Port of Sidney

Lochside Drive is even more illogical than most of Victoria's illogical streets. It begins inauspiciously just north of McKenzie Avenue off an orphaned spur of Cedar Hill Cross Road and runs for about a block...if you are driving. If you are walking or riding a bicycle, though, you can keep going because it joins the Lochside Trail. It's a very pleasant stroll or ride, especially as it passes by Blenkinsop Lake, and after about three kilometres it becomes a street again for a few blocks. Then it stops again before picking up again to parallel Cordova Bay Rd. until that street zigs and cuts it off at the junction. Lochside continues to hopscotch until it finally comes into its own as a self-respecting street at Mt. Newton Cross Rd, by which time it has almost arrived in Sidney. However, it ignominiously vanishes, never to be heard of again, just before it reaches downtown Sidney.

When I go to visit Sidney I like to get off the highway at Newton Cross so I can take Lochside the rest of the way. While the rest of the traffic hurtles in lockstep toward wherever its going, I prefer the scenic route. Likewise, when I get off the ferry I like to take the first exit and take it easy through Sidney while the poor highway tries to swallow the herd of fish disgorged by the ferry.

Sidney is a pretty little town, a good place to have a coffee, or browse Tanner's Bookstore or just park somewhere and go for a walk. Much of the part of town around the pier at the foot of Beacon Ave has been redone since I was here last and it looks quite spiffy, even if it's a little upscale for the likes of me. There is a lot of money around the north peninsula, and a lot of it is parked in Sidney's 'dockominium.' I don't have enough money in my bank account to fill the tanks of some of these floating fibreglass palaces. Personally, I'm more drawn to the lower end of the boating scale, to boats built by their owners. Myself, I can't afford a rowboat. Such is life.

One thing I noticed when I walked out on the dock was how quiet it was. I like that.

Today is this blog's first anniversary. I don't know how long I'll keep it up, but I've enjoyed doing it. According to the stats compiled by blogger I have had 756 'hits' in the last year. Not many, but it's strangely affecting to know that people from all over the world have stopped by. I wish a few of them would take a few minutes to jot down a reply.

Lies and damned lies

For the average honest, well-intentioned citizen who takes his duties in life seriously and tries to be responsible at work and in the raising of their families, it has to be difficult to grasp this nettle: when you tune into the news, when you open the newspaper, when you read a book, chances are you are being lied to. Notice I didn't say that what you read or see is merely wrong. No. I mean you have been deliberately lied to. It is so pervasive that once the realization hits you a feeling of disorientation causes feelings of vertigo. The mind reels. It's unbelievable, you don't want to believe it. You ask yourself if everything is a lie.

When you think about it, there isn't very much we know about the world from our own personal knowledge so we are accustomed to obtaining knowledge beyond our own personal experience through the reports of others. This type of knowledge may be of things that happened in the past or in some corner of the globe about which we know little or about what takes place in the circles of power. Very few people have personal access to this kind of knowledge. In many parts of the world, and for most societies down through history, the flow of knowledge was deliberately restricted by the ruling powers. They didn't want the little people to know anything. They wanted people to believe what the rulers wanted them to believe.

It's only been for about two hundred years that the idea of a free press began to take hold, and only in a few places. And only in the new American republic was the idea enshrined in the foundational law of the land and deemed essential to the flourishing of the democratic institutions the founders wished to establish.

As this new-fangled idea spread (in fits and starts) it took hold mainly in countries with a European heritage, most particularly those with an Anglo-Saxon heritage. And so in Canada we like to pride ourselves on a free press. That press is free to criticize the government if it wants, unlike in Soviet Russia where the press printed what it was told to print. Why, then does that free press of ours lie to us? Don't they like being free?

Unfortunately, I can't read minds so I can't answer the last two questions. Well then, you might ask how it's possible to know the truth of a matter. That's pretty tough, but the more you know, the better chance you have of separating the truth from the dross. Secondly, you have to learn how to spot logical fallacies. Since it is now an article of faith that one should trust ones feelings above all else, logic is no longer taught in school. Feelings are important but not always reliable. When I see a big slice of chocolate cake my feelings say eat, enjoy but my logical faculty reminds me that I am already overweight and therefore I should not give in to my feelings in this case. On the other hand, if I hear of a child being abused I experience feelings of outrage. These feelings are entirely appropriate. One of the signs that you are being had by a news writer is when he makes an appeal to your feelings. Thus, when socialistically inclined politicians and propagandists wish to tighten their grip on your wallet they will invariably try to make you feel guilty about something. They do this by trotting out some poor or sick individual and using him as a prop. "This is your fault," they say, "unless you give us more money for new government program xyz.."

So here's a little test. What is the oldest Canadian social program? If you answered the Department of Indian Affairs you would be absolutely correct. How has that worked out? Well, it just so happens that I have had occasion to visit some of the Indian Reserves around Victoria, and I will tell you that I know from my own direct personal knowledge that if you want to find a slum around here, that's where you want to go. The squalor is unbelievable. And this, logic tells me, as it would any person of normal intelligence, is a direct result of government trying to do something it cannot do, of sociologists, anthropologists, and other academic types using natives to conduct their experiments on, and of opportunists spotting a chance to make a few bucks.

I cite the squalor on Indian reserves, but examples abound. Let's get this straight. Government programs don't solve poverty, they create it. They have to- in order for the bureaucrats to perpetuate themselves and continue to collect their pay checks and pensions. They depend on suffering for their livelihood. It's a system that really stinks, and if there were any real reporters in Canada it would be a well known fact.

But I hadn't meant to get started on the fallacy of the welfare state. I meant this to be my post on the Victoria Street Newz, but it will have to serve as a preface instead. The Street Newz is so full of garbage that I'll have to save it for later. Actually, that's the best thing about it. Unlike the mainstream media, which spins its stories in fairly sophisticated ways, always preserving a patina of respectability, the Street Newz is blatantly crude and stupid.

The Carnegie Institute

Perhaps some of my readers think I exaggerate when I compare modern environmentalism to the murderous communist movements of the 20th century. An article in today's American Thinker makes me realize that David Suzuki's off hand comment about reducing the world's population by half is now mainstream thinking. To that end a study has been done by the Carnegie Institution. Ah, the Carnegie Institution. Wasn't that originally financed by Andrew Carnegie with the goal of building libraries in every town in North America so that the average person could educate himself? We have one of those libraries in Victoria. It's not a library anymore, but it's a fine looking building... as are all the Carnegie libraries. Plain and functional buildings were not sufficient for Mr. Carnegie. He wanted to add beauty to them as well. Philanthropy is a word meaning love of man, and Mr. Carnegie, having spent much of his life accumulating wealth reached a certain age and decided to give it all away. He was a classic philanthropist.

I wonder what he would think if he knew what the charity he founded was up to at the dawn of the 21st century. Philanthropists no more, the mot juste to describe his successors is misanthropic, which means hater of mankind. You see, for environmentalists mankind is a curse on the earth, a destructive parasite. And so Genghis Khan, a spiritual ancestor of Mao, whose depredations allegedly killed forty million people, is now a hero to these environmentalists. Why? Because nobody was left to till the fields in the regions he conquered and so reforestation occurred. This was much better than the Black Death (which is estimated to have killed half the population of Europe) because the Black Death happened too quickly. There wasn't time for the rotting corpses to completely decompose and stop giving off those horrid greenhouse gases. But Genghis Khan had a long career and so the corpses had lots of time to dry out.

This is the kind of thinking that comes out of our universities these days- Stanford, in this case, headed by one Julia Pongratz. You know the nice thing about about having women free to advance in the professions is that we need their warm and nurturing presence. The good news that war and death are good for the planet has quickly spread a lot of good cheer among the environmental "community." Of course, when they contemplate mass die-offs, they only imagine them happening to us little people, not to them. They, after all, are the enlightened ones, the wise guardians of the planet.

For them, the gulags, the Holocaust, the Great Leap forward, Pol Pot's regime, were all beneficial. As for the 50,000,000 babies killed since 1973, why that's just a trifle, and corpses that small don't give off much in the way of emissions. What's not to like?

One has to wonder how a totally bogus theory of climate change came to be so enthusiastically embraced by our academics and the media types who believe in them, even to the verge of advocating for the death of large swaths of mankind. The question I ask myself is if they are environmentalists (or communists or abortionists) first and develop their murderous proclivities later, or if people who are inclined to murder are opportunists who see ready made justifications in these ideologies.

This is hard for me to understand. Everywhere I look I see beauty. I was at one time attracted to environmentalism for that reason. But while there is beauty there is also ugliness and foulness, just as there is truth and there are lies. It's really important that we learn the difference.

Enemies of the poor

When I was downtown yesterday I picked up the latest copy of Victoria Street Newz. It comes out every month it seems, and is distributed on street corners by sad looking examples of Victoria's unemployable underclass. The only truthful word in this rag is in the top corner next to the title: "All the news that fits, we print." That is to say, its entire content consists of material that is kneaded, chopped and stretched to fit its Marxist philosophy. The poor sots who sell this nauseating mess have no idea that they are being used, nor do they have a clue that the policies and programs advocated in the paper will make them poorer not richer. The history of the twentieth century is largely a story of the contrasting fates of countries that fall under communist rule compared with countries that embrace private property, free enterprise and individual freedom.

Communism isn't new. Different forms of it have been tried over the centuries by differing cultures. Medieval monasticism is a form of communism, as were many of the radical religious sects that settled in North America. Hutterite communities are quite prosperous. It seems that a religiously sanctioned code of behaviour helps ensure that everybody does his share of the work.

Marxism is a modern version of communism. It is anti-religious, claiming that religion has been an instrument used to enslave "the masses." Marxists never think in terms of actual human beings, who they despise, but of the masses, who they see as a dumb herd to be manipulated.

Russia was the first nation to have the misfortune to fall under the Marxist spell. A creaking absolutist monarchy, Russia in 1917 was nevertheless a rapidly modernizing state. Public education was improving, industrialization was progressing, and the country had become an important world power. All that was to change in the wake of the First World War. Defeats on the battlefield led to civil unrest and fledgling Marxist groups were there to take advantage of the situation by taking seizing control of the Democratic government that had overthrown the Romanov tsar. After several years of fighting, Lenin's Bolsheviks emerged as victors. One of the first things they did was to hire more police to arrest anyone who objected to the dictatorship they established. But this was just the beginning.

In 1929 Stalin, who became communist party boss after the death of Lenin, instituted collectivization on the farms of Russia and the Ukraine. What this meant was that all land owned by private individuals was taken over by the state. The farms were then reorganized along communistic principles. The results of this policy weren't long in coming. By 1933 and estimated 7,000,000 Ukrainians had died of starvation on what has been one of the world's premier grain growing regions since the days of the Greeks. Some way to fight poverty.

You would think that one such example would be enough to warn the world. But no. The next Marxist triumph took place in China. Stalin's Bolsheviks were pikers compared to Mao.

The Japanese attack on China in the '30's had disrupted its society sufficiently to make it susceptible to the new disease. After the Japanese were defeated by the U.S. in 1945 a civil war in China broke out between a number of factions. The Nationalist faction, led by Chiang Kai-Shek eventually lost to the more ruthless Marxists of Mao Tse Tung. This turned out to be one of the greatest human catastrophes of all time.

"The Great Leap Forward" was the Chinese version of collectivization in the Ukraine, but Mao's results far surpassed Stalin's. Accurate figures are hard to obtain, but well-informed estimates range from 20,000,000 to 45,000,000 dead before the program ran its course. Mao's response? "When there is not enough to eat, people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill." It's not so much different from David Suzuki's remark that half the world's population would have to die to preserve the planet.

These facts are well known. Let me emphasize- whenever and wherever Marxists have taken power the people's paradise of their promises turns out to be the people's hell. Why, then, are there still so many apologists for Marxism, or the Marxism-light version we know as big government? It's easy to come up with explanations but hard to say if any of them are true.

Most people would rather not think of these things. After all, what can the average person do? I don't know for sure, but at the very least we should pay very close attention to the personalities who vie for office, and especially the frauds who put out propaganda like the Victoria Street Newz. I have never been able to decide if they are motivated by malice or if they are just stupid. If it's stupidity, then it at least has to be willful stupidity. If it's malice then we have to ask why they hate the human race. If they do hate the human race, then I can only postulate that it is themselves they hate. Howe strange. They claim to represent the interests of the poor. In fact they are the poor's worst enemies. To them the poor are nothing but tools for their agenda and are completely disposable. I'll try to parse the contents of the magazine in my next post.

We have had a persistently grey and dull weather pattern here in Victoria recently so I suppose it's a good time to think about these dark things.

Indian Spring

Indian summer is what we call a spell of summer -like weather in the fall, so maybe you could call a spell of spring-like weather in winter Indian Spring. We haven't had a spell of it yet, only a few days sprinkled here and there between periods of rain. The rain doesn't stop Victorians from getting out, especially Victorians with dogs. Dogs don't seem to care if it rains or not, and they still have to do their business on every shrub and post so all the other dogs in the vicinity will be aware of their presence. I don't have a dog or a place to keep one if I wanted to- but I am not a dog person so it doesn't matter. My attitude to pets is that they should be semi independent as they were when I was a boy. Maybe because Edmonton was still quite countrified with horses fairly common on the streets, it didn't seem at all unseemly to see evidence of their passing along with the swarms of horseflies that were an inevitable part of the ecosystem. I don't think the latter term had been invented yet. In the winter those frozen road apples made pretty handy pucks for street hockey. It all seemed pretty normal then and dogs wandered freely. One thing that strikes me about the dogs of today, especially those pathetic little creatures most women adore, is how stupid they are around traffic. The dogs I mean.

Due to a minor health problem I've been hors de combat since Christmas. It's been almost a year since I started this blog. I originally wanted to assiduously follow local events and try to counteract the predominant leftward slant of most commentators. But I don't have the patience to sit through council meetings and sift through the technical literature and I don't like to focus on personalities. So the blog has taken on a will of its own, becoming more of a tribute to Victoria than anything else. Not a tribute to our local politics, which seems hopelessly idiotic, but to the piece of earth whereon all of us here live whatever our beliefs or politics. Victoria has a soul and in my view it's vastly underappreciated by its denizens. Maybe our soul as a people will grow in stature and become worthy of it as time goes by.

But these are hard times for development of culture, afflicted as we are by the curse of political correctness. There can be no true art or literature unless a public exists that is receptive to plain language and plain truth to start with. The really deep ideas and understandings that humanity has acquired over the millennia are very hard to express and without a commitment to plain, well- ordered language it is almost impossible for any communication to exist from one generation to the next. Political correctness is more than anything else the perversion of meaning in language. Examples abound. Pro Choice. What does that innocuous sounding expression mean? Does it, for instance, refer to whether someone is allowed to eat peas for supper, or wear one's tie in a bow, or to buy a Toyota instead of a Kia? No. People who describe themselves as pro choice mean that they are in favour of killing babies.

How about 'gay marriage.' Never mind that what was once a fine word has been hijacked, but the word 'marriage' has been rendered meaningless. It has never meant anything other than the joining together of a man and a woman for a lifetime partnership. In Catholic teaching it is a sacrament. It has never meant two guys screwing each other in the butt.

But more than the perversion of ordinary words, political correctness has become a weapon used to attack traditional beliefs so they could be replaced with others. Has this come about by accident, or through some esoteric process of cultural evolution? No. It is deliberate. There exists a philosophical school behind it. Called post modernism, this school imbibes many flavours of ideas, from phenomenology to existentialism, to utilitarianism and many others, but they all have one element in common. They don't believe there is such a thing as truth. Ridicule it as much as you want, the adherents of these philosophies are not deterred. The post modernists such as Derrida and Foucault carried things to certain illogical conclusions. If there is no truth, and every belief is false, why then how does one decide who is right and who is wrong? Simple. The person with the most power gets to decide. And what does it matter how you get power, since all is deception anyway? So lying, perverting the language, violence are all perfectly legitimate means of getting on top. Before the 1950's these philosophies were the province of a small coterie of wing ding academics unknown to anyone but themselves, but gradually they began to insert themselves into the public debating square. Under no compunction to play the game fairly, they used any methods to infiltrate universities and the media. It all came to fruition in the '60's when they managed to whip up students whose brains had been softened by the ingestion of drugs and whose morals had been corrupted by the elevation of the pleasure principle to cult status and set them loose to riot and kill in the name of free speech and freedom. Those rioters pretty well took over campuses everywhere and have turned them into indoctrination centres.

At every turn they have used the perversion of language known as political correctness as one of their most effective weapons to destroy as much as possible the great heritage we are all entitled to, which one calls Western Civilization for want of a better term.

They are old now, these campus radicals from the '60's, and growing stiff in the joints and getting senile. They thought they had killed the American experiment in freedom and individual liberty. And now look what happens. One woman, from Alaska, a mother, a huntress, a lover of home, hearth and family, pops up from nowhere. She hasn't killed her babies. She loves her husband. She loves her country. She is smart. Worst of all, she is (gasp) sane. And she connects with the people... not because she calculates how to put on a pose, but because she is one of us.

Boy, do they hate her, as the outpouring of venom over the last few weeks has proved. I'm speaking of the aftermath of the shooting in Arizona, of course. It is the most sustained and intense attempt to promote a lie, a vicious lie, that I have ever seen. Like a tangle of hissing snakes they spit and hiss, but she is not afraid. They are.

Maybe the left wing winter is on the wane, though the winds still blow viciously. But here and there are signs of spring. A rainbow, a cherry blossom, a patch of snowdrops. For some reason this is how life on earth works. There is darkness and there is light. They alternate, but somehow in the end life triumphs over death.

New Years Day at Ogden Pt

There was plenty of frost on the punkin this morning, so much that the seagulls were a little puzzled as to why they were able to walk on the Dallas Road pond. Fortified with a cup of strong coffee, I was on my way for a walk on the breakwater at Ogden Point, just like last year.

It's barely a week since the sun started back up north, but already the light is noticeably brighter and stronger. One thing about one of these clear winter days in Victoria is the clarity and luminosity of the air. I guess that's two things. Colours are more vivid and striking than in the summer. The mountains seem closer and more imposing.

I missed the New Year's Eve festivities. Let me rephrase that. I did not miss them at all. It's been a long, long, time since I got any sort of thrill from the occasion. Another year gone by? I'd rather not think about it. And then, how about that traditional monumental New Year's Day hangover? Did I open my eyes this morning and wax nostalgic for the days when I would wake up with a pounding skull and a mouthful of rat droppings? Strangely enough, no. I was more concerned about whether that kidney stone had budged yet. In fact all day yesterday I had to remind myself that it was a special day, the last one of 2010. And around 11pm I forgot about it altogether and went to bed.

Another venerable New Year's tradition- aside from empty promises to lose weight- is to look back on the past year with a baleful eye, now wise with hindsight. Then the wise man's brow furrows as he scans the horizon. What will the next year bring? What calamity? What human folly? What great deed? What new trend? But as the years drop away, the main thing I think about is if I will be around for the next one. So I'd better do my best to enjoy this one.

Which reminds me of Sarah Palin. I watched a few episodes of her reality show last night, and what impresses me most about her is the unabashed love she displays for her state and country and the people who live there. It's not an abstract, at-a-distance type of love that many politicians pretend to have when they make speeches, or a pose crafted at a focus group. This is her. This is the real person. It's so long since we've seen such a person many of us don't know what to think. Many are suspicious, and don't really believe her. Could that be because her critics have never loved the places where they themselves have lived? Many of them seem to think such a feeling is a sign of unsophistication, of naivete, a feeling that only stupid people have. Maybe that's why they think she's stupid. They know its not true. She has been a mayor of a town, and then went on to become the governor of a state. The area of Alaska is 591,000 square good old miles, which just happens to be almost exactly the same as the areas of France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg and England combined. She is a Republican who took on an entrenched, and corrupt, Republican governor and in short order had those Augean stables spic and span. She then became a candidate for vice president in the last American federal election and was so effective that the Republican establishment quickly turned against her. It quickly became obvious that the Republican presidential candidate was not in her league. They thought they had brought a pretty face into the game, but it turned out they had a mama grizzly instead. It wasn't what they had planned.

Here then is my prediction for next year: whatever happens, Sarah Palin will be right in the middle of the action. She will turn the tables on the media. Already the public is turning against the media and the Big Hollywood image factory. They have been working overtime all last year throwing merde at her image, but this coming year they will find it has boomeranged, and they will be the ones buried in their own excrement.

Love of family, love of country, these are values the media, the social welfare agencies and the educational establishment have been trying to extirpate since the sixties. In Sarah Palin, the world finally has a someone who sees through the whole charade. Let's go, Sarah.

It looks like it will be a good year.

Snow from afar

The daffodils may not be blooming yet, but compared to what most of the rest of the northern hemisphere is going through, it's springtime in Victoria. I should not be smug, though. Winter has just begun and anything can happen. In fact, I'm a little afraid we have entered into a new mini ice age, like the one that wiped out the Viking colonies in Greenland. It's hard to believe that anyone ever fell for that global warming gag. If only it were so! If the world were in a warming phase it would be a much better place to live. Warmer air would hold more moisture, bringing rain to dry areas. Since hurricanes and other violent storms are caused by sharp contrasts in temperatures of air masses as they come into contact, they might be less frequent and not so devastating. More greenhouse gases? Of course. Plants love carbon dioxide. If we had more of it in the air, plants would grow in more abundance. Alas, I doubt if such a thing will happen. We are still in an ice age that's been going on for an estimated 10 million years and there is nothing to indicate that it is over. It's just in remission and it will come back. Those might be the kind of interesting times I would prefer to miss.

We've had no recent snow in Victoria, not even in the Sooke Hills or on Mt Douglas. So when I looked around from King George Terrace Rd, I was surprised to see a hillside across the water covered with snow. As nearly as I can figure out on my inadequate maps, it can only be the west shore of San Juan Island on the US side of things. How they got it and we didn't goes beyond my meagre knowledge of meteorology.

I will say this about snow. It's nice to look at from afar, from a safe distance, not requiring heroic and perilous driving feats to view. Vancouver Island's main ski hill is at Mt Washington near Courtenay and apparently they have record amounts, to the delight of those who enjoy sliding around on the stuff. In fact, they say it has the most snow at middle elevations of any other ski hill in the world. I don't know exactly what that means, but up yours, Whistler.

As for me, when "the weather outside is frightful, but the fire is so delightful..." Listen to Dean Martin supply the tune. But my favourite winter song is Baby It's Cold Out There, and nobody did it better than Johnny Mercer and Margaret Whiting.