Letter to The War System

October 24, 2024

Letter to The War System Sally Campbell

As I lay awake last night wondering about you, it occurred to me that you have not had a break or a vacation in a very long time. You have been hard at it for so many decades now – full-on, 24/7 – in many locations throughout the world. I guess that’s why you need to keep 900 US military bases going. Wow. That is a really impressive commitment, and I’m not surprised it costs you so much money. It’s actually hard to envision exactly how much the US military budget is – I mean, a trillion dollars a year. A billion is a thousand million, and a trillion is a thousand billion. That’s an astonishing amount of money to be provided every year by taxpayers, your funders.

You used to be called the “military-industrial” complex but we don’t use that term anymore. Maybe it makes the links between corporate capitalism and the military a bit too obvious.

Well you work hard and tirelessly, that’s for sure. In fact, the last time I think you took a slight break was after the Vietnam War, and those of us not part of the War System actually became lulled into thinking you might be retiring. Oh, the folly of the young! What were we thinking? Your work is so very profitable and the possibilities so limitless, why on earth would you think of retiring?

And you have so many willing to tell the story from your point of view, so many journalists happily “embedded” in your wars so they could get the exciting story close-up and from your point of view. You also have much of Hollywood with you. You made a brilliant offer to provide weapons, planes, and advice on how to stage war to Hollywood as long as they gave you final oversight on the product. An offer very hard to refuse it would appear. Any perusal of American films these days reveals just how much uptake you got on that. Plenty!

Of course, you really do have to feed the violence to keep it in the forefront, there has to be so much of it that people become somewhat numbed to it, and it gets normalized. Like constantly using the “f word”, it loses its sting. Violence has to be an integral part of entertainment, right down to children’s toys and games. And your progress on tv content is really remarkable; it’s hard to find an American made-for-tv movie that doesn’t have lots of enemies, threats & violence. Right on!

And your work recruiting in the schools is a really smart manouevre as well – get them while they’re young and unsure of what they’re gonna do next. Especially go after the ones who are poor and have no chance of a university education now that the state doesn’t fund post- secondary learning any more. Here in Canada we have private Jewish schools doing the same thing – get those idealistic young kids so indoctrinated in supporting apartheid Israel that they join the Israeli military. And let “charities” like Indigo owner Heather Reisman’s Heseg Foundation provide funding to “lone soldiers”, meaning soldiers “who don’t have family in Israel”. Better yet, get the Canadian taxpayers to foot the bill by giving Heather the tax writeoff. Now that is genius. Most of us don’t even know we’re subsidizing the Israeli military.

And then of course, you tie your US War System tightly into patriotism, so that any criticism of your wars is deemed unpatriotic. Politicians learned long ago to stop calling it the “War Department”. Always call it “Defense” and “protecting our security interests”. Divide your budget into various government entities so it won’t look so huge. Put nuclear weapons into “Energy” for instance. That removes a big chunk! Don’t include in the military budget anything to do with Veterans – their “benefits”, their care, their therapy, etc. Spread it out as much as you can.

But it’s always better to have the war happening “over there” – in Ukraine, in “The Middle East”

– so it never looks as if they are your wars. Oh no, they are someone else’s wars that you are “working tirelessly” to bring to an end. A closer look would reveal your primary role in these wars, so you have to be very, very clever to dupe the people who are paying for them in countless ways. You’ve made such good use of the “terrorism” threat since 9/11.

Keep people afraid and they’ll stay submissive.

Use fear and distraction together. Oh yes, sports entertainment! What an avenue for the War System – have some war planes fly over a tennis match, get everyone on their feet singing the national anthem and waving flags during a basketball or football game; here in Canada get those Snowbirds doing their high-flying tricks via a big Canadian military airshow, that gets the kids engaged early on and gets patriotism linked right in with the military. Maybe then the people won’t complain about the armed drones soon to come to Comox Base. After all, according to the Canadian military’s own website, it will all be benign – mapping and observing, and of course, they’re only gonna be surveilling “dissidents” and targeting “terrorists”, right?

(Next week: More ways of the War System)

Letter to the Editor – Oakley Rankin

October 24, 2024

Grapevine

Letter to the Editor: Carbon Tax

In my letter last week concerning the Carbon Tax I wrote that the tax was an ‘incentive’ tax but had an ‘inadvertent’ redistributive effect. With further research I discover the redistributive effect was not inadvertent at all. In BC the rebate for citizens is available only to those of lower incomes. Any married couple without children whose adjusted family income is below $57,288 will receive the full amount designated. Between $57,288 and $95,088 they would receive a reduced amount. About $95,088 they would get nothing. The upper limit of $95,088 rises with children but the calculation remains the same.

British Columbia, Quebec, Yukon, Nunavut, and the Northwest Territories do not participate in the Federal rebate system as they all match the Federal backstop criteria and so are allowed to administer their own system completely. It is not at all clear from Federal and Provincial websites if the remaining provinces have income based rebate amounts. As a former librarian I have long had problems with internet searches which substitute speed for accuracy and return hundreds of thousands of useless results; it is a clear example of human beings outperforming ‘AI’ by a huge margin and why we should be wary of discovering our ‘facts’ on the internet—as I did for my earlier article.

Legislated income testing in BC to ensure a redistributive effect accounts for the estimate that 80% of recipients receive more in rebate than they pay in tax and makes eliminating the Carbon Tax all the more disastrous for those citizens. As all political parties act as if the major group that counts in society is what we called the Middle Class, it is perhaps understandable that programs that actually do something for those falling below the Middle Class are viewed as having little voter traction. Perhaps that is why ‘axe the tax’ can have a closure effect on Middle Class citizens who don’t want to ask questions about what the tax actually does for others less well off.

Oakley Rankin

We Really Are The Bad Guys And This Really Is The Evil Empire

October 24, 2024

We Really Are The Bad Guys And This Really Is The Evil Empire

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE

OCT 20, 2024

Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

It takes some learning and insight to understand that western civilization really is the absolute worst. There can be a kind of hipster outsider tendency to judge your own society more harshly than you do others, and at first glance it can look like that’s what’s going on when you see western critics of the western empire denouncing the criminality of their own government and its allies much more harshly than governments like Russia, China or Iran. It’s not until you’ve done a fair bit of research that you go, wait, okay no, we are actually quantifiably far more destructive than any other power structure on earth, by an extremely massive margin. We really are the bad guys. We really are the evil empire, and everyone slamming our side as murderous monsters are absolutely correct.

Whenever I say this I get westerners going “Oh yeah well I’d much rather live here then over there” or “Oh well if it’s so bad here then why don’t you go live over there?”, but the fact that they immediately start babbling about where they’d prefer to live is just a symptom of how sick and twisted this civilization is. They’re so cognitively and emotionally divorced from the violence and tyranny their government is inflicting upon the global south that they think the question of which countries are worse than others is a question of how pleasant it would be for them personally to live in. It’s like yes asshole, it’s very nice to be living in the imperial core that’s receiving the benefits of mass murder and imperialist extraction, and it’s less nice to live in the countries where the murder and extraction is happening. That’s the entire fucking point here.

It can be nice to live in the western world, but the western world is not nice. Ours is the most savage and thuggish civilization on this planet, and it’s not even close.

❖

The Democratic Party really does look ready to lose yet another easily winnable election by running yet another awful, murderous candidate with awful, murderous policies, and then once again blame their loss on everyone in America who is a better person than they are.

❖

https://x.com/caitoz/status/1847753131482108339

❖

Always having to search for photos of Israel’s destruction of Gaza for my articles really drives home the fact that this didn’t start last year. I’m always like “Here’s one! Wait, this one’s from 2008. Here’s one! No this is from 2014. Oh hey! Bah, nope, different bombing, 2021.”

❖

My first encounter with Israelis was when I was backpacking through South America in my twenties, and I remember being shocked by how consistently awful they all were. I guess after their mandatory military service they tend to go traveling for a bit, and whenever I’d run into them they were reliably some of the nastiest people I’d ever encountered.

They weren’t ever nasty to me, though. I am a white westerner, and I never had a problem with them. They were nasty to the impoverished brown-skinned people who were hosting us. They were obnoxious and bullying toward local guides, they’d leave the place in a mess, and they were always trying to screw over the locals for a better deal or extra meals or favors. One time they tricked a hostel into putting up a sign in Hebrew for other Israeli backpackers which said ugly things about our hosts (they told the hostel owner it was a great review), which I only know because they were laughing hysterically about it and told me. They consistently treated the people who were looking after us like they were much lesser than us. Their pushiness and entitlement were just unbelievable.

It was a very educational experience for me. I knew the Palestinians were being treated unfairly because my father had told me so, but I also had a great love of Jews and Jewish culture. I had visited Auschwitz and Dachau and Anne Frank’s house in my travels, and I remember having some romantic ideas about kibbutzim. This was my first time directly encountering the reality that there is something unhealthy about Israeli society. Not Jews or Jewish culture, but Jewish Israelis.

Now I see evidence of this on my news feed every day, in the IDF soldiers prancing around in the undergarments of dead and displaced Palestinian women, in the AI translations of Hebrew tweets, in the polls which show widespread Israeli approval for the atrocities in Gaza, in Israeli TikTok videos mocking the suffering of the Palestinians, in the Israelis showing up in my comments justifying the worst things in the world in the most depraved ways imaginable.

My encounters with Israelis in South America were an early taste of ugly things to come. Everything I glimpsed then I’ve been seeing online over the past year. I keep thinking about those obnoxious pricks I met all those years ago, and about how they didn’t know at the time that they were giving me very useful information for me to make use of in the future.

When Israel supporters tell you to shut up about Gaza until you’ve been to Israel and met Israelis, just ignore them. Don’t go to Israel; you’re a westerner, they’ll be nice to you. You can just go to one of the tourist spots in the global south that Israelis like to visit — one with lots of brown-skinned people who’ve been colonized by the west — and watch how they treat people there. That will show you what Israelis are really like.

__________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go hereto buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Featured image via Adobe Stock.

Yugler and Zugler

October 24, 2024

Otto of the beach

October 24, 2024

Choices in Aging and Dying: A Workshop for the Whole Community

October 17, 2024

“Death is horrible. Who wants it?” Indeed, who wants to talk about death or its common partner in crime, aging?

This October, Hornby Denman Health hosts the first event in a quarterly series designed to help open up the conversation around aging and mortality in a compassionate, practical and lighthearted way.

Our kickoff event includes a screening of the BBC production Myriam Margolyes’ Deathly Adventure. With humour and a surprisingly life affirming approach, Deathly Adventure looks at the complex decisions that face us as we age. How do we continue to live our best lives? How do we move through our unique experiences of grief and pain? What practical things matter, and what choices do we have at the very end of life?

We’ll follow with a panel discussion covering the supports available within our unique island communities and reviewing some of the challenges faced by rural residents. Participants are also encouraged to check out hands-on displays, take home literature to keep the conversation going, and voice thoughts on future sessions.

Whether you are looking around the corner for yourself, or seeking to help build a community of compassionate support for your friends and loved ones, we hope to see you out! Join us October 23rd from 1 to 3pm at the Denman Island Activity Centre or October 25th from 1:30 to 3:30pm at Hornby New Horizons.

This event is open to all members of the community.

Tea, coffee and treats provided. Rides available on advance request.

To learn more, visit our website at www.hornbydenmanhealth.com or contact jane@hornbydenmanhealth.com.

CANADIAN NETWORK OF COMMUNITY LAND TRUSTS TO VISIT DENMAN

October 17, 2024

CANADIAN NETWORK OF COMMUNITY LAND TRUSTS TO VISIT DENMAN

What is the difference between a Conservancy Land Trust such as our Denman Conservancy Association and a Community Land Trust such as Denman Community Housing Society? On Tuesday, Oct. 22, three staff members of the Canadian Network of Community Land Trusts will be on Denman Island to give a presentation about community land trusts.

The presentation is sponsored by the Denman Community Housing Society. The Society is the affordable housing group formed by the recent merger of Denman Housing Association and the Denman Community Land Trust Association. DCH remains a land trust and is committed to promoting better understanding of this model of land stewardship for the purpose of affordable housing.

Come learn more on Tuesday, Oct. 22 at 7 p.m. at the Denman Activity Centre Lounge. Free event.

On Strategic Voting; The B.C. Election

October 17, 2024

If you choose to vote in the Provincial election, and you desire authentic changes to government policies, it would be irrational to cast your vote for either of the major political parties. On issues of environmental, social, and economic justice, one party has a chance to form a government that claims to represent your interests. But if your intention is to inspire real substantive changes on issues that are sincerely important to you, withholding your support for the major political parties is crucial. These parties, while rhetorically pandering to their respective ideological voter bases, are the two headed monster of neo-liberalism, and the threat of lost voter support is the only possible electoral resistance to them.

The Conservative Party’s predecessors, the governing B.C. Liberals initiated the unnecessary and destructive Site C Dam, with the John Horgan led NDP claiming to oppose the project. The B.C. NDP formed the new government in 2017, while Site C moved forward regardless, costing many billions of dollars more than budgeted. Years of NDP government have not significantly dealt with the chronic shortage of affordable housing, or seriously mitigated the opioid crisis. The B.C. NDP claimed to oppose old growth logging, then criminalized resistance to its continued practice. In 2019, the B.C. NDP brought us the B.C. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples legislation, yet we still saw the Coastal Gas Link pipeline forcibly pushed through First Nations’ territory despite clear opposition by indigenous people and their leadership, with the RCMP violently dragging the non-violent occupants and land defenders off to jail. John Horgan is now an executive employed at a B.C. coal mining company.

According to advance polling, the NDP and Conservatives each hold about 45% of likely voter support, leaving about 10% of the electorate as the so-called undecided “swing voters’, or “third party” supporters. These voters will ultimately decide the election, and we can expect to see all of the candidates aim their campaign messages at this heavily researched segment of the electorate. Both major parties take their base of support for granted, and the only hope to push a major party toward authentic change is to withhold your support from them until they actually deliver on it, unlikely as that may be. Those who support so-called strategic voting will argue that you should vote for the party that has the best chance of defeating their partisan opponent and forming a government. There’s a need to break this cycle of support for the “lesser of evils” and begin to firmly hold the more principled ground without compromise.

It’s often said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result. The grip of the neo-liberal duopoly ensures that the voices and will of common people are silenced and minimized, and that corporate interests remain firmly in control, with all of the evidence showing us that the hollow promise of incremental change is not tenable. The partisan advertising is revealing, with the primary messages of the major parties being, “The other party is terrible, and we’re not them.” As long as the major political parties receive support from their respective ideological bases, more pipelines will be the reality, and real change is a pipe-dream.

Shucking Oysters: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

October 17, 2024

Here we are finally, the BC election vote on Saturday. While I’m glad all the campaigning is over, I do worry about how it will all unravel. Our choices are: Blue: a 61-year-old Leo, Orange: a 48-year-old Leo and Green: a 54-year-old Gemini.

I didn’t listen to the radio debate, but I did watch the TV debate. Like Thanksgiving dinner with your dysfunctional family, the “open debate” sections were too much of a free-for-all. The moderator should have done her job and maybe we could have heard more. This was also noted listening to the radio debate. Both moderators were asleep at the wheel. No matter the medium, the format was the same and the sound bites were repeated. Who stood out? Sonia Furstenau. She was eloquent and called out both Rustad and Eby on their lack of action on many fronts. Eby was OK, but the continual poking gets to be tiresome. And Rustad? A toaster has more personality. It’s no wonder I don’t remember him in Crispy Clark’s cabinet.

Throughout the campaign all Eby and Rustad have been doing is trading insults about conspiracy theories and weak leadership and policy. Like the dysfunctional family dinner, it’s not pleasant listening to constant berating and pointing fingers. It’s unCanadian. Meanwhile, like the youngest sibling, we have Furstenau on the sidelines desperately trying to get our attention. And speaking of attention, what’s with the obligatory political right-hand gestures? Every high-level politician in Canada was trained by the same “message” therapist. Eby looked like he was trying to grab butterflies. Furstenau was shuffling cubes in the air. And “laser-focused” Rustad, well…

How did he ever get this far? He’s boring. Has no sense of humour. He seems to have just one expression: of a man who just ate uni for the first time and wants to spit it out but can’t. Rustad had a golden opportunity to “unleash” his human side, when he said “paper straws suck” with not even a smirk. (One of his lofty platforms is to bring back plastic straws and bags.) Someone on Reddit commented: “He is so slimy. If I were on crutches and there was an elevator that came once every 20 minutes to the 50th floor and John Rustad was in there alone, I would take the stairs every single time.”

After using my dysfunctional family analogy, on the radio debate Eby said, coincidentally: “I wouldn’t trust John Rustad to run my Thanksgiving dinner conversation with the family, let alone a hospital where my kids have to be safe, where parents and grandparents have to be safe.” And I wouldn’t let you boys sit at the same dinner table. Sonia, on the other hand, has an open invitation (but don’t forget the red wine).

And that’s the sad thing. Furstenau would make an excellent premier. She was clearly the winner in both debates. But the Green Party are full of tree huggers. They want more government intervention and industry accountability. The other two, want to fast track approvals for new mining projects – free from pesky regulations and oversight. Cut all that red tape into bits of confetti. Grow the green extractive economy – except it’s not friendly Avocado Green, it’s Army Green.

After the leader debates, someone commented, “Eby won just by not being bad.” With just over a week before election day, a poll from Ipsos Reid showed the BC NDP ahead of the BC Conservatives by a mere five percentage points. The most positive shift was for Furstenau and the Green Party, with 20% improved impressions versus 12% worsened impressions (50% stayed the same, 18% no opinion).

Both federally and provincially, we seem to vote more for our local politician versus for the leader of the party. I like Josie Osbourne. I’m not so keen on Eby. His platform is frankly not that different from Rustad’s and both have continually flip-flopped on key issues with nary a blink of the eye (especially Rustad’s). It seems the only way Eby differentiated himself in this campaign is to point out how crazy the other guy is and that has been his only strategy. Rustad has yet to explain how he will pay for any of his promises.

What is encouraging with this election, is a record 171,381 people voted on the first day of advance polls. That’s 45% higher than the previous record of 118,270 in 2017.

The NDP may have a slight advantage at this point, but the overall race is still scarily close. It’s going to be a nail biter of a weekend. We could go Pumpkin Orange or Cobalt Blue or an ugly mix of the two: Bittersweet Brown. Whatever the result, hopefully it’s with a Forest Green patina.

Green Wizardries: Quince and Steam Juicers

October 17, 2024

Quince trees love it on our islands. They are hardy, reliable and give a good crop every year. The only problem with that is that we Canadians do not tend to eat much quince and when we do it is usually as jam or jelly. I ask you, who among us really needs more sugar?

We have two quince trees and with minimal care they provide us with heaps of fruit every year. I planted them thinking it would be useful to have a supply of pectin for making jams and jellies as you can add quince juice to other fruit as a source of pectin.

I have found a new use for quince as the fruit of one of our trees has come ripe. I am lucky to have two cultivars that ripen at different times, allowing me to deal with one load of fruit before the other arrives. Many of our quince fruit split on the tree, especially the larger fruit. The fruit are golden when ripe and have a bit of a furry coat that washes off easily. They have a delicious scent and flavour. When cooked, they turn a beautiful shade of red.

The fruit do not become fully ripe here but they would in a warmer climate. They look like a lumpy cross between an apple and a pear and are a member of the apple family.

A friend gave me a Finnish steam juicer and it is my new favourite kitchen toy. My friend uses her steamer to make vegetable stock, juice and to steam meals. It really is an interesting and useful kitchen treasure. It has a chamber for water at the bottom, then a chamber for the juice and a basket on top which you fill with the food to be steamed. The juice comes out of the collecting chamber via a little hose. The whole thing is very low tech and really cannot go wrong as long as the chamber for water is not allowed to run dry.

I loaded my steamer up with chopped apples which were not of a good enough quality to wrap for the winter, some over-ripe pears and a bunch of washed and chopped quince. I turned it on and went away to practice the cello for an hour and came down to find it almost done.

The fruit or vegetables in the top compartment are much reduced and look dry when they are done. I sweetened the juice with a little honey in the collecting chamber and poured it into hot pint jars that I was holding in a little metal jug. The jug is necessary as the hose has to be lower than the reservoir and the jar will be too hot to hold in an oven mitt when the juice comes out of the chamber. The juice come out scalding hot so banish children and pets from the kitchen while you are doing this.

You will need to have your canning jars hot before you put the juice in and one way to do this is to put the jars on a baking sheet in an over set at 275 degrees Fahrenheit and leave them there for ten minutes. Another way is to pour boiling water from a kettle into each jar to heat it before you empty the jar and fill it with juice.

The book which comes with the canner explains how they can juice successfully in Finland and it seems to work as well here. You put scalding hot juice into a hot jar and pop the lid on, screw the ring down and leave it to cool. No processing in a water bath canner is required which makes the whole operation so easy and pleasant.

The juice was a fetching shade of pink and I had a little left over after canning six pints. We had a little of the juice chilled and topped up with soda water. It was a very pleasant and refreshing drink.

Quince can also be added in small quantities to apple sauce or pies to improve the flavour and to give a hint of colour. A friend taught me to wash quinces, wrap them in tinfoil and bake until the fruit is soft. Then, I unwrap the fruit and pour a drizzle of honey on it and eat it as a winter treat.

The Spanish make membrillo ( a thick quince jam that is eaten with cheese and walnuts) and the Portuguese make marmelada which is similar and they will tell you it is the best.

October and November are good months to plant fruit trees and every garden and orchard can benefit from having a small quince tree. The fruit is sometimes so heavy on the trees that it makes the whole tree look golden.