A Gay Son, a Straight Father, a Road Trip - "A COMPLICATED LOVE"

THEY'RE OFF AND RUNNING!

A Classic Hoagland Piece

The New York Times March 23, 2013 Pity Earth’s Creatures By EDWARD HOAGLAND Edgartown, Mass. AESOP, the fabulist and slave who, like Scheherazade, may have won his freedom by the magic of his tongue and who supposedly shared the Greek island of Samos with Pythagoras 2,500 years ago, nailed down our fellowship with other beasties of the animal kingdom. Yet we seem to have reached an apogee of separation since then. The problem is, we find ourselves quite ungovernable when operating solo, shredding our habitat, while hugging our dogs and cats as if for consolation and dieting on whole-food calories if we are affluent enough. Google Earth and genome games also lend us a fitful confidence that everything is under control. We have Facebook, GPS apps, cameras on any corner, week-ahead weather forecasts round-the-clock on-screen, repair crews ready to restore “power” if it ever flickers out. Power to the people is a worldwide revolutionary slogan advancing democracy, but presupposes a more ancient meaning: the prehistoric conquest of every other vertebrate on earth. When I lived on Samos myself in 1965, I heard about perhaps the last wild leopard killed in Europe. It had swum across the strait from Mount Mycale in Turkey, only a mile or so away, presumably a bachelor seeking virgin territory, and when discovered and chased, had taken refuge in a cave, where the Samians promptly walled it in to die of thirst. Wouldn’t you have done the same? I suspect that Aesop, however, might have advocated setting it free to garland the 27-mile long island (and thus Europe) for a few more years with a last whiff of the eons preceeding modernity. Sadistic flicks, sea rise, assassination drones: are we up to playing God? A tectonic shift in civilization has never happened this fast before, and we’re still part-chimpanzee with double Ph.D.’s in trial and error. Invent pesticides and see what they do to our organs, sell civilians assault rifles and count the schoolhouse shootings, experiment with longevity and economics, friendship and cellphoning. By our own account we’re pigs, yet bearish, owly but mousy, catty and bovine. We beaver at work, hawk merchandise, and ape others by parroting them. We’re lemmings, wolfish, snakes in the grass, weasels, bucks, hens, leonine or sharks. We’re beaky or tigerish, doe-eyed, raven-haired, foxy, chicken-hearted, slow as a tortoise, meek as a dove, sheepish, dogged, old goats, goosey, sitting ducks or vultures. We butt in, bull ahead, change our stripes or spots, strut like a peacock, weep crocodile tears, ram through or swan about. We’re rabbity, calf-eyed, we beat our chests like gorillas, buzz off, or act like a jellyfish. Aesop would perk his ears, pick up a pen at this thicket of still current figures of speech. But what he, Aristotle, Linnaeus, Darwin, Emerson, Kipling would make of what’s going on should give us pause. I don’t mean whether they would like e-mail and “the cloud” so much as the price in demolitions paid, the dramatis personae wiped out. Even Isaac Newton, sitting in his apple orchard, might wonder, “what have you done with the birds?” — was it a fair trade? Will Robert Frost be the last great poet to notice that leaves are gold before they’re green? And his beloved stars; where are they? Would Newton need to fly to Australia or the Andes to gaze at them as before — and feel the magic of the plane was worth it? So much of creation has gone up in smoke to produce glass skyscrapers flocks fly into, superhighways, on-demand electronics, seven billion people in flabbergasting densities, that it’s anybody’s guess what these luminaries would say. Would they prefer what used to be called “God’s green earth?” It’s a steeplechase, hell-for-leather and exhilarating, for the highest stakes, but not knowing where we’re going. Call it progress or metastasizing, what we have done as a race, a species or a civilization is dumbfounding. Every inch of the planet is ours, we claim, and elements of clear improvement are intertwined with cancerous excess: the two-car American dream empowering women’s independence but engendering horrendous African droughts. Would Emerson and Aristotle find their hair standing on end, or would they grin so hard their mouth muscles finally wore out? And Darwin’s reaction to the tsunami of discoveries succeeding his? A ride on the subway, a month of inquiries, a walk in the park? “Is there any nature left?” he might ask, without concluding if he was pleased. Planes high as the sky, kids with instant gratification from fingering a gizmo, and no gangrene. The seethe dizzies us, also (two billion people were alive when I was born), though we’re acculturated to extraordinary amounts of disorientation — the steely shriek of wheels underground, hostile searches at airports, changing lanes in heavy traffic at a mile a minute, sudden bureaucratic notifications — without blowing a fuse. Strokes and heart attacks we postpone by surgery or pharmaceuticals, plus an evolving tolerance for stress. Yet my patriotism is shifting, from America in its triumphalism toward the wider sphere of everywhere: Africa, India, England and New England. The total entity is entering troubled waters. There are precedents for our imperial decline but not, in written history, for climate alteration on the scale that’s looming or for gargantuan extinctions in forest and ocean — our global skin. Simulations have become an addition for us, collaging reality into surrealism and taming it for convenience, entertainment or profit. Simulations are faster, zanier and tailored to our preferences, sentimental or otherwise. IT’S fantasy, amusing, but as technology closes in upon mimicking God, once again are we up to it? Who shall live, who shall die? We’ll save the pandas and the whales that sing prettily, but, like godlings, we’re playing with fire and water, tides and industry. The “City Upon a Hill” will have wet feet even if scientists simultaneously, let’s say, clone a mammoth to prove their prowess. I’d like to ogle the mammoth but would prefer to hear the bobolinks and wood thrushes singing in the spring as before. We have Dumbo but are losing Jumbo for his ivory (remember the cruel phrase “tickle the ivories,” for piano-playing?), and the former needs the latter for good grounding. Kindle presents a lapful of world thought and literature on tap at a tap, but will the owners pore over it with wholehearted absorption, as book lovers used to do? And when cars drive themselves, will the operators lavish their leisure on the landscape or on a tablet in their hands? We’re a species as slippery as mercury, appropriating any space of every shape from the Sahara to the Arctic Circle, so perhaps we can adapt to surreal simulacra transmitted through the ether, too. At least a critical mass of observers has not yet turned pessimistic. Photosynthesis we’ll have for growing calories, plus the blessings of rain, and like lichen, be hard to dislodge even in extremis from the rocks of our home, living willy-nilly in reduced bands. A sparer version of civilization may emerge, a throwback to leaner virtues. To kill so vastly as we have (a third of life?) and yet remain unscathed seems unlikely. I do meet younger people who are fervent about reform. Theirs is a preliminary zeal, still suffocating underneath the indifference of older generations. But love is central to life, now and again overriding selfishness for a spell. Love, mercy, pity are vividly called for with respect to corals, songbirds, sea mammals, lofty trees and other majesties, not to mention endangered pleasures like eating clams and marveling at the starshine in the depthless heavens. Nature is undefended by the powers that be, having no vote or much innate appeal to the sort of “people people” who run for office. They don’t saunter (Thoreau’s favorite term) and gaze, turn off the motor and open the window when passing a pond to hear the spring peepers sing — won’t know if the frogs have all died from toxicities. They’ll jog on a treadmill for their heart’s health while scanning spreadsheets. It’s not just ponds being steamrollered for industry, but gazing itself being lost to Twitter. The attention span involved in formulating a menagerie out of cloud shapes in the sky while lax on one’s back in the grass has been eclipsed by what’s interesting on-screen 20 inches away, and conscientious parents will troop their youngster to a planetarium, as to the dinosaur hall next door. These stars at least are carbonated, a firmament in whirligig mode, like the animated characters that populate children’s programs. Mason jars and the verb “leapfrog,” instructive bedtime stories like “crying wolf” and the goose that laid the golden egg, or the image of Death as a somber figure hefting a scythe — are these all gone? Certainly wolves and scythes are, and the 30th-generation captive-bred lion lying sleepily on cement in a zoo will be no match for the pep and gab of pizazzy graphics designed for a new century. Even if we’re fired or a hurricane is predicted, the temptation is simply to switch channels. “Out of the woods” once meant clearing your head, or protesting “in a pig’s eye” if you couldn’t. “You can lead a horse to water,” we’d tell the boss before quitting. Will we still “crow” about small victories, speak of a predatory matron as “a cougar” or somebody scammed as a poor “fish” — still sniff the scent of loam and cedar, dangle our feet in a creekbed (unless we feel “a frog” in our throat) and “eagle eyed,” scan the sky for barn swallows and chimney swifts or a glistening meadow for spider webs jeweled by the dew? Mostly that’s over, but Aesopian metaphors were artesian if not prehistoric. The tortoise and the hare, the lion saved by the mouse, the monkey who would be king, the dog in the manger, the dog and his shadow, the country mouse and the city mouse, the wolf in sheep’s clothing, the raven and the crow, the heron and the fish, the peacock and the crane. From where will we draw replacement similes and language? Pop culture somersaults “bad” to mean good, “cool” to mean warm, and bustles and bodices segue into tank tops and cargo pants, as in a robust society they should. But will a natural keel remain, as we face multiflex, multiplex change? “Hogging” the spotlight, playing possum, resembling a deer in the headlights, being buffaloed or played like a fish: will the clarity of what is said hold? A “tiger,” a “turtle,” a “toad.” After the oceans have been vacuumed of protein and people are eating farmed tilapia and caked algae, will Aesop’s platform of markers remain?

Edward Hoagland is a longtime nature and travel writer, and the author of the forthcoming novel “Children Are Diamonds: An African Apocalypse.”

How to Make Sense of Your Workplace

Dee-Vine

Canadian Productivity

Busy Wednesday Night?

David Berner – Founder & Broadcaster

David Berner is a broadcaster, actor, writer, teacher, and addictions expert.

Mr. Berner was the Founder of Canada’s first Residential Treatment Centre for drug addicts and alcoholics. The program thrives 45 years later and sends hundreds of people each year back into the community as clean and sober citizens.

In the late 1970’s, Mr. Berner shifted his energies to Show Business, where he has compiled a 5-page resume of performances in radio, television, stage and film.

He was a Province Newspaper columnist and he has just published his first book, All the Way Home, chronicling the history and theory of his addictions work.

Audiences best know him as an enormously popular Talk Show Host on CKNW Radio. These days you can see him four times a week on his public affairs show on SHAW COMMUNITY TV, CABLE 4.

He runs therapy groups at The Orchard Recovery Centre and he is the Executive Director of The Drug Prevention Network of Canada.

The Pacific Club is pleased to present David Berner as our guest speaker on Wednesday, March 13, 2013.

JUSTICE WAAAAAAY DELAYED

PARK BOARD KABOB

The Family Preem?

A LITTLE DECORUM PLEASE

THere you go - almost 2 hours of music heaven - Rubinstein/Chopin

DEEP ROGUE RAM

BIG DAILY LAUGH

Patrick Brazeau has been put on a leave of absence after the Senate enacted a rarely used power to suspend one of its own, saying the move was needed to protect the reputation of the upper chamber and the "public trust and confidence in Parliament."

Hahahahahaha...The reputation? Hahahahaha...

Read the rest of the story here if you must, and then reflect on these two notions:

With the leave of absence, Brazeau retains his title and salary - $132,000 a year. Of course, like most Senators he was already committed to doing nothing, but now he really must do nothing.

I am only one of many hundreds of thousands of Canadians who have consistently said close down this august body of hot air. A chamber of sober, second thought? I can point to several (dare we call them?) members who wouldn't know sober if they fell in a pile of it.

WHY SHE LOVES HIM SO

In case you missed it this morning, HERE is Vaughn Palmer's nail-on-the-head column on Christy Clark and Sukh Dhaliwal.

The key paragraph is this:

He [Dhaliwal] did shirk his responsibility to disclose his legal difficulties to press, party and the electorate alike until he got caught out publicly, a point the Liberals themselves made in their Friday morning press release.

The one politically incorrect issue that never gets mentioned in reports of this on-going cheesy melodrama is that Mr. D's sole contribution to Canadian life is that he can deliver busloads of voters - many of whom have no idea what it is exactly that they are so enthusiastically supporting.

But not to despair, kids.

A page or two later, The Sun advises us that construction has begun in the Okanagan on an amazing new radio telescope.

"It's almost like time travel," said Kris Sigurdson, an astrophysicist from UBC and co-investigator on the project. "It's looking back into the past and how the universe was at that time."

Sigurdson said scientists know the universe is expanding, but they don't know why. They are also trying to learn more about the composition of "dark energy," which makes up about 70 per cent of the universe.

They could have saved themselves a lot of money by training their eye on the legislature and on Parliament - dark energy galore!

We All Need a Yellow Ukelele

Rictus

Final penny photo-op with Jim Flaherty cost $56,000

 

The federal government decided to get rid of the penny because it was costing 1.6 cents to make. 

But now we're learning that final penny cost $56,000 to make, some of it paid for by taxpayers.

 

That's because Finance Minister Jim Flaherty stamped it himself at the Royal Canadian Mint in Winnipeg and also held a press conference and photo op for the occasion on May 4.

Postmedia News obtained the documents about the event through access to information. Flaherty and his director of communications spent just over $6,000 on their trip to Winnipeg, but the majority of the event was paid for by the Mint. 

Dropping the pennyThe government has decided to phase the penny out of existence starting this fall, CBC's Havard Gould reportThe Mint spent $50,000, although spokesperson Christine Aquino said taxpayers didn't spend a penny on this because the Mint is a federal for-profit Crown Corporation and generates its own profits by producing coins. They make money literally and they also generate a profit by producing coins for more than a dozen countries and making collector coins. 

"People are hoarding these pennies in their jars at home and now we're encouraging people to give the pennies to charities and that'll be good for the Canadian economy and our communities as well," Flaherty told CBC after the May 4 photo op. He said the penny has simply become a nuisance to people and businesses and doesn't expect consumers will lose out due to rounding.

The government says killing the penny will save taxpayers $11 million a year. The final penny that Flaherty stamped isn't in circulation, but sits at the Currency Museum of the Bank of Canada in Ottawa.

Mr. Flaherty was elected to serve the Canadian public. He could have chosen either to walk across the street to the Ottawa-based mint for his 15 seconds of ill-got fate or to declare the whole exercise silly and not worth the penny saved.

Because he did neither, and chose instead to spend $58,000 of our money, he does not deserve another moment of our attention.

Because voters are relentlessly stupid, he will be elected again.

The Efficiences of Reform

MARGARET WENTE

Saskatchewan knows what Tommy Douglas would do

The Globe and Mail February 7^th 2013

[Thanks to Dr. Brian Day for this item]

When Janice MacKinnon teaches her course in public policy at the University of Saskatchewan, she likes to tell the story about the elderly Ontario woman who fell in the lobby of a hospital and broke her hip. (The woman had been visiting her dying husband.) Hospital staff told her that, unfortunately, they couldn’t help her until she called an ambulance to take her to the emergency room.

The story captures what’s wrong with health care in Canada – bureaucratization, rigidity in attitudes and work rules, lack of common sense. Ms. MacKinnon, a former NDP finance minister in Saskatchewan, has loads of common sense. She also has a few ideas for improving health care. Here’s one: Let private clinics, not hospitals, perform routine surgeries.

This idea is so controversial in Liberal-ruled Ontario that it’s not even on the radar. Public-sector unions and academics denounce it as the first step on the slippery slope to dismantling Medicare. Yet, it’s working well in the cradle of Medicare itself – Saskatchewan. “They’ve kept it very low profile,” Ms. MacKinnon tells me. “They’ve been selling it as a solution to waiting lists.”

The Saskatchewan Surgical Initiative began in 2010 as a response to long wait times for surgeries. Today, the province contracts out a growing number of procedures to private clinics. The unions (and some doctors) warned that the clinics would cost more money because the profits would be “siphoned off.” They wanted the government to expand the public system, instead.

Here’s what happened under the new system: Wait times plunged. Safety and quality improved. Overall costs for the contracted-out procedures declined by 28 per cent. The cost for some procedures was cut in half.

How is this possible? “The clinics are very focused and they only do a small number of procedures,” Ms. MacKinnon says. “They’re small and easy to manage, and they’re not unionized.” By contrast, hospitals are large, complex, inflexible bureaucracies with several different unions. “You need a huge administrative capacity just to handle the union contracts and the grievance process.”

Patients prefer the private clinics, too. They’re more convenient, and offer better service. It’s also easier to park.

But wait. What would Tommy Douglas think?

“You know, he ran a very efficient government,” Ms. MacKinnon says. “He believed in sound public services delivered efficiently. And that’s what the unions are missing. Their alternative was that we would pay more for the staffing of the facility and the public would have fewer and slower services.”

Ms. MacKinnon, a cabinet minister in Saskatchewan during the 1990s, is in the Tommy Douglas mould. She was the first finance minister in that period to balance the budget.

“The real problem is that health-care costs are squeezing out education and social services, which have important influences on health,” she says. “Tommy would not have tolerated that.”

Nor would he have tolerated the generational inequity that has become a central feature of the system. As it’s now structured, the children and grandchildren of the baby boomers will pay a large share of the boomers’ health-care costs. According to one study cited by Ms. MacKinnon, Canadians born between 1958 and 1967 will consume over $4,000 more in health-care services than they’ll pay in health-care taxes. But people born between 1998 and 2007 will pay over $18,000more in health-care taxes than they’ll take out. And people born after 1988 will wind up paying peak taxes that are twice as high as what the boomers paid.

That’s not fair, Ms. MacKinnon says. “You can’t have a society built on the youngest members being stressed to the point where they lose hope.”

Her answer: Change the income tax system, so some of the health-care costs are borne by those who use it. She explains her reasoning in a new report, Health Care Reform from the Cradle of Medicare, published by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. Some will say her ideas are heresy, but I think they’re common sense. As she puts it, “We can best honour the spirit and legacy of Tommy Douglas by reform.”

One of the greatest tunes - One of the greatest players

MEDDLING, of the Lowest order

One likes to think - naively, optimistically - that certain  principles abide.

Here's one.

Democracy is about engagement. The more citizens are involved in their local communities, the healthier we all are. Neighborhood watch, block parties,  community centres, volunteerism - these are among the many signs of a mindful local group who recognize both their privacy and their common ground.

But there are other principles at play.

Like, money.

And, as we always say in Journalism 101, "follow the money."

This bone-headed maneuver on the part of the Vancouver Park Board to seize control of community centres is all about a pittance in cash revenues. It is not only stupid; it is cheesy and small-minded.

Local citizens have volunteered their time and energies for many yeras now to assure that yoga, language lessons, bridge games, tennis, and a score of other activities are available and affordable in their immediate neighborhoods.

It is the lively commitment of these exemplary involved citizens that make community centres tick.

Now, the august gang of elected thieves calling themselves the Park Board have decided that their bureaucracy can do a better job.

Pathetic. Tragic. A direct hit to the heart of the democratic ideal.

When this story first surfaced, I asked myself once again (This question comes up about once every two years.), "Isn't the Park Board just a part of Vancouver City Government?"

It didn't take long for my old buddy, Allen Garr, to answer that question in the Courier.

And right smartly too.

The penny drops.

Is it time to phase out Vision's Penny?

By Allen Garr, Columnist February 7, 2013

 

There is at least one penny a growing number of people in Vancouver would be happy to see taken out of circulation. That would be Penny Ballem, Vancouver's city manager.

Vancouver Vision operatives insist it's nothing but NPA political blarney to believe that the whole mismanaged assault by the Vancouver park board on the city's community centre volunteer boards of directors is being driven by Ballem.

Her Vision Vancouver political masters may eventually pay the price for this appalling behaviour. But community centre board members from across the city note it was Ballem who kept turning up like the proverbial bad penny when she joined her direct report, park board general manager Malcolm Bromley, in a series of meetings a few months back. Community centre presidents and their boards were told the park board would, in a new Joint Operating Agreement, be taking control of all community centre revenues. And that was "non-negotiable."

More recently, on Tuesday evening while Green Party Coun. Adriane Carr was sitting in a public hearing at city hall regarding a contentious West End development, her cell phone rang. It was Ballem. Carr would get back to her at the next beak.

It turns out that on Monday, Carr, following city council procedure, filed a notice of motion to ask staff essentially this: given the park board's intention to take over the revenues of community centres which would most likely dampen future fundraising efforts by community center volunteer boards, what was the city's estimation of the funding shortfall this would create for the park board? And, given that the park board is a department of the city from whence it receives its budget, what contingency plan does the city have to make up for that funding shortfall?

A reasonable request based on a reasonable assumption, no?

But it's also reasonable to assume we will never find out. Because according to Carr what Ballem phoned to say was this: Carr's notice of motion would never see the light of day. Carr says she was told that her motion asking for information could jeopardize the "negotiations" now going on between the park board and the community centres.

When I emailed Ballem and asked about her extraordinary move to muzzle an elected representative, her communications machinery spit out an elaborate "no comment."

Incidentally, the public hearing Carr was sitting through Tuesday night under city hall rules ended at 11 p.m.. It would continue at a later date to hear the rest of the 50 or so speakers. (The rule says hearings must end at 10 p.m. but can, with a unanimous vote of council, be extended by one hour.)

Nothing so civilized was contemplated across town the night before. That's when 74 people lined up to speak in a packed room at the West End Community Centre. This was at an "emergency meeting" called for by what is an increasingly inept and disrespectful park board to hear from the public on the board's plan to have their way with community centre funds. For decades, these funds had been left in the hands of volunteer boards to be used for everything from renovations to the creation of new facilities. That was ending.

The approximately 30 pages of material for the meeting was not available until 11 that morning, which meant that most board members who work for a living didn't see it until an hour or so before the meeting started.

As you may already know, the meeting started at 6:30 p.m. and clattered on for nine hours, which made it 3:30 in the morning with members of the dwindling audience repeatedly asking for an adjournment only to be rebuffed.

It finally reached a sorry state of frustration because of the lateness of the hour and the vast majority of the speakers opposing what the park board was up to, frequently pointing out significant errors in the material being presented. I was long gone by the time the Vision majority blithely passed the motions to support what they had intended to do all along and cops had to be called in to restrain those who were left.

This passes for what Vision Vancouver calls citizen engagement.

agarr@vancourier.com
 
© Copyright (c) Vancouver Courier

                                            *     *     *

This morning, The Sun advises us that City Councillor Adrian Carr has had to hire a lawyer to get simple financial information from her own - our own - government.

Ballem has been a tyrannical autocrat of the worst order from Day One. It is only slightly amusing that such a happy feel-good  biking, goat-feeding council should need Axe Lady in their corner. Good cop, bad cop redux.

Let's get a new City manager and let's leave the good folks to run their own pre-natal classes, shall we?