Letter To Santa Claus

Dear Santa Claus,

I don't want anything new for Christmas; I just want to stop losing what I already have. Some Favourite Things are disappearing: books in print, clock radios, landline phones, pay-phones, lawns, paper money, folding maps, greeting cards, stamps ... (and the whole Post Office ...)

Instead of hanging a stocking for you to fill I have left a stocking full of things for you to take away: shopping "membership" cards, cellphones, Global Positioning System, CCTV camera, fit-bit monitors, Kindle readers, plastic packaging, cat-leash, meat, and "apps".

Thanks, Santa -- just close the chimney when you leave. 

Shipped off to torture and execution -- the horses of Canada

 

The Canadian Government is "... balancing the need to develop effective and science-informed policies and strategies with the perspectives of stakeholders who are affected by its decisions. Stakeholders will be engaged in consultations, as applicable ...". 

Have you ever heard a more appalling piece of bureaucratic bafflegab by a government? Well yes -- it happens all the time. This one is about why the Gov of Canada cannot stop torturing innocent horses. "Stakeholders" might not like it if they did. Let these stakeholders show their faces, as they watch no-longer-wanted horses forced into a 28 hour flight without food or water to the slaughter houses of foreign customers. 

Yes, the Canadian Government -- friend of the abused -- can't even stop that abuse. 

Some things they really can't stop -- they can't suddenly make climate change go away, or make Russia, Afghanistan and Iran stop torturing people. But how is it they can't even stop themselves torturing innocent horses? Herding them into trucks and planes as live meat ready for butchering. Old racehorses, the winners and the losers, old saddle-horses, show jumpers and rodeo performers -- all now surplus to requirements. 

The question is, why don't Canadians require ethical behavior and decency from their government? The PM's "Mandate Letter" of one year ago to the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food included "ban the live export of horses for slaughter". 

So what happened? Oh yeah, that "stakeholder" thing. If you feel you have an ethical stake in non-cruelty, write to your MP, and to the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food: marie-claude.bibeau@parl.gc.ca  

If you need help find some here: https://cpj.ca/writing-a-letter-to-your-mp/  (from Citizens For Public Justice)

C

BAD History

The Rearranged-History Institute has a mission: re-frame the past. It should never have happened. A new breed of graduating historians is committed to pretending it didn't, or at least that it happened differently. Committed to equity, inclusion and diversity they are intersectionally dedicated to authenticating new heroes. The old ones will have their statues knocked down.

Statistical data, historical records, documented research, archives, eye-witness accounts by participants at historical events ... these sources are deemed untrustworthy, for they reveal history outside the correct narrative, history that doesn't obey ideological instructions. (BAD History! "Marginalized" groups are very angry with you. They think you hate them, so they consider you Hate-History.)

"We have ways of re-arranging you", they warn. So take cover, History. But take heart -- in a generation or two the re-discovery of your hiding places will launch a thousand new PhD papers. History is nothing if not cyclical.

SEE ALSO:

https://satiricalscene.blogspot.com/2022/06/manufactured-history-can-you-study.html

Oh Christmas Tree

To be sung ...  You know the tune🎄  (Alter-carols for the Christmas Season)

OH CHRISTMAS TREE

Oh Christmas tree, oh plastic tree,
How slippery your branches are
Oh Christmas tree, oh plastic tree
How brightly shines your styro-star
How sturdy your metallic stem
Lights twinkle off, then on again
Oh Christmas tree, oh plastic tree
Your branches are so fragrance-free

Oh Christmas tree, oh plastic tree,
Much puzzlement you bring to me

From in a box they bring you out 

No cones or needles drift about

Oh Christmas tree, oh plastic tree

You limply stand, so tinsel-y

.

On a Scroll

Walking, sitting at a bus stop, in a cafe or waiting room, lining up in a shop, walking the dog, visiting a playground with the kids -- whatever else they're doing, everyone seems to be scrolling through a smartphone at the same time. When do you ever see anyone reading a book, watching a sunset, or just sitting? Just thinking? Thoughts are buried under the spillage which content-providers lay out online. Advertisers and meme-merchants are on a roll.

The device-addicted are like pollinators primed by evolution to flit from bloom to bloom until they die. No thought is required because their brains are pre-wired. 

Once they learned that people's brains were pre-wired to crave gratification, and once digital innovation provided the perfect tool for harnessing cravings, advertisers and influencers found it easy to herd us. 

We are told the Internet offers free choice, but the algorithmic influencers and persuaders have pre-arranged the choices ("-range" coming from the French "ranger", to rank). This parody of freedom reminds us of Marx's theory that the State would wither away once the working class awoke. Instead, a pan-national state has come into being with an iron grip on our brains: the Cyber-state (and the world's workers never awoke, they just got "woke".)

Can we break out of cyber-bondage? Re-discover scattered bits of personal thought "recollected in tranquillity", phone turned off? We could replace social media with private media by turning our gaze to the physical world, to weather, birds, nature, passers-by, and our own ideas. Non-democratic governments now outnumber democratic ones on the obsessively phone-checking world stage; maybe because democracy depends on free-thinking citizens?

As we re-claim individual thought our addicted fingers might itch to start pecking again. We'll have to sit on our hands and free up our eyes. Yours might be rolling at this suggestion, but then again they might enjoy time off the scroll. They might even read a book in print. It's interesting how before the advent of the printed (or handwritten) book there was the ancient scroll -- of papyrus, say -- and after the printed book there was the online scroll. In between, we lived in a special literary moment.

Now, as in some of those earlier times, we live in a period of ideological thought control. Call something "hate" and it's banned. In former times people scratched messages in crypts, or like spies wrote coded secrets on scrolls slipped into holes in a rock wall: the romance of censor-dodging. Today, it's almost more fun to write for a world that tries to stop you than for one that scans-and-forgets you, un-noticing. 

What's ahead? More constriction, thought police and censorship as far as we can tell. So, more scrolls in the holes in walls, but also more challenges to the censors for readers are drawn to the forbidden, which becomes the secret, which becomes the mysterious. Often the best thing that happens to a book is to be banned. Sometimes it becomes a best-seller -- underground, newly "rare". Such irony: controversy sells, controversy does its own marketing ("contra"/against "verse"/speech). Speaking against is speaking for -- and often means being on a scroll. 

The Ghost Reader

Ghost Reader is the reader unknown, the one who reads a book anonymously, who invisibly borrows it from a friend or communal library or maybe finds it in a charity box, who neither recommends nor denounces it to others. The Ghost Reader is the one whose name isn't on a library card the book was borrowed under, or an Amazon order it was purchased through, the one who doesn't send a note to the author or follow him/her on social media, the one whose thoughts about a book leave no trace.

To the writer, Ghost Reader is a phantom, a fleeting figure imagined like all those familiar literary characters that do and do not exist. Ghost Reader may have attended a book's launch, sitting at the back during the reading and saying nothing, before slipping away with the author's words forever scooped into her neural circuitry .. but s/he might on the other hand never have existed. 

Some readers send messages to authors, ask questions, write reviews, reveal their identities. Any author's glad to hear from them of course, but the best true follower, the one who really "gets" her themes and characters is the Ideal Reader who looms large in her writerly mind. Ghost Reader is the mirror image of Ghost Writer, and like that participant in the publishing world might well remain Anonymous forever.  

Per-verse

 

Think how boring life would be

if everything was known ahead,

if living held no mystery

and all you needed to say was said

Imagine you woke to certainty

and went to bed with nothing at stake

Would nightly sleep more peaceful be

or would longing for mystery keep you awake?

Would you rather a floating fetus be

suspended unknowing in a safe soft womb,

knowing not dread nor comedy

nor what might happen from now until doom?

If all was known ahead of its time

who could bear eternity?

You gave me your word about everything

but I prefer delicious uncertainty

                                           -- A. Blair

Everyday Ghosts: A Tale for Halloween

Ghosts are restless spirits of people repressed or banished from history. Historical figures banished in one way will reappear somewhere else, haunting the places they used to flourish in when alive. Somehow they seem to redress retroactive cancelling. The more we censor the past the more we need ghosts, for re-balancing.

It's not only historic personalities but historic social habits that erupt again in our thoughts, haunting us like secret underground unconscious desires -- products of taboos.

On the morning of Halloween, at the laundromat I smelled cigarette smoke. I swear it was there, a ghostly odorous emanation, even though no one was smoking and the walls were plastered with “No Smoking” signs. The diagrams on these signs made the images of wasted lungs look like skeletons: very Halloween-ish, very appropriate for hallows-evening! The night before All Saints Day, night when the non-saintly ones get out and express themselves.

More ghostly things happened to me that day: at the cash machine outside the bank I put my card in ... and it disappeared. Some evil force stole it and left a creepy message: “insufficient funds”.

This meant less cash with which to buy Halloween candy for the trick-or-treaters. I knew I'd have bad luck at the store and sure enough, a black cat crossed my path. A free one! Just walking along! We rarely see a free cat since the “lock up your cat” lobby forced everyone to keep them indoors – for the sake of birds. The spooky crows in the trees overhead seemed real enough. They cawed raucously, jeering at the black cat, who vanished down a dank alley. These crows had spent the summer killing baby robins, for which cats got blamed – a criminality of crows they were, black against a darkening sky. They soon flew off, evaporating like shadowy wisps ...

Some people say ghosts are mere imaginings, products of our need to hang on to things we've lost, things like history and the habits that used to be robust choices in our personal lives ... let letting our cats go out. This seems to suggest that ghosts are “real”, and that whatever we ban comes back to haunt us.

In my town, the City Council decided it was wise to ban the statue of Canada's first Prime Minister because some aboriginal people didn't like walking past it. His statue's gone now, but Mr. Macdonald isn't: I saw a shadowy top-hatted frock-coated figure on Government Street the other night, flitting round a corner under the moon as the clock chimed midnight.

He'll stick around. History has a way of not going quietly.

  

                                            

.

The Invasion of the History Snatchers?

The Canadian Museums Association wants government money to finance "indigenous-led reconciliation in the museum sector". ( Canadian Museums Association recommends 10 ways to decolonize heritage sector - Victoria Times Colonist )

The "museum sector" is one of the channels by which knowledge of History is delivered to the public. Indigenous groups want material artifacts now in museum collections to be returned to them, which sounds only reasonable (although which individuals actually own them isn't clear). Beyond material artifacts, however, they want "sovereignty" over material created about them, which includes accounts, photos and art produced by others. The proper owners of artistic and written works are their authors. 

Material "created about" aboriginals includes accounts of Canadians' shared past -- the story of the whole nation, by the whole nation. It's hard to record the history of Canada without writing about aboriginal people ... and everybody else. To say that only one in-group "owns" a story is censorship, a silencing of the speech of others. (Can you imagine a decree saying that only white people can write about white people??)

History as a subject should be presented in museums, archives and textbooks by professional historians, not by ideologues with a political purpose. (Personal memoir and fictional-imaginative narratives might be by anybody of course, and are protected as free speech.)

The government money for the reconciliation which the Museums Association wants more of, is taxpayers' money. Taxpayers come from every ethnic background and ancestry.

Imagine legislation saying "only Canadians of European ancestry are allowed to write about other Canadians of European ancestry" -- how would that go over? Let's make sure the equity and inclusion principle so proudly adopted in other contexts, prevails also in the matter of Canadians writing about their society and each other. Someone can feel they "own" their own culture, but they don't own somebody else's words. That's what "right to free speech" and copyright means.

Dr. Manners' Election Etiquette For Candidates and Voters

CANDIDATES:

Tell us what you would do in office; not what you think others should NOT do

Don't attack your opponents in the media; speak only about your own platform (voters like positivity)

Meet voters at doorsteps and gatherings; do not spend time digging into the historical past of other candidates' ancient emails so as to find something to shriek about (DON'T shriek, or jeer, insult and ridicule opponents, or attack voters' ancestries)

Never remove or deface opponents' flyers, posters or lawn signs

If you see someone else's lawn sign knocked onto the ground, stand it up again (wouldn't it be nice to know everyone else would do the same for you?)

If you claim any environmentalist intention in your literature, do not even HAVE a plastic lawn sign (hypocrisy is a turn-off)

Remember that personal conduct is more important than promises, in campaigning (character trumps ideology)

Avoid terminally-overused words like: privileged, marginalized, unsafe, vulnerable, and "people experiencing ..." whatever.  

Don't use (anti)social media to get your message out

VOTERS:

Look for and share what you support in a candidate's platform; don't harp on the one thing you disagree with

Personal conduct of candidates is more important than promises; vote for civility, not ideology. (Which would you prefer to see on Councils for the next four years?)

Never remove or deface posters of candidates you disagree with (remember freedom of speech??)

Don't go to (anti)social media to get information 

Ignore what you dislike; echo what you do like (don't attack; only defend. Negativity is corrosive.)

As the World Shrinks - soap opera for our times

             (This story first appeared in Mad Swirl literary magazine:                          As the World Shrinks | Mad Swirl)

When Joe told his friend Jocelyn that he was seeing Dr. Dold, she laughed. Joe was affronted.

“Is it that funny to consult a shrink, I mean… therapist?”

“No. Sorry.” Then an extended after-giggle. “Sorry.”

Joe went anyway. His life was so empty of stress he felt abnormal, and could bear it no longer.

“My life is empty,” he told Dr. Dold, “or at least, lacking in certain things which others have.”

“How was your relationship with your parents, growing up?” asked the therapist, a middle-aged specialist in childhood trauma. The more suppressed the trauma, the better he liked it.

“Fine.”

“Did they split up?”

“No.”

“What work did they do?”

“They were scientists. Still are. Quietly devoted to their research.”

Dr. Dold tapped a note into his iPad. “So you were neglected.”

“No, they shared their enthusiasm with me.”

“Any siblings?”

“No, I was an only child, they were older parents. Being caught up in their careers they had married late.”

“Ah.” He tapped another note. What did ah mean, Joe wondered?

“You felt inferior?”

“To whom?”

“Them. Scientists. You’re literary, aren’t you?”

“Well, yes. They used to read stories to me. That’s what got me into storytelling, I guess.”

“So would you say you live in a fantasy world?”

“Yes and no. What writer doesn’t?” He paused. “What person doesn’t?”

“Were you late learning to read?”

“No.”

“Dyslexic?”

“No.”

“So, this immersion in stories is an escape from social anxiety.”

“Is it? I didn’t say I had social anxiety.”

“Denial,” murmered Dr. Dold, pecking again. “And do you have suicidal feelings?”

“No.”

“Friends?”

“They don’t either, as far as I know.”

“I meant … do you have friends?” (Avoidance, he pecked.)

“Sure.”

“What are your relationships like?”

“Untroubled. That’s why my life feels empty. It contains only one kind of thing: pleasant days and good fortune. It’s like I’m missing the true soap opera of life, the drama of dysfunction, disability and ‘difference’.”

“You are indeed! Tell me more,” said the therapist, leaning forward.

“When I meet friends for a drink, although I’m a professional storyteller I can’t match their tales of hysterical breakdown, epic strife, online betrayal, trolls, rivals, enemies.”

Dr. Dold shook his head in compassion. “We’ll leave it there. Come back the same time next week.”

•••

Next week, Dr. Dold asked about Joe’s work.

“Is your workplace diversified and inclusive?”

“Sure. I work from home, with all the diversion I want and including any projects I want. I also work for a magazine in an office two days a week.”

“Is it insufficiently diversified and inclusive?”

“No. It’s fine. Except for having to attend meetings about those very things.”

“And that’s not fine?” Dr. Dold’s bushy eyebrows shot up to his bushy hair. (Hypo-intersectional, he wrote.)

“Well… it’s a bit tiresome. They call them ‘awareness sessions’. I call it re-education camp.”

“Do you fit in?”

“Hell no, I zone out. It’s when I dream up my best thriller plots.”

“Do the others in the meeting notice that you’ve zoned out?”

“No. Too busy weeping and wailing and pledging ‘allyship’ to persons experiencing… whatever.” He stopped to consider. “Although the leader did say I contribute nothing. He says I don’t ‘share’.”

“Why not?”

“Nothing to share. No trauma, anxiety, disability. I told you. That’s why I’m here. What’s wrong with me?”

•••

At the next session Dr. Dold laid out a therapy plan. “Keep a trauma-diary,” he instructed. “You need to uncover your hidden PTSD. The hidden kind is the worst. It invades your mind-body, a silent virus taking over brain cells with happiness-fantasies. These multiply, until you live in a world of irresponsible contentment.”

Joe went home and followed these instructions. The diary he started however soon blended with his usual diary, which consisted of prospective plot outlines. He now came up with a new thriller, and bounced out of bed each morning anticipating the joy of writing it. It grew of its own volition. He showed Dr. Dold his plot notes (having no other notes in his therapy-diary).

“But I don’t understand these entries,” said Dr. Dold. “Where are your feelings of marginalization and depression?”

“My feelings are that my new story is an allegory about a swarm of ships meeting another swarm of ships on the high seas, which are shown on ancient maps as the Ocean of Words. Marginalization is indicated on the margin of the map, just here… see? It’s a battle of armadas, which as I’m sure you know means ships that are armed. There’s Allyship, Membership, Readership (because you have to make readers “see themselves”), and their retinue of Relationships. There’s Stewardship, and Their Worships: the lords of media correctness who, instead of mediating the moderate middle, fall off the edge of the map into an underworld of demons. The Island of Nature in the centre of the map is a flowery land of mild weather and balanced viewscapes.” Joe became increasingly excited as he described his story.

“You are mad,” said Dr. Dold.

“’Mad’? Isn’t that a rather non-technical term?”

“And your madness is overlaid with political non-correctness. Why are you even writing this book?”

“Because writing it gives me pleasure.”

“Pleasure? What’s pleasure got to do with anything?” Dr. Dold frowned in astonishment. “I think you need medication.” He reached for a notepad and pen (real ones, which astonished Joe in turn). “Here, take this to the pharmacy. Today. It’s an emergency.”

The problem with public transport is the public

If a crush of messy, noisy, shoving, coughing, backpack-swinging-in-your-face crowds wasn't in them, buses would be fine. 

I once lived in a small town where the bus was often almost empty, or even totally empty (that was bliss, like having a private chauffeur), because most people living there used cars. They could do that because streets were quiet and spacious, and parking plentiful and free. No problem getting right to the shop or business you needed, which was great for the businesses. 

The town enjoyed these civilized circumstances because it had a low population -- and that largely senior or retired, which meant a population with a certain calm tolerant seen-it-all, just-calm-down mentality not frequently seen in growing, thrusting, densely populated urban centres.

What quality exists in a life spent in a high-rise shoe-box, coming and going via crowded elevators to catch a crowded bus to a crowded workplace? Might the "quiet quitting" phenomenon and the preference for working from home really be not about quitting, but about avoiding too much human proximity? Is it about a Hardy-esque desire to get farther from the madding crowd? Against a background of rising world population that need will only get stronger. 

Overcrowding is a predictor of violence and aggressive behaviour. Among rats in labs, scientists have documented more aggression when a certain ratio of space to individual is reduced, regardless of food supply. The resource the rats are competing for is private space. 

In human society too, privacy is becoming scarce. In London and other European capitals with fast-growing populations in the 18th and 19th centuries this was understood, and large tracks of land were put aside as park space whether by the Crown or conservation societies. Perhaps, being closer to a rural past, the city-designers of the time were used to the lingering longing for natural spaces. Today in parts of Canada, we seem to be filling open spaces in, in a futile quest to make housing affordable by making it denser. Yet, the less space available, the higher its price and the greater a developer's investment will cost. It seems that affordability will only come when population control comes, i.e. not when supply goes up (and only the wealthy can access the supply) but when demand goes down. Should that ever happen the supply of mental and physical health-giving privacy will also go up.

We need to change more than Earth's atmospheric climate; the crisis starts with the climate of urban overcrowding. An end to meat-farming, forest destruction and fossil fuel burning would help, but ultimately Earth's resources are only saved by not drawing them down through the over-consumption which over-population causes.

It's ironic that by allotting less space per person (as world population grows), we consume more nature per bio-region.

The planetary bus is full.

 

Freedom Rallies in Canada, 2021-22

When I went to my first "Freedom Rally" at the BC Legislature in Victoria I didn't go to take sides, but to observe. What I observed was a thoroughly jolly and perfectly peaceful event, and it was interesting to note the dominant demographic of the large crowd: lots of seniors. These Second World War folk and early baby-boomers had fought and marched for freedom before, and they also knew how to enjoy themselves. This Rally was a festival:

Men in kilts, dogs in dresses,

Shaven heads and long blond tresses

Sea of flags in reds and whites

Placards claiming civil rights

The un-vaxxed ask to keep their jobs,

while children chase the bubbles

Seniors grin at age-ist yobs

and forget for a day their troubles

Some dogs off-leash chase after fun,

Freedom the concept tugs at everyone

(F.J.)

Systemic Erase-ism and Hate Speech Against the Dead

 In Canadian law hate speech against the living is a crime, so why is it acceptable to express hatred for the dead, in speech and writings? 

The minute you die, your obituary can legally be riddled with hateful innuendo, if not outright condemnation. Your obitus (death, in Latin), if you're from a white colonial background, is an occasion for legal abuse and character assassination. So be "obitu-wary", if you've ever stuck your neck out for a traditional cause: yesterday's hero is today's "racist", "eugenicist" or trans-phobic. 

The name of a former hero might be erased from schools, government buildings, theatres, streets and parks, by people who feel "triggered" or "hurt" by this person's existence. If that's not an expression of hate, what is it?

Take, in Victoria BC, the names on schools built in the early 20th century, such as Frank Hobbs, Margaret Jenkins, Elizabeth Buckley and Edward Milne. Probably most people in the third decade of the 21st century don't know who these figures were, but that won't stop their names being systemically erased from schools and streets. (They were educators, councillors, and humanitarians who had emigrated from England, Scotland and Wales respectively.)

The outgoing Council of Victoria BC has de-platformed Canada's first Prime Minister: Sir John A. Macdonald has been exiled-in-effigy, his statue shipped in a box right out of town because a group of aboriginals decided to hate him.

Name-blanking is one of history's time-honoured ways of hating figures who have fallen from fickle grace, and this Systemic Erase-ism is reaching epidemic proportions in Canada. Even the very plants in our gardens and the birds in our skies are threatened with scientific re-classification, if named after "colonial" specimen collectors. (The AUDUBAN movement?)

We do have to wonder why it's slander to hate-speak about the living but not the dead, who can no longer defend themselves. It's up to the fair-minded historian without a tribal identity-agenda to do it for them. And it's up to the ordinary citizen to resist the knee-jerk Systemic Erase-ism which is meant to re-arrange the past.

Parents keep children safe in cars for school drop-off

Schools beg cyclists:  SLOW DOWN! First week of school: School Zone speed limits in effect! Children crossing. (You're wearing a helmet, they aren't.)

Observe bike lane speed limit because "Speed Kills". Be aware, take your earphones out, look around you. 

Concerned parents are observed driving kids to school. "For a pedestrian, walking across bike lanes is hazardous", they note. Slow-driving parents prefer to keep their kids safe in cars. "A speeding bike is lethal," they point out.

 

Bulldozing Language in the Name of Urban Re-Development

What is "human-scaled design"? Not what it used to be. The connotations suggest something not massive. In terms of domestic architecture this would not mean a 46-storey building towering over any humans in the vicinity -- and containing "units" so micro you couldn't swing the proverbial cat in them (although there's room for cat-astrophe, design-wise). 

Downtown living in a commercial core is not human-scaled; it's business-scaled. (But then, maybe both renters and the units they live in are but commodities -- a renter simply a customer of the housing industry.)

What matters is that the language around this real estate "development" is dishonest. In the mid-sized west-coast city of Victoria, BC, the small downtown core once shelved off gradually into well-treed suburbia. The low-rise route leading out of downtown was christened "Antique Row" by advertisers and tourism promoters because most shops sold old furniture and collectables. 

Now that this heritage is being destroyed by growth and development and the shops replaced by towers, Antique Row is being re-christened, mendaciously, "Heritage Corridor" -- now that its heritage is being erased. 

The City pitches the coming 46-storey high-rise as a "sensitive and innovative response to the existing character" of the neighbourhood: the opposite of what it is. How can dense high-rise blocks of "units" with no parking replace rows of low shops and easy customer access and be called "human-scaled"? 

Neighbourhood history is being erased -- but that happens in growing cities. The worst destruction is to language. Describing things by words that mean the opposite is reprehensible dishonesty, not to mention illogical illiteracy. 

The foundations of language and communication are being bulldozed -- our heritage of reasoned speech, and not "sensitively". We live in a post-postmodern era when people in pursuit of real estate profit from overpopulation can apparently "innovate" new heritage, and if that sounds counter-intuitive to you, you're in the wrong "heritage corridor" in the race to urban uglification. 

Loss of Professional Training Means Loss of Workers -- Does Compelled Thought fill the gap?

Canada is short of qualified workers. Businesses are closing for lack of staff, air transport and local ferry services are in total disarray, and hospital emergency rooms are closing while medical personnel resign in droves. 

It's hardly surprising. What are people trained for today? What do universities teach? Who gets qualified to do real jobs?

A few things we're short of: nurses, lab technicians, doctors, veterinarians, ship pilots, airline pilots, bus drivers, lifeguards, emergency personnel. Even waiters and cashiers.

Take a look at some subjects the universities feel it helpful to offer:

Disability Studies, Gender Studies (e.g. "Power & Difference"), Queer Film, and "Queering the Undead" (that's essential knowledge for a well-prepared work force, eh?) 

Also in Cinema is "Decolonizing the Screen", and in History: "Decolonizing Settler Societies", and "Hockey Nation and Canadian Identity". In Philosophy, "Meta-ethics", and the whole spectrum of Social Justice Studies ...

Graduate programs offered at UBC include: "Antiracism Education", "Indigenous Pathways Through Social and Emotional Learning", "Principles of Applied Sports Analytics", "Meaning and Identity in the Digital Age", "Knowledge Translation and Implementation Sciences", and most curious of all: "Climate Studies and Action Capstones ..." Action Capstones, you ask?? It's education-jargon for something once called doing a Thesis ... except without the research. Quelle surprise.) 

There's even a shortage of tree-planters. (Unfortunately there seems to be no shortage of loggers. Why don't universities teach Climate Studies and Forest Regeneration, instead of "capstones"?)

No wonder no one can drive a bus or fly a plane. Educators are "translating and implementing" the wrong knowledge. 

What work do graduates choose to do? We seem to have a lot of web designers, financial advisors, YouTube makers, podcasters, graphic novelists, singer-songwriters, counsellors, coaches and "influencers". So who gets the actual work done? 

So: Flight Is Cancelled. Ferry Cancelled. Emergency Department Closed. Even swimming pool closed.

Lots of teens used to go in for lifeguard training, but now to take the program they have to sign a contract agreeing to "decolonization and equity" in order to learn to swim (as far as I recall, they always were taught to rescue all drowning persons equally).

Many Admissions Departments of schools and post-secondary institutions are now requiring Declarations of Compelled Thought. No wonder a thinking student is loathe to enroll. So now we get an under-trained populace, and a dangerous shrinkage of essential services. 

CLOSED

PLEASE POSTPONE YOUR EMERGENCY

TO A LATER DATE

Civil Frights in Canada

A historic Canadian university recently changed its name. First named after Egerton Ryerson, the 19th century journalist and polymath, promoter of education and free speech, it's been re-christened Toronto Metropolitan University so as to sound less "colonial".

Its new values are anti-racism, "equity", "indigenization" and other phrases we've become used to in government-speak. 

George Brown College in Toronto also commits to anti-colonialism -- which it identifies with "anti-oppression". George Brown the person was another 19th century upholder of responsible government, literacy and journalism (founded Globe, forerunner of the Globe & Mail). George Brown College forbids "hate speech". It's not defined, but anyone with questions about what they may or may not say on campus must contact the "OAREHRS". 

Any office with that many bureaucratic letters is sure no bastion of elegant speech. It means Office of Anti-racism, Equity and Human Rights Services -- and the cause it serves is not the cause of Civil Liberties. College staff are called Thought Leaders, and their mission is to "infuse anti-racism into everything we do".

"Thought-leadership"?? Is that a cousin of thought-control? And as for "mission to infuse" ... Doesn't such language trigger certain negative historic associations -- and dubious contemporary ones? Scary, to free-thinkers and civil liberties advocates.

And while institutions of higher learning compel speech and fiddle with "equity" obsessions, the Canadian government steals our freedom from surveillance -- but everyone's equally. (Check out Canada's Digital Identity Framework.)

Whatever happened to a university's job of promoting free exchange of ideas, open-minded discussion, non-ideological scholarship, and non-denial of historical fact? On those principles, rests civil liberty.

What passes for one group's "civil rights" may stand for another group's Civil Frights. People who value freedom of thought and speech are starting to be very afraid indeed.

Here's a list of Civil Frights of the moment:    

    Censorship

    Religious fundamentalism

    Group-think

    Denial of reproductive choice

    Gun-obsession

    Surveillance

    Digital Identity Programs

Feel free to add your own fears to the list.

Re-discovering the 'Doctrine of Discovery'

An "Indigenous Corporate Training" organization says that the "Doctrine of Discovery" is the basis of Canadian Law. Not true.

First of all: never trust "training" -- too much like molding and grooming. (And brainwashing.) Secondly, the antecedents of the evolution of Law in Canada came way before that Age of Exploration during which Europeans found their way to other continents. Canadian (British-based) law has roots in Celtic and Druidic justice, pre-Anglo-Saxon. Those communities settled disputes in much subtler ways than historians often give them credit for. 

When European explorers discovered that North and South America existed (having previously discovered that the Earth was round, and therefore deciding to sail around it), they found tribes that settled disputes through raids, warfare, and the taking of slaves (a fact which they noted but today's commentators are loathe to acknowledge). 

Who has sovereignty over a landscape? Not humanity, humans living but a moment on a planet billions of years old which has hosted a churning cauldron of billions of other species. But, our fundamental transitoriness notwithstanding, the practical arrangement is that national governments have sovereignty over citizens -- and in a democracy use it in protection of life, liberty and property for all citizens equally.

During the Age of Discovery and the Age of Settlement, democracy too was being discovered, and developed in Europe and North America simultaneously. 

Where do property rights come from? From legal use, i.e. from working the land. Where your labour goes, you have ownership interest. To buy, sell and bequeath your interest, government sets up Land Title Offices. (Settlers didn't find such offices among the tribes they encountered in the "New World", so they proceeded under Old World legalities.) 

When non-Catholic monarchies like the British claimed territory (as in Canada) they made claim against other monarchies, not against aboriginals living there. With the multiplicity of aboriginal groups they made Peace and Friendship Treaties, exhibiting the opposite of dispossession (see the Royal Proclamation of King George III, 1763). 

The organized legal transference of real estate (land) is a foundation of peaceful society. Is that a thing we want to throw away, adopting a Doctrine of Strife instead of a Doctrine of Discovery? 

No. Nor did people want to in Canada's colonial years; in fact the way they (as it turned out, naively) thought they'd include aboriginal people in the mainstream of opportunity was through education -- but we know how that turned out. Education takes more than a generation, and we see now that schooling shouldn't have been left in the hands of punitive clergy with rigid religious agenda of their own. 

Their punitive harshness wreaked misery on generations of white students also ... but that, in contemporary thinking, is overlooked. No doubt in future those students too will stake a claim to compensation. 

The Serial Re-discovery of North America

North America is discovered every day -- masses of immigrants arrive at airports and discover it for themselves. Layers of Canada are constantly uncovered, something new appearing not noticed by everyone else. 

They say no one creates, only re-creates; it's the same with discovery. As an infant you discover the world beyond your crib, and then your neighbourhood as a child venturing out on your first bike. Maybe one day you discover a mountain-top, a stunning view, after a laborious hike. It's irrelevant whether you're the first to see this view; this is your discovery of the place. 

Let's stop arguing about which race saw something first, since everything is serially re-discovered in every generation. With unsettling speed things are often rediscovered in another guise: live animal becomes meat, wild space becomes farmland, tribal territories becomes a country, an oasis becomes a tourist resort. Life is all discovery -- of change.

Scientists discover new species. They've always been there, but they're new to science. Their evolutionary descent is uncovered through genetic analysis. 

A stream is altered by flooding, a shoreline altered by a cliff collapse. If you're not discovering new things in your surroundings most days, you're not alive -- or at least not looking around. Everyone brings new eyes to a locale, and it keeps offering something new to discover. Yes, it will be transformed, and the documents describing it can also be changed: new values discovered, and then, in the future, past values rediscovered. "History" is the history of rediscovery.

Prairie becomes pasture, then lawn, then pavement. Each generation sees what previous ones never knew. Discovering the same place, generations see different places. So who's the first discoverer? There's no such person. What you discover isn't about where you are, but what you notice, and we tend to find what we are looking for.

Maybe we should focus on uncovering joy instead of tribal resentment. Sharing instead of evicting. We need to discover open-mindedness, especially in education. Schools shouldn't re-shape information to fit political correctness of the day. Learning new information is scary, but that's not news: book-banning by religious and nationalist forces has always been about fearing to uncover inconvenient historical facts -- and other people's ideas. That's why it's essential to keep a country's National Archives preserved and away from the political agendas of rivalrous groups. That's why the recent deletion of certain words, facts and records from the National Archives of Canada is deeply dangerous -- it's an official cover-up.*

Whenever records are suppressed, historians silenced and history itself made ahistorical, we discover ourselves to be lost in a wilderness of muddle and dispute.

So who "discovered" North America? Primitive Asian tribes migrating over an ice bridge from the northwest thousands of years ago? Vikings crossing the Atlantic from the northeast? Spanish explorers sailing up from the south? 

Once Europeans discovered that the planet was round, mariners sailed around it. Looking for a water-way to the Far East, Europeans found continents: North and South America. Whatever lands adventurers explore and settle in, someone else always wants to cover up parts of history they dislike. But no fear: it's fuel for RE-discovery. The partisan cover-ups of documents today will supply revelations for generations to come -- lots of material for new history scholars to do their PhDs about. 

*See Purge of 'offensive content' in national archives a guess to employees | Toronto Sun :        “Much of the content on the Library and Archives Canada website reflects the time at which it was written,” wrote Canada's Chief Archivist in a June 9, 2021 email.  Of course it reflects its time! It's supposed to. That's why it's in an archive (the "place in which government records are kept"). This archivist goes on to say "much of this content may be offensive". All historical content offends somebody, but an Archive's job is to preserve it, not delete it.

Has "safety-ism" gone mad?

Someone online demanded that the government create free programs in parks during school holidays, for kids whose parents can't afford summer daycare programs. 

Governments already have: the parks themselves. That's why we have them -- so kids can go there and play. Together. With other kids, of all ages, using the playground equipment provided, or racing around the grass and hiding-and-seeking among the trees -- without adults.

"Go out and play" parents used to tell kids in the summer holidays, and kids reveled in freedom from school, rules and supervising adults. They hung out with other free-range kids, learning to make their own entertainment and plan their own day. "Be home by dinner" was the rule, plus "look both ways when you cross the street".

Today kids are prisoners in lockdown, pandemic or no pandemic, living a merely virtual life, becoming unfit and often obese. 

If you do see kids at a playground, the parents or minders won't be far away yet they're usually mentally absent: heads bent over phones, texting, scrolling ... not actually interacting with the kids they're helicoptering around.

The playgrounds themselves are peppered with warnings, for we have helicoptering bureaucracy too, in mortal fear of lawsuits, and caught in the grip of Safety-ism:

Parents won't even let their kids ride around quiet neighbourhoods on bikes. Assuming they're not unfortunate enough to live downtown, that's a major brake on independence. Much better to learn the best rules early: stay on the curb, use hand signals, obey stop signs, and watch what's going on around you. The road to responsibility -- so many kids never take it. 

There May Be a Shortage of Workers, But Don't Go Short of Humour

Is the current shortage of staff (in retail, wholesale, transport, airports, ferries, health care, construction) linked to a reluctance of upcoming generations to seek employment? A preference of graduates (or drop-outs) to keep living with parents (citing existing rental unaffordability), while dreaming of careers "working online", i.e. never having to step away from the computer screen? 

Does the worker shortage (and shortage of qualifications for positions of responsibility) also result from changes in the education system? What do schools teach, today? They've given up on Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic, that's obvious. Those are replaced by texting, TikTok and "oral traditions". Arts and Science (literally and originally, meaning "skill and knowledge") have been replaced in the K-12 curriculum by subjects like Safetyism, Competitive Victimhood, Neuro-variance (Curating Your Moods), Gender-rights, Data Violence, and Dysphoria (the state of feeling dissatisfied). 

Students certainly aren't being groomed to be satisfied with customer service work or jobs involving skill, physical labour, or commitment. (On-again off-again gigs are always short-term, for when you want to be off again. This is called work-life balance.)  

Does this sound like a typical aging person's grumpy assessment of the "younger generation", as offered since time immemorial? Yes, indeed. Yet, some things are different now: the technology-driven ones (retreat to life on-line) and ideological ones (creating mediocre education through PC virtue-notions of equity, diversity,  inclusion ... and colonials' exclusion). 

Maybe the healthiest thing is to keep a droll sense of humour -- our best armor against "dysphoria". Some folks choose to be "On the Droll":  

On the Droll | Mad Swirl

Some kids choose to drop out of school.

 

City Councils Proclaim Anti-Canada Day

Post-Covid-lockdowns, in 2022 and 2023 Canadian residents of Victoria BC again gathered for Canada Day on July 1st, although it's now considered Anti-Canada Day by some (including Winnipeg -- and Victoria municipal councilors and their "Family"). 

Re-naming Canada's national day in 2024 is being proposed in 2023*, the better to free us to repudiate our founding fathers and cultural mothers (and all of the British Isles), and to make room for maple-syrupy declarations of allyship with the "marginalized and victimized".

That way, we will be able to go on apology-overdrive for being a liberal democracy. 

Apologizing is what Canada does best. Victoria's City Council wants to have a "review", meaning a thinly disguised process to de-platform history with "thoughtful analysis" -- and to enforce compelled speech about it. 

To culturally-correct drumming we will sing the new version of our national anthem: No Ca-nadaaa ...🎶

Participants in Canada Day festivals are asked to leave their maple leaf flags at home, in case the white spaces on them are offensive to vulnerable groups.

In Victoria, statues of colonial figures will kindly stay locked in their crates.

Editorial: Victoria Portrait Facing Uncertain Future Amid Debate About Colonial Symbols (iheartradio.ca)

See below: An old-fashioned insubordination celebration (!)      Canada Day Picnic 2021 in a municipal park, held when Victoria Council decided to "cancel" Canada Day -- but others did not. 

*https://www.timescolonist.com/local-news/victoria-considers-taking-lead-on-canada-day-events-again-7366576

The Last Stoics Standing Are the Elderclowns

The CLOWN is an ambiguous figure. S/he goes two ways. The ELDER clown, wearing the famed double mask of theatre, is a seasoned expert at perfecting dual comic-tragic presentation -- being old enough to have seen all sides of life. A clown (also known as the "wise fool" or "holy fool") is a philosopher. Elder ones are often of the Stoic school. 

Do schools of philosophy match phases of the life span (and maybe also the eras of human civilization)? Infants are still at one with nature, and humanity's earliest mind-body lore is pagan. Beyond early childhood, which schools match which phases of life?

Adolescence: Nihilism (Morality has no factual basis.)

Early adulthood: Existentialism (Life has no inherent purpose, it's up to the individual to create meaning. Wear weird clothes.)

Early middle age: Hedonism (Pleasure is tops. Seize - and share - the most you can get while you can get it.)

Later middle age: Empiricism (with a topping of Rationalism. Face facts, be logical. Top up your pension, slim down your diet.)

Senior years: Stoicism (Acceptance, inner balance, calmly knowing what you can and can't control, and seeing the humour in it all even in the face of death).

At the Philosophy Cafe the elder-philosophers consider themselves the Last Stoics Standing -- while also falling down laughing. 

Visit the Cafe at Just Jests:

https://justjests.blogspot.com/2022/12/chapter-one-epictetus-was-street-corner.html

Combatting Systemic Erase-ism

How can the past be future-proofed, if Systemic Erase-ism blanks it out for current and future generations? Erase-ism doesn't see history as a series of events that have happened, but as an assault on the sensibilities of some people in the present. It re-shapes history as parable ("fictitious narrative or allegory") in defense of dominant attitudes of the present. Once it becomes a creature of ideological opinion-shaping, History as a subject is no longer a scholarly discipline but a branch of identity politics. 

The problem is not only that new parables are written to suit contemporary tastes (every generation does that), but that actual historical evidence in the form of documents, memorial sites, graves, archaeological remains, architecture, letters and memoirs are being erased and destroyed.

In every generation, knowledge of the past must survive depredations of the present. If we (the present) suppress parts of our past story considered discriminatory or "unsafe" for some (e.g. "privileged, dominant, colonialist, white, elitist, etc. ...), what will we be leaving descendants and future scholars? The future, where scholarship is concerned, will be blank.

How is this erase-ism accomplished? With displays of diversity-equity. This takes forms we have become used to: statue destruction, vandalism of buildings, removal of inconvenient documents from public archives and libraries, name changes of cities, streets, schools and universities.

This process is common when one regime or zeitgeist replaces another. It can change names and streetscapes, but not the actual facts of what happened in the past, because the past cannot unhappen. It can be unknown however, to an ignorant populace. This is engineered ignorance.

Removing statues of early explorers, politicians, inventors and philanthropists in Canada doesn't remove the fact of their having been nation-shapers. Changing the name of Ryerson University (for example) to Toronto Metropolitan University, doesn't change the fact that Egerton Ryerson the person had enormous effect on Canadian literacy, education, journalism and free speech. It can only erase public knowledge of the fact.

In the past, churches and polite taste muzzled certain expressions of speech, but speech was loosened up during the 20th century -- only to be re-muzzled today. Today we suppress not profanity but ideas that others say make them feel marginalized. 

Now, scholars with a different take on history than the ideologically correct one are banned from campuses (exactly the arena where they would be speaking, in an open society). It only needs someone to call their theories "hate" for them to be sent the way of statues: de-platformed. 

Next, editors of mainstream media accept submissions only from "disadvantaged" groups. Festivals, conferences and theatres only receive funding if they demonstrate the right kind of "diversity" (i.e. non-diversity). We live in paradoxical times. 

Thought can be erased before it even finds expression -- through self-censorship.  This is about freedom of speech, debate and analysis among citizens, academics, writers, bureaucrats and officials. Only if we preserve open expression can the past and present be held proof against future erase-ism.

“If we lose our freedom, it will not be because of invasion from without, but erosion from within; not because of autocratic dictators looking to do bad, but parochial bureaucrats seeking to do good.”
                     — Alan Borovoy, Canadian Civil Liberties Association

The Settler's Ballad for Canada Day

(You know the tune 😊)

Old Macdonald had a farm

E I E I O

and on that farm he made a life

E I E I O

With a bank loan l here and a workforce there,

here a flood, there a fire, everywhere another care,

Old Macdonald settled here

and shaped the countryside

Old Macdonald made the wealth

of Canada though toil,

Old MacDonald fed the crowds

when settling he broke soil,

and Macdonald took a wife

without whom he'd have led no life

Thank Macdonald for our health,

and Mrs. Mac for Canadian wealth