Tim Moen

This was the last topic I thought I'd ever write about, but this month marks the 150th anniversary of Lincoln's  Gettysburg Address  widely considered one of the greatest speeches ever delivered. I came across this article by a Canadian professor repudiating post-modernism and calling for Canadians to engage in principled rhetoric using Lincoln's famous speech as inspiration. He cites Canadian statesmen Thomas D'Arcy McGee who was Lincolns contemporary and admirer as saying, "A war for the unity of the Republic must be necessarily, ipso facto, a war for liberty. The dogmas of which the Republic is founded are the genuine articles of every freeman’s creed. " This caught my attention as a self-detonating statement. We need to engage in war to compel unity so that we can all be free? If a dogma of the Republic is  individual liberty doesn't that necessarily mean freedom from compulsion, force and unwanted unions? I didn't think they had post-modernists b...

I was recently invited to speak at a rally to impeach Allison Redford in Edmonton. The rally was organized by Richard Heathen a political activist and organizer from Grande Prairie. Here is an excerpt from the Facebook page that explains what spawned this rally: The Alberta Government under the leadership of Alison Redford has, through it's numerous scandals and it's prolonged attack on the property rights of Albertans shown itself unfit to govern. The Redford government with it's fetish for top down central planning, has shown itself incompatible with the Alberta culture of free enterprise and adherence to property rights. Under The Land Stewardship Act The Alberta Government has given itself the power to strip any existing rights to the land from property owner s. Bill 36 is an authoritarian law giving the Alberta Government complete control over what you can and cannot do on all public and private land, every last acre of it. With Bill 24 The Carbon Storage Act the ...

A couple weeks ago I wanted to let my family and friends know what was going on in my life and I tweeted that I was going to be filming with Neil Young and Daryl Hannah in Fort McMurray. I was not prepared for the reaction. My phone was immediately blowing up with media requests to find out what was going on. Reaction from people commenting on social media in the community ranged from concern to rage over how Fort McMcMurray would be portrayed by these people who have a clear environmental agenda. I refrained from commenting in the media ahead of time because I wasn't sure how much publicity they wanted and I didn't want to ruin my chances of working with these people. I agreed to an interview with Wallis Snowden at Mix 103.7 after filming was over and she presented a fair and brief synopsis of our interview to the listeners. I'd like to offer my readers a more detailed account of what transpired. Background I was contacted a few weeks ago by Neil's produc...

My wife called me today while I was downtown and asked me to pick up a Texas Instruments TI-83 graphing calculator for my daughter who is in grade 11 math. I asked why she couldn't use a free app on her iPhone instead of buying $130 piece of 1970's technology. Apparently they aren't allowed to use new technology...it's considered cheating. I remember running into the same line of reasoning when I was a kid with regards to using a calculator. Its cheating. I was required to memorize times-tables up to 12 and spend inordinate amounts of time doing equations by hand that could be rapidly figured with a calculator. Never mind that in the real world we have access to technology, the internet, and all sorts of apps and information that can help us rapidly solve problems. The job of school it seems isn't to prepare kids to problem solve but rather to be tested and ranked on their ability to memorize, regurgitate, and obey. The lesson here kids is that problems are solv...

At the tender age of 15 Rehtaeh Parsons was allegedly raped by four boys about her age. As a father of two girls (aged 15 and 16) I doubt I'd be able to contain my rage or impulse to commit violence against those who harmed my children. I am, however extremely thankful that justice is not left to enraged fathers and lynch mobs, we aren't known for our reflective objectivity, our rationality, our dispassionate evaluation of the evidence. There is a process, in theory, that exists called justice, the rule of law which is to negate the rule of passion and impulse. In an ideal world justice would not be punitive, designed to inflict pain and discomfort in order to gain compliance, but rather restorative and healing. Rather than locking criminals in cages at the expense of taxpayers criminals would be held to account for their crimes. Being accountable means fixing what you broke, restoring a victim to a future you took from her, it means restoring your credibility as a citizen th...

The State is not something that exists in material reality. You can't point to something and say, "there is the State." So we know that the State is a concept, a narrative, a story we tell ourselves and each other, a belief system that has unhealthy consequences, it is a pattern of neuronal activity that one day we may be able to see with advanced imaging devices. The problem is how do we deal with this mind virus that prevents us from being free of violence and a sustainable, virtuous world? It occurred to me recently that it might be helpful to view the State through the lens of addiction.  New insights into addiction may help those of us who want freedom from superstitious violence to make some progress with battling the State. Gabor Mate a psychiatrist that has made a career of treating addicts in Vancouver's inner city has interesting things to say about addiction. Addictions fill a need in the addict. Substances in and of themselves do not create addiction....

This fathers day my kids took me to see the latest Superman movie and I was struck by the similarities between the Superman narrative and the Christian narrative. Here are the things I noticed: 1)       Heaven – Krypton is a designed and created Utopian paradise where Kryptonians seem to live forever. 2)       The Fall of Lucifer – General Zod was Kryptons top general and disagrees with the ultimate authority and battles for control and is ultimately cast out to another dimension, just like Lucifer and his minions. 3)       A Unique Birth – Jesus was born to a virgin (assuming Mary and Joe didn’t lie) and Superman was the first Kryptonian born through a vagina in Millenia, all others were birthed in a genesis chamber. 4)       Sent to Another World to Be its Savior – Jor’el pontificates that Superman could guide and lead the people of Earth to a better future and prevent ...

Carl Sagan popularized the phrase, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Skeptics of pseudoscience, paranormal activity, deities, snake-oil salesmen, psychics, Loch Ness Monster, and leprechauns often use it to explain to people that the onus is on the person making a claim so extraordinary that it exceeds everything we know of the natural world and the universe. So a person claiming, “I have a dog” requires far less evidence than a person claiming “I have a dragon.” In the former claim we all know people who own dogs, we know that dogs exist empirically and so when Bob shows us a picture of a dog we can justifiably believe him. The latter claim requires more evidence because there has never been evidence for dragons existing and it is incredibly likely that a fire breathing monster would have been seen and reported at some point in the past century if it exists, so when Bob shows us a picture of his dragon we cannot justifiably believe he's telling the truth kno...

Part I - Lessons Learned My graduate thesis looked at self-organizing emergency response teams. I wanted to look at things like firefighter team dynamics and effectiveness through the lens of self-organization and see what could be discerned about things like leadership and why some teams were more effective than others. I became interested in looking at this because I noticed that teams that were led by autocratic leaders seemed to run into far more problems and be far less effective than other teams. These are the lessons I learned about self-organizing systems and how leaders/change agents can create real change in systems. All Systems are Self-Organizing When I started researching my thesis I had a difficult time finding a clear definition of what a self-organizing system was among scholars. How would I know whether I idnetify a team to be self-organizing or behaving in a self-organizing fashion if I didn't know what criteria to use? In the end I identif...