Blinky and Bibi telegraph tactical Israeli nuke strike on Lebanon and Iran

If you watch the presser you'll note they didn't mention Lebanon. But they didn't have to. There is a long history of top IDF brass warning that Hezbollah has at least several hundred thousand missiles, enough to turn the Holy Land into a compost pile. Instead, Iran's imaginary nuke program came up again and again. Bibi is doing a masterful job of turning his distate for Ukraine into anti-Iranian propaganda. He may despise Ukraine and refuses to send rockets and missiles, but OH MY GOD IRAN IS PROVIDING DRONES TO RUSSIA!!! As much as we want to hope that cooler heads will prevail, political opportunists like Natanyahu will always put their personal ambitions over the needs of their people, or humanity in general. A sharp slap with a tactical nuke might be enough to slap down both Hezbolla AND Iran.

Jeep Hemi

For those of us of a certain vintage, the word "hemi" has meaning. Specifically, it means you had one bad-ass, tire-smoking, Chevy-killing unit. I never owned one myself. A buddy had a '66 hemi Charger, one of only eight sold in Canada. Another friend had a '70 hemi Challenger that could run 13 second quarters off the lot. That was stupid quick back in the day, although I did see that car lose to both a '69 GTO Judge and a 302 inch Z-28 Camaro on the Line 86 dragway in front of my house. Fast forward fifty years, and you can get the modern iteration of the hemi in a Jeep. It'll run the quarter in 12.9 seconds. That's quite something for a vehicle with the aerodynamics of a cement block. Problem is, the hemi Jeep starts at $110,000. Throw in a few options and the taxes, and you're easily over the $140k mark. The one I built on the Jeep website could be mine for two grand a month... every month for eight years. That's more than I paid for every house I ever lived in except the 100 acres here at Falling Downs. Back in 1970 a hemi Challenger was within reach for every unionized factory worker in town. There's no factory workers today, anywhere, union or not, signing on the dotted line for a $140,000 Jeep. You're encroaching on G-Wagen territory here. No matter how you slice and dice it, a Fiat-Chrysler-Stellantis vehicle ain't never gonna be a Mercedes.

Brace yourself for a carnival of anti-police violence

Tyre Nichols is the latest addition to the pantheon of victims of police brutality. The fact that Nichols was beaten to death by Black cops may make it more difficult for the usual suspects to use this tragedy to fan the flames of race hatred. Instead, it will serve as a rallying cry for cop-haters of all races, creeds, and ethnicities. You can bet a wide swathe of miscreants will use this as an excuse to target police officers clear across the country. The crisis in American policing is, in my view, merely a symptom of the wide-spread rot that has infected all aspects of American society. The "exceptional nation" that never tires of preaching to the rest of the world about freedom and human rights is revealed once again to be morally bankrupt hypocrite. America is a great place to live for the rich, who can afford to live in Potemkin village-like gated communities. The non-rich are left to struggle with generational poverty, unaffordable health care, unaffordable housing, and an ever-diminishing standard of living. The resources America squanders in its failing attempts to maintain its global dominance should be spent at home, invested in the American people. Only then can America begin to heal.

Meet the prime minister who waited three years for hip replacement surgery

Made you look! That prime minister doesn’t exist. There’s a reason for that. Those who rule over us see the world differently because they live in a different world. They make decisions based on what makes sense for the world they inhabit, not the world the rest of us live in. That’s why so many government policies make no sense. If there’s a health care crisis, we can fix it with more private clinics. If there’s a doctor shortage, we can fix it by poaching doctors from Africa. No one at the governance level, where the decisions are made to throttle admissions to our medical schools, will ever be held accountable. Our education system is a mess, from pre-school to post-secondary. I spent 25 years watching my remedial math students walk across the stage at graduation with high-school diplomas and grade three math skills. The post-secondary system is addicted to the foreign student revenue stream. Not to hire more tenure-track academics, but to grow the bureaucracy. Not one in a hundred PhDs will ever have a tenured professorship. Nobody in the halls of power is at risk of homelessness. That’s too bad, because many thousands of Canadians are. Their ranks will only grow as our overlords ramp up immigration without anything whatsoever resembling a housing policy. Even grade three math skills should be enough to discern that when immigration far outpaces housing starts, you are only ramping up the housing crisis. That’s where we’re at, and the idiocy obtains in every domain. Foreign policy. Let’s scrap the entire Global Affairs edifice and replace it with a secretary and a spokesperson who’ll read the instructions from Washington and announce them at a press conference. We’d save many billions. Look at the poor pathetic Canadian Armed Farces. We’ve been watching one after another of top brass have their careers destroyed because an unauthorized ass-grab in basic training, forty years ago, just came to light. The same leadership cadre pursuing these witch hunts are simultaneously scratching their heads over why nobody wants to pursue a career in the CAF. Don’t even get me started on the defense budget. Really smart people claim we need to spend untold billions on F-35 fighter jets. So we do, never bothering to question either the intelligence of those really smart people, or the necessity of those jets to the actual national interest of the vast majority of Canadians. In my 25 year teaching career, I never encountered a curriculum document that didn’t pay lip service to “critical thinking.” There was a rogue prof at Western, in my teacher-training days, who claimed you had to know something before you could think critically about it. Unfortunately, that’s not how we roll.

You're not flushing the toilet; you're pulling the trigger

I've lived in dilapadated fixer-uppers most of my life. When I was younger I actually fixed them up. I still do, but now it takes so long nobody notices. When you live in an old house with old plumbing, your bathroon routine goes something like this. In the first place, you don't flush if there's no solids in the bowl. The old cottage-country maxim applies; if it's yellow, stay mellow; if it's brown, flush it down. And that's where the adventure begins. You push that handle down... and wait. You're never sure what might happen. The contents of the toilet bowl will slowly begin moving in a circular motion. Round and round and round we go. As we're going round and round, and this is most disconceting to anyone who's never taken a crap in an old house, the water level gradually begins to rise. Round and round and heading to the rim. This is when you start looking around for the plunger, at least if you're a seasoned pro. First-timers have been known to panic at this point. My advice is don't panic, grab the plunger, and better sooner than later. Once that mess goes over the top, you're dealing with a whole 'nother situation. Problem is, unless you have a certain expertise in these matters, it's hard to gage when that load is going over the top. That swirling fecal cauldron can tease you; it'll come up and go down, and just when you don't expect it, come back up again. That's why you don't dare leave the room until things are well and truly out of sight. Only then can you put them out of mind. As you can imagine, the toilet flush can take a good five minutes, on top of however long it might have taken to come up with that shit. The older you get, the more unpredictable it becomes. One day you can hardly make it to the shitter on time, next day you can read the entire Globe and Mail without anything happening. That is why I am so utterly amazed by this new toilet. First time in my life I didn't buy the cheapest unit on offer. In fact, I paid about three times more for this unit than necessary. But holy shit, is it ever worth it! You give that handle the slightest nudge, and BANG! Shit be gone! And I mean gone in half a second, never to be seen again! It's like you pulled the trigger! It's almost enough to restore my faith in progress.

Reuters claims Ukraine riddled with corruption

I know! Who can imagine such a thing? This is a most brazen example of Russian propaganda. How do they get away with slandering Ukraine like this, especially in the midst of a civilizational war that will determine the future of humanity. Or at least freedom and democracy. Here's the money quote; "Ukraine has a long history of corruption and shaky governance." What? How can they be corrupt if they are the last defensive line standing between freedom and tyranny? That's almost as absurd as the heinous slander Russia unleashed earlier, claiming that a country with a Jewish president could somehow be infested with Nazis. Shame on Reuters!

In the city you hear sirens; out here it's the howling of the coyotes

There has been debate here at Falling Downs about someday, maybe, in the fullness of time, eventually, perhaps moving back to the city. We'd be closer to family, of which we have none less than a two hour drive away. In winter, that can easily become three hours or more. Once you're at five or six hours of driving to have a two hour get-together, you tend not to do it as often as you might like. I'm not crazy about the idea. Speaking strictly for myself, my quality of life would be diminished. Took a two hour walk this afternoon, through the woods across the road, across the snow-coverered fields on the neighbours place, along the sideroad and then back through my woodlot atop the hill and along the creek to home. The solitude was divine. Just a few minutes ago, I stepped out on the stoop for a breath of fresh air, and the coyotes were singing. In the city, you'd hear sirens instead. Police, fire, ambulance... sometimes singing in unison, celebrating the bad luck of folks whose day is going way worse than your own. Out here, you can be more or less alone with your thoughts. There's a few birds about, the winter's been mild enough you might see a racoon, but that's it. In the city, you pass hundreds of folks on a two hour walk, and most of them are pissed off about something. It's a tough call.

It's about to get bloody in Israel

100,000 in the streets of Tel Aviv today, railing against Netanyahu's strategy to impose full-bore fascism on the Holy Land. The only democracy in the Middle East has seen its democracy glands go into overdrive these last few years. It's been an election every six to nine months, and the latest iteration of democracy in the only democracy in the Middle East sees the Greatest Leader Since Moses back-stopped by a coalition of extremist nutters. They've got people in government who hate homosexuals and Palestinians. We know this because they brag about it. It gets them votes. I wouldn't want to be a gay Arab in Israel these days. But as our media never tire of reminding us, Israel remains the only democracy in the Middle East. So Bibi's coalition of Jewish extremists has put hard-core Arab-haters in charge of the occupied territories. We're already at an average of a dead Palestinian per day. You ain't seen nothing yet.

Propaganda

Propaganda is something our enemies do. We in the Nations of Virtue (ie Uncle Sam’s club) trade only in true facts and hard truths. After all, when you’re on the side of freedom, human rights, and democracy, you don’t need to bullshit anybody… Bullshit! Case in point: the saga of tanks for Ukraine. Back in March and April, Western media were circulating triumphalist tales of Ukraine having captured so many Russian tanks that the AFU had more tanks in their inventory than when the war started. Soon after, Ukraine sprung a massive counteroffensive that put the run to the Russians, pushing them back with one battlefield rout after another, until December, when they had the Russians trapped in Bakhmut and were systematically destroying the Russian army with their superior valour and military prowess etc…. Oops… all of sudden, after months of winning, Ukraine desperately needs hundreds of tanks, or it’s all over. Freedom and democracy will have been slaughtered on the altar of Putin’s imperialistic ambitions… UNLESS UKRAINE GETS TANKS NOW! Ya right. Weapons weapons weapons. The future of civilization depends on it. We know. Shut-up already! Let’s think this tank thing through. Ukraine had 2000+ tanks at the outset. They added hundreds of captured Russian tanks to their forces. But now they’re out of tanks? But 300 fresh ones from NATO will allow final glorious victory? Something doesn’t add up. I think somebody’s been bullshitting us! The tank demand has exposed some rifts within “united as never before” (according to Sec-Gen Stoltenberg) NATO. Everybody wants to donate tanks but nobody wants to go first. Apparently they’re all afraid of the almost-defeated Putin. UK finally broke the ice with the promise of 14 obsolete Challenger tanks, relics from an era when the UK still had an armaments industry. Zelensky was not impressed. Right now there’s a big push to deliver German-made Leopard tanks. The Germans have been reluctant. After all, the last time German tanks went to Ukraine to fight Russia, it didn’t end well for Germany. Unexpectedly showing a hint of backbone in the face of pressure from their American occupiers (true fact; Germany has been occupied by the US Army since 1945), the Germans have said they’ll permit the transfer of Leopards if the Americans send the vaunted Abrams M-1. That’s where we are at the moment. You can bet there’s some heavy-duty arm-twisting going on in the background. In the last two days The Globe and Mail has run two “news” stories and an opinion piece on the matter. None of them mentioned Germany’s offer to send Leopards IF the Americans send the Abrams. The German position seems perfectly reasonable to me. The reason Americans are reluctant to send their latest and best weapons into actual combat are not a mystery. Weapon sales are one of the few bright spots for the US economy. Why jeopardize those sales if you don’t absolutely have to. It’s not just The Globe shaping its reporting to support a narrative. Today I spent ten minutes at CBC listening to a guy from the Ukrainian NGO StopFake explaining Russian disinformation. Yup, nobody better than Ukrainians to explain Russia to a Canadian audience! StopFake’s Wikipedia entry tells me their funders include the Foreign Ministry of UK and Washington’s National Endowment for Democracy. More reliable sources for what’s what in the Ukraine war! The Globe and the CBC are two media outlets most Canadians view as credible, which they are to a point. But when it comes to preserving USA hegemony over the planet, they are every bit as propagandistic as their Russian counterparts.

Gay Baptists On Heroin

The news that Snoop Dogg was just inducted into the songwriters Hall of Fame gave me hope. Back in the summer of '78 we toured our band, GBOH, through what I later learned was known as the "Bible Belt." We were not well recieved. Which was a pity. We had lyrics that could match anything Snoop has ever done. Alas, I suspect that due to the band's name, we were victims of homophobia. That's ironic. While a couple of bandmates may have dabbled in hard drugs, as far as I know, nobody was either gay or Baptist. We were literally appropriating a gay Baptist identity, which must have pissed off actual gay Baptists something fierce. Anyway, the Gay Baptists on Heroin have been lost in the mists of time, while Snoop Dogg is forever memorialized in the songwriters Hall of Fame. Life just ain't fair.

Guess what? Ukraine needs more weapons!

Does anyone see a pattern yet? Ukraine has been winning since March, or perhaps even February, thanks to the support of her NATO allies, who have generously donated billions of dollars in weapons to the cause. A few weeks go by, and ya, they're really putting the run to the Rooskies, but the final glorious victory demands a few more months and a few more billions worth of arms. We've been treated to a non-stop loop of this tape every few weeks since this started. When do Western news consumers wake up and smell the coffee? Those billions in weaponry aren't being donated. You, the taxpayers in the "donating" nations, are paying for them. They mostly come from the same US arms manufacturers who fund the think-tanks who dreamt up this brilliant plan to bleed Russia and thereby prolong America's "full spectrum dominance" of life on earth. Don't look now, but things are not going to plan. The current debate around main battle tanks is a good illustration. Ukraine won't get anywhere near the number of tanks it's asked for, but they'll get just enough to prolong the war a few more weeks, and then we'll be back at "Ukraine just needs a few more billions and a few more months." Meanwhile, Ukraine is being systematically destroyed. But who cares? It's happy days for Raytheon and General Dynamics and the rest of America's war profiteers!

The death of God and the birth of Woke

I've been developing this theory since my first undergrad Soc course, and it goes something like this. There lies within some of us a genetic predisposition to mind the affairs of others. Early geneticists speculated that some subset of the population had what they informally referred to as the "can't mind my own business" gene. In previous times, this caused the afflicted to devote much of their energies into improving the lives of others. This inevitably manifested in all sorts of ways. Back when people were more religious, it created waves of missionaries who roamed the world spreading dozens of versions of The One True Faith for the simple reason that they couldn't mind their own business. This was fine until the death of God. It's hard to pin-point a date on that, but I think we can agree He was pretty much a gonner by the time Nietzsche was done with Him. After that, the genetically impaired were forced to secularize their impulses. They simply switched from saving your soul to saving everything else about you. Along come seat-belt laws and gun laws and catalytic converters and before you know it you can't even have a smoke in the pool hall anymore. Soon enough they were running out of real-world stuff to regulate, and were forced to expand to the world of feelings. In the early days, we dismissed this as "political correctitude" and assumed its inherent idiocy would doom it soon enough. Were we ever wrong... welcome to Woke-World, where silence is violence and we debate whether or not women with wieners belong on the ladies swim team. America is doomed.

Sitrep: Bathroom Reno

We're waiting for the grout to cure, and then we'll have a functional shower for the first time since October. People assume you must really stink if you haven't had a shower in four months, but that is not the case. We only lost hot water for a few hours, and as long as you got hot water and soap, there's no excuse. Mind you, there are added risks. We've got a generous sized farmhouse sink in the kitchen, but I damn near broke my back when I fell off the kitchen counter. Thank God that's over! There were many lessons learned in the course of this adventure. Lesson 1: I'll never make it as a plumber. My four month project would have been a four day project for professionals. I'm sure if I had to do this over, I could cut down the execution time by at least half. But here's the problem. As a non-professional, I do these projects every ten or twenty years, not every day.

Sardines and smoked oysters; the secrets to surviving the apocalypse

Remember how the world was gonna end back at the turn of the century? Yup, all the computer systems running the world's infrastructure were going down the shitter when the clock struck midnight on 31 December 1999. Nothing happened. My old pal Kipling had a half ton of potatoes stashed in his basement, just to tide his family over till civilization returned. Turned out it never left. His family was eating potatoes morning noon and night till at least '05. That may have been a false alarm, but we might be facing the real deal at the present moment. That NATO war on Russia, for democracy and human rights, could take a turn for the worse any minute. Right now the grid is down in Ukraine, but if we don't stop Putin it could be down everywhere by next week. That's why the smart folks are stocking up on essentials. Toilet paper and booze. And food, of course! And this is where the tinned seafood from maritime Canada enters the picture. My pantry is chock full of tinned sardines and oysters and mussels and herring and you name it. Tinned seafood keeps for years. Defeat Putin; buy East Coast tinned seafood.

Newsweek pushes "FBI corruption" conspiracy theory

We know FBI corruption is a conspiracy theory because no less an authority than the FBI has told us so. So why is Newsweek promoting such egregious misinformation? Check it out; "FBI Gaslights America Over Twitter Files." What’s more, since when does mainstream media use expressions like “wrongthink?” That term is a clear signal that the writer is up to no good. If the media gatekeepers were on their toes, this article would have been “pre-bunked” before it saw the light of day. What’s going on here? We obviously need much more regulation of not only the internet, but media more generally. Otherwise all sorts of nonsense is likely to be spread by the likes of Newsweek. If we can’t even trust the FBI, what’s next? The CIA killed JFK? Putin and Trump not secret lovers after all? The mind boggles…

Canada commits untold billions to "piece of junk" F-35 fighter

Because all the other US vassal states are doing it, we should too. That's the level of logic on display in the statements of our leadership class. If you recall, we committed to a fleet of F-35 fighters way back in the Big Steve dark ages. Then PM Fluffy ushered in the Sunny Daze era, and we had to start all over again. Now that we're back where we started, our aged fleet of CF-18s is even more aged. But how does that make a case for new fighter jets, especially the over-hyped, over-priced, and overall underwhelming F-35? Our current Minister of Defence, an obvious diversity hire with no apparent comprehension of any aspect of her portfolio, assures us that the ten lost years were actually a good thing. We now have a mature aircraft that was a little immature the first time we bought it. All our allies are buying it, so it must be great. The F-35 first took to the air in 2006. Almost 800 have been delivered, and they serve in the air forces of nine nations. But get this; no F-35 has EVER engaged in combat. The closest you'll find is an Israeli F-35 taking out a couple of Iranian drones. If you need a $100 million jet to take down a $20,000 drone, you're in trouble. There's a reason they're deliberately kept out of combat theatres. If the world realized how inferior they are, even to last gen US jets like the F-16, Lockheed Martin would never sell another one. The future is missiles and drones. Manned fighter jets are a relic of the past.

Washington Post: Kiss freedom goodbye forever or give Zelensky everything he wants

That’s according to the Washington Post. And this isn’t just a random op-ed by the usual in-house suspects. These insights come under the byline of none other than Deep State faves Condi Rice and Bob Gates, former Secretaries of State and Defense respectively. That gives the story some serious cred. So lets ponder the insights these insiders inadvertently reveal. The first shocker is in the title. Time is not on Ukraine’s side? It isn’t? Who knew? The WaPo has been regaling us with tales of Ukrainian derring-do and endless battlefield triumphs since March. As more and more of the billions in US and NATO armaments arrive in-country, how is time not on Ukraine’s side? And here’s where these two American Exceptionalists drop a truth bomb about Ukraine: The country’s economy is in shambles, millions of its people have fled, its infrastructure is being destroyed, and much of its mineral wealth, industrial capacity, and agricultural land are under Russian control. Ukraine’s military capability and economy are now entirely dependent on a life-line from the West - primarily the US. Yup, sounds like Ukraine is on a winning tear all right. Nevertheless, Bob and Condi argue these realities demand the West up the ante. Ukraine desperately needs more mortars and missiles and rockets and bombs and billions, and this is the time for tax-payers in the West to tighten their belts to further engorge the coffers of the American manufacturers of all those mortars and missiles etc. Or, we could take a step back, and ponder the realities of the situation. Is another hundred billions in “assistance” likely to accomplish anything the first hundred didn’t, other than kill many more people, mostly Ukrainian? Not likely. Sounds like Zelensky's puppeteers are determined to fight Russia right down to the last Ukrainian.

Prince Harry actually bagged 25 wogs

In 2012 I wrote a post called "Prince Harry bags a wog." That was prompted by a story in the Telegraph which implied that Harry had been "blooded" during his tour of Afghanistan in the British Army. In my round about way I was giving a shout-out to the traditions of the British Empire, in which Prince Harry is a player. That empire traditionally made sport of "flogging the wogs," as was often required to keep peace in the colonies. It was a nothing post, but I loved the title. Ten years later Harry releases his bio, and holy shit, Harry didn't bag a wog; he bagged over two dozen! I don't know how many the nancy-boy Prince William ever shot, but I'm pretty sure if the answer was a number higher than naught we would have heard about it. Therefore, it seems to me that the true inheritor of the mantle of Empire can only be Prince Harry. How can anyone pretend to lead the British Empire without at least some token wog-flogging on the CV, let alone actually bagging a wog, let alone BAGGING 25 WOGS! LONG LIVE KING HARRY!!!

I'm now the proud owner of a glass tile nibbler

The pride comes not from mere ownership, but from having successfully used such an invention. Twelve hours ago I had no idea such a thing existed. It was about twelve hours ago that I was prowling the tile aisle at Home Depot. We're in the final laps of the bathroom reno that started in October. Ya, I don't know how she stays with me either. I'd naively assumed the heavy lifting was done when I successfully ran the tub for five minutes without it raining in the kitchen below. Turns out it had barely begun. I found that out shlepping three cases of ceramic tiles up the stairs. Then we ran into some issues that appeared to demand the rental of a wet tile saw and the purchase of a diamond hole saw. I instead revised the plan to eliminate those issues and instead bought some 12x12 glass tiles that had to be cut down to 9x12. Hence the glass tile nibbler. Now that this job is done, I may never need to nibble a glass tile again. If somebody wants a good deal on a lightly-used glass tile nibbler, give me a shout.

Delusions of the covid-addled mind

When I say covid-addled I don't mean the virus; I mean the hysteria. To my way of thinking, the COVID PANIC was from the get-go much ado about not a whole lot. Killed a lot of old folks. Cleared out a lot of nursing homes. On the other hand,if you were under 60 and in good health, you didn't have much to worry about. That was obvious from early on in the panic, but by then the giant wurlitzer had whipped up a frenzy of fear. By March you had lock-downs spreading faster than the covid in most of the Western world. Florida was a trailblazer in stepping back from the hysteria, dropping restrictions six months later. Here in Ontario we had the longest lock-downs in North America. We destroyed our economy and messed up our kids for a full year and a half after Florida. One of the disturbing aspects of this scandal is that to my knowledge, no politician, medical expert, or mainstream media pontificator has had the grace to apologize. Mind you, there are places on the planet even more totalitarian than Doug Ford's Ontario. Communist China, for instance. It's just in the past couple of weeks that the commies caved and made the decision Florida made almost two and a half years ago. Reaction of our media hysteria promoters to this development has been harsh. China endangers the world with their sudden lifting of covid restrictions. Just like Florida endangered the world with their premature lifting of restrictions in 2020. I think the media types are just pouty because nobody believes a thing they say anymore.

Dog Park Report

We ran into town for supplies today, and to let Big-Lips Bruno have a romp at the dog park. He's been missing canine companionship, so we were disappointed to find we had the place to ourselves. We decided to try the Oliphant dog park, ten minutes away. Lo and behold, a very pretty mastiff awaited us. She was a silver-fawn brindle, taller and thinner than Bruno. They were still exchanging introductory butt-sniffs, to much tail-wagging, when Murphy joined them. Murphy is an exhuberant bernadoodle, and three of the best looking hounds you'd ever want to see treated us to a solid thirty minutes of unbridled rompery. That's pretty much all the Big Boy can handle. Penny and Murph had a little more staying power. He's snoring contentedly in front of the fireplace now... so contented he's slept right past his supper time!