Recent reports show that the European Union is considering legislation that would require all seeds for sale or trade to be of certified varieties only, with costs to certify being between $4 000 and $5 000 per variety. From my standpoint, this is another move to give corporate seedsmen, mostly owned by large chemical concerns, complete control over what gets planted and by whom. It fits right in with the philosophy of relegating environmental concerns to the background and letting wild fish stocks dwindle to the point where fish farms will control the seafood supply, and it fits in with the de facto privatization of water and power, as well as state policy around here that supports the fossil fuel incumbency. Should we be worried about what the EU is doing with seeds? Damn right, given that Canada, under the leadership of one Stephen Harper, has recently signed a free-trade treaty with the EU which would likely include provision for harmonization of agricultural policies of this nature. Measures of this nature would preclude organizations like Seeds of Diversity and the U.S. Seed Savers’ Exchange from doing what they have been doing to protect diversity in both production and gene plasm. It would likely pull the rug out from under small, independent seed houses, some of whom raise their own seed stock and many of whom rely on networks of small independent seed producers: none of these people would be able to afford the costs in both time and money to get their material homologated under the proposed regulations. Ho hum, just another turn of the CPC screw on the people whose interests the government of Canada is supposed to protect.
As a tadpole, I was taught that the period from the fall of Rome to the Renaissance was a time of ignorance occasioned by the loss of classical knowledge and a lack of inquiring spirit. It may not have been entirely so, but the very name of Dark Ages could occasion intellectual and emotional shivers, particularly in the context of the enlightened times in which we were living.
As I have looked progressively deeper into the wheels and levers that drive and direct our society, I am struck by the sheer volume of knowledge that we have developed in recent decades, as well as by a dearth of the wisdom to channel the use of said knowledge. In particular, recent developments at both the Federal and Provincial levels of administration lead me to believe that we have come to value ignorance and to reward avidity to the point of self-destruction. There is much talk out there about Harper’s war on knowledge and on those who seem able to draw coherent conclusions from the mounds of data.
This move by Strahl is simply an admission of his advocacy all along, that he’s been working for Enbridge and not for the Canadian public, but using publicly-funded organizational framework for the benefit of a major corporation that, contrary to anything that the Environmental Review Panel may have said in this instance, does nothing in the public interest.
Honesty? Good management? Transparency? None of that from any political party that I can see (with the possible exception of the now-doubled Green caucus).
And, just for good measure, and because I like this stuff:
(The irony of the header image is that it’s title relates to the results of good government. Ha!)
… 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.
This is a screen snap from Libération, a Paris daily that is supposed to be on the leftish side of the political spectrum, about in the same way the Vancouver Sun might be, or somewhere between the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star. The quote stems from a visit by Senator John McCain to the faction of the Ukrainian population demonstrating in favour of building closer ties with the European Union and moving farther from the Russian fold.
Now Here’s Some Good News!
It’s very sad that McCain rates anything like the attention he’s getting here, a son of Western privilege looking to fight the wars of the U.S. neocons on other peoples’ turf, after the fashion of Syria. His intent is to complete the Orange Revolution of 2004 and move the Ukraine definitively out of the Russian sphere of influence. McCain has been playing at this since his days flying for the US Navy over Vietnam, and it seems likely that part of the virulence of his campaign relates to having spent a stretch in the Hanoi Hilton when his aircraft was shot down in 1967. As with myriad US figures, he seems to operate on the premise that people care for his opinion. People who embrace John McCain’s dicta do so at their own peril unless they are wealthy American conservatives: anyone who can stand on the same stage as Sarah Palin with a straight face needs psychiatric help rather than an endorsement on policy.
In another situation where life for many of its citizens is difficult and where political circumstances can be troubling, Ukrainians find themselves caught between factions pulling in opposite geographic directions, but where neither choice is likely to provide better living and working conditions for the average citizen. Putin’s Russia has, under one leader or another, had many opportunities to build a thriving national economy and a society where debate and dialogue might be the norm. They didn’t, and there is ample discontent to attest to that lack of constructive action. Behind Door Number Two, Ukrainians can opt for closer ties to the European Union, where, on the face of it, there is freedom of expression, mobility, jobs, subsidies, the German economy and a perception that life will be considerably better than it is presently. Any reasonably astute observer will note that a good part of the EU is living a story of economic decay, of domination by the EU bureaucracy in Brussels, largely directed by large financial institutions and where neo-liberal economic theory, particularly austerity, is the rule. It could be that the right choice is neither Russia, nor the EU, but no one seems ready to propose this option which, admittedly, ensures at least short-term pain, but which gives a shot at real independence and freedom from the soul sucking ideologies of both other options. The very fact of the American involvement on one side of this conflict, and Russian on the other just might indicate the pawn status that should rightly be assigned to this, and other, revolutions with a colour assigned to them in the popular mythology.
Proxy wars are, of course, nothing new, and the Spanish Civil War is about as good a case study as any, wherein the forces of Fascism and Communism clash in someone else’s back yard as a prelude to more open and general conflict leading to the general devastation of large parts of Europe and other parts of the planet using the methods pioneered at the expense of the Spaniards. Did anything of real significance come out of the Arab Spring? See saw battles for power in Egypt, Libya under the rule of doctrinaire Islamist thugs, Tunisia rid of one dictator, quickly replaced by another oppressive régime, and Syria looking increasingly like the testing ground for a three-way tug-of-war between the US and its EU friends, Russia, and the Wahabist Saudi régime. No one is winning, but the Syrians are losing. There are attempts to make this conflict out, like so many others, to be a battle of good against evil, of the welfare of the population against either the invading hordes or the oppression of a dictator, and there is some justification in both cases, but the underlying notion of the conflict, and the reason it seems to have such staying power, lies in that same pawn status that the Syrians share with the Ukrainians, a status shared to some extent by all of us, on whatever side of whatever current divide we might live.
Update: Here is a video with some added perspective from The Real News network out of Toronto and Baltimore:
Isn’t it a little bizarre that we are putting rovers on the moon and on Mars, fighting shooting wars all over the world and preparing to square off over what’s left of the planet’s resources while we seem to need the intervention of charitable organizations to look after the most basic needs of a good part of the Earth’s population? Merry Christmas.
Then, there’s this gem from Dan Hicks going back to the days of the Charlatans and the Hot Licks, specially dedicated to John McCain:
In the latest move in Canada Post’s drive to make itself totally irrelevant, the corporation has decided to end door-to-door delivery in cities. It is rapidly heading toward an existence akin to the rump of BC Rail, something of a holding company for what’s left of the assets that rightly belong to the citizens in general and which are very much in danger of being sold on the cheap to the friends of the government who bought off the politicians and now expect a rich return on their investment. This move is one of the purest expressions we’ve yet seen that the government exists not to serve the well-being of the electorate, but rather as a mechanism to move wealth from the lower and middle reaches of society to the investor class at the top of the increasingly steep economic pyramid. It is part of the bold and flagrant program of suppression of unions by the Harper government and a way of ensuring that the labour pool keeps expanding as the opportunities for work shrink, thereby ensuring a flow of cheap labour on the “open” market. And, with the disappearance of the letter carrier goes a wealth of cinematic and musical inspiration, thinking of items like “Please, Mr. Postman”, “Il Postino” and “The Postman Knocks Twice”. Now I wonder if the price of a letter will decline…
And I can’t miss the opportunity to mark another sad exit, though it would be hard to argue that the man got cheated:
The educational world is all a-flutter about the poor performance of students on a recent battery of Math tests that were administered to fifteen-year-olds in various locations around the world. In my daily ingestion of “content”, I heard pretty much the same refrain from officials here in Canada, in the United States, and there was a feature report on the matter on the Journal Télévisé from France 2 in their daily 19-20 slot. There was a great deal of hand-wringing from official circles whose answer to poor test scores seems to be more testing, test prep, accountability, and choice, all mantras of a segment of the educational institutions dominated by market-driven precepts and the desire to standardize everything. The best of the reports of yesterday’s lot was some documentation in the France 2 segment wherein they compared student life in France to that of young people in South Korea, whose students scored excellent marks on the PISA. The first distinction mentioned was that Korean students spend, typically, sixty hours a week in school, whereas their French counterparts spend half that total. The Korean girl followed by the reporters started her day at six in the morning, went to school at eight and stayed there until ten in the evening, after which she attended private tutoring until midnight. She seemed quite comfortable with the situation, as did her parents, but I know I wouldn’t have done this to my own children, nor to students in general, given a sense that much learning takes place outside of school, particularly in terms of interpersonal relationships, life experience, and general cultural development. If the point is to become a drone in the commercial and industrial apparatus, the Korean/Singaporean/Japanese/Hong Kong model will serve well, I suppose, but in terms of building a sustainable and humane society, it’s likely that the hive mentality will leave serious shortfalls. PISA, the brainchild of the OECD, is aimed squarely at reinforcing the current economic paradigm, and it bending the drive of the education system worldwide to that effect, this being the paradigm in which growth in a finite living space has no limits and where we can create wealth out of thin air and distribute said wealth unequally to the point of ridicule. It favours a lock-stepped standardized, modular and cellular education that gives pride of place to narrowly focused knowledge of the quantifiable, and where progress is measured only on the basis of single-event high stakes testing, much of it framed as multiple-choice questions in the interest of statistical purity.
There has been substantial and well-documented push back against the tide of stats-driven education and the drive to turn education into a profit source, but it doesn’t often spill into the arena of public discussion, not surprising given the vested interest of the organs of the press in support of their own corporate model. Diane Ravich recently published an article on the Huffington post which I saw republished on Common Dreams, entitled “What You Need To Know About International Test Scores”, in which she cites an article from Phi Beta Kappan by Keith Baker (2007), saying the following:
Baker wrote that a certain level of educational achievement may be “a platform for launching national success, but once that platform is reached, other factors become more important than further gains in test scores. Indeed, once the platform is reached, it may be bad policy to pursue further gains in test scores because focusing on the scores diverts attention, effort, and resources away from other factors that are more important determinants of national success.” What has mattered most for the economic, cultural, and technological success of the U.S., he says, is a certain “spirit,” which he defines as “ambition, inquisitiveness, independence, and perhaps most important, the absence of a fixation on testing and test scores.”
Baker’s conclusion was that “standings in the league tables of international tests are worthless.”
Ms. Ravich draws some lessons from the test scores, mostly relating to the silliness of accepting that such a measurement would have any meaning other than all the programs aimed at improving test scores have been a dismal failure. My personal favourite, of course, is where she points out that having so many people living in conditions of deprivation does nothing to help test scores, or general education, to which I would add that the impetus to get educated seems increasingly tattered where an education seems more like a path to significant debt loads than to gainful and meaningful employment. Finally, it should come as no surprise that Democrats, both New and U.S., as well as Socialists-In-Name-Only all over the world have done little to nothing to lay the groundwork for a society where an education would be simply part of what the society does and where both work and rewards would be shared on a somewhat more equitable basis.
Please also take a minute to check out Henry Giroux’s writings in this vein.
The BC Liberals. Missing legislative sessions, missing information and now missing yet another important deadline.
Also, Missing in Action…. period.
Well, no surprise there. It puts me in mind of something Paul Hawken said:
We know—you know in this room—how to transform this world. We know what to do. We know how to provide meaningful, dignified living wage jobs for all who seek them, how to feed, clothe, and house every person on Earth. What we don’t know, admittedly, is how to remove those in power whose ignorance of biology is matched only by their indifference.
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
Thats how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died
Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long stem rose
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that you love me baby
Everybody knows that you really do
Everybody knows that youve been faithful
Ah give or take a night or two
Everybody knows youve been discreet
But there were so many people you just had to meet
Without your clothes
And everybody knows
Everybody knows, everybody knows
Thats how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows, everybody knows
Thats how it goes
Everybody knows
And everybody knows that it’s now or never
Everybody knows that it’s me or you
And everybody knows that you live forever
Ah when youve done a line or two
Everybody knows the deal is rotten
Old black Joe’s still pickin cotton
For your ribbons and bows
And everybody knows
And everybody knows that the plague is coming
Everybody knows that it’s moving fast
Everybody knows that the naked man and woman
Are just a shining artifact of the past
Everybody knows the scene is dead
But theres gonna be a meter on your bed
That will disclose
What everybody knows
And everybody knows that you’re in trouble
Everybody knows what youve been through
From the bloody cross on top of Calvary
To the beach of Malibu
Everybody knows it’s coming apart
Take one last look at this sacred heart
Before it blows
And everybody knows
Everybody knows, everybody knows
Thats how it goes
Everybody knows
Oh everybody knows, everybody knows
Thats how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows
Yes, we may know and there is ample evidence all around us, but, to finish off with one last little quip:
Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know.
—M. King Hubbert
In the meantime, I will now get out and enjoy some of this:
The Mothership Flounders, Founders And Slips Beneath the Waves?
Mothership’s Best Friend?
As I have progressed down the continuum of Canadianness, I have developed a special feeling for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. As a matter of fact, I used to really like it and appreciate the programming, even if I didn’t necessarily like all of it or agree with what was being said. But I recall waiting for an appointment about a decade ago where a spoke (person) for the CBC talked about shifting the focus and looking to appeal to a different, younger, demographic, and thinking at the time that this was a silly move because what they were after was a transient phenomenon that was already the prey to commercial broadcasting, and that the privateers had broader budgets and answered to no one in terms of standards of veracity or quality of content. So we got Ghomeshi and Strombo and perhaps some young ‘uns did either move to or stick with the mothership, but slowly the overall aspect of the place came to resemble a cheesy facsimile of the same dross that populates most segments of the broadcast spectrum. No longer is there a non-commercial entity out there to call bullshit when the odoriferous hits the circulating blades: the Mothership is beholden to some of the same revenues as the commercial idiot image generator, and gets the rest of its financing through an ideological and pathological entity called the Harper Government. The last real source of advertising revenue pretty much got nuked this week when the National Hockey League sold exclusive rights to all broadcasts in Canada to the Rogers conglomerate, and you could almost hear the double thud as the oysters of what was left of the CBC fell into the tray for surgical detritus. Insufficient taxpayer funding combined with the end of any vestige of real clout in attracting private advertising spells a death knell for any meaningful existence for the public broadcaster, something that has become increasingly clear with the preponderance of business bafflegab and pop nonsense on the programming sheet. The National, which was once a serious newscast, has become a bully pulpit for panels of programmed apologists for spoliation and any catastrophe, no matter how minor, is the occasion for immense expenditure of resources and broadcast time until the story loses its legs, along the same lines as the same coverage from the privateers: there is only a story to tell as long as it sells advertising, and for every typhoon there is a helicopter in a Scottish pub, for every invasion of Kuwait, there is a Swissair crash off Peggy’s Cove. Peter Mansbridge once had gravitas, a standing that came with substantive reporting. He’s become a doddering, self-promoting figurehead, and I suspect he knows it, but can’t live without he media presence, or perhaps he’s worried that Mr. Harper has ransacked his pension. It’s a symptom of what’s happened all through the network. There is hardly a more useless news site than cbc.ca, slow to update, riddled with double entries, devoid of serious content and totally missing any whiff of context. Blackberry, once the darling of the tech world, has taken a similar tumble and seems the perfect reflection, as an advertiser, of the woes of the CBC. They may have a wonderful product, but who will ever know if they spend their ad money on CBC, and I can’t imagine that CBC will be generating enough funds from their association with Blackberry to stave off the totality of rump status as a megaphone for Mr. Harper. Perhaps the execs of the two organizations can plan a sort of suicidal synchronized swimming routine where they hold up first one, then two, then three fingers, as their respective organizations slip down the whirlpool of the drain of oblivion.
Might as well choose our distractions. Here’s Rory Gallagher:
Master of finger style guitar and patter with a particular twist, Leo Kottke:
Toronto used to have better exports than the Ford Brothers. Here’s the Walsh brothers and some friends dba Downchild Blues Band.
Hope everyone had a great Buy Nothing Day. I did. I spent the day mulching artichoke plants, cooking lamb shanks, playing my Godin Fifth Avenue, reading and quietly fuming about the future and the potential lack thereof.
Driving past Nanoose Bay in the late Seventies was an adventure that must have twisted more than a few necks and people did double-takes at the sight of what appeared to be a World War II.-vintage submarine painted a bright yellow sitting across the bay and the marine ordinance testing station. Given that we were only ten years out from the original penning of Yellow Submarine and that the Canadian Navy didn’t seem to be that much of a threat to anyone, it was easy to think of this phenomenon as being fairly innocuous and more than a little amusing. The business at hand, it turns out, was fairly serious, and involved much more than just the Canadian Navy, with nasty real subs coming and going from the Winchelsea test range to see what they could potentially blow up with their non-doomsday ordinance.
I also recall having a rather visceral recoil at the announcement in the late 1990s when it was announced that Canada was buying four mothballed British subs to renew our aging and ineffective fleet. Having had experiences with Triumph, Norton and BSA motorcycles and with Triumph, MG, Morris and Jaguar automobiles, I was horrified to think that we were going to spend $750m for equipment from the land that produced Lucas electrics, commonly known in motoring circles, was Lucas, as the Prince of Darkness, a tart little appellation relating to the failure of all systems and the consequent lack of light or spark. In particular, on had to sake oneself why it was that the Royal Navy (the real one, as depicted on the box of Players cigarettes and a Procol Harum record) had mothballed these modern marvels. We were assured that they would be put ship shape and fighting fit prior to delivery, but such has not turned out to be the case, with these ships (actually, don’t real seamen call subs “boats”?) spending more time in refit than working to defend out coastlines from the marauding hordes of….the drug interdicted? The Russians? I’ve seen with my own eyes a couple of American aircraft carriers that have managed to slip through the protective ring, disgorging a multitude of swabs onto lighters and Government Street to admire the hanging baskets.
True to form, it seems to have taken years to refit the ships prior to taking delivery, and then the poop came off the poop deck, with a series of onboard fires, groundings, leaks, both internal and external, and who knows what else. So the big news seems to be that the Athabaskan made an appearance being towed in dry dock to Ogden Point to be placed gently in the water to see if she would float, prior to shallow diving and eventual full sea trials. This refit apparently took five years, following the original refit. I suspect that the cost of getting this lot ready for service is more than the original purchase price, and we still don’t have a serviceable submarine fleet.
I would be happy to do without the sub fleet altogether. These are at least as useful as F-35 fighters, which is to say, they are good for the defines industry and no one else. My proposal is that they be converted into low-cost housing, or at least disarmed and set to tasks like monitoring ocean temperature, acidity, radiation levels and other potentially useful information, but I have a difficult time rationalizing even that usage when these things have to be manned by real personnel whose hair must stand up on learning of deployment, or who clearly already suffer from PTSD, and should be ashore getting treatment. Part of the romance of anything in British Racing Green was that it was a ready excuse to retire to the garage, but I don’t think we want to be doing that when the garage turns out to be Davie Jones’s Locker.
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.
