Category Archives: World Spiralling Toward Hell

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.

 

 

 

 

 

How Can These People Sleep At Night

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SOTJ

 

 

Conscience is thoroughly well-bred and soon leaves off talking to those who do not wish to hear it.

—Samuel Butler

In relation to most of our governing hierarchy and the corporate pyramid that supports the hierarchy, I have often wondered what these people learned from their parents and subsequent interactions with schools, faith organizations, business connections and general interactions with other members of society. A quick look at the ideals that are plastered all over every surface of our society would call for an empathy quotient sufficient to apportion opportunity, wealth and societal value according to some criteria other than Al Davis’ infamous “Just win, Baby!” Such seems not to be the case when the cadres holding the reins of political and economic clout clearly suffer from a deficit in their EQ and a blindness to reason that might show them that they are taking us (some of us kicking and screaming) down a path to oblivion (the original category of post pertaining to World Spiralling Toward Hell was originally meant as a bit of nasty silliness, but has become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy). They seem to be incapable of hearing that sucking sound as they and theirs go down with the rest of us in what will clearly be the pyrrhic victory to literally end all others, or, if they hear it, they are plainly incapable of anything like a competent interpretation of the signs around them. It is a truly Herculean undertaking to educate the expediters of doom, and perhaps even more daunting to contemplate awakening the legions of their victims, those who cheer as breeches are opened in their own hulls, and the walking dead who blithely continue down the trench of consumption, blind to the cesspit into which we are all about to plunge.

 

 

What Comes Around

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f4

(AFP Photo)

 

I used to be a nut for airplanes, particularly fighters, so when I saw this photo on Common Dreams this morning, I was taken back to the Sixties: these are F-4 Phantoms, a mainstay of both the US Air Force and Navy for a decade or so during the Vietnam War and beyond, more or less. The trick is that these craft are operating for the Iranian Air Force, likely having served since before the 1979 revolution. I suspect that they were part of the arms largesse lavished on the Shah and got left behind. It’s a head-scratcher that they’re still flying, and I would have to say that it’s a tribute to the ingenuity of Iranian flight support crews that they might still get off the ground, or to the wiles of arms dealers that they can still find spare parts. It’s also a bit of a laugh that Iran finds itself ranged on the same side as the US in the current struggle against Sunni ISIS. We must fight religious fanaticism, mustn’t we? Oh, wait, it’s the wild and crazy Christians and the Fundamentalist Shi’ia in pitched battle against the Extreme Wahabist Sunni. Not much to like in any of these poxed houses, but I’ll wish them a Pax (real, not Romanus or Britannicus) on both their houses, or, perhaps we could gift them all with F-22/35s, in which case the whole conflict could just grind to a halt as one warplane after another crashed and burned.

Once again, I have to harken back to reading Catch-22 in my much younger days: this is not a satire, it’s a user’s manual.

There’s Always A Way

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110211-O-XX000-001

So Michael Byers had a piece in the Globe and Mail that seemed to confirm reports that the Pentagon had leaked a missive that the Canadian government was going to go ahead with the purchase of a mere four F-35 Joint Strike Fighters. There still has been no competition to replace the F-18 aircraft we currently deploy, and considerable fuss arose when the plan to buy a whole fleet of them came to light a few years back as it became clear the the Defense people weren’t being particularly candid about the cost of the program and about the notion that the aircraft itself is not particularly adapted to the ideal mission for Canada. On top of that, the whole program has run decades behind schedule and has run over its original budget by orders of magnitude. The problem with buying four of these beauties is that the JSF then is likely declared the winner of the competition that never happened and the standard for further procurement.

I recall distinctly the feeling I had in the pit of my stomach when I learned that the Chrétien government had signed a contract to acquire four British submarines back in the late ’90s.

 

Vic

There is much I love about Britain and the British, but their engineering and construction of mechanical devices has left a trail of broken hearts among all those who’ve experienced the joy of owning an MG, or a Triumph, or a Handley Page Halifax, and the Canadian experience with these vessels would seem to bear that out. The original price quoted by Chrétien & Co. was on the order of $750 m, but by the time any of them was declared fit for service, our own poor little exchequer had disbursed several times that, and we had lost lives when one of the things caught fire in Mid-Atlantic on the way to Canada. Our little dabbling with the JSF looks like a similar story, aside from the price tag running over $100 bn., and it seems hard to locate any discussion of this in the House, a phenomenon that would have demonstrated a modicum of consideration following all the previous upheaval over back room dealings and the desire of AirShow McKay to have his Mission Accomplished moment. Nope, a leak, sort of like our submarines.

Sadly, we have a government that won’t take no for an answer and that will trip around the back door or under the toilet seat togged what it want, even through chicanery and pure skulduggery.

 

 

 

 

 

To Market, To Market

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CanBuck

Lots of ink spilled about respect for the fallen who gave up their lives for our freedoms. Peter Mansbridge is solemnly pontificating in the next room, falling in line with Mr. Harper’s bid to gain votes by sanitizing the slaughter of millions for the sake of the Empire, a benefit for industrialists and (ig-)nobility. People not attending the ceremonies will include those trading on various stock markets around the globe because, after all, it was really all about money anyway, wasn’t it? (Aside from Royal pissing contests.) Markets are up, and here’s the eventual payoff for our august leader…

USD

 

None Of The Above

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None

 

Above is a bit of a rogue’s gallery of major players, at those front and centre, in the disputes taking place in the Ukraine, which came to mind because of this piece on The Real News Network. Of course, some of the same players would be in an analogous gallery relating to Syria and the Iraq redux (re-redux? re-re-redux?), or Libya, Egypt, take your pick, as there seems to be no end of selection for trouble in the current state of statesmanship. Our little graphic is also missing the IMF and World Bank, but their faces coincide with this lot, except Putin, perhaps, and perhaps only in this instance. The lead-in to the piece in question reads:

Political economist Aleksandr Buzgalin says the Russian state is pursuing geopolitical interests in Syria and Ukraine for its elite – to the detriment of ordinary citizens.

The implication is that ordinary Russians are taking a beating over Ukraine and its discontents, a likely scenario, and one would have to think that perhaps Petroshenko represents the same routine when it comes to the general populace of the Ukraine. A lot of this came to mind while reading the current post on Northern Reflections in which Owen muses on the foolishness of Stephen Harper’s adventures in trying to emulate Winston Churchill’s war prime minister persona. I left the following comment:

 

This is all pretty Alice in Wonderland stuff, though actually, it reeks of people who used Catch-22 as a user’s manual. It also reminds me of reading Barbara Tuchman’s March of Folly and finally discerning that the case studies, while about nations acting contrary to their national interests, were actually cases of nations working for the narrow self-interest of the forces behind the governments in question.

This surely describes the great preponderance of world leaders, people who consistently lead away from any manner of society that would smooth our the edges of conflict, provide a decent living for all citizens and encourage broad participation in the moulding of public policy. Our parliament is right in the middle of a debate on the current mission proposal, a debate mooted before its start by the very fact of a Con majority, and by the tepid nature of the opposition. The Libs want a humanitarian mission, and while the NDP makes noises about diplomacy in this case, they fall flat on a laundry list of environmental and some social issues. Elizabeth May, the only elected Green (Hayer being a refugee from the NDP), often makes complete sense, but the party itself often goes wide of the mark on social and economic issues. In effect, none of the choices in Canadian politics will be able to get us to a nation that will be preparing actively for the survival of humanity a century from now. The same situation exists at the provincial level and in a lot of municipal governance. It is encouraging to see, in our little neck of the woods, the emergence of a broad spectrum of candidates for city council and mayor’s chair, some of whom stand steadfastly for the status quo (though they may not entirely own up to it), some of whom are feeling their way toward a new path, and a few who already understand the engagement necessary to move our community toward being a vibrant and inclusive place to live.

 

I Haven’t Read The Book, Either, But I Did Read The Comments

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Mw

 

I’ve been delaying reading this piece because of the anticipation of sheer pain at another shot at someone trying to do something to ensure that we have a planet to live on a couple of decades down the road. I can understand that Margaret Wente, as an apparently very well-off US citizen living a fairly cosseted life as a columnist in Toronto, might take exception to the existence of the economic system that set her up in the life of Riley, but her column was written without, apparently, the benefit of reading the actual book.

(Full disclosure: I, too, hold US citizenship, and lead a different version of that cosseted life out here in the last remaining low-rent district on the Wet Coast. Neither have I read Naomi Klein’s latest tome, though it’s on the list. Unlike Ms. Wente, I came to the conclusion long ago that we are staring down both barrels of the apocalypse on a number of counts and have been actively engaged in local initiatives to do something about the endless wars, resource extraction follies, over-consumption and possible disasters related to food/water shortages and disease.)

MW’s contention is that Klein is clueless on a number of questions relating to both capitalism and climate change and in the rather snide way of discounting the thought that went into the book, labels her the It-Girl of climate change, rather a low blow for someone with pretentious to intellectual status. I was curious to see what the mood was amongst the commenters ( I didn’t get too far, but was surprised to see how vehemently the commenters protested Wente’s not having read the book and proceeded to point out flaws in her argument, specifically that Klein hadn’t addressed issues relating to China and India, stating that those who read the book would find that it was all there. The sad thing is that the Globe and Mail would leave the impression that Wente was on the right side of it all, except for those intrepid enough to dive into the comments.

I’m glad that I delayed reading the piece and glad to get this thought out where I can now ignore it. We all have some pretty important tasks to attend to.

Outed

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AMMV

Socialist In Name Olny

Like many, the early days of the Obama presidency brought with them expectation that we had lived through something of a nightmare and that it was time to move on to rebuild the shattered community. the economic landscaped, the tattered diplomacy and the crumbling environment that characterized the Bush years. Sadly, the glory of the Obama presidency has been more of same, the odd sop to progressivism and sound ecology, but more war, more torture, more violation of rights and more inequality. This situation is reflected all over the world, for me particularly in a land for which, thanks to my Dad, I have a strong predilection, France. There, following the disappointment of the two terms of François Mitterand, nominally a socialist, the French got two terms of Chiracism, the new crony capitalism in its nascent form with a strong dose of self-perceived De Gaulle ego. This was followed by the nastiness and arrogance of a term of Sarkoland where the lords of the towers of money really established their preeminence and life for the general populace seemed to spiral down the crapper. Sarkozy was removed in the general election of 2012, when François Hollande came to power with, of all things, a parliamentary majority, and with the support of the EELV, the greenies of the Hexagone. The greatest achievement of this formation has been the Pacte de Responsibilité (just what it sounds like) which bestowed some forty billion euros worth of breaks on the business sector without any established quid pro quo in terms of creation of employment or any other measure to improve the lot of the  working folk. Of course, the idea is to increase the competitive level of French business in relation to the rest of Europe and the World, meaning more stuff being made in France and more jobs. Sounds like straight Strauss to me and some of the elected Socialist Députés felt the same way. including the Minister of the economy, Arnaud Montebourg, who, this week, had the audacity to say something about it. Manuel Valls, the Prime Minister appointed by Hollande five months ago, wasted no time in inviting Montebourg and a couple of his colleagues to leave the cabinet. Montebourg was replaced as Minister of the Economy with a chap named Emannuel Marcon, a product of the Rothschild banking concerns. From this, we can see easily why people are more than a bit disappointed by the Hollande government and has a lot of people divorcing themselves from the political manoeuvres of both the Socialist Party and the UMP, looking to find solace in the arms of Marine Le Pen’s Front National or just calling a pox on all their houses.

As our own next federal contest approaches, I find myself asking if there is a choice worthy of a vote: Harper has devastated, physical, social and spiritual landscapes here in Canada, contributed to a new Dark Age of Ignorance, doomed to planet to war, pestilence and climate dislocation and created inequality in Canada on an unprecedented scale. Justin Trudeau wants to cast himself in the rôle of Saviour from all of the above, but is still a champion of pipelines, of the investment community, big pharma, the arms industry and a hawkish Israel and NATO. Mulcair seems unwilling to tell the nasty truth because he knows it won’t bring him to power. The prospects for responsible government seem to fade with each day. We can only hope that Mr. & Ms. Every(wo)man will begin immediately to scratch some part of another of the collective anatomy and utter the polite Canadian equivalent of WTF before starting to school whatever politician of whatever stripe about being accountable to those with little to lose and an allegorical pitchfork stowed somewhere in the closet.

Big News:Pot Calls Kettle Black

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GM

 

Gwynn Morgan suggests, in a Globe piece, that oil sands foes (not the lack of tar) should use facts, not a popularity contest, to sway opinion. Do I really have to say more? This character drips crude and bitumen, spent time as head of Enbriidge, moved to become Christy Clark’s adviser on Northern Gateway (no conflict there) and has been a tireless shill for an industry that’s on its way to killing life on the planet. His idea of facts eliminates islands from Douglas Channel, touts world-class spill clean-up (ask people in Kalamazoo how they feel about that) and is the living incarnation of Mencken’s description of the political class:

 

“The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can’t get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing.The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods.” –H. L. Mencken

(Thanks to Informationclearinghouse.com for the quote)

This, I think, reflects poorly on Morgan, but we should expect it of him: it’s his gig, bad as it may be. The real shame is on the Globe for giving him the pulpit and an air of credence to which he has no legitimate claim.