Canada election 2021

Singh is uninspired and hopeless.

Paul somehow managed to equate her brief stewardship of the Green Party with both antisemitism and anti-Black racism simultaneously, a rare feat indeed. The Greens will never recover.

O'Toole is just a useless tool.

Which leaves PM Fluffy a clear path to a majority.

What a clown. What an a-hole. Does this man-child have any redeeming features whatsoever? If so, I've never been able to ferret them out. Nevertheless, he's the best our vaunted democracy can throw up.

What an embarrassment to democracy!

The gentrification of Ontario's cattle country

For as long as I can remember, northern Grey County and all of Bruce County were considered "cattle country." The official mascot of Bruce County was "Big Bruce," a beef cattle-beast, whose twelve-foot-tall likeness still welcomes you at the northern approach to the town of Chesley.

A hundred acre spread up the road just came on the market at $1.5 million. A hundred acres let's you graze a dozen cow-calf pairs over the summer, plus grow the hay to overwinter them. In a good year, those twelve calves will fetch $12k at sale. Out of that you pay for your inputs. Hayfields need to be rejuvenated, equipment must be maintained and replaced, and veterinarians will occasionally be called upon. Your hundred acre beef farm might reliably return five or six thousand dollars in the course of a year.

Do the math, and you quickly realize that farm up the road won't be bought by a beef farmer. 

Instead, it'll either go to an absentee investor who will separately rent out the house and the pastures, or an affluent urbanite looking for a weekend retreat and a retirement option.

To the untrained eye, the landscape will remain the same. There'll be cows grazing in the fields, because neither the investors nor the affluent urbanites care for farming, and are happy enough to rent their pastures back to authentic farmers.

And that's an endangered species, the authentic beef farmer. The only young farmers getting into beef around here are kids who are inheriting the family farm and are debt-free. Not all farmer's children want to live the farm life, and as time goes on, more and more farms end up owned by non-farmers.

That's just common sense, given current market conditions. The guys who graze their cattle on my farm are a father-son team who own a couple farms of their own, inherited mortgage free, rent a few more, and have a herd of 150 cows. My guess is if you divided their total net annual income by the hours they put in, they'd be shy of making minimum wage.

On the other hand, they could cash out, pocket at least three millions for throwing in the towel, and the next generation of their family can live the good life in an exciting city somewhere. 

As much as they love what they do, you know what's going to happen eventually. 

On the plus side, the Audis, Porsches, and Land Rovers give you a nice break from watching nothing but pickups and John Deeres going by.

Latest toxic turd from Ministry of Truth: "prebunking"

We also know that while debunking falsehoods is difficult, we can inoculate people against myths by prebunking. Prebunking involves warning people that misinformation is coming their way - similar to how vaccines warn the human immune system to be on the lookout for dangerous pathogens.

That's a paragraph from an article titled At this point in the pandemic, it's misinformation that's killing people, from today's Globe and Mail.

Sounds good to me! Who wouldn't want a heads up that there's a load of BS coming their way?

Let's see now... that would require a central clearing house that could reliably sort bunk from truth; a "Ministry of Truth," in other words. Such an institution would of necessity be staffed with experts. Not just any old random experts, but experts whose expertise does not run afoul of Ministry of Truth guidelines.

In the case of pandemic misinformation that is now killing more people than the pandemic itself, the relevant experts would be drawn from the pharmaceutical industry, because nobody knows more about vaccine than they do. Their truths would then be disseminated via established and reliable media outlets like The Globe and Mail and CBC. 

Isn't that where we've been all along?

I would suggest that a great deal of "vaccine hesitancy" is due to the fact that the ever-changing guidance provided by experts and legacy media has left people confused and distrustful. As well, a lot of folks have by now noticed there are plenty of well-qualified experts who are never heard from because they disagree with the prevailing narrative, and as everybody knows, questioning official narratives is the enemy of science, at least "science" as the word has been redefined over the past 18 months.

So it's obvious we need an official arbiter of what's truth and what's bunk. Let the prebunking begin!

All hail the Ministry of Truth!

Lynn Legacy; one of the greatest hair-dressers of all time

True story.

The Farm Manager isn't a gotta-get-my-hair-done-every-week kinda gal, and thank God for small blessings.

But when she does have to get her hair done, only Lynn Legacy touches it.

Lynn's been pretty much shut down for the last year and a half, but things are opening up a bit, and the FM was able to get in today for a trim and a "bit of colour."

On the way home, we stopped for supplies at the Indian River LCBO. The guy behind the counter asked the FM for ID!

The Farm Manager will be celebrating her 60th next year, and she's not been hassled for ID in quite some time. Like decades!

That's some magic you worked there, Lynn!

Living with wildlife

Here's some shit you never have to deal with on the 20th floor of a condo tower in Toronto.

There is a bat making sporadic passes through the living room this evening. This is considered no big deal. We'd prop the door open and eventually he'd find his way out, but then the mosquitoes would get in, so best leave well enough alone.

There was a bat colony in the attic when we arrived at Falling Downs. In the early years we made very determined efforts to get rid of them. The bats won.

Last year was the worst ever for rodents, from mice to chipmunks. Yes, fucking chipmunks in the house! You think they're cute when you're camping, but wait till the little fuckers are shitting in the candy dish on your coffee table. That'll change your opinion on the lovable chipmunk.

And who can forget the snake under the fridge.

Mr. Bat just did another fly by. The Farm Manager thinks we should give it a proper name. She's got the proper attitude when it comes to country living. 

If you can't beat them, let's be friends.

Make yourself comfy, Batski!

Implosion or explosion, America is primed and ready to blow

Had breakfast with my old pal Kipling at the Teviotdale Truck Stop today, because you can do that again.

Kipling is one of those rare souls who has been blessed, if you can call it that, with the magical powers to cross the closed Canada-US border. That's because his cargo is deemed essential to national security, on both sides. He's one of the few contractors fully licensed to haul machine guns and mortars. Apparently national security considerations trump covid any day of the week.

In his stateside travels, Kipling has the opportunity to take stock of the country he's been doing business in for fifty years. He doesn't like what he sees.

He talks about "food deserts." I've read about that. He's seen it. There's neighbourhoods where you're miles from anything resembling fresh food, where people do their food shopping at the local gas station. There's entire neighbourhoods where people get by on Doritos and pop, with once in awhile gas station hotdogs for special occasions. Is it any wonder everybody in the Dorito zones is obese?

The only healthy industry in America today is the one providing hyper-processed fake food to fat people.

The infrastructure is third world, public health care is non-existent, the government is bankrupt, guns and despair are everywhere...

But, take your pick of Fox or CNN or MSNBC; all of them talk as though America remains the "indispensable nation."  

The wake-up call is long overdue. 

Me and Bella

There's five houses along the dead-end side-road where I take my morning walk. Bella's house is the first I come to. Back in the day, she would often join me and the hounds on the hike.

That ended with my first Bruno walk. Bella came trotting out, tail awag, and Bruno knocked me down and dragged me through the snow trying to get at her. I've been missing her ever since.

Today I took the morning constitutional sans Bruno, because he hates warm weather, plus Mum's home all day. Bella was lying in her driveway. I'd pretty much passed by before Bella realized Satan was not in tow, and suddenly, there she was, trotting along with me, tail going 100mph.

To me, Bella is the spitting image, if not the re-incarnation of a dog I had as a boy. Husso had the same shaggy fur in the same colours, and the same busy bushy tail that just says "Fahne hoch!"

When things changed and Husso didn't fit into family plans anymore, he was gifted to one of my father's workmates who lived about 40 miles away. He was back four days later, having traversed forty miles of country he'd never seen before.

I remember him every time Bella comes out for a walk.