Large Fierce Mammal

Back in March of 2018, I published an article here titled Smoke, Mirrors, and a Soldier, the inspiration for which was summed up in its first paragraph:

I read an article the other day written by Josh Makuch and published last Friday to Vice with the title, “I’m a Veteran In Favour of More Gun Control — Gun owners could learn a lot from how the Canadian military treats their firearms.” This was, of course, trendy because the Trudeau government is only this month rolling out the latest federal tweak to Canadian firearms laws in keeping with a campaign promise to combat “gun violence” by revising, yet again, the laws governing those who legally own, or wish to legally own, firearms.

Remembering that was early 2018, you can imagine my surprise when two days ago I found myself reading a CBC News opinion piece by yet another former member of the Canadian military — Tony Keene — titled, Why Canada should ban the sale, ownership of handguns — There is no conceivable reason why an ordinary person needs a handgun, writes Tony Keene, and that I realized I could react to here, if I so chose, by simply editing my 2018 article for appropriate changes of names and dates. However, as I meditated on that CBC News piece in comparison to the one from Vice I’d written about previously, it felt to me as though some editor had done that very thing. Of course, let the record show I’m sure that’s not what happened.

A bizarre realization nonetheless, and the similarity was striking enough in lyrics and melody that, had it been a song, I believe Vice would have a valid reason to go to court for copyright infringement.

For my own part, I regard it as nothing more than exploitation of a previously made point, built atop the same flawed argument, released into the wild in search of relevance with an audience that may have missed it the first time.

Never let it be said that I am above such exploitation myself, and so what follows will be my 2018 article, in its entirety, only this time with the aforementioned changes of names and dates, provided in bold type to illustrate just how little editing was required. While I do sometimes say that some of my utterances almost wrote themselves, this one literally did. (more…)

“The first time I read Lord of the Rings, I’m sure I was personally responsible for skyrocketing values of stocks for companies involved in the production of bacon, mushrooms, and dark, full bodied beers. I absolutely enjoy any literature that confronts me with a description of food consumed by the characters that leaves me wanting to devour whatever they’re having.” ~ The Sandwich With the Dragon Tattoo

Yesterday I had cause to quote a number of sentiments spoken by Public Safety Minister Bill Blair, and since then one point has particularly rankled to where I knew something had to be physically and decisively done about it.

The offending utterance, with emphasis added, was, “We’ve heard many people express concern about the militarization of our police, and this is a direct consequence of the militarization of our society.”

Since then, I’ve had a poem I wrote and published here back in January of 2018 running on an endless loop in my head, and I don’t know if you already know this, but unlike a song stuck in your head that can be easily expunged by actually playing it, poems are a different breed, and requiring of more drastic measures. So for brunch today, and at my request, Mrs. LFM indulged me with fried “bully beef” accompanied by hard boiled eggs, the back story for which was that we’d stolen them from some hapless French farmer’s hen house while out overnight on a listenin’ patrol. She even stood by and kept a straight face while I stabbed the can with a dagger before she opened it to see if it outgassed so we’d be sure it hadn’t gone off.

Thanks to her I’m good now, and here is that damned poem I told you about.

More Mud Than Glory

By LFM

Late O-seventeen
Was a big freeze and blow,
That turned dirt into concrete,
With bugger all snow.

With twenty-eighteen
Came a warm spell and rains
That tore a small thaw as
It choked all the drains.

By the time the rain stopped
All the earth was laid bare,
Slicked over with mud
Under warm humid air.

While some folks complained
How the water and mud
Turned their yards into lakes
And their basements to flood.

Stiff drinks in our hands
We looked out from our lair,
And instead of mud ugly
Saw ambience there.

So we bought some provisions,
And invites were sent
To twelve hearty guests
For our “war themed” event.

Then we buried some mines
And we dug a latrine.
We added some trenches
With barbed wire between.

Had six vet’ran soldiers
For three hours, non-stop
Firing live ammunition
Straight over the top.

We served bully beef
Eaten straight from the can,
And “rat-au-van” — rat
That’s been killed by a van.

The doneness of bacon
Was never in doubt.
It was cooked with a candle
That kept blowing out.

The tea that we served
Flavoured water abused,
Delivered in petrol cans,
Most of them used.

When armistice came
To our trench of delight,
We called for some cocktails
To round out the night.

Brought up to “the front”
By the Rum Ration bloke
Was a jug of rough trade,
And we all took a choke.

Then our guests were demobbed
And drove home on a lorry
That bore on its sides
The words, “More Mud Than Glory”.

An RCMP member in Burnaby, British Columbia, on patrol at Canada Day celebrations on 1 July 2018 armed with a C8 “patrol carbine” (CBC News). Colt C8 rifles are now defined by the Hon. Bill Blair, Minister of Public Safety, as, “Guns that belong on a battlefield, and not on our streets.”

“What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander — idiom — chiefly British: Used to say that one person or situation should be treated the same way that another person or situation is treated.” ~ Merriam-Webster

Further to my comments here a few days ago, I will speak today specifically to the officially stated reasons for, and parameters applied in, the defining and banning of over 1500 types of firearms that up until 1 May 2020 were legal to use, own, purchase, and transfer between licensed Canadians. It should also be emphasized that prior to that date, use of any of them was subject to the strictest of criminal penalties if such use already violated the Criminal Code of Canada.

The move was implemented by means of an Order in Council under the hyperventilation inducing title, Regulations Amending the Regulations Prescribing Certain Firearms and Other Weapons, Components and Parts of Weapons, Accessories, Cartridge Magazines, Ammunition and Projectiles as Prohibited, Restricted or Non-Restricted:SOR/2020-96, and clicking here will lay out the entire list for your perusal.

I will not try your patience, Goode Reader, by subjecting you to the eye watering boredom of the Prime Minister’s official announcement on the grounds that, here in Canada, all official statements made on the Prime Ministerial level are spoken in segments, first in English and then repeated in French, and each piece of this is painful enough to listen to the first time let alone the second. That being said though, us Canadians still have to sit through all of it, both to get to the end and to make sure the speaker isn’t trying to slip a fast one through in the other official language. We all have our cross to bear.

Instead, here is Public Safety Minister Bill Blair, under whose file this matter falls, making his announcement in English, as he has come to know it. (more…)

Mrs. LFM has asked me to put out an announcement that readers may be encountering, or come to encounter, cases in which links found in articles here that should take you directly to another on the LFM site may instead present a message that the page does not exist.

This is due to a long overdue upgrade to the way the site manages file names and will be corrected soon. Until then, if you know the title of the article you’re trying to get to, entering that in the search box and hitting enter should provide the gratification you seek.

Thank you for your understanding and indulgence.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Sadly, when it comes to meddling with firearms law, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. (Source: CBC News)

All these weeks into the global clusterfuck spawned by The Pestilence, it seems natural that as governments have become comfortable with the new reality (notwithstanding whether or not the body politic has) they would revert to the old habits inherent in partisan politics and party defining ideologies going back to great great great granddad’s generation.

And so has it come to pass for the minority Liberal government of Justin Trudeau which yesterday enacted and announced an Order in Council that bans more than 1500 “military-style assault weapons”. A sweeping “final straw” move attributed to the recent killing of 22 Nova Scotians by a man driving a perfect replica of an RCMP cruiser, and credibly dressed as a Mountie in actual components of RCMP uniform. Unlicensed to acquire or possess firearms in Canada, his crimes were facilitated by an assortment of handguns and long guns, all obtained illegally, most from the United States. At the time of the killings, people in the affected areas had been made aware by one means or another of an active shooter and several structure fires left in his wake, but police were still coming to realize the perpetrator looked exactly like one of them, meaning people would be naturally cooperative and easy targets. By the time they figured it out, all the damage had been done.

The scab is barely dry on the wound left by those heinous events, but it is safe to say that even if the present ban, which Public Safety Minister Bill Blair says includes two types of firearms used by the killer, had been put into effect a decade ago, it would have changed nothing. The investigation quickly disclosed that he had violated every current Canadian law and regulation that relates to firearms licensing, registration, training, acquisition, importation, storage, transport, and use. An already strict set of laws sold to Canadians in the first term of the Trudeau Liberals as necessary to “make Canada safer” was completely ineffective in stopping, or even impeding, the gunman’s clearly very lengthy period of planning and preparation.

And how could they be otherwise under the circumstances now known to have prevailed in the course of those terrible hours?

Sentiments about firearms and their ownership in Canada run a scale from open the floodgates and let the good times roll on the one hand, and calls for their complete uninvention on the other. Somewhere in between are people with an interest in firearms that is no more an indication of evil intent than that of one who appreciates fast cars. Pursuing their interest requires education, training, and accreditation in best practices and legislation governing when and under what circumstances a firearm may be uncased, loaded, and discharged. It also means being a target yourself for every government that wants to substitute “gun control theatre” for intelligent thought.

Wherever you fit in that continuum, it’s not open to dispute that we already have laws forbidding the acquisition and possession of firearms by unlicensed Canadians as well as their transportation or importation across international borders by anyone lacking official authorization to do so. Likewise, it is already very illegal to conspire, plot, or commit murder by any means, and to do so while disguised as an officer of the law is to be frowned upon from the highest level.

Had the killer survived to stand trial for his crimes, the legion of his offenses would have far transcended those that breached the Firearms Act. Enacting a dramatic ban on certain firearms will stop law abiding Canadians from acquiring, using, and transferring them to others, but those are not the people this move was touted as being the fix for.

Before this tragedy came to light, the Trudeau Liberals were hot on the trail of another killer that hasn’t limited itself to Nova Scotia, but still stalks all of us. I would suggest they stop wasting time and treasure on worthless dramatics until there is time enough to revisit what measures could have intercepted and prevented 22 murders. When that time comes, I believe it would be prudent, before any new laws are proposed, to begin with a sober examination of just why it was that existing ones were so absolutely ineffective. Perhaps with that answered we can move forward with laws that don’t share such impotence, through built-in acceptance that laws affect only the law abiding, and those of other sorts who are unlucky or incompetent enough to get caught breaking them. To go forward with laws that exist to define the consequences of non-compliance, that don’t simultaneously impose burdens on the compliant just for keeping faith. How great would that be?

Until next time Goode Reader, and in the interests of utmost clarity, I will close with this flow chart which you must click to enbiggen and release all its fragrant springtime goodness.

The Clan LFM busy shunning society in the Back 40. (Mrs. LFM photo — click to enlarge)

Indigenous Ability is the title of an excellent blog written and updated regularly by Mark Hatmaker for the purpose of “Examining & Resurrecting Indigenous Skills and Frontier Rough & Tumble Combat”. In this, it succeeds admirably, to the point where even those labouring under the travails of urban living would do well to drink deeply and often from that well.

In his 9 April 2020 post titled Move Like a Scout or Indigenous Warrior, Mr. Hatmaker laid out, and then categorized elements of the subject matter, including four attributes of what he referred to as, “This School of Movement/Skulking Thought”. The third of these was:

“Hands-Free. A remarkable amount of the movement is predicated on leaving the hands free (even when on the ground) for weapons access or ‘brush-clearing,’ or in some tribal schools of thought, items in the hand ‘steal the mind.’

“That is, you think about what you grasp even if you are not thinking about it. To refine that thought, some aspect of your attention must be spent on a grasped item. (Ponder that next time you realize your phone is being carried in your hand even when not in current use.)

“As a loose rule for some tribes, if it was not a weapon or tool for imminent use, or the hand of a loved one, your hand was to be free so the mind could be free.”

It is this concept that gave me the first inspiration for the poem that follows, and Mrs. LFM’s photo from last week that completed it.

Hands Free

By LFM

He travels best who treads beneath
An unencumbered mind,
So shoulder what the trip requires,
And leave the rest behind.

For a mind’s more prone to boggle
That must juggle the demands
Of cargo that’s best stowed away,
Yet occupies the hands.

Let mind and hand be one and free,
Ere push should come to shove,
To grasp a tool, a weapon,
Or the hand of one you Love.

He travels best on any trail,
However foul the day,
Whose every need and every want
Are but arm’s length away.

Source: healthcentral.nz

There is no corner of the world unaffected by The Pestilence, and weeks of unrelenting media coverage hell bent on not letting anyone forget it have engendered a dangerous forgetting. We’ve forgotten that people occasionally sneeze and cough, that those occasions have always represented the majority of times when they do, and for the most part are the result of a non-viral inflammation sucked up from the immediate environment. Like cat dander coming off the sweater of the bloke up wind of you in the neatly 2 meter spaced lineup outside your local Super Store.

This time of year is also the lead in to a period that used to be known as “hay fever season”, suffered through to greater or lesser degree by no small number of the population.

All that having been said, here’s …

Nothing to Sneeze At

By LFM

Now Spring is here, the pollen’s out,
As happens every year.
And allergies, once common,
Have become a thing to fear.

Now, reddened eyes, a runny nose,
And Gods forbid, a sneeze,
Will send to flight both prole and toff,
Forfending dread disease.

An allergy’s a common thing,
It happens all the time,
But now it complicates a world
Where every cough’s a crime.

Dr. Michael Ryan is hereby granted an F in bedside manner. (Source: WHO)

March of 1994 came at the end of a bitterly cold winter practically devoid of snowfall. Every lake, still-water, and bog was frozen to a depth of 18 inches or more, and the bare ground in forest and field was stone hard.

When spring finally broke over the flood plain surrounding New Germany, Nova Scotia, it came with a week of warm temperatures and torrential rain. The frozen earth couldn’t absorb the water, sending it down every incline to fill the LaHave River and its tributaries to overflowing. As water collected in nearby lakes, the thick surface ice lifted. So too did that covering streams running out of them. With the warming trend in full sway, the ice began to disintegrate into thick rafts ranging in dimension from a few feet square to that of a good sized refrigerator. Buoyed and pushed by the still rising waters, these began their inexorable grinding migration downstream until, arrested by shallows, narrows, and bridge abutments, they piled into impenetrable dams that left the water behind them nowhere to go but up and out.

At the time and place this played out, I was Director of Emergency Measures for the Municipality of the District of Lunenburg, and it fell to my authority to be Incident Commander for response efforts involving elements of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, several Fire Departments, Lunenburg County Ground Search and Rescue, Nova Scotia Department of Emergency Measures, and Nova Scotia Department of Natural resources air assets, as well as a few heavy equipment operators who, if they knew what fear was, never showed or mentioned it.

It took a week to first identify risks to life, property, and infrastructure, locate and relieve choke points, and follow up on bridges and roads that had been stressed and/or undermined to confirm if and when they could be returned to service. In the end, no lives or buildings were lost. A few bridges needed repairs, and a stretch of highway that had been free-floated by a sheet of water flowing across it under the pavement so it undulated like a recently vacated waterbed, had to be torn up, rebedded, and repaved. Beyond that, the biggest cause for concern was the persistent and steadily snowballing rumour that started on the second day of steadily rising waters — that I was secretly planning to dynamite the ice dams. (more…)

Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (Wanderer above the Sea of Fog), Caspar David Friedrich c. 1818

Our title today is a twist of a sentiment expressed in song by the character of Fagin in the musical Oliver!. In the wake of an existential threat from Bill Sikes, Fagin reflects on his own litany of bad life choices and how things might be different if he only tried some options on for size. End result of his mental gymnastics — he finds he can’t wrap his mind around any of them. He’s screwed.

Yesterday’s piece, Cui Bono?, spoke to how the philosophy of multicultural globalism (a small example of which can be found here) created the perfect storm for the situation we now share with all the other jolly sailors adrift with us aboard the Goode Ship Earth. Where mere weeks ago, open borders, sunny ways, and friend helping friend were the mantra of Western Liberalism, the ship is now a life boat, its passengers scrambling over each other to lock the watertight doors in hope that at least their compartment won’t sink with all the rest. An analogy made all the sweeter by the plethora of “cruise ships of the damned” that have spent weeks being shunned at every port as passengers and crew sickened and died.

If COVID-19 has done anything, it has raised the question of whether the adherents of Western Liberalism have abandoned multicultural globalism, or if it has abandoned them. One thing is certain — the bigger an organism is, the more dependence it has on stability of the environmental conditions in which it evolved. When those veer too far from ideal, megafauna become fossils with surprising speed.

Another grimly positive effect of what I will henceforth refer to as The Pestilence is that it has highlighted where lines need to be drawn through all levels of society, and suggests that going forward, he risks career suicide who leads a nation into codependency with any other to the point that the homegrown essentials of national self-sufficiency are lost.

We will need a clearly defined, decidedly unconvoluted, definition of “homegrown essentials of national self-sufficiency”, and if there was ever an understatement, that is it.

Stay tuned. As you can probably sense, I’m not done yet.

Xi Jinping and Justin Trudeau at the September 2016 G20 Summit in Hangzhou, China. (Damir Sagolj/Reuters)

The title of today’s piece is common usage short form for part of a longer expression attributed to Lucius Cassius, “… whom the Roman people used to regard as a most honest and most wise judge, was in the habit of asking time and again in lawsuits: ‘to whom might it be for a benefit?’ (cui bono fuisset?)” ~ Wikipedia

Also applicable to today’s point —

“American sociologist Peter Blau has used the concept of cui bono to differentiate organizations by whom has primarily benefited: owners; members; specific others; or the general society.” ~ Wikipedia

In the throes of the current unpleasantness as we now all find ourselves, a lot of people will think it more than a little addlepated to even suggest that any person or group could possibly find benefit in any way. But I beg to differ. We can all benefit, or rather, they can benefit who survive to correct the sins of the past.

Permit me to clarify.

The present situation is a double whammy built from two existential crises:

1. The actual illness we face with all its attendant risks to life and limb; and
2. The effects efforts to mitigate item 1 are having on the income realities of individuals and national economies as a whole.

Complicating resolution of either is the globalist economic model embraced by Western democracies that turned China into the world’s factory, a reality that could not have been more perfectly demonstrated than by means of a contagion that started its onslaught by shutting the factory down. Overnight, government leaders found themselves stammering through explaining to their respective bodies politic not why essential medical equipment and medicines were in short supply — as with the Spanish Inquisition, nobody expects a global pandemic — but why shortages were such a complicating factor.

In short, globalism and the foundational principles of global economics had hoist the lot of them by their own petard.

This is not to say that the very same body politic shares no complicity in crafting the bomb that blew up in our faces these few short weeks ago. For example, in 2007, American journalist Sara Bongiorni wrote A Year Without “Made in China” chronicling her family’s attempt to live a full 12 months free of anything bearing that label.

An abstract of Ms. Bongiorni’s book published by The Economist listed these “take-aways”:

• China rules the global market in many sectors, including electronics, clothing, athletic shoes and toys.
• Cheap labor, a manipulated money supply and state-sponsored subsidies give China a competitive edge in international trade.
• United States consumers constitute one of China’s largest markets, but the U.S. faces a trade deficit with China of more than $202 billion.
• More than two million American workers have lost positions to China’s industries.
• One family addressed the job loss and trade imbalance by refusing to buy Chinese products for a year. This is their story.
• Avoiding the lure of cheap and abundant merchandise from China proved difficult.
• Shoes, sunglasses and appliances from China cost dramatically less than products produced elsewhere.
• Most Halloween, Christmas and Fourth of July merchandise is created in China.
• Even products assembled in the U.S. include components manufactured in China.
• Many sectors, such as the shoe and toy industries, have completely halted production in the U.S.

A Google or YouTube search for, “no more made in China”, will yield a wealth of similar results. But cheap, abundant, quality, only occasionally toxic-flammable-explosive, goods have delivered a resounding, “So what?” to such dire warnings because, to paraphrase, the Chinese will beat any price, and they will not — indeed CANNOT be undersold!

This being said, it should come as no surprise at all that when appearance of COVID-19 in China caused an instantaneous shutdown of the world’s factory, everything in the West unravelled. While it was never a secret, the way in which China has become intertwined with domestic production of essential medical and safety supplies finally came home to roost for the average citizen in a way no cawing storm crow could ever have managed.

U. S. based 3M, producer of the much talked about N95 respirator, makes the masks in their Chinese factory. Some producers of hand sanitizer have lots of the constituent chemicals on hand, but are hampered in delivery because the dispenser bottles they typically use are made in China. The list of “always there” items goes on and on, including finished goods openly produced entirely in China, and things marked as made anywhere BUT China that couldn’t be made absent critical components that are.

None of this was new news when the afore mentioned book detailed one family’s travails in trying to live a year untouched by China. China had not suddenly and overnight come to rule, “… the global market in many sectors, including electronics, clothing, athletic shoes and toys,” created a system of, “Cheap labor, a manipulated money supply and state-sponsored subsidies …” giving it, “… a competitive edge in international trade,” that caused, “More than two million American workers (to) have lost positions to China’s industries,” so that, “Many sectors, such as the shoe and toy industries, have completely halted production in the U.S..” Neither had they done it alone because, like vampires, they couldn’t step over the threshold absent invitation.

Coming forward to more proximate days, an article posted by CBC News on 28 February 2020 under the title Diplomats warned federal government about getting too tight with China, committee hears, carried some interesting, albeit tardy, revelations:

“Global Affairs briefing papers released by a House of Commons committee show that Canada’s professional foreign service has been warning politicians that it’s dangerous for Ottawa to get too close to China.

“Seven documents were released by a Commons committee on Canada-China relations that was formed in January after opposition parties united to outvote the Liberal minority, which opposed the creation of such a committee.

“The last of the documents is described in a cover letter by Global Affairs’ top civil servant as ‘a concise diagnostic for the incoming minister of foreign affairs to set the stage for strategic advice on how to approach relations with China’. Deputy Minister Marta Morgan writes that the paper distills the new approach to China, and that ‘Minister Champagne has called for a new framework for Canada-China relations.’

“That paper, written in October 2019, warns that ‘while Canada has long framed its China policy through the lens of economic opportunity, it now needs to take account of Beijing’s long-term strategic challenge to Canada’s interests and values.'”

Wow. If only we’d known sooner.

But we do now, so what are we going to do about it?