Category Archives: Just Stuff

Disturbing Outlooks and Attitudes #1

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Hoax

 

I used to argue back and forth a decade ago with a sometime colleague who was an ardent supporter of George W. Bush, with he usual outcome that we would agree to disagree. I have since drilled down a ways into the current and developing status of humankind on this planet, and the auguries are not auspicious, to say the least. I was not at all comforted when said gentleman asked me at a gathering last evening whether I was looking forward to once again engaging in the breaking of speed limits for thrills, something I once undertook regularly with great relish, but gave up when it finally dawned on me that being a carbon critic who stunted on back roads for fun was not a particularly good example for others to follow. I answered him in the negative without much comment at all and was a little taken aback when he pursued his line by telling me that humans had no control over the course of the unfolding of the universe and that our best hope for survival and for thriving as a species was to decamp to the farther corners of the known universe, and that he would therefore continue to burn up resources at as rapid a pace as possible for his own enjoyment. This falls right in line with the Bill Gates geoengineering crowd, a group who doesn’t seem to understand that our living systems are more complicated, interwoven and subtle than our engineering minds can fathom, and that a look back at our witting on other interventions in managing our living space looks like a bit of a chronicle of disaster: particularly without a significant attitude adjustment and the development of both deeper and broader questioning strategies, our past would point to abject failure, this time on a scale that would basically be guaranteeing that we would, in short order, be kissing our behinds good-bye, taking the vast majority of life on the planet with us. This outlook speaks to a willingness to do whatever it takes to protect a position of privilege, and, as with most conservatives/libertarians, any justification is good enough as long as it allows life to continue on without sacrifice of the least bit of personal freedom or economic clout. The sad part is that we’ve known for decades how to manage most of the crises that confront us: we have had solutions that involve very manageable levels of sacrifice, usually balanced by long-term gain in well-being and stability. How very sad.

Burn

 

Meanwhile, here are a couple of music videos that caught my eye:

 

Looks like Green, Spencer, Kirwan, McVie and Fleetwood. Interesting that all the guitars get a voice at the front.

Perhaps one of the greatest studies in how to grow old gracefully. I think Taj is the only North American, the rest being Brazilians. Particularly nice harp playing.

Sometimes Evil People Speak the Truth

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Or parts of it, anyway.

KO

I had one of those nights where I woke up and made the mistake of having a thought, and with thoughts, as with potato chips, one leads to another. Soon, I had wads of things flitting between my ears, and it was clear that I wouldn’t get back to sleep until I logged some time with book and early morning television, normally a great soporific. I saw a report about how lotteries in Canada are suffering because their best clients (milk cows) are old and dying off and that the current generation of Millenials, those in the 18-34 age bracket, aren’t playing with the gusto of the older folks. Of course, my own reaction is that this is a wonderful phenomenon and that I don’t feel a great deal of sympathy for those who run the gambling establishment in this, or any, country. Then, this being CBC Newsworld, there had to be an expert attestation: their expert on all things economic, Kevin O’Leary, about as sterling an example of anti-social greedmongerning as could be had anywhere, a man whose sense of entitlement and self aggrandizement grates against every fibre of my being. His take? Essentially, good on the Millenials for sussing out that lotteries, like most forms of gambling (stocks, bonds and mutual funds excepted) are taxes on the stupid. I hated that I would agree with KO on anything, and his undercurrent of tax avoidance  sealed the deal: KO wants us to fail miserably to support each other, to go it alone as rugged individuals so that the already-advantaged can use their financial and political leverage to perpetuate a system of gross inequity (and iniquity). Of course, the stupid factor was on full display with reports of an event honouring the real participants in The Great Escape, not Americans, and not Steve McQueen ( and who knew that Hollywood might rearrange the substance of a story to fit their hero cult) and a replay, several days delayed, of a nun singing some r ‘n b tune on an Italian version of some reality show, something of which I would have remained blissfully unaware were it not for the inordinate amount of “news” coverage that such a non-event got. Newsworld, all entertainment, all the time. How can Nancy Wilson keep a straight face as she reads this stuff (she was, in this case, the designated deliverer of good news, a task at which she has much company, unfortunately).

Guaino

 

Then there is Henri Guaino, now an elected member of the French National Assembly and formerly a special advisor to former President Nicolas Sarkozy, who was invited to answer questions on a segment of a Paris morning show (Télématin) called Les Quatre Vérités, with the hot topic being the outcome of the first round of the municipal elections. His rightish UMP did well, the current central government of François Hollande did generally poorly and the real “winner” seems to be the National Front, whose populist thuggish nationalism seems to have become a safe harbour for a lot of the protest vote. Bless Guaino’s pointed and selfish little head, he was able to spot that not only were the Socialists being sanctioned, but the whole political class was taking something of a beating for their unfulfilled promises to improve life for the general citizenry in France. Guaino cited in particular the surrender of the levers of power to the EU and to the financial and corporate structure (this from an individual very much in the house of those entities). I didn’t hear any real solutions (the segment lasts all of ten minutes), but the implication is clear that democracy, when it gives over power to economic interests and bureaucracies, is in serious trouble. Who knew.

mdAs a cap to all this, Murray Dobbin had a piece published in The Tyee this morning about big ideas and why the New Democrats seem to have lost some of their luster as they get more enthused about the idea of possibly forming a government (dream on!) and move toward the centre to attempt to capture that vote. In the end, the election of an NDP government might look more like a Pierre Trudeau government of the late Sixties than a real solution to the economic, environmental and social ills that beset us, so that the Dippers would have gained power, but would be unlikely to be able, or willing, to undertake the renewal that would lead us to a more just and equitable society.

 

 

Three Times A Fool

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One for Syria, one for the Ukraine and one for Venezuela.

 

 

Stirring up the pot in the name of democracy where greed is the less apparent and root cause of the loosing of the hounds. Of course, it’s not the Henry Kissingers, Hilary Clintons, Angela Merkels, Dick Cheneys, and all manner of denizens of capitals wherever capital holds court who pay the price, either in terms of blood and despair, or in terms of austerity crashing down on opportunity and sanity. It’s the poor saps who started business  in the Maidan, in Damascus, and the poor of the barrios who will surely be stuffed back in their cages if the “middle class” privileged of Caracas regain the ascendency. So here’s another Otis Rush:

 

 

Tell me I’m ‘way off base, but it seems to me that Otis Rush’s All Your Love (Miss Lovin’) is the song that inspired Peter Green to write Balck Magic Woman, morphed into high-octane rock by Carlos Santana…

 

 

 

 

Every Once In Awhile

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I like to revisit this ditty that often used to start off my week, a) because it’s about Monday mornings, and b) because it does have a tendency to engage the movement instincts (and really did when I was 17 or 18). The whole album is a masterpiece, and part of its charm comes from the meddling of Sam Charters, I suspect, who seems to have wanted to tone down some of Buddy Guy’s edgy and unbridled approach to playing: it’s not typical BG, but the restraint works well.

Of course, this misses the great news about the Oscars, the Heritage Classic and the end of the world, wherein Obama says to Putin: “I dog double dare you.” Putin says nothing, just goes ahead and deploys the troops. Well, what did you expect, Barry. Once again, an honest yearning for more local control and a better life has been hijacked by a group of local National Socialist types and reinforced by “diplomacy” from the EU and NATO. Ianukovitch and his lot should be gone, but when John Baird hies himself off to congratulate the newly installed administration (just who is it that rushes in?), you have to wonder which of the big miners is staking a claim. It’s what Canadians do. Again, rather like Assad in Syria, al-Sisi in Egypt, and whoever is running the show in Libya. Tunisia seems to be evolving, but who knows what goes on behind the scenes? Venezuela and Thailand are also targets for the “spokespeople” of the investor class, it would seem.

 

And, of course, this one always comes back:

 

Encore Redux

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Yes, it’s like déjà vu all over again.

 

gc

 

Again, Gail Shea does the bidding of the Norwegians:

 

herring_venus

 

(Got this from the Powell River Pesuader)

Against the advise of her own DFO people and First Nations biologists and decision makers, Shea wanted to open up the West Coast of Vancouver Island and Haida Gwaii for herring roe fisheries. Her advice from other stakeholders was that there might be enough fish to justify a commercial opening, but that said opening might threaten the long-term stability of the herring population. This would open the possibility of a cod-like collapse in the herring population, something with which Shea ought to be quite familiar in her home turf: it would deprive First Nations of ceremonial and food fish (thereby degrading their cultural heritage as well as a source of healthful food), and would knock out one of the pillars of the survival of wild salmon. Of course, this would make a nice complement to expansion of net-pen fish farming on the coast as well as the increased support that taxpayers have been forced to give to an industry that operates against the interests of said taxpayers. It’s all part and parcel of a policy line that removes citizen control and access to what ought to he resources held and managed in common, and a good reason to choke on Shea’s title of Honourable Minister of Fisheries and Oceans.

In The Isolation Ward

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olympic-rings

 

I had to leave the living room frequently over the last couple of weeks (it was beginning to look like a tart remark free-fire zone and snarkfest, mine all mine), and the weeks leading up to the last couple of weeks, and I’m gun-shy about turning on any broadcast media even now, lest I hear that taahh da-da-da-da  da-da-da-da  dum-dum-dum-dum and the stream of drivel that would follow, haloed with messages from Tim Horton’s and Molson’s, VISA, RBC, GM, McDonald’s and all the back patting and bonhomie that seems to accompany the least success in a major sporting competition. And now we’re into the post-mortem, picking over a corpse that wasn’t all that interesting in the first place.

There is also something of a sense of anticipatory dread stemming from the knowledge that the hype stream has already started for the World Cup this summer, the programs for which will barely have a chance to hit the recycling bin before we’ll hear the clarion of the trumpets signalling the barrage related to the next round of summer games.

The Russians admitted to $50 billion in expenditures for this round (check here for a point of view: who knows how real this is) . How much was spent by all those national teams in the lead-up to the actual competition, one might wonder, along with what a real reckoning of the disbursements for the Sochi installations. It would be interesting to compile a progressive equivalence list: what good could we have done with that money, material and effort were our empathic instincts less repressed?

Oh, and while we were so busy thumping our chests over our world domination in curling and hockey, the Ukraine passed from the hands of one set of oligarchs to a new/old set, Syria continues to be a warlord’s wonderland, Thailand is caught in a see-saw of interests similar to what transpired in Ukraine and the forces of evil are at work stirring things up in Venezuela. Our own deal leader went to misrepresent us in Mexico, then to sign away what last vestiges of democracy might still exist at a TPP meeting in Singapore, and his return will see the passage of an undebated Fair Elections Act that has about as much Fair as the Bush II. administration’s Clean Air Act had Clean in it. Our language is headed in the same direction as our ability to control our economic and political destiny.

Stay tuned. Or perhaps, even better, stay tuned out.

 

The Wonders of Transformation

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I ran across the second vid via Open Culture through the Gazetteer’s blog roll. I missed a certain amount of the Guns ‘n Roses stuff because I was preoccupied with other music. It’s always interesting to see how a piece can be reworked in a different context.

 

 

Of course, this is pretty much what Busketeering is all about, and the Gazetteer would be the one to know.

 

John Kessler, over at KPLU.org, does a Saturday and Sunday show called All Blues between six and midnight and, at eight o’clock, dials up the Blues Time Machine, wherein he traces songs back to their roots through three or four different versions. It’s gotten hokier and more formalized over the years, but still an interesting look at the evolution of some of the tunes that have become blues standards, or classics, or just favourites. He used to do different songs on Saturday and Sunday, but I guess it got too onerous. There are a bunch of podcasts on the site:

Blues Time Machine

Speaking of New Orleans jazz, I recently discovered Aurora Nealand and really a couple of collections I got through eMusic.

All good fun.

We Need To Do More Science (mild Irony)

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gc

 

This is The Honourable Gail Shea, Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, Government of Canada, loyal Conservative and Harperite.

She was speaking at the Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo yesterday on the addition of $54 million in research grants to the station’s budget, which really ought to be an expenditure to bring joy to our hearts. In support of the grant, Shea emphasized the need for the country to carry on additional scientific research on fisheries, and that certainly ought to be the case.

CTVVI News Report

Nanaimo Daily News Article

Problem number one with her grant is that it is directed solely at the expansion of aquaculture, specifically open-water aquaculture, of both shellfish and fin fish. The government’s program is clearly to support an industry that is largely controlled from beyond Canada’s borders and which, to say it mildly, is not without controversy. This grant will do nothing to lessen that controversy in that there are certain foregone conclusions inherent in the grant, those being that farmed fish are better for the economy than wild fish and that we should be fully invested as a people in net cage open water fish farming.

The first bit of irony lies in Shea’s statements that we need to do more science, this from a minister of a government that shuts down scientific libraries in the interest, on the face of it, of saving a rather paltry pittance in tax dollars. Shea chooses to ignore serious science in the public interest that indicated pretty strongly that fish farming, as it is currently practiced, harms habitat for a wide variety of sea life and threatens stocks of wild fish. The DFO has repeatedly rejected any results from any lab linking fish farming to the propagation of fish-borne viruses sea lice. This, of course, is very convenient for a couple of reasons, one being that it obviates the need for fish farming operations to be moved to dry land, and, secondly and of greater interest to the citizens of Canada, it allows for the degradation at least, and the disappearance at worst, of wild stocks. The degradation/disappearance of wild resources has a couple of benefits for the supporters of the Harper political/economic agenda: it turns the resource into a controlled commodity rather than a part of the biosphere to which all stakeholders have some access, and it removes the need to protect vast areas that have traditionally been protected as part of the salmon spawning régime, removing a significant set of obstacles for resource extraction. The science Shea wishes to pursue is the science of the foregone conclusion, that operates on the principle of perpetuating an ideological goal rather than discovering what all the implications are of the action contemplated.

My own sense is that the reports linked above both demonstrated another part of the tilted equation in that they tend to accept with little question the premise behind Shea’s announcement rather than giving sufficient time, space and credence to a well-documented alternative point of view. This wouldn’t be so much of a problem if so many people weren’t convinced that CVVI and the Nanaimo Daily News, along with the preponderance of the press organs, speak with the force of deep and broad knowledge. They don’t, they are press release channels.

Hence, the following quip from Woody Guthrie:

“I’d rather have the devil running my country than the screwbally bunch we got in most of our offices these days.”

Meanwhile, here’s a little object lesson from Delbert McClinton:

Perkins: The Real Program Leaks Out

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The Deprived

The Deprived

 

Tom Perkins has come out with a couple of doozies the last week or so: wouldn’t it be great if his statements could be dismissed as the rantings of an overly rich fringe freak? His whine that the rich were being treated as the Jews were treated at Kristallnacht seems quite removed from reality in an era where the wealthiest of the Bush Bundlers were handed tax breaks over the long term to ensure that the invisible hand would have no meddling role in impeding their continuing accumulations of wealth, and where the “competent” authorities don’t seem to be able to muster the spine and resources to chase the trillions of dollars hiding in offshore accounts (according to certain sources). Alternet had the following:

Asked for an idea that could “change the world,” billionaire venture capitalist Tom Perkins told an audience at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on Thursday that Americans shouldn’t be able to vote unless they pay taxes and that the wealthy should have more votes.

 

In essence. what Perkins says is just the codifying of much of what has gone on in the process of de-democratizing what was at one time a fairly people-oriented society, as in about 1968, the date once cited as the high-water mark of democracy in North America (prosperity overall is said to have peaked in 1973, just prior to the Yom Kippur War and the resulting OPEC crisis). Various pundits of the privileged expounded in the lead-up to that point that we had a crisis in that society was becoming all to democratic and that steps would have to be taken to reverse that trend. In retrospect, a lot of it makes sense, and we may be in the end game even as I write with Stephen Harper pursuing the same kind of voter exclusion campaign waged by Harris in Florida in 2000 and Blackwell in Ohio in 2004. Another ploy is the OTAA gambit (Other Than As Advertised), a kind of bait and switch where the campaign rhetoric morphs, once the election is won, into practice that looks a lot like more of the same. Jean Chrétien’s Red Book was a sterling example wherein he would revoke NAFTA, axe the helicopter contract and reverse the GST. Of those, he managed to delay the helps, and, via the good offices of his Finance Minister and successor, Paul Martin, managed to “slay the deficit” along with the well-being of thousands of his constituents as the Feds cut services and transfer payments, often leaving junior levels of government to pass along the pain. We still have the GST and not only do we have NAFTA still hollowing out the economy and blocking any jurisdictional corrective measures, we are staring down the barrel of the next generation of “Trade” treaty, the TPP, which will extend the corporate hold over all economic processes and hence, the machinery of government. The other outstanding example of OTAA would have to be Barack Obama. whose pronouncements during the 2008 campaign spoke of redress for the ills of the Bush years, of a revelling and recalibration of the business of society, but whose actions have shown a continuation and even accentuation and acceleration of the same ponzi scheme perpetrated by GWB as well as his predecessors. LBJ comes out better on this scale than anyone in that office since, and largely because the general public at the time was in a mood that could best be described as truculent. Selfishness found its voice in his successor and discontent never has recovered the unity of purpose that moved the antiwar, human rights, and environmental movements to a position of prominence.

Recent decisions by the Supreme Court of the United States have unleashed the flood of money into political campaigns, in effect bringing forth a system much along the lines of what Perkins proposes, but we don’t call it vote rigging, we call it free speech, another of those perversions of language that hide the drive to return citizens to the status of serfs. The ongoing assault by the Harper Government on public institutions and on the commons in general fits right into this pattern, and another term in office will likely see out Dear Leader taking off the veil and instituting “reforms” based on his radial right-wing and religious fanatic beliefs, things that he hasn’t as yet felt emboldened enough to attempt. The militarization of law enforcement and the overreach of the surveillance apparatus are steps to enable to forcing of unpopular legislation  that will have been enabled by his thirty percent “majority”. Don’t like the prospect? Do something. Start talking now to your neighbours. Turn off the distractions like the Five-Ring Circus and spend some time working through steps to rebuild community. Either join a political party or start one, or scare the bejaysus out of all of them. But do something.

My Canada

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MiddleOttawa to give IRS information on Americans living in Canada

Headline from the Globe & Mail, February 5, 2014

 

I am one of the million-strong contingent of American citizens living in Canada. I moved here in 1968 and have always resided here since that time. I spent one summer back in California in 1969 mostly, as it turns out, winding down some aspects of a social life that had run its course and was becoming irrelevant. Since then, I have made brief forays into the US, either to visit relatives and a few friends of increasingly long standing, or as part of an annual ritual motorcycle ride, a ritual that disappeared in the rear-view mirror of carbon consciousness a decade or so ago. I became a naturalized Canadian Citizen in 1974.

Due to a recent reinterpretation of US tax law, it turns out that I am delinquent in my filings for the IRS in the US, something to which I hadn’t given the slightest thought, not having generated any income in the US since I worked part-time in a gas station on the corner of Scott and Lombard Streets in the winter of ’67-’68. I did my university schooling here in Canada, worked a variety of part-time and summer jobs, always in Canada, and spent three decades toiling in the belly of the public education system, retiring to my office and garden almost eight years ago.

I don’t mind at all paying my fair share to support the common enterprise that is a nation and all the possible good it can do when citizens get together to provide the services that make life livable for all, and while I certainly don’t agree with much of the way the spending goes, particularly of late, I happily jump through whatever hoops are necessary to pony up what the law says I ought to: withholding at source ensures that I don’t often need to cut a cheque, but when that happens, I do so in the knowledge that I am fulfilling my responsibilities as a citizen, the price of the rights I am supposed to enjoy.

What I do mind, and what no one should have to go through, are unnecessary hoops and bureaucratic bumpf such as the IRS is now proposing, nay, demanding. OK, it’s the law, but we have to ask ourselves why the process can’t be streamlined in such a way that the process doesn’t need to be duplicated on two sides of the border. This is to catch people who are hiding income from the IRS to evade taxes. I don’t fall into that category. I don’t believe that the IRS has any claim to any of the income that I’ve generated in Canada over the last 46 years. Under the right circumstances, I would be happy to attach my Social Security Number to a declaration from Revenue Canada that I had no earnings subject to US taxes, and be done with it.  It’s clear that such will not be the process.

So the real pinch is that Revenue Canada is going to share my information with the IRS as a matter of policy. There are those who will posit that this is already happening, and that recent revelations of the actions of the NSA, CSIS, CSEC and who knows who else pretty much tell the tale that nothing that any of us does is cloaked from the broadly defined security establishment. This would certainly not have been the case when I first came to Canada, and there have been manifold occasions where the government of this country has more or less thumbed its nose at our neighbours to the south, particularly in instances where they weren’t being particularly good neighbours. Our current government is all of a piece with the corporate lobbyist-run show in DC, and, in fact, seems to be trying to outdo our American cousins at the game of enabling a Monopoly-style game of locking down the economy, and eventually all of society. I suspect that most Canadians have changed much less in this direction than their government, but the trend to intrusiveness and dishonesty is so widespread among those who direct our affairs that it seems to matter increasingly little what ethical positions might be held by the mass of Canadian citizens. Richard Newell, the infamous King Biscuit Boy out of old TO wrote a song that seems to characterize what’s become of our fair land: You Don Tore Your Playhouse Down Again