Welcome to The Cranky Beaver

My name is neumann, and I'm a compulsive writer. There's no known cure for this condition. Sure, there's an abundance of therapies out there, and I've tried most of them, but nothing has worked.

But I've made peace with my higher power. I just keep writing.

In pre-internet times my writing was confined to letters to friends, random political pamphleteering, and keeping a journal.

Then the internet came along and soon birthed the "blog." I was a late adaptor, but thousands of posts later, I've come to appreciate blogging as the methadone for writing addiction.

I've often thought my blog was a little too all-encompassing. I've got everything under one roof, everything from where my cats shit to my latest ruminations on the state of the world. One of my go-to themes has been Canadian politics.

That's a topic I've lived and read extensively. I bring to politics a deep-rooted working class perspective. I was a schmuck on the shop floor longer and long before I was anything else. The working class perspective on anything is more or less absent from any meaningful representation in media.

So I've decided to celebrate the New Year by hiving off my ramblings on Canadian politics into a stand-alone blog. Ramblings about the greatest leader since Moses or Uncle Sam or Putin will remain at the home farm unless they specifically reference Canada. 

Here are a few verities I take as a given:

- NAFTA was uniformly bad for Canada's working class.

- NATO is, thirty years after the demise of the Warsaw Pact, universally bad for Canada and the world.

- Canada should be a free and sovereign nation, unencumbered by colonial era loyalties to the UK and neo-colonial loyalties to the USA.


Welcome to The Cranky Beaver.