Bigger conglomerates building crappier stuff...

That pretty much sums up the arc of progress, doesn't it?

Time was, manufacturers took pride in building durable, reliable, and quality products. In case you haven't noticed, those days are largely behind us.

Nowadays, one conglomerate with manufacturing facilities in China will push out hundreds of thousands of you-name-its, whether they be washing machines or lawn tractors, under half a dozen different brand names, all of which are fully expected to be replaced within five years or less. The idea that you should take pride in building a quality product that can last a lifetime is so ancient...

Speaking of lifetimes, the Farm Manager and I attended a birthday bash today for a family friend who was celebrating his 94th. Took along the 89 year old Bubbinator. Their paths used to cross all the time thanks to the Owen Sound Little Theatre. Earl was a patron and his late wife an occasional actor, while Bubby was for decades the beating heart of that outfit.

Also present at the party was a Syrian gentleman of my recent acquaintance. Nash is in his 80's and he's not a newcomer. I think he's been in this country longer than I have. The reason the dude fascinates me is that he's a genuine cannabis whisperer. He was keen on hearing how my crop (two plants) was faring this year.

Fifty-fifty, I said. Half my crop unexpectedly turned male when it was about three feet high. The other half is promising a very decent yield. Think "elephant sticks." If you weren't a pot aficionado fifty years ago that reference might be meaningless to you, but it's a good thing.

Nash gave me some hints on how I could improve the odds for my cuttings. He's a seriously smart guy who is in demand as a consultant for some of those Bay Street wankers who ended up owning Canada's legal weed market, thanks to PM Fluffy.

As you recall, Fluffy was elected in no small part due to his promise to legalize pot. What he neglected to mention on the campaign trail was that his legalization gambit was premised entirely on making sure the corporate sector was handed the market, instead of legitimizing the mom-and-pop growers who have kept weed science alive for the last hundred years.

That was merely one of Justin's bait-and-switch shenanigans. He got a lot of votes from folks who still harboured happy thoughts about the reign of his dear daddy. Pierre was his opposite, a Canadian nationalist who pulled no punches when it came to our relationship with the elephant next door. Pierre was all in for an independent foreign policy. Justin is all in for making sure we don't offend the Trump-Bolton-Pompeo axis of virtue.

That's why we're discussing the 19 billion dollar purchase of fighter planes and a 60 billion dollar warship building program... in a country that can't afford to ensure our Indian Reservations have drinkable water.  After all, ensuring "interoperability" with the armed forces of "our allies," meaning Uncle Sam, is going to be way more important than clean water once the Ruskies snowshoe over the North Pole to invade us.

To say nothing of the Yellow Peril...


The day began with a bit of a scare. My dear Hanna was up for a brief visit. She's been in Toronto for the last seven or eight years, collecting various university degrees that have thus far failed to improve on the income she makes from that Iranian food-truck operator. I think she's finally on a good track; starts an MSW degree at U of T next week. Hopefully that will get her out of Hoonan's food trucks once and for all.

So Hanna has her turn in the shower, and whoopsie... there's no more water!

I panicked. Last time this happened it took multiple trips to Home Hardware and a couple of YouTube videos to sort things out. Ya, I know; I'm one of those geezers who still wants to fix everything himself.

I had a party to go to, and no time for Home Hardware or YouTube. I was just pissed off that I was denied a shower.

Long story short, when someone, anyone, (I'm not mentioning any names) has a 45 minute shower, both the hot water tank and the pressure tank will run dry. By the time we got back from the birthday bash everything was functioning normally again.


What a relief!

YOU MUST GET MORE STUFF!!!

For roughly the first fifty years of my stint here on Prison Planet, I was keen on getting stuff. Now I'm keener on getting rid of stuff. I'm finding that easier said than done.

Tried to get rid of a used electric kitchen oven earlier this year. Put it at the end of the driveway festooned with "free" signs on three sides. It was a perfectly functional range.

Somewhere during the second week, some dirtbag stopped to help themselves to the elements. Is there not a code of honour that demands you take the whole thing when helping yourself to free stuff?

Halfway through the third week a local artsy type picked it up to "practice painting on enamel."

Whatever. I was just happy to have it gone.

Parked the old Rockwood tent-trailer out there next. We got that because we used to do some camping, and the Farm Manager decided she no longer wanted to sleep on the ground in a tent, but would prefer to sleep in a tent that's on a trailer. We used it for two seasons and then she declared it "musty." We haven't used it since.

That must have been four or five years ago. For sure it smells musty now! And the canvas is rotten. So I put up a sign asking $800. The sign was on a 8x11 sheet of paper. No enquiries. After a couple of weeks I thought maybe they can't see the sign, so I made a new one out of a two foot by four foot piece of plywood, and dropped the price to $600.

At least now people were stopping, but they were mostly idiots. From my point of view, once I've told you the canvas is rotten and needs replaced, and you come back with "how many holes are in the canvas," you're an idiot.

Eventually some guy hauled it away for three hundred bucks. His son had a couple of little guys who loved fishing and camping. They were on a budget, and figured they could still get a few years out of this rig with a little patching and some sound tarping.


Point is, it took all summer to get rid of a stove and a camper... at that rate, it's gonna be three or four more years before I get the garage cleaned out!

Buck-a-beer and legal weed

On the face of it, you wouldn't think Ontario Preem Doug Ford, the hardest right-wing nutter we've seen here since the days of Mean Mike Harris, and PM Fluffy would have much in common.

But they do.

Ford rode to power on a wave of booze liberalization promises. Booze available at every 7-11 twenty-four hours a day, booze in public parks, boozed-up tailgate parties in the parking lots of CFL stadiums, and most famously, "buck-a-beer."

Trudeau, on the other hand, offered a feminist foreign policy and legal weed.

While one seems the opposite of the other, what do they have in common?


Doug wants to keep you half in the bag, and Justin wants you to have a toke on top of that...

That's right; they want us to be more or less comatose.

They're hoping that way you won't notice that minimum wage 7-11 employees are now doing the work of Beer Store and LCBO workers who used to have pensions and benefits and all that fancy stuff.

They're also hoping that you won't notice that our feminist Fluffy has aligned us with neo-fascist states like Brazil and Honduras as we lean in to overthrow the government of Venezuela. And that's just an encore after delivering the marijuana economy to Bay Street on a silver platter.

So have another beer or two, and by all means, have a toke, or maybe gorf down some of those edibles...


Doug and Fluffy need you wasted so they can keep doing their shit.

With Boris and Donald at the helm of the Anglo-American Empire...

...can Armageddon be far away?

Seriously, it might be time for a re-read of the Book of Revelations.

After all, we are in the end times. My screen tells me that every day. Only twelve years left to curb greenhouse gas emissions, or the planet's a gonner. As in, there is no future!

That's an inspirational message for our children...

If nothing else, we should be ashamed of ourselves, but we live in the post-shame era. I mean, how else do you explain Boris and Donald?

Prince Andrew should be ashamed of himself... but I guess if he hardly even knew that man, maybe we're being a little harsh...


I've been a news junkie forever, and in my estimation the art of news reportage is in terminal decline. The fear-mongering is overwhelming. Between Xi, Putin, and climate change, we are well and truly fucked.

And even in our quieter moments, there is no escaping the ugliness. Here's a story I first heard on CBC radio in the car, on the evening news program "The World This Weekend." A couple of women get into a scrap over a parking space at a BC shopping mall. One of them uses a racist slur against the other...

Yup. Right here in Canada. In 2019. A racist slur.

We must all hang our heads in shame...

Or not! How about we all call out CBC for making such a petty bullshit story into a national news story. Some people are rude. Some people are racists. Some people are assholes. Some people don't know how to park at the mall.


How is there anything newsworthy about this story?

Some thoughts around income inequality

It's crazy times we live in.

The latest stats show that CEO pay is close to 300 times that of shop-floor-shmuck pay.

Put another way, consider the income of someone making the US federal minimum wage of $7.25. Over their lifetime, if that worker begins full-time employment at age fifteen, they'll have to work well into their eighties before they've hit a million dollars in lifetime earnings.

CEO compensation, on the other hand, is typically a million dollars a month or more in your upper echelon of corporate entities.

I'm well acquainted with the arguments in favour of massive income inequality. That's no surprise; we all are! People who make a lot of money are smarter and work harder. That's the standard response from our billionaire-owned media. What else would they say?

There's certainly an element of truth to that. But, are they really three hundred times as smart as the shop-floor worker? Do they really work three hundred times harder?

I'm all in with the idea that a hard worker should make more than the shirker. At least twice as much...

And obviously, somebody really smart should, if they are a hard worker, make even more! Maybe even twice as much as that hard worker of average intelligence...

But nobody anywhere is three hundred times smarter than the person next to them, nor is it possible to work three hundred times harder!

The level of income disparity in the USA today is absolutely unconscionable.

Three multi-billionaires have more net worth than half the population? How is such a thing possible?


It's possible because the billionaire class has bought the political system. They bought it because they can afford it. The rest of us can't. The supreme court decision on Citizen's United cemented their purchase into the law of the land.

And here we are.

It's the plutocrats driving foreign policy. War is good for business.

It's the plutocrats driving domestic policy. We'd have to raise taxes to provide decent education, housing, and health care... and who needs that? Plutocrats already have decent education, housing, and health care.

The Exceptional Nation is operating at maximum efficiency!


Only a traitor would rock the boat...

Recycling NYT's shoddy journalism cheaper than producing your own

News-hungry hicks in these parts rush to the newsstands bright and early every Sunday to get their hands on The New York Times International Weekly, which comes as a supplement with the Sunday Star. This week we were rewarded with a front-pager titled "Deception Fuels Tilt To Nativism In Sweden," which is a recycled version of this story which ran in the mother ship a week earlier.

The gist of the story is that anti-immigrant sentiments in Sweden are due not to reckless immigration policies that brought in migrants in substantially greater quantities than could be readily assimilated. Nope, it's not that... it's Putin!

That's right! Kremlin troll farms are doing their devious best to "...weaken Western countries by polarizing the debate," thereby opening the eyes of the docile Swedes to the fact that some neighbourhoods in their country have become ghettos of dark-skinned people.

I'm no expert on Sweden, but I have a hunch the Swedes would have noticed that without prodding from Kremlin trolls. What we have here is not a news story per se, but just another exercise in Russia bashing.

Writer Jo Becker quotes an expert from the "Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a non-profit that tracks extremism," to lend the story a sense of gravitas.

Here's what you should know about the Institute for Strategic Dialogue that Becker neglects to mention. Its "partners and funders" include:

•  Brookings Institution
• Chatham House
• Google
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Microsoft
• Yale University
• British Council
• Open Societies Foundation (Soros)
• International Republican Institute
• US State Department
• UK Foreign Office
• Governments of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, Australia, Canada

There's more, but you probably get the drift. The partners and funders of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue are a veritable roll-call of institutions and vassal states committed to American Exceptionalism, which we are constantly reminded has ushered in the era of peace we have seen since WWII, not to mention enforcing the "rule of law" and lifting billions out of poverty, etc.etc...

And of course, they all agree, the biggest threat to continued world peace and prosperity and the "rule of law" is... Putin!

I have no problem when our "free press" labels Sputnik a Russian propaganda outfit. They are, after all, funded by the government of Russia to put a pro-Russian spin on their reportage. However, it's disingenuous to pretend that the NYT or the Institute for Strategic Dialogue are any different. They are American propaganda outlets every bit as much as RT or Sputnik are Russian propaganda outlets.

As for the Toronto Star, they have numerous anti-Russian propagandists on their own staff, so why do they need to import it from the US?

CBC discovers hateful black bigot

How could such a thing be possible? Diversity is our strength, after all.

Turns out the black dude in question has some intersectionality going on. Not only is he black, he's religious too! That's not the sort of "intersectionality" the "diversity is our strength" crowd appreciates!

Here's the story, straight from the CBC.

I suspect Putin's minions are behind this scandal...

Beware the child activist

Greta Thunberg is the latest manifestation of the "child activist" phenomenon. In less than a year the Swedish teen has become the world-wide poster child for climate change action. Greta seems an inspiration to many people, and is unafraid to put other people's money where her mouth is. Just now she is on her way to New York aboard a five million euro racing yacht to attend multiple photo-ops. In this,  she is leading by example; in a perfect world we'd all make our transatlantic crossings by sailboat, thereby saving the planet by eliminating the carbon footprint of trans-Atlantic flights.

This is a publicity stunt, of course. I have a hunch that there's nothing remotely "carbon-neutral" about building a sixty-foot racing yacht, and we'd have to build one hell of a fleet if they're to replace air travel!

Before Greta, we had little Bana, the plucky seven year old Aleppo girl whose moving tweets implored the West to do more to save Syria's children from Assad and Putin. Within months of leaving Syria, Bana was at the Oscars, rubbing elbows with the Hollywood elite. Her first book, a memoir, was recently published by Simon and Schuster.

Before Bana, we had Malala, the youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner in history. Malala campaigns for the rights of women and girls in Muslim countries. This is a popular cause amongst the Western NGO class. Who can be against equal rights for women and girls? In fact, one of the rationales for the initial occupation of Afghanistan was that we were improving the lives of women and girls there. Ironically, eighteen years later the same do-gooders are complaining that if the US quits Afghanistan, all their hard-won gains will be erased.

Before Malala, we had Craig Kielburger, the twelve year old Canadian kid who launched the Me to We non-profit (and the shadow for-profit that cleverly sprang up alongside it.) Craig too wants to help the downtrodden and oppressed in less fortunate lands.

These idealistic children have in every case been "managed" by media-savvy adults working in the background. As such, they are being used to advance the agendas of the grown-ups around them.


Child activism, or child exploitation?

Canada is awash in affordable real estate

Unfortunately, it tends to be in places that folks are reluctant to go to. Like New Brunswick and rural PEI.

It depends on what your priorities are. If it's REALLY important to you to own the ground under your feet, you'll find that in the far reaches of either of those provinces you can find a habitable abode for well under a hundred grand. More than likely, you'll find work in a nearby lobster processing plant that pays shit by Toronto standards, but will pay the mortgage on the aforementioned abode.

But even up here in the Bruce, less than three hours from Toronto, things are relatively affordable. Check this out. You'll easily qualify for the mortgage that will make this place yours with a household income of sixty thousand or so. If you drive a snow-plow in the winter and a gravel truck the rest of the year, and your wife works the check-out at the dollar store, you can swing this place!

And there's lots of those kind of jobs available around here.

But, every one wants to write code and nobody wants to drive a snow-plow, so everybody goes to Toronto, and then they complain they can't afford to buy a house!

It all comes back to what your priorities are. If it's important to you that your children frolic in a yard of their own, forget the city and come drive a snow-plow.

The evolution of farming

From the late fifties till 1967 my family lived on a four acre "farm" beside the railroad tracks in Elora. Four acres isn't much of a farm by today's standards, but it allowed us to keep a couple cows, some pigs, ducks, geese, rabbits, and chickens, and the most expansive kitchen garden you'd ever want to see. It was a re-creation of what my parent's had grown up with in the old country.

The cows gave us milk, and when the time was right, steaks. The chickens provided eggs, and when the time was right, various tasty chicken parts. Probably three quarters of what was on the supper table back in the day came from those four acres.

But things were changing fast. As Ed Hutton, a farming lifer, explained to me, "we used to get everything from the farm and rarely spent money anywhere else. Now we grow one cash crop and buy everything at the grocery store."

The farmhouse here at Falling Downs was put up in 1914. It replaced the log cabin that had stood here since pioneer days. In 1914 a hundred acres could throw off enough cash to put up a two story brick farmhouse.

That was the case till after the WW II, when farm economics changed to where Mr. Farmer could make way more money working in a factory than he could tending his hundred acres. If you loved the farming lifestyle you couldn't maintain it on a hundred acres. Guys who kept farming were forced to get bigger. Today, anything under 500 acres is a hobby farm. Most serious full-time farmers count their acreage by thousands, at least if they're into cash cropping or grazing cattle.

As farms got bigger and more expensive, most of those farmers who "feed cities" succumbed to the lure of "scientific" farming. That's where all the inputs get more expensive and it becomes imperative to drench the soil in chemicals in order to get the crop yields required to pay your debts. On the livestock side, factory farming became the norm. When you're buying pork or chicken today, odds are those animals spent their entire lives indoors and never saw a ray of sunshine.

But I believe the pendulum is swinging the other way now. That's partly because more people realize that the way we've been doing things for the past 75 years or so is not sustainable. Drenching the land in chemicals eventually kills the soil. Factory farms are an exercise in animal cruelty.

There's got to be a better way...

And there is. We made a stop today at DeJong Acres, not ten minutes away. They do sheep and pork and a variety of stuff the old-school way. Their flocks of sheep are outside in the fresh country air, herded and guarded by authentic old-fashioned sheep dogs. They've got a farm store going on in order to deal direct with the consumer and cut out, as much as possible, the middle-men.

That's the future of farming.

Five years later Hilliard Macbeth is still wrong

There's a widespread belief that Canada's seemingly out-of-control real estate bubble is about to burst.

Hilliard Macbeth has seen it coming for at least five years. If you'd had the misfortune of heeding Hilliard five years ago, you'd have bailed out of the market and rented a place. After the collapse, you would have got your dream home at a massive discount!

Alas, the collapse has yet to happen. If you're one of those pathetic souls who acted on Hilliard's prognostications, you're now permanently doomed to rental, because the half-million-dollar house you gave up five years ago in anticipation of the imminent collapse of the real estate bubble, will now cost you a million to buy back.

Has Hilliard apologised? No. In fact he's got a revised edition out. Seems his theory was golden, just his timing was off...

Boy, can I ever identify with that! My theories on everything from oil futures to shorting Apple have been spot-on, but, more often than not, my timing was off.

But, I've apologized for my shitty advice and am doing penance, shooting spitballs of umbrage at the establishment in my role as the pot-addled hillbilly at Falling Downs, whereas Hilliard remains employed by a legit financial concern.

It's my impression that while real estate valuations seem grotesquely distorted, they remain tied to the basic laws of supply and demand. If you track population inflow from all sources, and compare it to new construction, it's obvious that we have a serious disconnect.


There is absolutely nothing on the horizon to indicate that this disconnect will be repaired in the foreseeable future.

World's top thinkers converge on Toronto

Again!

This time they're gathering round to share their wisdom at the "Global Forum for Inclusion," something cooked up by the folks at the Institute for Canadian Citizenship. According to their full-page ad in the Globe and Mail yesterday, I'm welcome to join the conversation... if I buy a ticket, of course!

Toronto people are suckers for this kind of foolishness. Remember when David Frum and Steve Bannon duked it out (metaphorically) last year? Or when the ridiculous phony Tony Blair took on Christopher Hitchens? That spectacle had Tony speaking for God, if such an absurdity can be imagined.

What caught my eye was the picture of leading world thinker Nadya Tolokonnikova right at the top and centre of that advert. As near as I can tell, the thought that Nadya thinks most often is, "what can I do for my next publicity stunt?" She's had a history of publicity stunts since dropping out of Moscow State University, and scored her biggest coup with the infamous "Punk Prayer" at Moscow's Christ the Saviour cathedral in 2012.

That put Pussy Riot on the international map, and while it didn't sell a lot of copies, it did get the attention of various A-list professional do-gooders like Madonna. Yup, if you break into a Moscow church and shriek "fuck Putin" for a couple of minutes, you've established your bona fides as a legitimate public intellectual in the Nations of Virtue.

The Institute for Canadian Citizenship is a government-funded "charity" invented as a sinecure to keep outgoing governor-general Adrienne Clarkson busy after her six gruelling years as Her Majesty's rep in Canada. Since we've already paid for this shindig once, with our tax dollars, why should we pay again for tickets?

Then again, if these folks truly believe that Tolokonnikova belongs anywhere near a list of the world's top thinkers, I'm pretty sure I'd be disappointed.


Those 40+ top thinkers will have to have their conversation without me.

The most eagerly anticipated suicide of our time

There's a lot of folks in high places breathing a sigh of relief that Epstein is over.

There has obviously been a power shift somewhere behind the curtain. Forces that had enough power a decade ago to protect Epstein were forced to turn him over. What remains to be seen is whether the end of Epstein will also end the Epstein Scandal.

The people responsible for the former clearly have a vested interest in the latter.

Opa

He's not my Opa, he's my dad, but the kids have been calling him Opa forever and eventually it became what I call him too.

Opa was recently warned away from doing any arc-welding by his doctor. The electrical impulses from the welding machine could seriously mess up his pacemaker, he was told. Since I'm the acknowledged welding expert in the family, he asked me to give him a tutorial in oxy-acetylene welding.

No electrical complications when you're welding with gas.

I had a day open, and this is it. I arrive at the "home farm" and I notice that Opa has the John Deere up against a tree, bucket up, and he's standing in the bucket sawing off an offending branch with a bow saw.

Opa, my dear father, is closer to 90 than he is to 80.






Dad, you're a real inspiration!

Let's get down with Chrystia's rockin' human rights party!

“What’s happening in Venezuela is a struggle between democracy and human rights and dictatorship, and that’s why Canada has made it such a priority to stand for the people of Venezuela and support them."

That's our Minister of Foreign Affairs reiterating Canada's "commitment" to the people of Venezuela. We care so much about the human rights of the Venezuelan people that we're fully aboard with American plans to completely destroy their society so that we can restore their human rights.

But we're not America's flunkies in this noble pursuit. Forsooth! 

No, we are instead part of a completely independent group of American satellite states, robust and independent democracies all, the "Lima Group." We're meeting in Lima, Peru this week! And although we in the Lima group are completely independent of the US, John Bolton took time out of his busy schedule to get the party started. Here's a link to Human Rights Watch's latest report on the state of human rights in Peru.

Honduras is another human rights champion all aboard for restoring human rights in Venezuela. Please excuse the deadly anti-government riots happening at the moment... in Honduras!

Columbia is another one of our "democratic allies" working hard to bring democracy to Venezuela by overthrowing its elected government. According to Human Rights Watch, Colombia has plenty of human rights challenges itself.

As do our Lima Group besties in Guatemala, according to this piece in the New York Times.  And let's not even start with that  cesspool of corruption, Brazil.

These are the kind of inspirational democracies and human rights champions that our Foreign Minister has aligned us with. She is even proud of Canada's (meaning her own) leadership in this laughable excuse for an "international coalition fighting to restore democracy and human rights" in Venezuela.

This is nonsense. The Lima Group is largely a collection of far-right US client states with little or no legitimacy either as democracies or human rights champions. Being associated with the Lima Group in any way, let alone in a leadership role, brings shame on Canada.

Why anti-government riots are good in Hong Kong but bad in France

Because in France, they have human rights and freedom and democracy.

Whereas in HK, they have no human rights, no freedom, and no democracy.

Rioters in France are obviously Putin-funded fascists who just hate immigrants and want to retain their white privilege, but in reality, they have nothing to complain about.

Whereas in HK, the NED and Soros-funded protesters are trying to throw off the yoke of a communist dictatorship.

France is a member of the EU and NATO, and a charter member of the Nations of Virtue coalition, whereas China is the enemy.

Therefore, the HK rioters deserve our unreserved support, whereas the rioters in France deserve only our contempt.


Got it?

Here's an example of good parenting

When the weather hots up like this, me and the Farm Manager like to head to the shore of Colpoy's Bay. A mere fifteen minute drive from Falling Downs and we're sitting on a bench behind the Wiarton Water Treatment Plant, coolers in hand, enjoying the bay breezes and watching the boats go by.

We're sitting there the other day, and a guy and his toddler son paddle by in a kayak. The kid can't be more than three years old. He's on his dad's lap, he's paddling, but Dad's hands are on the paddle too. There's not a screen in sight. Right away you know there's something good going on.

There's not much that's sadder than watching a parent drag a kid down the street with one hand while they've got the phone in the other, but you see it every day.

As they're passing by our bench, I couldn't help but blurt out, just loud enough that they could hear it; "there's a shark following you!"

Both their heads snapped around. Then I saw Dad whisper something into his kid's ear, and a second later the kid shouts up, in his three-year-old sing-songy voice, "It's just a pretend shark."

Not only was Dad spending quality time with his little boy, he just calmed the kid's fears.

That's some quality parenting.

Just another day in a land where everyone has a gun and nobody has a chance...

God bless America...

At some level you have to ask yourself, what the hell is wrong with those people?

The second amendment is a beautiful thing. At the same time, there's something to be said for having some checks in the system that would prevent the mentally ill from buying assault weapons. Whatever excuses will be proffered up over the next few days, there's no getting around the fact that one would have to be profoundly disturbed to take a gun into Walmart and shoot people down.

No doubt we'll soon hear the argument that if only more folks in Dayton or in that El Paso Walmart had been carrying, the shooters would have been stopped sooner. Is that the answer?


Probably not. Mass shootings are a symptom of a deeply dysfunctional society. The symptoms won't go away until the underlying root causes are addressed, and as far as I can see, that's not even on the agenda.

Burning rubber on Memory Lane

I was 18 years old. Budd Automotive in Kitchener hired me on my 18th birthday. No skills to speak of, and no high-school diploma, but back in the pre-NAFTA days, factory jobs like that paid a decent wage.

Decent enough that I considered buying a house. I even had my eye on one, a little bungalow in Guelph, available for a mere $20,000. I also had my eye on a 1973 Trans Am 455 SD at Weiland Motors. This was a few years before they snagged a Ford dealership and became Weiland Ford.

The Trans Am had a mere 6,000 miles on it. She was a beauty; red exterior, white interior, four speed. It didn't have that ugly bird plastered on the hood. Insofar as a red Super Duty Trans Am could be subtle, it was. A good solid example today will run you well into six numbers.

The payments on the Trans Am were approximately the same as the payments on that bungalow. I was 18. Of course I went for the car.

And it was a beast! That motor made tons of torque. It could literally break the tires loose in any gear anytime you stood on the gas too hard, which was most of the time.

It wasn't all that impressive on the top end, though. That beastly motor ran out of wind pretty quick once you passed 5,000 rpm, and with the 3:42s in the back that meant your top speed wasn't going to be much more than about 120 mph. But it sure got there in a hurry!

I used to cruise around the high school I'd dropped out of the year before. Girls who'd never noticed me when I was a student clamoured for a ride in the Trans Am. At 18, I was more than happy to oblige.

I'm 18, making good money, driving a red Trans Am... life was very good indeed!

Then disaster struck. After the 1973 Arab-Israel war, the Arabs got together and unleashed an oil boycott. That eventually trickled down to seriously crimping the market for the big cars Budd built the frames for. Six months after I bought the Trans Am, I got a lay-off notice.

Looking back, I think that oil boycott is what triggered my interest in geopolitics.

The oil boycott also crimped the market for cars that only got 10 mpg. Without a job, I couldn't afford to put gas in the car, nor could I afford the payments. I eventually traded it to a dealer in Toronto for a somewhat ratty 1969 Dart GTS 340 and two thousand dollars cash. The money got me through to the next job, but the girls weren't nearly as keen on the Dart.

But I made the best of things, and I got by...



That bungalow I passed up for the Trans Am recently sold for over half a million.

Getting tough on China

The Globe and Mail has another editorial on view today castigating PM Fluffy for not "getting tough" on China.

The China-bashing in the pages of the Globe has ramped up significantly since the arrest of Meng Wanzhou at the behest of Washington. China retaliated with the detention of two Canadians, an act of "political hostage-taking," and cancelling contracts for some Canadian agricultural products. The editorial provides a dubious compare-and-contrast between the US and China.

China, we learn, is "an amoral authoritarian prison state that is entirely detached from the rule of law," whereas the US, in spite of Trump, "...largely follows the rules, and it has independent courts where complaints can be heard."

Like I said, dubious. But it gets better; "China... has no compunction about hurting smaller countries that displease it."

Huh? You mean countries like Afghanistan? Iraq? Syria? Libya? Venezuela?... Oh wait; it wasn't China hurting those countries, was it?

If we were operating in the realm of reality, the Globe and Mail would be forced to concede that the list of smaller countries hurt, if not outright destroyed, by the US, is exponentially longer than the list of counties hurt by China.

Alas, we are not in the realm of reality, we're in propaganda land.

Meng Wanzhou's original sin was that her employer allegedly broke sanctions the US unilaterally imposed on Iran. Rule-of-law America is under the impression that it alone has the right to dictate to other countries who they can and cannot trade with. This is flat out bullying and a breach of international law, but the US gets away with it because everyone can see what happens to smaller countries that displease it, and therefore very few countries dare to defy American dictats.

The argument that Canada had no choice but to arrest Wanzhou is nonsense, and every diplomat and former diplomat and every reasonably well-read Canadian fully gets this. The Trudeau government had any number of options to avoid getting stuck in the middle of a US-China spat. The choice they made had nothing to do with the rule of law, and everything to do with toadying to Trump. That was a poor decision made by an inept government.

Justin's PR team has been very busy clearing the decks of unpleasant facts before the upcoming election. They're still hoping the SNC thing goes away. The Norman prosecution has disappeared. A number of controversial files have been deferred till after the election. Yes, it would be very lovely for the Liberals if the two Michaels could be home by the time we cast our ballots...


Both the Globe and Mail and Andrew Scheer think our best bet to resolve this stand-off is to align ourselves yet more closely with the US.

That will prove an enormously short-sighted and self-defeating strategy in the long term.