IDAA 2019 Knoxville Tennessee, Part 2

It’s Sunday. I’m sitting in the Knoxville Market square.  I’ve just come from hearing Lori share her experience, strength and hope. She’s a humble heroine of the soul.  What an amazing story of hope,  growth and humor.  With epidemic suicide rates among doctors I’m so glad she found her way here.

 My personal nemesis has been sociopaths and psychotic people in power. I’ve fulfilled my contract, doing the best possible healing,  with the best training. I’ve served, reducing  “morbidly and mortality”, fighting disease and saving lives. 

Today that’s of little importance compared with ‘political correctness.’  Today,  the patient can die so long as the ‘chart’ lives. It’s all about spin and who you know. 

My police friend described her leaving the force saying, “I became a police woman to ‘fight crime’ . At the end end all I was allowed to do was ‘record’ crime’.  I feel like I joined the best hockey team in Canada. However today the  coach  only excelled in writing memos. Instead of firing coaches, doctors are required do more laps of the ice.

Lori’s challenges were family, sense of loss and betrayal traced back to childhood. I suspect my anti authority issue could relate to  being caned and strapped in school for ‘talking back’. 

 IDAA is always a time of deep reflection.  It’s not a place to ‘blame’ as much as I enjoy that. We discuss ‘choices’. 

In the psychiatry breakout meeting we talked of retirement, hearing among others, from my favourite retired psychiatrist,  his joy in welded art. Others talked of ways of winding down. Meanwhile the youngest heard  our stories and shared their own struggles with their new careers and their aspirations. 

It’s sadly the only place in the profession today that we talk openly and honestly without fear of retribution by the authorities or ‘loss of face’.  I attended the national medical meeting and enjoyed the didactic ‘fact’ lectures somewhat but felt so much ego. I was glad I’d worn my suit and tie. 

At IDAA most everyone wore shorts and Hawaiian shirts except for the banquets. The girls looked great in sun dresses. The ladies were so elegant. The group cleaned up well. Every conference there’s a thousand present plus or minus a hundred or so. Some 40,000 plus are active members. 

Saturday night banquet Merve gave the most succinct and moving banquet speech. He described his journey of recovery as a series of interventions  of divine and human love. He ended his extraordinarily miraculous talk with a quote from the Doobie Brother’s “Without love where would we be now?” “Without Love where would we be now!”. 

Of course,it was a medical conferenece too. That day I’d attended a terrific CME discussing reward centers, the amygdala, nucleus accumbens, the pre frontal cortex, and effects of dopamine and oxytocin. which drugs did specifically what. We even learned the genetic codes associated with predisposition to alcoholism. 

The Friday CME was especially good. I loved Dr. Michael Baron’s talk, Prescribing and Pain. In Tennessee the doctors prescribing opiates must attend two hours of CME on addiction and opiates. I was privileged to attend this, truly appreciating the combination of neuroscience , public health and common sense presented. 

Abstinence remains the treatment of choice  but Dr. Bill Haning's talk, Cultural Aspects of Addiction,  on Culture of Addiction emphasized that treatment  isn’t just stopping a substance but involves significant life changes to prevent relapse. The work addressed in this CME was about harm reduction and abstinence.  The speaker talked of the great benefits of AA fellowship but also discussed a variety of groups which also help. 

Having dealt with so much grief, such mind numbing, debilitating, heart rending sadness , I simply enjoyed the  Dr Jes Montgomery's talk on grief and recovery. It was healing personally and certainly gave me tools to help with patients.

Our small group discussion of illnesss and recovery, dealing with pain without opiates, avoiding relapse when opiates were needed post surgery, was highly informative.  I’d thought this group of doctors who were so good looking and smart were immune and immortal.  We all discussed  various illness we’d had and various treatments. .One had just had surgery. I’d had a dental implant. Another had arthritis.  It’s one thing to read  the textbooks some of which were written by people in the room, but a whole other thing to hear what people actually did.  

As a psychiatrist we learn about the ‘self’ , the false self, the ego, and  ‘persona’ . Quite frankly IDAA is the only place I really get to talk with other physicians,but especially psychiatrists. The other docs and specialists say it’s the same them..  I loved my colleague from a small town saying this was the only time he’d spoken truthfully and meaningfully with another psychiatrist in ‘years’.  

Training as an analytic psychotherapist  I’d early enjoyed bearing my soul and gaining  useful insights . But here it was even better because I knew that the psychiatrist I was sharing with had been divorced like me. No one claimed to have the answers here. No one was holier that thou. I just love the lack of hypocrisy. There certainly wasn’t any pomposity which seems to thrive elsewhere. 

Dick didn’t pretend he didn’t have feel pain walking. Cheryl didn’t conceal her love and concern. No one was just ‘fine’ (that’s an acronym which ‘fucked inside, nice exterior’ ).  Everyone’s hurting sometime. But here everyone knew that and also also shared their love and their joy. 

I heard the most wonderful stories of trips, travels, children and grandchildren, recovery and successes in work.I was so pleased my young Canadian friend was now on the national board. Several other docs I knew had completed fellowships, while others had become heads of programs and hospitals. 

Through the year I read about the ‘greats’ in our fields who I meet here.  World renown plastic surgeons and cardiologists with the rankest sense of humor continue to inspire me.  The most beautiful brilliant elegant ladies talking intimately about their disease and finally asking for help touch my inner being. I laugh and tear up more in these days than I do all year.

It was also so moving to be among the many there with incredibly long term marriages.  What examples these 30, 40 and 50 year married doctors provided. My friends Art and Carole have 53 years together but seem like high school sweethearts.  

I loved seeing Adam and Corinne when Corinne celebrated the Jerry Moe program sharing what it meant for her son. I loved seeing the Jerry Moe kids and the outrageous teens.  The babies and toddlers there represented hope and faith in the flesh.  

Overall I felt again I’d entered an adult learning place  of genius and creativity beyond the limited world of bean counters and administration that saw health care as commodity. I was able to discuss difficult patients and changes in treatment over coffee and in  hall way consults.  

The whole relevance of ‘sign in’ CME came up for discussion in our little group where the actual definition of a professional was so reminiscent of what I’d signed up for. “I learn from a patient. If someone comes in with something I don’t know, that triggers my research and consultation.  I don’t pay attention to all this other stuff that does’t apply to me and my area of work.”  The anesthesiologist shared.

That was exactly what I thought.   I will never forget administrative doctor shouting ‘doctors should never learn from patients’ they’re there to teach the patients’. By contrast,  at times over coffee,  it seemed like a ‘barter market’. I was sharing psychiatry jewels I’d been bequeathed to get in return dermatology pearls. This is the  way ‘adult professionals’ learn. But then we wondered if this only worked because we were in this IDAA bubble where it was okay to be to not know everything’, to be vulnerable, and to share. I joked about sitting at the ‘in table’ with Art and Dick and Graeme.  

It was fun to be at IDAA.  I emailed a friend who I hope to see at next year’s high school reunion saying, “IDAA  iwas like being at a doctors ‘ elementary school reunion’ . It could only be better if Jerry Moe and the kids let’s us join their program. All that was missing was the dance with the mirrored balls hanging from the ceiling.

Next year it’s Spokane. IDAA2020 Spokane.

I love the town of Spokane and already know some brilliant psychiatrists there.  I’m thinking of riding my Harley down and certainly wearing boxers even if they do ride up my ass.  I’m all signed up.  IDAA is like the love story “same time next year’.  

I know I’d never have been able to stay a doctor and especially a psychiatrist without IDAA.  I might not even be alive.  I certainly wouldn’t have this life beyond my wildest dreams.  I may not have the spaceship I want but I can truly say with the deepest gratitude I’ve had times of being rocketed into the fourth dimension.  I can’t wait to read the cyberdoc on line discussions (and gossip)  in the coming weeks.  I love hearing  Hugh, Nathan,  Zeke and Dave . I actually talked to two doctors Saturday  who had been to Antatica. One who worked there and the other wanted to see penguins. There’s something about belong to a group of doctors with characters like that.

God bless.

. 

Kim’s Convenience Play at Pacific Theatre

The beginning of fall is heralded by the season of theatre, song and dance.  The first production is Kim’s Convenience





 at Pacific Theatre. Why live in Vancouver with the traffic and construction if not to experience the wondrous ness of high culture.  Pacific Theatre is my favourite consistently good theatre company.  Season’s tickets for a quarter century have never failed to be the best bang for the buck in live entertainment.

Kim’s Convenience was a delightful play. No wonder CBC made it a series.  I loved the actors, the plot, the humor and pathos.  I saw my father and me in the interaction between Korean father and son.  My friend, Laura was uplifted. 

Our friend Laverne, former literature professor thought it wonderful. We’d both enjoyed different plays this year at Bard on the Beach. She’d loved As You Like It while Laura and I loved their MacBeth. Now we had had another amazing fix of talent, creativity and genius.  Lorne had driven all the way in from Chilliwack, through the demon infested Langley freeway back up just to enjoy another night at Pacific Theatre.

Bringing undue attention to ourselves wolfing down the delicious hoer d’oeves of opening night, we realized we’d all missed dinner.  The youg people were beautiful and mingling discussing the finer points while us old folk were focussed on foo.   After enjoying seeing Ron Reed  happy with the sold out successful standing ovation production, our little group headed up Granville to the excellent restaurant West.  We dined in elegance, sharing thoughts on our childhoods and neighbourhoods topics raised by the thought provoking play.

Thank you Pacific Theatre for another wonderful evening. 

Company Doctors: Professionalism and Political Correctness

Historically, physicians among professionals have had the highest rating for trustworthiness and truthfulness.By contrast lawyers have been at the bottom of the heap.  Some actually say it’s sad that 90% of lawyers give the other 10% a bad name.  My old lawyer friend had insisted that this was  a product of the rise in social legislation that followed Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s reign.  My friend, an  old man, had  practiced law in Scotland before coming to Canada.

“I was proud to be a lawyer. It was a very honoured profession in my youth. Today I sometimes feel it’s just because of the money lawyers are perceived so negatively. I did well enough but if money was the sole criteria I’d not be thought as good a lawyer as some of my colleagues who sought celebrity and seemed only interested in the fame and fortune.  When I became a professional I saw it as a duty and service and frankly most of my colleagues saw it as that too.  We were there to serve people. Our independence and autonomy as professionals allowed us to protect our clients from governments and corporations alike.”

It wasn’t long after I heard him say that, that  a lawyer at my church told me “I think you can still can be a lawyer and a Christian in Canada but I no longer think you can be a Christian and a Corporate lawyer in Montreal.”

I can say the same is increasingly  true for doctors.  The lowest slur a doctor could make against another was to call him a “company doctor”. 

The ‘company doctor’ reached it’s a nadir during the years of the asbestos mining.  Miners were coughing up blood and dying all the while the doctors hired by the company and were paid exorbitantly essentially to lie and insist the problem wasn’t the  asbestos at all.  The miner instead, in classic ‘blame the victim’ was told he had ‘weak lungs’. It became the  great scandal of the era exposing corrupt courts, government, corporations and the doctors involved..  Science eventually prevailed as today we know and diagnose “asbestos lungs’. 

It should be understood that a doctor may give his opinion in court ,which remains a 19th century rationalist construct and sees the world in black and white as opposed to the multi factorial quantum universe considerations of 21st century rainbow science.  The ridiculousnesss of such ‘opinions’ was highlighted best by the farce of the OJ Trial with all its dream team and ignorance of DNA. 75% of the fruitfly DNA is the same as Human DNA. 

In British Columbia “Moynihan’s Law’  was enacted essentially to reign in the competing claims of ‘expert witnesses”.  Moynihans’s Law insisted that expert opinions be predominantly objective and serve the judge not the solely the lawyers paying them.  Some of the insurance company expert witnesses were paid so exorbitantly as to make the ‘company doctors’ of the asbestos mine era look like altar boys.   Tragically I was obliged to teach a judge the history of this in recent years, as he appeared to have missed out on the insanity of the courts that required a specific new “Moynihans’s law” to reign in the ‘expert testimony ‘ of competing factions.  Perjury laws have always existed but do appear to be rarely used as increasingly the courts move away from the ‘truth’ standard of old.  “The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth” is no longer associated with the modern court but rather remembered as a line from the Perry Mason era. 

The judge appeared unaware of Dr. Jay Lifton’s seminal book, the “Nazi Doctors” which addressed the whole issue of the ‘company’ or ‘government doctor’ in exquisite horrifying detail.  

It should not reflect badly on this judge because we’re collectively seeing this phenomena today  in the ‘fake news’ . The media was once constrained by the idea of ‘fact’ but today has  lost all track of the very notion of  ‘objective’ and now sells ‘facts’ as ‘opinions’ to the highest bidder.  Judges, themselves, have historically been considered’ corrupt’ as their opinions have been on occasion bought as readily as world soccer players.  The remaining issue today ,as Canadian culture devolves into multiculturalism,  increasingly,  is not whether someone will sell out their integrity but at how low a price.

Around  the world in other jurisdictions and cultures the issue is not whether to bribe the official ther how little one can give without insulting   government representative. The whole idea of the ‘tip’ which once was only an issue in hotels and restaurants is the very basis of business and law in`many countries.  

The next worst ‘slur’a doctor could have against him was that he was a ‘pharmaceutical company doctor’. Some pharmaceutical companies hired doctors to promote their medications and rewarded those who ‘sold’ medications by down playing or denying risks while celebrating success.  I was hired only a couple of times by one drug company to give talks to family physicians about new produce.  I was subsequently   told by  that company that  I was ‘too objective’ and hadn’t ‘sold’ enough of  the product. . I took that a compliment but it caused me to look askance at some of my colleagues who took pride in being consider ‘trendsetters’ by some in the pharmaceutical industry. They considered it a compliment to be called ‘drug pushers for the multinationals’ and paraded their academic and financials rewards with gusto.   “Unhinged: the Trouble with Psychiatry” by Dr. Daniel Carlat discusses this problem in depth. 

It became so egregious an issue in medicine  that physicians in academic settings and journals are collectively now required to give notice of their ‘conflicts of intererst’.   At the beginning of a lecture a doctor is required to put up a slide indicating which drug companies or businesses had paid him for this lecture or his research in this area.  

Unfortunately the licensing bodies for professions, in general, like the Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons, have not as yet had such a renaissance. The conflicts of interest that influence hiring, appointments,committe membership of non professionals,  their  political and fashionable decisions remain darkly opaque.

  

This practice has been in place for decades and naturally doctors wish that politicians and bureaurats would be required to do the same housekeeping regarding ‘conflicts of interest” and ‘lobby groups.” The partisanship of bureaucrats is a huge problem since they are required to be 'objective' but increasingly in Canada it has been exposed that government bureaucrats are Liberal biased.  To avoid this in many countries and eras the whole government apparatus was overturned and replaced by the followers of the winning party.

Given the scandals  over the foreign influence on Hillary Clinton and Justin Trudeau by Islamic countries and the alleged influence on Trump by Russia , politics seems mired like the media and courts outside the promises of the 21st century.  Escobar, the great drug lord used to brag that he had bought both the Republicans and the Democrats, hedging his bets, not that that did him much good in the long run. 

Doctors addressed this issue of autonomy first in the Hippocratic Oath of Ancient Greece.  I’ve taken the revitalized Hippocratic Oath of today since the ethical and moral foundations of professionalism have been increasingly eroded by government intrusion. The ‘do no harm’ clause is all but obsolete now  the ‘abortion industry” and recently  ‘euthanasia industry’ have completely won over the prevailing  government and their bureaucrats so reminiscent of the 'banal' of Arendt's writings.   Further, the various ‘codes’ of doctors in the western world were influenced by the “sanctity of life’ premise  inherent in Christian religion which inherited and refined the Judeo Graeco Roman traditions from which Western Civilization arose.  Other cultures have not had this notion of ‘sanctity of life’.

Further the ideas of where on the continuum the doctor sits regarding the collective and the individual are wholly different than what most Canadians assume.  Also the 'accountability' of the doctor in different countries is wholly different from the local ever changing responsibility of the doctor and indeed the health care system. This was never better reviewed than the greatest scandal of hospital administration of our time, the finding of the man dead for 36 hours in the Canadian teaching hospital and the abdication of accountability of administration.

There is also distinctly different ideas of cause and effect and accountability in eastern and western 'culture' which affect the very practice of medicine by doctors depending on training and background.

It was no surprise that Dr. Kellie Leitch, a brilliant physician and accomplished paediatric surgeon, should spearhead the importance of 'Canadian values' in this time when the dope smoking pretty haired selfie snapping Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was insisting there was no 'Canadian culture' and hence no 'Canadian values'.  Ironically he also said that Quebec French  speaking Prime Ministers were superior to English speaking Prime Ministers when his basic premise was that there was no such thing as a Canadian ‘culture’. While denying Canada 'culture' and denying Canadian 'values'  he insisted on the superiority of the French speaking. 

The word ‘culture’ derived from the Latin word ‘cultus’, ‘to care’ and from the French word to ‘cultivate’ or to ‘fill the ground’.  Well no one in their right mind would doubt that Dr. Leitch cares or is a highly cultivated individual who has done a lion’s share of work, there continues to be complaints about PM Justin Trudeau, simply not caring about Canada, and not by his personal history having much to do with cultivation and work.  Unfortunately Dr. Leitch’s insightfulness flew over the stoned heads of easily offended young followers of the Prime Minister. 

The ‘private’ physician retained their autonomy and worked for the patient just as the lawyer and accountant and engineer primarily served their client.  Historically the true ‘statesman’ served the country as a whole not the entrenched interests of corporations like Bombadier or the  urbans tastes of Montreal female voters.  

The ‘business’ of profession however always was tied to the idea of ‘he who pays the piper calls the tune’.  As the “private” physician was working directly for the patient even though an insurance company might well be paying the bill, the doctor’s greatest concern was the ‘patient’s health’.  This was before the Hydra of  Cultural Marxism's weaponized political correctness redefined 'health' like the 'renaming' of 'gender" as something other than the ‘morbidity and mortality’ of science.   

Today the ‘insurance doctor’ is the next greatest ‘slur’ that can be made against a doctor.  It’s a bit wrong as there clearly are good and bad insurance companies. But clearly if the patient becomes sick and unable to work and provide insurance payments it’s in the interest of the insurance company to ‘de list’ that member as they are no longer a viable ‘client’.  Further, the worst insurance companies use and abuse the courts to offer the least inclusive definition of health and spend fortunes on lawyers fighting claims. 

Canada is a single party insurance scheme so that the ‘government doctor’ and the ‘insurance doctor’ ‘slurs’ can overlap.  Historically in public and private endeavours there was this area where the public need for finance existed because of the size and ‘risk’ of the project and in areas where there was no likelihood of profit but that as a society we collectively saw a need to care for others in a way private sources could not afford to.  

Our present government appears to be giving billions to foreign countries while not caring for it’s own sick and old.  The sick and old and those who suffer catastrophic  injuries were the principle reason for development of the Canadian Health Care system.  Tommy Douglas and those who were  principally Christian doctors of the  Saskatchewan model would obviously roll over in their graves  if they were to see the actions of the ‘company doctors’ and ‘government doctors’ of today.  Government spending today,  is to those early men and women of Canada,  a total corruption of the ideals of Canadian traditions.  Not surprisingly, Liberals get around this by indeed,   denying Canadian culture or tradition.

The highest paid doctors today are government doctors  and cosmetic surgeons while the front line workers in all fields are policed to no end and treated as the enemy by their superiors because they have been given the unenviable task of ‘rationing health care’ while the government doctors and political doctors make endless promises that are simply impossible to meet.

Professionals say that there is no ‘autonomy’ or ‘profession’ any more because the structure of our present centralized communist leaning government which is totalitarian authoritarian and diametrically opposed to the freedom of the individual and wholly supportive of the ‘collective’.   Indeed many professionals have considered that the ‘unions’ which developed in a much more hostile relationship to government may be the answer to the failing health care system.  Some doctors have approached the Teamsters feeling the whole idea of ‘profession’ is defunct in face of government corruption and the cancerous growth of the government burocracy to the detriment of professions and their clients.  

Canada has a history of having had a purely ‘government socialist based’ health care system which was associated with the worst morbidity and mortality statistics in the Canada. This was the Indian Affairs government health care system which is now being used as a "model" for all of Canada despite is at times horrendous failures.  

Given that immigrant doctors increasingly come from countries which do not share  Canadian ‘values’ of ‘sanctity of life’ , the importance of the individual, freedom, and libertarianism and other such ‘pesky’ ideas it is increasingly no surprise that the government calls’ physicians’ not by their ‘professional designation’ but increasingly as ‘health care workers’ as a collective job title. Ethically there fore in the government eyes they have no difference from the cleaning staff in the hospitals.  

It concerns me as the corruption of government and media and the refusal of the courts to move forward that doctors medical professionalism is now defined solely by ‘company doctors’ and dominated by ‘conflicts of interest’ that soon it will be said of doctors that 90% give the 10% a bad name.  It is no surprise that 75 % of Canadian doctors would not recommend medicine at present in Canada. 

As a dinosaur doctor I am increasingly concerned about health care not as much as a provider but because I might well need services and can see from the desperate experiences of my patients that they are utterly frustrated, dissatisfied, and wholly crippled by the government callousness, Naturally their opinions never appear in the government propaganda media or are always attributed to the doctors and nurses rather than the top heavy administration.  They express repeatedly concerns about  inefficiency and corruption the feeling that their basic needs and values are not being met.

A company doctor explained to me that I ‘cared too much’ and must ‘lower my standards’ as well as ‘learn to lie’ as he did for he enjoyed greatly his well rewarded government company doctor lifestyle.  I personally have to consider every day whether I want to continue as a ‘company doctor’ or if I should, like the other dinosaurs of my era retire early and accept that Christians, godly people in general,  moral people and all the doctors of old, especially my most esteemed mentors, and Tommy Douglas, a politically incorrect Baptist minister, are all  no longer welcome in Canada.  Insurance company models also routinely reward the physicians who do the least for the patient and save the government the most money.

This was a 'joke' of my surgical training where heart surgeons and lung surgeons would compete among themselves as to who could use the least 'thread' as the administration had a fashion of the month campaign to get the surgeons to save money in the operations.  At the time I thought it was something out of MASH where no show better defined the oxymoron on 'military intelligence". Yet the surgeons explained that the administrators were more concerned with their budgets than the lives of the patients. Indeed I caused myself no end of difficulty complaining that a small town administrator had robbed the hospital budget for a baby incubator so that he could have a new desk and chair with better wood panelling.  

I do envy the migrants who routinely return to their ‘homes’ whereas I personally feel my own home and profession have been destroyed.  This feeling has grown strongest since  I was told that  Dr. William Osler is no longer considered a ‘professional’. Clearly Dr. Osler is no longer welcome in Canada and  should never  apply to work here.

Jesus, the greatest healer of all time, would not be welcomed  either.  Jesus  was vulgar, kept the wrong company,  swore and behaved badly, the epitome of a politically incorrect individual.  Politically correctness and professionalism were once diametrically opposed.  Today a doctor kills or heals as the prevailing mood dictates. It’s just fashion.  Medicine is theatre.  The Kardashian’s are the new models of medicine.    

Gratitude Friday

Thank you God for my night of rest. I have known countless nights awake on call in hospitals and community. I have been a wake nights at sea through storms unable to sleep for slept meant death.  I have had so many nights with nightmares, the faces of the dead and the constant judgement of the ungodly perfect superiors.  I have played to you Lord but being a people pleaser I have tried as well not to offend the devil.  The devil rules this land and I am sorely afraid.  But I beg for your mercy. These are the times Isaiah prophecized of the “long necked women and their boys”.  There have been so many nights sleepless at the bedside of sick and dying.  My dogs loss of his remaining eye this week has been terribly trying, but it is good that he is well now.  Thank you for the night of rest.
Thank you for the recovery of my dog. Gilbert. He was only awake once last night. Whimpering for attention. Lonely and afraid.  I am pleased each day as his life is restored.  I am thankful that his life is no longer being threatened.  I am thankful that he is recovering. It was such a gift this morning that George, the rescue cat, came out into the living room, walked up to Gilbert and put his head inside Gilbert’s cone of shame and rubbed noses.  Gilbert’s tail wagged. He’s been bored more now. Unable to play with the cone on.  Frustrated, and here was George making contact.
Thank God we are not alone. Even if this is a mental created illusion of me and others it’s better than that deep sense of despair that I feel at times when I touch the isolation and existential angst.  Thank you for the Holy Spirit, the advocate sent by Jesus to comfort us who are Christians.  I find comfort in that sense of connection with God.
“In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.”  John 1.1
Thank you for the word.  Thank you for the silence and the word. Thank you for the contrasts.  Even now thank you for the rain after the glorious sunshine.
Thank you for the coffee and the oat meal. Thank you for the Red River Cereal I bought and ate a bowl of last week. Thank you for the brown sugar which I bought for the Red River Cereal but have now enjoyed with Quaker Oats.  Thank you for this keyboard and this couch and this table. There is so much I take for granted.
Thank you for all those I disparage and criticize especially the institutions and government. Thank you for the Prime Minister if not this satanic buffoon but for the position and the hierarchy. Thank you for leadership and beurocracy and ministries of health and communication and defence and finance even when I disagree with them.
Thank you for the courts and judges even though I feel increasingly they are becoming tyrannical and removed from the world of fairness and justice. Thank you for objectivity and the people who will put an end to the tyranny of ‘emotional abuse’ and ‘sexual harrassment’ and ‘racism’ and all the weaponized words and invasion of leftist communist aetheist ideology.  Today is the anniversary of the Un American Committee that reviewed Hollywood and black listed communists infiltrated into the arts community with the agenda of subterfuge and destruction.
I  enjoyed reading the article of Putin's time as a nihilistic KGB agent infiltrating the European 'hippy' scene, undermining peace and recruiting operatives. I remember meeting such an operative when I was in the Peace movement and wanting disarmament but suddenly this focussed fellow insisted we should unilaterally disarm and demanded it. It was so strange and I'd not trained as a group psychiatrist then so didn't know as I witnessed it, this hijacking of process.  The whole group had been promoting bilateral disarmament and then this fellow began to speak up vociferously, well trained, and insisting with much emotional and shame that good people would lay down their weapons first and that we could trust the aethesist communists.  They were just like us.  Everyone wanted peace, he said. I know today that's not the case that so many want war.  They profit from it, like Lenin and the UN. Many like to play with it and see if they can 'control' it and direct it's forces. I see it all like a cattle stampede and the young wealthy sons and daughters of the elite riding to the front and having stampeded the cattle now try to direct it to where it profits them most.
Today it’s Harvey Weinstein. There was no consequence to the woman who complained that Trump groped her 40 years ago. There is no consequence in the courts or in society today for ‘false accusations’.  There is no consequence for all those who through sins of omission and through 'enabling' supported the Harvey Weinstein's of the world.   The fake news, lying on the grandest scale is huge profit.  Fake news  has been caught repeatedly as the alt-left, CNN and CBC have worked their propaganda angles doing fifth columns from within. No one is punished for lying.  Goebbels reigns and it's all just 'white washed as marketing'.
“J’ACCUSE!” “J’ACCUSE!” “JACCUSE!”
Under French law, the false accuser must pay the penalty that would have been paid by the accused if the accuser was truthful.
I self reported that I was smoking marijuana and went to AA to address my smoking marijuana and nicotine and drinking. The drinking was a minor issue relative that when I drank I smoked marijuana and hence had to stop drinking because by definition this was alcoholism, as I persisted in doing a criminal act which held risk despite my realization of this. I saw a psychiatrist who recommmended I smoke marijuana and discussed my wine drinking with him as I was considered a wine connoseiur at the time. He felt that I didn’t have a problem but understood the ethical and moral dilemna that’s I had with ‘breaking the law’.  Marijuana was against the law and so many I knew had gone to jail and otherwise had their lives ruined by their contrary behaviour.  I could get get my ex wife to seek help as her behaviour was far far worse and that impaired she was a danger to herself and others but refused to seek help.
I don’t believe Justin Trudeau sought help with his addiction to marijuania and I don’t believe Morneau is seeking  help with his addiction. If anything I expect both are speaking to lawyers and marketing agents to improve their  lying and dissembling.  They lack remorse.  So the elite see lawyers and the poor see counsellors.  I doubt that Harvey Wallenstein or Bill Clinton will any time soon attend one of those mandatory sexual behaviour group counselling sessions the Justice Institute sells so vociferously for huge profit.
Now I’ve held myself to the highest standards of ethics and morality despite the constantly moving end point of political correctness.  I’ve never raped or sexually violated a woman.  I have fought for women’s rights and been ridiculed and shamed and beaten for supporting 'equality' and 'fairness' and  meritocracy. I've insisted gender, sexual orientation and other such factors should not decide who flies the plane.   I’ve been celebrated repeatedly for my “non discrimination”.  I've challenged based all the false flags and false values. I've have faced the wealthy and powerful on behalf of the principles and poor.  I have been physically attacked repeatedly for defending women and LGBT members and yet today the lies pile on and on. The cost to me personally has been in the tens of thousands of dollars.
Increasingly the “emotionally abused’ insist that they are ‘more’ harmed that those who have been shot and beaten and raped.  This is of course the age old demand for the girl who has it all to claim that she is a greater victim. It’s Sense and Sensibility.The courts have been taking smoking pot or are grotesquely power hungry like our present Government and are  increasingly removing them selves from the realm of objectivity to subjectivity.  Objectivity is all that the poor have had to balance the power of institutions, corporations and the elite, despite the latter's capacity for manipulations of 'evidence'.  The Judge becomes all powerful in the court of 'subjectivity'. This was what was once called the Kangaroo Court and was what always reigns in Communist revolutions.  The judge plays to the crowd and fears for his position so is politically correct.
The Assistant Registrar at the College of Physicians and Surgeons said “Women Don’t Lie About Sex”.  This is not out of context. This is reality. This kind of narcissism and arrogance and ignorance was confirmed at the Gomece trial where the Judge found the accused ‘not guilty’ and hundreds of women insisted that the judge was wrong and ‘women don’t lie about sex”.  Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. We had a decade when children who were used as weapons by parents in divorce cases were said “not to lie about sexual abuse.’  This is tribalism. It’s primitive sociopathic behaviour.
A sociopaths is a person who is of a group that has rules they obey within their group but not with outsiders who belong to the larger group. The Hells Angels theoretically wouldn’t steal from another Hell’s Angel but would steal from a Canadian citizen. Canadian Citizenship before the traitorous Un Canadian PM Trudeau took office superseded other social groups. Now however the courts of Canada are separated into some for us, Sharia Courts for Muslims and Indigenous Courts for Natives. Under Justin Trudeau there is no longer one law. Morneau and Trudeau are not held accountable to the same law as I am.
There is in CAnada like in the Middle East where the courts are uniformly corrupt, like the UN which is a den of theives, one law for the rich and one law for the poor.  The poor as we know in Canada now include the middle class. Because of social communism and the socialism of Globalism there is now an Elite, these are politicos and administrative class bean counters and paper pushers. They’re otherwise useless incompetents with lust and addiction to power.
Everyone lies. That’s why we have big brains.
Thank you God for my Big Brain.  Thank you God for my capacity to lie.  Yet thank you too for the Ten Commandments that demand in a society that I do not bare false witness. There are white lies and black lies, good secrets and bad secrets, good lies and bad lies. I have been sneaking pills into my dog in his food all week. If I didn’t disguise them he would not take them.
Thank you God for the Balance of Power.  Thank you for winter as it cleans and sterilizes the ravages of summer, the insect infestations and fires and dirt in the street.  Thank you for the pendulum that swings. Thank you for all those who see in Justin Trudeau the same megalomania that was in his father, Lenin, Napoleon,  Hitler and all those historical figures who demanded centralization of power.
Capitalism is decentralization of power
Socialism has been in effect centralization of power.
We have a mixed economy.
 Wall Street is just a huge casino. It  is rigged so the house always wins. " Steal a little and they put you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king."
For women, the most popular "50 Shakes of Grey" , more loathsome insidious overt pornography than ever Hugh Hefner stooped to, would be an episode of Criminal Minds were it not for the perpetrator being a billionaire.
I don’t trust Ottawa, Victoria or Washington or Moscow and especially I don’t trust Bei Jing. Brussels is distinctly evil.  Merkel played them all so well with her 'migrant armies' and 'scab labour' and overall threats.  She's East German. Her moves are so like the Cold War operatives.  There's that old guard world domination group left over from the Cold War and they're still so powerful with their secret cabals and wealth dating back to the Nazi wars and before.  A few families of elite playing with the world like a single family can control the politics of a country.  Corporate monarchies.
Thank you God for Faith. There is faith and anxiety.  Anxiety is a measure of one’s distance from God.  I have been too anxious with Gilbert's surgeries and the deaths of patients from Fentanyl.  There's a war on Canada by the Chinese who are marketing death for the west just as Canada was a conduit for terrorists against America.  Trudeau paid a terrorist 10 million dollars rewarding him for killing an american soldier and making bombs to kill Canadians.  All the gobbledygook legalism and disgusting disrespect for Canadian people still doesn't allow pot head pretty boy Trudeau to claim that 'two wrongs make a right'.  Even now as the Canadian dollar plummets further and the value of the country devolves to third world standard and our health care system caves, Canadians ask why is Mr. Trump playing hard ball with Justin Trudeau over trade.  You don't bite the hand that feeds, silly.  Stop the flow of heroin into the US through Vancouver and stop terrorists going into American and stop paying people for killing American soldiers.
I had hoped that Good Women would stop the Vagina Headed women and insist that these Subjective Nutbars join greater society. We have watched the Left with extreme violence attack the law and order of society and increasingly introduce new ‘justifications’ and ‘rationalizations’.  The whole ‘divide and conquer ‘and lack of willingness of the judges and the parliament to stop this raging insanity is diabolical. Always the marketing propaganda lies. Mr. Trump says he's going to stop 'illegal' immigration and the Left , the deceitful CBC and CNN say Trump is against Immigration.  Bill Clinton and Obama said 'stop illegal immigration' and no one said they were against 'immigration'.  They profited by saying one thing and doing another.  The democrat voters were dominated by illegal aliens.
According to the Charboneau Enquiry Quebec, the political home of the Liberals and Justin Trudeau, is ruled by Biker Gangs and Mafia.  Canada is no longer 'strong and free' but ruled by criminals whose incomes come from gambling proceeds, selling drugs, alcohol and pornography taxes. Why shouldn't young people kill themselves.  They're born into a rigged system and their value is only as consumers. Consumer fentanyl.  Nihilism.
Every person I know who has been physically (objectively) abused has been equally if not more ‘emotionally abused’.  You can have ‘emotional abuse’ without physical abuse but you can not have physical abuse without emotional abuse.  So where are the voices of women responding to this insanity.  Where are the voices of men. Where are those who say, sorry you don't get to claim 'equal suffering' and insist on 'safe zones' for 'bad words'.  Dr. Peterson in Canada must fight to live. When will the heads of universities that have allowed this debacle of education be challenged.  When will the university stop being a propaganda outlet for communism and sharia.
White privilege is a crock.  In India I had no 'white privilege' and in Africa they're killing whites .  The 'ruler' and his 'class' have superiority for a time. The Chinese are the most racist of all and each successful Chinese revolution has put their people in place. Now this lot is killing any indigenous people.  Jews were killed but now are ruling Palestine with an iron fist having see what they themselves did as revolutionaries. The ideas of Marx came from their ghetto existence, their years in Babylon.  But the Chinese are ethnic cleansing the Tibetans.  So here the uprising of blacks demands that whites give them what they earned.  George Soros profits from social war so supports Black Lives Matters. The Muslims massacred the Christian Kurds and the UN supported the genocides because the largest armies of the UN are muslim.  Money going to the UN goes to outfit the Muslim army of Bangladesh. Wahabi Sunni muslims kill other muslims.  The Saudi's killed the equivalent of the Shiite Pope in their country, out right murdered the man, no different than if Trudeau had ordered the Dalai Lama killed.  The steamroller narrative and marketing of fake media CBC and CNN hardly burped.
When is the pendulum going to swing. Do we need to return women to Burqas and declare the whole ‘women’s liberation’ and ‘meritocracy’ movement a dismal waste of time and failure.  Pierre Trudeau with his strong arm Mortgentaller aborted the catholic and Christian babies of Canada in the tens of thousands insisting that there was no room for children and unwilling to pay for mother hood. The women’s liberation movement was a movement supporting Women not Girls.  Mothers were included. Marriaed women were included. Feminism hijacked the Women’s Liberation and Suffragete movement and made it Social or Cultural Communism - women against men and girls against mothers with the abortionists killing more people than wars. Now Justin Trudeau who with his most un feminist wife just like his father with his addle brained drug addicted wife like Stalin with his crazy suicidal wife insists that we need to take refugees.
His SCAB VOTER campaign.
As much as I admire Sikh’s it’s clear our Defence Minister is a crazy ego inflated lwho insists he wins wars single handed is not representative of Sikhs in general.  His turban doesn't conceal his long hair but a swollen head.   What country in the world has a Defence Minister who wasn’t born in this Country?  Trudeau is selling citizenship and voting status en mass.  That’s what traiters do. This country is under siege and who cares.
Thank you God that I am old and slouching towards my dying end of life.
My father told me in his 90's  if he’d known that this was what Canada would become he’d never have fought in WWII. I’m utterly disillusioned .  I now know why he loathed the Trudeau family as evil as the Clintons, satanic and deceitful with arrogance galore.
Thank You God that I am nearing the dying end of life. . There are few years to remain.  I feel sadly for the next generation enslaved to the elite, Canada as increasingly an extension of the corruption of the  Middle East, Canadians collectively like Saudi citizens.  Trudeau would have us have a Sharia Bank already having introduced Sharia Courts. 1984 told it all. Some pigs are better.
I loved singing the Canadian anthem as a child, "True North Strong and Free" But they’re destroying the statues.  IF this was India and Trudeau was Prime Minister,  the Taj Mahal would have to be destroyed. ISIS destroyed the churches.  I learned recently when Ragga fell that there were videos of the ISIS fighters beheading Christian martyrs as Ragga was a Christian town.  The blood of Ragga Christian martyrs was then put in vials and ships en mass to Saudi Arabia. Muslims are told to Jihad and if you are too old to physically jihad then you are to send money to the jihad and that way be apart of the jihad. So this blood was payment to Saudi from Isis Jihadists to the money backers. And the video showed these old men, the brothers of Saudi elite Obaman bin Laden washing their hands in Christian blood. I am a Christian and Jews condemn me for defending my faith today. I have never criticized Jews for defending Israel against the hoards of muslims wanting to annihilate Jews in the middle east. Yet here in Canada I defend my fellow Christians and find no solidarity, no voices of support from the so called 'multi cultural' country, this land where we have tolerated the screaming raving atheists, the whining and self pitying of all the other religions of the world but when Christians are beheaded and their blood is sent to Saudi Arabia so bankers can wash their hands in it, well Justin Trudeau just gives my tax money to Muslims and celebrates terrorists.
The Civil War Statues are coming down in the States. If this was England then the Tower off London would be destroyed by Black lives matter.  Communists destroy history.  In Moscow they are rebuilding all the churches that Lenin destroyed if only for the tourist value. Aethesists would destroy the Louvre.
Wake up.  Wake up. Wake up.
Gratitude. Thank you Lord for those who will right these wrongs. Just as Pierre Trudeau was sent to the ashes and four prime ministers tried to clean up the mess he left with his communist ideology and arrogance so too will this pass. Just as they are building churches again in Moscow, the Muslim Jihad was stopped in Vienna, and Brexit is countering the Brussels beurocrat dictatorship revolution.    The despicable destruction by Justin Trudeau of all that is Canadian, the culture of Canada and values of Canada so well stated by Dr. Kellie Liethc,  and all respect for Law and Order, this criminal law breaker, will one day be gone as that greatest criminal Mao and Che and Castro went.  Please God let Trudeau go before Canada is reduced to a communist wasteland like Cuba and Venezuela and it's jails swell with independent thinkers , like the Gulag, Auschwitz and the jails of Mecca,  Tehran and Venezuela.  Canada is fast becoming a  country of lawless , a pirate’s den today.
Patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings.
I have no home. Jesus said that too.  My kingdom is not of this world.
I will go to work and serve my patients even today as Abortionists make more money and have more acclaim than those who heal.   Abortionists are rewarded more in Canada than  obstetrician.  The government now pays and celebrates more the doctors who do euthanasia than their colleagues. The College of Physicians and Surgeons has never published sanctions against any abortionists and hell will freeze over before we read of a doctor practicing euthanasia being sanctioned.
Where have you gone Dugald Christie?
Thank you God for all I have been given. Thank you God for your love and the promise of escape from this veil of tears. Thank you God for those good people who do the good fight and see clearly today. Thank you God that I am old and my days are numbered.  Thank you God for my teachers and friends and family and those who have passed on before me.

CMDS 2017 - True Treasure, living gospel values in the medical community and culture at large, Pastor Dan MacDonald

Pastor Dan Macdonald: True Treasure , living gospel values in the medical community and culture at large

{I arrived late and missed the song that preceded this first plenary session of the day. I did however join near the end and heard the whole question and answer period, taking these brief notes to capture a sense of what the talk was on. I think this gives a taste of what goes on here.  I’ve been coming to Christian Medical and Dental Society Meetings for a number of years and as well as leading clinicians it’s not uncommon for pastors to be speakers.  Pastor Dan MacDonald was a lawyer before he went on to do a Masters of Divinity.  He is now senior pastor at Grace Toronto Church. He is an astute observer and outstanding speaker and obviously very spiritually blessed and devoted to his service.   (I had work to complete this morning then I walked from my hotel to this hotel , the long way, through Toronto of my childhood, a beautiful city, the financial and art districts. I lost track of time so enjoyed the walk and the beauty of this city.)}

How many of you are too busy?(All hands go up)How many of you are not busy?(5)
Your culture demands that doctor’s be busy.Our culture demands that a carpenter be busy.But demands a doctor be much more busy.
Referee for yourself.
When I looked at my own business and how I was building a practice,I saw that I was working more hours for more money and materialism was at the base of it.Ask about the spiritual principles
I know why I’m busy.I have an idol of respect and I want respect so do more work to get more respectI work in field of judges, lawyers, professionals all of who are busy
Ask yourself about your business? Is this what nurtures yourself spiritually as a Christian.

Persecution?Is it wrong to pray for persecution to go away.No But that was not all.In the New Testament they fled persecution.They had fear in Jerusalem and fled and spread the gospel.
Cultural ShiftShift away from Judea  Christian beliefs.All the old traditional culture believes are being denounced.The new academics are being turned to instead of the judges, lawyers, bankers and now doctors.
Technology is changing the worldNew arguments of medicine will be whether someone’s 30% machine is true.
As Christians we need to get together in the medical world and decide how we may face this new culture in a godly way.
Pessimism - feeling nothing we do can make a difference?
You are going to have to navigate the doctor patient relationship.Your fiduciary relationship with patients is not our mission fieldYour colleagues may be
When you you obey God and practice civil disobedience?When the culture asks you to sin, you obey God.When your culture asks you to kill babies you obey GodWhen your culture asks you to murder, you obey God.
Civil Disobedience needs to be more than doctors, engage your pastors and Christiens.There is a community that is being discriminated against.In Alabama the whole community marched.The Gay community enlisted the larger community The Jews came together.
We as Christians have been very bad at this Because we’ve been living in the remnants of the Judea Christian cultureWe Have not realized we are in a post Christian environmentWe need to learn in a Post Christian community what the Jews learned, the Gays learned, the Blacks learned, that we need solidarity
Ask for the courage to bear up under persecution.
Get your church involved in advocacy.
WitnessHow do you prepare yourselfWell I ask , how did you prepare to be doctorsYou readStart with water cooler advocacy Read “Reason for God”You don’t need the high level Christian apologeticsYou need to have ‘water cooler answers’  really simple well thought out books
Moving from comfortable pew Christianity to activists.
We must learn the courage to speak boldly.
I say there is no room in Christianity for complacency.If you think so then REPENT.
We have false gods-sex, power, status,
God is sovereign. The more people who share their faith the more people come to God.It’s numerical.
You sow where you are. You will reap there.
The guys who want you to be a good Jewish doctor will talk to you. They won’t talk to meYou can influence them. You can talk to them. Introduce them to Jesus.
I was a lawyer, I influenced a court clerk I worked with as a young doctor.

Ballet BC Program 2 Queen Elizabeth Theatre

Both Laura and I are getting over spring colds.  Vancouver is experiencing  dreariness with ugly rain holding back the coming of the sun.  If it weren’t for season’s tickets to the ballet neither of us would have got off the couch and escaped from the tv to culture.  It never seems like a good idea getting dressed but history has proven over and over again that an evening of Ballet BC is an uplifting intriguing consciousness raising event. It even puts a smile on my face. Curmudgeon that age is making me.

And true to form this ballet did.  The  Queen Elizabeth Theatre is  a bright oasis.  Tonight  the young women were truly gala in the latest fashions.  Marvellous dresses and splendid shoes. I like best the gaggles of the  early teens with their aunt or dance instructor mentor  all fluttering and vibrant. But tonight it was the 20 year olds looking truly mysterious and captivating.  The young men in jackets and fancy shirts and well scrubbed faces were there as well.  

There is always the older crowd. Fewer tonight  compared to the surge of youthful enthusiasm with it’s obvious appreciation of excellence. Us older folk are main stay.  The City set.  Very uptown.  Banyan Books meets Nordstrom crowd.  Uniquely Vancouver.  But this night seemed mostly for the young and beautiful people. My favourite place in the whole world for people watching is the Ballet.

 Queen Elizabeth really is a fine little theatre.  Not the Lincoln Centre by any means.  Neither is it shabby.   I like the seats and the view.  I like too when Emily Molnar comes on stage and briefly describes the coming show. I was miffed though she didn’t mention St. Patrick.  There was however a swath of green dresses and jackets in the audience.  I was wearing my patch vest from Dublin.  Laura looked divine in her Ivanka. 

When the lights went down, the Anthem choreographed by Lisa Gelly and Josh Martin exploded on the stage, a minimalist background, with functional costumes,  a plethora of new moves and impossible bodies reached out to meet the industrial music of Colin Stetson, Sarah Neufeld, Ginzburg and Purgus. It was something never considered possible and yet it worked all together as one, a most incredible explanation of space and sound emotionally explored by human.  I truly loved the piece.  A World Premiere and somehow especially 2017.

I love watching individual dancers. I’ve known Alexis Fletcher, Peter Smida, Rachel Prince, Rachel Meyers and Gilbert Small now for several seasons so truly appreciate their interpretations and sophistication.  Each night a dancer might capture my attention as tonight Nicole Ward and Brandon Alley stood out for me.  It’s the troop though that astonishes,, like a flock of birds moving together in ultimate unison.  

I loved Swan, choreography by Wen Wei Wang,  music from Swan Lake, Alexis Fletcher and Kirsten Wicklund sublime and Christoph von Reideman, Andrew Bartee, Gilbert Small and Peter Smida so strong and robust.  Combinations and permutations so very modern and refined. Such a tableau of exquisite form.  Robson Street and Davie.  Kate Burrows costume design rippled.

The audience loved the Lesly Telford composition, “If I were 2” , an exploration of narcissism, especially the young people. A dance duet by Emily Chessa and Brandon Alley set to the words of Barbara Adler sounding like a poem played by nightclub turntable.  It wasn’t my cup of tea, like  the other time they brought a painter on stage.  I just wish for Nutcracker at such times despite my overall joy of the contemporary.  

But then as always Ballet BC redeemed itself  with the especially intimate Solo Echo choreographed by Crystal Pite to the beautiful music of Brahms.   It actually had me crying and laughing at the same time as the dancers together reminded me of the otters holding onto each through the night at Vancouver Aquarium or at other times they became like a mob of inquisitive meerkats.  I’ve never seen the like of it in all my years of ballet attendance such an original work of humans holding to each other, letting go and finding one another, then holding together as a group or family or community. Such delicacy and love.  The tablleaus of human forms were mesmerizing.  

The audience really loved it and we all leapt to our feet to give the performers a well deserved standing ovation. Then we funnelled back out to cars and taxis and the less dreary still raining city of Vancouver.  I even had a little bounce in my step.  

 

Radicalism and Canada

I am not a radical Canadian.  I’m pro Canada.  I was born here. I know Canada intimately. I’ve lived in various provinces and cities in Canada. I’ve lived and worked in wilderness, rural, suburban,  urban and inner urban areas of Canada.  I find more and more Canadians are urbanites whose knowledge of other areas of Canada are less than tourists.  Especially talking to activists and doom sayers I am astonished at their ignorance of the resources and wilderness of Canada.  When people talk of reservations I’m mostly aware that they’ve never been on one let alone the dozens I’ve been to.  When someone from Quebec talks about western Canada commonly their knowledge is less than Germans or Americans.  I’ve been to Quebec often. I’ve not worked there but I’ve spent weeks at a time in their cities and province.  Most Torontonians know nothing of Ontario let alone Manitoba.  Yet we all talk with ‘authority’ as Canadians.
I can honestly say that I don’t know any ‘radical’ Canadians.  The most radical Canadianism I know is the fellow who insists he’s not American.  I’ve lived in America as well as Canada and Britain so I’m not so sure I’d quickly judge these other countries in this way. Usually Canadians who speak like this are referring to the propaganda media representation of other countries. Canada is a country of misinformation and propaganda but I'm not so sure it isn't better than most countries where the governments are even more ignorant than Canada's is arrogant.
An American, in Colorado, on seeing my Harley Davidson license commented, “Canada, that’s north of us. Mexico is south, right?”  I answered yes, knowing that many people in Richmond wouldn’t know where Nanaimo or Squamish were or if Saskatchewan or Manitoba was further than Alberta.  We’re an ignorant people collectively in Canada.  There are always smart and stupid people but education beyond college isn’t rated as important as it is in Europe. I was astonished at travelling in Europe how admired education was for the knowledge not the money. Here a degree is equated in how much it can pay for a job.
I liked that in the US in a lot of places people who weren’t certified for a particular position simply weren’t allowed to do that. Here in British Columbia it’s attractiveness is that it’s the last place for the rise of the generalist.  The handy man can get the top specialist position.  Generalists and specialists are only differentiated by finance.  Standards aren’t that important.  Our construction industry is only better than Quebec's which is considered one of the worst and most corrupt in the world.
 Our education system charges a fortune for degrees but does little politically to ensure that those who don’t have a degree aren’t able to have the position because of what they know sexually or whose son or brother they are. One gets a degree in Canada only to find that the best jobs are already taken by those without degrees who knew someone or had some sexual or financial pull.
Corruption is a universal problem and while I’m critical of corruption here  in Canada ,my immigrant and refugee friends tell me that their countries make Canada look pristine by comparison.  By world standards the corruption of Quebec is probably mediocre.  My political science friend says that Canada as a country has ‘institutionalized baksheesh”.  Baksheesh is a bribe or a personal tax.  Canada is collectively taxed to dying while in other countries there are hands that need to be greased to get from one room to the next till you’re actually at the person who does the matter you have enquired about having done.Business is personal. It's more likely to get you killed in Mexico than it is in Canada for sure.
Increasingly Canada makes rules for companies and individuals behaviour overseas.  I can only believe these people are ‘wanting some of the action’ without actually knowing anything about other countries. Usually they have lived their lives a yuppies in some big Canadian city, usually Toronto or Montreal.
I’ve never been to Newfoundland.  I regret that.  The day I was to go, the ferry was cancelled because of storms so I never got there and travelled south to Boston instead.  One of the cross country road trips I took enjoying visiting the amazing variety that is Canada.  I truly love the geography and vegetation of Canada, the people, despite the homogenization of the people.  While the cities increasingly lack diversity, the land will never lose its appeal.  Tundras of the north, the Atlantic and Pacific, the great lakes, the Laurentians, the Rockies, the beaches of Vancouver, the wheat fields, and all the other cliches of Canada.  I love the land.
That’s what so many others want. They want our land and resources. They don’t want our culture. They don’t want our government. They don’t want our history. They’re like the first white men who came to Canada in the 1500’s. They wanted fish and furs.  Now the yellow men come and they want our Vancouver land for their houses.  The brown men want the place for their businesses only because our police have historically kept our businesses safe.  The blacks like to come here to get away from the violence where they were and to get into the trade we have here. No one wants Canadian Culture.
They do want ‘free health care’.
I’m a doctor and I have had ‘wage controls’ on my income for 30 years.  Doctors can't afford to buy houses in Canada because the "creepy" real estate moguls won't accept 'controls' except on doctor income. Everyone knows that health care , with the doctor and nurse wage slaves and rich fact administration, is what makes Canada most desirable.
I do a considerable amount of actual ‘pro bono’ work.  It’s had me condemned in the media, especially the pro dope trade Vancouver Sun yellow journalists,  because I’ve taken on those rejected marginal people who the courts and media  scandalize and shame along with me. I’ve defended these underdogs in my belief in ‘fairness’ and ‘justice’  and  “universal health care’.  I am shocked that in Bahrain doctors are jailed for treated patients.  In Muslim countries doctors are told they are only to treat the ‘right sort of people’.  This is tyranny.  In Canada may be a two tier system of care.  The rich often get what the poor cannot access.  Hence the rich go to Edgewood Treatment Centre like Betty Ford Clinic for addiction whereas the poor are given needle exchange and told to inject in the Insite drug pub where nurse waitresses will ensure they are cut off before they overdose.  Thanks to doctors and nurses accepting low hourly incomes and long hours and poor support the system works despite the increasing burden of interfering administration.
But I’m not a radical Canadian.  I’m just a Canadian.  We don’t really believe in radical anything here except maybe radical hockey, radical ideas, like love and quantum physics, string theory and multiverse.  We have heros who are scientists like Colonel Hadfield and also love our singers like Bruce Coburn and Laura McLaughland.  We give the Order of Canada to Dr. Jack Hildes for his work establishing Circumpolar Health Care as well as to Burton Cummings for his many hit records with the Guess Who.
I’m anxious around radical religion and radical politics and radical feminists and radical abortionist and anyone really who is radical enough to want to kill anyone, especially those who say ‘kill infidels’.  But the fact is I don’t know any radical Canadians.  I am not a radical Canadian and I don’t know radical Canadians.
 I do know the most amazing creative and ingenious Canadians.  I know Canadians who are loving and kind and yet would kill you in a second in self defence. I hate that the courts are so biased to the politically correct and serve primarily the rich and elite but otherwise they're not particularly onerous.  I have so many Canadian friends in the sciences, arts, military, politics, health care, law,  industry and resources and government and I truly admire them all individually in their work and home lives.  There’s incredible diversity in my friendship network and that concerns me because so many of my friends many of whom are elderly , young, Christian, Jewish, anti abortion, LGBT, writers, artists, performers, physicians, lawyers would be persecuted, arrested or killed living in so many of the nations of the world.  Half my friends would likely be arrested in Communist countries though I have several card carrying Communist friends.  Half my sexually diverse friends would be killed in most Muslim countries and almost all of Africa.  My Jewish friends would be persecuted in half the world. My Christian friends would be persecuted in China and countless other countries.  I am certain most of my writer friends, especially the poets would be arrested in most countries. The scientists would be made to work directly for the governments because they’re that good.  My business friends would likely do okay in their work but not be able to share what they think and feel socially. My political friends would generally be in trouble somewhere.
Canada is a land in which I’ve known freedom.  Increasingly I see this government and the policies of the world attempting to harmonize Canada to a reductionist 'world order'.  They want to reduce it to something radically un Canadian, something politically correct and 'safe'. Too few Canadians realize that 'buzz words' get their 'buzz' from the 'spin'.  What they sound like is the opposite of what they are.  Hence 'politically correct '  is truly politically incorrect.  And 'safe places' are the most unsafe places in the world.  At least 'carbon tax' is true since its just one more tax on a mountain of tax.  Sometimes these things concern me.
I’m not a Radical Canadian.  I don’t want to become one.

Moscow Morning Reflections

If anyone had asked me truthfully what I thought Moscow would be like, I’d have said the buildings would be more utilitarian and block like rather than the ornamentally crafted sculptured architecture that draws from Greece and Rome and French eras in design. I found one sculpture worn and old on a side of a heavy feeling building of workers looking to the sky with their arms upraised. State idealism enforced by design.  I remembered an exhibit of Soviet paintings I saw in Canada being toured around the world. All the plump and hearty looking peasants had the happy looks of the mentally retarded.  Everyone was ‘brain washed’ with that look only ‘cult’ followers about to take their ‘coolaid death drink’ might have.  I had so long heard how all opposition was removed.
Communism was Aetheism’s first political expression as the western world of mixed capitalism and socialism was Christianity’s political expression.  Aetheists had killed more millions in a hundred years than theists collectively had killed in thousands.  I was truly afraid of the forces of fear and conformity that this killing of ones own people represented. Even today I am made thoroughly anxious by American imprisonment of so many of its citizens competing mildly with the history of the Gulag. But these aren’t work camps or Auschwitz but still, though far removed from outright death, worrying nonetheless. No people is free from the collective inanities that have plagued the lowest and highest of civilizations. The very elite of Europe, sophisticated and privileged beyond record gave us WWI and Gallipoli. Mass slaughter houses for the young.
I was a member of Physicians for Social Responsibility and International Physicians against Nuclear War back when I belonged to the Canadian Civil Rights Association and Psychiatrists Against Political Abuse of Psychiatry. Yet I saw the worst abuses of psychiatry and politics in my home town and thought organizations were coopted when they refused to look inward as well as outward.  The same is true in military today where ‘friendly fire’ accounts for as many deaths and ‘enemy fire’ yet the paranoids always want to look outward and ignore the enemy within.  So more and more I’ve withdrawn from the insanity of those in politics about, less quick to judge, more respectful of snakes and anthills.  A friend knowing me gave me a lapel pin that said, “beware of stupid people in groups’.  One step ahead of the crowd you are a leader, two steps ahead, a martyr.
I enjoy the churches here.  A history of idealism weighted with politics and yet producing the greatest art of all times. I enjoy looking through the icons to the faces of hope twisted by gravity and real politics.  There are young everywhere and I am thankful for their enthusiasm, even more their laughter. Yet in the church, I see the outward and inner search for meaning in an apparently meaningless world. The only real shrine is the grocery store where ever one goes.  The frivolous is found in the fashion boutiques.  People eat, drink, sleep and mate then live the distractions of children until they can once again face their own irrelevance saved from thinking by the outward demands of their gods on earth, work, children, family, friends. Today these manifest in computers, cars and Facebook.
I was not prepared for all the corporate world fashion and food cultures to be so prominent here in Moscow. I have seen their homogenization the world over.  They were most evident in the Galleria of the Northern Mariana Islands.     Chanel, MacDonalds, Japanese chains, the GUM mall right on Red Square, Tiffany’s,  Salvatore, all the evidence of international corporate efficiency and distributions. These are the lucky charms of the jet setter culture.
In the time of St. Paul, the tent maker, it was no doubt the fabric of your tent and especially one made by that master craftsman artist, “Saul, no Paul, Paul of Tarsis?” “ I  can give you the name of my hair dresser too.  He goes on about this new religion ‘one world religion’, or was it Paul who does that. They’re both very good at what they do. I wouldn’t listen to what they say. Servants are always going on about this and that.”
The motorcycles are Kawazaki, BMW, Honda and Vespas but I even saw a Harley Davidson.  Seeing my own motorcycle represented, despite the immanence of the Germans I felt that Russians did have taste. We always think people who share our tastes, have ’taste’.  I’d expected to see more local Russian motorcycles.  I’d owned a Russian, if only because Canada is more known for its body armour that its getaway vehicles. We’re a stoic slow to mobilize people more defensive in our hockey game than some of the more offensive nations.   My favourite hockey memories of all time have been games between the Canadians and Russians.  There was so much evidence of skill and strategy rather than the all too common brash and brawn.
I had  expected more local manufacturers. I appreciate the unique and delightful  local foods I’ve savoured.  I’ve very much enjoyed  startling touches of ingenuity of dress the Moscow women add to old universal motifs of clothing.  A Moscow woman at night in a ‘little black affair’ does wonders with silk and gold accessories and the almost universal 4 inch heeled even shoes that will ensure podiatrists years of future business.   There is so much creativity and novelty here.   I’d actually expected more  conformity.  The Russia of my youth was boring to say the least.  There was so much that was  grim.  I guess I expected more military presence, fewer long haired men, more women weightlifters on steroids,  maybe a  tank or two in the streets.  it’s so easy to forget that Troudeau in my very own Canada had tanks deployed in our cities as every intellectual secretly desires.   There is an element of cold war in the rhetoric.  Yet today the war is economic and oil.  Ideology is trumped by Samsung phones and Peugeot. It’s really hard to imagine that I was checking the Canadian ’travel bulletins’ to see if it was ’safe’ to travel to Moscow given the international posturing and sable rattling going on amongst the world leaders. Yet, there has always been ‘war and rumours of war’.  I’m so glad I came.  
I am bored nearly to tears to hear the Quebec white hairs talk of “Separatism’ still.  Now the radical Feminists in my country are demanding equal distribution by gender.  There must be an equal number of women on every board and physicists must wear skirts whether they are male or female if they expect to get tenure anymore.  Tokenism has replaced meritocracy and if you have a cousin who is stupid as toast but the right ‘flavour of the month’ then they can be  tomorrows brain surgeon without any demand for training or irritating consideration of such irrelevant details as old fashioned ‘competence’.   Meanwhile the racists demand equal distribution by race. No one cares anymore if anyone can do anything just so long as they ’spout’ the right slogans.  Canada is more communist today than Russia was perhaps at its worst and more and more people, especially men, are being shunted off in Canada for ‘political correctness re education.”   Meanwhile the rich and powerful get richer and more powerful encouraging  the divisionary  tribalism fueled by anyone who can profit by promissory materialism and the idea of ’symbolic specialness’.  Denial reigns all over as we collectively forget about death and disease and hope the latest MRI will be available soon for a whole new range of Selfies. Euthanasia is fine just so long as we can share it on Facebook. We deal with our anxiety about insignificance in Andy Warhol 20 minitism. I confess, quietly of course, that I prefer the Bible to the Kardashian Twins and American Reality TV.
I see no difference here in the people and the world as if all has gone ‘global’ and ‘local’ is lost in the ‘one world order’ some hybrid communist capitalist hegemony of corporate power and elite family wealth.  All is so far beyond my pay grade.   I love that I can enjoy a boat ride down a Moscow canal looking at exotic sights in the company of a beautiful girl.  Sufficient is this day.  I am reminded of Arjuna in Bhagadvagita who says to Krishna that it is  his own family that is fighting on either side in this war.  He knows not what to do. Krishna responds that there will always be war but the question is not which side to join but rather whether to participate or not.
So many young people and old are alienated today.  They are lost in a variety of addictions, such a variety of choices. We are increasingly facing the hazards of abundance while the old people still struggle from a position of scarcity . People die of ‘lifestyle’ diseases more than starvation.  Everywhere there are ‘food banks’ when more and more we need the Third World skinnies to offer international ‘work aid’ for western fatties.  I am aware of my own middle age ponch so at home in America whereas here, obesity is present, it’s not as ubiquitous as mid west America.  Fast food has yet to be the scourge but mostly it’s the everywhere present smoking that shortens the local life while maintaining the appearance of health. Where once there was only politics or soccer,  there is so much variety. Perhaps in future wars people will fight over which video game is dominate. It’s amazing we have been able as a species to accommodate PC and Apple operating systems.  This gives me hope.
 I remember hearing that Communist stores had bare shelves because central planning in 5 year intellectual ‘bits’ could not keep up with the winds of change.  Today that now is dealt with by ‘on line’ shopping and on demand delivery and production.  Times have changed but not as one would think, rather from years to minutes, seconds to nano seconds. There are those on the margins but in the centre there is light speed.  The rat race is now a race of great danes and panthers.  One might think the lumbering bear and lofty eagle just couldn’t keep up with the anonymous hare.
I saw horses, sabres and rifles in the Kremlin today.  I love the ancient display.  I reflected how Churchill rode a horse into Sudan and later faced German unmanned missiles shot across the canal. It is an age of smart guns and smart drones and star wars.
But all this is still  a side show to the universal call of spring. Romance was so evident last evening in Red Square.  Couples walked hand in hand, stopping openly to embrace and kiss. They were surprisingly interested in what each other saying, completely unaware that their very attentiveness was driven by reproductive hormones.  We cry ‘freedom’ when we are most enslaved by biological urges.  I noticed a lack of public washrooms and made a point of remembering as my now deceased aunt once said, “never miss the opportunity to use a washroom when you see one.”   Older I’m more amused today than ever I was in my life before. I have  a comic strip representation running through my mind today so much more appreciative of tragicomedy where once there was only the seriousness of tragedy.    People who cannot laugh are social explosions looking for an excuse for drama.  I was once considered an “intellectual’ and view those days the same as when I was merely drunk on red wine.  There’s even more humility in the latter than the former intoxication.
Life is a muddle and may always have been.  The more certain I am the more aware of uncertainty I become.  There is such diversity now that perhaps we are saved by the multiplicity.  Political writers have said that the old dichotomy is splitting into a new regionalism.  I could not overlook the whiteness of this place. The brown face so rare, the yellow skin quite absent compared to my own Hongcouver Canada. .  I heard that gypsies were a concern and thought of our own “Occupy Movements’.  I was a hippy myself for a summer and wore flowers in my hair in the streets of San Francisco. But we were all about love and shouted ‘make peace not war’. Activism today is so much more about anger and selfies.
I don’t know really.. There is always only vagueness. The Moscow I envisioned was gone perhaps with the fall of the Berlin Wall. America itself died in a way when it lost the love hate romance it had with it’s drab dance partner of so many years.  There is so little evidence of the Moscow we still hear of in our news still.  Yet we hear of military rule in Thailand and millions in the street at the same time a friend has sent me a picture of himself and other I know enjoying their time in a Thailand beach village apparently unaffected by the ‘colour coded movements raging in the media and the cities always so easily full of themselves while country folk would rather picnic more often than not.  “Chill”.
Personally, culturally, socially, fashionably this could be another fashionable neighbourhood in a far eastern Canada.  Somewhere even more different than Quebec.  Russia is just another place in that sense  where they have a funny way of talking and a particularly difficult alphabet.   I just learned the Ethiopians have their own alphabet as well.  I was a little irritated when studying Hebrew I had to learn another alphabet and was particularly incensed by the Greeks when I rented a car and found that their traffic signs were all equally illegible.  How dare people not consult me on such a basic matter as alphabet. Don’t they appreciate that while I learned latin, english, french and some spanish I’m tired after all the science and medicine and legalese and beaurocratese I’ve had to learn that others would think not to include me in their very formation of letters and sounds.   I feel I can tolerate diversity a lot but alphabets are just going too far for me personally.  I want to draw a line , put my foot down, surrender, scream I give up. I need the babble fish now from that classic Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
Each person has their breaking point.  It was the same in Greece where I was irritated that words didn’t sound at all the way I thought they looked. It’s at the level of alphabet one approaches the rabbit hole of Alice in Wonderland. There is this vast illusion in ‘one world order’ and superficial similarities that overlooks the vast differences that can only be held together by a vast measure of love, maturity and tolerance.  I am reminded of a tourist I met in Germany frustrated by ‘currency’ shouting at a bank teller, “I don’t want any more of this coloured money, give me the real green stuff.” I thought he was an ‘ugly american’ but later learned he was just an overwhelmed Canadian from Toronto on the last leg of a many month travel binge thorough Europe.  I find myself that the desires of the Hobbit are increasingly my own despite the many adventures I have had and the spiritual travels I’ve had with my own Gandolf.  I miss smoking a pipe but still enjoy putting my feet up in my own home after I have closed the days.  I look forward to being reunited with my little dog yet I am only days into this differences and alieness. I really think that indoor plumbing, fresh water, clean air, and electricity are under appreciated.
Here the wifi has been intermittent.  I’m mildly irritated by the lack of constant coverage globally with ‘space age’ technology.  Does no one consider me.  I want my WIFI now.  I don’t want to walk next door  to the WIFI cafe.  Really, Beam me up Scotty!  I  take so much for granted and overlook the heated shower I have every day.
Each place has struggled to improve the lot of life for its individuals. This history has shown in it’s superb museums the world over. This desire for improvements  has been associated with war and all its varied tools, the development of increasing creature comforts from hot springs to engraved hair brushes, intellectual achievements in books and art and scientific and technological advances in transportation and construction and search for meaning in churches where questions of contemplation are engaged. There are libraries and factories the world over. I always feel it is a good place where there are more libraries than arsenals.
I love that this is the centre of empire with so much of the highest achievements apparent. Each power centre, all the empires of the world over have their undercarriage of slavery and addiction , but they also have their glorious works of human endeavour, their architectural wonders, their high speed public transport, their space era technologies.  I’ve been to Crete, Athens, Jerusalem, Rome, all the major cities of Europe, Bombay, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Mexico City, and London and Washington, following the development of dominance through chariots and cannon and calvary and naval and ultimate air power and then space age communication and satellite surveillance increasingly in an age of robots and drones.  It’s an amazing history of external development.  This is one of those greatest of great achievements and places where people came together in common for purpose only to later reflect and change direction, always slouching towards bethlehem, always moving closer to perfection whatever that might be.  It was still thousands of years ago that the world over the greatests nations concluded that the ‘golden rule’ was ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’.  Jesus added ‘pluck the log out of your own eye before trying to take the sliver out of your neighbours.”  Not that anyone listens so each generations we learn again what the previous one knew, and each empire begets another and that one learns all over again. Only now the years are nano seconds.
I am humbled here. That is good.  I’m away from the routines that dictate my life. I’m nobody among strangers.  I only must guard my passport, wallet and knapsack, with computer, iPhone and satellite phone.  I’m reduced to minimalist concerns. There’s a lightness of being. I’m Joni Mitchell’s “Free Man in Paris’. Here, in Moscow,  the  word freedom comes from a different alphabet.