Something nasty is blowing in...

I just came in from the stoop, where I' d briefly retreated to have a breath of fresh air, and also take a piss, since I'm out there anyway,  and I gotta say, the sky ain't lookin' happy.

There's some nasty shit a-brewrin', and  so far there haven't been any weather alerts..

Be that as it may, I'm gonna take a chance and call it a day... let the cold front blow through while I catch some much-needed rest.

In the 56+ months since Putin's invasion, Kyiv's NATO sponsors still desperately searching for "whatever it takes"

From the looks of things, the actual armories of the world's free peoples,  exhausted by years of war, are now emptier than Western Civ's Strategic Petroleum Reserves !  But NATO will never quit! 

Putin has been staggering from one disaster to another in his losing struggle to hold back the vastly superior NATO sponsored, supplied, and trained Ukrainian army, equipped  with the latest state-of-the-art American weapons.

Here in Canada, home of the world's second biggest Ukrainian diaspora after Russia, we will never rest until Russia is vanquished once and for all. Or if not Russia, at least Putin, because he's the real problem. Why, just a few days ago, the Globe & Mail released a deeply personal excerpt from Big Steve's forthcoming memoir, revealing for the first time that Putin is evil!

And if that doesn't wind down the war, the current PM upped the ante by announcing neither Russia nor Belarus will be allowed to participate in the World Junior Hockey Championships. Ouch! That's gotta hurt... we know how Putin feels about ice hockey!

And we haven't even discussed the huge developments unfolding at  breakneck speed in Canada's defence sector. As recently as two years ago,  membership in the Canadian defence contractors lobby numbered 600 firms. Once our political leadership embraced Donald Trump's demand we quadruple our military spend, from 1.2% of GDP to five,  so many entrepreneurial patriots have rushed to incorporate new defence companies, that number has almost tripled!

What virtually all these new entities have in common is no defence experience,  no financing, but a burning passion to stand up for freedom and democracy. With the new defence spending paradigm imposed by Mafia Don, good things will be happening soon!

Sit tight Zelly,  "whatever it takes" is coming right up!  You'll be swimming in missiles in no time once the can-do Canuckistanis jump into action! Just a matter of government money, building the plants, getting the contracts...

Hey, we should be ready to ship death and destruction around the time our German submarines arrive!

Hello there! My name is Fascismo... I think we've met before...

 I wonder what some of the oldsters would think of the current situation. The situation wherein a handful of billionaires own our economy, our politics, and our future.

A world where Facebook, the news source of choice for a vast cohort of Americans, is permitted to fob off its fact-checking responsibilities to various NATO/Atlantic Council affiliates.

A world wherein the arguably most influential news title in the world is owned by a billionaire with intimate connections to the CIA.

A world wherein everything you watch and read is vetted by unaccountable entities with a vested interest in the preservation of American Exceptionalism.


For well over ten years our serious media have treated us to a side-show of Russia-Trump foolishness, ostensibly because a few hundred thousand dollars worth of Facebook adverts upended democracy in America and put Trump in the White House.

Meanwhile, Mariam Adelson's meddling in that and every other US election, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, passes without comment. Or without a Mueller investigation, one might add. And Adelson is just one of many ultra-rich who make a hobby of dabbling in politics.

Foreign policy too is dictated by the same donor class. It's pretty much a closed loop between the industrial-military complex and the billionaire corporatists who own the information infrastructure.


I think the old-timers would have a word for that.


Fascism.

Justin Trudeau follows Jason Arday in stinking up Oxbridge's hallowed halls of higher learning

Last time the world caught a glimpse of the haircut that walks like a man, he was chilling at Burning Man with his super-hot pop-star girlfriend, eating baked beans out of the tin with his fingers, while sporting a backward baseball cap!

And while the spectacle of Fluffy making a fool of himself surprised precisely no one, this headline at CBC today shocked the world; Justin Trudeau steps into new role at Oxford University. 

Say what? That dorkshit eating beans in the desert is joining the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford, in the capacity of, get this, "Distinguished Fellow and member of their World Leaders Circle!"  The CBC journo sharing this great news points out that Circle already includes heavy-hitters like Jacinda Ardern and Rishi Sunak, so they can only be adding Justin in the hope of lending the Blavatnik World Leaders Circle a hint of gravitas!

Here's the money quote from the Dean of the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University; "
Our students are the public leaders of tomorrow, and the opportunity to learn directly from those who have navigated the complexities of government … is invaluable,”

 

Good grief, is the joke ever gonna be on your students!

Bear in mind Oxford & Cambridge represent the pinnacle of knowledge and wisdom in Western Civilization. Makes you wonder about the folks guiding our good ship Higher Learning, don't it?  Cambridge was the home of the most brilliantly insightful Sociologist in the history of Sociology, until he was exposed as a serial fraud and abject fabulist.

Can't imagine the Big Brains steering the destiny of  Western Civ can erase the embarrassment of Jason Arday by bringing aboard Justin Trudeau.

Is it time to take a page out of Mao Zedong's playbook, and send urban elites to the countryside to unlearn their hubris?

The previous post got me thinking. When it's in-your-face obvious that a 30yo university grad's standard of living in the big city is in virtually every aspect lagging far behind the standard of living of a 30yo high school grad, or even a high school drop-out, in small-town Ontario, maybe it's time to shake things up a little.

Generally speaking, the folks who make a go of it in these small towns have something to offer. Don't need to be fancy, but does need to be useful. Teachers, truck-drivers, nursing home staff, drywallers, painters, plumbers, dental hygienists, cooks, farm hands, and so on. If you've got useful skills you'll be fine, and most of these jobs don't require much formal ed at all, but we're happy to pay for what they do.

On the other hand, there's been a vast underclass of the over-educated growing like topsy. These are the folks who manage to spend their six or eight or twelve years of post secondary accumulating massive debt in exchange for credentials that are today worthless, or at least worthless-adjacent. I can't put my finger on it, but as a guy who took way too many soc courses, I've observed that the more your college major involved interrogating intersectionality, the less likely you'll have anything to offer these little communities.  

That said, there's nothing about that PhD, that you're paying off with a lifetime of sessional precarity, that prevents you from learning to drive a truck!

Canada's "housing affordability crisis" mostly impacts entitled, miseducated, urbanites with massive student loan debt

Recently the Globe has found ample space for the musings of a UBC academic who intends to leave the world a better, fairer place for the next generation. I'm certainly 100% aboard for that! Said academic has fired up his very own non-profit, with the help of a little government funding, called Generation Squeeze. As you can see from their landing page, hard work doesn't pay off like it used to. Younger Canadians go to school longer, to land jobs that pay less, only to face runaway housing costs.

Once you've digested a few of Professor Kershaw's Globe & Mail missives, you almost feel sorry for these kids. They were clearly sold a bill of goods. The "hard work" of attending post-secondary for six or eight or twelve years doesn't pay off like it used to.  Where once upon a time that might have given you a leg up on the riff-raff that didn't get into U of T or UBC, now these poor suckers find themselves locked out of the priciest real estate markets. Buying a detached in Toronto or Vancouver is a million +++ undertaking. In that market, you need at least a 20% down, and how is an under-employed PhD gonna pull that kinda coin together in a system where not one in a hundred doctorates will ever land a tenure track position?

Professor Kershaw is himself not only a tenured prof at a prestigious school, he is an award-winning prof at a prestigious school, so it's safe to presume he's not a complete moron, but he's completely unaware of how the other half lives. That other half is probably well represented in the hundreds of local kids who got high-school diplomas on the strength of their grade four level math skills, thanks to me. Hey, if they got  to my gr 10 class with gr 2 skills and gained two grade levels by June, I earned my paycheque and they earned their diploma!

Here's a few facts about the world they live in.

As in Toronto or Vancouver, two people each working full-time in a min wage job, will jointly qualify for a  $325000 mortgage. That's worth bupkis in TO or Van, but once you're 45 minutes north of Yonge and Steeles, a whole new world opens up! That mortgage, which wouldn't even suffice as a down payment in downtown Toronto or Vancouver, actually buys you a detached on an ample lot! And under a half million you need 5% down, not 20%.

Check out this stuff on offer now, easily within reach of those two hypothetical min wage earning grads.

For sale: 279 1ST AVE AVENUE S, Arran-Elderslie, Ontario N0G1L0 - X13819262 | REALTOR.ca

Say what? Two storey classic yellow brick on a quarter acre, in a quiet village in Amish country, for $330k ? Or perhaps, on the strength of you and your partner's minimum wage  jobs, you would prefer this easily affordable century bungalow.

For sale: 40 7TH STREET SW, Arran-Elderslie, Ontario N0G1L0 - X14094230 | REALTOR.ca

And if yellow brick ain't your thing, check out this red brick beauty!

For sale: 53 3RD STREET S, Arran-Elderslie, Ontario N0G1L0 - X13767306 | REALTOR.ca

Those are just a few of the options available to my students, none of whom have student loan concerns. A quick peek at the Government of Canada Job Bank listings for the area shows 182 jobs, most of which pay well above min wage. And the insurance policy of Amish neighbours in tough times is something Professor Kershaw's students will never find in Toronto or Vancouver!

Professor Kershaw's kids have massive student loans and need help. My kids are doing fine. They're buying homes and starting families. If they have to commute a half hour to work it's a country drive, not a twice-a-day ordeal. 

There you have it! Some kids bought the bill o' goods and now they're "generation squeezed"... other kids went straight to "generation live-your-life!"

Remembering when you could count on your John Deere to last 75 years

Yes, as a matter of fact, I'm warming up to deliver yet another rant about what a tragedy it is, or perhaps even an outright crime, and a quite despicable one at that, that nobody knows any more how to build stuff to last.

Regular readers will be well acquainted with my observation (not that it's in any way original to me, as I'm sure several billion folks around the world are acutely aware of the phenomenon by now) that whereas we once valorized concepts such as reliability and quality, those are archaic values today, deader than God Himself.

No! In the modern era, we celebrate the genius who figured out how to ensure that any fridge stove washer dryer and random countertop appliance expires within weeks, or ideally hours, after its warranty! That's why that lonely Maytag repairman, who single-handedly covered the lower 48 from the 50s to the Reagan era, has been replaced by hundreds of Mexicans. In every town.

And they're on the go 24/7!

I share this only to provide context re the brand mentioned in the title. It was in the early '70s that my father purchased a used John Deere 450 crawler-loader. It was at least twenty years old at the time. Dear Dad has gone to the happy woodlot in the sky, but the by-now 80 yr old JD 450 is still chugging through the family woodlot on the home acreage.

Fast forward from the 80 year-old Deere to me dropping in on the neighbours at the weekend. They are hard-core Deere guys, owning no less than eight of them, ranging from '30s vintage to pretty close to state-of-the-art. They should know from John Deeres, and in their estimation, every innovation for the last generation has been a step backwards. They are especially pissed about how newer models restrict their ability to repair their own machinery. Pretty much every old-school farmer thinks that an outrage, whereas the corporate guys figure it's just the way things have to work.

I had some farm matters to discuss, and when I pulled up, the father-son team happened to be tinkering with a '62 Massey Ferguson. The father explained that his father had bought it new in '62. I half-jokingly enquired if they were still claiming depreciation on it 64 years on. The no-joke answer was yes! Best tractor on the farm!

Well, guess it depends how you define best. They might love their wee Massey, but it's the Deere's doing all the work. That's why I've got my eye on this beauty. She's the little brother to the 450 my father had.  She's only fifty years old - barely broken in!

         Should clear the snow out the drive right smartly!