Reflections on the ice storm

The electricity went out here 9:30 Saturday night, and came on again about an hour ago. That’s three days and nights of no internet, no water, no home-cooked meals, no bath, no shower, and to flush the toilet I gotta mosey on down to the creek with a five gallon pail. No internet means I can’t live stream Al Jazeera’s Gaza coverage. Haven’t seen a dead baby in three days! I’m OK with that. It’s a nice break. Apparently the babies are still dying, but I appreciate the break even though they never got one. The water thing shows you how much we take for granted. You could live a lot longer without internet than you could without water. And three days without water? That’s a crisis for me, but three days can easily turn into three months or more in Sudan or Ukraine or Gaza. Three days is a minor inconvenience by their standards. When it comes to flushability, it’s a good idea to stockpile your toilet water before you actually need it. Here’s a tip; load up early in the day before you load up with a beer and a toke. The creek is well over it’s banks and it’s a bit of a muddy mess down there. One false step on the path back to the house and you’re on your ass with your empty water bucket rolling down the hill. When you need three trips to the creek for one flush it’s a long three days without electricity.

Canadian PM Carnage sparks up bromance with Mafia Don

Somehow the bankers and the billionairs understand one another. You gotta respect Mark Carney for not getting swept away by the tidal wave of patriotism that overtook our fair land after the CBC and Globe & Mail, the conjoined arbiters of goodthink in Canada, declared that a lame joke about PM Fluffy as the governor of the 51st state was actually a threat to our sovereignty. All concerned are fully aware Canada’s sovereignty, such as it was, has been frittered away over the decades, to the point the entire world knows “Canada” is just an automatic vote with the USA anytime a United Nations vote count matters. That’s a very good reason for the USA to keep at least the appearance of having allies. All these “allies” are proof of the old adage; when you’ve got ‘em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow. Oh look! The Free World (ie the nations whose nuts are firmly in Uncle Sam’s iron grip) is backing up the leader of the free world! I for one can not share the euphoria building around the Donald- Mark bromance. At this very moment Donald is enabling a genocide in Gaza, the disembowelment of Ukraine, and the trashing of freedom of speech in America. But we gotta suck up because otherwise a couple of car plants might have to shut down. It’s all about shared values!

Canadian election; are you bored out of your mind yet?

There’s a startling difference between Yankee democracy and ours. In the USA, the campaign essentially runs four years. Trump 2.0 has been in office hardly two months and OAC is on the campaign trail, doing a national tour, rallying support for her run for the White House in ‘28! In Canada, on the other hand, we look to keep our election campaigns as short as possible - four weeks in the current tussle. For good reason; we can barely stay awake for a four week campaign! Anything much longer would completely destroy our democracy! So far the most exciting thing that’s happened is the Liberal Party swapped out Fluffy for a Goldman Sachs man. That bought them an instant 20+ points in the polls. Obviously, even loyal Liberal Party stalwarts were beyond fed-up with their perfumed poseur. Not hard to see why. Before politics, he had a grand total of two years of full-time employment - as a teacher in a tony private school. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it looks a bit wimpy compared to thirteen years at GS, and that much again at the very pinnacle of global finance. Carnage is up against PP, a serious career politician. While Pierre never had to maintain order in a grade 7 drama classroom, he’s acquitted himself well in the drama classroom on Parliament Hill for twenty years. All the polls agree nobody else has a chance. Jag’s best hope is he might once again snatch relevance from the jaws of obscurity in case of a minority Lib government. Frankly, that’s wishful thinking. Jagmeet should resign now and make way for fresh blood in the NDP. He’s become as stale as Fluffy. So it’s a choice between the career banker and the career politician. Lets see how they compare. They both promise to stand up to Trump. They both promise to stand up to Putin. They both promise to stand up for Canada. They both promise to stand up for Ukraine. They both promise to stand up for workers. They both promise to stand up for Uighurs They both promise to spend more, much more, hundreds of $billions more, on the Canadian Armed Forces. They both promise more take-home pay for working Canadians. They both promise to solve the housing crisis. They both promise more money for retired Canadians. They both support Israel’s right to defend itself. They both believe in the ever-elusive “two state solution” that died with Izaak Rabin in 1995. They both condemn Gaza’s genocidal war on Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East… Can you see where things are going here? I’ve got a great idea. Elections Canada estimates this election will cost out at just under $600 millions. Why not just scrub the show and declare them co-PMs! That money could buy half a new submarine, and we need an entire fleet to ensure the future of our democracy. I’m sure at least the Goldman Sachs guy sees the wisdom in my words. Keep me in mind for a Senate appointment.

PM Carnage calls election; demands Canadians check couch cushions to raise $100 billion for Arctic sovereignty

Thanks to the predations of one Donald Trump, Canada has discovered the concept of “sovereignty.” In short, that’s what we pissed away over the course of many decades as our ruling class, the self-anointed “Laurentian elite,” embraced our status as a branch-plant economy and a vassal state. It’s taken Trump 2.0 for them to realize that may have been a mistake. Now they’re over-compensating. Every other day you see another desperate plea for spending billions or trillions or gazillions on cementing our sovereignty via warships and submarines and fighter jets. Because Trump! And let’s not forget the Arctic. Here’s Geoff Russ in the National Post; Canada needs an Arctic Empire, no matter the cost. Seriously? No matter the cost? Funny, that’s also trotted out in defense of warships and subs and fighter jets. A few months ago, we at least knew we were on the side of the angels, and we were willing to make sacrifices to “stand with our allies.” Then the Boss Angel, Lucifer, double-crossed us and joined Putin’s team. Oh my… What to do? It’s clear that the most important thing Canada can do at this moment is double down on military spending… or perhaps triple or quadruple down. As Mr Russ points out, our values of freedom and human rights and democracy must be preserved, no matter the cost. We must establish a robust military presence in the Canadian Arctic to defend our sovereignty. Putin, or rather Lucifer, has his eye on it for sure, and it’s gonna take a firehose of big bucks spraying non-stop before we can face down Lucifer. Indeed. Our Arctic defense force, the Rangers, patrol our North with ten year old snowmobiles and fifty year old rifles. They’re defending a Canadian Arctic population of maybe 150,000, most of whom live in tiny communities of a few hundred souls. Lucifer’s Arctic, in contrast, sports major cities and a population of at least 2,500,000 north of the Arctic circle. Instead of ten year old Ski-Doos, the Russians patrol the Arctic with state-of-the-art icebreakers, of which they have more than all other Arctic nations combined. So what is Geoff Russ saying when he says “no matter the cost?” What he and 101 other pundits are saying is we need to rubbish every present and future social program to facilitate the unlimited expenditure on war toys. Otherwise, freedom and democracy may perish! That’s total rubbish.

Ripper: the fart-making of Pierre Poilievre

Must say I was taken aback by the title of PP’s brand-spankin’-new just in time for the election biography. Ripper? The word conjures much, mostly negative to my mind. Makes you wonder what the demographics of their focus groups looked like. One of the less offensive connotations involves passing wind, or I should say, the art of the fart. Sure, everybody squeaks one out now and then, but in some environments the passing of wind will draw appreciative comment from bystanders. For example, early in my teaching career, until I gained a permanent contract that enabled me to say no, I “volunteered” to coach soccer and rugby, sports I literally knew nothing about. The team bus inevitably became a venue for competitive farting. “Ripping forth a beauty” meant you’d earned the respect of your peers. If you got really big decibels, cries of “Ripper!” resonated around the bus and fist-bumps were exchanged. The word applied both to the fart itself, and to the fartiste. Maybe that’s the Poilievre plan - to subconsciously appeal to the inner teen in every middle-aged voter.

Why do we continue to spend on war when we could make our world a better place?

Almost a year ago, I wrote a piece on Canada’s spending priorities; Chrystia Freeland's Canada; billions for Ukraine, $200 a month for the most vulnerable Canadians. In the course of my teaching career, I did a few years in “Spec Ed.” That’s where the kids in front of you are what fifty years ago was called “retarded,” forty years ago were “handicapped,” thirty years ago were “special,” twenty years ago were “exceptional,” and are today known as “developmental learners.” Those few years left me some of the best memories of my teaching career. I’m retired now, but the Farm Manager still has her day job as an Ed Assistant with those very students. One of her charges, a young man with a horrendous back-story and multiple challenges, not to mention a history of violence, has captured her ever-bleeding heart. She’s always been the champion of the lost-cause losers. I think maybe that’s why she’s with me. But I digress. Buddy has a fondness for animals, and for some time we’ve been trying to tee up a school visit by me and Bruno. Today we finally pulled it off. Bruno and I were waiting in the parking lot when Buddy and two of his handlers came to greet us. The FM had stocked up on pepperettes beforehand. This young man came out of the building with the flat over-medicated facial expression you see on so many of these students. A couple of pepperettes later, he had erupted into a beautiful full-body smile as he was caressing our Bruno, who, while a bit aloof, can handle a caress after a treat. This evening me and the FM got into a conversation about what lies in store for these kids after they age out of the school system. There’s a great program available locally that is largely volunteer driven and gets next to no official funding. Still, it costs money to rent a space and cover essential overhead. While it provides a variety of stimulating activities, and partially relieves the 24/7 burden of care their parents face, it still costs a hundred bucks a day. And, there’s a waiting list. The vast majority of our developmental learners have no hope to reach this program. What do their futures look like? Bleak. Which brings me back to our former Finance Minister’s budget wherein she promised multiple billions for assistance to Ukraine, and a $200 a month boost for our most vulnerable. Yes, when you’re at least a thousand a month below the poverty line, two hundred dollars does indeed give you a lift, but not out of poverty. At best, you’ll perhaps enjoy a slightly more genteel poverty! But only slightly. Meanwhile, not only have we found a few more billions for Ukraine, but we seem set to embark on ludicrous commitments to commit hundreds of billions of dollars to everything from warships to fighter jets to attack submarines. This is insanity! This is a crime against our most vulnerable! This is a betrayal of our values. Surely we can do better!

Drunk on hubris, American Empire races towards the abyss

For about the last thirty years, I’ve been hectored by save-the-planet types to mind my carbon footprint. If it’s not Greta Thunberg in my face, it’s Al Gore up my arse. We gotta get off fossil fuels or we’re all gonna die! In the here-and-now, we find ourselves in a world run by billionaires and their minions. Many of the billionaires hail from Silicon Valley. Most of them are salivating at the prospect of multiplying their billions many times over. Now that they’ve got a huge majority of the serfs addicted to their digital devices, they have concluded the next level in our enslavement will require massive server farms, aka “data centres,” to process the never-ending data streams we provide them. These require massive amounts of energy. The Silicon Valley billionaires have no compunction whatsoever about running their data centres on the very fossil fuels I’ve been warned away from for the last thirty years! And while the filthy rich keep getting richer, it becomes increasingly obvious that America at large is circling the drain. The physical infrastructure is crumbling due to habitual neglect necessitated by the needs of the one percent for ever-lower taxes. Ditto the education system. Housing precarity has become normalized. Health care in America boasts top-of-the-line expenses, but bottom of the barrel results. America’s vaunted military, by far the most expensive in the world, hasn’t won a war since 1945, and has lost it’s proxy war in Ukraine. America’s blank-cheque no-questions-asked support for Israel’s ongoing genocide is earning it the hatred of 80% of the planet. In response, America destroys the remnants of the rights and freedoms, that once made it worthy of the Statue of Liberty, by stomping on the rights of its critics, people like Mahmoud Khalil. As history repeatedly demonstrates, failing empires eventually resort to looting their allies, more properly termed vassals. That’s where we’re at in the present moment. We’ve destroyed Germany’s industrial economy but invite German manufacturers to set up shop in America. We’re going to snuff out industry in Canada and get their branch-plant economy to come home to Daddy. America is racing towards the abyss. The two hour phone call with Putin yesterday led to absolutely nothing. Our adversaries are not impressed, nor are they intimidated by idle threats. As I write this, the Empire is bombing Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the world, to make it stop harassing Red Sea shipping. Our operation “Prosperity Guardian” has in one year accomplished exactly nothing. The Yemenis are not cowed. Nor are the Russians or the Chinese or the Iranians. The world at large is fed up with American “leadership.” It’s increasingly obvious that Americans themselves, those suffering under the yoke of billionaire rule, are fed up too. Witness Luigi. Witness flaming Tesla stores. Only the blind and stupid, drunk with hubris, fail to see the writing on the wall.