'Playtime with Stormy' ends badly for Trump

Finally, a measure of justice! Frankly, I thought this case was even dumber than the real estate fraud case, if such a thing can be imagined. That time around, the prosecution’s chief witnesses were bankers who testified they made money in their dealings with Trump and looked forward to doing business with him again in the future. That was a slam dunk… guilty as charged! This time, the star witness was a convicted perjurer and self-confessed crook. The case hung in the balance between which lying liar was telling the truth… another slam dunk! Although I read the many thousands of words the Globe & Mail spent covering this crime of the century, (well, I might have skimmed a little bit) I’m still not clear what the crime was. Near as I can tell, Trump or his accountants (it’s hard to imagine Donny J sitting in front of a leger with a calculator) tried to fob off a payout to a hooker as a business expense. Like that’s never happened before! In any event, in this case the book-keeping hanky-panky that followed the pants-off hanky-panky was a clear threat to American democracy, a delicate flower if ever there was one! What I don’t get is why the brainiacs at the Globe thought this case was so essential to their readership. Today’s paper featured an all-caps banner headline; JURY FINDS TRUMP GUILTY. They whet our appetite with eight paragraphs in the front page and then devote almost the entirety of p.4 to the story. Almost. There’s about two inches at the bottom with an unrelated story, obviously of little significance. While the whole world was busy watching the Trump trial, Sleepy Joe gave our plucky Ukrainian allies the green light to use US missiles on Russian territory. What could go wrong?!

Notes from the twilight of Western civilization

Our internet provider here at Falling Downs shut us down for “routine maintenance” today. That’s one way to break your screen addiction, at least for a few hours! I used those hours to do some yard work. Must have pulled four wheelbarrow’s worth of weeds out of the flower gardens today. That’s not as grand as it sounds. Our flower gardens transitioned to weed gardens years ago, so four wheelbarrows is nothing. It was a beautiful sunny day, and as I was putzing about with the pruning shears and the rake, I was also cooking up a rant about the state of affairs we find ourselves in. Dress Codes In my hippy-dippy youth, I made a point of rebelling against dress codes. Then, when I did a mid-life career transition to teaching, I found out they had a dress code at the school board. I discovered this when I innocently wore a t-shirt to work with a Moosehead Beer logo on it. That was one of my favorite shirts, a relic from when I worked at Saint John Shipbuilding and Moosehead sponsored our slo-pitch team. A couple of cases of beer for every game and free t-shirts all around! The VP took me aside and explained no-one, student or staff, could wear apparel festooned with beer company logos. Or any other liquor purveyor. And no political messages or obscene language, of course. That was 1995. Fast forward 30 years, and my sources tell me beer logos, cannabis logos, and obscene language are all a matter of a child’s right to self-expression. If a child wears a “Fuck Trudeau” t-shirt to class, well… human rights! Is there any dress code left at all? Yes! Apparently the local school board has drawn a red line. Genitals and nipples must be covered. Cover them with your Fuck Trudeau shirt if you like, but your goodies gotta be covered. We have standards! Education We haven’t just tossed out the dress code, we’ve also dispatched any kind of educational standards to the dustbin of history. We’re currently experimenting with dumbing down the math curriculum again, mainly because certain BIPOC groups fail too often (hint; it’s not the People of Colour from Asia). Dumbing down education has downstream consequences. It puts us at a disadvantage vis-a-vis societies where they don’t dumb down math. Like Russia and China for example. I’ve read there’s more advanced math in a Russian high school curriculum than there is in a four year degree at MIT. That’s why Russia has hypersonic missiles that work, and America doesn’t. That’s why Biden just put a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs. We can’t compete. Defence Very much related to our declining education system, is the downward spiral in Western military capability. While the US military (and those of the me-too nations) spent the last ten years fine-tuning their pronoun protocols (human rights, you know), our adversaries were fine-tuning their missile technology. Ukraine had been an eye-opener when it comes to evaluating Western military technology in actual battlefield conditions. We can’t compete. Social Cohesion To have any hope of achieving a viable future, you need most of the populace believing most of the time that things are getting better. That’s the only way to keep a diverse population all rowing in the same direction. You can bleat “diversity is our strength” all you want, but if your diverse population all agree that we’re in a housing crisis and a health care crisis and a cost-of-living crisis, where exactly is the “strength?” Incompetence of the ruling technocrats We are governed by experts. Our actual elected parliamentarians are smart enough to know they don’t know what they’re doing. That’s why they spend billions on expert consultants. How’s that going? The general crapification of everyday life Look around you. Tent cities in parks and on major streets. Open drug use, and I’m not talking about doobies. People shitting in the street. Rent for a 1 bed flat starting at 2k per month. You’d have to work about four min wage jobs at once to make that affordable. A decent quality of life? More and more, young people, all across the diversity spectrum, are coming to the conclusion that you can’t get there from here. Meanwhile, they’ve got a housing crisis in China, too. In their zeal to provide decent housing for every one of their 1.4 billion citizens, the commies overshot the mark and have hundreds of thousands of new apartments sitting vacant! But at least there’s no tent cities!

The Christian roots of Israel's genocide in Gaza

Israeli ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, has had multiple opportunities to make grandiose and over-the-top presentations at that august body in recent months. Those presentations have been wildly theatrical and generally devoid of any content that would in any conventional sense be considered diplomatic. Which leads me to ponder who might be the target audience of his absurdities. Surely he knows nobody in Israel, outside the most fervent true believers in the settlements, takes him seriously, nor does anyone in the world at large, so what’s the point? The point, I concluded, is that he’s talking not to Israelis, and not to the world at large, but to the “Christian Zionists” in America. I’ve read various estimates of their numbers, which range from 10 to 30 million. That’s one hell of a voting block in US politics. That’s a voting block well worth pandering to if your goal is to keep Uncle Sam’s chequebook open no matter what atrocities you are committing in Gaza. I’d always assumed that Theodore Herzl was the progenitor of Zionism, and that “Christian Zionism” emerged only after evangelical fundamentalist Christians latched onto Herzl’s teachings because they jibed with their own interpretation of the Bible. Turns out I was wrong. In the course of researching Christian Zionism I ran across the name "William Hechler." Turns out that twelve years before Herzl published “The Jewish State,” Hechler had published “The Restoration of the Jews to Palestine.” Hechler was a German-born Anglican clergyman with extensive connections to the royal families of Europe. It was he who introduced Herzl into that milieu. The concept of a Jewish state in Palestine originated not with Herzl, but within post-Reformation Protestantism. By the late 1800s, Hechler was just another in a long line of Christian advocates for a Jewish state in Palestine. That’s why Zionism finds fertile ground in America today. While Joe Biden is neither an evangelical nor a fundamentalist, he, a Catholic, nevertheless proudly proclaims himself a Zionist. That’s why he’s programmed to look the other way when the Chosen People are annihilating the seed of Amalek, as Bibi has framed it. That’s why at least 30 million Christian Zionists in America will continue to support the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Blame Christianity!

Netanyahu will be sacrificed to save Biden's election campaign

My expectation when I watch Gaza news on Fox-CNN-MSNBC-CBS is that everything will be built around the “Israel is defending itself” narrative. No matter how many women and children suffer and die, Israel is defending itself. Let’s talk about 7 October instead. To get anywhere near the other side of the story you’d have to watch Al Jazeera. So imagine my shock when I put on CBS News 24 this morning and saw the same footage of the aftermath of a missile strike on a crowded refugee tent encampment in Raffa that I’d already seen on Al Jazeera. Rows of tents aflame, and the screams of mothers desperately fighting to save their children. This is a radical departure in how this war has been presented. The word “terrorist” didn’t come up. There was no reference to 7 October. No discussion of antisemitism on campus, and not so much as a nod in the direction of Israel’s right to defend itself. What’s going on? Here’s what’s going on. Genocide Joe has told Bibi many times, and very publicly, not to go into Raffa. Joe’s, and Uncle Sam’s cred more generally, have taken a beating since Joe won the oval office. First it was pictures of Afghan civilians dropping off fleeing USAF planes as they finally gave the country back to the Taliban. Then we were going to crush Russia’s economy, cripple Putin with sanctions, and give our Ukrainian flunkies whatever it takes for as long as it takes to finish Putin off once and for all on the battlefield. The entire world is watching America score one own goal after another. Until very recently, when Uncle Sam said “jump,” the world asked, “how high?” Now it’s just NATO and the EU who still jump, and even there you can sense things aren’t what they used to be. The rest of the world, ie the vast majority of it, sees Uncle Sam as a spent force, an Empire in decline. A hegemon who can be defied with impunity. And there’s Netanyahu, brazenly defying the President of the USA in front of the whole world! Here’s one last chance to grab back a little credibility on the world stage. Joe didn’t mind enabling the genocide that’s been unfolding over the last seven months, but dammit, if Bibi’s gonna make him look like a fool… goodbye Netanyahu. He was becoming a bit of a liability anyway. He may be the Greatest Leader since Moses, and a personal friend for decades, but all this genocide-war-crimes-ICC-ICJ talk gathers quite a putrid odor. When you’re going into an election it might be good to distance yourself from that, while also showing yourself a tough guy not to be trifled with. Having US networks show you unfiltered coverage of Bibi’s handiwork in Gaza is part of the move against him. He won’t be PM much longer.

Dandelion salad with wild strawberries; free food at Falling Downs

I was doing some grounds-keeping here at the Falling Downs estate the other day when I came across some dandelions with three-foot stems. Normally, I only encounter dandelions when I’m cutting the grass, and they never grow much taller than the deck height on the lawnmower. That lawnmowing shit is something that’s troubled me for years. Every time I’m pushing that mower back and forth across the two acres of lawn, I’m saying to myself, get some goats or something. Not only will they keep the lawn trimmed; you end the summer with plump, market-ready goats! One of these years I’m gonna act on that insight. Keep a few around till Ramadan, and I hear they’ll bring two or three hundred bucks a head off any gas station parking lot in Brampton! Plus, they trimmed your lawn for free! But I digress. I’d heard over the years that dandelions are an edible weed, and apparently folks also make tea and wine out of the plant, but I’d never before ingested dandelion, not as tea nor wine nor salad. So on finding these giant dandelions I also found their giant leaves. These were in a separate league from the dandelions we used to feed the rabbits my folks kept. “Kaninchenfutter” we called it. Long story short, I’m standing there with these giant dandelion leaves in my hand, and suddenly I’m seeing a salad. I mixed up some olive oil with white vinegar and tossed in the shredded dandelion leaves. I must say, that’s a perfectly edible plant! It’s a little bitter compared to your typical romaine or iceberg. The leaves are somewhat sweeter than the stems. You could toss in pretty much anything from your regular salad ingredients; tomatoes, onions, feta… hell, how about strawberries? There’s an abundance of tiny wild strawberries growing in the lawn right now! Just imagine! A dandelion salad with wild strawberries! And all for free!

How Sunday School almost ruined my life

Both of my parents had their childhoods shattered by the WWII. War often makes people find religion, and my parents were no exception. By the time they hooked up and had me, and washed ashore at Pier 21 in 1956, they were still people of faith. Therefore, church on Sunday was a regular thing growing up. The actual church would shift from time to time. There was a Baptist church at the corner of York Road and Victoria, where we were regulars when I was still small enough to stand on the pew between my parents. Then we suddenly moved churches. Found out years later it was because the leader of that particular flock had been busted in a bath-house raid in Toronto. We tried out a couple of other flocks and eventually landed at the Bethel Baptist Church in Fergus. By then I wasn’t standing on the pew anymore. I’d get shuffled off to the Sunday School section after the opening hymns and general announcements. “Please don’t forget to congratulate Mr. and Mrs. Bervie on their 50th wedding anniversary. We will be having cake and refreshments downstairs after the service” sort of stuff, and that was the signal for the youngsters to vamoose to the Sunday School classrooms. The classrooms were segregated by gender, of which their were only two at the time, so obviously, I’d get the boys class. Every week we’d get a Sunday School paper, and every week there was a feature story that always followed the same template. The protagonist was inevitably a young man (pretty sure the girls’ classes didn’t get the same paper) who fell into a life of sin. He soon found himself taking drugs and drinking alcohol and having promiscuous sex with skanky women to whom he was not wedded in holy matrimony. Sometimes the protagonist even joined a gang! Then, week after week, the protagonist would have his “Jesus” moment. He hit bottom, realized the error of his sinful ways, accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior, and became a boring dweeb just like me! How ironic! Every Sunday I resolved to be that guy, before he found Jesus! He obviously had way more fun than I did! I have no idea why he’d want to be me, but I for sure knew why I wanted to be him! Booze! Drugs! Gangs! Skanky women! It’s those Sunday School papers that inspired in me an ambition to become a great sinner! Alas, I never made it much beyond occasional drunkenness.

Whatever happened to decent pensions?

I’m one of the lucky retirees whose pension covers my bills. Apparently we’re a minority these days. How did that happen? Shouldn’t everyone who worked most of their life be entitled to live their alleged “golden years” in dignity? You’d think so. But you’d be wrong. If all you’ve got going on pension-wise is the Old Age Security and the Canada Pension Plan, your maxing out around $2k/month pension income, and that’s only if you religiously paid into those plans during your working years. Lot’s of folks, the self-employed, the precariously employed, and those in the gray economy, never did. I’m not sure how that $2k is supposed to provide a dignified life given the cost of everything now. It can theoretically work for people who bought a house 40 years ago and live mortgage free, but if you had one bad hand in life, such as illness or divorce, you’re screwed, unless you have a private pension. Those were once ubiquitous. Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, most unionized factory jobs offered defined-benefit pensions. That wasn’t something you gave any thought to when you were a 18 year old punk at Budd Automotive. We were convinced we had job security for life, and I recall a UAW slogan, “30 and out,” that was about negotiating a defined-benefit pension after 30 years of service. That would have allowed me to retire with a full pension at age 48! That all seems rather quaint in hindsight. Alas, as the 70s drew to a close, the reactionary politics of Maggie Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were on the rise. Union workers were spoiled crybabies who needed to face reality. They were too expensive. And their defined-benefit pensions were simply an outrage. They were an existential threat to the very capitalist system that underpinned our way of life, and indeed, democracy itself! Defined-benefit gave way to the defined contribution pension plan. That’s if you were fortunate enough to have any pension plan at all. Defined-benefit pensions became extinct in the private sector, but persist in the public sector. Why is that? Anti-union propaganda wants you to believe it’s because unions are too powerful. The reality is the public sector unions generally represent workers whose jobs can’t be offshored. You can’t scare teachers or cops or civil servants by threatening to send their jobs to Mexico or China, unlike manufacturing jobs. I had the dumb luck to snag a teaching career just as the tide was going out in Canada’s industrial sector. Scored a defined-benefit pension just as Budd and GE and a bunch of other union shops I’d worked in were closing up and shifting work offshore. I can afford to pay my bills and live life. The ranks of those who can’t are ever growing. Poverty, housing precarity, marginalization are their lot in life. Groceries from the food bank and a sleeping bag under a bridge are not much of a reward for folks who’ve done their best to be productive citizens for 65 years or more. It’s not that we couldn’t afford to help them; it’s just that we have limited resources and must prioritize our priorities… F-35s, warships, nuclear submarines, Ukraine…

Imagine a future where Bibi and Biden and Sinwar share cell at International Criminal Court

On a day when our media were preparing to celebrate the demise of “the butcher of Tehran” in a helicopter crash, Lady Luck peed in the punchbowl with the news that the International Criminal Court had applied to the International Court of Justice for arrest warrants for the leaders of Hamas, and, cinch up your seatbelts and don the oxygen masks, the Greatest Leader of the Chosen People since Moses! If granted, that means both Israel and Hamas leaders will be wanted on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. That’s not gone over well with the government of Israel. Any equivalency between a virulently antisemitic terrorist death cult and the democratic government of the only democracy in the middle east etc is nothing but a vile blood libel against the Jewish people blah blah blah… The Cotler-Farber gang will be burning up the phone lines today making sure the CBC, Globe, and the PMO get the correct message out. There is no equivalency between Netanyahu and Sinwar! And they’re absolutely right. Sinwar launched an attack that lasted for many hours and claimed the lives of some 1200 Israelis. Netanyahu’s retaliation is in it’s eighth month and has claimed the lives of at least 35,000 Palestinians. Irwin and Bernie are right; there’s no equivalency whatsoever!

CBC News declares plastic pollution is the new front in "the culture wars"

That’s the top headline at CBC News at the moment. New front in the culture war? Really? What was the previous front in this culture war? Under editor-in-chief Brodie Fenlon, CBC News took a definite turn for the woke. The main battlefronts in Brodie’s woke-wars were drag queen story hour and systemic racism. They really rang the bell that time they featured the drag queen who was denied a story-hour slot at the local library on account of racism. So I have to say, it’s a hard pivot from the front lines of those culture wars… to plastic pollution? What’s going on at CBC News? Could it be they’re toning down the wokery because Pierre Poilievre has threatened to cut CBC News off the government teat? Did Cathy Tait send out a stern memo demanding CBC culture wars focus on real issues, and the best they can come up with is plastic pollution? And not only are they changing the channel on the culture wars, they’ve been revising their take on some actual guns-and-bombs wars as well. After banging the drum for Israel for seven months, they’ve had antisemitic diatribes for two days in a row. Yesterday they had the temerity to suggest the war on Hamas wasn’t going that well, and today, they completely jumped the antisemitic shark and hinted The Greatest Leader Since Moses might be dragging this war out to keep his ass from being dragged into jail. Who can even imagine such unprecedented Jew-hate on CBC News? To suggest that Bibi puts his political career ahead of the fate of the hostages? A blood libel! An outrage! But Cathy and Brodie can’t very well back away from wokery by becoming relevant, and exploring, in a balanced journalistic way, some actually seriously important stuff, like Israel’s genocide in Gaza. So plastic pollution it is!

USA pushed Ukraine into a suicidal war and facilitates genocide in Gaza, so why do we think we're the good guys?

Putin and Xi had a love-in today in China. The Globe spun it as an increasingly isolated and desperate Putin sucking up to China. What I saw of the red carpet treatment the isolated Putin received in Beijing looked more like China sucking up to Putin. Russia isolated? Then how is there a Wikipedia page devoted to World leaders who have visited Moscow since Ukraine invasion? There’s about 40 world leaders on the list, including some from our NATO allies. NATO is more united and powerful (thanks to the addition of military heavyweights Finland and Sweden) than ever before, CBC and Globe &Mail incessantly remind us. So why are some heads of state of NATO allies making kissy-face with the evil dictator Putin? Seems to me, looking from a global perspective, the USA and its pathetic gang of camp followers are isolated way more than Bad Vlad is isolated. And how about that Gaza genocide that is by the day becoming more impossible to sweep under the rug? The CBC and the Globe are doing yeoman’s work trying to keep the focus on Jewish students feeling uncomfortable on university campuses where anti-genocide protests are ongoing. Most of the world seems to think ending a genocide-in-progress trumps the feelings of some Jewish students. And how about Ukraine!? Keep on rockin’ in the Free World, Blinky! Sorry we couldn’t follow through on all that “whatever it takes blah blah blah” shit Zelly, but what the hey, we gave you the tools and you fucked it up. But we’re still the good guys. Yes we, meaning Uncle Sam and his merry band of feckless acolytes, pushed Ukraine into a suicidal war with Russia, and continue to facilitate Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. But we’re the good guys.

This blog just cracked a million views!

That only took thirteen years and over seven thousand posts. And with a mere three followers! How does that work? I've heard there's no "follow" button when you go to this blog, so I don't know how there's even three. I'd guess it has something to do with the time Doublewide walked all over the keyboard and fucked up all my settings. To fix that, I'd have to retrace her steps. That would totally mess up the zen space I'm creating through mindful living. Be that as it may, it still feels like a decent accomplishment.

Finally! A glimmer of hope for Ukraine!

Some Ukrainian observers have grudgingly concluded over the past two plus years that America is incapable of delivering on the “whatever it takes for as long as it takes” mantra that’s been repeated ad nauseum since February of 2022. On the face of it, they seem to have a point. After all, when it comes to matters such as artillery shells, HIMARs, Patriot air defense systems, tanks, howitzers, and F-16s, the Americans have obviously failed to deliver whatever it takes. But there’s one thing more important than all of the above. Hope! Without hope, all the Patriots and F-16s in the world won’t make a difference, and yesterday US Secretary of State Antony Blinken delivered the greatest morale boost the lucky Ukrainians could ever have hoped for. Taking to the stage in front of several dozen spectators in an obscure Kyiv nightclub, Blinken unleashed an electrifying cover of Neil Young's "Keep on rockin' in the free world." The world is fortunate that Mr. Blinken’s diplomacy is every bit as impressive as his musicianship. A true renaissance man if ever there was one! And such a poignant reminder that Ukraine is fighting not only for itself, but for the entirety of the free world! So there you go, people of Ukraine. America has delivered hope in your darkest hour. The rest is up to you.

Doug Ford gets tough on car thieves

I see where Preem Douggie has dropped the gloves re: the stolen car epidemic that's overtaken Toronto these past few years. Yup, Doug is getting tough on the scawflaws... he's proposing to suspend their driving privileges! That's right! Get busted for car theft and lose your driver's license for ten years! Let's think this through. It's been a very long time since I stole a car, so I'm no expert, but it seems to me there are basically two types of car theft. Type one: the crime of convenience. You're walking home from a night of excess at your favorite bar. It's 4 a.m. and you've got another 12 blocks to go. As you're wobbling by the 7-11 you notice a Dodge minivan idling in front with nobody in it... and holy shit, next thing you know, you're a car thief! Frankly, under those circumstances, would the threat of a license suspension prevent this crime? I think not! Type two: the professional car thief. Those have always been with us. They thrive in the underground chop shops, autobody shops, wrecking yards, etc. It's the pros who have driven up the car theft stats that have got Mr. Ford so revved up. But the growth hasn't come from the traditional professional auto theft community. No, it's mainly driven by foreign-based crime gangs who steal high-end vehicles for export. Apparently the Nigerians are big in this racket, finding it even more lucrative than the tried and true "my uncle was the deputy finance minister and if you help me launder the $50 million he looted I'll cut you in for 10%" scam. My understanding is that the big dogs stay home in Nigeria, but send emissaries to Toronto. These guys mix in with local gangs where it's easy to find a kid happy to take a $100k Audi out of someone's driveway for a couple of hundred bucks. If anybody gets busted it'll be the kid, not the emissary and surely not the boss in Lagos. That kid doesn't need a driver's license in the first place, so where's the deterent? So why bother? Because there's just too many folks in neighbourhoods just like Doug's who are fretting about losing their high-end rides. That's Doug Ford's base! He's obviously gotta be seen as doing something!

A belated salute to the mothers of Gaza

Dear Mothers of Gaza, I apologize that this shout-out comes a little late. It’s not that I didn’t think of you yesterday; it’s just that I was trying to focus on the positive. To that end, I spent time with my own mother, now in her 90th year, and sent greetings to the numerous younger moms in my circle. Unlike you, all of them live lives of relative good health and good fortune. Unlike you, they have access to medicine, food, and health care. Unlike you, mothers-to-be can expect access to fully provisioned maternal-care facilities when it’s time to give birth. Unlike you, never have their children died premature deaths due to starvation or the indiscriminate bombing of their homes. You, on the other hand, have buried at least 15,000 of your children over the past seven months. They have died at the hands of a military that bills itself “the most moral army in the world,” in a war financed and facilitated by the richest country on earth, a country that bills itself “the leader of the free world.” UNICEF tells us that 180 of you give birth every day, in an active war zone where every maternal-care facility has been deliberately destroyed, and where starvation is rampant since food and water are being deliberately withheld. If by some miracle a handful of your 180 daily newborns emerge healthy, their life expectancy, in the circumstances your tormentors have imposed, will be measured in weeks, not years. Mothers of Gaza, I salute you. Mothers of Gaza, please know I am deeply ashamed of our complicity in your suffering. The blood of your children is on our hands.

Turn your front stoop into a hunting blind

I gotta admit I hit a patch of particularly creative thinking on this one. I was out for a ramble across the back forty yesterday when I happened across a hunting blind on the south west corner of the woodlot. It resembled a small tent, but fully decked out in cammo, with multiple zip-down windows, and a couple of chairs inside. I’m pretty sure it’s the handiwork of a hunting party of youngsters who’d asked permission to hunt turkeys on my property recently. I’m generally copasetic with those requests, with the quid pro quo being make sure something finds its way into my freezer after hunting season. This arrangement has worked out reasonably well for all concerned. The lads had built their blind in one of the most opportune locations on the property. From the corner of the woodlot they’ve got a view that goes from the Meaford tank range on the other side of Owen Sound bay, all the way round to the marsh at the north end of Bass Lake. Not that they’re gonna see any turkeys at the Meaford tank range, but it’s a nice view, especially if you’re settling into your blind in the pre-dawn hours and Meaford has some night-time live-fire exercises going on. But it’s out of the marsh at the north end of Bass Lake where the hunting action will come from. And there’s only one place on the entire property where you’ve got a better shot at the marsh. My front stoop. All I need to do is drape the stoop in cammo, and I’m good to go! Here’s a partial list of what I had a shot at during a four hour window Saturday afternoon. Instead of just sitting on the stoop with a gluten-free beer and my vape, I could have ducked behind the cammo curtain with my glutten-free beer and my vape and my Benelli side by side, and had a clear shot at: 1 bald eagle 1 blue heron 3 trumpeter swans 2 sandhill cranes half a dozen ducks several dozen geese. one turkey wandering across the lawn which may have been a peahen rather than a turkey. The astute reader will realize not all of the above are considered “table birds,” but here’s the thing. I’m not a hunter, but I have profound respect for the locals who take their teenagers out at deer season and teach them to field-dress a deer right out there in the woods. When the shit hits the fan, and Communist China collapses our power grid, and Loblaws and Foodland and all the rest of them have been shuttered for a month, the local hunters are going to keep me and my clan alive.

The challenges of a gluten-free diet

When I went gluten-free a couple of years ago, the first thing I heard was, “get ready to pay four times as much for a loaf of bread.” The second thing I heard was, “good luck finding gluten-free beer.” Those were ominous signals for a guy who’d lived on beer and bread for fifty years and then some. But it hasn’t been the end of the world. Yes, ten bucks for a loaf of bread and twelve dollars for four bagels is a lot. That’s three bucks per bagel. For that kind of money I used to get the bagel with the cream cheese and smoked salmon already on it. Not any more! The beer thing has been hit and miss. Glutenberg makes a passable beer. It’s competitively priced, relatively speaking, but it’s often out of stock. Nevertheless, it’s my first option, especially the yellow cans, which, if I’m not mistaken, is the IPA. The green ones are the lager. I used to favour the lager till I found out it’s got double the calories of the IPA. Tonight I was doing a comparison test of the Boxer gluten-free beer and the Forager brand from Whistler Brewing. Both are available here only in those small cans that always leave you thirsty. The European standard of 500ml for a can of beer should be the global standard as far as I’m concerned. We get close enough with our 473ml tallboys, because who’s gonna notice the missing 27mg? But once you’re down to the 355ml tin, forget about it! It’s impossible not to notice you only had half a beer. As for the comparison test, I definitely prefer the beer out of Whistler to the beer out of Wisconsin. The question is, do I prefer it enough to justify paying an extra $4.50 for a six-pack? Mostly that’s a redundant question, because my experience has been that gluten-free beer inventory is in such short supply you’ll buy whatever’s available. But back to the original point; gluten-free food is prohibitively expensive. I saw a story the other day lamenting the fact that poor people are hardest hit by inflation in food prices, especially fast food prices. Apparently poor people need to eat fast food. Tonight I had a chicken pot-pie that came from Newton’s non-gluten in Guelph. They do awesome work in gluten-free, and you can buy their stuff at the local Foodland. Expensive? Four of those chicken pot-pies came to $55. Each one is a complete meal unto itself, featuring fresh local ingredients and a gluten-free pastry crust that you’d never suspect was gluten free. That works out to $14 per meal. You’ll pay more for a Big Mac meal at the Mickey D drive-through!

Some Jewish students don't feel safe on campus

That’s understandable. Many university campuses are witnessing major protests against the live-streamed genocide ongoing in Gaza. This is the biggest wave of protests to hit elite universities since the Vietnam war era. You can’t very well speak out against this genocide without criticizing Israel. After all, it’s the IDF, at the behest of the government of Israel, carrying out the genocide. That government proclaims Israel as an exclusively Jewish state. It claims to act on behalf of all Jews everywhere. Some people object to the term “genocide.” Would you prefer “crimes against humanity?” How about “premeditated mass murder?” Doesn’t really make you feel any better, does it? While there are some Jewish students who don’t feel safe on campus, there are many others who are shocked, ashamed, and outraged at what the Netanyahu government is doing in their name. That’s why Jewish students are heavily over-represented among the leadership of the very protest camps that make some other Jewish students feel unsafe. The Jewish students who don’t feel safe were given the spotlight on Parliament Hill today. Looks to me like the Jewish students who don’t feel safe are being organized and coached by Chabad House and Hillel. These messianic NGOs, for lack of a better label, are all in with the settler ideology of Jewish supremacy that has brought Israel to the abyss. Their ideological brethren in the Holy Land are the people blocking aid trucks from getting into Gaza today, where children are starving as a result of the genocide that Netanyahu and Gallant announced in advance last October. So, who are you going to support? The Jewish students who don’t feel safe on campus? Or the Jewish students appalled and disgusted by what the government of Netanyahu and his extremist religious fanatic coalition partners are doing in Gaza?

Why Kendrick Lamar believes Drake is a fake

Leave it to CBC to get to the bottom of the Drake - Lamar feud. Matt Galloway had some experts weighing in on the matter this morning. Apparently the famous rapper “straight outta Compton” takes issue with the authenticity of the famous rapper “straight outta Jewish day school” in Toronto. After all, they both got rich in a genre that celebrates, let’s not mince words, some of the more violent and dystopian aspects of Black urban culture. That’s why so many up-and-coming rappers are dead and gone long before they’re rich and famous. Lamar has a point. There’s no comparison whatsoever between coming up poor and Black in Compton, and coming up middle class and Black-white-Jewish in Toronto. None. Might as well be two different planets. That’s why I think it’s time for Drake to take a hiatus from his music career. Once you’re the hate magnet of millions of authentic ghetto thugs who idolize Kendrick Lamar, and they obviously know where you live, take a break. Smell the flowers while you can!

Drake-Kendrick Lamar feud takes deadly turn

When the news came out that uber-famous rapper Drake was building a home base in Canada's most exclusive postal code, the neighbors whispered amongst one another, "there's gonna be trouble." They were right! Check it out from the CBC; Security guard shot outside Drake's mega-mansion. Bridle Path, Drake’s ‘hood, is the toniest, most posh neighborhood in all Toronto, where the median price of a crib, as the rapper’s like to call their place, runs about 8 millions. While I don’t follow matters in the world of rap music much, the CBC itself has informed me Drake has been in an on-going feud with Kendrick Lamar, another big name rapper, but in this case, straight outta Compton. My hunch is that “straight outta Compton” beats “straight outta Jewish day school” in the world of rap cred. Yo Drake, if I was you I’d be watching my back!

Closing the barn door twenty years after the horse got out

My teaching career left port in 1995, when laptops were a novelty and cellphones where seldom seen, except amongst school board admin, who were the earliest of early adapters. That was always a head-scratcher. When some school board wanker was tooling around Grey-Bruce, they were never more than 15 minutes away from a school, where they could use the phone to their hearts content. But what if they had to call head office in between those 15 minutes? After all, as everyone knows, school board superintendents do a lot of really important stuff. Mainly, they are responsible for liaising with other school board superintendents, and also with the Ministry of Education! They are the very foundation of our education system! They obviously have a lot of high-end responsibilities that can’t wait 15 minutes before the Superintendent for Student Achievement or some equally redundant time-waster makes it to the nearest school. Once the top-level school board worthies embraced cellphones, the die was cast. There was no turning back. I began to notice the impact by the late nineties, mainly because teenage girls would erupt, mid-lesson, into sobs of grief because their boyfriend had just terminated their relationship via old-school flip-phone. Then, when smart-phones took over, things really went for a shit. That’s when every research question you ever assigned became Wikipedia copy-and-paste. And as smart-phones got smarter, things only got worse. To be fair, there was resistance to abdicating our responsibilities as educators in favour of big tech. But we were very much in the minority. Every time you brought the matter up at a staff meeting, you’d be drowned out by the kool-aid drinkers who would regale you with the many studies, inevitably funded by big tech, that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that more tech in classrooms was the future of learning. The template was established by the leadership of the school board. Fast forward to today. In the last few years before I retired, I could walk down any hall in my school, and see that many of the teachers and most of the students were on their cellphones. Of course it was all in the name of “learning.” Too bad reading and math scores have been dropping precipitously since we turned education over to big tech. Twenty years after I was calling bullshit on our rush into big tech-enabled imbecility, it’s become an “issue.” The government is going to “crack down” on cellphone use in classrooms. Good luck with that!

Chrystia Freeland's Canada; $13 billions for Ukraine, $200 a month for the most vulnerable Canadians

One of many pie-in-the-sky promises Team Trudeau made during the last election campaign was to lift our fellow citizens, suffering from mental and/or physical disabilities, out of poverty. And what a beautiful promise it was. To be sure, those trying to make ends meet on the strength of a disability pension are inevitably mired in deep poverty, in addition to whatever other challenges they may face. In my province, the Ontario Disability Support Program maxes out at $1,300/ month for a single person. That’s in a province where you can’t find a one-bed flat for that. Thank goodness food banks are plentiful in Canada, otherwise these people would starve to death. Since winning the 2021 election, the Liberals haven’t made a move on that lifting-out-of-poverty thing. Since the next election will roll around in 2025, advocates for the disabled had high hopes something would be announced in this years budget speech. And it was. Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland announced every Canadian living on a disability pension would get a $200/month lift out of poverty… into more poverty, obviously! But let’s not be too hard on Chrystia. She’s got bigger fish to fry than a bunch of whiners in wheelchairs. In the same speech, she set aside an additional $320 million for Ukraine. Whether that’s included in the $13 billion we’ve already sent, or if it’s new money, isn’t made clear in this CBC interview with Ukrainian PM Denys Shmyhal. But what is clear is that, unlike the advocates for Canada’s disabled, Shmyhal is utterly enamored of Chrystia Freeland! According to the Prime Minister of Ukraine, Chrystia is the very best friend of Ukraine! I understand Chrystia has a soft spot in her heart for the Ukrainian nationalists, due to her family’s history of collaborating with Nazi Germany during the holocaust, but has she no decency? Shouldn’t she try a little harder to be a better friend to the most vulnerable Canadians?

Foraging for fiddleheads to boycott Loblaws

I spent a couple of hours in the marsh across the way foraging for fiddleheads this afternoon. This is the first time in a few years that I managed to get to the fiddleheads before they were three foot tall fern fronds. I can’t remember who turned me on to this delicacy, but I recall harvesting them along the banks of the Speed River south-west of Guelph fifty years ago. Back then, you headed out on May 24 weekend to fill your satchel. We’re a couple of hours north of there, so you’d expect the season to be a week or so later. Instead, fifty years on, the season is first week of May instead of last. Must be part of that “climate change emergency” so many folks are obsessed with. Quite aside from coming home with exceptionally nutritious and totally unprocessed free food that Loblaws didn’t get a cut of, the afternoon was time well spent. Firstly, you get away from the poison of the screen. I don’t know about you, but I generally never walk away from six or eight or ten hours at the computer feeling happier, more contented, or more optimistic than when I logged on. Then there’s all that fresh air and nature. As I made my way along the creek bank, I startled a nesting pair of Canada geese, who promptly paddled downstream with five hatchlings trailing behind, young enough to still have their yellow plumage. Later, a sandhill crane took flight just in front of me. I made my way home with about a pound’s worth of fiddleheads. I’ve got one recipe for all my foraging finds. Fry it in butter and salt lightly. Use salted butter and you can skip the second part. Whether it’s wild leeks, morels, or puffballs; fry in butter and salt lightly. It’s shocking how much food goes to waste simply because we don’t look at it as food. Every autumn, the backroads around here are lined with apple trees groaning under the weight of a perfectly edible crop, destined to fall to the ground and rot while folks pay five bucks for a three-pound bag of apples at the grocery store. Dream globally. Live locally. Forage as much as you can.

It's down the memory-hole for Ukraine and Zelensky

I just did a scroll-through of the home pages of CBC News, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox. There was not a single reference to Ukraine or its president, who for the better part of two years was met with rapturous applause as he toured the capitals of the democratic world in a never-ending fundraiser. Likewise, not a single story about the Ukraine war in the news section of today’s Globe & Mail. A passing reference in a story about Xi’s upcoming trip to the EU is as close as we get. Not a peep in the opinion section either. So what happened? Where’s Zelensky? Is the war over and media forgot to mention it? Have the plucky Ukrainians driven the Russians out of their land and secured the future of the Free World? No. Although none of those news platforms seem interested in informing us, the war is going horribly. For Ukraine. This is a monumental humiliation for the US and NATO. Time, therefore, to change the subject. Move along, folks! Nothing to see here! So, what’s the newest existential threat barreling down on us? At CBC it’s the imminent threat of a bird-flu pandemic. At Fox it’s the imminent threat of the antisemitic, Marxist, Israel-hating, terrorist-loving radicals occupying college campuses across America. At CNN, MSNBC, and in the pages of the Globe & Mail, the biggest threat to the future of civilization is a familiar one-Donald Trump! The brain trust at the Globe are so threatened by the possibility of a Trump win in November they’ve reached Rachel Madow levels of hysteria in sounding the alarm! Four full pages in the opinion section devoted to “can-democracy-survive-Trump” gnashing of teeth and rending of garments. Ya, they warned us last time too. There’s not a lot of folks convinced the world is better off after three years of Joe Biden as the top prop in America’s billionaire-run Theatre of Democracy. So goodbye, Zelly, your fifteen minutes are up. I’m sure you’ll be very well compensated. It’s a shame about your country…

Is Canada's Deputy PM a foreign agent?

There’s been a lot of noise about the need to have a registry of lobbyists who are working in Canada at the behest of foreign entities. The noise comes mostly from the same choir of American Empire Loyalists behind the current Hogue Inquiry into foreign interference in our democracy. Justice Hogue released her interim report today, confirming former GG David Johnston’s conclusion that we’re basically dealing with a media-driven nothingburger here. Her report did add the caveat that in some vague way the scandal may have undermined Canadians’ “faith in democracy.” Frankly, what undermines my faith in democracy is the quality of the candidates I’m allowed to choose from at election time. I never seem to have any choice outside a narrow range of pro-USA, pro-NATO, pro-Israel, pro-”free trade” options. That of course brings with it certain certitudes about what our foreign policy must look like. To put the matter bluntly, it inevitably looks like whatever Washington wants it to look like. Which brings me to a titillating headline I saw at the CBC a few days ago. Military charges senior officer with making derogatory remarks about commanders, allies. Murray Brewster, the top gun on military affairs at CBC, didn’t give us a whole lot of details, nor did any other Canadian news outlet. Today I ran across this nugget; Canada is losing its war against Russia and is charging senior officers with disloyalty. Holy heck, who could imagine!? I strongly recommend you read John Helmer’s article. Unlike Murry Brewster, he seems to have contacts in the CAF beyond the PR department. According to him, Colonel Robert Kearney committed the cardinal sin of deviating from the official script on our disastrous mission in Ukraine. Official script; with NATO’s commitment for whatever it takes for as long as it takes, Ukraine will eventually prevail and defeat Putin’s Russia. Colonel Kearney’s alleged heresy; Not a hope in hell. Apparently the Colonel was highly regarded as a tell-it-like-it-is kind of guy, which is a deviation from the norm amongst the neutered upper ranks of the CAF. When word of this outrage reached Ukraine’s numero uno lobbyist in Canada, Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland, his fate was sealed. Which brings us full circle to the question raised in the title. Should Chrystia be considered a “foreign agent?” That’s not as simple a question as you might think at first glance. Technically, a “foreign agent” would need to get some sort of benefit from the foreign entity they were working for. In Chrystia’s case, I’m not seeing that. Oddly enough, it looks to me like the main pro-Ukraine lobby, the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, is largely financed by the Government of Canada! How fucked up is that?

The evolution of "Canadian Values"

I’m an immigrant who landed at Pier 21 in 1956. Immigrants who landed here in 1956 were determined to do whatever they had to do to make a go of things. They had bills to pay in the new country, and since there weren’t any government welfare programs at the time, they took whatever jobs they could. After all, that was always a Canadian tradition. Why did people come here? Opportunity! Often the newcomers saw opportunity where the locals didn’t. That’s why so many successful entrepreneurs can trace their origins to a Jewish or German or Italian or whatever forebear who got off the boat and grabbed whatever job they could, which often meant grabbing a shovel. My father started his life in Canada shoveling coal at Kloepfer Coal in Guelph. The Farm Manager’s grandfather, the guy who brought their clan to Canada, paid the rent in those bleak early years by digging ditches. That was the Canadian way, and it wasn’t just about the immigrants. Historically, Canadians went to where the jobs were; that’s why I’ve encountered Newfies galore in every one of the four provinces I’ve worked in, none of which were Newfoundland. Doing honest work to pay your bills was a Canadian value. It was viewed as a civic duty in my parents’ house to help other newcomers. The first refugee immigrants we sponsored were from Viet Nam. They took whatever jobs were there, worked their butts off, and the extended family are now productive and tax-paying Canadians. Canadian values circa 1975. The next batch were from Afghanistan. We sponsored a Muslim family. Both Mom and Dad had been university professors in Kabul before the US-created Taliban took the country back to the middle ages. Both worked in menial jobs here in Canada for years before getting traction in careers commensurate with their qualifications. Canadian values circa 1995. Over the past few years I’ve been peripherally involved with a refugee family the Canadian immigration system randomly plucked out of a refugee camp in the Middle East. Both parents and two of the kids are on disability pensions. Two other kids are in school and show great promise. The oldest son, physically and psychologically whole, and at age 25 the father of three children, has had difficulty finding his way. He tried fast food for a few months, but that didn’t agree with him. Then he took a shot at construction, but that wasn’t for him either. He hasn’t worked in months, but just came back from his pilgrimage to Mecca, leaving his pregnant wife and three toddlers to fend for themselves. Sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do to find your true authentic self. Canadian values circa 2024.

Outrage as government asks civil servants to show up for work three times a week

They loved Fluffy when he was fluffing up the number of government employees by almost 40% since idiots like me voted him in back in 2015. Ya, it’s embarrassing to admit, but I fell for the “he’s a chip off the old block” narrative. Not that the “old block” didn’t have his flaws, but at least he put some value on retaining a wee sliver of sovereignty vis-a-vis our southern neighbor. Needless to say, I’ve had eight+ years of buyer’s remorse since then. One thing I never saw coming is what a craven crybaby Justin was, compared to Pierre. I’ll never forget Pierre staying in his seat at the 1968 St. Jean Baptiste parade in Montreal as a riot broke out all around him. Justin ran away under protection of his security detail when a protester threw a handful of parking lot gravel in his general direction. Maybe one of the things that fooled me was all the macho posturing Fluffy used to do. Remember the PR stunt boxing match with his good buddy Senator Richard Brazeau? Then when Brazeau got slammed with allegations of drug abuse and sexual harassment you never ever saw them together in a photo again. But it was fun while it lasted; Justin and Patrick posing shirtless for publicity photos. Very Putinesque! So apparently the civil service has expanded by about 100,000 fresh recruits since Team Fluffy took over in 2015. Since the onset of the Covid pandemic (remember that?) those folks have been working from home. Two and a half years ago Elon Musk informed his Tesla workforce that if they didn’t come back to the office, they’d have to pretend they were working for a different employer. Two and a half years later, the government of Canada is gently nudging its 350,000 employees in the same direction.