Community Choir Starting Thursday Sept 18 2:30
Community Choir Starting Thursday Sept 18 2:30
Yahoo we are getting back to singing together. Old choir members can stop reading now and get back to their fall chores, because we know just how wonderful choirs is. But if you are new here you need to read on.
We are very fortunate to have a wonderful choir director here on Denman. Bethany Ireland is a Uvic Music graduate, a great pianist and an inspired choir director. She brings youthful enthusiasm to every session and she is never critical. Her latest triumph was working with a group of teens for a week this summer, teaching them how to play and sing together in a band.
You are welcome to come for 2 weeks before you pay you choir fee just to check us out.
We meet at the Community Hall in the Back Hall. We sing 4 part harmony, and all voices are welcome. You do not have to read music to sing with us. If you would like more info, call Kathy Rieder 250 335 0559 or kathyrieder@telus.net. Cost is sliding scale $120.00 to $140.00 for 11 sessions and a concert. Arts Denman members (membership $10) are eligible for a grant of $150.00 per year for musical education.
Denman Island Garden Society News
The Denman Island Garden Society (DIGS) extends a warm thanks to organizer Shirley Ward, the great volunteers, the participants and spectators who helped with the Show What You Grow portion of the Fall Fair this year. We hope it inspired you to think about your own entries for next year. The scarecrow competition was fun and we hope to see many more of those next year, too. The winner, in case you missed it, was the scarecrow family and second was the teddy bear, but they were all great.
DIGS will kick off another season of activity with a meeting on Wednesday September 17 at 1 pm at the Gathering Place at the United Church. The theme will be (Garden) Bed Talks and they will feature The Poor Man’s Root Cellar (Joan Donaghey), Denman Island’s Million Dollar Melon (Max Rogers) and Growing Vegetables in Space (Mark Benard). New members and drop-ins welcome.
Shucking Oysters: More, More, More
Shucking Oysters: More, More, More
By Alex Allen
Big yachts. Fast cars. Private jets. The island in the Bahamas. The villa in France. For most of us, living like this is about as likely as getting off the Bayne Sound Connector in the same order that we boarded. Our days are spent commuting to work, struggling with the cost of living, and maybe feeling that sometimes the good things in life are passing us by. Compared to billionaires and rock stars, our lives can seem as exciting as a bivalve mollusk.
On Hornby recently, Vegas billionaire Lorenzo Fertitta, former Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO, had his 285-foot super yacht Lonian anchored at Tribune Bay. Fertitta also brought along a second megayacht, the 215-foot Hodor, a catamaran-style companion vessel that carried his big boy toys, like his jet skis, motorcycles, Peloton bikes, personal submarine, and helicopter.
George Monbiot wrote that great wealth flattens the world. “If you can go anywhere and do anything, everything is over the horizon…Place has no meaning, other than as a setting that might impress the friends you no longer trust.” There’s also a connection between speed, noise and ego. Monbiot unapologetically noted: “There must be something unresolved about a person who feels the need to fill the sky with noise and capture the attention of everyone he passes, whether he is on the road or the water.”
Making money – chunks of it – seems to be the only way to have a meaningful life, apparently. We live in a culture that prioritizes excessive pursuits of self-interest and competitiveness. Over 20 years ago, John de Graaf, David Wann, and Thomas H. Naylor observed that a “powerful virus has infected American society, threatening our wallets, our friendships, our families, our communities, and our environment.” In their book, Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic, they define this affliction as “a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety, and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.”
It’s the desire to be more wealthy, more successful, more better. Affluenza is also defined as the inability of an individual to understand the consequences of their actions because of their social status or economic privilege. People said to be suffering from this virus are in a constant state of dissatisfaction because they always want more than what they already have. Not much has changed today. In fact, it’s probably worse.
In our society of growing income inequality, those with financial privilege are more likely to sequester themselves from the riff raff at large. Unfortunately, this phenomenon fosters a sense of entitlement that can be self-perpetuating: the wealthy feel they have earned their way into an elite class with superior intellect and talent. As a result, they believe the rules of society do not apply to them.
Christopher Ryan asked in his book, Civilized To Death: The Price of Progress: What if the cold-heartedness so often associated with the rich isn’t the result of “having been raised by a parade of resentful nannies, too many sailing lessons, or repeated caviar overdoses, but the compounded disappointment of being lucky but still feeling unfulfilled?”
In an essay called “Extreme Wealth is Bad for Everyone – Especially the Wealthy,” Michael Lewis observed: “It is beginning to seem that the problem isn’t that the kind of people who wind up on the pleasant side of inequality suffer from some moral disability that gives them a market edge. The problem is caused by the inequality itself: It triggers a chemical reaction in the privileged few. It tilts their brains. It causes them to be less likely to care about anyone but themselves or to experience the moral sentiments needed to be a decent citizen.”
It’s not so much that being rich makes you less generous. Wealth creates a social distance between the haves and the have nots. The us-versus-them mentality applies to physical space, too. Ryan points out how money affords certain comforts which create physical distance between those who can afford isolating luxuries and those who can’t. “We use money to insulate ourselves from the risk, noise, inconvenience,” Ryan wrote.
According to one study, over the course of seven experiments, wealthy individuals were more likely to break the law while driving, make a habit of unethical decision-making, take valued goods from others, lie in a negotiation, cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize, and endorse unethical behaviour at work than lower-class folks. “While having money doesn’t necessarily make anybody anything, the rich are way more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people. It makes them more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereo-typically associate with, say, assholes,” Paul Piff, Associate Professor of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley told New York magazine.
Of course, there are exceptions. There are a few rich people who have a sense of decorum when navigating the “difficult currents their good fortune generates without succumbing to Rich Asshole Syndrome.”
So, yes, little grasshopper, there’s more to life than the endless pursuit of private luxury. It’s the vitality of our community, the health of our environment, and the ins and outs of everyday existence that makes us rich, not a $160 million yacht that costs $15 million a year to maintain and operate.
The Tyranny of “Normal” by Keith Porteous
The Tyranny of “Normal” by Keith Porteous
Several years ago, I learned that a friend who worked in music and television was experiencing a degenerative loss of their hearing, something that would be devastating to most anyone, and especially someone who worked with and loved sound so dearly. With the loss of their hearing, they were able to re-acquire some of their auditory capacities with the aid of a technological and biomedical procedure involving Cochlear devices, a neurological prosthesis surgically implanted. I remember getting a message from my friend following their recovery process, telling me they could hear the sound of rain on the roof. I was teary eyed upon receiving this joyful news.
Medical research and technology has moved to purposes and places only previously dreamed of in science fiction. Literally millions of people’s lives are improved and extended as a result. Replacing heart valves and installing stents to open arteries are commonplace examples of technological “miracles.” The cutting edge of technological research into helping those stricken with mobility issues and impaired sight, and a myriad of other maladies, seems a hopeful frontier of possibilities in improving our human experience. It appears as though we are on the threshold of advancing these technologies to where we will be able to repair, alter, and enhance our physiologies in some even more astonishing ways. This is often referred to as morphological freedom.
Morphological freedom suggests that our current human evolutionary status may be further evolved in a self-directed manner. At its core is the principle of bodily autonomy. As these technologies advance, our capacity increases to choose what kind of alterations and enhancements to our bodies we desire, and to what extent. Many of these alterations are cosmetic, but many more are intended as a repair or enhancement, some even improving on the body and mind we were born with, or at least that is one of its stated and primary aims. With the speed of technological breakthroughs and advances in artificial intelligence, how far can this go? How far will it go?
One of the streams of research in this field is the so-called “neurolink” technology, popularized by the deplorable Elon Musk. Is it inevitable that we shall have the ability to implant a device linked to the human brain that will rewire our capacities? This is often imagined to benefit those with mobility impairments, or repairing neurological damages from disease or stroke. The possibilities seem only contained by the limits of imagination. But as we cross the Rubicon of technological capability, it would be a very good time to take pause to contemplate where there is a need for some ethical, political, and philosophical concern to be expressed in relation to morphological freedom and the concept of Transhumanism.
Transhumanism is defined as a philosophical movement that advocates for the enhancement of humanity through artificial intelligence and converging technologies, with the goal of overcoming biological limitations. It suggests that morphological freedom will lead to a proliferation of radically different forms; enhanced humans, cyborgs, and genetically divergent lineages. Shared vulnerability and embodiment have historically grounded empathy and human rights, and without them, mutuality will fray. Morphological freedom promises emancipation, but risks shifting into coercion, inequality, commodification, and fragmentation. What is sold as freedom can become a new form of domination, unless tightly coupled with safeguards for equity, dignity, and shared humanity. Transhumanism creates the illusion of pure autonomy.
While morphological freedom is framed as individual choice, choices are never made in a vacuum. Market forces, social pressures, and cultural ideals will shape what “freedom” really looks like. For instance, if enhancement technologies become tied to employability, healthcare access, or social status, the supposed freedom could become coercion in disguise. You may not “choose” to enhance so much as submit to necessity. This can only lead to further entrenchment of inequalities. Enhancement technologies are expensive and will likely remain so. A freedom that can only be exercised by the wealthy ceases to be freedom in practice. Instead, morphological freedom risks embedding class divides into literal biological castes, where the rich become healthier, longer-lived, and cognitively sharper, while the poor remain “unaltered.” This can be described as a tyranny of “norms.”
Cultural standards of beauty, ability, and performance already exert intense pressure. If morphological modification becomes more normalized, what begins as freedom could become an obligation. Those who remain unmodified, whether for reasons of poverty, conviction, or health, will be stigmatized, marginalized, or excluded. Is this the next step in the full commodification of the human body? Treating the human body as a modifiable product risks collapsing distinctions between human dignity and market value. Cosmetic and performance modifications will become an extension of consumer capitalism, where bodies are branded, optimized, and marketed, further reducing identity to a purchasable commodity.
Transhumanism is a reduction of the human condition, treating humanity as a set of biological limitations to be solved, reducing human life to an engineering problem rather than acknowledging its complexity, unpredictability, and existential depth.
So that’s one symphony of splashing incompetence
Gabriel Jeroschewitz, August 25th, 2025. Dedicated to the shape of water, and my two favourite friends.
So that’s one symphony of splashing incompetence.
The sun beat down on the perfectly manicured lawn of Donald and Anna Bratwurst, glinting off the turquoise water of their kidney-shaped swimming pool. At the edge of the azalea bed, perched on a small, moss-kissed stone, sat Know Me, the garden gnome. His painted-on smile had not faltered in fifteen years, a ceramic stoic who had witnessed countless barbecues, awkward family gatherings, and the slow, creeping acquisition of things. Today, however, he had company.
Lounging in an invisible deck chair, a presence of shimmering heat and cold shadow that only Know Me could perceive, was Death. He wasn’t clad in a black robe; today, he’d opted for the ethereal equivalent of Bermuda shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. He tapped a long, bony finger against a spectral piña colada.
“Look at them,” Death sighed, his voice a dry rustle of autumn leaves. “He’s arguing about the pH balance again. She’s convinced the new inflatable flamingo is losing air. The sheer, unadulterated triviality is almost poetic.”
Know Me didn’t speak aloud, of course. His communication was more of a direct, grumpy transference of thought. They spent two hundred dollars on that flamingo, you know. Two hundred. For a glorified piece of plastic destined to fade in the sun and be pecked at by sparrows.
The argument escalated. Donald, a portly man with a sunburn perpetually fighting a losing battle with his SPF 50, gestured wildly with a water-testing kit. Anna, whose face was a testament to the fact that money could buy many things but not genuine contentment, snatched at it. A clumsy ballet ensued—a trip, a flail, a splash. Donald went in, his arms windmilling uselessly. Anna, screaming his name, leaned too far over the edge in a futile rescue attempt and followed him in with a shriek.
What followed was not a dramatic, heroic struggle. It was a symphony of splashing incompetence. They couldn’t swim. Not really. They could doggy paddle in the shallow end, but out here, in the deep, panic was a lead weight. They clawed at each other, pulling one another under in a frantic, gurgling embrace.
Death took a slow, deliberate sip of his non-existent drink. “And so it begins,” he murmured.
The messy part, Know Me projected. I hate the dirty part. The sirens will ruin the petunias.
“Oh, don’t worry about their bodies,” Death chuckled, a sound like gravel turning in a cement mixer. “That’s the one thing they no longer have to manage. It’s funny. They spend a lifetime moisturizing, exercising, dieting, and ultimately, they hand over the maintenance to others. Their relatives will handle it.”
Death settled back, narrating the inevitable future as the last bubbles broke the pool’s surface. “Cousin Helga—the one Anna always called ‘frumpy’—will be the one to go through their closets. She’ll take off their wet, chlorinated clothes. She and an undertaker they’ve never met will wash them, dress them up. Donald will be put in that navy blue suit he hated, the one he said made him look like a bank teller. They’ll be wheeled out of the house they mortgaged their happiness for and delivered to their new address: six feet of curated real estate at ‘Golden Slumbers Memorial Park’.”
Know Me added that the funeral will be a spectacle, his painted eyes fixed on the now eerily still water. The neighbours from number twelve will come, the Hendersons. They’ll cancel their tee time and complain about it in the car on the way home. Donald’s boss will appear, check his watch thrice during the eulogy, and think about who will get Donald’s parking spot.
“Exactly!” Death exclaimed, pointing a skeletal finger at the gnome. “The world won’t stop. The economy won’t even hiccup. Brenda from accounting, who is far more efficient than Donald, will have his old job by Tuesday. And the things, Know Me! The glorious, useless things!”
His gaze swept over the Bratwursts’ meticulously curated domain. The outdoor kitchen with a pizza oven was used only once. The shed was full of gleaming, top-of-the-line tools that Donald was always too afraid to scratch. Anna’s vast collection of romance novels, their spines uncracked.
The things I’ve had to watch them polish, the gnome groused. His keys to the vintage Porsche, which he only drove on Sundays? They’ll be sold. Her ridiculous collection of commemorative spoons? Donated to a charity shop where they’ll sit in a dusty bin. His precious first-edition sci-fi novels? Burned in an estate clearance, probably. An intern will be tasked with wiping his laptop, and all his carefully curated playlists of 80s rock will vanish with a single click.
“And the heirs,” Death continued, warming to his theme. “Their nephew, Thomas, who they always thought was a slacker, will inherit the lot. He’ll walk through this house with his girlfriend, pointing and laughing. ‘Can you believe they had a gnome?’ he’ll say.”
Know Me projected a wave of pure, unadulterated indignation.
“Someone else will sit on their Italian leather couch,” Death mused, ignoring the gnome’s silent fury. “Someone else will eat off their wedding china. The deep, theatrical pain will last for a week, maybe two. The good friends, their weekly bridge partners, will cry for an afternoon, then find a new couple to make up the foursome and laugh again. Their photos, the big smiling ones from the cruise to Alaska, will hang on the wall for a year. Then, they’ll be moved to a side table during a redecoration. Finally, they’ll end up at the bottom of a box in the attic, filed under ‘Misc.’”
A faint shimmer began to form above the pool. Two confused, translucent figures were coalescing in the air, looking remarkably like the Bratwursts. They stared down at their floating bodies with wide, uncomprehending eyes.
Their dog, Know Me, thought, a rare flicker of something other than cynicism in his mind. What about Bartholomew, the beagle?
“Bartholomew will be sad for a week,” Death said gently. “Then he’ll realize Cousin Helga gives him bacon scraps and get used to his new owner. He’ll be fine.”
The spectral Donald and Anna turned, noticing the lounging Reaper for the first time. Their ghostly mouths opened, but no sound came out. They looked around at their house, pool, and perfectly striped lawn, a dawning horror on their faces.
Death finally stood up, his form shifting from a casual vacationer to something taller, grander, and infinitely older. The Hawaiian shirt melted away into a robe of pure starlight and shadow.
“It all ends here, you see,” he said, his voice now a resonant boom that only the newly dead and the perpetually ceramic could hear. “It ends among people, ends in this world. But your story is just beginning. In your new reality, all of this…” He made a sweeping gesture encompassing the property and the entire concept of suburban ambition. “…is meaningless.”
He began to tick things off on his bony fingers. “The beauty of your bodies, your last name, the property, the loans, your working positions, the bank accounts, this house, the car, the academic titles you framed, the trophies from the club championship… it all loses its value. It’s currency for a country you’ve just left forever.”
The ghostly Bratwursts looked down at their shimmering, insubstantial hands.
“In your new life,” Death finished, his voice softening to an echo, “you will only need your soul. That is the only property that lasts.”
He turned to the gnome and gave a slight, almost imperceptible nod. “It’s always the same, isn’t it, my little friend? They spend their lives gathering, hoarding, and polishing. But as the old saint said, ‘You won’t take what you have from here. You only take what you gave.’”
With that, he gestured for the bewildered souls of Donald and Anna Bratwurst to follow him. They cast one last, longing look at the inflatable flamingo, which had, indeed, begun to list slightly to one side, before turning and dissolving into the shimmering air behind the Reaper.
Silence returned to the backyard, broken only by the gentle water lapping against the pool tiles. The sun continued to shine. The sprinklers would come on at six. Know Me, the garden gnome, remained in his spot by the azaleas, his vacant smile a fixed monument to the magnificent, hilarious, and ultimately transient folly of it all. He was already waiting for the subsequent owners.
9 1 25 lucky partial
9 1 25 lucky partial
When
I use
to put
out breakfast
at the homeless
shelter I always
made porridge
with powdered milk,
added some raisins
and put out a bowl
of apples
and again and again
some guy would
hold up one of those
rosy red apples
and say,
“Is this a cruel joke man?
Most of us don’t got any
teeth,” and then he’d
open his mouth so I
could peer into his
red toothless tunnel
and now due to accidents,
mismanagement and
a couple of good poundings
if I don’t have my partial in
I might as well gnaw on a
tennis ball
but I’m lucky
because
I can afford
a partial,
barely.
The Word “Terrorist” Becomes More And More Of A Joke By The Day
At the same time, the Trump administration is defending its assassination of a boat full of Venezuelans on the allegation that they were “narcoterrorists”, an imaginary category designed to lump garden variety drug traffickers in with suicide bombers and mass shooters.
The word “terrorist” becomes more and more of a joke by the day.
In the UK a terrorist is someone with a cardboard sign saying “I support Palestine Action”.
In the US a terrorist is a Venezuelan suspected of drug trafficking.
In Israel a terrorist is someone resisting occupation.
We’re told Yemen is full of terrorists because they’re trying to stop a 21st century holocaust.
We’re told Lebanon is full of terrorists because they oppose a genocidal apartheid state.
We’re told Iran is full of terrorists because its government resists imperial regime change agendas.
We were told Al Qaeda were terrorists because they perpetrated the 9/11 attacks, but when Al Qaeda helped the west get rid of Assad they suddenly weren’t terrorists anymore.
Uyghur militants used to be terrorists, but they came off the list when they were deemed useful operatives against Beijing and Damascus.
Iraq needed to be invaded because Saddam wanted to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists, but after the invasion it turned out that there were no weapons of mass destruction, and then Iraq was suddenly plagued by an epidemic of suicide bombings.
Afghanistan needed to be invaded because the Taliban was providing a safe haven for terrorists, but after 20 years of military occupation the empire needed its war machinery for other duties so they let the Taliban retake Afghanistan.
In 2010, then-vice president Joe Biden proclaimed Julian Assange a “high-tech terrorist” because his journalism with WikiLeaks exposed US war crimes.
Terrorism was used as an excuse to roll out the Patriot Act in the US and the Terrorism Act in the UK, and countless other authoritarian measures throughout the western world which tyrannical empire managers had been seeking to impose for years.
Really “terrorist” just means someone the empire wants to kill or imprison, or a group whose terrorist designation might be used to justify the advancement of preexisting geostrategic agendas.
Propaganda is used to sear events like 9/11 into western consciousness as examples of terrorism which must be prevented at all cost, and then this label “terrorism” is applied to literally anyone who poses an obstacle to the agendas of the western empire.
Once it is accepted that there should be no rules restricting how the state responds to the threat of terrorism, all the state needs to do is label someone a terrorist to remove all rules which might stop them from doing whatever they want to do. Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated right now than the ongoing genocide in Gaza which is being justified by the need to eliminate terrorists.
When power-seeking empire architects are given limitless power to fight terrorism, we suddenly find ourselves in a world full of designated terrorists.
The more despised the western empire becomes, the more “terrorists” there are going to be. Because a terrorist is anyone who takes action which inconveniences the empire.
If this keeps up, soon we will all be “terrorists”.
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