#terry glavin

[aescheretalks]

Pe kopa okoke oakut, lelang mitlite yukwa pe yahwa.

Yaka mitlite kopa tenas wawa pe ole shantie.

And this is how the language lingers here and there

It is in the small words and old songs

[vancouvertrueborns]

Those are not mermaids swimming around the second floor of this bewitching Fraserview home – they are sturmaids, as in sturgeon. The home owner commissioned local artist Lance Webb to create the sculptures and the sea maidens’ faces are based on the patron’s daughter.

Sturmaids, as whimsical as they are, make perfect sense for a South Van home, because a few of the knobby-backed fish still lounge in the muddy depths of the Fraser at the base of the hillside neighbourhood.

According to the Fraser River Sturgeon Conservation Society, sturgeon can live to be 150 years old, which means there may still be creatures along the shoreline that were here in 1868 – before Vancouver existed.

The fish are super agers because they have mastered suspended animation.  Author Terry Glavin explains in A Ghost in the Water that sturgeon can enter a state “... not unlike death, willed upon itself, and from which it can emerge at will.”

The photo of the permanently dead sturgeon is from New Westminster, 1920.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

All talk, no action, from Trudeau's Liberals on Trump's travel ban

By Terry Glavin

Well, that’s it, then. It’s settled. Canada is going to do nothing.

Ever since last Friday, when U.S. President Donald Trump shut America’s doors to all refugees and banned any visitors from seven countries in the Middle East and North Africa, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government has been preening about how different and better and hip and generous we Canadians are.

As it now turns out, at least for the federal government’s part, it was all just talk. On Saturday, Trudeau took to Twitter to declare: “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength. #Welcome to Canada.” The world loved it. It has now turned out to have been a platitude, a Liberal advertising jingle and a hashtag.

During Tuesday night’s emergency House of Commons debate on the implications of Trump’s malicious and shambolic executive order, the Peace Tower was illuminated in green to honour the six Muslims murdered while at prayer Sunday night at the  Centre Culturel Islamique de Québec in Quebec City. The visitor’s gallery was packed. The doors were opened to allow the Speaker’s Gallery to fill up.

Cabinet ministers and Liberal MPs said more nice things about Canada and about each other and they dutifully recited the Diversity is Our Strength jingle at every opportunity, but the one important thing they made abundantly plain during Opposition questions that began at 7:30 p.m. and ended close to midnight, was this: In the face of the United States’ four-month executive abdication from its commitments under the 1951 Refugee Convention, at a time of the worst refugee crisis since the Second World War, Canada will not step up.

Canada will do nothing about it, and Trudeau’s government doesn’t want Canadian citizens to do anything either. You can march around in your “pussy hat” and chant slogans until you’re hoarse. You can flood Facebook with the most dubious claims about the superiority of Canada’s splendid multicultural diversity, you can bewail Islamophobia and you can exaggerate the hell out of the difference between the Liberal and Conservative immigration records.

But if you and a group of your friends want to raise some money and bring to Canada just one of those broken-hearted Syrian families whose ticket in the American resettlement lottery was ripped up last Friday, you’re not allowed to anymore. Been there. Done that.

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[rayfredm]

Terry Glavin: Canada needs to call off renewing ties with Iran

“Nobody in Trudeau’s government knows quite what to think, or say, or do” The above quote by Terry Glavin, although taken out of contex, sums up very well the whole Trudeau Government, in my opinion at least. The rest of the piece? Some blather about Iran and Canada and embassies and such. Ray ________________________   Nobody in Trudeau’s government knows quite what to think, or say, or do…

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[xerxesxerxesxerxes]

Cascadia

A notional realm lying on and behind the Northeast shores of the Pacific, running, variously, from as far north as lower Alaska and south as Big Sur, from tide pools to the desiccated fringes of the inland semi-deserts where the presence of the ocean might still be discerned. Cascadia has been described in Chinuk Wawa as a place where

konoway tiillciums klatawa kunamokst klaska mamook okoke huloima chee illahie

everyone was thrown together to make [a] strange new country.

Here is its proposed flag, which bears the emblem of what some allege is a cannabis bud, but instead is a Douglas fir.

[coldsouq]

Afghanistan's former president Burhanuddin Rabbani was assassinated yesterday while attempting to negotiate peace with the Taliban -- a morally obscure strategy supported to absurd extremes by an America that's pressed for time.

Terry Glavin's take on this crooked path in today's Ottawa Citizen is crystal:

In Washington, London and Brussels, the whole point now is to convince "war-weary" electorates that capitulation is compromise, that the whole nightmare was brought about by stupid neo-conservatives, and that the problem is an incorrigibly violent and uncivilized Afghan people in whom we need not see the basic human rights we ordinarily recognize in our fairer-skinned selves.

Stand up, Terry.