What Happens When The West Runs Out of Willing Victims

The chicken said, “I’ve got it! We’ll provide bacon and eggs to feed the hungry.” The pig thought about the suggestion and said, “There’s only one thing wrong with your idea. For you, it only requires a contribution. But for me, it demands a commitment!”

Leaders of Western nations— minus quivering Carney’s Canada—gathered in Washington this week to thrash out Donald Trump’s proposals to end the war in Ukraine. There was considerable discussion of contributions and commitments from the assembled nations. There was also resistance from some to Trump calling the shots in the room. They agreed to disagree.

Underlying the posturing of the PMs and presidents is the supposition that, however they decide to face down Vladimir Putin, they have enough boots on the ground to counter Putin. The Russian leader is showing no signs of abating his supply of cannon fodder to the conflict. Current estimates show Russia has lost upwards of a million dead/ wounded/ missing. Sacrificing soldiers is a sacred Russian tradition in war that Putin’s hell-bent on perpetuating.

But Ukraine has no such well of the willing. For them it’s drones and the conscripted. “Drivers, artillerymen, and cooks” are holding the line”, says Bohdan Krotevich, an officer formerly with the Azov Brigade’s headquarters. “A maximum of 12 fighters hold sections 5-10 kilometres wide.” Russians regularly sneak through gaping holes in the line into Ukrainian cities and towns.

With no powerful ally sending soldiers, Ukraine has dredged up— at great cost— an entire generation of its young men to fight. Current estimates have Ukraine’s losses at over 100,000 dead and half a million civilians dead or wounded. The camouflage leader, Vladimir Zelenskyy, is desperate.

For perspective on their desperation look at the mysterious Ryan Routh, the man arrested in 2024 while stalking Trump with a rifle at his Jupiter golf club. Before his attempt on Trump Routh had mysteriously travelled the world trying to recruit mercenaries from Afghanistan, the Middle East and Asia to fight in Ukraine.

He was working with the U.S. State Department, collecting passports and having them processed through American embassies. Whether they were fighting for Ukraine or up to spy business is open to discussion. But they hardly filled the gap. For all the billions sent to Ukraine by Western Nations (absent Canada has sent an estimated $20 B.) you still need bodies to fight a war.

Israel is discovering the same about soldier shortages in its attenuated struggle in Gaza. Despite mandatory conscription, some soldiers are making a third or fourth return to military service since October. 7, 2023. The gap is widening with the exhausted army stating that it is facing a manpower shortage during the ongoing war, and currently needs some 12,000 new soldiers — 7,000 of them combat troops.

So the Israel Defense Forces announced last week that it would be giving draft dodgers — many of whom are members of the ultra-Orthodox community — a one-time opportunity to enlist in the military without facing punishment for desertion.

As opposed to Ukraine, Israel is no longer a puppy of Western democracies, many of whom— come on down, Canada— say they will recognize Palestine as a state in the near future. Tired of the bloodshed, Canada and others have stopped sending them military aid, leaving Israel isolated by all but the U.S. in its existential struggle to eradicate Hamas.

Which is ironic as Israel—like Ukraine— is fighting a proxy war on behalf on those nations, wiping out terrorist Hezbollah, the Houthis and the Iranian nuclear capability in recent months. In the analogy above, the EU and Canada are making a contribution. Ukraine and Israel are making a commitment in blood.

Not much has changed since we asked in our June 2022 column, “What Happens When The West Runs Out Of Ukrainians?”, “The entire fiasco is now as open-ended as the Stones Farewell Tour. Which is fine if the Ukrainians are, as advertised, willing to fight till the last man. America and the West can keep their hands clean. The media can play Plucky Little Belgium stories for their gullible viewers/ readers. “Experts” can war-game till the cows come home.

The fly in this ointment is that, with American prestige and profit invested so deeply now, what happens if they run out of Ukrainian patriots to throw into the fire against a seemingly unrepentant Putin? If the proxies are pushing up daisies what is Plan B? No one in the Western elites is sending their boys to die in Kiev or the Donbas region.”

This begs the question “what would compel the effete EU nations and Canada to commit soldiers on the ground in any NATO conflict?” Say Putin moves on the Baltic States, formerly Soviet possessions, under the guise of creating a buffer state? What if he decides to reclaim areas along the Finnish border?

Are Carney’s enervated Canadian progressives going to down their lattes and get killed in a foreign conflict? More to the point, can a bankrupt Canada obtain the weapons, materiél and logistics to meet their NATO obligations? If Putin or Xi are watching the current Elbows Up kabuki theatre in Ottawa do you think they’ll be dissuaded by Canada’s purity of thought from pursuing a new conflict in Europe or the Straits of Taiwan?

According to his spokesperson, Trump isn’t sending his boys/ girls/ other to the Dnieper River. “@PressSec: “The President has definitively stated U.S. boots will NOT be on the ground in Ukraine, but we can certainly help in the coordination and perhaps provide other means of security guarantees to our European allies.”

Ditto for the Woke West or the EU. Will Kier Starmer’s British or the Germans or French commit to the losses demanded for subduing Russia or China? Hard to see that sacrifice from peoples who’ve meekly accepted the immigrant wave the past decade. They don’t even have a motivating national cause besides free healthcare. Speaking of Allies with manpower issues, the South Koreans are also sending out warnings that their declining birth rate is cutting their military preparedness by 20 percent.

It doesn’t take much to see that the security blanket Western progressives count on to save them is, as Yeats said, “a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick”. An equation based on keeping their hands clean. Only luck will tell if they finally make a commitment or skate by with mere contributions.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, his new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.

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BRUCE DOWBIGGIN Award-winning Author and Broadcaster Bruce Dowbiggin's career is unmatched in Canada for its diversity and breadth of experience . He is currently the editor and publisher of Not The Public Broadcaster website and is also a contributor to SiriusXM Canada Talks. His new book Cap In Hand was released in the fall of 2018. Bruce's career has included successful stints in television, radio and print. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster for his work with CBC-TV, Mr. Dowbiggin is also the best-selling author of "Money Players" (finalist for the 2004 National Business Book Award) and two new books-- Ice Storm: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Vancouver Canucks Team Ever for Greystone Press and Grant Fuhr: Portrait of a Champion for Random House. His ground-breaking investigations into the life and times of Alan Eagleson led to his selection as the winner of the Gemini for Canada's top sportscaster in 1993 and again in 1996. This work earned him the reputation as one of Canada's top investigative journalists in any field. He was a featured columnist for the Calgary Herald (1998-2009) and the Globe & Mail (2009-2013) where his incisive style and wit on sports media and business won him many readers.

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What Happens When The West Runs Out of Willing Victims

Bruce Dowbiggin / 6 days ago

Elbows Up: Massive Land Transfers to Indigenous On Horizon?

Bruce Dowbiggin / 1 week ago

Golf’s Best 2025 Moment Is A Film That Endlessly Mocks The Game

Bruce Dowbiggin

Elbows Up: Massive Land Transfers to Indigenous On Horizon?

Published on August 15, 2025

Bruce Dowbiggin

There was a time when the great unwashed loved pro wrestling for its outlandish plot lines, cartoon characters and political incorrectness. It stood against the sober, restricted norms of society. But the collapse of public trust after Covid has changed the scenario. General society is now one big wrestling scam with no one believing the plot lines. Instead they revel in heel turns, outlandish characters and fake blood. Authenticity is dead.

As an example, take Elbows Up. Not sure that when Team Carney coined his Elbows Up narrative it also meant no bending of the elbows for bourbon, Napa Valley cabs or Oregon pinot noirs. But that’s the byproduct of Canada’s latest fainting spell. On the heels of Covid 19 crisis and unmarked Rez graves, the fatwa by Canada’s well-meaning on some of its favourite U.S. tipples is another group psychosis.

The disappearance of U.S. liquor and wine from Canadian stores (outside Alberta) has dovetailed with the self-imposed “Hell No, We Won’t Go” travel ban on the US of A. It’s meant as a stinging rebuke of Donald Trump. AKA Beelzebub. Many otherwise sane people sincerely believe their abstemious stance on California chardonnay and Kentucky bourbon will bring Orange Man Bad to his pudgy knees.

Or that forgoing your camping spot in the American South this winter will collapse Trump’s new economic model. Erstwhile Conservative premier Doug Ford of Ontario— who should know better— has boiled over in rage: “Sorry, I’m getting a little passionate today about this, because that guy drives me crazy down south, I’ll tell ya.”

The thought that Trump is attacking the Boomer Wives of Toronto obsesses them. It’s a notion common only to elitist Canadians. Nary a day goes by without a friend or neighbour telling us with a sigh how we must set an example for the world against Trump by joining China as the only other nation to employ counter tariffs on America.

They’ve created a Rod Serling scenario that, should they go south of the 49th parallel, they’ll have their phone confiscated, their purses turned inside out and maybe be forced to spend a night in a cold jail cell with Ghislaine Maxwell.

There is a naive sincerity to all this that harkens back to previous hysterias that gripped Canada’s ruling class. (Remember taking the vaccine because otherwise you’re killing grannies?) Hypnosis works. Once the influencers on Team Carney realized the benefits of amygdala flooding and neurobiological hijacking— creating fight-or-flight response— in the middle class… well, they kept pushing that button.

Properly employed, bypassing the prefrontal cortex (which works in the rational part of voters’ brains) promotes knee-jerk reactions. So Mike Myers in a Team Canada sweater = forget everything the Liberals mismanaged for a decade under Skippy the postmodern PM. Now, feed those same people another. Say, Trump tariffs = ignore that the BC Supreme Court just declared huge swaths of the land in the province not covered by treaty belong to the indigenous communities.

Among those properties is the Vancouver International Airport in Richmond, B.C.. How slick is that? A government that ran on protecting Boomers’ primary residence cashboxes has now managed to put the entire notion of fee simple home ownership at risk.

As blogger Liam Harlow writes, “Indigenous people will now have an unprecedented, parallel title to private property in that area, a legal first of its kind in a court declaration. This title is declared a ‘prior and senior right to land,’ implying a stronger claim, with the court fundamentally asking “what remains of fee simple title after Aboriginal title is recognized in the same lands?”

It doesn’t stop there. Under UNDRIP (United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples) the UN will hold any properties acquired “in trust” for all “aboriginals” as they bicker among themselves for supremacy. Whether Canada’s natives will actually get the land, they will have served as a convenient vehicle for the progressive Left to expand its jurisdiction.

The glass half full holds that Canada’s politicians negotiate a fee with the new owners to stay on these properties. (Good luck getting a mortgage with the Haida Gwai as co-owners on title.) The glass half empty is your equity goes bye-bye.

The decision shocked many earnest Elbows Up types who had no idea their elected government had fumbled the ball this way. As we wrote last week this is the culmination of decades of Liberal acquiescence on the Indigenous file, incompetence highlighted by Trudeau’s pandering visit to a graveyard that contained no murdered babies. Or his refusal to re-open the main rail lines in 2020 when natives blocked the CP tracks.

But when you’re busy banning Paso Robles merlots from Canada or refusing to cross the U.S. border to protect the dairy cartel there’s not much room in your prefrontal cortex for legal wrasslin’ at the UN. Or noticing that the Saugeen nation is claiming title to Sauble Beach, Ontario, lakefront. Or that China has put 75 percent tariffs oil Canadian canola, a huge part ion the Western economy in Canada.

While politicians can at least be excused for burying these stories in their self interest, what to make of the bought/ paid for media that supposed to keep Canadians apprised? As always they are blissfully distracted by their pet causes.

Here’s American writer/ critic Mike Doran on today’s journalists: “The press has always been left wing, but it used to be an independent center of power, full of very, very talented, educated, and experienced people who knew a lot about how the world worked, and they had their own independent base of authority.

“There was a kind of independent audit of politics that was conducted by the newspapers, and by the intellectual world. That is gone. The internet destroyed it by destroying the economic basis for this independent sort of journalism.” In short, media is self-censoring at just the moment the government is pumping out new heavy-handed censorship plans under the guise of “free speech”.

With that we’re going to re-watch the tape of WWE Summer Slam to get some reality in our diet.

Bruce Dowbiggin

Golf’s Best 2025 Moment Is A Film That Endlessly Mocks The Game

Published on August 11, 2025

Bruce Dowbiggin

The culmination of the 2025 PGA Tour and its rival, the LIV Tour, is upon us. The PGA Tour is in its FedEx playoffs and LIV is… who knows? Out of sight. The year in golf can be summed up as the inevitability of Scotty Scheffler. No wonder Ian Baker Finch thought this a good time to retire from CBS’ golf coverage.

In fact the biggest story for golf fans (and pro golfers, too, it appears) in 2025 was the release of Adam Sandler’s Happy Gilmore II on Netflix. A raucous, vulgar, silly, sweet, sloppy, creative shambles of a film, it’s one of those rare feats in Hollywood. A sequel better than the original. Some might say that it wasn’t a high bar to get over Happy Gilmore punching it up with Bob Barker. True.

But in its chaos HGII is one thing that the golf world itself has enjoyed this year. (Okay, there are holdouts. ) Judging from the endless string of cameos by pro golf legends, current players, Sandler friends and family and sports media the industry. There’s probably a great documentary on Sandler recruiting so many of the legends of the sport. They willingly embraced the nonsense.

No, enthusiastically embraced it as an antidote to the lifeless slog this season on the Tours with the insouciant Scheffler winning two majors and ten other Top 10s finishes. (He finished T3 this past weekend in Memphis.) And true to 2025 Scheffler steals the movie, too, punking his infamous 2024 arrest before the PGA Tournament in Louisville. He allows himself to be arrested and handcuffed on the tee box and taken to a chicken shack jail cell at an event like the U.S, Open. From then on he’s a sight gag, watching the unfolding tournament with some lowlifes in a jail cell.

(Knowing a good thing when they see it Netflix had a promotional tent set up at the FedEx St. Jude Championship called “Scottie’s Chicken Shack.” The food tent offers three varieties of chicken fingers, and if you’ve seen the film, then you get the joke.

In his omnipresent Boston Bruins jersey Sandler knows that if you go low, he can go lower. He and John Daly compete as alcoholics slopping booze from every possible contraption. The character of Shooter McGavin (Christopher McDonald) flips from heel to face in a graveyard. The guest stars, ranging from Jack Nicklaus to Rory McIlroy to Bad Bunny to Ben Stiller to Post Malone willingly spoof their images. With so many plot lines it would be pointless to list them all. But a few suffice. To reprise the gag of throttling the boy caddy from Gilmore I Sandler has employed current Tour player Will Zalatoris to play the kid grown up, now Happy’s playing partner.

Diminutive Sixth Sense alumnus Haley Joel Osment becomes Happy’s demonic foe in the golfing showdown. Sandler’s daughters, wife and mother all get face time in various roles as do SNL buddies Stiller, Dennis Dugan, Kevin Nealon and Rob Schneider. Sports broadcasters Dan Patrick, Verne Lundquist and Jim Gray are drive-by media spoofers. And what golf movie is complete without Eminem?

He’s also playing the oldies. From Chubbs’ (the late Carl Weathers) wooden hand and the infamous jeering fan’s (the deceased Joe Flaherty) “jackass” taunt to weird old “Mister Mister” lady who got crushed by an air conditioner, Sandler recycles the bits. He also rips a few new targets with a plot line about an evil genius (Benny Safdie) trying to modernize golf with rotating greens and fireworks. Hello, TGL (Tomorrow’s Golf League).

Perhaps the best way to consume all this silliness is with a cast list on hand so you can keep up with the army of cameos that fly by. Character development is supplanted by a red-carpet of celebrity schlock. Nothing is serious. But celebrity in pyjamas for celebrity’s sake has a place in 2025, too.

Happy Gilmore II is not the only golf product diverting fans from the dreary progress toward what they hope will be a classic Ryder Cup in September at Bethpage Black in NYC. The Canadian-backed Apple+ series Stick has also made an appearance. A 10-part vehicle for Owen Wilson it’s a more conventional Ted Lasso-style production as Wilson (hello Happy Gilmore) plays a burnt-out golf legend hoping to rise to the top again with a young prodigy.

Viewers will immediately recognize the comparison to Ron Shelton’s iconic Tin Cup that walks the same plot fairways of despond to redemption. But Wilson and the cast (Marc Maron, Mariana Trevino, Lilli Kay, Timothy Oliphant) make the most of the predictable format. If some of the scenes look familiar to Canadians the series was taped in and around Vancouver.

It’s a more gentle product than Happy Gilmore but Wilson’s likability (he’s got the most famous cinematic busted nose since DeNiro in Raging Bull) and his semblance of a golf swing carry off his relationship with prodigy Peter Dager.

The pair of golf films (thankfully apolitical) are a reminder of what the conventional golf war between America (PGA Tour) and Saudi Arabia (LIV Tour) are missing. A little self-deprecation, a little innovation, a little entertainment from the links. And something for fans.