Tag: Non-partisan blog posts

The Politics Of Science

Let the re-engineering of knowledge begin!

The new Conservative government has decided to slash spending on Environment Canada programs designed to fight global warming by 80 per cent, and wants cuts of 40 per cent in the budgets devoted to climate change at other ministries, according to cabinet documents obtained by The Globe and Mail. The documents also say that the Conservatives’ campaign promise of tax breaks for transit passes would cost up to $2-billion over five years, but would result in an insignificant cut in greenhouse-gas emissions because the incentives are expected to spur only a small increase in the number of people willing to trade using cars for buses and subways.

Interesting to note that, like the baby bonus toddler luxury cash grab, the bus pass money will cost a lot and do little. This seems to be a theme with Harper: cut and spend in reaction to assumptions rather than statistical studies or actual science. Now don’t get me wrong – every program aimed at a goal does not necesarily represent the best or even a good means to achieve that goal.

But our new rural overlords do not seem to be operating on that basis either. It’s all coffee clatch science: “I’ve heard the Smiths believe in evolution…how could we come from monkeys?…that must be wrong ’cause monekys are smelly…evolution is a lie.” Try it with global warming, finance policy or anything else. It’s like putting on 3D glasses when no one told you the movie was in 3D, you just thought what you were watching was fuzzy for no apparent reason.  The knee jerks instinctively.

Sign Up, Sign Up!

Rumours that GX40 sports pool management practices have been cited in the new Federal Accountability Act have been vastly over-rated. All references to Byzantine complexity and subjective point calculations are to be removed at the committee level, as illustrated. I am assured on that point particularly by my new friends in fat capital city.

Remember – this year I am promising fabulous prizes and this year I may actually follow through.

Easter Week

An excellent picture from the BBC this morning, most excellent because of the trendy girls in to the back and right who are looking at the black wizardy lads.

Easter week has often meant in my adult life hitting the road as it will this year, seeking a little saltiness and a little spring. As those little blue spring flowers are popping up here now, who knows what there will be to see in the Mohawk Valley or around Worchester, MA as we travel through. God forbid a leaf on a tree but maybe a daffodil.

Once, I knew it was spring because I was reading The Master and The Margarita as a way to renew myself. Silly lad, as now or at least for four of the last six years, spring does not start unless I have been in the company of Mainers. Remember when I used to post short short movies? Well, it is three weeks early but one can only hope to see a spring day like this again.

Reality Of A Sort

It’s nice to see compromise and a move from election platforms two days into the new Parliament. Why, soon it will be as if what is actualy policy was what was promised all along. Most pleasing is reading that the child care plan wasn’t really te child care plan and that the new plan is actually going to be something in the nature of a plan for the care of children and not just a partisan money toss:

Opposition Leader Bill Graham challenged Harper yesterday to reinstate the five-year, $5 billion program, citing an interview Human Resources Minister Diane Finley gave to the Toronto Star. Finley acknowledged tax credits, such as those the Tories promised in the campaign, haven’t stimulated an expansion of daycare spaces in the past, and said the government is now looking at “other incentives” and alternatives to the tax system to do so. “The minister responsible admitted … such tax credits fail to create child-care spaces,” Graham said. “Will the Prime Minister now admit he is wrong, or does he plan to push ahead with a plan that his own minister admits will not work?” Harper said his government will be “flexible” on how it puts together its $10.7 billion program on child care but provided no more detail.

After the interesting and important debate on Afghanistan last night – in which all parties represented their positions forcefully but, yes, the debate one that the new Prime Minister was never going to allow – it will be good to watch where we are actually going on many matters now. Too early to talk of flip-floppery and, in any event, this is a weak situation which mainly allows for sensible compromises if you let it.

Gen X Spring Sports Pool 2006

The tenth annual internet pool in a row. That is mind-numbing in the evident dedication to the pursuit of idleness and lack of productivity. Here are the rules in the most complex and utterly unwinnable pool yet:

1. NHL playoffs

Pick five scorers, one goon, one goalie, eight teams and a dark horse.

  • A point for a goal by a scorer.
  • A point for an assist by a scorer.
  • A point for a penalty minute by a goon. If your goon is kicked out of the playoffs and thereby the pool, you double the penalty minutes he has achieved to that point. The logic here is that the goon is a nut-bar. The later that he freaks and gets tossed for the balance of the playoffs, the more nut-bar like he is, the more he is the essential goon.
  • A point for each thousandth save percentage over .900 by your goalie
  • 5 points for picking each of the teams in the second, third and fourth rounds.
  • 25 bonus points for picking the dark horse – the team with the lowest regular season points to go the farthest in the playoffs. The dark horse must be seeded in the lower half of their conference.

2. Other Hockey

  • Name the winner of the Memorial Cup, Canada’s Jr A Men’s hockey championship. 10 points.
  • Pick four scorers in the Memorial Cup. One point for each goal or assist.
  • Pick the winner of the AHL’s Calder Cup. Ten points.

3. World Cup Fitba

  • Which team goes farther: Togo or Trinidad and Tobago? Ten points. Total goals breaks the tie.
  • Who wins the World Cup? Ten points.
  • Who wins the golden shoe for top scorer? Ten points.

4. Other Fitba

  • Pick the two teams in the English FA Cup Final. Five points each.
  • Pick the winner of the FA Cup. 10 points.
  • Pick the winner of the Scottish Premier League – not a Cup, #1 in the league table. Ten points.
  • Does Morton go up to the First Division of the SFA? Ten points if you are right.

5. Baseball

  • Who wins when the Red Sox and Yankees play on 1 May 2006? Ten points.
  • Who wins when the Red Sox and Yankees play on 2 May 2006? Ten points.
  • Who starts as pitcher for each team when the Red Sox and Yankees play on 1 May 2006? Ten points for each correct pick.
  • Which of thse two teams will be ahead of the other in the standings at 9 am 3 May and by how many games? Ten points for correct team and ten points for nearest to the lead in games.

6. Other Sports

  • Who wins the One Day International Series on Saturday, 20 May 2006 between teh West Indies v India, held at Jamaica? Twenty points. Guess the final score and you get ten more points if you are within 25 wickets on the score differential. Ten more points if you can explain how you exactly you know the score is what it is.
  • Who wins the World Snooker Championship at The Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, England held from 15 April – 1 May? Twenty points.
  • Who wins the British and Commonwealth super middleweight title match to be held on May 26, York Hall, London between Carl Froch v Brian Magee. Ten points. Ten more points if you name the exact round that the fight ends.
  • Who is the top scorer in the NBA playoffs. Twenty points.

I have to think of a few more questions on international sport. These will be posted in a bit. Get your picks in by 18 April 2006 at a reasonable hour.

Ah, My People

Things are a wee bit different in the old country:

…South Harris residents argue the Sabbath must be strictly observed as a day of rest. Some left marks of their disapproval at the quayside. Yellow tape bearing the words “Caution Keep Out” had been tied across the ferry slipway and several posters bearing the words “remember the Sabbath day” were posted on surrounding signs and buildings.

Just another reminder that I am going to aych-eee-double-hockey-sticks along with the rest of you lot fer dayin mony a wicked deed like taykin’ the ferrrrry ona Sundee. Badjuns alla ye.

This Friday’s Friday Chat

What kind of week was it? It was hopefully the last glimpse of a skim of
snow. It has been a fairly optimistic week otherwise with lots of contact with
old friends over the internet, planning a summer reunion in Halifax at the end
of July. But what else has the internet done for me lately?

  • Update#2: Just remembered that I forgot to remember to post about hearing Perry F. Rockwood on “The People’s Gospel Hour” this week on 1170 AM WWVA Wheeling, West Virginia while I was hunting for baseball. It is a Nova Scotia produced radio evangelical program seemngly on every station everywhere on the Maritime Canadian AM dial when I was a kid. I thought I had blogged posted before the soft spot I have for Perry’s voice and his pronunciation of “Boston, Massachusetts” at the end of every broadcast but I cannot find that reference via a search. So much for the internet. Good news! Perry is 88 and going strong.

  • Update: Iggy
    might get me to vote Liberal for the first time ever.

  • Mr. Harper is having a first brush with reality, needing now to debate the
    Afghanistan
    mission, having to pull back a
    contract to an insider     on accountability policy of all things and generally
    having to put a decade worth of puffery to the test. He is doing reasonably well
    but any claims to sightings the second coming of anyone’s Messiah are
    pre-mature. His tendency to secrecy and making up reasons for the things he does
    out of the air are going to get to be as annoying as his love of junior
    micro-management. He is not the only clever guy in the sandbox but at least he
    is a change and a keener. There is much good in hiring a keener.

  • It’s been a hard week for the creationists and Biblical literalists among
    you so there will be a round on the progressive faithful at happy hour today –
    soda pops for thems that want them, the good stuff for thems that need it.
    First, a
    transitional fossil     has been found linking our fishy forefathers to our
    monkey-like ones. I’ve never had a big problem with the scaley and tail-y past
    we share and suspect God has a good giggle at the trashing about people do to
    figure out what is what. I think reference to The Book of Job is
    instructive wherein the Creator took one of us aside and said “Huh? You think I
    tell you all the good stuff?” Then there was the
    Book of Judas     finding. Seeing as the Deas Sea scrolls were found in some guy’s tinder pile as
    he was stoking the flames of another fire under the bubbling stew pot for his
    family ‘s dinner, it should come as no surprise that there are loads of
    alternate versions out there. So raise a glass in commisseration for the
    fundamentalists whose fundamentals got a little shifty this week. Pray hoist ye,
    bruvvers and sistahs!

  • Has anyone started podcasting lately? I am feeling more and more that as
    bloggy text is actually solidifying as a hobby, podcasts are going the way of
    ham radio – nerdy and little understood. But it is not in the nature of the web
    to analyze what it likes to call its lesser successes. What people may be
    realizing is simply the difference in effort required to control text as opposed
    to sound. And podcasting needs a public success. After all, all of bloggy
    legitimacy has centered on one event, the great whoop-tee-doo of the firing of
    Dan Rather. Podcasting needs its similar Jimmy’s-in-the-well moment. It has yet
    to come.

  • Finally, I know someone who has had a windfall. I won’t tell you who or what
    but it was a surprising sign of my late-arriving semi-maturity that I did not
    curse my lack of such luck. Maybe it is the return of baseball, the passing out
    of winter or the general state of good tidings that have been surrounding me and
    mine far and wide but there was none of the usual gnashing gut churning
    why-does-this-never-happen-to-me stuff. Why is that? Am I losing my
    touch?

Well that is it for today. Let us gather and chat about things
we really do not understand fully and allow the glory of the medium give us
credence far beyond the quality of our thoughts.

Unfamiliar But Familiar

I am actually apolitical. Sort of. I think for the most part most politicians are good people working hard, the whole thing about Tory financial planning capacity aside. I also pretty much think that it is a difficult thing to translate the experience of people in another country and try to align it with what is going on here. The detailed ground rules are too important but practically speaking unknowable. I may be happy to watch the UK’s Question Period from Westminster on CPAC for the spectacle in lucid wit but we don’t really understand the context. Yet there is more than a moments entertainment for me when reading what Ian writes in his fuming foaming moments:

…you all got what you wanted, and in the eyes of progressives, you got what you deserved. Now your President has an approval rating of 37%, even in the usually-more-conservative Time Magazine poll. Roughly translated from the 2004 election returns, that means 14.2 MILLION people who voted for Bush now disapprove of him. Well, fourteen-point-two-million, you have nobody but yourselves to blame, you pathetic boobs.

Yes, I called you “pathetic boobs”. You deserve it. You left us with this guy and only now bother to show righteous indignation? You make me sick. You had access to the same information as the rest of us. At least real conservatives stick by their guns, but you’re the worst kind of pusillanimous, wobbling imbeciles. I hope your stomach lining eats away what’s left of your digestive tract.

Oh my. When I read or hear commentary like that I am really happy that I live in a country with more than two parties. I think that the greater complexity of us versus them helps focus on actual policy more than platform, on action more than words. So it is not without some hope that I watch this week’s return of the minority in different form to Ottawa. If you think about it, the nation has been locked in a set of facts that have been around compared to where we were about 1990 with Chretien and Martin fighting for the Liberal leadership and Reform was well on its way on its share of the plan to break up the then somewhat squalid conservative movement with the NDP and Bloq holding their own but not breaking away. Now, in a reversal of fortunes, we have conservatives actually being the ones saying they are going to clean up government and a bunch of the untested are competing for the Liberal leadership, all the while the NDP support solidifying under a more acceptable platform and leadership than has existed for decades and the Bloq actually starting to wobble as the old guard get older. In one way this is a new start but in another it will be less than a change as the ideas being shuffled are largely the same and, mortality being what it is, it is all downhill from here.

Opening Day

Here it is. The beginning of the good part of the year. Baseball begins tonight and I am already figuring out how and when to make the drive to Cooperstown – maybe even for the Hall of Fame game. Four and a half hours according to Google but I think it is more like three and a half if Syracuse is two from here.

Baseball’s beginning also means eyeing those two Watertown Wizards double headers on the Canada Day long weekend. Maybe a game at Auburn or Syracuse or Ottawa as well. Staying away from major league tickets means you can take the family to half a dozen games instead of buying a good pair of tickets to one.

This year I play catch. I am taking my glove to Maine in two weeks and, just for the record, note that Binghampton’s in town then. Maybe I’ll buy a bat and get the kids some mitts as well and start working on their double play. Six ain’t too young – not if you want to make sure they are more interested in the game rather than something grimly isolating like fly fishing or reading. And then there are those Sox games on the car radio fading in after sunset from 1080 Hartford. And on the computer during the day.

When does it get to be too much? How many times does it take for ice cream to become boring?

Update: A few lessons learned. First, price objects of kids’ desire before exposing kids to those objects. What they do not know will not hurt you. Second, Walmart has a good range of well made little kid gloves which are are sized by the inch. The lad got a ten and herself an eleven and a half. Who knew? Canadian Tire, no so much but it may just be that the stock is not out yet because hockey season lasts until July, dontcha know. Third, test the glove by having kid hold ball in glove and turn glove over to see if kid can hold ball in glove while shaking. Passing that test move on to the grip test wherein the kid with glove on tries to keep it on as you try to tug it off. This test can be confused with the no-kid-you-are-not-getting-the-129-buck-glove situation so be clear on the verbal instructions at that moment. Finally, good to see a league baseball is still under five bucks, though you no longer get them in individual boxes.

Now, off to throw three throws, roll my ankle and lay on the ground as the kids say “Gedup! Gedup!” knowing ten years from now in the same situation they will not be as kind.