Reflections of an Old Man

I’m happy to say that readership is increasing steadily and that feedback is generally positive. That was not the case earlier, especially during the ‘official pandemic’. The idea of the timeline is to share information that I am interested in with you folks that read and watch what I publish. Because of automation, this does not feel like ‘work’ to me at all. Facebook has its shortcomings, including the Zuckerberg appointed ‘police’, in whose bad books I currently occupy a spot, but it is also a very convenient medium for sharing information and ideas. Before retiring in 2011, I used to be a Caroline area reporter for Mountaineer Publishing in Rocky Mountain House for 11 years and was responsible for one page in “The Mountaineer” weekly newspaper with a circulation of about 10 000. That included local news and an opinion column I called “Pen Meets Paper”. I am happy to say that this is one family owned paper that has survived the online publishing revolution. Now in my 80th year I am ...

I happen to live in a place in Canada where conflict is likely to take centre stage in the near future: Alberta, that was the launchpad for the Freedom Convoy that shut down Ottawa for some 3 weeks in February. Prince Justin and his crew in Ottawa are in the process of launching an environmental armed police force based in Calgary, that is now advertising for applicants for positions. The leading contender for the Alberta United Conservative Party leadership position, Danielle Smith who will be the next Premier of Alberta if she wins, is on record saying that she will not cooperate with this new agency. At the same time, the federal government is attempting to greatly expand an environmental protection area in north-west Alberta and likely plans to use its new police force to enforce regulations at the expense of the oil and gas industry. Many Albertans see this as the thin wedge of a sword to shut down Alberta’s oil and gas industry and generate internal conflict within the province....

Covid has settled down among us. A stranger on the block some three years ago, it is now a familiar visitor to most. It has also learnt “to behave” for its own long term good. So it no longer kills a bunch of us hosts, like it did in the early stages. Most people, like myself, experience something like a cold during the period Covid breeds up inside our bodies. Being a host is no longer an extremely traumatic experience for most, so our fear of the virus has subsided. That’s exactly what Covid needs and wants from us, because that gives it free reign to invade and occupy our bodies. In other words, it has adapted to ensure its own long term survival in the human population. It is a smart virus. Can that be said of us, in regards to how we treat Gaia, our Earth Mother? Billions of us are crawling all over her, satisfying our own desires at her expense, with little or no regard for the well being of our host. Are we going to be a smart virus?

I’m risking my writer’s neck with this piece comparing Germany and France. So be it. Germany is the economic power house of Europe, no questions asked. Frenchmen tend to be more laid back, enjoy a drink of wine and beat up on their own government when they get pissed off about something (yellow vests come to mind). The Germans got badly beaten up in wars twice last century, with France on the winning side in both cases. But they pull themselves up by their bootstraps, rebuild industries and commerce, and away they go again. So what is their problem? They seem to get the thin end of the stick no matter what? Like now when they might be shivering in their homes this winter as Putin threatens to turn off the taps on pipelines to Germany from Russian oil and gas fields. The German idea was to use Russian gas as an interim measure while they created wind and solar farms and decommissioned their nuclear plants. The French? They wisely held on to their nuclear power generating plants and even...

In modern history this word is associated with Napoleon’s final defeat at a village of that name in Walloon Brabant, Belgium in 1815. “Waterloo” means “water” and “sacred forest”. From my studies online it is becoming obvious that water is the very underpinning of life and that our fresh water is being used at an unprecedented rate as heatwaves are enveloping the globe at this time. Fresh groundwater and surface water levels are constantly sinking both in North America and Europe. So I decided on a little experiment here in my own back yard: Collecting rainwater from the roofs of my cabins. Thanks to fortuitous timing I collected well in excess of 2000 litres in June during drought breaking rain events and stored the water in numerous drums and other containers. (I also have a good shallow water well but it showed signs of stress during the 2000- 2002 drought with fine sand coming out of the tap). This year I have also been growing green beans in my garden and tried growing th...

During July in 2021 we had tropical heat on the prairies in Western Canada, where I live. +30 degrees Celsius day in and day out for some 5 weeks. And very little rain resulting in bone dry conditions and low crop yields. This year farmers had better luck with some good rains in June, before things started to dry out. Then along came August with another tropical heat wave that we are in right now. +31 yesterday and the same expected today. When I first arrived in Canada I was struck with how cool the summers used to feel, after some 21 years spent in Australia. Not any more. In 1961 I spent 6 months with my family in Baghdad, Iraq where the temperature during summer fluctuated anywhere between +40 and +45 degrees C, making +35 feel ‘cool’ when it happened from time to time. The locals in the Middle East are well adapted to these conditions in terms of personal habits and clothes worn, for example. They also take a break from about 10am till 4pm every day to get away from the searing he...

That has been the catch cry of the New York ‘progressive’ establishment since he became the 45th President of the US in 2017. One reason for this frenzy “to get him” is that he is the ‘outsider on the inside’, a part of the New York establishment, but not really. Moreover, during a long period of engagement in the entertainment world, he developed connections to Eastern block countries in Europe. Prior to 2017 the Trump team managed to tap onto a seething anger amongst common Americans against the Obama led ‘progressives’ that had long forgotten them and their troubles. So they voted for Trump as President. It was the shock of a lifetime for the New York Deep State establishment that see themselves as the controllers of the Western Empire. Trump’s perceived connections to the Russian Empire were viewed with great suspicion as well and an attempt was made to “get ‘im” during the Russia Gate drama. Another attempt was made after he was accused of trying to blackmail Ukrainian President Z...

“Mooh!” or “Baah!”. Welcome to the internet funny farm where we are the cattle or sheep grazing in Suckerberg’s Meta landscape or on Planet Google. The big operators have one thing in common: To create fenced grazing paddocks inside our minds and control all the internal and external gates as much as possible. Big Brother has arrived in all his glory with his carrots and sticks and woe to he or she who tries to defy this self appointed would-be “Master of All”. Fortunately, the smarter among us are able to dig holes under the fences and generally navigate the system while retaining our independence of it. It is all about letting the unceasing propaganda stream from main stream and side stream media presstitutes fly over your head and making your own individual system navigation decisions.

Some folks are called “preppers” (being prepared). They try to anticipate future calamities and take measures to minimize impacts on themselves, like storing food, water, guns, money, etc. To some it has become a way of life and a form of religion. On the flip side we have: “The one that’s gonna get’cha will come out of left field with no warning” so why bother? I think there is reasonable middle ground here: For example, think about just how vulnerable our electricity distribution grid is to any number of problems and how much our modern lifestyle depends on that grid. So, filling up the freezer with meat and other frozen goodies in anticipation of a ‘rainy day’, or 20, may not make sense. Preserving food in airtight sterile jars is a much preferred option. That’s what we always did before the convenience of freezers won the day. Growing your own fruit and veggies in a backyard garden has been my hobby and passion for the last 50 years or so, at great advantage to physical/mental well...

Afghanistan should be a lesson for all. The tribal society of that country has successfully withstood the onslaught of several empires: The British, the Soviet and now the Western Empire that pulled out exactly 1 year ago after 20 years of rampant corruption sponsored in return for compliance with ‘Western values’. How did the Afghans manage to pull it off? I think it had a lot to do with shared traditional values and long deep relationships between individuals and families. How else could they have withstood the onslaught of foreign cultures with virtually unlimited financial and military power? Many years ago I cottoned on to a remark made by an Afghan patriot when he spoke about his contempt for the attitude of Soviet soldiers occupying his country: “They force their way into our mosques and piss on the floor” he said. I.e. Plenty of motivation to “get rid of the bastards”, which they did to the great detriment of the now extinct Soviet Union. The Americans and their cohorts, includ...

Representative democracy is about people putting their trust in elected representatives when it comes to enacting legislation that affects everybody. The party-political version of of this system has proven itself to be dysfunctional, to put it mildly, because the people whose interests are represented by the party always turns out to be a small connected minority with financial clout that use politics to further their own interests. The “inner brass” of an established party is always connected to this group, at the expense of the rest of us. The bulk of our elected representatives, picked over by party insiders to serve the party rather than the people, are generally opportunistic individuals looking for a career for themselves. So we invariably end up with a disconnect between people and party. The establishment ‘fix’ to this is to rotate parties in and out of power with new leaders, allowing people to vent against a system stacked against them. The status-quo continues.

We tend to take the availability of fresh water for granted. Like the air we breathe. Until we have to start looking for it. That’s increasingly happening across the world at this time. In Europe, the US and soon, here, in Alberta, Canada. Unless we prepare for the predicted outcomes of climate change and local warming. It seems that atmospheric water vapour is repelled by warm dry air over an arid area and attracted by humid ground conditions like those created by a forest, for example. Here in Central Alberta, after good rains in June, we are now back into a heat dome predicted to last until the middle to late part of August. We have had some concentrated hail events with baseball sized hail stones, but they have been fairly isolated, thankfully. In Europe groundwater levels are falling at an alarming rate, as our water monitoring bureaucrats here in Alberta are sitting on their hands in front of their computers, expecting some undefined others to get their feet wet out in the field ...

Alberta’s ruling United Conservative Party is in big trouble. It was formed following the election win of the New Democratic Party in 2015 leading to four years of conservative detested government by Rachel Notley. Conservatives from a broad spectrum of beliefs and opinions managed to hold their noses and form a political party, under the leadership of the present Premier Jason Kenney, for the sole purpose of removing the left slanting Notley from power. During the pandemic, deep rifts developed within the UCP, based on previous differences in outlook by supporters of the two forming parties, the Wild Rose Party and the Progressive Conservative Party that had been in power for some 40 years prior to 2015. A former leader of the Wild Rose Party, Danielle Smith, is now the front runner in a UCP leadership contest to replace Kenney as Premier of the province and has promised to bring in an “Alberta Sovereignty Act” as soon as she is proclaimed Premier. This would empower the Alberta Legis...

The political landscape in Alberta is changing towards a more independent stance against the edicts of a self serving federal government in Ottawa. More and more Albertans feel that their constitutional rights are being trampled on by federally elected politicians, as they watched Quebec refusing to support the Emergencies Act measures when it was proclaimed by the federal government back in the spring. Those measures froze the bank accounts of some Canadians at the whim of Prince Justin’s Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland and caused a bank run as people hurried to move their money into safe places. The (not so) United Conservative Party of Alberta leadership contender Danielle Smith is tapping into this emerging public sentiment and she is the leading candidate in the race to become Alberta’s next Premier shortly. As Prince Justin and his crew keep on alienating people in Western Canada by pandering to the preconceived notions of their political base, cracks are widening in the Ca...

“We” vs “I” ideas have shaped many societies and generated much conflict in times past, and in the present. European settlement of Turtle Island was largely guided by individual enterprise, sometimes sponsored by a state: “Between 1519 and 1521 Hernán Cortés and a small band of men brought down the Aztec empire in Mexico, and between 1532 and 1533 Francisco Pizarro and his followers toppled the Inca empire in Peru.” One kind of collectivist state emerged from the Russian revolution in 1917 under the iron hand of Vladimir Lenin, and later Joseph Stalin (“man of steel”) where all means of production were directly controlled and run by the state. Another form of collectivism emerged in Germany in 1933 under the hand of Adolf Hitler who proclaimed himself a dictator. Here the means of production was left in the private hands of regime supporters like Krupp Steel, for example. Be they individualist or collectivist regimes, one characteristic permeates them all: A small group of colluding se...

How do the rulers of a society with multiple internal stresses keep themselves in power? Groups of people with opposing views may face each other in the street, resulting in much destruction. During the nineteen thirties, a broken financial system led to much suffering and conflict right across the world and spawned extremist views both on the right and left side of the political spectrum. Young unemployed ‘bucks’ with no money were hanging out on street corners, looking for trouble. It was very convenient to have WWII break out in 1939, effectively mopping up all these ‘troublesome elements’, put them in uniform and send them off to war. Some 1300 years ago there was a surplus of young bucks in what is now my old homeland Norway and a ‘solution’ was designed by the establishment of the day by equipping groups of them with ships, weapons and provisions and send them off to raid distant shores. The expectation was for them to bring back wealth in many forms, including slaves. They are n...