Where can you get a decent bison burger?

I meant to hit the Port Elgin Pumpkinfest today, not for the pumpkins, but for the car show. First I had to meet up with my old pal Kipling at the Teviotdale Truck Stop for breakfast.

Kipling is complaining about how hard it is to find bison burger patties for the BBQ. There used to be a vendor at the Cambridge farmer's market who stocked them, but no more.

The problem with bison burgers is you need a place to graze the bison. There's a bison farm just a few miles from Falling Downs that's been around for awhile and seems to be making a go of it. Problem is, with the price of farmland being what it is these days, it'll take multiple millions of dollars to set up a viable operation.

So we got to speculating on the possibilities of setting up such an operation out east. Around here a 100 acre farm is a million bucks, give or take. In Nova Scotia or PEI you can still find them for under two hundred. Not that you're going to have much of a bison operation on a hundred acres, but it would give you a start.

There's other opportunities to turn a dollar in the Maritimes. Forty years ago there used to be a guy selling fresh lobster out the back of a rusted pickup just off the 401 in Aberfoyle. He'd fill up his massive plastic container strapped into the bed of his rusted out truck in New Brunswick, drive all night, and put out his shingle the next morning. Apparently his grandsons are running a fleet of a dozen trucks now doing the same thing, and the trucks aren't rusty anymore.

There's also the seaweed business. Kipling has been to Tignish to pick the brain of the guy in this story.  Seems a shame there's a valuable crop rotting on the shore for lack of a few hundred thousand in processing machinery.

We've covered bison, lobster, and seaweed before our food shows up! I used to go up and down that highway all the time back when my children were growing up. It used to be a 24 hour operation. That changed unexpectedly.

I was a little late leaving Guelph one night, and the gas gauge was a little low, but I figured I could make it to Teviotdale. I did.

It was closed! That was a long night...

I've dined here many times over the years, and this breakfast doesn't disappoint. For $10.95 you get three eggs, and instead of having to choose between the bacon and sausages and ham you get ALL of them, not to mention the genuine home fries, toast and jam. That's some serious value.

They've taken out the lights at the Teviotdale corner and put in a roundabout instead. What a concept! They're popping up everywhere these days. I guess there was a time when having traffic lights was considered more modern, but there's a lot to be said for roundabouts. Best of all, when you do have an accident, everybody's going nice and slow. Chances are you'll walk away.

Kipling is quite an accomplished herbalist, and I was half way home with a baggie of his finest when I realized I'd forgot to fork over the cash.

Sorry man! Guess we'll have to schedule another breakfast soon!

By the time breakfast is done we're noticing there's quite a few vintage cars mixed into the traffic. It's been a steady drizzle falling. There goes a '64 'vette. A very pretty '61 Chevy pulls into the parking lot. These guys are already heading home from Pumpkinfest...


Maybe next year.

Up in smoke

I see where Wente's got a ominous warning in her Globe column that legal weed is gonna lead to more potheads.

Hmm...

I have my doubts. I'm no expert, but I've been using the illegal stuff for pretty much fifty years now, and it seems to me that most anyone inclined to smoke pot is already smoking it.

What intrigues me is the mass hysteria of the folks who have already bid up the market cap of legal pot providers in Canada to over fifty billion dollars! Just who do they imagine is going to be smoking all this stuff?

What I see is a massive oversupply just over the horizon. All the folks already smoking weed they get from their existing suppliers aren't likely to drop them and pay double for "legal" weed just because it's legal.

Then what?

Then the air's gonna come out of that fifty billion dollar balloon, and fast!

My tip to legal pot investors; get out while the getting is good.

Those stock valuations are gonna go up in smoke.

When Canada stood tall

That's the title of an opinion piece in the Globe and Mail today. The sub-head reads, "Brian Mulroney's anti-apartheid speech 30 years ago was driven by an intellectual reverence for human rights and a fundamental sense of moral outrage."

No doubt it was. But this is Brian Mulroney we're talking about. Does the name Karlheinz Schreiber ring any bells? That little bit of chicanery triggered a goodly dose of moral outrage in many Canadians.

Which is not to suggest that Mulroney's intellectual reverence for human rights and his stand against apartheid were in any way inauthentic...

But!

Back when South Africa's ugly apartheid system was under well-deserved international sanction, one of their prime sources of foreign revenue was the Krugerrand gold coin. It was a favourite among gold hoarders around the world. There were few competitors.

Canada had introduced a rival gold coin in the late '70's, but it was slow to catch on. That began to change as the boycott of SA gained traction. Sales of the Maple Leaf gold coin soared! Brian was certainly one of the most high-profile champions of the SA sanctions.

Oddly enough, about fifteen minutes after leaving office, Mulroney was named to the board of directors of Barrick Gold, Canada's premier gold producer. He spent twenty golden years on the board of Barrick, pocketing millions!


Coincidence?...

Sarah Kendzior: slayer of imaginary dragons and self-promoter extraordinaire

Rushed home from The Korean's with my Globe and Mail only to find that the dolts who run the joint have given over two full pages of the Opinion section to the hyperventilating hack Sarah Kendzior. You'll recall that last winter Sarah was trying to get a NYT boycott going because the paper of Krugman, Freidman, and Maureen Dowd had, at least in her mind, become a shameless conduit for pro-Trump propaganda.

While the Times seems to have weathered the boycott, I'm thinking of organizing a boycott of the Globe if they keep forking over valuable space to D-list American public intellectuals.

Sarah's two-page yawner is titled "The path of most resistance," and not surprisingly, it's mostly about Sarah. Did you know Sarah wrote a book? Did you know Sarah lives in Missouri? Did you know she likes to take her kids to National Parks?...  Those are just a few of the things Sarah wants you to know about her.

So while she's driving around America on her epic (went to almost half the states!) camping trip - book promo tour, she also found time to stop here and there to rally "the resistance," which seems to be mostly middle-age white women who still can't get their heads around the fact that Trump is President and Hillary isn't.

She stopped in Knoxville Tennessee just before a scheduled gathering of neo-Nazis at the U of T campus, "a recruiting ground for white supremacists..." That leads to a five paragraph rumination on "the unhealed scars of history, and the callousness of elites who treat white supremacists as intellectual contrarians."

Here's a report on the neo-Nazi meeting from knoxnews.com. Forty- five people showed up. The University of Tennessee Knoxville campus has over 28,000 students. Looks to me like that white-nationalist recruiting is an even bigger flop than Kendzior's New York Times boycott!

She's still got a bee in her bonnet about newspapers in New York, wondering why they used to cover Trump but now they cover up for him instead. She's not naming names, though. Maybe she got a STFU letter from the Times legal department.

Anyway, things are looking pretty horrendous in Trump's America. In fact, it's so bad that "...there's a kind of horror that shakes you to your core, when you start believing in the devil because of what you witness, and in hell because you want comfort."

Yup, Trump's America is so frightfully toxic it's got Americans pining for the comforts of hell!


Come on, Globe and Mail! Surely you can do better than this?!

Grandstanding aside, Canada remains Uncle Sam's faithful lapdog

Here's a couple of news stories you may have missed this week, because after all, the most important news event in the world is whether the US elevates the privileged shit-bag Kavanaugh to the supreme court or whether some other privileged shit-bag gets the nod.

This week we signed on to Trump's plan to double down on the "war on drugs." Yup, it's been a losing effort for fifty years but count us in! Scootch over, Mr. Duterte, and let Justin slide into the pew beside you!

We're also taking a leadership role in toadying to American policy viz. Venezuela. Yup, we're gonna send Maduro to the ICC! That is quite hilariously portrayed as a snub to 45, who just the day before had made some derogatory remarks about the ICC.

Get serious! Getting rid of Chavez/Maduro and restoring the oligarchs to power has been a goal of Washington since 1999. The New York Times reported recently that there have been "informal" meetings between Venezuelan military commanders and Pentagon officials re: the possibility of a coup.

Justin and Chrystia aren't standing up to Trump; they're running interference for him.


Hard to imagine this obsequious toadying won't be rewarded with a spectacular NAFTA "win" in the very near future.

Virtue un-signalling?

Back in '07 Canada extended honorary citizenship to Aung San Suu Kyi. She was, at the time, the darling of the international do-gooder crowd for her principled stand against the Burmese military junta.

In the decade since, she's morphed into chief spokesperson for that same junta, and has understandably fallen out of favour in busy-body circles. My hunch is that her personal values probably haven't shifted that much - she's just ten years older and more aware of how fond she is of keeping her head attached to her body. Alas, her reticence to denounce the generals who hold her life in their hands has cost her those fair-weather political friends in Canada.

The House of Commons, peopled as it is by nice folks who've never had to worry about generals or keeping their heads attached to their bodies, has this week rescinded that honorary Canadian citizenship.

Virtue un-signalling?..


Or just more of the same?

SEC bigs obviously read this blog

How else to explain that only a week or two after I call out Musk over his "going private" ruminations, the normally inert SEC has launched a full-bore investigation of Musk's errant tweet?

Now, I fully acknowledge that any investment advice I've ever ladled out is not worth shit.

I've been advising folks to short Amazon since it hit $200.

I've been advising folks to short Apple for four or five years...

Ya, I know... folks who used to have a couple millions in the bank are regulars at the food bank now because they thought I knew what I was talking about.

I thought I did too.

Sorry.


But sometimes I'm on the right track.

That "420" reference was the tip-off for me... Ya, OK Elon, you're just fucking with us now...

Two months later the Securities and Exchange Commission investigative team comes to the same conclusion...


Remember, you read it here first.

Sometimes it's best just to shut the f**k up

I recall an occasion where, towards the end of a generally positive job interview for a highly specialized and very well-paying welding job, I remarked that I couldn't work Tuesday evenings because it would interfere with my AA meetings.

WELL!

Needless to say, I'd talked my way out of that job. Sometimes it best just to shut the f@ck up.

I eventually gave up on AA. The more meetings I went to, the more I realized it was just a bunch of old drunks bragging about their drunkenness. "Hey you young whippersnapper, I've spilled more booze on my tie than you've ever drank."

Maybe so, but give me a few years to catch up and we'll chat again.

But we never did. I've done OK without AA for a good forty years now.

Nevertheless, the lesson should have been that sometimes the best thing to say is to not say a thing.

I'm recalling this because I ran into a guy the other day who was more than a little pleased to inform me that he's learned Spanish over the summer.

That reminded me of my career as a student of the Spanish language.

I'd taken first year Spanish at the U of Goo and got a middling mark. I think it remains the lowest pass mark on my transcript to this day. The only fail mark on that transcript is second year Spanish.

On the first day of my second year Spanish course, the Prof went around the room asking each student why they were taking Spanish.

When my turn came, I had an extremely long-winded explanation that invoked Simon Bolivar, Che Guevara, and liberation theology. "I want to speak Spanish because it is the language of revolution!"

I was very pleased with myself as I wrapped up my dissertation.

Much later into the course I learned that the Prof and her family had fled Cuba when the Batista regime collapsed.

No wonder I failed!


Sometimes it's best just to shut the fuck up.

Justin Trudeau is still a wanker

I've been back and forth on Justin.  I had high hopes for him at the beginning. I think a lot of folks, me included, were so keen to usher Big Steve into the sunset that we gave Justin a pass.

But what's he done as our leader?

Bought us a pipeline.

Delivered the legal pot biz to Bay Street.

Enhanced Canada's profile in India?


What, exactly????

Workers rights

On considerable reflection after many decades in the trenches, I've concluded that the basic right of the most menial worker in the most unpleasant of occupations is the right to live a life of dignity.

That's a life where you know you've got a job tomorrow and you know you'll have a roof over your head.

That's a life where you can provide for your family from your paycheque without resorting to handouts. A life where you know your kids can get whatever education they have the aptitude for without getting a lifetime burden of student loans.

A life where you're NOT expected to root through the sales bin for the dented cans of tuna and then haggle with the manager over the price.

Unfortunately, worker's rights have succumbed to "the right to work." That's an Orwellian bit of nomenclature designed to draw your eye away from what's really happening. It shouldn't come as a surprise that "right to work" legislation first found traction in the slave states. It has by now infected even once #unionstrong states like Wisconsin.

"Right to Work" means you have the absolute right to work for an employer who won't let pesky union troublemakers on the premises. After all, those commies are just after your union dues! That's right! They collect millions from American dupes in the unions and then they send all the money to Russia, after they've skimmed off their percentage, of course.

At least that's the message the Koch boys and their myriad ciphers in the press like to present.

And the sad truth of the matter is that our unions have really let us down over the last fifty years or so.


Bring back the Wobblies!

F@ck NAFTA

If you believe what you read in the national newspaper of record or hear on the national broadcaster, you could be forgiven for thinking that our very future as a sovereign nation hangs in the balance as one fake deadline after another slips past without a deal.

"Canada only signs on to good trade agreements," Justin and Chrystia assure us, as if NAFTA was a good deal in the first place. I suppose it depends on which of "us" you're talking about. From the perspective of working class Canadians, it's been an unmitigated disaster, so what's the rush to sign on to NAFTA II?

The current thinking among the pundits seems to be that our negotiators are hanging tough in hopes of getting a better deal after the mid-terms. That's delusional. The folks eagerly awaiting a "blue wave" to give Congress to the Dems are by and large the same people who assured the world over and over that Trump was never going to be president, and they've still got their heads up their arseholes.

They seriously underestimate the contempt with which a very large slice of America views the coastal elites who presume to know what's good for them. That won't change no matter how many more exposes or op-eds by anonymous White House insiders the NYT publishes between now and November. In fact, the only thing the Times could do to turn Trump's base against him is to come out with an endorsement of him.

The CBC's Neil Macdonald recently wrote an opinion piece claiming that it's impossible to reach a deal because Trump is an habitual liar. That's true enough, but so are the folks who continue to tell me how great the original NAFTA was.


In spite of his tenuous relationship with "truth," Donald Trump is capable of the occasional searing insight. His observation that Justin Trudeau is "dishonest and weak" was right on the money.

Tomato Wars

Every spring the Farm Manager puts in a very modest kitchen garden. A few herbs, and some tomatoes. There's only so much you can squeeze into a ten by ten space.

One thing I've consistently enjoyed about life on this earth is dining. Next to intimate encounters of the extra-special kind, there's nothing like a good feed to make you grateful for having been born. I could write a book on my evolution as a foodie.

Well, not really. I have some expertise in burgers and fries, and I'm always interested in trying new stuff, but mostly, after food experimentation safaris to many destinations, I tend to come back to burgers and fries.

But there's one thing that'll blow the doors off burgers and fries any day of the week, and that's a big fat slice of vine-fresh tomato on a piece of fresh-baked sourdough bread. With a generous slathering of genuine Canadian tariff-protected butter, of course.

The problem with this fabulous tomato harvest is that all the tomatoes come due at the same time. For about three or four weeks at the end of summer I'd have to eat about two dozen tomato sandwiches every day to keep up with the crop. Fortunately, the FM freezes them up for spaghetti sauce next winter.

In spite of her best efforts, there remain many orphan tomatoes scattered about the garden, and this has piqued the interest of the hounds. They're constantly prancing about the yard with tomatoes hanging out of their snouts.

Some tomatoes, though, are worth more than others. Boomer has been guarding a special tomato for at least a week now. She starts growling whenever Phil gets within ten feet. Phil over-compensates by fetching her own tomato and racing back and forth, jumping over Boomsie with every turn.

So when I called them in the house tonight, Boomer abandoned her post and headed in. Silly Phil was out in the yard and thus had occasion to pass by the special tomato.

Unguarded.

It took ten minutes to pry her past the special tomato.


What's so special about the special tomato?

Near as I can tell, the only thing special about the special tomato is that somebody else wants it.

Truck shopping

I've had a new truck on my mind for a while now. The nineteen year old F-150 has a few issues. Do I address the issues, or do I bite the bullet and buy a new truck?

That's the problem. That ain't a bullet you're gonna bite, it's a 500 pound Paveway guided bomb... and it's gonna lead to you spending on a truck what you would have spent on a house just a few years ago. There's a nice Sierra sitting on the lot at the local GM dealer for a mere $87,000. Plus tax, of course, so we're looking at a 100k touch here. You'd have to be fucked in the head to take that seriously.

But people buy this shit.

Scrap the luxury floormats and another dozen or so superfluous add-ons and you can get a Sierra for half that, but that's still serious money. And even though the manufacturers are all-in with zero percent financing for the rest of your life, that's still seven or eight hundred dollars a month for the rest of your life, which would represent a significant impairment of my discretionary spending options for the rest of my life.

Fuck that!

So back to the F-150.

Needs a power steering pump, brakes, and a set of tires. The driver's side door should probably be replaced. Other than that she's a good solid truck. All in, I figure I'm looking at about three or four payments on a new truck to have the old girl fully road-worthy.


Think I just talked myself out of a new truck.

Pot-addled hillbilly beats elite opinion makers to the story, again...

By a year!

More than a year ago I made the observation that the creatives, the innovators, the "disrupters" won't be moving to Toronto if they can't afford to live here. Jeff Gray tells you the same thing on page A17 of today's Globe and Mail.

The so-called "solutions" discussed in Gray's story don't fully address the problem, in part because any solution that relies on "developers" is asking the very people who have largely created the problem to remedy it. Incentivising for-profit developers to build affordable housing is another way of saying you're going to subsidize their profits. That's the wrong approach.

Putting up apartment blocks is not rocket science. It doesn't require "developers." The Romans were putting up multi-storey buildings well before the time of Jesus. Toronto should be cutting the for-profit developers out of the picture, not subsidizing them. What makes property development both risky and lucrative is the cost of land and the convoluted approval process. Since the city of Toronto already owns plenty of land and controls the approval process, what's holding them back from getting shovels in the ground?

You don't need "developers." You need young keeners with fresh Construction Technology diplomas in hand to work as project co-ordinators. The construction unions will be happy for the work whether the finished product is nonprofit or designed to further enrich Toronto's billionaire developers.

Elsewhere in the Globe, John Rapley offers a meditation on Canada's love affair with home ownership. He reports the imaginary conversation of a couple of his imaginary friends which segues into a philosophical treatise on the meaning of money.

That's just more BS that skirts around the fundamental problem causing our runaway real estate inflation and the crisis of affordability; supply and demand. When the federal government is fixated on continuously ramping up immigration while simultaneously washing their hands of any responsibility to provide housing, it's no wonder we are facing a crisis in housing affordability.

That's not the fault of the developers. They're folks who play by the rules we've made for them, and they wouldn't exist if they weren't profitable. We can't relegate housing to the private sector and then complain when market forces make the resulting product unaffordable to the majority of Canadians.


A robust policy of affordable public housing co-sponsored by all levels of government is long overdue.

You know you're in the club when...

You know you're in the club when the neighbour pops in unannounced (the only way they pop in, by the way) on his ATV to show you the cow tongue he's delivering to the Scotsman on the other side.

"Ya, I told him I had a cattle-beast slaughtered, and he says can I have the tongue? My wife says, does he know that's the tongue he's been licking his ass with for the last twelve years?"

I was at somewhat of a loss for words. Me and the Farm Manager moved into the 'hood about ten years ago. Folks in these parts tend to be wary of newcomers. It took ten years to see a cow tongue in a plastic bag.

We've arrived!


Those Scots will eat anything... they invented haggis, didn't they?

Sweatshop titan Nike comes out for social justice

Kaepernick's Nike endorsement is where irony descends into something else entirely.

I'm pretty much all in with what Kaepernick is trying to foreground with his protests. Wanton police brutality. The mass incarceration of black men... but Dude, do you know anything about Nike?

You're taking money from the tax-averse sweatshop titans?

Shame on you!

But I see where Nike sales are up 31%.


More proof of the value of a dysfunctional education system, I guess.

Toronto hasn't figured out that Frum and Bannon live on the same side of the tracks

There's quite a few well-meaning liberals in Toronto soiling their undergarments at the prospect of the vile Steve Bannon beshitting their fair town. Today the Sunday Star had an opinion piece by Amira Elghawaby and the indefatigable Bernie Farber, who are aghast that Bannon is coming to The Munk Debates to take on David "Axis of Evil" Frum.

That's bound to be as fake a "debate" as any in history, but both these guys are seasoned media veterans who know how to put on a show. Frum long ago abandoned the Canadian liberalism that he imbibed with his mother's milk, to embrace the siren of American Exceptionalism. He's a hard-right, free-market, America first, (right after Israel) kind of Republican.

Bannon is a Navy veteran who joined Goldman Sachs after an honourable discharge. He worked his way up the corporate ladder, and walked away as a Vice President of Goldman Sachs.

He was rich. He was bored.

Rich and bored... a toxic combo if ever there was one. Some guys handle it OK. They spend their time boinking bimbos, snorting pharmaceutical-grade coke, buying sports teams, and commissioning super-yachts. It keeps them busy and the general public is relatively unscathed.

Other guys, unfortunately, think they need a different kind of hobby. Politics.

These are the guys who crave the spotlight, and Big Media certainly has provided Bannon with plenty attention. Here's a backgrounder on Bannon in Forbes. The guy owns a slice of the residuals from the Seinfeld show, for fuck's sakes!

All this press he gets is just free advertising for his political consultancy. He's another Podesta or Manafort. He's a hustler flogging a product. Isn't that what made America great?

Steve Bannon is every bit as much a devotee of American Exceptionalism as is David Frum.

They just have different marketing strategies.

Puppy tricks and dead elm trees

Took down a couple of dead elms this week, a pair of sixty footers that haven't sported any foliage for several summers now. One was a straight forward notch-and-cut operation that dropped exactly where it was supposed to.

The other was more challenging. It split into two separate trunks about four feet off the ground, each one a good two to three   feet in diameter. I'd been scratching my head about the best way to tackle this tree for a couple of summers now. The main problem was that once you got about twenty feet up, the branches were so intertwined that neither trunk was going to fall as long as the other was standing.

In prepping for the big adventure I took a run into town to pick up a small jug of two-stroke oil and a new chain for the Stihl. Set the oil on the floor in the back of the car and headed home. Imagine my surprise when I went to retrieve that jug. It had mysteriously disappeared from the floor and was lying in the back seat, neck chewed off, empty. Kept an eye on the pup for a couple of days, and she didn't seem any the worse for wear, so I assume most of it leaked into the upholstery. I better remember to put down a towel or something the next time I give Bubby a lift to a doctor appointment.

Usually I get the Oregon chain for my saw, but this week I bought something under the "Pro-Cut" brand. Complete shit if you ask me. By the time I'd gone through a tank of gas the new chain was so pooched I put the old Oregon chain back on.

Tackled the two-trunk dilemma by notching the first trunk about three-quarters through. Then I made a single cut slightly higher up through the second trunk. Worked like a charm! The notched trunk basically pulled the second one over, and they crashed to ground together with a satisfying ker-thump.

Now I've got practically a winter's worth of beautiful dry elm firewood on my lawn, and I don't heat with wood anymore. Luckily, lots of folks around here do, and my neighbour Greg was quick to claim the wood. I think he was also looking for an excuse to put his new Stihl 362 C through its paces. He told me that elms are particularly hard on saw chains because they draw up so many minerals out of the earth that when you're sawing at night you can see sparks coming off the wood. I don't do much chainsaw work at night, but that was good to know!

So a day or two after the oil incident I'm in town, picking up the daily paper, and I stop at the vet clinic to pick up a jar of pills for the older dog. The hormone therapy wasn't working to the satisfaction of the veterinarian and this was a new attempt to fix her incontinence by directly impacting whatever muscles are responsible for it. There's fifty two pills in the child-proof container, the receptionist tells me. I put the pill bottle in the cupholder and go on with my errands.

I get home and reach for the pills, but the cupholder is empty. New puppy had found the pill bottle, removed the child-proof lid without so much as leaving any teeth marks, and now there were fourty-one pills. A couple of frantic phone calls to the vet, and there we were force-feeding hydrogen peroxide to the poor puppy till she puked everything up.

You'd think that by now I'd know enough not to leave the hounds in the car unattended, but I've always been a slow learner. This morning the Farm Manager and I left the girls unsupervised while we had breakfast at Coalshed Willie's. Did a quick mental inventory and concluded there was nothing they could get into that would cause any harm, but...

Somehow she managed to fish my wallet out of the driver's door side pocket. It hadn't occurred to me that she could even get her stubby snout in there! Turns out the various bank cards and whatnot were not to her taste and remain intact... the leather wallet, however, is a gonner.

She went through for a nurse

That's considered an archaic turn of phrase these days.

"She went through for a nurse" meant she went to nursing school.

"He went through for an engineer" meant he went to university and got himself a P Eng.

I am reminded of this phraseology because I borrowed an old local history tome from one of the neighbours. It recounts the adventures of the local settlers who populated these barren lands back in the day. The pioneer days...

"Settlers" is a word that has a different connotation today than it did back in the day.

Nowadays you've got girls going through to be welders and engineers and boys going through to be nurses and teachers, and "settlers" are the folks stealing Palestinian lands in the West Bank...


Language changes over time, mainly to protect the guilty...

We'll drown you in 24/7 Trump till you beg for mercy

September has been all Trump all the time on the news networks. It kicked off with that nauseating McCain funeral carnival. Did you notice the media made that more about Trump than McCain?

Apparently Mr. President was not invited to the show and played a round of golf instead. Anytime I can avoid a funeral to play golf instead I figure I'm way ahead of the game, but this was treated as a major snub of the Orange Ogre.

Not that Senator McCain wasn't a "great American." Born into wealth and privilege, McCain used his advantages to his own advantage all his life, as great Americans generally do. The one courageous stand he took during his career was against torture, and he was more or less cornered into that to maintain the myth that had grown around his status as a one-time victim of torture.

Then it was the Woodward book. By God, somebody told Woodward that somebody in the White House referred to it as "Crazy Town!" I've never worked anywhere that at least a few folks didn't consider "Crazy Town," but I guess it's supposedly a different thing when you work at the White House.

By the way, do you ever wonder why a journalist whose career peaked over forty years ago is treated as a living legend of investigative journalism, while working journalists like Sy Hersh, who has at least as significant a track record, have been effectively de-platformed in US media?

Then came the infamous NYT op-ed...


When I'm having that much Trump waved at me to the exclusion of virtually all other news, I get suspicious. What's going on? Has The Empire really given up on regime change in Syria?

I think not.

Notice the impeccable timing of the lame-duck May government's latest allegations regarding the so-called Skripal affair. Other than being a convenient excuse to work the words "gas attack" and "Russia" into the same narrative, that story remains as dodgy as it ever was.

Notice too that this comes as the US, UK, and France have all vowed retaliation should Assad "use gas against his own people."

The stage is now set; Syria, and those well-known gassers in Russia, are poised to clean out Idlib. Inevitably, there will be claims that Assad and his Russian backers have resorted to using poison gas, because that's what those people do. Then the Nations of Virtue will rise as one, remove Assad from the scene once and for all, and put Putin on notice that the next time his minions run wild gassing retired Russian spooks in England we're coming for him too.

With Assad gone and Putin's fingers burned, Iran will be isolated. What a perfect opportunity to restore the pre-'79 liberal democracy in that benighted land!

The same crowd in DC who have convinced themselves that they are the shapers of history are about to shape some more.


What could go wrong?