BIG BROTHER EXPOSED!!!

a city falls and tough girls can win, obviously!

Sgt. Catherine Cawood of Happy Valley

This week I reported the deadly attack on a former CBC radio colleague and friend named Michael Finlay. He was an old-school, slayer of bullshit with a brilliant nose for news and the shifting zeitgeist and he is remembered by a generation of documentary makers for his astonishingly good writing and editing.

Not very many like him left. It was a random assault by a man in black he didn’t know — just walking down a main, commercial street in upscale Greektown, Toronto where he lived. We were neighbours long ago and hung out drinking wine and eating chicken wings in his favourite honky tonk which is near where it happened. Michael was returning home with groceries.

Something is terribly wrong in Toronto and no one wants to take responsibility for what they’ve done. Everyone is unhappy, operating on a depressive and low emotional frequency. A few have slipped into violent madness. Toronto is one of the most Covidian cities in the world with long lockdowns and school closures and totally captured news dailies who fanned the flames of fear and madness with headlines that reduced sceptical citizens to nothing more than dangerous and toxic disease vectors. Worthy of scorn and hatred. Much psychological damage has been done.

Below is Michael, back in the day, at his desk. Are those beer bottles? He’s probably been up all night putting a show to bed and having a few, back when CBC employees were interesting and could do that. Michael was a little scruffy and had about him the wounded swagger of a deeply observant man with important stories to tell about how the world is going to ratshit. He was right.

Michael FInlay Back in the Day

The Old CBC Radio Building on Jarvis Where We Worked

Will his former colleagues at CBC sound the alarm about a citizenry traumatized after years of division and abuse from public health? Unlikely, since they cheered it on — foolishly thinking themselves virtuous and superior to the brave folks calling it all out. I’m so glad I’m long gone from legacy media.

Toby Young stopped in from London to talk about being watched by Big Brother for his commentary on C-19 policy mistakes and his commitment to free speech. Toby is behind both the Free Speech Union and The Daily Sceptic. He has a great piece in The Spectator about being targeted. He writes: I was amoung the critics of the government’s pandemic response who’d been monitored by the Counter Disinformation Unit, the Intelligence and Communications Unit and the 77th Brigade.

They did this by branding our scepticism ‘disinformation’ or ‘misinformation’ – or by squashing the two together under the heading of ‘mis/disinformation’. The reason for merging these categories is that some of these agencies were originally set up to protect the integrity of British democracy from hostile state actors spreading false information to influence elections. That’s textbook ‘disinformation’ and, on the face of it, has little connection with, say, an Oxford medical professor writing an article for The Spectator questioning the evidential basis for the ‘rule of six’, which is then shared on social media. But if you’re the minister responsible for defending this policy, you can first label the article ‘misinformation’, then claim it falls into the category of ‘mis/disinformation’, then persuade the Rapid Response Unit (RRU) to monitor the professor’s social media activity and report back. As the author of the Big Brother Watch report says, that’s a ‘concerning level of mission creep.

Others targeted were Peter Hitchens, Julia Hartley Brewer, Carl Heneghan, Tom Jefferson and David Davis. All early and prescient critics of the Britain’s heavy handed C-19 response. You can read more about the organizations that alerted Toby in this piece by journalist Paul Thacker.

This week I’m heavily into interviews for a documentary I’m hard at work on hoping that it will crash through the cognitive dissonance of the C-19 holdouts. I fear some of them need deprogramming more than they need facts but I’ll work in the medium I understand — which is storytelling.

Speaking of which — I have fallen under the spell of the extraordinary BBC police drama called Happy Valley. Wow. There are two seasons out on Amazon and a third that just finished in the UK will drop here sometime in March. I did find it online, I confess because I couldn’t wait for the finale. It is perhaps the best show of its kind ever made and the female lead, the magnificent Sarah Lancashire deserves every award she is getting.

For those of us women over fifty - who feel unseen and discarded no matter how significant our accomplishments, Sgt Catherine Cawood, as rendered by Lancashire lifts us all. I can’t say enough good things about it. Even the crappy, lefty Guardian and I finally agree on something.

‘…unreservedly, unapologetically northern, middle-aged, female point of view – the point of view of people in charge of clearing up all the mess that twats leave behind as they make their careless way through life…’

Watch this clip to the end when she introduces herself to the kid about to light himself on fire. I felt like she was living my life and that of every tough, hard working woman who gets it done while saving her family and trying to save everybody else. Go to 2:18 if you are impatient.

Stay critical.

And in the immortal words of Sgt Catherine Cawood — It’s complicated……let’s talk about you.