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Andy Johnson,Editor-in-Chief

Garett Svensen,Production Editor

WE ARE LIVE!

After months of diligent work, Taren Johnson, the CNCSU web manager has re-launched the cncsu website!

On it you’ll be able to find our current campaigns, services, events, contact infromation for the Executive Commitee, directions ane more!

Andy and I are currently hard at work, deep in the process of formatting our back issues of The Confluence for the web. They will go up as soon as we get them finished.

So check it out, Taren’s revamped nearly every aspect of the site for the better.

Garett Svensen, Production Editor

Taren Johnson,Web Manager

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The Confluence is produced biweekly at the CNCSU office on CNC’s Prince George campus by Garett Svensen and Andy Johnson.

Submissions, inqueries and requests can be made to news.cncsu.ca, in person at the CNCSU office room 1-303, or mailed to “The Confluence c/o CNCSU 3330-22nd Ave. Prince George, BC. V2N 1P8”

All submissions are welcome, the authors of edited works used in the confluence receive a $20 cheque upon publication. Advertisement rates are availiable upon request.

Black History Month Family Day:2pm Cafeteria

Environment Canada 7-Day Weather Forecast:For Prince George, BC. 4-10 April 2013Friday, April 4: -1°C, Snow.Saturday, April 5: 4°C, -2°C, Rain and Snow.Sunday, April 6: 5°C, -2°C, Cloudy.Monday, April 7: 9°C, -3°C, Showers.Tuesday, April 8: 11°C, -2°C, Showers.Wednesday, April 9: 10°C, 1°C, Sun and Cloud, Showers.Thursday, April 10: 8°C, -2°C, Sun and Cloud.

Weather

April 2013Rock The Vote Block Party

Executive Meeting3pm

CNC Community Clean up12pm@ Residence

Student Award Ceremony

Last Day of Classes International

Student PartyECE End of Semester Party

Earth DayExecutive Meeting3pm Exams End

Orientation12-5pm

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Message from Chairperson Roxanne

Thank you CNC students! I am very pleased to be your Chairperson in 2013. Our new year will be filled with exciting changes in our community and society. My hope is that we continue to promote the many great services the student’s union local 13 has to offer. This year is monumental in that it is the first year three Aboriginal Representatives sit on the executive board, these representatives are pursuing more than specifically designated Aboriginal positions and that in itself is tremendous. Way to go CNC students for your encompassing ideals and morals.

I would like to mention that we relish in hearing your ideas and needs, so please visit our office and check us out.

Our new year will be filled with social events and opportunities to build new friendships. I cannot wait for the New Year to begin so that we can have some fun.

I’d also like to announce the rest of the executive:

Arnold Yellowman –Secretary

Joshuah Balsom –Prince George Campus Representative

Mick Fraser –Treasurer

Chantelle Quock -Aboriginal Students’ Representative

Leila-Soila Abubakar –Women Students’ Representative

Patricia Obasi –International Studnents’ Representative

Look forward to working with this new team to provide quality services and events while advocating for you and ensuring that we have strong and inclusive campaigns for the upcoming year.

-Roxanne Quock

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13HoroscopesYou have reached a new pinnacle — or achieved a goal you thought would take quite a bit longer. Whatever it is, celebrate for a bit, but then make sure that you build on your hard work.

HIJKL

BCDEFG

You don’t have to prove yourself to anyone. You know what is best for you right now, and you just have to keep doing it — at your own pace! Some people are always in a hurry and they have a distorted sense of deadlines.

Your big brain is busting out with new ideas left and right and you need to keep track of them somehow. You may recruit some folks who are impressed with your intellect, or you could just babble into voice mail.

Money problems are pretty much universal, though the details are always different. Yours are coming to a head right now, which is both stressful and beneficial, as you can solve them quickly.

Pride can be a real problem — in you and in others! Make sure you’re as humble as you can be, even if those around you are hogging all the glory. Your day is coming soon!

You love tinkering with organization schemes and a new one is coming your way — so see how it works! Your own ideas can make it a winner, and the time you save should make life more fun.

You are having more fun than you had thought you might, so make sure that you’re pushing yourself in new directions and shaking things up in a good way. Your energy is blissful!

You’re finding it harder to handle things around the house — but that just means that you’ve got to redouble your efforts! Make a show of wanting to help or fix things and all will be well.

Remember communication key. You may find it easier than usual to open up to almost anyone. If there’s a challenging person in your life, now is the time to sit them down and hash it out.

A money-related issue pops up and can’t be ignored any longer. Make sure that you’ve got the mental energy to handle it — you’ll be glad you can face reality.

Energy won’t be a problem for you, even if you’ve got lots of work to take care of. It just keeps coming, and you may stay at it much longer than anyone else. Your focus is admirable!

You need to feel socially useful. A new opportunity could do just that. Things are looking good for you and yours, so make sure that you’re reaching out to the less fortunate.

Every once in a while, the good Captain would note in the ships log: Today the First mate was sober. Of course, the First mate, being highly conscientious was always sober. After the six month trading voyage was complete, the ship’s owners reviewed the Captain’s logs and promptly fired the First mate.

Submitted Anonymously

How to Ruin aReputation

A

CNCSU:

Tackling Student Issues

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Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, and Dreamweaver are yours to explore in this two year diploma program. Learn to build websites, animate ads, draw digitally, and design books, packages, logos and more. Unleash your digital creative and begin a career you’ll love!

What do you get when you cross a laptop, smart phone, camera and creative applications?

A two year career-building program at CNC...

For more information on a career in digital art and web design email: Sean Siddals, program coordinator at: siddalss@cnc.bc.ca

Ad_Faculty assoc NMCD.indd 1 12-12-20 4:42 PM

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With the wind under myWings creating a heavenlyFlow that lifts me higherAnd higher, and with eachGust of wind I realize howLively I can be, motherNature, it will always beYou and me.

With each paw printImprinted in the snow,My love for you will show,And even though motherNature may wash awayMy trails, I will alwaysMake new ones to showYou that my love for youWill never fail.

With each passing day, toMyself I will always say...Mother Nature, together asone... I hope it will alwaysbe you and me, as eachother’s guide, our love forone another shall neverreside.

Our People Our Land Our MotherBurton Alexis,Contributor

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Swimming strong, theFlow never seems wrong.With a specific destinationIngrained, reaching thatGoal is simply a questionOf time, there can be noDoubt, Mother Nature youHelp my children sprout.

We as children of MotherEarth are put on this landTogether, so that our journeyThrough life may be fu-filling.For without her we cannotLive prosperous lives. To liveOn this land with love, is To show respect and top knowThat what ever is thrownOut way... we will alwaysHave the power to riseabove

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Our society’s leaders seem to have the objective to keep everyone busy and crushed with debt. The prospect for students seems to be debt and austerity for the indefinite future, with no light at the end of the tunnel.

Work for Work’s Sake.The late New York feminist, Ellen Willis, seemed to encapsulate the

problem in a short paragraph in her 1999 book, Don’t Think, Smile!: Notes on a Decade of Denial. She says austerity has “reinforced the characteristic anti-intellectualism of American culture, deeply rooted in a combination of business-oriented and populist attitudes, which takes thinking, imagining, and learning with no instrumental object to be a useless luxury rather than work in any meaningful sense. After all, such activities are not quantifiable in terms of how much they add to the GDP, nor... are they easily rationalized in terms of working hours. Furthermore, they are pleasurable; therefore it seems unfair that they should be economically rewarded. In fact, they are regarded not only as pleasure but as infantile narcissistic gratification, as one might infer from such locutions as ‘They’re off contemplating their navels,’ or ‘thumbsucker’ as a pejorative term for essay.

“Intellectual occupations excite suspicion because they are always at least potentially outside social control; at the same time, they are perceived and widely resented as a source of power and influence and as the preserve of an elite that is getting away with not putting its nose to the grindstone.”

This attitude continues throughout English-speaking North America. And an article in a recent issue of Bloomberg Businessweek (January 28-February 3, 2013) notes that the austerity-oriented prime minister of England, David Cameron, for seeking to increase the U.K.’s influence in Europe. They praise his efforts to persuade the European Community (EU) to become more competitive, and the magazine’s editors see France, with its strong limitations on work hours, as the main obstacle to Cameron’s initiative.

“Many EU rules need to go: for example, the working time directive, which is hated by U.K. employers because it restricts the hours that employees can work,” the article continues. “Yet the odds are slim that a socialist government in France will agree to let the U.K. opt out of a rule that it sees as levelling the playing field--no matter how absurd it seems in the age of competition with China.”

In other words, EU countries that have promoted reasonable work schedules and have set five or six weeks of annual vacation as basic labour standards must give up on promoting humane workplaces and instead harmonize their rules with those of the corrupt and totalitarian workhouse powers of the world. Any restrictions on the hours a person may work seem to be inappropriate in the view of the neo-liberals at Bloomberg Businesweek, and likely also in the viewpoint of the neo-conservatives in the Stephen Harper Conservative government in Canada. At a non-union daily in the Prairies during the 1980s, I put in a lot of all-nighters and a few times worked 32 hours straight. The unfortunate employees of electronics-assembly and computer plants in Guangzhou frequently have to work 32 hours straight. This does nothing for their health, and there have been suicides over working conditions at these plants, according to reports in Huffington Post. The critics of globalization who say it is leading to “a race to the bottom” in work hours and working conditions seem to be absolutely right.

The mantra of “the need to become more competitive” under increased free trade through globalization means plummeting wages in the developed industrialized countries of North America and Europe. “How could we ever expect to have high wages in any country that becomes globally integrated with a globe having a vast oversupply of labour?” says Herman E. Daly, University of Maryland professor of public policy, in his book Ecological Economics and Sustainable Development (2007). Good-bye, family wage. The world will become a workaholic hell. Any union member in Canada who complains, or any student who

Downsized at Fifty-FiveBy Paul Strickland

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mockingly, “Your problems are First World problems. Get over it!”

We have to struggle against this trend toward unlimited globalization and unlimited work hours. In his book, Work Without End: Abandoning Short Hours for the Right to Work, Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt writes, “But even in the midst of the modern religion of work a few countercurrents continue to flow, echoes of a past debate that moderates somewhat this book’s generally pessimistic conclusion about the future of leisure. Although amounting to a modern heresy, arguments for freedom from unnecessary work and a transcendence to higher things can still be found.”

Let’s hope this is the case.

“Alcohol is a poison,” a noted wine columnist writes at the beginning of his encyclopedic book on wine con-noisseurship. Jason, reflecting on events four decades earlier, thought that might have been an instance of truth in advertising in a book other-wise completely laudatory about wine culture.

Jason had gone along with friends on a hunting trip to the Sheldon Antelope Range in late August. Toward dusk, music from Harris's boom box could be heard far out into the desert where Jason had gone for a walk alone as a break from the party at the hunting camp. Several cases of beer had been brought from Vya for everyone's en-joyment during the expedition. In the quickly cooling desert air, Jason could clearly make out the lyrics of “Going Mobile” by The Who a half mile out into the sagebrush from the hunters' trailers and pickups.

The next day, a Friday, the young men managed to get up well before

dawn and walk several miles across the high plateau. The scarce wind-swept trees reminded Jason of an African scene. Early in the afternoon a large herd of antelope ran at what seemed like forty-five miles per hour in a U-shaped pattern around one of these trees. They were running too fast for Harris, stand-ing just in front of the tree, to be able to draw a bead on any of them. After that unsuccessful encounter, the hunters decided to call it a day.

Anyway, it was the weekend. Toward evening they drove off the antelope range across the California line toward Cedarville in search of excitement. “Guitar Man,” by Bread, was played a couple of times on distant stations Har-ris could tune in on his pickup's radio. Jason, 22, was melancholy after hearing the lyrics. He remembered someone quoted in a mid-Sixties Life magazine article about the draft had said, “You're washed up by the time you're 25.” In Jason's view life was now well into the twilight of youth. And in a week and a half he would have to be back at UBC for his second year of graduate studies in English.

The Modoc County Fair in progress that weekend drew the attention of Har-ris, Frank and his friends. The demolition derby was a highlight, but Jason worried that eventually a couple of the cars crashing into each other would burst into flame.

“That's the point,” his friend Rob said. “Everyone's secretly hoping some-thing like that will happen.”

Then everybody had burgers and salty fries at the fair, washed down with a few beers. They stopped at a bar in Cedarville for a few more brews before it was decided to drive back to the Sheldon Antelope Range and their hunting camp by way of Eagleville.

It was now quite dark. There was a lot of hooting and celebratory yelling from friends in the back of Harris's pickup and from other friends in Frank's truck following them. Animal spirits were high.

On leaving Eagleville they drove by what looked like a deserted nineteenth-century clapboard hotel. One of the young men in Frank's truck thought the bench in front would be convenient seating for the next night's supper and beer at the camp. He jumped out and proceeded to the porch of the old hotel. He picked up the whitewashed bench and was carrying it back to the truck in which he had been riding when “Blam!”

The hotel owner, in pyjamas and a nightcap, had fired a shotgun blast from a window in the second storey just over the cab of Harris's truck.

“PUT IT BACK!” he yelled.

One of the shotgun pellets had hit the top of the cab of Harris's truck.

“What the hell?!” Harris yelled. “Are you going to kill us over a f------ bench?!”

“PUT IT BACK!” the hotel owner repeated.

Harris's friends threw the bench to the asphalt from the back of their truck, and both trucks sped away.

Little active hunting was done the next day.

PoisonBy Paul Strickland