Dec. 7:

Well, let's start with Jana Giles on p. F3. That's in Whatever, the high school section. She wonders how sports have become so important in high school and university, and there's little interest in the arts. There's a story in that.

Going back to the 1700s - at least - the British upper classes had money and power. Their weakness was in brains to justify that money and power. Now, in those days, organized sports (games with standard rules) could be played only by those who had the money and time to organize them - the upper classes. Out of that developed the myth that the upper classes didn't need brains. What was required was something vague called leadership and character. A pioneer in this was one of the leading schools of the upper class - Rugby.   And, yes, that's the school that invented the game of rugby which, with modifications, became football.

The children of these upper class schools became the ones to go to university. So Rugby, like cricket, became enshrined as the game that prepared these special children to become leaders in the House of Lords, in the army, in just about everything.

Of course, none of this was available to their sisters. Women, after all, were not going to be leaders or to have power, not if men could prevent it. So women were kept at home where they could study things that were still upper class, but would not make them leaders - music, art, literature.

The result? The upper classes produced large numbers of male dunces, most of whom would be sent to the army to become generals - a practice that continued up to (and including) World War 1. Others would become incompetent politicians.

Women were the ones who developed brains - but little chance to use them.

A survivor of those days is the belief that football, for example, develops character and leadership and has class status. Thus its continuing importance in our universities.
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The first section of today's TandT would h ave been popular reading among the old, British upper classes. There's nothing in it that requires or encourages any brain whatever.

There's the story that SWN has packed up and gone home - and a rumour that it isn't coming back.

Finance Minister Higgs says the province must cut its spending. That's a theme that runs over to the editorial page as well. It's quite a frequent theme, and the tune is always the same. The province is spending too much money. And the cause of the problem is social services, EI, the flinging of money at the poor. I have never, not even once, seen a hint that there are some very rich people in this province - and that maybe they're part of the problem. How much does it cost to keep those people's bellies filled? They are getting richer daily. Most of us aren't. Where's their money coming from?

What taxes, in real money, do the rich and the corporations pay? How much have they wiggled into doing jobs that government used to do (Public/Private/Partnerships)? How much to do we give them on the sly, as city council did for Robert Irving?

How come the newspaper is always keen on cutting down on spending for those who need it - but openly propagandizes to go deeper in debt for  something the rich want - like the events centre?

A newspaper is supposed to give us information - like how much to the rich cost us? How much do we give away to them? How little do they pay us back? Their incomes are going up. Our incomes are going down. How can we be the only cause of the province's budget problems?

But we don't get information. All we get is propaganda and ads.
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The big story in NewsToday, "N.B.'s unemployment rate goes down", tells us nothing. One can play all sorts of games with statistics so that, if you torture them enough, they say whatever you want them to say. Bruce Northrup flaps his wings and crows with joy that the rate has dropped below ten percent to 9.7. That's a figure that doesn't mean poop.  The drop is less that a half of one percent - and that includes an unstated number of part time jobs.

There's a story I couldn't find but that should have been there. Alberta, despite severe warnings from its own Environment minister that it is going to cause severe environmental damage has approved an expansion of the oil sands. Why this rush to expand oil production on all sides?

It's because the oil companies know that their selling days are numbered. Even if extracting oil were as harmless as rubbing skin cream on a baby's bum, we won't be doing it much longer because, as demand rises, the price is going to go up. It will very soon be impossible to operate millions of gasoline-engined cars or to heat homes with oil. It's bad enough now. It can only get worse, and in a hurry. The oil fields have to make money NOW because they won't be able to within a very short time.

And that's not even counting climate change.

Big business thinks three months at a time. Our survival depends on extending the attention span of big business. Ot elect a government that thinks? Business thinks three months at a time. We need a leadership that think ahead by twenty uears or more.

And that's most of NewsToday.
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As always, the sports section has more news than the news section does. And they're still using that corny headline "Wildtown Catfight". Isnt' that a tad juvenile for adult readers?

And, look, even on a sports page, a  headline should be a news statement, not an ad for the team. Similarly, one of the biggest stories "Wildcats Tigres clash" isn't a story. It's really an ad for a game that hasn't been played yet.
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The editorial page is entirely on the province's finances. Read it carefully. Underline the word Irving wherever it appears. (No. Don't bother to get up. You won't need a pen.)

The editorialist says "We're maxed out".  This is, I presume, the same editorialist who routinely harangues us to borrow 125 milliion (or more) for an events centre.

Norbert Cunningham's column is the very silly result of an appalling ignorance. He doesn't, for example, appear to know what the word capitalism means.

Norbert, look up. The world is in a profound economic crisis. That crisis was caused by the greed, shortsightedness, and criminality of the people you (wrongly) call capitalists. Other people you think are capitalists (but are not) are stealing all the world's wealth, creating poverty all over the world  (especially in the west and Africa). As well as being ignorant of the meaning of the world capitalist, you seem not to notice the enormous damage these people have done.

Then you babble about leftists - a word that seems to mean anyone who doesn't agree with you. You accuse "leftists" of wanting to give more of other people's money to (presumably) poor people. In fact, much of what "leftists" advocate is legislation to make capitalists act like real capitalists.

So where the hell were you when we found out the city government was giving  other people's money to Robert Irving?  I must have missed the abuse and rant you poured on him.

Norbert, grow up. We are living through a crisis that began with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. They shovelled national wealth into the pockets of the rich. The result is that we now live in a western world that is in serious decline  caused by selfishness and greed.

The rich have also used their new wealth to seize control of governments. They have used that control to steer even more money to themselves, to increase development in areas our world cannot handle, to effectively destroy democracy (espeically in the US), and to destroy individual privacy with spy systerms which are as much for big business as they are for any national interest.

As a result, we not only face economic uncertainty and severe environmenal crisis, but decades of wars - all of them fought to make the rich richer.

In your own, miserable paper,  two years ago, you published an op ed piece by an Irving in which he actually said he was a member (without being elected) of the government. That statement was illegal under the Canadian consitution.

He then appointed his boys to be advisors to the Minister of Finance. (a real Minister of Finance would immediately have resigned on that. Who the hell was Mr. Irving to give himself that right?)

In other words Norbert, since Irving's hoods were  advising the minister, that means they set the budgets. So where is your column giving  hell to Irving for having made a mess of the budgets? Was it greed? Was it incompetence? Is it possible he did himself favours with his control of the budget?

Come on, Norbert. Let's hear you call Mr. Irving names.
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Brent Mazerolle has a column on op ed. The point seems to be that we need to prepare for terrible accidents like the Halifex explosion of World War 1, and the more recent deaths of 47 people in Lac Megantic.

Brent, where have you and your paper been since the Lac Megantic tragedy? Where were your questions? Where was  you investigative journalism? Boy, talk about pious.. How do we prevent these things when we get no information on what caused them?.

Gwynne Dyer has an interesting column on how big powers bully lesser ones with, in this case, Russians bullying the Ukraine. There aren't any of them big powers nice guys, not to anybody.
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The Faith Page sermonette is the usual wimpy and close to irrelevant stuff. Are there other possible topics?

Well, ever heard of cluster bombs? These are small bombs dropped in a bigger casing that opens up widely to cause indiscriminate slaughter. (They spread so widely, there really  can  be no such thing as a target). There they lie, perhaps for decaades, until some child picks one up out of curiosity - and then loses an arm - or a life.

They were dropped in the millions in Vietnam; and to this day children are still picking them up. They were also used in Iraq, with similar results. Indeed, cluster bombs are so vile, that most of the world, including Canada, signed a treaty never to use them.

If I remember correctly, it was Harper who signed that treaty. Now, unnoticed by our  press, he has said that Canada is still opposed to cluster bombs and supports the treaty. However, Canada will use them if allied with another country that feels them necessary. (The US did not sign the treaty, and still feels cluster bombs are necessary.)

Perhaps Jesus might have touched on such an issue?

Then there's Norbert's opinion that the poor cause recessions. And he has only praise for the rich.

Well, Jesus was poor and unemployed. And his country was being run by those nice, rich people who have all the brains.

These might be good topics for a sermon.

 

Dec. 6: Just briefly on the TandT - and then....

What's to say? It's the usual TandT. On the death of Nelson Mandela, Stephen Harper says, "World has lost one of 'its great moral leaders'..." So it has. But the irony is it's hard to imagine a man with less moral leadership than Stephen Harper. I'll be talking more about that later.)

Then there's page of page of an ad disguised as a news story, the Mazerolle thing on New York. Save the price of a TandT, and pick up a free brochure at any travel agency.

Except for Mandela, the rest of the world doesn't exist in the news section. I mean, who cares that the US and China are gearing up for a new cold war that could get very hot? Who cares that French troops have invaded yet another African country in the pretence of bringing law and order when they're really there to rip off its minerals?

The editorial writer says that civil service pension reforms are fair. Sure. It's not his pension that got reformed.

Alec Bruce has an interesting piece on New Brunswick's financial problems, and whether these are caused by a fear of failure. I rather think they're cause by lack of fear of failure. Capitalist is supposed to involve risk; that is supposed to be what makes it innovative. But not in the New Brunswick version. Here,  the Irvings and others can open projects with guaranteed success thanks to government loans and grants, tax breaks, etc. If fear of failure is a good thing, maybe we should give a shot of it to the Irvings.

Norbert is off on another anti-CBC rant. Someday, very soon, I'll have to do a long column on his towering ignorance of broadcasting both public and private. He also reveals a complete ignorance of how radio and TV work, and the effect they have. He also has a line that in news, the CBC just picks up and repackages what others have reported. Norbert, you can't be that ignorant on the state of news-gathering in Canada. CBC has far the best news-gathering in Canada. Private radio can't do it because its news staffs are too small and inexpert. Private radio and newspapers won't because they are owned by people who don't want us to know what's going on. This whole column is just ignorant, ranting crap.

Suzuki, as always,  has a good column.  There's also a good letter to the editor "Climate change warning to all" about Suzuki's talk in Moncton (which I don't remember seeing reported in the TandT) Finally, the Letter of the Day is an excellent one by the assistant commissioner for the RCMP in Fredericton.

Now.......

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Back in the days when I was doing some volunteer work with convicts, I met one fellow with an extraordinary background. He was a young and handsome guy, so he had several girlfriends - all at the same time - and all of them knew about it. And they all worked for him - on the streets, in bars...

One day, he killed one of the girls, a teenager. Then, with the help of another of the girls, he cut up the body and put it in garbage bags.

We used to talk about all sorts of things, him and me and the other 25 or so. Once, morality came up. They all had strong feelings on the subject, and all pronounced at some length. As the young and handsome guy listened, I could  see his eyes getting hard and angry. At last, he interrupted a speaker.

"If there's one thing I can't stand, it's to see a woman paying for her own drink."

Some day, I should like to have a similar discussion with 25 corporation executives.


The corporation exists for no moral purpose at all. It doesn't exist to make people's lives better. It may do so by accident. But that's not its purpose. It doesn't exist to create jobs. Quite the contrary. The fewer the jobs it has, the better for its profit margin. It doesn't exist to maintain law and order. Indeed, the world's biggest killers and thieves are corporations. And it's all done not even for their countries - but for the corporation.

At the height of the British Empire,  as British corporations looted the farmlands of India, the gold of South Africa, the minerals of the rest of Africa, British workers lived in vile conditions. In the Scottish industrial cities of 1900, it was common for fifty people to share one bathroom, and for drinking water for hundreds to be available only at faucets on the streets. Even in London, it was common at that time for the homes of the poor to have no bathroom at all. Many places in London, up to the 1950s at least, had outhouses. Others just used whatever open space there was in the filth of the cities.

Corporations subjected China to a century of robbery, drug addiction and civil wars. The Canadian  government in the late nineteenth century deliberately starved thousands of native people to death in order the make railway execs and land sales agents happy.

I have pictures of unspeakably vile living conditions that were common in Canada. Readers might also be surprised by conditions in Canada ,(using Montreal as an example), in Terry Copp, The Anatomy of Poverty.

In the US, and it's coming here, private companies operate prisons (at very high cost). They bribe judges to deliver longer sentences, spend virtually nothing on rehabilitation,and often operate the prisons as compulsory factories at extremely low wages. Harper  has expressed interest.

Similarly, private corporation operate government-subsidized private schools that are in no way superior to the public schools they replace - except that they cost parents more money, thereby forcing the majority of children to remain in public schools which have been dstroyed by withdrawal of funds in order to subsidize the schools for richer kids.

And American education in general, has now dropped into the world's educational toilet.

Even the seemingly generous offer of business groups to establish and operate an entrepreneur programme in the schools is not the generous one it appears to be.

There is no possibility that entrepreneurship offers a future for most children. The proportion of entrepreneurs in our society has been declining for well over a century. It's declining even faster now as big and wealthy entrepreneurs (Walmart, Target, grocery and pharmacy chains, etc.) swallow up the small ones.

A compulsory, 13 year programme to teach entrepreneurship makes no sense at all - unless----unless these businessmen aren't doing it for the children at all, but for themselves...unless the real purpose of this programme is to indoctrinate childen into an almost religious belief that private ownershhip is always good and public ownership always bad.

That, certainly, is the message of Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, C.D.Howe Institute and a swarm of similar insects financed by wealthy individual and large corporations. This isn't being done for the children. It's being done for the benefit of the businessmen who set up this scam.

And I would be very surprised if the scheme was not begun farther up the food chain by very big business in this province.

Capitalism is entirely self-seeking, greedy, and indifferent to the needs of others. And that is what is called a lack of morality.

But there's a reason for morality. I'm not going to preach about this. I'm not going to suggest that morality comes from churches. (In fact, damn little comes out of churches these days.)

But us humans need a code of standards, of values, of morals to live by. Without that, no society can survive. We've seen it so many times. The self-serving, the greed, the indifference to the needs of others have been destroying societies and civilizations for millenia.

The western world imposed the immorality of its capitalism on Asia and Africa and Central America for centuries. The record of it was so terrible that Britain, for one, destroyed tons of government accounts of imperial brutalities and savageries as it got chased out of its empire about 1950.

Societies have been so damaged that in most of Africa, for example, no government by anybody is possible. (It takes people a long, long time to recover from the trauma of conquest and impoverization by a completely alien society.)

And we face decades of unending war, unending and often undeclared and unreported by our servile press.

Corporations have no standards for their behaviour toward others. They exist only for themselves, only to make profit, nothing else. And the people who own them can build chapels across New Brunswick and name all of them for themselves - and they will still have no standards, no values and no morals.

There are churches who seem to believe that morality is all about oneself, about keeping oneself pure so that one can go to heaven and spend eternity clapping hands for Jesus and shouting Halleluya for eternity. (on a personal note, I think I would find that pretty boring after the first million years or so.)

But that's not what morality is all about. It's not about us. It's about others. It's about how we treat others, how we care for them. And it's directly opposite to the big business creed of thinking only of profit and self-interest with no concern whatever for others.

Think of it as religious or think of it as common sense. The essential point is that a sense of moral values is the glue that holds a society together. And there is no sense of moral values in capitalism. That's why capitalism will work only if it is subject to control by us to make sure it stays within our moral values.

The Liberals and the Conservatives are a dead loss for this purpose. Both have long since become agents of big business. We have to turn to parties that are not owned by big business.

We also have to turn to ourselves to think through what our moral values are. And central to that is not whether we are pure or good or virtuous or something equally boring. We are not alone. We are part of a society. We need to think of things in terms of how we feel other people should be treated. And what we decide will also decide how long our society - and we - will survive.

An election is not about programmes or neat ideas. Essentially, an election is about our sense of morality. We need to think and to talk about that well before election day.
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As a footnote, I have always found it strange that a family should build a church, then name it after itself. It's a bit, well, self-centred, don't you think? Offhand, it's very hard to think of another church named after its builder. I mean, if you're moral, you think of others in society. You think of honouring others who have done great things, not just yourself.

Or, one could get cutesie as so many of our churches do with their billboards. For example, one could rename the Irving chapel as The Wee Kirk in the Dingle by the Dell: courtesy of the Philanthropic Irvngs.


 

Dec. 5:

For many years now, I've been following a sort of blog called Information Clearing House. It's almost a one-man operation which must require intense work as it scans the world press for stories that don't make the news in a tightly-controlled US.  But, suddenly, it's disappeared.

That's happened before. Computer experts in the various domestic spying organizations have disabled his computer for days at a time. Though he's never broken a law, police routinely visit him to scare him out of business. Now, his blog has simply disappeared for close to a week.

There's no point in checking out the public press for some explanation. It plays from police state rules.

The Guardian in Britain, arguably the best newspaper in the English speaking world - and perhaps the best in all the world - is under severe pressure from the British government. It's so angry at The Guardian for printing the story about how Britain, Canada, the US, Australia and New Zealand have been spying on the rest of the world, it has been harrassing editorial staff and threatening criminal charges of aiding terrorism.

Yes, it's come to that. Telling the truth in Britain, that breeding place of democracy, makes you a terrorist.

I don't think New Brunswickers appreciate that we live in place with a free and honest press.
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Fortunately, a reader of this blog, who researches stories that don't made the mainstream press has sent me some stories.

In the US, for example, 40% of all employed Americans make less than $20,000 a year.

Almost 50 million Americans live in poverty. (That seems a generous figure. $20,000 a year sounds poverty level to me, and if 40% are are living at that or less, then that would be something more like 150 million Americans.)

But fear not, if many are poor, we still have 1% who have more wealth that all the rest combined.

And in the face of this, he US government (which is owned by the 1%) is cutting the budget for food stamps.

And, just in case the 99% get greedy and want more, US police forces have militarized (much like our "paramilitaries") to deal with the enemy within.
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Meanwhile, Phillip Morris (tobacco) is suing the Australian government for billions. It charges that the Australian government ran a campaign to reduce teenage smoking. And that's bad because Phillip Morris sales went down. So they're suing for billions.

That right to sue, incidentally, is a feature written in to trade agreements almost as a general rule. The trade agreements are commonly designed by company lawyers; and they make it possible for foreign companies in the deal to ignore Canadian law, and even to sue even when a law is made necessary.

For example, Harper's trade deal with Europe allows the ignoring of Candian laws on pollution (even on those that are left after Harper has destroyed most of them.) That same will be true of the terms of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Typically, such deals are framed on the basis that a government which in any way interferes with corporate profit can be sued in secret courts largely controlled by coporations. (This is for real.) And all the workings of these courts and their decisions will be kept secret.

This is the sort of deal we used to force on third-world countries from 1945 on. Now, in the eyes of the great corporations, we are all third-world countries.

Such agreements could, for example, put Canada in a position to allow its fresh water to be polluted - or even to be taken in such quantities that not nearly enough would be left for us. (One country which has already given indication it would like to do that is the US which faces severe water problems.)

Corporations were never organizations that felt any obligation to us common people. Now, they have no obligation to any country, either. They have no nationality, no society they belong to, nothing they owe obedience, respect, or allegiance to. Trade deals have liberated the corporation.

Obviously, this will eventually destroy not just countries, but also the corporations that feed on them. Common sense tells us that. But common sense is not often found in corporate head offices. Greed and the arrogance of power makes them short-sighted and - no exaggeration - stupid and destructive.

In Canada, we have the most deadly combination. We have corporations that are greedy and short-sighted combined with a prime minister who shares their views exactly.

The premiers are bad enough. They are amoral puppets. But Harper is more than that. He actually thinks like a corporate executive.

But none of this appears in the TandT.
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There's nothing much in the TandT. There's a front page story that policing protests will cost 4.3 million this year.

Way to dig for the truth all you news hounds. Now,.....

Could we also have a story some day about how much the Irvings of this world cost us? How much money a year do we give them? The story about Robert Irving sneaked out  (no thanks to the TandT), as did the story of fake professor (also no thanks to the TandT).

Now, how much do all our governments give away (of our money) to just that one family. How much to they make?  How much taxes do they pay? (After all, what they don't pay is our business, because we have to pay it - a point that Norbert never mentions when he rants about the provincial debt.)

How much of the wealth of New Brunswick does that one family hold?

You know, if that much money were being absorbed by the cost of the unemployed and the poor, we'd sure hear about from the Irving press. Well, the Irving press surely has the inside track on this story. How much do the Irvings cost this province every year?
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The big, local story is that the provincial Liberals are leading in polls. You remember the provincial Liberals. There the ones we were so mad at that we voted them out to bring in the Conservatives. Now, we're mad at the Conservatives, so in true, New Brunswick fashion, we'll show them. We'll vote in the Liberals that we voted out....etc.

Not that the corporations give a damn. They own both of them.

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On the editorial page, Alec Bruce is interesting on Quebec's approach to education. I don't know much about it because by the time it was introduced I was long out of the public schools. But it seems worth examining, particularly if one remembers that the Catholic (mostly French) schools of Quebec were probably the worst in North America only forty years ago - and even later.)

Norbert fusses about the deficit. As usual, And, as usual, he never mentions the corporate world as a possible cause. 

And, as always, his closing quotation makes no sense at all. He quotes Jane Jacobs (yes, I know who she was and how eminent) as she says "...poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes."

Bright scholar, Jane, but she had a terrible habit of making sweeping statements about things she really didn't know. Poverty has no causes? In fact, poverty is quite deliberately imposed on most of the world in places like Central America, Africa, and Asia so corporations can make money out of cheap labour. It was deliberately imposed on the US by allowing corporations to move their work and their jobs  out of the country.

The op ed page is for opinion. Alas the only opinion Rod Allen has is that he's funny. This time, he had so much wit to burn, that he was half way through his column before he got to the subject of it.

Beth Lyons has a real, opinion column; and it's well done.

 

Dec. 4: Wow! Yea! O joy O rapture unforeseen...

The TandT printed my letter  on the project to teach enterpreneurship in the schools.

Now, for those who would claim I am opposed to entrepreneurhip or to teaching it, that is not what I said at all. What I am opposed to is

1. A special interest group coming into the schools to teach anything. I think that students should be taught was communism is. But I don't think it should be a programme designed and taught by the Communist Party of Canada.

2. A special interest group has a stake in its subject. It cannot be impartial. It will be an indoctrination rather than a teaching group. We had a hint of that when the premier made his puerile statements that entrepreneurs make happier communities and happier families.

 Sure. And they're also better in  bed.

3. To run such a programme for the full school life of 13 years really means that this can only be indoctrination, not learning of any sort. (And they haven't even given us the names of the people who are behind this.)

4. Finally,  to devote so much school time to a career which has only limited opportunities - and those declining - is absurd.

But my letter made it. I'm so excited.

There's also  an excellent letter by David Coon of the Green Party.
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Norbert has an exceptionally  wacky and ranting column. He begins by accusing liberals and left-wingers  ( whatever he may mean by those) of just calling their opponents names. Then he writes a column in which he just calls them names.

And the man doesn't have a clue what he's talking about.

1. He is writing an attack on those who think everyone should get equal pay. What is he babbling about? I've never even met a person who says everybody should get equal pay.
2. He writes a paragraph about how the rich have higher IQs. I know of no evidence that is true. Does he have any? Would he, perhaps, write a list of the IQ of each member of the Irving family?
3. Then he says the argument about IQs is silly. I agree. So why did he waste a whole paragraph on it?
4. Then he has high praise for the economic policies of Margaret Thatcher. Apparently, he hasn't noticed that those policies have created an economic crisis and monstrous poverty in Britain. It has also opened up the banking system to criminal abuse by the bankers. And they have taken full advantage of it to copy the American banking crisis in Britain.

In effect, Norbert is using ignorance (and vague ignorance at that) to refute an argument that nobody has made in the first place.

Despite Norbert's claim, nobody has suggested throwing money at the poor - though Norbert has often enough spoken in favour of throwing money at the rich. (like giving a hockey team owner some 80,000 a year to......to what?)

He says the rich need an incentive. Okay. the senior Irving makes more money in five seconds of sipping a cup of coffee than a single mother makes at a whole day of hard work for Walmart at minimum wage. Are there any limits, Norbert, to the incentive?

He opens by saying "Here's something on the pointlessness of being a slave to ideology." Then he shows us how he is a slave to ideology, and a hopelessly ignorant one at that.

Invested health keeps the economy healthy? You  twit. The US and Canada have never had so much invested wealth at they do today. Do you seriously call our economies healthy? Are you so blind as all that?

Norbert obviously blames leftists for all this - though there is no reason to believe he knows what a leftist is. That makes his closing quotation bizarre.

"As long as your ideology identifies the main source of the world's ills as a definable group, it opens the world up to genocide."

Norbert ---- are you so thick as not to realize that that is just what you have done - to identify the main source of the world's ills as a definable group?

To be very serious Norbert, I could not give this wildly illogical column a passing grade for even a freshman class. Indeed, it is so ill-informed and ranting, that I don't think I could have accepted it at all.
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With more respect, much more, I also disagree with Alec Bruce's "Our education system has lost its way".

This deals with the poor scores by Canadian students in world wide testing. (Actually, Canada's scores are, in general, at the upper levels. They are far superior, for example, to American schools which are now in the world basement - partly because of the deep poverty in much of the US, partly because of racism, and partly because of interference by the rich in the schools - rather like our case of "entrepreneurs" interfering in our schools.

It's a subject on which I feel strongly because my first year of school, I was in a class with  the normal range of human intelligence. But not one finished high school. Later, I would be in a class with Jewish kids, again with the normal range of  human intelligence. But almost all of them went to university. Still later, I tuaght classes in China. Again, with  the normal range of human intelligence. But the quality of work was higher than I had known among my Canadian students.

It's not just the schools that do the teaching. It's also parents who do (or don't). Kids in my grade one class were raised to think of finishing grade 9 as a triumph. The greatest ambition was a 'steady' job.

My Jewish friends were brought up to think of going to university as normal and, commonly, the see the PhD as normal, too. Their parents and communities and synagogues also taught my Jewish friends to take a lively interest in intellectual life -to discuss, to learn, to experience. (That was quite a contrast to my Christian church.) I had the same experience later in working for the YMCA and then for the YMHA.

My Chinese students were spurred on by a strong sense of family, and the duty to do well for the family.

And in New Brunswick? Well, there is no intellectual life. The newspapers are trivial. Radio is mostly trivial. Public discussion doesn't exist. Churches? Their limit is pancake breakfasts and cute slogans on their billboards.

I've taught in Canada, The Netherlands, and China. I've seen no great difference in the teachers or the educaton systems. But, oh, there are  huge  differences in the societies and the people. If we want to improve our schools, we need to start with ourselves. (It would also help to keep outside groups and billionaires well away from our schools.)

You wonder why our children aren't intellectually more active? Take a look at the op ed page of the TandT almost any day - especially today.
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There's really no point in reading anything in today's paper- though there have been things an intelligent editor would have noted. (You think our schools are in trouble? Take a look at our newspapers. A public that buys newspapers like that is a public that produces children who will not do as well as they should in school.)

One item of interest that didn't make the TandT is that the Bank of Montreal is laying off 1,000 people.

In the past year, the bank made a record profit of 4.2 billion.

Yessirree, Norbert. It just shows that if you let the rich keep their wealth, they will use it to benefit.....well......themselves.  To be fair, though, they also provide jobs for column writers who kiss the right rear ends.

Romeo Dallaire, now a senator had a car accident yesterday. It seem to be h ave been due to extreme stress. Rwanda was a shattering experience for him; and yesterday he was coping with the news that three Afghanistan veterans had recently committed suicide.

Funny how the papers don't say much about that. What happens to soldiers who suffer mental illness from their experience of war? How many suffer? What do we do about it? In the US, at least they get news reports - and t he figures there for suicide and mental illness are stunning. That's something we might talk about next somebody suggests we join somebody else's war.

What was Afghanistan about? Even Americans don't know. And it's their war.

Finally, I had a note yesterday that some 85 million bees were found on just one Ontario farm - dead.
They're dying all over the world in billions to such a degree that farming is being devastated for lack of pollination. In some countries, they they have to do the enormous job of pollinating plants by hand just to get enought to survive.

What's killing the bees is a pesticide containing neonicotinoids. produced by Bayer. The European Union has banned it for two years. Bayer, being public-spirited and all, is suing the government for cutting into its business.

The Harper government, predictably, has done nothing whatever.

There's a price for doing nothing. One hell of a price.

 

Dec. 3: Fascinating news story on p. A9....

Remember the story of how someone, presumably employed at Moncton City Hall, leaked the story that council has been paying Robert Irving to keep his hockey team in Moncton rather than take it to some big market metropolis like, say, Sussex or Berry Mills?

Now, I don't offhand know of a law which makes it illegal to pass on information about public business to the public who vote for the council and are, therefore, entitled to know what it is doing. But the mayor threatened to call for a police investigation. And he's done it.

It seems he has decided that the person who leaked the information was in violation of public trust. But, gee whiz, Mr. Mayor, if council refuses to tell us when it is handing out our money to rich people, isn't that a violation of public trust?

The news story is about the opinion of Professor Geoff Martin of Mount Allison. He doesn't think much will happen; and he concludes, "Calling the police may be just a symbolic activity for council to show they are displeased with what happened."

Really. So council is not just handing our money by the bushel to a wealthy man. It is also wasting in an ineffective investigation - just to show it's all in a tizzy.....   This is not something council is doing for us. It's something council is doing for itself. And it's doing it because somebody told the truth about what council was doing to us members of the public.

Way to defend the citizens who voted for you, council.

Now, just so we all remember who to thank for this on council Election Day, would  the TandT be good enough to give us a list of who voted to make Mr. Robert Irving more secure in getting his supply of his daily bread? And who voted against it?

And wouldn't it be nice - for the next election - if the Irving press gave us some information about what these people stand for?

The same could be said for election of school  board members. These, too, seem mostly a rare collection of nobodies with minimal understanding of education. I am astonished that any school board would ever allow an outside special interest group to come into the schools and impose a programme on the students - as has just happened here. It's rather like inviting convicted pedophiles to teach classes on sex education.

But that all takes us to  the basic problem of New Brunswick politics, doesn't it?
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Well, one of the two, basic problems of New Brunswick politics. One problem is the ownership of the Liberals, the Conservatives and, I suspect, many councillors and school board members by big and greedy money (oops,  sorry -  philanthropists).

The other, and the first one that has to be tackled is the general ignorance of what is going on, what the issues are, what they mean, and how they can be dealt with.

That ignorance happens because most of the news of this province comes from a press dominated by liars, propagandists, big money and....oh...you know....editors who couldn't find their own bellybuttons using both hands.

And they can get away with it because this is a province in which people are too scared to exercise their basic right to discuss public affairs in public.

Forget the programmes, the policies, the pipelines, the events centre. Until this province deals with those two basic problems, it's going nowhere. The culture of ripping the public off is so rich here that if we turned out to be awash in shale gas with no greenhouse gas emissions and so pure you could grow flowers in it and feed it to your children, we'd still end up poor.

The problems of New Brunswick lie in traditions of placidity, of subservience and of fear. Those traditions have to be broken. And  you don't have much time.
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The Liberals and Conservatives will begin their campaigns seriously close to the election date. It already appears, though, that the Liberals have decided on their strategy - to let the Conservatives lose. It makes sense. That's a common strategy in this province. Indeed, that's  how Mr. Alward won. And that's why things never change.

That's a strategy that won't work for the alternate parties. Nor will it work for them to start campaigning at the same time as the  others. They have to change the way New Brunswickers think. You can't to that in a few months.

Nor can they expect fair treatment from the Irving press. They have to get out and rally people; and they have to start yesterday.

And they shouldn't waste their time at first discussing (yes, and getting everybody else to discuss) neat ideas like building a pipeline or building a new hockey rink. No, because they have to begin by encouraging people to rethink what politics is for, what it's all about.

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At the beginning, it's not about hockey rinks or pipelines. It's about the fundamental principles we live by, our values. Without those, all politics can be about is a fight in the jungle - and the  most vicious and deceitful and greedy always win those.

Before I would think of voting for a politician, I would want to know what his values are. How are we connected to each other? Are we connected? If we are, what is essential to maintain that connection. What do we owe each other? What do others owe us?

That's sort of like what people talk about in church ---except there's a point to it.

It's from that you build your programmes. But it takes time and it takes commitment and it takes frequency.

And it has to start soon. New Brunswick is ruled by a combination of greed, lack of any principle and, to a considerable degree lack of brains. And that's a formula that can only lead to destruction.

Dec.2: We'll start on light note.........

Because we're going to need all the light notes we can get today.

Start with Norbert. He is just wetting his pants over the CBC losing hockey night in Canada. He, who has the journalism standards of a fignewton, has the nerve (no, the ignorance) to criticize the CBC for not having high standards of journalism.

He praises the BBC for its high standards. Actually, I often watch BBC news - and I doubt very much whether Norbert does. If he did, he would know  about recent scandals over poor journalism which have rocked it.

Well, it's still a nice bit of light relief to read somcthing like this by the village idiot.
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There is no news, nothing in the whole, damn paper. Well, there is a story on the front page about the new, Moncton city plan. Alas! the story tells us nothing about it.

Like everything in New Brunswick, though, such plans always seem to be based around the needs of business. We even have an economic leadership  council chaired by Robert Irving. What a thrill!

And all of this depends on giving business leaders full  freedom, no restraint, no limitations. After all, if if makes money for them, we all benefit.

Actually, no. that's not true at all.

There has only been  one period in Canadian history when (almost) all Canadians benefitted from economic good times. That period was from the beginning of World War Two  to the late 60s or early 70s. And it wasn't business that did it.

In the early part of that period, prosperity began when severe restraints were placed on business. There were limits to profits.  There were social obligations. There was protection for consumers.
That continued after 1945 with vastly improved access to education, to health, to social services.

Then big business got its old self back together, bought government, threw off the restraints, went wild on tax cuts for itself, and began the attack that still goes on against those things that made us more equal - things like health care and education.

Today, The Atlantic Institute of Market Studies carries on the attack against public education, giving big business a chance to slip into control of such matters as evaluation, and that half-wit programme on entrepreneurship which has been adopted by a French board. It also openly interferes with health and the civil service.

It's far worse, of course, in the US where big business has driven public education to the very bottom level in the whole, developed world. And where health is just a wish for millions.

The shared prosperity of that period was not built by big business. It was built by a highly skilled civil service and by our parents who had the wit to elect politicians that would serve them.
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But big business has worked its way back in so that it now has a a free hand. The result is the stunning drop in shared prosperity we have seen in the western world. That result is that when banking houses and other major concerns in the US went bankrupt due to their own criminality and greed, those who suffered because of what they had done also had to pay them back their losses so that bankers could pay each other multi-million dollar bonusses for the greed and imcompetence..  

That's going to happen again; and it's probably not far off.

It has also meant endless wars as economic bosses try to establish themselves as rulers of all the world.  Think of all the wars since 1945. How many were caused by foreign countries invading the US? Canada? Britain? France?____________________________________________

Why do you think  the US maintains a huge fleet in the Pacific? Land bases in Japan and Australia and North Korea? What is the point  of the US keeping troops in Afghanistan? Why is it so crucial to come to term with Iran? Why this extremely dangerous conflict over some tiny Islands off the coast of Japan?
Because within a decade China will have the biggest economy in the world. That would be a huge market lost to American business. And, before that, it can quite possibly mean the destruction of the the American dollar. China can do that almost at will, now.
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And what are Canadians doing now? They're dithering over a choice between Harper and Justin.  Harper is the cause of economic and social disaster that hangs over us. His refusal to deal with climate change, his abandonment of environmental regulations, his invitation to the world to come and take our resources as quickly as possible and any way they like will be so costly and terrible that one might be forgiven for wondering about his mental condition.  (seriously)

And Justin is a figure made up of chicken fluff and wires.

Within New Brunswick,  we have the Provincial Liberals and Conservatives, both of them homely Barbie dolls for Mr. Irving.

In recent history, people in a position like ours have turned to fascism.  But that won't work. We're already there.

We have only two other parties to speak of - the NDP and the Greens. I have reservations about both. But either would be superior to the Liberals and the Conservatives.

What? You  think the Irvings of this world would be better at running things? Get real. The Irvings of this world are the ones who have created this crisis.

And frankly, we don't have much time. Another term with Harper would mean the end of Canada. I have seen no evidence that Justin is better.

In New Brunswick, a term for either   Conservatives or Liberals, and it's game over.

Big business has to learn - now - that capitalism is  defined by risk, not by government favours, that it works well, like most institutions, only when it is regulated.

And, oh, I do wish New Brunswickers would learn that this is THEIR province, that in a  democracy we all have the same rights and, in a democracy, the government is ours. I suggest that Robert Irving stay home, and let the people of Moncton and Riverview decide how they want to develop and what they want to develop.

And, oh, I wish the people of t his city would  develop the courage to speak publicly about the political system that is theirs. Nobody else's. This is our city, our future, our children's futures. We decide by public discussion what will happen to our lives.
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Alec Bruce writes a nice piece of subtle humour - something he always does well. I always fear, though, that in this city there are many who miss the humour. To get a laugh in Moncton, you have to do something really funny - like tripping and falling into a pit of rattlesnakes.

I always enjoy Steve Malloy's touch on ordinary things. This time he talks about people smoking at the Santa Claus parade - though I also think he missed a good topic. Have you seen the videos on youtube of people duking it out in the fight for cheap items on Black Friday at Walmart stores?

Hey! that's what Christianity is all about.
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Dec. 1: It gets worse...

A search of google using "executives psychopathic " will turn out lots and lots of fascinating results.  The percentage of psychopaths in executive offices is ten times the ratio that it is for the general population.

And these studies do not come from the pages of scandal mags. Though some are written in popular form, all are based on many years of serious study by scholars.

What are the characteristics of a psychopath?  He or she is characterized by glibness, manipulation, callousness, lack of emotion, irresponsibility, impulsiveness, and aggression. (Why do I see a picture of Stephen Harper in my mind?)

These are the people the Norbert Cunningham's of this world think are ideally suited to govern a society. Glib, manipulative, callous, emotionless, irresponsible, impulsive, and aggressive. These are the people who feel they are ideally equipped to give orders to the politicians we elect, to control our major source of news, to interfere with health care - and now to introduce a compulsory school programme on entrepreneurship. (Bet they won't mention anything about psychopathy in it.)

There are the people who say their word is to be trusted when they assure us that shale gas is perfectly safe. These are the people who are responsible for centuries of slaughter, torture, impoverishment in colonies all over the world.

And they're still at it in Haiti, in Guatemala, in Congo, in Central African Republic. These are the ones who murdered millions, mostly civilians, in Vietnam, Guatemala, Iraq just in recent years. These are the ones who hold Haiti in a state of filth, disease, poverty and starvation.  And they will just as happily do it with us.

Now,  through their influence in government, they have armies of spies listening in on our phone calls, digging out our hospital records----and that information goes not just to government and police, but also to the psychopaths.

Well, that's what happens in world run by manipulative, callous, emotionless, irresponsible and aggressive people. (They make great executives for t he company, though.)

In all of this they are very similar to the dukes and earls and counts of another age and, in that similarity, they are self-destructive. One of the first victims of this self destructiveness is the United States.

The American debt, all of it borrowed from other countries to feed the stunning corruption of the Defence and foreign aid businesses is so great it can never be paid. Indeed, the American dollar will very soon collapse, creating a level of poverty the US has never seen before.

And even as it collapses the psychopaths borrow more to spend more on other psychopaths, and cut basic supplies like food to the growing numbers of poor.

That's why we're going to see growing number of "paramilitaries" in camouflage with military rifles. They're to keep us in line.

It's not that all the money in the US and Canada (and Europe) has disappeared. Goodness, no. It still exists. But it's tucked safely away, sometimes in foreign currencies, just to be sure. Over half the wealth of our country has gone from us to them.

It's even worse in the US where average pay increases for the rich now amount to over 30% a year for the very rich, but less than 1% for the poor.

Callousness, lack of emotion, irresponsibility....... And, like that same sense of entitlement of the old, European aristocracy, it destroys itself - and us with it.



Of course, not all big execs are psychos. Some are crashingly stupid. That can be particularly  true of the sons of the very rich.

Perhaps the best example is a young man born to a very, very rich daddy whose family had made its fortune largely out of selected government jobs, and really, really good political connections.

The young man was not a successful student. Through privately educated at great expense, he did poorly in university, so poorly his grades were far too low for him to get into the MBA programme at an elite school.

But, with Daddy's help, he got in, anyway. And, amazingly, he actually got a degree. That was particularly amazing since he had spent most of his school years on alcohol and drugs.

Then a war and a draught came. But it was all fixed. Daddy got him a spot in the National Guard so he was in no danger of being sent overseas. He walked out on the National Guard when it interfered excessively with his booze and drugs. But nothing happened.

By then, he was thirty, and Daddy thought it was time for his first job - president of an oil exploration company in Texas, funded by some of Daddy's very rich friends. But it went broke.

He was able, illegally, to sell his stocks before word got out he was broke. But Daddy covered for that, too.

Then, a company offered him a top job. And he would not have to do anything at all. The company was building a hugely expensive stadium, and had to demolish a large, residential area to do it. It also had to raise gifts from the government in order to pay for the job. The young man, with his daddy's connections, was perfect. So he did nothing in an office for several years while collecting millions of dollars in pay. Then several things happened.

He found Jesus, gave up drugs and booze and so became a better man, though in no sense a more intelligent one. And he decided to run for governor.

Now, here was a man proven to have no brains, no significant success at anything. What on earth made him think he could run for governor?

Well, he was rich. Like the aristocracy of old, he didn't need brains or ability. He was entitled.

So he became a governor, receiving, while in office, millions of dollars as gifts from psychopaths he had helped.

Then he became President of the United States. Of course, a man with brains, Dick Cheney, who was Vice-President made all the decisions. He had to; George Bush Jr. was far the most stupid man ever to occupy the White House.

But like the idiot sons of kings and Lords, he was entitled. It still happens.

There's a pattern here that runs back to the Olympics and even before. It's a very human thing. Some people are born into positions in which they believe they are superior to others, who set themselves above the common herd, and who assume power over life and death.

They often half psychopathic traits which make them effective thugs either as warrior lords or as business executives. They are effective rulers - but only inasmuch as immediately benefits them. In the longer run, they are short-sighted and destructive of themselves and others.

They also hold democracy in contempt. The nerve of those common people thinking they have equal rights with their masters....

Now, with all that in mind, look around at the governments and the business leaders of New Brunswick.