'Playtime with Stormy' ends badly for Trump

Finally, a measure of justice! Frankly, I thought this case was even dumber than the real estate fraud case, if such a thing can be imagined. That time around, the prosecution’s chief witnesses were bankers who testified they made money in their dealings with Trump and looked forward to doing business with him again in the future. That was a slam dunk… guilty as charged! This time, the star witness was a convicted perjurer and self-confessed crook. The case hung in the balance between which lying liar was telling the truth… another slam dunk! Although I read the many thousands of words the Globe & Mail spent covering this crime of the century, (well, I might have skimmed a little bit) I’m still not clear what the crime was. Near as I can tell, Trump or his accountants (it’s hard to imagine Donny J sitting in front of a leger with a calculator) tried to fob off a payout to a hooker as a business expense. Like that’s never happened before! In any event, in this case the book-keeping hanky-panky that followed the pants-off hanky-panky was a clear threat to American democracy, a delicate flower if ever there was one! What I don’t get is why the brainiacs at the Globe thought this case was so essential to their readership. Today’s paper featured an all-caps banner headline; JURY FINDS TRUMP GUILTY. They whet our appetite with eight paragraphs in the front page and then devote almost the entirety of p.4 to the story. Almost. There’s about two inches at the bottom with an unrelated story, obviously of little significance. While the whole world was busy watching the Trump trial, Sleepy Joe gave our plucky Ukrainian allies the green light to use US missiles on Russian territory. What could go wrong?!

Notes from the twilight of Western civilization

Our internet provider here at Falling Downs shut us down for “routine maintenance” today. That’s one way to break your screen addiction, at least for a few hours! I used those hours to do some yard work. Must have pulled four wheelbarrow’s worth of weeds out of the flower gardens today. That’s not as grand as it sounds. Our flower gardens transitioned to weed gardens years ago, so four wheelbarrows is nothing. It was a beautiful sunny day, and as I was putzing about with the pruning shears and the rake, I was also cooking up a rant about the state of affairs we find ourselves in. Dress Codes In my hippy-dippy youth, I made a point of rebelling against dress codes. Then, when I did a mid-life career transition to teaching, I found out they had a dress code at the school board. I discovered this when I innocently wore a t-shirt to work with a Moosehead Beer logo on it. That was one of my favorite shirts, a relic from when I worked at Saint John Shipbuilding and Moosehead sponsored our slo-pitch team. A couple of cases of beer for every game and free t-shirts all around! The VP took me aside and explained no-one, student or staff, could wear apparel festooned with beer company logos. Or any other liquor purveyor. And no political messages or obscene language, of course. That was 1995. Fast forward 30 years, and my sources tell me beer logos, cannabis logos, and obscene language are all a matter of a child’s right to self-expression. If a child wears a “Fuck Trudeau” t-shirt to class, well… human rights! Is there any dress code left at all? Yes! Apparently the local school board has drawn a red line. Genitals and nipples must be covered. Cover them with your Fuck Trudeau shirt if you like, but your goodies gotta be covered. We have standards! Education We haven’t just tossed out the dress code, we’ve also dispatched any kind of educational standards to the dustbin of history. We’re currently experimenting with dumbing down the math curriculum again, mainly because certain BIPOC groups fail too often (hint; it’s not the People of Colour from Asia). Dumbing down education has downstream consequences. It puts us at a disadvantage vis-a-vis societies where they don’t dumb down math. Like Russia and China for example. I’ve read there’s more advanced math in a Russian high school curriculum than there is in a four year degree at MIT. That’s why Russia has hypersonic missiles that work, and America doesn’t. That’s why Biden just put a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs. We can’t compete. Defence Very much related to our declining education system, is the downward spiral in Western military capability. While the US military (and those of the me-too nations) spent the last ten years fine-tuning their pronoun protocols (human rights, you know), our adversaries were fine-tuning their missile technology. Ukraine had been an eye-opener when it comes to evaluating Western military technology in actual battlefield conditions. We can’t compete. Social Cohesion To have any hope of achieving a viable future, you need most of the populace believing most of the time that things are getting better. That’s the only way to keep a diverse population all rowing in the same direction. You can bleat “diversity is our strength” all you want, but if your diverse population all agree that we’re in a housing crisis and a health care crisis and a cost-of-living crisis, where exactly is the “strength?” Incompetence of the ruling technocrats We are governed by experts. Our actual elected parliamentarians are smart enough to know they don’t know what they’re doing. That’s why they spend billions on expert consultants. How’s that going? The general crapification of everyday life Look around you. Tent cities in parks and on major streets. Open drug use, and I’m not talking about doobies. People shitting in the street. Rent for a 1 bed flat starting at 2k per month. You’d have to work about four min wage jobs at once to make that affordable. A decent quality of life? More and more, young people, all across the diversity spectrum, are coming to the conclusion that you can’t get there from here. Meanwhile, they’ve got a housing crisis in China, too. In their zeal to provide decent housing for every one of their 1.4 billion citizens, the commies overshot the mark and have hundreds of thousands of new apartments sitting vacant! But at least there’s no tent cities!

The Christian roots of Israel's genocide in Gaza

Israeli ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, has had multiple opportunities to make grandiose and over-the-top presentations at that august body in recent months. Those presentations have been wildly theatrical and generally devoid of any content that would in any conventional sense be considered diplomatic. Which leads me to ponder who might be the target audience of his absurdities. Surely he knows nobody in Israel, outside the most fervent true believers in the settlements, takes him seriously, nor does anyone in the world at large, so what’s the point? The point, I concluded, is that he’s talking not to Israelis, and not to the world at large, but to the “Christian Zionists” in America. I’ve read various estimates of their numbers, which range from 10 to 30 million. That’s one hell of a voting block in US politics. That’s a voting block well worth pandering to if your goal is to keep Uncle Sam’s chequebook open no matter what atrocities you are committing in Gaza. I’d always assumed that Theodore Herzl was the progenitor of Zionism, and that “Christian Zionism” emerged only after evangelical fundamentalist Christians latched onto Herzl’s teachings because they jibed with their own interpretation of the Bible. Turns out I was wrong. In the course of researching Christian Zionism I ran across the name "William Hechler." Turns out that twelve years before Herzl published “The Jewish State,” Hechler had published “The Restoration of the Jews to Palestine.” Hechler was a German-born Anglican clergyman with extensive connections to the royal families of Europe. It was he who introduced Herzl into that milieu. The concept of a Jewish state in Palestine originated not with Herzl, but within post-Reformation Protestantism. By the late 1800s, Hechler was just another in a long line of Christian advocates for a Jewish state in Palestine. That’s why Zionism finds fertile ground in America today. While Joe Biden is neither an evangelical nor a fundamentalist, he, a Catholic, nevertheless proudly proclaims himself a Zionist. That’s why he’s programmed to look the other way when the Chosen People are annihilating the seed of Amalek, as Bibi has framed it. That’s why at least 30 million Christian Zionists in America will continue to support the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Blame Christianity!

Netanyahu will be sacrificed to save Biden's election campaign

My expectation when I watch Gaza news on Fox-CNN-MSNBC-CBS is that everything will be built around the “Israel is defending itself” narrative. No matter how many women and children suffer and die, Israel is defending itself. Let’s talk about 7 October instead. To get anywhere near the other side of the story you’d have to watch Al Jazeera. So imagine my shock when I put on CBS News 24 this morning and saw the same footage of the aftermath of a missile strike on a crowded refugee tent encampment in Raffa that I’d already seen on Al Jazeera. Rows of tents aflame, and the screams of mothers desperately fighting to save their children. This is a radical departure in how this war has been presented. The word “terrorist” didn’t come up. There was no reference to 7 October. No discussion of antisemitism on campus, and not so much as a nod in the direction of Israel’s right to defend itself. What’s going on? Here’s what’s going on. Genocide Joe has told Bibi many times, and very publicly, not to go into Raffa. Joe’s, and Uncle Sam’s cred more generally, have taken a beating since Joe won the oval office. First it was pictures of Afghan civilians dropping off fleeing USAF planes as they finally gave the country back to the Taliban. Then we were going to crush Russia’s economy, cripple Putin with sanctions, and give our Ukrainian flunkies whatever it takes for as long as it takes to finish Putin off once and for all on the battlefield. The entire world is watching America score one own goal after another. Until very recently, when Uncle Sam said “jump,” the world asked, “how high?” Now it’s just NATO and the EU who still jump, and even there you can sense things aren’t what they used to be. The rest of the world, ie the vast majority of it, sees Uncle Sam as a spent force, an Empire in decline. A hegemon who can be defied with impunity. And there’s Netanyahu, brazenly defying the President of the USA in front of the whole world! Here’s one last chance to grab back a little credibility on the world stage. Joe didn’t mind enabling the genocide that’s been unfolding over the last seven months, but dammit, if Bibi’s gonna make him look like a fool… goodbye Netanyahu. He was becoming a bit of a liability anyway. He may be the Greatest Leader since Moses, and a personal friend for decades, but all this genocide-war-crimes-ICC-ICJ talk gathers quite a putrid odor. When you’re going into an election it might be good to distance yourself from that, while also showing yourself a tough guy not to be trifled with. Having US networks show you unfiltered coverage of Bibi’s handiwork in Gaza is part of the move against him. He won’t be PM much longer.

Dandelion salad with wild strawberries; free food at Falling Downs

I was doing some grounds-keeping here at the Falling Downs estate the other day when I came across some dandelions with three-foot stems. Normally, I only encounter dandelions when I’m cutting the grass, and they never grow much taller than the deck height on the lawnmower. That lawnmowing shit is something that’s troubled me for years. Every time I’m pushing that mower back and forth across the two acres of lawn, I’m saying to myself, get some goats or something. Not only will they keep the lawn trimmed; you end the summer with plump, market-ready goats! One of these years I’m gonna act on that insight. Keep a few around till Ramadan, and I hear they’ll bring two or three hundred bucks a head off any gas station parking lot in Brampton! Plus, they trimmed your lawn for free! But I digress. I’d heard over the years that dandelions are an edible weed, and apparently folks also make tea and wine out of the plant, but I’d never before ingested dandelion, not as tea nor wine nor salad. So on finding these giant dandelions I also found their giant leaves. These were in a separate league from the dandelions we used to feed the rabbits my folks kept. “Kaninchenfutter” we called it. Long story short, I’m standing there with these giant dandelion leaves in my hand, and suddenly I’m seeing a salad. I mixed up some olive oil with white vinegar and tossed in the shredded dandelion leaves. I must say, that’s a perfectly edible plant! It’s a little bitter compared to your typical romaine or iceberg. The leaves are somewhat sweeter than the stems. You could toss in pretty much anything from your regular salad ingredients; tomatoes, onions, feta… hell, how about strawberries? There’s an abundance of tiny wild strawberries growing in the lawn right now! Just imagine! A dandelion salad with wild strawberries! And all for free!

How Sunday School almost ruined my life

Both of my parents had their childhoods shattered by the WWII. War often makes people find religion, and my parents were no exception. By the time they hooked up and had me, and washed ashore at Pier 21 in 1956, they were still people of faith. Therefore, church on Sunday was a regular thing growing up. The actual church would shift from time to time. There was a Baptist church at the corner of York Road and Victoria, where we were regulars when I was still small enough to stand on the pew between my parents. Then we suddenly moved churches. Found out years later it was because the leader of that particular flock had been busted in a bath-house raid in Toronto. We tried out a couple of other flocks and eventually landed at the Bethel Baptist Church in Fergus. By then I wasn’t standing on the pew anymore. I’d get shuffled off to the Sunday School section after the opening hymns and general announcements. “Please don’t forget to congratulate Mr. and Mrs. Bervie on their 50th wedding anniversary. We will be having cake and refreshments downstairs after the service” sort of stuff, and that was the signal for the youngsters to vamoose to the Sunday School classrooms. The classrooms were segregated by gender, of which their were only two at the time, so obviously, I’d get the boys class. Every week we’d get a Sunday School paper, and every week there was a feature story that always followed the same template. The protagonist was inevitably a young man (pretty sure the girls’ classes didn’t get the same paper) who fell into a life of sin. He soon found himself taking drugs and drinking alcohol and having promiscuous sex with skanky women to whom he was not wedded in holy matrimony. Sometimes the protagonist even joined a gang! Then, week after week, the protagonist would have his “Jesus” moment. He hit bottom, realized the error of his sinful ways, accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior, and became a boring dweeb just like me! How ironic! Every Sunday I resolved to be that guy, before he found Jesus! He obviously had way more fun than I did! I have no idea why he’d want to be me, but I for sure knew why I wanted to be him! Booze! Drugs! Gangs! Skanky women! It’s those Sunday School papers that inspired in me an ambition to become a great sinner! Alas, I never made it much beyond occasional drunkenness.

Whatever happened to decent pensions?

I’m one of the lucky retirees whose pension covers my bills. Apparently we’re a minority these days. How did that happen? Shouldn’t everyone who worked most of their life be entitled to live their alleged “golden years” in dignity? You’d think so. But you’d be wrong. If all you’ve got going on pension-wise is the Old Age Security and the Canada Pension Plan, your maxing out around $2k/month pension income, and that’s only if you religiously paid into those plans during your working years. Lot’s of folks, the self-employed, the precariously employed, and those in the gray economy, never did. I’m not sure how that $2k is supposed to provide a dignified life given the cost of everything now. It can theoretically work for people who bought a house 40 years ago and live mortgage free, but if you had one bad hand in life, such as illness or divorce, you’re screwed, unless you have a private pension. Those were once ubiquitous. Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, most unionized factory jobs offered defined-benefit pensions. That wasn’t something you gave any thought to when you were a 18 year old punk at Budd Automotive. We were convinced we had job security for life, and I recall a UAW slogan, “30 and out,” that was about negotiating a defined-benefit pension after 30 years of service. That would have allowed me to retire with a full pension at age 48! That all seems rather quaint in hindsight. Alas, as the 70s drew to a close, the reactionary politics of Maggie Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were on the rise. Union workers were spoiled crybabies who needed to face reality. They were too expensive. And their defined-benefit pensions were simply an outrage. They were an existential threat to the very capitalist system that underpinned our way of life, and indeed, democracy itself! Defined-benefit gave way to the defined contribution pension plan. That’s if you were fortunate enough to have any pension plan at all. Defined-benefit pensions became extinct in the private sector, but persist in the public sector. Why is that? Anti-union propaganda wants you to believe it’s because unions are too powerful. The reality is the public sector unions generally represent workers whose jobs can’t be offshored. You can’t scare teachers or cops or civil servants by threatening to send their jobs to Mexico or China, unlike manufacturing jobs. I had the dumb luck to snag a teaching career just as the tide was going out in Canada’s industrial sector. Scored a defined-benefit pension just as Budd and GE and a bunch of other union shops I’d worked in were closing up and shifting work offshore. I can afford to pay my bills and live life. The ranks of those who can’t are ever growing. Poverty, housing precarity, marginalization are their lot in life. Groceries from the food bank and a sleeping bag under a bridge are not much of a reward for folks who’ve done their best to be productive citizens for 65 years or more. It’s not that we couldn’t afford to help them; it’s just that we have limited resources and must prioritize our priorities… F-35s, warships, nuclear submarines, Ukraine…