What Time Can Teach Us

Posted on 2014/07/13 by danneau

(belongs to info wars.ca)

Title from an article on the Globe & Mail’s site. I’m not going to read it:

The rise of the drones: Do privacy concerns outweigh the benefits of this burgeoning technology?

The obvious answer is yes, but not just drones: our lives are interlaced with a plethora of different technologies and their associated gadets, some of which may enhance our lives, but many of which have too much downside, and the sum of which amounts to an addiction to veeblefeetzers and goldbergian claptrap. We’ve been sold a load of not-so-goods that channel the way we live and bind us to the culture of consumption. It would be interesting to know what portion of the Earth’s human population is employed in the development, production and marketing of what are essentially toys: civilization seems to have structured itself to choke itself on stuff to the extent that our escape route is not entirely clear and becomes less so by the day.

I suppose the radio and television set the tone early on in the last century, a brilliant way of extending communication and a possible step in improving the human condition. What we got was the best pavlovian Bernays sauce of conditioning through limited discussion and debate reinforced with tsunamis of emotional drek and lowest-common-denominator views of society and its discontents. What started with the promise of a vehicle for the improvement of culture and the broad dissemination of information and analysis, became, with the television, the complete medium for the perpetration of a scheme of lies and salesmanship, promoting consumption, covetous desire for baubles and meaningless status, and the preeminence of an American dream built on the pillaging of other peoples’ resources. The culture, debate, information and analysis was there, but it took a skilled and dedicated seeker to connect with it,a task that became increasingly difficult as a compliant school system largely failed to give students the requisite questioning skills before trying them loose to be good producers and consumers.

I have been good at this sort of compliance, even in the face of an education, part of it in school, a lot of it from reading, from social interactions with peers and family and, finally, from recoiling from some of the anomalies in what I was hearing/seeing, and what I perceived to be a version of real events. Here I am working on a somewhat passé computer, using a browser and blogging software, so I haven’t escaped unscathed from the onslaught, but the ad below, for our provincial political masters, one of the sleaziest governments I’ve ever encountered in person or in story tells me that we haven’t learned much. We haven’t learned that any technology can be bent to the rules of crass commercialism in the service of colonization by capital. The Internet, like radio and television, seemed to start out as a medium of contact and discourse, but has evolved into a maze of pornography, cute cat videos, a shitstorm of political venom and yet another bully pulpit for oil lobbies and other destructive groups.

This is not to say that there isn’t a ton of good material and fine journalism and rhetoric out there, that there aren’t loads of inspired images and sounds, some that go beyond simple entertainment to provoke thought and engage the viewer in a constructive interaction with others, but without actually putting the thesis to the test, a browse through a day’s Facebook posts seems to confirm it, as do the frequent arrests of people from all walks of life for charges relating to porn.

It is yet again an instance of doing what comes easily to us rather than tackling what really needs to be done.

Meanwhile, here’s a link to a video of the late Charlie Haden playing with none other than Ginger Baker (who’d-a thunk it) and Bill Frisell:

Nowhere To Run To

Posted on 2014/07/05 by danneau

I got home to see this in my inbox and on Facebook. It’s the kind of shenanigan that makes people distrust political parties of any stripe. I’ve had dealings with Paul, all of them constructive. He has been a consistent advocate for democracy, environment and rule of law, including the fighting of discriminatory and corruptive legislation. However, he isn’t good enough to even present himself as a candidate for the NDP. Sad, and in particular because it highlights the current struggle in the progressive mind in the conflict between the desire to get elected and to hold the power to form government, and the adherence to ethic and principle. Ideally, the power of a party to educate citizens to the necessity of changing direction from our present self-destructive course would mean that this dichotomy wouldn’t be in play, but parties don’t seem to get that they need to be constantly schooling their prospective electorate. Paul has done much of this, but not in the quest for political power, but because he has seen the destruction wrought by our present lot of scallywags and has foreseen the consequences of failing to make a radical course change. In this, the NDP has failed miserably and left it to Elizabeth May federally, and Andrew Weaver at the provincial level, to probe and elucidate the horrors being perpetrated in our name. Solution: vote Green? This is a tough one because Greens and Dippers don’t talk much to each other and increasingly it appears as though neither can unseat the incumbents whose cancerous tentacles seem to have sunk deep into the consciousness of Canadian voters, either to continue with Harper as the prudent fiscal manager he touts himself to be, or to give in to apathy and not vote at all. Trudeau is a younger, slicker version of the same corporate shill and, though most people don’t seem to see through the smokescreen, is, given access to a majority in the House, would likely follow in the footsteps of Stephen Harper, just as Barack Obama seems to have been largely unable to change course from the W era.

Backing Down, Spinning Around

Posted on 2014/07/04 by danneau

This Janet Holder, the face of Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline project. I wrote a post a week ago or so before disappearing into the wilds of Southern Ontario for a family occasion, lots of schmoozing without song or strong drink, a ton of humidity and heat, but mostly pretty relaxed and in good company. I haven’t published the post because it might be too inflammatory a thing for pure opinion. Who knows? The gist of it was that Holder and all the other mucky-mucks at Enbridge, the NEB, the Conservative caucuses in both Alberta and Ottawa need to be issued hazmat suits and put on standby for the rest of their natural lives in preparation for working in the trenches of the world-class clean-up contingency crew when the inevitable eventually comes to pass. A big part of the problems we face stems from the lack of personal responsibility for decisions that affect us all.

Then I get home to learn that we’re shipping yet another round of shipbuilding contracts for BC Ferries to Europe, specifically Poland. The curtain of deception makes it hard to see how they selected this group to do the building, but this is surely the forerunner of the whole procurement process inherent in the Free Trade agreements we seem to be signing without debate or even being allowed to see what benefits and constraints might be under that polished silver dome awaiting the unveiling of the main course. Do we need ferries? Build the suckers here, and, in the process, build capacity and skills to similar work in the future. I din’t particularly like Glen Clark, but his fast ferry fiasco included a lot of training for metal work, welding, fabrication, machining and what have you. Are there enough of these trained people around to work on new ferries and whatever the Royal Canadian Navy might need? Or have they all drifted into the Athabaska tar pits?

Australian solar power is already competitive with coal for generating electricity. I have a nephew who has a contract to place a couple of solar arrays on his “farm” for which he is paid $0.80/kw/hr. Go figure, I guess it’s a free market solution, now that Ontario Hydro has gone the same privatization route that BC Hydro suffered under the Campbell régime.

S.T., a member of our local Transitions initiative, sent this link to a TED talk that rings a responsive chord to thoughts over the last couple of decades.

…a recent brush with an updating of ancient history:

Some Wisdom Shows Through

Posted on 2014/06/03 by danneau

“Economics is a form of brain damage.”

–Hazel Henderson (economist)

The true civilization is where every man gives to every other every right that he claims for himself.

—Robert Ingersoll

These two people were guests on a forum from Boston organized by HuffPost: they are people who work within the current system, but who have drawn the wrath of much of the political class for advocating a return to some saner version of our current economic/social/political régime. Thomas Piketty got an earful from Kevin O’Leary, and it would seem likely that Elizabeth Warren scares the daylights out of even some of the Democratic caucus, as well as the entirety of everything farther to the selfish Right of the political spectrum. Why is that?, you may ask, when what these two are proposing is the rescue of our “civilization” from eating itself alive and taking much of life on Earth with it. Fundamentally, they are proponents of redistribution of wealth in the opposite direction from what the Washington Consensus and the Reaganite/Thatcherite bunch have written as law in the post-New Deal/post-Great Society era, in effect the taxation of wealth beyond a certain level of absurdity, where wealth ceases to represent a comfortable living and starts to represent power across the spectrum of economics, social affairs and into the deepest recesses of politics and governance.

Piketty and Warren don’t necessarily have all the answers to all our ills, but the refreshing part of what they say is the reasoned openness of their critique of the corruption and misdirection of human affairs where the corruption becomes entrenched in the institutions that are supposed to serve society as a whole and where moves are afoot to destroy the last vestiges of the commons, or the ability of society to come together to address the challenges that society has, by and large, created. This is evident in many spheres, but is particularly acute in the environmental field where the fossil fuel has drawn a verbal palisade around issues of energy, economy, and living space, including not only the buying of political influence, but the criminalization of revealing the nature of the damage being done by drilling, tracking, and mining of carbon fuel sources.

It would be nice if we had a special sandbox where the rich folk could hold sway and trade in luxuries as long as they didn’t encroach upon what the World needs to be doing to address inequality (especially inequality of opportunity) while the rest of us worked in a more constructive direction to rebuild a society where sense would be part of the commons and where we didn’t depend of stuff to define who we are. Sadly, the trade in luxuries tends to require an inordinate share of economic resources that will be needed to provide a decent standard of living for all of the rest of us.

Thanks to Crooks and Liars for the link to the HuffPo vid.

Even A Broken (analog) Clock (with a quick update)

Posted on 2014/05/13 by danneau

Update: Heavens to murgatroid! I agree with something from the IMF! So here it is, via the Tyee.

…is right twice a day. ( I wonder if this means that we have, through digital clocks, lost half our accuracy.)

The broken clock/record, in this case, is the Fraser Institute, that tireless advocate of all who champion less government, mostly on behalf of wealthy and corporate sponsors. Yet an article posted in this morning’s Vancouver Sun makes at least partial sense when it chronicles the vast amounts of money paid out by three levels of government over the period from 1981 to 2009. The surprising statistic is that the total of subsidies over that period exceeds the current Federal debt, and outlines some of the yearly costs to taxpayers as well as showing that some of the most egregious offenders were corporations that were already well-established and profitable. It also doesn’t account for loans, often forgiven, such as the $457 million paid to GM to upgrade plant facilities in Ontario (this was well before the last major meltdown and bankruptcy protection/bailout for GM) or the awarding of perhaps-fatter-than-necessary contracts for infrastructure and IT. It does include marketing management schemes like the Wheat Board, and the indications are that all governments at both Federal and Provincial level are involved. It would be interesting to see how the Rae government in Ontario handled this file, as well as the Doer régime in Manitoba, Romanow in Saskatchewan, and the Harcourt/Clark crowd in BC. I’m sure that there are good reasons for subsidizing some sectors of the economy to shelter them from predatory practices in the marketplace, providing some protection of the general citizenry from the vagaries of a sometimes twisted and tortured free-for-all in the business world. However it also seems clear that there are many instances where pork barrels are the appropriate metaphor and where, clearly, taxpayers are not getting good value for their taxes. For the most part, the Fraser Institute, through generous subsidies from their supporters who then write these contributions off their taxes as a business expense or as, ahem, a charitable donation, generally falls squarely in the category of an enterprise supported by people it seeks to disenfranchise.

Generally, subsidies ought to be used sparingly and only when there is clear benefit to the broad majority of citizens. Few citizens realize that they are not only paying high energy prices at the retail level, but that they are also subsidizing energy concerns through tax breaks, free use of infrastructure, exploration write-offs, and direct subsidies, not to mention the insane current levels of government support and media attention for energy megaprojects. The sad fact is that energy is more expensive than we’ve come to think, and a large part of that cost has been hidden in the tax bundle that we fork out, wherein we get to purchase at least part of the product, whether or not we use it. The same is true of the products of many agricultural sectors, meaning that it seems outrageously expensive to buy local produce because the price in the market is so much higher than an “equivalent” from the supermarket, and a great deal of the difference can be accounted for by that portion that was handed out as subsidies, meaning that you are paying the supermarket and the CAFO whether you eat the stuff or not. I suspect that many would make different choices in many domains were they confronted with the real price of the seemingly-cheaper goods, and this reckoning doesn’t yet take into account the costs of health, safety and environmental considerations.

Finally, it seems likely that many of the côterie of free market proponents wouldn’t be so keen to support a market that was really free based on broad knowledge of the practices of both business and government.

Again, the prescient wisdom of Mose Allison…Stop this world, let me off, there’s just too many pigs at the same trough.

At least it’s (sort of) honest…

Posted on 2014/05/11 by danneau

Politicians of all stripes routinely skirt some of the more stunning moves they plan to implement if they get elected to office. I find it hard to praise someone whose program I dislike quite intensely, but it would be dishonest to refrain from tipping a hat to his seeming forthrightness, along the lines, in this case, of Grover Norquist (to my knowledge never elected to anything, but a huge influence on many who have been and who have made a valiant attempt to actualize GN’s thought) stating that he wanted to shrink government to the size of a baby so he could drown it in a bathtub. I speak of Tim Hudak, Conservative candidate for Premier of Ontario, who promises to cut 100 000 civil service jobs and to reduce corporate taxation by thirty percent if he becomes Premier. While this places him directly in the middle of promotion and defense of and economic and social program that leads to complete collapse of all Earth systems, at least there is clear knowledge in advance for voters to consider in their choice. This has not been the case with, say, Stephen Harper, whose statements amounting to “trust me” conflict with his vague “you won’t recognize Canada when I’m through” statements when, in effect, he intends precisely what Hudak says he will do. Likewise, the case of our own provincial Liberals a dozen or so years ago, when Campbell and Company needed no policy statements to obliterate a stale and floundering New Democrat administration that tried to govern in a way that wouldn’t alienate the traditional business community rather than implement progressive economic and social policy. New Democrats had lied to themselves as well as to their constituents, and Campbell didn’t even need to lie. But lie he did, and his ministers and backbenchers alike, as to what their agenda was and as to the state of the province’s finances. The deception continues unabated pretty much everywhere and largely without regard to political, economic, or social orientation. John Horgan will perforce have to engage in massive tergiversation to get himself elected, I suspect, despite the contempt that so many have for the current régime, because the hard truth of our current straitened circumstances will be too much for the bulk of the electorate to stomach. Horgan may even believe that he can reconcile a vibrant energy sector with a fair deal of working folk and a program of environmental protection that can stave off disaster, but that would be inconsistent with everything we’re hearing from NOAA and IPCC, never mind the prophets of doom.

Just in case you didn’t catch all the lyrics, here’s a little helper so that we can appreciate the worth, in our present context, of something written decades ago. No, it likely wasn’t prescient, it’s just that things are even more Snafu’d now than they were back when our crises hadn’t become quite so acute.

If this life is driving
You to drink
You sit around and wondering
Just what to think
Well I got some consoloation
I’ll give it to you
If I might
Well I don’t worry bout a thing
‘Cause I know nothing’s gonna be alright
You know this world is just one big
Trouble spot because
Some have plenty and
Some have not
You know I used to be trouble but I finally
Saw the light
Now I don’t worry ’bout a thing
‘Cause I know nothing’s gonna be alright
Don’t waste you time trying to
Be a go getter
Things will get worse before they
Get any better
You know there’s always somebody playing with
Dynamite
But I don’t worry about a thing
‘Cause I know nothing’s gonna be alright

Silence Like A Cancer Grows

Posted on 2014/05/09 by danneau

Much ado in broadcast media about the doubling of the price of Dungeness crab in local markets (haven’t been down to the Codfather to ask Max about it) and the fact that we’ve entered into the era of the $50 crab, shell on, live and kicking. The explanation comes from a booming export market in China. In a roundabout way, oil exports finance inflationary pressures on local food wherein we send dilbit to China, they use it for fuel and to manufacture CPSFC* that we all run to WalMart to stock up on and the Chinese entrepreneurial class use the proceeds from all this to buy up crabs (they apparently call them golden crab, ironically enough) and they have so much money that they can pay prices that take local food right off the menu for the rest of us. It’s a true manifestation of what a global market system can do for us. We have to hope that, even if it is the Chinese entrepreneurial class that’s chowing down on the crabs, the fishery is being managed for long-term survival, or maybe that doesn’t matter, given that the “perpetuation” of this way of doing things will kill itself and all of us with it. It occurs to me that crab shells are made from the same stuff as scallop shells, and might therefore be subject to the same environmental perils as local scallops who can’t make enough shell because of ocean acidification that might be tied to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that might, in turn, be tied to the manufacture of CPSFC* linked to petroleum and its uses.

As is often the case, this reminds me of a song I first heard on a Mose Allison record long ago, but penned by Charles Brown. The reference is to the days three decades ago when, of a Friday, a pickup truck would roll up to the parking lot of the school where I was working (or, alternatively, the school where my wife was working: they were close and on the route of said pickup truck) and fresh, live Dungeness crabs would be dispensed to buyers at the princely sum of $2.00 each. Home to cook, clean, and ice the beasts, toss a salad, whip up some home made mayonnaise or aioli, crack a chilled bottle of Muscadet and tear hunks off a loaf of crusty bread.

Life was good for some of us. It still is, for some of us, but the great leveller (somewhat selective) is progressively removing an increasing number of these pleasurable and nourishing experiences from our domain.

*CPSCF=Cheap Plastic Shit From China, a term I first saw on Northwest Edible. It’s really a generic term that applies to disposable goods of any material from any jurisdiction. Nobody would be too offended if Stuff were to be substituted for Shit.

Disturbing Outlooks and Attitudes #1

Posted on 2014/03/30 by danneau

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.

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

Posted on 2014/03/24 by danneau

Or parts of it, anyway.

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).

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.

As 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

Posted on 2014/03/23 by danneau

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…

Rub Eyes, Shake Head

More Useless Comment

Category Archives: World Spiralling Toward Hell