When Trust is Lost

October 31, 2024

When Trust is Lost

When someone decides they are the boss of you

You have the right to ask where they got that authority

Did you agree to have your rights taken away

Did you give them the right to destroy your livelihood

Did you give them the right to interfere with your elections

Did you agree to global control by unelected billionaires

Did you give them the right to take your earnings

Did you give them the right to support war criminals

Did you give them the right to defend terrorists

Did you give them the right to sell your country out

Did you give them the right to destroy the economy

Did you give them the right to commit treason

Did you give them the right to steal your community

Did you give them the right to poison you

Did you give them the right to buy off the media

Did you give them the right to use force

Against those who disagree with the most corrupt

Government in Canadian history?

When leaders fail to demonstrate integrity

And they do it over and over

And they lie with impunity

And cheat and steal

And commit fraud

You finally lose trust

You have no choice

There is no where to go

All you can do is say no

To deranged and unethical actors

Who insist they have authority over you

While flaunting the rules that don’t apply to them

They are everywhere in our midst

They are the 4%

Working for the 1%

We are the 95%

And we are not their prey.

Rocking Retro Halloween Dance with FACEHEATER

October 24, 2024

FACEHEATER! The island was lacking a rock’n’roll cover band, so we made one. It went like this: Steve and Curtis met at a Conrad Campbell show, started a punk band, but longed to play classic rock. Steve put down the guitar to play drums, and they used Rush songs to get the hooks into Dave to play bass, converting yet another guitarist. They put out the call to audition singers, and before long Sue was fronting the band with powerful, soaring vocals. FACEHEATER aims to please with hit after hit, plenty of radio-rock favorites, and some tunes you’ve forgotten about for years.

Green Wizardries: Samhain

October 24, 2024

Green Wizardries, Samhain by Maxine Rogers

Samhain, pronounced, “sowin,” is the third and last harvest festival of the year. Its emblems are the fallen leaves, the dry corn stalks and the newly ripe pumpkins because that is what nature is producing in abundance right now. The ancient Celts thought of Samhain as the end of the year. Samhain means summer’s end in modern Irish. The ancient Irish recognized only two seasons, summer and winter and Samhain irrevocably marks the end of summer.

They also believed that this time of year is marked by a thinning of the veil between this material world and the spirit world which is always near us but closest at this time of the year. The ancient Celts were not totally comfortable with the idea of spirits roaming the land so they sometimes wore masks to disguise themselves if they had any powerful enemies in the spirit world that might come and haunt them.

On the other hand, they were very happy to lay a place at the table for deceased family members to come share a meal at this time. I can remember my mother doing this when I was little. She was raised with the help of a Grandmother who came to Canada from Ireland. My Great-grandmother was a Christian and a very educated woman who practised this sort of magic as a matter of course.

These ancient Celtic traditions found their way into Christianity via the Catholic Church which knew a good thing when they saw it. Around the year 700 AD they started to celebrate All Saints Day on the first of November. Before that, it had been celebrated in May. All Saints Day, November first celebrates the deaths of martyrs and All Souls Day, the second of November is a time to pray for all the souls in Purgatory, which is a kind of stuffy, unpleasant, waiting room in the afterlife.

How then did we get to the annual sugar-worship fest of Halloween? Well, it comes from a contraction of the words, “all hallows eve,” which means the evening before All Saints Day. The Celts thought of the night as the start of time so they always began the celebrations on the evening before as that was the start of the day to them.

Of course, they celebrated with bonfires which were important to cleanse the body and to frighten off evil spirits. That is why we always used to celebrate Halloween with fireworks and bonfires. Sadly, this custom is in abeyance on Denman. No good will come of it. If you don’t follow tradition, you just make a mockery of the whole damned thing.

The fireworks on Denman were glorious and I want to thank all the volunteer firefighters who put on such a splendid fireworks show for so many years. The people who put an end to the fireworks here will just have to deal with the bad luck and dislike they have let themselves in for.

If anyone would like to get away from the commercial and tacky aspects of Halloween, they might want to build an altar to their beloved dead. Such an altar is traditionally built in three levels to represent life, death and the afterlife. It is decorated with flowers, candles, and the favourite food of the deceased. The altar should contain the four elements of air, fire, water and earth. Air is represented by incense or those Mexican paper flags. Fire by the candles. Water is self explanatory and the bread we set out represents earth.

My altar always has a bowl of alfalfa pellets as that is the favourite treat of my pet sheep, Septima, now lost to me these many years. This year, it will also have a small bowl of cat food as we lost our beloved cat, Caligula, last spring. It will also have a piece of bread for the human spirits who will visit and a jug of water to refresh them after their long journey. Other favourite food such as chocolate and wine are added. I have a deal with a Mexican-Canadian girlfriend to visit her altar if I pass first and she will visit mine if the reverse is true.

As a religious person, one of my duties at this time of the year is to pray for the spirits of the dead. I do this every morning for the people I know who have died but this time of the year, the prayers are more extensive. I will pray for the comfort and ease of all my ancestors and all who died under tyranny and all who have died of medical malpractice which is a terrible betrayal.

A feast is usual at this time of the year and we have so much fresh food in our gardens still and recently harvested from our orchards that selecting beautiful, nutritious food is a pleasure. I wish you all a Happy Year’s End.

Shucking Oysters: The Sky is Falling

October 24, 2024

Shucking Oysters: The Sky is Falling

By Alex Allen

We humans have a tendency to avoid the unpleasant; to look the other way or not even look at all. But today, it’s never been more important for us to pay attention. No more so than when we’re reading the news. Cursory narratives. Opinions over facts. The devil in the details. Everything is not always what it seems.

For instance, have you heard about the HPAI? Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza? In Canada thousands of wild birds and millions of poultry have been infected or died from H5N1 since the outbreak began in early 2022. In the US in 2024 alone, over 10,000 wild birds and 103 million poultry have been affected. And this influenza is not just for the birds.

Since the H5N1 bird flu virus was first reported in the US last August, over 300 dairy herds and 16 people – all dairy workers – have been infected. (So far all of those who’ve tested positive have only mild, flu-like symptoms.)

At one massive poultry facility in Colorado, workers were infected while culling infected birds. Local health authorities described the conditions: “they struggled to properly wear protective equipment over their mouth, nose and eyes as they handled thousands of sick birds in a sweltering barn, with industrial fans blowing feathers and other potentially virus-laden material into the air.”

All the human infections occurred in “heavily virus contaminated, high virus dose environments,” in other words, factory farms. UN bodies, academics and epidemiologists have long recognized the link between the emergence of highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses and increasingly intensive poultry farming. More than half a billion farmed birds have died or been culled globally due to bird flu since 2021. Many were broilers confined in factory farms where they are crammed so closely in huge sheds that they can barely move, or egg-laying hens that live confined in cages the size of a car battery.

The congregation of susceptible farm animals in “concentrated animal feeding operations” can lead to avian influenza viruses, hepatitis E virus, and so many unpronounceable diseases. These CAFOs are built for only one purpose: to house as many animals as inhumanely possible.

Senior vice president of scientific and regulatory affairs at the National Chicken Council, Ashley Peterson claims that criticism of confined farming practices is “the work of vegan extremist groups who are latching on to an issue to try and advance their agenda.” (Or Keto Communists.)

Wild birds are routinely blamed by governments and industry for spreading avian flu along migratory routes, but it’s clear that factory farms are Petri dishes for more and more deadly viruses. Rob Wallace, an American virologist warns that the new strains are continually adapting to intensive poultry production. “Influenza’s infiltration into industrial livestock and poultry is so complete that these farms now act as their own [disease] reservoirs,” he says. “They are their own source.”

Meanwhile, at the beginning of October, the Center of Excellence for Poultry Science hosted a four-day International Avian Influenza and One Health Emerging Issues Summit in Louisiana, with researchers, veterinarians and private sector professionals from 51 countries.

Guillermo Tellez-Isaias, the chairman, opened with a cheery note: “The highly pathogenic avian influenza virus has naturally been able to adapt to species that it never infected before. If it fully adapts to humans, COVID-19 will look like a small cold compared to what this virus could cause.”

Not one presentation touched on the inhumane factory conditions contributing to the horrific suffering and disease. Instead, attendees learned about: Breeding chickens to conserve water while maintaining growth under heat stress. Strategies for salmonella control in poultry production at feed mills. Management practices to mitigate lameness caused by bacteria in broiler chickens.

And up in Virginia coincidentally, the International Bird Flu Summit was taking place. Here the agenda was somewhat different. Among the workshops: Direct Fatality Management Tactical Operations. Handling Panic and Maintaining Public Order. Managing Surge in Crime During Pandemic. Controlling Social Unrest and Public Disorder. Implementing Isolation Measures in Correctional Facilities. Managing Traffic and Transportation during Crisis. Conducting Mass Vaccination Efforts. Enforcing Quarantine Measures Effectively.

No really, the sky is falling.

Update on our friend Mohammed Al Zaza

October 24, 2024

Previously (Grapevine, August 1^st 2024) I related the story of Mohammed Al Zaza, a young Palestinian refugee co-sponsored by the B.C. Muslim Association and the Vancouver Chapter of Independent Jewish Voices (I.J.V.) who lived with us in Vancouver for several months last year. To recapitulate briefly, Mohammed was badly injured in 2011, when he was fifteen, during an IDF bombing of Gaza that killed 124 people and wounded several hundred more. He was miraculously saved by the intervention of an Israeli peace organization, B’Selem, which managed to get him to a Tel Aviv hospital where he was treated for horrendous burns and severe injuries to one leg and arm. After almost three years he was sent back to Gaza, still in need of medical attention, which he finally received in Turkey. Unable to return to Gaza, after many ordeals he ended up in Vancouver in February 2023. Since then he has undergone more operations and rehab., narrowly avoiding the loss of his leg after an infection. He is now enrolled at Langara College and struggling to make a life here, while deeply preoccupied by the terrible human catastrophe in Gaza that is affecting his own family as well as two million others who are living hell on earth. As I explained before, he is trying to raise funds to get them out of there (many thanks to those who have contributed!). A group has been working on applications for his family members to be eligible for a family reunification programme, once they can leave. The Canadian government normally requires documentation for sponsorships (birth certificates, transcripts etc.) that is currently impossible to obtain in Gaza. He was elated to learn on September 16^th – his birthday, and the same day he had another operation on his hand – that the applications for some of his family had finally been completed and submitted, beginning with his closest brother and his wife and two young children.

You can imagine his horror and distress on learning, that very day, that this brother, Mahmoud, was killed by a bomb while fetching water for the family. He leaves behind his wife and two young daughters. This is the second brother to die, Abdullah is still buried beneath rubble. He also leaves behind a wife and two children. We visited Mohammed in his small Kitsilano studio and saw how devastated he is. Still dazed by heavy doses of painkillers, he is struggling to maintain any hope of rescuing some of his family. We looked around his room, decorated with idyllic images of Palestine, the Canadian Rocky Mountains, khafir shawls, a Palestinian flag wrapped around his computer chair, and a large photo of the brother he hoped to welcome to Canada. He tells us that he was hurriedly buried with a dozen more victims in an unmarked grave: just one more casualty among the tens of thousands of civilians slaughtered in a war gone berserk. It’s heartbreaking. Mohammed now has many close and generous friends in Vancouver providing material and moral support – Jews, Moslems, and a spectrum of other human beings with no specific religious or political tags. But this cannot compensate for the agony of wondering each day how many of his family are still alive.

Because we have got to know Mohammed well, the war in the Middle East has become a major focus of attention in our family. What shocks me most is the silence of our politicians, who seem to be completely paralyzed when asked to take a moral stand on this gruesome massacre. Two of our children are teachers in Vancouver, and they hesitate to talk about the situation at work for fear of being labelled anti-semitic. Within Israel, anti-war protesters and human rights groups like B’Selem and Breaking the Silence are being harassed and threatened with arbitrary detention (according to a U.N. Commission of Inquiry). Similar actions against journalists and peace activists are now occurring in Britain and Germany. We have all seen how organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace have been suspended and threatened by lawsuits on American University campuses. We know how important it is for our friend Mohammed – and all Palestinians who have no hope of ever seeing their own country again – that those of us who can do so continue to express our support in whatever way we can. Our hearts go out to them, and to all those in Israel who still hope and wish that they could live in peace with their neighbours rather than hatred and destruction.

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.

__________________

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