Anticipating Schadenfreude from Vancouver Olympiad

Well, I have to say that with every rescue truckload of snow they have to drag onto one of the Vancouver Olympic sites, the tiny cockles of my mine heart go up a few degrees. Today, as the CBC and other dog-tails of the Canadian media are wildly wagging about, is day one of the massive bread-and-circuses operation that Gordie Campbell and his lightweights have been blustering about through most of their regrettable tenure as BC's government.

If I knew voodoo or other magical arts and could bring down a big wet heat wave from Whistler to the mountains of North Vancouver, I would do so. But there is an added glimmer of hope for we who would delight in the Olympics turning into a meteorological fiasco. The final carrier of the flame that has been traipsed literally all around Canada, is top secret. But word on the street has it that Wayne Gretzky got fingered (hey, I was fingering him long before this! Read here, here and here)for the endgame of that happy torch tradition that goes back to and still echoes Hitler's Olympiad.
Flash back to Turin in 2006 when the not-so-Great-One "managed" (no one ever explained much about what that management entailed) the Canadian Men's Hockey Team and they finished a dismal 7th. Remember ? - that was when the Whiner abandoned the team in the dying seconds of loss to Russia, wiping tears from his baby blues, a phony replay of the now immortalized weeping when he, quite voluntarily, deserted the Edmonton Oilers for fatter paychecks south of the border.

Or, more recently than that, note that in their first post-Gretzkian season the Phoenix Coyotes are actually winning again! You take my drift, eh? Have that arrogant, over-rated twit carry the torch to the lighting of the Olympic flame tonight and the whole dog-dumb spectacle that will inconvenience Vancouverites for the next several weeks, may be jinxed and flop as badly as his other recent sports involvements.

For me, avid antagonist of the Vancouver Olympics and of Gretzky, all that would be needed for the perfect storm at tonight's foolishness is to have Celine Dion sing a tribute to Princess Diana.

Margaret Roberta Howatt Dale - 1922-1990

She was my mother. She was born in the village of Cape Traverse, Prince Edward Island, terminus for the mail "ice-boats" that plied the Northumberland Strait before ferry service and long before the fixed link bridge crossing. She grew up mainly in Summerside, became a teacher in a one-room school and then went to work in the post office. During World War II, a young Czech trainee, Bernard Dale, from the nearby air force base, kept buying stamps from her and eventually, they married. Thence my brother, Peter, my sister, Ari and lastly, me.

As my father was an military officer, we moved about, first to Ottawa in 1949 and then to the Montreal area, where my mother resumed teaching at the Preville School in 1959. I was among the pupils in her first incoming Grade 6, an intriguing experience for both of us. She continued her school career until a UN job took my father to Nigeria in the midst of that nation's civil war in the mid sixties. With my father she returned to Prince Edward Island in 1968 and lived there until 1987 when they both moved to Victoria.

Her passion was always animals with an enormous Newfoundland named Angus her deep love until his passing from which, I think, she never fully recovered. Among her things I would later find a little poem scrawled on a note pad:



To Angus

"My Friend is dead.
At peace? Gone to rest?
No
He is dead.
God is there a place
where good dogs go?
I don't know many things
He sleeps in my heart, I loved him so

I know that he was alone when he died
The lilacs had just been born
Did they mourn my dead friend?
I loved him so."




In late 1989 she was diagnosed with lung cancer and died this date (January 21) in 1990. Countless gifts she left us not least of which, a quite brief journal she began to keep December 16, 1989. In it she dutifully recorded the coming and going of pains and medications but also wrote of the things and people she loved, the dreams she had, whether realized or not, and of what, in what turned out to be her final days brought comfort - old pictures, the sound of rain on the roof, and...

Dec. 24, Sunday:

"Had some rather special experience this A.M. during my slumber (6-7:30) I needed this inspiration badly because I was starting the day with the same concerns as yesterday. The message was, 'live today to its best, don't worry about tomorrow... According to the speaker the message is one of Jesus. I had never heard that one before..."

Later she would muse, without, it seemed, huge regret, that she once wanted to write a "great novel...now, look at this!" So her journal,more valued on my shelf than any other book, the picture here of her with me as a baby, and a vaster collage of memories she gifted me with, today define my horizons. I listen to some favourite music of hers, Strauss waltzes, and reflect: whatever is best in me, Ma, you've put there.

Adopting Haiti ~ An Immodest Proposal

Amidst innumerable stories of efforts to do something for Haitians in the aftermath of their latest enormous catastrophe, there have been many themed about adoption. Completing an adoption from the country is notoriously difficult, as perhaps it should be when prospective parents consider transplanting a child into a culturally and, often, racially distinct setting, one that may permanently estrange the kid from her origins. The spate of celebrities toting their little subalterns about as tokens of their generosity and global consciousness only sharpens the doubts within and outside of third world countries regarding such permanent transplants. Add to this, the severe governance defects that Haiti has suffered almost since its inception, and one is sure to have questionable responsiveness on adoption. Thus one readily finds laments about multi-year processing difficulties with Haiti's Institut du Bien-Etre Social et de Recherches, or IBESR. Woeful tales abounded before last week's quake, from would-be parents and harsh frontline workers who cared for Haitian orphans.

The earthquake can be variously seen as likely to exacerbate delays, or just possibly, awaken Haitian social service bureaucracies now ever-more inundated by needful millions, to the necessity of fast-tracking adoption, getting the suddenly tenfold newly orphaned and those already queued for departure, out of horrific conditions that will no doubt persist for a long time. But the latter is far from a strong bet. To repeat, critics will say, with some legitimacy, that even in (perhaps especially in) the aftermath of a disaster that has unquestionably killed tens of thousands of biological parents, rushing little kids out of Haiti risks a host of abuses including fraudulent trafficking and the accidental destruction of already aggrieved Haitian families.

Well, as you might expect, the Grouse has his own immodest proposal that would circumvent the difficulties and much more, take direct aim at the massive human tragedy that has and continues to be Haiti. By way of entree, let me remind you of an attempt back in 1974 initiated by the late NDP MP, Max Saltsman, for Canada to annex the Turks and Caicos islands. The reasoning was far from altruistic: it would, Saltsman argued, give snowbirds a place to spend away without draining the Canadian economy. the idea simmered away for many years: in 1988 the islands made overtures to the Canadian government to consider growing a relationship that just might culminate in confederation. Nothing came of that nor of the efforts of Canadian Alliance MP Peter Goldring in 2004 on much the same idea. Nonetheless, the thought of flying back and forth unrestricted to such an ostensible island paradise was, Goldring argued supported by 100% of Canadians.

Paradise, Haiti is not. But after more than 200 years of corrupt kleptocracy, something more than a marginal adjustment to its governance seems in order. Wait, wait! Before I stand accused of being a patronizing, neo-colonialistic, great white father, I must hasten to say that while I have not - yet - worked out the precise means by which the two sovereign nations of Canada and Haiti would establish an adoptive bond, for sure it would have based on unprecedented bilateral negotiation with ample opt-out clauses. Recalling that in the unrequited relationship with the Turks and Caicos, the operative and unacceptable verb was "annex". I think "adopt" is more a-propos. For a host of reasons, now ever so much worsened by natural disaster, Haiti has just not been able to muster stable, democratic statehood. An extended period - say 25 years - of membership in our Canadian condominium, would allow for sufficient incubation and restoration that the great dreams of Haiti's heroic founders, can be resurrected.

Far-fetched? Undoubtedly, but it is not the first time that we've confederated with a geographically and culturally distant island, and at least the Haitians, unlike the Newfoundlanders of 1949, speak one of our official languages! Indeed, adopting Haiti would give our ever-reluctant confederated marriage partners in Quebec greater demographic comfort in terms of parity between native speaking Francophones and Anglophones. It would remove travel barriers between the home island and the largest diaspora of Haitians, Montreal. Our vice-regal leader and military Commander-in-Chief just happens to Haitian, a fact that would surely facilitate the arrangement and ease the transition.

Canada could give back to Haiti gifts that her people have conferred on the world, not least of which was the since shaky counter-example that a people in chains can achieve and enjoy freedom. Over that quarter century -- and possibly longer if Haiti wanted, Canada could take a leadership role in the real job of peace-keeping that we have foregone in what will, I believe, be the predictably miserable failure of ours, the USA's and NATO's intervention in Afghanistan. In and with Haiti we'd be taken on a rebuilding job that is valiantly challenging but not fated to be deconstructed by popular Muslim extremists. Maybe we'd even restore some of the esteem with which our nation was held BH (before Harper)!

Let us end the talk and prepare for reflection on my proposal with a sonnet that I came across written by no less than William Wordsworth about the founding father of Haiti who was deceitfully abducted by Napoleon's minions, then to die in a Paris prison.

To Toussaint L'Ouverture

By William Wordsworth

(1770–1850)

Toussaint, the most unhappy man of men
Whether the whistling Rustic tend his plough
Within thy hearing, or thy head be now
Pillowed in some deep dungeon’s earless den;
O Miserable Chieftain! Where and when
Wilt thou find Patience? Yet die not; do thou
Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow:
Though fallen thyself, never to rise again,

Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind
Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies;
There’s not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.

The Georgia Strait's Big Dicks

For those avid readers flung further afield, I must briefly disambiguate that the Georgia Strait is not the Strait of Georgia, itself a busy waterway, subsumed now within the Salish Sea, and environmentally degraded by the otherwise progressive Winter Olympic City -- you know: the one that doesn't get any winter. Nay the Georgia Strait is a venerable and illustrious Vancouver weekly, once, though no longer, fashionably radical, but still always politically correctly tinged.

Recently, queuing up for all the meaningless but endlessly fascinating end of decade listmania, the Strait, distinguished itself from other compilers with the -oooh- sexist epithet for its targets: "the biggest dicks of the decade." Crude even for the inheritors of the once radical 60s rag, the article was penned by one Mike Cowie, apparently a frequent proselytizer for this journal. Exactly why Mikey's list should be of interest to the world, given his still formative stage of journalistic achievement, one pauses to wonder. But I am a sucker for lists and so perused his litany of decadal villains. Really, not much new or surprising. George Bush and Dick Cheney win, with Bin Ladin in second and other notable malefactors including - hooray from me - "the Dictators of China."

Predictably, given the paper's politics and the world's knee-jerk pick on the Middle East's sole democracy, "the Israeli Government" makes the "biggest dicks of the decade" grade. In the tried and true recitation of that country's wrongdoing, Mikey cites the invasion of Lebanon and Gaza and blithely goes on to rant about creating the world's largest prison camp (i.e. Gaza), failing to acknowledge that Egypt seems no less interested than Israel in hemming in the fiefdom of Hamas.

Naturally, yours truly could not refrain from pointing, in posted comments,how the occludedly learned compiler had missed Hamas itself. That murderous and largely cowardly organization managed to split the already dis-empowered Palestinian "nation" by maintaining a position of annihilating Israel and encouraging its primitive but vicious operatives to provoke their powerful neighbour. When writing his anti-Israel screed, Mikey spoke of how he found it, "fun to listen to Israel's kneejerk defenders explain why all of this oppression and land stealing is not just ok, but is actually the Palestinians own fault." But then - sound of clarion trumpets please! - he shares with us, as only a young Vancouver-based journalist can - THE TRUTH, i.e. "that this (Israel) is one of the last bastions of outright brutal colonialism in the world." Well, of course -- and if he wanted to he could even cite the fact that Israel has by far the highest number of human rights investigations ongoing by that pinnacle of impartial rectitude, the UN Human Rights Council! By way of review, that's the body that has processed more than three times as many resolutions against Israel than it has for North Korea, Sudan, and Burma combined since 2003.

But, for those with such profound consciences, one need not stray quite so far afield to find "bastions of colonialism:" try just driving on down from the Strait's Kitsilano coop, to the pitifully constricted Musqueam homeland in South Vancouver or any of the other 200 or so BC First Nations who, in spite of what Stephen Harper has to say about Canada's imperial history, remain the indentured on-reserve "Indians" of a not-so-post-colonial nation. So much more comfy to point fingers across the sea than to come to terms with the extent to which Cowie like most Lotuslanders, sings praise for living in a "paradise" invaded and then stolen from the original inhabitants.

The Villains of the Piece: China at Copenhagen

That the Copenhagen Summit on climate change fell far, far short of the expectations of anyone who takes this threat seriously, is not only beyond dispute but was probably inevitable. As noted here before, major poly-national treaties that close in on worldwide consensus need to develop organically and adaptively and not be fixated on implausible make-it-or-break-it milestones.
This said, there is a storyline emerging consonant with my admittedly chronic perspective that the Peoples Republic of China is now almost an omnipresent villain: wherever something tragic is happening in the world, inevitably a Chinese "interest" is close by whether this be murdering their own or arming and financing the most repressive smaller regimes on earth such as Sudan, Burma and Zimbabwe. The account of how China sabotaged Copenhagen has been published in The Guardian and on a blog by Mark Lynas, a British journalist focused on global warming and author of the alarming and visionary book, Six Degrees.

Lynas scored an inimitable contact and route into the wormy heart of Copenhagen negotiations having been befriended and selected as a climate change advisor by Mohamed Nasheed, President of the tiny and vulnerable nation of the Maldives. Those islands, in case you need a memory jogger, are coral atolls southwest of India and Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean. The highest point on the islands is 2.3 metres the same height as Chinese basketball great Yao Ling, a factoid that should telegraph why the Maldives have become a leading and desperate voice for serious action on global warming.

So Mark Lynas got on the inside of what was going on amidst all the brouhaha in Copenhagen and has told tales out of class in a way that you'll never get from the genetically secretive faceless diplomats who usually frequent the highest altitude break-outs at international conferences. His verdict is blunt on how and why the gathering amounted to so little: "China’s strategy was simple: block the open negotiations for two weeks, and then ensure that the closed-door deal made it look as if the west had failed the world’s poor once again." Describing China's surreptitious two-faced and oft-times vindictive actions, he calls that nation's behaviour, "profoundly shocking." Because China virtually runs any number of illicit third world regimes now, it was able to front these small stature criminals like Sudan to make blustering indictments of the west, while tirelessly working behind-the-scenes. This would insure that whatever came out of the conference would in no way limit their massive and exponentially growing use of filthy, dangerous coal.

Along the way, it was not enough to do all possible to make Obama look bad and ineffective by undermining his last-ditch heroics of consensus-building; the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, even snubbed the US president and other world leaders by sending a foreign ministry underling to what were supposed to be highest level special deal-making sessions. Making America feel small was a fringe benefit of the worn but still effective negotiating tactic called, "higher authority" - which pays off (for those who wish to stall agreement) by necessitating awkward delegate caucuses and telephone consultations while other world leaders wait on China.

Again, one wonders just how much longer the world, especially the diminishing fraction of it that can pretend to be "free", will tolerate the rude, sneering bullies of Beijing. At this time, limiting their power is still remotely possible. But in the horrific Age of Stupid, time is running out on both the problem of climate change and, what we can now see as the closely linked threat of the People's Republic's hegemonic ascent.

2012 - On the End of Days and a Non-Believer's Special Offer

On this penultimate day of 2009, I awake knowing that in just a little under two years, we are all going to blown to smithereens by an as yet unseen celestial onject! Or inundated by a mega-tsunami right up to the peaks of the Himalayas. Or - worst of all - become transformed into gibbering hordes of mystical new-agers, not unlike the krishnas who used to hang about chanting in airport terminals. The horror, the horror!

Now that the movie is out, so too in ever greater numbers will be the dire predictions and expectations of the last days of earth. Variously, this prophecy is Mayan or Hopi in origin -- neither of which really say the world will end only that it will change precipitously, a much safer bet since it has been doing so, according to no less that the great Marcel Proust:

The one thing that does not change is that at any and every time it appears that there have been ‘great changes.’

I had taken about as much notice of this dreaded imminence as I had of the anal infection of the beetle that lives under my desk, until recently when my rather sensitive and nervous 11-year old daughter came home from school verging on tears because her reading group had been avidly discussing the ominous possibilities two years hence. Overcoming my instinctual desire to rip the lips off of whatever presumptive adult had presided over such malarkey-talk, I played the judicious and wise father and explained quite a number of things about the history of prophecy to her. I noted, for example, the fascinating sociological study I read years ago, called When Prophecy Fails. In that account, the researchers - including the late Leon Festinger, originator of the concept of cognitive dissonance - closely followed the dynamics of a millenarian claque in Michigan. The group had received the wisdom of THE END from much further afield than old wise indigenous earthlings - kindly aliens had informed their leader, Mrs. Keech, of a flood that would engulf us all on December 21, 1954 - there's something about the Winter Solstice, eh? So Festinger and his colleagues sat up all night with the believers as they patiently, at first, but then with growing, albeit temporary, disquiet as the hours passed, awaiting the catastrophe.

As you may have already figured out by the very fact of your sitting comfortably reading this excellent blog, they and their extraterrestrial informants were wrong...No wait, not wrong at all! The Keech family wackos took very little time realizing that they and the rest of creation had been saved at the last minute by - you guessed it! - God who in his beneficence had once more held the finger off the global smite button. They came out of it their beliefs intact, the quintessential exemplar of the aforementioned phenomenon of cognitive dissonance.

It does seem, then, that it may take some considerable effort to move devotees of this doomsday bullcrap off their spot and, again in that same conversation with my daughter, an inspiration came to me which I shall apply to anyone I henceforth encounter who espouses the inevitability that at 11:11 a.m. (11:41 in Newfoundland) on December 21, 2012 we'll all be trans-personalized into some infinite or new age-y void. This offer applies to any reader wishing to take me up on this.

I will agree to pay any such person the princely sum of $2,012.00, right now, for full title to their unmortgaged house (or any other similarly-valued chattel) with possession on December 22, 2012. Naturally, their unshakable conviction that I am buying what will at that point no longer exist should have them laughing all the way to the bank, so to speak.

Any takers?

If not then will y'all believers do the rest of us the great kindness of shutting your gob about 2012 and the apolcalyptic hocus-pocus surrounding it!

Who We Are Dealing With: China Murders Sick Man

If all the tainted goods and devastated North American local economies, all the bald-faced brutal suppression of internal opposition and the dogged attempts to discredit his Holiness the Dalai Lama while making Tibet, a "hell on earth,", all the price-gouging and illicit counterfeiting of goods, haven't convinced you, today's state-sanctioned murder of Akmal Shaikh ought to move you a little closer to recognizing the monsters that have been allowed to take over the world economy.
I am not opposed to finding the kingpins who tirelessly underwrite the international drug trade, and removing them in any manner whatsoever. The head honchos are unquestionably destroying lives in every sense of the words. But China, as in so many other things makes punishment into an hyperbole and in this case has plain-and-simple murdered a delusional sufferer of bipolar disorder who was clearly duped into muling several kilos of heroin. This empire, more truly evil than anything even Ronnie Reagan could have ever imagined, carries out nearly three-quarters of annual executions worldwide.

In this case wide-ranging international appeals, including from Britain where Shaikh was a citizen, met with the same "fuck you guys!" attitude that the People's Republic adopts increasingly as its economic might aggrandizes. And be clear: China is vigourously converting that financial clout into military capacity that will further assure their ability to do what they want within and outside their borders. The lethal injection stuck into Akmal Shaikh is just one more small if revolting shot fired in the widening China Wars.

One sees in the stiffly worded but action-free reaction of the British Prime Minister, the extent of empty puffery which most Nations on earth now feel obliged to limit themselves to due to China's power. In response to Gordon Brown's noisy indignation, China has, in essence, even challenged the right to freely criticize their atrocities. Thus does party mouthpiece Jiang Yu rejoin, "We express our strong dissatisfaction and opposition to the British government's unreasonable criticism of the case. We urge [them] to correct their mistake in order to avoid harming China-UK relations."


Correct our mistake? This is the same "re-educational" argot as in Pol Pot's Cambodian bloody regime -- and the time is surely coming when China will not hesitate to apply the very military force that our relentless purchasing of their cheap and dangerous goods has funded, to physically shut up us impudent westerners, just as they now silence the Tibetans and groups such as the Muslim Uighur and Falun Gong.

Is it too late for the West to recognize the monster that we have largely created, and put them back in the isolation tank? Too late to suspend them from every gathering of purportedly respectable world leaders and impose on imports of their nigh slave-produced goods, a rigourous human rights audit? Probably, for to paraphrase from Leonard Cohen's old song, "Stories of the Street," our pleasures - the pleasures of cheap - are the seal of the prison we are now locking ourselves into.

Of Externalities, or Sticking PG Polluters with the Bill

It was a clear night as I flew back on a recent Sunday evening from Vancouver. You could see Prince George glistening like a jewel (well, a bunch of rhinestones, anyway) even by Quesnel. At the crew's insistence, I put away my iPod on which I was listening to B.J. Harrison's fine rendition of the Moonstone (Classic Tales readings - shameless promotion) and prepared to step out into the -24C crispness that the pilot had announced.

But as we were about to land, simultaneously the cabin filled with the familiar noxious smell of the pulp mills and the engines revved up suddenly. We began to ascend. Things grew quiet among the passengers and after a few minutes of banking and flying about, the pilot announced that visibility had been too limited: there was, he said, "a bit of fog" at the north end of the runway.

By this time we were high enough to have a good vantage for seeing what the real problem was. The mills located on the north side of the Fraser were, as usual, spewing out their filth and in the considerable cold, plumes of vapours, aqueous and otherwise would rapidly condensing. And the winds just happened to be pushing this airborne crap to the south, straight over the Prince George airport.

The pilot tried another approach, this time from the west but with no better outcome. Having had a nice scenic tour over BC's northern capital, we turned south for Vancouver where we recollected our luggage and a fistful of food and hotel vouchers from West-Jet. Having boarded the plane at a little after seven, it was near midnight by the time I settled into the palatial facility at the Richmond Sandman, thinking back to economics 101 and the concept of externality.

To the economist, an externality "... exists whenever one individual's actions affect the well-being of another individual -- whether for the better or for the worse -- in ways that need not be paid for..." In simpler and very crude but apt terms, it means I enjoy a nice shit and you have to smell it. We are all familiar with the game that pulp mills and similarly noxious industries play with local and high-level pols. In essence it is that if such companies are forced to clean up and, thereby, to absorb externalities, to pay fully for the burden they place on the well-being of others, they'll just shut down and move to a more welcoming locale, i.e. some even more desperate community or country where they can get away with figurative and, if it so happens, literal murder.

I did suggest to West-Jet that they ought to invoice CanFor and its malodorous buddies for the substantial cost to the airline of an extra flight and all those meals and beds for the stranded. So far they have only chuckled and sighed and, yet, internalizing such externalities is the exact prescription that economists are making the world over as an alternative to more draconian regulations or, my personal favourite, putting the executives of these polluters in pillories down at the public market.

Copenhagen - Just whose deadline is it anyway?

As the clock winds down at the Copenhagen climate change boondoggle, the theater has become evermore tedious and predictable. Obama, playing so well the ineffectual postmodern hero; Wen Jiabao, Premier of China, mouthing the usual lame alibis of the nasty heavy, and Stephen Harper.. well I'd say, the court fool, but that would denigrate a very useful medieval occupation and, Stephen is only funny when he's trying to act as if he was actually a human being.

Meanwhile myriads of primarily useless bureaucrats from all sectors scurry about self-importantly, accomplishing very little except that they will be able to go back home soon and act as if, somehow, breathing the fetid air of a predictably failed treaty process, makes them special, worthy claimants of insights into something that so very few, if any, have.

The hubris of humans individually and collectively is, of course, at the spiritual roots of why we are in crisis. Like boozed-up teenage boys on prom night, we've got high and been speeding around in our souped up vehicles, sure that cold scientific facts of impending doom will make never catch us, that we shall escape becoming a fatal statistic.

In part the foreseeable failure at Copenhagen has to with the excessively complex nature of the event itself. Billed as treaty-making it has few of the requisites for that seemingly lost art. The hitherto most complex exemplar of relatively successful multi-nation environmental diplomacy were the United Nations Law of the Sea negotiations. The process of developing a substantive multi-faceted treaty that won most of the world's support took 15 years of steadily building. In contrast, foolish hopes blossomed in Kyoto with few or no sanctions for duplicitous participants - like Canada - who figured that a climate treaty was like an election, that it's okay to promise more than you ever intend and hope that the public goes amnesiac. The global climate issue, unlike the global ocean issues, has never seen power and knowledge combined in dedicated visionary leadership. Obama, the heir apparent to saving the world, shows little of the sustained commitment that he did, for example, to passing medicare and, even more vigourously, to getting himself to the White House. Now, there was a cause he could really sink his teeth into!

No one is even asking the right guiding questions: what future course will save us and the biomes we are so powerfully affecting? What does the path to salvation actually look like? We need that vision in as much specificity as we can muster. Instead we (I refer to the collective "we" of humanity) have busied ourselves bickering about meaningless reduction targets -- is 1.5 % reduction compared to 1990 emission levels enough or should we agree on 2%? - as if scientific knowledge is anywhere close to being able to say what different outcomes such alternatives might lead to. Will this difference really matter in coastal Bangladesh and, indeed, will we ever have the predictive insights to make that call?

Meanwhile, like jealous infantile siblings, the leaders point accusatory fingers at each other, saying in effect, "I'm not going to behave if my brothers and sisters won't." There is no thought of any significant nation (something which Canada once was on the verge of being), saying in essence, screw you all: we are not going down in history (if there is any left to be read) as having dithered around while the storm tides swelled. We will make sacrifices regardless of who else does it, adopting the noble disposition of the great Spanish existentialist, Miguel de Unamuno, who said: "If it is nothingness that awaits us let us so act that it will be an unjust fate."

Meanwhile back in Copenhagen, one question that none of the legion of reporters on site seemed to have asked, is where this ostensibly unshakable deadline comes from? Yes, yes, I know that this is an urgent global problem but it is not going to be significantly less solvable (if it is solvable at all) the day, or month or year after Copenhagen than it is now. To believe that this fractional assemblage of the human population, well-fed and overpaid as it is holds the key to all our futures is just more of the same bloated self-importance and hubris that got us where we are.

Like it or not, the same pompous politicians and their lackeys will have climate change to deal with next week and into the very distant future. They don't get to just move on to the next flavour of the month issue. If there is the thinnest vein of real leadership among them, they will leave the Danish capital humbled by the enormity of what must be done, and committed to act, as they have not so far, as if - paraphrasing Unamuno once again - they are the valourous parents of our future rather than just the whimpering offspring of the past.

An Obamian Fable

Trying to wrap my head around the mind-set that has resulted in last night's dramatically pronounced new American Afghan strategy, I get to thinking analogically.

Let us shift the setting to an inner city neighbourhood rotten with punk gangs running protection schemes. In the parlance, they own the 'hood. A new savvy, good-talkin' police chief is hired and after much deliberation and amidst great pomp and circumstance announces how he's going to fix things.

He says he will be tripling the number of police in the 'hood for 18 months. the baddies will be hunted down like dogs and neutralized if not neutered; and meanwhile, he will collaborate with one particular gang, build up their capabilities and then pull all the cops out of the area once and for all. The police chief warns the leader of his chosen thug allies that if they aren't able to subdue the even nastier groups within this time frame, he's still going to yank out all the flatfoots come hell or high water. That should make the living easy for the hapless civvies especially women and free-thinkers!

Now imagine yourself head honchos of the targeted gangs. You know the place'll be crawling with cops for a year and half. No biggie. Keep your head down, bide your time, and get set for all the post July 2011 fireworks reunion with the homeys.

And the moral? It may sound great sitting in the Oval Office to spout tough-sounding guidelines and timetables but any Taliban and Al-Qaeda with half a brain -- and they have shown that intelligence is not their short suit - is just going to hang in there and prepare to take back the whole country when America's half-hearted, half-baked and half-assed strategy implodes.

All Points Tasteless

I will be uncharacteristically brief here because I have no wish to add to the unimaginable grief of the families, friends, and communities of the six people who died in Sunday's float plane crash at Saturna Island. As is so often the case when a commercial flight goes down, we are beginning to hear and posthumously appreciate the gifts that were those lost lives.

What I write for is to draw attention to the utter insensitivity of the producers and staff of CBC's All Points West who sent a reporter down to Victoria's float plane terminal and asked passengers if they felt safe flying today. It seems hard to believe that no one from the afternoon program had the minimum intelligence needed to immediately recognize just what a bad and heartless idea this was.

It was vulturous, the depraved act of two-bit journalists whose only interest, apparently, is to fill up more time on their already bloated show. For All Points West was expanded from 2 to 3 hours a few months ago at the same time that a truly wise and fine program, BC Almanac was cut back to one hour. Naturally, I wrote CBC back then and asked for a financial accounting as to how Alamanc being diminished while the less than shining Miss Roberts and her Vancouver opposite number had their shows enlarged, could be justified. No answer yet from the folks whose salaries I pay.

Just think about it, if you are at all familiar with the now sadly abridged host, Mark Forsythe - can anyone imagine him countenancing for a moment such callousness?

The Journalistic World of George Packer

Another very early waking for me and a vain attempt -- it almost always is - to chase mundane but nerve-racking thoughts away and get more sleep by listening to the drone of some podcast I've downloaded. One of my favourite podcast subscriptions is the Carnegie Council which with what seems high pretension subtitles itself "The Voice for Ethics in International Policy." Holy cripes, I thought when I first ran into this bunch, I hadn't known such a voice exists and I wouldn't have expected it to arise from the riches of one of the great robber barons (yes, I know I've used that word now in two consecutive posts , so now, one more time and it's mine), the industrialist arguably to be blamed for such notorieties as the bloody 1892 Homestead Strike in Pennsylvania and the Johnstown flood of 1889 in which over 2,000 died. That Carnegie would later become a reputed philanthropist, among many other things endowing public libraries throughout the English-speaking world, still seemed merely redress for a wild and woolly career of plunder. Thus my initial puzzlement at also being the benefactor of a centre with such immodesty about its role in "global ethics" whatever the heck that is.

But this said, and with my usual concision, the Carnegie Council has some fascinating podcasts usually centered on an author of some repute with a just-released tome which she or he discourses on, as some relatively small and select audience munches on breakfast in Manhattan's Upper East Side. Among the most recent event was a presentation by a journalist from the New Yorker, George Packer who has compiled a book of essays, titled Interesting Times: Writings from a Turbulent Decade.

I knew his name by sight but not much of him (still don't matter even after the inevitable "enlightenment," such as it is, from Wikipedia!). Packer is one of the New Yorker's stable of in-house writers whose articles are lengthy - often over 15,000 words - insider perspectives on difficult places. Yes, I know, that is an odd generic epithet but how else does one group contexts that range from the seamiest slums of the bloated city of Lagos, Nigeria, to the butchery in Baghdad, to the soldier-children of the Cote D'Ivoire. Packer's tack is go deep inside finding intimate narrators who can give dimension to the otherwise voiceless. He calls it "long form narrative journalism" and has not only practiced this difficult art form but even transmuted his research from the Iraq context, into a stage play, Betrayed, exposing the shameful treatment of Iraqis who served as translators for the Bush invading force.

But the points that caught my attention circa 4 this morning were those about the perilously rare brand of reportage that Packer conducts, and its perilously plentiful opposite, the talking heads on most news TV networks who, without ever having been to the places they pontificate about, feed their cheap tripe to the great unwashed. Further, that broad public, according to Packer, can now be seen as doing little more in the enunciation of its views than parroting high-paid ignoramuses whether from Fox or Al Jazeera. Insightfully and worryingly, Packer tells of squabbles overheard in heartland, USA diners that are also verbatim playbacks of whatever shallow debates among armchair experts that CNN ran the night before.

I shall not spoil more, the trip you really ought to take to the Carnegie podcast with George Packer nor (look in my side bar) this rare bird's New Yorker blog).

It's time to Boycott Wal-Mart

I grew up or, at least came of age, in an era of passionate boycotting. The earliest I recall was the Delano grape boycott and vivid images of the great Cesar Chavez marching on Sacramento. It was distant news and I don't recall ever passing up a nice grape no matter its provenance. But this was merely the signs of things yet to come as the 1960s writhed with all varieties of social protest, of which boycotting was but one.

Now, of course, the world did not begin with me on a sullen gray evening 61 years ago to this very day (shameless hint that, yes, this is the anniversary of my hatching and any good wishes and gifts you wanna send along, do so, except if they are from Wal-Mart the matter of which I am getting to, trust me). The word, boycott, derives from one Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott, a land agent for John Crichton, the 3rd Earl of Erne. Poor Charlie was caught somewhat in the middle. Having defended his employer against angry tenants, he became their target and was so successfully ostracized that he hightailed it out of the Emerald Isle and, unwittingly into the dictionary.

Since those etymologically fateful days of the 1880s, boycotts have become legion. Some we can look back on admiringly, as for example, the courageous bus boycotts in old Dixie in the early 60s, the miscellaneous determined anti-apartheid boycotts - I can still remember snubbing Paarl Roodeberg one night during a period when I snubbed very little of the alcoholic beverage family. And there were infamous boycotts as well, most notoriously, the Nazi ones against the Jews.

Overall, however one hears less about boycotting these days but it is long overdue now to direct one at the great Satan of Bentonville, Arkansas, Sam Walton whose Wal-Marts have become one the primary causes of the de-industrialization of most of the western world. In the process, Wal-Mart has led the way in enabling an even greater nemesis, the Peoples Republic of China to use economic judo on America and its allies, turning the force of our insatiable appetites for cheap crap into our undoing. I am tellling you nothing you don't already know, to say that there are very few goods we buy today which have not been manufactured in China. But the role that Western greed and cupidity has played in not allowing but forcing this to happen is too often forgotten as we race into one of the always proliferating Peoples' Republic factory outlet stores, AKA so-called "dollar stores" or to the very nucleus of the problem, Wal-Mart.

Along the way to reeking macro-economic havoc, Wal-Mart has not neglected the micro-level, making sure that it decimates older down-towns and at the same time brutally fights off any attempts by its workers to unionize. the latest development in this and indeed the impetus for this grousingly call for a boycott is the adjudicated finale exonerating the Wal-Mart bullies for their blatant tactics of intimidation. The setting is Jonquiere a small city on the Saguenay in Quebec. In 2004 the Jonquiere Wal-Mart was unionized by United Food and Commercial Works (UFCW). Within a few months, Wal-Mart Canada made a press release to the effect that the Jonquiere store was not "meetings its business plan." Indeed! The very presence of a union that can offer some modest counterbalance to Wal-Mart's despotic intolerance of the slightest uppitiness of employees, is certainly not part of old Sam or his descendant's "plan." To the contrary in its own stores and in the massive infrastructure of Chinese suppliers, worker democracy is verboten.

So it came as no surprise that a mere six months after unionization, Wal-Mart pulled the plug at Jonquiere. Uncharacteristically for the corporation -- which has used cut and run punitive tactics before when the spectre of unionization loomed, the locals fought back. Two former clerks Gaeten Plourde and Johanne Desbiens led an ultimately quixotic legal tilt at the giant claiming that not only had the closure violated Quebec's labour laws but, that since joining a union was a basic right, Wal-Mart had violated the charter.

In a split decision on Friday, the majority of our highest court chose to affirm 21st century serfdom. Largely disregarding the charter rights issue, the majority of 6 over 3, came to the brilliant conclusion that since Wal-Mart had, for whatever reasons it saw fit, closed the plant, naturally it permanently laid off its workforce in Jonquiere. That the closure was a direct attack on a sanctioned right and, indeed a very much planned threat to any employees in Canada and beyond, was disregarded in this trivialization of the matter by our learned lead justices. There is some solace to be taken in the minority opinion, written by Madam Justice Rosalie Abella who, in an unusually candid statement, opined that the majority decision was a ""a marked and arbitrary departure from the philosophical underpinnings, objectives and general scope of the labour code."

Two things emerge with painful clarity here: Wal-Mart can and will continue to throw its behemoth weight around in all aspects of its business (a similar union busting closure hit Wal-Mart's tire and lube outlet at Gatineau, Quebec, just last year) and the highest court of the land cannot be counted upon to challenge these robber barons. It is just for such a case that the valiant precedent of the good but poor tenants of Erne in 19th century Ireland should be followed. The extraordinary social and also economic costs of supporting Wal-Mart with your consumer loonie are crystal-clear. Each time you check out so much as a chocolate bar at one of the many outposts of these thugs, you are shoring up their dismal vision of self-aggrandizement and tyranny over all.

Googling the phrase "Boycott Wal-Mart" already turns up about 300,000 hits (though I have to admit that such sums are only to be expected, since googling damn near anything turns up crazily high numbers) but I believe sifting through all the usual internet chaff to find legitimate and potentially effective movements against us all having to live in Sam's dreams, is important enough that in coming blogs, you'll be seeing a kind of "field guide' to the options. Meanwhile, as Christmas comes on: please, please think about this question before you get sucked into one of those smiley-faced emporia of social repression: just whose job or community are you helping to wreck today?!

Finishing the Job in Afghanistan

News Flash! Peace Nobelist Obama has just finished protracted deliberations with his brightest and best, with a Bush-y style one liner about finishing the job, to wit, being able to show that America's going-on-ten-year Afghan police action has amounted to something more than a hill, nay, a mountain of corpses.


The likelihood of such an achievement is severely diminished by vagueness as to what success would even look like. All those years ago when the American led alliance was cutting through the Taliban and Al-Qaeda traditional forces like the proverbial hot knife through butter, the objective was to eradicate Muslim terrorism's cancerous core.
Then, totally predictably, the enemy just slipped into the hills, adopting and adapting the same successful guerrilla tactics that have worked all over the world for dedicated indigenes to confront vastly superior foreign military forces.

Over the years the relevance has become inescapable of historical precedents wherein world-class imperial forces were humbled in the rugged terrain of the Afghans. Alexander the Great was one of the earliest and, in fact, most successful of would-be overlords there. Yet having driven his way inexorably and rapidly all the way from Greece to the Orient, it then took three years to reach a semblance of control over the land then known as Bactria. Accordingly, he is said to have whined immodestly to his momma, "I am involved in the land of a leonine and brave people, where every foot of the ground is like a wall of steel, confronting my soldiers. You have brought only one son into the world, but everyone in this land can be called an Alexander." Multitudinous latter-day Afghan Alexanders re-appeared over the ages to play havoc with the British Raj and, more recently, the mighty USSR, which is now the former USSR, a fact not entirely unrelated to the ruinous war in Afghanistan from 1979 to1989.

This history means, that to "finish the job", as Monty Python might say, it's time for something entirely different, tactics that shall not win Amnesty International's seal of approval for playing nice with killers. And that does not mean pouring in thousands more troops but devising a strategy that will get a killing force right into the strongholds and refuges of the enemy. Of course, far more likely, will be proliferating political junk talk to make the continuing stalemate (or worse) smell like victory. Had I farm to bet on what things are gonna look like, say, in 2020, it would be that the Taliban and Al-Qaeda or some even worse Muslim extremist entity, will have retaken full control over the country, as we retreat under the spray of machine-gun-fast cover laid down in a second term of Obama's verbiage.

Not the least reason for this, other than all those latter-day Alexanders scurrying about in their rugged highland refugia, is well shown back home in one of the countries that has been sacrificing the most lives over there, Canada. Nationally, we have taken our eye of the ball, just, as at long last, Obama seems on the verge of doing something decisive, however questionable.

Our Afghan policy attention these days is almost entirely focused on the treatment of detainees. Cross-Canada hand-wringing predominates as we all feign shock at learning that Taliban and Al-Qaeda captured by Canadian troops get manhandled when turned over to an army composed largely of those who suffered under Taliban rule.

Duh.


Allegedly, those who serve the high masters of terror and fatwa, are getting what many would say they had coming to them: treatment almost as brutal as what the same young minions and their masters dished out to their captives -- remembering for example, Daniel Pearl, but, more broadly, countless, nameless women murdered or maimed in the name of Sharia law. Figure out for yourself whether the adjacent picture illustrates compliance with UN conventions.

Now, at a time when the uncaptured buddies of these detainees are still blowing up Canadian and other soldiers - not, to my knowledge humanely or in accordance with any rules except their own - we are glued to the media watching the debate over how much our military and political leaders knew about the likelihood of torturing the bad guys. On principle, I do have respect for Richard Colvin and any whistle blower who socks it to the craven bureaucrats and pols of Ottawa, but in this case, really: there are so many more injustices in this world we ought to be attending to before losing sleep over pay back to the Taliban and Al Qaeda bully-boys. And unless we stop fretting over international laws of war -- ones that no winning side has ever given a sweet shit about -- and get literally bloody-minded about the strategies used to dig the perps out of their mountain lairs, there will be no real "finishing the job" in any meaningful sense. We can just pack up, go home, and wait for the bad guys to return to power and start cloning the terrorists, who'll kill us and our children -- without concern for the Geneva or any other convention espoused by "decent" societies.

And Bless You More, Bobby Orr!

From the category of I-told-you-so's: The Bobby Orr was in the Grouse's current smelly domicile. i.e. Prince George, BC, this week as part of the local version of the Chevy Safe and Fun hockey camps. Naturally the presence of one of Canada's most deservedly famous sports celebrities led our daily garbage liner's reporter down to the coliseum for an interview, during which the question was popped: who is the greatest hockey player of all time?

"Orr takes little time in answering...--and it's not Gretzky, Beliveau or Lemieux. 'Gordie,' Orr answers with no hesitation...He could do everything."

Hey: who you gonna believe?

Bless You, Cathy Haag!

I am pleased to announce to the night-shifters, sleepless, early risers and the like that CBC has at long last trashed its long-irritating overnight programming, something which I had badgered them about for years (although I am not delusional enough to think they were paying me much attention). For those readers so fortunate as to spend the time between midnight and 5 am in the tender arms of Morpheus, you will have the added good fortune to have had, I presume, minimal if any knowledge of the indigestible smorgasbord our national broadcaster had been dishing out nightly.

The "feast" so to speak, began not too badly, in fact, with an hour long and often quite entertainingly newsy show from Radio Netherland. Thereafter, came Radio Sweden for a half hour, often featuring some deservedly unknown Swedish pop music. Then a taste of the BBC, a program called Outlook which now is sensibly at a better time on the new CBC Overnight. Thereafter half hour blurts followed one after another. For a while the absolutely dreadful Russian show, often an apologia for Putin's latest violations, would ensue; a ho-hum Czech or Romanian newscast that would probably not even interest its own nationals, and then in the darkest hour before dawn, we would be set up by a reasonable 30 minute piece from Germany followed by what was the crown jewel of dreadfullness that CBC Overnight would spring on the early-risers or utter insomniacs, Radio Polonia.

Canadians may have some sympathy to the mentality of Poland which like ourselves resides next to famous or, if you prefer infamous giant world powers. Always living in that shadow can lead to a collective inferiority complex and, springing from that motivation no doubt, Radio Polonia devoted almost every show to hyperbolic claims for the superiority of all things Polish - some backwater that produced the indisputably best pigfoot pies in the world or the "little known fact" (as Cheers's Cliffie used to say) that Einstein's theory of relativity had already been articulated though never written down by a late 19th century dockworker from Gdansk. It was truly the most dreadful programming I have heard on CBC or anywhere else.

Not one to leave such transgressions alone, some time ago I Googled up CBC Overnight and encountered the veritable last straw pushing me to abandon my characteristic reserve and register objections: There for all to see -- and none to readily dispute -- was the preposterous claim "CBC RADIO OVERNIGHT has become a huge success among listeners."

Huh? By what measure? And, more importantly, in comparison to what alternatives that the sleepless have such as listening to the wavering signal from a Los Angeles sports call-in show or a Wichita evangelist?

Now, I should say that writing and bitching to the CBC about anything - I do mean anything - evokes almost as surely as summer follows spring a boiler-plate response along these lines: "Dear Mr. Dale - Thank you for your interest in (name of program). We are always glad to hear from our listeners. We appreciate your concern about (slight paraphrasing of whatever I complained of). However, you should know that we get just as many listeners who like (whatever the hell I took umbrage at)... This happens so often that I now include in my initial crank letters a preemptive warning that I am not interested in hearing the standard insubstantial and un-substantiatable drivel about all the people who have spontaneously written countervailing feedback.

And so I wrote, suggesting, just for the fun of it, that not only was the programming bad, period, but that it was - O the horror of it! - Eurocentric. Where, I asked, were the rest of the continents, the Asian, the African the South American, that is, those who are not white?

The reply I received was, of course, along the aforementioned predictable vein, but went on to lament the extraordinary difficulty of getting such programming -- this, in an era when a few taps of the mouse and you can listen to radio stations from every nook and cranny of creation. The show host, Cathy Haag, then gave me a quick lesson in global economics, explaining that "Only rich nations can produce and broadcast external programs in English." A rather odd claim I thought for two reasons:

a) many of those less well off nations have English as a major second if not primary language (e.g. India, Nigeria, South Africa)

b) that some of the European Nations that were part of the current CBC Overnight stable are hardly "rich", by any standards: e.g. Romania!

Then, finding her groove, no doubt, Ms. Haag, ended her letter by telling me, and I quote, "If you do not enjoy Overnight, you do not have to listen to it." Oh the rapier repartee well honed from years of telling us who she is and that we're listening to CBC Overnight a dozen times a night! Of course I really was not confused about my basic freedom to shut her mixed but primarily trashy program off. But as I advised Ms. Haag in reply, alas, I have no such choice of whether my tax dollars subsidize such crap.

I think we had a few more vituperative little exchanges including her kindly providing me with a more senior locus to direct my nasties to. Then, our newfound relationship in tatters, life returned to normal, her telling us who she is over and over nightly, me suffering from frequent insomnia and the jingoistic early morning proclamations of Polish cultural hegemony.

But then several weeks ago, with the sudden joyous relief that remission of toothache can bring, Radio Polonia and the rest of the aural dog-breakfast vanished without even a magical "poof". Although they have yet to change the information on their website, the CBC Overnight show now begins with a redux of As It Happens between 12 and 1; some - omigod! - US programming from their National Public Radio, twixt 1 and 2; two hours of an excellent show from Radio Canada International, The Link, which is for "connecting new immigrants to Canada and Canada to the World"; and finally in the immediate pre-dawn two fine BBC shows, Outlook (which used to come on at 2:30 a.m.) and The Strand, a global trot around intriguing vanguard cultural art happenings.

Always one to show appreciation, your humble Grouse wrote again to Miss Haag, who still announces program transitions and herself throughout the night, and complemented her and her colleagues for having, midst this literal darkness, at last seen the light. Nothing back so far, but I am sure she's having to do a lot of thank you cards up for the all the night-crawlers who, like me, are singing "Hallelujah!"