if . . .

Dueck shares her disappointment regarding mediation process In perhaps her most frank comments to date during this protracted round of negotiations, Dueck implored teachers to remember that this has come to the point where it’s about much more than just the monetary issues. “We want to make sure our actions are not hurtful to teachers and the education system. This is bigger than about your pocket book– what we are also doing is trying to ensure that public education has a strong future, that it’s not destroyed in this province.” Saskatchewan Bulletin Vol 77 Number 10 :: Note :: ... negotiations by teachers with the breakdown of mediation talks seem headed towards ... well based on recent government actions ... not pleasant ... heart-rendering to advocate for education in a culture that revolves around an ill-conceived & short-sighted business agenda, a period of the privatisation of education ... but teaching itself is still fulfilling ...

Spent a few hours after teaching driving voters to their polling stations. A little bit of field work, I thought. The poverty was startling. Run-down apartment blocks, small dilapidated houses, streets dirty and pot-holed. A single mother with four little ones leaving the oldest in charge bringing her nineteen year old to vote for the first time. They knew the party leader they wanted to vote for but not the name of the riding representative. They resided on a busy, noisy thoroughfare and when asked if it was loud replied yes it was a difficult place to live. A talkative thirty something, labored breathing, living with his working girl friend collecting disability insurance after two bouts in the hospital dealing with lung cancer. Fighting to get re-trained, unable to pay for his drugs and therapy wondering how to survive. Another thirty something coming out of a single room home with ten people crowded around a TV. He's the only one in possession of proper ID to vote. The next doo...

After a local newspaper article Election has candidates all a-Twitter decided to contact Riding Saskatoon-Rosetown-Biggar candidates and engage in a twitter Q&A. All candidates had an account (Apr. 30, 2011): @KellyBlockcpc 285 Tweets 280 Following 1,189 Followers 136 Listed @Nettie_Wiebe 55 Tweets 189 Following 201 Followers 23 Listed @vicki_strelioff 135 Tweets 35 Following 29 Followers 4 Listed @leereaney2011 2 Tweets 9 Following 11 Followers 1 Listed Nettie Wiebe (NDP), Vicki Strelioff (Green) & Lee Reaney (Liberal) all started Twitter accounts for the 2011 election. Incumbent Kelly Block (CPC) started an account April 4, 2009 . Usage speaks for itself. Began with a Prologue - introductions and seeing possibilities. Primary intention was to ask a series of questions. Needed to alert that the arts are important. Also posted relevent arts links from page numbers of their particular par...

The Riversdale Community Association hosted an All Candidates Debate Forum for the federal riding of Saskatoon-Rosetown-Biggar on Thursday, April 28th at 7 p.m. Thanks to Community association president Doug Ramage for all his efforts to make this possible. The room was full of maybe a hundred and started with opening statements. Each candidate answered four questions from the chair: 1) The Environment 2) Health 3) Housing and 4) Riding Priorities. Candidates then directed questions to each other followed by an open microphone on far ranging issues: Defense, Treaty obligations, Agriculture, Food and Drugs, Unemployment Insurance, Poverty, Advocacy Rights, Student Tuition & Costs, Water Fluoridation and First Nation University funding. The candidates though reluctant to pose questions to each other answered all constituent questions succinctly with clarity and respect. There was in the room a looming sense of absence - in fact Nettie Wiebe directed her question to the missin...

"The festival strives to bring together many divergent groups: artists, social movements, community groups, organized labour and non-unionized workers to work together to support each other’s struggles and issues. We believe in using the arts to do this." ( MayWorks ) - See: Politics :: note :: ... sadly a day full of apathy where i am ...

John Ralston Saul makes the declaration we are a "métis nation" pointing as much to national identity as to a roadmap for our future. CBC Radio rebroadcast (originally aired in April '09) the 2009 UBC-Laurier Institution Multiculturalism Lecture The Aboriginal Peoples and New Canadians: The Missing Conversation (available for four weeks as July 13 podcast ). His coterie: "It's crucial that all Canadians cultivate an understanding of our Aboriginal heritage, and the role Aboriginal people played in the development of Canada," says Beverly Sabourin, Vice Provost (Aboriginal Initiatives) at Lakehead University. "Understanding our common history and our respective roles will help guide us into the future, allowing all of us to collaborate in building a "fair country." ( Lakehead U Talk ) "In one of the strongest and most convincing passages in the book, he argues that the 'single greatest failure of the Canadian experiment, so far, has...

"At a school with a locked-away ivorytower board of governors, one can feel hopeless to try to engage real change, Darwish of the Sierra Club told the group. "In my year it was cool to be an activist. It was cool to fuck shit up, but campuses are getting more corporate."" ( The Sheaf | Vol.99 Issue 22/ Jan. 24 2008 | pdf file ) "The Prairies Sustainable Campuses Conference will bring together campus community members from across Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta to build a regional network as part of the national movement to institutionalize social and environmental sustainability on campus." ( Prairie Sustainable Campus Conference ) Saskatchewan Education for Sustainable Development Mike Hudema Liela Darwish Rosa Kouri - See: Politics Environment Activism :: note :: ... a rich example of students working on important issues ... wishing to document this ...

"Arts and Letters Daily is an example of the pure ``communo-genic'' function. It creates a lens for the cultured, conservative Anglo Saxon, entirely by selecting from other web sites 3 noteworthy articles per day. We notice it at openDemocracy--when it lists one of our pieces we see the traffic spike. Arts and Letters Daily creates its cultural commentary through careful aggregation--it builds it with the smaller lego pieces available elsewhere. The traffic spike that we see from it suggests that Arts and Letters Daily has real credibility amongst its readers: they trust it to take them places worthy of attention. It is a sort of Michelin guide for that tribe. When I click through an A&L Daily article, I arrive at it with all sorts of preconceptions: I arrive at the article not with a mind as a blank slate, but ready to resume my conversation with the cultured right. A&L has framed my reading just as a newspaper's commentary pages does." ( openDemocracy | ...

"... If we didn't enjoy the war on terror, it would collapse." ( I cite | Enjoying Terror ) "'The first idea was 'OK, we don't go,' because it's impossible to put the rare instruments in the baggage [hold],'concertmaster and soloist Alessandro Tampieri told CBC News." ( cbc.ca | arts&entertainment | Baroque concert saved by loaned instruments ) - See: Politics :: note :: ... yes ... the power heirarchy has too much joy ...

:: comment :: . . . this is where my thinking on democracy landed . . . it is local with universal dimensions . . . rooted in particiaption & informed trust . . . "The analogy between the terms "global" and "universal" is misleading. Universalization has to do with human rights, liberty, culture, and democracy. By contrast, globalization is about technology, the market, tourism, and information. Globalization appears to be irreversible whereas universalization is likely to be on its way out." ( CTHEORY.NET > The Violence of the Global by Jean Baudrillard translated by FranÁois Debrix)

. . . after some general yard clean-up, garbage can in hand, stood mauling at a pile of rotting wood wondering how much will it take to rent a truck & when . . . the MLA for the area drove by & jumped out . . . "Am driving around doing a little neighbourhood clean-up. I'll come back and remove that load ." . . . twenty minutes later the back was cleared . . . the school up the hill had ordered a couple of extra disposal units . . . a politician hauling away garbage on a beautiful Saturday morning asking about an opinion on the new arts aid package . . . new meaning to 'dirty politics' . . . wondering about democracy . . .

"Whenever power can be wielded freely, and without responsibility, corruption is never far behind. Expect a big growth in the powers and budget of Homeland security, probably fuelled by an imminent danger of some kind (which may or may not come)." (Curiouser and curiouser!: Free Country ) "Humans gain trust by interacting and "getting to know" people. Transparent technologies that make it easy to see what people and companies are up to (in a sense the opposite of firewalls) are what help me trust. I like Reagan's saying: "trust, but verify". It implies that trust requires means for openness, not firewalls and secretiveness."(DPR: Security doesn't create trust )

The White House cancelled a literary symposium set for next month in Washington over fears it would become too politically-charged. see Poets Against the War

"Close your eyes and picture your community. Whom do you see? Your family, surely. Work colleagues? Everyone who shares your area code? Your religion? All Americans? Folks in Afghanistan? Unless we start answering yes to all of the above, we're in for big trouble. That's the message of Peter Singer's timely and thoughtful book, '' One World: The Ethics of Globalization .'' A professor of bioethics at Princeton University and one of the most provocative philosophers of our time, Singer writes, ''How well we come through the era of globalization (perhaps whether we come through it at all) will depend on how we respond ethically to the idea that we live in one world.''"

... if you missed the day choose any day & buy nothing with complete consciousness/awareness ...

"For me, it is not only a question of defending free speech, which is important enough, but also an issue of who controls the university. Concordia students, staff, administration and faculty voted, through the Senate, to lift the ban. It was the Board of Governors, dancing to the tune of corporate donors, that refused to lift the ban." rabble news (linkrot)

"Secrecy and Publicity - Reactivating the Avant-Garde" Interactivist Info Exchange "The curator of Documenta 11, Okwui Enwezor, has repeatedly stated that the main question for the mega-exhibition was the development of a public sphere in which art works could be discussed and utilized as a means of understanding the contemporary world. [27] Most of the mass-media coverage, though, and even that of the art media, focused on predictable quasi-topics - Enwezor as the first African curator of the Documenta, or as an intellectual supposedly expelling sensuous pleasure from art, et cetera. Not that all the blame for this rests on one side. The exhibition in Kassel was conceived by Enwezor as the last in a series of five 'platforms'; the first four had consisted of discussions and lectures on various aspects of globalization and postcolonial culture, held in different parts of the world. Some of these took place in closed session, and the published reports of their pro...

"Human rights creates the ground in which we are forced, against all our instincts, our cultural superiorities, our imperial heritages, to listen, to deliberate, to find compromises. There is some point at which deliberation has to cease. There are forms of treatment of women that in any construal of any set of traditions are not humanly possible or defensible. So it is that double side of human rights that we need to keep in mind: a language of equality that creates the possibilities of deliberation, and then also a set of core principles of which we finally say, if we can't reach agreement: "Here, unfortunately, we have to disagree; and here, unfortunately, sometimes we may have to fight." But that is also true of the other tradition, which is why equality is so difficult. I don't want to over-sell deliberation to you. There are moments where deliberation ceases. Human rights both creates the grounds for deliberation and tells you "we can go this far and n...

"An economy based on gifting rather than exchange. [via Abbe Normal ] "

fall fall fall down ... slowly holding ... A narchy R esistence Ac T Oct. 8-17 Toronto, Ontario/ location: Art System, 327 Spadina Ave, Toronto closing party Thursday, October 17, 7-11pm. In conjunction with Drawing Resistance there will a exhibition of politically engaged local artists in the project room and front window. Lines of Affinity. October 8 - 17, 2002 featuring Mark Connery, Luis Jacob, Maggie MacDonald, Andrea Matta, Alyson Mitchell and Rocky Tobey. Event will kick of the 1st Toronto Anarchist Bookfair (also the international day of the eradication of poverty)