RCMP author of Taser e-mail now advising BC on police accountability

RCMP author of Taser e-mail now advising BC on police accountability: The BCCLA has confirmed that the police officer whose e-mail brought the Robert Dziekanski inquiry to a halt for months is now advising the provincial government on the formation of B.C.’s new police accountability body. Dick Bent, along with another senior RCMP officer Russ Nash, has been hired on a contract that will pay him as much as $70,000 over six months (including expenses) to “make recommendations on a strategic and operational framework” for the new Independent Investigation Office.

Classic Covers: Fabulous dust jacket facsimiles to novels by Vonnegut, Woolf, Kerouac and more

Classic Covers: Fabulous dust jacket facsimiles to novels by Vonnegut, Woolf, Kerouac and more:

Over at Facsimile Dust Jackets you can find (and purchase) an incredible selection of scans of dust jackets from classic novels by Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K Dick, Doris Lessing, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Christopher Isherwood, Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, Agatha Christie, Aleister Crowley, Dennis Wheatley, Robert Bloch, Len Deighton and many, many more. Have a look for yourself here.

The neoliberal assault on university education

The neoliberal assault on university education:

While global elites continue their cynical assault on higher education unabated, the global student movement shows us that another world is possible.

It is often said that we live in a post-industrial society, where knowledge and innovation are the motors of production and information is the currency. We are also told, in the midst of a deepening systemic crisis, that the drastic measures taken by our governments, painful as they may be, are necessary steps towards renovating our economies for the post-industrial 21st century. Yet those measures, more often than not, undermine precisely those social institutions that are most conducive to developing our capacities in these areas, not only by violently reducing the quality of their output but also by restricting our access to them.

It would be naïve to think that the people responsible for these decisions are unaware of this point, especially when we consider how little their short-term fixes have yielded in terms of positive results for those of us who experience the effects of the crisis firsthand, and how much these fixes have yielded in short-term, publicly funded profits for kleptocratic banks, corporations and governments. Nowhere is this cynical dynamic more evident than in the approach currently being taken by governments towards reforming university education, for it is as if elites are taking the post-industrial slogan that “knowledge is power” to heart and making a concerted effort to minimize access to that power and sabotage its quality.

Take the recent cuts announced by the Catalan government and the dirty tricks used to implement what they call “the new university model”. These cuts, which amount to over 20% reductions in annual funding in some cases, specifically target university services and administration workers, as well as faculty with temporary contracts (teachers who make, on average, just 450 euro a month and often bear the largest teaching burden). Those who are not laid off, or simply not re-hired, will see the duration of their contracts cut to three or four months, their wages slashed by up to 44% and will no longer qualify for social security and other social programs.

Their work and teaching loads, on the other hand, will increase dramatically, which will undoubtedly have negative consequences for the quality of their courses. Meanwhile, student fees are set to increase by 7.6%, the maximum legal limit, thus further prohibiting access to students whose families have seen their earnings decrease in recent years. Disclosure and implementation of all of these measures were left to the individual universities (who were varyingly discrete and transparent in this task) and took place during final exams, when students and teachers were too busy working to notice a small message hidden in their virtual campus homepages.

The barrage of anti-democratic practices does not end there, nor do they limit themselves to Catalonia or even Spain. Current austerity measures are being imposed within the context of the implementation of the European Higher Education Area, commonly known as the Bologna Process. Billed as a project of European integration and academic modernization, this massive program actually represents the anti-democratic imposition of what is known as the Anglo-Saxon model of university accreditation across 47 highly heterogeneous countries, as well as a re-orientation of academic curricula towards a more specialized, technocratic training regime.

As Slavoj Žižek has put it before, “underlying these reforms is the urge to subordinate higher education to the task of solving society’s concrete problems through the production of expert opinions.” And of course, one needs only to look at the current crisis for evidence of the quality of the expert opinions produced through this inherently myopic methodology. What’s more, the Bologna process further deepens the downward spiral of the university-as-business model, where our aforementioned experts produce research at the behest of banks, multinational corporations and governments acting together through public-private partnerships in order to produce profits (a recipe which hardly guarantees the researcher’s independence, a necessary ingredient in producing reliable knowledge).

“Perhaps more than an anti-democratic imposition,” Raimundo Viejo tells me in an e-mail interview, “we should refer to the measures themselves as de-democratizing.” An activist, researcher and professor at Barcelona’s Universitat Pompeu Fabra specializing in social movements, Viejo explains, “In his book Democracy, Charles Tilly treats democracy not as an unchanging state of existence, but as an unstable balance between two antagonistic forces: democratization and de-democratization. The latter, in its most advanced state, prepares the failure of democratic regimes to open the door to dictatorships. The measures currently being applied are openly de-democratizing. They don’t seek to destroy democracy so much as to appropriate its legitimacy and use it for anti-democratic ends, such as neo-liberalism.”

No matter what one thinks of the content of the reform itself, what has sparked the most outrage and ignited years of protest is Bologna’s brutal implementation, which, in the years prior to the deepening of the crisis and its consequent austerity measures, paralleled the violent repression we can see today in Greece, Spain, England and elsewhere. In 2009, students from the University of Barcelona came together to peacefully occupy the halls of their campus in order to denounce the lack of transparency and democracy with which they saw their degrees and curricula changing. On the morning of March 18th, they were removed from campus through the indiscriminate use of clearly excessive force which, once images began to circulate online within hours, was met with a massive, peaceful protest against police violence.

What was most shocking about these incidents was not just the even more violent police response to students, teachers and citizens gathering together near city hall and shouting, “We use books! You use batons!” Most outrageous of all was the fact that the brutality that started set everything in motion, the bloody removal of the protesters sitting peacefully on university property, was ordered by the president of the University of Barcelona, Dídac Ramírez. For, according to Spanish law, the police are prohibited from entering any university, and full responsibility for the decision to allow them in lies exclusively in the hands of the university president.

The tragedy of the current state of affairs for European universities is not just the renewed, violent imposition of a neo-liberal model of university education and the restriction of access to a more fortunate class whose membership is shrinking by the day. The sad punch-line is that university workers, teachers and students (both former and future) now find themselves in the awkward position of fighting to maintain the already excessively precarious situation they are in.

Yet a glimmer of hope exists. From Italy to England and Greece to Spain, the Bologna reform has been met by combative student protests that, while varying in the strength of their coordination, have demonstrated significant tactical creativity and enjoyed their fair share of small victories. And currently, in Catalonia, despite the underhanded tactics mentioned earlier in this article, extreme austerity measures were met with an unexpectedly strong resistance that drew its strength from the context of mass mobilization throughout the Mediterranean region. What’s more, Catalan universities used the opportunity to come together to form the Unitary Platform for the Defense of Public Universities (PUDUP), which unites students, faculty and university workers from all of Catalonia’s public universities in a concerted effort to ensure that the academic year begins with a very hot autumn.

The torch lit by the Chilean university protesters, whose burning light has spread to the rest of civil society in their country, is a major source of inspiration. They want a high-quality, free education and they are willing to fight for it. By demanding it all when they are told they deserve little more than scraps, the Chilean students show their neighbors that another world is possible and worth the struggle. And it is precisely because of how difficult it must be to tell the family of Manuel Gutiérrez Reinoso, the 16-year old boy murdered by the Chilean carabineros on August 26th, that it is up to all of us to make sure that his memory is honored with a better future for all.

Time for Wally to go before things get messier

Time for Wally to go before things get messier:

BY MICHAEL SMYTH, THE PROVINCE SEPTEMBER 1, 2011 3:01 AM

Wally Oppal, head of the public inquiry into the Pickton serial killings, has been accused of being biased about the case.

Photograph by: Gerry Kahrmann - PNG, The Province

Wally Oppal is under increasing pressure to resign as head of the public inquiry into the Willy Pickton serial killings.

That's if the government doesn't fire him first over controversial comments Oppal made on the case that triggered accusations of bias.

Oppal appears to be digging in and standing his ground, at least for now. But this one could get uglier, and I don't think he can survive as commissioner.

It all started with a public letter Oppal issued in June, demanding the B.C. government pay for more lawyers at his inquiry. The letter contained an allegation that the Crown's failure to proceed with charges against Pickton in 1997 - when he was arrested for stabbing a prostitute - caused the deaths of more missing women.

Then Oppal left a voice mail for then-attorney-general Barry Penner, alleging that police ignored complaints about women disappearing from the streets.

The comments understandably angered the cops and the Crown, who think Oppal has already decided they screwed up the worst serialmurder case in Canadian history - all before Oppal has heard a single scrap of evidence at his inquiry.

I'm told Penner believed Oppal should have been fired back in July. The government appointed Oppal to head the public inquiry and could just as easily rescind the appointment.

But Premier Christy Clark, I'm told, has typically wavered on the point. She's worried the government would be seen as protecting the Crown and the police if they sacked Oppal.

Clark also likes Oppal, as many people do. Oppal's personal charm has helped him wriggle out of trouble before when his legendary motormouth got him in trouble.

But, this time, Wally may have gone too far. The government sent a letter to Oppal in July, pointing out his comments left him wide open to accusations of bias.

Oppal responded with a defiant letter of his own - sent to the government by his commission's lead counsel, Art Vertlieb - that angered the government even more.

The government and Oppal both refuse to release the letters publicly. But I'm told the government believes Vertlieb's letter contains even more evidence of bias.

Here's the thing to keep in mind: Oppal could very well be right that the cops and Crown dropped the ball on the Pickton case. There's already plenty of evidence that the case was a monumental screw-up by authorities.

But Oppal's comments are a brutal blunder for a former judge and attorney-general to make - and he knows it himself. That's why he issued a public statement on Monday insisting he hasn't prejudged the case.

But other loose-tongued commissioners have made similar mistakes - and paid the price.

John Gomery, head of the inquiry into the federal sponsorship scandal, was famously sued for bias by former prime minister Jean Chretien. Chretien won, and Gomery's findings against him were struck down.

The head of the public inquiry into Canada's involvement in Somalia was also successfully sued for bias.

The government is well aware of these precedents and has an alarming legal opinion about Oppal's comments. Many in the government are hoping Oppal resigns.

But Oppal is a stubborn fellow. And he's a making a tonne of money on this shindig - $1,500 a day as commissioner. He may dig in and fight - but I personally think he should resign now, before things get even messier.

msmyth@theprovince.com twitter.com/MikeSmythNews

© Copyright (c) The Province

‘Les Sucettes’: The Most Ridiculously Phallic Music Video of 1966

‘Les Sucettes’: The Most Ridiculously Phallic Music Video of 1966:

Yesterday when I posted about the great new France Gall DVD compilation put out by Mod Cinema, I was frustrated because I couldn’t find an embeddable clip of her notorious TV performance of “Les Sucettes.” (“The Lollipops”). Dante at Mod Cinema was kind enough to upload a higher quality version than any that were previously on-line so that I can share it with you here. It’s a doozy.

“Les Sucettes” was written for the virginal, 18-year-old Gall by that arch-lecher himself, Serge Gainsbourg, who wanted to market her as the ultimate French “Lolita” pop star. The song’s lyrics depict a young girl, Annie, who likes aniseed-flavored lollipops:

When the barley sugar

Flavored with anise

Sinks in Annie’s throat,

She is in heaven.

Annie’s aniseed. Think about that for a minute.

Christ, he’s good…

But here’s the thing: France Gall apparently had no idea that she was singing a song about oral sex and swallowing… seed.

When she performed the number on the television program seen in the clip below, she did so oblivious to what every other person present was thinking! It wasn’t until she was on tour in Tokyo that someone let the cat out of the bag. Gall was infuriated and greatly embarrassed by what she’d unwittingly taken part in. She felt betrayed by the adults around her and mocked like a naive fool. She refused to leave her home for weeks afterwards and ultimately stopped singing Gainsbourg’s songs that had made her so famous. For years afterwards her career suffered from her association with this scandal, even if “Les Sucettes” had been a big hit.

Tonight and tomorrw in Los Angeles at Cinefamily: Gainsbourg and His Girls

Previously on Dangerous Minds:

Bongwater: The Power of Pussy

A video story about “Les Sucettes” with a rare public comment from France Gall about the scandal.

Riot report out today

Riot report out today: Update to blog post below, following release of the report: Recommendations #47, that more CCTV cameras be installed in downtown Vancouver using "existing" Olympic infrastructure, and #51, that the RCMP consider purchasing an LRAD for "loud hailing" the crowd, confirm my psychic abilities.



However, these recommendations are not overly emphasized in the report, and will likely take second fiddle to those contained in the executive summary, so chalk one point against me for over-emphasizing the under-emphrasized. The future, I see it, but it is blurry...



Read the full report here.

-----------------



The riot report will be released this afternoon.



I was pretty surprised to hear that former 2010 Olympic organizer John Furlong had been tapped to review the Game 7 riot that took place in Vancouver during the Stanley Cup. The reason is simple: Mr. Furlong had taken a lot of heat, from the BCCLA and others, about excessive security measures including $900m in still unaccounted for security spending.



For example, last week I was at the Notting Hill Carnival Festival in London, England. This is Europe's largest festival, and the world's second largest following Rio's Carnival in Brazil. The cost to police it? 6.3m pounds total over two days last year or 3.15m GBP per day. The Olympics were 17 days. 17 days x 3.15m GBP = 53.55m GBP = $107.1m CDN.



$107.1m Canadian? Yes. But of course, the Olympics were in two locations, Whistler and Vancouver, so let's double that. $214.2m. But Dave, you say, the Olympic period was actually more like 30 days, so let's double that again! $428.4m.



Still missing somewhere in the neighbourhood of $500m. What better way to demonstrate that money was not wasted on Olympic security than to use this riot report to vindicate the most controversial expenses?



In the report, watch for:





Vindication of CCTV: The report will vindicate the use of Olympic CCTV cameras, saying that more surveillance cameras should be deployed during public events. CCTV was a massive expense during the Games, with hundreds of leased cameras monitoring people in public spaces during the entire Olympic period.



This recommendation in the wake of the riot, of course, will be absurd, as everyone realizes that the most effective surveillance came from cell phones of people in the crowd, making this riot one of the most heavily documented and recorded, possibly in history, and certainly in Canada. Cameras made no difference in several days of rioting in London, one of the most heavily surveilled cities in the world.



A business case for the sonic cannon: The report will attempt to rehabilitate the "sonic cannon" MRAD crowd control weapon, purchased secretly by the Vancouver Police Department in the leadup to the Olympics. It will be sold as a "public address system," despite the fact that cheaper and more effective portable public address systems exist, they just don't have the weapon feature.

Why Are Finland’s Schools The World’s Best?

Why Are Finland’s Schools The World’s Best?:

The secret seems to be emphasizing art, foreign languages, and physical activity, paying teachers like lawyers and doctors, and doing away with standardized testing. A shame that the United States is trending in the opposite direction regarding all of the above. Yes, it helps that Finland is a small, wealthy country with extremely equal income distribution, but its neighbor Norway follows a more “American” education model and with inferior results. Via Smithsonian Magazine:

Besides Finnish, math and science, first graders take music, art, sports, religion and textile handcrafts. English begins in third grade, Swedish in fourth. By fifth grade the children have added biology, geography, history, physics and chemistry.

Not until sixth grade will kids have the option to sit for a district-wide exam, and then only if the classroom teacher agrees to participate. Most do, out of curiosity. Results are not publicized. Finnish educators have a hard time understanding the United States’ fascination with standardized tests. “Americans like all these bars and graphs and colored charts,” Louhivuori teased, as he rummaged through his closet looking for past years’ results. “Looks like we did better than average two years ago,” he said after he found the reports. “It’s nonsense. We know much more about the children than these tests can tell us.”

The critical decision came in 1979, when reformers required that every teacher earn a fifth-year master’s degree in theory and practice at one of eight state universities—at state expense. From then on, teachers were effectively granted equal status with doctors and lawyers. Applicants began flooding teaching programs, not because the salaries were so high but because autonomy and respect made the job attractive. In 2010, some 6,600 applicants vied for 660 primary school training slots.

Some of the more vocal conservative reformers in America have grown weary of the “We-Love-Finland crowd” or so-called Finnish Envy. They argue that the United States has little to learn from a country of only 5.4 million people—4 percent of them foreign born. Yet the Finns seem to be onto something. Neighboring Norway, a country of similar size, embraces education policies similar to those in the United States. It employs standardized exams and teachers without master’s degrees. And like America, Norway’s PISA scores have been stalled in the middle ranges for the better part of a decade.

Read the rest at Smithsonian Magazine.