Maðurinn sem féll til jarðar (úr 12.000 feta hæð)

Við kölluðum þá oft í gríni bakpokaskríl. Þannig töluðum við um fallhlífarstökkvarana þegar ég var í sviffluginu í gamla daga.  Sjálfur hef ég aldrei stokkið í fallhlíf, tók þó nokkur teygjustökk í "den".  Það er skrýtin tilfinning að sjá jörðina koma æðandi á móti sér.

En það er ábyggilega ekkert grín að lenda í því að fallhlífin opnist ekki og varafallhlífin virki ekki, og sjá jörðina æða á móti sér á u.þ.b. 130 km hraða.

En jafn ótrúlega og það hljómar þá er lifði Michael Holmes það af.  Hann lenti í berjarunna og slapp með ótrúlega lítil meiðsli.

Það má lesa viðtal við Michael í The Mail On Sunday, og hér má sjá myndbandsupptöku sem hann tók á leiðinni. 

Ótrúlegt en satt.

Að þekkja vinstri frá hægri, eða snýst allt i hringi?

Ég fékk senda í tölvupósti í dag tengingu á dálk í Breska blaðinu Guardian.  Dálkur þessi er útdráttur úr bók eftir blaðamanninn Nick Cohen, sem er víst væntanleg snemma í febrúar.

Það er þó nokkuð langt síðan ég hef lesið eitthvað sem ég er meira sammála eða hefur fengið mig til að bíða útkomu bókar, ég held að þessa bók verði ég að lesa.  Það sem lesa má í útdrættinum er feykilega vel skrifað og hittir vel í mark, í það minnsta að mínu mati.

Það er fjallað nokkuð um "pólítíska rétthugsun" og síðan er Íraksstríðið í þungamiðjunni.  Afstaða vinstri manna til baráttunnar í Írak hefur valdið höfundi miklum heilabrotum og skilar hann þeim frá sér að einkar skýran og aðgengilegan hátt.  Hvernig Cohen gerir skýran greinarmun á stuðningi við við stríðið í Írak, og stuðningi við við uppbyggingu í landinu eftir stríð, eða stuðningi við "uppreisnarmenn" í Írak er líka vel þess virði að gefa gaum að.  En best er að lesa útráttinn úr bókinni og mynda sér sínar eigin skoðanir.

En grípum aðeins niður í útdrættinum:

"In the early Seventies, my mother searched the supermarkets for politically reputable citrus fruit. She couldn't buy Seville oranges without indirectly subsidising General Francisco Franco, Spain's fascist dictator. Algarve oranges were no good either, because the slightly less gruesome but equally right-wing dictatorship of Antonio Salazar ruled Portugal. She boycotted the piles of Outspan from South Africa as a protest against apartheid, and although neither America nor Israel was a dictatorship, she wouldn't have Florida or Jaffa oranges in the house because she had no time for then President Richard Nixon or the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

My sisters and I did not know it, but when Franco fell ill in 1975, we were in a race to the death. Either he died of Parkinson's disease or we died of scurvy. Luckily for us and the peoples of Spain, the dictator went first, although he took an unconscionably long time about it.

Thirty years later, I picked up my mother from my sister Natalie's house. Her children were watching a Disney film; The Jungle Book, I think.

'It's funny, Mum,' I said as we drove home, 'but I don't remember seeing any Disney when I was their age.'

'You've only just noticed? We didn't let you watch rubbish from Hollywood corporations.'

'Ah.'

'We didn't buy you the Beano either.'

'For God's sake, Mum, what on earth was wrong with the Beano?'

'It was printed by DC Thomson, a non-union firm.'

'Right,' I said.

I was about to mock her but remembered that I had not allowed my son to watch television, even though he was nearly three at the time. I will let him read Beano when he is older - I spoil him, I know - but if its cartoonists were to down their crayons and demand fraternal support, I would probably make him join the picket line.

I come from a land where you can sell out by buying a comic. I come from the left.

I'm not complaining, I had a very happy childhood. Conservatives would call my parents 'politically correct', but there was nothing sour or pinched about our home, and there is a lot to be said for growing up in a household in which everyday decisions about what to buy and what to reject have a moral quality."

"Looking back, I can see that I got that comforting belief from my parents, but it was reinforced by the experience of living through the Thatcher administration, which appeared to reaffirm the left's monopoly of goodness. The embrace first of monetarism and then of the European exchange-rate mechanism produced two recessions, which Conservatives viewed with apparent composure because the lives wrecked by mass unemployment and business failure had the beneficial side-effect of destroying trade-union power. Even when the left of the Eighties was clearly in the wrong - as it was over unilateral nuclear disarmament - it was still good. It may have been dunderheaded to believe that dictators would abandon their weapons systems if Britain abandoned hers, but it wasn't wicked.

Yet for all the loathing of Conservatives I felt, I didn't have to look at modern history to know that it was a fallacy to believe in the superior virtue of the left: my family told me that. My parents joined the Communist Party, but left it in their twenties. My father encouraged me to read Alexander Solzhenitsyn's exposés of the Soviet Union and argue about them at the dinner table. He knew how bad the left could get, but this knowledge did not stop him from remaining very left-wing. He would never have entertained the notion that communism was as bad as fascism. In this, he was typical. Anti-communism was never accepted as the moral equivalent of anti-fascism, not only by my parents but also by the overwhelming majority of liberal-minded people. The left was still morally superior. Even when millions were murdered and tens of millions were enslaved and humiliated, the 'root cause' of crimes beyond the human imagination was the perversion of noble socialist ideals."

"There were many moments in the Thirties when fascists and communists co-operated - the German communists concentrated on attacking the Weimar Republic's democrats and gave Hitler a free run, and Stalin's Soviet Union astonished the world by signing a pact with Nazi Germany in 1939. But after Hitler broke the terms of the alliance in the most spectacular fashion by invading the Soviet Union in 1941, you could rely on nearly all of the left - from nice liberals through to the most compromised Marxists - to oppose the tyrannies of the far right. Consistent anti-fascism added enormously to the left's prestige in the second half of the 20th century. A halo of moral superiority hovered over it because if there was a campaign against racism, religious fanaticism or neo-Nazism, the odds were that its leaders would be men and women of the left. For all the atrocities and follies committed in its name, the left possessed this virtue: it would stand firm against fascism. After the Iraq war, I don't believe that a fair-minded outsider could say it does that any more."

"It is hard to believe now, but Conservative MPs and the Foreign Office apologised for Saddam in those days. Tories excused Farzad's execution with the straight lie that he was an Iranian spy - and one reptilian Thatcherite declared that he 'deserved to be hanged'.

By contrast, Saddam Hussein appalled the liberal left. At leftish meetings in the late Eighties, I heard that Iraq encapsulated all the loathsome hypocrisy of the supposedly 'democratic' West. Here was a blighted land ruled by a terrible regime that followed the example of the European dictatorships of the Thirties. And what did the supposed champions of democracy and human rights in Western governments do? Supported Saddam, that's what they did; sold him arms and covered up his crimes. Fiery socialist MPs denounced Baathism, while playwrights and poets stained the pages of the liberal press with their tears for his victims. Many quoted the words of a brave Iraqi exile called Kanan Makiya. He became a hero of the left because he broke through the previously impenetrable secrecy that covered totalitarian Iraq and described in awful detail how an entire population was compelled to inform on their family and friends or face the consequences. All decent people who wanted to convict the West of subscribing to murderous double standards could justifi ably use his work as evidence for the prosecution.

The apparently sincere commitment to help Iraqis vanished the moment Saddam invaded Kuwait in August 1990 and became America's enemy. At the time, I didn't think about where the left was going. I could denounce the hypocrisy of a West which made excuses for Saddam one minute and called him a 'new Hitler' the next, but I didn't dwell on the equal and opposite hypocrisy of a left which called Saddam a 'new Hitler' one minute and excused him the next. All liberals and leftists remained good people in my mind. Asking hard questions about any of them risked giving aid and comfort to the Conservative enemy and disturbing my own certainties. I would have gone on anti-war demonstrations when the fighting began in 1991, but the sight of Arabs walking around London with badges saying 'Free Kuwait' stopped me. When they asked why it was right to allow Saddam to keep Kuwaitis as his subjects, a part of me conceded that they had a point."

"I got to know members of the Iraqi opposition in London, particularly Iraqi Kurds, whose compatriots were the targets of one of the last genocides of the 20th century. They were democratic socialists whose liberal mindedness extended to opposing the death penalty, even for Saddam Hussein. Obviously, they didn't represent the majority of Iraqi opinion. Equally obviously, they shared the same beliefs as the overwhelming majority of the rich world's liberals and leftists, and deserved our support as they struggled against fascism. Not the authoritarianism of a tinpot dictator, but real fascism: a messianic one-party state; a Great Leader, whose statue was in every town centre and picture on every news bulletin; armies that swept out in unprovoked wars of foreign aggrandisement; and secret policemen who organised the gassing of 'impure' races. The Iraqi leftists were our 'comrades', to use a word that was by then so out of fashion it was archaic.

When the second war against Saddam Hussein came in 2003, they told me there was no other way to remove him. Kanan Makiya was on their side. He was saying the same things about the crimes against humanity of the Baath party he had said 20 years before, but although his arguments had barely changed, the political world around him was unrecognisable. American neoconservatives were his champions now, while the left that had once cheered him denounced him as a traitor.

Everyone I respected in public life was wildly anti-war, and I was struck by how their concern about Iraq didn't extend to the common courtesy of talking to Iraqis. They seemed to have airbrushed from their memories all they had once known about Iraq and every principle of mutual respect they had once upheld.

I supposed their furious indifference was reasonable. They had many good arguments that I would have agreed with in other circumstances. I assumed that once the war was over they would back Iraqis trying to build a democracy, while continuing to pursue Bush and Blair to their graves for what they had done. I waited for a majority of the liberal left to off er qualified support for a new Iraq, and I kept on waiting, because it never happened - not just in Britain, but also in the United States, in Europe, in India, in South America, in South Africa ... in every part of the world where there was a recognisable liberal left. They didn't think again when thousands of Iraqis were slaughtered by 'insurgents' from the Baath party, which wanted to re-establish the dictatorship, and from al-Qaeda, which wanted a godly global empire to repress the rights of democrats, the independent-minded, women and homosexuals. They didn't think again when Iraqis defi ed the death threats and went to vote on new constitutions and governments. Eventually, I grew tired of waiting for a change that was never going to come and resolved to find out what had happened to a left whose benevolence I had taken for granted."

"Why is it that apologies for a militant Islam which stands for everything the liberal left is against come from the liberal left? Why will students hear a leftish postmodern theorist defend the exploitation of women in traditional cultures but not a crusty conservative don? After the American and British wars in Bosnia and Kosovo against Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic cleansers, why were men and women of the left denying the existence of Serb concentration camps? As important, why did a European Union that daily announces its commitment to the liberal principles of human rights and international law do nothing as crimes against humanity took place just over its borders? Why is Palestine a cause for the liberal left, but not China, Sudan, Zimbabwe, the Congo or North Korea? Why, even in the case of Palestine, can't those who say they support the Palestinian cause tell you what type of Palestine they would like to see? After the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington why were you as likely to read that a sinister conspiracy of Jews controlled American or British foreign policy in a superior literary journal as in a neo-Nazi hate sheet? And why after the 7/7 attacks on London did leftish rather than right-wing newspapers run pieces excusing suicide bombers who were inspired by a psychopathic theology from the ultra-right?

In short, why is the world upside down? In the past conservatives made excuses for fascism because they mistakenly saw it as a continuation of their democratic rightwing ideas. Now, overwhelmingly and every where, liberals and leftists are far more likely than conservatives to excuse fascistic governments and movements, with the exception of their native far-right parties. As long as local racists are white, they have no difficulty in opposing them in a manner that would have been recognisable to the traditional left. But give them a foreign far-right movement that is anti-Western and they treat it as at best a distraction and at worst an ally.

A part of the answer is that it isn't at all clear what it means to be on the left at the moment. I doubt if anyone can tell you what a society significantly more left wing than ours would look like and how its economy and government would work (let alone whether a majority of their fellow citizens would want to live there). Socialism, which provided the definition of what it meant to be on the left from the 1880s to the 1980s, is gone. Disgraced by the communists' atrocities and floored by the success of market-based economies, it no longer exists as a coherent programme for government. Even the modest and humane social democratic systems of Europe are under strain and look dreadfully vulnerable.

It is not novel to say that socialism is dead. My argument is that its failure has brought a dark liberation to people who consider themselves to be on the liberal left. It has freed them to go along with any movement however far to the right it may be, as long as it is against the status quo in general and, specifically, America."

"On 15 February 2003 , about a million liberal-minded people marched through London to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime. It was the biggest protest in British history, but it was dwarfed by the march to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime in Mussolini's old capital of Rome, where about three million Italians joined what the Guinness Book of Records said was the largest anti-war rally ever. In Madrid, about 650,000 marched to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime in the biggest demonstration in Spain since the death of General Franco in 1975. In Berlin, the call to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime brought demonstrators from 300 German towns and cities, some of them old enough to remember when Adolf Hitler ruled from the Reich Chancellery. In Greece, where the previous generation had overthrown a military junta, the police had to fire tear gas at leftists who were so angry at the prospect of a fascist regime being overthrown that they armed themselves with petrol bombs. "

"Saddam Hussein was delighted, and ordered Iraqi television to show the global day of action to its captive audience. The slogan the British marchers carried, 'No war - Freedom for Palestine', might have been written by his foreign ministry. He instructed the citizens of hdad to march and demand that he remain in power. Several thousand went through the streets carrying Kalashnikovs and posters of the Great Leader.

No one knows how many people demonstrated. The BBC estimated between six and 10 million, and anti-war activists tripled that, but no one doubted that these were history's largest co-ordinated demonstrations and that millions, maybe tens of millions, had marched to keep a fascist regime in power.

Afterwards, nothing drove the protesters wilder than sceptics telling them that if they had got what they wanted, they would, in fact, have kept a fascist regime in power. They were good people on the whole, who hadn't thought about the Baath Party. Euan Ferguson, of The Observer, watched the London demonstrators and saw a side of Britain march by that wasn't all bad:

'There were, of course, the usual suspects - the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Socialist Workers' Party, the anarchists. But even they looked shocked at the number of their fellow marchers: it is safe to say they had never experienced such a mass of humanity. There were nuns, toddlers, barristers, the Eton George Orwell Society. Archaeologists Against War. Walthamstow Catholic Church, the Swaffham Women's Choir and "Notts County Supporters Say Make Love Not War (And a Home Win against Bristol would be Nice)". One group of SWP stalwarts were joined, for the first march in any of their histories, by their mothers. There were country folk and lecturers, dentists and poulterers, a hairdresser from Cardiff and a poet from Cheltenham. I called a friend at two o'clock, who was still making her ponderous way along the Embankment - "It's not a march yet, more of a record shuffle" - and she expressed delight at her first protest. "You wouldn't believe it; there are girls here with good nails and really nice bags."'

Alongside the girls with good nails were thoughtful marchers who had supported the interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan but were aghast at the recklessness of the Iraq adventure. A few recognised that they were making a hideous choice. The South American playwright Ariel Dorfman, who had experienced state terror in General Pinochet's Chile, published a letter to an 'unknown Iraqi' and asked, 'What right does anyone have to deny you and your fellow Iraqis that liberation from tyranny? What right do we have to oppose the war the United States is preparing to wage on your country, if it could indeed result in the ousting of Saddam Hussein?'"

"In fairness to all of those who didn't want to think about the 'occasional genocide' or ask heaven's forgiveness for recommending that the Baath party be left in power, they were right in several respects. The protesters were right to feel that Bush and Blair were manipulating them into war. They weren't necessarily lying, in the lawyerly sense that they were deliberately making up the case for war - nothing that came out in the years afterwards showed that they knew Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction and thought, 'What the hell, we'll pretend he does.'

But they were manipulating the evidence. The post-mortem inquiries in America convicted the US administration of 'collective group think': a self-reinforcing delusion in the White House that shut out contrary information and awkward voices. Lord Butler 's inquiry in Britain showed the Prime Minister turned statements that the Joint Intelligence Committee had hedged with caveats into defi nite warnings of an imminent threat. Before the then Foreign Secretary Robin Cook resigned in protest against the war, he pointed out to Blair that several details in his case that Saddam had chemical weapons couldn't possibly be true. Cook told his special adviser David Mathieson after the meeting that Blair did not know about the detail and didn't seem to want to know either.

'A half truth is a whole lie,' runs the Yiddish proverb, and if democratic leaders are going to take their countries to war, they must be able to level with themselves as well as their electorates. If Blair had levelled with the British people, he would have said that he couldn't be sure if Saddam was armed, and even if he was there was no imminent danger; but here was a chance to remove a disgusting regime and combat the growth in terror by building democracy, and he was going to take it. Instead, he spun and talked about chemical weapons ready to be fired in 45 minutes. If the Labour party had forced Blair to resign, there would have been a rough justice in his political execution.

The war was over soon enough, but the aftermath was a disaster. Generals, diplomats and politicians covered their own backs and stabbed the backs of their colleagues as they piled blame on each other, but for the rest of the world pictures released in 2004 of American guards with pornographic smirks on their faces standing beside the tortured and sexually abused bodies of Iraqis at the Abu Ghraib prison encapsulated their disgust. To those who knew that the Baathists had tens of thousands of people tortured and murdered at Abu Ghraib, the pictures were evidence of sacrilege. It was as if American guards had decided to gas a prisoner in Auschwitz, while their superiors turned a blind eye.

Just as dozens of generals, politicians and diplomats shifted the blame, so journalists and academics produced dozens of books on the troubles of the occupation of Iraq. One point demanded far more attention than it got. Hard-headed and principled Iraqis, who knew all about the ghastly history of their country, failed to understand the appeal of fascism. The y worried about coping with the consequences of totalitarianism when the Baath party was overthrown. They talked about how many people you could reasonably put on trial in a country where the regime had made hundreds of thousands complicit in its crimes against humanity, and wondered about truth and reconciliation commissions and amnesties. They expected the invaders to be met with 'sweets and flowers' and assumed Baathism was dead as a dynamic force. They didn't count on its continuing appeal to the Sunni minority, all too aware that democracy would strip them of their status as Iraq's 'whites'. They didn't wonder what else the servants of the Baath could do if they didn't take up arms: wait around for war crimes trials or revenge from the kin of their victims? Nor did they expect to see Islamist suicide bombers pour into Iraq. Despite vocal assurances from virtually every expert who went on the BBC that such a pact was impossible, Baathists and Islamists formed an alliance against the common enemy of democracy."

"Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, wasn't against elections because he was worried they would be rigged or because he couldn't tolerate American involvement in the political process; he was against democracy in all circumstances. It was 'an evil principle', he said, as he declared a 'fierce war' against all those 'apostates' and 'infidels' who wanted to vote in free elections and the 'demi-idols' who wanted to be elected. Democracy was a 'heresy itself', because it allowed men and women to challenge the laws of God with laws made by parliaments. It was based on 'freedom of religion and belief' and 'freedom of speech' and on 'separation of religion and politics'.

He did not mean it as a compliment. His strategy was to terrorise Iraq's Shia majority. To Sunni Islamists they were heretics, or as Zarqawi put it in his charac teristic language, 'the insurmountable obstacle, the lurking snake, the crafty and malicious scorpion, the spying enemy, and the penetrating venom'. Suicide bombers were to murder them until they turned on the Sunni minority. He explained: 'I mean that targeting and hitting them in [their] religious, political, and military depth will provoke them to show the Sunnis their rabies and bare the teeth of the hidden rancour working in their breasts. If we succeed in dragging them into the arena of sectarian war, it will become possible to awaken the inattentive Sunnis as they feel imminent danger and annihilating death.'

Journalists wondered whether the Americans were puffi ng up Zarqawi's role in the violence - as a foreigner he was a convenient enemy - but they couldn't deny the ferocity of the terror. Like Stalin, Pol Pot and Slobodan Milosevic, they went for the professors and technicians who could make a democratic Iraq work. They murdered Sergio Vieira de Mello, one of the United Nations's bravest officials, and his colleagues; Red Cross workers, politicians, journalists and thousands upon thousands of Iraqis who happened to be in the wrong church or Shia mosque.

How hard was it for opponents of the war to be against that? Unbelievably hard, it turned out. The anti-war movement disgraced itself not because it was against the war in Iraq, but because it could not oppose the counter-revolution once the war was over. A principled left that still had life in it and a liberalism that meant what it said might have remained ferociously critical of the American and British governments while offering support to Iraqis who wanted the freedoms they enjoyed."

"When a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein came, the liberals had two choices. The first was to oppose the war, remain hypercritical of aspects of the Bush administration's policy, but support Iraqis as they struggled to establish a democracy.

The policy of not leaving Iraqis stranded was so clearly the only moral option, it never occurred to me that there could be another choice. I did have an eminent liberal specialist on foreign policy tell me that 'we're just going to have to forget about Saddam's victims', but I thought he was shooting his mouth off in the heat of the moment. From the point of view of the liberals, the only grounds they would have had to concede if they had stuck by their principles in Iraq would have been an acknowledgement that the war had a degree of legitimacy. They would still have been able to say it was catastrophically mismanaged, a provocation to al-Qaeda and all the rest of it. They would still have been able to condemn atrocities by American troops, Guantanamo Bay, and Bush's pushing of the boundaries on torture. They might usefully have linked up with like-minded Iraqis, who wanted international support to fight against the American insistence on privatisation of industries, for instance. All they would have had to accept was that the attempt to build a better Iraq was worthwhile and one to which they could and should make a positive commitment.

A small price to pay; a price all their liberal principles insisted they had a duty to pay. Or so it seemed.

The second choice for the liberals was to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. To look at the Iraqi civilians and the British and American troops who were dying in a war whose central premise had proved to be false, and to go berserk; to allow justifi able anger to propel them into 'binges of posturing and ultra-radicalism' as the Sixties liberals had done when they went off the rails. As one critic characterised the position, they would have to pretend that 'the United States was the problem and Iraq was its problem'. They would have to maintain that the war was not an attempt to break the power of tyranny in a benighted region, but the bloody result of a 'financially driven mania to control Middle Eastern oil, and the faith-driven crusade to batter the crescent with the cross'.

They chose to go berserk."

1. hluti greinarinnar er hér og 2. hlutinn hér.

Allar feitletranir eru blogghöfundar.

 

 

"Átsorsað" uppeldi?

Það er ekki ofsögum sagt að góð barnapössun er dýr hér í Toronto.  Pláss á góðu dagheimili kostar á bilinu 1200 til 1600 dollara, eða frá 70 til 95.000 íslenskar krónur. Og það er auðvitað bara fyrir 1. barn.  Ég veit ekki hvernig þessi upphæð stendur af sér gagnvart Íslenskum barnaheimilum, en ímynda mér þó að munurinn sé ekki ýkja mikill.  Stærsti munurinn er auðvitað að hér eru engar niðurgreiðslur.

En munurinn er líka sá að lægstu launin hér eru miklu lægri en á Íslandi.

Það er því ekki á allra færi að greiða slík dagvistargjöld og raunar má segja að fyrir marga borgi sig ekki að vinna ef greiða þarf slík gjöld, svo ekki sé talað um ef börnin eru fleiri en 1.

En það er hálf nöturlegt að lesa um fólk sem þarf að senda börnin sín yfir hálfan hnöttinn til að láta foreldra sína annast uppeldið.  "Átsorsa" uppeldið til "ódýrari" landa.  Því miður virðist sem svo að slíkt sé æ algengara.  Börn eru send til afa og ömmu jafnvel enn á fyrsta árinu. Önnur úrræði eru einfaldlega ekki til staðar.

Á vef Globe and Mail var frétt um þetta fyrir fáum dögum.  Þar mátti lesa m.a.:

"Sunny Wu had just immigrated to Canada from China when she discovered she was pregnant. Overjoyed, Ms. Wu prepared for her baby's arrival, never imagining that within a year, she would have to endure the agony and loneliness of being separated from her daughter.

Ms. Wu, a Chinese teacher, and her husband, a computer programmer, were squeaking by on minimum-wage jobs and could not afford to pay $1,200 a month for daycare. Ms. Wu, 34, also knew she would have to return to university if she didn't want to spend the rest of her life as an overeducated, embittered immigrant, packaging groceries for $7 an hour.

Though the separation was devastating, the couple could see no other way out. They sent their baby daughter to China to be raised by her grandmother, who was already caring for the toddler they had left behind.

“I felt so guilty. This wasn't how my new life was meant to be. I came to Canada to have a better quality of life, not a worse one.”"

"Canadians are, by now, familiar with the heartache Filipino and Caribbean women endure when they leave behind their children to come to Canada as live-in nannies. They end up parenting their offspring via long-distance phone calls and video cameras.

But the phenomenon of Chinese professionals immigrating here, and then sending their children back to China, is a new trend in what global experts call “transnational parenting.”

It raises troubling questions about how well Canada's immigration selection model is working — and may help explain the recent decrease in immigration applications from China.

“We discovered dozens of professional immigrants from mainland China were doing this because they all asked us how to get passports for their babies,” said Florence Wong, a social worker with St. Stephen's Community House in Toronto.

In 2002, Ms. Wong conducted a study of Chinese immigrants in five prenatal programs. Seventy per cent of the women said they were planning to send their children back to China to be raised by relatives. Social workers dealing with the community in Scarborough, Ont., confirmed the trend as well."

"“I think Chinese immigrants to Canada should be educated that sending their children back isn't the best thing. We keep our fingers crossed there won't be latent effects when they are teenagers.”

Judith Bernhard, director of the Early Childhood Education master's program at Ryerson University, says the psychological damage of separated children who reunite with their families can be severe.

“The most common issue is that the parent loses his or her status as an authority figure,” says Prof. Bernhard, who has conducted research into transnational mothers from Latin America.

The children often feel resentful and may rebel by refusing to listen or accept their parent as a decision-maker. Prof. Bernhard recalls one child who refused to eat in front of his mother.

For mothers, the most common emotion is guilt, and they sometimes compensate by spoiling the child, which can lead to more disciplinary problems."

Fréttina í heild má finna hér.

 

Et tu Brute

Það verður fróðlegt að fylgjast með evrunni á næstu árum.  Eflaust á hún eftir að vera mikið í umræðunni á Íslandi, en líklega ekki síður í öðrum löndum, löndum þar sem hún er nú þegar í notkun.  Eins og fram kemur í fréttinni er almenningur í Þýskalandi ekki of hrifinn af evrunni, en það sama má segja um fleiri þjóðir.

Nú um áramótin birtist frétt og dálkur í Daily Telegraph þar sem fjallað var um evruna.

Í fréttinni segir m.a.:

"Less than half of citizens in the euro zone are happy with European monetary system five years to the day after it replaced the franc, the mark and other national currencies, and following a painful rise in the cost of living.

A growing number of Europeans believe that the biggest monetary revolution in history has done more harm than good to national economic growth, the job market and standards of living, recent opinion polls have indicated."

"A poll published last week in France showed that 52 per cent of the French thought the euro had been a "bad thing."

The main complaint is that the euro has led to a rise in prices – 81 per cent described price hikes as its worst failing, a poll published by the European Commission indicated.

According to the poll, Italy is the most unhappy, followed by Greece and the Netherlands. Ireland is the happiest.

In France, official statistics suggest that inflation is no higher than before the euro, hovering around 1.6-2.1 per cent yearly since 1999.

But press investigations have shown that these statistics are inaccurate when it comes to basic commodities. According to Le Parisien, which published its own comparative study, the price of 30 everyday items had shot up by 80 per cent in the past five years. A baguette cost 65 cents in 2002 and 80 in 2006 – up 23 per cent. A coffee in a cafe had rocketed 120 per cent, a kilogram of potatoes had gone up by 93 per cent and toothpaste by 84 per cent."

Fréttina má finna hér.

Það er auðvitað einföldun að segja svona, en ef marka má fréttina er ef til vill ekki að undra að það sé drjúgt fylgi á meðal Íslenskra kaupsýslumanna fyrir því að taka upp evruna.

Í dálki á vefsíðu Daily Telegraph mátti lesa um svipað leyti:

"When the euro notes and coins were launched five years ago today, the question was who would be the next to join; now it is who will be the first to leave. Of the 15 EU members on January 1, 2002, it is the three that stayed out — Britain, Denmark and Sweden — that have prospered. The two Nordic nations have voted by handsome majorities to keep their currencies. In both countries, political leaders warned that a "No" vote would lead to a downturn; and in both countries, the "No" was in fact followed by a surge in the stock exchange, a fall in inflation and a drop in long-term interest rates. In Britain, public opinion is granite hard for sterling, to the extent that no serious politician proposes joining the EU currency, and the lobby group set up to campaign for it has folded.

Meanwhile, opinion within the euro zone has shifted. In France and Germany, majorities say they would rather have kept their old money. In Italy, some shops have started to accept lire again, to the delight of their customers. It may well turn out that membership of the euro has peaked at 13 with Slovenia's accession. The scenic Alpine state, which joined the euro at midnight, is the goody-goody of the new intake, keen to adopt every harmonising measure. Perhaps its euro-enthusiasm owes something to the fact that, uniquely among the ex-Communist entrants, it has been run continuously by the old regime. Not that Slovenia's rulers are Marxists these days, of course; indeed, they never really were. Rather, they are managerialists, supreme technocrats who have taken naturally to the Brussels system."

Sjá hér.

Ég á þó erfitt með að trúa að myntbandalagið brotni upp alveg á næstu árum en það er vissulega farið að bera á verulegri óánægju með bandalagið, fyrst og fremst vegna þess að efnahagur landanna slær ekki í takt.  Það er svo eðlilegt að menn velti því fyrir sér hvaða erindi Ísland á í þennan "klúbb".  Ef illa gengur fyrir nágranna eins og Þýskaland, Frakkland og Ítalíu að nota einn gjaldmiðil, hvernig gengi þá lítlu hagkerfi út í ballarhafi að finna takt við "klúbbinn"?

Ég fæ það oft á tilfinninguna að menn líti á evruna eins og alsherjar bjargvætt, skyndilausn sem kippi öllu í liðinn á augnabliki og allir lifi hamingjusamir upp frá því. 

 

Flestum Þjóðverjum þykir eftirsjá að markinu

Að bæta sig með nýjum græjum

Auðvitað er nauðsynlegt að stefna að því að bæta sig á nýju ári, í það minnsta í einhverju.  Nú er ég búinn að finna í það minnsta eitt sem ég get bætt á árinu.

Það er tannburstun.

Tannlæknirinn hefur löngum legið mér á hálsi fyrir að sinna tannhirðu ekki af nógu miklum krafti.  Þó bursta ég samviskusamlega bæði kvölds og morgna og stundum um miðjan dag.  En ég viðurkenni það á mig að vera ekki mikilvirkur með tannþráðinn eða önnur hjálpartæki. Margan yfirlesturinn hef ég fengið frá tannlækninum fyrir þann skort.

En nú horfir þetta allt til betri vegar, tannlæknirinn lét í hendurnar á mér nýja græju, nýtt "gadget".  Ég verð víst að viðurkenna að ég er jafn hrifinn (ef ekki hrifnari) og hver annar af nýjum græjum.  Þannig veit tannlæknirinn auðvitað hver er besta leiðinn til að fá uppkomna drengi til að sinna sínum málum betur.

Nýja græjan er Sonicare e9800 og þó að ég hafi eingöngu notað hana í örfáa daga, þá finn ég muninn.  Þetta er einfaldlega fantabursti og "cool gadget".

Gott að vera hæfileg hífaður?

Samkvæmt þessari frétt í Globe and Mail er það góð varúðarráðstöfun að vera hæfilega hífaður.  Hæfilegt magn áfengis verndar heilann í alvarlegum áföllum.

Eða eins og segir í fréttinni:

"The researchers say this suggests alcohol-based fluids might be a helpful treatment in head trauma cases, once accident victims have been well stabilized.

Trauma specialists from Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto and the Department of National Defence studied the records of severe head trauma victims that Sunnybrook had cared for from 1988 through 2003.

They found that those with low to moderate blood-alcohol readings were 24 per cent less likely to die in hospital of their injuries than patients with no alcohol in their blood."

Hitt ber svo reyndar á að líta, að hættan á alvarlegum áföllum eykst við það að vera "hæfilega hífaður", eins og segir reyndar einnig í fréttinni:

"Lead author Dr. Homer Tien said the findings send a signal that alcohol may be protecting the injured brain, but more study is needed before doctors could even think about testing alcohol-based fluids as a treatment for severe head trauma.

And the director of trauma at McGill University Health Centre in Montreal warned that alcohol raises the risk of having an injury in the first place. So Dr. Tarek Razek said if the choice is no drinking and no accidents versus moderate drinking and better chances of surviving head trauma, people should pick the former."

Þetta verður því dálítið eins og með hænuna og eggið.  Það er ef til vill betra að vera dulítið hífaður ef til óhapps kemur, en að sama skapi eykur það líkurnar á því að til óhapps komi. 

Það er vissulega vandlifað.

 

Skynsamlega að verki staðið

Þetta er ákaflega vel að verki staðið hjá Whole Foods Market.  Það er enda erfitt að reka verslanir til lengdar, ef það er ekki viðskiptavinurinn sem á síðasta orðið.

Auðvitað er líklegt að margir viðskiptavinir WFM séu ekki hrifnir af hvalveiðum Íslendinga, en það er alveg eins líklegt að hópurinn sem láti sig það litlu skipta, ef þeim líkar vörurnar vel, sé ekki minni.  Þeir búa enda í því landi sem er hvað stærsti aðili hvalveiða í heiminum.

Staðreyndin er sú að hér sem áður eru það gæði vörunnar sem skiptir meginmáli.

En það er reyndar annað sem ég hefði gaman af að vita, ef einhver getur frætt mig.  Hvernig eru verðin sem Íslenskir bændur eru að fá fyrir afurðir þær sem eru seldar í WFM?  Eru bændur að gera það verulega gott á þessari sölu? 

Það vantar nefnilega oft þegar sagt er frá stórkostlegum árangri Íslenskra landbúnaðarafurða erlendis, er hvað var kostnaðurinn við markaðssetninguna, hver greiddi hann og hver er raunverulegur afrakstur af sölunni?  Eða er þetta ekki að skila neinu í þegar allt er til tekið?

Sem dæmi má nefna, um hvernig alþjóðleg verslun með landbúnaðarvörur gengur oft fyrir sig, er að ég kaupi gjarna hér í Kanada, Norskan ost, Jarlsberg.  Hann stendur mér hér til boða á mun lægra verði hér, en býðst systur mínum, sem búa í Noregi. 

 

Whole Foods Market: Viðskiptavinir taki ákvarðanir

Af blæjum

Þó nokkuð hefur verið rætt um blæjur, notkun þeirra, hvort eigi að banna þær eða hvort þetta sé einfaldlega þægilegur og þjóðlegur klæðnaður fyrir ákveðinn hluta jarðarbúa.

Persónulega verð ég að segja að ég er ekki yfir mig hrifinn af þessum klæðnaði, en ég hef aldrei verið talinn neitt "átoritet" hvað tísku eða klæðnað snertir.  En mér finnst út í hött að banna eigi einhvern klæðnað, eða klæðaleysi ef út í það er farið.  Það er rétt að hver hafi sína hentisemi í þessum efnum.

En auðvitað verðum við að gera okkur grein fyrir því að þetta getur valdið ákveðnum vandræðum og ennfremur þurfum við að velta okkur fyrir því hvort ekki sé réttlætanlegt að banna "blæjuklæðnað" undir einhverjum kringumstæðum.

Það koma til dæmis upp ýmsar aðstæður í vestrænum löndum, sem eru ekki vandamál í upprunalöndum "blæjuklæðnarins".  Væri til dæmis ekki réttlætanlegt að banna "blæjuklæðnað" við stjórn ökutækja?  Í það minnsta sumar tegundir "blæjuklæðnaðar" skerða sjónsvið þess sem klæðist honum.

Hvernig brygðumst við við, ef við heyrum að "blæjuklæddum" einstaklingi væri neitað um afgreiðlu í verslun, þegar hún vildi borga með kredit eða debetkorti?  Myndir á þessum kortum eru ekki bara til að sýna hvað við lítum vel út, heldur gegna líka hlutverki öryggis sem persónuskilríki.  Væri hægt að leyfa blæjuklæddum einstaklingi að taka fé út af bankareikningi?

Væri rétt að neita "blæjuklæddum" einstaklingum um að kaupa til dæmis tóbak eða áfengi, þar sem ekki væri hægt að taka mark á persónuskilríkjum?

Hvaða reglur ættu að gilda hvað varðar lögreglu?  Hvenær gæti lögregla krafist þess að blæjan verði tekin niður og hvernig ætti að standa að því?

Sjálfsagt má ímynda sér fleiri kringumstæður þar sem "blæjuklæðnaður" getur valdið vandræðum, en auðvitað þarf fyrst og fremst að reyna að ræða málin áður en þau verða að vandræðum.

Kona með blæju mun flytja jólaávarp Channel 4

Já, hitaveita er lífsgæði

Þetta er góðar fréttir fyrir Kínverja, og sömuleiðis fyrir Íslendinga, það er ekki ónýtt að geta flutt út þá þekkingu sem hefur safnast fyrir í landinu hvað varðar hitaveitu og nýtingu jarðvarma.

Það er svo til dæmis hér í Toronto, að þegar verulega kalt verður í veðri, finn ég strax muninn í andrúmsloftinu, þá eykst gasbrennslan auðvitað og sömuleiðis skella margir timbri í arininn, eða kamínuna og lyktin og sótið liggur í loftinu.

En þetta eru ekki einu lífsgæðin sem hitaveita veitir.  Það er ekki lítill lúxus að hafa óendanlegt heitt vatn komandi úr krönunum eða sturtuhausnum.  Það hefur verið erfitt fyrir Íslending að venjast því hér, að heita vatnið er aðeins jafn mikið og er í heita vatns tankinum.  Svo verður bara að bíða, eða skola af sér með köldu, ef þannig verkast.

Já, hitaveita er sannarlega eitt af lífsins gæðum, sem fáir njóta.

Hitaveita og lífsgæði

16.000 gallon

Þá var vatnsreikningurinn að koma í hús, það má segja að það sé sá fyrsti sem við að Bjórá þurfum að greiða.

Notkunin frá 19. júli til 10 nóvember hljóðar upp á 16.000 gallon.  Það gerir reikning upp á ca. 6.300 kall.  Klórið í vatninu er innifalið.

Hvað skyldi meðalvatnsnotkun 4ja manna fjölskyldu vera á Íslandi?  Veit það einhver?

Alltaf gott að velta fyrir sér notkuninni á auðlindunum, ekki satt?