Never mind the homework, here's the Vegan Teacher

There’s some food for thought. Not that you don’t agree that we buy and throw away too much crap to begin with already.

Anywho, so today I gave a lecture to my ESL class on culture. The lesson plan was about musical genres, probably the only time a photo of Mastodon has made it onto a University whiteboard. Maybe not. It went pretty well though. I utilized the classroom space, had my students do some group discussions, got to talk about Fugazi and Ted Leo. I was hardly nervous, yet for some reason I kept looking at my notes. Having a hard time with the old improvising thing today, even after I practiced on my cats all morning.

Got my IPT (1st teaching practicum) school assigned today. From what I can tell it’s a small K-9 French Immersion school and the mentor teacher I will be working with teaches grade 5-9 science. Exciting!

Right now my workload is so heavy that I have become rather desensitized to the stress one would expect to feel because of it. It’s just a matter of deciding what hoop to jump through next!

Lastly, if you haven’t already heard about it, check out this guy getting tasered at a Q&A with John Kerry in a Floridan University.

Excessive use of brute force? And why didn’t anybody stand up for the guy? Bill O’Reilly had the audacity to call the tasered student a wimp. Way to go, you idiot racist.

For some reason I have been obsessed with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to the states. He’s totally bringing the ruckus to NYC and it’s really interesting to see the reaction of both citizens and the media to his presence. Check out the different ways his visit to Columbia University is being reported, and spun by selected media:

CNN 

CBC 

Al Jazeera

The Guardian

CNN’s lack of content always blows my mind. As an educated Canadian, it almost seems to me that a lack of media literacy is championed south of the border.

During my time this summer with the kids, they would always question why I brought the Globe and Mail to work everyday to which I would respond that in order to keep yourself from being unknowingly taken advantage of, you’ve got to stay on top of what is going on in the globalizing world. What’s shocking to me is that kids these days can successfully avoid any kind of current event reporting while surfing the ‘net, checking their facebook inboxes and grabbing free tunes. It’s not like when I was growing up, to get to my Simpson’s episode at 5, I’d have to at least sit through the preview for the 6 o’clock news. Now kids can blissfully remain unplugged. Kind of a scary thought.

Anyways, listen to the Clash will ya?

Yesterday I heard about how 6,000 mink were released in Newfoundland, and I really didn’t know what to make of it. So I thought I would post the discussion I had with a friend of mine who would like to one day practice animal law:

me-yo,
wondering what are your thoughts on this are:
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/newfoundland-labrador/story/2007/09/16/escaped-mink.html

friend-What do I think? It’s animal liberation, and I am all for it.

You should check out Peter Young’s website. He was thrown in jail for a couple years over exactly the same thing (he released a couple thousand mink from a fur farm in the States). http://supportpeter.com/

me-Yeah I know Peter Young.

My thing tons of mink died as a result of being hit by cars, they devastate the local ecology and kill people’s house pets. If the mink were rescued and brought to a sanctuary, that would be one thing. But instead they’ve got thousands of mink running around aimlessly. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time now, and I don’t think I can get behind that kind of animal-lib.

friend-Yeah, perhaps many of them will die, but if they stayed in the fur farm, they would ALL die! At least if they’re free, they can die in their own way, as much as is possible, anyway. As for a sanctuary, I’m sure they would be brought there if such a one existed, but the thing is, one doesn’t.

I know it’s problematic and complicated and not black-and-white, but when it comes to fur farms, I think liberation is key. There’s not really anything else you can do with that industry, and the numbers of animals kept by fur farmers are just too high to be putting into a sanctuary, or at least any sanctuary that exists right now.

I just can’t think of any other options besides liberation and anal electrocution, and I’m going to choose the former every time.

me-Huh, yeah maybe someone should start a mink sanctuary instead of using such a short-sighted tactic. But no one will, because it’s easier to pull a latch and then forget then how you are implicit in the death of hundreds of animals and destruction of the surrounding area. Unfortunately other options will only come with societal change I guess. It’s so lose-lose, maybe a few mink will survive, not be recaptured, killed or die.

But this kind of thing grinds my gears, like people who mess with the nets at fish farms. Then you’ve got all these diseased and genetically modified fish roaming around contaminating wild fish populations. I think if you can’t come up with an action that takes the welfare of the animal into account as well as the environment, you’re part of the problem. To me, releasing 6000 mink is a stunning visual, but beyond that I think it probably does more harm than good.

friend-You’re such a downer!

I agree that it’s not a good option, but it just seems like there IS no good option! As for starting mink sanctuaries, hell yeah, but sanctuaries generally take in animals whose release has been NEGOTIATED. Fur farmers aren’t giving up any of their animals any time soon, so that means liberators are now going to have to figure out how to get 6,000+ mink TO the sanctuary if they want to release them. This is ignoring the fact that it will be pretty noticable if 6,000 mink go missing one day and turn up at a sanctuary shortly after…

Maybe the liberations aren’t so short sighted – maybe they are what will precipitate some kind of change in either the industry (doubtful) or the animal rights movement (more hopefull) that will lead to more sustainable liberations/protests/actions.

Also, your environmental argument ignores one of the key things about animal rights – AR activists are NOT necessarily concerned with the environment. They are concerned with liberating animals. It would be nice if those two things always fell in line with each other, but sadly, they don’t.

Anyway, I’m still not hearing any real constructive criticism from you. Let’s have it!

me-Alright, first off, I know there’s no way to negotiate the release of 6,000 mink without huge money, and I think paying people not to kill animals is ridiculous. However, I think it’s more reasonable to liberate and actually save a few animals then letting them all out to find their demise outside the farm.

I can’t help but feel alienated by the animal rights movement if the environment is not taken into account by their actions. Their lack of seeing the interconnectedness of it all is the shortsightedness I’m talking about. You can’t just introduce species wherever you see fit, or you get things like the cane toad problem in Australia, or the zebra mussel disaster in the Great Lakes.

Maybe the animal rights movement needs some more perspective now to gain some allies. Think about how much more effective it would be (especially since the environment is such a hot topic now) if they also blew the whistle on how intensive animal production facilities are really hard on the land and water sources. Get people thinking about how wearing farmed fur is bad for the environment to help close them down.

friend-Well, yeah, except that all the “environmental” stuff (um, An Inconvenient Truth, for example) COMPLETELY IGNORES factory farming/meat consumption as a fix-able environmental problem. It’s not just the AR movement that’s alienating potential allies…

That said, you’re right. Of course you are, but some people just look at the 6,000 mink in the fur farm awaiting horrible torture and death and maybe even skinning alive, and they think, “well fuck – SOMETHING has to be done, and I only have the one option…” Yes, it’s shortsighted, but the intentions are good, plus, the fur farming assholes lose shitloads of money, which is sometimes enough to put them out of business, which means one less fur farm (a net gain, if you ask me).

In addition, we’re now seeing these laws that make it more and more difficult to actually organize around AR (and even environmental) concerns and plan sustainable, well-though-out actions. I think a lot of activists for WHATEVER cause feel isolated and accosted from all sides a lot these days, which makes it difficult to think things through.

As for appealing to people who wear fur on behalf of the environment, um, I think you might be barking up the wrong tree. Do you REALLY think that the people who BUY fur coats give two shits about the environment, no matter how trendy? I mean fuck – even most “environmentalists” won’t consider giving up meat!

Anyway, don’t give up on AR. That would be stupid.

So I conclude that the fragmentation of the left that is holding up all kinds of societal progression. Simple as that. Ah, just kidding.

Alright, I’m sure some of you have noticed, I often introduce my entries with a song title or a lyric that I think aptly describes my post. Today’s entry comes a day after the anniversary of 9/11, and the song I’ve chosen is a description of the frustration that many of us feel when trying to deal with some of the insane reactions that have resulted from the collapse of the World Trade Centers, the images of a smoldering Pentagon and the plane crash in a PA field. I saw some statistics yesterday and was reminded of the time my friend Andriko and I watched Captain War on the television, justifying the invasion of Iraq in 2003, then months later seeing this amazing PR stunt in which he declared that the main offensive was over.

Of course since then, troops stationed in Iraq have increased to over 150,000, over 70,000 civilians have been killed as a direct result of said offensive as well as roughly 4,000 soldiers. And for what? Even worse, a complete pullout is out of the question at this point since Iraqi infrastructure is more or less non-existent, and neither the government or regional army is capable of dealing with the mess the U.S. has made of their country. Then there is the Canadian offensive in Afghanistan (that has yet to be justified in such a way that I can feel comfortable funding it with my taxes). Is Canada picking up the slack? Are we really helping build democracy? Or are we just helping to facilitate the corporatist’s agenda by opening up the country to expensive contracts & oil pipelines? Anyways, I’m still trying to get my head around it and this song is a cathartic listen. Just to know that I’m not the only one that can’t understand the rationality of current “world leaders” provides me with a sense of security no Act or Bill initiated in the last 5 years is capable of. But I digress.

Today I gave a presentation to my Classroom Management peers on behavioural problems. It went really well. As you may or may not be aware, I don’t really dig public speaking. Even though I’m comfortable getting up in front of complete strangers, playing a set and addressing relevant current affairs, I have chosen to enter a profession that will require we to more or less improvise in front of people every day. It gives my gut butterflies. However, I was thinking about it the other day though, why I get all anxious when I have to present something, and it occurred to me that I’ve been taught how to write an essay, critique an article, draft a report, but not how to get up and give a lecture. After this realization, I spoke to a few of my peers and found they felt the same way. Elating! Furthermore, after we gave our presentation, we received all kinds of constructive feedback leaving me with a fulfilling feeling that I’m actually starting to learn some applicable skills. Woop woop!

Alright, on to the next thing I’ve had on my mind. A friend of mine informed me of this crazy initiative in which for North America to compete with the Euro, a strengthening Chinese economy and to save billions in currency exchanges, the Amero has been proposed (and surprise surprise, totally lauded by conservative think-tanks such as the Fraiser Institute), which would effectively assimilate the Canadian, American and Mexican economies under a single currency. If anyone is concerned about other threats to Canadian sovereignty, such as shady meetings about how to deal with US water demands (hint, opening our water up to American markets under NAFTA), keep your eye out for this development. It could be huge and I think it’s totally foreseeable given the state of the American market.

Lastly, I’ve got two really great books on the go, The God Delusion and The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Pick them up if the topics of atheism and how governments/corporations have historically exploited people’s vulnerability after a crisis (ie. tsunamis, hurricanes and plane crashes) is of interest to you.

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Listen to Ted Leo and forget about how it sucks sometimes

It’s Friday night, time to write a lesson plan about behavioral problems.