I Have A Shitty Job

Despite all my attempts to find design work, I find myself working 35 hours a week at a Blockbuster video store.
It's not as shitty as some jobs, but it's way shittier than I can tolerate for more than eight hours at a stretch, and not much of a reason to get up in the morning. It takes about 10 minutes to walk to the train, another 20 to get into the city, and another 20 to get to the store. It's a long time to spend considering the shittiness of my job, both before and after each shift.
The shittiness is partly acknowledged by my co-workers, or at least those intelligent enough to differentiate between grinding out each day and actually living. My manager fails to see this distinction. While not actually stupid, he lacks clarity and in all is rather hobbit-like, drifting gently around in a fog of contentment. The next most senior in our disparate Blockbuster family is genuinely stupid. When her point is made in conversation, recognised, agreed upon, and completed, it is then repeated until it is recognised, agreed upon, and completed. Her general tone is that of a Holstein who has spent too much time in the same paddock and considers it her own.
It's not often you get the chance to use the term 'disgruntled former employee', but Aaron is now one. A short, pock-faced dynamo, his clipped speech always seemed to end with a sharp intake of breath, and his dignity was ever on a knife-edge. Two weeks ago a customer playfully slapped his shoulder. Aaron changed colour several times, marched into the manager's office, and quit. Bustling out with accoutrement akimbo, he made straight for the door and never looked back.
The previous store manager gradually reduced her responsibilities and hours, dropping down the ladder to the second-lowest rung over the course of four months. A benign and gentle soul, she once picked up a trail of ants with paper and dropped them outside rather than subject them to the capricious fate of the vacuum cleaner. Her rule has become corrupt and lackadaisical, much to my relief. I am free to learn nothing and engage in various busywork, periodically checking the time to ensure I am engaged in obligation no longer than I must be.

I apply for, on average, about four jobs per week. Since I arrived in Calgary in September I have sent over 70 resumes and received precisely three responses. Two were for interviews. (One of the interviews extended to a second interview. )The third response was to inform me that the position had been filled. Clearly, Calgary's economic miracle extends only to those professions that involve the potential loss of fingers, either to machinery or to frostbite.

Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims: what's the difference?

The chief cause of deaths in Iraq is sectarian violence between two schools of Islam, Sunni and Shi'ite. About 65% of Iraq fall in these two groups. 25% are a third group in the north, Kurds, who mostly represent a mild form of Sunnism. The remainder are of various ethnicities.
90% of all Muslims worldwide are Sunni.
Less than 10% of Muslims are Shi'ite.
The two split from a general Muslim faith soon after the prophet Mohammad died in the 7th century.
Sunni follow a series of religious leaders (like Popes) called imams. Iraqi Sunnism is largely in central and northern Iraq. Osama bin Laden is a Sunni Muslim, as was Saddam Hussein.
Shi'ite Muslims, the more orthodox of the two, followed leaders of a bloodline of one of the four leaders who rose after the death of Mohammad (like royal lineage). Shia numbers were very low until the beginning of the 20th century. Shi'ite Muslims are now a majority in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon, and a minority in Pakistan, India, and other countries. Iraqi Sunnism is largely in southern Iraq. Hezbollah, a Lebanese (terrorist) organisation is Shia.

Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims have not historically been enemies--it is unusual to find any serious conflicts between 700 and 1960--but have engaged in sectarian violence heavily in the last 5-10 years, particularly in occupied Iraq.

Marx and Lenin and Stalin, o my.

The predominant struggle of the last sixty years was that of democracy vs communism. The Cold War wasted untold billions on armaments, irrevocably damaged many countries, and has repercussions, largely accidental or careless, which we see today in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Africa, Cuba, and countless other parts of the world.
Apart from a brief study of 'The Communist Manifesto' some six or seven years ago, I realised I knew little of how the other half lived, and thought, and dreamed. So I dug a little into communism and all those other -isms to see precisely how they worked, or rather if they worked.

The first thing to know is that 'communism' is an idealised end state, achieved after a long struggle, where communities maintain themselves in harmony; man did not exploit man, and all gave, and all had. This ideal was a dream that was never reached, and realistically never could be reached by any society of greater than perhaps 150 people for short periods. It was a system designed for saints, of whom, as the saying goes, there are few, whereas capitalism was designed for sinners, of whom there are many.
Marx (with credit also to Engels) penned his manifesto while seated in the very pink of capitalist privilege, the British Library. For Marx, the market was anarchy: it exploited and alienated people, and created unintended consequences. He was infuriated by the powerlessness of the worker (the proletariat) and the ascendancy of the business-owning middle class (the bourgeoisie [bor-zhwa-zee]). His belief was that workers, if given sufficient power, would create and maintain a more equitable society.
Jumping straight to communism is simply not possible. 'Socialism' is a transitory stage in which there is a 'dictatorship of the proletariat' whose job it is to distribute goods and services evenly. It is an economic system where production is nationalised. Thus one would have a socialist revolution with a view to eventually purifying society enough to advance to communism.
This was a time when it was pretty awful being anywhere in the bottom 90%. You and your children would work in a factory for 12-15 hours a day, tip your toilet into the street, lose most of your teeth by 40, and die upon having your fifth child. The idea of having a smidgen of power and freedom was more intoxicating than penny gin, though marginally more dangerous.
A vast swathe of Europe rose up and rushed about in 1948 and around that time; France much earlier (see Les Miserables) and Russia much later. Most of the revolutions were disorganised and extremely dangerous to be part of. England, true to form, trod slowly and carefully through a bloodless revolution, perhaps remembering how dull Cromwell's petit-revolution had been in the 17th century.
Russia's revolution came very late because Russia remained virtually medieval outside the major centers. It was only the spur of WW1, with its toppling of the old order of aristocratic Europe, that Russians got the idea into their heads to do the same. It helped that the post-war army was scattered all over the map; certainly a rag-tag bunch of intellectuals (i.e. people who wore spectacles) and torch-wielding shoeless peasants wouldn't have had much luck otherwise. With Lenin at their helm they killed as many rich people as they could find, and set up a little government.
Lenin headed the Russian socialist state from its formation in 1917 to 1922, when he got ill. Stalin took over and initiated his 'social fascism', which really got things moving. Russia got rather powerful, but this involved killing quite a few people (Lenin was more about disenfranchising and deporting; he killed only 6m vs. 30m, but he wasn't in power as long).
As I mentioned earlier, Russia was to a large part medieval at that time, so the changes pushed through five centuries' worth of technology in just a few decades. Large changes plus large population plus large country equals rapid power shifts, and Russia started taking over other countries.
The USSR was a totalitarian regime: it controlled not only currency and goods, but also the hearts and minds of its citizens. The ideology of purification, of cutting out the diseased elements of society, had no logical end in sight. Everyone was suspected; rules were capricious; law was total. Although the ostensible goal was to achieve communism, the practice merely served to cement Stalin's rule. Top-down orders trucked grain from fields in the east, leaving the farmers themselves starving. The socialist state failed to serve the workers, instead institutionalising the very inequality revolutionaries had fought against.
As with most totalitarian states, an inordinate amount was spent on great shows of force. By 1980 the Cold War arms race had left Russia virtually bankrupt. It had few natural resources and exports, and little food. It began cutting loose USSR satellites with all but Georgia gone by 1992.

Marx's original idea--to replace the free market with centralised order and direction--was flawed.
He believed that a seemingly chaotic system was rudderless and random, but this was not the case; a process of natural selection helps a free market evolve. Also, he did not consider that the new controllers would be untrustworthy, greedy, and corrupt (in short, human). A centralised system has more potential for abuse than a lasseiz-faire system, as when it fails consumers have nowhere else to turn. Government does not compete with itself. When it no longer serves the interests of the people, there must be checks and balances in place to correct it, and in the hastily-assembled socialist assembly there was little thought given to potential corruption. They were believers, and thought that their righteous fervour would serve.

Is there a better voting system?

The Democratic and Republican candidates have been voted on in Iowa, the first state this year to select presidential candidates. Iowa doesn't vote the way that most states and democracies do; they have a caucus.
An Iowan registered as a Democratic Party member would go down to his local school or church hall on January 3 to register his support. The first thing he sees are clusters of people, some wearing stupid hats, who support the same candidate. The Obama supporters stand in one area, the Clintonites in another. The man caucusing joins one of the groups, though is free to move to another. After everyone has chosen their first-choice group, the small groups--those with fewer than 15% of the people--must join the groups of more popular candidates. This is when the shouting, chanting and cajoling begins. "Hope, Hope, Hope!" begins the Obama crowd. "Change, Change, Change!" say the Clinton supporters. Eventually, and very publicly, everyone chooses a candidate's group. The numbers are counted. If that caucus was allocated, say, 15 delegates (representative votes from that local area), 6 might go to Obama, 4 to Edwards, 4 to Clinton, and 1 to Biden.
Needless to say, this is problematic. Fewer than 10% of Iowa voters turn out for this harrowing ordeal, where their choices are made public, questioned, criticized, and then misrepresented. However this hidebound system is traditional, and is therefore immune to change anytime soon.

Standard voting is not fair. It does not represent properly the feelings of electors, particularly those who have nuanced opinions about the candidates. If three people seek the victory, I may only choose one, and I must choose him absolutely. In countries like America where there are only two viable parties, a third-party or independent candidate does little but 'spoil' one major party's chance of success by siphoning off a crucial sliver of support, as Nader did to Gore in 2000, turning a Democratic majority into an incredibly narrow race with Bush.


The author William Poundstone recently wrote a book about alternative voting systems, some dating from the early days of French suffrage. He examined the following systems, from worst to best.

Plurality Voting: the current system, also called 'first past the post'. Voters select one candidate.
Instant Run-off Voting: voters rank candidates by preference. Loser candidates are dropped and their voters' rankings applied to popular candidates.
Borda: candidates are ranked from best to worst. Is open to abuse.
Condorcet: voters rank candidates and whichever beats the others in head-to-head matchups is the winner. Can result in strange ties.
Approval Voting: voters tick all candidates they approve of.
Range Voting: like Olympic ice-skating scores, all candidates are given a number on a range of, say, 1-10.

Poundstone evaluated the system by allowing people to 'vote' under the various schemes, then surveyed their overall satisfaction with the outcome.


Major parties resist voting reform which might increase representation for small parties. Thus instant run-off voting has been put forward as a potential system, despite it being more confusing and only slightly better than plurality voting. Its virtue seems to be that it gives the illusion of more choice while resulting in a two-party race. Range voting is simple and representative, but would generate more ambiguity. A President may be elected with only 40% of the vote, which raises questions about a mandate to govern. While parliamentary systems are open to power-sharing coalition agreements, federal positions (like President) are zero-sum games. You can't put Gore's legs on Bush's body, with Nader's left testicle; it's winner take all.
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Two films about grizzly bears

I've been following director Werner Herzog's work for a while, ever since I watched 'Burden of Dreams'. His remake of his own documentary 'Little Dieter Needs To Fly', called 'Rescue Dawn', came out last year with Christian Bale. But probably his best work recently was 'Grizzly Man'.
The film tells the story of Timothy Treadwell, a cross between Keanu Reeves and that blond guy from 'Queer Eye', who lives part of each year among the grizzly bear population of Alaska. The footage is Treadwell's own. It is a strange, and ultimately tragic, tale of someone who has rejected human society in favour of a deluded connection with dangerous creatures.
The heart of the film is this connection, when he plays with foxes, speaks with bears, and talks at length about protecting and maintaining the population. What drives the plot along is the awareness that he meets a horrible fate at the paws of ursus arctos horribilis. The story arc, revealed by the talking heads of friends, relatives and Treadwell himself, is his slow spiralling away from the last vestiges of sanity and into obsession. The gently-paced and whimsical film is a paen to his peaceful existence with a dramatic counterpoint of ever-threatening doom.
You can watch the trailer for Grizzly Man here.





The second film is 'Project Grizzly' by director Peter Lynch. It, more than anything, reflects rural Canadian culture in pleasant and natural setting, insofar as a man building an exoskeleton to fight bears is pleasant and natural. Troy Hurtubise (sounds like "herd o' bees") is an outdoorsman/junkyard owner from the eastern province of Ontario who has an encounter with a grizzly bear one cold winter's day in the deep forest. He emerges unscathed but is determined to meet another grizzly bear in a somewhat better-prepared state. The movie follows his comical development (and--better--testing) of a titanium, rubber and chainmail suit of armour to withstand a sustained grizzly bear attack.
As Hurtubise and his posse test the suits in their various forms, the fool's errand becomes more foolish. Troy is battered with baseball bats; he is knocked down with swinging logs; he is hit with a three-ton truck; he is tossed down an embankment. His final creation stands seven feet tall and takes tiny, mincing steps while Troy, inside, uses martial-arts mind control to overcome his intense claustrophobia.
Hurtubise is a deluded figure, there can be no doubt. His obsession with the grizzly bear encounter, built up to the level of myth, has taken over his life, yet is strangely unexamined. At the end of the film when the group of men meet a grizzly, his lack of purpose, ludicrous planning, and single-minded blinkered thought is revealed for what it really is.
This period takes place in Banff National Park, not 100km from where I live. It was fascinating to see the bluff woodsmen posturing with rifles, shaving with Bowie knives and making notes about bear attacks a mere whisker away from where I call home.
See the early prototypes being tested here.

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