Friday Afternoon Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- I'll join the seemingly long list of commentators who wouldn't ever have expected to cite David Brooks, but can't avoid it based on his latest column:

Eldar Shafir of Princeton and Sendhil Mullainathan of Harvard have recently, with federal help, been exploring a third theory, that scarcity produces its own cognitive traits.

A quick question: What is the starting taxi fare in your city? If you are like most upper-middle-class people, you don’t know. If you are like many struggling people, you do know. Poorer people have to think hard about a million things that affluent people don’t. They have to make complicated trade-offs when buying a carton of milk: If I buy milk, I can’t afford orange juice. They have to decide which utility not to pay.

These questions impose enormous cognitive demands. The brain has limited capacities. If you increase demands on one sort of question, it performs less well on other sorts of questions.

Shafir and Mullainathan gave batteries of tests to Indian sugar farmers. After they sell their harvest, they live in relative prosperity. During this season, the farmers do well on the I.Q. and other tests. But before the harvest, they live amid scarcity and have to think hard about a thousand daily decisions. During these seasons, these same farmers do much worse on the tests. They appear to have lower I.Q.’s. They have more trouble controlling their attention. They are more shortsighted. Scarcity creates its own psychology.

- Meanwhile, Katie Hyslop points out that the Cons are ensuring that arbitrary scarcity remains the norm when it comes to educational funding for First Nations - and that efforts to make such a basic service as Internet access available are being cut off:

Earlier this year Aboriginal Affairs announced they would no longer be funding internet connectivity for First Nations schools.

This not only threatens to cut kids in remote areas off from connection with an increasingly globalized world, according to Williams, but also prevents students from taking distance education courses or conducting online research.

"We would lose access to online library services, and that's really important, as in the elementary and secondary schools kids are asked to do research. Most of our schools have very, very poor libraries, if they have a library, and so now that, I think, is a basic service that kids are entitled to," she says.
...
While schools will be forced to reexamine their budgets in order to afford Internet fees, they'll have to take into account a 15 per cent holdback on targeted programming funds for First Nations education as of April 1. The government announced the holdback earlier this year, citing an uncertainty in funds for First Nations education thanks to the federal election delaying the budget.

"That means that there would be 15 per cent less money available to First Nations schools this year to implement programs such as parent involvement, support for teacher retention and recruitment, for language programming, for some of the literacy programming that we've put into place," says Williams, adding government hasn't said when, if ever, the 15 per cent will be restored.

- But at least offices outside the Cons' control aren't similarly looking to restrict the availability of information. And in fact, the PBO's new website discussed by Bill Curry looks like an excellent step in allowing Canadians to see how their money is being spent.

- Finally, Jim Stanford eviscerates the coalition supporting B.C.'s HST (and the "no" side of the current referendum) as being dishonest, unethical, and flat-out wrong. And the Conseil de Presse du Quebec much the same labels to two of the province's most recognizable right-wing names.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday.

- I'd think it's worth questioning whether we should be so quick to radically change our basic social assumptions based on a declaration of "war" at all. But Dan Gardner nicely points out the problem with using "war" language to deal with issues which obviously aren't subject to resolution through a one-time conflict:

(H)yperbole about terrorism isn’t mere nonsense. It’s what the terrorists want. And that may be the least of the damage done by framing the response to terrorism as a “war.”

The enemy in this “war” is not a nation. He has no armies to defeat in the field, no capital to occupy, no supreme commander who can agree to end hostilities. There can be no V-E Day. If this is war, get used to it. It’s permanent.

Dick Cheney was explicit about that. He warned of “decades” of fighting ahead. So did neo-conservative strategist Richard Perle and former Bush speech writer David Frum in their book An End To Evil. And Norman Podhoretz, the dean of the neo-cons, topped them all in his book World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism. In Podhoretz’s view, the Cold War was a 42-year-long world war, which makes “war on terror” the World War IV. Expect it to “go on for a very long time,” Podhoretz wrote.

The implication is as obvious as it is frightening. Peace is not the normal state of affairs in this mindset. Wars are not occasional and brief interruptions. Instead, war is the norm, and peace is but a brief interlude between conflicts.

But as we are constantly told, war is an emergency. It’s an existential struggle. To the extent that civil liberties and standards of civilized conduct get in the way of victory, they must be suspended. And since war is endless, the suspension is permanent — which is why, as James Madison observed long ago, “no nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

To be blunt, any politician or journalist who demands liberty and civility be curtailed because “we are at war” is a bigger threat to liberal democracy and western civilization than any terrorist.

- It's well and good for the Libs to point out a few prominent examples of how the Cons are wasting public money. But it's worth taking some time as well to go beyond the last two weeks' worth of headlines - and the Cons' longstanding commitment to throwing money at public-private partnerships wouldn't be a bad place to start.

- Not that I much disagree with Haroon Siddiqui. But can anybody explain why there would be any need for him to start his column on the Cons flat out making up "facts" with the qualifier "(w)hen cornered"?

- Finally, a shorter Eric Duhaime: We must fight the requests of mere undeserving artists at every turn, and instead take pity on their poor, helpless corporate distributors.