Global famine coming soon

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

Honey, we broke the weather!

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

Putin has looted trillions from Russia

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

IN A WORLD OF PUTINS BE A ZELENSKY

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

Celebrating the vultures

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

Ukraine brings home the bacon

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

Putin gets ass kicked in Ukraine

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