D-Day Remembered.



Canadian troops come ashore on Juno Beach.



D-Day means different things to different people, yet history is a generally agreed upon thing. Children are taught the story of those who lay in Flanders Fields, and most adults perceive dangers represented by various ‘isms’ – Imperialism, Fascism, nationalism, communism.

When taken to extremes, when men cannot be checked by reason, force ultimately

becomes the only answer.

In 1914, Canada went to war in joyous outbursts of patriotic fervour.

In 1939, Canadians went to war of necessity. The alternative: enslavement of the

world by Nazis.

In 1950, the country went to war with a new sense of purpose and national identity, (we get this shit out of history books) part of a United Nations effort to ensure that aggression would not pay.

Today our Armed Forces have developed an important role in keeping world peace

when called upon.

To the cynic, Nov 11, Remembrance Day here in Canada, may be about ‘the brave lads who died to keep India British.’

To most it is about recognizing sacrifice and perhaps, in some sense, validation of our own values.

And we all know someone.

Alec Ambroise

Alec Ambroise joined up and served in Europe in the Signal Corps (later transferring to the RCAF).

Would anyone like to be on a troop ship in the mid-Atlantic? He was there. A rumour flashed through the tightly packed men below decks. The Bismarck has broken out and is roaming the seas. The ship makes radical course changes for the next few hours, which comforts no one.

Another uncle, Peter Davidson of Strathroy, was wounded in Italy. The Italian campaign was one of bloody attrition, with house-to-house, hand-to-hand fighting, accentuated by rough terrain and atrocious winter mud.

My great uncle, John Farr, was with the Canadian Third Division, from Normandy to northern Germany at the surrender. His pay book shows his place of birth as Dawn Township. He was a farm boy and likely didn’t finish high school. He was trained as a rifleman and with a light machine gun, also as an artilleryman and signaler.

Yet another uncle, Frank Nalepa of Port Huron, Michigan, stormed ashore on Omaha Beach. It was a bloodbath and the attack nearly failed in the first half-hour. He was lucky, he got through. But 4,649 young American boys became casualties that day on Omaha and Utah beaches.

They are all gone now. When the last Second World War or Korean War veteran passes, it will be the end of an era. It will become a dusty memory, stacked on forgotten library shelves.

I suspect they all came home sadder but wiser, more committed to living life to the fullest.

We take so much for granted. Maybe that's the real message here. We take it a little too much for granted.

If prophecies are self-fulfilling, let us believe that Canadians will continue to serve with honour, integrity and distinction.

This country is a beacon of hope for starving, oppressed masses of humanity in other lands.

Let us remember that too.

Canadian family values are really just corporate values.

90 Sparks St., Ottawa location of the Royal Bank of Canada. (SimonP.)

Family values are really corporate values…

We  live in substantially nastier economic times than our parents did, with all of their high regard for authority and social customs. From 1990 to 2000, families in the top 10 percent income bracket saw incomes increase an average of 14.3 percent.

Families in the middle brackets saw incomes increase by a measly 0.3 percent, and Canadians in the lowest brackets saw their incomes reduced an average of 0.7 percent.

In October 2000, Prime Minister Paul Martin announced, “We must reduce the gap between rich and poor. We have always said this…” In 1990 the average income of the top ten percent was $161,000 and by 2000 it was $185,000. The lowest ten percent’s average income in 1990 was $10,341 and by 2000 it had only increased an average of $80. The top ten percent increased their earnings by over 295 times that of the poor.

In 2004, the top 20 percent of Canadian families earned 42 percent of all market income. The bottom 20 percent of families in this country earned a microscopic 3.6 percent. The 1990s saw an unexpected increase in numbers (of people, not income,) for the low-income groups, even as unemployment fell.

A report issued in November 2006 by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives shows that, “If the rich keep getting richer and the poor getting poorer, Canada will end up more like the U.S. Approximately 65 percent of those polled believed that most of the benefit from Canada’s recent economic growth has gone to the richest Canadians, and hasn’t benefited most Canadians.” The facts bear this out.

The Globe and Mail stated in May 2007, “It is a mark of a healthy society when incomes grow and no one is left behind. The system is working…” Once again the print media in this country reveal their strong ultra right-wing bias and a complete disregard for the truth. They don’t even seem to read their own papers.

In recent years the top income families took home an average of 13 times the income of the lowest ten percent of families. This compares with 5.6 times in Finland and is twice as much as the average in the Nordic countries. In 2004 the gap between rich and poor in this nation was greater than at any other point in our history.

A poll that came out in 2005 reported, “While a record number of Canadians believed that the country was in a period of strong economic growth, the majority say they are not receiving any of the benefits. Only 11 percent of Canadians believe their household income will keep pace with the cost of  living.” (Pollarca/Globe & Mail.)

In The Rich and the Rest of Us, issued by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, economist Armine Yalnizan showed that 40 percent of Ontario families with children saw little or no income growth for the last thirty years.

Countries that do better than us in income distribution include Hungary, Croatia, Slovakia, Mexico, Turkey, Poland and the U.S.

Norway, Sweden, Japan, Austria and others do a much better job than Canada.

Here on the National Newswatch website is an important article on how tax cuts represent a ‘race to the bottom,’ and how the gap between rich and poor is not just widening, but at an accelerating pace.

ING, owner of Intact Financial, & Trafalgar Insurance,
Grey Power, etc. is a global corporation. (MapLab.)

Payoff.

(British Formula Ford. Wiki Commons 3.0)



I want it all. You remember me. I was the kid who wanted to be a professional scuba diver, and a private detective, and a cowboy, or rather, a gunfighter/rancher. I was the kid who wanted that 1967 Triumph Spitfire, for only $350.00 way back when—I was sixteen, and I had my license. I’m the kid who wanted to play ball, and hockey, and God knows what all. I’m the kid who wanted the parents to drop everything and scrape up $1,400.00 for the Jim Russell Racing School.

Yeah, I’m the kid that wanted to be an archaeologist. As I recall, I was going win the Medal of Honour, and I’m the kid who wanted to invent his own religion.

I’m the kid who had tennis lessons, and swimming lessons, and sailing lessons, and Saturdays at the YMCA climbing up ropes and jumping over saddle horses, and I’m the kid with the new red bike.

I’m the kid who had those long summer vacation drives to a campground way off in the middle of nowhere, with little brother, little sister, feuding in the back seat while necks and faces became heated and voices were raised in the front seat. Some kids don’t even get that, when you think of it. Travel does broaden the mind, that much is true.

I’m the kid who sent off, long before the internet, for information on how to stake a gold claim in Northern Ontario, and I’m the kid who wanted to run off and live in a cave and feed myself with a muzzle-loading musket and black powder. I’m the kid who grew up in a house full of books, music, and adults with brains in their heads and some ideas of their own…

I’m the kid who should have taken flying lessons, I suppose. I’m the kid who was actually turned down by the recruiting office—not quite so much demand for cannon fodder back then, and I’m the kid who went off to be a newsman, and I’m the kid who went back to school fifteen times and still never finished. Yeah, I’m the guy who wanted to be a wildlife photographer, and I’m the guy who was planning to buy a sailboat and live on a desert island somewhere. I probably should have taken in a good university or two along the way, but of course I was too busy wasting time.

All that precious time.                                                                                              

I’m the kid who still has that grubby coin collection, and a few stamps. I’ve still got that pocketknife that my Uncle John left behind.

I think at some point that I made up my mind that I would never get married—otherwise, how in the hell was I going to find time to do all these other things? People just laughed. Look who’s laughing now, for surely you people are the ones doing all the interesting stuff, all of the above in fact, whereas I’m still sort of hung up on what might have been. You even got some posterity to show for it.

I suppose at some point we just have to let it go, and get on with what’s left of the rest of our lives.

You want to know something funny? I still want it all. It’s true. I even think I can have it all; I mean, when you think of all them kids around the world who will never have what I have had and enjoyed. I guess that’s maybe the lesson in all of this—shit happens and we make the best of it. Yet the streets really are paved with gold around here. I firmly believe that. It’s a question of what do you want to do?

There’s nothing stopping me from taking flying lessons, or canoeing to Belize for that matter.

It’s a question of how bad you want it, and how hard you’re willing to work for it. It’s a matter of how much you are willing to sacrifice for it. And I guess I sacrifice much for the dreams that I do still cherish.

But I will tell you this: if this really is a business, that is to say the business of writing books, which I have set myself to do, then at some point there had better be a payoff. Because anything else is just nonsense.

“Oh, the vast bulk of writer’s have unreasonable expectations.”

Yeah, they do.

But I don’t.

I think it’s a perfectly reasonable perception, and that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it through thick and thin.

Why are there so few atheists?

 (Henri Rousseau.)



Why are there so few atheists?

Atheism is the toughest religion of all. It demands much of its practitioners, not the least of which is the ditching of sentiment and a linear, logical approach to all things in life. A life which is completely subjective, based on sensations, based on raw emotions, and as some would have it, one that is hallucinatory at best. Some people believe that, or at least they say they do. They never really live that way, do they? Everything is an illusion, they say. My opinion is that therefore they cannot possibly have any knowledge, but that doesn’t hold back the tide of their opinions, does it? It’s not going to hold mine back either.

To be an atheist is to always be alone, without even God for comfort. You think about that for a minute—even the smuggest hypocrite secretly relies on God’s forgiveness, for surely He understands when no one else could. When caught, (in anything,) they hang their head in shame.

Surely they must believe at that exact moment in time. Otherwise what are you ashamed of?

Partly because of its intellectual rigour, and possibly because it claims no higher source of knowledge, law or even succor, detractors would state that atheism is completely amoral and therefore without worth. The fact is that the sacrifices demanded of the individual atheist are many. Some of them are quite onerous.

Think of a lifestyle with no Halloween, no Easter, no Christmas. Think of a belief system with no angels, no demons, no vampires, no cupids, no goblins, no spirits and no ghosts. Think of a belief system that pays no credit to miracles, accepts no divine intervention, no revelation, and has no dogma. It has no ritual, no candles and no prayers, no hymnology, no great body of organ music, no vast literature of analysis and criticism. It has no sects, no cults and no schisms—and it is my belief that these are vital to the survival and growth of any religion. We have no one to point a finger at and say, ‘This is wrong, this is immoral, this is evil, this is unjust.” We have nothing to go on and nothing to back us up.

It is a system with no priests, no interpreters, and no obscure and irrational points of crossover into another realm. We have no Heaven, no Hell. No Purgatory. No resurrection. No redemption. No sin, no guilt, not even the original kind where billions as yet unborn must pay the price of future mental slavery because of a mistake long in the past in some mystical garden.

We have no cathedrals, ladies and gentlemen. We have no mythology, no pantheon.

No cutesy fucking icons.

Think of a mind-set where empirical facts rule and the demands of the majority don’t matter because factuality, empiricism, is not a democracy, and doesn’t rely on mass opinions for its validity. Think of a belief system which doesn’t pay any heed to prejudice, sugar-coats nothing, and panders to nobody.

Atheism has no fortune cookies, no gambler’s luck and no horoscope. There are no mediums, no prophets, no visions, no speaking in tongues. There is no smoke, no incense, no magic incantations. We have no tenets of social control or persuasion. Nothing.

It is not for the masses. It promises nothing to its practitioners, and justifies nothing for its abusers. Atheism excuses no prejudice and allows for no form of discrimination which can’t be justified by some arithmetical measurement from some verifiable factual baseline.

Atheism conducts no seances, communes with no dead spirits, and accepts no superstitious folklore bearing glad tidings of future pie in the sky. It worships no ancestors. If atheism can be called a religion, which it really isn’t, it is one that has none of the pretty trappings, no spooky ceremonies, no symbols, no decorative icons on the wall that the ignorance of the perfumed masses demand and have come to expect. We have no costumes and no robes. We have no special shoes.

In a world where the Disney acquisition of Lucasfilm is seen as worthy of comment by the most popular pundits, atheism doesn’t have much to offer except to say that tales where good always triumphs over evil are a bit thin on the intellectual meat and defy the reality on the ground.

What will the Disney acquisition of Lucasfilm do for science fiction? Nothing. Nothing at all.

But of course that isn’t their purpose.

It is why folks take the kiddies to the next summer blockbuster film, and woe betide those who don’t, for their children are deprived of the most basic element in their education—a belief system which accepts, accommodates or even demands the fantastical. We can even justify it.

We are stimulating the children’s ‘imaginations.’

You will always do better by telling people what they want to hear. And who do those children grow into?

When grown men can’t wait to go see the warm and fuzzy Koogly-wooblies save Oscar the Penguin from The Grinch who stole Halloween from the Big Pumpkin, and are willing to spend hundreds of dollars to do it, an atheist turns away with a shudder of revulsion, and if not careful, gets trampled in the stampede of mouths, eyes and stomachs.

There but for the grace of wit and knowledge go I…what else can I say?

Some of the words, some of the basic concepts we need to express ourselves haven’t even been properly invented yet.

There is much work yet to be done. No one among us can say who is fit to lead, or even whether it’s strictly necessary. But holy crap, there’s just no way I’m going to follow.

I don’t rule out the possibility of love. If we have one rule, it would be tolerance, which implies a kind of forgiveness. What’s lacking is condemnation and retribution, a remarkable oversight by any standard. It’s a hard sell, as you can imagine.

http://i.imgur.com/U2R35.png

http://i.imgur.com/U2R35.png

Also, what he said: (Guardian, U.K.)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/dec/24/christmas-atheists

Marketing image progress.

I'm working on this marketing image for an upcoming project, which is bass-ackwards compared to the usual process. This one's not quite right, but we're getting close.

Soon I can format the story, which is 6,000 words, and get an ISBN to go with it.

This story will be out by December 1, 2012 on Amazon, B & N, Kobo, Diesel Books, Sony, etc, although it takes some time to filter down through the Smashwords distribution channels.

A science-fiction allegory of the writing life, the story asks the question, 'How much of who we are is wrapped up in what we know?'


Trapped in the game space, they don't even know their names, and a piece of knowledge may be worth killing for.

Someone will have to make the experiment.

New Image: 'The Paranoid Cat and other tales.'

(This is the new marketing image for 'The Paranoid Cat and other tales,' but I'm having trouble loading it to Smashwords.)



Marketing Images.

We're working on some new marketing images.

This is a rough idea of what they will be like.

This may take another day or two.











'Core Values.'










...and below, 'Heaven is too far away,' the first is horror and the second is a WW I memoir of aerial combat and the hunt for the Red Baron.