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I have to produce a comprehensive.  I’ll be back sometime end of April.

I plan to be drinking lots of earl grey tea, eating green tea laced chocolate, doing judo, going to the steamroom and writing in cafés that serve my favrite hard liquors!  I will address all social emergencies once I re-emerge.

The short rant like article is about Geospatial Data Infrastructures, however the article makes a comparison with telephone infrastructure and information infrastructure. 

HotTopic GeoConnexion 

I know many of you who read this blog do not have children and therefore do not consider childcare to be an issue for you!  However the day you do, if you do have children, and you chose / have to continue to earn an income, then this becomes a critically important part of your week.  I consider it as more important than public school in some instances, particularly since early childhood development critical years are between the ages of 0-6.  My two rascals went to the best non-profit, unionized, community daycare, Glebe Daycare and quite frankly my kids and I had a most fantastic experience and still visit from time to time.  The great thing about this form of daycare is the relationship building, it is for the long term, and the women and men who took care of my children for 10 years each are still there.  My children’s best friends are the kids they met in the baby room!  The kids they drooled on.  Those kids all now live in different parts of the city, go to different schools, but are inseparable.  It is the same for my eldest who started daycare in Canada at age 5.  This is friendship continuity that you rarely find in ones life, and rarely in workers in very low paid pink collar work. We do not need corporate daycare farms, we need community, neighbourhood groups who love and are dedicated to children first.  My sister’s experience in Quebec has not been as good as mine as the wages are very low for daycare workers, the rotation of workers high, and the accreditation and monitoring not as rigorous while demand sky rocketed with the 7$/ day policy.

Corporatization of child care:

It’s not as easy as ABC

Multinational child care corporations, including Australian giant ABC Learning, are moving into Canada. Corporate-run child care will damage high-quality, community-based non-profit early learning and child care –and threaten the future of a pan-Canadian system.

Learn more and find out what you can do at this free event.

Tuesday, April 1st, 7 to 9 p.m. Ottawa City Hall, A.S. Haydon Hall (Council Chambers) 110 Laurier Avenue West Featuring:

* Deborah Brennan, Professor of social policy, University of New South Wales Social Policy Research Centre: Australia’s experience with corporatized child care.

* Steven Shrybman, partner, Sack, Goldblatt, Mitchell: the trade dangers of foreign corporate child care.

* Lynell Anderson, Project Director, Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada and Associate, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives: the importance of child care as a publicly-delivered social program.

Panel moderator: Ottawa child care activist Jamie Kass

Accessible event

Refreshments provided

French language interpretation not available at this event

Sponsors:

Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada, Code Blue for Child Care, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), Canadian Labour Congress (CLC), Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE)

For more information contact: Emily King, CCAAC 613-594-3196 ext. 231

I love it!

Satellite images like this NASA MODIS time series demontrates how our desire to consume cheaply manufactured products, produced in unsafe, unclean and unsustainable conditions just comes back to haunt us!

I wonder if NASA has produced any time series images of the polution created from the oil refinery belts!  Oh! Mama! Could this really be the end! To be stuck inside of Mobil with the Memphis Blues again!  Shame the article does not look at what is being produced at home and sent abroad (north) in the atmosphere and rain!

Beyond how the story and the science were framed, this type of analysis is really important to help us see. Now if only we can translate what we know into common knowledge and develop insighful policies and entirely re-organize our value structures and economies!

There should be a place where teenagers can go and live for a few years with other teenagers and away from their parents.  Sorta like the long house idea, the morung in Nagaland or the kibbutz in Israel.  Prep and boarding schools sorta fulfil that function but these are not local nor cross class as they are intititions that reinforce a social status and social network which perpetuates the norms of people sharing a common access to power and class.  But the quality of the education of most of those institutions should be universalized and expected everywhere!  I am talking about a social environment of work, study and play that is intimetely intertwined with the community, citizenship where teens of all classes and backgrounds learn to live together, govern themselves, manage their resources - in a society.  Parents can rotate in the economic and social maintenance of that unit in whatever way they can with the teens. Parents and teens can learn to co-govern.

If democracy has to be learned and relearned by each generation then perhaps this is a healthy way to create some sort of social and local responsibility and communality. I am not convinced the current send them to high school with a ‘civics’course individualist free to do whatever model is the way to go!

The current model leaves parents going insane and alone with their very self centrered selfish kids that extract resources from the household and do not make any contributions to it while home or in their communities.  It is a free for all.  We then expect those parents to be sane, teach their children values and ethics in a context where these cannot be practiced in real terms by their kids except for at the mall, movie theather or the rave.  Lets not even think of citizenship and the means thereof, there is no such place for them to exercise this idea.  Then we are supposed to send those people to universities, colleges and jobs, out to vote, drive, shop, work and then take care of us when we are old and the planet we live on?  

Overworked, overextended, underpaid and well exasperated!

Please do not leave me "they will be fine" comments!  Or it will pass notes! Cuz that does not cut it.  If it takes a village to raise children, then please tell me where the village is in this self centred mediated shop til you drop society?  Please do not send me to a ’service’, ‘institution’ or ‘organization’. I want the village!

I will now eat chocolate, drink tea and avoid going home where tyranical teens are watching movies, cleaning out the fridge, leaving the dishes, tossing the boxers, and letting the snow accumulate and wanting to know what’s for dinner and where their socks are!

The federal government is taking an extra 30 days before it makes a decision on the controversial proposed sale of the Radarsat-2 and the Canadarm technology to a U.S.-based arms maker.

• Keep Radarsat-2 in Canada, National Post, March 24, 2008
• Selling Radarsat-2: Why Can’t Canadians Think Strategically?, The Systemic Analyst, March 24, 2008
  
• Ottawa plans longer probe of Canadarm maker’s sale, Globe and Mail, March 21, 2008
  
• Ruling on sale of Radarsat-2, Canadarm to U.S. arms maker delayed, CBC News, March 20, 2008
  
• Ruling on sale of Canadarm, Radarsat to U.S. arms-maker delayed 30 days, Canadian Press, March 20, 2008
  
• NewsTin feeds on the delay,
• Prentice delays decision on MDA sale, National Post, March 21, 2008

Tell them that athletes are as significant as they are when it comes to social and cultural contributions to society!

Woooow! Suddenly the body language shifted and the possibility of this thought blocked!  Most fascinating! 

The context was a conversation with two artist friends, one who was complaining that their son was a jock and hated art. I suggested that sport is as valid as art and that athleticism and artistic expression are equally important contributions to society.  

eeek! the silence was deafening!