In defense of Viktor Orban

Orban is one of those European leaders regularly trotted out as an example of the racist "populist" wave threatening Europe.

Why?

Because he has closed Hungary's borders to the never-ending wave of migrants coming from Syria and Iraq.

Let's step back a bit and size up the big picture.

Why is there a never-ending wave of migrants walking to Europe from Syria and Iraq?

Do you think it might be because American foreign policy has rendered Syria and Iraq uninhabitable?

While it's true that Hungary offered some token support to America's wars on those countries, it is beyond obvious that this was never a Hungarian initiative.

So why should Hungary bear the cost of feeding and housing the refugees who are fleeing American foreign policy in the Middle East?

Alas, questions such as this are never asked in your "mainstream media."

It's enough just to know that Orban is a repugnant racist.

What the Phoenix fiasco tells us about the people running Canada

I've long held in check my suspicion that both Justin Trudeau and his number one rep on the world stage, Chrystia Freeland, are lightweight twits who are in way over their heads.

But the epidemic of ineptitude that has overtaken us goes far beyond Justin and Chrystia.

Check out this story at CBC about the Phoenix payroll scandal.

The sub-head says it all; it'll take five years and billions of dollars to sort out the shit-show that is the public service payroll system.

I'm sure that everyone involved in every step of this fiasco is very well educated and has a very impressive CV. They've all got multiple degrees from the finest universities in the land. After all, you don't get into the upper reaches of public service without those prerequisites.


And this is the best they can do?


We are well and truly screwed...

Why a 1988 thirty foot SeaRay is worth less than nothing

Because more than likely it's got gasoline twins.

It's summertime, and I'm boat-shopping again.

Got my eye on a twenty-five foot Doral, circa '92 or so, with a single 7.4 Merc.

She's a beauty. Original owner since '92. That in itself is a wonder...

But I gotta wonder about the resale value.

Truth be told, there isn't any.

There's absolutely nobody out there looking to buy a V8 powered inboard these days.

And it's not a mystery why...

At WOT this Doral with a single 7.4 Merc sucks up 28 gallons per hour. That translates into about six bucks per minute at full throttle.

On the other hand, she's only got 400 hours on her, since '92.

Maybe, just maybe...

Let's face it; billionaires just have too much money

Where I come from, a millionaire is somebody who is rich. I know that verity has been degraded by the fact that anybody who owns a house they bought in Vancouver or Toronto thirty years ago is now a millionaire.

Nevertheless, there's a case to be made against billionaires.

A billionaire is a millionaire who made a million a thousand times over.

The SCOTUS sanctified the political power of billionaires a few years back with the infamous "Citizens United" decision.

Yup, corporations are people too. You'll recall that created a bit of a flap when Mittens made that claim in the 2012 election campaign.

In reality, corporations are not in fact "people."

In reality, having billionaires and their shadow corporations fund super-PACs is not an exercise in democracy.

No, it's quite the opposite of that... it's the super-rich buying democracy.

That's a state of affairs that's working out quite well for the billionaires.

Just look around you.


But how is this state of affairs working out for you?

City planning

Have you ever noticed that the most livable neighborhoods in any city are those that were developed before the invention of the "urban planning" profession?

Take my old 'hood in Guelph, "The Ward."

By the time my clan got there in the '50s it was pretty much all immigrants. A smattering of Germans and Greeks and Ukrainians, but for the most part, Italian.

The quality of life was incomparable. Everybody walked everywhere. Everybody had a garden. Everybody who wanted to work had a job. In a lot of cases, if you lived in The Ward you could walk to your job at Fiberglass or Omark or Malleable Iron, or Woods or Harding Carpets.

You'd find 30 by 80 foot lots with a 900 square foot bungalow planted in the middle that still had room for dozens of tomato and pepper plants and grape vines galore. The gardens would take up the front yard, the side yard, and the back yard.

Anybody with enough get up and go to get up and go to work could afford one of those plots on a factory wage. There was absolutely zero "urban planning" involved in the evolution of that neighborhood.

Contrast that to the lifestyle that the children, grandchildren, and greatgrandchildren of those immigrants enjoy in Toronto today, a city that never tires of broadcasting the savvy of its urban planners, who have made downtown Toronto a wonderful example of a "livable city."

They've moved on to Toronto for better opportunities. Education, jobs, and so on. Once they've got the education and the job they stay for the "action."

After all, downtown TO is where the action is!

Indeed!

All the cool shit happens in Toronto!

You probably won't be able to afford 900 feet anymore; that's a million bucks easy in a downtown highrise. So settle for half that.

And of course, that magnificent garden your Noni had on that 30 by 80 foot lot in Guelph is out of the question. If you have the extravagant good fortune to own a balcony, you'll settle for maybe two each of peppers and tomato plants. Forget the grapes.

But you're where the action is!

You are but a mere walk or a very short transit ride from the ACC or Rogers Centre, where you can go to see the corporate Leafs or Jays play ball!

You've got dozens of chain restaurants to choose from; you know the ones... everything comes from head office flash frozen and your chef heats it up. At $150 for two, with wine and tip!

And you're just a jaunt from half a dozen corporate music and arts venues where you can, for a pretty penny, view the latest avante-garde artsy spectacle that the corporate media has been raving about!

What's not to love about life in downtown Toronto?

Well, for one thing, anybody who remembers the rhythms of an authentic neighborhood, like The Ward, for example, is going to find it sterile in the extreme. Corporate condo towers, corporate dining, corporate sports and entertainment...

For this you want to mortgage your life?

I think not.

But... it's too late to go home to The Ward.

The urban planners have done f@cked it good. There's condo towers galore in downtown Guelph now, and they've been seeping into The Ward for at least twenty years. The corporate developers have been marketing them to folks who commute to Toronto. After all, that half million dollar condo in Guelph would cost you a million and a half or more at the other end of that GO Train ride.

But if you follow the market real close, you might still get that 900 foot bungalow on a 30 by 80 lot. True, it might run you half a million... but it would be two or three or four millions in downtown Toronto.

Obviously, no factory hands are moving to The Ward today.


But our "urban planners" are doing a great job, aren't they?

The greatest show on earth

For my money, the greatest show on earth is the never-ending shit-show unfolding in DC. I can't even call it a reality show anymore; it's a surreality show.

Let's see if I've got this straight; the Grand Old Party has been taken over by a rogue, a silver-spoon twat who stands for nothing more than lowering taxes on the rich and boosting, endlessly, America's obscenely bloated military budget.

Yup, the rogue has yanked the tiller out of the hands of the "real Republicans," those dyed-in-the-wool patriots who stand for... lowering taxes on the rich and boosting, endlessly, America's obscenely bloated military budget.

But do not despair, dear American neighbours... the RESISTANCE LIVES!

Near as I can tell, all roads of resistance lead back to the Democratic Party...

You remember them - the party that stands for lowering taxes on the rich and boosting, endlessly, America's obscenely bloated military budget.


Am I missing something here?

John's barber shop

Apparently John Drimmie has opened up a barber shop in Owen Sound.

That's good to know, because I need a haircut something bad.

It was John's mom who clued me in to the barber shop. His mom and me go way back, even way further back than either of us care to remember.

John's mom married the sibling or maybe a cousin of one of my grade school pals, David Drimmie. The Drimmies had a turkey farm just outside of Elora at the time me and David were school pals, and they also owned a sawmill in town.

Me and Dave used to play in that sawmill after school.

Somewhere along the line the Drimmie sawmill became the Elora Inn. Ya, that fancy-pants Inn overlooking the Tooth of Time.

As a matter of fact, I proposed to my first wife right there at the Elora Inn after a fabulously over-priced dinner. I'd got one of the wait staff to bring out the engagement ring!

How romantic was that?

Alas, it was all downhill from there...

So today John Drimmie's mom tells me John has a barber shop in Owen Sound.

"And you know he has a degree in economics," she says.

Well, actually, I do. And not only that, I happen to know he did an internship on an organic farm for a spell.

So the organic farmer with a degree in economics has opened up a barber shop...


Hey John, I'll be there as soon as your Mamma gives me the address. I want it way short on the sides and maybe a little longer at the top.


See you soon.

Russiagate, Babygate, and media malfeasance

I see where Mafia Don has done a rather hasty climb-down from the "zero tolerance" nonsense on the illegal immigrant families.

Let's face it; the optics were beyond horrid. Suckling babes ripped from their mothers' breasts...

The horror!

Unlike most ugly shit that America does, this quickly became "an issue." And once something becomes "an issue" in American media, you know it's got legs. It rapidly becomes immune to anything resembling rational discourse.

Most people who go to jail don't get to take their kids with them, not in the USA and not anywhere else. Indeed, people who go to jail, as a matter of course, generally give up their children.

Hell, Trump could have taken a page out of the playbook of the most moral army in the world and just had the Border Patrol shoot the poor sods down before they even crossed the border.

Oddly enough, that revolting spectacle passed virtually without comment in American media.

But the big boys who decide what's news knew they had themselves a winner, a fresh new beatin' stick to bash Trump with. After all, the Russiagate business seems to have more or less run its course; it's the never-ending nothing-burger that even the most fervent Trump-haters have lost hope in.

After a year and a half plus of multiple investigations we can be pretty sure that some non-entities with possible links to certain possible Putin associates may have stolen the last US election by meeting with certain people with links to the Trump campaign, and before the delicate blossom of American democracy knew what hit it, had robbed Hillary of the White House with a few well-timed Facebook adverts...

Nah... Russiagate is well past its best-before date.

No, "the Resistance" needed a new angle, and for a couple of promising weeks it looked like Babygate might be it. Alas, Trumpenstein caught on, and that's all over now.

What next?

Here's a suggestion; I think if you take another look at the Trump Team's collusion with foreign powers, you might get a little more traction if you picked a different country, say Israel.

I hear Sheldon Adelson himself made a twenty million dollar tithe to the Trump campaign, and many other Trump associates, including members of the Trump family itself, were colluding with Israeli interests to throw the election to Trump!

They could call it Bibigate.

Now that would be something worth investigating!



Don't hold your breath.

How to smuggle guns into Toronto

I caught a bit of the CBC radio show "The Current" this morning. The host had Toronto Police Association Boss Mike McCormack and a couple of other guests on discussing one of the perennial favorite topics of the Toronto cognoscenti - the never-ending gun-violence crisis in the city.

Apparently gun incidents and gun deaths have been on a steady up-tick for the last five years...

Hmm...  since around 2013, then?

Oddly enough, that was the year the Toronto Star published their boffo how-to series The Gun Pipeline, a veritable primer on the ins and outs of smuggling guns into Canada from the US!

The think tank here at Falling Downs thought that the height of irresponsibility; why advertise to all the wannabe gansta's how easy the gun-smuggling gig is?

Looks like we were right again!

Family picnics and a note to Bibi

Drove down to Waterloo yesterday for the annual family picnic. They used to have it in Bellwood but the Waterloo contingent considered that too far a drive, so for the last few years it's been held at the Laurel Creek Park in Waterloo.

That shortens their drive down to about ten minutes, but adds another 45 to mine, and I was having the longest drive anyway, absent any outliers from Montreal or New Jersey.

But these family picnics are a get-together I hate to miss.

What's way cool is how the next couple of generations are faring out. The third generation offspring of a bunch of DPs who got off the boat with nothing in their pockets are generally busy with masters or doctorate studies. It's the classic immigrant tale; the first generation digs ditches, the second generation manages the ditch-diggers, and the third generation, the Ph. D. crowd, produces studies that prove ditch-diggers are no longer required.

And while those master's and Doctor Phil kids have my utmost respect, I have to say there were a couple of kids there who I give even more. Nephew Sam found himself some kind of college course where he get's qualified to be a fishing and hunting guide.

Say what?

You can go to college for that?

Apparently you can.

Sam's got a gig at a hunting lodge in the North West Territories for three months, then he's got a fishing guide gig lined up in Algonquin Park, and after that he's eyeing some opportunities in New Zealand.

And nephew Isaac just got his Red Seal as a truck and coach mechanic. Isaac went the apprentice route instead of signing up for gigantic student loans. No student loans and making fifty thou a year doesn't sound too bad to me.

Especially when you compare him to all those schmucks with MA degrees in English Lit trying to pay their rent, not to mention their student loans, by driving for Uber.

But the family picnic is a tradition that goes waaay back. I think it had it's origins in the late 50's when they'd all decamp to Sauble Beach for a day in the summer. Then we moved it to the Elora Gorge Park for a few years, and then it went to Bellwood, and every year you'd see the same folks being just the same but a year older.

After fifty or sixty years, you can imagine they look quite a bit older...

Me included.

So the family shindig was six hours of driving for a three hour visit with the extended family, and today I drove half way back to Waterloo to have breakfast with my old pal Kipling at the Teviotdale Truck Stop.

Kipling is a larger than life character, and for reasons of national security I can't really tell the whole story till he kicks the bucket, and since he's looking hale and hearty I imagine that'll be a few years yet. Suffice it to say he's made his living in the transport business most of his life.

Kipling's got a bee in his bonnet about self-driving vehicles. Seems Freightliner or somebody recently ran a driverless truck all the way from California to Detroit without an accident.

Great!

Kipling points out that about 20% of the workforce is engaged in transporting goods from point A to point B.

He further points out that once you disemploy that 20% of the working population, there'll be 20% less people able to buy the shit those trucks are carrying.

I guess the AI robots who are taking over the driver's seat and a lot of other jobs in what's left of our manufacturing sector are gonna have to pick up the slack.

Not sure how that'll work out.


While I'm out breakfasting with Kipling, the Farm Manager is on the horn with the Bubbinator, and somehow, in their weekly exchange on all matters political, they get on the topic of dehumanizing the "other" and how that leads to genocide.

Canada as a British Colony dehumanized the native Canadians.

Germany under Hitler dehumanized Jews.

Israel today is dehumanizing the Palestinians. That's why it's A-OK for Israeli snipers to shoot unarmed Gaza protesters in the back.

To my surprise, Bubby agreed with this line of reasoning.

I was surprised because, as long as I've known her, she's been a staunch supporter of Israel, no matter what. This is a departure.


Note to Bibi; when you're losing the Bubbies of the Diaspora, you'd best have a long think about where you're heading.

Counter Counterpunch

From time to time folks who generally find themselves in agreement with the opinions I promote on this blog ask me why I'm not on Counterpunch.

My stock answer is that since Counterpunch is where I steal most of my ideas, it would be redundant to be there.

Plus, they've never invited me.

So fuck Counterpunch.

But I've noticed that there's a wellspring of anti-Counterpunch discourse welling up from allegedly leftish points of view.

Hmm...

Maybe the Anti-Punchers have a point...

After all, just today I read a story there that was, at least sort-of, pro Jordan Peterson.

Not only that, but there were two or three writers who found something kind to say about Trump's Korean gambit.

What the fuck has come over that St. Clair twat? Why is he allowing this proto-fascist shit on his website?


I don't see the problem. As far as I can tell, Jordan Peterson is the Ann Landers of the 21st century.

And so far as Trump's Korea gambit goes, how is it unreasonable that condo-hustler Trump would rather build hotels in North Korea than nuke the place?

While I'm pretty sure that more condos on the beaches aren't the solution to anything, I'm 100% sure that's way better than nuclear war.

The fabulous joys of free speech in the comment section

Not too long after I sparked up this blog, back whenever that was, I got an email from Before It's News offering to "syndicate" this blog, whatever that means. Apparently that was going to help me "build my brand" or something.

Had a bit of back and forth with the person who sent that missive. Wanted to make sure they were comfortable with some of my way-out-there theories.

Like the theory that Jimmy Hoffa's final, or perhaps not-quite-final resting place was at a salami factory...

Buddy from Before it's News was happy to oblige. No worries, he said.

So this blog has showed up on their website ever since.

That was before they had a million stories on their website. They're over six million today.

Funny thing is, there's never more than a couple of thousand people viewing their website on any given day, but they've got a total of over a billion page views?..

That's amazing!

I long ago concluded that whoever runs the show at BIN is running a click-bait factory. Nevertheless, I've not made any effort to remove my blog from that site. And as a matter of fact, there must be real sentient people actually reading their site from time to time, because how else would you get a comment like this;

b4

typical bull shett from a leftist commie maggot–falling down..who is the brain dead one,falling down no doubt–oil is organic you fool–it comes right out of mother earth you idiot–there is untold trillions of gallons of it on the earth,a gift from mommy nature you moron–now if you burn it in a way that causes pollution,shame on you–one volcano produces more pollution than all of man made pollution so go figure you brain dead shett head–go crawl back under a rock you maggot

That's a reply to my Here's what happens when you make a pothead your Prime Minister post.

Hmm... alrighty then!

Hey, if you're gonna have free speech, it's gotta be free speech for everybody, no matter how retarded they are.

Carry on, b4!

Dotard and Rocket Man have Deep State in tizzy over fears that peace could break out in Korea

Sixty-five years after the end of hostilities on the Korean Peninsula, North and South Korea remain officially at war.

And that's a good thing. After all, those 25,000 US soldiers and sailors and airmen who call South Korea home soak up a goodly slice of America's bloated military budget. Take Korea out of the US military budget and there'd be a lot of hurtin' accounts receivable amongst your top shelf military provisioners.

And you know what that means, don't you? Job losses in the homeland!

North Korea has been an essential rationale for at least some of that insane military spending the warmongers rely on for their bread and truffles. Why is Trump in such a rush to reduce demand for the products of the Military-Industrial Complex when no other enemy is in sight to take its place?

Truth be told, all of Korea would have been way better off had the Yanks just packed up and left after their ill-fated attempt to conquer the Korean Peninsula ended in a draw in 1953. And if the American Empire was about peace and US security, that unfortunate war wouldn't have happened in the first place.

Then again, I could be wrong about that "no other enemy in sight" part.


Those 25,000 men and women in uniform who call Korea home could come in handy when we get serious about restoring democracy to Iran.

Pot-addled hillbilly beats mainstream media to NFL demise by years

Mark Kingswell had an op-ed in my Globe this morning about the demise of the NFL.

I couldn't agree more.

Obviously, the pot-addled hillbilly here at Falling Downs was all over this insight well before Kingswell, one of the top intellectual prognosticators in all the land.

In other insights from the Globe and Mail's op-ed page, I've got The Plagiarist bemoaning the barbarian storming the gates in Ontario's election, and Doug Saunders bemoaning the implosion of the democratic world at the G7 shindig in Quebec.


Here's what the pot-addled hillbilly prognosticator thinks, and you'd be well advised to pay attention, because I generally beat the mainstream experts to the nitty-gritty by a generous margin.

The NFL, the G7, and business-as-usual politics in Ontario are all well beyond their best-before dates.


Change is long over-due.

The avalanche riders

Every winter you hear a few sad stories about snowmobile riders being swept away by avalanches out in BC.

And they are sad stories, no doubt about it.

Sometimes totally innocent recreational snowmobilers  get caught up in an unexpected avalanche.


But more often than not, we're dealing with hard-core avalanche baiters. These are your adventurous types who will take up a wing suit after they get bored with their avalanche baiting adventures.

These are the welders and pipefitters and electricians who make $150,000 a year in Fort St. John or Fort Saskatchewan or Fort Mac, and they've got the credit rating to get the latest high-performance sleds from Polaris or Arctic Cat or Bombardier and then spend another thirty or forty thou to wring three or four hundred horses out of a thousand cc motor.

They go into the Kooteneys to provoke avalanches, not to avoid them.

As a matter of course you can usually outrun the avalanche you triggered, or at least use that power to stay on top of it.

But sometimes not.

That's when you see those sad headlines...


But you'll also see the bereft heading to the same slopes next weekend.

The Bubbinator does eighty-eight

I'm not talking miles per hour, although the Bubbinator did at least that on her forays into Toronto till we convinced her to give up her car not too long ago. I mean, she'd park, and she'd be four feet off the curb, and you'd say "good job" just because it wasn't six feet off the curb.

No, I'm talking about her birthday, number eighty-eight to be precise.

Bubby was one of those drivers who, when you're driving behind, it looks like there's no driver. Well of course it looks like that! She's eighty-whatever, and she wasn't that large to begin with and has been shrinking for decades - she could barely look over the window sill of her Camry!

Now she just gets other people to drive her. People like me.

But that's cool!

I'll be more than happy to drive you anywhere you need to go!


Happy Birthday!

Here's what happens when you make a pothead your Prime Minister

You find yourself desperately trying to follow his utterly tortuous logic, as for example in this interview with Dawna Friesen at Global News.

Don't just read it... read it twice! Or three or four times...

Does it make any sense? We have to triple our exports of dirty oil to meet our commitments to a clean environment?

Huh? Say what?... Read it again... still doesn't make sense?

I hear you.


Now try this; roll yourself a nice plump fattie.

Fire up that fattie...  draw deep. Really deep.

Hold it in as long as you can.

Repeat as required.


Yup, Trudeau's pipeline plans are starting to make sense, aren't they?

Julian is famous now

Met Junior in Guelph today for a lunch, because we haven't seen one another for months, and I miss him. Had burgers and fries at a new place called the "Bread Bar." Two guys have burgers and fries and one beer each, leave a half-decent tip, and that's seventy bucks?

Get the f@ck outta here!

Anyway, we're at a table on the patio, and out in the park just outside the plexiglass barrier, there's a dude sleeping under a tree.

So we get to talking about homeless folks in Guelph, and Junior brings up Julian.

Junior says "that guy on his iPad outside the restaurant is homeless too. He just hangs around and tries to talk to young kids every chance he gets. His name is Julian."

The guy outside the restaurant?

We'd sat on the concrete terrorist-barrier outside the restaurant for a few minutes, having a smoke before we went in, and I'd vaguely registered a barefoot woman (I assumed) nearby, tapping on a tablet. Long dress, long hair...

That was Julian.

Long story short, in short order I figured out that I'd first met Julian at the University of Guelph thirty-five years ago. We had mutual friends at the time. I remember him from then...


Yo, Julian, what up?

I'm thinking.

What you thinking about, Julian?

I'm thinking my feet stink.



That conversation took place in a stairwell at the UC at U of G. Julian was in the habit of going barefoot everywhere all the time.

Maybe that's why his feet stank.

Julian was a graduate of the University of Cairo, and when he realized that didn't cut the mustard in the real world, took to hanging around university campuses world-wide, which is how I came to meet him in Guelph 35 years ago.

So Junior tells me this homeless dude who I thought was a woman actually had a documentary film made about him. I couldn't believe it, but here you go.

Yup, apparently Julian spent ten years of his life building harpsichords while squatting in a train station in Zurich.


Homeless Julian is famous now.



But here's what I'd like to know; were his harpsichords any good?