Toronto Jews prepare to make aliya to... Tulsa

Postmedia, owned by a Jewish venture capital guy in New Jersey, consistently bangs away at the wave of Jew-hate that has recently overwhelmed Toronto. Although living in Toronto is exponentially safer than living in Israel, it is alleged that many Jewish Torontonians are desperate to flee the city. But where to? Looks like their prayers have been answered! Today the National Post revealed that every Toronto Jew is entitled to a $4,000 loot bag just to come for a look-see around Tulsa, Oklahoma. Really? I did a little google-work. The Tulsa Jewish community is about 2,000 souls and has been slowly dwindling for decades. Meanwhile, Tulsa's Muslim community has been growing for decades, and now outnumbers the Jewish community 5:1. Tulsa University holds the distinction of having the first on-campus mosque of any American university! While there are only two synagogues, there's enough Jewish delis that Yelp has a top-ten list. Maybe once the Exodous hits critical mass, somebody will open a Gryfe's Bagels in Tulsa. That would really open the floodgates! Toronto Jews will turn Tulsa into the Jerusalem of the midwest! Or not! The only appealing thing about Tulsa is real estate is cheap. What runs two million in Richmond Hill goes for 200k usd in Tulsa. On the other hand, Tulsa will have more murders than Toronto this year, a stunning stat given Toronto has ten times the population. Safer in Tulsa? Nah...

How does a 24 year old with zero business accomplishments make the front page of Report on Business?

With his feet on a boardroom table, no less!

Report on Business is the the biz section of Canada's newspaper of record, regardless of the pretensions of the PostMedia folks. As such, it has more than a little shlepp. 

Alfred Burgesson is featured on the front page of Report on Business because he is Black. There is no other reason. There is nothing in the story to indicate that Alfred has any entrepreneurial experience other than filling out grant applications. But because of his skin tone, the slaves to political correctitude at Thomson-Reuters make this a front pager at Report on Business.

Surely there must be actual Black businessmen and women Report on Business could foreground who have actual business experience.

Government subsidies are bad for poor people but good for big business

When you give money to poor people, it destroys their work ethic. When you give money to news corporations, it saves democracy.  That's my takeaway from the recent announcement that the Trudeau government will begin offering assorted goodies to the hard-pressed newspaper industry.

You have to love Postmaster Paul's reaction; "Everybody in journalism should be doing a victory lap around their building right now." Sorry, Paul, I don't think Postmedia has any buildings anymore. They've all been sold off to appease the insatiable demand for interest payments on the part of the US hedgies who bought Canwest debt out of bankruptcy for pennies on the dollar, rebranded the smoking ruins as "Postmedia," and have managed to collect full value on that debt ever since.

Brilliant business strategy! The real estate had to go, the printing plants had to go, hundreds upon hundreds of journalists had to go, all in the name of finding "efficiencies" so that the unearned cash can keep flowing to the hedge fund vultures who are laughing all the way to the bank. Now the taxpayer gets to step up to the plate to help keep the whole charade afloat.

Elsewhere in the magical world of capitalism, the Globe and Mail informs me that there are now 122,455 "idle" oil and gas wells in western Canada, an increase of over fifty thousand since 2005. What happens to these wells? Well, what's going to happen to most of them is the tax-payers are going to be gifted the cost to clean them up.

The excellent Globe investigative report ( in its very own stand-alone eight-page section) details how the big "responsible" players in the oil patch fob off their played-out wells to fly-by-night entrepreneurs with high hopes but little money, who have nothing to lose by walking away from them in the event that their pie-in-the-sky plans don't work out.


Capitalism at its finest!

Must have been a slow news week

Nothing much in the weekend papers. Former G-G Adrienne Clarkson got a bit of self-serving twaddle into the Globe and Mail explaining why we should be grateful that she's still sucking hard on the government teat almost fourteen years after giving up that sinecure.

Elsewhere in the Globe we learn that the US will "temporarily allow" eight countries to continue buying Iranian oil after the new US sanctions kick in tomorrow. The wanton twattery of a bunch of American exceptionalists presuming to dictate to the world who can and who cannot buy Iranian oil passes without comment, naturally.

Things are pretty thin in the Sunday Star as well. Drake claims he was racially profiled at a Vancouver casino. Really? My hunch is that casinos are more interested in credit score profiling than racial profiling, and you'd think he'd be golden in that department, but whatever.

The NYT International Weekly (included at no extra cost with your Sunday Star, because actually paying Canadian writers for original copy is prohibitively expensive) makes the case for Colorado Governor Hickenlooper, a made energy industry bumboy from the get-go, taking a run at the White House in 2020. Seriously? I write more insightful shit than that.

Both Kristof and Stephens have op-eds that don't mention Donny J, to my considerable surprise. Maybe Sarah Kendzior is onto something...

Picked up a Toronto Sun just to see what the semi-literate folks are reading these days. With Remembrance Day around the corner, we've naturally got the predictable jingoistic claptrap about how the bold Canucks punched above their weight in the WW I.

What a concept, that WW I. The royal families of Europe had some differences. They're all related anyway, so you'd think they could sort things out with a family picnic or something, but no. Millions of working class schmucks on all sides had to make the ultimate sacrifice. We remember their sacrifice every November 11. Their naivete and gullibility, along with the craven cynicism of those who sacrificed them, we prefer to forget.

Further in we get a few accolades for Doug Ford's war on the poor with his Making Ontario Open for Business Act. But even that isn't enough for guest columnist Peter Gossman, who is pleased to inform us that he's planning to open his next factory in the US instead of Canada.

I'm sure Trump will appreciate your help in making America great again with the few dozen minimum wage jobs you might create there, Pete!

Gossman also informs us, via a quote from another PostMedia title, that "...oil, gas, and coal remain the fuels of the future."

Huh?... oh ya, we're reading the Toronto Sun...

Pres of the Ontario Chamber of Commerce Rocco Rossi gets a guest column too, although it's largely incoherent. Since it's in the Sun maybe the readers won't notice. His members are experiencing both a labour shortage and a skills shortage, so the Ford government's war on the working poor is going to create a lot of jobs...

Or something.

The Sun still has their Sunshine Girl, but she's near the back of the paper now. Used to be on page two or three if I remember correctly. That was a great gig for the photographer back in the day, at least till he got charged with attempted rape or something. I think he went to jail for a spell. Today's Sunshine Girl, Lavender, "is a Sagittarius who is all about Sunday, smiles, and sunshine."


Good to know!

PostMedia cuts unpaid interns out of the loop

The think tankers here at Falling Downs have long held that most PostMedia content is the product of unpaid interns working feverishly out of a Burlington Timmies; working feverishly but working for free, just to get a few more lines on their resumes, so that when the time comes they can score one of those imaginary paying jobs in the modern media world.

I think they're even more out of luck than we suspected.

We were perusing the Google news aggregator this afternoon when we chanced upon this story at the Edmonton Journal.

When you click on the story, you get a press release from CNW Group, a Cision Company. Yup, you see "Edmonton Journal" in the hot bar but you've got a press release from a private PR company in front of your eyes.

Hmmm....  look around a bit more and you'll soon discover that the Edmonton Journal story cum CNW press release is actually this press release from the Government of Canada!

Now, does that mean CNW, a Cision Company, actually wrote the Government's press release?

I'd guess yes.

But the other thing we must note is that those unpaid interns weren't even allowed to change a single word before it found the light of day under a PostMedia title!

It's bad enough that the pirates who hijacked Postmedia have been shitting on their professional journos for six years, but denying the legions of unpaid interns the opportunity to tweak a press release goes beyond the pale. I mean, they're working for free already!... give them a little something to put on their resumes!

Meanwhile, guess who's NOT working for free?

If you guessed that cabal of money-grubbers around PostMaster Godfrey, you'd be right!

Random riffs & rants

Not that I want to draw too much attention to it, but we pretty much have a triple alliteration going on there, don't we?

A successful triple alliteration never fails to give me a boner, but that's just me, I guess.

I listen to the CBC news every morning, usually more than once. Not sure yet about this "David Common" character. Is this an actual person or did they make him up?

I can see the focus group in my mind's eye;

CBC suit; "So, can we think of a name for a on-air personality that would appeal to the commoner?"

Focus Group; "how about we give him a really common name... like Brian Smith or something?"

CBC suit; "How about Brian Common instead? After all, "smith" is a little too common..."

FG; Brian Common?... sounds too common.... how about "David Common?"

CBC suit; BEAUTIFUL!

So now we got a guy allegedly named David Common reading our morning news.

Not only that, but this supposed real-flesh mensch seems to be a world class undercover media reporter!

I don't know if it's just me, but have you noticed that a lot of CBC news stories are now about CBC news? Like they found out that your local no-kill pet shelter fobs unpleasant pets off to the other pet shelters? As in pet shelters that may not be averse to killing your pet?

And just today I learned, thanks to a CBC task force headed up by, who else, David Common, that
marijuana today is not what it was when your grand-pappy smoked the weed 'o wisdom.

Really?

Get the fuck outta here!

Who knew?

Everybody at the CBC is shitting their pants because maybe, somewhere down the road, a right wing NDP or right wing PC or right wing Liberal government might say see-ya-later to the CBC.

That would be the kiss of death to real estate values in certain wildly over-priced Toronto neighbourhoods.

Be that as it may, we must riff and rant about the private sector too.

How about those PostMedia bigs getting six-number bonuses while the minions who put the words to the page are being axed in their thousands. Is that a great story or what?

As usual, things are far more flammable south of the border.

Did you hear that Donald Trump won the presidential election?

Donald?

Get the fuck outta here!

But he did. Really.

The latest news on that story is that Jill Stein has collected enough cash in the last few days to be able to demand recounts in several borderline states. She has allegedly garnered more cash for this initiative in a few days than she did in two years for her own election campaign. Is there anything fishy about that story?

Of course not! At least not if you read that story on a mainstream news platform, where at least you know it's gotta be REAL news as opposed to the other kind.

So much to rant about.... so little time.

Royal Canadian Legion long past Best Before date

I was a member of the Legion myself for a spell, and not just a member, but an "honorary" member!

Seems that when the Irvings were busy buying up property for the expansion of their shipyard in Saint John back in the day, there was one property owner that refused to sell; the Legion. Thus it came to pass that when the Saint John yard was in full blossom during the eighties and early nineties, there was a Legion smack dab in the middle of the parking lot!

In theory, one must have a direct connection to someone who served with the allied forces in order to imbibe at a Legion hall. I didn't. In fact both of my grandpas were drafted into the Wehrmacht. One went to the Eastern front and most probably froze to death in a snow-drift. The other became a POW in the opening weeks of the war and spend the next six years in POW camps in Pennsylvania and northern Ontario.

Neither of them make me eligible to buy a beer at the Legion.

But for some reason, that rule was kept in abeyance at the Saint John Legion. After all, if dozens of thirsty drydock workers were going to swarm your beer hall on their lunch break, it just didn't make economic sense to turn them away.  So there was an arrangement made, whereby employees of Saint John Shipbuilding were afforded "honorary" membership status. We were, after all, building those state-of-the-art frigates for the Canadian Navy.

Alas, that's the kind of common sense adaptation to reality that is sadly absent from the Legion today. The old boys who call the shots have got themselves a heap of bad PR with their latest bone-headed blast of stupidity. According to this story from David Pugliese at Postmedia, the Legion has suspended an 82 year old member of long standing because she has had the temerity to ask a few questions about how the Legion bigs were spending all that poppy money collected by Legionnaires across the land in the weeks leading up to November 11 every year.

Yup, Joan Beznoski has been told that since she can't shut her trap about her concerns, she is henceforth persona non grata at her local Legion hall, where she's been an active member for almost four decades! That's the value of the freedom of speech all those long gone veterans fought for those many years ago, apparently.

Shame!

Who in the Canadian media landscape will stand up for the virtue and righteousness of Empire once Postmedia collapses?

Oh, I don't know... the Toronto Star crowd maybe?

That's a question that arose as I was reading Mike Den Tandt's missive at the National Post re: China's over-reaching ambitions in the South China Sea.

Mike is all knotted up because POTHEAD has been making friendly with the leaders of that commie dictatorship in the most populous nation on earth, the People's Republic of China. Mike is a local guy who made good; he's one of the few Postmedia employees who still draws an actual pay-cheque from the rapidly sinking conglomerate. He gets to work mostly from home these days, mainly because his bosses have sold his office building and put his office furniture in hock to stave off the hedgies for another month.

But that's another story.

In this story, Mike is fulminating against the commies, which I think is a must-do in the job description of every Postmedia employee, whether they be real employee or unpaid intern. So Mike wants to champion the plucky Canadian reporter who raised some questions about human rights in China during a presser the Chinese FM was having in Ottawa.

This is of course a very Canadian thing, to harangue others about their human rights abuses while remaining comfortably numb about our own human rights record. (See stats on native suicides, native incarceration rates, residential schools, etc.)

Nine paragraphs in, Mike drops the gloves with Well, OK. But here's what the US State Department report for 2015 says about China's human rights record.

Seriously? Come on Mike, surely the US State Department can't be your go-to source on the state of human rights in China?

Get outta here!

Another fucked up French-Canadian tries to stab a soldier, and therefore Canada must prepare for Jihad?

Yup, Tarek Fatah spells it out for you in the Toronto Sun.

Maybe one reason the SunPostMedia brand of journalistic hysteria is sinking like a stone is because the vast majority of Canadians recognize this as the rancid fear-mongering bullshit that it is.

It will be interesting to see who buys the Toronto Sun out of the scrap-heap of bankruptcy after that Paul Godfrey engineered trainwreck that's been going on in slo-mo since 2010. After all, the Sun is probably a viable stand-alone title.

I'm thinking it might be a great side project for the Ford Brothers.

Journalism is... doomed

I see where Carleton and Ryerson and Postmedia remain major sponsors of the Journalism Is... PR campaign designed to entice gullible youth into a journalism programme.

Wonder how that's working out?

I don't imagine Postmedia will remain a corporate sponsor of this campaign for much longer. Postmedia Networks has sacked more journos in Canada than any other employer over the past few years, so the brazen hypocrisy of their sponsorship is eventually going to contaminate the entire campaign.

Journalism used to be an honourable profession, one that I contemplated committing to at one time. Had a few stories in the Ontarion back in my U of Goo days. It was all fun and games when you're getting high with the Downchild Blues Band, but write something critical about the Big Dogs at the OVC, and all of a sudden "journalism" got downright creepy.

Yup, the Rolex crowd didn't waste any time letting me know what I had to change in my stories.

Oddly enough, the hippy dippy rebels running the Ontarion at the time were more than a little ambivalent about exposing the bullying of those Big Dogs. Truth be told, I pretty much knuckled under too.

So it was with some mixture of nostalgia and bemusement that I read Marsha Lederman's impassioned paean to the profession in today's Globe. Marsha's getting the A2 space these days, so obviously the big dogs at the Globe are on board.

According to Marsha, professional journalism has forestalled many a catastrophe in these times. For instance, it was only the professional journalists at the Toronto Star who short-circuited the second term of mayoral nightmare Rob Ford.

Maybe.

What I recall of that fiasco is that the "professional journalists" were pretty much as cringe-worthy as Fat Ford himself. Ya, on one side you've got this dude with obvious substance abuse problems, and on the other side, the side of virtuous professional journalism, you've got folks buying up videos of Ford's drunken rants to better facilitate the mayor's public shaming.

JournalismIS... that?

I'd like to think not.

Decisions this stupid can only be taken at the very top

I see where the SunPostMedia gang are gonna slice off another 90 journalism jobs for the sake of efficiency.

Because the paper-buying public will never notice that the Ottawa Citizen and the Ottawa Sun have merged newsrooms...

As the think-tank here at Falling Downs has been relentlessly pointing out for years now, the SunPostMedia conglomerate isn't about the news business anymore.

No.

Instead, it's about paying off a couple of hedgies who bought up CanWest debt at pennies on the dollar back in the day.

Yup, those dudes have been working miracles in Canadian journalism ever since!

What's really extra funny, just in case you haven't had enough yet, is that these assholes have the gall to sponsor those galling J-School promos designed to convince idealistic but gullible youth that the once-honourable profession of journalism has a future.

Pot-addled hillbilly beats Globe and Mail to story by two years

James Bradshaw has an interesting story about SunPostMedia's inexorable slide into bankruptcy in the business pages of today's Globe and Mail.


Ha! I've been banging on that for well over two years.


What I'd like to see a real journalist like James Bradshaw do is a story about the financing the Godfrey team used to buy the former Canwest assets. If there really was $950 millions in cash involved in that purchase, which I don't believe for two seconds but which was widely reported at the time, the new owners would have been running a virtually debt-free company.


PostMedia and now SunPostMedia may be Canada's largest conglomeration of news platforms, but first and foremost it's a cash cow being milked to death by two or three unscrupulous hedge funds. In an ironic case of deja vu all over again, what Bradshaw wrote about the company today is almost identical to what was being written about Canwest in the year or two before it went tits up.


Headline of the future; "Paul Godfrey fronts investor group to buy former SunPostMedia assets out of receivership."

Oh Jeez... maybe Arthur Porter really did have cancer?

Arthur Porter was, among many other things, Big Steve's hand-picked top civilian over-seer of Canada's  intelligence agency, CSIS.

That all went south in a hurry, and with virtually no comment by Canadian media, once Porter got entangled in the graft/bribery/corruption stink around the new Montreal Hospital.

In fact, Steve's boy didn't just get "entangled," he was pretty much the architect of the entire scandal.

In any other country, having your top spy overlord exposed as a fraud would generate endless headlines for a long time.

In Canada, the Bell-Postmedia-Rogers holy trinity who manage the news don't see anything newsworthy about Arthur and his banishment to the wilderness from the innermost circles of the Harper gang.

Anyway, you had a good run, Mr. Porter.

RIP

Ron Giesbrecht re-elected despite being relentlessly slandered by racist PostMedia

Nobody in the main-stream media went after Ron Giesbrecht more viciously than the so-called journalists at PostMedia.

They're still talking about his supposed "million dollar salary" even as they reluctantly report his re-election.

The people writing that copy totally understand the difference between a "salary" and a bonus. They demonstrate their understanding in every story they ever put out about any business leader. But when it comes to reporting about Chief Giesbrecht, a once in a career bonus becomes the man's salary.

Why do the editors at PostMedia push this blatant lie?

You tell me.

Mamas don't let your babies grow up to be journalists

So Junior wants to go off to Carleton or Ryerson or Columbia for a few years to study up for a career in journalism?

Just say no!

First of all, a journalism degree is a ticket into the precariat. After four or five years Junior will be lucky to find him or herself in an unpaid internship.

Even "real" journalists who get paid find themselves recycling corporate press releases and passing them off as "news."

For example, Christina Blizzard had a great article across the Sunmedia (soon to be a division of Postmedia, because two stinkers make a rose...) chain on Feb. 12 about how we can save a lot of money on policing. Good solid journalism, eh? She even talked to Stephan Cretier, boss of one of the worlds biggest private security outfits, Garda. Her keen investigative journalism reveals that we can replace a lot of $100,000/yr cops with $40,000/private security guards.

Dig around a little, and you'll soon discover that all she's done is recycle this Jan. 29 Garda press release!

That's what passes for "journalism" today.

Journalism was once an honourable profession.

And PS, the only mall cop making 40k is some poor shmuck with no life working three or four double shifts every week.

Canada's warmongering press shills for Ukraine escalation

While even US puppet Poroshenko seems to realize he's up a stump, that's not stopping Canada's right-wing paper of the far-right record from shilling for more death and destruction in Ukraine.

The National Post was originally a Conrad Black contrivance dreamed into being because Conrad, back when he was still marginally solvent, thought that Canada's newspaper of record, the solidly right-slanting Globe and Mail, was a bit too leftish for his tastes.

Now the Post is little more than an anchor around the neck of the flailing Postmedia Network, but they still have two or three writers on staff who aren't unpaid interns, and John Ivison is one of them.

As you can see, John is a true believer in the "Putin plots world domination" theory, and therefore it behoves him to rally all freedom loving peoples the world over to do what they can to fight Putin.

And if that means supplying the bankrupt failed state of Ukraine with weapons, well, we gotta do what we gotta do!

The "Putin plots world domination" theory is an uneasy cousin of the "Putin isolated" meme that the National Post and like-minded propaganda outlets like to spin out for our edification.

Putin is so isolated that yesterday he received a warm welcome in EU member Hungary.

In the past month the isolated Putin has signed off on mutual cooperation deals with India, China, NATO member Turkey, Egypt, and others.

That doesn't sound like isolation to me.

Postmedia considers crowdfunding to appeal wrong-headed defamation lawsuit

The bankrupt Postmedia network is resorting to "crowd funding" to appeal a recent court decision that found Canada's dominant media conglomerate guilty of smearing some obscure global warming fanatic.

These are bad times for media in Canada, but salad days for the dirty oil crowd. In fact, just today news came out of Brussels that Canada's oily tar sands sludge would not be considered "dirty" going forward.

That's what passes for good news in Canada these days.

OMG!!! University campuses a cesspool of sin!...

Who knew?

Yup, another non-story from the good folks at Postmedia.

A bit of salacious innuendo, and voilà, lots and lots of media attention!

The Universite de Moncton has the same cohort on campus as every other university in the world; young people in their late teens and early twenties, away from home for the first time, trying out their new-found independence.

They do pretty much the same things as young adults throughout history have done when they get away from the parental eye...

This is news?

Making up news out of nothing

I see where John Ivison, one of the few non-interns still writing copy at Postmedia, is in a flap because the project management contract for the Canadian Surface Combatant shipbuilding program has gone to Irving Shipbuilding.

Since the actual building of the ships on this shipbuilding contract was primarily awarded to Irving years ago, anybody with half a brain would realize that the only option for overall contract management was Irving.

So some lobbyists from no-hope outside contractors are now kicking up a fuss? How is this news? That's what lobbyists get paid to do!

There are many legitimate questions about the CSC shipbuilding contract. If all our navy is doing is drug interdiction for the DEA and imaginary terror suppression missions for NATO, do we really need this new fleet? The obvious answer to that is NO!

However, if our government is determined to upgrade the RCN, the ships have to be built in Canada, and the overall contract management can only be managed in Canada.

As the lead contractor, Irving is the only responsible choice for overall project management.

71 year old hottie rapes paramedic in ambulance

Memo to unpaid interns at PostMedia; don't be wishy-washy with your headlines. That "sex with elderly woman" stuff isn't going to get you on the payroll.

On the other hand, if you spin this story just a bit, you'll get the headline featured above. That's going to generate some page views, my dear working-for-free friends!

And especially when you're working for a bankrupt entity like PostMedia, those page views will make all the difference between getting a paycheck, or not.