Drake-Kendrick Lamar feud takes deadly turn

When the news came out that uber-famous rapper Drake was building a home base in Canada's most exclusive postal code, the neighbors whisperd amongst one another, "there's gonna be trouble." They were right! Check it out from the CBC; Security guard shot outside Drake's mega-mansion. Bridle Path, Drake’s ‘hood, is the toniest, most posh neighborhood in all Toronto, where the median price of a crib, as the rapper’s like to call their place, runs about 8 millions. While I don’t follow matters in the world of rap music much, the CBC itself has informed me Drake has been in an on-going feud with Kendrick Lamar, another big name rapper, but in this case, straight outta Compton. My hunch is that “straight outta Compton” beats “straight outta Jewish day school” in the world of rap cred. Yo Drake, if I was you I’d be watching my back!

Closing the barn door twenty years after the horse got out

My teaching career left port in 1995, when laptops were a novelty and cellphones where seldom seen, except amongst school board admin, who were the earliest of early adapters. That was always a head-scratcher. When some school board wanker was tooling around Grey-Bruce, they were never more than 15 minutes away from a school, where they could use the phone to their hearts content. But what if they had to call head office in between those 15 minutes? After all, as everyone knows, school board superintendents do a lot of really important stuff. Mainly, they are responsible for liaising with other school board superintendents, and also with the Ministry of Education! They are the very foundation of our education system! They obviously have a lot of high-end responsibilities that can’t wait 15 minutes before the Superintendent for Student Achievement or some equally redundant time-waster makes it to the nearest school. Once the top-level school board worthies embraced cellphones, the die was cast. There was no turning back. I began to notice the impact by the late nineties, mainly because teenage girls would erupt, mid-lesson, into sobs of grief because their boyfriend had just terminated their relationship via old-school flip-phone. Then, when smart-phones took over, things really went for a shit. That’s when every research question you ever assigned became Wikipedia copy-and-paste. And as smart-phones got smarter, things only got worse. To be fair, there was resistance to abdicating our responsibilities as educators in favour of big tech. But we were very much in the minority. Every time you brought the matter up at a staff meeting, you’d be drowned out by the kool-aid drinkers who would regale you with the many studies, inevitably funded by big tech, that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that more tech in classrooms was the future of learning. The template was established by the leadership of the school board. Fast forward to today. In the last few years before I retired, I could walk down any hall in my school, and see that many of the teachers and most of the students were on their cellphones. Of course it was all in the name of “learning.” Too bad reading and math scores have been dropping precipitously since we turned education over to big tech. Twenty years after I was calling bullshit on our rush into big tech-enabled imbecility, it’s become an “issue.” The government is going to “crack down” on cellphone use in classrooms. Good luck with that!

Chrystia Freeland's Canada; $13 billions for Ukraine, $200 a month for the most vulnerable Canadians

One of many pie-in-the-sky promises Team Trudeau made during the last election campaign was to lift our fellow citizens, suffering from mental and/or physical disabilities, out of poverty. And what a beautiful promise it was. To be sure, those trying to make ends meet on the strength of a disability pension are inevitably mired in deep poverty, in addition to whatever other challenges they may face. In my province, the Ontario Disability Support Program maxes out at $1,300/ month for a single person. That’s in a province where you can’t find a one-bed flat for that. Thank goodness food banks are plentiful in Canada, otherwise these people would starve to death. Since winning the 2021 election, the Liberals haven’t made a move on that lifting-out-of-poverty thing. Since the next election will roll around in 2025, advocates for the disabled had high hopes something would be announced in this years budget speech. And it was. Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland announced every Canadian living on a disability pension would get a $200/month lift out of poverty… into more poverty, obviously! But let’s not be too hard on Chrystia. She’s got bigger fish to fry than a bunch of whiners in wheelchairs. In the same speech, she set aside an additional $320 million for Ukraine. Whether that’s included in the $13 billion we’ve already sent, or if it’s new money, isn’t made clear in this CBC interview with Ukrainian PM Denys Shmyhal. But what is clear is that, unlike the advocates for Canada’s disabled, Shmyhal is utterly enamored of Chrystia Freeland! According to the Prime Minister of Ukraine, Chrystia is the very best friend of Ukraine! I understand Chrystia has a soft spot in her heart for the Ukrainian nationalists, due to her family’s history of collaborating with Nazi Germany during the holocaust, but has she no decency? Shouldn’t she try a little harder to be a better friend to the most vulnerable Canadians?

Foraging for fiddleheads to boycott Loblaws

I spent a couple of hours in the marsh across the way foraging for fiddleheads this afternoon. This is the first time in a few years that I managed to get to the fiddleheads before they were three foot tall fern fronds. I can’t remember who turned me on to this delicacy, but I recall harvesting them along the banks of the Speed River south-west of Guelph fifty years ago. Back then, you headed out on May 24 weekend to fill your satchel. We’re a couple of hours north of there, so you’d expect the season to be a week or so later. Instead, fifty years on, the season is first week of May instead of last. Must be part of that “climate change emergency” so many folks are obsessed with. Quite aside from coming home with exceptionally nutritious and totally unprocessed free food that Loblaws didn’t get a cut of, the afternoon was time well spent. Firstly, you get away from the poison of the screen. I don’t know about you, but I generally never walk away from six or eight or ten hours at the computer feeling happier, more contented, or more optimistic than when I logged on. Then there’s all that fresh air and nature. As I made my way along the creek bank, I startled a nesting pair of Canada geese, who promptly paddled downstream with five hatchlings trailing behind, young enough to still have their yellow plumage. Later, a sandhill crane took flight just in front of me. I made my way home with about a pound’s worth of fiddleheads. I’ve got one recipe for all my foraging finds. Fry it in butter and salt lightly. Use salted butter and you can skip the second part. Whether it’s wild leeks, morels, or puffballs; fry in butter and salt lightly. It’s shocking how much food goes to waste simply because we don’t look at it as food. Every autumn, the backroads around here are lined with apple trees groaning under the weight of a perfectly edible crop, destined to fall to the ground and rot while folks pay five bucks for a three-pound bag of apples at the grocery store. Dream globally. Live locally. Forage as much as you can.

It's down the memory-hole for Ukraine and Zelensky

I just did a scroll-through of the home pages of CBC News, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox. There was not a single reference to Ukraine or its president, who for the better part of two years was met with rapturous applause as he toured the capitals of the democratic world in a never-ending fundraiser. Likewise, not a single story about the Ukraine war in the news section of today’s Globe & Mail. A passing reference in a story about Xi’s upcoming trip to the EU is as close as we get. Not a peep in the opinion section either. So what happened? Where’s Zelensky? Is the war over and media forgot to mention it? Have the plucky Ukrainians driven the Russians out of their land and secured the future of the Free World? No. Although none of those news platforms seem interested in informing us, the war is going horribly. For Ukraine. This is a monumental humiliation for the US and NATO. Time, therefore, to change the subject. Move along, folks! Nothing to see here! So, what’s the newest existential threat barreling down on us? At CBC it’s the imminent threat of a bird-flu pandemic. At Fox it’s the imminent threat of the antisemitic, Marxist, Israel-hating, terrorist-loving radicals occupying college campuses across America. At CNN, MSNBC, and in the pages of the Globe & Mail, the biggest threat to the future of civilization is a familiar one-Donald Trump! The brain trust at the Globe are so threatened by the possibility of a Trump win in November they’ve reached Rachel Madow levels of hysteria in sounding the alarm! Four full pages in the opinion section devoted to “can-democracy-survive-Trump” gnashing of teeth and rending of garments. Ya, they warned us last time too. There’s not a lot of folks convinced the world is better off after three years of Joe Biden as the top prop in America’s billionaire-run Theatre of Democracy. So goodbye, Zelly, your fifteen minutes are up. I’m sure you’ll be very well compensated. It’s a shame about your country…

Is Canada's Deputy PM a foreign agent?

There’s been a lot of noise about the need to have a registry of lobbyists who are working in Canada at the behest of foreign entities. The noise comes mostly from the same choir of American Empire Loyalists behind the current Hogue Inquiry into foreign interference in our democracy. Justice Hogue released her interim report today, confirming former GG David Johnston’s conclusion that we’re basically dealing with a media-driven nothingburger here. Her report did add the caveat that in some vague way the scandal may have undermined Canadians’ “faith in democracy.” Frankly, what undermines my faith in democracy is the quality of the candidates I’m allowed to choose from at election time. I never seem to have any choice outside a narrow range of pro-USA, pro-NATO, pro-Israel, pro-”free trade” options. That of course brings with it certain certitudes about what our foreign policy must look like. To put the matter bluntly, it inevitably looks like whatever Washington wants it to look like. Which brings me to a titillating headline I saw at the CBC a few days ago. Military charges senior officer with making derogatory remarks about commanders, allies. Murray Brewster, the top gun on military affairs at CBC, didn’t give us a whole lot of details, nor did any other Canadian news outlet. Today I ran across this nugget; Canada is losing its war against Russia and is charging senior officers with disloyalty. Holy heck, who could imagine!? I strongly recommend you read John Helmer’s article. Unlike Murry Brewster, he seems to have contacts in the CAF beyond the PR department. According to him, Colonel Robert Kearney committed the cardinal sin of deviating from the official script on our disastrous mission in Ukraine. Official script; with NATO’s commitment for whatever it takes for as long as it takes, Ukraine will eventually prevail and defeat Putin’s Russia. Colonel Kearney’s alleged heresy; Not a hope in hell. Apparently the Colonel was highly regarded as a tell-it-like-it-is kind of guy, which is a deviation from the norm amongst the neutered upper ranks of the CAF. When word of this outrage reached Ukraine’s numero uno lobbyist in Canada, Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland, his fate was sealed. Which brings us full circle to the question raised in the title. Should Chrystia be considered a “foreign agent?” That’s not as simple a question as you might think at first glance. Technically, a “foreign agent” would need to get some sort of benefit from the foreign entity they were working for. In Chrystia’s case, I’m not seeing that. Oddly enough, it looks to me like the main pro-Ukraine lobby, the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, is largely financed by the Government of Canada! How fucked up is that?

The evolution of "Canadian Values"

I’m an immigrant who landed at Pier 21 in 1956. Immigrants who landed here in 1956 were determined to do whatever they had to do to make a go of things. They had bills to pay in the new country, and since there weren’t any government welfare programs at the time, they took whatever jobs they could. After all, that was always a Canadian tradition. Why did people come here? Opportunity! Often the newcomers saw opportunity where the locals didn’t. That’s why so many successful entrepreneurs can trace their origins to a Jewish or German or Italian or whatever forebear who got off the boat and grabbed whatever job they could, which often meant grabbing a shovel. My father started his life in Canada shoveling coal at Kloepfer Coal in Guelph. The Farm Manager’s grandfather, the guy who brought their clan to Canada, paid the rent in those bleak early years by digging ditches. That was the Canadian way, and it wasn’t just about the immigrants. Historically, Canadians went to where the jobs were; that’s why I’ve encountered Newfies galore in every one of the four provinces I’ve worked in, none of which were Newfoundland. Doing honest work to pay your bills was a Canadian value. It was viewed as a civic duty in my parents’ house to help other newcomers. The first refugee immigrants we sponsored were from Viet Nam. They took whatever jobs were there, worked their butts off, and the extended family are now productive and tax-paying Canadians. Canadian values circa 1975. The next batch were from Afghanistan. We sponsored a Muslim family. Both Mom and Dad had been university professors in Kabul before the US-created Taliban took the country back to the middle ages. Both worked in menial jobs here in Canada for years before getting traction in careers commensurate with their qualifications. Canadian values circa 1995. Over the past few years I’ve been peripherally involved with a refugee family the Canadian immigration system randomly plucked out of a refugee camp in the Middle East. Both parents and two of the kids are on disability pensions. Two other kids are in school and show great promise. The oldest son, physically and psychologically whole, and at age 25 the father of three children, has had difficulty finding his way. He tried fast food for a few months, but that didn’t agree with him. Then he took a shot at construction, but that wasn’t for him either. He hasn’t worked in months, but just came back from his pilgrimage to Mecca, leaving his pregnant wife and three toddlers to fend for themselves. Sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do to find your true authentic self. Canadian values circa 2024.