If that url does not work, then put GORDON GILCHRIST into the search box.

Has anybody stopped to ponder “Were Mr. Gilchrists comments true or false?”

What arrogance that Mr Gilchrist dared to defend himself at the Kawartha School Board meeting, and as a result, the otherwise strong and brave member from the Community and Race Relations Committee, Andrea Fatona, broke down into tears, “I was crying in there as he continued to defend his racism.”

It used to be that when I was on the verge of tears, I’d run to the washroom for a good cry, come out at bit later, refreshed and with my pompadour well groomed, ready to move on. However, we must realize that Ms Fatona’s maudlin breakdown, as Kevan Brownson of the Peterborough Coalition Against Poverty put it, is the reason why it is important to place “needs of the most vulnerable members of the public at the centre.”

After all, we seriously do not want Andrea Fatona to weep and wail again, and if the curtailment of freedom of speech will prevent the most thin-skinned, er, uh, the most vulnerable individuals from ever having to shed a tear again, then by golly, lets gag some dissident mouths and trim the tongues to politically correct mediocrity.

Ms Fatona called Gilchrist’s statements an “outrage” and pleaded for the continuation of “our safe and tolerant community.”

The Coalition Against Poverty weighed in by asserting that Mr Gilchrist’s comments reflected a “deeply racist view.” Wow! It’s worse than I thought. If Mr Gilchrist has a “deeply racist view” then I would be curious how the Coalition Against Poverty would characterize the writings of a Ku Klux Klanista. Perhaps they would say it is a doubly deep racist view. Oh doubleplusgood that we nipped that badthink in the bud.

Councillor Dean Pappas said that Mr Gilchrist’s letter “could actually jeopardize the city’s economic growth.” adding that such letters “are very dangerous.” I can hear the kindling now. I love the smell of political correctmess in the morning, it smells like, . . . totalitarianism.

Mike Ma of the Peterborough Community and Race Relations Committee claimed that Mr Gilchrist’s letter was “racist and ignorant” and has caused “serious damage” to the larger Peterborough and Kawartha community. Finally Mr Ma called on Mr Gilchrist to take “anti-oppression training”. And yes, a grief counsellor will always be on standby in the rare event that client decompression breaks into overwhelming remorse.

The press conference was taken right out of George Orwell’s 1984, specifically the scene of Two Minutes Hate.

People would assemble in an auditorium to express their hatred of Emmanuel (Gilchrist) Goldstein, the Enemy of the People. Orwell described him as a “renegade and backslider”, and “He was the primal traitor the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching.”

Orwell had Goldstein ranting in “an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it. He was abusing BIG BROTHER”. Orwell noted that his rant was presented “in rapid polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the habitual style of the orators of the Party, and even contained Newspeak words: more Newspeak words, indeed, than any Party member would normally use in real life.”

Thank God [or Allah, if I know what’s good for me] for the unelected bureaucraps and other groups in the pay of the government, they are the avante garde. “A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police.”

Finally, Orwell had this to say about Two Minutes Hate: “The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness.”

“stop piling on”. Ha! The guy’s crook, plain and simple. The question isn’t should he be removed from the board -it’s how he ever managed to get elected in the first place.

Geez….where’s my wallet? It was right here a minute ago. Gord! Gord! Didja see my wallet anywhere? Gord? Oh, Gordon…..

I used to drive trains for VIA Rail. The other day I went over to Cobourg station and picked up a handy little VIA pocket schedule. I picked it up for a friend because, as someone who is concerned for the environment, I refuse to take a VIA train.

The schedule was so treacly sick with its chlorophyll/leaf/green cover motif I just about threw up. VIA ‘green’? What a laugh. Half empty trains half the time all pulled by 16-cylinder diesel powered electrical generators on wheels. Thats right: The diesel turns a huge main generator which produces electricity that gets fed to huge electric motors hanging on the axles. Coal was more environmentally sensitive than these behemoths. Behemothe, incidently, that are allowed to idle for hours on end in Kingston, Ottawa, Windsor, Toronto -you name it.

BUT!!!! Because VIA has, with your money, managed to scare the livin’ bejesus out of anybody thinking of buying a -gasp!- car, we all think we’re saving the planet by taking a VIA train. Believe me, I know, I worked there. How much packaging garbage do you think is created on every train re their crummy sandwiches, their bottled water, their styrofoam plates? How much of that crap do you actually think they recycle?

Go ahead -save the world. Take the train. I’ll drive thanks.

That’s the trouble with the whole ‘environmental’ emergency. It’s half marketing ploy half scare tactic. There’s big bucks in making people think they’re doing the right thing, playing on their built-in guilt complexes. Take a good look -I mean a REALLY good look at the number of products on your supermarket shelf that use the word ‘green’ in their labels. Everything is green. Christ, Selsun Blue is green. Bleach is green. Everything is green. But read the labels. Almost nothing (except the label) has actually changed. Everything is just as toxic now as it was in 1955. But we buy both the product and the hype. We buy it because we’ve been scared into buying it. It’s a hoax. Lay all the world’s experts on global warming end-to-end and I gaurantee you -they’ll never reach a conclusion.

No one has the right to self-satisfaction in this deal unless the live in a Himalayan yurt and eat nothing but smallish rocks. There’s only one kind of pollution on the face of this earth and that’s us.

Yeah….1955. That’s about the same time Pogo, using his inverted telescope from the prow of his flat-bottomed Okeefenokee swamp boat, surveyed the scene and declared “I has seen the enemy -and they is us.”