2020: YEAR OF THE EXPERT

Don't know about you, but I'm starting to lose my faith in "experts."

Seems to me, the folks who own the information infrastructure, ie the billionaire class, pick and choose the "experts" they want you to heed. Needless to say, those are inevitably the "experts" who happen to push the interests of their paymasters.

This most obvious observation is today dismissed as a "conspiracy theory."

You can find experts with a list of credentials longer than your arm to take any side of any issue. There's certainly no shortage of experts in this world. 

Experts, especially the ones who are cultivating careers as "experts" on FoxCNNMSNBCetc, are in it for the money. Once a research scientist takes a government post, their science is by definition politicized. Yet we treat the "experts" who stand in front of the cameras with a totally unwarranted deference. 

To our peril.

Puppy make poo-poo... GOOD BOY!

It's crazy how fast you revert to baby-talk when you get a puppy.

Puppy go poo-poo... as if having a shit is a noteworthy endeavour. And I guess it is if you're a one year old... or a one year old Italian mastiff puppy.

For the puppy, it's nice when they take their shit outside. Bruno has been decorating the yard with his poo-piles for almost two weeks now. It'll be just great when the great unveiling comes in the spring, when all the snow melts and you realize the scale of a winter's worth of dogshit on your lawn.

So, overall I'd say there's a pretty shitty prognosis for the whole dog thing.

But then again, you won't get the love if you can't take the shit.

Lord willing... if the creek don't rise and the Covid don't get ya

I've always had trouble acting my age, and it was a complete shock to find myself at an age where I found myself gently nudged into retirement.

So you can imagine that when I look at Covid stats that tell me some 95% of Covid deaths are folks 65 and over, I pay attention.

After all, I don't want to be the guy who dismissed the pandemic and then dies from it. That would just give too many people the last laugh.

I'm taking what you might call a "fatalist" approach, as in, if my number comes up it comes up. Nothing I'm gonna do about it. Let's face it; there's going to be a cause of death on that death certificate, and I'll be just as dead if the certificate says Covid or says something else.

Which is why I have grave reservations about our lockdown policies. Ya, lockdowns might save a few of us over-65s, but to what end? Some of us might get another twenty years, others just a few years, and the average Covid fatality, an 82 year old in a long term care home with multiple co-morbidities, might get a few months or weeks. 

At what cost?

Thousands of independent businesses gone forever, their trade absorbed by Walmart and Amazon.

Thousands of mom and pop restaurants gone (but don't worry. Mickey D hasn't skipped a beat.)

Millions of folks making ends meet with their low-wage jobs at those independent businesses thrown out of work, permanently. Millions of these people are facing eviction and bankruptcy.

And that's all worth it so we can add a few months to the lifespans of the elderly ill who are rotting away in under-staffed and under-funded care homes?

No thanks.

About the never-ending clown show in Washington

I see where Rubio is in the news for claiming that "elites are tricking you into taking vaccine," or something to that effect.

Remember, this was the leading "serious" establishment candidate for the leadership of the GOP before Trump upset the applecart.

Elites are tricking you into taking a vaccine? Alrighty then...

I mean, who am I to judge? Those elites are tricking us about all kinds of shit all the time, so there's nothing new here.

And what's going on with Sleepy Joe as he assembles his cabinet? 

Hmm... looks like he's putting together a team of true believers. True believers in American Exceptionalism. True believers in America's God-given mission to shape all nations into America's image.

What's that look like? I've refused to go see for myself since they made a passport a requirement to cross the border, to keep terrorists out or something. Well, fuck that. The Buffalo Sabres haven't got a penny from me since.

And just as well. From what I hear, see on the TV, read in the papers, and get from the personal accounts of folks who've had the pleasure of first-hand observation, the place is going down the shitter, and fast. The tent cities keep a-growing just as the fortunes of the billionaires keep a-growing even more!

It's as if the joint is run by retards.

Which is ironic, because it's actually run by lawyers (hence the infatuation with the cliche, "rule of law") who graduated from Harvard and Yale and sport the finest CVs in the land.

The ruling class now busying itself asset-stripping the USA may be a bunch of greedy, amoral, and vicious cunts, but they're very highly qualified and definitely not stupid.

Bruno Briefing: Week 1

Bruno has, as of yesterday, embarked on the second week at his new forever home here at Falling Downs.

We had a couple of potentially dangerous brain farts in week 1, where he'd randomly take a gallop down the middle of the road. This isn't a dog (yet) you can trust out of the house without supervision. He's a bit more of a house dog than I expected. More of a couch buddy than a walking buddy.

He's taken a couple of half-hearted runs at squirrels, but we have yet to hear him bark. He's quite the pussy, but he looks mean as hell. I've spent a few happy hours wrestling doggie toys out of his yap, and that's got to be the scariest mouth this side of a snapping turtle.

Every time he takes a drink out of his water dish, the aftermath looks like someone deliberately tossed a glass of water on the floor. When we hear the big slurps we immediately stand by with a towel. 

The longest walk I've manage to get him on took me to the top of the Burgess hill, about half a kilometre into my daily 5K. But, it's early days. I'm sure we'll build on that.

You can make bagels on your laptop

Ya, I know... get the fuck outta here neumann, I hear you mumble as you click on something else. But I'm not making this up. 

Check this out.   

I'm new to retirement, and I gotta say it's getting kinda old. I mean, planning which room you're going to paint next, and what colour, well... what can I say?

What I can say is that ain't gonna be my "golden years." And while I do have some longish-term plans, in the short term I feel I need to do something just to get out of my retirement rut, which has devolved into an orgy of beer-swilling, pot-smoking, blog-spewing nihilism. 

Or something like that. 

So I went to the Canada Job Bank to see what kind of employment opportunities might be out there, and what the heck, I find this "baker's helper" job posted by Kettlemans, an Ottawa bagel outfit. It's a long way from Owen Sound to Ottawa, but, thank goodness, this is a "virtual" job.

Virtual jobs are a new category that the folks at Canada Job Bank invented since the rise of covid. Virtual jobs are jobs you can do from lockdown over the internet!

Perfect!

As regular readers will know, I've been a fan of bagel making since my old pal Amanda Robinovich was trying to get her bagel joint off the ground down in Maryland a few years ago. (footnote: Amanda's bagel emporium was burned to the ground again in the George Floyd riots last summer, and she finally pulled the plug. Once I learn how to make virtual laptop bagels I'll reach out to her.)

I'll be giving Kettlemans a call Monday morning. I'm keen to get in on the ground floor of over-the-internet bagel-making.

The only problem is, if I get a job making internet bagels, it doesn't get me out of the house...

Have a Merry Covid Christmas!

Today is the day we ostensibly honour the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. By what I remember from Sunday School, he was a mellow dude who encouraged his followers to be kind to the less fortunate, to eschew conflict, turn the other cheek, and so forth. The Jewish fringe cult he founded "went viral," as we would say today, and eventually evolved into "Christianity," the more-or-less official religion of the Nations of Virtue, and especially of the USA.

I'm pretty sure if the guy who delivered the Sermon on the Mount came back today, he wouldn't recognise the Christianity of men like Mike Pence or Mike Pompeo or Tony Blair, just to choose three high-profile names who profess to be followers of the Prince of Peace.

While everyone in America is riveted by the duelling dumpster fires of covid and Trump, nobody seems to care what America is doing in the rest of the world while this shit show is going on. 

In country after country America has been using its enormous economic clout, which is backed by what is by far the most expensive military in the world, to bully weaker nations in this time of global pandemic. Rest assured this is a fully bipartisan initiative. Democrats and Republicans can't agree on whether $600 or $2000 will tide you over while the virus runs its course, but they're in full agreement that this is a great time to further tighten the screws on people living in Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and anywhere else that folks would prefer not to be governed by Washington. 

Those sanctions have real consequences, especially among the poorest in the target countries. They cause more suffering to people who are already suffering, in the cynical expectation that if they suffer enough they will rise up and overthrow their government, making room for a US-approved stooge who will allow Washington to call the shots. These policies come from a Secretary of State who claims to be a devout follower of that mellow dude on the mountain.

This Christmas, let's think about what kind of foreign policy Jesus would have.

 

Dog=Joy

We've been getting to know Bruno, and he's been getting to know us.

He's rather more shy than he looks. He's learning a lot of new stuff. He showed up here after a week at the rescue shelter. Before that, he spent most of his time in a crate in someone's basement in town. Unlike every previous hound we've had, he's not a fan of car rides. 

He's a gentle beast. I was leery of getting a male, because they can be aggressive. Last male I had, a beautiful Alsatian named Buddy, would still be trying to chase the porcupine up the tree even after he had a hundred quills in his face. He was actually a German Shepherd, but my elderly Jewish neighbour at the time couldn't make the word "German" come out of her mouth, and since I otherwise quite enjoyed her as a neighbour, we kind of reached an unspoken agreement that both Buddy and I were Alsatians.

He loves to job-shadow the Farm Manager as she goes about her cooking voodoo. He's a very attentive student and will become a famous chef someday, I'm sure. 

I had him out on the stoop just before I sat down to write this. It's just getting dark, and the coyote choir was conducting a rehearsal. You'll hear an eruption of yip-yapping from the ridge to the south, and it will be answered, call-and-return style, with a chorus of yip-yapping and kye-eyeing from the ridge to the north. 

Then neighbourhood dogs join in the action. There's a couple of Shepherds just east of us, a couple of Aussie Shepherds half a mile to the north, and a Lab just to the west. Often the dogs will keep talking to one another even after the coyotes have finished their rehearsal. We've had dogs who sing along, but so far Bruno is content to just take it all in. 

I've taken him on a couple of short walks, and hope to build up to my normal 5k over the next week or so. He shows no interest whatsoever in passing vehicles, which is a happy thing. He did however take off after a dude who jogged by in the dark last night. That in itself is highly unusual. In the first place, nobody jogs by here, period. And in December, in the dark? Anyway, I didn't even see the guy till Bruno rocketed off the porch in a great display of athleticism. Then I hear a panicked voice, "does he bite?"

Well, he didn't, and I can't imagine he would. He's the best thing that's happened around here all of 2020.

On the downside, Doublewide, the barn cat who made good, will never forgive us.

Miracles of American democracy

As every patriotic American knows with every fibre of their being, this great nation has been extravagantly blessed by God since He guided the Mayflower to these shores all those many years ago. After the revolutionary war, which finally gave God an actual foothold on earth, our profound faith in the Almighty gave us "Manifest Destiny," a God-given mission statement that guides America to this very day.

There are those who claim America lost her way in the post WW2 era. There are those who claim civil rights and gay rights and losing Viet Nam made God turn away from America. There are those who claim that the likes of Mike Pompeo, with his lyin' cheatin' stealin' ways, besmirched God's good name.

Nonsense! The miracles of 2020 put the lie to those who doubt American Exceptionalism.

First miracle; The Democratic Party Primaries.  As you may recall, the candidate they call "Sleepy Joe" stumbled badly out of the blocks. He was handily eclipsed in the first few rounds by Bernie and Mayor Pete. Then, the first 2020 miracle, in North Carolina. Sleepy Joe comes out of nowhere. Only the hand of the divine could engineer such a comeback. The pretenders quickly made way for God's anointed. Sleepy Joe miraculously became the official candidate!

Second miracle; the Trump campaign.  Donald Trump was never expected to win in 2016, and he certainly wasn't supposed to win in 2020. Further, the political establishment that had displeased Our Lord for the last seventy years was determined to see to it that such an eventuality would never come to pass.

To that end, they hammered Trump with the most sustained campaign of negative media coverage in the history of electoral politics. This campaign was utterly relentless for four full years. Each concocted slur upped the ante on the last one. By the time the 2020 race got serious, Trump was the most lyin', most misogynist, most xenophobic, most homophobic, and, last but not least, most RACIST candidate in the history of the nation.

After Nov. 3, we learned that the four year campaign of Trump-bashing resulted in an increase in his voter support from Blacks, Hispanics, and gays. In fact, some twelve million more Americans voted for Trump in 2020 than in 2016. All told, Trump polled four million more presidential votes in 2020 than Obama did in his record-smashing 2008 election. Truly a miracle!

Third miracle; the resurrection of Sleepy Joe. So, Trump got more votes in 2020 than any presidential campaign in over 200 years of American democracy... except for one. Yup, Trump may have smashed Obama's record vote total... but Sleepy Joe trumped that miracle by another SEVEN MILLION!!!

Who could even imagine such a miracle! Our Lord chose to speak through the millions of masked, but not silenced, Dem voters who voted early, or voted by mail, or both. 

The silent majority is silent no more! 

And, far more importantly, the result of the election proves that God still cradles America in His loving embrace. 

Now that God has revealed His will, let us come together to forward the Lord's agenda in China, Iran, Russia, Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and any other nations that have lost the path of true democracy.

Miracles can happen among those hapless peoples too.

Just put your faith in the Lord.

Meet Bruno, our Italian mastiff

At least a thousand times I've heard the Farm Manager say we'll never get another "large" dog. That all went out the window when this pretty boy showed up at R&R Rescue and Resort just up the road.

How to change the world without war, mayhem, or revolution

It's all about the tax code.

What we need is a tax regimen that discourages the formation of extravagant wealth. Billionaires have way too much money, and when they invest their excess money in politics, nothing good will ensue for non-billionaires. 

We need a political leader with the cajones to stand on a platform that promises a tax structure that will turn every billionaire into a millionaire.

That would sell to the masses.

And if you're super-rich, it's really no skin off your ass, as you get to keep 999 million, which should keep the Gulfstream in the air and keep the staff on the yacht and the London and New York City homes flush for the duration. 

But we'd seriously curtail the ability of the super-rich to twist politics to their whims. Mike Bloomberg would think twice about tossing $100 millions at an election campaign if he only had a $999 million kitty to draw from.

I love Amazon, and here's why you should too

Ya, I know I've talked a lot of shit talk about Amazon. Because the greedy money-grubbing cunts who run the joint richly deserve the opprobrium, and that's especially true of CIA stooge and greedbag-in-chief Jeff Bezos.

Who knew an online bookstore would take over the world?

But you gotta give credit where credit is due.

Check out this story at CBC: Amazon opens pickup depot in Iqaluit. 

Apparently the anti-Christ and his minions have managed to do what the government of Canada has been unable to do forever, ie get the necessaries of life into the far north.

Read the story. 

Hopefully this won't make you hate Amazon less... you need to hate government more!

The zen of shopping for bath towels

We were sitting in front of the (fake) fire, deeply lost in our screens, when the Farm Manager announced, apropos of nothing, that she was shopping for bath towels on Amazon. (Is a gas fire actually "fake?" It is an actual fire, after all.)

I hate Amazon and I hate everything it stands for. 

Rampant unbridled consumerism. The fact that it's making it's CIA-cozy boss millions per minute just ramps up the hatred.

I already know it's a fucked up world, and I've said so often enough right here on this blog, but when the world's richest man and the CIA figure into a post about buying bath towels, well, you know it's way more fucked up than anybody could have imagined, even a year ago.

So I embark on a scorched earth "anybody but Amazon" campaign. 

As in, "I'm just gonna feel dirty if I dry off with a towel from Amazon." 

That's mostly bullshit. When I'm towelling off, I think about getting dry. I'm not wondering where the towel came from.

But anyway, my rant got the FM considering other potential bath towel provisioners. 

Believe or not, after an hour on the internet, she concluded that our best bet for new bath towels was Canadian Tire.

Wow!

Evolving our Yellow Peril propaganda

There's a reason I keep banging away at this Yellow Peril thing. War with China should be seen as a far greater threat to our well-being than either covid or climate change.

Yet, day after day, our big media, the supposedly "responsible" outfits, are pushing an anti-China agenda. While the discourse is drenched in faux outrage over China's record on human rights, the reality is that the great push for confrontation with China comes primarily from the purveyors of American Exceptionalism in Washington.

These people are determined to maintain American hegemony over the planet at any cost. Think that through.

Generally speaking, reportage around Meng and the Two Michaels in Canadian media has been devoid of serious context. They'll acknowledge that yes, we did in fact nab Meng first, but that was totally rule-of-law hunky-dory because Uncle Sam asked us to nab her, because she violated US sanctions against Iran, and, well... rule of law!

Never have I seen in any Canadian media an explication of the precise nature of those US sanctions on Iran. Are they legal? Who says so, and why? 

Today, Jeremy Nuttall has a update on Meng and the Michaels in the Toronto Star that dispenses with the Iran angle altogether. And why not? It's a pesky detail in the narrative, and American Exceptionalism doesn't do well with pesky details. Here's how Nuttall explains the arrest of Meng Wanzhou:

The United States is seeking her extradition to face bank fraud and other charges related to allegations going back years.

Cute, eh? Iran has completely disappeared from the story!

China bad! We're the innocent victims of Chinese communism! We MUST rely on our our allies to "voice their displeasure with China..."

What allies do you suppose we're talking about? Australia? New Zealand? Are those countries going to change China's policies? Of course not! Whenever you see references to our need to rely on allies, the ally we're talking about is the USA.

So, our national security, our dignity, our sovereignty, are all reliant on the failing and flailing American Empire. Whether it's Donald or Joe or Kamala in the White House doesn't make much difference. Our policy-makers and their media echo chamber are determined to hitch our wagon to US foreign policy. 

Ponder that.

Red Bay Lodge

Me and the Farm Manager took a tour over to the Red Bay Lodge today, to check out the fish and chips.

From what I hear, and this is all hearsay, the joint was boarded up for a few years. It's one of those old-school summer resorts, a short walk from the shores of Lake Huron. Popular with a working class who couldn't afford their own cottage but wanted to take the family on a vacation. They had rooms in the main lodge and then cabins. There's places just like it all around the Great Lakes. Now that our betters have re-jigged the economy in such a way that working people can no longer afford vacations, these old-school lodges have been struggling.

So it was good news when a young couple decided to bring the place back to life, and I guess they were just getting on top of things when the virus struck. After a complete shut-down in the spring they were trying to nurse the business back from the dead, when they got their insurance renewal, which informed them that their annual insurance premium had gone from seventeen to fifty-four thousand dollars.

That seems grotesquely unfair to me. For that young couple struggling to get a business going, they're already up against a covid regimen that favours the big chains. Then their insurance company pulls this? You can bet the chains aren't paying anywhere near that kind of money for equivalent square footage.

You'd almost think there's a plot afoot to drive the last independents out of business. Oddly enough, billionaire Warren Buffet (no. 6 on the Forbes billionaire rankings) owns a gaggle of insurance companies, and his pal Bill Gates (no. 3) is rumoured to be the mastermind behind the lockdowns... 

Which is why we figured it was the right thing to do to drive out to Red Bay. 

As for the fish and chips, highly recommended!

 

Which lives matter most?

They've been having quite a time of it out in Alberta with the "second wave," possibly because they came out of the first wave relatively unscathed, leaving an abundance of low-hanging fruit lingering in the long term care homes. In reading up on the pandemic in Alberta I learned that the average age of a covid death in the province is 82, and will typically have at least three co-morbidities, the most common of which is dementia.

Those are the people we've been killing the economy for in order to "save lives." There isn't a jurisdiction in the world where anything remotely resembling lockdown would have been contemplated based on the mortality rates of those under age 65. Deaths globally are massively skewed towards the elderly. 

Ironically, society otherwise doesn't give a whole lot of thought, let alone support, to the elderly. Long term care institutions are systemically underfunded throughout the capitalist democracies, often to the point of criminal negligence. Until the pandemic, nobody much cared.

That's all changed! We gotta get the deadly virus under control! It's cutting years off the wait lists at the long-term care facilities! OMG!!!

LOCK'r DOWN TIGHT!!! MASK UP YOU SELFISH BASTARD!!!... 

So, which lives suddenly matter most in this time of pestilence? 

Not black lives. Not "all" lives.... the lives that matter most are those oldsters lying neglected in nursing homes, who don't know who or where they are, and are oblivious to the fact that their diaper hasn't been changed for two days.

According to the economics of this pandemic, those are the lives that matter most.

When the best and the brightest aren't up to the job

When it was revealed last week that Canada had offloaded responsibility for vaccine distribution to the Canadian Armed Forces, I was underwhelmed. After all, the Forces long ago morphed from being a "can-do" kind of operation to more of a "we'll do what we can as long as it doesn't a) cost too much, b) hurt anyone's feelings, and c) doesn't endanger the health and/or safety of the fine women, men, and others in uniform."

If that announcement was underwhelming, today's Globe and Mail headline on the vaccine roll-out is downright disturbing; "Ottawa searches for technology to handle vaccine distribution."

Huh? Isn't the roll-out set to start next week? 

If you're wondering why that should be disturbing news, allow me to refresh your memory with a flashback to the Phoenix pay system scandal. That's where Big Steve figured he could save a bit of money by replacing lazy-ass civil servants with technology. The system has been in the works for over a decade, was officially rolled out five years ago, and... still doesn't work!

Big Steve is long gone, of course, but the same Big Tech cartel that couldn't get Phoenix up and running with a five year lead time is now going to provide a nationwide vaccine tracking infrastructure in a matter of weeks?

Good luck with that!

Your daily dose of anti-China propaganda

Take a gander at the front page of the Globe and Mail today; "FIRST LOOK AT CHINESE FORCED- LABOUR CAMP," the all caps headline screams at us!

Great! We've heard so much about these "concentration camps." Finally Nathan Vanderklippe is going to provide us with a actual first look!

Alas, the 4,000 words that follow scarcely live up to the promise of that headline. He took a picture of some buildings behind a fence, where allegedly the commies are building daycares to free up parents to go to work, and other concentration-camp-type outrages. Vanderklippe taps a trio of "Western researchers" to flesh out his utterly news-free scoop. They are:

Professor Laura Murphy, a seasoned anti-China hand whose most recent Yellow Peril screed appeared in the Washington Post mere days ago

Nathan Ruser of the rabidly anti-Chinese Australia Strategic Policy Institute

Adrian Zenze, an anti-communist "human rights activist."

At the Globe and Mail, the concept of balanced journalism is dead and buried. Instead, a regular diet of anti-China propaganda, driven by the US State Department, is pretty much the only point of view we're going to get.

How to fake a pandemic in four easy steps

Disclaimer: This article is strictly hypothetical. I am in no way claiming that the current pandemic has been faked. I am merely suggesting that in the event that party(s) unknown were inclined to do such a thing, these might be some useful strategies.

Step One: Crank up the hype. The hype was being cranked unbelievably back in January. Yup, a deadly killer virus was on the move. Oh my God, it'll be the worst thing ever! Even then we were being regaled with comparisons to the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918-1920. Canada enjoyed three more months of over-the-top hype before suffering a single covid death.

Step Two: Create a definition of a new disease  that is so broad, so diverse, so inclusive, that virtually any symptom under the sun qualifies as a symptom of the new deadly disease. Runny nose? Could be the virus. Sore throat? Could be the virus. Headache? Could be the virus. Muscle cramps? Cough? Sneezing? Aching joints? Could be the virus.

Step Three: Once you have defined the scary new disease, come up with a test to detect its presence. Ideally, you should have a test that will be as generous in the detection as you were in defining the symptoms. If, perchance, your test detects a cold you had last year and calls it covid, well, better to err on the side of bigger numbers. Remember, we're just idly speculating about hypothetical people wanting to panic the populace with a fake virus. 

Step Four: Pump up the jam! Numbers numbers numbers! Cases cases cases! Never confuse the public by publishing test numbers anywhere they're easy to find. Otherwise folks might get wise to the fact that whenever there's a new RECORD COVID CASES headline, there was also a record number of tests done that day that never made it into the news.

That should pretty much get your "pandemic" off the ground! How long you can keep it aloft is up to you. If you're part of that exceptionally privileged cohort who happen to own the world's information infrastructure, you can probably milk it for a good long while.

What you do with that opportunity is up to you.

A brief respite from Yellow Peril hysteria

Charles Burton, a frequent anti-China ranter in the pages of the Globe and Mail, was at it again yesterday. Four paragraphs in, the reader is treated to this bit of speculation, "...the unlikely coughing canary in the coal mine of potentially cataclysmic global strife lies in China's recent diplomatic blitz against our plucky Commonwealth cousins in Australia."

There follows a list of "achievements" our plucky cousins have scored in their campaign to alienate their most important trading partner, a self-defeating policy if ever there was one. Charles recommends we show our own pluck by standing in solidarity with our cousins by buying Australian wine over the holiday season.

Burton is advertised as a Senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, an outfit financially supported by a bevy of A-list Big Pharma and Big Oil multinationals,  a variety of foundations, and the governments of Latvia, Japan, Taiwan, and the US. Its influence in Canadian media is deep and broad. There's rarely a day goes by when one or more MLI "fellows," "advisors," or "experts" don't have their China-bashing or Russia-bashing articles published in the Globe and Mail or on the CBC, or both.

Here's a timely rebuttal to Burton's warmongering by Tony Kevin, a former Australian diplomat, and one of the few Aussies with the pluck to speak out against the prevailing US driven anti-China hysteria: Australia sabotaged its own interests in China relations.

Since we're flirting with "potentially cataclysmic global strife," maybe we should call a time-out on the trash talk and take a moment to consider a point of view you'll not find at the CBC and the Globe and Mail. Maybe it will help us avoid the cataclysm. 

The greatest "democracy" diddle of all time

 As regular readers (hi Dad!) will know, I'm not convinced that it makes any significant difference whether Trump or Biden is in the White House after next January.

But this joke of an election that the world's premier democracy just put on would seem to validate the claims of every anti-American ranter who ever ranted.

The guy who couldn't get three dozen people to a town hall blew away all presidential voting records?

Get the fuck outta here!

This is the model of governance that America imposes on the world at the point of a gun.

This won't end well.

Fun with firearms

Let me tell you right off the top that I'm a firm believer in gun control. Between the ex-wives and the near misses, (and none of the partings would be considered "cordial" by an honest judge) if it was as easy to buy a gun here as it is in Ohio or Michigan, I'd be a gonner for sure. Heck, I wouldn't have seen middle age!

I happened across the doc on Hunter Thompson the other day, Buy the ticket; take the ride, or something along those lines. Thompson is largely responsible for the demise of both responsible journalism and proper English, in my estimation, but I was a big fan of his writing back in the 70's, as were ten million other pot-addled wankers writing for their college newspapers.

Thompson was allegedly a chap who knew how to have fun with firearms.

So the Farm Manager is watching this old Law and Order episode where the good guys are trying to pin a conviction on a gun dealer for selling a gun to a wacko who used it to kill people, and I'm watching a wacko who only killed himself with his gun, and naturally, we get to talking about guns and gun control.

In these parts it's probably safe to assume that nine out of ten homes along your concession road have guns residing therein. Me and the FM are among the "free riders" in this scenario. When the urban hordes head up this way in the coming "reset," after the grid goes down and all the supermarkets have been looted, it'll be the gun-toting neighbours who turn them back at the county line, not us.

My hunch is they'll be turned back a few county lines before they make it up here, but that's just speculation.

Generally speaking, the guns residing locally are legally owned and registered. Generally speaking, the guns that make headlines are not. After that whack job in Nova Scotia shot down 22 people last summer, PM Fluffy banned 1,500 models of "assault" rifles within a week, long before it came out that all the weapons deployed by the nutter came through illegal channels. 

(And that in itself is a factoid that is seriously fucked up... What? There's 1500 different kinds of assault rifles???????)

How do you stop nutters who use illegal guns by sandbagging legal and law-abiding gun owners?

Meanwhile, that media franchise most invested in gun crime, the Toronto Star, wins a fucking award for a how-to guide on smuggling guns from Ohio and Michigan into Canada.

It's a fucked up world.

Top brass couldn't drive Taliban out of Kandahar or racists out of their ranks. Should we trust them with the vaccine roll-out?

Canadians were aghast at the revelations unearthed by the Somalia Commission more than 25 years ago. The inquiry exposed a culture of rampant racism in the ranks of the Canadian Armed Forces and led to calls for reform. Fast forward a quarter century, and guess what? Last week the Toronto Star treated us to this headline; Canadian Armed Forces moves to crack down on racism and extremism in its ranks.

That racism nut is apparently a tough one for the Forces to crack... but that fact doesn't seem to temper the wave of adulation greeting the news that we've got a Major-General supervising our national pandemic vaccine roll-out. According to CTV, the military already has dozens of officers embedded with the Canada Public Health Agency. 

Same deal here in Ontario, where Premier Doug has tapped retired General Rick Hillier to oversee vaccine distribution. Hillier was the guy who stupidly promised to run the Taliban "murderers and scumbags" out of Afghanistan in short order. That was in 2005. By 2008 Hillier had retired from the Forces to pursue opportunities in the private sector, and today the murderers and scumbags are negotiating with the US government about their (the US, not the murderers and scumbags) final surrender, or, if you will, "victory." Hillier will trouser a cool $20 thou/month for his vaccine efforts.

Our future is in the most trusted hands our politicians can find. I for one am not impressed.

Why gold will triumph over crypto in the long run

 

There's certainly been plenty of easy money made on speculating in Bitcoin and the like. And plenty of money lost, too.

Yet as Bitcoin had its recent run towards 20k, there were numerous pontificators speculating that cryptos were displacing gold as a "storehouse of value."

Not a chance.

When the shit hits the fan, and as long we have a clique in Washington convulsed with the delusion that America must rule the world, it inevitably will, the world wide web will be history about fifteen minutes into the first day.

What's your Bitcoin worth then?

Gold, on the other hand, will keep doing what it's done for thousands of years; serve as a storehouse of value. When electrical grids are down and the internet is gone, gold will rule again.

An insult to every Canadian

Or at least every Canadian who still imagines this to be in some sense an independent sovereign state.

Check this out from CBC; US Justice Department in talks with Meng Wanzhou. 

You know the story. World Cop USA is hot to show Iran and China who's the boss. They make up some totally illegal bullshit sanctions, and then charge Meng Wanzhou, CFO of one of China's iconic brands, for violating those bullshit sanctions.

Getting their hands on Meng would be a real score. What a great way to humiliate China! And humiliate China we must.

They are communists.

They hate freedom and democracy.

They are determined to take over the world.

Therefore, we must hate them. We must rally with our allies to stymie them at every turn.

Meng was savvy enough to avoid US airspace, but when Uncle Sam tapped PM Fluffy with the job of nabbing her, Trudeau was delighted to oblige.

And here we are, two years later, and the Wall Street Journal reports that the US government is negotiating not with the government of Canada, but with Meng directly!

Because it matters not a whit what the government of Canada has to say on the matter. The government of Canada will be happy to go along with whatever decisions are made in Washington.

Winter strikes again!

Every year, winter catches me by surprise.

As a guy who survived long enough to get a pension, you'd think I'd have spotted the pattern by now, but no. Winter is a complete shock every year.

Although winter does not officially commence for a few weeks yet, the winter weather has moved in. The school kids got a day off yesterday, and the snowplow drivers are getting decent hours. 

December one isn't a bad time for winter to start. I would say January one isn't a bad time for it to end.  So things are looking good!

Not really. 

Every news outlet I turn to is still hyperventilating about Trump's reluctance to officially throw in the towel. The purpose of the hysterical hyperventilation is to make you think it matters whether it's Biden or Trump in the White House for the next four years.

It makes no difference whatsoever. If anything, we increase the odds of serious conflict with Russia and China with a President Biden, because he is very much favoured by the warmongering classes whose money elects presidents.

But either way, rest assured the rich will prosper, and the rest of us are fucked.