Globe and Mail reveals who is behind anti-Putin documentary "Navalny"

Barry Hertz has an interview with the Canadian director of the must-see documentary “Navalny” in the paper today. It’s an up-close look at the inner workings of Putin’s depraved, malevolent, paranoid, and incompetent inner circle. It made a splash at the Sundance Film Festival, and is now at Hot Docs in Toronto. It’s being heavily promoted by both CBC and the Globe. Director Dan Roher, a youngster with one previous doc under his belt, explains how the film came together. I was sitting around in lockdown, trying to figure out my next move… when in September 2020 I was invited to Vienna to meet this Bulgarian journalist, this Sherlock Holmes character named Christo Grozev. That trip turned into a visit to Kyiv. Christo said he might have a lead for Navalny. A week and a half later I met Alexy and it was now my job to convince him that not only was a documentary a good idea, but that it should be me who leads the project. It obviously wasn’t Dan Roher who lead the project, it was that “Sherlock Holmes character” Christo Grozev. Grozev has been “lead Russia investigator” at Bellingcat, which wants you to believe it is a collective of independent investigative journalists, since 2014. Oddly enough, this collective of independent journalists is funded by the US government via the National Endowment for Democracy. Odd, because the Assange case shows us all we need to know about America’s respect for independent journalism. Then again, it’s probably expecting too much of the journalists at CBC or the Globe & Mail to connect the dots.

Make no mistake; Russia is winning in Ukraine

Sleepy Joe announced, in his catatonic way, another 33 billions in aid for the plucky Ukrainians yesterday. Of the 33b, 20 is for US military supplies. The chances of any of that 20b in Raytheon and friends product actually getting anywhere near the front lines are 100% non-existent. So this is just free money for the war profiteers. Meanwhile, the CBC-Globe&Mail propagandists, in sync with “free press” among the American satraps generally, (the same ones working overtime to make sure Julian Assange never again sees the light of day) keep piling on the bullshit about how those plucky Ukrainians are actually winning this American war on Russia. Another twenty billion to Lockheed and Raytheon should do the trick. The war is lost, but the seriously deluded continue to delude themselves. That’s why both the CBC and the Globe were pushing the Navalny narrative today. Apparently there’s a new doc we should all watch, all about how Putin’s #1 rival is once again exposing Putin’s perfidy. CBC had on the director of said doc, explaining how Russian military intelligence and it’s military in general are nothing more than “professional morons.” That’s why they’ve failed to assassinate him after trying so many times. Sure. The last time he was almost assassinated, the German medivac plane that flew him to Germany was chartered days before he was poisoned, not that the doc will confuse you with that factoid. As far as I know, Navalny has never polled above 6% approval among Russian voters, even in his heyday. Since America’s Ukrainian war went hot, Putin’s approval has gone from high 60s to low 80s. This war was effectively won by Russia in the first few days. All we’ve been doing since is ensuring more Ukrainians will suffer and die in the interest of USA/NATO geopolitical objectives.

Nursing home attendants and dump-truck drivers can still buy homes in small-town Canada

Yes, we certainly have a housing affordability problem in Canada. Big picture, we’ll be having one till supply meets demand, and don’t worry, experts are busy studying that right now. When you zoom in from the macro to the micro level, things look a bit different. Friends of ours recently sold a tidy three bed, one bath, on a modest lot in Wiarton for a price in the mid 300s. I remember having Italian neighbours in Guelph who got an entire year’s worth of tomato sauce out of their gardens, who lived in smaller houses on smaller lots. According to the TD mortgage calculator, the monthly freight on a 300k mortgage runs $1,600 per at the just-raised rate of 4% plus. That means the young couple applying for that mortgage is going to need a combined annual income in the 70k range. How hard is that to achieve in a place like Wiarton? Wiarton is a twenty minute drive to Owen Sound. Punch “Owen Sound” into the Canada Job Bank and you get over three hundred replies. What kind of jobs are available to the “most vulnerable,” ie the least educated applicants? Here’s a shocker. PSW jobs that pay $18/hr in Toronto pay the same locally. Dump truck driver jobs that pay $22/hr in Toronto pay the same here. In short, anyone who came within a whisker of a high-school diploma and is willing to work can make 40k a year. When the dump truck driver marries the PSW, they’ll qualify for that 300k mortgage. I get not everybody wants to live in Wiarton, but if home ownership is important enough to you, you’ll give up your big-city dreams and take a closer look at the small towns you never noticed before.

Clayton gets a beat-down

Clayton was a Black kid who worked on my unit at the Irving shipyard in Saint John. In fact, he was my apprentice for a spell, training up to be a "marine steel-fitter." He was a bright kid and a fabulous athlete. We played on the same slo-pitch team. He also played some considerably more substantial ball with a local team, but this was just a way of goofing off with the work-mates and getting free beer. Our team was sponsored by Moosehead Breweries. We all got free Moosehead ballcaps and a couple cases of beer for every game. Clayton liked his beer and his weed, so occassionally we found ourselves spending time together. This guy's family arrived in Canada about 150 years before mine, so there was never an issue about who was more "Canadian" or any identity shit like that. He had a second floor walk-up a few blocks away. One night we're sitting on his balcony having a toke and a pint,and some youthful drunken rowdies proceed down the sidewalk, making quite a ruckus. We sit in silence as they pass by. Then he tells me this story. He'd been sitting out there one eveing, and a particularly boisterous gang of rowdies was passing by. He admonished them to shut the fuck up. They replied with that most debilitating racial slur of all time, the one that today scars young Black kids with PTSD for life. Further insults, slurrs, and taunts were exchanged. "So I figure it's time I go down there and kick some ass. I mean, they're so shit-faced they can't walk a straight line. How hard can this be? After I came to in the hospital I realized my judgement might have been a little impaired too. That's why I just let the drunken assholes go on their way now." Good call, dude! Lost touch with Clayton after I left Irving's shipyard, but I have a hunch he fared out OK.

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.

Global famine coming soon

There's experts all over the place making that prediction. Costs of crop inputs are going up exponentially. That was ramping up due to supply line issues etc, even before Putin's war. That's just turbo-charged the downward spiral. Between Ukraine and Russia, you've lost 40% on next years wheat from the international market. Oh, and 40% of the world's fertilizer supply! So there's gonna be less food. Which means what food there is will be way more expensive. You know who gets to skip meals when that happens. Poor people. Not typical middle-class whingers. Neither they nor their pets will go hungry, although they'll be feeling a bit of a pinch and will accordingly be squeaking the loudest. The people who will pay the price are those already food-security challenged. WE've had record food-bank visits year after year in Canada, and those were fat years. When we go into the coming lean years, it's gonna get serious. Around here we keep the supply lines pretty short. There's two farm stores on the next concession. We can source most of our poultry and beef within five miles. The "Eat Local Grey-Bruce" folks take care of the rest. They can actually deliver real Toronto bagels. Not sure how that's considered local, but they're good bagels. And just for good measure, I think this is the year to put in a serious garden, and finally build that chicken coop. Not only that, but me and one of the neighbours were recently lamenting all those tons of apples that fall to the ground up and down the concession roads all around here. We're contemplating going haves on a press. We'll have apple sauce and apple cider out the ying-yang in perpetuity! So, we're good to go around here. Come what may, we'll be living large on eggs, apple sauce, and home-grown carrots and potatoes.

Honey, we broke the weather!

The thermometer got darn close to 80 today, yet there’s a risk of snow flurries in the days ahead. That’s fucked up! It was so summery today I got my plaid cargo shorts out of the bottom drawer. Ya, it was that warm! In fact, the Farm Manager ridiculed my get-up. Apparently the plaid of the shorts clashed with the horizontal stripes on my shirt… When I enquired whether my outfit made my fat look ass, she rejoindered that I did indeed look like an ass. But you gotta bear in mind this assessment comes from a woman, that half of the species whose favorite shoes are always the ones that hurt their feet the most. But back to the weather. It does look a little f’d up, doesn’t it? How do you go from balmy to arctic in 24 hours? It’s gotta be this global warming thing they’ve been warning us about for fifty years. For fifty years we didn’t believe them. Now it’s here.

Putin has looted trillions from Russia

When Bill Browder showed up on CBC recently, I thought Brodie Fenlon’s CBC News must be the last news network to give this charlatan any cred. I was wrong. Here he is on MSNBC; Putin's a mafia boss trying to hold on to power. Bullshittin’ Bill has a whole new take on the Ukraine war, not to mention a new book to flog. Apparently this war isn’t about NATO expansion or any of that stuff, not at all. Instead, it’s about Putin the mafia boss desperately trying to stay in power. Hmm… Well, Bill should know a thing or two about mafia bosses. “His” Hermitage Capital was the wunderkind of a couple of Israeli mafia bosses. If you drew a venn diagram of Israeli and Russian mafia bosses you’d see an extraordinary overlap. They had a decade of salad days looting post-Soviet Russia. They originally supported Putin on the mistaken assumption that he would allow the party to continue. He didn’t. Bill got most of his ill-gotten loot out of Russia in the nick of time, and reinvented himself as a human rights crusader, a discredited schtick that apparently still has traction at CBC and MSNBC. Here’s a NYT story about the much-suppressed doc about Browder, The Magninsky Act; Behind the Scenes. You can still find it online if you make the effort. My favorite scene is near the end, where the pudgy middle-age Jew leaps out of his limo and sprints a hundred yards in nine seconds flat to avoid a guy trying to serve a subpoena! Bullshittin’ Bill still bills himself Putin’s enemy #1. If that’s the case, Putin doesn’t have much to worry about.

IN A WORLD OF PUTINS BE A ZELENSKY

That all-caps exhortation has been taunting me from the sign in front of the Kemble United Church since late February. Kemble is one of those cross-roads country hamlets that sprung up in the pioneer days. The pick-up trucks are big and black, and the tractors are green and yellow. It’s home to the oldest functioning chapter of the Women’s Institute, an interesting historical factoid. The Kemble WI built that beautiful lookout just south of town where Grey Road 1 turns down to the bay. The folks are hard-working regular people, many of whom can trace their local roots back multiple generations. I’ve taught a lot of their kids over the years. Until recently you could buy a house at an affordable price. I can think of a few that changed hands for under 100k as recently as five years years ago. Those days are gone. By and large, they’re folks more interested in the livestock report than the international news, and insofar as they consume any, it’s most likely courtesy of CBC News. So what would they know about Putin or Zelensky? They would know that Putin is a tyrant, a dictator who launched a totally unprovoked war on the peaceful and prosperous democracy next door. They would know Putin’s thugs mostly target civilian infrastructure, especially kindergartens and hospitals. They would know that Putin’s plans to seize the capital and remove the democratic government were thwarted by the fierce resistance of the Territorial Defence Units rallied by Zelensky himself. They would know these bold commoners, mostly actors, artists, and writers who never before picked up a weapon, put the run to Putin’s criminal thugs. They would know that Ukraine is winning the war. And while they’d never vote for Justin Trudeau in a million years, when they hear him promise away another hundred million of their tax dollars because the heroic Zelensky needs more weapons, well, they figure it’s a worthwhile cause. When you get your news from CBC, you never have to trouble yourself with names like Nuland or Pyatt and their role in the coup that took down a democratic government in Ukraine. You never have to trouble yourself with the disturbing idolatry of Stepan Bandera among Ukrainian nationalists. You never question that latest hundred million dollar gift of weapons to Ukraine, a gift that has precisely zero chance of ever getting to the front lines, because CBC forgot to mention that the Ukrainian army ceased to be a cohesive fighting force in the first twenty-four hours of this war. So ya, under the circumstances, that sign in front of the Kemble United Church almost makes sense. In a make-believe world threatened by evil tyrants, we all want to be Zelensky.

Celebrating the vultures

No, I'm not celebrating the vultures like Eddie Lampert and Bill Ackman, vultures who swooped into Canada to destroy the lives and livelihoods of tens of thousands of working class Canadians. They've been amply celebrated in the pages of Canadian buisiness press already. The vultures I want to celebrate are the turkey vultures. I think we got a clan of them roosting in the barn. Like everything else at Falling Downs, the barn is falling down. It's an old-school homesteader era barn, and it's a shame to watch her go. At the same time, farming isn't done the way they used to do it when that barn was built. You had a large hay-mow up top, and usually a granary, and down below, you had space for cattle. Today the hay is stored in those massive plastic-wrapped sausages that festoon the countryside. Apparently it's way more nutritious if you wrap it in plastic than if you store it in a barn. The main reason for restoring an old barn today would be to use it as a wedding venue. I've thought of that. Rent out the barn for ten grand a night instead of fifteen hundred for the year. Alas, I'd have to sink in half a million I don't have in order to turn that falling down barn into a wedding venue. But I can enjoy the vultures without doing a damn thing! They are a beautiful bird to watch soaring. Where there's one there's usually an entire crew not far away. They float through the thermals and are one of the most graceful birds you'd ever want to see. They get a bad rap because they eat road-kill, but that's a great public service too. What a blessing it is to appreciate the beauty that surrounds me!

Ukraine brings home the bacon

No matter your perspective on the Ukraine war, you gotta admit one thing is for sure; it’s one helluva bonanza for Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, et al. Yup, it’s Christmas every day for the weapon makers! Today PM Fluffy promised heavy artillery to Ukraine. Oh, golly, guess we’ll have to buy new stuff to replace it! Ka-ching! Oh, and this nasty war stiffened Fluffy’s spine sufficiently that he committed to 88 brand-spankin’ new F-35 fighter jets at $100 million plus per copy! Heck, a few billions here and a few billions there, pretty soon you’re talking serious money! Team Biden actually convened a meeting of the top weapon manufacturers to implore them to batten down the hatches and prepare to go flat out! The merchants of death then turn around and lavishly fund all those think-tanks that provide the endless stream of experts whose job it is to sell us the next war. It’s obviously a winning strategy.

Putin gets ass kicked in Ukraine

I apologize in advance for the fact I haven't been able to reformat this page since my cat walked over the keyboard a couple weeks ago. I've been under the weather for the better part of the past week. Could be Covid but the Farm Manager doesn't want me to get tested, because she'd have to take a week off work in the event the test was positive. No appetite, no energy, and there's red blotches on my skin that feel like they're on fire. While all that is going on, the Good Lord figures this is the right time to send me a bouquet of hemroids. So now my ass is on fire too. I must have displeased the Lord something fierce to deserve that double-whammy. Been so obsessed with my health challenges I've been neglecting current events. Looks like those actors and writers and artists who joined the citizen militias in Ukraine have succeeded in pushing the Rooskies all the way back to the Donbass. So we know for sure the PR team behind "Zelensky" is winning the propaganda war. Unfortunately, the real war will not be won by propaganda, but by facts on the ground.

Hiking the Bruce Trail

Right off the top I have to apologize for the fact that the last few posts appear as run-on gibberish. Normally I at least try to compartmentalize my gibberish into paragraphs. But the fucking cat walked over the keyboard the other day, and I have no clue how to undo whatever the useless fur-bag just did. So here we are. Here at Falling Downs, we’ve got various strands of the Bruce Trail in close proximity. This morning I set out to explore one of those strands just on the other side of Bass Lake. To get there, I had to hike about a quarter mile east and then make a right at Lundy Road, cleverly named after the only family that lives on Lundy Road. What is essentially their very long driveway is maintained by the municipality, which is a good deal, but it’s also part of the Bruce Trail. The Lundys hike the Bruce every time they walk down the driveway! But enough about them. Walking is part of my mindfulness regimen. These are stressful times, and a little mindfulness helps dull the pain of the relentless mind-fuckery we are inundated with every day through our screens. I find it helpful to have a mantra you can repeat to yourself, something that keeps to the rhythm of your walking. I’m partial to Gregorian chant, but anything you can bend to your pace, even Bieber lyrics, would fit the bill. So I’m motoring up the Lundy Road and into the meadows beyond, the walking sticks a-flailing, talking to myself, and as I tend to do, I eventually go “off piste.” I’d done the trail that skirts the south side of Bass Lake, and at some point crossed a logging road. The Bruce Trail continued ahead. The logging road seemed to head in a vaguely westerly direction. I once did a lap around Bass Lake on my mountain bike. I figured it should be possible in hiking boots. I keep walking and chanting and inhaling the forest air. I’m in uncharted territory here. I emerge from forest trails into open pasture. More forest trails, more pastures… I’ve long since lost sight of the lake. I come to a fork in the logging trail. I bear right, because that should take me back towards the lake. Then there’s another fork, and I take the right again. More pastures, more logging roads, I’m totally in the zone. I got full mindfulness going on… About three hours into my hike, I had a sudden realization that the meadow I was traversing seemed uncannily familiar. Not only that, but I didn’t seem to be getting any closer to Bass Lake. I’d been walking around in circles. But here’s the thing. By the time I got home, I’d spent four hours out in the fresh air and away from the laptop. There’s still snow on the ground around some of those trails. The lake itself is mostly frozen. If we can get a spell of warm weather, the lake will thaw and the water will still be high enough I can take my canoe from my place right to the very end of Bass Lake. Just have to adapt the mantra to the paddle strokes.

Real time vs. screen time

That’s quite a budget-cum-propaganda exercise Agent Frida unleashed yesterday. Sure, there was some run-of-the-mill empty promises. The “experts” have apparently noticed housing starts haven’t kept pace with population growth for at least a quarter century. It boggles the mind how many millions have been spent studying the matter. My hunch is experts will still be studying the matter ten years from now. The experts can’t figure out how to get clean water to Indigenous communities, and they’ve been studying that one for at least fifty years. Don’t hold your breath waiting for an affordable place to live. But where Agent Frida truly broke new ground was in her assertion that the tyrant Putin needs to go. This was her prelude to the announcement that the Ukraine military will henceforth be partially funded out of Canada’s military budget. Eight billion fresh funding for the CAF over five years. That’s 1.6 billion annually, and you can bet most of that is weighted towards the end of that five year projection. If the half billion is earmarked for Ukraine’s immediate military needs, that means most of our increased military budget in the immediate future is for the benefit of Ukraine, not the CAF. But what the heck… if we can help the plucky Ukrainians stop the Rooskies in Ukraine, we won’t have to fight them on the Plains of Abraham. Meanwhile, back in the real world, the doyenne of the dog park had bad news when me and Bruno showed up this morning. She’s a blunt-spoken old gal. “Some fucking cunt stole the shit-shovel. That’s gotta be about as fucking low as you can go.” That is bad news. Not every dog poop lends itself to pick-up with one of those poo-bags they conveniently leave at the gate. I’ve used that shovel myself when Bruno has had maybe too much fruits and vegetables and KFC the previous day. Anyway, after that somewhat abrupt welcome, me and the Big Boy enjoyed a happy hour of me walking around in circles, and him cavorting with his canine friends. On her PR mission to Kyiv today, President of the EU Princess von der Leyen announced she and PM Fluffy would be co-hosting a fundraiser for the benefit of Ukraine. I’ll be pitching in for a new shit shovel instead.

Escaping the "news cycle"

These are stressfull times for news junkies. There's a lot of shit going on in the world. Putin with his totally unprovoked war on Western civilization. Women with weiners rewriting the NCAA record books. Then there's the housing crisis, the overdose crisis, the financial crisis... And at the end of the day, even if you survive that litany of existential threats, there's that climate crisis that just keeps getting worse! So it's easy to get bummed out. That's why I'm stepping away from the news cycle. It's making me miserable and depressed. Took a day away from screens to have lunch with Junior in Guelph. We went to a joint called "Carl's Roadhouse," which, if I'm not mistaken, used to be a Crabby Joe's, and before that, an Eddie Shack donut store. That's gotta be the best value in town. A burger and fries is less than a Big Mac meal at Mickey D's. Plus, they had a special on the 30 oz stein. Thirty ounces? That used to be called a pitcher. It was a day well spent away from the screens, and a smooth trip except for the last few miles. Got a flat tire at the top of 6th street. Found myself changing the tire in the parking lot behind city hall. Spent the next day arranging a tire. This is not as simple as it would seem. McArthur Tire, where I bought these, is offering bookings in the week after Easter. WTF is that? I'm driving around on a fake spare that you aren't supposed to put more than 100 miles on, and never over 50 mph. Lucky for me, the shop manager at McArthur felt my pain, and we were able to get going with the new tire this afternoon. That's two days I missed the latest Putin atrocity. Both of those days I managed to get the Big Boy to the dog park for a romp with his pals. That always puts a smile on my face. CNN/CBC/Al Jazeera never put a smile on my face. And now I'm advising the Farm Manager on which rubber boots to buy that will go with the awesome yello Eddie Baurer slicker she just got. We're planning a trip to Nova Scotia in June, and she wants to fit in. Because all the locals wear Eddie Bauer? I've escaped the news cycle for two days... And I like it!

Blinken declares Russia has lost Ukraine war

Blinken took the good news to network TV this morning. Russia has already lost the war in Ukraine. The plucky Ukrainians are putting the run to them. NATO is stronger and more united than ever! Free and democratic Ukraine will be thriving long after Putin is gone!

I don’t mean to be the turd in the punch-bowl, but Ukraine is gone already. The map of Ukraine will never again look like it did on February 23. According to the latest Leveda poll, Putin’s ratings are thriving.

The US policy of avoiding direct confrontation with Russia, aped by the vassal states, is designed to prolong a hopeless war as long as possible by flooding Ukraine with weapons. Given the rampant corruption in Ukraine, it is inevitable that much of this hardware will find it’s way to the black market.

There’ll be blowback, big time.

Meanwhile, the US has sent emissaries to their long-time victims Iran and Venezuela, to talk nice and maybe see about getting a little of their oil, since our allies in the Middle East won’t open the taps…

WTF?

When you gotta suck up to your enemies, because your friends won’t help you, maybe it’s time to do some soul-searching.

And isn’t it curious that, in addition to avoiding at all cost F-35s having to face the competition head-on, the US Navy abandoned the Black Sea around the time the White House started claiming a Russian invasion was imminent?

The most powerful military in history absents itself from the battlefield just as actual war breaks out? What’s wrong with that picture?

As for NATO unity, even the dullest allies will soon realize the alliance is a liability, that their role is to be cannon fodder for the Empire, tucked away thousands of miles from the action.

Everybody gets it except the cretinous western elites. Here’s a cartoon from Global Times, a Chinese government owned newspaper.

Ukraine enlists Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland as lobbyist

That's according to a trio of Globe and Mail professional journos, which reminds me of a certain Newfie joke involving a light-bulb and a ladder.

Here's the context, from today's paper. Fife, Curry, and Chase insinuate that the reason the budget is late and most likely lame, is because Chrystia has been distracted by the crisis in her homeland.

Ukraine had enlisted Ms. Freeland, who speaks fluent Ukrainian and Russian, to plead the case among allies to target the Central Bank of the Russian Federation by cutting off access to its massive foreign exchange reserves, which Moscow could use to offset the impact of Western sanctions. 

They enlisted Agent Frida to lobby on their behalf because she speaks fluent Russian and Ukrainian? Is that what they speak in those allied nations to which she is pleading Ukraine's case?

Obviously that's BS. They enlisted Chrystia because she is a loyal Ukrainian partisan.

Doesn't she have a job in Canada?

How does this brazen conflict of interest get a pass?

Twitter and Facebook incite hatred

Will Smith’s slap heard round the world was more than a gift to racist stereotypes.

The fact that after his physical assault on a person who used hurtful words, he was applauded by the elite of American popular culture, has more sinister implications.

Smith has a lot of support in some circles. Facebook and Twitter are waiving their hate speech policies and allowing rampant hate mongering against other comedians who have offended those same circles.

Tweaking algorithms in such a way as to incite hatred is not a new development. Twitter sidelined its hate-speech policies to allow anti-Russia hate to blossom.

It’s not just social media, it’s news as well. Just a few weeks ago the nabobs at CBC were determined to find connections between the truckers’ protest and far-right extremism. Now the same “journalists” are working even harder trying not to see fascists in Ukraine. After all, they are fighting Russians, and every decent person of sound mind must surely hate Putin and Russia by now, and if Nazis are fighting Russia, we need to support them.

I tune in Al Jazeera a couple of times a day. You can’t watch half an hour of their Ukraine coverage without multiple anti-Russian slurs; “Russians are animals,” for example.

The Al Thani clan, Qatar’s “royal family,” fund Al Jazeera. They play a tidy double game. On the one hand they host US military bases and provide a steady stream of anti-Russian propaganda. Their correspondent Assed Baig is particularly fun to watch.

On the other, they are relentlessly pro-Palestinian, and declined participation in the Judas Accords. Nor are they in any rush to join in those Russia sanctions Uncle Sam is demanding, because they continue to maintain cordial relations, not only with Russia, but with Iran as well.

Like many of America’s supposed allies, the Qatari’s remain on the fence, waiting to see which way the winds of change are blowing.

When the time comes, they may have to change the target of their hate-mongering.

And that’s when we’ll have to reap what we’ve sown.

What is "real time?"

Spent most of the evening sitting in front of the fire, with the hound curled up by my side.

I am grateful that I can have a fire to sit in front of, and I love my dog, but instead of taking the time to appreciate these blessings, I've got one eye on Al Jazeera on the flat screen and the other on Redd Foxx on the laptop.

After considerable ponderation, I have concluded that your time isn't really real unless you get your face out of the screens.

Stepped out for a breath of fresh air just a few minutes ago. Lo and behold, the night sky is clear, and there are more stars than you could ever count. Standing dumbfounded staring at the sky isn't widely considered a productive use of one's time, but it does help you put things in perspective.

How many of those distant stars have planets whirling around them?

In an infinite sky, there are infinite possibilities.

But rather than considering those possibilities, we would rather retreat to our screens.