Bob Edwards, Editor

It’s universal and timeless. From time to time, fanatics turn up in every political party. They’re usually the hardest workers and are often mighty effective. They are attractive but fatally attractive. Someone has got to purge them and that someone has got to be strong. Franklin Delano Roosevelt wheedled Left-Wingers (the real bad ones) out of the U.S. Democratic Party  in the 1930s. In Canada, Tommy Douglas purged the Saskatchewan NDP (then called the CCF) of Communists and then led North America’s first Socialist government. Ernest Manning purged Nazis out of the Social Credit Party in Alberta after William Aberhardt died. Even Hitler and Stalin had to liquidate hotheads more hotheaded than they.

Many – including I – thought the U.S. Democratic Party was headed to factional oblivion. We were wrong. 

Field Marshall Gabriel Dumont

We’ve created a link – showing how Big Pharma’s Johnson & Johnson’s executives  outright lied in a full page ad they published the other day in the Victoria Times Colonist – the Executives who published the ad said that their competition’s cheaper drug was dangerous – It wasn’t. The executives lied and bilked customers into paying more for the same product. The executives threw in at least one other lie as well. The fraudulent  executives should go to jail and society should throw the keys into a cesspool.

U.S. President Donald Trump lies like a cheap rug. He’s the President of the United States of America.  The St. Petersburg Times’s Pulitzer Prize winning Politifact series published 12 pages of President Trump’s lies – each page containing about 15 lies.

The Ten Commandments should be amended. The Commandments only  rail against lying that hurts one’s next-door-neighbour – they don’t rail against lying generally.

If Donald Trump wishes you a “Good Day” – look out the window to see it’s not raining a nuclear attack. it’s almost assumed that politicians and businesses are lying. economies and countries depend on trust – without trust we’d be back in the dark ages – or the Middle East.

Liars don’t pay nearly enough for lying. We say punish liars and punish them plenty. If a politician or a business executive lies – in the words of President Trump; “Lock ‘em up!!!” And throw the keys away!!

Chief Crowfoot

Federal Liberal propaganda doctors concocted a press release last week pretending that the Liberals are protecting Victoria and Vancouver and the Salish Sea and their inhabitants from a TransMountain bitumen spill. Read between the lines. The Liberals have cut the Canada Coast Guard out of the picture. Western Canada Marine Response Corporation – an  outfit owned and operated by the oil companies themselves – good capitalists all WCMRC will spend more time saving money for their owners than really worrying about really cleaning up a real oil spill. Hopefully the Trudeau’s TransMountain Pipeline boondoggle will die a natural death.

Meantime – to really sell Western Oil – the answer is an energy corridor from Fort McMurray to the open Pacific near Prince Rupert. B.C. natives themselves are proposing exactly that – The Eagle Spirit Pipeline. We’d hope they may actually refine bitumen at Fort McMurray and ship product through the Eagle Spirit Pipeline to be marketed throughout the Pacific.

Lawyer Paddy Nolan

Drunk driving penalties are  not tough enough, writes Cathy Arscott of Argus, Ontario. I (yer man Paddy Nolan) am an Irish booze artist who never learned to drive but I am an experienced lawyer and I agree. I say that there’d be no drunk driving if the Parliament of Canada gave every drunk driver a fair quick trial and thew every convicted one in jail for two years minimum. And if Canadian judges were doing their job – that’d be the case. Judges administer the law like waitresses pour tea in Victoria’s Empress Hotel. If the judges want to be nice guys and nice girls – they should trade in their +/- $300,000 per year jobs for minimum wages at the Empress. But – of course – politicians should be working at the Empress too – as smiley faced bus boys and bus girls. Convicted drunk drivers have killed or tried tried to kill human beings. 

Read More of Paddy’s rant against drunk drivers, lilly-livered judges and power-hungry kops

Continue reading →

Adding to The Gross National  Product

THE OLD TIMER FROM PINCHER CREEK

Researchers at the University of Washington five years ago found that – all over the world –  in the 33 years before 2014 children’s obesity shot up 47.1% and obesity shot up 27.5% for humankind overall. The highly respected medical journal, The Lancet, published those findings. To my knowledge, obesity hasn’t improved these last five years. 

My doc says its carbohydrates and sugar that cause obesity and he referred me to a YouTube Video for doctors – Low Carbs for Doctors by Dr. David Unwin. Of course, Big Food (who peddle carbohydrates because they’re cheap to produce) and Big Pharma (who promote obesity because they can sell more pills to obese sick people) tell the booboisie  not to worry about carbs – worry about fatty food, say they. Big Food and Big Pharma are deliberately lying and their bosses should be treated like tobacco merchants and thrown into jail or worse. Obesity causes no end of sickness and cost.

Lord Strathcona – He drove the CPR’s last spike – Venture Capitalist Extraordinaire

Amazon’s founder’s wife just cashed out of the marriage game and pocketed $37 Billion. But she’ll give 1/2 away (she gets to decide who to). The  poor still won’t inherit the earth – she’ll keep the other half!!!!!

I bet there’s better things to do with $37 Billion. Many kids don’t get enough to eat. Pharmaceuticals and college cost a mint. Many kids are poorly educated. There’s still potholes and beggars all over the streets of Canada. Etc. … etc. …

And should rich kids get to inherit their parents gotten and ill-gotten games? Couldn’t wealth be kept inside the enterprises that created it and not dumped out to the so-called “owners” of the enterprises or their estranged spouses?

“What can’t a $Billion buy?” ask the Vlog Brothers and Bill Gates. Bill’s giving away 1/2 too (maybe more) but to whom he chooses. He gets the pontificating rights and to keep what’s left over.

Sam – Bartender at Bard and Banker, Victoria, B.C.

Last Friday, amidst the sound and fury of the inquiry into goings on at the B.C. Legislature, a reader wrote the Victoria Times Colonist:

“Lost in the conversation is the role of the press in this saga. James worked at the legislative assembly for decades. Was the culture of entitlement and lack of accountability a new phenomenon? Was the fact that the Legislative Assembly Management Committee never met not news?”

We notice too that pontificating from the pages of the Times Colonist and knowing everything about everything is Gwyn Morgan the Prince of Hear No Evil/See No Evil Right-Wing economics. Morgan was Chairman of the Board of SNC Lavalin when the company played footsie with Muammar Gaddafi and Dr. Arthur Porter. Despite being the one-time poster boy for Canada’s Horatio Alger set, Morgan didn’t no nothin’ about nothin’ in SNC’s  Corruption Department. He lives retired in the most expensive home on Vancouver Island.

WestJet copied the successful business model of Southwest Airlines. But Gucci shoe clad airline executives hated the model. Southwest flies only one airplane – the Boeing 737. It isn’t big and it isn’t sexy. But only one plane means only one set of parts and one training program for air and ground crews. WestJet shareholders fought off the Guccis for some years. And WestJetgrew and grew. Then the Guccis took over. Big airliners. Expensive ground facilities. And it’s shown. The profit shareholders make from Southwest is almost twice as high as what shareholders make from WestJet (a price/earnings ratio of 12.12 versus 22.49). West Jet should be worth 5 Billion Dollars – a hedge fund is picking it up for only 3.5 Billion.

Vulture Kapiitalsm – Bay Street  hedge fund – AKA “Private Equity Firm” –   wants to buy Calgary’s battered WestJet – worth $5 Billion  for only $3.5 Billion  – West Jet Board  wants to sell!!! … The Toronto Wheeler Dealer behind West Jet takeover

Lord Strathcona — He drove the last spike

Moderate Joe Biden

Liberal/Progressive Elizabeth Warren

The Hill – a Washington, D.C. webpage and newspaper  says that – before last November’s election: 

• 44% of American voters were Moderate
• 24 % were Liberal
• 32% were Conservative

And 62% of Independent Voters were Moderate.

Obviously the Democratic Party would be foolish not to select a Moderate. But 24% of voters who are Liberal (“progressive”) believe that America is broken and needs to be fixed and a Moderate like Joe Biden won’t do it. America needed fixing in 1932 too. But master politician Franklin Delano Roosevelt did that by pretending to be a Moderate – running for the presidency by, for example, promising to balance the budget but – after being elected – turning on a dime and bringing in the truly radical, budget-deficiting New Deal that saved America from collapse and made America the World’s greatest nation.

Elizabeth Warren wants the U.S. to adopt Canadian-style health care and to purge or destroy Wall Street. Both need doing but both are not Moderate proposals. Joe Biden is 76. Warren is only seven years younger but might be tempted to gamble on Biden not surviving eight years in office.

Is a Biden/Warren ticket possible? One Washington State Democrat we know says that Biden is tarnished by his many years as a Delaware politician – Delaware is the home of many a U.S. corporation and big bank – and Warren may not want to bed down with Biden. Some of Biden’s corporate friends might abhor the thought. CNN thinks their bad blood runs deep. But politics finds strange bed-fellows. 

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Bishop Odo wielding The Holy Ghost at the Battle of Hastings – from the Bayeux Tapestry

The Lady That’s Known as Lou

This week’s news from Sri Lanka and Saudi Arabia got me thinking aplenty about religion and religious leaders. William the Conquerer made his brother Odo a bishop. Odo – being a Christian  Bishop –  could not carry a sword.  Pope Alexander II – the first undemocratically elected pope – allowed Odo could use a large club – which the Pope Christened “The Holy Ghost” – to beat the brains out of many an Anglo Saxon at the Battle of Hastings. Odo commissioned  an illustrated history of the battle – The Bayeux Tapestry – preserved miraculously and now on display at Bayeux in Normandy. William stole Dover Castle and the entire County of Kent – handed it over to to Odo. Odo stole plenty himself – even from his brother the Conqueror. Odo was a marketing genius and probably invented Purgatory. We don’t know if Odo messed with women. The Tapestry is beautiful and even a cynic would say that Odo did (some) good. god rest Odo in Holy Peace. amen.