The Day the Freedumb Died.

Is it only about a month since the truckers occupation of Ottawa was in full swing? How quickly things change. From the stupid, idiotic, chants of “Freeedom”  in one of the freest country’s on the planet to the the real crushing attempts of Russia to stamp a country out of existence and end the freedoms of its Ukrainian citizens. It kind of throws the whole stupid pretext of the convoy and “freedom” demonstrations into context. To add weight to a correct perspective of the events take a listen to the following song. It takes Don MacLean’s classic song American Pie and adds new lyrics that brings truth to the events.

I hope all those people who supported the convoy now feel stupid and embarrassed. For the rest of us just remember the names of the politicians who tried to score political points by supporting the convoy and at election time vote accordingly.

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Postscript: A Study in  Contrasts – When Russian citizens started protesting the war in Ukraine they were very quickly met with riot police and threats of jail terms of up to fifteen years.Fifteen thousand citizens were arrested.  When police in Ottawa finally started moving in on the convoy protesters they were still wearing “soft” uniforms and applying minimum force. A day or so later they had started to wear “hard” uniforms and face shields. Batons were in evidence but not aggressively used. Full riot gear and aggressive crowd control was not in evidence. Mounted Police were used to skillfully to  separate the protestors from the police line and force them back. To my knowledge in Ottawa there are only two incidents under investigation. There was a single use of tear gas and woman was knocked down, but uninjured,  by a horse. I think there was over 170 arrests most of whom were released. Several of the organizers face charges of “mischief” and were held pending bail proceedings. In the scale of things this was pretty minor stuff. At a number of border blockades the police in “soft” uniforms formed single lines that slowly marched forward forcing the protestors to fall back. The police line would then fall back, re-form and slowly advance again. The procedure was repeated until the protestors were cleared away. In another time and in another country the process would have included police in full riot gear beating their shields with their batons and advancing with intent to beat the protestors into submission. There would have been tear gas in the air, blood on streets and mass arrests. But this is Canada and that is not how things work here. So, supporters of the convoy, do you still think we live in a police state? I think the police should be commended for their discipline and restraint in very difficult circumstances.

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PUTIN’S RELIGIOUS MISSION

This is an interesting perspective of “What are the deeper religious and philosophical currents informing Vladimir Putin and the Russian invasion of Ukraine? “. It is not entirely without controversy, read the comments in the post, but interesting never-the-less.

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Postscript: Why Angels Fall – A journey Through Orthodox Europe from Byzantium to Kosovo by Victoria Clark (2000). This is an excellent read that explores the modern day reverberations of the great religious  “schism” of 1054. That was when the Christian world was split between the “rational” Christian West and and the “mystic/spiritual” Orthodox East.  It kind of backs up the analysis in the above YouTube.  Back in the heyday of the Soviet empire there was a belief that the Soviet empire was evil because the communists had lost religion. It was thought that once they once again found religion the world would come back into balance. That has turned out to be a pretty naive assumption. The Soviet empire has been well and truly gone for thirty years and Putin’s Russia is once again Orthodox and yet nothing much has changed.  Victoria Clark’s book is an exploration of the impact of the various Christian Orthodox religions on modern Eastern Europe.  My edition I picked up in a second hand book store in Sydney Australia. It is now listed on on Amazon and Kindle.

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Convoy Commentary from the pages of THE GLOBE AND MAIL (2022/02/23)

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Beverley McLachlin: The Ottawa truck convoy has revealed the ugly side of freedom.  Beverley McLachlin is a former justice of the Supreme Court of Canada and served as Chief Justice from 2000 to 2017.

During the truck convoy protests, we have watched banners demanding “freedom” waving over big rigs parked in front of Parliament. But what does this vaunted “freedom” mean? The answer is, everything and nothing.

Everything: the right not to wear masks in public places; the right not to be vaccinated; the right to hold Ottawa’s downtown residents and businesses hostage; the right to malign public officials and call for the Prime Minister’s death; the right to shout epithets at people of color.

And nothing: Because freedom is an empty word unless you ask further questions: “Freedom from what?” “Freedom to do what?” And beyond that, “Where do my freedoms end and the freedoms of others begin?” Freedom is not absolute. We live in a social matrix, where one person’s exercise of freedom may conflict with another person’s exercise of freedom. Section 1 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms states this plainly. The Charter gives Canadians a bundle of rights and freedoms. But it prefaces them with this caution – these rights and freedoms, precious as they are, are not absolute. Governments, it proclaims, can limit freedoms, provided the limits are “reasonable” and can be “justified in a free and democratic society.”

The bottom line is that you can’t use your freedoms in a way that unreasonably conflicts with or affects the freedoms of other people. The freedoms guaranteed by the Charter stop where they harm others. With freedom comes responsibility. Who sets the limits on our freedoms?

In the first instance, it is our governments – our duly elected representatives in Parliament, and the executive branch that has the responsibility to maintain “peace, order and good government,” to quote the Constitution, for the good of all. Our governments must draw the difficult lines that mark the limits of freedom in a particular situation. When you must wear a mask. Whether you can cross a border without a vaccine certificate. How many people can attend a party and who gets to go to school. But governments are not free agents. They are accountable. Accountable to the people, who can vote them out at the next election if they get the line-drawing wrong, and accountable through the courts. Citizens have the right to challenge the limits governments set on our freedoms in court. In the midst of a crisis like the pandemic, the immediate challenges may be difficult. But in due course what governments have done can be examined by the courts to see if the limits governments imposed on people’s rights and freedoms were reasonable and justified. The mechanisms of accountability may not be immediate, and that may frustrate people fed up with what they view as an illegitimate here and now impingement on their freedom. But the mechanisms of accountability work in the long run. They are rooted in our Constitution and our common commitment to the rule of law. They provide an orderly and effective process to restore the balance if governments go too far. The alternative is anarchy.

Throughout the never-ending pandemic, we have watched our governments, provincial and federal, struggle to draw the lines on freedom in the right place – to echo the words of the Charter, to set limits that are “reasonable” and can be “justified in a free and democratic society.” Inevitably, some people will disagree with where a particular government has drawn a particular limit, how long that limit should be maintained and how it should be enforced. If we care about our democracy and common future together, we will submit to those limits in the short run and use elections and courts to hold governments responsible in the longer run. The danger is that people who disagree with particular limits on the exercise of rights that governments have drawn may become impatient and decide to take matters into their own hands, threatening the welfare of people around them and, more broadly, the constitutional framework that allows us to continue to live together.

The heady notion of freedom, defined as the unconstrained right to do what you want free of government limits, serves as a cloak for actions that harm women, men and children who are simply going about their business and trying to do the right thing. Freedom without limits slides imperceptibly into freedom to say and do what you want about people who don’t look like you or talk like you. Sadly, the Ottawa truckers’ convoy has revealed this ugly side of freedom. Scholar Elisabeth Anker in her book Ugly Freedoms examines the historic use of freedom in America to justify discrimination, domination and avoidance of the law and regulation essential to a peaceful and prosperous society. The same, we now know, can happen in Canada.

As we move forward from the pandemic into the future, we need to understand the true nature of freedom under our Constitution.

Freedom is not absolute but subject to reasonable limits.

Freedom, misconstrued as license to do and say whatever one wants, is dangerous.

True freedom – freedom subject to reasonable limits that allow us to live together – is essential to a peaceful and prosperous future for us all. Let’s not allow the freedoms we cherish to become ugly freedoms.

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Andrew Coyne: Our shared reality – and the knowledge that undergirds it – is being assaulted

The blockades that paralyzed Ottawa and various border points have been removed, at least for now. But the blockades are merely the symptom. The disease is disinformation. We are discovering for ourselves what until now we had observed at secondhand: large numbers of our fellow citizens can be made to believe almost anything. This is a challenge to our democracy orders of magnitude greater than the disruptive possibilities of a few strategically placed trucks. It is a challenge, in part, because we are so reluctant to consider it. If so many people are so upset about something, we think, surely there must be some basis to it. There are two sides to every question, we are taught, and by and large this is a good rule to follow. Too many people nowadays are too ready to declare too many debates “closed.” But we should not fall prey to the opposite mistake, of assuming any belief is worth discussing, simply because lots of people believe it. There are not two sides to whether the world is flat, or whether Donald Trump won the 2020 election. And yet millions of people believe both.

It was possible for a reasonable person to worry, circa December, 2020, whether the vaccines developed in such relative haste against the coronavirus might pose some risk to human health. Fourteen months and 10 billion safely delivered doses later, it is not. Valid health exceptions are well known and accommodated; unanticipated adverse events are vanishingly rare. And yet thousands of people were persuaded that vaccines, and vaccine mandates, pose such a monstrous threat to their health or freedom as to justify occupying the national capital and menacing its citizens, in defiance of the law, for weeks on end. Hundreds were willing to risk arrest rather than obey a police order to disperse. This is not normal.

Opposition to vaccine mandates was not by any means the only idea behind the occupation, or the strangest. Protest leaders appear to sincerely believe, inter alia, that vaccines contain RFID chips, that the governor-general can rule by decree, and that Canada has a First Amendment. This is a movement in opposition not merely to vaccines, but to science, authority, expertise of all kinds: in a word, knowledge. What is at work here is not a series of individual deficiencies, but a collective failure of socialization. These are people who appear to have detached themselves not only from the behavioral norms of civil society, but from the whole transmission chain by which knowledge is spread among the population.

Knowledge, that is, is a social process. We form our beliefs about the world, not in isolation, but with the help of those around us. We learn from people with more knowledge, experience and judgment than we have, and through them absorb the accumulated wisdom of society. We have to. We cannot individually relitigate every elementary fact of human knowledge every day. But what happens when that breaks down? What happens when knowledge is transmitted, not vertically, as it were, but horizontally? Then you have what we have witnessed over the past few years. It has been described as a class war, but it is a class war of a particular kind, in which the dividing line is not money or birth but knowledge.

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Thanks to Douglas Francis Mitchell for bringing these two Globe and Mail articles to my attention. Thanks Doug.

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Read any Good Books lately? (#22) – Islands and Highlands Pandemic Binge Reading

In my youth I was never a big fan of Murder/Mystery/ Crime fiction. Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie were never on my reading list. But in my late middle age something must have changed because that particular genre of literature is almost my preferred recreational reading. My wife being Scottish may have had something to do with it. She introduced me to the Scottish writer Ian Rankin.  It was only a short hop to the Swedish novels of Henning Mankel  and a whole plethora of Nordic Noir. So now that I am hooked,  I am always on the look out for new writers in the genre and the latest one to come to my attention is B.M. Allsop. She is  an Australian writer of The Fiji Island Mysteries. She lived in the South Pacific islands for fourteen years, including four in Fiji where she worked at the University of the South Pacific in Suva. She now lives in Sydney with her husband and tabby cat. All of the key ingredients of the genre are there in the series. There are good plots with an unexpected twist here and there, peopled by believable, sometimes flawed, characters, all set in a specific geographical location that invests the  novel with a unique atmosphere. On the requirements of plot, personalities and character development The Fiji Island Mysteries scores top marks. In the series there are five novels that feature two main characters, DI Josefa (Joe) Horseman – a washed-up rugby player and DS Susie Singh  a driven Indian woman who has to deal with familiar gender issues as well the racial and feudal issues of Fijian society.

  • Death of a Hero: Fiji Islands Mysteries is the prequel to the Fiji Islands Mysteries series. Set in 1990s Suva, the young Horseman’s first case is not only a twisty whodunit that will have you reaching for your thinking cap, but a sensitive coming-of-age story that will touch your heart…..  Amazon.  This is  the rugby playing Josefa (Joe) Horseman in his youth at the University of the South Pacific (USP). Like most Fijians the motivating force in his life is Rugby and to this end he was on the University rugby team while studying for a business degree. All that changed when the team captain was murdered and he became a prime suspect.To clear his name he became involved in the investigation and in the process his academic focus shifted from business to policing. That’s how it all began.
  • Fijian Island Mysteries: Book one – Death on Paradise Island.  Joe had left University behind him and chosen a career in the police. The chance to play on the police rugby team was a  motivator. Rugby is a brutal game and he suffered some career ending injuries that required treatment and rehabilitation in the USA. On his return to Fiji he is immediately back on the job investigating  a murder on a resort island. Tourism and environmental concerns are big issues on the islands and the murder in a resort setting poses significant challenges and difficulties.
  • Fijian Island Mysteries: Book Two – Death by Tradition. “Only 5 more days… Horseman can’t wait for his American girlfriend, to join him in Fiji. So, when a young activist is murdered in the remote highlands, Horseman sets a deadline to crack the case. But he knows nothing of the dangers looming through the mountain mist.” ….. Amazon Books. Fiji must be one of the few feudal societies left on the planet and as such it creates some of the unique challenges that are explored in this story.
  • Fijian Island Mysteries: Book Three – Death Beyond the Limit. “DI Joe Horseman stares into the eyes of a severed head fished out of a shark’s gut. Did the tiger shark kill Jona or was he already dead when it clamped its teeth around his neck?” ….. Amazon Books. The novel explores the political and environmental complexities of industrial fishing and how a small island nation has to deal with the big political and commercial international players in the industry.
  • Fijian Island Mysteries: Book Four – Death Sentence. “Everyone in Fiji hates Dev Reddy, in prison for horrific abuse of his own son. When he is released after serving only half his term, the Fiji media whip up a public outcry in Suva. As protest escalates to riot, DI Joe Horseman fears Reddy’s parole may prove to be a death sentence. But Horseman defies the court of public opinion. He must even battle his new boss to protect Reddy just like any other citizen under threat. Together with DS Susie Singh, he pursues blind justice through the streets of Suva and the rural back blocks. Can he unearth a killer the public applauds?” …. Amazon Books.

The series has been a wonderful way to explore the geography and culture of a location that is tucked away from public view and allows one realize that despite the remoteness of the islands there are certain themes and issues that are universal. The place names and the Fijian language might be a bit of a challenge but the rewards are well worth the small effort required.

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Highlands and Islands Detective Thriller Series by G.R. Jordan

This box set collection contains the first six books in the Highlands and Islands Detective Thriller series which have already been published as individual books:

  • Water’s Edge
  • The Bothy
  • The Horror Weekend
  • The Small Ferry
  • Dead at Third Man
  • The Pirate Club

When we think about Scottish Murder/Mysteries the author Ian Rankin and his chief protagonist John Rebus comes to mind. His stories are generally in the urban settings of Edinburgh and we forget that there are are two Scottish realities.  One, the modern urban Scotland that is a land of modern cities similar to the rest of the world albeit with a Scottish accent. Two, the other part of Scotland,  the wilder more primitive  regions of the  north and west – The Highlands and Islands. Ian Rankin’s urban world is much the same as the rest of us, a little grittier perhaps  but with a Scottish accent.  G.R Jordan’s world is a Scotland  where the “Wee Free Church” and a Calvinistic mentality  still has some hold over the minds and manners of men and women. Sunday in that part of Scotland is the Sabbath with attendance at  two Church services and the rest of the day is spent in prayer and contemplation. Nothing moves or is pursued in that part of Scotland on Sunday. Just try and get a restaurant meal on Sunday in the Western Isles. Things are changing but on the Isle of Skye  in 1972 we found that just getting a meal on a Sunday was a challenge.

In this collection of six novels the author invites you to join stalwart policeman  DI Macleod and his burgeoning new DC McGrath as they look into the darker side of the stunningly scenic and wilder parts of the north of Scotland. From the Black Isle to Lewis, from Mull to Harris and across to the small Isles, the Uists and Barra.  This mismatched pair follow murders, thieves and vengeful victims in an effort to restore tranquillity to the remoter parts of the land. MacLeod is very, very  old school and is trying to come to terms with his traditional view of things and the political, cultural and professional changes taking place around him. His new partner, McGrath, is a very modern miss who has to deal with the macho male mentality of her chosen profession but is very much in tune with the changing world around her..

Become a observer of these tales of a surprise partnership, amid the foulest deeds and darkest souls who stalk this peaceful and most beautiful of lands, and you’ll never see the Highlands in the same light ever again.

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I do most of my reading on Kindle. By and large I have nothing but high praise for the device. I particularly like the bright screen and the  instant availability of the dictionary. The only time I find Kindle  less than satisfactory is when the reading material has a lot of graphics. I also subscribe to a service called BookBud that sends me daily listings of budget priced e-books. It has been a wonderful avenue for finding new and interesting books. All at a low cost.  The Fijian Island Mysteries and the Highlands and Islands Detective Thriller Series are two collections that I would not have found otherwise.

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YouTube Picks (#42) – Manha de Carnival

In my opinion Manha de Carnival is one of the great melodies of the 20th century. It is a Brazilian Bossa Nova classic and a staple in the jazz repertoire. It is an original composition by Luiz Bonfa and is the theme song from the 1959 Academy Award film Black Orpheus. Luiz was born on October 17, 1922, in Rio de Janeiro and began studying  guitar with the Uruguayan classical guitarist Isaías Sávio at the age of 11. Luiz  is best known for his involvement with Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes and the development of Bossa Nova in the late 1950s. …. wikipedia

Stephanie Jones is a young classical guitarist originally from Perth Western Australia. “From a very young age her childhood resonated with the sound of music.She played many instruments, beginning first with the piano, and progressing to the violin, viola, saxophone and flute. However, it was the guitar with its captivating range of sounds and great versatility that especially appealed to her, and it quickly became her first love. She is a world-renowned soloist and chamber musician who specializes in classical guitar performance. Stephanie received her undergraduate degree with First Class Honours at the Australian National University under the guidance of Tim Kain and Minh le Hoang, as well as a Masters degree at the University of Music Franz Liszt Weimar with Prof. Thomas Müller-Pering. She is currently based in Germany and now studying Konzertexamen.

Stephanie continues to perform extensively around the globe in multiple tours and festivals, and has also released three solo albums; “Open Sky” (2020), “Colours of Spain” (2015), and “Bach, the Fly, and the Microphone” (2009). She is also a member of the acclaimed Weimar Guitar Quartet, releasing their debut album in 2019.

She has also won numerous awards in prestigious competitions, including first prize at the Hannabach Guitar competition, Uppsala International Guitar Festival Competition, and Fine Music Network Young “Virtuoso of the Year” Competition.”  …. Stephanie Jones website.

Over the past 50 years a number of versions of Manha de Carnival have made their way into the Classical Guitar repertoire. This is an outstanding arrangement by Stephanie Jones.

She plays a number of traditional Classical Guitars including a 2012 spruce top guitar by Perth luthier Paul Sheridan, a 2020 crossover guitar by Daniel Zucali, and a double top spruce guitar by Altamira. On this recording she is using a TransAcoustic & Silent Guitar manufactured by Yamaha. Essentially it is an electric travel guitar but as this video demonstrates it has a “true” acoustic Classical sound.

  • Nylon Strings, Natural Finish. Body and neck material is mahogany
  • The SLG is the perfect instrument for practice, travel or stage use – any time an acoustic guitar just won’t do.
  • Near-silent performance makes discrete practice simple
  • Yamaha’s exclusive SRT-Powered pickup system gives incredibly natural acoustic tone through headphones or line-out
  • Studio-quality on-board effects enhance playing to perfection and line-in functionality makes jamming easy

In performance Stephanie also uses a GuitarLift. This is an innovative device that enable the guitarist to hold the instrument in the most desirable stable configuration.

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Here is another Bossa Nove tune from Stephanie…

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Entitlements, Responsibilities & Wishful Thinking

A classic case of Entitlements ………….” In 1974, Frank Sinatra came out of a short retirement to tour Australia for the first time in over fifteen years. The legendary crooner was not prepared, however, for the changed political landscape Down Under. Increasing numbers of women were entering higher education professions and public life” and to refer to Australian female journalists as “hookers” was a big mistake and one  that the journalists’ Trade Union could not overlook. Unions hit the Sinatra tour with a black ban that immobilized the tour. Check out the following video………

After the tour Sinatra commented ” I made one mistake in Australia. I got off the plane”.

Nearly half a century later another celebrity tangled with Australian officials. This time it was the number one seed in the Australian Tennis Open, the  Serbian tennis star Novak Djokovic. To compete in the event the request from the Australians was simple. To enter the country he just had to show proof of vaccination against Covid 19 and abide by the public health rules in place. In reality it was a non-issue. If you want to compete you have to be vaccinated. A very simple equation. Djokovic, an outspoken anti-vaxer tried to evade the rules and as a result he was deported from Australia. The decision to deport the tennis star was generally supported by the Australian public. The country had come through two years of public health lock downs and was in no mood to overlook entitlement behavior. Because Djokovic was removed from Australia using ministerial powers under the Migration Act, he is now barred from returning to Australia for three years. However, since each visa application is reviewed on its merits, the ban can be waived in certain circumstances if he satisfies the conditions of a visa. How ever, His future participation in the Australian Tennis Open Championships is in jeopardy. As a follow up to the Australian brouhaha  Djokovic’s participation in the French open is now also in jeopardy. As vaccination rules tighten up in other jurisdictions he might end up in a very lonely place on the tennis circuit.

Across North America and the world there is a misplaced celebrity culture that fosters a sense of entitlement without a counter balancing sense of responsibility. Djokovic was one of a number of athletic celebrities trying to evade or bend the rules.  Luckily the general public tends to follow the rules and not support entitlement bad behavior. In British Columbia the public has acted very responsibly. Vaccination rates are over 90% and, by and large, public health orders are followed. In certain sectors this has not been easy. Gyms and hospitality industries have been hit hard and despite some confusion around some orders, compliance has been excellent. We acknowledge that all citizens have a right to earn a living but some people have tried to stand on that principle to allow them to flout public health orders. Certain health care workers, despite their intimate contact with vulnerable populations, have refused to vaccinate. The policy of the public health team has been to tread “softly, softly” and have tried to rely on education to nudge the unwilling in the right direction. Health orders are out there but enforcement has been mostly non confrontational. In the case of the Health care workers refusing vaccination they were given the option to comply with health orders or face unpaid leave with the possibility of eventual dismissal.  Apart from the health orders there are certain professional ethics that needed to be observed and if not followed there would be professional consequences.  Dr. Bonnie Henry was heard to comment that if “they are not prepared to vaccinate and protect their patients then, perhaps, they are in the wrong professions”. A very tactful criticism of the offender’s behavior. Those refusing to comply are small in number but very vocal. The latest group to buck the vaccination orders are the cross border truckers. Because of the essential nature of their services, they had been exempt from vaccination. That is about to end. Both the Canadian and US governments are now demanding that truckers need to be vaccinated. Just for their own safety the majority of truckers have been vaccinated, but, once again there is a vocal minority  who feel they have been hard done by. I suspect when faced with significant quarantine periods after cross border trips, the hold outs will comply. It is the old story of when paychecks are threatened then there is an incentive to buckle under and comply.

From the very beginning of the pandemic there has been a significant level of wishful thinking. The foremost question has been “when can we get back to normal?” It has driven certain politicians to ignore the science and pursue policies that contravene sensible public health policies. The most infamous was Alberta’s Premier Jason Kenny declaring the end of public health precautions and predicting that Alberta was going to have “The best summer ever”. We all know how that turned out. Following the government’s pronouncement there was a very predictable spike in Covid cases .

For most people “getting back to normal” means a return to way things were before the pandemic. That is not going to happen. The pandemic is a catastrophic world changing event and there is no going back to the way things were. Just a brief look back at catastrophic events over the past hundred years underscores that notion. World War I started in 1914 and lasted until 1918 and that was followed immediately by the “Spanish Flu” pandemic that lasted a further four years. When that was over the world was a different place. Life in the early 1920s were vastly different to life in the 1914  pre-WWI era. There was no going back and, if the truth is known, there was nothing to be gained by trying to go back. Similarly the Great Depression of 1929 was followed almost immediately by World War II. Once again life had changed so dramatically and there was no going back. Life in 1945 was vastly different to life in 1930. So here we are only two years into the current pandemic, and optimistically we are at the mid point with at least 12-24 months still to go. and when we come out of the pandemic that there are the implications of Global Warming breathing down our neck. By 2024 the world will be a very, very different place to the one we left in 2020. There are expectation that international travel and tourism will resume at pre-pandemic levels. We have forgotten how the virus originally spread across the world? International travel was a significant component. We have also forgotten how prime tourist destinations were being overrun by visitors and local populations were already calling a halt to the disruptions of the tourism industry. Despite the warnings of the CDC there are people “dying” to get back on board the “floating petrie dishes” that are cruise ships. The last time I looked,  the CDC was advising against taking cruises and 19 cruise ships are being currently monitored. Some maritime destinations have refused to allowed some cruises to land.

Over the next two years there will be many false starts and hiccups on the way back to “normal”. I suggest it is better to continue to hunker down and allow the post-pandemic world unfold in a slow and orderly way. Jason Kenney is probably right. We are going to have to live with the virus but that is going to take time and experience. As the saying goes “everything will turn out in the end and if it hasn’t then we are not at the end” (The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel).

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2022-01-24 Postscript: As we speak, cross border truck drivers are rebelling against the government’s mandate for all cross border truckers to be vaccinated. A truck convoy has started traveling across the country to converge on Ottawa. I suggest as a protest it is doomed to failure because……..

  • Both the US and the Canadian governments are in lock step with their demand that cross border truckers must be vaccinated.
  • Governments cannot afford to have such important supply lines at risk.
  • The protest lacks public support.
  • The truckers lack industry support.
  • The protest is a form of social blackmail.
  • Truckers cannot afford to have their rigs off the road for the duration of a protest. Each day off the job is a very significant economic drain on their resources.
  • The truckers have had over a year to comply with vaccine mandates.

So guys, give it up and suffer the minor inconvenience of a vaccine jab. Swallow your wounded macho pride and get back to work.

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Read any Good Books Lately (#21): The Balkans – The Middle of Nowhere and the Center of Everything

Australia. “The Land Down Under” and the last great discovery in “The Golden Age of Exploration”. An island continent perched  on the edge of nothing. Below Australia there is no significant land mass until Antartica. To the East there a lots of scattered Pacific islands but no major land mass until until you eventually hit South America. To the west, provided you steer ever so slightly north there is Africa but if you veer just a little bit south there is nothing until you hit the east coast of South America. Once again, to the north of Australia there are lots of island nations but no major land mass until you hit the Asian mainland. Australia is a long, long way from everywhere, including the Balkans.

The Balkans. Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia of the former Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria  Albania, Macedonia and Greece are a collection of small nations that are the buffer states between Christian Europe and the Islamic states of Asia and the Middle East. If it were only as simple as a  case of East meets West then maybe the history of the region would have been different. Within the Balkans there is a hoge-poge mixture of ethnic and religious animosities. Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Albanians, Hungarians, Romanians, Macedonians, Muslim, Orthodox Christians, protestant denominations and  Roman Catholics all intent on pursuing their own agendas.  On first glance one would be forgiven for discounting the Balkans as a region of world wide significance. And yet what happened in the Balkans in 1914 precipitated World War I and impacted the whole world. Australia is a long way from the Balkans and yet the activities there eventually resulted in Australian and New Zealand troops fighting the Turks in the Dardanelles. That campaign became a monumental military disaster and gave birth to the ANZAC mythology that has became ingrained in the culture of both of those countries. How is that possible?

The author Tim Butcher was obviously puzzled by notion of how could the assassination of two Austrian Royals in a nondescript  Balkan city in 1914 lead to a World war. After all Arch Duke Ferdinand wasn’t the first assassination in that part of the world. What was so different about the circumstances of that particular event? Tim explores the event and then  goes onto explore the ongoing pivotal role of the Balkans in the history of the twentieth century.

The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War (Kindle Edition)

“A splendid book, part memoir, part history,” about the teenager who killed Archduke Ferdinand and sparked World War I.

“Sarajevo, 1914.  On a June morning, nineteen-year-old Gavrilo Princip drew a pistol from his pocket and fired the first shot of the First World War, killing the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Princip then launched a series of events that would transform the world forever. Retracing Princip’s steps from the feudal frontier village of his birth to the city of Belgrade and ultimately Sarajevo, journalist and bestselling author Tim Butcher discovers details about the young assassin that have eluded historians for a century. Drawing on his own experiences in the Balkans covering the Bosnian War in the 1990s, Butcher also unravels the complexities and conflicts of this part of the world, showing how the events of that day in 1914 still have influence today.” –  Amazon Books……

For history buffs this is a good fast read and I highly recommend it as a companion to Balkan Ghosts – A Journey through History by Robert D. Kaplan (1993). To have some understanding of the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s this is an essential read. I have read it several times and I will probably read it again.

Most books on the Balkans point back to the 1938 travel book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by novelist Rebecca West. Although it is listed as a classic I found it heavy going.

On a tangential subject Why Angels Fall – A journey Through Orthodox Europe from Byzantium to Kosovo by Victoria Clark (2000) is also an excellent read. Back in the heyday of the Soviet empire there was a belief that the empire was evil because the communists had lost religion. It was thought that once they found religion again the world would come back into balance. That has turned out to be a pretty naive assumption. The Soviet empire has gone and Putin’s Russia is once again Orthodox and yet nothing much has changed.  Victoria Clark’s book is an exploration of the impact of the various Christian Orthodox religions on modern Eastern Europe. Unfortunately it is a book that is hard to find. My edition I picked up in a second hand book store in Sydney Australia.

(2022//01/03 – I have just discovered that Why ANGELS Fall is now available from Kindle for $9.99)

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Postcript: Growing up in Sydney,  Australia any notion of the Balkans was intimately linked with the the local football (Soccer) clubs. The growth of the sport was linked to post war immigration from Britain and Southern Europe. Local clubs conformed to ethnic origins with such teams as Yugal, Croatia, Pan-Hellenic, Macedonian and Italian based clubs. Fans were divided along ethnic lines and often reflected old loyalties and divisions in the home countries. This often led to tensions off the field. If I remember correctly this lead to the renaming of some clubs to diffuse ethnic tensions. Also, if I remember correctly, in the 1960s it was not uncommon to read in the newspaper of bricks thrown through the window of the Yugoslav Consulate in Sydney. At that time ethnicYugoslav tensions in Australia were high off and on the soccer field.

Migrants continued to boost interest in the sport in the 1970s and 1980s, especially from the Middle East and the former Yugoslavia.

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Gordie Tentrees at Centre 64

Gordie Tentrees at Centre 64 in Kimberley, Saturday November 28, 2021, 8pm

In this day and age performers like Gordie Tentrees are labelled as Singer / Song writers. In Gordie’s case that is true but it is not the whole story. Singer / Song writers can run the whole gamut from trivial pop music through the most esoteric music possible. In a different era Gordie would have been labelled simply as a “Folk Singer” but these days that is a rather a quaint label to hang on an artist. When was the last time you saw “Folk Singer” given any promotional  prominence? Never-the-less, that’s what Gordie is, an honest-to-goodness folk singer and storyteller in the tradition of Woody Gutherie (without the prewar politics), Pete Seeger (without the banjo), John Prine (without the twang) and, closer to home, the Canadians Freddie Eaglesmith and David Francy. With these masters the story is the thing and in Gordie’s case the songs are slices of life polished to a gem like luster to enhance the story.

Gordie Tentrees (vocal, guitar, harmonica, Dobro, foot tambourine and stomp box) was accompanied by his side kick, the “icon of the Yukon”, Bob Hamilton on pedal steel guitar, mandolin and arc top guitar. They traveled down from Whitehorse in the Yukon to do a string of twelve performances and, despite the horrendous weather, torrential rains, floods, wash outs and road closures they made it all the way through to Kimberley for the gig on Saturday November 28, 2021. The next day they headed off to Calgary for the long trip back up north to their home base in Whitehorse. That is a lot of kilometers to traverse to play twelve gigs in venues governed by strict Covid rules.

The show opened with some nice, gentle pedal steel guitar on the song Wind Walker. For the next hour and a half the audience was treated to a plethora of stories and songs that touched on Far Away Friends, Ring Speed (experiences as a boxer), Bye Gone Days (a desire to rewrite Canadian history), Craft Beards and Man Buns (dubious man fashions), Less is More (you don’t have to be a deadbeat dad), a Tlingit song and lots of stories culled from and interesting life that started in Bancroft, Ontario before heading across Canada and the world. Along the way he spent time in New Zealand and Western Australia and in one of my favorite places – Byron Bay, New South Wales.

Bob Hamilton played his appointed role as an accompanist on Pedal steel guitar in a C6 tuning (for those interested in that sort of thing), some driving mandolin and arc top guitar. Geordie gave him lots of solo space and spiced up the music with some tasteful foot tambourine and stomp box. Because of covid restrictions there was no interval. In these trying times we are thankful for the Kimberley crew who planned and organized the evening’s music. Well done guys.

Here are some more images from the evening:

       

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POST SCRIPT:

Gordie’s  comments on race relations are worth repeating “the New Zealanders are way ahead of Canada and Australia is way, way behind”. Australia has yet to confront its racist past and its treatment of indigenous people. I can verify his opinions. I am Australian born and lived in Australia until I moved to Canada in my early 30’s. Growing up in Australia I had no contact with Aborigines. I met my first Aborigine in  Byron Bay while working in a slaughter house. I was then in my late twenties. Prior to that time I had worked and lived in Sydney and each day I caught the train into the city to go to work.. Each day I would step off the train at Central station and, unbeknownst to me,  immediately behind the station, on the other side of tracks, so to speak, there was an aboriginal ghetto.I worked in the city for nine years without being aware of that fact.  In later years I learnt there were parts of the city where “whites” were not welcome. In the late 1960s I hitch hiked across Australia to Perth and outside Kalgoorlie in Western Australia I was picked up by a driver who must have been in his seventies. In conversation he mentioned that in his youth he was a drover on one of the big cattle stations and, because they speared cattle,  he said that they were under orders to shoot “wild blacks”. That would have placed such instances back in the early part of the twentieth century. Not that long ago when you stop and think about it.

Since that time I have traveled to New Zealand a number of times. I even lived there for the best part of a year and became aware of the Maori culture and its impact and integration into New Zealand society. New Zealand must be the only place on the planet where the indigenous culture has changed the white man. If I had not finally settled in Canada, New Zealand would have been my choice as a place to live and bring up a family. Every body should take a trip to New Zealand before they die. It is a very special place.

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The Tree

About ten days ago I was standing by the kitchen window drinking my morning tea and it just caught my eye. The unmistakable tint of dead needles in one of the huge trees just downhill from the house. It was a surprise because earlier in the summer the trees by the house were healthy. This one must have died very quickly and very silently over the summer. The was no lightning strike no catastrophic event. It just died of old age I guess.  I walked down and checked it out and it was dead. A tree dying in the forest is not a remarkable event, however this was a huge tree and if it should come down it could take out our power, telephone, the sun deck and a significant portion of the house. There was no need to panic. A dead tree could stand for a couple of years before mother nature and gravity brings it down but eventually it would come down.

I contacted a local tree service run by Don Johnson. He came in, confirmed my fears and arranged to come back with a crew in few days and take it down. As mother nature would have it,  a tremendous storm blew through the province and Don was delayed as he dealt with clients with more urgent needs. A few days later he showed up with a crew, three trucks , Cherry picker, flat bed trailer, a huge chain saw, tools and a chipper. They formulated a plan: Stage 1 – Decide where to fall the tree and clean out the landing area; Stage 2 – Bring the tree down; Stage 3 – Remove the branches; Stage 4 – Cut up the log and remove; Stage 5 – Clean up

Here is  photographic record of what ended up as a  2-3 hour job………..

Preparing the landing site

Bark removal & the first cuts :

   

Working it with Wedges

     

And down she comes, on target  right between the trees…….

On the ground and the clean up

Counting the rings

Portrait of a Logger – Don Johnson

The Job’s done – The final paragraph: The tree  came in at around 80-90 feet and was probably around 200 years old. That means it germinated around the time Queen Victoria was born (1819) and was a mature tree by the year of Canadian Confederation. A tree of that maturity and magnitude deserves to have a name and Ol’ Vic would seem appropriate.

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ES:MO

DUE TO ADVERSE WEATHER CONDITIONS THIS CONCERT WAS CANCELLED BUT MICHAEL AND ELIZABETH HAVE RESCHEDULED THE EVENT FOR SPRING 2022

Slowly but surely live music is returning to the post-pandemic world. Elizabeth Shepherd and Michael Occhipinti are returning to the area to perform concerts in support of their new release Weight of Hope. Elizabeth and Michael tour out of Toronto and Montreal (I think) and  have visited the Kootenays many time of the years. They are both Juno Nominees and, as always their performances will produce music above and beyond the normal.

The concert will be limited to 30 seats @ $ 20.00each. To reserve your seat please send interac etransfer to John Siega jtsiega@telus.net. All attendees must provide proof of double vaccination and follow Covid 19 guidelines as per venue requirements. The concert will be at Cranbrook Art Gallery at the 1401 Gallery site on 5th street North . Any questions please contact Louie Cupello (250) 417-9690.

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