Kielburger kult death spiral continues

First time I saw a Kielburger presentation, I was underwhelmed. They obviously had a pretty slick shtick, but it was a little too slick for my tastes.

I recall one of the lads regaling the crowd with tales of his first mission to end child labour in Bangladesh or somewhere. Then he was in the paper. Then he decided to start a NGO. Then he met the Prime Minister. Then he met the Sec-Gen of the UN. Then he met Mother Teresa... it was a most cringe-worthy orgy of name dropping.

For fucks sakes, he's gonna pull the Pope out of his ass in a minute...

Sure enough! 

Anyway, I was wrong. Their little NGO caught fire. Soon they were building schools all over Afghanistan and Kenya and all kinds of other benighted lands, or "shit-hole countries," as some would frame it. On paper, that's not a bad idea, but when you think things through, it's pretty obvious that most of the shit-hole countries are shit-holes primarily because they've been ruthlessly plundered and abused by the "liberal democracies" of the West for hundreds of years.

So I'm not impressed by two-bit NGOs who are gonna make it all better. Nevertheless, they soon had hundreds of thousands of school children baking cup-cakes for fundraisers to build schools for needy children in less fortunate countries, an undertaking that apparently demanded a substantial real estate footprint in downtown Toronto.

The latest revelation surprises me somewhat. Sure, they overplayed their shtick, but not even I suspected they would engage in out and out fraud. According to the CBC, the Kielburgers would fly a big money donor to Kenya to witness the opening of a school built with his money. They'd have a big ceremony and unveil a plaque with the donor's name. 

A couple of weeks later, they'd fly another big donor to the same school and repeat. The article doesn't specify how many times they dedicated the same school to different donors, but we definitely seem to be in the realm of criminality here.

I wonder how many of the teachers who fell for the charms of the Kielburgers will embrace this time as a teachable moment?

Fake news even more fake than we thought

If you get your news from the Globe and Mail, CBC, BBC, or the major US platforms, you will never see this story.

The UK government has been contracting news organizations and NGOs to influence public opinion in Russia and other "adversary" states. That's another way of saying they are hiring propaganda subcontractors. The documents revealed in this story show that Thomson-Reuters, owner of the Globe and Mail, and one of the biggest media/data/information conglomerates in the world, are hot to trot in bidding for these contracts.

In other words, our "free press" is literally prostituting itself to government agencies for money, all in the name of fanning the flames of anti-Russia hysteria.

Here's a great interview with the guy who broke the story.

What a white culture's totem pole would look like

First Nations on the West coast have a tradition of creating magnificent works of art, "totem poles," to honour their ancestors. Expertly handcrafted by Indigenous artisans, they celebrate family or clan history through mythological references to spiritual traditions unique to First Nations culture.

Settler culture, on the other hand, is a little more materialistic. We tend to be more about hoarding stuff, so we celebrate our ancestors by keeping shit they used to own.  We're prime examples of that right here at Falling Downs. 

Here's what our totem pole would look like. For both aesthetic considerations and certain laws of physics, we should start with the larger totems first. Our totem pole has as it's base a 1999 Ford F-150. It was a hand-me-down from my father, and I believe he gave his dad, my grandpa, a ride in it once when he was visiting from the old country, so it's symbolic of the past two generations on my father's side.

In the bed we could put the old cashier's table from Gorbet's Fine Furs, which aptly references the past two generations of the Farm Manager's family.

We'll build on that with Uncle Henry's old console hi-fi, and maybe top it off with a kitchen chair from Uncle Murray with Auntie Mabel's art deco bedside lamp on top.

That should bring us up to a decent totem polish height, I would think.

However, I'm pretty sure you won't be seeing it in a museum or gallery any time soon

Ontario vaccination boss deems covid tougher than Taliban

Retired General Rick Hillier, drafted in to spearhead Ontario's vaccine roll-out for the modest stipend of $20,000 per month, on top of his six-figure government pension, is struggling to deliver the goods.

But that's not his fault.

There's misinformation out there.

Sometimes, even disinformation!

As a general rule, Putin's minions are behind disinformation.

But praise the Lord, there's a new sheriff on the world stage!... well, actually it's more like the old sheriff is back. You'll recall the old sheriff fondly. Sheriff Joe.

The old Sheriff brought democracy and human rights to Ukraine, Libya, and Syria. 

And thanks to General Hillier, democracy and human rights also launched in Afghanistan. 

Looks like Hillier is still firing blanks.

Just hold on to your hat to see what the new old Sheriff is capable of!!!

How unions were co-opted

Most of my shop-floor life was spent in union shops. USW, UAW, IWA, Ironworkers... probably a few more. It wasn't that I couldn't hold down a job. I just got bored.

But I did gain some insights into union politics. Not that I was into union politics; I was an IWA shop steward for a few months, and that's it, but I have a few observations.

At the factory level, unions are very democratic. Anybody can run for anything. General apathy has been killing that democracy since as long as I can remember. 

Guys get a job at a union shop. They're grateful for the extra pay and the benefits and all. They might even make it to a few union meetings. 

Six months down the road, they don't bother with the meetings anymore. They've convinced themselves that the enhanced standard of living they've enjoyed since they joined the union shop is due not to the union, but to their own merit. Six months after that, half of them are convinced the union is holding them back.

That's what's at the root of shop-floor folks voting conservative while the leadership goes in the other direction.

Meanwhile, in the upper echelons of the major unions, a bureaucratic elite took hold, as they do in any organization, left, right, fascist, commie... it's the same dynamic whether we're talking about a department store chain or a NGO. (A quick shout-out to my old Soc prof Sam Sidlofsky. We had this discussion forty years ago.)

Once the union bosses are making pay packets that resemble those of the corporate bosses, they soon find themselves living in the same neighbourhoods. Their kids are in the same schools. Before you know it, they're golfing together at the same country club!

Once the big unions began to debase themselves by acquiescing to two-tier contracts, they made themselves irrelevant. There is no possible way the next generation could buy in after you signed deals that specified in dollars and cents how much less worthy they were.

 

How sh!t works

Here's a great story at CBC. What's great about it is that Daniel Leblanc and Laurence Martin, or perhaps their editor, were able to present the corporate/government spin while simultaneously undermining it.

The corporatist view is obviously self-serving bullshit. There's a vacation wonderland in the foothills of the Laurentians.  People who matter have million dollar cottages in the area. But the area has shitty internet, which, as you can imagine, doesn't cut the mustard with people who matter.

So the government pushed through and funded a pilot project in conjunction with Bell to bring fibre-optic cable to the area, and oddly enough, turns out that Bell CEO Mirko Bibic is one of the people who matter with a cottage there!

And that, Leblanc and Martin assure us, with what I thought was a nudge and a wink, was pure happenchance, completely beyond reproach, absolutely 100% just a happy coincidence!

No it wasn't. That's just how shit works.

Biggest Mafia case in Toronto history collapses - just as we predicted two years ago

At least eight police agencies in three countries spent $8m to bust nine guys with Italian names a couple of years ago. The cops made some extremely generous claims at the time, such as these dudes were kingpins in an organized crime network pulling in some $80b (that's billions, with a "b") per year. As of today, the entire case has gone down the toilet.

The latest iteration of shady groups threatening our way of life, for the moment, are the domestic terrorists. But before that, we had radical Islamists, before that biker gangs, and way back when, the original threat to law and order and democracy were the Italian immigrants who brought their "secret societies" with them.

Anti-Italian racism used to be brazen, vicious, and 100% socially acceptable. Unless of course you found yourself living in an Italian 'hood, in which case you inevitably found yourself making friends with your neighbours. It also tended to make you skeptical of the hyperbole you find in news media on the topic of "organized crime."

This kind of headline case pops up fairly predictably, and most of the time they turn out to be a lot of sturm und drang about not very much. These investigations keep lots of cops busy infiltrating and surveilling, often for years on end. That's gotta be a fun gig... maybe even better than the OPP Marine Unit, those guys who have the really tough job of lounging around on powerboats all summer. I was out at Cedar Hill beach one time and I swear I saw an OPP patrol boat cruise by with downriggers in the water.

No shit!

But I digress...

My point is, these cases collapse because there wasn't much to them in the first place. But it keeps a lot of cops busy doing fun and exciting undercover work. Don't expect this headline grabbing strategy to go away anytime soon.

Lessons not learned

You'd like to think society might have learned something from this plague. Something about how we value, or not, our elders.

The stats are stark. In Canada, the over 60 crowd makes up a mere twenty percent of cases, but we've got 70% of hospitalizations, and a whopping 97% of deaths! Generally speaking, those numbers reflect what's happened in other countries. This is a disease that picks off the elderly, and the more frail and sickly you are, the more likely you are to be picked off.

This fact has resulted in an inordinate amount of attention being focused on how we care for our elders. Too often, it is more realistic to describe our system of eldercare as warehousing rather than "caring for."

In the year since the panic began, much hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth has attended this topic. The truth is, we've allowed our eldercare infrastructure to be privatized. In many cases, nursing home chains are just another profit centre for a global corporation. The prevailing ethos in any for-profit enterprise these days seems to be, spending a dollar more on patient care means a dollar less in annual profits.

Paring the hours of PSWs to below full-time, instead of making this most essential front-line job full-time with benefits, helps the bottom line. As far as I can tell, there's been virtually nothing done to change this practice, even though multi-site part-time PSWs were a major transmission vector, a fact recognized early in the first wave.

Personal Support Worker needs to be a full-time job with proper benefits, whether they're working in a unionized government facility or anywhere else. If all our praise of heroic front-line workers is more than blah blah blah, things need to change.

And that would go a long way towards slowing down the next pandemic.

Deep State flunky in White House steers world toward nuclear Armageddon

Canadians of a certain age will recall the "nuclear umbrella." Back in the Cold War days that "nuclear umbrella" was a real thing, or at least as real as an article of faith can be.

See, it was the age of the red menace, the communist threat. The commies hate freedom and democracy and everything America stands for, so they have amassed vast terror arsenals of nukes with which to threaten us, our freedoms, our democracy, our very way of life.

Which is why we Canadians were so grateful to live under Uncle Sam's "nuclear umbrella," that being the even more lethal stockpile of nukes than the bad guys had. Thank goodness for that!

You'd think that mindset would have gone away after '91. The Evil Empire is Vanquished!

We are finally free from the threat of commie nuke annihilation!  No more need to cower under Uncle Sam's umbrella!

Well, hasn't quite gone that way, has it? 

As I write this there are very highly educated people in places like DC and Langley gaming every possible nuclear war scenario. Spending on nukes has been going up since Obama. You've got top military commanders opining on the prospects of nuclear war with Russia or China or both.

There's a power elite in Washington that truly believes in their mission of global domination. They make the USA the most dangerous threat to world peace and prosperity.

It's never too late to celebrate British Imperialism

Last week CBC had a feel-good story on the keel-laying for HMCS William Hall, the first Canadian navy vessel to be named after a Black Canadian. Here's a taste;

Knowing and seeing a Canadian naval vessel bearing the name of a Black Nova Scotian, a Black Canadian and a Black naval hero will allow those Blacks and other minorities throughout Canada to feel maybe there is a place for them within our ranks.

William Hall was also the first Black man to be awarded the Victoria Cross for his bravery in breaking the siege of Lucknow. Let's explore the context. It's the mid 19th century and the British Empire is approaching full bloom. Unfortunately, the natives are restless all over the place. The Chinese were in a tizzy about Britain forcing the opium trade on the country. Hall's ship was enroute to China for a bit of "imposing law and order," otherwise known as "flogging the wogs," when the Lucknow rebellion broke out, and the crew was diverted to India instead.

The Brits had a close call at Lucknow. Their garrison had been under siege for months and the situation was dire. Fortunately, the Black Canadian and many other minorities in the employ of British arms came through, and Britain's colonial rule over India was to continue for almost another hundred years. Hall and 23 others were awarded the Victoria Cross for their valour in breaking the siege and thereby ensuring the survival of the British Empire.

In other words, Mr. Hall got his reward for being a loyal servant of the colonial masters in putting down a rebellion by the oppressed, and that, not his skin-tone, is why he is being honoured with an eponymous navy ship.

OH MY GOD THE NEXT PANDEMIC IS UPON US

Yup.

Russian bird flu.

Sure. Why not. Anything to keep you scared shitless.

Or perhaps more aptly, to keep you shitting your pants in fear.

Have you noticed that no matter how good the pandemic news gets, as in right now when cases are dropping across the board, there's always another wave of scary headlines about variants and mutations and OMG there's a Russian bird flu on the loose...

When are we allowed to call bullshit on this very deliberate campaign of fearmongering that our trusted news providers have been bombarding us with?

Another great thing about getting old

Once upon a time I used to be capable of sitting in a pub and downing at least four pints before I felt a need to seek out the men's room.

Whether it was the Bastion in Victoria or whateverthefuck that place on Water Street was called in Saint John, or 1001 beer joints in between, I could hold my own, and that included my own bladder control.

Nowadays, not so much.

You can go from A-OK to I GOTTA PEE RIGHT FRIGGING NOW OR I'M GONNA PISS MYSELF in about two seconds.

The "golden years" indeed!

Sloppy Joe

The Farm Manager reads this blog. I think she's waiting for me to incriminate myself beyond the point of redemption. 

Fat chance! Overall, life with the FM is pretty cozy, and I'm savvy enough to appreciate it. 

So I guess she was catching up, and she clicked on the link I'd put in a post about Sleepy Joe a few days ago. 

A few minutes in, she proclaims; "that's what you talk like when you smoke pot. You meander along for ten minutes and then you can't remember what you were talking about."

Hmm... 

When the leader of the free world sounds like the pot-addled hillbilly from Bruce County, you'd best have a plan B.

Or a plan K. 

Are you ready, Kamala?

Internet anxiety

Internet anxiety. It's not officially listed at WebMD yet, but it will be. Needless to say, there are already a variety of pills available if you're one of the unfortunate victims of Internet Anxiety Syndrome (IAS). Lucky for me, I grew a wack of shit in the garden last summer that helps keep me away from the Xanax.

As regular readers will know, we live just south of the Middle of Nowhere, and our internet access isn't the greatest. At the moment, we're with an outfit called Xplore-Net, and apparently their entire network went for a poop this afternoon. 

So for a few hours, we were deprived of access to the internet...

WELL!!!

As much as I hate modernity and everything about it, I've become addicted to the 'net. No internet?

Oh my God!

What am I missing????????

Has Kamala become POTUS, and I don't even know?

Did we nuke Iran and I don't even know?

Has Premier Doug locked me down again, and I don't eve... hey wait a minute... are we out of the last lockdown yet?

See what I mean? There's an awful lot of shit to stew about if you don't have reliable internet access...

Or, you could just take the dog for an extra-long walk. 

Meet the sharpest legal mind in Canada

That mind could only belong to Canada's Minister of Justice, David Lametti. Opining on the cruelty of mandatory minimum sentences, the Globe and Mail attributes to him the following quote;

Imagine an overwhelmed single mother who walks into a store and shoots at the ceiling, scaring people but hurting no one. Is incarceration with a minimum mandatory penalty the right penalty for her?

Say what? 

An overwhelmed single mother walks into a store, pulls a Glock out of her handbag, and fires a round into the ceiling... hey, no harm done, and besides, she's overwhelmed. 

If there's anybody who deserves a break, it's gotta be them single moms. I say give her a break, maybe have her patch up the bullet hole on her own time... although being already overwhelmed, that too sounds somewhat harsh. 

Maybe the kids could help her? Restorative justice, family style?

But, what if it's an almost but not quite overwhelmed single mom who opens fire at the 7-11? 

Or an overwhelmed single dad? 

Or an overwhelmed married mom? Quite often married moms are even more overwhelmed than the single ones. Look at the jerks they married and you'll see why.

When you get right down to it, damned near anybody can have such a no-good rotten day they see no other option than pulling out a gun and shooting up their neighbourhood convenience store. Mr Lametti is clearly onto something. A one-size-fits-all criminal law is dangerously discriminatory and fails to recognize that every citizen is a unique and precious individual.

A few tweaks to our criminal justice system, and that "just society" Justin's daddy used to talk about will be within our grasp!

Thank you David Lametti!

America; the reluctant hegemon

Check out Robert Kagan's ode to American Exceptionalism at Foreign Affairs. The trouble with too many Americans is that their innate modesty often prevents them from seizing the mantle of world leadership that history has bequeathed them.

You'll recall Kagan as the co-founder of The Project For a New American Century. That effort was launched in '97, and the "new" American Century at the time was to be the one we're in now. Nobody pushed harder for new wars on Afghanistan and Iraq than the neocons at PNAC, which resulted in the first twenty years of the new American century being more or less a disaster, not only for America, but especially for those benighted lands where we were spreading human rights and democracy.

But a new dawn has broken! Time for a reset on American Greatness! With a deep state yes-man in the White House there's nothing to hold America back from achieving true world mastery!

Except for those cowardly isolationists who have lost faith in America's mission of world leadership. Buck up, oh ye of little faith! American leadership is not optional. History has granted America not only the ability to impose its will on the world; it has fated the USA with the moral obligation to do so...

There you have it. It's not that America wants to play global policeman and ceaselessly bully the rest of the planet...

 It's a moral obligation.

CNN discovers Sleepy Joe's a liar

When I saw the headline I had to double-check to make sure I wasn't on Fox.

"Biden makes at least four false statistical claims at town hall."

But that is indeed a CNN story, by no less a fact-checker than little Danny Dale, late of the Toronto Star, and now becoming a veritable institution; Official White House Fib-Tracker. With this story CNN is signalling they're going neutral on Sleepy Joe. 

By my estimation, that's just the first step in the big push for Kamala, the Chosen One. And won't there be universal jubilation when Kamala breaks through the glass ceiling and the women of colour ceiling, and the Asian-American female ceiling and the Black woman ceiling all at the same time!

When you check out this excerpt from the town hall that CNN put on YouTube, you know Joe's tenure in the big house is gonna be measured in weeks, not years. I mean, you gotta feel bad for the guy. He's just not keeping it on the rails anymore.

All hail Kamala!

What is the mission of Bellingcat?

You gotta love those Horatio Alger bootstrap tales that Western propaganda keeps shoving down your throat.

Little Bana.

Malalah.

The Syrian sniper babe.

Pussy Riot.

Darlings of the western media, every one.

Concoctions of our full spectrum propaganda war, every one.

Eliot Higgins, Brown Moses, and Bellingcat are likewise concoctions of the establishment spin-miesters. 

I mention this only because of the hysterically self-righteous article by Eliot that the normally sensible folks at Unherd saw fit to publish. 

The slippery little turd forgot to mention his sponsorship by Regime Change Central, aka the National Endowment for Democracy. 

You know, that "non-government-organisation" totally funded by the US government.

You would think that sensible people would see through that bullshit. If you follow Higgins' work you'll see what side he's on in the overall scheme of things. That would be the side of his paymasters in case you were wondering.

You have to marvel at the provenance of the Higgins brand. Another stay-at-home loafer, brought up on Chomsky and Pilger, has a lot of spare time, and before you know it, he is discovering stuff on Google Earth that even the sharpest tools in deep state spook bunkers missed!

Of course he is!

Coulda easily been so much worse...

I like the way we process a shitty hand as a good thing, because, after all, it could have been so much worse.

We're in a bit of a blizzard in these parts at the moment, and you're not supposed to be on the road unless it's absolutely essential. That's a blizzard lockdown on top of a covid lockdown, in case you're keeping track.

In spite of the double lockdown, we're still allowed out and about for essential services. That in itself is a bit of a lark. In Ontario under covid lockdown I was able to go to the dentist but I can't get a haircut. How retarded is that?

But I digress. I was making an absolutely essential run to the Indian River liquor store. The roads are a sheet of ice under a skim of fresh snow, and whenever the wind picks up it's whiteout city. I'm approaching Indian River corner, slowing up, I got the turn signal on, slowing, slowing, there's a GMC pickup well back, slowing, slowing... he's not slowing, there's traffic oncoming, he sees me, he's skidding and swerving, last oncoming goes by and I hit the gas just as... 

He clipped my bumper.

He was clearly going too fast for the road conditions. 

But in his defence, he said he didn't see my turn signal. Fair enough. Although I brushed off all the windows and lights before I hit the road, driving through ten kilometres of blizzard makes that redundant in a hurry.

We exchanged information and went on our way. I've got a crumpled plastic rear bumper on my Toyota that'll cost thousands to fix. He's got a slightly scuffed front bumper on his GMC. He'll get the scuff out with a half hour of elbow grease.

There you go; needless aggravation for no good reason. How to respond?

EUPHORIA!

Holy shit!? Half a second one way and he would have missed me althogether.

But, half a second the other way, and he would have bunted me into oncoming traffic.

It could have been so much worse!

There's always a silver lining...

"There's a moose loose aboot the hoose..."

When I worked at Frankel Steel there was a gang of steel-fitters and welders at the place who had been brought over from steel works in Scotland. This was the mid-eighties, and the UK was a little ahead of us in the de-industrialization race to the bottom. These guys were relegated to the dole back home and were happy to come over for a chance to earn a living.

That lasted a few years, but as the Canadian dollar approached parity with the USD, the competitive advantage for a big fab shop like Frankel, which did much of its work for US projects, gradually declined, and eventually they found themselves on the dole again. By and large they were an agreeable lot, and they had that great accent, that I tried to capture with that quote from a guy whose wife saw a mouse in the house.

I'm thinking of that because this has been a banner year for mice in the house, and although it's not much of a comfort, it ain't just us. Back in the autumn TSC and Home Hardware were both sold out of mouse-traps. We were catching 2-3 per day for at least two months. Thankfully, we seem to be winning; there's only been one mouse caught in the last three weeks.

Unfortunately, our ordeal is not over. Now we've got chipmunks in the house!

As a life-long camping aficionado, I've always enjoyed their company. They are regular companions in campsites across the country. Quite often, within a few hours of settling in, they'll come right up on your picnic table and eat peanuts out of your hand. It's always delightful, and the kids used to love it.

For some reason, the prospect of feeding them peanuts out of my hand while I'm sitting on the couch watching TV isn't nearly so delightful.

Forgotten icons

 Check this out.

Doctor John and Johnny Winter jammed once, and somebody was there with a camcorder. Actually, a network was there with a professional crew.

CBC radio is bringing out a new show featuring "Black" music. CBC has been on a woke tear the last year or two. It's as if the place has been taken hostage by a bunch of York U sociology grads.

Black Music?

Those two white guys I started off with were playing black music. What are the odds they're gonna be on the new CBC show?

I think it's a really stupid idea to politicise music. The CBC no doubt has expert consultants aplenty advising them what's black music and what's not. I have a hunch Doctor John and Johnny W won't make the cut.

Be that as it may, when the good white doctor went to his white reward, there were plenty of black folks in New Orleans happy enough to claim him as one of their own.

We won't be seeing that on CBC, but that's the real world.

Stereotypes

 

Not knowing anything about this dude, I nevertheless make some assumptions based on his presentation.

This is probably a kid who didn't get enough quality parenting. Or enough early intervention. A few hundred bucks in therapy sessions before it was too late would have saved the guy tens of thousands in ink and piercings.

I make a further assumption that, unless you're from a culture where facial tattoos are in some way relevant, folks who get face tattoos aren't too bright. I mean, there's plenty of ink options other than your face. Do you really want to be unemployable for the rest of your life?

So imagine my surprise when I discovered that the loser in that picture actually has some very intelligent things to say. His name is Tom Macdonald, and he's got a supposedly controversial video out called Fake Woke.

That's some crazy shit, eh? Billionaires using their media platforms to fan the flames of racial hatred? I think this guy is making hate speech against oligarchs. 

Watch him while you can!

Portrait of the pot-addled hillbilly with his dog

 Here you go.

Beer & pot and the fate of humanity

 I've been feuding for a few years now with my dear son Jake over this guy.

Jake loves the dude. He sent a rocket into outer space with a red sports car and an eternal loop of David Bowie's Commander Tom tune. Plus, he smokes pot on TV, and generally gives the finger to what we used to call "the man." What's not to like?

And I get all that. At the same time, this guy is also now one of the super richest of the super rich. He has unlimited licence to do all kinds of shit that would get you or me a ride in a police car, at the very least. 

His rocket science adventures tie him to the inner workings of the US military-industrial complex, and the blank cheque he gets there infuses his other adventures with an aura of legitimacy. What is the future for Tesla, that manufacturer of exploding EVs that is currently valued by very smart people who should know better as being worth more than Toyota/Ford/VW/Honda/GM and everyone else combined?

I'd like to believe in the dude too, but I just can't get there.

Donald beats Jesus to second coming

Although, to be fair, in Trump's case it's just the second coming of impeachment.

I don't get it. The Democrats are determined to give Trump yet more bragging rights. I can already hear him boasting to his billionaire pals at Mar-a-Lago; "Ya, and on top of everything else, now I'm in the history books with another presidential first! Greatest president ever! Bigly!"

My hunch is that pretty much everybody involved in this theatre of the absurd is acutely aware of the fraudulence of the entire exercise. It's no secret that actual democracy is long dead in the USA, long ago sold off to the highest bidder. 

Oddly enough, the highest bidders routinely come from the billionaires and the corporate crowd. American democracy is working very well for its owners.

As for the rest of you, sorry about your luck. 

Enjoy the show!

Canadian crooner "the Weeknd" stinks out Super Bowl half-time show

Did you see that?

Did that suck, or did that suck?

The Weeknd's management team obviously thinks their boy is bigger than football, bigger than the NFL... what exactly was that massively self-indulgent, self-referencing wank all about?

Remember when MJ did the half-time show?

Remember when Prince did the half-time show?

Those were half-time shows to remember.

Sorry, Weeknd, this just sucked.

"Walmart" becomes a verb

Just saw a TV commercial wherein a wholesome American family was explaining "why we Walmart."

Not why they shop at Walmart, but why they "Walmart."

I guess that's a thing now. We're not shopping... we're Walmarting?

As for "why we Walmart," let me offer a suggestion. 

Everything else is fucking closed, that's why we "Walmart."

Death by algorithm

One of my pet whinges concerns the algorithm's used to suppress wrongthink on the Blogger platform. I know it's not about me, because I'm not a Russian bot; I'm a mere useful idiot. 

A couple months after I started this blog I got an email from somebody at Before It's News, asking permission to repost it. For the first couple of years, views on Blogger outstripped views on Before It's News by a handy margin. As the algos were gradually refined, that changed, quite drastically.

In January I published 43 posts at Blogger, 42 of which showed up at Before It's News. As of today, those posts have a total of 607 views at Blogger, the biggest blog host on the web. At the fringe site Before It's News, where I'm on the fringe of that fringe website, stashed out of the way in the "alternative" section, those posts have 4,872 views.

Beware the warmongers

A goodly load of jingoistic claptrap infests my Globe and Mail this morning. Steven Chase gets the party started with a story about how some virtuous Canadian politicians are calling for a boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics, because of China's campaign of genocide against the Uyghurs. We know that to be the case because both Mike Pompeo and Tony Blinken say so, and we need to stand with our allies.

Next up is a Reuters' story about a US Navy "freedom of navigation" mission through the Taiwan Strait. The Yanks are keen on keeping the sea lanes open, because China could shut them down anytime, thereby instantly destroying their own economy. The fact this makes no sense of any kind won't prevent Canada sending its own warship through the Strait in a show of solidarity with the warmongers in the Pentagon.

Then we've got Professor David Welch from the University of Waterloo opining on the importance of "standing with Taiwan" in the face of China's aggression. That there has been no Chinese aggression against its rogue province in seventy years is a moot point; we need to stand with our allies in furthering US foreign policy, and in the long run the goal of that policy is regime change in China.

The opinion page features Robyn Urback chiming in on the Uyghur genocide before Konrad Yakabuski sees us out with a timely reminder that China is not our only enemy; let's not forget the ever-present threat of Russian aggression. 

The war talk is abundant on our state propaganda broadcast network as well. In little over an hour this morning I was treated to a lengthy anti-Putin rant by Madeline Roache, a self-made Putin expert, and a further run-down of the China threat by Professor Stephen Nagy of Tokyo Christian University. That may sound impressive, but Tokyo Christian University (enrolment less than 200!) boasts it is the only Evangelical university in Japan. Not to put too fine a point on it, but a professor from a evangelical school probably brings a certain set of biases to his analysis of the Chinese Communist Party.

That Canada is a non-entity on the world stage goes without saying. That we are undergoing a sea-change from a uni-polar world dominated by the US, to something else, should also be self evident by now. Under the circumstances, a policy of calculated neutrality would seem to be more prudent than rashly throwing in our lot with American Exceptionalism. I leave the last words to USN Admiral Charles Richard, head of United States Strategic Command, who recently stated that nuclear war with China or Russia, or both, is "a real possibility."

That's the problem with supporting your allies. If your main allies are war-mongering genocidal imbeciles, how does "standing" with them benefit the Canadian people? We need to rethink our alliances. Canada would be well advised to ally with nations working against nuclear war rather than provoking one.

Former head of Canadian Armed Forces General Vance couldn't keep it in his pants?

I have no opinion about this story but I do find it highly ironic. I seem to recall multiple news stories over the past few years about Vance vowing to drum this scourge of sexual harassment out of the forces.

I suspect the underlying problem isn't so much a failure of military governance as it is a failure of political correctitude. Nobody knows the details of the alleged indiscretions, but the entire nation has found him guilty. 

I'm willing to bet that over the course of a four decades career most folks would have at one time or another fancied a co-worker. What that looked like will of course vary from case to case, and indeed, some of those relations may have been abusive and should be called out.

But let's stop stigmatizing people who find one another attractive and want to make with them, as the Bard wrote, "the beast with two backs."

Heed the wisdom of elders

America's corporate media, duly regurgitated by the CBC, posits that Joe "the Unifier" Biden faces an intractable problem. However can Joe unify the nation when almost 75 million 'merican tards voted for hate-spewing, Putin-loving, white supremacist, Donald Trump? 

What to do? Obviously, these people are so stupid, the mere fact they are allowed to vote at all is a stain on America's democracy. How can they possibly vote for a man who told 30,573 whoppers during four years as president? What are they thinking? Are they even capable of thinking? Clearly, the prospect for unifying the American people are bleak indeed if you insist on including 75 million domestic terrorists...

(btw, nobody can claim Trump made America great, but he sure did wonders for the career of little Danny Dale, who went from scouring the seedy underbelly of Toronto's drug scene for those elusive Rob Ford crack tapes, to stardom and a million plus twitter followers as CNN's official Trump Fib-tracker.)

And that's kinda where things stand.

Which is why Stephen Jarislowsky's opinion piece in the Globe's business section was such a breath of fresh air. Jarislowsky, 95 years old, cut his teeth in the era before "business ethics" became an oxy-moron. Yes, that does make him something of an outlier in the modern era, but his analysis of where Trumpism came from is right on the money.

In a nutshell, Trump's base is what was left after American business and political leaders offloaded America's industrial sector to low-wage economies. "Free trade has killed their jobs and this, in turn, has killed their communities."

If Joe "the Unifier" wants to de-radicalize 75 million Trump voters, Jarislowsky has a timely tip for him. Rebuilding the industrial sector is not only essential to restoring the living standards of working class Americans, but such a restoration of manufacturing capacity is also a matter of authentic national security, unlike most of what is done in the name of national security today.

"If this is not restored, there will be more rebellion."

The hat I lost has been hiding under the couch for a week...

Not that it was much of a hat. A plain brown toque without the pompom on top. It sported a couple moth-made vents. Not much to brag about, but I missed it.

So we had to move all the furniture to coral the absent puppy toys, because they inevitably end up under furniture the dog can't move himself. Which means the really heavy stuff, cause you'd be amazed what this dog can drag across the floor when we're having a tug-o-war. I can be sitting in front of the fireplace in the La-Z-Boy, the one from '55 I had recovered at four times what the original cost, and Bruno the Barbarian will drag me all the way into the kitchen as we tussle over his favorite toy.

And so the toys end up under the couch, and so does my hat, and we rescued the hats and the toys today, and it's a great day for humanity.

We still haven't solved war or found a cure for cancer, but at least I found my hat.

Fifty years ago, no self-respecting person on the left would have dreamed of aligning themselves with the FBI or CIA

Things have changed in fifty years.

The FBI and the CIA have been rehabilitated. Comey and Brennan are heroes of the resistance. And, unlike fifty years ago, anything you read in the New York Times is Guaranteed Gospel Truth! Back in the day, your first reaction to mainstream media claims was always skepticism. 

Now, NYT/WaPo/CNN/PBS are the go-to platforms for truth-seeking lefties.

That's not all that's changed. Fifty years ago, the Black Resistance to 350 years of oppression gave rise to inspirational leaders like Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and MLK. Today, Black Resistance to 400 years of oppression is centralized in the corporate-sponsored BLM astro-turf movement.

Fifty years ago, most people still viewed the Democrats as the party of unionized labour. Now it's the party of union-busting hedge-fund billionaires.

Fifty years ago, Republicans were the war party and Democrats were at least more likely to talk peace, if not actually cease and desist from dropping our Paveway instruments of democracy on recalcitrant third world peasants. Today the Democrats are as keen on perpetual war as the old war party ever was.

Sadly, what we have witnessed over the last fifty years, is the wholesale betrayal of the interests of everyday working people, of all ethnicities and creeds, by both parties.

Sooner or later, blowback is coming...

Biden's Marxists take over

I saw that headline somewhere on the internet. Biden's Marxists. It must be true if you saw it on the internet.

But really? Biden's Marxists? 

Didn't they used to call Biden the senator from Mastercard? But now that he's pres of the USA, he's a Marxist? 

Colour me skeptical.

Unless credit cards are a communist plot...