What you don't see while you're watching 24/7 Trump news

The New York Times had a story the other day about how the Reverend Al Sharpton and Donny J are the best of "frenemies."

Of course they are! Both of them have always been ruthless publicity hounds more than willing to butter one another's bread for mutual advantage. They have a lot in common!



Photos like this wouldn't have raised an eyebrow before Trump declared his candidacy for the 2016 election.

Then Trump won that election. Then he became a racist. Then he introduced lying to US politics. What a disaster!

It's been a godsend for American media of course. They quickly made the man they suddenly love to hate, after thirty years of obsequious slobbering over him, the number one news story all day every day. He's been a ratings bonanza for them.

American mainstream media obsessively focus on largely irrelevant "outrages" perpetrated by the liar in chief. So he called Baltimore a "rat-infested dump?" Cue a thousand hysterical op-eds denouncing his egregious racism!

That is neither news nor racism. Plenty of folks have made the same observation before Trump. But while nothingburger stories like that hog the headlines, what are you missing?

How many hysterical op-eds did you see when Trump made Jerusalem the home of the US embassy?

How many hysterical op-eds did you see when Trump gave the Golan to Israel?

How many hysterical op-eds did you see when Trump gave himself and his billionaire buddies (the same crew who own that mainstream media we're talking about) the biggest tax break in history?

How many hysterical op-eds have you seen about America's military budget going up by almost 50% since Trump was elected?

Next to none, I'll wager.


Wake up America! Your "free press" buries the important stuff while burying you under an onslaught of fear-mongering bullshit.

Picnic with Junior

Took old Boomer, age 98 in dog years, down to the city for lunch with Junior.

Junior is still in his twenties, and he just logged four years working in the same joint, a milepost I didn't hit till I was well into my forties.

Junior recently broke his elbow.

He broke his elbow because one night a couple weeks ago, when he got seriously fucked up on pot and beer, he ran out of cigarettes at three in the morning.

So he decided to skateboard the twelve blocks to the nearest all-night variety store.

He hadn't skateboarded since the last time he broke his elbow, and he was never much good at skateboarding to begin with.

That's my boy!


He knew enough not to take the car.


***

After driving around aimlessly for ten minutes, discussing possible lunch venues, we settled on having a take-out picnic by the Speed River, mainly on account of not wanting to leave Boomer in the car.

We settled on a KFC picnic. The gal at KFC was young and pretty. She was also an airhead. It wasn't till we unpacked our lunch that we realized Young and Pretty had packed us macaroni salad instead of potato salad, and had forgotten to provide those single-use plastic utensils that are destroying the planet while simultaneously being absolutely essential to eating either macaroni or potato salad.


It's a messed up world...

But I'm happy to report that Junior seems to be on top of it.

Great Lakes Rising

Seems to me the water in this part of the Great Lakes Basin has come up about two feet since last year. That's in my mind's eye, so perhaps it's the last two or three years...

If and when it comes up another two feet, and whether that takes one year or two or three, once it's up another couple of feet we'll be having some problems in these parts.

Right now, the parking lot at the Wiarton waterfront park is already starting to flood. For the first time in my recollection the breakwater has been blocked off because it's partially submerged.

Water is also beginning to encroach on the parking lot at the marina. If the water came up another two feet, the marina will be toast.

As will the waterfront park, and what they call "the flats" in Wiarton, which is about half the houses in the town.

In Owen Sound, the Pottawatomi River has come up enough that the walkway behind the Kelso Villa retirement home is partially flooded. If the Pottawatomi were to come up two more feet, the residents of Kelso Villa would have to relocate, although most of the town would be alright. There are no "flats" in Owen Sound.


Oddly enough, this isn't something you hear much about in the local media.

Did Putin get to Mueller too?

After Robert Mueller and his team spent over two years examining how Putin put Trump in the White House, many found his appearance before the House committees something of a disappointment, to say the least.

Mueller didn't seem particularly well-acquainted with the report he'd compiled. In fact, the man came across as something of a dimbulb.

What went wrong?

Fear, my friends... FEAR!

The dramatic assassination attempt on Sergei Skripal, coming as it did smack-dab in the middle of the Mueller Inquiry, was a warning to all who would cross Putin. Skripal was lucky that his UK hosts were able to save his life, and is no doubt grateful to be held in protective isolation ever since.

But the damage was done. From that moment on, Mueller lived in fear that his doorknob might be next. He faced a stark choice; bury the truth, or possibly face an attempted poisoning and protective isolation himself. Sadly, he selfishly put his own well-being before the interests of the nation.


What America needs now is an Inquiry into the Mueller Inquiry, to really get to the bottom of things...

Is Chrystia Freeland Justin Trudeau's brain?

Whatever else you might say about Chrystia, she is a person who sticks by her convictions. I guess you could call that, from a certain perspective, "integrity".

Whereas Justin always came across as a not-too-bright trust fund kid whose heart was in the right place. His universe was pretty much confined to a school-teacher's routine complimented by dinner parties and reefer after work. Nice enough guy, but perhaps not quite Alpha enough to be a real leader.

He doesn't come across as a guy who had any particular convictions on anything. Sure, he can toss out the vacuous bromides with the best of them, but it's not "conviction" in the sense Chrystia has convictions.

Justin had a liability that others, perhaps a little more savvy than he, thought they might leverage into an asset, given the right strategy. He had the Trudeau name.


And here we are...

Zelensky, Nazis, Chrystia Freeland, and our "free press"

Yves Engler is a Canadian journalist who you'll never read in the mainstream for the same reason you'll never read me there; he's about more than regurgitating the official establishment narrative.

This story caught my eye this morning. It's now official; Chrystia and Justin have been up Trump's ass from the get-go. That's something I've been saying from the get-go. They work really hard to convince the public otherwise, but the facts are the facts; the constant Russia-baiting, the support for fascist elements in Ukraine, the me-too toadying every time Trump issues another round of sanctions against some country that is reluctant to play lap-dog to Empire, the "leadership" role in America's regime change obsession with Venezuela...

Lloyd Axworthy is one of those establishment ciphers who is shuffled into a fresh sinecure whenever he gets bored with the last one. He's a regular election-observer in Ukraine, leading a Canadian delegation to make sure everything is on the up and up and Putin isn't doing any hanky-panky with Ukraine's democracy. (US hanky-panky, on the other hand, as revealed in the infamous Nuland-Pyatt tape, is never a problem!)

Lloyd reported that the recent Zelensky election appeared to meet Canadian standards, but he expressed surprise that the extreme right Canada has coddled didn't win any seats, whereas a number of Russia-friendly parties did very well!

Well, Lloyd, no need to scratch your head over that! Here's another article from someone you won't find in the pages of the Globe and Mail;  Zelensky's dilemma. That writer and that article strike me as vastly better-informed than anything I've ever read on the subject in our "free press."


Which I suppose is the reason our leaders are so keen on silencing alternative media.

Did baby crap her nappy?

Thank God they've come up with an app that will answer that question! No longer does the over-worked parent have to move in for the sniff test. Instead, they can continue to obsessively focus on their phone and ignore their child, until the screen itself informs them that a diaper change is due.

Unfortunately, this tech breakthrough comes too late to be of any use to me. My diaper-changing days were done long before smart-phones were invented.

Then again, perhaps this innovation will benefit me going forward, as I barrel towards my second childhood. The PSWs (Professional Shit Wipers) at Gateway Manor will get instant notifications on their phones every time I shit myself.

I can see it now...

Scene in staff lounge at Gateway Manor Nursing Home. Two PSWs enjoy a break while staring into their phones.

PSW A: Aw, for f@cks sakes, Neumann shit himself again!

PSW B: Again? What's that, the third time this shift?

PSW A: At least! Guess we'd better go and fix the old bastard up.

PSW B: Nah... let him sit in it; he won't know the difference. We'll get to him the next time the app goes off.


Who says there's no such thing as progress?

Turf war at the hummingbird feeder

Instead of the Crips and the Bloods, or the Capulets and the Montagues, we've got the Greenies and the Brownies fighting it out here. And they've got the aerial aspect to their battling those other guys don't.

It's like Spitfires and Messerschmitts dogfighting it out in the skies over Europe ... but that comparison would do our hummingbirds a grave injustice. They can zoom in at full throttle and change direction on a dime. They are far more manoeuvrable than any fighter plane.

I guess our recipe for feeder fodder is right on the money.

Who's in charge of WWIII?

Is it Trump?

Is it war fanboys and "Christian - Zionists" like Bolton and Pompeo?

And where is America's non-existent "deep state" in these deliberations?



As the S-400 debacle has highlit, Turkey, or at least the Turkey of Erdogan, is no longer a reliable member of Uncle Sam's NATO bumboy club.

And good for Erdogan. After that stab-in-the-back coup attempt by the CIA cipher in Pennsylvania, Erdogan has every reason to be suspicious of American goodwill.



I'm no mystic, but there seems to be a lot of nasty shit gathering on the horizon.

Donald Trump hurt my feelings...

I was pleased to see a little bit of a Social Dem caucus forming around Bernie after the mid-terms. If the Democratic Party is to gain any traction going forward, it'll only happen once the old guard shuffles into the sunset. Until then, there's no particular reason for anyone of a progressive bent to vote Dem.

Six months in, I'm underwhelmed. Instead of keeping the focus on their progressive ideas, they've been reduced to mud-wrestling Trump in the quagmire of identity politics. Sorry, but being offended by Trump's race-baiting hyperbole isn't going to be much of a vote getter in 2020. They're quickly making themselves irrelevant.

In this they have the full connivance of America's mainstream media, the proprietors of which are more than happy to sideline anyone espousing real health care reform and serious taxes on unearned wealth. And indeed, they much prefer endless coverage of outrages, real and imagined, to reasoned discussion of critical issues.

If the Social Dem Caucus is to make good on it's potential, they need to get over their hurt feelings and shift the focus back to electoral politics and actual issues. Trump's tweets need not be an issue, if you don't make them one.


Otherwise, they're just helping ensure a Trump victory in 2020.

Help wanted: professional money launderer required

The York Region Police Chief is understandably chuffed at having presided over the "largest organized crime operation"in the history of York Region. Not only did the cops nab 27 mafia owned houses and 23 mafia owned cars, they also scored this mafia owned bag of playing cards!




I'll  try to leave aside my scepticism on the overall case for the moment, although my hunch is that we're looking at a whole lotta hoo-ha about not very much. Not every guy with an Italian name and an Italian car is necessarily a mafioso.

But here's the part that puzzles me. The police claim these guys were "cleaning" $30,000 to $50,000 per day through Ontario casinos.

Could someone please tell me how that works? I know if I walked into a casino with thirty thou, the only thing that would get cleaned is my pockets. It's called gambling, after all. How do these guys do this day after day and still have any money?

The only way you're going to consistently and reliably launder money through government owned casinos is if the casinos themselves are dirty.


Now that would be a story!

Senator Joe Who finally makes his mark

Since the Duffy Scandal faded away, I'd be hard pressed to name three persons sitting in the Canadian Senate...Duff, Hugh Segal... and I think David Frum's sister, if I'm not mistaken. I had no idea there was a Senator Joseph Day.

But there is! He's been toiling in obscurity since being appointed by that lovable little guy from Shawinigan way back in 2001. Apparently that was a reward for his having tried and failed five times to win a seat for the Liberals in New Brunswick, and he was due to retire when he hits the mandatory retirement age of 75 next year.

So Joe goes 0 for 5 in his political career and then spends nineteen quiet years in the Senate, and would have disappeared without a trace, were it not for the fact that he has accidentally uncorked a bit of geopolitical turmoil in Europe. Seems that Senator Day, in his capacity as a member of a NATO committee, leaked the secret locations in Belgium, Germany, Italy and Turkey where the US stores its nuclear weapons!

Thank-you Senator Day! European anti-nuke protesters now know for sure where they should picket!

The government of empty gestures

Grand Chief Small Potato

In an even slightly better world, Cindy Blackstock would not have to write the opinion piece she has in the Globe and Mail today, When will Ottawa end its willful neglect of First Nations children?

Unfortunately for First Nations children, the answer is, not anytime soon. I respect Cindy's optimistic faith in our electoral process; "...this October we can all vote in the federal election for a comprehensive and public plan to end the inequalities in First Nations public services..."

But isn't that what we thought we were doing last time around? Wasn't Justin going to usher in a new era of nation-to-nation dialogue with our indigenous peoples, based on mutual respect?

What happened?

In a nutshell, little of consequence. I think people, native and non-native, are generally apprised of the issues. 

You can continue with studies. You can throw more money at inquiries. And by all means, let's have some more apologies, a cost-efficient way of saving face while doing nothing. But what's required is not more empty gestures; it's long past time for meaningful action.

It's not that Canada doesn't have the money to address the issues facing First Nations, its that we lack the political will. Look at how blithely our politicians are willing to throw multiple billions of dollars at warships and fighter jets.

While I respect Cindy's optimism, I don't share it. Unless some new force emerges between now and October, I see little cause for optimism. Electoral politics have been failing our First Nations for generations. 

Perhaps its time to try something else.

A tip of the cap to Ken from Port Moody

Ken obviously had his wild days... that business about sharing the stage with Led Zeppelin? That was priceless!

And Ken is obviously a dog guy, and I thank you for that, Ken from Port Moody.

The reason I'm thanking Ken is that the way things are going, it won't be long before I'm off the internet altogether, and then it will be too late. That's why I'm tipping my cap now.

For a few years this blog was reliably getting between three and four thousand looks per month. That's not a big deal, but it seemed vaguely respectable. I can't figure out for the life of me why it isn't three or four thousand per day, but whatever.

Then Big Tech started to crack down on stuff that didn't meet the minimum standards for towing the party line. That was aimed at big-league big-money websites right and left, but this blog got caught in the downdraft.

This blog has never been monetized, so it's not that I'm out of pocket, but to see traffic at less than half of what it was three years ago is discouraging.


Thank you for your support, Ken!

Neumann

It's tits up for Chippy

I've been a camper as long as I can remember. Must be in my DNA, probably as a result of those years my folks spent in a refugee camp in Denmark. So at some profoundly deep level, I have a craving to sleep, at least once in awhile, in a tent.

Over the years I've pitched my tent in every province except Newfoundland, and that's on the to-do list. I've worked with a lot of Newfoundlanders in the course of my various careers, and they really are the salt of the earth. Come from Away could not have happened anywhere else.

One of the constants no matter where you pitch your tent is that inevitably you're going to make friends with one or more chipmunks. And just as inevitably, you'll call her "Chippy." If there's more than one, the others will be known as "other Chippy."

Kind of like in the stories Newfoundlanders will tell; every random guy in the narrative is officially known as "Buddy."

Subsequent random guys are all "other Buddy." As in "I got Buddy to move his traps outta my zone and then other Buddy figures he's gonna drop his there."

But back to the chipmunks and away from the quaint regionalisms that make this country so interesting. Depending on the park, the chipmunks will already be more or less domesticated. They'll be eating those peanuts out of your hand in no time.

Out here at Falling Downs, they're a little more skeptical, but we had one particular chipmunk who was becoming a regular, and I thought eventually he'll be taking those peanuts from me. And I believe he would have, if Doublewide hadn't interjected herself in the relationship.

Doublewide is the number two cat around here, and she's on the heavy side. She's not the cat you see in your mind's eye when you picture a cat ready to pounce.

She likes to enjoy the evening air with me out here on the stoop, where we'll spend hours enjoying the antics of the birds and Chippy. Unbeknownst to me, Doublewide was being seduced by primal urges as we sat there encouraging Chippy to come ever closer...


Longish story short, we left Doublewide out one night last week, and in the morning we found the remains of Chippy on our doorstep.

Cobble Beach

I played golf for a few years in my youth. At one time or another I played most of the courses around the Guelph area, but my go-to place was Victoria Road West, owned by the DeCorso family. One of the DeCorso kids actually played some minor pro golf for a few years; I played a round with him when he was about thirteen. He beat me handily.

I drive out Victoria Road from time to time to this day. Victoria Road East appears to yet be in business, but the West course has long been subdivided into residential development. That's kinda what's happened to the sport of golf; it's become the plaything of real estate developers.

Had breakfast today with my old pal Kipling at the Teviotdale Truck Stop. As usual, we traded notes on what it's like getting old. We are in agreement that it ain't fucking great.

But what can you do?

Kipling is an accomplished herbalist, and at the conclusion of our get-together we transferred a couple of plants from his van into my Toyota. Although the back windows of my car are heavily tinted, when you looked in the back you could see the unmistakable profile of the weed 'o wisdom. Although the shit is allegedly legal now, I figured that profile was just asking for a hassle in the event that an OPP cruiser happened to pull up behind me.

So we rigged up a little curtain out of my lumberjack shirt, and I stuck to the back roads as much as I could on the drive home.

Once you get up into the Grey-Bruce area, it's home turf for me. It's an interesting part of the country. We have a lot of poverty, but we also have reasonable real estate prices and a lot of interesting folks living on those back roads.

There's a guy on the 24th Concession who recently put up a home shop big enough to park a Greyhound bus in. While he doesn't seem to have one, he does have a vintage AMC AMX parked in there, as well as a couple of Harleys. I owned a AMC Rebel Machine once in one of my past lives, so eventually I'm gonna have to stop in and get the downlow on what makes this guy bother with an AMC hi-performance car. That's a pretty small club.

A concession north of that lives a guy who used to be an economist at a big-shot US university. He packed it all in to live up here with his aging mother. He rides a bicycle into Wiarton to pick up his necessities. That's got to be a good seven or eight miles, but its gotta seem a lot farther when he's riding his bike into town in the winter. That's another character I'll have to get acquainted with.

My journey passed through a goodly swath of Amish country, and it being Sunday, I passed a lot of Amish folks in their Sunday best and their black buggies. Seems the young lads in that cult get to ride their bicycles to the Sunday meeting, so the shoulder of the road had a whole lotta guys who looked like they were pedalling to a Blues Brothers reunion. Black fedoras, white shirts, ties... and dark glasses of course.

Don't laugh. That's a culture that'll survive after the assholes who run the planet succeed in destroying what we think of as "civilization." I'm keen on staying on good terms with them.

Nearly home, I thought I'd take a meander through Cobble Beach. I drive by it all the time, but I don't often drive through it. Cobble Beach is a high-end golf resort/ real estate play by the McLeese family.

The McLeese family have extraordinarily deep pockets, but you never hear a thing about them. I suspect that's because they're the opposite of the kind of people who lobby Forbes to get put on the Forbes "rich list." These folks are more likely to threaten Forbes with legal action if they were to be put on it.

As near as I can tell, and it's really hard to get solid info, McLeese the elder was an engineer who specialised in coal-plant construction. He at some point branched out into financial engineering, and made a fortune selling turn-key coal-fired electricity generating plants to American cities on a no-money-down basis. No money down, but you can pay for this with municipal bonds for the next hundred years, etc.

Cobble Beach became a retirement project for McLeese the elder, may he rest in peace. He got all the approvals for a high end golf course, designed by Doug Carrick, and a couple of thousand housing units around it. He spent a fortune putting in the infrastructure and building the clubhouse and the golf course, and then the 2007 recession hit.

By my estimation, at least $50 million had been dropped into this project by that time.

From what I surmise, and I've got some pretty good feelers into the business, aside from jettisoning some peripheral properties, McLeese never ever offered discounts or had fire sales for any Cobble Beach properties. They went years without having more than one or two new homes built on the development.

It takes very deep pockets to sustain that.

Now the place has exploded. Cobble Beach is a thing. They host by far the best car show in all of Canada every September. Where else have you ever seen an authentic, first edition Bugatti?

They've had more new builds this year than in the last ten combined. And prices are going up. A 1200 foot townhouse clocks in at $400k plus, and things only go up from there.

As much as I applaud McLeese and his deep pockets, here's what bothers me. I drive through the place in the middle of a sunny Sunday afternoon, and nowhere in this very pretty community do I see a single soul sitting on their porch with a drink in their hand.

What is wrong with those people? Is this a place I'd want to live?

NO!!!

Then again, maybe the reason I'm not seeing them on the front porch is because they're all on their back decks. Either way, having a front porch and/or a back deck is rapidly becoming something of an unattainable dream for a lot of our next generation.


Best moment of the day; I'm barrelling down Wellington Road 6 on my way to Teviotdale at a good turn of speed. There's a Amish black buggy on the shoulder with an Amish family aboard on their way to their Sunday meeting. I veer wide to give them lots of room, and just as I'm passing, a little girl about three years old sticks herself out the back window and waves at me.


There is hope for humanity.

Trump, Clinton, Epstein; it's lonely at the top

Just to clarify, that's a couple of POTUS types hanging out with a couple of NYC mayors. No, Epstein didn't make it to this particular photo-op, but he hung with the same crew.

Today, none of these guys remember anything about Epstein.

Epstein is old news.

Epstein has long been in the habit of paying teenage girls thousands of dollars for a "massage," or a hand-job, in other words. Apparently a lot of these girls were amenable to coming back the next weekend and making a few more thousand, or perhaps even giving a little extra and getting a bonus!

Why is this shocking? In winner-take-all America, where money has always trumped morality, there are plenty of parents who would consider the fact that their teen daughter made thousands of dollars giving a billionaire a hand-job as a good career move. Not unlike dropping your thirteen-year-old off at a famous Hollywood director's house for a "photo-shoot."

The faux outrage over this old news story is quite remarkable, as is the newly resurrected debate as to whether or not or how deeply Epstein was an intelligence asset. Epstein was embroiled in what might have become a major scandal fifteen years ago or so, but fortunately for him, he had enough friends in high places at the time to make it more or less go away.

What's missing in the coverage of this recycled scandal, at least in most mainstream coverage, is any mention of Mike Cernovich, the guy most responsible for digging up this corpse.

Just like those teenage girls, Cernovich is doing his best with what he's got.

Isn't that the American way?

You know it's fascism when...

What is fascism?

Folks smarter than me have spent entire careers teasing that out. Look at Gramsci... or at least read up a little about him and what he had to say about fascism.

Our touchstone when contemplating this definition is always Nazi Germany, and to a lesser extent, Mussolini's Italy.

Still, there is no convenient and universally agreed definition. There are, however, some commonalities among the various definitions the past has bequeathed us.

First among those commonalities, the melding of the corporate sector with the state, and secondly, the "defence" sector gaining primacy within the corporate sector.

That's where we're at. Both Israel and the USA meet the definition of a fascist state today.

Which makes it doubly ironic that one is the indispensable democracy and the other is the only democracy in the Middle East.

And we wonder why "democracy" has lost its charm?


Throughout the 20th century, everybody knew who the "Reds" were.

The commies. The pinkos.

The reds were always and everywhere the left.

But look at what massive media manipulation has achieved; in America today, it's the red that's blue, and the blue that's red.

In a similar vein, historically, it was always a tactic of the fascist right to stir up street violence. But look at what happened in Portland the other week. Some anti-fascist activists beat the crap out of a gay Asian reporter because... I'm not entirely sure, but apparently he was a "fascist."

If you step back and take a look at the big picture, that almost makes sense.

Red is Blue. Blue is Red.


The fascistic enthusiasms of our anti-fascists are truly frightening.

Billionaires agree free press essential for democracy

The Global Conference on Media Freedom wrapped today in London. I eagerly searched my Globe and Mail and the CBC, Canada's pre-eminent news outlets, for the downlow on the state of press freedom in the world.

The Globe has apparently taken Paul Waldie off the press freedom file, as he was tasked with providing a story on the resignation of the UK ambassador to the US. As an aside, the Globe had a brilliant cartoon on view Tuesday addressing that "diplomatic incident."

 
Sometimes the cartoonist is the smartest guy at the paper.

So Waldie was busy and it therefore fell to unpaid intern Jill Lawless to update us on the state of the free press, and by default, the state of democracy itself, because as we all know, without a free press, democracy is a gonner.

But bear in mind that when we're talking about "free press," we're not talking about folks like Manning or Assange, who actually expose the lies and crimes of our governments.

No, that's got nothing to do with "press freedom." That's just treason.

All things considered, Jill did a good job. Lot's of good stuff about Amal Clooney and Jeremy Hunt calling out Mafia Don on his vile attacks on journalism. Not a mention of Assange, of course, who is cooling his heels at Belmarsh Prison, a mere twelve miles away from this celebration of free media.

Over at the CBC, it fell to Derek Stoffel to give us the latest news from London. Derek tells us it's all about the money. He tells us that we, the Canadian taxpayers, committed a cool million to the cause of press freedom. He tells us that the main sponsor of the media freedom conference, the "global philanthropic organization" Luminate, wants to see at least $1.3 billion raised to fight for press freedom.

Derek forgot to tell us that Luminate is a vanity project of eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar, who could easily fork out the entire 1.3 billions without having to skip any meals. As I mentioned yesterday, Pierre has lots of billionaire pals who also are deeply concerned about press freedom and want government money to make it happen.

Here's Pierre's pal Richard Branson on Why we should defend media freedom.


And it's all good! I couldn't agree more!

But here's the problem... when billionaires own the world's media, including the platform that this blog is published on, what's holding them back from allowing more media freedom?

Getting to the bottom of the bullshit at the Global Conference on Media Freedom

Paul Waldie has another report on the Global Conference on Media Freedom in the Globe and Mail today. Once again, we need not invoke the name "Assange" in covering a conference on "press freedom" in London, because after all, Assange is not a journalist.

Instead, we meet Maria Ressa, whose plucky anti-Duterte website "The Rappler" is fast becoming a darling of the mainstream "press freedom" warriors. Oddly enough, up until Duterte's election in 2016, nobody in the capitals of the West ever gave a shit about democracy or the lack thereof in the Philippines, let alone how free the press might be there.

So what changed with the election of Duterte? He's threatened to follow an independent foreign policy and forge better relations with Russia and China. That's why "democracy" and a "free press" in the Philippines are suddenly top of mind.

Waldie informs us that a Pierre Omidyar "charity" has taken Ressa under it's wing. Omidyar is the  billionaire founder of eBay, and, like so many of his billionaire buddies, has taken to investing his spare time and spare hundreds of millions dabbling in politics and journalism.

A quick scan of his Wikipedia page reveals that Omidyar has lots of fun collaborations with like-minded super-rich. He's on the advisory board of Berggruen Institute, a vanity project of billionaire Nicolas Berggruen, son of billionaire art dealer Heinz Berggruen and fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, the grand-daddy of America-uber-alles think tanks.

He also funds, along with George Soros and others, the Poynter Institute, a non-profit "journalism" school which recently provided the public with a list of over five hundred "fake news" outlets. Alas, their list was quickly exposed as being fake news, and was taken down in a matter of days, in a replay of the Washington Post's (another billionaire plaything) ProporNot scandal.

Waldie quotes Ressa as claiming that Google and Facebook are "the real threats to media freedom because they've provided an accelerant for populism to take hold across Europe and Asia." Nevertheless, a few paragraphs later we learn that Ressa is now "working with Facebook in the Philippines."

So apparently that plucky website The Rappler has Facebook AND a bunch of billionaires in its corner. That should give Ressa the immunity card she needs to take on Duterte.

As for Facebook, let's not forget they were also a partner in the Integrity Initiative, a UK government attempt to shape what "news" your eyes get to light on. Ironically, the Integrity Initiative was exposed by RT and Sputnik - the two media outlets banned from the Global Conference on Media Freedom in London, because they "spread disinformation."

So, did I get to the bottom of the bullshit? Hell no!

But I think I can make a preliminary conclusion about the Global Conference on Media Freedom. When the likes of Jeremy Hunt, Chrystia Freeland, and Facebook are looking out for media freedom, at a conference where uttering the name of Assange is verboten, it's probably already too late.

Protecting "media freedom" while burying Assange

I notice that CBC is reporting on the "Faux Free Press Conference" in London while dutifully avoiding any mention of Julian Assange. Paul Waldie managed the same disappearing trick while writing about the conference in the Globe and Mail yesterday.

Jeremy Hunt has made no secret of his contempt for Assange. The kind of "free press" being celebrated in London is the kind that sticks to authorized government-approved talking points. Rogue journalists who reveal government lying and criminality are not "real" journalists at all and must face the full force of the law.

It's interesting to see that the Russian news sites Sputnik and RT have  been banned from the conference for spreading disinformation about the Skripal affair. That's unintended confirmation that those outlets probably came a lot closer to the "truth" of that debacle than anything you might find in the Telegraph or the Guardian.

That ban is also sweet revenge of sorts for Chrystia Freeland, who was quick to blame "Russian disinformation" when the true story of her family's collaboration with the Nazis emerged (the actual real Nazis marauding all over Europe 75 years ago - not the wannabes supposedly lurking all over the internet today).

It's hard to fault RT for their response to the ban;

"It takes a particular brand of hypocrisy to advocate for freedom of press while banning inconvenient voices and slandering alternative media."

How to fix Formula One racing

I for one have found that Grand Prix racing has got way boring over the years.

Guys like Surtees and Clark and Stewart were more interesting people. Your top guys now seem to be more interested in being global A-list celebrities.

We've also seen how technology has overtaken everything under the sun, to the point where "artificial intelligence" will soon be driving you home after a eight hour shift at the local pub, like if you were ever out at a bar to see that last game with Kahwi in a Raptors uniform.

If AI can drive you home from the pub, then why can't it drive a racecar around a track? That would eliminate the human variable from whatever calculations determine the constructor's cup. Then we'd find out who really has the best racecar.

But that would be boring too.

After all, a racecar isn't going to sign a book deal, be interviewed on late-night TV, or anything like that. F1 would slip off the pop-culture radar pretty quick.

So we gotta keep the drivers in the game. How about we have a parallel F1 where every driver gets an identical rig, be it Ferrari or Mercedes or whatever, and then they go head to head on every F1 circuit.


That way we'd find out just how good those drivers actually are.

Some happy news about the Doug Ford government

Seems Ontario MPP Lisa MacLeod gave Sens owner Eugene Melnyk a piece of her mind the other day.

She called Melnyk a "piece of shit" and a "loser."

Thanks for voicing the concerns of hundreds of thousands of Sens fans, Lisa!

And isn't that exactly what we pay MPPs for? To voice the concerns of their constituents?

Never thought I'd have anything positive to say about Doug's government, but there you go.


As an aside, isn't it precious that the Rolling Stones can bring together an NHL team owner and a member of Doug's cabinet?!

Trump's got 2020 in the bag

Watching the draft-dodger in chief extol the virtues of American military might  for almost an hour last night left me convinced that this guy could put dog turds on sticks and sell lollipops.

The fact that the most powerful military machine the world has ever seen hasn't actually come out on the winning side of anything since 1945 isn't going to keep the American people from those lollies.

That's what the American public has become; a people so besotted with their delusions that they're wilfully, even gleefully, bamboozled by a Manhattan condo hustler who knows how to give them what they want to hear.


Donald J Trump is the smartest politician in America.

America's fake "border crisis"

It's been a bipartisan reality over many decades that America treats "illegal immigrants" crossing the Rio Grande with a nod and a wink. That's because both sides of the aisle are keen to give American farmers the cheap undocumented labour they need to make ends meet.

All that cheap undocumented labour has a welcome ripple effect far beyond the farm-fields of southern California. It serves to depress the wages of workers across the country. That's considered a happy thing among the political elite in both parties. After all, who wants to pay more for strawberries or tomatoes? And who in the finer counties of Connecticut or New Jersey wants to hire a landscaping contractor who uses only fully legal employees?

The costs would be through the roof!

Illegals have always been a welcome thing to America's ruling class.

So what has changed?

Two things.

First of all, the sheer volume of illegal immigrants has overwhelmed the usual job markets for them. The influx is overwhelming the uptake. That leaves a lot of illegals lingering in border detention, whereas traditionally they would have readily made their way to the vegetable plantations of California.

The increase in volume is more than anything the result of deteriorating living conditions in the countries of central America. And why are those living conditions deteriorating? Long story short, US meddling in the politics of central American states, always on the side of the oligarchs and never on the side of the masses, has made life intolerable for the working classes in much of the region. Combine that with the "war on drugs," which has largely militarised law enforcement while simultaneously giving rise to militarised drug cartels, and it's no wonder that you've got what you've got at America's southern border.

Secondly, the "border crisis" has become a useful trope for both sides in polarized America, and more than that, a blunt instrument in the hands of a money-losing media desperate to stir up controversies that will generate clicks and glue eyeballs to screens.

OH MY GOD WE'RE PUTTING CHILDREN IN CONCENTRATION CAMPS!!!

Well, how can that not be a headline grabber? Then the other side inevitably replies with;

BUT OBAMA DID IT FIRST!!!

Nobody, but nobody, remembers that both the Republicans and the Democrats have been totally hunky-dory with meddling in central America and turning a blind eye to illegal immigration for at least the last fifty years.

Crisis?

There's no crisis... it's just more of America's chickens coming home to roost.

In praise of free-range burger patties

I'm sitting on the stoop watching the calves frolic in the meadow across the road. It's a sight to see.

The neighbour brings over about a dozen cow-calf pairs in the spring. None of them know, yet, that things will end badly for them. Yup, sooner or later, they're gonna be the burger patties on my Big Mac.

But in the meantime, they've got a great quality of life!

Fresh air and sunshine and green grass all day long... and room to romp!

It'll end sooner for the calves, or most of them at least. They'll probably end up in a feedlot at the end of the season. That'll be the end of the fresh air and sunshine. They'll spend a couple months standing in front of a feed trough, getting fatted up before their trip to the abattoir.

The mama cows generally fare a little better. They can stretch their tenure to a good decade and a half so long as they reliably drop a calf or two every spring. When they can't, they're on their way to Big Mac City too.


But today, as of right now, it's a pleasure to see them enjoy life.