Second Gen (2003-2016, 2016- )
It seems like the Morton and the Red Sox never win on the same day. Sure, they basically play in opposing seasons but still you would think there would be more days like this when Livingston and the Angels know the sting of defeat. Bay and Wake both doubled, too.
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So who do you blame? Who do you blame for the evaporation of much of the CBC today? Do you blame me who stopped watching and listening years ago and regularly disses it? For that you can pretty much blame Brent Bambury leaving the local CBC Ottawa drive home show as that was the last thing I would tune in for. Do you blame Stephen Harper? You could I suppose – but when people are losing their jobs all over the place, when private news and entertainment sources in Canada are closing – is every job at the CBC sacred and worthy of tax dollars? Harper himself would blame consumers – you – ultimately but that is part of his whole passive / aggressive love / hate thing that has worked out so well.
You know who I blame? Paul Martin and Stephane Dion – Tweedle dumb and Tweedle dumber. “WHAT???” you say with a high screechy voice? Yes, Martin and Dion. They had the nation handed to them as only a Liberal party leader can, they had the ability to continue in the steady (if sometimes slightly sticky) hand of Jean Chretien. But no. Martin has to wrestle the leadership away from Jean only to find he has no skill at being leader. And Dion has to run against Iggy only to discover that, zoot!, he is actually a goofball egghead. Had these two men not botched the natural governing party, we would not have the social and economic experimentations of our rural overlords. We would not be driven into deficit by the single decision to reduce the GST from 7% to 5%. Remember that? Would it have made a tick of difference to anything other than the emptying of Federal bank accounts had the GST stayed at 7%.
This is what happens in a leadership void whether a void created intentionally by the CPC which wants to prove that the Federal level is irrelevant or by the Grits who, until recently, apparently wanted to prove that they were. Don’t get me wrong. I think the CBC in large part created the wall that it is now slamming headlong into. It has a singular lack of vision and stilted stance on its own importance that stands out among public broadcasters and public institutions. I should be a fan of the mothership, a booster. But it failed me long ago. I feel very badly for those who will be out of work, perhaps including creative clever friends from that undergrad with the journalism school I attended all those years ago. Still, the CBC deserved and deserves better. Blame those who should have defended her and who should have been there in these dark days. Blame Martin and Dion and the Grits who supported them.
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I wonder about things. I wonder why I need so many half consumed jars of jam. I wonder why the rise of the internet, the economic bubble and its bursting are all related. I wonder why no one seems to notice that. And I wonder why Twitter is taking off, jumping the shark and about to become (in Mr. James’s words or – better – something like them) the usenet of the 2010’s. Remember usenet? It was so great. People being all Web 2.0 a decade and more before Web 2.0? Now people are being all 25% usenet fifteen years or more later. What is up?
Anyway, being ticked that the Whitehouse apparently really really discovered Twitter last night and finding 30 or so of the last 50 posts I had to wade through were about policy and Obama girls, I deleted that feed. I have been spending much of my Twitter time in the last two weeks deleting feeds. I even had a show trial of a brewer whose pace of twitting was far too manic. I bet that really stung. Being unhappy with Twitter has given rise to a few observations which I trust you will confirm in their entirety:
So, is Twitter the widget that is so simple yet dysfunctional that no one actually has to admit it does not really work except as a Borg training device?. And why is it so apt for people in the time of recession? What does it speak to in a time of doubt and uncertainty? Is it like Depression-era eating goldfish or dancing non-stop contests without a prize?
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Do we hate “red tape” as much as before? Is there still a general feeling that too much intervention is always wrong? Not a chance. This morning I think even Stephen Harper with his recent anti-libertarian and anti- classic liberal statements would be nodding in agreement with this passage from today’s New York Times editorial page:
The financial crisis, including what went wrong at A.I.G., is not just the result of a missing regulator, a gaping structural gap in the regulatory framework. Rather, it is rooted in the refusal of regulators, lawmakers and executive-branch officials to heed warnings about risks in the system and to use their powers to head them off. It is the result of antiregulatory bias and deregulatory zeal — ascendant over the last three decades, but especially prevalent in the last 10 years — that eclipsed not only rules and regulations, but the very will to regulate.
Now, to be fair, our rural overlords in their heart of hearts want to regulate things in our private lives that mostly don’t need regulating but the point is still valid. What is the most important word up there? Deregulatory? Bias? No, it’s “zeal” – that thing that can overcome good sense wherever you go. Why would you want a zealot to structure your law – whether financial regulations or social engineering – when you would not want to sit next to that person at a dinner party? Is it not the zealot’s lack of balance that gives us terrorism, obscenely sub-prime mortgages, mockery of the deaths of the weak, bifurcation of the community and the undermining of the long standing social principles and institutions which have served us so well? And blogging. Don’t forget in inanity of blogging. Could it be plainer? Is there anything behind social instability other than zeal? So, in this time of transition and reformation, ought we not drum out zealotry wherever it may be found? Is this not the cause of the next five year?
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Monday morning. No one like Monday morning but you can bet you like this Monday morning more than a certain somebody in Ottawa:
An aide in Mr. Petit’s Ottawa office said the MP was very busy, and would not likely have time for an interview to explain his comments.
Should we not feel for the backbencher’s aide? Are these not the jobs held by friends that people initially admire until that Saturday night dinner party where too much is poured? “Too busy,” he said, “Tell them I am very busy!!!” “More wine?” “Yes. Yes, please.”
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It was 1:22 am when the game ended. I only made it to about four overtimes listening on UConn’s radio AM 1080 out of Hartford but Syracuse won. So that was good. I thought I was staying up late to watch Cramer on John Stewart but that was a fold. I kept waiting for Cramer to say “but you don’t exactly treat your subject matter with full seriousness.” Nada. He rolled over and asked to have his tummy rubbed.
Gotta run. Up way too late.
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One thing that I think the internet may have done is tempered local weirdnesses about bad things. When I was a kid in the Annapolis Valley, the local AM radio stations would broadcast the fire alarm announcements as paid advertising. So, thirty four years ago, right in the middle of hearing the theme to The Greatest American Hero or “Island Girl” there would be the sound of a wind up fire alarm, the statement “the fire alarm in the Middleton Area is brought to you buy Smith’s Chev-Olds” a little ad and then the news that Mrs. Muldoon’s chicken shed burned down due to little Johnny playing with matches. If the fire news was good enough, people would get in their cars and go have a look see. When the Greenwood mall burned, the gawkers packed the highways and byways, likely impeding trucks providing mutual aid from outlying communities.
I thought of that when I heard about the new French-language obituary channel that is starting up in Quebec.
A Quebec businessman believes he has the perfect business to suit ageing, Baby Boomer viewers – an obituary channel. The country’s first television channel dedicated to funerals and mourning could start broadcasting as early as this summer, after the CRTC granted a licence for a regional Quebec cable channel called Je me souviens. The French-language station would broadcast obituaries, notices of hospitalization and messages of thanks and prayers.
It may come to English Canada, too. What a boon for the disaster mongers currently stuck cursing the sunny days on the weather channel. Guaranteed negative news to cluck over. Apparently the developer of the concept “the idea of putting obituaries on television came after he attended several funerals over the years that left him longing for more.”
There is something odd about this. And not just the obvious oddness. Does anyone think this is actually a bad plot of a sci-fi show and that somehow somewhere this will trigger the undead to be walking the streets?
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Are the profiteers all that are left? Ben relishes the self-promotion of one who will go nameless or the other who will go nameless but US conservatives seem to have fallen to the point that these are all there is left. In late 2004, I posted a few half based things about recovering the moral majority and one of the key points was to a regain a communications strategy on message. Obama may have done that with the hope, with the change and now well see how all that plays out in these the days of just the spare change. But those who go nameless are now pinching the last few coins, an echo of the departed, the voices of the hollowed hollow men, those who gifted the globe economic collapse. Having been built up by the cause they have nothing left once the cause is gone – and aren’t they, in fact, now more a barrier to the cause? The Flea doesn’t see it yet but no one would imagine Bush debating Michael Moore in 2003 out of some confused idea that promoting another’s self-promotion equates with national debate. The converse, especially after the collapse, is far less appealing. As Cheney would know, no one debates clowns.
So, how will they be asked to leave? When will their inertia leave them bound to Newton’s first law, still drifting along but slowly further away, receding after the tack turns the boat around? Who will be the spokes-folk for the next conservative agenda?
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Why doesn’t the National Post point that out as part of the byline on Conrad Black’s musings? I mean at the end of my fellow blogger Stephen Taylor‘s NP posts on the same “Full Comment” feature it states in sort of a footnote:
Stephen Taylor is a scientist, political analyst and a Fellow at the Manning Centre for Building Democracy, an institute founded by Preston Manning. Read more at his blog, stephentaylor.ca.
If that is the right thing to do – and it is – should Conny’s at least state that he is n the hoosegow for corporate finance crimes the sort of which were indicative of and generously larded the years leading to the current worldwide economic collapse? Seems only reasonable to me.
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Previous celebrations: 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008. Spring happens this month. Baseball happens this month. Plants will poke their heads out of the ground. I might even BBQ. March good. The bad months are past. Woot.
These Too Be Sun Worshipers Update: While one may quibble as to the point, UMPI plays ball:
Because winter can last until May in northern Maine, Presque Isle routinely plays its entire season on the road. With their campus 400 miles north of Boston, the Owls have not played a home baseball game since 2005, when there were two. “You can either complain that the baseball field is buried under six feet of snow, or you drive to where you can play baseball,” said Tyler Delaney, a junior infielder. “We don’t complain.
Here is their schedule in case you want to catch a game.
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