Law-Abiding Politicians

"I think politicians are entitled to private lives," - John Baird

Yet another article in today's G&M - page 3 no less - about pot smoking politicians.  Recently Trudeau admitting to having a puff since becoming an MP.

I totally support legalization of marijuana, and I don't care if you were a junkie as a teenager, but I think all politicians should be law-abiding while in office, and, ideally, maybe even a few years prior.  Is that so much to ask?

I remember once, in my early 20s, sitting with friends when a joint was being passed around.  One friend got up and left because she was thinking about becoming a cop and didn't feel right being in the same room with people breaking the law.  She was just thinking about it.

That's the kind of politicians I want.  Once you start thinking about getting into politics, you've got to clean up your act.

Which is why I prefer to just blog about politics and write them letters!

On Canada: A Fair Country

I used to be so proud to be Canadian and that's wavered over this difficult period in our history.  I was searching for this book to loan out, and once found, I got totally engrossed in re-reading it.  It made me feel so much better.  It's an important book about who we really are:  A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada by John Ralston Saul (2009).  What a delight!

Like Hedges' Empire of Illusion, this book focuses on our cultural stories or myths.  How we understand ourselves affects how we live and act, our beliefs and allegiances.  And we Canadians have lost our way swimming through the miasma of American influence.  As a civics teacher, when I do a pre-test at the beginning of the year, a good half the grade ten class give American answers to questions about Canadian politics.  Once in a while, someone admits that they thought Obama was our president too.  And they're not far off.  We have a long journey ahead of us to correct this indoctrination.  We can't be true to ourselves if we don't know who we are.  

Here are my notes and thoughts along the way, but do read the book - I've just captured the ideas, but the stories are what make it. 

Paternity Rights in Rape Cases

It's an interesting moral dilemma to have a judge decide a child has access to a father when the only contact the mother and father had was a sexual assault producing this child.  This isn't entirely the story here.  In this article, it could be a case of statutory rape.  It's possible there was a relationship for a while, that led to vocally consensual, yet not actually legal, sex.  It's not clear from the article if it was a guy jumping out of the bushes or a romantic tryst gone wrong or something in between.

The young mother, H.T."says she lived with her mother, who had to quit her job to care for the baby."

Well...the grandmother didn't have to quit her job to support the baby.  That was a choice she made - a difficult choice, but not the only possibility.  It makes me nuts when someone says they "had to" make some sacrifice for someone.  Apparently abortion wasn't on the table even though she was 14 when she gave birth, but that could have been an alternative to suffering caused by one fewer paycheque in the family.  It was her choice to leave her job.  But that's just a minor point.

The Benevolent Dictator isn't a Fascist

In a post a while back I advocate the best of our worst options for saving our species:  a government that forces us be less wasteful.  It's an idea that James Lovelock proposed, and some called it fascist. But there's a world of difference between enforcing legislation that actually protects the citizens in the long term and a police state.

John Oliver did a series of clips about how Australia managed to change their laws to ban semi-automatic weapons and seriously restrict other guns.  The trilogy is well worth a watch at only 18 minutes in total.  But the part that interests me is the idea that politicians had to commit political suicide in order to pass the legislation through, AND they were willing to do this for the good of the country.  People protested the new restrictions and voted the politicians who supported it out of office.  But it had already passed.  This was in 1996, and since then, the citizens have gotten used to the restrictions on their freedom and appreciate that mass shootings have gone from almost one/year down to zero.

On Hedges' Empire of Illusion

"People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster."  - James Baldwin 

Thus begins Chris Hedges' Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (2009), a collection of five independent parts that lead to the same place.  We're in denial - thick and deadly.  It's similar to Jane Jacobs' Dark Age Ahead, but I can't, for the life of me, find my heavily annotated copy of the book.  So I'll skip the comparison except to say they both suggest we're in a similar cultural place that many empires were just before collapsing.  What Jared Diamond did with environmental degredation's effect on the fall of empires, Hedges does for cultural illusions.  The problem with this fall is that it will be global.  There will be no area of the world that can rise up afterwards.  There will be no area of the world.

Here are some of the main points in brief.  It's a quick read though, so go buy it!

On Raising the Minimum Wage

So, the argument goes something like this:  If you raise minimum wage, corporations will pay for that cost by raising prices, thereby increasing inflation, and we'll all be poorer for it as everything gets more expensive.  The problem isn't wages, but inflation. Therefore, we should not increase minimum wage.

It follows, that it's necessary that some people work full time yet live well below the poverty line because otherwise, if we raise their wages, they'll end up even poorer because everything will costs so much more - right?  So, we're actually helping people by maintaining a lower wage for them and letting them choose between heat or food.  We're awesome! 

I don't buy it.

On Solar Panels

By request - how well does using solar panels work?

Well, it's hard to say.

I covered my roof with panels under the Ontario MicroFIT (Feed-in Tariff) program that ends next year.  So far I think it's only in Ontario, but some other provinces are thinking about it.  The power I generate from the panels goes directly back to the grid, and I'm paid about 55 cents a kWh and will continue to be for the duration of my 20 year contract.  So far this summer, even with all the rain, it translates to about $300-400/month.  So the cost of the panels is paid for in about 6-8 years.  After that, the money I make in the following 12 years is mine to keep!

Just Legalize it Already

I spent a lovely extended weekend in Awenda and fell in love with Penetanguishene through a scenic bike ride.  The sun filtered through the trees on either side of the road, with the blue, blue lake peeking through - gorgeous!  But it was marred by my chosen beach read:  Chris Hedges' grim Empire of Illusion, which actually gave me nightmares - featuring Hugh Laurie for some reason.  Spooky, me possums!  I'll get to the book another day, but for now, let's focus on the distraction du jour:  marijuana legalization.  That's much easier to think about.  Tra-la-la.

Medicinal ganja is already legal, and new regulations are apparently streamlining the process to access it, but that's a boring issue anyway, so we'll move on.  The meaty question is: Should another mind-altering substance be legally available to the healthy masses?

On Categorization of Behaviours and Abilities

People are always looking for the single magic bullet that will change everything.  There is no single magic bullet.  - Temple Grandin

Some people are quite upset about the recent change to the DSM that removes Aspergers as a separate category from Autism. Now kids formally diagnosed as having Aspergers are on the Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) instead. The WHO advocates using the ICD anyway - where Aspergers is still a separate category; the DSM is more American than universal.  Whatever. I’m more bothered by how the DSM and ICD are set up to begin with.

Why do we want to label things so clearly and with finality – particularly conditions that are largely subjectively determined? There’s something nice about knowing. There’s a relief that you’ve finally figured it out and can move on. But that feeling is illusory and temporary. And I’m not convinced it helps us in the long run to have so many kids labeled with something as if they’re static beings that were completely figured out by a professional figure-outerer. As if that’s possible.

On a Four-Hour Workday

Stephen Elliott-Buckley echoes Bertrand Russell's idea of the 4-hour workday.  Russell in brief:

Above all, there will be happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia. The work exacted will be enough to make leisure delightful, but not enough to produce exhaustion. Since men [and women] will not be tired in their spare time, they will not demand only such amusements as are passive and vapid.

And many of us - maybe half - could do it easily but for our unbridled desire for more stuff.  It's an easy fix for many problems if those who need less money simply worked fewer hours and freed up a job for someone else who needs it to survive.  If all the teachers who are living comfortably worked part-time, we'd be able to hire a bunch of new recruits and get some fresh ideas in the system.

Sammy Yatim: When is a Cop Justified in Using Fatal Force?

There's a "justification" piece in the National Post on behalf of the cop who shot Sammy Yatim.  It doesn't offer much to go on beyond that we shouldn't trust a brief video to tell the whole story.  But I asked a cop what he thought of the situation, and he gave me some astute points for consideration (liberally paraphrased from memory):

But it was just a little knife!

Stabbings kill far more than shootings.  One good jab with a 3" blade can do fatal damage.  Using pepper spray or a taser isn't going to cut it if someone's coming at you with a knife.  You have to stop them for sure.  Immediately.

Raising Gable Ends Alone

It's more physically demanding than raising kids alone, yet no less fraught with peril.

I'm just documenting my morning of partial success on my studio construction.  I was ecstatic to figure out all the angles for the gable end.  And it all fit perfectly - more or less.  But then how to get it up there on my own?  What if it falls on my head?  It's not that heavy, but it's awkward.  I took pictures to document it in case I died in the process!

On Liberty and Death

Does it have to be both?

One of the reasons I advocate for restrictions on personal freedom as a means to save our species from extinction is that I need my own behaviours to be externally regulated!  Intellectually, I can assess what I need from what I want - I think better than most even.  I'm usually at the tail-end of buying anything new - like a computer, which I got after many years of teaching and typing assignments on a typewriter.  I finally succumbed to the pressure to get a cellphone just three months ago.  The final blow was realizing that monthly costs for a cellphone are cheaper than for a landline.  Similarly with my car-avoidance - they're such a money-pit!  It's quite possible I'm more financially motivated than environmentally.   Even my solar panels are making me money.

And then there's this:

Too Stupid to Live - Literally

Mound of Sound has a post at Disaffected Lib about the likelihood of doubling GHG by 2100.  If we don't do something very quickly and very intentionally, then, based on temperature projections from the 1970s on, we won't be able to live in this part of the world sixty years from now.  Most of Canada and the U.S. will be basically uninhabitable - not to mention most of the world.

I commented there:

We're no longer at a point where we need contests or incentives to get people to recycle more. We need concrete restrictions - corporate and individual. I'm all for personal freedom, but not if it's costing us our lives. For instance, we could save millions of trees from being cut down each year if we just made disposable cups illegal, forcing people to remember their travel mug or go home un-caffinated. Fuck roll-up-the-rim! And that doesn't have to be a slippery slope to totalitarianism, like I'm sure some will suggest. It'll be a difficult road for politicians to face, but it'll be far worse for us all if they wimp out.

On Chomsky

I think everyone should read Chomsky. He’s brilliant, yet far less dense and inaccessible as some people think. He’s a different person than you or me – well, than me for sure. He has a wealth of knowledge and an astute analysis of events pretty much from the beginning of time to now all in his head and instantaneously available to him. I have to look up the word “hegemony” every time someone uses it. But he’s also very down to earth, which makes him all the easier to follow. Most importantly, he gives us a framework of the world necessary to understand in order to help us fight the good fight.

He’s written many books, and many others were compiled from his speeches. Below are ten common threads in his work taken from Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky. (Page numbers are from the 2002 paperback edition.) The ideas here are abridged without all the evidence – you have to read the full 400-paged book for that and/or the footnotes.

On Smoking and the Illusion of Concern

I took the kids to the beach on Sunday, and there's new signage everywhere about the problems with using the sand as an ashtray.  In hopes for a "butt-free beach," they included information on wildlife concerns, toxins, costs to taxpayers, and the level of pollution:  cigarette butts are the most common type of litter found on beaches.  But the signs didn't seem to affect anybody's behaviour because they didn't come with people actually patrolling the beach to offer friendly reminders much less tickets or anything more punitive.  Nor did they offer other options - like empty cups from the garbage half-full of sand for people use as ashtrays, then throw back in the garbage.  Nothing.

Can Animals Provoke Action?

Whenever I talk about atrocities around the world in class - slavery, oil spills, and the like, and I get the class to talk about what bothers them most or what most influences them to change, or get them to do a project on it, a good 70% of the class will focus on animals.  That could be in part to distance themselves from the effect all this has on people, but I think it's more likely that it because we actually care more about animals than people.   Animals are innocent, and people often suck.

via Forbes

In one class I showed real film footage of a 12-year-old girl being saved from almost being manipulated into prostitution slavery in the Ivory Coast, and footage of young girls working 16-hour days in factories in China.  How do we help kids like this?  Do boycotts work?  Does letter-writing work?  And the student response in that particular class was, more or less, "It's their own fault for being taken in by scams.  We shouldn't do anything to help them."  The class wasn't malicious, just so immersed in information about scams they can't imagine otherwise, and they're self-protecting by victim blaming.

Faith that the End is Near

In today's G&M, Jared Bland writes from a perspective I've been taking lately as well.

"Despite seeming reasonable in other areas of my life, I believe that we are quite likely living in or near the fabled end times....[I]t's becoming easier and easier to feel that the shadow hanging over us isn't just another massive rain cloud.  That it's something bigger, something worse.  And that it's moving in awfully quickly.....I'm convinced that things would be a lot better, were we to start to expect the end.  We fear it, we suspect it, but we need to embrace it....What if, instead of responding to disaster with kindness and support, we were just kind and supportive?   What if this were how we lived?.... [Living as if the end is nigh] allows us to think and feel and act in ways we otherwise might deny ourselves.  It encourages us to be more direct, more honest, more loving.  It says, in fact, that we must."

On Worry

There were many terrible things in my life and most of them never happened.” ―  Montaigne

At first I was worried about normal things.  Plane crashes.  Theft.   Okay, maybe kidnapping and prostitution rings entered my mind a little, but I get carried away sometimes.  It’s not that I don’t trust the people of Thailand and Cambodia.  I don’t trust anyone around a young woman in an unfamiliar country.  And I never trust airplanes. 

I dropped her at the airport in the wee hours, and we cried a bit.  That was unexpected.  Neither one of us is the emotional type.  But we were both tired and run-down from the prep work of travel.  It was enough to break our resolve.          

“You can have a few drinks on the plane now!”

           

“Nope.  Drinking age is 21 in the states and 20 in Thailand.”

           

“Well, have a quick one before you leave Canada then.”

           

“Before breakfast?”

Educating the Differently-Abled

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." - widely attributed to  Albert Einstein but likely in error

I love writing essays.  Sometimes organizing my thoughts on paper is the only way I can actually figure out what I really think.  I've had many jobs in my life, but, unfortunately, none that required writing.  There are some jobs that necessitate advanced writing skills but precious few.  So I'm wondering why our education system is still so heavily geared towards essay-writing.  We use it as a marker of academic excellence, but perhaps that needs to change.