Active Alert World

End of this Blog (Concentrating Efforts Elsewhere)

2008-10-26T13:17:00.000-06:00

When I started this blogging thing I thought that I would keep the different sizes of my personality in different blogs. (Just like I once had several web sites for different purposes). Instead I am reverting to just two blogs.
If you want to keep track of me in the future then please visit:

ActiveAlert.blogspot.com
and
ActiveAlertTravel.blogspot.com

Flatlanders attempt to chew gum and walk at the same time

2008-09-27T14:59:00.000-06:00

Good article by Michael Hirsh on A Nation of "Flatlanders" at Truthout.org. He writes about the apparent inability of the United States and its politicians to multi-task and work on more than one problem at the same time.

the responsibility of the person in the Oval Office is to oversee, day by day, a vast, multidimensional international system, one in which economic, security and social problems are all intertwined and must be balanced against each other. It is a mind-bogglingly complex job, the hardest task in the world.

After ranting about inability of Palin / McCain he mentions that for Obama "until his campaign, he's never run an organization bigger than the Harvard Law Review or his Senate office." The whole country has suddenly lurched from concentrating on Iraq to doing a massive bailout. No one seems capable of concentrating on two problems at the same time.

The smartest people on Wall Street and in Washington know that the real targets of these bailouts are not the U.S. investment banks and insurance companies, and the intended beneficiary is not the U.S. financial system per se. They are the foreign funds, the "sovereign wealth funds," that keep America's financial system afloat by giving us the money fixes that allow us to continue our rampant consumerism at zero savings rates. Unless these funds get reassurance, the great game is over. So is our long period of growth and power.

This made me think about the idea that many -- including one or two of my friends -- have that the Gulf Arabs are all screaming around in their air-conditioned Hummers and Range Rovers while good hard-working Americans are lining up to buy $4 gasoline for their Ford pickups and Dodge minvans. Actually things are far from that simple.

Yes, I agree that it is outrageous that there are so many desert dwellers living in incredible luxury while teaming populations just across the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea are fighting for scraps and suffering from every disease know to man. But certainly that is only a few degrees worse than the fat North Americans living off the work of the teaming masses across both the Rio Grande and the Pacific Ocean.

Americans have no more inherent right to live in luxury than Arabians do. The USA does have great intellectual capital but recent events hardly prove that population in general has great intelligence or knowledge. The US is now a net importer of oil and most natural resources. So how can they claim to have a natural right to superior wealth and standard of living. Why should the world bail them out? Of course as a Canadian observer I should hardly claim superiority over the population to the south.

I hardly have a superior preferred share claim on wealth and luxury myself. (I managed to spend $2000 on gas for my Hyundai this past summer). I am just a Cassandra pointing out an example of wrong thinking. If I ever get some good ideas how to change things for the better I will be glad to happily pass them along without charge.

Henry A Wallace and Thomas E Dewey

2008-08-11T15:36:00.000-06:00

I was reading some Internet articles on picking VP candidates when I stumbled across the career of Henry A Wallace. He was some interesting dude. Republican farmer and then a Democrat Secretary of Agriculture. Later he was American Vice President from 1941 to 1945.

Where it got interesting is when you read of his disciple-like status with a very strange Nicholas Roerich; Wallace's apparent love of Communism in the late 1940s; and his bid for election with the Progressive Party in 1948. According to Wikipedia, his platform advocated an end to segregation, full voting rights for blacks, and universal government health insurance. Imagine what things he might have tried if he had been VP when Roosevelt died in 1945!

One of the most amazing things about Henry Wallace was that he apparently admitted that he had made mistakes! In the September 2, 1952 issue of This Week Magazine of the New York Herald-Tribune, he wrote an article titled Where I was Wrong. That must be an almost unique occurrence in the history of American politicians and I will try and find down a copy.

I was partly intrigued since last year I read an interesting book titled Journey to the Far Pacific by Thomas E Dewey. It is a less than perfect but reasonably perceptive analysis of Dewey's visit to East Asia in 1952. Until I read the book the only thing I knew about Dewey was the famous headlines when Truman beat him in the November 1949 presidential election.

The book showed a progressive thinker who also just happened to be -- like Henry Wallace -- an upstate New York Republican farmer. This all brought to my mind how some of history's losers had the possibility of greatness within. (Of course these same people also had the possibility of being complete raving loonies!) It shows how even the American Republican party has occasionally put forth leaders with a potential for greatness. (So why have they gone so wrong lately?)

Which version of history? People and history forgotten?

2008-06-28T18:48:00.000-06:00

I have been studying for some history courses the last few months.

It has been fascinating discovering the way that events are filtered through the fog of history. We look at something like the civilization of the Minoans on Crete. As far as I can figure out there is almost no decipherable records on these these guys.

Even the name of this civilization is unknown. Old Arthur Evans -- the man who dug up Knossos and claimed all the credit of discovery -- really seemed to be winging it a lot of the time. He knew that the darn thing was a palace so spent a lot of time and money making everything fit with his imagination. He was a classic scholar, he had read of the Minotaur and sure enough this place had a few bulls in prominent places. So, presto, this just had to be the labyrinth and the culture was named after Minos. (As one web site puts it, at least he wasn't as bad as the other guy).

Another mystery civilization that I had not heard of until recently was the Srivajaya. This is an entire civilization where any kind of description, even at 'Srivajaya Totally Explained'[Link lost], includes the liberal use of words such as postulated, forgotten and suspected. Basically they are basing the whole civilization on a half dozen references to places named Sanfoqi, Yavadesh and Javadeh. My photo shows the coast of Sumatra near the equator crosses the East Coast. Or at least as close as I could figure it when we sailed by in 1975.

So my point is that if we can't be sure that an entire civilization with thousands of people actually existed then how much harder is it to be exact in our knowledge of s single object or person. I have also been studying some art history. There sure seems to be a lot of artists who are named 'Master' whatever after their most famous works or location of where they worked.

I have been more museums and art galleries than most people so how could I have missed out on someone like Jan van Eyck, as seen at Britain's National Gallery, or Rogier van der Weyden as seen at the Prado Museum. Sure I love Rembrandt and Vermeer but there were men painting wonderful painting, just as advanced in technique and style, in the same general area, almost two hundred years earlier. The big difference is that we know a lot more about the personal stories of Vermeer and Rembrandt. Just because an artist's personal life is a big blank though does not mean that he should be forgotten and ignored.

I was joking with a friend a few days ago about alien visitations. Erich von Däniken was famous for writing that alien assistance was necessary to build the Egyptian pyramids. But since they were apparently at least partially made of concrete then alien or divine intervention was hardly required. But I think that I just discovered something that is completely impossible to create unless you have a big microscope and some kind of alien photocopier.

If you look at this book hidden in New York's Metropolitan Museum and click on the enlargement you will see a near full size image. The pages are only 3 1/2 inches high and I refuse to believe that anyone without superhuman abilities could have actually painted this in the 14th century!
What do you think? Could this have been done by a Medieval human being?

So in conclusion, there are a lot of academics and a lot of students writing complete drivel based on conjecture and little evidence. If we can't explain the creation of a simple prayer book by anything other than divine or alien intervention, and if a complete civilization can be nearly forgotten, then how can we believe that our perception of the historical truth of anything else is not complete fabrication and conjecture?

Gun culture, Virginia Tech and many questions

2007-04-17T08:42:00.000-06:00

Apparently the student gunman at Virginia Tech was from South Korea. Too bad that poor ignorant country doesn't have something like the wonderful American gun culture and the Second Amendment.

The silly idiot never had the benefit of childhood target gun classes. He never went deer hunting with his dad. He had probably hadn't even been to a gun show before arriving in Virginia! So he just fell apart when he found freedom in the US of A. Too bad that his parents didn't educate him in the proper responsible use of modern weaponry. And of course, if all the students were issued mandatory guns and NRA memberships and gun classes then he would have been gunned by the time he could have fired the second shot!

If that happened he would have been just another statistic instead the holder of a record that demented people will try to beat for decades to come. Also too bad that the ignorant cops in Virginia didn't learn the lessons of the shooting at Columbine and just last year at Dawson College in Montreal. After two people are shot in mysterious circumstances did they shut the campus down or send out warnings or storm the place?

No they calmly waited two hours until the students crowded their halls of learning to await their fate. Were the police ignorant or just complacent? Perhaps two on-campus killings is no big thing in Virginia so they felt no reason to panic. They just thought that it was a domestic dispute and therefore nothing to worry about. Perhaps they felt that some student was just expressing his constitutional rights to free speech and to bear arms. I sometimes find it hard to believe that all these people live in the same world as I do.

Apparently all the people who could have stopped this tragedy had some sense and intelligence and training before things started. So how could things have gone so horribly wrong?

Vancouver? All that glitters is not gold but some really is!

2007-04-15T13:50:00.001-06:00

A friend wrote to ask about Vancouver's reputation for stock scams. David Baines has been writing these stories in the local press for years. I started to write a short reply which just grew and then got revised and partially deleted and then rewritten. This essay is the result.

Vancouver Mining Companies

There are a number of historical reasons for these things to get hung on Vancouver's collective neck. The Colony of British Columbia (aka BC) was founded in the days of the 1858 BC gold rush. Both Vancouver and Seattle first prospered in the effort to supply the miners rushing to the 1898 Yukon gold strikes. Since it takes millions or billions to explore and develop a mine, it was only natural that the Vancouver stock market evolved into a world centre for small exploration companies. This is still true today.

There are many small mining companies exploring and operating in places like Peru and New Guinea that are based and financed from Vancouver. As they get larger and more established many of these companies move to the Toronto exchange. There have been many head office moves, corporate sellouts and company mergers in the last few decades. Many more large mining companies are based in places like Toronto and London than in Vancouver.

Forestry and fishing are also key BC resources in the local economy but have never required financing to the same extent. It is much easier to set up a shake mill or buy a local fishing boat than build an operating mine or smelter. Eventually in the nineties the Vancouver Stock Exchange closed down its trading floor, merged with the Alberta exchange and was swallowed up by the much larger Toronto Stock Exchange. Many of the smaller exploration companies still operate on the Toronto Venture Exchange subsidiary.

Vancouver Penny Stocks

All those brokers and traders working in Vancouver weren't quite ready to leave the Vancouver beaches to live in Ontario mining towns. After the mining promoters got educated in pumping and dumping mining stocks it was just a short step to using the same skills on lottery ticket scams and Internet promotions. Some turned their skills to the promoting and plugging and dumping on every profitable scheme that came their way. Just as California invented Pets.com and Calgary invented Bre-X Mining, I am afraid that many traders in Vancouver have had a fun decade operating lottery scams and pumping penny stocks.
Small neighbourhood stores here still feature the weekly Northern Miner right between the daily Racing Form and the Western Investor.

The local population

Vancouver is still close to the wilderness in many ways. One can walk across a bridge from the city centre and within a few hours find wild deer, coyotes, bears and some of the world's tallest trees.

This is the Terminal City where adventurous misfits end up. It is a new place only founded in 1886. It is not so strange that the people who have drifted here from "back east" or across the Pacific are more likely to include more rogues and scammers than the crowd of clerks and farmers that remained at home.
The BC drug culture must be part of this story. For many reasons there has been a long local tradition of tolerance for human idiosyncrasies and foibles. When you scratch the surface veneer of many a local law firm, real estate agency or car dealership you are likely to find a lot of drug money sloshing around. What better way to launder some of that money but to put it to work on some sort of shady promotion?

BC Politics and oversight

British Columbia has had some colourful politics. While we have a strong tradition of unionism and socialism we also have a slightly stronger right-wing political tradition. The wacky Social Credit party ruled this place for more than thirty years o my life. The Bennetts and Vander Zalms rarely saw a big project or big business that they did not love and appreciate. If that meant skipping a few steps in the rules for financing or stock market oversight that was rarely a problem.

In the Socred years both the powerful BC Forestry Minister and the Vancouver Police Chief were convicted of bribery. (The local double speak is interesting. The BC Social Credit movement was anything but socialist and the current BC Liberal government is far from liberal). Knowing something of provincial politics is important when looking at stock market oversight.

In many ways the Canadian provinces have a much stronger role in regulating the economy than the American states or even European Common Market members do. The Canadian provinces retain full ownership and regulation power over all onshore mineral and forestry resources. While the federal government creates criminal law, the provinces regulate stock markets, enforce the criminal law and set civil law regulations. We have the absurd situation where a bank or insurance company that operates country-wide has to follow 13 sets of regulations.

Gold among the dross

Finally I wanted to point out that not everything that glitters is Fool's Gold. Occasionally the gleam leads to true wealth. Two of the world's biggest mining companies, GoldCorp and Teck Cominco, still have BC headquarters. Some of those pink sheet and OTC stock companies are legitimate and some of them will lead to wealthy investors. The old rules still apply. Diversify your investments and if something is too good to be true it probably ain't.

While investigating this blog I came across a company named Klondike Gold. (I am certainly not recommending this stock and I have certainly not evaluated its financial prospects at this time. The company president used to work with my father decades ago).
My heart did beat faster as I read the names in the story and interview. Any Canadian's heart should beat a little faster when he reads about the Eldorado stake, the Sullivan Mine and Hemlo Gold. My intellect knows my investments should all go into steady and boring things like big cap mutual funds but the romance of striking it rich in the next gold rush remains close to my western Canadian soul. I am still just a little beguiled at the prospect of the next big discovery.

The Big Bee Story

2007-04-15T08:22:00.000-06:00

This report on the possible connection between cell phones usage and the drastic dying off of honey bee hives might turn out to be the big story of 2007. It will be interesting to see what happens to the stock of phone companies and food producers in the next few weeks. Honey bees are important for a lot more than pollinating flowers.

Quoting from ebeehoney.com I see that:
Almonds, apples, avocados, blueberries, cantaloupes, cherries, cranberries, cucumbers, sunflowers, watermelon and many other crops all rely on honey bees for pollination. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that about one-third of the human diet is derived from insect-pollinated plants and that the honey bee is responsible for 80 percent of this pollination.

Of course if this bee / electricity connection is proven, then it will put a lot of other human animal interactions in sharper focus. If our electrical and radio emissions are so harmful to bees why would they not be as equally damaging to sharks, whales, tadpoles, spiders and young children?

If this really is an electrical phenomena, then the bees should be surviving better in places like Alberta where there there is a relatively lower intensity of cell phones. (Alberta is the third biggest honey producer in North America). Many of the hives in the north are transported south to coastal BC each fall and returned in the spring. In addition thousands of queen bees are imported each spring from California. All this points to yet another extreme example of world reliance on species monoculture. (The photo shows one of the vast Alberta canola fields that are pollinated by bees).

As I have written elsewhere, it is simply not enough to save the baby seals. The earth is a global system and once mankind started tinkering with one species in isolation they became responsible for the whole shebang.

[April 18, 2007 Update: Here is an interesting relevant article.]

Dog and Cat Food: 95 friggin brands!?

2007-04-05T19:58:00.000-06:00

Who'd a thunk it?
I knew that there were companies who manufacture and sell several brands out of the same factory. When you buy the house brand from Safeway or Kroger's the food does not come from a Safeway or Kroger's factory. But I was astounded that 53 brands of dog food and 42 brands of cat food could come out of just one humongous multi-national factory.

So why does anyone buy the so-called better brands?
Why on earth would we buy Alpo or Nutro Max when the Complements or Foodtown pet food is apparently made on exactly the same machine and with exactly the same ingredients? And of course why would anyone at all buy Pepsi or Coke when the house brand comes out of the same factory with the same ingredients? And do you really think that one hand bag is worth a thousand times another simply because someone named Paris or Brittany prefers the ridiculously expensive version?

And what the heck is wheat gluten?
And why on earth would we be buying it from China? I thought that America was exporting food to Asia. I thought that China was making noodles and buns from Canadian Durham wheat. Apparently a portion of that flour is processed, mixed with as much as 6% melamine and shipped back to the USA for dog food. Outrageous!
The part that no-one wants to think about. Do you really think that in all of China this was the only batch of wheat gluten mixed with melamine? Apparently the shipment responsible for the animal deaths comes from one exporter; and apparently that one company (Xuzhou Anying) makes something like 10,000 tons a year and ships about 1 percent back to North America. It is only common sense that something stinks in China.
I am sure when the dust all settles on this story we will find that there was thousands of tons of contaminated food sold in China for humans. I would also be astounded if the contamination only happened in one batch last winter. Luckily for me and my pet i always thought that the chunks and gravy wet dog foods always seemed like an expensive way to buy water and gravy. So I have never fed my dog that crap. So far at least I am thankful that he is healthy. But I will continue to wonder what other food contaminations is going on. A hundred years after Upton Sinclair wrote his discoveries and exposures apparently there is a lot being adulterated and hidden from public view.

Knut cuteness and global fish stocks

2007-03-24T09:20:00.000-06:00

Knut Cuteness
Well here I am back at "Active Alert World". I have started several blogs and this one was designed for world events, news and rants. So why am I writing about Knut?

Isn't he so cute!!!! Kawaii!!! (As they say in Japan).
Knut is the adorable fluffy little CUTE polar bear born into a zoo in Berlin. Have you ever seen anything so adorable?

Out here on the west coast of Canada though, this story raises a lot of unsettling thoughts. What about all the polar bears -- and other creatures of this planet -- that just are not quite so cuddly? Adult polar bears are lean mean predatory killing machines. Apparently they are the only Arctic creature that will actively hunt humans. That is nothing strange or artificial. It is just the way that they were born and it is simply the niche that they fill in Arctic ecology.

They are also social creatures used to covering rather large territories. According to the news reports, Knut the Cute was rejected by his mother and hand-raised by human zoo keepers. Seems like a rather sad existence to me. He certainly can't be reintroduced into the wild again and his best future prospect is to live in a concrete zoo enclosure padding back and forth begging for peanuts. (The bear in my picture once lived in the Vancouver Zoo).

Yes the world population of polar bears is shrinking; and yes we should be controlling hunting and repairing the climate; but I hardly see where all this effort in hand rearing such a wild polar bear will actually help the wild population.

Seal Cuteness
As a Canadian that of course brings me back to the perpetual question baby seals. Of course they are cute and of course it is nasty and a dirty business to harvest them on the St. Lawrence ice flows. But please don't condemn the hunt simply because baby seals are cute! If I read that someone wants to stop all animal hunting for food; or if another wants to stop all use of animal fur; then I see these like sincere rally cries. But please don't pick or choose your targets according to their state of cuteness.

Is a cod cute?
Help save the Harp Seal! But also while you are at it:
Let us save Salamanders, Komodo Dragons and the Atlantic Cod.
In any case, humans have already intruded into all parts of the world's ecology.
We have entered an era of unintended consequences I am afraid. Once we decimated the commercial cod fishery the force of commerce caused the trawlers and draggers of the oceans to seek out the toothfish, dogfish, rockfish and sablefish of the seas to sell as Chilean Sea Bass, Red Snapper and Black Cod.
Of course -- this is the unintended consequences bit -- decimating those mid-sized fish stocks will likely lead to a collapse of all those larger prey animals such as seals, walrus, sharks and killer whales that depend on those fish species for food.

And what do polar bears eat?
Well, when they are not seeking out a tasty Inuit snack, their favourite food is the lowly harbour seal or perhaps a baby walrus or two.

So I am not pleading for anyone to ignore Knut -- he really is CUTE! -- but I do plead for people to realize that ecology is about a total environment and interplay of species. It is simply not enough to save cute creatures without saving all the wallflowers species -- such as squid, sharks and eels -- that both feed and prey upon the cute ones.

The entire world is now a zoological park
We live in a small place now. There are only a limited number of top level carnivorous species, there are only a limited number of abundant food species and the amount of rotifers, shrimp and krill for them all to eat is also limited. We can't just worry about the ecology of a few species selected for cuteness and expect all the others to somehow get survive on their own. Ecology means the science of relationships and all those tiny relationships need preservation.

Remembrance - Poppies / Matilda

2006-11-11T09:17:00.000-06:00

This morning I read a good discussion of the poem In Flanders Fields at the Tyee Web site. That web site is a good independent voice of news in BC. The article does a good job of putting this all just so Canadian an icon in perspective.
The photo on the left shows my maternal grandfather John Gibson in his WWI sergeant's uniform of the York and Simcoe Foresters. (Actually the York part of this name is a bit of a puzzle. On his attestation papers the stamp says that he joined the Y & S Foresters Construction. I read somewhere that was York and Simcoe but can't find any such reference on the web. There was a 35th Regiment (Simcoe Foresters) which is probably the same thing.
John Gibson joined just in time for the autumn campaign in Flanders and northern France). He survived and lived for many years after the war. The picture on the right shows Bert Belcher who would have been my mother's uncle if he had survived the war. He joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force in October 1915 but never made it out of Canada. He was buried in Saskatoon in 1916.
In some ways the world is still feeling the effects of those battles. The battles in Turkey and the empire partitions in the Middle East were direct contributions to the current turmoil in that area. The Balkanization of the Balkans took hold during the Great War. And the repatriations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles were direct causes of Germany's need to regain power in WWII.
At that same Tyee web page I found a reference to the moving song by Eric Bogle named The Band Played Waltzing Matilda. Even with all my time in Australia I had missed that one. The lyrics are quite moving. WWI was known as the war to end all wars but it ended little. Yes, I do believe in peace but the world is a tough place and sometimes we have to stand up for what we believe in.

It could be worse - Amiel & Conrad Black

2006-10-29T21:02:00.000-06:00

I spent some time today reading the trashy gossip about Barbara Amiel and Conrad Black in the TimesOnline edition. Ouch. Great story. Nothing like getting all your dirty laundry and old writings aired in public. They even published a story entitled Maneating her Way Up that details the steps that Barbara made on her smitten lovers on the way to the top. The articles are based on a new book Outrageous Fortune: The Rise and Ruin of Conrad and Lady Black by Tom Bower. Looks like a doozie to me.

Of course things could be worse for Canada's ex-power couple. Instead of being prominently spread naked -- in words at least -- in something sleazy like one of those gossip columns that she used to write in the old Toronto Sun instead of something respectable like the Times. (I hope that they both appreciate getting so much free publicity in what has been the English newspaper of record for more than 2 centuries). I am sure that teams of lawyers must have gone over every word of the story and the book; but I imagine that Mr. Murdoch must be really pissed off to put some much emphasis in his newspapers to the downfall of Lord Black of Cross Harbour. Too bad that we can't get such controversial news in the Canadian press. Our libel laws are too liberal and privacy laws too strict. They make it nearly impossible to get the truth about our national oligarchy out to a national audience.

Rogers Communications publishes Maclean's which is Canada's only national news magazine. Their favourite columnist? Barbara Amiel. What is the chance that they will give prominence to this story and this book? Here where I live in the Vancouver area, news ownership is even more monopolistic than normal even in Canada. CanWest Global owns not only the most watched source of television News but also both daily Vancouver newspapers.

Now they pass out free morning newspapers and have the audacity to call their main web site Canada.com! At least on the web we have some choice. I like the Tyee web site for some balanced BC opinions. Vancouver's Georgia Straight used to be quite outrageous but these days its political expose of the month is splashed on the front page but most of the other pages could be published just as well in the Langley Times or the Tri-City News. I am afraid that advertising for prostitution 'escort' agencies is hardly likely to shake the business establishment nowadays.

Afghanistan travels and arguments

2006-10-21T07:33:00.000-06:00

I am one of the lucky few travellers who has visited the great tourist attractions of Afghanistan. I am not joking. Some of the finest scenery on this planet is found in the mountainous regions of Central Asia. I have photos and words at my Afghan Travelogue page. It is probably not a coincidence that tribalism, factionalism and Muslim fanaticism have all prospered in these remote mountain valleys. There are many places to hide and one needs a strong moral belief system and strong tribal group to survive. History and the weather have ensured that individualists have a great disadvantage in Central Asia.

I recently came across the letter of a Canadian soldier written as he headed off to Afghanistan. I find his arguments are convincing and written well. He wishes to be discrete so lets call him 'MTS':

Heading out for my deployment to Kandahar in a couple of days; but before I go I just wanted to get a few things off my chest that have bothered me as I get so many "take care, stay safe" phone calls and farewells. For all of you who know me know I don't always speak up but this time I think I will, just to enlighten you on what my goals for this next six month really are. They in fact go well beyond the next six months and will continue to develop over the next generation.

For my friends who have already served over there, I'm proud to be following in your footsteps ( just hope I don't muck em up ). Its taken me some time to figure out what I wanted to say but here goes: Disagree or not - this is how I feel, I hope it is respected. When people say to me they support our troops but don't think we should be there, it really hurts me... if they understood completely why Canada was chosen to go over there and knew the history of Afghanistan they would see the honour that goes with such a mission. Yes our countrymen love their "peacekeepers" but we got to be that way only by doing mission like these.

We as a country were losing face in the eyes of NATO by previous failed missions. Bosnia was a relative success (thanks in a large part to Canadian troops) and Afghanistan is another arena were other countries have balked at responsibility for (the old we won't fight America's war). But is it really just their war? Look at the countries that have had terrorist acts targeted towards them; Spain, England, France, Australia of course the USA and others in just the past 2 yrs. Its simply amazing that Canada has not had a successful attack targeted towards us. Some tried but were caught (the group of 17 in Toronto).

They live amongst us here whether we know it or even like it but its true... they do. They riot over cartoons in the newspapers. Our country was built on the very essence of respect between our cultural differences. If we can show that our country actually cares, and is willing to bear the burden of loss and help them re-build; then maybe just maybe the extremist that are out there will think differently on Canada as opposed to how they view the rest of the western world. I think America has been given a bum rap. We can live next door to them without any real problems. That very trust is which I hope countries like the ones we serve in will someday understand. This is my hope. No I don't expect them to live the way we do over here.. it won't happen, nor will a government operate exactly the way ours does.

However if it is good for them, in their way, done by their people - that is all we are trying to do for them. We'll do the lions share of the work, allowing the Afghan Army & Government to take credit and then they win, their people can trust them and support them, they can then police themselves under their own Islamic laws, they can become self sufficient... then our guys can come home. It will be 20 yrs or more for that country to right itself. It is difficult to comprehend an Islamic society based on western idealism of democracy, but it could happen. If it is not done there (Khandahar is the birthplace of Islam in Europe), then the hatred they have for the rest of the non Islamic world will spread within their culture and my children (and yours) will grow up living in fear due their hatred (hence the buzzword known as Terrorism).

My kids may never know what the world was like in the days before 9/11. Upscale security, DNA documentation, restricted travel areas in the world... what will it be like for them? But can what our soldiers do over there now, ensure that the Canadian flag they will wear on their backpacks be respected all over the world in their future? I certainly hope so. Sure the army is a job that puts food on my family's table, but it is also the very backbone for me to hold my head up high when the eyes of the world are upon us. This is what I strive to be a part of, with hopes that my children will someday understand. I hope that you all too understand why I do what I do. You are all my friends. See you in six months. It's late, I'm tired and my brain is overworked right now I'm goin to bed. Just wanted to let everyone know how I'm feeling.

I hope that we hear more from MTS. Though I am against using armies for the sake of intimidation; talking is not always enough. The world is shrinking and Kandahar is part of my backyard.

[2020 Note: I have no idea where I got that letter from. I wonder what happened to MTS]

A mild preliminary rant

2006-10-14T22:23:00.000-06:00

This is the place where I will put my rants and comments on the final years of the planet called Earth. Final years? Yes, I am not predicting the end of life as we know it in my lifetime or the next but that is certainly a possibility; and if human life is still around In The Year 2525, it likely will be in a form beyond our recognition. Politics, economics and human frailties will be found on this blog.