Midnight at the bullshit factory

"God sees the little sparrow fall..."

-Civilla Martin

I've been spending a lot of time on the stoop watching the birds. There's an arbour fifteen feet in front of me with a couple of feeders hanging from it. We've been getting a lot of those bright yellow finches this year.

Watch the feeders long enough, and you're gonna see some nasty stuff. The other day, I watched a sparrow peck a slightly smaller sparrow to death. I intervened, but it was too late. By the time I had the little guy sequestered in a cardboard box with a dish of water, he only had another five minutes left in him.

While I'm out there, I can also keep an eye on what's going on traffic wise. Concession 20 isn't that busy at the busiest of times, and things have definitely slowed up since the lockdown. So you notice when a local farm family goes by on their after-dinner ATV ride.

Every farmer has one or more ATVs now. They swear by them. They can't remember what they did without them.

I can remember; you used your pickup more and you walked a bit more. I worked on a farm long before ATVs were a thing.

The farmer family ride is led by a kid standing up. He's not having to stoop over to reach the bars, so I figure he can't be more than twelve years old. He's moving along at a nice clip. I guess he's the scout.

Next up is the paternal unit. He's on a much bigger ATV and he's giving the throttle a poke now and again, as if to prod the kid along.

Behind him is a kid with a long pony-tail waving in the breeze behind their helmet. I don't want to make unwarranted assumptions, but I assume that's the daughter.

Bringing up the rear was Mum. Lagging back in a maternal way, making sure the family unit is OK.

I hope they can continue their recreational rides, but farmers are up against it on multiple fronts these days. Even before this plague, the dairy farmers were sold down the river to facilitate the latest "free-trade" agreement. The beef guys never had quota protections like the dairy farmers, but even as our scare-mongering media talks up food shortages, there's no noticeable uptick in the wholesale price of beef. You may be paying more at the supermarket, but none of that is filtering down to the farmers.

Fear-mongering via promoting a food shortage seems to be the latest leg in big media's campaign to scare the hell out of everybody and keep them scared. Every day more and more people question the official corona narrative. That can't be good. Let's scare the bejeezus out of them with a food shortage!

My father has told me that in the village he lived in, which is now part of Poland, the farm animal of choice was the pig. That's because a mamma pig could drop a litter of anywhere between eight and twelve, whereas a cow was most likely to drop one calf per season, maybe twins in a lucky year. When the Nazi Party apparatchik came round to gather up the agricultural surplus, it was way easier to hold back a piglet or two than it was to hide a calf.

Even Jews will eat pork before they starve.

That's why country folks are going to be dining while the food shortage descends on the cities, if the worst-case scenarios that our fear-mongering media are busy fanning come to pass.

It seems beyond obvious that this alleged pandemic was always about a lot more than a virus. This has been most visible in the home base of the most rapacious brand of exploitative capitalism the world has ever seen, the United States. America's political class and its billionaire patrons have larded up the deficit to the tune of trillions, mainly to insulate themselves from the economic collapse that they themselves have brought about.

Then again, I thought it was obvious that Trump would win in 2016. The mainstream folks, the "experts," the pundits, totally underestimated the level of contempt that regular working people held them in.

While I hold no brief for Donny J, I believe his election was the logical conclusion to the last fifty years of the arc of American democracy. Bullshit and celebrity culture rules, and any semblance of integrity has long since been kicked to the curb.

Trump was himself a product of that culture. And look at how the A-list celebs came out for Hillary in the final hours of the 2016 campaign. Somebody well-connected in the Hollywood machine made a phone call, and all of a sudden you've got Katy Perry and Madonna and even LeBron James shilling for Hillsy!

The big push right now in our media is to convince the voting public that a vote for Biden will bring back the good old days. Really? Trump-Biden is a choice between one geriatric corporate-owned pussy-grabber and another.  

American "democracy" has become as predictable and as cartoonish as any Dana White creation. In this corner, the good guy. In the other corner, the bad guy...

You can bet that the folks who own the ring are OK with that.