Maritime Morning - Andrew Krystal

While Christmas is about family, many in Atlantic Canada, indeed, the West, are asking “Where did it go”? Where are the numbers? Populations are shrinking rapidly and industrialized countries, from Japan to Canada, are increasingly looking for immigration to fill the gap. Charles Cirtwell, from the Atlantic Institute of Market Studies, just published a report on how Atlantic Canada could reach Third World status in the next few years without more people, more tax payers, and more workers.

Why? What happened?

Well, according to some, the feminist movement has discouraged women from having families for the false God of career and “independence.” Many women who were calling in today expressed similar sentiments that it is impossible to “have it all” – a career and a truly balanced home life (something has to give); while a woman’s right to choose in the abortion debate seems like a fair way out of male pressure or common mistakes, what has actually killed more babies than abortion is the active choice, by working women, to have either smaller families or none at all; as a result millions of people have been unborn; millions of children never had a chance. It is the sin of omission. And we will pay for it economically.

Yes, children are more expensive – life is more expensive. But is economics, alone, the reason for the decline of the Western family?

It seems to some women listeners to my broadcast today that mother’s in the 1980s told their girls that having a family must come second, if at all, to the self-actualization fulfillment of a career, or a career direction which could be side-tracked by family choices.

Similarly, boys were removed from their role as providers since doing so could be interpreted as imprisonment and an attempt to tyrannize; and if Motherhood was no longer special, or a desired goal by young women, how far down the list does you think fatherhood was for boys then?

Just as we have seen, as a cultural change, attitudes adjusted with regard to, for example, drinking and driving, so we have undergone a social change with regard to the nuclear families’ place in society. Whereas before the family was seen as a goal and a role, today it is seen as an option for women – an option fraught within the maelstrom of a 50 per cent divorce rate. Marriage is still an option – even with a large family in tow. There are no rules, anything goes. Having a family could actually be a nuisance and get in the way.

But are women any happier today? Are men?

The last thing you will ever say on your death bed is that you wish you could’ve spent more time at the office — the opposite is true when it comes to loved ones.

The simple truth is that our culture is, literally, dying out relative to others. That is why we need immigration. In the Western world we call that success.

You’ve come a long way baby.

Will the world, as the ancient Mayans predict, come to an end on Dec. 12, 2012?

Apocalypse 2012 author Lawrence E. Joseph joined me on air today. As a science consultant, journalist, and high-tech industrialist, he is uniquely suited to the interdisciplinary study of the end of our days. He has kids. And while he has written the book Larry does not want to see the party end.

I mentioned to him this morning that there is nothing more taboo in our culture than the contemplation of death. Bad for business I guess. However, there is nothing more titillating than ruminating upon the sensational crash of the whole civilization as a result of a colossal event!

The Ancient Mayans were astronomers of the first order. They knew as much about the sky, practically, (pre-hubble) as anybody. The ancient Mayan calendar ends on Dec. 12, 2012. While interesting, I, personally, do not attribute to this fact anything pressingly prescient.

Big deal, I say.

The more pressing issue is not the Mayans, or Nostradamus, or the Bible, or doomsday cults, nor “the rapture”; the issue concerns our pressing problems that are actual forces: economic, environmental, historical, that course through the world and that could easily upset our highly fragile civilizational applecart.

We are not only overdue for an asteroid hit — like the one that eliminated the dinosaurs 65-million years ago, and paved the way for mammals — we are overdue for a major war. Nuclear proliferation cannot continue unabated without repercussive effects; world population and resource competitions cannot continue without increased security (read military) competitions. Simply put, growth, as we know it, is unsustainable.

We also do not know where some of our scientific enquiries will lead us.

Nano technology, for example, has the potential to create a new, self replicating species of robot. Sun Micro Systems Chairman, Bill Joy, has warned us of this before. It is not science fiction either.

Our scientific Frankenstein’s are one thing, but it is good, old-fashioned human nature, the kind which Shakespeare so accurately defined, and which has gone unchanged, that is the culprit. We cannot escape human nature. Moreover, International relations Professor John Mersheimer calls it “the tragedy of great power politics.” War — inevitable war. Human beings like war, no matter how much we say we don’t.

As far as the year 2012 is concerned, Author Lawrence Joseph feels that anticipated, irregular, dangerous, sunspot activity and our planet’s shifting magnetic poles, will cause havoc.

There is also the danger of biological weapons: Labs are small, easily financed, and genetic engineering breakthroughs may have the opposite effect in the hands of the wrong people. No less a thinker than Britain’s Stephen Hawking is worried the most about this one. Super viruses and diseases are easy to make - and much harder to stop.

As well, naturally occurring viruses (a virus is a little bit of ribonucleic acid wrapped in a protein) such as bird flu, while not a civilization killer, has the potential to put a damper on our planet party in much the same way another avian flu, The Spanish Flu, killed millions in 1918.

One of the problems with having a well-publicized end of times date, is the capacity for some to make this a self-fulfilling prophesy. We are that dark as a species. We don’t need any help from volcanoes, sunspots, or asteroids.

Apocalypse 2012 author Lawrence Joseph qualifies the end of the world - from the Mayan perspective - by saying that the ancients spoke more towards a violent transformation, than just the raw negative of the end of things. But would our civilization be recognizable with such transformation? Would it be a metamorphosis?

Extinction is a part of life. The average species lasts about 300,000 years. In fact, species extinction is a constant. To presume otherwise is to be arrogantly false.

Speaking of human arrogance, the Roman poet Ovid wrote in Metamorphosis:

“Wherever Roman
power reaches, conquered lands, I’ll be read:
& with fame through all the ages, if poet’s predictions
are true at all, I’ll live”

Yet it was Horace Smith who wrote best about such human vanity, the truthfulness of the forgettable quality of this race, when he concluded his sonnet Ozymandias with a view upon the sand-blown ruins of a forgotten Babylon:

“He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess
what powerful but unrecorded race
once dwelt in that annihilated place”.

December 12th, 2012.

And all this time I thought that April was the cruelest month.

If Robert Pickton’s victims were involved in a legalized profession many of these women would still be alive today. The mere fact that the victims were castigated, outsiders, marginalized, allowed Pickton to kill at will — because no one cared.

The voluminous-ness of the crimes, the sheer amount of his victims, is what led to Pickton’s serial killing demise. It took that amount of street workers to die in order for the authorities to finally pay attention and get him.

Escort services already run rampant in every major Canadian city. The phone book companies, daily, profit from the avails of prostitution. What we are really talking about here when it comes to prostitution is a street presence.

According to investigative journalist Stevie Cameron, whose book, The Pickton Trial, chronicled the trial’s early going, and her upcoming book, The Pig Farm, to be released in a year-and-a-half, and that deals with the entire tragedy, said that many jurors do not know many of the facts about the case that we do. Pickton’s defense did a superb job. The second-degree murder conviction on six counts resulted from the issue of other people’s access to his farm and some measure of reasonable doubt.

Pickton did do it. He even confessed at one point.

The trial has cost the tax-payers an unbelievable amount. It will cost us $100,000 per year to imprison Robert Pickton – and he will never get out. No parole for him.

What about the 20 other charges? The 20 other women whom he killed? Will they get their day in court? Not likely. He is already going away for good.

Is this justice?

How can there be justice when our culture has already written these women off, just like the serial killer, as being sub-human. Not worthy of our pity or of police protection.

Just another missing prostitute on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside:

“Maybe she went home….I heard she went back to her family and her kid. Did you see her lately? Have you seen her? It is not like her to leave like that without saying goodbye. I hope she’s okay. Is she sober? I heard she kinda straightened out and went back to Steve. Have you seen her? She left her favorite sweater at my place. I hope she’s okay”….

The recent assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies released Monday indicates that Iran has halted its nuclear weapons program, and did so in 2003. This contradicts a previous assessment two years go which said Iran was going full tilt towards nuclear enrichment for the purpose of creating nuclear arms.

This throws a monkey wrench into Bush’s plan to attack Iran before his time runs out – but it may not be enough.

Presently the Canadian Navy has the HMCS Charlottetown deployed in the Persian Gulf as part of an American-led task force.

The concern is that Canada will be drawn, sleep-walking again, into a war with Iran in the same fashion as it has been drawn into a combat role in Afghanistan as a result of a weak Prime Minister, Paul Martin, and a vacuum in terms of both military policy and civilian leadership.

All of the alarm bells have been ringing, for a while now, regarding the U.S. and Israel gearing up for a war with Iran. The administration has been open in its discussion of war; with Bush even saying you will have World War III if Iran isn’t thwarted in its nuclear ambitions. Israel, an America client state, has been pretty much hysterical in this regard.

What is the truth? Iran does need nuclear power domestically. While it has huge oil reserves, it has a very inefficient economy and could use nuclear power to free up more oil exports. Does it want nuclear weapons? Sure. But there was a time, during the early stages of the Iraq invasion, when Iran was showing compliance. America ignored her. America, under Bush, didn’t believe in diplomacy then, and doesn’t so much now.

There is the thinking in the current Bush administration that American prestige can be regained, and that Iran’s ascendancy, in the wake of the demise of Iraq (a traditional enemy which balanced Iran’s influence), can be thwarted, by military means. Israel, as well, is nervous that Iran’s influence in the region will also empower the Shiite Hezbollah and Sunni Hamas — organizations Iran supports. A nuclear bomb in the hands of terrorists is a non-starter for the Israelis. However, Iran is unlikely to relinquish such power to another party – especially when such things have a return address.

An air strike on Iran would be fraught with a variety of problems, and would not, in all probability, be bloodless for America and her allies (hopefully not Canada).

Iran has lots of current generation Russian sea-skimming anti-ship missiles, plus Chinese Silkworms. Capital ships are highly vulnerable to having their defenses overwhelmed by such weapons. Think of the Sheffield, hit by a French made Exocet in the Falklands in 1982 — only much worse.

Western Navies have a false sense of security when it comes to an actual shooting war.

Should America ever lose a capital ship, there is no telling what kind of retaliation would occur: tactical nukes, unconventional weapons, massive civilian religious leadership targeting. It would be a mess. Perhaps even strategic weapons; involving others too, that may decide to get involved.

What Canadian policy makers have to be aware of is that Stephen Harper would, unquestionably, like the Canadian navy to be involved in an American-led war on Iran.

This is wrong on a number of levels.

Canada must be vigilant about the course direction here politically. There must be an open declaration by the opposition parties that Canada, under no circumstances, will be involved in a war on Iran. Moreover, our ships should be removed from the Persian Gulf. With two U.S. carrier strike groups in the Gulf, it is easy for an “incident” to occur.

There is simply no reason why this country should be sleep-walking again into armed conflict. We already know that Bush only has a hammer in the tool box. It has never been enough, but he doesn’t know how to use anything else; and, after failing in Iraq, Bush wants to go double or nothing on Iran.

I was contradicted by Maclean’s writer Michael Petrou when I declared that Canada is a peace-keeping nation. But that contradiction was incorrect; while Canada has acquitted itself well on the battle field during the Boer war, two world wars, (and where America was a Johnny-come-lately) and Korea, Canada was never involved in wars of choice like Vietnam or Iraq. A war against Iran would be a war of choice.

There is a case to be made that America’s (Rumsfeld’s) “leaning forward” strategy, and a militarized foreign policy, caused Iran to involve itself in a security competition and a nuclear approach. North Korea, in fact, began its nuclear program, again, following America’s reckless adventure in Iraq.

Canadian Frigates should not be brought into harms way as diplomatic cover for a country, and an administration, that has power, but little moral authority left.

American isolationism and American unilateralism are cut from the same cloth — and it is not Canada’s way.

It is time to wag the dog.