The zen of shopping for bath towels

We were sitting in front of the (fake) fire, deeply lost in our screens, when the Farm Manager announced, apropos of nothing, that she was shopping for bath towels on Amazon. (Is a gas fire actually "fake?" It is an actual fire, after all.)

I hate Amazon and I hate everything it stands for. 

Rampant unbridled consumerism. The fact that it's making it's CIA-cozy boss millions per minute just ramps up the hatred.

I already know it's a fucked up world, and I've said so often enough right here on this blog, but when the world's richest man and the CIA figure into a post about buying bath towels, well, you know it's way more fucked up than anybody could have imagined, even a year ago.

So I embark on a scorched earth "anybody but Amazon" campaign. 

As in, "I'm just gonna feel dirty if I dry off with a towel from Amazon." 

That's mostly bullshit. When I'm towelling off, I think about getting dry. I'm not wondering where the towel came from.

But anyway, my rant got the FM considering other potential bath towel provisioners. 

Believe or not, after an hour on the internet, she concluded that our best bet for new bath towels was Canadian Tire.

Wow!

Evolving our Yellow Peril propaganda

There's a reason I keep banging away at this Yellow Peril thing. War with China should be seen as a far greater threat to our well-being than either covid or climate change.

Yet, day after day, our big media, the supposedly "responsible" outfits, are pushing an anti-China agenda. While the discourse is drenched in faux outrage over China's record on human rights, the reality is that the great push for confrontation with China comes primarily from the purveyors of American Exceptionalism in Washington.

These people are determined to maintain American hegemony over the planet at any cost. Think that through.

Generally speaking, reportage around Meng and the Two Michaels in Canadian media has been devoid of serious context. They'll acknowledge that yes, we did in fact nab Meng first, but that was totally rule-of-law hunky-dory because Uncle Sam asked us to nab her, because she violated US sanctions against Iran, and, well... rule of law!

Never have I seen in any Canadian media an explication of the precise nature of those US sanctions on Iran. Are they legal? Who says so, and why? 

Today, Jeremy Nuttall has a update on Meng and the Michaels in the Toronto Star that dispenses with the Iran angle altogether. And why not? It's a pesky detail in the narrative, and American Exceptionalism doesn't do well with pesky details. Here's how Nuttall explains the arrest of Meng Wanzhou:

The United States is seeking her extradition to face bank fraud and other charges related to allegations going back years.

Cute, eh? Iran has completely disappeared from the story!

China bad! We're the innocent victims of Chinese communism! We MUST rely on our our allies to "voice their displeasure with China..."

What allies do you suppose we're talking about? Australia? New Zealand? Are those countries going to change China's policies? Of course not! Whenever you see references to our need to rely on allies, the ally we're talking about is the USA.

So, our national security, our dignity, our sovereignty, are all reliant on the failing and flailing American Empire. Whether it's Donald or Joe or Kamala in the White House doesn't make much difference. Our policy-makers and their media echo chamber are determined to hitch our wagon to US foreign policy. 

Ponder that.

Red Bay Lodge

Me and the Farm Manager took a tour over to the Red Bay Lodge today, to check out the fish and chips.

From what I hear, and this is all hearsay, the joint was boarded up for a few years. It's one of those old-school summer resorts, a short walk from the shores of Lake Huron. Popular with a working class who couldn't afford their own cottage but wanted to take the family on a vacation. They had rooms in the main lodge and then cabins. There's places just like it all around the Great Lakes. Now that our betters have re-jigged the economy in such a way that working people can no longer afford vacations, these old-school lodges have been struggling.

So it was good news when a young couple decided to bring the place back to life, and I guess they were just getting on top of things when the virus struck. After a complete shut-down in the spring they were trying to nurse the business back from the dead, when they got their insurance renewal, which informed them that their annual insurance premium had gone from seventeen to fifty-four thousand dollars.

That seems grotesquely unfair to me. For that young couple struggling to get a business going, they're already up against a covid regimen that favours the big chains. Then their insurance company pulls this? You can bet the chains aren't paying anywhere near that kind of money for equivalent square footage.

You'd almost think there's a plot afoot to drive the last independents out of business. Oddly enough, billionaire Warren Buffet (no. 6 on the Forbes billionaire rankings) owns a gaggle of insurance companies, and his pal Bill Gates (no. 3) is rumoured to be the mastermind behind the lockdowns... 

Which is why we figured it was the right thing to do to drive out to Red Bay. 

As for the fish and chips, highly recommended!

 

Which lives matter most?

They've been having quite a time of it out in Alberta with the "second wave," possibly because they came out of the first wave relatively unscathed, leaving an abundance of low-hanging fruit lingering in the long term care homes. In reading up on the pandemic in Alberta I learned that the average age of a covid death in the province is 82, and will typically have at least three co-morbidities, the most common of which is dementia.

Those are the people we've been killing the economy for in order to "save lives." There isn't a jurisdiction in the world where anything remotely resembling lockdown would have been contemplated based on the mortality rates of those under age 65. Deaths globally are massively skewed towards the elderly. 

Ironically, society otherwise doesn't give a whole lot of thought, let alone support, to the elderly. Long term care institutions are systemically underfunded throughout the capitalist democracies, often to the point of criminal negligence. Until the pandemic, nobody much cared.

That's all changed! We gotta get the deadly virus under control! It's cutting years off the wait lists at the long-term care facilities! OMG!!!

LOCK'r DOWN TIGHT!!! MASK UP YOU SELFISH BASTARD!!!... 

So, which lives suddenly matter most in this time of pestilence? 

Not black lives. Not "all" lives.... the lives that matter most are those oldsters lying neglected in nursing homes, who don't know who or where they are, and are oblivious to the fact that their diaper hasn't been changed for two days.

According to the economics of this pandemic, those are the lives that matter most.

When the best and the brightest aren't up to the job

When it was revealed last week that Canada had offloaded responsibility for vaccine distribution to the Canadian Armed Forces, I was underwhelmed. After all, the Forces long ago morphed from being a "can-do" kind of operation to more of a "we'll do what we can as long as it doesn't a) cost too much, b) hurt anyone's feelings, and c) doesn't endanger the health and/or safety of the fine women, men, and others in uniform."

If that announcement was underwhelming, today's Globe and Mail headline on the vaccine roll-out is downright disturbing; "Ottawa searches for technology to handle vaccine distribution."

Huh? Isn't the roll-out set to start next week? 

If you're wondering why that should be disturbing news, allow me to refresh your memory with a flashback to the Phoenix pay system scandal. That's where Big Steve figured he could save a bit of money by replacing lazy-ass civil servants with technology. The system has been in the works for over a decade, was officially rolled out five years ago, and... still doesn't work!

Big Steve is long gone, of course, but the same Big Tech cartel that couldn't get Phoenix up and running with a five year lead time is now going to provide a nationwide vaccine tracking infrastructure in a matter of weeks?

Good luck with that!

Your daily dose of anti-China propaganda

Take a gander at the front page of the Globe and Mail today; "FIRST LOOK AT CHINESE FORCED- LABOUR CAMP," the all caps headline screams at us!

Great! We've heard so much about these "concentration camps." Finally Nathan Vanderklippe is going to provide us with a actual first look!

Alas, the 4,000 words that follow scarcely live up to the promise of that headline. He took a picture of some buildings behind a fence, where allegedly the commies are building daycares to free up parents to go to work, and other concentration-camp-type outrages. Vanderklippe taps a trio of "Western researchers" to flesh out his utterly news-free scoop. They are:

Professor Laura Murphy, a seasoned anti-China hand whose most recent Yellow Peril screed appeared in the Washington Post mere days ago

Nathan Ruser of the rabidly anti-Chinese Australia Strategic Policy Institute

Adrian Zenze, an anti-communist "human rights activist."

At the Globe and Mail, the concept of balanced journalism is dead and buried. Instead, a regular diet of anti-China propaganda, driven by the US State Department, is pretty much the only point of view we're going to get.

How to fake a pandemic in four easy steps

Disclaimer: This article is strictly hypothetical. I am in no way claiming that the current pandemic has been faked. I am merely suggesting that in the event that party(s) unknown were inclined to do such a thing, these might be some useful strategies.

Step One: Crank up the hype. The hype was being cranked unbelievably back in January. Yup, a deadly killer virus was on the move. Oh my God, it'll be the worst thing ever! Even then we were being regaled with comparisons to the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918-1920. Canada enjoyed three more months of over-the-top hype before suffering a single covid death.

Step Two: Create a definition of a new disease  that is so broad, so diverse, so inclusive, that virtually any symptom under the sun qualifies as a symptom of the new deadly disease. Runny nose? Could be the virus. Sore throat? Could be the virus. Headache? Could be the virus. Muscle cramps? Cough? Sneezing? Aching joints? Could be the virus.

Step Three: Once you have defined the scary new disease, come up with a test to detect its presence. Ideally, you should have a test that will be as generous in the detection as you were in defining the symptoms. If, perchance, your test detects a cold you had last year and calls it covid, well, better to err on the side of bigger numbers. Remember, we're just idly speculating about hypothetical people wanting to panic the populace with a fake virus. 

Step Four: Pump up the jam! Numbers numbers numbers! Cases cases cases! Never confuse the public by publishing test numbers anywhere they're easy to find. Otherwise folks might get wise to the fact that whenever there's a new RECORD COVID CASES headline, there was also a record number of tests done that day that never made it into the news.

That should pretty much get your "pandemic" off the ground! How long you can keep it aloft is up to you. If you're part of that exceptionally privileged cohort who happen to own the world's information infrastructure, you can probably milk it for a good long while.

What you do with that opportunity is up to you.