$USTAINABILITY $CAM

Greetings, Comrades! Good news! Our wise and benevolent local government has come up with glorious plans to save us from ourselves! For a mere $340,000.00, the CVRD has hired an out-of-town planning company to come in and tell us how to live. The Green Socialist Manifesto (oops, I mean draft 3 of the Comox Valley $ustainability $trategy) is 80 pages long and available online at the CVRD website. I would heartily recommend that you take a look at it, and while you're there it wouldn't hurt to take a gander at how much we pay the staff to sit around all day picking their noses and rejecting septic tank permits.

This $ustainability $trategy is just bristling with wonderful green ideas, like cramming us all into cheap multifamily housing in town (a developer's dream), taking cars away from 85% of us, and forcing us to use mass transit. Oh yes, I'm sure that I will enjoy sitting on the bus with the winos and crackheads who will be infesting these future ghettos, but the plans include lots of "greenspace" conveniently located so the criminals can mug me on my way home from the bus stop. After all, bad guys have to make a living too - equal employment opportunities and all that.

We are also going to reduce our carbon footprint in a big way. In fact, the CVRD is so dedicated to this that they're planning to send a couple of their henchmen (make that loyal employees) on a free trip to China to explain to the Chinese people how wonderfully the green agenda is working in the Valley. That should reduce those pesky CO2 emissions all right - if they're planning to walk, bike, or take the bus. Excuse me, but isn't this a bit redundant? I mean, it's CHINA, for God's sake - they already KNOW how to be communists!

They'd also like us to reduce our energy and water use by 50%. Yes, I can see it now: after a fulfilling day of attending sustainability workshops, volunteering for community projects and memorizing the quotations of Chairman Mao, I can pick up my ration of organic tofu, shove it into my recyclable bag knitted from armpit hairs and trudge home to my hovel in the inner city. Then I could enjoy a fun night of squatting around in the dark smelling my own feet - with 50% reduction in water use, it won't be long before we all smell so bad you won't be able to tell us from the environmentalists.

Maybe we should reduce our crapping by 50% too. That would be a great waste-management strategy. We could even do offsets - constipated folks could sell their crap credits to people with diarrhea. There you have it: Mrs. Pelican's Crap and Trade program. Think I could get a grant for that?

PS: Take a look at what the Fraser Institute has to say about "Smart Growth". It's not pretty.

AND NOW THE NEWS

Shout it from the rooftops! Third swine flu death in Canada! Same crap, different pile. Third person to die. All three had chronic preexisting conditions, this one had even been in the hospital "for some time" before his death. Yet the headline is CANADA REPORTS THIRD SWINE FLU DEATH. Some people just scan headlines so - mission accomplished - there will be people out there believing that the swine flu is lethal.

How about some honesty? How about SWINE FLU NOT KILLING HEALTHY PEOPLE IN CANADA? Why are they beating this thing to death? A sick man dies, and just because he happened to pick up the swine flu virus on his way out, we're supposed to believe that's what did him in. If he just happened to have athlete's foot too, did that kill him? Betcha if the fearmongers were promoting an athlete's foot pandemic, it would have been at least a "major contributing factor".

The World Health Organization is still trying to drum up business, saying the swine flu is going to get more severe and kill more people. Wow! More! At last count it has killed 115 people in 62 countries. Omigod, that's almost two people per country!!! Run for you lives!!! I wonder how many people world-wide died from athlete's foot complications?

So why the fuss? Let's see, could it be the billion dollars the U.S. is putting into "fighting" it? Or the 32 million Japan is planning to spend? How about Sanofi-Pasteur, Novartis, Baxter, or GlaxoSmithKline? Think they're going to make any money by selling flu shots? Drug companies did pretty good off the bird flu scare - in fact Roche still has three million packages of Tamiflu (an antiviral) stockpiled in anticipation (or hope) of some great pandemic. Heaven forbid that stuff should expire, there goes the gosh-darn profits. But if everyone can be sufficiently alarmed and convinced that we need to get vaccinated, I'm sure they can more than make up for any losses.

What I can't believe is all the media attention this is getting, considering the pitiful evidence they have to present. How do you make something like this into a big scary deal? Misleading headlines? Opinions obscuring facts? Guesswork? A whole pile of could, would, might, maybe, possibly? It worked for Al Gore, but you'd think maybe the media would grow a collective pair  and actually present facts without putting the alarmist spin on things and catering to the current groupthink. No wonder newspapers are going out of business.

THE DEER HUNTER

Wow, long time no blog. Finally, finally, FINALLY getting over the awful flu. Of course, I couldn't be lucky enough to get the cool trendy SWINE flu, where you get a few days of sniffles and your picture in the paper. Oh no, I get stuck with the cheap-ass, low-budget three-week long horkorama that is the ORDINARY flu. No fame. No glory. Just dirty looks from the cat when my coughing into the wee hours disturbs his beauty rest by dislodging him from my pillow. That's one nasty cough - I think my left lung is in a landfill somewhere along with 40 boxes of generic tissues. But I'm all better now.

Unfortunately, while I was occupied with trying to keep my lungs on the inside of my body, my garden woke up and realized winter was over. Everything immediately started growing like crazy (everything being weeds), which was the signal for the deer to come in and start eating the good stuff, like the apple tree.

This awoke the primal instinct in the old man (mighty hunter), who decided to show those effin deer who's the boss, once and for all. Well, he underwent several changes of persona during this little episode. First he was Elmer Fudd, with his trusty musket, vowing to get rid of not only the effin deer, but the wascally wabbits as well. Number of deer eliminated by this process: zero.

Deciding to scale back the technology a bit, he morphed into Hiawatha, stalking the wily forest-dwellers with his crossbow. Number of deer killed: zero, although several of the rabbits looked slightly nervous.

Being persistent, if not very accurate, he then took up the Dennis the Menace approach, and, armed with a bag of marbles from the dollar store, stood in the yard taking pot shots at them with a slingshot. The deer seemed to like this, as it gave them something to look at while they were finishing off the clematis.

When he was finally reduced to becoming Og the cave man and hurling rocks and invective at them, I realized that it might just be an opportune time to (once again) broach the (touchy) subject of finishing off that deer fence. Amazingly enough, he agreed. " Yes. Too hard kill effin deer. Og do fence now. Woman right". Ah, evolution.