The future is sand, my friends

I had no idea. Been so consumed by the impending WWIII and the global famine that’s just around the corner, not to mention that lingering pandemic, the climate emergency, or, God forbid, a Trump comeback, it was inconceivable that we could be made even more depressed. But I was watching Al Jazeera for a spell, and by golly, apparently we are on the brink of a global sand shortage. Don’t laugh. Apparently sand is the most-utilized commodity on earth after water. You can’t build a road or an apartment block without it. Anywhere. Now that I think of it, I remember being on holiday in Myrtle Beach, thirty years ago, and reading something in the local paper about sand being barged in from Florida or somewhere. So I guess the problem has metastasised. Seems to me this isn’t so much a matter of an absolute sand shortage, but rather, there’s lots of sand, but no easy way to get it where it’s needed. I’m guessing Goldman Sachs has field teams staking out the vast expanses of desert in Saharan Africa and the Gobi desert. Sand merchants will corner the market and become the new billionaire class. The future is sand, my friends.

I guess that's one way of getting more women into corporate management

I see where Goldman Sachs managing director Michael DuVally has crossed the floor, so to speak. That's right; you can call her Maeve.

That gives GS an immediate boost in women-in-management numbers without actually having to go through the hassle of making a new hire.

It's a constant refrain in feminist circles that women are under-represented in senior management and on corporate boards. Let's think this through. There must be a lot of guys well into their corporate careers who were so busy getting their MBAs and their law degrees and then spent years of hundred hour weeks establishing their careers before giving any thought to their sexuality.

Now they're into middle age and a corner office. They can relax a little... and maybe listen to that nagging voice they've spent decades stifling, the nagging voice that tells them they were born into the wrong body.

We're never surprised when such revelations come from the world of arts and letters, but it's rare in the world of Wall Street. If Maeve ignites a trend, gender equality in the managerial ranks could be closer than we think!

High tide at Falling Downs

We've been having some screwy weather in these parts. Could that be a symptom of "climate change?"

There's no doubt winter is lingering. We woke up to -10 C this morning, and spring officially arrives this week. Last week we had a couple of days of rain. That washed out the Burgess Sideroad and also brought Indian Creek up four or five feet. For a few hours on Saturday afternoon the water was actually going over our bridge instead of under it, which we've only seen once before in the ten years we've been here.

I remain what might be called a climate change skeptic. According to the experts, ten or twelve thousand years ago Falling Downs would have been under a mile and a half of ice and snow. Obviously a lot of climate change happened long before humanity went wild with the fossil fuels. Climate is constantly changing whether we burn fossil fuels or not.

Which is not to say we shouldn't be trying to minimize our carbon footprint. Tread lightly on the earth, and leave things better than you found them has always been my mantra. But when you see outfits like Goldman Sachs promoting carbon tax solutions to our alleged climate crisis... that's always struck me as the equivalent of an obese person paying an anorexic not to eat.

I think there's a certain amount of unacknowledged hubris involved in the climate change debate.

"We are the master species and we can kill off all life on earth."

Well, I doubt it. I don't think Mother Nature gives a shit one way or the other if our species survives or not. Here at Falling Downs we've got pre-historic snapping turtles climbing out of the marsh every spring to lay their eggs in our driveway. They were doing that a million years ago and they'll be doing that a million years after we humanoids drive ourselves to extinction. They've survived cataclysmic volcanic eruptions and asteroid strikes.  They roamed the earth in the age of dinosaurs and they're still here.

My favourite environmentalist isn't Rachel Carson or David Suzuki. It's Wiebo Ludwig.

Wiebo was what you might call a "direct action" kind of environmentalist. He was also a fundamentalist Christian. Oddly enough, neither Christians nor environmentalists have ever embraced the guy.

So we had the water going over the bridge and then the rain turned to snow and things got colder. The water level dropped over the course of Sunday. By late Sunday night, when I went out on the stoop for a breath of fresh air, you could hear the ice sheet cracking and collapsing all through the marsh and down to Bass Lake. It's an eerie sensation. A dead quiet night punctuated with the groans of fracturing ice and sudden crashes.

But, it's forecast to warm up this week. Another couple of weeks and I'll be able to put the canoe in across the way and paddle down to Bass Lake.


By then, the snappers should be digging their way out of the marsh again.

Toronto hasn't figured out that Frum and Bannon live on the same side of the tracks

There's quite a few well-meaning liberals in Toronto soiling their undergarments at the prospect of the vile Steve Bannon beshitting their fair town. Today the Sunday Star had an opinion piece by Amira Elghawaby and the indefatigable Bernie Farber, who are aghast that Bannon is coming to The Munk Debates to take on David "Axis of Evil" Frum.

That's bound to be as fake a "debate" as any in history, but both these guys are seasoned media veterans who know how to put on a show. Frum long ago abandoned the Canadian liberalism that he imbibed with his mother's milk, to embrace the siren of American Exceptionalism. He's a hard-right, free-market, America first, (right after Israel) kind of Republican.

Bannon is a Navy veteran who joined Goldman Sachs after an honourable discharge. He worked his way up the corporate ladder, and walked away as a Vice President of Goldman Sachs.

He was rich. He was bored.

Rich and bored... a toxic combo if ever there was one. Some guys handle it OK. They spend their time boinking bimbos, snorting pharmaceutical-grade coke, buying sports teams, and commissioning super-yachts. It keeps them busy and the general public is relatively unscathed.

Other guys, unfortunately, think they need a different kind of hobby. Politics.

These are the guys who crave the spotlight, and Big Media certainly has provided Bannon with plenty attention. Here's a backgrounder on Bannon in Forbes. The guy owns a slice of the residuals from the Seinfeld show, for fuck's sakes!

All this press he gets is just free advertising for his political consultancy. He's another Podesta or Manafort. He's a hustler flogging a product. Isn't that what made America great?

Steve Bannon is every bit as much a devotee of American Exceptionalism as is David Frum.

They just have different marketing strategies.

The strategic thinking behind Trump's cabinet picks

Looks to me like Trump is using the same strategy in choosing his cabinet that an aspiring middle-school teacher would use in managing a classroom.

Pick out the leaders of the various cliques, get them aboard, and then let them deal with the naysayers and upstarts. Once the factional leaders have pledged allegiance to the alpha dog, the grumblers will eventually shut up and fall in line.

Works in the classroom. Will it work for Trump?

That's one reason Trump's cabinet is full of GS alumni. Wall Street may be reluctant to take direction from Donny J, but when there's a half dozen former GS heavy hitters in the Trump cabinet, at least you know Wall Street will be paying attention.

So if the decree comes down from the top of Trump Tower that there's a one-time window for corporate tax avoiders to repatriate their off-shored billions at a low rate, those corporate types will be far more amenable to hearing that message if it comes from their GS brothers than if it came from the tax-evader-in-chief.

Same goes for General "Mad Dog" Mattis. By all accounts he's a highly respected guy the length and breadth of the military establishment. When the order comes down to close half of America's offshore military bases, the folks being downsized are going to be way more amenable to the message if it comes from General Mattis than they would be if it came from some unruly NYC condo developer with fake hair.

One thing that I'd wager on with 100% certainty is that, unlike Barry O and W before him, Mr. Trump will never be a prisoner of his cabinet.

Time will tell.

Countdown to Armageddon

 It's been busy times here at Falling Downs.

Bubby took another spill recently and therefore the Farm Manager has been splitting her time between the farm and Bubby's place in town. The main thrust of the time in town is to convince the fiercely independent Bubbinator to just say "yes" to a home.

The next day Hillary went viral with her denunciation of "fake news." Yup, apparently it was fake news that crippled her campaign.

It wasn't that Trump thoroughly out-worked her. I mean she was doing one event every other day and he was doing four or five every day. Trump may be a silver-spoon twat, but you gotta admit the man has a work ethic. Not only that, but he actually had stuff to say that resonated with a lot of folks.

Trump was the first political contender to ixnay the "free trade floats all boats" bullshit that has been conventional wisdom for the past quarter century. If nothing else, we should thank him for that.

But back to "fake news."

We gotta be on the look-out for fake news. It's everywhere all the time, especially once you're out of the certified truthiness neighbourhoods out there in the world 'o news. You know what I'm talking about. Play it safe; get your news from reputable news sources like WaPo and NYT and you'll be good. Get your news from some dodgy punks at Global Research or Paul Craig Roberts' website, and... well, obviously you're imbibing Putin's propaganda wholesale.

So on Friday the mainstream news was chock full of fulminations about those dastardly Russian Olympians who have been making a mockery of WADA and every wholesome convention of fair play in sports. Russians are cheaters, was the message. And of course, Russia being the dictatorship that it is, Putin bears personal responsibility for every Russian infraction of the rules of fair play.

I actually had some things to say about that on Friday. Unfortunately, Friday was consumed by the demands of the Farm Manager's holiday party at her day job. Yup, the FM has a day job. The cash flow here at Falling Downs is not sufficient for the lifestyle she is accustomed to, especially in those years when the OPP Air Force flags our herb garden. Even though we keep the herb garden on the neighbour's property, this is the kind of thing that has a very negative effect on the cash flow around here.

So instead of writing a thought-provoking blog, I had to go to a party where grown-up middle-aged types were playing "party games." People were voluntarily dabbing vaseline on their noses so they could safely carry a cotton ball across the room. Because if you could do that faster than your competition, you won the game!

Get the fuck outta here. Some of those folks are actually interesting people who I wouldn't mind talking to. Watching them carry a cotton ball across the room stuck to a gob of vaseline on their nose does NOT interest me.

In any way whatsoever.

Next day, the Russian hacker shit hit the mainstream news fan. Yup, unnamed sources have informed the Washington Post that the CIA has determined that the Ruskies interfered with the US election in favour of Trump!

Oh!

My!

God!!!

It's true then! Even as those Podesta emails were ripping the curtain away from Hillary's all-out campaign to undermine Bernie we were being side-tracked into thinking the scandal was not about the Dem hierarchy fucking Sanders, but about the "fact" that the Ruskies were behind the leaks!

That gosh-darned Putin!

So I was about to post a pithy blog about that, but had to defer it because I had a holiday family function to attend in Waterloo. My dear Uncle Werner, who used to be a professor at the University there, started this tradition a quarter century ago. Alas, he is so far ahead of me on the Alzheimer Highway that I don't even have his tail-lites in view anymore, and he hasn't attended his own tradition in years, but nevertheless I make an effort.

Even though it was six hours of driving through various levels of blizzard for a bowl of chilli I'm always glad I made the effort. You get to see those elders who are still more or less with it. And some who aren't.

You get to catch up with the youngsters who are racking up massive student debt at the finest universities in the land.

And you get to catch up with your peers who parent those kids and whose parents are not 100% anymore. It's usually a very therapeutic undertaking. You come away with a new appreciation for your situation. I mean, you can be on the brink of bankruptcy, have seventeen different medical procedures pending, but holy shit, at least you're not in cousin so-and-so's shoes...

That makes six hours of driving through blizzard conditions for a sandwich and a bowl of soup eminently reasonable!

But it did cause a further delay for the next blog post.

So here's what I've been wanting to say ever since Hillary made her anti-alt-news speech last Thursday.

The so-called fake news sites have a long way to go before they catch up to our mainstream outlets in the disbursement of fake news. When you get fake news from InfoWars or Breitbart, who cares?

When you get fake news from the Washington Post or the New York Times, bad shit happens.

Like the war on Afghanistan.

Like the war on Iraq.

Like the destruction of Libya.

Like the current fiasco in Syria.

In every case our honest and reliable mainstream news media delivered up a fully baked loaf of bullshit as though it was "real" news.

The Washington Post and the New York Times peddled the most egregious bullshit as though it were true.

Millions believed them.

Millions died.

So now we are expected to snap to attention because WaPo publishes a story attributed to "anonymous sources" in the CIA who tell us Putin interfered in this election?

Get the fuck outta here!

Yes, interfering in the democratic process is a vile thing, and ya, maybe Putin's minions have engaged in such dastardly deeds.

Maybe.

But take a gander at the home page of the National Endowment for Democracy. Right there on their home page they boast about interfering in the democratic process in over 90 countries!

And if you want to talk about fake shit, how do you like their claim that they are a "private, non-profit foundation."

Bullshit!

It's a 100% fake NGO that gets 100% of its financing from the US government! NGO stands for "non- government organization." How is a non-government organization a non-government organization if they get all their funding from the government?

Anyway, these are the sorts of folks who are running scared at the thought of a Trump presidency. If they're scared, they must know something about Trump that I don't.

Not that there isn't plenty to be scared of. I mean how many billionaires and generals and GS alumns can you pack into your cabinet and still pretend you're the saviour of the little people?

The countdown to Armageddon is on.

Some thoughts on the warmest winter in memory

So this is global warming?

I was kind of OK with this narrative about how fossil fuels are destroying the climate, till I heard that some sharpies at Goldman Sachs had figured out that something called a "carbon tax" would help set things right.

That's where the over-polluters buy carbon credits from lesser polluters, and it's all good because GS will be having their sticky fingers all over this little global carbon credit exchange thingy.

Sounds like the fat kid paying the anorexic kid hush money so he can keep gorging.

This has in fact been the softest winter in memory, at least so far. That could change yet.

By contrast, the last two winters were among the harshest ever.

Which proves nothing.

Which is why you need to scratch your head when you hear that the Rumpelstiltskins at Goldman Sachs have figured out a way to stop climate change.

After a thorough review of the peer-vetted sources, I've come to the conclusion that climate has been changing as long as this little marble of misery we inhabit has had a climate.

For instance, I'm told that here in southern Ontario, ten thousand years ago, the snow was piled up miles deep.

There must have been a whack of climate change to make all that snow melt. And it melted way before the fossil fuel era and the industrial age.

So there's nothing new about climate change.

The CIA does venture capital?... who knew?!

So I'm reading my Globe and Mail this morning, and there's this fascinating story about a company in Vancouver called D-Wave Systems. They're working on something called "quantum computing." That's gonna allow scientists to tackle "massively complex problems that are now unsolvable."

Cool!

Then I read this;

D-Wave has raised $174 million from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Goldman Sachs, the US Central Intelligence Agency, and venture funds. 

That's right there on page B7 in today's Globe.

I had no idea the CIA was so into science!

Rumpelstiltskin's new spinning wheel

This story at Bloomberg sketches out the latest scam that the usual suspects (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Barclays etc.) have devised in order to further enrich themselves while contributing absolutely nothing to society at large.

It seems to me a tragic waste that so many fine minds are bent to constantly inventing and refining dubious get-rich-quick schemes. It's all fun and games till we have another Long Term Capital or an Enron on our hands, at which point we all get to pay to clean up the mess.

That's why the think tank here at Falling Downs has long advocated for a 100% tax on non-productive economic activities.

Cut out this nonsense and use your money and your brains to do something useful.

Goldman Sachs' latest straw-spinning trick

You have to admire those guys for their chutzpah.

When GS bought Metro International Storage five years ago the Detroit warehouse network had 50,000 tons of aluminum in storage. At 48 cents per ton per day that's daily rent of $24,000.

Today they're storing 1.5 million tons for a daily rent of over $700,000!

Before Goldman, it took six weeks for an order to be delivered. Now it takes well over a year. Clogging up the supply line has also caused an across the board price increase even if you never deal with GS.

Rumpelstiltskin is spinning in his grave!

Net benefit to society? Zilch... although we all get to pay a little more for aluminum products.

Net benefit to Goldman Sachs? Somewhere in the range of $250 million a year.

A 100% tax on non-productive economic activity would help steer the geniuses who dream up this stuff towards doing something useful.

Pot-addled hillbilly blows Goldman Sachs out the door with 350% gain

And not just Goldman Sachs, but Bridgewater and Bain and all the rest of them.

I wrote this on September 28 last year;

No matter how you look at it RIM is a buy in the current price range.

The price at the time was a smurf-hair over six bucks. The price at closing today was a smurf-hair under fifteen.

That's about 110% in just over three and a half months.

Or about 350% annualized.

Sweet!

Hillbilly blogger scoops Goldman Sachs analysts by six months

Here's today's story. Goldman Sachs gnomes declare RIM a buy.

Here's what you read at The view from Falling Downs six months ago. Beer-swilling pot-head organic farmer declares RIM a buy.

Luckily I took my own advice and accumulated a healthy long position over the summer, way before those Goldman Sachs smarty-pants types even started reading my blog.

Crop circles reveal Mark Carney is the Anti-Christ!

Don't let the calm demeanor fool you...

I was out there in the corner field, driving the Ford 4000 around in circles looking for the crop circles, and whoa!..

There they were!

Now I have to admit they were more properly "snow circles" rather than crop circles, due to the fact that the crops are under a foot of snow at the moment, but no matter.

I swear, when I got off the tractor, I could clearly make it out:

                 CARNEY=ANTICHRIST

Yup, right there in the corner field. Come out and have a look if you don't believe me... Oh nevermind. It's snowing again.

You won't see a damned thing by the time you get here.

Mark Carney; another Goldman Sachs alumnus rises to the top

Canadian Mark Carney has been anointed the next governor of the Bank of England.

Carney spent more than a dozen years at Goldman Sachs, and can therefore be relied upon to intuit the expectations of that firm's corporate culture.

In the big leagues they don't ask "what would Jesus do?"

Instead, they ask "what would Goldman Sachs expect us to do?"

And we expect Carney will know.

A good part of the reason why Carney looks good has little or nothing to do with the man himself. As his Wikipedia entry notes in passing, Canada's relatively robust transition through the current recession has far more to do with her "risk-averse fiscal and regulatory environment" than with anything Carney did or didn't do.

Canada was risk averse before Carney took the helm of the Bank of Canada and it will be risk averse after he leaves.

And that's a good thing.

Memo to only democracy in Middle East; you are no longer the only democracy in the Middle East

The Globe and Mail had an intriguing profile today about a Canadian professor working in China, who is arguing that democracy is not all it's cracked up to be.

Hello! That's been painfully obvious ever since Hitler was democratically elected in 1932.

But none of that has impinged on Israel's UK ambassador's eagerness to provide this op-ed to the Telegraph today.

Ambassador Taub trots out the usual shibboleths about terror here and terror there. Hamas is a terror group, don't you know. Not only that, but they've borrowed from the Hezbollah lexicon and, oh my God, even improved upon it!

As if such a thing is even thinkable...

The entire op-ed is designed to stoke fear in the diaspora Jewish community. It's a continuation of the age-old "we have no partner for peace" gambit.

People who are serious about peace make it a point to talk to their enemies. That guy who wants to wipe you from the map? That's the guy you need to talk to.

And the old "only democracy in the Middle East" tale is getting a bit stale too. Hamas, the people Taub can't talk to, because they don't like him, were democratically elected in 2006.

Whatever else they are, they are also the democratically elected government of what Charles Krauthammer has called a Palestinian state.

So Israel, once the only democracy in the Middle East, has lots of company now. Not only Hamas, but thanks to Arab Spring, their Muslim Brotherhood brothers on the other side of the Red Sea.

Labels like "terrorist" and "democracy" have by far outlived their shelf life.

Let's get serious about peace. Forget the name-calling and sit down face to face with both Hezbollah and Hamas.

Mayor Bloomberg visits Goldman Sachs to deliver hugs and best wishes

Mayor Mike went a-calling on Goldman Sachs today. Seems the banksters are a bit down in the dumps because of that nasty farewell letter one of their departing VPs got into the New York Times the other day.

In case you missed it, Greg Smith told the world what the world already knew; the folks at Goldman are more interested in their own bottom line than they are in yours.

I'm shocked that anyone on the planet thinks this revelation is newsworthy.

Then again, I'm a bit behind the spirit of these times.

I was shocked that Romney made it out of town without tar and feathers after that "corporations are people too" episode.

I'm shocked that anyone even considers voting for Newt Gingerich under any circumstances.

I'm shocked that Sheldon Adelson keeps shoveling good money into a lost cause.

And I'm shocked that Mike Bloomberg would want to go on the record as a Goldman Sachs fan.

Doesn't he have to be re-elected at some point?

Mario Monti: most important man in the world

Actually, when Time magazine put him on their cover, he was only the "most important man in Europe".

Well, if this blog had a cover, we'd fix that caption. Obviously an oversight by the folks at Time.

So why is this Goldman Sachs advisor and un-elected Prime Minister of Italy the "most important man in Europe/the world?

Damned if I know. Seems to have something to do with his links to Goldman Sachs.

After all, they're the mega-bullies who've engineered the current economic crisis, and they're also profiting most handsomely from it. I shouldn't say Monti was not elected. Goldman Sachs elected him to be the democratically elected leader of Italy.

Getting their boy on the cover of Time must be something of a coup.

But I can see why Berlusconi had to go. His insatiable appetite for teen tarts was becoming a bit of an embarrassment.

So now Mario has his big test in front of him. He has to tame those commie-infected Italian labor unions. You know the ones. All about a living wage and paid holidays and the usual smorgasbord of union demands.

Enough of that!

Global stock markets rise as Greece sinks into despair

The Greek parliament today passed the latest round of so-called austerity measures in an attempt to soothe the international community's concerns about their ability to repay the latest rounds of bail-out loans.

"International community" in this case seems to mean mainly the Germans. There are a number of banks in Germany that are going to have some difficulties in the event Greece defaults on her sovereign debt.

There are of course a large number of opportunistic investment banks and hedge funds in America that have been buying up Greek debt at a steep discount and now clamor for the Greeks to pay up.

That's a pretty sweet deal, when you think about it. You buy Greek government bonds at forty cents on the dollar and within the year blackmail the Greek government into paying back the face value. That's certainly going to top up the bonus pool at Goldman Sachs next year.

And the folks paying those bonuses, the working poor and the pensioners in Greece, will have absolutely no say in the matter beyond the sporadic street protests we've seen so far.

But global markets went up today, so I guess it's all good.