Country artist Jason Aldean is in hot water due to a recent release entitled Try That in a Small Town.

Numerous celebrities, including musicians, are jumping on Aldean for a track and video that they say promotes violence, vigilantism, racism, and gun use.

First, although I’m not a big country fan, even I can appreciate the song as a piece of music, and in my opinion, a rather good one.  I think it’s a good song.  That said, I can see the merit in some of the criticism, but I honestly don’t think the artist is guilty of some of the stuff that he’s being blamed for.  And that’s a lot coming from me, because Aldean is a big-time conservative and Trump supporter, always welcome at Mar-A-Lago to kiss the ring of the king.

But this is about a song, not the man’s politics.

For the longest time it’s appeared to me that there’s a desperate need for reform of the nation’s national police force, the RCMP, or Royal Canadian Mounted Police, or simply, the Mounties.

There are far too many systemic problems within the ranks of this organization, problems that permeate into the realm of organizational actions that impact the service rendered to the public.  Harassment, sexual and other, professional incompetence, the diminishment of women, of Natives, and generally the optic they give of being Canada’s version of the “keystone cops” of old Hollywood fame.

For those of us in Ontario, the only time you’re going to see a Mountie is on Parliament Hill or at ceremonies swearing in new Canadians or honouring Canada’s war dead.  But for Canadians in eight provinces and three territories, the RCMP is much more visible, tasked as they are with provincial and territorial policing as well as community policing.  As such, the Mounties are, by far, the largest police force in Canada.

Tommy Tubervbille, the Republican senator from Alabama, is in the news, and the fact that he is at all is particularly troubling.

In most democracies, idiosyncratic personalities like Tuberville could be easily and safely ignored.  He would be relegated to the fringe minority, the object of polite ridicule in public, and harsher ridicule in private.

But in the United States, home to the most arcane system of government ever invented,  guys like Tuberville can do real damage, simply because the wise folks in Alabama elected him as their representative in the United States Senate.  And so here he is, in his fifteen minutes of shame, holding up promotions within the United States military until that organization changes its policy with respect to abortion.  For the record, the U.S. military supports reproductive rights of its members, but Tommy doesn’t think that’s right, so he’s going to hold the world’s largest and most powerful military hostage.

The absurdity of this is that he can do it at all.

The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is in crisis, chiefly because it’s been compromised by the encroachment of machinations intended to result in a political make-up that reflects the ideological viewpoint of the political party in power, most notably, the Republicans.

Throughout most of its existence, the Supreme Court has had more of a balance between justices that might lean conservative with those that might lean liberal.  But all this went out the window, beginning in the later part of 2016.

You may recall that 2016 was a presidential election year, the final year of the Obama Administration.  With the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016, Obama nominated U.S. Court of Appeals justice Merrick Garland for the opening on the country’s highest court, but that was blocked by the Republican majority in the senate, where Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell stated that it shouldn’t be an out-going president that names a replacement justice, but the new one to be elected in November.  That, of course, was Republican Donald Trump, who proceeded to stack the court with right-leaning justices, including Amy Coney Barrett in October 2020, just a month before that year’s presidential election, despite what the seemingly hypocritical McConnell may have said back in 2016.

Remember all the arguments for and against the sale of beer and wine in grocery stores?  For better or for worse, these alcoholic products were finally allowed on grocer shelves by the provincial Liberal government back in 2015.  Greater consumer access, more consumer flexibility, a seemingly more mature approach to alcohol sales in the 21st century.

The grocers, of course, were all for it, accomplished as they are at identifying new sources of profit, not caring one whit about what might be best for Ontario consumers.  I’m not saying grocery store availability of alcohol was a bad thing, or for that matter, a good thing.  I’m just simply saying that the decisions made by grocers were made on the calculus of profit margins, not improved access for consumers.  They just used that argument as a basis for what they saw as the potential for increased profits.

There is a trend afoot with our grocers that sell beer and wine, especially in stores owned or operated by Loblaws, a company that always manages to emerge with stink on its breath when it comes to its customers.  It appears that the company is scaling down, or eliminating altogether, the sale of beer and wine in its stores.  The reason for this is simple:  they’re not making enough money.

Profit margins for alcohol sales in grocery stores were slim to begin with, and so it seems the last eight years have borne witness to this reality.  Plus, anyone purchasing spirits at a grocery store must make their purchases at a specific checkout with an alcohol-serving approved employee, limiting the number of checkout lanes available to that consumer.  And, as well, theft through shoplifting of alcohol has cost the grocers dearly.

It’s ironic that self-checkouts, primarily intended as a means of lowering employee and staffing costs, have proven to be sieves when it comes to shoplifting, for groceries and alcohol alike.

So, as time marches forward, don’t be surprised to notice the gradual, if not sometimes sudden, demise of the beer and wine section of your local grocer.  It’s just a sign that they’re not able to rip us off as much as they are on things like meat, butter, bread, eggs, produce, and everything else they have on offer. It’s also a sign that consumer behaviour can influence profits, and can result in change.  

If only we could mobilize a boycott of targeted grocers to get the rest of our costs down.  But apparently a docile population would much rather be stiffed in the ear or line up at a food bank before they would ever take any action to make their lives better.  Grocers depend on this docility.  It will only be when the anger to action threshold is reached that we will see any improvement in the behaviour of our grocery banditos.

When a cashier at a grocery store has to access a food bank?  Is that not enough irony for anyone?

It would work with gas stations too.  Just saying.

Say what you want about Olivia Chow, but she is, in fact, the mayor of Toronto.  At least she is as of today, Wednesday, July 12, 2023.

Funny how, even prior to taking office, right-wing disrupters will take any chance they can find to sling some crap at anyone they view as an enemy, in this case Chow, who they label a “lefty,” something antithetical to their own identification as “righties.”

Fairness and truth are not part of the right-wing playbook.  So that’s why Chow is greeted with the following statements, both on Twitter, that blame Chow for violence on Toronto’s streets, even though she hasn’t even taken up the responsibilities of mayor yet.

“Welcome to Olivia Chow’s Toronto, — where shootings happen in broad daylight.”

“Just an ordinary day in Olivia Chow’s Toronto.” 

The first, from user Natasha Biase, with 4000 followers and a blue checkmark denoting that she’s for real, as in a real jerk, and the second from Ezra Levant, the odious poster boy for the equally odious Rebel News, that hotbed of political hatred ingested by so many distorted thinkers who seek distorted “news” as a replacement for mainstream, and somewhat more balanced, media.  Biase, as well, is a so-called “journalist” at Rebel News, just for the record.

Elly De La Cruz.

In all honesty, I’ve never heard of him, but then again, I’m not the follower of Major League Baseball that I once was in my youth.

But De La Cruz came to my attention yesterday as part of a YouTube short video where the Cincinnati Red star stole three bases in the same at-bat after first singling to get everything started.

On June 6, De La Cruz was called up to the big club from the minors due to an injury to regular Nick Senzel.  The next day he hit his first home run.  On June 23, he hit for the cycle against Atlanta, the first player to do so since Cesar Cedeno way back in 1972.

And then came July 8, 2023.

Taking a dog for a walk was once a thing I considered to be most tedious, mostly owing to the fact that it was.

Dog’s have selective attention, something that manifests every time they fixate on something you’d prefer they’d ignore and ignore something you’d prefer they fixate upon.

My dog’s deaf, which adds an additional layer of frustration to the process, but yet still hasn’t stopped me from hurling obscenities at the little beast for yanking on the leash every two seconds to sniff/investigate/water every blade of grass along our path.  The poor dog can’t hear me, but passersby certainly can, something that can be embarrassing.  My neighbour had a daughter that shared the same name as my dog, Dolly.  I’d let the dog out to do some business, but of course it would wander away from me in a direction of least convenience.  As if it would help somehow, I’d bellow out “Dolly!!  Dolly!!!!!”  As if that would make any difference.  But to the neighbours, who were new at the time, it must have represented a bit of a quirk in their new neighbour’s personna, a very unattractive one.  Coupled with the inevitable profanity that attends owner frustration, such displays must have had the new residents wondering if I was suffering from Tourettes.

Former prime minister Stephen Harper, despite his self-promoted brilliance and his self-perpetuated aura as being the smartest guy in the room, has never in his life met a mud puddle he didn’t want to step in.  I guess, as they say, old habits die hard.  Maybe without Ray Novak living in his garage, Harper doesn’t have the guidance he once did, not that Novak’s much better in the political principles department.

Harper, who is now the chair of the the International Democrat Union, heads an organization that encourages right-wing entities, government and organizational, to come together to collaborate on right-wing principles.  These “principles” usually involve some sort of open hostility towards vulnerable populations that live within the borders of nations controlled by conservative-minded governments.

The federal Conservatives are but a shadow of their former selves.  I would know because I was once one myself, at least one of the progressive conservative variety.

But we were labelled “Red Tories,” as if that was something to be ashamed of, and all but chased out of the party after all the anger and grievance of the Reform Party came to town, resulting in a merger with what was left of Canada’s traditional Conservatives.  From those days forward, the new amalgamation of hard-right western (read mostly Alberta, the province that most stirs the angry drink) bitterness has resulted in a party that has tasted power for nine of the last 31 years, and only four as a majority.

There is no party more responsible for the cavalcade of perpetual Liberal governments than this one.  So if you hate Trudeau, these are the ones to blame.  Year after year after year, and election after election, more people vote against the Conservatives than for them, and the Liberals are the chief beneficiaries of this.  The number of people who vote Liberal to keep the Conservatives away from the levers of power is staggering, again something I would know of as I’m one of them.