Category Archives: Just Stuff

Les enfoirés, ou la charité d’une autre perspective

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Hard at work for others

Hard at work for others

 

Les Enfoirés débarquent ce soir sur TF1. Ils sont le symbole de notre époque où la lutte contre la misère s’est transformée en charité organisée et en compassion planifiée. Les artistes, les communicants et les marques, aidés dans leur tâche par des médias peu cohérents, aiment aujourd’hui à afficher leur engagement humanitaire. Mais il s’agit de verser une petite larme et de passer rapidement à autre chose…

Interesting little piece over at Marrianne.net letting us know, in a somewhat circuitous fashion, that the telethon will be on one of the main networks in France tonight, but there is a good deal of chiding inherent in the message. First, the se of the word “enfoiré”, meaning, more or less, bothersome idiot, a term brought into current usage by Coluche, a comedian who stuck pins in a lot of society’s balloons and who founded les Restos du Coeur, a chain of eating establishments dedicated to feeding the poor and dispossessed at the height of the ’80’s recession. It was meant to be a stopgap measure, especially with the election of the Socialist Mitterand government, but the institution, and the problem endures today, and in a grossly exaggerated form (if this sounds familiar, it is because it is a phenomenon that exists in one form or another all over he world, and what happens in France is a reasonable mirror of how we attempt to deal with it here). Mitterrand, it seems, liked the name and the party, but really didn’t act as a socialist, as seems to be the case with the latest Socialist In Name Only, François Hollande. OK, here is a rough translation of the paragraph from Marianne:

The Idiots land tonight on TF!. They are symbolic of our times where the struggle against poverty has morphed into organized charity and planned compassion. The artists, spokespeople, and brands, helped along by the rather incoherent media, like to show off their humanitarian solidarity on this one day. But it’s really that we’re called on to shed a little tear and to move quickly on to other matters…

 

Everywhere people are called on to open their hearts and wallets to help feed, house and clothe those who seem not to be included in the golden dream that is our society. I can’t say that we actually designate certain people to be at the bottom of the economic and social heap, but by default, when some are allowed to corral an inordinate share of society’s riches, someone at the other end has to take less. As inequities have grown over the last forty or fifty years, there has been a multiplier effect where, for every Bill Gates, Warren Buffet or Carlos Slim, there are thousands whose livelihood is diminished, and, while these people may sell themselves as leaders and job creators, the vast majority of their wealth has been generated by people other than themselves, and their claims of increasing the size of the economic pie often ring hollow as the pie they expand is entirely based on monetary fictions, easily erased by economic contractions. In effect, we have seen no diminution of poverty or precarity, though often the stats can be manipulated to show whatever the current régime wants to put in front of the electorate (e.g., unemployment stats based on the number of job seekers registered with the authorities, rather than the actual number of people without meaningful work).

Here is a quip from Teddy Roosevelt, born to privilege, but able, at least, to articulate what it might take to reduce poverty, want, and precarity in a society that truly functioned as a society:

“The fundamental thing to do for every man is to give him a chance to reach a place in which he will make the greatest possible contribution to the public welfare…No man can be a good citizen unless he has a wage more than sufficient to cover the bare cost of living, and hours of labor short enough so that after his day’s work is done he will have time and energy to bear his share in the management of the community, to help in carrying the general load. We keep countless men from being good citizens by the conditions of life with which we surround them.” – Theodore Roosevelt

 

While you’re at it, go have a look at John Ralston Saul’s The Comeback, a reasonably detailed litany of the transgressions of the Crown (us) in Canada against First Nations and what it means for the sorry state of our government and societal institutions.

 

Did You Ever Have To Make Up Your Mind

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Monsanto's Time Is Nye?

Monsanto’s Time Is Nye?

 

Bill Nye may be the Science Guy, but we have to wonder about the science of GMO when he appears to have reversed field following a visit to Monsanto, as outlined in an article on EcoWatch. He hasn’t published, that I know of, the changes he intends to make in his writings on the subject, but a lot of what he had previously written was pretty damning, as has been much of the literature written by those not sponsored by the gene-splicers. I have to admit to having and not-totally-open mind on the subject and I suspect it will take some serious convincing to get me to accept that what Monsanto, Bayer, Syngenta and the like have done is in the general interest of the public, that it contributes to the greater good without doing irreparable damage. First consideration has to be the stubbornness with which these folks cloak their doings in secret and gain legal approval through the purchase of political levers rather than convincing the public that they are acting in the interest of anything other than profit and, as it seems likely, the ability to choke and control much of the food supply. Their unwillingness to abide even labelling of their product speaks to a group that has something to hide. Second consideration is that, other than being able to drench landscapes in pesticides/herbicides, I don’t think that a convincing argument has been made for the necessity, or even utility of these genetic modifications. I’ve seen little evidence that more food is produced using large-scale agricultural methods with major inputs of chemical soil amendments and pest controls. Monsanto, in particular, seems to have done a woeful job of keeping their organisms under control in nature and may be doing a tremendous amount of harm through simple lack of oversight. I wonder how frank Bill Nye will be about his change of heart, and how much of a change of heart will he have had? Could be another icon of rectitude down the rectitube, so eyes and ears open seems to be the watchword.

 

One Way Or Another

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Undoing What Was Done

Undoing What Was Done

A report in Libération this morning decries the sack of the ruins of the archeological site at Nimrod, using heavy construction equipment to destroy the heritage of earlier societies that they consider blasphemous, having already addressed, apparently, a wealth of societal treasure in the museum at Mosul. My father actually worked on digs around Mosul in the mid-Thirties, and somewhere in the family treasure, there exists a small trove of 8-mm. film of locals moving dirt in their burnooses, no bulldozers being available. I recently discovered some prints of RAF photos of the dig site, part of the stuff of Hank’s personal legend.

The reflection runs thusly: is it worse to desecrate to artifacts of the past than it is to ensure that all but selective material gets buried in collective ignorance and forgetfulness? I can’t think of a single constructive or positive comment to make about the beheaders, the desecrators and those who would establish a religious or doctrinary hegemony of any sort, and that includes those in our own society whose walled-in take on life looks to take us back to some new version of feudalism. The horror of ISIS should lead us to look at our own foibles and missteps a little more closely, particularly that seemingly insurmountable impulse to bomb anything that moves, each time sowing more dragon’s teeth with each bomb that falls. I wonder when we will realize that we’re still getting the same results with our repeated actions that clearly don’t work for the majority of us (or them) and down tools for a reassessment of links between our actions and what people do in response.

I don’t know if that will help bring those Assyrians up to speed with current Islamic thought, but it might to some distance toward setting our own society free from the constraints imposed by the greedy canyon-minds.

(…one way or another, this darkness got to give.)

Adam and Eve

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Birds Of A Feather

Birds Of A Feather

There probably isn’t too much for me to add to what has been said by Owen Gray, or posted by Jim Scott, but I’m offended, as always, by the silliness that constitutes the dominant tenor of the discussions of events in the political landscape. Eve Adams’ defection to the Liberal Party smacks of political opportunism and her bleatings about being the victim of bullies and fear-mongering shouts of the hollowness of a message hollered down a bamboo tube. Did she not vote for all the regressive and destructive legislation that passed through the House during her tenure as a Conservative MP? Where was the crisis of conscience in the face of Omnibus Budget Bills, secret trade negotiations and the building of the structures of repression in Canadian law? She only left when it became apparent that she would not be running under the Conservative banner anywhere in Canada. Conversely, if the Liberal Party of Canada not represents her values, what does that say about what we might expect from a Trudeau régime? It’s a daunting prospect, one of those frying pan/fire dichotomies that clouds any hope of a return to some form of humanist hope for a society floundering in ignorance and lack of care for self, society and the environment. Of course, the media love the stuff: they can promote the ongoing soap opera of…

 

Ooops! Got busy, had to leave this and I’ve totally lost my train of thought. Who cares where Eve ends up? Who cares about Justin’s hair or his carbon tax? Mulcair’s daycare initiative is a vote-getting ploy. Ms. May stands up and says all the right things, but is this what her party stands for? I really like the idea of people like Leadnow.ca who are working to elect someone other than Harper, but I have a hard time at this point seeing how that would work without a load of cooperation on the part of the other three parties. They are like the Conservative, Reform and other splinters who floundered and fought amongst themselves, allowing for a succession of Chrétien governments which, in the end weren’t that much different from what Harper offers now. We just weren’t as far down the road of secret trade deals, the militarization of police forces, the suppression of dissent, the hollowing out of the real economy and the transformation of Canada into a beggared, oil-soaked dystopia (OK, not there yet, but the signs are pretty clear).  At what point do we get depressed and sneak off in a corner with a dozen IPAs in a vain attempt to dull the pain of watching anything civilized get trashed through a combination of mean-spiritedness and ignorance? I’ll (hips!) let you know when we get there.

 

 

Harper Has Moved Us

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Stephen+Harper

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

According to our friends at the Globe and Mail, Stephen Harper has succeeded in moving Canada significantly to the right, to that place where we all function as rugged and moral individuals practicing free-market ideology and end-times Christian wing-nutttery so that the puppet masters behind the curtain can continue to profit mightily and lock down all the benefits of an ownership society. The real Government of Canada Action Plan even has arrows showing where all the wealth and power will go in our newly restructured gush-up model of wealth redistribution. The current administration in Ottawa, along with its provincial counterparts, has made ignorance fashionable, torpedoed both knowledge and responsible analysis, corrupted the English language with feel-good labels for pernicious realities, torn vast holes in the social safety network (that was already threadbare from the predations of Paul Martin/Jen Chrétien/Brian Mulroney) and trashed what was, at one time, a perception that Canada had a constructive rôle to play in international affairs. We have become more like our dysfunctional neighbours to the south whose system of governance has morphed into a perpetual politics machine, staggering through inaction and paralysis from one election to the next and much of whose discourse has become so biblically hide-bound as to lose the very nature of metaphor and the sense of what history might teach us. In effect, Harper’s move hasn’t so much moved us from left to right as it has from sane to wrong.

 

A Taste In My Mouth

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WebAil

 

This is a time of year when the garlic gets a little easier to peel. This is the beginning of a casserole that will feature some Great Northern beans that I soaked all last night, a head of garlic, some of Pete’s chorizo, probably some onions, some of our bottled tomatoes and some greens scavenged from under the tents in the garden. I get to make this up as I go along. It’s a lovely change from the ruminations of yesterday, full of angst and murder. Angst and murder are always there, but this is what will fill the kitchen with aromas this afternoon, allowing for a little lightening of the general mood.

Wherefore Tolerance?

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LPeerse

 

Today’s attack on the staff of Charlie Hebdo, as well as on the spirit of criticism in which they worked, brings thoughts of all those works of the Enlightenment in which tolerance was such a dominant theme. The illustration is from the cover of a recent pocket edition of Lettres persanes, by Montesquieu, in which he portrayed the foibles of contemporary European society as he would have imagined it to be perceived by a couple of visitors from the Levant, in effect mocking his own people. Montesquieu went on at some length in other works, notably L’Esprit des lois, about the need for separation of powers and about keeping religion out of the business of worldly government, a notion that seems increasingly imperilled all over the world, though not every so brazenly as seems to be the case with certain fundamentalists unable to close their eyes to an irreverent attitude on the part of those who don’t share their views of either the spiritual or the temporal world. When Charlie Hebdo first published images of the Prophet, it was clear that they had knowingly hit on a very raw nerve, and to those most offended, being an equal-opportunity lampooner matters little, underlying the sense that certain sects of almost all religions cannot and will not distinguish between the affairs of this Earth and those of whatever version of celestial existence is part of their credo. In addition, and this is where the real rub arises, they cannot and will not accept that what constitutes their own system of beliefs has no relevance for those of other systems of belief: they have all the right answers, and they have the answers for everyone, to the point where simple argumentation will not suffice for redress of transgression and all other dogmas must be extirpated. These are people who are not willing to let the elected and the damned be sorted at death, heretics must be expedited on their way to eternal damnation. Charlie Hebdo chose to be the burr under the saddle in a time and place where there was considerable risk of inciting the kind of violence that was visited upon them today, they knew those risks and chose to proceed. It’s a heavy price to pay and will only be validated if there arises a true spirit of willingness to tolerate diverging opinion. It is also a little painful to hear the commentary from folks like John Kerry and Stephen Harper, as well as other leaders who have been the beneficiaries of tolerant societies who rise up to pontificate on the values represented by a free and open press and the unfettered flow of information and ideas, but who support emasculated and feckless organs of a press establishment that consistently curries favour with corrupt enterprise in both the public and private sphere, and whose organs of government engage in prosecutions of whistleblowers and other truth-tellers, the rendition and torture of prisoners and the extra-judicial executions of those who either refuse, or even neglect, to follow their own social and economic dogma. It’s sad that we pay so little beyond lip service to the thought embodied in the works of Montesquieu, his contemporaries in the Enlightenment, and those who both preceded and followed up in the quest for tolerant pluralism.

Lovelier Thoughts, Michael

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PP

We listened to this endlessly when we were little tots. Strangely, my eldest brother was named Peter, and the sourpuss who couldn’t quite get the flying thing was ceaselessly exhorted to “think lovelier thoughts, Michael”, that being the name of my other elder brother who, being analytical from a young age, tended to express rather cynical thoughts on many scores. So over at The Tyee, Bill Tieleman posted a piece in which he points out that, upon meeting some political foes, he discovers that they have some common likes and that they might be human just like him and that perhaps we ought not to demonize these folks.

Perhaps demonize is a little too strong a term for what needs to be our outlook and how we ought to guide our actions, but a quick scan of the misery and misrepresentation spread by Jim Flaherty, I find that a shared liking for the Group of Seven isn’t enough to want me to treat him particularly kindly, that his behaviour is any more worthy of compassion than petty thugs (who at least can often plead need for their predations, or impulse). There is such a litany of double-dealing, prevarication, greed and grand larceny on the part of so many politicians, and so much of it fits a recurring pattern that belies the possibility that simple stupidity might be at the root of these misdeeds, that it seems difficult to avoid concluding that these folks have knowingly and intentionally engineered schemes to redirect public funds into private pockets and then to smile and cook up a wealth of rationalizations and justifications to cover their real intentions.

Therefore, we needn’t demonize these people: they’ve done that by themselves and anyone who treats them with deference and respect is putting on a display of connivance, or complacency, or ignorance, or some combination of the above. We might want to keep this little quip from Charles Dickens in the back of our minds as we deal with the current régimes in Victoria and Ottawa (and beyond):

I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don’t trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance, any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.
—Charles Dickens
And, sadly, as we reflect back on the year and consider what we were promised and what we got, we might want to hold this image close to our hearts.
Political Promises

Wherefore Learning?

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U

 

Independence is one of the hallmarks of a great university and of the educational opportunities it provides. The independence of our institutions of post-secondary learning is perhaps in deeper jeopardy than at any time in recent history with the issuance and signing of mandate letters, Government Letters of Expectations, this past spring. Reading superficially through the letters doesn’t necessarily set off any alarm bells, but that’s precisely the weaselly nature of the document. These letters, and some addenda, are to be found on the Web at the links below, and all include the same material in the letter itself, it seems.

After the preamble on the purpose of the document we get:

In the spirit of collaboration and cooperation, the Institution agrees to:

 

– In establishing the Institution’s priorities, consider the Government’s goals of supporting our economy by controlling spending to balance the budget, job creation and investment in the province, and improving social programs that support families of every description and improve the lives o f British Columbians.

 

Notice the government buzzwords about social programs and families? Think of how good the balancing of the budget has been generally for families and social programs. Job creation and investment both look like code for “we will only fund programs that do what business wants.” It’s good that they only want the institution to consider the Government’s  priorities.

 

– Work in partnership with the Government and Aboriginal communities, organizations and institutes to implement the Aboriginal Post-Secondary Education and Training Policy Framework and Action Plan in order to increase the participation and success of Aboriginal learners.

 

This tells me that the Government wants to do to Aboriginal communities what they’ve done to the rest of the citizens of the Province.

 

– Assist in advancing Government’s International Education Strategy, including promoting greater internationalization o f the education system, attracting and retaining more international students, and providing increased opportunities for students and educators to study and work abroad.

 

Here we see the drive to generate trade by importing international students we can soak for exorbitant tuition and housing while excluding needy students from British Columbia, all of whom should move to Peace River gas fields or go straight to Tar Sands Land.

 

– Continue to support the development and adoption of open education resources, including Government’s open textbook initiative, to increase affordability for students and their families.

 

Washes of material on-line, mostly unmediated, selected texts available for free while the real stuff hides out in bookstores for very real money, but keep this young riffraff off the campus and as far as possible from Gordon Head, Burnaby Mountain and West Point Grey.

 

– Support seamless delivery of education and skills training for students from high school right through entry into the workforce.

 

Start students down this path while they’re young and have neither choice nor discernment and keep hammering that message until they get let out with a mountain of debt to toil as drones with only the light of BCTV and National Post to inform them of their good fortune.

 

– Collaborate with Government to set targets for post-secondary graduates to ensure British Columbia’s current and future labour market needs are met.

 

We don’t do broad-ranging inquiry, research and knowledge. Cultural heritage? Take it elsewhere.

 

– Continue to minimize overhead costs and, where appropriate, consolidate functions across different post-secondary institutions.

 Cut programs that don’t pay their way in the perhaps vain hope that one of those other universities will fill the gap. Not our worry.

 

– Undertake an institution-wide core review of post-secondary education programming to ensure student seats are being filled .

 

Core review is an oft-recurring code for insane cutbacks. A good way to ensure seats are filled is to create an artificial shortage.

 

– Comply with the Government’s tuition limit policy that limits tuition and mandatory fee increases. For 2014/15, fee increases will be limited to two percent. A copy ofthe tuition limit policy can be found on the Ministry’s website.

Meanwhile, what has been the direction and magnitude of salary increases for those close to the Premier’s office?

 

Under the heading General Institutional Accountabilities, we see the following:

 

– Conduct its affairs in a manner consistent with the spirit and intent of all applicable legislative, regulatory and policy framework established by the Government, and with the principles of integrity, efficiency, effectiveness and service.

 

Let she who is without blame cast the first stone.

 

– Ensure audited financial results (before endowment contributions) achieve a balanced or surplus position on an annual basis, and develop strategies to ensure this is achieved.

 

These strategies must include shredding of union contracts, keeping the faculty in line should they start to get uppity, or even restless, and offloading expenses down the hierarchy wherever possible.

 

– Conduct board matters in accordance with the Government’s best practice guidelines-

BC Governance and Disclosure Guidelines for Governing Boards o fPublic Sector Organizations, which can be found on the Ministry of Finance website.

 

How much did those Olympic Games cost? How about the Millennium Line? B.C. Place refurb? Site C?

– Ensure any board remuneration is publicly disclosed on the Institution’s website as required by the Public Sector Employers’ Council Secretariat.

 

Along with all the other financial shenanigans we’ve seen out of Victoria…

 

– Comply with the Government’s requirements to be carbon neutral under the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Targets Act.

 

Carbon Neutral? Liquid.Natural.Gas. Let she who is without blame cast the first stone.

 

– Comply with the Government’s freeze on executive and management compensation announced September 2012.

 

– Comply with the 2014 Economic Stability Mandate which applies to collective agreements that expire on or after December 31 , 2013 . A summary o f the mandate is available on the Public Sector Employers’ Council Secretariatwebsite.

Remember those union guys? They’re a botheration on the spirit.Do whatcha gotta, but beat them back.

 

Neither, Nor

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VPErdo

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BHO

 

Angela Merkel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A most frequent occurrence, there’s a lot of telling material for your reading pleasure at Salt Spring News, the latest instalment dealing in considerable depth with recent moves involving a developing alliance between Russia and Turkey, doing something of an end-around to counter NATO moves in the Ukraine and Syria. Mr. Scott has run this most excellent aggregator site for more than a decade, providing not only the material for rumination, but a short rumination of his own from time to time. He has often featured pieces from Pepe Escobar, a pundit who is the diametric opposite of what we see in our closer-to-home press, that is to say, a fine researcher and a scribe who looks under all the rocks before informing his readers of all aspects of the subject of his enquiries. His latest piece can be accessed at SSN (link above) or here, so now we can get to the point of the mainstream of tonight’s symposium (h/t Tom Lehrer, An Evening Wasted With, c. 1959).)

 

Pictured above are some of the prima ballerinas in the current dance macabre working through Eastern Europe and the Middle East, with Erdo and Vlad finessing some slick stuff on Merkie and Obie of late. For those of us who don’t like the meddling of NATO in the affairs of the Ukraine or supporting sworn enemies to unseat Assad in Syria, there is this tendency to gloat at the undoing of the narrative that the West is promoting in this region, as well as others around the globe. There is also a tendency to forget what sort of people Vlad and Erdo have shown themselves to be through the repressive actions against minorities in their own countries as well as the sequestration of wealth and suppression of human and general social rights at home and abroad. The sad part is that, for the ordinary citizen who believes that we should all have a say in the affairs of our land, there may be no viable choice from those extant, and there is a readjustment in thinking, one that takes us from an alignment with existing organizations to a sense of belonging to a broader human group of fluid and changing nature in which we provide our own leadership and delegate freely as long as those to whom we delegate work toward agreed objectives. When objectives are not met, or the effort goes astray, we withdraw our support and realign. Anyone who felt the upsurge of interest and energy attendant upon the “hope and change” campaign of 2008, who sensed the stark contrast between the mumblings of the Bush and the soaring oratory of Obama, it continues to be something of a bleeding sore to see that Obama has, for all intents and purposes, become Bush, other than the words. We saw this play out on a lesser scale a couple of weeks back when we saw the loyal opposition in Victoria sign on to a tax bill that even some of their members qualified as a sell-out. It was a no-brainer: the measure would pass with or without their vote, and instead of taking a stand against the bald giveaway of what should be common resources, the opposition became the same corruption by voting with the government. Weaver stood alone is asking the rhetorical WTF? and the sitting was over.

The difficulty lies in building community activity to counter this massed stupidity and betrayal, a process that seems to require a good deal of patience, but there remains the question of how much time do we have to be patient, given the pressing nature of the challenges we face.