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!

Never surrender

I think it starts when you hit 60. That’s a hard number. Deep inside everybody “celebrating” their 60th, is a 16 year old wondering what the fuck happened. And it only gets worse from there. There’s a lot of societal pressure to see yourself as “old,” a “senior citizen,” etc. They lure you in with so-called “senior’s discounts.” Who doesn’t want to save five bucks on a haircut? Succumb to that, and you’ve embraced the senior citizen identity. Which I have, to be perfectly honest. I do like to save five bucks on a haircut… and it pays to visit Shoppers Drug Mart on seniors day. But there is a dark side to getting old. You get old. For the first time in your life you’re following your bowel movements the way you once followed your favorite sports teams. Go Leafs go! Then there’s the testosterone thing. Your testosterone factory has pretty much shut down by the time you’re a pensioner. There’s a lot of guys who are in denial about that. They take pills for that “special moment.” Ya right. You wake up every morning of your life with a boner, and now you have to take a pill? That doesn’t make a “special moment” for anyone who remembers their youth. But we want to delude ourselves with the fantasy that we still “have it.” While it’s inevitable that one make allowances for the passage of time, “old age” catches up to you sooner or later if you live long enough. That in itself is a cause for celebration! I’ve already passed the life expectancy I had at birth… party like it’s 1955! Nobody actually celebrates old people in our culture. My understanding of Indigenous societies is they revere and respect their elders. They’re way ahead of us in that department. In our society, elders are viewed more as a profit centre for nursing homes and pharmaceutical companies. But here’s my point; just because you’re old, doesn’t mean you have to act like it. My role model in that respect is my dear father. When we first arrived at Falling Downs, nearly twenty years ago, he was well into his seventies. We’d invited Mom and Dad up for an al fresco luncheon. They brought the fluffy white buns from Bunsmaster in the city, and we provided the cold cuts. I glance out the kitchen window while I’m putting things together, and there’s Dad, a good thirty feet up a pine tree, hacking away with a pruning saw because some of those branches might eventually impede the power line. You can’t stop the clock, and you ain’t gonna get younger no matter what pill you take. But you can keep climbing trees and living your life. That’s my shout-out to Dad this father’s day.

Bats in the attic, snakes in the cellar

It's all going to hell at Falling Downs. Our cat, Doublewide, is what's known around here as a "Drimmie cat," in honour of a woman who, while too cheap to have her cats fixed, is in line to inherit a substatial wad. For many years she had a steady stream of kittens to donate to locals, and in due course we adopted our share. Alas, some of the dogs we used to have were not pussy-friendly, and we were losing them almost as fast as we adopted them. Doublewide is the lone survivor. She was an awesome mouser in her heyday, and eventually expanded to chipmunks. The summer before we got Big-lips Bruno, she was bringing us chipmunk offerings on a daily basis. Unfortunately, she was seriously traumatized when we introduced the mastiff into her life. It didn't help that Bruno gave every indication he'd like to eat her the first time they met. We didn't see her for about six months, and that winter the chipmunks took over the house. We beat back the invasion, and while it took the better part of a year, Bruno and Doublewide have made their peace. Thanks to the half-dozen spray-cans of expanding insulation foam, we no longer have chipmunks in the house. Instead, we have snakes. That's right! Doublewide has been keen to go down to the cellar for months, and we couldn't figure out why. Today she brought up a baby snake, dead. Obviously, she's been stalking mama snake, but found her a bit daunting as prey. The babies? Not so much. Meanwhile, I suspect the bats are back from their winter caves on the escarpment. Once again, they have returned before I got around to sealing the attic. Hey, I was busy rebuilding a bathroom. Give me a break!

Celebrating the vultures

No, I'm not celebrating the vultures like Eddie Lampert and Bill Ackman, vultures who swooped into Canada to destroy the lives and livelihoods of tens of thousands of working class Canadians. They've been amply celebrated in the pages of Canadian buisiness press already. The vultures I want to celebrate are the turkey vultures. I think we got a clan of them roosting in the barn. Like everything else at Falling Downs, the barn is falling down. It's an old-school homesteader era barn, and it's a shame to watch her go. At the same time, farming isn't done the way they used to do it when that barn was built. You had a large hay-mow up top, and usually a granary, and down below, you had space for cattle. Today the hay is stored in those massive plastic-wrapped sausages that festoon the countryside. Apparently it's way more nutritious if you wrap it in plastic than if you store it in a barn. The main reason for restoring an old barn today would be to use it as a wedding venue. I've thought of that. Rent out the barn for ten grand a night instead of fifteen hundred for the year. Alas, I'd have to sink in half a million I don't have in order to turn that falling down barn into a wedding venue. But I can enjoy the vultures without doing a damn thing! They are a beautiful bird to watch soaring. Where there's one there's usually an entire crew not far away. They float through the thermals and are one of the most graceful birds you'd ever want to see. They get a bad rap because they eat road-kill, but that's a great public service too. What a blessing it is to appreciate the beauty that surrounds me!

Traditional spring grass fire a blazing success!

It was a sunny and quiet morning, and I thought it a good time to burn the old newspapers and flyers and cardboard that's been accumulating in the pantry. I got a little more than I bargained for.

Somehow my little fire got out of the fire pit and burned off a good half acre of old grass. I'd been tidying up some debris that fell off the old pine in the front yard, and when I checked on my garbage fire ten minutes later, well!

I rounded up a couple of buckets and kept the flames away from the barn, but other than that, it didn't have anywhere to go and eventually petered out. It had pretty much run its course save for a couple of smouldering fence-posts, when a young fellow who lives up the road stopped in and introduced himself. He's a member of the Intertownship Fire Department and wondered if I'd like him to radio for a crew. By that time I'm sitting in a lawn chair with a beer in my hand. I've heard the landowner gets a whopper of a bill when they're called out, so I declined the offer.

Now I've got "replace burnt fenceposts in corral" added to my to-do list. I've pencilled it in for summer '26.

Bald eagles at the bird feeder

We keep a couple of bird feeding stations here at Falling Downs. They're quite popular over the winter months, attracting a lot of little stuff that can't be bothered to fly south; chickadees, swallows, sparrows, woodpeckers... but that's nothing compared to what a guy down the road gets at his bird feeder.



Here's a picture from a couple years back.

Bald eagles aren't going to bother with suet and sunflower seeds. Buddy says the secret to attracting the big birds is... animal guts! He's one of the few people locally still running an old-school trap-line, which provides him an ample supply.

He says they're particularly partial to coyote guts.

The view from Dorcas Bay

From time to time me and the Farm Manager get to pondering about cashing out of Falling Downs and getting a place on the water up the Peninsula.

We saw a place today that would be economically feasible. On the Lake Huron side, not too far from Dorcas Bay. Bit of sand, bit of rock, perfect spot for grandchildren to come and spend the summer.

Then the FM messes it all up by pointing out that we have no grandchildren.

She's got a point there.


Where did we go wrong?

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

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

I couldn't agree more.

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

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


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

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


Change is long over-due.

Deep State War Dogs salivating over prospects of Iran attack

Looks like the greatest leader since Moses has come up with some incontrovertible evidence that, nuclear deal or not, Iran is just months away from a nuclear weapon. Yes, just like they've been months away from a nuclear weapon since Netanyahu's first stint as PM a quarter century ago.

The entire expose on Israeli media had a strong whiff of Colin Powell's magic vial about it, but nevertheless, it was good enough for Bibi's sock puppet in the White House.

Today's PR stunt was exquisitely timed. We're just a few days away from the anticipated renewal of the Iran Nuclear deal by Washington. You can kiss that goodbye.

Both Trump and Netanyahu have their plates full with domestic scandals that they're more than keen to distract their respective electorates from.

Netanyahu needs to win back the diaspora, where the faint of heart, like Natalie Portman, have looked askance at the footage of IDF snipers gunning down unarmed Palestinians.

And Trump is wallowing in praise for allegedly finessing the DRK stand-down.

Oh look, he's a man of peace!

Ya right!

Perhaps there's been a trade-off made... we give up on Korea but all hands on deck for the imminent destruction of Iran.


The Farm Manager has family in the Holy Land. Might be a good time for that extended visit to Falling Downs they've long threatened.

Every piece of shit tells a story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This one will eclipse them all.

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

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


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

Phun with Phil

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




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

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

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



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

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

Individually, each of those dogs loved her.

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

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

Thirty-six hours

It's been something of a roller-coaster here at Falling Downs.

Thursday night, after I'd stepped out for my bed-time toke, Chloe the Cat slipped out the door as I was slipping in.

That's not like Chloe. She'll maybe venture onto the front stoop on a sunny afternoon, but that's about it.

I didn't give it much thought, but reminded the Farm Manager to let the cat in before she retires for the evening.

Friday morning comes and there's no Chloe in the house. Apparently she was nowhere to be seen when the FM went to let her in.

We spent the morning looking for her, around the house, the garage, the barn, calling her name and shaking a bag of cat treats.

Nothing.

Chloe is somewhere around twenty years old. We braced ourselves for the worst. I spent the afternoon researching "behaviour of dying cats."

There's a vast trove of info out there about how ageing cats are wont to steal away and die alone when the time has come.

We had obviously come to that time.

I must admit we both got a little misty-eyed contemplating the demise of our beloved companion of twenty years. She could be, depending on her mood, aloof, cloyingly affectionate, distainful, or openly hostile. All
within a fifteen minute span.

Now she was gone... oh how I wished I could have rubbed her belly one last time.

Too late for that.

Even as tears flowed freely, I was able to discern the outlines of a silver lining.

We didn't have to pay $350 for the vet to put her down.


So we'd made peace with the fact that Chloe was gone to her reward. I was sitting out on the stoop around midnight last night, well into my cups, having that bed-time toke, when I thought I heard a meow.

When you're half in the bag and you just fired up a fattie you don't believe the first thing you hear, and I didn't.

Then I heard it again.

And again.

I got up and wobbled off in the general direction of the meowing.

It was coming from the barn. It briefly occurred to me that I should inform the FM of our good fortune but I thought better of it.

This could be a hallucination, triggered by grief and wishful thinking and good weed.

When I got closer to the barn I actually saw her, the dead cat I'd been mourning moments before. Then she ducked into the barn.

The barn here at Falling Downs is of course falling down, so we don't venture in there without good cause. This was good cause. By then I'd alerted the FM and between us we retrieved our dear Chloe.

We celebrated well into the morning!


We woke up just in time to see the Lundys off-loading their cow-calf pairs in the barnyard. The cows had wintered at their home farm, but were now set free to graze in our lush meadows for the summer.

It's one thing to see wee calfs romp and frolic and kick up their heels. It's quite another to witness a 1400 lb. cow do the same. They were just delighted to be here!

We were even more delighted to see them here.


And tonight, twenty-year-old Chloe caught a mouse.

Why I drag my feet

I drag my feet over all kinds of shit.

Just as a for instance, I've had my doctor hounding me about a colonoscopy for years. Ain't gonna happen. There are just some things you don't have to know. If my bowels are indeed consuming themselves from the inside out, what good does it do to know this?

Sure, you could "take measures."

That tends to involve hugely invasive medical procedures that will a) make the payments on my doctor's BMW for several years, and b) completely destroy my quality of life.

So I'll take the quality of life, and the quality of mine is pretty damned good, thank you very much.

Just this afternoon me and the Farm Manager were sitting out in front of the barn, out of the wind. Every now and then a car goes by, but most of the time all you hear is the wind in the trees and the birds singing to one another.

Once in awhile an airplane flies over. I've used the Flight Tracker website enough now to know roughly where they're coming from and where they're going.

The northwest to southeast flights are usually heading to Toronto from points west in Canada.

The southwest to northeast flights are usually heading to Europe from somewhere in middle America. From Chicago to virtually any European destination takes you right over Falling Downs. So does Los Angeles to Zurich or London. Those are the ones where you wonder who's on that airplane.

It's not just passenger jets flying over. This afternoon I saw a red-tail hawk swing by with a couple of small birds in hot pursuit. They were mightily pissed, and Mr. Hawk was doing his best to evade them, without a lot of luck.

Quality of life.

Not much in my Globe and Mail today. Paul Waldie brought me up to speed on that French election. Apparently the far-left fringe candidate Melenchon is a communist and wants to align France with Venezuela. That's the take on the French election from Canada's newspaper of record.

I pity the poor folks who rely on the Globe for their news. They don't actually send Waldie to Europe to "research" this shit, do they? That was about as lame a take on the French election as anyone could possibly imagine. An unpaid intern with an interest in politics could easily put together a more informative article from a computer terminal in their local public library in Toronto.

If you want some insight into the election in France, don't read the Globe and Mail, read this instead.

Chloe is the real reason I drag my feet. She's the cat I got out of the clinic where Karla Homolka worked. She's got to be twenty years old by now. She has outlived all the dogs we've ever owned; Buddy, Charlie, Gus, Roxy, Peaches... and she's on track to outlive the two hounds at Falling Downs today, Boomer and Lucy.

For the first fifteen years of our life together she studiously avoided me. The last few years she's really warmed up, to the point where she follows me around from morning till night. She's literally under my feet every moment of the day.

I drag my feet to avoid stepping on her.

Tomorrow we're off to the city to move Junior out of residence at U of T. He's studying economics...

Where did I go wrong?

PostMedia cuts unpaid interns out of the loop

The think tankers here at Falling Downs have long held that most PostMedia content is the product of unpaid interns working feverishly out of a Burlington Timmies; working feverishly but working for free, just to get a few more lines on their resumes, so that when the time comes they can score one of those imaginary paying jobs in the modern media world.

I think they're even more out of luck than we suspected.

We were perusing the Google news aggregator this afternoon when we chanced upon this story at the Edmonton Journal.

When you click on the story, you get a press release from CNW Group, a Cision Company. Yup, you see "Edmonton Journal" in the hot bar but you've got a press release from a private PR company in front of your eyes.

Hmmm....  look around a bit more and you'll soon discover that the Edmonton Journal story cum CNW press release is actually this press release from the Government of Canada!

Now, does that mean CNW, a Cision Company, actually wrote the Government's press release?

I'd guess yes.

But the other thing we must note is that those unpaid interns weren't even allowed to change a single word before it found the light of day under a PostMedia title!

It's bad enough that the pirates who hijacked Postmedia have been shitting on their professional journos for six years, but denying the legions of unpaid interns the opportunity to tweak a press release goes beyond the pale. I mean, they're working for free already!... give them a little something to put on their resumes!

Meanwhile, guess who's NOT working for free?

If you guessed that cabal of money-grubbers around PostMaster Godfrey, you'd be right!

Shoot out at Falling Downs

OK, I know the Farm Manager just lost it.

It happens.

People just lose their cool.

But little did I realize how profoundly she was bitten by the Hillary bug till she pulled the AR 15 out of the gun cabinet.

Last thing I heard was "fuck you and fuck Donald, and I hope you go to hell," which was followed by a short burst from the AR-15 which, while aimed in my general direction, succeeded only in blowing the hummingbird feeder off the front porch.

I guess I shouldn't make light of that. I was sitting on the front porch at the time.

Anyway, she's sulking behind the barn right now. Steps out to let off a burst from the AR every couple of minutes. I've got the H & H side by side at my side. I loose a round in the general direction of the barn roof every ten minutes or so, just to keep her on her toes.

I'm shooting to miss, and I sure hope she is too.

After all, she's the best thing that ever happened to me.

Sure hope she gets over this need to kill me.

General John Allen (retired) takes crap in "love trumps hate" celebratory punch bowl at DNC

Things have been a little tense around Falling Downs the last couple weeks. The Farm Manager insists on watching the conventions on CBSN, aka "the HRC network."

She's largely fallen for the mewling pro-Hillary propaganda that CBS has smothered us with this week.

So thank God for General John Allen!

Suddenly all that "indispensable nation" shit seemed to roust her out of her stupor.

Yup, General John showed us why all those PNAC types have been defecting from the GOP to the Hillary camp. If you wanna make sure that America remains the most indispensable and most special and most powerful nation in the family of nations, you gotta vote for Hillary!

Gotta go... Chelsea Clinton is making her speech...

How do dogs decide where to shit?

The hounds here at Falling Downs are mighty particular about where they drop their doggie doo-doo. They've got a half acre of trimmed lawn at the edge of a hundred acres of cow pasture here, so guess where they wanna go? Right, the trimmed lawn.

Same when I walk them. Me and the hounds do two and a half kilometres up the Burgess side-road  every morning. There's about fifty feet of trimmed lawn in front of McKay's place, and another fifty feet of trimmed lawn in front of Carter's place. So on a 5K walk, they've got a total of about 200 feet of manicured lawn vs. 4.99 kilometres of regular ditch wherein to do their business.

So where do they crap? On that minuscule patch of manicured lawn of course!

It's even more aggravating when we take them into town. We like to take them to the park out by the water treatment plant in Wiarton. That's a pretty sweet little spot; limestone cliffs all around you, the blue waters of Colpoys Bay in front of you, and a tiny patch of trimmed grass on the edge of a vast boreal forest.

So where do they shit? On that tiny patch of trimmed grass of course!

And they'll shit there even if they've already befouled McKay's lawn and Carter's lawn only an hour before!

What's really puzzling is that they'll do this even though they've proven time and again, on days we're out and about, that if they have to, they can go twelve hours or more without taking a shit in the house.

Here's my theory; in a dog's mind it's just more fun to shit where it maximizes the inconvenience to your so-called master.

It's part of the K-9 Passive Resistance Movement.

About the impending Trump presidency

Some folks incorrectly see me as a Trump advocate, and I am therefore asked quite often how I think a Trump presidency might play out.

Donald Trump is not the kinda guy who is ever going to have his life scripted 24/7.  The think tank here at Falling Downs figures Trump is gonna delegate the business of the nation to the usual bureaucrats, and then he's gonna be playing a lot of presidential golf.

I'm hoping to get in a round or two myself!

Happy Mother's Day!

Seeing my dear Mum these days involves at least five hours of driving for a round trip. That's a lot of driving for a 45 minute visit.

It's well worth it though. After all these years I still love Mum, as much as ever. Or Mutti as we knew her back in the day.

She's had some health issues these past couple of years, and I was happy to hear that she's getting ahead of that stuff! She looks and sounds great!

Then she updated me on my brother's medical situation. He blew an intestine recently and was kind of in the grey zone for a bit - we didn't know if he was going to heaven or staying here a while longer. Looks like he's made up his mind to stick around, and he's making the best of it.

Rock on, brother!

Then she gave me the update on one of the relatives back in the old country. An uncle of mine.

Great guy. I've met him maybe half a dozen times. Very congenial.

So my Mum is telling me this story, about how Onkel is perhaps heading down the Alzheimer Highway, but meanwhile, his companion of 25 years, who happens to be at least 20 years his junior, (there's a mystery quadratic equation in there somewhere folks... tell me what it is and I'll send you a Falling Downs coffee Mug) has been suffering a non-stop array of ailments... she needs a kidney... and she has some kind of cancer... and, quite unrelated to the cancer, she's going in for brain surgery next month...

ENOUGH ALREADY!!!

By then it was time to go.

My mother is enjoying relatively good health and has her wits about her. That's my present on Mother's Day.

Happy Mother's Day, Mutti!

PS Anybody who writes in about that mystery quadratic equation, don't forget to include $45 for shipping and handling for your free Falling Downs coffee mug.

Thanks.

Koch Bros. prove yet again that just because you inherit great wealth doesn't mean you're smart

These must be trying times for Dave and Charlie.

It was not even a year and a half ago that the Koch boys proudly announced that they had set aside almost a billion USD to determine the outcome of the 2016 election. Check it out here at the New York Times.

How is that going for them?

Well, thanks to a loud-mouth NYC condo promoter, not that great.

Seems a lot of regular folks took umbrage with the idea that a couple of rich boys would brag about the fact that they intend to buy America's next election. That single story in the NYT probably did more to kick-start the campaigns of both Bernie and Donald than it did for any candidate associated with the Kochs.

Contrary to what Mittens told the public in the last campaign, corporations are NOT people too, and an overwhelming majority of ordinary people in America are disgusted with the thought that the political class is so out of touch that they can go around making such idiotic statements.

Or announcing that they've got a spare billion lying around to buy the next election.

So the Koch bros have been looking on in horror as the Manhattan Motormouth steamrollers over their bumboys. Within the past few days you've seen the erratic desperation from their team.

Cruz and Kasich combining forces to stop Trump?

We saw last night how that brain-wave worked out.

But not to worry. Ted Cruz just pulled the ultimate Hail Mary out of his ass; announcing Carly Fiorina as his running mate! After he pretty much lost even the longest of long shot chances at the GOP nomination!

Hey Dave and Charlie, listen up! I know you've got a well-paid army of "political consultants" designing strategy for you, but isn't it time to admit they're a bunch of retards and show them the door? I mean announcing Carly as a "running mate" at this point in the game is ludicrous. What are they running for? The Canadian border?

Anyway, the think tank here at Falling Downs can give you way better advice than what you been getting, and I'm willing to bet we'll save you a bundle too.

Looking forward to hearing from you!