Mobs:

Toronto's inner city space is overrun with noisy mobs these days. You'd think we actually had no procedures to redress social ills and no politicians with enough backbone to have them enforced.

The process of peaceful co-existence seems to have been subverted by noisy minority groups who have nothing better to do than to gather in the streets, bellowing loudly to draw attention to their causes.

There's the inner city feminist mob, the indeterminate sexuality (LGBT-whatever) mob, and, most prominent lately, the Black Lives Matter mob.

The BLM mob, bent on bringing attention to the killing of a black man with a hammer by a cop, has been receiving most attention from the electronic media lately. At its nucleus are a pair of stridently loud black females with a megaphone, an accusatory attitude and language suitable for launching bloody revolution.

We can only hope that at some point in their undertaking, they come to realize that their message would be more effective if it included all lives, not just black lives. And if, having achieved that, they might proceed to use their influence on their own community to take up that message.

Even better, they might get their community to cooperate with the police when witnesses to shootings should step forth to make law enforcement easier.

Let's hope their efforts evolve into a learning experience for them with achievable goals that will benefit all of us. 

The Ghomeshi decision:

Amateur analysts everywhere are expounding on the pros and cons of the Jian Ghomeshi trial.

Most of the pros come from members of the judicial fraternity while the Toronto inner city feminist mob remains unconvinced.

So far, haven't seen much from the shrinks--either amateur or professional--on the probable psychological profiles of the people involved.

It was mentioned at some point during the proceedings that Ghomeshi obviously liked his sex rough. Nothing new there. Tom cats do it that way all the time. Lots of people like their sex rough too, possibly to make it more interesting.

Obviously, each of the three plaintiffs also liked it rough, or they wouldn't have tried for return bouts. Since none were offered, they each retreated into a petulant sulk that stewed on for years.

Since there was no mention of families in the media, apparently none of the participants in this little drama had the imagination or the resilience to go on and establish normal human relationships including spouses and families of their own.

So, what can we assume from this? Was the whole cast, including Ghomeshi, a group of basically dysfunctional individuals? And while the lawyers in this case are going to be handsomely remunerated--well deserved in Ghomeshi's lawyer's case--can our society afford to dump a petulant load of crap like this in the laps of the judiciary every time someone's delicate feelings are hurt?

It's not easy to imagine that our forefathers who structured our laws to make society work smoothly, worried much about hurt feelings. 

Yet, in this case, the law worked just fine.

New cause for panic

I see the panic mongers are beginning to program the gullible among us to the effect that we are running short of water.

The We are going to die of thirst gang are going to add this to all the other panics soliciting funds such as:
--Human-generated Global warming,
--Human generated environmental degradation,
--Human-generated de-forestation,
--Human-generated air pollution,
--etc., etc.

Of all the hyped-up crap being offered in the media, so far, nobody has suggested that water shortages are confined almost exclusively to areas of third world human over-population. These are areas where people should not be living in the numbers recorded or there is no one among the leadership with enough initiative to get up and do something about it.

If the water they have to drink is unsuitable for human consumption, don't worry. Mother Nature does not hesitate to reduce the human infestations when unavoidable.

Massive Undertaking

Big headline in today's news is young Trudeau meeting with provincial politicians to tackle climate change.

Gee, if they can do that, maybe we ought to ask them to hasten the onset of spring and cancel next winter all together.

Now that the Climate change (Global Warming) cheerleaders have convinced the more gullible among us that we are responsible for what the climate is doing, it ought to be easy for us to see the logic in what our busy politicians are trying to do. Or maybe not.

What arrogance! And what abysmal disregard for the global forces that govern this planet's dynamics!

I can hardly wait to see what this new crop of geniuses is going to do next.

World War #3

Last weekend's slaughter in Paris is not just an isolated event. It is another step in lunatic fringe Islam's war with the West. It's evolution at work. It is what war has become.

It's a dispersed war. It is no longer concentrated on massed battlefields where dug-in armies slug it out as in WW1 or highly mobile mechanized armies do battle on the run as in WWII. Now, this new war can erupt any time, anywhere.

At this point it ought to be quite clear that major technological changes were initiated and hurried along by battlefield needs. If we see technology as a plus, then war is a plus, too, right?

So what we have now is limited skirmishes launched by psychological basket cases all around the planet. 

Their contribution to the evolution of technology is significant. There would have been no pressing need to develop the high-flying drones, the satellite monitoring systems and the smart bombs fully capable of taking out targeted sites anywhere on the face of the planet and deliver a knockout punch on mobile moving targets from the edge of space.

There remains only the problem of correctly identifying moving targets from space, but rest assured there are people working on it right now. When that one is solved, we can thank the jihadis for initiating its need.

While effective in weeding out the homicidal psychopaths among us, war also costs many innocent lives, so it is unclear if it qualifies as a good evolutionary process. We can only sit back and hope that over all, it serves humanity's evolution in a positive way.

Our new Prime Minister

Our newly-minted PM might have taken the ISIS attack on Paris as a solid opportunity to back out of some less than brilliant election promises he made without being held accountable or being seen as back-pedalling.

He did not. Instead, he spent his opening rounds at the international conference posing for selfies and reaffirming his own lack of good judgement.

More mature leaders all pledged support for the French cause in the face of mindless terror, but Trudeau stuck to his guns. He reaffirmed his off-the cuff decision to withdraw air support against ISIS and import large numbers of migrants from Syria in a hurry, ignoring the chance that there might also be lunatic Fringe Islamic infiltrators among them.

The withdrawal of Canada's fighter jets gives ISIS the opportunity to brag openly that the Paris attack has succeeded in putting a wedge into the solidarity of the forces aligned against them.

It's easy to speculate that these actions accurately represent the head space of the electorate that rocketed Trudeau to power in Canada. Had he shown some ability to think on his feet, our newly minted Prime Minister's actions would have been unrepresentative of the mentality of the people who cast their ballot for a rock star instead of an experienced leader.

Olga

Not everybody is lucky enough to have an older sister. Older sisters are useful when they're around and mom is too busy doing other things.

Somehow, the responsibility of looking after the younger whelps always falls on the female offspring. Maybe that is what Mother Nature intended. Despite all the brave new attitudes and political incursions into human relationships, it would be logical to think so.

Although I didn't know it at the time, I was a lucky kid. My older sister was in the Sixth Grade when I started school and was a source of endless information, profound wisdom and guidance when I needed it most.

For instance, one bright fall morning, on the way to school, when I first noticed the beautifully colored leaves on the trees and asked her how that happened, she informed me without hesitation that it was Jack Frost who painted them like that.

The picture that immediately sprang to my mind was a little green pixie wearing boots with turned-up toes, flitting about like the hummingbirds I observed in my mom's flower garden in the spring. Clutching a painter's palette board in his left hand, paint brush in the other, he buzzed about busily tinting the leaves on the aspens and willows a bright yellow, those on the currants and dogwoods crimson, and those on the wild cherries a bright scarlet.

The elves, pixies and fairies were always on hand to answer questions people have a hard time with. For instance, they helped my sister to explain the presence of those tiny, perfect, pink, blue and yellow bells that grew in small clumps in the shade of the woodlot at the east end of the garden.

"Fairy gardens," my sister explained.

But it wasn't all about pixies and fairies. Later on, when the teacher at Ft. Pelly School assigned the arithmetic times tables, my older sister took the time to actually drill me on them until I could fire back the right answers almost without thinking. It was a task most kids would have done anything to avoid, but she did it. It was half a century before handy palm-size electronic calculators appeared, and school kids were still required to think and memorize.

Also, there were times when she would have been happier to spend alone with her neighborhood friends without her little brother tagging along, but everyone else in the family was occupied doing something more important. It couldn't have been the most productive way for her to pass her time, but she did it without complaining too much.

I have to assume that my early years would have been a lot less interesting without my older sister's input.

In her 90th year, Olga went to sleep quietly at the Gateway Lodge in Canora and didn't wake up the morning of October 20.

She was a significant presence in the lives of her family, her community and all who knew her. It was a good life, well lived.

                  --30--