Livable Basic Income Bill

If it's possible to ensure that everyone has the necessary conditions of live, sign me up!

I watched a video on the Pacific Gyre years ago. This post isn't about all the horrible garbage in the ocean, but about the documentarians who made the film. They had never been on a ship for a lengthy time before. This wasn't a cruise ship, but a much smaller boat, and the expectation was all hands on deck when the water starts coming over the sides. 

When they started their weeks-long journey, a couple of them were sick for days before they "got their sea legs" and were able to manage the constant motion.

But something they didn't expect came at the very end. As they got off the boat, back on solid ground, they had to readjust to the ground being relatively still. 

We all expect a new situation to take some adjustment, but we forget that we need to manage a change back to what we had.  

Of course this has to do with Covid, sort of!

On Student Absences

I've been thinking about the concern with kids not going to school for reasons beyond the rampant illnesses caused by letting a highly-infectious virus run wild. 

The Fortune article suggests that schools are less welcoming now. "Everyone seemed less tolerant, more angry." They mention a host of reasons for absences including poverty, housing instability, transportation issues, and school staff shortages that mean a rotation of supply teachers. But they don't mention that Long Covid that has led many to be chronically disabled: From this article, a 13-year-old explained, "I don't remember a day without pain." H/t Laura Miers, who points out: 

"We're disabling everyone. It will NEVER improve with no mitigation. Kids and adults are at the same risk for Long Covid."

Meanwhile, the Fortune article blames online learning:

"The effects of online learning linger: School relationships have frayed, and after months at home, many parents and students don't see the point of regular attendance."

Symbols of Class

The Titan submersible hasn't been found yet, and the supply of oxygen is gone. Some think they perished days ago from pressure or another type of malfunction, all horrific to think about. That likely won't stop anyone from looking for the vessel in order to recover the bodies. 

It's my worst nightmare to be under water in a container, particularly if it's bolted shut from the outside. 

Lots of comparisons are being made between this submersible containing five wealthy men who paid ¼ of a million dollars each to see the Titanic, stuck somewhere about 700 km off the coast of Newfoundland, to another vessel that went down 100 km from Greece, a fishing trawler carrying 750 passengers, some who gave their life savings to get from Libya to Italy, of which 81 bodies have been found so far. Neither vessels met regulations for travel, but if we have extra time and money to be creative, like make a sub that's run with a game controller, it's called innovation. If we do something similarly questionable or reckless for our own basic survival, it's criminal.

Kids Today!

A letter has been circulating and in the news complaining about kids today. Things have changed in the last few years, but I don't think it's as dramatic a shift as is being portrayed yet, and while phones play a role, so does our cowardice in neglecting to set clear boundaries for kids, and so does an economic system that leaves them without attainable future goals.

The letter describes a Mississauga middle school in which students are defecating on bathroom floors, throwing things, stealing, vandalizing, and threatening staff and students. On top of all that, "Students have also called teachers names, have banged on their doors and run away and called the classroom phone and hung up repeatedly when the teacher has answered."

First, Some Perspective: 

I don't believe, as some commenters fear, that it's total anarchy in the schools today. I'm a little wary of any complaints about public schools these days, and hyperbole can be dangerous. We're in a precarious place where a tipping point of parents could enable privatized education to fully take hold. And that would be very bad.

Arendt on Revolution and the Necessity of Eradicating Poverty

Hannah Arendt's essay, "Thoughts on Poverty, Misery, and the Great Revolutions of History," written in the 1960s, was apparently just recently published for the first time. It continues to be relevant in our increasingly weird times with a tyrant who would rather dominate than excel in case after case:

"For the will to power as such, regardless of any passion for distinction (in which power is not a means but an end), is characteristic of the tyrant and is no longer even a political vice. It is rather the quality that tends to destroy all political life, its vices no less than its virtues. It is precisely because the tyrant has no desire to excel and lacks all passion for distinction that he finds it so pleasant to dominate, thereby excluding himself from the company of others; conversely, it is the desire to excel which makes men love the company of their peers and spurs them on into the public realm." 

She explains that the goal of revolution from a tyrant isn't just that people are treated well, which any benevolent dictator would do, but that people have access to the decision-making process that determines how they will be treated:

Monbiot's Impossible Crises

George Monbiot lists 13 crises, but warns you should only read the list if you're feeling very strong. It's an appropriate warning.

He's barely even talking about climate change here, so this list could be so much longer including the degradation of the oceans, poisoned waterways, messed up ecosystems...  His list is more political in nature: Trump and his new team running a country with a powerful military and unbreakable corporate ties. On the other side of the pond, there's concerns with the effects of Brexit, the financial stability of Italy, and the French election.

If Le Pen wins, the permanent members of the UN security council will be represented by the following people: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Theresa May and Marine Le Pen. It would be a stretch to call that reassuring.

Everywhere, there will be fewer jobs as automation takes over, and with the Paris agreement likely trashed, the new landscape will create "a mass movement of people that dwarfs current migration" and an accelerated increase in the extinction rate of mammals. The scariest one in my books is that soil loss alone relegates us to only sixty years of harvests left.

So even if we can keep the politics working, without intervention we have six decades of food.

But we're so totally blind to all of this. I don't think there will ever again be a good time to have kids, yet my daughter's doctor still won't let her get her tubes tied because she might change her mind later. There are so many little things we do that reveal a profound disconnect with the way the world is headed. We're keeping this information in a different place in our heads and not letting it seep in, protecting our emotional core from knowing about it gnostically.

Monbiot says his goal is not to depress us, but to "concentrate our minds on the scale of the task," but without power to effect change, I'm not sure what he hopes focusing his readers will do. At Standing Rock they have a task, stopping the machines, and that task carries the symbolic weight of stopping the power of big business, exploitation, environmental destruction, and the pursuit of profits over people. It's a vitally important fight on the ground. Those who aren't near there don't have a task. We can donate to them, and then write our letters, but it feels impotent. We could drop everything and join them. In a movie, hundreds of reinforcements marching up over the hill would be the climactic point where the music swells, but there have already been problem with white people joining only to use it for their own means. Man, we suck!

I think one thing we really need to be proactive about, that unfortunately might be more possible than being proactive about climate change, is to generate an influx of books and articles and teachings and preachings and an entire marketing scheme / mythology on getting along during a crisis. If we're lucky, we'll only need it to learn to be kind and respectful shopping for bargains on Black Friday. Well...we can keep telling ourselves it's about luck.

At this rate, we're likely to go out fighting, like in so many extinctions and collapses of the past. I'm not sure that can be changed, such is our nature. But while we're continuing to work on convincing the powers that be to implement solutions already, we can continue to work to foster more connected and inclusive lives, vigilant with our own character when we might waver and our drive for survival tries to override our compassion. Can we do this with grace, kids?

Child Poverty Worse than During the Depression

The article is about the states, but Canada isn't far behind.

Children growing up in poor households are likely to lag in their brain development and thereby perform poorly in schools, even if they move in better neighborhoods, a new longitudinal study on child development revealed this week. Examining hundreds of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans from a group of children growing up in poor households, researchers from the University of Wisconsin–Madison discovered that the regional gray matter volume in case study brains was up to 4 percent below the developmental norm for their ages.

We know it's wrong, but we don't care quite enough to fix it. Most of us, that is. A local university student, Elle Crevits, started a Food Not Waste non-profit. She gathers food that would have been tossed from grocery stores and restaurants and brings them to soup kitchens.  It's a local version of Toronto's Second Harvest. I've been saying we need something like that locally for years, but then didn't actually act on my own words in any way. I'm glad somebody did.

But it would be nice if we could stop the problem further upstream. Maybe with the guaranteed basic income that the Greens and some NDP have been on about will actually happen one day.

A Little Hope is Effective...

A lot of hope is dangerous. - President Snow

This may be a little hokey, but I think Catching Fire is an important film to see right now.

And it's awesome!

I read the books ages ago, but even though I know how they each end, it didn't stop me from being on the edge of my seat.  And I was surprised by how inspirational I found the film to be.

Grist relates how the books chronicle what happens after climate change destroys the world and makes for scarce resources for the survivors to fight over.  We have a really interesting crisis to overcome for our time.  It's not us against the state - not just us against the state - but against our own conveniences.  Not enough of us have the foresight to vote out politicians who are supporting the pipelines.  That's one problem.  But a bigger one is that too many of us are sliding into complacency.

Moving Beyond the Rational

Unlike everything else in the news, this isn't about Rob Ford.

I'm going to merge some Fraser Institute news with recent discussions in class, an old Munk Debate on religion, and some ideas from David Hume.   Here we go!

Kate McInturff writes at the CCPA that the Fraser Institute,

"would like to remove compassion from the policy debate about poverty in Canada....because....compassion is causing us to confuse those who have lower income with those who do not have enough income to sustain life."

The interesting bit to me is just these few words:  "compassion is causing us to confuse...."