Category: Uncategorized

Hopeless Harper

I zipped this off at Ben’s in response to yet another dense comment from someone other than Ben (as Ben is as bright a conservative thinker as I have come across) about how the Tories are great because the Liberals are bad…and then I thought it was rather good. It’s a list of Harper’s mishandlings of the last ten days or so:

…talk about not having a clue. Just look at his acts:

  • no reference to the policy of the CPC when the polls looked good,
  • no knocking on the door of Rideau Hall when some claimed the constitution was in crisis,
  • no stopping of Parliament just a milksop early adjournment after participating in the business of the House,
  • not even realizing your party’s edges were getting chipped away.

He blew it and yet you will call him a great leader. Why? Because he is not as crooked as the Quebec wing of the Liberals? That is a hell of a claim to fame.

Has he done anything right in the last few days? That last one is a doozie. Harper says he was speaking just a few days ago to his wife that Belinda would leave. He apparently did not share those fears with her or anyone else in the party as everyone else is shocked today.

I fear the Tories are in no mooded for reflection – it will remain good enough for them to point out the Grit’s dog is ugly rather than notice their own has got a wicked case of the mange and a funny smell as well. Wells may be right that Harper will not lose his position over this but that is likely due to the need for Tories to ride their pony into the ground publicly in a great show.

Update: One more thing, mentioned in the comments earlier. It appears that Harper’s leadership skills certainly do not make it across the country to the two remaining Tory MPs of Newfoundland, Messers Doyle and Hearn. This according to The Globe this evening:

“There are so many things happening, so I’m going to wait for a day or two before actually saying beyond a shadow of a doubt that … I’m voting for or against it,” Mr. Doyle, the MP for St. John’s East, said. “I’m just going to play those cards when the time comes around.” Mr. Hearn was more coy. “I’ve been around politics long enough to know that you never know what’s going to happen, so we’ll find out on Thursday,” Mr. Hearn told reporters Monday. Their votes assumed more importance Tuesday as news broke that Conservative MP Belinda Stronach had defected to the Liberals. The Liberal government can likely survive with the support of two Independent MPs, instead of all three. Meanwhile, Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams [Ed.: a Conservative, too] is keeping up the pressure on the two MPs in the hope they will vote with the ruling Liberals. Mr. Williams has said Mr. Doyle and Mr. Hearn should vote for the budget because it includes the province’s revamped, $2.6-billion offshore energy deal with Ottawa. “Mr. Hearn is talking in terms of a vote for Canada,” Mr. Williams said Monday. “Now, if he wants to trade off the country for his own province, then that’s his decision.”

Solid.

Everything So Good

I am trying to find somthing to get me away from the gripping storyline of The Bachelor. I have watched too many reality show finals and I really did not care about any of them. Survivor was dullsville, Amazing Race is somewhat last week and later this week The Apprentice will still have a man with really funny hair on it who everyone treats like he invented beer but will take it all away if you cross him. All sugars, too. And you can’t even wish that you had the good old shows like The Rockford File ’cause you can actually watch them now in the 200 channel universe 24 hours a day and they are awful.

So – what do you do? You surf. And when you surf you come across moments in the life cycle of a topic like this:

Holy Moly! Real reality isn’t quite so dull but I am apparently going to die of everything all at once. That would be bad but it appears health is about bad stuff and there is plenty of it. Bad bad bad. I have no idea what the lady with the phone is smiling about. Maybe she is an urban phone user – her brain is safe. Whew Good. Or maybe she is a rural artist hoping something drastic can improve her style. Bad yet good. Just don’t drink beer and talk on the phone in the country. Bad. Your brain will be doomed. Bad bad bad. Best headline – “Toxic chemicals” in celebrities. That really has to suck:

Celeb-wannabe: So doctor…if I only want a little fame do I still need the big needle?
Doctor: I am afraid so.

Maybe it means celebrities are the source of toxic chemicals. That would be fairly freaky. I hope the celebrities stay away from my town.

So I get off the web and I find this in the file manager of the blog – I photo saved but I don’t think ever used. I look at it and I know Stephen Harper is listening to Aerosmith’s “Dude Looks Like a Lady” in his brain at that very moment. Right about the third chorus. Or he finally tried a beer. Nut-tay. He looks like his is trying to explain what it feels like, too.

But I suppose my day really went wrong when I sensed the end of the universe was truly nigh, knew secretly that monkey were flying out of private places everywhere and noted that the cow to moon ratio must be alarmingly high…all because in Nova Scotia the NDP propped up the Tory minority.

Tsunami Relief?

Care of Jay, I was directed to the Financial Times which ran a string of stories last week on the failings of tsunami relief. This is quite shocking:

  • May 12, 2005: “Within a week a Diageo supplier began sending the equivalent of eight 20ft shipping containers of drinking water to survivors in Indonesia’s Aceh province, the area hit hardest by the disaster. Almost five months later, that water has yet to reach Aceh or survivors. It is still sitting on the docks in the North Sumatran port city of Medan. The water is part of a daunting pile of international relief supplies from aid groups, rotary clubs and companies such as Dupont and The Body Shop, lying idle as those struggling to make new lives in Aceh continue to clamour for help. ‘We understood there might be some difficulty in getting the water out there. But it’s a bit of a disappointment when we learn it’s still sitting on the docks,’ says Ron Ainsbury, Diageo’s director of corporate affairs in Sydney.”
  • 12 May 2005: “Five months after the Asian tsunami disaster, many hundreds of containers of aid are stranded at ports in Indonesia and Sri Lanka because of bureaucratic bungling and missing paperwork. As many as 500 containers, a quarter of all aid shipped to Sri Lanka after the Boxing Day disaster, are on the dockside in Colombo.”
  • 14 May 2005: “As of yesterday morning the equivalent of 1,500 20ft containers of aid – almost a third of those that had arrived since the December 26 disaster – remained stuck at the port of Medan, the main hub for supplies heading to Aceh, the hardest hit province.”

Most importantly perhaps for Canadians is what Mark Styne wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times today, 15 May 2005:

Bolton would have no problem getting nominated as U.N. ambassador if he were more like Paul Martin. Who? Well, he’s prime minister of Canada. And in January, after the tsunami hit, he flew into Sri Lanka to pledge millions and millions and millions in aid. Not like that heartless George W. Bush back at the ranch in Texas. Why, Prime Minister Martin walked along the ravaged coast of Kalumnai and was, reported Canada’s CTV network, “visibly shaken.” President Bush might well have been shaken, but he wasn’t visible, and in the international compassion league, that’s what counts. So Martin boldly committed Canada to giving $425 million to tsunami relief. “Mr. Paul Martin Has Set A Great Example For The Rest Of The World Leaders!” raved the LankaWeb news service. You know how much of that $425 million has been spent so far? Fifty thousand dollars — Canadian. That’s about 40 grand in U.S. dollars. The rest isn’t tied up in Indonesian bureaucracy, it’s back in Ottawa. But, unlike horrible “unilateralist” America, Canada enjoys a reputation as the perfect global citizen, renowned for its commitment to the U.N. and multilateralism. And on the beaches of Sri Lanka, that and a buck’ll get you a strawberry daiquiri. Canada’s contribution to tsunami relief is objectively useless and rhetorically fraudulent.

I’ve noted a couple of weirdnesses with the tsunami relief but, if this is true, this will be explosive and, as Jay says, worth one or more Question Periods in Ottawa before, say, Thursday. I know Mark Styne is a poster boy for a certain class of crank so I will take his allegations right now with a grain or two of salt – but it is certainly time to show the accounting.

Travellers

From what I understand, Travellers are families of Scots or Irish origin, an indigenous UK minority community, which were disrupted generations ago by landlord evictions and who took up the road as a means to maintain their own continuity. I first came upon them when, for a law school paper, I was looking for community outside of Canada to describe which had first suffered legal discrimination then human rights protection. I find the fact of their existing fascinating.  Unlike, for example, the familiar story of the Highland Scots culture crushed after 1745 or the less well-known story of the Fenland people in England, whose life off the land was destroyed by industrialization from the 1600s to the 1800s, the Travellers have survived.

The Travellers are like the Roma (the people most call “gypsies”, an error from an assumption in the 1500s that they came to England from Egypt) in that they had long lived in horse drawn caravans, have come into conflict with greater society, and have much the same needs but they form a distinct Gaelic culture, compared to the complex Indian roots of the Roma.  A third group, new age travellers, has also been identified.   Here is some information on the legal issues these communities have faced from the angle of their education needs in Scotland. This is an interesting passage illustrating someting of the nature of the community:

While it was important to establish and highlight Travellers’ very specific, special or particular needs it also brought a degree of exposure and limelight which many Travellers had not sought and often did not want. They had survived many centuries of often brutal and repressive legislation, usually by keeping a low profile, a degree of separateness and by being ‘unseen’ as they went about their lives.

This current story characterizes some of the tension and attitudes they live with or trigger, depending on your point of view:

“If the Irish travellers acted like everybody else and stopped intimidating people and went through planning permission, people wouldn’t have to have such a problem with them.” Next to the Irish travellers’ site is a small row of legally-built houses belonging to Roma Gypsies who have been in the area three decades. Residents are unanimous about this smaller group of settled travellers. They are variously described as “fabulous”, “excellent people” and “never a problem”. For the Irish travellers, the local authority, Basildon council, is resolute. The council says it provides many legal traveller sites, but it does not plan to build more and expects central government to take a lead in the issue.

Local municipal governments in the UK have provided caravan parks and other housing suitable for the life of the travellers though there are still organizations needed to advocate for the recognition of the legitimacy of the lifestyle of these communties. Governments even have a challenge identifying how many there are and where the communties are located at any given time, what services they need and the extent of their rights and the obligations of greater society to address those rights.

What I find most interesting is the perception and the subjective reality, the seeming desire to perpetuate a dislocation that is no longer forced upon them, the failure to grasp the thing at the heart of the community that speaks to them of themselves. It is an excellent illustration that where discrimination occurs, it is largely based on lack of understanding, some real conflict but also and likely mainly false assumptions of the discriminator having little to do with how the community which suffers the discrimination knows itself.

The Queen’s In Town On The 19th

Matt has pointed it out. On the day of the confidence vote, the Queen will be here in the colonies. While she is at it, touring Manitoba cheese plants and all, let’s have the old dear give us a new Parliament by taking the PM’s word up if the vote goes against him. That would be sweet and disturbed at the same time – our vestigal symbol of unmerit and anti-democratic status settling the hung Parliament.

What I Want The Web To Do For Me

I was listening to an US AM radio station last night when I heard an ad for eHarmony, a dating/matching service, which got me thinking how it is too bad that it is focused on the big but (if at all effective) one-time event. We need similar tools like that on the web which actually serve on-going purposes like some of these:

  • e-Literate.com: a readers service where you put in the last 12 books you like as well some other information to get recommended reading for the next 12. No sales of books are tied to the site as flogging is not the point.
  • Ska-mazon.com: you tell the web site which ska records you have and it will tell you the ones you should look out for and where you can get them. Flogging is OK as it is pretty hard to find good ska these days.
  • e-Quaintance.com: once you have pals from undergrad who move away but you keep in touch with and once you have a family, everyone still needs a circle of some what tenuous acquaintences that you can get together with but have no need to really get to know. You can have a decent pint with them. You can talk a bit of sports with them but when they head out you can’t be sure if you have their name quite right. The service weeds out those who would be a particular irritant to a decent crowd – including you.
  • LiFix.com: It is as likely as not that the thing you would be best suited for is something you have really never come into contact with. I, for example, am convinced but for fate I would have made an excellent Bush Tucker Man or second rhythm guitarist for a major rock act….major. So with this website, people load in their lives facts offer to give them up in exchange for a better fate and see if through a succession of elaborate exchanges of place and identity, the real life you deserve – like mine of either the outback or spandex – might be lived either on a temporary but also perhaps permanent basis given filing of certain consents and health information.

Is this too much to ask of the internet which promised so much but gave us only blogs? There must be more web apps you would like to see.