Dialogue Magazine, Vol. 31-4, Summer 2018

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VOL. 31, NO. 4, SUMMER 2018

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PHOTOS

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SUMMER 2018, VOL. 31, NO. 4

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A word from the publisher and editor…

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Dear Reader, This Summer 2018 issue of Dialogue, to end our 31st year, seems something quite remarkable. Not only because of the many outstanding contributions that are included in these pages, but also because of the “T” theme of Thankfulness for The Trees, who give us breath, life and inspiration and who also make it possible for you to read these words on the paper of the printed edition.

A special Thank You to Susanne Lawson and Paul Bowles, whose Tree works of art grace the front and back cover of this issue.

Although the completion of this issue was not without its trials and tribulations, now that it has all come together, we would like to say how grateful we are for the opportunity to continue doing this work of love. We Thank You – the dedicated writers, artists and readers who are pursuing your dreams of a better world – for the great privilege of pulling this together for you! Without You there would be no Dialogue! And we are also very thankful for the small number of readers whose donations enable Dialogue to continue.

Rather than highlight some of the not-to-be-missed treasures that follow… we commend to your Summer reading enjoyment a wondrous variety of compelling topics from engaged and engaging writers. You will no doubt find something that you need to read at this time! (And you may well discover things in this issue that challenge your assumptions and unexamined premises!)

Here are a few of the “T” Topics you will find… Tao, Technology, Telling the Truth, Toads, Time, Thinking, Thanking, Titles, Traditions, Territories, Tourism, Toxic, Transcendental Treachery, Transportation, Tribunal, Tributes, Trust, Truths, Tsilhoqot’in Nation, vTaiwan.

Thank you for being part of this publishing adventure!

Maurice

volunteer publisher

Janet

volunteer editor

…& Penny & Lucky!

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.

dialogue

was founded in 1987 and is now published quarterly.

Maurice J. King, Volunteer Publisher Janet K. Hicks, Volunteer Editor

Date of Issue: June 27, 2017 Annual subscription: $20.00 [including GST, # 89355-1739] Canada Post Agreement No. 40069647 Registration No. 08915 ISSN: 1184-7042 Legal Deposit: National Library of Canada (409731)

The views expressed in this publication are those of their individual authors.

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

due, you should find a renewal slip enclosed in this copy of Dialogue (See p.58).

Reprints of published articles are included for their educational value.

P.S. 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.

6227 Groveland Drive Nanaimo, BC, Canada V9V 1B1

Tel: 250-758-9877 Fax: 250-758-9855

P.P.S. 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. [If you would like to receive a designated “Smile Card,” please let us know (250-758-9877).] ♣ www.dialogue.ca

…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 31st 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.

E-mail: dialogue@dialogue.ca WEBSITE: www.dialogue.ca

Deadlines: Sep. 1st - Dec. 1st March 1st - June 1st

VOL. 31, NO. 4, SUMMER 2018

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Truths & Consequences

Peoples’ Tribunal hears concerns about Fracking From: Jessica Ernst, Erik Andersen, June 6, 2018

A Preliminary Statement was issued by the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (PPT) and judges at the end of their Session on Human Rights, Fracking and Climate change (14-18 May 2018).

Jessica’s comment: A vivid, snappy read (2 pages: you can read it on p.11). A brief quote that hit me: “....underline that the violations of rights are generally planned and implemented intentionally, as well as being hidden when possible and denied when exposed. Also, the frequent absence of appropriate juridical-normative terms of reference is not recognised by governments as a vacuum to be urgently corrected, thus providing corporations an excuse to operate within a regime of impunity.

“The scenario of rights violations and impunity, often resulting from regulatory capture, that fracking

presents appears as an exemplary model of the broader geopolicies and strategies of states and powerful corporations that have imposed a tragic hierarchy of values across the world, which has resulted in the rights of people and the rights of nature being subjugated to the financial interests of states and corporations. A sort of systemic crime architecture.”

[Emphasis added] – Jessica Ernst, magog@sasktel.net ,

Comment from Erik:

In response to Jessica: Finally someone of importance noticing the "emperor has no clothes."

It does not get clearer than this.

Erik Andersen, Gabriola Island BC twolabradors@shaw.ca Thank you to Erik for bringing this to our attention MORE ON THE PEOPLES’ TRIBUNAL / STATEMENT, P.11♣

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RECD. FROM JUNE ROSS, SHARON NOBLE:

Kinder-Morgan Buyout by the Federal Government A petition – e-1722 (Oil and gas) – has been launched to stop the federal buyout of the Kinder Morgan pipeline. Please consider signing and sharing, if so inclined. Sponsored by M.P. Elizabeth May, initiated by Harald Hommel from North Saanich, BC, on May 31, 2018, re Trans Mountain pipeline: open for signature until September 28, 2018, at 4:22 p.m. (EDT)

Petition to the Government of Canada

Whereas: • The Trudeau administration has announced it will spend $4.5 billion of public funds on acquiring the existing Trans Mountain pipeline from Kinder Morgan; • This $4.5 billion is not inclusive of construction costs for the expansion, projected to increase the cost of the deal to over $11 billion; • The pipeline was valued at $550 million by Kinder Morgan in 2007; • The expansion still has to pass the National Energy Board's 157 conditions and over a dozen court challenges before it can be built; • During the election, Trudeau promised to overhaul the Harper administration’s deeply flawed pipeline approval process, respect Indigenous rights, and end 4 dialogue

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fossil fuel subsidies; • A diluted bitumen spill would devastate local ecosystems and economies on the West Coast, or any area surrounding the 800 bodies of water its path crosses; • There is no proven way to clean up a diluted bitumen spill in a marine environment; • Shipping out unprocessed diluted bitumen to refineries in other countries ships out Canadian jobs; and • The Trans Mountain expansion will: lock in oilsands production growth that cannot be reconciled with Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions reduction commitments, increase the risk of a diluted bitumen spill, violate the rights of Indigenous communities along the pipeline route, threaten Indigenous communities reliant on the marine environment for their livelihood and cultural practices.

We, the undersigned, residents of Canada, call upon the Government of Canada to immediately halt any plans to purchase the Trans Mountain pipeline or otherwise support its expansion.

LINK: https://petitions.ourcommons.ca/en/Petition/ Details?Petition=e-1722 ♣ www.dialogue.ca

More “T” Themes

Target the Termination of Plastic Use An open letter to my favorite supplier of tools for woodwork & gardening (and any other company's officer who cares to read) Alexander Miller, Port Alberni what you sell, even when made of 'eco-friendly' I'm certainly not one of your bigger customers but I wood, metal, natural fibres etc., has connections, acgreatly appreciate your unusually high, quite amazing cessories, 'bits' and features that are made of plastic: level of customer service, as well as the quality of not only environmentally undesirable but often a weak many of the unique & innovative items you sell. (Not link in terms of reliability & longevity. always your prices, but I trumpet my admiration to I could go on & on but I'm sure your company's peoanyone who'll listen.) ple have enough imagination to outstrip mine. I do Now here's a very serious suggestion I want to make: think the time is ripe for companies to declare war on At a time when our planet and its oceans are being plastics and other undesirable substances; eliminate choked & potentially destroyed by discarded plastic, them from their product lines. How about setting out how about becoming a leader in minimizing, virtually to lead the field and be able to brag about it? eliminating, all types of non-renewable or non-recyAnd, oh dear, did I forget to mention packaging??? clable materials in your business? I see that much of Alexander Miller ambler@shaw.ca ♣ **************************************************************

T is for Transportation From Mike Nickerson, Lanark ON

I Took My Car to the Corner Store I took my car to the corner store, to get a loaf of bread; It turned out to be quite a trip, when all was done and said.

First I took the doors along, as they were first at hand; A trip with each, my heart did pound, the exercise was grand.

Next I took the hood and trunk, they easily came undone; The body posed a bigger task, it could not be moved as one.

I’ll not tell all, about the chore, with torch and saw to render; Suffice to say, when it was done, I could carry every member.

But for the engine, I had to cheat, its weight too much for me; I brought a wagon to the task, man powered, though, you see.

With fenders, gears and manifolds, www.dialogue.ca

bumpers, clutch and brakes; My heart and lungs were racing now, a little rest I’d take.

Oh how I love my motor car, its chrome and paint do shine; The neighbours stare as we go by, I’m so glad that it is mine.

The tires I choose to roll along, a wonder is the wheel; After axles, tranny and padded seats, I was ready for my meal.

Alone, one man, but for his car, the corner store’s so handy; I got the bread that I came for, some cheese and also candy.

The joys of transport are so grand, the world is there to roam; I took my car to the corner store, now I have to take it home.

Excerpt from "Life, Money and Illusion; Living on Earth as if we want to stay”

"Life, Money and Illusion” is now available in VOL. 31, NO. 4, SUMMER 2018

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French: "La vie, l'argent et l’illusion.” Not sure how to distribute them, but I have to appreciate the huge effort made by our translator Monique Boulanger and the lay-out efforts and publishing services of Sean Fordyce.

Yours, Mike N. http://www.SustainWellBeing.net 7th Generation Initiative, 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, ON 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: Living on Earth as if we want to stay ♣

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Salmon Farming – it’s unbelievable!

YOU are as important to wild salmon as the rivers, the rain, the ocean Alexandra Morton, Sointula BC

Salmon Farming in British Columbia has reached a point beyond ridiculous. The diversity of voices speaking out is unprecedented, there are four lawsuits from all sides in play, one virus, two countries, opposite conclusions. Here you have it in 4 minutes: http://alexandramorton.typepad.com/ This is a very quick update on the truly unbelievable situation that the Provincial Government of British Columbia and the Federal Government of Canada have put themselves in to accommodate the salmon farming industry.

Please know you have an essential role to play in the survival of wild salmon. You have become as important to wild salmon as the rivers, the rain, the ocean...

- Alexandra Morton, March 3, 2018

Website: http://www.alexandramorton.ca/ ♣

Washington State prohibits farm salmon virus that Canada ignores May 17, 2018 the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) announced they had denied permission to Cooke Aquaculture for transfer of 800,000 juvenile Atlantic salmon from a land-based hatchery into marine grow-out pens, because the fish are infected with an Icelandic strain of piscine orthoreovirus (PRV). Earlier this year Washington State enacted a bill to phase out Atlantic salmon net-pen aquaculture by 2022. Cooke Aquaculture had planned to operate until then, but now has 800,000 smolts they can’t use.

Independent biologist Alexandra Morton has been in court for 5 years to uphold the law against the Canadian Minister of Fisheries, who refuses to screen BC farm salmon for PRV. Read more: https://tinyurl.com/am-reg-cap ♣

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Your house is on fire. Do you form a committee or put it out?

From: Stan Proboszcz, Watershed Watch Salmon Society

[June 15th] Premier John Horgan announced a new Wild Salmon Advisory Council to tackle the challenges facing wild salmon.

We had high hopes for this announcement, but the last thing we need is another industry-biased investigation, council or process to examine the situation for months. B.C. wild salmon are in a crisis situation!

We need action now, before it’s too late.

Instead of an advisory council, here are a few things the Province could do today to help wild salmon: • invest in habitat restoration in the lower 6 dialogue

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Fraser River, • finish implementing B.C.’s Water Sustainability Act and make more water available for fish in our streams, • stop clearcut logging in sensitive salmon habitats, • And let fish farm tenure licences lapse as they come up for renewal.

We are expecting an announcement on fish farms next week, and we need to keep up the pressure. The Province needs to know that another committee is not going to do anything for wild salmon. […]

Stan Proboszcz is Science & Campaign Advisor, WWSS WEBSITE: https://www.watershed-watch.org/ ♣ www.dialogue.ca

Poisoning Clayoquot Sound for Private Profit The many downsides of (marine-based) fish farming Susanne Lawson, Tofino BC

The displacement of other livelihoods, the lack of natural food sources and the pollution and poisoning of our waters are the main reasons fish farms have to go, not just be placed on land but they have to be taken away from further harming our living ocean.

I have watched the farms be placed in areas where prawn fisherman used to have their best catches. I have watched the herring disappear due to parasitic sea lice as well as the smell of salmon, a natural predator for herring, along with the stench of the farms themselves chase the herring away. The sea lice are out of control and are the reason Clayoquot Sound waters are being poisoned with pesticides in the waters right now. Sea lice are killing almost every small fish that lives in these waters but to kill the sea lice with pesticides in the ocean is just exacerbating the problem. It is a downward spiral.

The bird life that used to feed on small fish are disappearing. The rows of eiderducks, murres, and others that depended upon the small fish for sustenance have gone and there are fewer murrelets and other ocean dependent life around. That along with high wattage lights underwater at the fish farms that attracts the small fish into the nets where they are consumed by the Atlantic fish being raised there is also a factor in the loss of small fish here.

I have seen the ocean around this area become almost devoid of life from what it was before the fish farms came in. Wild salmon, cod, herring, halibut, clams, oysters, mussels, gooseneck barnacles and so much more have been so negatively impacted many are disappearing and what remains aren't fit to eat. Without this healthy source of food, the other marine life like whales, seals, sea lions, otters, mink and more are disappearing or going elsewhere.

It is a sad time for this area where profit for a few before the health and wealth of everything else comes first. We have tried hard to stem the destruction of this area but in the face of government subsidies for fish farming along with private propaganda by the fish farming industry, it is almost too late for this area to sustain a healthy ocean and marine life. It has become unsafe to eat the shellfish and even the sea weeds due to the diseases that are coming out of the bloodwater www.dialogue.ca

from the farms along with the sewage that is being produced. Piscene reovirus, a virus that attacks the heart muscles of the salmon has been found in the bloodwater here and there have been recent cases where humans have had mysterious diseases caused by food borne viruses that have permanently damaged their heart.

Dump that into the mix of a small town that hosts millions of tourists every year and dumps raw sewage into the ocean along with the bloodwater, you have a very dangerous and unhealthy combination. It is only a matter of time before this area is condemned, already there are shellfish closures. That puts an end to the oyster festival (where many people got sick last year) and to the prawn and crab fishermen, to gooseneck and geoduck harvesting. Mussels don't even come from the west coast of Canada anymore, the ones you eat in restaurants are from the east coast of Canada or New Zealand. Too bad because they were once a wonderful and easy source of food at low tide here. Now they are condemned and local people go hungry.

The fish farming industry had the same problems in Norway where they have divested their dirty industry to Mitsubishi and now Canada and Chile bear the brunt of it. From genetically modified frankenfish to rampant diseases which caused Norwegians to have to poison their rivers just to eradicate the diseases, they managed to get the Canadian government and taxpayers to take on the problem while we subsidized their profits which continues today.

Without a healthy marine environment here in Clayoquot Sound, so much is lost. The wellbeing of all has been sacrificed for the profit of a few. Time to turn it around and hopefully bring our healthy, living ocean back. p.s. Although there are some Columbia River Spring Salmon coming through now, there is a lack of small local fish to be found here. We wonder how the marine birds on Cleland Island will survive that depend upon the small fish coming out of Clayoquot Sound Rivers and surroundings when they have to travel so much further to provide for their young. Between sea lice, pollution, underwater lights on the farms, pesticides and more, it is a wonder there is life here at all.

From: S Lawson, councilfire@hotmail.com ♣

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Mythic dam battle at Site C is a showdown between “progress” and those who would preserve the Valley Amy Reiswig, in Focus Magazine, Victoria BC FOUR-YEAR-OLD CALEB helped pull late September corn stalks at Ken and Arlene Boon’s farm, uncovering the pumpkins he’d eventually choose among for Halloween. There on a bank of the Peace River, this boy with blue glasses and dirty hands is the fifth generation to harvest in this garden, likely unaware that he may be the last, as the new highway for Site C will run through this part of his grandparents’ expropriated land. Nearby at Tluuge sus (Bear Flat), First Nations families have gathered for thousands of years—long before the Boons arrived. Cultural camps allow the sharing of ancestral knowledge and help maintain a spiritual connection to the land…for now. Site C construction will claim it, too. Farther out, downstream in the river itself, is what locals call Eagle Island. Named for its nests, every tree there has already been cut down.

These aren’t scenes you’ll find in government reports, industry-commissioned studies, or mainstream media accounts about the now-greenlit hydro megaproject taking shape in northeastern BC. Rather, they are some of the intimate stories told in award-winning journalist Sarah Cox’s new book Breaching the Peace: The Site C Dam and a Valley’s Stand Against Big Hydro (UBC Press, May 2018). Through in-person visits, detailed interviews, and dogged research, Cox takes us to meet the place, its people, and its rare and little-studied ecosystems— all in peril. She reminds us that for local First Nations, farmers, and hundreds of species, the Peace River Valley is not a hydro opportunity; it’s home.

Billed as climate-friendly clean energy to meet future demand, the Site C dam was first proposed in the 1950s and has been a topic of hot debate, and resistance, for decades. Designed to produce 1100 megawatts on some of the province’s best agricultural 8 dialogue

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land, Site C would affect 34 farms, the traditional territories of the Treaty 8 First Nations, 450 known archaeological sites, 900 areas of “paleontological sensitivity,” and more than 100 species at risk by flooding 128 kilometres of the Peace River Valley and its tributary valleys. As Cox encourages us to imagine, that’s the area between Victoria and Nanaimo under up to 15 storeys of water. The zone widens when you include the stability impact line and the wave impact line (where reservoir waves caused by landslides would reach). Oh, and there’s the new highway. It’s all going to cost us $10.7 billion, as of the January 2018 estimate.

That’s a lot of numbers, and I often lament that “number” contains the word “numb.” While Cox, with a saint’s patience, sifts through the tens of thousands of pages of environmental impact assessments to tell us, for instance, that “fourteen at-risk butterfly species will also be impacted by the project, including the Old World swallowtail and Aphrodite fritillary,” she clearly knows from her own experience that it takes more than data to help people understand what’s at stake and what’s been happening in the now bittersweetly-named Peace.

Like most British Columbians, Cox had never been to the Peace region. That changed in 2013 while working for Sierra Club BC. Being there, her expectations of “just another pretty BC valley” were blown open, and she describes what she instead encountered: “something of a biological curiosity… a northern Garden of Eden.” After that personal contact, her ideas about conservation shifted, looking at nature to include “the preservation of other values as well: traditional way of life, human history, the smaller green spaces that connect protected areas for wildlife, how everything fits together.” From that, the spark was lit. “I remember the end of a conversation with a friend from the www.dialogue.ca

Peace,” she tells me, tucked into a quiet upstairs nook at Nourish Cafe. “I said, ‘I wish there was something else I could do.’ I literally woke up the next morning with the idea for the book.”

Personal contact is truly at the heart of Breaching the Peace. We hear the voices of expropriated landowners, of First Nations Chiefs and activists, even of birds like the endangered yellow rail, or the slow drip from the delicate geology of tufa seeps. Cox’s hands-on approach produces an ever-surprising series of “who knew?” moments: in the Peace you can grow everything from artichokes to watermelon; you can find 11,000-year-old taiga vole bones on the same land as prickly pear cactus growing farther north than Moscow; BC doesn’t have stand-alone legislation to protect endangered species; and methylmercury from flooded forest and agricultural land means Chief Roland Willson of West Moberly First Nations must already lament, “Nowadays what I get to do is to teach my son how to throw contaminated fish back into the river.”

“I was surprised all the way along,” Cox tells me, “by the extent of the damage—the damage to First Nations communities and rights and title, the damage to the environment, the damage to farmland.” And she’s not easy to shock. With an MA in political science, a freelance journalism career (earning a Vancouver Press Club Award, a BC Journalism Award, and two Western Magazine Awards), and a background with science-based conservation organizations, Cox has more recently been the legislative reporter for DeSmog Canada, focusing on energy and environmental issues. Site C wraps all of Cox’s interests into one big, unruly ball which she deftly untangles.

But Cox doesn’t just gather and chronicle information.

The beauty of her book is that it allows us to stand in closer, deeper relation to this threatened place and its determined people. And we should. Its loss is rationalized as being for our collective gain, so there’s a responsibility to know what is being sacrificed for our supposed good. You can’t fight for—or mourn—what you didn’t even know existed.

The public also can’t stand up against an invisible process; that’s the other side of her story. Cox wanted people to see exactly what expropriation in BC looks like, and how BC Hydro quietly bought up land in the Peace, spending millions, all through the ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s, and early 2000s until the BC Liberals made good on their intention to push Site C past the point of no www.dialogue.ca

return, despite previous rejections. She wants people to see the tactics employed—not by a foreign-owned corporation, but by their own Crown Corporation – in an intimidating BC Hydro civil suit against First Nations protesters in order to discourage potential future involvement (a suit, Cox notes, that’s still open).

Quite simply, she says: “The story of what’s going on up there needs to get out.”

So while BC Hydro and the Canadian Hydropower Association wouldn’t speak to her, she ducked underneath and behind official lines to gather evidence through one-on-one talks, digging through stashes of letters and clippings, conferring with scientists, making FOI requests, excavating unsorted museum archives, hiking out on the land, visiting an international hydro conference, and meeting with alternative energy producers.

She also considers the global context of hydro megaprojects dating back to the 1920s and through to cautionary contemporary examples of Muskrat Falls, Newfoundland, and the Keeyask Dam in Manitoba.

Big dams once stood as symbols of progress, independence, and ingenuity, but later represented corruption and arrogance, as environmental and human costs became too great to defend… until now. She writes: “One project that was dusted off and polished with a climate-friendly cloth was Site C. It joined big hydro dams around the world…as a phoenix rising from the ashes.” The climate has changed indeed.

While Cox’s prose is controlled, deliberate, shot through with wonder, deep respect, and empathy, she injects a sense of the mythic, conveying the enormity of the larger principles at play—and also at risk. Despite NDP Premier John Horgan’s giving the go-ahead in December, Cox doesn’t believe the fight is quite over.

With two First Nations court cases and major geotechnical issues (she says they still haven’t found bedrock), she believes Site C’s fire may still go out. “The public turning against the project could also stop it,” she says.

“I think most people still don’t know.” With Breaching the Peace, we’ll all know a lot more.

Writer and editor Amy Reiswig continues to believe that our greatest natural resource is one another—to listen, ask questions, find solutions, and stand in support.

Received from June Ross, May 3, 2018 REPRINTED FROM FOCUS MAGAZINE, VICTORIA BC

http://www.focusonvictoria.ca/may-june-2018/sara-coxbreaching-the-peace-r6/ ♣ SEE ALSO: Review by Andrew Nikiforuk at TheTyee LINK: https://tinyurl.com/tyee-0618 ♣ VOL. 31, NO. 4, SUMMER 2018

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'The Poison Papers' – US and Canadian Regulators Colluded with Manufacturers of Highly Toxic Substances Dr. Jonathan Latham explains how the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) & Canada's Health Protection Branch concealed fraudulent tests of dangerous pesticides THEREALNEWS.COM INTERVIEW: [EXTRACT] Jonathan Latham, Ph.D. is the Director of The Poison Papers project and co-founder of the Bioscience Resource Project.

Together with the Center for Media & Democracy, Latham brought the Poison Papers to light in late 2017.

Video(11 min)/Transcript [ https://therealnews.com/ ] LINK: https://tinyurl.com/trnn21687

DIMITRI LASCARIS: This is Dmitri Lascaris reporting for The Real News from Montreal.

EXTRACT & LINK: DIMITRI LASCARIS: Our Canadian audience will be particularly interested to know, I would think, that The Poison Papers suggested the Canadian counterpart of the EPA, the Health Protection Branch, colluded with pesticide manufacturers to keep invalidly registered products on the market, and covered up problems with many of the safety tests performed on these products. Could you talk to us about what The Poison Papers reveal about the collusion of the Health Protection Branch in Canada?

JONATHAN LATHAM: Yes. So you know, this goes into something that is also very important in these papers, which is that, you know, we have a system that is involved in such a way that chemical manufacturers do not normally do the health and safety testing of their own products. They farm them out to normally independent laboratories, who are in fact quite big companies, and who are, in fact, often owned by chemical companies.

But this is basically a system that creates an illusion of independence. And this independence is an illusion in the sense that a chemical company is repeatedly going to go back to these independent testing laboratories.

And these independent laboratories know this. And so the chemical companies basically can pick and choose between these independent testing companies, and even in cases where there are honest ones, those basically, 10 dialogue

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those honest ones, are likely to go out of business.

The EPA in many cases has known that that the reports submitted to them by these independent testing labs are fraudulent. And in the papers this comes out quite often in discussions of the EPA. But also there was a big blow up in the late 1970s and early 1980s when a company called Industrial Bio-Test Labs was basically discovered by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to be submitting fraudulent tests. And essentially, FDA passed the baton to the EPA, including Canada's Health Protection Branch, to do something about this. And the solution they came up with was basically to cover it up as much as they could.

(But) it was already public understanding, so they could only cover it up to a certain extent, because it went to court, because the Justice Department became involved, because executives of Industrial Bio-Test (IBT) ended up going to prison. There were limits to how much they could cover it up.

They organized a meeting of the chemical manufacturers, of IBT of the EPA and Health Protection Branch, basically to work out how to buy companies time so that they could then do, do their tests again, and essentially keep their products on the market. And this is thousands of tests of well-known products. Glyphosate, atrazine, many, many other commonly used household products or pesticides. So is this testing disaster was basically affecting the whole system, but it really, it only intermittently and irregularly made the news.

But the main, the main reason being that instead of cleaning out the system and basically, for example, transitioning to a system in which the EPA did the test or some, some government agency did the test, they basically decide to paper over the cracks and allow what was basically an unstable and unreasonable set of ways of doing chemical testing, basically to allow that process to continue, so that essentially the public would not be allowed (to know); we'd have no idea which tests were fraudulent, actually. […]

DIMITRI LASCARIS: And this has been Dimitri Lascaris reporting from Montreal, Canada for the Real News.

READ IN FULL AT LINK: https://tinyurl.com/trnn21687 ♣ www.dialogue.ca

Testimony & Evidence Presented re: Human Rights, Fracking & Climate Change (Received from Jessica Ernst) AT THE PERMANENT PEOPLES’ TRIBUNAL The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (PPT) was established Over five days, from 14 to 18 May, 2018, the PPT in Bologna in 1979 as a direct continuation of the Russell heard testimony and received other evidence relating Tribunals on Vietnam (1966-67) and Latin America (1973to fracking and its impact on climate change, human 76). Lelio Basso, who had been a member and speaker, rights and the rights of nature. Included were very proposed that these celebrated tribunals be transformed into a permanent institution that could become an instrusubstantial reports from four pre-PPT Citizens’ Tribument and platform to give recognition, visibility and a voice nals that had gathered scientific, technical, social, culto the peoples suffering violations of their fundamental tural and experiential testimony from many commurights, victims who, according to the Universal Declaration nity organizations, experts and individual citizens. of the Rights of Peoples, proclaimed in Algiers in 1976, The PPT also received other such evidence from indiwere marginalized in international law, which had increasingly become the guarantor of the interests of the public viduals, experts and NGOs on the negative impact of and private holders of political and economic powers. fracking on the environment, people’s lives and on The PPT is built around an international network of experts, their communities. social actors and scholars from several countries of Europe, Given the overwhelming volume and comprehensiveSouth America, Asia and Africa, recognized for their indeness of the evidence received and the need to consider pendence and competence. The characteristic of “permanency” and the selection criteria used in the appointment of all of this carefully, the panel of ten jurors will necesits judges, renowned for their independence and expertise, sarily take several months to formulate a precise and have made this opinion tribunal a laboratory of denunciation comprehensive Opinion, including recommendations. and interdisciplinary research. In its 45 sessions and judgments, the Tribunal has accompanied the transformations Because the matters considered by the PPT are of and struggles of the post-colonial period, the development of great significance and public concern around the economic neo-colonialism, globalization, the resurgence of globe, especially to those affected negatively by the war and the International Criminal Court’s declaration of nonfracking industry, and generally speaking by the competence for economic crimes. expansion of the fossil fuel extractive frontier, with all Its long experience of research, analysis, and development its consequences on the climate crisis, on the environof innovative criteria for the interpretation and promotion of the law have made the PPT one of the most active opinion ment and on peoples’ rights, by industry role players tribunals for the expression of initiatives and movements themselves, and governments across the world insofar that push for effective laws that can meet the growing chalas they have responsibilities to abide by laws and to lenges of globalization and economic impunity. protect the public, human rights and the environment, The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal is based in Rome, at the this Preliminary Statement is issued now for public Fondazione Lelio e Lisli Basso, Via della Dogana Vecchia discussion and action to abate the negative effects of 5; E-mail: ppt@permanentpeoplestribunal.org fracking.

Session on Human Rights, Fracking and The dramatic impacts of the Unconventional Gas and Climate change (14-18 May 2018) Oil Extraction technologies on people, the environPRELIMINARY STATEMENT ment and the climate were elaborately documented to the PPT, including a comprehensive exposition of The PPT is an international, fully independent organization established in 1979 as an opinion Tribunal hav- facts and related oral, visual, juridical and cultural eviing as its primary statute The Universal Declaration of dence which clearly established beyond any reasonable doubt the reality of violations of the rights of huPeoples’ Rights (Algiers, 1976). The main aim of the PPT is to contribute to the struggle of peoples for their mans and of nature, and a significant contribution to climate change. Such findings require the urgent asself-determination and the prevention, assessment, certainment and attribution of responsibilities as well judgment and reparation of their fundamental rights, as of the measures which must be undertaken to avoid whenever international institutions do not fulfil their an irreversible worsening of the situation; and to bring responsibilities to ensure the full respect of obligatory about changes in practices, policies of reparation for duties of justice by public or private actors. www.dialogue.ca

VOL. 31, NO. 4, SUMMER 2018

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injuries suffered, and rehabilitation of environmental destruction including the contribution of fracking to climate change.

What has become clear is that fracking is, with important but limited exceptions, an ongoing and expanding reality that affects both the rights of nature as well as the rights of individuals and communities in all the countries which were considered by the PPT, with specifically dramatic consequences on indigenous peoples. This is just a sample of impacts and consequences suffered elsewhere where fossil fuel exploration and extraction (including of non conventional fuels such as tar sands as well as shale gas and shale oil) continues unabated. The many practices of resistance, research and of resilience by people and their communities that have been presented to the PPT underline that the violations of rights are generally planned and implemented intentionally, as well as being hidden when possible and denied when exposed.

Also, the frequent absence of appropriate juridicalnormative terms of reference is not recognised by governments as a vacuum to be urgently corrected, thus providing corporations an excuse to operate within a regime of impunity.

The scenario of rights violations and impunity, often resulting from regulatory capture, that fracking presents appears as an exemplary model of the broader geopolicies and strategies of states and powerful corporations that have imposed a tragic hierarchy of values across the world, which has resulted in the rights of people and the rights of nature being subjugated to the financial interests of states and corporations. A sort of systemic crime architecture.

The Advisory Opinion of the PPT will be oriented to provide proposals that are not merely descriptive by answering the four main questions which have guided the preparation and implementation of this Session.

The Opinion will also explore, evaluate and make findings on the responsibilities for the multiple abuses of rights violations and the roles that many actors play in this respect. The Tribunal will, in addition, focus on: – the possible ways of strengthening the role of local communities and indigenous peoples which must be further recognized as the main subjects of inviolable rights including that of self-determination; – the necessary evolution of existing international, national, and local juridical institutions, concepts and laws which could ensure an innovative role of the guarantors of the rights of affected and threatened human communities 12 dialogue

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and of nature; – the promotion of broader and more effective networks of community and political actors capable of transforming the many but fragmented and dispersed experiences of resistance and resilience into a true transversal “people”, fighting for the combined respect and promotion of the fundamental Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the more recent Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth.

It is then the Interim Opinion of the PPT that: The evidence we have considered is consistent internally, almost without exception. It is also consistent with the external evidence to which the Tribunal was referred, i.e. the results reached, discussed and analysed in hundreds of independent reports and refereed research publications.

The evidence clearly demonstrates that the processes of fracking contribute substantially to anthropogenic harm, including climate change and global warming, and involve massive violations of a range of substantive and procedural human rights and the rights of nature. Thus the industry has failed to fulfil its legal and moral obligations. The evidence also shows that governments have, in general, failed in their responsibility to regulate the industry so as to protect people, communities and nature. In addition, they have failed to act promptly and effectively to the dangers of climate change that fracking represents.

Finally, this particular Session of the PPT has been an experiment of collaboration and communication. It has sought to overcome the economic constraint of limited resources which impede what should be a permanent, timely exercise of assessing, monitoring, preventing and transforming the universe of violations which occur in the present global scenarios, where the decisions on policies which go against the fundamental rights of nature and of human communities are taken, imposed and directed centrally by those who have unlimited resources.

The experiment has been a resounding success, with the inevitable but instructive limitations, thanks to the commitment of an organising group which deserves the recognition and gratitude not only of the PPT, but of all those who can now transform this experiment into a flexible and powerful tool which could allow the struggles of the communities of the world to become more globally and more timely known, shared and effective. ♣ [SEE ALSO, JESSICA ERNST, ERIK ANDERSEN, P.3]

www.dialogue.ca

More Truth and Consequences… 3+ million people killed From Stephanie McDowall, Nanaimo BC LINK: www.voltairenet.org/article195690.html

Thierry Meyssan:* Sixteen years ago, I denounced the September 11th coup d’état. What I was anticipating at the time did happen: those responsible for this operation established a permanent state of emergency in the United States and embarked on a series of imperialist wars. Many people have retained from this book* only the short passage on the Pentagon bombing, but it is a book of political science that should have been taken more seriously.

I do not understand why I am asked if I still "believe" what I wrote in 2002: I see it, I see it every day.

Political science is an empirical science; one can only distinguish between hypotheses, those which are true from those which are false, through their consequences. And time has proven me right.

France has been under a state of emergency for more than a year, while the wars have devastated the enlarged Middle East and already killed more than 3 million people. They are in the process of overflowing into Europe with migratory flows and terrorist attacks. * Thierry Meyssan is a French journalist and political activist. He is the author of investigations into the extreme right-wing, as well as into the Catholic Church. Author of 9/11: The Big Lie: ‘challenges the entire official version of

the Sept. 11 attacks.’– Aug 1 2002, ISBN-10: 1592090265.

Comment from S. McDowall, Nanaimo:

What the heck is wrong with us as a people... that we would tolerate these killings... mostly civilians... without screaming bloody murder to our governments? I am just surprised that we or the U.S. do not have more so-called terrorist attacks by people whose families or countries have been so badly harmed/destroyed. Now the U.S. is itching to attack Syria along with support from her allies. I hope Canada, a U.S. ally, is not part of these additional murders. Yes murders!! Canada can no longer claim to be peacekeepers. Afghanistan ended that. I am angry and very, very sad... in fact, grief stricken. By the way... what was the reason for the war against Afghanistan ???

From: Stephanie, smcdow@telus.net ♣

FOR AN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE, WATCH…

Afghanistan, The Great Game – A Personal View by Rory Stewart EPISODE 2: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3vx9jo Rory Stewart explores the history of the invasions of Afghanistan by Britain and the U.S. in the 20th and 21st centuries. The documentary also discusses the period from 1929 to 1978, when Afghanistan enjoyed a peaceful respite from international aggression. [Episode One tells the story of British interventions in Afghanistan in the 19th century: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a7bP49ehKQ ] ♣

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Trans Mountain and better alternatives Larry Kazdan, Vancouver BC

Exxon Valdez. Deepwater Horizon. Lac Megantic.

These were accidents not supposed to happen, but in fact were accidents waiting to happen. Tripling the oil transport through a heavily-populated area like Vancouver, and increasing coastal oil traffic by a factor of seven are risks that threaten the tourist and fishing industries of British Columbia and the health and wellbeing of residents.

The arrogance that dismisses pipeline protests also ignores economic alternatives. New energies research and commercialization, conservation and environmental protection, and the provision of local community services to assist seniors and educate the young could be part of a just transition program that would immediately boost the Albertan economy. A war-like mobilization would be required but is well within the fiscal capabilities of the same federal government that suddenly found multi-billions to purchase and develop www.dialogue.ca

Trans Mountain.

Albertans deserve at least as much care as corporations and big banks receive, and British Columbians should not have to endure the catastrophic risks of oil slicks, land contamination and toxic fumes.

Footnotes: 1. Assessing the risks of Kinder Morgan’s proposed new Trans Mountain pipeline http://credbc.ca/assessing-the-risks/ "An oil spill would put at risk industries that together employ over 200,000 people locally, including tourism, film and TV, real estate, high tech, agriculture and coastal industries.

In 15 years of operations, Kinder Morgan has accrued a significant number of spills, largely the result of human error. This includes four along the Trans Mountain route since 2005.

In the case of a major spill, taxpayers would likely be responsible for the burden of costs, as a company’s liability is limited to $1.3 billion and a major spill could easily cost ten times this amount."

Larry Kazdan CPA, CGA, lkazdan@gmail.com ♣ VOL. 31, NO. 4, SUMMER 2018

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“Prévoyance”

Re: Trans Mountain Purchase – and solutions for tanker tribulations Erik Andersen, Gabriola Island Comment in response to article by Diane Francis, FinancialPost.com, June 1, 18*

In the game of international commodities, local and national politicians play no role of consequence.

Finger pointing at governments only has entertainment value for journalists looking to fulfill their quota of words.

If indeed a bigger pipeline is a good idea then take note that Trans M is a 50-year old pipeline going to a terminal in Burnaby that is seriously size-restricted.

Shipping from their terminal is only possible using Aframax-size tankers# that the oil industry only uses for coastal transport. The two bigger categories of tankers cannot physically get into Burrard Inlet, yet they are the required sized, for transport economics reasons, that can serve a trans-Pacific trade.

That is why I have been pushing the idea of an expanded pipeline package that stays south of the Fraser River and uses a converted BC Ferries terminal to ship from. So far no takers, even though by doing so the risk of tanker/ferry collision is taken off the table and the $3 Billion tunnel replacement/expansion in Delta could be deferred. Ferries to and from Vancouver Airport (YVR) is a very customer-friendly option given the already existing transit and airport services at YVR. Cheers from Erik * LINK: http://business.financialpost.com/diane-francis/kinder-morgans-divestment-from-trans-mountaina-huge-black-eye-for-canada # Aframax size: smaller than 120,000 metric tonnes and with a breadth not greater than 32.31 m Erik Andersen, Gabriola Island [Email: twolabradors@shaw.ca ] ♣

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INVESTOR STATE DISPUTE SETTLEMENT (ISDS) Digby Neck quarry ISDS claim: PM should save us from NAFTA PAUL MANLY, Nanaimo BC While the Trump administration is attempting to get rid of Chapter 11 of NAFTA, which allows companies to take legal action against member countries which impinge on their profits or potential profits, Trudeau is fighting to keep it.

On Feb. 2, 2018, at the prime minister’s town hall in Nanaimo, BC, I asked Justin Trudeau why he and his government were fighting to keep Chapter 11 of NAFTA in the agreement. [See his answer below] I explained that Chapter 11, containing the controversial Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions, allows foreign corporations to seek damages from the government of Canada when our laws and regulations get in the way of their ability to maximize profits.

The Bilcon vs. Canada case is a prime example.

Bilcon is a Delaware-based corporation that’s seeking $500 million-plus costs for the loss of “potential profit” after their proposed quarry at Digby Neck, N.S., failed to pass an environmental assessment with a federal-provincial joint review panel.

Bilcon wanted to blast a 150-hectare hole near important habitat for the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale and then ship the gravel to New 14 dialogue

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Jersey. The project was deemed to be too harmful to the environment, and not in the interest of the local community. Bilcon claimed there was an error in the environmental assessment process, but rather than take its case to federal court, it appealed to a NAFTA tribunal, which ruled that Canada had discriminated against the company.

Starting this week, the Permanent Court of Arbitration panel will meet again to determine how much Canadian taxpayers will have to hand over to Bilcon. If it’s the full half a billion dollars the company is demanding, that will be $15 out of the pocket of every single Canadian.

In November last year, I travelled to the site of the proposed quarry to interview people who were involved in the environmental assessment process as part of a case study for the film I am producing about ISDS provisions in international trade agreements.

Local fisherman Kemp Stanton, whose family has been living in Digby Neck for over 300 years, told me that Bilcon regarded locals as “stupid fishermen and country hicks” and treated the environmental assessment process like a walk in the park. www.dialogue.ca

Unsurprisingly, their representatives were furious when they found out that locals had lined up a series of experts who swiftly and thoroughly debunked the assumptions Bilcon had made in its own environmental impact study.

I also spoke with experts on the Nova Scotia environmental assessment process who told me that Bilcon based its discrimination claim on the joint review panel’s conclusion that the project would have a significant and adverse environmental effect on “community core values” of Digby Neck. This terminology was used to summarize the socio-economic effects on the community, which are a consideration under the Nova Scotia environmental assessment process.

The experts who testified on behalf of Bilcon at the NAFTA tribunal, David Estrin and NDP MP and environmental lawyer Murray Rankin, understood the federal environmental assessment process. But according to Dalhousie University law professor Meinhard Doelle, neither had “any experience or particular expertise with respect to the Nova Scotia Environmental Act and its environmental assessment process.”

Not one local resident or expert from the joint review panel was allowed to testify at the NAFTA tribunal.

Mr. Trudeau’s answer to my question about Chapter 11 was that Canada would not be bullied in the NAFTA negotiations. This was an odd response, given that Canada is already the most bullied country under NAFTA, having paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation to U.S. corporations. Meanwhile, the U.S. government has never lost a case - and they’re the ones calling for Chapter 11 to be scrapped.

The prime minister also stated that the Liberal government is pursuing progressive trade agreements that protect the environment and the rights of workers and Indigenous peoples. He cited changes to the investment chapter of the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement with the European Union (CETA), and the

Trans Pacific Partnership without the USA (TPP11), both of which maintain old-school ISDS provisions allowing foreign corporations to sue our governments when laws protecting our communities could impede their potential to earn profits.

All three NAFTA countries have judicial systems that can adjudicate trade disputes between companies and governments. We do not need a secretive tribunal system to protect corporate interests. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer agrees. “I’m always troubled by the fact that non-elected non-Americans can make the final decision that the United States law is invalid. This is a matter of principle I find offensive.”

I hate to agree with the Trump administration, but I find the concept offensive as well. We must get rid of Chapter 11 in NAFTA, and for that to happen, the government has to stop defending it in the negotiations.

Old-school ISDS mechanisms have no place in progressive trade agreements between established democracies. Our sovereignty is literally at stake.

– Paul Manly, Nanaimo BC Paul Manly is the International Trade and Investment critic for the Green Party of Canada and producer of the featurelength documentary You, Me and the SPP: Trading Democracy for Corporate Rule.

LINK: http://thechronicleherald.ca/business/1547280commentary-digby-neck-quarry-claim-pm-shouldsave-us-from-nafta [Feb. 20, 2018] ♣

See also: CCPA says Canada has been sued over twice as many times as Mexico and the U.S. combined The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) says Canada has been the target of more claims under Chapter 11 than its Mexican and American partners and the trend is getting worse as Canada has been sued over twice as many times as Mexico and the U.S. combined since 2010.

Canada is also far more likely to lose challenges — the CCPA says Canada has won nine and lost eight concluded cases so far while Mexico has won seven and lost five and the U.S. has won all 11 of its concluded cases. LINK to Article at CBC: https://tinyurl.com/cbc-ccpa-11 ♣

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Time to disband NATO

Gerry Masuda, Duncan BC NATO was developed under US influence after WWII

to keep the Russians out, to keep Germany down, and to keep the US in Europe. The time may have come to review the security of Europe in view of the current economic and political realities.

It is time for Europe to develop its own armed forces to replace NATO. The new European Armed Forces www.dialogue.ca

will be an independent defence force responsible for Europe’s own security.

The new European Armed Forces would replace NATO which would be honourably disbanded. The globe would become more balanced and stable in a multipolar world composed of Europe, the US, China and Russia. gerry.masuda@gmail.com ♣ VOL. 31, NO. 4, SUMMER 2018

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“Have Computer Will Write” ~ Jeremy Arney

Transcendental Treachery!

A bit different than usual…

By Jeremy Arney, Sydney BC granpaiswatching@gmail.com

This month has been rather tumultuous on a personal level and I have been paying attention to what has been happening but not doing very much about it. So, when your gentle deadline reminder came to me with the letter T as the letter of the edition my mind clicked through all the wonderfully attacking words beginning with T. I had to take a moment to consider why I did not think why words such as Truth, Talent or even Tyke (of which there are two in my family) did not come to mind and I came to the conclusion that my “Third eye” divined these whilst my conscious mind was bombarded with the harsher reality of Canada and the world.

I came up with a double-barreled TRANSCENDENTAL-TREACHERY which literally translates into excelling or surpassing violations of faith or trust, or betrayal.

To many of your regular readers I could probably stop there and they would completely understand what I wrote and agree with it; but no, I will expound a bit.

Even on 23rd May, I watched a group of business and First Nations leaders from across Canada argue on CPAC that Kinder Morgan’s TMX was essential for Canada’s prosperity. What kind of business leaders would place the prosperity of a country all in one pipeline for bitumen? Do we really have nothing else to offer the world? Are we now so devoid of ideas that we cannot imagine a clean world full of innovation? At no time nor anywhere have I heard or read just where these “new” markets for bitumen are located. The inference is Asia, but where in Asia is there a country with the ability to process bitumen into a useable petroleum product, or perhaps they are asphalting every piece of green land over there too and that’s why Morneau invested in the Asia infrastructure bank – to ensure there was money to pave the earth with our bitumen. Time after time there is this mantra about exporting bitumen (actually calling it oil) to overseas markets and not a thought or mention of the problems that NAFTA will cause if it is still in place. The bitumen is only ours until we dig it up and then it belongs to the 16 dialogue

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USA according to Article 605 of NAFTA. Ever wonder why the Canadian Action Party wants to do away with all the restrictions put upon us by NAFTA? That is only one of them and as both the USA and Canada are members of the WTO its not as if we couldn’t trade with them anymore. Trouble is perhaps that it would become a more level playing field than Mulroney either wanted or agreed to. TRANSCENDENTAL-

TREACHERY!

Meanwhile, $4.5 billion of taxpayers’ money is available to Kinder Morgan to induce them to proceed with their pipeline and yet boiled water advisories are still happening on First Nations Reservations, there are hundreds of thousands of homeless and starving as well as seniors struggling to make ends meet, not to mention our mentally and physically wounded veterans hurt in someone else’s wars. But all is well with our MPs who are well paid, fed and housed with golden tax-free pensions awaiting them. Is there also money available to pay off the NAFTA tribunal awards over bitumen being exporting to a country other than the USA? After Stephen Harper’s promise in 2006 that “You will not recognize Canada when I am through with it” and his following actions against our parliamentary ways, it is hard to see that our parliament is more of a joke than ever; yesterday (23 May) there was a question from a CPC MP querulously complaining about the lack of grain railroad cars available to farmers.

Yet they voted to do away with the Canadian Wheat Board which arranged such things without a hitch for years, and it was then left to the farmers to order their own railcars after that and we all remember what happened and how much of that year’s crop was ruined.

Nothing has changed as our foreign-owned railroads are more interested in transporting oil and foreignbuilt automobiles than grain.

Committees in the HOC have become beyond a joke.

Examination of facts, listening to presenters and evidence is so entirely time constrained that it is ludicrous and when MPs ask questions they spend so much time listening to themselves talk that there is little time left for the answer. Thus, real examination is simply not possible and the attitude in committees is as partisan as it was under Stephen Harper’s dictate anyway. Remember this? (LINK: https://tinyurl.com/yt-point-of-order ) www.dialogue.ca

…/

Question Period is more about personal attacks than questions, and debates are poorly attended and there is no real debate; questions after a speech yes but very partisan, sometimes attacking and personal and they are rarely answered because it is not in the party prepared script. TRANSCENDENTAL-TREACHERY!

Then there is the world scene…

The world is now a reality show run by one Donald Trump. He openly claims to be running the world as he dictates what will happen to whom and where, what sanctions will be applied to which countries and if they are not followed by “allies” then sanctions against those allies who will not apply sanctions, and if Israel is not given full support for their indiscriminate killing of unarmed civilians -including children playing with old tires – based on a false premise of self-defense then yet more sanctions. The movement of the USA embassy to Jerusalem directly causing riots and blood shed followed by the presidential statement: “Trump, in a recorded message, said he remained committed to peace between Israel and the Palestinians.” (LINK: https://tinyurl.com/manorama-embassy )

Are we supposed to take this all seriously?

Sanctions against Europe because they are willing to buy cheaper and a more secure supply of natural gas from Russia; board games with North Korea (maybe we will meet, maybe we will not), and foreign policy via twitter. Actually, that sums up the American mentality of the ruling class, whilst the starving, workless, drug and disease infected Americans just hate each other and their governments with equal passion. Their middle class believe it is their right to have and use guns against whoever in or out of schools, theatres, shopping malls – wherever there is a captive and likely unarmed prey – just to prove they are …what exactly?

American? How many of these events are real and how many staged. I read that the only death certificate issued after the Parkland School shooting was the coach who died on two separate days and was photographed three days later attending a “funeral”. What to believe? (LINK: https://tinyurl.com/fetzer-hoggwash ) Underneath it all, there is an agenda for corporate control and that is so obvious that it hurts. Kevin Taft wrote a book “Oil’s Deep State” in which he researched and described the takeover of governments by big oil. It did not happen overnight but over decades insidiously and surely so that we in Canada now have this ludicrous situation where our federal government is www.dialogue.ca

being told without doubt by bitumen producers to spend money to rescue a Texas-based pipeline company in face of stiff opposition from BC. Do they really think this will change the minds of those in BC who want to have a safe environment with unpolluted rivers (well any more than they are already) an ocean and coastline upon which it is safe to live, play, boat and fish; to breathe air free from bitumen diluting gases?

More simply put why should the people of BC have their back gardens, orchards, crops etc., destroyed by the transportation of a product of the past, which actually only has one market – the USA – at a giveaway price? Would the lobstermen of the east coast agree to such a deal? Are they willing to pay the price of the NAFTA tribunal? Do they or the people of Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba or in fact all the rest of Canada – except of course Alberta – agree to this price? The lie about it being in the national interest is so blatant and has been told so often that it is as true as the dodo bird is alive and well in Elvis’ vegetable garden.

Where is the mandate for any government, politician or corporation to go against the wishes of the people?

Whatever happened to “governments grant permits but people grant permission”? TRANSCENDENTALTREACHERY!

Democracy is a word bandied by politicians and the media about as if it meant something. What should it mean? People are represented and their representatives do their bidding. Where does this actually happen in Canada?

We are subjected every day to TRANSCENDENTALTREACHERY and we appear to be willing to put up with it. I spoke to a young woman today and asked her about KM and the $4.5 billion and she just shrugged and said: “what can I do about it”? When I told her, she was appalled that she would or could be expected to do anything. That is the biggest part of our problem. We have been betrayed so badly, so many times that as a people most of us just sink deeper into apathy.

Yet somewhere in all of us lies the yearning for truth, reality, for love, kindness and compassion, for understanding and co-operation, for a future for our offspring and future generations. These do not come at the click of a mouse or finger but need to be fought for.

Perhaps the first step would be to have representation to the federal government and I do not mean by an …/ VOL. 31, NO. 4, SUMMER 2018

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MP submissive to their caucus’ whims

I would point out that The Demand for Representation has a long history, going back to sections 51 and 53 of the Magna Carta, (June 1215) which says that there should be no taxation without representation. Which of you, dear readers, can honestly say that you have representation to the federal government?

The question I suppose becomes: “Is the fight for our country worth it? Or do we simply submit to permanent TRANSCENDENTAL-TREACHERY?” – Jeremy Arney, Sydney BC

“What is physically possible, desirable and morally right, we can make it financially possible through the Bank of Canada.”

Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.

– Mark Twain Website: https://jeremyarneysblog.com/ I am adding letters; to see them, visit: LINK: iamjemaletters.wordpress.com Jeremy, granpaiswatching@gmail.com ♣

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T is for Titles & Traditional Territories

Oh, Canada, our unreconciled land!

Eva Lyman, West Vancouver

“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.”

– Socrates From where I sit, there is a lot of money being spent on so called “reconciliation with First Nations.”

Sadly though it doesn’t seem to be making any difference to the well-being of the people. We have to ask why this is.

Let me just take the situation of the hearings on “Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women and Girls”. This traveling circus has apparently not achieved much and is asking for another extension.

Various Indigenous women’s groups don’t want that extension, giving the reason that it hasn’t done anything useful. A good reason, indeed, if true.

Maybe we need to look at some underlying fundamentals. There is an old saying to the effect that poverty causes conflicts.

Could it be that poverty is the cause of violence against women? Domestic poverty promotes spousal abuse, and the need to make money; often the only way poor women can earn is in the abusive sex trade! If we go right to the source of the widespread Indigenous poverty, to the root cause of the problem, it’s still the stolen land. No society can be self-sustaining financially without an adequate land base to support an economy! And here we are right back to the early days, and the theft of the land from the original inhabitants! Funny, isn’t it?

The real issue never went away!

I am so reminded of the post war Communist regimes 18 dialogue

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in Europe, and what they did to mine, and other families, who were in possession of any material assets.

We were “nationalized,” right out of our homes. Just by the stroke of a pen. The Colonial powers, however, “nationalized” whole continents, so they were, in effect, worse than the hated Commies! And all by planting a flag on some beach!

Canadians are still subjects of the colonial “Sovereign,” whose predecessors just planted a flag on the beach back east, and took over what they claimed to be a terra nullius. [*See also ‘Christian Doctrine of Discovery’ - https://tinyurl.com/ncr-doctrine-roots ]

After all, our MPs swear allegiance, not to Canada or Canadians, but to the British “Sovereign” in perpetuity!

In fact even today, if you own a home in “fee simple,” underlying this is the Queen’s title, and she could expropriate it, as the Crown often does, for roads, and other “necessary” uses. But, unlike the Indigenous people, you do get paid market value!

And yet, apparently, even beneath this Royal title hides a little mentioned (if ever) “Indefeasible Aboriginal Title”. I just heard of it recently! (from Tony Hall) That’s after my 70 years in Canada!

Well, how do we resolve this mess, which gets worse every year, as we welcome, annually, some 400,000 people, as (hopefully) legal immigrants and refugees.

This policy has meant that the Indigenous people have become increasingly more and more outnumbered.

But does that justify depriving them of their rightful lands? Can we still accept the validity of that old flag in the sand on the beach? www.dialogue.ca

Perhaps the first symbolic step to real reconciliation should be to replace the Queen’s title by that little known Indigenous title. But while at it, we should strengthen property ownership rights. No expropriation rights. Once a person has paid for that home site, it really should be theirs.

Shouldn’t this underlying title give the original people a veto right, to protect the land, waters and so on against destructive, unsustainable resource development!

I think making this recognition would help reconciliation more than any present “reconciliation” payouts, and apologies. And it wouldn’t cost the taxpayers a cent, as it already seems to be the law!

At the same time, the Indigenous population must realize that the 35 million “settlers” are not going to disappear. This land is our home also. And for those born here it is the only home they’ve ever known and love.

In BC, the main issue is still the “crown” land that was not “sold or ceded by the said Indians” as the Royal Proclamation of King George III stipulated.

Here we have some 90% of the land as undeveloped “Crown land,” claimed by the Province. But Provinces do not have a Constitutional relationship with the Indigenous people because Provinces did not exist in the days of George III. And most of that land in BC was not ‘sold or ceded by the Indians’ to anyone. It was just sort of squatted onto, for a dollar to the Government at best, or even for free to forestry or mining companies. Wink, wink!

Lord Dufferin said this about the BC situation, clearly trying to be diplomatic: “Now we must all admit that the condition of the Indian Question in British Columbia is not satisfactory.

Most unfortunately, as I think there has been an initial error since Sir James Douglas quitted office, in the Government of British Columbia neglecting to recognize what is known as the Indian Title. In Canada this has always been done; no government whether provincial or central has failed to acknowledge that the original title to the lands existed in the Indian tribes... Before we touch an acre, we make a treaty with the chief representing the bands we are dealing with, and having agreed up and paid the stipulated price, oftentimes arrived at after a great deal of haggling and difficulty, we enter into possession, but not until then do we consider www.dialogue.ca

that we are entitled to deal with a single acre!” * As time went on, the new immigrants just poured in.

Many as political or economic refugees, hoping to create better lives for their children. Well, we all want that, even the First Nations parents!

When my parents and I became Canadian citizens in the mid-1950s, we were given a booklet to inform us about Canada. I still have a tattered copy somewhere!

It was first published in 1950, and it was still in use in 1976, possibly much longer!

I remember exactly what it said about the “Indians”: Under the heading of “Immigration to Canada,” it started off by saying: “Canada is a land of immigrants. The first to come were the Indians, who came from Asia 600 years ago.” Next to come were the French who came 200 years later. And so on. So everyone sort of came about the same time, right?

Well, then, what is all this fuss about land claims?

Nice try!!

The section on the Government of Canada in the pamphlet likewise did not mention Indian treaties. Did the Government of Canada not know in 1950 that the “Indians” were here 10,000 years ago? Of course we immigrants didn’t have a clue. I suspect today’s immigrants don’t either. Maybe someone should tell them.

Were we being deliberately misinformed?

But what about the future then, and actual reconciliation? I can see how the senior governments are trembling in their boots at the thought of a fair and just land settlement with the Indigenous nations! What a can of worms! How to right one wrong without creating another? And what would fair sharing of land and resources mean, given the relative population numbers, the original land theft contravening constitutional provisions, and everything else considered?

Clearly, if the Indigenous nations started to press for the return of all their traditional territories that had not been sold or ceded, the majority population could easily rise up and overpower them. This is not South Africa where 80% are Indigenous (Black) Africans. We could be back to square one, or worse!

Could we agree on a 50:50 split of the land? Some may think it too little, others too much! A great deal of difficult negotiations lie ahead. Obviously, none of the 35 million Canadian “settlers” will want to lose their homes and incomes. So both sides will have to …/ VOL. 31, NO. 4, SUMMER 2018

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proceed with a great deal of caution, and wisdom.

We need to, finally, get this right!

There is much more to the near-destruction of Indigenous societies than even the land, however. In a less material sense, the loss of the Indigenous cultural knowledges would be an immense tragedy for all of us. No society on earth is so bereft of wisdom that we all could not learn something of value. And here there was a great deal of value! We all need to vigorously support the efforts of protecting this wisdom for the sake of all our future generations!

For example, who speaks for the voiceless in our modern world as we “develop” willy nilly? I mean the land, waters, plants, animals and birds? In many of the Indigenous societies there were members trained to speak for them: How will this or that community action affect the land? The waters? Will this move lead to over-fishing, and loss of stock? And so on.

Given how intimately and harmoniously the First

Nations lived within the ecologies of each region, how sensitive they were to all aspects of the home land and all life upon it: that in itself is a wisdom that we severely lack, and desperately need today. It could well be critical for the survival of humanity, perhaps even of life on earth! * It apparently came from a speech, but I don’t know the date; it shows that some were concerned about BC back in the mid-1800s!

Eva Lyman, West Vancouver BC P.S. I have since learned (From Tony Hall) that there is an indefeasible Indian title underlying the Queens title. I just mention it in passing. And I found the priceless quote of Lord Dufferin that I used in a flyer almost 20 years ago. It apparently came from a speech, but I don’t know the date. I added it, as it shows that some were concerned about BC back in the mid 1800s!

Eva Lyman evalyman@gmail.com ♣ Indefeasible: A right or title in property that cannot be made void, defeated or canceled by any past event, error or omission in the title. Also indefeasible title. Often used in land titles to describe ownership. ♣

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An historic apology

T is for Tsilhoqot’in

From: National Observer, Mar. 31, 2018 newsletter@nationalobserver.com Forwarded by Bob Hansen, Nanaimo

A century and a half ago, six Tsilhqot'in war chiefs left their home to meet the governor of the colony of British Columbia. They were in the midst of a war with the colony, one focused on protecting their land, water and people from gold and copper mines.

They were invited to the meeting to broker peace. But that promise was a trick. Instead they were shackled, tried, and convicted of massacring a road-building party. Five of the six war chiefs were hanged in Quesnel. The sixth was tried and hanged the next year in New Westminster.

"The stories of the Tsilhqot'in war of 1864, of the hanging of their chiefs, of the pain and resilience of those left behind, are stories that Tsilhqot'in people grow up hearing," Emilee Gilpin writes.

"But they are not stories that Canada has been eager to share." Until this week, when Tsilhqot'in chiefs, elders and community members went to Ottawa and received a "long overdue" apology from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The war chiefs were officially exonerated.

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"Today our government acknowledges what the colonial government of the day was unwilling to accept: that these six chiefs were leaders and warriors of the Tsilhqot’in Nation, and that the Tsilhqot’in people they led maintained rights to land that had never been ceded," Trudeau told the House of Commons.

"Even though the colonial government did not recognize these rights, the chiefs acted in accordance with their own laws to defend their territory, their people, and their way of life."

Chief Joe Alphonse called the exoneration "the first order of business" after a groundbreaking 2014 ruling recognizing Tsilhqot'in First Nation land title.

"Reconciliation starts here, ground zero with the Tsilhqot'in. This is where it starts," he told reporters in Ottawa.

Full story by Emilee Gilpin, National Observer, LINK: https://tinyurl.com/no-6-tsilhqotin-chiefs Read more of Emilee's work, part of the First Nations Forward series: https://www.nationalobserver.com/ special-reports/first-nations-forward ♣

www.dialogue.ca

Robin Mathews Uncut

Canada and the Paris (May, 1968) Shutdown of France

By Robin Mathews, Vancouver BC

At a tea-party to mark the gift of the “Esther and Robin Mathews Paris (May, 1968) Poster Collection” to Simon Fraser Special Collections, one of the ‘Friends of SFU Library’ said … “that’s very nice, but does it have anything to do with Canada?”

Unknown to a great many Canadians … the answer was a resounding “Yes”. And it all has to do with Charles de Gaulle who lived a stormy, brave, tenacious, somewhat egotistical, lifelong engagement with France and its place in the world. He was at the bottom of the famous “events of May” in Paris in 1968, a student-led, (mostly) peaceable insurrection that produced one of the largest strikes of Labour in European history – perhaps the largest. Of course, those “events” also produced the – increasingly celebrated and truly marvellous – posters that the ‘atelier populaire’ – ‘the people’s studio’ – produced day after day and posted all over Paris in support of the student-andLabour revolt against de Gaulle’s regime.

The story is told that a student in the ‘movement’ went to the gates of the Renault automobile factory at Flins (outside Paris) and wooed the workers there into support of the student protestation … beginning the strikes and occupations all over France that are said to have involved ten million French workers.

Out of a complex and long life, de Gaulle’s last decades were marked by three priorities: The gaining of a nuclear strike force (force de frappe) to guarantee France’s place in the global power structure. Done.

An attempt to break the U.S. dollar. (Not done…and which the BRIC countries to this day, with allies, are attempting to do by breaking the petro-[U.S.] dollar).

And de Gaulle’s third priority was to enrich and expand the role of France as the centre of global Francophone cultures…. Some said it was an attempt to re-build something like a French Empire….

And in that last pursuit, de Gaulle stood on the balcony of Montreal City Hall before a large crowd of welcomers, on July 24, 1967, and uttered his famous phrase in support of the independence movement in Quebec: “vive le Quebec libre.” Prime Minister Lester Pearson was not amused… and instead of proceeding to Ottawa as planned, de Gaulle made his www.dialogue.ca

way back to France.

Living in Paris at the time and talking to Parisians … I detected that the French were also not amused by de Gaulle’s antics … thinking them a display of atrocious bad manners. And that event was one of the causes in the building of the head-of-steam that finally ‘blew’ with the student “revolt” and the “events of May.” For de Gaulle, Quebec – which is more than twice the size of France – as an independent French-speaking entity would be a very useful addition to the Francecentered powers in the world.

His desire to expand the influence of France in the world was only one of the matters contributing to the student revolt and “the events of May”, but it was one of them. De Gaulle struck me as “Papal” as well as “Presidential”, and he clearly struck a lot of French people that way, too. Wounded in the First World War, leader of the “Free French” forces in the Second World War, fighter for France’s place after that war – and with his nuclear “force de frappe’ guaranteeing a strong position for France in global affairs … nonetheless, his over-confidence in his own abilities and his (in fact) condescension to everyone … wore away even his supporters.

For a Canadian in Paris in 1967-68 a de Gaulle “Press Conference” was something to behold. He sat well above his questioners. No question was permitted to be uttered there; all questions had to be delivered in writing a day or two ahead. “The General” (as he was referred to) would then decide which of the questions he would take up … and he would discourse almost as if not answering the question(s). That was a de Gaulle press conference!!

After one of them, I asked a few French acquaintances - somewhat in alarm – what they thought of the Press Conference. “Ahhhh,” one of them said, “the General speaks such beautiful French!” (And so he did.) But the resistance to him was growing because, in part, in pursuit of “la grandeur de la France” the de Gaulle government was willing to sacrifice attention to the needs of the French people … and the French people became very impatient. In the 18 months preceding the blow-up, books began appearing which judged the General … and found him wanting. …/ VOL. 31, NO. 4, SUMMER 2018

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University students in France felt the pinch. I watched them, by attending some lectures at the Sorbonne (to try to improve my French). The amphitheatre was huge. The professor was “magisterial” – that means he took no questions, asked no questions, and simply lectured, bowed, was applauded (!!) and left the lecture hall. Because all of the students couldn’t fit into the room, a large number sat in another room and watched the lecture by closed-circuit TV. Those who sat in the huge room where the lecturer was speaking talked to each other, passed notes, ate various kinds of food … and did things that would have made me (as a Canadian professor) know I was doing a lousy job!!

There was clearly rot in the system. Friends at the British Council told me that they had – quite frequently – to ask for ‘recommendations’ for Sorbonne students applying for various things. “Every time,” they told me, “we get a note from the professor saying ‘Ms. or Mr. X attended my lectures on Y and received such-and-such a grade for the course’. The professor never knows anything about his students, never meets them in his office, jumps in his car after lectures and drives to his home eighty (or more) kilometres from Paris”. [The GREAT Sorbonne University!]

Indeed, I was asked by the Institut Britannique (a sort of adjunct to the Sorbonne and Cambridge University) to give public lectures to Paris. Actually, they were for Sorbonne students preparing for a very tough examination that would vet them for ANY job as teachers in France. The students interested in my lectures wanted to be teachers of English language and literature … and so I was asked to lecture on a few major English writers of the 18th and 19th centuries.

They were “magisterial” lectures. The students couldn’t ask me questions, and I couldn’t ask them questions. (Europe does that all over the place.) The large amphitheatre became fuller and fuller as I lectured (the word got around quickly – the examinations they had to “sit” were very important to them.) In Canada, early in the series, I would have asked the students some questions, found out exactly where they were in knowledge, and shaped my lectures to answer their needs. As it was, I had to guess.

On the last evening of the series, four or five students came down to the dais from which I was lecturing – my first direct contact with any of them. They told 22 dialogue

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me they were very sorry the series was ending. I thanked them and said I was sorry there wasn’t interaction between us during the series. One of them, on leaving, turned and said: “You are better than any of the professors we have at the Sorbonne!” (I would have been deeply flattered if I hadn’t sat in Sorbonne lectures and watched a few Sorbonne professors at work ! ! ! And, also, I came to know that the bad teaching, the bad administration, and the bad planning for French universities created the spark that created the “insurrection” across the French nation.)

As everyone knows – at the height of conflict – de Gaulle fled Paris to Germany … perhaps to arrange response to real conflict if it arose. And premier George Pompidou (who was out of the country) came back, sat with the opposing forces, arranged necessary changes … and prevented what might have become real revolution. (Walking by the Seine river, where armed soldiers mingled with the crowd, I had a distinct feeling that if one soldier provided provocation … the fuse would be lit … and all hell would break loose.) Not only did veils of Tear Gas hang in the air of Paris on the Left bank … but also a feeling that very, very little could set off violent actions that would engulf all of France. That feeling passed with the meetings at which Pompidou made clear he wanted to correct some of the wrongs done.

The Gaullists won the next election handily, the French being very complex … at one level really the articulators of The Rights of Man … and at another level deeply Conservative. Sympathizers say that any country occupied by an enemy three times in a hundred years will harbour deeply conservative feelings.

But that is another story…. And … night after night I went out with a kitchen paring knife – amid the gaiety and madness of “les evenements de mai” 1968, and cut (what became) famous posters from Paris walls … which now may be seen at Special Collections, Simon Fraser University.

ROBIN MATHEWS, VANCOUVER rmathews@telus.net [Some Articles online at www.dialogue.ca ] SEE: The Esther and Robin Mathews mai 1968 Paris Poster Collection: https://tinyurl.com/ERM-1968paris-posters The Esther and Robin Mathews mai 1968 Paris Poster Collection [Robin Mathews – Paris 1968]. Available at W.A.C. Bennett Library (Burnaby) Special Collections (DC 412 E8 1968) ♣

www.dialogue.ca

Truths Outside our Triumphalist Narrative A New Essay from Charles Eisenstein to Remind You that You Aren't Crazy Our New, Happy Life? The Ideology of Development.

By Charles Eisenstein, May 7, 2018

In George Orwell’s 1984, there is a moment when the Party announces an “increase” in the chocolate ration – from thirty grams to twenty. No one except for the protagonist, Winston, seems to notice that the ration has gone down not up.

[EXTRACT & LINK]

‘Comrades!’ cried an eager youthful voice. ‘Attention, comrades! We have glorious news for you. We have won the battle for production! Returns now completed of the output of all classes of consumption goods show that the standard of living has risen by no less than 20 per cent over the past year. All over Oceania this morning there were irrepressible spontaneous demonstrations when workers marched out of factories and offices and paraded through the streets with banners voicing their gratitude to Big Brother for the new, happy life which his wise leadership has bestowed upon us.

The newscaster goes on to announce one statistic after another proving that everything is getting better. The phrase in vogue is “our new, happy life.” Of course, as with the chocolate ration, it is obvious that the statistics are phony.

Those words, “our new, happy life,” came to me as I read two recent articles, one by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times and the other by Stephen Pinker in the Wall Street Journal, both of which asserted, with ample statistics, that the overall state of humanity is better now than at any time in history. Fewer people die in wars, car crashes, airplane crashes, even from gun violence. Poverty rates are lower than ever recorded, life expectancy is higher, and more people than ever are literate, have access to electricity and running water, and live in democracies.

Like in 1984, these articles affirm and celebrate the basic direction of society. We are headed in the right direction. With smug assurance they tell us that thanks to reason, science, and enlightened Western political thinking, we are making strides toward a better world.

Like in 1984, there is something deceptive in these arguments that so baldly serve the established order.

Unlike in 1984, the deception is not a product of phony statistics. Before I describe the deception and www.dialogue.ca

what lies on the other side of it, I want to assure the reader that this essay will not try to prove that things are getting worse and worse. In fact, I share the fundamental optimism of Kristof and Pinker that humanity is walking a positive evolutionary path. For this evolution to proceed, however, it is necessary that we acknowledge and integrate the horror, the suffering, and the loss that the triumphalist narrative of civilizational progress skips over.

What hides behind the numbers?

In other words, we need to come to grips with precisely the things that Stephen Pinker’s statistics leave out. Generally speaking, metrics-based evaluations, while seemingly objective, bear the covert biases of those who decide what to measure, how to measure it, and what not to measure. They also devalue those things which we cannot measure or that are intrinsically unmeasurable. Let me offer a few examples.

Nicholas Kristof celebrates a decline in the number of people living on less than two dollars a day. What might that statistic hide? Well, every time an indigenous hunter-gatherer or traditional villager is forced off the land and goes to work on a plantation or sweatshop, his or her cash income increases from zero to several dollars a day. The numbers look good. GDP goes up.

And the accompanying degradation is invisible.

For the last several decades, multitudes have fled the countryside for burgeoning cities in the global South.

Most had lived largely outside the money economy.

In a small village in India or Africa, most people procured food, built dwellings, made clothes, and created entertainment in a subsistence or gift economy, without much need for money. When development policies and the global economy push entire nations to generate foreign exchange to meet debt obligations, urbanization invariably results. In a slum in Lagos or Kolkata, two dollars a day is misery, where in the traditional village it might be affluence. Taking for granted the trend of development and urbanization, yes, it is a good thing when those slum dwellers rise from two dollars a day to, say, five. But the focus on that metric obscures deeper processes.

Kristof asserts that 2017 was the best year ever for human health. If we measure the prevalence of …/ VOL. 31, NO. 4, SUMMER 2018

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infectious diseases, he is certainly right. Life expectancy also continues to rise globally (though it is leveling off and, in some countries such as the United States, beginning to fall). Again though, these metrics obscure disturbing trends. A host of new diseases such as autoimmunity, allergies, Lyme, and autism, compounded with unprecedented levels of addiction, depression, and obesity, contribute to declining physical vitality throughout the developed world, and increasingly in developing countries too. Vast social resources – one-fifth of GDP in the US – go toward sick care; society as a whole is unwell.

Both authors also mention literacy. What might the statistics hide here? For one, the transition into literacy has meant, in many places, the destruction of oral traditions and even the extinction of entire non-written languages. Literacy is part of a broader social repatterning, a transition into modernity that accompanies cultural and linguistic homogenization.

Tens of millions of children go to school to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic, history, science, and Shakespeare, in places where, a generation before, they would have learned how to herd goats, grow barley, make bricks, weave cloth, conduct ceremonies, or bake bread. They would have learned the uses of a thousand plants and the songs of a hundred birds, the words of a thousand stories and the steps to a hundred dances. Acculturation to literate society is part of a much larger change.

Reasonable people may differ on whether this change is good or bad, on whether we are better off relying on digital social networks than on place-based communities, better off recognizing more corporate logos than local plants and animals, better off manipulating symbols rather than handling soil. Only from a prejudiced mindset could we say, though, that this shift represents unequivocal progress.

My intention here is not to use written words to decry literacy, deliciously ironic though that would be. I am merely observing that our metrics for progress encode hidden biases and neglect what won’t fit comfortably into the worldview of those who devise them.

Certainly, in a society that is already modernized, illiteracy is a terrible disadvantage, but outside that context it is not clear that a literate society – or its extension, a digitized society – is a happy society.

The immeasurability of happiness Biases or no, surely you can’t argue with the happiness 24 dialogue

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metrics that are the lynchpin of Pinker’s argument that science, reason, and Western political ideals are working to create a better world. The more advanced the country, he says, the happier people are. Therefore the more the rest of the world develops along the path we blazed, the happier the world will be.

Unfortunately, happiness statistics encode, as assumptions, the very conclusions the developmentalist argument tries to prove. Generally speaking, happiness metrics comprise two approaches: objective measures of well-being, and subjective reports of happiness.

Well-being metrics include such things as per-capita income, life expectancy, leisure time, educational level, access to health care, and many of the other accouterments of development. In many cultures, for example, “leisure” was not a concept; leisure in contradistinction to work assumes that work itself is as it became in the Industrial Revolution: tedious, degrading, burdensome. A culture where work is not clearly separable from life is misjudged by this happiness metric; see Helena Norberg-Hodge’s marvelous film Ancient Futures for a depiction of such a culture, in which, as the film says, “work and leisure are one.”

Encoded in objective well-being metrics is a certain vision of development: specifically, the mode of development that dominates today. To say that developed countries are therefore happier is circular logic.

As for subjective reports of individual happiness, individual self-reporting necessarily references the surrounding culture. I rate my happiness in comparison to the normative level of happiness around me. A society of rampant anxiety and depression draws a very low baseline. A woman told me once, “I used to consider myself to be a reasonably happy person, until I visited a village in Afghanistan near where I’d been deployed in the military. I wanted to see what it was like from a different perspective. This is a desperately poor village,” she said. “The huts didn’t even have floors, just dirt which frequently turned to mud. They barely even had enough food. But I have never seen happier people. They were so full of joy and generosity. These people, who had nothing, were happier than almost anyone I know.”

Whatever those Afghan villagers had to make them happy, I don’t think shows up in Stephen Pinker’s statistics purporting to prove that they should follow our path. The reader may have had similar experiences visiting Mexico, Brazil, Africa, or India, in www.dialogue.ca

whose backwaters one finds a level of joy that is rare amidst the suburban boxes of my country. This, despite centuries of imperialism, war, and colonialism.

Imagine the happiness that would be possible in a just and peaceful world.

I’m sure my point here will be unpersuasive to anyone who has not had such an experience first-hand. You will think, perhaps, that maybe the locals were just putting on their best face for the visitor. Or maybe that I am seeing them through romanticizing “happynatives” lenses. But I am not speaking here of superficial good cheer or the phony smile of a man making the best of things. People in older cultures, connected to community and place, held close in a lineage of ancestors, woven into a web of personal and cultural stories, radiate a kind of solidity and presence that I rarely find in any modern person.

When I interact with one of them, I know that whatever the measurable gains of the Ascent of Humanity, we have lost something immeasurably precious. And I know that until we recognize it and turn toward its recovery, that no further progress in lifespan or GDP or educational attainment will bring us closer to any place worth going.

What other elements of deep well-being elude our measurements? Authenticity of communication? The intimacy and vitality of our relationships? Familiarity with local plants and animals? Aesthetic nourishment from the built environment? Participation in

meaningful collective endeavors? Sense of community and social solidarity? What we have lost is hard to measure, even if we were to try. For the quantitative mind, the mind of money and data, it hardly exists. Yet the loss casts a shadow on the heart, a dim longing that no assurance of new, happy life can assuage.

While the fullness of this loss – and, by implication, the potential in its recovery – is beyond measure, there are nonetheless statistics, left out of Pinker’s analysis, that point to it. I am referring to the high levels of suicide, opioid addiction, meth addiction, pornography, gambling, anxiety, and depression that plague modern society and every modernizing society. These are not just random flies that have landed in the ointment of progress; they are symptoms of a profound crisis. When community disintegrates, when ties to nature and place are severed, when structures of meaning collapse, when the connections that make us whole wither, we grow hungry for addictive substitutes to numb the longing and fill the void. […]

Published first at Tikkun; Read in full at LINK: https://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/our-new-happy-lifeby-charles-eisentstein Charles Eisenstein is the author of several books, including Sacred Economics and The More Beautiful World our Hearts Know is Possible. His next book, Climate: A New Story comes out in Fall, 2018.

From: Charles Eisenstein [mailto:marie@sacred-economics.com] ♣

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A BAD START – By Herbert Spencer

A Review / Essay of “A Social History of Greece and Rome” – 1992 book by Michael Grant (1914-2004) ABSTRACT [from Herb’s 5000-word essay) Read in full at: https://herbspencer.academia.edu/ research#bookreviews

This essay evolved from a short review, to become an attempt to remind people of the two pathetic societies that set the standard for the later societies of Western Civilization. Contrary to the opinions of intellectuals, who have been extremely influenced by the Abstract Ideas of these two primary cultures, most people have little knowledge of the extreme price paid by the 99% of people, who have suffered from the Values and Attitudes displayed by the Warrior Elites and their descendants ever since. Philosophers have been far too forgiving of this price; worse – the elitist political www.dialogue.ca

philosophers (from Plato, through Hobbes to the present day) have justified Rule by the Elite Minority; even when the elites still hide behind pseudoDemocracy.

The author, Michael Grant was a famous English historian of Ancient Times, especially Greece and Rome.

He was a prolific and popular author of 70 books.

This was Grant’s final thoughts on these influential groups; it generated a mixed response: opposition from the Academic supporters of the modern elites while a few experts recognized his original scholarship, expressing deep empathy for the vast numbers of forgotten people. Many historians make the theoretical claim for the relevance of History but few show the unchanging similarities. The most damning …/ VOL. 31, NO. 4, SUMMER 2018

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response to this book is to see how little the values and behaviors of these ancient ruling classes have changed right up to the present time. Worse, (most historians) ignored the social tensions between the classes and cared little for the precarious lives of the vast majority of their fellows. The long ignored social/economic inequalities periodically erupted into violent internecine strife. The European elites appear to have also ignored these lessons of history; perhaps hoping that history will not repeat itself. Meanwhile, debt levels increase to fearful heights as today’s Rich have forgotten that excessive debts were the major cause of Athenian civil strife.

The famous historian G. M. Trevelyan described “Social History as history with the politics left out; without which history as a whole is not understandable.”

Grant does include some discussion of the politics that affected the ordinary daily lives of all the people, especially the almost ever-present violence and warfare.

He admits that by mainly leaving out wars he deprives the ‘top’ men of a great deal of the advantages that they would otherwise possess over the women, as the subjects of a history. He even concludes that in a social history men still preserve any priority over women at all (except in so far as most source material

Links from Herb Spencer…

See the real numbers behind Trudeau’s political KM decision, at TheTyee: LINK: https://tinyurl.com/tyee0518

John Perkins: Economic Hitman Upgraded As the interviewer says: “one of the best books to explain what is going on in the world” for those who are still sleepwalking. Sorry for readers (like me) - only sound (33 mins).

LINK: https://tinyurl.com/ph-hitman-update (See P.59)

The Death of the Economy If you think we escaped the Axe in 2008 with the Big Crash, listen to this expert about the Parasites that are destroying the Economy.

LINK: https://therealnews.com/stories/rise-financefall-american-business

There is an ALTERNATIVE to Failed Capitalism This short interview shows that Spain and Italy have succeeded with many Worker-Coops.

LINK: https://tinyurl.com/b-work-co-ops

Homelessness This (Guardian) story about Finland shows how to REALLY help the homeless vagrants (usually addicted).

The typical selfish rich response is counter-productive…

LINK: https://tinyurl.com/TG-finland SUMMER 2018, VOL. 31, NO. 4

Herb Spencer, Surrey BC, spsi99@telus.net ♣

* * * * * * * * * * * *

National Interest? bah, humbug, just bad math

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happens to be about men and was created by them). It is surely more than ironic that this important subject is called in English: ‘HIS-story’. Here, Grant makes a major innovation by giving a significant section to the ‘Unfree’. This short book (122 pages) concludes with two brief appendices: one on immigrant foreigners and the other on a critique of Karl Marx and his followers, as these have influenced many social historians but which Grant openly dismisses as mainly outdated and misguided. Additionally, in contrast to Gibbon’s widely-believed blaming of Christians for The Decline and Fall of Rome, Grant points out a much older and deeper cause: the growing gulf between the rich and the exploited poor.

Ultimately, I cannot recommend reading this book, as it is no more than another historian’s opinions of overused resources from the same books preserved by the West’s Curators of the Mind. This is why I have provided much detail instead. Even for the many who will not ever pick up this book, this essay will be a fast refresher in the old dictum: “those who are ignorant of history are bound to repeat it.” The 20th century well illustrates this replay of the disasters that befell Ancient Greece and Rome. Perhaps our collapse is imminent?

A Little Appreciated Trump Fraud in Higher Education Here’s a story that needs wider circulation, especially by people with an interest in Education.

Trump (Founder of Trump “University”) has got his Education Secretary, Betsy de Vos (she of the Amway scam) to shut down the Federal investigation of Private universities. Here’s Bill Black, one of the top White Collar Crime Investigators, giving us the background.

LINK: https://tinyurl.com/trn-trump-educ

The Pathology of Power Here are two of the smartest observers of the American scene who are sharing their insider insights. They know how Conspiracy is the fastest way to Power. https://therealnews.com/stories/tdrake0618raipt5

The Great (Social) Divide Well here’s more evidence that we have learned nothing from history, as my Greek/Roman essay (on P.25) tried to show. This Atlantic Magazine story shows how the next layer of US Society (the “9.9%”) have made government work for them. Sorry folks, most of us are not in these two Top Clubs. All societies in history have finally collapsed from these huge levels of inequality. There are NO exceptions. LINK: https://tinyurl.com/ta-Am-9-9-pc ♣ www.dialogue.ca

“The Fifth Columnist”

The Ego has landed

Michael Neilly, Dunrobin ON

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”

- Margaret Atwood

How true. Recalling the April 23rd tragedy on Toronto’s Yonge Street, a young man drove a rented van onto a sidewalk, killed 10 people and injured some 15 others. After hours of speculation as to the motive, it was revealed in a post on Facebook that the driver, one Alek Minassian, saw himself as an Incel, an involuntary celibate, forever being rejected by women.

It’s true the rejection hurts. And lots of people have been rejected for one thing or another. What’s different is that people now have the technology to kill on a massive scale with relative ease.

In the movie Forbidden Planet, a brilliant scientist uncovers the truth about the death of an advanced civilization. In just one night, an entire race tears itself apart. The “monster id,” the “mindless primitive” of millions is enabled by a fantastic invention that allows the inhabitants to do anything they want without “instrumentality” i.e. by using their minds.

According to Wikipedia, Freud said that the ego mediates between the impulsive id and the superego, our conscience. Me, I think the ego has been co-opted by the id and they’re secretly collaborating. And who needs a fantastic invention to act out when you can rent a van or buy a semi-automatic rifle.

In my last column, I suggested that we all learn to meditate, to recognize our egos at work. Because if we don’t, we face eventual annihilation.

The id, the ego, the “self-cherishing,” “self grasping” entity described in the book Transform Your Life – A Blissful Journey (Geshe Kelsang Gyatso) condemns us to live in the samsara, a multi-story house whose occupants live in various states of pain and suffering. Who we are now is the result of seeds planted by previous generations, and what we do now will manifest in our future lives—karma.

The only way out of samsara is to end our selfwww.dialogue.ca

grasping/cherishing ways and to love others more than ourselves. To recognize that our bodies were given to us by our parents, and that the mind should be pre-occupied with not only this life but also an eternity of future lives.

The science fiction miniseries “Childhood’s End,” based on a book by Arthur C. Clarke, tells the story of a peaceful invasion of aliens called the Overlords. They resemble the devil, red-skinned, horned with huge bat-like wings. The Overlords deliver a Golden Age of peace and prosperity, but later the earth’s children develop supernatural abilities and they transcend to another plane, leaving the earth and its population with no means to survive. At the end of the series, the earth is consumed, and a human stowaway convinces the Overlords to leave a memorial in space to mark humanity’s passing. In the end, all that is left is a piece of classical music.

In order for the human race to survive, or at least to escape our pain and suffering, we must transcend ourselves. We must stop being self-grasping individuals and become a collective, if you will. The thing is, how do you get six billion individuals to agree about anything?

I suspect that, in a way, we are being cultivated, and then will come the harvest. This puts me in mind of a Twilight Zone episode called To Serve Man. A benevolent alien shows up offering to help mankind (er, humankind) and presents a book in their language as a guide to their intentions. Eventually Earthlings begin to trust the aliens and begin visits to the alien home world. Cryptographers ultimately decipher the book and realize that it’s a cookbook, To Serve Man. This is a long and convoluted way to arrive at the beginning. That suicidal drive down Yonge Street on a beautiful spring day. Perhaps it’s a kind of insanity –damaged, out-of-control egos declaring war on society and humanity for want of affection or 72 virgins.

The vanguard of humanity drives a white van. Selfish and vengeful. Viewed from the outside, it’s bad karma.

Michael Neilly, michael.neilly@tc.gc.ca ♣ VOL. 31, NO. 4, SUMMER 2018

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T is for Trust

An unintentional parable

By Jim Taylor, Okanagan Centre BC

I was driving north, up the main highway. As I came down the hill into town, traffic slowed to a standstill.

The truck ahead of me turned on its four-way flashers.

Something was happening, but I couldn’t see what. I peered through the gap between the vehicles ahead of me. And I saw a woman, walking backwards across the four lanes of traffic, beckoning to something or someone with her hands, encouraging them to come on. Then I saw what she was encouraging. A pair of geese. Canada geese. Big birds. When they spread their wings and hiss, they can be terrifying. But these two waddled along following the woman. And right behind them came a pair of goslings, balls of fluff on toothpick legs.

And finally, behind them all, came a man pushing a bicycle, making sure no one got left behind. Or run over. The whole cortege reached the far sidewalk.

The geese vanished into the park. The man and woman gave each other high-fives, and went their separate ways. Traffic rolled again.

The kingdom of trust And as I too drove on, it occurred to me that I had just seen a parable enacted, a parable of the way the world could be, and should be.

Jesus didn’t have Canada Geese or four-lane highways to talk about in his parables. But I think he would have described that scene as a sample of the kingdom of God. The goslings trusted their parents enough to follow them into a totally foreign environment. The geese trusted the woman enough to follow her across the highway. The woman trusted the drivers enough to believe that no impatient driver would run her down.

And it worked. For that couple of minutes, no one roared over the sidewalk to save a few seconds. No

one honked angrily. No one brandished middle-finger salutes. Everyone got where they were going, at most a couple of minutes late.

It’s a parable of the “kingdom” because all our relationships depend on trust. Every day, we commit hundreds of little acts of trust. So many, in fact, that we don’t even think of them as acts of trust — we take them for granted.

I trust that my breakfast cereal is safe to eat. That an oncoming driver will not suddenly swerve into my lane. That the radio news is not fabricated fiction.

That the cash register at the grocery store will add my bill accurately. That the tree will stay upright, the bridge will hold, the sky will not fall.

At least, not today.

The reminders we need If I couldn’t trust these incidents, I’d be paralyzed.

Afraid of everything. A nervous wreck, a human Chicken Little.

Trust keeps our society, our civilization, even our world, running smoothly.

We exist in a vast, universal, web of relationships. We are, in a sense, the sum of our relationships. When we can no longer trust those relationships, we lose a huge part of what we are. We are reduced to being an individual playing solitaire.

That’s why breaches of trust are so serious.

And that’s why little incidents that remind us how much trust matters, matter. Even if they bring traffic to a standstill. **********

Copyright © 2018 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit 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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“Meditations”

From Martin LeFevre, Chico, California

– who discovered Dialogue online I was drawn to your publication because of its online title: "Dialogue--A Forum For Sharing Insights."

That is exactly the intent of my column, "Meditations."

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I am a religious and political philosopher who has written an 'underground' spiritual, philosophical, and (more dubiously) political column on the Net – for nearly 25 years. I would love to see 'Meditations' published in Dialogue Magazine. …/ www.dialogue.ca

The following is Martin’s March 20th column:

Animals, Mind and Brain Martin LeFevre, Chico, California

In quick succession along the short path after the footbridge to the picnic site, there were three close encounters with animals. First, a stipple-winged woodland hawk alighted from the nearest branch, spreading its great wings and gliding to the next nearest branch just 20 meters away.

The majestic raptor didn’t fly away when I stood beneath it, and you could feel the animal’s intense awareness of its environment before dropping from the branch and soaring off.

As I approached the site a deer poked its head out from the bushes a few feet away. It was a yearling, with no fear of people because they aren’t hunted in the area. Even so it’s strange to be face to face with a free-ranging animal in a municipal park.

Finally, a pair of plump mallards stood at the edge of the swollen stream as I entered the site. They began to go downstream, but turned around and stayed. Just three or four steps away, they did their duck things for half an hour—foraging in the sandy bottom, preening, and even sleeping.

The male had the striking plumage of the species, with a bluish-green florescent neck and a dashing chevron on its wings. Whenever the female moved more than a few feet away, it would follow. They were both healthy, and she looked close to giving birth to a new batch of chicks.

Comically, when the ducks did enter the fast-flowing creek, they paddled in such a way that the current carried them sideways downstream.

People occasionally passed by on the path behind me, and one felt affinity and affection for them. An older couple stopped a short distance away to look at a trio of relatively small redwoods. They laughed at a private joke, and continued on. The woman, small with a slight frame, had long, completely gray hair. There was a spryness about her.

Fifteen minutes later they were back. ‘I wondered if you’d be able to get through,’ I said, referring to the dip in the path that fills with water after a heavy rain.

“No bridge over troubled waters,” the woman said with a smile, and I laughed.

A physicist’s absurd question again came to mind: www.dialogue.ca

“When will be able to upload our brains?” Failing to make the distinction between mind and brain, between thought and awareness, is probably the greatest existential error of our age.

Consider Emily Dickinson’s poem, “The brain is wider than the sky.”

The Brain — is wider than the Sky — For — put them side by side — The one the other will contain With ease — and You — beside — The Brain is deeper than the sea — For — hold them — Blue to Blue — The one the other will absorb — As Sponges — Buckets — do — The Brain is just the weight of God — For — Heft them — Pound for Pound — And they will differ — if they do — As Syllable from Sound — Our thoughts are not who we truly are, nor even the operating program we call ‘my self.’ Awareness beyond thought, self and time is what makes us human beings.

Can the brain be anchored in attention, undivided, undirected attention? Clearly that, not concentration, and certainly not any method or technique is the action that quiets the mind-as-thought, and opens the door to the numinous in the brain.

The observer, that illusory, infinitely regressive entity that always stands apart, is never neutral. It is always judging and interpreting from the past, from conditioning, experience and memory.

Therefore sit quietly outdoors, let your senses be open to the present, and ask without answering: Is the observer operating? You’ll discover the brain has the capacity for observing without the observer.

Psychological time is the false continuity of self and thought. Therefore once the separate observer falls away in passive awareness quicker than thought, ask: Is time operating?

When time ends one sees, beyond words, what Emily Dickinson meant by “the brain is just the weight of God.” Martin LeFevre, Chico California martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net ♣ VOL. 31, NO. 4, SUMMER 2018

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Walk Hand in Hand

Ramblings

Randy Vancourt, Toronto ON

Walk hand in hand with me, through all eternity Have faith, believe in me, give me your hand...

These are the opening lyrics to Canadian composer Johnny Cowell’s 1956 hit song, Walk Hand In Hand. It went on to be recorded over 90 times and counting, with hit versions

by Tony Martin, Andy Williams and Vera Lynn in the 50’s, and Gerry and the Pacemakers in 1965 (my older brother had this 45 when I was a kid, and I loved the song).

We lost Johnny last January 22, 2018 at the age of 92.

I had discovered a couple of years ago that Johnny and Joan, his wife of 62 years, lived only a couple of kilometres from me here in the Bluffs area of east Toronto.

Johnny’s story is an inspiring one. A renowned trumpet soloist since the age of 15, he played with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra for 40 years. During that time he composed numerous hit songs for various artists, and although industry folks continually tried to lure him south to Nashville and New York, Johnny stayed here in Toronto.

One of my jobs is Music Director for a mid-sized church here, and once a month I lead a special music service based on different themes. I also bring in guest musicians to perform – it’s amazing how many of my friends I have been able to convince to come and play at 10:30 on a Sunday morning!

Last June in honour of Canada 150, I decided to do a service featuring hymns and other sacred music by Canadian composers. Most of the choices were older hymns but for contemporary composers we used Oscar Peterson’s Hymn To Freedom, and Johnny’s Walk Hand In Hand. While not technically a religious song, I thought it qualified as it’s so often used at weddings.

I wanted to invite Johnny and his wife to attend our service. It wasn’t hard to get his phone number since 30 dialogue

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our musician’s union provides all members with a complete list. One morning I gave him a call and he and Joan kindly spent half an hour on the phone with me. They told me wonderful stories about this song and its continued use (in a Christmas episode of Call The Midwife), plus some of Johnny’s other songs and their ongoing popularity.

These Are The Young Years, his 1963 hit for pianist Floyd Cramer, had recently been in an episode of Breaking Bad and I laughed as June described the two of them watching this notorious show for the first time.

I am always interested in the stories behind the writing of songs. Walk Hand In Hand was composed while on an anniversary trip to New York; one night they had gone to see the film, Love is a Many-Splendored Thing. All through the film, the characters were walking hand in hand. When they came out of the theatre, Johnny told Joan, “I think I’ve got a good title for a song, called Walk Hand in Hand.” By the time they got back to their hotel he had written all the music.

I invited them to attend my service and to my delight they accepted. That Sunday it was a huge thrill for me to have them in the congregation as our choir performed his song. He and Joan couldn’t have been more gracious, and at the end of the service Joan paid me a lovely compliment when she said my piano playing reminded her of Floyd Cramer.

I was saddened to hear just a few months later that Johnny had passed away. The following Sunday I announced it to our church and in his memory we once again performed his most famous song. I noticed several tears throughout the congregation and the choir. They had only met him once but the power of his music, and now the silencing of his talent, touched them all deeply.

That was the magic of Johnny Cowell. *******

By the way, my musical comedy Bring The Piano (www.bringthepiano.com ) will be on stage in Toronto from July 5 – 14, then my new show Tuned premieres in Winnipeg from July 19 – 28!

Website: www.randyvancourt.com ♣ www.dialogue.ca

“BOOK TALK”

By J.S. Porter, Hamilton, Ontario

www.spiritbookword.net

There’s Someone You Need to Meet – Dorothy Day (1897-1980) We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.

Dorothy Day She knew something about love.

“Love means answering the mail that comes in—and there is a fearful amount of it. That person is in hospital, that person suffering a breakdown of nerves, the person lonely, far-off, watching for the mailman each day. It means loving attention to those around us, the youngest and the oldest (the drunk and the sober).”

She admired the Russian writers, especially Dostoevsky who gave her words to live by: “Love in action is often a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.”

She knew something about dedication and perseverance. A priest in Jim Forest’s pictorial biography, All is Grace: A Biography of Dorothy Day, remarks: “…year after year living an austere life in the grimmest of conditions, being jailed again and again, never giving up doing the works of mercy, never getting cynical, never letting her love of god and people dissolve. Anyone can be saintly for a week or two, or even a year, but to persevere from youth through old age, to remain on the cross until death—that is a mark of true holiness.”

She lived by the code of Ecclesiastes: “Do what comes to hand. Whatsoever thy hand finds to do, do it with all thy might.” She found service to others what was at hand and she did it mightily.

She admired Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, with her emphasis on “the little way.” You make a difference in the world by paying attention to details. Does the stranger have a bed to lie on, clothes to wear, food to eat and a job? Does he or she feel wanted, needed, loved?

As a young woman, her face was beautiful. As an old woman, her face was beautiful. And in the in-between years her eyes were bright and determined. She knew who she was and where she was going. www.dialogue.ca

In her youth, she smoked, drank, swore, prayed, read, wrote and worked for the poor and the needy. She had literary friends, including Malcolm Cowley and Eugene O’Neill. My kind of woman, my kind of saint. Later in life, she prayed, protested, went to jail, read, wrote, raised a daughter, read to grandchildren and great-grandchildren, spoke out against injustice, internalized the Gospels, and worked for the poor and the needy. My kind of woman, my kind of saint.

Kate Hennessy, author of Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty: An Intimate Portrait of My Grandmother, wrote in The Catholic Worker 17 years after her grandmother’s death: “To have known Dorothy means spending the rest of your life wondering what hit you. On the one hand, she has given so many of us a home, physically and spiritually; on the other, she has shaken our very foundations.”

I think she is beginning to shake mine. I’m beginning to wonder what hit me. I’ve read very little of her and know of her as someone Thomas Merton wrote to, and sometimes for, as in his “The Root of War is Fear” article for The Catholic Worker. In reading Jim Forest, I learn other things: she established 160 houses of hospitality throughout the US and elsewhere; and was responsible for the printing of 94,000 copies of The Catholic Worker by 1976.

She makes me rethink my thoughts. “Women,” she says, “think with their whole bodies.” Child-bearing imposes “a rule of life which involves others.” Men needn’t be so anchored.

There is no sentimentality in Dorothy Day. She sees clear-headedly. She reprimands her correspondentfriend Thomas Merton for his idealist regard for the Beats and those who follow them: “they are a fly-bynight crew who despised and ignored the poor around us…I am uncharitable about the intellectual who shoulders his way in to eat before the men on the line who have done the hard work of the world…”

The FBI had a fat file on her for, among other things, her stand against the Vietnam War: “I accuse the government itself, and all of us, of these mass murders in Vietnam, this destruction of villages, this …/ VOL. 31, NO. 4, SUMMER 2018

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wiping out of peoples, the kidnapping, torture, rape and killings that have been disclosed to us…Reparation is needed. We must do penance for what we have done to our brothers.”

When Pope Francis delivered his address to Congress in 2015 he commented on four Americans: Abraham Lincoln, Dr. Marin Luther King, Jr., Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day. Pope Francis acknowledged Day’s fight for social justice and the rights of persons, which meant freedom

from poverty, unemployment and oppression: “In these times when social concerns are so important, I cannot fail to mention the Servant of God Dorothy Day, who founded the Catholic Worker Movement.

Her social activism, her passion for justice and for the cause of the oppressed, were inspired by the Gospel, her faith, and the example of the saints.” *All quotations are taken from Jim Forest’s All is Grace: A Biography of Dorothy Day. Toronto: Novalis, 2011.

J. S. Porter ♣

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“Though Invisible to Us, Our Dead Are Not Absent”

By Edward Curtin, Jr., Massachusetts, US

Those titular words were sent to me by Fr. Daniel Berrigan shortly before he died.

It is a glorious spring day as I write. The day my father died was also glorious, and I cried like a baby. It was 25 years ago today, May 1, 1993. To the young it must seem like a long time ago. To me it is yesterday.

I am his namesake for which I feel blessed. Every day that passes I realize how profound his influence has been on me. Perhaps not obvious to others, it runs like an underground stream that carries me forward and soothes my soul through the passage of days. The early morning he died was so beautiful, almost as beautiful as he was. The call from the hospital came at 5 A.M. When I was leaving his apartment shortly thereafter, the birds were in full throat, singing madly.

The flowering bushes leading into his apartment building were in full bloom and the smell intoxicating.

The morning was arriving and my father departing and my heart was aching. The bittersweet juxtaposition of his day of departure has never left me, nor has the feel and smell of him as we would hug in those final years as he was weakening and preparing for his restless farewell. My father never waivered from his faith that “though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal.” Those words ring their reminders in my ears continually.

Now it is spring again. Yesterday as I drove to work through the gentle New England spring rain, I noticed how fast the grass was turning green and how in a few days the weather will turn quite warm and the flowers and foliage will explode with joy. “Explode,” yes.

That word dragged my thoughts across the world.

And I thought of all the bombs and missiles exploding 32 dialogue

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throughout the Middle East and the guns of the killers exploding everywhere, extinguishing the possibility for joy for so many. And the nuclear ones hiding in their silos and those treacherously sliding silently under the world’s oceans in Trident submarines, primed to kill us all. And the indifference of so many people to this carnage, initiated and sustained by our own government. Or was it indifference? Or something else? It seemed to me as I wondered in the rolling silence of the car that it was that and yet wasn’t just that. There was a missing link that I couldn’t fully understand, and still don’t. Was it fear?

Then I recalled that yesterday was the anniversary of the death of Dan Berrigan two years ago, another father and mentor whose influence runs through my veins. Dan and my father never met, and in ways they were opposites, but yet a marriage of opposites. Both trained by Jesuits, and Dan a Jesuit priest, who became a renegade radical priest, a criminal felon in opposition to the American Empire and its terrifying violence; my father, eight years older, a gentle more conservative soul inspired by the same faith, expressed in quieter and more personal ways, and possessed of a gift with words equal to the eloquence of Dan’s writing but more humorous and sometimes acerbic.

Dan, the serious poet; my father, a master of the epistolarian’s art and quite the serious comedian.

The tragedian and comic, faithful to the paradox of our condition. In one of his last letters to me my father wrote, “I am hooked up to a heart monitor and have been examined by a neurosurgeon named Block.

I think he is H.R. Block of tax forms. I have also just signed a consent form for a cat scan. I think that’s to see if I like cats.”

And of course Dan, in his role as dissident, wrote so www.dialogue.ca

famously, fifty years ago this May 17, as he stood burning draft records in Catonsville, Maryland with his brother Phil and seven other brave resisters to the war against Vietnam: Excuse us good friends for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house.

We could not, so help us God, do otherwise. For we are sick at heart. Our hearts give us no rest for thinking of the Land of Burning Children….We say killing is disorder. Life and gentleness and community and unselfishness is the only order we recognize… In a time of death, some men… the resisters... those who preach and embrace the truth, such men overcome death, their lives are bathed in the light of resurrection, the truth has set them free…

Who am I? Who are we?

The mystical and political poet Kenneth Rexforth wrote in “Growing”: I and thou, from the one to The dual, from the dual To the other, the wonderful, Unending, unfathomable Process of becoming each Ourselves for the other.

How do we become who we are? asked Nietzsche,

while paradoxically telling us. But in speaking paradoxically, he, the alleged murderer of God but himself a paradoxical lover of Jesus, spoke the truth about us all, or at least about me. I am a paradox, a combination of influences of those who came before me and now whisper to me from the shadows and those living friends and enemies who inspire me. Their spirits flow into me while I flow on. It is a vast conspiracy of the communion of the living and the dead.

I can hear my father whisper to me what he wrote years ago: “The other day Mama saw a death notice of an Edward J. Curtin but happily he came from Brooklyn, so it wasn’t either of us. I told you things would get better.”

I am laughing through my tears as I recall how he would often end his epistles with the word pax, and then further on the question – quién sabe? (who knows?).

I don’t know, but knowledge is overrated.

The world is beautiful, and we must save it by listening to the voices of our blessed dead, who instill us with life and love and the spirit of resistance. We must carry it on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaZ1qiYT6U8 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/

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The Poetry of Susan Keyes Woodsworth From John Woodsworth, Ottawa: Here is another poem written by my dear wife, Susan Keyes

Woodsworth, who passed away a little 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.

Solar passion

By Susan Keyes (Hoik) Woodsworth

Oh, sun so red, so fierce a fiery ball — You set the world aflame with your slightest raytouch...

some needing but a moment’s touch, others — deeper, lingering embraces, penetrating every fibre...

Our earth-home races around your perimeter on an endless journey of heat-penetrating days and shade-cooling night-rest from your scorching kisses...

Our love affair with your passionate pursuit claims us in an endless surrender, becoming a total commitment through aeons of transforming, fiery baptisms...

Your warm beams of light open irresistibly every flowering tree, every living thing — www.dialogue.ca

What will future millennia reveal through our constant intercourses?

Without you we are lost VOL. 31, NO. 4, SUMMER 2018

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in an endless vacuum of blackness, unrecognized, undiscovered, unloved in an eternity of frigidity...

What loving cause, what creative force grasped us in your hold of cycled destined embraces?

What glorious power placed us perfectly positioned, not too much and not too little

of your needed rays of revelatory revolutions?

Red-hot ball of flame — Fire our imagination for an eternity of passion-filled days of poetic praises (promises?) to fulfil…

Susan K. Hoik, Ottawa (Monday, after a ride and walk, the sun a huge ball of fire), 17 July 1989 [The Editor apologizes to John and readers for misspelling Susan’s middle name in the Spring issue, p.39]

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T is for ‘Time’ – Thinking - Thanking…

Original Thinking by Glenn Aparicio Parry (2015) – A Radical ReVisioning of Time, Humanity, and Nature [EXTRACT FROM THE INTRODUCTION]

In hearing the phrase "original thinking;' you probably anticipate something new and innovative-and you may get it. But the title of this book is intentionally playful.

This book is about thinking – the origin and full continuum of thinking – in the past and in the now.

Thought is vibration. Thoughts of the past may dissipate, but they never quite disappear. They continue to matter in the present. The web of thought is vast and mysterious, and unfolds at its own pace.

The sum total of thought is tantamount to the intelligence of nature. Nature is intelligent in part because it contains volumes of stories. These stories reside in particular places-in rocks, caves, rivers, and oceans; but they also penetrate the memories, dreams, and reflections of all creatures. These stories are original and immutable. They are part of the fabric of life.

Our story is both new and old because it is connected to the origin of all stories. It includes humans but is not exclusively about humanity. Nothing ever is.

A very long time ago, people first gathered around a fire to tell stories. Storytelling is the oldest form of communication known to humankind. Today, people continue to gather in this way, and it has a name: talking circle, also known as dialogue. Talking circle is a model of inclusiveness, for all voices are welcome, and everyone is able to see each other's faces. Talking circle is the origin of what became known as consensus-making, where decisions are made as a group.

But there is more to talking circle than meets the eye.

These kinds of circles typically have an opening in 34 dialogue

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one direction, which was originally a way of inviting spirit into the circle from outside the tribe. The opening allows the spirit of nature to enter and speak directly through the members.

This was because, unlike today, we once believed our thinking emerged directly from nature. People were understood to be vessels – conduits for thought – not the originators of our thoughts. To think was to receive inspiration from nature. Thoughts emerged from Great Spirit, or the womb of creation-moved through us, and then returned to the Great Mystery. Thought and Spirit were the same thing. All of creation was once understood as a dance of the elements: fire, air, water, and earth. Everything-not just humans-was known to be imbued with spirit-with consciousness.

Our thoughts were sacred because they connected us to All there is.

The origin of the word "thinking" is thanking because our thoughts were originally prayers. The original purpose of thinking was to express our gratitude and renew our relationship with creation. These prayers were effective. Our ancient way of thinking held a mysterious power-a power largely unknown to today's rational mind. Whatever we thought became manifestfor thought, speech, and action were one.

We were once the embodiment of what the late physicist David Bohm called “participatory consciousness:” We moved with the flow of natural events, co-participating in their creation. When we danced, our dances were the rhythms of the land; when we sung, our songs were the songs of the earth; and when we spoke, our speech was the animate earth breathing through us. …/ www.dialogue.ca

The way we communicated – our ancient languages – were expressions of this original participation.

This sense that humans are embedded in the circle of life – consciously participating in and renewing it through thought – is a very old and once universal idea. It is only in modernity that we in the West began to imagine that our thoughts were separate from the

rest of creation.

Is it still possible to recover the ancient ways of interconnected thinking without losing the best of modern thinking? This is what the book explores ISBN-10: 1583948902 Published on Nov 23, 2015 by North Atlantic Books ~ Berkeley, California - www.northatlanticbooks.com ♣

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On Monarchy, Britannia, G7, EMF exposure…

David Muir Foster, Port Perry ON

What I do in the wee small hours…

So I dabble in world affairs, searching for fellow Monarchists. A week before the Solstice – and the days dwindle down, to a precious few. Stay well.

I have been in Royal Company... hernia repair, hip replaced, and now cataracts. Not quite rarin’ to go.

Letter to Tom Walkom at The Star From: david foster david.foster2@powergate.ca Sent: Sunday, June 10, 2018 To: Tom Walkom, Toronto Star, twalkom@thestar.ca

Re: G7 costs unjustifiable

As usual, hatred of the police and absurd costs for 28 hours of ill will. Canada’s part of that cost alone could have built a floating security haven. The previous one was the ‘HMY Britannia,’ retired prematurely and angering Prince Philip because the ‘press’ had no idea what it actually did. 412 feet of floating secure convention centre easily moved, even into the Great Lakes. Some estimates guess that at a cost of about 120 million Pounds Sterling a replacement can be built, and maintained from public money from individuals with no ‘clout’ at all. Run a Commonwealth wide lottery. Read what that ship actually did in public service and how.

Or pass the idea on to Star Editors as a ‘Feature’.

David Muir Foster, Port Perry [Reply] From: Walkom, Tom, twalkom@thestar.ca Sent: June-11-18 Re: G7 costs unjustifiable

Thanks for the idea. TW

Britannia Rues and Waves David Foster

Somewhere in Britain I assume there is a castle with a locked room where they keep old crowns and old titles, Dukes and whatnot for recycling. For Marriages among Royals, they consider wedding gift titles involving sex. (Essex, Wessex, Sussex). Curiously they left the North out of the set... perhaps too cold.

Norfolk. (Watch the spelling!) www.dialogue.ca

I loved the re-runs of the Royal Wedding. But the Crowning Gift was left in Scotland: ‘Britannia,’ the 412-foot long motor Vessel, retired long before its ‘best before’ date. Prince Philip was phurious when the Labour government pulled the plug some 20 years ago (1997). All it needed was new engines, otherwise ‘sound as a bell’ and good for 40 more years. But operational funds pulled, they moved it to the Edinburgh area where it is now the most popular tourist draw in Scotland. 300,000 oglers a year.

Ahhh... rue Britannia... The ‘waves’ are from tourists saying good bye. Yet a curious afterbirth has arisen...

Meghan had a bridal veil with symbolic 53 little stars imbedded, one for each of the nations, states, territories of the British Commonwealth that seems able to be born again and again in pomp and splendour (Hallelluia! Clap your hands with joy! And we all did).

The sneaky idea has crept in that we two billion of the Commonwealth should hold a Royal Yachtery Lottery. To avoid big buck influence, the Little people buy a chance at winning a fortune, (the ‘take’ being used to build another ‘Britannia Yacht.’ About 120 million Pounds Sterling needed.

Those who visited the old girl in Leith, learned all the things the vessel did besides offer the very seldom luxury to a few royals alone to get away from it all.

It was an important tool of State. Even penetrated to Chicago where the local press recognized Queen Elizabeth as the Queen of Canada and Canada as a nation apart. Hands off.

Okay. Who will start the Lottery Movement? Perhaps the Scots among the visitors who come to Oooh! and Ahh! and ogle...

A Response from Jennifer Armit at The Royal Yacht Britannia Office Hello Mr. Foster, Thank you for your email. I have forwarded your message on to Derek Miller, who is Head of Maintenance here …/ VOL. 31, NO. 4, SUMMER 2018

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at The Royal Yacht Britannia, and may be able to help you further with some technical details/drawings.

Hopefully he will be able to contact you shortly. I do hope this is helpful, however please feel free to contact me if you have any questions, and I will do my best to assist.

Kind regards, Jennifer Armit

Receptionist/Office Administrator The Royal Yacht Britannia Ocean Drive, Leith, Edinburgh EH6 6JJ 18 May 2018 (or may not). This is not a hoax. It is my own birthday! It is real. ♣

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Have you heard of vTaiwan…? vTaiwan - A Glimpse of Open Source Open Space Government (Part 1) – “the most remarkable innovation in governance I’ve run across in a long time”

By Tom Atlee, Eugene OR, Dec 6, 2017

www.tomatleeblog.com/archives/175327876

remarkable calm center, Audrey Tang), on which Dear friends, I have not posted much in the last few months, having you can spend 5 minutes or five days or more if you been very busy with (among others): wish to delve into the topic in more depth....

– the Emerging Network It has taken me almost two months to Governance Initiative – a project understand vTaiwan to the extent I do arising out of the insights and possi– which is to at least glimpse its simbilities I noted in my post of July 9, plicity on the far side of its complexity 2017 Inclusive networks are shaping (instead of the oversimplifications on our lives right now. Are they governthis side of its complexity) – and I am ance? [www.tomatleeblog.com/arseriously impressed. At the same time chives/175327737 ]; and I realize that vTaiwan's current form – vTaiwan, the most remarkable inis not so much a model to be replinovation in governance I’ve run cated as an inspiring beginning of a across in a long time – one which is potentially profound evolutionary shift hard to track, partly because it is conin all aspects of our collective governstantly evolving. ance. There is so much more to it than ... structure / self-organization...

I intuit that all these – and the wise I have written in these four posts, but I democracy pattern language and Nora Bateson’s think this material represents the core of what I want “symmathesy” worldview centered on “mutual learnto share at this time. ing in context” – are pointing to a radically different Enjoy!…. and breathe! :-) understanding of how we could collectively order our Coheartedly, Tom public affairs in wise and largely self-organized ways.

I will be reflecting on all that in another post soon, but Intro to vTaiwan I want to share my excitement about vTaiwan first.

What would it look like if democracy involved citizens, public servants, and issue stakeholders working The following is a layered description of vTaiwan together to develop policies, programs and regulations over four messages: In this, the first post, you’ll find that featured approaches that made sense to almost all an introduction (a one-minute read) followed by a 3of them? What if their ways of doing this were prominute overview. In the second post [links at the end] ductive, totally transparent and constantly evolving I offer you eleven brief "Notes on Aspects of the through initiatives and dialogues among thousands of vTaiwan Phenomenon” (probably a 10-15 minute people dedicated to making it all work better? We can read). In the third post, I describe two early examples glimpse this possibility in the rapidly evolving of the work done by vTaiwan and its associated hacktivist community, g0v (gov-zero). In the last post, political culture of Taiwan, especially in vTaiwan, a self-organizing mix of online consensus discovery and I share some of the best links I’ve worked with (inlive-streamed face-to-face dialogues. cluding video conversations I’ve had with vTaiwan's 36 dialogue

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www.dialogue.ca

vTaiwan is neither a platform nor a process, but uses many platforms and processes in a self-organizing participatory activity that surfaces issues around which there is energy; it then calls up significant information and points of consensus about those issues that help stakeholders and public servants interactively draft and modify regulations.

There is nothing else quite like it in the world. And although it arose out of Taiwan's unique political history and conditions, it has many features, principles, patterns and lessons that can inspire democratic evolutionaries everywhere.

The next step will be to understand those features, principles, patterns and lessons more fully so that new versions of the evolution they represent can be innovated elsewhere around the globe in ways that truly serve the life of the places in which they flourish and shift. ====

Overview of vTaiwan vTaiwan is a unique adventure in open source, open space participatory democracy, profoundly self-organizing, seriously intelligent and intentional, and deeply motivated by having fun, building trust, and finding creative solutions at all levels of Taiwanese society. It uses a rich and sensibly integrated palette of shared tools for collaborative thinking and transparency online, face-to-face, and in virtual reality - woven together into a coherent whole. vTaiwan runs parallel to and partners with traditional institutions of representative government. It frames itself as a consultation activity, although I see it as a whole-system collaboration rather than merely advicegiving. vTaiwan processes attempt to engage a full spectrum of players working together to improve policy outcomes. This approach explicitly supports public servants, creating safe spaces for them to do the right thing. Yet in the realm of political theory, it seems to turn democracy inside out and upside down.

Despite its (r)evolutionary nature, it is thoroughly grounded in the core principle of rule by the people and, in particular, by those who are most affected by specific government decisions. To accomplish this it upgrades the opportunity for meaningful citizen and stakeholder participation and citizen-government engagement and trust by several orders of magnitude.

There is little voting in the usual sense, but countless opportunities for personal expressions of perspectives, preferences and possibilities that have real impact on www.dialogue.ca

policy outcomes, especially thanks to the institutionalized participation of government officials.

This engagement ecosystem inspires a weave of diverse dynamics. In activities like the national e-petition process, facilitators utilize the legitimacy of numbers: 5000 signatories are required to guarantee a government response. In other aspects — like the crowdsourced consensus-mining platform Pol.is — it taps dynamic relationships between public agreements and disagreements to identify common ground and deeper insight. In still others — such as its weekly hackathons — it cultivates the creative initiative of individuals and the self-organizing dynamics of their interactions. Most importantly it constantly convenes and harvests generative conversations between interested citizens, public servants, and issue stakeholders, all of whose views tend to shift in the process.

The result is a complex nonlinear mix of people’s engagement with each other and with evolving fields of information and proposals all unfolding in and around a core pattern. This core dynamic first evokes and clarifies useful information and common ground from the many divergent perspectives that make up any given public issue. It then feeds the resulting insights into public reflections by panels of stakeholders and officials. The outcomes of those conversations translate into official deliberations that generate laws, regulations, budgets, and other products of government.

All this is tracked, catalyzed and facilitated by hundreds of contributors — including the uncannily perceptive and accessible Digital Minister without Portfolio, Audrey Tang — who move through it all having fun and enabling everyone else to have as much fun as possible while nurturing trust among all sectors. The entire phenomenon is historically rooted in the inclusively co-creative experience of the Sunflower Movement of 2014 — a plurality of spontaneous, self-organized communities of thousands of students and activists who occupied parliament for 22 days while engaging each other and the country in innovative deliberations that impacted public policy. vTaiwan is a major evolving legacy project of that watershed event.

[For more on vTaiwan’s current practices and some examples from its recent past, see Parts 2 and 3 of this series, as well as the many links in Part 4.]

Part 1, vTaiwan – A Glimpse of Open Source Open Space Government: www.tomatleeblog.com/archives/175327876 VOL. 31, NO. 4, SUMMER 2018

…/

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Part 2, vTaiwan – Notes on Aspects of the vTaiwan Phenomenon: www.tomatleeblog.com/archives/175327882

Part 3, vTaiwan – Two Stories of Tapping the Wisdom and Resourcefulness of the Whole: www.tomatleeblog.com/archives/175327886

Part 4, vTaiwan – Online sources for my research: www.tomatleeblog.com/archives/175327889

Part 5, vTaiwan – Lessons for Government-Engaged Popular Deliberation www.tomatleeblog.com/archives/175327898 Tom Atlee, The Co-Intelligence Institute POB 493, Eugene, OR 97440 Website: http://www.co-intelligence.org / Blog: http://tomatleeblog.com "Evoking and engaging the wisdom and resourcefulness of the whole on behalf of the whole."

Tom Atlee is the author of: The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World that Works for All; Empowering Public Wisdom: A Practical Vision of Citizen-

Led Politics; Participatory Sustainability: Notes for an Emerging Field of Civilizational Engagement; Reflections on Evolutionary Activism: Essays, Poems and Prayers from an Emerging Field of Sacred Social Change On the website, you can read about these books and browse our vast database of transformational resources at the Wise Democracy Project. Please support our work.

Your donations are fully tax-deductible.

BOOKS: EMPOWERING PUBLIC WISDOM PARTICIPATORY SUSTAINABILITY THE TAO OF DEMOCRACY (see P.59) REFLECTIONS ON EVOLUTIONARY ACTIVISM

Visit the Wise Democracy Pattern Language Project www.wd-pl.com - The Wise Democracy Pattern Language highlights dynamic factors and design principles which can make an activity, organization or community more wisely self-governing. Based on hundreds of real-life innovations, this evolving database of wise democracy “patterns” helps us understand, re-imagine and transform the ways we manage our shared world.

The Co-Intelligence Institute, P.O. Box 493, Eugene, OR, 97440; cii@igc.org www.co-intelligence.org ♣

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T is for Technology

The decades-long quest to end drought (and feed millions) by taking the salt out of seawater “The world isn’t short of water, it’s just in the wrong place, and too salty," says Charlie Paton – so he's spent the past 24 years building the technology to prove it. www.wired.co.uk Full Story: https://tinyurl.com/wired-sea-green Sundrop Farms now produces 15 per cent of the Australian tomato market – all of it grown using seawater [Photo,right] Story by Emma Bryce 20 March 2018 [EXTRACT/LINK] Charlie

Paton is the founder of Seawater Greenhouse, a company that transforms two abundant resources – sunshine and seawater – into freshwater for growing crops in arid, coastal regions such as Africa’s horn. The droughtstricken landscape that cloaks this region doesn’t exactly inspire visions of lush agriculture – but then, Paton sees things differently: “The world isn’t short of water, it’s just in the wrong place, and too salty,” he says.

His latest project in Somaliland (an autonomous but internationally unrecognised republic in Somalia) 38 dialogue

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takes that bullish optimism to the extreme. On a 25hectare plot of desert land close to the coastline, he’s building the region’s first sustainable, droughtresistant greenhouse.

Using solar power to pump in seawater from the coastline and desalinate it on site, Paton is generating freshwater to irrigate plants, and water vapour to cool and humidify the greenhouse interior. In January – less than a year after its launch – this improbable desert oasis produced its first harvest of lettuce, cucumbers and tomatoes. “The idea is so simple that it’s rather insulting,” Paton says. “People say, ‘If that’s going to work then somebody would have done it before.’ ” Read the Full Story at Wired… https://tinyurl.com/wired-sea-green ♣ www.dialogue.ca

“Your Health Matters”

A Confession and a Hope…

Dr. Derrick Lonsdale, Strongsville OH

Many years ago, I was a pediatric oncologist at Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, for about six years as part of my career. I was a member of a group of researchers based in Houston, Texas, funded by government money as part of the Nixon “war on cancer.” Although the drugs that we used gave initial remission responses, relapse was guaranteed and all the children that I tried to treat died. We were trying to find the “magic” success story. It was a very stressful occupation and I gave the job to a successor and took up another interest involving knowledge and use of biochemistry.

The chief of radiotherapy had become a friend and not very long before I gave up oncology, I was having lunch with him one day. He asked me whether I had a patient with leukemia in the hospital at that time. I replied that I did indeed have an 18-year-old girl with the variety of leukemia known as myelogenous. This particular form of leukemia was at that time the most resistant to all types of treatment.

I knew that the state of her disease was critical and I did not expect her to survive. In fact her death was predictably imminent. Anyway, I asked my friend why he had posed this question. He replied that he wanted to take a unit of blood from a patient with leukemia, irradiate it and put it back into the patient.

Naturally, I asked him why on earth he had conjured up this experiment. In fact I knew that blood irradiation as a treatment for leukemia had been tried with little or no success.

He replied that he had had a patient with Hodgkin’s disease (cancer of the lymph glands). He had irradiated swollen cancerous glands in the patient’s neck and to his surprise, glands in the groin area disappeared. He had come to the conclusion that irradiating the neck glands had released something into the bloodstream that had an effect on the glands in the groin. Well, I said, if you can get the blood from my patient, treat it and put it back before the patient passes on, you are welcome. At that time, researchers were free to use their own judgement in such an experiment. He took a unit of blood and put it under www.dialogue.ca

the cobalt bomb (the most up-to-date way of carrying out therapeutic irradiation), turned the machine on and went for lunch. When he came back he found that he had delivered 13,000 rads (a rad is a unit of x-ray dose). When you consider that 1000 rads given to a patient could be lethal, please be aware that this dose was given to a unit of blood, not to the patient. He put the blood back into my patient and to my incredible surprise, she went into a clear-cut remission. Remission is the word used to state that all evidence of the disease has disappeared. The word “cure” is not used since the disease is expected to return at an unpredictable time in the immediate future.

I sent her home with a modest dose of an anti-leukemia drug. She relapsed about a year later and died.

Remember, at that time our treatment of acute leukemia was unpredictable. When you achieved a remission, relapse would take place sooner or later and for this type of leukemia to produce a remission that lasted a year was impressive. In fact my friend and I did the same thing with six more children with leukemia and each of them went into remission.

Although remissions didn’t last, at least one of these patients was in the end-stage of the disease, after two remissions had relapsed, and was not expected to respond again. Her response to blood irradiation was nothing less than amazing.

Well, obviously we needed data and we asked for a meeting with the specialists known as hematologists who took care of adult leukemia. We presented the facts as we had seen them and to our great surprise, the skepticism was not only obvious, it was chilling.

The whole idea was rejected and we were considered to be “dreamers.” No further interest was shown by the hematologists, so I went to the Research Division and I was told that they had a research project that they were following and could not take on any further work. They showed no interest at all. Neither could I persuade my oncology successor to report it to the research group from which I had retired. My radiotherapist was also unable to find “an ear.”

Obviously this required further detailed research. …/ VOL. 31, NO. 4, SUMMER 2018

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Because we had not collected sufficient data and could not initiate the necessary research, we were unable to publish this in a medical journal and it has been on my conscience ever since. I have tried to get numerous physicians interested, but skepticism has always abruptly ended our conversation.

I write this with the hope that somebody might read about this experiment who is in a position either to begin personal research or report it to somebody else that can. The treatment of leukemia in children is still devastating although it has advanced considerably since my years of oncology. A massive irradiation of the patient’s own blood outside the body and its subsequent return to the patient seems to me to be a lot less dangerous and less toxic than some of the current drugs being used to treat leukemia. It is possible that the initial remission from radiotherapy might work with newer drugs that might be less toxic and effective at lower doses.

– 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 ♣

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That’s My Take On It

Perhaps a cure for Asthma after 89 years… A personal story John Shadbolt, Acton ON

I am 89 years old, and can remember most of the different drugs and remedies I was given for my asthma over the years. Injections that my doctor gave me, pills, vile tasting liquids. I remember the pills giving me a really bad coated tongue. Taste was not there anymore. Injections lasting for 5 minutes or so, because they were bad for your heart.

The most terrible tasting liquid – Ipecac – was a liquid to make you vomit. And when I say vomit, that’s putting it mildly; it made you puke your guts up. It was terrible, but it has allowed me to get a handle on my asthma after some 80 years.

The reason I vividly remember is because amongst the vomit was phlegm floating in the mess. A lot of phlegm. And I remember that as soon as I got rid of the phlegm I was asthma free for several weeks. Of course, at the time I did not know this was really a life-saving occurrence.

Over the years, I was put on better drugs, new 40 dialogue

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inventions. Puffers – the great asthma Saviour. Not for me. They did alleviate my asthma, but I took them every day. That is until two months ago, when I was put on THREE puffers, because my asthma was so bad. No cure here – but helped me stay alive.

Over the years I had the impression that while puffers helped, it seemed to me that they also somehow compacted the phlegm in my chest, although no doctor seemed to understand that; in fact, I never found a good expectorant. So I talked to my local health food store, and was told to try SERRAPEPTASE. I did this and no doubt it did help, but was not the thing I had been looking for. So a MIRACLE happens...

My daughter, who is a Yoga instructor came to see me. She had some Essential Oils with her that she wanted me to try. They were very interesting, but not much help to an asthmatic. But it stated me thinking about the use of steam to help my breathing, plus the fact I had never really thought about essential oils.

Much to my amazement, my wife found an inhalation www.dialogue.ca

steamer that I must have purchased years ago, and forgotten all about. So now I had a steamer. But the steamer would be no good without something to get the phlegm off of my chest. So once again talked to my local Health Food Store – and the owner told me she had a really good essential oil I should try called Olbas.* So I purchased some, and VOILÀ. A miracle.

Remember, I was taking THREE puffers – one every four hours, one every six hours, and one once daily.

I took a steam inhalation using OLBAS. It is really strong stuff, nearly took my nose off. It was first made about 100 years ago in Switzerland. It was amazing.

For FOURTEEN weeks (and counting!) I have not taken any doctors prescribed medications.

As a matter of fact, I now take SERRAPEPTASE if I feel I need it, perhaps every two weeks or so, and I

only take the OLBAS when I feel the asthma is coming on again.

I am not a doctor, but I do try and do what my body tells me to do. That, and with a really great local advisor (Willow Lane Natural Foods in Acton, ON; 519-8533051), plus a ‘never stop looking/learning’ attitude has given me a new lease on life. And I feel much, much better. One other thing, I think OLBAS dissolves the phlegm rather than coughing it up. I hope it helps you as it has helped me.

From: John Shadbolt, jshadbolt@primus.ca ♣ [From the product packaging: Olbas Oil, inhalant, decongestant; mixture of essential oils containing: Eucalyptus oil 35.45% w/w, Menthol 4.1% w/w, Cajuput oil 18.5% w/w, Clove oil 0.1%, Juniper berry oil 2.7% w/w, Wintergreen oil 3.7%, Demetholised mint oil 35.45% w/w.] ♣

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Telling The Truth Takes Guts…

Zionist Bigotry – by Thomas L. Are It has been said, Pride goeth before a fall, meaning, “People who act overconfident or too arrogant are likely to fall.” Oh, I remember where that quote comes from. It’s in the Jewish Bible, God’s word to his chosen people. (Proverbs 16:18) As Israel celebrates 70 years of stateism, it has become a nation of racism, arrogance and bigotry.

Bradley Burston, writing in Haaretz, a leading newspaper in Israel, says: It hurts me to write what I’m about to. But it also hurts me to have to live in this place today. This is Zionism as racism… As a public servant, as an Orthodox rabbi, as a settler, you’re free to say anything, as long as it’s anti-Arab, anti-black, anti-Muslim, anti- Palestinian anti-Nazi, anti-North American… For sheer, unadulterated Zionist bigotry and hatred… no one can touch Benyamin Netanyahu [i] It’s amazing. Dov Lior, chief rabbi of Hebron issued a religious edict saying: A thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew’s fingernail. He also asserts that Arabs could be used for medical experiments.

Ovadia Yosef, a former Sephardi chief rabbi said: “The sole purpose off non-Jews is to serve Jews.” www.dialogue.ca

This declaration was endorsed by 250 Jewish religious figures. [ii] Again, Allan Brownfeld writes: Israel repeatedly refers to itself as a “Jewish state,” but its current direction represents a rejection of Jewish moral and ethical values. Slowly, more and more American Jews, who believed Israel shared their values are coming to the realization that it does not.

I used to think of Israel as a century state, meaning that it would survive for about 100 years. Israel seems to thrive on creating enemies and I thought, one of these days, one of them is going to stomp in and crush it.

No more. I now think if Israel makes it ten more years it will be a miracle. Not because some “enemy” will invade but because it will implode from within. Israel has no foundation other than its illusions about itself, such as: Of all the people on earth, we are God’s chosen. Jews are smarter and more valuable than other people. Actually, Israel has little self-control, no constitution and recognizes no borders. It has one true friend in the world, the United States, and that could easily change as more and more young Jews reject the actions and arrogance of Israel. …/ VOL. 31, NO. 4, SUMMER 2018

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`Most Americans have supported Israel over the years as, “the only democracy in the Middle East.” But what kind of democracy is it when Israel’s Jewish leadership declares that it is not a nation for all its citizens but rather, its democracy is for “Jews only?” It is pure Zionist bigotry.

Thomas Are, June 26, 2018 LINK: http://thomas-l-are.blogspot.com/ Thomas L. Are: I preached for forty three years in the Presbyterian Church before retiring. If anyone would ever refer to me as a Liberation Theologian, I would be pleased.

I started blogging several years ago to express my political and religious concern for justice, especially justice for the Palestinians.

FOOTNOTES: [i] Allan C. Brownfeld, Israel at 70: An Alarming Growth of Racism and Intolerance. Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June 2018, p. 40. [ii] Also from Allan C. Brownfeld, Israel at 70: An Alarming Growth of Racism and Intolerance. Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June 2018, p. 40.

Article forwarded by Paul Craig Roberts, 27 June 2018, under the title, God’s Chosen People.

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Who Controls the CIA, US State Department and Donald Trump Edward Griffin, March 15, 2018 Website: https://NeedToKnow.news

Political analyst, Jake Morphonios, examines the significance of President Trump’s nomination of Mike Pompeo, the present Director of the CIA, to the post of Secretary of State. To do this, he starts with the history of the Council on Foreign Relations, founded in 1921 by Colonel Edward Mandel House and JP Morgan, and shows how this group ever since has been at the center of a movement to

transform the US from an independent nation into a political subdivision of a world Marxist government. No one is spared in this dissertation. If you ever voted for a US president who won the election, including Donald Trump, be prepared to be indignant – and enlightened. This is one of the finest history lessons you will ever find.

LINK: https://tinyurl.com/ntn-puppet-masters Rec’d from Adrian Swanston, Vancouver alipatricesankara@gmail.com ♣

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Letter to the PM re Canadian arrested in Germany at the behest of a B’nai Brith complaint Gunther Ostermann, Kelowna BC, gco@shaw.ca

Open letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau: You may, or you may not know that a Canadian born citizen, Monika Schaefer, from Jasper Alberta, was arrested and incarcerated on January 3, 2018, by the German police during her visit there. This happened on recommendation of B’nai Brith who filed a complaint against Monika Schaefer with German officials, because of her “anti-Semitic incitement.”

Monika Schaefer was a lifelong believer, like all the world was made to believe, that Germany murdered 6 million Jews. She chastised her parents, who claimed they didn’t know anything about it, why they didn’t do anything about it.

Not until 2015 did Monika research and found out, for all the world to see, that the plaques at Auschwitz had been changed in 1995, on suggestion of President Lech Walesa of Poland. The number of deaths on 20 cast iron plaques was changed from 4 million to 1.5 million, mostly Jews, which includes the deaths in Auschwitz, Birkenau and Monowitz. Wouldn’t that be 42 dialogue

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a reason to celebrate? 2.5 million Jews found? But the six million figure has never been changed, going back as far as 1915 to 1938, in articles in the New York Sun and New York Times and other publications, where always ‘6 million Jews lament their fate and persecution in various countries.’ Just Google it. (June 6, 1915 and Oct 18, 1918 for instance) If Germany would have allowed an honest investigation, just like with any other crime, with ‘evidence’, instead of jailing anybody that asks a question, including defense lawyers, then Monika Schaefer would have had no reason to post the ‘six million’ lie on YouTube. This is a witch hunt of the 15th century.

Mr. Prime Minister, we Canadians cherish our freedom of speech and opinions, and I hope you will do your utmost, and a.s.a.p, to bring Monika Schaefer back to Canada, to the Twenty First century.

Only with Honesty, Truth and Justice can there be a future for our species, and plants and animals on the extinction list. ♣ www.dialogue.ca

BOOKS

Bypassing Dystopia: Hope-Filled Challenges to Corporate Rule Bypassing Dystopia: HopeFilled Challenges to Corporate Rule by Joyce Nelson; Published by Watershed Sentinel Books, Comox, BC (Vancouver Island) Canada; May 2018, Softcover | $20 CAD + shipping (address at end); ISBN: 978-0-9953286-3-1

In Bypassing Dystopia: Hope-Filled Challenges to Corporate Rule – a followup to Beyond Banksters – Joyce Nelson explores global examples of active and creative resistance to the iron grip of corporatism on our economies and imaginations.

As BC journalist/filmmaker Damien Gillis summarizes, “The book serves two important functions – first, decoding the corporate jargon used to disguise what is really the transfer of wealth from the pockets of everyday citizens to the hidden offshore accounts of multinational corporations and the elite investor class. Terms like “quantitative easing” (bailouts for big banks), “austerity” (passing the cost onto regular people), and “asset recycling” (privatizing public assets) are translated into plain English, so the public can know what it’s up against.

“The other role the book plays is offering solutions from empowering stories of resistance to these neoliberal economic policies. Through Rafael Correa’s Ecuador, Mexico’s Zappatistas, Spain’s “Indignados,” Cuba’s revolutionary organic farmers, the North American divestment movement, Denmark’s happiness-boosting social services, and Japan’s erasure of “sovereign debt” with smart central banking, Nelson provides a roadmap to liberation from the greedy banksters’ deathgrip on our environment and societies.”

Read full review… at LINK: http://commonsensecanadian.ca/canada-backs-foreign-investor-rightsprotect-mining-sector-book

Advance reviews of Bypassing Dystsopia: “In Beyond Banksters, Nelson laid out key forms of financial and trade practices that enrich the very wealthy, and obstruct the rights, security and opportunities of ordinary citizens. Now, in this sequel, she www.dialogue.ca

details further initiatives that enrich the vastly rich, but she also lays out a brace of key examples of successful pushback from those same ordinary citizens, aided by courageous industry whistle-blowers and bold and prescient political leaders. The outline of a new social contract – where people always count more than profit – is present in this work, and it will undoubtedly stir readers to apply new and constructive ideas in their own lives.” – R. Warren Bell, Past Founding President, CAPE (Cdn. Association of Physicians for the Environment)

“Read and rejoice! This meticulously researched and lucidly written book (the sequel to Beyond Banksters) not only exposes the civilization-shattering rampage of our powerful business and political leaders. It also hails and details the rising tide of opposition to their greed-driven economic, social, and environmental atrocities. Everyone concerned about the future of humankind should read this uplifting tome. It offers well-founded hope that a belated but inexorable revolt against the purveyors of poverty, pollution, and inequality may yet save us from Armageddon.”

– Ed Finn, journalist, author, former Newfoundland politician and editor of the CCPA Monitor

“Illuminating the tactics and disclosing the modus operandi of North America’s financial pirates was exceptionally well carried out by Joyce Nelson in her 2016 book, Beyond Banksters. In this sequel, Bypassing Dystopia, Nelson extends globally her account of bankster tactics and procedures, and provides details of citizens resisting.” – Dr. Jerry Ackerman, Financial Analyst

“We live in the Neoliberal Age of Austerity. I am often told not to use the term ‘neoliberalism’ because people do not understand it. But if we do not name the enemy or the problem, it cannot be solved. Nelson’s latest book is a wonderful map of the neoliberal terrain, internationally and in Canada.”

– Herb Wiseman, Former Vice-Chair of COMER (Committee On Monetary and Economic Reform), www.comer.org

“Given an economy rigged against us, Nelson’s book provides examples of citizens acting together, affecting fundamental and structural change.”

– Judy Kennedy, Activist

“Joyce Nelson’s incisive sequel to Beyond Banksters is, like the predecessor, required reading to understand …/ VOL. 31, NO. 4, SUMMER 2018

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the deep structural evils of neoliberal capitalism.

Again and again, Bypassing Dystopia exposes how vile greed is institutionalized to economically and ecologically rape our planet and its people, the vast majority (of whom) are propagandized to believe in the latest versions of progress, packaged and sold by corporations, banks, their political servants and PR flacks. The author points to beacons of light in the darkness of corporate control, such as the regenerative organic agricultural revolution, but she makes it clear that without a grassroots revolution of informed and

organized citizens, the seductions of neoliberalism doom us to serfdom and ecological destruction.”

– John Stauber, Author and Activist

To order Bypassing Dystopia: Canada: $20 + $6 shipping USA and International: $20 + $15 shipping 1) Pay by cheque – download this order form and mail to: Watershed Sentinel Books, PO Box 1270, Comox, BC V9M 7Z8 Canada 2) Order by phone: 250-339-6117 3) Order directly via the form, at LINK: https://watershedsentinel.ca/bypassing-dystopia/ ♣

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Wild Fierce Life: Dangerous Moments on the Outer Coast – by Joanna Streetly, Tofino BC [From the front jacket] Wild Fierce Life is a heartstopping collection of true stories from the Pacific Coast that build a vivid portrait of life on the continental edge and one woman’s evolving place within it.

Joanna Streetly arrived on the west coast of Vancouver Island when she was nineteen, and soon adapted to the challenges of working on boats of all sorts, guiding multi-day wilderness kayak trips along the BC coast, and living in remote situations often without electricity or running water.

From a near-death experience while swimming at night to an enigmatic encounter with a cougar, these stories capture the joys and dangers of living in a wild environment. Streetly’s vivid storytelling evokes a sincere respect for nature, both its fragility and its power.

These stories reveal the interplay between inner and outer landscapes – the evolution of a woman uncovering the pleasures and dangers of the wild life.

Joanna Streetly grew up in Trinidad and moved to

Vancouver to study Outdoor Recreation and Wilderness Leadership. In 1990 she moved to Tofino, where she has lived ever since. While transitioning to writing and editing, she worked as a naturalist guide and sea kayak instructor. Most recently, her writing can be found in Best Canadian Essays 2017, and in numerous anthologies, magazines and literary journals. She is the author of Paddling Through Time (Raincoast Books) and Silent Inlet (Oolichan). Her published work includes fiction, non-fiction and poetry. She lives afloat in the Tofino Harbour with her partner, Marcel, and daughter, Toby.

ISBN-10: 1987915658 Publisher: Caitlin Press (March 24 2018) ♣

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The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to create a world that works for all - by Tom Atlee Here is a book that explains how 'We the People' can build our collective capacity to see clearly where we're going and govern ourselves wisely. It describes how we can break through to conscious evolution and to co-creating a shared future that makes sense to all of us. To find out more about The Tao of Democracy, visit: http://www.taoofdemocracy.com/ “Here-and-now practices showing what's possible in our immediate future. An important gift for our small, 44 dialogue

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challenged planet!” -Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet, co-author of Hope's Edge Published by The Writers' Collective, Cranston, RI, 2003 Paperback: 334 pages, $16.95, ISBN: 1-932133-47-X ♣ www.dialogue.ca

Feedback

Feedback on the Spring Issue‌ Paul Bowles, Fruitvale BC

Spring greetings to you and Maurice. The weather is nice here anyway and we have been out in the yard digging and wheel barrowing. I really am past doing physical work, the body complains but my wife is out there rearranging things, so how can I just sit under the cedar tree blowing Zipadee Dooda on my harmonica!

Thank you for another fine job on the magazine, what a great cover again, and nicely complimentary to the issue of our times, for me anyway, that is Alexandra Morton’s fight for the wild salmon’s safety in the face of ignorant and complicit government denying the poisoning of their waters from the disease-ridden fish farms. Now, with the miraculous passing of the bill in Washington state to remove (ocean-based) salmon farms perhaps our Canadian feet dragging on this matter will be re examined. In the vimeo (video link),

Alexandra said that even Trump consented to remove the farms, which beggars belief, but if that is so Canada should feel ashamed for not getting the message. Put the farms on land for God’s sake!

They have been doing that in New Zealand for twenty years. ♣ From Noel Paterson, London ON:

“Excellent Radical (true) Messages & Articles.

Thank you for your commitment all you Kings! ♣ From Alexander Miller, Port Alberni BC:

I thank you & yours for this inspired endeavour. I value the Dialogue highly. ♣ From W. Terrence Gordon, Bedford NS:

Canada Post saw fit to deliver the Dialogue you mailed to me (Winter Issue)‌ just yesterday! No matter, I am reading it cover to cover and enjoying hugely. Kindest regards, Terry Gordon halifaxpanopticon@yahoo.ca ♣

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“Stirring the Soup�

ANOTHER SEASON‌ Marie Gaudet, Edmonton AB acadian.lady@hotmail.ca

Thought I should let you know that I won't have an article for the next issue. In fact, I'm considering stopping altogether. I just don't know where my brain's at lately, but I truly haven't been happy with my writings for quite some time now. I can't seem to find my passion anymore, for whatever reason. And I can imagine that if I'm boring my own self to death, that can't be pretty for your readers!

So I figure I may as well step back and lay down my pencil until I find my muse again. I suspect you will probably have no trouble finding someone to pick up the slack and keep your readership as captivated as all

your other columnists do. You've done such an incredible job with this magazine, and I'm so very proud to have been a part of it for these past 10 years. You keep up the amazing work. But don't forget to rest up when you need it! I think you work too hard. Either way, you'll always be in my prayers.

And hey, who knows? Perhaps my passion will search me out and if it does find me, maybe I'll send you the odd article now and again. Take care, Janet, Maurice, Penny & Lucky, I feel so lucky to have known you! đ&#x;˜Š Marie ‌ But I'm not saying goodbye, just taking a step back to see how I can spice up my writing. It's in my veins and I'll never give it up, but I think an upgrade is in order. M. ♣

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David Foster has fun with T‌ Anyone for Tea? In the world of efficienT use of symbols, your noTion of the alphabeTic leTTers can be fun. (There we had a chance aT Two Teas for Two...) I Toyed with Trouble. Taking Trudeau to Task as efficienTly as possible. Trust Torn. Tradition Trashed. LobbiesTs as TerrorisTs. Trade Terrorism. NAFtA. www.dialogue.ca

The ‘or ism’ is the poliTical mind seT of our Times. ‘Time’ gentlemen please (to close the bar, pub, BriTish pub-Talk within a communiTy) ‌. david FosTer porT perry, onTario ♣ VOL. 31, NO. 4, SUMMER 2018

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Tributes

A FAITHFUL SUBSCRIBER – a note from Herb Losch, Toronto Dear Editor, I took the liberty to photograph one of your ardent subscribers, Henry Broneder in Toronto.

You can tell, from the photo, he was quite engrossed in the subjects of your publication.

I happened to flip through the pages of the same issue and found an old friend literature-wise in Joseph Campbell. I read his books but even more so, enjoyed his series on Television. You made two people happy with two different interests.

Speaking for Henry… He sends his warm regards.

Herb Losch, a relative of Henry’s from S. Africa, but a 64-year happy Canadian; los134@aol.com Editor’s Note: Sadly, Henry passed away on May 31, 2018.

Herb Losch’s note re his friend Henry: [Written and sent on April 20, just six weeks prior to Henry’s passing.]

Henry lives in the old historic section of town, next door to the ST. LAWRENCE MARKET, with a supermarket across the street and so is the bank plus numerous services. I am afraid he is fading fast in spite of having a good heartbeat and normal blood pressure.

Taking a lot of pills which I am supposed to administer but he sometimes does it himself and gets mixed up. However, that is not serious at all. I really was worried today because he seemed so weak; pathetic how shuffles along with a barstool on which he can lean and feel secure. [Must laugh, that was one of my ideas… that he swears makes a difference in his life.

Yes, I have to laugh, he is the engineer but I am a creative person.] It takes me 30 minutes to get to his place in the morning, on foot, and back in the afternoon, rain or shine. He was in such a poor condition this morning, I shall have to spend even more time

ABOVE: Henry Broneder enjoying the Spring Issue of Dialogue. Photo taken by Herb Losch.

with him. Luckily I have a good disposition. Getting back to another laugh. Your publication is involved.

Even as recent as two years ago, he would dive into your publication and highlight certain passages. That made it easy to find out what was on his mind.

At one time, I had fun – and when he got on his soapbox and railed against certain organisations, I had a way of distracting him. Actually it was quite a performance. Always a reference to your publication, his holy bible for sure.

Not sure what is going to happen. All I can do is trying to make life easier for him…

Spring is very late here but in Nanaimo surely the daffies are out. I spent a year in the Yukon a long time ago, but spring meant watching the ice break up in the river. Pardon me my gabbing, it is HENRY usually who cannot shut up.

Thanks again, Herb los134@aol.com ♣

HENRY JOSEF BRONEDER August 9, 1921 - May 31, 2018 Forwarded by Henry’s friend Herb Losch Long-time Dialogue reader and occasional writer, Henry Broneder… “passed away peacefully at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto on May 31, 2018 at the age of 96 years. Son of Ella and Josef, predeceased by his beloved wife Wendy. Forever remembered by his son Herbert (Maria) and daughter Sylvia, grandchildren 46 dialogue

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Birgit (Alex). Patrick, Nicholas and Gabriel (Julia), greatgrandchildren Solis, Jolie and Adrian, loving sister Emma Gyallay, nieces Christine (Vincent) and Bette (Stan) and numerous other family and friends in Canada, the United States, Austria and Germany.

“Henry was born in Vienna, Austria in 1921 and moved to Canada in 1951, ready to tackle new www.dialogue.ca

language and culture challenges and to succeed in a new world. Succeed he did and he enjoyed a long career as an engineer with the federal government and loved to recall the many bridges and roads he helped build. Well-travelled, he loved to read and complete crossword puzzles.

“Henry's friendliness touched many people including neighbours and staff at local banks, stores and restaurants. Many thanks to his caregivers and

hospital staff who cared for him in recent years and a special thanks to his close friend Herb who helped ease his last years and final moments.

A celebration of his life will be held on Sunday, July 29th. To leave condolences and share memories, please visit: https://www.affordableburialsandcremations.ca/henryjosef-broneder-august-9-1921-may-31-2018 ♣

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A Tribute to The Man Who Befriended Bears and Worked to Keep Them Safe EXTRACT & LINK TO THETYEE.CA ARTICLE

Charlie Russell, who passed away in May 2018, pioneered bear studies, mentored naturalists and flew like a joyful mad man.

By Sid Marty June 1, 2018 | TheTyee.ca Sid Marty is an award-winning Canadian writer, singer, conservationist and former park warden.

LINK:to story at TheTyee: https://tinyurl.com/tt-charlie-russell

Charlie Russell died on May 7 in Calgary due to complications following a five-hour surgical procedure.

Charlie used up his nine lives long ago, but his death at 76 was still shocking to those who knew him well.

Few people have lived as intensely as this man, or as dangerously. He has flown in some of the worst conditions on earth and walked, or crawled (with a broken back one time) away from both a hang-glider and an ultra-light crash, and over time he prevailed in a number of forced landings. He is, he was, internationally famous for the ground-breaking work he and the artist Maureen Enns did at Kambalnoye Lake, Kamchatka, in Russia, living in close proximity with brown bears and raising orphaned cubs which not only survived the wilds but eventually reproduced. A mentor to many naturalists, his experiments in “exploring the

possibilities of trust” challenged the prevalent orthodoxy of his day, which held that bears which have no fear of humans are always extremely dangerous, and that all bears are unpredictable and therefore always a threat to humans. Yet he was wise enough to know that what he learned working with those wild bears in B.C. and Kamchatka, in true wilderness settings, should not be applied by the layman to human-influenced bears in our southern national parks.

Charlie up close with a bear on Princess Royal Island. Photo by Jeff Turner.

Being famous didn’t make Charlie rich, by any means. In fact there is a Charlie Russell GoFundMe initiative on right now to lift his estate out of debt.

Read in full: https://tinyurl.com/tt-charlie-russell ♣

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Inner Peace If you can start the day without caffeine, If you can always be cheerful, ignoring aches and pains, If you can resist complaining and boring people with your troubles, If you can eat the same food every day and be grateful for it, If you can understand when your loved ones are too busy to give you any time, If you can take criticism www.dialogue.ca

and blame without resentment, If you can conquer tension without medical help, If you can relax without liquor, If you can sleep without the aid of drugs…

Then You Are Probably.................... The Family Dog! Forwarded by Sammy Camilleri ♣ VOL. 31, NO. 4, SUMMER 2018

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Stories from Magical Moon Lake

Karl Backhaus, Holland Centre ON

About my stories…

My journey into Nature began in wartime Hamburg as the wish of a city boy to live in the forest. Magical Moon Lake is the inspiring story of how this wish became a reality. In 1993, a peculiar dream led me to tell the amazing story of Magical Moon Lake, my home, which began with a landscape that once-looked like 'the Moon'.

My real life experiences show the slow process of creating a lake, the return of the forest, and my awe as the animals came back, one-by-one.

The stories are entertaining, often dramatic, joyful, and sometimes sad – always surprising; they also include some practical hints and educational thoughts,

on nature and life, to suit a wide spectrum of ages and cultures. Magical Moon Lake is a beckoning doorway to those who wish to discover our kinship with Nature, and perhaps rekindle their own dreams.

Perhaps the time is right to envision that collectively each of us can have a positive impact on our precious Planet Earth, our home, and the home of many, many Beings without a voice who rely on you and on me.

My stories end with a dream - one that may also be yours. Life can be magical and exciting, as you will find out in 'Magical Moon Lake'.

[Dialogue has been featuring stories from Karl’s book for many years, with Karl being a reader/writer/subscriber since 2009.]

The Toads Karl Backhaus From Magical Moon Lake (2014)

When we encounter a toad for the first time we may mistake it for a frog, but toads are very different in make-up and behaviour. Toads seem clumsy and slow-moving but they make up for it by being able to change the colour and texture of their coat to blend in with their surroundings. So a toad may look like the earth it rests upon or will blend with a coloured lea£ Accidentally, I dug up a toad while it hibernated in my garden. For a few moments it looked naked, pinkish like a pig, before it changed to the surrounding colour of earth. So toads are like chameleons. While frogs are daytime insect hunters, toads are most busy at night when they catch moths and other insects.

Insignificant as they may seem I will tell you a few of my encounters with toads so that they are no strangers to you when you see one.

Almost every summer during daytime I see hundreds of tiny baby toads awkwardly moving through the grass in my lawn. For a while they seem to be everywhere. Since they perfectly blend with their surroundings I have to watch out that I do not accidentally step on one. This is the new generation of my insect-catching friends.

At night during summer I often encounter the same large toad that seems to be growing bigger by the year. Most of the time it is at the same spot near my house. Here it is patiently waiting for another insect to 48 dialogue

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fly by. It must live for many years.

One of the toads I encountered amazed me. This giant toad was almost the size of my fist and was sitting on a tree stump about two feet above the ground. I could not figure out how it managed to jump that high. The next day it was still sitting motionless on the same spot seemingly undisturbed by my presence. The way this wise old toad was looking at me was mesmerizing, almost magical to experience.

I have never seen a toad jump very high; they seem to be so slow-moving. But toads can be big jumpers as I found out when I saw one trapped, floating in water in a large bucket with a rim two feet above ground. I was glad that I could rescue it.

Not only frogs but also toads seem to favour my garden. In the fall toads dig themselves in here to hibernate. When tilling my garden with a fork I am always very careful not to hurt anyone hidden in the soil. So far I have been very lucky and so are the toads. When I dig one up it looks naked and drowsy in its early hibernating state. Right away I will dig a shallow hole at the edge of my garden and transfer it to a safe spot so it can go back to sleep for a long winter.

In my next episode we will encounter a variety of amazing flying insect-catching experts.

Karl Backhaus (Magical Moon Lake, p.84) ♣

www.dialogue.ca

Paul Bowles, Fruitvale BC

Tales from Fruitvale…

Malachi The Announcer Over spring break seven year old Malachi was on loan to his grand folks, so the spirited and the sedentary could exchange energies in a mutually learning context.

There was reading and writing to encourage, that is Grandmother Allison’s forté; also swimming and skating made it onto the agenda. The ball room down at the local mall became my responsibility where playtime and social skills interface as kids flop around and bury themselves in a large cage full of balls or climb up nets and crawl through the overhead tubes, sliding down to launch themselves through the air on the ring rail or whatever it’s called. From outside of the play room looking in, parents observe and give occasional guidance when someone gets ploughed into.

Back at home we spent the best part of a day constructing a pyramid together out of cardboard, it was about three feet high with a door, window and a second floor.

We thought he would use it as a barn or something, to place wooden animals or dinosaurs in it but nothing much transpired. Malachi took it home with him and apparently it awaits further utilisation.

Malachi also enjoys playing old records, particularly The Beatles, and aside from this musical education and passion for putting the records on the turntable himself and watching it go round, he likes to know how things work. He asked me how the music comes from the record out of the box; my response was relaxed and thoughtful.

“The music is put into the plastic somehow,” I said, “I don’t know how, so it’s in there and when the power is switched on, the record player needle picks up the sound and sends it through the wires. The wires go to a speaker which is kind of like a mouth that sings.” Then, in a flash of brilliance I remembered that there was a microphone in a drawer under the record player and I said, “Let me show you this www.dialogue.ca

thing called a microphone, which might help you understand, if we can find a music player with a microphone socket.” We hunted through the house and after checking five music players we found one in my room with a microphone jack socket. Malachi plugged in the mike, turned on the power and transformed his life then and there. Hearing his voice loud and clear coming through those speakers was a galvanising experience, he became an announcer on the spot.

Malachi led an imaginary audience into the room, told them where they could sit and what was about to happen. He gave them all imaginary popcorn and said there would be a treat for them to take away at the end. I listened with glee as he searched for words to pitch his ideas for the performance which was about to take place, granddad would play a song. He asked me what I would play and left me to carry on with my choice of drum, xylophone or harmonica.

After I had finished a piece, Malachi led the audience out of the room thanking them for showing up. It was priceless and the announcing game was repeated over and over, but once with a slight twist. I announced that Malachi should play Twinkle on the xylophone which he had learned at one time. He did remember the notes and played it, although a little hesitatingly, but it was a successful opportunity found, to push him a bit to play a coherent song, since he has a tendency to prefer experimentation rather than order. He doesn’t like being restrained by having to remember notes, but he has a great singing voice with perfect pitch and the school choir beckons.

P.S. This summer there will be another major convergence of the family, minus Ambrose who will be dealing with not only the farm but a new baby so there should be something to write about. All the very best to you both, love Paul.

More from Paul…/ VOL. 31, NO. 4, SUMMER 2018

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DYNAMIC AGING Paul Bowles, Fruitvale BC DYNAMIC AGING in heart, mind and body, is every-

one up for it? I have a friend in his early 70’s who ran the 12 k. Bloomsday run in Spokane, and who ran, biked and swam in the Nelson Triathylon, I would call that AGING DYNAMICALLY. As for me, I have trouble getting up the stairs. But at least my fingers and wrists are functioning---enough to write with a pen and to play drums and xylophone. I have sufficient breath to blow the harmonica, as long as I don’t have to sound like a freight train steaming down the tracks.

DYNAMIC AGING is a suspicious phrase, it has a nice sound to it and implies potential and it IS a good suggestion. I am 72 now and in spite of energy depletion, I can still do random jobs in the yard and walk to the post office, I enjoy several hobbies which I would like to share with you: speaking, such as here now and at Toastmasters, in Castlegar. I write stories, (about my grandkids,) calligraphy, (which you can see here, mostly poems of all sorts,) and playing music. Music can be shared with the grandchildren.

GRANDCHILDREN, have TOO much DYNAMIC energy, so we must siphon from them what we can when visiting, by playing and walking with them and helping to develop THEIR interests one way or another.

My wife and I have six grandkids, from 7 years down to a few months. They, all live far and away – from Kelowna to Montreal, so between visits we Skype with them on the computer. My wife does most of the talking and I would entertain them by tapping on a hand drum and shuffling around or playing the harmonica. I recently played for Amelie, who is a BILINGUAL four year old, she sometimes dances when I play something jolly or she runs off to fetch her own harmonica. This particular time she sat and listened and after I had finished playing a, very mournful ‘Over the Rainbow,’ she said “Granddad that was beautiful.” I will never forget that.

I have been trying to pull off other successes with her one and a half year old brother Henry, by singing and playing ‘Head and Shoulders, Knees and Toes,’ he now repeats these words when prompted, but I don’t expect comment from him yet. However, five year old Malachi from Kelowna has a good ear for music and his voice has perfect pitch, when I played the Happy Birthday song for him, I made a mess of it.

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After I had finished playing the song, he said, “Granddad, you really should get a better harmonica that one is not working.”

When speaking about DYNAMIC AGING to a retired school teacher friend of mine, he said, “Dynamic AGING is an oxymoron.” He chose that word presumably because AGING implies deterioration while DYNAMIC means power, growth, and sense of life. My mum’s sense of life was extended by her passion for ballroom dancing; she passed on in her 90’s. I used to be flexible although I am slower now and with aches and pains but the heart is still beating, that is DYNAMIC enough. The rewards of heart, mind and body are provided by the interests in life and the WILL to keep on going, to tap out a rhythm every morning.

The most DYNAMIC parts of life in my 20’s and 30s were playing with Rock and Roll bands in England.

In my 40s the most DYNAMIC part of my life was planting trees in the mountains of Canada and learning calligraphy. In my 50s I operated a printing machine in Trail and in my 60’s; I retired to the armchair and the xylophone, playing solo ‘Coffee House’ gigs. In my 70s, I am enjoying learning harmonica and a B.C. magazine called Dialogue publishes my stories.

Most recently, I play percussion with a band called ‘Second Wind’, four old guys who find their DYNAMIC through playing music. Among the tunes that we play are: ‘It’s Now or Never’ (our lives won’t wait) -------------- and ‘Zipadee Doodah.’

I highly recommend singing Zipadee Doodah for feeling the DYNAMIC OF LIFE young or old. ♣ *"Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" is a song composed by Allie Wrubel with lyrics by Ray Gilbert from the Disney 1946 live action and animated movie Song of the South, sung by James Baskett. For this song, the film won the Academy Award for Best Original Song [WIKIPEDIA] In case you have forgotten…

Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah Zip-A-Dee-A My oh my, what a wonderful day Plenty of sunshine heading my way Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah Zip-A-Dee-A Mister bluebird on my shoulder It's the truth, It's actual Everything is satisfactual Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah Zip-A-Dee-A Wonderful feeling, Wonderful day. ♣ www.dialogue.ca

Twists & Turns from Norm Zig

Oh oh...he’s at it again...

Norm Zigarlick, SK

Leaving family and culture behind for an education unavailable at home…

I like this story – LINK: https://tinyurl.com/cbc-0481 [by Alex Brockman, CBC News, March 19, 2018]

Laney Beaulieu is working to become the 1st geneticist to come from Fort Resolution, N.W.T. (She) moved to London from "Fort Res" last fall to study pre-medical science. The 17-year-old Métis teen dreams of becoming a geneticist.

I have known the Beaulieu family a long time, I worked in Ft Res as an Economic Development guy in the 1990s I’ve known gramma Gail since before she became Beaulieu. In fact her husband Dan suggested it might have been my “fault” they got married.

I flew a group of young folk out to the Taltson River for a canoe trip in the 197Os. I was a bit late picking them up.

Their daughter took part in a business training program I conducted in the 90s.

Gail is an RN. Dan may be one of the most accomplished, self-sufficient people I’ve ever known.

Equally at home on a trapline, a fishing boat, a Boardroom table or in a political debate. A no nonsense but always fair gentleman in my experience.

Odd factoid... Dave Hancock, former Alberta Cabinet

Minister and acting Premier after Alison Redford’s resignation, was also born in Fort Resolution.

Also of note, the story says it’s a community of 500 people. In 1993 it was a community of 517 people. No urban sprawl there.

Who knows a lot about anything?

From: Norm Zigarlick, Sask. (May 18th)

Today there is a bit in Sask news about the Environment Minister going to try getting a $62 million cheque from Justin. It’s because Sask wants credit for reducing CO2 but doesn’t qualify for the $62m because it refuses to apply a carbon tax.

Yesterday there was news that global temperatures on average had increased slightly, 400 months in a row.

I don’t understand climate science but I am amazed at how many truck drivers, grain farmers and oil patch guys do. On the other end of it, I am just as surprised by how many of my scientist friends know so little about it. Some of them still believe climate change is real.

All this brought to mind a conversation I had with a very religious Accounting Manager I worked with at an oil field supply company. She said “global warming is a bunch of hooey, the earth will get warmer when God wants it to”!!

The lord does work in strange ways. Apparently God wanted her brother to quit skydiving. ♣

* * * * * * * * * * *

ALSO FROM NORM… Northern tourism – A Weekend in Yellowknife by a Metis/Dene family that battled bureaucrats and March 29, 2018 LINK: https://tinyurl.com/cbc-98978 insiders for several years before becoming a major inNorm’s comment: ternational operator is this area of tourism ( including The opening picture featuring northern lights and tipis outperforming a competitor owned by former bureauis of Aurora Village just outside Yellowknife. This crats and Yellowknife insiders then buying their assets has become one of Canada’s largest Aurora viewing for about 20 cents on a dollar from a Receiver.) sites since being founded in 2000/2001.

Don Morin is a long-time friend of mine, he founded I take some pride in it. I wrote the original business the company which is now operated by his children plan in 2000, designed the heated seats they featured and grandchildren. He is a rough and tumble guy who and took part in developing their Japanese market. among other things became Premier of the NWT in spite of constant attempts to marginalize and discredit In 2010, I was asked back to do an operational revue him during his political career and his business efforts. of the company and spent several weeks in From: Norm zigarlick normzig56@gmail.com ♣ Yellowknife doing so. This business is 100% owned

Re: An article by Paula Worthington at CBC Life

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“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 Tyrus Weed (Pop)……January 10, 1901 Mary Elizabeth/Loretta (Cook) Weed (Mom) Dec. 19, 1905 Married: August 17, 1923 Children: Juniper Shirley / June (Grouch), May 19, 1925 Patty, Patricia Ann (‘Sweet Pea’) Dec, 21st.,1927 George (‘Donkey’), August 17, 1930 Ben (‘Shooter’), April 2, 1932 Bob (‘Stretch’), October 10, 1934 Adam (‘Flyer’), July 30, 1936 Tom (‘Weasel’), June 4, 1939 Cousins: Marian (cousin), August 21, 1925 Sam (cousin), December 26, 1931 Bobby (cousin), May 3, 1935 Ray (my buddy) Joe (Ray’s brother)

THE JOKER Patty was a bit of a rebel, smoking behind Mom’s back for example; this, at her young age. In order to do this smoking in evenings and weekends, she and two friends would walk up and down the road away from our house. This way they got to know most of the neighbours. They would get bored and so would stop to visit everybody, eventually becoming well acquainted with most people on our road and the two parallel roads.

Their favourite place to visit was John and Marcia Van-Dabour. There was a reason for this; Mrs. VanDabour was so clean and always had coffee, cookies or other fresh baking. Also, they both were so friendly to the girls.

The visits were not every day as their home was the farthest from our home. John Van-Dabour was always teasing the girls, making them blush but they enjoyed this attention. These twelve-year-old girls, all craving attention and here they could get it. Each and every time Marcia gave the girls a cup of coffee, John would go into the front room and back, setting a tobacco tin on the table. “Put your nickel in here for every cup of 52 dialogue

SUMMER 2018, VOL. 31, NO. 4

coffee you drink.” This he would say with a big grin.

The first time they didn’t know he was kidding and sat wondering what to do, as they had no money. Marcia could see the girls were very uncomfortable and said, “Don’t you girls believe a darn thing he tells you, he is always teasing somebody.” Even so, the next time was the same.

John was a really good piano player and the girls liked this also, they would sit drinking coffee and tapping their feet to the beat of the piano. One day John said to them, “Hey! You girls can dance if you like, I’ll play a fast song for you.”

This was great as they had very little other opportunities to dance. John started to play a real fast song and the girls were right into the dancing. Having a great time, doing the black bottom and every other dance step they could think of. This went on and on but John could not wear the girls out. Finally he stopped playing, spun around on his stool and said in a very scolding voice, “You girls should be ashamed of yourselves.” They looked at each other and then at Marcia. They knew their dresses had been flying around maybe showing a little bit of their bloomers, but John’s back was always towards them.

“What did we do wrong?” came from one of them.

With a look of disgust on his face John said, “You girls, you girls, shame, and shame on you.”

“What did we do?” came again.

“Shame on you, shame on you, only bad girls would dance to the tune of The Old Rugged Cross!”

The girls stood there with mouths open, trying to comprehend what John was talking about. Again Marcia came to their rescue, “Oh girls, he’s teasing you again; he was playing the rugged cross in the fastest beat he possibly could, no one could tell it was the Old Rugged Cross!”

The girls headed home knowing old Mr. Van-Dabour with one of his jokes had got them again. That was okay with the girls, as it always added some spice to their, as they called it, dull lives.

PAT AND LITTLE TOM Our radio was run with a 6-volt car battery. We listened to Amos and Andy, The Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and Inner Sanctum which we called www.dialogue.ca

‘The Squeaky Doors.’ There were also Lux Video Theatre and The Green Hornet, The Shadow, and others I can’t remember.

One day while listening to the radio, Pat said, “Oh no!

My leg has gone to sleep; it really feels funny and hurts.” Tom, the baby, walking and talking, tip toed over to her, leaned down close to the sleeping leg, and yelled, “Wake up! Wake up”! He was so loud that

Mom looked into the room. We sure got a big kick out of this! Tom was about three at the time and we had named him ‘Weasel’ – as all he did was eat, poop, and sleep. We also had a wind-up gramophone with two records, which we nearly wore out before we were given a more from a friend of Pops.

Wayne Russell, The Vagabond Writer slyolfart@gmail.com ♣

**************************************************

What’s Next Marion Urquhart Charkow, Flesherton ON

I have watched with interest an info-commercial with a woman at a potter's wheel expounding on the various courses and exercises she has taken over her lifetime and how she was always looking forward to the next one, which in this case was "improve." Shortly thereafter, I read an article in the Toronto Star about "Fashion Guru Iris Apfel" stating that she wished everyone would put away their cell phones, computers and other digital apparatus and reconnect with their fellow man. I have been mulling over what these two insightful women have to say and have thought how interesting my own life has been without my thumb tweaking a piece of plastic several hours a day.

When I was ten, I thought I would be a great Canadian writer and I kept that dream. Instead at eleven I joined my cousin's pipe band. At sixteen much to my mother's chagrin, I entered the Miss Toronto contest. I made it to the finals at Exhibition Park but I didn't win except for a gold-coloured elasticized bathing suit which looked ghastly with my bleached skin, dark hair and black pumps. Age twenty saw me slopping about in ankle deep mud in the excavation of what was to be my home for 35 years. With no money saved up for a down payment on the new houses in subdivisions in Scarborough, it was build-our-own, slowly as the paycheques came in.

A television came a few years later when a friend loaned us $50. We were not bored, there was too much living to be done.

When I was forty-eight there was an ad in the Bolton Enterprise, someone was starting up a pipe band. "I think I'll join", said I to my son. "They won't take you, Mom, you're a girl and besides you're too old." Five minutes later found me the newest member of the Bolton and Kleinburg Pipe Band, I hadn't played my pipes in 30 years. I had many happy times with those www.dialogue.ca

guys and gals, seeing small town Ontario as we played for Remembrance Days, Santa Claus parades, summer Scottish events.

Then came the day to leave that beloved home and relocate in retirement. There was never a question of "what shall I do", I took up quilting, a new endeavour.

For several years, I made a quilt for the Flesherton Kinette's annual draw. Also I taught Sunday school, another aspect of life I had always wanted to do, but I did it in a different way. The kids and I and other teachers went on field trips to a Synagogue, a Pentecostal church, a Lutheran, and a Roman Catholic. As I had always been curious and interested in what's around the next corner, I wanted to instill that.

In the meantime, I took a local night school course in Creative Writing. That snowballed into many writing groups, dear, dear friends whom I still keep in contact and of course, the publishing of many of my essays in "Curious," "The Leaf," "Dialogue," "Mosaic" and "Day tripping." My first publication had been in "Canadian High News" at age 16, essays about fishing with my Dad. So now, at 83, like the lady in the ad, I'm looking for something new. I can assure you it won't be improve.

I had taken a 6-week night school course from a wellknown artist, in water colour art. Perhaps you'll see my paintings at local rummage sales!* Whatever the next few months holds in store, I can assure you it won't be exercising my thumb and index finger. Come all you young people out there, start to really live, experience and enjoy, put away the I-pads and cell phones, life is a dance! ♣ * Editor’s note – Perhaps we will see one of Marion’s watercolours on the cover of a future issue of Dialogue!?!

VOL. 31, NO. 4, SUMMER 2018

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“Observations from Lithuania”

Ken Slade, Vilnius

We Are Not All Equal…

by KR Slade Every person is a unique identity; uniquein-time: present, past, and future; unique in all places. No persons are equal: all persons are different / unique: different in the present, different from any persons who ever existed, different from any persons who will ever exist, even different from themselves -over time -- because every individual changes.

There is the notion of: “All men (i.e., persons) are created equal”; this is a false notion, completely devoid of reason(ing); merely a simplistic fable. The 1776 American ‘Declaration of Independence’, attributed to Thomas Jefferson, states “ ... Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal ... ”. Such is Enlightenment rhetoric, but without any basis in actuality.

The idea of ‘equality of all persons’ is a mis-statement of the totality of the right, good, and fit ethical concept that ‘every human being has an intrinsic / inherent and inalienable dignity’; thus, it is the human-dignity that is equal, not the person(s). We are constantly confronted with differences between people, and how individuals change. People are troubled by the ambiguities, indeterminacies, and uncertainties of the nature of humanity; thus, the simplistic concept of ‘human equality’. Consider the differences of people; consider that the non-equality of all persons is the essence of humanity; consider that the focus on equality of persons is detrimental to the equality of human dignity.

PHYSICAL The undeniable fact is that every person is totally unique (and therefore identifiable and distinguishable) by his / her: eyeballs, ears, body odour, walk, buttocks, skull, fingernails, fingerprints, nose pores, body-hair pattern, etc. Less obvious is the fact that of all of the cells in the human body, only 43% are human; the remaining 57% are microbes (i.e., microbiome; and includes: bacteria, viruses, fungi and single-celled archaea). The human genome -- the full set of genetic instructions for a human being -- is composed of 20,000 instructions, called genes. Add-together all of the genes in our microbiome, and the total amount is between two (2) million and twenty (20) million microbial-genes; such combination is known as ‘the second genome’. We can fool ourselves into believing the notion of a perfect human-clone; however, a dog’s nose would not be fooled.

CREATION ● Biological A process called 'recombination' means that each egg and each sperm carries a different mix of a parent's genes.

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individuals were created to be the same, the subsequent circumstances of any one individual’s situation over time are unique. Such circumstances include nutrition before birth; therefore, it is impossible that any two individuals could be identical, in any point of time. ● Theological There are numerous religious-based concepts that deny the uniqueness of individual human-beings, and promote the concept of equality of all humans -- especially of equality of those who are members of the sect, as distinct from nonmembers. Most Christian religions allow and encourage artistic images of both God (i.e., as the Father-Creator), and Jesus (i.e., the Son of God); such artistic images promote visages that are more Aryan-race, rather than Semitic-race.

Interestingly, Judaism and Islam do not permit artistic imagery of God or his prophets (i.e., including Jesus). ‘Equality’ is as convenient as deus ex machina.

The Judeo-Christian Biblical (i.e., Genesis) concept of ‘God created man in His own image’ has affinities with ancient mythology. The ‘image’ is interpreted primarily to be physical. The logical conclusion from such illogical physical-imagery premise is that any human-being who does not look equal to our artistic rendition of God, is not equal to the normative of human physical appearance, and therefore is not human in the sense of equality to the normative-human. More ancient than both Christianity and Judaism is the religious-philosophy of anthropomorphism: the attribution of human-form or other characteristics (i.e., including mental states) to beings other than humans (i.e., particularly deities and animals; also to sun, moon, etc.). Thus rises the question of which came first: ‘God created man in His image’, or ‘Man created image of God in man’s image’; in any event, there is no place for a human-being who does not look like the norm. The concept that a human must look like our image of God is re-enforced by the notion of ‘God the Father’, both anthropomorphically and figuratively: son-like-father, not father-like-son.

Religions (including philosophies held as religion) may have self-interest of propagation to thwart the concept of each human-being being distinct rather than equal. The ‘all are equal’ has given rise to: the “good and superior we” versus the “evil and inferior them” concept; the divinely pre-ordained: We are all here for a reason on a particular path -- it is the individual’s own fault if he or she does not meet with success; disability / disadvantage is a punishment from God; some people are hopeless or not worthy; there are only two sexes: male and female; marriage is ‘until death do us part’; sexual acts must be for only procreation; ''your body is your enemy, and the enemy of God's glory''. Let us prey [sic] . . . www.dialogue.ca

ABILITIES The subject of ‘abilities’, when confined to a highly-limited range on a spectrum, invariably leads to the subject of ‘disabilities’ -- which include: learning, developmental, cognitive, and intellectual (especially ‘IQ’); as well as physical, economic, political; etc. Moreover, the connotation of ability is the range of: excellent > good > average > below-average > disabled. Ironically, the ‘able’ possess a "confident ignorance" (i.e., when a person's self-perceived ability far outweighs that person's actually ability), which is associated with the highest level of stupidity; and notably is independent of IQ [c.f., ''conceit''; excessive confidence disproportionate to competence]. In other words: ‘the pot calling the kettle black’. In order for the ‘disabled’ to receive any societal services, they must be declared ‘disabled’. Ultimately, in this dystopian thinking, is that everyone will have to be declared ‘disabled’, because everyone has, or will have, some ability(-ies) that is/are ‘below-average’.

EFFECTS ● Societal After WWII, some previously basic/essential societal norms of human relations began to change, which changed the concept of ‘we all are, and must be, equal / all-the-same’. First there was divorce, which changed from ‘extraordinary and unacceptable’, to the present judgment of ‘ordinary / typical’ (i.e., most marriages end in divorce) and ‘not important’ (e.g., Camilla and Meghan). Next on the ‘all-the-same’ requirement was the subject of hetero-sexual activity outside of marriage (e.g., Bill and Monica); although this area remains undefined (e.g., Trump and harem).

The current challenge to ‘we are all the same’ is the fact of non-binary genders, and fluid gender-identities. ‘Intersex’ is a general term used for a variety of conditions in which a person’s anatomy does not fit the typical definitions of ‘female’ or ‘male’ [c.f., ‘hermaphrodite’ in the 1960’s and prior). An entire spectrum of human possibilities, however, is implicit among the images of male and female transvestites, trans men and women, the cisgendered and the genderqueer, straights, gays, lesbians, the pan-gendered, the genderfluid and the gender-neutral; and, the changed from one-toanother, or others, and/or return to a prior/original.

‘LGBTQQI’: lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, ‘questioning’ and intersex; but does not include: asexual (i.e., an orientation, unlike voluntary-celibacy which is a choice), involuntary celibacy, and/or "polyamorous", and/or ‘allies’, and/or ‘Two-spirited’ (i.e., a term used by Native Americans to describe more than one gender identity).

The even-greater issue is whether psychological, physical, and environmental influences -- not a conscious choice between right and wrong -- control human behaviour. This issue will involve determination of what is criminal, rehabilitation, punishment, and especially capital-punishment. www.dialogue.ca

● Political The promotion of equality based on a norm, while denying legitimacy to the uniqueness of every individual, promotes: a structure held together by overconfidence, historical accident, and the power of precedent ... biased opinions, prejudices, and dogmatic intolerance ... preying on people's conformity, people's deference, and people's desire to be held in the esteem of their comrades ... in favour of a ‘common culture', 'a big happy family' ... with prejudices against 'difference' itself ... approving only homogeneous groups of people who are identical ... a great 'melting pot' of people from different heritages, ethnicities, classes, and regions ... taxonomy (i.e., the process or system of terminology, describing the way in which various things are related by putting the things into groups) ... the unintelligible as intelligent, with some measure of mysticism if not morality ... etc. … all affecting the effect of an empty loftiness form of apparent truth, absent the spirit of truth.

Thus, 'whatever is not pro-agenda is propaganda'; whomsoever denies our common equality is subversive, and therefore anti-social. However, the dark side of this sense of community is the lack of privacy, as well as the lack of freedom to speak one’s mind. The result of ‘equality’ are meetings that are gatherings nominally to discuss seemingly beautiful and clever ideas, to demonstrate who is more intelligent, and to applaud the leader and the group, and never to work generously with authentic-freedom and humble-creativity. Ideology can be even more terrifying than insanity or irrationality.

“Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation, or creed.”

- Attributed to Bertrand Russell (1872-1970); British philosopher and mathematician.

● Medical The concept of ‘everyone is equal’ denies the fact that the effectiveness of some treatments may vary from person to person; and, with the same person, from one time to another time. No one is permitted to ask the obvious questions: ●Why are the reactions of the patient (unidentified) to medications not recorded, collected, or reported to the drug-licensing authorities, to the manufacturers, and to the general public? ●Why does the examining doctor/technician not have access to knowledge about the complete and actual condition and history, as well as current/chronic complaints, of the particular patient? ●The one-size-fits-all mentality is evident with identical chairs at the medicaldoctor's office, hospitals, and health-care facilities; why aren't the chairs of different sizes, shapes, heights, designs; as are the patients? ●Why do medical doctors dispense only drugs and referrals for tests and procedures, and never dispense education? ● Accommodations There exists a norm of equality among churches, theatres, VOL. 31, NO. 4, SUMMER 2018

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cinemas, meeting halls, conference rooms, libraries, legislative halls: all must have the same type of seating, and at the same height, and with the same space around the seating.

Apparently, in any room: all tables / desks must be of the same design, at the same height. In places where people must wait, everyone must be required to stand in a line, and to remain standing at all times while they are waiting. At the end of the waiting, every person to be served must approach a counter, where they must remain standing. In all airports and large vehicle-parking-areas, people must walk to their destination. All public transportation to large shopping-areas must travel only on public roadways, and must not enter the private-property of the shopping-area. On airplanes: prestress the passenger before boarding, cram the passenger into the smallest-possible space, maximize noise, reduce air-quality, encourage alcohol, provide inadequate food, and impose military-type discipline and martial-law. If any individual reacts negatively to this ‘equality’, then arrest them, throw them into jail, and ruin their remaining life. ● Educational Why are there identical chairs / desks / tables at schools (and libraries)? ... Why aren't the items of furniture of various sizes, shapes, heights, designs; as are the students? ... Why are the computers placed so as to be uncomfortable for the students? ... Why is there the ‘open-classroom concept’ (everyone in one big room -- with no walls/partitions), which permits din, disruption, and distraction; in crowding, chaos, and cacophony; yielding a correspondingly lower performance? All for the non-educationalserving ‘advantage’ of lower costs for square-footage, as well as greater management-control with limited personnel? ... Where is the recognition that persons who are bombarded with multiple distractions have slower reaction, lower productivity, and lower performance?

The student, if not otherwise distracted by other activity / persons / affects, may become unable to understand a message because of focus on: 1) physical-sound elements: pronunciation, volumes, pitch, cadence, rhythm, etc.; and, 2) oratorical elements: pauses, emotive language, metaphor, alliteration, imagery, authority, etc. Language is difficult or impossible to understand when the relationship / sequence / choice of the words makes no easy sense; some people find all language to be this way; others of us have grown accustomed to such presentations. In a monologue, Groucho Marx said, “One morning I shot an elephant in my pyjamas. How he got in my pyjamas I don’t know”. On 2015-01-02, HRH Prince William said, "I never used to really kind of sort of get too wound up or worried about things". Consider the phrase in a newspaper article: “a pregnant pastor's wife” http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/ nation-now/2015/11/12/pastors-wife-dies-shooting/75644914/ Only after reading the first sentence of the article can there be the realization that what the writer intended to write is: 56 dialogue

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“the pastor's pregnant wife”; the pastor is not gay/lesbian, the pastor does not have a same-sex partner, and there is no reason to wonder how she became pregnant. Any person has difficultly with the inane, senseless, meaningless, absurd, trite, fluff, fillers, insipid weeds of words; in some sequence of stream-of-consciousness, with boring pauses and sounds that are not words; blotting any substance, in favour of trendy familiar sounds.

The students who are not successful in ‘mainstream education’ are not recognized as having many different and complex needs. What is considered to be ‘mainstream education’ does not address the needs of students who are outside of the pre-determined and arbitrary narrow-range of ‘normal’. Thus, there is the resulting category of ‘non-normal’, which consists of a wide-range of people -- who often are not even diagnosed -- on multiple spectrums that include: stress, trauma, minor/major learning-disabilities, physical limitations/disabilities, brain damage, emotional disorders, and psychiatric or psychological disorders (e.g., Schizophrenia, Bipolar). The message is: “If you’re not equal to the ‘norm’, then get out!!!” The problem cannot possibly be our educational system; the problem must be the student!!! The solutions employed are: babysit the student until they are old-enough to quit school, or drug the students so they do not cause us problems, or expel the student from the school/system.

The educational system -- with its focus on tests, targets, inspections, comparisons to other schools -- is full of unintended consequences and perverse incentives. There is the 'other' education: messages in education-methods -- ''Do as I say, not as I do.'' Furthermore, schools have become a source of angst, trauma, and bullying -- the persistent demeaning, devaluing, harassing and intimidation of an individual. There is the exclusive focusing on the traditional discipline(s)-based education, the ‘rote learning’ -- not teaching to think and/or speak, but to repeat facts -- from memory -- without thought of meaning or application. The function is not to educate, but to indoctrinate; not to inform, but to conform. Instead of having individuals who are able to teach, society prefers to have education experts with impressive-sounding specialities, such as: onychophagia or “rhinotillexomania” (i.e., biting one's finger-nails or picking one's nose). The only true function of a ‘teacher’ is not to ‘teach’ anything; the teacher should enable / encourage / direct conscious reflection to awareness, employing the appropriate cognitive educational-techniques to individual students.

“When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, It's a wonder I can think at all” – ‘Kodachrome’, 1973, Paul Simon

CONCLUSION There is the need for individuals, approaches, institutions, and governments to tolerate paradoxes and www.dialogue.ca

complexity and unknowns... to let-go of inherited ideas, especially the panaceas of earlier times... to acknowledge and embrace that differences can be tolerated, accepted, and even celebrated... to encourage societal advancement in thinking... to embrace diversity.

Conclusion: the fact of all individuals being completely different is a moral issue, an intellectual issue, a societal issue, and ultimately a political issue … The resolution has begun, is accelerating, and will be humankind's greatest revolution ... The time of resolution of the issue is beyond the lifetime of the currently living ...

“But meanwhile it is flying, irretrievable time is flying.”

Author's Note: I offer my (semi-) apology that I sincerely regret that my choice of words was possible to be interpreted in an aberrant manner that was desired to seem to have caused some semblance of manufactured offence.

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) ♣

Georgics, Virgil (70 -- 19 BCE) **************************************************

Laughter & ‘Lightenment!

A Midweek Chuckle from Erik Andersen

Husbands For Sale Husband Store: A store that sells new husbands has opened in Melbourne, where a woman may go to choose a husband. Among the instructions at the entrance is a description of how the store operates: You may visit this store ONLY ONCE! There are six floors and the value of the products increase as the shopper ascends the flights. The shopper may choose any item from a particular floor, or may choose to go up to the next floor, but you cannot go back down except to exit the building!

So, a woman goes to the Husband Store to find a husband. On the first floor the sign on the door reads: Floor 1 - These men Have Jobs She is intrigued, but continues to the second floor, where the sign reads: Floor 2 - These men Have Jobs and Love Kids.

'That's nice,' she thinks, 'but I want more,' so she continues upward. The third floor sign reads: Floor 3 - These men Have Jobs, Love Kids, and are Extremely Good Looking.

'Wow,' she thinks, but feels compelled to keep going. She goes to the fourth floor and the sign reads: Floor 4 - These men Have Jobs, Love Kids, are Drop-dead Good Looking and Help With Housework.

'Oh, mercy me!' she exclaims, 'I can hardly stand it!'

Still, she goes to the fifth floor and the sign reads: Floor 5 - These men Have Jobs, Love Kids, are www.dialogue.ca

Drop-dead Gorgeous, Help with Housework, and Have a Strong Romantic Streak.

She is so tempted to stay, but she goes to the sixth floor, where the sign reads: Floor 6 - You are visitor 31,456,012 to this floor. There are no men on this floor. This floor exists solely as proof that women are impossible to please. Thank you for shopping at the Husband Store.

PLEASE NOTE: To avoid gender bias charges, the store's owner opened a New Wives store just across the street. The First Floor: has wives that love sex.

The Second Floor: has wives that love sex and have money and like beer. The Third, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Floors have never been visited. ♣ ******

From Herb Spencer…

Blonde Men Jokes A blonde man is in the bathroom and his wife shouts: "Did you find the shampoo?"

He answers, "Yes, but I'm not sure what to do... it's for dry hair, and I've already wet mine." ~~~~~~~~

A blonde man sees a letter lying on his doormat.

It says on the envelope "DO NOT BEND." He spends the next 2 hours trying to figure out how to pick it up. ~~~~~~~~

A blonde man shouts frantically into the phone, "My wife is pregnant and her contractions are only two minutes apart!"

"Is this her first child?" asks the Doctor.

"No!" he shouts, "this is her husband!" ♣ VOL. 31, NO. 4, SUMMER 2018

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Contributors in Ackerman, Dr. Jerry (Quote) 43 Andersen, Erik, BC….....4,11,57 Are, Thomas L., U.S (reprint) 41 Arney, Jeremy, BC ……….…16 Atlee, Tom, OR………36-38, 44 Backhaus, Karl, ON………….48 Bell, R. Warren (Quote)……..43 Bowles, Paul, BC…45, 49,50,60 Broneder, Henry, In Memory, 46 Camilleri, Sammy (from) 47, 59 CBC Life (Link)………………51 CCPA (Policy Alternatives)15,43 Co-Intelligence Institute……...38 Cox, Sarah, author……….….08 Curtin, Edward, MA……….…32 Ernst, Jessica, SK………....4,11 Eisenstein, Charles, US……..23 Finn, Ed, CCPA (Quote)…….43 Foster, David Muir, ON.…35, 45 Gaudet, Marie, AB…..............45

dialogue, Vol. 31 No. 4

Gordon, W. Terrence, NS…..45 Griffin, Edward, U.S. (link)…..42 Guardian,The, UK(links) 26, 59 Hanson, Bob, BC (from)……..20 Kazdan, Larry, BC…………...13 Kennedy, Judy (Quote)………43 Lascaris, D., & Latham, J…….10 Lawson, Susanne, BC………1,7 LeFevre, Martin, California…28 Lonsdale, Derrick, M.D.,US…39 Losch, Herb, ON……………..46 Lyman, Eva, BC……………...18 Manly, Paul, BC………….…..14 Marty, Sid, BC (extract/link)…47 Masuda, Gerry, BC………….15 Mathews, Robin, BC……..21-22 McDowall, Stephanie, BC…..13 Miller, Alexander, BC….5, 45 Morton, Alexandra, BC…...06 Neilly, Michael, ON…………27

Nelson, Joyce, BC, Author…43 Nickerson, Mike, ON………..05 Ostermann, Gunther, BC……42 Parry, Glenn Aparicio,Author 34 Paterson, Noel, ON………….45 Permanent Peoples Tribunal 11 Porter, J. S., ON…………….31 Proboszcz, Stan, BC………..06 Reiswig, Amy,Focus Mag.….08 Ross, June, BC (from)……...04 Russell, Wayne, BC………...52 Saul, John Ralston, Author…59 Shadbolt, John, ON…..…….40 Slade, Ken, Lithuania…...54-57 Spencer, Herb, BC.……..25-26 Stauber, John (Quote) 43-44 Stewart, Rory (link)…..….…13 Streetly, Joanna, BC, Author 44 Swanston, Adrian, BC(from) 42 Taylor, Jim, BC………….…..28

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TheRealNews.com (link)….10 Tsilhqot’in Nation (BC).……20 TheTyee.ca (BC) Link………47 Tikkun.org (reprint)………23-25 Urquhart, Marion, ON……….53 Vancourt, Randy, ON…….....30 Watershed Watch/Salmon…06 Wired: re Charlie Paton (link)38 Wiseman, Herb (Quote).……43 Woodsworth, John, ON…….33 Woodsworth, Susan Keyes 33 Zigarlick, Norm, AB/SK……..51

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BEGIN WITH ISSUE #________________ PLEASE ADD DETAILS ON SEPARATE SHEET: ADDRESS, SPECIAL MESSAGE, INSTRUCTIONS, ETC.

P.59 salvu1@hotmail.com

The Century of the Self

Clif High Alternative Cosmology

Clif High joins the Leak Project for an exciting, mind-expanding, high-energy session, discussing the Earth's plasmic core, the Expanding Earth Hypothesis and how this relates to the erupting Kilauea Volcano, the cometary/vortical model of planetary movement, the Solar System's current transit through an area high in charged particles, causing irreversible alterations to the planets, the cyclical release of "grey matter" every several thousand years, catastrophic Earth Changes, mass extinctions, Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and much more! Running Time: 14 min

How politicians and business learned to create and manipulate mass-consumer society.

Adam Curtis’ The Century of the Self tells the untold and sometimes controversial story of the growth of the mass-consumer society in Britain and the United States. How was the all-consuming ‘self ’ created, by whom, and in whose interests?

Freud provided useful tools for understanding the secret desires of the masses. Unwittingly, his work served as the precursor to a world full of political spin doctors, marketing moguls, and society's belief that the pursuit of satisfaction and happiness is man's ultimate goal.

Complete Series - Parts 1 Through 4 (approx. 58 min. ea.)

LINK: https://tinyurl.com/ich12642 (04/08/06)

https://forbiddenknowledgetv.net/clif-high-at-hisfinest/

Camping Anyone?

From Sammy Camilleri A FAIR COUNTRY by John Ralston Saul In this startlingly original vision of Canada, renowned thinker John Ralston Saul argues that Canada is a Métis nation, heavily influenced and shaped by Aboriginal ideas: Egalitarianism, a proper balance between individual and group, and a penchant for negotiation over violence are all Aboriginal values that Canada absorbed. An obstacle to our progress, Saul argues, is that Canada has an increasingly ineffective elite, a colonial non-intellectual business elite that doesn't believe in Canada. It is critical that we recognize these aspects of the country in order to rethink it's future.

ISBN-10: 0143168428, Penguin Canada; Reprint edition (Sept. 22 2009)

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VOL. 31, NO. 4, SUMMER 2018

dialogue 59

T is for Thorium…

What is thorium and how does it generate power?

This Q&A is part of the Guardian's ultimate climate change FAQ

By Duncan Clark, 1 Nov 2011 [EXTRACT & LINK] Thorium is a radioactive chemical element that could in theory be

used to generate large quantities of low-carbon electricity in future decades. Compared to the uranium that powers today's nuclear plants, thorium is more abundant and widely distributed in the Earth's crust. It also offers various safety benefits over uranium: it's not prone to runaway chain reactions that can lead to nuclear disasters; its waste products remains dangerous for a much shorter period; and its byproducts aren't useful for making nuclear weapons. In addition, thorium reactors could theoretically be used to burn up the dangerous plutonium stored in existing nuclear waste stockpiles. […]

LINK: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ 2011/nov/01/what-is-thorium-nuclear-power

See also: Is Thorium Power Being Suppressed?

(8-minute video): https://tinyurl.com/fktv-thorium ♣

https://tinyurl.com/fktv-china

p.60 - Calligraphy? Paul bowles?

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