canada and France declined, causing a desperate search for some desperate (preferably majority black) country to take the lead role in the newly-created Multinational Security Support mission, or MSS. The original Kenyan deployment has been in-country for a few weeks now. They’re still training (don’t shit in the drinking water) and waiting for their back-ups from a handful of Caribbean nations also keen on wheedling a few bucks out of Uncle Sam’s purse. CNN has a world exclusive on view today. They actually interviewed the current non-elected PM Conille, the first international media to do so! Conille is very optimistic that, if America comes through with its promises of whatever it takes for as long as it takes, democracy and prosperity will follow! I wouldn’t get my hopes up.

Stop this crazy train and let me off

Things are going nuts all over the world. Gaza, Ukraine, Yemen... death and destruction like never before! What happens when you spend too much time on screens is you allow yourself to believe it’s always fifteen minutes or less to Armageddon. I know turning off your screens doesn’t stop the ugly shit from happening, but do I really need to watch Al Jazeera 24/7 so I can see every dead baby in Gaza? No! Luckily, I’ve got my lazy Italian mastiff at my side as I negotiate the path towards mindful enlightenment, or perhaps, enlightened mindfulness. Frankly, I’ll happily settle for either one. Bruno is the most affable companion one could wish for. He mostly spends his few waking hours planning his next nap. And he’s really good at it! What makes his napping so exceptional is the utterly symphonic snoring that comes with it. I spent some time on the stoop this afternoon, watching the buzzards float in circles a thousand feet overhead. They can spot a dead chipmunk on the road from that height. They can see me too, if they see that chipmunk. Wonder what they’re saying as the circle up there? When that fat fuck drops dead we’ll be living large, boys! I gotta be worth a couple hundred dead chipmunks! So I’m sitting there watching the buzzards and speculating about their possible conversations, and my ruminations are interrupted by the soothing sounds of Bruno’s melodious snoring… That sound is so soul-healing I should record it. Instead of listening to canned surf sounds in your yoga class, you could listen to Bruno instead! Bruno could become a wellness guru!

How to get away with genocide without really trying

First step; find a receptive audience. As The Greatest Leader Since Moses demonstrated last week, if you’re selling genocide, there’s not a more receptive audience than the US Congress. They really love this stuff. When you’ve murdered thousands of children over ten months, there’s not a lot of venues will provide you a standing ovation. Welcome to America! Secondly, make sure everybody knows you’re the victim. October 7th, don’t you know! Biggest slaughter of Jews since The Holocaust, don’t you know! The equivalent of eleven 9/11s, don’t you know! Personally, I don’t know. In fact, I’m highly skeptical. Israeli spook services are arguably the best in the world. They can track down terrorist masterminds to a single apartment in Beirut or Tehran and dispatch them with a single missile. But they had no idea October 7th was coming? When they’ve been watching Hamas practice up for this assault for at least two years? When Egypt, Qatar, and USA all gave them a heads up in the week before? Get outta here! What I’d like to see is an independent international inquiry into who knew what and when. Perhaps such an inquiry could investigate who ordered IDF forces to cool their heels for hours as the attack unfolded. Perhaps such an inquiry might even get around to establishing how many of those Jewish victims were slaughtered by “friendly fire.” Finally, when you want to sell genocide, always focus on your superior values. That goes over big in DC. Since America is the font of all justice and human rights in the world, Americans automatically assume any ally of America shares those values. You can’t possibly be evil if you’re allied with the good guys! And here we are…