Canadian Navy busy busy helping DEA intercept cocaine five thousand miles from our shores

And for this the Canadian taxpayer should build our Navy a new fleet?

Don't get me wrong. I'd rather nobody touched the stuff. But that's just me. I have it on reasonably decent authority that cocaine remains the grease that lubes the wheel-bearings of the beautiful people from Wall Street to Sunset Boulevard. That such a thing is even conceivable tells you all you need to know about the efficacy of the forty-years-and-counting "War on Drugs."

As in, it's been a complete sham.

Not that this fact should deter the Royal Canadian Navy from wasting it's time and our tax dollars rooting out the scourge of cocaine use.

After all, cocaine doesn't just limit itself to the beautiful people. Check out this little tidbit from the Wikipedia page for HMCS Saskatoon, the very vessel being celebrated today for her outstanding efforts in the War on Drugs;

In 2007, a court martial revealed that a third of the crew of the ship used illicit drugs, namely cocaine. This led to a wider investigation in the Canadian Forces into drug use.

The real reason Toyota named its budget bomb the "Toyota 86"

When you read up on this question you run into a lot of hokum about how Toyota high-performance projects going back fifty years had the number "86" somewhere in their nomenclature.

Ya, maybe...

But here's a much more compelling explanation.

I think Toyota's branding department went into the history books and dug up the story of an authentic street-racing culture that was thriving fifty years ago on Highway 86.

Right in front of my house.

Makes perfect sense, doesn't it?

Where to get a Montreal smoked meat sandwich just like they make in Toronto when you're out in the sticks

At Pat and Kevin's deli-pub in Goderich, that's where.

Made a day out of taking Bubbs and the Farm Manager down to Goderich to see a play. The theatre thing runs real deep on the Jewish side of the family.

We get to Goderich in good time, and the gals are a little peckish, so we park the car and duck into this little joint called Pat and Kevin's.

We were in a bit of a rush and the gals let the staff know it. Our food arrived pronto. My Octoberfest sausage on a bun was edible but forgettable.

But the gals got Montreal smoked meat on rye... and I got the left-overs!

Simply amazing!

There ensued an animated debate on where amongst the pantheon of great Toronto delis we would locate the Pat and Kevin Montreal smoked meat sandwich.

Dudes! You're right up there with the Centre Street Deli and Kaplansky's!

Chuck Berry, guitar hero

I never thought of Chuck Berry as a guitar hero. He was more of a all-round here's the rock and roll kind of guy. But there was more to the man.

Check this out.

Retard Nation: the manifold blessings of a shitty education system

The think tank here at Falling Downs is constantly amazed by the foolishness that passes for public debate among our cousins south of the 49th.

Take the current ruckus over Obamacare vs Trumpcare (sometimes labelled "Ryancare" in order to provide the POTUS with a measure of deniability). Trump is determined to rob tens of millions of Americans of their health insurance. I suppose if you consider monthly premiums in the thousands of dollars and deductibles in the tens of thousands as "health insurance," you'd be right.

But it's a bullshit debate. It's a debate that obscures the reality that health care and for-profit health insurance are at root fundamentally incompatible. Nobody has ever made a profit providing health insurance to sick people. For-profit health care is predicated on NOT providing health care to sick folks. It's a no-brainer.

How retarded would you have to be to think that Donny J was going to deny his billionaire buddies the opportunity to hold your health ransom to a for-profit health care infrastructure?

The rancour over Trump's "Muslim ban" is another head-scratcher. Reading the mainstream media, you get the impression that banning travellers from a handful of Muslim nations is a far more heinous crime against humanity than actually making war against Muslim nations. Bush and Obama managed to do the latter time and again with barely a murmur of protest. Trump wants to keep a few Muslims out of the country and an enraged citizenry takes to the streets in their tens of thousands. How is that possible?

You really have to root around on the fringes of the world-o-news to discover any hint of a causal relationship between the global refugee crisis and American foreign policy. That's simply not up for discussion in polite society. Refugees are flooding US allies in Western Europe and massing at America's borders to take advantage of the generous welfare provisions on offer in the Nations of Virtue. The fact that the US and the me-too NATO club has been bombing a good slice of the Muslim world to ratshit for at least two generations cannot possibly have anything to do with it.

And the latest round of Russophobia is quite remarkable too. Because some anonymous ciphers in America's legion of spook outfits have claimed that some inevitably secret evidence leads them to conclude that Putin was behind the DNC Wikileaks last year, it's fobbed off as fact by virtually the entire mainstream news edifice in the Western world. Nevermind that there is a rich vein of journalism, festooned with multiple Pulitzers, exposing the perpetual lying and conniving of those same spook outfits; this time they're telling the truth.

How retarded would you have to be to swallow that?

None of these controversies would be possible without a seriously dysfunctional education system. Speaking of which, how is it that the same folks aghast at Betsy Billions' ascent to Sec of Education were mostly hunky-dory with Arne Duncan? Look behind the faux outrage and you'll soon discover that on the important philosophical points, the Duncan - DeVos evolution provides virtually seamless continuity.

Then there's the abysmal record of America's previous Groper-in-chief before the current one. One of Bill Clinton's most lucrative post-POTUS gigs was his multi-million contract with diploma mill extraordinaire Laureate International Universities. That's the for-profit outfit that sucked millions of young Americans into debilitating student loan debt in return for worthless "education."

But it made Bill Clinton, a white-trash climber from Arkansas, many millions of dollars richer.

Americans aren't born stupid. It's the education system.

Plagiarism not a big deal (if the plagiarist is white)

By all accounts Chris Spence was a highly regarded administrator. He recently lost his job as Director of Education at the Toronto District School Board.

The reason? He got busted for plagiarism.

Today the Bluewater District School Board, a couple of hours away, announced a new Director of Education, a long-serving superintendent who, just a few years ago, was found guilty of plagiarism by the same College of Teachers that revoked Spence's teaching credentials.

The plagiarist who lost his job as Director of Education is black.

The plagiarist who got promoted to Director of Education is white.

Go figure...

Canadian Trumphobia not as bad as originally feared

Here's a story from CBC that says Canadians are making more trips to the USA since the election of you-know-who. That figures. Canadians tend to be a smug and hypocritical lot. They may despise that vile man in the Oval Office, but Girl Guides aside, they're still gonna cross the 49th if they can save ten bucks on a tank of gas.

On a related note, here's a point of view on the Muslim ban that hadn't occurred to me. Seems that within hours of its implementation the high-traffic freight crossings from Ontario into Michigan and New York State were getting seriously bunged up.

Here's why; back in the day, when the Teamsters were a serious outfit and the vast majority of drivers were members, driving truck was a respectable career. If you were a Teamsters driver in the middle sixties you were solidly "middle class" income wise.

There weren't a lot of guys named Mohamed in the Teamsters at the time.

Thanks to fifty years of deregulation and union-busting, truck-driving has become a shit job, and you know who takes those. As has always been the case, the recent immigrants end up in the shit jobs. When the Irish were recent immigrants, they got the shit jobs. Same with the Italians, the Ukrainians, the Poles... everybody started out at the bottom of the ladder.

When my dear Daddy got off the boat in 1956, his first job was shovelling coal at Kloepfer Coal in Guelph -  with a hand shovel, not a power shovel.

Guess who you're likely to find behind the wheel of the typical big rig today? That's right - a recent immigrant, and a lot of those guys have Muslim names.

So Mohamed pulls up to US Customs with a 52 foot trailer loaded with a million dollars in auto parts from Linamar or Magna. Customs guy notices driver was born in Somalia.

"Ya'll park that rig in the lot over there and come in for a chat, Mohamed."

Well guess what? If the driver isn't crossing that bridge, the truck ain't either!

That million dollars in auto parts is heading for a Ford or GM or Toyota or Mercedes plant somewhere. Thanks to the magic of JIT and all that stuff, those car plants cripple up pretty quick.

Team Trump may take their sweet time returning calls from lawyers for the ACLU, but they pay attention right smartly when lawyers from GM and Ford are on the line. By the end of day one dozens of those trucks were parked and Team Trump knew they had a serious problem.

Judge James Robart's overturn of Trump's travel ban was actually a huge face-saver for Team Trump. Anything else you're reading is just spin and optics.