A Senator and a CIA guy walk into a bar

A Senator and a CIA guy walked into a bar around noon last Tuesday for a quick bite and a drink or two. Jon had a Ruben and Mike had a BLT and they had a couple of beers.

Then they had a couple more beers and sat around and shot the shit for awhile.

After that they had a few more beers. They were brainstorming.

Midafternoon the barkeep brought over a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue. That really helped the brainstorming. Beer. Scotch. Brainstorming.

Around 7:30 Jon says to Mike, well I should go but ya know, I fink we fuckin got us somethign here ya know...

And Mike says fuckin rigght we fukin do an ya know what ?

What sez Jon.

Ya know what?

What?

I think we fukin got us ya this is kgood I thidn we cna ya. We should call whathisfukinface agt the Post.

Ya, the Post. They'll publishish it fgor sure...


Jon and Mike made it safely home that night. Their story appeared in the Washington Post today.

Mexico Pres seizes last opportunity to give his people the finger

You can't say "Fuck You" to the electorate any louder than by granting your country's highest honour to... Jared Kushner?!

That's what outgoing President of Mexico Enrique Pena Nieto just did! After all, he's out the door this weekend - he's got nothing to lose.

So why not?


As for the "new" NAFTA, I guess time will tell if it's better than the old one. Better for whom would be the logical question. It was already pretty damned good for corporate types who used it as cover to ship thirty dollar an hour jobs out of the US and Canada into two dollar an hour factories in Mexico.

How to tell if you're a twat

If you go out in public looking like this...


...you're a twat!

There are conceivably some far fetched reasons why you might legitimately dress like this, like all your clothes were burned in a fire and this was the best you could do out of the Sally Ann donation hamper, or somebody stole all your clothes while you were at the gym and so you just stole somebody else's stuff, but if you paid $1100 for these at the Alexander McQueen boutique, you, my friend, are a twat!

The good news is that people who dress like this deliberately are less likely to be Trump voters. That's according to Christopher Wylie of Cambridge Analytica fame.  According to Wylie, the fashion industry was crucial in the election of Donald Trump, whose voter base prefers Wrangler jeans because they (the voter? the jeans?) are mistrustful and less open.

I always suspected that Facebook-stole-the-election bullshit was, well, bullshit.


I'm sure of it now.

Bill & Hillary tour flops

Good! Maybe they'll take the hint... but I doubt it. If there's a dollar to be turned, the Clintons will be there to turn it.

Gotta think that whoever promoted this yawner in Toronto took a bath. They sold barely 3,000 tickets in the 19,000 seat Scotiabank Centre. Apparently tickets were slashed to a mere six bucks in a last ditch attempt to fill more seats, to no avail.

I recall reading about the event when it was first announced back in March, but as we got closer to curtain time there was no buzz whatsoever. Nor was there any buzz after the fact. This latest bout of Clinton money-grubbing wasn't part of the conversation around the water cooler or anywhere else.

But... if you're a diehard Clinton fan, take heart! You can motor up to Montreal tonight and catch them at the Bell Centre. For $5,000 bucks you too can partake of a meet and greet and have your picture taken with Bill and Hillary...


I'm guessing the lineup for that is gonna be really short.

Greed uber alles

The idea that a major employer like General Motors is bound by some notion of "social contract" is as good as dead.

Greed is the ultimate value these days among the keeners coming out of MBA programs. Greed makes some people filthy rich. Greedy people can get rich enough to buy the people who make the rules. Then you've got a closed-loop self-devouring perpetual greed machine on the loose...


That can only end badly, as it is ending badly for those three thousand families in Oshawa. As it has for 16,000 Sears employees and their pensions.

A couple of greedbags were allowed to plunder CP Rail, destroying over five thousand jobs but walking away with billions for their efforts.

Meanwhile, our precious princeling billows progressive hot air into the heavens in such volumes that we'll never meet our emissions targets, while simultaneously buying us pipelines, because the greedbags who own our oil demand them.

And don't expect to get the whole story from your friendly corporate news media; the greedbags own those too.

Government subsidies are bad for poor people but good for big business

When you give money to poor people, it destroys their work ethic. When you give money to news corporations, it saves democracy.  That's my takeaway from the recent announcement that the Trudeau government will begin offering assorted goodies to the hard-pressed newspaper industry.

You have to love Postmaster Paul's reaction; "Everybody in journalism should be doing a victory lap around their building right now." Sorry, Paul, I don't think Postmedia has any buildings anymore. They've all been sold off to appease the insatiable demand for interest payments on the part of the US hedgies who bought Canwest debt out of bankruptcy for pennies on the dollar, rebranded the smoking ruins as "Postmedia," and have managed to collect full value on that debt ever since.

Brilliant business strategy! The real estate had to go, the printing plants had to go, hundreds upon hundreds of journalists had to go, all in the name of finding "efficiencies" so that the unearned cash can keep flowing to the hedge fund vultures who are laughing all the way to the bank. Now the taxpayer gets to step up to the plate to help keep the whole charade afloat.

Elsewhere in the magical world of capitalism, the Globe and Mail informs me that there are now 122,455 "idle" oil and gas wells in western Canada, an increase of over fifty thousand since 2005. What happens to these wells? Well, what's going to happen to most of them is the tax-payers are going to be gifted the cost to clean them up.

The excellent Globe investigative report ( in its very own stand-alone eight-page section) details how the big "responsible" players in the oil patch fob off their played-out wells to fly-by-night entrepreneurs with high hopes but little money, who have nothing to lose by walking away from them in the event that their pie-in-the-sky plans don't work out.


Capitalism at its finest!

Putin's plans for world domination suffer setback

The free world breathed a sigh of relief this week when Russian Alexander Prokopchuk was narrowly defeated in a vote to elect a new Interpol president.  After a last minute deluge of behind the scenes arm-twisting, a candidate from the US satrapy of South Korea was elected instead.

The campaign against Prokopchuk was lead by erstwhile freedom fighters Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Bill Browder, two men who enriched themselves immensely back in the Yeltsin era by swindling the Russian people out of billions in state assets, and who have long-standing and impeccable ties to America's deep state.

So, the forces of freedom and democracy have prevailed again! Take that, Bad Vlad!

Elsewhere in the battle between Good and Evil, I see where a couple of radicals from the communist fringe of the Democratic Party are again floating the Stalinist idea of a "basic income" for poor people. That's where you give poor people free money for no good reason other than they're poor. As any patriotic American knows, such an idea turns on its head the very value system that made America great.

Critics of Harris and Booker's loony leftist plan correctly point out that such a socialist scheme would not only rob the national treasury, it would rob the recipients themselves of any incentive to take one of the millions of jobs readily available at the US official minimum wage of $7.25/hr.


That's just un-American!

Highway 86 revisited

I was at a get-together on the weekend, the 95th birthday celebration for the matriarch of the extended family, my dear Tante Hilde.

One of my cousins in attendance, a chap my age who got a shout-out in a post I wrote six years ago, reminded me of what's happened to that cohort of folks who used to care about fast cars.

We can't afford that hobby anymore.

Johnny was the guy with the Super Bee. Getting a 4,000 pound car up to 120 mph in the quarter mile takes a fair bit of disposable income. Factory guys like us used to have disposable income back in the day, before our jobs went to Mexico and China.

You can still buy a Super Bee today. Under $15,000 or so you're just getting junk. From 15 to 30 you might get a driver. From forty upwards you can probably find something that's been restored at some point and might last you a few years if you baby it. A clean '69 six-pack Super Bee or anything with a hemi is going to run into six numbers.

Or you can go to your local Subaru dealer and drive away with a car that will blow the doors off that hemi in a drag race. It'll also turn better, stop sooner, go three or four times as far on a gallon of gas, and it has a warranty.


The era of the big thumping V8 is gone, and it ain't coming back.

Democracy dies in darkness

That howler was adopted as a slogan by the Washington Post about a year and a half ago, just months after they released the manifestly fake ProporNot list of 200 fake news sites.

I must admit I don't understand how any thinking person can read that slogan without arching an eyebrow or two. The Washington Post has long been regarded as the unofficial mouthpiece for the CIA, and that was long before it was purchased by the world's richest man, whose connections to the CIA are a matter of public record, at least some of them.

Note how they've painted themselves as champions of press freedom since the untimely demise of their occasional contributor Jamal Kashoggi. That's every bit as hilarious as Erdogan claiming that mantle. Kashoggi was a reliable pro-Kingdom stooge for his entire journalism career, until the palace coup that brought in MBS. Suddenly the Kashoggi clan were on the wrong side of KSA history, and Jamal decided to self-exile himself to DC, there to do whatever he could to further the cause of his side in the internecine struggle for the rulership of the Kingdom.

That's why he's dead now. The irony of his having become a posthumous symbol of journalistic freedom seems to be lost on the public at large. One gets the impression that the vast majority of those shocked and appalled at the Kashoggi murder are folks who can't wait for Assange and Snowden to face "justice" in the American judicial system.

The fact that the WaPo is promoting Jamal as a martyr for "press freedom" tells you that the CIA is, at least for the moment, throwing their weight behind the old guard in the Kingdom.

Having said that, it's good to see that at least some US media outlets get the bigger picture. Unfortunately, those outlets are hemoraging money and won't last much longer...

Sooner or later the CIA will buy them too.

Ramping up the hokum at Global Affairs Canada

Never imagined I'd say this, but I miss Bullshittin' Baird.

Those were simpler days, and Big John always wore his heart on his sleeve. When John was "deeply concerned" you always got a sense that, at some level, he probably was.

With the Trudeau crowd, you're pretty sure they're only "deeply concerned" if the object of their concern has passed muster with the usual partisan focus groups.

With the Harper Gang, the hypocrisy was hit and miss.

With the Sunny Daze Gang, the hypocrisy is systemic.

Take a gander at the Global Affairs website. The last three news items are about gender equality in Ethiopia, Canada's leadership in global gender equity, and Canada's leadership role in calling out the horrific human rights situation in Iran.

You know Iran; the only Middle East country outside of Israel where Jews are constitutionally protected, and a country where women have never NOT had the right to drive cars. Ya, that country. We're really upset about their human rights...

Yup, no way we'd ever sell those guys military hardware, because that would just be wrong, and besides, our besties in Likud wouldn't like it. We'll call out human rights in Iran, but we'll spout nonsense non-stop about Israel's right to defend itself while the human rights of Palestinians are trampled underfoot.

And while the KSA is setting liberal hearts a-flutter by allowing some women to drive, we'll not get too bothered about their overall track record on human rights, because, after all, they buy military stuff from US branch plants in Canada that employ Canadian workers.

And how lovely that we're gung-ho for gender equality in Ethiopia and beyond.

By the way, women in Canada are still a good distance away from achieving gender equality, but that's no reason not to champion ideals globally that we've not yet achieved here at home.


How about we address the beam in our own eye before we lecture the rest of the planet about the mote in theirs.

Seeing things

The Arab guy did my other eye yesterday, and holy cow, can I ever see!

There's been a crack in the plaster of our bedroom ceiling for years. Never really paid any attention; I could barely see it...

Now it looks like the entire ceiling's on the verge of collapse!

And can I ever see where a coat of paint is required... EVERYWHERE!!!

Noticed the garden hose when I pulled in the drive today, and suddenly realized I haven't shut off the water to the outside tap.

Oh no! We've been in winter for a week already!

Last time I forgot to turn off the water the pipe split, and we had a little waterfall coursing down the basement wall, a mere couple of inches away from the electrical panel. Just got around to fixing that this summer.

Hope I got it in time; otherwise I guess I can fix it again in the spring. Point is, I wouldn't have thought about it had I not noticed the garden hose, and till now I've never noticed it, ever.

I can rattle off the 20/20 line on the eye chart with either eye, a first in my lifetime. The downside is I need reading glasses to read. And also for other stuff like seeing what screwdriver I need to remove the handle from the outdoor tap.

And trimming my nails...

And shaving.

And packing my vaporizer...

And... well, anything that you'd normally move closer to your eye to get a better look at.

I'm also learning about reading glasses. First pair were Foster Grants from the Rexall. Thirty bucks.

Then I found a pair of Foster Grants at the Looney Tooney for five bucks.

Today I went to Dollarama and got a pair of no names for $1.25. I thought 1.25 was the strength, till I got to the checkout and found out that was the price.

Holy moly, I've been buying glasses for fifty years, and I don't remember a pair coming in under $400 in years!

There's obviously one hell of a mark-up on this stuff!

New report reveals Canada is number one in the world!

There we go punching above our weight again!

Yup, a new report from Climate Transparency reveals that we produce more greenhouse gases per person than any country in the G20!

Well done, Canada!

And if "Sunny Daze" Trudeau has his way, sooner or later, by hook or by crook, we'll get one of those pipelines built that'll uncork the market potential of all that bitumen out in Alberta...


Ain't nobody gonna catch us then!

Vote no, Calgary

The Olympics are a scam.

The people of Calgary were already scammed once. You really want to do that again?

The Olympics are a total corporate greed fest. Lot's of corporate brands will get lots of screen time. People who are already rich will get richer. Contractors will pad their estimates. A few star athletes will turn their podium moment into millions.

And when the party's over, guess who gets stuck with the tab?


No thanks!

Canada to lead Nations of Virtue in seizing assets of despots and dictators

Perennial do-gooder Lloyd Axworthy has come up with a great idea; lets help ourselves to the frozen bank accounts of dictators and despots and use the money to address the global refugee crisis! Lloyd figures we should be able to raise ten to twenty billion a year from the bad guys on our shit list.

Whose bank accounts we seize is of course a question of politics rather than morality. You'll notice that it tends to be leaders Washington doesn't like who have their assets seized. Maduro and Putin are despots, but MBS and Erdogan get a pass.

As for the refugees themselves, what are they fleeing? In the great European refugee crisis of 2015-16, 75% of the arrivals came from only three countries; Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. What do those countries have in common? They've all been targeted for regime change by those same Nations of Virtue now wringing their hands over the refugee crisis, Canada included. How ironic to read such nonsense on the very day that we're remembering those 158 Canadians who gave their lives in the noble mission to bring freedom and democracy to Afghanistan.

This is not a fact that the Axworthys of the world address or even acknowledge. So long as disinterested experts like Ahmed Chalabi or Bill Browder can be trotted out to spin scary stories, that's good enough for Lloyd.

Here's an alternative funding source for staunching the refugee crisis; a modest tax on international weapons sales. Since eight out of ten of the top weapons purveyors are in the Nations of Virtue club, reaching a consensus on such a tax would be a snap!

Refugee crisis solved!

Even better, although "thought leaders" like Axworthy can't seem to get their heads around the concept, we in the virtuous West could end most refugee crises simply by minding our own business and giving up the idea that it's our right to meddle in other countries.

MBS gets mojo back

If Crown Prince MBS was chastened by the global stink over the Kashoggi affair, there's scant evidence of it in our major media. Just this morning, on page A10 of Canada's most liberal newspaper, there's a glowing puff-piece on the reformist Prince, "A Kingdom learns to laugh."

What? Barely five weeks since the gruesome demise of Jamal, and we're yukking it up with the Great Reformer, without so much as a nod to the Kashoggi affair? My first instinct was that such an oversight can only be the result of the Crown Prince's "Buckets 'o Baksheesh" tour back in the spring. After all, that visit included a sit-down with the editorial board of the LA Times, where The Star found this story.

Alas, there's a less nefarious explanation. Seems the interns charged with putting together the Sunday paper just changed the headline and did a little editing of this LA Times story from September, when Jamal yet walked among us.


Which speaks volumes about the level of geopolitical acuity at One Yonge Street.

Warmongers gather to celebrate failure of Great War to end all wars

Just what is that hand-holding thing Trump and Macron like to do when they get together?



I think the Trumpenstein gets a bad rap sometimes... doesn't look too homophobic in that shot.

And doesn't our "Sunny Daze" Trudeau looked chuffed to be seated in the front row, next to the greatest leader since Moses and his boss Sara?



I'm surprised there's not a conspiracy theory yet about Sara and Brigitte Macron having been separated at birth...



Maybe if I have time this afternoon I'll cook one up.

So while we're remembering the millions who made the ultimate sacrifice in the Great War, including 60,000 Canadians, let's not forget that war was Greatly Profitable for the captains of industry and titans of finance on all sides.

Climate change and motorsports

That's got an oxy-moronic tone to it, eh?

How does a quarter million people driving to Indianapolis help fight climate change? It doesn't, obviously. There's probably not that many these days, because motorsport has been dying a slow death anyway.

They're bulldozing grandstands at NASCAR tracks so the stands look full on TV.

I love the old hot-rod days and I'll miss them.


But they're fading out.


The other day I came across one of those Poker Run shows. There's forty feet of fibreglass with three, four, or, God help us, five Merc 400s hanging off the back.

And that's just one boat. There's well over a hundred on this run...


Why?

Save the planet; bring back fur

I'm sitting at the kitchen table with the Farm Manager. Our kitchen table used to be the table where the cashier at Gorbet's filled out the sales receipts.

Gorbet's was the number one fur emporium in Owen Sound back when furs were cool.

Furrier was a traditional old-world Jewish trade, and near as I can tell the first Gorbet reached the new world just after the WWI, when things were somewhat topsy-turvy in the old world.

Long story short, after building up a chain of fur stores over the better part of a century, the Gorbet clan came up against something nobody even imagined.

Animal rights.

The Gorbet Furs empire was in short order whittled down to the value of the real estate the stores sat on.

The fur business was dead.

It was over.

Instead, we've got the consumer going nuts for fake fur and synthetic fabrics. Where do you suppose that stuff comes from? And where do you suppose it goes?

Back in the fur coat era, you'd have your fur remodelled every few years, just to keep up with the style trends. You could keep the same fur coat looking trendy for fifty years or more.

The FM's father, Norm, would pick up your coat and put it in cold storage for the summer.

A fur coat pretty much lasted a lifetime.

Now, everybody needs a new winter coat every year. The old one goes to the landfill. Those synthetics will take thousands of years to break down, in the meantime giving off innumerable toxic substances as they deteriorate.

Ecologically speaking, how is this an improvement over fur?


Just one more example of how progress isn't everything it's cracked up to be.

A moving story

When my dear daughter went off to university, the move was pretty much all mine.

When she moved out of res and into a house in town after her first year, dad's back and dad's truck bore the brunt.

When she switched schools and moved again after her second year, I was there. As was my truck, needless to say, but I only had to make one trip, for the big stuff.

There were a couple more moves between apartments while she finished her studies that hardly involved me at all.


She's recently moved again, into her very first house. She bought it with her fiancee. He's got a Ph.D in chemistry and a finer truck than mine. The move was done 100% without me.

That's how you know you succeeded in your parenting; your child can navigate the world without your help.


So why do I feel sad?

Must have been a slow news week

Nothing much in the weekend papers. Former G-G Adrienne Clarkson got a bit of self-serving twaddle into the Globe and Mail explaining why we should be grateful that she's still sucking hard on the government teat almost fourteen years after giving up that sinecure.

Elsewhere in the Globe we learn that the US will "temporarily allow" eight countries to continue buying Iranian oil after the new US sanctions kick in tomorrow. The wanton twattery of a bunch of American exceptionalists presuming to dictate to the world who can and who cannot buy Iranian oil passes without comment, naturally.

Things are pretty thin in the Sunday Star as well. Drake claims he was racially profiled at a Vancouver casino. Really? My hunch is that casinos are more interested in credit score profiling than racial profiling, and you'd think he'd be golden in that department, but whatever.

The NYT International Weekly (included at no extra cost with your Sunday Star, because actually paying Canadian writers for original copy is prohibitively expensive) makes the case for Colorado Governor Hickenlooper, a made energy industry bumboy from the get-go, taking a run at the White House in 2020. Seriously? I write more insightful shit than that.

Both Kristof and Stephens have op-eds that don't mention Donny J, to my considerable surprise. Maybe Sarah Kendzior is onto something...

Picked up a Toronto Sun just to see what the semi-literate folks are reading these days. With Remembrance Day around the corner, we've naturally got the predictable jingoistic claptrap about how the bold Canucks punched above their weight in the WW I.

What a concept, that WW I. The royal families of Europe had some differences. They're all related anyway, so you'd think they could sort things out with a family picnic or something, but no. Millions of working class schmucks on all sides had to make the ultimate sacrifice. We remember their sacrifice every November 11. Their naivete and gullibility, along with the craven cynicism of those who sacrificed them, we prefer to forget.

Further in we get a few accolades for Doug Ford's war on the poor with his Making Ontario Open for Business Act. But even that isn't enough for guest columnist Peter Gossman, who is pleased to inform us that he's planning to open his next factory in the US instead of Canada.

I'm sure Trump will appreciate your help in making America great again with the few dozen minimum wage jobs you might create there, Pete!

Gossman also informs us, via a quote from another PostMedia title, that "...oil, gas, and coal remain the fuels of the future."

Huh?... oh ya, we're reading the Toronto Sun...

Pres of the Ontario Chamber of Commerce Rocco Rossi gets a guest column too, although it's largely incoherent. Since it's in the Sun maybe the readers won't notice. His members are experiencing both a labour shortage and a skills shortage, so the Ford government's war on the working poor is going to create a lot of jobs...

Or something.

The Sun still has their Sunshine Girl, but she's near the back of the paper now. Used to be on page two or three if I remember correctly. That was a great gig for the photographer back in the day, at least till he got charged with attempted rape or something. I think he went to jail for a spell. Today's Sunshine Girl, Lavender, "is a Sagittarius who is all about Sunday, smiles, and sunshine."


Good to know!

Another globalisation success story

Africans have always been exploited for cheap labour. Back in the bad old days of the slave trade, you had to bring the Africans to the work. In the modern era, in the "knowledge economy," you can bring the work to the Africans!

You must admit the optics are way better; no chains, no slave auctions or slaveships. It's all good... just check out this story at BBC.

Rumour has it the brain trust behind Samasource was originally going to call their company Sambosource, but that didn't fly with the focus groups they ran it by. Thank God for focus groups! That would have been a PR nightmare...

Sambosource.

What a brilliant business plan... set up an outsourcing company that lets companies like Google and Microsoft outsource their work to IT professionals in Kenya who work for nine dollars... A DAY!!! We're talking about serious efficiencies here, folks! You can bet there'll be a few folks over here getting richer on the backs of the nine-dollars-a-day folks over there.

Just imagine the bags 'o boodle Google and Microsoft can add to their offshored hundreds of billions stashed in offshore tax havens by paying nine bucks a day for work they used to do in America! As everyone knows, US workers have long been way too precious, pampered, and lazy to even consider working for such a wage, whereas Kenyans couldn't be happier with these crumbs from the Big Tech banquet table.

And look how progressive Sambosource is; they even provide lactating rooms for their female staff! That's what happens when the upper echelons of an American company are predominantly female; they bring progressive workplace policies right into the heart of the Dark Continent!... for nine dollars a day.


That truly is a heart-warming globalisation success story!

Cognitive dissonance and our "ironclad" support for Israel

The Freeland-Trudeau team like to go out of their way to pose as Trump-defying humanists, stalwarts of the international anti-Trump resistance. That's a pose meant primarily for the domestic audience, where pretend resistance scores a lot of political points among great swathes of the populace.

In the real world, we're 100% in with the Israel-KSA-USA axis of virtue. How else to explain our dithering over our biggest arms sale ever? How else to explain Chrystia's grovelling performance in Jerusalem last week?

The IDF turkey shoot at the Gaza fence continues week in and week out, with nary a peep from our dynamic duo of "feminist foreign policy," save for that one ill-advised slip of the tongue on Trudeau's part back in May, when he accidentally misspoke about the need for an impartial inquiry into the IDF's multiple murders of unarmed Palestinians. That brief outburst of sanity went missing immediately.

Maybe Kushner made a phone call.


No, we're proud to offer our "unwavering and ironclad support" for the Trump-loving Likudniks who are systematically destroying Israel and turning it into a loathsome apartheid pariah.

New proletariat rising

That's quite an interesting thing going on at Google. These are limited walkouts around some pretty specific issues, but it's a start.

If this goes well it could catch on elsewhere in the economy. It could open a lot of minds as to what else might be possible. We're watching the evolution of millennial resistance to traditional power structures. These are smart people...

Who knows? Maybe they'll come up with some other ideas, like challenging their employers disgusting tax avoidance strategies.

Maybe the six-number nerd crowd at Amazon will demand that their boss, the world's richest person, pay the warehouse grunts a living wage!

Or perhaps the educated millennials at Nike will stand up for Asian sweatshop workers...


Anything could happen!