Armageddon cometh!

Ever since Trump had that tariff brain fart last November, Canadian media have been agog at the horrors about to befall us. The sky is about to fall. Brace yourself. Don’t mean to gloat, but I believe I’ve more than once reminded you of the famous adage from the famous war criminal Henry Kissinger; “To be America’s enemy is dangerous; to be America’s friend is fatal.” Since that November cheeseburger and diet Coke binge, Trump has massively disrupted Canadian politics. PM Fluffy resigned. Doug Ford called an election. Looks like the folks who cling to the fantasy of the world’s longest undefended border and all those values we share with Uncle Sam are in for a rude awakening. We’ve already agreed to guard the undefended border to keep fentanyl and illegal migrants out of America. Virtually zero of those threats to US national security come over the northern border, by the way. Defending US borders is a US responsibility, not ours. We don’t even defend our own, so what does Trump expect from us? This must be a stressful time for all those American Empire Loyalists who populate Canadian media and politics. Let me explain it to you. The American Empire is an empire in decline. It is desperately flailing about looking for a strategy to extend its hegemony. The last stage in the collapse of any empire is heralded by the looting of its vassal states. And here we are. Probably a little late to find alternative markets for the 80% of our exports that go to the US. There was a strategy at one time to build up our trade with China, but after Obama pivoted away from China, we did too. That’s just what you do when you’re a vassal. My hunch is that after three or four months of pressure, Canadians will begin to see the wisdom of becoming the 51st state. We haven’t really functioned as a sovereign state at least since the book “Galt, USA” came out in ‘72. I can’t imagine we’re going to start now.

Quitting NATO

NATO is at least 35 years past its best-before date, and stinks accordingly. There was only one reason to keep it operational after the Soviet Union collapsed, but that reason tells you everything you need to know about the threat to global security it has become. NATO is a giant cash cow that has a multitude of contractors, consultants, lobbyists, PR shops, advertisers, an entire “defence” industry, and myriad “think tanks” and politicians sucking it dry. That’s why NATO leadership is adamant that the members of this special club of Uncle Sam’s arse-lickers pony up 5% of their GDP going forward, a 150% jump from the previous annual dues to be members of Uncle Sam’s Club. And don’t get me started with the bullshit about we’re the world of freedom and human rights and democracy, and our values are the light of morality that light the path for the like-minded world, and we’re up against the forces of darkness. That’s mainly Russia and China and Iran, plus any other country that imagines it can defy the dictats of the Big Dog. For Canada, 5% means a quadrupling of our military budget. We’re toying with hundreds of billions of dollars wasted on 20th century war technology in the age of drones and hypersonic missiles. All so we can “stand with out allies.” Look around at the quality of life in your community. Do you pass homeless encampments on your way to work? Do you have a family doctor? Can you afford to send your kids to college? Our education system is broken. Our health care system is broken. Social cohesion is fraying rapidly. We simply cannot afford to waste resources on delusional fantasies that we’re somehow special because we put the American Empire ahead of the well-being of Canadians. President Trump, the de facto leader of NATO, with his recent rants about Canada, has ignited a wave of nationalist sentiment in this country. Our political elite are obsessed with appeasing America. That’s not putting Canadians first. Let’s break away from Uncle Sam’s Club, and become a sovereign nation. If not now, when?

Gaza, as seen through the eyes of Donald Trump

Back in the day, before Trump got famous and flabby, he used to be a real estate developer of some repute. The fame put an end to that. Donny J got so famous that he could just rent out his name to some other developer, and take a slice of the pie without ever developing anything himself! That’s why there were Trump Towers all over the place that Trump never had a dime in. Fast forward thirty-five years, and Donald Trump is, just as Oprah predicted in 1988, President of the USA. That’s an interesting video. Trump was totally dialed in to making allies pay up even then. Now that he’s the Big Dog, he wants to make bank on that NATO protection racket. Turn over 5% percent of your GDP or something bad could happen to that nice country you got there. This is the guy who all the top billionaires have rallied behind, because he’s just the champion of the working shmuck they’ve been waiting for. They loved the Mickey D schtick, and peed their pants over the garbage truck stunt. So today, as Mafia Don is winging his way towards the ME aboard Air Force One, to visit Egypt and Jordan and, of course, the Holy Land, they do a fly-over of Gaza. Trump is truly impressed! The place is a complete demolition zone! Trump sees the opportunity immediately! Yup, this place could be the next Luxembourg or Monaco! Perfect climate, miles of Mediterranean shorefront; everything the super-rich could want in a warm-weather destination, because who wants to hang in Zermatt or Telluride year round? And he’s got a plan for the pesky natives; send them to Egypt and Jordan! That’ll free up Gaza’s sea-front for a whole whack of casino-resorts! Truly the highest and best use for this glorious real estate! Tomorrow is Holocaust Remembrance Day. Eighty years after the Holocaust, we will solemnly intone ‘NEVER AGAIN’ while completely ignoring the Holocaust of our time.

If you've ever heard of the G7 RRM, raise your hand

Don’t see any hands… kinda what I expected. To be frank, I had no idea what it was either. Maybe a new iteration of the venerable Mercedes G-Wagen? Alas, it’s no such thing. As I discovered while absently rooting around on the Global Affairs Canada website, the G7 RRM stands for the Rapid Response Mechanism of the G7 nations, ie the “Nations of Virtue.” Yup, the Nations of Virtue have put together a Rapid Response team to combat threats to freedom, democracy, and human rights posed by our authoritarian adversaries. Now you’d think that might involve some crack military units fully equipped to rapidly respond to actual physical threats to the Nations of Virtue. You’d be sadly mistaken. No, it appears to be a mostly theoretical amalgam of entities poised to combat “Russian disinformation.” We, the G7, do not have any crack military units to combat Putin’s threats to freedom and democracy. What we have is an ad-hoc conglomeration of lap-top warriors fully primed to respond to Russian disinformation! Russian disinformation is not to be taken lightly, and our RRM agents obviously take their mission seriously. So seriously that they volunteered to work from home during that Putin-inspired “Freedom Convoy” that subjected downtown Ottawa to a horn-tootin’ terrorist attack back in early ‘22. Russian disinformation is everywhere. In spite of all the Western experts from our government-funded NGOs saying otherwise, Russian propaganda still wants you to believe Ukraine is losing the war! Don’t they follow the Institute for the Study of War? Oh sorry… the ISW folks seem to have succumbed to Russian disinformation themselves of late. But not to worry; truth will out! Just the other week no less an expert than Lloyd Austin declared that Ukraine’s destruction is the greatest military success story of our time! If nothing else, that marks Austin as a senior leader on the G7 Rapid Response Mechanism team. Personally, I am of two minds on this “disinformation” brouhaha. Yes, I can see where our adversaries could be trying to poison our well of info on what’s going on in the world. On the other hand, it seems to me that the G7 crowd is bullshitting us way more than that so-called “Russian disinformation.” In reality, Ukraine has lost the war its NATO allies pushed it into. In reality, Putin has not only de-militarized Ukraine; he has demilitarized NATO. Russia continues to produce more weapons and ammo than all NATO combined, and that’s after three years of being sanctioned up the wazoo by the combined West. In reality, it’s way past time to give up our exceptionalist fantasies and learn to live in the real world.

American tech leadership is in DeepShit

Just three days ago I watched the billionaire president and three of his billionaire sidekicks razzle-dazzle the rubes with the announcement of “Stargate,” an ambitious plan to invest $500 billions into artificial intelligence, securing US tech leadership well into the future. This was perhaps the capstone of Trumps grand strategy to make America great again. The triumphalism on display was contagious! Yes, it’s morning in America again, and with wokery in retreat, our billionaires are dreaming bigger than ever! The stars and stripes will be planted on Mars in no time! The entire universe will be in awe! I had never heard of DeepSeek, and unless you’re a hard-core tech nerd, you probably hadn’t either. Three days later, DeepSeek is all over the internet. On the same day Don and Larry were promising individualized AI-engineered cancer vaccines, a little start-up in China unveiled an AI platform that outperforms the latest offerings from Open AI. At roughly 3% of the cost! And that’s after ten years of US using every trick in the book, from sanctions to arresting Chinese tech executives, to hobble China’s tech sector. China has pulled ahead in spite of our best efforts. That’s what happens when you have too many scientists searching for new genders and not enough doing science.

2025: does Germany survive?

I was born in Germany, and once held a passport from the Federal Republic. But I’m a Canadian now. As such, I have nothing invested in the survival of Germany. As rotten and incompetent as our political superstructure is in Canada, we ain’t got nuthin’ on the Square-heads. How an intellectual dwarf like Scholz ever became the top dog in what was once a proud nation is a mystery well beyond my pay grade. How the Fairy Princess Annalena Baerbock became Foreign Minister is an even greater puzzle. The Foreign Minister pledges to support Ukraine regardless of what the German voter wants! That’s the kinda democracy you wanna die for, ain’t it?

God smites Gulf Coast

They say the Lord works in mysterious ways, but I reckon there’s nothing mysterious about the worst snowstorm in 100 years descending on the Gulf Coast within hours of Trump rebranding the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. Coincidence? You tell me… but I’d say it’s more likely the Almighty is mightily pissed. After all, the Mexicans are a deeply Christian people. In fact, they are so pious that even the cartel bosses have patron saints! In America, on the other hand, mocking God has become a national sport. While Donny J was never a noticeably religious man, he came around when that would-be assassin’s bullet grazed his ear. Donald, the Lord is watching you, so don’t get too big for your britches. Pride goeth before the fall. Stay humble! We’re just glad you didn’t rebrand the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of Trump… that might have unleashed a tsunami instead of a mere snowstorm.

Sleepy Joe shows some decency on his way out the door

Actually, from what we know now, Joe was apparently irrelevant to his own presidency throughout his four years in the White House. Think on that for awhile. What does that tell you about American democracy? What it tells me is that the standard-bearer of the democratic world order is a faux democracy, as fake as a three-dollar bill. Yup, the Exceptional Nation that has busied itself spreading democracy hither and yon these past few decades doesn’t actually have one at home. Instead, it has a bustling hive of conniving opportunists, careerists, lobbyists, and grifters of all stripes, each committed to the lofty American ideal of lining their own pockets at the expense of what in simpler times might have been called the “common good.” Needless to say, when the DC hustlers realized they were advising a dementia patient, they ran with it. Gotta make hay while the sun shines, dontcha know! And did they ever make hay! Under Biden, hundreds of billions in US dollars flew out the door to “save democracy” in Ukraine, in Taiwan, and in Israel! For almost a year, the hive buzzing around Biden claimed they were working 24/7 for a ceasefire in Gaza, to no avail. Do you really believe Trump’s golfing buddy Steve Witkoff has more influence in Israel than the entire US State Department? Or is it more likely that Sullivan, Blinken, et al were never interested in a ceasefire? How else to explain Trump’s Middle East envoy securing a ceasefire with one visit to Jerusalem, a ceasefire that eluded Antony Blinken and the entire state department for a year? But enough of that; I come to praise Caesar, not to bury him under mountains of well-deserved opprobrium. History will look after that. In the dying minutes of his last day in office, President Biden granted clemency to Leonard Peltier, who has languished in the US prison system for nearly fifty years for the alleged murder of two FBI agents. Over the decades, everyone from the Dali Lama to Mother Teresa to Nelson Mandela to Amnesty International has lobbied successive US administrations for clemency. Every president, including Clinton, Obama, and Trump, has ignored Peltier’s plight. Until today. Good on you, Joe.

Zen and the art of shoveling snow

There’s about a hundred and fifty feet of driveway between the road and the house. We’re having what the locals call a “hard winter” in these parts, and I’ve been spending a lot of time shoveling snow. When I bought the place almost twenty years ago, my father gifted me an old Ford 4000 with a snow-blower attachment. The trouble with that was, it was too efficient for its own good. That little tractor comes with a sturdy 53 hp diesel engine. Those can be fussy in winter. You need to keep them plugged in, and once fired up they should warm up properly before doing any work. You’re into twenty minutes of dinking around before you actually blow the snow, which takes about 45 seconds down the drive and another 45 seconds back up. In a minute and a half you’re done, and then, just to preserve the integrity of the mechanicals, you should let it idle for a few minutes before shutting it off. Being a younger and less patient man twenty years ago, I chafed at all that wasted time. I’d never owned a snow-blower, mainly because I’d only had conventional two-car-lengths driveways, and until relatively recently, say the last thirty years or so, it would never occur to anybody that they needed anything other than a snow shovel to clear that drive. But now I’m in the country, and I’ve got a serious driveway, so I took the plunge and splurged on a super-duper Toro with heated handle-bars and power steering! No shit! Who can even imagine such a thing! Actually, when you drive through town these days, everybody with any driveway at all seems to have a snow-blower, and given suburban lust for the newest and best, heated hand-grips and power steering are probably old news by now. Be that as it may, I nevertheless enjoyed the next two years of mild winters wherein my new Toro had seen maybe ten hours of use. Towards the end of the third winter, also a mild one, it suddenly developed an urge to run at full throttle no matter what you did to the throttle lever. I made a mental note to look after that during the summer. During the summer I forgot all about it. I mean, who thinks about their snow-blower in the summer? Get a life! Or at least get a boat! Anyway, it’s late November and we finally get a decent dump of snow, and all of a sudden I am reminded of this full-throttle issue. By now I’m retired. It doesn’t really matter if the lane is cleared in two minutes or twenty minutes… or by noon! So I bought a snow shovel. The next summer I dismantled the throttle linkage on the Toro. Not complicated - just a few springs and screws and brackets. I set them aside in an orderly way and then forgot about them. That was three years ago. Now we’re into this hard winter, and yesterday it took me three hours to shovel the snow from the house to the road. It was a beautiful experience. I’m savvy to the fact that heart-attack-while-shoveling-snow is a leading cause of death in my cohort, so I take lots of breaks, just to lean on the shovel and admire the scenery. And it was spectacular! In the ebb and flow of an ongoing blizzard, the skies were a kaleidoscope of greys and blues and silvers and whites, and the cold air was pure, without the taint of fuel fumes. It was a beautiful thing!

Blinken and Biden, shit and Shinola

Foreign Sec Antony Blinken and Sloppy Joe have been giving interviews summing up their glorious four years atop the global power pyramid. To hear Antony tell the tale, American diplomacy has never been a more potent force for good in this world. Never! Um… from where I’m sitting, (on the couch in front of the fireplace), American diplomacy looks like an unmitigated disaster. What diplomacy? Oh, you mean the diplomacy that prevented a war in Ukraine? Or the diplomacy that stopped the Gaza genocide in its tracks? US diplomacy never recovered after Tony and Jake exposed their complete incompetence to China’s FM at that embarrassing meeting in Alaska just a couple months into the Biden admin. Wang Yi quickly concluded that Tony and Jake were to diplomacy what Australian Olympian Raygun was to break-dancing… not ready for prime time. Blinky’s delusions are nothing compared to the twilight fantasies of Sloppy Joe. It’s almost impossible to imagine Biden believes the nonsense he spews. He talks as though he’s made America great again! Surely those are merely the musings of a late-stage dementia patient. In reality, no four years in American history have dissipated US standing in the world as much as these four under Biden. From the Keystone Cops retreat from Kabul, to the “whatever it takes for as long as it takes” disaster in Ukraine, to “we’re working 24/7 to get the hostages back” (for over a year with zero results) in Israel, no serious person anywhere on the planet imagines these four years past have in any aspect enhanced America’s standing in the world. Then again, a few idle media posts about tariffs from the president-elect have thrown Canadian politics into crisis. I guess there’s at least one country that still takes Uncle Sam seriously.

You know you're a serious county when...

When the guy who wants to be the next Liberal Party leader debuts his campaign on a US comedy network. Mark Carney is a Serious Person. As such, he is networked with many other Serious Persons in the upper reaches of the ruling plutocracy. After all, you don’t get to be governor of not one, but two central banks, unless you have the stamp of approval from, for lack of a better term, the ruling class. For reasons known only to Mr. Carney, and/or his blackmailers, he seemingly is willing to risk his thus-far mostly stellar rep for a chance to lead the Liberal Party of Canada into the next election. That makes no sense on any level. Be that as it may, Mr. Carney chose to debut his Prime Ministerial campaign on John Stewart’s satirical talk show. You can see the wheels turning in the heads of those PR sharpies who dreamed up this stunt; we gotta show Carney as more than a stuffed shirt… let’s showcase him as a regular guy who can take a joke! Alrighty then! John Stewart it is! At least he didn’t show up on Colbert! Does Carney improve the odds for the Liberal Party? Remember, this is the party that brought in Hillary Clinton for their ‘23 policy convention. When the cupboard is so bare you gotta call on Hillary, I guess Carney sort of passes for a “fresh face.” And since Canadian politics have degenerated into a non-stop clown show, there’s no better stage to present the next leader of the ruling Liberal Party than on a US comedy network.

As America lurches from one military debacle to the next, who profits from all this disaster?

If you know America, you’ll know nothing happens unless somebody makes a buck on it. America has been lurching from one military fiasco to the next for well over fifty years by now, and you know that wouldn’t keep happening if nobody was trousering wads of cash off all these disasters. Let’s take a look at how the big military contractors have fared out since just before the WOT (War on Terror) set America on the path of endless war after 9/11. Boeing was under forty bucks in January of 2000. In spite of years of bad news on their civilian side, what with their airplanes falling out of the sky on a regular basis, it’s still up over 400%. General Dynamics has gone up well over 1000%, from twenty bucks to $250. Lockheed Martin is up over 2000%, from twenty bucks to $460. Northrup Grumman is likewise up almost 2000%. Get the general direction we’re going here? In every case, the majority owners are a handful of hedge funds, led by Blackrock, Vanguard, and State Street. Given that America hasn’t won a war since 1945, what is it that keeps these war stocks climbing? There’s an elaborate think-tank network, lavishly funded by the war profiteers, that steers American policy inexorably towards more war. What’s doubly disturbing; the overpriced products of the US military-industrial machine don’t seem to meet the standards of… North Korea? You’re dealing with a closed loop; a veritable “perpetual motion” machine. As long as the experts at the think-tanks and the lobbyists can bribe and cajole the elected representatives into more war, the gravy train will keep chugging along.

As Babylon burns, lawyers drool

You can bet the torts and briefs will be a-flyin’ long before the fires are out. There’s an abundance of fat targets just waiting for subpoenas to be served. The bureaucrats throughout the upper echelon of the local and state governments. The feds. The fire department, police department, and emergency management at all levels. This unprecedented fire event will result in an even more unprecedented fireball of litigation! The bad news; all concerned will be sued to death over the next ten years. The good news; unprecedented opportunity for recent law graduates!

Lloyd Austin says Ukraine war is greatest military success story of our time

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin pulled that rabbit out of his ample arse at the Mannheim Air Base this week on the occasion of the 25th meeting of the "Contact Group" of Ukraine’s enablers. According to Lloyd, thanks to America’s leadership and the resolve of the freedom loving peoples of the world, Ukraine now has a “booming defense-industrial sector.” You might want to check into that, Lloyd; those booms are coming from the Russian missiles flattening Ukraine’s defense-industrial sector faster than the combined West can stand them up. How is it possible for Austin to make such ludicrous claims at a time when mainstream anti-Russian media like the New York Times and the Washington Post have grudgingly concluded this war is lost? Simple; we’ve come to the place in the narrative where America declares victory and goes home. Sure, there’s a few loose ends… but hey, that’s not our problem! We gave Ukraine everything it needed to defeat Putin. It’s not our fault they screwed it up. So see ya later alligator! Uncle Sam’s got bigger fish to fry - in the South China Sea!

Canada vows to fight against Trump threats

On A6 of today’s Globe & Mail, Marcus Gee, one of the top knobs at the Globe brain trust, throws down the gauntlet; “Thanks, Trump, for reminding Canadians why our county is worth fighting for.” Eight pages later, none other than the little guy from Shawinigan chimes in with a 3/4 page middle finger right in Trump’s face. We gotta get serious about Donald Trump’s outrageous threats! At 91 years of age, Jean Chretien has dusted off his Ross rifle and was last seen racing his mobility scooter in the general direction of the US embassy on Sussex street. He is “ready at the ramparts” to defend this great country from the evil designs of the brutal dictator, Donny J. It’s good to see Canadian thought leaders vowing to fight for us, at least till you realize they’re only fighting “metaphorically.” As in, not actually fighting at all. In terms of an actual real-world resistance, let’s get serious! Everybody knows we long ago surrendered our sovereignty. In the empirical world, ie the real one, we’ll fight Trump’s Anschluss the way Austria fought Hitler’s Anschluss… With cheering crowds!

Canada should solve its housing crisis before it buys a fleet of F-35s

Christy Clark is on to something. She's announced she'll take a run for the leadership of the Liberal Party, currently 20 points behind Poilievre's Conservatives. Pierre Poilievre is running a two-gear campaign. Low gear is, “axe the tax.” High gear is, “I’m not Justin.” What else does he have? Plenty of pie-in-the-sky, but not a whole helluva lot that would differentiate him from Christy Clark now that Clark has vowed to axe the tax too. And she’s at least as much “not Trudeau” as Pierre. To prevail over the Conservative’s 20 point lead in the polls, she’ll need to take some bold initiatives. Let me suggest one; backing away from following US foreign policy in lock-step. She would revive a Liberal Party tradition wherein we weren’t afraid to chart our own course. Think Jean Chrétien declining the invitation to join the “coalition of the willing” post 9\11. I think it’s Pierre’s Achilles heel that he panders so enthusiastically to the US-NATO-Israel crowd. There are many Canadian voters who recognize we have priorities beyond defending the status quo. Clark’s team could take a gander at my highly relevant post; How many public housing units could we build for the cost of a single F-35. That’s a debate worth having.

Trump to attack Canada, Greenland, Denmark, Mexico, Panama, Venezuela, Mars, and Canis Major

Relax folks! It's just Donny J taking his supercharged ego out for a rip! More than a few sharpies have sniffed out that Trump’s musings about us Canadians are massive interference in our democracy. We all knew the dastardly authoritarian dictatorships, Russia and China, have been interfering relentlessly, and we recently discovered that our fellow former colony, vibrant democratic India, has been in on the action too! But not in our darkest paranoid nightmares did we dream that by far the most egregious threat to our democracy would come from our best friend, benevolent big brother, leader of the democratic world, Uncle Sam. What are we to make of this? There’s a tone of near-panic in the Canadian pundisphere. I even read some idiocy about how Canada’s sovereignty is sacred because Canadians sacrificed their lives and so forth… No, in the imagined glory days of our military prowess, we were fighting for our colonial master, not our sovereignty. I suspect us Canadians will become US Canadians without putting up much of a fight.

Blast from the past... remember the exploding train in Lac Magentic?

The archives at Falling Downs, the precursor of this humble Substack, are chock-full of prescient commentary on the goings on in this messed up world. Looks like Bill Ackman has invested part of his 2 billion $ haul from the rape of CP Rail into taking a position in iconic Canadian asset manager Brookfield. Friday, October 3, 2014 Uber-douchebag Hunter "Hitman" Harrison blasts gov't for overreacting post Lac Megantic You remember Lac Megantic?That was the sleepy Quebec small-town that was literally blown off the map last year when one of Fast Eddie Burkhardt's single-crew oil trains exploded in the downtown.Hardly a year has passed, and CP Rail Boss Hunter Harrison is busy whinging about government over-regulation. Harrison just doesn't get why the busy-body government regulators need to fiddle with the free market, and impose draconian communistic rules about everything from speed limits for trains carrying dangerous goods, to mandating that a mile-long train loaded with dangerous goods should have more than a one-man crew!Well Hunter, let me 'splain it to ya; the reason the government needs to regulate greedy twats like you and your acolyte Burkhardt, is because your logic, your procedures, your unregulated over-weening greed, killed 47 people in Lac Megantic......yet nobody is facing murder charges!The reason Hunter is lobbying for less regulation is obvious. The entire Ackman/Harrison strategy for boosting CP Rail's obscene profits going forward hinges on making trains longer and running them faster with smaller crews!Fuck safety!Fuck sleepy small towns everywhere!Profit uber alles!

Carney and Freeland can't wait to stab PM Fluffy in the back

Most Canadian voters don’t care if the pretenders stab Fluffy in the back - as long as somebody stabs him, soon. Canada is beyond sick of PM Fluffy and his non-stop virtue signaling. Canadians are facing an unpleasant dilemma. We are reminded daily that we are falling down when it comes to standing with our allies. Our NATO spending needs a hundred billion dollar boost, minimum. And that’s before the incoming Major Domo of the free world, the billionaire condo salesman from Manhattan, ups the protection juice from 2% to 5% of GDP. Meanwhile, I hear the Farm Manager complain constantly how in her day job, programs for “disabled” kids are being cut back relentlessly. They’re not disabled, of course; they just have differing abilities, which unfortunately take a pile of public money to mitigate, even partially. And there’s our dilemma; we can invest in warships and F-35s and submarines, or we can invest in our people, but we can’t do both. Do either of the pretenders have a plan to resolve this dilemma? Let’s take a look at their resumes. Mark Carney is the pride of Fort Smith, NWT. Google Fort Smith, and Carney is the only name on their “famous” list. Fort Smith is a hard-scrabble kinda place, so you might expect him to have some empathy for the little people. Unfortunately, he went rogue. Unlike every other youngster in Fort Smith, he ended up climbing through a variety of elite schools and landing at Goldman Sachs, a trajectory all too common amongst elite politicians in the Free World. Then he blew past every previous GS alumni and became, serially, the Governor of the Bank of Canada, and then the Governor of the Bank of England! So now he’s pitching to be our next PM? I’ll just take a wild guess, but my hunch is he will prioritize F-35s over autistic kids. Which leaves us with Chrystia, or “Agent Frida,” as the Rooskies supposedly labelled her when she was fighting for freedom and democracy for the former Soviet satellite states, especially Ukraine. I have Chrystia’s 2012 bestseller “Plutocrats” on my bookshelf. Here’s my favorite quote: Many members of the global super-elite have helped me to understand their world and some have become friends. They include George Soros, Eric Schmidt, Victor Pinchuk, David and Mary Boies, Nikesh Arora, Jeff Immelt… And at least another half-dozen names of the uber-rich. I know I have my prejudices, and one of them is “when you’re in bed with the Plutocrats, you’re gonna put F-35s over autistic children… or the unhoused, or the seniors with inadequate pensions, or the people without a family doctor, or the university grads with crippling student loans, or the this and that out the ying-yang.” The good news is either of these pretenders could replace Trudeau. The better news is that Fluffy has poisoned the well of Canada’s democracy to such an extent that neither of them have a hope of winning the next election. The bad news is, that leaves us Poilievre or Singh. Looks like we’re screwed no matter what. To hell with autistic kids… bring on the F-35s!