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Today we fulfilled a travel wish we've harboured for many, many years. We saw two sets of paleolithic cave paintings.

* * * *

The day started out a bit interesting, with an early-morning phone call that appeared to be from our dogsitter, scaring me (although it turned out to be a mistake), and a non-working shower. While we ate breakfast, the desk clerk wanted to tell us the shower was fixed, so she wrote this on a scrap of paper: "The bath this one are repaired. Forgives the inconvenience." I have no doubt my Spanish sounds equally amusing.

We had to wait for the tourist information office to open in order to get a regional map; our large road map of Spain is useless for local driving. This meant getting a later start than we wanted, so we were unsure if we'd get to the first cave in time for our 10:40 reservation. As it turned out, the cave was much further away than we thought, and after we found the town, we then had to drive past the town, leave the car on a trail, and walk up steep switchbacks - a good 20 minute walk uphill - to the cave entrance. At the top of the trail, there was a little cabin, locked up, and we assumed the tour had left without us.

As it turned out, this was great. When the "tour" came back, it consisted of one park ranger tour guide, and only one tourist. For this tiny cave, only six people can go in at a time. Because we missed our appointment, we had the next scheduled tour to ourselves.

This was Cueva de Covalanas, the Covalanas Cave. It's one of the least developed in the region in terms of tourism. The guide spoke only Spanish, but I told her if she spoke slowly, I could understand. And when she remembered to speak slowly, I did! I translated for Allan as best as I could.

The guide unlocked the entrance with a key, and we all walked in. The only light was her little pen flashlight. We walked for a few minutes, then she turned off her light so we could see how dark the cave really was. It is the darkest dark you can experience. Total blackness. Even after a few minutes, your eyes don't adjust, because there is nothing to adjust to. You literally cannot see your hand in front of your face.

Then she clicked on her light and there on the wall: a deer. It's drawn in vivid red. It was drawn 16,000 to 20,000 years ago, and it looks like it could have been put there yesterday.

The guide traced the form of the deer, using the shadow of her finger as a pointer, showing us how the artist used the natural contours of the cave as part of the animal's form. By moving her flashlight, she showed us how the animal form is better seen with indirect light. With her flashlight above the figure, rather than directly in front of it, the shape really came alive.

The guide explained how people didn't live in these caves, they lived in caves below, closer to where we parked our car, and only used these caves above for some special significance. She told us how they would make light with fire (burning animal fat) and how they made the paint out of minerals. The paint isn't found naturally, it was a painstaking process, very deliberate. And of course the painter was drawing from memory, without a model or a photo in front of him.

Using her light and the shadow of her finger, the guide showed us several more animal forms. The animal's name translates as deer in English, but it looks more like what we would call an antelope. There was also a horse that the artist portrayed with its mane flowing and legs running, the front legs not drawn but formed by the rock.

There are 18 paintings in all. They are all red, and made with a distinctive style: the painter used his or her thumb to make dots or daubs. You can get very close to the paintings, and they are incredibly well preserved.

Our guide told us about how the great cave paintings at Altamira are now locked up - the irony of permanent preservation, but their gifts no longer reaching the public. She said, there are the reproductions, but it's not the same. To her, the best cave is Covalanas, because it's dark, and not developed, and you can be so close, and the red is so vivid. She was clearly passionate about her work, and often she would forget to speak slowly, and I would get only the barest gist, but it didn't matter. It was just a privilege to be there. Allan and I were both very moved.

Since you can't take photos in the cave, we bought a book. The text is only in Spanish, but the photos are wonderful. We took a few photos of the surrounding mountains, with sheep grazing in mountain pastures. As we left, two people had arrived for the next tour.

* * * *

We weren't sure if we could make our next appointment, which was in the complete opposite direction, and over the provincial border in Asturias, plus there was some road construction along the way. But we did make it, just in time, to the little town of Ribadesella, to see the Cuevas de Tito Bustello, named for one of the cavers who stumbled on them in 1968.

This was an entirely different experience, and an excellent counterpart to our first tour. At Tito Bustello, as many as 20 people can go in the cave at a time. There is a specially constructed tourist entrance, with a cement floor and artificial lighting on the floor. It is still dark, and wet, and slippery, but the cave has been transformed for tourists. There's a large interpretative centre that (supposedly) will one day replace the caves when they are closed to tourism.

At this cave, the group walked a long way in, through large open rooms full of stalactites and stalagmites, and strange, beautiful rock formations. The guide talked quickly and incessantly. We were the only non-Spanish-speakers in the group, and mostly we just didn't understand anything. I could generally understand the subject of the talk - now he's describing how the cave was formed by the river, now he's describing what paleolithic people ate - but that was about it.

We walked a long ways in, towards the originally entrance to the cave, which has since been closed by a landslide. The guide turned off his light so we could experience the darkness, and also asked for silence, so we could hear the rushing water of the river (which you can't see). Then the guide used the same techniques - the flashlight and finger shadows - to show us a large area painted with red and black deer, antelope, bison, and geometric shapes. Above them all, too high for a person to paint without some type of ladder or scaffolding, is the beautiful image of a horse's head: the image that has come to symbolize cave paintings in the north of Spain.

There are many more paintings in Tito Bustillo, but they are in small spaces that are now closed to the public.

After the tour, we spent time in the interpretive centre, which was truly excellent, signed in both Spanish and English. There was an exhibit on how the paintings were discovered by a group of cavers purely by chance, and a lot about the painting techniques, and the lives of the people who created them.

* * * *

I love to think about these people, fully human, just like us. People who are the ancestors of all of us, people who made tools, who learned how to survive - but who also made and wore jewelry, and made art, and fashioned tools that were not only useful but beautiful. This means we share something with these long-ago humans, we have a commonality with them. They are part of our shared heritage, the heritage that links all humans as one. And, as far as we know, they were the world's first artists.

I can go on and on about this stuff. If you haven't yet seen the Werner Herzog movie "Cave of Forgotten Dreams," I hope you will. He captured and expressed the wonder I feel about this work.

* * * *

After we drove back, we walked into the little town centre for dinner. Dinner was better tonight - cocido montenes, a local stew with white beans, greens, and sausage, and some pork medallions, and more flan, and dinner always includes water, wine, and bread.

We end the day the way it began, with a mistranslation. On the menu, a dish is described as "loin of pork, including its landfill".

If Stephen Harper wants to operate a quasi-criminal enterprise on the public dime then he has to take full responsibility for it.

The Prime Minister's Office is his and his alone.  He decides who works there and he decides what they do or don't do.  It is funded from the public purse but is accountable to no one save the prime minister.

The Harper PMO is not only unaccountable, it's opaque.  What goes on in there goes on behind closed doors.   There is no transparency whatsoever at least until something leaks out or erupts.  In other words, it's perfectly designed for corruption.  It is the perfect vehicle for someone like Stephen Harper to have done what he cannot risk being caught doing himself.

In the wake of the latest scandal there was utter shock in the media about the resignation of Harper chief of staff, Nigel Wright.  The universal take on Wright was that he was the ultimate straight arrow, a great guy.   That might have been true, at least before Wright became entangled with the Harper PMO but then everything changed.

Put it down to the culture of corruption that inevitably emanates from the Grand Corrupter himself, the prime minister.  Stephen Harper is the poster boy of sociopathy.  He is a ruthless and amoral character who refuses to accept restraint or responsibility.  He showed us he was bent at the outset when he removed portraits of the prime ministers of Canada from the foyer of the House of Commons and replaced them with photographs of himself, the narcissistic hallmark of a sociopath.  In his daily life he shows a cold, detached and utter lack of conscience.  His two most frequently observed character traits are mean-spiritedness and vindictiveness.  Stephen Harper does not play well with others nor does he play by the rules which is why an organization like the PMO will inevitably devolve into a criminal enterprise.

The current scandal is a three-part affair.   The minor scandal deals with the Cavendish Cottager.  The intermediate scandal lies in the Senate itself and the Conservative senators who control it and have allowed it to be corrupted.   The major scandal lies in the Prime Minister's Office through which Stephen Harper has pulled the strings in all three scandals.   Follow those strings back and you're sure to find them in Harper's very own hand, or at least you might but for his cut-out, his font of plausible deniability,  his PMO.

Mike Duffy was Stephen Harper's pick to serve as a senator for Prince Edward Island.   The statutes were clear enough.   Duffy obviously wasn't "resident" in Prince Edward Island as stipulated but rules, for Stephen Harper, are inconveniences to be circumvented or bent wherever necessary.  In this way a statutory requirement was treated as an irrelevant formality.

Duffy was a loyal and energetic servant of his Master.  He was a fundraising machine.  In his many appearances across the country, when Duffy spoke he usually did it with the venom of the man he served.  He really dished out the ridicule.  Harper must have loved it.  Of Harper's many Senate appointments, Duffy was the highest-profile by far.

Then arose a controversy about certain senators and their expenses, particularly extra housing allowances claimed by senators who seemed to be resident in Ottawa, Duffy foremost among them.  The rules, bent by Harper at the outset, were now to be examined, tested.   This promised to be not only bad news for Duffy but a huge embarrassment for the prime minister.  A little string pulling would be in order.

When the Senate appointed independent auditor, Deloitte, to review the suspect senators, their claims and status, the PMO brought Duffy in-house.  As Duffy's unfortunate e-mails of the time indicate, he was given a 3-part deal.  He would be given the cash to clear his Senate tab, to reimburse the expenses he had improperly claimed.  He was ordered to stay silent and not to cooperate with the auditors.  "They," as in Stephen Harper, would intervene with the Senate committee and see to it that their report on Duffy "went easy on" him.

Three pieces, sublimely sociopathic - an under the table payment, subversion of an audit process and corruption of a Senate committee.  Now tell me that was Nigel Wright's doing.

It all worked.   Duffy dutifully handed the Senate someone else's cash.  Duffy spurned the requests of the independent auditors for information and documents.  The Senate committee, or at least the Tories in charge of it, laundered the report, removing in particular the damning finding that Duffy was not nor ever had been since childhood resident in Prince Edward Island.

And it all worked, right up until one or more dissidents, believed to be from the Senate, began feeding information and documents to a CTV parliamentary reporter.

The leaks were staged in such a way as to elicit denials or admissions that tied the principal actors to their stories.  Layer by layer leaks were fed to the CTV reporter as the cement hardened around the feet of Duffy and Nigel Wright.  The final straw was the leak to the CBC of the original Senate report on Duffy that, read in the context of the official version, revealed how the Tories who controlled the committee had been compromised, corrupted.  The story of just how that happened is still to come out and may be the most telling of all.

When Stephen Harper addressed the Conservative Parliamentary caucus on Tuesday morning, he displayed all the aplomb that might be expected of a sociopath in his circumstances.  He took no responsibility whatsoever.  He portrayed himself as the victim and blamed the whole mess on everyone else, right up to and including staff in his own PMO.

Curiously, he didn't seem to single out Duffy.  Why not?  After all he was spreading the blame pretty thick on everyone and anyone else he could think of.  Presumably because Duffy can't be scapegoated lest people ask too many questions about his "special handling" throughout this affair.   Duffy also probably knows too much, the sort of stuff that could dissolve Harper's plausible deniability of his role in all three scandals.   For this is Harper's doing, front to back, start to finish, and it reveals him to be utterly corrupt, head to toe.

Harper isn't going to bring in fresh blood to the PMO, not at this point when so much is at stake.  He can't trust new people.  That's why he fell back on his principal secretary, Novak, his young but fiercely loyal confidante.

It is right that Harper doesn't have to account or report on the activities of the Prime Minister's Office.   The PMO can't function without plenty of privacy.  It is a partisan agency and every prime minister needs that to do the job.   But a PMO  that has no accountability is a PMO, just like Harper's, that is ripe for corruption.  That's why prime minister Harper must be held personally responsible for everything that comes out of his PMO, good and bad alike.  He doesn't get to play victim and point fingers.  The skullduggery that goes on inside his personal enclave is his, in full.

Harper lost any benefit of the doubt after the Bruce Carson scandal.  From that point on he had a special obligation to stay on top of his PMO and ensure nothing like that happened again.  Even if you're willing to accept his absurd claim that he knew nothing of  the Wright-Duffy dealings, it doesn't matter.  That's on Harper, squarely on him.

As Stephen Harper said of then prime minister Jean Chretien: "He is the leader and a leader is responsible for the actions of the people he leads.  If he had a right or honourable bone in his body, he'd admit that and resign immediately."

Well put, Steve.  
 

It's not a big problem, yet, in Canada and most of us wouldn't know there's a problem at all.   But much of our world, including the United States, is already experiencing serious freshwater challenges.

Global warming plays a huge role in the worsening freshwater crisis.  A warmer atmosphere holds more water vapour and that triggers a variety of consequences from providing additional energy to fuel severe storm events to disruptions of the very precipitation patterns that enabled the creation and growth of our civilization.  In the future places that already have enough or too much rainfall will get more and places that don't have enough will get less.

We're familiar with the projection that mankind's population will swell to over nine billion within this century.  A new report forecasts that a majority of those nine billion will live with permanent water shortages.

Welcome to the Athropocene:

We are about to go out exploring downtown Edmonton, so just a little something for your viewing pleasure today. It might be useful to bear in mind the context within which this should be viewed, the decision by Mike Duffy in 2008 to show the false starts and stops of Stephane Dion, then the Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, a decision that some say was a significant contributing factor in the Liberal electoral woes that ensued.

The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council found that CTV Atlantic violated the Radio Television News Directors Association Code of Ethics in a broadcast on October 9, 2008:

The CBSC has concluded that CTV violated Article 8 of the Code, regarding decency, consideration and conduct, for broadcasting the interview outtakes after it had said that it would not do so.

Hmm... decency, consideration, conduct - seems like the now disgraced Seantor Duffy learned nothing from the decision.



H/t Chrisine Reid, Canadians Rallying to Unseat Stephen HarperRecommend this Post

For anyone who has been paying attention, it's been evident for a long time that Stephen Harper is a phony. There has always been a chasm between what he says and what he does. The Duffy-Wright Affair has once again illustrated that chasm. Michael Harris writes that Harper is no conservative:

Stephen Harper has forgotten that real conservatives care about values lived, not values espoused. They detest dishonesty, sleaziness and abuse of office. All three of those traits drip from the PMO/Senate scandal like poison from a boil. Before scurrying away to an insignificant Perrier-fest in Peru, the prime minister failed to drain that abscess.
Harper defines conservatism as blind loyalty -- to him. He does not, however, display any sense of loyalty to his underlings.

Consider the prime minister’s ride down the slippery pole of changing stories. When the Mike and Nigel story first broke, the PM’s chief of staff was practically canonized — you know, a saintly friend paying back improperly-claimed taxpayers’ money that a semi-penitent Conservative senator could not repay himself. Why, Pierre Poilievre himself said it. So it had to be true, right?

Then Dubious Duffy morphed into Bad Duffy when he contradicted Nigel Wright’s version of that $90,000 cheque. Out of caucus he went. Next, when it became obvious the St. Nigel story was coming across as bogus stigmata, the PM’s “full support” turned into blaming his former chief-of-staff. It was all Nigel’s fault now and the PM knew absolutely nothing about anything.
Harper has played Canada's real conservatives for fools -- and he has done it for a long time. The backbench should do some thinking. When things got tough, Harper left them to shoulder the burden. If they continue to do that, they truly are fools.

Assorted content to end your week.

- For all the talk of fraud and cover-ups among the Cons this week, the most important story on that front looks to be the release of Judge Mosley's decision on Robocon - featuring findings of fact based on the best evidence presented by the Cons (and affected voters) that the 2011 election was marred by electoral fraud facilitated by the Cons' voter database, and that the first Cons covered it up by destroying the records which would have allowed investigators to determine who was actually responsible, then engaged in questionable tactics to keep the facts from seeing the light of day.

- Don Lenihan sees the glaring gap between spin and reality on the Cons' Clusterduff scandal as a revelation as to the Harper government's contempt for the truth, while Michael Harris also treats the Senate scandal as a comparatively new development. But Paul Wells is right to note that this is merely another example of a long-standing Harper philosophy that facts and other people are to be thrown under the bus whenever it suits his political interests - meaning that the bigger question is why anybody has taken the Cons' word for anything in the meantime.

- And lest anybody think that the Cons' culture of compulsive concealment is limited to scandals, Colin Horgan finds some prime examples of blatant lies about simple facts in Question Period, while Mike de Souza reports that Joe Oliver is trying to keep the contents of a $16 million, publicly-funded oil industry propaganda campaign secret from the Canadian public.

- Finally, the Senate itself is certainly looking all the worse based on David Tkachuk's remarkable admissions that he kept in touch with the PMO to make sure that his committee's report on Mike Duffy's expense claims fit with the Cons' political interests. But Althia Raj reports that there's plenty more ludicrous abuse of public trust and money where that came from - such as substantial annual payments to the chairs of committees even when they're not meeting.

OMG. What did I do to deserve this? So I can do it again, and again, and again.

Because this is just too good to be true eh? 

As if that Con scandal in the House of Pork wasn't already one of the most amazing shows I've seen recently. Right up there with The Bates Motel. Or Rob Ford and the Scary Crack Dealers.

Now if you can believe it, here comes Mike Duffy demanding a full public inquiry !!!!
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Maude Barlow puts the robo-call decision in perspective.

Just hours ago the long-awaited Federal Court ruling on election fraud was released...

In a clear and bold statement, Judge Richard Mosley wrote: "I find that electoral fraud occurred during the 41st General Election."

While his ruling stopped short of annulling election results, this is a powerful victory for Kay Burkhart, Ken Ferance, Yvonne Kafka, Bill Kerr, Sandra McEwing, Tom Parlee, Jeff Reid and Peggy Walsh Craig – the eight brave Canadian voters who launched their legal challenges and the thousands of us who continue to stand behind them.

The judge raised grave concerns that the fraudulent calls "struck at the integrity of the electoral process by attempting to dissuade voters from casting ballots for their preferred candidates. This form of 'voter suppression,' was, until the 41st General Election, largely unknown in this country."

From the outset, the eight applicants argued that the fraudulent robocalls were widespread, targeted and centrally organized – which is precisely what Judge Mosley found. "I am satisfied that it has been established that misleading calls about the locations of polling stations were made to electors in ridings across the country, including the subject ridings, and that the purpose of those calls was to suppress the votes of electors who had indicated their voting preference in response to earlier voter identification calls," and that "the most likely source of the information used to make the misleading calls was the CIMS database maintained and controlled by the CPC [Conservative Party of Canada], accessed for that purpose by a person or persons currently unknown to this Court."

Of course the CPC will try to paint this as a victory, but they have nothing to celebrate. That is unless an attempt to steal the election using their database, to which only senior Conservative Party members have access, is a cause for rejoicing. This is a serious indictment of the CPC.

Judge Mosley himself praised the eight applicants for their virtue, while chastising the Conservative MPs. "It has seemed to me that the applicants sought to achieve and hold the high ground of promoting the integrity of the electoral process while the respondent MPs engaged in trench warfare in an effort to prevent this case from coming to a hearing on the merits."

And Mosley even made special note of their shameful obstructionist tactics, stating, "Despite the obvious public interest in getting to the bottom of the allegations, the CPC made little effort to assist with the investigation at the outset despite early requests. I note that counsel for the CPC was informed while the election was taking place that the calls about polling station changes were improper. While it was begrudgingly conceded during oral argument that what occurred was "absolutely outrageous", the record indicates that the stance taken by the respondent MPs from the outset was to block these proceedings by any means."

This is the third part of a series on evolution and politics. You can also check out “Why Bacteria are Smarter than Drug Companies” and “Science Denialism and the Future of Humanity.”

One of the most common truisms you’ll run across in commentary on politics and the economy today is that the private sector is efficient and the government is not. For this reason, we should leave all policy problems to be solved by the private sector if at all possible: it can solve them cheapest. It’s only when the market fails that the government should step in to provide a solution. Otherwise, governments should avoid the temptation to “pick winners” by intervening in “the market.” Governments are usually effective at solving problems but always inefficient, whereas the market is always efficient and sometimes ineffective.

Leaving aside the partisan nonsense of the present Conservative Party, there are plenty of intelligent public commentators who take this view. I suggest reading Andrew Coyne of the National Post. (Naturally, Coyne is frequently rewarded for his ideological integrity by his right-wing readers with declarations that he is a deceitful liberal stooge consumed by hatred of Stephen Harper.) My last column looked like it took this position. I argued that the free market cannot develop lasting solutions to bacterial evolution in time to prevent the end of the antibiotic era, and the perpetual public health crisis that awaits us on the other side. I said that government investment was the solution.

That may be true, but it’s only part of the story. Governments don’t somehow stand aloof from evolutionary pressures. In point of fact, we are hard done by when we reduce everything to talking about “efficiency.” Both companies and governments are entirely efficient — just at doing different things. And there are some problems which can’t be solved effectively by either the free market or government, efficiently or not. Efficiency can seem like a tempting thing to focus on if you’ve taken an economics course or two, but left on its own, it’s actually an exceedingly dangerous idea.

The dodo and the moa could tell us this, if there were any of them left. One of the surprising discoveries of early European empires was that isolated islands around the world, like New Zealand and Mauritius, often had unique flightless birds on them. These are, or were anyways, the ancestors of birds that got marooned on the islands and gradually lost the ability to fly. The evolutionary history, of course, was much less interesting to our ancestors than the fun that was to be had in killing, stuffing, and/or eating such birds. Consequently most large flightless birds, including both the moa and the dodo, are now extinct.

The fact that the dodo might have survived the arrival of European sailors if it had possessed the capacity to fly and to fear potential predators which its ancestors doubtless had when they arrived on Mauritius is important, but is less interesting than why the dodo lost those things in the first place. The theory of natural selection supplies an answer: they’re expensive. There was really nowhere to fly to on Mauritius, and there were certainly no predators to watch out for.

To put this in economic terms, the dodo-pigeons that arrived on Mauritius a few million years ago were an inefficient design. They had wings, but nowhere to fly to. They had a sophisticated predator detection and escape system in their brains, but there were no predators to detect or escape from. Because skittishness takes up a lot of energy, and because a lot has to be sacrificed to maintain a body capable of flight, these dodo-pigeons suffered from some real liabilities. Nature, like the free market, is very good at rooting out these sorts of inefficiencies, and over the next million years or so, it did so very effectively. By 1500, the dodo was once again a very efficient bird.

Dodos didn’t have education or the capacity for abstract thought. If they did, they probably could have agreed that the ability to detect and escape potential predators would be a good thing to keep around in case predators ever re-appeared. I’m not sure it would have mattered. Contrary to what many people believe, the end goal of evolution is not the survival or the improvement of the species. Evolution, like the free market, doesn’t have end goals. It’s not that dodos wanted to be killed off by newly arrived predators. It’s just that this possibility didn’t seem relevant at the time.

Thus we return to governments. The question, as Janice Gross Stein explained at the Massey Lectures more than a decade ago, should never really be whether government or the market is more efficient. The question should always be, efficient at what? Unlike evolution, and unlike the free market, social beings like us should be goal-oriented. It’s pointless to talk about reducing costs unless and until we’ve settled on what we’re trying to accomplish in the first place.

But this isn’t just a question of whether we should focus on efficiency in government or not. Governments aren’t actually “inefficient” in an objective sense, any more than the pigeon or the dodo. It’s just that some of the things they’re efficient at doing don’t seem particularly valuable from the much more narrow perspective adopted by most liberal and conservative parties today, which is concerned only with the monetary cost on the one hand and the production of a good or service on the other hand. Democratic governments also do a range of other things. For instance, they redistribute wealth. They provide lots of good-paying jobs. They provide seemingly interminable opportunities for consultation, compromise, and tinkering with the goals of public enterprises.

We now say that such things are “inefficient,” and from a neoliberal perspective, that’s true enough. So off with them! But notice that this isn’t actually a question of efficiency at all, but a question of which outcome is more desirable. If the only thing you’re interested in is getting the greatest number of goods and services for the lowest monetary cost, then it’s true that democracy, wealth redistribution, and lots of good-paying jobs are unnecessary add-ons. But this isn’t about which is more efficient. It’s about which goals you think are worth pursuing.

The problem gets even more serious when we move away from the ideological level and look at real-world problems, because in addition to which goals you think are desirable, there’s also the question of whether the goals you think you’re pursuing are the ones you’re actually pursuing. Take grade inflation, for instance. It’s now frequently alleged that the education system in this country has failed because you can no longer fail under-performing students and because students are earning ridiculously high grades despite doing very little work. Professors lament that freshman students don’t know basic grammar. Right-wing columnists complain that graduates aren’t ready for the job market.

Both may be right, but in fact, the school system has been very successful. Many years ago now, we agreed that in a successful school system, fewer students will fail, and more graduates will have high grades. We quickly set about encouraging people, programs, and ideas that promised to boost graduate rates and grades. And now, we’ve succeeded. Not many students fail. Lots of students have high grades.

Ah, you say, but that’s not what we really wanted: what we really wanted were smarter graduates. Well, that’s true enough. But we didn’t incentivize genuine improvements to the education system. We incentivized cheap and easy tinkering which increased grades, lowered failure rates, and increased graduate rates. And we got what we asked for. Genuine reforms, in contrast, would be expensive and difficult. So would picking administrators likely to implement such reforms. Understandably, we didn’t opt for the difficult route.

The problem becomes even more difficult when you look at real problems, that have to be solved to ensure our long-term survival, instead of theoretical problems, like universal healthcare or public education, which are certainly important to us as a society but aren’t directly necessary for our survival. Take, for instance, climate change, about which I’ll have more to say next time. Most governments now claim to agree that climate change is an existential threat which must be confronted. Most educated people agree with this sentiment. Most heads of state are educated enough, or have aides who are educated enough, not to doubt them when they say they realize the magnitude of the problem.

And yet, year by year, the possibility that the human species will intentionally take any large-scale measures to prevent or mitigate civilization-threatening climate change dwindles.

Which is okay. After all, such measures would be inefficient. And we don’t want to be inefficient.

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Fascist-friendly concert planned for Toronto June 22, 2013:

This link was sent to me by a reliable source. At the moment, no venue for the concert has been announced. Instead of adding my own commentary, here are some highlights from the article.

A concert slated for Toronto, featuring Condemned 84 (England), supported by the likes of Légitime Violence (Quebec), threatens to flood the area with fascist lowlife and their passive supporters on the night of Saturday, June 22.

Clearly, Condemned 84 and bands in their orbit are interested in playing to the extreme right, as well as the apolitical crowd. Just as they try to obscure the fact that they play for organized neo-Nazis to sidestep criticism from the non-political clientele, they also try to manage perceptions for the benefit of their neo-Nazi clientele.

The main support for Condemned 84 on the show that’s been announced for Toronto is Légitime Violence, an ultra-nationalist RAC band connected with the right wing skinhead crews, Quebec Stompers (Quebec City) and Coup de Masse (Montreal). LV are venomously anti-left wing (hippies and other soft targets only, please), while at the same time cowering behind the ‘apolitical’ label. The band’s imagery displays an obsession with portraying steroid junked-up skinheads preying on the smallest and weakest of the stereotypical ‘left-wing activist’. Proudly sporting “anti-antifa” T-shirts all over Facebook (anti-antifa means anti-anti-fascist, and is a slogan/psuedo-movement started by neo-nazi s in Europe), they’ve been fairly open about their political leanings. Arguably, their hatred of anti-fascists is somewhat justified. Quebec Stompers and Coup de Masse has been kicked around a fair bit by anti-fascists, although evidently, not hard enough.

…

This isn’t about being “PC,” and this isn’t just about one dodgy band either – it’s about a disturbing agenda being pushed by the fence-sitters and closest-fascists who, under the deceptive banner of “no politics” want to make our scene a safe zone for nazi bullshit. This isn’t a coincidence – it’s been a conscious strategy of the Nazis after being forced underground in previous decades: infiltrate the “apolitical” fold and recruit amongst the fence-sitters; after all, if you already listening to nazi bands and claim “anti-antifa,” how much farther do you have to go?  The fascists smell easy pickings.

To read the rest, see: http://condemned84.wordpress.com/

I’m not sure who actually gets to declare these “days”. But whoever does saw fit to designate May 23rd as International Turtle Day; and it befits a blog as catholic and diverse as the Dawg’s to recognize and honour the... Balbulican http://stageleft.info

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●          “People have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook.” – disgraced American president Richard Nixon

●          “I don’t recall. I don’t recall that.” - disgraced American president Ronald Reagan

●          “A proof is a proof. What kind of a proof? It’s a proof. A proof is a proof. And when you have a good proof, it’s because it’s proven.”  - disgraced Canadian prime minister Jean Chretien

●          “Anyways, like I said this morning, these allegations are ridiculous …”  – disgraced Toronto mayor Rob Ford

●          “Canadians deserve to know all the facts. I am confident that when they do they will conclude … that my actions regarding expenses do not merit criticism.”” – disgraced Canadian senator Mike Duffy

 ●          “Let me be clear …” – disgraced Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, clearly the worst prime minister that Canada has ever had

Things that lying, corrupt, arrogant, privileged, rich, white, middle-aged, male, elitist, pro-corporate politicians say when they are caught in scandals.

This song is dedicated to them, and all the others like them (including Brian Mulroney). It’s “Liar” by The Damned.

It appears to be the magic right wing scandal number right now.  It's the amount Stepen Harper's chief of staff surreptitiously paid to a sitting Senator in order to stonewall an embarrassing audit.

And now its the amount the Alberta Wildrose Party has been charged by the CRTC for unsolicited and deceptive robo-calls during the the last provincial election.  Good luck find out about it in Alberta's right wing cheer-leaders pretending to be unbiased media. Only Global Media tersely reports the story but declines to report the nature of the calls.

I received one of the calls personally and immediately recognized it as a Wildrose push-poll.
There were lots of questions like "If you knew that PC leader Allison Redford supported the Liberal daycare plan of Paul Martin and opposed Stephen Harper's parental credit alternative and hired a campaign manager who didn't pay his debts would you be more or less likely to support her?"The call didn't identify itself as being from the Wildrose Party, didn't identify itself as campaign material, in fact deliberately presented itself as a poll with the implication of impartial information gathering and was a deliberate, sleazy attempt to damage Allison Redford by implying, horrors, that she was a squishy liberal.

Global's story twists itself into knots to avoid mentioning any of this.

$90,000.  A number that now represents the venality, arrogance and media granted impunity of Canada's political right.sdnxry5z7g

OMG. This is so spooky.

I knew they were as close as peas in a pod.

I remember how in that video of them at Rob Ford's bush party, they were falling all over each other.

But who knew that just days after Stephen Harper lost his Chief-of Staff, Rob Ford would fire his?
Read more »

Getting out of Madrid was a whole lot easier than getting in. We found our way to the highway easily, and had a short drive to the town of Segovia, to see its famous Roman aqueduct. It's pretty amazing to see a gigantic, completely intact stone aqueduct right in the middle of a town: see here. It's about 32 kilometres (20 miles) long, 28.5 metres (93.5 feet) tall at its highest point, and made of more than 20,000 stones, and not a drop of mortar.

Years ago, we saw the Pont du Gard, a famous three-tiered Roman acqueduct in France. We went way out of our way to see it, and were well rewarded for our trouble. This one in Segovia was equally impressive. It was a beautiful, sunny morning and we took a lot of pictures.

Segovia has a "centro historico" dating back to the middle ages, with a Jewish quarter, old churches, and an alcazar (castle) with, I hear, an impressive view of the valley below. There are dozens of similar towns, and we wanted to make sure we have time for the final and important piece of this trip, so we just visited the acqueduct and hit the road.

Then we set off for Cantabria and Asturias, two regions in the north of Spain that are dotted with caves, many of which contain paleolithic paintings. We had reserved a room in the town of Santillana del Mar, outside of Torrelavega, near the larger city of Santander.

We took a very scenic route that wound through country completely different than what we saw in the south. Where in the south the land looked arid and dry, here everything was lush and verdant, with lots of forest and pasture. In the south the sky was huge, you could see for miles and miles, orchards receding into the mountains. In the north it is very closed in, small valleys with steep mountains on all sides, lots of forest, cleared only for pasture. There are cows, sheep, and horses grazing everywhere. The sheep are fat with wool; the cows look dumb and relaxed as cows should. Low stone walls divide pastures. The houses are all stone, too - no white adobe here - although they do have red tile roofs. The country is very different and beautiful.

The road wound through mountains, not fast highway driving, but nowhere near the painstaking crawl we had driving to Ronda. For a while we were on a high plateau. Dozens of large birds were swooping and floating in the air currents. I don't know if they were hawks or eagles, but they were beautiful. At one point, we drove through a fog, and it started to rain a bit. Winding mountain roads, fog, rain, and now some road work! Anything else?? It was a bit interesting for a while, but the fog cleared and eventually the road wound downwards.

I made two stupid navigational errors, which unfortunately took a long time to correct, so by the time we got to the hotel, we had been driving for a long time. The hotel is on the road into town, a short walk from the historic centre, and has its own car park. We checked in, showered, and walked into town.

The town itself is pedestrian only - residents can drive in and out, but they can't drive around. The town is impossibly quaint - cobblestone streets, stone buildings, and everyone has colourful flowers on their windows and in little gardens in front.

This region, Cantabria, and the neighbouring Asturias, are known for a lot of local food products, and all the tourist shops in town are piled high with them: sobao (a sweet cake that looks like cornbread, made with wheat and milk), quesada (a sweet milk cake), local cheeses, sausage, anchovies. We were very hungry and ready for dinner, but of course dinner was hours away. The earliest anyplace serves dinner is 20:00h, otherwise known as 8 p.m. Desperate, we bought sobaos from a tourist store: a package of 12 costs 3 euros.

We went back to the hotel, and sat on the patio with our sobaos and a bottle of cheap vino tinto from Madrid. A teen group from the UK was at the hotel, and we watched them cavorting around, and drank our wine while we waited for dinner. Dinner was very simple, a fixed menu. I had fish soup, a "tortilla" (what we call a fritata) with chorizo, and flan for dessert. And this comes with a bottle of wine, a large bottle of water, and bread, for 10 euros each. It wasn't Gourmet Night at Fawlty Towers, but it was fine.

After dinner we completely collapsed. Allan has two days of cave paintings mapped out for us, and I made reservations online. We're not completely sure it will work out, but here's hoping.

Sam Katz responsibly deciding to fund community
groups instead of new 'burbs & political ad campaigns?

Now that's funny!

Image Source: Borris Minkevich/Winnipeg Free PressThe Winnipeg Free Press has an editorial out titled "Mayor Selinger". It's about the Province funding community initiatives and centres throughout Winnipeg.

The Freep editorial, written by a "staff writer", claims that the Province is intruding on the City's rightful turf as distiller of grants to community organizations. According to the Freep editorialist, this is bad because the Province can use such grant money for political purposes like shoring up support in south Winnipeg swing ridings.

The proper and less problematic grant distributor, so the column seems to imply, is the City.

There's some holes in that reasoning.

For one thing, the municipal government really has no constitutionally guaranteed role. They're able to do whatever the Province lets them do and derive their authority from the fact that the Province sees it fit to delegate certain tasks to them, for logistical purposes.

The buck stops at Broadway.

Illustrating this point is a discussion I had with a Manitoba Green Party supporter about the Winnipeg Citizens Coalition. 

The person claimed that the problem with the Coalition was that there were too



Financial axeman & Katz's number two man
Russ Wyatt wants to cut the Broadway Community
Centre grant. 

Image Sources: WAYNE.GLOWACKI@FREEPRESS.MB.CA/
Winnipeg Free Press  (Top)
Christian Cassidy/Flikr (Bottom)many NDP partisans affiliated with it. This was a problem because if the organization really disapproved of City Hall they should criticize the Ledge. This is so, the person reasoned, because the Ledge can fix any problems with the City by amending the City Charter or overruling its decisions.

In short, to solve civic problems my fellow discussant recommended trampling over what the municipal rights people hold dearest. It appears that the Province has, partially, followed suite.

The Freep also fails to argue exactly why the City is in a better position to dole out grant money than the Province. Given that Manitoba's population is less than that of Toronto's and that the provincial government is located in Winnipeg, it doesn't seem like there's a "too much distance from the governed" problem. Indeed, Winnipeg's diverse swath of neighbourhoods and communities are likely better represented by the 31 MLAs in Winnipeg versus only 15 councillors at City Hall.

And the notion that there's less politicking at City Hall is ridiculous. As the campaign to privatize the golf courses shows, there's pretty much NO distinction between politics and bureaucracy in the municipal government. Heck, prior to suggesting that the City slash and burn essential inner city programs, our deputy mayor secured generous money for pet projects in his ward. This is the exactly same shoring up support with grant money problem the Freep bemoans.

 The City suffers just as much, if not more, from the problem of pandering to the outer suburbs as well. Just look at the extension of roadways to the city's fringes, the plans of constructing new outer-ring fringe suburbs, and the enormous sway developers have with City Council. If anything, the Province (with it's greater revenue capacity) might be in a better position to resist pro-sprawl forces.

Responsible, wise, and impartial with public funds City Hall is not.

Municipal governments, on the alter of subsidizing suburban sprawl, seem itching to cut community programs and sensible public investments. Despite massive partnership deals from the Feds and Province, the Katz administration has done very little on Rapid Transit. His number two man, meanwhile, wants to axe countless community programs while Council plans for a new 'burbs.

Urbanists rightly criticize the fetish for mega-projects in this province. What could be a better antidote, in the Freep's own words, than "micro-promises" and "micro-announcements"?

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