Rainbow Bridge Incident.
Cost of send Christmas cards.
EU Bond Market.
Ireland in turmoil.
EV's not selling well.
Spending more than you earn could be problematic.

AI developed transcript bellow. Not 100% accurate.

So here we are again, a little bit late, nothing last week I guess.
No, some people were busy.
Oh, what were you doing?
I said some people.
I know.
I mean, let's face it.
Some people going out and having fun in the mountains.
I guess I was busy.
I guess and nothing wrong with that.
No, you know, what's the saying?
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
Something like that.
Yeah.
Yeah, indeed.
But yeah, welcome to the BORDERPOL JOURNAL.
He's Bob.
I'm Tom.
And before we go on any further, just to let you know, you should hit the like button and the subscribe button so that you can be aware of when we're back on the air.
Because it's, you know, we're not as regular as we should be, but maybe that's part of the deal.
And I'm not talking about, you know, our daily embellishments.
You know, you sit back and you've got to think that there's way too much.
It's kind of like watching TV.
I don't put the news on very often anymore because although there's a lot of new things that show up in the news, there's a lot of things that are just repeats.
And stupid.

We don't have a lot of tolerance for stupid here anymore, you know.
It's just
I'm afraid that's that old saying, a spore is a gump, right?
A stupid is, a stupid does.
Well, I know we talked about a bunch of stuff yesterday about what we're going to talk about today.
And I tell you, it's like a hose pipe that's been cut.
The stupid just keeps coming, gushing out.
We never run out of things to be critical of in our little over the fence talks.
Well, no, I just, I don't understand a lot of it.
I think COVID has unleashed a lot, you know, sitting around the house, you know, not supposed to go out, you're not supposed to do this, you're not supposed to do that.
And I wonder if it just made people reflect, sit back and think.
And sometimes that's a good thing.
And sometimes it's not.
And I think it's becoming very evident that it was a not thing.
Well, you know, this is the Black Friday edition, so people who are watching are getting a double sale item here with us.
Yeah, it's even cheaper than it was before.
Oh, I can hardly wait.
Where's the subscribe button?
Well, in actual fact, we have a new thing on our Twitter account.
People can actually buy us a coffee if they think this program is worthwhile and to give us some support.
So we're announcing the buy us a coffee.
I guess it's a
Well, I had seen something on the news about that and I didn't know what
What caused it?
Well, somebody went around stabbing people and the police and the social media are full of information which isn't easy to figure out because some say it's about misinformation and about who the attackers were, but they don't want to release any information on it.
yet there are others are saying this is basically anti-immigration riots because the country's starting to discover there's a whole lot of folks there who are not exactly in the Irish mode you might say.
So there's that.
Then you've got the news that the hostages in Israel this morning, we're seeing 13 Israeli hostages and 12 Thai nationals freed as Gaza hostage thing goes on.
Then you've got really dumb things going on in the economic world where you have the major engine of the economy in Europe called Germany and Germany decided that they're going to borrow more money to
pay off people with social programs because no one's working.
So they're going into debt even more, much like our pals in this country.
So you spend more money than you make, and that will fix things.
So that's what they're doing.
And the bond market has gone kind of wonky in the markets because if you spend more money than you make, or then you can pay back, trouble follows.
No.
Ah yeah, and then another news, it just came out, of course it comes out on a Friday afternoon, and it says that the US manufacturing has unexpectedly slumped, and jobs and prices are lower than they actually, so for the first time in almost three and a half years, oops, things are not going well.
and I guess part of that is reflected by another headline this morning that people are losing interest in Black Friday, which they better not lose in our case because we need those coffees.
But Black Friday was getting bigger and bigger right up until the pandemic and then since then it's been going south.
Well, I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that it's not that they're losing interest in
Black Friday per se, I think a lot of it has to do is there's just not that much spare money around.
No.
You think?
In spite of trying to be bought off with our own money and borrowing money to buy us off with other people's money, the pinch is here.
There's a lot of people feeling uncomfortable with
Well, I mean, the one poll I saw on the news the other night was people are saying, well, Christmas is just around the corner.
And yeah, I'm still going to celebrate, but I'm certainly not going to be buying the number of presents that I did last year.
And I'm probably not going to be buying for everybody that I bought for last year.
So I guess it's just, yeah, things are starting to squeeze.
Well,
My wife and I were talking about the business of Christmas cards, sending them out, and I'm thinking, it's not the card that's expensive, it's the postage.
podcast featuring BORDERPOL JOURNAL
Well, we've for a long time just done the email thing.
I know it's not proper.
It's not, I guess, correct, but we found that you can put a nice newsletter that tells what you did with, you know, with the families and the like and throw some pictures in and, you know, you've only got so much weight and then it goes up to the next class and
Yeah, it just goes on.
You're right.
A lot of it is postage.
And you know, you're already paying for your internet.
So why not just use that?
Maybe, maybe, maybe throw some music in there to, you know, like, Santa Claus is coming to town.
So when they open it up, they'll know it's a Christmas letter.
I don't know.
Yeah, I'm a little
I see the card business as more people who don't necessarily have a computer, or if you send them a greeting like that, particularly the ones that have the music and a lot of time it ends up in their spam box and they never see it.
And so particularly folks who you see rarely or you really hold contact with them,
podcast featuring BORDERPOL
everybody who's on that list.
I mean, obviously, you and I talk to each other all the time.
So it's different.
But I mean, people who you might have as a, you know, contact from overseas that you haven't, that you don't talk to all the time, but you keep in touch.
It's one of those thin threads of, you know, keeping in touch.
Yeah.
I do have a couple of distant cousins that I've met through my genealogy hobby.
And I'm perhaps a little sad to say I don't know their address, but I certainly know their email address.
So that's usually how we keep in touch with them.
But yeah, there's a lot of things that have changed over the course of a couple of years on how you communicate and how you talk with people and how you view yourself and
Probably a good thought to think about and maybe another broadcast on.
Sure.
Well, we still have Christmas a month away, so we can certainly talk about that.
On the fly-by news, as you called it, the Americans have discovered that the government's rush to have people buy electric vehicles is not working out very well.
because the cost is simply too high and they're not all that environmentally friendly apparently it's now become clear because when you look at it dispassionately take out the politics and the emotion of you know saving the planet when you discover that the actual
The creation of these vehicles is far more dirty in terms of pollution to the planet and far more expensive and far more intrusive on the lives of people where the materials come from and so forth.
That actually has been a bill of sale that we should never have been conned into in the first place.
It's not happening the way the various G7 governments are, particularly the US, Canada, some of them in the EU, because the rest of the world doesn't give a rat's behind about this, frankly, from what I can tell in looking at their priorities for countries outside of the little group we were just describing.
Sorry, go ahead.
is saying, you know, we let the government's leaders down this path.
And I think we've talked an awful lot about government somehow.
I think I saw a great quote, one of the flyby news articles today is that, and they were referring to our particular leader.
But the quote was, this is a man that probably couldn't introduce a magnet
to a refrigerator and have it stick.
And this is the same kind of people that are trying to sell us on all sorts of things that they tell us is good for us, but it turns out that it's probably not, or there'll be another iteration somewhere along the line.
So yeah, the old adage, if I'm from the government, I'm here to help you.
This doesn't help.
Wow.
Well, that's a growth industry, certainly in Canada's government.
We are up, I think, 39% higher number of bureaucrats now in Canada than there was when the current government took over eight years ago.
And there's no proof that things have gotten better in terms of service delivery.
by that many more bureaucrats.
In fact, one of the things that really got me nuts yesterday was they hired consultants on how to deal with consultants.
That's absurd.
That goes back to my old conundrum that I had is who psychoanalyzes the psychoanalyst, but yeah, okay.
No, it's... And again, keeping in touch, I won't disparage any other government, but I just wonder how many of those consultants were friends of friends within the powers that did the hiring, you know?
You don't want to... Are you using the concept of corruption here?
Corruption, nepotism, I don't know what you call it.
You mean when people steal money from other people legally?
Well, I don't know if you can actually say that it's legal stealing.
It's just out in the open.
Yeah, you know, we're only skipping over the topics this morning because, you know, we will go down a rabbit hole with this.
Any one of these, you're right, would lead us down so far.
We'd probably be able to meet those poor Indians on the other side of the world and the hole they're stuck in if we went any deeper.
I tell you, you were talking to me yesterday about how you had to get a card for your PC. Brings me to AI and chips.

Yeah, the shares slumped on the market this morning because they have to pause launching their new artificial intelligence chip because it has to comply with U.S.
export rules, basically designed to keep the Chinese away from learning things that the U.S.
doesn't want them to
to learn.
The trouble is that they are going ahead with their own chips, which in some cases are better than the ones that they want to keep away from them.
So the Chinese have said, well, you know what, the folks in our experimental labs, along with Huawei and so on, we're just going to build chips that we're going to sell to other people around the world.
And the NVIDIA's of the world and the Intel's of the world can go pound salt.
So, in fact, the export restrictions on them has done precisely the opposite.
These people said, well, you know what?
We're just going to hunker down and start making our own chips.
And whether you want to trade with us or not, who cares?
We'll just do our own.
and that we'll sell them cheaper than what you can sell them for.
And while you're busy worrying about things like ESG and whatever, we're just going to go ahead and our researchers and manufacturers are going to make a product and that's it.
Well, a couple of things that come with that is that once you try and ban something, there are ways and means
put out by people who will make sure that that particular ban or particular export, whatever it is, will be found out anyway.
I think it's called industrial espionage, and it usually involves money and making somebody rich.
The other side of that is that wasn't it just that long ago that
India put some kind of vehicle on the moon and the Chinese are, you know, get stuff that are on the backside.
Why don't we just all work together?
Gee, what a concept, Bob.
You should run for office.
Where would, well... No, run away from any office.
Sorry, I meant... Run away from any office, I know that.
That would be... I'd still like to wake up in the morning and have a mirror in my house to be able to look in the mirror

I tell you, I was reflecting on our chat yesterday and looking again this morning at speaking of people who can't look themselves in the mirror is how politicians like to make up stuff and then the next day do a completely 180 degree turn on stuff they made up the day before and this is related to the two hours of craziness that went on at the Rainbow Bridge
at Buffalo on Wednesday over the alleged terrorist attack dreamt up by the news people.
Between quarter to 12 and 2.30 it went from the world is ending to some crazy people drove their car the wrong direction at 80 miles an hour into a border crossing inspection station.
which also apparently according to the flyby news this morning had something to do with a cancelled KISS concert or something.
Can you imagine that these people got so unhinged over a cancelled concert by a rock and roll group or whatever the heck KISS is these days and that's like, how old is the KISS group?
My goodness, they got to be in their 60s or 70s those guys.
Well, I don't know.
A couple of things come to mind on that.
One is that Vancouver will be the only stop in Canada for the Rolling Stone tour next year.
So there you go.
There's a group that's very long in the tooth, shall we say.
Oh, well, absolutely.
I'm surprised they don't come out in wheelchairs.
Well, it was interesting.
I saw something on one of the social media platforms the other day, and I had to chuckle, and it was Willie Nelson and Keith Richards kind of sitting on a bench, obviously photoshopped or AI put together.

And the comment from one of these little balloons above their head that co-joined was, you know, these young kids have really got to get it together.
What kind of world are they going to leave behind for us?
Well, but getting back to this Rainbow Bridge fiasco, I mean, I watched it and was following it along on Twitter for the BORDERPOL JOURNAL, and it really struck me that there was a narrative that had to be driven right out of the gate.