Monday, December 24, 2018

Cedar Trees and Earl Grey,The Legend of BC Mary



Written by Grant G



There is something about the rain, a soothing rhythmic song that descends from the clouds, in a moment the harbour is afroth with bubbles and fresh ozone, pattering drops pelt out an energetic medley upon our metal roof, not a day for indoor indulgence, rain like this must be experienced in the flesh...But first a cup of Earl Grey tea...

Dependence, I miss the three eager faces that used to greet me with kisses and purrs, the love of animals can run deep, maybe it`s human nature, the need for rain, the need of dependence, humanity in the form of crumbs, satisfaction and emotional release all accomplished under the guise of mutual dependence, Earl grey tea with one small teaspoon of sugar...

There is a young ancient cedar tree outside my window, it must be a hundred years old but basically it`s still a baby in old cedar terms, it`s home to a family of raccoons, the mom had a litter of 2...She has lived in the cedar tree a long time and every 2 years she has another batch, long loopy lower branches allow easy access for climbing and today, well, momma raccoon and her teenagers came meandering down this old tree, I see this routine every other day and....And about halfway down the full of play baby(teenage) raccoons took a different route, the mother sat back on the main trunk and just watched, this plump little tyke gingerly walked down the skinniest of branches(still 20 feet in the air), I could see that the branch was way too skinny to support this plump baby, half way down this branch it starts a bending, the raccoon stops, only to have its eager sibling come racing down the same skinny branch, this is gonna be good I thought, the branch bent over, both plumpsters went for a wild ride but surprisingly they both clung on, the look on the mother`s face was priceless, she growled out a harsh message and the babies came a runnin, meanwhile the skies were thundering liquid gold but the beauty of this ancient cedar tree is underneath it`s bone dry, mother nature`s umbrella, warm sticky drops of rain falling like strands of syrup from the outer branches while mischievious raccoons annoy momma in complete dryness, dependence is so empowering to one`s own soul..

The blackies, the crows spotted me as I went by the kitchen window and started cawing, nothing goes to waste, dinner leftovers, old bread, meat scraps and lots of cooked rice, you see you can`t cook good Chinese sticky rice unless you make a whole pot, alright crows, I hear ya, no leftovers for me as I toss rice and bread out the window, my mom loves the blackies, they are very orderly, they have a set pecking order, quite civilized, and the most interesting new member is a little smart black bird, the size of a Robin but different, he has white spots on his black fantail, similar to the tail of a bluejay, this little feller comes out from this low ground hedge, looks right at me and chirps, he gets a couple of crackers everyday, I toss it to him/her, the bird grabs the cracker in a shot and darts back under the hedge, meanwhile back at the old cedar tree the baby bandits are still goofing around, having survived their thrill ride on the now broken branch the little raccoons are pushing the envelope, both are slowly climbing out on two more rather thin limbs, these branches leading to a nearby arbutus tree, momma raccoon looking totally twisted really started squawking but her babies were having none of it, down the skinny branches they went and when they started to bend the little raccoons made short leaps onto the Arbutus tree, only to realize that Arbutus trees have no bark, no grip, a smooth shiny hardwood tree and I swear that momma raccoon was laughing it up as her babies skidded and slid at speed all the way down the Arbutus....I `m sure the playful bandits learned their lesson, a minute later they climbed back up to console with mom..


Squirrels, raccoons, crows, humming birds, little black birds, my mom, Gin Gin(orange cat)...Dependence is very empowering and all one needs are but a few crumbs of humanity, I haven`t written much lately, reading mostly, reading stories and blogs, why is it when I read certain writers like Ross K or Laila Yuile, BC Mary I come away feeling warm and included while other sites are cold, desperate venues for hate and self grandization..

Normally I don`t put up guest posts but I was worried about our Dear friend Mary, BC Rail is her story, more than even Bill Tieleman, more than any mainstream media, BC Mary`s site did more to keep the BC Rail file alive than any venue in Canada, every revelation every nuance, from a corrupt investigation conducted by the RCMP, BC Liberal political insiders in charge of the prosecution, the betrayal of Loukedalis, all the meetings, meetings on Savory Island, meetings with lobbyists, the Bruce Clark connection, David Mclean funding Gordon Campbell, every angle from the missing $1 billion dollars to the now $600 million dollar and growing tax indemnity CN has against the province..

BC Mary has the archives of thousands of BC Rail stories, from radio tricks in Prince George to bogus financial statements used as propaganda, it`s all in BC Mary`s archives. ...

Dependence, it`s very empowering, a little rice, a chirp, a caw and a trip down to the dock to dance in the rain...

Thank you for all those years of crumbs and crackers Mary.







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Cheers Eyes Wide Open

Hollowed Souls and The Inescapable Box, Donald Trump Edition





Written by Grant G


Donald Trump's presidential victory...

I have difficulty in describing the hollow feeling within, my internal compass was and is still spinning wildly, not knowing what direction to point, an emptiness filled my soul after Donald Trump triumphed and I'm not an American nor do I live in that country so it's easy to relate to the despair 50 million Americans are feeling..

Alone, that's how I felt when my father died, depressed and bitter when my long lived animal companions perished in a house fire, but never before did I feel hollow, dad left me direction and a moral compass, my feline family members left me resolve to start anew and Jinnycat has more than filled the void..

I was not a Hillary Clinton fan, believed the democratic party didn't try hard enough to give America a fresh choice, Clinton..Bush..never do I want to see those names on a presidential ballot again..

The Klu Klux Klan is making plans for a December 3rd victory march in Pelham North Carolina  and yes Donald Trump is saying he disavows that racist club but does he really, a wink nod campaign, Donald Trump alluded to 2nd amendment fanatics and NRA people to stop Hillary in a not so subtle assassination threat..even at Trump's election night victory party his supporters were calling for Hillary Clinton to be locked up..

Did I know racism was so rampant in America, not to this extent, a rural suburban divide, a division of the educated, a division of colour, a division of voters who live in diverse multi-coloured cities against nearly all white rural counties and no, it's not right to paint voters with a broad-brush but one can't overlook or ignore the demographics...Donald Trump attracted older white male votes, older white female votes and votes from the least educated Americans...the same demographic that voted for Stephen Harper in our last federal election...

Americans marching and in some cases protesting violently from coast to coast and Trump has yet to do a single legislative thing or use any presidential executive order, those privileges don't kick in for a few months and I don't see how Donald Trump can do anything to pacify Americans on either side of the political spectrum, conservative or democratic...

If Donald Trump actually starts building a useless wall or creates deportation goon-squads the protests we see today will seem like mere angry letters to editors and if Donald Trump doesn't go forward with his core election platform....(Deport millions of undocumented people....Build an impenetrable wall with Mexico picking up the tab....Lock Hillary Clinton up...Extreme vetting and Muslim immigration ban)

If Donald Trump abandons his election platform his base will go ballistic, his core voter finally had a president willing to carry out what they believe is wrong with America, not only stopping illegal immigration but deporting millions.....Donald Trump has put himself in a box, put himself in many boxes...Will corporate America close down their factories in Mexico and China and return to America, will those Americans who lost countless jobs to outsourcing and modernization begin anew making flip-flops, dish-racks and plastic forks, and if they do what will corporate America pay those workers...

Factories that once employed thousands now employ mere hundreds, or dozens, automation and robot factories are the new norm, driverless trucks, robot workers, exactly what jobs can Donald Trump bring back to the rust belt...Joe Fresh clothes being made by Indian workers making a dollar per day....

Rebuild America's infrastructure, for the last 20 years every politician in America and Canada have made that election promise, rural America isn't going to get new infrastructure, big cities will and big cities have all the tradepersons they need, ..in America and Canada big infrastructure projects go to a finite group of companies, SNC Lavilin for example..over-priced projects always going over-budget by gobs of money and that won't change anytime soon..

America's demise, Canada's demise started in the Ronald Reagan/Margaret Thatcher era and it's been downhill for workers ever since...Trickle down economics has never worked and Donald Trump is prepared to double-down on failed policies...

The American farm, family farms are nearly extinct, Monsanto and automation, self-serve checkout, tellerless banking, no more gas jockeys, no more buggy-whip makers, no more endless requirement of workers, we are indeed at a crossroad, 5% of the world's workers can produce 100% of what the world's people need to survive and who is prepared to rip up the world's entire economic system, who is prepared to remove the accumulated world debt, a debt that will never be paid or reduced...

Third world countries denied computer generated pixel money to modernize their infrastructure and or to improve living conditions because of no ability to repay the vapourmoney yet Canada, America, Russia, and Europe will never reduce their debt...

The world elite, the bankers, Wallstreet, IMF, the Federal Reserve, ....Derivatives, fraud and endless bailouts for the architects of the Ponzi....

The Great Depression brought on by a rigged market...1989 saving and loans Bailout..2008...Bear Stearns..AIG..Freddy and Fanny...European bank bailouts...too big to fail but not big enough or proud enough to not take bailout money created out of thin air...

Hollow and gutted is how I feel and I didn't like Hillary Clinton as a choice, the lessor of two evils syndrome perhaps..

Donald Trump built himself a presidential box from which he can't escape.....

America can't return to making dish-racks for many reasons, one reason being corporations won't pay wages high enough to cover house notes and health coverage..America can't deport millions of undocumented people...a wall won't keep people from relocating and won't stop the drugs, and considering big pharma is the new druglord, killing more people and destroying lives at levels never seen before....only legalization of all drugs will curtail the drug-fuelled nightmare...

"Make America Great Again"

Clean the air and keep water drinkable, feed the masses and finally come to the realization that endless growth on a finite planet is impossible...

Only admitting the truth and facing our fears head on will make America, and the world great...as for again, the world and America never was great to begin with...

I hope that Time, my dreaded enemy Time heals my hollow hurt and returns warmth to a frozen soul..



The Straight Goods

Cheers Eyes Wide Open

Friday, December 21, 2018

Justin Trudeau...Rachel Notley...John Horgan...Too Clever By Half






The Emma Jackson Story


Written by Grant G




Something going on around here......

Emma Jackson, who is she, I don't know but boy oh boy is she needed, especially the message she voices..

Ten Years.....according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC) that's how much time citizens of planet earth have to stop using the worst of the worst fossil fuels, that includes fracking and tarsands....ten years, that's not a lot of time, it's a blink and a wink and we're there...ten years...and if we don't?

Forget about limiting average temperatures around the world rising by ONLY  1-1/2 to 2 Celsius....it'll be game over, we're looking at runaway climate change, it could lead to a rapid extinction of mankind....perhaps, just perhaps if there is a God, he'll, she will let us perish, punishment for failing to protect and preserve what's really precious, harmony with nature, with millions of species from winged, to finned to furry, to land and ocean plants....species are dying off , becoming extinct at a pace that....at a pace that scares the hell out of me..

Oh, i know, there are climate change deniers among us, in fact all our Canadian elected politicians are climate change deniers...

Maybe Emma Jackson and the IPCC is wrong

If we follow Emma's advice, and she's wrong, what's the harm, less pollution, a faster transition to cleaner fuels, human longevity increases, habitat restoration and maybe even a return, or at least a stop to this current mass extinction..

What if the IPCC and Emma Jackson are right, a mere ten years to get it done or earth rampages into runaway climate change...

Who am i.....a nobody, what do I know......I've been on earth for five plus decades, my dad, my dear departed dad, he took me fishing when I was tiny person, rod, reel hook and line, we used live herring and mooched for salmon, mooching, probably not a term most of you are familiar with...throw out the anchor, reach into the live bait-well, grab a herring and put em on the hook, long slender light tipped rod, very thin fishing line and about a three ounce weight....drop it down 10...20....or even to 100 feet down and wait for a bite..

We fished together near every summer up until he passed....

Howe Sound use to brim with salmon, they are no more, the Sunshine Coast and Pender Harbour, .the salmon, the herring balls, needlefish, hake, black cod and sharks, an ocean bread basket market that existed for millennia, it's gone, no more...From Vancouver Island's west coast to Kitimat and beyond, a once bountiful filled ocean is now a mere shadow of what it once was, yes there are still fish and nature sometimes surprises us Westcoasters and delivers a large unexpected return of wild salmon, however, we have Orca, Orca whales that depend on Wild Chinook salmon for their survival, they're starving, dying and making me cry..

Everywhere dad and I fished, everywhere we didn't fish along the B.C. coast the story is the same, numbers in perpetual decline and countless outright extinctions...what most don't know, our BC wild salmon...Chinook..Coho..Chum..Sockeye..Steelhead salmon, the same species of salmon in different river systems produced different Coho,..unique to that river Chinooks, up and down our beautiful coastline the same fish species were one of a kind...the massive 100 pound Chinook that a mere handful of rivers could produce, one of those being Rivers Inlet....why did those Chinook get so large, again, it's the river system...only the biggest and strongest Chinook could spawn, the gravel was heavier...

Again I cry, because it's gone, bird life gone, species extinction here in B.C...death by a thousand cuts.

I'm a nobody...but i'm smart enough to know that what remains of mother nature must be left alone, be given a chance to recover, areas still pristine must be left alone, areas already decimated must be cleaned up, restored and be given all the help we can to return it to a stable state...

Ten Years left to do something about it...

Too clever by half...Justin Trudeau once elected told Paris and the world that Canada was back at the climate mitigation table..

Justin Trudeau once elected told Canadians and the world that Canada is doing its part for the climate by expanding tarsand production and building pipelines to the Westcoast, Eastcoast and south to the USA as our commitment to the Paris Accord...huh?

Justin Trudeau told us now laughing Canadians that his world leading climate change plan requires us(Alberta) to increase production of the dirtiest of fossil fuel tarsands and build new bigger pipelines to tidewater so Canada can ship this product to Asia as a key plank in his plan to protect the environment..? huh?

Every year the Prime Minister of Canada gets a sit-down meeting with provincial premiers, what happened, did they, in private come up with this latest bafflegab plan to try and fool the people that they were concerned with climate change...a joint plan among the leaders where they all say in unison, like lemmings that "increased production and exports of dirty fracked gas and dirt oil are the key to saving the world as long as we put a carbon tax in place"...huh?
_______

"If we then choose to start looking at both of Trudeau’s pet B.C. projects in terms of how much eventual total GHG they produce, it is shocking. His Trans Mountain pipeline expansion (TMX) project will ship material off the B.C. coast with more than an additional 100 million tonnes (MT) per year of GHG when burned. When you include field GHG production to get the material out of the ground, this number is greater than 120 MT/yr.
So Canada LNG, plus the Trudeau TMX pipeline project have a total associated GHG of more than 160 MT per year. To put that in perspective, the Harper 2030 target the Trudeau government committed to for national total GHG emissions is just over 500 MT/yr.  These two projects alone — both of which the Trudeau government is promoting — are equal to almost a third of our total targeted national 2030 emissions"
https://ipolitics.ca/article/trudeaus-pet-projects-dont-mesh-with-canadas-climate-goals/

______

Tens years left to stop using the worst of the worst fossil fuels

Rachel Notley, Alberta's NDP premier....Rachel Notley authorized Alberta to run full of false statement ads across Canada promoting Trans Mountain Bitumen pipeline expansion to BC(tripling current capacity)....Rachel Notley has turned shrill and noisy..Rachel Notley endorsed Justin Trudeau's climate action plan until....until TMX pipeline expansion was halted by the court, the court ruled the NEB, the Federal government and big oil tried to ram this project through..through unceded First Nation land...Canadian Supreme court thus far has stopped TMX from going forward...then Rachel Notley, Premier of Alberta, shrilly hollered, like a big oil executive that....

Unless that TMX pipeline to Vancouver Harbour to transport diluted bitumen for export to Asia gets built Alberta won't agree to a carbon tax or the decades off Alberta tarsand emissions cap ..

Alberta, 300 square miles of toxic tailing ponds, poisoned rivers like the Athabaska ...

Alberta tarsands.....Canada, a nation of more than 40 million people, a northern hemisphere country..Tarsand operations use 1/3 rd of all the natural gas used in Canada, just for extracting the tar from the ground...once out of the ground upgrading and then more refining is required to make the product usable...imagine that..all that energy just to get it out of the ground, all that steam, all that toxic water needed to be pumped into bird killing tailing ponds....and that's just the start of the process...
____
2.38 billion cubic feet per day or a record 29 per cent of purchased natural gas was used for oil sands production in northern Alberta in 2016. That compared with 730 million cf/d or 12 per cent of total demand in 2005.

______

Ten years left to stop using the dirtiest of the dirty fossil fuels....TMX pipeline expansion is being built for a 100 years of use...not 9 years, or 10....a 100 years of bitumen dirt oil to Asia..

John Horgan, British Columbia's newest Premier...When John Horgan was merely opposition leader in BC..Horgan and his entire party screamed, yelled and debated facts about LNG emissions in our legislature, how we couldn't possibly keep our provincial emissions flat let alone achieving any climate ghg reduction targets with an LNG industry..and he was correct..

__________

"LNG Canada Project...... When you add up the GHG emitted in getting the natural gas produced, shipped and liquified, combined with the amount that will be emitted from the final burning of the material, you have emissions equal to 75 per cent of the B.C.’s current GHG emissions. And that’s being kind about how much fugitive methane will result in production" 

https://ipolitics.ca/article/trudeaus-pet-projects-dont-mesh-with-canadas-climate-goals/

_________

But, once elected in 2017 those provincial emissions no longer mattered, to hell with a climate change plan, we are going to frack and combust and leak methane and let 5 foreign mega-corporations build Canada's most prolific GHG emitting operation. .....millions of megatonnes of GHGs year in year out for decades to come from a single plant, ..a single LNG plant increasing our provincial emissions by 20% or more...all these years we paid a BC carbon tax and now the BC Government says to hell with targets we're gonna sell LNG and don't worry folks because we'll be helping China burn less coal......Horgan said all that while promoting BC coal exports to China...Meanwhile the last 2 years British Columbia's forests have burned for months on end, the beautiful lower mainland, Vancouver, Surrey, Fraser Valley, everywhere in the province people  choked on forest-fire smoke, all summer long, advisories telling people to stay indoors....five decades in British Columbia and never had it happen once, now two years in a row....

Too Clever by Half...10 years to stop using the worst of the worst, fracking, tarsands...or face runaway climate change..

Who am I....I'm a nobody...

Who is Emma Jackson......She is the future..



And here is a little of what Emma has to say..


StraightGoodsTweet text



I responded to Emma....Rachel Notley didn't..






I love your passion Emma...Don't waste time on ..Notley has dead eyes and no soul...Between Notley and ..NDP and everything they stood for died with those two, no vision..it's up to your generation to punt them out of office.



_____________

Too Clever by Half....nobody with commonsense believes you Justin, Rachel, John....you don't build dirty fossil fuel infrastructure for 40 years, 60 years, a 100 years of use on one hand while at the same time claiming this is how we'll fight climate change...

Nobody buys the bullshit, not the 50+ years me or mankind's future, 25 year old Emma Jackson...

That's the generation we can't fail..

Too Clever by Half,,,,,indeed



The Straight Goods

Cheers Eyes Wide Open










https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/too_clever_by_half