Andre's Blog - Power and Justice - News

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” This is a quote out of “The Red Lily” by Anatole France, published in 1894. Could Anatole France have imagined that 110 years later the City of Toronto would ban people, the rich as well as the poor, from sleeping in Nathan Phillips Square, and that the Province of British Columbia would enact the Safe Streets Act, a law to forbid people, the rich as well as the poor, from aggressively soliciting in designated areas throughout the province?

Frank Lloyd Wright, one of America’s greatest architects, believed that “the insolence of authority is endeavoring to substitute money for ideas.”
Ideas are driven by real, perceived, or anticipated change. A change in something that affects our lives calls for a response. Government announce-ments, particularly announcements about services such as education and health care, too often refer not to ideas, but to money. It is as if society has lost the ability to think in terms of anything but dollars. There is a growing trend for governments to announce changes to services in terms of millions of dollars to be spent or saved over the next one, three, or five years. Such announcements are as common as they are meaningless. Of course money is involved when a change is made to a service, but the merits of a change cannot be judged on the basis of costs or savings alone.

Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that “Everything that can be thought of at all can be thought of clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly.”
The progression from thought to clear thought involves editing information. It involves the elimination of words that cloud a thought, and the careful selection and placing of words to reveal the essence of an idea. The clarity of thought depends on the effort that goes into thinking.

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Apr 22 show

The last Nelson City Council meeting in Nelson's historic City Hall building on Ward street was held on Monday April 18 2005. The picture above was taken during the last Council meeting which was attended by all councillors and the mayor on April 4, 2005.