The Website of a Guy Named Craig
Common ostrich. (Cropped and reduced, Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0)
All during the COVID-19 pandemic I sat and mocked the morons who were demonstrating in the streets against lock-downs and various other methods to control the population to reduce the spread of the disease, around the world, here in Canada, the United States, Australia, etc.
I watched the experts, who I will not demean by putting that word in quotation marks, speak sense to the masses. I decried the people who stalked doctors and nurses and other medical personnel, and besieged hospitals, in an attempt to intimidate them into stopping their vital work.
And now I’m watching the farce at Universal Ostrich Farms. As I said previously, I find it odd that I’m now apparently in bed with the same nut jobs I couldn’t believe were seemingly convinced the end of the world was near, who predicted I’d be dead with a year of the first COVID vaccine I took … five years ago.
I’m not a virologist; I will admit that up front. I believe I am a scientific and critical thinker. I don’t think that ostriches are magical animals, something that only occurred to me after reading the diatribes of a virologist. That virologist is Dr. Angela Rasmussen, who I recognised from her appearances on the TV news when she was explaining to Canadians (and anyone else who would listen) how COVID worked and why is was important to wear a mask and how to behave in groups of people to avoid transmission of the virus. She made sense to me then, so I am dismayed to learn that she is in favour of the “stamping out” policy of the CFIA (Canadian Food Inspection Agency) with respect to the ostriches.
As I said previously, “Would humanity have ever made its way out of the caves if we mindlessly executed every human that ever caught a cold?” That’s the crux of my argument against culling 400 ostriches. It’s not that I have a special bond with Speckles, one of the named ostriches; it’s that I have a bond with all … well, most … living creatures on this planet, especially those that are subject to the whims of authoritarian humans, who can decide with the stroke of a pen that 400 lives are meaningless and can be vapourised in the blink of an eye, or however many hours or days it takes to kill 400 animals. Why is life, human or otherwise, so disposable to us humans? That’s what I, and I’m sure many people, think and wonder about.
I’ve done some research on Dr. Rasmussen (which is a loaded assertion after the pandemic), which research I do for every blog post which is why I do so few of them. I am shocked at the extent to which some have gone to threaten and intimidate her. Those are the people I referred to above. There’s no excuse for that; I disagree with her, but I don’t think she should suffer the same fate as she thinks the ostriches should. I also realise that there is a huge difference between the “colds” that humans get, and “highly pathogenic avian influenza” (HPAI) that was diagnosed on the ostrich farm, so don’t bother disagreeing with me on that point.
Although it’s not the first time, I looked at her blog on Substack. The lead article there (as of 6 November 2025) is “Release The Ostriches’ Grippe“. I won’t focus on its title and the odd possessive of “ostriches”, and the use of the word “grippe” (which I had to look up, so I expect its context means more to some people than others), but when I opened it I found it odd that an “unbiased scientist” (she links to someone who goes by that moniker on her home page, so I assume she’s claiming to be unbiased herself) would open a supposedly scholarly article with, “I cannot believe that I have even used the word ‘ostrich’ this much in my life. I went into virology because I prefer studying microscopic parasites to vertebrates. I should have known better than to think I wouldn’t have to know about these terror birds. … Sometimes the hosts [of viruses] are incredibly annoying. Ostriches fall into this category.” OK, so Dr. Rasmussen has an emotional reaction to ostriches, but we’re still supposed to take her thousands of words about them at face value as being “unbiased”! So really, my emotional reaction to snuffing out 400 lives is just as valid. She goes on right after that to call the opposition to the cull “a radicalized absurdist yokelfest” after that, so she has even more biases than just the one against ostriches.
I was going to read her full article anyway, despite the fact that she goes on to demean those who disagree with the cull with more slurs. I chose a career in IT, where I can minimise my interaction with vertebrates, both bipedal and quadrupedal, but I still take interest in some of their blogs … the bipedal ones anyway. But ten days later work has overtaken me and the press has moved onto other shiny things. I’m not going to bother reading her full article because I’m sure it will be just a mean-spirited rant against the aforementioned “yokels” and anyone else who holds life to be sacrosanct. No thanks.
Updated, 2025-11-17: Immediately added that I understand the difference between a “cold” and HPAI. Also added the word “also” to the title.
It no longer exists.
As has been predicted by just about everyone, the fascist American trump administration régime has gone after, is going after, and will go after (as trump himself has already made plainly clear) any type of disagreement with trump. It’s a playbook we saw back in the 1930s. It’s not new; it’s shocking in the 2020s, yes, but it’s not new or unexpected.
I don’t know how the American right and their apologists can do this with a straight face. The hypocrisy is galling; it’s the very “cancel culture” of which they accuse the left … or the “radical left” as trump so eloquently keeps putting it. Whether or not there are any mergers in play is irrelevant, the Federal Communications Commission should not be, in a free country, threatening anyone. It’s the very “big government” that the Republican Party claims to be against. But the Republican Party is not in control anymore, we know that. The American Republican Party party in the 2020s has become the National Socialist Party of the 1930s. And the MAGA whiners wonder why we Canadians don’t want to cross the border?!
The crackdown on free speech continues. The “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” show used to run on the ABC network, and so does “The View”. The next morning, after “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” was suspended, the usually talkative current events panel just glossed over the topic as if it never even happened, as if American democracy wasn’t crumbling around their very ears. Whether they didn’t talk about it because they were self-censoring or because they received a sternly worded memo from ABC brass telling them not to, the bottom line is that they didn’t.
I don’t find Kimmel particularly funny. His disappearance from TV won’t affect my daily life one iota (and I’m in another country, thankfully), but I’m not on TV; I’m not on TV because nobody on the planet knows who I am or whether or not I’m funny. But Kimmel is on TV (or was) because he is well-known, and (apparently) some people think he’s funny. It’s called entertainment. If you don’t like the so-called entertainment on one channel, change the bloody channel! I don’t think any one person will find their life not worth living because any one entertainer disappeared from their list of choices, but that “any one person” needs to consider the bigger picture; it’s not just about any one entertainer.
Do I really need to remind everyone of the following admonition:
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
Apparently there are many cowards in the United States, including and especially among shareholders.
Updated, 2025-09-19: Better characterised the trump régime.
If you’re going to start a conversation with, “Prove me wrong,” you’re doing it wrong. Because the phrase, “Prove me wrong,” implies that you’re opening with the statement, “I’m right, prove me wrong.” So if you start out by telling your opponent, “I’m right and, ergo, you’re wrong,” then maybe you should start with another phrase?
Just another tip in my, “How to Win Friends and Influence People” course that you can buy now for 9.99. It might save your neck. You’re welcome.
God forgive me for taking the side of anti-vaxxers like Tamara Lich (whose surname I pronounce like the worm I believe she is), RFK Jr., Dr. Oz and others, but I’ve re-discovered that they still exist (long after the pandemic ended and their catastrophic predictions were proven wrong) through the “Save our Ostriches” website, but politics make for strange bedfellows.
When I was in elementary school I participated in a school project which was, as I recall, an in-school version of an inter-school competition called the Young Scientists Exhibition. It was a competition to create the best project, complete with posters and all the “stuff” you could come up with to make it engaging for the people touring the exhibition — so, working models, demonstrations, etc., and ostrich scat (poop) in my case. My project, the subject of which I chose, was on ostriches. (I was a bit of an ornithologist at that age, and I thought ostriches were pretty cool birds.) That was in 1979, and I still had the papier mache ostrich my father helped me create with its welded wire skeleton and marble eyes until I finally decided there was no point in my carting it around from house move to house move in the early 2000s. But anyway, ostriches and I go back a few years.
I’ve read a lot — largely through the “Save our Ostriches” website, I will admit — about the case with the ostrich farm and the cull order issued by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. It’s hard to disagree with the assertion that the CFIA has overstepped the boundary of its authority in ordering this cull. Would humanity have ever made its way out of the caves if we mindlessly executed every human that ever caught a cold? Sure, maybe killing every single chicken in an infected flock makes some sense, but ostriches are not chickens. I’m not sure that any CFIA bureaucrats have ever seen a chicken or an ostrich outside of a picture book in their offices.
Fortunately, as of a few days ago, the Federal Court of Appeal seems to have come to its senses … for now.
The world’s press has spent the last few days, and today (Friday here) in particular, trying to make a “nothingburger into filet mignon”, as one commentator said. Anyone with a brain knew well in advance of today that nothing substantive was going to happen without the presence of Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the summit, especially as trump wants so desperately to be seen as a friend of the enormously popular (excuse me while I retch) putin. After absolutely nothing happened except that putin got to ride in The Beast and watched a brief personal airshow, they both jumped in their planes and burnt a few more holes in the atmosphere to fly back to opposite sides of their continents.
All that I really saw was that the world’s most powerful dipshit and wannabe dictator spent the day sucking up to the world’s current biggest war criminal … who, I will point out, was not arrested when he landed, but this is no surprise given that the United States refuses to become a party to the International Criminal Court (ICC), has been aggressive towards the ICC and has hosted other war criminals in the past.
In fact, it was just two dictators getting together for lunch; trump probably asked putin for advice on getting away with sending troops into his capital city!
But maybe we’ll never know what they talked about because, other than admitting utter failure to negotiate a peace deal (certainly not why putin was there), both sides have refused to say anything. So in the absence of any information we’re left to wonder if the world’s two super-dictators have cooked up some sort of deal where they both get richer and the little guy (Ukraine) gets shafted.
It was just a typical “nothingburger”! Nothing else to be said!
The latest idiot to raise my ire is his ambassador to Canada, Pete Hoekstra, who has pissed me off in at least two ways recently:
If you want to whine about where you find yourself because of your boss upending the entire world order, foisting the cost of tariffs on American consumers and turning decades of economic integration between our countries inside out, don’t blame Canada. We’re just spectators in this farce you and your boss have created. Having just scanned your Wikipedia article, you sound like more of a dipshit than a “diplomat” should be, but that doesn’t surprise me.
I’ll have more to say in the very near future about how you’re fucking up Ukraine as well.
I’m late posting this because of … excuses.
I hadn’t heard of Victoria Mboko until less than a week ago, now she is my heroine. She’s my heroine for two reasons: (a) all the bloody TV commentators who can’t/won’t pronounce her surname properly because they don’t know how to pronounce African names with successive consonants and African words in general, and (b) because she soundly beat Naomi Osaka.
As you will know if you’ve read me for a while, I am no fan of Naomi Osaka. For me she’s the female version of John McEnroe, a whiny crybaby, but the difference is that McEnroe had to have known that he was making a spectacle of himself. Per the article to which I’ve linked above, I feel that so-called professional athletes should learn, not only their sport, but also how to behave under pressure. That means not wimping out when the going gets though (the topic of the post to which I’ve linked), but also losing and winning graciously. Osaka has yet to acquire that skill, and she demonstrated that beautifully on the court with Mboko and off the court afterwards.
Hey, listen, elite athletes are getting younger and younger, which means top athletes are being evicted from their perches younger and younger and sooner and sooner! Accept it, and get over it. You’re not gonna be number one forever. Your pouty and pissed-off faces on the court and not even making an attempt to get to some balls only show how little you deserved the top spot in the first place.
Congratulations Victoria Mboko!
I am incensed!
As if Canadians needed another example of why the electoral system in Canada is biased — and indeed rigged — towards maintaining the status quo of the first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system where the Conservatives and Liberals take turn governing, look no further than the Leaders’ Debates Commission’s decision yesterday to rescind their most gracious (pardon my sarcasm) invitation to the Green Party of Canada to participate in the Leaders’ Debates.
Yet, the Bloc Québécois, WHO ONLY RUN CANDIDATES IN ONE PROVINCE, were allowed — and will be tonight — to participate!
This is supposedly based on these three criteria, two of which must be met:
This is a classic case of the difference between pedantry and mastery, as espoused by George Polya, a mathematician who lived between 1887 and 1985:
Pedantry and mastery are opposite attitudes toward rules. To apply a rule to the letter, rigidly, unquestioningly, in cases where it fits and in cases where it does not fit, is pedantry … To apply a rule with natural ease, with judgment, noticing the cases where it fits, and without ever letting the words of the rule obscure the purpose of the action or the opportunities of the situation, is mastery.
The Leaders’ Debates Commission are, without question, pedants, not masters.
Let me also remind everyone that Canada is in an unprecedented war situation, with the President of the United States of America declaring a trade war on Canada, and coming within a hair’s breadth (so far) of declaring actual armed conflict.
The Green Party were ejected from both the French and English debates on the morning of the French (first) debate because they had apparently not met the second criterion above, yet there is absolutely no way that the Bloc can come anywhere close to meeting either the second or third criterion because the most candidates they can field are 78! That is 18% of federal ridings! And I, in British Columbia, cannot even vote for their party because they “intentionally” don’t run any candidates here! (The word “intentionally” was pointedly used in the Commission’s justification for barring the Green Party from the debates.)
If that isn’t hypocrisy — and pedantry — then I don’t know what is.
The Commission alleges that because the Green Party is now polling at below 4%, they no longer qualify, despite the fact that on 31 March (28 days before the election) they were indeed polling at or above 4%. Let’s also remember that the polling numbers in this election have changed wildly due to the war being waged against us. But more importantly than whether or not the Greens were polling at or above 4% on 31 March, is the fact that the Green Party of Canada is a national party competing in a national election, while the Bloc represents a very narrow slice of Canadian society, and therefore cannot ever hope to form an actual government, especially as Canadians in 82% of Canada’s ridings cannot vote for them!
It’s not too late, Leaders’ Debates Commission, to change your minds and DO THE RIGHT THING before tonight’s English debate. Show us that you are indeed not pedants, but masters of this undemocratic situation you have created.
While perusing trump’s Bullshit Social (aka “Truth” Social) feed the other day when writing that gargantuan post about how and why he is so wrong on the subject of tariffs, I couldn’t help but notice two of his posts about the 2025 Potomac River mid-air collision between a US Army Black Hawk helicopter and an American Eagle aeroplane. They are classic examples of why qualified, professional investigators are required to be allowed to do their work before any bullshit artists (aka, politicians) should say anything.
The first, posted on 29 January 2025, the very day of the crash:
donald trump, Bullshit Social post, 2025-01-29.
The airplane was on a perfect and routine line of approach to the airport. The helicopter was going straight at the airplane for an extended period of time. It is a CLEAR NIGHT, the lights on the plane were blazing, why didn’t the helicopter go up or down, or turn. Why didn’t the control tower tell the helicopter what to do instead of asking if they saw the plane. This is a bad situation that looks like it should have been prevented. NOT GOOD!!!
Where do you start with this one?!
The second was posted two days later:
donald trump, Bullshit Social post, 2025-01-31.
The Blackhawk helicopter was flying too high, by a lot. It was far above the 200 foot limit. That’s not really too complicated to understand, is it???
This is a textbook example of why crash investigators — like the ones at DCA after the crash appearing before the press — go to great lengths, as they always do, not to prejudge the investigation’s and the report’s conclusions.
This is also a textbook example of why you cannot trust anyone who claims they have common sense, and who also claims that he’s the “least racist person in the world”.