In desperately seeking any non-pandemic news, I came across this story which broke a few days ago.

It is just too comical and symbolic not to re-post for any who may have missed it.

A small German cruise ship called the RCGS Resolute encountered the Venezuelan warship Naiguata in the Caribbean Sea at the end of March.

There was a dispute between the ships over whether or not the Resolute was in Venezuelan waters. The hapless socialist Navy was probably navigating with an antique sextant so I am inclined to side with the private cruise company on this one.

The Naiguata then opened fire on the Resolute.

Apparently the Naiguata didn’t have adequate firepower to take on the cruise ship so they then tried ramming the ship.

This led to the warship Naiguata taking on water and sinking. All crew members were safely rescued.

The Resolute then carried on to port in Columbia.

Most of the stories of Venezuela’s failed socialism are pretty dark including their desperate citizens even breaking into zoos in order to eat the animals.

This story is more on the comical side but it does illustrate just how wretched socialism is. Despite having some of the richest oil reserves on the planet, Venezuela couldn’t even build a navy capable of taking on a small cruise ship.

We should bear these lessons in mind as we enter dark economic times.

There are still many fools who think socialism is the way to deal with our pending economic crisis and we can’t let those notions take root.

Remember when folks were calling for emptying Canada’s jail cells due to Coronavirus concerns were assuring us that it would only be “nonviolent” criminals who would be released?

Well that didn’t last long.

Global news is reporting that judges are releasing a growing number of violent criminals due to the pandemic.

We are not talking about shoplifters here.

Among those released, one was a getaway driver in a murder attempt, one pistol whipped and tasered two people and one was accused in a recent shooting.

I should clarify that these people were accused, not convicted. All the same, we incarcerate people accused of such violent crimes for good reason. There is a high likelihood that they will harm other people if they are free.

The thieves and drug dealers being released are not harmless either though some may consider them not to be violent.

What will these criminals do with their new found freedom? Seek jobs? Do volunteer work in the community?

For the most part these people have no stable network of friends and family to settle in with during the quarantine. They will be displaced, stressed and desperate. Then they will often try to rob people which can lead to some pretty dire results.

Our nation has put its law abiding citizens under house arrest and is releasing its violent offenders. What a gross and dangerous trend.

I suggest that folks who own firearms double check and ensure that their firearms are well maintained and ready for use. Those without firearms had best double check their home security and seek other ways to defend their families.

The pandemic shutdown has many associated impacts which can hurt people and crime will be one of them.

When the state refuses to protect the citizens, the citizens must protect themselves.

I hope this is remembered in the courts when the self-defense cases begin to roll in.

The “Friends of Canadian Broadcasting” group has been hanging around the periphery of social media notice for a few years now.

Despite their best efforts, few have really taken this bunch very seriously. When one looks at what is at the top of a list of items in their statement of purpose, it is not hard to see why they languish on the fringe.

Read that out loud to yourself. It sounds like a cult chant for the State Broadcaster. One can’t help but envision a circle of these loons standing in a circle around the CBC logo and starting their day by reciting this mantra ten times.

Sacred?

Nothing builds and extreme and closed point of view more effectively than declaring something as being sacred.

This little gang blundered into wider social media notice a month ago when they put out the absurd tweet below.

For those not familiar with twitter, there is a term for reaction to a tweet called “getting ratioed”.

This happens when a tweet is either so idiotic or so offensive that reactions from people decrying it far outweigh the positive responses. In this case there were over 1,100 responses in comparison to 56 likes. That is nothing less than a brutal ratio.

People have happily embraced alternative sources of entertainment such as Netflix and happily pay for it. CBC on the other hand is down to single digit viewing support and the funding for it is mandatory. Over 1000 people made a point of expressing that to these “friends”.

Despite being something of a fringe group, somebody has clearly dumped some significant money upon these people.

Formal polls are expensive to run yet the “Friends of Canadian Broadcasting” managed to commission a poll through Nanos with a number of questions.

The results really make one question the integrity of pollsters.

With 1000 people polled, apparently 70% of Canadians want more funding for the CBC?

A majority want tax dollars to fund mainstream media outlets?

As can be seen, the National Post and many other media outlets happily jumped on this and gave this little group some oxygen. They understandably want money.

I am forced however to call bullshit here. It beggars belief that in such a time of crisis with a looming depression that may last years, that people would want their scarce tax dollars going towards producing more shitty content with the CBC.

I held a twitter poll of my own. I understand that this will reflect bias of my following but all the same, with 5,300 individual voters at the time of this writing the results can’t be dismissed out of hand. Particularly when the outcome is so strongly on one side.

Of 5,301 people, 96 percent do not want more tax funding going to mainstream media outlets.

Even when the bias of my following is taken into account, where does this land? 85 percent? 75 percent?

It is pretty clear that the numbers that the “Friends of Canadian Broadcasting” gathered are utter hogwash.

Where did Nanos do their sampling anyway? The lobby of the CBC building?

Look, I know that conventional media members are hurting. Those are people like anybody else in that industry and they have bills to pay. They are stressed just as we all are while their industry collapses. That said, it doesn’t justify pumping more tax dollars into it. Just as the restaurant industry I am in has collapsed, so has conventional media. We need aid for the workers but the industries will need to settle on their own into whatever a sustainable model may be in the future.

Hard times are only beginning for us all. Many people will be coming with hands out seeking tax dollars to ease their burden.

The “Friends of Canadian Broadcasting” can take their ask for further handouts and stuff it deeply up their collective asses.

Canadians have no appetite for the government getting further into the media business. They are in too deep already.

Its almost as if they don’t even know that the worst economic crisis we have seen since the 1930s is looming.

The Mayor and council with their six figure salaries and multiple pensions feel that they can carry on with business as usual in city hall and continue to tax and spend as if times were good.

Jeromy Farkas and Sean Chu were the only voices of reason and as usual, they were insulted, belittled and shouted down by Mayor and the rest of council for their daring to propose to liquidate a city slush fund in order to halt the tax hike.

Ward Sutherland for example mused about Farkas having a “limited skill set”. When one considers that Ward’s claim to fame is his having spouted on about “Johnny Jew” while in the middle of an election campaign, he is hardly in a position to question the skill sets of others.

Along with Ward Sutherland, Naheed Nenshi, Druh Farrell, Evan Woolley, Shane Keating, Ray Jones, Peter Demong, Jeff Davison, Jyoti Gondek, George Chahal, Joe Maglioca, Diane Colley-Urquhart and Gian-Carlo Carra all voted in favor of a 7.5% property tax increase.

This makes for a very handy list of who should not be re-elected in the 2021, Calgary municipal election.

How utterly disconnected from reality does one have to be to not understand just how economically screwed the city of Calgary is right now?

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the city of Calgary was in a terrible fiscal position. Years of revenue from downtown energy companies had spoiled the city to the point that they hadn’t a clue how to stop overspending when the revenue collapsed. With a prolonged downtown office vacancy of 30 percent, the imbeciles in city hall tried to compensate for the lost tax revenue by increasing business taxes on remaining businesses by as much as 300 percent. Spending restraint simply won’t enter their minds.

We will be lucky if even three quarters of businesses in the hospitality industry reopen after the pandemic. Property values are going to be dropping dramatically and tax revenues will plummet.

How many businesses which had adapted to having their staff working from home will stick with that model after the pandemic? Many companies have just discovered that they no longer need brick and mortar locations or at least not nearly as much as they used to. Office space vacancy in Calgary is likely to spike to 50 percent soon. Who the hell needs it anymore?

Spending cuts aren’t a theoretical measure. They are a hard reality.

With the Mayor and council refusing to even accept that they need to get spending under control today, the economic catastrophe is going to be twice as bad tomorrow.

I don’t think there is any hope of bringing common sense into a group of people as disconnected from reality as the Mayor, most of council and the bulk of senior bureaucrats in Calgary city hall.

These people need to be fired en masse next year in the municipal election and replaced by people with a grip on economic reality.

The mushrooms in city hall have thrived on apathy and low voter turnouts. They count in an indifferent populace in order to maintain their perches and perks.

People are going to be galvanized and pissed off in the next municipal election. Calgarians will finally be ready for change.

We need to get to work right now in order to ensure that we replace the current crop of council mushrooms with decent people though. Fake conservatives such as Sutherland always manage to slither through the cracks and we need to vet these types out before they get near a council seat.

Calgary can’t afford another four years of the incompetence that Nenshi and gang have offered for the last decade.

After five years in the business, I just sold my pub and cafe.

It has been quite the adventure and with the Coronavirus crisis hitting us in our last few weeks of ownership, the business made sure to stress us out right to the bitter end.

The stress for the new owners is unimaginable right now. What a time to make the leap.

Thankfully, the pub has a solid and loyal customer base in a bedroom community with limited competition. Despite only being allowed to do takeout service during this crisis, the pub has been doing relatively OK. Sales are a fraction of what they were during fully open times but with virtually no staff to pay, they should be able to squeak by until the lockdown ends and locals have really been stepping up to support their local watering hole. They will be back in full as soon as they can.

One of the measures the province put in place to mitigate the horrific damage being done to the hospitality industry was to back off on the regulation of takeout liquor sales. For now anyway, we are allowed to sell wine, bottled beer and draft beer with takeout orders from the pub.

Allowing us (I still work there for another week) to see draft beer in growlers (large takeout bottles) has been a saving grace. When the shutdown came, we had thousands of dollars in draft beer in the cooler and feared we would have no way to save it. I have always stubbornly only carried local craft beer on tap. Unfortunately, most craft beers don’t have preservatives and that stuff in the cooler has to be sold or dumped. We thankfully were given the means to sell it.

Many restaurants and bars will never open again after this crisis. In such a narrow-margin industry, owners simply won’t have the means to come back after the shutdown. People won’t have the funds to go out as much as they used to for years to come.

For those restaurants and bars that do remain in business, I see no reason why we can’t or shouldn’t allow them to continue to sell takeout liquor.

The world hasn’t ended since it has been allowed. Roving gangs of drunks haven’t been wandering the streets with their growlers. It really has done utterly no harm.

Draft beer is in right now. Craft breweries can use the boost in sales from bar taps for takeout service. Those breweries are facing a tough future as well.

We will be entering quite period of hindsight and introspection in the post-pandemic world. We need to look at every possible way to ease the burden on floundering businesses. I am sure there are many other areas where deregulation can aid many different industries.

Right now though there is one regulation that can easily be dumped permanently.

Let licensed facilities continue to sell their liquor products to go. It was always ridiculous preventing such sales in the first place.

Free the beer!

Its hardly a secret that Calgary has been overtaxing its citizens for over a decade in order to feed the wanton spending of Nenshi and most of city council.

Businesses crushed by city tax increases last year were forced to revolt and rally at city hall in order to try and make city council understand that they couldn’t keep taxing and spending local enterprise to death in order to fund petty, pet projects.

Now with the world reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic decimating the economy, it becomes more important than ever for governments at all levels to get spending in line. Calgary stands out with its pattern of grotesque, wasteful spending on hideous, foreign public “art” projects and having a city workforce which apparently requires ten people in order to paint a green box on a road.

The areas where the City of Calgary has spent wastefully are myriad and all are worth auditing and cutting deeply.

One of the most odious uses of tax dollars in Calgary has been the $100 million slush fund given to the Calgary Economic Development Corporation.

Nenshi and gang overtaxed Calgarians so much that they managed to build up a surplus of $100 million dollars. Rather than apply that surplus to tax relief for struggling businesses in the city, Nenshi and company decided to give it to Mary Moran and CED in order to have them piss it away in chasing pie in the sky, unicorn business investments.

Moran’s name may sound most familiar for her inept management of the Calgary Olympic Bidco which pissed away millions of dollars in a failed bid to convince Calgarians to spend billions of dollars on a vanity project for Nenshi.

Mary Moran has applied all the skills she demonstrated with Bidco to the Calgary Economic Development Corporation slush fund and predictably, she has garnered the same empty results.

With vapid initiatives from flying Calgarians to Seattle in order to have them do cute chalk drawings in a bizarre and predictably failed bid to draw Amazon to Calgary to the CED wasting years touting Rocketspace as a victory though it never actually set up shop in Calgary, Mary Moran and her cadre at CED have proven themselves as being utterly inept.

Calgary Economic Development Corporation in itself is little more than a patronage pit for favored city council insiders. That was demonstrated rather clearly when a plum appointment was given to Jason Ribeiro shortly after his “volunteer” efforts in chasing the Olympic dream for Nenshi and Moran. The whole organization should be dissolved.

While it may (though it shouldn’t) take awhile to get rid of an organization which has a mandate to draw foreign competitors into the city at the expense of existing businesses, it shouldn’t take long at all to liquidate the slush fund under CED management and give tax relief to what few businesses still remain in the city of Calgary.

We can’t afford to looks the other way any more as vain civic politicians and their chosen senior bureaucrats drain existing businesses in order to piss those funds away in the pursuit of other businesses. It is nothing less than vulgar.

There is still well over $70 million dollars sitting in the Calgary Economic Development Corporation slush fund right now and there is no excuse for them holding on to it any longer. That money must be dedicated to Calgarian businesses in the form of tax relief and it must be done right now.

That would do more for Calgary’s economy than a million hand picked kids being sent to Seattle to party and make cute chalk drawings.

Let’s face it. We have all always known that many Asian nations practice utterly abhorrent acts of animal cruelty every day.

We hear about the sadistic treatment of captive bears as repugnant vivisectionists harvest hall bladder from them while alive as they concoct potions which they sell in order to give impotent men a hard-on.

We hear of the dog festivals where tens of thousands of animals are choked in horrific conditions only to be slaughtered in the most brutal of ways including skinning and boiling them alive.

Now with it looking more and more likely that “wet markets” which specialize in the sale and live slaughter of exotic animals was where the Coronavirus pandemic originated, people are being forced to see what has been happening over there.

Don’t let people look away! Don’t dismiss this as something which is out of sight and out of mind.

Don’t use the excuse of cultural sensitivity in order to say we can’t or shouldn’t try to change this. Modern societies have learned to practice humanity in our treatment of animals and there is no longer any excuse for other societies to start doing the same.

Hell, even if you don’t care about the welfare of animals and only have self-interest in mind, you should support ending these horrific practices in Asia. These markets are filthy and it is surprising that we haven’t seen more new diseases springing from them than we have already.

We have more immediate things to deal with as this pandemic brings the world to it’s economic knees.

When today’s crisis does finally pass, we need to ask ourselves how we can prevent these things in the future and how we can make the world a better place.

A good place to start would be in having some serious international pressure being placed on any nation which embraces animal cruelty in the way so many do today. Sanctions, tariffs, whatever it takes. We will be in a position to put pressure on these nations and we should damn well do so.

I am no radical animal activist by any means. I was as annoyed and disgusted by the idiots who trespassed on an Albertan turkey farm last year as anybody is. I have no problem with people eating meat. It’s not to my taste and never will be but I don’t think eating dog meat is any more cruel than eating beef. The issue is with how we treat these animals in raising and slaughtering them. We have no need to be cruel and we can no longer tolerate it.

As humans we are higher on the chain than animals. This allows us to consume animals and trade them as property. In being higher on the evolutionary scale than animals, we possess (or should possess) empathy and we should be obligated to practice it.

There will be little good coming from the pandemic of today. One positive which we could foster though is a movement towards the end of animal cruelty. The whole world will be better for it.

Many nations implement a policy of shooting looters during disasters. That is because there is and always will be a number of losers who will try to take advantage of a crisis situation in order to rob others. They want to steal the property of other people when citizens can least afford to lose it.

Justin Trudeau strongly hinted today that stronger measures to enforce shutting people in could be coming soon. That likely means the implementation of the Emergencies Act. That is martial law under a different name and invoking that act will take us from a crisis situation into a full disaster situation. Rest assured their are many scumbags out there rubbing their filthy hands together at the very prospect of this.

Just this week in my area, two shitbags broke into a business in Bragg Creek. They are taking advantage of empty streets, early business closures and slow police response times. We are just seeing the beginning of this sort of thing.

This looks very much like the method the losers who repeatedly robbed my pub last fall used. Crowbars for entry and then a failed effort to steal the ATM. I wouldn’t be shocked if these were a couple of the same ones who robbed me. Aside from one who has been subsequently charged with murder, the rest of the losers who robbed my pub are all free and awaiting trial.

Note the second person in the picture. It looks very much like he is carrying a firearm. These people are armed and stupid. This is a dangerous combination.

If indeed we find ourselves in a state mandated lockdown, we had better prepare to defend ourselves and our property from these criminals.

Don’t be naive. We are a spoiled society. We have been lucky. We are prosperous and have never had to deal with any real disasters. We need to prepare for the crime wave which will assuredly come with a shutdown as many will work to victimize and rob us during the crisis.

This crisis will be like no other in that rather than being evacuated, we will be locked into our homes. This makes it even more dangerous as the desperate and the unprincipled try to steal from us while we are essentially imprisoned in our own homes.

Emergency services will be overtaxed and neighbors will be less inclined than ever to leave their homes to check on you. It is up to us to ensure that we remain safe and we had best plan for it now.

People make plans within their households to deal with emergencies such as fires. Now is the time to plan for possible emergencies such as home invasions.

I can’t afford to be robbed again and I won’t let it happen to my home or my business. I know that criminals are often armed and my response will be based on that assumption. I truly don’t care about the well being of looters. I expect that many others feel the same.

There are many ways that this pandemic can and will hurt people outside of a viral infection itself. Prepare to defend your home and family now or you will only have yourself to blame if you are victimized. We are going into uncharted waters here. The worst that could happen is that you secure your home and make a plan that you never implement.

The pandemic has me afraid. Like everybody else, I have vulnerable family members who could be killed by the Coronavirus. Hell, I may even turn out to be one of the 0.6 percent of healthy people under 80 who succumb to the bug. What has me much more afraid than the virus itself though is the damage which will be caused by a protracted world panic response to the pandemic.

We are barely into a week of business shutdowns and self-quarantine measures and we can already see the massive cracks forming both socially and economically. It is nothing less than utter madness to think that we could withstand months of this kind of state yet many folks are calling for just that. It simply isn’t reasonable and the cure in that case will indeed be far worse than the disease.

The vapid calls for government to pay for everything come whenever anybody dares to question the economic impact of an indefinite shutdown and quarantine. These calls come from the economically illiterate and if they haven’t learned economic reality by now, they never will. Its time to ignore them.

Let’s follow the progression of thought for these types to the inevitable conclusion.

The people calling for government to simply pay for everything usually claim that they are doing so for the sake of our most financially vulnerable at this time of crisis.

Our most financially vulnerable are a large segment of the population, especially since the oil and gas industry cratered years ago. It has been noted many times how a huge number of people are only one or two paychecks away from insolvency. Well, a week into the shutdown and those people are already screwed. Many worked in the hospitality, tourism or energy sectors. They are facing potential homelessness already and the stress is incalculable.

The vacuous voices call out “Let them live rent free! Ban landlords from evicting them!”

OK, I sure don’t want to see people kicked out on the street by any measure but landlords can’t live for free any more than their tenants can. Contrary to popular leftist belief, most landlords aren’t filthy rich, moustache tweaking industrialists who swim in money bins. They are folks who invested their earnings in real estate who rely on a return from it in order to put food on their tables and pay the bills too.

Then the mindless calls come for the banks to forego collecting mortgage payments.

Yes, I understand that banks make a lot of money and few people hold love for them. That said, when it comes to banks their wealth truly is based on pure numbers and it won’t take much or long to put them in a losing position if they can’t collect on loans. They are an integral part of the fabric of our already decimated economy and if they go down the damage to us all will be cataclysmic.

Never short on answers, the fatuous will say “government can cover the cost!”

This inevitably is the fallback line for the folks suffering from economic illiteracy.

“The government” is us. There is only one taxpayer and the taxpayer is broke. The government produces nothing material and all they can do is shift resources around. Right now there aren’t a hell of a lot of resources to shift.

“Government can borrow!” are the cries of the idiotic in light of this.

I won’t go into detail but folks are more than welcome to google “hyperinflation” to see what happens when a government tries to borrow itself out of a hole when the economy has crashed.

Yes, government will be able to offer every Canadian weekly cheques during the crisis. Unfortunately a loaf of bread will cost $100 if you can find it. The only thing which may come down in price in such a situation will be real estate as the hundreds of thousands of foreclosures take effect.

The dystopian hell I am describing is not fictional. It is well on its way if we try to shut down our economy for months.

The last call of the moronic in this kind of situation is “If it saves but one life! How can you put a price on a human life!”

Well buttercup, whether you like it or not we put a price on human life every day. If we lowered highway speed limits to 20kph we would save lives. If we had a registered nurse in every household we would save lives. If we had a fire station on every street corner we would save lives.

Why don’t we then?

Because we can’t afford to. We had to choose and find a balance between economic reality and the number of lives being put at risk. We have that choice before us again and on a level we have never seen before.

There are a million things that the government needs to do right now and I don’t envy decision makers. They need mitigation plans, health care allocation plans, legislative plans and law enforcement plans.

One plan we aren’t hearing yet though is the plan to get out of this economic shutdown. This indeterminate end to shutting in society is adding to the economic and social damage which has already been wrought. We need to see where this tunnel ends and soon or we will see chaos.

Poverty takes lives just as effectively as any virus will. Suicides will spike and crime waves will ensue if we don’t change this course soon. Food riots may become a reality as supply chains falter. You think hoarding is bad now? Just wait a few more weeks if we don’t see a possible end to this seclusion.

We are a soft and spoiled society. We don’t know how to survive without supply chains and we don’t have the means to feed and cloth urban populations with out them.

We need to demand many things from our leaders right now. One that is critical though is to demand a timeline. It will only get worse for putting it off.

To be fair to our politicians, they are in a very tough spot with this COVID-19 pandemic. We are in uncharted waters here and there appears to be no right answers.

To overreact could mean causing economic and social damage which may take decades to recover from.

To under react could be to let a virus potentially overwhelm our medical services leading to untold deaths and misery which may have been prevented by proper intervention.

The pressures on both sides of the issue are huge and no leader of any political stripe wants to take the wrong approach. The stress must be immense.

The wisest course is generally to listen to the experts and defer many choices to them. In Alberta Jason Kenney has deferred to Dr. Deena Hinshaw, (our Chief Medical Officer) when it comes to reactions and decisions on the crisis. Various other civil servants and bureaucrats are surely advising leaders at every level of government too and hopefully leaders are heeding that advice.

So if the key decisions are actually in the hands of bureaucrats, what is the role of our political leadership?

They need to lead!

This is a tremendously important role. Panic is one of our greatest enemies right now and the best defense against this enemy is strong political leadership.

People are afraid and confused. We need to know whats going on and what we need to do.

We need our political leadership to communicate to us confidently and concisely with calm and measured authority.

Naheed Nenshi did a masterful job during the flood crisis in Calgary and Rachel Notley’s leadership during the Fort McMurray forest fires was fantastic.

Now that we are facing a global crisis on a level never seen in our generation we need strong federal leadership more than ever and let’s face it, we don’t have it.

I truly hoped that Justin Trudeau would find his feet and shine in this crisis. The state of the country is more important than any partisan dislike I may have of him and his party.

I have found myself disappointed to say the least.

The federal government still hadn’t really pulled out of it’s leadership crisis with the illegal blockades around the nation when this new crisis took over and Justin is as ill prepared as ever to deal with it.

We are getting slow, disparate and limited communication from the federal government right now. It looks like they have been crippled by indecision and they have terribly bungled on the screening issue at airports while communicating that they had it under control.

On Sunday, the government put out a teaser of a release saying that more was to come in a conference today. What the hell is with that? The crisis is here and now. If you have something of fucking substance to say, say it now!

Today’s press conference was a debacle. It began nearly 40 minutes late and by the time Trudeau began with his statement, pretty much all of what he was announcing had already been leaked.

This is hardly instilling confidence among the citizenry right now. If our Prime Minister can’t even manage a simple news conference, how the hell can he manage this crisis?

It is time for leadership to arise from within the federal Liberal Party. They need to deal with their weak leader for the sake of the nation. I don’t know if it will mean taking Trudeau aside and beating sense into him or pushing him aside and letting somebody competent take over the role but they can’t let Justin keep drifting along as he has been during this last couple months.

Justin Trudeau has never been a great communicator and in this last few months he has gotten far worse. He appears to prioritize his time with hiding from the public and handing off responsibility to others whenever possible. I don’t know if he has personal issues going on or if its a case of internal party turmoil but we simply can’t have it anymore.

The world is in for a rocky ride in these next few months. Countries with strong leadership will be better able to weather the storm. If Canada doesn’t deal with Trudeau soon, we won’t be among those aforementioned nations.

I hate to think of the unnecessary damage that will be caused if we refuse to fill the federal leadership void that we are suffering under right now. Let’s hope that some of the powers that be recognize and deal with this soon. We can’t afford to let it go on like this.