Happy New Year from Falling Downs

I have to say, that year kinda sucked. But you have to make the best of it. We had a white Christmas but it's looking pretty green for the new year. There's so much melt-water the creek is near its all-time highs. You can hear the creek from the front porch. Right now we're fighting to stay awake till the midnight hour. It's a losing battle once you hit senior citizen status. It's coming down to setting the alarm so you can wake up and crack the champagne. Happy New Year!

Trump tax filings reveal rich people pay no taxes

Well there's a shocker! Who knew? Lose an imaginary billion here or there, and that's written off against real income in perpetuity! The US tax code truly is a thing of wonder. After all, it was tax lawyers who wrote it and revise it, ensuring it meets the needs of the best and the brightest who naturally rise to the top in the American meritocracy. Here's what's extra special. Legions of thousand-dollar-per-hour and up legal wizards have been duking it out over Trump's tax filings for about seven or eight years now. Donald Trump made billable hours great again!

Montana not a libertarian utopia after all

There's a lot to be said for Big Sky living. The views are amazing. There's hunting and fishing right out your door. Eight-year-olds can open carry... well, not sure that's true. But here's what I found out today. I'm watching this Montana real estate porn, and they're trying to find a property for a guy who plans to do a lot of snowmobiling. They show him this beauty place in the mountains. Nothing but deep powder for miles. The perfect world for a $40k mountain sled, and they say you can get five or six months of sledding up in the hills. Then the real estate agent says, "You're really close to the trails here. You don't have to trailer very far at all." Trailer? WTF? Around here you don't trailer anywhere. You can live in a condo in town, fire up your sled in the parking lot, and off you go! They don't believe in gun control, but you gotta trailer your sled to the official snowmobile trail? Get outta here!

Journalism or propaganda?

On Wednesday Global Affairs Canada issued a news release, in concert with the governments of Sweden, Ukraine and the UK, condemning Iran and demanding justice for the victims on flight PS752, the Ukrainian airliner shot down by Iranian missiles minutes after take-off from Tehran on January 8, 2020, resulting in the deaths of all 176 aboard. The news release runs a couple of hundred words. On Thursday The Globe and Mail reported on the news release. The story starts top left of the front page and gives you another dozen paragraphs on page 4. In a couple of thousand words it sheds no light on what may have transpired that day, but dwells on the suffering of the victims’ families and the odious malevolence of the Iranian regime. So what else was going on in Iran on January 8? While the Globe story doesn’t mention it, that was a dangerous day in Tehran. The Iranians had fired a barrage of cruise missiles at American military bases in Iraq that day, payback for the American assassination of Qasem Soleimani the previous week. That brazen hit, completely beyond the pale under international law, was authorized personally by America’s gangster-in-chief at the time, Donald Trump. So who can blame the Iranians for being a little jumpy? They were expecting imminent retaliation for the missile attack that killed no one but allegedly left over 100 US personnel with traumatic brain injuries. Shooting down a passenger airliner by mistake under those circumstances seems more than plausible. Oddly enough, that was also the excuse when the Americans shot down Iranian flight 655 in 1988, a passenger airliner, killing all 290 persons on board. These facts would have been considered essential in establishing context in the old days when The Globe and Mail used to do journalism. Now that they’ve re-invented themselves as a propaganda organ for American Exceptionalism, it’s become more important to avoid context.

Living Big Sky: is Montana the last refuge for white people?

Living Big Sky is basically a promo for the state of Montana. A relative newcomer in the genre of real estate porn, it draws its audience from people who fantasize about mountain views and fresh air. The Farm Manager has been binge-watching Living Big Sky, and I can see why. One rustic mountain horse farm after another. Every place has fresh air and mountain views and a rustic homestead. They're really big on rustic in Montana. We'd head on out ourselves if it wasn't for the grand-kids. I'm not binge-watching this schlock myself, but I'm binge-adjacent you could say, so I'm kinda following things. After about 12 episodes I enquire, have you seen any Black people yet? The FM is way more progressive than me. She ponders my query for a long moment, and realizes, to her horror, that she has been bingeing on a show that excludes Black people. Relax, I tell her. There's no Black people in a show about Montana because there's hardly any Black people in Montana to begin with. You can't exclude people who aren't there. A few episodes along, we met our first Black person in Montana. He was a real estate broker selling fresh air and mountain-view horse farms... To white people!

Canada needs to grow up

Bob Rae was a socialist once upon a time. Since 2020 he’s been Canada’s ambassador to the UN. Today he gets a half-page spread in The Globe and Mail; “World needs to grow up, Canada’s UN envoy says.” According to Bolshevik Bob, there remains a tendency for “governments to see the world as a chessboard on which national ambitions are played out… a global tendency not particular to Canada or the United States or anyone else.” Maybe so, but there’s only one country that claims to own the chessboard, and that’s the USA. I refer to Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives. It’s a must read for anyone wanting to make sense of the last 25 years of US foreign policy, right up to the current disaster in Ukraine. While I don’t want to spoil it for you, the “geostrategic imperative” can be summed up thusly; America must strive to maintain full-spectrum dominance of any country or grouping of countries that could potentially threaten its role as global hegemon. America has been striving mightily indeed. After a series of lopsided victories over a string of upstarts (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria) America is now on the cusp of victory over Putin’s Russia. America’s Ukrainian proxies have dealt the Russians “heavy military blows” and garnered “a groundswell of international opinion on their side.” The reality is that Ukraine is on life-support provided primarily by American tax-payers, and the US-designed sanctions are taking a far greater toll on the economies of America’s allies than they are on Russia. And while just a few more months and a few more hundred billions in weapons may or may not cement our victory, Bob bemoans the fact that this challenge has been more difficult, militarily and economically, than many had expected. It’s sad to see a former man of principle reduced to shilling for American Exceptionalism. Hey Bob, maybe we should do a little growing up before we lecture the rest of the planet.

Pitch for new Netflix series... this one's a winner!

Had this brainwave, not sure where it came from, but outta the blue, I said to the Farm Manager; "you know what would make a good show?" I figure I'd bounce it off her on account she watches Netflix all the time, whereas I rarely get past Al Jazeera and Jay Leno's Garage. "Follow the adventures of a guy who's coming to terms with mortality. You know; one foot on a banana peel an the other foot on the gas as he's steering that Dodge Hellcat down the Alzheimer Highway at 200mph. You could follow him through life as he grapples with one existential crisis after another. The solutions are always readily at hand by he never recognizes them. Instead, he is constantly forced to MacGyver his way out of calamities largely of his own makeing." Yup, I think that could be a winner all right! I'm a planner, not a doer, so I'm not looking for a starring role or anything. But I do have quite a range of story ideas, and could be persuaded to take a consulting role.