A brief respite from Yellow Peril hysteria

Charles Burton, a frequent anti-China ranter in the pages of the Globe and Mail, was at it again yesterday. Four paragraphs in, the reader is treated to this bit of speculation, "...the unlikely coughing canary in the coal mine of potentially cataclysmic global strife lies in China's recent diplomatic blitz against our plucky Commonwealth cousins in Australia."

There follows a list of "achievements" our plucky cousins have scored in their campaign to alienate their most important trading partner, a self-defeating policy if ever there was one. Charles recommends we show our own pluck by standing in solidarity with our cousins by buying Australian wine over the holiday season.

Burton is advertised as a Senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, an outfit financially supported by a bevy of A-list Big Pharma and Big Oil multinationals,  a variety of foundations, and the governments of Latvia, Japan, Taiwan, and the US. Its influence in Canadian media is deep and broad. There's rarely a day goes by when one or more MLI "fellows," "advisors," or "experts" don't have their China-bashing or Russia-bashing articles published in the Globe and Mail or on the CBC, or both.

Here's a timely rebuttal to Burton's warmongering by Tony Kevin, a former Australian diplomat, and one of the few Aussies with the pluck to speak out against the prevailing US driven anti-China hysteria: Australia sabotaged its own interests in China relations.

Since we're flirting with "potentially cataclysmic global strife," maybe we should call a time-out on the trash talk and take a moment to consider a point of view you'll not find at the CBC and the Globe and Mail. Maybe it will help us avoid the cataclysm. 

The greatest "democracy" diddle of all time

 As regular readers (hi Dad!) will know, I'm not convinced that it makes any significant difference whether Trump or Biden is in the White House after next January.

But this joke of an election that the world's premier democracy just put on would seem to validate the claims of every anti-American ranter who ever ranted.

The guy who couldn't get three dozen people to a town hall blew away all presidential voting records?

Get the fuck outta here!

This is the model of governance that America imposes on the world at the point of a gun.

This won't end well.

Fun with firearms

Let me tell you right off the top that I'm a firm believer in gun control. Between the ex-wives and the near misses, (and none of the partings would be considered "cordial" by an honest judge) if it was as easy to buy a gun here as it is in Ohio or Michigan, I'd be a gonner for sure. Heck, I wouldn't have seen middle age!

I happened across the doc on Hunter Thompson the other day, Buy the ticket; take the ride, or something along those lines. Thompson is largely responsible for the demise of both responsible journalism and proper English, in my estimation, but I was a big fan of his writing back in the 70's, as were ten million other pot-addled wankers writing for their college newspapers.

Thompson was allegedly a chap who knew how to have fun with firearms.

So the Farm Manager is watching this old Law and Order episode where the good guys are trying to pin a conviction on a gun dealer for selling a gun to a wacko who used it to kill people, and I'm watching a wacko who only killed himself with his gun, and naturally, we get to talking about guns and gun control.

In these parts it's probably safe to assume that nine out of ten homes along your concession road have guns residing therein. Me and the FM are among the "free riders" in this scenario. When the urban hordes head up this way in the coming "reset," after the grid goes down and all the supermarkets have been looted, it'll be the gun-toting neighbours who turn them back at the county line, not us.

My hunch is they'll be turned back a few county lines before they make it up here, but that's just speculation.

Generally speaking, the guns residing locally are legally owned and registered. Generally speaking, the guns that make headlines are not. After that whack job in Nova Scotia shot down 22 people last summer, PM Fluffy banned 1,500 models of "assault" rifles within a week, long before it came out that all the weapons deployed by the nutter came through illegal channels. 

(And that in itself is a factoid that is seriously fucked up... What? There's 1500 different kinds of assault rifles???????)

How do you stop nutters who use illegal guns by sandbagging legal and law-abiding gun owners?

Meanwhile, that media franchise most invested in gun crime, the Toronto Star, wins a fucking award for a how-to guide on smuggling guns from Ohio and Michigan into Canada.

It's a fucked up world.

Top brass couldn't drive Taliban out of Kandahar or racists out of their ranks. Should we trust them with the vaccine roll-out?

Canadians were aghast at the revelations unearthed by the Somalia Commission more than 25 years ago. The inquiry exposed a culture of rampant racism in the ranks of the Canadian Armed Forces and led to calls for reform. Fast forward a quarter century, and guess what? Last week the Toronto Star treated us to this headline; Canadian Armed Forces moves to crack down on racism and extremism in its ranks.

That racism nut is apparently a tough one for the Forces to crack... but that fact doesn't seem to temper the wave of adulation greeting the news that we've got a Major-General supervising our national pandemic vaccine roll-out. According to CTV, the military already has dozens of officers embedded with the Canada Public Health Agency. 

Same deal here in Ontario, where Premier Doug has tapped retired General Rick Hillier to oversee vaccine distribution. Hillier was the guy who stupidly promised to run the Taliban "murderers and scumbags" out of Afghanistan in short order. That was in 2005. By 2008 Hillier had retired from the Forces to pursue opportunities in the private sector, and today the murderers and scumbags are negotiating with the US government about their (the US, not the murderers and scumbags) final surrender, or, if you will, "victory." Hillier will trouser a cool $20 thou/month for his vaccine efforts.

Our future is in the most trusted hands our politicians can find. I for one am not impressed.

Why gold will triumph over crypto in the long run

 

There's certainly been plenty of easy money made on speculating in Bitcoin and the like. And plenty of money lost, too.

Yet as Bitcoin had its recent run towards 20k, there were numerous pontificators speculating that cryptos were displacing gold as a "storehouse of value."

Not a chance.

When the shit hits the fan, and as long we have a clique in Washington convulsed with the delusion that America must rule the world, it inevitably will, the world wide web will be history about fifteen minutes into the first day.

What's your Bitcoin worth then?

Gold, on the other hand, will keep doing what it's done for thousands of years; serve as a storehouse of value. When electrical grids are down and the internet is gone, gold will rule again.

An insult to every Canadian

Or at least every Canadian who still imagines this to be in some sense an independent sovereign state.

Check this out from CBC; US Justice Department in talks with Meng Wanzhou. 

You know the story. World Cop USA is hot to show Iran and China who's the boss. They make up some totally illegal bullshit sanctions, and then charge Meng Wanzhou, CFO of one of China's iconic brands, for violating those bullshit sanctions.

Getting their hands on Meng would be a real score. What a great way to humiliate China! And humiliate China we must.

They are communists.

They hate freedom and democracy.

They are determined to take over the world.

Therefore, we must hate them. We must rally with our allies to stymie them at every turn.

Meng was savvy enough to avoid US airspace, but when Uncle Sam tapped PM Fluffy with the job of nabbing her, Trudeau was delighted to oblige.

And here we are, two years later, and the Wall Street Journal reports that the US government is negotiating not with the government of Canada, but with Meng directly!

Because it matters not a whit what the government of Canada has to say on the matter. The government of Canada will be happy to go along with whatever decisions are made in Washington.

Winter strikes again!

Every year, winter catches me by surprise.

As a guy who survived long enough to get a pension, you'd think I'd have spotted the pattern by now, but no. Winter is a complete shock every year.

Although winter does not officially commence for a few weeks yet, the winter weather has moved in. The school kids got a day off yesterday, and the snowplow drivers are getting decent hours. 

December one isn't a bad time for winter to start. I would say January one isn't a bad time for it to end.  So things are looking good!

Not really. 

Every news outlet I turn to is still hyperventilating about Trump's reluctance to officially throw in the towel. The purpose of the hysterical hyperventilation is to make you think it matters whether it's Biden or Trump in the White House for the next four years.

It makes no difference whatsoever. If anything, we increase the odds of serious conflict with Russia and China with a President Biden, because he is very much favoured by the warmongering classes whose money elects presidents.

But either way, rest assured the rich will prosper, and the rest of us are fucked.