Randy Duncan Quintet to play the Community Hall
It’s been 12 years since we have played at the front hall, and we have a new album can’t stop the procession. The show will consist of two sets first set will be instrumental, celebrating our album following will be a vocal set featuring the voices of Jordy Hillberry Erika Bland and Katherine Watt Kimmins
There will be a bar and refreshments available, also kids free
Denman Island Community Education Society (DICES) News
With over 15 volunteers participating in the planning, building and hosting of the 2024 Hallowe’en Howl, DICES was able to raise over $800 in support of the food bank and recreational programming for children on Denman Island. Big thanks to DICES Council members Kevin, Ann, Enrico and Laura for coming out on the scariest night of the year to make a memorable night of “funraising” in our community. The soundtrack for the night was just excellent thanks to DJ “Pandamonium” – thank you for your time and expertise. To all of the spooksters who came out in full regalia as terrifying characters in the barn; you outdid yourselves and scared all of us at least once. Everyone’s safety and fun was in focus thanks to our Haunted Barn guides Mikel and Nolan and we can’t forget Gary, the host with the most (who might also be a ghost) for sharing the historic Piercy barn and the Shack for a super fun night. We had two groups of friends participate in the “Trick Your Trunk” which was very popular with kids of all ages. We hope to see you and more of our friends participating next year. Another thank you to Shel’s group “Awesome Adventures” for the donation of hot dogs and buns and some treats – much appreciated by all the hungry goblins. The biggest thank you goes to our community for coming out and supporting our efforts. We hope you had fun and that we’ll see you next year!
Our annual Holiday Hamper program is now underway. The hampers are organized by Denman Islanders for Denman Islanders and are partially funded through grants from larger organizations in our area. Last year we provided 42 hampers serving a total of 92 people. At this time we expect to support even more families and individuals this year due to the increasing numbers of food bank users in the last several months.
To fill the hampers, we are accepting cash and cheque donations via the donation jars at the General Store, the Denman Island Hardware Store and in the foyer of the Community School. Please make out cheques to DICES. Donations over $50 are eligible to receive a charitable tax receipt! We also accept e-transfers to dices.communityprograms@gmail.com and donations through canadahelps.org. For planning and budgeting purposes, we would appreciate it if all monetary donations are submitted by December 12th.
There are two ways that community members can share in the gift giving this year. We will be accepting new unwrapped gifts at the Denman Hardware Store (thanks Graham and Verna!) starting in mid-November. Look for the big box near the front of the store.
We are also facilitating an “Adopt A Family” program this year. Families or individuals in the community apply to select and purchase gifts for their anonymous “adopted” family. Once the gifts and other items are purchased, “adoptive” families can bring their gifts to the DICES office and we will make sure they land safely in the “adopted” family’s hamper along with all the fixings for a Holiday feast and some treats for the holiday season.
We welcome helping hands on the morning of December 21, when we will be wrapping presents, packing, and delivering the hampers. If you would like to lend a hand, send an email to dices.communityprograms@gmail.com or leave a message at 250-335-2058.
To receive a Holiday Hamper please fill out the form that you can find at the General Store, the Food Bank, and the School foyer. You can also find the form at www.dices.ca.
Thank you Denman Islanders for your ongoing support for the Holiday Hampers!
Shucking Oysters: High Notes
Surprise. It’s not the kids you should be worrying about being pot heads; it’s the grandparents. Seniors are among the fastest-growing age group in Canada for using cannabis. A StatsCan report found that more than 400,000 seniors reported using cannabis in 2019, up from 40,000 seniors in 2012. I’m sure the numbers are a lot higher – who wants to admit that you’re a stoner in your late 70s.
The most noted geriatric pothead is Willie Nelson, famous for his public love for ganja and his unpretentious music. Nelson, at 91, just released “Last Leaf on the Tree,” his 76th solo studio album and 153rd album in total. He and his partner have also recently released “Willie and Annie Nelson’s Cannabis Cookbook.” From reading the reviews, it sounds like they were baked compiling the cookbook. One reviewer wrote that the recipes could be better organized, “freewheeling sequencing that places squid ink paella directly after bourbon pecan bars.”
But getting high is not all euphoria and munchies. A 2022 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that three provinces – Alberta, BC and Ontario – saw twice the increase in geriatric hospitalizations after edibles were legalized. One reason for the increase in ER visits is the potency of THC today. Another is that edibles take longer to kick in compared to having a toke or two, which leads to “dose stacking.” Hhhmmm…Maybe I’ll have one more…And then…whoa.
Marijuana popularity is nothing to wheeze at. In 2022, the annual sales of recreational cannabis through provincial retail outlets in Canada was $4.5 billion. No surprise that flower is the most popular item. In BC we currently have 375 licensed private retail stores, plus 30 government cannabis stores, and growing weekly. Our neighbours, Courtenay and Comox have six cannabis shops each. One, the Comox Valley Cannabis Company, with over 400 products in stock, could be a day trip, in more ways than one.
Every dispensary has a different mood and groove depending on what kind of customer you are. Trendy? Narcissistic? Inspired Cannabis Boutique in Vancouver is for you. The flagship House of Brands boutique boasts a 2,400 square foot “immersive gallery space where leading brands bring their products to life in a creative way.” Or perhaps, if you like to shop for pot like you’re shoe shopping, the Seed & Stone cannabis boutique will appeal to your carnal ways. “Oooh, look at the Tangerine Dream buds on the pedestal. Can I smell?”
Dispensary names range from the clever to the whimsical: High5 Cannabis in Armstrong; Happy Isle Cannabis Company on Bowen Island; Dazed Cannabis in Kamloops; High Score in Kelowna; My Buddies in Merritt; Daily Bud in Nanaimo; The Potorium in Nelson; Revelsmoke in Revelstoke; Weed Mart in Pouce Coupe; Weed Be Delighted in Slocan; Up in Smoke in Vancouver and honourable mention, It’s 420 Somewhere Cannabis Company in Nimpo Lake. Now that would be a road trip.
Visitors to Hornby often ask if we have a dispensary. I reply with benign sincerity, “yeah, on every block.” If we did have an actual commercial dispensary, we’d have the clever and whimsical covered. Naturally HI. HIjuana. HI 5. I really could go on. HI Bud. HI Times. HI Ho. HI Way.
It’s a good thing getting a marijuana high is just getting a marijuana high, and not making another part of your body get high. We’d have to book appointments months ahead just to get through the front door. Instead of names like Unicorn Poop and Mango Cake we’d get Horny Goat Weed (a common ingredient in male enhancement pills) and Ashswagman (a play on another ingredient, ashwagandha).
Humans are not the only ones to get the munchies after getting stoned. For nematodes, better known as round worms, cannabinoids amplified their “existing preferences for calorically dense, palatable food sources, a phenomenon called hedonic amplification of feeding.” In other words, eating for sheer pleasure.
Fish can get the munchies as well. In 2017, Lebanese researchers decided to test out the effects of cannabis oil on Nile tilapia to see if cannabis would help the aquatic creatures relax. Instead of making the tilapia chill, it seemed to speed up their metabolism making them want to eat constantly – an expensive habit for a fish farm. Relaxing 9,600 fish raised in a 12X30 foot tank in five feet of water? How about holding less fish in the tank? That might make them feel a bit better.
Can other creatures get stoned? Though not new, a questionable NASA experiment, “Using Spider-Web Patterns To Determine Toxicity,” was published in the 90s, to see how LSD, caffeine, marijuana, benzedrine and sleeping pills affect spider web patterns. Benzedrine caused spiders to zigzag unsteadily while building the spiral part of the web, making it uneven. Spiders fed with small flies loaded with LSD reportedly seemed blissfully concentrated and produced more perfect webs than when in a ‘normal’ state. Spiders on depressants, in resignation forgot to finish their webs. The spiders on marijuana, were able to spiral just fine, but would omit the first part of the spiral, and complete the central part of the web only. The take-away? How did they ever get funding?
Indigenous Wisdom: Can We Hear It?
Someone once asked me what I mean when I say, “Stay Brown.” Well, my people say that life is a circle. They say that we are part of all of life. They also say that, as a part of all of life, we are creating our lives every instant we are here. My spiritual father taught me this way: What I think I create. What I create I become. What I become I express. What I express I experience. What I experience I am. And so on and so on and so on. That’s the circle moving. My responsibility to myself and to life is to act as though I believe this until I do believe it. So, stay brown. Be the circle moving…
Richard Wagamese
(Embers, One Ojibway’s Meditations, 2016)
Trump Puts An Appropriately Ugly Face On A Very Ugly Empire
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
The only thing I like about Trump is exactly what so many empire managers hate about him: he gives the game away. He says the quiet parts out loud. He’s the only president who’ll openly boast that US troops are in Syria to keep the oil or lament that they failed to take the oil from Venezuela, or just come right out and tell everyone he’s bought and owned by Zionist oligarchs.
Trump is the opposite of Obama, who was very skillful at putting a pretty face on the evil empire. Trump puts a very ugly face on a very ugly thing. He is a much more honest face to have on the empire. A crude, stupid plutocrat who is owned by other plutocrats is the perfect representative of that tyrannical power structure.
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The propaganda machine has been spinning its head off trying to frame soccer brawls in Amsterdam as a horrifying “pogrom” against Jewish people because the side instigating the violence were supporters of team Maccabi Tel Aviv who flew in from Israel.
Video evidence shows far right Israeli hooligans terrorizing the streets of Amsterdam, chanting “Fuck the Arabs”, starting fights, beating people, tearing down Palestinian flags, attacking a cab driver, and singing “Let the IDF win and fuck the Arabs! Why is school out in Gaza? There are no children left there!”
In the face of all this evidence of atrocious behavior by Israeli soccer fans, The New York Times ran a story with the headline “Antisemitic Attacks Prompt Emergency Flights for Israeli Soccer Fans”. The Wall Street Journal ran with “Antisemitic Attacks in Amsterdam Prompt Tight Security at Jewish Sites”. “Pogroms have returned to Europe, and the ‘anti-racist’ Left are silent,” says The Telegraph.
Meanwhile the Daily Mail sports section ran with a headline more in line with what people actually saw: “Israeli football hooligans tear down Palestine flags in Amsterdam as taxi drivers ‘fight back’ in night of chaos ahead of Maccabi Tel Aviv’s visit to Ajax”.
Leaders of western nations like the US, UK, Canada and France joined the Dutch kingin framing these soccer brawls and hooliganism as a historic mass-scale hate crime against Jews, while Israeli officials have been melodramatically shrieking like their hair is on fire.
These exhausting victim-LARPing freaks. Stop playing sports with Israel. Stop holding sporting events which could lead to the deranged members of a genocidal apartheid state showing up in your community stirring up violence and hate so they can cry victim and say you holocausted them.
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Another thing that sucks about the fake “antisemitism” crisis that the western political-media class are pretending to believe in is that it will probably become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy which creates real hatred of Jewish people.
You can’t keep telling everyone over and over and over again that Jews and Israel are one and the same and that any criticism of one is always necessarily an attack on the other while the state of Israel is murdering children by the tens of thousands without contributing to unfair prejudice against Jewish people everywhere. Israel is exacerbating this effect by insisting its actions represent all Jews and are done in defense of Judaism while committing genocidal atrocities under a Star of David flag.
If you understand the truth that modern Israel is a settler-colonialist project of the western empire which uses the Jewish religion as an excuse to inflict violence and tyranny in a crucial geostrategic region, then you understand that there’s no real connection between modern Israel and the Jews you encounter in your community. Sure a majority of western Jews buy into the empire’s lies and support Israel, but a majority of the westerners of all faiths buy into the empire’s lies about its wars and official enemies and all its other propaganda too. This is just what it looks like when you live in a highly propagandized society which is structured to psychologically manipulate people into consenting to nonstop military violence.
Once you understand this, you see that blaming ordinary Jews in your society for the actions of the state of Israel makes about as much sense as blaming ordinary Muslims for the actions of the Saudi royals — but most people don’t understand this. It takes a lot of learning and close examination, and most people haven’t reached that level of lucidity in our confusing information landscape which is distorted by lies and propaganda.
So when they see a self-evidently evil thing being done and hear their leaders and pundits telling them over and over again that if you hate what you’re seeing then you necessarily hate Jewish people, what understanding do you think they’re going to form in their minds?
Greater hatred and prejudice looks like a fairly inevitable consequence of this messaging from where I’m sitting. And it will all be the fault of the western pundits and politicians who are aggressively promulgating this message throughout our society right now in an effort to stomp out criticism of an active genocide.
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The garment-rending emotional reaction to the US election results compared to the apathy on Gaza over the last year tells you that liberals don’t see Palestinians as human beings. They’ll deny it, but it’s true. Their emotions show you much more than their words ever will. This is who they are.
Ignore their words and watch their actions. It works with politicians, it works with entire governments, and it works with individuals too. If you see someone flailing around on the ground because their genocidal candidate lost after spending a year walking around functioning perfectly fine throughout a year of genocide, that tells you something about them that their words would never tell you.
People are always much more honest with their actions than their words, because words can spin narratives and actions cannot. If you’re ever unsure of someone’s true motivations and where they really stand, don’t ask them, just watch them. They’ll tell you eventually, with their actions and not their words.
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Letter to the Editor – Maxine Rogers
I haven’t liked to go into how dangerous the Covid 19 gene-therapy shots are, as so many of my family members, friends and neighbours have taken them. I don’t want people to be frightened because there is nothing they can do about it now. I am pleased to say, my sisters and their families have stopped taking the boosters. I choose to speak out on the subject of vaccine injuries as they are so prevalent and so very unnecessary.
I read an article from The Children’s Health Defense about an Ontario man in his late 40’s. He had some Covid 19 vaccinations and had a bad vaccine injury. They call it, “Covid 19 Vaccination Syndrome,” and it is indistinguishable from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I know a lot about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) as I have lived with it for more than twenty years. I became ill with puzzling symptoms after a bad bout of the flu. This is a typical presentation of CFS.
We were told by Public Health Officials that the vaccines were safe and effective. There was no way they could have known this because the vaccines were not tested over the usual five to ten year time period needed to assess the effects of a vaccine. The gene therapy preparations were made ready in a matter of weeks.
Usually, vaccines are tested in vitro, then in small animal studies where the mice are given a dose of vaccine and then they are monitored and their progeny is monitored for months or years before they go on to study the effects in rabbits in the same manner and then in primates until after many years, it is decided it is likely safe enough to test on humans. None of this was done with the Covid 19 injectables.
Even with all these precautions, there were still vaccine injuries and a number of vaccines have been pulled off the market even after all these studies because they were found to cause injuries and death.
Well, the Ontario man got very sick after his Covid shots and a booster. He lost a great deal of function. Typically, the patient presents with fatigue, weakness, sleep disorders, a lot of physical pain and mental fog which makes even the simplest tasks very difficult. When I was ill for the first few years, before I found ways to stabilize my condition, it often felt as if I was trying to function while experiencing nitrogen narcosis. Before I became ill, I was a passionate SCUBA diver and experienced nitrogen narcosis a number of times. The confusion is profound.
So, this poor man, who had been well and healthy, took the Covid 19 vaccinations because the Public Health Officials and his own physician told him it was safe and effective. Well, we now know it is not effective at stopping people from contracting Covid 19 and from spreading it. So much for, “No one is safe until everyone is safe.”
He became very ill. He was hospitalized for feeling suicidal. I too felt suicidal when I became ill as I had previously been very healthy and fit. Because I had the support of my family and friends, I was able to pull myself together and decide that if I was willing to kill myself then I should also be willing to pursue every possible way of improving my health.
The young man in Ontario was not so lucky. Instead of being helped to overcome his illness he was offered euthanasia. He was confused, depressed and desperate. He accepted MAiD to end his suffering.
His case was one selected for review in Ontario. “This case shows how the Canadian Healthcare system abandoned a suicidal patient in need of real medical and psychiatric care. If it had not come from a Government report, I would have difficulty believing this horrifying case history,” wrote Dr. Aaron Kheriaty.
The fact is, the patient was mentally ill at the time he was killed and mental illness should have disqualified him from receiving death by a Doctor. The members of the panel who investigated his case questioned how a condition, “previously unrecognized in medicine his “post vaccine somatic syndrome,” could be considered incurable given limited available clinical knowledge and research.”
Even the very few safeguards around receiving euthanasia in Canada are routinely ignored. Track Two patients, those who are not terminally ill, are supposed to have a 90-day waiting period between applying for Maid and being killed. The median time between requesting MAiD and being killed is only eleven days and I got that statistic from Health Canada.
If this poor man had not taken the Covid 19 gene therapy that made him so ill, he would be alive and well today. I find it appalling that he did the, “right thing and rolled up his sleeve,” to take a shot of a toxic product that left him disabled and was then casually killed by the very medical professionals who had a duty to care for him.
