Ken Hill

Never met the man, but it feels like he was my teaching assistant for a few years.

I had an English class at the time, sort of a Hail Mary class; a last chance credit course for kids who had already failed the literacy test twice. I was constantly on the look-out for stories that might engage them, and these were tough kids to engage.

That's how I happened upon Mr. Hill. I found a story in the Toronto Sun about a court case. A woman had taken her ex-husband to court to have her child support increased. Nothing much engaging so far, but get this; she was already getting $30 thou a month from Ken Hill!

I got teen moms in the class who can't fathom such sums. I got kids from single parent homes who can't fathom such sums. That's gonna get their attention!

It gets better. The protagonist, the dead-beat dad who is only paying $30k per month, is an Indigenous guy! That's gotta pique the interest of my FN students.

Turns out Mr. Hill had other kids with other gals. Apparently all of them were generously provided for.

That story was the gift that kept on giving. I used it for several years. It brought up loads of opportunities for discussion around parental responsibility, what it means to be a father, gender and racial stereotypes, and all kinds of other stuff. The kids loved reading about a FN  entrepreneur who shattered so many stereotypes, partied with Snoop Dog, and did the right thing for his children. What a mensch!

So while I never met the man, I introduced him to a couple hundred students over the years. Thanks for the help, Mr. Hill!

America; where everybody has a gun and nobody has a chance

Rather a macabre scenario playing itself out down there in the exceptional nation, wouldn't you agree?

I mean, what do they do with those 74 millions who just voted for white supremacy? Re-education camps? Sensitivity training? Critical Race Theory tutorials?

How about a three-strikes law. If the Trumpkins still haven't seen the light after all of the above, what then? Three strikes, and then... a final solution?

Anyway, let's not forget all those dickwads have guns, and lots of 'em. Oh, and everybody else has lots of guns too! In fact, nowhere on the planet do people fetishise guns the way Americans do... it all goes back to that Second Amendment Moses brought down from the mountain.

Or something.

The bread lines grow exponentially. But they're not breadlines per se. It's people in late model vehicles lined up at drive-through food banks. They line up for miles. They line up in forty thousand dollar cars they bought with no money down back when that seemed like a good idea. 

They park their Hondas and Fords and Ram trucks in front of tents by the underpass these days. Nothing left but the car payments and the gun. Oh, and the phone.

They're wondering where this will end...

Thank God they have Joe Biden stepping up to the plate in a couple of days!

Second wave Ontario: cases up 600%, deaths about the same

We in Ontario have been deluged with scary stories about the second wave of COVID-19. I spent a leisurely morning perusing the government's own pandemic website.

Some salient facts:

- during the first wave, Ontario processed approx 15,000 tests per day

- daily case counts peaked approx 550

- daily test numbers have trended steadily higher. 

- Dec 10 was first time over 60,000 were processed. 

- Jan 1 was first time over 70,000 tests were processed

- daily case counts now approx 3500, increase of 600% +

- daily deaths @ peak of first wave: 60

- avg daily deaths past seven days (Jan 9 - 16): 60

Draw your own conclusions.

One night in Maine

One summer night in Bar Harbor, and we're going back thirty years here, me and the family were having dinner in a restaurant in the tourist district. That pretty much encompasses all of Bah Hubba, as far as I can recall.

It was an absolutely fabulous dinner. Bar Harbor had some great food joints at the time. Maybe they still do. Ain't seen the place since '92 or so. I'd have to get a fucking passport before I can have dinner in Bah Hubba again...

Anyway, the family consisted of my two beautiful children and their mom, my wife at the time. We found ourselves dining in Maine due to our move to New Brunswick, where I had scored a gig at Irvings shipyard, building warships. 

We're in this place, and the children are being their rambunctious selves. Which is to say, they're well enough behaved, but they feel free to express themselves. When my wee daughter scampered away and I nabbed her and hoisted her aloft by the straps of her Oshkosh overalls, we got a round of applause. 

At the time, it paid to have a weekend in Maine if you lived in New Brunswick. If you stayed over for two nights, you could pretty much bring two cartons of smokes and a jug of liquor back duty free. Not to mention what you had stuffed in the bottom of the diaper bag. That paid for your weekend in Bar Harbor, at least in the off season. 

So it's Mr. Bill time, and the waitress says the guy in the cowboy hat got your tab. How cool is that!

We get out to the parking lot, and there's the guy in the cowboy hat, pissing on the back tire of a Cadillac Eldorado with Texas plates.

"You have a beautiful family, Suh," he says as he zips up and gets in his car.

I like how he calls me "sir" even though he's at least fifty years my senior. Kinda like every waitress south of the Ohio River automatically calls you "honey."

That's America... those are Americans.

Baseless conspiracy theories without a shred of evidence

As a life-long news junkie, I've noticed that there has been a recent trend in many supposed news stories to include some version of this heading embedded either in the title or the body of the story. This is particularly noticeable in coverage of Team Trump's various challenges to the November election and also in reportage of competing pandemic narratives. In both cases there is an official narrative, and any deviation therefrom is inevitably "baseless conspiracy theory without a shred of evidence."

This marks an evolution in how news is presented. Where were the "without a shred of evidence" disclaimers when our "legitimate" news outlets were regaling us with yarns about Saddam's nukes or Qaddafi's rape squads? Perhaps a note of caution injected into those scary stories could have slowed the march to war on those countries.

Likewise, our truth-tellers in the mainstream media never asterisked four years of Russiagate hysteria with that disclaimer. Any anonymous leak from the "intelligence community" that served to obstruct Trump was presented as gospel, when in reality they actually were baseless conspiracy theories without a shred of evidence.

I ran into the phrase this morning in this CBC story about billionaire and Clinton crony Frank Giustra, one of the biggest donors to various Clinton "philanthropies." Unpaid intern Jason Proctor lays it out in his opening sentence;

West Vancouver billionaire Frank Giustra has been given the go-ahead to sue Twitter in a B.C. courtroom over the social media giant's publication of a series of tweets tying him to baseless conspiracy theories involving pedophile rings and Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Hmm... "...tying him to baseless conspiracy theories involving pedophile rings..."

Sorry, what ties Giustra to those baseless conspiracy theories are stories like this one from The Guardian, and this from CNBC. 

Seems there was this sociopathic pedophile named Jeffrey Epstein. He was an actual convicted pedophile who cultivated the who's who of America's political elite. He is believed to have continued both his diddling and his cultivating until ending it all in a spasm of remorse in a NYC prison last year.

There's an old folk maxim we're all familiar with; you are judged by the company you keep. That Giustra kept company with folks who ran with Epstein doesn't prove him guilty of anything, of course.

But the "pedos in high places" story would seem a long way from "baseless conspiracy theory."

Trump makes history

Yup! First president in the history of USA to be impeached TWICE!

To what end? We're a week away from the hand off. What is the point of this?

The point is to rub salt in whatever wounds 74 million Americans might be suffering right now. Sleepy Joe comes not to heal, but to inflame.

The overwhelming majority of US voters know that the status quo is not working for them. Some of those put their faith in Bernie, only to be thwarted by the DNC.

Many others put their faith in Trump, only to be thwarted by the DNC.

Someday soon, an anti-status-quo candidate will rise up with a third party that appeals to that majority of the population who believe their elites have failed them.

Democracy will come to the USA, eventually.

Cannibal salami

There was a joke going around Guelph back in the day. I don't want to get into the particulars, but it suggested a link between Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance and the fact that there were several thriving salami makers in town at the time. By today's standards it would be considered, among other things, an egregious  ethnic slur.

I'd mentioned the joke to the Farm Manager recently, because we'd watched the latest Hoffa movie, which was very good. That plot has a lot more plausibility than the salami story. But somehow we got into a discussion about cannibalism and stereotypes.

I took the view that one reason the salami story has no cred is because everybody knows Italians are too European to indulge in such barbarity. The only place you'd ever find such a thing is among some African tribes, I ventured.

The FM called me on that stereotype, as she should, but it got us interested enough to mount a google search. What an eye-opener! Yup, they indeed had cannibalism in the heart of Africa, but damn near everywhere else at one time or another, including the heart of Europe!

Obviously, the taboo against cannibalism is a social construct, and like all social constructs, is by definition a tool of the oppressor. 

As we await the Great Reset, that rapture wherein Klaus and the Billionaires free us from capitalism, let's hope we are also set free from this archaic taboo.

We demand freedom!

WE DEMAND CANNIBAL SALAMI!!!