Countdown to Armageddon

 It's been busy times here at Falling Downs.

Bubby took another spill recently and therefore the Farm Manager has been splitting her time between the farm and Bubby's place in town. The main thrust of the time in town is to convince the fiercely independent Bubbinator to just say "yes" to a home.

The next day Hillary went viral with her denunciation of "fake news." Yup, apparently it was fake news that crippled her campaign.

It wasn't that Trump thoroughly out-worked her. I mean she was doing one event every other day and he was doing four or five every day. Trump may be a silver-spoon twat, but you gotta admit the man has a work ethic. Not only that, but he actually had stuff to say that resonated with a lot of folks.

Trump was the first political contender to ixnay the "free trade floats all boats" bullshit that has been conventional wisdom for the past quarter century. If nothing else, we should thank him for that.

But back to "fake news."

We gotta be on the look-out for fake news. It's everywhere all the time, especially once you're out of the certified truthiness neighbourhoods out there in the world 'o news. You know what I'm talking about. Play it safe; get your news from reputable news sources like WaPo and NYT and you'll be good. Get your news from some dodgy punks at Global Research or Paul Craig Roberts' website, and... well, obviously you're imbibing Putin's propaganda wholesale.

So on Friday the mainstream news was chock full of fulminations about those dastardly Russian Olympians who have been making a mockery of WADA and every wholesome convention of fair play in sports. Russians are cheaters, was the message. And of course, Russia being the dictatorship that it is, Putin bears personal responsibility for every Russian infraction of the rules of fair play.

I actually had some things to say about that on Friday. Unfortunately, Friday was consumed by the demands of the Farm Manager's holiday party at her day job. Yup, the FM has a day job. The cash flow here at Falling Downs is not sufficient for the lifestyle she is accustomed to, especially in those years when the OPP Air Force flags our herb garden. Even though we keep the herb garden on the neighbour's property, this is the kind of thing that has a very negative effect on the cash flow around here.

So instead of writing a thought-provoking blog, I had to go to a party where grown-up middle-aged types were playing "party games." People were voluntarily dabbing vaseline on their noses so they could safely carry a cotton ball across the room. Because if you could do that faster than your competition, you won the game!

Get the fuck outta here. Some of those folks are actually interesting people who I wouldn't mind talking to. Watching them carry a cotton ball across the room stuck to a gob of vaseline on their nose does NOT interest me.

In any way whatsoever.

Next day, the Russian hacker shit hit the mainstream news fan. Yup, unnamed sources have informed the Washington Post that the CIA has determined that the Ruskies interfered with the US election in favour of Trump!

Oh!

My!

God!!!

It's true then! Even as those Podesta emails were ripping the curtain away from Hillary's all-out campaign to undermine Bernie we were being side-tracked into thinking the scandal was not about the Dem hierarchy fucking Sanders, but about the "fact" that the Ruskies were behind the leaks!

That gosh-darned Putin!

So I was about to post a pithy blog about that, but had to defer it because I had a holiday family function to attend in Waterloo. My dear Uncle Werner, who used to be a professor at the University there, started this tradition a quarter century ago. Alas, he is so far ahead of me on the Alzheimer Highway that I don't even have his tail-lites in view anymore, and he hasn't attended his own tradition in years, but nevertheless I make an effort.

Even though it was six hours of driving through various levels of blizzard for a bowl of chilli I'm always glad I made the effort. You get to see those elders who are still more or less with it. And some who aren't.

You get to catch up with the youngsters who are racking up massive student debt at the finest universities in the land.

And you get to catch up with your peers who parent those kids and whose parents are not 100% anymore. It's usually a very therapeutic undertaking. You come away with a new appreciation for your situation. I mean, you can be on the brink of bankruptcy, have seventeen different medical procedures pending, but holy shit, at least you're not in cousin so-and-so's shoes...

That makes six hours of driving through blizzard conditions for a sandwich and a bowl of soup eminently reasonable!

But it did cause a further delay for the next blog post.

So here's what I've been wanting to say ever since Hillary made her anti-alt-news speech last Thursday.

The so-called fake news sites have a long way to go before they catch up to our mainstream outlets in the disbursement of fake news. When you get fake news from InfoWars or Breitbart, who cares?

When you get fake news from the Washington Post or the New York Times, bad shit happens.

Like the war on Afghanistan.

Like the war on Iraq.

Like the destruction of Libya.

Like the current fiasco in Syria.

In every case our honest and reliable mainstream news media delivered up a fully baked loaf of bullshit as though it was "real" news.

The Washington Post and the New York Times peddled the most egregious bullshit as though it were true.

Millions believed them.

Millions died.

So now we are expected to snap to attention because WaPo publishes a story attributed to "anonymous sources" in the CIA who tell us Putin interfered in this election?

Get the fuck outta here!

Yes, interfering in the democratic process is a vile thing, and ya, maybe Putin's minions have engaged in such dastardly deeds.

Maybe.

But take a gander at the home page of the National Endowment for Democracy. Right there on their home page they boast about interfering in the democratic process in over 90 countries!

And if you want to talk about fake shit, how do you like their claim that they are a "private, non-profit foundation."

Bullshit!

It's a 100% fake NGO that gets 100% of its financing from the US government! NGO stands for "non- government organization." How is a non-government organization a non-government organization if they get all their funding from the government?

Anyway, these are the sorts of folks who are running scared at the thought of a Trump presidency. If they're scared, they must know something about Trump that I don't.

Not that there isn't plenty to be scared of. I mean how many billionaires and generals and GS alumns can you pack into your cabinet and still pretend you're the saviour of the little people?

The countdown to Armageddon is on.