Is it time to take a page out of Mao Zedong's playbook, and send urban elites to the countryside to unlearn their hubris?

The previous post got me thinking. When it's in-your-face obvious that a 30yo university grad's standard of living in the big city is in virtually every aspect lagging far behind the standard of living of a 30yo high school grad, or even a high school drop-out, in small-town Ontario, maybe it's time to shake things up a little.

Generally speaking, the folks who make a go of it in these small towns have something to offer. Don't need to be fancy, but does need to be useful. Teachers, truck-drivers, nursing home staff, drywallers, painters, plumbers, dental hygienists, cooks, farm hands, and so on. If you've got useful skills you'll be fine, and most of these jobs don't require much formal ed at all, but we're happy to pay for what they do.

On the other hand, there's been a vast underclass of the over-educated growing like topsy. These are the folks who manage to spend their six or eight or twelve years of post secondary accumulating massive debt in exchange for credentials that are today worthless, or at least worthless-adjacent. I can't put my finger on it, but as a guy who took way too many soc courses, I've observed that the more your college major involved interrogating intersectionality, the less likely you'll have anything to offer these little communities.  

That said, there's nothing about that PhD, that you're paying off with a lifetime of sessional precarity, that prevents you from learning to drive a truck!

Canada's "housing affordability crisis" mostly impacts entitled, miseducated, urbanites with massive student loan debt

Recently the Globe has found ample space for the musings of a UBC academic who intends to leave the world a better, fairer place for the next generation. I'm certainly 100% aboard for that! Said academic has fired up his very own non-profit, with the help of a little government funding, called Generation Squeeze. As you can see from their landing page, hard work doesn't pay off like it used to. Younger Canadians go to school longer, to land jobs that pay less, only to face runaway housing costs.

Once you've digested a few of Professor Kershaw's Globe & Mail missives, you almost feel sorry for these kids. They were clearly sold a bill of goods. The "hard work" of attending post-secondary for six or eight or twelve years doesn't pay off like it used to.  Where once upon a time that might have given you a leg up on the riff-raff that didn't get into U of T or UBC, now these poor suckers find themselves locked out of the priciest real estate markets. Buying a detached in Toronto or Vancouver is a million +++ undertaking. In that market, you need at least a 20% down, and how is an under-employed PhD gonna pull that kinda coin together in a system where not one in ten doctorates will ever land a tenure track position?

Professor Kershaw is himself not only a tenured prof at a prestigious school, he is an award-winning prof at a prestigious school, so it's safe to presume he's not a complete moron, but he's completely unaware of how the other half lives. That other half is probably well represented in the hundreds of local kids who got high-school diplomas on the strength of their grade four level math skills, thanks to me. Hey, if they got  to my gr 10 class with gr 2 skills and gained two grade levels by June, I earned my paycheque and they earned their diploma!

Here's a few facts about the world they live in.

As in Toronto or Vancouver, two people each working full-time in a min wage job, will jointly qualify for a  $325000 mortgage. That's worth bupkis in TO or Van, but once you're 45 minutes north of Yonge and Steeles, a whole new world opens up! That mortgage, which wouldn't even suffice as a down payment in downtown Toronto or Vancouver, actually buys you a detached on an ample lot! And under a half million you need 5% down, not 20%.

Check out this stuff on offer now, easily within reach of those two hypothetical min wage earning grads.

For sale: 279 1ST AVE AVENUE S, Arran-Elderslie, Ontario N0G1L0 - X13819262 | REALTOR.ca

Say what? Two storey classic yellow brick on a quarter acre, in a quiet village in Amish country, for $330k ? Or perhaps, on the strength of you and your partner's minimum wage  jobs, you would prefer this easily affordable century bungalow.

For sale: 40 7TH STREET SW, Arran-Elderslie, Ontario N0G1L0 - X14094230 | REALTOR.ca

And if yellow brick ain't your thing, check out this red brick beauty!

For sale: 53 3RD STREET S, Arran-Elderslie, Ontario N0G1L0 - X13767306 | REALTOR.ca

Those are just a few of the options available to my students, none of whom have student loan concerns. A quick peek at the Government of Canada Job Bank listings for the area shows 182 jobs, most of which pay well above min wage. And the insurance policy of Amish neighbours in tough times is something Professor Kershaw's students will never find in Toronto or Vancouver!

Professor Kershaw's kids have massive student loans and need help. My kids are doing fine. They're buying homes and starting families. If they have to commute a half hour to work it's a country drive, not a twice-a-day ordeal. 

There you have it! Some kids bought the bill o' goods and now they're "generation squeezed"... other kids went straight to "generation live-your-life!"

Remembering when you could count on your John Deere to last 75 years

Yes, as a matter of fact, I'm warming up to deliver yet another rant about what a tragedy it is, or perhaps even an outright crime, and a quite despicable one at that, that nobody knows any more how to build stuff to last.

Regular readers will be well acquainted with my observation (not that it's in any way original to me, as I'm sure several billion folks around the world are acutely aware of the phenomenon by now) that whereas we once valorized concepts such as reliability and quality, those are archaic values today, deader than God Himself.

No! In the modern era, we celebrate the genius who figured out how to ensure that any fridge stove washer dryer and random countertop appliance expires within weeks, or ideally hours, after its warranty! That's why that lonely Maytag repairman, who single-handedly covered the lower 48 from the 50s to the Reagan era, has been replaced by hundreds of Mexicans. In every town.

And they're on the go 24/7!

I share this only to provide context re the brand mentioned in the title. It was in the early '70s that my father purchased a used John Deere 450 crawler-loader. It was at least twenty years old at the time. Dear Dad has gone to the happy woodlot in the sky, but the by-now 80 yr old JD 450 is still chugging through the family woodlot on the home acreage.

Fast forward from the 80 year-old Deere to me dropping in on the neighbours at the weekend. They are hard-core Deere guys, owning no less than eight of them, ranging from '30s vintage to pretty close to state-of-the-art. They should know from John Deeres, and in their estimation, every innovation for the last generation has been a step backwards. They are especially pissed about how newer models restrict their ability to repair their own machinery. Pretty much every old-school farmer thinks that an outrage, whereas the corporate guys figure it's just the way things have to work.

I had some farm matters to discuss, and when I pulled up, the father-son team happened to be tinkering with a '62 Massey Ferguson. The father explained that his father had bought it new in '62. I half-jokingly enquired if they were still claiming depreciation on it 64 years on. The no-joke answer was yes! Best tractor on the farm!

Well, guess it depends how you define best. They might love their wee Massey, but it's the Deere's doing all the work. That's why I've got my eye on this beauty. She's the little brother to the 450 my father had.  She's only fifty years old - barely broken in!

         Should clear the snow out the drive right smartly!                                               

                                                           

Five lessons I learned today from the war-mongering Editorial Board at the Globe & Mail

As Remembrance day looms, the worthies at 351 King are keen to get us in the right blood-lustig mood. To that end, they today  provided a stark warning of what  horrors await us should we neglect to elevate military spending to the very tippy top of our priorities list.

Lesson 1

In 1941 Canada dispatched 2,000 troops to Hong Kong to stand with our allies against Japan. They were poorly trained and  poorly equipped, were promptly captured and spent the next 4+ years in Japanese prison camps. The lesson the Globe Brain Trust takes from this history is we need to bust the bank on training and kit long before we send our troops into harms way.

The GBT neglects to mention that our two thousand courageous men in uniform weren't so much "dispatched" by Canada, as they were ordered there by their British commanders.  Those commanders, and their supposed overseers in the Canadian political class, were fully aware of their lack of prep and kit, but sent them to certain death regardless.  

The lesson I take from that is, unless we are masters in our own house, we'll forever be at the whim of those who usurp our sovereignty. We traded our British masters for Uncle Sam, and now that's gone sour we're looking to ingratiate ourselves with the virulently ant-democratic EU.

Lesson 2

Thanks to lessons learned in Hong Kong, the 2000 Canadians on the ground in Latvia are now some of the best-trained and best-equipped troops in NATO, but the GBT seem up in the air on whether we're ready enough; best to err on the side of more training and equipment.

I've got news for them. If NATO's big-talking small fry, most obviously Carney and his Baltic buddies, keep talking, and keep facilitating attacks on Russia, Putin's hordes won't be marching across borders. Their vast missile stockpiles, which NATO has no answers for, will take Latvia off the map long before our superbly trained and equipped Canadians ever see a Russian.

Lesson 3

"The Germans are preparing to fight within three years, but Canada will take the better part of a decade to bring its armed forces to a baseline level of readiness. Hopefully, the Russians will 

be considerate enough to delay any incursion until then."  

Ya, won't be the first time the Germans have prepared to fight Russia. And this provides what lesson for us? Frankly, Russia is no more a threat to Canada today than Japan was in 1941.  If the Germans are in the mood to take another crack at Russia, leave us out of it. Why are the globalists at the Globe so keen to put Canadians in harms way?

Lesson 4

Our thought leaders offer this gem in their penultimate paragraph; "None of this is inevitable, of course. Changing it starts with an act of imagination. "

Well, it might if this ossified crew of jilted American Empire Loyalists were capable of imagining anything other than a return to the pre-Donald status quo.

Lesson 5

If you're with our thought leaders so far, you'll see they saved the best for last.  What we really gotta do, and we dropped the ball on this in '41, is develop a network of trauma centres for the mass casualties we will inevitably encounter when we stand tall for our Canadian values.

There you have it, Canada! It is our sacred duty to prepare for mass casualties, because that's the least we can do to preserve our free and democratic way of life!

And while the Ed Board doesn't spell it out, I'm sure they'll be all aboard for transitioning to a focus on housing, health-care, and education  as soon as we're done beating Putin, Xi, and the latest ayatollah.

 

Countdown to Smarmageddon

Here we are yet again at 'the most important election in US history.'  Of course we are! Seems to me every election since at least Ford - Carter has been the most important in US history. In fact, as America's democracy becomes demonstrably the opposite of "democratic," the global America-centric Western media empires now claim US elections are the 'most important, ever, not just in America,  BUT IN WORLD HISTORY!!!'

It's no secret that across the so-called liberal democracies, the 'will of the people,' voters, is everywhere usurped by the one-percenters, or more correctly, the point-double-O-one-percenters, more recently sometimes referred to as the Epstein Class.  American democracy was officially dismembered by the SCOTUS Citizens United decision in 2010. While the relationship between money and power was hardly hidden before, from that moment forward, money has  officially trumped the ballot box in America's electoral system.

The  Trump era has brought a new twist to  media coverage of  elections in the world's indispensable, greatest, and most admired democracy. Whenever Mafia Don shows up on the ballot, not only is the next election the most consequential in the history of democracy, it could be the LAST ELECTION EVER! And that goes double for today's midterms.  The future of American politics has never been at such risk... OMG, is he gonna pull out the BIG RED ATOMIC BUTTON?

Well, with the clown posse around Donny J, I suppose anything is possible, but I'll go out on a limb here and make a prediction.  When the dust settles (no no no... not the nuclear, but the metaphorical) it'll be business as usual. Regardless of the outcome of the most expensive midterms in history,  the Gaza genocide will continue, as will the ethnic cleansing of West Bank and the destruction of Syria and Lebanon. 

We will continue to ply our Ukrainian patsies with empty promises. We'll ship 500 Patriots... as soon as our defence industry, which is the envy of the world and the scourge of our enemies, gets around to building them. The American voters are tired of seeing their taxes fund wars they were never consulted on and couldn't care less about. All of these things will continue seamlessly, regardless of which party prevails today. 

Equally true: the actual concerns of the voting public will never be addressed.

Bibi-Donnie bromance shows signs of severe strain

Back in February last, when USA/Israel launched a surprise attack on Iran, in the midst of pretend peace negotiations, it looked like the good guys had the upper hand for a few days. We murdered the top wog and most of his family, to say nothing of his ruling clique who all deader than dead! In fact, we killed so many of the evil-doers we don't even have anybody to talk to for the next round of fake peace negotiations.

And as we've been reminded once or twice by Mafia Don and the unctuous jerk-off of a platoon-leader who by some miracle became Secretary of War,  our forces of righteousness and projectiles of democracy have sent their navy to the bottom of the sea and its leaders to hell. Oh ya baby!... USA USA USA!!!

A few days into that glorious war, I posted this; The war Israel and USA started ten days ago now threatens the future of both.  

Bingo!

Seven months later, how's it going? The towelheads o' terror are still firing missiles with reckless abandon. The Good Guys seem to be running low on interceptors. There is no sign of peace on the horizon. The Nations of Virtue have sanctioned the Persians from top to bottom and up the wazoo since '79, to no avail. Those folks will eat grass and live in caves for a thousand years before they bow to the genocidal duopoly USAIsrael.

Both of these war criminals are getting more than a little nervous about where things are headed.  There's a real fear that the terrorists might launch a few thousand missiles before the Good Guys in Jerusalem get their next batch of Patriot interceptors, which are scheduled to arrive in three years time. Both of  'em are way out on political limbs they're furiously sawing off in hopes of distancing themselves from blame, but I don't see any hope. America will be in turmoil after Tuesday. The GOP will be decimated, but the Dems will explode in civil war. A lot of heavy hitters in the donkey club hate their fellow asses more than they hate Trump, if what just happened in Michigan is any taste of where we're heading.

Meanwhile, The Greatest Leader Since Moses, while having lost the election, nevertheless finds himself as the 'caretaker' PM while a coalition is formed, a process he should be able to stretch out indefinitely. So here we are. Trump knows Bibi has already destroyed his presidency.

That's not the kinda thing Mafia Don is gonna forgive and forget.

How your perspective on dying changes when you realize you're dying

Don't get me wrong; all of us are always dying, and like the motto of one of my fave alt-news sites proclaims; on a long enough timeline the survival rate for everybody drops to zero.

No shit!

But circumstances have brought me to a place where the odds of my dropping dead any moment have allegedly increased exponentially. That of course is the regrettable course of events that led to a couple of nasty diagnoses nobody wants to hear; CHF and COPD.

Well, you can't really make light of that sort of thing. At the same time, what are you supposed to do about it? I've had my issues in the past. In my "wild hare" days I graduated through one of the world's finest addiction rehab centres not once, but twice! Today I'm six years older than the life expectancy of a boy-child born in '55.

Not only that, but neither of my allegedly life-threatening ailments have in any way impacted my ability to do the things I love most: read and write!

So as far as I'm concerned, my best bet is to keep living life. At this point, cutting out the weed or the smokes or the beer is entirely beside the point. I owe life to the grace of God, and I give thanks every day. 

Some of the kids are still alright

With apologies to Roger and Pete, it brings me joy to say so.  We're so used to imbibing wall-to-wall doom & gloom about the future prospects for our children, we're blind to the good news, even when it's sitting right  next to us.

That's happened here a couple of times of late. Back a few months ago, during the height of high summer, we found ourselves on the patio at the Erie Belle, a seafood joint down Kincardine way we've been patronizing sporadically for at least thirty years, whenever we're down Kincardine way.

There's a boisterous gaggle of twenty-somethings in the street in front of us. Two-three couples and maybe 3-4 singles, but all one happy, ethnically diverse crew, vaping their way down the street, and about the time our drinks arrive, they arrive at the other end of the patio.

They're a little on the noisy side for our ears, but by golly there's an animated conversation happening over there about what sounds to me like office politics. Fifteen minutes in we concluded they were co-workers from some high-tech outfit in Waterloo, just an hour down the road, but here's what was so amazing; in the hour or so we shared that patio, none of them ever pulled out or consulted any "device."

That gives me hope.  I made a point of mentioning that on my way out. I'm guessing they marveled at how little it takes to give an aging boomer hope! 

Fast forward to this morning in one of our favorite local joints, Dockside Willies, named after the famous rodent, Wiarton Willie. The Farm Manager had a brutal week in her day job, and we were down for a quiet breakfast. We weren't settled into our window seats, overlooking Wiarton harbour and Colpoys Bay, more than a few minutes, when a crew of six kids, barely if at all out of their teens, take the next table. 

Believe it or not, none of that crew ever consulted any device in the 45 minutes we shared their space, and while we weren't "evesdropping" per se, their chit chat was mostly about the jobs they had and a couple of recent job interviews. Clearly, these are kids not hiding in parental safe houses seeking comfort in their video games and AI therapists.

Maybe it's easier to find engagement with the real world in these rural communities, where most of the folks still trust their neighbours... or at least know their names!

Mavis Gallant, fathers and daughters, and fathers and sons

Fathers and daughters

I happened to be watching the Daytona 500, and the race got red-flagged early on, so I took the opportunity to drive into town for a sixpack, and had the immense pleasure of hearing an interview with the late Mavis Gallant on the car radio.

Canadian literature has always left me a little cold. I think it's that "Canadian" label. Why do we need to have labels for literature? Isn't it enough that it's in a language I can read? As long as you're writing in English should it matter whether you write from India or Ceylon or Nigeria or the US or England?

Or Canada?

It struck me as a way to get some spotlight for otherwise mediocre writers who would have drowned in the big pool but were able to become big fish in the segregated pool we call Canlit.

So Michael Ondaatje came to Canada and is now a great Canadian writer; Malcom Lowry did some of his best work here but was never a Canadian writer. Elizabeth Smart was a Canadian but didn't write here so is excluded from the Canlit canon... it all seems a little arbitrary to me.

Mavis was a Canadian writer who wrote elsewhere and was therefore a Canlit outsider of sorts; proudly embraced after the fact of her international success, which only underscores my point that these labels of national identity are irrelevant if not illegitimate.

Good writing is always universal. Love, death, peace, war...

The father-daughter bond is one of those universals, and it was poignant to hear the octogenarian Gallant reminisce about events in her life from over 80 years ago. The father-daughter relationship was evidently a crucial one in her formative years. It's remarkable that she can wistfully recollect memories even though he died when she was ten years old.

I've had the extreme good fortune of not dying when my daughter was ten. That's allowed me to be a coach and cheerleader as a shy but precocious little girl has negotiated the innumerable hazards that lie in wait for a girl growing up, and I do believe it's tougher for girls than for boys.

For well beyond the first year of her life I walked her to sleep every night to Sing it again, Rod. At some level that hour-long walk every night created bonds that have been strained at times, by divorce and adolescence and all the baggage that goes with that, but have never been seriously threatened.

It's a joy I can scarcely articulate, to drive to the big city and visit with her, an independent and successful young professional making her way in the world.

The last ten years have also gifted me a step-daughter. That relationship did not have the benefit of that crucial first year of being walked to sleep to Rod Stewart tunes. As a result, we had to fight through a lot of that adolescent baggage, a process that had both highs and lows. But we made it.

She too is a fiercely intelligent and independent young woman successfully making her way in the world.

I feel bad for Mavis' dad. He missed so much.

And I am the luckiest dad in the world.

*************

Not sure why it's easier for me to write about the girls than the boys. The father-son bond between me and my boys was always coloured by my relationship with my own father. They say your personality is largely shaped in the first five years of life by what your parents do. 

My parents were dirt-poor immigrants fighting to make a go of it in their new country. For the first five years of my life Dad went to work in a factory every day. By the time I was six my life's ambition was to have the best job in the factory.

By the time I became father to a son, my own father had betrayed his factory beginnings and had reinvented himself as a real estate broker. At some level I was never able to forgive that betrayal. 

Fortunately, the confusion and despair that betrayal engendered made it utterly impossible to dictate the dreams and aspirations of my own boys.

While that may sound generous, the fact of the matter was none of the lads were the slightest bit interested in my insights, ever! Where the girls are high-energy over-achievers, the dudes are all laid-back under-achievers. Between the three of them I've got two cooks and an ed assistant. Thus far none have been featured in the alumni magazines post-secondary institutions use to brag up their grads!

Is Canada a serious country?

Given the hoo-ha around that EU delegation convening in Montreal, you'd almost think so. Queen Ursula herself has declared that Canada would make a meaningful addition to her stable, although I'm not sure why. Just today Global news has a story about our inability to provide ammo to our armed forces. Ponder this quote; " ... Canada's Auditor General Karen Hogan said a flawed inventory management system, dysfunctional data analysis and contracts plagued with inefficiencies has resulted in the Department of National Defence (DND) not knowing how much ammunition it has or needs, or how to get more."

So the EU Strike Force Ursula is building to defeat Putin wants to cosey up to a military that doesn't know how much ammo it needs, or how to get more? Well, we can't really build our own, because Canada's military-industrial infrastructure is but a tiny fraction of what we had 75 years ago. Lucky for the Western Alliance and their warmongering elites, Russia and her allies have also allowed their military-industrial capacity to atrophy... NOT!

Our blonde bimbette of a cabinet minister, recently given the boot out of the Foreign Ministry, has been drawing attention to her ineptitude by picking a fight with the American owners of Canada's largest steel producer. Does Ursula realize the target she is seducing doesn't even own its steel industry? Has zero armament-building capacity other than foreign-owned branch plants? Is decades away from replacing China as a source of rare earths and strategic metals? And she wants to partner the EU with Canada because... of our common values?

Ms Joly has stated loudly and publicly she will on no account entertain a face-to-face with the CEO of the company handing out layoff slips to the Hamilton steelworkers until he brings them all back. She's extra pissy because the dude once said Trump's tariffs were a good idea, and now she's gonna hold him accountable for that outrage!

What a moron! What clout does she imagine she has? Does she not realize CC would just as soon shut Stelco down?  That's a time honoured tradition in Canada - sell our success stories to foreigners who shut 'em down to eliminate the competition. Champion grader in Goderich and the GM Diesel locomotive works in London were both sold to Caterpillar and shuttered.

All this is bad enough, but we ain't seen nothing till we marvel at the truly bizarre take our official propaganda outlet has on matters pertaining to Canada's role in this world-on-the-brink. Long-time CBC staff writer (and I note that only to underline he is not a recent TMU grad dropped into a temp internship funded by Meta and Google) Evan Dyer, whose editors blessed his long-winded expose with the title, "Trump's increasing support for Russia carries existential danger for Canada."

Yup, Evan found at least half a dozen academics and think-tankers who missed the Mueller investigation's final report, and the lot of them are still banging on about Putin's seizure of American democracy. The reality is that they're half-right, but the folks who really call the shots in Washington reside in Jerusalem, not Moscow.

Congrats to Steve Liebig on his re-election win!

Hey Steve, good to see you prevailed in spite of  my endorsement!

I've got nothing but respect for the folks who try to make a go of governing at the local level. Insofar as our democracy has any claim to authenticity, it's found at the grass roots of local politics. That's gotta be a thankless task. In one of my previous lives I occasionally had dealings with local officials around minor zoning variances and such, and it was always a little disheartening when county councilors began to audibly snore during my presentations.

Once you go up the value chain in power politics, you soon realize actual democracy is limited to that very elemental "grass roots" level... anything beyond that, well by golly, thank God we've got some sensible mayors who appreciate their "strong mayor" powers. That ain't democratic, but at least it gets things done! Benito would be proud, and Doug Ford is too!

God bless the folks who give up their evenings to attend council meetings. You're keeping democracy alive!

Canada joins Eurovision in bold display of solidarity with Israel

Not that I ever paid it a whole lot of attention, but after Conchita Wurst won, I had to admit it was way too avant-guardy for my simplistic level of art appreciation, and I've been blissfully oblivious to it ever since. That's why the announcement that Canada would be joining Eurovision for the 2027 season came as a surprise. What possible motivation might the Carney team have for taking this decision at this moment in time?

Here's my theory. What's been the most controversial issue for Eurovision since Conchita? That's hands down the inclusion of Israel in this European contest. While the Ashkenazi elite may disagree, Israel is not actually part of Europe. Furthermore, certain participants geographically present in Europe take exception to the inclusion of the non-European genocidal state, on the grounds that the contest is being used to cool-wash Israel's war crimes. Exhibiting the rare trait of taking a stand on principle, five European countries boycotted the 2026 competition.

Which brings us to Mark Carney's surprise announcement that Canada is gonna kick ass in Eurovision 2027! We're even further from Europe than Israel is, but hot damn, we're keen! Why?  Carney has been dogged by claims he's not doing near enough to push back against the rising tide of antisemitism that has hogged news headlines non-stop. Frankly, a lot of those headlines are horseshit. I'd be utterly shocked if any authentic Torontonians, anywhere along the Bathurst Street downtown-to-King Township corridor, and its many tributaries into the the most prosperous and consequential neighborhoods,  EVER move to Tulsa to escape rampant antisemitism in Toronto! Nevertheless, I've been treated to multiple stories across mainstream Canadian media claiming we're on the cusp of exactly that! 

So what better way to make a very public display of our support for Israel than by going all-in on Eurovision '27!  And naturally, our official government propaganda network is gung-ho! For what it's worth, it costs big bucks to enter.  How many big bucks we taxpayers are expected to fork over to this

brazen attempt to normalize the genocidal state isn't something our leaders  want us to know. Apparently it's all covered by the CBC's budget, so look for their government subsidy to rise sharply as we deploy them to do blatant PR and narrative management.

Anyway, CBC remains my default soundtrack in the car, and today they're already pushing the beejeezus out of five fresh new Canadian talents, all of them hoping to become the next Conchita Wurst.

Our tax dollars at work!

 

Tense times in the freedom & human-rights-loving democracies

 My news feeds are staggering under the sheer volume of clashing pro and not-so-much narratives around who's the fascist and who's the commie and who's the patriot and who's laughing all the way to the bank.

What we're most likely to agree on is the latter. You obviously can't shovel hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to Ukraine, via Lockheed Martin et al, without enriching the MIC in general, and the corner-office crowd therein most of all. But that's the least of it.

We find ourselves at what I consider a novel juncture. The freedom-loving democracies of yore are today clamoring for war, and sooner rather than later. All of the freedom & human rights champions across NATO are slashing social spending to exponentially boost war prep spending, because Putin.

BTW, the Nations of Virtue were already outspending Putin 10:1 long before Mafia Don ordered NATO vassal states to double, triple, or in the case of Canada, quadruple our military spending, because Putin.

Well... all that sturm und drang shouldn't cause us to lose sight of who's laughing all the way to the bank, and that's Trump's merry posse of billionaire Zionists in general, and the Trump clan in particular.

Can Commander Cody's hotrod Lincoln outrun those Chinese EVs?

The Lincoln label has been an iconic American luxury car brand for over 100 years. In the early days they fought for pride of place against the likes of Packard, Duesenberg, and Pierce-Arrow.  In the post-war boom they and Cadillac ruled the luxe roost in the American market, at least until German manufacture rose from the ashes of WWII.

When I was a gas-pump boy at John's Supertest in my teens,  the Lincoln Mk III was the ride of choice for quite a few of the more affluent folks. Harold Knight owned a local lumber yard and pulled in once a week in his burgundy coupe with the black vinyl roof. One day he got to yacking with somebody in the store and I asked him to please move his car. He apologizes and gives me "if you wouldn't mind kid, could you pull it ahead... keys in it." That moment was the highlight of my tenure at John's Supertest!

I greatly admired the last generation of Lincoln land yachts culminating in the garish excesses of the late '70s. Remember the 1979 Town Coupe? A family of four could live comfortably in one of those while simultaneously solving the commute-to-work challenge!

I've been partial to Toyotas and Suubs most of my adult life, but there's a reason Lincoln has been on my radar of late. It's about a) towing cap, and b) depreciation. In the event the Farm Manager actually follows through on her threats to retire at 65, we might like to spend some time towing a boat or a camper. No firm plans and no fresh ideas, but it seems to be the kinda shit people do if they don't die first.  And frankly, I'm looking forward to it! 

Truth is, the tow cap on my Toyota is more a toy cap. There are certainly Toyotas with outstanding towing capacity. A Sequoia will tow any boat or camper I'd ever own. So would a Lincoln Navigator. Both run well over $100k, but here's the thing; the Lincoln depreciates 60% over five years; the Toyota depreciates  37%.  In other words, in terms of affordable tow vehicles, a used Lincoln is far more affordable than the Toyota.

Which brings us back to Commander Cody.  Since I'll never need four tons of towing capacity, I was looking at the lighter stuff. The Lincoln Nautilus caught my eye. It's got double the tow capacity of my Rav4.  It'll easily handle a little teardrop camper or a small boat. And it also has the extra-special distinction of being built right here in Ontario, at Ford's Oakville plant!

Or at least it used to be. I used to pride myself on thinking I was kinda on top of what goes on in this world, but I had absolutely no idea that as of the '24 model year, every Lincoln Nautilus sold anywhere in the world is manufactured entirely in China. 

Yup, one of the very few surviving American car brands... made in China.

New study reveals penguin farts cause climate change

Imagine my shock when I happened across this headline at Euronews; Antarctic penguins emit up to 7 million tonnes per year of methane.  Oh. My. God!!! And here we've been blaming ourselves for this disaster ever since Silent Spring came out! And it's been those gosh-darned penguins all along!

Well, this news is a real gamechanger! If it's been the penguins all along, that means all that crazy stuff like the energy transition and EVs was just the hoax Donald Trump claimed! 

Kinda hard to believe,  really. I mean, the little devils look so cute and cuddly, you'd never guess they're destroying our habitat with all that methane. Cute and cuddly they may well be, but each and every one of them is farting 7 tonnes of methane into the air we breathe. Hell, I doubt I'm putting out those volumes even since I went to the beans & cabbage diet on account of the gluten thing. And there's only one of me.

But truly, it is so refreshing when science can expose long-accepted verities as false with more science!

What would Moses do?

There's a story on view at the Jpost about Bibi putting pressure on his White House puppet to cough up a few more endorsements of The Greatest Leader Since Moses before Israelis go to the polls two days hence. Gives you a clear sense of how off-the-rails the Israeli polity has gone. It's gotta be a vanishingly small club of world leaders who imagine a Mafia Don endorsement at this moment in time would boost their fortunes!

And all too obviously, Trump is increasingly reluctant to provide such endorsements. Netanyahu's plunge into genocidal mayhem post-7.10  hasn't been as popular in America as Donald's AIPAC handlers had assumed, and he's got his own election storm-clouds gathering. Americans can't get honest news out of Israel from Western media, but al Jazeera and other non-Western platforms have been live-streaming Israel's industrial-scale mass-murder of women  and children for three years now, and to their credit, most Americans don't approve. 

The fact such an endorsement matters to Bibi speaks volumes. In the mind of The Greatest Leader Since Moses, a Trump endorsement would, even at this late hour, potentially move the needle enough to keep him in power and out of jail.

Ironically, it could potentially do the opposite for Trump!

As for what Moses would do, that's a distraction. It could be argued Bibi is not only greatest since, but GREATEST of ALL TIME! And here's why Moses 2.0 beats the pants off the original iteration. PM Netanyahu has devoted his entire career to fulfilling God's command, issued thousands of years ago, to kill all of Israel's enemies, and their children, and their dogs, and their sheep... there's more, but you probably see the drift. Moses 1.0 on the other hand was pretty loosey-goosey with God's commands even during his own lifetime, let alone thousands of years up the road.

There ya go Donnie; I figure it would please the Lord most if you cranked out a barrage of Truths over the next coupla days endorsing the war criminal, thereby, God willing, speeding the political end of you both!

Elon Musk explains never-ending Ukraine War boondoggle

Apparently the think tank here at Falling Downs is not alone in noticing the eternal feedback loop that has taken hold in Zelly's prosecution of his "defence" of Ukraine. For years now we've gone again and again through the near-defeat of the aggressor, and but for the lack of just a few crucial weapons and a few even more crucial tens or hundreds of billions of euros or USDs, we can finally free the Russian people from the evil dictator Bad Vlad, but also restore freedom and sovereignty to Ukraine!

Elon took note of this phenomenon in a post on X yesterday, in which he took the critique to the next level. According to him, this cycle keeps repeating because the folks approving ever more billions, and giving away NATO's armory, personally benefit from this absolute waste of taxpayer dollars. Of course they do! Not many pols in the liberal democracies are willing to risk donations from the war profiteers by calling out this massive criminal waste of euros, USDs, and Ukrainian lives.

Thanks for that insight, Elon! Let's take it to the logical next level. For the ruling junta in Kyiv, Russia's "unprovoked, illegal, full-scale invasion" is the gift that keeps on giving! How else do you imagine the Kyiv Bentley dealership clawed its way to the top of the European Bentley sales charts... from dead last just five years ago!

Carney invites Russia, Iran, and North Korea to join coalition of like-minded nations to overthrow Trump regime

In a stunning reversal of policy, the Canadian PM has offered yesterday's enemies a seat at the table as he builds a coalition to restore the freedoms and human rights of the American people. Clearly Trump has become a deranged madman obsessed with restoring the former glory of a once-serious power. 

He has cowed allies and enemies alike into submission. Everybody except Canada, which is why it's up to the Globalist Banksters favorite banker to set things right, and clearly, time is of the essence. After starting and losing two wars at once, Trump has become so delusional that he's more convinced by the day he actually won them. He is flooding the streets of American cities with armed thugs who are hunting down Trump opponents. He is murdering his own people!

We have rarely seen such a clear-cut case for the application of R2P, the Responsibility to Protect doctrine Canada was instrumental in getting through the UN. The leadership burden therefore falls to us.

We haven't been called to do much punching-above-our-weight since the golden age of Big Steve, but Canada stands ready. Leadership is what we do.  We're ready to take back our rightful role at the top o' the democratic order!

Former ambassador to Russia briefs CBC on grim human rights situation under Putin

 It's grim alright. Former ambassador Sarah Taylor painted a bleak picture... not for herself, but for the 140 million Russians who don't have the freedom to escape Bad Vlad's dystopian shithole.

Sarah shared some profound insights that brought into focus the scale of Putin's relentless disinformation war. It is truly mind-boggling! For example, for over fifty years the communist dictator Nikita Khrushchev had a completely bogus rep as a reformer, when in reality he was one of the worst they ever had till Putin came along. All that hogwash about Nikita K freeing millions of political prisoners from the Siberian Gulag? Lies lies lies!!!

But the lying didn't really take off till Putin seized the Kremlin  via an obviously fraudulent "democratic" election featuring, literally, some two dozen alleged political parties! Ya, as if! And the disinformation war against the West went completely bonkers after Alexei Navalny returned from his all-expenses-paid education at Yale and began asking questions about where Bad Vlad had squirreled away the billions, nay, tens of billions... double nay nay, HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS Putin has pilfered from his longsuffering people.

At great risk to her personal safety, Taylor made the courageous decision, along with the ambassadors from France, UK, Germany, and USA, to attend Navalny's funeral. There, her heart was almost broken by the sight of "many" thousands of Muscovites who defied Putin with their presence. Although CBC didn't use the phrase "tens of thousands" in their reporting at the time, she ventured that in her estimation it might very well have been possible!

Her interview with Matt Galloway was a real eye-opener, and another job well done by our public broadcaster. Bravo Matt and Sarah!

Meanwhile our PM was over in Ankara to sign trade and defence deals with like-minded NATO ally  Turkiye. It's a lot like Canada, except for a couple of minor things... for example, while they've got twice our overall population, they've got 10x the prison population! And there is an argument to be made our erstwhile NATO ally holds more political prisoners than Russia! The Sultan's human rights bona fides may be a little over-ripe, but any port will do in this storm of authoritarian terror launched by Putin and his minions in Tehran and North Korea!

But for the Grace of God...

The Grace of God. We don't put much stock in the Grace of God in the modern era.

Got a call last night from my old pal Kipling. But for the Grace of God, Kipling woulda been a gonner twenty times over long before now. And he knows it. That's the thing about old guys who are shocked and confused when they suddenly find themselves grappling with the fact they actually made it to old age! 

That truly is a WTF moment. I went into a Service Ontario office yesterday and came out a half hour later with a VIP handicapped parking permit. WTF? How did that happen? First place I went to try it out was Shoppers Drug Mart, and wouldn't you know, all the handicapped spots were taken!

That's obviously something to get pissy about if you're looking for a handicapped parking space, but since I'm new to gimp-world, I'll just hang back and reserve judgement. But for the Grace of God, I may have very well dropped dead in some random parking lot long before I snagged that VIP parking permit!

In praise of elderly Jewish gentlemen who happen to have law degrees

We're delving into the archives here, and I've no idea if Uncle Sid remains among the living, but thirteen years ago he made enough of an impression that I wrote about him.

********************

First of all, Sid ain't my uncle.

I don't think, technically speaking, he's even an "uncle" to the Farm Manager. Maybe a second cousin once removed or something.

Anyway, I ran into Sid at the family get-together about a month back.

Usually I only run into Sid at family funerals.

So I grabbed Sid's hand for a good old farm-style handshake, "hey good to see ya Sid... I only see you at funerals!"

I should mention that Sid is 87 years old. Still goes to his office at his law practice every day. Still got all his marbles, and they're all rolling in the right direction.

I think he does real estate law mostly. You can probably do that till you're 150. After all, what can go wrong? The title searchers do the title search. The lien checkers check for liens. The legal secretaries and assorted unpaid interns do the rest.

When all those folks have done all your work, you give it the stamp of approval and off you go!

Now that's just a general rant about real estate lawyers. I don't mean for a moment to suggest that's how Sid rolls.

But Sid is one savvy dude. When I mentioned about only seeing him at family funerals he rejoinders, without a moment of hesitation, "ya I know! Everybody I know is dead!"

What a great guy to have a beer with!

Here's to ya, Sid!

How to tell when you're busting the speed limit on the Alzheimer Highway

Not that I would, personally, know anything about that, but I've heard through the grapevine one of the sure-fire symptoms is when you start doing shit you've never been known to do before. Like, just to pick a hypothetical example out of the ether,  shopping for high-end footwear.

 I gotta admit I've been somewhat infatuated with the Dayton 64 brand of late, and I'll tell you why. Thanks to a recent Globe feature on bespoke brands unique to Canada, I learned that Dayton 64s are called that because the IWA Canadian HQ was at 64 Dayton Avenue in Vancouver!

And here's why this matters to the pot-addled hillbilly. For a period of several months, I think four max, maybe four and a half, I was the shop steward at an International Woodworkers of America local in Victoria BC. As it happened, none of the older guys wanted the job, so the punk from Ontario got it by default. The punk from Ontario was soon enough embroiled in crises on all sides that had him scurry home to Ma & Pa's basement, but to this day I regard those few months with nostalgia and regret...

Not sure what that's worth... you get to a certain age and damned near everything you see in the rear-view is framed in nostalgia and regret!

And I'm not a complete stranger to Canadian-made high-end footwear. I've had a pair of blue suede Hartts forever.  I got 'em in a thrift shop for twenty bucks. There was another high-end brand also from New Brunswick that I think is still around, but their shoes are built in England now. 

But back to the Alzheimer Highway. Right now I'm looking at a vintage pair of Daytons, a wee bit scuffed up, on offer at five hundred bucks. Ya, that's three times what I've ever paid for footwear before, but hot damn...  wait a minute! That sharp-looking logger's boot may look good but it don't have so much as a steel toe! WTF? 

I couldna even wore those puppies into the IWA shop where I was the shop steward! They mighta made real boots once upon a time, but they're strictly Japan / China tourist fare today. 

See!  A guy who can figure that out still has a lot of runway left on that highway!

Remembering the fake-news fairies who brought you Malalah, Greta, and little Bana

From the archives, but near as I can tell  we're way more befuddled by the diff between shit & shinola, truth & truthiness, than we were back then!

**************

You gotta admit the wily Erdogan knows a good photo-op when he sees one.

If nothing else, this story proves that the roads from "rebel held" areas of Syria to the capital of Turkey remain wide open, in spite of the fact that Turkey has allegedly joined the fight against Daesh. How else to explain the fact that Bana was only evacuated out of Aleppo two days ago, on a Syrian government bus, and transferred to rebel held territory, and finds herself on The Sultan's lap in Ankara a mere 24 hours later?

That's truly amazing!

But in annals of the wily Erdogan's amazing adventures, it's par for the course. This is the guy who heads the second largest military in NATO but is conniving with Bad Vlad in all sorts of nefarious goings on in the neighborhood. He's fighting ISIS but fighting the Kurds even harder, even though it's universally acknowledged that the Kurds are fighting ISIS harder than anybody. The guy who embodies the shared values of NATO even while wreaking havoc on his Kurdish population, side-lining democracy in his own country, and jailing more journalists than any despot in the world...

Sometimes it's hard to figure out where the truthiness ends and the fake news begins, isn't it?

Remembering when ethnic jokes were funny

At least they sounded droll enough to my ear. They were largely jokes passed around amongst immigrant factory hands in southern Ontario and beyond, in the post war economy where they were crammed into factories alongside other ethnic groups they'd been locked in mortal combat with not too many years before.

The fun thing was virtually all these different ethnic groupings were white Christians. A true fact we've absolutely lost sight of is no matter how many not-whites European colonialism murdered in the roughly 500 years it was dominant, it murdered far more white Europeans! 100 million plus just in the two industrial-scale wars of the 20th century! Virtually all of them, outside the Pacific theatre, were white. Even the Jews murdered by the white Nazis were white European Jews, not non-white Arabic Jews.

The gist of this joke genre was what personality traits to keep an eye out for in case your former enemies were about to return to type. So you got a lot of stuff like never trust a German in a uniform. Never turn your back on an Irishman with a jug of whiskey. Never trust a Jew with a law degree.  Never turn your back on an Italian with a hard-on, and so forth. Over the years the oeuvre gained in specificity, so by the time we got to "beware of Greek restauranteurs with valid insurance policies," Greeks had long been considered mainstream white Christians.

Today pretty much all that stuff is "hate speech." And as we are all reminded day in and day out, there's nothing, NOTHING more corrosive than hate speech to our cohesion as a sovereign nation!

Ya, maybe. But it seems our national cohesion was far more robust before our ruling strata got obsessed with stamping out hate speech!

What up with CBC obsession over Alberta "separation" vote?

I daresay there can't possibly be  more than a tiny handful of Canadians for whom the question of a possible future referendum about a possibly even further-in-future destruction of Canada because of tomorrow's vote is something they're even aware of.  Yet for at least the past month, this vote has crowded out virtually every other issue around the country and around the world! 

Why? What is it our official government propaganda mouthpiece is trying to distract us from? What are a few issues that concern Canadians far more than the hypothetical scenario above. Hmm... how about the fact our kids can't afford homes. How about new grads struggle to find jobs, let alone start careers. Number one among pretty much all Canadians other than talking heads on CBC is the rapidly rising cost of absolutely everything. Most folks are way more interested in reducing the number of homeless in their streets than they are in what might happen in case "separatist's" win an election in Alberta twenty years down the road.

Right now I've got Cross Country Checkup in the background, and it's been one expert after another solemnly warning of the grave threat separation poses to everybody except the gay-hating racists who have been secretly promoting it, in collusion with US MAGA forces, not surprisingly. The tone is even more solemn due to the disaster at the CAF base.

News sites world wide have been reporting all day long, the explosion happened when a live-fire training exercise went awry and hit a nearby natural gas pipeline pumping station.  Still waiting for Carney's PR department to verify.

It's tits-up for Micron

Li'l Napoleon keeps plumbing new depths in the history of French presidential polling. When you listen to him, he seems to believe massive street protests are proof he's on the right track! From the looks of things, more and more folks obviously believe he is! In fact, the French masses are so impressed by their li'l emperor's sagacity they have set multiple cities alight in celebration!

CBC's coverage has been careful to stress that the massive street protests are entirely the result of  disgruntled high school students, belatedly joined by a few yellow vest types. While manifestly false, there's a reason for that framing. Canadian students are far too polite  docile to ever push back against the governments who have systematically underfunded education for the past fifty years, and besides, we never had yellow vests.

The reason a million Frenchmen and women are in the streets is because Li'l Nap has made it abundantly clear, over and over again, that in the democracy he presides over, he calls the shots, and the voters don't. Oddly enough, that's the exact message the German people are getting from Blackrock Schmertz and the Brits from the latest hapless dork who finds himself in 10 Downing. What these key NATO allies, the very like-minded democracies Mark Carney wants to hitch our wagon to, have in common is they've all announced massive social spending cuts in order to prepare their people for war with Russia by 2030. That's why France is in flames today, and unless there's  a change in course soon, the conflagration can only spread.

Which brings us back to CBC. Canada has yet to impose the draconian social spending cuts seen among our European allies, but the writing is on the wall. Thus far Carney's orgy of military spending is only in the planning stage, and we can hope the government follows through with the time-honored Canadian tradition of giving ourselves a pat on the back for a job well done, and leave it at that.

I'm not a fan of Brodie Fenlon's gang of wokies,  but they want to blame teenagers for the mayhem in France for a reason. Otherwise they might have to face the fact that voters don't call the shots in Canada either. Mark Carney at this moment has the highest numbers in the history of Canadian polling. He has announced a trillion dollars in military spending that no voters have been consulted on. If only half  those projects proceed we'll see those massive social spending cuts as surely as night follows day.

Another shady conman fools Canadian pols and CBC journalists

There's a happy happy story on view at CBC today about a brand-spankin'-new AI data centre coming to Cape Breton! Yessiree Bob, that's $10 billions of investment that'll put Cape Breton on the map, and not just any old map,  but the map of bustling high-tech hubs!

This turn-around in Nova Scotia's long history of economic decline is thanks to the visionary American-Australian venture capital veteran Trent Vichie. Vichie originally made headlines with a plan to become a major clean-hydrogen player, a venture that will pay off as soon as the next tranche of government funding arrives. Not to mention Viche's  not one, not  two, but FOUR wind farms snuggled tight between the clean hydrogen complex and the $10B AI campus! None of this stuff  is anywhere near shovel-ready but all of it has been repeatedly announced to great fanfare.

Not a venture capitalist to rest on his laurels, the industry veteran's Everwind Fuels is behind this $10B project. Not only that, but he has revealed that one of the two biggest names in AI, Anthropic, will take a twenty year lease when the project is completed several years hence.

Virtually everything in the CBC story is uncritical paraphrasing, if not straight-up plagiarizing of various Vichie-related press releases. Anyone even peripherally acquainted with what's going on in AI today would put zero stock in any claim that Anthropic will be in any position to lease anything by then, if it survives at all. Check this out.

This is an all-too-common example of so-called journalists thinking their job is done once they've regurgitated a corporate press release. How does Taryn Grant get this story when she clearly knows nothing about her topic, and worse, apparently has no interest in knowing anything about it.

Like Eliot Pence, Trent Vichie is a visionary so far ahead of his time that it takes a steady stream of government grants to keep these bullshitters afloat. As with Eliot, legitimate biz press like Forbes and Bloomberg missed their spectacular achievements over the years. A simple google of Vichies name pulls up shit like this.  Looks like his "chief of staff" at Everwind also washed his car and did the lawn. I ask you, should that not raise some questions among the politicians and CBC journalists fawning over this clown?

Return of Gerrie the Geriatric Ranter

I once had a Substack by that title; "The Geriatric Ranter." Had high hopes for it, but a few years in it was somewhat underperforming my expectations, and I pulled the plug. 

Meanwhile, the numbers on the original blog went nuts. Even today, when I've posted nothing yet, 6k+ views. And what's kinda screwy is at least half the stuff I'm writing sounds like it coulda come straight from Gerrie.

So I'm sort of thinking maybe I should bring back the Ranter. On Substack. Because the algos gate-keeping at Google's Blogger insist I'm still violating their imaginary "standards." Therefore I could never monetize on Blogger, but could on Substack.

On the other hand, I like bragging up the fact I write not for filthy lucre, but because it's in me and it's gotta come out... oh Lord, let that boy boogie woogie!

Anyway, Gerrie woulda had some fun with the adventure I had today. I'd meant to stop for gas after me and Big-Lips Bruno the mastiff were done our laps at the dog park, and I'd actually meant to do it yesterday but wtf, I'm old, I forget shit. So I 100% knew it was 100% essential to fill up today.

And then I got a call from my dear sister inviting me for lunch in Wiarton! She is the most wonderful sibling I could ever wish for, deeply cares for me, is driving all the way up from the city, and of course I said yes, and since I'm at the stage of mental impairment when I can't actually keep two thoughts in my head at the same time, I totally forgot that fill-up.

We had a lovely lunch, and I was swimming in good vibes on my way home to Falling Downs. Or at least I was till the "low fuel" warning light came on... Oh shit! Wiarton doesn't have a gas station anymore... I'm 30 km from the nearest gas station and according to the flashing warning light I got 12 km range left in the tank. 

So I obviously go from happy vibes to  max stress in about half a second... and by the time I got to my driveway I had 4 km left, and for a guy still learning his limits around congestive heart failure and COPD, all I can say is thank-you Jesus for not calling me home today!

With 4km in the tank I obviously wasn't driving the 20km into town to pick up the Farm Manager from her day job. Luckily I was able to get through and give her the heads-up, although there was a moment of miscommunication when I had to clarify it was essential the jerry can I was asking her to bring home be full.

But all's well that ends well, and that's pretty much all I ask of life these days; happy endings!

Getting back to the Geriatric Ranter, maybe it's time for Gerrie to fire up a fresh Substack.

Beware of visionaries lobbying for taxpayer funding

There was a heart-warming story in the Globe & Mail this morning that hit all the right notes. A Canada-Ukraine joint venture has been formed to build autonomous vehicles, in Canada! The Ukraine partner has already delivered 5000 to the army, and would like to expand while moving production out of range of Putin's missiles.

The Canadian side, meanwhile, is a recently launched start-up, Dominion Dynamics, led by visionary leader Eliot Pence, an expert in AI, robotics, and the architect of Anduril Industries growth from obscure start-up to industry giant in the 2018-2022 period. We're obviously lucky to have Eliot on our team! Alas, the only thing missing for this joint venture to save democracy and crush evil, and make Canada a world leader (here we go again!) in autonomous vehicles with fully integrated AI, is a juicy government contract for oh, maybe a few hundred thousand units.

When something sounds too good to be true, we used to say it doesn't pass the smell test. My first stop was to read up on Pence's time at Anduril, because it's a story I'm somewhat acquainted with, and I'd never seen that name associated with it. Well, imagine my surprise when Google couldn't find a single reference to the dude in any American business news from 2018 to 2022. Maybe Google's AI missed something... or maybe he did all that great stuff under a pseudonym?

A true renaissance man, Eliot also runs a VC shop called Tofino Capital, which invests in small cap frontier start-ups in Nigeria and other over-looked markets. Check it out! Back to the sniff test... Lord, he stinketh! 

And how about the Ukrainian partner?  With 5000 of their machines already in service on the front lines, I couldn't find anything on YouTube showing them in combat. I did however find a story at Kyiv Post from yesterday almost identical to the Globe's - except it was about Tencore entering a contract with a German partner to build autonomous vehicles there, and unlike the dimwitted Carney who is dithering, Mertz wasted no time guaranteeing open-ended funding for as long as it takes! 

Hmm... I have a hunch the Kyiv Bentley dealership will be at the very top o' the heap at the European Bentley Dealers Association annual awards gala for the foreseeable future!

Bye the way, the Ottawa Business Journal today named Pence Ottawa's newsmaker of the year.

It's a small world...

Forgive me for not tooting my horn re the blog passing 6 million views,  but one fact I always found non-toot-worthy was that as views went ballistic, comments absolutely stalled. If you peruse the last few years of the Falling Downs archive, you will find comments from only two (2) readers.

That's part of a long-term trend to quiet criticism. Go to the View from Falling Downs home page and you'll notice there are no join or follow options.

One is Ken. Ken is from Port Moody BC,  and he originally made contact to tell me what a fucking retard I was for promoting Donald Trump. Anyway, we got over that and Ken has been there forever, and I'm convinced the only reason I still get messages from Ken is because he's been there since before the algos were unleashed and blocked messages.

The other notable exception is Timmie. Unlike Ken, I've actually met  him. Tim seems to post stuff in spite of a ban on my blog by the folks who own the platform. The only connect between me and Tim is we're both acquainted with the local farm boy who became a Nobel laureate. That's what got us together for a face-to-face over a pint or two.

As it happens, Tim's day job consists of liaising with NATO military contractors around the world, and I strongly suspect his internet may be a little more robust than what the rest of us have access to. That's why he can post comments on my blog and you can't.

Be that as it may, the other discovery we made over a burger and a beer is that his sister-in-law was once besties with one of my ex-wives. He hates her guts and I'm still kinda fond of her! Be that as it may, I'd love to have more of Tim's NATO contacts reading this blog!

An open letter to Steve Liebig

 Dear Steve,

It was brought to my attention, by persons who will remain un-named, that I willfully mocked your political career in a recent post.

Steve, nothing could be further from the truth. I apologize unreservedly if that "Lie Big" post caused you discomfort.  Anyone remotely acquainted with my work is well aware I traffic heavily in political satire, and it is in that context my comments should be considered. 

And in that context, "ya couldna sucked too bad" is a ringing endorsement!

Go Steve!

Vote "LIE BIG" on October 26

They're having local elections shortly, and the roadsides around Eden Mills were festooned with "Vote for me" signs from the many candidates hoping to grab the bottom rung of the democracy ladder. I'm negotiating a twisty roadway en route to our b&b, and while I'm not able to admire the signage, I couldn't help notice  the "Lie Big" message.

Eden Mills is best known today for the annual Eden Mills Writers Festival, but 150 years ago it was a thriving mill town on the banks of the Eramosa River. By the time the Ontario Agricultural College in nearby Guelph became a university, the water-power era was long over, and Eden Mills was just another struggling hamlet down on its luck.

One thing the struggling hamlet enjoyed in abundance was stone cottages. As you can imagine, when the local cow college was made a uni, building an English department was a top priority. After all, without that claim to Shakespearean sophistication, the U of G was just a cow college! 

By the 1970s you had a thriving English department 15 minutes away, peopled by folks who imagined those stone cottages were just like the stone cottages their literary heroes in Victorian England lived in, and that struggling hamlet has gradually morphed into a chi-chi destination for yuppies with substantial renovation budgets.

It was the U of G crowd who started up the Eden Mills Writers Festival. Due to flukes of circumstance, I ended up on first-name terms with quite a few of them. In hindsight I suppose I might label them "cultural entrepreneurs." It was pretty much the same crew that launched the Guelph Jazz Festival.

In some ways socializing with English profs was an eye-opener. I was accustomed to boozing it up with welders and truck-drivers, but I gotta say nothing prepped me for the level of alcohol abuse among the English department crowd.  To this day I recall a wobble home as the sun was coming up. I'd been at a bash in the apartment of a grad student who was dating a married prof fifty years older. For the last two hours Bowie's Rock & Roll Suicide had been on repeat at max volume. It was ringing in my ears for the entire wobble home, six blocks away. I had more nights to lacerate my brain with that bunch than I ever had with welders and truckers.

Our b&b is a departure from what Eden Mills has become. The woman who runs it has roots in the town that go back six generations. The home she rents out is the home she's lived in her entire life, the home she raised two children in. When she rents her home out she relocates herself to a cabin a little further back on her 16 acres. She's a fascinating character in her own right. She just got home after touring her one-woman play, "She won't come in from the fields," across Canada.

She's like everybody else, getting on in years, and both her children are now living in BC. Six generations rooted on the banks of the Eramosa River are drawing to an end. But in the meanwhile, life goes on. There's municipal elections coming up in a couple of weeks. Once the car stopped and I had a chance to scan a Lie Big sign standing still, I found out Steve Liebig is running for re-election in ward 3. Re-election! He's already on the bottom rung and is just hoping to stay there. Good luck Steve! If you were already elected once, and can still raise funds to have signs printed, you couldna sucked too bad!

Check out this interview with ambassador Chas Freeman accusing Israel of propaganda!

Ya, I know Israeli propaganda isn't exactly a scoop, but with the last post it looked to me like the Blogger platform has, for whatever reason, been attempting to restore proper paragraph formatting. Just so you know, as a writer, I'm absolutely obsessive about para formatting. Here's why you haven't seen any here for about six years or so.

Just as covid was coming in, and I was debating retirement, and my left eyeball blew its retina, one night Doublewide (our cat) took a stroll across my keyboard, and every post has been run-on paras ever since. Needless to say, given my state of tech retardation, I had no idea how to investigate the innards of my laptop to restore proper paragraphs. 

As I was casting about for some expertise re how to fix this dilemma, and I'd coaxed Doublewide across my keyboard many times, to no avail, in hope she could retrace her steps and undo the damage, a crazy thing happened. The numbers on the blog took off.  It was down to sub-100 views per day before Doublewide danced across the keyboard, but, and at some level this is a bit of a disappointment, proper paragraphs lost out to run-on paragraphs, big-time.

So this post is an experiment. Nothing new here. But there are three clear paragraph breaks, and just to take it to the next level, let's see if they'll allow a link; Amb. Chas Freeman: Israel is Commiting Suicide

Mafia Don is done! Finished! Kaput!... or maybe not...

Regular readers will know I've become increasingly convinced there ain't no possible way Donny J is gonna survive midterms. Oh, he'll certainly "survive," since as he's pointed out more than once, he's not on the ballot. All I can say to that is good luck with the last half of your term after you lose both congress and the senate. It's hard to see anything other than two years of a zombie admin 100% focused on avoiding impeachment.

But maybe I've got it all wrong. I was  down city-way today for thanksgiving and had occasion to chat at  length with some very well-read youngsters who posit as definite possibility something I've dismissed as far-fetched... and their scenario goes something like this; over the next three weeks the admin turns up the dial on ICE violence in Dem cities. They'll ramp up the outrage factor to whatever it takes to ignite massive public push-back, and then they'll declare martial law and cancel the midterms. What's really ominous is none of these kids have ever heard of Chris Hedges!

If I'd heard that conversation a year ago I would have dismissed it, but a year on I gotta admit that we're at a place with this admin that it is literally true that ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE!

About Mafia Don's diesel deal with Bad Vlad

After four years of threatening death and destruction against allies who might dare breach his arbitrary sanctions on Russian oil, Donny J done shredded his own sanctions and announced he'd contracted to swap a few million tons of Russian diesel for a few billions of USD.

Not hard to see where that came from. We're three weeks from mid-terms, and Team Trump is starting to panic. The war he promised to end in 24 hours is now chewing the legs off the global economy. If that's not bad enough, the new war his pal, the Greatest Leader Since Moses, conned him into, promises to destroy what's left of American credibility in the Middle East - in fact, that's pretty much a done deal at this point.

All of which leaves the NATO vassals up the proverbial stump. Since it was Trump's bullying that coerced them into ramping up their military spending, they assumed Uncle Sam would reward them by leading the charge to dislodge the evil dictator in the Kremlin. Instead, Trump announces a multi-billion $$ deal for Putin's diesel!

I've seen some analyses by industry insiders who estimate these purchases might, in a best case scenario, keep US diesel prices tamped down till the midterms. Unfortunately for Mafia Don, he's got 101 crises cooking beyond the price of diesel, so even if this latest brazen display of market manipulation  were briefly effective, he is doomed. Trump's next two years will be 100% devoted to fighting impeachment, so fighting for or against anything else is a non-starter. 

Donny J has had a spectacular run, but it's winding down...

Befuddled elderly gentleman can't find lawyer's office to sign will

I had a moment this afternoon when the thought crossed my mind that maybe I'm a little further along the Alzheimer Highway than I realized. One of the great joys of aging is planning for your death. When you're younger you figure why would you give a shit - you're dead! That's been my attitude most of my life, but the closer you get to your inevitable meet-n'-greet with the Grim Reaper, the more I've thought, oh, what the heck, maybe I should avoid leaving a big headache that will aggravate the heirs for years to come, or even longer. So a few months ago, based on queries to locals I know and trust, I made an appointment with a local lawyer whom I'd never met before, and we hashed out a draft last will and testament. A few weeks go by, and I get an email advising me it's ready for review and signing. Great! Much as I resent the entire process, I'm looking forward to getting it out of the way. The signing ceremony was scheduled for 1 pm today. So I pull into the parking lot a good 15 minutes early. I'm pumped! I'm ready to go! I'm finally doing some really important adult stuff that's a little overdue, and I'm feeling good! The parking lot wasn't quite the way I remembered it, but I'd only ever been there once, and didn't pay much attention. Then I went to the back entrance, and that's changed too. Last time, I was welcomed there, and today I'm greeted by a sign asking me to use the front door. Well, that seems a little odd... I go around to the front, and I notice there's no mention of any lawyerly enterprises on the sign at the street... WTF? Am I in the right place? I go into the memory files...two or at most three old red brick office buildings past a low-slung modern building on the corner. The modern building is right on the corner where it should be, but... so I go into the second place past it. The sign mentions a wellness spa and a tattoo parlour, and I realized instantly those were one and the same. There were at least four employees, and as far as I could tell, one client, but clearly this was an up-market tat joint. Everybody had enough piercings none of them coulda gone anywhere near a metal detector, and there was ink as far as the eye could see, and presumably where it couldn't too. I've had a little ink for fifty years and have always had an eye for top-shelf artists, and what I saw was first class. So, I apologize for interupting, and explain that my lawyer's office used to be in that building and would they know where it went, because I have an appointment blah blah blah... All four stop what they're doing and consult amongst one another. These are the sweetest, kindest people in the world, but they all agree there's never been any lawyers in their building. They enquire as to the name of the firm. I can't remember, and a panic attack is starting to move in as I realize I may have been duped by some shady fly-by-night operation... do I at least remember the name of the lawyer? Yes I do! Jennifer! I guess that wasn't quite enough for them to work with, and they seemed genuinely sad they couldn't help this obviously confused wretch who had wandered into their day. I get out and look up and down the street. I definitely remember the low-slung building, and there's no corners like that further west, so I shuffle eastward. By now I'm sweating profusely and just below panic threshold, when I get to the next light. As I push the crosswalk button I realize... there's a low-slung building on the corner opposite... is it possible? Could it be? By the time they let me in the back door at precisely 1 pm I was begining to recover, but I gotta say it gave me a wee fright for fifteen minutes. The old "steel trap" ain't what it used to be...

American pop culture has mocked God for 50 years; God has finally turned His back on America

When I look at the wars that the Nations of Virtue, ie the freedom & democracy loving full-patch members of Western Civ, are at this very moment pursuing, I can't help but wonder what an actual "Just God" might conclude. I can't imagine that the "Just God," be He from the Christian, the Judaic, or the Muslim tradition, could ever, in any way, endorse the mass murder of women and children. Yet our Western Civ refuses to utter the taboo word, GENOCIDE. Let's not lose sight of the fact that Israel is a charter member of the Nations of Virtue club, the "Golden Billion" who get to lord it over the seven billion lesser beings who, truth be told, are getting a little tired of the charade. We are at the cusp of serious shit. All the idiot talk I hear from Washington suggests they still imagine they're winning the war they lost months ago. You have to spend a little time on Fox News every day just to get a sense of what Mafia Don watches, and Holy Mother of God, the Towelheads o' Terror are the absolutely worst evil that has ever been seen in history! Nobody who writes that crap ever explains how or why their evil is any more evil than the evils of Western Civ, but that's the mentality that keeps our warmongering going full-tilt into ultimate disaster. It was former CIA director Mike Pompeo who bragged up the fact Uncle Sam lies and cheats and steals. (As an aside, the fat warmonger is now a skinny warmonger... Ozempic???) Anyway, the point I'm trying to get to, is that if there is such a thing as a "Just God," there's no possible way that Just God could be on the side of Western Civ.

White Supremacy on the march across Canada

Hard on the heels of the nazi takeover of Millarville Alberta last summer, CBC today exposed a white supremacist group in Ontario that is plotting to overthrow the government, deport all non-whites, and set up a thousand year master race with themselves in charge. This was revealed in a confidential report to CBC from the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, the same government funded "NGO" that tipped the CBC to the Millarville scoop. The "Dominion Society," near as I can make out, is a couple dozen middle-age, generally fat guys who like to get together now and then to piss and moan about politics, as is the norm in societies everywhere. I'm guessing they came up with the club idea because it sounded way better when you told your wife you're off to a policy conference, as opposed to you're off to a piss-up with your pals! The leader of this dangerous gang of white supremacist revolutionaries is one Daniel Tyrie, who was obviously thrilled to get his first-ever interview request from CBC, and didn't disappoint! He's clearly hoping for many more. I have a hunch most of his drinking buddies... or "foot soldiers" if you will, may skip future policy meetings. Anyway, the old "far-right threat" to our freedom and democracy continues to be a reliable excuse for our leadership elites to impose ever more fascistic limits on our freedoms and human rights.

What's wrong with this headline?

"Ottawa plans Crown corporation to break defence procurement logjam." Apparently the multiple bureaucracies responsible for spending taxpayer dollars on bombs and bullets and F-35s and German submarines are completely incompetent when it comes to spending money. They can't spend it fast enough due to bureaucratic bottlenecks in the spending pipeline. Fortunately for peace, justice, freedom, democracy, and all the other good stuff Canadian taxpayers relentlessly fight for, the Carney government has announced the creation of a new crown corporation to supervise the spending of tax monies. That's right! We're getting a fresh new level of bureaucracy to whip all those other levels into shape! Not the way I'd handle bureaucratic gridlock, but what the hey, let's give Carney a chance...

For what it's worth

Spent an hour or so last week having a face-to-face with a family friend who's been in the real estate biz forever. I'd requested the sit-down because I'd been thinking about some concerns my mother had brought up, like wouldn't it be a great idea to sell Falling Downs and move to Guelph to be closer to family. Ya, I know my folks have been in the biz forever too, but this gal comes from the other side. Which in no way rules out the possibility she could be in cahoots with my dear Mom! Anyway, due to my various old-fucker-about-to-croak medical issues I've been diagnosed with, there seems to be pressure building that I should slow down, scale back, simplify my life, and move into a wheelchair-accessable abode. I'm quite OK with most of that. What's not to like about slowing down and scaling back? Count me in! But inevitabley, these conversations turn to the what it's worth question, and I gotta say these real estate folks really toss around some impressive numbers. Apparently the joint has gone up 250% in the twenty years since I bought it! I'm a millionaire! Great! I can cash in and trade my hundred acres of peace, quiet, tranquility, and good neighbours for a condo in town! Oh ya baby, I'll get right on that! Or maybe not; not just yet, anyway. And while it's true enough that such a move would provide the second bathroom we lack here at Falling Downs, that hardly seems an adequate incentive to move into town. For what it's worth, I'm content to pee off the porch while gazing at the stars, with the coyote choir providing the sound-track, for as long as I can get to the stoop without a wheelchair ramp!