Northern Overexposure

Until we meet again my brother

10/21/2020

On October 20, my brother Mark Waino Drazenovich shuffled off his mortal coil and began a new journey. My prayer, hope, and expectation is that he is at peace. And my faith provides me certainty that I will see him again.

I have many memories of my older brother and our many conversations. He was an educator with an eclectic spirit. He too was his father's son and followed his path as an educator with a heart, especially, for those students who were the most marginalized in our society.

Mark studied at the University of Kings College in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He grew to love the spirit of the Maritimes; its culture and the English, Scottish, and Irish heritage that exerts such an influence on that region of Canada.

At my father's funeral, Mark delivered the eulogy, and perhaps in a moment of transference or perhaps a more felt sense of spiritual kinship, admitted that my father was a complicated man. In this he drew on our Catholic tradition of the saints who offer important insights into the nature of human beings. One of the great English saints, admired by Mark, St. Thomas More, said:

“God made the angels to show Him splendor, as He made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But Man He made to serve Him wittily, in the tangle of his mind.”

This image of serving God, intellectually, in the tangles of our mind resonated with my brother. All of us experience conflicting motivations, impulses, defences, delusions, occurring within ourselves as we strive to live a full life. But that is not psychopathology; that is how we are created. Our very purpose in this life is to serve God, wittily, within these very tangles. We cannot avoid them. In fact working through these very tangles to forge a just society and a meaningful life is what constitutes our human dignity.

Mark embraced his contradictions and conflicts. His spirit was a free one. It was not conventional. He did not teach in a conventional school (he taught students who society or the education system had marginalized). He did not live a conventional life or remain in the stable institutions such as marriage that our society and ecclesial institutions afford us. He moved from northwestern Ontario, to the Maritimes, and finally to California for the last well over 30 years. And notwithstanding the length of time spent in California, he was planning, after retirement, to move again to Alabama for reasons known only to him. He loved his estranged wife Ann and it was a regret that he could not make that work. Yet, in and through all of this he remained a devout and practicing Roman Catholic until the end of his life.

He eschewed advice from his brothers who when calling him urged him to go to the hospital the day before he died. He complained of sore ribs and a sore throat. He forthrightly refused to attend to these matters for reasons none of us remaining behind will understand. But such is the dignity of human choice and self-determination.

For those of us close to him, we loved him in all his complications, contradictions, good humour, sarcastic wit, and sentimentality. He shared once with me a poem by Robert Frost that captures the essence of who Mark is an was. It is entitled, "The Men Who Don't Fit In".

There's a race of men that don't fit in,
    A race that can't stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
    And they roam the world at will.
They range the field and they rove the flood,
    And they climb the mountain's crest;
Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,
    And they don't know how to rest.

If they just went straight they might go far;
    They are strong and brave and true;
But they're always tired of the things that are,
    And they want the strange and new.
They say: "Could I find my proper groove,
    What a deep mark I would make!"
So they chop and change, and each fresh move
    Is only a fresh mistake.

And each forgets, as he strips and runs
    With a brilliant, fitful pace,
It's the steady, quiet, plodding ones
    Who win in the lifelong race.
And each forgets that his youth has fled,
    Forgets that his prime is past,
Till he stands one day, with a hope that's dead,
    In the glare of the truth at last.

He has failed, he has failed; he has missed his chance;
    He has just done things by half.
Life's been a jolly good joke on him,
    And now is the time to laugh.
Ha, ha! He is one of the Legion Lost;
    He was never meant to win;
He's a rolling stone, and it's bred in the bone;
    He's a man who won't fit in.

In a moment of serendipity, in on one of our Skype calls, we were discussing, of all things, King Lear. Mark shared with me his favourite Shakespearean quote. I imagine my brother as the favoured child Cordelia and my father as King Lear taking Mark's hand and saying "come Mark let's take upon 's the mystery of things, As if we were God's spies".

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Let's take upon us the mystery of things

9/2/2020

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King Lear is one of Shakespeare's most famous plays. Themes of what is madness and what is clarity pervades the play.

One of the most moving scenes occurs at the end of the play with King Lear and his noble daughter Cordelia. With her, he can endure prison. What looks to us as folly and even disassociation actually contains great spiritual truth.

During this prolonged period of lockdowns, quarantines and excessive and disproportionate (in my view) responses to Covid, Lear's final soliloquy is moving and inspiring.

No, no, no, no! Come, let’s away to prison.
We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news, and we’ll talk with them too--
Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out--
And take upon ’s the mystery of things
As if we were God’s spies. And we’ll wear out
In a walled prison packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by the moon.

Lear underscores the value of just one vital relationship with a loved one. And even if we are with only this one loved one, we can sing like birds in the cage.

I love the line "to take upon us the mystery of things as if we were God's spies" There is something divine in seeing hope amid suffering. It is akin to being a contemplative in action - engaged deeply in the world but not being "of" it.

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Boulevard Lake Rock Circle - Thunder Bay

7/20/2020

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Very interesting rock circle was found under Boulevard Lake in Thunder Bay not far from my home. Lakehead University researcher Scott Hamilton says that "while he's reluctant to guess, the idea that the formation was created by First Nations people for a ceremonial function seems most likely to him, said Hamilton, adding that he wants to talk to the city about making sure the site is protected."

Rest of CBC story here

Mystery is always captivating and touching the sacred always increases the level of my consciouness.

I captured my own video below.

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Voluntary Intoxication - R. v Sullivan

6/17/2020

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Many sexual violence advocates are voicing concern and political oppostion to the Ontario Superior Court of Appeal finding that s. 33.1 of the Criminal Code of Canda, which prevents the use of voluntary intoxcation as a defense for violent acts, was found to be unconstitutional.

The link to the court decision can be found here => R. v Sullivan

Without going to far in the weeds of criminal law, two elements need to be present for a criminal conviction; the actus reus (the actual act) and the mens rae (the state of mind). A person who lack the mens rae is said to be acting with automatism and therefore their actions are not voluntary and cannot be said to be criminal. As the judge explains (quotes from ruling all italicized throughout):

Automatism is defined as “a state of impaired consciousness, rather than unconsciousness, in which an individual, though capable of action, has no voluntary control over that action”: R. v. Stone, [1999] 2 S.C.R. 290, at para. 156, per Bastarache J. Involuntariness is therefore the essence of automatism. The“mind does not go with what is being done”: Rabey v. The Queen, [1980] 2 S.C.R. 513, at p. 518, citing R. v. K., [1971] 2 O.R. 401 (S.C.), at p. 401.

The most common way of describing automatism is "not guilty by reason of insanity", technically known in Canadian law as "not criminally responsible" (NCR).

There are two branches to the defence of automatism. The mental disorder defence, codified in s. 16 of the Criminal Code, R.S.C., 1985, c. C-46, applies where involuntariness is caused by a disease of the mind, since those who are in a state of automatism are incapable of appreciating the nature and quality of their acts or of knowing at the time of their conduct that it is morally wrong [“mental disorder automatism”]. If successful, a mental disorder automatism defence will result in a not criminally responsible verdict, with the likelihood of detention or extensive community supervision.

The other branch, and the focus of both Section 33.1 of the Criminal Code and the ruling of the court is this branch:

The alternative branch, the common law automatism defence, applies where the involuntariness is not caused by a disease of the mind [“non-mental disorder automatism”]. Where a non-mental disorder automatism defence succeeds, the accused is acquitted.

In response to this common law defence, Parliament passed Section 33.1 of the Criminal Code of Canada which deprived anyone who was voluntary intoxciated of using non-mental disorder automatism as a defense.

Part of the debate in this ruling was the relationship between Parliament and the judiciary. The judiciary must respect and show deference to duly enacted laws of Parliament. But Parliament may not pass laws that violate fundamental justice as enshrined in the Charter. And it is the function of the judiciary to rule on Charter issues.

The judge writes:

I also recognize Parliament’s core competency in creating criminal offences. However, courts have core competency in identifying constitutional principles that determine the proper reach of criminal liability in our free and democratic society, and the responsibility to protect those principles from unconstitutional laws: Reference re Section 94(2) of the B.C. Motor Vehicle Act, at para. 15. As Vertes J. observed in R. v. Brenton, “deference is not the same thing as merely taking Parliament’s choice at face value. That would be an abdication of [judicial] responsibility”: (1999), 180 D.L.R. (4th) 314 (N.W.T.S.C.), at para. 78, rev’d for other reasons, 2001 NWTCA 1, 199 D.L.R. (4th) 119. Even after due deference is accounted for, Parliament’s choice in enacting s. 33.1 cannot be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.

Finally (for this post), the judge reviews the debate before Parliament at the time of the passage of 33.1 of the Criminal Code. The judge suggests that creating a charge of "Criminal Intoxication" would serve to advance the the purpose of s. 33.1 while at the same time preserving the aims of fundamental justice for the accused.

I agree with the trial judge that the option of a stand-alone offence of criminal intoxication would achieve the objective of s. 33.1. Making it a crime to commit a prohibited act while drunk is the response Cory J. invited in Daviault, at p. 100, and that was recommended by the Law Reform Commission of Canada: see Recodifying Criminal Law, Report 30, vol. 1 (1986), at pp. 27-28. It is difficult to reject this option as a reasonable alternative given the impressive endorsements it has received...

Certainly, this option would also be less impairing than s. 33.1 since it does not infringe, let alone deny, the Charter rights that s. 33.1 disregards. It would criminalize the very act from which the Crown purports to derive the relevant moral fault, namely, the decision to become intoxicated in those cases where that intoxication proves, by the subsequent conduct of the accused, to have been dangerous.

This distinction protects and safeguards important civil liberties while providing for accountability for offenders. I wonder, also, whether non-mental disorder automatism could fall under the NCR category. Those found NCR for voluntary intoxication could be placed in forensic facilities fo treatment and supervision.

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Was Sweden Right?

6/10/2020

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As most of the Western world, including my province of Ontario, begins to move towards "Stage 2" or whatever euphemism governments want to use to describe mitigation strategies, more journalists are asking, was Sweden right?

After all, what has changed in terms of our ability to manage the virus? There is still no vaccine, existing therapeutics are the same as we have been using for months. Testing has indeed continued and we understand more of the epidemiology of the virus. But that understanding strengthens rather than diminishes Sweden's approach.

As of Friday, in rural places in Ontario, most business can open, gatherings can be enlarged with more announcements to come.

There is a lot of evidence to suggest that Sweden struck the right balance right off the jump.

As the Guardian's Simon Jenkins argues, those who criticized Sweden's risk mitigation strategy are now imitating it:

The half-Swedish commentator Freddie Sayer has been closely monitoring this debate from the UK. He makes the point that with each passing week the rest of Europe moves steadily closer to imitating Sweden. It is doing so because modern economies – and their peoples – just cannot live with such crushing abnormality as they have seen these past two months

Furthermore, Ellen Brown shared the graph below.

Sweden has actually fared better than many industrialized countries that did lock down their economies. As of June 5th, Belgium, the UK, Spain and Italy, which all locked down, had more deaths per million than Sweden; while France, the Netherlands, Ireland, the US, Switzerland and Canada all had fewer. Sweden was in the median range. Other researchers have found no correlation between lockdowns and COVID-19 deaths.

And the ACTUAL deaths were far below the projected ones.

Every public policy strategy is a risk. But that risk must be balanced against a wide range of factors impacting public health. As Jenkins concludes:

Sweden gambled in its response, but so did the rest of the world. South Africa’s lockdown threatens it with economic and political catastrophe. The UN warns that the world could lose four years of growth at a cost of $8.5 trillion. Famine and further disease will be rife. That was surely the greater gamble.

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George Floyd, Regis Korchinski-Paquet, and the rise of the warrior cop

5/30/2020

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The death at the hands of the police, on camera, of George Floyd in Minneapolis has raised the entire issue of policing and race relations once again. This is true not only for the US but for Canada as well. In Toronto, Regis Korchinski-Paquet, fell to her death from the balcony of a Toronto apartment building when the police attended. Demonstrations are occurring in Toronto today.

The issues that gave rise to these incidents are not new. Back in 2014 Radley Balko wrote a fascinating history on The Rise of the Warrior Cop.

Rania Khalek has an excellent summary on the history outlined in Balko's book and on Twitter => Rania Khalek on Policing

In 2003, the Ontario Human Rights Commission completed their systemic review of racial profiling by police in Ontario and concluded with recommendations for actions. You can read it here => Paying the price: The human cost of racial profiling

The point is that sadly this is not new. While I completely sympathize with the anger, the riots and burning are not effective means to effect lasting change. Change requires a committed and engaged citizenry that works day in and day out on these issues. Many community leaders have been doing just that and incidents such as these reinforce the need to continue these efforts toward better policing and criminal justice reform.

For those unfamiliar with the background surrounding this issue, these links are very good reading for review and historical context.

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Capitalism, Oligarchy, and the rise of neo-feudalism

5/25/2020

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The concept of “neo-feudalism” is being advanced by many thinkers – one of whom is Sam Vankin.

Vankin argues the super-rich have all the capital and that it has now been taken out of circulation. The 10, 000 richest people in the world have as much money as 3.9 billion in the world! These richest people are taking money out of the economy much faster and leaving the rest of us much poorer. This forces central banks to create money to keep the rest afloat. We are all left with socialism with a capitalist face.

But, he argues, capitalism is not about taking all the money out of society – that is an oligarchy and its inevitable manifestation is our modern capitalist system. Market capitalism (and he explains what market capitalism is which is akin to the barter system) allows for a free exchange of goods and services as opposed to an assumed and fabricated created equality that regulation and punitive taxation claim to facilitate.

As market capitalism grew 400 years ago, it discovered that if states became clients, they could become richer. The state became the biggest business partner. This marriage between the state and the market was a marriage made in “hell”. As evidence of this growth he argues that in the US, in 1920, the State grew 3.1 % of GDP, the state today is 37% of GDP, 70 times bigger.

Capitalism, he argues, copes with individual entrepreneurs. In capitalist societies, entrepreneurship was a great hope. Entrepreneurs are intuitive futurologists and risk-takers. Exclusive ownership is allowed, in the social compact, to exclude others from the fruits of the entrepreneurial effort. Legal copyright, the trademark are all accommodations to this system. Exclusive ownership is just, however, only if there is enough for others and others have the opportunity to grow. Hence, anti-monopoly laws and practices are useful functions of the state to interrupt monolithic big growth. We see today that monopolies are all over and six companies own almost all the modern telecommunication systems.

When the state and capitalism mix, as they have in modern history, the capitalist system has no way to cope. Capitalism is ill-adapted to the growth of the state. Yet, in the modern world, they have grown up together. Boeing, for example receives 1/3 of its income from the state. The only player is now the state. But capitalism has no public vision or sense of the commons.

Vankin sees the rise of mental illness, specifically narcissism, as a psychological manifestation of this dynamic. People, instead of voting according to their economic and social interests, regress to infantile stages and are unable to restrain their childish impulses. They turn to the nanny state projecting their narcissistic image to the state. This projection takes the form of political personality cult(s) – projecting personality to the state (e.g. Obama, Trump, Trudeau, etc).

But this dynamic is not an economic or politcal solution and simply furthers the march of oligarchy towards a neo-feudal society.

As I reflected on Vankin’s thought, I become more convinced that political and economic “anarchism” is the best way forward. I base this on Illich’s work on conviviality and Berdyaev’s philosophy of the spirit. In the weeks ahead, I hope to carve out the contours of an alternative political and economic model that may be palatable for democratic consideration.

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Regulate the Internet as a public utility

4/30/2020

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There have been multiple stories of tech giants censoring content on the internet. The latest is from You Tube and a story from the Daily Mail states that Elon Musk and a host of critics have slammed YouTube for removing a video of two doctors suggesting COVID-19 death tolls are being boosted and urging an end to lockdowns because they do more harm than good. The site took down the video of news conference featuring Drs. Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi, who run a private urgent-care clinic in Bakersfield, California, on Monday because they claim it violated their user policy by disputing health officials.

What insulates these companies from Charter challenges and civil rights challenges or actions under the US Code for deprivation of rights is that these corporations are private and not public entities nor are they public utilities. I do not agree with this, by the way, as when the founders codified freedom of the "press", they meant the actual press that printed paper. Each person should not be restricted from the use of the "press" to disseminate opinions. In practice the internet and that includes YouTube and even blogs such as Weebly which hosts this site, are the latter-day "press". People just cannot invent their own sites although alt sites such as BitChute and Gab are proliferating but none have the reach of Twitter or You Tube.

In my view, the only way to ensure that free speech is protected online is by making the internet and companies such as YouTube and Twitter public utilities. There will always be arguments around what constitutes violations of Terms of Service but this can be adjudicated more fairly in courts.

Other arguments to support regulating the internet as a public utility are in circulation and easy to find but, in my view, the speech issue is a compelling reason.

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Canada contemplating legislation to criminalize "fake news" (what could possibly go wrong?!)

4/20/2020

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In the midst of Covid - 19, the Canadian federal government is contemplating a law to criminalize people spreading disinformation online, See CBC story here

Privy Council President Dominic LeBlanc said that he "is interested in British MP Damian Collins's call for laws to punish those responsible for spreading dangerous misinformation online about the COVID-19 pandemic". Collins' concern was that "at the outset of the pandemic much of the misinformation and disinformation in circulation was promoting fake cures for COVID-19 or offering tips on how to avoid catching it."

Canadian lawyer from Quebec, Viva Frei, laid out an effective criticism of this proposal in the you tube video below.

During civil emergencies, laws to curb important civil liberties such as speech are always offered "for the public good". We witnessed the plethora of laws in the United States following 9-11 including the Patriot Act and the NSA surveillance program (a program Canada has partnered with according to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and journalist, Glen Greenwald).

As the saying attributed to Benjamin Franklin goes, "whoever would sacrifice liberty for security will soon have neither."

Aside from the issue of who decides what is "fake" information and the slippery slope towards crushing dissent is that fact that legislation is a blunt instrument to address the problem raised by Collins.

As Frei outlines below, there are ALREADY laws in the Criminal Code of Canada to prohibit much of what Collins' says is occuring - namely fraud. If somebody is trying to sell a remedy that can cure Covid - 19 or making wild and irresponsible misrepresenations, they can be charged with fraudulent misrepresentation or criminal negligence. But again, I think it is pretty obvious to see how such a law, even if applied, could be a slippery slope towards crushing scientific dissent in the public square. Nonetheless, there are mechanisms that the governement could apply to individual people making such claims.

There is no need to begin to curtail and encroach upon civil liberties. There is a very good Latin phrase that can guide both the interpretation and crafting of legislation. It comes from the canon law tradition but is applicable to civil law: Odia restringi et favores convenit ampliari. This short phrase is literally translated as whatever is odious should be restricted and whatever is favourable should be extended. It is used as a guide in the "rules of law" to mean "laws that place burdens or restrictions on people must be drafted and interpreted strictly and narrowly; and laws which grant favors or freedoms must be drafted and interpreted as generously as possible so that people can enjoy favors and freedoms."

This is an effective guide. Laws that restrict individual liberty and freedom (including laws on speech) must be narrowly and strictly interpreted to only prohibit specific behaviour. But laws or charters such as the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (which is more of an acknowledgement of human dignity and the inherent right of people rather than a law "granting" civil liberty but that distinction can be for another post) must be interpreted generously and broadly.

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The economy and the Covid 19 Response

4/9/2020

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It is important and essential to question prevailing orthodoxies, particularly when the contours of those orthodoxies impact public policy and create massive and potentially irrecoverable economic devastation. There is a chorus of experts and immunologists who are proferring policy alternatives based on science and informed analysis, two of whom are Canadians, here and here.

We need to also avoid uncritical dualities and Manichaean styled juxtapositions such as those “good” people who care about the health of the people more than economy and those “bad” people who only care about the economy and are insensitive to the health care needs of the most vulnerable. As Ramin Mazaheri, writes, “Mary Waitress has no income, no job, no health care and a mortgage, condo dues, two kids in day care, an underemployed ex-husband, a Mom in a nursing home and a government which couldn’t have cared less about any of that. Where has your conscience been for poor paycheck-to-paycheck Mary, I fairly ask?”

To the extent that we can avoid Draconian restrictions of movement that severely frustrate economic vitality, we should. I liked Mazaheri’s analysis primarily because he invites us to consider the broader horizon of our world. As F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise"

While I do not claim to have the answers, I am using my time to research and reflect. And yes, all of us should observe social distancing, handwashing, and follow public health measures as I continue to do. But that does not mean a suspension of our critical faculties. As I posted in an earlier post, nationalizing the banks is a good start following the end of this crisis. While I do not agree with every prescription offered by Mazaheri, I am completely on board with many of his ideas moving ahead including “ending banker rule, move on to ending lawyer-bureaucracy, go on lockdown only to have a massive national discussion (on the value of civil liberties) and ensuring that these are foundational values in any policy direction, access to timely health care, informed responses based on a considered view of available data), etc.

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My Pensées

The title of this blog is an allusion to the famous work of Blaise Pascal. This blog represents the variety of my interests and thoughts on any given day and are strung together, like Pascal's Pensees, in no particular order. I work in the field of mental health and education. I write and am a social justice advocate. I enjoy poetry, jazz, spirituality, politics and a potpourri of other interests that you will see reflected in this blog.

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