What are we, retarded?

Konrad Yakabuski had an op-ed in the Globe and Mail the other day wherein he bemoaned the fact that certain fast-fashion retail chains have become so globally ubiquitous that he's not sure whether he's shopping in London or Paris, Tokyo or Toronto. "McShopping," he calls it.

And while the veil of stultifying sameness that has descended on the great shopping cities of the world makes him sad, he does find a silver lining; millions of "decent" jobs have been created in the global South to bring this cornucopia of fast-fashion to the consumers in the global North.

How retarded would you have to be to buy into that?

The reality is that the same brand names that were once manufactured in factories in Canada and the US are now made in sweatshops in Bangladesh and Pakistan and China. As recently as twenty years ago you could buy jeans made in Canada, shirts made in Canada, shoes made in Canada... and while we may have referred to those factories as "sweatshops," they had little in common with the sweatshops in Asia that we've outsourced our production to.

Back in the "boat people" era my family sponsored a family of Vietnamese refugees into Canada. Two or three of them got jobs at the Rennie shirt factory in Guelph. That was considered a bottom-rung shit-job, the kind of place that new immigrants go to to get a toe-hold in the new land. Within three or four years that Vietnamese-Chinese family had bought their own house in Guelph, which was a veritable palace compared to the "house" that a typical Bangladeshi garment worker in one of Yakabuski's "decent" jobs would find themselves living in today.

Yet we are constantly implored to view the immiseration of workers in the global South as evidence of progress.

That's not progress!

That's just bullshit!

And here's some more progress for you. I happened to find myself wandering around Home Depot this afternoon. Spied a Samsung fridge that had been marked down by an unbelievable $2500! That caught my eye; I often buy shit I don't need because I get a good price on in. My garage is so full of these bargains I haven't been able to park a vehicle in there for years.

But wait a minute... even with that $2500 discount, this refrigerator is still within a whisker of five grand. What gives?

It's a good-sized double door stainless-steel with an ice-maker. OK, that's way more complexity than I'd ever consider, but you can get one of those for around fifteen hundred. So where's the other six thou come in?

Aha! Our Samsung has a 21.5 inch touch screen right on the fridge door! But wait a minute; how does that become a six thousand dollar touch? There's plenty of touch-screen monitors out there for $500 or less...

I figure you can buy that stainless two-door fridge, a computer with a bigger touch-screen, and top the package off with a decent phone, and you'll barely break the two grand barrier. I guess the genius of Samsung is to stitch all that into one package and charge a 200% premium! That premium is your ticket to the "internet of things!"

That's more progress for you!

Or maybe just more bullshit.

Bolt beat, billions applaud!

The nauseating hero-worship bestowed on Usain Bolt by an adoring world press can wind down now. Let the man have a quiet retirement. Please!

Bolt, as the entire world knows all too well, was the fastest man to ever lace up a pair of running shoes. That made him great. In fact, his greatness was greater than great... he was one of the greatest greats in the history greatness! No, he was THE greatest. Ever. In all of history no one has even come close to Bolt in terms of greatness!

Too bad a couple of other guys ran past him in the (hopefully) last race of his career.

So, happy retirement, Usain! I for one am looking forward to leafing through a Bolt-free sports section. Besides, you weren't really that fast. I'm pretty sure I ran faster that night when two bouncers from the Manor chased me down the middle of Waterloo Avenue with blood-lust in their eyes and pool cues in their hands.

It can't be bad gas

Back in the spring I was conferring with my pal Mac about why or why not various internal-combustion-powered stuff around Falling Downs was or was not starting up.

Mac is no Jimmy Lippert when it comes to internal combustion magic, but he's way ahead of me. I'm just a welder. Bring me a blueprint and I can build you something that looks like it, but don't ask me about how shit actually works. That's all voodoo to me. They used to have a saying at the drydock; a welder is just a pipefitter with his brains kicked in. There's an element of truth to that.

Anyway, we concluded that perhaps one of the issues confronting me was "stale gas." That's where you top up the tank with cheap low-lead gas, let the item in question sit for a year, and whoopsie, it never fires up again! At least not until you drain all that stale gas, flush the lines, clean the carb, and have another go at it with new fresh gasoline.

Sounded plausible.

But look at what went down today. I haven't used the F-150 for two years. I parked it in my parts-vehicle field and have rarely given it a second thought, nor would I have given it a second thought except the Farm Manager has been on the nag about what she considers to be a lot of useless shit sitting around the yard.

My opinion is of course a little different.

The classic Mustang 50 was working as recently as May. I'm sure it's just a little thing.

Oddly enough, the Ford 4000 diesel tractor gave up the same week as the Mustang.

And then there's the little Escape 4x4 that's was a blast as a "field car" right up until it wouldn't start this spring.

Could they all be suffering from bad gas?

Well, I hooked up the battery charger to the F-150 last night, the vehicle that's had bad gas in the tank the longest, and today it fired right up!

There goes the "bad gas" theory.

German ingrates stab Uncle Sam in back

Hey Squareheads, have you forgotten everything that Uncle Sam has done for you?

Have you forgotten the Marshal Plan?

Have you forgotten who kept you safely tucked under his nuclear umbrella while the Evil Empire was running amok on the world stage?

So now Uncle Sam is asking for a little sacrifice, a few pfennigs lost from your bulging geldbeutel, in order to slow down the new Stalin's bid to resurrect the Soviet dynasty, and you want to begrudge this?

Shame!

And this shameful selfishness is not only coming from the pinkos of Die Linke, but from the Chambers of Industry and Commerce and the Foreign Minister himself!?

Come to your senses, Volk!

What, after all, does it really mean to give up a gas pipeline from Russia when you have a chance to further the interests of freedom and democracy worldwide by paying double for American gas supplies?

And after everything that Uncle Sam has done for you...

The mind boggles!

Bell tolls for Bibi

Looks like the faint odour of corruption that has so frequently wafted about the career of the greatest leader since Moses is settling in once again. This time round it seems to have legs.

If you go by the story in the Globe and Mail, this is about rather trifling stuff; running a little interference for one of Sheldon Adelson's competitors in the newspaper wars, and enjoying fine wines and cigars provided by an admiring public.

But there's a much bigger corruption story lurking in the background. The submarine scandal promises to be about big money and big jail time if anything sticks to Netanyahu. That would truly end his political career once and for all.

Alas, while once I would have thought that a good thing, I'm not so sure anymore. Israeli politics
have moved so far to the right in recent years that Netanyahu may well be remembered as the last moderate Prime Minister.

And that does not bode well for the future of the country.

True crime drama from Dumschitt County

I really can't improve on this, so here's your crime story verbatim from the Owen Sound Sun-Times website:

NEWS LOCAL

Suspect spotted on mower after alcohol theft

Wednesday, August 2, 2017 4:23:03 EDT PM

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An Etobicoke man has been charged with theft after the suspect was seen leaving the area of the Thornbury LCBO on a riding lawnmower.
On July 26 shortly before 11 a.m., police were called to the LCBO store on Arthur Street in regards to a theft.
The suspect, who was seen leaving the area on a riding lawnmower, was located a short time later. The man was found to be under the influence of alcohol, a roadside breath test was conducted and he was found to be in the "warn" range, resulting in a three-day licence suspension, it said in a news release from the Collingwood and The Blue Mountains OPP.
Further investigation found the man was in possession of a bottle of alcohol that was taken from the LCBO, the news release said.
The 37-year-old man has been charged with theft under $5,000 and is scheduled to appear in court in Owen Sound on Aug. 17.

Top twat pontificates on Venezuela's economic catastrophe

According to his Wikipedia page, Ricardo Hausmann is best known for inventing several abstruse concepts to make the Dismal Science even more obscurantist than it would otherwise be. When I was coming up "dark matter" was a term from theoretical physics and "original sin" was something you learned about in Sunday school.

No more. Thanks to Hausmann, introducing these concepts to economics has given dismal scientists some much-needed tools to better explain the inexplicable, or whatever it is those people do.

In his spare time, Hausmann is the director of Harvard's Center for International Development, the successor to Harvard's Institute for International Development, which went down in flames as a result of hanky-panky involving its activities in post-Soviet Russia. It was in his capacity as director at the CID that I found him in the Op-ed pages of my Globe and Mail today.

Here's a taste; "The Maduro government's all-out attack on liberty and democracy is deservedly attracting greater international attention." Hmm... gotta say that whenever I hear an apologist for Empire profess concern for "liberty and democracy" the old bullshit detector starts twitching uncontrollably. No honest person today would posit that being on Uncle Sam's bestie list has anything whatsoever to do with one's commitment to "liberty and democracy."

As for that "greater international attention" bit, I suppose that's all relative. There has certainly been no deficit of American attention to Venezuelan politics in recent decades. By their own admission, the National Endowment for Democracy (that US government funded "NGO"- how Orwellian is that!?) has spent over 100 millions since the election of Chavez meddling in Venezuela's internal politics, and it looks like their efforts are finally bearing fruit.

The claim that Venezuela is the world's most indebted country is a bit of a puzzler. According to the CIA, (ya, that CIA) Venezuela has a debt/GDP ratio of 36.7%. That compares to 181.6% for Greece, 132.5% for Italy, and 126.2% for Portugal... and oh lookee! There's the USA with a debt/GDP ratio of 73.8%!

But Venezuela is the most indebted country in the world? Get outta here!

So why doesn't Maduro just belly up to the loan desk at the IMF or the World Bank like all those other guys? Borrow a few billions to tide his country over this tight spot? That's an interesting question. Here's a couple of paragraphs from a Huffpost article a few years back.

Venezuela also has specific grievances against the IMF, which are likely to generate sympathy in other developing countries with democratic, left-of-center governments. On April 12, 2002, just hours after Venezuela’s democratically elected government was overthrown in a military coup, the IMF stated publicly that it was “ready to assist the new administration [of Pedro Carmona] in whatever manner they find suitable.”

This instantaneous show of financial support for a newly installed dictatorship - one which immediately dissolved the country’s constitution, general assembly, and Supreme Court - was unprecedented in the IMF’s history. Typically the IMF does not react so quickly, even to an elected government. It is no wonder that this move was seen in Venezuela and elsewhere as an attempt by the IMF to support the coup itself. Washington, which dominates the Fund, had advance knowledge of the coup, supported it, and funded some of its leaders - according to U.S. government documents.

Oopsie... it almost looks like Uncle Sam and his toadies at the IMF and the World Bank are a little inconsistent in their commitment to "liberty and democracy," doesn't it? 

So there's no question that one of the main causes of Venezuela's suffering today is due to a long-standing policy of egregious Yanqui meddling. 

A related and equally important cause can be found in Mr. Hausmann's text, "...the government decided to cut imports while remaining current on foreign-debt service..."

WTF? What kind of "socialist" is this Maduro? He prioritizes debt payments over feeding his people?

That's the Venezuelan tragedy in a nutshell; not enough socialism and way too much US meddling.