Whoopi makes an oopsie

B-list Hollywood has-been and current MSNBC regular Whoopi Goldberg made quite a slip of the tongue the other day, something to the effect the holocaust not being a biggie, because after all, it was just white folks killing other white folks.

Seems it slipped Whoopi's mind for an unfortunate moment that one of those two groups of people happens to own the media-entertainment space. That's the space that butters Whoopi's bread.

Now that's an oopsie! If you're looking for Whoopi next week, check the C-list...

Having said that, I must say she has a point. While she herself has claimed to be Jewish, we, and obviously she, generally consider Jews to be white. Sure, there's a few who look like the racist caricature of a stereotypical Jew, but generally not. 

You can't go by the name, either. Look at my name, for example. Neumann is most often a Lutheran name, but there's plenty of Catholics and Jews with the same handle.

As for the "white" thing, that's a very malleable concept. There was a time when mainstream opinion, which was then Anglo-Saxon opinion, held that Greeks and Italians weren't white.

Even the Irish were suspect, at least the Catholic ones, which was always a real head-scratcher to me. How could those Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants spend decades, even centuries, at one another's throats, when they all love Jesus?

Not only that, but, at least to my eye, they were all white!

Whoopi will soon enough see the error of her ways, and provide us a grovelling walk-back.

When "girls" with wieners are re-writing the NCAA record books, you know America is doomed

Who are we kidding with this shit?

Don't get me wrong. I'm all aboard for gay kids not getting beat up in high school. That's why I was one of the staff sponsors of the GSA club at my high school for years.

That's cool. I've got a smattering of folks with various identities in the family tree, and I'm of the belief that you gotta be your true self.

But joining the girls swim team while you still have your dangly bits dangling is a bridge too far.

And it's the experts at the NCAA who have made this possible.

You would think that the masters of the "American Exceptionalism" narrative would recognize this scenario ain't gonna fly anywhere else in the world.

But no... America's best and brightest really are that stupid.

How are things going with Putin's "Freedom Convoy" in Canada?

The elite journos at CBC actually posed that question.

Our legacy media are desperate to disparage the truckers' protest any way they can.

It's pretty much the same story at our national newspaper of record.

I drive into town every day, and fork over $4.20 for my daily Globe and Mail to the Korean Extortionist at the Circle K store. Not that there’s ever $4.20 worth of news in the newspaper, but I gotta stay up to date on which way the wind is blowing amongst Canada’s ruling class.

Those fuckers read The Globe and Mail every day too, and man, I can tell ya honestly, they suffer some serious delusions.

That’s playing out in the public square as I write these words.

The top guns at the Globe were already connecting this weekend to last January 6 in DC two days before the first protester showed up in Ottawa.

The Globe reflects what our “thought leaders”/ elites/ owners/ wish to be the case, and it’s mostly wishful thinking.

In their wishful thinking, the world we have is the best of all possible worlds. More people starving while billionaires get richer is the natural order of things. Only stupid racists would disagree. Therefore, everybody who isn’t happy with our benevolent management of their lives is a domestic terrorist.

And only Putin could engineer such a turn of events.

That’s the level of engagement with the 99% in the pages of The Globe and Mail.

Left libertarian

When I was taking a Macro Economics course at the University of Guelph a few lifetimes ago, I had a TA who felt sorry for me and helped me get through the more mathematically challenging aspects of the curriculum. His name was Tom, and he went on to become a professor of political science at a legitimate university in Canada.

He's the guy who pegged me as a "left libertarian."

I liked the sound of that, but the other libertarians sure don't. "Left" libertarianism  does not exist in the world of the purists. Leftist tendencies are met with everything from condescension to death threats.

But even Hayek waxed wise about how much support is due the indigent. You can hate government all you want, but scraping human feces off your shoes after a walk in the park will make you pay attention to homelessness, and that ain't a problem the market has been able to solve.

Anyway, I'm still in touch with the guy who gave me that label, and we're tentatively planning to hike the Bruce Trail, Wiarton to Tobermory, this summer.

Ya, two guys crowding 70 are gonna tackle the Bruce Trail.

What could go wrong?

Worst case scenario; the big orange helicopter airlifts you to the hospital.

Freedom Convoy needs dude with turban at the front

That would defuse the slimy innuendo of white supremacy our legacy media are desperately trying to smear the protesters with.

Sikh leadership is what allowed the farmers in India to roll back odious agricultural “reforms.” The farmers took their own Freedom Convoy to Delhi… and stayed for a year! PM Modi climbed down. The farmers won!

There’s plenty of Sikhs in Canadian trucking, both as drivers and as entrepreneurs who own small to medium fleets. I don’t know enough about politics in the Sikh community to guess what side they’d take.

But imagine what this popular anti-government uprising could accomplish with the kind of leadership that faced down Modi. Imagine if those thousands of trucks don’t move on Monday morning.

Imagine if the Freedom Convoy spokesman breaking the news was a dude in a turban.

“We are prepared to stay as long as required to negotiate the end to vaccination mandates.”

Unlike the NDP guy and our former Defence minister, most Sikhs are serious people, and once PM Fluffy’s handlers realize they’re up against serious people, they’ll get serious themselves.

It’s time to end pandemic mandates.

Don't let facts disturb your faith in covid vaccines

I’ve often said that if we want to understand the pandemic, we need to look to what’s happening in Israel. That’s because Israel was first off the mark with mass vaccinations, and has one of the highest rates of fully-vaccinated people in the world.

Here’s a timely ten minute read, published yesterday; Israel is overrun with Covid. The vaccines have failed.

Long story short, Israel is on the second booster shot - four doses of Pfizer’s safe and effective vaccine, and they’ve got more covid than ever. This is not a new story and the trend has been evident for some time, but that’s done nothing to rein in media fear-mongering.

One wonders if that’s just due to will-full ignorance, or is something else at play? 

Finding plumb-level in a world out of balance

Here’s something to consider.

Before Covid-19, we used to get a vaccination so we’d be immune to smallpox or mumps or the flu or whatever. And that’s how it played out.

Now, when you’re double vaxxed plus boosted, and you still get the virus, it’s because of that selfish shit-bag who refuses to get vaxxed.

If you got vaccinated for smallpox and still got smallpox, would you be celebrating the effectiveness of the vaccine? Probably not.

Yet today, when the double and triple jabbed are still getting sick, nobody is allowed to state the beyond obvious; the vaccines just aren’t that great. Instead, we’re programmed to hate the unvaccinated.

It’s their fault! If only we had 100% vaccine take-up, this pandemic would be over!

Another scientific fact that changed in the last two years is the concept of herd immunity. Never before in the history of medical science has it been claimed that herd immunity can be achieved only with a 100% vaccination rate, yet that claim is routinely made and never challenged in our mainstream media.

Nevermind that the actual scientific consensus at the moment is that natural immunity is far more efficacious than the current vaccines.

And that’s just the mind-fuck on the pandemic file.

If that’s not enough to put you on anti-depressants, we also have the Ukraine file on the front burner at the moment.

Bad Vlad is gonna attack the Ukraine any minute now. He vehemently denies it, but that just proves he’s gonna do it. Russians are like that. Remember Nikolai Volkoff? That’s all you need to know about Russians.

And always remember; Russia is a nuke armed country itching for nuclear war

And never forget; even if you survive the virus and nuclear war with the Russians, you’re still fucked!

Climate change. 

And if you’ve been paying attention, asteroids. 

And there’s aliens out there somewhere…

Ya, it’s a fucked up and supremely doomed world out there, and I can see why you might reach for the Xanax.

Here’s some advice from a guy who’s been fighting cognitive dissonance since 1955.

Just say no to pharmaceuticals.

Take a walk in the woods instead.

As trucker's Freedom Convoy nears Ottawa, Trudeau announces he'll be "working from home"

Those thousands of pissed-off truckers and their supporters will be disappointed that no prime ministerial welcome awaits in Ottawa. Seems PM Fluffy had a timely brush with the virus, and must, as the science dictates, self-isolate for five days. By then the coast should be clear, and he’ll dare show his face again.

Of course, if the insurrectionist mob of smelly working people hasn’t disbursed by then, don’t be surprised if there’s another unfortunate brush with the virus, or perhaps a new science breakthrough that demands a lengthier isolation.

In the meantime, expect to see wall-to-wall demonization of the raging anti-vaxx science-deniers from our official government propaganda organ, the CBC. We will be incessantly reminded that only Trump-loving white supremacists question the safety and efficacy of the vaccines.

The idiocy of mandating trucker vaccinations at this stage, after having allowed unvaccinated drivers freely back and forth across the border as far more deadly covid mutations raged for the last two years, is obvious to anyone who has managed to hang on to even a tiny sliver of rational thought. 

Will 5000 Freightliners parked in downtown Ottawa get PM Fluffy's attention?

I was talking to a (very) recently retired trucker who plans to join the protest parade to Ottawa. He's taking his grandchildren. 

That protest hasn’t got much attention in the national propaganda organ yet, and what we’ve seen has been desultory and dismissive.

But it seems to be a happening thing.

The guy had been crossing the border several times a week throughout the pandemic. At this stage of the game, claiming he shouldn’t do that anymore unless he gets the “safe and effective” vaccine seems silly. Are we still flattening the curve, two years on?

He also says it’s about a lot more than vaccine mandates. People, at least actual people who do real work that can’t be done at home, are tired of being talked down to. They’ve been going backwards economically all their lives. Their kids are priced out of higher education and priced out of the housing market. Their dreams are massively circumscribed compared to past generations of working class people.

The CBC will do everything they can to portray them as anti-science morons, and most probably domestic terrorists to boot. There’s a lot of Asians drive truck, and hopefully they’re well represented among the protesters. After all, the Sikh-led farmer protests in India managed to force Modi to a climb-down, and he’s way tougher than Trudeau.

Alas, Jagmeet, leader of our putative “workers party,” has already denounced the protest.

A few thousand tractor-trailers parked in downtown Ottawa and Toronto for a week should get Justin’s attention.

I just got an electric bill for $267.09

The crazy thing is, that's not our main heat source. Sparlings dropped a load in the propane tank the other day and left a bill for fourteen hundred bucks.

What's even crazier, from a carbon footprint perspective, is we're heating 1900 square feet of drafty farmhouse, built the same year, to keep two adults and a dog warm

We're generally all found within a ten foot radius of one another. How does that take 1900 feet?

So there's gotta be a down-sizing in the overall scheme of things.

What that will look like, time will tell.

But it ain't gonna look like a townhouse in the city.

I admit it can be tempting. You move into something new, where everything works and nothing needs repair... at least not yet.

And I should probably forget about the shop anyway. I never did anything with the shop when I had one, so how does it make sense that I'd do stuff now if had one again?

Like everybody, I'm getting older. No matter my dreams, wishes, aspirations, blah blah, when you get older you'll be doing less, not more.

Besides, at this point I'd be happy turning out a few birdhouses from the garage in my townhouse.

Ya, there's a lot to said for an easier life...

Then again, where's the townhouse where you can take a piss off the porch whenever you have to go? 

The closer that gets to being every half hour, the more you want to stay in the country.

Pandemic Emperors' clothes increasingly threadbare

Looks like the end of the line for the Great Wuhan Flu. More and more countries are completely eliminating pandemic restrictions.

Not in Canada. In fact, now that the virus has pretty much run its course, our Pandemic Emperors in Ottawa and the media figure it's time to restrict unvaxxed truckers crossing the border. They'e been golden since the pandemic started. No vax - no problem, and that's back when the deadly virus was way more deadly than the latest mutation.

Suddenly, PM Fluffy sees the need to crack down on unvaccinated truck drivers. The federal Pandemic Emperors have spoken! And this bold stroke comes when our emaciated supply lines are already front page news.

Hey morons; if you got it, a truck brought it. Think it through!

But I digress. There are an awful lot of these emperors all across Canada. Because health care is a provincial responsibility, every province needs their own Pandemic Emperor, and of course, a robust support staff of experts, all of them drawing plump six-number pay packets and few of them ever seeing a patient.

All of them are replicating the same studies and modelling already done by the Pandemic Emperors in Ottawa, who are replicating the same studies and modelling already done in England or Sweden or Israel. It is an article of faith among these experts that the same virus behaves differently once it crosses borders.

Omicron was discovered in South Africa. From the get-go we were told it's mild but it spreads like wild-fire. Pandemic Emperors around the world have had to research those claims and find out for sure, often shutting down their societies and inflicting serious, often grave injuries on everything from your livelihood to your child's education.

And guess what? They universally proved the original assessment was right! It's nothing more than a bad cold, but it spreads like a motherf@cker. In fact, multiple teams of experts in many different labs generally agree the Omicron has an R value in the 4 - 5 range. 

That means if you get the virus, on average you'll pass it to four or five others, each of whom pass it along to four or five, and so on. 

Do the math. Since the Omicron was discovered, every breathing soul on planet earth has been infected at least twice. 

This isn't a development the Pandemic Emperors welcome. After all, it's a fun job...

Isn't it time to sack the lot of them, so we can go back to our own jobs, and our kids can go to school, and the CBC can talk about something other than how delighted parents are to find a safe injection site for their five year old?

It's time to move on.

Ukraine Army to train Canadian Armed Forces

Canada has embraced a leading role in huffing and puffing about Russia’s imminent invasion of Ukraine.

 That Canada is not hectoring the Rooskies from a position of strength is obvious. We’re among the NATO stalwarts who turned tail after failing to rout the Taliban “scumbags and murderers” from Afghanistan after twenty years of trying. In the end, the Afghan forces we’d spent years training collapsed so suddenly, we had no choice but to leave behind hundreds of Afghans who had risked their lives working for NATO.

With that failure fast receding from memory, we’re now laying down the law to Bad Vlad. 

Don’t you dare invade Ukraine, or else! 

Nobody knows what the “or else” looks like, but it sounds like we’re huddling with “our allies” to cook up the Mother of All Sanctions or some similar tomfoolery.

Doubt that’ll go far… Europe, home of some relatively important allies of ours, gets 40% of its natural gas from Russia. Once the sanctions bite, Canada will be able to replace that gas. Our European allies will just have to sit tight for ten or twelve years while we build out our pipelines and LNG terminals, and hope for mild winters till at least 2035 or so.

Meanwhile, if our humiliating retreat from Afghanistan wasn’t enough of an embarrassment, the Globe and Mail today reports that we can’t even get our Afghan interpreters out of Ukraine!

Turns out getting them out of Afghanistan was the easy part. In fact, all it took was a phone call from the Globe to the office of President Zelensky of Ukraine, and Ukrainian special forces in Kabul sprang into action to rescue a couple of their fixers, and spirit them to Kyiv. That certainly gives me a new respect for the geopolitical schlepp of our newspaper of record.

So here’s the grim irony; Canada’s bureaucracy is so incompetent we can’t even get these poor schmucks out of Ukraine, an allied country where our military has boots on the ground and where we’re training, believe it or not, Ukrainian special forces!

Maybe the Ukrainians should be training our guys instead.

Cat demands end to dog drool in water dish

I've told you about Doublewide. She's slimmed down some since she entered the double digits.

Overall, she's been a good cat. Used to be much feared in the mouse community, but not so much anymore. 

The summer before last, she took a huge bite out of the chipmunk community as well, which was somewhat unpleasant to witness at times.

Then Bruno entered her universe, and she was out of action with PTSD for a good six months, and is just coming into her own again. While she was side-lined, the chipmunks literally invaded the house.

After taking drastic action to beat back the invaders, no thanks to Doublewide, we are relatively rodent free this winter. But even though she's basically not contributing anything to the battle, she's more demanding than ever.  

She lingers beside the water bowl, which still has a half inch in it, and wails for a re-fill every time you walk by.

That's because when you share your water dish with big-lips Bruno, that last half inch is mostly dog drool.

So, who can blame her?

I wouldn't drink dog drool either. Why should she?

Globe & Mail walks back two years of hysterical covid fear-mongering

After two years of relentless fear-mongering, the Globe today gives four full pages to what until yesterday were considered conspiracy theories. I had to double check to see if maybe Joe Rogan or RFK Jr wrote it. Among the stunning claims:

• vaccine testing prior to approval was rushed and not fit for purpose

• vaccines have far less efficacy than claimed by drug companies

• natural immunity far more effective than vaccination

• doctors and scientists with legitimate alternative views were censored and silenced

• the Great Barrington Declaration got it right in October of 2020

• 303 studies confirm that Dr Donald Trump was right about hydroxychloroquine

• there are more vaccinated than unvaccinated in our hospitals and ICUs

In other words, the “master narrative” the Globe and Mail was so instrumental in creating and promoting was mostly a load of hooey from the beginning.

This is a most remarkable change of direction. Makes you wonder what media truth is gonna disappear next...

Putin and/or Xi not interested in world domination after all?

Fossil fuels are your friend?

Exceptional Nation not so exceptional?

The mind boggles...

We fooled everybody... except the health inspector

In my teen years I had a gas-pumper job at John's Supertest, out Waterloo Ave just past Silvercreek. It was a two-storey structure with a couple of apartments upstairs, and public washrooms, an office, and an auto repair shop on the main floor.

My job included keeping the public washrooms clean. Over time, there seemed to me to be more and more plumbing malfunctions, to the point I was spending more time mopping up toilet overflow as pumping gas.

We brought the situation to the attention of the absentee owner, who had bought the place as a real estate investment. Eventually a backhoe and a couple of guys with clipboards showed up. 

Bad news! The city sanitary sewer didn't run that far out Waterloo Ave at the time, and the septic system needed replaced.

The owner wasn't the kind of guy to throw around money on capital improvements if they could be somehow delayed, avoided, or simply forgotten. His solution? The backhoe had partially exposed the rotten septic tank, so there was an open sewage pit in the side-yard. He spent fifty bucks on a sump pump and fifty feet of plastic pipe to pump the shit and piss into the ditch.

That solved the problem of the toilets not flushing, but it created a new problem.

The scent of raw sewage permeated the air.

People would comment on it when they pulled up for gas. I blamed it on the City of Guelph sewage treatment plant, just down the road.

"Ya, I know! When the wind blows the wrong way, they stink up the whole neighbourhood. Ain't it disgusting!"

That worked pretty good for about six months. Then one day, the health department guy who does septic tank inspections stopped in for gas. Unbeknownst to me, his office was at the sewage treatment plant, so he knew what it smelled like down there, which was nothing like the smell at John's Supertest.

As I'm filling up his car and washing his windshield, he's walking around sniffing the air. His sniffer takes him towards the ditch. He bends over and puts a finger in the muck and lifts it to his nose...

I knew we were screwed right there.

He spots the plastic pipe and follows it back to our sewage pond. We're shut down on the spot.

Overnight, the owner found the money for the new septic system, and we were open for business by the next afternoon!

Alas, John's Supertest was eventually bulldozed to make way for the mother of all highway interchanges, where Waterloo Ave crosses the Hanlon. That monstrosity wiped out everything in a one mile radius except for a strip joint and the Guelph Bible Chapel, but I'll leave those for the next history lesson.

Dogs of war howling loud

Caught part of Matt Galloway’s show on CBC Radio this morning. He and his panel of experts were speculating as to what horrors Bad Vlad is about to unleash on not only Ukraine, but the “free world” at large.

Expert One was a reporter for a Western-financed internet news portal in Kyiv. Experts Two and Three were veterans of US think tanks lavishly financed by the likes of Lockheed-Martin and Raytheon. All the experts agree that Putin’s gonna go big if he can get away with it.

Yup, those Russian battle-tanks are gassed-up and waiting for the signal to seize the entirety of Ukraine… and who knows where they’ll stop? Poland? The English Channel?

That’s why it’s so important that all democratic nations stand united with Ukraine, because if we don’t stop Putin now, we’ll soon be fighting Russians in the streets of Brampton. The Big Dog, leader of the Free World dog pack, has made it abundantly clear that there will be no American boots (officially) on the ground, but we’re sending best wishes and rushing in hundreds of millions worth of weapons, so that the Forces of Righteousness can fight Putin’s hordes right down to the last Ukrainian.

For the most part, the hyperventilating across our legacy media studiously avoids any mention of actual Russian concerns, chief among them the steady expansion of NATO ever eastward. The semi-official rebuttal to that claim is NATO never promised not to expand eastward. Last Saturday The Globe’s Doug Saunders made the comically stupid argument that if such assurances were made, they were made to Gorbachev, not Putin, and therefore don’t count.

We tend not to hear much about the Minsk Agreement either. Kyiv signed off on that, promising greater regional autonomy to the predominantly Russian-speaking eastern areas of the country. Needless to say, that didn’t happen, nor do we ever hear any politicians in the West imploring the Ukraine side to honour their obligations.

What we hear a lot of is the sanctity of Ukraine’s territorial integrity and how Putin needs to give back Crimea before we can revisit “normal” relations with the subservient Russia of the Yeltsin era.

That’s an especially rich argument when Canadian politicians make it. Twice in my lifetime Canada has agreed to redraw its own “territorial integrity” if 50% plus one Quebec voters chose Quebec sovereignty. Prior to Russia’s “annexation,” a referendum was held in Crimea, and some 95% of the population voted to reunite with Russia as opposed to sticking with the crew of anti-Russian ultra-nationalists brought to power in the US-sponsored coup of 2014.

Double standards, anyone?

Yet here we are. The Brits and the Yanks are promising Zelensky a bonanza of anti-tank weapons. The Canadian poodles, always wanting to impress the bigger dogs, are clamouring that we must assist in the arming of Ukraine too.

Realistically, in the event we fail to contain our confrontational rhetoric, all those hundreds of millions in weapons and munitions will be destroyed in their warehouses in the first 24 hours of hostilities.

But not to worry… Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin will be happy to ramp up production and sell plenty more!

There's no such thing as baloney steak

The Farm Manager was reading me the menu at a new place in town that some overly optimistic keeners opened just in time to be repeatedly shut down because you-know-what.

So we can't actually go there, but some day soon, after we all get our boosters or N95s or whatever the magic bullet is gonna be, when you-know-what is vanquished, we'll be first in line.

Because the menu is truly drool-worthy.

Or it was, till we got to the baloney steak.

I must object to that one.

I know baloney, and I know steak.

You can bet they don't call it "baloney steak" to imbue an actual steak with the prestige of a little baloney ambience.

No, it's the other way around!

Then the FM reads the ingredients.

Grilled with cheddar cheese, tomato, corn relish, mustard, and mayo. Choice of sourdough or rye and a side: mac & cheese, dilli potato salad, baked beans, cole slaw, or Caesar salad.

Hmm... that's almost enough to get me to try a baloney sandwich for the first time in fifty years!

BUT DON'T CALL IT STEAK!!!

What if Putin isn't bluffing?

The cabal of dorkshits who pissed away $300 million every single day for twenty years before cutting and running from the Taliban, now see themselves entitled to dictate what's what to Russia and China.

I don't think you have to be a genius political analyst to see this can't possibly end well.

The Americans spent billions to over-throw the democratically elected government in Ukraine. After decades of encroaching on former Soviet satellites, Ukraine was to be the big prize. If we could turn Ukraine, NATO would be right on Russia's border!

Alas, the "Revolution of Dignity" wasn't much of a revolution, nor did it bring anything in the way of dignity to the people of Ukraine.

The current tensions in Ukraine can be traced back to comments the clown-comedian leader of Ukraine made back in the spring, about re-taking the Crimean peninsula. That's when the first "build-up" of Russian forces on the other side of the border happened.

Since then, Western politicians and media have been recklessly goading Zelensky to make good on his threats. Even as both the UK and USA announce up front they won't back Ukraine militarily, they keep up the confrontational rhetoric and flood Ukraine with hundreds of millions in fresh weaponry. 

The reporting in Western media on last week's meetings between EU, OSCE, NATO, and Russia was dismissive of any Russian concerns. We are, after all, the Good Guys, whereas Putin is an evil dictator looking to revive the Stalin era.

In Canada, the two primary organs of state propaganda, The Globe and Mail and CBC, are full of hubristic twaddle about how we and our allies need to call Putin's bluff and put him in his place.

Canada cut and ran from Afghanistan years before the Americans gave up. Yet somehow, we think it's our job to rally round Uncle Sam as the Americans provoke a military confrontation with an entity that is infinitely more capable than the Taliban?

This will not end well for the self-proclaimed Nations of Virtue.

Donald Trump and the collapse of American democracy

In my estimation, US democracy was officially declared dead with the supreme court decision permitting unlimited private campaign funding. That was 2010.

It had been in rough shape for decades, but you’d still get the odd twitch out of almost-dead corpse. That explains Jimmy Carter. It was easier to pretend America had a functioning democracy in those days.

That’s over. When political campaigns cost billions, politics becomes the plaything of billionaires. Which is not to suggest that America no longer has bitterly contested elections. In fact, they seem more bitterly contested than ever, now that they are virtually meaningless.

Take the transition from Trump to Biden, for example. What has changed? In spite of holding both congress and the senate, Team Blue couldn’t get anything done that people got excited about during the campaign. All that progressive feel-good stuff Biden promised just wafted into the ether.

Ditto in the foreign policy realm. Have any of Trump’s egregious violations of diplomatic norms been corrected?

Nope! The Golan now belongs to Israel and Israel’s capital is now Jerusalem. That Iran deal is way too complicated to revive. No point easing up on Cuba sanctions, which Obama had done and Trump reversed.

There’s a different guy in the White House, but the machine keeps lumbering on pretty much the same as before.

With US democracy dead and buried, the theatre of democracy becomes paramount.

Check this out. The character Donny J is rolling out his 2024 White House run in Arizona, to an arena full of enthusiastic fans. He comes on stage to the theme of that World Wrestling Entertainment character, “the Undertaker.” The fans love it!

Boo ya! Gonna save America!

American democracy is dead. Long live democracy theatre!

In some bizarre way it’s totally appropriate that Donald Trump is in the WWE Hall of Fame. 

How things go down, from the perspective of an Italian mastiff

Took the Big Boy to the dog park for a romp today.

Which only happened because the Farm Manager had to come into town to get the elite pet food our pets demand. The impulse for elite pet food does not originate on my side of the family.

When you share every Big Mac or pizza slice or Timmies invention with your best friend, they don't need the ultra-premium pet food anymore.

Anyway, we stocked up on the premium pet food, and then we stopped by the off-leash dog park.

Bruno hasn't seen his dog park pals in weeks, because the FM has been working from home, and her job is my only excuse for driving into town.

The beauty of the occasion was that the FM, our mutual boss, was able to witness first-hand Bruno's interactions with his dog park pals.

Like his complete deference to that miniature poodle half the size of his head.

But he's also thrilled to romp with the other big dogs, like Bandit and Maverick. They race around with bared fangs and constant growls, but they're just kidding.

We stopped by the Food Land on the way home. The FM picked up a few essentials, and also an entirely non-essential box of mini cinnamon buns.

Me and Bruno are polishing them off as I write these words.

Nobody needs to know...

 

"You sh!t in a bag and threw it out the window"

I was sitting in the waiting room at the dentist office the other day. One of the abiding absurdities of the current era is how you can't get a haircut, but you can go to the dentist and have one of the gals spend an hour playing in your saliva while cleaning your teeth.

There's an old guy, masked and socially distanced, sitting across from me. I don't get out much anymore, so I seize any opportunity to strike up a conversation.

Turns out Buddy is a semi-retired trucker, well into his seventies. Still runs a load of rocks out of Wiarton two or three times a week to supplement his OAS and CPP stipends. 

We get to chatting about how far you can go on a tank of gas. He used to drive for an outfit called Quik-as-Air. Their calling card was they could get Toronto mail to Vancouver in the same 36 hours you got when you paid the extra for "air mail."

And they did.

Their Freightliner cab-overs, kitted out with max tankage, could literally run from Toronto to Vancouver without ever stopping.

Not even once.

Not for anything...

I'm taking this in. I get that there's two drivers and you spell off, but... don't you have to take a crap once in awhile?

Nah... you just shit in a bag and throw it out the window.

Correcting vaccine falsehoods (brought to you by Pfizer)

The top ‘o the op-ed page in today’s Globe goes to Timothy Caulfield; Correcting falsehoods isn’t cancel culture.

Mr Caulfield, we are told, is Canada Research Chair in health law and policy at the University of Alberta. He has a bee in his bonnet over those gosh-darned anti-vaxxers and COVID deniers like Aaron Rogers, Joe Rogan, and “disgraced American virologist Robert Malone.”

Rogan had the disgraced guy on his show recently. I personally don’t have the attention span to follow a three hour interview, but apparently 11 million others did. That’s a gargantuan number for anything found on American screens, easily eclipsing all cable news platforms combined. Obviously, pandemic scepticism is growing, two full years into this circus.

I like to check out the affiliations of the thought leaders who appear on the op-ed page. I googled "corporate partnerships u of alberta."

Oh, what a surprise! There’s Pfizer! Along with fellow pharma bigs Merck and J & J! Root around a little more on the old googlator and you’ll find the pharma partners are worth tens of millions to the U of A!

Check out this Wikipedia page, List of largest pharmaceutical settlements.

All of U Alberta’s pharma partners are on it!

Pfizer is on it twice!

And that list ends in 2012. Here’s an updated accounting of Pfizers many regulatory challenges since 2000. Over ten billion in fines for their many shenanigans in the past twenty years!

So who are you gonna believe?

An NFL quarterback, or a guy whose employer takes money from Pfizer?

It can take 50 years for the Wheel of Karma to complete one rotation

Ya, it can. Sometimes it can take even longer...

But let's stick to the case in point.

Back in the day, when your female high school students got themselves knocked up, it quite often meant the termination of their academic career. 

Objection 1. There are no "female" students. Gender labels are a tool of the patriarchy. 

Objection 2. Nobody, regardless of gender, gets themselves knocked up. It will require the assistance of at least one other non-gendered person of the other non-gender.

So just to keep things professional, let's call this person Jane Doe.

When Jane dropped out of high school, she short-circuited a lot of options in life. She found herself waiting tables at the local sports bar.

Every Friday a couple of guys from the high school dropped by to chat her up and drink lots of beer. They became comrades in arms. 

Objection 3. She didn't short-circuit anything - the patriarchy did.

Objection 4. Comrades in arms? That used to be called Stockholm Syndrome.

They convinced her she had what it takes to get a job at the very school that had shunned her years before. They even tipped her to a job opening and provided references.  

Objection 5. Typical patriarchal exploitation of desperate single mothers.

Fast forward fifty years or so.

Jane Doe is a forty year veteran school board employee. Thirty-nine years ago she suffered a concussion after being struck in the head by a basketball in a Phys-ed class.

She's been on long-term disability at 90% pay ever since!

Karma gave her the last laugh.

Those tussles with life

I stepped out on the stoop a few minutes ago, for a breath of fresh air, and in the distance I could see tail-lights trying to negotiate the uphill driveway at the farm a quarter mile to the west.

It's winter. The snow packs hard and turns to ice.

Those tail-lights go half-way up the hill... and then they go down again.

Then up... and down.

Somebody can't get up their driveway.

For them, it's a great piss-off, and in all likelihood, ruining their day.

For me, their predicament provides semi-interesting entertainment for a few minutes.

When you stop and think about it, a lot of life's great piss-offs are like that.

You can get all wound up about shit that, when you back away a bit and take in the big picture, isn't such a big deal in the overall scheme of things.

So when you can't get up the driveway of life, just park at the bottom, walk home, and deal with it in the morning.

After a good night's sleep.

Get ready for Donald v Hillary - the rematch

I was checking out some of those disreputable sites, where folks just make shit up. That's in contrast to the legit sites, where highly paid consultants, experts, and expert consultants just make shit up.

So here's what I'm hearing. There's a school of thought out there posits that the most viable candidate for the Dems 2024 is... Hillary!

Go figure!

I would have thought they can wind up the Bernie wind-up toy once again and do better than Hillary, but Bernie's pied piper routine always gave the big donors the willies... as in, what if he's serious about all that socialist talk?

The so-called squaddie radicals have already shown themselves to be unprincipled careerists, but they'd never have a chance against Trump anyway.

Nor would Sleepy Guy and/or his stunned side-kick. What a study in incompetence that loser is!

And Trump seems to be the forgone conclusion as the GOP candidate, which is again, a searing indictment of America's education system and culture at large...

Or at least it would be, if we were talking about democracy.

But we're not; we're talking about Democracy Theatre, which is a completely different kettle of fish.

The producers figure Donald-Hillary is the best bet for max pay-per-view uptake.

They're probably right!

Expert claims 66% higher rate of myocarditis for Moderna vaxx nothing to worry about

You’ve probably seen the CBC story about all those fussy folks walking away from the Moderna vaccine if that’s what’s offered when they go for their booster shot. The narrative managers at CBC have decided to nip that irresponsible bit of effrontery in the bud.

To that end, Julianne Hazlewood interviewed a 70 year old virologist just after the eight o’clock news this morning. He reassured the audience that the Moderna vaccine is so safe and effective that he, an expert, personally requested it by name.

Our expert even brought some stats with him. Of every 100k vaccinations with Pfizer, 1.5 people will develop myocarditis, or swelling of the heart, whereas with Moderna, the number is 2.5, which he assured us is “nothing, only one more person per 100k vaccinations.”

I thought, hold the phone, Mr. Expert. An increase from 1.5 to 2.5 isn’t nothing.

It’s a 66% higher chance of getting myocarditis with your vaccination!

That's hundreds more myocarditis cases when you're vaccinating all of Canada.

But not too worry. According to the expert, myocarditis is no big deal - there’s plenty of safe and effective pharmaceutical products out there to fix up your myocarditis in no time!

Do you ever get the impression that a lot of these "experts" are just glorified vaccine salesmen?

Putin poops pants in paroxysm of panic

CBC informs us that Canada has offered to join Uncle Sam in threatening "massive consequences" against Russia, should they renew their aggression against Ukraine.

I’m sure Uncle Sam is delighted to have the back-up of one of NATO’s bench-warming non-entities, especially since the US has already stated categorically that it has no intention of intervening militarily should Putin decide to annex his neighbour.

No, instead, they’re promising “massive sanctions.”

Whoa!

Not massive sanctions!

That’s gotta have Bad Vlad pooping his pants in paroxysms of panic… Russia hasn’t been slapped down like that since Poroshenko struck Putin from his Christmas card mailing list in 2015!

So Canada is all-in for massive sanctions. Problem is, Russia-Canada trade was never anything of consequence to begin with, and what remains has been subject to progressively tightening sanctions since at least 2014.

In other words, Canada has zero leverage in the sanctions department, so our FM’s generous offer to Blinken was a complete nothing-burger.

On the other hand, there are some serious NATO members in Europe who could have some leverage against Russia using trade sanctions. Unfortunately, they are heavily reliant on Russian natural gas to power their electrical grids and keep their populations from freezing to death.

Looks to me like Putin’s in for a stern scolding should he annex Ukraine!

Which raises the question, why would he want to?

Ukraine, in Soviet times, was both the breadbasket and the industrial heartland of the Soviet Union. That ended thirty years ago. Over those thirty years Ukraine has become a failed state, mostly due to the corruption of its oligarch-infested political class. GDP/capita is now 3x higher in Russia than in what was once its most prosperous region. (As a point of reference, Canadian GDP/capita is 4x Russia’s.)

Aside from the eastern areas where Russian-speakers predominate, there are no Russian interests in Ukraine. Why would Putin want to “annex” a hostile failed state?

That said, our foolish talk about NATO membership for Ukraine has led to the current crisis. NATO infrastructure in Ukraine, Russia says, is a red line. That would include those NATO “training missions” Canada prides itself on “leading.”

Here’s a potentially life-saving tip for FM Joly and CAF brass. If we absolutely must train Ukrainian nationalist extremists, why not bring them here? After all, there's plenty of military bases out in Canada's Ukrainian provinces, Alberta and Saskatchewan, where our trainees would be welcome and Russian missiles won't reach.

Sounds like a win-win to me!

Fall-out from another Covid Christmas

Let me tell you what the fall-out looks like around here.

We were planning on a lovely family get-together on Christmas Eve. 

Plans were made. 

Arrangements were arranged. 

Gifts were purchased.

We don't do gifts per se, but there's the courtesy gift for the host, and I like to bring a box of chocolates for each of the aunties.

The Farm Manager pitched in with four gift packs of gourmet roasted nuts. Each gift pack is billed as a "party serving for six."

Then there was the jug of Crown Royal for my brother, who was born the day after Jesus.

The day before the party, we got the email that there ain't no party this year.

Covid, of course.

The booze didn't make it to new year's eve.

But we're just into the second box of Mill Creek chocolates, and we got four more to go, so we'll be good to spring, at least.

Unless diabetes strikes first.

As for the nuts, I found a lentil-walnut spaghetti recipe in the paper today, but that barely puts a dent in the stockpile.  

My greatest fear is that we'll still have this year's Christmas goodies in the pantry when next Christmas rolls around.

And if that's a Covid Christmas too, I'm planning a walnut-and-chocolates overdose to take me to a better place.

So Canadian, eh?

Took a drive out to Tuggy's Gas and Variety on the Saugeen Indian Reserve today, to gas up and pick up a little bud. The gas is about ten cents cheaper than off reserve, and their pot shops undercut the government pot shops by half or better.

Not that I need weed, but once in awhile I want a change of pace from my own home-grown. After PM Fluffy legalized the weed 'o wisdom, pretty much every smoke shop, variety store, and gas bar out there opened a cannabis dispensary. At some level I suppose I'm cheating the government out of some tax revenues by patronizing Indigenous establishments, but I see it as doing my part for reconciliation.

Over the years I had quite a few kids from this community pass through my classroom. One of the rare success stories from my time in teaching was how the participation rate for male students has improved. Thirty years ago you didn't see many Indigenous young men in high school. It was almost as if it was a cultural taboo.

The last few years before I retired, there didn't seem to be a stigma anymore, and many of those young men were thriving.

Most homes and businesses displayed "Every Child Matters" banners. You see quite a few of those off reserve too, but not like this. That's a sharp reminder of the long and disgraceful history of Indian-government relations in this country.

One little shop had a sign out front that was almost as big as the store. 

Top line; Every Child Matters.

Second line; Go Leafs Go.

So Canadian, eh!

Insider reveals why CBC going down the toilet

If you’re one of those taxpayers who bemoan the billion dollars plus of annual subsidies lavished on the CBC, you’ll no doubt enjoy Tara Henley’s resignation letter, published in the National Post yesterday.

Oddly enough, her letter largely echos points I made months ago; CBC explains why it's going down the toilet.

It’s been disappointing to see how so many professional journalists have willingly gone along with the CBC’s embrace of a supposed “cultural and social revolution,” invisible to all but the most earnestly “woke.”

Disappointing, but not surprising. The profession has taken a beating in the internet era, and a CBC paycheque isn’t something many journo’s are willing to put at risk.

They were, no doubt, all idealists at one time.

But that was then.

Today, when faced with the choice of defending journalistic integrity or making their mortgage payment, with rare exceptions, they choose to keep their home.

It’s an understandable choice, but let’s stop calling the CBC’s abject propagandizing of everything from foreign policy, to vaccination mandates, to race relations, “journalism.”

Here we go again!

Yup, we had Captain Doug at the microphone again today.

Friends, you know I hate to do this, but the Science...

Tsunami of cases...

A freight-train bearing down on us.

Ya, we know, Doug.

As near as I can tell, the only reason for this latest lockdown is we gotta try to save the healthcare system from collapse.

Excuse me, but when you have to shut down the schools and the economy to save the healthcare system, hasn't it already collapsed?

You'd think a healthy healthcare system would be able to handle sick people, even when there's an uptick in admissions. 

Instead, we've so starved healthcare of funding, there's zero resilience left in the system.

Part of the problem, in addition to chronic under-funding, is where the money goes. 

I've been mightily impressed with how many national, provincial, regional, and local health authorities and round-table experts we have in this country, all of them dipping into the public trough for very healthy six-number salaries, all of them available at a moment's notice for a TV interview, and none of them ever going anywhere near a patient.

Couldn't we save a lot of taxpayer boodle by having one healthcare administration system for the entire country? Health care seems to be very top-heavy, but there's never enough money to properly compensate the PSWs changing the bandages and the diapers.

Anyway, it's a done deal. Big Doug has done shut 'er down at least for a couple weeks. 

Because there's a tsunami of cases coming at us like a freight train, and we gotta man the battle stations...

Because we're all in this together!

Spinning vaccine propaganda

Here’s a fun experiment you can do from your couch.

Search “which countries use ivermectin to treat covid” using different search engines.

You’ll notice the search results from Google are substantially different than the results from Yahoo or Bing.

Google offers up scare stories.

The other search engines answer the question.

When Google has 90% market share in internet searches, most people will never see what Google’s algorithms are hiding from them.

That’s how our free society rolls. We have created a most free and wonderful public-private-partnership of narrative control.

It’s a beautiful thing…

Remember Arab Spring?

Welcome to Fascist Spring!

Duck fat spray

My new year's resolution; I'm gonna keep things light.

Yup, no more politics in the old blog. 

I'm getting a little tired of it anyway. I mean, I've been telling you for years America has devolved into a fascist corporate billionaire-run dictatorship, and nobody gives a shit.

So I'm gonna talk about cooking instead. The Farm Manager likes to cook like I like to write. I'm not even sure how we got on the topic, but somewhere along the line we got to debating the best way to reheat potatoes.

When you get right down to it, that's quite a fascinating field of study. Think Irish potato famine. In fact, there should be Potato Studies programs throughout the universities.

I'm surprised Ryerson doesn't have one, because they're usually well ahead of the curve on this kind of stuff, although, for obvious reasons, they'd have to market it as "Critical Potato Studies." 

But I feel I'm veering into the political realm again, so lets bring it back to the potatoes.

How best to reheat potatoes depends on what kind of potatoes you are reheating. There are potato dishes like perogies or their cousin, the potato dumpling, that can be passibly reheated by microwave. Everything else needs a real oven or stove-top.

That's where duck fat spray entered into the conversation. The FM claims the very best way to reheat potatoes is in the skillet, after you give the skillet of squirt of aerosol duck fat.

I had no idea!

How do they even get the duck in the can?