Globe and Mail advises parents to install trampolines on condo balconies for their children

There's a lot of hysterical nonsense in today's Globe and Mail, most of which concerns the US election, "the most consequential since 1864," according to contributor and New Yorker stalwart Adam Gopnik. 

What's so consequential about it? 

Whether Trump or Biden prevails on Nov. 3, the American people can be assured of remaining the only modern society without public heath-care. They can be assured of the continued emaciation of the middle and working classes. Income inequality will continue to rage out of control. Military spending will continue to rise, employment precarity will increase, and the homeless crisis will get worse.

In short, the world will continue to be a bed of roses for the billionaires and their minions, while the rest of us double down on the fight for the hind teat.

So why do Gopnik and the other never-Trumpers featured in the Globe's opinion section find this election so important? Because it's the last best chance to turn back the clock to the pre-Trump golden age of the American Empire, when the USA unambiguously led the Nations of Virtue in the battle for freedom and human rights against the forces of darkness; China, Iran, Russia, and the handful of failed states who bob in their wake.

In other words, they're pining for the good old days; Hiroshima, Korea, Viet Nam, Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria... the glory days when American might determined what was right.

Yessiree, it would be tough to top the foolishness in the opinion pages, but Mathew Hague pulls it off on page p3. The sub-head of his story, on coping with kids in your condo apartment in the time of covid, caught my eye; "climbing walls in bedrooms, foldaway desks with chalkboard, and trampolines on balconies... how some are making the most of their condos for their kids."

I'm not always a big fan of "expert opinion," but I'm willing to bet that 100% of pediatricians would not recommend putting a trampoline on your high-rise balcony for your children.

In this case, I'm with the experts.

About those Trump boaters

 If you're not up on the Trump boat parades, search that on YouTube. They're everywhere.

The thing that strikes me is that a lot of these folks seem to defy the media stereotype of "Trump's base." Generally speaking, life doesn't gift you a fifty foot SeaRay as a reward for being a moron.

For these folks, who are bright enough to know that Trump is full of shit most of the time, their Trump support is not about Trump. It's about giving the finger to an establishment elite they feel are out of touch with the America they live in. That would be the elite at the helm of virtually all cultural institutions, from the academy to the media to Hollywood and beyond.

Saw a T-shirt the other day; TRUMP 2020  Because FUCK YOU again.

Trump boaters vs. Biden voters...  I'm with Michael Moore on that one.

White House 2020 puppet show off and running!

Everything before now was just warm-up laps. Now that Kamala is aboard, it's showtime!

In the Blue corner, Lunchpail Joe, man of the people! Champion of American Exceptionalism! Staunch friend and ally of big money, the military, and Israel.

In the Red corner, actor, author, and serial bankrupt Donny J, man of the people! Champion of American Exceptionalism! Staunch friend and ally of big money, the military, and Israel.

On the face of things, there's not much to choose. But that's why the US election cycle has become a multi-billion dollar industry; to convince the rubes that it makes a difference who they vote for. Thousands of hacks and flacks and carny barkers of all stripes are billing PACs and pols on both sides top scale to foster the illusion that your vote matters.


That's what democracy has become in America.

Biden still close to choosing running mate

This headline at the CBC has been up for a week and a half now; Biden close to choosing running mate...

A week and a half?

Is he getting any closer?

Why is it so problematic to find a suitable running mate? After all, the odds are good that this running mate will, sooner or later, become POTUS. Probably  sooner, given what we've seen of Joe recently.

So what's the hold-up?

I guess Joe did winnow the field when he tipped it had to be a person with a cervix, or whatever we call women these days.

And if you're heading up Tokenism Trail anyway, you might as well pull out the stops and go for a Black person with a cervix.

Remember, this Black person with a cervix has to be "presidential" material.

How can that possibly be a problem? Take a look at what passes for "presidential" these days.

It's not like we've set the bar particularly high.

The smart money seems to be tilting towards Susan Rice. Nobody ever mentions the other Black person with a cervix named Rice, Condi. I don't understand how she can be overlooked.

After all, how many Black people with a cervix have ever had an oil tanker named after them?

That's gotta count for something.

You ain't black, but you smarter than we thought

One of the foundational beliefs underpinning anti-black racism in America is the widely held notion that African-Americans aren't up to par, intellectually speaking. That's what came through loud and clear with Biden's claim the other day that those black folks who can't decide between Biden and Trump are not authentic black people.





Joe Biden, friend of Black America, with Jesse Jackson



Donald Trump, friend of Black America, with Jesse Jackson


At least he looks like he's enjoying himself when he's hanging with Donny J.

Jesse Jackson would know what happened to incarceration rates of black Americans after the Clinton-Biden crime bill of 1994 was passed into law. Here's an easy to understand graph.



What the 2020 campaign needs is a choice other than Biden or Trump. Ya, I know there's Dr. Jill Stein, but she's just a little too white and a little too egg-heady to capture the public imagination.

I spent some time this afternoon waxing nostalgic over Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition. Jackson came within a whisker of becoming the Dem candidate in '88. Alas, he was thirty years ahead of his time. As a historical footnote, Joe Biden was one of the candidates that Jackson beat that year.

We've seen twice in a row Mr. Democratic Socialist cave to the anti-socialist anti-democratic DNC. The logical thing for him to do, and what Jackson should have done in '88, is run as a third party candidate.

Alas, Bernie won't, and time has passed Jesse by. America needs the values of Jackson's Rainbow Coalition more than ever.

Biden's comments on The Breakfast Club, delivered with all the self-righteous presumption of a plantation master, gave Len McKelvey, aka "Charlamagne tha God," a national profile in non-black America.

How does "Charlamagne tha Prez" sound?

Donald Trump, disposable doofus

I've said it before, but it bears repeating; the decision making powers of President Donny J don't extend too far beyond whether he's gonna have KFC or Micky D's for lunch.

Real decisions are made elsewhere.

Between COVID-19 and the collapse of the stock market, the odds of Trump winning a second term are becoming increasingly remote. But what a bonanza his four year term has been for the folks behind the curtain!

Relations with Russia are completely down the shitter. Ditto China. The Iran deal is out the window. The screws are tightening on "rogue" states like Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

Meanwhile, for the Likud crowd, every day has been Christmas Day since Trump's inauguration. Whether it's gifting Golan, whacking Soleimani, or moving the embassy to Jerusalem, they love Santa Trump in the Holy Land.

So sit tight for a few months, and America should be back to "normal," to the great relief of the American political establishment. They won't roll back any of Trump's deeply counterproductive decisions, but at least the Orange Ogre will no longer distract the world with his tweets.

Instead, they'll  celebrate a "safe" president, a guy with a thirty plus year record of screwing over working class Americans, a guy who appears to be a few laps ahead of me on the Alzheimer Speedway.

The fix is obviously in, and nobody raises any serious questions about it. How exactly did Buttigieg go from winning Iowa to endorsing Biden less than a month later? How is it possible for the Dem leadership race to be over after the first three primaries?


Yes, Trump was an aberration. A guy with zero political experience, he'd been a Clinton funder and all-round pal since Bill was running for governor in Arkansas. The Clintons thought it might be fun to see their pal stir up shit on the Republican side, and whoopsie, Trump grabbed the ball and kept running.

The rest, as they say, is history, but don't worry; there'll be plenty more history coming down the pike soon enough.

Buttigieg exposed!

Well there's an oopsie!

There's a whole lotta top-drawer campaign consultant types billing over-time right now just brainstorming on how to pin the Iowa shit-show on Putin.

The flaws in the process are being attributed to an app designed by a software company owned by one of Buttigieg's billionaire backers. That's almost too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence, wouldn't you think?

Civil war in the Deep State?

Things aren't going that well with Impeachment Palooza.

I had it pegged correctly when I wrote DNC on brink of spectacular own goal back in September.

Not only is Biden's Ukraine hanky-panky coming out, various mainstream media outlets are now focusing on the Biden family's China hi-jinx.

The Biden candidacy is toast.

I strongly suspect that we're on the cusp of a Trump rehabilitation initiative at the MSM.

The Dems aren't doing a very good job of sand-bagging Bernie. Bernie v. Bloomberg is indeed a fight for the soul of the Democratic Party, but why should the billionaire donor class worry about a billionaire v. billionaire showdown between Trump and Bloomie if they've already got one of theirs in the White House?

Although Trump has been widely castigated for his alleged pro-Putin agenda, the actual record is that the military-industrial complex's billionaire owners have seen a rising budgetary tide lift all their boats under Trump.


Sooner or later, in a Trump v. Bernie showdown, they're gonna go with Trump, and they'll marshal all their resources to make it happen.

How the Democrats can make America great again

How about a Bernie-Tulsi ticket?

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

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


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

From Russiagate to Ukiegate

If you thought Russiagate was thin gruel, brace yourself for the shit-show that's going to hog the headlines for the next two years - Ukiegate.

Ukraine is by any metric a failed state. It was a failed state before the US-sponsored Maidan uprising, and its downward spiral has only accelerated since. Not only is it a failed state, it was deliberately failed by its plutocrats in the interest of lining their own pockets.

It's hard to understand the thought process among the DNC brain trust. The first casualty of Ukrainegate will be the Biden election campaign. It will be impossible to investigate Trump's alleged malfeasance without getting lots of splatter on the top Dem contender, something already reflected in the latest polls.

That will leave Warren as the likely Democratic Party candidate for 2020, an unhappy prospect for big-money Dem donors. At that juncture even billionaire never-Trumpers will be holding their noses and voting for one of their own rather than for somebody whinging about income inequality and a wealth tax.

It's also hard to understand the reckless abandon with which the Democentric media has climbed aboard this issue. If they really hate Trump as much as they profess, why are they working so hard for his re-election?

Donald Trump hurt my feelings...

I was pleased to see a little bit of a Social Dem caucus forming around Bernie after the mid-terms. If the Democratic Party is to gain any traction going forward, it'll only happen once the old guard shuffles into the sunset. Until then, there's no particular reason for anyone of a progressive bent to vote Dem.

Six months in, I'm underwhelmed. Instead of keeping the focus on their progressive ideas, they've been reduced to mud-wrestling Trump in the quagmire of identity politics. Sorry, but being offended by Trump's race-baiting hyperbole isn't going to be much of a vote getter in 2020. They're quickly making themselves irrelevant.

In this they have the full connivance of America's mainstream media, the proprietors of which are more than happy to sideline anyone espousing real health care reform and serious taxes on unearned wealth. And indeed, they much prefer endless coverage of outrages, real and imagined, to reasoned discussion of critical issues.

If the Social Dem Caucus is to make good on it's potential, they need to get over their hurt feelings and shift the focus back to electoral politics and actual issues. Trump's tweets need not be an issue, if you don't make them one.


Otherwise, they're just helping ensure a Trump victory in 2020.

CNN stumping for Trump

Check this out. The headline is a little misleading as the article isn't so much about Trump voters as it is an itemized list of reasons why most voters might want to consider voting for the Orange Ogre. It's certainly not something you'd expect to find on the CNN home page, since the network works hard to position itself at the "progressive" end of the media spectrum.

What's going on?

My hunch is that the folks who own America's mass media, the super-rich and the corporate class, are beginning to suffer sphincter spasms at the sheer volume of socialist-sounding rhetoric emanating from the Dem side. Wealth tax? Single-payer health care? Free college? 90% marginal tax rate on incomes over a million?!...

Oh my God!!! We'll all be running around dressed in Mao outfits if these loony leftists have their way!

And it gets worse, if such a thing can be imagined... how about that Tulsi Gabbard and her talk about reduced military budgets and shutting down overseas army bases!?

Trump's treasonous flirtation with Bad Vlad is nothing compared to that!

We're a year and a half out from the election, and the engines of democracy are starting to rev. The billionaire class who own the media are desperately looking for a Dem candidate they can get behind, one who doesn't talk all that commie shit. They can't bring back Hillary. Biden is tanking. The only Dems creating any buzz with the under forty crowd are all spouting leftist homilies...


Buckle up for a great show!

Happy Easter!

Sorry Mom, I didn't make it to church this year. Didn't make it to synagogue for Passover either, if that's any consolation. My God-fearing agnosticism is multi-confessional.

I did however find time to go out to the garage and tinker with the Ninja. She's purring like a kitten and waiting for her spring ride, just as soon as the weather clears up a little.

The big news this Easter weekend was the Tax March. That's the latest spasm of the anti-Trump movement, die-hard Hillary fans who have yet to concede last November's election.

Come on folks - even Fareed Zakaria acknowledges that those 59 Tomahawks have rendered Donny J Presidential!

Yup, he's got blood on his hands. That's what America looks for in a leader.

What caught my eye in the news coverage of the Tax March was the logos of Dem Party astro-turf outfits all over the place.



If you think that tax march was some kind of grass roots thing that just happened, think again. Go to taxmarch.org and check out their partners page. Holy cow, that page could keep a Soros-is-the-antiChrist conspiracy theorist busy for months!

What baffles me is that all these groups are invariably described as "leftist," yet they've all been co-opted by the Democratic Party. I'm a long-term observer of US politics, and I'd have to say I didn't notice much of a leftward tilt under eight years of Obama... nor under eight years of Clinton, for that matter.

Mind you, I'm a long-time small "c" commie and what I understand by the word "leftist" may mean something else. I suppose you could be relatively leftist as long as you only compare yourself to those to the right of you on the political spectrum, but has there been anything to the right of the Democratic Party in the last twenty years? At a minimum the label should imply the prioritisation of the interests of working people over the interests of capital.

Maybe this watering down of labels and their meanings is all part of the long term bamboozlement of the working class in America. Kind of like how "red states" means Republican states. In the rest of the world the colour red is unambiguously associated with the political left. Only in America has that been successfully turned upside down.

With the Ninja shaking off the winter hibernation the only vehicle in the fleet still giving trouble is the little Ford 4x4. A friend was telling me the other day that could be stale gasoline. After all, it's been parked in a snow-drift all winter.

Possibly, but the Mustang 50 was parked one snow-drift over and took only a half hour on the battery charger to come alive. The Ninja wasn't fired up once all last year, so the gas in the tank is two years old and I've got it running.

Can't be stale gas.

I think that almost universal ignorance of what is "left" is what allowed Donny J to waltz away with Hillary's election. That MAGA schtick worked wonders for a class of marginalized Americans who wanted so desperately to believe that the ersatz billionaire was going to set things right for them. Little did they realize...

But here's the good news. Trump tapped into massive voter disaffection with the political establishment. So did Bernie. Both men eventually sold their supporters down the river. Those people are still there, and there's no reason to think most of them, both the Sander's supporters and people who voted for Trump, are going to be anything other than pissed off when the 2020 White House contest gets serious.

With the right candidate, maybe then Americans will get the change they can believe in.

I picked up that Ninja for cheap just a few weeks before my 60th birthday. I was in denial. That old chestnut about how inside every sixty year old there's a sixteen year old wondering what the fuck happened is truer than true.

So I bought a motorcycle. Next sunny day I'll take her for a blast around the block, which happens to be a ten mile loop with a lot of long straightaways. Spring ain't truly sprung till you get that first rush of 90mph wind through what's left of your hair...

Happy Easter!