A Review of "Planet of the Humans", or, How Bad Can Doomer Porn Get?

The other day I got an email from a friend telling me about a new film that has been uploaded to YouTube and that he thought I might want to check out. It's Jeff Gibbs Planet of the Humans. For those of you who might not know, Gibbs is a film-maker who's been very involved with Michael Moore for many years. According to IMDb, he produced Fahrenheit 9/11, Fahrenheit 11/9, Michael Moore in TrumpLand, and, Bowling for Columbine---which were all Moore vehicles. Gibbs is also a musician and he helped with the soundtracks of Capitalism, a Love Story, Fahrenheit 9/11, and, Bowling for Columbine. 

Planet of the Humans promotional shot c/o Matthew Carey's blog Non Fiction Film.
From viewer's left to right: producer Ozzie Zehner, director Jeff Gibbs, and,
executive producer Michael Moore.

I found it to be an infuriating movie. In fact, I was so angry at it that I had to stop watching it after the first third and wait a day until I'd cooled off enough to finish it. 

Let me outline a couple issues that I had with it.

First, as near as I can tell, Gibbs plays fast-and-loose with the truth. Look at this clip from the film (it's a little over 30 minutes into the film).

The fellow he's talking to says that "some solar panels are built to only last ten years".  Think about that statement "some solar panels". Did you actually learn anything from it? Not really, because the important issue is "how many solar panels only last ten years?" I looked around and found out that the vast majority of solar panels last a lot longer than that---and the length of time that they do last keeps getting longer and longer as engineers get better at building them.

The first thing to understand is that "only last" doesn't mean that they melt into a puddle of goo after they've expired. Instead, the issue with solar panels is that their efficiency degrades over time. According to this 2014 article in Engineering.com titled What Is the Lifespan of a Solar Panel? by Tom Lombardo, the way we should understand a panel isn't "how long will it last?", but rather "how fast does the output degrade---under what conditions?"

there has been a general rule of thumb that says that Photo Voltaic (PV) panels lose 1% of their productive capacity per year. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) performed a meta-analysis of studies that examined the long term degradation rates of various PV panels. They found that the 1% per year rule was somewhat pessimistic for panels made prior to the year 2000, and today’s panels, with better technology and improved manufacturing techniques, have even more stamina than their predecessors. For monocrystalline silicon, the most commonly used panel for commercial and residential PV, the degradation rate is less than 0.5% for panels made before 2000, and less than 0.4% for panels made after 2000. That means that a panel manufactured today should produce 92% of its original power after 20 years, quite a bit higher than the 80% estimated by the 1% rule.

Gibbs doesn't technically lie when he put in the quote that says "some solar panels are built to only last ten years" because I suspect that there are probably solar panels being made for something like lawn lights or a child's toy that this is true. But that's not relevant to the thesis of the film, and putting it in the film will confuse many casual viewers into thinking that PV panels are a scam. 

Moreover, Gibbs doesn't allow for the potential that PV panels can be recycled. According to this website, they can.

These are two different recycling process for two of the most common types of
PV panels: silicon-based ones on your left, thin-film on your right. 

&&&&

OK. Anybody can make a mistake. But how about this example? (It comes at a little over 42 minutes into the film.)

Basically, the intrepid film makers go to the one of the nine power facilities of the giant Solar Energy Generating System (SEGS) in California. The naive viewer of the above clip would think that the entire system has been shut down and removed. But as near as I can tell, that's simply not true.

According to a blog by Ketan Joshi, the facility is currently up and running---with no abandoned or non-functional parts. I went into Google Earth and looked up the "Solar Energy Generating System California", and got this screen grab. 

Here's a satellite image of the array in 2015.

The date of this photo that comes up with my Google Pro viewer (you won't see the date with the on-line version) is September 5th, 2015. There was also no mention of the SEGS system being dismantled in the Wikipedia article on it. Joshi's commentary on it is as follows: 

Without knowing when the footage was taken, the only likely explanation for this is the pair of dudes visited the site midway through the point at which one of the fields was being removed and replaced with newer models, something which has happened several times over the past few decades.

 &&&&

These are two examples that I've chosen to look into, but I suspect that there are lots of similar fibs, over-generalizations, and, dubious analogies. Gibbs uses what philosophers call "the Gish gallop". That's an informal logic error that happens when someone quickly throws a barrage of lies, half-truths, innuendos, etc, at someone and never allows him or her the time to think about the relative truth of what has been said. This turns on the fact that it takes a lot longer to analyze whether or not a specific statement is believable than it does to just say it. Gibbs says a lot of things in his film that I find hard to believe, but it has taken me quite a few hours to just deal with the two specific issues I've raised above. Most people don't have the time or ability to truth check what Gibbs is saying, so a lot of folks will simply take what he says at face value---which would be a very bad thing.

(If people are looking for a suggestion about how they should respond to this sort of thing, I'd recommend something that you might want to call "the Hulet hammer". That is, when you find someone like Gibbs playing "fast and loose" with the truth, simply decide that you will never listen to a word he says ever again. It's true that even a stopped clock is right twice a day, but the problem is that unless you have a properly functioning clock too, you won't be able to tell exactly what times of day the stopped clock is right. Frankly, I "hammered" Michael Moore a long time ago, but when my friend contacted me, I thought I might get an op ed out of it.)

&&&&

The really annoying thing about Gibbs is that I think that I agree with the point he was trying to make, but he did such an appallingly bad job of saying it, that it totally destroys the utility of the film. Here's a clip from an interview that I found on line.

He says that the ultimate problem that we are facing is too many people consuming too much and makes the bizarre claim that "we don't even have a name or words for this". Well, yes we do---we call it "overpopulation" and "greed".

There's nothing in this that I disagree with. But that message gets damaged by the out-and-out bullshit that he spreads all over the film. If someone puts as much misleading nonsense in his message as Gibbs does, the only rational thing to do is ignore everything he says. Moreover, he's just created a powerful resource for people who want to stop the government from actually doing anything about the Climate Emergency. You better believe that clips of his film are already being shared around the "alt-right" networks as proof that "so-called climate change is a socialist plot", as Stephen Harper used to say. 

&&&&

There are other things that are problematic about this film. 

He does the stupid "gotcha quotes" thing when he approaches people like Al Gore and Bill McKibben. If he'd made the effort to really try to get to know these people, he'd probably realize that environmental leaders tend to have an extremely deep and nuanced understanding of these issues. But they are heavily constrained by the system that they inhabit. 

I've known a fair number of local "celebrity environmentalists" and the majority of them are far, far, far more radical in their assessment of the problems we face than you would ever know from what they say in public. That's because they are constrained by the institutional situation they find themselves in. One of Leonard Cohen's poems has the lines "They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom / For trying to change the system from within." That's what it's like to work as an elected green politician or manage an environmental Non-Governmental Organization (NGO). You have to dumb-down your message to the point where you often feel that you are being dishonest. That's not because you are a bad person, it's because so many people you need to donate money or support your legislation will simply tune you out if you try to educate them about how bad things really are and what we need to do if we are going to turn things around. 

People in positions like this don't have the luxury of following the facts where they lead them. That's something that a journalist like me or a film maker like Gibbs can do. The problem with Gibbs is that for some reason he decided that it was better to cite a convenient falsehood than actually get to the nub of the problem. 

&&&&

Think about this, if you will. This godawful stinker of a movie will be seen by a lot more people than this review. That's because it appeals to what's worst in people. Well, why not show the world that instead you want to see well-researched, thoughtful analysis instead? You can do that by subscribing through Patreon or Pay Pal. A dollar a month is fine, and you will be showing the world that you think there should be more than just sensationalist crud on the Web. 

&&&&

There's another element to this that needs discussing. Gibbs---like Moore---doesn't believe in rational discourse. Instead, they absolutely blast viewers with emotional images. For example, he talks about using waste fat as part of bio-fuels and shoves in this short clip to illustrate what he's talking about. 

Maybe it's because I've studied philosophy, maybe it's because of my childhood being surrounded by out-of-control, hyper-emotional, angry people, but I do not think that any issue is served by an empty appeal to emotions. That's what demagogues do to whip the mob into a frenzy. 

This isn't to say that there is no place for emotions. I'm a fairly emotional person myself. And I think Greta Thunberg's emotional tongue-lashings of the "powers that be" have done a lot of good. But the difference is that young Greta is real in a way that I suspect Gibbs can never be. What she says is spontaneous, honest, and, from the heart. Gibbs' movie is contrived, gratuitous, and, artificial. He didn't just say what he feels---he sought out some sort of really nasty footage from a dead stock operation, contacted the person who owns the rights, and, paid them to be able to put it in the film. 

That's not about letting the public know about the Climate Emergency. It's about artificially exciting people's emotions to create an extremely heightened sense of concern about the future. It's exactly the same thing that a pornographer does when he records images aimed at exciting the sex drive of jaded people. Jeff Gibbs is a pornographer and Planet of the Humans is doomer porn. 

He suggests that what he is trying to do is "create awareness". 

There is a common belief among some people that if you just show people how tremendously awful things are, they will change the way they act. I'm of the opinion that that doesn't work. Instead, making people feel bad about the future, IMHO, just makes people "shut down" and disengage. Our media is full of stories about how bad things are, but what is lacking is a description of an alternative future where things are better and a serious road map that outlines how we can get from here to there. That's the sort of movie I would have liked to see. Unfortunately, I don't think Gibbs (or Moore, for that matter) are good enough film makers to do such a thing. Too bad. 

&&&&

This is getting a bit long, so let me leave Gibbs at this point and briefly mention something that we should all be thinking about right now. 

Up until about two months ago I don't think many people believed that a nation could "turn on a dime" and totally change the way it does things. Well, almost all the governments of the world were told by their scientific advisers that a new disease had emerged that was a threat to a great many people. And almost all the governments decided to do something that had never happened before---they asked their societies to shut down their economy. Most citizens gladly went along with the quarantine orders. And most governments have opened up their purses to help many of the people hardest hit by the economic "freeze". In the space of a couple weeks our societies went onto a war footing. 

But this is the strangest "war footing" that the human race has ever seen. We didn't fly in planes, we didn't drive our cars, we didn't do much of anything that really wasn't about having enough to eat, keeping a roof over our heads, and, helping sick people. The result was a dramatic improvement in the environment and I believe that a great many people have also redefined what is important in their lives. 

I have hope that the Neo-Liberal consensus is gone and it will never return. We now know that it is possible for the population to be mobilized by strong leadership to do great things. And if we can do it for COVID-19, we can do it for climate change. Gibbs is right, technology will not "save us" as we go through the 21st century bottle-neck. But public mobilization using appropriate technology can. Unfortunately, I think Gibbs doesn't understand enough about anything to be any help in getting people to change their behaviour. Instead, I think his film will probably be more of a hindrance. It deserves to be quickly relegated to the dust heap of history. 

&&&&

Moreover, I say onto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

Training Schools, Part Two: The Graveyard of Good Intentions

In my last post on this subject I talked about the Grandview Training School for Girls, the $16.4 million settlement for abuse and mistreatment that was paid out by the provincial government and the fact that it was just one of a whole series of institutions across the province. I also started talking about where training schools came from, specifically with reference to George Brown's parliamentary investigation of the Kingston penitentiary and its sadistic first governor, Henry Smith. Now I'd like to go beyond the Kingston pen and talk about the development of juvenile law in Ontario. (What follows is mostly drawn from  The Development of Canadian Juvenile Justice: A Background for Reform by Jeffrey S. Leon, from the Osgoode Hall Law Journal, vol 15, # 1, June 1977, article #3.)

In 1857 the Province of Canada passed the Act for Establishing Prisons for Young Offenders that established "reformatories". People under the age of 21 who'd committed crimes punishable with prison terms and children under 16 who'd been committed for minor offenses and would otherwise spend times of 14 days or more in a gaol would do their time there. The idea was that they would be less harsh than a penitentiary like Kingston.

This wasn't good enough for the reformers, though, who thought it might not be a good idea to put really young children into a prison with 21 year olds. The results of their activities, unfortunately, wasn't what they wanted. To understand exactly what happened we need to understand some theoretical subtleties.

The first thing to understand is that when politicians create justice regimes they have to ask themselves what it is that they are doing. In this case, the people righting the legislation never really thought through several issues.

• Were they trying to protect the children, or, were they trying to protect society from the children?
• Are the courts trying children to see if they are really guilty, or, do they assume guilt and focus on sentencing to punish/rehabilitate? 
• Are children who commit crimes young adults who freely choose to be criminals and who can forced to understand that "crime doesn't pay"? Or, are they children who are acting out because they are horribly stressed by an awful home life? 
• Who exactly are we going to get to administer any program that this new legislation brings into existence?

Because the elected officials never thought through these problems, the system that they came up with created a lot of misery in the lives of too many children.

Just who exactly was the legislation trying to protect?

There appears to have been a great deal of concern in 19th century Ontario vis-a-vis the decline of the traditional family. The idea was that as more people moved off the farm to the city for jobs in factories, children were increasingly left to their own devices---which people thought would invariably lead to a life of crime. 

For Victorian-age reformers, "the distinction in status between neglected and criminal in effect translated as potentially versus actually criminal." This attitude towards the prevention of criminality was reasserted by those who later drafted Canada's delinquency legislation in terms of the idea "that there should be no hard and fast distinction between neglected and delinquent children, but that all should be recognized as of the same class, and should be dealt with with a view to serving the best interests of the child." ' This perceived similarity facilitated protective and rehabilitative responses to children which ultimately worked to the detriment of the procedural rights recognized for children in the court process. (Leon, P-76)

This attitude also fostered the creation of mandatory public education, which seems to have been created just as much to get children away from "bad influences" as it was to educate them in "ready, writing, and, arithmetic". 

The promotion of schooling, under the leadership of Egerton Ryerson, who was popularly regarded as the 'father' of Ontario's school system, was also associated with crime prevention and the effective preparation of children for productive roles in later life. The attitudes expressed by this movement continued to be voiced by later reformers. It was believed that deviation from an idealized view of family life, and the failure of children to attend school, would result in children "rapidly acquiring an education of the wrong kind." (Leon, P-77)

When a society becomes afraid of a specific problem we get a phenomenon known as a "moral panic". As we've seen in my past articles about things like eugenics and euthenics, there were a lot of middle-class people who were concerned about the working class. Some folks like Dr. Helen cMurchy and Alvin Kaufman  felt that they were out-breeding more intelligent people and "destroying the race". In the case of the training schools, it appears that the motivation was that without some sort of replacement for the parents who were off working in factories, children would become out-of-control and eventually grow up into being career criminals.

To this end, Ontario passed An Act Respecting Industrial Schools in 1874 that allowed for the creation of residential schools for children under 14 who could be committed for as long as a court deemed necessary---but which couldn't hold them past their 16th birthday. (No facilities actually existed until 1887 for boys, and 1891 for girls.)  Take a look at the following list of "offenses" that could put you into one.

(1) Who is found begging or receiving alms, or being in any street or public place for the purpose of begging or receiving alms;
(2) Who is found wandering, and not having any home or settled place of abode or proper guardianship, or not having any lawful occupation or business, or visible means of subsistence;
(3) Who is found destitute, either being an orphan or having a surviving parent who is undergoing penal servitude or imprisonment;
(4) Whose parent, step-parent or guardian represents to the police magistrate that he is unable to control the child, and that he desires the child to be sent to an industrial school under this Act;
(5) Who, by reason of the neglect, drunkenness or other vices of parents, is suffered to be growing up without salutary parental control and education, or in circumstances exposing him to lead an idle and dissolute life.  

Added to this array of what were essentially incidents of neglect was a
further category included in an 1884 consolidation: 

(6) Who has been found guilty of petty crime, and who, in the opinion of the Judge or Magistrate before whom he has been convicted, should be sent to an Industrial School instead of to a gaol or reformatory. (Leon, P-80)

As you can see from the above list, it appears that to a very large extent a key way to get sent to an Industrial School was to break the law against being poor. Of course, being virtuous Social Darwinists, the middle-class people running Ontario wouldn't see parents as being exploited by an unfair economic system---instead it was obvious that these children were the victims of either "feeble-minded parents" or parents who made "bad life choices".

Here are some poor, urban children from the Victorian era.
Common parlance of the time was to call them "street Arabs", because
of their nomadic lifestyle. Not much different from our present day
homeless----except for their age. Photo of unknown provenance, but
obviously public domain because of it's age.

Lest someone think that this is an exaggeration, consider the case of "Anna" from the documentary Until Someone Listens. According to the study guide accompanying the film, she was 13 when she was sent to the Grandview Training School for Girls because she was deemed "out of control" (she kept skipping school because she had to babysit her siblings.) Of course, it didn't help that she was from a First Nation and lived on a reserve---. (See pps 50-51 of the Study Guide for Until Someone Listens.)

It was probably a good thing that Ontario got a universal public education system. On the other hand, it was probably a bad thing that the underlying assumption was that this had to be done to stop children from descending into savagery. It was almost certainly a bad thing that many children got sent to institutions just because their parents were poor and this kept them from being able to keep up middle-class appearances.

&&&&

Conflicting visions and muddled execution

Another part of the problem comes from the fact that there were two very different visions about what would be best for the children. One faction appeared to favour a "tough love" approach and didn't want to see "street Arabs" "molley-coddled". (It occurs to me that I should mention that the term "street Arab" is racist. This isn't news to me, but that's the term people used back then. I wouldn't generally use it today, and I wouldn't recommend anyone using it outside of a historical context---which I've never heard anyone do anyway.) Another group wanted to keep as many children as possible out of Industrial Schools as possible. Their suggestion was to create a probation system. Short of providing financial help, I can only assume that the idea was that this would ensure that children got the proper moral guidance they needed to bootstrap themselves out of poverty.

To this end a federal law was created

Complicating this was the fact that Toronto had already set up an informal "children's court" that was presided over by Magistrates. This meant that children were already being processed into Industrial Schools through an existing system. The reformers---in effect---were "horning in on their turf". But in the event, the reformers "won the day".

In 1903, legislative recognition of probation was extended by An Act to amend the Children's Protection Act of Ontario. The Act provided for the appointment of volunteer "children's committees," whose agents were to assist the Superintendent of Neglected and Dependent Children and the children's aid societies in child placement, visitation, and fund raising. These "children's agents," along with consenting officers of children's aid societies, could also serve as probation officers in whose care a judge could place, without registering a conviction, a child under sixteen years of age accused of a provincial offence. The probation officers, charged with the duty to take a "personal interest in the child.. so as to secure its reformation," might be required to report periodically to the judge "concerning the progress and welfare of the child."' The trend against institutionalization was further emphasized by a provision that such children be granted bail as often as possible, or be put in the temporary care of an association or individual, rather than be committed to gaol or the police station pending trial. (Leon, pp. 91-92)

Having said that, it is important to understand the depth of opposition among some Magistrates and police officers.

The police officials associated with the Toronto children's court, including Inspectors Stark and Archibald and Police Magistrates Denison and Kingsford, were most vehement in their attacks. They argued that not only were the existing methods both sufficient and less expensive, but also that the "harsh" attitude of the police had a deterrent effect by making an impression on children without resulting in the police being viewed as enemies. The debate was often bitter. In a report circulated to gain support for the police position, Archibald characterized the new proposals as "child saving propaganda" and the advocates of these measures as "superficial and sentimental faddists" who, in the interests of their own "selfish ends":

"work upon the sympathies of philanthropic men and women for the purpose of introducing a jelly-fish and abortive system of law enforcement, whereby the judge or magistrate is expected to come down to the level of the incorrigible street arab and assume an attitude absolutely repulsive to British Subjects. The idea seems to be that by profuse use of slang phraseology he should place himself in a position to kiss and coddle a class of perverts and delinquents who require the most rigid disciplinary and corrective methods to ensure the possibility of their reformation. I would go further to affirm from extensive and practical experience that this kissing and coddling, if indiscriminately applied, even to the best class of children, would have a disastrous effect, both physically, mentally, morally and spiritually"  (Leon, p-166)

Eventually, the reformers won the day, however and in 1908 a federal Juvenile Delinquents Act was passed. It "created" a system of special "juvenile courts" and "probation officers" who's duty it was to dispense and administer some sort of support for delinquent/abused children according to this new system.

I have emphasized the importance of understanding the opposition to the spirit of the law among magistrates and the police because of the way the legislation was implemented. In 1908 1910 Ontario passed An Act Respecting Juvenile Courts that pretty much kept the status quo. I say that, because what the province did was to hand over the new law to the people who were responsible for the old state of affairs.

The establishment of juvenile courts in Ontario was haphazard. An Act respecting Juvenile Courts, passed in 1910, provided that every County or District Court Judge's Criminal Court and every Police Magistrate would constitute a juvenile court. Agents of children's aid societies were to be probation officers. (Leon p-101)

The government didn't create an army of probation officers and new courts for children. Instead, it "deputized" a charity---the Children's Aid Society---and declared that that charity's social workers were "probation officers". It also declared all existing Magistrate Courts were now "juvenile courts". In effect, the federal government passed a law dreamed-up by "bleeding heart liberals" and the province gave the "tough on crime" crowd the task of administering it. 

&&&&

Since I've raised the importance of who ended up administering the institutions, I thought I'd bring up an article I found in the Maclean's Magazine archives. It's titled The Most Heartbreaking Job in Canada and it was written in 1953 by the famous writer and activist, June Callwood.

June Callwood, photo from the Casey House website.
Image used under the "Fair Dealing" provision of the Copy Right Act. 

It's an interesting read because it gives a very positive description of the Grandview Training School for Girls---the one that recently awarded millions to previous inmates for abuse and mistreatment.

In the Second World War the Grandview buildings were taken over by the Navy and the inmates were sent to a temporary facility in Cobourg where

a Canadian writer, Gwenyth Barrington, visited the school at its wartime location in Cobourg and reported that the children were flogged, locked in basement cupboards for such offenses as laughing or scraping their chairs, and were fed on bread and water for days at a time. The Ontario Department of Reform Institutions denied all the charges but there were some ugly stories the newspapers began to recall: a mass breakout had once been controlled only after a night supervisor had been slugged; a seventeen-year old escapee had drunk iodine in a suicide attempt to avoid being returned. The superintendent resigned (Callwood in Macleans)

At the end of the war the girls were moved back to Galt and a new superintendent was selected: Isabel Macneill. She had no background in criminology, prisons, or, law enforcement. What she had been was the commander of HMCS Conestoga, which was what the Navy had called the school for Women's Royal Naval Service (WRNS) that was established in the Grandview Buildings for the duration of the war. (Incidentally, this meant that Macneill was the only woman in the entire Commonwealth who was considered a commanding officer of a ship, and as a result was piped on board of any Navy ship when she came aboard.) 

Isabel Macneill in uniform. I assume that this is a Public Domain
image, c/o the Canadian Encyclopedia. Cropped by Bill Hulet.

According to Callwood, Macneill brought a totally open mind to her job, did extensive reading on the latest understanding of juvenile delinquency, and based her approach on it. 

She found that the common denominator in all juvenile delinquency, without a single exception, was an unsatisfactory home—a home where there was divorce, separation, illegitimacy, prostitution, alcoholism, drug addiction, incest, unwanted children or, occasionally, overprotection so that the child never felt the consequence of her misdeeds. Delinquency, she discovered, is a word for the natural rebellion of a child against an unpleasant situation. Forcing table manners and good deportment on such children in an institution would only make them more efficient delinquents, better able to fool authorities; the child would have to recognize her problem and learn to live with it if she could ever expect to be a well-adjusted adult.

Under her command the school rapidly lost the heavy screens that had been placed over the windows. Corporal punishment was banished entirely—no one on the staff is permitted to touch a girl—and psychologists, case workers, a psychiatrist, sympathetic house supervisors and teachers were hired as the budget permitted. The cost of the rehabilitation program— four dollars and fifty cents a day per child —is the highest, of any reform institution in Ontario, but Miss Macneill has made her school one of the world’s most progressive penal institutions.

Her salvage record is impressive: almost seventy percent of her girls eventually rejoin the community as happy and well adjusted women.

Macneill spent six years at Grandview but then was called back into active service in the Navy in 1954. That term of service ended in 1957. In 1959 she went on a trip across Europe to study women's prisons there, and was eventually appointed Warden of the Kingston Women's Prison in 1960. She kept that position until 1966.

Taking Callwood's article on face value, I can only assume that Macneill's regime was just an isolated "blip" on an otherwise awful history of upper management at Grandview.  Unfortunately, it is the tendency of governments, lawyers, and, victims to protect their privacy. This means that it is probably impossible for a reporter---even one with far more access to records and individuals than me---to really find out how one ever got put into the job of being superintendent at a Training School. There's even less chance that I would ever be able to find out what process was followed when one of them had complaints leveled against them.

&&&&

It's a strange thing asking for money. I don't really "need" it. But I do think that if you get some value from what I write, and you can afford it, you should consider giving. A dollar a month is fine because it's really the principle that I'm after.

I don't mention it much, but I've studied under various spiritual teachers for long periods of time. One of them told me that payment is important for learning not because the teacher needs it, but because the student does. Whether we like it or not, most people simply do not take seriously what they do not pay for. And that's why I ask for a token submission. Please tell me and all journalists that you take us seriously---it's easy to do through Patreon and PayPal. 

&&&&

The Training School system has shut down in Ontario. The only things I could find out about the local one in Guelph---Hillcrest---was

1. its location, at the North East corner of Stone and Victoria---nothing at all is left
2. a FaceBook group titled Hillcrest Training School Guelph Ontario with no posts and absolutely nothing at all on it that would identify who set it up
3. one picture from the Guelph Public Library collection of Guelph Mercury photos

Open House at Hillcrest, from the Guelph Public Library Archives.
Guelph Mercury photos. Ref # CA ON00126 F45-F45-0-8-F45-0-8-0-0-237

A class action lawsuit was approved by the Ontario courts last year. If you were a victim of this particular type of institutional cruelty, there are law firms that are interested in hearing from you. Usually, part of the settlement is a non-disclosure agreement so we may very well never hear any particulars of why the schools had such a hard time figuring out how to treat the children with kindness instead of cruelty. Consider what follows rank speculation---. 

My feeling is that government institutions pretty much follow the general opinion and worldview of the people who live in a country. If a large percentage of the population have an urge towards anger and cruelty, so will their public institutions. A small part of the process of getting beyond these tendencies is educating people about what really happens---as opposed to what they think does. This is a large measure of why I wrote these articles. I think that I'll try to find another topic for next time.  

&&&&

Furthermore I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!  

Developing a Global Immune System

I've been trying to avoid adding to comments about the plague we are living through, but I had a conversation with a friend recently that got me thinking. She was going on about the economic catastrophe that many people are facing. I commented that I hadn't really thought much about it---that's just not how my mind works. Moreover, I'm retired, my house is paid off, and, I've spent my life living very frugally so I would minimize the chances of getting into financial trouble during "hard times". (That's the result of seeing the human turmoil that came about when we lost the family farm in the 1970s.)

Anyway, shortly after this talk I came across a really fascinating clip from a CNBC business show that has been reposted around the Web. (I'm using this clip under the "Fair Dealing" provision of the Copy Right Act.)

What I was interested in was the clash of worldviews between the television host and the guest. Most business journalists tend to "drink the Kool Aid" when it comes to what passes for conventional wisdom among the moneyed classes. And very rich people, as a general rule, tend to carefully align their own personal interest with what they consider to be good public policy.

Imagine his surprise to find out that a very wealthy man---Chamath Palihapitiya, who owns a private equity firm and was one of the founders of Face Book---suggests that government aid should be going to poor people and small businesses instead of large corporations. But here's the reason why, Palihapitiya grew up poor. His family immigrated from Sri Lanka and his mother worked as a housekeeper and his dad was chronically unemployed. They lived on welfare for at least part of his childhood. As a result, he knows something about life that the vast majority of middle and upper-class people don't.

Moreover, as a high-powered business person he also knows some things that the vast majority of poor and middle-class people don't. As he alludes to in the exchange, the fact is that bankruptcy for large corporations is totally different from what happens to poor people and small businesses. That's because they have access to something called "pre-packaged insolvency". The idea behind this is that it really doesn't make any sense to totally destroy a company when it becomes bankrupt. Instead, the idea is that a court-appointed administrator is brought in to manage the process. If an outside partner comes along who wants to buy-up the company, the administrator is able to negotiate a take-over, including a price. That means that a company can go bankrupt and the administrator can sell it without the employees even missing a day's work. 

The second point that Palihapitiya is making is that when large businesses take on debt it isn't all governed by the same rules. What happens is that it gets broken up into different "tranches" or slices. These different types of debt are governed by different rules. As a general point they are more or less risky---which means that if the company goes under, the debts that are less risky get paid first and the more risky ones last. To compensate for this, the less risky debt fraction generally pays less interest than the more risky one.

Graphic created by Thomas Splettstoesser and registered as a Public Domain Image under the Copy Left rule.
Image c/o the Wiki Media Commons. 

As a matter of fact, the majority of loans that pension funds make to large corporations tend to be low risk/low return, whereas the "Wolves of Wall Street" types tend to make high risk/high return ones. That means that when business commentators blather on about people's "pension funds" or "jobs", they are generally trying to create a smokescreen to hide their appeal for the government to bail them out for the dumb investments that they made.

Incidentally, one interesting thing I noticed was when the host suggested that employees often own shares in the company they work for. I'd ask you, dear readers, how many of you have ever owned shares in a company that you worked for? I've worked for a couple large corporations in my life---Consolidated Building Maintenance and Eatons---and I didn't know a single person who did. Palihapitiya called the host on this and I think the shock on his face explains how completely and utterly "out of touch" with ordinary people a great many television media hosts are about how the "other half" lives. The thing to remember is that any journalist you see on a big audience, legacy media channel has precious little in common with ordinary working people---instead, he's an extremely well-paid member of the ruling class. And it usually shows, like it did in this interview.

&&&&

What got them started was with regard to the airline industry, which leads me to my second point.

The guy who interviewed Palihapitiya was shocked at the idea that businesses should suffer from the effects of the Corona Virus outbreak. It's obvious that that he thinks no one in their wildest dreams could predict that something like this would happen. The thing is, this is total nonsense. Human history is full of pandemics. There may still be people alive today who went through the Spanish Influenza. Everyone has heard about the Black Death. Lots of experts have been warning that we are going to inevitably going to have something similar. For example, here's a TED talk on the subject.

The above talk is really worth watching, especially towards the end. That's because it describes how a small Canadian government program called GPHIN managed to use web crawlers (something that the computer companies use to develop statistics on things like websites) to stop the SARS outbreak from becoming a global pandemic like COVID-19. The speaker, Larry Brilliant (I know, a great name---he really lives up to it!) was also involved in starting a group titled InSTEDD ("Innovative Support To Emergencies Diseases and Disasters") which uses technology to help organizations from governments to grassroots citizen groups detect problems early, before they become too big to easily deal with. 

The thing to remember about Brilliant is that he gave this TED talk in 2006 and as a major league expert on the subject of communicable diseases, he didn't say "if there is another pandemic", he said "when there is another pandemic". The problem with the guy interviewing Palihapitiya and most of the business people who he's spent his life fawning over is that they think that people like Brilliant are total and complete ass-hats that they don't have to listen to. "What do they know?" "If they were that smart, they'd be rich, right?" And the Wall Street and Bay Street "Masters of the Universe" use their money and influence to make damn sure that no elected politician every listens to complete and utter jerks like Larry Brilliant. See, that's the problem with our society, it isn't that no one can predict problems before they arise---it's that our leaders separate themselves from said experts so they never hear from people like them. And if by some weird fluke they do hear something, they dismiss it out of hand because it would make their lives a little difficult to put into place their advice.

&&&&

I'm working away at these stories in the hope that people will learn to support local independent media. If you want good news stories that aren't designed to pander to your prejudices or get you angry so you will click on ads, you are going to have to pay for them. All I'm asking for is a dollar a month, which is easy to do through the micro-payment option provided by Patreon and Pay Pal. Don't see this as you buying these articles, instead see them as a public service you are offering to everyone. These articles will never go behind a pay wall, so money will never be a problem. In effect, your subscriptions are providing an on-line library of research that allows people to learn the background of the important issues that dominate their life. Is a dollar a month too much for that? 

&&&&

Here's one lesson we should be learning from the present pandemic. We need to cut down dramatically on activity that makes us susceptible to pandemics. That means a lot less jet air travel, period. As I pointed out in a previous blog post we are cooking ourselves to death with all the damn jet fuel we are burning. The tourism industry is simply too dangerous to allow it to continue at it's current size. Suck it up. Get used to it. The government needs to wean communities off it. No civilization in human history up until now has had this much physical mobility and it needs to be dramatically reduced.

Another big industry that needs to crash and burn are cruise ships. We've known for quite a while that if an infectious disease gets on them it can rip through the passengers and crew like a wildfire. Moreover, they are an ecological nightmare. So why exactly do we have to have them? Really?

One last thing. I've read that part of the way the Asian countries have been able to trace and tamp down their epidemics has been through using cell phone telemetry to do automatic contact tracking when someone tests positive for the virus. Invariably, I've heard Western critics suggest that it might be hard to get around people's privacy notions to do that here. My response to that is "bullshit"! We lost a great deal of our privacy already the moment we decided to let our population grotesquely over-shoot the carrying capacity of the earth. We have to have hugely complex governments and economies just to keep our collective heads above water. That means we've already "painted ourselves into a corner" and need to give up whatever fantasies we might have about the world we live in. There's no room for privacy when you live in a "global village". By all means work towards a better world, with a smaller population, more in harmony with nature, and based on respect for human liberty. But don't let whining about present compromises with that ideal get in the way of dealing with global emergencies like pandemic diseases!

These things---and a whole lot more---are how the human community will build itself a new collective immune system that will protect us from a great many potential problems. I understand that it's a nightmare to libertarians. Ayn Rand is no doubt rolling in her grave. But the fact of the matter is that it is what we need to do if we are going to have any semblance of a decent life living with the "new normal".

&&&&

Moreover, I say unto you, we need to deal with the Climate Emergency!  

More Cruel Institutions: Training Schools, Part One the Grandview Training School for Girls

In a previous post I talked about how cruel social policies by government created the nasty warehouses for mentally challenged people across Ontario. Well, in the process of looking at them, I came across yet another chain of abominations across the province: the Training Schools. I first became aware of them through a local institution, The Grandview Training School for Girls in Galt, Ontario. It was founded in 1933 and was a place where girls between 12 and 18 were sent for exhibiting "incorrigible or delinquent" behaviour. When a child was sent there, her parents lost any control over them and the government of Ontario was deemed their new "parent".

Here's an view of the Grandview facility from 1953.  Public Domain photo originally from the K/W Record.
Image c/o the Wikimedia Commons.

Unfortunately, it's very hard to find definitive, concrete examples of what happened to these girls because the legal process that was followed to pursue their complaints was designed to protect their privacy instead of educate the public about what went on. There was a documentary film on the subject that talked about some of the survivors. I tried to get a review copy, but the local library doesn't allow inter-library loans for films, and, the corona virus thing hit anyway. I did find a trailer for it on You Tube and the director of the film sent me the study guide that supposed to go with it. So, for what it's worth here's a little bit of what it's about. 

As I mentioned, it was a bit hard to figure out exactly what happened to these girls because such great pains were made to protect their privacy. I did a fair amount of research on line and the best source that I could find was The Kaufman Report which was created by the Justice Department of Nova Scotia. Luckily, it has a very detailed account of what the Ontario government did in response to complaints from survivors of the Grandview facility.

Primarily, the process adopted by the Ontario government avoided the formal adversarial court procedures and instead went for a more informal mediation process. What this meant in practice was they appointed women with relevant expertise to listen to the survivors tell their stories in private---to the point where no transcripts were recorded of the conversations. The people testifying were allowed the right to bring legal representation, but most opted not to have any. At the end of the process a set of guidelines were drawn up for awarding damages according to the severity of the abuse suffered. Once the mediators had drawn up a system, the survivors were allowed to vote on whether or not they agreed to it---which they overwhelmingly did.

According to Kaufman, Ontario spent $16.4 million on various group and individual benefits for survivors of the Grandview school. This was split up between group and private awards, with the private awards given on the following basis:

Successful claimants were entitled to a financial award for pain and suffering as a result of abuse and/or mistreatment. “Abuse” and “mistreatment” were defined as follows:

1.1 ABUSE means an injury as a result of the commission of a criminal act or act of gross misconduct by a guard or other official at Grandview or in some circumstances by another ward and includes physical and sexual assault or sexual exploitation. It is acknowledged that sexual abuse includes arbitrary or exploitative internal examinations for which no reasonable medical justification existed and which resulted in demonstrable harm. Act of abuse is the act that causes injury.

1.2 MISTREATMENT means an injury as a result of a pattern of conduct that was “cruel” and for which no reasonable justification could exist (arbitrary) and includes conduct that was non physical but had as a design the depersonalization and demoralization of the person with the consequent loss in self esteem, and may involve discipline measures unauthorized by any superior authority. This is conduct that is plainly contrary to the policies and procedures governing conduct at Grandview and the purpose of the governing legislation. Proof must establish a pattern of conduct directed towards the individual personally and errors of judgement will not be sufficient. This conduct may include taunts, intimidation, insults, abusive language, the withholding of emotional supports, deprivation of paternal visits, threats of isolation, and  psychologically cruel discipline or measures which were not officially permitted in the management and control of the residents of the facility. The general environment of Grandview, the discipline and regulation of the conduct of the wards in accordance with policies and procedures established for the governance and management of the institution cannot constitute mistreatment.

(P-336 of Searching for Justice: an Independent Review of Nova Scotia's Response to Reports of Institutional Abuse, by The Honourable Fred Kaufman, C.M., Q.C., D.C.L.)

Again, I imagine it will be hard for the average reader to figure out exactly what people mean by looking at this dry, legalistic language. People's psyches aren't really designed to assimilate new information this way, which means that they can often have a very hard time imagining the implications of what is meant. This can cause a problem getting people to really understand what people are talking about.

"Fortunately" there have been some exceptionally brave individuals who have stepped forward to tell their stories in public. Here's a clip of testimony given by a survivor of another training school---one for boys---from a CTV W5 documentary that I'm using under the "Fair Dealing" provision of the Copyright Act.  

&&&&

Most editors would probably note that bad things happened to people, the government is making restitution, and tell the reporter to move on to the next story. That's certainly what happened with most of the stories I've read. But the whole point of the Guelph-Back-Grounder is an attempt to put stories into a context that tries to explain why it was that a specific thing happened. The hope is that if readers can see the larger issues at play, they might be better prepared to see similar things happening in other contexts. The hope is that that will allow us to learn from past mistakes and stop the problem of constantly playing "catch up" as society lurches from one preventable problem to another.

The first thing readers should understand is that Grandview wasn't a "one off". There was a whole series of institutions spread across the province, including one in Guelph.

Here's a map of Ontario Training Schools in Ontario. This again comes from an excellent CTV News story.
I'm using this image under the "Fair Dealing" provision of the Canadian Copyright Act.

They grew out of a series of laws passed by the Ontario and federal governments over one hundred years. Academics have put a lot of effort into understanding this process and I don't think anyone can really understand what happened at places like Grandview unless they make the effort to understand how it came into being in the first place. 

Some Technical Terms Plus Something About the Bad Old Days

The first thing to understand is the lingo around incarceration. 

• "lock up": a cage or holding cell in a police station for holding people prior to processing
• "jail" (or "gaol"): a temporary centre where prisoners without bail are held during trial, or, for incarceration for minor penalties for short period of time
• "reformatory": a provincial institution that used to be for youths of 21 years or younger, and which morphed into a place where people serve sentences of 2 years less a day
• "penitentiary": a prison where serious criminals are held for serious sentences of over 2 years duration
• "training school": a place where children ended up who for one reason or another were removed from their parent's care and who were not able to find a foster home 
• "prison": I'm using this as a "place holder name" in the following discussion simply because there needs to be a general, non-technical term for a place where people get locked up against their will because the criminal courts say they should

All of these descriptions are vague and imprecise because as society evolved the roles that each filled changed. But I do think that it helps readers to start off with these distinctions as they try to make sense of a very messy and confusing history.

George Brown, reporter,
prison reformer, Father of Confederation.
Public domain photo c/o Wikimedia Commons

The first real attempt at creating a prison in Ontario was the Kingston penitentiary which was built in 1834 to house criminals in Upper Canada. From what I've read, it sounds like it was a really "fun" place. One of the Fathers of Confederation, George Brown, wrote a report titled "The Brown Commission Report" that explained how outrageously inmates were being treated. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find a copy of it on line, so I'll have to quote from a brief article in the Maclean's Magazine archives by Don Townson:

Smith [Henry Smith---first Warden of the Kingston Penitentiary] ordered physical punishment for the slightest infraction of the rules—talking, nodding, gesticulating. or turning around in the chapel. Ten-year-old Peter Charbonneau, who was committed May 4. 1845, for a seven-year sentence, was lashed on fifty-seven occasions in eight and a half months. His offences were those of a child: staring, winking, and laughing. Eleven-year-old Alex Lafleur, a French Canadian, was given twelve strokes of the rawhide on Christmas Eve. 1844, for speaking French. Fourteen-year-old Sarah O'Connor was flogged five times in three months of the same year for talking. James Brown, an insane prisoner, got 720 lashes while under Smith's jurisdiction.

There are two other points I'd like to make. First, that Warden Smith was a political appointee who was concerned about finances:

Henry Smith, the first warden of what later became Kingston Penitentiary, gained office by political pull. Once installed, he charged curious Kingstonians admission: male adults, one shilling threepence; women and children, sevenpence halfpenny. Smith made sure his patrons got a good horror show. Standard items on the tours included a visit to the dark cell and a leisurely march past convicts being punished with the lash, the ball and chain, the Oregon boot, the water hose and the sweat box.  

In case you didn't know, this is an "Oregon boot".
Imagine having to go through the day wearing one of those!
Public domain image c/o State of Oregon.

And that he was able to "pull the wool over the eyes" of outside observers: 

The fiendish warden was evidently not without charm. Charles Dickens visited Smith in the early 1840s and afterwards wrote: “Here at Kingston is a penitentiary intelligently and humanely run.”

Smith’s graft and cruelty eventually proved too much for the penitentiary physician, Dr. James Sampson. He laid charges against Smith which resulted in an investigation by a commission appointed by the new Reform (Liberal) government and headed by George Brown, founder of the Globe newspaper and a strong Liberal. Smith, after fourteen years as warden, resigned under fire. 

But the storm was to rage for many years yet. Smith and the Board of Inspectors of the penitentiary were good friends of the late Conservative government and Smith enlisted the support of the former receiver-general, John A. Macdonald. The ensuing investigations and bitter debates led to the enmity that was to continue between Brown and Macdonald in the years to come.

&&&&

This part of the series is getting a bit long, so I want to draw things to a close and talk about more in a future one. But there is a point that I really want to "put a pin in" and ask readers to consider. There are bad people in the world, and there are also good ones too. Further on, I will probably talk about someone who seems to have been very good who ended up in charge of both Grandview and Kingston for a period of time. But the point really shouldn't be about good or bad wardens, it should be about the system that was put in place to make sure that no warden deviates from a specific "minimum standard of behaviour". That's a systems approach as opposed to a moralistic one. Public policy shouldn't be about good people or bad people, instead it should be about whether a bureaucratic system works according to it's stated intentions or not. My experience in politics has taught me that a lot of people simply cannot understand the difference between these two things, and feel that "meaning well" should be good enough. The story of our penal system is all about how legislation made under the best of intentions can go horribly wrong if no one tries to understand what happens if bad people end up in positions of authority.  

&&&&

I know that hordes of people are facing tremendous financial hardship due to the pandemic. Good luck if you are one of them. The Guelph-Back-Grounder will never go behind a paywall, so it will always be there for you. But if you do have a steady income, why not sign up to send me a token amount of money to show that you really do care about local, independent news sources? All I'm asking for is a dollar a month. It's easy to do through Patreon and PayPal. 

&&&&

Moreover, I say unto you---the pandemic doesn't lessen the need to deal with the Climate Emergency!