Seeds of hope in troubling times

The garden, May 2018

On a scale of one to ten this perplexing spring so far in Hope Ness and the rest of southern Ontario isn’t much to complain about when Putin’s bombs and missiles are killing thousands of innocent people in Ukraine, destroying the country, and threatening the future of the world

After Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24 of this year, I posted this brief comment on Facebook: “Suddenly, everything else is irrelevant,” without referring to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But the mostly local people who replied understood quite well what it was about. I sensed an unspoken, deep-seated anxiety about the increasingly unstable state of the world, one thing after another piled on in recent years: a persistent global pandemic; an attempted Trump-cult coup in the U.S. that only now are we learning how close it came to succeeding; democracy under threat by extremist, so-called ‘conservative’ movements in other parts of the western world, including Canada; hatred and divisiveness running amok.

And last, but certainly not least, climate change and its effects, being demonstrated, clear and ongoing, by this current spring in the upper Great Lakes area of Ontario and other parts of Canada.

At the time my ‘irrelevant’ comment felt right, and still does, depending on the outcome of the war in Ukraine. Just yesterday, April 26, 2022, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov again raised the threat of nuclear war if Ukraine continues to ask for and receive military supplies from the U.S. and other NATO members. Russian President Vladimir Putin has previously made similar statements.

Lavrov said he would not want to see risks of a nuclear confrontation “artificially inflated now, when the risks are rather significant,” he said on Russia state television, as reported by the Associated Press. “The danger is serious. It is real. It should not be underestimated.”

It was an obvious threat, designed to keep the world at bay while the Putin Regime has its brutal way with Ukraine.

The most recent reporting says more than 8 million Ukrainians are now refugees, most of them women and children and old men. In a heartbeat, I would welcome them here at Cathedral Drive farm. And if they want to find some solace by helping in the garden, that would be fine. But no pressure. Sometimes a body needs to sit in the sun for a while, watch the clouds roll by, listen to the birds, go for a walk on the nearby trail, and rest.

Seedlings waiting patiently to go outside, April 27, 2022

Hopefully, there will be an abundance of raspberries, strawberries, and vegetables from the garden by then. No matter where in this area refugees may go, I would be more than happy to gift them, and their hosts, with naturally grown produce from Cathedral Drive Farm. It would be a privilege.

The season is late so far this spring, to say the least. Last night, with the forecast calling for -3 Celsius temperatures I thought it best to bring the seedlings out of the cold frame and into the warm of the house. Now, April 27, early afternoon, the temperature is still struggling to get above freezing. Tonight, the forecast is for a low of -5 C, and -3 tomorrow night. This is not normal for the end of April. Southern Ontario is on the verge of setting a new April record for cold weather. Normally, by now potatoes, peas and other cool-weather crops would be planted; garlic and strawberries, their winter-straw blankets removed, would be flourishing in 10 to 15 Celsius temperatures. Instead, the soil is still too cold and wet to work. Maybe by the end of the week, with warmer though still unseasonably cool days ahead, and sun, precious sun.

Rows of garlic emerging slowly, -1 Celsius, April 27, 2022

Meanwhile, I just received word from a berry nursery in Quebec that their shipments have been delayed because of unprecedented cold, April weather there. I ordered 100 young raspberry plants to start a new, sunny patch in the back garden, and expected to plant them this week starting May 1. “Pas de souci. Je comprend,” I replied.

What’s going on, one might ask?

Climate change, that’s what – climate change that has weakened and disrupted high-altitude Polar Vortex and Jet Stream winds, allowing cold, arctic-air anomalies to dip farther south than what used to be called ‘normal.’ For some reason those anomalies have a particular liking for the Great Lakes region, and once down this way, they like to stick around.

Jet Stream map, environment Canada, April 27, 2022

Yes, colder springs may seem counter-intuitive when global warming is the root cause of climate change. The problem is the polar regions are warming at a greater rate, relatively speaking, than the tropics. And that fact, by the way, has also disrupted the warm-water Gulf Stream, so much that winters in the U.K and other parts of Europe are much more severe in recent years.

Hopefully, some day soon, the world will get the message that something needs to be done.

In the meantime, the best we can do is spread the word, try to do good, be caring and helpful where it’s needed most, and keep planting seeds of hope.

The lies that brought us to the brink

A classic ‘picture worth a thousand words.’

Donald Trump (DT), the well-known pathological liar and former President of the U.S.A. who tried but failed to overthrow its democracy has blamed President Joe Biden for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s ongoing military invasion of Ukraine. But the well-documented record of the last six years shows DT has done more to weaken the U.S. than anyone in its history, while constantly acting as Putin’s ‘useful fool’ puppet, with the help of so-called ‘conservatives’ in the U.S.

I say ‘so-called’ because since when is enabling and supporting social-political disruption and hateful division in one’s own country conservative. In fact, it is knowing or unknowing traitorous behavior that has enabled Putin’s plan to restore the Russian/Soviet empire and emboldened him to attack Ukraine.

Meanwhile, the self-centered DT stands on a public stage before a rapturous audience of several thousand useful-fools, so-called conservatives, and millions of gullible members of his cult, and calls Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, a world-class “tyrant.” And for what? For being patient for weeks? For repeatedly asking protestors occupying the nation’s capital to go home, before defending our country against the imported cult of disruption and chaos trying to destroy democracy in the name of ‘Freedom?’

It boggles the mind that this is what the world has come to: the continuing human tragedy of millions of people being taken in by the lies and hypocrisy of two madmen drunk on power. And as a result, the existential future of the world is at stake; especially now that Putin has raised Russia’s immense nuclear power to a state of imminent readiness.

It is utter madness in a world in which most people simply want their children and grandchildren to have the hope of a peaceful and secure future in which to live.

One morning in the spring of 2016, I was out in my garden hilling rows of recently emerged potato plants. The sun was shining, a few clouds were drifting by in the sky above. I was full of thoughts about why DT, still not formally chosen the Republican Party candidate for the U.S. presidential election that year, would suggest the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NAT0) was obsolete. And, besides, he said, most NATO members don’t pay their fair share of NATO funding, unlike the U.S..

I asked myself, why would he say that now, just two years after Putin’s Russia had invaded and annexed the Crimea, then part of Ukraine, and with Russia conducting a clandestine war in eastern Ukraine in support of separatist rebels. The former Soviet republics that joined NATO after the fall of the Soviet Union were understandably alarmed by those signs of renewed Russian aggression. Wasn’t the U.S. supposed to be their allies?

As a political move aimed at gaining support from members of the Republican Party, what DT said also didn’t make sense. The party had long been a staunch opponent of the former Soviet Union, and prior to the 2016, of Putin’s Russia. So, what was he thinking?

I put down my hoe, looked up at the sky and suddenly saw the light. “He’s got a deal with the Russians,” I said to myself. Call it a hunch: at the time that’s what it was, based on what I knew.

I comforted myself by thinking that, if it was true, the truth would surely come more to light, one way or another, and the ‘smoking gun’ found.

Granddaughter Mirabella helping Grandpa hill potatoes, spring 2016.

Nothing that happened leading up to the 2016 election and after has done anything to change my mind about my thoughts then. On the contrary, I believe now more than ever DT had a ‘deal with the Russians,’ and maybe still has. Certain things that happened over the past almost six years continue to stand out amid BT’s generally fawning attitude toward, and praise of Putin: the Helsinki summit with Putin, for example, whereby DT dismissed the conclusions of the U.S. official Intelligence community that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election. After a secretive close-door session with Putin, the then-President of the United States said Putin had ‘strongly’ denied anything of the sort had happened. Commentators in the U.S., many of them former high-ranking government officials and military officers, were astounded, “I never thought I’d see the day” when a President of the United States would ever say such a thing, said one.

Throughout his one-term tenure, DT continued to say time after time, and still does, that the whole “Russia thing” was a “hoax.” It was not.

The investigation led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller only happened because former U.S. Attorney-General, the late Jeff Sessions, recused himself from the probe into the possibility of Russian interference in the 2016 election, and the possible collusion of DT’s 2016 election campaign. Rod Rosenstein, Session’s deputy A-G at the time appointed Mueller to head up the investigation in May, 2017.

The final Mueller Report found plenty of evidence of interference by Russian government agents and operatives. A Grand Jury for the District of Columbia (D.C.) charged a dozen Russians with criminal offences, including Conspiracy to Commit an Offense Against the United States. They have never been arrested and are likely hiding in plain sight in Russia.

Mueller himself said the reason DT was not charged with Obstruction of Justice was because of a Department of Justice policy against charging a sitting president with a criminal offence.

Bill Barr, who was Attorney-General when the Mueller report was about to be made public, took pre-emptive action by writing and releasing a summary that appeared to exonerate DT, who quickly seized on the moment to claim again that it was all a “hoax.” Partly as a result, 75 million Americans voted for DT in the 2020 presidential election. He still lost by seven million in the popular vote, and also by a wide margin in the electoral college, as confirmed by Congress on January 6, 2021. That was despite a riot by DT supporters who breached the capital in hopes of disrupting the process. To this day DT still claims the election was “stolen” from him.

To his credit, Attorney-General Barr, after ordering a DOJ investigation, said no serious evidence of election fraud was found. And then he resigned after DT’s angry reaction to that.

The Guardian published an interesting article last summer that I recently re-read. The Guardian is widely respected as one of the best news venues in the world. The carefully worded article cites “what are assessed to be leaked Kremlin documents” that indicate Putin personally approved a secret Russian plan in January, 2016 to support what the leaked papers describe as a “mentally unstable” DT in the 2016 US presidential election

The leaked document speaks of it being “acutely necessary” to take strong measures to facilitate DT’s election as U.S. president. That would help bring about Russia’s favoured “political scenario” because a Trump win “will definitely lead to the destabilisation of the US’s sociopolitical system, and see hidden discontent burst into the open.”

Some of the measures Russia might take to infect American public life with media viruses” would become self-sustaining as they mess with the “mass consciousness” of certain groups of Americans, the Kremlin paper says, as quoted by the Guardian.

Spokespersons for both Putin and Trump strongly denied at the time there was any truth to what the Guardian article said.

It is worth mentioning here though, that if there was indeed such a plan, that it certainly succeeded, beyond Putin’s wildest dreams. The fate of U.S. democracy is still in jeopardy.

A lament for the proud, Canadian dream

Readers of this blog may recall that I have often written proudly about Canada as a wonderful example to a troubled world of a country where a great diversity of people of many cultural backgrounds live together freely in peace.

Ottawa in the midst of the Trucker Convoy protest.

I have always in the next stroke of the pen, as it were, noted that Canada is ‘yes, still a work in progress. It has a history of injustices, especially toward Indigenous people, that it seeks in good faith to reconcile. I have always taken a positive attitude, in expressing my personal belief that Canada is ‘heading in the right direction,’ based on the growing mutual respect of Canadians towards each other, and our shared belief, hopefully, that this is a ‘good country.’

That above being said, I now have to say, the events of the last few weeks have been personally disillusioning and heartbreaking.

I must also confess to being … yes, even angered by the sight of large groups of self-righteous people wrapping themselves in Canada’s flag, while doing great harm to the well-being of this ‘good country.’

Picking beans with great, granddaughter, Jorden: living the Canadian dream

And for what purpose? The truckers’ protest began with a focus on the federal mandate requiring Canadian truckers crossing the border on their return trip to Canada to be vaccinated against Covid-19 or be quarantined if not. Then it became a protest against all government Covid-19 mandates and restrictions. In the midst of that were growing indications that the real objective is to overthrow the current Liberal federal government and democratic system. And so far, protest organizers – whoever they are, and wherever they are – and defiant supporters still occupying Ottawa and blocking vital, cross-border, trade routes, show no willingness to bend on that extreme demand. Meanwhile, foreign donor money, from ‘anonymous’ sources in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world, has aided and abetted the undemocratic aims; Trump flags and U.S. flags, even Confederate flags, have flown at the Ottawa ‘occupation’ and border blockades. And Fox news, the most politically biased news media venue in the Western world, fans the destructive flames in blatant support. The ignorance of their unqualified hosts knows no bounds.

Meanwhile, around the world, Canada’s reputation as a peace-loving country, and Canadians as a peace-loving people, is in ruins.

I have to ask, who is this benefitting? Certainly, not Canada; and certainly not the future of my children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren; and yours too, my fellow Canadians, who felt warm and secure in the believe our good country was one of the best places in the world to live, and well on its way to being the best. We felt fortunate. We felt blessed. Didn’t we, most of us?

Some among us felt differently. They thought there was something fundamentally wrong, something evil even, embodied in the person of one man, one Canadian, one of us. It is a cruel and dangerous lie.

With certain rare exceptions, who haunt us still, none of us are perfect or evil, trucker convoy protestors and others with different opinions.  But the base, human instinct to close doors, to destroy or blockade bridges, to build walls, to fall into tribal traps, to not love your neighbor: those are symptoms of the ongoing human tragedy. As Canadians we are better than that, and as human beings. That sacred truth was reaffirmed, by the way, more than 2,000 years ago. I’ll leave it to the convoy protestors to discern what that comment is about and give it some thought.

The road ahead.

Keep your hands on that plow, hold on: January 6, the fate of American democracy, and a door left open.

Keep your hands on that plow, hold on.” — The refrain from an old American gospel/folk song

The wonderful thing about the annual celebration of the arrival of a New Year is the spirit of hope it inspires. Whatever the troubles of the old year were — though they can’t all be consigned safely to history or memory — they can be met with a new resolve. For a wonderful moment, anything is possible again. The earth, this precious, little, blue-green jewel of a planet, has come full circle. Another journey has begun; and with it the chance, again, to get things right, or at least start heading decisively, resolutions in hand, in that direction.

I really would like to continue this post in a hopeful, positive tone, about how I’ve got my seed order in already for the 2021 gardening season, how the renewed interest in growing and eating food you grow yourself is a good thing for more than that good reason. It is also a continuous learning experience that helps keep your body, mind, and spirit healthy and hopeful. Or to put it another way: being close to the soil is good for the soul.

But first, dear, patient, persevering reader, allow me to pause long enough to consider an important event in a few days that could have a huge impact on the shape of things to come in 2021, and beyond. One way or another, January 6, 2021 could be a date that will go down in history as an epic turning point; hopefully, for the better.

This coming Wednesday, starting at 1 p.m., a joint session of the U.S. congress, the House of Representatives and the Senate, will meet in the House, to formally hear and confirm the results of the November 3, 2020 U.S. election. That is, the state-by-state, certified electoral college results as voted on December 14, 2020. That process gave the Democratic Party candidate, Joe Biden, 306 electoral votes for President, compared with 232 for incumbent, one-term President, Republican Donald Trump. Biden won the national, popular vote by more than seven million, in an election that saw more than 155 million American voters cast ballots, the most ever.

But Trump has not conceded defeat and continues to claim there was widespread fraud during the election, despite the claim being repeatedly dismissed in court for lack of evidence. Inauguration Day is January 20. The January 6 Joint Session, normally a routine affair, is shaping up to be anything but routine.

Sitting Vice-Presidents of the U.S., in their capacity as President of the Senate, preside over the Joint Session, unless they choose not to, or otherwise are not available. Vice-President Hubert Humphrey declined the job in 1969. In those circumstances the President pro tempore of the Senate presides, the Congressional Research Service says in its December 8, 2020 report, Counting Electoral Votes.

If the current Vice-President, Mike Pence, is not willing or available for whatever reason, he would be replaced by Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, the current President pro tempore of the Senate.

Assuming he will be presiding, Pence’s job will be to open the sealed electoral college result envelopes from each state, and hand them over to appointed ‘tellers’ to be read aloud to the Joint Session. At that point, his other role, to maintain “order,” could get much more than routinely interesting.

“When the certificate or equivalent paper from each state or the District of Columbia is read, the President of the Senate shall call for objections, if any,” the Congressional Review Service says. “Any such objection must be presented in writing and must be signed by at least one Senator and one Representative. The objection ‘shall state clearly and concisely, and without argument, the ground thereof.’ During the joint session of January 6, 2001, the presiding officer intervened on several occasions to halt attempts to make speeches under the guise of offering an objection.”

The report goes on to say, “When an objection, properly made in writing and endorsed by at least one Senator and one Representative, is received, each house is to meet and consider it separately. The statute states, ‘No votes or papers from any other State shall be acted upon until the objections previously made to the votes or papers from any State shall have been finally disposed of.’ However, in 1873, before enactment of the law now in force, the joint session agreed, without objection and for reasons of convenience, to entertain objections with regard to two or more states before the houses met separately on any of them.”

The report does not clarify what effect, if any, the actions of 1873 may still have on the application of the statute if multiple objections are raised during the upcoming Joint Session. Recent news reports have said up to 140 Republican members of the House may raise or support objections, and so far, 11 Republican senators. Might it be up to Pence to rule objections be handled state-by-state, or collectively, as in 1873? When objections are accepted as valid by the presiding vice-president the Joint Session is required to adjourn, and the House members and Senators go to their separate chambers to debate the issue, for a maximum of two hours. If Pence rules multiple objections during the reading of each state’s electoral results should be handled one at a time, that will certainly spell a long delay in the Joint Session process, and disruption.

The Congressional Review Service report raises another interesting point regarding the “basis for objections.” It says the federal statue and “historical sources” appear to suggest the “general grounds” for objections include “that the elector was not ‘lawfully certified’ according to state statutory procedures.”

The paragraph continues, “It should be noted that the word lawfully was expressly inserted by the House in the Senate legislation (S. 9, 49th Congress) before the word certified. Such addition arguably provides an indication that Congress thought it might, as grounds for an objection, question and look into the lawfulness of the certification under state law.”

The Trump campaign has raised the issue of the lawfulness of state election law — in swing states, not states he won – but the actions were dismissed in court. Will it be raised again on January 6?

There does seem to be lots of potential for the Joint Session to become problematic, to put it mildly. The chances of Trump and his political enablers succeeding in overturning the election results are said by many in the news media to be slim at best, to impossible. But after four years of Trumpism it seems anything, no matter how outrageous, is still possible. And the mechanism of the Joint Session leaves that door open.

Bad enough the fate of the world’s first and once-greatest democracy is at stake; but the fate of the world itself also hangs in the balance.

So much for my hopeful, positive intentions for this post.

Yes, I have ordered my garden seeds for the 2021 season. I strongly recommend you long-time, or Brave New Gardeners, do the same, ASAP, because lots of people are getting on board the grow-your-own bandwagon. It was true last year, and is likely just as true, or even more so, this year.

I promise, you’ll be glad you did: there’s nothing like gardening to offer refuge for the worried mind.

Alberta’s American heritage and the threat to Canadian national unity

lethbridge-flag

The official municipal flag of the city of Lethbridge, Alberta, a version of the flag American whiskey traders flew over Fort Whoop-up before 1874

Winter has come relatively early here at Hope Ness, as elsewhere in this part of Canada, from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic. It came much earlier on the Canadian prairies, just as farmers were taking in the harvest; and even on Canada’s Pacific coast, normally still quite balmy in mid-autumn.

Meanwhile, another big chill has gripped Canada: a serious threat to national unity in the wake of the apparently divisive results of the recent federal election. Continue reading

The simple truth

 

potatoes

Digging potatoes with grandson Jake, and Buddy.

I’m a simple man in some ways. I think my love of growing potatoes reflects that. It takes a certain know-how, and I am proud of what I do to avoid the use of pesticide: thick straw mulch and a lot of hard work. The result this year is my best crop ever, if I say so myself.

But, growing potatoes is not quite “rocket science,” some might say, as if that’s the highest standard of intelligence anyone might reach. Yet, when you give it a little thought how hard can that be? You pack a metal tube full of explosives, point it toward the sky, stand back, count to 10 backward, push a button, and say, “we have lift off,” in whichever language applies at that moment. Continue reading

My “cool” garden, Toronto Island flooding, and “the old fogy days.”

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My “cool” garden, with lettuce thriving and in need of picking and thinning

If a picture is worth a thousand words, I might say this is, therefore, a 2,000-word update on the progress of my “cool” garden. But I better make allowances for the fact they’re two views from different angles of essentially the same picture and call it 1,000 words. Nothing but “real” news here, by golly. Continue reading

Trump takes aim at Canada

milking

Cows being milked on a modern dairy factory-farm

Oh-oh.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, in the midst of worsening tensions with North Korea and the risk of a major, possibly nuclear war that entails, U.S., President Donald Trump took aim at Canada and fire what sounded an awful lot like a trade-war shot across our bows.

But of all the things Trump had to pick as an excuse to get bigly tough with Canada on trade, why did it have to be dairy? Continue reading

The tears of the hopeful dead

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The Canadian National Vimy Memorial

Yesterday Canada celebrated the 100th Anniversary of the beginning of the Battle of Vimy Ridge during the First World War. That battle in which thousands of Canadian, British and German soldiers died has become part of Canada’s national mythology, a seminal event from which its emergence as full-fledged country in its own right is often dated.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and and a total of 25,000 other Canadians were there, along with many other dignitaries, including members of Great Britain’s Royal Family, Prince of Wales, Charles, and his two sons, Prince William and Prince Harry. French President Francois Hollande, were also in attendance.

But I daresay the dominant presence was the collective spirits of those who died there, watched over by one of the most strikingly-impressive, national war memorials ever conceived and built. The crowd has gone; the field of battle is relatively quiet again except perhaps for some visitors paying their respects. And of course the dead remain, in known and unknown graves.

Continue reading

A new generation can lead the way to hope

I’m not an economist, far from it; and someone will no doubt correct me if I’m wrong. But it strikes me that the current spate of daily bad economic news exposes underlying problems that surely need to be recognized and somehow brought into any discussion about how to turn things around.

First, the modern world economy is largely based on the idea that the pursuit of material wealth in all its forms – including monetary wealth itself – is the be-all and end-all of happy human existence on earth. Not that I wouldn’t mind winning one of a number of million-dollar, and now even billion-dollar lotteries: I am also, like most of us, a product of the consumer/materialistic culture into which I was born, and in which I have lived all my life. We are all victims of it, you and I. That’s true even if we’re strapped financially and can’t afford to buy much. We’re not good consumers; instead, we’re part of the economic problem known as a “lack of consumer confidence.” Continue reading