Shucking Oysters: Still Life with Donald

February 27, 2025

By Alex Allen

Did you hear the one about…? Neither did I. Being funny today seems to be as popular as having a cough and sniffles. Remember when having a sense of humour was considered attractive? Now, it’s socially awkward being the life of the party. It’s become a sign of disrespect and immaturity. Oh, grow up. Are we suffering from a new strain of world chronic humour fatigue syndrome or just losing our humour?

In his first term in 2016, Donald Trump was the perfect target to joke about. Topics of the day like police brutality and Black Lives Matter were not exactly late-night fodder. For the writers – whose job was to come up with something funny out of the absurd and horrifying news feeds – figuring out how to joke about Trump was a challenge. The challenge was not for lack of material, it was that he was already a parody. He was the punchline.

In interviews with the comedy trio Colbert, Kimmel, and Fallon, a theme emerged during Trump’s first presidency: Writing Trump jokes sucked. All wondered that if they just stopped writing about him, would he go away? At the time, it was still considered laughable that he would be the nominee, let alone the president.

Fast forward to 2025. When things start going really crazy, satire becomes too true to be funny. As Trump begins his second term, late-night hosts are back with their anti-Trump jokes, yet the tone and mood seems hollow. Instead of funny, this time around, many are finding Trump-bashing tiresome. How many more at best, amateur Trump impersonations do we have to watch, let alone find funny this go-around? In the Daily Mail, Alex Hammer wrote that it’s “not necessarily disagreement with the message conveyed by most of late-night television that Trump is a malignant force in American life,” it’s about sheer fatigue. And it’s just the beginning of a four-year roller coaster ride.

I read somewhere that comedians ultimately want to be philosophers. Think about the great philosopher-comedian, George Carlin, his comedic brilliance was his unfiltered social commentary. Can you imagine if he was alive today? Or perhaps, comedians ultimately want to be politicians. Zelensky was a Ukrainian comedian who played a teacher in a show who becomes president. The TV program, “Servant of the People,” was about a high school teacher who rises to the top of Ukrainian politics after a viral video “shows him waxing lyrical about government corruption.”

Trump had a similar career trajectory with the show “The Apprentice,” which featured aspiring, but otherwise unknown, business people competing for a chunk of money to promote one of Trump’s properties. In Trump mode, the show always ended with the encouraging words “You’re fired!” Trump then proceeded to be fired by NBC when the studio disagreed with remarks he made about Mexican immigrants during his presidency announcement in 2015. Soon other upstanding individuals played host to different versions of the show, notably former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in a reverse career move, and lifestyle mogul Martha Stewart, who has yet to announce her run for presidency.

Or maybe politicians ultimately want to be lifestyle moguls. In between upending the world, Trump seems to be channelling Martha in the felony interior decorating department, making the White House a Washington version of Mar-a-Lago.

The most controversial makeover is to the iconic Rose Garden, which will be stripped of its greenery and replaced with limestone or other hard surface. Trump wants to recreate the “patio experience” that he has at Mar-a-Lago. Apparently, Trump has been known to spend hours of his Florida evenings soaking in the Gulf of America air and receiving his minions. He especially likes to blast Luciano Pavarotti and James Brown tunes at earsplitting volumes. And just to complicate things, the Rose Garden is not technically part of the White House; it comes under the purview of the National Park Service, which is controlled by the Department of the Interior. So, maybe he’ll do a little exploratory drilling before he pours the cement.

The Trumping of the interior would not be without its gold veneer – gold vases, gold statuettes, and gold figurines. It’s all about gilt and mirrors, marble-and-gold, canopy beds, and fresco-style ceilings. Trump plans to hang – the ultimate symbol of the nouveau riche – a GREAT BIG chandelier from the ceiling of the Oval Office. Just outside hangs his infamous scowling mug shot in all its felon glory. (Trump once again monetized the moment with t-shirts and bumper stickers emblazoned with the mug shot and phrase: “Never Surrender!” Within 24 hours, he made more than $4 million. Not bad for a convicted felon.)

Trump has also hinted that he would like to build a ballroom at the White House at a cost of a $100 million. He is not the only president to put his personal imprint on the White House. Gerald Ford built the swimming pool and Barack Obama got the basketball court.

The Trump look, Peter York wrote, “is miles from the architectural tradition of Washington, whose neoclassical public buildings evoke stability and trustworthiness through their restraint.” The capital was designed to project a message of simplicity, democracy and egalitarianism – precisely the opposite of the new brand in town. Dictator interior decorating, which simply means, “I am tremendously rich and unthinkably powerful.”

FW25: The Portal

February 27, 2025

FW25: The Portal

Gabriel Jeroschewitz

Feb 13, 2025

Of all the places I’d expected to find myself on a Saturday evening, standing in the middle of a former industrial warehouse in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, while humanoid AI attendants dressed like extras from Blade Runner circled a disconcertingly glamorous woman, was not one of them. But there I was, pressed shoulder to shoulder with Manhattan’s finest—critics, influencers, museum curators, that guy who invented some app everyone deleted after two weeks—all with wine glasses in hand, staring at the curious spectacle unfolding before us.

This was FW25: The Portal, Alexis Bittar’s bold debut into the theatre of New York Fashion Week. It had been hyped mercilessly on Instagram for months: “A performance to bend time, blur perception, and shatter convention.” The enigmatic nature of this description left us all in a state of bewilderment, and from the murmured conversations around me, most of the crowd was as baffled as I was, yet undeniably intrigued by the mystery unfolding before us.

“Is it…art?” someone whispered behind me.

“No, it’s a jewelry line,” their equally mystified companion replied. “I think.” The uncertainty in their voices mirrored the confusion that seemed to be a shared experience among the audience.

The lights dimmed, and a hush settled over the room. A spotlight blinked on, illuminating the central setup—a vintage vanity table, ornate and gold like it had been plucked from the set of Dynasty. But where the mirror should have been, there was an oval-shaped screen, rippling like disturbed water. The woman seated at the vanity was a vision. She had the kind of presence that made you feel inadequate just by existing in the same room. Her hair was a sleek, silver waterfall, and she wore shimmering gold ornaments—bracelets, earrings, necklaces—all from Alexis’s new collection. Draped over her was an iridescent cape with a strange, otherworldly texture that I could only describe as “space couture.”

But it was her expression that hooked me. She wasn’t smiling. She didn’t even look particularly interested. Instead, she exuded a kind of serene detachment, a mysterious aura that made her seem both above and entirely removed from the chaos of the crowd gawking at her.

That’s when the robots arrived.

—

Calling them robots feels reductive. These were humanoid AI attendants, and they moved with an unsettling grace that was neither entirely human nor fully robotic. Their silicone-coated faces were eerily flawless—no pores, no expression, just a bland neutrality that made my skin crawl. Each was clad in a tailored suit with subtle iridescent accents as if they were part of Bittar’s futuristic vision.

The attendants began performing tasks around the woman: one gently brushed her hair, another polished her jewelry with exaggerated reverence, while a third refilled her invisible teacup because, of course, this strange future dystopia involved tea. It was done with the precision of choreographed theatre, their movements so fluid they seemed to glide rather than step.

Above the vanity, the screen portal shimmered to life, displaying fragmented radio signals—numbers, voices, snippets of songs. The sound wasn’t clear; it was more of an atmospheric hum, like a distant station you couldn’t entirely tune into. The woman glanced toward the portal and tilted her head slightly as if contemplating it. Then she reached out a hand, her fingers brushing the glassy surface of the screen.

Was she looking into the past? The future? Was this supposed to mean something?

I turned to the fashion editor standing next to me. “Do you know what’s going on?”

She shrugged. “It’s about ageism,” she said knowingly, sipping her wine. “Or possibly technology? Whatever, it’s chic.”

—

The atmosphere in the room shifted as the performance continued. The air felt heavy with meaning, but it was meaning none of us could decipher. My attention was drawn back to the woman. She remained impossibly composed as the humanoid attendants swirled around her like moths to a flame. She exuded a quiet confidence that made it clear that she didn’t need anyone—not the crowd gasping at her jewelry or the soulless attendants doting on her.

It was both inspiring and, frankly, a little intimidating.

“What do you think she’s thinking about?” someone whispered to their date.

“Probably whether or not her Uber’s arrived yet,” the date replied.

And yet, there was something undeniably poignant about the tableau. The woman was caught between two eras, surrounded by trappings of old-world wealth and futuristic technology. The jewelry she wore—pieces inspired equally by the chunky gold of the ’80s and the sleek industrial minimalism of imagined futures—seemed to represent that, too. It was as if the entire performance was a meditation on identity: what it means to belong to a time and what happens when you don’t.

My phone vibrated with a text from my friend Tamara, who had skipped the event in favour of Netflix and pyjamas: “How’s it going? Are you still staring at shiny things?”

Tamara had once joked that fashion was just “expensive existentialism,” and for the first time, I thought she might be right.

—

As the performance peaked, the woman stood from her vanity. The humanoid attendants paused, their heads tilting in eerie unison as if awaiting her command. She clicked her golden stiletto heels—another exquisite Bittar design—against the floor and turned her back to the vanity, facing the crowd for the first time.

She looked at us—not with warmth, but with a steady, appraising gaze that made us all feel highly seen, and not necessarily in a good way.

“I,” she declared in a voice smooth as velvet and deceptively commanding, “am not your reflection.”

The room was dead silent. Somewhere in the back, someone audibly dropped their wine glass.

She turned back to the portal, her figure silhouetted against the shifting waves of light and sound on the screen. Extending a single hand, she pressed her palm flat against it. There was a flash—a brief, blinding burst of light—and then she disappeared, leaving us all in shock.

I blinked. The humanoid attendants bowed in unison, their movements perfectly synchronized, before gliding sensibly offstage. The crowd erupted into applause.

“What…” I started, but the words failed me. Everyone else seemed equally confounded, though that didn’t stop the praise from flowing.

“Brilliant,” declared a man in a velvet blazer.

“A masterpiece,” agreed his equally bejewelled companion.

“This is going to look amazing on TikTok,” someone near the front added as they uploaded their video.

—

The evening concluded with a press conference-slash cocktail party, at which Alexis Bittar addressed the crowd in a metallic blazer reminiscent of David Bowie in his heyday.

“Fashion,” he said with a mischievous smile, “is about raising questions, not answering them.”

We all nodded in solemn agreement as if that explained anything.

Later, as I walked out into the crisp Brooklyn night, I thought about the woman at the vanity. Was her solitude by design, or had technology stripped her of something essential? Was technology her jailer or her liberator?

But mostly, I wondered if Alexis would ever create a handbag that could hold more than lipstick and a single Tic Tac.

For now, though, that was a question for 2050.

Seedbeds of Liberation

February 27, 2025

Charismatic talented child actor having stage presence

Seedbeds of Liberation

“Actors are athletes of the heart.” Antonin Artaud

On a Valentines’ Day in 1997, my Playback theatre troupe sent an open invitation to all Salt Spring residents to participate in a sharing of personal love stories. We rented a small art gallery and since it was a horribly wet and windy night we expected just a few people. At 7 pm the place was packed full and we decided to squeeze everyone in at the expense of floor space for the actors. We acted out several exciting, juicy love stories from the audience and then I was ready to go home to my two teenagers. Just as we thought no one was going to volunteer a final story, a sad looking fellow got up from the audience and sat in the tellers’ chair. Robert, our flamboyant gay director, sat beside him and in his usual energized fashion and began asking the fellow questions, e.g.”What is your name?” Silence prevailed and the fellow stared down at the floor. Then Robert said “Oh, so what story would you like to tell us tonight?” The fellow with no name remained silent. Anxiety kicked in and I doubted that including random people in the show was a good idea. Robert next asked “Of all the actors here, who would best play you in this story?” The fellow looked up and gazed at all 6 of us actors. This is an important choice because the tellers’ actor begins, leads and ends the scene. After an eternity, the fellow pointed at me. There were two men in our troupe and yet he picked me for some reason. I took some deep breaths and decided to drop my impatience. I recalled Marshall Rosenberg’s advice: “If it isn’t play, don’t do it.” I began to practise presence; listening not for words but emotion, with my whole body. Gradually, Robert coaxed the fellow to answer some yes and no questions like “Were you at home?” ‘Yes…..” he whispered. “Do you live alone?” “Yes……” he muttered. “Do you have a sweetheart?” “Kind of……..” he mumbled. “How does your story end?” “She knocks on my door and we go out to the movies……” he managed to gasp. Robert then turned to the actors and proclaimed “Thanks for this amazing story. Lets’ watch “The Date!”

We actors left the stage and I felt baffled as to how to begin and carry off the scene, when I had no real concrete plot to follow. I was procrastinating in the shadows, when I spied a broom. Without thinking, I tiptoed over, got it and walked on stage, sweeping the floor. I continued to sweep, sweep and sweep some more as I waited and listened for footsteps at my door. I mimed checking my hair in the mirror, brushing my teeth, in between picking up the broom and sweeping. Finally, the knock comes. I hesitate to open the door and pretend not to hear it. Another knock and another. Slowly I opened the door to see my date. After a long silence, I leave my tiny apartment, turning to smile at the audience as I exit. Applause erupted. Robert turned to the teller and asked him how he was feeling after seeing the story played back to him. The fellow looked up at me, smiled and asked: “How did you know that when I am feeling stressed, all I can do is sweep the floor?” Our eyes met and my heart melted. I felt honored to be in his shoes for a few minutes. Somehow, my instincts or my mirror neurons were resonating with his tried and true strategy of sweeping, to meet his need for self-soothing. The simple community care that we provided him that night was, in my view, Wise Play, an act of embodied social justice.

” Theater is the art of looking at ourselves.” Augusto Boal

Home Sweet Home (Part 3)

February 27, 2025

Home Sweet Home (Part 3) Sally Campbell

Atta Jaber is a 62 year old Palestinian farmer who looks 20 years older. Among other acts of violence, threats and property destruction his family has endured, his home has been demolished several times. As he says: “You can rebuild a house many times. It’s not the house that is damaged. Damage [is to] the heart of the children….To break a child’s heart, it’s like breaking a glass cup. It’s very hard to rebuild.” Atta was born on land held by his family for at least 700 years. Located in the south Hebron Hills, his land has now been declared by Israel’s Civil Administration to be “State Land”. The illegal (Jewish only) settlement of Kiryat Arba was built on his family land. The State of Israel and its settlers are closing in on the whole area by systematically bulldozing olive trees, rainwater reservoirs, ancient terraced hillsides, roads and homes. Young settlers are declaring “ownership” by planting and grazing their newly acquired sheep on Jaber’s land.

I recently watched Voices From the Holy Land’s featured monthly film, Al Jazeera’s “Rooted in the Land”, which shows this relentless destruction and settler cruelty, inflicted with impunity on Palestinians. It is a fascinating longitudinal film as Bruno Sorrentino & Uri Fruchtmann, the filmmakers, follow Atta Jaber’s extended family for 25 years. Also featured is Jeff Halper, an American-Israeli anthropologist and author, who founded ICAHD, the Israeli Committee against Home Demolitions. ICAHD volunteers rebuilt Jaber’s family home after its 2^nd demolition. Of the over 60,000 homes destroyed by Israel since 1967, they have rebuilt 179. As Halper recounts, this is a symbolic gesture, a way of raising awareness about what ethnic cleansing looks like, and showing solidarity with Palestinians. At one point, we see Halper and other Israeli activists sleeping on the roof of Jaber’s home, using their privileged status to deter the bulldozers.

When we witness this ongoing violence of home demolition, cloaked under the ruse of removing structures built “without permits” (98% of Palestinian permit applications to build or renovate are rejected), we see that the wasteland that Israel has created in Gaza over the years, and particularly the last 16 months, is no isolated event. It is a continuation of the “matrix of control” (Halper) that Israel exerts over Palestinians in its now 77 year-old settler- colonial project.

Why, one might ask, would Israel bother to destroy these small simple shelters housing shepherds/farmers and their families, who have lived on that same land for centuries? According to one Civil Administration official in the film: “I want to crush any hope you may have. I want to take your dreams”. This theft of dreams is intended to motivate Palestinians to simply “leave”, but as we’ve seen over decades, Palestinians still carry keys to the homes from which they were displaced in the 1948 Nakba. They and their descendants transmit their dreams – of home, of freedom, of equality – down the line through their families and their culture of “sumud” (steadfastness). Palestinians of all ages also carry the weight of a trauma that is never “post”; it is ongoing.

As Halper makes clear, Zionism does not exist in a vacuum; it is an idea acutely sensitive to international politics, and it can only be successful because of Israeli impunity in the eyes of the West. Not only does the West fund the violence against Palestinians by supplying arms & equipment, mainstream media normalizes it by looking the other way (not naming genocide for example), by suggesting it’s a “conflict”, which implies a measure of equality in bargaining power, and by consistently blaming Palestinians (“terrorists”) for their suffering.

I want to write about local housing and yet I find myself pulled to the immensely more serious assault on housing/home experienced by Palestinians for all these many years since 1948.

We do need to pay attention to housing here, and to step up to care about and care for the most vulnerable among us. We have healthy communities where often small groups of volunteers give their time and expertise to create safety and stability for all who live here. In truth, we need to attend both locally and globally, and in my view, let go of what is not important. Let old grievances die. Work together. Uncluttering of the non-essential is very freeing. A global lens puts our issues in perspective.

Voices from the Holy Land offers another example of how a few dedicated people can make a big difference. They showed “Rooted in the Land” and coordinated the panel afterward. VFHL was started about 12 years ago by a small group of people in Virginia. Deeply concerned about Israel-Palestine, and recognizing they couldn’t all travel there, they decided to bring Israel- Palestine home. They offer an excellent film (free or donation) each month which viewers can register to see at their leisure, followed by a salon/panel discussion toward the end of the month, always on a Sunday at noon. Their salons feature the filmmaker and/or people knowledgeable of the film’s content and larger context, and they are great learning opportunities. VFHL is run by a small group of dedicated volunteers with no outside funding. In any given month, they may have well over 1,000 register to see their films. Their next month’s topic is Zionism, the flawed ideology that started the whole debacle in Israel-Palestine. You can find them at VFHLonlinefilmsalon@gmail.com. And “Rooted in the Land” is accessible on Youtube. Just under an hour, it is powerful, vivid, and devastatingly honest.

In the meantime, whatever your concept of home may be, let’s envision safety & security of home for everyone, and act to make that a reality.

You Don’t Actually Need To Pick A Team

February 27, 2025

Caitlin Johnstone

FEB 21

You don’t have to pick a team.

You don’t have to side with Democrats because Trump is bad.

You don’t have to side with Trump because Democrats are bad.

You don’t have to give Trump “credit” for anything.

You don’t have to give Trump the benefit of the doubt.

You don’t have to buy into narratives that Trump presents some dangerous new threat that other US presidents did not.

You don’t have to trust right wing media just because the liberal mainstream media are liars.

You don’t have to like Trump just because bad people don’t like him.

There’s this weird assumption that Americans are under some kind of moral obligation to take a side side either with Trump or with his pretend opposition in the Democratic Party, and it’s just silly nonsense. You don’t have to, and you should not.

The US empire is the single most murderous and corrupt power structure on this planet, by an extremely massive margin. Everyone at the upper echelon of empire management is the sort of person who is willing to facilitate the incomprehensible atrocities and abuses that are necessary for the continuation of that empire. Thinking you need to choose a favorite empire manager is like thinking you need to choose a favorite Nazi.

A lucid mind does not look at the turmoil of corruption and psychopathy of the Washington swamp and start calculating which of the vampiric slime beasts are their friend. A lucid mind looks at all the managers of the US-centralized power structure as part of the same enemy.

Sure the swamp monsters bicker and contend with one another along various fronts; you’ll see that under any power structure. That doesn’t mean they’re not all devoted to advancing the interests of an empire that feeds on human blood, and it certainly doesn’t mean they are your friend.

No US president will ever be your friend. No Washington politician, empire manager or oligarch will ever be your friend. Donald Trump is not your friend. Chuck Schumer is not your friend. Elon Musk is not your friend. Hakeem Jeffries is not your friend. Marco Rubio is not your friend. Bernie Sanders is not your friend. JD Vance is not your friend. AOC is not your friend. RFK Jr is not your friend. Elizabeth Warren is not your friend. Tulsi Gabbard is not your friend. Joe Biden is not your friend.

These people have some differences, but what they all have in common is that they have all knowingly made careers out of serving the interests of a globe-spanning empire that can only be maintained by nonstop tyranny, abuse, and murder. That one quality rules them out as anyone you should side with, sympathize with, or support. The only reason this isn’t immediately obvious to everyone is that the entire western world is marinating in a highly controlled information ecosystem where such obvious facts are hidden from our perception.

Whenever I talk about how everyone in Washington is a corrupt monster I get called negative or “blackpilled”, but nothing could be further from the truth. I have plenty of hope for positive outcomes for our world, I’m just not delusional enough to believe those outcomes will ever come from the heart of the power structure most responsible for our world’s problems.

I have plenty of hope in humanity as a collective. Plenty of hope in the real revolutionary movements of the global south. Plenty of hope in the possibilities that could potentially open up with the rise of a multipolar world. I just have no hope in the one power structure on earth nobody should ever place any hope in, in the same way nobody should look to a rapist currently committing rape for solutions on how to curb sexual assault. They are the problem. They are what needs to be fought.

Real solutions will begin emerging as soon as there is sufficiently widespread understanding of our problem. Our task — and it is a difficult one — is to punch through the propaganda matrix of imperial narrative control by circulating as much true information as we can about our world, our rulers, their abuses, and their lies. In this way we can start opening eyes to the reality of our situation and begin organizing together to effect real change using the power of our numbers.

Is that easy? No. Is it harder than casting a vote for your preferred presidential candidate? Yes. But unlike voting and cheerleading for your favorite swamp monster, it stands a chance of actually bringing positive change to our world.

A Walk in the Woods

February 27, 2025

https://printartphotography.ca

Letter to the Editor – Maxine Rogers

February 27, 2025

A Letter to a Palestinian Friend

My Dearest Nura,

I can fully understand your wanting to leave Jerusalem and Palestine. This is a decision that is going to be so much harder for you than it would be for a one of us here in Canada. We do not have your deep roots which go back thousands of years. We have little sense of family and our culture changes from moment to moment. We seem to crave novelty where you Palestinians seem to me to crave peace and security. I can see very little hope of your obtaining peace and security where you are now.

I enjoyed my time in Israel as a young woman. I worked on Kibbutz Metzer which had very friendly relations with the Palestinian village of Metzer. My boss ,Joshua, would drive the work truck to the village every morning and we would pick up a couple of older men who helped with the pruning in the orchards as this is a task which you cannot leave to the inexperienced.

The village was neat and prosperous. The last time I saw the Kibbutz and the village, they were both behind high fences of barbed wire and the Kibbutz was surrounded by a high electric fence for good measure. The farmers could no longer get out of the village to tend their fields.

I used to walk for many miles through the West Bank. The Israeli lady in charge of us volunteers insisted we take a boy with us for protection from the Arabs. This worked a couple of times until the word got around that when I suggested a walk, it was going to be a hike of many miles and we might end up in Syria by mistake. I carried on walking and those times alone hiking in the west bank are my favourite memories of Palestine.

There were plentiful wildflowers as it was early spring and the grass was lush and green. I would walk on the West Bank accompanied by the calls to prayer from the many villages. No one ever made me feel unsafe or unwelcome. It was a better time.

Now, I wish to tell you a few things abut America and Canada to help you make an informed choice. People here will be prejudiced against you, not because you are a Muslim, but because you are religious. I have even heard people say that anyone who is religious is mentally ill.

People here are all for women’s rights up until the moment a woman chooses to wear the hijab. Laws have been passed against the custom here and there. The famous open-mindedness of the West and respect for another person’s private life do not encompass freedom of religion.

Most Muslims end up living in the cities where they form enclaves with other Muslims. A dear friend lives in Edmonton Alberta, Canada and she tells me there are many Palestinians and Syrians in the city. Her Doctor is a Palestinian and there are many Middle Eastern restaurants that she enjoys. She also told me that they are experiencing a balmy -15 degrees Celsius after a bad cold snap. During Canada’s cold winters, no one would notice you wearing the hijab because they will all be bundled up and their faces covered by scarves to fend off the cold.

A lot of Muslims emigrate to the United States every year and some people convert to Islam but the total number of Muslims does not seem to grow as many people leave the faith. In Vancouver, I met a lovely Algerian man who was diving a taxi. He told us that when his children were young, they thought him wise. As they grew older, he became stupid and old fashioned. His children wanted to drink alcohol with their friends and go out partying with them.

The man ordered his whole family into the taxi and took them to a famous area in Vancouver on the corner of Hastings and Main Street. This is an area where mentally-ill people and drug addicts, prostitutes, drug dealers and similar congregate.

A Doctor friend from Germany saw this area and was deeply shocked by the sickness, open drug use including very unsanitary injections, people with open running sores from the injections and people who were clearly insane and in distress. He asked me if we had any mental hospitals and I had to tell him we do not. They were closed many years ago. The government said the community (whatever that might mean) would take care of these people. The results are not great.

The taxi driver’s family lasted fifteen minutes before they said he was, in fact, right and they would strive to be good Muslims if only he would take them home. He made them sit there and watch hell on Earth for two hours. He hasn’t had any trouble out of his kids since then.

So, as a Muslim, immigrating to Canada or the States, it can be done but don’t expect it to be easy or comfortable.

by Maxine Rogers

Poor Jeb

February 27, 2025

Seedbeds of Liberation

February 20, 2025

A victorious Leonard Peltier, surrounded by family and friends, was released on Tuesday, February 18th from his 49 year term in a US maximum-security prison. He was in high spirits saying he will carry on the fight for justice and autonomy for Indigenous Peoples. Leonard, you are a faithful teacher of real resilience and deep wisdom.

“The Polyvagal Theory posits that co-regulation through social behavior is a biological imperative – a need as hard-wired into us as that for food or sleep….safe social behavior and playing with others makes us more resilient to trauma.” ” Stephen Porges, author of Our Polyvagal World

My grandson said to me recently: “You have always told me there is a difference between fun and play. I think I now understand; watching a movie can be fun but it clearly is not play.” And I replied: “Hip hip hippie hooray.” In these times of global trauma, upheaval and insecurity, we can reflect on the words of Joan Baez who said that action is the antidote to despair. Along with political and social action, I think we also need Wise Play. This is a name I am using to describe a wide spectrum of actions that children and other young mammals already understand and that contribute to interpersonal resilience, emotional healing and skillful self-care.

Wise Play is motivated by the innate instinctual need to express joy, happiness, curiosity, intimacy and awe. According to Stephen Porges, a professor of psychiatry who developed the Polyvagal Theory, the nervous systems of animals at play, flows between the parasympathetic aka Green state and the sympathetic aka the Yellow state. Green signifies a sense of safety. When we feel safe from inner and outer harm, we are able to relax, rest and digest. When we are in the Green state the brain produces oxytocin and we are able to engage in cooperative social engagement, creative thinking/art making and the nurturing of others using empathy and compassion. Notice that I’m not saying when you think you are safe but rather, when you FEEL safe. In order to play, the body and mind take turns dancing. The Yellow state occurs in between the Green and Red states (freezing due to life-threatening situations). The Yellow state mobilizes physical behaviors, pain tolerance, adrenaline production and defensive systems. In the Yellow state the fight and/or flight systems are activated. In the Red state, the brain and body are immobilized and there is a complete inability to engage in empathy, compassion and effective communication. Politicians, dictators and institutions actually want us to feel unsafe so that we will comply and conform. “For an authoritarian, convincing a large number of people that they are under threat is required to maintain power.” Porges writes extensively on manufactured dread in his book.

A close friend of mine has two grandsons whose lovely but busy working parents let them play video games from a very young age. At ages 20 and 23, neither one can hold down a job, live on their own, or maintain friendships. In other words, they do not have the emotional intelligence required to engage with the world. Trigger Warning: “no form of digital technology is a true substitute for face to face interaction. Video games superficially trigger the social nervous system without ever truly giving us the specific components of social interaction that our nervous systems are searching for.” Porges. Digital “social” media use must be balanced out with time with people and animals and nature.

Wise play exercises our nervous systems and rewires reactivity into seeing challenge as opportunity. “….while any form of art might be effective, theater may be a particular powerful pathway.” I will write about theatre next week.

Green Wizardries: Winter Work

February 20, 2025

For women, winter work used to involve a lot of textiles. There was, and is, a lot of wool to be spun and garments knitted and mended. People used to wear wool shirts and wool trousers as well as coats which would wear out and need to be darned. In Victoria’s time, children were taught to knit, sew and darn in school or by a Governess.

I have seen some beautiful framed examples of the darning from that era. A student’s master work was so important that it was sometimes framed like a picture. A master work involved being able to match the colours and textures of a piece of tweed fabric. I darn a bit and from this experience, I know just how skilled people are who can mend in this way.

My father taught me to darn. He could really darn beautifully as he was a bachelor until late in life when he met my mother. I have only taken up darning again in the last few years as darning greatly extends the life of wool socks.

I also have time in the winter to bring out my spinning wheel and spin up some of the roving I have. Roving being carded and partly spun wool yarn that is very easy to spin. I am a total amateur compared to the real shepherdesses of a generation and more ago. I remember seeing a photo of a woman in Southern Italy spinning a fine, white thread from a greasy, uncarded fresh fleece. That is magic!

A more modern set of circumstances see people making preserves in the middle of the winter rather than the much busier autumn. We have some lovely Marion berries growing in the garden. We got a huge harvest of fruit last summer. I spread the freshly-picked berries on baking sheets and froze them. Then, I put the berries in bags to process later or to eat fresh.

I was explaining to a friend that we had recently bought a hand of bananas. She asked why that was significant. It is because we hardly ever buy fruit as we produce so much of it ourselves. Marion berries, strawberries and cherries form the bulk of our winter fruit eating with plums entering the equation in more fortunate years.

I have been using my Finnish steam juicer to process heaps of Marion berries. The fruit is loaded into the top chamber, the juice drips into the middle chamber and the bottom chamber holds the boiling water. Juice produced in this way is so much easier than the previous method of juicing which involved the mashing of the fruit by hand with a potato masher and then draining it overnight in a jelly bag.

To make Marion jelly, and there is no finer flavoured jelly in the world, I measured the remarkably-clear juice as I got it from the steam juicer and added 3/4s of a cup of sugar for each cup of juice. Then, the juice and sugar is simmered until it comes to the jelling point. I like to use the frozen saucer trick to find the jelling point.

When I begin jelly or jam making, I put a small stack of saucers in the freezer. I put a little spoonful of jam on a saucer and leave it in the freezer for two or three minutes. After that, a finger, dragged through the syrup lets you know if the jelling point has been reached. If the jelly has to cook more, the syrup will slide back together after you pass a finger through the syrup. Once the jelly is done, the jelly will wrinkle up on each side and the syrup will not run back together. It really is that simple.

That said, years ago, a friend as trying to make strawberry jam and the recipe said to boil it until it hit the jelling point. My friend had cooked the strawberries for hours but she left the lid on the saucepan. The point in boiling jams and jellies is to reduce the water content through evaporation. You have to leave the pot uncovered.

After the jelly, I processed another load of maybe 12 pounds of Marions through the steam juicer. I sweetened the juice with a little honey and then canned it in pint jars. We use juice like this to flavour soda water and it makes and excellent and refreshing drink.

My next project is to steam even more Marion berries, probably two loads to get the juice for my husband to make Marion wine which is another delicacy. Blackberry wine is very tasty and intoxicating, much more so than it alcohol content would suggest. I expect the body simply becomes giddy from ingesting all those phytonutrients.

All this really to say how much I love that steam juicer and what an excellent piece of homesteading equipment is .