Incoherent ramblings

The emphasis of remembrance day is so wrong!

November 11, 2015 Incoherent ramblings , , , , , , , ,

I’ve deposited my stepson for the day at the Unionville public school warfare celebration and indoctrination center for the day. He’s got his scouts uniform with him so he can put it on for the celebration of war, and make the veterans feel good. He was sent off with instructions to enjoy the celebration, and how much this day is about respect.

The flag is at half mast today. In reverent tones other fathers tell their sons that this is to show respect. I stand there listening, just barely able to keep from gagging.

Needless to say, I feel significantly different about remembrance day than most people I know. It seems so obvious to me that this day was designed as war propaganda, but I’m not allowed to have that opinion. My opinion is viewed as one of disrespect. I’m not allowed to view veterans as unwitting pawns in the actions of evil men. I am supposed to respect the fact that they had the misfortune to have to go off to war and kill other people for the psychopaths that run governments “in our names”.

I am especially not allowed to have an opinion that the great and holy world war II shouldn’t have been fought. I must love Hilter for thinking something like that. It’s true that I consider it a tragedy that so many civilian populations in Germany were bombed in the name of bringing down Hilter. I also consider it equally tragic that civilian populations in Britain were also bombed by Germany. Warfare should not involve civilians, but it always does. That is one of the reasons that it is so profitable.

We will never know what history would have been like if North American forces did not submit the propaganda of glorious warfare, but there are a few things that we can know. We know that Allied support was given to Stalin, killer of more of his own people than Hilter killed. We know that Churchill gifted still more victims to Stalin when all was done. We know that the United States engineered to have Japan enter the war by imposing brutal sanctions. We know that US companies like Ford and IBM supported Hitler’s war and genocide actions (respectively). As with all the current enemies of the United States, you can almost always find a time when those enemies were incubated by the same people who later turn on them as warfare fodder. We know from the admissions of Germans interviewed after the war, that full fledged war was used as the justification for the Jewish genocide. We know that psychopaths in the United States government killed hundreds of people in Japan with needless atomic bombs. Those atomic bombs were explicitly dropped on civilian populations, because they wanted test sites that had not already been ravaged by conventional carpet bombing. Japan was ready to give up when these bombs were dropped, but the atomic bombs were a great way to show power, especially to Russia, who was ready to move in and take desired resources. We know a lot about the blatant evil that did occur because “we” joined the war. Despite that one is not allowed to question the holiness of world war II.

It seems especially despicable to me that remembrance day is pushed on us and on the kids without any context of history. Don’t look at the root causes for the wars that turned your grandfathers into pawns. Don’t think about all the civilians that are were killed and displaced as they served.

Close your eyes and observe the holy moment of silence, but don’t think. Thank and respect the veterans for their service, but never look at the underlying issues. Celebrate the goodness of war.

Unionville public school. Acting even more like a jail.

October 26, 2015 Incoherent ramblings , ,

I dropped off Karl’s lunch on the way to work (we didn’t have anything he would eat, so I made him something when we got back).

The school is more and more like a jail. In addition to the asinine security system, the secretary today wouldn’t even let me into the school office to drop off Karl’s lunch. She came to the door to get it, instead of letting me in for a few seconds.

I view the security system at the school as pandering to idiotic media fear porn. Implemented board wide, I’m sure that some security company is making bucket loads of cash at our expense.

Perhaps they wouldn’t let me into the school because I didn’t play their Oh Canada conformity training game, and have been open stating that their multiplication teaching methods are stupid. I’m definitely a bad influence. The new-math “four ways of multiplying” are great for making Karl (and other kids) confused, but are excellent ways of ensuring that we’ll have another generation of kids that have to use a calculator to do basic math, and will shortly live in a third world country with respect to the sciences.

Greetings to new Markham-Unionville conservative rep Bob Saroya.

October 21, 2015 Incoherent ramblings , , , ,

The Honourable Bob Saroya,

Congratulations for your success winning your position in parliament for our district. Unfortunately for you, this means that you are also obligated to represent me. I did not vote for you. I effectively voted none-of-the-above, by voting for the Green Party representative Elvin Kao, knowing full well that he was too inexperienced to be successful. I’m not sad that he was not successful, because his emails expressed a belligerence in foreign policy matters that turned my stomach. He got my vote in the end because he answered my mailed questions, unlike yourself and unlike your like your Liberal running mate Mrs. Jiang. Your Liberal predecessor in Markham Unionville, Mr John McCallum, as a representative, has a 2/5 score for answering correspondence. However, that small non-zero portion of his positive score can really be attributed to his administrative assistant, Mr. Nicholson.

I have a very poor opinion of politics, and politicians, and as my representative, you have an infinitesimal chance of changing that position. Given that you did not answer correspondence sent while running, I do not expect there is much chance of that occurring. What I do expect is to see more voting for increased government when you have the chance. Take bill-C51, the police state bill, tabled by members of Minister Blainey’s hierarchy that effectively gave themselves paychecks and power. Despite knowing that there was a massive objection to this bill, so much that it probably cost the Conservatives their majority this election, it was still forced through. It seems to me that this bill owes its success to the putrid non-democratic policy of the party whip. Because the Liberal leadership was also deluded into thinking there was rational for a new Canadian police state, the average joe like me will slowly start to see how big government in Canada will exploit this to spy on all it’s could-be-terrorist citizens. Welcome to the new Canada, where fear mongering trumps rationality.

I am not surprised that fear mongering is so successful here. We are conditioned to be conformist and patriotic. Our schools are like jails, locked down, with active shooter drills, and require police checks of parent volunteers that discourage involvement of non-school personal in raising the little obedient soldiers who stand for their dose of Oh Canada every morning.

The desired product seems to be unthinking patriots that will be willing to go off to war to bomb the current bad-guy brown people de-jour. Such people are guilty of having been selected as targets by the USA and their North bordered military lackey, but this always occurs in a predictable way. First they are sold or given weapons, then later declared to be enemies. It’s a beautiful scheme to keep the armaments industry going.

What do we not see taught in schools? We don’t see anybody taught to think for themselves. We don’t see basics taught. We are raising a generation of kids that have to use a calculator because they haven’t learned their timetables, and have had the new math shoved down their throats. They won’t be able to multiply the way our generation, our parents, and grandparents learned, but by the time they have been subjected to the matrix method of multiplication, the line crossing method of multiplication, and the array method of multiplication … they will give up. Math will be viewed as too confusing, and we will have a generation of math illiteracy. Our generation has front row seats to watching our first world status get flushed down the toilet.

Ranting aside, I have a couple questions.

1) Should Mr Trudeau follow through with his unlikely promise to repeal parts of bill-C51, imagine that the party whip was given the day off, and you were given the chance to vote in a democratic fashion instead of having to obediently follow the party line like a good Oh Canada trained compliant patriot, how would you vote?

Yes, I know that it is unlikely that the party whip would be given the day off. A more likely scenario is that he/she gets correctly identified as a source of anti-free-speech and anti-democracy, and gets shot by terrorists inspired by Canadian bombing throughout the world.

2) The Quirks and Quarks radio show hosted by Bob McDonald hosted a political debate on science topics. This was a pretty putrid affair, like all politician debates, and the point of the debaters seemed to be to win points for most spin, and least fact.

One point debated seemed to be fact checkable. Opposition members brought up the destruction of one or more Canadian research libraries by the conservative party. The conservative party rep claimed that they were lying, and said that the libraries were not destroyed but digitized to be made available for all. The opposition then predictably claimed that the conservative was also lying.

How many research libraries were destroyed? Where are the digitized copies of all the books available? Was that a 100% digitization, or a partial digitization. If partial, where is the policy used to decide what was destroyed, and are there records showing what was destroyed?

Sincerely,

Peeter Joot

Damn, couldn’t resist walking out on Oh Canada during “New math” objections.

October 15, 2015 Incoherent ramblings , ,

I made the mistake of walking away from Oh Canada during a conversation.  I don’t respect the training in conformity and patriotism (a trait second only to religion for inspiring war) that the Oh Canada ritual provides.  This and other similar patriotism rituals like the US pledge of allegiance have no more business in the schools than the old religious pledges that we used to have to mumble as kids, not knowing what we were even saying.  In my opinion, Oh Canada is an important brainwashing technique, and trains us to love our country regardless of the actions done in our name by the government and its unending bureaucracy.  This ritual trains us in blind obedience.  The end result is that we are comfortable dismissing real insanities like the political party whip, a true destroyer of democratic representation.  With blind love for our country we can ignore insanities of our government, thinking of them as yet another facet of Canadian values.  It is training to not question the system imposed on us.
I know that I am extremely isolated in my distaste for Oh Canada, and I haven’t figured out a good strategy for dealing with it.  We’ve been trained to respect it with so much force, regardless of there being no good reason to do so, that breaking with the convention unfortunately upsets people when they see it done.  Once I came to the conclusion that Oh Canada should not be respected, it was hard to fight the training in conformity that I had been subjected to.  It would be much easier to just stand and pretend to like it, and let the old feelings of patriotism back in, but I feel I have a moral obligation not to do so.
Unfortunately, walking out on the go-to-war-for-country song, interrupted my conversation with Mr Dixon (Unionville public school principle) on the more important topic of some bizarre multiplication techniques that are being taught in fourth grade, techniques that have the side effect of severe confusion, and making mathematics suddenly a hated subject, where it used to be loved.  This hatred is coming from a boy with a natural aptitude for numbers, who for example, memorized 50 digits of pi in three days just for the sheer pleasure of doing so.  Because of the effort of trying to keep the “four multiplication methods” all straight in his head, he’s not sure how to do the most important of them all: the standard multiplication technique that has been the workhorse of paper multiplication for hundreds of years before these bizarre teaching ideas invaded the curriculum.  I recall when my kids came home with these techniques.  They had the good sense to go through the motions mechanically and forget about them after that.  To spend all this effort just for the best case option of having all the kids that learn it forget it after the test is nonsensical to say the least.  But when it also has the side effect of destroying love for the subject, it is unforgivable.

Letter to Liberal Markham-Unionville Liberal representive

October 14, 2015 Incoherent ramblings , ,

Hello Mrs Jiang,

I’m interested in your position on two topics that probably rule out my vote for the liberal party.  Before the vote, I am giving you a chance to defend or justify your stance on these policies.

The first is the party whip.  This is, in my opinion, a destroyer of democracy, and effectively ensures that local constituents have no possibility of representation.  A meaningless vote every four years is made further meaningless by requiring that “representatives” vote the party-line.  Even school children realize the absurdity of such a policy, but such absurdity appears to be not only tolerated but desired by Canadian politicians.

The second is the Liberal vote for bill C-51 required by the party leadership.  I’ve appended correspondence that shows my position on this bill to the incumbent “representative” for Markham-Unionville.  His reply was voting for the bill, which did not surprise me.

Peeter Joot

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please note that I make a copy of all political correspondence (or lack thereof) available online.
Appended copy of my “take a firm stand” letter to John McCallum, incumbent Markham-Unionville “representitive”.