Friday Afternoon Musical Mood

 

A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down…

 

 

 

Elizabeth May Q & A on Canada’s Kyoto Withdrawl

 

Here is the Q & A portion of Elizabeth Mays’ statement on Canada’s withdrawal from Kyoto which occurred this past December 2011.

As usual she is very insightful on the issue of climate change, as well as Ottawa’s unfortunate and perilous lack of interest in the science behind climate change.

With this in mind it’s interesting to note, as the BBC reported this week, that many scientists in Canada are denied access to the media to report their findings on various issues including the environment.

Paging George Orwell…

 

Upon Reflection

 

When Professor Chomsky discusses human nature, the history of science and our willingness to be puzzled by simple things, it’s surprising to learn what people from the past assumed to be true for a very long time before they stopped and questioned what seemed, up to that point, obvious.

For a couple thousand years when you asked scientists questions like ‘Why does steam go up instead of down?’ or ‘Why when I drop a ball does it go down instead of up?’ the answer was roughly that they were going to their natural places.  For ages this answer was perceived as so obvious that it just wasn’t worth discussing or challenging.

It wasn’t until Galileo (1564-1642) and his contemporaries allowed themselves to be puzzled by these supposedly simple things that it became clear they were not so simple after all.  As it turned out, we had yet to explain why steam rose and objects fell.

But what was revolutionary was this willingness to stop and ask questions about simple everyday occurrences in an effort to explain them.  This really became the essence of science and the path leading us to the higher understanding and awareness of the world we have today.

Between then and now we’ve learned a lot about a lot, each answered question giving rise to countless new questions, but in the realm of human nature it doesn’t seem as if we’ve come too far.  In fact, according to Chomsky, our tendency to not question aspects of our nature by dismissing them as too simplistic or obvious to bother with has led our approach to the study of human nature to be ‘pre-Galilean revolution’.

In other words, we’re not yet at that stage where we are willing to challenge fundamental aspects of our nature.  We have yet to seriously challenge the assumptions we make regarding both how we function internally and how we organize our relations with each other, among other things.

My simple thought is that if our contemporary consciousness can be described as ‘pre-Galilean revolution’, what are the odds of solving even a few of the growing list of pressing challenges we’ve created since the time of Galileo?

 

Neoliberalism Is One Hell Of A Drug

Its been argued for quite some time by economists like Paul Krugman that in times of recession what’s needed is not austerity but stimulus.  Furthermore, the deeper the recession the greater the stimulus needed.

His argument is not motivated by ideology nor is it academic.  He is careful and methodical in making his case using history and the available economic indices, all of which prove, as in the case of Europe for instance, that the austerity measures imposed on the middle classes are exacerbating, expanding and indeed causing the current economic crisis.  But the European leaders responsible for implementing these errant policies seem either blissfully unaware or indifferent to their effects.  Krugman once compared it to a medieval doctor who is driven to save a dying patient by bleeding him further.

In the case of the United States, he observes on his blog that:

“It’s hard to overstate just how wrong all this is. We have a situation in which resources are sitting idle looking for uses — massive unemployment of workers, especially construction workers, capital so bereft of good investment opportunities that it’s available to the federal government at negative real interest rates. Never mind multipliers and all that (although they exist too); this is a time when government investment should be pushed very hard. Instead, it’s being slashed.

What an utter disaster.”

And it continues. Here in Canada as Parliament resumes we have the Conservative government resolutely pushing the same notions of austerity in the form of pension reform, no doubt to be followed by an incremental defunding of universal health care and anything else characterized as an entitlement.

While I know many people voted Conservative in the last election, my suspicion is that they wouldn’t have had these proposals been front and centre as campaign promises as in

‘If elected we promise to eliminate your retirement pensions.  You can bank on it!’

Or

‘As Canadians, we want to be more like Americans, so if elected count on us to bleed off the social safety nets including health care to ensure that only the wealthy are entitled to their entitlements.’

Had they said that, their campaign would have run aground faster than an Italian cruise ship.

But unlike Professor Krugman, their arguments are ideological and part of broader attempts to concentrate wealth at taxpayers’ expense.

And economic policy makers from Europe to North America continue to refuse to acknowledge, at least publicly, that their ideas are causing, not solving, recent economic woes.

It’s as if they’re all self-medicating from the same bottle of blue pills, revealing, I suppose, that neoliberalism is one hell of a drug.

 

Some Like It Hot

 

NASA providing some perspective on climate change.

 

Naomi Klein on Occupy Politics

 

Here is a fine interview with Naomi Klein from December 2011 offering a range of thoughts on the status and nature of the Occupy movements, current and possible future strategies, as well as how they shifted the national conversation to allow public pressure to influence the policy direction of the Obama Administration on the Keystone pipeline project.

This is most interesting since Obama decided yesterday to agree with the State Department that the project should not be given the green light until issues concerning its route are addressed.  Presumably his re-election team saw the rubber stamping of this project as a liability for the 2012 presidential race.

While it’s likely the project will eventually be granted permission to continue, the Obama decision does give temporary life to the notion that organized pressure can indeed influence policy.

 

Neil Young

 

Neil Young

 

Saturday Afternoon Musical Mood

 

Sitting alone by my window
Counting the stars of the night…

 

Word to the Wise

 

Regarding the tone Canadian popular culture has assumed over the past several years, it seems to me to have changed from the self-effacing and the respectful to the brash and the humorless.

I’m no expert, but following  the narrative outlined for us from the 2010 Olympics a la ‘owning the podium’ to the militarization of the hockey culture to the craven disinterest in honoring our treaty obligations like Kyoto to the veneration of such concepts as ‘greed is good’, the latter paid for by taxpayers and promoted by the CBC, one can’t avoid being struck by the shifting nature of the Canadian sensibility.

It’s not so much that these attitudes are new, but rather they’ve moved from the margins of the culture to the forefront in an attempt to reflect the current ideological mind-set of those currently occupying Ottawa.  And its worked.

Also reflected in this new cultural paradigm is a palpable disinterest in intellectual curiosity or probity, resulting in policies unmoved by fact or sound argument, or the opinions of those people on the ground like John Edwards et al whose job it is to implement, for example, the new ‘tough on crime’ legislation.

So if Bertrand Russell were to advise those in government, what might he say?

When asked for advice to future generations worthy of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Russell gives a very good answer (despite the sexist video title), and one I’d hope wouldn’t require Canadians a thousand years to appreciate.

 

Don’t Know Much About History

 

The History Channel used to be a place where scholars and documentary film makers discussed, believe it or not, history.   But since that’s apparently not enough to capture the imagination of viewers and advertisers, they’ve decided to re-invent themselves as the home for so-called reality TV and pseudo science with shows that follow the historically significant exploits of bush pilots and truck drivers to the hysterical ravings of, wait for it, ‘ancient astronaut theorists’.  I love that phrase.

To illustrate, after reading today’s edition of Truthdig, the online magazine worth everyone’s’ time to read, I came across this great video explaining the recent fascination with 2012 end of the world scenarios, a topic of great concern to the people who program content on the History Channel.

Now, if the Mayans had somehow mentioned something about the prospects for the upcoming 2012 U.S.Presidential election, then I think that would be worth a human sacrifice. Or two…