Nota in Brevis, December 9th
*Buried in the headlines is the notice that at least 30 Afghanis are dead, killed in an attack by the Taliban at Kandahar airport. God rest their souls, and so goes life if you are unfortunate enough to live in a fundamentalist Islamic backwater almost devoid of the rule of law, except so-called Sharia ‘law’. I am still puzzled over our, and America’s, mission there, or was that a ‘war’? What exactly did we accomplish with our sacrifice of men, women and untold billions?
*But we chicken littles still think the sky is falling, or at least filling, with CO2. Canada’s 380 man (yes, yes, and woman) delegation to the Climate Conference in Paris was bigger than that of the host country, the U.K. and the U.S.A. combined, and that does not include the back-and-forth trips of our own provincial premier. That’s a whole lot of carbon goin’ on, or is that up? I could do the quick math on how much that cost, but it would depress me, and likely you as well. Let’s just say it’s also a lot of our hard-earned tax dollars. But, then, when you elect people who are unvirtuous into office, a professed autocratic lesbian and a pampered autocratic millionaire in the case of our two vaunted provincial and federal leaders respectively, why would we expect anything different? They actually think they can reduce the temperature of the Earth by 2 degrees. Astounding, and up there with Obama’s promise to make the oceans recede. We have let the gremlins loose in the candy store, and there won’t be a lot of candy left soon.
*Alberta, once the land of milk and honey, keeps getting pounded. Oil is now $37 a barrel, and falling. There is now a new carbon tax, other taxes are rising, and the risible and foolish NDP government has added a muddled layer of bureaucratic laws about farm labour, effectively stymieing the family farm. Finally, farmers are fed up (that works well alliteratively) and are protesting. We will see where this leads.
*Eventually the buck will stop, reality will hit, and the great Titanic of our economy, or at least the Titanic size of its debt load, will have to be faced. The government class are in the first class cabins, and they will be the last to taste the icy-cold salt water of the north Atlantic. The small guy (i.e., the those who still work for the private sector, not least oil and its spin-offs) will feel it first: economic despair, unemployment, inability to pay one’s mortgage, homelessness, and so on. It was just reported that the suicide rate in Alberta has jumped 30%. I am not entirely sure what that means, but for sure nothing good. Alberta will soon be in the same economic bracket as Nova Scotia, but, unlike Nova Scotia, there will soon be no Alberta to save Alberta. If things do not change for the better, there will soon be no Canada to save what is left of Canada.
*Yet, the clamour for more money still continues unabated, as provinces and cities ‘appeal to the federal government’ for help, as though our government were a bank that just printed money. Trudeau and his Liberals are now discovering that ‘taxing the top 1%’ does not work so well. For the same reasons that they are in the top 1%, they are also adept at hiding their money from the voracious jaws of the tax-man. Who wants to support two-nannie Trudeau and his entourage jetting around the world for photo-ops?
*Ah, well, there is always hope, but not in a material sense. Today is the memorial of Saint Juan Diego, the visionary of Guadalupe, a humble peasant who lived a quiet life, famed for a few moments of conversation with a mysterious lady on the side of a mountain on this day in December, 1531. Our Lady of Guadalupe brought millions of souls into the Church, sort of a balance, as some Church historians say, of the millions who were leaving in the Protestant ‘reformation’ (Luther had pinned his 95 ‘theses’ to the church door at Wittenberg in October 1517, beginning the revolt against the Church, and by 1531 it was in full swing). God always knows how to balance things out, just right and just so, as Pope Benedict XVI so eruditely explained in his beautiful encyclical Spe Salvi. A beneficial read during Advent, the season of hope and expectation.
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Pope Leo and a Rosary for Peace
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Payette’s Payout
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