Reflections on the ice storm

The electricity went out here 9:30 Saturday night, and came on again about an hour ago. That’s three days and nights of no internet, no water, no home-cooked meals, no bath, no shower, and to flush the toilet I gotta mosey on down to the creek with a five gallon pail. No internet means I can’t live stream Al Jazeera’s Gaza coverage. Haven’t seen a dead baby in three days! I’m OK with that. It’s a nice break. Apparently the babies are still dying, but I appreciate the break even though they never got one. The water thing shows you how much we take for granted. You could live a lot longer without internet than you could without water. And three days without water? That’s a crisis for me, but three days can easily turn into three months or more in Sudan or Ukraine or Gaza. Three days is a minor inconvenience by their standards. When it comes to flushability, it’s a good idea to stockpile your toilet water before you actually need it. Here’s a tip; load up early in the day before you load up with a beer and a toke. The creek is well over it’s banks and it’s a bit of a muddy mess down there. One false step on the path back to the house and you’re on your ass with your empty water bucket rolling down the hill. When you need three trips to the creek for one flush it’s a long three days without electricity.

Canadian PM Carnage sparks up bromance with Mafia Don

Somehow the bankers and the billionairs understand one another. You gotta respect Mark Carney for not getting swept away by the tidal wave of patriotism that overtook our fair land after the CBC and Globe & Mail, the conjoined arbiters of goodthink in Canada, declared that a lame joke about PM Fluffy as the governor of the 51st state was actually a threat to our sovereignty. All concerned are fully aware Canada’s sovereignty, such as it was, has been frittered away over the decades, to the point the entire world knows “Canada” is just an automatic vote with the USA anytime a United Nations vote count matters. That’s a very good reason for the USA to keep at least the appearance of having allies. All these “allies” are proof of the old adage; when you’ve got ‘em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow. Oh look! The Free World (ie the nations whose nuts are firmly in Uncle Sam’s iron grip) is backing up the leader of the free world! I for one can not share the euphoria building around the Donald- Mark bromance. At this very moment Donald is enabling a genocide in Gaza, the disembowelment of Ukraine, and the trashing of freedom of speech in America. But we gotta suck up because otherwise a couple of car plants might have to shut down. It’s all about shared values!

Canadian election; are you bored out of your mind yet?

There’s a startling difference between Yankee democracy and ours. In the USA, the campaign essentially runs four years. Trump 2.0 has been in office hardly two months and OAC is on the campaign trail, doing a national tour, rallying support for her run for the White House in ‘28! In Canada, on the other hand, we look to keep our election campaigns as short as possible - four weeks in the current tussle. For good reason; we can barely stay awake for a four week campaign! Anything much longer would completely destroy our democracy! So far the most exciting thing that’s happened is the Liberal Party swapped out Fluffy for a Goldman Sachs man. That bought them an instant 20+ points in the polls. Obviously, even loyal Liberal Party stalwarts were beyond fed-up with their perfumed poseur. Not hard to see why. Before politics, he had a grand total of two years of full-time employment - as a teacher in a tony private school. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it looks a bit wimpy compared to thirteen years at GS, and that much again at the very pinnacle of global finance. Carnage is up against PP, a serious career politician. While Pierre never had to maintain order in a grade 7 drama classroom, he’s acquitted himself well in the drama classroom on Parliament Hill for twenty years. All the polls agree nobody else has a chance. Jag’s best hope is he might once again snatch relevance from the jaws of obscurity in case of a minority Lib government. Frankly, that’s wishful thinking. Jagmeet should resign now and make way for fresh blood in the NDP. He’s become as stale as Fluffy. So it’s a choice between the career banker and the career politician. Lets see how they compare. They both promise to stand up to Trump. They both promise to stand up to Putin. They both promise to stand up for Canada. They both promise to stand up for Ukraine. They both promise to stand up for workers. They both promise to stand up for Uighurs They both promise to spend more, much more, hundreds of $billions more, on the Canadian Armed Forces. They both promise more take-home pay for working Canadians. They both promise to solve the housing crisis. They both promise more money for retired Canadians. They both support Israel’s right to defend itself. They both believe in the ever-elusive “two state solution” that died with Izaak Rabin in 1995. They both condemn Gaza’s genocidal war on Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East… Can you see where things are going here? I’ve got a great idea. Elections Canada estimates this election will cost out at just under $600 millions. Why not just scrub the show and declare them co-PMs! That money could buy half a new submarine, and we need an entire fleet to ensure the future of our democracy. I’m sure at least the Goldman Sachs guy sees the wisdom in my words. Keep me in mind for a Senate appointment.

PM Carnage calls election; demands Canadians check couch cushions to raise $100 billion for Arctic sovereignty

Thanks to the predations of one Donald Trump, Canada has discovered the concept of “sovereignty.” In short, that’s what we pissed away over the course of many decades as our ruling class, the self-anointed “Laurentian elite,” embraced our status as a branch-plant economy and a vassal state. It’s taken Trump 2.0 for them to realize that may have been a mistake. Now they’re over-compensating. Every other day you see another desperate plea for spending billions or trillions or gazillions on cementing our sovereignty via warships and submarines and fighter jets. Because Trump! And let’s not forget the Arctic. Here’s Geoff Russ in the National Post; Canada needs an Arctic Empire, no matter the cost. Seriously? No matter the cost? Funny, that’s also trotted out in defense of warships and subs and fighter jets. A few months ago, we at least knew we were on the side of the angels, and we were willing to make sacrifices to “stand with our allies.” Then the Boss Angel, Lucifer, double-crossed us and joined Putin’s team. Oh my… What to do? It’s clear that the most important thing Canada can do at this moment is double down on military spending… or perhaps triple or quadruple down. As Mr Russ points out, our values of freedom and human rights and democracy must be preserved, no matter the cost. We must establish a robust military presence in the Canadian Arctic to defend our sovereignty. Putin, or rather Lucifer, has his eye on it for sure, and it’s gonna take a firehose of big bucks spraying non-stop before we can face down Lucifer. Indeed. Our Arctic defense force, the Rangers, patrol our North with ten year old snowmobiles and fifty year old rifles. They’re defending a Canadian Arctic population of maybe 150,000, most of whom live in tiny communities of a few hundred souls. Lucifer’s Arctic, in contrast, sports major cities and a population of at least 2,500,000 north of the Arctic circle. Instead of ten year old Ski-Doos, the Russians patrol the Arctic with state-of-the-art icebreakers, of which they have more than all other Arctic nations combined. So what is Geoff Russ saying when he says “no matter the cost?” What he and 101 other pundits are saying is we need to rubbish every present and future social program to facilitate the unlimited expenditure on war toys. Otherwise, freedom and democracy may perish! That’s total rubbish.

Ripper: the fart-making of Pierre Poilievre

Must say I was taken aback by the title of PP’s brand-spankin’-new just in time for the election biography. Ripper? The word conjures much, mostly negative to my mind. Makes you wonder what the demographics of their focus groups looked like. One of the less offensive connotations involves passing wind, or I should say, the art of the fart. Sure, everybody squeaks one out now and then, but in some environments the passing of wind will draw appreciative comment from bystanders. For example, early in my teaching career, until I gained a permanent contract that enabled me to say no, I “volunteered” to coach soccer and rugby, sports I literally knew nothing about. The team bus inevitably became a venue for competitive farting. “Ripping forth a beauty” meant you’d earned the respect of your peers. If you got really big decibels, cries of “Ripper!” resonated around the bus and fist-bumps were exchanged. The word applied both to the fart itself, and to the fartiste. Maybe that’s the Poilievre plan - to subconsciously appeal to the inner teen in every middle-aged voter.

Why do we continue to spend on war when we could make our world a better place?

Almost a year ago, I wrote a piece on Canada’s spending priorities; Chrystia Freeland's Canada; billions for Ukraine, $200 a month for the most vulnerable Canadians. In the course of my teaching career, I did a few years in “Spec Ed.” That’s where the kids in front of you are what fifty years ago was called “retarded,” forty years ago were “handicapped,” thirty years ago were “special,” twenty years ago were “exceptional,” and are today known as “developmental learners.” Those few years left me some of the best memories of my teaching career. I’m retired now, but the Farm Manager still has her day job as an Ed Assistant with those very students. One of her charges, a young man with a horrendous back-story and multiple challenges, not to mention a history of violence, has captured her ever-bleeding heart. She’s always been the champion of the lost-cause losers. I think maybe that’s why she’s with me. But I digress. Buddy has a fondness for animals, and for some time we’ve been trying to tee up a school visit by me and Bruno. Today we finally pulled it off. Bruno and I were waiting in the parking lot when Buddy and two of his handlers came to greet us. The FM had stocked up on pepperettes beforehand. This young man came out of the building with the flat over-medicated facial expression you see on so many of these students. A couple of pepperettes later, he had erupted into a beautiful full-body smile as he was caressing our Bruno, who, while a bit aloof, can handle a caress after a treat. This evening me and the FM got into a conversation about what lies in store for these kids after they age out of the school system. There’s a great program available locally that is largely volunteer driven and gets next to no official funding. Still, it costs money to rent a space and cover essential overhead. While it provides a variety of stimulating activities, and partially relieves the 24/7 burden of care their parents face, it still costs a hundred bucks a day. And, there’s a waiting list. The vast majority of our developmental learners have no hope to reach this program. What do their futures look like? Bleak. Which brings me back to our former Finance Minister’s budget wherein she promised multiple billions for assistance to Ukraine, and a $200 a month boost for our most vulnerable. Yes, when you’re at least a thousand a month below the poverty line, two hundred dollars does indeed give you a lift, but not out of poverty. At best, you’ll perhaps enjoy a slightly more genteel poverty! But only slightly. Meanwhile, not only have we found a few more billions for Ukraine, but we seem set to embark on ludicrous commitments to commit hundreds of billions of dollars to everything from warships to fighter jets to attack submarines. This is insanity! This is a crime against our most vulnerable! This is a betrayal of our values. Surely we can do better!

Drunk on hubris, American Empire races towards the abyss

For about the last thirty years, I’ve been hectored by save-the-planet types to mind my carbon footprint. If it’s not Greta Thunberg in my face, it’s Al Gore up my arse. We gotta get off fossil fuels or we’re all gonna die! In the here-and-now, we find ourselves in a world run by billionaires and their minions. Many of the billionaires hail from Silicon Valley. Most of them are salivating at the prospect of multiplying their billions many times over. Now that they’ve got a huge majority of the serfs addicted to their digital devices, they have concluded the next level in our enslavement will require massive server farms, aka “data centres,” to process the never-ending data streams we provide them. These require massive amounts of energy. The Silicon Valley billionaires have no compunction whatsoever about running their data centres on the very fossil fuels I’ve been warned away from for the last thirty years! And while the filthy rich keep getting richer, it becomes increasingly obvious that America at large is circling the drain. The physical infrastructure is crumbling due to habitual neglect necessitated by the needs of the one percent for ever-lower taxes. Ditto the education system. Housing precarity has become normalized. Health care in America boasts top-of-the-line expenses, but bottom of the barrel results. America’s vaunted military, by far the most expensive in the world, hasn’t won a war since 1945, and has lost it’s proxy war in Ukraine. America’s blank-cheque no-questions-asked support for Israel’s ongoing genocide is earning it the hatred of 80% of the planet. In response, America destroys the remnants of the rights and freedoms, that once made it worthy of the Statue of Liberty, by stomping on the rights of its critics, people like Mahmoud Khalil. As history repeatedly demonstrates, failing empires eventually resort to looting their allies, more properly termed vassals. That’s where we’re at in the present moment. We’ve destroyed Germany’s industrial economy but invite German manufacturers to set up shop in America. We’re going to snuff out industry in Canada and get their branch-plant economy to come home to Daddy. America is racing towards the abyss. The two hour phone call with Putin yesterday led to absolutely nothing. Our adversaries are not impressed, nor are they intimidated by idle threats. As I write this, the Empire is bombing Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the world, to make it stop harassing Red Sea shipping. Our operation “Prosperity Guardian” has in one year accomplished exactly nothing. The Yemenis are not cowed. Nor are the Russians or the Chinese or the Iranians. The world at large is fed up with American “leadership.” It’s increasingly obvious that Americans themselves, those suffering under the yoke of billionaire rule, are fed up too. Witness Luigi. Witness flaming Tesla stores. Only the blind and stupid, drunk with hubris, fail to see the writing on the wall.

Kevin O'Leary, cheap gas, and AI data centres

Do you recall ever voting for AI data centres? Me neither. Yet, they’re a really big thing and they’re coming whether you like it or not. According to Kevin O, there’s a $70 billion AI data centre in the works in Alberta. Alberta Preem Danielle Smith has put out the welcome mat for AI data centres. In case you’re wondering, as I am, why we suddenly need to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into the electricity grid to power AI, let me bring you up to speed. AI is the future. AI can write shitty essays at all levels of the education system, and while they’re typically shitty as shit, they blend in seamlessly with the shit a typical social science or humanities student produces without the benefit of artificial intelligence. Needless to say, the entire education bureaucracy, from K to post-Doc, is all aboard for the next great thing! The drivers of AI, the big data barons who own the cloud(s), are staking claims on present and future electricity supplies to an extent that AI will impoverish the energy ecosystem regular folks count on to heat their homes and cook their meals, not to mention charging your EV so you can do your part to save the planet! All of that is irrelevant to Big Data. Our digital data universe needs to be properly harnessed so maximum profits can be harvested. So here’s the conundrum. We (ie the Western World led by USA) have been warring against the Chinese tech sector for at least ten years, ever since Obama’s famous pivot. That’s when we started seeing the never-ending yellow peril propaganda all over our media. That’s when we declared war on Huawei and started throwing sanctions at anything that might advance China’s tech sector. Well guess what? The country that graduates 10x more science and math students than the West is pulling ahead in spite of our best efforts. That’s why DeepSeek is excluded from Western tech infrastructure. Chinese tech could run better data centres with 90% less energy consumption. That’s why we have to put a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs. Without that tariff, we don’t have a chance to compete. Ya, if you look at the cold hard facts, you might think our Western way of life is doomed. But cheer up, at least we’ve got moral superiority!

Trump makes Liberal Party of Canada great again!

Saw a headline today; “Progressives flock to Liberal Party.” Say what? The party elects a Goldman Sachs man to the top job, and the “progressives” abandon the NDP to climb aboard? As the great Bob Dylan sings in that song I like to listen to after a toke and a few pints, people are crazy and times are strange… To paraphrase Fluffy; make that make sense. Please! Windbag Trump has also managed to fill the sails of the good ship Zelensky with a much needed polling boost. He’s up 10 points since that shit sandwich Donny and JD served him at the famous White House lunch a few weeks ago. If he goes back for a couple more of those, he can probably win the next election! You’d think our new PM would make his first foreign trip to DC, to thank Mafia Don for destroying Pierre Poilievre’s political career, but no, his first trip is to France, there to schmooze failing fellow banker and would-be new leader of Free World Macron (approval rating 27%). Now that Dastardly Don has switched sides in the Russia-Ukraine war, Macron sees an opening in the Global Fight to Save Democracy. To that end, he’s putting together a coalition to send a EU army into Ukraine to enforce the 30 day ceasefire Trump and Zelly have agreed to but Putin hasn’t. What could go wrong? After Paris, our man Carney hopped over the Chanel for a visit with King Charlie (approval rating 51%) and PM Starmer (approval rating 31%). Starmer is all-in with Macron’s EU army plans. Perhaps they can be Co-Leaders of the Free World! After all, their combined approval ratings leave Trump’s 47% in the dust. It’s a shame there wasn’t time for a visit with Germany’s Chancellor-elect Friedrich Merz, another big-league banker. (What is it about Democracy that attracts so many Blackrock - Rothschild - Goldman Sachs types to become public servants?) And a double-shame there’s no time for a meet with Fraulein Faschismus VdL (no approval required and no ratings provided) and her sidekick KK. Oh well, it’s early days for Carney and there’ll be plenty more trips to Europe in the weeks and months ahead. What I’m sensing is a grand anti-Trump coalition in the making. Our new PM is aligning himself with Europe’s champions of human rights and the rule of law. There will be strength in numbers when they all face down the Orange Ogre together. But wait! After our intrepid European freedom fighters prevail over Trump and Putin in Ukraine, perhaps they can mend fences and unite for the greater good. After all, there is an even more important civilizational struggle playing out in the Holy Land. Carney’s new European allies and their nemesis in Washington are all on the same page on that one. Trump, Macron, and Starmer will all support Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians with whatever it takes for as long as it takes.

Can Canada survive Donald Trump?

According to the crack journos at CBC and the Globe & Mail, Canada is facing an existential crisis. Our forever besties south of the border want to annex us. For real! Read any recent op-ed by Andrew Coyne. It’s all because of the unhinged moron our neighbours voted into the White House last November. Catherine Cullen, of CBC’s The House, got a few minutes with UK Foreign Secretary this morning. He was in Canada for a meeting of the G 7 foreign ministers to formulate their Ukraine strategy. She spent one minute asking one question about Ukraine, and ten minutes asking one question, over and over again, about why our G 7 allies aren’t standing with us against Trump. The short answer, Catherine, is that every one of them is, just like Canada, a US vassal. Number one rule for vassals who have ceded their sovereignty to the Hegemon is this; remember your place. Otherwise, you’re cruising for a slap-down. Neither Lammy nor any of the other G 7 chihuahuas are dumb enough to risk that simply because the thin-skinned Canadians feel threatened by Trump referring to us as the 51st state. Perhaps our elite are suffering a pang of conscience for the many years they looked the other way while the Leader of the Democratic World bullied sundry smaller nations. Surely they are acquainted with the “Ledeen Doctrine;” every ten years the US needs to throw some shitty little country against the wall to show the world we mean business. The term was coined 25 years before Mafia Don entered politics. Maybe they’re afraid it’s our turn, or maybe it’s just a bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, which has always hit the journalism profession particularly hard. While much of our over-reaction strikes me as juvenile posturing unworthy of a serious country, the moment provides an opportunity for sober second thought on some recent decisions. The F-35 purchase comes to mind. The more you read about it, the more you realize it’s an overpriced piece of shit American pilots would prefer not to fly. There are sound reasons the plane has never seen combat, unless you count dropping bombs on Gaza or shooting down Chinese weather balloons. The F-16 and F-18 are superior fighter jets. By far the most intelligent thing I’ve seen in the Globe re the Trump threats is a full page advert on page A20 in today’s paper, placed by Caldwell Investment Management CEO Brendan Caldwell. It’s an open letter to Mark Carney, exhorting him to take the high road and eschew the “elbows up” jingoism so popular these days. After all, we don’t demonstrate Canadian values by stooping to Uncle Sam’s level.

Are we there yet? How criticism of Israel became a hate crime

The attached essay, first published at Neumann’s Blog in 2015, is about then Foreign Minister in Big Steve’s government, Little John Baird, first declared war on the BDS movement’s campaign to isolate the state of Israel for its policies of apartheid, land theft, and ethnic cleansing. PM Fluffy’s government took the next step in 2019, adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which condemns virtually any criticism of Israel’s conduct vis-a-vis the Palestinians as antisemitic, and therefore a hate crime. That solves the mystery behind the supposed epidemic of Jew Hate in Canada, and in fact in the world at large. When the PM and Defense Minister of the state of Israel announced their intent to commit genocide, and then proceeded to do exactly that for the next year and a half, it is not surprising that criticism of Israel has ramped up. ____ Sunday, January 18, 2015 It's official; support for BDS is now "anti-Semitism" in Canada John Baird made news today when he was seen running from a barrage of shoes and eggs directed his way when he had the chutzpah to show his face in Ramallah. The Palestinians, due no doubt to the troubling impact their religion has on their thought process, see Baird as an Israeli stooge.After giving the Palestinians a stern lecture on the importance of the rule of law etc, he decamped to Jerusalem, where he signed six "memoranda of understanding" with Avigdor Lieberman, his Israeli counterpart. The cumulative effect of the memoranda is to totally hand off Canadian foreign policy in the Middle East to Israel. Canadian foreign policy hasn't been independent for some time, but today's signings make it official.Included in the memoranda is this gem, governing "public diplomacy cooperation." That means Canada will not only blindly support Israel behind the scenes; we are now committed to make sure we are seen to be doing so in public!Here's the bit that equates BDS with anti-Semitism;Deeply concerned by efforts to single out the State of Israel for criticism and isolate the State of Israel internationally including calls for a boycott of the State of Israel, for the divestment of investments, and for sanctions to be imposed on Israel, Recognizing that the selective targeting of Israel reflects the new face of anti‑Semitism, We're there, folks! Look for the Harper gang to push through something in the next anti-terror bill that incorporates this development, and criticism of Israel will be a crime in Canada.

Trump's bullshit "peace plans" exposed as flim-flam

Who can forget Donald Trump’s bold campaign rhetoric? He was going to go into the history books as a peacemaker for the ages. Those two wars in Ukraine and Gaza, which would of course never had started, had he been in the Oval Office instead of Biden, the worst president in US history, would be wound up right away; Ukraine in 24 hours, and Gaza maybe a day or two later. We’re past the first fifty days of Trump 2.0. Should the Nobel Committee be mooting a Peace Prize for Mafia Don? Alas, that would be premature. The current Gaza ceasefire went into effect the day before Trump’s swearing in. Its primary flaw is that Israel has never ceased fire. They’ve merely scaled back the genocide, killing a mere handful of Gazan’s per day instead of dozens or hundreds. At the same time, they shifted the focus of their ethnic cleansing campaign, massively expanding their attacks on the West Bank. For the past week Israel has again blocked all food, water, medicine, and energy entering Gaza. There is no peace and no ceasefire. The 24 hour peace envisioned for Ukraine was stillborn. Instead, some 1,200 hours in, Rubio has announced, with much fanfare, that Zelensky has agreed to the Trump plan, and “the ball is now in Putin’s court.” The Trump non-plan is for a 30 day truce. Of course Zelensky signed on. He has no choice! But what’s in it for Russia? Even in our legacy media, all but the most deluded fabulists now admit what was obvious enough from the beginning, that Ukraine is losing and will continue losing more every day. Threats of more arms, or the even sillier threat of more sanctions - really tough ones this time - are as ridiculous as they sound. The official Kremlin response has not arrived, but it would be foolish to expect anything other than a big fat nyet. In conclusion, Trump the peacemaker is 0 for 2 at this juncture. On the other hand, Trump the destroyer is batting it out of the park all over the place!

Traffic jam in Indian Creek

Last summer the beavers built a dam on Indian Creek, right under the bridge where it flows under Concession Road 20. That’s right where the snappers will crawl out of the creek and lay their eggs in the gravel shoulders of the road come May and early June. There’s typically a couple dozen turtle nests each season, and the racoons generally have them cleaned out within 24 hours. I walk along there every day, and in almost twenty years I’ve encountered a total of one baby snapper. Infant mortality among the snapping turtle population is horrendous, but somehow the species has survived since dinosaurs roamed the earth. There’s also river otters in that stretch of creek. We’ve had a couple sightings just in the past week, one adult and one adolescent, scampering through the snow on the creek bank. I assume if the beavers hadn’t blocked the creek under the bridge, they’d just swim down the creek. Instead, they now have to exit the creek, run along the bank up to the road, cross the road, and then get back in the creek on the other side of the bridge. We’re gonna have river otter road-kill one of these days. Today there was a muskrat sitting on the ice just on the south side of the bridge, on the edge of open water. It was a fairly young one judging by its size. I stood there eyeballing it for a solid two minutes before it noticed me and plunged into the icy water. An adult would have noticed me and disappeared long before I ever saw it. It’s mighty busy in our little stretch of Indian Creek. Somehow all these different species manage to coexist peacefully on the same small patch of real estate. We humans could learn a lot from them.

Jewish student arrested for Nazi salute at Auschwitz during school trip

I know what you’re thinking. Neumann’s been drinking deeply from those fringe news outlets that spew non-stop antisemitic bile. Guilty as charged; that headline comes from the Jerusalem Post. The Polish authorities, still a little sensitive over their complicity in the holocaust, arrest this Israeli teen who has come to Auschwitz on a school trip. Auschwitz is a top destination for school trips not only from Israel, but throughout the West. Auschwitz generates serious tourism dollars for the state. That’s why the local cops nipped this teen sieg-heiler in the bud, pronto. As a veteran teacher who supervised a few school trips, I can vouch for the fact teens will get up to all kinds of shit. I remember I chaperoned a busload at the International Plowing Match one year, and I had to spend the entire day in the beer tent to keep the little shits out of it! It’s not hard to imagine a teenage wise guy impressing his pals with a Nazi salute at the gates of Auschwitz. They are teens, after all! Luckily for him, his pals spun a pretty good yarn to get him a much-reduced sentence. They were just taking random pictures as Hitler Youth boy was innocently waving at them, and it just happened to look like a Nazi salute! You know, just like that shot of Musk’s recent Nazi salute.

Canadians excited to have former Goldman Sachs banker as new Prime Minister

We’re in the big leagues now! We finally have our own GS alum in the top job, just like they had Rishi Sunak in Britain, Italy had Mario Draghi, and Australia had Malcom Turnbull. Off the top of my head, I don’t recall any of their governments celebrated for improving the lot of their people. Trump packed his first cabinet with GS alumni. His shadow boss Steve Bannon is former GS. There are literally scores of them at the top of the banking and insurance industry in the US and EU. Alice Weidel, leader of the far-right AfD in Germany is a GS grad. They generally skew right politically, although they were plentiful in recent Dem administrations (not that I’d consider that skewing left!). There’s less of a GS presence in the Trump 2.0 cabinet. That’s too bad, otherwise Carney could have sorted out this tariff fracas with a phone call. The billionaires Trump’s hired on from Cantor Fitzgerald and Morgan Stanley are probably just as sympathetic to the interests of the common people as the GS folks. After retiring from the BoE gig Carney was handed not one, but two lucrative sinecures, at Bloomberg and at Brookfield. I’m willing to wager he’s got more billionaires on speed-dial than Chrystia, but probably not as many Ukrainian ones. It was a little unnerving to witness the raucous applause he got from the Liberal faithful at the convention. They’re obviously expecting great things. I am too. Not so much for the folks lining up at the food banks, but certainly for the kind of people he’s spent his entire professional career serving.

Trump and the ever-gushing firehose of horseshit

It’s comforting to imagine the dismay and disarray that has befallen our “Laurentian elite” since January 20 is part of an awakening to just how destructive to Canadian interests US domination of our economy and society has become. Alas, this elite has been all too comfortable with our vassalage, which has been undeniably obvious at least since John Diefenbaker killed the Avro Arrow in 1959. I don’t believe their sudden obsession with Canada’s sovereignty is anything other than nostalgia for the gentler pre-Trumpian days, when Uncle Sam picked our pockets clean while whispering sweet nothings into our ears. Trump, on the other hand, claims we’ve been sponging off the American Empire all along and demands we make it up to them. It’s a vulgar despoilation of the fantasy that we’ve always been besties. Recall it was merely three months ago that our pretty but undeniably stupid Foreign Minister announced the Canadian Arctic was henceforth to be known as the North American Arctic, and that we Canadians were in actuality members of something I’d never heard of; the “North American Homeland!” My view has consistently been that Trump’s political persona is an integral part of America’s Democracy Theatre. Insofar as there ever was a functioning democracy in the US, it has long ago ceased to be such. The billionaires who control the joint can’t just come out and admit that, hence the ever-gushing firehose of horseshit about values, human rights, democracy, and so forth. There’s an excellent essay on view at Naked Capitalism which is well worth a read. The writer argues that the perceived chaos in Trump’s Washington is nothing more or less than the rebranding of the American Empire to better reflect the interests of its owners. I’m inclined to agree.

Remember the looting of Sears Canada

Yesterday’s HBC news brought to mind the not-unrelated fate of Sears Canada, so I thought the time is right to revisit that unfortunate episode in Canada’s economic history. Our PM at the time was the same lightweight goofball who the Liberal Party is officially replacing today. If I recall correctly, he was really sad that 16,000 Sears Canada had lost their jobs and their pensions, but there was nothing he could do. That’s the same guy who frequently attended the openings of new Amazon warehouses in Canada to thank Jeff Bezos for bringing “good” jobs that would “strengthen the middle class.” As if! Of course, when the benevolent Bezos recently shuttered eight Amazon warehouses in Quebec to prevent their unionization, our PM was again missing in action. Frankly, I don’t see Freeland, Carney, or Pierre Poilievre doing anything different. The looting of Sears Canada (from Neumann's Blog, October 15, 2017) In yesterday's Globe and Mail business section, "retailing reporter" Marina Strauss offers yet another it's-all-over-but-the-crying insight into the slow and painful death of Sears Canada. This paragraph caught my eye;Sears's insolvency came after years of declines and red ink at the retailer amid shifting strategies and leaders. At the same time, its major U.S. shareholder – hedge fund manager Edward Lampert – profited from Sears Canada's asset sales over the years in the form of generous dividends while leaving relatively little money to invest in the chain.That's the only mention of Edward Lampert. So he arranged for some generous dividends for himself, did he? Just how generous were they? Don't the folks at the Globe and Mail think that might be a relevant bit of info? I'd sure like to know!This seems like an unfortunate oversight from an outfit that never tires of reminding us how great their professionally trained journalists are, how they speak truth to power, and blah blah blah... Anyway, since Marina won't tell me, I decided to look it up for myself.According to dividendchannel.com, in the ten years before Sears Canada fell into the clutches of Ed Lampert, the company paid a modest dividend of .24 per share per year. That's $2.40 over ten years. Then our brilliant American hedgie gets his hands on the wheel, and the good times get a-rollin'!First thing over the side is the Sears Canada credit card unit. That was considered the most valuable part of the company according to news stories of the day. It fetched almost three billions at auction! At that point, the company could have chosen to reinvest in the business, but who are we kidding!? That's not generally the business model that hedge funds pursue, so instead, within months of Lampert's arrival, there's a special dividend of $18.64 per share to spread the loot to the shareholders, especially himself! That's about 750% more paid out in the first year of King Eddie's reign than was paid out in the previous ten years combined!Is this guy a genius or what!And the special dividend gravy train had barely left the station. There followed special dividends totaling $7.00/share in 2010, another 100 million out the door in 2012, and yet another ten bucks/share in 2013!The company that paid out a dividend of twenty-four cents/share per year before Eddie, paid out an average of $4.50/share/year over the first eight years after Eddie. Or putting it another way, over ten years before Eddie, the then profitable company paid out about a quarter of a billion dollars in dividends. In the ten years after Eddie, the now money-losing company paid out close to four billion dollars in dividends. And as the biggest shareholder, Eddie Lampert was the biggest beneficiary of these "special" dividends!Ain't that special!So now the game is over. Sixteen thousand employees have an opportunity to find more meaningful work, and who needs a pension anyway?... But that's a small price to pay for this great system that brings so much prosperity to all of us.More to some than to others.

Canada once again promises the new warships they've been promising for 20 years

I see where the long-promised new fleet of warships, formerly the “surface combatants,” now the “River-class destroyers,” have moved one step closer to actual construction. They allegedly started cutting steel for the first ship last summer. Today’s news is that at least three of the proposed fleet of 15 have got the green light. The bad news is they’re scheduled to come in at 7+ billions apiece. The worse news is, given our wretched shipbuilding history, that number will at least double by the time they’re commissioned sometime in the mid-2030s. Worse than that, by the time the last of the 15 new ships hits the seas in the 2050s, you can mark my words, we’ll have sunk half a trillion dollars into this project. All that, so we can “stand with our allies?” That’s especially problematic now that we’re not sure who our allies are anymore. And let’s not forget; war has changed since this project was first on the drawing boards twenty years ago. The Russians are losing battleships to $100k amphibious drones in the Black Sea. Why would anyone build a multi-billion dollar warship that can be sunk for a hundred grand? That threat aside, Russia continues to build warships like there’s no tomorrow. Last year the Russian navy took delivery of 12 new surface ships and four submarines. That’s a half- century of production by current Canadian standards! But we’re not Russia. We simply cannot afford this idiocy. Look around you. Any tent encampments in your town? Crazy people wandering the streets shouting at God? We have record-breaking line-ups at food banks clear across the land. We simply have more important priorities. Let’s scrap this insane idea that we need to spend untold billions on warships and F-35s while we’re on the precipice of becoming a third-world shithole. Breaking away from the American Empire is the first step in making things right. Go Trump!

The slow and painful death of the Hudson's Bay Company

While my Globe & Mail today was mostly saturated with Trump tariff hysteria, they did find the space to inform me that our beloved Hudson’s Bay Company was filing for bankruptcy protection. How sad, I thought. I was aware the company had fallen into the clutches of American hedge fund billionaires some years ago, but I still saw it as Canadian. Turns out the only time this almost 500 year old company actually had Canadian ownership was for a few years after Canadian billionaire Ken Thomson, also known as Baron Thomson of Fleet, bought it in 1979. According to Wikipedia, Thomson bought the company for $400 million, sold off the oil and gas assets for $550 millions, and eventually sold on what was left to US billionaire Jerry Zucker for a billion! That’s a pretty sweet return on investment! Far from being a Canadian company, two hundred years older than the country itself, HBC was a tool of British colonialism, and a very effective one. In the 1800s the HBC trading posts formed a network that extended as far south as San Francisco. They even had an outpost in Hawaii. They actively discouraged settlement in the northwest, fearing it would interfere with their lucrative fur trade. That changed when HBC was sold to the International Financial Society, a consortium of London bankers, in 1863. Many of London’s banking houses were neck-deep in the promotion of railroad stock, and they saw the potential in the vast land holdings of HBC. Thereafter, the company became aggressively pro-settlement, because you don’t need railroads without a population. Among the bankers was Richard Potter, father of Beatrice, whose bank eventually evolved into the JP Morgan we all know and love today. Not that they didn’t continue the fur trade. In the 1920s the famous Doctor Frederick Banting, and his good friend, the painter A.Y. Jackson, did a tour of the far north and were disgusted by the company’s treatment of the indigenous population. Outraged, Banting travelled to London and faced off with the directors. He accused them of swindling the locals out of $100,000 worth of fox pelts in exchange for $5,000 worth of unhealthy whiteman food that made their teeth fall out. It was the HBC bigshots’ turn to be outraged. They accused Banting of slander. Alas, they themselves had never been to Canada. When they made some enquiries, they backed off, and actually sent Banting an apology. But back to the present. It has been the sorry end of many a once-iconic institution, built up over decades and sometimes centuries, to fall into the hands of today’s robber barons, the venture fund sharpies who specialize in enriching themselves by destroying the livelihoods of others. They have made themselves so filthy rich that, where they once were content to buy race-horses, they now buy politicians. Proving yet again that as long as we allow money to be power, we will always be ruled by the rich.

Globe & Mail editorial board laments death of Pax Americana

According to the clique of American Empire Loyalists who comprise the Globe & Mail’s editorial board, the post-WWII era of US hegemony, “Pax Americana,” was a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity in the world. It was? Try telling that to the millions of Koreans who paid the ultimate price from 1950 to 1953. Try telling that to the further millions who made the ultimate sacrifice in Viet Nam, Laos, and Cambodia in the 1960s and ‘70s. Try telling that to the millions in the Middle East who have enjoyed the non-so-tender machinations of the Leader of the Free World, from the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953, to the destruction of Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya, to the unlimited support for Israel’s decades long campaign to ethnically cleanse Palestine of Palestinians. Try telling that to the peoples of El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Chile, and Argentina where US support for fascist governments disappeared hundreds of thousands. The cozy smug American Empire Loyalists at the Globe editorial board don’t remember any of that. All they recall is 80 years of peace and prosperity! Now, in the space of a week,… Mr. Trump has ended Pax Americana. Oh, for fucks sakes! How can you publish such overwrought rubbish? Yesterday’s editorial goes on to proclaim that Canada is left with no choice but to follow the liberal democracies of Europe as they rally to keep Pax America afloat without America. This means joining the unelected Ursula von der Leyen’s jihad to raise a trillion euro’s for the defence of democratic Ukraine. Ya sure, why not? Another trillion down the “whatever it takes for as long as it takes” black hole? That’s beyond stupid, beyond counter-productive, beyond complete mental retardation. Yup, that’s the road we want to take! And it’s not just the editorial board at the Globe. Top Globe thought-leader Andrew Coyne has become completely possessed by Trump Derangement Syndrome, to the point where his latest rants are a cry for professional intervention. In one single recent 800 word op-ed, he informs his readers that Trump is: a nullity, depraved, callous, insane, a criminal, a madman, crazy crazy crazy, a threat to the peace of the world, and a moron. Dude! Lean back in your La-Z-Boy, put on some Bob Dylan, and fire up a fattie. Works for me.

Ukraine, Gaza, and Trump's Nobel Peace Prize

According to the UN, Russia’s unprovoked, full-scale invasion of Ukraine, has over three years claimed the lives of almost 700 Ukrainian children. Israel’s war on Gaza, in less than a year and a half, has claimed the lives of over 18,000 Palestinian children. When PM Trudeau met the press this morning, to outline Canada’s response to Trump’s tariffs, he prefaced his remarks with the observation that, in his mind, it was incomprehensible that Trump would turn on his allies, while normalizing relations with the “murderous dictator” in Moscow. In my mind, it’s incomprehensible that Justin would bring that up, considering he has never said a word about the murderous war criminals running amok in Gaza. Justin and a lot of his fellow NATO underlings are aghast that Trump is moving to normalize with Russia. For them, even though they’ve nothing to contribute other than their best wishes, they remain mesmerized by the “Putin can’t be allowed to win” mantra. Trump recognizes something they don’t; Russia has won. It’s all over except the pissing and moaning and finger-pointing. Not only is Ukraine defeated; NATO has been exposed as a paper tiger. NATO is just coming to terms with the fact that, without America, they hold no cards. It’s over. Rant all you want about Uncle Sam’s callous perfidy in provoking this war (and I’ve done my share of ranting) and then walking away from it. Donald Trump imagines himself to be a peace-maker, and he’s doing the right thing. Which brings me to Gaza. I predicted early on that no matter how toxic Biden was to the Palestinian cause, Trump would be exponentially worse. Yet Trump took the Arab-American vote in the crucial states of Michigan and Minnesota. Arab-Americans hated the Democratic Party so much they were willing to give Trump a chance. How is that working out? Today there was an Arab League summit in Cairo. They were making plans to rebuild Gaza, a plan that would not involve the removal of its inhabitants. Would this summit have occurred if Trump had not floated his uber-gauche plan to turn Gaza into a casino resort? No! Trump has managed to consolidate an Arab coalition willing to rebuild Gaza. So far so good, but what about Netanyahu’s ultimate dream; to have America lead an attack on Iran? To my way of thinking, that’s the ultimate litmus test viz Trump’s intentions. Bibi won’t launch that attack without US participation. If Trump holds back, the Greater Israel fantasies are over. And if Trump can pull that off, he fully deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.

Doug Ford, the mouth that roared

Did anyone else figure that brou-ha-ha in the Oval Office last Friday looked suspiciously like it might have been scripted by Dana White? Think about it. Don and Dana are pals from way back. Dana’s got the secret sauce that can get the rubes to cheer for… whoever he wants them to cheer for! That’s why I worry about Doug Ford. Doug is Preem of my province. He recently pissed away $180 millions to hold an unnecessary election so he could have a strong mandate to take on Trump. For all those millions, his party gained one solitary seat. I’m surprised he got as much support as he did. At the onset of this unnecessary campaign, he announced he had a plan to ensure every Ontarian had a doctor within four years. I thought, hey Doug, you’ve already been Preem for seven years, why the fuck don’t we have doctors already? But you know politics… I can see Dana’s scriptwriters penciling in Trump’s next victim after Zelly. Doug Ford, the mouth that roared.

Mysteries of the Woke Mind

I took my first university courses in the ‘70s. There were ashtrays on the desks in case you felt like having a smoke during class. Political correctness had yet to be invented, and its toxic spawn, the woke warrior, could not have been imagined. PoMo literary theory, at least in the non-elite schools that admitted the likes of me, was an entertaining novelty, enthusiastically debated over pitchers of beer in the campus pub. It was heady stuff! Once you realize that absence can be framed as the highest form of presence, you’re looking at a big new world of possibilities! In hindsight, it’s not hard to find the through-line to Woke-world and the Woke Mind. Consider a couple of scenarios, purely hypothetical of course. Scenario I: A young girl, let’s call her Muffy, is born into an Italian family, but grows up to believe she is actually an American Indian. A gifted singer and songwriter, she achieves great success and champions Indigenous human rights causes, to the extent that she finds herself on the FBI’s list of radicals and her career suffers twenty years in the wilderness. She perseveres, stays true to her adopted identity, eventually becoming, in regular minds, an iconic voice for Indigenous Rights. In the Woke Mind, she is a fraud, and must be exposed, humiliated, and stripped of decades worth of honours. Scenario II: A young boy, let’s call him Billy, grows up to believe he is actually a girl, in spite of the obvious evidence in his pants that this is not the case. In high school, with the encouragement and support of a caring community, he comes out, and switches from the boy’s swim team to the girl’s. Regular minds immediately claim he is a fraud, and demand Billy keep his willy out of the girl’s change room. In the Woke Mind, Billy is a hero, who should be celebrated for finding the courage to live his authentic life! Maybe fraud is the highest form of authenticity… or is authenticity the highest form of fraud? Either way, you can blame post-modern literary theory.

Starmer's Summit of Silliness promises to keep making empty promises for as long as it takes

British PM Sir Keir Starmer only got that job because the Israel lobby in Britain kneecapped his predecessor on account of his refusal to endorse Israel’s extermination campaign against the Palestinian people. As such, he is fully aware that his tenure is at all times dependent on far more than the whims of British voters. Indeed, every “sovereign” nation outside the Big Three exists at the pleasure of their more powerful neighbours. So what’s an enfeebled vassal state to do when world events call upon it to show some spine? Why, call a meeting, of course! And that’s what Starmer did, hastily convening the “Securing our Future” confab in London yesterday. And, while our own PM Fluffy wasn’t on the original guest list, there he was in all the photo-ops, ingratiating himself with his fellow non-entities. Here’s a quote from his official website: “Ukraine’s fight for sovereignty is a fight for freedom and democracy everywhere. The important discussions we had today reinforced our shared resolve: as Allies, we will remain steadfast in our support for Ukraine. Canada will be there for Ukraine until there is a just and lasting peace. Slava Ukraini!” - The Rt. Hon. Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada If hot air, wishful thinking, and empty promises could win wars, the Ukrainian army would have occupied the Kremlin a year and a half ago! Slava Ukraini indeed! Starmer’s coalition of the deluded concluded with promises of allied “boots on the ground and planes in the air” to push back Putin and save democracy. When you read the fine print, this remains entirely dependent on what is euphemistically referred to as the “US backstop.” In other words, he affirmed what Trump spelled out to Zelensky last Friday applies to the entirety of Europe; without America you’ve got no cards. But you can bet the empty promises will keep on coming for as long as it takes.

Zelly visits White House, gets shit sandwich with side of humiliation

I had just wrapped yesterday’s rant on the catastrophic consequences of America’s “help” to Ukraine over the past decade, when I turned on the TV to that live presser from the Oval Office. What a fitting exclamation mark to the point I was making! It was the old ass-grabber and war criminal Henry Kissinger who observed that being America’s enemy was dangerous, but being America’s friend could be deadly. How do people forget that? Yet every time another one-time ally gets stabbed in the back, we are shocked and appalled all over again. Wrap your minds around it folks; horny Hank wasn’t joking! America has no friends and no allies. It has only “strategic interests.” The dimwits in Ottawa desperately crafting a policy of appeasement in hopes of avoiding Trump’s threatened tariffs are wasting their time. Trump will do what he does, and no amount of ass-kissing will change the outcome. During Trump’s first term Chrystia Freeland tried to ingratiate herself with Mafia Don by assuming leadership of the Lima Group, that made-in-USA confection that tried and failed to fob off the ridiculous Juan Guaido as the legitimate leader of Venezuela. She achieved nothing other than tarnishing Canada’s reputation in the Global South. Did her service to Trump raise his opinion of her? Just yesterday he dismissed her as a “whack job,” so I’m guessing not. And about that 51st state nonsense. The first time Trump said it he had no idea of the scale of bed-wetting it would unleash in this massively insecure country, so now he tosses it out there at every opportunity just to get a rise out of us. We’ve got serious people writing at CBC and the Globe bemoaning that none of our allies have asked Trump to stop making that lame joke. One overwrought journo wondered why King Charles wouldn’t step up and say something! Really? Grow up, Canada!

Unfathomable evil: America's extortion of Ukraine's precious minerals

The frightened US puppet masquerading as president of Ukraine will be in Washington today to sign over to Mafia Don the future rights to whatever is left of Ukraine. This will compensate the Americans for the “hundreds of billions” they claim to have invested in support of Ukraine since 2022. The number comes as a surprise to knowledgeable observers, as it is several times the value of support actually given, and seems to be another example of the Trumpian arithmetic that discovered an annual 200B USD “subsidy” to Canada. Furthermore, much if not most of the money never went to Ukraine, but to US arms manufacturers, for game-changing weapons systems that have clearly been no match for the supposedly inferior kit the Russians bring to the party. The rationale for the extortion of this broken country is that America must be repaid for its investments. Let us consider what American “support” has brought Ukraine. The stage was set for war with Russia by egregious US meddling in Ukraine’s domestic politics in the lead-up to the coup of 2014. The coup, or the “Revolution of Dignity,” as Western propaganda would have it, brought to the fore elements of the rabidly anti-Russian Ukrainian ultra-nationalists, who pine for the days when they donned SS uniforms and gleefully assisted in the cleansing of Poles, Jews, and other Untermenschen. The shooting war began in April of that year with Ukrainian attacks on the Donbas states that had refused to recognize the coup government and instead declared their independence. By 2022 the Donbas war had claimed over 10,000 lives, the vast majority being Donbas civilians. In December of 2021 Putin offered an ultimatum of sorts; let’s negotiate a new security architecture for the region to end the blood-letting. He was summarily ridiculed and ignored across the West. In February, as Ukrainian artillery attacks on Donbass were reaching all-time highs, he reluctantly implemented the “military-technical” option to demilitarize Ukraine. There erupted across the West a gusher of hyperventilating outrage over Putin’s totally unprovoked full-scale invasion. We, the Democracies of the world, promised to back Ukraine “with whatever it takes for as long as it takes” to crush Russia, a promise reiterated almost daily in the capitals of NATO countries. When Zelensky’s government sought to negotiate a truce a mere month into the war, the preening weasel Boris Johnson arrived to scuttle it. Three years later, the damage to Ukraine is incalculable. Ukraine has largely been demilitarized, and so has NATO. The West’s warmongers turned out not to have the “whatever it takes” of their pie-in-the-sky promises for nearly long enough. Hundreds of thousands are dead. Millions are broken in body or mind, and millions more have fled the country. The cost of reconstruction will run into the trillions. Three years later, there’s been an election in the country that leads the Free World. The returned Trump is mostly interested in reminding us the war would never have started if he’d won in 2020. Beyond that, he’d like to move on, and normalize relations with Russia. There’s just one little thing. Uncle Sugar wants his money back. Hence, Zelensky's pilgrimage to the White House today, to sign away whatever is left of his country’s future, and thank America for all its help.

Identity fetishism; the putrid heart of wokery at CBC

News today that Buffy Sainte-Marie has been booted from the Canadian Museum of Human Rights. She’s already had her Order of Canada clawed back. This is all thanks to a CBC campaign to root out “Pretendians,” fake Natives who aren’t really Indians. Supposedly there’s an epidemic of this fakery going on, which is somewhat ironic. You don’t hear about Indians passing themselves off as white to steal university jobs from whites, but for some reason the system incentivizes the reverse to happen. Before the colonists arrived, Indigenous peoples decided who was a member of the tribe. The settlers wanted to improve that loosey-goosey system, so they introduced something called Blood Quantum Laws. That enabled them to determine who was or was not Indian enough. Now the Indians themselves have embraced this settler innovation. Buffy didn’t make the cut. She must be destroyed. Also today, news that human remains have potentially been discovered in the Winnipeg landfill search. It will take at least two weeks to determine whether the remains found are human remains, and more time to determine their identity. That didn’t prevent the CBC from interviewing relatives of the missing women to get them to share their feelings at this moment. That’s pretty much the epitome of exploitative journalism. If CBC needs to feature this story, why don’t they focus on stuff that’s known, instead of speculating about what isn’t. One thing we know for sure is millions are being spent in the search for the remains of these marginalized human beings. Why couldn’t we spend the money on them before they died? Nobody would ever die in a dumpster if we made sure they had a roof over their head. Buffy Sainte-Marie was a one-time supporter of Leonard Peltier. She backed away from that position during an anti-Peltier smear campaign run mainly through CBC. The man is free at last. Here’s his welcome home party. Times are changing, but CBC’s identity fetishism lives on.

Bullshittin' Bill Browder still golden at CBC

Whenever CBC runs out of more reliable sources of anti-Putin propaganda, they turn to the serial liar, con man, crook, and indefatigable self-promoter Bill Browder for his insights, and there he was on The Current this morning. According to Bill, these are indeed bleak times for the Free World, especially since Trump has officially thrown his lot in with Putin against Ukraine. You might think he’s getting a little ahead of his skis with that kind of nonsense, but Matt Galloway wouldn’t know that, so his wild speculation goes unchallenged. Bill is introduced as a human rights activist and Putin expert. In the 1990’s Browder was the junior partner and front-man for a couple of senior Israeli banking moguls of dubious repute. They set up Hermitage Capital to “invest” in Russia in the wild west days after the fall of the Soviet Union, and made out like bandits! According to Russian authorities, that’s because they were. Browder high-tailed it out of Moscow in the nick of time, and set about reinventing himself as a corruption fighter, human rights champion, and best-selling author. Back in 2019 the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel published a detailed critique of Browder’s yarns. True to form, Bullshittin’ Bill had a hissy fit and filed a complaint with the German press watchdog. They sided with Der Spiegel against Browder. Here is Der Spiegel's response. By the way, CBC aren’t the only ones to fall for this charlatan. Last year he was knighted for his service to the British Empire. He is now Sir Bullshittin’ Bill Browder!

Trump just stabbed the Free World in the back

There’s a whole lotta gnashing of teeth and rending of sackcloth going round the punditocracy these days. Trump has betrayed Ukraine! Trump is a Putin stooge! Trump has abandoned our NATO allies! The folks who write this stuff are in shock. They’ve made careers out of shilling for Empire, and they’re in denial about what is happening right in front of their eyes. What they’re seeing is the propaganda they’ve been shoveling so vigorously for the past three years being exposed as delusional bullshit. Since Russia’s totally unprovoked full-scale invasion of 2022, they’ve been regaling us with stories of Ukraine’s soon-to-come victory over Putin. Putin is already on the ropes. Running out of missiles and manpower. The economy is teetering. Soon… just a few more months and a few more billions and maybe some battle tanks and fighter jets… Russia’s collapse is inevitable. Anyone who has bothered to educate themselves about the origins of the Ukraine war, knows it was meticulously provoked over decades by the American Exceptionalists in Washington and their NATO vassals. Nor was there in February of 2022 any “full-scale” invasion. What there has been is endless propaganda about Russian aggression and Ukraine’s pending Triumph. And it’s been bullshit top to bottom and end to end. In reality, this has been a proxy war by US and its NATO allies on Russia, and Russia has won. The dementia case propped up in the oval office imagined he ran the world. The guy who replaced him a month ago doesn’t seem to consider “running the world” his mandate. This is a blessing for the entire planet! It’s an acknowledgement that America is a powerful nation among others, but not the world’s only super-power and Boss of Bosses. It’s an acknowledgement that the interests of other nations will need to be considered going forward. It’s a giant step towards peace in the world.

Snowmageddon

Just over a month ago, I wrote an ode to the joys of clearing one’s drive with nothing more than a shovel. No fancy climate-killing internal combustion propelled snow-blowers or tractors required. Well, that was then. We’ve had about another six feet of snow since, and let me tell you, that hand-shovel shit is getting more than a little old. The local school board has declared 25 “snow days” since Christmas. In my twelve years as a student, and twenty-five as a teacher, I don’t recall ever having more than ten. The kids have lost more than a month of teaching days, and it’s barely the middle of February! Truth be told, the only thing that’s saved me from a heart attack is the fact my tenant farmer has taken pity on me, and has run a good-sized John Deere tractor with a robust snowblower up the drive a few times. Pity, perhaps leavened by the fact I haven’t bumped the land rent in fifteen years. There you go. Be kind to people, and they’ll be kind to you. Give it a try!

Miracle in Toronto

That Delta plane crash in Toronto has been the top story on Canadian news networks for days now. But what really gets the Canadians revved is when US networks cover anything that happens in Canada. A lot of Canadians have a bit of an inferiority complex vis-a-vis our big neighbour. We disguise that by pretending to be morally superior. Whereas Americans are xenophobic racists who object to illegal migration, Canadians built a welcome centre for illegals on the famous Roxham Road on the New York-Quebec border. And if that isn’t virtuous enough in itself, they actually closed it down during Covid, only to re-open it when the virus scare, if not the virus, was in retreat. We’ve always been somewhat holier than thou with the neighbours, and I’ve always considered that a spot of compensation for that underlying inferiority complex. That’s why it’s so awesome to see the outpouring of national pride these past few days. On our twenty minute drive into town, there’s a couple of dozen Canadian flags flying in front of folks who never had them before, often not even on Canada Day. You can thank Trump for making Canadian nationalism great again! But I digress. The world’s attention briefly falls on Toronto, and Torontonians are basking in the attention, because it’s affirmation of Toronto’s status as a “World Class City.” There’s no city in the world more desperate to be considered “World Class” than Toronto. While the US and international news outfits have long since pulled their satellite trucks back to the the states, CBC is still opening every TV news show with a picture of a commuter jet lying upside-down on the tarmac at Canada’s busiest airport. For at least the past 36 hours, that iconic photo has been accompanied by a soundtrack of experts trying to convince you air travel is perfectly safe! Maybe… maybe not so much. The fact that all aboard survived that crash strikes me as a divine miracle rather than an argument for the safety of air travel.

Is NATO over?

That wasn’t a mere turd JD Vance dropped in the punchbowl in Munich last week; that was a full-on double-barreled shit. So, is NATO over? It should have been over 35 years ago, obviously, but keeping it chugging along served a useful purpose for the American Empire. It made America’s adventures in Yugoslavia and Libya look like there was more behind them than America’s lust for destruction. It also kept the money flowing to America’s military contractors. As anyone even peripherally acquainted with the facts of the Ukraine war will know, without Washington’s policy of NATO expansion, there would have been no war. Lucky for Uncle Sam, NATO has long absorbed the Baltic chihuahua’s, whose ever-shrinking populations haven’t diluted their historical Russophobia. Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, with a combined population less than the greater Toronto area, and no military capabilities to speak of, are the loudest voices for war with Russia in all of NATO. So it’s no surprise they were blindsided when Vance broke the news Washington doesn’t love them anymore. It’s quite a slap in the face to the American Empire Loyalists in the heights of media and academia in Canada. Until very recently, we were treated to multiple Globe and Mail opinion writers exhorting us almost daily that we need to spend gazillions of dollars on fighter jets and submarines so we can “stand with our allies.” Now that we understand how Uncle Sam really feels about us, ie, 51st state if we’re lucky, we’ve suddenly realized all those sacrifices to the national treasury we’ve been demanding, would be made so we can “stand with” Latvia and Lithuania? And we haven’t even got to the best part; Trump and Putin are now solving the Ukraine war without consulting the EU, NATO, or even Ukraine. This absolutely, positively, has to be the last nail in NATO’s coffin. But yet… Just how frightened are the vassals now that Uncle Sam has dumped his Ukraine war in their laps? Are they scared enough to cough up 5% of GDP for US weaponry? Are the scared enough to up that to 10% if the Empire demands it? I have a hunch Trump-Putin negotiations may not end to America’s liking. Uncle Sam could well need a posse again in the near future. If so, look for a lot of kissy-face hypocrisy as the Big Dog and the poodles make up.

Uncle Sam: destroyer of nations

The trail of destruction goes back decades. Uncle Sam has wrought his magic from the Korean peninsula to the Caribbean to the Middle East. The carnage continues. American senator and perennial War Pig Lindsey Graham was in Munich this week, spreading the word about freedom and democracy, and in a sit-down with Ukraine’s Zelensky, thanked him for sacrificing hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians so that no American’s had to die to bleed Russia. Zelensky sat there like a scared rabbit and took that abuse. Left to its own devices, Ukraine would never have provoked a war with Russia. But no, we could not resist. The US spent billions subverting democracy in Ukraine. John McCain and Vicky Nuland handed out sweets in the Maidan! Once our ultra-nationalist pets were in place, we promised them the moon! NATO membership! EU membership! Everything it takes for as long as it takes to put Putin in the dustbin of history once and for all! Three years and a million dead Ukrainians later, Uncle Sam is harumphing about Zelensky’s lack of appreciation for everything we’ve done for him. Ukraine isn’t the only country being destroyed by Uncle Sam’s war on Russia. Germany, the industrial heartland of Europe ever since WWII, is rapidly de-industrializing. Why? Because some unknown entity destroyed the Nordstream pipeline! Now Germany relies on LNG shipments from America that cost four times what they used to pay for Russian gas. But, according to geopolitical geniuses like Sholtz and Baerbock, that’s actually a blow for freedom and democracy! And so it goes… The clearly ridiculous becomes an article of faith, and as Lindsey Graham reminds us, it’s all worth it to save American lives while we defeat tyranny and preserve freedom in the world.

Rage and redemption

When Bert Tallman came home from residential school as a young man of 15 or 16, he was filled with rage, and lusting for revenge. That’s perfectly understandable. Rage is a powerful thing. It becomes all-consuming. You gotta get your revenge or die trying. You try to beat those feelings back with booze and drugs, and things get worse. In the CBC interview, Bert talks about a wise auntie who helped guide him through this fraught time. You want revenge. You can go to jail. You can die. How does this help you? While Bert didn’t come right out and say auntie studied the Bible, the story inferred that her influence took him to a place where he finds peace and strength in studying the Bible. The reason this triggers cognitive dissonance in so many, is because the Bible has been befouled by false prophets for so long that we forget there’s a lot of really good stuff in there. When you see public figures like Mike Pompeo and Mike Huckabee claiming to be “devout Christians,” and then look at their works, well, I don’t think the guy who delivered the Sermon on the Mount would approve of those gentlemen. We’ve come to associate Christianity with colonialism and the slave trade, while forgetting that Bible-centred faith communities were instrumental in ending both. Every other civil rights leader in mid-20th century America was a minister in the Christian church! Kids in residential schools suffered abuse at the hands of emissaries of one Christian church or another. Choir boys in Catholic countries around the world have been abused by Christian priests. None of that is endorsed in the Bible. That’s why Bert and millions of others continue to find peace and strength in the teachings of the Bible.

Rossana Dearchild, CBC, Bert Tallman, and my Dad

I had occasion to spend five hours driving to the city and back the other day. I tend to hear more CBC radio when I’m driving than I normally would. CBC has its challenges, and I’m generally not a fan, but sometimes I hear stuff that almost convinces me that the taxpayer’s annual billion dollar subsidy to the Corpse is money well spent. The occasion that forced me behind the wheel was my sense of moral duty to visit my dear father in his new long-term care digs. I don’t think he cares if I show up, but I feel that moral obligation regardless. He moved in a couple weeks ago, so I’m feeling the guilt. I had the trip cued up twice, and both times wild winter weather interrupted my plans, so it felt good to finally be on the road. Somewhere around Mount Forest, Rosanna Dearchild’s program came on. Dearchild has had a presence on CBC for awhile. She’s a no-nonsense advocate for indigenous rights, and while I respect her, I’m not a regular listener. Most of this episode was built around Bert Tallman, a Blackfoot artisan who crafted jewelry, carvings, sculptures, and such. Bert pretty much spilled his life story. From his early years with his grandparents, who still lived the traditional ways, through the trauma of “the scoop” and the residential school experience. He came through all that and is now somewhat of an elder statesman, not to mention an accomplished artist. One of the things I appreciate most about First Nations culture is how it respects the elders in the community. The older I get, the more I appreciate it. My father was a classic immigrant success story. He got off the boat at Pier 21 in 1956. His first job was shoveling coal. In 1972 he was a real estate broker tooling around in a Cadillac, and successful enough to take his family, which by now totaled five children, on a grand tour of old Europe. He had respect. There wasn’t a lawyer in town who wouldn’t return his calls, in person and promptly. He doesn’t get much respect anymore. What hit me about the Bert Tallman story was when he brought up, very matter-of-factly, that he studies the Bible. My first thought was, how did the Wokies at CBC let that slip through? The second was, how did poor Bert internalize the religion of his tormentor? I was sufficiently perplexed that when I got home, I went on CBC to give the interview another listen. Here’s what Bert teaches me. Although there are people in this world who take pleasure in cruelty, the Creator made every one of us capable of kindness. That’s the Sermon on the Mount in a nutshell. Be kind. I got to Dad’s new pad just as he was coming back, slowly and wobbly, from lunch, with his walker in front of him, and my mother at his side. He shook my hand and gave me a “good to see you.” Then he fell asleep.

Cartoon Democracy

Trump 2.0 is taking the world by storm, at least the Western world. The Rooskies and the Chinese commies, on the other hand, don’t seem to be overly concerned. Today I saw a Musk-Trump PR stunt obviously intended as push-back against the massive outrage ignited by the over-reach by Trump 2.0 in shutting down half the government in the name of ‘fighting corruption.’ It should, in a normal democratic society, be seen as a red flag when the Deep State operative Elon Musk, who has never been elected to anything, is in charge of rooting out corruption in America’s democracy. That in itself would be enough to chew on, but what really fucked me up was seeing Musk’s mini-me, his spawn “X,” standing beside him while dad, the richest man in the world, delivered a lecture on transparency in government! How is that not hilarious? If Elon’s kids were even half as smart as their dear daddy, you’d think the little shit would have at least justified his presence in this scene by translating his daddy’s speech into American Sign Language. But no… he just stood there. The 2006 film “Idiocracy,” for all it’s prescient insights, never imagined such a scene. We’re well beyond Idiocracy!

Billionaires have too much money

It’s no secret that money corrupts politics, and nowhere does it corrupt politics more openly and brazenly than in that shining city on a hill in the cradle of democracy, Washington. That’s been the case for decades, if not centuries, but this latest election cycle blew the needle off the political shit-o-meter. American democracy has made Musk the most powerful man in America, and all it cost him was a mere $300 millions from his couch cushion stash. Rich people weren’t a danger to society back when they bought racehorses and art. But as they got richer and richer, they accumulated the capital that allowed them to buy politicians and government regulators as well. That explains Musk. I’m not against people getting rich, but somewhere along the line they can’t be allowed to turn their money into political power. They have billionaires in Russia and China too, but the difference is that in the Free World, government now operates at the pleasure of the billionaires; among our adversaries, the billionaires operate at the pleasure of the government. I’ve seen the headline; “China executes billionaire tycoon.” We will never see the headline; “US executes billionaire tycoon.” No matter how venal, stupid, and destructive, America celebrates its billionaires, and there’s never been as much to celebrate as there is in Washington today.

Too poor to afford groceries, too rich for a winter fuel subsidy

Over in not-so-great Britain, there’s a stink around the cancellation of the winter fuel subsidies many seniors typically receive. Those are more important than ever, because heating costs have spiked in the UK, as have food prices, ever since Putin unleashed his full-scale assault on the Democratic World. That wasn’t the cause, per se; the cause was all those sanctions the Free World slapped on him in retaliation. Bombing that pipeline didn’t help. The Russian economy grew by over 4% last year. Every other economy in Europe is shrinking, but hey, it can take awhile for those sanctions to kick in. Meanwhile, there’s tens of thousands of pensioners who have been cut off from the winter fuel subsidies. For many, that’s an eat or heat dilemma. You don’t want the heat cut off, but pay that bill, and you’re reduced to eating cat food. But, times are tough. Buck up and buckle down, folks! Where’s that famous stiff upper lip? Freedom isn’t free! Nor are food or heating fuel. For reasons that I cannot comprehend, PM Starmer saw fit to sign a 100 year partnership deal with Ukraine last week. The deal promises Ukraine billions of UK taxpayer’s pounds every year for the next 100 years, because, after all, if Putin isn’t stopped now, he’ll be having a victory celebration in Wembley Stadium before we know it. The good news is that the pathetically pathetic Starmer is so broken in the polls he can’t possibly be around much longer, and this PR stunt in Kyiv can only hasten his demise.

Two weeks of Trump and heads are exploding all over the place

He can’t do that! Then he does it. Pulling the plug on USAID and NED is long overdue and highly laudable. Those are the two most potent tools that have been used to spread chaos throughout the world for the last half century. Sure, USAID does some legit humanitarian work, but mostly they stir up shit against foreign governments who are reluctant to take instruction from DC. Interesting to note that virtually all “independent media” in Ukraine has been silenced by the pause in USAID funding. How did we ever get to a place where we considered US-funded media in foreign countries to be “independent?” The retardation runs deep. Here’s another conundrum I’m grappling with; how is it possible for anyone on this planet to imagine that Trump’s coalition of billionaires are in fact the champions of the working class? The McDonald’s stunt and the garbage-truck stunt were brilliant PR strokes, but those were stunts, people! But here’s a bunch of working class hosers celebrating Mafia Don. Those stunts work! And that entire Gaza Riviera fantasy is beyond belief. You gotta give that new press secretary full marks for how she batted that back the next day. I’ll go out on a limb here and predict that both the working class and Arab Americans will regret their votes for Donny J sooner rather than later.

School shootings, lockdowns, and scaring the crap out of kids

In my 25 years on the front lines of education, ie at the front of a high school classroom, I never had to deal with an actual school shooting. School shootings are relatively rare in Canada. We had that kid in Taber back in ‘99, and there’s been the occasional teen gang-banger in Toronto hunted down in their high school by gang-bangers from other gangs in other high schools, but overall, school shootings have never become part of our cultural wallpaper the way they have in America. So while I happily avoided school shootings, I unhappily endured many dozens of lockdown drills. You started seeing those after Columbine, but they really took off after Sandy Hook. Usually staff got the heads up that the drill was coming. We were forewarned that an “intruder alert” was pending. Sometimes we even got the expected arrival time. Our job when that alert went off (and the buzzer sounded very much like the tornado alert to me) was to coral the kids in the room, lock the door, and close the blinds. Absolute silence was essential, lest your would-be murderers detect the sound of life on the other side of that locked door. The students were to be kept away from the windows, and preferably seated on the floor against the walls. So you’ve got thirty teenagers on the floor around the perimeter of the classroom, you’ve admonished them over and over re the life and death consequences of breaching the absolute silence protocol… and a kid farts. Somebody giggles. Farts are funny to the vast majority of teens. Giggling is contagious, so that first giggle is followed by a wave, and just as that wave subsides, somebody rips forth a beauty that doubles the decibels on the previous effort, and the entire room explodes in raucous laughter. Lucky for all of us, this was merely a drill. Had there been an actual armed intruder prowling the halls, he (and while I hesitate to indulge gender generalizations, it’s almost always a “he”) would have blasted his way through our locked door and slaughtered the lot of us. I made a point of debriefing the class after every intruder alert. The comment I heard most often was; “if somebody wanted to kill us, wouldn’t they just come at lunch when we’re all sitting in the cafeteria?” True that, but the School Board has to do these bullshit lock-down drills anyway, just in case there’s ever a real shooting, and they have to prove in court they did everything to protect us.

American Exceptionalism and Jewish Supremacy will go to the grave together

In case you haven’t heard, Donald Trump has revealed his plan to bring peace to the Middle East. Just as a hammer sees every problem as a nail, a real estate developer sees every problem as a redevelopment opportunity. Since both the president and his special ME envoy Steve Witkoff are NYC real estate developers, it shouldn’t be a shock that when they look at Gaza, they mostly see 25 miles of waterfront on the Mediterranean. Their people are probably busy with a site plan right now, figuring out where the marinas will go, the casinos, the waterfront condos… it’s the opportunity of a lifetime! Meanwhile, back in the real world, stunned disbelief is setting in. Not only did the US facilitate the Gaza genocide with bullets, bombs, billions of dollars, and multiple vetoes at the UN, they have the gall to now claim they want to build a better place for Palestinians, because somehow their homeland has become a demolition site! These altruistic NYC billionaires want to build a nice place for the Gaza refugees somewhere in Egypt or Jordan. After all, they need somewhere to live. Needless to say, this will never fly.

Trudeau threatens Trump with tariff war

We saw a different PM Fluffy at that presser on Saturday. It’s worth a watch, simply because it shows a different Justin from the one we’re so fed up with. He actually sounds like a serious person! He might even have some leadership potential! What a shame he announced his resignation three weeks ago! What a contrast to the smirking frat boy babbling woke insincerities for the last nine years. Having said that, I should also say I found the overall tone counterproductive. No serious person imagines Canada will prevail in a tariff war with our neighbour, whose economy is 12x the size of ours, and who accounts for 80% of our exports. A lot of the Rambo talk from the likes of Doug Ford seems aimed at the domestic audience. Oddly enough, Doug just called an election, so you can bet he’s playing to Ontario voters. It might look good on TV to see LCBO stores taking Kentucky bourbon off the shelves, but think it through. Where’s it going after they take it off the shelf? Down the drain for a 100% loss? Or back to the supplier under a steep return fee? Either way, Ontario is subsidizing a Doug Ford photo-op. The tone seems to have moderated somewhat after the two Trump-Trudeau phone chats today. I’m sure it will moderate even further in the weeks ahead. At the end of the day, once we realize that booing the US anthem at Raptor’s games is pretty much the most serious weapon in our tool kit, we’ll make peace with reality. After all, what can be so bad about being the 51st state?

Caesar Bibirius of Judea to meet Mafia Don in White House

Netanyahu is the first foreign leader to score a face-to-face with Trump 2.0. This visit may shed some light on the perennial question; does the tail wag the dog, or does the dog call the shots? Cynics will assume that Bibi is flying in to give Trump his marching orders for the next four years. It’s not hard to see why some would think that. It’s rare to see an American president push back against Israel. It didn’t happen in Trump’s first term, and it certainly didn’t happen in Biden’s four years. Things might be different this time. I’m not sure if Trump will praise Caesar, or bury him… or slap cuffs on him and pack him into a CIA jet for a one-way trip to The Hague. Yes, sounds ridiculous on its face, but bear with me. If you follow things in the Holy Land you’ll know The Greatest Leader since Moses is in a bit of a pickle at the moment. His war of choice in Gaza has been an unmitigated disaster. Fifteen months ago he promised to eradicate Hamas. After by far the longest war in Israel’s history, and the most costly in blood and treasure, we now witness the spectacle of heavily armed Hamas Al Aqsa Brigades escorting the Israeli hostages to their rendezvous with the IRC. Even without all the war-crimes talk, that in itself is a reputational death blow to the once-vaunted IDF. I’ve been wondering for weeks what was behind Trump posting that Jeffrey Sachs critique of Netanyahu. Obviously, there’s a message being sent, but what is it? Consider this scenario; Trump sidelines all aid to Israel until Bibi steps aside. All aid remains stalled until Israel elects a government that does not include the messianic nutters and will at least pay lip service to the ever-elusive “two-state solution.” Bingo! The Abraham Accords come out of the grave Bibi’s war put them in; relations are normalized between Israel and the Gulf states, who will invest the hundreds of billions to rebuild Gaza, and Trump wins the Nobel Peace Prize. The world will know it’s the dog that wags the tail. On the other hand, if the USAF is bombing Iran by the end of the week, we’ll know the cynics were right.

Armageddon cometh!

Ever since Trump had that tariff brain fart last November, Canadian media have been agog at the horrors about to befall us. The sky is about to fall. Brace yourself. Don’t mean to gloat, but I believe I’ve more than once reminded you of the famous adage from the famous war criminal Henry Kissinger; “To be America’s enemy is dangerous; to be America’s friend is fatal.” Since that November cheeseburger and diet Coke binge, Trump has massively disrupted Canadian politics. PM Fluffy resigned. Doug Ford called an election. Looks like the folks who cling to the fantasy of the world’s longest undefended border and all those values we share with Uncle Sam are in for a rude awakening. We’ve already agreed to guard the undefended border to keep fentanyl and illegal migrants out of America. Virtually zero of those threats to US national security come over the northern border, by the way. Defending US borders is a US responsibility, not ours. We don’t even defend our own, so what does Trump expect from us? This must be a stressful time for all those American Empire Loyalists who populate Canadian media and politics. Let me explain it to you. The American Empire is an empire in decline. It is desperately flailing about looking for a strategy to extend its hegemony. The last stage in the collapse of any empire is heralded by the looting of its vassal states. And here we are. Probably a little late to find alternative markets for the 80% of our exports that go to the US. There was a strategy at one time to build up our trade with China, but after Obama pivoted away from China, we did too. That’s just what you do when you’re a vassal. My hunch is that after three or four months of pressure, Canadians will begin to see the wisdom of becoming the 51st state. We haven’t really functioned as a sovereign state at least since the book “Galt, USA” came out in ‘72. I can’t imagine we’re going to start now.

Quitting NATO

NATO is at least 35 years past its best-before date, and stinks accordingly. There was only one reason to keep it operational after the Soviet Union collapsed, but that reason tells you everything you need to know about the threat to global security it has become. NATO is a giant cash cow that has a multitude of contractors, consultants, lobbyists, PR shops, advertisers, an entire “defence” industry, and myriad “think tanks” and politicians sucking it dry. That’s why NATO leadership is adamant that the members of this special club of Uncle Sam’s arse-lickers pony up 5% of their GDP going forward, a 150% jump from the previous annual dues to be members of Uncle Sam’s Club. And don’t get me started with the bullshit about we’re the world of freedom and human rights and democracy, and our values are the light of morality that light the path for the like-minded world, and we’re up against the forces of darkness. That’s mainly Russia and China and Iran, plus any other country that imagines it can defy the dictats of the Big Dog. For Canada, 5% means a quadrupling of our military budget. We’re toying with hundreds of billions of dollars wasted on 20th century war technology in the age of drones and hypersonic missiles. All so we can “stand with out allies.” Look around at the quality of life in your community. Do you pass homeless encampments on your way to work? Do you have a family doctor? Can you afford to send your kids to college? Our education system is broken. Our health care system is broken. Social cohesion is fraying rapidly. We simply cannot afford to waste resources on delusional fantasies that we’re somehow special because we put the American Empire ahead of the well-being of Canadians. President Trump, the de facto leader of NATO, with his recent rants about Canada, has ignited a wave of nationalist sentiment in this country. Our political elite are obsessed with appeasing America. That’s not putting Canadians first. Let’s break away from Uncle Sam’s Club, and become a sovereign nation. If not now, when?

Gaza, as seen through the eyes of Donald Trump

Back in the day, before Trump got famous and flabby, he used to be a real estate developer of some repute. The fame put an end to that. Donny J got so famous that he could just rent out his name to some other developer, and take a slice of the pie without ever developing anything himself! That’s why there were Trump Towers all over the place that Trump never had a dime in. Fast forward thirty-five years, and Donald Trump is, just as Oprah predicted in 1988, President of the USA. That’s an interesting video. Trump was totally dialed in to making allies pay up even then. Now that he’s the Big Dog, he wants to make bank on that NATO protection racket. Turn over 5% percent of your GDP or something bad could happen to that nice country you got there. This is the guy who all the top billionaires have rallied behind, because he’s just the champion of the working shmuck they’ve been waiting for. They loved the Mickey D schtick, and peed their pants over the garbage truck stunt. So today, as Mafia Don is winging his way towards the ME aboard Air Force One, to visit Egypt and Jordan and, of course, the Holy Land, they do a fly-over of Gaza. Trump is truly impressed! The place is a complete demolition zone! Trump sees the opportunity immediately! Yup, this place could be the next Luxembourg or Monaco! Perfect climate, miles of Mediterranean shorefront; everything the super-rich could want in a warm-weather destination, because who wants to hang in Zermatt or Telluride year round? And he’s got a plan for the pesky natives; send them to Egypt and Jordan! That’ll free up Gaza’s sea-front for a whole whack of casino-resorts! Truly the highest and best use for this glorious real estate! Tomorrow is Holocaust Remembrance Day. Eighty years after the Holocaust, we will solemnly intone ‘NEVER AGAIN’ while completely ignoring the Holocaust of our time.

If you've ever heard of the G7 RRM, raise your hand

Don’t see any hands… kinda what I expected. To be frank, I had no idea what it was either. Maybe a new iteration of the venerable Mercedes G-Wagen? Alas, it’s no such thing. As I discovered while absently rooting around on the Global Affairs Canada website, the G7 RRM stands for the Rapid Response Mechanism of the G7 nations, ie the “Nations of Virtue.” Yup, the Nations of Virtue have put together a Rapid Response team to combat threats to freedom, democracy, and human rights posed by our authoritarian adversaries. Now you’d think that might involve some crack military units fully equipped to rapidly respond to actual physical threats to the Nations of Virtue. You’d be sadly mistaken. No, it appears to be a mostly theoretical amalgam of entities poised to combat “Russian disinformation.” We, the G7, do not have any crack military units to combat Putin’s threats to freedom and democracy. What we have is an ad-hoc conglomeration of lap-top warriors fully primed to respond to Russian disinformation! Russian disinformation is not to be taken lightly, and our RRM agents obviously take their mission seriously. So seriously that they volunteered to work from home during that Putin-inspired “Freedom Convoy” that subjected downtown Ottawa to a horn-tootin’ terrorist attack back in early ‘22. Russian disinformation is everywhere. In spite of all the Western experts from our government-funded NGOs saying otherwise, Russian propaganda still wants you to believe Ukraine is losing the war! Don’t they follow the Institute for the Study of War? Oh sorry… the ISW folks seem to have succumbed to Russian disinformation themselves of late. But not to worry; truth will out! Just the other week no less an expert than Lloyd Austin declared that Ukraine’s destruction is the greatest military success story of our time! If nothing else, that marks Austin as a senior leader on the G7 Rapid Response Mechanism team. Personally, I am of two minds on this “disinformation” brouhaha. Yes, I can see where our adversaries could be trying to poison our well of info on what’s going on in the world. On the other hand, it seems to me that the G7 crowd is bullshitting us way more than that so-called “Russian disinformation.” In reality, Ukraine has lost the war its NATO allies pushed it into. In reality, Putin has not only de-militarized Ukraine; he has demilitarized NATO. Russia continues to produce more weapons and ammo than all NATO combined, and that’s after three years of being sanctioned up the wazoo by the combined West. In reality, it’s way past time to give up our exceptionalist fantasies and learn to live in the real world.

American tech leadership is in DeepShit

Just three days ago I watched the billionaire president and three of his billionaire sidekicks razzle-dazzle the rubes with the announcement of “Stargate,” an ambitious plan to invest $500 billions into artificial intelligence, securing US tech leadership well into the future. This was perhaps the capstone of Trumps grand strategy to make America great again. The triumphalism on display was contagious! Yes, it’s morning in America again, and with wokery in retreat, our billionaires are dreaming bigger than ever! The stars and stripes will be planted on Mars in no time! The entire universe will be in awe! I had never heard of DeepSeek, and unless you’re a hard-core tech nerd, you probably hadn’t either. Three days later, DeepSeek is all over the internet. On the same day Don and Larry were promising individualized AI-engineered cancer vaccines, a little start-up in China unveiled an AI platform that outperforms the latest offerings from Open AI. At roughly 3% of the cost! And that’s after ten years of US using every trick in the book, from sanctions to arresting Chinese tech executives, to hobble China’s tech sector. China has pulled ahead in spite of our best efforts. That’s what happens when you have too many scientists searching for new genders and not enough doing science.

2025: does Germany survive?

I was born in Germany, and once held a passport from the Federal Republic. But I’m a Canadian now. As such, I have nothing invested in the survival of Germany. As rotten and incompetent as our political superstructure is in Canada, we ain’t got nuthin’ on the Square-heads. How an intellectual dwarf like Scholz ever became the top dog in what was once a proud nation is a mystery well beyond my pay grade. How the Fairy Princess Annalena Baerbock became Foreign Minister is an even greater puzzle. The Foreign Minister pledges to support Ukraine regardless of what the German voter wants! That’s the kinda democracy you wanna die for, ain’t it?

God smites Gulf Coast

They say the Lord works in mysterious ways, but I reckon there’s nothing mysterious about the worst snowstorm in 100 years descending on the Gulf Coast within hours of Trump rebranding the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. Coincidence? You tell me… but I’d say it’s more likely the Almighty is mightily pissed. After all, the Mexicans are a deeply Christian people. In fact, they are so pious that even the cartel bosses have patron saints! In America, on the other hand, mocking God has become a national sport. While Donny J was never a noticeably religious man, he came around when that would-be assassin’s bullet grazed his ear. Donald, the Lord is watching you, so don’t get too big for your britches. Pride goeth before the fall. Stay humble! We’re just glad you didn’t rebrand the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of Trump… that might have unleashed a tsunami instead of a mere snowstorm.

Sleepy Joe shows some decency on his way out the door

Actually, from what we know now, Joe was apparently irrelevant to his own presidency throughout his four years in the White House. Think on that for awhile. What does that tell you about American democracy? What it tells me is that the standard-bearer of the democratic world order is a faux democracy, as fake as a three-dollar bill. Yup, the Exceptional Nation that has busied itself spreading democracy hither and yon these past few decades doesn’t actually have one at home. Instead, it has a bustling hive of conniving opportunists, careerists, lobbyists, and grifters of all stripes, each committed to the lofty American ideal of lining their own pockets at the expense of what in simpler times might have been called the “common good.” Needless to say, when the DC hustlers realized they were advising a dementia patient, they ran with it. Gotta make hay while the sun shines, dontcha know! And did they ever make hay! Under Biden, hundreds of billions in US dollars flew out the door to “save democracy” in Ukraine, in Taiwan, and in Israel! For almost a year, the hive buzzing around Biden claimed they were working 24/7 for a ceasefire in Gaza, to no avail. Do you really believe Trump’s golfing buddy Steve Witkoff has more influence in Israel than the entire US State Department? Or is it more likely that Sullivan, Blinken, et al were never interested in a ceasefire? How else to explain Trump’s Middle East envoy securing a ceasefire with one visit to Jerusalem, a ceasefire that eluded Antony Blinken and the entire state department for a year? But enough of that; I come to praise Caesar, not to bury him under mountains of well-deserved opprobrium. History will look after that. In the dying minutes of his last day in office, President Biden granted clemency to Leonard Peltier, who has languished in the US prison system for nearly fifty years for the alleged murder of two FBI agents. Over the decades, everyone from the Dali Lama to Mother Teresa to Nelson Mandela to Amnesty International has lobbied successive US administrations for clemency. Every president, including Clinton, Obama, and Trump, has ignored Peltier’s plight. Until today. Good on you, Joe.