I went on social media this morning with the intention of, amongst other things, posting notice of a local meeting to investigate sponsorship of a refugee family, but found that there is something that really rankles about the idea. I’m an immigrant to Canada, and my forebears were immigrants from Germany and Ireland, some political and some economic refugees, and all this shuffling around has worked out pretty well for our lot, as well as for the receiving countries. Truth be known, everything I read indicates that it has worked out a damn sight better for us than for the original inhabitants of this land, and for many who haven’t been as successful at navigating the shoals of hostile economies and social situations as we have been. Much of this, both success and failure, can be ascribed to dumb luck, with Dame Fortune smiling on some and throwing stones at many more. A good deal more can be ascribed to the mean-spirited and short-sighted policy environment that has enveloped us in the last four or five decades and has (and continues to) caused disasters and misery abroad, discrimination and disparity at home.
My own sense is that there is a great need for rewriting our social and economic playbook, and that the care of our living space needs to be at the top of the list of priorities, and that charity is a band-aid on the festering sores of environmental degradation and the economic imbalance that produces poverty and homelessness, hunger, exposure and violence. As I suspect the case might be with many others who have avoided these pitfalls, we are charitable, but have the feeling that we could donate our way into our own poverty, and that it would make little difference in the overall scheme as those who have sequestered the great wealth of society in their own pockets would only deepen their own pockets of absorb the new donations without it making a whit of difference to the indigent. I reserve a special space in hell for people who fatten on the outpourings of charitable donations as part of the Charity Industry: it might be a good gig economically, but it’s morally indefensible. It’s also an excuse to let governments continue to funnel funds to their cronies and shirk responsibility to citizens for protecting our common living space, both physical and social.
Let’s accept refugees, welcome them with open arms and all the love and support we can muster. We have done much to create the conditions that forced them out of their former lives, so let’s try to make up part of it by ensuring that they have a better life here. At the same time, we here in Canada have a core of disenfranchised citizens, our own cadre of internally displaced persons, victims of whatever combination of toxic social circumstances and bad decisions by whomever. We can do better at looking after “our own” as well as taking in some “outsiders”, in the spirit of Gilles Vigneault’s Mon Pays:
De ce grand pays solitaire je crie avant que de me taire A tous les hommes de la terre ma maison c’est votre maison Entre mes quatre murs de glace je mets mon temps et mon espace А prйparer le feu, la place pour les humains de l’horizon Et les humains sont de ma race
(Basically, my house is your house, and all humans are of my race.)
Fairness doesn’t always dictate that everyone get the same treatment, but it ought to mean that no one goes without the necessities of life, including participation in society in economic, intellectual and spiritual dimensions, and full opportunity to improve the living situation, as long as it isn’t at the expense of others. So let’s sponsor both refugees from abroad and our own internal refugees. And let’s work toward a better economic and social balance at home, and quit blowing stuff up elsewhere.
One red light going off when Steelhead started working with Huu-Ay-Aht on an LNG port at Sarita Bay, old (at least in spirit) white guys from Howe Street (or wherever) promoting a get-rich-quick scheme likely to utterly destroy most everything in its path, and lots of folks, including some (really) old white guys feel really uncomfortable pointing out the pitfalls to people plundered by their Wall Street culture, just the sense that there’s a scam at work here, one that fits in well with the kind of hucksterism that characterizes everything that has come out of Victoria/Ottawa in the last fifteen years.
Now double the trepidation as a project of similar nature is brought forward by the Malahat First Nation in cahoots with the very same Steelhead crowd: this reminds me of the smelter proposition that kicked around these parts, studies paid and plagiarized, not a snowball’s chance of ever happening and the air of scam all about. According to reports in media (OK, I don’t trust them either) there was a missing detail with the Malahat crowd in that they don’t seem to have consulted with their membership, kinda à la NEB.
Given the general seeming acceptance of Victoria’s LNG ploy at face value, it looks as though a lot of people are set up to lose a lot of face in the whole deal. Sad.
And there is almost the whole rotten hockey-sock full of us, camping at Mt. Lassen in 1958. Maggie is off somewhere tending to the latest, baby Gabrielle. I got on well with my Dad, though I occasionally got into a tempestuous funk when he called bullshit on some of my out of bounds forays. Retrospect, even the shortest and most immediate, drove me to apologize and acknowledge that he was likely right about everything he said, and ultimately, it was that schooling that helped me to be a reasonably constructive being (of course, I also had the benefit of a mother who tempered whatever hard-nosedness I perceived on Dad’s part, so equal participation in whatever good I might have done).
This all came to mind when the house filled up with the perfume of black currants last evening, part of the cycle of things ripening in the yard and coming indoors to be eaten or to be processed for later reference. Black currants make wonderful syrup (Crème de Cassis) or jam/jelly. Dijon is famous for its currants, as is another spot somewhat to the North and West, Bar-le-Duc, which was the source for a blackcurrant jelly that Dad particularly liked.
So, after enjoying the perfume of the blossoms, I watched as Erica pulled the fruit off the bushes while I did some grunt work close by.
Then they went into the steam juicer and into the Maslan Pan.
Eventually, they look like this. There was even a partial jar so that we could toast some of Erica’s whole-wheat bread and slather it with our own home made jelly.
I have no children of my own, but I worked at being a decent mentor for my stepson and have been pretty present in the lives of his kids. The young man in question asked me long ago why I never seemed to get upset and I explained to him that first of all, I had two grandfathers who didn’t really want to deal with children and whose gruff manner was enough to ensure that there would be no attempts at intimacy, and that, as well, he never seemed to do anything worthy of anger (true statement).
When he was over on Thursday, we snacked and cobbled together a home-made periscope, something that arose in a book his mother had given him.
The book also had material on spiders, on bruises and cuts, on sea urchins and a wealth of other topics. most of which the little man wanted to share. His mother’s parents live in town as well, so he and his sister are surrounded by care, love and coaching at many levels.
As much as to say that life in our little circle is pretty darn wonderful. The sad part is how quickly the picture degrades as we move away from that centre of friends and family, a wider world that seems to have forgotten the value of integrity, truthfulness, mutual aid and caring.
It is somewhat comforting to think that there are myriad other little islets of family and friends, of integrity, truthfulness and caring, though the network is spotty and we aren’t all connected, and that there might be a possibility that cooperation, collaboration and mutual aid might emerge as a dominant way of directing our actions. The alternative is too ugly to contemplate.
This is a revolutionary act, telling the money to walk because it maters not where the environment and culture are concerned. Too bad it took the rest of us so long to figure out that those First Nations we beat up so badly might have had the right idea in the first place and that Wal-Mart doesn’t wash when the devastation hits.
“One of the world’s greatest problems is the impossibilty of any person searching for the truth on any subject when they believe they already have it.”
—Dave Wilbur
James Lunney: Christianity under siege
James Lunney, National Post Monday, Apr. 13, 2015
The past year has seen unprecedented attempts to diminish, discredit and suppress a Christian world-view in law, medicine and academia. That was the message from Christian leaders a few weeks ago in Ottawa. At the same time three politicians, all Christians, were publicly condemned as ignorant and unscientific for daring to disagree with an intolerant fundamentalist religion. Questioning theory vs. fact is the unpardonable sin for adherents of evolutionism.
Bigotry and intolerance are the trademark of militant atheism and its adherents’ campaign against God. Conrad Black exposed as much in his eloquently written and defended articles recently. As a multi-racial, multicultural, multi-faith society, Canada has been known to a world in conflict as a standard for respect for diversity and inclusion. However, a religious defence of science seems to be the vehicle for the most vitriolic, pejorative, vulgar campaigns of intolerance and ad hominem attacks in Canada today.
These public shaming assaults are not in keeping with the nature of scientific inquiry or the character of an otherwise extraordinarily tolerant nation. They are the hallmark of scientism and evolutionism bearing all the hallmarks of religion, but unrestrained by any modicum of respect for anyone who contradicts the tenets of the faith. In this regard militant atheism is more akin to militant Islam than any of Canada’s multi-faith communities.
Evolutionism is losing its grip as biological sciences have outstripped any rational defence of the origins of life or the complexities of the simplest cell ever coming into being by random undirected events or natural processes. Darwin was a brilliant naturalist; his keen observations have inspired great advance in our understanding of how living things are related. However the world of the cell was beyond anything Darwin could have imagined.
The notion that belief in God is incompatible with pursuit of science is a falsehood clung to by a dwindling cadre of atheists in the science community today. It began with Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, a brilliant scientist in his own right; and the father of eugenics. While Gregor Mendel, was laying the foundation for modern genetics, Galton was promoting the concept that belief in God was an impediment to the advance of science.
The concept of Non-Overlapping Magesteria is a sanitized repackaging of Galton’s legacy adopted by the American Academy of Sciences. While atheists have made great contributions to science, the identification of the DNA molecule by Watson and Crick does not diminish the contribution of Francis Collins, an evangelical Christian who led the effort to decode the three billion base pair sequence of human DNA. Collins wrote in The Language of God: “DNA is the most efficient information storage system known to man!”
Science is agnostic. There is room for people of all faiths or no faith to contribute to science; indeed that is the historic record.
It was the NDP who shut down my attempt to put this on the record in the House of Commons. Ian Capstick, former NDP strategist and communications director, stated on national TV that he had to “take me down.” He describes himself as a militant atheist. Rick Nicholls was savaged in the Ontario legislature, while Gordon Dirks was targeted in Alberta, but not because either is a threat to science. Rather, they failed to affirm evolutionism, the religion of the militant atheist.
Capstick boldly states he is going after the charitable tax-exempt status of the church. Does he speak for Tom Mulcair? Who is funding the campaign to disparage a Christian worldview and pressure the Canada Revenue Agency to strip churches of their charitable status? Is it the big banks and corporations that wrote to law societies trying to shut down the TWU law school?
Who are the 22 members of the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons who unilaterally moved to strike down doctors’ long-standing Charter rights to refuse to provide services that would violate their conscience? Dr. Chris Simpson, president of the CMA, says eliminating conscience provisions is not acceptable; but Ontario doctors, like Trinity Western University, are now compelled to launch costly Charter challenges to defend their rights.
Evolutionism is based on a false construct from another century; it is as repugnant as any other form of bigotry. If this campaign for a godless Canada were successful, the Canada that would emerge is one that few Canadians would recognize and most would not want to live in. The “shabby, shallow world of the militant atheist”; it couldn’t be better stated.
National Post
James Lunney is independent member of Parliament for Nanaimo-Alberni.
Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.
—Arthur Schnitzler
The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.
—Hubert Humphrey
The following was published in the local paper as an editorial piece. David Black, the owner of Black Press, hence, the owner of the paper, is a proponent of pipelines to the Coast from the Athabaska Tar Sands and the installation of refineries on the Coast itself.
Diana West in The Death of the Grown Up challenges us to look accurately at the world around us and stop our delusional thinking.
She focuses on a number of interesting things including: a loss of parenting, nonjudgmental multiculturalism, and politically correct self-censorship as well as today’s victim, hero reversal.
But I want to talk about the biggest delusion of our day – the delusional idea that going green will benefit our lives.
Sure there are many sincere individuals who want to keep things clean, to be less wasteful and who wish to ensure that future generations can live a good life.
People with these beliefs are not a problem, they’ve only been mislead. This I call small green thinking. The earth doesn’t care if you pick something up and put it down in a different place.
No, it’s the strident activist, the BIG Green folk who are a problem.
These are the people that think there are too many people on the earth, that our factory system is environmentally destructive, that our energy use is killing the planet. In other words, that all our development is bad and needs to be stopped. I call them the Luddites of our era.
Truly, in a scant 300 years our lives are now 20 times richer than our ancestors. Mostly because some very bright individuals learned how to tame the energy embedded in fossil fuel. Because they shared their discoveries and inventions with their fellow man, the world changed – for the better.
We live in a man-made world.
Roofs keep us dry. Walls and windows and central heating keep us warm. Roads and cars and airplanes cause us to forget how our ancestors travelled. Our modern medicine system means we will die after 80 years of life rather than 30 as those ancestors did.
Today in the developed world, virtually everyone lives a better life than even the aristocracy of the past. As Milton Friedman said, “The ancient Greeks needed no running water; they had running slaves. Measured in human energy output, our energy use equates to some 90 people working for us. That is because we feed fuel into machines.
Today we have the equivalent of some 90 people working for us because we feed fuel into machines.
Everything that enriches our lives, and that we can afford, comes to us cheaply through the doors of a factory. The doors BIG Green wants to slam shut.
The destruction of enterprise begins if we fail to add ‘free.’
We would not expect good results if we put ignorant people in charge of brain surgery or rocket science….mechanics or construction, yet we have given the ‘right to impede’ to those who lack the ability to do or the desire to think about what they oppose.
BIG Green has lost its way.
These folks want to end the industrial world. They don’t look at the world from a human health consideration. Their view is distorted by what my friend Alex Epstein calls the ‘perfect planet premise,’ that a world untouched by man is paradise.
Well in truth, without man’s intervention, called ‘natural,’ life is more accurately described by Thomas Hobbes: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
And it’s happening today.
Development is being opposed at every level in the name of saving the planet…from man rather than for man.
For proof we have the ranting of the BIG Green leaders. An interesting book, Merchants of Despair, by Robert Zubrin, provides a wealth of documentation. It’s your life…don’t let them steal it.
No carbon footprint means no life. Exploit the earth or die.
I suspect that Dr. Lunney and Mr. Seinen have both lived lives of reasonable ease and speak their truths for fear that anyone might impinge on their right to profit from the misery of others. Each is entitled, as are we all, to his own views, but it strikes me that neither should be allowed to intrude into the area of public policy. I would amend Mr. Seinen’s final statement to the following:
Exploit and die.
“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy: that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
Not a terribly exciting or engaging image, I have to admit, lifted, though, from this post on Libération yesterday morning in the course of the daily read-around. I’ve been engaged in the process of writing an Energy Descent Action Plan for out local Transitions initiative, a process that seems to drag on and in which few seem keen to participate, but one of the recurring themes is that we use too much of just about everything, and much of our usage is wasteful, literally, as we purchase and use goods that are built to fall apart or become obsolete and require replacement. I suspect that many of us have had the experience of having to replace a relatively recent major appliance because of the failure of an electronic module or because there are already no replacement parts available. Almost equally pernicious is the situation where an item can be repaired, but where the cost of doing so makes for little economic advantage over simply throwing it out and buying a new one. Hence the “excitement” over the above image, as it represents a washing machine labelled by its designer as “L’Increvable” , which is more or less meant to convey the idea of bullet-proof. His idea is that the machine should last a lifetime, that it should be user-serviceable (given a certain level of tool savvy), and that all parts be easily replaced and repairable. This way of doing things is a fair approximation of the opposite of the way most design and manufacturing is done, our current mode being predicated on an unlimited stream of materials and energy and a sucker population willing to accumulate large amounts of valuable material in landfills. Clearly, our current mode is suicidal as we move toward a world population of eight billion and as more and more of the world’s inhabitants are less and less willing to accept the deprivations of poverty to supply the consumer society in other parts of the world.
There rests the question of developing a species-wide awareness and ethos that will allow for a decent life for all. Can we dial back on our consumption so that others might have the wherewithal to live a life without want? Current indicators don’t hold out a lot of hope, particularly when the people in charge of the zoo seem set on a path of division and a desire to sequester as much of the available store of resources as possible for the use of a chosen few. It’s difficult to imagine the mass of humanity developing the mutual aid outlook as long as that mass is scrambling just to survive and facing interference and opposition form the people they should be helping and who should be returning the favour.
One of the best ways to reign in our over-consumption is to build durable, repairable and recyclable goods, and to encourage others to do the same. The insane chase after levels of material wealth that we’ve been sold is best illustrated in the tech sector where whatever gadget you buy is out of date about the time you finish the transaction to remove it from the store. New software requires the purchase of new hardware, and hardware seems to generate the need for software upgrades as tech companies bootstrap the upgrade ladder to waste and obsolescence. The same phenomenon appears in most phases of our existence, where single-serve coffee makers replace other methods of brewing that are perfectly adequate, but just aren’t the latest fad. This, of course, follows on the notion that we should have uninterrupted access to the beverage of our choice at all hours of the day and night, and we’re trained from an early age to expect this pampering because we deserve to have only the best. We just don’t stop to ask ourselves what that “best” is as we abandon civic duty and critical analysis in favour of accumulation.
Those of us who live in the lap of some version of North American luxury can celebrate the creation of a truly durable washing machine, but that celebration is also about having clothes to wash, an abode to house the machine, the clothes, and us, and clean water to do the washing, along with a host of other pre-conditions that don’t hold in many places in the world. Recently, my brother told me he had to replace the speed control on his stand mixer, and that he had to rig up a rheostat arrangement because there didn’t seem to be any parts of this particular machine. I had been through a similar vexation with a dishwasher three or four years ago, though that’s where the similarity ends. The dishwasher was less than three years old and no parts could fix it. It has become a dish drying rack for dishes we wash by hand and we seem to be none the worse for it. The stand mixer was purchased in 1950, and, with the installation of the rheostat, is now fully functional. Perhaps l’Increvable is a sign of a return to an outlook that will allow us a little breathing room in our quest to balance our lives in a way that will see future generations stretching our for centuries. Without that rebalancing, the prospects for life beyond a generation or two seem pretty discouraging. Too bad for us.
Living as if there were no tomorrow, we are converting a carefree metaphor into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
—John Whiting
One who knows “enough is enough” always has enough.
Bill Nye may be the Science Guy, but we have to wonder about the science of GMO when he appears to have reversed field following a visit to Monsanto, as outlined in an article on EcoWatch. He hasn’t published, that I know of, the changes he intends to make in his writings on the subject, but a lot of what he had previously written was pretty damning, as has been much of the literature written by those not sponsored by the gene-splicers. I have to admit to having and not-totally-open mind on the subject and I suspect it will take some serious convincing to get me to accept that what Monsanto, Bayer, Syngenta and the like have done is in the general interest of the public, that it contributes to the greater good without doing irreparable damage. First consideration has to be the stubbornness with which these folks cloak their doings in secret and gain legal approval through the purchase of political levers rather than convincing the public that they are acting in the interest of anything other than profit and, as it seems likely, the ability to choke and control much of the food supply. Their unwillingness to abide even labelling of their product speaks to a group that has something to hide. Second consideration is that, other than being able to drench landscapes in pesticides/herbicides, I don’t think that a convincing argument has been made for the necessity, or even utility of these genetic modifications. I’ve seen little evidence that more food is produced using large-scale agricultural methods with major inputs of chemical soil amendments and pest controls. Monsanto, in particular, seems to have done a woeful job of keeping their organisms under control in nature and may be doing a tremendous amount of harm through simple lack of oversight. I wonder how frank Bill Nye will be about his change of heart, and how much of a change of heart will he have had? Could be another icon of rectitude down the rectitube, so eyes and ears open seems to be the watchword.
A report from Bloomberg details how various corporations have stashed 2.1 trillion in profits in low-tax jurisdictions, including including another $69 billion in the last year. So the business plan is to mine, manufacture and market through the jurisdictions where labour is cheapest, ship and sell where product will generate the most profits, then export the profits to the jurisdictions where the tax burden will be the least onerous. It’s just business, after all.
How about we have a new system that states that the jurisdiction where you sell the goods dictates what you pay for labour, for materials, for shipping, for marketing and taxes. If the firm doesn’t want to, or can’t, then they can’t sell into high-priced markets.
And while we’re at it, the firms represented by the above three logos are a big part of generating mounds of electronic garbage through planned obsolescence and count on the largesse of society as a whole to clean up the mess made by the throwaway gadgets as well as the mountain of plastic packaging that accompanies the electronics themselves. The real price to society in clean-up costs ought to be added to the dodged tax revenue and the societal costs of poor working conditions of people employed to manufacture the items they often can’t afford to buy. Many of us might make different purchasing decisions if we had to pay the true price of many of the items we buy.
All this comes on top of recent revelations that HSBC has been actively helping monied clients to hide money from taxing authorities to the tune of a couple of hundred billions of dollars. Perhaps these people so averse to working as part of a larger society should be ostracized, excluded entirely from all the business of society, along with their friends at HSBC (and any other institution engaging in like practices), or just locked up and fined the same way that has been happening to Black people in Ferguson, Missouri, as a matter of “the way we do business”.
…except it was already happening, if the snippets I’ve read about the reaction (in more ways than one) to the defeat of Barry Goldwater in the 1964 American presidential election. There was this perceived excess of democracy at home and abroad as control of the economic and political processes slipped from the grasp of monied interests. Already plans were being put in place for a long-term strategy to ensure that the semblance of popular rule would return to and remain forever a semblance, and that there would be little chance that popular demonstrations and voter registration campaigns would have any meaningful effect on the stranglehold the wealthy and powerful would be exercising over the affairs of the country and the world. My sense is that Bill C-51 is the most open manifestation of the will to openly and boldly exercise that control, particularly combined with the RCMP’s statement of the threat assessment that environmentalists pose to the fossil fuel business, making it clear that our PM’s version of prosperity (that lives in Houston, Texas) will take priority over the survival of life on the planet. As usual, there have been some really clear statements from various of the usual suspects (hasn’t that phrase taken a somewhat sinister connotation?), including this little bit from the Galloping Beaver. There is something in the lapsed Catholic part of me that cries out for some form of compensatory justice in relation to those who have perpetrated this fraud on humanity and who continue to do so under the guise of “sound fiscal management”, but, then, I guess the church would likely tell me that it is for God to judge and that we will all find our justice in the next life, rather like the promises of a burgeoning economy that will happen just after the next election. Watch for a good deal of this to be featured in the upcoming tilt for the PM’s chair this year.
According to our friends at the Globe and Mail, Stephen Harper has succeeded in moving Canada significantly to the right, to that place where we all function as rugged and moral individuals practicing free-market ideology and end-times Christian wing-nutttery so that the puppet masters behind the curtain can continue to profit mightily and lock down all the benefits of an ownership society. The real Government of Canada Action Plan even has arrows showing where all the wealth and power will go in our newly restructured gush-up model of wealth redistribution. The current administration in Ottawa, along with its provincial counterparts, has made ignorance fashionable, torpedoed both knowledge and responsible analysis, corrupted the English language with feel-good labels for pernicious realities, torn vast holes in the social safety network (that was already threadbare from the predations of Paul Martin/Jen Chrétien/Brian Mulroney) and trashed what was, at one time, a perception that Canada had a constructive rôle to play in international affairs. We have become more like our dysfunctional neighbours to the south whose system of governance has morphed into a perpetual politics machine, staggering through inaction and paralysis from one election to the next and much of whose discourse has become so biblically hide-bound as to lose the very nature of metaphor and the sense of what history might teach us. In effect, Harper’s move hasn’t so much moved us from left to right as it has from sane to wrong.
