OH (NO) CANADA. OH BROTHER (OOPS AND OH SISTER).

O Canada is a lyrical poem written by Adolphe-Basile Routhier and set to music by Calixa Lavallée who left behind Canada to serve with the 4th Rhode Island Volunteers of the Union army during the War Between the States.



In 1880, Lieutenant Governor of Quebec Théodore Robitaille commissioned Lavallée to compose the song, which became Canadians' national anthem one hundred years later in 1980.

Routhier wrote the poem in his French. In 1906, Robert Stanley Weir loosely translated the poem into English. Weir tried his hand at it again in 1908. It is Weir's 1908  version, which became the version sung at most every hockey game played across Canada.

Now, too-much-time-on-his-hands Canadian politician Mauril Belanger has introduced a bill to change two words from thy sons to of us. The Liberal Party meddler Belanger believes that without such changes, O Canada is not inclusive enough. It surprises that meddler Belanger hasn't protested against the word God in the seventh line of the poem.

The word son is an Old English word. Son means descendant as well as  immediate male offspring.

English reveals reverence for females with female-specific words — daughter. English lacks the same reverence for males. Words for males also get spoken when sex lacks relevancy. Sons is one of those words.

The word man means person. Men, the plural for man, means persons. Mankind means people. And world means all men (persons) everywhere on earth. And no, the world doesn't mean the earth, though many weak speakers of English believe so, wrongly.

All of those words — man, men, mankind, world — are bedrock English words spoken by Germanic ancestors of all Englishmen, Canadians and Americans who have Germanic ancestors.

A literal translation of the poem reveals a fiery Canadian who is willing to take up sword and cross to forge an epic history.

O Canada!
Land of our forefathers,
Thy brow is wreathed with a glorious garland of flowers.
As is thy arm ready to wield the sword,
So also is it ready to carry the cross.
Thy history is an epic
Of the most brilliant exploits.
Thy valour steeped in faith
Will protect our homes and our rights
Will protect our homes and our rights

The 1908 translation comes across as something Bob and Doug MacKenzie might have sung, reducing Canadians to rent-a-cop security guards.

O Canada!
Our home and native land!
True patriot love in all thy sons command.
With glowing hearts we see thee rise,
The True North strong and free!
From far and wide,
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
God keep our land glorious and free!
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

If Canadians are going to buckle under to cranks like Mauril Belanger, they might has fix the song in full to reflect reality. Here is my gift to Canadians: O Canada, 2014.

O Canada! (village!)
Our home and once the natives' land (reservations!)
True multicultural legality in all political command.
With indifferent hearts we see thee rise,
The True North once strong, now wimpy!
From far and wide,
O Canada, we skate on ice for thee (hockey!)
For glorious two-four, Canadians keep the queen!
O Canada, we skate on ice for thee (hockey!)
O Canada, we skate on ice for thee (hockey!)

Enjoy native Canadian William Shatner having a go at making O Canada fit into the vision of the Belanders of Canada.




As a bonus, enjoy Geddy Lee, bassist of Rush, the Canadian band inducted into both the Canadian Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the American Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

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NAT GEO PUBLISHERS SAY YOU SHOULD FEEL GUILTY FOR BEING ALIVE MORE OR LESS

So today, I read a story by Dennis Dimick of National Geographic in which Dimick uses rhetorical deception to lull readers into accepting hints at eugenics and behavioral control.



So what does Dennis Dimick do? Repeatedly, Dimick uses the pronouns "us" and "we."

Someone should have told Dimick, there is no "us." There is no "we." There are only individuals.

First, Dimick tries to pluck the heart strings of his readers by opening with an unsubstantiated, but seeming fact of "There are more than 7 billion people on Earth now, and roughly one in eight of us doesn't have enough to eat."

After hitting his readers with unsubstantiated, wild guesses about the future head count (11 billion vs nine billion in the year 2100), cloaked in the garb of mathematical authority, Dimick lures in readers by suggesting that "we" need to have a talk about how we relate "climate change, energy, food supply, and freshwater" with population. Here, Dimick lays foundation for a call to behavioral control and eugenics.

Dimick follows up quickly with "..how many of us there are, how many children we have, how long we live, and where and how we live..." Instead, Dimick should have written: How many individuals there are, how many children individuals will have, how long individuals will live, and where and how individuals live.

Dimick continues his witchery by suggesting to his readers that his readers have been breeding like rabbits when he writes, "We've been on a big growth spurt during the past century or so... Now, there are about 7.2 billion of us...In recent years we've been adding about a billion people every 12 or 13 years or so." If this were so, Dimick is suggesting to his readers that another seven billion individuals shall be upon the earth by 2100, pushing total population to 14.2 billion, or 3.2 to 5 billion beyond his reported mathematical authority earlier in his story.

Of course, Dimick fails to mention Africans. Sub-saharan Africans are those contributing most to population growth with the fastest growing population. Demographers estimate the one billion one hundred and eleven million sub-saharan Africans who now live shall grow to 3.5 to 5 billion by 2100. Nigerians alone are expected to increase from 200 million today to 900 million by 2100 according to a story published by the Guardian on 18 September 2014. In short, Sub-saharan Africans should constitute almost all population growth through 2100.

One would believe that a magazine publisher with a long history of geographic reporting would have revealed how population growth has been proceeding in relation to geography. For details on African demographics, check out what World Population Review published.




And soon thereafter, Dimick commits another appeal to authority fallacy by citing the long discredited Thomas Malthus and an essay Malthus published in 1798 in which Malthus, failing to see productivity gains from technological advances, wrongly claimed that food production could only increase linearly while population would increase geometrically. Malthus could not envision giant combines that produce the work of thousands of men in only a few hours. Malthus could not foresee fertilizers, weed killers and computer-controlled irrigation.

Worse, Dimick mentions Paul Ehrlich, the foolish academician who lost a bet with Julian Simon over resource scarcity. Idiotically, Ehrlich believed prices would increase for copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten under his false belief that such materials would become increasingly scarce. Simon bet that prices would fall rightly believing that mankind would become more efficient in extraction methods and utilization methods.

After side-tracking readers with more academic foolery, Dimick gets to eugenics with  a suggestive call for reducing fertility — the number of children any woman bears in her lifetime — for each woman on the planet.

Then Dimick shames his readers in attempt to elicit guilt feelings by calling his readers "an elite crowd of Earthlings" who should feel guilty for having "reliable electricity, access to Internet-connected computers and phones" as well as leisure time to read Nat Geo since "one-fifth of those on Earth still don't have have access to reliable electricity" and "reliable lighting and cooking facilities ... remain beyond the reach of about 1.3 billion."

Dimick's glaring misuse of pronouns is his attempt to trick readers into feeling guilt about how they live, to agitate for population control eugenics and to agitate for behavioral control all in the name of the false Gaia goddess, Mother Earth.

Dimick fails to congratulate his readers for achieving their material progress through their willingness to adhere to law, commerce and property in spite of incessant attacks upon his readers from politicians. Dimick fails to give thanks for the ancestors of Americans — Anglo-Saxon-Normans — who set the bedrock upon which Americans through time have made their achievements, escaping poverty, in spite of their sabotaging politicians.

To be sure, mankind never has suffered a shortage of meddling intellectuals, those toadying lackeys always in awe of authentic, manly men who can gain the reins of power, intellectuals with their Church of Academia en vogue theories, which almost always get proven wrong in time. When not given a public forum to spew their foolery, these intellectuals always seem willing to work as bureaucrats and technocrats in petty attempts at tasting the crumbs of power by wielding the scepter of government regulation.

Perhaps Dimick needs Captain Kirk. In the episode from the original TV series Star Trek, "The Mark of Gideon," a race of overpopulated aliens immune to sterilization and pregnancy control abduct Captain Kirk hoping a virus Kirk carries in his body, Vegan choriomeningitis, will infect the aliens causing deaths.

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