NB Media Co-op: Call for Participation and Support

NB Media Co-op: Independent Media BY and FOR New Brunswickers

Call for Support and Participation

Tired of one-sided media run by its advertisers? Opposed to corporate media consolidation? Don’t sit by -- participate in making the news!

The NB Media Co-op relies on participation from readers like you! A small group of people are currently keeping the NB Media Co-op going. We are seeking community supporters to actively involve themselves in the organization. Please consider committing your time to ensure the sustainability of independent media in New Brunswick’s public interest.

•           Gain valuable experience working for a non-profit progressive media organization

•           Develop your research, writing, editing and journalistic skills

•           Join a collective of folks concerned about social justice and marginalized voices in NB

•           Participate in changing the media landscape

•           Help build a lively democracy in New Brunswick

There are many ways to get involved!

Distribute The Brief! We would like to increase distribution of The Brief, our monthly broadsheet publication that can be found ‘for free’ in coffee shops, libraries and doctors’ offices around the province. Please contact us at info@nbmediacoop.org if you can distribute copies or have suggestion of a location to place The Brief.

Join our Organizing / Story Meetings! Meetings are currently held in Fredericton, but it’s easy to attend from a distance by phone or Skype. What stories, events, people, and issues are not being covered in New Brunswick?  What struggles and voices are being marginalized in the corporate press?  Bring your grassroots story ideas! Email info@nbmediacoop.org for more information.

Volunteer editing, copy editing, and fact-checking! Are you a style and grammar geek? Obsessive about getting the facts right? Passionate about editing, writing and the news? Do you have experience working on an editorial collective? We need your help! Email editors@nbmediacoop.org to get involved.

Write for the NB Media Co-op! We are always seeking submissions in French and English (news, opinion pieces, letters to the editor, event listings, reviews, photography, audio and video media). Whether you are an experienced writer or not, we encourage you to make a contribution today! Submit your article at editors@nbmediacoop.org. Contributor guidelines are available on our website.

Become a sustaining member! We depend on individuals like you to provide us with the financial support we need to maintain an independent media voice in New Brunswick. Donations would allow us to continue to publish The Brief (our primary expense). We would also like to pay for certain written contributions, and hire a staff person / editor. Already a sustaining member? Ask your family, friends, and local organizations to consider joining the N.B. Media Co-op. Please make all checks payable to NB Media Co-op, and mail to: 180 St. John St., Fredericton, NB E3B 4A9

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NB Media Co-op

180 St. John St.,

Fredericton, NB

E3B 4A9

Email: info@nbmediacoop.org

Web: www.nbmediacoop.org

Taeyon's take on Occupy

Published by the NB Media Coop


Why I went to Occupy Fredericton

“Knowing what is enough is true wealth.” The Tao Te Ching

As we prepared to head out to Occupy Fredericton’s rally, I asked my 9-year-old if he understood what the whole occupation movement was about. Nope.

Ok. I drew a circle and shaded in a small segment. “Oh!” He looked excited. He’d seen this before in his math class, and before I could explain, he said, “I know, I know, it’s a pie!”

Yes. Ok. Imagine you’re at a birthday party and there are ten kids. One kid gets this whole big piece, and the rest of the nine kids have to split what’s left. Is that fair? He looked offended, “No way.”

Any kid can understand this. We take so much pains to nurture sharing and fairness in our children. But then, when we send them off into the big wide world, suddenly they’re confronted with a system where sharing is suspect and fairness is naive. If you want to get ahead and “succeed” in this system, otherwise known as capitalism, then you’d better unlearn the values you learned as a child.

But in that birthday cake scenario, our family would probably have gotten a pretty decent piece of that cake, though not as much as that 1% kid. We would probably have enough. Because within the 99%, some of us are still better off than others, some of us still have a job, a home, and a decent income. So if we’re doing so well, why did I go to the Occupy Fredericton rally?

Call me naive and my motives suspect, but I still hold to those values I grew up with as a child: sharing and fairness. Only now, as an adult, I call them equity and justice. Any movement for justice must rely on more than self-interest. It must tap into the conscience of those who are not directly suffering to recognize that we cannot live a moral life while others suffer because of us.

For years, we didn’t see how people in other parts of the world suffered at our expense. Because of our foreign policies fashioned by multinational corporations, because of our insatiable desire for cheap consumer goods, because of our careless destruction of the environment and overuse of natural resources, because of our banks and financial institutions that impoverished entire nations.

But capitalism must always grow. So now that the third world has been sucked dry, the system is coming home to do the same to us. We’re only beginning to see what others in the rest of the world have experienced for years: the amassing of wealth among the few at the top, the dismantling of social programs and the impoverishment of the masses.

Now that we are the ones suffering, we finally realize what this system does to people.

Most importantly, our system is driving us all towards ultimate annihilation. As far as capitalism is concerned, everything, including our air, our water, our natural world, is a commodity from which to make money. As long as money can be made, be it from drilling for oil or fracking for gas, the consequences don’t matter. Even if it means making it impossible for the earth to sustain life.

This is how New Brunswick’s ongoing struggle against shale gas connects with the Occupy movement. We took our anti-fracking signs with us, as did others. Some people found that confusing. It may look like the message of the movement is unfocused and too diverse, but that’s because today’s attacks on the environment, labour rights, education, social security, democracy, peace, etc. can all be traced back to our capitalist system.

This movement is urgent. It is no less than a matter of life and death, for our species and for all life on earth. Chances are, you are part of the 99%. Join us.

Here we go again: "national security"...

Unwanted Missiles for a Korean Island
by Christine Ahn, Korea Policy Institute

New York Times, 5 August 2011

Congress 2011 of the Humanities and Social Sciences

I should point out that this sign was installed specifically for the hosting of Congress 2011, the "premiere destination for Canada’s scholarly community."
A French crash course will be offered on the rez-de-chaussée (or 1er étage) of this building.

Rally to protect the UNB woodlot... from UNB.

Working on a second Nobel Prize

Canadian "Gasland"

It's good to see that more information is reaching the public about the madness of fracking (shale gas exploration).
Here is a documentary broadcast on the CBC:

Click here to watch the documentary

Please consider signing a petition to stop fracking in New Brunswick.

Images other than goose steps out of North Korea

Pyongyang Style from Steve Gong on Vimeo.

Soon to "Be... gone from this place"

Here is one thing that the Conservative government of NB is doing right: getting rid of the NB provincial slogan "Be... in this place." Its French equivalent was equally harrowing: "Etre... ici on le peut."  When one thinks that the previous (Shawn Graham) government charged the taxpayers of NB $229,000 on "research," consultation and development of this brand, one is entitled to speculate about how many seconds the brand team needed to come up with this inaneness.  22.9 seconds?

link

Students at STU are generating momentum

I know for a fact that St. Thomas University students have been organising for this sort of protest well before the "virus spread in the Middle East" (as John McCain said on TV about the democratic movements in Tunisia and Egypt), but no doubt that seeing that regular folks can overthrow military dictatorships by taking to the streets and occupying public places has further fired up their energy.
So, they made a public scene of their demands for lower tuition fees and for support to public education today.  Their stand is not limited to the protection of college education, but to public education in general.  There have been concerted efforts to undermine the ability to deliver and acquire quality education, perhaps not just in New Brunswick, but certainly in New Brunswick.  Elementary and secondary schools have been told to choose themselves which limb of their budget they'll agree chop off, lest they don't bleed themselves to death.
Public support for universities is also under threat, and post-secondary institutions must rely increasingly on private funding, including higher tuition fees.  Considering universities increasingly teach basic skills which high schools used to, but no longer have the resources to teach (perhaps due to recurring budget cuts), one could say that the concept of public education for the "general good" is a threatened species.
Minister of Post-Secondary Education Martine Coulombe made a courageous appearance at the rally outside the Legislature.  How to describe it?... Hm... Underwhelming perhaps?  It failed to reassure us that our education system was in good hands.  Be the judge.

Rally on the STU campus

Joined by a few UNB students on the way to the Legislature

Outside the Legislature, Minister Coulombe was heckled a few times

It was windy and cold, but STU liberal-minded students were inspired

Regulation Lax as Gas Wells’ Tainted Water Hits Rivers

Regulation Lax as Gas Wells’ Tainted Water Hits Rivers
New York Times article, 26 February 2011




If Pennsylvania is unwilling to impose high enough fines to deter companies from violating state regulations, which are presumably determined according to scientific research, we would be foolish to trust that New Brunswick (Inc.) will establish a better record. 
Most importantly, what this article shows is that "sound science" in shale gas drilling is a rather arrogant - or dishonest - assessment, considering that everything suggests that we have an unreliable understanding of the implications of what we do 3 kms underground.  Curiously, some are advocating that CURRENT regulations be set up based on FUTURE results of scientific experiments - oh! I see, experiments on us, the guinea pig communities.
In this context, how can we possibly believe that regulation will protect our environment, our access to clean water, our health and ultimately, our cheque books?

No need to translate this one.

Zotero - ideal for academics

Ever wondered what it would be like to be able to do all the following with ONE click?

- "import" the full citation of a book you find on amazon.com or on a university library catalog
- save a copy of a newspaper article onto your laptop, with full citation, of course
- save the URL of an NGO website and attach a related report in pdf format to it
- save a youtube link
- generate a bibliography or a footnote in the writing style of your choice (two clicks here)
- share a centralised bibliography

If you are looking for a tool to "collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources," you should check out  zotero.

Part of the beauty of this free tool/service is that it works from within the open-source Firefox browser, and therefore joyfully strolls across platforms.  Furthermore, you can work "locally" if you are concerned about confidentiality [i.e. you save the information you select exclusively onto your computer] or you have the option of setting up zotero to sync your data with the zotero online server.  The latter gives you the ability to share sources with collaborators, and to conduct your research or prep for class from different computers [e.g. office/home] without worrying about syncing matters.  Zotero looks after this automatically.

Yes, they are taking it down.

Now, let's hope that democracies will learn something from what average Egyptians have accomplished on Tahrir Square in the last few weeks.  And that they won't back up another military regime in Egypt.

Why do Belgians keep an empty glass on their nightstand?

For when they're not thirsty.

I didn't write this.

School District 01 rejects NB government's calls for self-crippling

We can applaud the French District Education Council in New Brunswick for refusing to impose on the schools in its district a budget cut demanded by the provincial government. The Alward administration believes that the current state of our economy requires that everyone tighten their belt. And what is less crucial for our society, our economy and the general well-being than our children's education?

This sacrifice would not be wasted because this province has critical expenses. For instance, we need to find millions of dollars to allow for the construction and running of the indispensable Convention Centre in downtown Fredericton, which has a value vastly superior to that of the school system. Recently, Fredericton considered widening King Street to save 30 seconds to motorists who wanted to drive across town. Vital.

We should alert the government that savings can be made from budget cuts in similarly superflous services, such as hospitals and public transport. After all, it is imperative that we do build up money for the rainy day, when banks need to be bailed out again, and their CEOs their indecent bonuses.

If you read French, you can access the letter sent by the District Education Council to the government by clicking here.

Prank on a Belgian Customer Service call centre

Why there is still no government in Belgium...

Opinion on shale gas extraction in New Brunswick

South Western Energy

Here are my reflections on the visit by an energy corporation based in Texas (Southwestern Energy) to the UNB campus on Thursday 20 January to discuss, in essence, the technicalities of “safe” fracking, and the other, related to it, has to do with the responsibilities of the Environment Ministry.

Senior representatives from the Environmental Defense Fund (Arkansas) and Southwestern Energy (Texas) came to the UNB campus last Thursday, and argued that there was room for “working collaboratively to ensure that the environment is protected while resource development takes place.”  To be sure, we should be cautious in our general assumption that having “environmental” or “environment” in one’s name necessarily implies that the organisation works towards the protection of the environment.  There was not even pretense of good cop, bad cop last Thursday.  From the reported “sue the bastards” approach of its early years, EDF has now moved to “working towards a common goal.”

What I find remarkable about the ostensible pursuit of compromise when dealing with industries involved in the business of extracting natural resources - as shale gas - is the placatory impact it has on public opinion.  This strategy worked well at the UNB presentation, as the speakers of the Environmental Defense Fund and Southwestern Energy spoke in turn about the potential dangers and about the fail-safe safety measures they have developed.  Insidiously, the industry and this pursuit of compromise have managed to confine the debate to the technical aspects of the issue: Which chemicals are toxic?  In what quantities?  Can they be replaced by other, more benign chemicals?  Would it be possible to place a tracer in the fluids used?  How thick must the casing be in order to be perfectly safe?  The experts of the industry relished these questions and answered them with great ease.  Who was going to challenge them on their turf?  A historian?  Or a local farmer?  But these made up the bulk of the questions asked last week.  At some point, someone asked them to walk the audience through what would happen in an - unimaginable - Deepwater Horizon-like event.  For once, our experts were at a loss, like those in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010.  For the rest of the Q&A, however, it was a walk in the park for our experts, who emphasised “the role that regulations can play to ensure best practices in natural gas drilling.”  This will sound inviting to government officials, but it, again, restricts the issue to its technical aspects, on which the industry will consistently have the upper hand.

Environment Ministries have gotten into the habit of expressing their obligation to take business  considerations into account as they map out environmental policies.  If the Environment Ministry of NB opens that door, then it is obligated to reckon with other considerations, such as the long-term health risks, the long-term socio-economic implications of this type of exploitation of natural resources by a foreign corporation. 
The key word for this Ministry should be “long-term.” 
Of course, it is tempting to want to harvest immediate benefits of any development in an economically devastated province.  But we shouldn’t be naive: there are enough examples of third-world peoples who have seen their natural resources being plundered by multinational corporations and who experienced no improvement in their lives, while their élites were becoming obscenely wealthy. 

New Brunswick doesn’t NEED this natural gas for its own use at this point.  If it were extracted now, the gas would go straight to the U.S. where the appetite for energy adjusts itself to whatever size the supply is.  It seems cynical that the NB government would let an American corporation come and make profits extracting a NB natural resource for immediate consumption by Americans.  No doubt that the revenue made by “NB” (and who in NB?) in this entreprise would be modest compared to the value of that natural gas when New Brunswickers will find that energy sources abroad have become scarce and extremely expensive.  Therefore, it is the Environment Ministry’s responsibility to plan for the long term: extracting and exporting NB gas now clearly goes against the long-term interests of the people of New Brunswick, if not its environment. 

Instead of negotiating a regulation framework with the industry, the NB government should establish a sine die moratorium on shale gas extraction.

Spooky...

After the sinking of the Cheonan and the bombing of Yeonpyeong Island, the crossing of the border...

Dialogue with China

Nate Beeler

From the trickle-down theory to the syphon-up reality

Viewed on the New York Times today.

So, we can conclude:
- Waw!  The economy is doing great!
or
- Wow, time to tighten our belts!

I suppose it all depends on which pages of the NYT we read.

Here and here

Obama Presidency: Year Two

This year, it's "DUPE".

Que faire en cas de tapage diurne à Okinawa?