K-W Surplus and my first set of wrenches

When I was fifteen years old I saw an ad in the paper, 50% off a set of combination wrenches at K-W Surplus in Kitchener.

I wasn't yet of driving age, so I thumbed my way up Highway 7 to the K-W Surplus store, and then thumbed my way back home with my prized wrench kit under my arm. If I remember correctly, that  kit had everything from a half inch to an inch-and-a-quarter in it. "Combination" meant you had a box wrench at one end and an open wrench at the other.

First thing I did when I got home was blast the entire kit with a stripe of orange spray paint, because I wanted to make sure my tools didn't get mixed in with my dad's tools or with the tools of the various buddies who would be borrowing them.

That worked out well.

Fifty years later, I still see the orange stripe on some of the wrenches in the tool kit my father keeps in his truck. And in the tool boxes of a few of the buddies who have survived from then to now. In spite of all that thievery, I've still got a few of those orange-stripe wrenches in my own kit!

K-W Surplus is still around too. In fact, they birthed a spin-off called "Deals." Good deals on all your home shop essentials. I still shop at their Owen Sound store from time to time.

I used to take immaculate care of the shit in my kit, cleaning and oiling those wrenches a couple of times a year. But eventually life took over. Wiping down your wrenches with an oilcloth wasn't that important once you had kids to feed.

Or legal bills to pay.

As my final retirement draws nigh, I find myself once again caring about those wrenches. That inch-and-a-quarter has a real good heft to it, and in the course of the last fifty years was probably more often used as a weapon than as a tool. Not that I cracked any skulls with it, but there was the odd time when just having it dangle menacingly from your hand could change the course of a conversation.


When you go to your reward, whatever it may be, you want to have a tidy tool kit at your side.

Trans athletes

There's a bit of a brouhaha brewing in Toronto  over the appearance of an allegedly trans-phobic writer, Meghan Murphy, making a speech at a city-owned public library. Even Toronto's blue-blood mayor John Tory has come out against letting a city-run facility facilitate "hate speech."

The nub of the hate speech allegations is Murphy's opinion that just because a man claims to be a woman, that doesn't make him one.

I'm inclined to concur.

Just take a look at what's happening in the world of women's sport.

Before we do, let's take a moment to consider there is generally no concern evinced anywhere about trans men participating in men's sport. There's a reason for that. Whether you blame God or Mother Nature or Darwin makes no difference; fact of the matter is that men are generally bigger and stronger than women.

That's why a mediocre male athlete can become an elite trans woman athlete, whereas an elite female athlete will never become more than a mediocre trans man athlete. That's also why, when the Canadian women's Olympic hockey team plays exhibition games, they like to play Jr. B boys teams. That's their level of competition.

When the people in charge declare that trans women are entitled to a level playing field in women's sport, they are ensuring that trans women will in short order dominate women's sport.


Doesn't look like a great leap forward for feminism from where I'm watching.

NBA conspiracy theory

I was thinking how wacked it is that the folks who own global media, a very small clique of billionaires, have the power to decide what news you'll get or not get.

Take this Thunberg phenomenon for example. When you get right down to it, the only thing newsworthy about this kid is that the media have made her newsworthy.

Or consider the Hong Kong protests, which have been given saturation coverage across all Western media, while far more deadly protests in numerous other countries are ignored. The people deciding what you're able to see don't do this randomly, they have an agenda.

Israel is in our pocket (or we theirs), so no need to talk about the violent protests at the Gaza fence.

Haiti is in our pocket, so no need to talk about weeks of nationwide rioting that has taken dozens of lives.

And did you know the Yellow Vesters in France haven't gone away, they've just disappeared from your news feed!

Meanwhile, Hong Kong gets the spotlight because it serves the interests of the ruling class to make trouble for China.

It seems to me there's been substantially less HK in the news the last week or so. It seemed to fall off just after Coach Dickhead down in Texas tweeted his pro-protester tweet.

That led to a bit of a kerfluffle between rival billionaire factions, some of whom are NBA owners and some who are anti-China (because if we didn't have enemies, why would we need a trillion dollar military budget, and if we didn't have that we'd go broke).

Looks to me like the money-grubbers won out over the patriots (those guys who send their minions to the annual shareholder meetings at all the big military contractors and also fund pro-war think-tanks and own media networks), at least for the time-being.

I suspect Adam Silver made a conference call to the various billionaires on all sides, and said something like this;

Look guys, some of you are being assholes about this. China is the goose that is gonna be laying our golden eggs going forward. Maybe even the next 50 years! The China market is gonna make you all trillionaires by then! Stop fucking around already!

We can always resume our support for the protesters after that.

God bless America!

Actually, I don't think Silver would say that last bit, but isn't it interesting that coverage of the HK riots has dropped off the charts?


Remember, you read it here first.

Top terror mastermind killed again!

Islamic State's top towelhead 'o terror is a gonner! The good news came directly from the lips of The Real Donald Trump, so obviously it must be true.

This is of course not the first time the good guys have killed Abu Bakr "Big Daddy" Baghdadi. Check out this accounting of his various deaths at International Business Times. That's from over two years ago and doesn't include his several assassinations since. This guy has more lives than Bin Laden!

So did they really actually get him this time?

Who knows? Maybe...

But consider this counter-narrative. It was a particularly hallucinatory week in US foreign policy. It began with Trump's announcement that he, in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief, was withdrawing American troops from Syria. This sent the entire US defence and foreign policy establishment into a collective shit-hemmorage.

What!? That's treason! Nobody, not even the President, pulls US troops out of a foreign country they were illegally occupying! This just IS NOT DONE!!!

By the end of the week, forces higher up the food chain than the Commander-in-Chief had over-ruled Trump. US troops weren't leaving Syria after all; they were merely re-locating within the country to "protect the oil," which like all oil globally, pines for the protective umbrella of Uncle Sam.

Having exposed Trump as an ineffectual puppet president and American foreign policy as a bankrupt farce, the folks behind the curtain needed some catchy headlines to take our eyes off this shit-show.


Voila, there we have it; US Special Ops kill top terrorist in daring mission!

Here we go again...

Bolivia just had an election, and the guy who won is not a favorite of Washington. Ergo, the election was obviously fraudulent.

Bolivia is another one of those countries where the US government-funded "Non-Governmental Agency" the National Endowment for Democracy has been generously building capacity and stuff, which boils down to funding any group of malcontents who promise to make trouble for the government the USA does not approve of.

The US immediately declared the election fraudulent, and was instantly backed up by the usual ass-kissers in the EU and its South American vassal states. No surprise there.

But it prompts this scoldy story by Evan Dyer at CBC; Canada not ready to condemn Bolivia's election. The tone suggests that Canada is being remiss in not puckering up in sync with the other toadies.

Don't worry, Evan; we'll surely pucker up soon enough. Give it 48 hours.

The new now

As I've mentioned before, the Farm Manager still has her day job with the Greywater Board of Ed.

That's the same school board whose top gun was busted in a plagiarism scandal a few years ago and who takes home the same pay as a Brigadier General in the Canadian Forces. Because school boards are on the front line when it comes to defending democracy, I suppose...

The school board has been ruthlessly cutting back on Education Assistants for years now, even while the local college was minting dozens of newly qualified contenders every year. Thanks to union seniority rules, the EA staff now consists of a whole lotta middle-age gals who are prone to the manifold ailments that come with the ageing process.

And now they have access to legal marijuana!

According to the FM, all the EAs talk about around the water cooler is how to grow pot, how to cure pot, and how to turn pot into soothing balms for whatever happens to ail you.


That's the new now.

Chrysler 300

I first met Kipling when he was bleeding all over the interior of a 1969 Chrysler 300. The guy who owned the Chrysler says to me, "he's bleeding all over my fucking upholstery!"

Me and Mr. Chrysler were standing on the side of what is now officially "Line 86," but was at the time known as the Elmira Road. Kipling was out giving a demo ride to a couple of guys who were interested in buying his Chevy II.

I'd almost bought it before Kipling bought it. It had been owned by one of the Leader boys. The Leader boys worked at a gas station on the corner of Silvercreek and Waterloo Avenue. I walked by it every day after school on my way to my job at John's Supertest.

On the lot they had a couple of cars for sale. A 66 Chevelle with a 327 for $1,500, and a 64 Chevy II with a 283 4bbl and four speed, for a thousand bucks.

I worked crazy hours at John's Supertest, and was salting away a bit of cash from my dollar an hour job. That Chevy II called my name every time I walked by. My sixteenth birthday was coming up, the day I would have a driver's licence... and a 64 Chevy II!

Unfortunately, somebody bought it out from under me before that happy birthday.

Kipling.

A few years later, I'm talking to Buddy beside the road that night. There's two other guys still in the Chevy II, either dead or comatose, and Mr. Chrysler doesn't seem that interested in pulling them out and having them bleed over what's left of his upholstery.

That test drive had gone awry. Kipling had downshifted and stood on the gas to pass that Chrysler 300. A rookie mistake.

The road was a little damp due to the first snowflakes of the season.

The Chevy II spun out, left the road, and hit a tree head-on right across the road from the Brubacher Sales Arena.

That was quite a deal in its time too, the Brubacher Sales Arena. Some sharpie from the States comes up, buys a farm just down the road, calls it a "Sales Arena," and before you know it, they're in the news for selling a dairy cow for a hundred thousand bucks!

But I digress.

Kipling fully recovered from his injuries, as did the comatose guys in the Chevy II. In fact, they recovered so well that they sued Kipling's ass nine ways from Sunday. He's still paying the price today.


I don't know if Mr. Chrysler ever got over his bloodied upholstery.

The seven dangers of blogging while stoned

1. You totally forgot you wrote a blog.

2. You vaguely remember you wrote one, but you can't remember what it was about.

3. After doing some internet research, you realize that you wrote about conspiracy theories and paranoia.

4. You'd be paranoid too if everybody was after you!

5. You realize that your biggest challenge, going forward, is growing more and better weed.

6. You remembered you wrote a blog, but you forgot that nobody reads it.

7. Last but not least, how realistic is it to imagine that we'll ever have an open and unabridged internet?


Ya, that's the kind of shit I'm thinking about after I've fired up the vaporizer. 

Blame the climate crisis

The other day me and the Farm Manager took a tour up to Lion's Head, an exquisitely pretty town half-way up the Bruce. We come this way often, and it's always been on the back burner, at the back of what's left of my mind, that this would make a sweet retirement destination.

Mind you, the locals might take a dim view of a neighbour who has four or five parts vehicles decorating his property and likes to pee off the porch.

We were out by the marina and we both remarked on how much beach debris, including random driftwood and lots of those softly rounded (by millions of years of wave action) white rocks that make up the shoreline, had been thrown onto the marina parking lot.

They'd obviously been walloped by a fairly nasty nor'easter.

While we're on our walkabout, I hear, "hey, is that place still for sale?"

The FM was pointing to a place across the harbour that we'd noticed when we were in Lion's Head last summer. A little waterfront cottage perched on the edge of the cliff. It was on offer in the low four hundreds, which seemed like a bargain. We figured it would be snapped up in days.

But here we are a few months later, and the place is still for sale! We decided to go for a closer look.

There was nobody around. The view is spectacular and the house is cute beyond belief, all cobblestone and hardwood. But...

Those nor'easters have been beating the hell out of the waterfront. The last storm took the shoreline within thirty feet of the house. Another nasty storm or two, and your wee cottage on Georgian Bay is gonna be in Georgian Bay.

Thing is, the shorelines of his neighbours don't seem to be impacted. That's because the neighbour to the east had a sturdy stone and concrete seawall, and the neighbour to the west had a very robust steel seawall. Unfortunately for them, the erosion will now wash away their properties behind their seawalls when future storms hit, as they inevitably will.

Once that damage is done, the cottages further down the waterfront will be at risk.

Somebody needs to take action here, and soon!


My question; is this the result of the climate crisis, or is this the consequence of multiple poor decisions made by property owners?

Here's a headline you couldn't have imagined 20 years ago

Because twenty years ago, this human rights case would have been inconceivable.


The problem with stories like this, and also with the bicycle racing story that broke today, is that they invite scorn and ridicule on trans people generally. A few individuals obsessed with self-promotion thereby complicate the lives of the vast majority of those who just want to be who they are and get on with their lives.

If the current approach persists, within a few years trans women will own every record in women's sport.


That triumph of human rights will also mark a triumph of idiocy.

How the Democrats can make America great again

How about a Bernie-Tulsi ticket?

The think tank here at Falling Downs likes the look of that. Between Bernie's small "s" socialism and Tulsi's anti-war stance, a change in the Oval Office could conceivably mean an actual change in how things work in America.

Any Clintonite or Clinton-lite Dem ticket practically gifts Trump the White House for the next four years. Remember, Trump got his first four because so many American voters are well past disgusted with the billionaire-owned media and political establishment.


Just imagine; those trillions wasted in wars that make the world hate America, could instead be invested in making America great again!

Four more years of Fluffy

Or maybe not... coalition governments have a tendency to die a premature death.

I'm guessing that having to coordinate policy with the NDP will put the brakes on Mr. Trudeau's authoritarian tendencies, which would be good for the country but won't sit well with Trudeau. He'll ditch that coalition the moment he thinks he can win a majority.

That would be a mistake. This campaign has elevated the profile of Scheer from non-entity to contender. In fact, he won the popular vote. A credible performance in the months ahead would boost his chances next time round. I'm sure Justin would rather share the power pie with Jag than see Scheer gorf down the whole thing.

Hopefully, we will now tone down our enthusiasm for regime change in Venezuela. Our "leadership" of the Lima Group is an embarrassment to Canada and a stain on her reputation.  Although a lot of Liberals share that view, the Trudeau-Freeland team has successfully throttled them. That won't be so easy now that Justin will have to keep at least one eye on his coalition partners, and that's where anti-Lima Group sentiment in parliament has been most frequently voiced.


If I were Jagmeet, I'd make shuffling Chrystia out of Foreign Affairs a precondition for any coalition agreement.

Thuggy's Guns

That's a gun store located in the back of an auto-body shop not too far from Jane and Finch.

When Mayor Tory pontificates on the topic of a handgun ban, putting Thuggy and his ilk out of business is what he's talking about.

Yup, Thuggy is just one of many gun purveyors selling handguns to teenage gangstas, no questions asked.

It's high time the City/Province/Ottawa put the thuggish and ethically challenged handgun retailers out of business....

Bring on the handgun ban!


The only problem in this scenario is that Thuggy's Guns is 100% fictional. There are no gun stores anywhere in the country selling any kind of guns, let alone handguns, with no questions asked. Not to middle aged businessmen, and certainly not to teen ganstas.

But promising a handgun ban is a vote-getter.

If you're looking for a hard dose of reality to squelch the squawking for more gun control, don't hold your breath.

Getting in front of Zelensky

There's a reason Ukrainian voters voted overwhelmingly for political neophyte Volodymyr Zelensky this year; they're sick of the status quo. They saw in Zelensky hope for both a winding down of the conflict in the east, and a long-promised clean-up of Ukraine's famously corrupt political culture.

According to a feature story by Sarah Lawrynuik in the Toronto Sunday Star today, six months in, the natives are once again getting restless. Now they're afraid Zelensky will "capitulate" to Putin.

Lawrynuik's sources include a couple of disgruntled ex-pats who were "forced" out of Crimea, a few "patriots" who volunteered to fight in Donbas, and a couple of people with very close ties to foreign NGOs that have been meddling in Ukraine since well before the US-sponsored "Revolution of Dignity." There's not a whiff of "balance" to be found in the story.

A glance at a map and a passing acquaintance with Russia-Ukraine history would suggest that Russia has far more legitimate interests in Ukraine than does the US. This point of view is of course not shared by Washington, which continues to shower "pro-democracy activists" in Ukraine with lavish funding from the National Endowment for Democracy.

Their motto; "supporting freedom around the world," needs to be a little more specific. What freedoms are they supporting? The freedom of grifters like Biden and Trump to meddle in Ukraine's affairs? Lawrynuik recycles the three-year-old story of the alleged Surkov emails, reassuring us they "were judged to be authentic by the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab."

Well duh! What else would we expect from NATO's propaganda arm?

"Military consultant" Glen Grant gets quoted a lot. He's a former UK army guy who's been making mischief in Eastern Europe on behalf of NATO for years. Last year he published an essay in the Western-sponsored Kyiv Post titled How Ukraine can build an army to beat Putin.

Those are the voices from Ukraine that the Toronto Star editorial board sees fit to represent to us what is happening in Ukraine. They're exclusively voices that want to push Zelensky towards further conflict with Russia.


That's not why 73% of Ukrainian voters made him their president. Western war-mongers need to shut up, butt out, and let him do his job.

RIP Sonny

Sonny wasn't a close personal friend. He was barely an acquaintance. But he was one hell of an interesting guy.

Sometimes life affords you the opportunity to make connections with people with whom you don't have much in common. Sonny was one of those.

Sonny was an Argentinian with impeccable political connections in the country. Back in the "dirty war" era his name came up on a People's Revolutionary Army hit list. As a dyed-in-the-wool pacifist, I'm not for hit lists, but I have to admit that my sympathies were more with the ERP than with the folks on their list.

I first met Sonny in the '80s. In addition to being a card-carrying member of Argentina's landed aristocracy, he was also a dedicated public servant, and it was in that capacity that he made occasional visits to Canada, where it turned out we had mutual friends.

He was a bit of an eccentric. Back home on his latifundia, he wore a revolver on his belt and drove a '20's era Model T Ford that his father had bought new. When that car came up for sale a few years ago I briefly toyed with the idea of flying down to Argentina and driving the car back to Canada.

On sober second thought, after outlining my possible homeward bound routes on a map, I reluctantly came to the conclusion that there were far too many places along the way where the locals would be happy enough to shoot the gringo in the head and steal the car.

That was the end of that.

One thing we had in common was a robust contempt for political correctitude. Sonny was exceptionally well-travelled (at the expense of his perpetually bankrupt state), and his vacation pictures always included scantily clad young women frolicking in the fore-ground of his touristy holiday pics. When questioned on this happy coincidence, Sonny would reply, "What? You thought I was a homo?"

I hadn't seen Sonny for a few years, and I knew he was crowding 90, when I recently bumped into one of our mutual acquaintances.

"How's Sonny doing these days?"

"He's dead."

"Oh shit! I was looking forward to having a pint with him..."

"Not anytime soon, I hope," came the reply.


Me too.


RIP, Sonny.

A tip of the cap to CanadaLand

Back in September I had a bit of a rant when the Globe and Mail provided me with a special Kielburger section to the paper, without mentioning it was paid advertising. (Paid in one way or another.)

I wrote an indignant letter to the ed, and another one to the public editor, fully apprising them of my indignation. These efforts went nowhere.

I couldn't believe that I'm the only one who smells fish in the Kielburger creation myth, and so I googled "Kielburger critics."

Low and behold, these guys came up.

That's the first I ever heard of CanadaLand, which tells you something about how dialled in I am on what's happening in resistance culture. They were ranting about the Globe's Kielburger collaborations years before I even noticed them!



Anyway, I think I'll let them carry the ball. I can't afford to get sued.

The American Empire is crumbling before our eyes

There's a reason the billionaire-owned "free press" works so hard to denigrate so-called alternative news sites.

Take a look at this analysis of current events in Syria from Moon of Alabama. I find that far more informative than the stuff I've been reading at The Guardian, CNN, Fox, and the rest of the reputable sources.

No, all the reputable sources seem to be aligned with the view of the Deep State wings of both the Democratic and Republican parties; that pulling US troops out of a country they were illegally occupying is a grave affront to American values.

Unfortunately, the view that America has an inalienable right to wreck other countries, whether by bombs or economic warfare, has become an inherent American value. There is a rising tide of outrage in the political establishment, duly fanned by the billionaire-owned news industry, aimed at what is portrayed as Trump's capitulation to Putin.

Ending wars is not good news for those who profit from them. You can understand why they're pissed off.

That's what America has become; the plaything of billionaires who have bought the political and media infrastructure, and who can force through policies that reflect their own priorities, while running roughshod over the interests of 99% of the population.

Point is, America is retreating because the policies that put them in Syria, and in Iraq and Afghanistan, have failed. Think that through. These policies have been failing for some time. America simply doesn't have the ability to follow through on all the imperialist adventures dreamed up by the Washington establishment.

US foreign policy has limped from failure to failure for the past fifty years. That foreign policy has been largely in the hands of the same crowd who have profited mightily from making America the world's number one weapons peddler.

Eventually, saner people will have to prevail, if this is not to end very badly for all of us. About the only place in the American political spectrum where I see any sign of sanity is on the left flank of the Democrats. You've got at least half a dozen people there who are not afraid to use the word "socialism" in public. That's not a development I ever expected to see in my lifetime.

Maybe we'll see other things we never expected to see, like foreign military bases closed, foreign entanglements (like telling other countries who their next leader will be) disavowed, universal health care, a living minimum wage, affordable housing for all...


Hey, America just might become great again!

Swiss Chalet goes full sports bar

I've been a regular at Swiss Chalet since my kids were little. Reliable, predictable, never great but always good, you knew what you were getting when you made a date at Swiss Chalet.

Almost as good as Red Lobster.

So we didn't have any reservations about taking Bubby to Swiss Chalet for Thanksgiving dinner. They've even got a "Thanksgiving Special!"

Little did we realize that Swiss Chalet has had a makeover. There's a big-screen TV in every corner, just like every sports bar in town.

The new booths have way too much distance between the bum level and the chin level. The ever-shrinking 89 year old Bubbinator found that the top of her water glass was actually over her head. She had to reach up for her water.

My 89 year old mother-in-law suggested to the staff they needed to provide booster seats for the elderly.

And what's up with the canned music? Is the management team trying to capture a new demographic? When we were having Thanksgiving dinner and the after-church crowd was just streaming in, the sound system was pumping out Run DMC and Aerosmith's Walk This Way.

Really?

In Owen Sound for Thanksgiving dinner?

They've also tampered with the menu items. One of the fixtures of a Swiss Chalet dining experience, at least for the forty years I've been a customer, is you get a decent Cesar at a decent price.

The Cesar is still a decent price, but the glass is thinner and taller, and get this; instead of getting a celery stalk in your drink, you get a pickle instead.

What the fuck is that about?

I want a piece of celery in my Cesar, not a pickle spear lying on top of it!


But that's progress, I guess.

Pot addled hillbilly predicted legal cannabis industry collapse a year ago

That's when the mainstream folks, especially the pot-addled twats at the Globe and Mail, were still in full pump mode on the Great Canadian Legal Weed Pump and Dump Scam.

Now the mainstream folks are predicting "a bad trip for the legal pot industry."

Told ya so!!!... over a year ago!


Up in smoke indeed!

Justin Trudeau's bulletproof PR stunt

We've been warned for months that unspecified entities are looking to disrupt our democracy.

Could be Putinist trolls sowing doubt about the democratic process...

Could be Putinist trolls riling up your deplorables to commit whatever deplorable things those people have up their sleeves.

Could be Putinist trolls turning French against English, Indians against settlers, vegans against carnivores, gay against straight. When diversity is your strength, you unfortunately give the enemy (Putin and his massed troll armies) many more loose threads with which to pull apart the very fabric of our democracy!

So after being repeatedly warned by many experts across all media, no one can feign surprise that it's finally happened; Trudeau now campaigning in bulletproof vest.

That's right! Not only that, but "uniformed tactical officers wearing heavy backpacks surrounded Trudeau as he addressed the crowd."

Oh my! Right here in Canada!


 

Wait a minute... do those guys with the heavy backpacks look like an RCMP tactical squad? Or do they look like a central casting version of same? What do you suppose could be in those heavy backpacks? Their heavy weapons?

When the bullets start to fly, they're gonna take off their backpacks, fish out and assemble their weapons, and return fire?

Does Justin look worried?



I smell PR stunt!

Before It's News: clickbait or bastion of free speech?

Blogger is by far the biggest platform of its kind. I've been on it for eight years.

A few months after I fired up The View From Falling Downs, I got an email from someone at Before It's News asking if they could "syndicate" my blog. I'd never heard of them. It looked to me like they "syndicated" damn near anything they could get their hands on, from corporate press releases to weather reports. Their business model, as far as I can tell, involves generating internet traffic to sell advertising. A lot of the stuff you'll read there seems aimed at people who truly believe God anointed  Donald Trump to make America great again.

Needless to say, it's not a place where you'd expect to find a particularly sympathetic audience for my shit.

As my web traffic has been increasingly throttled by Google algorithms, I thought I'd take a look and see if anyone is reading my pithy insights at Before It's News. I tallied up the total views for everything I wrote in September. Twenty-six posts on Blogger garnered a total of 312 views.

Only twenty-three of those made it onto Before It's News. Maybe they've got algos too? But those twenty three posts got 1,837 views.

Twelve views per post on the biggest blogging platform in the world.

Eighty views per post on a fringe website.


That's the power of the algorithm!

Best conspiracy theory of the day

Everybody knows Trump was early in with the World Wrestling Federation, which morphed into the WWE. The name may have changed a little but their staple remains the same; scripted wrestling dramas with fake heroes and fake villians.

Fakery abounds!

So here's the scoop. When Donald Trump (aka Mafia Don, Donny J, Trumpenstein, etc...) moved into the White House, he moved a whole lotta former WWE script-writers into the basement.

No shit!

It's obviously true.


Pretty much every headline you see proves it.

Media malfeasance

Within forty-eight hours of Nancy Pelosi announcing the Trump impeachment initiative, the brain trust that runs Canada's national newspaper of record weighed in on the matter with utter certainty; Trump was guilty of treason.

There's a belief among Globe and Mail "thought leaders" that they can't be seen as deviating too far from whatever the NYT/WaPo/WSJ consensus might be.

If they would stick to reporting actual news, that editorial would not have happened. Ukraine-US history didn't begin with Trump's phone-call to Zelensky. It didn't even begin with the US sponsored 2014 Maidan coup.

Nor did political corruption in the Oval Office begin with that call. As near as I can tell, even when you put the worst possible spin on Trump's "arm-twisting," it's nothing more than a business-as-usual moment in American history.

Trump may be a serial liar, but he's not the first American president to tell a lie, or lots of them.

Trump may be using the office to enrich himself, but that's a time-honoured American tradition. A number of US presidents of the past were born in poverty. None of them died in poverty.

What was the Clinton Foundation other than a massive pay-to-play scheme?

If our "free press" were even remotely free, they'd be giving us the whole story.

Instead, they relentlessly pursue an obviously partisan agenda that bears little or no resemblance to lived reality.

Ultimately, this is not about Trump. The same media that today denigrates Trump at every turn, never missed a chance to kiss his ass in the twenty-five years before he entered politics. How else did Trump become a "celebrity?"


What's really threatening America's elite isn't having a serial liar in the White House. It's having a self-proclaimed "socialist" knocking on the door.

Ellen DeGeneres and her pure Christian heart

You have to hand it to Ellen; she's done more than most Christians to visibly activate the "love your enemies" dictat found in the Bible.

There she was last week, yucking it up with Dubya, the President who worked tirelessly to deny gay marriage, not to mention having started the odd illegal war here and there.

The liberal icon obviously has a bottomless well of forgiveness!

At some level, it's discouraging to see how she has been corralled into the Bush Brand Rehabilitation Initiative.

It's just a matter of time before she reconnects with this old friend.

Canada prepares for a red-orange-green coalition government

It'll be a minority government one way or the other. A Scheer-Bernier coalition is not inconceivable either.

My gut feeling is that Trudeau stays, thanks to a coalition with either the NDP or Greens or both. That would hopefully pull him back a bit from Uncle Sam's embrace, but perhaps that's wishful thinking.

One of the most shameful episodes of the past four years was Canada's brazen toadying to American regime-change ambitions vis-a-vis Venezuela, when we took on the "leadership" of the Lima Group. That was our PM and his Foreign Minister prostituting Canada's good brand to run cover for a bunch of US vassal states that have egregious human-rights challenges within their own borders.


Why is this not an election issue? After all, we were interfering in the politics of a sovereign state in the most outrageous way possible!

But we're supposed to be afraid of Russian trolls?

Cinderella's carriage

Took in the car show over at Pumpkinfest in Port Elgin on Saturday. It offers substantially more bang for the buck than the Cobble Beach extravaganza that happens two or three weeks earlier. That's because Port Elgin charges zero admission, whereas Cobble is $45 per, if I remember correctly.

Port Elgin is a little more grass-roots. Pretty much everything there drove to Port Elgin under its own power, which isn't a claim most of the field at Cobble Beach can make.

Port Elgin is where you'll find a late-sixties muscle car that the loving owner spent ten years and all his disposable income restoring.

Cobble Beach is where you'll find the rarest of rarities that the doting owner dropped off at a high end resto shop and dropped several hundred thousand dollars on its restoration.

They are both well worth-while.

There was some very cool stuff on view. How about a '69 SS 427 Yenko Chevelle?

Saw a '67 Impala SS identical to one I owned; 327 Powerglide, but in blue instead of the beigey-brown of mine.

There was a Rebel Machine in red. First one I'd seen although I'd read there was some built that weren't the red white and blue of the Machine I owned.

Perhaps my favourite was a '69 Coronet R/T, plain white, black interior, buckets, four-speed, dog-dish hubcaps... that transported me straight back to my late teens. A beautiful car!

Big turnout of Corvettes this year, especially the latest ones, which isn't very interesting because you can see those anytime you want in the showroom of your local Chevy dealer.

There were a number of older Vettes as well, all the way back to the fifties. One that caught my eye was a '62 that looked like it was in barn-find condition, cracked fibreglass and all. I remember seeing one just like it back in the early sixties at Pinehurst Conservation Area down near what is now Cambridge.

At the time, my dad worked at Omark, and they had their annual factory picnic out at Pinehurst. Are factory picnics still a thing?

Anyway, I was impressed with the cool cars some of Dad's coworkers could afford, including a very pretty little '62 Corvette Convertible. It made such an impression on me that I recall it to this day.

In hindsight, it's amazing that factory parking lots used to sport all sorts of the high-end muscle cars. Working-class guys were 99% of the market for those cars.


But times changed. Insurance and pollution regs pretty much put the kibosh on the muscle car genre. Then NAFTA came along. Twenty dollar an hour factory jobs in Ohio or Michigan or right here in Ontario became two dollar an hour jobs in Mexico.

Factory parking lots in my home town aren't that big anymore, because much of the workforce takes the bus. What cars remain in the parking lot are more likely to be fifteen year old Hyundais rather than late model Corvettes.


Thank goodness for progress!

The limitarians are coming

Limitarianism is a thing. I read about it just this past week.

Limitarians are people who espouse a "maximum wage." We're open to the idea of a minimum wage; why not have a maximum wage to cap the other end of the spectrum?

Why not indeed?

Doctors are arguably the most respected profession, and we should compensate them accordingly.  Doctors have to be really smart and work very hard to be doctors. When the local health authority was advertising for doctors in the past year, they were offering salaries in the range of 250 to 350 thousand dollars a year. That's roughly twenty to thirty thousand a month.

That seems close enough to reasonable that I won't quibble with it. But why does anyone need to make more than that?

That's the limitarian line, and they propose to tax the hell out of any income above that or some other arbitrary threshold.

I'm OK with that.

There'll be plenty of hysterical counter-arguments, to be sure.

"What about professional athletes? Their careers most often only last a few years."

Huh? We've been telling the kids for years now that they should expect to have five or more different "careers" in their career... but athletes are exempt?

I think not!

There'll also be a lot of caterwauling about how this stymies entrepreneurial types. You know, those small business owners who are allegedly the backbone of the economy.

At least 95% of small business owners only dream of making thirty thousand a month, so an upper limit in that range is more or less meaningless to them.

If we had a $15/ hour minimum wage and a thirty thousand a month max, we'd have a factor of twelve between the top rung and the bottom. That's enough of a differentiation that folks would still be motivated to get a good education, work hard, etc., but not enough to allow the proliferation of an uber-rich class with so much spare cash they can afford to buy our political system.


And that would be a good thing.

Hong Kong; only place on earth where masked Molotov-tossers are "peaceful protesters"

The brazen media hypocrisy around the riots in HK is a wonder to behold.

Much is made of "police violence." In fact, the police reaction to the so-called protesters deserves praise for its restraint. It's certainly the very model of restraint when compared to the brutal repression of protest seen in places like France, Israel, or Haiti.

Our media are virtually silent on the deadly use of force by authorities in France, Israel, and Haiti, whereas we are treated to endless twaddle about the HK authorities' "brutality," which, unlike those others, has yet to cost a life.

Why do the HK protests get endless promotion in our media while the far more deadly protests in France, Israel, and Haiti are ignored?

Because the governments of France, Israel, and Haiti are American allies, whereas China is America's rival.


Isn't that how our "free press" has always worked?

The one that got away

From time to time the half dozen or so regulars to this blog have heard me whine about how I'm being sandbagged by algorithms.

I'm not exactly sure how those things work, but it's obvious that they do. Too much crazy talk dissing US Exceptionalism seems to get the attention of these creatures.

What I find curious is that one particular post from a few years ago has by far outstripped any other of the five thousand plus posts that I have, to my dismay, birthed from Falling Downs. This particular post has over 15,000 looks, about ten times as many as the nearest runner up. If that was a book it would be a best-seller!

But why?

Reading it again four years later, I find it more or less stands the test of time. Name-dropping Heiner Muller into it was perhaps a little dilettantish, but overall it's a good solid piece of political commentary.


Here's the mystery; I've got hundreds of posts that are as good or better, that never got 150 views, never mind 15,000. Somehow this one slipped past the gate-keepers.

Clara gets her first checkered flag!

At age three!

Clara made her racing debut at the Tuff Truck shindig down Harriston way last weekend. She was competing in the Toddler Division, where the wee ones raced their little electric cars through a challenging off-road course.

Unbeknownst to Clara, her dear daddy and her grampa had swapped in a big old tractor battery in place of the original equipment on her mini-Jeep.

That little hot-rod, with 1,000 cranking amps, was throwing up thirty-foot rooster-tails from all four corners when Clara was going through the mud-bog!


Congratulations, Clara!

Where to shit when you're homeless

There's a lot of focus on the shitting habits of homeless folks these days. Check out here and here.

That's about San Francisco. There's some really good reasons why the homeless are homeless in San Fran. Sure, mental illness and addiction take their toll, but what about that winner-take-all hyper-capitalist culture that causes so much of the stress that causes the addiction and the mental illness in the first place?

So here's a thought. Instead of shitting in the streets, why don't the homeless pitch their tents and void their bowels on the lawns of the tech millionaires and billionaires?

Same goes in other parts of the country. Anybody homeless in the Northeast should head for Connecticut, and the miles of verdant lawns surrounding the estates of all those top-drawer hedgies domiciled there.

If you're homeless a little further south on the eastern seaboard, setting up camp and a field toilet at a Trump golf resort would be a great idea!


Not only would taking a crap on a fairway at Bedminster be far more aesthetically rewarding than taking a dump in the street, shitting in THEIR back yard would allow the plutocrats to become better acquainted with the fruits of their labour.