Canada election 2021

Singh is uninspired and hopeless.

Paul somehow managed to equate her brief stewardship of the Green Party with both antisemitism and anti-Black racism simultaneously, a rare feat indeed. The Greens will never recover.

O'Toole is just a useless tool.

Which leaves PM Fluffy a clear path to a majority.

What a clown. What an a-hole. Does this man-child have any redeeming features whatsoever? If so, I've never been able to ferret them out. Nevertheless, he's the best our vaunted democracy can throw up.

What an embarrassment to democracy!

The gentrification of Ontario's cattle country

For as long as I can remember, northern Grey County and all of Bruce County were considered "cattle country." The official mascot of Bruce County was "Big Bruce," a beef cattle-beast, whose twelve-foot-tall likeness still welcomes you at the northern approach to the town of Chesley.

A hundred acre spread up the road just came on the market at $1.5 million. A hundred acres let's you graze a dozen cow-calf pairs over the summer, plus grow the hay to overwinter them. In a good year, those twelve calves will fetch $12k at sale. Out of that you pay for your inputs. Hayfields need to be rejuvenated, equipment must be maintained and replaced, and veterinarians will occasionally be called upon. Your hundred acre beef farm might reliably return five or six thousand dollars in the course of a year.

Do the math, and you quickly realize that farm up the road won't be bought by a beef farmer. 

Instead, it'll either go to an absentee investor who will separately rent out the house and the pastures, or an affluent urbanite looking for a weekend retreat and a retirement option.

To the untrained eye, the landscape will remain the same. There'll be cows grazing in the fields, because neither the investors nor the affluent urbanites care for farming, and are happy enough to rent their pastures back to authentic farmers.

And that's an endangered species, the authentic beef farmer. The only young farmers getting into beef around here are kids who are inheriting the family farm and are debt-free. Not all farmer's children want to live the farm life, and as time goes on, more and more farms end up owned by non-farmers.

That's just common sense, given current market conditions. The guys who graze their cattle on my farm are a father-son team who own a couple farms of their own, inherited mortgage free, rent a few more, and have a herd of 150 cows. My guess is if you divided their total net annual income by the hours they put in, they'd be shy of making minimum wage.

On the other hand, they could cash out, pocket at least three millions for throwing in the towel, and the next generation of their family can live the good life in an exciting city somewhere. 

As much as they love what they do, you know what's going to happen eventually. 

On the plus side, the Audis, Porsches, and Land Rovers give you a nice break from watching nothing but pickups and John Deeres going by.

Latest toxic turd from Ministry of Truth: "prebunking"

We also know that while debunking falsehoods is difficult, we can inoculate people against myths by prebunking. Prebunking involves warning people that misinformation is coming their way - similar to how vaccines warn the human immune system to be on the lookout for dangerous pathogens.

That's a paragraph from an article titled At this point in the pandemic, it's misinformation that's killing people, from today's Globe and Mail.

Sounds good to me! Who wouldn't want a heads up that there's a load of BS coming their way?

Let's see now... that would require a central clearing house that could reliably sort bunk from truth; a "Ministry of Truth," in other words. Such an institution would of necessity be staffed with experts. Not just any old random experts, but experts whose expertise does not run afoul of Ministry of Truth guidelines.

In the case of pandemic misinformation that is now killing more people than the pandemic itself, the relevant experts would be drawn from the pharmaceutical industry, because nobody knows more about vaccine than they do. Their truths would then be disseminated via established and reliable media outlets like The Globe and Mail and CBC. 

Isn't that where we've been all along?

I would suggest that a great deal of "vaccine hesitancy" is due to the fact that the ever-changing guidance provided by experts and legacy media has left people confused and distrustful. As well, a lot of folks have by now noticed there are plenty of well-qualified experts who are never heard from because they disagree with the prevailing narrative, and as everybody knows, questioning official narratives is the enemy of science, at least "science" as the word has been redefined over the past 18 months.

So it's obvious we need an official arbiter of what's truth and what's bunk. Let the prebunking begin!

All hail the Ministry of Truth!

Lynn Legacy; one of the greatest hair-dressers of all time

True story.

The Farm Manager isn't a gotta-get-my-hair-done-every-week kinda gal, and thank God for small blessings.

But when she does have to get her hair done, only Lynn Legacy touches it.

Lynn's been pretty much shut down for the last year and a half, but things are opening up a bit, and the FM was able to get in today for a trim and a "bit of colour."

On the way home, we stopped for supplies at the Indian River LCBO. The guy behind the counter asked the FM for ID!

The Farm Manager will be celebrating her 60th next year, and she's not been hassled for ID in quite some time. Like decades!

That's some magic you worked there, Lynn!

Living with wildlife

Here's some shit you never have to deal with on the 20th floor of a condo tower in Toronto.

There is a bat making sporadic passes through the living room this evening. This is considered no big deal. We'd prop the door open and eventually he'd find his way out, but then the mosquitoes would get in, so best leave well enough alone.

There was a bat colony in the attic when we arrived at Falling Downs. In the early years we made very determined efforts to get rid of them. The bats won.

Last year was the worst ever for rodents, from mice to chipmunks. Yes, fucking chipmunks in the house! You think they're cute when you're camping, but wait till the little fuckers are shitting in the candy dish on your coffee table. That'll change your opinion on the lovable chipmunk.

And who can forget the snake under the fridge.

Mr. Bat just did another fly by. The Farm Manager thinks we should give it a proper name. She's got the proper attitude when it comes to country living. 

If you can't beat them, let's be friends.

Make yourself comfy, Batski!

Implosion or explosion, America is primed and ready to blow

Had breakfast with my old pal Kipling at the Teviotdale Truck Stop today, because you can do that again.

Kipling is one of those rare souls who has been blessed, if you can call it that, with the magical powers to cross the closed Canada-US border. That's because his cargo is deemed essential to national security, on both sides. He's one of the few contractors fully licensed to haul machine guns and mortars. Apparently national security considerations trump covid any day of the week.

In his stateside travels, Kipling has the opportunity to take stock of the country he's been doing business in for fifty years. He doesn't like what he sees.

He talks about "food deserts." I've read about that. He's seen it. There's neighbourhoods where you're miles from anything resembling fresh food, where people do their food shopping at the local gas station. There's entire neighbourhoods where people get by on Doritos and pop, with once in awhile gas station hotdogs for special occasions. Is it any wonder everybody in the Dorito zones is obese?

The only healthy industry in America today is the one providing hyper-processed fake food to fat people.

The infrastructure is third world, public health care is non-existent, the government is bankrupt, guns and despair are everywhere...

But, take your pick of Fox or CNN or MSNBC; all of them talk as though America remains the "indispensable nation."  

The wake-up call is long overdue. 

Me and Bella

There's five houses along the dead-end side-road where I take my morning walk. Bella's house is the first I come to. Back in the day, she would often join me and the hounds on the hike.

That ended with my first Bruno walk. Bella came trotting out, tail awag, and Bruno knocked me down and dragged me through the snow trying to get at her. I've been missing her ever since.

Today I took the morning constitutional sans Bruno, because he hates warm weather, plus Mum's home all day. Bella was lying in her driveway. I'd pretty much passed by before Bella realized Satan was not in tow, and suddenly, there she was, trotting along with me, tail going 100mph.

To me, Bella is the spitting image, if not the re-incarnation of a dog I had as a boy. Husso had the same shaggy fur in the same colours, and the same busy bushy tail that just says "Fahne hoch!"

When things changed and Husso didn't fit into family plans anymore, he was gifted to one of my father's workmates who lived about 40 miles away. He was back four days later, having traversed forty miles of country he'd never seen before.

I remember him every time Bella comes out for a walk.

Good clean climate-killing fun!

Another blistering hot day in these parts, so me and the Farm Manager grabbed a few coolers and spent the afternoon at our favourite beach.

Being a weekday, there's less boat traffic, but a handful of powerboats were conglomerating about a half-mile off-shore. Looked like a couple of them were putting out tubes with wee children aboard.

In due time, four boats and a jet-ski took off full throttle in the direction of Griffith Island. Three of the boats were v-8 inboards, and the last one had twin v-8 inboards. That's forty cylinders of gas-guzzling exhilaration!

Not to mention the jet-ski, and judging by the amount of air the pilot was pulling when wake-jumping behind the boats, that had to be another four cylinders.

The day will soon be upon us when that kind of fun will be outlawed. It's very hard to argue that this represents responsible or necessary use of fossil fuels. It won't be long before these boaters become social outcasts. They'll be as toxic as anti-vaxxers and Trump voters. Every responsible citizen must call them out.

But don't you dare call out the US Air Force for creating 100X more greenhouse gases every time a fighter jet is dispatched on another routine bullshit training mission. THAT pollution is the price we pay for freedom!

Million dollar townhouse the new normal for entry-level real estate

Get used to it.

We had some family business to attend to in the city today. Our journey took us to the northern reaches of North York, in the vicinity of the aptly-named Pleasant Avenue.

Pleasant Avenue was developed as a middle class subdivision, mostly in the sixties and into the seventies, when the middle class still had pleasant prospects. What's been happening in the neighbourhood, as in many other established Toronto neighbourhoods, is that whenever one of those 70's era middle class houses comes up for sale, it's marketed as a building lot. 

Hey Mr. Builder! Buy this perfectly viable four bed two bath home for a million five and rip 'er down. Put up four thousand feet of vinyl siding and particle board, (with quartz counters and Miele appliances, of course!) and turn it over for three million! 

Don't laugh. It's happening all over town.

But it's all affordable housing, because as my dear Daddy used to remind me, and he was in the business for fifty years; if somebody bought it, it must have been affordable.

What's even more amazing is that as we're negotiating our way into the city, we pass one "townhouse" development after another that isn't anywhere near anything that could be considered a town. There's million dollar plus "towns" for sale off King Road, where you're half-way between Newmarket and Richmond Hill, each of which is at least 15 kilometres distant.

How is that a town home?

But I digress. 

Point is, there's no housing shortage for folks who can arrange the financing on a million dollar townhouse in rural King township, or a three million McMansion on Pleasant Ave.

There is, however, a growing housing crisis for those who can't.

Canada's shameful betrayal of our Afghan flunkies

No occupying military can ever make a go of it without the assistance of traitors on the other side. That was as true in Vichy France as it is in Israel today and as it was in Afghanistan during our tragic involvement there.

Canada, having made big promises about ridding the country of murdering scumbags, and assuring the world over and over again that "we're not the type to cut and run," cut and ran seven years ago.

Now that Uncle Sam has cut and run too, the fate of our collaborators is suddenly front page news. 

And suddenly, PM Fluffy is making this a "priority."

What?

They've done right next to nothing for seven years, but it is suddenly a priority?

Yup. It's made the front page, and Fluffy's handlers noticed. That's why our Prime Minister has made it a priority. Nothing matters till media notice and poll numbers are at risk.

The Afghans who risked their lives for us weren't worth a fig till their plight threatened Justin's re-election prospects...

And suddenly he deeply cares!

Things you don't see every day: a hillbilly with a man-bun

I was just pulling out the drive when a white Dodge pick-up went by. Maybe a four inch lift with big tires that stuck out four inches beyond the fenders flares. You half-expected to see a set of truck-nutz hanging off the trailer hitch.

What a concept, truck-balls. Really? I mean, where would your head have to be at to come up with that idea? 

Hey Jeb, ya know what would really set yer rig apart? Some pretend testicles danglin' off the back!

Anyway, no truck-nutz; quite a relief, and almost a surprise, because surveys show that fake truck balls are more likely to be seen on Dodge trucks than any other brand. In fact, scientists have never seen such a phenomenon on any foreign trucks. Send me a pic of a Tacoma, Tundra, or Titan with pretend genitalia, and I'll send you a free Falling Downs beer cozy.

So Billy-Bob pulls over down the road to chit-chat with a chap on a tractor, and Holy Mother of God, if the youngster piloting that Dodge isn't sporting a friggin' man-bun that would be right at home in the Fruit Belt in Toronto!

Yup, when ole Bobby Zimmerman told us the times were a-changin', not even he could have imagined where we'd end up. Guys with man-buns driving jacked diesel trucks...

What the fuck is next? Gay farmers?

It's high time to add cannabis to food bank staples

Now that growing your own weed is legal, I can't be the only guy who finds himself with more herb than I can ever use myself. I can't sell it, on penalty of stiffer punishment than before it was legalized, so eventually I guess I'll feed it to the rabbits or something.

Which strikes me as a waste. There are legions of poor among us who struggle to buy groceries, let alone the little luxuries of life, like pot. Food banks have been a growth industry, to our shame, for decades now. There's nothing on the political horizon that I can see changing that.

So why can't we do a progressive and humanitarian thing? Why can't hemp hobbyists donate their surplus to the local food bank?

Be Afraid! Right-wing extremism a growing threat in Canada

When I was studying sociology a few lifetimes ago, there was a guy in the Soc Department at U of Goo who was already well into what would turn into a long career specializing in the study of right-wing extremism in Canada. Professor Barrett had an ominous warning for us; right-wing extremism was a growing threat!

Almost fifty years later, right-wing extremism is still a growing threat, according to the CBC, except the threat seems to have moved online. Yes, those nefarious basement-dwelling fascist nose-pickers are plotting the overthrow of democratic pluralism. They are furthering their evil plans for world domination by sending hurtful social media messages from the grubby underbelly of the internet. 

The CBC story is entirely based on a report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, one of many similar NGOs policing cyberspace for deviations from acceptable political thought. Take a moment to peruse their Partnerships and Funders page. You've got a smattering of billionaires, the governments of Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, and USA, as well as the entire gamut of tech giants from Amazon to Facebook to Microsoft to YouTube, and there is NOTHING their combined resources can possibly do to stem the tide of racist hate emanating from the basement dwellers!

Colour me skeptical. If the tech giants can silence the White House when it suits them, surely they've got the ability to silence these wack jobs if they were at all serious about it.

Which they're not. 

Think about it. There are literally thousands of otherwise unemployable poly-sci and soc grads gainfully employed in academia, government, think tanks, and NGOs, ferreting out right-wing extremism on the internet and issuing earnest reports. Were this menace ever to be vanquished, they'd all be unemployed!

The tide of right-wing extremism is forever rising because exposing imaginary threats to American Exceptionalism has become a niche career with great prospects. The billionaires enjoy funding this nonsense because it keeps the little people at one another's throats, instead of considering their common interests, which are most definitely not the interests of the billionaire class.

Get your conspiracy ducks in a row

I've been studying up on conspiracy theories more than I care to admit, but I think I've sorta got things figured out, for the most part, at least somewhat.

Black Lives Matter and affiliated Marxist enterprises are all funded by billionaires and their foundations. Billionaires are by definition capitalists, who are secretly Marxists. Joe Biden is ushering in a communist revolution, because that's what you do when you have record levels of Wall Street (ie Marxist) campaign money. The Chinese communists want to take over the world, but the Biden communists don't like them, so we have to have a nuclear war to see who is a better communist. Climate change will kill us all if covid and communism don't, and that's why we should ban bad thoughts from the internet, and especially ban bad thoughts about vaccine, because bad people. 

And there's always the distinct possibility that Jews are behind it all.

Hope that helped.

Western forest fires obscure the skies at Falling Downs

It's not unusual to have a hazy summer day. Usually the haze lifts once the sun has been up for a few hours, but we're on our second day with no sign of blue in the sky. When you have hundreds of forest fires burning out west, the smoke eventually drifts here. It's not a headline story at CBC yet, but they'll find it eventually, and it'll inspire dozens of hysterical climate panic stories.

As a retired person who no longer has a purpose in life, otherwise known as a "job," I have lots of time to sit on the stoop and watch the world go by. What I've noticed is that around here most of the world goes by in large four-door four-wheel-drive pick-up trucks. These trucks are typically propelled by more torque than you'd find in a fifty-year-old Freightliner that used to haul twenty ton loads cross-country.

The trucks going by here are mostly used to haul one lone dude back and forth to work.

I don't get it.

There is no substitute for honest hard work

It was back in the 70s that Americans first noticed that Japan had gotten off the mat. Not only were they building cars, they were building cars Americans wanted to buy.

By the 80s, you heard an element of alarm from certain quarters about how Japan was fast gaining on American industrial supremacy. You'd read articles decrying the fact that in Japan they graduated one lawyer for every ten engineers. In America it was the opposite. With MBAs the difference was even more extreme.

Fast forward fifty years and look around you. This is the result of prioritizing paper-shufflers over people who do productive work. What bright young student wants an engineering degree, when everybody knows it's financial engineers who make the real money. 

The dystopia you barely recognize as America when you watch the news is the direct result of that mindset. Our culture glorifies the idle rich and the rapacious billionaire oligarchs, while we under-pay, exploit, and generally shit all over real people doing work that actually matters.

Sooner or later, America will have to make that right.

Why waste good money on bag tags when you can just toss your trash off the escarpment?

Took a bike ride today, along the Georgian Range Road heading towards Big Bay. Thought I noticed that old-time city dump smell hanging in the air. Got off the bike to investigate. Peeked over the edge of the escarpment, and this is what I saw.

That's a lovely assortment of construction refuse and household garbage. The red object in the centre is a snowblower, and I thought I saw evidence of a lawn tractor too.

Whoever is doing this, give me a call and I'll fix you up with some bag tags.

Bob and Leroy stole a case of beer

1. If Bob had 2 and Leroy had  3, how many beers were left?

2. Expressed as a fraction in lowest terms, how much of the stolen beer did Bob consume?

3. Expressed as a fraction in lowest terms, how much of the stolen beer did Leroy consume?

4. Optional question for students who get this far before the end of class;  Bob and Leroy sold the rest of the beers for two bucks each at Boiler Beach. How much money did they take in?

__________

That's a ready-to-go worksheet for you 9L math teachers. As for the lesson, just bring in a case of beer. Show the kids that there's 24 in there (although virtually all 9L kids already know this) and 24/24 is a whole number, whereas after somebody drinks one (pick a volunteer, and you'll have lots) we are in the brave new world of FRACTIONS!

That's how you get kids interested in learning fractions, one of the biggest hurdles in math education.

What you might not know about academic streaming

Academic streaming; parsing the grade nine students into more able and less able prospects in critical subjects like English and math.

Streaming is much in the news recently. The can-do academic stream is what will get you into university. The "I don't get it" applied stream will lead to a life of poverty and despair, according to prevailing wisdom.

What I've never seen acknowledged in media coverage of the issue, is that there is actually a third stream, the "Locally Developed" cohort.

Those are courses, fully endorsed by the Ministry of Education, aimed at those kids who still don't get it when they're in the "I don't get it" applied class. School Boards use them to fluff up their graduation stats. 

In theory, these courses were only open to kids who were within two grade levels of Ministry expectations. In reality, I was teaching kids who were anywhere from two to seven grade levels behind. In other words, a kid could show up in my grade nine math class with grade two math skills.

There's no point trying to foist the grade seven or eight curriculum on kids with grade two skills, so as a teacher I did what I should; meet them where they're at and help them move forward. If they made an effort and showed some progress, they got the credit. You could do your mandatory three maths required for a high school diploma without ever showing competence in anything beyond grade four math! 

Insofar as my math-teaching experience reflected the race issues behind the current move to de-stream math instruction, I never really made any connections. I'd meet the odd Black or Indigenous kid, but most of my students were white boys who chewed tobacco. 

I guess the good news for them is unless you want to be a math professor or an engineer, grade four math is more than enough to get you through life.

CBC a conduit for US propaganda

Check out this CBC story on Cuba. A handful of anti-revolutionary agitators are interviewed, and to no-one's surprise, they are miffed that Canada isn't doing more to stand up to authoritarians in Havana.

For over 60 years the US has used all available means to strangle the Cuban revolution, so that the benighted Cuban people can partake of the fruits of democracy and American friendship.

While the US has been busy putting the screws to Cuba, there is another country, only fifty miles to the east, that has enjoyed the warm embrace of American friendship throughout that time; Haiti. The people of Cuba enjoy a better standard of living, by any conceivable metric, in spite of sixty years of American sanctions, sabotage, and subversion, than the people of Haiti.

Insofar as Canada is an independent nation with its own foreign policy, and insofar as we put actual human rights ahead of currying favour in Washington, we should be denouncing the American campaign against Cuba, not cheering it on.

Unleashing the flip-flops of death

Had a busy day today, for a retired guy. Nothing else on my calendar till the end of August, so at least I can take a much-needed breather.

Went to breakfast with a retired teacher who, although he is several years my junior, left the teaching profession six months before me. He must have hated the fuckers even more than I did!

When retired teachers talk about "the fuckers," they're not talking about students. For the most part, they're not talking about their colleagues either.

No, they'd be talking about admin.

Ask any retired teacher you meet, and 99% will verify this. The other 1% are still hoping they'll be called back in.

My personal nemesis for the last ten years of my career was Floocy (not her real name.) She didn't bring the most horsepower to the admin pool, but by sheer ass-kissing, mendacity, and determination, she eventually found herself in a principalship. 

That was about ten years ago. Then, a day after I hand in my retirement notice, she announces her retirement!

The bitch! I woulda stayed another five years if I'd known she was outta there!

Anyway, what's done is done. 

We had a break from the rains today, and the side-yard got done too. I've broke down the grass-cutting deal into three separate units (known as "chunking" in edu-jargon), and the side yard takes about a tank of gas and an hour of my time. I used to do the whole thing all at once, but now that I'm retired, I try to pace myself.

That gave me time for a quick shower before my visit to Doctor Bob's Dental Emporium for an hour with one of his hygienists. I probably don't need to have another shower till around the end of August, now that I think about it. Must be saving a bundle on hot water!

After the stress of the dentist office, I need to unwind at the beach, so I picked up the Farm Manager and Bruno and a few coolers, and we sat by the water for a spell. (By the way, how utterly idiotic is it to force barbers and hairstylists to close down, while the dental hygienist gets to play in the saliva of a dozen strangers in the course of her working day? Where's the science on that?) (Spoiler alert: dentists invest more in lobbying, and money trumps both common sense and science every time.)

After such a busy day, I thought I'd settle into my easy chair with my laptop. Got comfortable out on the stoop, and busied myself reading up on Petra Kelly and Green politics, because that's something I find interesting at the moment. 

The next moment, I might be swept away by the mystery of how the power-to weight ratio of the 2021 Hemi Challenger compares to that of the 1971 model. Holy shit, there's fifty friggin' years, half a century, between the old Hemi Challenger and the new one! They even look the same when they're going down the road! It's not just the Green Party spinning its wheels on wet grass!

Yes, the internet is great, isn't it? 

But I digress. While I'm researching Petra, I'm being pestered by flies. They're bad this year. Eventually I remove my flip-flops and start whackin' 'em. Cheap plastic on hard concrete makes a sound not unlike a gunshot, which got Bruno and the FM all excited...

What's going on out here?

I'm unleashing the flip-flops of death...

Epic fail: Green Party paints itself as anti-Black and anti-Jewish all in one go!

I had high hopes for Green Party politics when they first emerged as a formal political party in Germany back in the Petra Kelly days. 

Petra Kelly styled herself an "ecofeminist," which has a cool ring to it even forty years later, and the political potential of green politics fired up a lot of imaginations back in the day.

Alas, forty years on, Green parties everywhere are spinning their tires on wet grass. The German greens are a NATO-positive eco-fascist movement now. And the Canadian version is busy consigning itself into oblivion even as I write these words.

The Green party in Canada was always the preserve of political dilettantes, at least in the upper echelons. Their modest grassroots very occasionally managed to elect someone to parliament. When Annamie Paul was elected national leader last year, I originally saw grounds for optimism.

Paul was the first leader of a national political party in Canada who was Black.

She was also the first Jewish woman to lead a national political party!

They elected a Black Jewish woman. What could be more progressive than that? To my mind, they'd hit a three-run homer in the virtue-signalling sweepstakes! Don't diss virtue signalling. How do you think Justin got elected? Why do you think he's miles ahead in the polls now? 

Yet, a series of unforced errors have left the Greens absolutely irrelevant.

Why and how did this happen?

Chelsea Cogswell is a national hero!

Bombardier Cogswell stands accused of feeding pot-infused cup-cakes to her fellow bombardiers in the Canadian Armed Forces, practicing up for war on our adversaries.

I gotta say I stand with Bombardier Cogswell on this one.

If only we could get more of the top brass and their political bosses onto your special cupcakes!

The wolf would lie down with the lamb in no time!

Words that must never be spoken

Goes without saying, top 'o the list has got to go to the much-feared "N-word."

Look what happened to Wendy Mesley. She used to be a marquee name at the CBC. I had the misfortune of reading her weepy apologia in the Globe and Mail the other day. Seems a couple of highly-educated Black professionals were struck down with PTSD when they heard Mesley say you-know-what instead of "N-word" at a team meeting.

I guess I'll never have a political career, because if someone were to comb through my 6000+ posts, they'd discover oh, maybe a dozen or so actual N-words. Like Mesley, I never used the word with malice, but that doesn't matter anymore.

Also like Mesley, I don't consider myself a white supremacist, although today denial is largely considered a proof. The kind of Black people struck down by PTSD at the sound of the N-word strike me as the kind of people who wallow in the turgid pool of micro-aggressions.

Wonder what Alvin Ailey would have to say about micro-aggressions? Wonder how many of the recently woke even recognize that name?

According to the CBC, the "S-word" has joined the list of words that must never be spoken. 

Squaw.

An intrepid CBC reporter found a few Indigenous females who were totally crushed when some racist redneck referred to them with the S-word. The Indigenous cohort referenced in the story skewed heavily towards poets and community activists. 

The Indigenous women I know, a cohort skewed heavily to the gals who work at the gas station and the smoke shop, would just bust my nose and kick my ass if such idiocy ever slipped past my lips!

That strikes me as a far healthier response than a lifetime of PTSD. 

Next challenge for corporate Canada: find some Black Canadians with disabilities

The back page of The Globe and Mail's Report on Business today carries a full page advert from the Canadian Foundation for Physically Disabled Persons. They want to shine light on their "A Seat at the Table" initiative, which seeks to place more persons with disabilities in corporate directorships. Here's the pitch.

Canadians with disabilities can make a great impact on your board. This rich talent is now going untapped. CFPDP, at no cost, is offering to help your business find highly qualified candidates through a unique vetting process. Here are just a few of our candidates.

Then we're treated to the pictures of seven white dudes and a white woman!

What?! 

Surely they must have some visible minority candidates? 

Or do they sit at a different table?

Haiti: here we go again

Looks like the long-suffering people of Haiti are in for more suffering.

Haiti was the only slave state where the slaves liberated themselves. Every place else, white folks freed the slaves. In Haiti, they actually had a revolution. That was around the turn of the century. The 18th century.

The colonial masters have been extracting vengeance ever since. Haiti has been non-stop subjugated and systemically looted for over two hundred years now. 

After all that help, they still can't get their shit together!

Canada has a particularly shameful legacy in Haiti. How long have we been "aiding" Haiti by training their police? And what is the result? And why do we never talk about our complicity in overthrowing the democratically elected Aristide? 

What's left of the puppet government is now formally asking for help from the puppet-masters. Be sure it will come soon.

The yoke of subjugation must be restored.

Buried deep inside every pensioner is a 16 yo wondering what the f@ck happened

Remember when you were 16?

Remember all the shit you were gonna do before you were 30?

You'd be a millionaire by then, for sure. Maybe even working on your second million. Remember, a million used to mean something back in the day.

Now, any schmuck who bought a house in Toronto thirty years ago, and paid it off, is a millionaire.

By the time you were thirty, you'd not only be a millionaire, you'd be living with the hottest chick in your high school. You'd have a couple of genius kids who modelled in their spare time. You'd have a Cadillac and a Corvette in the garage, and a nice four-wheel-drive truck to tow your bass boat to the boat ramp.

Of course, by the time you were thirty, you'd no doubt have a waterfront summer place with a boathouse, so that boat trailer would be redundant...

Well, by now you know how all that turned out.

You're a pensioner now, still working on that first million. The kids' modelling days are well behind them. By the time you were done paying alimony and child support to your high school hottie you were well into middle age, and so was she...

The new Corvette is a bargain at $70k. Unfortunately, at this stage of life, even if I were able to shoe-horn myself into one, I'd never be able to get out.

Own your own home for under 60,000 Canadian $

 Check it out.

Nothing fancy, but you own it! And you own the land it sits on, which is the main thing.

That used to be why people invested in real estate. You owned the land! 

That was such a novelty for all those immigrants from eastern Europe who got off the boat back in the fifties. Now they own most of the real estate around the GTA. That's why 60k won't get you a parking spot in Toronto.

But it'll get you a roof over your head and a half acre of land in New Brunswick.

And the local fish processing plant is always hiring. 

This $2million house is only $385,000 in New Brunswick. Think of the Lambo you could buy!

I dare say you couldn't replicate this place anywhere within a two hour commute of Yonge and Front for less than a million bucks. And in the city proper, forget about it! A vacant lot that size will run you at least that.

More smart young folks should consider the possibilities, and not just recent immigrants and high-school drop-outs. If you're a Bay Street analyst who can work from home, ditch your over-priced sloppily built million dollar condo, and get real in New Brunswick!

Imagine the Lambo you could buy with the savings!

Get your head out of your @ss and your @ss out of Toronto

I for one am sick and tired of listening to folks bleating about how they can't afford to live in Toronto anymore. Real estate speculators and immigrants are forcing them out. Mostly that's new immigrants forcing out the previous ones. 

Why does everybody have to live in Toronto?

That's where the jobs are.

For the folks with minimum skills and experience, those entry-level jobs are available everywhere, not just in Toronto, and shit jobs pay shit wages clear across the country.

That's why I can't figure out why more folks don't take those crappy jobs out east. The pay is the same, but you can buy a three bed two bath place on a spacious country lot overlooking the Saint John River for well under two hundred.

According to the TD Mortgage Calculator, you can carry a two hundred thousand dollar mortgage for under $1000/month. That's half the price of an apartment in Toronto!

There's all kinds of jobs available for anyone willing to work. Minimum skills, education, and work experience will still get you a 30k/yr job or better. Any young couple moving out there to build a life can make their home ownership dreams a reality.

But you'd have to move your ass out of Toronto.

Hang around the fort long enough, and you too could become Governor General

What strikes me about Mary Simon's CV is the almost fifty years of service to the government. That would be the settler government.

Stuck in a tsunami of bad press re: those thousands of missing native kids from the residential school era, our ever-opportunistic PM came up with a brilliant PR solution to a bedevilling PR problem; make an Indigenous woman the Queen's representative in Canada!

The establishment commentariat has lauded this bold stroke. How refreshingly post-modern to have the colonial power represented by an Indigenous person! And oh, what wonders this appointment will do for reconciliation! A mere 410 years after the first English settlers arrived in Canada, the English monarch has finally made things right!

Although it's hard not to be cynical, this symbolic gesture is better than nothing. On the other hand, given the history of the past 410 years, let's hold the hosannas for now. Symbolic gestures are too often conflated by our political class with "doing something" or "redressing issues."

Time will tell.

The future of farming

I'm sitting on the front stoop listening to the neighbour across the side-road bale up about five acres worth of large round hay bales. I'd be surprised if there's more than a dozen bales coming off there. That will have a max value, depending on market conditions, of around $1,200.

The place across the side-road changed hands a couple years ago. It's a hundred acre spread and the house is a sister-house to Falling Downs, most likely put up by the same crew. The new owners are not "farmers" per se. But they do invest in the local economy.

That $1,200 worth of round bales pooped out of a $40,000 baler towed behind a $150,000 tractor. That'll feed the dozen cow-calf pairs they keep on the place over the winter. 

From a farming point of view, none of this makes sense. 

The numbers don't work.

But from a hedge-against-inflation perspective, the numbers work just fine. The play-farmers bought the place three years ago for half a mil.

They could probably turn it over for a million and a half today.

I hear Bill Gates is buying farmland.

 

Ukraine reveals secret weapon - Russians die laughing

Mission accomplished... so long as the Russians actually do die of hysterical, uncontrollable, terminal laughter. But how could they not?

Come on Zelensky! What kind of shit is this? You think this will speed up your NATO membership?

What's that?...  that's the new Trans Company A training up for the Azov Brigade?

Oh, beg your pardon. My bad!

Good one, Zelensky! That gambit should have you in NATO before the snow flies!

USA! USA! USA!!! America is down, but not defeated...

Happy 4th of July!

It's not the best of times for the Light unto the Nations.

They haven't won a war since '45, although God knows they've started enough of them.

The Germans have been building better cars since the sixties.

The other losers of the WWII have been building better cars since the seventies.

They're a dependency of Taiwan when it comes to computer chips.

They're a generation behind in hypersonic missiles and "next generation" fighter jets.

They've got the most awesome military budget on the planet, not that any of the adversaries are impressed.

Although they lost their own democracy years ago, you gotta give 'em credit for never giving up on spreading democracy to the rest of the world. 

There isn't a modern "developed" nation on earth that can hold a candle to them when it comes to people living in tents on sidewalks. Nor is there another "developed" country where routine health challenges mean certain bankruptcy.

And nobody, but NOBODY, is gonna come close to Joey Chestnut's new world record of downing 76 hotdogs at a sitting!

USA! USA! USA!!!

Proper etiquette when you're being robbed

1. don't panic, act normal

2. don't make eye contact

3. hand over the goods - your iPhone isn't worth dying for

No point letting a little armed robbery ruin your day!

Turban guy gets uppity - military coup coming in Canada?

Well, isn't this interesting! Canada's turban-sporting Minister of Defence is refusing to roll over for his betters. Talk about insubordination!

Harjit Sajjan is flat-out contradicting both the PM and the power behind him, the She-wolf of Galicia. They've told the CBC that acting CAF Top Gun Lt. Gen. Wayne Eyre is not fit for service, and what does Sajjan do? He turns around and tells the CBC, nevermind those two; I, who serve at their pleasure, have full confidence in the man.

Hmm... this can't end well for Mr. Sajjan. I'm expecting to see an imminent reduction in diversity in Fluffy's cabinet, real soon!

Unless...

Would the Prime Minister treat a white cabinet minister like this?

PM Chrystia Freeland and her front man Justin today reprimanded the country's top military officer for some personnel decisions arising out of the never-ending Canadian Forces sexual harassment scandal.

Normally that should be the job of the Defence Minister, Harjit Sajjan. He's the guy who helped Justin burnish his bona fides by becoming our first Defence Minister to sport a turban. Just within the past week Justin had assured the public he maintains full confidence in the man.

Alas, that was before Chrystia, aka Justin's brain, clued him in as to which way the winds of political correctitude were blowing. As in, look chump, a vagina trumps a turban any day. If anyone knows those fickle winds it's Chrystia. When making a speech about Canada's threat horizon as Foreign Minister, she listed "incels" right alongside Putin, commies, and terrorists. You'd have be among the PC cognoscenti for that to happen. 

As for Sajjan, once both the PM and the deputy PM talk for you in the media, they really aren't that into you anymore. Do the honourable thing and resign.