Fed up with 'America'.

. They have become a straightjacket on humanity. Not their geography. Not the people. Just the words: 'America' and 'American'.

They are all the more restrictive coming from such a frequently thought-provoking journalist as Fareed Zakaria. I realize he has chosen to work within their borders, but last night he used them as often as the word 'innovation', in a program about, well ... Innovation!

'America' has lost the lead on Innovation to Asia. 'America' has lost the lead in Education to India. 'America' has lost the lead in manufacturing to China. The 'American' dollar will cease to be the world's settlement currency. 'America' is fostering anti-Americanism with its war on terror. 'America' perpetuates organized crime by criminalizing soft drugs. 'America' isn't preparing for global warming. 'America' doesn't get Hugo Chavez's jokes.

I hadn't realized how nauseous this mindset made me feel until I heard George W. Bush stand at ground zero mere hours after 9-11, amidst the legacy of three thousand human beings from all over the globe, and speak to the planet about an attack on 'America'.

What a travesty. What a lost opportunity for humanity to look at ourselves as a community, for a change. Ten years later, the so-called Arabian Spring has come along to awaken us all to those overdue sentiments.

Against all odds, I'm glad to say I saw it coming. Highly unusual for Nahonky. (A North American of undiluted Caucasoid genealogical ancestry.)

Two years ago I discovered Al Jazeera English. I devoured its new look and feel, its bold invitation to view news and information from a global perspective. The relief from relentlessly Eurocentric, northern and western hegemania (sic) was overwhelming. I actually cried sometimes watching Witness, Listening Post, People & Power and Empire. Such an oasis in the media desert we otherwise face in North America.

No more Lou Dobbs! A break in the Blitzer-krieg. A refuge from the shrill staccato of embedded propaganda and pharma-petro-dollar advertising.

By contrast, Al Jazeera deliberately highlighted their low-key tone and matter-of-fact delivery with devastating content and unprecedented honesty. Outright daring. Their deeper intent became obvious when, amidst exclusive broadcasts of the earliest Bin Laden tapes, Al Jazeera's most senior editor was threatened with death for broadcasting the simple question, "How can we possibly aspire to democracy when we aren't even allowed to argue with our own fathers?"

The stage was set. Those who had ears, heard.

That ground breaking thrust in the global public narrative came from the Arabic-speaking crescent of our planet. After more than a century of Euro-centric obsession with national boundaries, ethnic loyalties and inter-ethnic conflict, an arabic-speaking and predominantly Muslim cluster of societies defied all sovereign hierarchies and reached out universally, horizontally, to neighbouring contemporaries who shared this ground swell of aspiration.

I beg of you, Al Jazeera, do not surrender the tone, nor the accent, on which your remarkable trust is based. Do not succumb to the temptation to CNN-ize your presentation during the North American segment of the global broadcast day.

We in North America need to know, viscerally, that we are hearing of the world through Doha, Kuala Lumpur and Lima. Not through London, and not through Laurel. (Maryland)

It is simply too soon for the overly affable 'American' likes of Tony Harris.

Anderson Cooper Joins the Liars

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Well, it's finally happened. Anderson Cooper has succumbed.

Lowered himself to the crassest elements of the Lou Dobbs syndrome. Blatantly re-parsing and re-framing. Falsifying the context of another person's statement.

He has lied.

Dem. Congressman Steve Cohen recently cited Goebbels as the progenitor of the most fundamental tenet of modern propaganda: make up a simple, tactical lie, repeat it ad nauseam, and in time the audience will come to assume it's true.

That is the meaning of Goebbelism in common vernacular. The tactic is as true and attributable to Goebbels as are fridge for refrigerator to Frigidaire, xerox for photocopier to Xerox, or kleenex for tissue paper to Kleenex.

They are elements of contemporary idiomatic English.

When Congressman Cohen recently suggested that the entire Republican, Tea Party and neocon right-wing of American political debate spent 2010 applying that tactic ruthlessly and shamelessly to Obama-care and Government-run health care, he was factually, politically and idiomatically correct.

But when Anderson Cooper repeated no less than 20 times in the space of a mere 14 minute segment that Cohen had thereby "compared Republicans to Nazis" and "abused the holocaust", Cooper himself descended into filth. Logical fallacy and rhetorical rot. For minutes on end he supplemented that audio with a capitalized ticker-subtitle shouting DEMOCRAT COMPARES GOP 'LIES' TO NAZI.

In a segment cynically titled "Keeping them Honest", Cooper didn't even have the decency to let the word 'LIES' stand on its own without the single quotation marks! Congressman Cohen had not used the word tongue in cheek, nor as metaphor; he had knowingly and deliberately called them LIES!

As Cohen parried each repetition with the simple fact that the issue and the lie were over 'insurance', not 'care', Cooper progressively raised his voice and simply shouted the congressman down with ever sharper assertions that Cohen had "... compared Republicans to Nazis".

Before our eyes, using the slimiest sort of reality-TV by example, Anderson Cooper used the very syndrome Steve Cohen was decrying, thus joining the Goebbelsian hoarde.

Shame!
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Nunavut in Crisis?

Have you ever read the rules that stiffle civil servants as long as they remain in the Government's employ? Have you ever wondered what risks that generates the day one of them ceases to wear the muzzle? Right now I feel like a Wikileak infopipe clogged full of Nunavutian collusion, illusions, delusions and allusions ... and ready to down a can of liquid plumber.

The worst of it? I needed a doctor's prescription before taking such medicine. Was I too much of a wuss? Too stupid to see through the sham? Or just another starry-eyed believer hoping that Nunavut would finally be different?

The mindless, knee jerk, simplistic civil service bashing that passes for political narrative in this community has become the exclusive domain of hypocrites who haven't the cojones to get into the ring and actually do something. They just take the money and run, whether as salaries, advertising revenue, or contract dollars. Do we really lack the wit or daring to confront our false assumptions?

Political scientists write books upon books advising us to "Speak Truth to Power?", but in this instance, we don't even speak to each other. We haven't a clue how influence flows in our case. Are we just lazy? Do we deliberately turn a blind eye. Are we embarrassed? Or are we just not quite sure what to do about it yet? No use shouting until we have a solution, right?

So our civil servants sit in frustrated silence while our politicians pontificate and our media messengers masticate, on the same old cud.

As our much bludgeoned linguistic saviour, Lord Noam Chumpski, says in verse 13.7 of his Sermon on the Ice, "Beware clichés and jargon, for they are the ring through your nose, not the ring in your ear; neither the embellishment in a marine mammal pelt, but the blubber of apprehension that seals your mouths and clogs the arteries of your humanity."

Nunavut in crisis? Damned right.

The good kind.

We're on the brink of a revolution, a civil war over how we think of ourselves. Over how we speak of ourselves. Over what we dare say about ourselves. And the discussion is about to break wide open.

The purveyors of jargon will call it a debate over 'governance'.

This blog will air the people's play-by-play.

(remember to click on the pics...)

- 30 -

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Conservatives: Fiscal, Social, or Foreign

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Arianna Huffington recently penned a eulogy for left-right dialectics, declaring them to be inadequate - going on useless - as a tool for political analysis in the 21st Century. Conversely, one of the better status reports on the US Republican party made pretty good use of it to send Sarah Palin and Pit Bull Romney to the penitential corner of our democratic classroom for an overdue time out.

Truth is, most of us have no trouble at all deciding whether a politician is a fiscal or social conservative. We are even pretty good at mixing the two. "Oh he's a (lower-taxes-no-matter-what) fiscal conservative, but he's an (innocent-children-of-immigrant-abortionists-might-need-welfare-for-a-while) social prograssive

The one that keeps us all stumped, however, is foreign policy.

Arianna Huffington's hunch from the middle is nearly correct, but she's still holding onto the fence a little.

You see, the further East we go, we find people are more protective of their privacy. Europeans might live next door to each other for three generations and never see the inside of their neighbour's living room or kitchen. Centuries of war and invasion have left them thinking that sovereignty is epitomy of peace and respect. They were so reluctant to internvene in Kosovo.

But as you travel further West, especially into George Bush and Dick Cheney's wild West where survival more recently depended on blurring those boundaries a bit, people don't need an invitation to charge into a neighbour's house to help extinguish a fire, or rescue an invalid, or punch a bully in the mouth for beating up his children. A certain amount of vigilante collective action has been more acceptable in the wild West as a way of dealing with both tyranny and tragedy.

If George W. Bush had stuck to those cowboy roots of his and simply belted Saddam Hussein one right in the kisser and walked away instead of proliferating such weapons of mass distrust, how differently might the world feel right now?

In fact, I bet Europeans and North Americans would be having a much more intelligent discussion about whether our species on this planet can succeed in dealing with global issues on a purely bilateral basis rooted in concepts of national sovereignty. Might we not agree that there are some issues facing the planet right now that warrant the occasional Neighborhood Watch type action where free people might nonetheless sometimes impose a minimun standard of decency when rogues threaten our children's right to a little peace and quiet?

That is where the confusion comes from, between left and right, between east and west, between Republicans and the Tea Party, and between Muslims and modernity.

The American Empire made a terrible mistake when they allowed their admirable penchant for wild west generosity to be co-opted and misused. Rather than keeping Neighborhood Watch strictly en garde, to be used solely on occasions of universally recognized brutality or disaster, they have twisted the meaning of 'freedom' and premptive deterrence into a missionary mandate to dictate self-serving terms for global commerce.

We keep hearing claims that a rogue minority have hijacked global Islam. Ok. What of global Christianity?

And there you have it. Collossal Weapons of Mass Distrust. (C-WMD)

Just when the world most desperately needs a trusted kind of global Neighbourhood Watch to lend a hand with environment, energy, female genital mutilation, and usurious international bond bandits... nobody trusts anybody.

That is the real legacy of the recent American Empire. Insufficient trust for humanity to collaborate on issues that simply cannot be resolved unilaterally or bilaterally.

Gawd forbid I should have to quote Hillary Rodham Clinton, but dammit, it does take at least a village!

As for my beloved Canada, we do have conservative politicians, mostly wed to the Bond and Data Bandits. Bad enough that they want to stop collecting census data lest that expose their weak policy arguments, now we learn they have knowingly shredded the final report on the Tar Sands?

In whom do we trust?

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Popping the Fiscal Balloon

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It was one of the most electrifying moments in modern political television... for those who had ears!

"Should we lower the debt or flood the world with trillions of dollars in cash?" asked Fareed Zakaria.

In the red corner, Nobel sanctioned economist Paul Krugman was advocating more money, lots of it, now. In the blue corner, word-merchant historian Niall Ferguson countered for immediately reducing the debt.

In case you missed it... and many did 'miss it' even though they watched it on CNN's GPS, here's the layman's translation.

Imagine your brain sprung a leak to the outside of your skull, you would die if the hole weren't plugged. On the other hand if only one artery developed a bubble inside your skull putting pressure on the surrounding tissue, you would poke a hole in the bubble, relieve the pressure, then strengthen the artery so it wouldn't happen again. That's called an embolism. The rest of the brain would be fine. Embolisms can be fixed.

In economic terms, Ferguson is warning us that rampant debt is a financial leak threatening the entire system.

Krugman, on the other hand, counters that debt is just part of the economy. The real threat is cumulative charges, interest and profit on the debt, an expanding embolism, susceptible to regulatory popping and remedial cauterization.

But Krugman goes farther. Much farther! He calls it the "phantom in the room".

Brrr, feel the chill of fear?

The financial community is loath to talk about this ghost because we ordinary mortals might actually begin to understand. The high priests dare not give it a simple name, like profit, for fear we masses will lose faith.

Like a magician who slips and nearly reveals how a trick is done, Ferguson almost blew it. He euphemized so accurately, so close to the truth, you could almost feel the collective fiduciary scrota shrinking around the globe. Millions of high finance testes running for pubic cover, wincing in anticipation of this catastrophic blow to their semantic groin.

"Fiscal Credibility", Ferguson intoned. "Nasty Fiscal Arithmetic". "Domestic appeasement of local interest (lobby) groups". "Once you find interest rates rising..."

The phantom stirred.

Then Zakaria rescued him. "So what's the solution?"

Caught in his own dangerous rant, Ferguson scrambled for cover. "Radical fiscal reform". "Flat tax". "Cut entitlement programs". Gawd forbid we should reduce our profit. A flurry of semantic transformations to re-bury the deep structures of the daemon he had nearly exposed.

The world's banks must have heaved a huge sigh of relief. Krugman wasn't in the studio at the same time to pounce on the gaff, to expose the lie, to dress the naked emperor.

An embolism of what ... greed? Good grief!

What might Krugman have said?

Except for natural disasters like the recent one in Haiti, countries rarely fail to repay their real debt, the actual amount they initially borrowed. Every other instance of fiscal collapse in the history of the world has stemmed from an inability to keep pace with ballooning compound interest on the debt, not the debt itself.

Insatiable greed.

Krugman had been brutal in anticipation. He whisked so close to naming the beast himself. "Bond Vigilantes" he called them at one point. The viscerally corrupt curia of collusion among the banks and the insurance companies who are siphoning the wealth of humanity into gated backwaters of privilege and impunity.

Of course, there are legitimate costs incurred by those who lend and those who insure us against unforeseen misfortune. They are also entitled to make an income. However, those costs should be calculated transparently based on the true actuarial risk of default or accident. Far from such a fair return, the current banking and insurance industries, no matter how low interest rates appear to be right now, continue make obscene profits from the cumulative effect of compound interest. Interest upon interest, upon interest... ad infinitum.

That is the phantom in the room!

It is the omnipresent and never-to-be named threat, not from the borrowers, not from the actuarial risk of capital default, but from the arbitrary whim of exponential greed that cranks the interest rate up to whatever the market will bear in good times, or simply threatens to do so in bad times.

Krugman's "Phantom in the Room".

Decades of political advocacy and activism haven't a fraction of the power and influence of thirty seconds of reversing an embedded pre-supposition.

Fareed, I dare you. Just one minute a week. Have an impartial and professional semanticist analyze a single utterance from the week's news coverage. Maybe just before your closing soliloquy and book recommendation. You might go down in history as having single handedly rescued democratic dialogue, and governance..

It's time someone stuck a linguistic finger down our throat and induced a little purge to clear the bullcrap.

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Creeping Yellowknification

. Forty years ago Kenneth Boulding cracked up Toronto's York University audience with an opening sequence to his celebrity lecture there. "I couldn't help but wonder at the architecture as I drove in." (a few snickers in the audience)

"I had some trouble, at first, placing it in the correct period." (more chuckles and a few outright guffaws)

"Then it came to me," he said. "Early Brutal!" (pandemonium of uncontrolled laughter.)

"I will suggest to you that it falls into the broad contemporary trend of creeping Wichitization, that remorseless and rather disconcerting pressure where Bangkok, Bombay, Beirut and Budapest become more and more like Wichita." (No more laughter.)

Twenty years later, in a column for Yellowknife's News North amidst the struggle for division of the old Northwest Territories and creation of Nunavut, I borrowed from Boulding by describing Yellowknife as a victim of creeping Sudburization. A tendency for once predominantly aboriginal communities across North America to become more and more like Sudbury, with increasingly white, Euro-Canadian administrations and business communities supplanting increasingly marginalized aboriginal and Métis inhabitants.

I concluded with a fervent plea to our N.W.T. neighbours to admit the demographics were hopeless in the West, to graciously relinquish the fractured and bare aboriginal majority they could only temporarily maintain with Inuit influence, and to allow the Eastern Arctic to go its own way in order to benefit from its overwhelming majority Inuit electorate.

They did. A deliberate and noble sacrifice. Surprising and historic.

So "Here's the question", as Jack Cafferty would say. What do you detect in the following sequences of names?

(1) Carmen Levi, Rosemary Keenainak, Koovian Flanagan, Alooki Rojas, Victor Tootoo, Melinda Janes and David Akeeagok, et al;

(2) Bob Long, Janet Slaughter, Kathleen Lausman, Louise Wasson and Markus Weber, et al.

That's correct. They have all been appointed Deputy or Assistant Deputy Ministers with the Government of Nunavut at some point.

Yet there are other thought provoking patterns that emerge. One group consist entirely of beneficiaries to the Inuit Land Claim, the other none, and the other has largely replaced the one.

Coincidence? Possibly. A sign of the times? Probably. Creeping Yellowknification and Ottawization? Almost certainly. Discouraging? Can the Nunavut and Tamapta dreams survive it? Too soon to tell.

Our kids will decide.

Meanwhile, we do need to clean up our finances, housing, health, educational effectiveness and the environment. Leona, Eva and Elisapi seem sincere in their desire to provide better governance and services to citizens in each of these regards.

But you tell me. Are the cultural distinctions, the deeper IQ, the language, the precious payload of Inuktitut Social Values slowly slipping away as an inevitable part of the process?

Say it ain't so. ..

The Spilsbury Underground

. Facebook had a precursor in Nunavut When the Government of Canada began rounding up Inuit from their ancestral homes in the 1950s and locating them in fabricated settlements, many families continued to escape at every opportunity to slip back out 'on the land'. Some only went a few feet each Spring, pitched a tent right beside their settlement house and lived in it until Fall. Others hightailed it back to their accustomed family areas to hunt and trap and gather until winter threatened.

A determined few didn't bother coming back. They resumed living on the land again all year round.

The Government took to calling these Outpost Camps, a very settlement-centric thing to do. When Brigitte Bardot, the aging Caucasoid Tart of European Imperialism outgrew her own role as purveyor of other furry artefacts, she set out to destroy the value of seal products. Canada graciously (sic) responded by creating programs to supplement Inuit subsistence with a few dollars for fuel, equipment and the odd emergency medivac by helicopter.

Which raised an interesting point.

How were outpost camp dwellers to call for that emergency medical assistance? The answer lay in what was to become the bright orange talisman of every outpost camp evening. The Spilsbury SBX-11A SSB transceiver. Nothing was more characteristic of the outpost auditory environment than the gentle background hiss of static weaving in and out of murmuring family chat. Qilujak and Lucaatsi providing life's play-by-play commentary, boiling tea, a Coleman lamp. It is one of the warmest Inuktitut experiences available. Intimate and secluded.

Until the Spilsbury crackled!

"Inukikunnut, Inukikunnut, qajaqtuqtulirijiit, naalappisi? Uuva!" Or if Qilujak was the caller, more like "UUUuuuuUUUUVA!!!!"

Suddenly a whole other world sprang to life. A virtual reality that, especially in its later years, settlement-bound folks hardly knew existed unless an elder kept a Spilsbury in the bedroom, with an inverted-L antenna slipping out the window to a couple of oars propped up with rocks and nylon guy wires.

I thought it was gone. There are so few, perhaps even no truly permanently occupied outpost camps at all anymore. Is there no similarly sane alternative to town-bound inanity available any longer?

Then along came Spilsbook or is it Facebury?

A new Inuktitut underground is emerging. Not the dreary qallunaattitut litany of "I'm making pancakes now", "think I'll go to a movie", but the new soul of Nunavut. An alternate community is floating gently up above the concrete day-to-day of Town life. The word 'virtual' doesn't fit. It's too laden with wispy, ephemeral connotations of artificial realities. The Spilsbury Underground is not only real, it is the very substance of Inuktitut, the way of being, not just the language.

Take a deeper look at Nunavummiut on Facebook. They are already creating something so different from Town-bound culture, so much more like the old Spilsbury Underground, something to which the rest of the community are still oblivious. The quality of life, the way of treating each other, the subtle access into English of concepts that were previously only possible in Inuktitut, the language, so many elements of culture that until now were slipping away, appropriated by well meaning politicians, bureaucrats and policy wonks into stillborn IQ platitudes, the modern equivalent of an earlier and equally insulting equivalent, 'Cultural Inclusion'.

One does not subsume an entire cultural into an element of curriculum, or policy! It is the curriculum and the policy that are mere elements in an overarching culture.

Keep it up you guys. You are Inuit Qaujimajaqtuqangit. You are breathing it into this new community, this late evening social chatter, the new Spilsbury Underground.

For people like me, who understand just enough to lurk and notice, it is a delight. But for your contemporaries and offspring, and for generations world-wide after that, it will be the breath of life.

The attitudes capable of helping humanity navigate the next hundred years of crisis are not surfacing from the First and Second Worlds. They are gurgling and nurturing and re-emerging from the Third and Fourth Worlds.

Keep refining it. The time is coming when it will quietly produce real concensus and influence, the kind that can sway elections and reform planetary discourse.

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Baker Lake Uranium

. I caused a bit of a storm a year ago with some tough comments on generating electricity in Nunavut. I should have spoken to the people involved first and made sure they understood what I intended before lambasting their ideas in public. My mistake, but theirs too. None of us distinguished sufficiently between electricity and the methods we use to generate it. During that debate, my every mention of hydro generation as a way of extracting energy from gravity was interpreted as advocating a particular community's least preferred reservoir location. Every mention of wind generation was interpreted as wanting to impose massive noisy turbines in someone's back yard. Every question of nuclear generation was interpreted as advocating uranium mining near Baker Lake. Unfortunately, the best intentions don't matter a damn. No matter what we say, the true meaning of our communication is the response we get. Judging from the resulting furor, I expressed it very poorly then. Let's try again. Energy is energy. Period. Just pure oomph. With four important considerations ... (a) there are several different sources that contain energy; (b) there are good and bad ways of extracting energy from a source; (c) there are good and bad ways of transporting the extracted energy closer to where it is needed; and (d) there are different jobs we want to do with that energy once it gets there. It pays to keep these four catagories straight in our thinking. For example, we might easily agree that Sun light is an ideal source, but question whether chopping down trees, to plant corn, to be converted into ethanol, to be transported in trucks, ships or pipelines, to be burned by internal combustion engines, to generate electricity, to power our appliances, is the ideal way of capturing the sunlight (corn), transporting it (ethanol), to generate electricity (diesel generators), to run our applicances (stoves and toasters). The same logic applies to Gravity. What are the wider consequences of piling up water, exposing it to increased evaporation, removing it from adjacent aquifers, dropping it from great heights onto the blades of a turbine (extraction), pushing it over thousands of kilometers of towers and poles as high tension electricity (transportation), and then transforming it for lower voltage use in our appliances? How about a Nuclear example. Whence the uranium and how do we mine it (source), reactors to convert it to electricity (transportation), how is it stored until needed for our appliances (stoves and toasters). We need to think this thing through... properly. We almost never do. The elements are all tangled up and tied to each other. It's hard work dammit! Our only hope of sorting this all out is to learn to discuss each of these components clearly, separately, deeply and, as often as possible away from the threats and whinning of lobbyists for vested political and commercial interests. Lobbyists occasionally bring useful technical and governance expertise to the table, but they wrap it in so much bullshit. It's just another kind of mining we have to learn, how to extract the warp and weft of wisdom's cloth from their tightly spun and twisted 'yarn'? (pun intended) All of this to say that the hydro project once contemplated for Iqaluit had some serious aquifer management and transportation problems. A tidal source might avoid both extraction and transporation difficulties, but what about ice and salt corrosion. Even much maligned nuclear alternatives should be considered. If mined uranium is an undesireable source, if current extraction technology risks filty toxic impacts on Baker Lake's aquifers, if newer technologies to downgrade and recycle weapons waste aren't ready yet, these factors should be examined honestly. Our final goal should be kept firmly in view, however, no matter how energetic the discussion gets. We want to transform Nunavut society forever into all of that Pinasuaqtavut and Tamapta describe as social and economic outcomes and contribute to them by heating our homes and powering our vehicles on clean, 7 - 10 cents per kilowatt electricity, rather than perpetuating the Petrified Oleum Pandemic. Think that's foolish utopianism? Have you the guts to pretend it isn't, temporarily? Care enough to join me in looking foolish for 36 months while we independently pursue unbiased answers to these questions rather than being herded by mantra-spouting lobbyists with a vested interest in the status quo? .

All Potholes are Global

. A recent letter to the editor of the Nunatsiaq News got me thinking. "Worst Iqaluit Roads in 53 years", the headline raged. I suspect it was based on the state of the one hundred meters of the Apex Road directly in front of the author's house. Are all politics that local? With apologies to Tip O'Neill, I'm going to suggest it's t'other way 'round. Potholes can be global ... when placed in their proper context. Iqaluit roads have never been so well maintained. In my thirty-five years here this is the first winter that snow removal on the Apex road has begun before people went to work. It is the first time in those same thirty-five years that snow removal on the Apex Road continued after people got home safely. Somebody at City Hall re-discovered shift scheduling and applied it to the core mandate of any municipal government: deliver the water, remove the sewage and garbage, and clear the snow so the ambulance and fire trucks can get through! Not stopping there, they paved streets throughought the city last summer, nothing less than a godsend. The number of vehicles in Iqaluit has increased so dramatically over the last few years that residents were experiencing acute respiratory problems from the perpetual cloud of dust that enveloped the city from dawn 'til dusk, six months a year, especially in Apex. City officials warned ahead of time that not all neighbourhoods could be done in a single year. They even showed good sense in their selection of areas to be done later. Heeding the common sense observation that "huge trucks, fully loaded, cause a lot of the problems," City staff decided to wait until major work on the infamous sinking Arena was finished, before paving that particular stretch. Yep, you guessed it. The letter writer lives right next door to the arena. The work has since been completed. Care to guess where the paving starts this summer? The lesson to be learned from all this, of course, is that too local a context can be very misleading. Dreadful as some 2010 potholes have been in specific locations, they do not constitute the worse regime of road maintenance in Iqaluit for 53 years. Where, you might ask, is the global aspect in all this? Truth is there are very few 'local' issues these days. Even potholes occur in a wide ecological context. Impatient for global warming to reach Iqaluit, perhaps the author travelled to warmer climes this winter? He ignores this having been the heaviest snow accumulation in at least 53 years, by a huge margin. Despite this unprecedented threat, spring runoff caused only a fraction of the typical damage of recent years precisely because drainage ditches and culverts were so much better planned this time, before the extensive paving program began. As for the ridges of frozen sand and ice that accumulated at some intersections, they were presumably left for a week or two to melt naturally because any attempt to remove them using brute force and heavy equipment would indeed have damaged the brand new pavement underneath. All of which leads to the global 'local' question. Why do we so rarely bother to simply ask for an explanation? Me included! Many years ago, when I was the ignoramus shooting my mouth off cursing the state of the roads in Frobisher Bay, I decided to stop Town foreman Art Barrieau as he drove by in the truck he practically lived in. "Sir Arthur, what's up with the roads?" I asked. "Damn grader broke a blade on ice-locked rock," he replied. "The boys are welding it in the garage right now to get us through until a new one gets here." I only needed to ask. So simple. Which raises the one issue Mr. Pearson got right this time. (He's been right before by the way. He was openly laughed at for putting down the first thin layer of pavement as Mayor of Frobisher Bay years ago. The stuff lasted for decades.) Where he hits home this time is in suggesting that, with Saali Sagiattuk gone, our new and younger City staff would do well to ask more experienced folks where common snowmobile trails need to cross Iqaluit streets when returning from a long hunting trip. The evident disregard snow crews have shown for those longstanding access points when approaching Town from Imiqtarviminiq, or near the airport, or coming in through the pack ice, is disrespectful in the extreme towards the very people Iqaluit and Nunavut are all about. Next time on the global local beat, we'll revisit Baker Lake aquifers and uranium mining. .

Cyber War

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I first noticed Richard A. Clarke when he claimed to have warned Condoleezza Rice and George Bush Jr. about the threat of 9/11. He was The Shrub's principal advisor on national security at the time and was ignored.

Clarke has just written a new book about the next threat to global security.

The first half of that book, Cyber War, won't surprise computer professionals much. It might even seem rather ho-hum. They already know this stuff. It will and should upset a lot of lay people, however, including Presidents and Prime Ministers.

The second half is mandatory reading for professionals and ordinary citizens alike.

I was drawn to this book by Fareed Zakaria's May 9th interview with Clarke in which he, a professional on the side of security and intelligence, far from smooching with Dick Cheney, surprisingly accused the executive branch of government of using 9/11 as an excuse to breach the US Constitution and unnecessarily trample on civil rights.

I am one of those who think Michael Ignatieff's little book, "The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror", is the seminal guide to thinking about this topic. (I refer here to the distinguished and principled former historian, Michael Ignatieff, not Mickey Iggy the gutless and Pablum-spouting current leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.)

I was hoping Clarke would situate his arguments squarely in that context.

Not quite.

Before walking Ignatieff's philosophical and constitutional tightrope to meet this newest threat, Clarke urgently wants to first convince us the threat actually exists. Not only does he succeed in this, he goes on to suggest that intelligent reaction to the threat is being undermined by the same gridlock that hijacked the American discussion of health insurance.

We need to protect critical infrastructure such as power, water and transportation facilities, which might require regulating some elements of business, especially Internet business. Anathema to conservatives.

Other requirements, if abused, might violate our understanding of privacy. Anathema to liberals.

Meanwhile, the threat speaks for itself. All current governmental efforts at so-called cyber security, including the US Patriot Act and Homeland Security are designed first to protect government and defense establishments. They do little to save the rest of us.

Our financial, electrical, agricultural and transportation systems are owned by private sector conglomerates whose conservative governments and lobbies eschew regulation just as vehemently as liberal lobbies rant about any use of profiling.

I won't spoil the read by giving too much away. Let's just say that the days of treating cyber crime like break-and-enter are long gone. Security incidents no longer drill out the locks, shatter the windows, or break down the doors. Most of all, they don't remove anything from the premises. In fact, they leave no sign of having entered at all.

They just walk away with the knowledge of how to remotely overload and burn the bearings on our power generators, confuse civilian radar and air traffic control, shut down water distribution, and paralyze the control systems on our ships, trains, and airplanes.

While we were all blissfully surfing eBay, Facebook and YouTube, the stalwarts of western civilization such as Ontario Hydro, WalMart, ScotiaBank and Air Canada began monitoring and interconnecting their (our) generators, refrigerators, stock markets and control towers using the unprotected Internet.

China, Cuba and Afghanistan have not.

(To be continued, when I've finished reading the second half ...)
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Damned Bureaucrats!

I have just noticed a fresh instance of Nunavut's frontier journalism. It caters to my adrenaline rush addiction with some classic ambulance chasing, spiked with a little anti-government diatribe.

I sheepishly suspend my better judgment and enjoy the thrill until, eventually, I can't help wondering how thoroughly the reporters have delved into the matter.

None of us really expects a Toronto or Edmonton meter maid to show much discretion when issuing a downtown parking ticket, for example. We all understand it's just another source of revenue to help with road maintenance.

However, we do expect supervisors to provide some discretion, perhaps even an avenue of appeal. If I leave my car for a hundred and fifty seconds while rushing to help an accident victim until paramedics arrive, I might reasonably expect the bureaucracy to review that context.

Judging from the Nunatsiaq News report on this latest Nunavut incident, it appears the once and former Fire Marshal, rather than merely ordering the deficiencies at the Territorial Correctional Center to be remedied, opted for an immediate closure order?

I'm just musing here, but with my vicarious adrenaline rush over, my reaction as a resident tends towards wondering whether the reporters, or the Fire Marshal, thought of the safety impact on the community of so sudden a closure, compared to the short term risks to the inmates.

What about the safety of the public, or the logistics and financial impact of air lifting that many people to another jurisdiction for six months to a year? How about the impact on unilingual Inuktitut speaking families and relatives?

The Auditor General's latest report points to a common underlying element in most difficulties in Nunavut. A chronic and crippling lack of people and resources in government programs.

So I am left to wonder how thoughtful it would be to blame the situation on a few exhausted public servants trying desperately to hold Nunavut's under-resourced services together. I wonder what really sent the former Fire Marshal running to the police crying professional interference? Did someone in the nebulous bureaucracy ask the same questions that have occurred to me as a mere resident and lay person in this matter?

On its face, most of us understand the Fire Marshall's logic, of course, but he's a professional, not a mere inspector-reporter. Shouldn't he test his assumptions in a slightly broader context in case he's overlooking something?

How about charging Doctors Without Borders and all the parents in cholera-plagued Haiti with criminally neglecting their sick children?

Ah yes, I feel so much better now. That should wake those infernal bureaucrats!

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Racism in Nunavut Schools

Generations of Nunavut students are tripping over fractions.

The practice of promoting them based on age rather than subject-specific competence is crippling them. Grade 4 through Grade 7 curriculum especially is stunting their mental and intellectual growth as surely as would a lack of protein.

They miss decimals, ignore percentage, and choke on ratio, proportion and probability. They never recover. Not academically and not from the psychological scars of being made to feel they just aren't smart enough.

Some drift for another grade or two before being shunted away from the academic stream, but they abandon forever the kind of secondary and post-secondary thinking required for modern life and modern jobs.

The consequence of this failure in Nunavut schools disproportionately affects Inuit, of course, and is therefore institutionally racist. Here's an analogy from the world of chemistry. In 1972, University of Waterloo professor Murray Moo Young accused the entire western world of a blatantly discriminatory food aid policy toward Africa and Asia. At the time, the bulk of such aid from countries like Canada was grain. Since grain does not provide complete protein, dumping our excess wheat was actually harming mental development in generations of hungry third world children, just when their growing brains needed complete protein. Professor Moo Young developed a way of growing protein, microbial protein, on any cellulose base, even pee-drenched discarded Pampers. The result was a complete protein that could be formed into any shape, textured and flavoured to emulate anything from meat to cookies. It was brilliant. It could have worked locally on any continent. It would have decimated both food and transportation costs. Why haven't we heard more of this potentially Nobel Prize winning work? Because distinct silos in the chemical and food industries couldn't get together to combine the two ideas. It threatened their existing revenue streams.

So how is protein deprivation a suitable analogy to Nunavut’s policy of glossing over functional innumeracy? Simply that we've known the solution for nearly thirty years and yet we continue to opt for the status quo. For the first eighty years of the industrial era, we largely excluded women from the maths and sciences. "They will only get married and wouldn't need that sort of thing." We then compounded the idiocy by hiring, almost exclusively, those same women to teach our children throughout the early and middle years of school! We've cheated our children (and their teachers) for so long the problem has become structural and self-perpetuating. On her very first day of Grade 4, my daughter reported her teacher began the first math class by saying, "I don't really like this stuff either and I'm not very good at it, but, well, we have to do it anyway." The centuries old established pedagogical instruments for introducing abstract thinking are all numeric. Yet literacy campaigns seldom test for abstract thinking before presenting abstract literature. In Nunavut, the solution could be so simple. Rather than expecting 'home-room' teachers to teach all subjects during the middle years, we need only introduce the concept of a roving math wizard visiting each class specifically for math instruction. Just pick the best darn 'splainer', the best darn story teller, the richest and most prolific metaphor and analogy generating brain in the entire school and dedicate them to math class.

The vicious cycle of entrenched academic under achievement could be broken in a single generation.

If you have any doubt about this, take a look at some of the Navaho school boards in New Mexico where exceptional teachers have led this kind of transition to numeracy in aboriginal contexts for years. To paraphrase James Carville, "It's the fractions stupid!"

And, if that means continuing to offer well designed Grade 4 math classes to children who are purportedly in Grade 5 or 6, so be it!

Taissumani? Maannaruluk!

. I'm looking forward to the next installment in Kenn Harper's essay on Explorers and Inuit - The Nature of Testimony. I've long been fascinated with reports of broken treaties with aboriginal peoples and wonder if his musings on cross-cultural testimony might shed some light on that history as well. There was a time when professional interpreters avoid translating away from their mother tongue. The theory was that, while people become fluent hearers of a second language and can render unique thoughts from it into their first, they seldom acquire sufficient idiomatic subtlety in the second to do the reverse. Related to this is the phenomenon of Commonwealth Literature. Hundreds of writers from nearly as many backgrounds have grown up speaking English as well as their mother tongue. While still understanding the subtler thoughts of their ancestors, each of these authors manages to find adequate metaphoric access into English for concepts that have never occurred to unilingual English speakers before. The result makes Commonwealth Literature a universal gene pool of concepts from several continents, all rendered into the planet's emerging lingua franca. However, among aboriginal languages in the Americas, Inuktitut included, authors have yet to add much to this repository. Instead, middle-aged speakers of aboriginal languages all over the world are heart broken at the loss of their most precious, expressive, tender, hilarious and healing turns of mind and phrase, all of which had been reliably passed on orally until recently. Few of those who still understand the deepest insights of Inuktitut are rendering those concepts into English. Our media certainly aren't. Even assuming their good will, few urban Inuit speak about their great-grand parents in terms that allow youngsters to grasp the subtleties of Inummariktitut. Reminds me of meeting Father Van de Welde in Hall Beach years ago and hearing him say, "L'Inuktitut, c'est un bijou pour le Canada!" Even on a practical level, far from the realms of sacred wisdom and lore, mistaken interpretation and translation play havoc in our day-to-day. Nunavut's new senator, Dennis Patterson, got caught in such a situation during a rape trial years ago as a young legal aid lawyer in Iqaluit. The unilingual English-speaking judge, jury, prosecutor and Dennis himself at the time, struggled in a courtroom where only the victim, the accused and the interpreter were Inuit. "So he didn't have to force you into the bedroom, is that not right?" asked Dennis. "No" replied the victim. The interpreter dutifully rendered this as "So, is it incorrect to say he shouldn't have forced you into the bedroom?" The victim's monosyllabic, but complex reply meant, "No, that is not correct; it is correct to say that he should not have forced me into the bedroom." The anglos in that courtroom, including judge and jury, understood her to say "No, he did force me into the bedroom!" Two entirely different narratives based on that single utterance. By the most fortunate coincidence, the outcome was the same that day. Which brings us back to Kenn Harper's thought provoking essay and my longstanding ruminations about First Nations treaties. If many early contact reports of Inuit behaviour were euro-centric, absurd or plain wrong, what about the many claims by First Nations that their treaties did not mean what colonial administrators made of them? . Anyone want to revisit the etymology of the common 1950s North American expression 'indian giver'? .

Frontier Journalism

. Once upon a time the 'rush' was for fur, gold or oil, in communities called Hochelaga, the Klondike and Calgary. Each suffered decades of transient, rabble-rousing fortune seekers overwhelming the local population. A second invasion consisted of insufferably condescending do-gooders purporting to rescue that local population from further exploitation, outside influence and vested interest. Eventually, some of the newcomers settled among the oldtimers, adding new narratives and allegiances, until a new 'local' population emerged that behaved with an eye towards longer term community and well being. Nunavik and Nunavut are in their frontier phase right now and they are reacting pretty much the same as Prince George, Whitehorse, or Anchorage did before them. The excesses in resentment, nepotism, plutocracy and paternalism are only typical of peoples trying to shrug off a colonial past. Which is why today's residents of northern Québec and Nunavut are fed up with media stereotypes that harp on nothing but substance abuse and political shenanigans. The latest round in that battle has Makivik president Pita Atami and Nunatsiaq News editor-in-chief Jim Bell squaring off over the role of the press in all this. Atami feels that reporters are so obsessed with their watchdog role that it distorts most press coverage. Bell responds by accusing Atami of denying journalists sufficient access to information to report properly on northern leaders and their management of public affairs. Unfortunately for the communities they serve, there is a troubling element of truth in both points of view. Northern governments and businesses are not yet as transparent as they should be, while the press, both national and local, consistently fail to offer narratives of adaptation and innovation that suggest an alternative way forward. While Jim Bell rightly asserts that 'rapportage' involves more than the unfiltered transmission of raw news, he fails to address Mr. Atami's broader critique regarding Nunavik's and Nunavut's need for a better narrative. If 'one' means we are stuck and 'two' means dilemma, then choice begins at 'three' and Nunavut's intellectual, academic and media communities are failing dismally to provide a more choice-filled narrative of our history and our present. Historians and reporters have an obligation to accurately document the past, but as a community's intellectuals, they are also responsible and accountable for crafting a self-depicting narrative that helps more than it hinders If Mr. Atami's expression of frustration with the current play-by-play on polar affairs was not altogether up to Mr. Bell's standards for style and principle, that won't surprise the rest of us who continue to mourn the loss from our public commons of voices like those of the Experimental Eskimos and other thoughtful contemporaries. .

Muslims - Missing the Point

The western democracies are finally beginning to discuss whether they can tolerate the more controversial characteristics of certain immigrant cultures.

In France, the debate has centered on whether Muslim kids can wear a scarf in school. In Switzerland, on whether the sets for Heidi and the Sound of Music should be contaminated with minarets. In Holland, on whether cartoonists may caricature religious leaders. In Canada, the province of Québéc has launched a wrenching series of public debates over what constitutes ‘reasonable accommodation’. Nearly every other receiving jurisdiction is at least confused over whether complete face coverings (niqab, burqa) should be tolerated in public.

Concurrently, but seemingly not in response, thoughtful elements of the so-called ‘Muslim world’ are immersed in debate over the Theory of Evolution. They are avoiding, remarkably, the most significant issue facing them this century. Idolatry. The very root of thought itself.

This much deeper question precedes any debate over freedom of expression.

Almost as troubling, the West and the Muslim diaspora within it offer precious little encouragement or alternative. Enthralled with the Greco-Roman hairsplittings of secular and constitutional law, Ayan Hirsi Ali, the Dutch press, Irshad Manji, countless American pundits, Jewish academics, and even the Roman Catholic Church have been fooled into framing the debate as a concern over free speech. The United States refer to it self-referentially as First Amendment rights.

They are all missing the point.

Free speech might indeed appear in the First Amendment of the US Constitution, but among Abraham’s children, limits on free speech are not addressed until the second Commandment. The First Commandment deals with an a priori and much more fundamental fallacy: the inherent trap in symbolic thought itself!

Contemporary fundamentalists stand in breach of that First Commandment. They think it forbids drawing cartoons of Muhammad or Jesus. It actually only advises against deifying such images after they have been drawn. The outrageous idolatry at the root of Islamists threatening to assassinate Dutch cartoonists isn’t in their believing the Dutch cartoons insulted the Prophet, it is in allowing that a cartoon, or any other any image, could depict the divine in the first place!

The sin of idolatry is being repeated in the minds of those fundamentalists as surely as among the Jews at the foot of Mount Sinai / Jabal Musa. Moses smashed the tablets in frustration at this truly original sin. Jesus mocked and derided the pretentions of Pharisaic posturing rooted in this same confusion of symbol with what it represents. It is time for Twenty-First Century Muslims to do the same homework.

Until representatives of the three traditions claiming roots in the Middle East renew their common understanding of the First Commandment, they will remain incapable of reasonably accommodating their differing descriptions of the approach to that common, sacred, and primordial presence they respectively call Christ, Allah, or JWH.

Free speech does play a role in this. It's just not the main issue. As one brave managing editor of Al Jazeera put it recently, "how can any community aspire to the democratic principle of free speech so long as we are forbidden to argue with our fathers?"

Meanwhile, personally, despite the most Canadian of reasonable accomodations, there are two aspects of immigrant practices that I can’t bring myself to consider as human, religious, cultural, or civil ... rights.

They are female genital mutilation and the refusal to show one’s face during legal, 21st century civil transactions that inherently require facial display as the appropriate level of biometric authentication of identity.

Soeur Marie-Hélène de l'Assomption CND wore a veil every day of her life and it didn't interfere one iota with her teaching us to conjugate the verb accommoder in the imperfect subjunctive just minutes before we donned our balaclavas to play outdoor hockey at 24 below.

Soeur..

My bedside viewing and reading table

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What a mess!

Oliver Stone's Comandante; Thomas Cahill's Hinges of History; Rainer Maria Rilke's short story The Encounter; David Sanborn Scott's Smelling Land; Jocelyn Létourneau's Que veulent vraiment les Québécois?; Ayan Hirsi Ali's Infidel; Fareed Zakaria's Post-American World; Michael Ignatieff's The Lesser Evil; Chomsky's original essays on Deep Structure and Transformational Grammar; Cali Ressler and Jodi Thompson's Why Work Sucks and How To Fix It; Katie Kay and Claire Shipman's Womenomics; and James Workman's Heart of Dryness.

None are published as blogs. Just 'old media' hanging on for dear life. Mixed together, they illustrate how a deeper theme can emerge from jumbled thoughts, unrelated topics and an eclectic collection of authors.

That is the hope and potential of this blog ... that readers might eventually notice an emergent property of the whole that is less obvious from any single post.

Let me know once there are 25 or 30 rants to evaluate.

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Obama's First Pitch

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American baseball has begun another pampered journey towards its self-styled world series this fall. It will be hard enough doing so against the fanfare of a genuine world event like this summer's 2010 World Cup of Football (soccer), but it must gall honest American sportsmen even more that the real championship of baseball finished in the wee hours a week ago Monday, in Cuba!

In the tenth inning of the seventh game, Havana beat Santa Clara in a nail-biter. It was a terrific series, played against the backdrop of fundamental cowardice in sponsored American media who dared not cover it for fear their fans might learn the truth: that the best Cuban teams would clean the clocks of what American and Canadian fans pay through the nose for: a second class product.

That's the real secret behind the spiteful Helms-Burton embargo. The best teams in Cuba would win North America's so-called 'World Series' hands down. A Cuban second string already thumped the Baltimore Orioles 12 - 6 at Camden Yahds in 1999 and MLB hasn't had the guts to risk another such comeuppance since.

The latest evidence came in a March 31st article on the eve of this year's magnificent Cuban final, when McClatchy-Tribune News reporter Kevin Baxter, drawing on files from the Associated Press (AP), didn't even mention the series! All he could blather about was how many Cuban players 'defect' during international tournaments.

He was quick to vaunt the $30.25 million Cincinnati paid for pitcher Aroldis Chapman this January even though Chapman was no star in Cuba and had posted losing averages in two of his four seasons in the Cuban league. Same thing goes for most of the other so-called defectors.

And therein lies the lie.

North-American sport media only ever mention the defectors. Where is the coverage of the 95% of first string players that remain in Cuba and, more importantly by far, where is the coverage of Cuba's teams, not just a few individuals?

The truth is that stories about individual players leaving Cuba for the US are spun to look like migrations towards a superior brand of baseball. They are not. They are the understandable attempts of a few journeymen players in the Cuban league trying to escape dead end careers and poverty. No mention is made of the fact that superior players remain in Cuba, that the defectors would far prefer to live and play in Cuba themselves given a reasonable economy, and that the only reason for their poverty is the vindictive and hateful spite of Helms-Burton.

President Obama, you have a tough decision to make. Lift the embargo and the elite of Cuban baseball will opt to stay at home, play at home, and repeatedly win any genuine world series in which you dare let them play.
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