Homophobia costs Caribbean over $4 billions per year

That's a nugget found on Al Jazeera this morning.

The implication being if these countries rolled out the Pride carpet and embraced queer tourism, those billions would be ripe for the plucking. The study was conducted by an outfit called Open for Business. As you can see by the list of corporate sponsors on p.5, a crowd of A -list money grubbers like that makes you wonder if they're motivated by helping Caribbean economies or fattening their own bottom lines.

Mass tourism of the type that inflicts itself on the countries in question doesn't do much for the hosts. It typically displaces local development initiatives in favour of foreign controlled investments that will repatriate the profits out of the area. It is almost always a boon to a small local elite and their foreign backers, while increasing the dependency of the country as a whole and further immiserating the local work force.

Even if these societies made a concerted effort to woo gay tourists, they have another problem; crime. The most peaceable among them have crime rates exponentially higher than the affluent countries gay tourists come from. How about these murder rates in some of the favourite tourist destinations:

Trinidad & Tobago   30 per 100,000 pop.

St. Kitts                   34

Jamaica                   47

The Canadian stat is 1.8 per 100,000. Who wants to holiday in a country where you're 2000% more likely to be murdered than at home?

While the reluctance of gay tourists to visit these countries may leave a few billions on the table, I can't see this changing in the foreseeable future. Gays are just way too smart.

War with Russia will be the catalyst for martial law in America

The Yanks have really been cranking up the provocations against Russia in the last little while, and with all the NATO manoeuvring going on in the Black Sea at the moment, it would be an opportune time to start the fight they've been itching for.

While that's been going on, any modestly perceptive observer cannot help but notice that America is practically on fire. The guys determined to impress the world with the current "America is Back" PR exercise know that's not a good look for the home of the brave and the land of the free. Martial law will be just the right fire hose to tamp down those flames.

National security will demand it. America is under attack and the malcontents are aiding and abetting the enemy. Off to the gulag with them; every last one.

Best use this time to collect all those guns out there. No pesky court challenges allowed under martial law, and too many of them are falling into the hands of people sympathetic to Putin. 

Under martial law any enemy sympathisers found in the civil service or the universities will find their job security non-existent and tenure terminated.  And of course elections will be suspended for the duration.

Unity will be restored!

The Empire will prevail!

America is back!

Canada joins US ballistic missile program

That's according to Michael Byers, writing in The Globe and Mail today.

If that's news to you, it's because our illustrious PM, he of the "feminist foreign policy," has brought Canada on board "on the sly," as Byers puts it. No public debate required, because we can't afford to waste precious time when freedom and democracy hang in the balance!

Make no mistake; freedom and democracy don't come cheap. Installing the AEGIS Combat System is projected to add over 500 million to the cost of each of our new warships. Given what we know about projections from military contractors, that should at least double by the time we actually fire a missile for peace.

Speaking of which, the current price for a single SM-3 missile clocks in at 15 million Canadian dollars. That's a lot of cake for a country that can't afford to provide decent healthcare, housing, and education for our Indigenous population.

Trudeau's embrace of the US government's weaponization of space upends almost forty years of Canadian resistance to American pressure to sign up, going all the way back to Ronald Reagan's Star Wars fantasies. Not even tough-talkin' commie-hatin' Big Steve Harper went there!

It's all for the good, though. We gotta "stand with our allies" against the Ruskies and the Yellow Peril, as the war-mongers never tire of telling us, and that means hundreds of billions flushed down the toilet in the name of "interoperability." If we want to be in Uncle Sam's posse, it is essential we buy his guns and bullets. 

Speaking of interoperability, we're also signing on for Cooperative Engagement Capability, "a remote firing system that allows a commander on one ship to launch missiles from another, without the latter being in the decision loop." In other words, if an officer from one of our Baltic allies sees a Russian threat, and they are really good at spotting Russian threats in Latvia and Lithuania, he could launch a Canadian missile (Raytheon) from a Canadian ship (Lockheed Martin, BAE). 

Ponder that for a moment. Talk about giving away our sovereignty on a silver platter!

I agree with Byers that our Prime Minister needs to explain these decisions that have been made without public input and could have grave repercussions going forward. 

Surely we have more important priorities than currying favour with Uncle Sam.

My bike ride

I was an avid cyclist in my youth. I used to ride my bike no hands all the way from my house to Elora Public School back in the day, including that downhill stretch from Bird's store, across the bridge, and around the corner!

In my U of Guelph days I was a mad-man on that Gordon Street hill, passing cars on the left, on the right, and generally making a bad name for cyclists.

I fell away from bike rides once dogs came into my grown-up life. I'm a firm believer in vigorous daily exercise, but once you have a dog, that means walking the dog, not solitary bike rides.

Can't say enough about that daily dose of exercise. Get's the heart pumping and the blood circulating, and that's a good thing. Then about a year ago, I was forced to face the fact that my walking buddy, Boomer, wasn't up to much of a walk anymore.

So I bought myself a new bicycle. Apparently that's no mean feat these days. The Globe and Mail had a story on the bicycle shortage just yesterday. They had a cool infographic that showed how a $5000 made-in-Canada Rocky Mountain bike was totally dependant on parts from Taiwan, China, and Japan.

Pretty much the only thing "Canadian" about a Rocky Mountain bike is the frame, unless that's been offshored too and I don't know it yet. Which led me to reflect on the inputs on that $5000 bike. I'm sure they're paying maybe $500 tops for all those foreign bits.

So their frame is worth $4,500?

I don't know, but I'm asking because I can't imagine there's more than 20 minutes of welding involved in fabbing up a bicycle frame. Twelve feet of tubing, twenty minutes of welding, $500 worth of foreign-supplied value-added bits, and you've got a $5000 bike.

And there's a waiting list!

But I digress.

I didn't pay that kind of money for my new bicycle. Mine came from Canadian Tire. I'm a sucker for a mark-down, and this honey was reduced from $600 plus to something that started with a 3. That was good enough for me.

First bike I ever had with disc brakes and shock absorbers.

So I got in quite a few bike rides last summer. Boomer didn't mind me leaving on a bike, whereas if I walked she desperately wanted to come with. After we said goodbye to Boomsie,  I was walking again, and then Bruno came into our lives.

Bruno loves to walk, but not in the hot weather, and so I've been getting some bike rides in again.

Today I headed down Concession 20 all the way through Kemble, and then took the "Kemble By-pass" out to the Lookout. 

Nobody knows why Kemble needs a by-pass. There's like two dozen houses, a church, and a post office, and traffic congestion is generally not an issue. It does come in handy for the locals on those rare occasions the OPP puts a ride-check in the main intersection.

I don't know anything about the outfit, but that look-out is a project of the Kemble Women's Institute, which actually has a fascinating back story. And you catch a fine view there, all the way to Christian Island, and on some days the headlands behind it.

From there I headed downhill and found myself on the Presquille Road, which is a nice little waterfront subdivision. A couple of years ago you could still get a waterview lot there for under $200. The lots are all gone and a decent home in the hood is gonna come in close to a million, if you can find one.

It's a nice bike ride because most of the way the waterfront road is between the houses and the shore, so you get that waterfront experience. I experienced it to where it goes back up the hill at the south end. Then I doubled back and took Grey Road 1 to where it hits the end of Con. 20.

That's considered a "multi-use trail" these days, and the sign informs you that ATVs, snowmobiles, motorcycles, bicycles are all welcome, and watch out for pedestrians.

Twenty-five years ago, when my children were children and spent summer with me, we used to be able to drive that road in our Subaru.

From there it was straight up the road and home to Falling Downs. Two hours and 20 kilometres... I earned my six-pack today!

What's "peer reviewed" worth when all the peers are suckling at the same teat?

In one of my past lives I wrote an article about the vet college at the U of G in their student newspaper, the Ontarion. The vet college bigs were dudes with Rolex's on their wrists accustomed to attending multiple foreign conferences every year. When I was tracking them down for the story, they were generally unavailable because they were attending a shindig in Zurich or London or the UN or somewhere.

Meanwhile, the vet school at U of Guelph had just been placed on probation by the American Veterinary Association, because while these guys were off on fancy trips, their school was being run into the ground.

Needless to say, my questions were not welcomed, and there were efforts made to suppress the story. That experience forever tainted my view of the academy.

Public universities are chronically under-funded. That forces them into the arms of corporate donors. In the case of a school like U of G, which began as and essentially remains an agricultural school, that partnership does not bode well for scholarship.

All the big corporate donors in any Ag program come from the Big Ag Big Chem Bayer-Monsanto end of the spectrum. Inevitably, virtually everyone peer-reviewing one another's work, across university programs around the world, has their work to some extent underwritten by the chemical-intensive ag industry.

Same goes for other industries, like pharma, for example. Big Pharma funds big on research programs at the top schools around the world. 

We should stop assuming "peer reviewed" is a stamp of intellectual integrity. 

Ironies of the unipolar world (no. 271)

One of the obligations that falls to the leader of the free world is to maintain stability. What that tends to mean in real life is maintaining the status quo, at least when and where the US bloc has the upper hand.

Stability. What a concept!

Instability, defined as the absence of stability, was once considered a characteristic of the "shit-hole" countries. 

But look around you.

Nobody who looks at the USA today can possibly come away thinking this is a stable country. Yet it's the country that has hundreds of billions to invest in surrounding China and Russia with military bases. To ensure stability, of course. 

Hopefully not the same level of stability that obtains in the iconic urban centres of America; Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, San Francisco and all the rest of them. The people responsible for that ongoing nightmare are the people who want to impose their model of society on the rest of the world.

In the name of shoring up stability.

Meanwhile, China invests in building ports and railways in countries happy to have the help. They're the bad guys.

It's not just America that's crumbling from the inside. How's the stability thing been working out in France or Germany lately?

And check out how stable UK is now that they've Brexited. Boris has fully embraced Uncle Sam, to the point where he happily risks WW III by recklessly flouting international law with idiotic provocations in the Black Sea. 

All for the sake of stability!

America is back- and scaring off even its most fervent allies

Check out this editorial from JPost today; Israel must stay out of US-China struggle.

Well that's gratitude for you! Hundreds of billions in free money over the years, not to mention that indispensable veto Uncle Sam whips out whenever that nest of Antisemites at the UN starts talking about Palestinian rights, and this is how they thank America?

America is back to lead the Nations of Virtue in the global struggle for human rights and democracy, and the only democracy in the Middle East can't figure out whose side they're on? 

Shame!