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jbg

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  1. Gordon Lightfoot - November 17, 1938 to May 1, 2023 - Rest in peace. One of the most talented singer-songwriters that ever walked the face of the earth, picked up a guitar or sat down at the piano. With a breathtaking range of geography of his songs, from Canadian Railroad Trilogy to Christian Island to Seven Island Suite to Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, his songs range "all the way to Biscayne Bay," over the Canada and the U.S. Gordon Lightfoot personified Canada. He lived, sang and breathed the land, but also had his U.S. life. I guess he had Plans of His Own: [MEDIA=youtube]GANfVbHOutw[/MEDIA] His lyrics show his frightening intelligence. Some of them personify values and friendship and love, even if like all people he could not always live those values. At least he tried and, unlike many other musicians of that era did clean himself up. May you, to quote Christian Island, always be "sailing on a summer wind, with whiskers on your chin."
  2. I basically agree. I would assume most Covid spread is asymptomatic. If you are vaccinated your chances of getting seriously ill are almost nil (gee with that line I could be a poet). People don't need lockdowns to keep them alive. As the Rascals said in their 1967 or 1968 hit "all the world over so easy to see, people everywhere just want to be free, listen to you listen that's the way it should be, peace in the valley people got to be free...."
  3. The really scary thing is that people are willing to impose restrictions on others that they won't obey. Man is a social animal. Man also aspires to a better way of life. You cannot, simply put, force people to make sacrifices unless absolutely necessary. And not for hypothetical problems. In the case of Covid, when the leaders were gallivanting around without fear, they were showing that the "rules were for thee, and not for me." Ditto, with private plane travel to global warming confabs.
  4. Back in the 1970's they wanted to blacken Arctic ice to fight cooling.
  5. The truckers' demonstration started over the vaccination issue. I happen to be pro-vaxx. It later embraced lockdowns and masking. I am with the truckers on lockdowns and masking. To me, vaccinations are 30 minute affairs, three times over a five or six month period. I'm fine with that. I'm not fine over continuing dictatorial powers and restrictions.
  6. Nobody, however, made these rules G-d. As Myata said in Post 143 (link): The governments should be made to remember that they work for us. We don't work for them. The Covid emergency seems to have given government leaders the world around the belief that they could invoke the talisman "Covid" and order everyone around.
  7. The movie and then the Broadway show Network featured the line "I'm mad as h**l and I'm not going to take it any more. I think people are tired of lockdowns and restrictions. I don't know if anyone has made this parallel, but there on May 23, 2020 there were riots in Lansing, Michigan. Maybe this is just coincidence but that was when the dam broke and phased reopenings of life were announced for many "blue" states (I know in Canada "blue" is color-coded to Conservative). I do not expect the Ottawa government to visibly cave, but I predict the restrictions will rapidly fall. People have a limited tolerance for boring, depressing life in a bubble.
  8. Now I am reading The Klondike Fever: The Life and Death of the Last Great Gold Rush by Pierre Berton. To be continued when I finish.
  9. I believe that the provincial and federal governments will not explicitly cave to the trucker's demands. I suspect that the dam will break towards a return to normalcy. This is not confined to the far-right. People don't like living this way.
  10. I don't see anything but theater in those approaches.
  11. I recently finished reading Second Serve by Renee Richards and John Ames. I thought this book would give me some good tennis tips, such as how to improve my second serve. Only trouble is that Renee Richards, formerly Dick Raskind is a "leftie." Only kidding. I knew it wasn't a sports-coaching book though she did coach Martina Navratilova. I found this book in my beloved and late father-in-law's library. My father-in-law was his classmate and tennis-teammate at Yale, and close lifelong friend. Dr. Richards has other deep and abiding ties to my family. The book is definitely "R" if not "X" rated. Reading parts of the book is tinged with the fascination of driving past a multi-car pileup. That being said, the only way the book could make its point was to be brutally straightforward. Dr. Richards describes rather graphically her adventures with gender confusion, which were not aided by certain people in her family. Dick Raskind decided a fair amount of time that he would be best served by changing genders. He had gone through years of fruitless therapy, with doctors who basically tried to convince him to, in short form, forget about his problems. Despite those problems, he had risen to great accomplishments in both the medical and athletic fields as a male. Forgetting about a deep-seated confusion, apparently, is easier said than done. Though the book ends in 1981 (she continues to practice medicine at age 87), about six years after the gender-changing surgery, the book gives tantalizing hints of a better, more satisfying future. This book is definitely worth reading.
  12. Politician love to virtue-signal with someone else's money.
  13. 1) Canada had "responsible government" and not dominion status. That would wait until July 1, 1867; and 2) One of the reasons Britain was eager to declare Canada independent was the willingness of Canadian companies to trade with a renegade republic, the Confederacy.
  14. I'll start. Even though I'm a "Yank" I read my share of "Canadian content." I just finished reading the book, The Great Lone Land, by William Francis Butler, was a thrill to read. I was led to this book by The Impossible Railway: The Building of the Canadian Pacific, by Pierre Berton. The Burton book relied extensively on The Great Loan Land's description of pre-railroad conditions. Or, to quote Gordon Lightfoot, "There was a time in this fair land when the railroad did not run, when the wild majestic mountains stood alone against the sun, Long before the white man and long before the wheel, when the green dark forest was too silent to be real." This book describes a world that is almost unreal; deeply isolated, with bone-warping cold and only recently teaming with bison. The Great Lone Land strikes me as a Canadian Journal of Lewis and Clark. Some of the material echoes that found in 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann. In particular, the author details the depredations of the smallpox virus on First Nations/Native Americans. The author, William Francis Butler, was commissioned by William McDougall, Lieutenant Governor of the Northwest Territories (then covering most of Canada west of Ontario except for a much smaller province of Manitoba) to: "1) report upon the whole question of the existing state of affairs in that territory, and to state your views on what may be necessary to be done in the interest of peace and order; 2)ascertain, as far as you can, in what places and among what tribes of Indians, and what settlements of whites, the small-pox is now prevailing, including the extent of its ravages; 3) ascertain, as far as in your power, the number of Indians on the line between Red River and the Rocky Mountains; the different nations and tribes into which they are divided and the particular locality inhabited, and the language spoken, and also the names of the principal chiefs of each tribe." (paraphrased). This book was a tale of his fascinating journey, from October 1870 to February or March 1871, through what Butler called "The Great Lone Land." The journey started at Fort Garry, near modern Winnipeg, thence west to modern Edmonton, southwest to Rocky Mountain House, then returning to the Red River area of Winnipeg. During his journey he intercoursed with the Metis (he called them "half-breeds"), First Nations (called "Indians" at the time) and white settlers and members of the military. The Appendix is essential reading. It contains McDougall's original orders, and the report Butler filed about two months after his journey. Books such as these are rare, and hard to get. I will email PDF's of the book to anyone who requests and supplies an email address, since the book is no longer under copyright. My edition of the book goes to 351 pages, 384 with the appendix.
  15. It's my understanding that in fact the educational TV service ordered-up the song.
  16. For what was Gordon Lightfoot commissioned to write this song?
  17. I wish these compassionate bleeding hearts were giving their own money.
  18. Don't you realize that our Constitution bans grants of titles of nobility?
  19. One of my favorite songs, Canadian Railroad Trilogy, I believe was written for this show:
  20. Thing is I doubt that many people like Dougie93 are among those that "blow a fuse resulting in a mass shooting." I think they have real lives, real families, real agendas in life.
  21. Echoing Chretien's views. And by the way I finished the book on the train riding into NYC today.
  22. Even though I am a Yank who knows nothing about Canada I feel a need to weigh in. Canada has always been a disparate country, strung together first by a railroad, and then by a few highways. It has always had a liquidity problem. Notwithstanding the above, it has become an amazing country, punching far above its weight. Canada has problems, as do all countries. Its problems are not nearly as bad as most countries. It remains a good place to live. Broken, hardly.
  23. The better approach would be for the non-primitive societies to be more self-confident and less self-destructive. There is no reason to let hijackers, for example, use an airplane they couldn't have built to destroy buildings they couldn't have built.
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