Boycott is a tactic . . . we’re trying to create a dynamic which was the dynamic that ultimately ended apartheid in South Africa… It’s an extraordinarily important part of Israel’s identity to be able to have the illusion of Western normalcy.”

“When that is threatened, when the rock concerts don’t come, when the symphonies don’t come, when a film you really want to see doesn’t play at the Jerusalem film festival . . . then it starts to threaten the very idea of what the Israeli state is.

She and about 200 other Palestinians and foreign activists were in the West Bank village of Bilin. They gathered near Israel’s illegal separation wall, which is intended to divide the state from the occupied Palestinian territories.

Billin villagers are suing two Canadian companies, accusing them of illegally building homes for Israeli settlers.

After her comments, AFP reports, Israeli forces fired teargas as protestors approached the fence and threw stones.

Klein’s “Shock Doctrine” has just been translated into Hebrew and Arabic. She will receive no royalties from the Hebrew version, instead donating them to an activist group.

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In November 2007, I received “The Shock Doctrine” as a gift from my brother. On its cover, he recorded that the Canadian dollar was at 1.0894 US, oil was nearing $100 per barrel, and that seven unique stories relating to Dick Cheney’s impeachment were on the front page of reddit.

How times have changed.

Government data is being put online to increase accountability, contribute valuable information about the world, and to enable government, the country, and the world to function more efficiently. All of these purposes are served by putting the information on the Web as Linked Data. Start with the “low-hanging fruit”. Whatever else, the raw data should be made available as soon as possible.

Berners-Lee assembles the guidelines in the context of his work on linked data. Which, really, is where his ideas about the world wide web came from.

Generally, his concept of linked data is straightforward and sensible.

1. Open – non-proprietary formats and unlimited access
2. Modular – allow mash-ups
3. Scalable – allow additions, plan for permanence and permanent change

These guidelines would prove helpful for governments (and organizations) of any size, especially those beginning to look at openness, and include actions that can be taken today.

The pace at which people expect open practices to be adopted will continue to accelerate and this, too, can serve as another resource for public activists.

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Tim’s TED Talk on Linked Data, from February 2009:

In light of this, movies tend to be good filler. Still, I’ve never been much of a moviegoer. I approached the whole concept of movie-going somewhat reluctantly. I don’t like the idea of two-hour narratives, I find I always leave wanting more, preferring the longer arcs of episodic “television” series. Also, most of the movies that seem available look like rehashed story lines with gut-wrenching product placement. So I’ve been pulled in slightly kicking and screaming.

An example is Away We Go, which Jeff had been pulling me to see for a while. We just returned and… it was excellent. Creative and confident, it just might be responsible for getting me excited about movies again.

It’s written by Dave Eggers and has an impressive cast. John Krasinski, Maya Rudolph, Catherin O’Hara, Jeff Daniels, Allison Janney, Jim Gaffigan, and Maggie Gyllenhaal are especially memorable and pull together a believable and rewarding movie.

Not to bore you with written exposition, a preview from YouTube:

A few conclusions:

1. I have a habit of stubbornly rejecting mediums for rather arbitrary reasons, later being impressed by their use. (See: comic books, cartoons, teenage vampire dramas).
2. I love Allison Janney, she warms my heart.
3. Maya Rudolph is a talented dramatic actress.
4. I don’t read enough Dave Eggers.
5. I should see more movies.

It’s a great movie. Check it out.

A global climate action is being coordinated and encouraged by 350.org for October 24th, 2009.

I was pretty struck by this video. Impressively done. I’ll definitely be out there — marking my calendar!

Any prep work being done in Vancouver, yet? Edmonton? Calgary?

I challenged myself when I was younger to read (and complete) his novel Infinite Jest. I remember almost nothing from it today.

In a commencement address at Kenyon College. For the most part, it was about the misery of an adult life if lived on a “default setting.” It was about worship and arrogance and “boredom, routine, and petty frustration” and unlike any other commencement address I’ve heard until then or since.

He warned the graduating class:

Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master”.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

All terribly depressing. All the more so considering his own end. But, in its entirety it is a remarkably inspiring speech.

The address serves as a sound warning about “default settings” in life. It is a routine that is wrapped up in worship of power, money, things, sex, influence, intelligence, appearance, health. This worship, he said, is something that we “just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.”

This worship creates a type of false freedom. One that we crave in lives of undeniable and unavoidable boredom and routine. And, of course, to feel sorry for ourselves because of it and to pretend that somehow this makes us aware and free people.

Of course, we should hope that this is merely the default setting. Wallace offered this suggestion:

Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about in the great outside world of wanting and achieving. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

One wonders what he forgot, or if he forgot, or if there is still some lesson lacking.

The full speech is recommended and available here.

The face paint animation film is made up of 4,816 separate stills. Each and every frame was hand-painted, shot, wiped off and redrawn, slightly differently for the next frame in order to create a seamless sequence. This time-consuming process involved the band members lying still for two consecutive days in a studio.

Expect both the song and the animation style to be in a Canadian communications company ad campaign by year’s end.

There is a “making-of” video and another of We Have Band performing the same song, live, in Paris.

(The online registration with EventBrite was quick and easy.)

Vancouver’s leading independent media makers lead a panel and discussion about proposed government bailouts of corporate media, the impacts of cuts to the public broadcaster, and exciting alternative models for media.

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Wednesday, May 27 6:45-9:00 pm


VIVO Media Arts Centre, 1965 Main St. near 3rd close to Main Street/Science World Skytrain and Main Street #3 bus

Featuring:

Charlie Smith, Editor, The Georgia Straight
Marika Swan, Interim Manager, Redwire Native Youth Media
Colin Preston, Library Coordinator & Canadian Media Guild Secretary, CBC Vancouver

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At this critical time when the new media environment is being molded and the traditional news industry is in a state of decline, creative approaches to journalism are urgently needed.

Yet politicians and policy makers are poised to further support the big conglomerates that got us into this mess in the first place. Canwest and other corporate media may even get a government bailout. At the same time, CBC is slashing jobs and programming under unprecedented cuts, and there is no end in sight.

- If news financed by big business is failing, what alternatives do we have?

- What role could/should CBC play?

- What other models for media are available?

- What can we do?

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Suggested Donation $7 in advance, $12 at the door
no one turned away for lack of funds.

Snacks will be served – bus tickets available – Free childcare available onsite with advance request.

Seating is limited! To save your spot, please R.S.V.P. by net, phone, or email:

To register by email: naava.smolash [at] gmail.com

By phone: (604) 875-8455 (please leave a message)

For more information and updates, check out the Facebook event page or EventBrite.

Money matters and today most of us have less of it, so no one will be surprised by new survey results from the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index showing that Americans are smiling less and worrying more than they were a year ago, that happiness is down and sadness is up, that we are getting less sleep and smoking more cigarettes, that depression is on the rise.

An uncertain future leaves us stranded in an unhappy present with nothing to do but wait.

But light wallets are not the cause of our heavy hearts. After all, most of us still have more inflation-adjusted dollars than our grandparents had, and they didn’t live in an unremitting funk. Middle-class Americans still enjoy more luxury than upper-class Americans enjoyed a century earlier, and the fin de siècle was not an especially gloomy time. Clearly, people can be perfectly happy with less than we had last year and less than we have now.

So if a dearth of dollars isn’t making us miserable, then what is? No one knows. I don’t mean that no one knows the answer to this question. I mean that the answer to this question is that no one knows — and not knowing is making us sick.

Full article, worthwhile, here.

And, Dan Gilbert’s controversial 2004 TEDTalk on happiness.

If we choose to rebuild our shattered economies, a return to the blind and obsessive pursuit of “economic expansion” isn’t just impossible, but also disastrous and self-destructive.

Times have changed. We’ve destroyed and are destroying our ecological supports, have run out of cheap energy, of water, of accommodating atmosphere, have built an empty financial system based on deceit and corruption, and have seen genuine measures of well-being fall since the 1970s.

Key to these civilizational failures is the West’s belief that all problems can be solved through limitless expansion of the economy at any cost.

Victor argues it is time for a rethink and it is refreshing to read the argument in a major commercial daily.

The way out, he says, is to look to the rather ignored field of “ecological economics.”

Ecological economists understand economies to be subsystems of the earth ecosystem, sustained by a flow of materials and energy from and back to the larger system in which they are embedded. It is understandable that when these flows were small relative to the earth they could be ignored, as they have been in much of mainstream economics.

[The] mainstream perspective teaches that if resource and environmental constraints are encountered, scarcities will be signalled by increases in prices that will induce a variety of beneficial changes in behaviour and technology. Should this system of scarcity-price-response fail then economists can estimate “shadow” prices which can be imposed directly through taxes or used indirectly through policies based on cost-benefit analysis to fix the problem.

To ecological economists, this is an inadequate response to the myriad problems of resource depletion, environmental contamination and habitat destruction confronting humanity in the 21st century. They question the pursuit of endless economic growth and contemplate a very different kind of future.

To visualize this in practice, he offers examples from his own work and action being taken elsewhere.

I have examined whether and under what conditions a country like Canada could have full employment, no poverty, much reduced greenhouse gas emissions, and maintain fiscal balance, without relying on economic growth. Using a comparatively simple model of the Canadian economy I have explored scenarios in which these objectives are met. The ingredients for success include a shorter work year to reduce unemployment yet retain the advantages of technological progress, a carbon price to discourage greenhouse gas emissions, and more generous anti-poverty programs.

In such an economy, success would not be judged by the rate of economic growth but by more meaningful measures of personal and community well-being. We would adjust to strict limits on our use of materials, energy, land and waste, guided by prices that provide more accurate information about real rather than contrived scarcities. We would enjoy more services and fewer but more durable and repairable products, and we would value use over status when deciding what to buy.

Rampant consumerism would be history, advertising would be more informative and less persuasive, and new technologies would be better screened to avoid problems to be fixed later, if at all. Infrastructure, buildings and equipment would be more efficient in their use of energy and we would think and act more locally and less globally. With more free time at our disposal we would educate ourselves and our children for life not just work.

While that’s a pretty high-level summary of how an ecologically-minded economy would be experienced it’s far more appealing than anything I’ve heard from a policy-maker since the crisis manifested.

So why is there such a mechanical rejection of this when it hits legislators, candidates, or city councillors? Or the most corporate media?

The status-quo isn’t acceptable, nor is it even possible. There is an opportunity to adjust voluntarily and positively. If we deny the world as it is and as we have made it, our adjustment will be involuntary and much more unpleasant.

Bigger isn’t better – Ottawa Citizen

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This post originally appeared at the New Resilient, a Western Canadian blog about food, resilient communities and life after collapse.

Hannah Arendt – a writer that has seriously influenced my worldview – spent an invaluable career describing the responses to political and social change. She looks at late 19th-century European imperialism as an almost dreamlike state. There is a complete freedom of action with no supervision, no consequences; all the other players are non-people.

Stepping back has been a bit jarring. Calgary and Alberta were strange places. An incompetently governed banana republic, Alberta and its corrupt petrocracy continue to steer the province into moral, economic and ecological bankruptcy. The democracy we broke seems powerless to stall or stop its feverish, yet narrow-mindedly profitable, decline.

I left during an Orwellian period, where the PC government moved to introduce changes to the “Human Rights Act.” It would dismantle the Human Rights Tribunal and prevent some children from being educated about human sexuality and evolution, all while taking credit for rights protections that had been affirmed by the courts for a decade.

Still, I miss it — if only because I felt more comfortable with responding to its troubles. British Columbia is an unfamiliar place and it will likely take some time for me to understand how I fit in and where I can contribute.

I arrived in BC to see a status-quo Liberal government reelected with less than half of British Columbians participating in the electoral process. Electoral reform via an STV referendum failed. I feel unable to comment much on this — it all seems new and meanwhile, I’m setting up my life here. And on top of it all, I’ve only reestablished a regular internet connection in the last few days.

This move provides an opportunity for me to refocus, too. I’ll be taking advantage of that.

Having left my job a bit early in preparation for grad school in September and having refreshing flexibility in my time, I’ll be blogging and sharing more of my experience here (and here and here and elsewhere) with more attention and consistency.

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First off, perhaps as a sad recognition of my difficulty in moving on, some tar sands and global warming updates.