Another Einstein notices more testing results in more covid

I don't know who Jim Quinn is, but his article at Zerohedge calling out manipulation of covid data seems a winner. At 8 this morning it had over 40k looks. Took my morning walk and it was over 50k by the time I returned, and it's doubled since.

It's been obvious since the beginning of the pandemic that virtually all media have been hyping the fear factor. It's cases, cases, deaths, cases, cases, oh look, another more deadly variant! They'll tell you everything you need to know about case and death counts, but if you want to know test numbers, you're on your own.

That's not by accident.

And of course the vaccines are perfectly safe. Perfectly safe! There is no excuse other than selfishness and/or stupidity why anyone should be vaccine hesitant... 

Oopsie! Here's an embarrassing headline from page A4 of today's Globe and Mail; New data confirm Pfizer, Moderna vaccine link to risk of heart problem.

But it's only a tiny risk, so the vaccine is perfectly safe! Who could possibly be reluctant to get a perfectly safe vaccine that'll give you a few months of partial protection from a virus that over 99% of infected recover from? 

It's time for the pinheads at The Globe and Mail to update the windy axiom that graces the top of their editorial page.

The subject who is truly loyal to the chief magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures unless we say so.

Wobbling down memory lane again

My reunion with The Kid triggered some memories.

Back in the day, when my folks had the good fortune to build a house on the starting line of the Route 86 Dragway, we lived about three miles from the wee town of Maryhill. It was called Maryhill because it was founded by Catholic settlers and they built a church on the hill. 

Get it?

In addition to the Catholic church, Maryhill, population of perhaps 45 people at the time, boasted two pubs! This was back in the day when if you got caught with booze in your car, the cops took the booze and told you to smarten up.

So in addition to the townfolk and the local farmers, the two pubs enjoyed a goodly drive-home-shitfaced clientele from nearby Kitchener-Waterloo.

If I remember correctly, the main intersection of Maryhill had a Dodge dealership on the southeast corner, Vic's Commercial Tavern on the northeast corner, and Ralph's Tavern on the northwest corner.

From the time I got my driver's licence at age 16 I'd pop down the road to either Vic's or Ralph's. My fake ID worked equally well in both spots, but I gradually developed an affinity for Vic's, to the point of carving my name into one of the tables with a knife. 

Too bad they've changed the furniture since the '70's, because that table would be a real score now.

What triggered me was that The Kid is still friends with Vic's son. That's funny, because one night coming out of Vic's I tripped over a bicycle that a child had carelessly left in the parking lot. Vic and his family lived at the pub, and his kid had left his bike out.

I stomped all the spokes out of it... ya, I owe you a bicycle, dude.

Anyway, one day I was whiling away the afternoon in the company of a couple of bad-ass locals, Bill Baily and Kenny Andrews. We were sitting in the parking lot of Ralph's in my '64 Bonneville convertible with a forty pounder. I can't recall who brought the gun, but we were taking turns shooting crows out of the trees around Ralph's parking lot.

We ended up at Vic's, and I remember an acrimonious dispute about whether or not we should venture into the city and find a drinking establishment where one might find women.

Bill and Kenny apparently already had plenty of women, and refused to go along with my plan for the evening.

Well, fuck you, you assholes!

I was gonna find those women on my own, but in a parting gesture of "fuck you" I pulled up in front of Vic's. There was still some full ones in the case of beer we'd been chasing the hard stuff with, and I lobbed one through Vic's front window.

I was immensely pleased with myself as I headed down that back road to home.

Unbeknownst to me, there was a cop car sitting at the Dodge dealer across the street at the time. Also unbeknownst to me, the getaway car had a flat tire.

I wasn't a mile out of town when I saw the flashing red lights in the mirror.

I offered some good ones.

The reason the car was all over the road was because of the flat tire.

That might have had a chance, but I had a self-defeating follow-up.

Besides, I was trying to open a beer with the seat-belt buckle.

 Waterloo Region Jail, here I come!

A further meditation on where my dog sh!ts

I can't figure out what's wrong with Bruno. He's got a hundred acre yard to do his business, but he insists on dropping his substantial turds within twenty feet of the front stoop.

I've been trying to train him. I take him out to the scene of the crime, while the evidence is still steaming fresh, and politely explain, as I'm shovelling up his shit and walking it to the hay field, that he has many options. Look pal, I tell him, the entire hundred acres is your toilet. Be a good boy and move the action.

He wags his stump and proceeds to drop another one five feet from the porch. 

And the Farm Manager thinks this is the smartest dog we've ever had.

Speaking of steaming fresh shit, I'm trying to work through my Sunday Star, and haven't even made it through the first section. I won't get to the International New York Times till Wednesday or Thursday, at this rate.

One of the issues that slowed me up was a three-plus pager by Ed Tubb and Kenyon Wallace about our never-ending covid crisis. Check out this sub-head; "Science of airborne risk is not absolute."

Not absolute? I thought the science was settled?!

WTF?

Oh my God... suddenly I'm wondering what else the experts might have got wrong!

High on General Electric

Had occasion to hook up with "The Kid" recently.  

The Kid is my kid brother who came out and stayed with me for a spell in Alberta, back when Neil Young was exhorting everybody to go to Alberta.

So we did.

It mostly sucked.

The Kid came out to stay with me, because I had an apartment in Edmonton, and he just wanted to get out of the house.

I was cool with that. But I was a guy who had to work every day to pay the bills.  If The Kid was gonna hang with me, he'd have to get a job and pitch in.

The Kid's idea of getting a job meant signing up his name and my phone number at the Alberta Agricultural Labour Exchange. Then he sat back and waited for the phone to ring.

A few weeks later, the phone rang, and The Kid was off to a farm job out near Vegreville.

Not a week into the job, he's luxuriating in his farm-worker shack one morning, when the farm owner comes in to give instructions for the day.

The Kid lights a cigarette, and the farm-worker shack explodes.

He ends up in the Vegreville Hospital, along with his boss, who was blown clear across the pasture by the blast.

Long story short, we learned in short order that the farm owner was on the board of trustees for the hospital, and not only that, but he was a big-shot on the local political scene.

Even though the farmer's negligence caused the explosion, and the Vegreville Hospital got my brother addicted to opioids, a lawsuit in that neck of the woods wouldn't go anywhere.

But I digress. We enjoyed some fine times together back in the day, and we're both thrilled and delighted to still be on this earth. Today he was reminiscing about his days at General Electric.

I was a gas-cutter, and I'd often have hours between jobs, so I'd head up to the roof and get high and have a few beers.

Holy shit! I worked in the same joint ten years before he did, and on a slow night, you'd find yourself on top of what they called the "high bay." 

That was high enough off the ground on its own account, but climb up there for a toke and a few beers...

High on General Electric took on a whole new meaning.

The sunsets were spectacular! And the city skyline was just beautiful at night!

There's gotta be a lot more folks than us who got wasted on the roof of a GE plant somewhere.

We should start an alumni association!

Real estate insanity

I pass this six acre building lot when I run into town to pick up my Globe and Mail. For $682,000 you get a view of Colpoys Bay!

Just a couple of years ago that money would have bought you that view, and also a decent shack included, never mind "building lot."

Our best and brightest currently campaigning for the PM job are unanimously promising to fix the housing affordability crisis. 

That crisis, as anyone who passed Economics 101 knows, is the result of an imbalance between supply and demand. Giving tax breaks and incentives to first-time buyers gooses the demand side. How does that address the problem?

Meanwhile, we're aiming to admit at least 400,000 new Canadians every year going forward, while building 200,000 new housing units annually. That too puts more pressure on the demand side.

Why is no political leader addressing the supply side?

It's been a tradition in our society that the free market takes care of the housing supply, but you can't expect private enterprise to build housing for people who can't afford it. Larding up the development process with interminable levies and fees doesn't help, but those pay for a lot of city planners and environmental consultants, so they'll never go away.

Governments at all levels own lots of land and control the development process. Building four-storey walk-ups isn't rocket science. The Romans, Incas, and Pueblos were doing it thousands of years ago.

Hire a few kids out of Construction Technology programs, provide the land and the green light, and you'll be building 100,000 government-owned geared-to-income units per year in no time.

But, that would take political will.

Incompetent political leadership is destroying the Canadian Armed Forces

I felt sorry for Wayne Eyre today, the "acting" head of the CAF. 

The reason he's "acting" is because everybody above him has been sidelined by sexual harassment allegations. Yup, it's a horny bunch there in the Officer Corps, and if you're accused of an unsolicited crotch-grab during basic training in 1982, well, you can kiss your career and your reputation goodbye forty years of exemplary service later. The CAF doesn't want to be associated with filth like you.

Wonder what that does for morale?

We've got some screwed up priorities in this country. The whole point of "armed forces" is these are the folks you train to kill our enemies. You're training killers, but in Canada, those killers you train must always treat their fellow humans with utmost respect and sensitivity at all times, at least until you have to kill them.

 So mind the micro-aggressions, and please, no crotch grabbing.

General Eyre was trotted out today to take the fall for Canada's dismal performance in looking after our Afghan collaborators, because neither Justin or Sajjan have the balls to take ownership of their incompetence. 

Eyre went out of his way to blame the Taliban.

Eyre and every other officer in the CAF knows that's not true. Canadian operations in-country ended seven years ago. Trudeau and Sajjan have held the reins for the last five. The US announced a complete US-NATO withdrawal 18 months ago. We had more than enough time to do the right thing by the Afghans who risked their lives to ally with us. 

Blaming the Taliban for a debacle festering for five years under their watch is disingenuous, to say the least. 

The tenure track vs. the racetrack

I've said it before, but it bears repeating; tenure track positions at brand-name schools go to people who bring their own sponsors. 

That's pretty much how it works in NASCAR and Formula One car racing. Drivers work to build a brand, and by the time they get to the big show, they've built it, and the sponsorship money not only follows them, but blossoms! Unless you're a kid like Lance Stroll, whose billionaire dad sponsors his F-1 team.

Take Nikole Hanna-Jones for example. Not having a billionaire daddy, she set about building her own brand, and did she ever! After the glory of her Pulitzer Prize, she was considered for a tenure track professorship at UNC - Chapel Hill, in their journalism school.

Unfortunately, the billionaire whose name graces the J-school at UNC, didn't feel the magic, and dug in his heels. So Nikole cashed in on her brand, and headed to Howard with $20 million in sponsor money!

That's how you get tenure today, kids!