Strange Times Indeed part two

There are times when I do a blog that I know exactly what I want to say and the initial words just bubble out with relatively little work; there are times when I only have a glimmer of what I want to express and it can take well over an hour to get out a measly 500 words. Then there are times when I think I know where I want to go - but somewhere along the thought process I go in a completely different direction - one that frequently leaves me feeling dissatisfied. My last blog was like that.

I wanted to talk about how absolute in our judgements our society is becoming; of how we seem to be unable to look at the whole person, but rather we fixate on one event and assume that we know the person. It feels as if we will never be able to forgive the people who use to be our role models, our idols, our elected leaders.

It needs to be stated clearly that there is no doubt that all of our politicians in the last 200 years have been both racists and sexists. Even the most enlightened suffragette was racist. It was how the elites were educated - and those who aspired to be of the elite - copied their manner and attitude. I do not think we should ever forget how their beliefs and their mind-set shaped the policies and actions that they were engaged in. It does not particularly matter that they may not have done it intentionally or with malice - their acts were damaging to people different than them - people they deemed to be less than them. Those acts have had long-lasting consequences, consequences that we need to deal with and is some fashion remediate. But I am not convinced that we need to toss those public figures away, to tear down their statues or in the case of current political figures to bar them from ever running for office again.

My high school had for a number of years in the early 1960s a "Negro Minstrel Show". While I was too young to participate, I do remember attending at least one or two of the shows. In all honesty, if I had been older when the concerts were happening and if I could sing - I would have probably been delighted to be a performer. Should those high school students - some of who would be in their 80s now, be condemned for dressing up in blackface and singing what we referred to as negro spirituals almost 60 years ago as a racist? It clearly would have been profoundly offensive to anyone who was black, it clearly was inappropriate. But before we evaluate those young people, do we not need to look at their lives in the past 60 years? Have they by act and word atoned for their misguided acts.

Similarly, I am willing to bet that the vast majority of young men who went away to university in the mid to late 1960s had very little sensitivity to issues that now consume us in terms of race or gender. There is no doubt that young men like me said things that were horrific. We used language to describe people that would have been offensive (I have never used the "n" word) to those people. The fact that we did not realize it was wrong - is irrelevant. We said it and we should be ashamed.

My attitude and responses to women were no better.

But if you are only going to judge me by my participation (and enjoyment) of a concert 60 years ago where high school students wore black face, or by my use of language (and the attitude/lack of sensitivity that went with it) then you will have missed who and what I am. Instead, I would rather you judge me by my friends, the people I have worked with and the vocation I chose to devote my professional life to. Perhaps even more importantly - judge me by my children and their friends.

Don't judge me by what my parents and community taught me about what is okay or not - judge me by what I taught my children.

Strange Times Indeed

There can be no doubt that we are living in strange times. Never before in the history of the world have anonymous, uninformed or just not very intelligent people been given the power to direct and control both what information we are given and how to value it. The news we have been given has always been controlled by people who have biases. Whether it was the print media, or radio/television, the people who controlled those news corporations - controlled what news and from what perspective that news got discussed. Those who write the history books have always got to decide what happened. But most critical thinkers and informed readers/viewers knew that there was a bias. There were always other formats that allowed a different level of discussion of the facts.

Social media has in some ways levelled the playing field. One no longer needs to be rich to have a platform to disseminates one's views. Unfortunately one also no longer needs to be capable of thinking outside of a very small box or to be aware of the consequences of that view. Given the all-pervasiveness of social media, the general inability for people to think and their overwhelming fear of appearing to be different than anyone else - one person can make a statement and everyone agrees.

Liam Neilson disclosed that he had clearly violent, racist thoughts over a specific incident 40 years ago. He acknowledged that it was wrong and said that he had gotten help to understand what had happened. Was he wrong - of course, he was. It is clearly racist to blame every person of a certain colour for a specific act. There is now conversation amongst the media and on social networks as to whether or not Neilson's career is over because he acknowledged his behaviour in a very public way.

There has been no suggestion that Neilson has, since that event, continued to have violent racist thoughts, there is no indication that he has ever acted out that rage. If there was a rational dialogue happening - one could explore how those thoughts were formed in a young man in Northern Ireland in the midst of the "troubles". We could learn from those experiences, thereby understanding both how to prevent others from feeling that way and why and how he realized it was wrong. But instead, it is much easier to castigate a well-known celebrity because he admitted that he is human.

In my mind, the primary problem with social media is that it uses a very wide brush to taint everyone with the same attitude regardless of why or when. It is fine to label a person's behaviour as racists but surely context is important. While it might be essential to recognize a behaviour, it seems to me far more important to ask what did that person learn and did the behaviour reoccur?

It is as if some of the commentators on social media believe that we should all leave our mother's womb without faults. However, it is not how a person starts out - it is how they grow that is important.

The Absurdity of Cryptocurrency

I have almost no sympathy for people who think they have found a short cut to getting rich and then lose their money. I have even less sympathy for those who think that one of the paths to getting rich is to avoid paying taxes on their income. I have therefore taken some delight in reading about those who invested their money in one specific cryptocurrency and now appear to have lost access to their money. The person who ran the company has died without telling anyone how to access the accounts. Given that the cryptocurrency prides itself on its ability to ensure that the accounts are absolutely safe from hackers - it may never be possible for people to gain access to the accounts. I find it rather interesting that some investors in the semi-underground cryptocurrency economy are now demanding that the government regulate the industry so that investors are protected.

Someone needs to tell those investors that you can't have it both ways. You cannot plan on making money in a process that celebrates its lack of government regulation or monitoring - in fact, argues that cryptocurrencies are better than "regular" money that is issued and controlled by the government because it exists in a totally free market - and then ask for help to create regulation when it all goes bad. It boggles my mind that people would think that one could give "real" money to someone who would invest it in something that had no value - and in fact never really existed and then be surprised when a problem appeared.

Cryptocurrency has always seemed to me to be a bit like investing in alpacas or some other exotic animal. It only has value when someone says it does. The alpaca, for most Canadians, has no value. Its fleece is nice but there is a fair amount of processing required to make it useful and there are a limited number of people who want to use it. The real money was in selling the breeding stock. Once everyone had an alpaca who wanted one, the value of the breeding stock became significantly less and alpacas no longer were being touted as a way to get rich. Similarly, cryptocurrency has no value except what one can buy with it. The seller will always control the value of the currency. The value of the specific cryptocurrency is not tied to any specific item or economy. It floats somewhere in the cloud finding what value it can find. Trying to regulate or monitor the activities of private individuals who intentionally work outside the banking system utilizing something that cannot be defined or measured seems a pointless and perhaps impossible task.

If investors want some security - then they need to invest in systems that are regulated and monitored by agencies that are created using our tax dollars. If you want to get rich quick by gambling - feel free but don't come whining to me when you need assistance.

On a secondary note, the cryptocurrency economy uses a huge amount of electricity to run the computers. CBC noted that " A new study investigated how the energy consumed by these two processes compared, and found that crypto mining can use more than four times as much energy, for value produced, as mining for real resources like gold, copper, and platinum.". (1)

All in all, cryptocurrency seems like something the self-proclaimed elite use just to prove that they are different and therefore better than the rest of us. Pretty typical - use our collective resources (e.g. energy) to make money for themselves but then demand that someone protect them when it doesn't work out the way that they planned.

(1) https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/bitcoin-s-energy-costs-beatboxers-invent-new-sounds-wind-farms-change-lizards-and-more-1.4897314/bitcoin-mining-uses-more-energy-than-mining-for-real-gold-1.4897333

Venezuela - What to Do?

It may be that I am getting older and therefore less intellectually alert, but the political situation in Venezuela is confusing to me. Or rather any solution to the mess that country is in - is beyond me

It seems inconceivable that a country that is sitting on one of the world's greatest reserves of crude oil - is so far in debt and is so unable to meet the most basic of needs of its citizens. There is no doubt that the production of oil has been mismanaged. There appears to be a myriad of possible causes including the big multi-national oil companies who took out countless of billions of dollars of profits in the late 1960s and early 1970s did not contribute enough to the national economy. Others blame the Socialist government of Chavez who nationalized those companies and perhaps lacked the expertise to manage the oil reserves. It is clear that the world economy could not sustain the ever increasing cost of oil that the Venezuelan government depended on to maintain its programs and that the growth that the Venezuelan middle class demanded. The more cynical of us would wonder if there had been some not- so-subtle interference in the Venezuelan economy by some western countries and their multi-national corporate allies who opposed the concept of a Socialist government.

Every news site from Al Jezerra to the BBC to the Globe and Mail has suggested answers but it is difficult to ever imagine finding a solution to a crisis if one cannot agree on the causes of that crisis.

There would appear to be two factions within Venezuela. Both leaders are arguing that they have a legitimate right to control the resources and the military. Both are supported by various governments around the world. Neither leader, from what I have read - have a clue as to how to reverse the crisis that is Venezuela.

I am unclear as to why my Canadian government has decided to be such a verbally active advocate of Juan Guaidó - the head of the National Assembly who has declared himself interim president. The stated reason - that of being concerned for the human rights of the Venezuelan people, rings hollow to me. There are numerous other countries with whom Canada has trading relationships with, who have an abysmal record of human rights including Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, the Philippines, China, Russia and perhaps on occasion, even our neighbour to the south of us. I have no problem Canada providing some leadership on the issue of human rights. The world needs countries to call out other countries that ignore the most basic protections for their citizens. But we need to be sure that we are getting our own house in order and that our condemnations of other countries are applied equally. We must not "cherry pick" which countries we pick on.

It would seem to me that we could be far more effective if we offered some expertise to assist Venezuela in dealing with its problems. We seem to have lots of experienced, professional oil field workers and managers who, according to the press, are scrambling for work - perhaps we could pay their salaries for six months and offer their expertise - free and without strings to the Venezuelan people. But we should not be loudly advocating for the military of one country to desert to support another leader. Encouraging armed insurrection should not be what we are known for.