From the Foreign Desk: Sir John A MacDonald

What Now, Fearless Leader?

Canada-Citizen of Canuckstan: To my surprise, it happened. After only 2 days of the Emergency Act, Trudeau rescinded it. Why? Well, that’s where the speculation comes in. To several people, the fact that Canadians were withdrawing their money from banks led the banks to pressure Trudeau to back down. Others hold that the “emergency” really was over after....two days. I find that hard to believe. Did the polls suddenly change? I’ve seen no evidence of that. Ditto that Trudeau was intimidated by the international condemnation in the press. The Canadian media didn’t really have a problem

I think it’s more likely Trudeau realized that he didn’t have the votes in the Senate. Ordinarily, the appointed Canadian Senate is little more than a rubber stamp for the House of Commons, but in this case there were several (Liberal) Senators saying that they thought the Emergency Act went too far. As well, the Senate was upset that they were pressured to pass an Act when no one could really explain what the emergency still was.

This hasn’t ended. The banks that froze accounts now have to face the fact that the Emergency Act was technically never truly in force. And many accounts are still frozen. Truck protester leaders are still in jail. And a number of lawsuits, including one by the province of Alberta are heading for the courts. This will take a long time to unscrew this mess. And the fact that Putin has invaded the Ukraine using the same language that Trudeau used to condemn the truckers is not going over well.

Hold the line. It looks bad now, but I think things will get better. Eventually. It just may take years.

If it's Monday, Its Metal et al

Lots of posts yesterday. It happens.

The Olympics are over, thank God. What a travesty. Stupid masks, power plant cooling tower backgrounds, an unprecedented figure skating catastrophe, some genocide.

The Queen has Covid, but only 'mild' symptoms so far. Thoughts and prayers. This blog wants to avoid a King Charles rein at all costs. 

Our latest bit of collusion is up this morning: 'Just a few weeks ago, this observer predicted the Kansas City Chiefs would defeat the Dallas Cowboys in Super Bowl LVI. Instead, Tens of thousands of Los Angelenos watched their hometown Rams defeat the Cincinnati Bengals 23-20. Almost everyone in Los Angeles’ SoFi Stadium was maskless, including Mayor Eric Garcetti and California Governor Gavin Newsom, both of whom have maintained some of the strictest lockdown rules in the nation. Last summer Newsom was caught dining sans mask at the swanky French Laundry restaurant in California’s wine country...' You know the drill.

This week we'll be reading a printout of The Great Salvation of 1976. This process will be slow as we're line and content editing. That is, we're looking for places to make the story better. We already found one with a Tennessee/Chattanooga chapter. This is the largest surviving city east of the Mississippi and the Rockefeller Administration is establishing the Federal Reserve there. This gives us a chance to describe the overall situation in that region. 

We feel the ju-ju for getting back to and finishing up World War 1990: The Weser. 

Putin Watch: Someone found a video of Putin walking through the Kremlin (which we're finding extremally useful, btw) and overdubbed Staying Alive. Click on through. [You're man-crushing -Ed] He's an interesting guy. Reminder, when Soviet Russian tanks cross the border, we stop writing for Russia.

Reading Russia Today, Sputnik, Elint News, invasion looks imminent. 

For Monday Metal, we continue our 30-year nostalgia trip with Queen's Headlong. We still love this song (it's great treadmill fodder) and when we hear it, for just a second, we're back in our '86 Toyota Celica. At 3:10-3:20 we'd floor the accelerator. That car had a lot of kick. 

From the Foreign Desk: John A. MacDonald

Emergency Powers

Canada, Citizen of Canuckstan- Trudeau hasn’t brought in the military. Yet. He is instructing banks to freeze the accounts of anyone “associated” with the protesters. I think we will find that “associated” has a very broad definition. I expect to see many people who supported the trucker protests having their bank accounts frozen. And possibly seized by the government. Why not? Trudeau cannot back down, he must crush the truckers’ protest in such a way that it is clear that he is in charge and the rest of us are just his servants. Trudeau has gone from the supposed leader of Canada to the ruler of Canada. But nothing will change the fact that he fled the capital when the truckers arrived. This will not end well.

But if he does crush them, what next? Does he truly believe that everyone will just go home, go back to work and pretend this never happened? Of course not. Protesters and their leaders, regardless of whether Trudeau stays in power or not, will have their lives destroyed. This is the price of standing up for freedom and holding a peaceful protest. I have seen no murders, no assaults, no broken windows, no looting. Unlike virtually every protest in North America in the last decade Yet more and more pressure has been placed on the protesters, and less and less leeway is given to them. The protesters will likely spend time in prison, to make it clear that you do not cross Trudeau. He is in charge, and you are not

I don’t think it will end here, even if the police remove the entire protest group from Ottawa. I expect to see work slowdowns, further protests and pressure on Trudeau to repeal the Emergency Act and step down. I fear Trudeau will do neither.

From the Foreign Desk: John A. MacDonald

Having too much fun

CANADA, Citizen of Canuckstan - The problem with using fear and intimidation is it becomes a habit. People were told first to be afraid of the virus, afraid of what it would do to our health care system and how it would be overwhelmed (it wasn’t). Then we were told to be afraid of anyone not wearing a mask, followed by anyone who isn’t vaccinated. Now the protesters are the ones we are supposed to be afraid of. Fear, fear, fear.

But as I’ve watched the trucker protests, I’ve noticed something fundamentally different. The truckers and the other protesters are....having fun. Not the cruel, mocking fun most leftists use today but genuine fun. Dance parties in the streets. Bouncy castles. Popcorn makers. And the latest one, a hot tub in the middle of the street. Kids and families with pets are seen everywhere. Yet politicians and media condemn them constantly. Children’s aid has threatened to take away the truckers’ children for....being at a protest. The elite are acting in a strange way. Or maybe they are simply weak and can’t figure out how to deal with these protesters.

Compare this with Antifa, Occupy Wall Street and CHOP. Violence was everywhere. Hundreds of police were injured and many killed. Billions of dollars of property damage. Rapes and assaults by the dozens. Yet the elite called the violence of left wing and anarchist groups “understandable” and they had to be given “room to protest”. The truckers receive no such room.

I think the media and the “powers that be” need the truckers to be violent. If they are largely peaceful, they can be ticketed, but it is hard to justify harsher methods. Especially with so many private journalists or just vloggers walking around the protest freely and filming pretty much anything. Antifa would never allow such a thing. Once the protesters are shown to be violent, then a radical and brutal crackdown can be justified. The problem is, other than some blindingly obvious false flag operations, there hasn’t been violence. We’ve heard that “healthcare workers have been threatened” but with no video – and everyone has a cell phone with video capabilities these days – it seems hard to credit.

What’s the next step? The powers that be still refuse to meet. I think there is a danger of a serious manufactured incident. The question is will the police really move in? The rank and file of the Ottawa police don’t seem inclined. The next few weeks will tell one way or the other.

From the Foreign Desk: John A. MacDonald

CANADA, Citizen of Canuckstan -Real grass roots protests are rare. This makes the Trucker’s protests a once in a generation, possibly once in a lifetime, event. But they’ve been ignored and smeared by all levels of government in Canada. Why?

I think this is a problem of class. Once you’ve seen enough protests, you start to recognize the regulars. And the Trucker protest has none of them. Not the regular thing you see. Trucker protests won’t get them nice write ups in the local newspaper or jobs with left wing groups. I believe that the class problem goes deeper than that.

I have a University education. While I was going to University, we had a few regular protesters attending as well. They were always off at a protest about something, but they also met a lot of people while doing that. People in positions of power, people in government, people in the police. They all had University education in common and they often kept in touch.

The Truckers have none of that. Most of them didn’t go to University and never met “future leaders” or people who would work in important positions. I think this is why Trudeau and the rest of the government and police forces have reacted so strongly against them. They don’t know any of these truckers and they don’t want to. The truckers are all, in Trudeau’s circle, rubes and rednecks. Nobody that they have to talk to or respect.

But now they are unavoidable. Trudeau and the rest of the bureaucracy don’t know how to talk to them or treat them as anything but lesser beings to their exalted status. Now the truckers have the power to shut down the country, the government has smeared them all and doesn’t know how to back down.

To put this in a bit of perspective, last night truckers shut down the Ambassador bridge from Windsor to Detroit. Along with the Bluewater bridge in Sarnia it is one of two absolutely critical supply chain arteries between Canada and the United States. Shut both of them down and the auto industry in Canada and the Northeastern United States will die within days. I am not sure how much it costs to keep auto factories running, but I have heard estimates in the thousands to tens of thousands of dollars each minute.

The truckers can shut down North America, and the US and Canadian governments are helpless to prevent it. All because they view blue collar workers as “less than they are”. 

Will Takes Stroock's Books International

Good morning Stroock's Books Commune.

Alert reader(s) may have noticed a second post last night from a Canadian known only as Citizen of Canuckstan. We are recruiting other foreigners as well and hope to make these overseas postings [Canada is in North America-Ed], a regular feature here.  Are you one of these people? Email us at wtstroock@yahoo.com. 

[How do we know these people are real? I mean, look at Qbi Wan-Ed]

Are you saying Qbi Wan is just an imaginary friend meant to mess with any feds who might be (and probably are) monitoring my comms and I just think the name Qbi Wan is hilarious?

[You really think the feds are reading your emails?-Ed]

They read Tucker's emails after he tried to get an interview with Putin, and I, you know, write for him too. 

[Tucker?-Ed.]

No, Putin.

We admit we're getting paranoid.

[Getting? Six months ago a black SUV pulled up to the house and you shouted, 'It's happening!' That nice young man delivered flowers-Ed.]

True.

[You checked the flowers for listening devises, didn't you?- Ed]

No comment.

In our research of the Kremlin [Again with the Russians?-Ed] we discovered that it's defended by a unit called The Kremlin Regiment. This is an ad-hoc force of soldiers who pass a rigorous test to join the regiment. During the Cold War they were very often combat vets. We're thinking we should give more space to this regiment and create a character to do so. Which is how scenes, books, entire series grow like weeds. We already have a couple of guys hanging around Lenin's Tomb wondering why choppers are approaching Red Square....

Which brings us to...Will Writes: One must avoid the urge to write about something just for the sake of showing off that one learned something cool. Tom Clancy did this, and it was one of the reasons his novels were seven, eight, nine hundred pages long. We did this in A Line Through the Desert. That Grafenwoehr gunnery scene is damn near unreadable, no? But it seemed so cool at the time. We found a guy who used to run the gunnery exercises, and a couple of guys were on the range the day Iraq invaded Kuwait. We even got our hands on physical copies of the gunnery tables. So what one reads there is the way it was.

What Will's Watching, or should we say, what the actual fuck? The Book of Boba Fett Chapter-6 was another episode of The Mandalorian with Luke and Baby Yoda thrown in. The Luke and Baby Yoda scenes were really blatant masturbatory fan service. 'Yoda once told me...' Did you at least get five bucks for that hand job? Jesus. BoBF is bad and Lucas Films knows it. 1/4

From the Foreign Desk: Sir John A. MacDonald

CANADA, Citizen of Canuckstan - “Silence is Violence” was the mantra of the Black Lives Matter protesters last year. For the BLM protest in Ottawa, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau came out and took a knee to show his support. When churches were being burned across Canada to protest a “recently found mass grave” on the grounds of a former residential school, Trudeau called the church burnings “understandable”. We have since learned that there may be no mass grave at all.

Trudeau instituted a vaccine mandate for all truckers crossing the US border into Canada. He has further said that he will impose a vaccine mandate for any truckers crossing provincial borders. Now, the truckers have come to Ottawa to protest. Trudeau tarred them as racists, white supremacists and every other left wing boogeyman you can think of, and refused to meet with them. So they have stayed for almost two weeks. Trudeau has fled the capital. The Ottawa police have admitted that the protesters are calling the shots. A raid to try and move them out Sunday night has pretty much failed. Ottawa city council wants to put together a class action lawsuit against the trucker protesters. Tow truck companies are refusing to tow the protesters vehicles. GoFundMe tried to seize their funds.

And this is spreading. Coutts, Alberta, a major crossing on the US-Canada border is blocked. The police have been unable to move them and people have breached police lines to join them. There have been trucker protests in Vancouver (the mayor has told them to protest and get out), Calgary, Edmonton, Regina, Winnipeg, Toronto, Sarnia, London (Ontario), Quebec City and Halifax. And those are only the places there have been some reports about. Farmers are joining.

I don’t think Trudeau will back down. He’s been made to look weak. This is a Prime Minister who simply cannot handle anyone disagreeing with him. It’s the way he’s been raised. So I think this will spread further. So far, it’s been largely peaceful. Air horns and honking are annoying but most protests are loud anyway. At this point the military is sitting things out and considering how far this has spread, it’s unlikely they could stop it anyway. 67 000 troops in the entire military, counting the Air Force and Navy. What will they do, try to put the protesters under the guns of HMCS Charlottetown? I’m not sure they could get it up the Ottawa river. There have been 4 arrests in Ottawa and apparently 2 of them were Ottawa citizens threatening the protesters. Compare that to Occupy Wall Street or the CHOP zone.

I hope this will spread the to the US. Get your convoy together sooner rather than later. Remind your neighbours that while silence is violence, air horns are anarchy.

Will's Good Idea for the Week of 2/6/22

This afternoon we're  gonna start boxing up our books, stacked randomly on the utility room floor after last summer's flood and subsequent basement purge. During the boxening we'll find our Russian/USSR books, enabling us to improve The Final Storm's SAS scene. We have 24 banker's boxes ready to go. It's a start.

Up in the land of the moose, our boy Pierre Poilievre, MP for Carleton, has announced he's running for leadership of the Cannuck Conservatives. Here's Poilievre nuking Justin and bouncing the rubble. Conservative Politics down here and up there isn't about policy anymore but the ability to retaliate, the willingness to say, 'No, your boss wears blackface! You're the racist!'

Our man on the ground up there thinks events are moving beyond Justin's ability to control or even influence them. One Canadian commentator we read, wish we could remember who, said that both sides are playing a game of chicken that neither can lose. Justin called the Freedom Truckers every kind of 'phobe' he could name. Now he can't move them, but he can't let them stay either. 

Exit question: will Justin turn Parliament Hill into Tiananmen Square? This blog is reminded of a wonderful scene in Cast a Giant shadow, where a British army officer threatens to open fire on hundreds of Jewish refugees that have just landed in Palestine. 'I guess now is when we find out if we're the bloody Nazi's or not,' says a young subaltern.

This blog admits to feeling some powerful ju-ju for our old Putin's War novel. We like the idea of a massive American task force (three carrier battle groups, a marine division, the 82nd Airborne on alert) showing up in the Western Pacific....and and!...A British led Commonwealth task force moving into the South China Sea. Lots of Aussies...Wonder what their target would be. Is a Russian/Chinese war unrealistic given the Putin-Xi Axis of Eurasia? Perhaps. Then again, Hitler did betray Stalin. 

Lots of great ideas, not enough time or energy.

To recap where we stand:

The Great Nuclear War of 1975: formatting, needs final read through.

The Great Salvation of 1976: needs print reading preparatory to going to the editor. 

World War 1990: The Weser: final draft almost done. One more month of work, this includes print reading.

World War 1990: The Final Storm: tonnes of work to do.

The decks will be cleared for the summer sneak in and a fresh project in the autumn.