Now The Fun Begins…

Posted on 2013/12/21 by danneau

… and you’ll pay each of the teams for a ticket (at least if you’re wise).

(A big shout out to Dan Murphy, once of the Vancouver Province, now with Deep Rogue Ram, likely at least in part because his genius wasn’t welcome: it stated obvious and unpleasant truths.)

An item in the Globe and Mail from last night and this morning outlines how Ottawa (that is to say, our government) is preparing for the fight over the now-NEB-endorsed Northern Gateway pipeline. Those who have an inkling of the potential impact of this project, and others of the same ilk, as well as the drain it represents on the Canadian economy in favour of the international fossil fuel clique, will want to step up and throw something n the pot to ensure that it isn’t for lack of a dollar or two that we all get subjected to the degradation of the environment, the body politic, the real economy and the spirit that this project will represent.The sad part is that we will sure as hell be funding he Enbridge end of the fight, and, barring an election and a serious change of direction as well a government, we, the citizens of this once-fair land, will have no say in how deeply the government and its legions of lawyers and lobbyists will dip their oily hands in our collective pocket. Many of us have suspected since long before current revelations about CSEC doing industrial espionage in our name for the benefit of predatory mining and oil interests, that our elected government was very much in thrall to certain well-monied interest groups, but the current spate of moves on their behalf is so brazen as to defy any notion of conflict of interest. Not only to we pay exorbitant energy prices, we pay subsidies to entities that make huge profits and that are actively working to exacerbate the conditions that are likely to make our one planet uninhabitable. Makes great sense, does it not? When the long and largely abortive Treaty Process was at its height, there were many complaints about the money that taxpayers were furnishing to fight both sides of the case. In the true spirit of Catch-22, that user manual for modern society, we should expect that First Nations could have access to the same bottomless pit of legal tender offered to Enbridge, Kinder Morgan and the rest of their crew.

Old Cartoon, Message Still Current

Posted on 2013/11/19 by danneau

Like old Tom Lehrer songs, this cartoon, despite the replacement of Mr. Bush, remains pretty much on point. I wanted to share it in light of Laila Yuile’s engagement of a cartoonist to bring a bit of visual satire to her site. Humour is a great way to highlight the ills that plague us, and allow a chuckle as we contemplate all the nastiness and, hopefully, engage in remediation and restructuring. I’m also put in mind of a kind of column that I almost never see any longer, thinking of Art Hoppe’s series in the San Francisco Chronicle of the mid-/late-Sixties about the eighteenth year of our lightning campaign to wipe out the dreaded Viet Narian guerrillas. Who knows, they may be out there but I don’t want to bother looking right now.

So here’s a cute one from Mr. Fish:

Mr. Fish Takes The Electorate To Task

Just substitute “Premier”, or “Prime Minister”, if you prefer, for “President”.

And perhaps have a listen to Chris Hedges as he speaks to a group of students:

Gee whillikers, all that just to welcome a new cartoonist to Laila’s site.

Teaching, and What Tories and Ford Nation Are Missing

Posted on 2013/11/18 by danneau

When we were quite young, several of us in the younger generation of our family liked to make bets about little bits of obscure information, in effect, an ongoing tournament of Trivial Pursuit, avant la lettre. This has carried on, though the betting phase pretty much ended when the payoff was forbidden by parental authority. I don’t think it ever diminished the competition or the love of both trivia and broader knowledge. Hence, the Jeopardy reference:

Well, This Is Television, Isn’t It, Alex?

I believe it was this gentleman, a teacher from Massachusetts, who, as part of the between-rounds patter was cited for teaching his own class in critical thinking. Queried as the the nature of the curriculum, Mr. Barrieu replied that he was teaching his students to sharpen their “malarkey filters”. There was a brief pause for all to absorb just what that might mean, following which Mr. Barrieu added: “Well, this is television, isn’t it Alex?”, after which the host moved quickly to resume the game.

I’m not sure that I agree that critical thinking consists solely of having a functioning malarkey filter, but it certainly is a good starting point, and an item woefully lacking from the armoury of an awful lot of citizens are missing as they degenerate into simple consumers. A degree of skepticism and a willingness to dig into the available information would essentially do an end-run around the obfuscation and window dressing that is the bulk of what comes out of the disseminators of information, written and broadcast press, a group that, in turn enables people like Rob Ford, Stephen Harper, Christy Clark and the like to spout misdirection, meaningless and distractive factoids, half-truths and outright lies. Even with the euphemism, this man’s forthrightness is refreshing. It may eventually, carried to its logical conclusion, lead to some serious questions and to the the demise of post-political personalities, à la Sarah Palin, a trajectory that could soon be the destination for Rob Ford.

An Offer Too Good To Be True?

Posted on 2013/11/04 by danneau

But first, one of my favourite twangers, not twanging in this case, though there are some licks that have a sniff of a pedal steel in them. If you know Gatton, you’ll know this isn’t his steady diet, but it seems he could do just about anything. I’m terribly thankful that he wasn’t camera or microphone shy, and there is a lot of his playing available.

The real mainstream of tonight’s symposium ( steal a quip from Tom Lehrer, another of a different ilk, but worth a listen), is nuclear energy, particularly the recent statement by a group of respected (outside of the Heritage/Fraser Institute crowd) climatologists, including James Hansen, that we need nuclear energy to make the transition to an economy eventually centered on renewables, solar, wind, tidal, geothermal and the like. As I watch the plume of radioactive cesium from the Fukushima disaster spill out across the Pacific Ocean, I recoil in horror from such a concept. The idea of feeding the beast that is the nuclear industry with all the forever-in-practical-terms waste it generates, the vast corrupt business and government connections it maintains, the general willingness to cut corners in the name of profit and the inherent danger in corralling a runaway fission reaction strikes me as being repugnant and counterproductive in the extreme, almost on a par with the continuation of the use of fossil fuels, with all the attendant pipeline, rail, fracking, refinery and distribution infrastructure, and, of course, the myriad layers of labyrinthine connections between those same industry and government structures.

Then I spent a bit of time yesterday watching a Youtube video, when I could, and perhaps should have been studying to become more Gatton-esque, about molten salt reactors and the use of thorium rather than uranium. I won’t go into the gory details, most of which are irrelevant, nor can I get into the physics, but it seems as though there is legitimate expectation that this technology could, and should, replace our current nuclear infrastructure. Here is the video:

So I did a bit of a quick search and found the company that is looking to propagate this technology:

Flibe Energy

And this morning, a former student posts a link to this on Facebook, stirring the whole thing up some more:

Industry Tap: Thorium Powered Automobile

Not that the process of reconversion isn’t fraught with pitfalls and dangers, but it almost looks like one of those offers that’s too good to be true. And even with the promise of plentiful and non-polluting energy (or, shall we say, less-polluting), there is the constant danger that the whole scheme, like so many others, will fall prey to the rapacious control behaviour of the same clique that is responsible in large part for the corner into which we have backed ourselves.

Finally, from the wonders of the information age, a closing statement from the aforementioned Tom Lehrer:

In The Night Garden

Posted on 2013/10/01 by danneau

My grand daughter used to watch a rather pointless television show called iIn The Night Garden, and example of which you can find here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeYhb8h47CE

I was out planting the last of the garlic this morning and found this.

Calling Card

It’s about ten centimetres across, and is either from a very big dog, or, more likely, one of our local bears. We’re very careful about compost and we don’t leave fruit on the trees. This part of the garden is fenced, but bears hardly deign to recognize the existence of a fence. I went looking for the “deposit” type of calling card, but found nothing.

Meanwhile, here is what I brought in for Sunday dinner with the rest of the family. Grandchildren do love them some corn, and there seemed to be no difficulty in giving away some butter to go with it.

A Gathering

In addition, there remains a load of stuff to be harvested on an ongoing basis, some of it to be mulched and some to have tents for cover through the cold, rain, and snow, truly local food, which brings me to the subject of today’s venting: local food that isn’t.

A recent labeling decision by the provincial government defines as local anything that comes from this province, meaning that food from the Peace River area is now local to Vancouver Island, a notion so patently absurd that it could only have come from the kind of government currently occupying the throne. This is the kind of drek that allows supermarkets to advertise local food that patently isn’t local, and who’s to tell the difference? It represents further cheapening of language by removing any sort of precision from the meaning of key terms so as to keep maximum hold on all aspects of the economy in the hands of Jimmy Pattison. There have been many attempts to water down the idea of organic culture, and it’s getting to the point where organic will be impossible because there will be so much genetic pollution in the seed pool that there will be no organic feed nor fertilizer, meaning there will be no organic food in the real sense, but who knows what Christy lark, Stephen Harper and Jimmy Pattison (or any of the Westons, or others of that ilk) will be able to call organic and actually have people believe.

Finally, and after this I’ll go do something constructive, I promise, in response to a Facebook post by Denis Olsen, I posted this video link of Albert Collins playing with Lonnie Mack and Roy Buchanan. Check out where Collins attaches his capo!

Collins, Mack and Buchanan

Two Teles and a V

Send In The Clowns

Posted on 2013/09/30 by danneau

Un Clown pet en cacher un autre!

Had a chat with a friend about how Berlusconi can send the whole Italian government down the crapper when he, and probably a good number of his colleagues ought to be locked up and forgotten. Yet somehow, he retains office and influence al out of proportion to his contribution to society: some folks there seem to identify with him even though they are most likely among his victims.

Loose lips, and all that.

Of course the Italians have no corner on the idiocy in politics market, and a swing through Washington these days is likely to be good for a few guffaws before the spate of tears that must inevitably follow, given the consequences of the lack of substantive action in the face of impending disaster. It’s not just Ted Cruz reading Dr. Seuss (you can almost hear the Seussian spirits gagging in the next dimension), but the whole notion that the peoples’ business can be stopped dead in its tracks by the collection of louts that sits in those august chambers is beyond ridicule and goes a long way toward explaining why nothing has been done about climate change, about oil spills and the devastation of water resources through tracking, the sacking and pillage of the economy by the sponsors of said louts, who mostly hail from Wall Street, the crisis, not only of health care, but of health itself, brought on by our inability to tell ourselves the truth about diet, medication, exercise and the spare parts philosophy of care.

Innocent-looking fellow, don’t you think?

Caped Cruzader? Cruz Missile? Here is another man whose message is hidden behind the rhetoric of individual freedom. The unstated and sinister part of the message is that he protects his own freedom to plunder at the expense of the freedom of millions of fellow citizens, and he has a lot of company.

It’s everywhere: the Olympic torch has left Greece headed for Sochi, for a winter pageant to be held in a place with a sub-tropical climate, and where the vultures have moved in to boost the cost of hosting the event to something in the $50 billion range, according to recent reports on CBC news.

The government in Ottawa is removing the culture of medicinal marijuana from small operations run by individuals and is putting it in the hands of large corporate concerns. It will be interesting to see if the Bronfman clan gets in on the action. This looks from the outside as an invitation to graft and corruption where the current group in Ottawa are running like hell to catch up to the crew in Washington.

Go find a copy of Stephen Bruton’s song “The Clock”: it’s ticking, you can hear it every time you contemplate the direction set by leaders in all levels of political and corporate governance. What did Frank Zappa say about stupidity? That there’s more of it in the universe than hydrogen, and that it has a longer shelf life….

More Misdirection

Posted on 2013/09/26 by danneau

This pic is from:
http://suttonhistoricalsociety.blogspot.ca/2011/08/small-town-newspaper-news-opinion.html

Small town newspapers can be charming, a little quaint, terribly parochial and downright ridiculous when they try to be something other than a small town paper. Our local paper is right in line with most of this: they’re essentially a mouthpiece for the local chamber of commerce types, heavy on gossip and filler from sources from farther away, including most of the editorials, pretty much all of which parrot the editorial stance of the parent company, that being, don’t risk annoying anyone who might buy advertising, and besides, we want to be on the side of the economic winners. I’m saying this for a couple of reasons: 1) it’s very difficult for dissenting opinions to get published, even in the letters section of the editorial page, and, once labeled a dissenter, nothing gets into the paper, even completely non-controversial material relating to community cultural activities, and 2) anything is an excuse to sling more advertising, in whatever guise it may appear.

As to the first reason, I was a little taken aback to hear my wife mutter something about having the wrong last name in response to some item she thought ought to be highlighted in the letters column, and that she was going to write. I guess some of the bitter tone might have been directed at me for pissing off the powers that be, but she was also certainly lamenting the difficulty of getting anything with our last name past the gatekeepers at the editorial desk. I guess that might have something to do with my writing here occasionally, and in full knowledge that it’s about as likely to be read as it would be in the local paper, with the one consolation that it isn’t likely to be a bed for budgie droppings or a wrap for dead fish.

But here’s the killer: yesterday was deemed Raise-A-Reader Day to promote literacy, and the town notables were on the street soliciting donations for local literacy initiatives but, strangely, handing out copies of a rag from the bigger town 80 kilometers to the South and East (said paper being in some foo-doo for a second incidence of publishing material deemed by local First Nations to be blatantly racist). As well, the local had an insert devoted entirely to supporters of literacy, with a few nice pictures, a little bit of text and captioning, but you’ll have intuited that most of the space was taken up by advertising for those staunch business supporters of literacy who, coincidentally, would like us to drop by and leave behind some cash, while we’re at it. My literacy training tells me that there’s a lot less interest in literacy than in business, and I keep wondering why I deem it my civic duty to subscribe to the local paper, because, frankly, I only get from it the gloss that tells me what the parent company wants me to think is news. Newspapers are becoming irrelevant because they are patently not what people want them to be, or at least need them to be, that is to say, distributors of information and forums for real debate. Perhaps time to let the subscription lapse and redirect the funds to real journalists. Just as an example, have a look at Bob Mackin’s piece about the same event under discussion here:

http://2010goldrush.blogspot.ca/2013/09/raise-reader-rouse-adman.html

Bastille Day: A Long Story

Posted on 2013/07/14 by danneau

My parents used to do something that might, in other circumstances, be considered rude, but might have been a necessary evil under the circumstances. My mother was one of the uppity women who actually had a college degree, and Dad, who bailed out of much of his formal schooling at fourteen or fifteen, had spent considerable time in France, so when they wanted to discuss something of weight in privacy, but were saddled with their considerable brood, they would just speak French and carry on the conversation with us trying to make some sense of what was going on. Dad, in particular, was a pretty serious francophile, particularly in terms of certain lifestyle issues, and this rubbed off on me to the point where, when offered the opportunity to learn some French in the latter stages of Grade 7, I leaped at the chance, even though it meant that I had to show up for school an hour early every day, and that there was no credit attached to the course. I carried this enthusiasm right through high school and eventually graduated from university with a degree in French Literature. After some kicking around trying out job options, I returned to university for a teaching certificate, and launched a career, now entirely in the rear-view of time, teaching mostly French at the secondary level. I generally found this rewarding and frustrating at the same time, and it certainly gave me an excuse to hone my language skills and cultural background by travelling in both France and Québec, by indulging in French television, radio and music, and continuing to read all manner of material from comic books to Jean d’Ormesson. I actually managed to incorporate a whiff of a lot of this stuff into the classroom routines to give students a sense that this wasn’t a hollow exercise in conjugating verbs and that an appreciation of one’s own culture required an outside reference point to be really effective (that was my line, and I still sense that it has some validity).

I guess the point of this is that there is a reason why I still pay attention to what happens in that far-off land, even though I don’t see myself going back. My sense was that there was a major current of progressive thought in much of the literature I studied, so of course I had the expectation that this would be something of an influence on how society functioned in France, even though I knew about the upheavals of decolonization and vicious undercurrents of fascism and reaction that have always acted as a counterbalance to any progressive leanings that might stir some portion of the population: ever the optimist in something of the Voltairian sense. Heck, they even have a Socialist Party and a Communist Party, and the Socialists have now elected a president for three mandates in recent memory, along with a stint with a Socialist Prime Minister from 1997-2002. Ah, but politics being what it is, we have what is known as a Socialist In Name Only, wherein Mitterand continued pretty much the same policies as various conservative political formations have put forward over the decades, where Lionel Jospin admitted to lack of power to do anything when layoffs became standard operating procedure among profitable corporations, and where François Hollande, the current president and SINO, follows the EU austerity line, beggaring more citizens and further enabling the Medef and the hierarchy it represents. It’s a microcosm of what discourages people from voting. I listened to Mitterand, to Jospin, to Segolène Royal (PS candidate who lost to Sarkozy, the French Bush) and to Hollande. So much of what they said as candidates rang true, made sense, gave hope. They all crapped out, Mitterand blowing up Greenpeace vessels and dealing in all sorts of shady transactions in Africa, Jospin bowing to business as usual, Royal turning out to be a great friend to Tony Blair, and Holland betraying the mandate given to him by voters who had for too long been victims of the Sarkoziste pay to play system (so it would seem to an outsider). It seems rather like voting for Hope and Change, and getting Guantanamo six years on, the NSA in every box of cereal, drones all over, repeated corporate bailouts, cabinet posts dominated by Goldman Sachs, and a litany of failed policies leading to the point where there are almost as many people on Food Stamps as there are with legitimate jobs.

So I take this day to slurp some French Grape, eat the French national bird (raised in beautiful Beaver Creek, procured at the local Farmers’ Market from Bob) and ruminate somewhat on what could have been and what might still be, though the possibilities seem to narrow with each passing day.

So Rare, The Truth, The Whole Truth, Nothing But The Truth

Posted on 2013/07/07 by danneau

What We Don’t See (Ane Need To Look For!)

Recent discussions of the road vs. rail in the face of the possible construction of a gateway facility on the Alberni Canal are all valid, but they miss a couple of points, or fail to give them the focus needed. What has come to light is that there has been a lot of discussion of public business without the public being invited to the discussion, and it’s particularly disturbing that it took months for the information to come out via a Freedom of Information request, stalled on several occasions, delayed from August, 2012 until June, 2013. If we subscribe to the idea that justice delayed is justice denied, we are surely, as members of the public, being shortchanged on the flow of information on which to base decisions. Disturbing is, indeed, a term we might apply to much of what is being done in our names. In a business-to-business negotiation, it may be appropriate to withhold information from the seat opposite, but as soon as the public good is engaged in the discussion, there is a need for those little words that get bandied about so frequently without really meaning anything: open, transparent and accountable. It isn’t only a question of who pays (taxpayers), but also of who benefits and whether taxpayers get good value for money spent, of whether projects are worthy to begin with, and of the general direction of policy. The obfuscation, delay and misdirection seems to happen at all levels of government, and the links between local, regional, provincial and federal governments seem to become increasingly tangled and the smokescreen increasingly universal. Taxes are good when they serve the community, but toxic when misdirected, and the only way to know the difference is through access to quality information, all of it, and in a timely fashion.

Negotiation?

Posted on 2013/06/25 by danneau

So the new education minister has said that he will scrap the BCPSEA, which bargained on behalf of government in contract talks with teachers. His aim is to settle a ten-year long contract with the BCTF and to, in the words quoted in the Vancouver Sun, ditch the toxic relationship between the province and the teachers. The BCPSEA was always a shell, an organization set up so that it could legitimately plead poverty in negotiations even when its parent seemed flush with cash for megaprojects, spectacle and ruinous IPP contracts. Good riddance to what was, essentially, a living lie. However, the idea that the BCTF would willingly sign an agreement with the province of the length proposed by Minister Fassbender (mouthpiece for Christy Clark, engineer herself of a large part of the legacy of bitterness between the province and teachers) without there being ironclad guarantees of stability in purchasing power and serious teeth in the implementation and enforcement of reasonable provisions for class size and composition, an end to meddling in professional development, and a more collegial decision-making process in which teachers, through their bargaining unit, would have a real say in how the school system functioned, is pure fantasy, and really points to more of the same vitriol. It would be, in effect, the imposition of a contract whose terms would be dictated largely by the Liberal Party bureaucrats through the Ministry of Education and would virtually guarantee that there would be no peace in the school system until a more balanced approach were found. It could be seen as an initiative to finally break the school system beyond repair as an excuse to turn the whole enterprise over to private interests, wherein the Province could take the costs off the books, they could cut teachers and their nuisance union loose and let them take their chances with aggressive capital. This would also, of course, further the Liberal dream of a province and world without unions, where capital and privilege reign supreme, where wealthy families can educate their young in the lap of luxury while the rest are forced to attend fact factories on their way to low-skill, low pay work, or pass directly into the penal system, where the work is the same and the pay even lower.

We have another four years of this kind of underhanded chicanery that does nothing to build a relationship of trust and everything to frustrate all other stakeholders. Parents are being held hostage, but it isn’t the BCTF that’s doing it.

Many thanks to Adrian Raeside for generously allowing the use of his work.

Rub Eyes, Shake Head

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