The rodent LIED!

It was a mere four weeks ago that Wiarton Willie came out of his hole and predicted six more weeks of winter.

The rodent flat-out lied!

Winter's over. Spring has sprung. A few days ago I heard a mourning dove cooing for the first time in months. The Canada Geese who wintered in the Carolinas have been settling in the marsh across the way with a great whoop-dee-doo of honking and general sqawkery.

And today the Farm Manager spotted a pair of Sandhill Cranes on her trip into town.

But the surest sign that winter's over? Today, the last day of February, the first spandex-clad wannabe bicycle racer of the season pedalled silently past...


Gonna be a long season.

Every piece of shit tells a story

I'm not talking about that foil-clad envelope in an envelope I just sent off to LifeLabs to verify that I don't have any of 23 varieties of ass cancer. And by the way, is that a gross undertaking or what? Seriously, I have yet to figure out a way to stifle my gag reflex while I'm scooping samples with those miniature popsicle sticks that come with the kit, no matter what I've tried.

No, I'm talking about something else entirely. With apologies to Adam Sandler, I'm talking about the fleet of piece-of-shit vehicles that festoon the property. It was a very lovely spring-like afternoon here at Falling Downs, and I wasted it splendidly sitting on the stoop surveying my empire, and I have to admit, every piece of shit tells a story.

Take the old Allis Chalmers back-hoe, for example. That was fully functional when my dear father dropped it off here five or six years ago. Dad was a real estate guy, but he had a hobby that let him out of the office. He'd spend his free time building various roads to nowhere throughout the acreages that he owned.

To that end he had a dozer and a dump truck and the old Allis. When he got a newer backhoe old Allis showed up here at Falling Downs on a float. I dug a few random test holes, smoothed out the roadway into the Bass Lake marsh across the road, and used it to clear snow once or twice.

Then I parked it, and it's been parked ever since.

Just like the Ford Escape has been parked for a year. This is an older Escape, when they still looked like SUVs, unlike the new ones. Originally bought it for the tires. It was wearing a decent set of off-roaders that I thought I could use on the F-150. Got the whole vehicle for less than a new set of tires. Used it to collect firewood around the woodlot for a couple of years, but it turned out those tires weren't rated for the larger F-150.

Then there's the Mustang Fifty. It's been in the fleet for seven or eight years, and I don't believe we've put five thousand miles on it. Once in awhile I like to go for a spin in a car that pushes you into your seat when you stand on the gas, and the Mustang does that in spades. The longest trip it's ever been on was from here to Bayfield.

My favourite piece of shit is the 2005 Subaru that's become the daily driver. It's old and ornery, much like me, but I've come to love it.

It's authentic. You know you're driving a real car. No back-up cams or blind-spot alerts with this puppy, and the manual transmission means you actually have to know how to drive. She's my fourth Subaru. Two of the other three got well past 400 thousand kilometres.

This one will eclipse them all.

Anyway, you can only drive one car at a time. I'm getting older (and you are too) and I think I'm going to start paring down the fleet this year. I haven't even mentioned the 500 Ninja or the Ford 4000 tractor or the GM SUV...

After all, I can still tell their stories when they're long gone.


I'm thinking of trading the entire fleet for a new F-150.

CBC broadcasting US propaganda

Caught the CBC radio program Day Six this morning. Host Brent Bambury interviewed Mona Yacoubian, a Syria expert from the United States Institute of Peace, about the current situation in Syria, and specifically in East Ghouta.

In the interest of journalistic integrity, the CBC has an obligation to provide enough background on those to whom it gives airtime so that the audience can decide for itself if we are getting unbiased analysis or, instead, the partisan spin of someone with an axe to grind.

To that end, it would have been germane for Mr. Bambury to point out that in addition to being a "Syria expert," his guest is also a fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, the influential US foreign policy think tank that has never seen an American intervention not worth cheer-leading.

Furthermore, he could have pointed out that the US Institute of Peace is a wholly government-owned "NGO" with intimate ties to the CIA.

Shame on Brent Bambury and shame on the CBC.

Stay Woke: Guardian reveals secret code words of the conspiracy theorists

We owe Jason Wilson, aspiring intern at The Guardian, a debt of gratitude for exposing the secret code words of the alt-right conspiracy types.

No less a conspiracy theorist than Pepe Escobar recently warned me off The Guardian in an email, claiming it's just another formerly decent vaguely leftish rag pushed to desperate measures by the collapse of traditional newspapering.

Sure Pepe... if I can't trust The Guardian...

So here's the REAL TRUTH, according to Jason Wilson. When you see references to crisis actors or the deep state or a false flag operation, you know it's the anti-truth cabal messing with your mind.

Let's unpack Wilson's claims.

Crisis actors. Wilson acknowledges that this is an actual thing, but apparently it's been high-jacked by the conspiratorially inclined to throw shade on the folks working 24/7 to protect us from the evil-doers.

Deep state. This is a term which insinuates a level of control over news and commentary and actual events driven by actors who hide behind official officialdom.

Unofficial officialdom lurks in the background and pulls the strings.

Folks who fall for the "deep state" gambit think Saddam's WMDs were imaginary. They think the official 9/11 investigation was a cover-up. They fall for the narrative, widely promoted by Putin's troll farms, that America is not in fact the virtuous guardian of freedom and democracy that we all know it to be.

What a pathetic bunch of gullible imbeciles!

Oh, and let's not forget "false flag." That's secret code, the etymology of which goes all the way back to the privateer days of the 17th century, for when evil-doers would do evil but pretend somebody else done it.

For example, just google USS Liberty and you'll see how much mileage the antisemitic conspiracy theorists have wrung out of a simple mistake by the IAF.

Well, thanks for the expose, Mr. Wilson...


I'll let Escobar know he got it all wrong about The Guardian.

Selective outrage

I see where Kim Campbell, who was Canada's first female PM for about 15 minutes back in the nineties, has called out those slutty female news anchors who have the temerity to show bare arms on your evening newscast.

Well!

Bare arms undermine credibility, apparently.

Oh Kim!

Kim Kim Kim!

You have no idea how deluded you are.

Kim seems to think your evening news is about the news.

Get with the program, Kim. News is not news. It's content. It's entertainment. Us male viewers with the male gaze WANT to see bare arms...

By the way, and I ask this parenthetically, was there actually a TV show called "Naked News," wherein the female anchor removed her clothing while reading the news? Seems I saw it once or twice.

I personally didn't get it. I don't need to see the news-reader jiggling her girls while she's informing me of the latest suicide bombing in Baghdad. That's a combo that short-changes both boobs and Baghdad.

But back to Kim.

Kim's egregious breach of the protocols of political correctitude left me no option but to marvel at how out of touch this political icon is... but we expect this from Conservative politicos.

It also lead me to marvel at how quickly the story disappeared.

Had Stephen Harper or Patrick Brown or, god forbid, Donald Trump made such an asinine comment, we'd be hearing about it for days on end.

But Kim Campbell is Canada's first woman PM.

Therefore, she gets a free pass.

Dastardly Ruskies caught doping again

I see where Russian bronze medal curler Alex Krushelnitsky has been caught with doped up pee at the Olympics.

Really?

Doping in curling? Get the f@ck outta here!

Curling is the only Olympic sport that can be successfully played at the elite level while simultaneously quaffing a pint and smoking a ciggie. What kind of doping would give this Russian dope an edge?

Mind you, they're always shouting at each other to "go hard" with those brooms...

Are we talking about Viagra here?

Could you wipe your way to YouTube stardom?

I bet you could.

The media machine is hungry for content. Sure, in a few years AI is gonna be serving up way better shit than mere mortals can conjure up, but that's why we gotta strike while the iron is hot, so to speak, as it were.

I was thinking again about that lovely million dollar condo where you get the bird's eye view while doing that "thinker" thing.

You know, where you're sitting on the porcelain throne contemplating a crap and being totally in the moment and all that shit.

If you look at that picture you'll notice a couple of condo towers going up in the middle distance. That looks like a couple thousand units at least.

What's really fucked up is that those couple of thousand million dollar condos all have a clear sight-line to your window seat.

That's a fact just crying out for its own YouTube channel.

The greatest American poet

It's not Emerson and it's not Whitman...

The greatest American poet is Chuck Berry.

As is often the case with great poets, they have their foibles...

Drugs, booze, the entire spectrum of sexual perversion, and so forth.

But they're poets, for God's sake... let's cut them some slack!

Chuck Berry is without a doubt the greatest American poet of all time.


Southern Trust and Greyhound Bus and kiss my ass, it never gets better than that.

How a Mexican kid with an Italian name grabbed the American Dream

Back in the early sixties my DP folks lived on the wrong side of the tracks in Elora. My family, fresh off the boat, were still learning the lay of the land and getting a grip on the English language. My father worked in a factory and my mother worked as a cleaning lady. We were immigrants on the bottom rung.

Now and then a box would come in the post filled with second hand clothes. It would be a present from our more established relatives in New Jersey. Nice second hand clothes. We looked forward to those gift boxes. Once in awhile Onkel Erich himself would show up at the door. He and his wife Adele had the good fortune to leave the old country before the WWII. If I'm not mistaken he drove a Buick convertible with a ton of chrome.

Later on in the sixties, when our fortunes were on the rise and those gift boxes were no longer required, their daughter Brunhild would come up for summer visits with her Italian-American husband Jack DiNovi. Jack was an authentic Italian dude from Philadelphia who had an accent like what you'd hear on the Sopranos. Huge Phillies fan and all-round great guy. All us kids loved them.

Jack and Brunhild had two kids of their own. Then they adopted a little boy from Mexico. They named him Brett.

Brett DiNovi. Google that name and you'll see what that Mexican, adopted by a German and an Italian, went on to do with his life. He's employing hundreds of people, providing an essential service to society, and winning awards for being a great employer.

The American Dream doesn't get much better than that.

They're not Italians or Germans or Mexicans, of course; they are Americans. But they or their parents were all immigrants.

These are turbulent times in America, and Brunhild must often shake her head at the anti-American slant this blog sometimes appears to take.


I just hope the American Dream can survive the machinations of the parasitic political elite that has the "land of the free" so firmly in its tentacles.

Globe and Mail normalizing Trump

Seems to me the guardians of Canada's democracy at 351 King are letting their guard down. All through the first section, not a single headline with the name "Trump" in it. Nowhere in the Opinion section either. And not a single letter to the editor mentions Trump even in passing.

Let's hope they're over their obsession with Trumpian doggerel. It's nice to have my newspaper back.

Silly Philly demonstrated a new trick this morning on our trip to ransom the Saturday Globe from the Korean extortionist. Exiting the car via the window. I had just parked the car out at the water treatment plant to let the girls out for a romp, when she popped up outside my window. She'd let herself out. For some time she's been able to lower the back windows by standing her front paws on the arm rest, a trick the gals at the Timmies drive-thru window find really cute. Today was the first time she actually went out the window, though.

Then she did it again five minutes later, as we're driving by the marina on Bayview Street. That's not funny anymore! Luckily, there's not much traffic there in February, but after that I figured I'd best activate the child locks for the first time in many years. In another month her ass will be too big to fit out the window, but in the meantime we'll play it safe.

Another thing that's not funny any more is what screen addiction is doing to our society. The Opinion section features a lengthy discussion between psychiatrist Norman Doidge and Jim Balsille of "Crackberry" fame. Me and the Farm Manager have long been skeptical of all this supposed connectedness technology has gifted us.

We'll be sitting in a restaurant and there's entire families around us so connected that they completely ignore one another.

Mothers are pushing strollers down the street while texting.

Otherwise respectable people think nothing of giving iPads to their pre-schoolers.

Anyway, that alone is well worth the price of the paper.

Elsewhere, I found myself agreeing with both Saunders and Wente's opinion pieces. Not sure what's going on there... maybe those folks are finally coming to their senses?

Or maybe that's just another marker on the side of the Alzheimer Highway. Either way, it's boring to read stuff you agree with.

At the end of the day

At the end of the day I'm sitting in front of the fire with an elbow on the haunches of one of the hounds, the one sharing the sofa with me at the moment.

Today is "Valentines Day."

That's the fake holiday manufactured by the manufacturers of mass market greeting cards, chocolates, and cut flowers from Colombia and Ethiopia.

Fake or not, you gotta give it some respect.


One year I thought I'd be perfectly honest, and I didn't get the Farm Manager a thing. No flowers, no chocolates, no nothing.

I told her I didn't want to buy into the commodification of sentimentality.

She was not impressed.

I never played that hand again.


At the end of the day, Valentine's Day, I'm sitting in front of the fire. I'd picked up a heart-shaped box of craft chocolates at Mill Creek Chocolates.

It was the least I could do.

What I want in my million dollar condo; floor to ceiling windows in the bathroom

Check it out.

This is one of several bathrooms in this lux condo, but for sure it's the one with the best views.




Yup, you can enjoy the view while taking a crap! You must admit, it don't get much better than that!

Meanwhile back in Waco...

Yesterday marked day 1,000 since the infamous "Waco biker massacre." That was the brawl-come-gunfight carefully orchestrated by half a dozen law enforcement agencies in May of 2015.

Bikers are a handy foil for ambitious law enforcement types. I mean, they have "gangs" and tattoos and they ride loud motorcycles and they look scary, at least some of them. And they don't have a well-funded lobby group like Black Lives Matter looking out for their interests.

In other words, they're an easy target. The cops originally corralled 171 people; anyone in the vicinity of the Waco Twin Peaks restaurant who looked like a biker, including unfortunate folks who didn't have tattoos, motorcycles, or gang affiliations, and held them all on a million dollar bond.

Each.

In the immediate aftermath the media treated us to all sorts of fanciful speculation about the biker underworld declaring war on the Waco Police Department.

Yup, Bandidos looting National Guard warehouses for rocket launchers was just one of the hysterical fake-news stories making the rounds.

And then, the story disappeared. The million dollar bonds were reduced and reduced again. The attention span of Jane and Joe Public being what it is, we lost interest. I personally haven't gone out of my way for a Waco update for at least a year.

There's only one place to go for a Waco update; The Aging Rebel. I know nothing about the guy who runs that website, but I find it rings authentic. Here's where things stand almost three years after the event;

One thousand days after Reyna and other local authorities deliberately sought out to obstruct justice in Waco, there remain 45 unresolved civil cases with at least 148 individual complainants in various state and federal courts throughout Texas. There remain 27 unresolved asset forfeiture cases. There remain 171 unresolved criminal cases. Only in Waco in McLennan County in Texas could that be seen as something like justice.

Holy Moly! That's a long time to have these serious criminal charges hanging over their heads for those 171 defendants. Wonder how many jobs have been lost, marriages and families destroyed?

The ongoing cases will keep dozens of lawyers in new Cadillac Escalades for at least the next twenty years.


Only in America!

Middle East at the brink as Netanyahu indictment looms

The big question hanging over the ME is how far will Bibi go to slip the criminal indictment noose?

To Beirut?

To Damascus?

All the way to Tehran?

What a coincidence that just as multiple corruption investigations into the greatest leader since Moses are coming to a crescendo, Israel finds itself yet again in the grip of a dire existential threat. Everybody in Israel knows there's only one way forward, and that's behind a proven strong leader. Fortunately, Israel has just such a leader.

Netanyahu.

Yes, in this dark and perilous hour, the nation must rally round the only man who can be relied upon to stand up to the ayatollahs. This is no time for petty bickering over trumped up allegations of malfeasance.

Corruption corrshmuction... leave the man alone already!


Hey, the "create a timely existential crisis" gambit has worked for him umpteen times before... why shouldn't it work this time?

Full throttle into the abyss

There's a great essay on view at Counterpunch today by Steve Horn, who writes for the DeSmog Blog.

Steve has got his knickers in a twist over government collusion in the master plan to turn Appalachia into a "petrochemical hub." Looks to me like the entire project is predicated on more fracking and fracking deeper.

Fracking, just in case you don't know, is about injecting toxic chemical cocktails deep into the earth under extreme pressure to break up rock formations that harbour gas and oil that would otherwise be inaccessible.

Fracking critics correctly point out that our freshwater aquifers are down there somewhere, and that fracking threatens our potable water supply.

Which it does.

More fracking means a greater threat to the water supply.

So what's the problem? If some ballsy entrepreneur can get rich by poisoning your water supply for the next ten thousand years, that's just "the American way."

It's the free market at work, don't you know.

It is a searing indictment of our world view that we permit a handful of "free market" hustlers to put our clean water at risk in perpetuity. Horn's article spells out the revolving door phenomenon wherein today's public servants are tomorrow's fracking lobbyists, and "democratic process" is circumvented.


That's just wrong.

What is fascism?

That's a word that gets tossed about a fair bit, fascism.

But what does it mean?

Nobody seems to know. The old school guys want to direct you to Gramsci's prison notebooks, but I wouldn't recommend that... unless you're in prison too and have as much time to read them as Tony had to write them.

We've been hearing the word more often since the advent of the Trump era. A lot of folks who never gave the question of fascism any thought pre-Trump suddenly got woke and realized America was in the clutches of a fascist dictatorship.

Or almost.

Or something...

They're not wrong, but it's got little or nothing to do with white supremacist 45 sitting in the White House today. White supremacist 44 wasn't much different when measured by policy outcomes.

So what is fascism?

Not sure, but when the interests of FacebookTwitterGoogle align so perfectly with the interests of the war profiteers at BoeingLockheedMartin, and when the guy who owns the Washington Post does hundreds of millions in business with the CIA, maybe some of us aging radicals should lay off the ganja for a spell and try and make some sense of it all.


It's not looking good.

Remember The FBI?

I'm talking about the TV show here. Kinda followed it a bit in the sixties, before I got woke and switched the channel to "The Mod Squad."

Were those guys cool or what?

Nevertheless, The FBI is where the wholesome image of the FBI was fabricated, the image that the Trumpists stand accused of besmirching.

Seriously? Wasn't Hillary doing the same thing just a week before the election? The FBI is politicized today, was then, and in fact it was born politicised. Anybody remotely leftish at any point in the Bureau's existence would have died laughing if they witnessed the current controversy.

The FBI wasn't politicized? Get outta here!

J Edgar Hoover had his hands all over that TV series. He personally approved every actor who played an FBI agent. He and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. consulted on pretty much every episode. Hoover crafted a propaganda masterpiece! For one prime time hour every Sunday night, The FBI gave the FBI an hour of very compelling free advertising.

That show made the agency's reputation for integrity and ethical policing. Apparently there are still folks around who buy the bullshit.

If you're one of them, google FBI history and do some reading.

I assume that the people running the reputation chestnut up the flagpole are well educated and intelligent folks who already know the truth. The news business is in the news business though, not the truth business. They're sometimes reporting facts, but often they're creating the very facts they're reporting on. That pretty much explains the last 30 years of Donald Trump's career, and especially the last couple.

No, the infotainment-industrial complex, big papers, big news providers across all platforms, provide many essential services to the "deep state."

Telling it like it is ain't one of them.

TTC spokesperson Wanda Dunkelwasser explains why TTC no longer hires recent immigrants

Here is her explanation.

Yup, that's all too true and at the same time it's entirely fake news.

But often enough fake news turns out to be truer than true. Here's a very current story about the school-bus driver shortage in the Toronto area.

There is an obvious remedy to this driver shortage - pay the drivers a living wage already!

In Toronto, a unionized cement truck driver delivering concrete to a construction site makes about four times the hourly wage of a school bus driver.

Tells you something about our priorities as a society, doesn't it?

Knowing how things work in Justin's just society, nobody's gonna give the bus drivers a raise. Instead, the bus companies will produce a "labour market analysis" that shows Canada has a grievous shortage of qualified school-bus drivers, and voila, the floodgates will open to thousands of temp foreign workers who have driving experience.

Even if that driving experience consisted of driving twin oxen instead of a V-8.

Celebrating American Culture

Ya, I know...  WTF is "American culture?"

American culture is a lot of things. But generally speaking, when we talk about American culture, we tend to forget about these folks.

That's a video worth watching if you're interested in American culture. The Lake Lanier Poker Run is high culture in the deep South. I didn't see a black face till about the sixteen minute mark, and I think those guys were spectators, not boat pilots.

Didn't see a lot of fat chicks either.

What I saw a lot of is fat middle-aged white dudes and skinny young women and million dollar fast boats.

So what's wrong with that?

Nothing.

There may be a dearth of black faces in this celebration of excess, but let's get real; there's more to owning a million dollar boat than being born white. Otherwise every trailer park honky would have one. Speaking as a honky who is a lot closer to the trailer park than I am to a million dollar boat, I don't find this unreasonable.

Not that I have a problem with the boats. To a certain extent I understand the allure of a fast boat. I get twin 502's in a 32 foot Cigarette. I get four 400R Mercs hanging off the transom of a 40 foot Fountain...

But when I hear these guys talking about sixteen fifty Mercs I gotta admit I don't even know what they're talking about.

So watch that video and celebrate this obscure corner of American culture, where nubile young women flock to middle aged fat dudes and black folks serve drinks.

And remember, this is all for charity. They got 300 boats registered. From what I saw, the average boat was a million bucks and tow vehicles were $100,000 plus. Overall you're probably looking at close to half a billion in hardware in that video.

They're hoping to raise $400,000 for charity...


God bless America!

Phun with Phil

Here's a tip for dog lovers. Having a dog is great. Especially a dog like this.




Phil is just a joy. She loves the heated front seats in the Subaru. Of course she's not allowed anywhere near the front seats when the Farm Manager is riding with us, but when it's just me and the hounds, well, what the hell...

Why would you want to let a heated seat go to waste?

Having two dogs may or may not be even better. Around here we're fond of the two-dog model because when we have to step out, they've got one another for company. These were our two dogs BP, or "before Phil."



Here they are on the shore of Colpoys Bay awaiting the next stick toss.

But don't ever get sucked into having three dogs. Nosiree, three dogs is a dog pack. A dog pack is more than the sum of its parts. A pack develops a pack mind that can have a completely different personality than any of the dogs may have individually. That's why you read those sad stories about the little old lady who was ripped to shreds by her pack of schnauzers.

Individually, each of those dogs loved her.

As a pack, they woke up one day and their pack mentality told them she was the prey.

That's something we hope to avoid here at Falling Downs.