WTF is up with those "moderate rebels?"

Who invented the category of "moderate rebels" anyway?

Can you imagine the headlines if "moderate rebels" were trying to foist an armed rebellion on America?

But apparently it's A-ok if "moderate rebels" attempt a coup in Syria... especially if those "moderate rebels" have been trained and armed by the USA from the get-go.

Armed insurrection would not be tolerated for five minutes in the USA.

But when the armed insurrection in Muslim lands is trained and funded by that most exceptional nation, everything is hunky-dory.

America remains a long way from an honest look in the mirror.

Sean Penn's unfortunate masturbation/hell fixation

I see where one-time Hollywood A-lister Sean Penn has got himself some headlines for his ruminations on the 2016 White House campaign.

Yup, it's either vote Clinton or masturbate your way into hell.

I'm no psycho-analyst, but I suspect Sean's Catholic upbringing may have something to do with his hell & masturbation theme, mainly because there's pretty much no other group on the planet as fixated on that particular diad than the Catholics.

What impact will Penn's thoughts have on the campaign for the White House? Penn probably just gave Trump a good goose in the polling numbers. Acting mojo aside, what the fuck does Sean Penn actually know about anything?

Look at his Haiti schtick. What's he accomplished there? Nothing. At least nothing positive. But his reflexive Clinton cheer-leading has left him a vocal supporter of the reactionary status quo in that benighted land, a land that has been more fucked up by the Clinton White House than by anything else in recent memory, with the possible exception of the 2010 earthquake.

Penn has a lot in common with Trump. Thanks to America's dysfunctional education system, there's a lot of folks who assume that just because somebody they saw on a screen says something, it is worthy of their attention.

Whether your name is Penn or Trump, that's not necessarily true.

The best America has to offer

Did you watch the debate last night? Between the world-class war-monger and the world-class tax evader?

Did it occur to you that if this is the best America can throw up for an election, that maybe it's time you were throwing up too?

Give me Mountain Dew Comacho any day of the week... at least he had a sense of humour!

Meanwhile, the much neglected Jill Stein, who, if you listen to her for a few minutes, exhibits all the symptoms of certifiable sanity, was ushered off the Hofstra campus hours before the shit-show was scheduled to begin.

Sorry lady, we don't need no sane folks round here... there's a presidential debate about to begin.

God bless America!

Who won debate one?

Trump won by faking a faux "presidentiality" for an hour and a half. Ya, I get that nugget of word play there... he's so fake that his fake fakery cancels itself out to the point that eventually you reach some fucked up zen zone of authenticity.

If such a thing can even be imagined...

Hillary won because she managed to not faint, collapse, or otherwise fall over, thereby proving that she does indeed have the stamina to be president.


Don't you get the sense that you've been witnessing a slow-motion train wreck?

And don't you get the sense that something's going to hit the wall in November?

Donald Trump is bringing democracy to the USA.


It won't be pretty.

Weekend in Wiarton

The Korean is now charging me $5.25 for the Saturday Globe and Mail.

That's a high tariff to get the latest insights from the likes of Renzetti, Saunders, and Wente. God knows they're not compelled by the Korean Korner Store Mafia to pay $5.25 to read my shit.

That makes the Sunday Star a veritable bargain; not only do I get the Toronto-centric pundits, but for less than three bucks I get the creme de la creme of the NYT punditocracy thrown in to boot, with that marvellous NYT insert that shows up every Sunday in my Sunday Star.  

Ya, for less than three bucks I get world-class bullshitters like Friedman, Cohen, Brooks, and Douhtat.

I'm rapidly coming to a place where I'm going to skip the Saturday Globe, save $5.25, and just go to the world-class guys on Sunday.

Which leaves me with a bit of a problem; how to fill the time I used to spend turning the pages of Canada's national newspaper of record?

Newspaper wars may be what they are, but we're still stuck in Wiarton. Picked up my Saturday paper and headed to Dockside Willies for breakfast...

WTF?...

The place was packed! As in so packed there was no place to open up your weekend paper! Billy-Bob with the jacked-up Ford pick-up has a raging success on his hands! Who'd a thunk it?

Back when the place was known as Coal-shed Willie's I don't recall ever having to walk out the door because it was too busy.

Fuck success!

So we headed back up the hill to the Top Spot. No view of the bay, no outside patio, but really good straight-up breakfasts every day all the time.

Mind you, they could be succumbing to the siren call of success too... I notice their famous Sunday breakfast buffet has now migrated to include Saturday... the thin edge of the wedge, to be sure.

But at least you can still find a booth in which to unfold your weekend newspaper.

Shits and giggles on the campaign trail

It all started innocently enough. After a dinner party at Trump's palatial penthouse in Manhattan, Donald and his pals the Clintons sketched out the rough outlines of a Trump '16 campaign.

It wouldn't take more than a few months out of #therealdonaldjtrump's career of perpetual self-promotion, and, by golly, those few months would be consumed with perpetual self-promotion! There's a win-win for sure!

Trump, a dyed-in-the-wool Manhattan liberal, would run as a Republican, just to stir up shit in elephant land for the duration of the primaries. Make the Republicans look like dork-shits while making Hillsy look golden in comparison.

No serious person in America, including Donald J. Trump and the Clintons, dreamed that Donald might actually win the Republican nomination over that stable of establishment bum-boys.

But he did.

And that's where things started to go off the rails for the Clinton-Trump conspiracy to take over America.

Suddenly Mr. Trump realized that maybe, just maybe, he could gorf down the whole enchilada all by himself. Yes, all he had to do was stab his old pal Hillsy in the back, and the oval office was as good as won.

So he went for it.

And by God, look at where he is today! Running neck and neck with Hillsy even in the most egregiously biased polls!

Even after the entirety of the Republican establishment's Deep State PNAC apparatchiki has joined the Hillsy camp.

Even after the entirety of the mainstream media propaganda apparatus has jettisoned every last principle of professional journalism to dump on Trump.

He's a racist! (Let's just ignore the entire pool of Trumpian imagery that suggests he was more than cordial with the likes of Jesse Jackson, Ali, Don King, Reverend Al, etc...)

He's a misogynist! (Impossible to deny that he has referred to certain female critics in wildly misogynist terms.)

He's a cheat! (Hey, the only people who file 12,000 page tax returns are really rich people who pay zero taxes, but I'm sure it was all legal.)

He has made complimentary comments about Bad Vlad, the foreign leader most reviled by the PNAC crowd because he hasn't signed off on the Brzezinski plan for America's full-spectrum dominance of the planet in perpetuity.

What the elites don't realize is that every one of these charges just endears Trump to the rubes who long ago turned their backs on the contagion of political correctitude.

They just figure he called some fat ugly bitch a fat ugly bitch?...  This bald breach of PC etiquette should have voters turning their backs on Trump in droves.

In fact, it has the opposite effect.

And doesn't he have a profoundly problematic relationship with the elephant in the elephant room, AIPAC? One day he's going to be "more balanced" in his approach to Israel/Palestine, and the ziocentric media panics...

But today Bibi pays a house-call... what to make of that?

Who knows?

Trump is a wild card, a loose canon,  and at least another half dozen cliches all rolled up in a phenom unlike anything American politics has seen in the modern era.

In November he will destroy Hillary in the election.

By January he'll be dead.

Guardian unearths vast anti-Clinton conspiracy again

You remember the Guardian, one-time bastion of all that was good about the fourth estate?

Well, they've come a long way. As in a long way down the toilet. Dispassionate dispenser of objective truths?

Forget about it.

Take a gander at this Guardian scoop; Who is Palmer Luckey, and why is he funding pro-Trump trolls?

Palmer Luckey is the kid who founded Oculus, which he sold to Zuckerberg for 14 trillion dollars when he was only eleven years old. Or something.

According to the Guardian, Luckey has been using his vast fortune to fund anti-Hillary trolls on Reddit... because, I guess, that could be a game changer???

The Guardian has made a name for itself by laying waste to all the conventions of what was once considered proper journalism with its anti-Trump vendetta over the past year. Little do they realize that anti-Clinton trolls don't need funding.

Their motivation is the fact that they truly believe Hillary would be so much worse!

Yes, Virginia, there is a black working class

I find it truly abominable that mainstream media pretend there isn't and never was a black working class. Stories about the travails of the white working class such as the one at CNN referred to in the previous post ignore the black working class altogether. In CNN's world, blacks are either social activists, entertainment industry bigs, welfare layabouts, gangstas, or in prison.

Here's a story from Al Jazeera back in February that you may find a little discombobulating if you're accustomed to reading the piffle on view at CNN. You get background, context, depth... all those things J-schools supposedly teach but which their few graduates who find paid employment in America's mainstream media seem totally unaware of.

Who knew that sixty years ago the very county that CNN focused on to explain and exploit the demise of the white working class had a population that was one quarter black? Nobody who gets their news from CNN, that's for sure.

It's an excellent read. You'll meet black folks, men and women, who are to this day employed in the West Virginia coal industry. You'll meet black folks who counted white co-workers among their best friends (class solidarity forever!) You'll even meet employed blacks who are contemplating, God forbid, a vote for the uber-racist Donald J. Trump!

Highly recommended.

CNN finds the face of America's white working class

The face of the white working class belongs to Ryan Barnette. I'm guessing Ryan's mug was chosen to represent the white working class because his picture ticks a lot of boxes for the stereotypes that media elites harbour about those people; scruffy, dirty, obviously a marginally literate Trump supporter with considerably less than a college education... probably looking to score his next fix of hillbilly heroin. Maybe he can't wash up because his trailer doesn't have running water?

Stereo-types aside, we learn that Ryan is a coal miner in West Virginia. Talk about an endangered species! You'd have to ask CNN why they splashed his picture all over their platform without giving the guy a chance to wash up. That would seem to me a very basic courtesy, but hey, the picture works better like this.

You're being used, dude!

That dude must have balls the size of cantaloupes

Watched a bit of the Trump rally in Ft. Myers yesterday. Apparently scalpers were out reselling tickets to this shindig, which, if true, is unprecedented in American electioneering history. By all accounts it's not happening in the ever-lamer Clinton campaign.

But what caught my eye was the solitary black dude in the frame of the main camera focused on the stage. I'm not saying he was the only black guy at the rally, but he was the only one visible to me.

That's gotta take some serious cajones!

Not because of what might happen to him at the Trump-fest, but for what might happen later when the local chapter of BLM tracks him down.

Good luck to ya!

About that 38 billion dollar "aid" package to Israel

There's a lot of commentary across the spectrum about the recent aid package Washington negotiated with Israel. At one end of the spectrum you've got folks claiming that isn't nearly enough. At the other end you've got all kinds of folks with their knickers twisted up over the fact that Obama can find 38 billions in aid for the State of Israel, but the cupboard is bare when it comes to aid for US states like Mississippi, West Virginia, and Arkansas, which are by any metric poorer than Israel.

You're missing the point, folks... this is "military" aid, not good old regular run-of-the-mill do-gooder aid. In fact, what you're looking at here is 38 billion dollars in free money to America's military-industrial mafia. This foreign aid should be seen as a subsidy to the bombs & bullets sector of America's manufacturing economy, not as "foreign aid."

What the hell would Arkansas and Mississippi do with 38 billion dollars worth of military aid?

Me and Trump

Have to say I was never much of a Trump fan.

I read his "Art of the Deal" book back in the day, and mostly I recall shaking my head and muttering "what an asshole" on pretty much every page. I was especially chagrined by his germ-phobia that prevented him from shaking hands with the commoners.

Looks like he's gotten over that.

But, what I took away from the book was that at the very end he went out of his way to pay respect to the union workers who build his shit. It was a step outside of the overall tone of his tome. He didn't have to do that, but he did.

By the time his next book came out, he was in the midst of bankruptcy proceedings of some sort. "Of some sort" is the key clause here, because after multiple bankruptcy proceedings it is apparently true that, as he claims, he has never filed for personal bankruptcy.

And why would he? Apparently his dear daddy Fred left a legacy of some 15,000 apartment units in NYC, and I've never seen any stories about them being sold off, so I assume they're still somewhere in Trumps portfolio. Given the nature of real estate inflation over the past forty years or so, that alone would make Trump a multi-billionaire, no matter what he did or did not achieve on his own account.

Those bankruptcy proceedings were hugely entertaining. I remember reading shit about how he needs to keep his yacht because it was a platform for hosting fundraisers for charitable organisations. As I recall, the courts let him keep it.

When I was at Frankel we fabbed up the steel for a new Trump casino in Atlantic City. We were a well paid union shop and as far as I know everybody got paid. The Trump casino initiatives eventually went tits up, but not before Trump won huge on them.

But that's the capitalist way, is it not? Move in fast, make your money, let the taxpayer clean up your mess. That happens everywhere all the time. You can't blame Trump for inventing predatory capitalism. And where is capitalism not predatory?

When Trump announced his candidacy for a 2016 White House run I initially thought Mountain Dew Comacho. Yup, Trump is gonna give real-world cred to the film Idiocracy. It's not sci-fi anymore; it's a documentary.

Then he trashed the non-fiction GOP candidates in the primaries, and suddenly I had a new view of Donald J Trump.

Hey! This guy could actually bring down America's rancid, rotten, self-dealing political establishment!

And he could.

That's why the entire right wing of the GOP and the entire PNAC crowd have been deserting the GOP and aligning behind Hillary.

And that's why, if you're against perpetual war, if you're against universal "free trade," if you're against more of the same old same old, you need to take a chance on Donald Trump in November.

Shocking truth revealed: Reverend Al Sharpton actually a white supremacist in black-face

Really!

How else to explain THIS photo:



How else to explain this handshake with the ultimate white supremacist of all time, Donald Trump?

Ya, I know the part of Reverend Al sticking out the top of his suit jacket always looks black, and that in itself should be a tip off. How many black activists do you know who wear suit jackets 24/7?

That's a white mans gig right there.

If Al was a genuine black dude he'd be wearing a hoodie, would he not?

And look at the hands in that handshake. Are those not two white hands in a brotherly grip?

Unless...

Unless maybe Trump is not the uber-racist that he's been painted as by the mainstream media...

Unless that was a handshake of genuine collegiality we're looking at here...

Trump and Sharpton; brothers under the skin-tone...

Thunderstruck; Axl, ACDC, and the collapse of Western Civilization

Before you judge me, take a gander at Axl fronting ACDC in this video.

You gotta admit he pulls it off...

Even though you know in your heart that this is as phoney as Ford putting a Ferrari badge on the nose of its latest Mustang.

Everything has become interchangeable/expendable...

Brian not available?

You can just imagine the suits making frantic calls to see how they might salvage the latest ACDC tour.

Not only did they save the tour, they simultaneously resurrected the careers of a dozen or so aging rockers well past their stale-dates.

And the ticket-buying public bought up those tickets like there's no tomorrow.

When recycled nostalgia is the biggest show in town, you know we're only heading down...


... and there is no "tomorrow."

So enjoy Axl fronting ACDC while you can!

Ford Motor Company to "migrate" all small vehicle production to Mexico

Hard to believe that Ford's CEO would actually deploy the word "migrate" to describe his company's on-going commitment to the destruction of manufacturing in America.

Yup, Ford factories don't move because ruthless greedbags make cut-throat decisions to further plump up their already record profits. No, it's much more organic than that... they migrate, like a migrating caribou herd, or migrant workers or something.

Mr. Fields is gonna have to have a serious chat with Mr. Trump about that wall Trump wants to build. It's gonna prevent Mexican migrants from heading back to Mexico to take all those jobs Ford is shipping out of the USA.

And what a timely story to rebut all those revisionists who claim that American manufacturing jobs are being destroyed by automation, not by "free trade" agreements. If, per Barry Lando and many others, it was really automation and robotics that was killing American jobs, Ford would have been more than happy to build a new automated plant in... Detroit?

But no. CEO Fields is migrating Ford production to Mexico. Lando et al want us to believe that's got nothing to do with Mexico's exponentially lower manufacturing wages and everything to do with robotics.

Bullshit!

We are not afraid

"We" being a bunch of multi-millionaire pop-culture superstars who have signed on to the project of convincing the masses that refugee/immigrants are nothing to be afraid of.

And they don't have anything to be afraid of. After all, the likes of Keith Richards or Yoko have so many levels of handlers between themselves and the public that it's unlikely that they'll ever set eyes on a refugee, never mind having their bottoms groped at a public bath. And it's not as if a recent immigrant is gonna be bumping them out of their jobs or anything, is it?

Note that lovely second paragraph; "We are not afraid" is a global campaign aimed at raising funds for the refugee crisis and victims of political and religious violence.

And where are all those refugees coming from, pray tell? Why, mostly from Islamic states that have been in the cross-hairs of America's "war on terror." Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan...

So our governments here in the Nations of Virtue continue to pursue the policy of bombing Muslim countries, and our pop-culture mega-stars are going to rally us to provide alms for the refugees our policies create? Almost looks like a perpetual motion machine, doesn't it?

And just what has it cost to create the refugee crisis? Here's a timely story from The Atlantic. Writer Uri Friedman posits that the actual bombings and invasions have run to about three trillions post 9/11, and the all-in cost when we factor in the war debt will run closer to five trillions.

Five trillion dollars to create a refugee crisis, and then our entertainment industry elite will put on a full court press to raise a few millions to ameliorate that crisis?

Sounds like bullshit to me.

Here's an idea; why don't we just stop bombing those people? I mean, with all due respect to W and the rest of the elite cretins who claim not to understand why those people hate us, I think they hate us because we've been bombing them to ratshit for the last fifteen years.

Stop that and you'll stop the refugee crisis.

A minor side-note to Canada's vaunted public health-care system

At three o'clock this afternoon I dropped my daughter off at a hospital in Richmond Hill.

As I write this she is still waiting for a definitive assessment of her condition.

It's been eight hours.

She's still hanging around the emerg ward at a hospital in Richmond Hill eight hours later?

Get the fuck outta here!

Surely we can do better than that!?

The two million dollar tear-down in North York

Take a gander at this two million dollar plus listing in north Toronto.

This lovely home on 57 feet of street frontage on Tobruk Crescent is obviously being marketed as a tear-down.

For two million bucks.

Bear in mind that we're an hour commute from King and Bay, and that's on a good day. Or, you could take a twenty minute hike to the Finch subway station, and then sub to the downtown in a forty year old subway car in which the air-conditioning hasn't worked properly for the last ten years.

That's an hour commute too, but at least you don't have to worry about parking when you get there. But your shirt will be sticking to your armpits, and you will have that subway smell about you, which is probably not what you're looking for if you just bought a four million dollar monster home in the northern reaches of Toronto.

Ya, the local micro-developers who will buy this place and rip it down aren't gonna replace it with something smaller... they gotta make a buck too. So by the time this particular place is bought, levelled, and a bigger, posher place put up, we'll be close to four millions all in.

The Farm Manager spent a spell on Tobruk twenty years ago, when that same house might have traded for maybe $200,000.

What the fuck is going on?

Here's what's going on. It's all about supply and demand. Whereas a few years ago four millions would get you a castle on one of the most posh streets in the Bridle Path neighbourhood, today it'll get you a McMansion on Tobruk in North York.

Where at least you can walk to the Finch subway station.

A handful of big dogs have become billionaires exploiting the shortage of buildable land in and around Toronto.

A whole lot of micro-developers have become millionaires buying up places like this house on Tobruk and working their magic.

Meanwhile, our government wants to up the immigrant quota to 300,000 per year. Most of them will want to settle in the greater Toronto area. Where is this gonna go?

Good question.

And where is our government?

Semi-literate Bruce County bumpkin beats professional journalists to the story by months

Here's a headline from Maclean's that caught my eye; Donald Trump and Bill Clinton once posed together, America learns.

Indeed!

Most sentient Americans would already know that Trump and the Clintons have been pals since the embryonic stage of Bill's political career, but unpaid intern Aaron Hutchins at Maclean's perhaps did not. He simply cribbed his story from NBC or Politico or one of the other US sources that have been pushing this non-story for the last couple of days.

Here's the Falling Downs take on the Trump - Clinton relationship from a couple months ago, complete with a picture of the Trumps and the Clintons engaged in a hair-pulling, eye-gouging death match. Maybe they're not teaching the new journos about Google Images down there at Ryerson University J-school.

Politico's version also caught my eye; New photos show Bill Clinton yukking it up with Donald Trump...

Yukking it up? Sounds familiar... oh ya, I used the expression "Donald Trump yucking it up with Al Sharpton..." a couple of months ago about this picture.





Hey, maybe in a couple of months Aaron and his crew at Maclean's will discover that one too! I can already see the headline; Anti-racism crusader Reverend Al Sharpton and Donald Trump once posed together, Americans learn.

Yukking it up.

What if they played the national anthem and NOBODY stood up?

It's quite the thing that Colin Kaepernik got started, isn't it? Americans publicly displaying their contempt for their ruling elites by refusing to stand for the anthem. Kaepernik has been joined by other NFL players and soccer star Megan Rapinoe, as well as an enlisted sailor who may well pay a high personal price for her act of defiance.

Not only that, but there are rumours afoot that the entire Seattle Seahawks roster will decline to stand at an exhibition game on Sunday, the 15th anniversary of 9/11.

Frankly, while this is all symbolism, it's highly significant. Americans have become totally inured to reflexively honouring the flag, the anthem, the men and women in uniform who have made the ultimate sacrifice to supposedly keep America free... free from a decent public education system, free from universal health care, free from racial justice, social justice, and economic justice, and free from having to take responsibility for the devastation they have visited on vast swaths of the planet over the past fifty years.

The times they are a changing.

You'll know it's over for the plutocracy when the NASCAR boys choose to put a knee to the tarmac during the pre-race patriotism ritual.

Getting it right on the wrong side of town...

Been reading up on how the CMA will do whatever it can to trip up the legalisation of marijuana.

Their latest brainwave it that perhaps a legal age for purchasing legal pot should be 21 years... which is gonna cut the 14 yo boarders out of the equation altogether.

And they're your number one market for weed!

Everybody suspects that the CMA is more or less in the pockets of Big Pharma. So it's not a huge shock when Big Pharma prods their bought and paid for politicians and regulatory types to put all kinds of artificial stumbling blocks in the path of legalization.

Let's keep taking one step at a time.

Fuck you, Torts...

I see where John Tortorella is all in against having multi-millionaire athletes making "political statements."

Sorry John... I think you're a few years late and a few multi-million dollar contracts short.

I'm guessing that black NHL superstars like Subban and Joel Ward have had their Lambos pulled over for no good reason more than once or twice.

Why battle against the fact that racism in pro sports is a fact, just like racism in society at large is a fact?

What are we trying to hide?

You know for sure that Trump is thumping the Clintons when Atlantic is publishing shit like this

Democracy can be an ugly thing.

This time round it's perhaps uglier than ever...

Not just uglier... maybe even more democratic than in a long while. Check out this story at the Atlantic about Bubba's visit to a high-school gym in North Carolina.

Yup. Bubba, America's first black president if you believe the Dem/Atlantic bullshit, managed to get a few hundred dupes to a high school gym in Durham.

Meanwhile, Trump is filling arenas coast to coast.

You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what's going to happen next...

Conspiracy theorists will be debating the Trump assassination for the next hundred years.

Welfare Wahhabis still pose terror threat to Canadian public

Yup, those BC terror twins, Nuttall and Korody, are still threatening our delicate democracy.

Remember that these are the terror suspects who couldn't figure out how to make rent, but thanks to a multi-million dollar entrapment scheme involving hundreds of six-number law enforcers, were fingered as the lynch-pins of Islamic Terror in Canada.

As this blog has pointed out more than once, if the Nuttall - Korody terror network is the kind of dipshit terrorists we're up against, we don't have much to worry about.

But the government types who invested multiple millions in the frame-up and persecution of these unfortunate misfits just can't leave well enough alone.

Nope, we should all be scared, really scared, of the Nuttalls and Korodys still running loose in our midst.

More Irving mythology

What's the difference between myth and mythology?

I'm not sure. Seems to me that mythology may have more of a ring of truth about it. Pure myth, on the other hand, may imply sheer fabrication.

But here's another Irving tale.

Seems there was a point where the drivers at one of Irving's many transport companies were sufficiently riled up to vote for a union.

The Irving heir in charge of the transport division came to the following conclusion; if our drivers think they need union representation we obviously need new management.

Irving fired the entire management team at Sunbury and life went happily on without a union.

When I heard a billionaire's apology

Not for being a billionaire, of course.

Fact is, it's not the fault of the billionaires that they have too much money. It's primarily the fault of the tax codes. Blame the politicians.

No, billionaire JK Irving was apologising to me (not just me, but to a crew of marine steel-fitters) for the fact that the ineptitude of his management team left us sitting in drydock with nothing to do.

The Irvings had a curious relationship with the people of New Brunswick. It wasn't a straight up love-hate deal. Lots of folks who took an Irving paycheque quite hated the Irvings. Other's didn't mind them. My personal experience was that they kept the bar high and treated you fairly if you made any effort at all to meet it.

Nothing wrong with that.

Ackman resignation from CP board ends four year reign of terror that cost Canada 5,000+ jobs and made Ackman 2.6 billions

Canada's newspaper of record today bids a fond and fawning farewell to hedgie Bill Ackman, who is walking away from an immiserated Canadian Pacific after stuffing his pockets with 2.6 billion dollars. Here's the intro paragraph to writer Svea Herbst-Bayliss' story;

Activist investor William Ackman left the board of Canadian Pacific on Tuesday, marking the end of a four-year tenure that helped overhaul the ailing railroad company and earn his hedge fund roughly $2.6-billion.

I suppose 2,600 millions is a reasonable sum to pay an "activist investor" for overhauling an "ailing" company that had net income of $650,000,000 the year before Ackman began accumulating shares. After all, the writers and editors of Canada's number one business newspaper seem to think so.

I'm a little perturbed that Ackman's overhaul cost the Canadian economy somewhere north of 5,000 excellent jobs. The think tank here at Falling Downs was always a little iffy about why major Canadian media keep telling us that it's a good thing that American investors would or could be given carte blanche to loot an iconic Canadian company.

But they were, they did, and it's all over but the gloating by our media and the crying among those 5,000+ Canadian families who saw their bread-winners shunted out of well-paying jobs to set the table for Bill Ackman's heroic rescue of Canadian Pacific.

Using the future to explain the past; a reply to Barry Lando

Barry Lando has an essay on view at Counterpunch wherein he lays asunder the claim that American manufacturing jobs have been decimated by free trade agreements.

Nope, it hasn't been free trade at all, Lando assures us. It's been robots!

I don't want to dismiss Lando's argument altogether, because he does grapple with an odious truth. Going forward, many manufacturing jobs will be displaced by robots, AI, and so on.

But that's going forward.

That doesn't explain what happened under the original US-Canada Free Trade Agreement or the subsequent North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Hey, I was there waving bye-bye to the jobs, and it wasn't robots taking them.

Here's a story that claims more than 5 million US manufacturing jobs were lost between '97 and 2014. Now I admit the source is perhaps a little too union-friendly for mainstream tastes, but nevertheless that's a lot of jobs lost.

When jobs from Canada or the US end up in Mexico and China it's not because the Chinese and Mexican robots work cheaper than the Canadian or American ones.

Thandie Newton finally discovers racism in Hollywood...

... but still professes shock that there are not more black faces in Vogue magazine?

Here's a news flash for ya, Thandie; I can't imagine that there's very many Americans left who give a shit one way or the other about what kind of faces appear in Vogue.

What this Guardian "human interest" story is telling us is that editors in mainstream "liberal" media are still flogging the dead horse of the identity politics/star-struck journalist crowd. That's becoming a really small crowd.

No news there... seriously, what relevance does Vogue magazine have today?

About as much relevance as who won Trump's Miss USA contest last year, which is to say none.

What's newsworthy is that both Hollywood and The Guardian are running to catch up with the times, but the times have left them behind.

Looks like our "peacekeepers" are heading to Mali...

Good choice, I must say.

It would indeed be difficult to find a country in Africa with more Canadian mining activity that has a greater need for peacekeepers.

Go Justin!

TRIGGER ALERT; If you suffer from an infection of political correctitude please skip to next story

When our mainstream media outlets refer again and again to the fiction that Donald Trump's support base is found in the disgruntled white working class, I always wonder, what has become of the black working class?

Are they are still working?

They never existed?

They're not working but still insist on supporting the free trade agenda?

Where exactly have they gone? The reason I wonder is because when I was a pre-NAFTA foot-soldier of the working class, I had black dudes around me all the time. I know they existed.

Where have they gone?

It's a popular conceit among the mainly white intelligentsia and journalsim elites that "working class" means white folks with less than a college education. That substantial quotient of the working class that didn't have white skin just got disappeared to somewhere...

But where?

When I was at Budd Automotive back in the '70's, there were black dudes everywhere on the shop floor. I know for a fact they lost their jobs just like the white dudes when the plant closed.

Ditto for the black dudes at Frankel Steel.

Ditto for the black dudes at Saint John Shipbuilding, where, by the way, I worked alongside black guys who could trace their family's heritage in North America at least 150 years further back than I could mine.

But the black working class is just GONE!

Nope, it's just the white working class that is so fed up with "the system" that they're stooping to supporting Donald Trump.

It's a mystery alright...

Truth is, the unemployed auto-industry black dude, the unemployed steel-fab black dude, and the unemployed black shipyard worker all have way more in common with their unemployed white working class brothers than they do with DeRay Mckesson.