A Back-To-School Wishlist for Society
Simply, two things. Let’s make sure our public school system recognizes two things: Our children are priceless individuals with immense capacity to excel, not standardized, interchangeable commodities who can be warehoused in assembly line learning factories. Thinking matters, not just filling up heads with data. A week before the new school year starts is a [...]
Building Community as a Tonic for Political Cynicism
More than just political burnout, there is a malaise of cynicism present in many progressives across Canada right now. Instead of just being tired from fighting many battles with social and economic conservatism, more and more progressives I’m encountering have become disillusioned with those who ought to be our champions. There are number of head-scratching [...]
The Beautiful Game: Football, Politics and Social Struggle
Is it any accident in the countries where sports teams are considered community institutions, publically owned and politically active, that their general social welfare situation is in much better shape? Is it not entirely fitting that in a country like Canada where even basic services like education and healthcare are increasingly becoming unaffordable and inaccessible to the majority of people, that things like pro sporting events have likewise become obscene luxuries?
Is a Car Free Vancouver Possible?
CarFreeYVR posted a nice video [below] discussing the motivations and inspirations for car-free days in Vancouver. With car-free days festivals coming again on June 20 on Main Street, Commercial Drive, Kits and the West End [happy Father's Day!], I’m excited to see hundreds take over the pavement. But how does Vancouver ever become the first [...]
Teddy Bear Catapults and Corporate Overlords
Creative resistance to global corporate overlords and their comprador governments will hopefully move to a new level next month during the G8/G20 meetings in Ontario. I know the stakes are high as at least one group [or agent provocateur] has asserted its tone with the RBC firebombing. I’m reading of rebel clowns, watching a video [...]
Globe and Mail’s Irony: Calling The Yes Men Cynical
The Globe and Mail‘s editorial yesterday calling the Yes Men cynical is a classic example of psychological projection, calling another group cynical when corporate media today cannot likely be any more cynical. The entire editorial is below, but here are ten comments about how deluded the editorial department at the Globe and Mail is. We [...]
Emotional Emancipation
As a Jungian, poet and former high school English teacher, I should say that the following two songs and music videos are a solid and inspiring testament to the human process of emotional emancipation and liberation that comes from rejecting manufactured consumer culture. Aaaaaaaaaaah. Jaded, by the way, is right up there as one of [...]
Empire State of Mind
I’m having trouble getting this song out of my life. Vancouver is a fine town, but aside from a nice mention in Tom Cochrane’s “Life is a Highway” there’s not much we could do to make a civic anthem like this song. It feels like lots of things: Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” Neil [...]
A Poem A Day for April
I’m inking up my poetry quill again this month! Write Club: NaPoWriMo is a Facebook group I joined yesterday. I’ll let them explain themselves: “April is National Poetry Writer’s Month, or NaPoWriMo for short. In 2003, Maureen Thorson invented the NaPoWriMo 30/30 Challenge. As such, all are invited to participate in NaPoWriMo by writing a [...]
I Am a Free Speech Zone: No Mayor Can Waive My Charter Rights During the Olympics
Granted, I’m not a lawyer. I consider myself at best a pretend-lawyer [I prefer "lay-lawyer"] so when I dispense legal advice I add a standard disclaimer that I’m not real. We’re all lucky, though, that David Eby is a real lawyer, even those around here who have drunk the Olympics Boosterism Kool-Aid[tm]. But when it [...]
“I Am A Free Speech Zone”: A T-Shirt for the Olympics
“I Am A Free Speech Zone” Let’s put it on t-shirts to let VANOC know that citizens are in charge in a democracy! What if we all wore them all around town during the Olympics as a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card? Would it be like when I used to hand out copies of the Charter [...]
Handcuffing a Community’s Resilience: Bata in the 21st Century
I first knew Bata shoes as a kid taken shopping to try on new shoes. As a teen I learned about the nexus of globalization and apartheid with Bata as a model, since they were operating in South Africa. Thomas Bata said, “We expanded into Africa in order to sell shoes, not to spread sweetness [...]
Destroying the CBC: Another Step Today
I’ve already written about the slow destruction of the CBC. And I’m at it again today. The short list of what I wrote before: constrain funding to lose Hockey Night in Canada lose the rights to the HNIC theme song kill the CBC orchestra And now: “the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. plans to cut up to [...]
No One Is Illegal – Ignite resistance ~ Canadian multiculturalism is not enough!
No One Is Illegal – Vancouver » Blog Archive » Ignite resistance ~ Canadian multiculturalism is not enough!. In a world where the deregulated global market capitalist regime is imploding, there is wide open space to re-frame the local, national and global economy in a socially and economically just way. An off-shoot of this progressive [...]
The Backstage Lounge, 2002
So Virgin took over Crave 95.3fm in Vancouver recently, which had been Zed 95.3fm since 1991-ish. On Virgin yesterday afternoon they had Marianas Trench in the studio. They talked about compiling a band of folks who could sing really well, which shows because their vocal talent surpasses that of most popular bands in the world [...]
keep looking »contributors
