UPDATE: NHL: an aardvark in terms of evolved masculinity

UPDATE: June 23
The NHL has finally banned hits to the head by any player from any angle...in a move long overdue.
Perhaps, now they can impose penalties consistent with the "crime" of terminating another player's career, especially one as important to the game as Sidney Crosby.
As an avid Canadian hockey fan, it is time to congratulate the Boston Bruins, winners of the Stanley Cup for 2011. Their defeat of the favoured Vancouver Canucks in the seventh game was, in the end, not a surprise, given their convincing wins in three home games earlier in the series, linked to three minimal losses by one goal in Vancouver.
But, for me, hockey, especially at the NHL level, has lost much of its fascination.
It has become another example of "extreme" sports, with too many destructive, potentially career ending hits, and it is only a matter of time before someone dies playing the sport.
And the NHL will have no one but itself to thank if and when that happens.
Skating on thin ice, is one of those "Canadian red flags" for kids. When the weather in winter is warmer than usual, the ponds are covered with ice too thin to hold the skaters, and they fall through, risking drowning.
In the NHL, it seems that global warming has thinned the ice metaphorically, moving the league and its seven or eight hundred millionaire "slaves" to the edge of that thin ice.
Sidney Crosby, the game's best player by all accounts, hasn't skated since the first week of January, having suffered a serious concussion from an elbow to the head, by one name Stekel, who did not even receive a penalty. The captain of the Stanley Cup winners, Zdeno Chara, himself broke the neck of a Montreal Canadian by driving his head into a stanchion covering the exposed edge of glass on the side of the Bell Centre in Montreal. The victim has not returned, and once again, Chara was given no penalty or supplementary discipline like a fine or suspension.
The Bruins themselves lost one of the better players in the final series, when Nathan Horton was struck in the head, and left unconscious on the ice with another concussion, after a brutal and senseless hit by Aaron Rome, leaving him with a serious concussion. Rome was suspended for the remaining four games of the final series.
The league seems impotent to make changes, for example, to the icing rule that permit two men to race at top speed the full length of the ice after the puck, both crashing into the boards and risking permanent injury, not to mention risking their lives. In the olympic and international and junior leagues, that rule has been eliminated without damaging the game in any way. The league also seems impotent, or stubbornly unwilling to eliminate the "head hits" from their game, in the same way that the OHL Junior A executives have done with their game, once again without in any way detracting from the speed and the skill and the excitement of the game.
Unfortunately, the NHL is like General Motors, when only big cars would satisfy the ego's of their executives, and they hoped, their customers, and changes were out of the question. It took bankruptcy, staring it in the face, to bring GM to its knees.
Will it take a funeral of one of the best players to bring the NHL to its knees? Let's hope not.
If the league executives were to be considered models and mentors of healthy masculinity by anyone, such a judgement would have to rank as imbecilic, much like judging cheating male spouses "hot" by any segment of the population.

Brilliant: a non-union workers group at Wal-Mart...and others?

By Steven Greenhouse, New York Times, June 14, 2011
After numerous failed attempts to unionize Wal-Mart stores, the nation’s main union for retail workers has decided to try a different approach: it has helped create a new, nonunion group of Wal-Mart employees that intends to press for better pay, benefits and most of all, more respect at work.

The group, Organization United for Respect at Walmart, or OUR Walmart for short, says it has quietly signed up thousands of members in recent months, and it is going public this week with a Web site, ourwalmart.org, and a Facebook page. Organizers say they have more than 50 members at some stores, and they hope to soon have tens of thousands of members. Wal-Mart has nearly 1.4 million workers nationwide.
Although the Web site of OUR Walmart depicts the organization as a grass-roots effort by Wal-Mart workers, the United Food and Commercial Workers has provided a sizable sum — the union will not say how much — to help the group get started. The union has also paid hundreds of its members to go door to door to urge Wal-Mart workers to join the group.
In addition, the organizers are receiving help from ASGK Public Strategies, a consulting firm long associated with David Axelrod, President Obama’s top political strategist.
In recent weeks, OUR Walmart has organized gatherings of 10 to 80 workers in Dallas, Seattle, Los Angeles and other cities, meeting inside churches, fast-food restaurants and employees’ homes, where the workers chewed over how they would like to improve Wal-Mart. One big concern, they said, was low wages.
Finally, a non-union workers' group that will press Wal-Mart for better wages and benefits for Wal-Mart workers!
And why would it not be supported by both the labour movement and organizations like ASGK, the Consulting firm associated with David Axelrod, Obama'c chief political strategist.
This is political, economic and historic organizing that faces the reality that Wal-Mart will simply close any story in which a union is certified.
Of course, we can expect a legal pushback from corporate headquarters; they do not want any kind of worker organization. However, this move to organize workers in an asociation, that is not called a union, that is not tied to the union history, or its corrupt officials, or all of its tactics, and it presents a new and different, and potentially viable instrument of negotiating leverage for workers at the bottom end of the food chain.
The real dangers in this initiative is that it too will devolve onto the shoulders of leaders whose own need for power and control exceeds and subverts the legitimate aims of the organization. If that risk can be avoided, and organizers must have considered how to mitigate against such development, then workers co-operatives, or associations, or clubs, or whatever they eventually come to be called, can and will serve the collective interests or workers who, without such collectivity, stand hardly a chance against the strong winds of corporate suits determined to operate without any kind of worker collective.

Canada: update our marijuana laws

Globe and Mail Editorial, June 8, 2011
 On July 1, Connecticut will become the 14th American state to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana, without going so far as to legalize the drug. It is in no way fitting that the new rules take effect on Canada Day. Canada continues to treat possession of marijuana for personal use as a crime, and to waste government resources on doing something about it.
Mexico’s former foreign minister on the Mexico-Canada relationship It may surprise Canadians that so many states have moved to decriminalize marijuana – handing out fines akin to speeding tickets. At the state level, it has now become possible for legislators of both parties in the United States to admit that the war on drugs has been a costly failure.
It is a bit too early to speak of an emerging consensus south of the border. But the voices being heard more often are those like Brenda Kupchick, a Republican member of the state legislature: “I've known a lot of people over my lifetime who've used marijuana, and who grew up to be productive citizens and never used drugs again. And I know people who took drugs out of their parents’ medicine cabinet and became full-blown drug addicts and lost their lives.”
In Connecticut, possession of less than a half-ounce (30 joints) would result in a $150 fine for a first offence, and between $200 and $500 on subsequent offences. Those 21 or under caught using marijuana will lose their driver’s licences for 60 days. In Alaska, possession of up to one ounce of marijuana in a private home brings no penalty at all. A set of U.S. studies has found that, when cannabis was decriminalized, use did not rise any more than in states where possession remained a crime.
Canada’s possession laws are an expensive irrelevancy. In 2009, there were 48,981 incidents of cannabis possession reported by police. While there is no up-to-date estimate on the annual costs of enforcement, a reputable 2002 study put them at $300-million. All this for a “relatively harmless” drug, as the Ontario Court of Appeal has called it. Canada has not even been able to get its act together to make marijuana truly available for medicinal use, according to an Ontario judge who has ordered Ottawa to fix the medical-marijuana law.
There is a social/religious/moral/traditional "mental block" to decriminalizing marijuana in Canada.
The block itself, verges on a kind of conventional prohibition without the legislation needed to support it.
There is a chasm of difference between the opinions of most middle and senior aged Canadians, and the opinions of those under forty. It smacks of a kind of "generation" or class divide. Of course, any taboo substance has its prophets, not to mention its profits and marijuana certainly qualifies on both counts in Canada.
There is a serious down-side to the costs of "policing" or regulating of the banned substance and even the courts are calling the substance "relatively harmless".
Having put too many classmates in university to bed so drunk they could not stand erect, back in the 1960's, and having watched as alcohol abuse literally shattered the dreams and lives of dozens of individuals of otherwise high repute, and having descended from a gandmother who was a WCTU (Women's Christian Temperance Union) activist, and a mother who told her husband, prior to my arrival, "It's either the parties and the booze or the marriage!" (he chose the latter)...I am more than familiar with the control that alcohol, a legal, available and controlled substance can and does have on individuals and families.
Surely, marijuana, which by itself is either less addictive or non-addictive, by comparison, requires an in-the-face, direct response from the nation's legislators, after both a comprehensive review of the research literature and public opinion in all regions and demographics.
Connecticut is hardly a hippie commune, as we can all hear some of the most conservative among us calling those who use the banned substance. Canada would do well to examine the examples of those states whose laws have kept better pace with the social indicators, without the erosion of morality that many would and do predict.
And yet, with the social conservatives in charge in Ottawa, we need not hold our breath waiting for change in this file.

Business Schools, in all countries need more "social" and "ethical" teachings

Editorial from Globe and Mail, June 9, 2011
A Canadian business school took an important step toward a truly global orientation on Thursday in agreeing to operate a campus in India, beginning in the fall of 2013. A huge world market exists for a commodity that Canada has in abundance – quality education – but entering that market in a productive way is tricky. York University’s Schulich School of Business, of Toronto (and soon Hyderabad), has taken an approach that could produce large, intangible benefits.

Those benefits may not be immediately apparent to the naked eye. After all, Canadian universities are not profit-making institutions. Is the expansion to Hyderabad just ego, empire-building? The university makes a credible case that it is no longer enough simply to offer students a chance to learn from international faculty, as Schulich and other Canadian business schools already do. It is important to have a presence abroad, especially in the emerging economies.
Deszo Horvath, Schulich’s dean, put it this way: “The real benefit for Schulich is that we will have a presence, a hub in Asia, the fastest-growing market, and some of the largest economies in the world will be around us. So we will have expertise, knowledge. We will be able to provide students an opportunity to learn about this.”
Schulich expansion sounds very corporate – refreshingly so. “Why do corporations go abroad? To make a stronger base at home. To create a larger market. Reduce risk. If North America is declining in demand, we have to be in this part of the world.” Dean Horvath also says Canadian companies are too dependent on the United States and not willing enough to venture out to China and India because “Canadian executives have not been trained to deal with a global market.”
Mamdouh Shoukri, York’s president, suggests another benefit; the graduates of Schulich’s Hyderabad campus (drawn not only from India but from around the world) will spread Canada’s influence far and wide.
With a young population and a bottomless appetite for educated managers, India needs what Canada has. In return, an Indian developer gives Schulich a $1-a-year, 20-year lease on a new, $25-million campus, and India offers itself as a classroom. A good deal for everyone.
Putting a business school in India, as part of the globalization of York University, makes sense to those committed to its execution. However, what these "educators" are really trying to do is to build the reputation of York among its potential donors, including the corporate elite of both countries. Everyone knows that universities have morphed into "trade-schools" offering job-skills to incipient professionals. Universities compete as vigorously, albeit with considerable sophistication and elan, for corporate dollars whenever and wherever they can find them.
Business schools, especially, offer training in "how to operate a system" for those seeking entry into the corporate ladder, but certainly not creative, unconventional, or thought challenging to the status quo.
In fact, with the possible minor variance of trying to nudge Canadian corporate executives into the new world markets, by planting a faculty and student body in India, York garners platinum editorials from Canada's corporate newspaper. Will that enhance donations at home? Probably. Will that generate enhanced political connections within Canada? Most likely. Will it generate graduating classes willing and equipped, through their learning at either campus of Shulich, to challenge their corporate masters, with innovative thinking, with new theories of management and integration of social ethics with corporate pursuit of profit? Not likely.
The world of business, led by the U.S. example, is driven by the pursuit of personal and organizational profit. And, within limits, that pursuit has some social benefit.
However, it is the continual raising the ceiling of those limits, to permit excessive personal ambition and excessive organizational greed that generates both a cynical push-back from many in the non-profit sector, whose very survival depends on the largesse of those corporate cheque writers, and a string of governments-in-bed-with their corporate bankers that disturbs.
Where are the business educators who are promoting public financing of democratic elections?
Where are the business educators who are advocating more public funding for job creation and more credit released for job creation?
Where are the business educators who see a mutual benefit, both short and long term, of business generating jobs, incomes and benefits for people as an equally valid and even more balanced perspective to endow in their student learners than a fully sanctioned, unbridled and even "unschooled" support for pursuit of profit at all costs.
Until we find those business educators in the majority in all our business schools, we will continue to struggle with resistance to regulation for business, and with a kind of incest between the business moguls and the political class, who also depend far too much of their bankers for their survival. Hence the continuing and growing sycophancy of politicians in many countries.

Harper and Tooey: experts in BOREDOM?

By Tom Ashbrook, NPR's On Point Host, from their website, June 14, 2011
Life can be very exciting. It can also be boring.

Ancient Greeks knew it. Romans knew it. Monks in the desert knew it.
And on long summer days or Sunday afternoons, in lines waiting, or lecture halls wilting, anyone can know boredom.
We avoid it. But sometimes we may just need it. To escape the clamor and rush of modern life.
Ashbrooks' guest was Peter Toohey, professor of classics in the Department of Greek and Roman Studies at the University of Calgary. His new book is “Boredom: A Lively History.”
Put this piece of information, and its historical perspective articulated by a professor of Classics from the University of Calgary with this following observation by Richard Gwyn, and ask yourself if this is a coincidence:
Gwyn: Tories learn that boring works, for now at least (by Richard Gwyn, Toronto Star, June 13, 2011)

While the Ottawa-based political reporters covering the weekend conference of the Conservative party did their best to make the affair seem interesting, its defining quality could not be disguised.
This was that it was terminally boring.
Which is what made it extremely interesting. No baying triumphalism by right-wingers now that they’ve won a majority, and may have made themselves into our new, quasi-permanent government party by driving a silver stake through the heart of the Liberal party.
And no sign, not even a fleeting sight of, the once well-known fact that Stephen Harper has a “hidden agenda” to eliminate all government spending on the halt and lame and blind, as well as everything from the environment to the arts.
Rather, the principal characteristic of the Harper Conservative government is that it will be . . . well, there’s no other way to say this — very conservative.
Not ideological, that’s to say. Nor in any way ambitious. “No surprises” as its war cry, which may be very sensible but that certainly isn’t in the least inspirational.
What city does Mr. Harper represent in the House of Commons? Calgary.
Does Mr. Harper know Professor Tooey? Who knows? Does he subscribe to the Tooey theory that we need boredom, especially in a world overrun with information, opinion and conflict? Perhaps.
There is neither vision, in the traditional sense of that word, nor the desire for vision in the Canadian culture at this time, according to Mr. Gwyn. He says that Canadians see vision as "surprise"....and we certainly don't want any of them.
Pointing to a history of Canadian governments of Mackenzie King, St.Laurent and Chretien as also boring, Gwyn omits the long-running government of William Davis in Ontario, that was considered "board-room boring" also, with the possible exception of community colleges and funding for separate schools.
And yet, we are prompted to inquire: How does one tell the difference between cynicism and bordeom or indifference. They are the background spaces in any oil painting. They are not the flowers or the faces in the foreground. In fact, there is little or no foreground when the empty spaces dominate the painting. And when there is little or no demand for foreground definition, artists can, like politicians hide in the weeds of the painting.
Are Canadians prepared to hang paintings of principally empty spaces, with little or no foreground features, knowing that, in those empty spaces may and most likely do lurk hidden tricks that we will only learn from the archives, when the histories of the paintings/governments have been written, when it will be too late to turn the tragic tricks around.
Since we are dealing with empty spaces, on the Ottawa canvas, it might be wise to survey another Conservative government, less attracted to boredom and empty spaces, whose "tricks" were front and centre and whose actions and policies left the province infinitely poorer, economically, culturally and socially.
That is the government of Michael Harris, many of whose cabinet members now inhabit the front benches in the House of Commons, sadly. And they will now, and for the next year, trumpet their "fiscal restraint" and cost cutting measures as their painting of the boring, empty spaces in their canvas, while behind the scene, they will purchase billions of dollars of Fighter Jets and prisons, neither of which we either need or want.
We all need to take a comprehensive course in art appreciation, including the skill of detecting deception, to be able to discern real art from its "faux" version...because this faux version is going to be very costly.

Water: the next political, economic and environmental frontier

Water, water everywhere: Phnom Penh a clean water success story

By Craig and Marc Kielburger, Toronto Star, June 13, 2011
It’s a sweet and increasingly scarce sound. The sound of rushing, clean water as it sloshes out of the tap.
Across the globe, about one in eight people lack access to safe water, according to the United Nations. Every week, an estimated 42,000 people die from diseases related to low-quality drinking water and water-borne diseases.
In our own experiences doing development work, we have seen people struggle to access clean water; walking for hours to the nearest clean water source; lining up all day at pumps or to buy small plastic bags of water sold for staggeringly high prices. People in slums often pay five to 10 times more per litre of water than wealthy people with water piped into their homes living in the same city.
We have also faced our own challenges in finding clean water when travelling abroad — even adding a few drops of bleach to our drinking water. We thought it was a great idea, that is, until our mom found out and made us promise to stop.
Despite the challenges the world faces in providing clean water, there are success stories. The city of Phnom Penh is one of them.
Of the 1.7 million residents in Cambodia’s capital, 92 per cent of them have access to safe, clean drinking water today thanks to the Phnom Penh Water Supply Authority (PPWSA) and its director — Ek Sonn Chan.
As a young engineering graduate, Chan lost his family to the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge. He survived working as a farmer until 1979 when he landed a government job in Phnom Penh. By 1993, he’d risen to become head of the city’s water supply authority. It was a daunting challenge. Not just because Chan had to provide clean water to a country that had recently emerged from close to two decades of civil war, but also because the water system was in ruin.
Barely a quarter of the city’s population had access to water. There were no blueprints for the system, an entanglement of ancient French pipes. None of the engineers who knew about the system had survived the war.
“The distribution was abandoned,” he said in an interview. “There were no technicians.”
Chan had inherited a near-impossible challenge when he took over in the early 1990s. He soon made changes, according to a 2010 PPWSA report. Chan and his team laid down 1,500 km of new pipelines and set about stamping out corruption. He chased down those who wouldn’t pay for the water — including his own employees, as well other government officials.
Early on, Chan visited one Cambodian general to demand the army start paying for water. The general grew angry, held a gun to Chan’s head, and still refused to pay. Chan returned with a group of journalists. Once again, Chan ended up with a gun pointed at his head. His solution? He cut off the water supply. The army paid its dues.
Chan also culled a significant number of his employees, and created a merit-based reward system, according to a 2010 report by the PPWSA. He replaced anyone guilty of any form of corruption.
“My first reform here was in terms of human resources. We had to try to bring on qualified young staff who really wanted to work,” he said. “We work together as a family, as a team.”
With help from his staff, he installed thousands of water meters and a computerized billing system. His teams went door-to-door convincing Cambodians that installing water meters and paying a small price for water meant that they would save money and be healthier in the long run.
It worked.
Of course, we commend Chan, and all the other Chan's everywhere who are working assiduously to bring clean water to those whose access is denied, interrupted, unavailable, or blocked.
This is one of the principal issues, causes, dangers of the globe for the foreseeable future...and while the ice caps melt leaving both floods in the valleys and less reserve on the caps themselves, politicians and health monitors seem under the radar at best, or non-existent.
And with naysayers like Rush Limbaugh, in the U.S. and the Harper Conservatives in Canada, not paying even lip service to climate change and global warming, but more seriously even denying the issue completely, many people who would otherwise be receptive to the science, are turned off, become naysayers themselves and governments, consequently are not forced to change their approach.
The people of Canada are heirs to one of the largest fresh-water sources in the world; and yet the issue of clean water, and its future is barely covered in national media. When a tanker with spent nuclear rods plies the waters of the Great Lakes, there is a collective yawn from most, except a few mayors, like the one in Sarnia, past whose city the boat sails.
While everyone is amazed at the persistence and the courage of the Chan in the Kielbergers' story, where are the Canadian equivalents of Chan? What can the Canadian public do to bring this issue to the front pages and out of the closet?

Sweet November: the movie all workaholics must see!

Watched Sweet November, the movie, last night with Michelle, my wife. In it, Keanu Reeves, an advertising workaholic and Charlese Therron (Sarah) turn a chance encounter into a gripping and disclosing sequence of encounters starting with her ambition to disabuse him of his 24-7 addiction to his work, and ending with the disclosure of her terminal Hodgkins Lymphoma disease.
His "macho" resistance to her overt and blatant ambition to "re-make" his life into one of reflection, relationships and compassion, as opposed to one of grovelling for clients, cash and stardom, coincides with his "firing" from the agency for having blown a presentation to a prospective client who sells hot-dogs. The winner of the account turns out to be a transvestite friend of Sarah's who also, eventually, invites both Nelson (Reeves' character) and Sarah to dinner, dressed along with his male partner, in drag.
It seems that Sarah, having learned of her terminal illness, has decided to "turn her last months into the best job" she can find, and that focuses on intellectual and psychic make-overs for one male each month. Designed as a complete "plan" for her to implement, controlled to the last detail, including, "one month is not too long to become a relationship, and long enough for the process to work," she is religiously committed to her "rules".
Ironically, and cosmically, no one can or does control all variables in any plan, and Sarah is no exception. Falling in love with Nelson, as does he with Sarah, the plan reaches its turning point when he finds her on the floor of her apartment in San Francisco, violently opens the locked cupboard where she keeps her literally dozens of medications, and her "secret" is revealed.
It is, however, the actual parting that is most memorable. And let's leave that for your viewing.
However, made in 2001, this film excoriates the workaholic archetype, with unlimited compassion (for a month) and just as in Shadowlands, the bio-pic of C.S.Lewis, melts the psychic armour of its leading men, only to have both men, ironically and paradoxically, lose the new love of their life.
The theme of the transformed workaholic can not have too many retellings. The Canadian television journalist, Peter Trueman left his hectic anchor chair at Global TV for a more contemplative and more relationship-based life on an island in Lake Ontario with his wife. After a quarter century of a similar driven life, I too gave it up, for a return to study and a professional detour before settling with a much more modest income but much more "grounded" and life-giving, relationship-centred autumn of my days, thanks to my own "Sarah", Michelle.