Carney invites Russia, Iran, and North Korea to join coalition of like-minded nations to overthrow Trump regime

In a stunning reversal of policy, the Canadian PM has offered yesterday's enemies a seat at the table as he builds a coalition to restore the freedoms and human rights of the American people. Clearly Trump has become a deranged madman obsessed with restoring the former glory of a once-serious power. 

He has cowed allies and enemies alike into submission. Everybody except Canada, which is why it's up to the Globalist Banksters favorite banker to set things right, and clearly, time is of the essence. After starting and losing two wars at once, Trump has become so delusional that he's more convinced by the day he actually won them. He is flooding the streets of American cities with armed thugs who are hunting down Trump opponents. He is murdering his own people!

We have rarely seen such a clear-cut case for the application of R2P, the Responsibility to Protect doctrine Canada was instrumental in getting through the UN. The leadership burden therefore falls to us.

We haven't been called to do much punching-above-our-weight since the golden age of Big Steve, but Canada stands ready. Leadership is what we do.  We're ready to take back our rightful role at the top o' the democratic order!

Former ambassador to Russia briefs CBC on grim human rights situation under Putin

 It's grim alright. Former ambassador Sarah Taylor painted a bleak picture... not for herself, but for the 140 million Russians who don't have the freedom to escape Bad Vlad's dystopian shithole.

Sarah shared some profound insights that brought into focus the scale of Putin's relentless disinformation war. It is truly mind-boggling! For example, for over fifty years the communist dictator Nikita Khrushchev had a completely bogus rep as a reformer, when in reality he was one of the worst they ever had till Putin came along. All that hogwash about Nikita K freeing millions of political prisoners from the Siberian Gulag? Lies lies lies!!!

But the lying didn't really take off till Putin seized the Kremlin  via an obviously fraudulent "democratic" election featuring, literally, some two dozen alleged political parties! Ya, as if! And the disinformation war against the West went completely bonkers after Alexei Navalny returned from his all-expenses-paid education at Yale and began asking questions about where Bad Vlad had squirreled away the billions, nay, tens of billions... double nay nay, HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS Putin has pilfered from his longsuffering people.

At great risk to her personal safety, Taylor made the courageous decision, along with the ambassadors from France, UK, Germany, and USA, to attend Navalny's funeral. There, her heart was almost broken by the sight of "many" thousands of Muscovites who defied Putin with their presence. Although CBC didn't use the phrase "tens of thousands" in their reporting at the time, she ventured that in her estimation it might very well have been possible!

Her interview with Matt Galloway was a real eye-opener, and another job well done by our public broadcaster. Bravo Matt and Sarah!

Meanwhile our PM was over in Ankara to sign trade and defence deals with like-minded NATO ally  Turkiye. It's a lot like Canada, except for a couple of minor things... for example, while they've got twice our overall population, they've got 10x the prison population! And there is an argument to be made our erstwhile NATO ally holds more political prisoners than Russia! The Sultan's human rights bona fides may be a little over-ripe, but any port will do in this storm of authoritarian terror launched by Putin and his minions in Tehran and North Korea!

But for the Grace of God...

The Grace of God. We don't put much stock in the Grace of God in the modern era.

Got a call last night from my old pal Kipling. But for the Grace of God, Kipling woulda been a gonner twenty times over long before now. And he knows it. That's the thing about old guys who are shocked and confused when they suddenly find themselves grappling with the fact they actually made it to old age! 

That truly is a WTF moment. I went into a Service Ontario office yesterday and came out a half hour later with a VIP handicapped parking permit. WTF? How did that happen? First place I went to try it out was Shoppers Drug Mart, and wouldn't you know, all the handicapped spots were taken!

That's obviously something to get pissy about if you're looking for a handicapped parking space, but since I'm new to gimp-world, I'll just hang back and reserve judgement. But for the Grace of God, I may have very well dropped dead in some random parking lot long before I snagged that VIP parking permit!

In praise of elderly Jewish gentlemen who happen to have law degrees

We're delving into the archives here, and I've no idea if Uncle Sid remains among the living, but thirteen years ago he made enough of an impression that I wrote about him.

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First of all, Sid ain't my uncle.

I don't think, technically speaking, he's even an "uncle" to the Farm Manager. Maybe a second cousin once removed or something.

Anyway, I ran into Sid at the family get-together about a month back.

Usually I only run into Sid at family funerals.

So I grabbed Sid's hand for a good old farm-style handshake, "hey good to see ya Sid... I only see you at funerals!"

I should mention that Sid is 87 years old. Still goes to his office at his law practice every day. Still got all his marbles, and they're all rolling in the right direction.

I think he does real estate law mostly. You can probably do that till you're 150. After all, what can go wrong? The title searchers do the title search. The lien checkers check for liens. The legal secretaries and assorted unpaid interns do the rest.

When all those folks have done all your work, you give it the stamp of approval and off you go!

Now that's just a general rant about real estate lawyers. I don't mean for a moment to suggest that's how Sid rolls.

But Sid is one savvy dude. When I mentioned about only seeing him at family funerals he rejoinders, without a moment of hesitation, "ya I know! Everybody I know is dead!"

What a great guy to have a beer with!

Here's to ya, Sid!

How to tell when you're busting the speed limit on the Alzheimer Highway

Not that I would, personally, know anything about that, but I've heard through the grapevine one of the sure-fire symptoms is when you start doing shit you've never been known to do before. Like, just to pick a hypothetical example out of the ether,  shopping for high-end footwear.

 I gotta admit I've been somewhat infatuated with the Dayton 64 brand of late, and I'll tell you why. Thanks to a recent Globe feature on bespoke brands unique to Canada, I learned that Dayton 64s are called that because the IWA Canadian HQ was at 64 Dayton Avenue in Vancouver!

And here's why this matters to the pot-addled hillbilly. For a period of several months, I think four max, maybe four and a half, I was the shop steward at an International Woodworkers of America local in Victoria BC. As it happened, none of the older guys wanted the job, so the punk from Ontario got it by default. The punk from Ontario was soon enough embroiled in crises on all sides that had him scurry home to Ma & Pa's basement, but to this day I regard those few months with nostalgia and regret...

Not sure what that's worth... you get to a certain age and damned near everything you see in the rear-view is framed in nostalgia and regret!

And I'm not a complete stranger to Canadian-made high-end footwear. I've had a pair of blue suede Hartts forever.  I got 'em in a thrift shop for twenty bucks. There was another high-end brand also from New Brunswick that I think is still around, but their shoes are built in England now. 

But back to the Alzheimer Highway. Right now I'm looking at a vintage pair of Daytons, a wee bit scuffed up, on offer at five hundred bucks. Ya, that's three times what I've ever paid for footwear before, but hot damn...  wait a minute! That sharp-looking logger's boot may look good but it don't have so much as a steel toe! WTF? 

I couldna even wore those puppies into the IWA shop where I was the shop steward! They mighta made real boots once upon a time, but they're strictly Japan / China tourist fare today. 

See!  A guy who can figure that out still has a lot of runway left on that highway!

Remembering the fake-news fairies who brought you Malalah, Greta, and little Bana

From the archives, but near as I can tell  we're way more befuddled by the diff between shit & shinola, truth & truthiness, than we were back then!

**************

You gotta admit the wily Erdogan knows a good photo-op when he sees one.

If nothing else, this story proves that the roads from "rebel held" areas of Syria to the capital of Turkey remain wide open, in spite of the fact that Turkey has allegedly joined the fight against Daesh. How else to explain the fact that Bana was only evacuated out of Aleppo two days ago, on a Syrian government bus, and transferred to rebel held territory, and finds herself on The Sultan's lap in Ankara a mere 24 hours later?

That's truly amazing!

But in annals of the wily Erdogan's amazing adventures, it's par for the course. This is the guy who heads the second largest military in NATO but is conniving with Bad Vlad in all sorts of nefarious goings on in the neighborhood. He's fighting ISIS but fighting the Kurds even harder, even though it's universally acknowledged that the Kurds are fighting ISIS harder than anybody. The guy who embodies the shared values of NATO even while wreaking havoc on his Kurdish population, side-lining democracy in his own country, and jailing more journalists than any despot in the world...

Sometimes it's hard to figure out where the truthiness ends and the fake news begins, isn't it?

Remembering when ethnic jokes were funny

At least they sounded droll enough to my ear. They were largely jokes passed around amongst immigrant factory hands in southern Ontario and beyond, in the post war economy where they were crammed into factories alongside other ethnic groups they'd been locked in mortal combat with not too many years before.

The fun thing was virtually all these different ethnic groupings were white Christians. A true fact we've absolutely lost sight of is no matter how many not-whites European colonialism murdered in the roughly 500 years it was dominant, it murdered far more white Europeans! 100 million plus just in the two industrial-scale wars of the 20th century! Virtually all of them, outside the Pacific theatre, were white. Even the Jews murdered by the white Nazis were white European Jews, not non-white Arabic Jews.

The gist of this joke genre was what personality traits to keep an eye out for in case your former enemies were about to return to type. So you got a lot of stuff like never trust a German in a uniform. Never turn your back on an Irishman with a jug of whiskey. Never trust a Jew with a law degree.  Never turn your back on an Italian with a hard-on, and so forth. Over the years the oeuvre gained in specificity, so by the time we got to "beware of Greek restauranteurs with valid insurance policies," Greeks had long been considered mainstream white Christians.

Today pretty much all that stuff is "hate speech." And as we are all reminded day in and day out, there's nothing, NOTHING more corrosive than hate speech to our cohesion as a sovereign nation!

Ya, maybe. But it seems our national cohesion was far more robust before our ruling strata got obsessed with stamping out hate speech!

What up with CBC obsession over Alberta "separation" vote?

I daresay there can't possibly be  more than a tiny handful of Canadians for whom the question of a possible future referendum about a possibly even further-in-future destruction of Canada because of tomorrow's vote is something they're even aware of.  Yet for at least the past month, this vote has crowded out virtually every other issue around the country and around the world! 

Why? What is it our official government propaganda mouthpiece is trying to distract us from? What are a few issues that concern Canadians far more than the hypothetical scenario above. Hmm... how about the fact our kids can't afford homes. How about new grads struggle to find jobs, let alone start careers. Number one among pretty much all Canadians other than talking heads on CBC is the rapidly rising cost of absolutely everything. Most folks are way more interested in reducing the number of homeless in their streets than they are in what might happen in case "separatist's" win an election in Alberta twenty years down the road.

Right now I've got Cross Country Checkup in the background, and it's been one expert after another solemnly warning of the grave threat separation poses to everybody except the gay-hating racists who have been secretly promoting it, in collusion with US MAGA forces, not surprisingly. The tone is even more solemn due to the disaster at the CAF base.

News sites world wide have been reporting all day long, the explosion happened when a live-fire training exercise went awry and hit a nearby natural gas pipeline pumping station.  Still waiting for Carney's PR department to verify.

It's tits-up for Micron

Li'l Napoleon keeps plumbing new depths in the history of French presidential polling. When you listen to him, he seems to believe massive street protests are proof he's on the right track! From the looks of things, more and more folks obviously believe he is! In fact, the French masses are so impressed by their li'l emperor's sagacity they have set multiple cities alight in celebration!

CBC's coverage has been careful to stress that the massive street protests are entirely the result of  disgruntled high school students, belatedly joined by a few yellow vest types. While manifestly false, there's a reason for that framing. Canadian students are far too polite  docile to ever push back against the governments who have systematically underfunded education for the past fifty years, and besides, we never had yellow vests.

The reason a million Frenchmen and women are in the streets is because Li'l Nap has made it abundantly clear, over and over again, that in the democracy he presides over, he calls the shots, and the voters don't. Oddly enough, that's the exact message the German people are getting from Blackrock Schmertz and the Brits from the latest hapless dork who finds himself in 10 Downing. What these key NATO allies, the very like-minded democracies Mark Carney wants to hitch our wagon to, have in common is they've all announced massive social spending cuts in order to prepare their people for war with Russia by 2030. That's why France is in flames today, and unless there's  a change in course soon, the conflagration can only spread.

Which brings us back to CBC. Canada has yet to impose the draconian social spending cuts seen among our European allies, but the writing is on the wall. Thus far Carney's orgy of military spending is only in the planning stage, and we can hope the government follows through with the time-honored Canadian tradition of giving ourselves a pat on the back for a job well done, and leave it at that.

I'm not a fan of Brodie Fenlon's gang of wokies,  but they want to blame teenagers for the mayhem in France for a reason. Otherwise they might have to face the fact that voters don't call the shots in Canada either. Mark Carney at this moment has the highest numbers in the history of Canadian polling. He has announced a trillion dollars in military spending that no voters have been consulted on. If only half  those projects proceed we'll see those massive social spending cuts as surely as night follows day.

Another shady conman fools Canadian pols and CBC journalists

There's a happy happy story on view at CBC today about a brand-spankin'-new AI data centre coming to Cape Breton! Yessiree Bob, that's $10 billions of investment that'll put Cape Breton on the map, and not just any old map,  but the map of bustling high-tech hubs!

This turn-around in Nova Scotia's long history of economic decline is thanks to the visionary American-Australian venture capital veteran Trent Vichie. Vichie originally made headlines with a plan to become a major clean-hydrogen player, a venture that will pay off as soon as the next tranche of government funding arrives. Not to mention Viche's  not one, not  two, but FOUR wind farms snuggled tight between the clean hydrogen complex and the $10B AI campus! None of this stuff  is anywhere near shovel-ready but all of it has been repeatedly announced to great fanfare.

Not a venture capitalist to rest on his laurels, the industry veteran's Everwind Fuels is behind this $10B project. Not only that, but he has revealed that one of the two biggest names in AI, Anthropic, will take a twenty year lease when the project is completed several years hence.

Virtually everything in the CBC story is uncritical paraphrasing, if not straight-up plagiarizing of various Vichie-related press releases. Anyone even peripherally acquainted with what's going on in AI today would put zero stock in any claim that Anthropic will be in any position to lease anything by then, if it survives at all. Check this out.

This is an all-too-common example of so-called journalists thinking their job is done once they've regurgitated a corporate press release. How does Taryn Grant get this story when she clearly knows nothing about her topic, and worse, apparently has no interest in knowing anything about it.

Like Eliot Pence, Trent Vichie is a visionary so far ahead of his time that it takes a steady stream of government grants to keep these bullshitters afloat. As with Eliot, legitimate biz press like Forbes and Bloomberg missed their spectacular achievements over the years. A simple google of Vichies name pulls up shit like this.  Looks like his "chief of staff" at Everwind also washed his car and did the lawn. I ask you, should that not raise some questions among the politicians and CBC journalists fawning over this clown?

Return of Gerrie the Geriatric Ranter

I once had a Substack by that title; "The Geriatric Ranter." Had high hopes for it, but a few years in it was somewhat underperforming my expectations, and I pulled the plug. 

Meanwhile, the numbers on the original blog went nuts. Even today, when I've posted nothing yet, 6k+ views. And what's kinda screwy is at least half the stuff I'm writing sounds like it coulda come straight from Gerrie.

So I'm sort of thinking maybe I should bring back the Ranter. On Substack. Because the algos gate-keeping at Google's Blogger insist I'm still violating their imaginary "standards." Therefore I could never monetize on Blogger, but could on Substack.

On the other hand, I like bragging up the fact I write not for filthy lucre, but because it's in me and it's gotta come out... oh Lord, let that boy boogie woogie!

Anyway, Gerrie woulda had some fun with the adventure I had today. I'd meant to stop for gas after me and Big-Lips Bruno the mastiff were done our laps at the dog park, and I'd actually meant to do it yesterday but wtf, I'm old, I forget shit. So I 100% knew it was 100% essential to fill up today.

And then I got a call from my dear sister inviting me for lunch in Wiarton! She is the most wonderful sibling I could ever wish for, deeply cares for me, is driving all the way up from the city, and of course I said yes, and since I'm at the stage of mental impairment when I can't actually keep two thoughts in my head at the same time, I totally forgot that fill-up.

We had a lovely lunch, and I was swimming in good vibes on my way home to Falling Downs. Or at least I was till the "low fuel" warning light came on... Oh shit! Wiarton doesn't have a gas station anymore... I'm 30 km from the nearest gas station and according to the flashing warning light I got 12 km range left in the tank. 

So I obviously go from happy vibes to  max stress in about half a second... and by the time I got to my driveway I had 4 km left, and for a guy still learning his limits around congestive heart failure and COPD, all I can say is thank-you Jesus for not calling me home today!

With 4km in the tank I obviously wasn't driving the 20km into town to pick up the Farm Manager from her day job. Luckily I was able to get through and give her the heads-up, although there was a moment of miscommunication when I had to clarify it was essential the jerry can I was asking her to bring home be full.

But all's well that ends well, and that's pretty much all I ask of life these days; happy endings!

Getting back to the Geriatric Ranter, maybe it's time for Gerrie to fire up a fresh Substack.

Beware of visionaries lobbying for taxpayer funding

There was a heart-warming story in the Globe & Mail this morning that hit all the right notes. A Canada-Ukraine joint venture has been formed to build autonomous vehicles, in Canada! The Ukraine partner has already delivered 5000 to the army, and would like to expand while moving production out of range of Putin's missiles.

The Canadian side, meanwhile, is a recently launched start-up, Dominion Dynamics, led by visionary leader Eliot Pence, an expert in AI, robotics, and the architect of Anduril Industries growth from obscure start-up to industry giant in the 2018-2022 period. We're obviously lucky to have Eliot on our team! Alas, the only thing missing for this joint venture to save democracy and crush evil, and make Canada a world leader (here we go again!) in autonomous vehicles with fully integrated AI, is a juicy government contract for oh, maybe a few hundred thousand units.

When something sounds too good to be true, we used to say it doesn't pass the smell test. My first stop was to read up on Pence's time at Anduril, because it's a story I'm somewhat acquainted with, and I'd never seen that name associated with it. Well, imagine my surprise when Google couldn't find a single reference to the dude in any American business news from 2018 to 2022. Maybe Google's AI missed something... or maybe he did all that great stuff under a pseudonym?

A true renaissance man, Eliot also runs a VC shop called Tofino Capital, which invests in small cap frontier start-ups in Nigeria and other over-looked markets. Check it out! Back to the sniff test... Lord, he stinketh! 

And how about the Ukrainian partner?  With 5000 of their machines already in service on the front lines, I couldn't find anything on YouTube showing them in combat. I did however find a story at Kyiv Post from yesterday almost identical to the Globe's - except it was about Tencore entering a contract with a German partner to build autonomous vehicles there, and unlike the dimwitted Carney who is dithering, Mertz wasted no time guaranteeing open-ended funding for as long as it takes! 

Hmm... I have a hunch the Kyiv Bentley dealership will be at the very top o' the heap at the European Bentley Dealers Association annual awards gala for the foreseeable future!

Bye the way, the Ottawa Business Journal today named Pence Ottawa's newsmaker of the year.

It's a small world...

Forgive me for not tooting my horn re the blog passing 6 million views,  but one fact I always found non-toot-worthy was that as views went ballistic, comments absolutely stalled. If you peruse the last few years of the Falling Downs archive, you will find comments from only two (2) readers.

That's part of a long-term trend to quiet criticism. Go to the View from Falling Downs home page and you'll notice there are no join or follow options.

One is Ken. Ken is from Port Moody BC,  and he originally made contact to tell me what a fucking retard I was for promoting Donald Trump. Anyway, we got over that and Ken has been there forever, and I'm convinced the only reason I still get messages from Ken is because he's been there since before the algos were unleashed and blocked messages.

The other notable exception is Timmie. Unlike Ken, I've actually met  him. Tim seems to post stuff in spite of a ban on my blog by the folks who own the platform. The only connect between me and Tim is we're both acquainted with the local farm boy who became a Nobel laureate. That's what got us together for a face-to-face over a pint or two.

As it happens, Tim's day job consists of liaising with NATO military contractors around the world, and I strongly suspect his internet may be a little more robust than what the rest of us have access to. That's why he can post comments on my blog and you can't.

Be that as it may, the other discovery we made over a burger and a beer is that his sister-in-law was once besties with one of my ex-wives. He hates her guts and I'm still kinda fond of her! Be that as it may, I'd love to have more of Tim's NATO contacts reading this blog!

An open letter to Steve Liebig

 Dear Steve,

It was brought to my attention, by persons who will remain un-named, that I willfully mocked your political career in a recent post.

Steve, nothing could be further from the truth. I apologize unreservedly if that "Lie Big" post caused you discomfort.  Anyone remotely acquainted with my work is well aware I traffic heavily in political satire, and it is in that context my comments should be considered. 

And in that context, "ya couldna sucked too bad" is a ringing endorsement!

Go Steve!

Vote "LIE BIG" on October 26

They're having local elections shortly, and the roadsides around Eden Mills were festooned with "Vote for me" signs from the many candidates hoping to grab the bottom rung of the democracy ladder. I'm negotiating a twisty roadway en route to our b&b, and while I'm not able to admire the signage, I couldn't help notice  the "Lie Big" message.

Eden Mills is best known today for the annual Eden Mills Writers Festival, but 150 years ago it was a thriving mill town on the banks of the Eramosa River. By the time the Ontario Agricultural College in nearby Guelph became a university, the water-power era was long over, and Eden Mills was just another struggling hamlet down on its luck.

One thing the struggling hamlet enjoyed in abundance was stone cottages. As you can imagine, when the local cow college was made a uni, building an English department was a top priority. After all, without that claim to Shakespearean sophistication, the U of G was just a cow college! 

By the 1970s you had a thriving English department 15 minutes away, peopled by folks who imagined those stone cottages were just like the stone cottages their literary heroes in Victorian England lived in, and that struggling hamlet has gradually morphed into a chi-chi destination for yuppies with substantial renovation budgets.

It was the U of G crowd who started up the Eden Mills Writers Festival. Due to flukes of circumstance, I ended up on first-name terms with quite a few of them. In hindsight I suppose I might label them "cultural entrepreneurs." It was pretty much the same crew that launched the Guelph Jazz Festival.

In some ways socializing with English profs was an eye-opener. I was accustomed to boozing it up with welders and truck-drivers, but I gotta say nothing prepped me for the level of alcohol abuse among the English department crowd.  To this day I recall a wobble home as the sun was coming up. I'd been at a bash in the apartment of a grad student who was dating a married prof fifty years older. For the last two hours Bowie's Rock & Roll Suicide had been on repeat at max volume. It was ringing in my ears for the entire wobble home, six blocks away. I had more nights to lacerate my brain with that bunch than I ever had with welders and truckers.

Our b&b is a departure from what Eden Mills has become. The woman who runs it has roots in the town that go back six generations. The home she rents out is the home she's lived in her entire life, the home she raised two children in. When she rents her home out she relocates herself to a cabin a little further back on her 16 acres. She's a fascinating character in her own right. She just got home after touring her one-woman play, "She won't come in from the fields," across Canada.

She's like everybody else, getting on in years, and both her children are now living in BC. Six generations rooted on the banks of the Eramosa River are drawing to an end. But in the meanwhile, life goes on. There's municipal elections coming up in a couple of weeks. Once the car stopped and I had a chance to scan a Lie Big sign standing still, I found out Steve Liebig is running for re-election in ward 3. Re-election! He's already on the bottom rung and is just hoping to stay there. Good luck Steve! If you were already elected once, and can still raise funds to have signs printed, you couldna sucked too bad!

Check out this interview with ambassador Chas Freeman accusing Israel of propaganda!

Ya, I know Israeli propaganda isn't exactly a scoop, but with the last post it looked to me like the Blogger platform has, for whatever reason, been attempting to restore proper paragraph formatting. Just so you know, as a writer, I'm absolutely obsessive about para formatting. Here's why you haven't seen any here for about six years or so.

Just as covid was coming in, and I was debating retirement, and my left eyeball blew its retina, one night Doublewide (our cat) took a stroll across my keyboard, and every post has been run-on paras ever since. Needless to say, given my state of tech retardation, I had no idea how to investigate the innards of my laptop to restore proper paragraphs. 

As I was casting about for some expertise re how to fix this dilemma, and I'd coaxed Doublewide across my keyboard many times, to no avail, in hope she could retrace her steps and undo the damage, a crazy thing happened. The numbers on the blog took off.  It was down to sub-100 views per day before Doublewide danced across the keyboard, but, and at some level this is a bit of a disappointment, proper paragraphs lost out to run-on paragraphs, big-time.

So this post is an experiment. Nothing new here. But there are three clear paragraph breaks, and just to take it to the next level, let's see if they'll allow a link; Amb. Chas Freeman: Israel is Commiting Suicide

Mafia Don is done! Finished! Kaput!... or maybe not...

Regular readers will know I've become increasingly convinced there ain't no possible way Donny J is gonna survive midterms. Oh, he'll certainly "survive," since as he's pointed out more than once, he's not on the ballot. All I can say to that is good luck with the last half of your term after you lose both congress and the senate. It's hard to see anything other than two years of a zombie admin 100% focused on avoiding impeachment.

But maybe I've got it all wrong. I was  down city-way today for thanksgiving and had occasion to chat at  length with some very well-read youngsters who posit as definite possibility something I've dismissed as far-fetched... and their scenario goes something like this; over the next three weeks the admin turns up the dial on ICE violence in Dem cities. They'll ramp up the outrage factor to whatever it takes to ignite massive public push-back, and then they'll declare martial law and cancel the midterms. What's really ominous is none of these kids have ever heard of Chris Hedges!

If I'd heard that conversation a year ago I would have dismissed it, but a year on I gotta admit that we're at a place with this admin that it is literally true that ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE!

About Mafia Don's diesel deal with Bad Vlad

After four years of threatening death and destruction against allies who might dare breach his arbitrary sanctions on Russian oil, Donny J done shredded his own sanctions and announced he'd contracted to swap a few million tons of Russian diesel for a few billions of USD.

Not hard to see where that came from. We're three weeks from mid-terms, and Team Trump is starting to panic. The war he promised to end in 24 hours is now chewing the legs off the global economy. If that's not bad enough, the new war his pal, the Greatest Leader Since Moses, conned him into, promises to destroy what's left of American credibility in the Middle East - in fact, that's pretty much a done deal at this point.

All of which leaves the NATO vassals up the proverbial stump. Since it was Trump's bullying that coerced them into ramping up their military spending, they assumed Uncle Sam would reward them by leading the charge to dislodge the evil dictator in the Kremlin. Instead, Trump announces a multi-billion $$ deal for Putin's diesel!

I've seen some analyses by industry insiders who estimate these purchases might, in a best case scenario, keep US diesel prices tamped down till the midterms. Unfortunately for Mafia Don, he's got 101 crises cooking beyond the price of diesel, so even if this latest brazen display of market manipulation  were briefly effective, he is doomed. Trump's next two years will be 100% devoted to fighting impeachment, so fighting for or against anything else is a non-starter. 

Donny J has had a spectacular run, but it's winding down...

Befuddled elderly gentleman can't find lawyer's office to sign will

I had a moment this afternoon when the thought crossed my mind that maybe I'm a little further along the Alzheimer Highway than I realized. One of the great joys of aging is planning for your death. When you're younger you figure why would you give a shit - you're dead! That's been my attitude most of my life, but the closer you get to your inevitable meet-n'-greet with the Grim Reaper, the more I've thought, oh, what the heck, maybe I should avoid leaving a big headache that will aggravate the heirs for years to come, or even longer. So a few months ago, based on queries to locals I know and trust, I made an appointment with a local lawyer whom I'd never met before, and we hashed out a draft last will and testament. A few weeks go by, and I get an email advising me it's ready for review and signing. Great! Much as I resent the entire process, I'm looking forward to getting it out of the way. The signing ceremony was scheduled for 1 pm today. So I pull into the parking lot a good 15 minutes early. I'm pumped! I'm ready to go! I'm finally doing some really important adult stuff that's a little overdue, and I'm feeling good! The parking lot wasn't quite the way I remembered it, but I'd only ever been there once, and didn't pay much attention. Then I went to the back entrance, and that's changed too. Last time, I was welcomed there, and today I'm greeted by a sign asking me to use the front door. Well, that seems a little odd... I go around to the front, and I notice there's no mention of any lawyerly enterprises on the sign at the street... WTF? Am I in the right place? I go into the memory files...two or at most three old red brick office buildings past a low-slung modern building on the corner. The modern building is right on the corner where it should be, but... so I go into the second place past it. The sign mentions a wellness spa and a tattoo parlour, and I realized instantly those were one and the same. There were at least four employees, and as far as I could tell, one client, but clearly this was an up-market tat joint. Everybody had enough piercings none of them coulda gone anywhere near a metal detector, and there was ink as far as the eye could see, and presumably where it couldn't too. I've had a little ink for fifty years and have always had an eye for top-shelf artists, and what I saw was first class. So, I apologize for interupting, and explain that my lawyer's office used to be in that building and would they know where it went, because I have an appointment blah blah blah... All four stop what they're doing and consult amongst one another. These are the sweetest, kindest people in the world, but they all agree there's never been any lawyers in their building. They enquire as to the name of the firm. I can't remember, and a panic attack is starting to move in as I realize I may have been duped by some shady fly-by-night operation... do I at least remember the name of the lawyer? Yes I do! Jennifer! I guess that wasn't quite enough for them to work with, and they seemed genuinely sad they couldn't help this obviously confused wretch who had wandered into their day. I get out and look up and down the street. I definitely remember the low-slung building, and there's no corners like that further west, so I shuffle eastward. By now I'm sweating profusely and just below panic threshold, when I get to the next light. As I push the crosswalk button I realize... there's a low-slung building on the corner opposite... is it possible? Could it be? By the time they let me in the back door at precisely 1 pm I was begining to recover, but I gotta say it gave me a wee fright for fifteen minutes. The old "steel trap" ain't what it used to be...

American pop culture has mocked God for 50 years; God has finally turned His back on America

When I look at the wars that the Nations of Virtue, ie the freedom & democracy loving full-patch members of Western Civ, are at this very moment pursuing, I can't help but wonder what an actual "Just God" might conclude. I can't imagine that the "Just God," be He from the Christian, the Judaic, or the Muslim tradition, could ever, in any way, endorse the mass murder of women and children. Yet our Western Civ refuses to utter the taboo word, GENOCIDE. Let's not lose sight of the fact that Israel is a charter member of the Nations of Virtue club, the "Golden Billion" who get to lord it over the seven billion lesser beings who, truth be told, are getting a little tired of the charade. We are at the cusp of serious shit. All the idiot talk I hear from Washington suggests they still imagine they're winning the war they lost months ago. You have to spend a little time on Fox News every day just to get a sense of what Mafia Don watches, and Holy Mother of God, the Towelheads o' Terror are the absolutely worst evil that has ever been seen in history! Nobody who writes that crap ever explains how or why their evil is any more evil than the evils of Western Civ, but that's the mentality that keeps our warmongering going full-tilt into ultimate disaster. It was former CIA director Mike Pompeo who bragged up the fact Uncle Sam lies and cheats and steals. (As an aside, the fat warmonger is now a skinny warmonger... Ozempic???) Anyway, the point I'm trying to get to, is that if there is such a thing as a "Just God," there's no possible way that Just God could be on the side of Western Civ.

White Supremacy on the march across Canada

Hard on the heels of the nazi takeover of Millarville Alberta last summer, CBC today exposed a white supremacist group in Ontario that is plotting to overthrow the government, deport all non-whites, and set up a thousand year master race with themselves in charge. This was revealed in a confidential report to CBC from the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, the same government funded "NGO" that tipped the CBC to the Millarville scoop. The "Dominion Society," near as I can make out, is a couple dozen middle-age, generally fat guys who like to get together now and then to piss and moan about politics, as is the norm in societies everywhere. I'm guessing they came up with the club idea because it sounded way better when you told your wife you're off to a policy conference, as opposed to you're off to a piss-up with your pals! The leader of this dangerous gang of white supremacist revolutionaries is one Daniel Tyrie, who was obviously thrilled to get his first-ever interview request from CBC, and didn't disappoint! He's clearly hoping for many more. I have a hunch most of his drinking buddies... or "foot soldiers" if you will, may skip future policy meetings. Anyway, the old "far-right threat" to our freedom and democracy continues to be a reliable excuse for our leadership elites to impose ever more fascistic limits on our freedoms and human rights.

What's wrong with this headline?

"Ottawa plans Crown corporation to break defence procurement logjam." Apparently the multiple bureaucracies responsible for spending taxpayer dollars on bombs and bullets and F-35s and German submarines are completely incompetent when it comes to spending money. They can't spend it fast enough due to bureaucratic bottlenecks in the spending pipeline. Fortunately for peace, justice, freedom, democracy, and all the other good stuff Canadian taxpayers relentlessly fight for, the Carney government has announced the creation of a new crown corporation to supervise the spending of tax monies. That's right! We're getting a fresh new level of bureaucracy to whip all those other levels into shape! Not the way I'd handle bureaucratic gridlock, but what the hey, let's give Carney a chance...

For what it's worth

Spent an hour or so last week having a face-to-face with a family friend who's been in the real estate biz forever. I'd requested the sit-down because I'd been thinking about some concerns my mother had brought up, like wouldn't it be a great idea to sell Falling Downs and move to Guelph to be closer to family. Ya, I know my folks have been in the biz forever too, but this gal comes from the other side. Which in no way rules out the possibility she could be in cahoots with my dear Mom! Anyway, due to my various old-fucker-about-to-croak medical issues I've been diagnosed with, there seems to be pressure building that I should slow down, scale back, simplify my life, and move into a wheelchair-accessable abode. I'm quite OK with most of that. What's not to like about slowing down and scaling back? Count me in! But inevitabley, these conversations turn to the what it's worth question, and I gotta say these real estate folks really toss around some impressive numbers. Apparently the joint has gone up 250% in the twenty years since I bought it! I'm a millionaire! Great! I can cash in and trade my hundred acres of peace, quiet, tranquility, and good neighbours for a condo in town! Oh ya baby, I'll get right on that! Or maybe not; not just yet, anyway. And while it's true enough that such a move would provide the second bathroom we lack here at Falling Downs, that hardly seems an adequate incentive to move into town. For what it's worth, I'm content to pee off the porch while gazing at the stars, with the coyote choir providing the sound-track, for as long as I can get to the stoop without a wheelchair ramp!

Did the golden age of rock & roll ever produce any superstars who were NOT drug addicts?

None come to mind. Ted Nugent maybe? But he was only a superstar for maybe a year and a half around the time of the Cat Scratch Fever tour. For the past fifty years his only paying gigs have been at GOP events. The serious superstars, Clapton, Beck, Page, Bowie, Prince, SRV, Steve Earle, MJ, Joe Strummer, Joe Perry, Keith... and you could pretty much work your way through the music industry "A" list and well into the B,C, and D lists and never find a somebody not tainted with the addiction curse. Don't get me wrong. I don't think there's anything new under the sun about musically inclined folks wanting to get high. Then again, I'm living proof that getting high will not in and of itself kickstart your music career. I can only hope Liebe Mutti never sees this post, but maybe that's because I was never sufficiently addicted! I never really got beyond pot and beer, whereas successful musicians in the golden age started with heroin and took it from there. Maybe that's why most of them are dead and I'm not!

Pot-addled hillbilly goes global

Back in March I noted in a post that the View from Falling Downs had passed 3 million views, and it had taken 15 years to get there. Six months later, it's racked up another 3 million. Not bad numbers for a blog with three followers and a warning for readers with every post! Somebody suggested maybe that's why people read it. If it's worth censoring, maybe it's worth reading! Anyway, pretty sure half a million views per month ain't anywhere near Lambo country, and besides, I'd have to get onside with those community standards to monetize, which prospect holds no appeal for me. The pot-addled hillbilly has definitely gone global though. Check out the top ten audiences over these six months, ranked in order: USA, Brazil, Singapore, France, Bangladesh, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, and "other." That last category makes up over half (1.64 million, to be precise). The pot-addled hillbilly is everywhere!

France in flames as Micron determined to go out in blaze o' glory

Spent some time watching live video feeds from various French cities this afternoon. The headlines proclaiming the unrest is just "student riots" are highly misleading. Sure, there were scenes of riot police clubbing kids who looked barely in their teens, but big picture, you had a wide swathe of unions and civil society orgs and fringe political outfits and just about every other constituency in France not part of Little Napoleon's 14% approval rating. The reporting at CBC avoided any mention of the real reasons for the unrest; severe cutbacks to social spending in favour of a vastly increased military budget and the promise of perpetual financial propping-up of rump Ukraine. There's a reason for that. The top nabobs at our official propaganda network are all too well aware that's exactly the course we're on; France, Germany, and numerous other NATO-EU states will no doubt see street riots before we do. There is no question we're looking at the same fate. The Carney regime has embarked on a clear program of crippling social spending by committing at least a trillion dollars to military spending over the next fifty years. PM Carney's got polling approval numbers never before seen in Canada. African dictators are in awe! He has a solid plan. We'll pay down our debt by selling our critical infrastructure to US hedge funds! Most of those African dudes did that long ago, but no worries... elbows up! But back to France. I can't see how Li'l Napoleon is gonna get the toothpaste back in the tube at this point. How long are the cops gonna attack retired firefighters protesting their shrinking pensions before they realize they should be pounding out the politicians instead!

Cost of Quebec City - Windsor high-speed rail corridor has already doubled, years before construction can even begin

The original estimates, cooked up by the Liberal Party in 2024, clocked in at 60 billion CAD. The revised estimate, released today by the Parliamentary Budget Office, doubles that number! And remember, it's the earliest of early days, and opposition to this project hasn't begun to coalesce. Frankly, like most of Carney's pipe(line) dreams, they make for splashy announcements, but most of this stuff will never see the light of day. They do, however, serve to reinforce the illusion that all these fab projects somehow represent our stand against The Ugliest American of all time. You know, the guy who demanded we more than triple our "defence" spending from 1.4% of GDP to 5%! Yup, that's the guy we're defying with a trillion in deficit spending for military and another T for infrastructure. PM Carney has put our country on the same path to war our NATO allies are speeding down. Germany, France, and UK have all announced spending cuts to social programs to facilitate massive boosts to military spending. These NATO allies are people our useless legacy media claim Carney wants to forge an anti-Trump alliance with. Ya, I don't know how retarded you'd have to be to swallow that shit. An anti-Trump alliance with a bunch of impotent clowns known to refer to Mafia Don as "Daddy?"