The New Provincial Budget

Well, the Government of Alberta rolled out next year's budget, and they're running a multibillion dollar deficit.  I suppose advanced education should feel fortunate that they are "only" facing a 0 percent increase, even though we all know that's going to mean another round of cuts at our poorly run university.  However, to me the bigger issue is the underlying source of the red ink:  lowered revenue.  Two directors from the Parkland Institute offered a pointed analysis of how things like rendering permanent the criminally low revised royalty scheme imposed last year have led to the present situation.  In effect, all of the services that are being starved in the budget are helping to subsidize the oil patch, when oil is going for $100/barrel.

This should be viewed in the context of what's going on down south.  There is a concerted push underway to abrogate the social contract that has been in operation for decades (a living wage, affordable education and health care, some semblance of a safety net), in order to orchestrate a massive wealth transfer to corporations and the top 1% of individuals.  As long as there is no danger of being voted out, this government will continue on its present course, and we will continue our move towards serfdom.

Colloquy (again)

Wow.  This attempt by the University to run a blog is getting embarrassing.  In its several weeks of existence, the blog has been plagued with sporadic posting, too much propaganda, and a dearth of comments.  The latter is perhaps explainable by the pathetic handling of comment moderation, with some comments taking days to show up.  News flash:  readers will quickly lose interest when confronted with these conditions.

I hope that the powers that be decide to loosen things up and run this a little more like a real blog.

It's All About the Civil War

Sorry for the hiatus--had some inescapable real-life things come up.  In the meantime, the Wisconsin protests continue, and grow, as their governor intransigently tries to force through the revocation of labor rights that have been in place for decades.  Here is a post from Balloon Juice that ties the rabid opposition to organized labor that we see in the Republican party to earlier efforts to profit economically off the unpaid labor of others (e.g., slavery and prison labor).  The maps are quite telling.

Tote that barge! Lift that bale!

In case no one has noticed, there has been a class war going on for the last 30 years (roughly since Reagan was elected), and you can guess which side is winning.  (Hint:  one side has most of the money, controls all branches of government, and literally owns the mainstream media.)  Here is a post from the American blog Balloon Juice, which captures in a few deft words the severity of this situation.  We may be a little behind the curve here in Canada, but we're fooling ourselves if we think we're not going down the same path.  Really, the issues we are encountering with the U of A are a microcosm of the larger effort to grind down the middle class and cement a large class of serfs to service the elite plutocracy.

Let's Hear It for Trains!

With the recent announcement by the Obama administration of a major new rail initiative, I'm reminded of another old post from my former blog, which I am pasting below. I hope that Canada will show similar boldness, though something tells me that we can expect nothing of the sort from this government.

Anyway, enjoy!

In the academic racket we aspire to international scholarly reputations, and with this comes the need to travel. Trips to national or international meetings to present invited lectures are common, as are various invited talks at other universities. Then there is the overseas junket, perhaps as a visiting scholar, or a plenary lecturer. All of these things need to appear on the CV, with frequency, if one is to make the case for eminence.

What all of these activities have in common is the use of air travel. Being in an older demographic, I can still remember a time when flying had a certain allure: it was not that commonly done, and the customer service allowed passengers to convince themselves that this was something truly special. Those days are long gone, replaced with the current pathetic rituals of travel--pointless security kabuki theatre, overpacked planes, arbitrary cancellation of flights, indifferent ticket and gate agents, identical terminal food franchises, etc. The horror of modern air travel acts as a disincentive to seeking the kind of international renown that demands its use. Then there is the environmental cost. Every flight of reasonable distance consumes a significant amount of each passenger's annual carbon footprint, if we were serious about reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

In the future, when (if) the recession recedes, demand for fossil fuels will rise, and production will not be able to keep pace. This is the long-predicted phenomenon of "peak oil," and the economics are clear: when there is no longer any slack between supply and demand, the price will rise steadily, even precipitously. The impact that this will have on air travel will be profound. It will simply no longer be a routine activity, because relatively few will be able to afford the cost of a ticket that is in any way pegged to the actual cost of the fuel.

As this unfolds, we will all have to reevaluate our rationales for travel, and our expectations for how that will be accomplished. One likely outcome is a resurgence in travel by rail. Back in the mid-20th century, it was still considered reasonable to expend several days to travel somewhere distant, and this was the case for those in academics as well. An invitation to speak at Yale and Dartmouth? Book it when you have time to take the train there and back. And people were forced to be more choosy about their trips; accepting every invitation would entail traveling 100% of the time.

A return to that slower-paced approach might not be so bad. As I contemplate it, I'm reminded of Ani DiFranco's poem "self evident," written in the days after 9/11. Here's an excerpt:

here's to our last drink of fossil fuels 
let us vow to get off of this sauce 
shoo away the swarms of commuter planes 
and find that train ticket we lost 
cuz once upon a time the line followed the river 
and peeked into all the backyards 
and the laundry was wavingthe graffiti was teasing usfrom brick walls and bridges 
we were rolling over ridges 
through valleys 
under stars i dream of touring like duke ellington 
in my own railroad car i dream of waiting on the tall blonde wooden benches 
in a grand station aglow with grace 
and then standing out on the platform 
and feeling the air on my face
--from "self evident" by Ani DiFranco

Sounds pretty good to me.

Brave Functionaries

Over at the U of A's "official" blog, there has not been much activity so far, with one exception.  There have been a grand total of 3 posts, nominally by three different people (though we don't really know who is writing the posts).  Two of those posts have generated a combined total of 1 comment, but the first one has a healthy comment string approaching 20 at this point.  There is a phenomenon that I have observed previously in blog comments that has made an appearance here:  the notion that using one's real name displays a level of virtue and fortitude that is lacking in those who remain completely anonymous or rely on pseudonyms.  Thus, we have the director of the University Bookstore and the executive director of "Ancillary Services" (whatever that is) at the Lister Centre making patronizing comments about people like Keyser Sose, who is actually raising important, substantive issues.  Because he is not using his real name (presumably due to a feeling of vulnerability to reprisals by the administration), they seem to think that this makes the case for devaluing what he has written.

Here's a suggestion:  stop worrying about what name someone else is using, and try actually addressing the points that are coming up.

Elevator Use

So, this morning I rode the elevator in my building to the top floor.  On the ground floor, an undergraduate student, obviously in perfect health, got on and proceeded to hit the button to go up one floor.  (Notably, the elevators are in a large, open stairwell, so taking the stairs would consist of merely turning around from the elevator bank and walking up 22 steps...something I do many times per day.)  The question that plagues me in these situations is not so much why an able-bodied student would take the elevator up one floor (or for that matter, DOWN one floor, which is also common).  The answer is laziness.  No, what I wonder is whether these students have lost all capability of feeling embarrassment.  When I was an undergraduate, I would NEVER have considered doing something like that, and I don't recall seeing many of my peers do so either.  Apart from not wanting to wait for the elevator, I would have worried about looking totally lame to my friends and coworkers.  Are the two generations really that different in how they manage their image?  It appears so.

Colloquy

Well, I tried to drop a comment at the U of A's new blog, Colloquy, but so far it has not shown up.  There was nothing especially mean in my comment, just a discussion of the significance of the name they chose for the blog.  If that's enough to disqualify my comment, then I think we can predict that this enterprise is going to be a colossal waste of time.