The difference between porch and stoop

I spend a lot of time on the stoop, watching the world go by. Sometimes I write about it. Sometimes, when I’m writing about it, I call the stoop the “porch.” So what’s the difference between porch and stoop? I’ve not consulted Google on the matter, so I could well be wrong, because as we all know, Google is the final arbiter in questions of what is fact and what is not. In my view, there’s no difference whatsoever, other than this. If you’re sitting on the porch, you live in town. If you’re sitting on the stoop, you’re in the country. I’m in the country. We’ve been having way too much rain lately, but unless there’s a robust wind blowing out of the south south-west, I avoid most of it on the stoop. One of the distractions when I’m focused on frogs and buzzards is the traffic on the road between the stoop and the marsh. Not that there’s a lot of it by city standards. A busy Sunday afternoon might see a few dozen cars go by. There’s people driving by where you can hear their car stereo from a mile down the road. I just think, how deafening must that be in the car? Then again, I remember a time when a loud stereo was considered really cool. In fact, when I was department manager for automotive at the K-Mart in the Stone Road Mall, big-ass car stereos were a big seller. That was just around the time the supposed “muscle car craze” of the late sixties morphed into the van craze of the early seventies. Suddenly a 426 hemi was last decade’s news, and a six-cylinder Econoline van was the happening thing. You had to admit the van had some advantages. Trying the oinky-boinky in a Dart GTS with bucket seats, console, and floor shifter wasn’t exactly an erotic experience, and the back seat wasn’t much of an improvement if boinker or boinkee were more than four feet tall. That’s the era when car stereos hit the big time. I recall a hitchhiking trip from Washington to Minnesota back in the van era. Somewhere in North Dakota a couple of long-hairs gave me a lift. They had the 24” woofers blasting Jerry and company full volume. They eventually pulled over to focus on the hash pipe and a lively discussion about whether sound waves could be harnessed to propel a vehicle. Fast forward fifty years, I’m sitting on the stoop here at Falling Downs, and I can hear the thumping bass of an approaching Land Rover that comes by about the same time every day. I figure these are the same bougie twats who muddied the waters on the porch/stoop debate by introducing the backyard “deck.” That was always just a thing that let you set down your drink on a hard surface instead of on the lawn. I’m sitting on the stoop.

"Journalist of the Year" exposed as warmongering dimwit

By happy coincidence, yesterday’s Globe & Mail brought not only the news of Doug Saunders’ prestigious honour, but a fresh op-ed by the Journalist of the Year himself! “NATO’s spending targets are out of touch.” Finally! A long-awaited rebuke to those many American Empire Loyalists given multiple column-inches daily to shame Team Trudeau over our woefully inadequate expenditures on US military kit. Our allies are fast losing faith in us. We are no longer a serious player on the world stage. We must be more like Australia and commit tens of billions to a nuclear-powered submarine fleet to augment the tens of billions earmarked for surface combatants and the hundred or so billions destined for Lockheed Martin’s F-35. Those obsessions are reflected daily in the hysteria over Canada’s failure to meet NATO’s 2% of GDP spending target. Then I read his column. What a buzzkill. Sadly, Doug doesn’t dwell on the obvious - that a country that can’t afford to provide adequate health care and housing for its own citizens has no business pissing away such vast sums in return for a pat on the back from Uncle Sam. No, Doug is writing from a much deeper level of profundity. He has discovered that the very nature of war in the 21st century has changed. “Military spending is now primarily a matter of buying arms and munitions to supply other countries engaged in wars we will not join, rather than building up domestic forces for our own defence.” Got it? We don’t have to spend those hundreds of billions equipping the Canadian Armed Forces, because we face no threats and won’t join in any wars regardless. Instead, we need to spend the money so we can send the weapons to Ukraine and Israel, countries that are fighting very expensive wars on behalf of our shared values. Shared values? In Ukraine, Canada connived in the overthrow of a democratically elected government in 2014, and then participated gleefully in the US campaign of goading the newly-installed nationalist government towards conflict with Russia. In Israel, the values displayed in the slaughter of 14,000 children in six months speak for themselves. Enough with the “shared democratic values” horseshit. Our values, and our spending, must prioritize the needs of Canada’s citizens, not the fantasies of Empire propagandists writing in the pages of the Globe and Mail.

The Israel we knew is gone forever

Like most every kid who came up in a Christian home in the middle decades of the last century, I was raised to have a profound respect for the Jewish people and their long overdue homeland. With the creation of the state of Israel, a land without people for a people without land, biblical prophecies were coming true all over the place! The Six Day War cemented our bond. The hand of God alone permitted the Chosen People to prevail when their massed enemies unleashed a sneak attack on them! In ‘73 we doubled down. Back in the day, Israel was a destination for many idealistic young people who wanted to demonstrate solidarity by spending some time on a kibbutz. Today the idealistic young people prefer to demonstrate solidarity with the Palestinians. What changed? One thing that changed is that my generation outgrew the Sunday School propaganda we had marinated in throughout our childhoods. We learned that the land without people actually had people after all. We learned those people had been displaced. The realization slowly dawned on us they remained displaced decades after the fact. The resistance of the displaced people against their displacers began to get serious attention by the late ‘60s. The “terrorism” of the PLO led, in the fullness of time, to the negotiation of the fabled “two-state solution.” The Oslo Accords were to be the first step on the way to that solution. In 1994 PM Yitzak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat shared the Nobel Peace Prize for the Oslo Accords. The following year, Rabin was murdered by a right-wing Jewish religious nutter. The two-state solution died with Yitzak Rabin. The people who killed him now steer the ship of state. There will be no peace. There will be no two-state solution. As progressive Israelis abandon ship, as they have been doing for years and will do with increasing urgency going forward, the land we once idealized will become the preserve of Jewish supremacists determined to cleanse the land of the “Children of Darkness.” Yes, they talk like that. And the greatest democracy in history, the ultimate redoubt of human rights, the City on a Hill shining freedom’s light into the darkness of creeping authoritarianism, the United States of America, with the most powerful military in the history of history, backs up Israel’s genocide in Gaza 100%.

The blessings of moving to Amish country

I wrote about the sub $200k residential listing in Teeswater the other day. A roof and a yard and so affordable almost anybody can buy it. What affordability crisis? What I neglected to mention was the many strategic benefits of moving to Mennonite country. The southern reaches of Grey and Bruce counties, most of Huron and a good part of Perth counties, plus most of Waterloo Region, have multiple old-order Amish and Mennonite communities. In trying times, these are the best neighbours you could ever wish for. When the day comes that one of our tyrannical authoritarian adversaries unleashes a cyber-attack that collapses the power grid, where do you want to be? In a 22nd floor condo in downtown Toronto? Or down the road from a guy who’s never been attached to the grid, whose children sell farm-fresh eggs, fresh-baked pies, vegetables, and farm-made summer sausage at the end of their lane (no Sunday sales, thank you very much)? I stopped in at one of those places, just outside Teeswater, because they had summer sausage on offer. The twelve year old kid asks me if I want a full one or a half. Gimme the big one, I said. The kid disappears in the back room and comes out with something that resembles a fence-post. We did some quick renegotiating. I settled for half of a quarter of the fence-post. My old pal Jim Lippert, may he rest in peace, used to be a auto-shop teacher at the same institution of learning where I was a welding teacher. We used to car-pool from Walkerton to the high school in Owen Sound. He lived in the country and had a side-gig raising chickens, that dropped enough eggs that he supplied several local restaurants. When the laying hens wore out, he’d swap them to an Amish family for a stack of fresh-baked pies. We’d drop off three dozen hens on the way to work, and pick up half-a-dozen pies on the way home. By then every one of those hens was cooked, dressed, and pickled. Like most old-order families, these folks also ran a home business in addition to farming their 100 acre spread. In this case, a sawmill. Lippert was close enough to these folks that he felt comfortable taking me around back to see the operation for myself. In one of my past lives I used to do maintenance welding at sawmills on Vancouver Island, so I know from sawmills. I’d never in my life seen anything like I saw in Zook’s back yard. The biggest draught horse you’ve ever seen in your life is walking around in circles all day, attached to a giant wheel that in turn drives innumerable shafts and pulleys, which in turn drive, among many other things, a saw blade that would be at home in any industrial West Coast sawmill. Zook’s workforce seems to be mostly barefoot teenage boys in straw hats. Zook’s operation ain’t gonna miss a beat when the grid goes down. I rest my case.

Affordable housing

Don’t you love those real estate ads that start with “ideal for investors and first-time buyers?” They’re admitting right off the tee that they’re pitting first-time buyers against somebody looking to expand their “portfolio.” Of course they are. They’re paid by the home-owner to get maximum price for their property. Whether it goes to a family starting out or some guy buying the 17th income property for their portfolio isn’t their concern. My dear father, who was in the business for about a hundred years, liked to say; “if somebody bought it, it was obviously affordable.” Hard to dispute that. And there’s a lot more affordable real estate out there than people realize. Problem is, there’s a huge cohort who have convinced themselves they need to be in the GTA. Alrighty then! You can settle for $2000/month for a basement studio, or look a little further afield for affordable housing. I keep an eye on the market around here, and there’s a habitable place on offer right now in Teeswater for under $200k. Definitely a starter, but a roof and 66x132 of real estate. That’s a mere two hour commute to the GTA! Invest a sliver of your accommodation savings in a Tesla twin-motor, and you can probably cut that commute time in half! And here’s a current listing in Owen Sound, two hours out of the GTA. A 19th century townhouse that would be a million in downtown Guelph and at least two million near downtown Toronto. In downtown Owen Sound, a short walk from the waterfront and the farmer’s market, you’re under 300k. Back in the day, people used to go to where the jobs were. That’s how my clan got to Canada, and that’s why we have Newfies clear across the land. Today, there seems to be an expectation that everyone is entitled to a cozy life wherever they please. Who’s going to break the news to the Gen Zs and the millennials that things don’t work that way?

Woke CBC snubs wheelchair athlete

I was curious how things went down at the Boston Marathon. Not that I’m a runner, but I know at least a dozen people who have at one time or another made it a bucket list thing to run the Boston Marathon. By and large I’m not crazy about those people; they mostly come off as snobbish and condescending towards non-runners. Anyway, it’s always interesting to see if maybe a Canadian made a good showing. I scan the men’s results. No Canucks in the top ten. I scan the women’s results. No Canucks in the top ten. I scan the wheelchair results. Holy heck, we got us a Canadian on the leaderboard! Josh Cassidy! A 39 year old wheelchair athlete who has competed for Canada in so many elite events I’ll just refer you to his Wikipedia page. This is a dude who won the wheelchair at the 2012 Boston Marathon! And the 2010 London Marathon! At 39 years old, he finishes in the top ten! That’s a story! So here’s the main page CBC story on the Boston Marathon. The top two Canadians in the women’s category used to run on back roads around Thunder Bay! They arrived at the finish line 15 minutes after the winner. Ok, but so what? Why is this the CBC’s Boston Marathon story? Doesn’t the 8th place in the wheelchair cat trump being 15 minutes behind in the women’s category? I am truly confused by CBC’s diversity policies. Granted, there apparently weren’t any trans or non-binary folks to write about, and all concerned are, unfortunately, white, but focusing on two able young women at the expense of a 39 year old dude in a wheelchair strikes me as both ableism and ageism. Explain yourself, Brody!

Mass graves discovered at Gaza hospital after retreat of "most moral army in the world"

Most moral army in the world? That pungent flower of PR supremacy is wilting fast. Most of us who follow these things are so relieved the face-off between Iran and Israel has been tamped down, at least for now, that we’ve almost forgotten Gaza. But the genocide continues. The death toll has passed 34,000. Gazans, especially the youngest and most vulnerable, are starving to death - if they live long enough. And let’s not be deluded about why they are starving. The food that would prevent their starvation rots in tractor-trailers that sit at the gates of Gaza, while Israel slow-walks aid via 1001 petty obstructions. Al Jazeera is the only major news source available in the West that reports out of Gaza without Israeli censorship. That’s why you can’t hope to be reliably informed if you limit yourself to BBC/CBC/CNN/MSNBC/Fox. The “mighty Wurlitzer” of American Empire propaganda ensures we see only the side of the story that is convenient to the Empire. The story we were treated to today was that Israel’s retaliation against Iran demonstrated Israel’s strategic dominance. The Iranians were cowed into standing down, and global nuclear war was averted. Whew! Here’s a more plausible scenario. While we were told the first Iranian direct attack on Israel in history was an abject failure, the reality seems to be somewhat different. We were told 99% of incoming was taken down by a combination of Israel and its allies. We now know some missiles got through the various defences and hit at least three strategic military targets. That was a wake-up call for at least some of the senior IDF guys who don’t pull their strategies out of 3,000 year old religious texts. That’s why Israel’s response was, in the words of Itmar Ben Givr, Minister of National Security and far-right religious nutter, “lame.” It’s comforting that their are some sane folks left at the top of the IDF. Whether they can prevent the Greatest Leader since Moses taking the country into the abyss remains to be seen.