Got a tweet from Chrisale about an article from Andrew Coyne in the NatPost, had a look and sent back a message about how fawning it was over PMSH. Was informed that it was tongue-firmly-buried-in-Cheek style, something I can usually sense right away, but I’m afraid that, as I pointed out in the next round of the exchange, there was such a long history of Coyne being an apologist for all that the current régime has done that it never occurred to me that he might have slipped quietly off the bandwagon. In a rather mild way, this is something that really grinds my gears, where a series of lies comes to light and all of a sudden there are crowds of rats crawling down hawsers or looking for PFDs, but for a decade, there have been omnibus bills, trade agreements that are more litanies of corporate capitulation than anything to do with a layman’s definition of trade, cones of silence enforced around any knowledge that runs contrary to what dear leader perceives to be his best interest, attempts to subvert the constitution, cheating on elections, creating a police state and garnering a succession of the best-deserved awards for climate troll (he might get a run from his friend Tony Abbott of late), and political panels have consistently avoided discussions of the glaring incidents of predation by the Harper crowd.
Over the years, I’ve taught myself not to gloat when I’m on the winning side, and that’s been pretty easy, given that I haven’t often (in politics anyway) been on the winning side, what with a succession of administrations having turned out to be abusive of the commons and of those who most must depend on some form of mutual aid. Mulroney was a disaster, but Chrétien immediately broke with all he had promised and turned out to be pretty much as abusive as Mulroney and just as corrupt and dishonest. Ditto for Paul Martin, though the expectations were pretty low, given his long track record in Finance, but all of the aforementioned must be polishing up their halos for that moment when they stand next to Harper in judgement. The sore loser part, and my attempts not to engage in sour grapes, are rooted not so much in what I see as bad policy being foisted on the citizenry as it is a sense that little or none of this would be allowed to happen were people aware of it, hence the thorough dislike of, and lack of respect for, dear leader and his henches, as well as those who sang his praises throughout the run-up to the current campaign. Foremost among this crowd would be Mr. Coyne, and a plea of ignorance would somehow mirror Mr. Harper’s denials of knowledge of cheques to Mr. Duffy. My sense, for all that I disagree with what Mr. Coyne stands for, is that he is well-versed in his subject matter and an experienced and astute observer of political and social behaviour and would have had thorough knowledge of the Harper Current in public affairs.
Nonetheless, as a not-too-sore loser, I salute Mr. Coyne with a resounding face-palm: I missed it. I would also welcome any and all, of all political stripes, who slide off the ship of fools that is the Harper régime and join the rest of us swimming in our little sea of uncertainty.
One of those sad moments in our parliament’s long and tattered history of miscues and snafus: Lisa Raitt ushering Elizabeth May away from the microphone in mid-tirade at a press dinner. “It’s all right dearie, perhaps a touch too much claret, overwork, whatever, but we ought not to spoil the evening with such vile venting!” First problem: it all made complete sense to anyone who had been paying attention to the direction of the legislative body in this fine country. It was unfortunate that, as presented anyway, it did come off as a bit of a rant and not the coherent and incisive discourse for which May is generally known. When the dust settled, it seemed as though Raitt’s intervention was that of a friend and that everyone in Parliament, though there might be serious disagreements on issues of policy, is an upstanding member of the Canadian citizenry and the human race.
Hogwash.
Now McLean’s has a piece that Mulcair turned down a position as an adviser to the current Conservative lot because they wouldn’t offer him enough money, Mulcair fires back that he declined because of differences of opinion on policy. Why was this a consideration at all? Harper was already firmly in control of the CPC and everything in his background screamed aggressive corporate takeover, a a lack of recognition on that front constitutes a serious lack of awareness if not moral flaccidity.
The idea that these clowns are all worthy souls and members in good standing of the League of Elected Good Folk just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Many of us have close associates with whom we maintain civil and friendly relations, but there is a personal honesty and integrity that goes with the package, and there are so many in the Ottawa caucus of the LEGF who seemed to have missed that memo (please see, for starters Perps With Perks #17 in full knowledge that the blue men have no corner on the misdeed market, despite the rush of the current CPC crowd to cash in at the public trough).
How bad is it? The local branch of the library found me a copy of Michael Harris’ Party of One. It took months to get around to me, and the book is still in demand, seemingly, as there is a sticker on the front limiting the loan to two weeks without possibility of renewal. I read a chapter and put it down, not because it isn’t a splendid book or that the narrative is anything less than detailed, perceptive and gripping, but because I’ve already lived through this and followed it in all its sad and tawdry details. Hence, it seemed a good idea to let someone else anguish over the book.
I’m taking a day off from a lot of the engagement to spend that day in the best of the Voltairean traditions, cultivating my garden.
Happy Canada Day!
Addendum: My garden (and most everything else) partner with some Voltairesque lettuces…
So all people can now get married and enjoy the responsibilities and benefits that our society accords to people who settle into a domestic union. Like interracial couples, LGBTQ folk should now have access to what the rest of us have enjoyed in terms of societal recognition. community acceptance and tangible benefits over the span of recent history.
So here is Nancy Pelosi, House Minority Leader, celebrating Pride and the Supreme Court Ruling that says that people ought not suffer discrimination based on sexual orientation.
Problem is that a raft of Democrats then climbed on board the TPP Fast Track wagon, expediting the adoption of yet another treaty that has less to do with real trade than it does with ensuring corporate rights to make profits before all other considerations, including human health, the environment, and the democratically expressed will of the people of the U.S. Lest we feel smug, we need to remember that Canada wasn’t originally scheduled to be included in the TPP, but Stephen Harper whined and complained loudly and long enough that the rest of the guys gave up and allowed him into the club. Negotiations have been held in the most strict of secrecy and only small parts of the treaty have leaked out, but we can say with a degree of certainty that the section on investor-state relations, the Chapter 11 of this monster, is the key and basically enables malcontents in the corporate world to sue the rest of us for profits they think they might have accrued had laws not been passed to insert sticks into their spokes. I believe it also allows the suits to override whatever restraints any jurisdiction within the signatory countries might put on unbridled greed.Note that these cases are heard by (again) secret trade tribunals set up by the corporations themselves.
In effect, your vote doesn’t really mean anything any longer, unless you and any democratic pals you have can fly under the corporate radar. I don’t quite know how that could happen with the increased surveillance that seems to happen all over both the corporate and government sectors, sectors which seem to be closer to a complete merger with each passing bit of legislation.
So to all the LGBTQ folk, welcome to equality, but you’ve picked a bad time to win this equality, because it means that you will basically earn the same exploitation as the rest of us.
(In all fairness to Ms. Pelosi, I believe she voted against Fast Track in the House, but her friend Diane Feinstein voted for it in the Senate, so it seems that there is unlikely to be any public debate on this corrosive corporate dreck.)
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.
I signed a petition today in what will likely be a vain effort to forestall the construction in a prominent location in Ottawa of a monument to the victims of communism. Even though that brief interval and the energy of a few keystrokes may have been wasted, it is a fine jumping-off point for some reflection on ideology and the ideological underpinnings of régimes and their resulting misdeeds.
The motivation behind the monument, along with the scale and placement of the structure amounts to a dishonest pandering to one or more constituencies being curried for votes and financial consideration and perhaps to a lasting sign of the Harper legacy of eschewing any real diplomacy for supporting the side that best suits his own ideological and religious bent. Ideologies, like guns, don’t kill people, but, also like gun, if you leave one lying around, there’s a pretty good chance that someone will pick it up and use it for his own ends, likely in the service of coercion. In this, communism has certainly been the backdrop for millions of victims, but let’s not mistake what we called the Communist Bloc for communism: the USSR and its satellites were tyrannic dictatorships that spouted communist rhetoric as they exacted vengeful exactions indiscriminately on their own people and on those who had the great misfortune to fall under the extended Soviet influence. Do other ideologies have a tally on the victim slate? I would think so, even in something so “innocent” as the British/American strategy during the Second World War of delaying direct engagement with Axis forces in Europe until the Russians (note: Russians, communists and otherwise) had essentially absorbed the worst punishment that the Third Reich could hand out and turned the tide against the Nazi menace. Under the occupation, sympathetic factions arose in almost all countries to carry out many of the worst atrocities attributed to the Nazis, using National Socialism as a screen behind which to shelter the murdering, rapine and thievery that was at the heart of the matter, without regard to some ideological justification. And when the tide went the other way, there was more of the same, but from the other side, and pretty much without regard to any opposing or replacement ideology. The story of Alexander Solzhenitsyn is instructive, a seemingly loyal artillery officer who, at then end of the Great War, was gifted a dozen years in the gulags, demonstrating that Stalin et al were equal opportunity oppressors.
On the other hand there is the purported antithesis of communism, capitalism, whose record contains a litany of the same horrors perpetrated by the Stalinists. In theory, it is a perversion of capitalism for personal gain that lies at the root of the crimes, and that puts capitalism in exactly the same category as communism. It’s interesting to note that Mussolini characterized fascism as the marriage of capitalism and state power. This sounds vaguely familiar:
Let’s add Pan-Slavism and Zionism, the Greater Asiatic Co-Operation Sphere, The White Man’s Burden, the Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Aztec and Incan empires to the list of ideas that have wrought great deeds (their own definition) and left great works as monuments to their superiority (yikes, do the world’s great religions get caught up in the net?). So really, to be fair (not something for which the Harperites are really known), each of these ideas should have a memorial erected to the memory of its victims, and, given that real estate in Ottawa is at a bit of a premium, we could do these memorials as scale models of the great works such as that planned for the victims of communism, and house them all in a single building.We could then call it The Museum of Civilization.
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.
How ironic, the Clarkish one in the rôle of teacher. Ms. Clark has come up with another doozy in the wake of the Notley election in Alberta, to the effect that she has a lot to teach Alberta about carbon and climate change, and that, in fact, she has much to teach the rest of the country. Presumably this is because we have a carbon tax and they don’t, but she fails to mention that the carbon tax was a ploy by her predecessor to hog tie Carole James, making her either agree with the rampaging Liberals, or gainsay them in a move that would alienate her from voters in the greener shades of the spectrum, politics pure and simple. Herself hasn’t helped to redefine BC as anything other than a carbon furnace with the continued shenanigans related to the Pacific Carbon Trust, to dedicating agricultural land to carbon offset projects, and mostly her giveaway support of the gas industry, particularly the fracking end of it.. Her government has consistently missed opportunities to support alternative energy, despite indications that wind, solar, tidal and geothermal energy all hold great promise. She is an object lesson in what not to do, even as she waggles her finger at the rest of the country from the standpoint of someone who, without any reasonable explanation, seems to consistently dodge the consequences of both her actions and her inactions.
Update: (05/01) Gary Mason says that the BCTF would do well to raise the white flag.
Bully for Gary, and not a surprising comment from one out to feather his own nest and who represents the entrenched economic failures, not to mention the moral and ethical failures occasioned by the drinking of the Radian Kool-Aid. Anyone who cares for the maintenance and enhancement of public services, who cares for children and the possibility of constructive and enlightening experiences in the public school system, or who cares about the value of a signed contract or the process of consultation and negotiation should be in there hammer and tong as a countervail for the heinous larceny practised by Clark & Co.
Today’s release of a ruling by the courts in B.C. that determined that the Province had, indeed, consulted with the BCTF regarding class size and working conditions proved that much of our language has lost and real meaning. It would be hard outside of the niceties of the law, to argue that there was any real consultation when the MoEd basically sat on its hands through the whole process,including through two lower court rulings, and to this day, through the smug babbling of Clark about this being an opportunity, the Province hasn’t offered the slightest change in position.
In essence, the court has decreed that no contract has any validity. I imagine Phil Hochstein and his little posse are licking their chops in anticipation of testing the private-sector contract waters.
The only bright side is that the idea might later be turned around to imply that none of the Free Trade, NAFTA, CETA, FIPPA and TPP provisions about investor-state relations means anything, either, and that we as citizens can do whatever we damn well please within our several layered jurisdictions.
Any of the political class, particularly BC Liberals and FedCons who says anything about defending Canadian values has “a mouth full of gimme and a hand full of much obliged.” it’s hogwash. Their pink shirts are the sheep’s clothing for a pack of lupine bullies.
This is part of the Fraser Institute clique’s plan to privatize schools, to keep the public schools in as much penury as possible and subsidize private schools that cater to the clog at the top of the Cremeville bottle.
This decision must clearly be a proper interpretation of the law (we’ll see if the Supremes want to weigh in as soon as the BCTF files an appeal), but it fails miserably any sniff test of ethics or morality.
“Oh, Mon dieu, promets-moi que l’enfer existe!”
(Dear God, promise me that there is a hell!) —Luc de la Rochellière
“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.”
Campbell Clark has an article in this morning’s Globe and Mail with the title Harper’s Economic Halo Is Hard To Dim. Mr. Clark likely hasn’t talked to the thousands being laid off from the Oil Patch who might still be gainfully employed if we were engaged in the clean energy transition that other countries are undertaking. He likely hasn’t talked to the multitudes stuck in dead-end low wage employment or to those who can’t afford to live in Vancouver, Victoria, Toronto or a myriad of other places where housing is out of just about everyone’s realistic financial grasp, or the TFWs that have been brought in to ensure that the wages will stay low. I doubt that many of those Canadians mired in gobs of oozing debt will see that halo encircling the holy pate of the Prime Minister. Even Stephen, the man himself, seems to be campaigning on other than his much lauded (can you hear the snickers from the peanut gallery?) economic acumen. The Globe outdoes itself in Kowtowing to the Conservative Côterie. And, in passing, is it just me, or does the juxtaposition of the author’s two names say something ominous to those of us in BC?
