The Scarlet Letter

Of course I refer to Rod Rosenstein's resignation letter showering the treasonous orange mobster in the White House with gloriously epic shade.

Whoever wrote that letter deserves a Pulitzer.

P.S. Enjoy Prison, Asshole

Eric Garland to the Rescue

Like I've said, I'm not on Twitter because political Twitter is a toxic cesspool dominated by Big Men on Campus advertising themselves. And if anybody dares to call them out on anything they don't want to be called out on, which is everything because they're all as phony as fake cowboy convoys, they just direct their bot and troll armies to complain to @jack, who then suspends the critic's account.

Whatever the intent of the white male nationalist libertarians of Silicon Valley, it seems pretty clear that the political beneficiaries of social media platforms are Conservative politicians.

Coincidence? I think not. More like that's a fact, @jack.

Doug Ford is an unlikable and corrupt thug with no platform to speak of, the Liberal vote in Ontario collapsed as Kathleen Wynne was bullied and maligned by our Conservative mainstream media (estimated editorial content being 80% Conservative with 99% Conservative Party endorsements during elections) and Andrea Horwath was awesome and at the top of her game and yet - voila! - another Conservative majority government in Canada!

We're probably completely screwed and will be further punished with a federal Conservative Party government this fall, in spite of the fact that the NRA, which I think funded Stephen Harper's leadership campaign, whether directly or indirectly, which would mean that Russia funded it, too, is imploding from treason and money laundering.

I don't know that, it's just my guess, but he lobbies for what I consider a white male nationalist outfit, hence his cheering on of white male nationalist governments like the sexist racist anti-Semitic one in Hungary.

Anyway, Americans are, ironically, way ahead of us (thanks to the Mueller investigation - which is massive and ongoing and just shut up all you finger-wagging naysayers) in dealing with their political garbage, while the Big Men on Twitter Campus busily sabotage our liberal Feminist shiny pony (of course I mean, Justin Trudeau) and his, yes, disappointing government, because... ???

Hey, whatever else you think of Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott, their assisted dying and cannabis legislation couldn't have been more conservative if it had been drafted by a Conservative government, so spare me. Those two ain't no friend of liberal Feminist me.

So to my point - here's Eric Garland, who I usually find offputting and incomprehensible, on the suspension yet again of @SpiceyFiles, proving, as every liberal Feminist knows who has ever gone up against a BMoC, that Twitter is complete and utter bullshit when it comes to free speech:

Oh No She Dittint

"I Told Him NOT To Endorse Me, Dammit!"

Well I see Joe Biden's campaign is off to an auspicious start.

Anybody Missing an "N"?

A Helping Hand

My mother recently had a physician assisted death, and because I want to demystify the process for other people, I wrote a column that I hoped to get published - for payment - in a Canadian newspaper. Alas, the Globe turned me down, perhaps because I was submitting it to Comment, since First Person doesn't pay, and the column isn't suitable for Comment. I decided to skip the Star because it doesn't publish this sort of column, either, and Postmedia, well, I guess I got all the money I'll ever get from that racket because unless you're one of the few survivors on the Ottawa Citizen's staff, forget it.

But that's okay because I really just want to get the word out about physician assisted dying and don't much care if I'm published in a Canadian newspaper anymore. The money isn't worth the freelance agreement, to be perfectly frank. So I'm blogging my column here and I invite all ye who pass this way to share it if that's what you'd like to do. I'm not on Twitter or I'd tweet it so feel free to tweet it for me if you'd like.

In the meantime, thanks for reading.

**********************************************

Two weeks after her 95^th birthday, in her room at a nursing home in Sault Ste. Marie, attended to by two young middle-aged female doctors and witnessed by three of her four children and our partners, my mother had a physician assisted death.

It was what she wanted. In fact, as soon as she found out she might qualify, about three weeks earlier, her mood brightened and she looked forward to the future as she had not done in years. Meanwhile, we who knew how much she wanted to die, and so wanted her to die, too, held our breath that nothing and nobody would get in her way.

The process began in late March, when my mother formally requested a physician assisted death. The request had to be made by her, she had to be of sound mind to make it, and she had to remain of sound mind right up until the end when she would be asked one final time if she still wanted to go ahead. No one who might benefit financially from her death could be involved at any point in the process. And there was no guarantee that she would even qualify for it, the bill that was passed into law being so restrictive that Rob Oliphant, my mother’s friend and the Liberal MP and co-chair of the committee responsible for consulting on and drafting the original bill, couldn’t, in the end, bring himself to vote for it.

I’m not sure how a person with the disabilities my mother had, who doesn’t have people at the ready to manage the process for them, would fare. A niece and grand-niece managed it all for my mother, both of them fluent in healthcare, and in fairly short order she was assessed by one doctor to see if she met the criteria, then another doctor about a week or so later. Both doctors determined that she qualified but I don’t think I fully exhaled that breath I’d been holding until an hour or so after my mother’s body had been cremated.

I have to say, it felt like such a privilege to be able to be in the room with my mother while her life was ended for her, it really did. Prior to the procedure we were asked to leave the room so that the doctors, with a representative of the nursing home present, could ask my mother, lying in bed, dressed for the day as per usual, one final time if this was what she wanted. Then we were invited back into the room. We seated ourselves around her bed, my mother said she loved us all and we yelled into her ear (she was very hard of hearing - in spite of hearing aids) how proud we were of her.

The doctor performing the procedure kept us informed as she administered a sedative to relax my mother, and then the anesthetic that would end her life.

After the doctor was done, and it's hardly any time at all, she brushed away a tear, telling us that she’d become very fond of my mother in the short time she’d known her, impressed by her determination to live life on her own terms to the last.

That was my mother, only too happy to show everybody else the way.

Ironically, it was her tough heart that was preventing my mother from going naturally (although death from natural causes is what goes on the death certificate after a physician assisted death). She could no longer see to read or watch television or even recognize our faces, her hearing was impaired to the point that people had to shout in her ear to be heard (in spite of hearing aids, as noted above). Her hands, which hadn’t functioned for years (she could no longer feed herself) now caused her pain. Her feet had gone the same way as her hands; she had no balance and required assistance going to the bathroom.

(Nursing homes push diapers on residents pretty shamelessly. There's no percentage it seems in being continent.)

Even buzzing for that assistance had become so tricky that I once visited to find her sitting on the side of her bed clutching the buzzer in case she had to go, a buzzer in hand worth two anywhere else. That was before she ended up strapped into her wheelchair so that she wouldn’t pitch forward to the floor if she fell asleep.

More recently, possibly due to the medications prescribed for sleep, she seemed to suffer from waking nightmares.

(I won't go into the drugs my formerly drug-free mother had prescribed to her in later years because I don't want blood to shoot out my ears due to a sudden and dramatic rise in pressure.)

But still her heart wouldn’t give out and let her go.

Yes, there are people in worse circumstances who have every desire to keep on living, but my mother wasn’t one of them. She had certainly experienced adversity in her life, having been born in 1924 into a family of very limited means, and years later losing her husband to cancer, leaving her to raise me and my siblings, aged 1, 4, 7, and 9 on her own.

But she also went to and hosted a lot of parties, traveled around the world a dozen times over with friends, enjoyed her career as a high school librarian, and happily devoted time and money to getting Liberals elected to public office. Back in the day, I would often hear her voice on the morning news, the first female chair of the planning board. That was my mother, either on her way to a meeting, getting ready to host a party, or packing a suitcase for a trip.

Years ago now, in the seniors’ residence she lived in before the nursing home, I said to her, “You thought you’d die in your sleep one night in our house on Poplar.” And she said, “Yes.” She didn’t have to add that she wished she had.

Some people do old age better than others.

My mother used to say that life is for the living, but in the past couple of years she took to saying that she wasn’t living, she was just existing. What I want now is for our assisted dying legislation to allow for more Canadians to avail themselves of this humane life ending procedure. My mother, I know, would happily have scheduled her death at least two years sooner than she did, if not more, to save herself the pointless suffering.

It’s a good thing, physician assisted dying, but it should be a lot better.

Ooh What Big Bots You Have!

Weird how the media would have us believe that Donald Trump is actually being the US president as opposed to just sitting on the toilet all day tweeting up a self-incriminating storm like every other Big Man on Twitter Campus.

I resigned my volunteer position from our housing association committee (to which I was elected and re-elected and re-elected again) because people care more about their cars than they do their neighbours and I was tired of their whining and complaining and threats of lawsuits.

The old-timers in our association are particularly toxic and will even start fist fights with each other at annual general meetings. These are men in their seventies. The most egregious offender was actually ON our committee at one point, too. I rate him as the third worst person I've ever known.

We got along okay but I have PTSD now so my advice to you reading this is to just say no to toxic people.

Unfortunately, a while after resigning I had to un-resign when our committee ended up without quorum to instruct our property management company.

Nobody wants to do it anymore because everybody's so hateful.

Anyway I figure Jim Mattis et al have done a version of that while the media is busy clickbaiting everybody with stories about Jack Dorsey meeting Donald Trump to assure him that the bigger the man on Twitter campus, the more bots and trolls he attracts, and so the more bots and trolls must be culled.

Oh and to lament that the internet is forever and there's not much he can do about the case of obstruction Trump's tweeted against himself.

Dollars to donuts Dorsey was wearing a wire, too, but worship on, Twitteratti.

An Ontarian Writes

Dear Jason Kenney, Conservative Electoral Fraud Champion of Alberta and Raving Loon: If the market can be trusted to act rationally free of government regulation like Conservatives say it can, then industries in Alberta will ignore your attempt to spite Justin Trudeau by reversing environmental and human health protections, and instead drastically reduce their carbon footprints to not spite anybody.

Cheque please!

I was going to wait until tomorrow to break the good news, but, what the hell - I read today that even billionaires are starting to worry about their prospects for the future.

The Tired Times

I'm too dispirited to blog right now but if you're curious as to what I think of Julian Assange I think he's a rapist and white male nationalist and hacker who works for the GRU (Russia).

Not Yet Vegan

Okay, so, it's hard to blog against type but I'm going to try really hard to break out of the role I've cast myself in on this here internet and be less of the problem and more of the solution.

No wait, too egotistical, which is not blogging against type at all. I'll just go with "less of the problem" and see where that leads.

So first, I do ask forgiveness from my vegan readers because I do get it and I know it's hard to be vegan in a carnivorous world and I will get there and be one of you (hopefully with a more helpful flies to honey approach?). I imagine there are vegan substitutes for the ingredients in the recipe I'm about to share but I also imagine they are very expensive.

Sincerely, kudos to vegans who walk the walk and even more kudos to parents who do.

Anyway, I have an issue with anxiety that turning sixty has exacerbated instead of alleviating, made worse by current circumstances that I'll probably blog about in future, and since I know that being kind generates kindness, it is a sin for me not to at least give it a go.

One vox populist at a time.

I'm starting out small and somewhat indirectly by blogging a recipe, I know.

One of my favourite books in young adulthood was "Heartburn" by Nora Ephron, and I've loved books interspersed with recipes ever since. But I've been in a book club for twenty years or so and my reading is pretty much down to whatever the book that month is plus something by Jane Smiley, The Lord of the Rings, and Game of Thrones.

If I die before finishing the LotR it won't be a moment too soon, by the way.

And I really don't want to read book five of GoT but I will. They're really good, captivating, but ugh.

The rest of my reading is online, how to be a better person yammerings and echo chamber political blather, except for the Saturday Globe and the most pretentious section of a newspaper ever imagined, Pursuits.

It's absurd, really, so I decided to make use of it and try the odd recipe because who am I to pretend not to be even more absurd, and last Saturday's was a cheesecake recipe that I modified a bit, but not much, because I'm going to pretend expense is no object for the next year or so when it comes to baking and cooking.

It's a cheesecake recipe so it calls for a springform pan, but I have never really understood why a springform pan is necessary. I do have one, however, because I used to be a middle-class homemaker living in the suburbs in a four bedroom house with a car and a husband and three kids and a dog.

Use whatever pan you have, in other words, and press a mixture of 1/2 cup melted butter, 1/4 cup brown sugar, 1 cup flour, 1 cup rolled oats, and pecan pieces into it and bake for 10 or 15 minutes at 350 to set the crust for the cheesecake filling.

Cool.

No seriously, let it cool.

Now mix two packages of cream cheese (ugh, butter and now cream cheese and the dairy industry is a tough one, you're right, vegan readers) with 1/4 cup brown sugar, 1/4 maple syrup (I have to insist to my pauper readers that you splurge for the real deal even if you have to go without caviar for the next week or so), two eggs (okay, vegan readers, maybe you should just skip this blog entry), and a 1/2 cup of organic grass fed yogurt that if you're like me you should never buy unless you're making several cheesecakes within a two day period.

Bake at 350 for about 45 minutes.

Partway through cooking put pecans on the cheesecake around which you plan to cut slices, which you'll want to be slim because it's cheesecake, not rice cake. I will not be responsible for people feeling uncomfortably full. Cheesecake is an indulgence, deserved, of course, but an indulgence all the same. I know I felt like a Lady Rockefeller eating my slim piece.

Also, I cooked down frozen mango chunks to have with it but next time I'll cook down frozen blueberries and make a topping for it. I'll place the pecan pieces close to the edge and fill in from them with the blueberry topping.

There. And I can tell you that instead of feeling worked up after blogging the above, I feel useful and accomplished and if not kind, closer to it.

I also feel a little worried that I might be sued by the woman who does the recipes in Pursuits for adapting it a bit but not so much that it isn't plagiarized, so please if you know her tell her to be kind and not do it.

Thanks and you have an awesome day!

Feminarchists

So yesterday I followed a back and forth between Feminists about Jody Wilson-Raybould vs Justin Trudeau.

I was afraid to even "like" the comments of the one Feminist I agreed with, a younger woman who is normally too extreme in her Feminism for me, because the other Feminists (there were three of them to one of her) were bullying her to the point of gaslighting and, you know, how much crazy do I really want to attract now that I'm sixty.

But I did. I liked her comments. As Bill Maher might say, it was literally the least I could do.

Then some idiot man decided to weigh in with his 'splainin' for the three crazy bitch Feminists (cbFs) and, although I kind of agreed with him on that primitive brain level some of us find ourselves cursed with - especially when we're online, which is almost always - I took him on.

Ugh. I was totally sucking up to the cbFs, wasn't I.

So craven.

Anyway, in the course of taking him on, "Femsplaining" (coined, I think, by Danielle Crittendon of David Frum fame), I figured out what was going on with the three cbFs.

Feminists are so much scarier for Feminists to argue with than men are it's totally unnerving, I can't tell you. Men are lucky they're pretty much clued out about Feminism when they aren't just completely ignoring it. If you're a man reading this, just know that there are waves and waves of Feminism now and just when you think you're hip with the Feminist now, you've outed yourself as a dupe of the patriarchy and as yesterday as giving a shit about climate change.

Anyway, as you can tell from my blogging here, I'm not on Team Jody, I'm on Team Justin. This, I realized, as the cbFs pummeled the one just a little too extreme for me Feminist and I stood by bravely liking every third comment of hers, is heretical to cbFs because Jody is an Indigenous woman and Justin is a white man. Indeed, the one ltefmF was derided for even claiming to be a Feminist when she wasn't on Team Jody.

At one point, when she cited her experience with male sexual violence, she was actually laughed at via the laughing emoticon by the cbFs. Then when she expressed her fear of Scheer Madness in the face of climate change the cbFs, and at this point I was like (in my head) NOOOOO, STOPPPPP, went in for the kill.

Nothing it seemed, short of breaking down and declaring her allegiance to Team Jody after all would make her a Feminist again. Just like that, she was over.

It was very crazy-making. So I went back and read it some more. I was shocked that my Facebook friend whose page it was on wasn't telling people to back off, but I guess earlier that day I'd told a sock puppet, first name Garth, on another friend's page to go fuck himself (twice) on behalf of a whole other woman whom he was accusing of being a sexist racist for not being on Team Jody, and she didn't tell me to back off, either.

ANYWAY, it was during my Femsplaining to the idiot man who weighed in (brave or just stupid, it was hard to tell, but my Facebook friend popped in long enough to indicate stupid) that I figured out what was going on with the cbFs.

They don't give a shit why Jody Wilson-Raybould is blowing up the government, they just care that she's blowing up the government.

Justin = Patriarchy
Jody = Matriarchy

I'd argue that you have to be some privileged to not care that blowing up this government will result in a way worse one unless you're a white male Christian Conservative nationalist, but I'm too chicken.

Also, my bottom line now for a Prime Minister of Canada is that she or he be able to balance his or her entire body off the edge of a table so that she or he is parallel to the floor, which probably puts my Feminism back a few waves to completely irrelevant.

But that's the fun part of being sixty, isn't it, I can accuse younger Feminists who disagree with me of being Ageist.

#Ironic

Canadian Politics in 2019: Justin Trudeau, who is, as far as I know, the only male leader of a political party anywhere in the world to tell prospective candidates to his version of the Liberal Party of Canada to be pro-choice or fuck off to another party, achieve gender parity in his cabinet, and legalize cannabis (Feminist because it safely enhances the female sexual experience) - is being hash-tagged as a #FakeFeminist by men and women who not only haven't done any of those things, but who wouldn't do them even if they could.

Such is social media, I guess, that hashtags trump reality.

Wake up, Feminists. We're being used.

Like Ra-a-ainnn On Your Wedd-inggg

Can we retire the phrase "strong woman", please?

I find it unbelievably patronizing.

Also, I don't recall anyone referring to Tom Mulcair as strong when he resigned as an Environment Minister on principal.

And now the Arctic is melting.

Ah, Tom Mulcair. I actually voted NDP in the last federal election, but only because I live in a safe Liberal riding.

In other words, I could afford to vote NDP.

But if the Conservative candidate had won by one vote over the Liberal candidate and Stephen Harper became Prime Minister again I wouldn't be telling you I voted NDP in the last federal election, that's for sure.

I'd have changed my name and moved to Timbuktu.

Oh, and while we're retiring phrases, I think we should retire "my truth", too.

The Arctic is melting, ffs.

Time to get over ourselves.

And yes, I recognize the irony of blogging the above sentence.

What Once Was Ours Is Now Theirs

Words either matter or they don't, so assuming they do, the Conservative government of Ontario's proposed licence plate motto change from "Yours to Discover" to "Open for Business" clearly tells us that Doug Ford doesn't consider Ontario ours, he considers it his.

When I was a kid it was so much fun to come across public access to our natural resources. And when I finally made it to the southern states I was shocked by how limited public access is to waterfront. Even here in Ottawa private owners of property around Lake McKay deny the public any access to the water.

I thought people saw through politicians who vow to run government like a business once it was suggested by someone clever that they run government like a government instead. But I guess I was wrong.

Fifty teachers were just laid off in Guelph. It's such a stupid waste of us, of our citizenry, of the whole point of community. No good will come of any of this for anybody. It's anti-social. Politicians, at the very least, need to recognize that capital has replaced labour, but why bother when you don't even have to release a platform during a campaign and you can get elected premier.

Apparently, Mark Towhey is the new editor-in-chief of the Sun. Well who cares, I say. Why not Conrad Black or Ezra Levant. The Sun is garbage with a sports section.

A bully demanded of Kathleen Wynne the other day in the Legislature - our legislature - "What are you still doing here?" It actually hurt my heart, it was so gratuitously shitty.

I don't know. It's hard living here now. Imagine how hard it's going to get.

Expectations Alert - Lowered

I spent this past weekend in a smaller city that's seen better days, staying in a surprisingly good hotel. I'm not always keen on hotel swimming pools (anymore) because I had the misfortune of visiting one a few years ago that was chock-a-block with 12-year-old boys (hockey team), and something kind of clicked in my head.

Sorry, 12-year-old boy hockey teams, but you're gross.

I swam in this pool, though, and it was pretty good. And even though I typically shun buffets, I had the complimentary buffet breakfast.

Maybe I'm lowering my standards in preparation for a very old age in a nursing home.

Outside the hotel was a different story altogether. There seemed to be an inordinate number of grizzled old guys riding bicycles, angry young men high as kites shouting at the sky, and people milling about aimlessly in the town square, looking a lot like they had nowhere better to go.

Later I learned that this city is on the rise, that it's expected to experience a fair bit of migration to it, like it will be the place to be in future days.

In the meantime, the cost of housing seems out of whack with the economy already, so I'm not sure what this will mean for people living there now. Certainly a lot of the people I saw would have a hard time getting jobs as day labourers, never mind anything steady.

Anyway, I read the Saturday Globe while I was there and one article was about the economy in Alberta and the likelihood that Albertans will vote for the United Conservative Party because of it.

This strikes me as a real shame for Albertans, for sure, but probably a harbinger of what's to come for the rest of us, when Canadians elect a Conservative Party government.

Conservatives these days are not what they used to be. There's aren't any Red Tories to keep them out of white nationalist territory, I guess.

And won't it just be so ironic when a year later Americans elect a Democrat POTUS who wants to leap dramatically forward into a dynamic and socially progressive America, while we're being dragged back and down into a lesser version of what we are now.

Fortunately, I seem to have a good start on lowering my expectations of the future.