Outlaws

I was watering the deck garden today, pleased that the sun was paying us a protracted visit. The weather of late has been windier and damper than average leading to an upsurge in umbrella sales. So many locals are adopting them for shelter against the elements, when a small idea popped into my head. About outlaws. Well not so much real Robin Hood or William Tell outlaws, but those dubbed ‘bad’ by a vociferous and corrupt faction in the media and political classes. I think we all know to whom I refer. The oppressors who use cries of “You’re a racist!” or “You’re an (add poorly latinised prefix here)ophobe!” to bludgeon any opposing voices into submission. Because the currently oppressed don’t think themselves bad people, they’re just saying “Not so fast. Give them time. Let the newbies integrate.”

The bad guys are those currently with power, the ones who pass laws giving privilege to the politically connected, in hock to NGO’s and the UN like Trudeau and his Liberals or corporate interests like Scheer and the Progressive Conservatives up here in Canada. To my eyes, they’re just two sides of the same debased coinage. You can include the NDP and Greens in that club too. They all sing off the same polluted hymn sheet.

It’s easy to be an outlaw in today’s political climate. I can think of three major candidates; Donald Trump in the USA, Nigel Farage in the UK and up here in the not so frozen north, ‘Mad’ Maxime Bernier. All three the result of personal passion and a genuine desire to help the little guy against their corporate overlords. In effect the Robin Hoods of global politics. I do not include Boris Johnson in this group because I have my suspicions, although if he can get BREXIT by October 31st when I’ll be in London, perhaps he can join the ranks of the Merry Men, especially if he enlists the support of the BREXIT party to move things along. The Tories as they are currently structured may be toast, but I have a seeming that Boris might just weld a new small state, pro small business Conservative Party together out of the wreckage. Not what the UK has had in recent years, which was effectively ‘Blue Labour’ but something a little more broad which actually recognises that what was good for the big corporate interests is not good for the smaller concerns, who can’t afford all the ‘compliance’ business today seems to require.

I liked his openings. Above and below. Love the wailing of broken-hearted lefties in the background.

Johnson’s speech proper opens at four minutes and ten minutes. Corbyn’s reply at twenty one minutes and twenty five seconds. Johnson’s riposte begins at thirty two minutes and forty eight seconds. Ian Duncan-Smith drops in a carefully planted question at thirty nine minutes and eighteen seconds. I could have listened to the rest but quite frankly the sun is shining and my throttle hand is getting twitchy.

Other good news is that now we have a certainty that BREXIT will happen, the value of the pound has begun to rise again. I am really looking forward to London 31st October. There will be champagne.

Now I’m off to get suited and booted. TTFN.

Fifty years ago…

July 1969, I was a science fiction loving schoolboy experiencing a feeling I have rarely felt since hearing the words “The Eagle has landed.” All around the world people shared this emotion and danced with joy as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin piloted their Lunar Excursion Module dubbed ‘Eagle’ down from lunar orbit to the regolith of the lunar sea of tranquility.

My Dad and Mum understood my obsession with all things space and allowed me to stay up well past my mandatory bed-time to watch it all happen. From the power and glory of that singular Saturn V launch where the sound was not just heard but felt, listening avidly to each voice only transmission, the TV programme animations and real time images of the command module docking with the LEM, to the disengagement in lunar orbit and down to the moon’s surface. The suspense of being unable to sleep waiting until the following day for Neil Armstrong to step off that ladder and utter those epic words, even if he did fluff his lines a little. Then there was the will they, won’t they suspense of the LEM being able to claw it’s way out of Lunar gravity and orbit for docking and the long journey home to our precious little blue marble. See the documentary below.

Now I come across occasional people who say that they believe the momentous events I was witness to did not happen. They have even gone so far as to publicly harass people who were actually there. However, I’d like to share a little video of what went down when they tried that to an astronauts face (With a few repeats – just for fun) Bless you Dr Aldrin.

No one can convince me that the events of fifty years ago did not occur because I was alive and I watched it all happen in real time. In a time when video fakery was primitive and easily spotted.

Those joyous memories of shared human triumph are etched across my soul as deeply as if carved there. To insist otherwise against all the available and extensive evidence is utterly pathetic. The abject narcissism of such a position is barely worthy of pity.

Excuse me. Now I’m off to have another nice day. I shall shortly be all suited and booted on my own terrestrial rocket ship.

Sorry officer, I was just trying to reach escape velocity.

Update:  or we could just watch the whole Apollo 11 moonwalk.

Remastered footage from the original mission.  thank you NASA.

Raindrops on roses etc

Not much going on chez maison Sticker at present. A series of rainy days mean I haven’t been out riding as much as I’d like. Frankly I’m wondering where summer has gone.

I’ve learned that I’m gainfully employed for another year but to tell you the truth I’m considering jacking it in. That and Mrs S wants to move countries again. If I may be totally candid with you, migration is a tough business and I’m not looking forward to repeating the experience. All the faffing around with paperwork drove me nuts last time around. All the anxiety. The money we spent. All the time and exam passing. Keeping Mrs S on an even keel, not an easy job at the best of times. Chums, It almost broke me.

There’s a point in a man’s life when he just wants to do what he wants to do. Nothing more, nothing less. This isn’t a mid-life crisis, because my whole freaking life has been a crisis on one form or another. Usually caused by other people. Stuff I had no part in breaking, but which have suddenly become my responsibility to fix. So I’ve been doing my own thing.

I see Boris Johnson is now more or less acknowledged heir apparent for the UK Plc’s Prime Monstership. May sounds like she’s trying to sabotage him on her way out by putting avid remainers in key positions before she leaves. Talk about bad faith, but that’s what we’ve come to expect from the remain camp.

Had the 2016 referendum gone the other way by a similar margin, all us peasants would be expected to jolly well shut up and watch our home country strangled to death. However, the remainers don’t really believe in democracy unless the results suit them.

All us thickies who can see the damage the EU is doing get labelled as too stupid to vote. We don’t want to be ruled cradle to grave, having our every waking thought and word dictated by some ivory tower academic. We understand that life is messy and fundamentally organic. There are no clear cut answers and sometimes you just have to wing it. A deal has no clear rules because it’s a negotiation. So there.

Oh and something just dropped into my YouTube subscriptions. “How Norway dealt with Antifa.” Enjoy.

Let the cops off the leash. Let them arrest all the violent. Allow self-defence. Make the courts deal with the violent offenders. Jail time. Short 30 day sentences ramping up like for contempt of court seems to work.

Hey, I’ve just seen the weather forecast and the open road is singing a siren song. Now where did I put the Mutts keys? See ya.

Negative on that negativity, guys

For some time there’s been a growing mood of public mistrust with an overtly partisan media. I think it’s because they seem so out of step with the majority of people outside their bubble reality. You know, the ordinary folk who have actually grown up and just want to bring up their families, continuing the march of the generations. Making a living in our journey from nascence to decease and making sure it wasn’t all for nothing. Looking up at the stars and wondering, “Could we?” then having to turn our attention to whether we can get a parking space at work and dealing with the latest demand for shiny toys from the kids.

Personally I think they’re just prodding the bear to make it look like they’re actually doing something. Creating outrage for outrages sake. Nitpicking all the time like an abusive spouse. And they wonder why their circulation figures are falling off a cliff. To call their output ‘news’ is hyperbole of the highest order.

The real news you have to go digging for with a JCB Backhoe sometimes, and sometimes it just bursts out into the open. Aaand it’s another ‘child grooming / prostitution’ scandal which has been bubbling under for quite some time. This time the stakes are much higher than a Kebab house heroin operation. This time the story is about the rich and powerful abusing underage girls, blackmail, drugs and possibly even disposal of the ‘inconvenient’. Whether of course a prosecution happens is debatable because the chief lynchpin in the greater story is one Jeffrey Epstein, a well connected fixer who has so far escaped full prosecution because he has purportedly some very rich and powerful people going to bat for him, including a previous President of the USA and, some rumours include, his one-time presidential hopeful wife. So many of the wealthy left wing elite all spent time on Epstein’s private island, Little St James’ in the British Virgin Islands. I know, Virgin Isles, sometimes the irony just clangs, doesn’t it? It’s even more interesting that Epstein’s island mansion burned to the ground in 2018 after an earthquake. Convenient, no? Twice, if reports are to be believed.

Even more recently that Epstein’s Wikipedia bio page was heavily edited to remove certain references whilst retaining others and taking a sly sideswipe at the current president. Which is also suspicious. We can also see that the circle of complicity has widened. Daughter of pension fund stripper Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine Maxwell stands accused of procuring teenage girls for Epstein and friends.

For ordinary working people whose efforts keep the world turning, Trump is not the problem. They are the ones who voted the bad orange man in. The ‘deplorables’ behind ‘populism’. Those sneered at by the very ‘educated’ privileged class that brought forth people like Epstein. The ‘educated’ who gave us hate speech laws and the institutional fraud of ‘Global warming’ and carbon taxation. The ‘educated’ who call those who disagree names, as if that was an effective argument instead of just a cheap way of shutting up dissenters. To quote an old friend who chided me when I was full of myself one day; “You might have been to school, but you haven’t learned much, have you?” Education has it’s place, but is what is being taught really true?

Yet most of the press has ignored or downplayed the other, interconnected stories. We are at a point where the jigsaw puzzle begins to make sense. This isn’t conspiracy theory, the facts are emerging and the picture they reveal isn’t pretty. How power and privilege are too often abused to the detriment of the very people we are told they protect. How someone protesting about rape gangs can be thrown in prison for one thing, yet the paid lapdogs of the ‘official’ media get a pass for exactly the same behaviour at his trial. Indeed the mainstream media seem to be on the side of sex criminals. They seem to like rapists and abusers. Maybe certain of them are involved? Why else would they attack those trying to bring the disinfectant of sunlight to bear?

However, thanks to the free transfer of information over the jolly old Interweb, the villagers have become aware that monsters are in their midst and that the wicked who protect their own only have double standards. All the ordinary folk ever wanted was for the law to be applied consistently. For the sake of a little justice. Power and wealth should be seen as no protection from the law, or what good is that law? The law is either for everyone or it is for no-one.

Justice must be seen to be done or the pitchforks will end up asking the reasons why. Pointedly. I do not wish to see this happen, although if the political classes continue to go against their electorates and abuse their authority, well, it’s not a pretty picture.

Not feeling it

No doubt you’ve heard about the recent California earthquake and all the death and disaster that didn’t happen. Up here in the not so frozen Pacific north west we didn’t feel a thing, yet we too have been having Quakes up to 6.3 Magnitude only the other day. The thing is, all our quakes tend to be old school Canadian and happen hundreds of kilometres offshore so as not to, heavens forfend, disturb anyone.

As a matter of good housekeeping chez maison Sticker we have a fourteen day grab bag set by in case the big one really comes. Usual thing, blankets, fire starter, water, food, first aid kit. Not that we’re likely to need it. My fishing gear sits ready, then there’s my hunting kit. Must replace the arrow shafts and practice my archery skills a little more often, but that’s all. Might even put money by for a decent quality crossbow. My hunting points got lost in a house move, so they’ll need replacing and I have a small boot knife which can double as a butchery / skinning tool, so yes, we’re as prepared as we can be. There’s even a propane barbecue and a butane stove. No eating out of cans for us. Worst case scenario we’re dead and won’t care anyway, otherwise we’ll have food, water, communications and shelter.

Of course the mainstream media have tried to make a drama out of a minor crisis, but what the hey, they’re in showbiz, which is what most news is nowadays. Enough fact mixed in for credibilities sake, but the rest a hodge-podge of poorly informed speculation. The last big quake that hit Vancouver Island was in 1946 there were only two deaths. One from a heart attack and the other drowned when his dinghy got swamped. So colour me an old fogey for not feeling the fear. Whatever happens, we’ll cope.