Thursday, September 3rd, 2020 —> +23˚C / +78˚F —> muggy & mostly cloudy @ 1:30 pm in Atlantic Canada –
– A Green Party sign showed up this morning. –
— From about 1995 until halfway through the year 2002 – I repaired and maintained the web site for the Green Party of Connecticut. I did this the hard way, editing in html.
— I’d been one of the USA’s vast group of unpaid home health care people as my father was frequently in distress with his C.O.P.D. and could not be periodically taken off his steroids without needing emergency trips to the nearest V.A. Hospital. The steroids gradually ate away at the calcium in his body and with his bone density going down hill, he developed a compression fracture in his spinal column that could have been triggered by something as simple as stepping down from a curb. He became confined to a wheel chair until a bone fusion operation in 1994 partially enabled him to get around, but he never fully regained his ability to walk without a walker or somebody to lean on. He’d been a Fire Fighter for almost thirty years and had been so healthy as a kid that he practically accused us of faking it when we had the mumps or measles during our childhood. But when the fire department was called to try to rescue a worker at Raybestos Manhattan’s local factory because the worker had fallen into a toxic pool of chemicals – because my father was a big guy, and the worker was pretty big too, the Fire Department sent my father in to pick up the worker’s already dead body, and drag it out of the pool. That might have been the beginning of my father’s deteriorating state of his health. After being sent to the emergency room with Asthma and breathing difficulties several times in the middle to late 1970’s the fire department decided that he needed to be retired with a disability. When he realized that his disability retirement payments amounted to ‘peanuts’ he went to the sitting Fire Chief and asked for help getting better monthly benefits. The Chief told him he couldn’t help him, that was not within his power. My father got something like $300.00 a month. The chief retired a year later with a pension that amounted to $30,000.00 PLUS a year. A guy who had been my father’s friend, who’d been a fire fighter about as long as my father had, either fell or jumped from the piece of fire fighting apparatus called a ‘Snorkle’ { a large basket with a fire hose or more than one hose/nozzles – on the end or a long arm – that looks like a cherry picker on steroids } and got more than twice as much as my father was getting as retirement with disability benefits less than a year after my father had to settle for his $300.00 + a month. My mother didn’t drive – My 3 sisters and a brother lived too far away to be on call ’24/7/365′ – taxis were out of the question expensive and so was ambulance service that might have been affordable if they took him to the nearest for profit hospital that my parents couldn’t afford. —> When Ronald Reagan was elected { pResident of the White House }, one of the first things he did was claw back funds going to social security which saw my father’s social security disability payments cancelled – Dad was forced to try to get temporary jobs – and while he was working one of those jobs he developed the compression fracture, which caused bone chips which pressed against his spine, which made him a paraplegic. The steroids also contributed in a large part to heart problems that killed my father in 1995.
— Add to this series of unfortunate realities the fact that I’d been diagnosed with Fibromyalgia as a result of years of P.T.S.D. symptoms – and I was basically a borderline near basket case myself.
— I couldn’t afford the spiffy new web site creating/editing software like DreamWeaver and its adobe and microsoft counterparts. I was informed that a new member of the Connecticut Green Party would be taking over the main job of keeping their web site up to date and looking a little more ‘professional’ than what I could do without all the new bells and whistles of an expensive web editing program. { I did get a standing ovation when I took their site out of the stone age and into 1995 when I did that. }
— And one of the guys who tried to update stuff was using micro-schnarr’s ‘Front Page’ – so I would get a call at like 11:30 at night from this guy and he’d say, “Jim… I tried to update our web site and now there’s this thick blue vertical line running through the middle of everything, Can you fix that?” – in those days, using the free stuff that came with netscape, it took me all night to fix that and when the same guy signed on at 7:30 the next morning and I’d just finished fixing what he and Front Page had screwed up, he ‘messaged’ me, saying “Are you still up?” & I replied, “Yeah, I just finished fixing everything that Front Page messed up, good night.”
— And when I fell in love with a Canadian and began trying to live up here, first as a permanent resident, then as a dual citizen, the guy who owned the servers that the Connecticut Green Party’s web site was on – revoked my ability to connect and do any of the minor updates and fixes that I worked on from about 1995 to 2002.
— I do have a ‘Green Party of Connecticut’ tee shirt – circa the year Y2K – If I can find it, I might wear it somewhere some day.
— And a yard sign showed up this morning proudly stating “Elect – { in English and French } Melissa Fraser – / Fredericton- York / Green -Vert” as the Provincial Elections for New Brunswick are 11 days away.
— This morning we also got ‘junk mail’ propaganda from the PC {“Progressive Conservative”} candidate – as well as the current PC ‘Premier’ of New Brunswick; the PA { “People’s Alliance” } candidate – and the Liberal candidate for this ‘Riding’ ( in the US we would have called this a ‘district’ – not a ‘riding’ ).
— So let me give you my unsolicited, maybe unwanted, opinion of the various parties and their candidates up here.
—> —> But first – let me tell you what the Honourable Paul Hellyer – ex Member of the Federal Parliament of Canada, Minister of Defense ,and member of the ‘Queen’s Privvy Council’ { After clarifying to the US talk show host who was interviewing him – that the ‘privvy council’ does not get its name from the US slang interpretation of ‘Privvy’ as ‘pertaining to a bathroom or outhouse’ ) – said on late night radio { Coast To Coast A.M. } this last Sunday Night / Monday Morning —> { not a direct quote } —> – Some of the Nazis who were semi-secretly smuggled into the USA at the end of World War Two as part of ‘Operation Paper Clip’ managed to secure important positions as advisors in not just scientific/aerospace research, but in intelligence and military circles, and in effect —> ‘Infiltrated’ {<— Hon. Paul Hellyer’s word } – infiltrated the US Government and helped establish what the Honourable gentleman called the ‘Cabal’ of international shadowy figures who pull the strings on everything that’s happening in the world right now. & he named several political organizations that most of you would probably associate with the rantings of anti-conspiracy ‘weirdoes’ – If you’re rolling your eyes right now, you’ve been duped, bought and sold – and led around by the ring in your nose that you never realized was there.
—> Progressive Conservative Party / Conservative Party of Canada —> Too many Conservatives / ‘Progressive’ Conservatives up here are mean spirited jerks who believe they gain political power by ‘divide and conquer’ tactics. The last Conservative Prime Minister of Canada – Stephen Harper – closed down so many satellite offices of the Vetarans’ Administration up here that he proudly accepted a cheque for One BILLION dollars from the then Minister of Veterans affairs. – This was during what had been labeled as an epidemic of Veterans’ suicides due to PTSD – Veterans groups were so angry about this – because it meant that veterans who did not live in Major cities could no longer go to counsellors and professionals familiar with their cases, and were therefore dumped into a system which routinely rubber stamped all requests for help as “Denied” – These veterans groups got together and started “ABC” campaigns { “ABC” = ‘Anybody But Conservatives’ } The “ABC” movement is largely responsible for Justin Trudeau’s amazing landslide victory in 2015. —> When we lived in Ontario, we heard die hard Conservatives call New Democratic Party’s Jack Layton, “Taliban Jack” for the ‘left leaning’ head of the New Democrats’ reluctance to jump into any war the USA’s 2nd Bush regime wanted to start, anywhere at any time. Harper also oversaw the trashing of dumpsters full of scientific books and pamphlets because he didn’t believe that global warming and anything anti-big-oil corporations and/or anti-clear-cut-deforestation messages were anything he wanted anybody to know about. He also muzzled scientists – kept them from saying anything that could be seen as detrimental to his corporation-friendly policies. The woman running for Parliament in our ‘Riding’ was described as a “Loose Cannon” – Prime Minister Harper assigned a ‘Handler’ to stay with her and keep her from saying anything that might hurt the Conservative Party, and especially Stephen Harper’s chances at securing a parliamentary majority and thereby – a ‘Majority’ government – and while I was working for a cable company where my job was to record and edit local town council meetings for the ‘Access’ channel – the Mayor of the town I was based in told me that he got a call ten minutes before that Conservative candidate was suddenly scheduled to show up in the town hall, and the Mayor was told, “No media can be present, not questions can be asked. She’s there to talk to your town council members and that’s all.” —> Guess who won the local election for member of parliament? My best friend rolled her eyes and said, “These fools would elect a dead goat if it ran under the Conservative Party’s banner.” —. Conservatives up here are mean spirited ‘Beedy Grastards’ who claim they’re trying to save “Your Tax Dollars” by cutting needed services, basically screwing everybody but the super rich.
—> The ‘People’s Alliance” party isn’t just mean spirited – they’re bigoted and try to make everybody believe that if they were in power the voters would get to keep more of the money that is now ‘wasted’ as tax dollars’ that pay for services for the ‘lazy’ and minorities and immigrants who do not share ‘Canadian Values’ & by Canadian Values they mean far-right divisive ‘Beedy Grastard’ values. They may be worse than the PC’s.
—> The Liberals may mean well, but if Liberals actually value human beings over tired old concepts of strict regulations and inhuman practices handed down from antiquity – it doesn’t show. Best Guess? They’re so wrapped up in maintaining any power they can get that they’re willing to make deals with the devil and allow big businesses to laugh all the way to their banks —> giving powerful businesses big tax breaks while forcing those who can’t afford it to shoulder the burden of higher taxes for dwindling services. If Liberals are a shade better than Conservatives, they’re still not good enough to earn my loyalty, or my vote.
—> The New Democratic Party { “NDP” } —> When I first came to Canada it seemed to me that the NDP was ‘Greener’ than the system of scattered and unaffiliated local Green Parties. They backed policies like ‘sustainable renewable power generation’ – ‘living wages’, ‘Gender Equality’ & basically, everything I liked about the US Green Party’s values and platforms. The NDP’s Tommy Douglas is the reason Canada has Universal Health Care – which the Conservatives and PA types would like to do away with completely { I don’t call them ‘Beedy Grastards’ for no reason }. —> When we first moved to the Fredericton, New Brunswick area, a female NDP candidate was the first and only local politician who came and talked to us, we really liked her, she was a Nurse – and stood for the things that were important to me and my lovely spouse. But after we asked for a sign endorsing her in the provincial race here, we have been bombed with requests for donations and financial support. Sometimes several times a day in email. And with the exception of a few charismatic Federal and local MPs { sometimes called “MLAs” or Members of Local Assemblies } in other provinces – the NDP looks like it doesn’t know how to run any effective local or federal campaigns. During the last provincial election, the NDP didn’t even run a candidate in our riding/district. Plus – the guy who used to be the head of the Provincial NDP here ‘jumped ship’ and joined the “Beedy Grastards” of the Conservative party. So much for dedication to real, honest progressive values…
—> The Green Party. —> Beginning with the election of Elizabeth May to the Federal Parliament from a riding in British Columbia a few elections back – the Green party has been making a little bit of progress here. They nearly won the last Provincial election in P.E.I. but one of their most popular candidates died in an accident and they lost their potential majority by just that much. David Coon was the first New Brunswick Green to be elected to the New Brunswick Provincial Assembly. In the next provincial election he was re-elected along with two other candidates. When I sent email to a green party candidate in Ontario, asking if they needed help with their web presence – the answer I got was kind of like, “What Planet are you from?” When we met a female candidate for our riding in the last provincial election here in New Brunswick and I told her about my web skills and previous affiliation with the Connecticut Green Party she asked, “Why didn’t you come forth a couple months ago?” The Green Party Candidate from this Federal riding was elected to the Federal Parliament in the last Federal election. The Green Party in this provincial election is the only party that has achieved gender equity . The PCs – who called the election, said they didn’t have enough time to aim for that. The nasty jerks in the Peoples Alliance claim they go with their most qualified candidates and don’t consider their gender while choosing. The Liberals said they would have gone for gender equity if they had more time – and the NDP apparently couldn’t come up with enough candidates to run somebody in every riding, so they took what they could get. —> I see the Green Party as the only party that is Honest, Ethical, Concerned with Real Human Values, is NOT DIVISIVE, —> IS inclusive and deserves my vote.
—> One last note before I shut up and post this. There are a couple forensic accountants in the USA who claim that – since Operation Paper Clip brought a lot of Nazis into the USA —> ‘American’ politicians – and by extension, every level of government in the so called free world – has learned to cook their books and hide income streams that account for 2/3 of the income that every level of government receives. Taxes account for 1/3 { One Third } of the income into Federal, State and/or Provincial, county, municipal and any other level of governments’ treasuries. These accountants claim that all levels of government could stop collecting taxes right now this minute – and deliver more and better services than they now claim are draining their treasuries. They have tricks that claim that assets are liabilities and we don’t know about their hidden bank accounts.
—> Do you want to guess who said “The vast majority of the public will more readily accept a big lie than a small one.”? —> Adolph Hitler.
– 4 deer munching away on on grass and oats on a winter morning at *7:30 am local time a couple years ago, within 15 feet of our porch – { *Atlantic Time – We’re an hour ahead of Eastern Time here – nyaaa – }
— Grumble grumble grumble,
~~~~~ Jim
