Jody Wilson-Raybould
Jody Wilson-Raybould resigned her position in the Liberal Cabinet yesterday. Now what?
I’ll tell you what: she wants to be Prime Minister one day, so she has to make a clean break today. She cannot be seen to be supporting a government that is soft on the rule of law. She’s the Maxime Bernier of the Liberal Party. I wouldn’t be surprised if she started a ‘true’ liberal party, focusing on Indigenous issues. We shall see…
Almost two years ago, I had a back and forth discussion with my youngest daughter on Facebook about the echoes of The Wizard of Oz had in the first Star Wars movie. This idea is not new.
And it doesn’t take a genius to work out the connections between the two, but it must have been a genius who made them. George Lucas based his story on ancient samurai legends, which is why a lot of the characters have oriental-sounding names. And, what is more astounding is his use of numbers in a few of the monikers:
Obi-Wan Kenobi (one);
R2D2 (two);
C3PO (three);
and “May the Force be with you” (four).
It seems so obvious now, but Luke Skywalker is George Lucas in his imagination. If you are going to launch yourself into an epic story, you would want your character to have your name.
Everyone thinks the Wizard would be represented by Yoda or Kenobi. But the illustration at the head of this post shows that Luke is the Wizard, and I would tend to agree with that thinking. The Force is always strong in him, and that is the mark of a hero.
As the series has continued to the present day, Skywalker is still here in some form or another. Long may he reign.
Courtesy of mattwilcox.net
In the first few moments of waking up today, I was bombarded with two different songs, each trying to express my thought for this day. Each of the songs was valid on its own, but none of them said exactly what I was needing to say.
Before I share these songs with you, let me tell you what I was thinking. As one of the coordinators of Fountain International’s Facebook page, I was surprised one day by a comment on one of the posts. It simply read, “Yes and no.”
Even though I have spoken of the middle way many times, I still haven’t really practiced what I preach. We live in a binary world, there’s no getting away from that. And the daily struggle means that we are choosing a path between one extreme and the other. Life, it seems, demands it. So how can we find the middle of the road consistently?
Douglas Adams had the answer: 42.
So here are the songs:
Cover courtesy of chapters.indigo.ca
I’m reading David Icke’s latest book, “Everything You Need To Know But Have Never Been Told”. On page 33, he repeats a story that he’s written about before.
“I have told the story in other books which the late Michael Talbot recalled in his excellent book, The Holographic Universe, in which he explored the scientific and experiential evidence that our conscious reality is holographic. He said that his father had hosted a party to which he invited a stage hypnotist to entertain the guests. The hypnotist put a man called Tom into a trance state and told him that when he ‘woke up’ he would not be able to see his daughter in the room. He then asked the daughter to stand right in front of the sitting Tom so that he was looking right into her belly. Tom was returned to a wakened state and the hypnotist asked if he could see his daughter. ‘No’, he said, she was not there. In fact, she was standing right in front of him. The hypnotist put his hand at the bottom of the daughter’s back and said that he was holding something in his hand. Could Tom tell him what it was? ‘It’s a watch’, said Tom, bemused at the question because it was so clear to him. ‘There is an inscription on the watch’, the hypnotist said. Could Tom read that? He peered forward and read it accurately while his daughter was standing between him and the watch. If the world was really solid and physical all this would be impossible and the Dogma Dawkins mentality within mainstream science would no doubt dismiss the story as fantasy. But Tom’s experience can be so easily explained when you know what reality really is. The daughter’s body, as with everything in the universe, is a waveform information construct and unless it is decoded through into a holographic state it cannot be seen by the conscious mind within the holographic realm of visible light. The hypnotist implanted a firewall into Tom’s decoding process by the hypnotic suggestion (program) that his daughter was not in the room. This prevented him from ‘reading’ her energy field into holographic form and so he couldn’t see her with his conscious mind. Only by decoding the waveform information from his daughter’s body-field could he bring her into the holographic reality of his conscious mind. With her deleted from his holographic reality she was not a barrier to seeing the watch because, in his experienced ‘world’, she wasn’t there. Everyone else in the room could see the daughter because they hadn’t been hypnotically ‘firewalled’ not to decode her.”
Icke, David. The Perception Deception – Part One . David Icke Books Limited. Kindle Edition.
Now, this story on its own has many different ramifications, but not the least of them is the fact that we live in a hologram. This hologram is only perceivable through the brain. Everything is in ‘wave formation’ until it is observed, at which time it becomes ‘fixed’ and can be ‘seen’.
(The Beatles)
Let’s face it, the world can be a confusing place just as it is. Now put yourself in a young person’s place who is just starting to live in their own home. No problem? We’ll see…
A classical look from advertising.
How much you really need.
Recommended doses.
Television advertised amount.
The advertising: no wrinkles.
The reality: dryer sheets damage clothes.
The second career to be launched on this second season of The Launch came out in 2015 as a gender neutral ‘non-binary‘. Before that they were known as Molly. This is news.
It means that the individual does not identify with either gender, and should always be referred to as ‘them’, ‘they’ or ‘their’.
It’s an election year. The Conservatives are hoping to find a chink in Trudeau’s armour. They are practically manufacturing scenarios to oust the Liberals from Parliament.
In other words, whatever works.
But being in power also means having the power to influence situations. And this latest ‘crisis’ is such a situation.
SNC-Lavalin is a big construction company in Quebec. The RCMP have charged the company with criminal activity, dating back to Gaddafi’s time in Libya: greasing the wheels might be the nicest way I can describe its activity, but bribery is bribery.
It does not seem beyond the realms of possibility to imagine that the Prime Minister’s Office could have contacted the then Attorney General, Jody Wilson-Raybould, to see if there was any other way that the case could be handled. The Globe and Mail newspaper, which broke the story, used the word “pressured” to describe the interaction.
The Prime Minister said the story was false, stating that no-one in his office “directed” the Justice Minister to make the prosecution easier. That seemed like a case of legal ‘hair-splitting’.
If the PM had responded with a gentler “we were just discussing the case to see what the options were,” this furor would not have the power to undermine the Liberal’s election chances on Monday October 21st of this year.
And what was Wilson-Raybould’s response? “No comment.”
Compare and contrast Canada’s response to the Huawei executive US extradition process to this one:
“The Government of Canada strongly supports the rule of law.”
Hmmm… transparent?
Don’t worry Mr Prime Minister, we can see through you and your office.
Courtesy of macleans.ca
Image courtesy of Time Magazine
As far as protests go, this one was a quiet revolution. It also brought into stark focus the difference between the two parties. One side is riding on the black coattails of a populist President, the other is trying to shine a white light for freedom. But whose freedom?
It used to be tough watching Republicans sitting on their hands whenever Obama gave the State of the Union address. They didn’t like ANYTHING he said. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, as it were, Trump has used the words of compromise, but not the intent. And the clapping occurred even in Democratic ranks whenever he said something they liked. However, I could see that a handful of Democratic women refused to stand or clap at any time during his address. Why? They want him out!
We shall see if the US Congress can work together in the future along bipartisan lines. With such a divisive President at the helm, dis ship of state looks doomed to crash and sink. Make America Great Again? No. How the mighty have fallen…
It’s a fact of life: you can never go back again.
But it doesn’t stop the urge to be gainfully employed. I had a ‘cattle-call’ ad appear in my email account two weeks ago. It was from a recruitment agency which also hires temporary workers for assignment jobs. They were wondering if I’d be interested in a temp payroll assistant position in the town next to the one we live in. My initial thought?
The commute would be only about 15 minutes each way…
So I clicked on the ‘apply now’ link and updated my information.
First question: What have I being doing since the last time we were in touch (more than four years ago)? My answer: Retired.
Second question: Why do you want to return to work? My answer: More money.
I explained that we’d moved out of Barrie more than three years ago, so I was told that I needed to upload a new résumé. Then I was told that they would send a link to a series of assessments, as they needed to update my skills record. I said OK.
Within an hour, I got the link to the assessments. The first two I did were multiple choice questions about Payroll and Accounting. I believe I did them fairly accurately, although I also did them quickly, since I knew they would be looking at how long it took me to answer each question.
The other two ‘exams’ involved the latest versions of Word and Excel. At my last job, the company upgraded to the 2007 version of these programs. My home computer has the 2003 versions. There are a lot of functions that I have never used, and even more that I’ve forgotten how to do since I retired. These two assessments took altogether three hours to complete, but I did them at one sitting. I also skipped whole sections.
I’ve heard nothing now for almost ten days. I’m fairly sure that I won’t hear anything anytime soon. My spur-of-the-moment impulse has probably been a waste of time.
But I’m retired…what else was I going to be doing?
