Tag: Non-partisan blog posts

Tory On Tory Handbags!

Sooner or later chickens come home to roost. They really do. I’ve never seen it but cliches do not lie. So it is fun, then, to watch someone somewhere who is a more principled, more confident leader than the bad batch of all stripes we have to deal with in Ottawa these days:

Danny Williams, the Newfoundland and Labrador Premier who has promised to make the federal Conservatives regret last week’s budget, on Tuesday ratcheted up his attacks on Prime Minister Stephen Harper. His government has launched an advertising campaign calling into question the honesty of Mr. Harper. “If we can’t accept at face value the promise of our Prime Minister, then who can?” asks the ad, which will run in newspapers across the country. “A promise made should be a promise kept. And as Mr. Harper pointed out, there is no greater fraud than a promise not kept.”

What a shocker! Imagine holding the PM to account rather than playing hide and seek when he glowers and grumbles as he stumbles as appears to be the wizardry of the Loyal but Not Very Capable Opposition. I remember the first week of law school in Halifax when all the keener sons of Bay Street partners of Calgary politicians opened their yaps to answer a question condescendingly only to face the wrath and wit of the baymen Newfs in the back, ripping them and their answers apart as the rest of us giggled and got out of the way. Go Danny! Remember – Atlantic Canada is right on this point and Ottawa promised. It is as simple as that.

Group Project: What Were We Like And What Are We Like Now?

…and what are we becoming? I know I go on but this new report on the state of privacy and surveillance technologies in the UK reminded me of this one about blogging, especially this passage:

…before the telegraph, for example, almost all ordinary people read entire newspapers and were generally very up to date on all issues of the day. It was not uncommon for politicians and other famous people of the day to come to town and speak literally for hours on end about complex issues facing people. Ordinary townspeople would know exactly what was being discussed and were not spoken down to or had the subject matter dumbed down for them. Postman relates one typical example where Lincoln was speaking somewhere for something like six hours, excused everyone to go home and eat supper, and then resumed speaking again an hour later. Then the telegraph made the spread of information much, much quicker. But because of all the dots and dashes, information became sound bites overnight. As a result, people’s tolerance for lengthier, meatier writing began to wane. And newspapers at the time who began getting their news from far away over the telegraph began writing shorter and shorter stories.

It’s the general proposition that I think interests me – as usual – how we as humans go about largely unaware of these sorts of quick shifts and are not very good at assessing whether they are good or bad, whether we are smarter or dumber because of them, freer or less free. The promise and the payout. We no longer think about things that were quite common ideas quite recently, like the information divide – which I think I think is as much due to the general ease of internet access as much as the awareness that most internet use is idle and recreational. No one considers access to a phone as a measure of full functional participation now either.

So, without getting into the goodness or the badness, how far could people go in immersing themselves into the unimportant and the abandonment of individual privacy while still being functional in a democracy? Are they even related? Do I need a coffee?

ADQ Whippersnappers Take Control In Quebec

We are declaring early and not just so we can get in an little extra early snoozing. There shall be a minority ADQ victory in Quebec’s provincial election and we are frankly stunned – but mainly with the realization that people in power are starting to look like they are younger than me. Not that I am not a very young 43. Precocious many say. Dainty. But the point is politicians should look like Lester Pearson when they do not look like John Diefenbaker.

Update: Ok, Ok – so Jean McCurlytop won in a way that can only be considered losing. Who’s happy now? And who is happy that shouldn’t be? And should Stephan Dion just quit now? No one won the pool, by the way. But Jay lost it.

Sports Pool 2007: Final Standings For The NHL

The next question is one that has been long clamoured for so we better give in or we won’t hear the end of it:

5. Identify and put in order divided by conference the 16 teams that will make the playoffs. Ten points for each correct team minus one point of the number of places the team is out of order. For example, picking Detroit for second but they come in fifth makes it a seven point pick.

Get your picks in before April 1, 2007. I better figure out the points so far so this thing doesn’t get out of hand.

Complete sports pool 2007 links here.

Ask What Your Country Can Do For You

I was wondering what to say about the Federal Budget that came out yesterday and what it says about the vision of the NuGov for a new nation being forged by private enterprise and getting the monkey off everyone’s back. But Andrew says it more plainly than I ever would as he voted for these guys:

Today’s budget is an embarrassment for those who consider themselves fiscal conservatives (especially those who poured countless hours into helping bring this government to power in order to change how business is done in Ottawa). Aside from a few small measures – including a continued commitment to pay down the national debt and some baby steps towards preventative health care, the budget is an undisciplined mish-mash of high-flying spending and ridiculous wealth redistribution. There are no true tax breaks, no obvious signs that government bureaucracy is shrinking and, worst of all, a 7.9% increase in overall spending – far more than the GDP’s growth.

Hokey-Ka-Bokey! Sounds like the red flag is flying once again from the Peace Tower in Ottawa. What is it in the water there that makes everyone a centrist? For me and my family, we get the “you have kids” break and the “you have a spouse” break but no income splitting, the real fiscal imbalance as far as I am concerned. My pal and his wife make what we make and have one kid. They get about $5,000 from the Feds we do not due to the bias against one income households. All so unfair to me.

So I won’t likely vote Tory now…and I was this close. Because if you are going to buy my vote, you really have to buy my vote. Maybe that is what we need now. NuGov 2.0. Personalized tax breaks defined to everyone’s own specifications defined by the person. The ultimate in government for I, me, mine. Maybe in a way then I could vote for me, the only thing that should really matter in an honest values system.

Doug Mientkiewicz On My TV


Come over to the dark side, Doug. Resistance is futile.

I watched the Yankees-Twins pre-season game last night care of the glory that is cable TV. If the Web 2.0 had a quarter of the success of cable TV, it might amount to something one day. Like that miracle of the 1990’s, pervasive email, the miracle of the 1980s, pervasive cable TV, has changed our lives so fundamentally we do not even notice it anymore.

Last night, the miracle transported me to a small baseball field in Florida to watch the Yankee hopefuls beat up on the hopefuls for the Twins. One of the former who used to be one of the later stood out – Doug Mientkiewicz. He stood out not only for his horrible grapefruit league batting average of well under 0.100 but his incredible catching at first, stretching out with last second splits to grab the ball a tenth of a second earlier than if he let it come to the glove.

I don’t know if that is enough to earn him a spot, though, given his batting. But one thing about pre-season baseball, compared to say NHL hockey, is there is a lot more potential for fluidity at the far end of the bench and with the farm team system more opportunity for parking people for specific purposes later in the season so we will likely see him play.

The NTY has a good story on Mientkiewicz (Ment-KAY-vich to you non-Slavophones) in this morning’s edition.

New Science From The New Government

Isn’t it great when politics can solve issues in science:

…a pair of Environment Canada bureaucrats said they don’t even know who’s responsible for climate change policy anymore. They said the now-defunct directorate was specifically in charge of overseeing all new climate-change policy, and that its 10 employees are being reassigned to various quarters.

“Even the people working here say, ‘Who’s really accountable for making climate change policy anymore?’ They don’t even know,” said one bureaucrat who requested anonymity. “Right now we don’t know who’s accountable.”

While that is admittedly a lot of ways of saying it, it appears the results of New Science is in – no worries – move along! Bloggers and politicians have settled the matter so let it be. Hopefully so they will have the vision to apply the same understanding of which knowledge can be to medicine and engineering.

No, I meant the other sort of engineering.

Monday And Coffee

I think I just disproved that theory about coffee. Consider this:

  • Monday.
  • Monday after the clocks leap forward.
  • Monday after the clocks leap forward and I “sleep in”.
  • Monday after the clocks leap forward and I “sleep in” and there are seven kids in the house because it is March Break and my nieces are visiting.
  • Monday after the clocks leap forward and I “sleep in” and there are seven kids in the house because it is March Break and my nieces are visiting so I can’t make coffee as we have a grinder and that will wake the nieces.
  • Monday after the clocks leap forward and I “sleep in” and there are seven kids in the house because it is March Break and my nieces are visiting so I can’t make coffee as we have a grinder and that will wake the nieces so I have to get it at work meaning a foggy drive in.
  • Monday after the clocks leap forward and I “sleep in” and there are seven kids in the house because it is March Break and my nieces are visiting so I can’t make coffee as we have a grinder and that will wake the nieces so I have to get it at work and I get to work meaning a foggy drive in – and there is no coffee when I get to work.

Somewhere, somehow, I earned some credit of some sort.