The Return of the Muldoon.

Lyin' Brian emerges from under his rock to smarmily declare that an underfunded, over-stretched, demoralized armed forces, a draconian Stalinist security bill that will have Canadians reporting on their fellow citizens for not revering Don Cherry enough and the highest federal debt that Canada has ever seen are the advantages Harper carries into the next election.

Well, not in those exact words but that's what it comes down to.

Go somewhere and expire Brian. Preferably alone. 

Harper Chooses To Remain in the Closet

The coward has again repeated that he will not participate in a national English language leader's debate.

It  appears he really, really likes the closet.

Now we get to see if the media consortium or the other national leaders have any courage left.

So Long, Dave. Thanks For The Laughter. Watch Your Step.

I confess that I will miss David Letterman even though I have not been anything close to a faithful watcher for many years.

However, there was a stretch of time in the 80's when I was away from home quite a bit. On tour or working in another city and after the show was over and a late night meal was found getting back to the hotel to watch Letterman and wind down the night was what was done.

Laughter before sleep. Better than drugs.

Last night, his penultimate night, I had to watch. I needed to see what Bill Murray would conjure of course but really it was to see Dylan. Bob Dylan. Not that other one.

I wondered what he might do. Would he do "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" perhaps, with a wink and a nod  to the desk? 

Maybe an updated version of License to Kill, which he sang the first time he appeared on the show back in '84.

Nope. He sang a song not even his own, The Night We Called It a Day, off his new album of American jazz and pop standards. He's always been Bob Dylan, of course, and last night he seemed even more so what with the flock of ducks that seemed to inhabit his body when he didn't have a good grip on the mike stand.

Surreal.

I think I'll choose to remember him for other things.

Like this.

I'll watch Letterman's last show tonight too. It will be bittersweet as so much of life so often is. We're the same age now, he and I.

I will miss knowing that I can always tune in to a Letterman show for a laugh. The new guys are just so reverential amid the giggling and fawning.

The Accidental Explainer Strikes

Now everything makes sense. 

Canada's National Newspaper

Elizabeth Renzetti of The Globe and Mail asks "Why are we trading liberty for security?"

In return I ask her:

Why are you still working for the corporate shill Phillip Crawley? 

As far as I'm concerned, Ms. Renzetti, you don't have the right to ask the question let alone attempt any of the facile answers that would be acceptable to the man who signs your paycheque.  

No one who works for the Globe and Mail, in my opinion, has the moral right to ask a question such as that. All of you have sold that right. Your integrity and credibility have a dollar sign attached to them.  None of you own a high ground upon which to ask that question. You are all compromised. 

You're an active participant in Canada's ongoing trading of liberty for security by virtue of being in the pay of one of Harper's most ardent cheer leaders. You are helping to enable the incremental and accelerating deconstruction of what once was one of the most admired and respected nations on earth. You are assisting in the creation of a new proto-fascist state where elections are suspect, citizens rights are not respected and science and learning are devalued in order to accommodate unmoderated corporate avarice. 

One must assume you all enjoy life on your knees . 

Spread this around.

It's "as if in 2005 we would have erased retroactively all of the audits that Sheila Fraser did in the sponsorship scandal" or "if there are allegations of electoral fraud, we would decide to pass a law to retroactively eliminate and erase all investigations," she explained.

Clark Demonstrates Her Respect

This toxic bitch has no respect or regard for what you or I or anyone else wants.

She wants what she wants because she wants it and you can go pound sand.

If it suits her narcissistic purposes to announce a death in your family she doesn't care if you specifically request that she not do it - she's going to do it anyway.

Surely there is a better use for the oxygen she uses up.

In Another Time This Would Have Made Me Very Happy

"Canada's left-leaning New Democratic Party (NDP), which stormed to victory in a provincial election in conservative Alberta this month, has vaulted from third to first place in national support, a public opinion poll showed on Thursday."

Now it just confirms for me that we're almost certainly on our way to another 5 years of the Harperium.

Ethics and Principles

Lying awake in the night can be fertile ground.

Last night, for instance, lying awake, I found myself reflecting on the accelerating disappearance of ethics and principles in politics.

I realized that, in this age of the market, ethics and principles too are merely commodities to be bought, sold and traded.

Thus the ease with which Layton could sell decades of CCF and NDP principle as the cost of more seats in Parliament.

The squinty eyed comfort of MacKay selling out the Progressive Conservative Party and caucus in exchange for the soul destroying illusion of power.

The toothsome credulity of mini-Trudeau as he accedes to the proto-fascism of Bill C51 in exchange for what he and his silent henchmen perceive to be an electoral defence strategy.

All examples of ethics and principles being consumed as commodities.

I offer no examples of Harper because Harper has neither ethics nor principles of his own to trade or sell. All he is capable of is stealing the principles of others and then debasing them as though they were his own.

Eventually I slept again.

Omar Khadr

Omar Khadr.

I hope he can remain out of confinement. I hope the US justice system has returned sufficiently to it's senses that he doesn't have to be returned to a cell. I hope he can be free.

He's not free now of course, irrespective of the bigoted bleating of various Harperian asshats. Even irrespective of his own misapprehension of his state. One day but not yet.

What concerns me most about his immediate  future, and by extension, yours and mine, is that  Harper will simply instruct his state police to charge into his lawyers home in full military gear under cover of night and re-take or kill him and possibly anyone who witnesses their action. They may even have enough confidence in their invulnerability to do it in broad daylight. Paulson has given me no reason to think he wouldn't simply 'follow orders' mindlessly.

Between Harper's mindless idiot followers, the apathetic cud chewing majority of the Canadian herd  and the Harperian corporate press there probably wouldn't be much more than a 5 day wonder of a stink raised. The deeper shame would be that in certain circles of the Canadian elite and press the action would be praised.

Cynical? You bet I am.

Prime Minister Bigot

 “Mr. Harper is a bigot. Mr. Harper doesn't like Muslims. He wants to prove he’s tough on crime so who does he pick on? A 15-year-old boy.”

Omar Khadr's lawyer spoke these words outside an Edmonton courthouse shortly after Mr. Khadr was released on bail. 

Say it loud and say it often. 

Canada has a bigot for a Prime Minister, with a bigoted cabinet, supported by bigoted voters. 

Don't it make you, proud. 

Let the Whining Begin

"Left turn in Canada's oil-rich Alberta leaves investors reeling"

This is an actual Reuters headline this morning. 

And what does this "reeling" look like. 

Less than 1.5 percentage points. 

Normal fluctuation in other words. 

There will be lots of this kind of fear mongering in the coming days. Get used to it. 

The corporate media will do it's level best to have you believe that the NDP government is a worse business partner than the government of China and their petroleum arm Petro-China which already owns majority control of the province's oil fields. 

Every time some corporate toadie whinges at you about this disaster in Alberta ask them if they think Petro-China is afraid of Rachel Notley and the Alberta NDP? Cause that's who owns the oil fields.

It's OK with them that non-Canadians own a majority of the oil sands production and that the lion's share of the profits go overseas but it's not OK with them that Canadians who live in Alberta have elected a government other than their preference. 

They can go fuck themselves. 

Alberta Liberation

Congratulations must be offered to Alberta's new Premier Designate Rachel Notley and her NDP colleagues for their astonishing landslide victory in my birth province.

For the first time in over 4 decades someone other than an Alberta Progressive Conservative politician is going to be able to see the books. Hhhhmmmmmmm....

Call me cynical but it wouldn't surprise me in the least if there aren't more than a few politicians, former as well as current, along with some technocrats and bureaucrats who are thoughtfully fingering their passports this morning and wondering...wondering...wondering...

It will be fascinating to observe the coming months as we learn more about her and her caucus.

It will be equally fascinating to watch the corporate backlash begin. It will probably be very subtle, at least to begin with, because the mandate is so overwhelmingly clear. I expect the discussions about what the backlash would be and how it would be rolled out began several weeks ago and continued late into last night while the scotch flowed and the flop sweat stank.

Former Premier and Harper cabinet minister Jim Prentice resigned his leadership and his just won seat before the night was even over. His days in the public eye are now over for ever.

It isn't likely that this surge presages a similar phenomenon come the next federal election. Provincial results and federal results are almost never reflections of one another - they're mirror images more often.

But then again a month ago no one would have believed the NDP would be elected to an overwhelming majority in Alberta while reducing the party of Lougheed and Klein to a third place rump.

All bets may be off. We'll just have to wait and see.

On a related note - I'm sure the pollsters are relieved they're not throwing up in the bathroom again.

Canada's Terrorist Government

Justice Myra Bielby of the Alberta Court of Appeal has postponed her decision till Thursday on whether to release Omar Khadr . 

She needs to weigh the threats made against her family. 

By the Harper government. 

The Academe Enigma

OK, now that the pleasantries are out of the way...

What's the deal with 20th century post-secondary educational institutions?

How likely is it the masters of the universe who brought us the 2008 global financial crisis were all uneducated? Or that they were ignorant of the possible consequences of their deceitful machinations? Or that they had been required to attend and pass courses on ethics while they gathered the credits they needed to be granted a licence to lie, cheat and steal?

Even more problematically, how probable might it be that entire cohorts of science and engineering graduates were never once exposed to the science of anthropogenic climate change? It would appear that thousands upon thousands of them were not. They're plugging away for the petroleum industry. Do you think they're not aware that they're ushering in a global catastrophe? Or perhaps the engineering school they went to taught them that the results of their work should not be included in their considerations.

There certainly seems to be something amiss when the biosphere of earth is facing near term devastation, perhaps total, while the most highly educated human population the world has ever seen are in charge.

Perhaps it's specialization and compartmentalization that's the problem. Perhaps humanity is simply devolving into a species of sociopaths or perhaps advanced educational institutions are by their nature themselves sociopathic and thus their progeny are as well.

I don't know. I'm just throwing stuff at the wall.

But it does seem contradictory that we're racing toward the cliff's edge at the urging of the most highly educated people the world has ever produced. Sure there are also those who are urging us to slow down, step back, stop the self destructive cycle - and they're effectively drowned out by the others. We're actually gaining momentum in our rush to oblivion.

Does anyone know if higher academia is trying to address this conundrum. I think they ought to be. It's their graduates who are leading us to our doom.

A pleasant thought for a sunny Monday on a hot planet.

So here it is, all these years later, and I'm blogging on The Beav again.

How many years you say?

Seven years, I respond.

It felt like a waste of time then. Harper was the new saviour, the wise men and women of the right were seemingly everywhere ascendant.

The country was going to be the great bastion of neo-conservatism and be a beacon unto the world.

Canada was going to be, as before, the war fighting world power we once were and this time with the added oomph and zowieness of being a world leader in petroleum production too.

The future was nothing but roses.

Except for the part that was shit. Which was the greater part and completely overwhelmed the scent of the roses, which weren't really there at all.

So now where are we?

We're fucked is where we are. The Mulcair Party and the Trudeau Party are both led by narcissistic demagogues more alike than different than the demagogue leading the Harperian Party. The leader of the Green Party, Elizabeth May, makes too much sense so there will have to be a concerted effort to exclude her from all events involving the other three - disregard the toothsome bleating of the haircut candidate, it's just that he opens his mouth and stuff comes out. As hard as his handlers work to try and fix it or ameliorate it it remains a feature of the boy who would be king. Mulcair at least has the capacity to think and plan and execute. Somewhat like Tony Blair, in that way, although Tony's been able to do a lot more executin' than has our Tom o' Bedlam.

And Harper? Well...that diet of raw kitten Laureen has the family on has really worked out for him.

Back on September 25, 2008 this was one of my last posts on The Beav. I'm just going to copy and paste. I don't feel any different today than I did then, when I stopped blogging regularly.

But now I'm back and I'm still mad as hell.

Thursday, September 25, 2008

Pissed Off. Oh Yes!

How many of you will be pissed off at me if I remind you what I said back onSeptember 9 ?

All of you?

OK. Fine with me. I didn't set out ten years ago to make anybody like me.

I want you to imagine what Canada is going to look like in four years.

If imagination is a faculty you still have and if four years isn't too long a time period for your attention span.

That's right, good for you, that's contempt speaking.

It's difficult for me to accept that so many Canadians I've been reading and listening to over the last five or six years have so little appreciation of what's at stake that they're willing to cocoon themselves within their habitual, comfortable partisan zones and completely ignore the larger stakes.

Try as I might I can't tune out the contempt I've come to feel for you hard and fast partisans of the Liberals, NDP or Green. You know who you are. Oh, yes you do.

I want you to know, I mean I really, really want you to get it in the acid of your disintegrating gut, that I hold you in just as much contempt as I hold Conservatives. I will be blaming you just as much as I will be blaming Harper and his gang for what is going to happen to this country over the next four to eight years.

Don't bother to try and defend yourselves, to explain your reasons, yourcommitments, your histories.

I don't care.

I only care about Canada.

You don't.

I repeat, you don't care about Canada.

You care about your partisan affiliation and you identify that partisanship as being the same as caring about Canada.

But it's not the same thing. I think deep down you know that too.

I believe you don't have effective boundary definitions any more. You simply don't know that Canada is a larger phenomenon that your party of choice.

It's a derangement syndrome.

You're in need of assistance.

But you won't be getting it from me.

From me you'll only be getting contempt.

So shut up and revel in what you've wrought.

I trust each ox Harper gores will be your special pet and your guts will twist in the wind with each thrust.

I hope I've pissed you off.