Beware of visionaries lobbying for taxpayer funding

There was a heart-warming story in the Globe & Mail this morning that hit all the right notes. A Canada-Ukraine joint venture has been formed to build autonomous vehicles, in Canada! The Ukraine partner has already delivered 5000 to the army, and would like to expand while moving production out of range of Putin's missiles.

The Canadian side, meanwhile, is a recently launched start-up, Dominion Dynamics, led by visionary leader Eliot Pence, an expert in AI, robotics, and the architect of Anduril Industries growth from obscure start-up to industry giant in the 2018-2022 period. We're obviously lucky to have Eliot on our team! Alas, the only thing missing for this joint venture to save democracy and crush evil, and make Canada a world leader (here we go again!) in autonomous vehicles with fully integrated AI, is a juicy government contract for oh, maybe a few hundred thousand units.

When something sounds too good to be true, we used to say it doesn't pass the smell test. My first stop was to read up on Pence's time at Anduril, because it's a story I'm somewhat acquainted with, and I'd never seen that name associated with it. Well, imagine my surprise when Google couldn't find a single reference to the dude in any American business news from 2018 to 2022. Maybe Google's AI missed something... or maybe he did under a pseudonym?

A true renaissance man, Eliot also runs a VC shop called Tofino Capital, which invests in small cap frontier start-ups in Nigeria and other over-looked markets. Check it out! Back to the sniff test... Lord, he stinketh! 

And how about the Ukrainian partner?  With 5000 of their machines already in service on the front lines, I couldn't find anything on YouTube showing them in combat. I did however find a story at Kyiv Post from yesterday almost identical to the Globe's - except it was about Tencore entering a contract with a German partner to build autonomous vehicles there, and unlike the dimwitted Carney who is dithering, Mertz wasted no time guaranteeing open-ended funding for as long as it takes! 

Hmm... I have a hunch the Kyiv Bentley dealership will be at the very top o' the heap at the European Bentley Dealers Association annual awards gala for the foreseeable future!

Bye the way, the Ottawa Business Journal today named Pence Ottawa's newsmaker of the year.

It's a small world...

Forgive me for not tooting my horn re the blog passing 6 million views,  but one fact I always found non-toot-worthy was that as views went ballistic, comments absolutely stalled. If you peruse the last few years of the Falling Downs archive, you will find comments from only two (2) readers.

That's part of a long-term trend to quiet criticism. Go to the View from Falling Downs home page and you'll notice there are no join or follow options.

One is Ken. Ken is from Port Moody BC,  and he originally made contact to tell me what a fucking retard I was for promoting Donald Trump. Anyway, we got over that and Ken has been there forever, and I'm convinced the only reason I still get messages from Ken is because he's been there since before the algos were unleashed and blocked messages.

The other notable exception is Timmie. Unlike Ken, I've actually met  him. Tim seems to post stuff in spite of a ban on my blog by the folks who own the platform. The only connect between me and Tim is we're both acquainted with the local farm boy who became a Nobel laureate. That's what got us together for a face-to-face over a pint or two.

As it happens, Tim's day job consists of liaising with NATO military contractors around the world, and I strongly suspect his internet may be a little more robust than what the rest of us have access to. That's why he can post comments on my blog and you can't.

Be that as it may, the other discovery we made over a burger and a beer is that his sister-in-law was once besties with one of my ex-wives. He hates her guts and I'm still kinda fond of her! Be that as it may, I'd love to have more of Tim's NATO contacts reading this blog!

An open letter to Steve Liebig

 Dear Steve,

It was brought to my attention, by persons who will remain un-named, that I willfully mocked your political career in a recent post.

Steve, nothing could be further from the truth. I apologize unreservedly if that "Lie Big" post caused you discomfort.  Anyone remotely acquainted with my work is well aware I traffic heavily in political satire, and it is in that context my comments should be considered. 

And in that context, "ya couldna sucked too bad" is a ringing endorsement!

Go Steve!

Vote "LIE BIG" on October 26

They're having local elections shortly, and the roadsides around Eden Mills were festooned with "Vote for me" signs from the many candidates hoping to grab the bottom rung of the democracy ladder. I'm negotiating a twisty roadway en route to our b&b, and while I'm not able to admire the signage, I couldn't help notice  the "Lie Big" message.

Eden Mills is best known today for the annual Eden Mills Writers Festival, but 150 years ago it was a thriving mill town on the banks of the Eramosa River. By the time the Ontario Agricultural College in nearby Guelph became a university, the water-power era was long over, and Eden Mills was just another struggling hamlet down on its luck.

One thing the struggling hamlet enjoyed in abundance was stone cottages. As you can imagine, when the local cow college was made a uni, building an English department was a top priority. After all, without that claim to Shakespearean sophistication, the U of G was just a cow college! 

By the 1970s you had a thriving English department 15 minutes away, peopled by folks who imagined those stone cottages were just like the stone cottages their literary heroes in Victorian England lived in, and that struggling hamlet has gradually morphed into a chi-chi destination for yuppies with substantial renovation budgets.

It was the U of G crowd who started up the Eden Mills Writers Festival. Due to flukes of circumstance, I ended up on first-name terms with quite a few of them. In hindsight I suppose I might label them "cultural entrepreneurs." It was pretty much the same crew that launched the Guelph Jazz Festival.

In some ways socializing with English profs was an eye-opener. I was accustomed to boozing it up with welders and truck-drivers, but I gotta say nothing prepped me for the level of alcohol abuse among the English department crowd.  To this day I recall a wobble home as the sun was coming up. I'd been at a bash in the apartment of a grad student who was dating a married prof fifty years older. For the last two hours Bowie's Rock & Roll Suicide had been on repeat at max volume. It was ringing in my ears for the entire wobble home, six blocks away. It's remains one of my all-time favorites.

Our b&b is a departure from what Eden Mills has become. The woman who runs it has roots in the town that go back six generations. The home she rents out is the home she's lived in her entire life, the home she raised two children in. When she rents her home out she relocates herself to a cabin a little further back on her 16 acres. She's a fascinating character in her own right. She just got home after touring her one-woman play, "She won't come in from the fields," across Canada.

She's like everybody else, getting on in years, and both her children are now living in BC. Six generations rooted on the banks of the Eramosa River are drawing to an end. But in the meanwhile, life goes on. There's municipal elections coming up in a couple of weeks. Once the car stopped and I had a chance to scan a Lie Big sign standing still, I found out Steve Liebig is running for re-election in ward 3. Re-election! He's already on the bottom rung and is just hoping to stay there. Good luck Steve! If you were already elected once, and can still raise funds to have signs printed, you couldna sucked too bad!

Check out this interview with ambassador Chas Freeman accusing Israel of propaganda!

Ya, I know Israeli propaganda isn't exactly a scoop, but with the last post it looked to me like the Blogger platform has, for whatever reason, been attempting to restore proper paragraph formatting. Just so you know, as a writer, I'm absolutely obsessive about para formatting. Here's why you haven't seen any here for about six years or so.

Just as covid was coming in, and I was debating retirement, and my left eyeball blew its retina, one night Doublewide (our cat) took a stroll across my keyboard, and every post has been run-on paras ever since. Needless to say, given my state of tech retardation, I had no idea how to investigate the innards of my laptop to restore proper paragraphs. 

As I was casting about for some expertise re how to fix this dilemma, and I'd coaxed Doublewide across my keyboard many times, to no avail, in hope she could retrace her steps and undo the damage, a crazy thing happened. The numbers on the blog took off.  It was down to sub-100 views per day before Doublewide danced across the keyboard, but, and at some level this is a bit of a disappointment, proper paragraphs lost out to run-on paragraphs, big-time.

So this post is an experiment. Nothing new here. But there are three clear paragraph breaks, and just to take it to the next level, let's see if they'll allow a link; Amb. Chas Freeman: Israel is Commiting Suicide

Mafia Don is done! Finished! Kaput!... or maybe not...

Regular readers will know I've become increasingly convinced there ain't no possible way Donny J is gonna survive midterms. Oh, he'll certainly "survive," since as he's pointed out more than once, he's not on the ballot. All I can say to that is good luck with the last half of your term after you lose both congress and the senate. It's hard to see anything other than two years of a zombie admin 100% focused on avoiding impeachment.

But maybe I've got it all wrong. I was  down city-way today for thanksgiving and had occasion to chat at  length with some very well-read youngsters who posit as definite possibility something I've dismissed as far-fetched... and their scenario goes something like this; over the next three weeks the admin turns up the dial on ICE violence in Dem cities. They'll ramp up the outrage factor to whatever it takes to ignite massive public push-back, and then they'll declare martial law and cancel the midterms. What's really ominous is none of these kids have ever heard of Chris Hedges!

If I'd heard that conversation a year ago I would have dismissed it, but a year on I gotta admit that we're at a place with this admin that it is literally true that ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE!

About Mafia Don's diesel deal with Bad Vlad

After four years of threatening death and destruction against allies who might dare breach his arbitrary sanctions on Russian oil, Donny J done shredded his own sanctions and announced he'd contracted to swap a few million tons of Russian diesel for a few billions of USD.

Not hard to see where that came from. We're three weeks from mid-terms, and Team Trump is starting to panic. The war he promised to end in 24 hours is now chewing the legs off the global economy. If that's not bad enough, the new war his pal, the Greatest Leader Since Moses, conned him into, promises to destroy what's left of American credibility in the Middle East - in fact, that's pretty much a done deal at this point.

All of which leaves the NATO vassals up the proverbial stump. Since it was Trump's bullying that coerced them into ramping up their military spending, they assumed Uncle Sam would reward them by leading the charge to dislodge the evil dictator in the Kremlin. Instead, Trump announces a multi-billion $$ deal for Putin's diesel!

I've seen some analyses by industry insiders who estimate these purchases might, in a best case scenario, keep US diesel prices tamped down till the midterms. Unfortunately for Mafia Don, he's got 101 crises cooking beyond the price of diesel, so even if this latest brazen display of market manipulation  were briefly effective, he is doomed. Trump's next two years will be 100% devoted to fighting impeachment, so fighting for or against anything else is a non-starter. 

Donny J has had a spectacular run, but it's winding down...