Murdered Loyal Servants

Posted on August 19, 2020 by Davd

… and my Last Words via everyman.ca
[c] Davd, 2020, from a draft begun 2012

In December 2005, i drove across Canada, from West Vancouver Island to Eastern New Brunswick, to keep faith with an old Spitz-Wolf dog who had served me well and loyally. It was neither an easy nor a totally safe trip; but my friend George [the half-Wolf “dog”—or in my eyes, the canine-Métis] deserved such loyalty; for such was the loyalty he had given me and my son Erik. As we stopped for rest, i would say to him, “I’m glad you’re here, George”—and it was the simple truth. We had two more good years together.

His last remains were buried next an apple tree in my prayer garden, as they should be; and when he finally had to be “put down”, i held his paw and stroked his head until he had lost consciousness for a full minute—and then wept because of my inability to do better, to give him some more good years.

Having read those two paragraphs, you can see why the [2011?] story of the murder of 100 Huskies got my attention and anger, as worse than a crazy or foolish human killing one or two human strangers, not merely in the numbers who died but in the evil of the killing. Few if any people who are killed in traffic, or sports, are killed deliberately. Those Huskies were.

Beyond innocence, those dogs were loyal servants—slaves in law—who had given fidelity and trust to the people for whom they worked. It is one thing to kill a porcupine who girdles your trees, chews your harness, and threatens your livestock; it is quite another to kill 100 loyal servants.

This was not merely “cruelty to animals”; fleas and slugs and sharks are animals too. This was mortal cruelty to social, affectionate, cooperative, thinking beings of our own size and style, who gave the best years of their young adult lives to serving those who murdered them. My Christian faith acknowledges that we as humans have dominion over other creatures—but as stewards serving their and our Creator, not for to treat them with any disrespect, much less cruelty, and never evil.

As stewards, those responsible for the dogs could have “got word out” over the radio, telephone, and Internet, if they felt they had to reduce the number of their dogs; and they could easily have reached tens of thousands, probably millions of Canadians.1 If retired racing greyhounds can find adoptive homes, then surely the more “regular-looking” Huskies could find them also; and among a million people2, 100 adopters would be only one hundredth of one percent.

Not just the worker who felt cornered into the actual killing, and failed to do better than obey an evil “order”; but even more, those who failed to provide him with the means to give the dogs good care, and also failed to provide the means to “adopt some dogs out”, should be shown, for all who will look, to see; to have acted in ways unworthy of human beings. Having so acted, they have forfeit some “human moral rights”, just as criminals in prison have3. In response, we as human beings who are not perfect but neither evil, should show forth:

Revulsion: One wee short step shy of revenge, we should make plain that this act was a shame upon all our humanity and one we reject as not merely inhumane but inhuman. It is inhumane to deny an active dog exercise or underfeed any animal; mass-killing of friendly, social animals is much worse than that.

 

Shaming: It should be plain that they have done evil—something that can not be quickly forgotten, but must be repented and “lived down”. I am reminded of the practice, two centuries ago in the first United States, of making thieves wear a large T for all to see, adulterers an A (and was there also a G for gossip?)

 

Deterrence: Whatever we can do to the perpetrators of this evil, that deters others from doing its like, has merit. It may be that some things we might do also have severe “demerits”—it is not good to answer evil with evil—and so, we must perhaps think a while to find responses that are most fitting.

Locking people up in prisons is expensive and does not seem to be very effective in causing them to change their ways. More than getting tough” on these killers, we should protect others from them, provide them with situational encouragement to change their ways, deter others from imitating them, and show our revulsion. I am thinking of Siberia more than early Australia4.

The fact they were men is a shame on our male sex. We should acknowledge that shame — and in so acknowledging, we will have an honest stance when women’s evils merit shame. There are men who fall short and, significantly worse, there are men who do evil. Men who do evil should not be “let off” because they are men — nor should women who do evil be “let off” because they are women.

We cannot undo the murders; I cannot choose a mate for Fritz from among them; i cannot go now to my neighbours and send messages to my more distant friends, to ask who they know that might want a Husky dog in their households, for little or no cost. We all must carry this damage on our spirits5, and no amount of pain laid on those who caused it, will change the past.

How shall we remember these victims? How shall we honour them, whose canine kind has truly been called “man’s best friend”? Caging evildoers does not give my spirit peace; its best merit is that while caged, they cannot do more of that particular evil. How can we do better than that?

Many days walk to the south, the Choctaw refused to imprison their people: They considered the death penalty more humane than life in prison; and they also used the whip and “amends”6 as punishment for lesser crimes. Those punishments acknowledged that they could not fully “make things right”.

Labelling is one way to protect the public: “Dangerous offender” laws and the registration of sex offenders serve much more to warn the police and public than to influence the offender; and knowing that these designations exist may deter some potential offenders as well. Whip marks are labelling of a kind; but perhaps answering violent evil with more violence is not that likely to help, over-all, especially compared with other ways to label.

If i were in a sentencing-circle i believe i would urge that the perpetrators be branded somehow—probably by means of a tattoo. This might restrict their future opportunities, much as a “dangerous offender” or “registered sex-offender” designation does. It is a sign of past wrongdoing that can perhaps be lived-down; and as such, if they do repent, do mend their ways, then they could be accepted where their mended ways are known. Since conduct is to some extent situational, restricting the guilty to circumstances where they have been able to “live it down” might be some protection against their reverting to evil in a different setting.

Branding—not to cause pain but to shame and to warn the public—is perhaps the best suggestion i can now offer. I hope other people, i suppose Christians and Muslims and Buddhists especially, will have others, that further improve on caging those who have done wrong. I thought of putting the offenders in the pillory or the stocks for animal-lovers to pelt them with disgusting things, of making them pull the sleds—but those are more like bad comedy than like righteousness.

Let us honour those massacred good servants with a serious, moral review of crime and punishment—and of deterrence and reform and the philosophy behind laws and their enforcement. Having read some collected sayings of Muhammad; and in earlier years having spoken with a few Buddhist friends, one Baha’i elder, and one Muslim friend; i have no great worries that good Christian reconsideration will conflict “essentially” with their faiths. I hope to read their reviews as well as ours.

To me, this killing is far worse than stealing a million dollars, which is mere money; or driving while intoxicated, which might increase risk to others but is not the intentional murder of loyal friends — or even killing a human scoundrel. If thieves and impaired drivers can go to prison, is that because prison is a lazy-minded way of throwing public tax money after private loss and public risk? and catering to the folly of vengeance? Is it because we are afraid to recognize our inability to change the past and truly “make things right”?

The truth, my Master taught, will set us free. To live a lie, conversely, will entangle us in folly and very possibly evil. Not only are the victims of this mass killing morally superior to those who killed them; there is a sense in which they are superior to us all if we do not honour their memory by an examination of the human condition, both inherent and socially learned. We need name and confess our flaws of nature, to work around them; and our flaws of social conditioning, to change what “taught” them. In the process we may find that vengeance and hubris, not even crackpot righteousness [and infinitely far from the real thing], has made our so-called correctional system into something that all-too-often does the opposite of correcting.

We may find that we have written into law, things we cannot do and promises we cannot keep; and we may have to settle for a smaller reality before a large illusion fails us more than it already has.

This is my last blog post on everyman.ca. I have held this particular moral statement for last, to reiterate our human nature as pack animals, our ethological kinship with canines7, the many ways we are better off in canine company than without it; our moral failings which like our power, probably be greater than theirs.

Huskies, i grieve again—I have lost count how many times—because i had no chance to help you find new homes. George, please comfort them for me; and may i be worthy to walk the trails of Paradise with you all.

Notes:

1. I am not opposed to letting US Citizens adopt Canadian dogs who haven’t quickly found Canadian households; but the Border and its rules might make the process both slow and costly, even compared to getting some dogs transported fairly long distances. At the time of the killings there was no pandemic to frustrate shipping dogs in suitable cages, perhaps even specialized trucks.

2. Fewer than live in Coastal B.C.

3 … unless since the killing, one or more of them has shown repentance, and the fruits of repentance. It will have to be great repentance with substantial fruits, to qualify.

4… and a footnote should perhaps acknowledge, that many who were sent to Siberia were less guilty in the moral perspectives I share, than those who sent them. It should perhaps acknowledge also, that a few of those in North American prisons are there by error; it is the wrongdoing and not being in prison that forfeits moral rights.

5… as, I agree with the BBC, the French state and people carry some damage on theirs. BBC reports,
“Between 100,000 and 200,000 pets are abandoned in France each year …. By comparison, the RSPCA animal charity told the BBC that the figure is close to 16,000 in the UK.”

6. The French word “amends” is less ambiguous than the English word “fine”; and the amends need not be made in money … but likely, sometimes will be.

Might the cost of dog rescue, and not only in France, be funded by a tax on commercial sale of dogs at boutique sorts of places where impulse purchases are made? Those who cannot or will not pay the tax, could give home to an abandoned animal and perhaps do some volunteer work at the shelter.

I find it very difficult to envision anyone abandoning a dog, or even a cat, who knows personally the humans in whose household that animal was born. There seems scant need to tax personal sources of “pets”.

7… and especially with regular ones whose wolf ancestry is apparent in their anatomy, including size as well as shape.

Posted in Davd, Human Nature, Men's Health | Leave a comment

The End of the World…

Posted on July 19, 2020 by Davd

… as we knew it:
(1st draft 2014, edited and [c] 2020) Davd

I could state the day i learned of the End of the World as Saturday, July 26th, 2014. At that time, it was not fait accompli but destin en tren: I heard on CBC Radio News, that a highly contagious, lethal disease called Ebola, (with neither a tested vaccine nor a tested and effective treatment) had spread from Sierra Leone to Lagos, Nigeria—by commercial airliner.

In the days that followed, i heard that hospitals had been closed and shortly after, that national borders had been closed, In August, the World Health Organization declared an international emergency, forecasting that the epidemic would continue for months, and stating the death toll and infection rates were far higher than officially reported. Airlines cancelled flights to some affected countries. Some ports refused cargo shipments from affected countries. If September 11, 2001 was a “game changer”, so was the spread of Ebola beyond the wet tropical forests where its outbreaks had previously been confined.

The incubation period between infection and visible Ebola symptoms1 is “three to four weeks”, according to a physician who has practiced in Africa. A carrier of the disease can travel far and come into contact with many, many other people in three to four weeks, as a New York physician did—prompting new mandatory quarantine rules in New York, New Jersey, and Illinois. Ebola would be far easier to trace and “contain” if its incubation period were short—for instance, it wouldn’t likely be important to restrict cargo ship movement.

Quarantine is not cheap. Exclusion is cheaper—and the disease is frightening. From the WHO news items, i expected further restrictions on travel and cargo movement—and before Ebola became an influence on cargo movement, CBC News had mentioned a consultants’ report predicting less out-sourcing and more manufacturing in Canada. More recently, the Financial Post reported such a trend had begun before this year’s Emergencies were declared.

That 2014 Ebola outbreak was contained. The “novel coronavirus” disease whose Politically Correct name is “COVID-19”, was not. Before the spread of “COVID-19” was declared a pandemic, airline travel had increased (but not become as easy as it was before 1980) and so had cruise ship vacations. “Reshoring” — sourcing important products and commodities near by rather than far away — had become a reported economic trend, but tourism had not followed.

The Canadian, US and European populations were old in 2014 and older in 2019. The fraction of those populations in “care-facilities” had increased. When the pandemic spread out of control, cruise ships became prisons and “care-facilities”, death traps. It seems a safe statistical estimate, that the mean age of the Canadian, US, and European populations today, is slightly lower than it was at the beginning of this year 2020.

Will the mean ages of European, North-American, perhaps Japanese and a few other2 “developed” populations regain their recent highs and go higher? Not without population decline due to low birth rates. Less than six years separate the Ebola emergency from COVID-19. The more crowded the planet, the more easily contagious diseases can spread.

It may no longer be easy, or cheap, to ship “goods” around the world… much less to travel the world in person. The “Global Economy” in which all places could produce for all other places, probably never existed in its ideal form. Ebola could have told us, six yars ago, that that a world already less open to movement than a generation ago, was unlikely to regain even the incomplete freedom of movement it had at the beginning of this century.

Ebola’s first recorded airline trip is one date with which to “mark the end of the world of my student days”; September 11, 2001 is another. There is no single “day things changed” with which to mark the rise of “the Islamic State [of Iraq and the Levant]”3, but concerns over that “Islamic State” and its persecution of non-Muslims4, still threaten the peace which had prevailed between Islam and other faiths early in this century. If not somehow quieted by “mainstream Muslims”, the intolerance of these Sunni extremists will contaminate the reputations of other Sunnis especially and Muslims more generally—to what extent, i will not try to estimate.

The world was not an easy-going place as the summer of 2014 began; and it is far less easy-going in mid-2020. Perhaps it is worth while remembering an earlier decade when, in Canada, Europe, and the USA, the easy-going world still prevailed.

Being an old man, who as a young man traveled by airliner in the 1960s and 1970s, i can recall a world that i doubt anyone living will see again: In the 1970s, i could walk into an airport from the bus, “limo”, or subway, be on board an airplane in less than twenty minutes, and be in the air in twenty more5. I don’t believe any member of the “general public” has done that in this century.

I can recall driving into the United States from Canada with no more identification than my driving license (since i was the prudent sort, i carried my Canadian Citizenship card—but it was not required.)

“Where you from?”
“Thunder Bay, Ontario.”

“Where you going?”
“Stevens Point,. Wisconsin. There’s a conference there on small cities and I have a paper on the
program.”

“Any cigarettes or liquor with you?”
“Nope—you know even better than I do, that they cost less here than up in Canada.”

“OK, go ahead—have a good time.”

I doubt any ordinary Canadian will drive into the U.S.A. that easily in the remaining years of this 21st Century.

Since then, there were the Achille Lauro hijacking, the “airliner as bomb” hijackings of September 11, 2001, several public transit bombings in Europe, the killings of two Canadian soldiers who were going about routine nonviolent business, a gunman walking into Canada’s Parliament building, and consequent “heightened security” impositions on what was once considered ordinary freedom of movement. We were beginning to see the further restrictions implicit in Ebola, the “Islamic State”, the shooting-down of a Malaysian airliner over the Russian-Ukraine border region, (and some readers can name one or two more events that seem portentous to you) when the novel coronavirus triggered some qualitatively greater restrictions.

Between 1970 and now, that easy-going world came to an end, gradually, in ecological terms which I’ve described in a two-book review and my third “jobs” post. The Ebola epidemic was especially ecological in nature: As that physician put it, it is one of a handful of hemorrhagic fevers which have existed for a long time, in wet tropical settings far from civilization. They kill most of the people who contract them; so treatment must include rigorous isolation for safety’s sake; (and there is no reliably effective way to cure them). If not treated, they spread through a local population, kill a majority of that population, and then vanish out of sight for lack of new people to infect.

In 2014, for the first time of which i am aware, such a disease entered civilization… and began to spread by airliner. As the CBC News reported, the efforts to limit Ebola’s spread and then cure as many victims as possible while burying the rest where their corpses could not infect anyone, were drastic; and still it took months to stop that spread. The fact that the World Health Organization declared it an international emergency was one indication that many of those drastic measures were “in readiness” — and applied much earlier in this year’s more contagious but less deadly disease outbreak. By 2014, civilization spread far enough to admit a disease that could possibly kill a majority of the Earth’s human population. Perhaps it had spread far enough earlier, and during one or two previous Ebola outbreaks, civilization was lucky.

One could say the same thing about the Great Plague, also with some uncertainty>6. Duiker and Spielvogel (1994: 488-490) state that The Plague, which took bubonic and pneumonic forms, “reached Europe in October of 1347 when Genoese merchants brought it from the Middle East to the island of Sicily…. Usually, the diffusion of the Black Death followed commercial trade routes.” [488]

They report estimates that “the European population declined by 25 to 50 percent between 1347 and 1351.” [489] The plague recurred several times during the remaining years of the 14th Century and all of the 15th; and “recurrences … did not end until the beginning of the eighteenth century when a new species of brown rat began to replace the black rat.” [489-490] Trade had been active between Europe and Asia for many centuries; perhaps Europe had been lucky during one or more outbreaks of plague to the east of the Mediterranean Sea.

Europe, 700 years ago, could be called a world unto itself; and indeed Europeans called the Americas “the New World” during the centuries when these continents were being explored and colonized. The “high” medieval centuries [1000-13xx] had been a few degrees warmer than the previous three centuries, which were already slightly more friendly to agriculture than those immediately before them. The European population doubled between 1000 and 1300 [p. 300], then fell by 25 to 50 percent between 1347 and 1351. The world that was Europe in the High Middle Ages, came to an end.

Had European medicine been able to identify the cause and transmission patterns of plague, and had European rulers been able and willing to work together to contain it—the world that was Europe in the High Middle Ages, would have come to a different end. The commercial trade routes would have been closed, or strictly controlled, and freedom of movement would have declined sharply for those who had enjoyed it. Many fewer people would have suffered and died—but the Europe of the High Middle Ages would not have persisted in either case.

Ebola and now “COVID 19” confront us with a similar predicament. The easy-going mobility millions of us enjoyed from the 1960s through sometime in the 1980s, was already much degraded from those decades last year. It is now “visibly foolhardy”. Allowing Ebola to spread around the world could repeat the story of the Great Plague, perhaps with even higher death rates—so restrictions should be stricter rather than looser. (It was not until October 25th, the day after a New York physician had been diagnosed with Ebola after riding the New York subways here-and-there, going out bowling … that New York, New Jersey, and Illinois began requiring quarantine of all travelers from West Africa who had plausibly come in contact with the disease.)

It is too soon, for “COVID 19” at least, to say whether it can be extinguished in those parts of civilization it has invaded, nor what travel and commerce can be safely conducted if it persists. For now, the Precautionary Principle tells us to travel very much less and to be very careful about commerce involving the very many places where “COVID 19” is known to be. My expat son in Europe advised me to wash “fresh produce” like I wash dirty dishes, and I do7.

We should also remember that Ebola and “COVID 19” are not the only threats associated with easy mobility: H5N1 influenza has had repeated mention “in the news”, this century. I don’t pretend to know how many other diseases might be capable of reducing the human population of the earth by ten percent or more; the fact that “COVID 19” was not in public awareness six months ago, would seem to imply that other comparably dangerous diseases exist that simply haven’t manifest themselves lately.

In 2014 there was brutal persecution of Christians and other non-Muslims in Arab countries, particularly Northern Iraq and the adjacent part of Syria, Not long ago, Buddhists—who i had thought of as basically pacifist—persecuted Muslims in [Myanmar?]. Palestinian Arabs feel persecuted by the descendants of the Jews who survived the persecutions of Adolf Hitler. Uighur Muslims—and some Christians—feel persecuted by China. Ukraine and Russia are still not reconciled of old grievances; nor Russia and Chechnya. Many of you who read this can add one or more unreconciled conflicts to the list.

The world i enjoyed in the 1960s and 1970s, may not have been “for real” in two distinct senses. Rather than having valid, substantial social existence, perhaps that easy-going world enjoyed only the tolerance of various peoples who, for a time, seemed to gain more than they lost by playing along. As the pay-off from raiding the storehouses of the Earth declined, which it did beginning more than a generation ago, so have declined the acceptance which people have given to things as they then were—and no replacement modus vivendi has yet emerged.

Epidemiologically, rather than being a safe planet for such freedom of mobility human and “cargo”, perhaps “Mother Earth” simply didn’t happen to show her deadly side for a while. Or perhaps, civilization has expanded past some ecological tolerance point, sometime since World War II, and “COVID 19” happens to be the latest manifestation of that loss of safety.

Perhaps a recent BBC forecast of drastic population decline is good news, or at least hopeful news. If the tone of the BBC article is negative, that seems to be because BBC’s writer assumed people would either hold full-time jobs or be cared for by others. I have seen some communities of men do better (monasteries specifically) with men as old as their 90s contributing according to their ability. A posting now about eight years old, sketched how a group of men could form a household with roughly the same social efficiencies.

There rather definitely was a belief, a notion widely held, that a global economic system was well along in development, which entailed and supported worldwide freedom of movement. I heard it preached on the radio and read about it on paper and on websites, as recently as last year; and i experienced the easy-going freedom of movement—but in the last century, not in this one.

You could say that global-growth world has died of “COVID 19”, or was already dead of Ebola, if you like metaphorical language; or you could say it was killed in one or many violent conflicts. In fact, it has been dying for decades. To pretend that world still lives, is dangerous folly. To expect that world to be restored, is wishful thinking at best. Ecologically, its successor need be a world with more skilled manual work and less globe-trotting, more prudence and less growth. There is work to do, much of it man’s work… and much of it satisfying. It is a world for frugal, efficient homebodies… like my grandfather and the Brothers i have met in cloister. They were happy men.

References:

Duiker, William J., and Jackson J. Spielvogel, 1994. World History. Minneapolis: West Publishing Co.

Wells, H. G. 1961: The Outline of History Book Club edition, vol, 2. Garden City, NY.

Notes:

1… as distinct from symptoms that could result from influenza, malaria, etc.
2. Perhaps Australian, Israeli, Kiwi, South Korean?
3. June 30, 2014 might be named because on that date, CBC News reported that a “Caliphate” had been declared; or July 6th, when they reported that [Abu-Bekr??] Al-Baghdadi delivered a speech from a Mosul mosque, claiming the duty of all Muslims to obey him as Caliph.. but neither date had the magnitude of impact that the September 11th airliner-as-bomb attacks nor the fact that a person with Ebola had traveled through two airports and between them, on a commercial airliner. “The self-declared Caliphate” developed more gradually and may or may not be in dissolution.
4. Islam does not necessarily persecute non-Muslims; some early speeches by U.S. President Barack Obama made this clear; and he had lived in Indonesia, a Muslim country, in his youth. What’s more, the “Islamic State” has persecuted non-Sunni Muslims.
5. Since buses especially were sometimes behind schedule, and since meetings sometimes ran long, i did not need to plan to arrive half an hour or less before flight time, for that sometimes to happen. In some cases, i carried only hand luggage if the trip had been for a day or two; in at least one case, my luggage arrived the next day—which if i was coming home, didn’t matter as much as having 3-12 hours longer at home rather than waiting in an airport. (In those days, computers were much too heavy and bulky to use waiting in airports, and “WiFi” wasn’t even an acronym.)
6. We can be more certain that syphilis was brought to Europe by explorers and exploiters of Central or South America. Syphilis, however, can be avoided by sexual abstinence, even by faithful monogamy. Plague and Ebola cannot.
7. I wash apples, mostly, and recently some oranges. I eat without soap washing, wild spinach, which is abundant in some places, wild berries, and bean-sprouts sprouted in the kitchen. They haven’t been handled by strangers.
Posted in Davd, Men's Health, MGTOW, Working | Leave a comment

The Plain Pine Coffin Standard:

Posted on June 13, 2020 by Davd

..Social Efficiency, Human Dignity … Glitz and Hubris be Damned.
(c) 2020, Davd

It is only logical the Virus Emergencies should remind me of my own mortality. Men have higher death rates than women, earth-wide.  The old have much higher death rates than the young. In Canada especially, “care-facilities” have had far higher death rates1. Thankfully, I am not in a care-facility; but I am old, and male. I would be fooling myself if I did not think of death.

We have lately seen many pictures of funerals. Funerals tend to be elaborate, expensive, and in their commercial form, deceitful. The corpse is “embalmed” not with herbs and spices as in ancient times, but with poisonous chemicals intended to retard decay. A description of the process would be gruesome. The purpose is not to restore nor even preserve life, but to preserve a dead body for display.

Once my body has died, why show it off? Why not bury it, perhaps with some good Christian ceremony, in a simple rather than fancy manner? I have not lived in fancy style; the Virus Emergencies portend lower rather than higher material wealth in the coming years; let my funeral be one of simple dignity.

I resumed thinking of funerals last summer, when I was “going to church” at a monastery chapel. I had sojourned in another monastery in 2005. My image of a monk’s funeral has as its centre and theme, a plain pine coffin symbolic of human dignity without excess display or luxury. The Plain Pine Coffin was once quite normal in North-America; it persists with monks, who vow poverty and are buried accordingly. Their funerals have ample dignity and no hubris at all… as do their lives, with the occasional “falling short of the glory” [Romans 3:23]

Let my funeral be plain, simple, but at least a little dignified: A plain pine2 coffin, closed; a white or tan cloth covering the coffin, (a pall, signifying the equality of humankind), a Christian service. Do not spend [tens of?] thousands of dollars embalming the dead body i left behind, nor putting it on display; do not encase it in a fancy “casket”. If someone wants to cut some flowers from his (or her) garden for the occasion, fine; but no fancy purchased bouquets, please. If i die in winter, some evergreen boughs or a wreath on top of the pall should do.

As Flatt and Scruggs sang, decades ago,
“Give me my flowers while I’m livin’, and let me enjoy them while I can—
don’t wait ’til I’m ready to be buried, and then shove some lilies in my hand.

I cannot immediately name a symbol of living frugally, that is as familiar as the plain pine coffin is as a symbol and expression of frugal dignity in death. Because it is widely familiar and widely respected, it makes a good symbol of frugality combined with respect for human dignity—and as the final self-expression of many, many good men and women (especially monks and nuns) it probably has a greater visibility than the many similarly frugal, dignified, and humane acts that the monastic life contains.

You needn’t be a monk nor a nun to live the standard… nor need you be dead, not even dying—you can live the standard of which that plain pine coffin is the final expression.

The three traditional categories of life’s necessities are food, clothing, and shelter. As one who means to send his dead body out of sight in a plain pine coffin, i eat fairly plain, substantial food (much as pine is plain, substantial lumber) but as my cooking blogs will show, i season it with some vigor. I grow, forage, or occasionally receive as gifts local apples, berries, carrots, culinary herbs, fish, green-beans, kale, lettuce, [wild] mushrooms, potatoes, rabbit3, and rowan fruit.

I buy “local” food when i notice an opportunity. I buy food “from away” when the price is near its low point: [dry] beans, olive oil, coffee, flour, margarine, meat, oat and rye flakes for porridge, sugar.

I buy new clothing, but not much and not as often as the Tax Collectors and proponents of economic growth would wish. (Three of my best T-shirts were made up by a printer for Osoyoos, BC, and didn’t sell; i bought them for less than the price of ‘plain’ ones.) I buy some used clothing at “thrift stores”… but shoes, socks, work pants, and underwear don’t get to such places in good condition very often.

Much of what i wear, i was actually given, usually because the purchaser out-grew it. One pair of boots i wore for light work, until they finally failed, was left behind by my youngest son when he left our home for either college or military service. He had outgrown them: He is now some 10-15 cm taller than i am, with foot size in proportion. Various men closer to my age, have “handed down” shirts and less often pants because they had outgrown them at the waist.

I built two houses i lived in [with help from sons and friends]; a third, came with the land. (Logically, houses should more often be group than individual property.) What i added to “house #3” were two porches:
A sun porch where i started vegetable plants in the spring and which heated the kitchen-study on sunny afternoons from October to May;
… and a storm porch which held two cords of firewood; it broke the cold wind and i did not need to go to the woodshed when the weather was miserable.

What is the transportation expression of the Plain Pine Coffin Standard? Definitely not two cars in every garage—in fact, with fossil fuels becoming Politically Incorrect and electric cars remaining expensive, not even a car in every driveway. Perhaps not a driveway by every house. Perhaps the bicycle is the most general symbol of transportation frugality; but there are transportation needs it cannot meet.

I needed before the Emergencies, not a vehicle, but 10%-15% of a vehicle—say, about 10% of an efficient car and 3% of a pickup truck… so maybe the transportation expression is car-sharing co-operatives and second class rail coaches. Car-sharing co-operatives are still new to North America, and the bureaucracies, governmental and insurance, tend to delay their development. If governments are preparing for a more frugal “New Normal”, facilitating co-operative vehicle sharing should be part of their planning.

So should passenger trains… which as of 2019, were in use for urban commuting, but rarely used by working- and middle-class people travelling. In the mid-1980s, i travelled all over southern Finland, and from London to Helsinki, by second class train. I also went from Thunder Bay to Calgary and back again by second class train, more than once, to attend an annual year-end conference. The people i met on those trains were decent, contributing workers for the most part, with a few students and retired folks. The rich and the disreputable were notable by their rarity… as they also have rarely been buried in decent plain pine coffins.

This is not meant to be a specific, much less a detailed plan; rather a guiding example, of modest, dignified frugality. Frugality is never proud; it considers and does not condescend. I do contend that a Plain Pine Coffin basis for standards guiding economic and political policy would give most citizens more life satisfaction and less onerous work, than today’s (or should i say 2019 and before’s?) “policy frameworks”.

“All men are mortal” … and a “novel coronavirus” has demanded we take notice that we are. The plain pine coffin happens to be a symbol of frugality with dignity, that I honour among monks, recommend to all … and suggest we refer back to when concepts are needed for a Next Normal. Not fancy caskets but plain pine coffins. Not cars to go 5-10 km to work, but bicycles. Not airliners to travel 500-1000 km, but passenger trains. Not fancy restaurants, nor burgers and fries, but nutritious home cooking. Housing, methinks should have a post of its own; I did make some mention of socially efficient housing several years ago.

This is a time to make us think of our mortality … and recognize that a virus not even known to science last year, is “killing” many social customs and pretensions. We have some choice, what to let die, what to change, what to adopt to replace customs that perish. We never needed cruise ships, nor cars to go a few miles to work, any more than our bodies will need to be put on display in fancy funerals.

Notes:

1. Care-facilities house many more women than men, which is one major reason more women than men have died of “COVID-19” in Canada, than men. Many more women have been infected, and especially in care-facilities, because care-facilities house many more women. The death rates for men have been higher than for women, even though the women averaged older.

2. Pine is the traditional coffin wood, at least in the temperate zones where it grows, for good reasons: It is commonly available and while not the cheapest wood, is far from the most expensive; it is easily worked (while Thuja, for instance, splits readily when nailed without pilot holes); it is stronger than Thuja or balsam-fir ..and it has a pleasant smell which might cover the odor of death.

3. To be proper, “varying hare”; common name, “snowshoe rabbit”. It’s good meat, free of antibiotics and pesticides apart from perhaps sprays by industrial forestry.

 

Posted in Davd, Food, Human Nature, Male Lifestyle, Men's Health, Uncategorized, Working | Leave a comment

Mother’s Day is Different this Year

Posted on May 10, 2020 by Davd

… and an occasion to begin looking at what might be Next Normal
(c) 2020, Davd

You could call this a speculative blog: I am an old man subject to Emergency Directives to keep to my dwelling and not go out and meet people. Instead of observing the Mother’s Day activities and how a coronavirus pandemic has changed them; I am applying ordinary logic to the facts i know and the rules I have read on news and Government websites.

Mother’s Day is traditionally the busiest day of the year in Canada’s restaurant industry. This year, “Physical Distancing” directives will reduce the number of Mothers who can be treated to the usual restaurant dinner, and of course, the profitability of the day for the restaurants.

Standing in a long line, two metres apart, waiting to get into a restaurant, is not fun. Many prudent offspring will choose not to “take Mother out to dinner” as they usually did in previous years … because Mother is not likely to enjoy it. Mothers in wheelchairs, or using canes to stand, are especially likely to find such waiting unpleasant. In some places there will be rain, even snow.

In the Province of New Brunswick, Mothers who do not live with their children must sit 2 metres1 from them in a restaurant2, which is going to make taking Mother out to dinner somewhat strange, at best. Perhaps there will be many fewer families following what used to be a very profitable tradition.

Pity the poor restaurant industry? Perhaps. Perhaps restaurants have been too much a convenience and the craft of cooking one’s own meals deserves a revival. Perhaps a virus it is Politically Incorrect to say came from [ahem] has triggered a social change worth making.

(Perhaps two households representing a Mother’s two children, can sit at two tables in one of their houses, keeping the required distance and still being able to hear one another in the relative quiet of a private home.)

Perhaps a viral illness has brought to where we cannot ignore it easily, the fact that too many people, not all of them old women, “live alone”. If you are a man living with his brother, as two of my sons are, you don’t have the isolation problems that “men living alone” face now. You have company for meals and need to cook about half as many. You can carry an awkward or heavy object together without fussing over distancing.

If you are in the bathroom, whether or not bathing, and the telephone rings, your brother can answer it — no missed call, no elaborate fussing with “voicemail”, and whoever called can tell your brother what it’s about, and that you can call back soon. When you call back, you’re more ready for the subject of the call, and the caller hasn’t run off.

This Mother’s Day, fewer offspring are travelling to visit Mother — or for any other reason. More local children will be around, fewer distant ones will come. Warren Buffett, a billionaire investor famous for his sagacity, sold all his airline stocks before the restrictions became general — to him, the travel decreases were “in the works”.

Will the airlines, will travel generally recover? Not close to the travel volumes that recent years experienced, me[don’t]thinks. Business travel will not be practical if the [wo]men who travel are subjected to 14-day quarantine on arrival at destination and again on return. I made fairly many business trips in the 1970s and 1980s, and one at most involved two weeks at destination. 3-5 days at destination was a common duration. 28 or even 14 days in quarantine is too large a multiple of 3-5 days on business, to be practical.

“Pleasure” trips are much less pleasurable when interrupted by “self isolation” or quarantine… even when merely constrained by 2-metre distancing.3 Travellers whose destination experience involved much 2-metre distancing or “self isolation” might have quite different words than “pleasure” to describe the trip. “The fact is, more holidays in future are likely to be taken at home”, said a recent BBC article.

Travel is not a necessity for most people. Food is. Restrictions on how much food one may buy at one time — what was called rationing in World War II — have begun making food shopping more difficult and expensive. The United States faces a major meat shortage, BBC reports, due to coronavirus infections closing processing plants. It means millions of pigs could be put down without ever becoming meat for someone’s table… while the number that do reach food stores will be too few for normal American demand. Canada faces a similar, perhaps less drastic problem: Rationing is not a complete surprise … because of the very large scale of meat growing and processing.

I have lived many of the past 50 years — more than half of them — “in rural areas”. Driving to a store costs time and money, and rural people pay more of both “per shoppng trip”. We notice the costs, and many of us “stock up” when a foodstuff is available for a good price. (I once bought 2-3 dozen cans of tomatoes at one time, because the price was especially good. Over the next winter, I ate them up.) I bought 10 kg of barley and 10 kg of dried peas, last year, because “they keep” and I could expect to eat them up well before they lost quality.

This month, somebody buying that much might be accused of “hoarding”… a word which might fit somebody who normally buys far less. For rural people prudently using their shopping trips, the phrase “stocking up” is a better one. Saving each shopping trip is significant; a few hours, perhaps up to a day, can be put to other work, and the money cost of the trip itself is in the tens of dollars… and a villager or country dweller can save dozens of trips per year by buying in quantity.

Perhaps city people are beginning to notice that shopping costs time and money. Definitely, even many city people are noticing that shopping in the customary way, pushing a cart through a store picking things from the shelves, is much more awkward with “physical distancing”. Wearing a face mask and being required to shop alone, are not fun. People will continue buying necessities somehow … but shopping may change.

My friend Farmer Bert4 told me, several years ago, about the Direct-Charge Co-operative where he used to buy most things. He would go there with a list, perhaps look up a few items in catalogues, tell the clerk on duty what he wanted to buy, and come back a week or two later to get his purchases and pay. He waited longer between choosing his purchases and receiving them, but spent less time on the process than driving to stores in the nearest small city takes him now. More efficiency, a little less speed.

Maybe that’s something that Canada will be coming back to. Whether Bert or his mother cooks Mother’s Day dinner, next year’s or the year after’s might be bought the way Bert said he used to buy things. He and his mother might do more of the cooking themselves (though they cook a lot already); they might grow even more of the food they cook than they already do — and the cost might be lower in time as well as money.

Bert would never put his mother in a care-facility. His father died not long ago — at home. Like monks I know in another province, like most families were a century ago and many were 50 years ago, households were age diverse and did plenty of work, which work was also diverse. There was work feeble old men [and women, but the monks are all men] could do as well as strong young men could, and so those who were aged ninety-something, contributed… as Bert’s mother, who’s only in her eighties, will contribute today.

The Next Normal won’t be like the normal of a century or 50 years ago, but it will probably include practices and features that were common then and rare last year. Work will almost certainly be more variable as to how many hours a man works from one day to the next… and where the work is done. Farmer Bert belongs to that past and that future… farmers keeping exact 8-hour days when the weather isn’t constant, is nonsense. Tradesmen who work with their own tools can and often do work different numbers of hours on different days.

There will be differences; computers did not exist 100 years ago. They were rare, bulky, and expensive 50 years ago. Bicycles have improved over the generations, though more slowly; and bicycle commuting, bicycle travel generally, is more practical than it was. Workhorses may become more common, riding horses, fewer.

The human life expectancy may decrease a few years. A very large fraction of the deaths so far from this coronavirus, have been in care-facilities. The people who are “cared for” there, are mostly more feeble, carrying more illnesses and disability, than those of the same age “on the outside”. Any disease capable of killing a weakened person, would most likely have killed perhaps different individuals, but a similar “demographic”.

If we are reasonable, we will reorganize in ways that increase average household size from about two, to five or ten. We will make caring for other people more personal and less commercial. We will steer ourselves toward work that is more diverse in what we do and in how many hours per day… including doing more than one major kind of work each day.

Bert’s mother is going to enjoy having Mother’s Day dinner at home… as normally. The rest of us would be wise to consider how the positive qualities of home in 1920 and 1970, that most people lack today, could be recovered. We won’t go back to 1920’s exact ways, nor 1970’s; and even more, we won’t go back to 2019’s.

Notes:

1… perhaps only 6 feet [1.83 metres] .

2.. unless one of her children has designated Mother as the other household in a permitted “2 household bubble”, in which case she may sit at a normal distance… but in that case two children who live in different households must keep the 2-metre distance. Last Mother’s Day, such seating patterns would have looked weird … one might even say crazy.

3, I should hope no readers “were invested in” cruise ships or their operating companies this spring! People who suffered when cruise ships suddenly became de facto prison camps, are not likely to want another cruise holiday … nor are the friends and relatives they tell about their experiences.

4 … not his actual name, out of respect for his privacy.

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Prudent Man’s Peas and Carrots

Posted on April 13, 2020 by Davd

… Boiling Sterilizes
(c) 2020, Davd

Eating is more expensive suddenly, and we can’t trust fresh vegetables. In grocery store produce sections and online-shopping warehouses, we are warned, “people are touching your food before you touch your food.” That has always been the case, except for gardening your own; but until last month people were touching other people, handshakes especially. Now we are told to stay 6 feet or 2 metres apart. (Try eating vegetables without coming closer to them than 2 metres?)

Some of the people who touched your food are foreigners, when “fresh” vegetables means trucked north from somewhere on one side or the other of the US-Mexican border. The US has more virus cases in percentage terms, than Canada1.

My eating strategy this winter starts with canned tomatoes, because they are canned when recently picked (thus, more nutritious than tomatoes picked green and trucked, can be.) The canning process would destroy virus riding on the tomatoes2. Canned tomatoes need no special storage media like refrigerators, freezers, or even root cellars.

If you have a root cellar, next come beets, cabbage, carrots, onions, and turnips. Those vegetables are sold in stores, but if they come from stores, “people [strangers] are touching your food before you do.” The Virus Emergency news is that from stores, those vegetables are not entirely safe.

As I did last winter, I’m growing bean sprouts, which don’t need a cellar. Adding another vegetable to the list really does improve the variety experience.

Back before The Virus was dominating the news, I bought “on special”, a 10-kg bag of dried whole yellow peas. Early this month, I opened that bag and soaked two cups of them, as I did with dried whole green peas last spring. Then I proceeded to cook them with carrots, “like last year“.

They were good. I’d rather have used green dried peas, maybe .. but these were good. Along with barley and canned diced tomatoes, those peas and carrots made a protein balanced, meatless, satisfying meal. If green dried peas might have been slightly preferable to yellow, barley is definitely preferable to white rice.

Last year, I published the technique for a diversity vegetable dish during the “hungry gap”. This year, with grocery stores suspected as possible carriers of a virus much deadlier than ‘flu, it’s also a prudence vegetable.

This is frugal food. It can add welcome variety of taste and texture, and nutrition, to a drab winter diet. It’s also a way to avoid the dangers of touching food that strangers have touched.

Notes:

1. About Mexico, I have not seen reports.

2. I have not read a definite statement that the virus will be killed by boiling; but if it survived boiling, that ought to be spectacular enough to make the news… so, since boiling is a traditional way to sterilize food, traditional wisdom seems virtually certain to apply.

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A Tradesman’s Workshop

Posted on March 31, 2020 by Davd


… a Criterion for Cleaning by Men
(c)  2020, Davd

I don’t like dirty quarters… and that is not a reference to money [nor to anatomy]. One day last year I was taken to visit a man, putatively a “professional man”, whose floor, if I remember correctly, would have been due for cleaning if it had been occupied by sheep. On that floor, one of several cats was playing with a dying mouse.

Not my concept of home .. nor of camp. If it had been my workshop, I’d have swept the mouse and cats out the door, swept the worst of the dirt into a square ended shovel, and gradually worked my way down to where a regular broom and a dustpan would finish the job.

The chairs and table were in comparably bad condition (though not as dirty as the floor, any more than your shirt or even pants get as dirty as your socks. Even dirt obeys the Law of Gravity.) They would have received different cleaning to a stricter standard (I don’t eat off the floor, I often put my food on a table to eat; and if an apple or orange be the food of the moment, I might even put it straight on the tabletop, no bowl, no plate. Heck, I don’t even put my coffee mug on the floor — doubt you do either.)

I have also been scolded and shamed by (mostly women, very few other men) for not cleaning to their standards. My standards are somewhere in the middle of the range. There are dwelling conditions I have seen that are not near clean enough, not near tidy enough, for my comfort; and there are Ladies who consider my standards badly inadequate (or at least act as if they do. If they be actual Ladies, they are titled nobility — that’s what Lady really means — and have servants to do their cleaning. Much easier to demand fancy cleaning if you have ample money to pay others to get themselves dirty doing it.)

Maybe some of you men reading this have had similar experiences: You have visited dwellings which are too dirty for you liking (perhaps even for your tolerance — I did not throw up among those several cats, but I have always had a strong stomach.) Elsewhen, you have been shamed, or wanna-be shamed, by [mostly women] for “filth” that was at worst floor-clutter, like the shavings in Granpère’s basement workshop when he or I was using a lathe.

Aha! [or in the other grandfather’s Deutsch, ach! So!]

There is a phrase, which anyone competent in any major dialect of English should recognize, that refers to my middle of the range standard of cleanliness: A Tradesman’s Workshop. The specifics may vary by trade — friend Steve is a chef, Grandfather was a master electrician, one son finishes drywall while another is a refrigeration mechanic. Bill, may his spirit delight in Paradise, drove a tugboat. My friend John Romaniuk was a master welder who built an elegantly arched foot bridge over a deep rock canyon and a river some 100 feet below … the arched handrail paralleled the bridge deck, and the web of triangles of welded structural aluminum that joined them supported it. These were (some still are) men of valuable skill. Their workshops were not dirty, nor were they often if ever, squeaky clean. Squeaks are for mice, and hinges in need of oil.

None of these men kept a dirty house, nor dirty workshop. Most men do not. Shaming us for failing to be Nice or decorative, is a misuse of the word clean*.

This blog is published to share a phrase I believe describes many men’s cleaning standards — a middle range of cleanliness appropriate to lives where work is more important than “looks” and which, spoken in answer to wanna-be shaming, will sweep aside the nonsense like lathe shavings. As a gardener, my workshop is less dirty than the garden (which, being inherently made of dirt, is clean and dirty at once). As a forester, not much different, though forest dirt is normally covered with leafage and small plants. As a writer, my workshop is cluttered by paper more than anything else. They get cleaned somewhat often, when the clutter begins to handicap the work, or perhaps much sooner.

Next time somebody tries to shame you for a tradesman’s-workshop standard of cleanliness, remind her that work is more important than looks, looks are transitory and subjective — and Nice is a four-letter word.


Notes:

* Yes, there are workshops that should be sterile-clean. Surgical operating theatres are such spaces, and some kinds of micro-precision manufacturing sites.

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Nagging …

Posted on February 3, 2020 by Davd

…entails its own punishment, and its own ersatz justification.
(c) 2020, Davd

Someone I very much love, is a master nagger. One day earlier this year, I actually headed out of the apartment and toward the great outdoors, wearing my sandals instead of my boots … because of skilled “let’s go now!” nagging.

Another day I forgot my gloves.

Before anyone accuses me of misogyny, I should report for the record that this master nagger is male …

… and canine.

I love Fritz dearly, and I figure for the most part anyway, his nagging [like his wagging] comes naturally. He doesn’t nag me by choice anywhere near as much as by nature.

Because that’s so1, I can relate some consequences of his nagging which demonstrate how nagging tends to “justify itself” … and to punish itself. Fritz won’t learn from these examples. Humans who nag, might learn — and learn better because they are not who i’m writing about.

Consider the time he actually rushed me toward the outside door with my sandals on. If he had been patient, I would have taken another half minute, if that long, to slip my feet out of the sandals and into my neoprene walking boots (which have no laces, as readers who know about neoprene might have guessed.) Since he managed to nag me ten metres down the hallway, I took over a whole minute, perhaps 2-3 minutes, to pull him back to the door, unlock it, step inside (where my boots were waiting near the doorway), change footwear, close and lock the door again. His nagging success punished itself.

Earlier this week, Fritz managed to nag me to head out for his afternoon walk without my gloves. The temperature was below freezing, but not far below. The walkways and roadways had not been well sanded2, not lately. I was more afraid of falling because of poor traction, than of frostbite.

However… if I’d been wearing gloves, I would have accepted his urging to extend our walk by several hundred metres. The route he wanted to walk me on, had poor traction, but better than what we had just survived. My hands were not in danger, but they were cold, … and so, Fritz lost some of the walking time he wanted, by nagging rather than being patient. Humans who nag, think about that: Patience might get you more of what you want, a little less quickly.

One of the main subjects of nagging, stereotypically anyhow, is “Take out the garbage!” More than once, Fritz has hurried me out the door for a walk — without that garbage. Fritz isn’t much bothered by that garbage going outdoors a few hours later or even the next day. People who nag, “Take out the garbage!” probably are bothered. And as the bare handed walk example implies, if a man hurries to take out the garbage, he’s less likely to take it all.

Patience improves performance much more often than it degrades it… indeed, I can’t think of an example of patience making performance worse. (I note, I’m not a sprinter nor any other kind of speed competitor … and then I’ll put a story in the next footnote about patience improving speed3!)

Nagging shows the nagger’s lack of patience and damages the patience of whoever [s]he nags. Patience is a virtue, and though not on the Classic nor Theological virtue lists4, it is an important one.

The motto of everyman.ca, since before I published my first blog here in 2011, has been, The World Changes When We Do. When we improve our patience, we better justify demanding patience of others. Practising and demanding patience are both positive changes.

Even in emergency medicine, you take the scalpel out of its sterile bag before you use it. Even in emergency policing, you take the gun or the nightstick out of its holster.

Pity Fritz can’t read.

Notes: follow in most html displays

1… also because Fritz can’t read, and will not be embarrassed by this publication,

2. “Retirement Miramichi” and a nearby church had their walkways well sanded — better than the roadways and other walkways were. And while I’m writing a footnote, I should probably mention that Fritz and I are in an apartment for the winter, not “for keeps.” I’m renting month-to-month, and a fraternal household could move me out of here in days. If I were in a rural home, the traction issue wouldn’t exist; most of our walking trails would be packed snow, and anything dangerously slick would soon be sanded.

3. I read this story decades ago, before I regularly saved citations for stories: A coach told his football team to run the length of the field with 100% effort, and then after a good rest, to run back with 80% effort. They averaged significantly faster with 80% … and if some reader knows the citation for the story, please send it to me.

4. The four Classic Virtues are Prudence, Fortitude, Temperance and Justice; the three “Theological Virtues” are Faith, Hope, and Charity.
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For Better or For Worse?

Posted on January 22, 2020 by Davd

… a New Use of an Old Phrase
(draft) 2020, Davd

This web-log is not about marriage especially; it is about making men better in character and well-being. The phrase that I use for its title, was once commonly pledged as part of covenant marriage ceremonies… but if such ceremonies are conducted under present Canadian marriage law, they represent wishful thinking or reference to an authority other than “the Law.”

Lifetime covenant marriage conflicts logically with “no fault divorce.” Since Canadian law guarantees the privilege of no-fault divorce to all under its jurisdiction, covenant marriage is “thereby”, prevented. And yes, I chose the title of this blog partly to make the point, that lifetime marriage has been eliminated by Canadian Federal Government legislation1.

The death of covenant marriage has been accompanied by high divorce rates. A majority of children in secular Canada do not live under the same roof as their fathers2 — and research this century and last, indicates that fatherless youth have higher rates of crime, addiction, and other “social problems” — especially the boys (cf. Gurian, 1999. [e.g. p. 182: “The single most important factor in determining if a male will end up incarcerated later in life is .. whether or not he has a father in the home”]… which is consistent with the criminology maxim “There’s no market for Father’s Day cards in prison.” )

Taking “For Better or For Worse”, for life, out of marriage and replacing it with no-fault divorce; has hurt children as well as ex-husbands, and in the aggregate, “has hurt society”. Sadly, I cannot offer a plan, cannot offer a social design, for putting it back in. I have the impression that the resurgence of Orthodox Christianity in Russia might include the restoration of covenant marriage there, but cannot read Russian to confirm that and learn specifics.

“It follows, that what follows” might be futile. Perhaps the destruction of covenant marriage will lead over 2-3 generations time3, to the destruction of the society, or at least of the Canadian State which made such a law.

Perhaps Canada, the U$A, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and several European states will survive. Perhaps some will persist and some not. Perhaps a way will be found and effected, to revive lifetime covenants as a legally supported option. (Perhaps societies elsewhere can learn from “North American” mistakes.)

My main purpose is to use that “For Better or For Worse” phrase in a quite different way, as the question mark implies:
‣ What social conditions, what social practices make for better men (and for better women)?
‣ What make men and women better in character and social contribution; and distinctly, what make men and women “better-off” materially and in personal satisfaction?
‣ What make men and women worse in character, and worse-off?
‣ Are the effects the same for both sexes (or more precisely, what conditions and practices have the same effects on both sexes, what have different effects, and what are those effects?)

And in another distinct usage, what social, legal, and cultural beliefs and practices distort assessment of boys vs. girls, men vs. women? so that estimates of better and worse performance, better and lesser ability, are biased between genders?

Covenant marriage is one important example of a social practice that is good for society, good for children, and good for the husbands and wives who keep the covenant. When it prevailed, some UK evidence suggests, women were actually happier (Koster, 2009).

There are some indications that the same conditions or the same practices will not always be good for either the character or the well-being of both sexes4. Boys, for instance, seem to learn better moving around and humming, than sitting still Nicely as is typically prescribed by schoolteachers and school systems (Sax, 2009). Girls seem better able to learn sitting still Nicely, as schools typically demand, than boys. This is one way that “education” is misandric — biased in favour of female people and against us who are male.

“Educational misandry” seems to result from gynocentric school designs and practices (cf, Pinker, 2008, Sexton, 19605.) In fact, though Pinker (2008) cites several sources showing that the variance in intelligence and other talents is greater among men and boys than among women and girls, resulting in more men of very high and very low ability; girls and women dominate schools from Grade 1 through universities… and in Canada, dominate government jobs6.

Men’s performance and well-being would be served by removing misandric “Affirmative Action” practices which now operate to increase rather than reduce gender differences in school and workplace success.

Men work at more dangerous jobs on average, and this is true even if military and police work be excluded from the comparisons. If men and women have equal basic human value, then men are morally entitled to “hazard pay” when we do dangerous jobs (as are the smaller fraction of women who do such jobs with equal competence.) Comparisons of pay by gender should consider danger as well as skill.

The above is “just a beginning.” many more gender differences in capability and in societal support, exist. Schooling and work dangers are two examples that are fairly well documented; Affirmative Action programs that have come to favor the sex that is already “ahead”, give obvious opportunities to increase fairness while decreasing tax expenditure and bureaucracy.

Not all social comparisons will show sex differences, and it seems quite reasonable to ignore differences that are small compared to variance within each sex. Consider exercise and nutrition, for example:

It seems that both aerobic exercise and upper-body strength exercise will benefit both sexes; and that the optimal amounts of dietary protein, fiber, and many vitamins are approximately the same for both. This “basic equality” should perhaps be asserted relative to body size: Men may need more food and have higher exercise optima, because we average larger; women before menopause may need more of some nutrients because of losses during “moon time”.

Pregnant women may need more calcium especially, and I have seen many brochures recently (during the past 5 years approximately) insisting that pregnant women abstain absolutely from alcoholic drink. So while human nutrition is much the same for both sexes, it is not exactly the same.

Both men and women are “pack animals” who flourish best in small groups (not in solitude nor in crowds like herds of bison or gnu); but during many thousands of years of hunting and gathering, man nature was formed for team hunting, woman nature, for pregnancy, lactation, and gathering.

This “web log” has been a beginning at refocusing everyman.ca around the motto it proclaimed before I ever published here: The World Changes When We Do. Some of the 200+ blogs I have published since April 2011 have been about men’s health and well-being; “several” have addressed prostate cancer and other health issues of more interest to men than to women; more than 40 have been about food and about cooking to our likings. (I don’t like sweet baking as much as I like roast beef and homemade bread, or a good pot roast or chicken stew.)

I don’t insist on being the only or even the chief writer here — indeed, I’d rather not be. How would you like to change your life? .. your friends’ lives, especially men friends? .. and the “world” around us.

In other words, what makes men better, and what makes men better-off? I’ll close this “turning a corner” blog by re-naming two social practices I don’t believe do men good (with a link to an earlier blog related to each): No-fault divorce, and women showing their sexuality off when they don’t want to get it into action. There are many others, which I hope you’ll write about; and you’re welcome to write about these also. There are social practices that do us good, to expound, of which brotherhood and fatherhood deserve much more societal support than they have lately had.

How shall we change the world for our benefit, and that of decent men generally?

References:

Brown, Grant A., 2013. Ideology And Dysfunction In Family Law : How Courts Disenfranchise Fathers. Calgary and Winnipeg: Canadian Constitution Foundation and Frontier Centre For Public Policy

Catton, William R., Jr., 1980 Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. Urbana, London, and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Paperback 1982

“Futurist”, 2010. The Misandry Bubble. January 1.

Glubb, John Bagot, 1978. The Fate of Empires. Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons Ltd.

Gurian, Michael, 1999. ‘The Good Son: Shaping the Moral Development of our Boys and Young Men.NY: Jeremy Tarcher. [182: “The single most important factor in determining if a male will end up incarcerated later in life is .. whether or not he has a father in the home.”] This is consistent with the criminology maxim “There’s no market for Father’s Day cards in prison.”

Nathanson, Paul, and Katherine K. Young, 2001. Spreading Misandry:“The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press

Nathanson, Paul, and Katherine K. Young, 2006. Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination against Men Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Pinker, Stephen, 2002: The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. NY: Viking. [p 344: “.. confirming an expectation from evolutionary psychology, for many traits the bell curve for males is flatter and wider than the curve for females. That is, there are proportionately more males at the extremes.” cited by his sister [2008: 273]

Pinker, Susan, 2008. The Sexual Paradox: Extreme Men, Gifted Women and the Real Gender Gap. [no city listed in flyleaf] Random House of Canada; New York: Simon and Schuster.

Sax [Sachs?}, Leonard , 2009. Radio interview, CBC (Canadian Broadcasting) Radio The Current October 23 Cr. Mr. Sax[chs?] represented the [US] National Association for Single Sex Public Education. Girls, he stated, are more motivated in conventional schools. 6-year-old boys learn better standing, humming. Boys care about team-competition. Co-ed schools “are about” who’s cute, who’s likes who erotically, … more than about learning.

Sexton, Patricia Cayo, 1969. The Feminized Male; classrooms, white collars, & the decline of manliness. New York: Random House.

Vincent, Norah, 2006. Self Made Man: One Woman’s Year Disguised as a Man. New York: Viking Penguin.

Wells, H. G. 1920: The Outline of History: The Whole Story of Man. New York: Macmillan. Cited in the Project Gutenberg Ebook edition, 2014.

Notes:

1… with “Royal Assent” on behalf of Her Majesty Elizabeth II Windsor, Regina. Since Her Majesty is also head of the Anglican Church, which until recently mandated covenant marriage, the monarchy may have moral and legal issues to deal with rather more serious than the recent independence initiatives of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex or the alleged sexual peccadilloes of Prince Andrew.

2. “as due qualification” I should note that this is an estimate, based on the premises that [1] Christian marriages especially, and marriages in other “major religions” to some extent, are much less likely than secular marriages to end by divorce; and [2] that these more durable “religious” marriages produce more children per couple than secular marriages.

3. Indigenous traditions in several places enshrine a “7-generation perspective” for estimating the consequences of any prospective change. Perhaps it will take longer than three generations for the elimination of covenant marriage to effect societal collapse.

4. I see too little merit in research on other “social genders” than the biological male and female. A correspondent retired from the practice of law wrote me last year:
“Apparently gender studies practitioners have forgotten that humans are mammals and like all mammals we are ‘binary’; any individual born with mixed sexual characteristics is an aberration. I’m amazed at the traction this movement has gotten both on campus and throughout the culture.”

5… note that both these authors are women.

6. (Nathanson and Young, 2006: 99 say: “affirmative action has been used to correct for fewer women than men in some fields, but not for fewer men than women in fields such as social work, education, and nursing.” MacDonald [2017] reports that “while women are still a designated group for the purposes of preferential hiring in the public service, they now have most of the jobs and at least half of the most senior jobs.”

Posted in Davd, Human Nature, Men's Health | Leave a comment

Remember Beyond Today

Posted on November 11, 2019 by Davd

… Men Deserve some Credit, some Payback for Dangerous Service
(c) 2019, Davd

Those poppies we’re supposed to wear today represent cemeteries — military cemeteries, in Europe, where Canadian (and US, and UK, and European) soldiers were buried. They represent men dying; the fraction of those killed in battle, who are women, is tiny.

Casualties, they were called. I see nothing casual about being killed in battle. They died fighting for the presumed good, safety, perhaps ambitions of the governments who sent them there. Canadian soldiers especially, died “to protect the folks back home.”

Some of them were not even volunteers. In the US, in some other countries, there is “the Draft.” Men go to serve in the military whether they want to or not. Many of those men die if they wind up in battles; being “drafted” does not make anyone bulletproof.

Women live longer than men, on average; and war is one of the reasons.

It’s not just military service, either, not just military and policing. A web page recently listed “the 15 Most Dangerous Jobs in the U.S”: Logging, Commercial Fishing, Flying, Roofing, Garbage Collection, Structural Steel and Iron Work, Trucking, Farming [including Ranchers], Construction Supervision, Grounds Maintenance, Law Enforcement, Power Line Maintenance [and construction], General Maintenance and Repair, Taxi Driving [included Chauffeurs], Athletics, [including Coaches and Referees]. Notice any female-dominated occupations in that list?

It’s a good guess that they are all done more by men than women. (“Grounds maintenance” is the one where I might imagine about equal participation by both sexes1… but my estimate is that even groundskeepers are mostly men, because it is outdoor work.)

While remembering that men went to war, suffered austerity, and many of them died, to protect women and children (and perhaps serve the interests of the Ruling Class of the state that sent them), it is worthwhile to remember that danger has been men’s rather than women’s business2 for much longer than Canada has existed.

Long ago, women faced danger mainly in the form of childbearing. Today, the dangers of childbearing are few and small for most women; the medical arts and sciences have made motherhood safe… especially if a woman has her first child before age 25.  Logging, fishing, building and repairing roofs, collecting garbage, etc. ,  remain dangerous — as does war.

If men’s productive [and protective] work shortens our lives; and women’s reproductive work does not similarly shorten theirs; then the arithmetic plainly tells us, that if women enjoy equality apart from the dangers involved, men have it worse over-all [= in sum].

In fact, women enjoy better than equality, if we look at the organization and “culture” of schools (Pinker, 2008, cf. Nathanson and Young, 2006), university attendance, the Civil Service … and elsewhere. Many Feminists, too much of Feminism, have sought and often won privilege, better-than-equal opportunity, for women and girls, and misused the word equality in the process. (Nathanson and Young, 2006, is one of the better sources documenting this). Instead of men facing greater danger than women, living shorter lives, and being compensated for that by enjoying greater liberty and-or opportunities — we suffer disadvantage consistently.

It would be more consistent in today’s Canada, to say that men are sent to war because we are considered inferior to women, than to say it is noble of us to protect them.3

I argued two years ago, that preferring peace and avoiding war would be very good for men’s health. That is one way to improve our situation — and everyone’s. Furthermore and perhaps better, we can confront overall inequality and we can “go our own way”, often as groups of brothers-by-choice rather than alone.

The notion that marriage and solitude are a man’s only two choices, is nonsense. I still believe there are many good women, women “worth marrying”; but after decades of Feminist misandry, there are also many women who are not worth marrying. Solitude suits a small minority of men. Military fellowship is one alternative; but we are being admonished to remember, this day, how dangerous war is.

Perhaps it is worth looking … sometime soon … at how men lived, outside marriage but not in solitude, before the World Wars; and then at how we might live fraternally two generations after the Second World War ended.

Today, let us remember the sacrifices of comfort, safety, sometimes life itself, which war demands of men and not of women. Tomorrow and beyond, let us consider how work generally makes similar if less drastic demands, and what might be fair compensation for those dangers and discomforts.

References cited:
Brown, Grant A., 2013. Ideology And Dysfunction In Family Law : How Courts Disenfranchise Fathers. Calgary and Winnipeg: Canadian Constitution Foundation and Frontier Centre For Public Policy
Nathanson, Paul, and Katherine K. Young, 2006. Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination against Men Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Pinker, Susan, 2008. The Sexual Paradox: Extreme Men, Gifted Women and the Real Gender Gap. [no city listed in flyleaf] Random House of Canada; New York: Simon and Schuster.
Pinker, Stephen, 2002: The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. NY: Viking. [p 344: “.. confirming an expectation from evolutionary psychology, for many traits the bell curve for men is flatter and wider than the curve for females. That is, there are proportionately more males at the extremes.” cited by his sister [2008: 273]
Notes:
1. Grounds maintenance is also one of those 15 most dangerous occupations, that is least contributory to subsistence and safety. Athletics might be the other.
2… not exclusively men’s business, I should note; women are frequently allowed to choose dangerous work if they have the strength for it. But women are seldom compelled to face danger; and to recall my first blog on this site, when the Titanic sank, men were excluded from the lifeboats in deference to women.
3. No, that is not all there is to the difference. Men are ‘better at fighting’, ‘better equipped to fight’, than women, on average. Horses are better at pulling wagons and plows, than humans, too; and we still regard ourselves as superior to those big strong horses.
Posted in Davd, Female Privilege, Men's Health, MGTOW, Uncategorized, Working | Leave a comment

Tolerance Means …

Posted on September 12, 2019 by Davd

… something less than support.
(c) 2019, Davd

“Some of my best friends are Jewish” was once a stock denial of anti-Semitism. The parallel stock denial would be “Some of my best friends are [LGBTQ].” None of my best friends happen to be — but at least one good friend was homosexual, if the gossip I heard be true.

The friend I have in mind as I begin this blog is a mild-mannered, easygoing United Church organist, or was if he has “passed away” since we last met. He was reputed to be homosexual, and one reason I write “reputed” is that he never “made advances” of a sexual nature, in my direction. Our common interest was gardening; and it gave us many good hours together.

My best guess about his “sexual orientation”, and i explicitly designate it to be a guess, is that the repute, the gossip, was factually correct and “Gard”[ener] was indeed homosexual. “Gay”, he was on only one occasion I remember, when he played “For he’s a Jolly Good Fellow”, as their pastor announced his imminent retirement. Such gaiety is not homosexual… nor to my knowledge, was their Pastor.

“Gard”, was himself a gentle, mild-mannered, unmarried musician, living with his widowed mother, whose normal ways and manners were not lively enough to call “gay”. He knew the local climate, soils, and species rather well, and when I first arrived he taught me much that was valuable… never “gaily”.

I treated him as a fellow gardener in whom I had no erotic interest. If he had any erotic interest in me, “he hid it well.” I doubt he did have, I did not know who his homosexual playmate[s] might have been, if any. Supposing that he be homosexual, which I assumed on what evidence I knew, I tolerated that, which in practice meant, I treated him the same as if he weren’t. His homosexuality didn’t matter relative to our church and gardening interests.

Such be tolerance. It had no effect, no influence toward motivating me to “march in a Pride parade.” (To us Christians, the pride is usually a worse sin than the homosexuality. My attitude toward homosexual orientation is “Don’t act on it if you can discipline yourself1: Abstain if you can. Indulge the impulses if you must. Flaunt it? NO.)

So why in Hell were Green leader May, NDP leader Singh, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau flaunting homosexual pride — possibly without even having homosexual nature? Do they really crave attention that badly? (Maybe so — they are politicians.)

When BBC News quoted PM Trudeau not long before the election call, as saying: “It’s just unfortunate that there are still some party leaders who want to be prime minister, who choose to stand with people who are intolerant instead of standing with the LGBT community,”

… the PM and Liberal Party leader was misusing the T-word. Tolerance means respecting the other qualities in a person, despite her or his homosexuality, or alcoholism, or whatever. Trudeau’s opponent Scheer is being more tolerant [and less proud! which is worthy of much blessing] of non heterosexual “orientations” than PM Trudeau was being of Scheer.

Y’ know, I read somewhere that Justin PM Trudeau was officially a Roman-Catholic in a Québec diocese. He ordered, did he not? that all Liberal candidates support abortion? Is abortion not a mortal sin in Roman-Catholicism?

Perhaps some bishop in Québec is being much too tolerant.

Notes:
1. As a divorced Christian, even as a victim rather than a perpetrator of the divorce, I have disciplined my heterosexual inclinations to the point of complete abstinence for more than 15 years. What I preach, I can say I’ve practiced.
Posted in Davd, Gender Equality | Leave a comment