Koreans promise to stop eating your pets

South Korea has been under US occupation for over 70 years, so I’m surprised that more American values haven’t rubbed off on them. They do well with the boy bands, and it’s hard to believe the country that gave us Gangnam Style still engages in such barbarity, but they eat dogs in Korea. That’s right! It’s not just Haitians hunting your pets! Thankfully, this horror is coming to an end. No doubt spurred on by Trump’s vile insinuations re the Haitian guest-workers in Springfield Ohio, the government of SK is taking steps to outlaw dog farming. Yup, apparently dog farming is a thing in our democratic ally South Korea! Or it was. The government is promising an end to dog farming by 2027. Luckily, the dog farmers are to be compensated to the tune of $450USD per animal. Believe it or not, the dog farmers think that isn’t enough! Really? I guess it depends on the dog, but I find it hard to believe even a big boy like our Italian mastiff would yield that much in dog-steaks and dog-chops. Just goes to prove yet again protein is where you find it. One man’s Lassie is another man’s sausage on a bun.

Greatest Leader Since Moses elects to go down gambling

In choosing to escalate against Hezbollah, Bibi is making a double bet. In the first place, he is betting that America will jump in and save his ass when he embarks on a war Israel cannot win. Retired IDF generals have been for years regaling us with exposes on how many hundreds of thousands of missiles the baddies have squirreled away in the hills and valleys of Lebanon. Enough to fire a thousand a day for months on end. Iron Dome will be exhausted by noon on day one. Then what? In Bibi’s fevered imagination, then Uncle Sam swoops in to make it all good. How could he not? The applause from those 58 standing ovations is still ringing in his ears. He’s probably right. After all, Biden-Harris, Trump, and RFK Jr are each and every one 100% in the tank for Israel, World Court be damned. Genocide? What genocide? You’d have to go down ballot all the way to Jill Stein before you find a candidate averse to enabling Israel’s genocide in Gaza. She’s polling under 2% as I write this. So it’s entirely plausible that Bibi’s gambit in luring the US into the war will pay off. But here’s the thing. The greatest fighting force in the history of history don’t got the mojo no more. Uncle Sam waves a big stick and talks a big game, but those Afghans falling off the last USAF flights out of Kabul tell a different story. Netanyahu, just like Zelensky, is betting on the support of a military empire that is a pathetic shadow of its former self. This new Lebanon front is going to become a war of attrition. Think about it. Israel is in a war of attrition with a people who have been accustomed to periodically living in caves just to survive the latest onslaught. How many Israelis in Haifa or Tel Aviv are gonna live in caves for more than two weeks before they seek refuge in Berlin or New York or Toronto? Bibi’s run is just about done. He will go down in history not as the greatest leader since Moses, but as the man who destroyed Israel.

Art critic destroys million dollar masterpiece

And I don’t mean he “destroyed” it metaphorically in a thumbs-down review. No, he literally smashed it into a thousand shards right there on the floor of the gallery! The piece was a porcelain sculpture celebrating, you guessed it, the great Ai Weiwei himself! Apparently he’s trying to figure out who he is after all these years. I’ve always been skeptical about Ai Weiwei and his greatness. When you listen to his interviews, he’s more likely to be mistaken for Chance the gardener than Confucius. He tipped his hand with that bullshit “Straight” exhibition around 2013. He and his team salvaged 90 or 120 or 150 tons of rebar from collapsed school buildings after an earthquake in China, chipped off the concrete, straightened them, and voila!.. a profound statement about… I was never sure what. Earthquakes? Building codes? I don’t know much about art, but I’m fairly knowledgeable about rebar. One thing I know for sure is salvaged rebar from a collapsed building is never ever gonna be straightened. Oh, you might get it straight enough to reuse it again, as rebar. But not as an art exhibit! Ever! Yet, that art exhibit travelled the world. Clearly, they ordered a fresh batch of rebar in every city they landed in! Nobody shleps 50 tons of rebar around the world for the sake of art! He followed that up with the ultra-cringe Alan Kurdi artwork, wherein he pretended to be a drowned refugee toddler. Because how would the world ever know there was a refugee crisis if the great Ai Weiwei didn’t attach his name to it? I gotta tip my cap to that Italian art critic. Enough with Ai Weiwei already.

Most retarded story in the Globe & Mail today

The Korean extortionist at the Circle K just bumped the price for the Saturday edition to $9.45. Back in the day I had that paper delivered to the door every morning, and a week later the paper-boy would come round to collect a buck and a half… or maybe that was for two weeks. Have you noticed that although they keep ramping the price, the news doesn’t get any better? Nor does the journalism. I suppose it would be smart to bypass the Korean altogether, since I have the digital subscription, but once a week we like to go for a leisurely breakfast at the European Bakery, with the newspaper spread out on the table in front of us. How decadent! How 1965! In good weather, we’ll do this on the dog-friendly patio with Bruno at our feet. So there we are, and on page 8 of the opinion section, I find this headline; “Authoritarianism is a military weakness.” We are told the writer is an “author and professor,” which I suppose imbues her insights with somewhat more cred than I get, having styled myself the “pot-addled hillbilly.” So here’s the gist of Professor Elyse Graham’s argument. Democracies are inherently stronger military powers because of their openness to diverse ideas and diverse people. We know this because Democracy defeated Authoritarianism 80 years ago. Sorry to break it to you professor, but during the WWII, the US Army was racially segregated, gays were drummed out of our militaries with dishonorable discharges or worse, tens of thousands of Japanese had their farms, houses, and businesses stolen by our diversity-loving governments, and both USA and Canada turned away the MS St. Louis, a refugee ship carrying 900 Jews fleeing Hitler. Such was our diversity and tolerance. Furthermore, nine out of ten German soldiers who died in that war died on the Eastern front. The war was won not by Democracies in the West, but by the Soviet Red Army, led by one of the most ruthless authoritarians of all time, Joseph Stalin. But 80 years on, our national newspaper of record sees fit to publish such ahistorical nonsense?

Why do cement-truck drivers make twice the hourly wage of school-bus drivers?

Once again, September brings a school-bus crisis. There's just not enough folks willing to take the job. I know I’ve ploughed this ground before, but here’s all it would take to end this never-ending crisis. Pay drivers properly and treat them with a modicum of respect. What is “proper pay?” I say the hourly wage of a school bus driver should be equal to the hourly wage of a cement-truck driver, plus at least one symbolic dollar-per-hour more to acknowledge that a cargo of children is more important than a cargo of cement. Secondly, the cement-truck driver only has to supervise the cement. The school-bus driver has to supervise 40 or more children, who could range in age from two to twenty, all while he/she is driving the bus! That is just wrong! Once those kids are off the bus and on school property, the school boards and the teachers’ unions dictate that every student be under the supervision of a trained professional at all times. Being under the supervision of the bus-driver doesn’t cut it, by my estimation. They’re already doing their job; driving the bus. If you’re asking them to do two jobs for the price of one… well, maybe you’ll have a school-bus driver shortage! Expecting one and the same person to do two jobs simultaneously for a wage they can make at McDonalds guarantees you’ll have a school-bus driver shortage. That's why every school bus needs to have a second adult aboard to supervise the children while the driver focuses on their job; driving the bus.

Picking the winner in the coming WW III

Remember the original “Axis of Evil?” The term was allegedly coined by part-time Bush Jr speech-writer David Frum, the son of a Toronto dentist who made it big in strip-malls. Just to be clear, it was Dad who made the family fortune, not David. But a little education and some stiff financial backing and family connections can take a budding ideologue a long way, and David is now on staff at The Atlantic. The original Axis of Evil formulation was Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. That was in 2002. The new and improved Axis of Evil consists of Iran, Russia, and China. The White Hat lineup hasn’t really changed. It’s the world’s leading democracy with the most powerful military of all time, plus NATO, and, last but not least, the only democracy in the Middle East, Israel. You’ve got the democracies on the one side, and brutal dictators, tyrants, and terrorists on the other. Democracies are countries where billionaire political donors get together periodically to select the next leader of the free world. The Good Guys, ie the Democracies, are currently engaged in two wars against evildoers that threaten to spin out of control. While they do have billionaires in the Axis of Evil, there is a crucial difference. In the Free World the billionaires are free to call the shots. In the Autocratic Tyrannies, the billionaires operate at the pleasure of the state. That’s why we need to have a war; to free those free-market champions in Iran and Russia and China from the yoke of tyranny! The wars that the Axis of Evil have forced on the Free World by resisting NATO expansion and Israeli genocide are both one escalation from going ballistic, pardon the pun. When those escalations occur, what’s likely to happen? Unfortunately for the Free World, things aren’t looking good. Ukraine hangs by a thread, completely dependent on financial and materiel support the Free World doesn’t have. In Israel, the only Democracy in the Middle East continues to clear terrorists out of Gaza neighborhoods they’ve cleared multiple times already in a war that’s gone on for almost a year. Clearly, the Forces of Righteousness are not winning. Yesterday’s vote at the UN General Assembly provides a handy barometer of which way global sentiment is tilting in this struggle between good and evil. 143 countries voted against the American Empire’s preferred outcome. 14 voted for it. That’s why this story at the Globe and Mail caught my eye; Deepen US ties and reboot Canada's geopolitical strategy, former ambassadors urge. Yup, five former Canadian ambassadors to the US, American Empire Loyalists to the core, insist we double down on a lost cause. Tragically for Canada, we are on course to follow their idiotic counsel. Let’s commit trillions of dollars and the financial health of our country for generations to come by buying submarines and fighter jets and warships so we can stand tall on the wrong side of history. Or, we could become a sovereign nation, chart our own course, and invest in the health care and housing and education infrastructure we so desperately need.

Canada's betrayal of Israel

There’s an op-ed on view at the Jerusalem Post today titled "Canada's betrayal of Israel; irresponsible and shameful." Elsewhere at the Jpost you can find an expose on how the reliably anti-Arab BBC is in fact virulently antisemitic, and another on how Australia has “lost its moral compass.” Canada, Australia, and UK are just three of the 43 countries to abstain from the vote at the UN General Assembly today urging Israel to comply with international law and shut down the settlement project. Most of those 43 countries are traditionally pro-Israel. So what up with this tidal wave of antisemitism sweeping over Israel’s former allies? Could it be that true friends don’t let friends do genocide? No, that’s far too generous for the abstaining nations. Most of them do absolutely nothing to prevent or even slow down Israel’s murderous rampage in Gaza and the West Bank. These 43 abstainers are the cowardly nations. Vaguely disturbed by their complicity in an ongoing genocide, they feign umbrage while doing nothing of consequence. Like halting shipments of military supplies. Like sanctioning trade with the genociders. Like severing diplomatic ties. Nope! We’ll just abstain on this vote while continuing business as usual! That’s not a betrayal of Israel. It’s a betrayal of our claimed humanitarian values.