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VOL. 31, NO. 3, SPRING 2018
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PHOTOS
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SPRING 2018, VOL. 31, NO. 3
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A word from the publisher and editor… Dear Reader, This issue is dedicated to all the brave souls – living, recently passed, or from times past – who have dared to expose unpopular, forbidden or scandalous truths about the world we share. You will find several of them in this issue, including Dr. Shiv Chopra, author of “Corrupt to the Core: Memoirs of a Health Canada Whistleblower” (2010), who passed away on January 7, 2018 (p.21); the intrepid Robin Mathews (p.17); authors, John Avery (p.54), and Hervé Ryssen and his translator Carlos Whitlock Porter (p.55); and all of the writers in the issue, from Alexandra Morton (p.4) to Norm Zigarlick (p.50), and everyone else who dares to share her or his truth with the world. Thank you to all the outstanding contributors in this issue – and the heroes in past issues, such as Jessica Ernst and Anthony James Hall. And don’t miss the link to Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah (59). A special thank you to Susanne Hare Lawson, whose artwork graces the front cover of this issue. And we are pleased to introduce writer Kim Clark, who is well-known in Nanaimo literary circles, with several published works of short stories and poetry. Kim talks about her latest book, A One-Handed Novel, on p.43. We also welcome back Edward Curtin who shares with us, on p.47, his recent essay On Seeing: Try Learning Not to Ride a Bicycle So We Can Save the World. A few of the ‘S’ themes in this issue… Salmon, Sacred, Scams, Scandals, Security, Salvation, Sex & Satire, Seeing, Shakespeare, Sleaze, Song, Soul, Space, Speculating, Stories, Symbols, Symptoms, Syncretism, Synergy… If you enjoy Dialogue, please consider ordering (or renewing) a Gift Subscription for a friend or local library, or a waiting room/café [p.58.] And Thank You if you are able to help with a donation, so we can meet expenses while keeping our subscription rate affordable for everyone. And thank you to Thrifty Foods and to Dialogue readers who are making use of the Thrifty Foods Smile Card Fundraising Program – which enables friends of Dialogue (in B.C.) to have their grocery purchases at any Thrifty Foods store to support the magazine. The program donates five percent of purchases to Dialogue, at no cost to the shopper: amounting, so far, to more than $300 in donations. [If you would like to receive a designated “Smile Card,” please let us know (250-758-9877).] At this special season of rebirth & renewal, we thank you for being a valued part of this publishing adventure!
Maurice
volunteer publisher
Janet
volunteer editor
…& Penny & Lucky!
IMPORTANT: If you wish to continue receiving the magazine, please ensure your subscription is paid up! PLEASE LOOK AT YOUR ADDRESS LABEL ON THE BACK COVER of this issue to find your RENEWAL DATE. If your subscription is
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dialogue is... …an independent, Canadian volunteer-produced, not-for-profit quarterly, written and supported by its readers – empowering their voices and the sharing of ideas. Now in its 30th year, dialogue provides a forum for the exchange of ideas and an antidote to political correctness. We encourage readers to share with others the ideas and insights gleaned from these pages. If this is your first issue, please let us know what you think of it.
If you would like to share your ideas and become a writer/artist in our magazine, please consider this your personal invitation to participate! We also need your support as a subscriber, to help us continue (See P. 58 for details) We receive NO government funding and no advertising revenue. We rely totally on the generous support of our readers & subscribers.
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was founded in 1987 and is now published quarterly. Maurice J. King, Volunteer Publisher Janet K. Hicks, Volunteer Editor
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Tel: 250-758-9877 Fax: 250-758-9855 E-mail: dialogue@dialogue.ca WEBSITE: www.dialogue.ca
Deadlines: Sep. 1st - Dec. 1st March 1st - June 1st VOL. 31, NO. 3, SPRING 2018
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Salmon & Symptoms…
Finally, progress re Wild salmon Alexandra Morton, Sointula BC
Washington State votes to phase out Atlantic salmon farms!! Finally, good news! Washington State is the first government anywhere, to legislate removal of Atlantic salmon farming from a region of our oceans. It was a tough fight, with last minute desperate theatrics to stop the bill Washington State Passes Bill to Phase out Atlantic Salmon Farms!!! [Read at: http://alexandramorton.typepad.com/ ]
March 2, 2018 was a day of nail-biting suspense. Washington State House Bill 2957 to phase out Atlantic salmon farming was on the order papers for an early vote, but then simply disappeared from the roster. It reappeared late in the day with 25 new amendments attached to it like sea lice! The senators in favour of this bill made sure to raise it just before the cut-off at 5pm and so were granted the opportunity to debate and vote on each amendment for as long as was required. It was painful to watch the opposing senators stand up and plead a yes vote on each amendment, so as to force the bill back through another round of approvals. At 4:15 pm the Seattle Times reported that Cooke Aquaculture (the sole operator in the state) spent $72,000 on lobbyists, signing three new ones in the past week to defeat the bill. I wondered what did it take to get the senators to stand and make such ill-thought out performances? However, every amendment was defeated, several were removed without voting. A senator out of breath rose to claim that Bill 2957 was in violation of rule 25. The live feed video went silent, people
wandered in disarray, and then the process was back in motion, there was no violation. It was hard to breathe through the final vote, but at 6:30 pm the first government ever legislated retreat of the Atlantic salmon farming industry out of a region of our global oceans. VIDEO: The Vote on Bill 2957 Mar 2, 2018 Washington - from Alexandra Morton on Vimeo. I am enormously grateful and impressed by the determination of U.S. First Nations, who united for the first time in their history, together and with fishermen to tell the Washington State government to get Atlantic salmon out of Puget Sound. Believe me, I know this an aggressive industry and watching each opposing senator trot through their scripts on why this bill should have been defeated was not only revolting, but a peek into what BC politicians face. I have released a new five-minute innovative film – behind-the-scenes on farm salmon science, because frankly it is hard to believe. The film is spreading rapidly. You can see it here: http://alexandramorton.typepad.com/
We are getting closer to finally closing this disastrous chapter in our history, but for now the next generation of wild salmon leaving BC rivers face the same exposure to farm lice and disease and they really are in no condition to survive this. Thank you for sticking with me on this! Alexandra Morton, March 3, 2018 Website: http://www.alexandramorton.ca/ ♣
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Symptoms of the real issue, corporate dictatorship Jack Etkin, Victoria BC Stephanie McDowell says: "I don't understand
why our political leaders did not see the danger of allowing so many North American manufacturers to relocate to China and other Asian ... countries where labour was cheap and at the same time creating unemployment in both the U.S. and Canada." It's really very simple ... The corporations control our governments (and they also own the media). The relocation was all about corporate profit. Nobody cared about the unemployment. The corporations want to 4 dialogue
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manufacture where they can pay 30 cents an hour instead of $20 or $30. And 'our' governments allow it because they WORK FOR and are controlled by the corporations... And that is the underlying root cause of virtually ALL of our problems in Canada ... from our failing health care system to homelessness and high house prices. This corporate dictatorship is the issue we 'really' have to deal with... Pipelines and GMOs (etc.) are just the symptoms. jetkin@hotmail.com ♣ www.dialogue.ca
Guaranteed income vs. Job Guarantee Larry Kazdan, Vancouver BC [A comment sparked by article in The Guardian *]
The guaranteed income proposal unfortunately absolves government from responsibility for generating jobs, and by entrenching a "reserve army of the unemployed" relieves pressure on the private sector to raise wages. In feudal society, nobles kept the serfs just above subsistence levels and divided the remaining surplus among themselves - a scenario of rising inequality where we are heading. Rather than guaranteeing income, the national government should guarantee opportunities to work. This can be achieved by direct job creation programs as have been successful in countries such as Argentina, India and South Africa. Our societies have children and elderly to care for, youth to educate, houses and buildings to retrofit, rivers and parks to tend, and neighborhoods to beautify. A Job Guarantee program would not only assure that those willing to work could contribute to society while maintaining income and self-confidence, but would also set a livable minimum wage (with benefits) that the private sector would be forced to match to retain a satisfied workforce. Footnotes: 1. You’re Hired! The Democrats are looking for a big idea? Here’s one: a guaranteed job for anyone who wants one: http://democracyjournal.org/magazine/44/youre-hired/
As Polish economist Michael Kalecki observed, the real issue is that full employment strips business owners and the capital-owning class of power... With full employment, the capitalists lose their leverage to depress workers’ wages and must give up more profits. 2. What is a Job Guarantee? LINK: http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=23719 "...the Job Guarantee is actually a macroeconomic policy framework designed to ensure full employment and price stability is maintained over the private sector business cycle. Job Guarantee workers would enjoy stable incomes, and their increased spending would boost confidence throughout the economy and underpin a private-spending recovery. 3. The Job Guarantee: Delivering the benefits that Basic Income only promises LINK: https://tinyurl.com/prt-job-guarantee "The ‘BIG’ (basic income guarantee) proposal is a compassionate but paternalistic policy that does not ultimately deliver the jobs that those at the bottom of the economic ladder want. The JG (job guarantee) proposal by contrast is based on several core considerations: 1) it acknowledges what people want and accommodates those needs; 2) it designs a program that delivers greater macroeconomic stability; and 3) it helps redefine the meaning and nature of work, helping transform the economy to a more just and humane system.
Larry Kazdan CPA, CGA, lkazdan@gmail.com Modern Monetary Theory in Canada: LINK: http://mmtincanada.jimdo.com/
* Re: Universal basic income is no panacea for us – and Labour shouldn’t back it, by Sonia Sodha, Dec. 18, 2017; LINK: https://tinyurl.com/tg-ss-uinp ♣
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Green Party applauds EU Court’s ruling against Trade dispute settlement mechanism March 07, 2018, OTTAWA — The Green Party of Canada welcomes yesterday’s ruling (March 6, 2018) by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) that the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) clauses in the Netherlands-Slovakia investment treaty are incompatible with European Union (EU) law. “This decision could call into question the legality of ISDS clauses in other EU trade deals, including the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA),” said Green Party international trade critic Paul Manly. “In CETA, the Investment Court System is similarly structured to allow corporations to sue governments if legislation interferes with a corporation’s ability to maximize profits. The ECJ will soon rule on whether the Investment www.dialogue.ca
Court System is in fact consistent with EU laws. “The Green Party has long argued against trade dispute settlement mechanisms that allow foreign corporations to override domestic laws designed to protect the environment and community well-being. They are inherently anti-democratic and should be removed from all trade agreements and ISDS measures to which Canada has committed. That means NAFTA’s chapter 11 and the ISDS mechanism in the revised Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) must be scrapped as well. Canadian sovereignty is at stake,” concluded Mr. Manly. Contact: John Chenery, Director of Communications, 613-562-4916 x215 | John.chenery@greenparty.ca PRESS RELEASE LINK: https://tinyurl.com/gp-eu-isds ♣ VOL. 31, NO. 3, SPRING 2018
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“Soft and Hard Edges”
Canada’s jury-picking process enables prejudice By Jim Taylor, Okanagan Centre BC
Something is not just in the Canadian justice system. And I think it has to do with jury selection. As everyone probably knows by now, an all-white jury acquitted Gerald Stanley of murdering Colten Boushie, a 22-year-old Cree man. Some facts are uncontested: Boushie had been drinking with four buddies. They were driving around in an SUV, and drove onto Stanley’s farm. Stanley came out carrying a loaded handgun. During an argument, Stanley shot Colten Boushie in the back of the head. Other matters are not clear. Such as whether the five genuinely wanted help for a leaky tire. Or if they intended to steal and/or damage property. Stanley claims the fatal shot resulted from a “hang fire” -- a delay between pulling the trigger and the bullet leaving the gun. Gun experts disputed his claim. A CBC investigation suggests that the RCMP botched its gathering of evidence. They left the car in which Boushie was killed uncovered, with the door open. A rainstorm washed away blood splatters in the car before forensics experts could examine them. No photos were taken of blood spatters on the roof of the car. The gun and Stanley’s hand both showed significant gunpowder residue. But Boushie’s body didn’t, suggesting that the bullet that killed him was not shot at close range. Emotions ran high. Saskatchewan farmers rallied behind Stanley, claiming that they had a right to defend their property from indigenous invasions. Indigenous people called the jury’s verdict proof of a historic bias against indigenous peoples -- citing many trials in which whites accused of murdering indigenous victims were acquitted. Meanwhile, indigenous people have a far higher conviction rate than white people. About 23 per cent of inmates in federal prisons are indigenous, although they make up barely five per cent of Canada’s population. The Saskatchewan government has since decided not to appeal the acquittal. The Crown prosecutor said that the judge, the prosecutor and the defence lawyer had followed the law scrupulously. But it’s precisely the law that’s the problem. "They keep asking us to have faith in the justice system,” 6 dialogue
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said Boushie’s uncle Alvin Baptiste, “but indigenous people have no faith in the justice system at all." Flaws in the process The root of contention, it seems to me, is jury selection. Theoretically, juries are chosen at random from the total population of Canadian citizens. Some exclusions apply. But beyond those, lawyers have “peremptory challenges.” Either side can disqualify up to 14 potential jurors -- in this case -- without giving any reasons. It might be because the person wears a business suit. Or has a beard. Or, perhaps, looks indigenous. In the U.S., judges can demand reasons for peremptory challenges. In Canada, they can’t. Although it’s illegal to challenge for gender or racial reasons, the Globe and Mail reported that Stanley’s defence rejected every potential juror who looked indigenous. “Peremptory challenges are really asking lawyers to rely on their stereotypes,” charged Jonathan Rudin of Aboriginal Legal Services in Toronto. “You never see people being excluded from a jury because they’re white.” Reasonable criteria I have no inside knowledge of the system. Indeed, I have only once been called for jury duty. A native man -- the term we used in those days -- was accused of raping a woman who had accompanied him to his fishing boat and had passed out drinking. I wasn’t asked a single question about my prejudices (which I did have at the time, I admit), or any prior knowledge of the case. The defence lawyer eliminated me after a single glance. It seems to me that potential jurors should be dismissed only if there is reasonable cause to believe they cannot produce an unbiased, unprejudiced verdict. Juries must render their verdict “beyond a reasonable doubt”; surely “reasonable” should also apply to jury selection. Legitimacy of the system Over the years, a variety of studies have recommended abolishing peremptory challenges, or at least www.dialogue.ca
amending them. In 1991, the Manitoba Aboriginal Justice Inquiry called Manitoba’s jury system a “glaring example of systemic discrimination” and called for peremptory challenges to be eliminated. Similarly, in 2013, former Supreme Court Justice Frank Iacobucci issued a “scathing report” about the under-representation of First Nations people on juries. He recommended that Ontario amend its Criminal Code to prevent peremptory challenges against First Nations people called for jury duty. Iacobucci argued the under-representation of
indigenous jurors has affected perceptions about the legitimacy of the whole judicial process. It would take very little to amend jury selection, and to make the Canadian justice system look a lot more just. *******
March 10, 2018, Copyright © 2018 by Jim Taylor. Nonprofit use in congregations and study groups, and links from other blogs, welcomed; all other rights reserved. To comment on this column, write jimt@quixotic.ca (and send a copy to dialogue@dialogue.ca too, thanks!) ♣
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NB Sinking… but the sun still rises, some birds still singing Dave Stevens, Bocabec NB Hope all’s well out in BC. New Brunswick is slowly
sinking under the combined weight of enforced (and activist) bilingualism, fiscal mismanagement, corruption and general incompetence. But, the sun
still rises in the East, the planet rotates on its axis with only the usual wobble, and the remaining birds we haven’t killed with our goddam forestry herbicide still sing. The world is still a great place despite us… Cheers! Dave (note received with renewal) ♣
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S is for sleaze… Jim Erkiletian, Nanaimo BC
Congrats to the new (federal) “ethics czar” Mario Dion (Globe & Mail, Jan 12, 2018, p. A4). Maybe we'll stop hearing about Finance Minister Morneau's piddling $5 million oversight in his portfolio, or PM Justin's million dollar visit to the Aga Khan's. There's much more expensive sleaze than that in the Liberal party. The rejected Energy East pipeline would have made us independent in fossil fuels. Western Canadian oil, refined in the Atlantic Provinces and sold into the Quebec and Ontario markets' could replace the oil those provinces buy from the Middle East and Africa (unethical oil?). It would have reduced tanker traffic in the Atlantic Ocean, ships that burn bunker oil, the dirtiest liquid fossil fuel.
The Kinder Morgan pipeline to the west coast, accepted by the Liberals, will transport bitumen for export, will be owned by Texans and will increase tanker traffic in the Pacific (and accidents in the Salish Sea). Liberal Paul Martin, owner of Canada Steamship Lines (although most of his boats pay no Canadian taxes as they are registered off-shore) might have excused himself from voting on these projects because of the obvious multi-billion dollar conflict-of-interest with his company. One nice thing about Pierre Trudeau's leadership, he kept the Martins in his caucus under a loose leash. Look who's wearing the leash now. erkil@telus.net ♣
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David, Thank you for being with us – you will be missed David Boese, St. Catharines ON
Dear Janet, Maurice and Penny This is a hard letter to write. I’m so sorry that I missed renewing my subscription last September. I haven’t been well and my health problems are not getting better. Since 1991, I’ve had 8 heart attacks and numerous operations and I’ve reached a point where I can’t even read any more. Because of this, I’m sadly not renewing my subscription. I’m sending you $20 for my missed payment and asking you to take me off the mailing list. www.dialogue.ca
I have to say that it’s been more than a real pleasure being part of the dialogue group, and you are to be revered for your dedication, in making this publication such a success. I hope, for your readers, that you have many more years of dedicated publishing. Happy Trails to You David Boese, dash@vaxxine.com ♣ EDITOR’S NOTE: David has been reading and
writing with Dialogue since 2009. Bless you, David. VOL. 31, NO. 3, SPRING 2018
dialogue 7
“The Fifth Columnist”
To market, to market...
Michael Neilly, Dunrobin ON
The recent murder of 17 people in Parkland, Florida, has triggered an outpouring of suggestions as to the causes of gun violence. These murders followed the October 2017 massacre on the Las Vegas strip that left 58 people dead and 851 (!) people injured, which came on the heels of the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, where 26 people were killed. It’s the Wild West, all over again. Of course, automatic weapons are making killing easy. What would be an immensely tiring and gory task with a knife is now as easy as pointing and pulling the trigger. We can suggest that schools be “hardened,” that teachers be armed, that television violence be censored, the list goes on, but the killings will continue. Meanwhile, people are absolutely twisting themselves into knots trying to avoid their responsibility, especially the National Rifle Association (NRA), which maintains that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. I wonder how many innocents must be murdered for the government to take even the most basic steps, such increasing the legal age of ownership, outlawing bump stocks, controlling how guns are sold at gun shows, on Kijiji. Netflix is currently showing The Frankenstein Chronicles. One element of the story involves body snatching. The practice arose when the only legal supply of corpses, which was from capital punishment, was outstripped by the demand for cadavers from medical schools and the like. Corpses were used for dissection and lectures. At the same time, fewer people were being executed for the lesser crimes, also lowering the legal supply. In the 1800s, grave robbing was not a felony and so there was an incentive to steal corpses with little legal deterrence. The show makes the point several times that because nobody “owns” the corpse, body snatching wasn’t a real crime. In the end, what stopped the practice was the Anatomy Act, which, among other things, gave surgeons and others legal access to unclaimed corpses, such as from prisons, 8 dialogue
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hospitals and other state institutions. I bring this up to draw an analogy between the practice of body snatching and the social problems of guns, drugs, illegal immigration, and the consumption (burning) of oil products. In all of these cases, there is a market for these goods and services to supply eager consumers. Unfortunately, we can’t unlearn the manufacture of automatic rifles. Wealthy people own those factories and will defend them to the end. Every liter of oil will be pumped from the ground before we ever see a clean, reliable and cheap energy source. The suppliers are too well defended and too entrenched to make any meaningful change. It all comes down to the consumer. It’s the consumer who takes drugs, who hires an illegal gardener or nanny, who buys a semi-automatic rifle, it’s this individual who drives the demand, who is afraid of minorities, who is afraid of their government, who has lost all hope, or who sees the act of consuming these goods and services as harmless. And at the heart of the consumer is the ego that dwells on the past and fears for the future. I love the quote: Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. You can attack the supplier all you want, wage your war on drugs, on guns, and so on, but it’s the consumer who will ultimately dictate if a market, black or white, thrives or fails. We need an evolved human being. Not one forced to conform, but one who loves and who is at peace. The dystopian view is that only of necessity will this come. Only when missiles strike into every gated community, when drug addicts clamour at their gates and every drop of oil has been sold, when even the rich can’t get clean air, will the market deliver Human Being 2.0: content, peaceful and obedient — living cleanly as part of this Earth, not just on it. To this end, I’m convinced that the market will figure out how to strip the ego from our minds. It’ll happen at birth. Except for privileged, who will get to keep theirs. It would be easier if we all learned to meditate. Of course, that’s not what the market wants! But it’s what we need. ♣ www.dialogue.ca
Centre for Global Research –All Eyes on Russia, Selected Articles: By Global Research News Global Research, March 14, 2018, Montreal
Following President Vladimir Putin‘s 2018 State of the Nation Address (*), the Russophobes in the West represented by the mainstream media have contributed to exacerbating the tensions between US-NATO and Russia. Playing tone-deaf to the hypersonic nuclear development of the Kremlin, the UK has used the Sergei Skripal incident as a leverage to further inch towards all out war. Read articles at the following LINK: https://www.globalresearch.ca/selected-articles-alleyes-on-russia/5632068
* * * Why the West Cannot Stomach Russians By Andre Vltchek, March 13, 2018 It saved the world from Nazism. It did it at a horrific price of 25 million men, women and children, but it did it; courageously, proudly and altruistically. The West never forgave the Soviet Union for this epic victory either, because all that is unselfish and self-sacrificing, is always in direct conflict with its own principles, and therefore ‘extremely dangerous’. * * * Double Agent Sergei Skripal – There’s More to This Story Than Meets the Eye By True Publica, March 12, 2018 As we mentioned in our report last week “What You Are NOT being Told About Russian Spy Sergei Skripal” – it should not be forgotten that Skripal is a traitor who sold the identities of dozens of Russian agents abroad to the UK, in exchange for hard cash. This may very well have caused the deaths of some of those Russian agents operating in conflict zones. Skripal is also a known double agent – or double traitor. Without doubt, Skripal had enemies, probably quite a few. * * * Gang of Four: Senators Call for Tillerson to Enter Into Arms Control Talks with the Kremlin By Dr. Gilbert Doctorow and Ray McGovern, March 12, 2018 In a sad commentary on the perilous state of the U.S. media, a letter to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson from four United States Senators dated March 8 calling for opening arms control talks with the Kremlin ASAP is nowhere to be found in mainstream www.dialogue.ca
newspapers a day after its release on the Senate home page of one of the authors, Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.). * * * Why Russia’s New Strategic Capabilities Come as a Shock to the US Intelligence Community By Philip Giraldi, March 11, 2018 On March 1st, Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke before his country’s Federal Assembly plus a large group of both local and foreign journalists, outlining his plans for the economy and also dealing with other domestic issues should he be re-elected later this month [which he was on May 18th with 76% of the vote]. The final third of the presentation was on national defense and, in its substance, was clearly directed at a global audience, particularly the U.S. * * * The British Government is “Talking War With Russia”: The Mysterious Skripal Incident-Another Anti-Russian Provocation By Christopher Black, March 11, 2018 The British government is talking war with Russia over a mysterious incident that is claimed to have taken place on Sunday March 4, just a few kilometres from the secrecy shrouded British biological and chemical warfare research and development facility at Porton Down in Wiltshire. * * * Truth in media is a powerful instrument. The World is at a dangerous crossroads. Global Research is a small team that believes in the power of information and analysis to bring about far-reaching societal change including a world without war. Consider Making a Donation to Global Research The original source of this article is Global Research Copyright © Global Research News, Global Research, 2018 ♣ NOTE FROM THE EDITOR:
(*) You can watch/hear President Putin’s March 1st address (with English translation, on C-SPAN, 2 hours):
https://www.c-span.org/video/?441907-1/russianpresident-vladimir-putin-state-nation-address ♣ VOL. 31, NO. 3, SPRING 2018
dialogue 9
John Shadbolt, Acton ON
That’s My Take On It
S is for Survival… Will humans survive? As an old guy I have to say no. Why not? I think anyone can come to the same conclusion, if you look around, observe and think. So what am I talking about? Pretty well everything that we are told is good is really bad. • We are told that water fluoridation is good. Do your research. Trust me it is really bad. • We are told that GMOs are good. Trust me, they are bad. Along with all the pesticides etc. that go with them. • We are told that vaccines are good. Trust me - you get the idea. • You are told that natural cures are no good. Trust me, they are. The list goes on. So can humanity change, will they change? My bet is no. The only thing that matters these days is power and money. You cannot eat money. Money cannot cure. Money is the new God. The old God was much better. If you have enough money you can do pretty well anything, lie and pillage and create wars. We see it every day. Kill the earth, water, life itself and no one cares if there is money involved. Money is the new Satan. That is why satanical companies like Monsanto thrive. When they survive, humans, animals, insects, etc., do not. Personally I do not think things will change, and if they do will it matter? By then it may be too late. Are the nations with money going to stop the destruction that wars cause? Making more weapons (money) is considered good (i.e. for “the economy”). Will farmers stop killing insects, growing GMO crops? Not while money is being made. Will we stop killing the earth? Not while money is made. Will we stop killing ourselves? Not while money is made!
So will mankind give up spending money on the above? Your guess is as good as mine. Me, I doubt it. Case in point: Fluoride “In point of fact, fluoride causes more human cancer deaths than any other chemical. When you have power you don’t have to tell the truth. That’s a rule that’s been working in this world for generations. There are a great many people who don’t tell the truth when they are in power in administrative positions. This amounts to public murder on a grand scale, it is a public crime. . . . It is some of the most conclusive bits of scientific and biological evidence that I have come across in my 50 years in the field of cancer research.” – Dr. Dean Burk, Biochemist, co-discoverer of Biotin and a co-developer of the prototype of the Magnetic Resonance Scanner. Burk published more than 250 scientific articles in his lifetime. He later became head of the National Cancer Institute's Cytochemistry Sector in 1938. After retiring in 1974, Dean Burk devoted himself to his opposition to water fluoridation. According to Burk "fluoridation is a form of public mass murder." - Wikipedia LINK: https://tinyurl.com/yt-dr-dean-burk (2011)
Case in point: Monsanto/Dow GMO The GMO Agenda Takes a Menacing Leap Forward with EPA's Silent Approval of Monsanto/Dow RNAi Corn – by Sayer Ji, Founder, www.GreenMedInfo.com
“Without much more than a whisper from the mainstream media, Monsanto’s newest Frankenfood has received full EPA approval and will be arriving on dinner plates by the end of the decade. The implications of this are harrowing, to say the least….” LINK: https://tinyurl.com/gmi-mon-rnai
From: John Shadbolt, jshadbolt@primus.ca ♣
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QUOTE…
"The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it." – George Orwell 10 dialogue
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“Prévoyance”
About that Consumer Price Index and public services… (with local BC examples) Erik Andersen, Gabriola Island
In case you need some evidence of the predatory nature of governments – they are after all monopolies, here are some values from our life. The official CPI (Consumer Price Index) website, page 3, describes what is not in the calculation and why. "Many public goods and services provided by governments [and crown corporations], and for which there is no market price, are excluded since they cannot be associated with a retail price." The change in the national CPI from 2007 to 2017 was + 17 %. Over the same period: • Our garbage collection fees increased by + 31 % with no change in number of people at our address
and no change in service levels. • Our electricity costs increased by + 94.6 % with no increase in the amount needed per year. • Property taxation increased by +21 % with no change in service provided, no road improvements and no increase in the size of house, which is a depreciating asset. • One last example, but not the end by any means, BC Ferries, an essential transport service we need for medical, dental and visiting friends and relatives. (social purposes) + 33 %. The obvious take away is that politicians who are in charge of monopolies cannot resist using abusive/ predatory power. They have zero capacity to think outside of the current social box – thereby assuring the continued victimization of the individual and defenceless.
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Site C: a legacy of bad decisions past & present. Islanders for The Peace – a group that has come together to stop the completion of the Site C dam – claim that the BC government’s decision to proceed with the dam will consign you, your children, and grandchildren to a massive unnecessary debt – one that British Columbians will have to pay over and over again. Why? Because contrary to the BC government’s statements, the $4 billion they argue would be wasted if the project is shut down does not cost more than the projected $10.7 billion (and counting) it would take to complete it. The dam will also flood valuable agricultural land, is in complete opposition to the NDP government’s stated commitment to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and commits BC to outdated and expensive energy generation when new ways of producing electricity are increasingly less costly and far better at creating permanent jobs. Islanders for The Peace were at Brechin United Church (1998 Estevan Road, Nanaimo) on March 25 for a forum and fundraiser in support of the People of The Peace and future generations of BC Hydro customers. www.dialogue.ca
Speakers included retired economist and BC Hydro analyst, Erik Andersen, and Ken Boon of the Peace Valley Landowners’ Association (PVLA). Chief Roland Wilson of the West Moberly First Nation participated by Skype and to talk about the legal challenge and answer questions. A video of world-renowned energy economist Robert McCullough refuted a letter written by NDP MLA David Eby on the cabinet’s reasons for continuing with Site C dam project. Funds raised will go towards financial support for legal challenges by the West Moberly and Prophet River First Nations, and the Peace Valley Landowners’ Association. This event was co-sponsored by the Mid-Island Council of Canadians. For further information: Louise Gilfoy, organiser, (250) 668-8064; LouiseGilfoy@gmail.com Available for interviews: Ken Boon, President, Peace Valley Landowner Assoc. (250) 262-9014; pvla@xplornet.com Erik Andersen, Retired economist, Islanders for the Peace; (250) 247-8438; twolabradors@shaw.ca Erik Andersen, Gabriola Island [Email: twolabradors@shaw.ca ] ♣ VOL. 31, NO. 3, SPRING 2018
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“Have Computer Will Write” ~ Jeremy Arney By Jeremy Arney, Sydney BC granpaiswatching@gmail.com
Once again we are being fed nonsense and almost panic by our two mainstream media tv stations. This is a perfect opportunity to show the Americans that their rape of Canada is no longer acceptable to us. There is no reason why we cannot enter into real trade agreements with any country we choose without having the possibility of reprisals from the US. If they want to slap huge tariffs on some of our products that is their problem. Such tariffs hurt American businesses and deprive them of some first-class products. Without NAFTA to restrict our ability to export to other countries we would be better able to trade around the world. The concept of almost giving our bitumen to the USA and paying a premium price for what is refined from it does not make any economic sense, yet that is what is happening. It really is time we started demanding that we are shown the mandates from the Canadian people for governments, of either colour, to give away what we produce either from the ground or from finished products. Jeremy, granpaiswatching@gmail.com
Subject: NAFTA Letter sent to CTV and CBC, Mar 5, 2018 CTV <news@ctv.ca>, CBC <yournews@cbc.ca>
It being a rather quiet day on the hill for some reason, I spent some time watching both of your networks TV programs on basically NAFTA and the negotiations to reframe an investment/trade agreement - instead of scrapping it completely and starting again on a real trading basis under the WTO – or better yet country to country, there seems to be a panic to restructure a very bad agreement for Canada before the Canadian people wake up to how we are handcuffed in so many ways by this Mulroney original (FTA) and Chrétien update. We have been taken to the NAFTA tribunal through chapter 11 almost as often as Donald Trump changes his mind, and we are even further restricted in what and how we can export our natural resources. We can now add Canadian corporations which incorporate in Delaware so that they too can challenge Canada for perceived profit losses (Lone Pine Power of Calgary 12 dialogue
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being a very good example of that). Article 506 of NAFTA ( *1) allows us to increase the percentage of our production of natural resources to either country but not decrease them again later. For an example, 100% of the bitumen from the tar sands in Alberta is exported to the USA, so exactly how we are going to export even one barrel to another country is a puzzle to me. The Canadian Action Party has believed for years that we should scrap NAFTA and all other investment agreements disguised as trade agreements and start trading with any country which wants to trade with us, with MUTUALLY Agreeable terms. Morneau will not budget for these NAFTA claims; Trudeau is ignorant of the finer points of NAFTA; Freeland is too busy hating Russia and should be concentrating on our shaky relationship to the rest of the world rather than meddling in the business of the Trade Minister; and Alberta believes that it should get some more money coming in whilst the remainder of Canada will pay for that through NAFTA challenges. What a mess! Do I hear about these points on your programs??? FOOTNOTE: *1. NAFTA
Article 605: Other Export Measures Subject to Annex 605, a Party may adopt or maintain a restriction otherwise justified under Articles XI:2(a) or XX(g), (i) or (j) of the GATT with respect to the export of an energy or basic petrochemical good to the territory of another Party, only if: a) the restriction does not reduce the proportion of the total export shipments of the specific energy or basic petrochemical good made available to that other Party relative to the total supply of that good of the Party maintaining the restriction as compared to the proportion prevailing in the most recent 36-month period for which data are available prior to the imposition of the measure, or in such other representative period on which the Parties may agree; Jeremy Arney, Leader of the Canadian Action Party, PO Box 52008, RPO Beacon, Sidney, BC V8L 5V9 Tel. 250-216-5400 Email: iamjema@gmail.com
Blog: https://jeremyarneysblog.com/ Cc: justin.trudeau@parl.gc.ca chrystia.freeland@international.gc.ca Francois-Philippe.Champagne@international.gc.ca bill.morneau@parl.gc.ca, jody.wilson-raybould@parl.gc.ca premier@gov.ab.ca, tracey.ramsey@parl.gc.ca ♣ www.dialogue.ca
Re: Coca cola Nestlé privatizing largest water reserve in South America, second largest aquifer in the world From Patricia White pwhite.red@gmail.com By Amanda Froelich, TruthTheory.com, Feb 5, 2018 [EXTRACT/LINK] Private companies such as Coca-Cola and Nestlé are allegedly in the process of privatizing the largest reserve of water, known as the Guarani Aquifer, in South America. The aquifer is located beneath the surface of Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay and is the second largest-known aquifer system in the world. Reported by Correiodo Brasil the major transnational conglomerates are “striding forward” with their negotiations to privatize the aquifer system. Meetings have already been reserved with authorities of the current government, such as Michel Temer, to outline procedures required for private companies to exploit the water sources. The concession contracts will last more than 100 years. […] This issue extends beyond South America, as all humans will be affected by the decision to privatize the second-largest aquifer system in the world. Essentially, the corporations are profiting off a natural resource that should be freely available to all. Under the Guarani Aquifer Project’s Environmental Protection and Sustainable Development Project, known as ANA’s Guarani Aquifer Project (SAG), the aquifer would be managed and preserved for present and future generations. Following the conservatives’ victory in Argentina and the coup d’état, pressed for by the ultra
right in Paraguay and Brazil, only Uruguay was left to vote on the privatization of the aquifer. Approximately two-thirds (1.2 million km²) of the reserve is located in Brazilian territory, specifically in the states of Goiás, Mato Grosso do Sul, Minas Gerais, São Paulo, Paraná, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul. Future generations will ultimately suffer if this deal goes through, which is why human rights organizations around the world are getting involved. “Organized civil society is alert to possible privatization strategies of transnational economic groups. Since 2003, the Organization of American States (OAS) and the World Bank, through the Global Environment Facility (GEF), have implemented the Environmental Protection and Sustainable Development project to gather and develop research on the Guarani Aquifer, with the objective of implementing a common institutional, legal and technical model for MERCOSUR countries,” says a document from the Human Rights Organization Terra de Direitos. Nothing will change if we, as a populace, sit idly by and watch greedy individuals exploit the environment and snatch precious resources from present and future generations. If you agree, please share this article to raise awareness. LINK: https://tinyurl.com/tt-s-amer-aquifer ♣
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Comments on the above report: Jeremy Arney, Sydney BC:
I do not support either Coke or Pepsi and my children and g-children (and soon, I imagine, my g-g kids) know this. It will take a lot of people around the world to join in and not buy their products and I am not convinced that will happen. After all, there have been times when people have been asked something really simple such as not to buy Shell gas for one day and it has not happened. We are in a complacent society where the money for a Friday drink and a ticket to the hockey game mean more than a healthy family, never mind earth. Jeremy, granpaiswatching@gmail.com Gerry Masuda, Duncan BC
Hi. The basic problem is bigness which has outgrown its competition and now has monopolistic power and all the abuses which could result. Market forces cannot control these corps. What is the alternative? Perhaps an expanded market theory involving regulation. Gerry, gerry.masuda@gmail.com www.dialogue.ca
Vera Gotlieb, Germany wrote:
Nestlé has been misbehaving all over the planet. That is why I BOYCOTT all their products and have been doing so for a number of years already. vg, peskyvera@stafag.ch Stephanie McDowall, Nanaimo wrote:
This is the second largest fresh water reserve in the world. This should not be allowed. This will establish a precedent for other countries water. Steph, smcdow@telus.net ♣ ALSO FROM PATRICIA WHITE:
I know people don’t want to read the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion... but unfortunately it spells out the whole plan for global domination very clearly [published in Russia in 1903, translated into multiple languages, widely available. According to the claims of its publishers, the Protocols are the minutes of a late 19th-century meeting where Jewish leaders discussed their goal of global Jewish hegemony by subverting the morals of non-Jews and by controlling the press and the world's economies.] ♣ VOL. 31, NO. 3, SPRING 2018
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LINKS FROM JUNE ROSS From June Ross, Nanaimo BC, jross12@telus.net
Is 5G a complete scam? From Dennis and Sharon Noble:
From this article it sounds like what Telus did to me. Promised fiber optic cable to my home, connected via wires in my home, but then deceived me with hidden wireless modems. The people of Boston were not told about this bait-and-switch and neither are the people of BC. And while they were at it, they stole my landline. But worse, it’s a scam to remove regulations. The telecoms will be putting cell transmitters outside our homes instead of having cell towers. No matter if they have current frequencies or new ones, they will be exposing everyone to high levels of microwave radiation. LINK: https://tinyurl.com/5G-bait-switch
5G and IoT*: a Trojan horse From Dennis and Sharon Noble: Dr. Paul Héroux, Ph.D., Professor of Electromagnetic Toxicology, Faculty of Medicine, McGill University warns about the dangers of 5G and reasons for the push. There are no good reasons for this, and there are options that are so much better in every way.
«The wireless industry dreams of deploying its new 5G (fifth generation mobile networks) infrastructure in your neighbourhood soon, as it has begun doing in
California. Boxes the size of a PC could be placed every 150 meters or so on utility poles, sometimes with small-refrigerator-sized boxes on the ground. 5G technology uses pulsed, millimeter-sized microwaves that are easily blocked by obstacles such as leaves, hence the need to install millions of cell signal boosters near homes. The telecoms say this is the most efficient way to ease the digital congestion caused by audio-video streaming, whose global traffic, according to American giant Cisco, will be eleven times higher in 2018 than in 2014. Data would move through fibre optic cables, but rather than bringing these cables to your home, the last leg of the data’s journey would generally be wireless… As markets work, personal mobile phone subscriptions are more profitable than the higher speed fibre optic connections linked to desktops through your own router. LINK: https://maisonsaine.ca/english/5g-and-iot-atrojan-horse.html
* IoT: during the past decade, the Internet of Things (IoT)
has revolutionized the rapidly-increasing use of computing applications to control physical infrastructure, hardware devices, appliances, etc. – in industry, business, transportation, government, homes, healthcare, education, etc. ♣
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Green Party leader Elizabeth May, M.P., warns of consequences re Site C after China buys Aecon From: Dennis and Sharon Noble/ June Ross:
Elizabeth May explains how sale of a construction company to China can hurt BC [National Observer] “The practical impact of this is huge. Horgan’s government will find itself at a disadvantage should it seek to toughen rules for workplace safety, for the environment or to belatedly and inadequately respect Indigenous rights. Any attempts to insist that Samsung and Aecon hire only Canadian workers, much less British Columbians, will lead to complaints… “Anyone reading the report of the BC Utilities Commission knows that Site C is an economic boondoggle and threatens the province's long-term fiscal health. Now the premier has to consider the potential threat of damages if he should regulate improved workplace safety or environmental measures in construction. He must pull the plug on Site C before the China 14 dialogue
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Communications Construction Co Ltd. purchase of Aecon is confirmed.” [Read in full at LINK: https://tinyurl.com/no-em-aecon ] ♣
Elizabeth was arrested on March 23, 2018, at the Kinder Morgan worksite. You can find a statement and numerous articles related to her act of civil disobedience at LINK:
http://elizabethmaymp.ca/category/news/week-in-review/
Site C updates From: Jack Etkin, Victoria
Here's some info about Livestreaming of the Site C Summit –Accountability and Action, held Jan.26-27, Victoria. You can 'subscribe' if you want... And keep an eye on the website for updates... (Please let people know). LINK: https://tinyurl.com/yt-siteC-summit ♣ www.dialogue.ca
The MATRIX restated Derek Skinner, Victoria BC
Many of you are aware of the fictional theme of the illusory world of The Matrix shown in some famous movies. Well, brace yourself… We do live in a real Matrix. Our Matrix is a composite of religion, manipulation of money, political corruption, control of the media, globalization and the artful use of language, to name just a few of the main ingredients. It has been concocted by and is now run by those that some call the oligarchs or “deep state” or the Bilderbergers or the “Jewish conspiracy” or a confederation of them all with similar agendas. No matter, they all use a facade of words and phrases to befuddle the relatively ignorant sheep. Consider religions – originally derived from superstitious explanations of physical phenomena; the priests and the rabbis and the mullahs have assumed to themselves the authority to determine moral standards and direct how people shall live. The sheep are enmeshed in a process of thought-control based on Faith, endless repetition of dogma and fear of the consequences that obscure any access to reality. No need for logical thought. But some are starting to break free.
Few people can connect the dots to see that Christianity is in effect a subset of Judaism – and this, despite the fact that Jesus was a Jew and the Old Testament of the Christian Bible is copied verbatim from the Jewish Torah so that Jewish mythology is embedded in Christianity. 1. Consider the Manipulation of Money. Originally conceived as a way to measure a difference in value and issued interest-free by authorities, it was later endowed with the ability to reproduce itself by the application of interest. Over the last few thousand years this has enabled economic growth and Statehood and the accumulation of vast personal fortunes. However, it has also resulted in the subordination of States to control by Banking interests. Some people still believe that loans are based on other people’s deposits as used to be the case with the old Savings & Loans Banks. These rules were discarded long ago. www.dialogue.ca
Nowadays, Private Banks create over 95% of the money in circulation as computerised credit available through multiple loans (10 to 20 times) based on a single “reserve” value in the Bank, using the principle known as “fractional reserves.” That means 10 to 20 times the interest: based on that single reserve amount. The single most poverty-inducing influence is the application of interest. If you incur a loan as debt, i.e. create money and repay the capital to extinguish the debt, the money equation is balanced. But nobody created the money to pay the interest. You can’t create money, so the only way you can pay the interest is by selling some of your own capital - be it a painting or some cattle, or working extra hours of labour or brainwork, or going without something. In this way, the wealth of the world is transferred at X% per annum from those who borrow to those who lend and this explains the increasing gap between the wealth of the 99% and the 1%. 2. Consider control of the media. People are gradually becoming aware that the “media” in all its forms (print, radio, TV, internet servers and even movies) is controlled from coast to coast by a few corporations which are the prime and sometimes the only source of information available to the public. The only other source is the minor “alternate media” distributed by individuals. The controlling interests in the corporate media empires are uniformly in favour of corporate interests. Opinions and editorials on issues that affect public policy are written at a central desk and distributed to compliant local media. The consumer has little access to alternate analysis. Add to this the endless parade of titillating sex scandals, sports trivia and any disaster anywhere – and is it any wonder that the man on the street is kept unaware of the primary issues that are reducing the world to the point of ruin. 3. Consider the use of language and words. The use of language and special words is central to the maintenance of the Matrix. Major corporations exist and use psychologists and behavioural analysts to study human behaviour and the key motivators that move public opinion. Originally devised by advertising agencies to entice people to buy products, the process has moved …/ VOL. 31, NO. 3, SPRING 2018
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big-time into political organizations and their need to persuade people to live life in a certain way and accept their policies. This has led to the creation of very large “consultancies” such as Hill Knowlton specializing in “Thought Leadership” and advice to political parties including promotion of mind-bending phrases and outright misrepresentations like “war means peace” and “Free Trade means freedom.” Do you remember Brave New World (Aldous Huxley) and “1984” (George Orwell) 4. Consider political corruption. This occurs at two levels: a) by the Party; and b) by the elected Individual. Corruption by the Party occurs when election platforms promise one agenda but the Party executes a different or unmentioned agenda when in power, because Parties are now dependent on Bank loans and corporate donations and have to respond with policies promoted by donors and special interest groups. Corruption of the individual elected representative may be via money pressures (it takes at least $100,000 to get elected), or via lobby groups or blackmail regarding misdemeanours. 5. Consider Globalisation. We are just now realizing that globalization is not just the formation of transnational companies operating in cheap labour markets but an outright attack on the sovereignty of individual States in order to implement a single platform of trade and social control orchestrated by unelected, faceless, corporations that can override national judicial regimes. The so-called “Free Trade Agreements with their corporate protection clauses are the oligarchs plan to euthanize National States.
The NWO integration of separate States has been tried with the creation of the European Union which is now collapsing because “one size does not fit All.” The New World Order cannot be implemented except by force until National States no longer exist. National States will survive until racial identities are eliminated. 6. Now Look at the Real World. Under this miasma of deceit there is a real world based on the Earth that supports everything we do… Mother Earth… Gaia. It is perfectly feasible to live and prosper and protect the environment, without endangering the flora and fauna – and we could live with stability instead of endless competitive growth. If we had the smarts we would harness the Sun’s output of zillions of gigawatts of energy that fall on the Earth everyday instead of fiddling with nuclear energy and wondering what to do with the accumulation of thousands of tons of radioactive waste. Critical Thought and Education are the keys to solving most problems and they apply in Canada to the six factors I listed above and many more of your own devising. I respectfully suggest that one of our problems is that so many worthwhile but impoverished organisations can only deal with one issue and have no interest in diverting their limited resources to a major community capable of effective action When we can get people interested in the whole Matrix we will be able to create a Force. There are incipient rumblings but they are only partially coherent. We need someone younger and smarter than me to write a text that will resonate over all dimensions of the Matrix. Derek Skinner, 17 March 2018
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A few links from Herb Spencer…
The Hacking of the American Mind: Pleasure vs. Happiness ~Explained by Dr. Robert Lustig
Here’s a Power-Link to an intelligent expert on food, addiction, mental health and HAPPINESS. Lustig is a professor of endocrinology at UCSF, where he specializes in neuroendocrinology and childhood obesity. He’s author of The Hacking of the American Mind, in which he reveals a massive conflation that exists in American ideology (and in the American consumerist ideals that have propagated throughout the planet) 16 dialogue
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between pleasure and happiness, which Lustig explains are completely different… (Jan. 29, ‘18, 18 min. video) From Alexandra Bruce, ForbiddenKnowledgeTV.net: https://forbiddenknowledgetv.net/the-hacking-of-theamerican-mind/
Schools destroy Creativity - proven From https://www.blacklistednews.com:
Shocking story of U.S. Schools dumbing down kids so they will be suitable for working in boring factories. Unfortunately, this corrosion is moving upstream into ‘higher’ level education. LINK: https://tinyurl.com/bln-edu-syst-destr ♣ www.dialogue.ca
Robin Mathews Uncut
RCMP: one of the most important legal cases in Canadian history is in the shadows “the Law’s delay, the insolence of office” (Shakespeare/Hamlet) By Robin Mathews, Vancouver BC possible and do in fact take place. One of the most important legal cases in the history of With brilliant care and detail, Justice Bruce unpicked Canada is presently in shadows as three B.C. Appeal the verbal and film evidence submitted by the RCMP. Court justices weigh arguments in the Crown-apThe RCMP representative was presented to the acpealed case (Jan. 15, 2018) against socially-chalcused couple, she concluded, as wholly sympathetic to lenged and recovering heroin addicts, John Nuttall and violence, as building a strong friendship with the pair Amanda Korody. Put simply – they were charged as accused, financing (for the couple) travel, hotels, Islamic Terrorists intending death and destruction to meals, transport – even, allegedly, nudging them toinnocents on July 1, 2013, at the grounds of the B.C. wards the choice of terrorist device … and … perhaps Legislature. even helping to assemble the false bombs. (As well as The case is one of the most important in Canadian his- dissuading them from seeking advice from an Islamic tory because the jury conviction of ‘guilty’ was erased Holy Man about the religious validity of blowing up by Madam Justice Catherine Bruce as part of a truly innocent people.) gigantic decision that the whole expensive, monthsIn a case of such compelling importance (ignored allong activity operated from the RCMP Ottawa head ofmost completely by so-called Mainstream Press and fice into the B.C. Fraser Valley (and to Victoria) was Media in that regard), Canadians have to think of the undertaken to lead, entrap, and criminalize the two ackinds of pressure that are exerted on the three, prescused … in a plan to mislead and misinform Canadiently engaged, B.C. Appeal Court judges. We want to ans about terrorist activity in the country. The mere believe their review of the case is completely unenpossibility that State operatives in Canadian democcumbered by “influence” of any kind. And that may racy might be engaged in such a way points to a possibe the situation. ble development of Fascism here that should send a But the federal Cabinet has already made clear where quiver of fear (and outrage) down the spine of every its loyalty lies: it is “with, right-or-wrong, the RCMP” Canadian. (a very, very dangerous stance). My letter to major In addition, the matter is hugely important as the apparent uncovering – the revelation – of a “False Flag:” Cabinet members asking for a Public Inquiry into in short, a dark political action (possibly ordered from RCMP behaviour and actions was funnelled to the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedthe Stephen Harper Prime Minister’s Office) to vicness – the Honourable Ralph Goodale. His reply to timize the incompetent and innocent pair on behalf of me did not mention that the letter concerned a Public “Western” desires to paint Islam as an inhuman Inquiry. Instead, he thanked me for my letter about breeder of despicable brutalities. (Fortunately, Justice the RCMP’s “major crime technique”. And Minister Bruce had no need to go near that matter in her reaGoodale urged me to support the RCMP. soning or judgement.) So far – across the West – the If the actions of the RCMP in the matter of the Nutpower and tightness of control by “the Deep State” tall/Korody case reveal the exercise of the Force’s has been so effective that an undeniable finding of “major crime technique”, then any Canadian may State “False Flag” activity has been impossible to fairly believe the Federal Cabinet (not incorrectly achieve anywhere. Some will say that such a finding termed “the Crown” in criminal cases) openly aphas been impossible because in a fair review of facts proves of the RCMP as a criminal organization – … no such finding could be made. doing the bidding of government insiders and their This case is, nonetheless, unique in that – if the judgement by Justice Bruce is upheld – it will con- ‘handlers’ ... however criminal the bidding. (A more alarming possibility is hard to imagine.) firm from the highest level of justice that governThe justices on the case have an unenviable task. ment-created False Flag criminal events to indocJustices Pamela Kirkpatrick, David Harris, and …/ trinate and brainwash populations are in fact www.dialogue.ca
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Elizabeth Bennett are experienced jurists. But they are not “better” than Justice Catherine Bruce, repeatedly praised for her clear head, her conscionable independence of mind, and her skilful judicial reasoning. The Appeal Court justices are acting in the face of enormous power – not an unusual situation for higher court Justices. But … in relation to the higher courts of Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia I believe that, in recent years, I have been able to detect real attempts to control (that is, to manipulate) judicial action and its fair operation … in short, to use the
higher courts to achieve criminal ends. That means, in this case especially, Canadians should be aware and vigilant. Especially since they won’t be urged to be those things by British Columbia’s “Mainstream Press and Media” whose hands, I believe, have been blackened (repeatedly) in their work “reporting” to British Columbians about major court actions of deepest interest to the people – and to the rule of law – in the province. Robin Mathews, Vancouver ♣
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Also from Robin: Some Post-WWII history The European Union. Self-Destruction in Process. by Robin Mathews (March 2018)
It didn’t come together quickly … and its collapse won’t happen in a blinding flash. But the growing dissatisfaction among European populations will grow. Misrepresented by the likes of Mario Draghi, European Central Bank head – and former Goldman Sachs employee, and Jean-Claude Junker, President of the European Commission - as well as by almost all Mainstream Press and Media … dissatisfaction will grow ... will increase and strengthen the process of decay… The European Union began in a lie and – because of the punishment being suffered by the people of Europe – the lie cannot continue. Clothed in a truly Great Idea about the liberation from wars on a continent full of different languages, cultures, and national borders, the experiment is, in fact, wrapped in the greed of international bankers, U.S. imperialism, local (European) competitions, and a blighted and inflexible retinue of private corporations which are so ‘progressive’ they would return to slave labour quickly if only it could be imposed…. The European Parliament is mostly a toothless sham. European power lies in Washington, in Berlin, in NATO, in the appointed European Commission, and in various European organizations, corporations and holders of capital. None of those forces is ‘enlightened’. Nor is the lackey European Press which is mostly owned by them. How did it happen? The history of the formation of the European Union is longer than most think. After the First World War a small group of thinkers and political actors urged the idea of One Europe. They were a small minority, but they did what they could to keep the idea alive: 18 dialogue
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meeting, publishing, campaigning. A significant voice through the time, Aristide Briand, eleven times Prime Minister of France, proposed (unsuccessfully) an economic union of Europe in 1929 – hoping to prevent what fell upon Europe after his death in 1932. And so came Adolf Hitler and in 1939 Blitzkrieg and the military unification of Europe. Some of the longtime advocates of unity thought Hitler’s Europe could be transformed into a democratic union. They were accused of being “collaborators” with Nazi brutality … and abused for their naïve hopes. And then Europe was cleared of the Nazi scourge. Even more intensely the cry arose that something had to be done to end the brutality of inter-European wars. The cry of ‘One Europe’ was raised again. Across the Atlantic as the Second World War was winding down (1944) numerous nations (44 of them) met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, U.S.A. to work out the coming shape of trade, commerce, international finance, justice, labour … (The creation of the U.S.-led military force, NATO, and the de facto exclusion of Russia came separately and a little later.) All of Europe (except Germany), the U.S.A., plus the United Kingdom, (in the 1944 meetings) set to work to hammer out a future for the Planet – a future which was, in fact, forged and controlled by the U.S.A. A famous contest ensued between Britain’s John Maynard Keynes and U.S. representative Harry Dexter White in which – simply because of the sheer post-war power of the unscathed U.S.A. – the U.S. won and created a global, U.S.-dominant financial and trading system … with endless implications for a “European Union.” When the 1939-1945 war ended, the U.S. discovered www.dialogue.ca
that the Marshall Plan (to restore Europe) presented unlimited possibilities of profit (and control). And those ideas pointed to the U.S. helping to create (and control) NATO and every major step in the construction of the European Union – an entity that is now so (needlessly) complicated that the European Parliament is an almost-toothless debating society. Not without central importance (but rarely mentioned), the bureaucracy of the EU proposed and wrote a Constitution for Europe. Three volumes long (perhaps the longest Constitution ever written, 2004-5), its creators were not anxious that the people of Europe study it. Governments in power began passing it. But a few countries, among them France and the Netherlands, required a vote by popular referendum to pass such a measure. French activists got copies, read it … and went on the offensive to disclose its contents and block passage of the “un-liberating” document. The result in 2005 was that both France and the Netherlands refused the so-called Constitution by significant margins. It was dead on the ground. Not to be defeated by the people of Europe, the EU bureaucracy created a treaty (the structure of treaties binding European countries is now called ‘the growing Constitution of the E.U.’), presented it at Lisbon in 2007 – where it was passed by governments of Europe – and The Treaty of Lisbon (containing some of the rejected material of the written and rejected Constitution) went into effect in 2009. Leaping to today, we are faced with the sleight-ofhand in France that gave it a sudden new party “En Marche” [“Marching on”, “Let’s Go”] and Emmanuel Macron as president of France. As the Socialist Party of France collapsed from betrayal … by following the dictates of the reactionary European Commission, France’s capitalist class rushed the blue-eyed saviour [‘Emmanuel’ translates ‘God is with us’] into place. Avoiding the direct attacks on working people that characterized the government of Francois Hollande, Macron is – for the time – securely in place. Marine le Pen’s opposing party – mis-called by most commentators (partly because it seriously questions EU structure) - struggles to maintain its presence, having made a creditable showing in the election that placed Macron in power. The recent shattering election in Italy routed the socalled Centre Left party led by Matteo Renzi (a duplicate of the Francois Hollande “Socialist” government www.dialogue.ca
in France). In both cases the governments were anti-labour, punitive to ordinary people, useless on the question of unemployment – in fact in the hands of the JeanClaude Junker European Commission (and through it of corporate Europe and its U.S. connections). Italy’s election – which gave the Five Star Party (radically questioning EU policies) the largest number of votes … and increased the power of Rightest elements – created a Mess, but a perfectly understandable Mess. The failure of “established” (media-acceptable) parties to hold their positions has brought about screams of the move to power of “Far Right”, “Populist” parties – which means nothing more than that legitimate protest voting has worked. (After all, populist parties are those supported by the population rather than by rich, contributing corporations!). And when reactionary governments like the “Left” governments of France and Italy meet Opposition – what to call the Opposition? The hack press of Europe chooses to call it “Far Right”! All over the Western World (except for Britain) socalled ‘Left’ parties have sold out to corporate domination, Canada not excepted. In Italy (and Europe generally) hurting parents, unemployed youth, and increasingly insulted working people are seeking a solution to the corporate-world-centred government of the EU. If one wishes to think of the Gigantic Failure of the European Union, one only has to look at Greece. Cursed with no greater corruption than the U.S.A., assisted in its faking of a balanced economy by Goldman Sachs of New York, desperately needing real community assistance to reconstruct its economy and political legitimacy, Greece has been chopped into fragments, desiccated, dishonoured, devoured, and sold-off by a conscienceless “troika” of EU appointees - to European and foreign Vultures – until the most able six million of Greece’s population have fled the country. (Do we really dare to speak of The European Community?) Italy is the third largest member of that “European Community’. The struggle in the next months to form a government that will work for Italians (instead of everyone else in the world with putrid wealth and criminal intent) ought to test the unity of the European Union and massively change its power structure … or announce the death-knell of the whole tragically misbegotten nightmare. ROBIN MATHEWS, VANCOUVER
Articles online at www.dialogue.ca VOL. 31, NO. 3, SPRING 2018
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“Ideas”
Liars’ Dice When Lords were Lords and Titles Meant Something David Muir Foster, Port Perry ON, david.foster2@powergate.ca
I was asked by a pressure group to send an E-message to the Prime Minister. They included a format frame that began: ‘To the Right Honourable Justin Trudeau, PC, M.P.’ I sent a message chiding him on lies and false promises. Then I saw the absurdity we all can’t see... there is nothing ‘Honourable’ about the whole Canadian ‘titles’ custom we have somehow created out of when we stopped having British Aristocracy being invited to over-see our governments, the Governors General who were trained for that sort of thing. Medieval custom had preceded every official pronouncement with a long list of ‘honours ‘won’ (or more likely self-awarded, so as to over-awe the recipient). Now and then a commoner would simply call their bluff. But then people of no particular consequence began calling themselves ‘The Honourable’ when clearly both the profession and the persons were as liable to be without true honour (as in Value Systems or Public Awards). Adding the honorific was just a failed attempt at one-upsmanship. We dumped it about 1918. The French after killing all their nobility around 1796, went through a period of implying there was a superior class called ‘Citizen.’ Napoleon Bonaparte would have none of that and tore it all apart to invent another aristocracy of ‘nobles’ loyal to himself. Why they were called ‘noble’ was because they were meant to pay for the privilege by being first to go forth at personal risk to enforce the will of the king. Bonaparte observed that, ‘Were it not for religion, the public would rise up and murder the rich everywhere.’ The privilege of wealth meant they could afford to educate themselves in the complex business of how to run a kingdom that would not divide and conquer itself. Empire building. But us? (It gets complicated... See Wikipedia: ‘Orders. Decorations & Medals of the United Kingdom’). ‘Lord’ originally meant the ‘Keeper of the Bread,’ charged with seeing we all had enough to eat, to plant, 20 dialogue
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to sow. There were social-support duties that were high on a Noble’s bucket list. And, over time, some 13 or more levels of hierarchy were introduced in England. From mere ‘Gentleman’ (small land owner) through to Cadet of the Military orders in Knighthood, on up to barons and eventually Marquesses and Dukes. All part of the pledge to see to the overall welfare of the kingdom. The British still have their Nobles with their sense of ‘noblesse oblige.’ Every military adventure was led by a ‘Knight’ at personal risk that made him and his class ‘noble.’ But us? When did any of the politicians we have do anything ‘noble,’ worth calling ‘Honourable’ or ‘Right Honourable’ in the face of lies? Maybe a few who did outstanding military service and earned a medal in that sphere. But the rest: bathing in adoring drivel. Neither of the Trudeaux ever did anything knightly. ‘Dear Mr. Trudeau’ (Bad start. He is only ‘dear’ in the sense of ‘O! Dear. What a mistake!’ Or ‘what he has cost us?’). So we live by customs we don’t even think about, until we can’t think at all let alone act to correct. No wonder a convicted swindler wanted to be given the title ‘Lord,’ the selfish Republican capitalist. Black as in evil. Clever, but evil. David Muir Foster, Port Perry, Ont. Mar. 3, 2018 david.foster2@powergate.ca ♣
Also from David…
Part of the “Green” mix that few are talking about…
Popular author Clive Cussler put out a novel called ‘Fire ice’… I wondered how much might be true, so I looked up ‘Methane Hydrates’ and got a credible US Agency. Makes me re-think much of what I thought was true, basic, or obvious. Apparently it is real and the US takes it seriously. That casts doubt on all the so-called ‘green technologies’ we are caught within. The most demanding industry everywhere is preparation for war, and that requires portable fuels and machines to win wars. That produces human damage and migration which itself causes more war. Morality …/ www.dialogue.ca
goes out the window as we all struggle selfishly to survive, our only comfort is sex which produces more humans for the struggle. And the population continues to rise toward 9 billion while the Educational Systems deal with trivia of interest to the age set 18 to 27 whose brains (according to the US ‘National Institutes for Mental Health’ studies and experiments over 30 years) are not yet ‘mature.’ Thus young men go off to be soldiers for one cause or another. Canada should be
on the forefront of this but isn’t. We fund little if any original research. ‘Going Green’ is apparently a colossal emotional fraud, a hysteria of interest apparently mostly to women and ‘youth’ in their endless social yakking. Going ‘Environmentally Clean’ is the sharper re-definition. Clean up the offal being washed into the seas. And that can begin locally right here at home, any home. David Muir Foster, david.foster2@powergate.ca ♣
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In Memoriam – A true Canadian hero, Dr. Shiv Chopra From Lucy Sharratt, Coordinator, Canadian Biotechnology Action Network (CBAN)
A true Canadian hero, Dr. Shiv Chopra, author of “Corrupt to the Core: Memoirs of a Health Canada Whistleblower,” has died. Sadly there seems to be no one willing or able to replace him. Dr. Shiv Chopra, Public Servant https://cban.ca/gmos/issues/regulation/in-memoriam-drshiv-chopra/
“I was speaking out, but it was my duty to speak out.” – Dr Shiv Chopra, September 2017 We mourn the death and celebrate the life and lasting contributions of Dr. Shiv Chopra, a strong and vibrant champion of science in the service of the public good. He has left behind a loving family and a legacy of committed, courageous campaigning for justice and accountability. Dr. Chopra was a dedicated public servant who shed light on how our food is regulated in Canada and the dangerous influence that corporate power can have on government decision-making, if public servants are not willing to speak up. Dr. Shiv Chopra was a veterinary scientist with a Ph.D. in microbiology. He was a senior scientist at Health Canada (Canada’s food safety regulator) where he worked from 1969 until 2004. Dr. Chopra was one of three Health Canada veterinary scientists who spoke out in the 1990s about pressure to approve animal drugs despite their concerns about animal health and food safety. They questioned carbadox, a drug used in pigs, and Baytril, which was used to promote growth in cows and chickens. Most prominent were their concerns over Monsanto’s genetically engineered veterinary drug Bovine Growth Hormone www.dialogue.ca
(BGH). Their public criticisms of BGH were met with gag orders from their employers at Health Canada but finally led to Senate hearings and a 1999 decision not to approve the drug. Dr. Chopra defied instructions from his employers not to speak publicly about his concerns, and about the pressure he was under at Health Canada. In 1998, Dr. Chopra and his colleague Dr. Margaret Haydon were interviewed on national television and asked why they thought they were under pressure to approve drugs quickly. Dr. Chopra replied, "Well, what do you think? Money. For multinational companies that produce those things." Dr. Chopra and his colleagues Dr. Margaret Haydon and Dr. Gérard Lambert were eventually fired in 2004 for insubordination. Dr. Chopra challenged his dismissal in court [https://tinyurl.com/cbc-sc-2004] and continued to fight in the courts for thirteen years, until the latest verdict in September 2017. He concluded, “If today I had won, I would get compensated for my loss of salary. But the issue of public food safety would still remain.” [https://tinyurl.com/oc-sc-2017]
Putting the interests of the public first "These three scientists are perfect examples of public service professionals putting the interests of the public first, ahead of their own interests. They are leading the way in the protection of the public good and they are pioneers in whistleblowing," - Gary Corbett, former president of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, 2011. Shiv Chopra continued to speak out on the wider issues of food and public health safety, including at the invitation of many communities in Canada and internationally, and he set up an organization called the Canadian Council on Food Safety & Health. …/ VOL. 31, NO. 3, SPRING 2018
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Dr. Chopra detailed his saga in his book, “Corrupt to the Core: Memoirs of a Health Canada Whistleblower” (2010) and some of his work and history is documented on his website http://shivchopra.com/ A summary of what happened in Canada over Bovine
Growth Hormone and the role that Dr. Chopra played is posted at LINK: https://cban.ca/the-story-of-bovine-growthhormone-in-canada/ - See also: http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/after-a-13-yearbattle-former-health-canada-scientist-wont-get-his-job-back
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Tribute to Dr. Chopra From Ann Clark, associate professor (ret.), University of Guelph:
“The tragic experience of Shiv Chopra as a whistleblower should be required reading, not just in institutions of higher learning but at every level of government in Canada. His chilling story centre’s on Monsanto’s flagship genetically engineered product rBST, commercialized as Posilac, but more broadly, profiles the ongoing conflict between corporate influence and government policy in Canada. Canada joined most of the rest of the world in declining to approve Posilac for injecting into Canadian dairy cows to increase milk production. For this, Canadians can thank the integrity of Shiv Chopra, and his colleagues Margaret Hayden and Gerard Lambert at Health Canada, despite terrible costs to themselves. It is difficult to see how the public good has been served by the decades-long government effort to stifle the well-founded concerns of these courageous whistleblowers. We must remember, and
celebrate, these true Canadian heroes.” "Whistleblower Shiv Chopra Remembered for 'Speaking Truth to Power'" Ottawa Citizen, January 11, 2017: http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/whistleblower-shiv-chopra-remembered-for-speaking-truth-to-power "NFU Remembers Shiv Chopra" National Farmers Union, Press Release, January 10, 2017 http://mailchi.mp/7703fa88526e/nfu-remembers-shiv-chopra?e=3e56e765fb Lucy Sharratt, Coordinator, CBAN Canadian Biotechnology Action Network (CBAN) Collaborative Campaigning for Food Sovereignty and Environmental Justice Temporary phone (cell) 613 809 1103 Email: coordinator@cban.ca / Website: www.cban.ca Follow us on Facebook and Twitter @biotechaction
ALSO FROM CBAN: GM Food Alert: A genetically modified salmon is on the market in Canada, unlabelled. For details see www.cban.ca/fish ♣
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ONTARIO WARNING: Controlled Act of Psychotherapy proclaimed into force; witch hunt has started Grace Joubarne, Ottawa www.StopPsychotherapyTakeover.ca
I love your magazine and despite being overwhelmed with the work involved in dealing with the endless attacks on our human rights by the Ontario government, I manage to find the time to sit with a nice cup of Chai and enjoy good articles. If you are able to, please find a spot in your next edition for this update. We are trying to warn practitioners as much as possible. Bless you for all the hard work you do. - Grace On December 13th, 2017 despite thousands of letters, emails, phone calls and petition signatures, the Province of Ontario ordered the proclamation of the Controlled Act of Psychotherapy into force [See: Order in Council 2318/2017].
An unaccountable corporation called the College of Registered Psychotherapists now decides what is and is not psychotherapy and is poised to eliminate all natural, holistic and spiritual care practitioners. 22 dialogue
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And while most residents were busy with the holiday season, Ontario’s Lieutenant Governor signed off on legislation that puts over 10,000 innocent and valued holistic, natural and spiritual care practitioners at risk of massive fines and jail time, effective Dec. 30th, 2017. In doing so, she engaged in massive human rights violations, indicating that the entire government structure has ignored legally-binding human rights legislation. The violations of freedom of association, freedom of spiritual care, medical autonomy, & privacy place thousands of practitioners in grave danger and millions of Ontarians without choice in mental health treatments. Legislation is now in force that: (a) violates virtually every legally-binding human right and freedom; (b) is much like the law deemed unconstitutional in the Texas 5th Circuit of Appeal in May 2016; and (c) places all healthcare under the full control of www.dialogue.ca
medical model/pharmaceutical advocates. Here is a brief synopsis of the situation: a) Back in 2007 the Ontario government started a fullout assault on our human rights by passing the Psychotherapy Act and the Controlled Act of Psychotherapy in a huge Omnibus Bill 171 that one MPP noted that they had had no chance to read before the vote. Some provisions in that Bill, including the Controlled Act of Psychotherapy, were not proclaimed immediately. We have been working hard for years now to prevent proclamation, always being disregarded and demeaned, kept out of the loop and deemed not to be "stakeholders" even though we, as both practitioners of natural healthcare and clients of other practitioners, are amongst those who will be most affected. Not even the general public is considered a ‘stakeholder,’ although it is their lives and well-being that are on the line. b) The Controlled Act of Psychotherapy could have died a natural and appropriate death on December 31st, 2017, being automatically repealed under s. 10.1 to the Legislation Act, 2006, for not having been proclaimed within 10 years of having passed its 3rd reading. Instead, on November 22nd, 2017, the Health Minister posted a "proposal" to amend Regulation 107/96 of the Regulated Health Professions Act (RHPA), allowing “for a period of time during which anyone may perform the controlled act of psychotherapy”. Public commenting on the "proposal" closed on December 3rd, 2017 – in violation of the province’s Regulatory Policy requiring a mandatory minimum 45-day period for public comments. On December 19th, 2017, the Registrar of the College of Registered Psychotherapists (CRPO) notified those on CRPO’s email list that “The Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care is proposing amendments…” -- more than 2 weeks after the period for public comments on the proposal had closed. c) To ensure that his abuse of practitioners and the public would not affect him in the next election, Minister Eric Hoskins went ahead and installed the amendment in Regulation 107/96 as section 7.2 and 7.3, exempting a person from being charged under the Controlled Act of Psychotherapy until December 31st, 2019, but in the meantime the unaccountable College of Registered Psychotherapists is sharpening its act as it engages in pretext calls to Reiki and spiritual care practitioners. [Note that regulations such as Regulation 107/96 can be amended without a vote in the Legislature, www.dialogue.ca
meaning that just as this amendment was added to Regulation 107/96 with virtually no meaningful advance notice to the public, Minister Hoskins also can have it removed or altered after the election without any meaningful notice to the public, in order to ensure that practitioners are put out of work as soon as possible after the election.] d) Meanwhile, Minister Hoskins had the Controlled Act of Psychotherapy proclaimed, and, illustrating his ongoing abuse of the legislative process, his Ministry of Health’s December 21st Bulletin states that they don't even know what the controlled act means and plan to figure it out over the next two years. By preventing the controlled act from dying as it should have on December 31st, the Minister has extended CRPO’s ability to torment innocent natural wellness practitioners and coerce them into joining its useless regime of extortion and control. e) On December 21st, two days after their belated email informing of the "proposed" amendment, CRPO issued an “out-of-left-field” email bizarrely stating “As you are likely aware, the Ontario government has proclaimed the controlled act of psychotherapy.” Making matters worse, CRPO stated that “without a thorough review of a full application, we cannot determine if one's practice involves the provision of psychotherapy that falls outside the controlled act.” Once they have an innocent spiritual care or holistic practitioner’s application, they have a clear target for their prosecution… if you are a practitioner, it is not likely in your best interests to get involved in any way with the College. Many applicants feel they have no choice but to apply in order to continue to earn their living, even though what they do is not and never has been psychotherapy… it is truly a horrible situation! f) And now, beginning in late December (see details at https://tinyurl.com/sptt-false ), CRPO, or someone else connected with this scheme, has apparently decided to use these next 2 years to collect information on natural practitioners, by making pretext calls and emails to Reiki practitioners and others. Ontario residents cannot have good health if a dictator and his pharma masters remove their safest and most cost-effective options. What you are seeing is more privatization at work to dismantle Canada. The government knows that people do not have years to spend fighting their way through courts, only to find that the Judges appointed by them do not subscribe …/ VOL. 31, NO. 3, SPRING 2018
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to human rights, even though the Supreme Court of Canada has repeatedly stated that the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights are binding on the government and are the inspiration for the Charter. You were set free of servitude to the corporate "government" in 1976 and ever since then, the government has spent billions to keep you from knowing that individuals are no longer obligated to the government, cannot be forced to pay any taxes, levies or dispose of their resources in any way but for their own ends…and cannot be forced to associate with a corporate regulatory college. Please wake up to what is happening in Ontario… in Canada.
All political parties run interference for one another; Conservative Party leader, Patrick Brown, even had the gall to change our 15,000-signature petition wording without our consent just before it was read into Hansard in January! We are working with other affected groups (wind turbine, hydro rate victims, parents, senior drivers, property owners, poverty) and will keep you posted. The People must take back the province and we must have a government run by the people, not money. We need your financial help and your skills. Contact: admin@stoppsychotherapytakeover.ca love & blessings, Stop Psychotherapy Takeover team www.StopPsychotherapyTakeover.ca♣
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Please Watch this film – Why HPV Vaccine Must be Stopped: From Inge Hanle, CDSAPI, Vancouver
“Sacrificial Virgins Documentary: How the HPV Vaccine Destroys Teens” LINK: https://tinyurl.com/smv-stop-hpv
Sacrificial Virgins is a documentary series in three parts, written and narrated by Joan Shenton and directed by Andi Reiss. It is a co-production between Meditel Productions and Yellow Entertainment. The three-part series features: Part I - Not for the Greater Good Part II - Pain and Suffering Part III - A Penny for your Pain – This part is highly recommended for viewing – sums it all up. We Are Exposing the Biggest Public Health Experiment EVER (taken from the webpage) The HPV vaccine – one of the world’s most popular vaccines – is also the world’s greatest source of serious adverse reactions, on a different scale to any other mass-administered vaccine, according to a new film now playing on YouTube. “It is a medical scandal,” asserts the film’s writer and narrator, Joan Shenton. “The Human Papilloma Virus vaccine – or HPV vaccine – is in a class of its own when it comes to causing pain and suffering, and in Sacrificial Virgins we are asking why. “The vaccine is supposed to prevent cervical cancer in later life. In part one of our series, we lifted the veil on that claim. In part two, we look at what adverse reactions really mean and uncover an appalling potential cause for them: replacing long established vaccine additives with new additives or new 24 dialogue
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combinations of additives that have not undergone long-term safety trials.” The leading HPV vaccines, Gardasil and Cervarix, are widely administered, often freely in schools or through national immunisation programmes. In the UK, the uptake in adolescent girls is well over 85% in the US, it’s 60% of adolescent girls and boys. Japanese rates were comparable with the UK until the government suspended the programme in 2013 because of the number of adverse reactions. There has been no such suspension in the UK, US or most countries. Yet UK government records, revealed in the film, show that in the years 2008-2014 reports of adverse events attributed to the HPV vaccine far exceeded reports for any other vaccine, including those on the most common mass vaccination programmes. By April 2017, such reports had reached nearly 9,000, including more than 3,000 “serious” reports. No other vaccine comes close. ANOTHER LINK: https://tinyurl.com/nh365-hpv Added Comment from CDSAPI: There is no dictatorship more dangerous than a "medical dictatorship" which "enslaves your body" to the "dictates of the state," which are compliant to corporate wishes, especially the "profit potential of Big Pharma" and whatever other "Agendas" the "Deep State Drivers" might have. Since Gardasil contains several ingredients that are known to cause reproductive failure in animals, is "population control" a reasonable suspicion for the drive for mandatory HPV vaccination of all teenagers? Inge Hanle, Vancouver, hanle@telus.net CDSAPI Citizens Demand Scientific, Academic, Political (and Media) Integrity ♣ www.dialogue.ca
A Natural approach to Healing Public intro-lecture about the teaching of Bruno Groening From Anna Christine Doehring, Nanaimo BC
Bruno Groening (1906-1959) held lectures about "Help and Healing on The Spiritual Path" during which astonishing healings occurred. Healings also occur today by applying his teaching as back then. Several thousand professionals from all medical professions (professors, physicians, healing practitioners, etc.) from over 90 countries worldwide belong to the Medical Scientific Group of the Circle of Friends. At present there are several thousand success reports in written form that are verified by physicians on the basis of independently produced medical findings & in so far as possible are documented. In accordance with the example of Bruno Groening, the Bruno Groening Circle of Friends provides no medical consultation, examination or treatment. “Help and Healing on the Spiritual Path Medically Verifiable” Friday, May 4, 2018 at 7 pm (introduction to the teaching), Shelley Road Centre, 186 Shelley Rd., Parksville, BC. Local contact: Anna Christine, 250-756-2235, Nanaimo (Vancouver Island).
For location & times for other cities (below): Contact Sylvia Liedeck, sialied@gmail.com May 3 - Intro lecture in Victoria, May 7 - Intro lecture in Vancouver May 9 - Intro lecture in Calgary May 11 - Intro in lecture in Winnipeg For more information please visit: http://www.brunogroening.org/english Watch a movie about the man and his healing phenomenon: https://bruno-groening-film.org/ ♣
Understanding True Healing and what is required to Heal (Nanaimo) Workshop by Anna Christine Doehring, RHFP, RCP Over 20 years a certified Practitioner of Reflexology, JinShinDo® Acupressure, & CranioSacral, Anna Christine knows now, after her certification of Reconnective Healing®: • That healing is actually quite simple. • That healing is based on something very different from what most believe. She will talk about various ways to receive healing in this very easy natural way. Two videos from healers are the proof. During watching these some experienced healing. Date: April 24, 2018; Location: Unity Nanaimo, 2325 East Wellington; Time: 7:00–9:00 pm. Admission by donation. Energy All Around Therapies, Nanaimo, BC 250-756-2235 - www.ReconnectionToTheCosmos.com / www.energy-all-around.com ♣
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Edwin Kaal: The Proton-Electron Atom — A Proposal for a Structured Atomic Model, presented at EU2017, held Aug. 17-20, 2017, in Phoenix (link to rebroadcast below) LINK: https://tinyurl.com/yt-edwin-kaal shapes correlate to the elements; why there are forbidFrom: D. Talbot, Thunderbolts.info (video presentation den configurations; and how groups in the periodic taof Edwin Kaal, 42 min. with simultaneous text) Begins with ble naturally arise. Magnetic spheres can be used to an overview of scientific thought concerning the atom, mimic the nucleus-specific construction and can be since Dalton’s research in the early 1800s. learned by anyone. Importantly, this model does not ThunderboltsProject, Published on Mar 11, 2018 contradict the evidence in chemistry and physics, but Edwin Kaal presented a new model for the atom rather provides a new interpretation and a promisingly based upon the principles of densest packing, balancfresh approach. With this model, Edwin has been able ing of electrostatic forces, symmetry, and the stable geometry of Platonic solids. Using this model, the sac- to resolve enigmas in chemistry and make predictions to inform future research. rosanct “strong force” of the modern theory is not reEdwin Kaal has studied fundamental and environmenquired. In addition, neutrons are redefined as a connection between protons and electrons. Thus, atoms in tal chemistry over his lifetime. After working in the IT sector for 10 years, he began to do independent rehis model are just protons and electrons in electrosearch. His journey of discovery led him to revise the static and geometric equilibrium. Following simple atomic structure… He resides in the Netherlands. rules and postulations, a structured atomic model emerges. The shapes represent specific attributes of Website: https://etherealmatters.org/ The Thunderbolts Project Home: www.thunderbolts.info the elements such as the valence value. The model EU2017: Future Science: https://www.electricuniverse.live ♣ shows how a number of nucleons and the geometric www.dialogue.ca
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Sustainability – Seeking a Future that Works Mike Nickerson, Lanark ON
These are challenging times. How do we get a civilization that has been growing for 10,000 years to realize it is grown up now? Getting bigger is no longer what we need to do. Since before recorded history, more people and more activity made humanity stronger. We lack models for a mature, post-growing state. Yet, many problems are unfolding as we grow toward planetary limits: the rising prices and conflicts associated with diminishing natural resources along with the health and safety issues resulting from pollution, including climate change, are just a few. In search of visions for a post-growth world, our 7th Generation Initiative has asked a lot of questions. While the magnitude of the necessary change is too great to offer a detailed plan, some ways of thinking about the challenge can be helpful. History speaks often of communities accomplishing great works when informed by a common vision: transport and communications networks, rebuilding after conflicts and disasters and splendid public places come to mind. Once we set sight on a world that can endure, there is reason to be optimistic. People thrive when their efforts have purpose. The vision for resolving today’s challenges must include two key elements: 1) the well-being of the natural world upon which all living things depend and 2) the well-being of all people. Our intent must focus directly on these outcomes. The goal of perpetual growth will not lead us there. While there are few cultural examples of a no-growth world, some guidance can be gathered from individual human experience. Growing is good for children. If a four-year-old is not growing, it is cause for concern. If an adult grows as fast as a four year old, however, that is cause for concern. Fortunately, stabilizing at a certain size is built into our individual lives and there are lots of adults around to help us make the transition. Unfortunately, besides overshoot and collapse, there are no clear models for post-growth humanity. There is hope though. As individuals, once we reach mature size, while we stop getting physically bigger, 26 dialogue
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our circle of relationships expands, we become more knowledgeable and develop more skills. We develop interests in sport, music and other arts and find satisfaction in helping others and simply appreciating the wonders of our world. If such were the general aspirations of people, the basics of life can easily be assured. Our bodies are mostly made up of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen which circulate in the air practically everywhere. Other elements that we need to sustain healthy life can be cycled endlessly through soil, plants, animals, people and back to soil. We know how to build structures that require no fossil energy to maintain. Health care, at the preventative level, and education are mostly products of our unlimited capacity for knowledge and goodwill. Humankind could be comfortable, healthier, more content and far more secure in such a world. Why would we choose to grow until we drop? Our challenge is to recognize our ecological maturity at all levels of society and to base decisions on accommodating that maturity. When accommodation becomes society’s purpose, enthusiasm will replace fear and denial in response to the time ahead. 7th Generation Initiative www.sustainwellbeing.net/challenge_and_goal.html Phone: (613) 259-5022; Messages: (613) 482-1208; email: sustain5@web.ca
The Sustainability Project / 7th Generation Initiative is an educational, non-profit organization that exists to collect, study, develop and teach ideas, information, technologies and customs that promote green values and lead toward a sustainable future. Mike Nickerson: Mike coordinated an initiative to establish a Genuine Progress Index for Canada. He is the Executive Director of The Sustainability Project and spends several months of the year travelling across Canada, making presentations and facilitating meetings on "how to live on Earth as if we want to stay". He lives near the village of Lanark, Ontario and supports his interest in cultural evolution doing custom woodwork. He would like to spend more time growing things. Mike is the author of Life, Money & Illusion: "Life" refers to the biological processes by which living things maintain themselves over time, "Money" to the present economic ideology that says that as long as the volume of money changing hands increases, all will be well. "Illusion" refers to the fact that these two perspectives are directly opposed in terms of how they would solve current problems. One of them must be mistaken. ♣ www.dialogue.ca
On Seeing… Try Learning Not to Ride a Bicycle So We Can Save the World By Edward Curtin, Massachusetts, Feb. 8, 2018
“Who would study and describe the living, starts By driving the spirits out of the parts: In the palm of his hand he holds all the sections, Lacks nothing, except the spirit’s connections.” Mephistopheles warning to the student in Goethe’s Faust
“And how far would you like to go in?” he asked and the three kings all looked at each other. “Not too far but just far enough so’s we can say that we’ve been there.” Liner notes to Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding album
“The shadow is what I am but will not admit I am. For the shadow of the psyche involves me in a deepening self-recognition which is more humiliating and emptying than the normal limits of endurance. In the end, acknowledging the shadow means acknowledging a bottomless void within me. The initial question of truth-force is: How deeply will I acknowledge my own emptiness?” James W. Douglass, Lightning East to West: Jesus, Gandhi, and the Nuclear Age We are haunted by a specter. Strange as it may sound, I was reminded of this when I saw a photograph of the quarterback of the Super Bowl winning Philadelphia Eagles, Nick Foles, looking and pointing up to the heavens. Or to be more precise, the roof of the aptly named U.S. Bank Stadium, a fitting venue for a national celebration of violence and the warfare state. But if we can assume Foles’ gesture was meant to penetrate the roof and travel up to heaven, then you too may find it a bit odd, if touching. Most people, as the poet Czeslaw Milosz has said, are ashamed to ask themselves a question about the implication of such a gesture. “They have experienced the collapse of hierarchical space,” he writes, “and when they fold their hands and lift up their eyes, ‘up’ no longer exists. Let no one say that religion can manage without such primitive directions to orient people.” Modern science has brought this about. And together www.dialogue.ca
with its models of reality, it has given us its technological child: nuclear weapons. So now we live haunted by the shadowy thought that human beings, having assumed God’s mantle, can bring this world to an end in a flash. As William Butler Yeats said in another context: “All changed; changed utterly.” But while we live in these end-times, in a new symbolic universe, our sense of spiritual power to stop the nuclear madness has been sapped by our refusal to venture deep into the interior of this enigma and change our minds and spirits enough to change the world. We seem stuck riding our bikes when we need to stop the world we think we know and experiment with truth at the deepest level. We need a revolutionary spiritual transformation to give us faith and courage to counter the nihilists who wage endless wars for the American empire and threaten nuclear destruction at every turn. Where can we find this inconceivable spiritual energy? ***
I was thinking of this not long ago when something very strange happened to me. Six days previously I had written an article subtitled, “In Light and Shadows.” On this particular morning I was sitting at the kitchen table contemplating that piece of writing and whether or not readers had grasped what I was trying to say by linking three very short stories that undulated like the flow of consciousness in waves of light and darkness. The phone rang, and as I answered I stood up and looked out the window at a flaming red bush, it being the height of fall’s display of colors. I heard my wife sobbing on the other end. “My mother’s dying,” she cried. “Oh no,” I replied, as I had an immediate flashback to my own mother dying five years earlier, and an inexplicably dark foreboding feeling gripped me. For some reason I looked at my watch; it was 10:58 on Thursday morning. In that instant, as I raised my eyes back to the blazing bush, I saw a sliver of a crescent dark shadow creep into the inner corner of my right eye as I listened to my wife tell me through her tears how her mother, who shared the name Rita with my mother, had turned a corner toward her death. When she was done, I told her something strange had happened to my eye. I had suffered a detached retina. While I was fortunate to have excellent doctors for …/ VOL. 31, NO. 3, SPRING 2018
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whom I’m very grateful, they were not very interested in my story of when the detachment occurred. Their job, as they rightly saw it, was to repair my eye and the rest was speculation since they operate within a materialistic paradigm. But as I recuperated, lying face down with my eyes closed for a few weeks, I had a lot of time to speculate (Latin, specere, to look at, view; pursuit of the truth by means of thinking). As I lay there hour after hour, day after day, eyes closed, I found that what began as thinking turned into contemplation. I had come to a dark place. I had been stopped in my tracks. The world I took for granted, my routine, my habitual way of seeing, my known world was stopped, and while shocked, I realized that I was given the gift of a revelatory experience if only I would accept it. With my eyes down and closed, I had entered the temple of contemplation where images rose to my inner eye, and if I paid enough attention, they would lead me to a place of insight. * * *
As a sociologist, I teach my students that sociology is the study of our social habits of thought, speech, and action. These habits or routines, which often become crystalized into myths and institutions, imprison us in ways we are loath to admit. Our collective mental habits are so powerful because they lie far deeper than mere thought can reach, and therefore to break them is as difficult as learning how not to ride a bicycle after years of knowing how. Where does one begin? George Orwell once observed that “we have sunk to a depth at which re-statement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” Today restating the obvious doesn’t seem to make much difference. At the level of the habits of group think and political and cultural propaganda, many of us have been trying to do that to little avail as the lies and deceptions of the U.S. power elites seem to win the day, day after day. It is blatantly obvious that these people lie endlessly in their pursuit of an empire built of sand saturated with the blood of innocent victims at home and abroad. Yet despite the obvious, and despite it being pointed out again and again, vast numbers of otherwise intelligent people continue to imbibe the myth that the “other side” (now the Democrats) will change the nihilistic trajectory of an evil capitalistic system leading to nuclear annihilation. The naiveté is frightening as these people calmly ride their bicycles down the primrose path of death denial. [See editor’s improvised image on the back cover.]
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* * *
As I lay contemplating the images that crossed my inner eye, I saw that we wear our social mental habits like shrouds that conceal the waking dead those habits have rendered us, sleepwalking prisoners marching toward oblivion. But why? Sure, the political propagandists are skilled at their work, having learned from and greatly superseded their mentor, Edward Bernays, in the tricks of the trade. And the technology has made their job much easier, and the CIA and other intelligence services have their people throughout the mass media. Yet something was missing in this explanation, a deeper explanation. It was then I again realized that there are different paradigms or experiences of reality operating in the world. The prevailing one today sees only a world of things, a material world that includes people and animals, a billiard ball world where surfaces without centers careen around in physical cause-and-effect determined movements. In this world the story of how my retina became detached is perhaps somewhat weirdly interesting but “just coincidental.” I suspected that my good doctors, if we met for a drink, would still hold firm to their habitual paradigms of physical cause and effect. They would have a very difficult time trying not to ride their bikes. * * *
Another way of seeing is provided by Owen Barfield, English philosopher and poet, one of the most neglected and original thinkers of the twentieth century, who countered the superficiality of our materialistic collective thinking with these words: “The real world, the whole world, does not consist only of the things of which we are conscious; it consists also of the consciousness and subconsciousness that are correlative to them. They are the immaterial component of the world. But today the only immaterial element our mental habit acknowledges is our own little spark of self-consciousness. That is why we feel detached, isolated, cut off not only from the world as it really is, but also from those other little sparks of detached self-consciousness we acknowledge in our fellow human beings.” Imprisoned in our isolated minds and failing to grasp the interpenetration of mind and matter, thought and feeling, a sequence of forms and patterns changing into other forms, Barfield argues that we end up treating not only other people and ourselves as things, but all of nature, including animals, as inanimate objects to be used. The world becomes a place for necrophiliacs, not the home of living interconnected www.dialogue.ca
spirits. In such a world, schizoid experience becomes …/ commonplace. In such a crazy world, “what the self of each of us feels isolated from, cut off from, by its encapsulation in the naked physical reality presented to it by contemporary culture, is precisely its own existential source.” Such a physically encapsulated self is a false self without reality. It is no wonder that the use of drugs of every kind has risen exponentially, the earth despoiled, wars waged constantly, and nuclear weapons prepared to blow the planet to smithereens. * * *
I had been thrown off my bicycle and then my doctors got me up again. Of course I was so thankful for their medical expertise, but I needed to try to not ride the same old bike. How could I break the habit, and of what did the habit consist. I didn’t want to say that I had gone not too far in but just far enough to say I’d been there. In where? During the days when I strictly, almost obsessively, followed my doctor’s advice and, despite the great discomfort, lay immobile, face down, eyes closed, I found myself deep in a prison that seemed to open out into a place of fear and freedom simultaneously. Although I wasn’t looking around and needed help with simple things, which my wife so kindly provided me, I experienced a weird sense of concentrated power from within the terrible vulnerability I felt. I am trying not to exaggerate, but this sense of power in vulnerability was very real. I had no interest in listening to the two books on tape I had; Tolstoy and James Baldwin seemed like intruders. They would distort the vision of what I was sensing. I think at its heart was a core of emptiness and powerlessness, which in the oddest of ways made me feel very powerful, as though all my teaching and writing and efforts to help others and make the world a better place and give advice and try to change people were useless and arrogant, but that their uselessness was their usefulness, and in accepting that I was embracing an essential truth. Earlier in my life I had numerous very profound experiences with synchronicity that had convinced me that our consensual reality conceals a level of truth rarely felt because of the power of habit. But these experiences had been all positive and had left me feeling amazed but powerful. One even involved the power of a look I gave another. The power of my eyes. This latest one was different since it frightened me and made me vulnerable. Telling you all this makes me feel www.dialogue.ca
doubly vulnerable, but now I don’t care. I now know why I have long wanted to make a word my own but never could. The word is insouciant. Somehow it has become me more since this latest experience. * * *
We are ruled by people who think they have everything under their control, including the nuclear weapons that are the ultimate expression of the hubris emanating from Einstein’s equation of E = mc2, the unimaginable amount of energy contained in a particle of matter. Those who brandish nuclear weapons operate within a consensual reality that is a form of madness, and these madmen will incinerate us all unless they are opposed by a force equal to that they brandish. How can we stop them? In his extraordinary book, Lightning East to West, Jesus, Gandhi, and the Nuclear Age (2006), James. W. Douglass, suggests that there is such a force and a way to stop this holocaust. It lies within you and me. He says: “Is there a spiritual reality, inconceivable to us today, which corresponds in history to the physical reality which Einstein discovered and which led to the atomic bomb? Einstein discovered a law of physical change: the way to convert a single particle of matter into enormous physical energy. Might there not also be, as Gandhi suggested, an equally incredible and undiscovered law of spiritual change, whereby a single person or small community of persons could be converted into an enormous spiritual energy capable of transforming a society and a world? I believe that there is, that there must be, a spiritual reality corresponding to E=mc2 because, from the standpoint of creative harmony, the universe is incomplete without it, and because, from the standpoint of moral freedom, humankind is sentenced to extinction without it.” * * *
I believe it too. It arises in the hearts and minds of those totally committed to the truth no matter where it leads, and the passion to suffer it, even when it makes them look foolish. “A man needs a little madness, or else…he never dares cut the rope and be free,” Zorba tells the boss in Nikos Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek. So let’s try learning not to ride our bicycles so we can save ourselves and the world. ARTICLE ONLINE: https://tinyurl.com/ec-so-we-can Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is http://edwardcurtin.com/ ♣ VOL. 31, NO. 3, SPRING 2018
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“Symmathesy”
(Pronounced: sym-math-a-see)
Mutual learning in context – everywhere – always… “[Nora Bateson] introduces the term symmathesy to describe the contextual mutual learning through interaction that takes place in living entities at larger or smaller scales.” (Book notes from the publisher of her book, Small Arcs of Larger Circles: [See also p.59] Framing Through Other Patterns, Paperback, Oct 2016, ISBN: 1909470961) ~ Combining the Greek prefix Syn/Sym (together) + Mathesi, (to learn):
By Tom Atlee, Eugene OR, Dec 6, 2017 LINK: www.tomatleeblog.com/archives/175327861
A poem about another deep dynamic we can tap into to generate wisdom together. What is it about the fact that everything is interrelated that makes it so * exciting * inspiring * and overwhelming? I once was called into a poem-journey about that vibrant dynamic …. https://www.co-intelligence.org/I-taoofCI.html And many years later (last month, in fact) a dear colleague sent me a book by Nora Bateson (Gregory Bateson’s daughter) whose newly minted word “symmathesy” highlights the idea that everything is mutual learning in context. That’s what Nora says: everything – at least everything with even the slightest hint of aliveness – is learning together in context. Not only is everything – every person, organism, system, and other life form – learning from and with other entities in whatever context they happen to find themselves… but each of them IS mutual learning in context – I mean, that’s what they ARE! That thought boggles my mind – 30 dialogue
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taking me to places thoughts don’t normally go. I have to take a moment to poke around in the space of that thought and feel my way into what it just might mean to me…. and to us…. Nora Bateson is telling us that mutual learning in context is all that’s going on, all the time at every level of existence. We could say that symmathesy IS what existence is made of. And it’s what WE are made of. Now, it is important to realize that this learning isn’t like school learning. It’s more like a dance or a flock in flight or a fight or a closing down because it isn’t safe or a learning to turn away or turn toward or dive in or escape or respond in whatever way seems likely to work in this moment or for the long term… intellectually, viscerally, emotionally, habitually, systemically… in our bodies, our hearts, our stances, our stories, our world…. Such learning isn’t always positive it isn’t always cumulative, it isn’t always conscious or even visible; but it is always responsive and mutual
…/
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with everyone and everything responding to each other all the time in big ways and small ways and it never stops. Each part of us is responding to all the other parts (which are its context) and to the world around us (which is its larger context) and to our history (which is its deeply embedded context) and to our assumptions and expectations (such potent ghostly contexts!) often filtered through this or that perspective or system (contexts upon contexts upon…)…. so many contexts – and they never ever stop. (I get this strange feeling that reality is some kind of evolving learningful field that’s really alive all around us and totally within us everywhere…) Nora notes that art – being intuitive, evocative, contextual, relational – is usually more able to comprehend, convey, and commune with this vibrantly alive complexity than science and reason which (while being extremely useful) are trying to nail things down (like clouds, children, forests, feelings…) that don’t actually respond well to nails. She also says that when we are trying to “solve” something we should – most importantly, truly, yes – recognize that the “problem” is connected, interacting and evolving with everything else and therefore: we would be wise to be humble and curious and to take the trouble to explore it www.dialogue.ca
through different lenses, perspectives, disciplines, contexts (a mind-expanding exercise, a world-expanding exercise she calls “transcontextuality” which begets what she calls “warm data”). And after my mind finishes boggling, I find I have questions: How do we decide where to stop? How do we choose the “best” lenses and contexts to view through? Or is it sufficient to humbly use some clearly incomplete gathering of perspectives that seem like they just might be enlightening and see what we discover by looking through them all and then humbly try things out in light of that and see what happens over and over and over… as all of it changes? And also – since I want to be an agent on behalf of Life and healthy evolution (Is that even possible? What does that mean?) – I find I want to translate all that into the primal power of conversation. Because we can view all that mutual learning in context as conversation – as conversation of everything with everything else – and that certain kinds of human conversation can be humanity’s most fruitful practice of “mutual learning in context” that serves the life of everyone and all. After all (says my “change agent” self) we know so much about how to help conversations transform differences, disturbances, destruction and dreams into greater insights and creative energies for whatever is next that is better …/ VOL. 31, NO. 3, SPRING 2018
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(or seems to us now to be better in This Context) over and over and over forever learning. “Symmathesy” calls up in my visionary mind’s eye the possibility of a vibrating evolving global web of life-bringing conversations among ordinary people, special people, expert people, powerful people, marginalized people…. across the borders of nation and scale across the chasms of “stakeholder interest” across all the battle lines and disciplinary boundaries across the illusory islands of “nature” and “society” across the weave of past, present, future engaged in finding what is new that will work for all. Symmathesy: mutual learning in context… It seems so obvious to me now that that’s all that’s going on, even in this moment that I’m writing…. And it seems equally obvious that that is how we human beings live into whatever our destiny is, into whatever destiny we are creating together even when we think we’re apart, alone, opposed…. (because, of course, we’re not: we’re always connected, always learning together, no matter how separate we seem…). And in the midst of that realization, I like to think that being awake, respectful, humble, and curious as we learn together in symmathetic conversations could make all the difference in the world we live in, in the world that we are, and in the world that we become. 32 dialogue
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Sources about Nora Bateson’s work: (book) Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing Through Other Patterns https://www.amazon.ca/Small-Arcs-Larger-CirclesPatterns/dp/1909470961 (movie) An Ecology of Mind http://anecologyofmind.com (Facebook) http://facebook.com/norabateson (podcast interview) Small Arcs of Larger Circles https://jeffcarreira.com/nora-bateson-interview/ (videos) An ecology of mind (and related videos) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8lA8jsQkNw (articles) Symmathesy https://norabateson.wordpress.com/2015/11/03/symmathesy-a-word-in-progress/ Liminal Leadership: www.kosmosjournal.org/article/liminalleadership/ ________________________
Tom Atlee, The Co-Intelligence Institute, Evoking and engaging the wisdom and resourcefulness of the whole on behalf of the whole Visit the Wise Democracy Pattern Language Project Read: EMPOWERING PUBLIC WISDOM PARTICIPATORY SUSTAINABILITY THE TAO OF DEMOCRACY REFLECTIONS ON EVOLUTIONARY ACTIVISM
The Co-Intelligence Symbol represents co-intelligence, not the Co-Intelligence Institute. It is available for use by anyone. You can copy it from this page and put it on your letterhead, business card, or anywhere else. The symbol has a number of meanings and connotations. In their most mundane meaning, the three elements constitute a loosely formed CoI or CoI, for Co-I(ntelligence). The right- and left-hand elements were derived from the famous yin-yang symbol of Taoism: The yin-yang symbol represents the interdependent opposites of the universe -male/female, good/bad, black/white, self/other, etc. The two halves of the co-intelligence symbol also represent difference -- although not necessarily opposite-ness. While the Taoist symbol represents the interdependence of yin and yang using the "eyes" (the small circles of the opposite color), the co-intelligence symbol represents connection between differences using the oval in its center. This oval especially represents dialogue between differences. The two black sections on each side of this central oval, mirroring each other, symbolize the two sides really hearing each other, even though they are still very much themselves. (They are also a bit like eyes, suggesting they are really seeing each other, as well.) The central oval also symbolizes something co-created by the two different lives that face each other and interact in the co-intelligence symbol. The "S-shaped" space in the middle suggests they are a good fit, that there is synergy. They are making something new together. This represents the essential co-creative dance of everything in the universe with everything …/ www.dialogue.ca
else, out of which each new moment and every new phenomenon emerges. The white ‘i' in the middle of the oval is a symbol of intelligence -- in fact, co-intelligence -- the kind of intelligence that resides more in the relationship and interactivity between us than it does within us individually. It is the special intelligence that arises out of dialogue and cocreativity (the central oval) -- especially when we fully hear and see each other. Some people reflecting on this symbol discover more meanings -- and we believe that is good. But
the meanings described here were the most conscious meanings guiding its design (or evoking its emergence...). Feel free to use it, share it, spread it however you wish. It is a generic symbol, like the peace sign or the yin-yang symbol above. It belongs to us all. We would love to see it everywhere.... The Co-Intelligence Institute, P.O. Box 493, Eugene, OR, 97440; cii@igc.org www.co-intelligence.org ♣
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Boolean algebra
“Your Health Matters”
Dr. Derrick Lonsdale, Strongsville OH
Some mathematicians may be familiar with a form of statistical analysis known as Boolean algebra. The subjects of analysis can each be represented as a circle interlocking with circles that stand for other factors that are under examination. Each circle can be assessed easily by calculating its area. The area of overlap between any two circles can also be calculated. The three circles of health Imagine three interlocking circles. Circle number one overlaps with circle number two that overlaps with circle three that overlaps with circle one. They all overlap in the center. I have used this for many years in the assessment of the state of health for a given individual. Genetics, circle number one Each of us comes into the world with a set of genes inherited from both our parents. These provide us with the characteristics that are genetically determined by the two sides of the family. Now that we know that genes are constructed from a substance known as deoxy ribonucleic acid (DNA), we understand that our identity is written in the form of a complex code. An adult body is constructed from the union of 70 to 100 trillion cells, each being a one celled organism in its own right. Something that most of us do not generally think about is that each cell requires energy that is generated by cellular "engines" known as mitochondria. A relatively recent discovery is that mitochondria have their own genes that are inherited only from the mother. We all know, of course, that we can inherit genes that cause us to have a specific disease. The genetic error may be in the cellular or the mitochondrial genes. We are now being informed from further research that a genetic error may be quite slight, insufficient to cause disease in its own right. Although genetics may be the www.dialogue.ca
sole cause, disease usually follows when the genetics circle is influenced by something else. The size of the circle decides its importance. Stress, circle number two We survive in a hostile environment to which we have to adapt throughout life. We adapt to environmental changes of temperature, heat, cold, wet and dry. We are surrounded by micro organisms ready to attack us. Add to that the circumstances that surround us as a result of civilization and we begin to perceive stress as a force that can be physical, mental or both. What we fail to realize is that adapting to any form of stress requires energy to drive the cellular response. This is conducted and organized by the lower part of the brain. Because this part of the brain and the heart both work 24 hours a day, they are the organs that are most demanding of energy. Of course, potentially lethal trauma or a pathogenetically virulent microorganism might well be the only circle that matters as the source of stress, but generally speaking, a healthy adaptation requires genetically structural integrity and sufficient energy for the adaptive mechanisms. It is again the size of the circle that indicates its importance. Nutrition, circle number three Our environment has to supply all the ingredients required to meet the synthesis of energy. It is therefore exquisitely complex but can be broken down into three parts, oxygen, fuel and ignition. We extract oxygen from the air, absorb it into the bloodstream and convey it to all our cells where the oxygen combines with fuel in the process known as oxidation. Vitamins and minerals, both of which must be included in the food, are essential components, resulting in oxidation that releases energy from the fuel. Epigenetics A relatively new science known as epigenetics …/ VOL. 31, NO. 3, SPRING 2018
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studies the relationship between nutritional components and genes. We now know that nutrition and lifestyle can influence genetic function. This therefore represents the overlap between the first and the third circle. The clinical use of three circles of health I will take diabetes types 1 and 2 as examples. Most people are aware that type I has a major genetic background. But the disease rarely, if ever, occurs at birth. We have to conclude therefore that some other factor has to come into play to cause the disease. It is fairly well-known that the first symptoms appear in an individual who develops a cold (infection stress), or experiences some form of physical or mental injury. I remember the statement of a university-based geneticist. He had failed to develop a genetically determined prediction for the appearance of the disease for the use of genetic counseling. In my view, he had not (and could not) included some form of stress. Neither had he considered the absence of nutrient complement in the etiology. Recent research has found that deficiency of thiamin (vitamin B1) is virtually a constant feature in type I diabetes and it has been found that megadoses of the vitamin may very well be an additional therapeutic approach. In fact, diabetic neuropathy is probably a result of this vitamin deficiency. In consideration of type II diabetes, the genetic linkage is much more obscure but thiamin deficiency also occurs in this disease. Since type II diabetes is sometimes the forerunner of Alzheimer's disease, it is not surprising that research has shown that thiamin metabolism is an important feature of Alzheimer's disease. Energy It is becoming more obvious that there are minor mistakes in the formation of DNA. The mistake may be in the cellular or mitochondrial genes. These changes may not be sufficient on their own to cause disease, so in most cases of health breakdown the other two circles play a part. However, nothing happens in the brain/body union without energy and there is no doubt that survival is impossible without oxygen, food, or water. Since food is, as far as we know, our only source of energy, it must be complete in its complexity. Effect in the brain As already stated, the brain, and particularly the lower part of the brain where the effect of our emotions is generated, is at risk from incomplete nutrition. Crime that has become extremely common in the poorer parts of British cities has been classified as disease. Should we not consider this as a possibility to explain the 34 dialogue
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multiple school shootings in America? One can easily imagine that a grievance, nursed emotionally, can break into the kind of hatred that is well beyond the summons to activity of a healthy brain. Years ago the public defender in Cleveland brought to me a young AfricanAmerican after he had committed a completely stupid robbery. The public defender wanted to plead temporary insanity, a defense that is legal in the state of Ohio if it can be proved. We found evidence of highly abnormal brain chemistry and his diet was appalling. With nutrient supplementation and directing his diet, a year later he was in a community college studying for a job. A defense of temporary insanity was accepted by the Common Court but was overturned by the High Court of Ohio and he still had to go to jail. It is becoming much more obvious that brain disease represents dysfunctional chemistry where the interlocking of genes, stress and nutrition might make sense out of senselessness. In one of the newspaper reports of the Florida shooting, it was mentioned that the shooter had been directed by voices in his head, surely the hallmark of schizophrenia.
– Derrick Lonsdale, M.D. “Everything is connected to everything else.”
Dr. Lonsdale retired in 2012 at the age of 88 years; he is a retired Fellow of the American College of Nutrition and a Certified Nutrition Specialist. Website: www.prevmed.com/ Blog: http://o2thesparkoflife.blogspot.com/ Dr. Lonsdale is author of: A Nutritional Approach to a Revised Model for Medicine – Is Modern Medicine Helping You? and also Why I Left Orthodox Medicine, and, in Aug 2017, his new book:
Thiamine Deficiency Disease, Dysautonomia, and High Calorie Malnutrition by Derrick Lonsdale (Author), Chandler Marrs (Author) explores thiamine and how its deficiency affects the functions of the brainstem and autonomic nervous system by way of metabolic changes at the level of the mitochondria. Thiamine deficiency derails mitochondrial oxidative metabolism and gives rise to the classic disease of beriberi that, in its early stages, can be considered the prototype for a set of disorders that we now recognize as dysautonomia. This book represents the life work of the senior author, Dr. Derrick Lonsdale, and a recent collaboration with his co-author Dr. Chandler Marrs. The book: • Presents clinical experience and animal research that have answered questions about thiamine chemistry • Demonstrates that the consumption of empty calories can result in clinical effects that lead to misdiagnosis • Addresses the biochemical changes induced by vitamin deficiency, particularly that of thiamine. ISBN: 0128103876 / Kindle, ASIN: B073NCFNLX ♣
www.dialogue.ca
“BOOK TALK” By J.S. Porter, Hamilton, Ontario
www.spiritbookword.net
Nicholas Royle, How to Read Shakespeare. I never seem to tire of books about Shakespeare. My library is ever-pregnant with new additions. Nicholas Royle’s guide on how to read him is one of the most enjoyable and insightful additions I’ve come across in recent years in its recognition that words in Shakespeare “seem to take on an autonomous life … They are like little search engines, meddling imps, strange creatures with wills of their own.” Royle examines seven plays, a chapter for each. He investigates each play through a key word that reveals its heart. Witsnapper : The Merchant of Venice Phantasma: Julius Caesar Love-shaked: As You Like It Mutes: Hamlet Seel: Othello Safe: Macbeth Nod: Antony and Cleopatra Some of the words on Royle’s list—witsnapper, phantasma and love-shaked – are nonce words, one-timers; that is, they appear in the play in question and never again. Shakespeare seems to do that from time to time: invent a word for a special occasion. Witsnapper, for instance, has to do with the quickness of wit (wit in the in the sense of humour and wit in the sense of intelligence). To be a witsnapper is to rhyme off words with the ease of a snapping finger. Royle reminds us that “How to read Shakespeare is a question of how to think about wordplay.” He goes on: “A single word in Shakespeare…opens up into a drama of wits…Playing on words, playing with words, words playing all by themselves: wordplay in Shakespeare entails the wit of seeing…” When I’m reading Royle on Shakespeare I start to believe that Shakespeare must have read, or anticipated, the American-Russian novelist Nabokov’s conviction: “Everything in the world plays: the blood in the veins of a lover, the sun on the water, and the musician on a violin… Everything good in life – www.dialogue.ca
London: Granta, 2014.
love, nature, the arts, and family jests – is play.” Royle makes three generalizations about Shakespeare’s language. First, “[T]here is no plain meaning in Shakespeare without irony.” Secondly, “Shakespeare’s language is ‘tricksy’ (Shakespeare’s word) – ironic, deceptive, artful, ambiguous, crafty or capricious – even when it may appear ‘plain.’ ” Thirdly, “[W]ordplay or witsnapping makes up the enduringly strange character of his writing.” By strange, Royle means Shakespeare’s capacity to surprise and “alter our sense of the world.” Royle’s selection of “mutes” is an example of his and Shakespeare’s irony. Perhaps the most word-driven, word-obsessed play in the Shakespearean canon peters out into silence. After the bloodbath of all the significant characters, except Horatio, wordy Hamlet’s last word is literally silence – “The rest is silence.” Before the finale, he turns from the dead Queen, his mother, to the playgoers watching the play: “You that look pale and tremble at this chance,/That are but mutes or audience to this act…” Mutes are speechless actors, and Hamlet’s words seem “directed beyond the stage, addressing us, as readers or spectators.” By the end of the play Hamlet is mute and so too is the audience. Tiny words in Shakespeare often have immense power. Take ‘nod’ in Antony and Cleopatra, for instance. In the course of the play, Antony nods to Cleopatra and Cleopatra nods to Antony. They exchange rivers and lakes of words as well, but the nods seem even more revelatory than what they say. “Something of their extraordinary passion and rapport with one another is communicated, speechlessly, cryptically, through the shifting play of this little word.” The word accommodates a wide range of connotations: “[I]t can be imperious or deferential, detached or intimate, confiding or cryptic, menacing or seductive, vigilant or sleepy.” But in a love story, which Antony and Cleopatra most certainly is, the word primarily displays love. I think here of Raymond Carver’s short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” where the character who talks the most about love seems to know …/ VOL. 31, NO. 3, SPRING 2018
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the least about it and the character who talks least about love seems to show it best through physical gesture and touch. Centuries before Carver, Shakespeare seemed to know viscerally that love is best communicated through little gestures, touches, glances. Nicholas Royle’s How to Read Shakespeare is a delightfully playful little book where you as the reader need to pay attention to little things. In the high praise
of the French critic Helene Cixous: “If there is today a Prospero who can conjure up the ageless magic of Shakespeare…it is the marvelous Nicholas Royle.” J. S. Porter -------------------------------
The Granta Books series on “How To Read…” also includes short accounts on the Bible, the Qur’an, Heidegger, Kierkegaard and Plato. ♣
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Invoking the soft, spacious warmth of Love… Thinking of You with warmth, and gratitude [Though written in December, a timeless message…]
From Christina Stafford, Nanaimo BC
Because we are in such unusual times, I’ve found it difficult to turn toward the traditional lightness of this season. And so I wanted to stop, and focus on the unusual beauty and mystery of the night and its luminous gifts… And I want to remind myself – and all of us – that our world is part of a vast intelligence – abundant with potential far beyond what we can imagine when we are contracted with fear and anger toward the harm that has been slowly engulfing our planet through a system of belief that severs the human mind from its own heart and the vulnerable bodies of all living things… But we are all part of an infinite wholeness, even though this truth can be obscured and denied… And that wholeness is animated by the energy of
love – which is why we feel pain when harm comes to that – or those – we care about. Love is only a word, but its essence is unimaginably powerful. That’s why it is feared so profoundly by those who depend on generating fear in others in order to create an illusion of power in themselves. So I imagine all of us – effortlessly afloat in a pool of soft, warm water – allowing every contraction to loosen while trust in the spacious warmth of Love that supports us, relaxes and restores us – and melts whatever is frozen in our hearts and minds and bodies. I am grateful to be able to imagine floating in a pool of warmth, looking at the night sky* – with you there too. Warm wishes at Christmas and all the year through. Christina, cm.stafford@shaw.ca ♣ * Christina’s night sky image is on back cover.
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The Train of Life From Sammy Camilleri, Sault Ste. Marie ON salvu1@hotmail.com
This has been around before, but it has such beautiful sentiments I'm sending it out again – Sammy
At birth we boarded the train and met our parents, and we believed they will always travel at our side. However, at some station, our parents will step down from the train, leaving us on this journey alone. As time passes, other people board this train, and they will be significant: our siblings, friends, children, and even the love of your life. Many will step down and leave a permanent vacuum. Others will go so unnoticed that we don't even realize they vacated their seats. This train ride will be full of joy, sorrow, fantasy, expectations, hellos, goodbyes, and farewells. 36 dialogue
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Success consists of having a good relationship with all passengers, requiring that we give the best of ourselves. The mystery to everyone is: We do not know at which station we ourselves will step down. So, we must live in the best way: love, forgive, and offer the best of who we are. It is important to do this because when the time comes for us to step down and leave our seat empty we should leave behind beautiful memories for those who will continue to travel on. I wish you a joyful journey on the train of life. Reap success and give lots of love. More importantly, thank God for the journey. Lastly, I thank you for being one of the passengers on my train. ♣ www.dialogue.ca
Slightly ex-saturated John Woodsworth, Ottawa A life-based story by John Woodsworth, written while a student at the Summer Slavic Workshop, Indiana University (Bloomington, Indiana, USA) in the summer of 1963, shortly after watching a Russian film.
Outside the storm raged on. As I came out of the film I was greeted by flash after flash of sparkling, iridescent light illuminating the whole upper hemisphere of the heavens. The hundreds of music lovers that, on the prospect of a pleasant evening at the opera, had flocked to the magnificent production of Verdi’s Aïda in the university’s huge outdoor amphitheatre, were now to be seen scurrying hither and thither across the campus — some seeking immediate shelter, others trying to make their way as fast as possible to the residences. Cars, which didn’t seem to be any more orderly than the pedestrians, inched their way down the local campus thoroughfares, all heading in different directions, but all for the same place — home. Still lulled in a half-stupor by the effect of the film I had just seen, I stood in silence on the steps for a few moments, trying to collect my thoughts and at the same time trying to take in the wild and unaccustomed scene before my eyes. For far away on the Pacific coast of Canada where I lived, a lightning storm was something of a rarity, and certainly never before had I been so close to one as this. Thus was the scene that night so strange and exciting to me. “Hey, want a ride to your dorm?” someone shouted at me through the rain, scarcely audible under a loud peal of thunder. But I heard, and gladly accepted, for indeed the rain was coming down in pellets, and fast ones, just as if we were being bombarded from the air by a mass of tightly-packed machine guns. Only we weren’t just suddenly struck down all at once, as by real bullets — no, these we had to endure — we were to be wounded, painfully inflicted, but left alive to suffer. Ah, at last the car, and our haven of refuge — for a while, at least, from the hostile torrent outside. I climbed in first, followed in rapid suit by four other wet but happy refugees. The doors clapped to and we started off. The ride was only a few minutes — only a few seconds, it seems now — but back then it felt like an eternity, as if the events of that night had suddenly expanded their temporal dimension and filled a whole lifetime, or if a whole lifetime had been concentrated www.dialogue.ca
into that one memorable night. I felt a little shiver down my spine at each new series of flashes, but at least the radio blaring in my ears succeeded in drowning out the noisome thunder to some extent. I was still not quite in full consciousness, and as we drove along through the wet, it seemed to me as though we were vainly splashing our way through some fantastic dream — so beautiful, and at the same time so terrifying, even like the lightning itself. The bustling crowd of opera-goers appeared to be in more of a bustle than before, as the machine guns above increased their fire and the watery pellets pelted down with constantly renewed vigour and velocity. Almost in vain the lone policeman at the corner, garbed in a glistening white mackintosh, braved both the vertical and horizontal traffic surrounding him. When our turn came, he waved us wetly on with a routine movement from his inevitable electric torch; the latter now appeared so poor and tiny amid the vast splashes of brightness which repeatedly spread themselves across the whole sky above. “Turn right here,” I said to the driver beside me, who was then leaning as far forward as he could, trying to peer out of the rapidly frosting windscreen, for the car by this time was filled with stifling cigarette smoke. Fortunately, I had my window open a little and was able to see in time the side-street that led down to the residence. We turned. Instantly the array of headlamps and the noise of cars and people fleeing the amphitheatre ceased. Even the radio seemed quieter. Only the illuminating flashes across the night sky and the machine-gunned pellets from above was I conscious of, but of these I was conscious to the full. A few more turns in the road and the car pulled to a slippery stop in front of the great entrance doors. Thanking the driver for his kindness, I jumped out, clapped the door to, flitted across the drive and up the steps, until at last I felt myself safe in the warm and inviting, well-lit entrance hall. As I momentarily turned and looked back, all at once a great flash cast a shadow of blue light over the friendly vehicle which had brought me safely hither, and which was now wending its way further into the night to seek similar shelter for the rest of its occupants. *
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The hall was empty when I entered, except for one lone boy sitting quietly on the only chair visible in the room. All seemed so quiet and peaceful after the raging storm which I had just left outside. I looked up at the clock, ticking away undisturbed from its customary position on the wall above the notice board, as if defying the elements in their temporary tirade against our community with its calm, quiet, endless ticking, ticking, as though signifying to all the calm but irrevocable advance of time. I looked up at the clock. A few minutes past ten. As I wasn’t living right in the main residence where I had arrived at the present, but in a smaller annexe a little distance away, I decided to stay where I was for a bit and await a possible let-up in the downpour. After about ten minutes of impatient pacing around the floor, trying to interest myself in something or other on the notice board and repeatedly letting my eyes casually drift upward to the clock, and again over towards the window (in order to satisfy myself as to the latest progress in what was taking place beyond it), I suddenly noticed that the boy had left and the lone chair was now unoccupied. Moving it over to a more comfortable position — away from a rather unpleasant draught injected by the monster storm outside through the cracks between the doors and their frames, like a scaly, slippery tentacle injected slyly through the cracks in a ship’s hold by some fearsome monster of the deep — I sat down and began to think. I thought about the film I had watched that evening, and passed the time trying to find any possible connection between it and the events which followed (already described above). No luck with the plot: the love affair of a Leningrad doctor with one of his patients didn’t tie in very well with a cloudburst in the American mid-west... Only the film’s title arrested me: An unfinished story. Could the theme of the story have continued in the events that followed in real life? Was the finish still to come? However, before I had time to think about the answer to these self-imposed questions (which I still wasn’t quite ready to regard as entirely rhetorical), I was suddenly interrupted in reverie by the sound of voices from the door. I looked up to behold two new helpless victims of the raging beast outside. *
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But these were wet, all wet, pitifully wet, clearly having braved the battle longer than had I. Aïda was just 38 dialogue
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beginning her second act, said the ladies, when the second cancellation was announced. Apparently the performance had been cancelled earlier on account of a mild shower, but the company had decided to proceed upon this passing over, little recognising it as merely the vanguard of the great and mighty regiment to follow. “When they stopped it the first time, they should have stopped it for good!” said one of the ladies with the slightest touch of indignation, as though she had received a personal insult from either the storm or the company — both equally irresolute and frivolous, never doing what they appear to be doing, and so forth. “Well, I’m not going to drag myself over there again tomorrow night,” complained the other. “I’m just too wet and tired to do anything!” She evidently felt she had been permanently injured. And thus the conversation went unconnectedly on about the weather and the opera, and the dangers of going to the opera in the rain, etc., etc., until both finally became as tired as they had been saying they were, and waddled over to the waiting lift to take themselves to their rooms. Plop! at the door. Turning in the direction of the sound, I beheld a personage slightly convex in figure, fallen flat on her face on the wet floor. So the tyrant of the evening, water, was penetrating even behind our lines of Dryness, and claiming victims within our camp of shelter — as one might make a last attempt to bring down an escaping prisoner-of-war, fleeing just past the enemy front on his way to shelter among his own. This one was brought down, all right, but not for long — there was her companion frantically trying to help her up and... and plop! again. Water, water everywhere... Too much water. Once again the companion with mighty effort began to inch the burdensome body upward — up and slowly, slowly out of the spreading liquid mass… “Easy there now...” Oops! Dropped a little… Hold ’er steady!... “Now up, up… that’s it, nice and easy!” And slowly but surely, higher and higher rose the great and mighty figure, under the tireless support of her companion, until at length she succeeded in getting the foe (water!) under her feet and recovering her normal vertical position. “Well, my dear,” remarked the companion, “that was quite a fall!” The other, being neither prepared nor able to utter any arguments to the contrary, panted in silent agreement. www.dialogue.ca
Having now reached safety in the deeper reaches of the hall, both let out a long, somewhat waterlogged sigh and deposited their damp selves on a long, low, slitted affair — which looked like a cross between a saw-horse and a coffee table, but which was unfortunately in the wrong place for either one. “Good evening,” I ventured, trying to make my voice sound as warm and cheery as possible. “Soaked!” came the reply — cold, but certainly with feeling. “Is it still raining hard?” I tried to sympathise. This time my query was answered entirely with feeling, for not even one word was offered. I decided I had better follow suit. And thus we sat several minutes in silent communication about the weather and the slippery floor, and the dangers of going to anything in the rain, etc., etc., until at last it was
remarked that they would be better able to bear their grievances in bed, whither they eventually set off, by way of the lift, and I found myself once more alone. And at this point, sitting silently alone in the empty, draughty hall, with the rain and wet beating about the doors, I decided to take up my pen and set forth for posterity the adventures which I had both witnessed and suffered that evening, your perusal of which, dear reader, is just now coming to an end. John Woodsworth, jw@woodsworth-ott.ca Visit: LINK: https://tinyurl.com/ie-alumni-jw to read A Life in Translation: Interview with John Woodsworth by Olga Bueva: about John’s career as Slavic scholar and literary translator… “One of the more interesting challenges of my career (2005–2008) was the translation of the 9-volume Ringing Cedars Series by Siberian author Vladimir Megré, as it deals in large part with esoteric concepts that relate only indirectly to our familiar, everyday human life.”
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Also from John Woodsworth…
THE POETRY OF SUSAN KEYS WOODSWORTH It is high time I started submitting poems written by my dear wife, Susan Keyes Woodsworth, who passed away just over three years ago, after almost 50 years of marriage. She started writing poetry only in 1989, and wrote several hundred up to the time of her passing. She had a background in modern dance, studying under such notables as Jan Veen, Martha Graham, José Limón and Merce Cunningham. Many of her poems and art works reflect this background. You can find some of her art and poetry (in English, with a few poems in Russian translation), along with a brief bio, on this Russian website: www.nikvel.ru/phalbums/skw.php
Seasonal changes By Susan Keys Woodsworth How does a season evolve? Is it a series of chain reactions or does it unfold in the heart where a palette of soul-felt colours is discovered, identifying every detail of what exists?
So we have an in-between season when lovers meet but no longer love, their glances are vacant, their voices shallow, their hands reach beyond each other…
Where does the cold come from? The rays of the sun withdraw and refuse to touch this reality and one's glance becomes frozen into a state of unabandoned reverie.
From one season to the next we find this. It saddens the heart… But when the new season appears, we celebrate… for new beauty and colour are here. They call to us and we fall in love again, hoping this time it will last… but it never does.
The seasons move in a stately trance. They dance in costumed beauty and bid us join in, but just when we've caught the rhythm they change and begin to disappear. www.dialogue.ca
Susan Keys Woodsworth, 29 October 2004 ♣ VOL. 31, NO. 3, SPRING 2018
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“Stirring the Soup” [Article #54]
THE SEASONS OF LIFE… Marie Gaudet, Edmonton AB acadian.lady@hotmail.ca
Experts describe our life seasons as follows: Childhood: 0-20 – Season of Joy – Spring; Youth: 20-40 – Season of Love – Summer; Middle Age: 40-60 – Season of Strength – Fall; Old Age: 60+ -- Season of Rest – Winter. Oh, if only life were so easy that all we had to do was follow this map, right? Then we could prepare for what’s coming next and avoid pitfalls. But life isn’t always a well-demarcated map with easy to follow longitude and latitude markers to keep us on a straight path so we never misplace ourselves. No, just to be contrary, our life paths are blurred, winding, muddy, icy, bumpy, full of dark tunnels, sometimes veering way off the beaten path, or worse, altogether closed, either leaving us following an unexpected and treacherous detour, or lost in the woods alone and out of gas. If I had to choose a season where these challenges were most prevalent in my own life, it would be my Childhood. Which, by the way, was supposed to be my Season of Joy (0-20), or Spring in terms of climatic seasons. This was meant to be a season for learning, opportunity and dynamic thinking. I must’ve missed a highway marker somewhere and ended up in a cave instead. But then, we turn a corner and are blessed with a beautiful sunny day, green grass and a view of the ocean, wildflowers swaying in the wind, pine trees welcoming us with their scent, butterflies flitting about and geese flying overhead. We stay at a cozy forest cabin and have a picnic on the grass while our children attempt to catch frogs, play tag and enjoy the warm breeze. We take a family walk up a mountain path, to be gifted with a fine mist from the waterfalls once we reach the top, then we feed the squirrels on our way back down, feeling quite safe on the pedestrian bridge anchored into the rocky mountain wall. This was definitely my predicted Season of Love (20-40), my Summer season, which was destined for reward, celebration, and fulfillment, but it also had the added advantage of being amply knitted to my 40 dialogue
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previously missed Season of Joy, for a lovely doubledecker season of all the best my world has ever had to offer me. Maybe it was an El Niño thing. Such an idyllic environment allows our muscles to slowly relax and, as we close our eyes and let ourselves get carried away by the heavenly scent of petrichor... we encounter a dangerous hairpin curve that has us slamming on the brakes, swerving and skidding as we very nearly fail to negotiate the curve, then YIKES! A steep roller-coaster-like plummet downwards as our tires have only just reclaimed the ground, leaving our hearts firmly lodged in our throats and our hair standing on end as we finally skid to a stop, Oy! Welcome to Middle Age (40-60), or Fall in climatic terminology, aptly named because you will find yourself more often on your butt than floating on clouds. Until, that is, you learn to have the patience of a saint; accept whatever crosses your path and learn to embrace it as a learning opportunity; and understand that no matter what, everything will all work out in the end. There are no options. You must learn this lesson or die. And into the mix, just for fun, the universe has flung everyone’s ignorant opinions about age at you; employers refuse to consider you as competent for anything but jobs usually delegated to teenagers; you have to go to medical school to figure out how your body wants you to eat now, and you get a shitload of grey hair to boot, to ensure that you fully comprehend that algor mortis is imminent and you are about to begin decomposing. Yes, this is ostensibly the Season of Strength, though I prefer to call it the season of warfare. It calls for survival, making mistakes, and dealing with problems… no kidding, Sherlock! This season was clearly marked on the map though and I should not have been so surprised to find it exactly where the experts said it was going to be. But not only did I not see it coming and then clumsily stumble into the majority of its snares, I figuratively went down (fittingly, as it was my Fall season), sliding into trenches, grazing my knees as I went, filling my favorite combat boots with mud and destroying my helmet hair-do before lifting myself up, sputtering and flailing like a drunk in .../ www.dialogue.ca
shock and awe. So yeah, this season has been fun. I now assume I’ve entered Old Age, the hypothetical Season of Rest (60+), or Winter if you will, which is supposed to be a season for reflection, hibernation, and planning. Good thing I love winter and lying dormant. And perhaps I may be finally starting to grow into my age. Looking back, because all my lessons had to be learned the hard way, I realize I’ve now acquired a Masters in Life from the School of Hard Knocks. You may bow to me. My whole life, from a childhood sharing space with 13 siblings, followed by two marriages plus six kids plus lots of long-term visitors, through a career spanning many years as a woman in a man’s world, I yearned for the alone time which my soul desperately needed but never got. Now that I actually have plenty of alone time, I’ve learned to L-O-V-E reconnecting with and learning to love myself (following a shaky beginning with a belligerent attitude of course, but that was just me on auto pilot fighting to get back to the Season of Love, until I realized this season was better). If I had just kicked back and accepted everything, I probably would’ve been a much happier person all along. But lessons are never fully learned until they’ve been experienced the hard way first! I’ve finally organized my life now so that there is some of everything I love in it -- work, family, entertainment, friendships, helping others, hobbies, travel and lots of down-time. I’ve removed toxic relationships from the equation altogether, thereby reducing my blood pressure to normal for the first time in decades. I only do what I enjoy doing and nothing that I feel obligated to do. And I’ve learned to accept myself, warts and all and if people don’t like me, they can just stay away from me. This makes me much more comfortable in my own skin than the girl with the bitchy resting face that sometimes came out on my worst days. And I’ve survived so many experiences in life that I am now ohso-wise, like an Elder. Really. Ask me anything and I can spiritually guide you. But… Season of Rest?? I think not. What? Are you kidding? When my eyes are just now fully opened and I can see what’s happening around me? When I have the time and energy to be of help by driving Home Care clients to doctors’ appointments? When I can take photos of the elderly and see the smiles light up www.dialogue.ca
their faces? When I am still in top shape (not tip-top, just top, as in top-heavy) and can still walk for miles? When I am still able to go on wild adventures? When I can alleviate loneliness in others just by lending a kind ear? When my 2-year old grandbaby thinks my sunset photos are “such beautiful”? When I can still play an active part in my community? NOW is the time I should sit down and rest??? No offense, experts, but that would be, as the kids say, craptacular. I (and a lot of other Boomers) have a very different plan. Rather, my Winter season will be “awesome sauce” (awesome topped with awesome sauce). I’m going to take a road less travelled and see where I end up. I will do my damndest NOT to get old before my time. I will head out into the unknown and explore the farthest reaches of my soul. I will try to love as often and as deeply as possible. I will refuse to vegetate, stagnate and decompose just because someone else’s roadmap says it’s that time. And when I can’t do everything my soul calls me to do anymore… Then and only then will I enter Season 5 (forgot about that one, didn’t you, experts?) – 80+ (or maybe later?!) – the Season of yoga pants, lady diapers, crossword puzzles and re-reading old books. I will allow myself to be bathed, fed, clothed, medicated and entertained in my nursing home. I will probably give people a hard time and revive my bitchy resting face some of the time. I imagine I’ll throw food at people if they don’t give me what I need. I’ll expect my kids to come and visit me, talk to me, take me out every so often, feed me sometimes too, because after all, who taught them how to use a spoon? And when I’m for real ready for algor mortis, I anticipate having them beside me so I don’t have to face this destined moment alone. And I will go gladly, looking forward to seeing my loved ones on the other side. THAT, ladies and gentlemen, will be my Season of Rest… and not a moment before. Marie Gaudet, Edmonton acadian.lady@hotmail.ca ♣
Words the Editor looked up… Petrichor: a pleasant smell that frequently accompanies the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather Algor mortis: the second stage of death when body temperature post mortem changes, until the ambient temperature is matched. ♣ VOL. 31, NO. 3, SPRING 2018
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#WhyNotMe? S. Julian, Victoria BC
Dear H.R. Department: (Re. Your Sexual Harassment Policy) As a faithful hardworking employee, I'm asking that you not make sexual advances in the workplace a crime until I've had a chance to be a victim. In all the years I've worked for the company no male colleague has commented on my appearance, touched me inappropriately (or even appropriately), invited me to his home, flirted, winked, waved at or harassed me. I feel quite left out. This has damaged my self-esteem. I'm thinking of applying for stress leave. You say you're an equal opportunity employer but where's the equal opportunity in this? Why do some girls get all the action? Everyone should have a chance to be hit on. It's like there's a new contest among women to see who has notched up the most sexual advances, like in high school -- a way of letting everyone know how popular you are. Look at Kayleigh-Rae in the cubicle next to me: me too, me too, she wails all day, meaning "I'm so irresistible men can't keep their hands off me." Maybe they can't, but are you telling me that Kayleigh-Rae's not the tiniest bit complicit? Sorry if that sounds like sour grapes, but I am sour about women who dress to show off their assets and then act outraged when a guy looks. What was their intent? The outrage only happens when it's the wrong guy, of course. When the guy you lust after is doing the looking, then it's appropriate. Which brings me to my next point, which is that this is unfair to men. Some, anyway. Not the real lechers and assaulters, obviously, but what about those awkward, nerdy, homely ones that women make fun of? The market for lewd remarks hasn't been cornered by men, Dear HR. You should hear the conversation in the women's washroom. Do you think your female employees never commit "verbal assault"? After all, if muscle is the male's weapon, the tongue is the female's. But be that as it may, who would want to work in an office without the fun of flirtation? Office work is pretty boring without it. Hence the IN-uendo box 42 dialogue
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and the OUT-of-luck box -- it's all a game of chance, of thrust and parry, advance and retreat, come hither or -- get lost. Think of all the fun of pheromones and secret signals. And think of the matches and marriages that started as office romances. What will we have instead, arranged marriage? Segregation of the sexes in the workplace? Should we all start wearing burkas? I can hear those Muslim imams: "We told you so!" No, I don't want to be assaulted in the workplace but neither do I like being ignored like one of the desks. Personal questions? I'd love it if a male colleague asked me something other than â&#x20AC;&#x153;can you fix this damned printer?" Most of them make love to their smart phones all day -- certainly not to me. It seems that if you don't have an "I was stalked/groped/seduced" story, you're no one in this organization. You'll never be promoted up the ladder to higher victimhood. (Do people now list their three best sexual harassment stories on the job application form?) In summary, Dear HR Department, I came up with a plan: I started a #not-me-too club for the sadly resistible, those who have received no sexual advances in the workplace and have suffered poor self-esteem -- even PTSD -- as a result. We began as a group of women (both clerks and managers, everyone is equal here). "My name is Mary and I'm an outcast" we say at each meeting -- and then we drink a lot of wine and share sexual fantasies. What happens in the club leaves the club, of course, and guess what? The men heard about it and demanded, as our co-workers, to be included. So now the Outcasts Club includes anyone shy, awkward, tonguetied or generally unsexy of any gender. We host "Cheeky Compliment Practice Night," the "Suggestive Salon Discussion Group" and "Flirty Friday". We've already triggered a couple of love affairs, and now we're celebrating our first engagement. The wedding's next spring! There's only one club rule: no one, years later, will blame anyone for anything they heard or saw in this club. We knew what we were doing when we joined it, and we're adults. Sincerely yours, Plain Jane Doe From S. Julian, Victoria BC â&#x2122;Ł www.dialogue.ca
Sex, Disability and Humour… Can this be funny?! Kim Clark, Nanaimo BC
As a late-blooming disabled author, I’ve proved that adding humour to those awkward bedfellows – Disability and Sex – can make it fun to write and to read! After the publishing of my short stories and poetry, my third book, A One-Handed Novel, has just come out with Caitlin Press. It’s funny, honest, heartbreaking and hopeful, and offers a fresh take on independence and disability, ambition and love, and the communities that help us cope when our bodies and our desires are ever-changing. Mastering humour didn’t happen overnight or in a solitary vacuum, but the impetus began with me and my disease. A diagnosis of MS twenty years ago made my future sketchy. I figured that if I was going to be crippled I’d better find something to do, a way to be, that would be interesting, fulfilling and doable in a wheelchair. I chose writing and, despite being told it couldn’t be done THAT way, I joined a wonderful writing group in my forties, completed a Creative Writing degree at VIU* in my fifties, and just wrote, read, learned, wrote, read, learned… Wait, I’m still doing that and I’m now in my sixties! You might ask, why write about this? Well, disability is part of humanity and society that we’re still uncomfortable with. Plus, it’s incredibly difficult to find disabled characters that aren’t vilified, infantilized, reduced to inspiration or used as a prop for an ablebodied main character. I was able to use my own progressive MS experience to fight the stereotypes and bring disability into mainstream literature. Even the title, A One-Handed Novel, is based on my onehanded typing. My dominant left hand has lost its small-motor skills, so I’ve had to teach my right hand to do everything—and to do it mostly alone. Ditto for my protagonist, Melanie. www.dialogue.ca
Sex is interesting too. I wanted to include it, both the pleasures and the pressures – social, personal and medical – surrounding it. Both disability and sex are hard (no pun intended) to write about, especially from the inside. I know it’s complicated! But orgasms have benefits! I wanted to add humour partly because it’s a natural go-to for me and partly to make it less bleakly mundane, hence more appealing for readers. Using fiction to combine all three gave me the freedom to add speculative aspects as well because, “What if…” But my work isn’t done. While the story begins with a disabled protagonist surrounded by a cast of able-bodied friends, the sequel I’m working on now has four main characters, all with different disabilities. Because differentness attracts me, I recently brought another book project to fruition. I was noticing the growing numbers of redhead memes and comments on Facebook (Social media has hidden perks!) and being a ginger myself I thought, hey, this tiny redhead percentile has historic, cultural and personal significance. What a cool book idea! I reached out to Dawn Marie Kresan in Ontario, not only because she’s a Canadian ginger writer but because we both have MS. Kindred conditions. We got busy and put together Canadian Ginger (Oolichan Books)—a collection for, by and about redheads—which includes poems, short stories, essays, and drama excerpts from across Canada. Life is good! Find me here: www.kimclarkwriter.com P.S. Interested in other disabled writers? Try Adam Pottle (Mantis Dreams, Caitlin Press), Dorothy Palmer (When Fenelon Falls, Coach House Books) and Bruce Hunter (In the Bear's House, Oolichan Books). Kim Clark is a Nanaimo author, poet and playwright and gimp. Clark has published short fiction–Attemptations (Caitlin Press)–and poetry: Middle Child of Summer (Leaf Press), Sit You Waiting (Caitlin Press), and Dis ease and De sire, The M anu s cript (Lipstick Press), as well as coediting the red-head anthology, Canadian Ginger (Oolichan Books). She has also been a finalist in Theatre BC’s Playwriting Competition and has a novella under option for a feature-length film. The sequel to A One-Handed Novel (2017) is already in the works. Website: www.kimclarkwriter.com * VIU = Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo NOTES FROM KIM’S PUBLICIST, Michael Despotovic: Vancouver Island author, Kim Clark, fearlessly channels her experiences with disability into the character of …/ VOL. 31, NO. 3, SPRING 2018
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Melanie Farrell and her unconventional prognosis. It seems, based on a new study, that she only has six orgasms left. Six! Fortyish and single, Mel must decide how best to spend, save or at least not waste those precious orgasms. In praise of the novel, Dina Del Bucchia, author of Don’t Tell Me What to Do, writes: “To reveal too many details would deprive the reader of the wicked delight in discovering each fearless narrative surprise that awaits them in Kim Clark’s novel. In both humour and heart this book doesn’t tread delicately when addressing the reality of living with a disability, financial struggle, women’s sexuality, and the
complications that arise in every type of relationship. I cried, I cackled, and I couldn’t stop reading this wild, tender and very necessary book.” A One-Handed Novel offers a fresh take on independence and disability, ambition and love, and the communities that help us cope when our bodies and our desires are everchanging. ISBN: 978-1-987915-62-4 / $24.00 In April and May (Multiple Sclerosis Awareness Month), Kim will tour Vancouver Island and the Sunshine Coast. http://caitlin-press.com/our-books/a-one-handed-novel/ From: michaeld@caitlin-press.com ♣
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A beautiful thing that was spoiled by powerful parishioners… Madeline Bruce, Nanaimo BC
My Nanaimo experience is starting the Coffee Break at St. Andrew's United church downtown. This was a beautiful thing, but it got spoiled – for me. It was every Wednesday morning for a couple of hours, with coffee or tea, and home-baked goods, plus live music, all for free. I was at the point of getting a grant from city hall for the musicians. At that point the leadership of the group was snatched out of my hands by the most powerful parishioners in that church. I am not kidding. I had several teams of kitchen volunteers who would come on different weeks to make coffee, wash the dishes, etc. The ladies of that church were fantastic about providing baked goods for it. These cakes and things just appeared in the fridge on Wednesday mornings, not even a name on it. Angels. I loved coming up with flowers, branches, whatever for the tables. We were getting quite a few people every week, a few dozen at least, and such a nice mixture - First Nations people too. People from every walk of life. A beautiful thing. A Nanaimo City Councillor showed up – I think it was Fred Pattje! There was no pressure to socialize. The live music took the pressure off that. The socializing took place on the music breaks, very naturally. The main musician was Willie Thrasher, the singer, songwriter, and guitarist, who is Inuit, and his partner Linda Saddleback. Willie was bringing along some of his musician friends, such as the Banjo player Jim Erkiletian. This was not good enough for the head parishioners on the church board, who ordered me to get BETTER musicians, who should pay for free. I refused. Willie and Linda had been coming to play faithfully for over a year, on the bus, often in the rain, every week, never late. I handed over the leadership of the group to a lady that I knew could handle it. I have never entered that 44 dialogue
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church again. The Pastor, Bert Ramsay, took (very) early retirement but I don't know if it was over that. Those head parishioners have since gotten that grant for the musicians from city hall. Coffee Break is still running, without me. I have a great book about loneliness written by a lawyer. It is called LONELY: Learning to Live with Solitude. It is WELL researched. I got a personal note from the author because I wrote a review of the book for the Canadian Group Psychotherapy Association publication. [The book was written by Emily White, who is a lawyer. It contains the most recent studies and statistics on the subject. She wrote that that the population is not aware of the magnitude of this issue, so she appreciated my putting my review there.] Loneliness is a taboo word in our culture. People can talk about being treated for depression more easily than they can talk about loneliness. Ergo I think a social mixer like this should NOT be advertised for the lonely, for the mentally ill, for the handicapped – none of that – those are stigmas in our culture. Just ‘music, coffee, goodies’ – that's it. Of course the church is now using the word lonely in ads. There are grants available at City Hall for mixers that increase socialization. Doctors give out a pill to lonely people, because they think it is depression. In the news today (January 16, 2018), Great Britain has appointed a minister of Loneliness. [LINK: https://tinyurl.com/nyt-uk-min ]
A spooky thing happened right after I left the Coffee Break - Willie Thrasher gained worldwide recognition. Culturally, he has an important place, because, for one thing, he was one of the very first musicians, of any kind, to come out of the far, far North. He is a www.dialogue.ca
real voice for all Natives, and for the environment. He got written up in the Rolling Stone, McLean’s, and, in Britain, The Guardian. He is getting gigs across Canada now. Very recently, he was commissioned to write a song for the Nanaimo Art Gallery, for their Oceans exhibit. Willie spent many, many years of his childhood and youth in Residential School. To disrespect him, as the
church did? Oh God, spare me. His late sister Mona Thrasher was a great painter. You can find her on Google. - Madeline Bruce, Nanaimo oldcity@shaw.ca P.S. I would add that there is another group that I do not like to see ghettoized – off by themselves – and that is seniors. – Maddie ♣ [See also Maddie’s letter in the Nanaimo News Bulletin: https://tinyurl.com/nb-mb-lonely ] ♣
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Stories from Magical Moon Lake
The Springs and Water of Moon Lake – Live Fish in my basement From Magical Moon Lake (2014) Karl Backhaus, Holland Centre ON
Moon Lake is fed by two strong springs located on either side of my house. The weaker of the two springs is strong enough to supply my house and garden with plenty of wonderful water. Many of my friends who come here always take some of this water home. I appreciate good water, especially after tasting chlorinated and bottled water while traveling. For the longest time it was my understanding that Moon Lake was fed only by these two springs, until the day I decided to save energy and move my fivefoot upright freezer from the kitchen to the cooler basement. One part of my house is just five steps away from the lake. With footings only eight inches above lake level the basement depth varies between only three to barely five feet. Thus it was not high enough to accommodate the freezer. I had to excavate the gravel floor for an extra foot in depth, but my project turned out to be much bigger than anticipated. While I was digging, suddenly water came out of the ground, rising rapidly! Fortunately I had a working sump pump in place. Once it was activated the fastflowing water could escape to the lake through a gravity flow. But if I were away, with the power turned off, this system would not work. Then I would be risking a flooded basement. I decided to dig a trench under the footings of the house and then continue it, at a depth of almost six feet, on the outside, to lead the water through a 4-inch pipe into the lake. The pump would then be superfluous. The water in my basement could flow freely into the lake and become a third spring feeding it. Once my project was finished, I moved my freezer downstairs. To contain the new spring I built a cedar www.dialogue.ca
box that became my refrigerator. It is funny that after all this work I changed from freezing my fruit and veggies to dehydrating them! Now the freezer became useful only for storing empty jars. But my power consumption did drop dramatically to a daily average of only 3 kilowatt-hours. I feel that I am blessed having a spring right under my dining room, a hand pump for emergency in my kitchen, and a woodstove for hot water. This makes me pretty independent of electricity. At first I thought that the basement would be damp but it is bone-dry; even lemons shrink there. I found out that only standing water, not running water, creates dampness. This new spring also fulfilled an old dream of mineto be able to have a dip in the lake in winter. I accomplished this by inserting a 2-inch pipe and leading the spring right out to the dock. Here the running water leaves a small swimming pool open all winter. For several years I have not missed a single day without taking a brief dip here, even at minus 22 degrees Celsius. If Sue feels like a fish, I feel like a Polar Bear. I enjoy being in the water surrounded by ice and snow. One morning I briefly shared my winter pool with a muskrat although it soon disappeared under the ice. Another time a mink crossed my pool, then diving under the ice, just before I had my dip. In my experience, cold dips invigorate while hot showers take away energy. Finally we can come to the fish in my basement. One day I was very surprised to find a chub in the spring that I use as a fridge. The fish had come through the pipe from the lake. It spent the whole winter in my basement, safe from ice and predators. Once the word got around, the following winter my VOL. 31, NO. 3, SPRING 2018
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cedar fridge box became a safe haven for many fish. For a while it became a crowded noisy place with several hundred fish moving quickly and splashing water around every time I turned on the basement lights. Eventually the fish got used to my occasional presence. It was amazing to see my fridge box looking like a huge can of live sardines. Of course when spring came the fish moved back into the lake.
One year a frog joined the crowd. I found him at the edge of my fridge-box late in the fall. I took him outside, but the next day he was back again and I let him stay all winter. I hope my story about the fish of Moon Lake has given you a little insight not only into fish but also a little into my magical house and myself. Karl Backhaus (Magical Moon Lake, p.41-42) ♣
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Superstition and Following Your Bliss [Extract of interview] BILL MOYERS: Do you ever
have the sense of … being helped by hidden hands? JOSEPH CAMPBELL (Author, The Power of Myth):
All the time. It is miraculous. I even have a superstition that has grown on me as a result of invisible hands coming all the time – namely, that if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the
life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be. Read more: https://tinyurl.com/jcf-follow-bliss ♣
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What are the Solfeggio frequencies? Attuned Vibrations.com © [EXTRACT/LINK] Solfeggio frequencies make up the
ancient 6-tone scale thought to have been used in sacred music, including the beautiful and well known Gregorian Chants. The chants and their special tones were believed to impart spiritual blessings when sung in harmony. Each Solfeggio tone is comprised of a frequency required to balance your energy and keep your body, mind and spirit in perfect harmony. The main six Solfeggio frequencies are: 396 Hz – Liberating Guilt and Fear 417 Hz – Undoing Situations and Facilitating Change 528 Hz – Transformation and Miracles (DNA Repair) 639 Hz – Connecting/Relationships 741 Hz – Expression/Solutions
852 Hz – Returning to Spiritual Order They were used in over 150 Gregorian Chants. Where do these tones come from? According to Professor Willi Apel, the origin of the ancient Solfeggio scale can be traced back to a Medieval hymn… The hymn has this peculiarity that the first six lines of the music commenced respectively on the first six successive notes of the scale, and thus the first syllable of each line was sung to a note one degree higher that the first syllable of the line that preceded it. Because the music held mathematic resonance, the original frequencies were capable of spiritually inspiring mankind to be more “god-kind.” […] Read more: https://attunedvibrations.com/solfeggio/ ♣
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System, Security and Salvation - An ode to our times Susanne Hare Lawson, Tofino, BC As we sit in front Of a screen In our own sense of satisfaction And security Seemingly safe in a structural sliver Of comfort.... We forget the slight change The Earth holds 46 dialogue
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To start a slide into shock and sorrow. Severe winds, floods, freezing, tremors, collapse of systems, drought, disease, die off and more... Sit atop a precipice awaiting The shiver that may put us in danger. It is a slim slice of life we inhabit. Be grateful, love and care for it, Cherish and honor it, for it is our saviour And we may be our own salvation. councilfire@hotmail.com
♣
www.dialogue.ca
Ramblings
A BAD CASE OF SHINGLES Randy Vancourt, Toronto ON
Both my parents were farm kids, so although I grew up in a small town my parents filled us with country values. We learned important things like how to milk a cow and the difference between straw and hay. Which, believe me, is a confusing distinction for some city folks. When my wife and I made the decision to start a family, I remembered my father’s words: “A city is no place to raise kids.” Fortunately we stumbled upon a quiet, friendly neighbourhood in the eastern tip of Toronto, set atop the historic Scarborough Bluffs overlooking Lake Ontario. There is beautiful woodland at the end of our street and we often see deer walking outside our house. This area is still a bit of a secret around Toronto, and we like it that way. Our little haven has been home to a variety of Canadian celebrities including CTV anchor Harvey Kirk and novelist Arthur Hailey (Hotel, Airport) who actually lived just down the street from where we are now. I believe it was due to their farm upbringing that our parents instilled in us the value of land ownership. Although my current property is not enormous, it’s huge by Toronto standards. I don’t mind the yard work at all – it’s a constant reminder that we actually have a lawn. Our second summer here we decided we needed a shed to store all our accumulated equipment and tools that keep multiplying. It takes a lot for me to break down and hire any help, so we decided to build the shed ourselves. I purchased all the materials and with the assistance of my wife and brother, spent most of the summer building a glorious 8 x 12 foot beauty. It took that long because we only worked on weekends and beer was frequently involved. As the end of August approached the shed was finally reaching completion. The only task that remained was to shingle its roof. At this point I made the decision to hire someone to complete this job. I did this for a couple of reasons: 1) we had worked so long building the thing that I wanted to make sure I didn’t www.dialogue.ca
mess up the final step, and 2) this was the first roof I had ever built so I wasn’t absolutely certain it wouldn’t cave in once I was up there nailing on the shingles. Enter Jason the handyman. My neighbor frequently hired him for a variety of odd jobs, and I had used him once or twice to clean the gutters. I asked Jason if he knew how to shingle a roof and he immediately replied, “That’s my specialty!” I purchased all the necessary supplies; I had done he math and knew the exact quantity of roofing felt and shingles required. I even accounted for a little extra, just in case. The big day arrived and Jason showed up ready to work. I gave him the ladder and all the necessary supplies and left him to it. I’ve always believed that nobody works well while they are being watched, and after all, he was an expert. A few hours later I went out in the yard and my heart sank. The job was horrible. The roof looked like it had been shingled by a chimpanzee, and not a very agile one at that. It’s difficult to adequately describe just how bad a job Jason had done, as there were so many dumbfounding mistakes. He hadn’t put on a starter row (even I knew that was an absolute necessity), the shingles looked like they had been chewed apart instead of cut, every row was set at a different angle and the top of the roof was now a gulley, allowing water to pool right along the peak. He had managed to use up all the shingles (remember I bought extra) so for the last row he just used a spare, mismatched one. The whole thing had the look of someone who had tried to cut their own hair. Unfortunately shingles are not easy to readjust; this job would need to be torn off and completely redone. I had spent months on this project and the crowning glory, the one thing I left to the “expert,” had been botched. I made the decision to fix what I could and leave the roof for a couple of years before redoing it all. Now every time I look out my bedroom window the sight of my beautiful shed with its comically disastrous roof taunts me. It’s a constant reminder to trust myself; no matter how much of an amateur I might be, I would still have done a better job because I cared. I see Jason occasionally when he is working …/ VOL. 31, NO. 3, SPRING 2018
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next door. My neighbor is a nice elderly woman, so I try to smile and resist the urge to scream, “You ruined my shed!” Recently Jason noticed we had just finished putting in a new walkway.
“You should have called me,” he said. “Paving stones are my specialty!” Well I know it certainly isn’t shingling. Website: www.randyvancourt.com ♣
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Tales from Fruitvale…
Paul Bowles, Fruitvale BC
Malachi and the Train Ride It is curious how life provides unexpected moments of fulfillment, when timing is a serendipitous affair with memorable outcome. Walking with five year old Malachi down to the park is often subject to diversion. Once we cross the highway, we step onto a footpath which soon descends below the concourse of motorised humanity. We single file down the narrow dirt trail through a bush land of wild apple trees, Oregon grape, berries and long tangled grass. I duck beneath the overhanging branches and we cross the stream which flows down from a fissure in the high bank. Malachi stops on the little handmade wooden bridge to watch the water flowing under his feet and chooses to step into its inviting coolness. “Where is it going,” he asks as he watches it disappear under cover of tangled overgrowth. We continue strolling along the ridge above the railway tracks; he looks down and says, “There’s the train tracks, is the train coming?” I reply, “Maybe. Perhaps it is on its way back from the border, we will have to listen for the whistle blowing.” He says, “The rail cars are up there.” I reply, “I guess they didn’t need them.” “Can we go and see them,” asks Malachi. “OK let’s do that,” I said. We walked up the tracks, past the swath of giant bulrushes sitting in the stream running alongside us and ambled our way over to the rail cars parked on the siding. It was then that we heard that whistle blow, as the big old diesel freight train lumbered out of the wilderness into the village. We chose a grassy rise to sit on and waited for it to pass by. We saw it coming down the track, slowing and slowing and then it stopped right in front of us. Astonished, we wondered what was going on when the engineer left the train and pulled the big lever to switch the tracks. I hadn’t noticed the switching points when I picked our spot. The driver stepped out from the cab and yelled, “Do you want to come aboard?” I looked at Malachi and 48 dialogue
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we gleefully shouted “Yea,” ran over, grabbed onto the rail, climbed up the steep steel steps, along the narrow gantry, past the long nose of the engine and into the cab. The driver pointed to two seats by the side window and said, “Sit there.” He then asked Malachi his name and asked him if he would like to ding the bell and blow the horn. Which of course he did and then we sat back to be a part of the shunting of the parked rail cars onto the main track. When all was done we disembarked so the train could carry on to the wood yard where it resided. Upon our return home, I said to Malachi’s grandmother, “Did you hear the train’s bell ringing and the horn blasting today?” “Yes,” she said. I added, “Well WHO do you think it was making all that noise?”
THE FORCE Paul Bowles
I have recently been reminded of the Star Wars phrase, “MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU,” and have wondered what it might mean. What force? Well, what other than the force that expelled the universe into being and generated life that we know and that we are. We know it drives us, don’t we? It is still expanding the universe so it is not yet spent. We see the Force happening in the spring. You might say, “Well, that is just the position of the Earth in relation to the sun, it is something outside of us not inside.” But, tell that to the birds and the bees that come to even greater life than they already are with their colourful displays, dancing and song. Just because we have lost our instinct since adopting the supreme and glorious intellect, doesn’t mean we have lost the force within, it is still there, we just have to relate to it. It is especially there if we believe it is, acknowledging its power, drawing from its resource to grant our needs. If we don’t believe in it, we …/ www.dialogue.ca
can still function but with conflict rather than with ease, at odds with ourselves, at odds with our true power, functioning in our egos? “Of course,” you say, “What else is there.” Well, the universe is like our other mother, it will foster us if we let it, if we believe in it, so “May the Force be with you,” or else you are on your own. Love the Force, it is the source, the matrix, the vortex drawing us in, you might even call it God or The
Kingdom of Heaven that Jesus said was within us, but then religions make claim on that. Better to be free of that control, trust the Force within, be happy and draw further happiness to you. Draw upon our own confidence and like the “joyful heart that cleanses like a medicine,” the Force is the Eternal Seed that waits upon our desire to send forth the roots of achievement. The Force is already with you. Paul Bowles, Fruitvale BC
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Feedback from Paul regarding the Winter Issue of Dialogue: (link below) was something to the effect that valuable Since reading the Dialogue through, I enjoyed watchdialogue happens when both parties drop their agenda, ing the links (repeated below) sent by Herb Spencer then a third force comes into play to give meaningful (p.51-2, V.31-2, Winter 2017-18) regarding Joseph exchange. I felt that resonating for me. Chilton Pearce of Crack in the Cosmic Egg and Magical Child fame. Hope your arm is healed, Janet, and that the universe The two links, six minutes and the hour-long interis once again unfolding as it should. view tagged together, were very worthy of watching. Love from the universe, At the time, an eighty-six year old* man, Pearce all the best, Paul Bowles [SEE PAUL’S CALLIGRAPHY ON P.59] knows how to conduct a relaxed conversation of very revelatory content in a humble way. * Joseph Chilton Pearce died in 2016, at the age of 90 ***** I had read both of these books quite a while ago, in fact I still have them and will now pick them up once In case you missed the links from Herb again when I have got through The Divine Life by Sri Spencer in the last issue: Aurobindo. I seem to be re-reading my old treasures Re: Crack in the Cosmic Egg: a YouTube interview these days, just recently I have re-read The Universal with the author, Joe Pearce: Wisdom of the Heart. Idealist by Karl Heussenstamm: a remarkable work This is pure GOLD, especially around 15:00 min. from back in 1967, dedicated to those who are en[Darwin 1 and 2 – Survival of the Fittest and Descent thused by the Spiritual revolution that is still trying to from Love and Altruism, caring for those in need.] surface. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExDCFlARrlk I also wanted to say thank you for picking out the Herb noted: For all of you with limited time (or conshort passage in my ‘Universe From Nothing’ piece centration) to watch the one-hour interview with Joe and emphasising it with bold type. We must have Pearce, (link above) then do NOT miss this essential been in sync for that message, and I appreciate you as six-minute interview, LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mws5kCFLrDg ♣ my publisher resonating with it. Currently my wife and I are in Pritchard at Ambrose’s More from Herb Spencer in the next issue. and Kayley’s farm… Little Easton is sick with something though with red itchy skin and high temperature. If you can’t wait for the next issue to come out, you can read his essays online at: Today he was ambling around the house and I had https://herbspencer.academia.edu/research#bookreviews been in the main room humming some note formation * * * * * * * from the Beatles’ tune Paperback Writer and a few minutes later he was humming it, note for note. He is Synergy / synergistic / synergism: the interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or only two and a half. other agents, to produce a combined effect greater than the It made me think just how important Joseph Chilton sum of their separate effects. Pierce’s message was about kids picking up sublimiSyncretic/ syncretism: the attempted reconciliation or nally what we emanate [in his book Magical Child]. union of different or opposing principles, practices, or One more thing that Pierce said in that interview parties, as in philosophy or religion. ♣ www.dialogue.ca
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Twists & Turns from Norm Zig
Oh oh...he’s at it again... Norm Zigarlick, SK
I woke up at 6 o’clock and found the news on channel 85, I saw the cost of war was stable but markets were on the rise. There were scenes of bombings in the Middle East And it all looked like hell on earth, to say the very least. There was not a single thing I saw that I might call surprise. I knew I’d seen this all before, through these older eyes. Morning left and noontime came, with brand new bits of news. A man they call the President spewed his crazy views, Like changing schools from spots of learning, socializing and fun To wounded rooms of terror that echoed sounds from teachers’ guns. I heard him talk in hollow words that made stupid, harmful lies. I knew I’d seen this all before through these older eyes. The evening news was friendlier, it was all about the sports; A quarterback got 10 million dollars, according to reports. There was some talk of tax cuts for those already rich; The new cost to the poor folk would be just a little bit. The drama of the morning news had already gone and died. I knew I’d seen it all before through these older eyes. The late night news was focused on petty political disputes; The President denied his ever being in a house of ill repute. An old man on a phone-in show had something he tried to say About sleeping well until the sun came up, but seeing nightmares everyday A TV talking head corrected him and said it’s all good, the markets are on the rise. And again I knew I’d seen it all before through these older eyes. 50 dialogue
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Politics of privilege... or privilege of politics
So now Justin has himself in a conflict of interest that is based in pure self-indulgence. A guy who climbs to international fame because of his “fairness” couldn’t stop himself from being “special.” Now he is a bit like Ben Johnson winning an Olympic gold only to be found a steroid monkey and being sorry after being caught. Money has always been the steroid of politics the only difference is Johnson’s team bought his, we get to pay for those in politics. Sadly, we’ve become all too accustomed to politicians worldwide that have demonstrated being very generous in meeting their own wants while ignoring the needs of others. The only thing truly democratic about this behaviour is that in one form or another it affects all parties. As of today we have Wall in Sask., Horgan in BC and Trudeau in the PMO, right, left and center, all are tangled up in some kind of self-serving mess while professing to be serving the people. The only thing minimizing the fallout on each of them is Trump maximizing the self-serving process on the world stage and on a scale that makes our violators look like jaywalkers by comparison. How is this supposed to end well? ~ Norm Zig
Age and adventure... An 88 year old “wing walker”....she just started learning how. Re the story at The Guardian: LINK: https://tinyurl.com/TG-wing-walk
This woman uses a walker to get around but then gets up on an airplane wing and rides through mild aerobatics out in the wind at 140 mph. It’s a bit like George Bush senior who went skydiving at 90 or so. The first time he tried it was in World War Two when somebody shot an airplane out from under him. Perhaps many of the limits that come into play with aging are self-imposed because we measure against the past and don’t consider the future as having potential. My reality is I got to be this old mostly by accident because all of the stupid things I did earlier didn’t kill me. With luck I might have learned from that experience. There are some things I probably won’t do again. Bar fights come to mind. From: Norm zigarlick normzig56@gmail.com ♣ www.dialogue.ca
“The Vagabond Writer” THE GOOD WEEDS Wayne Allen Russell Clearwater BC
I hope readers enjoy these stories, they will bring laughter and a few tears to you. Taken from truth, but the “Family Weed” is fictitious. The family: Archibald (‘Pop’) & Mary Elizabeth/Loretta (‘Mom’) George (‘Donkey’), Aug. 17, 1930 Ben (‘Shooter’), Apr 2, 1932 Bob (‘Stretch’), Oct 10, 1934 Adam (‘Flyer’), Jul 30, 1936 Tom (‘Weasel’), June 4, 1941 Marian (cousin), Aug 21,’ 25 Sam (cousin), Dec 26, 1931 Bobby (cousin), May 3, ‘35 Ray (my buddy) Joe (Ray’s brother) Shirley (Grouch), May 19, 1925¨ Juniper (June)
GOOD GAME-GONE BAD Our cousin Bobby Wells would come and stay with us as often as he could. I couldn’t understand why, as he lived in the city with his Mom, his brother Sam and three sisters. At Aunt Annie’s, the two boys each had their own bed. They had running water, a bathtub, an icebox, the milk was dropped at the door, along with butter wrapped exactly in a one pound block. The store was only a five-minute walk away and they could buy ‘ICE CREAM CONES.’ And they never had to fight for the last piece of bread; in fact there was always some left over for the next meal. They never had to leave the house to do chores. The only chore they had to do was washing the dishes. They usually didn’t do them anyway; they just went outside and didn’t come back in until Aunt Annie had them done. Even the girls didn’t do dishes. Boy oh boy, their Pop was sure easy on them; lucky they didn’t have to answer to ours. Later in our lives I asked him why he would want to come into all that hard work at our place! He said he loved it, as every day was a new adventure. His mom would send him to our place all spic and span with new clothes from top to bottom. When he went home, he would have old socks and underwear, patched, worn-out shirts and pants. The law of our house was that the first one up was the best dressed. This time, on Bobby’s first night, we waited until he www.dialogue.ca
was asleep, then the older boys carried him outside and put him on the garage roof with an ace of spades under his head. This card was used to represent the devil I guess. When he woke up, he had no idea where in the heck he was. When he gathered his senses and climbed down off the roof they told him. “That darn old devil did it again, you’ll have to sleep with one eye open from now on.” And he did! I’ve said before; we had to make up our own games. One of them was playing on the barn hill. For those of you who don’t know what a barn hill is, it’s a manmade hill that allows the horses to pull the hay wagons into the upper floor of the barn. Well! We would get some old rubber tires and while one of us held the tire up, the other guy would sit in it with one butt cheek on each side. Holding the top inside rims with both hands, he would stick his toes inside the tire at the bottom and with a push; away he would go, head over heels, round and round, usually until he hit the field fence some four hundred feet away. It was a funny sight, elbows and knees sticking out of the tire, head held up tight to the inside rim. When we untangled ourselves and tried to stand up, we were like drunken sailors, staggering all over the place. We sometimes had as many as four of us lined up in the tires and would race to see who went the farthest and fastest. It’s a wonder we were not injured or killed. We would run into each other as sometimes the tire would go off to one side or the other and go down the steep edge of the barn hill; then you would run into the side fence with a heck of a jolt, as it was only a few yards from the edge to that fence. Our older cousin Sam was mean to us younger boys. We called him ‘Punch’ because he made us do things and if we refused, we got anywhere from one to ten really hard punches in the shoulder which hurt like the dickens. One punch would really hurt, but two would cut to the bone, three would cause bruises and swelling, any more than three would be so painful you’d cry no matter how hard you tried not to. Sam, like Bobby, was always at our farm. He got a new nickname one-day when we were playing hide and seek. He jumped into an old wooden barrel and Cousin Bobby jumped behind the same barrel. Old Speed, our hound dog who moved like a snail (and like the song says, was the laziest dog ever was …/ VOL. 31, NO. 3, SPRING 2018
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born), was just passing by as Sam and Bobby were hiding. As luck would have it, a big nest of bees already occupied that old wooden barrel. Sam came out of that barrel like a shot from a cannon, the yellow jackets attacked both him and old Speed. One of the bees went up Sam’s nose and old Speed got stung on the backside so away he went, running faster than we’d ever seen him move before. Bobby was also on the run, tears of laughter streaming down his cheeks at the sight of the old dog streaking along, howling, and Punch, the mean guy, with his nose swollen across his face, right behind old Speed. But Bobby didn’t laugh long. The bees caught up and stung him many times around the waist. Guess what: HE CRAPPED HIS
What a mess the three of them were, old Speed with swollen testicles, howling and dragging his butt across the front lawn like a dog trying to clean himself off, Sam with bites all over and a nose that covered his face. Bobby with lots of bites and shitty pants. The stings probably would have killed Sam but Mom made a baking soda poultice to draw out the stingers and the poison. Even so, he was a very sick boy for two weeks. When his Mom saw him, she didn’t recognise him. After this, we changed Sam’s nickname from ‘Punch’ to ‘Lumpy’ for a while. Our cousin Bobby became known as ‘Craps.’ Wayne Russell, The Vagabond Writer slyolfart@gmail.com ♣
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“Observations from Lithuania”
Ken Slade, Vilnius
The Fountain of Youth-speak . . . a/k/a: ‘Dumbing-down’ English by KR Slade [CONTINUED FROM THE LAST ISSUE]
The New Pronunciations ● pronunciations (= ‘pro-nun-see-ashuns’) becomes ‘pro-noun-see-ashins’ ● words ending with ‘-tary’, or ‘-tery’, or ‘-tory’, must become ‘tree’ [examples: ‘cemetery’ = ‘ce-me-tree’ (or ‘cem-tree’) . . . ‘history’ = ‘hist-tree’ . . . ‘military’ = ‘mil-i-tree’ (or mil-tree) . . . ‘secretary’ = ‘sec-re-tree’ (or ‘sec-tree’) . . . ‘victory’ = ‘victree’] If you need practice to learn this, then listen to BBC news presenters. ● delete a syllable ... penultimate syllables (i.e., ‘penultimate’ means: the-one-before-the-last) -- in multi-syllabic words, the penultimate syllable should be eliminated, and the pronunciation of the final syllable is changed. o 3 syllables [examples: family (= ‘fa-mi-ly’) becomes ‘fam-lee’; president (= ‘pres-i-dent’) becomes ‘pres-dent’] o 4 syllables [examples: legendary (= lej-endare-y) becomes ‘lej-en-dree’, ridiculous (= re-dic-u-lus) becomes ‘re-dic-liss’] o 6 syllables [example: revolutionary (= re-voloo-shun-a-ry) becomes ‘re-vo-lu-shun-ry’] ● add a syllable [examples: ‘parsley’ (as: pars-lee) 52 dialogue
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becomes ‘par-sa-lee’; ‘ethnic’ (= eth-nik) becomes ‘eth-a-nik’] o common new pronunciations o ‘chocolate’ (= ‘choc-o-lat’) becomes ‘choclit’ or ‘choc-lat’ o ‘commentators’ becomes ‘commenters’ (pronounced: ‘ka-men-tahs’) o ‘crazy’ becomes ‘ka-raze-y’ o ‘floor’ becomes ‘flow-ar’ o ‘idea’ (= i-de-a) becomes ‘i-dear’ o ‘kind of’ becomes ‘kinda’ (i.e., meaning ‘perhaps’ / ‘somewhat’) o ‘Marilyn Monroe’ becomes ‘Madelyn Monroe’ o ‘nuclear’ (‘nu-cle-ar’) becomes ‘nuke-q-ler’ (per President G.W. Bush) o ‘tomatoes’ (= toe-may-toes) becomes ‘tahmade-dowz’ [same rule for potatoes]; or o ‘dah-made-dowz’ / ‘pah-day-tahs’ o ‘twenty-five’ becomes ‘dwon-tree-fi’ o ‘Uniqueness’ becomes ‘unusualness’ o ‘you’ becomes ‘chou’ o ‘What did’ becomes ‘what’d’ or ‘wud’ ● for adult males and females, there is the new: style (fashion) / fad (trend) / affectation (adoption) . . . of speaking with high-pitched voice: from the back of the throat (as if through the ears), rather than from the diaphragm as is natural with adults. www.dialogue.ca
[Note: viz. Wikipedia: ‘falsetto’, ‘puberphonia’; no article is currently available for ‘silly-goosies talk’.] …/
The New Spellings First, do not be concerned with spelling; ‘spelin iz nat importint’; the only purpose of spelling is to try to cause problems for writers. There should be no such thing as ‘mis-spelling’. Spelling is only about memories of bad-times in ‘grammar-scold’. However you spell any word, any reader should know what you mean, because it is the job of the reader to understand; if the reader does not know / understand, then that’s their problem, not your problem. It’s your inherent right as an English-speaker to use English anyway you want. [example: “The man from Hungry said he was hungary”; everyone should be able to understand this, unless they want to be pompous about spellings.] ● Some common examples of new-spellings: o ‘principal’, ‘principle’, and ‘princible’ [sic] are interchangeable o ‘regardless’ becomes ‘irregardless’ o ‘between’ becomes ‘in-between’ o ‘dividing’ becomes ‘dividing-up’ o ‘board the bus’ becomes ‘get up, on, into the bus’ o ‘see you later’ becomes ‘CUL8R’ ● Never write ‘Ha’; instead write ‘LOL’ (which means, ‘Laughing-Out-Loud’ -- not ‘Lot’s Of Love’); or write, ‘Mwahahaha’. ‘Haha’ is too Chaucer. ‘Ha, ha, he’ is too Shakespeare. Remember: laughter establishes closeness to your reader, and tells people that you are fun, so they will like you more.
Have Fun To-the-Max With English (;-D) ● Remember the ‘Youth-speak Rule’: “You only live once, and you may not live long enough to be old.” ● There are only four (5) kinds of talk: white-collar talk, blue-collar talk, t-shirt talk, muscle-shirt talk, and no-shirt talk. ● ‘Backwards-speak’: when I was in secondary school, our 15-students in our grade’s acceleratedclass invented speaking backwards . . . for any kid, there is nothing so satisfying as to tell someone in authority: “kcuf uoy” (pronounced: ‘cuff-woi’) . . . Oh !! . . . no adult, and certainly none of the school bullies, were able to understand our code . . . ● One’s personality, and perhaps essence, is revealed www.dialogue.ca
by one’s use of language. Self-love is the force of our times, so no need to fear any appellation of ‘narcissism’. Always state the obvious -- as if it were your very-own original-idea -- and there will no need to have any fear of disagreement. Be proud -- grow your ego! You are all that is important; no one else need be considered.
Summary and Conclusion “Screw the ‘Granma-scolders’ ! English belongs to the young !! Dumb it down !!!” . . . ‘The Manifesto of the Youth-speak’ I, personally, myself, all-of-me, and therefore we (i.e., me, myself, and I): are going to try to avoid the Youth-speak (although writing this article seems to be having some contrary effect, which hopefully will pass). I was young once; being young was a lot of fun; I thoroughly enjoyed my youth; memories of my youth still bring me smiles; and I am still amazed that I didn’t kill myself with all of my adventures. Now, I am not young; in fact, I am old; and the thought of reliving my youth is something that horrifies me. I will enjoy my memories, and be amused with past and present, with my every remaining passing day. Warning for senior-citizens: you may wish / need to avoid your ‘Youth-speak’ in the presence of: your spouse, close family-members, and especially your medical doctor. There is the likelihood of them getting the idea of ‘second childhood’; you could find yourself with a one-way, no-return, trip to the ‘funnyfarm’. Note: no youths, seniors, or journalists were harmed in the research, writing, or publication of this article. However, upon publication, there may be a number of journalists (print and broadcast) who will lose their jobs . . . sic transit in mundum = ROFLMAO . . . All Rights Reserved: 2017, kenmunications@gmail.com Ken Russell Slade, B.S., M.Ed., M.R.E., J.D. All Rights Reserved: kenmunications@gmail.com ♣ Kęstutis Sladkevičius / english.lithuania@gmail.com mob. tel. (+370-6) 035-9513 Writer & English Language Consultant, Text Editor, & Instructor / Rašytojas, privatus anglų kalbos konsultantas, redaktorius ir mokytojas / Accredited media reporter, by Lithuanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs / Reporteris, akreditavamo Kortelė Nr. 17338 (Lietuvos Respublika, URM) ♣ VOL. 31, NO. 3, SPRING 2018
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SCANDALOUS BOOKS YOU MAY NOT HAVE HEARD OF! The Devil’s Dynamo: book by John Scales Avery Received from Countercurrents.org (India)
John Scales Avery’s book, “The Devil’s Dynamo,” is a collection of articles on military-industrial complexes throughout the world and how they drive and perpetuate the institution of war.(2014) This book can be freely downloaded, online at LINK: http://www.fredsakademiet.dk/library/devil.pdf (with clickable links to each item in table of contents)
Table of Contents 1 TRIBALISM 1.1 Ethology, 13 1.2 Population genetics, 25 1.3 Formation of group identity, 28 1.4 Religion and ethnic identity, 28 1.5 Tribal markings; ethnicity; pseudospeciation, 29 1.6 The mystery of self-sacrifice in war, 34 1.7 Fischer, Haldane, Hamilton and Wilson, 34 1.8 Cooperation in groups of animals and human groups, 35 1.9 Trading in primitive societies, 36 1.10 Interdependence in modern human society 37 1.11 Two sides of human nature, 37 1.12 Tribalism and agreed-upon lies, 38 2 HEART OF DARKNESS 2.1 Early examples of the Devil’s Dynamo, 49 2.2 Genocides in the Americas, 49 2.3 Modern weapons and colonialism, 52 2.4 Persistent effects of colonialism, 54 2.5 Racism, colonialism and exceptionalism, 55 2.6 Leopold II and Atrocities in Belgian Congo, 55 2.7 The Kaiser’s genocide, 63 2.8 The racism of Cecil Rhodes, 64 2.9 Our older brothers can help us today, 65 3 FROM TRIBALISM TO NATIONALISM 3.1 From tribalism to nationalism, 69 3.2 Nationalism in Europe, 70 3.3 The two world wars, 81 3.4 Lessons from the First World War, 94 3.5 What is to be done? 96 4 THE ARMS RACE 4.1 The arms race prior to World War 1, 105 4.2 Krupp, Thyssen and Germany’s steel industry, 107 4.3 Colonialism and the outbreak of the First World War, 107 4.4 Prescott Bush and Hitler, 108 4.5 Fritz Thyssen supports Hitler’s rise to power, 110 54 dialogue
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4.6 Eisenhower’s farewell address, 117 4.7 The nuclear arms race, 119 4.8 Global famine produced by nuclear war, 126 4.9 Dangers of nuclear power generation, 129 4.10 Military-industrial complexes today, 136 4.11 A culture of violence, 146 5 RESOURCE WARS 5.1 Adam Smith’s invisible hand is at our throats, 161 5.2 Our greed-based economic system today, 167 5.3 Human motivations were not always so selfish, 173 5.4 Neocolonialism, 173 5.5 The resource curse, 173 5.6 Confessions of an economic hit-man, 174 5.7 Debt slavery, 176 5.8 Blood for oil, 177 5.9 Concluding remarks, 182 6 THE THREATS AND COSTS OF WAR 6.1 The training of soldiers, 191 6.2 Killing civilians, 193 6.3 The direct and indirect costs of war, 199 6.4 Medical and psychological consequences; loss of life, 200 6.5 Effects of war on children, 201 6.6 Refugees, 201 6.7 Damage to infrastructure, 202 6.8 Ecological damage, 203 6.9 Links between poverty and war, 204 6.10 The threat of nuclear war, 206 6.11 Atoms for peace? 215 6.12 Cancer threat from radioactive leaks at Hanford, 229 6.13 An accident waiting to happen, 231 6.14 Nuclear weapons are criminal! Every war is a crime! 236 7 THE “WAR AGAINST TERROR” 7.1 Perpetual war, 247 7.2 Are we being driven like cattle? 249 7.3 Media exaggeration of attacks in Paris, 255 7.4 Driven towards war by fake threats, 256 7.5 The role of the media, 259 7.6 Television as a part of our educational system, 259 7.7 The mass media have failed us, 260 7.8 Alternative media, 261 7.9 George Orwell, we need your voice today!, 261 8 SECRECY VERSUS DEMOCRACY 8.1 The jaws of power, 271 …/ www.dialogue.ca
8.2 The deep state, 272 8.3 “The United States of Secrets”, 281 8.4 Censorship of the news, 282 8.5 Coups, torture and illegal killing, 283 8.6 Secret trade deals, 284 8.7 Secret land purchases in Africa, 286 8.8 Secrecy, democracy and nuclear weapons, 287 8.9 Freedom from fear, 288 9 INTERNATIONAL LAW AND GOVERNANCE 9.1 The future of international law, 291 9.2 Nuclear warfare as genocide, 320 9.3 Protecting whistleblowers, 322 9.4 The illegality of NATO, 325 9.5 Violations of Article VI: Marshall Islands, 330 9.6 Reform of the United Nations, 334 9.7 Federations, past, present and future, 336 9.8 The Tobin tax, 342 9.9 An international police force? 343 9.10 A few concrete steps towards United Nations reform, 344 9.11 Governments of large nations and global government, 346 10 A NEW SOCIAL CONTRACT 10.1 Caring for the future of our children, 353 10.2 We must achieve a steady-state economic system, 354 10.3 We must restore democracy, 356 10.4 We must decrease economic inequality, 358 10.5 We must break the power of corporate greed, 360 10.6 We must leave fossil fuels in the ground, 361
10.7 We must stabilize, and ultimately reduce, global population, 364 10.8 We must eliminate the institution of war, 367 10.9 Educational reforms, 368 10.10 Culture, education and human solidarity, 371 10.11 Construction versus destruction, 374 10.12 New ethics to match new technology, 375 APPENDICES A THE RUSSELL-EINSTEIN MANIFESTO, 383 B ALBERT SCHWEITZER’S DECLARATION, 395 C THE MESSAGE OF POPE FRANCIS, 405 John Avery received a B.Sc. in theoretical physics from MIT and an M.Sc. from the University of Chicago. He later studied theoretical chemistry at the University of London, and was awarded a Ph.D. in 1965. He is now Lektor Emeritus, Associate Professor, at the Department of Chemistry, University of Copenhagen. Fellowships, memberships in societies: Since 1990 he has been the Contact Person in Denmark for Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. In 1995, this group received the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts. He was the Member of the Danish Peace Commission of 1998. Technical Advisor, World Health Organization, Regional Office for Europe (1988- 1997). Chairman of the Danish Peace Academy, April 2004. http://www.fredsakademiet.dk/ordbog/aord/a220.htm. He can be reached at avery.john.s@gmail.com See article by John Avery on the Devil’s Dynamo, at: https://www.countercurrents.org/avery170614.htm ♣
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KOSHER CRIMINALS: A SHORT HISTORY OF THE JEWISH MAFIA BOOK REVIEW: Hervé Ryssen’s “The Jewish Mafia” REVIEW BY RONALD L. RAY, assistant editor of The Barnes Review [EXTRACT/LINK] We all “know” about the Mafia. We “know” it is primarily Sicilian. We “know” it has lost a lot of its influence on the world around us. We may even “know” that there are “Russian” or “Chechen” or “Asian” or “Colombian” organized crime syndicates. But is what we “know” really true? Or is all of it a clever deception employed by the real mafiosi to hide their actual identity? And do their co-tribalists in the mass media collaborate in the charade through deliberate falsehoods? Who are the true criminals? The Jewish Mafia is a book containing the sort of knowledge that gets people killed – particularly if they are muckraking journalists. That is not an www.dialogue.ca
exaggeration. More than one investigative reporter has died from “too much information” and an “excessive curiosity” about the doings of one of the most brutal, most ruthless and most deadly global criminal organization ever to exist: the selfsame Jewish mafia. “What is this ‘Jewish’ mafia?” you may ask. “I’ve never heard of it before.” Sure, there have been swindlers like Bernie Madoff, former bootleggers like the Bronfman family or a few unscrupulous rabbis who traded in human body parts. But a true Jewish mafia? Indeed, there is one, although nowadays even most Jews in America are ignorant of it. And it is one of the oldest and most pervasive crime syndicates, at that. It is, moreover, to the great honor of Hervé Ryssen, a Frenchman born in 1967, that he has assembled in …/ VOL. 31, NO. 3, SPRING 2018
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a single volume one of the most comprehensive overviews of Jewish criminality ever published. And it is to the credit of Carlos W. Porter, as well, that he has produced the English translation. There are not a few individuals who would like the facts contained in Ryssen’s book to disappear down the “memory hole.” […] READ FULL REVIEW ONLINE AT:
https://barnesreview.org/product/the-jewish-mafia/ NOTES ON THE BOOK:
The Jewish Mafia – The Great International Predators $35.00 By Hervé Ryssen. Translated by Carlos Whitlock Porter. Here it is, between two covers for the very first time—a comprehensive look at the Jewish mafia from the earliest times until today. Meticulously detailed and documented largely from Jewish sources, this book is a fearless examination of organized Jewish criminality in all parts of the world, with an astonishing catalog of serious crimes. Here it is, between two covers for the very first time—a comprehensive look at the Jewish mafia from the earliest times until today. Meticulously detailed and documented largely from Jewish sources, this book is a fearless examination of organized Jewish criminality in all parts of the world, with an astonishing catalog of serious crimes. The author, Hervé Ryssen, has been jailed 13 times for writing seven books. His most recent conviction in 2015, for which he received three months hard time, came simply as punishment for the original cover to this book (a stock illustration of 1930s gangsters with a list of their crimes—arms dealing, racketeering, contract murder, drug dealing, money laundering, pimping, casinos, pornography, kidnapping, burglary, armed robbery, diamond swindles, white slaving, smuggling, African slave trading, trafficking in stolen artwork etc.). That cover has changed to the one you see here. Now expanded, updated and revised, perhaps the most shocking chapters of the book are those dealing with forced prostitution in Israel, international organ trafficking and the organ transplant industry. But further description of the contents is not nearly as powerful as a portion of the table of contents…
Inside The Jewish Mafia, Ryssen details: 56 dialogue
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• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
the “Torah Nostra’s” history American organized crime (and you thought Al Capone was a top criminal) Murder, Inc. Meyer Lansky the “invisible” mafia the pillage of Russia Mafioso Democracy the fall of the Oligarchs, crime from Berlin to Marbella the Organizatsiya in America, Antwerp, Vilnius, Bangkok, Bogota the mafia in Israel the diamond industry revolutionary paramilitary funding hashish, cocaine, heroin and the “ecstasy” trade porno cinema the trafficking of illegal immigrants the white slave trade the Atlantic African slave trade Christian slaves of the Middle Ages organ selling the aesthetic surgery racket Claude Lipsky’s swindles Jacques Croz-marie and the ARC scandal horse racing and garage rip-offs the VAT fraud swindling fellow Jews Samuel Flatto-Sharon crime in England, the U.S. and France Monsieur Michel and Monsieur Joseph, Seams and Co. profit fever the pillaging of vanquished countries
and more. This is, without a doubt, the most comprehensive, fascinating and fast-paced book ever written on the crimes of the Jewish mafia, from a man who dares to write the truth despite being a favorite and repeated target of the politically-correct Zionist thought police. Softcover, 381 pages; 475 supporting endnotes.
RONALD L. RAY is the assistant editor of The Barnes Review – A Journal of Politically Incorrect History, and a freelance author. The Barnes Review, as an organization, is dedicated to bringing history into accord with the facts. Recent publications cover a wide range of topics, such as: UFOs and Aliens, The Secret Cabal that Orchestrated the WWI Bloodbath, Adolph Hitler, Christmas Before Christianity, Atlantis in the Carribean, Tunnel Rats of Vietnam, LINK to Barnes Review: https://barnesreview.org/ ♣ www.dialogue.ca
Car Keys…
Laughter & ‘Lightenment!
From Sammy Camilleri, salvu1@hotmail.com
They weren't in my pockets. Suddenly I realized I must have left them in the car. Frantically, I headed for the parking lot. My husband has scolded me many times for leaving my keys in the car's ignition. He's afraid that the car could be stolen. As I looked around the parking lot, I realized he was right. The parking lot was empty. I immediately called the police. I gave them my location, confessed that I had left my keys in the car, and that it had been stolen. Then I made the most difficult call of all to my
husband: "I left my keys in the car and it's been stolen." There was a moment of silence. I thought the call had been disconnected, but then I heard his voice: "Are you kidding me?" he barked, "I dropped you off!" Now it was my turn to be silent. Embarrassed, I said, "Well, come and get me." He retorted, "I will, as soon as I convince this cop that I didn't steal your damn car!"
Welcome to the Golden Years! ♣
A few good laughs – received from Herb Spencer…
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Contributors in Andersen, Erik, BC…..............11 Arney, Jeremy, BC ………12,13 Atlee, Tom, OR…………..30-33 Attuned Vibrations.com……...46 Avery, John Scales (book)…..54 Backhaus, Karl, ON………….45 Bateson, Nora (book).....…30,59 Boese, David, ON……………07 Bowles, Paul, BC…...........48-49 Bruce, Madeline, BC………...44 Bruno Groening Friends Tour 25 Burk, Dean (Fluoride link)…...10 Campbell, Joseph (quote)…..46 Camilleri, Sammy (from)…36,57 CBAN (Biotech Action Ntwk) 21 Chopra, Shiv - In Memoriam 21 Clark, Kim, BC……………….43 Cohen, Leonard, music link…59
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Co-Intelligence Institute….30-33 Curtin, Edward, MA………27-29 Ctr for Global Research, QC 09 Doehring, A.C., BC………..25 Erkiletian, Jim, BC……..….07 Etkin, Jack, BC………………04 Foster, David Muir, ON……...20 Froelich, Amanda (extract)….13 Gaudet, Marie, AB…...............40 Gotlieb, Vera, Germany…….13 Green Party of Canada……5,14 Guardian,The, UK(links) 5,45,50 Hanle, Inge, CDSAPI, BC……24 Joffre, Drew Rivers (Rio)…….59 Joubarne, Grace, ON……22-24 Julian, S. B., BC……………..42 Kaal, Edwin, Netherlands…...25 Kazdan, Larry, BC…………...05
Lawson, Susanne Hare, BC 1,46 Lonsdale, Derrick, M.D.,US…33 Masuda, Gerry, BC………….13 Mathews, Robin, BC…….17-19 McDowall, Stephanie, BC….13 Morton, Alexandra, BC…..04 Neilly, Michael, ON…………08 Nickerson, Mike, ON………..26 Noble, Dennis & Sharon……14 People for the Peace……11,14 Porter, J. S., ON…………….35 Ross, June, BC (from)……...14 Russell, Wayne, BC………...51 Ryssen, Hervé (book)…..55-56 Shadbolt, John, ON…..…….10 Skinner, Derek, BC…………15 Slade, Ken, Lithuania…...52-53 Spencer, Herb, BC.….16,49,57
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Stafford, Christina, BC……...36 Stevens, Dave, NB………….07 Stop PsychotherapyTakeover 22 Taylor, Jim, BC………….…..06 Thunderbolts Project………..25 Vancourt, Randy, ON…….....47 White, Patricia (from)……….13 Woodsworth, John, ON…….37 Woodsworth, Susan Keys….39 Zigarlick, Norm, AB/SK……..50
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Calligraphy? Paul bowles?
P.59 HOLDING SPACE (a poem) Can I keep my pole firmly planted? My heart is slanted. Can I sense clearly without flinching?
LEONARD COHEN IN LONDON HALLELUJAH
(on tour in 2009 after his retirement fund was stolen by his manager Kelley Lynch, forcing him to start touring again after five years in a Zen Buddhist monastery in California 7 minutes, 20 seconds of bliss and heart LINK: https://tinyurl.com/yt-LC-HAL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrLk4vdY28Q
My nerves are twitching. Can i sense the human behind the dense facade. Not too much, not too quickly Humbly, respectfully I prod. Banter at gun side Face to face Can I sit. Can I hold space? EPILOGUE I love the concept of “Holding space” with someone you respect. Again this is one of the cultural insights gleamed from Ecuatorian Shamanic culture. To Simply sit with someone… intentionally. To listen, be aware and feel the other’s presence. It is a gift that may be given and received. Drew Rivers Joffre In Rio Synergy / synergistic / synergism: the interaction or
cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects. Syncretism - the attempted reconciliation or union of different or opposing principles, practices, or parties, as in philosophy or religion.
www.dialogue.ca
Leonard Cohen - Hallelujah In An Unspoken Voice – How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness (2010) ISBN-10: 1556439431, by Peter A. Levine, PhD Best-selling author of Waking the Tiger (1997), Trauma Through a Child’s Eyes (2006), and Trauma-Proofing Your Kids (2008) From the back cover of the book: Unraveling Trauma in the Body, Brain and Mind—a Revolution in Treatment In this culmination of his life’s work, Peter A. Levine draws on his broad experience as a clinician, a student of comparative brain research, a stress scientist and a keen observer of the naturalistic animal world to explain the nature and transformation of trauma in the body, brain and psyche. In an Unspoken Voice is based on the idea that trauma is neither a disease nor a disorder, but rather an injury caused by fright, helplessness and loss that can VOL. 31, NO. 3, SPRING 2018
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be healed by engaging our innate capacity to self-regulate high states of arousal and intense emotions. Enriched with a coherent theoretical framework and compelling case examples, the book elegantly blends the latest findings in biology, neuroscience and body-oriented psychotherapy to show that when we bring together animal instinct and reason, we can become more whole human beings. “In this masterpiece Peter Levine has captured the essence of trauma as residing in the ‘unspoken voice’ of our bodies. Combining a thorough study of animal ethology, brain research and indigenous healing rituals with vast clinical knowledge, he provides a marvelous and original perspective on how trauma results in injuries that can be transformed and healed by attention to the natural healing powers that reside deep within every human being.” – Bessel Van Der Kolk, MD, medical director and founder of the Trauma Center in Boston, director
of the National Complex Trauma Treatment Network and professor of Psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine; author of The Body Keeps The Score (2015) “Peter Levine’s work is visionary common sense, pure and simple.” – Laura Huxley, lifetime partner and collaborator of Aldous Huxley.
p.60 back cover
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