Thursday, October 18, 2012
Wednesday, September 26, 2012
Saturday, September 22, 2012
Direct vs. Representative Democracy
"Everywhere
people are faced with a situation in which it doesn't matter anymore
who they vote for, because the economic policies will be the same as
long as our so-called "democratic" structures remain the same.
Occupy signifies a political impasse at which we all stand whether we
know it or not―an historical moment that is defined by the inability of
existing democratic structures to fulfil the democratic values we have
come to expect: equality, the ability to meet our most basic needs, and a
way to have a political voice in determining the most important
decisions that affect our lives."
— Marianne Maeckelbergh
"Horizontal Decision-Making across Time and Place."In Hot Sports — Occupy, Anthropology, and the 2011 Global Uprisings.
Sunday, August 26, 2012
"In The Ingenuity Gap, Thomas Homer-Dixon describes the poverty of an Indian city. Frustrated, he points out that many of the people who could barely feed themselves owned televisions, which they took great pride in. He might not have understood this need, but anyone who has grown up with the box as a third parent knows that television infuses us with a certain value, a kind of individual cachet.
"When you are watching TV, it is as if the entertainment is just for you. You become special, targeted, a person. TV is a way to escape the burden of say — poverty. Not necessarily because its entertainment value is so great, but because it (1) regularly features the lives of ostensibly normal people, (2) offers the illusion of choice, (3) is 'free' and constant, meaning that you can never be denied — you are entertained when you say you are ready to be entertained, and (4) permits you a connection to the world of celebrities, products, and the good life, no matter how poor or distanced from the nexus of power you may be."
-Hal Niedzviecki
p.80-1, Hello, I'm Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity. Penguin, 2004.
"How much of your living space is specifically arranged to make it easy for you to interact with devices that allow you to engage with pop-culture, to compose your personal spectacle? ... The message to turn your life into a success story is everywhere, beamed directly into our brains. The issue is not mind control (exactly). We want this stuff. We crave it. We seek it out. Whether on film or TV or in song, the tale of the little guy making good is one that we simply can't get enough of... The majority of us don't want to destroy the system, challenge the mass-market capitalism that degrades culture, and expose celebrity worship as a fraud. To the contrary — we uphold the system; we live for the system. ... Increasingly, the relationship is one of unrequited desire: We want in."[Hence the proliferation of self-publishing of all kinds – blogs, 'vanity CDs,' books, websites, youtube videos, 'backyard wrestling league broadcasts,' etc., etc. ]
-p.72 & 77 from the same
"When you are watching TV, it is as if the entertainment is just for you. You become special, targeted, a person. TV is a way to escape the burden of say — poverty. Not necessarily because its entertainment value is so great, but because it (1) regularly features the lives of ostensibly normal people, (2) offers the illusion of choice, (3) is 'free' and constant, meaning that you can never be denied — you are entertained when you say you are ready to be entertained, and (4) permits you a connection to the world of celebrities, products, and the good life, no matter how poor or distanced from the nexus of power you may be."
-Hal Niedzviecki
p.80-1, Hello, I'm Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity. Penguin, 2004.
"How much of your living space is specifically arranged to make it easy for you to interact with devices that allow you to engage with pop-culture, to compose your personal spectacle? ... The message to turn your life into a success story is everywhere, beamed directly into our brains. The issue is not mind control (exactly). We want this stuff. We crave it. We seek it out. Whether on film or TV or in song, the tale of the little guy making good is one that we simply can't get enough of... The majority of us don't want to destroy the system, challenge the mass-market capitalism that degrades culture, and expose celebrity worship as a fraud. To the contrary — we uphold the system; we live for the system. ... Increasingly, the relationship is one of unrequited desire: We want in."[Hence the proliferation of self-publishing of all kinds – blogs, 'vanity CDs,' books, websites, youtube videos, 'backyard wrestling league broadcasts,' etc., etc. ]
-p.72 & 77 from the same
Saturday, June 23, 2012
Friday, June 22, 2012
Sshhh...
"The most simple reality, God, is the one which humanity has striven hardest to complicate."
- Pierre Lacout, Dieu est Silence
"To me, Lacout's central thought is simply this: speech divides, silence unites."
-Erika Koenig-Sheridan
"True silence is the rest of the mind; and is to the spirit, what sleep is to the body — nourishment and refreshment."
- William Penn
- Pierre Lacout, Dieu est Silence
"To me, Lacout's central thought is simply this: speech divides, silence unites."
-Erika Koenig-Sheridan
"True silence is the rest of the mind; and is to the spirit, what sleep is to the body — nourishment and refreshment."
- William Penn
Friday, June 8, 2012
Waging War on Canadian Environmentalism
By Briony Penn
Last month, my 16-year-old son’s class was flown to Ottawa, housed, fed, lectured to and trotted around the capital’s institutions and memorials devoted to war for a full week—courtesy of Stephen Harper’s government. And, as the defense “booster” budget explodes, the environmental budget implodes. It appears they are inextricably linked by the Harper agenda.
My son’s school trip was part of a multimillion-dollar scheme to bring tens of thousands of young Canadians to the exhibits on Vimy Ridge and the War of 1812. The students are housed in barrack-like accommodation called “Encounters with Canada,” with a welcoming picture of a young Albertan shaking hands with PM Stephen Harper. Located in the industrial district, they are given a taste of institutional life—junk food, videos and confinement. In between visits to war exhibits and memorials, they are lectured on war.
According to David Pugliese, a veteran defense policy journalist, this youth indoctrination program is just a taste of what is to come. Pugliese, describes the ideological changes in defense policy as “unbelievable,” with unprecedented and undebated increases in spending, marching hand in hand with unprecedented cuts to the environment. (It turns out that the 10 percent cutback to the defense budget was mostly spin, and mostly directed at programs like care for traumatized soldiers.) Speaking with Pugliese helped me realize the school history/French immersion trip to the nation’s capital was, in fact, a calculated war immersion. While Katimivik, the hugely successful volunteer youth program working with communities was axed, Operation Vimy Ridge was launched.
The two programs couldn’t provide a starker contrast. Veterans Affairs Minister Steven Blaney states in a press release, “The Battle of Vimy Ridge helped define Canada as a nation as we made our mark on the world stage. By teaching youth about the courage and perseverance shown by the young Canadians who fought during the Battle of Vimy Ridge, we are helping to create a new generation that will help shape the future of our great country.”
In the Budget Implementation, Bill C-38, the attack on Canada’s national identity as a peacekeeping nation with social and environmental oversight, is explicit.
Cuts in the budget and laws regarding oversight and safeguards, start with the National Energy Board (NEB). The NEB is in the midst of its review of the Northern Gateway Pipeline. Under Bill C-38, the current Joint Review Panel would be cut off at 24 months (with thousands of British Columbians registered to speak who would not be heard), and recommendations from the panel would now be at Harper’s discretion to ignore—which he will do, as he is openly in favour of the project.
And which national agency will provide oversight on large projects? Certainly not the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency. C-38 gives discretionary powers to the minister to decide what projects do or don’t require an assessment, which together with a cabinet veto, streamlining, staff cuts, downloading of the responsibility to the provinces, and the exemption of federally-funded projects altogether, will make this agency clawless.
The Canadian Environmental Assessment Act itself will now apply only to impacts on aquatic species under the Species at Risk Act and migratory birds. But even the few species in these categories will be left without an ark, because revisions to the Species At Risk Act give agencies like the National Energy Board the ability to override protections of critical habitat on projects it approves. The recent legal victories for the protection of endangered southern resident orca habitat will now be an irrelevant footnote of history.
And don’t look to the Fisheries Act to slow the projects down when they cross rivers and oceans. The Fisheries Act has been not only gutted but headed, tailed and filleted into a spineless act that oversees only fish of “commercial, Aboriginal, and recreational” value, with habitat protections weakened to the point of no returns and again, the ministerial discretion clause applies. Even some Progressive Conservatives, like former cabinet minister John Fraser, are outraged. He told the Vancouver Sun, “To take habitat out of the Fisheries Act is a very serious error because you can’t save fish if you don’t save habitat, and I say this as a lifelong conservative. People who want to eliminate the appropriate safeguards that should be made in the public interest, these people aren’t conservatives at all, they’re ideological right-wingers with very, very limited understanding, intelligence or wisdom.”
Just to ensure there are no loopholes, the Navigable Waters Protection Act has been changed to exempt pipelines and power lines from its provisions. Those will now become a responsibility of the National Energy Board, which, as we now know, is a rubber stamp agency.
Under all these deregulations, Harper will be able push through his plans for the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion from the tarsands to Burnaby. The plans to triple capacity and infrastructure from 300,000 barrels/day to 850,000/day with up to 30 tankers a month plying the Salish Sea will be able to go ahead without public scrutiny. Existing decisions, like the protection of Fish Lake in the Chilcotin from becoming a tailings pond, will be able to be reversed as the bill applies retroactively to July 2010 (the Fish Lake decision came in October 2010). As local MP Elizabeth May cites in her analysis, “The new Fisheries Act provisions create an incentive to drain a lake and kill all the fish, if not in a fishery, in order to fill a dry hole with mining tailings.” Any recommendations out of the Cohen Commission on the sockeye disappearance will likely be waived under some discretionary wand and removed from the record.
In case you had one last hope that Parks Canada might be able to put checks on projects through national parks or marine conservation areas, think again. They have taken huge hits, losing nearly a quarter of their staff. The Gulf Islands National Park was, to quote an insider, “gutted.” They have lost their key scientists and ecologists, and Bill C-38 will permanently remove monitoring and ecological restoration from their responsibilities. By the end of this summer, the Canadian icon of the park warden educating children about nature will be virtually wiped from our institutional memory. Harper does not want an educated person identifying for children the beauty, diversity and fragility of the shoreline past which oil tankers are going to be passing when Kinder Morgan or Enbridge gets their pipeline approvals.
The rest of the 420-page Bill C-38 is more housekeeping to ensure that every loophole is plugged that might prevent the movement of the 71 percent foreign-owned bitumen to China. For example, the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, which brought Canadians from all walks of life together to provide advice on federal policies, has been dismantled.
Not content with shutting down the Round Table, Harper is shutting down every dissenting voice with unprecedented vindictiveness. Charities will no longer be able to accept gifts that may result in political activity. He has already allocated $8 million in the budget specifically to harass environmental groups like ForestEthics, already hounded with repeat audits.
Finally, if there was any doubt that there is, in John Fraser’s words, “limited understanding, intelligence or wisdom” in the architects of Bill C-38, water—the most basic of needs—has been the target of more deregulation. Environment Canada is losing a wide range of responsibilities from running programs on water-use efficiency to monitoring effluent discharge of toxins into our water systems. Combined with recent news that 75 jobs in the national contaminants program concerned with marine pollution have been axed—including nine scientists and staff at the Institute of Ocean Sciences in North Saanich—we simply won’t know whether there are dangerous toxins in our oceans and rivers. As Peter Ross, an environmental toxicologist who received his notice of termination, told news media, “I cannot think of another industrialized nation that has completely excised marine pollution from its radar…It is with apprehension that I ponder a Canada without any research or monitoring capacity for pollution in our three oceans, or any ability to manage its impacts on commercial fish stocks, traditional foods to over 300,000 aboriginal people, and marine wildlife.”
The siege of Bill-38 on our old bastions of agency oversight goes on and on. In all, 70 laws are rewritten. Did I mention that they propose the axing of the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act? This is the final nail in the coffin of policy on climate change and, therefore, fossil fuels. Altering the climate irrevocably will be seen as the greatest act of war on the Earth by the next generation.
Which takes us back to my son and his trip to Ottawa. Besides tales of the glories of war, what else are they teaching our children in Ottawa these days?
A walk inside the Museum of Nature reveals the sponsorship of Toronto-based Barrick Gold, the biggest gold mining company in the world. Barrick Gold creates vast strip mines around the world and has such a bad track record of violations that even the Government Pension Fund of Norway has dumped their stock on ethical grounds. When concerns about this partnership with a public institution charged with educating our young about nature were raised with museum CEO Margaret Beckel, her reply was, “The ongoing generous support from sponsors such as Barrick Gold allows the museum to realize priority projects thereby making it possible for the museum to achieve its overall goal of connecting people with nature.” Who is the latest appointment to the board of Museum of Nature? Byron Neiles, Enbridge’s Vice President, Major Projects.
[Briony Penn (PhD) is a
naturalist, journalist, artist and award-winning environmental
educator. She is the author of The Kids Book of Geography and A Year on the Wild Side. This article was sent out over Canadian Geographers e-list. The image and text is from Rock, Paper, Cynic.]
Last month, my 16-year-old son’s class was flown to Ottawa, housed, fed, lectured to and trotted around the capital’s institutions and memorials devoted to war for a full week—courtesy of Stephen Harper’s government. And, as the defense “booster” budget explodes, the environmental budget implodes. It appears they are inextricably linked by the Harper agenda.
My son’s school trip was part of a multimillion-dollar scheme to bring tens of thousands of young Canadians to the exhibits on Vimy Ridge and the War of 1812. The students are housed in barrack-like accommodation called “Encounters with Canada,” with a welcoming picture of a young Albertan shaking hands with PM Stephen Harper. Located in the industrial district, they are given a taste of institutional life—junk food, videos and confinement. In between visits to war exhibits and memorials, they are lectured on war.
According to David Pugliese, a veteran defense policy journalist, this youth indoctrination program is just a taste of what is to come. Pugliese, describes the ideological changes in defense policy as “unbelievable,” with unprecedented and undebated increases in spending, marching hand in hand with unprecedented cuts to the environment. (It turns out that the 10 percent cutback to the defense budget was mostly spin, and mostly directed at programs like care for traumatized soldiers.) Speaking with Pugliese helped me realize the school history/French immersion trip to the nation’s capital was, in fact, a calculated war immersion. While Katimivik, the hugely successful volunteer youth program working with communities was axed, Operation Vimy Ridge was launched.
The two programs couldn’t provide a starker contrast. Veterans Affairs Minister Steven Blaney states in a press release, “The Battle of Vimy Ridge helped define Canada as a nation as we made our mark on the world stage. By teaching youth about the courage and perseverance shown by the young Canadians who fought during the Battle of Vimy Ridge, we are helping to create a new generation that will help shape the future of our great country.”
In the Budget Implementation, Bill C-38, the attack on Canada’s national identity as a peacekeeping nation with social and environmental oversight, is explicit.
Cuts in the budget and laws regarding oversight and safeguards, start with the National Energy Board (NEB). The NEB is in the midst of its review of the Northern Gateway Pipeline. Under Bill C-38, the current Joint Review Panel would be cut off at 24 months (with thousands of British Columbians registered to speak who would not be heard), and recommendations from the panel would now be at Harper’s discretion to ignore—which he will do, as he is openly in favour of the project.
And which national agency will provide oversight on large projects? Certainly not the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency. C-38 gives discretionary powers to the minister to decide what projects do or don’t require an assessment, which together with a cabinet veto, streamlining, staff cuts, downloading of the responsibility to the provinces, and the exemption of federally-funded projects altogether, will make this agency clawless.
The Canadian Environmental Assessment Act itself will now apply only to impacts on aquatic species under the Species at Risk Act and migratory birds. But even the few species in these categories will be left without an ark, because revisions to the Species At Risk Act give agencies like the National Energy Board the ability to override protections of critical habitat on projects it approves. The recent legal victories for the protection of endangered southern resident orca habitat will now be an irrelevant footnote of history.
And don’t look to the Fisheries Act to slow the projects down when they cross rivers and oceans. The Fisheries Act has been not only gutted but headed, tailed and filleted into a spineless act that oversees only fish of “commercial, Aboriginal, and recreational” value, with habitat protections weakened to the point of no returns and again, the ministerial discretion clause applies. Even some Progressive Conservatives, like former cabinet minister John Fraser, are outraged. He told the Vancouver Sun, “To take habitat out of the Fisheries Act is a very serious error because you can’t save fish if you don’t save habitat, and I say this as a lifelong conservative. People who want to eliminate the appropriate safeguards that should be made in the public interest, these people aren’t conservatives at all, they’re ideological right-wingers with very, very limited understanding, intelligence or wisdom.”
Just to ensure there are no loopholes, the Navigable Waters Protection Act has been changed to exempt pipelines and power lines from its provisions. Those will now become a responsibility of the National Energy Board, which, as we now know, is a rubber stamp agency.
Under all these deregulations, Harper will be able push through his plans for the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion from the tarsands to Burnaby. The plans to triple capacity and infrastructure from 300,000 barrels/day to 850,000/day with up to 30 tankers a month plying the Salish Sea will be able to go ahead without public scrutiny. Existing decisions, like the protection of Fish Lake in the Chilcotin from becoming a tailings pond, will be able to be reversed as the bill applies retroactively to July 2010 (the Fish Lake decision came in October 2010). As local MP Elizabeth May cites in her analysis, “The new Fisheries Act provisions create an incentive to drain a lake and kill all the fish, if not in a fishery, in order to fill a dry hole with mining tailings.” Any recommendations out of the Cohen Commission on the sockeye disappearance will likely be waived under some discretionary wand and removed from the record.
In case you had one last hope that Parks Canada might be able to put checks on projects through national parks or marine conservation areas, think again. They have taken huge hits, losing nearly a quarter of their staff. The Gulf Islands National Park was, to quote an insider, “gutted.” They have lost their key scientists and ecologists, and Bill C-38 will permanently remove monitoring and ecological restoration from their responsibilities. By the end of this summer, the Canadian icon of the park warden educating children about nature will be virtually wiped from our institutional memory. Harper does not want an educated person identifying for children the beauty, diversity and fragility of the shoreline past which oil tankers are going to be passing when Kinder Morgan or Enbridge gets their pipeline approvals.
The rest of the 420-page Bill C-38 is more housekeeping to ensure that every loophole is plugged that might prevent the movement of the 71 percent foreign-owned bitumen to China. For example, the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, which brought Canadians from all walks of life together to provide advice on federal policies, has been dismantled.
Not content with shutting down the Round Table, Harper is shutting down every dissenting voice with unprecedented vindictiveness. Charities will no longer be able to accept gifts that may result in political activity. He has already allocated $8 million in the budget specifically to harass environmental groups like ForestEthics, already hounded with repeat audits.
Finally, if there was any doubt that there is, in John Fraser’s words, “limited understanding, intelligence or wisdom” in the architects of Bill C-38, water—the most basic of needs—has been the target of more deregulation. Environment Canada is losing a wide range of responsibilities from running programs on water-use efficiency to monitoring effluent discharge of toxins into our water systems. Combined with recent news that 75 jobs in the national contaminants program concerned with marine pollution have been axed—including nine scientists and staff at the Institute of Ocean Sciences in North Saanich—we simply won’t know whether there are dangerous toxins in our oceans and rivers. As Peter Ross, an environmental toxicologist who received his notice of termination, told news media, “I cannot think of another industrialized nation that has completely excised marine pollution from its radar…It is with apprehension that I ponder a Canada without any research or monitoring capacity for pollution in our three oceans, or any ability to manage its impacts on commercial fish stocks, traditional foods to over 300,000 aboriginal people, and marine wildlife.”
The siege of Bill-38 on our old bastions of agency oversight goes on and on. In all, 70 laws are rewritten. Did I mention that they propose the axing of the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act? This is the final nail in the coffin of policy on climate change and, therefore, fossil fuels. Altering the climate irrevocably will be seen as the greatest act of war on the Earth by the next generation.
Which takes us back to my son and his trip to Ottawa. Besides tales of the glories of war, what else are they teaching our children in Ottawa these days?
A walk inside the Museum of Nature reveals the sponsorship of Toronto-based Barrick Gold, the biggest gold mining company in the world. Barrick Gold creates vast strip mines around the world and has such a bad track record of violations that even the Government Pension Fund of Norway has dumped their stock on ethical grounds. When concerns about this partnership with a public institution charged with educating our young about nature were raised with museum CEO Margaret Beckel, her reply was, “The ongoing generous support from sponsors such as Barrick Gold allows the museum to realize priority projects thereby making it possible for the museum to achieve its overall goal of connecting people with nature.” Who is the latest appointment to the board of Museum of Nature? Byron Neiles, Enbridge’s Vice President, Major Projects.
Tuesday, May 8, 2012
Kaila & the Granolas - "The Cave" by Mumford & Sons
Say hello to my friends Kaila and Holly everyone! Kaila just started playing the ukulele 4 weeks ago. (I may have had a hand in this plunge into the uke-world, but can't take credit for the uke-prodigy she has turned out to be). Holly also has mad skills that will reveal themselves as the video progresses.
If you want to learn our arrangement for ukulele of this song, I've broken it down best I can here. This arrangement took as a starting point what 'jamiecook1993' plays on youtube here.
Kaila's already gone back to Waterloo, but she's got a youtube channel.
You should check out, and if she comes back for a visit to Ottawa, there will definitely have to be Granolas reunion.
Pet peeve here, but most versions of the lyrics on the internet say "maker's hand." But the cd liner notes definitely say "maker's land" — and Marcus definitely does sing it this way if you actually listen!
Also, like many people, I assumed that the song might be referencing Plato's "Allegory of the Cave." But apparently the line "come out of your cave walking on your hands / and see the world hanging upside down " is a near word-for-word quote from G.K. Chesterton's biography of St. Francis.
Friday, April 20, 2012
Thursday, April 19, 2012
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Let your pain save you
Happiness is a cage, so
Enjoy your faults, channel your anger, savour the beauty in your sadness
Love is so much less, and so
so much more than you think it is
Self-improvement is a scam, so
Kill fear, live vividly,
Burn freely.
Enjoy your faults, channel your anger, savour the beauty in your sadness
Love is so much less, and so
so much more than you think it is
Self-improvement is a scam, so
Kill fear, live vividly,
Burn freely.
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Flush your feelings down!
"I swear I had real feelings for her. But what are real feelings when it comes to love? If the love doesn't work out, feelings that drove you stone crazy one year could feel like a feather in your ear by the next. Feelings feel real enough when you've got them, but sometimes they don't mean much more in the scheme of things than what the weather was on this same date last year. When you think about it, it gets tough to put your emotions into boxes called Real and Not Real, or even Sexual and Not Sexual. The way a friend of mine puts it, the problem with attractions might be that they'll all sexual."
- The character Gary Gray in James Hannaham's God Says No (2009, McSweeney's, p.21).
- The character Gary Gray in James Hannaham's God Says No (2009, McSweeney's, p.21).
 |
| "Utahraptor, these aliens would meet us and say 'why don't they use the feelings washroom' at the same time that we'd be saying 'why don't they use the regular washroom' and we'd both have the same 'ewww gross' tone in our voice"(http://www.qwantz.com/) |
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
From "Dennis"
Every once in a while those forwards of a forward of a forward — those endless e-mail chains bring something decent to my mailbox.
_____________________
This relates to the American presidential race. I am, after 40 years, revisiting Rabelais, so my thoughts have turned recently to satire.
It seems that, with all of the religious demagoguery we are seeing in the presidential race, a few revisions of the gospels must be in order. These changes to the gospel might serve them well:
Replace "Blessed are you poor" (Lk 6:20b, Mt 5:3) with "Cursed are you poor. Quit bothering me. Thou art lazy."
Replace "When you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret" (Mt 6:6) with "Pray at all times in public, especially in schools and in all places in order to be seen by others."
Replace "Sell your possessions and give to charity" (Lk 12:33a) with "Keep all you have, unless you can get a good tax break. Then, toss a few crumbs."
Replace "Give to him who begs from you and do not refuse him who would borrow from you" (Mt. 5:42, Lk. 6:30) with "Tell those who beg from you to get a job. Tell those who would borrow from you to first raise their credit rating."
Replace "Blessed are you that hunger now" (Lk 4:21a, Mt. 5:6a) with "If thou art hungry, thou shalt urinate in a cup, pay for it, and if it is clean we might give you gruel and a biscuit." (Based on several state proposals to drug test welfare recipients.)
Replace "Love your enemies and do good to those who hate you" (Mt. 5:44, Lk 6:27) with "Hate those with different pigmentation or language or religion or hair color or whatever excuse you can find; then, try to kill them."
Replace "Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her (Mk. 10:11, Lk 16:18, cf. Mt. 5:31) with "Marry thy high school math teacher and when she gets old, find a trophy, and when she gets old find another, then suddenly become a Catholic and lay off the Viagra, lest ye shall needest thou another trophy."
Replace "You are missing one thing: Go, sell whatever you have and give the proceeds to the poor..." (Mk10:21, Mt. 19:21, Lk. 18:22) with "Buy stocks."
Replace "How hard it will be for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of God" (Mk 10:23, Mt. 19:23, Lk. 18:24) with "The kingdom of God is underneath the Fortune 500 sign."
Replace "Don't acquire possessions here on earth" with "More, More, More! Now, Now, Now! Warm up the credit card!"
Replace, "When someone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other as well" (Lk 6:29, Mt 5:39) with "Preemptive strikes are the way to go. Nuke 'em."
Replace "When someone takes your coat, don't prevent that person from taking your shirt along with it" (Lk 6:29, Mt. 5:40) with "Keep your Second Amendment arsenal armed and ready to go!"
Replace the six sentences of the Samaritan parable (Lk. 10:30-35) with four
words: "Corporations are people, too."
Replace "It is easier for a camel to squeeze through a needle's eye than for a wealthy person to get into God's domain" (Mk 10:25, Mt. 19:24, Lk 18:25) with "Medication, stapling the stomach, gastric by-pass are all keys to the rich entering the kingdom."
Replace "Since when do the healthy need a doctor? It's the sick who do" (Lk. 5:31, Mk 2:17, Mt. 9:12) with "Let the poor die if they can't afford health care. Blessed are the health insurance lobbyists, for they serve the wealthy."
Finally, the demagogues can replace the crucifix with an image of an electric chair.
_____________________
This relates to the American presidential race. I am, after 40 years, revisiting Rabelais, so my thoughts have turned recently to satire.
It seems that, with all of the religious demagoguery we are seeing in the presidential race, a few revisions of the gospels must be in order. These changes to the gospel might serve them well:
Replace "Blessed are you poor" (Lk 6:20b, Mt 5:3) with "Cursed are you poor. Quit bothering me. Thou art lazy."
Replace "When you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret" (Mt 6:6) with "Pray at all times in public, especially in schools and in all places in order to be seen by others."
Replace "Sell your possessions and give to charity" (Lk 12:33a) with "Keep all you have, unless you can get a good tax break. Then, toss a few crumbs."
Replace "Give to him who begs from you and do not refuse him who would borrow from you" (Mt. 5:42, Lk. 6:30) with "Tell those who beg from you to get a job. Tell those who would borrow from you to first raise their credit rating."
Replace "Blessed are you that hunger now" (Lk 4:21a, Mt. 5:6a) with "If thou art hungry, thou shalt urinate in a cup, pay for it, and if it is clean we might give you gruel and a biscuit." (Based on several state proposals to drug test welfare recipients.)
Replace "Love your enemies and do good to those who hate you" (Mt. 5:44, Lk 6:27) with "Hate those with different pigmentation or language or religion or hair color or whatever excuse you can find; then, try to kill them."
Replace "Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her (Mk. 10:11, Lk 16:18, cf. Mt. 5:31) with "Marry thy high school math teacher and when she gets old, find a trophy, and when she gets old find another, then suddenly become a Catholic and lay off the Viagra, lest ye shall needest thou another trophy."
Replace "You are missing one thing: Go, sell whatever you have and give the proceeds to the poor..." (Mk10:21, Mt. 19:21, Lk. 18:22) with "Buy stocks."
Replace "How hard it will be for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of God" (Mk 10:23, Mt. 19:23, Lk. 18:24) with "The kingdom of God is underneath the Fortune 500 sign."
Replace "Don't acquire possessions here on earth" with "More, More, More! Now, Now, Now! Warm up the credit card!"
Replace, "When someone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other as well" (Lk 6:29, Mt 5:39) with "Preemptive strikes are the way to go. Nuke 'em."
Replace "When someone takes your coat, don't prevent that person from taking your shirt along with it" (Lk 6:29, Mt. 5:40) with "Keep your Second Amendment arsenal armed and ready to go!"
Replace the six sentences of the Samaritan parable (Lk. 10:30-35) with four
words: "Corporations are people, too."
Replace "It is easier for a camel to squeeze through a needle's eye than for a wealthy person to get into God's domain" (Mk 10:25, Mt. 19:24, Lk 18:25) with "Medication, stapling the stomach, gastric by-pass are all keys to the rich entering the kingdom."
Replace "Since when do the healthy need a doctor? It's the sick who do" (Lk. 5:31, Mk 2:17, Mt. 9:12) with "Let the poor die if they can't afford health care. Blessed are the health insurance lobbyists, for they serve the wealthy."
Finally, the demagogues can replace the crucifix with an image of an electric chair.
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Happines is a Cage
Enjoy you faults,
Savour the beauty in your sadness,
Let your pain save you.
Burn freely.
Savour the beauty in your sadness,
Let your pain save you.
Burn freely.
Monday, January 30, 2012
Ego-guilt
"Guilt is a device of the ego to make you feel like you're doing something about your 'failure' — that somehow you're atoning for what you've done with how bad you feel."
- my friend Manuela (or my best memory of what she said)
- my friend Manuela (or my best memory of what she said)
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Suicide or Sell-Out? (Jesus' Dilemna)
Last night, I watched this 'amateur' music documentary, and it's probably the best I've ever seen. Well, at the least, it's the best I've seen on what it's really like to be in a band, and the struggles that go along with it. This includes questions of 'selling out,' what it means to succeed or fail, and 'why you do it.'
Things got particularly interesting from 40:30 on, culminating at 48:11, when Randy Blythe from Lamb of God confesses that he was perfectly content to have no money when he was 25. But now that he's nearly 40, and has put 15 years into his band, it would sure be nice to have enough to have kids and maybe even own a house.
Because my brain takes weird left turns like this, a little while later I started wondering...
If Jesus would have lived past thirty, would he have sold out? Decided that money, or government, or religion weren't really that bad after all... made his peace with such satanic things... settled down with a wife and a mortgage, content that he deserved a secure life and a decent living in return for his teachings?
[Watch it in youtube here]
Things got particularly interesting from 40:30 on, culminating at 48:11, when Randy Blythe from Lamb of God confesses that he was perfectly content to have no money when he was 25. But now that he's nearly 40, and has put 15 years into his band, it would sure be nice to have enough to have kids and maybe even own a house.
Because my brain takes weird left turns like this, a little while later I started wondering...
If Jesus would have lived past thirty, would he have sold out? Decided that money, or government, or religion weren't really that bad after all... made his peace with such satanic things... settled down with a wife and a mortgage, content that he deserved a secure life and a decent living in return for his teachings?
Monday, January 2, 2012
Brains are funny sometimes
The thing I like about books is that I can put them back on the shelf when I don't want them anymore.
The thing I like about fiction is that it allows me to live vicariously through stories that are much more easy, meaningful, and satisfying than my own.
The thing I like about movies is that they let me stare at pretty girls who can't look back.
The thing I like about fiction is that it allows me to live vicariously through stories that are much more easy, meaningful, and satisfying than my own.
The thing I like about movies is that they let me stare at pretty girls who can't look back.
Best commentary on Attawapiskat I've yet heard
Last month, the plight of people in Attawapiskat captured the attention of the Canadian media. Attawapiskat is a reserve/First Nation in northern Ontario, near Kenora. (The best background on the immediate crisis might be this article, by the MP for the area, which helped launch the media frenzy; this blog post by Pam Palmater gives excellent historical context).
This is a piece on Attawapiskat written by Bob Lovelace. Bob's an elder and former chief of Ardoch Algonquin First Nation, and lecturer at Queen's University. I was lucky enough to attend a presentation he did on the history of the Ottawa Valley and its original people, the Algonquins.
___________________________________________________
Seeing the Forest and the Trees
If you can cut through the racism, ignorance, and half-baked opinions of pundits, politicians and sound-bite media most folks will realize that Attawapiskat and many other First Nations have been laboring under the repression of Colonialism far to long. The antidote for poverty is self-determination and no one can give you that. You have to standup and take action yourself to make it happen. Colonialism does not give way on its own; it must be defeated through vigorous and enlightened opposition.
It is difficult in the face of human suffering to turn attention to the systemic and structural reasons that have led to this catastrophe but this is the very time when thoughtful analysis is needed. The homes are small and cold. The tedium of poverty bears down day-by-day and those who have stolen your children’s future call the daily bread on your table a “handout”. It is difficult to feel anything but shame through the numbing that is required to get-by every day. But there are reasons behind this suffering. There is a history. There is a structure to oppression, denial and indifference that houses this suffering and there is a system that perpetuates it.
...
___________________________________
Read the rest of the post here, at Bob's Decolonization Blog.
I'm certainly no expert on the situation, and haven't even done a very good job of following the media coverage. But two thoughts occur to me:
1) Government representatives in damage-control may toss around impressive-sounding figures that they've sent to Attawapiskat, implying that the money must have been wasted through corrupt management. But per individual, on-reserve natives get 2/3rds of the spending for government services that other Canadians receive. (Hello! That's racist!) So the amount spent on a similarly-sized group of 'regular Canadians' would be even greater.
2) If there's no place for natives to live on-reserve, maybe they'll move away and assimilate properly into mainstream Canadian society. Wouldn't that be convenient?!
This is a piece on Attawapiskat written by Bob Lovelace. Bob's an elder and former chief of Ardoch Algonquin First Nation, and lecturer at Queen's University. I was lucky enough to attend a presentation he did on the history of the Ottawa Valley and its original people, the Algonquins.
___________________________________________________
Seeing the Forest and the Trees
If you can cut through the racism, ignorance, and half-baked opinions of pundits, politicians and sound-bite media most folks will realize that Attawapiskat and many other First Nations have been laboring under the repression of Colonialism far to long. The antidote for poverty is self-determination and no one can give you that. You have to standup and take action yourself to make it happen. Colonialism does not give way on its own; it must be defeated through vigorous and enlightened opposition.
It is difficult in the face of human suffering to turn attention to the systemic and structural reasons that have led to this catastrophe but this is the very time when thoughtful analysis is needed. The homes are small and cold. The tedium of poverty bears down day-by-day and those who have stolen your children’s future call the daily bread on your table a “handout”. It is difficult to feel anything but shame through the numbing that is required to get-by every day. But there are reasons behind this suffering. There is a history. There is a structure to oppression, denial and indifference that houses this suffering and there is a system that perpetuates it.
...
___________________________________
Read the rest of the post here, at Bob's Decolonization Blog.
I'm certainly no expert on the situation, and haven't even done a very good job of following the media coverage. But two thoughts occur to me:
1) Government representatives in damage-control may toss around impressive-sounding figures that they've sent to Attawapiskat, implying that the money must have been wasted through corrupt management. But per individual, on-reserve natives get 2/3rds of the spending for government services that other Canadians receive. (Hello! That's racist!) So the amount spent on a similarly-sized group of 'regular Canadians' would be even greater.
2) If there's no place for natives to live on-reserve, maybe they'll move away and assimilate properly into mainstream Canadian society. Wouldn't that be convenient?!
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