Cartoons Come With Warnings

It has just come to my notice that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau attended Kol Nidre services at Congregation Shaar Hashomayim on October 13th in Montreal. So what is Kol Nidre? Wikipedia tells us that:

“Kol Nidre is an Aramaic declaration recited in the synagogue before the beginning of the evening service on every Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Strictly speaking, it is not a prayer, although commonly spoken of as if it were. This dry legal formula and its ceremonial accompaniment have been charged with emotional undertones since the medieval period, creating a dramatic introduction to Yom Kippur on what is often dubbed "Kol Nidrei night". It is written in Aramaic, not Hebrew. Its name is taken from the opening words, meaning all vows. The formula proactively annuls any personal or religious oaths or prohibitions made upon oneself to God for the next year, so as to preemptively avoid the sin of breaking vows made to God which cannot be or are not upheld. Kol Nidrei has had an eventful history, both in itself and in its influence on the legal status of the Jews. Introduced into the liturgy despite the opposition of some rabbinic authorities, it was attacked in the course of time by some rabbis and in the 19th century expunged from the prayer book by many communities of western Europe. The term Kol Nidrei refers not only to the actual declaration, but is also popularly used as a name for the entire Yom Kippur evening service.”

"All vows we are likely to make, all oaths and pledges we are likely to take between this Yom Kippur and the next Yom Kippur, we publicly renounce. Let them all be relinquished and abandoned, null and void, neither firm nor established. Let our vows, pledges and oaths be considered neither vows nor pledges nor oaths." -The Philip Birnbaum translation, from High Holiday Prayer Book, Hebrew Publishing Company, NY, 1951.

While this most curious in several ways to a man like myself, it was with greater interest that I stopped on my way to the fridge to get some cheese and crumpets on October the fifth. My wife had the TV on and was waiting for one of her programs to start. The now familiar sibilant staccato of my Prime Minister who at best suffers from an excess of speech writers and at worst, simply cannot narrate; sent me immediately to evict Dusty the cat from our favorite chair. By the third, “Uh”, I was hooked.

The gist of the speech was a predictable mix of fear, hope and self congratulation. It strikes me absurd that cartoons come with viewer discretion warnings but politician's speeches do not. The topic was the recent ratification by Canada of the Paris Agreement.

The crowning moment was when Justin congratulated himself and his fellows on “passing this new tax.” You could tell he was supposed to use a different noun or euphemism such as "initiative" or "accord" and his face looked like a boy who'd been caught bringing a frog into a church meeting. The moment passed and I could see the feeling of power wash the red tint from his ears in short order.

It is no news that some few self aggrandized carbon based life forms have devised a scheme to tax many other innocent carbon based life forms for emitting carbon and to do it in the name of a planet where all life is carbon based via international agreements and treaties that are signed and ratified with scarcely any input from the constituents of those territories who will be paying the tax. Years ago a Carbon Exchange was set up, which I believe is based out of Montreal. This, like a Stock Exchange will handle the manipulation of carbon credits. The whole shebang will be cycled through a Swiss located clearing bank. We should have been able to have learned from the existing Stock Exchanges how that game is rigged and if we haven't, I suggest to the interested person to look into that and extrapolate what they find in order to understand the new game.

Of course, countries who are officially struggling will be able to get welfare to build green energy plants while countries who are rich will be able to pay to over pollute. This, right off the bat negates any real attempt to clean up anything despite the rhetoric, in my opinion. What it does do is to bring underdeveloped nations into a higher degree of modernity and grows their middle class. Conversely it is in effect, financed on the backs of the existing middle classes in the already developed nations, which will experience a retrograde in their standard of life. It is a globalist bulldozer, if you will and when the plowing is done, new crops will be planted by those who own the farm.

Just thinking about the never-ending stream of environmentally conscious fear mongering that has plagued the media for decades now raises a few questions between my ears. For example, we are constantly presented with statistics and figures pertaining to automobile exhaust emissions. Why is it we are never presented with statistics and figures of the amount of emissions generated by all the military vehicles of every type across the planet? If we include tanks, planes, ships and the other terrestrial vehicles as well as their support vehicles, I know it is a mighty big number. How come it's not part of any of the equations, while your old pickup truck is counted right in there? How much smoke, dust, cordite and other pollutants are coming off of the myriad battlefields in the myriad undeclared wars today? How much carbon back taxes do they already owe? How much jet fuel was expended in the filming of the two Davids earth-girdling documentary adventures? Why is it that there just doesn't seem to be enough clean drinking water around but there is plenty enough for the liquor and soda pop industries? Why, if the oceans are set to rise and engulf the coastlines of the world, are there popular shows on TV about buying tiny islands to create money making resorts for individual investors? Do you think people in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe are enamored with the tiny house concept and dream of living in converted shipping containers as one would suppose North Americans are if they believed the shows being broadcast from here? While we are consuming programs depicting middle-class American and Canadian men and women rubbing sticks together, building palm-thatch huts and eating grubs, China is building entire ghost cities without populating them, all while still being listed as a developing nation and enjoying special trade and banking privileges.

To sum it up, it appears that we in the developed countries are being nudged to feel guilty for a set of doctored statistics, to expect less in the future than we have previously enjoyed through our own hard work and sacrifice, while we finance multinational corporate adventures across the globe in tandem with weakening any sense of nationhood via the induction of displaced persons who are simply in the way of these operations. This is covered with a prickly sweet insistence on separate passports, anthems, currencies, standing armies and taxes for each nation, even as many nations have already been amalgamated into fewer and fewer legally binding entities or unions.

So, what does the future look like to me at this point, you may ask? Well, I can assure you that Starbucks will be there but I cannot guarantee that you or I will be able to afford a cup, much less land a job slinging those lattes. Blues music will thrive and jazz will have a renaissance. Politicians will continue blowing smoke up our asses, whether or not they solemnize this fact with attending the Kol Nidre.

For the meantime, I could leave you with some songs that express what I think will be the reactions forthcoming from three levels of the societies affected by these new tax grabs. The first level would be the wealthy and for their song I have chosen, Peggy Lee singing Why Don't You Do Right? The second level is the middle class and for their song I have chosen Long Hard Times To Come by Gangstagrass. The third level is all those folks who have always had too much month at the end of the money and I have chosen for their song Charlie Daniels' Tennessee. The puppeteers at the top can go toot their own horns.
                                                                             
                                                                                   fin