Category Archives: Canada
How lucky we are, we who mourn the erosion of freedom and the implementation of Statism; for now, we at least have the consolation and comforting feelings that come with knowing we have a high degree of intellect directing our international diplomacy, more commonly known as “Smart Diplomacy”. The phrase our former First Lady used to describe her self-professed skills in diplomacy; skills that were apparently acquired in managing the “Bimbo Eruptions,” her husband precipitated during their marriage and sometimes bizarre journey to the White House. Skills that became patently obvious with the Obama Administration’s opening of our embassy in Damascus and Ms Clinton describing Assad,the butcher of Syria, as a reformer. Yes, if the diplomacy of the White House and the State Department were any smarter, the dictators of the world would be cowering in fear when Hillary flexes her brain and farts intellect by the bucket. Continue reading
It’s the mother of all boners. Barack Obama gambled the future of the US oil supply on Brazil.
He lost. China kicked his butt.
In March Barack Obama put on his best groveling suit (you know, the same one he wore when genuflecting to the Saudi King) and went off to Brazil looking for foreign oil. Continue reading
Obama “the job destroyer” has come even closer to not only losing all the jobs that would come with the XL Pipeline but also losing all that oil:
Canada is now looking to Asian countries to market its abundance of oil, natural gas and minerals as plans to build the proposed Keystone XL pipeline have stalled with the U.S. administration.
I offer the following purely as a thought experiment. I suppose it’s more of a leftward proposal, and, thus may be deemed unsuitable for this blog. I’m hoping that it may be viewed simply as a theoretical proposal to initiate thoughtful discussion of pros and cons.
I think that it would be advantageous to form some sort of global confederation of the primary English-speaking nations: Continue reading
Prologue: This is a story of two Stone Age chieftains, who migrated to America during the last Ice Age, approximately twenty thousand years ago: one came from the East and one came from the West, but before you begin to recite the teachings of Archaeology from twenty years ago, you might be surprised to know of startling new discoveries about the migration of man and the inconvenient facts surrounding the theories of Anthropomorphic Global Warming.
During the Renaissance and up until the late 19th Century, the Straivarius violin was the standard of the industry. A model by which all others were judged. The Stradivarius and fine sailing ships were built by employing Pythagorean mathematics, a keen knowledge of various woods, and a sense of artistic proportion. The result was an aesthetic marvel that would be admired by generations
Lars used the same Pythagorean mathematics, his love of exotic wood, and an artist’s sense of form and proportion to build his double ended ketch over thirty years ago. Wood makes a sail boat seem alive. The steel cable stays that brace the masts play their own music in different winds and the wooden vessel comes alive and sings beautiful songs on the high seas, but you needed to speak the language of sailing to understand the music of the songs of the sea. Continue reading
I had a Labrador and my best buddy Knarley Manners had a Chesapeake. The dogs were given to us by people in town, people who found that big dogs make a big mess in small backyards. That was fine by us, we usually had stock dogs and dogs for lion and bear, these bird dogs were exotics to us and really special. There was only one problem; we weren’t bird hunters. Oh sure, we shot prairie chickens (grouse and ptarmigan) for dinner out in the bush, but that was always with a pistol or a 22 and not all that sporting. Head shots at thirty feet or less was the rule, but the skills for shooting ducks and geese had eluded us. Why hunt ducks and geese when you can hunt moose and elk?
Now that we had dogs, we needed to learn how to hunt waterfowl. We made plans, oh how we made plans for weeks and months we made plans; the sort of plans that 13 year old boys make when they are hiding an expedition from their dads.
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Prologue: I am rewriting these articles as chapters in my first book “Skook, A Canadian Cowboy, Loose In America”. I will occasionally reprint a chapter for feedback. I hope you enjoy this rewrite.
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One of my neighbors asked for help in rounding up the cattle on his brother’s spread in the Chilcotin, down by Alexis Creek. His brother had been killed when a horse flipped over and crushed him against a log.
I was always up for an adventure and for seeing new country, so I told him he could count on me. The Chilcotin is about halfway to Vancouver and we considered it to be in the tropics. They could count on the thermometer dropping to sixty below come winter, but it is only a few hours from the Okanagan and they grow peaches down there.
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My intellectual mentors were two of the most unlikely characters you can imagine. They were both immigrants to Peace River Country from Europe. They were both well read and primarily self-taught learned men, who knew the classics and were prepared to argue politics, religion, or literature with any man walking the earth.
Todd or Tadeusz Podbereski, a huge Pole who stood six foot six and weighed well over 300 pounds, was a devout Catholic who brooded over Homer’s Illiad and could recite several of Shakespeare’s plays and most of the bible from memory. He could never resist the opportunity to assume the role of Falstaff, Shakespeare’s irreverent, glutton, bawdy, profane, drunken, mooching, liar monk: he would abandon his thick Polish accent and employ the overly theatrical method of a Shakespearian actor, in country stores and humble cabins, he’d quote passages that pertained to the daily discourse of almost any situation. Even the most stoic and unromantic watched in silent awe as Todd applied his thespian skills to illustrate an obscure point of conversation.
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