Cat demands end to dog drool in water dish

I've told you about Doublewide. She's slimmed down some since she entered the double digits.

Overall, she's been a good cat. Used to be much feared in the mouse community, but not so much anymore. 

The summer before last, she took a huge bite out of the chipmunk community as well, which was somewhat unpleasant to witness at times.

Then Bruno entered her universe, and she was out of action with PTSD for a good six months, and is just coming into her own again. While she was side-lined, the chipmunks literally invaded the house.

After taking drastic action to beat back the invaders, no thanks to Doublewide, we are relatively rodent free this winter. But even though she's basically not contributing anything to the battle, she's more demanding than ever.  

She lingers beside the water bowl, which still has a half inch in it, and wails for a re-fill every time you walk by.

That's because when you share your water dish with big-lips Bruno, that last half inch is mostly dog drool.

So, who can blame her?

I wouldn't drink dog drool either. Why should she?

Globe & Mail walks back two years of hysterical covid fear-mongering

After two years of relentless fear-mongering, the Globe today gives four full pages to what until yesterday were considered conspiracy theories. I had to double check to see if maybe Joe Rogan or RFK Jr wrote it. Among the stunning claims:

• vaccine testing prior to approval was rushed and not fit for purpose

• vaccines have far less efficacy than claimed by drug companies

• natural immunity far more effective than vaccination

• doctors and scientists with legitimate alternative views were censored and silenced

• the Great Barrington Declaration got it right in October of 2020

• 303 studies confirm that Dr Donald Trump was right about hydroxychloroquine

• there are more vaccinated than unvaccinated in our hospitals and ICUs

In other words, the “master narrative” the Globe and Mail was so instrumental in creating and promoting was mostly a load of hooey from the beginning.

This is a most remarkable change of direction. Makes you wonder what media truth is gonna disappear next...

Putin and/or Xi not interested in world domination after all?

Fossil fuels are your friend?

Exceptional Nation not so exceptional?

The mind boggles...

We fooled everybody... except the health inspector

In my teen years I had a gas-pumper job at John's Supertest, out Waterloo Ave just past Silvercreek. It was a two-storey structure with a couple of apartments upstairs, and public washrooms, an office, and an auto repair shop on the main floor.

My job included keeping the public washrooms clean. Over time, there seemed to me to be more and more plumbing malfunctions, to the point I was spending more time mopping up toilet overflow as pumping gas.

We brought the situation to the attention of the absentee owner, who had bought the place as a real estate investment. Eventually a backhoe and a couple of guys with clipboards showed up. 

Bad news! The city sanitary sewer didn't run that far out Waterloo Ave at the time, and the septic system needed replaced.

The owner wasn't the kind of guy to throw around money on capital improvements if they could be somehow delayed, avoided, or simply forgotten. His solution? The backhoe had partially exposed the rotten septic tank, so there was an open sewage pit in the side-yard. He spent fifty bucks on a sump pump and fifty feet of plastic pipe to pump the shit and piss into the ditch.

That solved the problem of the toilets not flushing, but it created a new problem.

The scent of raw sewage permeated the air.

People would comment on it when they pulled up for gas. I blamed it on the City of Guelph sewage treatment plant, just down the road.

"Ya, I know! When the wind blows the wrong way, they stink up the whole neighbourhood. Ain't it disgusting!"

That worked pretty good for about six months. Then one day, the health department guy who does septic tank inspections stopped in for gas. Unbeknownst to me, his office was at the sewage treatment plant, so he knew what it smelled like down there, which was nothing like the smell at John's Supertest.

As I'm filling up his car and washing his windshield, he's walking around sniffing the air. His sniffer takes him towards the ditch. He bends over and puts a finger in the muck and lifts it to his nose...

I knew we were screwed right there.

He spots the plastic pipe and follows it back to our sewage pond. We're shut down on the spot.

Overnight, the owner found the money for the new septic system, and we were open for business by the next afternoon!

Alas, John's Supertest was eventually bulldozed to make way for the mother of all highway interchanges, where Waterloo Ave crosses the Hanlon. That monstrosity wiped out everything in a one mile radius except for a strip joint and the Guelph Bible Chapel, but I'll leave those for the next history lesson.

Dogs of war howling loud

Caught part of Matt Galloway’s show on CBC Radio this morning. He and his panel of experts were speculating as to what horrors Bad Vlad is about to unleash on not only Ukraine, but the “free world” at large.

Expert One was a reporter for a Western-financed internet news portal in Kyiv. Experts Two and Three were veterans of US think tanks lavishly financed by the likes of Lockheed-Martin and Raytheon. All the experts agree that Putin’s gonna go big if he can get away with it.

Yup, those Russian battle-tanks are gassed-up and waiting for the signal to seize the entirety of Ukraine… and who knows where they’ll stop? Poland? The English Channel?

That’s why it’s so important that all democratic nations stand united with Ukraine, because if we don’t stop Putin now, we’ll soon be fighting Russians in the streets of Brampton. The Big Dog, leader of the Free World dog pack, has made it abundantly clear that there will be no American boots (officially) on the ground, but we’re sending best wishes and rushing in hundreds of millions worth of weapons, so that the Forces of Righteousness can fight Putin’s hordes right down to the last Ukrainian.

For the most part, the hyperventilating across our legacy media studiously avoids any mention of actual Russian concerns, chief among them the steady expansion of NATO ever eastward. The semi-official rebuttal to that claim is NATO never promised not to expand eastward. Last Saturday The Globe’s Doug Saunders made the comically stupid argument that if such assurances were made, they were made to Gorbachev, not Putin, and therefore don’t count.

We tend not to hear much about the Minsk Agreement either. Kyiv signed off on that, promising greater regional autonomy to the predominantly Russian-speaking eastern areas of the country. Needless to say, that didn’t happen, nor do we ever hear any politicians in the West imploring the Ukraine side to honour their obligations.

What we hear a lot of is the sanctity of Ukraine’s territorial integrity and how Putin needs to give back Crimea before we can revisit “normal” relations with the subservient Russia of the Yeltsin era.

That’s an especially rich argument when Canadian politicians make it. Twice in my lifetime Canada has agreed to redraw its own “territorial integrity” if 50% plus one Quebec voters chose Quebec sovereignty. Prior to Russia’s “annexation,” a referendum was held in Crimea, and some 95% of the population voted to reunite with Russia as opposed to sticking with the crew of anti-Russian ultra-nationalists brought to power in the US-sponsored coup of 2014.

Double standards, anyone?

Yet here we are. The Brits and the Yanks are promising Zelensky a bonanza of anti-tank weapons. The Canadian poodles, always wanting to impress the bigger dogs, are clamouring that we must assist in the arming of Ukraine too.

Realistically, in the event we fail to contain our confrontational rhetoric, all those hundreds of millions in weapons and munitions will be destroyed in their warehouses in the first 24 hours of hostilities.

But not to worry… Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin will be happy to ramp up production and sell plenty more!

There's no such thing as baloney steak

The Farm Manager was reading me the menu at a new place in town that some overly optimistic keeners opened just in time to be repeatedly shut down because you-know-what.

So we can't actually go there, but some day soon, after we all get our boosters or N95s or whatever the magic bullet is gonna be, when you-know-what is vanquished, we'll be first in line.

Because the menu is truly drool-worthy.

Or it was, till we got to the baloney steak.

I must object to that one.

I know baloney, and I know steak.

You can bet they don't call it "baloney steak" to imbue an actual steak with the prestige of a little baloney ambience.

No, it's the other way around!

Then the FM reads the ingredients.

Grilled with cheddar cheese, tomato, corn relish, mustard, and mayo. Choice of sourdough or rye and a side: mac & cheese, dilli potato salad, baked beans, cole slaw, or Caesar salad.

Hmm... that's almost enough to get me to try a baloney sandwich for the first time in fifty years!

BUT DON'T CALL IT STEAK!!!

What if Putin isn't bluffing?

The cabal of dorkshits who pissed away $300 million every single day for twenty years before cutting and running from the Taliban, now see themselves entitled to dictate what's what to Russia and China.

I don't think you have to be a genius political analyst to see this can't possibly end well.

The Americans spent billions to over-throw the democratically elected government in Ukraine. After decades of encroaching on former Soviet satellites, Ukraine was to be the big prize. If we could turn Ukraine, NATO would be right on Russia's border!

Alas, the "Revolution of Dignity" wasn't much of a revolution, nor did it bring anything in the way of dignity to the people of Ukraine.

The current tensions in Ukraine can be traced back to comments the clown-comedian leader of Ukraine made back in the spring, about re-taking the Crimean peninsula. That's when the first "build-up" of Russian forces on the other side of the border happened.

Since then, Western politicians and media have been recklessly goading Zelensky to make good on his threats. Even as both the UK and USA announce up front they won't back Ukraine militarily, they keep up the confrontational rhetoric and flood Ukraine with hundreds of millions in fresh weaponry. 

The reporting in Western media on last week's meetings between EU, OSCE, NATO, and Russia was dismissive of any Russian concerns. We are, after all, the Good Guys, whereas Putin is an evil dictator looking to revive the Stalin era.

In Canada, the two primary organs of state propaganda, The Globe and Mail and CBC, are full of hubristic twaddle about how we and our allies need to call Putin's bluff and put him in his place.

Canada cut and ran from Afghanistan years before the Americans gave up. Yet somehow, we think it's our job to rally round Uncle Sam as the Americans provoke a military confrontation with an entity that is infinitely more capable than the Taliban?

This will not end well for the self-proclaimed Nations of Virtue.

Donald Trump and the collapse of American democracy

In my estimation, US democracy was officially declared dead with the supreme court decision permitting unlimited private campaign funding. That was 2010.

It had been in rough shape for decades, but you’d still get the odd twitch out of almost-dead corpse. That explains Jimmy Carter. It was easier to pretend America had a functioning democracy in those days.

That’s over. When political campaigns cost billions, politics becomes the plaything of billionaires. Which is not to suggest that America no longer has bitterly contested elections. In fact, they seem more bitterly contested than ever, now that they are virtually meaningless.

Take the transition from Trump to Biden, for example. What has changed? In spite of holding both congress and the senate, Team Blue couldn’t get anything done that people got excited about during the campaign. All that progressive feel-good stuff Biden promised just wafted into the ether.

Ditto in the foreign policy realm. Have any of Trump’s egregious violations of diplomatic norms been corrected?

Nope! The Golan now belongs to Israel and Israel’s capital is now Jerusalem. That Iran deal is way too complicated to revive. No point easing up on Cuba sanctions, which Obama had done and Trump reversed.

There’s a different guy in the White House, but the machine keeps lumbering on pretty much the same as before.

With US democracy dead and buried, the theatre of democracy becomes paramount.

Check this out. The character Donny J is rolling out his 2024 White House run in Arizona, to an arena full of enthusiastic fans. He comes on stage to the theme of that World Wrestling Entertainment character, “the Undertaker.” The fans love it!

Boo ya! Gonna save America!

American democracy is dead. Long live democracy theatre!

In some bizarre way it’s totally appropriate that Donald Trump is in the WWE Hall of Fame.