1. Prefatory remarks

My founding of the DDO Defenders, and Karen's assuming the leadership of the Defenders from the first half of 2008 onward, and what I consider Karen's undermining of the DDO conservationist cause, from 2011 onward, pertain to the formal record of DDO advocacy. This is a record which I give not here but in the blog posting timestamped 20140218T035440Z. In this present posting, on the other hand, I analyze Karen's relationship with me. My aim is to set down all and only the facts needed for an objective picture to emerge. My aim is to recount everything that significantly counts for or against Karen, everything that significantly counts for or against me. Perhaps, however, there is something that I ought to have said, and yet have left unsaid. (Perhaps, contrary to what I believe, I have, for instance, left out something favourable to Karen - have left out something she could cite in her defence - or, on the other side, have left out something that discredits me?) In that case, Karen or her team should send me appropriate writeups for posting on this blog, therewith rectifying my omissions.

2. Positive aspects
of Karen's
personal relations
with me

My personal impressions of Karen are a mix of the favourable and the unfavourable.

On the favourable, or credit, side of the accounting has been her personal warmth. Here I note with special gratitude her repeated, strong, ultimately successful insistence that I seek out treatment for my depressions and my Asperger's.

I note also with special gratitude Karen's assistance in 2008 July, at a particularly troubling point in my casework in opposition to the University of Toronto Police, on the DDO grounds.

I will later have to publish, on a different Web server, a full account of the University of Toronto Police head, Mr Sam d'Angelo, in his 2008 efforts to discourage me from documenting the University's removal of heritage items from DDO. For the present narrative, centred as it is on my erstwhile colleague Karen, it is appropriate to start by putting the spotlight onto Mr d'Angelo's efforts on or around 2008-07-14, in the wake of a thing I shall not here fully expound, his unsuccessful 2008-07-12 verbal attack. (He had tried a cunning line regarding my last will and testament, my sources of income, and my thoughts on sex - all ultimately to no avail, since some visitors happened to stroll onto the DDO grounds even as he was in his carefully researched line of questioning endeavouring to get my adrenaline up.)

I assumed my by-then-usual monitoring position by the front steps of the Administration Building. Inside, in a place I was now forbidden by the University of Toronto Police to observe, was intense activity, with the library being packed up into cardboard boxes by the Departmental Librarian and some helpers. I was somehow not standing but crouching or sitting, close by the more southerly of the two big concrete planters that I would in each horticultural season fit out, as the de facto DDO gardener, with a tall ornamental grass and a few low bedding plants.

Mr d'Angelo leaned down, his mouth very close to my ear, and also sufficiently close to my nostrils for me to smell something disagreeable, such as garlic or halitosis. In place of speaking (low-key speaking had, I repeat, served him ill two or so days earlier, on 2008-07-12), he shouted: "Leave. Leave! LEAVE! LEAVE NOW! LEAVE NOW!" This went on for a while. Somehow, however, I managed to make a cellular-telephone call to one of my principal handlers in the monitoring operation, Karen. Karen drove over quickly from her then residence, a few kilometres away. Mr d'Angelo said to her - I think he was trying to argue psychiatric instability - that when he had been shouting at me, I had reacted by "shaking like a leaf". Karen was unimpressed by this line of argument. She took him aside, far out of my sight and hearing, and they had some kind of interview. The upshot of their confidential interview was that nothing much happened with Mr d'Angelo for the next several days. For quite a while, I was allowed to continue my monitoring, and my photographing, of the University's heritage removals, my stress hormones for the most part not surging to any level beyond what I could easily handle. For much of this time, my dealings as a documenter of the DDO pillage were not with the University Police at all, but (this was far easier) with various staffers from a security firm outsourced by the University, and charged with keeping DDO safe from outraged citizens while the University's removal of DDO contents proceeded.

I will be perpetually grateful to Karen, despite her subsequent abandonment of conservationist principles, for whatever forthright, and yet confidential, intervention she made on my behalf on the day of the shouting.

A further beneficial intervention from Karen is of a more minor, and indeed ambiguous, character, but nevertheless is again worth recounting at length.

My ongoing efforts at monitoring the University's removals came to a head on 2008-07-30. I was feeling low on this day, and the rain was coming down. Being the sole prospective DDO monitor on site that day (as on most days), I checked in by telephone with Karen. She showed what I am sure was a genuine and sincere concern for my welfare, urging me to stay away from duty that day. I, however, was insistent on proceeding to operations. This was a mistake.

On arriving at the Administration Building, I found not the now-usual University of Toronto outsourced security firm, as I had expected to find, but a staffer from a security firm engaged by Metrus-Corsica. I explained to this unfamiliar staffer, from an unfamiliar firm, that in all my operations hitherto I had dealt with the University of Toronto security-outsource firm, and that that firm had allowed me to stand in the porch if the weather was wet. The unfamiliar staffer said, in a quite unfriendly tone, "You can go stand in the rain." I think that had I been free of depression on the day, I would have done the clearly correct thing, namely, to stand in the rain, saying very little and communicating to the staffer by facial expression and body language that he was inflicting unreasonable discomfort on an individual striving to serve the public interest. As it was, however, I entered into a dispute.

Neither of us raised his voice. I remarked that I really should be allowed to stand where I had stood before, in the porch. The staffer said that he would not allow it.

In a moment of supreme idiocy, I then recalled the line that children are taught by their parents, namely, that the constables are "on our side" and "ready to help", and I said that I would discuss the matter with the York Regional Police (YRP). Phoning in with my cellular, I explained the situation, and quickly enough a couple of squad cars pulled up at the Administration Building.

The Metrus-Corsica outsourced security staffer gave his side of the story, and I gave mine, and I think YRP were initially uncertain how to proceed. YRP consulted someone or other, by telephone. Oddly, I had the impression that the consultation was with the University of Toronto, even though it surely from a legal standpoint had to be with the then owner, who then must (in view of the change in security staffing) have been Metrus-Corsica. On the strength of the consultation, YRP said that I would have to leave the property. But, I said, it was my "civic duty" to continue photographing what was going on (there was in fact much activity, with heavy items being taken from the Great Dome that morning). No, said YRP, it was not my civic duty. On the contrary, I said (neither party to this exchange indulged in any raising of the voice), it was my civic duty. No, said YRP, it was not my civic duty. But, I said, the obtaining of photos was my civic duty.

At this point I was put into handcuffs, but in what I would regard as a significant kindness had the cuffs put on with my arms in front of me, rather than, as in a criminal arrest, with my arms behind me. One YRP officer then took me under my armpits, the other under my knees. I offered no resistance. I did retain the presence of mind to pray a Hail Mary in English, very loudly but not in an absolute shout. Under the gaze of the (silent) former DDO Operations Manager, I was put into the rear seat of a squadcar, as the police might load in a dead coyote.

For a few minutes, the gravity of the situation weighed on me, to the extent that my body began a kind of rebellion: my skin tingled all over and felt tight, as though the circulating blood were being withdrawn to the vital organs. I did not, however, hyperventilate, and I believe that having completed my plea to Mary, I did not do any further significant vocalizing. One thought was uppermost in my mind. Here was my body, behaving oddly. Now my duty was strictly local, concerned strictly with what was happening within my own skin. My duty was now to avoid getting any sicker, for instance to avoid fainting or dying.

After perhaps two or five or ten (but I suspect fewer than ten) minutes, the odd tingling feeling went away, and I was somehow sitting in the cruiser rear, rather than sprawling like a coyote corpse over the length of the seat. Separated from me by a transparent barrier was the front of the cruiser, occupied by a YRP officer. As I took stock of my new and improved situation, my cell phone rang. My handcuffs afforded me enough freedom of movement to take the call. The call proved to be from a Richmond Hill resident, "PQR", sympathetic to the conservationist cause, and already rather well known to me. I managed to convey the essence of the situation, perhaps falsely adding in my nervous excitement that I was under arrest.

The officers in fact never used the word "arrest", and did not do any of the formulaic things that one knows from YouTube or similar sources, such as noting one's "right to remain silent" and one's "right of immediate access to legal counsel". I now, writing in 2013 and 2014, infer from these failures-to-act that no arrest had been made. I sometimes consequently wonder, in a quiet and low-key way, whether there may possibly have been a breach here of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Section 9 ("Everyone has the right not to be arbitrarily detained . . . ").

"PQR" became quite excited, going to the absurd length (as I learned probably some days later) of telephoning the Mayor.

The attending officer quickly enough relieved me of my cell phone. If I recall correctly - I am 80 per cent certain here - "PQR" protested over this, from the other end of the connection, and the officer made the Kafka-esque reply that it was necessary to confiscate my cell phone so that I would not harm myself with it.

Time dragged on and on and on. I am not sure how long I was in the squad car. I think, after allowing for possible distortions in memory, that it cannot have been a short time at all - perhaps twenty minutes, perhaps thirty, perhaps a little more.

Eventually I managed to do what I now, writing in 2013 and 2014, think was the right thing, in partial compensation for that overwhelming, terrible initial error in judgement which was my phoning YRP. I embarked on a line of talking-to-myself calculated to play on the constabulary nerves, planting into YRP cerebral cortices the thought that this was a case involving some kind of unusual individual, and liable to lead into a morass of paperwork - involving perhaps even some such document-intensive thing as the RCMP, CSIS, or a European consulate.

Paperwork complications are surely unwelcome to the constabulary mind. Indeed I would suggest, in all candour, that the DDO conservation case is liable to lead into exactly the bureaucratic morass I have here adverted to, were it in future to be incorrectly handled: I am, after all, a citizen both of Canada and of Estonia, and in the hypothetical contingency of unreasonable future constabulary action it would be appropriate enough for me to liaise either directly with the Estonian Embassy in Ottawa or with a Toronto Estonian-diaspora lawyer able for his own part to liaise with the Embassy. (I imagine that some disagreeably confrontational and theatrical lawyer might, in particular, ask not only whether my detention was consistent with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Section 9, but also whether my detention was consistent with the European Convention on Human Rights, Article 5.)

Police officers reading this narrative are herewith urged to be duly diligent.

Our matter proceeded, at any rate, as follows (with me soliloquizing, and with the constable in the front seat speaking, in the serious tones of Walter Cronkite, into his cellular telephone):

TOOMAS KARMO: Noh, siin ma olen, konstaablite küüsis, ja küll see veel on kole. See on täelik kaa-gee-bee, ehk Kilo Golf Braavo.

OFFICER: He is speaking a language we cannot identify. Yes, that is correct. A language we cannot identify.

TOOMAS KARMO: Je suis pres des gendarmes. C'est une situation terrible, épouvantable.

OFFICER: Now he has switched over to French. Yes, that is correct, he has now switched over to French.

OFFICER [perhaps after a pause]: ...well, he hasn't done anything. Maybe we should take him home.

It was astute of the officer to say that I had not done anything. For possibly the first time in this Kafka-esque or Orwellian proceeding, the constabulary were the voice of incontestable common sense. I summoned up enough courage to say in response, or rather to croak in response (I found the use of English unpleasant at this juncture), "Yes, home." Almost at once we were out of the gates and at "home".

On reaching "home" and being relieved of the bracelets, I was given a "ticket", this being a paper document of roughly postcard size, indicating that I had committed a trespass and was required to pay York Region (the upper-tier municipality) a certain sum of money. I forget the exact sum, but I believe it was just a little under 100 CAD.

In the excitement, it somehow transpired that not the Mayor alone but also my then colleague Karen had found out what was going on. Despite my very large reservations regarding Karen's post-2010 handling of DDO conservation (most notably, of course, from the time in 2011 when she entered Ontario Municipal Board "Mediation"), here I must say that her 2008-07-30 action was appropriate, even noble: I believe that she dropped whatever it was she was doing and headed out of her own home, fully ready to meet the constabulary and bail me out of incarceration.

But, as I say, instead of incarceration there was a "ticket". Accompanying the "ticket" was a polite, but very firm, verbal instruction not to reenter the DDO grounds.

I cried for quite a while in my basement flat, both in horror at my stupidity and over the squalid character of the events, loudly enough (as I later learned, in a friendly briefing) to be heard even upstairs in the house. Later, perhaps on the afternoon of the day, and trying to act correctly, I wrote out a cheque on my credit union in settlement of the fine. This I papermailed to York Region.

My writing the cheque elicited a strong criticism from more than one of the individuals in the inner circle of conservationists. It was felt that I had made an incorrect capitulation. Karen for her part put it to me, either directly or through some Richmond Hill Naturalists intermediary, that she knew a sharp lawyer who would "get me off". Chastened, and as anxious now to do my duty by the conservationists as I had been anxious to do my duty by the Crown, I phoned my credit union and succeeded in having a so-called "stop" put onto the cheque.

Now, however, the inner circle of conservationists recanted, saying that the case was in the final analysis too intricate to be worth their pursuing, and that I should simply pay the fine. I did so, eventually writing a second cheque, which was required by York Region to be somewhat larger (something on the order of 120 CAD or 125 CAD).

Here again some expression of gratitude is owed to Karen. She did what she could, holding out the hope of "getting me off". But the gratitude must be tempered by the stern realization that when we have committed a criminal offence or a civil tort, we pay the price, and that "getting off" with the help of a shyster lawyer is appropriate only for scofflaws and deadbeats. That Karen so readily formulated a proposal for "getting me off" does not redound unambiguously to her credit, as a would-be Town councillor.

Continuing with my accounting of the various points in Karen's favour, I next note here various unexpected personal gifts: a small pair of stereo ear buds, and (her professed atheism notwithstanding) a very nice colour calendar for 2011 with quotations from the Psalms. The calendar was published by "Mead Money Madness". Upon re-inspecting it in 2013, I found it had in 2010 been retailing for the absurdly high price of 14.99 CAD. (She had gone somewhat out of her way, in other words, to select a luxury, a top-of-the-line, calendar.) I have additionally had from Karen a set of things still more imposing than the calendar: a pair of gloves, a tuque, and a scarf. I fear I have lost one or both gloves, but the tuque I believe to be still in my set of heavily used winter tuques. The scarf is for its part one of the crowning glories of my winter equipment, being so warm as to make the wearing of a pullover under my soldier's cast-off forest-green jacket superfluous on many winter days, and extending to the generous length of 150 centimetres. I do not think I ever in my life, until I became the grateful recipient of some even more immense knitting from a young artisanal relative on 2013-12-25, owned so luxurious a scarf.

Above all, I wish in this recitation of points in Karen's favour to cite her sending me a card, upon my making a monetary donation to the 2010 Campaign Cilevitz (the public records, which I believe accurate, show me donating 160 CAD, and indeed show this to be the largest private-individual donation to the 2010 Cilevitz campaign), saying that that she would always treasure my friendship. Her card remains in my possession. I hold Karen and myself to its message.

I for my part did try to be appropriately warm in reciprocation. giving a couple of lessons in practical gardening (Karen did wish me to continue gardening on my own in front of her then home, during her absences, but this was not quite feasible, since the bus link was poor, and my time constrained), and bringing snacks on the various occasions I visited her then home, and (over and above making the big already-mentioned campaign donation) putting in many part-days of door-to-door canvassing in her 2010 election campaign.

This completes my accounting from the credit side of Karen's ledger. I repeat that if (what I do not believe) I have left anything out, Karen or others should send in appropriate blog material to remedy my (innocent, inadvertent) omissions. - Admittedly, Karen and I will have to take care in this work not to breach our 2014-05-05 out-of-court legal settlement. One of the provisions of the settlement is that we not communicate with each other. Blog submissions, and reciprocating acknowledgements of receipt by me, will therefore have to be made by indirect means, for instance using our respective lawyers as intermediaries.

3. Negative aspects
of Karen's
personal relations
with me

On the debit side of the ledger, I must first mention Karen's alarming (and to me, personally, in a decided degree distressing) lack of scientific background. Public astronomical outreach with Karen was a thing to fear, calling for disciplined restraint on my part. I recall her misrepresenting the sunspot cycle at the Mill Pond Park, forgetting that early in the cycle, sunspots appear at rather high solar latitudes, and that as a cycle progresses the spots appear closer and closer to the solar equator. Part of her public language was that sunspots appear in the "middle" of the solar disk. What can this mean? A new sunspot may certainly appear on the limb, i.e., at the apparent disk edge, but the equator (as opposed to the higher latitudes) is shunned by spots until the cycle is almost over. So if "middle" means "equator", we have here pretty much the opposite of the truth.

This was the same public-outreach session at which Karen brutally handled my own telescope, trying to move it by exerting hand force on the right-angle correct-image finder, which promptly came off its dovetail mount and fell to the ground. As luck would have it, there was no damage, but neither was there any particular apology from her for risking 110 CAD or so of my optics. When she blamed the manufacturer of the dovetail mount, I again largely held my tongue.

I must next mention two exceptionally severe dressings-down from Karen, outside the bounds of grumbling normal in a friendship, in the years prior to our actual grave 2011 ruptures.

On the one hand, she became angry to the point of [[one word omitted]] shouting, but only over the telephone (there was no face-to-face confrontation) upon perceiving me to be acting in what I concede to have been an inappropriately cooperative way with the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada National office.

On the other hand, she became angry in a cold and distant way, I think cutting all communications off, when I made some Google searches on the circumstances surrounding the naming of main-belt asteroid 108382 as (in her honour) "Karencilevitz", by an American asteroid hunter, and wrote up the results of my searches in a suitably lighthearted e-mail disseminated within our small and confidential DDO conservation circle. (This is the same asteroid hunter, "Myke Wolf", as is cited with a 2010 election testimonial at http://www.karencilevitzward5.ca: "Karen’s passion for justice, belief in the quality of life, and tireless love for people make her the perfect candidate for Richmond Hill. Her perseverance to the DDO cause, and the countless hours of research and time she has volunteered, is proof of her tenacity and focus when representing the will of the people. She is undaunted by opposition in her leadership strength." People reading this will think, I believe contrary to the facts, that Wolf is well acquainted with the municipal politics of Ontario. Those pursuing Internet researches parallelling my own, regarding the asteroid and its context, should google on the phrases

    "myke collins" asteroid

and

    "myke collins" "myke wolf" name change 

In neither case was the rupture particularly grave: normal relations were restored in a matter of perhaps days in the former case, and in a matter of a few weeks in the latter.

I now come to my fundamental reason for losing confidence in Karen (the first of the two 2011 ruptures), as I stumbled across something graver than her telephone abuse or that small indulgence which is her 108382. This is strictly part of the formal public record of DDO advocacy, which I must place not into this present Web page but into the more prominent framework of my blog posting timestamped 20140218T035440Z. Here it suffices to recapitulate just a pair of principal points: (a) Karen told me, clearly and unequivocally, in a hurried private consultation at a Green Party barbecue on the Saturday which was 2011-04-23, that her meeting with Metrus-Corsica (a meeting contemplated against the strenuous advice of the Richmond Hill Naturalists, and in the view of both the Naturalists and me dangerous to DDO) would not be until after the federal election, slated for the Monday which was 2011-05-02. (b) To my surprise, I later learned from what I believe to be a reliable source or set of sources that the meeting was held before the election, very likely on the morning of the Tuesday that was 2011-04-26, right in the boardroom of Metrus, with nobody from the disapproving Richmond Hill Naturalists present, and with Karen accompanied into the halls of Metrus only by the Green Party himself.

Here was the proverbial forensic bloodspot, the proverbial Scotland Yard fingerprint. If Karen was misleading me on one point, on what else might she be misleading me? Now I had to stand back, proceeding cautiously, and bracing for trouble down the road.

So far as our personal relationship went, big trouble did not come until the October of that year (2011). It came in an unexpected way. Although it was by that point clear that Karen had betrayed the Naturalists (she had now incorporated the DDO Defenders and entered OMB Mediation), I had kept things civil on a personal level even as the summer passed and autumn deepened. To my surprise, however, I received in October a somewhat unwelcome e-mail. Its contents are largely irrelevant to the present narrative, and in any case the mail carries Karen's normal boilerplate requesting (the request surely has no legal force) that the contents not be reproduced. In light of the irrelevance, and also by way of a courteous concession to the legal nullity which is the boilerplate, I censor the e-mail heavily here:

On Sat, Oct 8, 2011 at 9:43 AM, Karen Cilevitz ‹karen@gwsergo.com› wrote:
((CONCEALED)) and Toomas: As a courtesy to your involvement in this matter, this
is
to advise you the attached letter was ((SNIP))
 
 
 
Toomas: Please be advised this letter is ((SNIP)).
I trust that you will NOT forward, copy or reproduce this letter in any
manner or to anyone else. ((SNIP)) Please confirm receipt and
 acceptance of this request((SNIP))
 
 
 
Have a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend!
 
 
 
Love Karen xx
 
  
 
Karen Cilevitz
 
 
 
Chair - The David Dunlap Observatory Defenders Inc.
 
Website: www.karencilevitz.ca

Twitter: @kmcilevitz
 
BlackBerry: karenmona@telus.blackberry.net

Mobile: 416.990.6694

 
 
Owner/Operator ALX Technical Service Ltd. and GWS Ergonomics Inc.

Executive Assistant to the President - WNENA


 
This email and any attachment(s) are confidential and intended for the
recipient(s) only. Please do not forward, copy or reproduce in any manner
without the consent of the sender. Thank you.

I replied in a careful, and civil, choice of words. I reproduce my reply in almost its entirety, concealing only a handful of names. The details regarding RASC ("Royal Astronomical Society of Canada") are not relevant to the present narrative, and so I reproduce them without adding illuminating commentary:

From: Toomas Karmo [mailto:toomas.karmo@gmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, October 08, 2011 2:13 PM
To: Karen Cilevitz
Subject: Re: Demand letter sent to RASC-TC from Daphne Williamson re ddo.ca
disclaimer

Universal Coordinated Time (= UTC = EST+5 = EDT+4): 20111008T175059Z


Dear Karen,


Thanks for your mail of UTC=20111008T1343Z (several parts of which are
shown herewith, below) and its disturbing attachment (not shown
herewith).

You will hate my saying this, but  here goes:
I cannot give you a blanket undertaking to not "forward, copy or
reproduce" (your phrasing) your 20111008T1343Z mail or its attachment.

A fundamental reason for this is that you did not give me a chance to
refuse the documentation you thrust upon me before directing me to not
"forward, copy or reproduce".

An additional, secondary but wider, reason for this is that
I am not bound by you as by a directing authority, bound though I
would be qua Catholic by the Catholic Church exercising its
power-of-command licitly, or, again, bound though I would be qua
citizen by a constitutionally elected government exercising its
power-of-command licitly. All I can do is follow my own conscience,
defending the DDO to the best of my painfully limited ability.

I will state this additional, secondary-but-wider reason again, to
make sure my secondary point is clear: Your relationship with me is a
relationship of friendship, not of command. Friends cannot give orders
to friends, and when they try this (as of course sometimes happens in
imperfect friendships), it is the duty of properly loyal friends to
push back. I cannot give an undertaking to Karen Cilevitz because
directed by Karen Cilevitz, any more than I can give an undertaking
because directed by any other friend, such as Marianne or ((CONCEALED)) or
((CONCEALED)) or ((CONCEALED)) or ((CONCEALED)) 
or ((CONCEALED)) or Ian or Tuba. In each case I
maintain allegiance to principles, not to individual friends.

Although you will be upset by so blunt and direct a denial that our
relationship is one of directing superior and directive-executing
subordinate, I think that after a few days' agitated pondering you
will agree in your heart to the fairness of my position. I think that
you will therefore continue to be honoured to have me as a friend, and
that you will therefore continue to work with me and others in our
communal effort to save DDO.

I do do my utmost to protect DDO against those who, like, RASC, put
its telescope systems and its dark sky at risk. In doing so I do
listen politely and respectfully to any advice, as opposed to
directives, my many friends give me - as the shocking events unfold,
in ways now impossible to predict, from month to month and from year
to year.

I worry greatly about DDO, which I have as of 2011-10-01 spent a
logged 2881 hours, and an unlogged approx eight thousand dollars,
defending against fakes like RASC. I trust RASC no more than you do,
and I do herewith promise to continue doing all in my power to avoid
facilitating RASC's undermining of DDO.



Anxiously,

Tom

To my astonishment, this civil, although cool, response of mine to Karen triggered not the expected civil, correspondingly cool, response, but a heated one, which to my mind must be reproduced on the Web in the public interest (showing as it does that Karen lacks the qualities of restraint and judgement which the public would desire in a Town councillor). I perform only light censorship herewith, concealing only the name of a person whom I should shield from the public glare:

 
From: Karen Cilevitz ‹karen@gwsergo.com›
Date: Sat, Oct 8, 2011 at 3:51 PM
Subject: RE: Demand letter sent to RASC-TC from Daphne Williamson re
ddo.ca disclaimer
To: Toomas Karmo ‹toomas.karmo@gmail.com›


Oh for God's sake Toomas, relax, I don't need to receive these ridiculous
emails from you. I also did not need to INCLUDE you in the dissemination of
this letter. I did it as a COURTESY and this is what I get because I felt it
was absolutely necessary to inform you it was confidential and not to be
reproduced??

It is a legal letter. We don't want it published. You have a habit of
publishing everything on your website. We don't want that. How difficult is
that to understand?

I sent it to you as a COURTESY. Last time I do that.

I am NOT COMMANDING you to do anything. I was expressly asking you to keep
something confidential that is CONFIDENTIAL. Simple. I would think that
someone of your remarkable intelligence would get that without the
ridiculousness of your email below, nor your obvious necessity to send me
said ridiculous email and wag your finger at me as if you are an "authority"
or someone who feels they need to scold me.

Funny, NO-ONE else but you is offended at keeping something confidential
clearly marked as CONFIDENTIAL.

RASC has removed their offensive and insulting "disclaimer". Part 1
achieved.

Consider this the LAST email of a personal nature you will EVER receive from
me, Toomas. I do not need nor want any of your ridiculous emails being sent
to me ever again. I do NOT demand nor direct. How dare you. Your once
friendly, respectful and trusting attitude and demeanour toward me has
changed. Gee I wonder why that is? Must have something to do with that other
"reason" you suddenly became "non-trusting" of me in May. I find this
disturbing and extremely upsetting.

I was simply attempting to make it VERY clear to you WE do NOT want this
letter published publicly in any way. ((CONCEALED)) I knew would need no further
indication than a confidentiality disclaimer. You on the other hand.....

Pity you are unable to take that simple direction as a "request" and instead
take it as a ridiculous conspiracy attempt on my part to subvert you. How
absolutely, totally ludicrous. I have a "confidentiality" disclaimer beneath
ALL my emails. Is that offensive to you too?? How absurd.

And no, I actually don't consider you a friend anymore, Toomas. To me you
are now simply a colleague who is also interested in protecting the DDO and
helps out very gratefully with the AstroNats. And for that you will always
have my respect. The problem is I don't believe I have yours and I have
absolutely no idea why, other than a few very good possibilities. You appear
to have attempted to undermine my integrity and that of the DDO Defenders
from certain information which has come my way. And for that, you most
definitely lost me as a friend. My dedication and commitment to SAVING AND
PROTECTING the ENTIRE DDO and working tirelessly, diligently and
exhaustingly for the past 4 years to do just that, should NEVER be
questioned in any form whatsoever. But is by you?

DO NOT send me anymore of your rambling, inconsequential, ridiculous emails
that wag a rude and inappropriate finger at me. And yes, THAT is a command
if you wish to take it that way.

I have done nothing but be your friend and colleague over the past 4 years.
I have always jumped to your aid if necessary. Your email below is
atrocious. I have dedicated the last 4 years of my life to protecting and
saving the DDO. I too have incurred thousands and thousands of dollars in
expenses to maintain and manage this file. YOU are not the only one. It has
had an impact on my health and my personal life, impacts you couldn't
possibly be aware of. I have diligently and with great pride taken the reins
to lead the DDO Defenders over the past 4 years and lead our monumental
fight to save and protect her in her ENTIRETY for ALL - a position I will
gladly undertake for as long as is necessary as it is my absolute pleasure
and honour to do so. I do all of this with the utmost of personal pride and
honour.

I am upset, disgusted and beyond angry at your email below. And this on Yom
Kippur. Thanks a lot.

Do NOT respond. Do NOT email me EVER again.

THIS EMAIL IS CONFIDENTIAL. DO NOT REPRODUCE OR COPY. THANK YOU.

Karen Cilevitz

Chair - The David Dunlap Observatory Defenders Inc.
Website: www.karencilevitz.ca
Twitter: @kmcilevitz
BlackBerry: karenmona@telus.blackberry.net
Mobile: 416.990.6694

Owner/Operator ALX Technical Service Ltd. and GWS Ergonomics Inc.
Executive Assistant to the President - WNENA

This email and any attachment(s) are confidential and intended for the
recipient(s) only. Please do not forward, copy or reproduce in any manner
without the consent of the sender. Thank you.

A few points in the letter call for some minor degree of comment. In each case I first quote the pertinent language, in italics, and then add my comment in a plain typeface:

(a) It is a legal letter. This remark is prima facie puzzling: is the material referred to intended to be "legal" as opposed to being in some sense "in breach"? But what is meant is that the material referred to is of interest to lawyers. The details of this material (pertaining to the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada) are (I repeat) irrelevant to the matter I am here probing, namely, the nature of my personal relationship with Karen.

(b) You have a habit of publishing everything on your website. What is the "website"? Although I have been active in various ways on the Web since October of 2011, the only significant Web space under my control then was the (still-extant, but not particularly active) http://www.metascientia.com. What is "everything"? The meaning cannot be "everything in the field of human knowledge". Nor do I believe the meaning to be "everything involving DDO conservation". I believe Karen here meant only something like "Everything that interests you on computing, on your own psychiatric history, on Estonian affairs, and on the various other select topics referred to in the individual headlines of the 'Literary' and 'Business' and 'Technical' sections of http://www.metascientia.com", i.e., that her "everything" is an exaggeration.

(c) Must have something to do with that other "reason" you suddenly became "non-trusting" of me in May. The chronology here is a small way loose: I lost trust in Karen (as I explained above) in connection with her visit to DDO owner, and would-be developer, Metrus, very likely on the morning of 2011-04-26, and I am 60 per cent certain that I knew of this visit before 2011 April was over. But I conjecture that it is to this same problem that Karen is referring. She should post to my blog if my conjecture requires correction (taking care to use some appropriate intermediary, so as to adhere to our 2014-05-05 out-of-court settlement prohibition on direct person-to-person communications).

(d) You appear to have attempted to undermine my integrity and that of the DDO Defenders from certain information which has come my way. The meaning here is surely not, contrary to what is literally stated, that I have "undermined the integrity" of Karen and the organization she controls, causing them to do evil things. This does happen, as when Person A dangles cocaine or pornography in front of Person B, leading Person B into a moral fall. But the meaning here is surely, instead, that I have undermined the reputation for integrity of Karen and the organization. Although I cannot indeed recall having done this in the 2011 summer, there must be something to the accusation: somehow, somewhere, I must have said something wrong, in the nature of gossip. Here some explanation, through a posting to this blog by Karen or her team (subject to the just-mentioned restriction on person-to-person communications), would be eminently helpful.

(e) I have done nothing but be your friend and colleague over the past 4 years. I have always jumped to your aid if necessary. This is more true than false, as I hope I have explained in fully appropriate detail earlier on this present Web page.

(f) And no, I actually don't consider you a friend anymore, Toomas. Here what was surely meant was "any more", rather than "anymore". But the whole remark lacks weight, since it was written by a person at an hour of violent emotion, as opposed to reflective calm. She wrote in a state of calm in 2010, acknowledging my 2010 campaign contribution, that she "would always" treasure my friendship, and it is to this that (I say once again) I must hold her.

Although relations with Karen were in a sense put on hold after I got this scary letter, I did make some effort to patch things up the occasion of some day surgery. Karen's surgical matter seemed to me at the time to be grave. It was only later that I learned later the hospital procedure to have been routine, involving either no incision or only a most minor incision, and certainly involving nothing like the full dread panoply of an open-heart procedure under prolonged anaesthesia. Taking, however, a necessarily grave view on the basis of limited information, I sent Karen the following letter. The language is for the most part self-explanatory. I do conceal various names under the tag "((CONCEALED))", and I do additionally replace some unclear jargon with the tag "((EXPLICATION=))":

UTC=20120125T1855Z

Dear Karen (with subsequent e-mail transcript to 
desks of ((CONCEALED))+((CONCEALED))+((CONCEALED)) ), 

The news of your impending heart surgery reached me this morning,
about three hours ago. 

Please consider what I can now do, acting as your friend. You may
wish at this anxious time to have a look at the two books which I
believe are already on loan to you from my stacks, namely Gwynne
Dyer's _Climate Wars_ (first edition) and the hope-inspiring _Long
Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age_ by John Michael
Greer. 

Alternatively, however, it may be that I should be putting into your hands
a book more suited for contemplation (in the sense in which contemplation is a 
theological counterpoint or antithesis to action), namely L.H. Duquin's _They
Called Her the Baroness_. Duquin's book is the biography of a remarkable,
albeit occasionally foolish, woman, Catherine (Katya) de Hueck Doherty,
foundress of the Madonna House monastic movement. Duquin has the
merit and virtue of exposing her heroine fully, in all the oddness and
paradoxicality of a career that took Katya from Tsarist Russia into
the backwoods of eastern Ontario via, among other things, a collaboration
with Dorothy Day. 

Unless you advise otherwise, I will assume you do not have time to attend
to any of this before your operation, but that you will try to do
what you can afterward. My cell phone is, as always, 647-267-9566. 

Note also that it would be useful for us to talk about 
((EXPLICATION="Biblical Hebrew studies")) 
over tea, either before or after your operation. I should at that point
show you my minor Hebrew resources in 
((EXPLICATION="my place of residence")). As of bed
time last night, my timelog registered 117 hours 32 minutes. Progress,
although steady, is slow. 

I hope to be praying for your welfare with the Toronto branch
of ((CONCEALED)) 2012-01-30, 
in a meeting that I happened to
have arranged less than 24 hours before word of your impending
operation reached ((EXPLICATION="my place of residence")). 

Please note in the event of your death at surgery - but this is only a
_remote_ contingency, by the information percolating to 
((EXPLICATION="my place of residence")) - that
I shall forever consider you a 
friend, indeed a friend in the honourable-albeit-awkward category of
Erring Sister, and that I will be permanently grateful for the help
you were able to give in urging me to find specialists in
Asperger's Syndrome. 



                         Yours very faithfully


                         Tom 

This letter I wrote out on high-quality, heavy, parchment-like résumé paper with a hand-dipped nib, so as not to infringe Karen's 2011-10-08 prohibition on my sending her e-mail, and I think I used some kind of special service at the Canada Post counter, involving perhaps delivery-against-signature. I sent the above keyboarded transcript of it by e-mail to the three friends whose identities I have concealed.

The patching-up was a partial success, in that Karen later thanked me face to face for the letter, using this occasion also to assure me that she had returned Dwyer and Greer. (I have so far searched my living space in vain for these two books. The case of the books is at the moment in a confused state. The three forensically relevant facts are that I am for the most part quite tidy, with my book-lined, scholarly reading room always ready to receive visitors; but that I am additionally on occasion untidy, especially in my separate work room; and that in the 2012-2013 winter I actually had to pay the Richmond Hill library for a book of theirs which I myself mislaid.)

It is important for me to have quoted my UTC=20120125T1855Z letter here, since (as I now go on to explain) Karen was later to bring it up, in a misleading way, in a public forum.

Karen held a public meeting on the Saturday that was 2012-04-28, seeking in a church room roughly five hundred metres east of the DDO gate to explain the recently-unveiled OMB Minutes of Settlement to a possibly skeptical community. Her meeting was not attended as well as either Karen or I might have expected. Perhaps very roughly thirty individuals were present. (People, I would for my part suggest, are not fools, and they know how to stay away from something that does not feel right, even if they cannot articulate the source of their unease.) Almost all those who did come were in some way closely allied to Karen, for example by having explicitly worked in David Dunlap Observatory Defenders Inc. or in the 2010 Campaign Cilevitz. I was present as a kind of curious dissident, as were two or three or four others. Additionally, at the very end of the sorry proceedings, at what happened to be the unexpected moment of crisis, another of my friends helpfully walked in. Of Karen's immediate DDO-at-OMB Mediation team, Prof. Bleek was present; and Dr Ian Shelton and his wife Tuba were absent; and I rather suspect Karen's then lawyer, Daphne Williamson, was absent.

The main part of the 2012-04-28 meeting passed off without serious incident. Here the worst that happened was merely that Prof. Wilhelm Bleek responded, as it was proper for a retired political scientist to respond, to my own remark on the municipal government. I had made some such point as this, that the municipal government, in working through the Minutes of Settlement to destroy half of the 72-hectare DDO Trapezoid, was carrying out what had been its manifest intent ever since 2007 or 2008 (perhaps noting to Prof. Bleek that at the CRB Hearing our conservation-averse municipal government had ineptly advocated the imposition of a limited Cultural Heritage Landscape, over just half the Trapezoid terrain). We therefore, I urged, had ample reason to distrust our municipality. To this Prof. Bleek made the ill-judged reply that he had seen our municipal government for himself, at close quarters, in the OMB Mediation, and that on the strength of his intimate acquaintance he knew now that our municipal government could be trusted.

It is in retrospect perhaps fortunate that I did not have my wits around me, and that I consequently left my really cutting rebuttal to this lunacy (which I constructed for myself hours or days afterward) unuttered: Wilhelm, you are too young to have experienced at first hand the history of Mitteleuropa from 1933 onward, but your parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles must have experienced it. The principle that government is "to be trusted" had a name, "das Führerprinzip". In Ontario, we basically do not trust government. Our duty in Ontario, as we residents conceive it, is actively to distrust government at all levels, scrutinizing its operations and calling it to account. That, at any rate, is how things have stood here in Ontario since the Elgin Report, promulgated in the wake of the political ferment of 1837.

As this 2012-04-28 meeting wound down, a few people remained, talking around a blackboard or projector screen. The meeting was not at this point formally terminated. Having taken extensive notes on my clipboard, I continued keeping my seat, rather close to the front of the room, and continued writing on my clipboard. Karen then turned to me in fury and accused me of taking notes in the spirit of an eavesdropper, for conveyance to the Richmond Hill Naturalists. Although her accusation was substantially correct, I would here in this present piece of writing plead in extenuation that the meeting was not formally adjourned; that I was simply keeping the seat that I had had all along; and that if anyone was uncomfortable talking in the proximity of a note-writer, they were free to converse in some different part of the room. At the time, however, I did not try to defend myself. I instead broke down, and I think began to cry in some small way, possibly at this point already saying what I know I said at some stage in the proceeding, "Why can't we all just get along? Why can't we all just be friends?"

At this point a frightening thing happened. Karen left the question whether I was acting properly in taking my clipboard notes and opened up a new matter, again turning on me in fury, but now saying that I had sent her a letter, on the eve of an operation, taunting her with the prospect of impending death.

Even a person of strong nerves would find it hard to stay calm under so monstrous a provocation. I broke utterly. I buried my head in my knees; I wandered around the room; I leaned on a piano or some similar bulky installation and cried; I again buried my head in my knees, and pounded my own body with my fists, and cried and cried, with Karen repeatedly firing her accusation that I had tormented her by letter with a scenario in which I had tauntingly envisaged her death.

Realizing the profound danger I was now in, and listening also to duly diligent attempts at consolation from Karen's 2010 campaign manager (my personal friend, and sometime Green Party colleague, Liz Couture), I managed to get out of the room and under the open sky before the rather inevitable arrival of police. Although I did see two men in uniform, I cannot say whether they were from the police or whether they were merely church-building security officers. As good luck would have it, these two uniformed men stayed on the far side of a door opening into the meeting room. I was therefore able to make my way out unapprehended.

In the parking lot, I became increasingly coherent and increasingly quiet, listening at intervals to what was helpfully being said to me Liz, and I think also making reasonably rational points of my own. By our mutual agreement, I left the place of the meeting, walking the two kilometres home unaccompanied, and now vocalizing only mildly.

By the time I reached my place of residence, I was sufficiently calm to ask myself the necessary Singapore-or-USSR question: was there an unmarked police cruiser on the street? Although I at the time answered myself in the affirmative, I realized some days later (keeping something of a watch on what vehicles were routinely parked by which houses near my place of residence) that in all probability there had been no unmarked cruiser. A white vehicle that had initially aroused my suspicions proved on more careful analysis to be almost certainly the motorcar of a neighbour.

The incident concluded later in the day with a phone call, of no minor duration (we perhaps spoke for half an hour), from one of Karen's lieutenants, Dr Ian Shelton. Dr Shelton adopted a consoling and supportive tone.

But the matter was not over. Karen for her part continued by disseminating, at any rate to a small readership, an e-mail recounting the incident. On the afternoon of 2012-04-29 (SUN), Karen communicated with two person in my innermost circle of half a dozen Canadian friends, and in addition with Dr Ian Shelton and his family in my next-to-innermost circle of Canadian friends, in unsympathetic terms.

One might now think the sorry tale of my relations with Karen complete. In fact, however, there is still a little more to tell (some of it of a character not much less lurid than what I have just recounted), primarily relating to https://www.facebook.com/karenmonacilevitz.

In 2012, the conservationist Richmond Hill Naturalists, whom I support to the best of my limited abilities, took the DDO case to a full OMB hearing. In 2013 (as I explain also in my blog posting timestamped 20140218T035440Z), the OMB decision came in, conceding everything to Metrus-Corsica and its joint allies (the organization under Karen's control, and the Town of Richmond Hill), and conceding nothing to the Naturalists. I did what I could to bring the unjust character of the decision to public notice, commenting in the online Liberal that under the OMB settlement terms, homes would be built on, among other things, some McMansion lots coming to within a 150 metres of the main telescope dome, and adding that the settlement "undermines the Parks Canada case for UNESCO World Heritage designation".

I additionally ridiculed the decision, pointing out although it was eight months in the writing, it systematically misspelled the key name in our case, and asking sardonically, "What's not to like?" (I kindly enough refrained from pointing out the various other errors in names in the OMB's decision-writing, and a decision-writing error of roughly two years in a key date, and a decision-writing error in measurement. OMB's stated acre area, in their description of the "subject property", did not to even a somewhat coarse approximation equal their stated hectare area for this same property.) Somebody may well have drawn my sardonic online Liberal commentary to OMB's attention. Just a few days later, at any rate, OMB put out a special communication, correcting their erroneous "Dunlop" to the requisite "Dunlap".

As the year wore on, I continued to comment at the online Liberal in terms unlikely to please Karen, as I now explain at length, quoting all the relevant materials I can find (and probably, in so doing, leaving nothing out).

Very soon after the 2012-05-01 promulgation-of-OMB decision, editor Marney Beck at our principal Richmond Hill community paper, The Liberal, reported my online position, and also cited as other astronomically relevant material the DDO position of optical engineer Bud Skinner (formerly at the Canada-France Hawaii Telescope) and the ongoing DDO activities of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. (In what follows, the plain dots of ellipsis are from Ms Beck, rather than from me, and the dots of ellipses embedded in slashes are mine:)

/ . . . /

Toomas Karmo, who worked at the observatory as a respected scientist, posted a comment online at yorkregion.com saying that bright lights from "McMansions" will affect the use of the telescope and that the OMB decision "undermines the Parks Canada case for UNESCO World Heritage designation".

Another detractor, Toronto astronomer Bud Skinner, told The Liberal he's very upset that the Ontario and federal governments have "mismanaged and abdicated their duty" to the observatory, saying neither level of government helped to save the entire site because "they ignore the scientific community"

"There is an actual scientific community who wants our observatory back . . . to learn about stars," said Mr Skinner.

Whether or not the famed telescope that discovered the first black hole in 1972 can still operate effectively within the urban environment that has grown around it in Richmond Hill and the GTA is passionately disputed by scientists and supporters of the observatory.

The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, Toronto Centre, has stewardship of the observatory, which is still owned by the developer, and continues to give public tours and operate telescope programs for children and families.

/ . . . /

This reporting required a response from me, since it was liable to create the false impression that the ongoing research effectiveness of DDO was a matter of controversy, indeed of "passionate debate". I had to make it clear to the community that the research capability was, rather, an incontestable fact supported by (among quite a few other things) a much-cited recent series of fifteen astrophysical publications in a first-echelon journal.

Ms Beck's reporting additionally required a response from me so that I could correct her misleading "respected scientist", and so that I could protect myself from Metrus in the wake of my incautious language regarding McMansions.

I therefore sent the following to the newspaper Web server, in a posting timestamped "MAY 03, 2013 08:02 PM":

Thanks, Marney, for quoting me. More "technician" than "respected scientist", I'd say! ((GRIN)) But let me be clear, so I don't get sued by Metrus like those people around Fern Ave in 2011 or 2012: it will not all be McMansions. On OMB's vision, the 12 streets closest to Bayview get row houses, or something, in the manner of Lancashire. That's OMB's Wigan Pier. The McMansions are on the 2 new streets closest to the dome, safely distant from OMB's stormwater sump. That's the gated community of the future, with well-lit lawns coming to 150 metres from the dome where Slavek and the rest of us got orbits for common-envelope binary stars (15 much-cited papers in Astr.J. 1999 thru 2009). - Sincerely, grateful that you report both sides, Tom

A few minutes later, in a posting timestamped "MAY 03, 2013 08:24 PM", I took some minor corrective action:

Woops, just to make sure I avoid the dreaded lawsuit: when I wrote "gated community" in my previous comment, I did not mean to say Metrus plans to erect gates. I only think that over coming decades, with Ontario's economy disintegrating under Peak Oil and climate change, that would be a natural tactic for the gentry inhabiting those two near-the-dome McMansion streets. I did manage to foresee a rump-park fate for DDO, and did manage to write up some ideas on a gated community in a rump park, in 2007. Lawyers will find my 2007 DDO conservation essay still available at www dot metascientia dot com. In other words, I raised my gated-community idea well BEFORE Metrus bought in. - Anxiously, Tom

On or very shortly before 2012-05-10, Ms Beck published, in her printed-paper edition, a letter-to-the-editor from my conservationist friend Joe Agg (while to my mild irritation declining to publish in her printed-paper edition a careful and factually detailed letter from me). Joe's letter made some good points, but also gave the history of the case in a form that required my amicable correction. The part of Joe's letter which, through some injudicious omissions (I conjecture that he was not thinking everything through) failed to achieve a correctly journalistic standard of indictment read as follows:

/ . . ./ 

The real culprit in this case is not necessarily the developer, but the University of Toronto. The institution had a wonderful opportunity to create something worthwhile on this site, but chose to sell it off for very little. We could have had a northern campus, or other much needed facility.

Instead, we will have jammed together, dull, look-alike housing wiping out much needed green space in southern York.

The first thing the developer will do is destroy everything green and alive. Topsoil will be stripped off and little returned, leaving new homeowners wondering why nothing grows following their purchase.

The only hope is to encourage home purchasers to enrich the soil and plant trees and shrubs to try and replace what has been destroyed. LEAF (Local Enhancement and Appreciation of Forests), of which I am a member, the Town of Richmond Hill and others can help out with this effort.

 / . . . /

To this I made the necessary corrective, getting Joe's indictment straight, and yet doing so in terms which were bound to vex Karen, in a posting timestamped "MAY 10, 2013 10:10 AM":

There is not one culprit, but an alliance. When UofT started the process, Metrus bought in. The Town was from at least 2008 (by endorsing Scheinman's report) urging development on the eastern half of DDO's 72-hectare Trapezoid. Karen Cilevitz's DDO Defenders (DDOD; I founded this in 2007, but in 2008 Karen took DDOD over) in 2008, 2009, and 2010 deplored Scheinman and the Town as pro-development. Then came the municipal elections of 2010, with Karen's Ward 5 defeat. From 2011, Karen accepted development on the eastern half, forming an alliance with the Town. This alliance has now a pro-DDO-development settlement with Metrus. UofT's present financial involvement, if any, is not known to me. - Sincerely, Tom K (was with DDO)

Next (as I explain with the pertinent quotations) came a sequence of postings - two from me not mentioning Karen; then a disagreeable one from an anonymous "Dave"; and then the requisite reply from me, in which a mention of Karen proved also requisite.

On or just before 2014-05-09, some percipient person (perhaps conservationist Kathy Mochnacki) had written a conservationist letter, I suspect in the printed-paper edition of The Liberal as opposed to its online edition. To this I replied in concurring and amplifying terms, in a posting-to-server timestamped "MAY 09, 2013 09:34 AM":

Exactly. Of those house lots which are of McMansion dimensions, some approach to 150 metres of the dome. So we get unpredictable, uncontrollable, ambient lighting. How could any government now fund anything like our post-1999 binary-stars, NASA-Kepler, or Active Galactic Nuclei runs? In addition to mishandling Canada's largest heritage case, by undercutting the Mississaugas, undermining the potential Parks Canada UNESCO World Heritage List case, ignoring hydrogeological realities, and helping eviscerate the Cultural Heritage Landscape provisions of the Ontario Heritage Act (this case will be considered suasive at OMB in other CHL cases), OMB has given us a new Avro Arrow. - (signed) Toomas (Tom) Karmo (formerly with DDO)

This in turn I both amplified and hedged slightly, ten minutes later, in a posting timestamped "MAY 09, 2013 09:43 AM":

In case municipal, Metrus/Corsica, or DDO Defenders lawyers try to get me, I should add that I am not claiming DIRECT unpredictable light from the new lane and the 14 new streets, including the two McMansion streets near the dome. I claim only unpredictable SCATTERED light, from atmospheric particulates. You can't screen that out with vegetation buffers. The volume of atmospheric particulates will indeed itself be increased if OMB gets its way and half the existing parkland is replaced with a settlement of around 2000 people, running somewhat more than 500 vehicles. - Hastily, Tom

The anonymous "Dave" now commented as follows, in a posting timestamped "MAY 11, 2013 04:08 PM":

So glad that Toomas is no longer with the DDO, the group is much better off without you.

Here I was (to reiterate) compelled not only to reply, but to mention Karen. Being (I think) under time pressures or in some other way stressed, I replied eleven days after the identity-cloaked "Dave", in a posting timestamped "MAY 22, 2013 02:16 PM":

Sorry, Dave, I don't understand what you are saying here. I was employed at the David Dunlap Observatory (DDO). DDO was an astrophysics research institution, now in limbo. There is indeed a relevant "group" which continues to act (i.e., is not in limbo), but it is not the DDO: rather, it is the group led by Karen Cilevitz, called the DDO Defenders Inc. (DDOD), whose pro-development, pro-Metrus/Corsica stance I oppose. Is DDOD the group to which you refer? Perhaps you could post again, making your language duly clear? It would also be advisable to post under your full name, as I do, so that we maintain transparency, and thereby hold this comments page to a correctly high journalistic standard. (signed) Toomas (Tom) Karmo

So far as I know, the identity-cloaked "Dave" did not make a follow-up posting addressing my requests for clarity and transparency.

I believe my next foray into online journalism at The Liberal was in the evening of 2013-08-31, in response to Marney Beck's (printed-paper edition) article of 2013-08-30, "New challenge mounted to observatory deal". Ms Beck's article had reported action by the Richmond Hill Naturalists at Divisional Court. The Naturalists were trying to get a ruling upholding the 2009 Conservation Review Board broadly conservationist DDO decision. Their hope was that the ruling would censure the Ontario Municipal Board for paying insufficient regard to the CRB. (This action led to a 2013-12-09 hearing, of duration around 150 minutes, in which Madam Justice Himel found existing law not to be on our side: the nub of her verdict, released on 2013-12-31, was that under existing law CRB decisions inform and advise OMB, and yet fail to bind OMB.) My 2013-08-30 posting read as follows:

In promoting a storm-runoff sump, a lane, and 14 streets for the DDO Trapezoid (i.e., in destroying half of those 72 historic hectares), the OMB settlement mutilates a national patrimony meriting UNESCO designation. In promoting light pollution (the more distant of the envisaged 530 homes are bad, the envisaged McMansions near the telescope bad and comic), the settlement subverts astrophysics. What are the misleadingly named DDO Defenders defending when, in what Marney Beck calls their "outrage", they attack a principled community organization with 1950s DDO roots? (signed) Toomas (Tom) Karmo (2006-2008 DDO employee)

A few minutes later, I added the following, in a fresh posting:

Regarding "misleadingly named" (my posting, below): It was I who created the name "DDO Defenders", in the winter of 2007-2008, and it was I who, under this DDOD banner, wrote our first newsletters. Although Karen excluded me from key 2008-onward DDOD work, the name was accurate until 2011, with DDOD consistently defending land conservation and astrophysics. It was only in 2011 that Karen, in one of her "outrages", split with RH Nats; incorporated DDOD; made her new corporation an OMB-Mediation party answering to her duly selected, duly bulldozer-tolerant, new DDOD Board; and acquiesced in the 14 telescope-crippling Trapezoid streets projected in Mediation by Metrus-Corsica and municipal authorities. (signed) T.Karmo (2011 DDOD dissident)

On 2013-09-04, the online Liberal (and I presume also the printed-edition Liberal) printed a harsh editorial by Marney Beck, attacking the Richmond Hill Naturalists under the title "What can be gained from another observatory battle?". (Her "provisional court" is an error requiring correction to "Divisional Court". Ms Beck's reference to scandalous behaviour by the Richmond Hill Naturalists' lawyer, MacLean, who departed from client instructions on Summation Day, on the other hand, is accurate, and indeed points to a large problem with Ms MacLean which I must, after liaising with appropriate authorities, analyze at some point, on some server - but not here and now on this server, dedicated as this server is to the special topic of Karen. On this server it suffices to say simply that Ms MacLean misrepresented her client, the Naturalists, in claiming that the Naturalists were happy with much of the OMB DDO Mediation settlement when they in fact opposed it in the terms Ms MacLean had herself developed at the podium in all the previous days of the long OMB hearing:

Some are cheering the Richmond Hill Naturalists' move to take the fate of the disputed David Dunlap Observatory site to a higher court.

The Naturalists' formal request to have the provisional court overturn an Ontario Municipal Board decision comes after a 12-day hearing in August and September of last year.

To say it was costly is an understatement: five parties and their lawyers were represented, including our Town of Richmond Hill. So there's no doubt your tax dollars were used to fight over the multi-party settlement that was hammered out to let landowner Metrus/Corsica build homes on the east section of the land along Bayview Avenue, north of 16th Avenue, while "gifting" the western 56 per cent of the site to us, the residents, as a future park.

But that wasn't enough for the Naturalists, whose stated aim throughout the 12-day hearing, on its website and on numerous "save the park" lawn signs seen around town was to preserve the entire site.

Yet on the final day of the hearings, during the summation before OMB chairperson Karlene Hussey, when all the evidence had been sifted through, argued over and dissected word by word, the Naturalists' lawyer, Virginia MacLean, said if one internal boundary on the mediated settlement plan were changed and one small parcel deleted, "we have no problem" with the settlement.

Gasps were heard and frustration was immediately evident among the lawyers and representatives of the five parties.

Twelve days of hearings and all that money was spent on lawyers and the Naturalists really only wished one boundary had been changed and a small parcel of land protected?

It was a stunning and anti-climactic ending to a long, tortuous hearing.

Now they want to drag all parties back to a provincial court to hear all the evidence again.

This despite an attempt this summer to have Ms Hussey’s May OMB decision in favour of the multi-party settlement overruled.

Although Ms Hussey said the settlement represented good planning and overall is "in the public interest", the Naturalists asked the OMB to reject her ruling. In July, the top OMB representative refused to do that — stating no "errors in law" were found.

So twice the various aspects of their case and their overall aim to preserve the entire site has failed to sway the OMB.

Now they want to rehash the decision again at our provincial courts.

Yet by their own lawyer's admission, the group wasn't completely opposed to the settlement that would see nearly 100 acres dedicated as a park.

Why does it have to be all or nothing for the Naturalists? The site was originally supposed to have 833 houses built on it; now that has been reduced to 530. Isn't that a victory, especially from the pro-developer OMB?

How can a member-supported Naturalists group afford yet another costly court hearing?

Yes, they have asked the courts to award them costs if their request is successful, but isn't that a huge gamble?

There's no guarantee that the courts will even agree to hear the case.

But if a court hearing proceeds, all five parties — including the Town of Richmond Hill, funded by our tax dollars — will be dragged back to court yet again.

Only the lawyers should be cheering.

I made my reply in the online Liberal, in a posting timestamped "SEPTEMBER 05, 2013 10:28 AM" (with an unfortunate error in syntax in my last sentence):

In attacking, week upon week, the RH Naturalists (a conservationist 58-year-old community organization numbering among its earliest supporters Prof. Helen Hogg and Prof. Ruth Northcott from my Observatory), the _Liberal_ is exercising, in a fully legitimate way, its free-speech rights. While objecting to what our pro-development editor says, our community must affirm her right to say it. But will the _Liberal_ now will be giving space on its newsprint op-ed page to the maligned Naturalists, so that they can reply? (signed) Toomas (Tom) Karmo (supporter of Naturalists; 2007 founder of DDO Defenders, and a dissident within that now-developer-friendly organization from 2011 onward; 2006-2008 DDO employee)

An anonymous "Richie" made a good reply to this in a posting timestamped "SEPTEMBER 05, 2013 08:40 PM (as I have also had occasion to discuss elsewhere on this present blog):

@Toomas. A thoughtful man would rethink that comment about the editor being pro-development. The Liberal has published articles opposing many development proposals (like the one at Yonge and Major Mac), supporting the Town's policies on parkland, supporting the Town's right to get parkland from developers. The Naturalists have not said a word or done a thing to support the bigger fight for parkland, spending their efforts instead on what looks very much like a lost cause. That is a choice, but don't put a pro-development label on other people who think we have got as good as we are going to get on the DDO and who have in the meanwhile engaged in other important efforts for greenspace in Richmond Hill.

Here was the sole instance of an online Liberal commentator writing in opposition to the DDO conservationist faction, and yet doing so in measured, literate, professional terms. I conceded to "Richie" the validity of his central point (while calling him on his anonymity), in a posting timestamped "SEPTEMBER 05, 2013 11:40 PM":

Yes, you are quite right, Richie: I wrote carelessly, implying that the _Liberal_ has a general pro-development stance when I meant only to say that in the specific instance of DDO their stance is (inappropriately) pro-development. I will henceforth choose my language carefully. - Please, Richie and everyone else, whether opposing or favouring full DDO conservation: please sign your posts with first name and surname, so that we maintain standards of accountability in this community debate. (signed) Toomas (Tom) Karmo

Around the same time that Ms Marney Beck attacked the Naturalists in her editorial space, reader Ms Kathy Mochnacki published a letter-to-the editor. I have this document with date 2013-09-04 in the online Liberal, but I am 90-percent certain that it appeared also in the newspaper's paper edition.

Ms Mochnacki's letter for its part generated a long and rather harsh reply from Karen, at her https://www.facebook.com/karenmonacilevitz.

It is perhaps appropriate for me to maintain the narrative flow of this chronicle-of-Toomas-online-Liberal-postings by relegating both Ms Mochnacki's (commendable) and Karen's (unfortunate) letter to plaintext pages on this present server. The resulting pair of plaintext pages is reachable by clicking here and here (and in each case using the browser "Back" button to return to this present page). In the case of Karen's comment on Mochnacki, I interpose a lengthy comment, making it clear that Karen has, for whatever motive (I remain agnostic as to whether Karen acted from malice or from innocent inadvertence) misrepresented Prof. Tom Bolton's testimony at the 2012 OMB hearing.

The publications by Kathy Mochnacki and Karen led me to make an online posting to The Liberal timestamped "SEPTEMBER 05, 2013 01:11 PM". In this posting, I greatly regret the typo "Defenderds" for "Defenders". Far from being an attempt at unpleasant and puerile humour, my typo was inadvertent:

Well said, ma'am. Many in our community will be sorry to see Ms Cilevitz attacking this brave letter from you in her Facebook posting of 4:17 am on 2013-09-05 (THU). I will later have to do appropriate public work to correct the historical record, for your sake, and indeed for the sake of one of my former DDO supervisors, Prof. Tom Bolton. (He, too, gets named in Karen's posting.) (signed) Toomas (Tom) Karmo (supporter of RH Naturalists; 2007 founder of DDO Defenderds, and a dissident within that now-developer-friendly organization from 2011 onward; 2006-2008 DDO employee)

An anonymous "Carol" took up the cudgels on behalf of conservation in a posting timestamped "SEPTEMBER 05, 2013 09:25 PM" (showing a good heart, and yet making some errors in English, notably in her spelling of "sacrilege"; I also note that the dots of ellipsis are from this "Carol", not from me):

I agree with Kathy Mochnacki! The entire 100% of David Dunlap must and will be saved. It is a sacrilage to cut it up and have people living on these heritage lands. We must fight to save all of the David Dunlap lands and not compromise. Just having all the human activity on these beautiful grounds will destroy the treasured vegetations, wild-life, and even down to littlest mushroom. Please support the Richmond Hill Naturalist in their ongoing fight to superior court to save it ALL. Go Naturalist Go . . . and by the way every resident of this fair town should be backing the RH Naturalist in their fight to save these Heritage Lands.

The next morning, this same Carol again showed (I would respectfully submit) a good heart, posting again in the same vein and style, under the timestamp "SEPTEMBER 06, 2013 11:38 AM":

Kathy Mochnacki has it Right !! The vision for this Town is condominiums up and down Yonge Street. Our parkland is little and in sporadic areas. Richmond Hill Naturalists are defending the land to the last seed. I am so proud of their efforts and every citizen in this Town should be as well and if they are not I am Shocked. We will not compromise on this Heritage Land and neither are the Richmond Hill Naturalists. Richmond Hill Naturalist are sticking to their mandate despite all the odds you so carefully un-cover - I support the Protection of the ENTIRE 100% of the David Dunlap observatory Lands & there is no compromise. These are Heritage lands and they must be protected at all COSTS.

To anonymous "Carol" there replied an anonymous "Dave" (perhaps the same "Dave" as has appeared already in this recounting of online-newspaper materials), in a posting timestamped "SEPTEMBER 06, 2013 11:50 PM". As with Carol and all others, I here quote Dave verbatim, leaving some errors in English intact (and I note, again, that the dots of ellipsis are his, not mine):

Fight all you want, but unless their is a valid reason to change the OMB decision, which is highly unlikely since the Chair has already approved the deal... this exercise is a waste of time and money. Of course you all hope that all the land could have been saved, but the deal was agreed upon by 4 of the 5 parties involved, approved by RH Council, and the OMB agreed the deal was OK... you can support the Naturalists all you want, but that is not going to stop this deal from going through... its a done deal folks. Remember one thing, intensification is what the Province of Ontario wants, and to think they only got 60%, I consider the compromise a GOOD DEAL for RH residents, it could have been worse..

Having decided that the Dave letter raised issues of legal philosophy, I replied, in a posting timestamped "SEPTEMBER 07, 2013 08:20 PM". I took this also as an opportunity to remind the public that Karen's "Defenders" were developer-friendly:

Identity-cloaked Dave: In opposing the court testing of OMB-DDO, are you arguing (a) that OMB is fully reliable on points of law (i.e., is an institution of such consistent integrity that it is inappropriate for a court to test its reasoning)? Or are you arguing (b) that OMB is too powerful to oppose, i.e., that might makes right? - I reject both (a) and (b), because I don't want to see Metrus-Corsica, or their allies in the municipality and in the now-misnamed "DDO Defenders", undercut the authority of judges and provincial statutes. (signed) Toomas (Tom) Karmo (supporter of RH Naturalists; 2007 founder of DDO Defenders, and a dissident within that now-DDO-developer-friendly organization from 2011 onward; 2006-2008 DDO employee)

So far as I know, Dave did not reply to my question with a follow-up posting.

A final flurry of 2013 community-paper online activity involving me occurred when the Ward Four seat on Council fell vacant. There was much community discussion of the best way to fill the seat, whether by election (this is expensive) or by appointment (this was the procedure ultimately followed, perhaps correctly, with Mr David West appointed to the rather short-lived position; Ward Four was going to be contested at the polls rather soon, on 2014-07-27).

Among the many candidates putting themselves forward for possible appointment to the Ward Four vacancy were (a) community activist, and former municipal candidate, Angel Freedman, and (b) my friend Liz Couture, manager of Campaign Cilevitz 2010 (and our Green Party candidate at the provincial election of 2007-10-10). Ms Freedman maintained what might perhaps be considered a dignified stance, not choosing to promote herself in the online edition of The Liberal. Liz, on the other hand, did, and indeed cited her past DDO advocacy as a point in favour of her candidacy, going so far as to call herself "versed" in DDO.

Having sounded Liz out on municipal affairs in a phone chat on 2013-11-25, and having found her DDO knowledge to be weak, I felt that I might as well write something supporting Liz, and yet in terms no more and no less flattering than her grasp of DDO affairs merited. My moderately supportive posting was timestamped "NOVEMBER 26, 2013 01:07 PM". (The by-laws 63-95 and 100-09 to which I refer are, respectively, the 1995 DDO-protecting light-pollution bylaw and the 2009 bylaw defining the Cultural Heritage Landscape (in the meaning of the Ontario Heritage Act) on all but roughly one quarter of the 72-hectare DDO "Trapezoid". The cyber-unpleasantness to which I refer in The Liberal I discuss in detail, employing that description of it, later on this present blog page. (The expression "cyber********" is now forbidden me, under the terms of Karen's and my 2014-05-05 out-of-court legal settlement. It might be argued that in the block quote which I am about to make, I have legal immunity, since I am about to quote an earlier publication rather than re-publishing the forbidden term. That I am legally immune is particularly firmly established (so it might be argued) by the fact that I am about to quote a publication which would have become "Exhibit J" in Karen's civil action, had Karen brought her case to trial. This "Exhibit J" I likewise duly exhibit, as part of Karen's civil-action Motion Record, at http://www.karen-vs-toomas-legaldocs.ca. - The 2014-05-05 settlement also forbids me to now use another, related, word appearing in my quote, between the words "Cilevitz DDO" and the words "at RH Christian Community Church". The same reasoning, it might be argued, once again establishes my legal immunity: firstly, I am here about to quote a historical document, and am not going to write fresh contrary-to-settlement material; and secondly, my quote is in any case coming from an "Exhibit J" in Karen's eminently public Motion Record. Nevertheless, acting from what might be called "an abundance of caution", I redact the problematic words in quoting here.))

Thanks, Liz, for taking phone 2013-11-25. I'm 80% sure you merit solid passing grade (but not "High Honours" - your grasp of "DDO file", which you cite below, proved weak on by-laws 63-95, 100-09. I specially note you were able to console me when I melted down under Cilevitz DDO cyber[[part of one word deleted]] (her Facebook thread 2013-11-22/2013-11-25), just as you helped me handle meltdown under Cilevitz DDO [[one word deleted]] at RH Christian Community Church 2012-04-28. Calmness in crises is good in a prospective Councillor. And I saw already your devotion to principles when assisting in your provincial (Green) campaign of 2007. - Respectfully, Tom Karmo (formerly with DDO, working for conservn of all 77 hectares, resident in Ward 2)

Feeling it necessary to be even-handed, and I think having at this stage learned of some concrete good done by Ms Freedman (she had managed to cut out the middleman in the administration of certain clothing donations to the poor, by offering up space in her own garage for storage, in lieu of paid warehousing), I posted also in defence of Ms Freedman. This I did in an inadvertent double posting, bearing the pair of timestamps "NOVEMBER 26, 2013 06:47 PM" and "NOVEMBER 26, 2013 06:48 PM"):

To be clear: In writing positively about Liz herewith, I by no means seek to disparage other good candidates. Ms Freedman, do you now perhaps also wish to brief the public about yourself, in the same style as Liz has helpfully used? - Respectfully, Toomas Karmo (autistic resident of Ward 2, employed at DDO 2006-2008).

To my dismay, Liz now did two unsatisfactory things. On the one hand, she sent me a 2013-11-27 e-mail backtracking on her support for me in the face of Karen. On the other, she amplified her historical record in partial and tendentious terms, in a posting timestamped "NOVEMBER 27, 2013 10:14 PM":

Responding to Mr Karmo, I am "versed" but not necessarily "well versed" on the DDO file,. Involvement was minimal - canvassing signatures for petition, speaking at Queen's Park rally, sponsoring fundraiser table to hep pay legal bills. As leader, one needs to recognize when to back off and let others lead, which is what I did when I knew that this file was in the capable hands of Karen Cilevitz, who stepped up to the plate, and with huge personal sacrifice, stayed the course and followed through. Over the years, I've read 100's of emails she's sent us, quick scan method, so some details have left me. Although the outcome of DDO was not as everyone had hoped for, it was an unprecedented accomplishment.

Some reaction was called for, and so I posted a reply timestamped "NOVEMBER 29, 2013 01:55 PM". It might be argued that in what I am about to quote, I have legal immunity in quoting the two now-forbidden words following the two occurrences of the word "Karen's", for the reasons already given in respect of my quotation from my "NOVEMBER 26, 2013 01:07 PM" posting. Nevertheless, I here again exercise "an abundance of caution", suppressing the problematic language within my quotation:

Jeepers, Liz (your posting of 2013-11-27). You do now admit to speed-reading DDO papers, but fail to admit that your limited DDO advocacy was done under the umbrella of RH Nats, way back in 2008. And you backtrack in 2013-11-27 e-mail to me on your 2013-11-25 phone support in the face of Karen's cyber[[part of one word deleted]] (her Facebook discussion thread re DDO, 2013-11-22/2013-11-25). You tell me in your 2013-11-27 mail that my publicly discussing Karen's [[one word deleted]] may cause "extra problems". I can't back a Ward 4 candidate who turns like a windvane as soon as (so I believe) Karen applies pressure. - Anxiously, (Dr, not "Mr") T.Karmo (resident of Ward 2, autistic)

So much, then, for what I suspect is a full chronicling of all my online 2013 activity in Richmond Hill's principal community newspaper, The Liberal.

I should perhaps add that I posted additionally, at least once, in 2014, in terms liable to vex Karen. In response to a 2014-01-20 article in The Liberal entitled "Dunlap Defender taking second run at council seat", I used the online interface to make my position on the 2014 Campaign Cilevitz clear:

By signing on to a contested OMB settlement that seeks to give developer Metrus-Corsica 531 homes at DDO, my friend Karen betrayed the RH Nats, my DDO family, and her own values. I'll now have to go round to the several hundred houses I visited in Campaign Cilevitz 2010, explaining how wrong I was to have backed my misguided friend with $160 of my 2010 money and 196 hours of my 2010 time. (signed anxiously) Toomas Karmo (2007 founder of DDO Defenders; employed DDO 2006-2008).)

Some part of my 2013 activity triggered an angry comment from Karen at https://www.facebook.com/karenmonacilevitz, in which Karen complained -  accurately enough, but without the icy calm which such a situation requires among educated people in a civilized jurisdiction - that I had used the online newspaper to attack her.

Mindful of Karen's comment, I resolved to embark on an experiment. Among the interests injured at OMB had been a party with whom Karen's relations were poor, namely the Mississaugas. Their land had been in essence stolen from them, in 1787 and 1805, under the "Toronto Purchase". Within this offensively misnamed "Purchase" sat not only such valuable things as the footprint of the present-day City of Toronto, but the 72-hectare DDO Trapezoid and the 5-hectare DDO Panhandle. There was grave reason to think that OMB was for its part paying inadequate regard to the Mississaugas interest, not only at the 2012 Hearing but in a 2013-11-21 follow-on conference call. Should I not take this as an opportunity to try posting in a polite way not to The Liberal but directly to Karen's Facebook, pointing out my fears of an injustice, and seeing to what extent she might now be capable of responding to my courtesy with a courtesy of her own?

I accordingly made a posting which I show here in screenshot:

This courteous posting Karen quickly deleted (I was not quite expecting so radical a response), and made a discourteous posting of her own (this was not at all the scale and tone of response that I was expecting, even though I had in 2011 October experienced Karen's capacity for heated replique):

I have called the posting discourteous. It in fact goes beyond discourtesy: it crosses the line separating rudeness from something worse. The allegation that I have published falsehoods in the Liberal is itself false (as I hope emerges quite clearly from the detailed, and I suspect complete, chronicling I have just given). Additionally, it will be clear from what I have written above about the details of 2012-04-28 that Karen's account (the bare "you lost control of yourself", written without context) omits almost all the relevant facts, leaving readers with the false impression that I am hot-tempered, indeed that I am a danger to the public.

For completeness, I should add that I was indeed absent from the teleconference (Karen raises this question; I had a report of the teleconference only after the fact, from the RH Naturalists). I should also for completeness add, and indeed should underscore, that contrary to what Karen asserts through the person of the Metrus-Corsica lawyer, the Mississaugas had not been "contacted appropriately" (this point I checked with some care, in an exchange of four or so e-mails between my desk and a relevant Mississaugas desk).

How to handle this thing-worse-than-rudeness? The Facebook team were scant help, though I submitted a full report to them. I proposed, as a remedy, that Karen's account be kept active, but that as a mild punitive measure she be required to show the courteous Facebook posting from me which she had deleted, and to which she had responded with her heated words. To this there was essentially no answer from Facebook, beyond bland legal boilerplate.

Somewhat more helpful were the York Regional Police, whom I encouraged to start a file, and to whom I pointed out that some vandalism, of prima facie political motivation, had been inflicted in the last couple of years on two individuals (not on me) within the camp of the RH Naturalists. I remarked to YRP that in view of the vandalism I must now be alert to the possibility of physical attack. Here I had a kind, neutral, reply from Sergeant Chris Palmer in Newmarket, in the first instance by telephone, but then with a neutral and correctly reticent e-mail followup.

I would respectfully suggest that anyone, whether kindly disposed to me or unkindly disposed, with any information that YRP should be tracking, send e-mail to Sergeant Palmer through 920-at-sign-yrp.ca, or alternatively telephone him or his team at 905-830-0303x2608.

3. Remarks
in conclusion:
philosophical
and theological
analysis
of our relations

I may now wrap up my attempt at a correctly detailed, correctly comprehensive, accounting of my relationship with Karen by embarking on an overall assessment.

It is clear that Karen is in some sense a bad girl, an erring sister. It is also clear that I should not be washing my hands of her, but instead should be continuing to engage with her - in a rather crude and banal sense, by attending such public meetings as I am still allowed, by our 2014-05-05 out-of-court legal settlement, to attend (at any rate the doors of an all-candidates meeting remain open to me, and I can additionally convene a public DDO-awareness meeting of my own, inviting Karen to attend and debate), and going to the same houses that I visited in Campaign Cilevitz 2010, and in other respects being active on her 2014 hustings as a citizen urging her electoral defeat; but also in a more subtle sense, by working toward (authentic) reconciliation.

What form might authentic reconciliation assume? One starts here from the notion (somewhat abused, I believe, on "Vision TV" by late-night Bible-thumpers, and therefore somewhat suspect among today's reflective citizens) of sin. Indeed one starts from the absolute basics: Is there such a thing as sin at all?

In considering this question, it is useful to recall the words of Madonna House theologian Fr Denis Lemieux, on p. 109 of his book Going Home: Reflecting on the Mercy of God with Catherine de Hueck Doherty:

Love is at the centre of reality, or something else is at the centre of reality, or there is no centre, or there actually is no such thing as "reality". Those are our options.

There is a persistent line of thought, liable to come up in the undergraduate Department-of-Philosophy tutorial, that "all truth is relative". This is one way of denying that there actually is such a thing as reality.

The glib, easy reply to the slogan "All truth is relative" is, "Is it, then, a merely relative truth that all truth is relative?"

But a more thoughtful reply to the contention, however it may be worded, that there is no such thing as reality is to point to physics. It cannot be denied that there are profound conceptual difficulties in the interpretation of quantum mechanics. (This is a point suggested by the troubling story of Shrödinger's Cat.) It cannot be denied that the position of the observer has at least something to do with quantum physics, and that some version of quantum physics must ultimately be unified with the rest of physics (notably, with gravitation), in a theoretical project at present incomplete.

Let all quantum-mechanical difficulties be conceded. The point remains that if there is no objective, mind-independent reality, it becomes difficult or impossible to state why we see the things we do at telescopes, when we look far out in space and far back in time. Laboratory physics coheres internally, and it seems to cohere well enough with even the grandest lookbacks in observatory cosmology (as when we detect a galaxy at a redshift of z=8 or 9 or more, corresponding to the state of the cosmos only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Why is there such coherence, if there is "no such thing as 'reality'"?

It will rightly be objected that there is no tight logical entailment here. It does not rigorously follow, from the coherence of our telescope observations and our laboratory physics, that there really is an objective, mind-independent, external reality. The argument is only that no other hypothesis could equally well explain the impressive coherence.

But consider the hypothesis that the cosmos has existed for more than five minutes. The coherence of our present memories and historical records does not rigorously entail the existence of an old universe (in which, for instance, the Christmas card dated 1991 December, and one's own memories of that somewhat remote Christmas, cohere as the joint effects of a common, decades-remote, cause). For all that deductive logic can establish, the cosmos could have sprung into existence out of nothing, just four minutes ago, with all our present memories and historical records intact. Nevertheless, it is reasonable, in view of the coherence, to postulate an old universe.

Certainly in their conduct of practical affairs, as observed over a four-minute period (in their actual practical use of bus timetables, in their actual reproaches for promises allegedly made-in-the-past and not yet kept, and so on), philosophers do invariably betray many a sign of believing in a universe more than five minutes old.

By other lines of argument, it can be made at least reasonable to assert a mind-independent reality in mathematics. It is sometimes said that numbers are "mere human constructs". If, however, all sentient beings were to perish from the cosmos, the number zero would still exist, having in fact many interesting properties - it would still be the identity element for addition on the integers; it would still be the unique integer n such that for every integer m, the product of n and m is n; and indeed it would have the rather grand contingent, empirical property of now accurately enumerating the sentient beings.

By still further lines of argument, it can be made at least reasonable to assert a mind-independent, external, objective reality in ethics. Here I will merely point out - dimly recalling Sir Peter Strawson's arresting phrase, "freedom and resentment" - that, however inclined some people may in practice be to say that morality is "merely subjective", everyone finds that there are at least some hypothetical lines of action directed toward them that they would resent. Perhaps Person A does not mind being lied to. Perhaps Person B does not mind being raped. However, for pretty well every person, we can find some line of action or other such that if that person had to undergo that particular disgusting thing, the reaction would be not merely one of crying from discomfort (as, perhaps, a tortured chicken or squirrel might cry), but of outright resentment.

What, now, is resentment? This is a different state of mind from mere discomfort. We do not resent the poison ivy for stinging us. We do not resent the microbes for giving us bronchitis. Implicit in resentment is the idea that something has happened which ought not to have happened. Something is here unpleasant to us not in the merely subjective sense in which strawberries become unpleasant when covered in Dijon mustard, but in a special moral sense - the sense, namely, in which unfairness is unpleasant.

We may reject, then, in physics, in mathematics, and in ethics, the fourth of the four horns in Fr Lemieux's tetralemma, that "there actually is no such thing as 'reality'".

What, now, about the third horn, that there is indeed a mind-independent reality, but that it has no "centre"? This is atheism.

Atheism is common enough, and it is striking to see how its proponents hold it as an article of deep, fervent faith.

One way to bring out the faith aspect of atheism is to invite one's interlocutor to contemplate Saint Joseph's Oratory in Montréal. Here hang - or, at any rate, hung, when I was last inside, years ago - dozens upon dozens of crutches, perhaps even some hundreds of crutches, from persons purporting to have been healed upon praying to God through Saint Joseph. No doubt many of these crutches have been left by the deluded or the fraudulent. But is each crutch in that big array a mere testimonial to delusion and fraud? Every single one? It may be so. To assert, however, that it is so, to assert it in the fervent tones of a Hitchens, to assert it so dogmatically, so sweepingly, is to profess a faith as zealous as a Bible-thumper's.

Common though atheists are, good atheists are uncommon. By "good atheist" I mean here, "the atheistic equivalent of the good Catholic". It must be at once understood that a good Catholic is by no means the same as a Catholic who is regular in attending Mass and the Sacrament of Penance. These things are consistent with the religion of the Pharisees. It may well turn out that the really "good Catholics" of Toronto have in their ranks surprising people, including people irregular in their religious observance - for instance, prostitutes and criminals, who realize their own lostness more vividly than the outwardly pious, like me.

In the world of atheism, the corresponding "good atheists" will be the individuals who not only affirm with their lips that there is no God, but live this perceived truth out, with passion and sincerity. They will seek out serious atheist authors.

Perhaps Marx will prove useful in their quest. Finding good atheist authors is a challenge. Being quite willing to be converted to atheism if the arguments are more powerful than the arguments for Catholicism - my duty is to follow the truth where it may lead - I did in 2012 or so try a few chapters of Christopher Hitchens. But Hitchens felt in the end rather bourgeois, no more believable than watered-down "liberal" Christianity. Marx, as I say, or alternatively some of his disciples, may provide more traction.

The good atheists will work, with Internet and printing press, even with Molotov cocktail, for appropriate atheist goals in real life (perhaps for the ultimate triumph of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat), mindful at every self-denying step along their grim path of the grim truth that faith without works is dead.

The good atheists will above all realize that in their lives they are "condemned to freedom", tragically alone in a world without a centre, in a cosmos lacking meaning beyond such meaning as may be freely imposed on it by the human intellect in a theatre of political and military praxis.

I think of the good atheist as a forbidding, heroic figure, in the manner of some long-bearded, harsh, Slavic prophet-of-nihilism, or of some zealous Rosa Luxemburg, in the early twentieth century. Done properly, atheism would not be at all unlike theism in its shaggy, severely moral, severely prophetic, community-witness externals.

Karen is not a good atheist.

Were she a good atheist, she would never have permitted herself the already-quoted 2011-10-08 e-mail reference to Yom Kippur.

Were she a good atheist, she would never have permitted herself the already-mentioned gift to me of a lavish calendar containing the Psalms. From a good-atheist standpoint, such a gift would serve on the one hand to imperil my theological integrity, leading me far from true religion, and on the other hand to blur Karen's own necessary public witness.

Above all, were she a good atheist, she would have remonstrated with me: You are throwing your life away as a Catholic; regard for truth compels me to point out that you use the Church as a mere surrogate for the Party from which you were isolated, in your most formative years, by the width of the Atlantic, and for which you have a deep, primeval, authentic need; you must see that the Church executes for you a squalid id-against-ego agenda, of a shadowy species urgently requiring the clear and pitiless light of psychoanalysis (and so on, and so forth).

Karen either is a bad (a feeble, unreflective) atheist or, as I rather like to think, in fact in some muddled way embraces either the first or the second horn of Fr Lemieux's tetralemma.

The second horn has been tried and found wanting: "Something else (i.e., something other than Love) is at the centre of reality." We do find confused attempts to put Power at the centre. Without exploring this topic in detail, I will here only remark that the end result is liable to be thin, in a way suggested by Charlie Chaplin in that wonderful film about a "great dictator", as at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4UhJpviVYg. . (Chaplin exposes power-worship effectively around 00:52: the shortwave-radio translator intones for the edification of Anglo-Saxon audiences, "Tomania was down, but now he has risen," at which point the orating Chaplin, as the great leader Adenoid Hynkel, pours a glass of water down his military trousers. The crowd then makes the phallic nature of the proceeding fully explicit with its celebrated stiff-armed salute.)

It is, of course, the worship of Power that leads people, such as corporate leaders, to want money. What is the point of being rich beyond the first few millions? It is not to enjoy creature comforts. For those, a mere few millions suffice, since you can as a York Region businessperson only wear so many Armani suits, or eat only so many steaks, or enjoy sitting only in so many armchairs covered in red Italian leather. The lately deceased founder of Metrus Development Inc. was in recent years according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Canadians_by_net_worth valued at in excess of a thousand million. Money such as this confers raw power - the power to persuade, to sway, on occasions even to command. Its end results are as ridiculous as the Tomania of Adenoid Hynkel.

Is it Power that is at the centre of Karen's world? I do not think this accurate. She and her 2014 campaign team will be going through this blog with a fine-toothed comb, and she or her team can correct me if I am wrong, by sending me some blog postings for publication. My own suggestion is that in so far as Karen has clear ideas, they involve the first horn of Fr Lemieux's tetralemma: it is Love that is at the centre.

If I am right here, then the question with which we began has, both for her and for me, a straightforward answer: Yes, sin exists. If Love is at the centre, then the possibility of sin is available to us, as a falling-away from Love.

Sins divide naturally into the sins of weakness and the sins of malice. I will illustrate the difference from my own experience, in quite basic terms.

(a) One fine day, while life was still somewhat normal and I was gardening at the DDO, I did in a moment of weakness something wrong - not, as I rather often do, to other people, but in this instance to something very humble indeed, to a thing so humble as to lack even the intellection of a squirrel, to a mere ant colony. The day was glorious, the season late spring, the task the straightforward but urgent task of putting in a tall stonecrop, Sedum spectabile. I picked out a good spot for one of the potted specimens from the nursery, and in impatience noted that here was an anthill. Well, I said: I am in a hurry, and I am the boss here, and I simply will not be bothered to pay due regard to the ants, who are so beneath me; let me dig into the duly chosen spot and get my job over with, so that my day stays on schedule.

As I made my hole, the ant colony was thrown into chaos, its little city suffering its own minuscule 9/11. Ants scurried everywhere amid the ruins created by my trowel, carrying pupae to safety, in confusion and chaos. Heaven alone knows if their queen, on which the integrity of the colony depended, survived.

Here was a fault, betraying indeed a callous disregard for some lowly creatures whose space I was sharing, but triggered by weakness. (I do not claim that it is as huge a fault as, say, kicking a dog in a moment of weakness, or battering a fellow human. Surely ants feel no pain or terror. But the action was not morally indifferent. The order of the universe was disturbed in a small way on that day, even as it gets disturbed in a bigger way when developers bulldoze national heritage.)

(b) When I was a boy, I did a strange, terrible thing, into which I was not led by weakness at all. Again it was an offence against very humble creatures. And yet what I did was chilling. I took straws and disembowelled some beetles, gazing on their writhing with cold indifference, aware even as I acted that I was disturbing the even tenor of the quiet wasteland behind my parents' garage-cum-honey-house in their Nova Scotian exile. The difference between this act and the things that are done in war, against humans, in cold blood (I know about this from my research into a war-crimes case involving a person I never knew, and yet known to perhaps thirty people I know) - the pistol of the "Aryan" against the "racially impure" child's skull, in the ditch not far from the concentration-camp gates; his release of his catch; the smooth movement of his trigger;  the whole action repeated, with victim upon victim - this difference is a difference in degree, not a difference in kind.

If it is admitted that Karen, in betraying her conservationist principles (so eloquently professed at http://www.karencilevitz.ca before 2012, as anyone can see from the Wayback Machine, i.e., from http://archive.org/web/) sinned, then the question arises: was hers a sin of malice, or a sin of weakness? Have we here the equivalent of the cold-blooded boy torturing some insects for the sheer sake of torture - betraying, in other words, a public cause for the sheer sake of betrayal? Or have we, rather, the equivalent of the hurried, impatient, worried gardener, too harried to be properly diligent at an anthill? [[Two rhetorical questions, comprising 61 words, are here deleted, under directions from Karen's and my 2014-05-05 out-of-court legal settlement; this is the excision prescribed by Minutes of Settlement, Schedule "A", box "7".]]

Having isolated the key question, I say merely (as I have said elsewhere on this server) that I suspect weakness to have been key. I would suspect the same regarding the degree of culpability of certain other key DDO players, notably the OMB-supporting Sheltons (as I have said elsewhere on this server).

I do herewith invite Karen or her team, as they read this blog, to comment further on the moral issues, by sending me their own blog materials for publication on this server (mindful of the need, as laid out in the 2014-05-05 settlement, to avoid direct personal communication; blog postings will have to be submitted by an indirect means, for instance through Karen's and my respective lawyers).

In the end, it comes down to what has been known for millennia, from times antedating even Aeschylus, antedating even Homer: no matter what the nature of the sin, it can be dissected under proper, expert (in this instance, partly under Rabbinical) guidance. A degree of professional guidance will prove necessary also on the Catholic side.

Remorse is, in good pastoral theology, inadequate. But it has been known to reflective writers, even since before the dawn of Greek literature, that contrition succeeds where remorse fails. Our tears of contrition shed, we can embrace and move on, together.