Nunc Scio

Sometimes I forget I have a blog. After relentlessly promoting this video to friends, strangers, and heads of state for the last week, I somehow neglected to put it in the one place where I have total control over content. Brilliant.

Anyways, it gives me very great pleasure to present Tim Minchin‘s Storm for your viewing enjoyment.

This gem has been haunting my brain for the past little while, largely because of the whole cool animation + beat poetry + naturalist worldview fusion. I also really recommend Minchin’s work (well represented on YouTube) in general. Much more than just another musical comedy act.

In my weaker moments, I imagine that the arc of human civilization is sweeping gently upward, and we are all becoming better, more intelligent beings.

And then I see something like this, and I am reminded that we are the same nasty and brutish things we have always been.

City Councilors advocating murder, hysterical screaming, chants of “USA, USA”…yes, this video truly has it all. It kind of reminds me of another time where a bunch of people made up a bunch of stupid nonsense about another group of people, then used it to justify all sorts of monstrous violence. But we’ve learned since then, right?

Right?

Thanks to GA for the link.

My web guru Robin pointed my towards this Boing Boing post about Jimmy McMillan, a current NY gubernatorial candidate and founder of the Rent is Too Damn High Party. I really encourage you to visit his site for the groovy intro track alone.

Anyways, here’s a video of Jimmy at the Gubernatorial Debate last night:

As Robin said, “this man is my new hero.”

I guess the logical response in this situation is mockery. But I won’t make fun of Mr. McMillan, for a few reasons:

1. He’s a karate expert
2. He’s probably right
3. Really, no more or less ridiculous than, say, Christine O’Donnell, who is somehow a ‘legitimate’ candidate.

I say if he doesn’t win in New York, we invite him to be mayor of Toronto. I’d trust this guy a hell of a lot more than Rob Ford. Or Smitherman, for that matter.

As many of you may know/be unaware of/not care about, I work in  the area of higher education policy. I’ve also recently begun a PhD on this very subject (studying universities at university is the most meta degree EVER). So, I find myself with a lot of higher ed related thoughts which gradually pool over time, until they reach critical mass and spill out all over some unsuspecting word processor.

One such Vesuvial missive has ended up on The Mark, a really great website that (present company excluded) publishes work by very interesting Canadians. If you care to give it a look, the article is about the recent tuition review in the UK, and how its proposals may attract some attention in Canada. I’m not sure if quoting yourself on your own blog is a symptom of “The New Douchery”, but here’s an excerpt anyway:

Let’s be clear on what the Browne Report means. While its recommendations are couched in a stated concern for the quality of the university system and its accessibility to students from all backgrounds, this policy is about one thing and one thing only – reducing the government’s financial obligations to the university system. It doesn’t even increase the overall financial resources available to U.K. universities – it just shifts the burden of paying for the current system onto students and their families.

I’ve actually done a few things for The Mark, including this article about quality assessment in higher ed, and an audio interview where I hem and haw and say “you know” a lot. If you can get past my bits, it’s actually a very interesting piece.

Those who know me will not be surprised to hear that Bad Religion is my favourite band. In fact, you may be so intimately familiar with this fact that its mere mention will send you fleeing towards the proverbial fire escape (or perhaps literal fire escape – I have no idea where you are right now and how you might leave in case of conflagration, and frankly, I don’t care to know).

Anyway.

A big reason I am so fond of BR is lead singer Greg Graffin. As well as being a songwriter and vocalist, he’s also a professor of biology at UCLA. He also just wrote a book, Anarchy Evolution. Surprisingly, he was invited on to MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” to chat about punk rock and his views on religion:

If this doesn’t cement his rep as an elder statesman of Punk, I don’t know what will.

And, in case you’re wondering, the new Bad Religion Album “The Dissent of Man” is wicked good.

So, my dog MacDuff (aka Duffer, Duffly, or any other permutation you can think of), passed away this morning. He had a good long life, didn’t suffer, and was surrounded by family when he finally bid us all adieu. For a dog with such a big heart, it seems right that it was his heart that wore out first. He ran that sucker at full tilt for ten years, and I guess he got everything out of it he could.

I rarely post anything personal on this site (uncomfortable as I am with what you might call “human emotion”), but I thought I’d put up a few words of tribute to the old guy.  There was so much to love about MacDuff – his affection for every single person everywhere, his ability to give high-fives, his abiding gentleness. But today, I’m especially grateful for the lessons he taught me. The most important one was this: live your life completely attentive and open to the people that you care about most. I’m not sure if MacDuff was a big-picture kind of guy, but he knew what was important and never lost sight of it. Not during thunderstorms, not while  barking at nothing in the back yard, not even while eating. And he liked to eat. As someone given to bouts of cynicism and self absorption, this is something I need to remember. So, thanks for that, buddy. Thanks for everything, really.

And in case I didn’t tell you enough: you’re a good boy, MacDuff. I’ll miss you.

As I made my way to work through the deserted streets of Toronto, I came across a strange scene. An old woman was crossing King Street, headed north on Yonge. A police Forensic Services van (read: the “By Definition, We Only Show Up Long After the Trouble is Over” Van) was waiting at the light, and the driver had his window open. As the women passed, she said something like:

“God bless you boys. I’m praying for you. Good luck out there.”

This struck me as the kind of thing you say to a soldier going into combat, and the kind of thing said by a very frightened person. So why was this women so scared?

Presumably, she has subscribed to the widely held belief that this weekend’s G20 summit will somehow unleash biblical levels of destruction across the GTA. You know, fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes…The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!* This belief is, of course, somewhat  irrational (except, apparently, the bit about earthquakes).

Here’s what will happen this weekend: roads will be closed. There will a lot of people angry about something, and telling us all about it. There will be some property crime and/or civil unrest. The downtown will be deserted. Essentially, this is an average summer weekend in Toronto turned up by about 15 per cent. Even if things do go seriously pear-shaped, the damage will be cleaned up, we’ll all have a good think about what happened, and things will go almost immediately back to normal. We even have some helpful historical examples to guide our prognostication, all of which speak to the negligible effects of having the G20 come to your town:

• Washington, DC, USA (2008): Still Standing
• London, England (2009): Still Standing
• Pittsburgh, USA (2009): Still standing, also still has awesome football team

So there you go. I will 100 per cent guarantee that Toronto will still be here post-conference. Nevertheless, people seem very worried. Why is that exactly? These facts are all easy to perceive, so something must be clouding our reason.

I blame the media.

Scoring points off of the clowning band of hucksters we rely on for information is pretty damn easy, true. But I think the media really does deserve to be slapped around for this one. On a wide variety of issues – from terrorism to Swine Flu – our beloved fourth estate provides coverage that’s less the “Here are some facts for you to consider” variety and more the “DEAR GOD WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE EVERYBODY PANIC” type that really makes our public discourse pop with nonsense. There’s a well-traveled theory that media ‘primes’ the public, or frame what we think is important, and how we think about those important things. The media has uniformly portrayed G20 (and WTO, and IMF, and World Bank, and all other such events) as violent clashes between thuggish police and dangerous extremists. This primes everyone: police assume it’s their job to drop the hammer. Protesters assume it’s their job to be violent. And we assume we should all be very scared and get the hell out of dodge. The media has presented us with a picture of what  this event is going to look like, and we’re all keen to play our assigned parts.

There are a lot of legitimate issues around the conference. Why does it cost so much? Where do we draw the line between civil liberties and public safety? Why are these people protesting? Why don’t the G20 leaders care? But we can’t have a serious debate about any of these things if we’re frightened.

So, old lady crossing the street, don’t be scared. Everything is going to fine. This weekend will come and go, maybe with a few more headlines than normal. But we’ll all still be here on Monday.

*Ghostbusters is pretty much the best movie ever.