Category: Uncategorized

ELON MUSK AND HIS FALCON 9 ROCKET. MILITARY RESUPPLY IN THE EXPRESS LANE.

Back in late August I had to endure the experience of giving praise to Elon Musk, something I’m loathe to do given the fact that the man is a snot-bag adolescent begging for a go with a fully automatic bitch-slap machine.  I’d even volunteer to stand there and keep plugging loonies into the damned thing to keep it going, like I do at the car wash, only with way more fun attached to the experience.

At that time I was giving Elon props for achieving something that absolutely blew me away:  the vertical recovery of the Falcon 9 booster rocket used to propel a demo cargo into near-Earth orbit.  Booster rockets previously would splash down in oceans to be recovered, but they weren’t reusable, and the Falcon 9 is.  That fact alone cut the expense of firing things into space dramatically, making all manner of applications possible.

Including military applications.

I’m not talking about Star Wars here, although I’m sure that something along those lines is only a matter of time.  Weaponization of technology has been around for as long as humans figured out that It was possible to kill one another with things other than their bare hands, so none of that should come as a surprise.  In fact, much of the everyday technology we use in the most benign of daily applications likely had its start as a military application.

But today I’m not going to discuss war-craft or space-conducive fighting platforms.  Today’s topic has to do with something a little less glamorous yet probably more effective and important to any military effort anywhere.  

The idea of logistics and supply.

Continue reading “ELON MUSK AND HIS FALCON 9 ROCKET. MILITARY RESUPPLY IN THE EXPRESS LANE.” →

KENDRICK LAMAR COMING TO THE 6IX

So, I heard this morning that Kendrick Lamar is coming to Toronto.

Big f**king deal.

Except that it is.

We just survived six shows of Taylor Swift in The Big Smoke and now comes another performer who will command stratospheric ticket prices and bring the attention of the world onto Downtown Toronto.  But, whereas Taylor Swift fans exchange friendship bracelets with one another, we can only hope that competing rap enthusiasts don’t exchange gunfire.

Before I write another word, I have to make something profoundly clear.

I’m a gunna tell ya tha’ I ain’ no racist, and I’m a gunna tell ya that tha’ ain’t no basis, 
for dat shit I gotta say, as I startin’ wid ma day.
It only just da way it is and all ya gotta face it.

Or something like that.

My apologies to my children, to any rap fans, or to worshippers of rap warlords world-wide.  For a sixty-five year old man to be cringe-rapping into his cornflakes on a Saturday morning is perhaps a low point for just about anyone starting their day.  But in my defence, it’s important to point out that my commentary has nothing to do with skin colour, since that’s not on my list of criteria for judging a person.  So there.

Kendrick Lamar is coming to the 6IX, which is rap slang for Toronto, based upon some cleverness originated by another rapper named Drake, who happens to call Toronto home.  It’s a derivative of the city’s long serving 416 area code.

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AUSTRALIA TO BAN SOCIAL MEDIA FOR KIDS UNDER SIXTEEN

Australia has passed legislation that forbids children under the age of sixteen from having social media accounts.  To be clear, this is not a cellphone ban so far as I currently understand it, but rather something targeted at kids’ ability to sign up for social media accounts in the first place.  I guess the feeling is that, once you take the social media out of the phone, the device just becomes this inert piece of irrelevant technology.

Yeah, right.

In the Australian situation, being monitored breathlessly by provincial governments here in Canada who like to make big noises that have little impact, the gatekeepers, the people responsible for ensuring compliance with the age requirements, are the creators and operators of the social media companies that are being shut out of one of their most lucrative markets.  There’s those damned foxes again, in charge of the gate to the hen house, so to speak.

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COUNCIL BRAKE-CHECKS STAFF INFO-TECH RECOMMENDATION

In a way, it seemed that Wednesday morning’s Town Council meeting, at least the open part of it, was the relative political equivalent of a McDonald’s drive-thru window, in that you got what you were looking for much quicker than had you gone for the regular in-store experience.  At least for me, anyways, since Council then went into closed session, please don’t get me started.

But in that brief period of sunshine, important work was done, and that’s not being sarcastic.

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TOWN COUNCIL AND CLOSED SESSIONS. THE RULE RATHER THAN THE EXCEPTION.

I don’t think I’ve seen Renfrew Town Council at its best.  I don’t know if it has one.

So far as I’ve been able to determine from a first-hand point of view, there is no best to be had, unless they really crank it up behind closed doors, where they kick everyone out of the room so that they can talk about the real stuff, the stuff that people want answers to.  I can only assume they’re talking about important things in there, but how would I know?  As I said, I, and anyone else present, have been shown the door.  Only the so-called primary actors remain, the inner circle, the sanctum, the privileged few.  The ones who matter.

The foxes slamming the door of the henhouse once inside.

After close to three hours of the eyeball-bleeding, public-facing facade of “openness and transparency,” this council will often go into closed session.  Top secret, hush-hush and all that.

Continue reading “TOWN COUNCIL AND CLOSED SESSIONS. THE RULE RATHER THAN THE EXCEPTION.” →

THE RENFREW TAX MAN COMETH. AND HE COMETH WITH A VENGEANCE

In an earlier opinion piece, I threw out the notion that in Ontario, municipalities are not allowed to run operational deficits.

They’re not.  It’s as simple as that.  I didn’t make it up, agree or disagree, I just stated that fact as it currently stands.  Check out the Municipal Act 2001 if you wish.

It’s something that is obviously concerning if you live in Renfrew, pay property tax in Renfrew, and follow Renfrew news — such as it may be, and it ain’t much, unless you enjoy dollops of self-serving platitudes and accept them as “news” — so I can certainly see and understand some degree of anxiousness around someone coming along and telling you that the corporation that you fund — the municipality — isn’t allowed to carry a deficit term over term.  Because you know that, if deficits aren’t allowed, that shortfall will have to be made up somewhere.  And that you, as the primary source of income for that municipality, may — will — be called upon to make up a big chunk of that shortfall.  In other words, through no fault of your own, you’ll be required to pony up to make right the egregious mistakes or lack of rigour that has led to that deficit situation in the first place.

And by deficit, let me be clear.  We’re not talking about slipping into maroon territory here, where you you slide gently from black ink to red ink on the balance sheet.  We’re talking full-on red, dark red, the ugliest colour of ink possible when we’re talking about money, especially if it’s your money. 

Continue reading “THE RENFREW TAX MAN COMETH. AND HE COMETH WITH A VENGEANCE” →

WHEN THE DOGS AND PONIES ARE RUNNING THE SHOW

The circus comes to town every couple of weeks when Town Council has its regularly scheduled dog-and-pony-show exercise that passes itself off as municipal democracy in action.  And despite everyone performing their roles, with varying degrees of success, the production is made up seemingly of a council rubber-stamping whatever the administrative side of things wants it to rubber stamp.  Mind you, a couple of councillors will periodically raise objections to this, but will often get out-voted if they raise their concerns to the level of making a motion

That’s because here in Renfrew, we have what looks to be a chimera of democracy in play.  

Elected councillors are flummoxed by redundant and poorly organized agenda briefing documents, almost always numbering over a hundred pages, two-hundred pages, and often more.  This is how administration does it, firing smoke grenades to obfuscate things enough that councillors routinely pass what’s put in front of them because, as some have said, they trust the department heads to manage their departments with effectiveness and due diligence.

Sort of like the last council did.  

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SYRIAN REBELS ON THE MARCH WHILE REGIME ALLIES CRUMBLE

It’s a bitch of a day to be a dictator, especially one with any fingers in that toxic pie that we also refer to as Syria.

It appears that rebel forces, a term I use loosely to describe the various opposition forces, not necessarily aligned, that have broken out of their positions and attacked and taken Syria’s second-largest city of Aleppo.  No rebel force has had a foot in the ground in that city since 2016, back when the Russians carpet-bombed them out of the place, while at the same time indiscriminately killing thousands of innocent civilians.  You may know already that the Russians have never been accused of being bleeding-hearts when it comes to civilian deaths, or any deaths for that matter.  That said, their murderous tendencies fit hand-in-glove with those of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, and it was those Russian interventions, along with interventions from Iran and Hezbollah, that kept the slimy sum-bitch in power.  He did, after all, almost lose that power as a result of the more generalized Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, but hung on by the hair of his chinny chin-chin with the help of his benevolent friends.

But things have changed for Assad, and not in the best of ways.

Those three outside interventionists that prop up his regime are all now themselves involved in existential crises of their own making, because all three kept sticking their faces in places where they did’t belong, and are now paying their respective prices for that.

I’ll go Iran first.

Continue reading “SYRIAN REBELS ON THE MARCH WHILE REGIME ALLIES CRUMBLE” →

CANADIAN NEWSPAPERS FILE SUIT AGAINST ChatGPT AND OPENAI

It’s come to light that a group of Canadian newspapers have banded together to launch a lawsuit against ChatGPT and OpenAI, two entities that specialize in using artificial intelligence to generate what could be called “creative’ materials.  By creative materials, I speak mostly about text, or writing applications, and artificially-generated images, although the technology will soon expand to include other artistic endeavours, like video, music, and, well, you name it.

These entities are also referred to as large language models, or LLM’s, and get their capabilities from scouring the internet in the most precise detail and “learning” from what they scan, both in terms of content and style, to the point where they can replicate the work of a real person, and do so in seconds.

The implications, and ramifications of this, are huge.  And to a large degree totally unfair to those people and those organizations who generate creative content the old-fashioned way:  through talent, hard work, and much self-sacrifice.

The reason it’s newspapers leading this particular charge is two-fold.

First, it’s been the news media generally that has been stolen from on an egregious scale, victimized by the big tech companies who would allow that original content to be posted and re-posted on their various social media platforms and other platforms.  Given the rise and popularity in social media, it was only a matter of time before the advertising dollars followed suit, the same dollars that newspapers relied on to provide their product and pay their salaries and bills.  After all, when you advertise in a newspaper, your messaging gets thrown in the trash after a day or a week, depending on the type of publication.  When you advertise online, algorithms ensure that your message will remain alive, and pop-up conveniently everywhere a potential consumer may go, since the algorithm has already determined your surfing and interest patterns.  A much better bang for your advertising buck.

The kicker is that the place that created the original content is forced to lay off staff, downsize its operations, or close completely, thereby sniffing out the source of all that creative work.  So there go of all those writers, reporters, graphic artists, editors, and advertising sales people, all victims to voracious American big tech companies who have literally come in and stolen everything from you to fuel their own breath-taking growth.

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CANADA’S F-35’S ARE ON THE WAY

It’s been awhile since I last had anything to say about  Canada’s procurement of F-35 Lightning II jets for the Royal Canadian Air Force, or RCAF.  The combat aircraft, all 88 of them, were purchased as replacements for Canada’s aging fleet of CF-18 Hornets, in service since the 1980’s.

Things were so bad with the Hornets that, although a very capable aircraft and much better than none at all, we had to literally buy additional Hornets from Australia more for the spare parts they represented rather than the flying platforms themselves.  The Australians, as well, have gone the way of the F-35, but were ahead of Canada in the ordering of them, making their F-18’s available to Canada as we struggled to maintain a competent fighter-interceptor presence over Canadian skies while we waited for the new planes.

The Canadian F-35’s have always been the topic of scepticism.  Canada was one of the first countries that signed on to the original consortium of nations that plugged into the program that was to design and build what is officially known as the Joint Strike Fighter, a fifth-generation stealth fighter that would combine the very best of the F-15, F-16, and F-18 fighters into one platform that could also double as a networking attack quarterback capable of managing the entire battle space.

Continue reading “CANADA’S F-35’S ARE ON THE WAY” →

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