Truth In Parody

Last year, the Parody Project produced a stinging rebuke of Donald Trump and his acolytes through a song entitled Confounds the Science. If you haven't yet seen it, please click on the link. The following is a sequel to that effort, a sobering meditation on the mad heedlessness of our ways:

France Has The Right Idea

I am a member of an increasingly endangered and probably peculiarly-regarded minority. I do not have a smartphone. While I am an avid user of the Internet via my laptop and generic tablet, the thought of constant connectivity has never appealed to me. I value the kind of focussed solitude that promotes true connectivity with the world around me far too much.

I therefore applaud the bold step that France has taken: it has banned phones from all state middle schools.

“I thought I would be freaked out, but it has been fine,” said one 13-year-old girl, who got an iPhone when she was 11. “I left my phone in my bag all day and I was surprised to find it didn’t bother me. Normally I’d be on Snapchat and Instagram. But my friends are here at school so it’s pretty easy to just talk instead.”

To prepare for the ban, Claude Debussy middle school in Paris started with Monday bans on phones. And one of the results I suspect they hoped for, increased social interaction, emerged early in the ban, according to principal Eric Lathière.

“About four or five weeks into our phone-free Monday experiment, we saw children bringing packs of cards into school to play in break time...We hadn’t seen cards at school for years. Children brought books in to read and pupils stood around chatting far more than they had before.”

The logic for the ban is compelling:

The French education minister has called the ban a detox law for the 21st century, saying teenagers should have the right to disconnect. Children’s phones were already banned in classrooms – except for teaching purposes – but under the new law they are banned everywhere inside the gates, including playgrounds and canteens. The French senate expanded this to allow high schools to ban phones if they choose, but few, if any, are expected to do so. Many suggest 18-year-old pupils with the right to vote can make their own decision on phones.

I doubt that the political will for such a ban exists in Canada. For example, going completely in the opposite direction is the Toronto District School Board which last week restored access to Netflix, Instagram and Snapchat. The blocking of access to those services had nothing to do with educational principles but was prompted by the high amount of bandwidth such services require.

The board's egregious vacuum of leadership is perhaps best reflected in this statement by board spokesperson Ryan Bird:

“We leave the decision up to individual schools and individual teachers to put in place guidelines that work best for them.”

It is heartening to know that at least in France, that kind of buck-passing has yielded to educational integrity that puts the real needs of students first.

A Verbal Tap Dance

Talk, as they say, is cheap. Watch the following clip to see Environment Minister Catherine McKenna further debase its value by her non-answer regarding the now-stalled Trans Mountain pipeline expansion and the threat West Coast oil tanker traffic poses:

The Vindication Of Colin Kaepernick

Colin Kaepernick is someone I admire. As previously noted in this blog, the former NFL player, whose decision to protest police brutality against blacks by taking a knee during the American national anthem, has paid dearly for his integrity. But vindication has finally arrived, vindication sure to end Donald Trump into new paroxysms of outrage:

Last week, an arbitrator ruled that Colin Kaepernick’s collusion grievance against the NFL can go forward. This week, Nike unveiled a new ad campaign starring the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback, who rose to prominence in 2016 when he began kneeling during the national anthem to protest police violence against black Americans.

Given that Nike is the official uniform supplier for the NFL, this move is not without risk, but one the company believes is worth taking. And the backlash has already started. Take a look at the Twitter hashtag #JustBurnIt or #BoycottNike for some examples:

FVCK U NIKE THIS IS FOR SUPPORTING A MAN THAT DISRESPECTS OUR MEN IN BLUE #JustDolt #JustBurnIt



Ripping my Nike Air Max to own the libs #BoycottNike


Bloomberg News reports:

Nike shares slipped as much as 3.9 percent to $79 as of 9:31 a.m. Tuesday in New York -- the biggest intraday slide in five months.

They had climbed 31 percent this year through Friday’s close.

The fallout was no surprise but Nike may be betting that the upside of a Kaepernick endorsement is worth angering conservative Americans and supporters of President Donald Trump.

To its credit, this is not the first time Nike has waded into controversial waters:

Just a few weeks after Trump’s inauguration last year, the company launched a high-profile “Equality” campaign featuring LeBron James and Serena Williams. The campaign’s ambassadors included Ibtihaj Muhammad, a Muslim American fencer who wears a hijab when competing, and transgender triathlete Chris Mosier.

Now, all of this, of course, is about market share, but it is nonetheless refreshing to see a company taking a calculated risk while so many in Trump's America seem so keen on hewing to a very conservative, even reactionary, line.

And of course, for students of human nature, the reactions to this campaign constitute a fascinating Rorschach test, yet another conduit into the tortured and fractured American psyche.

Not to mention another dog whistle for the increasingly beleaguered Trump to blow.

A Pattern We Cannot Ignore

As I write this on the morning of Labour Day, it is already 38 degrees Celsius with the humidex in Southern Ontario, another day of oppressive heat and humidity in a long line of them this summer. Scientific consensus points to the ever-increasing effects of climate change as the chief agent responsible for a summer that has seen extreme temperatures worldwide. The key, if there still is one, to mitigating this unfolding disaster, is to wean ourselves as quickly as possible, off of fossil fuels.

And yet ....



.... our government chooses to ignore reality by buying a stranded asset, the Trans Mountain pipeline, whose expansion has been stopped for the time being by a Federal Court of Appeal ruling. The Trudeau Liberals seem stalwart in their intention to soldier on with this project, but perhaps they need to listen to voices outside their own echo chamber for a more realistic assessment of the situation:

Pipeline ruling shockwaves felt across Canada, Aug. 31

Last week, the Federal Court of Appeal told the government what they should have already known about the proposed Trans Mountain pipeline expansion — the National Energy Board vetting process was horribly flawed, and there was inadequate consultation with the Indigenous people who are affected by it.

The proposed pipeline expansion is simply unfathomable. Even without citizen protests, the financial community knows that investment in the oilsands has no future. Bankers are pulling out and current investors are looking simply to recover their existing investments.

Canada has wasted billions in subsidies to oil companies instead of building the infrastructure for a renewable energy industry. Even when the oil industry was viable, Alberta failed to recover the revenues it was entitled to with too low taxes and too low royalties.

Meanwhile, Norway has made its citizens millionaires by nationalizing its oil industry and undertaking development in an environmentally sustainable way. Canada has given its resources away for a song and now has little to show for it. Compounding the mistake by continuing to prop up a failing industry is a crime against future generations.

Canada and its citizens will have to make wrenching adaptations just to survive when the true cost of climate change hits us. I fear for my children and grandchildren.

Our resources should be directed to building renewable energy and transitioning the workers who will be affected. Those currently employed by the fossil fuel industry should not bear the brunt of the transition. They should be supported by all other Canadians through our tax dollars as they are retrained and find new jobs.

I implore the government to end the Trans Mountain pipeline and tanker project now, for the sake of our future generations.

Patricia E. McGrail, Brampton

Some Refreshing Leadership

Now that Canada's plan to increase its greenhouse gas emissions and further threaten coastal waters has been dealt a massive blow by the Federal Court of Appeal, I suggest it is time to adopt an approach that embraces the future, not the past.

Such an approach is to be found in California. With a population roughly equivalent to Canada's, the state has made a bold, visionary and necessary decision that serves to show all of us what is possible when leaders have vision and a concern for future generations:

California lawmakers approved a measure mandating that all electricity come from wind, solar and other clean-energy sources by 2045, marking the state’s biggest step yet in the fight against global warming.

The Assembly voted 43-32 in favor of the legislation Tuesday. It would eliminate the reliance on fossil fuels to power homes, businesses and factories in the world’s fifth-largest economy, accelerating a shift already under way. The state currently gets about 44 percent of its power from renewables and hydropower.

Unlike other jurisdictions, California has come to the realization that fossil fuels demand too dear a price, while alternative sources of energy are quickly becoming cost-competitive:

“It’s already happening for economic reasons,” said Pavel Molchanov, an analyst at Raymond James Financial Inc., who noted that solar and wind are the cheapest sources of electricity in some regions.

Bold state initiatives that buck the Trump-led efforts to role back environmental protections are also helping in this transition:

Earlier this year, California became the first U.S. state to mandate solar rooftop panels on almost all new homes. It would be the second state to require 100 percent carbon-free power after Hawaii.

Success, it would seem, rests on two related foundations: decreasing costs of batteries and increasing their prevalence. The following explains how this is likely to happen:


So Canada, like so many other countries, has a choice to make: continue to chase after white elephants or take a bold leap of faith and technology into the future.

This About Sums It Up

And it begs the question: Is our species really worth saving?