Carney invites Russia, Iran, and North Korea to join coalition of like-minded nations to overthrow Trump regime

In a stunning reversal of policy, the Canadian PM has offered yesterday's enemies a seat at the table as he builds a coalition to restore the freedoms and human rights of the American people. Clearly Trump has become a deranged madman obsessed with restoring the former glory of a once-serious power. 

He has cowed allies and enemies alike into submission. Everybody except Canada, which is why it's up to the Globalist Banksters favorite banker to set things right, and clearly, time is of the essence. After starting and losing two wars at once, Trump has become so delusional that he's more convinced by the day he actually won them. He is flooding the streets of American cities with armed thugs who are hunting down Trump opponents. He is murdering his own people!

We have rarely seen such a clear-cut case for the application of R2P, the Responsibility to Protect doctrine Canada was instrumental in getting through the UN. The leadership burden therefore falls to us.

We haven't been called to do much punching-above-our-weight since the golden age of Big Steve, but Canada stands ready. Leadership is what we do.  We're ready to take back our rightful role at the top o' the democratic order!

Former ambassador to Russia briefs CBC on grim human rights situation under Putin

 It's grim alright. Former ambassador Sarah Taylor painted a bleak picture... not for herself, but for the 140 million Russians who don't have the freedom to escape Bad Vlad's dystopian shithole.

Sarah shared some profound insights that brought into focus the scale of Putin's relentless disinformation war. It is truly mind-boggling! For example, for over fifty years the communist dictator Nikita Khrushchev had a completely bogus rep as a reformer, when in reality he was one of the worst they ever had till Putin came along. All that hogwash about Nikita K freeing millions of political prisoners from the Siberian Gulag? Lies lies lies!!!

But the lying didn't really take off till Putin seized the Kremlin  via an obviously fraudulent "democratic" election featuring, literally, some two dozen alleged political parties! Ya, as if! And the disinformation war against the West went completely bonkers after Alexei Navalny returned from his all-expenses-paid education at Yale and began asking questions about where Bad Vlad had squirreled away the billions, nay, tens of billions... double nay nay, HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS Putin has pilfered from his longsuffering people.

At great risk to her personal safety, Taylor made the courageous decision, along with the ambassadors from France, UK, Germany, and USA, to attend Navalny's funeral. There, her heart was almost broken by the sight of "many" thousands of Muscovites who defied Putin with their presence. Although CBC didn't use the phrase "tens of thousands" in their reporting at the time, she ventured that in her estimation it might very well have been possible!

Her interview with Matt Galloway was a real eye-opener, and another job well done by our public broadcaster. Bravo Matt and Sarah!

Meanwhile our PM was over in Ankara to sign trade and defence deals with like-minded NATO ally  Turkiye. It's a lot like Canada, except for a couple of minor things... for example, while they've got twice our overall population, they've got 10x the prison population! And there is an argument to be made our erstwhile NATO ally holds more political prisoners than Russia! The Sultan's human rights bona fides may be a little over-ripe, but any port will do in this storm of authoritarian terror launched by Putin and his minions in Tehran and North Korea!

But for the Grace of God...

The Grace of God. We don't put much stock in the Grace of God in the modern era.

Got a call last night from my old pal Kipling. But for the Grace of God, Kipling woulda been a gonner twenty times over long before now. And he knows it. That's the thing about old guys who are shocked and confused when they suddenly find themselves grappling with the fact they actually made it to old age! 

That truly is a WTF moment. I went into a Service Ontario office yesterday and came out a half hour later with a VIP handicapped parking permit. WTF? How did that happen? First place I went to try it out was Shoppers Drug Mart, and wouldn't you know, all the handicapped spots were taken!

That's obviously something to get pissy about if you're looking for a handicapped parking space, but since I'm new to gimp-world, I'll just hang back and reserve judgement. But for the Grace of God, I may have very well dropped dead in some random parking lot long before I snagged that VIP parking permit!

In praise of elderly Jewish gentlemen who happen to have law degrees

We're delving into the archives here, and I've no idea if Uncle Sid remains among the living, but thirteen years ago he made enough of an impression that I wrote about him.

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First of all, Sid ain't my uncle.

I don't think, technically speaking, he's even an "uncle" to the Farm Manager. Maybe a second cousin once removed or something.

Anyway, I ran into Sid at the family get-together about a month back.

Usually I only run into Sid at family funerals.

So I grabbed Sid's hand for a good old farm-style handshake, "hey good to see ya Sid... I only see you at funerals!"

I should mention that Sid is 87 years old. Still goes to his office at his law practice every day. Still got all his marbles, and they're all rolling in the right direction.

I think he does real estate law mostly. You can probably do that till you're 150. After all, what can go wrong? The title searchers do the title search. The lien checkers check for liens. The legal secretaries and assorted unpaid interns do the rest.

When all those folks have done all your work, you give it the stamp of approval and off you go!

Now that's just a general rant about real estate lawyers. I don't mean for a moment to suggest that's how Sid rolls.

But Sid is one savvy dude. When I mentioned about only seeing him at family funerals he rejoinders, without a moment of hesitation, "ya I know! Everybody I know is dead!"

What a great guy to have a beer with!

Here's to ya, Sid!

How to tell when you're busting the speed limit on the Alzheimer Highway

Not that I would, personally, know anything about that, but I've heard through the grapevine one of the sure-fire symptoms is when you start doing shit you've never been known to do before. Like, just to pick a hypothetical example out of the ether,  shopping for high-end footwear.

 I gotta admit I've been somewhat infatuated with the Dayton 64 brand of late, and I'll tell you why. Thanks to a recent Globe feature on bespoke brands unique to Canada, I learned that Dayton 64s are called that because the IWA Canadian HQ was at 64 Dayton Avenue in Vancouver!

And here's why this matters to the pot-addled hillbilly. For a period of several months, I think four max, maybe four and a half, I was the shop steward at an International Woodworkers of America local in Victoria BC. As it happened, none of the older guys wanted the job, so the punk from Ontario got it by default. The punk from Ontario was soon enough embroiled in crises on all sides that had him scurry home to Ma & Pa's basement, but to this day I regard those few months with nostalgia and regret...

Not sure what that's worth... you get to a certain age and damned near everything you see in the rear-view is framed in nostalgia and regret!

And I'm not a complete stranger to Canadian-made high-end footwear. I've had a pair of blue suede Hartts forever.  I got 'em in a thrift shop for twenty bucks. There was another high-end brand also from New Brunswick that I think is still around, but their shoes are built in England now. 

But back to the Alzheimer Highway. Right now I'm looking at a vintage pair of Daytons, a wee bit scuffed up, on offer at five hundred bucks. Ya, that's three times what I've ever paid for footwear before, but hot damn...  wait a minute! That sharp-looking logger's boot may look good but it don't have so much as a steel toe! WTF? 

I couldna even wore those puppies into the IWA shop where I was the shop steward! They mighta made real boots once upon a time, but they're strictly Japan / China tourist fare today. 

See!  A guy who can figure that out still has a lot of runway left on that highway!

Remembering the fake-news fairies who brought you Malalah, Greta, and little Bana

From the archives, but near as I can tell  we're way more befuddled by the diff between shit & shinola, truth & truthiness, than we were back then!

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You gotta admit the wily Erdogan knows a good photo-op when he sees one.

If nothing else, this story proves that the roads from "rebel held" areas of Syria to the capital of Turkey remain wide open, in spite of the fact that Turkey has allegedly joined the fight against Daesh. How else to explain the fact that Bana was only evacuated out of Aleppo two days ago, on a Syrian government bus, and transferred to rebel held territory, and finds herself on The Sultan's lap in Ankara a mere 24 hours later?

That's truly amazing!

But in annals of the wily Erdogan's amazing adventures, it's par for the course. This is the guy who heads the second largest military in NATO but is conniving with Bad Vlad in all sorts of nefarious goings on in the neighborhood. He's fighting ISIS but fighting the Kurds even harder, even though it's universally acknowledged that the Kurds are fighting ISIS harder than anybody. The guy who embodies the shared values of NATO even while wreaking havoc on his Kurdish population, side-lining democracy in his own country, and jailing more journalists than any despot in the world...

Sometimes it's hard to figure out where the truthiness ends and the fake news begins, isn't it?

Remembering when ethnic jokes were funny

At least they sounded droll enough to my ear. They were largely jokes passed around amongst immigrant factory hands in southern Ontario and beyond, in the post war economy where they were crammed into factories alongside other ethnic groups they'd been locked in mortal combat with not too many years before.

The fun thing was virtually all these different ethnic groupings were white Christians. A true fact we've absolutely lost sight of is no matter how many not-whites European colonialism murdered in the roughly 500 years it was dominant, it murdered far more white Europeans! 100 million plus just in the two industrial-scale wars of the 20th century! Virtually all of them, outside the Pacific theatre, were white. Even the Jews murdered by the white Nazis were white European Jews, not non-white Arabic Jews.

The gist of this joke genre was what personality traits to keep an eye out for in case your former enemies were about to return to type. So you got a lot of stuff like never trust a German in a uniform. Never turn your back on an Irishman with a jug of whiskey. Never trust a Jew with a law degree.  Never turn your back on an Italian with a hard-on, and so forth. Over the years the oeuvre gained in specificity, so by the time we got to "beware of Greek restauranteurs with valid insurance policies," Greeks had long been considered mainstream white Christians.

Today pretty much all that stuff is "hate speech." And as we are all reminded day in and day out, there's nothing, NOTHING more corrosive than hate speech to our cohesion as a sovereign nation!

Ya, maybe. But it seems our national cohesion was far more robust before our ruling strata got obsessed with stamping out hate speech!