Many of you probably already received the information about the phishing attack posed to Athabasca University student, where an official looking email is sent with a note that there is an outstanding tuition fee payment.  This, of course, is false, and cursory examination will show this through things like the account you’re supposed to send to being one for Algoma University, not Athabasca, or the payment address being to one “@athabascauniversity.store”  instead of the usual “@athabascau.ca” or even “athabasca.edu”

However, just because that phishing attempt was done by idiots doesn’t mean they all will be.  So as a general public service announcement, whenever you get any email dealing with money, whether sending or receiving, double check that all the addresses make sense.  Otherwise, you may have found an additional step to “Avoid Saving Money” as this week’s tongue-in-cheek article by Blythe Appleby presents.

But this week, I chose to feature The Fly on the Wall, as Jason Sullivan looks at reporting from a slate article talking about how general socialization in online video-games has gone largely quiet.  There was a time, not that many years ago, when I remember being able to sit in the lobby of a particular video-game just chatting with other people while we all waited for particular events to happen or certain favored players to join so that we could play with them.  Apparantly this does not happen as often, and, honestly, I’m not surprised.  The Fly on the Wall explores some possible reasons for that, reasons that one might conclude indicate things are getting worse, socially, but I think I might just counter that noting that Discord and other such apps have made chatting during videogames something that does not need to be constrained to the game itself.  And these days, people can be involved in multiple conversations simultaneously, with windows coming to the fore as comments are made, all while playing a video-game.  If anything, this says more, to me, about the quality of the games we’re being provided.  Graphical fidelity has certainly improved, but the gameplay mechanics of so many of these games seem to be rehashes of everything else as companies seek the most efficient ways to pull money from players.

Also this week, Alek presents us with his summary of the Hogue report resulting from the Foreign Interference Commission. Or more specifically, his summary of the criticisms against it, while cautioning us to remember that there is a second, classified report that is going to the lawmakers specifically.

Meanwhile, back in Alberta, things are continuing to heat up with the suit against the government now being filed for wrongful dismissal of the Alberta Health Services CEO, with Danielle Smith saying she knew nothing about the entire thing before media reports were published, although she also says the government has been asking for eight months for proof of wrong-doing, and for some reason fired the CEO and the entire AHS Board, even though it was her government that appointed them.  But hey, she says she was clueless about the whole thing.  In this case, I’ll not only give her the benefit of the doubt on that, but I’ll go so far as to say we shouldn’t assume she has a clue about anything going on in the Alberta government.

But what else is new.   Enjoy the read!

Then just recently the hot mic of Trudeau announcing that Trump’s talk of absorbing Canada into the United States is not just idle talk, but an actual strategy that he and the right-wing in the United States want to pursue.

Even as a Canadian, just reading about the US government’s activities is exhausting, it’s understandable that so many Americans just check out of the whole thing.  Which is probably what’s intended.  I’ve heard the saying that evil is what happens while good men do nothing, but I don’t remember ever thinking that it would be used as a strategy.

Meanwhile, here in Alberta, the CEO of Alberta Health Services was fired just a couple of days before a scheduled meet with the auditor general to talk about procurement and contracts within the Alberta Health system, in specific a $75 million deal to import children’s pain medication in 2022, where only 30% of the paid for medication was received, and what was received didn’t meet safety requirements. Oh, and those children’s medicines were just part of over $614 million delivered to MH Care for supplies and other services, a company owned by one Sam Mraiche, who also happens to have bought luxury tickets to NHL games for Premiere Smith and much of her staff.  She also maintains that she was under significant pressure while in the job to sign additional commitments to private surgical facilities that had significantly increased proposed costs.

In addition, the rest of the Board has now been let go, in what the Alberta Government says was a planned transition, with Deputy Minister of Health, Andrew Tremblay, being put in charge of the entire thing, and maintaining that the review of the procurement processes will continue.  Though no mention has been made of what will happen to the final report now once the investigation is complete.

All of which is to say don’t get exhausted or distracted by the shenanigans in the U.S. There is unfortunately very little we can do about those. Pay attention to what’s going on here at the local level.  If you look back at what has happened in the US, that’s how they started everything.  Get involved in the small boards and communities at your local level, the school board, the boards of your city and town, and we absolutely must start to get involved in our provincial political parties. Take Back Alberta took over the conservative party here in Alberta, and these types of things are the results.

Whether you’re of conservative or progressive leanings, centralizing provincial power to a smaller and smaller group of ministers and deputy ministers is not bringing that power closer to you or making government more responsive to your particular needs, but to stop it, you need to get involved. Or at least try to bring this stuff up to your friends and relatives; at least point out the stories where problems are being had so that the government does not get a chance to just sweep them under the rug. They’re far too good at hiding things already, we don’t need to make it easier.  Enjoy the read!

Regardless, the damage will be done. My partner and I have already made a commitment to #BuyUnAmerican.  In truth, we’ve been doing this on a low-key level for quite a while, more simply because we like to seek out local producers and support them.  Never mind that we have a horrible track record of finding products we really like just shortly before the company involved goes belly-up or stops producing that item. Regardless, that low-key effort will ramp up now, and personally I’m hoping it will catch on, not just to spite Trump and his goals of somehow countering a trade-deficit that’s less than the population difference of the two countries, but because it’s well beyond time that Canadians made a concerted effort to really support Canadian manufacturers and products.

And here’s the thing, that attitude won’t go away when the tariffs do.  If Canadians get into new habits of checking where things are made and purchasing accordingly during the tariff period, those habits won’t just disappear.  It’s always been the case that Canada has done most of it’s trade based on selling raw resources and purchasing back the manufactured and refined products, but we certainly have the technology, education, and man-power to stop doing that, if we really wanted to.  There just hasn’t been a huge economic case to do so, because economies of scale mean that production in the US (or China) can happen much more cheaply than it does here.  But here’s where those tariffs can change things, especially if our governments start imposing retaliatory tariffs on American products.  The economic shelter that will provide may be all the incentive, coupled with a growing concern about the leanings that have been, shall we say, manifested by the leaders down south, that Canadians need to spur a bit of risk-taking on our own to develop our own manufacturers  (And if someone wants an idea of a product to manufacture, consider cheap frozen burritos, please).

Of course, whether these tariffs go anywhere over the long run is anybody’s guess. An agent of chaos, attempting to predict Mr. Trump’s next moves beyond “whatever he thinks will benefit him most” is a fool’s game at best.

Meanwhile, in this week’s Voice Magazine, we’ve got some really interesting stuff, including a look at misinformation and the actions being used to combat it, a Fly on the Wall that examines the controversy around Elon Musks’ recent actions, and for which you’ll need to read the whole thing if you really want to get the point, a challenge from Blythe Appleby that may just help you not only with your studies, but might also help to calm down your life in a larger sense, and a feature comic that helps define the difference between the boys and the men, though perhaps without success.  Plus there’s scholarships, events, inspirational and entertaining articles, articles that may give you pause to question, reviews, and more!

Enjoy the read!

Tues, Jan 28, 11:00 am to 3:00 pm MST
Online
Hosted by AU Library
www.athabascau.ca/library/index.html
No pre-registration needed; access through chat box on home page

Library Chat

Thurs, Jan 30, 11:00 am to 3:00 pm MST
Online
Hosted by AU Library
www.athabascau.ca/library/index.html
No pre-registration needed; access through chat box on home page

AUSU Student Council Meeting

January 30, 2025  5:00 p.m. MST
Online
Hosted by AUSU
Register at the Event Link

All events are free unless otherwise noted.

Still, I think everything is back in place now, and aside from some minor hiccoughs with getting used to how they’ve regressed Windows in the latest version (hey Microsoft, I don’t care if you choose to hide more and more of the system from users to make it “easier”, but stop making it harder for users who use those features to, well, use them) I feel like everything is up and running again.

What do I mean?  There’s a feature in Windows 10 to change the “tags” property of a file (if it exists) directly from the folder window.  I use this extensively to track where things are in the editing process, whether it is at the copyright, substantive, copy-edit, image, or layout stage.   I can still do that, but it now takes an extra right-click and select, adding a little bit of extra time to a process I do every day that didn’t need to be added.

I really don’t understand why companies will do these kind of updates.  What’s even crazier, is I eventually found a way that I can bring back the exact functionality I used to have, without having to download anything or change any settings.  So it’s still there, just made inaccessible unless I perform a specific set of actions, a techno-ritual to the Microsoft Gods, if you will.  Unfortunately, it only remains active within that particular window.  Once you close it, you have to redo the ritual again when you next open a folder.  With this in mind, Blythe Appleby’s article this week about our over-reliance on technology hits particularly hard.  If only there was a better solution.

At any rate, this week, we come to you with some interesting material to read.  Alek has been attending the Foreign Interference Commission, and he’s brought us reporting on the policy and stage 2 meetings of the commission.  It’s an inside view on a topic most of us don’t think about, but one that takes on increasing importance as more and more people bypass the regular fact-checking and editing that occurs in the media, often diving deep into their own bubbles of like-minded social mediots.  Of course, there are some positive results to this, in that it’s harder for oppressors to control your access to information, but I believe that’s more than balanced with the negatives of being unable to trust that any information found is actually true without making additional effort to verify it yourself.  Some may argue mainstream and corporate media controlled what we saw, but what we did see at least was likely to reflect some portion of reality, rather than being completely made up, whether simply for the views, or for darker purposes.

In addition, Jaydan Harrison brings us an opinion on something AU could do to make assignments both easier and more useful for the students, and our feature article is a brief interview with Dr. Alvin Finkel.   Dr. Finkel was one of the first professors at AU, and has put out a new book.  You’ll be able to speak with Dr. Finkel yourself if you so wish, as AUSU has arranged a discussion with Dr. Finkel for members to attend on the 21^st.

Of course, we also have music reviews, scholarships, events, and other inspirational or interesting and perhaps even educational articles.  So enjoy the read!

Plus, this year, I got a new computer for Christmas, and while setting it up is kind of fun (and frustrating) it of course imposes other delays.

However, here finally is the Best of 2024 edition of the Voice Magazine.

For those unfamiliar, each year, I like to go through the articles of the past year, all 50 issues, and with the help of various readers, pick out articles that represent the best of the types of things that the Voice Magazine does, so that I can put together one issue that serves as the ideal example of what the Voice Magazine in 2024 would bring to readers.  It’s a great way to introduce new readers to the Voice, giving them the feel of a normal Voice Magazine, just a bit elevated by picking and choosing from the several hundred articles provided.

I also like to provide my own commentary as to why each piece was chosen, what makes it fit for inclusion in the Best of Edition, and freshen the whole thing up just a little bit.

But if you’re just here looking for the latest in scholarships and events, no worries, we’ve got those too.

So, welcome to the Best of 2024 edition.

Trust me when I say you’ll enjoy the read.

This meant I ended up missing the Council Meeting last night, as well as most of my sleep as the post-care instructions, especially in a house with another cat and a dog that’s super high energy, have been a constant challenge to keep up with.  That said, Smartie does seem to be recovering well at this point, so, though tired, I’m pleased.

Another interesting point to end the year is that Dr. Matthew Prineas has left the position as provost, returning to a position at AU as part of the regular faculty.  No specific reasons were given, and at first I was hopefully thinking perhaps he got annoyed at the demands government was placing on AU, and hence students, to deal with funding levels that are consistently decreasing on a per-student and inflationary basis. Was he taking a principled stand as a way to try to tell this government how displeased he was with their actions?  I mean it would be an exercise in futility if it was, but an admirable one nonetheless.  But then I came across a letter by the AUFA detailing why they “strongly opposed” his reappointment back in 2023.  So perhaps there are other reasons.  Still, it’s the holiday season, so, for this moment, let’s be charitable in our assumptions.  I can get back to cynicism next year.

And speaking of next year, there’s still a lot of room to be swayed if you can think of an article you think deserves to be featured in the “Best of the Voice” issue, which will be out on January 3, 2024. So let me know at karl@voicemagazine.org so I can take your opinion into consideration.

But what do we have for this final issue? A fair number of things. Our resident music reviewer Jessica Wilson takes a look at this year’s Spotify Wrapped, which was interesting to me simply because I’d never heard of such a thing before.  People actively sharing their meta-data about their listening habits?  Such a thing seems terribly odd to me, not because of any privacy concerns, but because of the “Who the heck cares?” factor.  It would never occur to me to share something some third party decided to cobble together from whatever information they gleaned about me from my activities, because I’d never think that such a thing would interest anybody else.

But I guess we live in an age where data supersedes connection.  I mean, it’s certainly more efficient to be able to look up what genres and songs someone favored than having to ask them and getting the self-filtered answers where people will try to provide you with the things they like that they think you’d like or approve of.

Getting back to the magazine, we still also have a music review, as a brand new writer provides us with her review and conversation with artist Matangi and her new album Nexus, part three of our look of street foods in Japan, Alek Golijanin digging into the topic of human trafficking and those who’ve lost their legal status to be in Canada, the latest Love Goddesses comic, events, scholarships and much more!

So enjoy the read, and the season, and we’ll pick this up again next year!

In addition, the course materials fee for undergraduate courses will be increasing by $16/course.  This means a total cost increase of $28.18 per course for a non-indigenous student, $26.96 if you are.  It’s not a lot, but when you’re already stretched thin juggling school and work, hit by price inflation and wage stagnation, every little bit hurts.

The email indicates they will continue to work closely with student leaders to increase access to rapid and effective funding supports.  I take this to mean that they hope AUSU will come up with more funding in awards and programs such as their emergency bursary and virtual food assistance program  to make up for the extra costs they’re imposing.

And the horrible thing is, I don’t even blame them.  Your tutors and professors and other staff at AU are dealing with the same cost inflations you are, and years of successive conservative governments working diligently toward (and boasting about) reducing the amount they spend on post-secondary education to among the lowest in the country on a per student level (to say nothing of in comparison to the province’s GDP) and, personally, I don’t believe there’s any more meat, never mind fat, left to trim from post-secondary budgets.  Given that most of the funding post-secondary institutions in Alberta receive is from private sources, is it even reasonable to say we have a publicly funded post-secondary system?  I suppose you could argue that we have a publicly assisted post-secondary system, but sometimes I wonder how long even that will continue.

Regardless, our fees are going up, though less than inflation.  And yes, government support is, in fact, going up, but again, much less than inflation.  Which leads to the obvious question, how is the university expected to keep up with inflation?  To me, it seems the answer is simply, “it isn’t”. Education has never seemed to be high on an ideological conservative’s priority list, if you ask me, with most of it I expect seen as being “leftist training grounds” in any event.

Personally, I’m surprised I haven’t already seen spam promoting AU merchandise, as the university has to be looking for other ways to supplement the funding they receive.  I sometimes wonder if the university should host a Go-Fund-Me page, more as a means of attempting to embarrass the provincial government into living up to their duty to provide a better economy and opportunities for their citizens (and those who don’t connect higher education with a better economy or additional opportunities are those who haven’t looked at the statistics) than to actually seek out funding.  Or maybe that’s an idea for the students’ union to run, as the university itself may not want to run the risk of directly offending the hand that is supposed to feed it.

Between a rock and a hard place, I guess all that’s left is to enjoy the read.

And we all know how well that goes.

Between family obligations, natural disasters both of the small and large variety, and the constant pressure to either live up to the consumer-corporate ideal of the holiday or to take on an active resolute stand against the commercialization of the season, we can often find ourselves waking up with the hang-over from the New Year’s Party that each year seems a little less special than the last and suddenly realizing that all that holiday time we wanted to spend studying we’ve been spending doing other things.

So.  In the spirit of all that.  Here’s one of those other things you can spend time doing, and it would be a great help to me.  Take a wander through your memories of the Voice Magazine articles you read (or perhaps wrote) over the past year, and let me know any that stand out.  That’s right, once again I’m starting to do the collection of material for our Best of the Voice edition.

If you’re new to this idea, every year I dedicate the first issue of January to a collection of the best and most interesting articles the Voice Magazine was able to publish over the previous year.  This not only serves as a great introductory issue to what the Voice Magazine is all about, it also gives Voice writers a bit of break, knowing that they don’t have to create yet another article while all the Holiday activities are going on.

But even though I have some good ideas of the stuff I think is the best, I’m really more interested in the things that you, the readers, feel is the most representative of what you think the ideal Voice Magazine should be like.

So drop me an email at karl@voicemagazine.org and let me know your picks.  Maybe you’ve got enough to create a full issue, or maybe you just kind of remember that one article about the thing with the thing and if you can manage to give me enough of an idea of what you’re thinking about, I’ll see if I can find it for you.

Meanwhile, this week, we’ve got a pretty solid issue, with, oddly, two writers both approaching the topic of how to deal with the traumas and bad things in life.  Even more odd is that they both came to similar conclusions though taking sightly different paths.  So if you don’t believe in coincidence, then maybe this is a sign of something.

We’re also featuring an article about a diversity issue that’s often not considered, the diversity of age, and an article that looks at the history of lawfare, and how it’s being used in Canada today.

Plus, of course, we have music reviews, events, scholarships, research opportunities, thoughtful and inspirational articles, not to mention our regular columns.  So enjoy the read!

This is actually the second comic she’s sent but I thought it was a better introduction to the characters we’re going to be travelling with, and so it’s with great pleasure that I bring you the first official installment of “Love Goddesses.” Personally, it’s giving me an “I Love Lucy” meets “Laverne and Shirley” vibe.  And for those of you who don’t understand that word salad, let’s just say I’m showing my age.

Beyond that, this week we also feature a new article from Blythe Appleby, providing us with quite a different take on the notion of stranger danger, and a take that seems especially appropriate given the oncoming season and current events.  After all, there is an irony in that as social media allows us to connect as never before, it’s fostered ever greater disconnects between people because we are no longer required to forge connections with those who may disagree with us or have a different point of view, which not only robs us of being able to consider what motivates them, but prevents them from having to consider our point of view as well.

Our third feature this week is a new music review from Jessica Wilson.  When Jessica asked what I felt made for a good music review, I pointed out that many of the artists and publishers we receive contacts from are smaller, as we’re a small magazine.  We don’t have Island Records wanting us to preview the latest Chappel Roan album, for instance (and if you don’t know what *that* word salad means, then I’m happy to have someone else showing their age somewhat closer to mine, I had to look it up myself) so it’s useful if the music reviews give us something to compare to that we’re more likely to have heard.  Jessica took those words to heart, and this week’s review gives me, at least, a real sense of what the music is, and to my mind, that’s what makes for the most helpful sort of reviews, so my thanks to her for that.

Of course, turning to the real world, the latest hub-bub is from President-Elect trump’s threat to impose 25% tariffs on all Canadian and Mexican goods until we somehow stop fentanyl from crossing into America.  Because apparently he does not believe Americans are capable of policing their own borders. Of course, most people will recognize this as simply an excuse to apply ever larger tariffs so as to be able to balance the US government’s budget when he reduces taxes on himself and his wealthy friends such as Elon Musk.  Such a tariff would also make it extremely difficult for Americans to purchase any electric vehicle not made primarily in America.  That this includes basically every electric vehicle producer aside from Elon Musk is surely just a happy coincidence for the man.

In somewhat related news, the prize economics given in memory of Alfred Nobel was awarded to three economists who have managed to prove that institutions created to exploit the masses are bad for long term growth. Societies that adhere to a defined rule of law with broad applicability and inclusive economic systems do better.  I’ll let you figure out the relation.   Enjoy the read!