Mother Nature poops on Bruce, again...

There we were, thinking we'd beat winter. The meadows were more brown than white, and the weather forecasts were promising.

Then, this.

Woke up this morning, looked out the bedroom window, and everything was white. It snowed last night, and it's been snowing all day long. By golly, I think the kids might be enjoying another "snow day" on Monday, if this keeps up.

That would be snow day number sixteen for this winter, if my count is anywhere near accurate.

That'll create quite the conundrum for the school board. Not that they actually give a shit, but they're quite concerned about giving the appearance that they do.

According to the latest "sunshine list," the plagiarist in charge of the local school board pulled down a cool $230,000+ last year. That's some sweet coin for a moron who can't figure out where one idea ends and another begins, especially when she's plagiarising.

Plagiarism aside, the school board rallies to the banner of "credit integrity" whenever they get cornered on the fact that winter weather can cause students to lose almost 20% of their classroom time. Nevermind the fact that they routinely issue high school diplomas to eighteen and nineteen and twenty year old kids who need a calculator to do grade three arithmetic and have grade four literacy skills, if that.

They actually put forward an initiative to "end the culture of snow days" a few years back.

Ya, like they're gonna control the weather?

Fortunately for the students in this school district, snow days are called by the down-to-earth folks who run the school buses, and not by the morons who run the school board.

Canadian military announces "Operation Absence"

Canadian Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan announced yesterday that our peacekeeping mission to Mali, Operation Presence, will continue indefinitely.

The mission, begun a year ago, saw 250 CF personnel and Canada's entire fleet of eight helicopters in the African country to deliver peace, development, and prosperity.

CF spokesperson Colonel Wanda Dunkelwasser elaborated on Sajjan's announcement in a media backgrounder; "Our analysts have determined that over the past year, our contribution to bringing peace, development, and prosperity to Mali has been precisely zilch. Nada. Bupkis. We subsequently further determined that we could find considerable efficiencies in our peacekeeping mission by withdrawing our personnel and our helicopters. Going forward, our peacekeeping mission will be known as Operation Absence."

On the same day that Minister Sajjan was updating the public on our peacekeeping mission, Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland shocked the UN by revealing that "Neo-Nazis, white supremacists, 'incels,' nativists, and radical anti-globalists" threaten the stability of the civilized world.

Alas, she was not referring to those smelly, basement-dwelling, maladapted, twenty-somethings playing kill-em-all video games eighteen hours a day. In her leadership role with the Lima Group, working to free Venezuelan women and girls and resources from the grip of their elected dictator, Ms. Freeland has gained invaluable insights into the psyches of white supremacists like her good friends, Mikes Pence and Pompeo.

When Freeland talks Neo-Nazis, we'd do well to pay attention.

Trudeau's "new politics" looks like the same old slime

So how are things looking for PM Sunny Daze' sunny ways, my friends?

Me and the Farm Manager spent five hours in the car today, to take in Horst Packull's funeral. We had the state broadcaster on most of the way. We learned that Canada is marshalling some top scientists to explain to the Chinese that there's really nothing wrong with our canola or our soybeans.

Well, that's nice, but I think most Canadians are probably smart enough to get that our problems in the China market have nothing to do with canola or soybeans, so why bother trotting out such a misleading story? China's ban on Canadian soy product and canola has nothing to do with science, and everything to do with politics.

Indeed, most Canadians fully understand that our current difficulties stem from our arrest, at Uncle Sam's behest, of Meng Wanzhou. Her crime? The company she works for has allegedly violated US sanctions against Iran.

To consider that a crime, one has to buy the argument that the US has a right to unilaterally dictate to other nations, allegedly sovereign states, who they can and cannot do business with. These Iran sanctions do not originate with the UN or any other international body. In fact, they originate in that country whose name we dare not speak.

Be that as it may, you can't do business with Iran because Uncle Sam says so.

Period.

PM Fluffy and his government obviously buy in.

But here's the thing. Anyone with a first year poly-sci grasp of geopolitics could pay lip service to the US sanctions while still avoiding a showdown with China. After receiving the arrest request from Washington, Canada had any number of options in terms of quietly signalling Huawei that travel plans had best take this contingency into consideration. That's what would have happened under Harper, or Chretien, or Mulroney.

That's just big-boy politics.

What Justin's social justice warriors are doing is virtue-signalling their moral superiority over Trump in the foreground, while furiously working to appease Trump behind the scenes, and the Canadian public is catching on.

Trudeau came to office promising a whole new way of doing politics.  And his government has certainly taken virtue-signalling to new heights. He's got a "feminist" government, don't you know! And nosiree, we won't be kow-towing to Mr. Trump! In fact, we welcome the world's huddled masses even while the Orange Ogre is banning Muslims!

The reason Canadians are in jail in China, and our agriculture products are no longer welcome there, is because the Chinese are calling Trudeau's virtue-signalling bullshit.

They're telling us that kow-towing to Mr. Trump has a cost.

Who knew?

Obviously, neither Justin nor his completely in-over-her-head Minister of Foreign Affairs could see this coming. We haven't even had an ambassador in China since January, because the highly respected John McCallum had to be fired, because he did see it coming. The decision to fire McCallum was a victory of virtue-signalling over common sense.

Thanks to the SNC scandal, we've recently been treated to a peek behind the scenes in the Sunny Ways government, and it ain't pretty. Seems the government that strictly observes the "rule of law" on the Huawei file has no problems elbowing the rule of law aside to do some bare-knuckle politicking on behalf of SNC.

Seems the "feminist" PM expects his female cabinet ministers to obey orders.

Seems the Prime Minister of Native Reconciliation doesn't have any qualms about putting the boots to a Native woman who calls him on his shilling for a corporate scofflaw.


Seems to me that politics in the age of PM Sunny Daze are as slimy as they've ever been.

A new fascism for a new century

One thing easy to miss during the last two years, as our "free press" was incessantly waving the Russiagate hoax at the public, is how the purveyors of fake news are incrementally shutting down our ability to access news that comes from alternative sources.

The Washington Post gave acres of free publicity to an outfit called PropOrNot in late 2016. PropOrNot claims to be working diligently to ferret out "Russian propaganda" on the internet. They compiled a handy list of websites to shun if one wishes to avoid having one's thoughts contaminated by "fake news." I'm a regular visitor to a number of those sites, and I like to think I'm intelligent enough and sufficiently well read to decide for myself when I'm reading bullshit.

PropOrNot would prefer that I not imbibe the propaganda to be found on sites like Global Research or truthdig. Frankly, my bullshit detector has to work a lot harder when I'm reading the Washington Post than when I'm reading those sites.

Similarly, the Integrity Initiative was a UK government effort to steer the public away from "fake news." It is beyond ironic that the fakery of the Integrity Initiative was exposed by one of those fake news sites we're supposed to avoid.

That concept of a "network of networks" detailed in the RT story clarifies a lot of things. It goes a long way to explaining the White Helmets' journey from al Qaeda auxiliary to Hollywood, and eight-year-old Bana al-Abed's journey from Aleppo to the Oscars.

Unfortunately, the powers that be are working overtime to make those alternative news sources harder and harder to find. Our tech overlords are joining with governments and the corporate media to restrict our access to information that might be upsetting to the establishment narrative. The Facebook-Twitter-Google crowd are all-in for making sure that your delicate sensitivities will be spared inconvenient facts.

It's all for your own good, of course.

In Albert Speer's Spandau prison memoir, the former Hitler deputy observed that if the Nazis had had television, they would have been unstoppable.


The new fascists have way more than television.

Israeli leadership candidate vows to reject US military aid

The think tank here at Falling Downs has had Moshe Feiglin on the radar since that crop circle incident five years ago.

In the interval, Feiglin has fired up more than his bong; he's fired up a new political party too. To say the man brings some intriguing ideas to the election is an understatement of epic proportions.

He wants to privatize health care. Then Israel will presumably have health outcomes more aligned with the US, which has the most expensive health care system in the world with outcomes that barely rise to mediocre.

And by all means, lets privatize education too! Haiti boasts an education system 90% in private hands and provides an inspirational model.

Paying Palestinians to leave isn't exactly an original idea, and while it would no doubt draw the wrath of the human rights hand-wringers, it would be vastly preferable, at least in PR terms, to shooting them down at the Gaza fence.

Nor is annexing the West Bank an original idea. It needs to be fleshed out a little, though. Do you annex before you pay them to leave? Or do you pay them to leave first? What if they take the money and don't leave? Clearly this needs a little more thought.

But where Feiglin's genius shines through is in his vow to never take another penny in American military aid. This is going to be enormously disruptive to US politics, where for many years political careers have been made and unmade on the basis of who can promise to lavish the most free stuff on Israel.

Obviously, Moshe has not thought this through. Is it really his intention to give succour to the new wave of anti-Semites infiltrating the Democratic Party?

I'm sure Ilhan Omar would love this idea.

Doug Ford's freedom agenda

As you know, Doug wants you to have more freedom.

Especially freedom from government regulation.

That's a win-win. You deep-six a bunch of government regulations and regulators, and you save a pile of money, right?!

There's a story in my Sunday Star by Rob Ferguson today that horks up for the umpteenth time the virtues of having booze on sale at your corner store.

Because that "gives consumers more choice and convenience, while giving businesses more opportunities."

F@ck off already!

I'm with Brian Patterson, the guy from the "Ontario Safety League," whatever that is. I've never found beer hard to find either.

Here's a couple of things to think about. Do you know of any corner store employees making more than the minimum wage?

I didn't think so.

Here's a link to the latest contract between OPSEU and the LCBO. You'll find that even the most expendable hired-for-the-Christmas-rush employees are a couple of bucks over min wage. And they're on a track that could reasonably be expected to see them making more in the future.

That doesn't happen in your corner store.

So what our dear Doug is doing, is turning liquor store jobs that used to offer some prospects, into corner store jobs that don't.


Because he's a man of the people, after all...

Remembering Onkel Horst

Woke up to find an email from my mother this morning, informing me that her brother Horst had passed.

While the extended family had already sent a few emissaries to America, Horst was the first to make it to Canada, in 1955. Trained as a millwright, he found himself at the newly opened General Electric transformer plant in Guelph, which was at the time known as "Generous Electric."

Most of my early memories of Horst and his family go back to Elora, when our families shared that big old pile of yellow bricks just south of the train tracks. The house is still there, although the train tracks are long gone. The Packulls had the upstairs, the Neumanns lived downstairs, and the gigantic garden in back was a joint effort.

Onkel Horst was a great story teller. There was always garden-related work to be done that lent itself to the enslavement of child labour. I remember sitting under the giant pines in front of the house, around an enormous heap of peas that needed to be shelled. Horst would press us kids into service, and then regale us with tales from "Die Flucht." I was always spellbound. I'd actually wish there were more peas to shell because I didn't want the stories to end!

For a couple of years he tried his hand at running a welding shop in the garage behind the house. I remember him fabbing up a crop sprayer for a local farmer. To my six-year-old eye it looked more like something the Wright brothers might have come up with. I asked him years later why he'd given up that side business. He said he enjoyed the welding aspect, but was spending more time chasing people to pay their bills, which he hated.

The Packulls were a little quicker than we were in embracing the benefits of modernity. They had a TV many years before we did, and we were therefore regular visitors upstairs, especially when the NHL playoffs rolled around.

In some ways they were more the traditionalists, though. I'd marvel at their Christmas tree, a floor to ceiling spruce festooned with real candles, the kind you light with a match! Us downstairs folks stuck to a string of electric lights instead.

Onkel Horst was very generous in using his position at GE to get a whole lot of the extended family in the door there, starting with his brother Werner. By the time he "put in a word" for me it wasn't known as Generous Electric anymore, but it was still a great gig compared to what's out there for the working class today. In those days a GE paycheque meant you could afford a house, a car, and you could raise a family.

He had been a welding inspector there, but somewhere along the line he went into supervision. I can vouch for the fact that he didn't cut me any slack on account of being family. Getting called into his office for a "chat" was known on the shop floor as "getting a load of Horst-shit." Years later, when I became a welding inspector at Frankel Steel, I made a point of thanking him for getting me into the trade.

Horst stayed in that plant until he retired. Along the way he and Gisela raised three kids who by now have made him a great-grandfather several times over. He was a good man, a solid working-class guy who you could count on.


He'll be missed. Mach's gut, lieber Onkel!