Who can even imagine that evildoers would inject drugs into a race horse just to improve their chances?
Disgusting!
Outrageous!
An abomination!
A pivotal moment for the sport of kings?
Alas, they've been pumping whatever shit they can get away with into race horses since the very first horse race, if they thought it would up the odds.
Only "news" here is that there's so many morons about who think this is news.
Just the other day I was reading one of the Globe and Mail's top guns referring to Colombia as a "successful democracy."
That's the sort of air-head reportage we've come to expect from the Globe, sadly.
Seems the people of Colombia are somewhat out of sorts with their democracy. Not that our top-drawer journalists would notice, but the people of Newfoundland might. I'm guessing the run-of-the-mall folks in Newfoundland will take to their "big reset" about as well as their peers down south.
That's where we're all headed, in case you were wondering. These staggering hundreds of billions in deficits we have incurred fighting that deadly ole virus are gonna have to be paid back, don't ya know!
And that will require much belt-tightening (ie gutting social programs all over the place but going full steam ahead on our 60 billion dollar commitment to a new warship fleet so we can "stand with our allies" as they provoke nuclear war with Russia and China), raising taxes, and selling off what's left of the public domain.
That last part could be a game-changer for the Newfies. They've got tons of assets just doing nothing. Imagine if a savvy international investor, like Sheldon Adelson for example,was to buy Gros Morne Park. Newfoundland could become the Macau of the North Atlantic in no time!
I'm hoping the Newfies will follow the example of the Colombians.
Let me say right off the top what a blessing it is to have reached pensioner status and still have two vibrant parents living in their own home! Not everybody gets to appreciate that.
Today's a day set aside to honour our moms. My mom came from a pretty tough place. Before she hit her teens she'd witnessed more death and destruction than I can possibly imagine. Their village in East Prussia was one of the last to evacuate as the Red Army approached. She spent five years in a refugee camp in Denmark before she was repatriated to a part of Germany as foreign as the moon.
A few years later she had married the dashing apprentice baker who rode his motorcycle half way across Germany to woo her on weekends.
Arriving in the new land with me in her arms and my sister in her belly, she took on every challenge head on, and eventually gave birth to five of them.
As far as I'm concerned, each of the five of us are all still the people we are today thanks to the Mom who brought us up. She was a powerhouse.
I don't know how you did it, Mom. The kitchen garden you used to keep would be considered a hobby farm today. You are an inspiration every day.
Happy Mother's Day!
I've got nothing but good things to say about my current piece-of-shit made-in-China lawnmower. I picked it up at Home Hardware a few years ago for $199 plus tax. That replaced my previous piece-of-shit lawnmower, also made in China...
But, no more than five years into its tenure, and while the motor started first pull after the winter hibernation, today one of the wheels fell off. Well, not fell off completely, but I guess metal fatigue led to the collapse of the gusset that stabilises the wheel assembly. I was able to bend it back into its original position and continue my mission, but you can only do that so many times before the thing breaks off completely.
So I mention to the Farm Manager that I may have to get a new mower. She says, maybe it's time to consider a ride-on.
Ya, maybe she's right. Maybe it's time. In my mind, I figure I'm saving the cost of a gym membership by pushing the fucking lawnmower around for three hours a week.
But maybe I'm being an idiot. Maybe I should get with the modern times. Smell the coffee, as it were.
After doing some research, I found the perfect ride-on mower. As a bonus, it has a back-hoe at one end and a bucket at the other, and all that for a mere $50k! And it's not even made in China!
The FM comes back with "they've got a nice John Deere ride-on at Home Depot for nineteen hundred bucks and it's got a beer-can holder."
So does the Kubota!
As a long-tine CBC Radio listener, and I'm talking fifty years plus, I'm embarrassed every time they embark on another campaign to make themselves more "cool," or possibly hip, relevant, engaged, dialled in... whatever you want to call yourself when you want to be with the cool kids in the high school cafeteria.
That's the level of management philosophy on view at CBC these days. The high school cafeteria mentality has taken over the news room. These are folks who see their shilling for establishment propaganda as revolutionary, as long as they can squeeze in a few hours on how awful life is for the two percent of Manitobans who identify as Black.
Further on down the road of toadying to the latest whims of the PC virus, these same mostly white (am I right?) geniuses come up with the idea of hosting an evening hour of "Black" music. Because the CBC is looking to lure in the Black teens from Jane-Finch?
Sorry CBC... that ain't gonna happen.
You've been busy alienating your traditional base while abjectly failing to make yourselves relevant to any potential new audiences. Instead, you've become a conduit for rank partisan propaganda, with the incessant anti-China/Russia/Iran propaganda peddled by our finest US-funded think tanks.
And far be it from the professional journalism practitioners at CBC to ever grant two minutes of air time to any expert with an opinion contrary to the official narrative on the great pandemic.
The CBC today is pretty much what TASS was in Soviet Russia; the state-sponsored propaganda organ. Dressing it up with an hour of Indigenous music here and Black music there ain't gonna cover the stench of our slavish devotion to American Exceptionalism.
There's all sorts of countries "opening up" now. What's also opening up is the opportunity for Big Tech to get on top of the imminent roll-out of the universal vaccine passport. That's where the vaxxed will be afforded special privileges not available to the non-believers. Like international travel, for example, or tickets for the next Rolling Stones tour.
The logistics of such an international tracking scheme will of course be in the hands of Big Tech, because, who else?
Society has lagged in appreciating the consequences of the massive concentration of wealth that has occurred over the past few decades. We've ceded to billionaires powers that were once the preserve of kings, despots, dictators, or from time to time, democratic governments. Jack Dorsey, accountable only to himself (oh sorry, I forgot the board of directors and the shareholders... like they matter!?), has the power to silence the president of the United States.
Billionaires like Mike Bloomberg think nothing of dropping a few hundred millions on an election campaign just to help out their favourite horse, for owning politicians has replaced owning thoroughbreds among the billionaire sporting set.
The Koch boys have been using their largess to corrupt the judicial system for over fifty years now.
George Soros funds innumerable astro-turf operations around the world, which oddly enough, share virtually the exact same agenda as the US state department.
Jeff Bezos, top 'o the billionaire pile for five years running, owns the most influential newspaper in the USA (only because NYT staff are now obsessed with auditioning for Jerry Springer).
I could go on, but the long and the short of it is, the billionaires now own our politics, our media, our economy, and our future.
The billionaires who own the global information infrastructure have the power to make Little Bana into a global brand overnight. They have the power to bestow a Nobel Prize on Malala. They can elevate a disturbed teen from Sweden into a global climate authority. They can turn a petty criminal and drug addict into a global icon for racial justice.
In short, they have the power to manipulate us into hating who they want us to hate, and cheering for whomever they tell us are the "good guys."
Imagine a future in which wealth becomes ever more concentrated. That's the trajectory we're on. The tech wizards pushing for 5G aren't doing it so a doctor in Singapore can do brain surgery on a child in Nunavut; they're doing it to entrench their wealth and power.
Are we there yet?
Or would they be Newfie jokes now? Capitalization is everything.
Once upon a time, Canada was awash with Newfie jokes.
How many newfies does it take to change a lightbulb? Three. One to hold the lightbulb and two to turn the ladder.
To be perfectly honest, I don't recall precisely what triggered my Newfielia, since it was well past 4:20 in the afternoon, but we were just having a discussion about what caused the extinction of the newfie joke.
The Farm Manager puts it down to political correctness.
I'm not so sure. Political Corectitude didn't really go full throttle till the advent of the internet, and especially, smartphones.
I believe Newfie jokes were in decline long before that.
Why?
I believe it largely had to do with other Canadians, ie the rest of us, getting to know Newfoundlanders up close and personal.
Over the years, a lot of us had the opportunity to do just that. After Joey Smallwood brought the Newfies into Canada, they were soon overwhelmed by tough times. Newfies began the exodus from their Holy Land that, after a brief respite around the discovery of oil offshore, continues to this day.
Then the cod fishery collapsed, after years of mismanagement by professional experts in Ottawa, and the outflow of Newfs doubled.
That's why there's a Newfie diaspora across this country today. The biggest Newfie social club is in Cambridge Ontario.
Back in my jouneyman welder journeying days, the four provinces I worked in I always worked elbow to elbow with Newfies. They were everywhere!
And they were the most decent of down-to-earth people. All the maudlin cliches in Come From Away are true.
I remember when my old pal Kipling and I were heading out west to make our fortune. Kipling piled my Dart GTS into a snowbank a hundred miles east of Winnipeg, because he fell asleep at the wheel at a hundred miles an hour.
It's dead of a minus forty winter night, and two longhairs are standing beside the Trans-Canada highway, and after standing there for a lot longer than you would imagine, given the reputation of this country as a land of kind and compassionate people, what finally pulled over to give us a ride was a Ford station wagon that already had five Newfies in it.
You can almost hear their conversation. Ay Buddy, we should pick up Buddy and other Buddy. Aw come on Buddy, we already got Buddy and Buddy and whats-his name in the back. You mean Buddy? Ya. Well fuck off then, ya can't just leave Buddy out there freezin to death...
Anyway, all the Buddies scootched over and off we went.
So, ya. Why would you want to make fun of people who treat you like that? Newfie jokes died out because once you got to know Newfoundlanders, you just had too much respect.
But times have changed. Newfoundland, or more correctly, "Newfoundland and Labrador," have sprung a fresh Newfie joke on us. You see, while the Newfoundlanders are kind and trusting people, over the years they put too much trust in the kind of slippery folks who were running the rest of Canada, those fancy MBA types with law degrees and a few years at a major US investment bank.
Generally speaking, that's not the kind of people regular folks should put their trust in, as the Newfies have discovered to their horror.
Today Moya Greene released her long-dreaded report on the economic future of a province run into the ground by four generations of well-educated experts.
Guess what? The "Modern Monetary Theory" that allows our federal government to explode deficits out the ying-yang doesn't apply in the case of Newfoundland. Nope, the same expert class that ran the ship aground is now recommending tough love, and lots of it.
That means drastic spending cuts, drastic cuts to social welfare, in a province already beset by poverty, cuts all over the place, and of course, the situation is so dire that we'll be forced to sell off all sorts of public assets. Oh, and raise taxes!
Hey Newfoundland, the joke's on you again!
Maybe it's time to contemplate Newfoundland independence.
