The Website of a Guy Named Craig
Holy crap! I have opinions! Lots and lots of opinions! You want to read my opinions NOW!
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.
As was to be expected, Albertans left their brains at home when they went to the polling booths in Battle River-Crowfoot, voting, of course, for Pierre Poilievre. It’s hilarious to me that the people on that side of the spectrum who make a big deal about not being “sheep”, blindly follow their sheep herder and just vote for the party rather than for someone local who would actually have been a good representative for them in Ottawa.
This seems to have put paid to any hope that the members of the Conservative Party might treat Poilievre the same way they treated Sheer and O’Toole, booting him from office as leader of the party. The fact that he blew a twenty-somethng percent lead in the general election would spell the death knell for any other party leader, but I don’t think even the Conservatives take themselves seriously any more.
Hey, I used to be a Conservative; it’s not the philosophy I have a problem with, but my problem is with mouthy, yappy, “I’m so tough and shouty” guys like Poilievre who have done nothing for Canadians other than be shouty and yappy! How are those leadership qualities?! How does that make you the best choice to be prime minister of this country?
It doesn’t.
I was hoping that Poilievre would be defeated and then we could stop watching him rant and rave on television, and perhaps someone with a brain might take over the Conservative Party. But is there anyone with a brain left in the party? There doesn’t appear to be.
I just thank the god I don’t believe in every day that we have an adult governing this country, rather than a career politician who couldn’t feed himself if he had to go out and get a real job. He dodged that bullet yesterday.
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’ve watched yet another sob story on the news about some small business just across the border in the US who are missing all of the business that Canadians bring with them across the border, and I just don’t get it.
I am one of the Canadians who used to cross the border about once a month, and I do not any more. However, I don’t cross not because I refuse to support a country or its president who talks of annexing us and imposes tariffs on us; I do not cross because if I do I will be a foreigner in their land, and the American government and its employees have shown a categorical dislike of foreigners. I do not want to be on the receiving end of that “categorical dislike”, whether it’s from a CBP employee, a Border Patrol agent or even a local sheriff!
I don’t make this statement based on hypothetical conjecture, I base it on real cases, one in which a Canadian was detained at the southern US border while she was applying for a renewal of her work visa, and then kept in custody for eleven days. One example of this insanity is all I need, no matter how it may have come about, the border at which it happened, and no matter how it may have ended — reasonably well for the Canadian after a couple of weeks in Third World-type detention! There’s even a case of a Canadian, who is a veteran who served the American forces, being deported, not to mention of the spouses of trump supporters being deported! My god!
And then, at the US’s northern border, there are so-called “random” searches being made of travellers (including American citizens, presumably) before they get to the Canadian border — so-called exit/outbound inspections! People love to say that, “If you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about or fear.” It’s an old trope, and it’s 100% true, but OK, I’ll just randomly pull you and all of your friends over next Saturday afternoon in your neighbourhood and we’ll see how much you object to that! Besides the fact that a twenty-minute trip across the line can turn into a few hours — or days if you’re really unlucky — nobody likes to be treated like a criminal for no apparent reason. That’s not part of the freedoms on which Canada and the United States are founded; it’s a symptom of a “police state”, no matter what excuses the American government gives (through one of its many police forces, of course) about how such random searches “[make] our community safer”. Yup, police states are very safe, unless you happen to make an enemy of a police officer or have anything to say about the current dictator.
I want to make clear that I don’t believe I have anything to fear — legitimately, if you don’t count my railing against trump on this blog — in crossing the US border; I’ve never been denied entry and, other than a grand total of two speeding tickets, I have never broken any laws in the United States. However, the experiences of the people above, who had less reason than me to fear the American government, give me even more reason to fear the American government and a complete lack of desire to turn one of my twenty-minute trips across the border into a two-hour (at best) ordeal. No thanks. I feel for the American businesses in border towns like Blaine and Point Roberts, but their solvency is not worth my freedom, even for five minutes, and the Canadian media needs to get over this claim that we’re not crossing the border because we’re trying to punish Americans.
It might be useful to note that academics who are avoiding travel to the United States are also not doing so to inflict punishment on mom-and-pop American businesses, they’re doing so to protect themselves from the excesses of xenophobic American government officials.
I realise I’m a bit late in getting to this, but I find it hilariously ironic that the constituents of the riding in which Pierre Poilievre (leader of the Conservative Party) ran in the last (2025) federal election took his policy of “CHANGE” so literally and seriously, that they voted to change their representative in parliament, away from him and to the Liberal candidate for the second time since Confederation. So the leader of the Conservative Party doesn’t even have a seat in the House. Of course, some Conservative MP is going to give up his seat so that Poilievre can get into the House of Commons, despite that fact that he’s been rejected by the public. If that isn’t hypocritically going against the will of the people, I don’t know what is.
But Poilievre was voted out for personal reasons; nobody likes him! And he’s not prime-ministerial material! I really think you’d be hard-pressed to find many Conservatives who likes his style or approach, and yet Conservative MPs will all belly up to the bar and claim that he, their leader, needs to muscle out some other MP (who will be rewarded down the road with patronage, of course) to be allowed to run in a by-election to get back into the elitist boys’ club against which he rails at every opportunity he gets. His two-facedness is just beyond belief.
I think the House of Commons will be far better off without him, but it’s a shame that the will of the people will be overthrown by the constituents in a “safe” Conservative riding in Alberta.
Ramaphosa and trump in the Oval Office.
In other trump news — we can’t get away from him — he tried to ambush Cyril Ramaphosa, president of South Africa, in the Oval office yesterday. However, the thing that really pissed me off was that the media — including the BBC and CBC — just piled on top of what they described as his long-debunked claims of a “White genocide” in South Africa. “Long-debunked”? That’s news to me. The systematic killing of White farmers in South Africa has been documented for a long time, many years. Sure, we can all debate whether or not the South African government is involved in said genocide but, other than the police force’s dragging their feet on the investigating of the perpetrators, I don’t believe anyone is actually accusing the South African government of being involved. If it’s questionable, my feeling is that the investigation is still open, and it may be years and generations before we know the real truth.
So as much as I do not want to be seen as someone who will pile onto one of trump’s misinformation/disinformation bandwagons, I think he does have a point about the prolific murders of White South African farmers that is still an open question.
It blows me away how disproportionate the military aid from America is between Ukraine and Israel. I’m a former supporter of Israel — although I still think they deserve more support than their enemies — but I think they’ve ridden and taken advantage of the Holocaust bus / gravy train for too long now. There’s no doubt that Hitler’s crime against the Jews in World War II is, and will remain, a black mark on world history that will exist forever, but that was almost a century ago now, and punishing Palestinians is not quite the same as going back in time and punishing the Nazis, despite the horrific attack on Israel by Hamas on 7 October 2023.
But my point in this post is not to get into the middle of that millennia-long conflict. The conflict in which I’m really interested is the one that started in 2014 when Russia began their destabilisation efforts against Ukraine. This was, essentially, the revival of the Cold War and the Russian imperialist agenda by vladimir putin, but either trump is all in favour of putin’s revival of Russian imperialism, or (as I’ve said before and will undoubtedly say again) he skipped out of all history classes in school and has no idea what’s going on. He certainly seems to have no idea that putin is playing him like a fiddle, promising peace one minute and then withdrawing that promise the next as he bombs more innocent civilians.
Since trump came to power for a second time, he has overloaded the Israelis with weapons and done all he can to withhold weapons from Ukraine in their existential fight against Russia’s invasion. That anyone in a war with Russia has to beg for military assistance from anyone in the West boggles the mind of anyone who lived during the Cold War (especially in one of countries in which the Americans and the Soviets fought one of their proxy wars), since the Americans adopted the Truman Doctrine in 1947. However, as I’ve said many times in this blog, trump didn’t read a single line of history is his very limited education, and so has absolutely no reason to be concerned about Russia (and especially putin) and his megalomaniacal ambitions. So he doesn’t care a whit about the Ukrainians, trying to work his infamous “art of the deal” on them instead, stripping them of their natural resources to a greater extent than Germany was stripped of theirs after World War II. It boggles the mind!
History will not smile on donald trump, especially if he helps putin “win” his war at the bargaining table.
This reminds me that I have been sitting on a piece I’ve written (but not fully completed) about Western companies (like Cadbury, owned by the American company Mondelez) continuing to do business in and with Russia despite the world’s sanctions against the country. I need to cut that piece off and publish it. That said, I have boycotted Mondelez products — and a huge number of others — since I found out years ago that they’re supporting Russia in their killing of Ukrainian civilians.