Ramblings about 2005....

WARNING!! I will probably use at least a few swear words here. Consider yourself warned!!

What REALLY hacked me off about 2005:: In no particular order of priority....
The shenanigans of our so called federal 'politicians':
I'm really REALLY fed to the back teeth with our government. If I had the ability to do so, I'd fire every single one of them, and rescind the cushy pensions that they seem to feel they're entitled to. And no, I don't just mean the 'ruling' party, the Liberals (or as I call them now, the 'Gliberals' - because they have a bland, slick, utterly useless answer for every question) I mean the neo-Republican-wannabe Conservative party, the Bloc-heads Quebecois, and the NDP (New Democratic Party - also stands for 'Not Destined for Power') as well. They should all be sacked and the rules should be changed to limit any MP to two terms in office. Period. No Exceptions. It is my ironclad belief that the majority of the MPs are only in parliament now because they'd be incapable of holding down a REAL job.
Ever since I started listening to the news, I wondered who these idiots thought they were in Ottawa, expostulating and pontificating on what 'the average Canadian' thinks or feels or does. What the hell do they know about it?! The fat bastards get a mostly tax-free salary that the average person would KILL to be able to make, they get a platinum-electroplated pension (gold is too pedestrian) if they survive two terms as an elected official, and then they get perks and freebies on top of all of that. And then they've got the unmitigated gall to complain that they're underpaid, and deserve more.
PROVE IT!!! Show me that you actually do something USEFUL for us normal people, and maybe I'd be inclined to believe you! Stop acting like you're better than the rest of us and deserving of goodies that the average person will never ever see, stop expensing your bullshit purchases to the Canadian taxpayer, and stop carrying on like a pack of attention-challenged 5-year-olds in the House of Commons!! I've seen flocks of chickens scratching at a barnyard shitpile look more decorous and organized than any news coverage of the so-called question period in the last 5-10 years. The petulant whining, grandstanding, and personal slurs and insults has to stop. NOW. You people are *supposed* to be our duly-elected representatives - start acting like professional adults instead of spoiled argumentative brats who need a diaper change.
Oh yeah - and the other thing that really pisses me off is that these jackasses can just vote themselves a raise if they feel like it. And they've tried it, at least twice in recent years. We should all be so lucky that we can just arbitrarily decide that we're not being paid enough and change the rules. (Our provincial political hacks are no better - they've tried to do it too, and they also suffer from the foot-in-mouth disease that infests the federal levels...). Brian Mulroney and his gang of alleged thieves raised arrogance to an art form while they were in power; Chretien managed to raise the bar, which I didn't think was possible at first. You are NOT better than the rest of us, and you sure as hell are NOT entitled to stick your hands in our pockets just because you happen to be in charge.
To return to my earlier point, I think the biggest problem is that all of the decision-making going on in Ottawa is happening in an ivory-tower environment that's cut-off from the 'every day' life of 'normal' Canadians. All the power-brokers or decision makers in Ottawa seem to be already rich through various (presumably legal) avenues - as such they have no clue what it means to have to go month to month making the rent payments and worrying about unexpected bills. Therefore they are unqualified to be able to make intelligent decisions about what will or will not affect the average Canadian.
Until we can get some intelligent people into Ottawa who have even a partial clue about what the 'average' person's life is like, we won't get anything useful out of any level of our provincial or federal governments.

The state of news media coverage in recent months:
For the sake of sanity, is there nothing that can be reported in the news lately that doesn't involve deaths, maimings, shootings, muggings, etc. etc. etc.? I mean, come on - if you believe the official data from Statistics Canada, violent crime was actually down in 2005. If you look at a smattering of recent newspaper headlines, you'd think you should be sandbagging your front door and hunkering down in a flak jacket with a rifle.
The international news coverage is as bad or worse - just look at the Iraq reporting going on. Recently at Christmas time I had the opportunity to talk to somebody who'd been serving in Iraq as part of a U.S. Marines unit stationed there for several months, and after talking to him, it became apparent that the constant barrage of bombs, death and destruction we hear about in the news from over there is not an accurate depiction of what life is like over there. Yes, it's dangerous, often thankless work - but it's also not the constant hail of bullets that the media seems to like to expound upon in gory detail.
Maybe it's just me, but in the last year or so I've really gotten turned off of, well, any major broadcast news. I find CBC and the BBC the least offensive to my particular sensibilities, but even they've leaned to the sensationalist side at times in order to make things more marketable to the public and to compete with everyone else. I'll catch the news at supper time after work if I feel like it, and then I'm done - I don't care to hear the same stories regurgitated again at 11:00 PM. OR hashed over endlessly on talk/opinion/analysis shows by legions of 'experts'. (I won't even get into the topic of TV stations that are either overt or very thinly-veiled propaganda vehicles.)
If we're living in the Age of Information, then we have reached the point where the volume of information being generated is getting to be toxic. Water is essential to plants for survival, but if you over-water a plant, it dies. I think the same thing is happening to people - some information and commentary is needed on some subjects, but the flood we're being inundated with is numbing the listeners to the point that they're either just shutting down and tuning out everything, or else getting the WRONG information out of the cascade of data.
The fact that Canada is suffering through the second phase of an election campaign right now, with all the negative attack ads, pious declarations of honesty, photo ops, flung fistfuls of mud, and endless commentary and analysis is not helping my perceptions any. It's almost as if the politicians are incapable of any kind of higher thought process the minute you stick a camera or microphone in their face. I would tell them to shelve the rhetoric and just try to be honest for 5 minutes about ANYTHING, but not only are they chronically unable to do that anymore (whatever happened to responsibility for one's actions?), the Canadian public is so cynical now that they wouldn't believe it even if you could somehow prove that they were in fact being honest. (And they did that to themselves....)
Oh yeah, and piss off with presenting absolutely everything as entertainment. I want the facts when I watch the news, damn it, not some slickly packaged pile of biased tripe. (Can you tell that I despise Infomercials? >_< )

Canada vs. The United States
The tendency of our media (and certain politicians trying to score cheap political points in an election year) to start foaming at the mouth in nationalist fervor because the U.S. criticized us over something was tiresome months ago, and it's getting damn aggravating now. Canada and the U.S. have never seen eye-to-eye on every issue, and we probably never will. Like it or not, the two countries are joined at the hip geographically and economically - although the U.S. is admittedly the 800 pound gorilla of the two.
Canada has no business criticizing the U.S. about some of their policies when our own are no better - or sometimes worse. Case in point: our not-so-esteemed Prime Ministor hectoring the U.S. government over its failure to reduce greenhouse gases at an international conference, conveniently glossing over the fact that Canada has *increased* in output to the point that we can't make the Kyoto Accord targets. Hypocrisy, thy name is Paul Martin.
That being said, the U.S. government should not expect to escape criticism when it unilaterally decides to ignore trade rulings that were not in its favour and inflict punitive fines on the so-called 'offenders', and then scream and whine about it when somebody does it right back to them. The most-often spouted tagline I heard in last year's relevant speeches from the White House is "We are a nation of free traders!", which does not stand up to scrutiny. When you look at the facts, the U.S. usually slaps tariffs on goods being imported from their trading partners regardless of rulings from trade organizations or legal entities involved in a dispute (NAFTA, anyone?), and yet demands open and unfettered access with NO tariffs on their exports. Doesn't sound very free to me. Hypocrisy, thy name is also George Bush.
All the parties involved need to shut up, step back, sit down, and think things over very carefully. The US-bashing that seems to be in vogue right now in our current federal election needs to end now, and the U.S. administration needs to keep its loose change out of our affairs until after the election is over. (IMO, even though I happen to agree with some of what the U.S. Ambassador had to say recently, publicly threatening reprisals over perceived slights is the act of a petulant schoolyard bully. It is also politically maladroit to do so right now because it's guaranteed that somebody's going to try and make political hay of it during an election.)

More to follow later...: I'm really REALLY fed to the back teeth with our government. If I had the ability to do so, I'd fire every single one of them, and rescind the cushy pensions that they seem to feel they're entitled to. And no, I don't just mean the 'ruling' party, the Liberals (or as I call them now, the 'Gliberals' - because they have a bland, slick, utterly useless answer for every question) I mean the neo-Republican-wannabe Conservative party, the Bloc-heads Quebecois, and the NDP (New Democratic Party - also stands for 'Not Destined for Power') as well. They should all be sacked and the rules should be changed to limit any MP to two terms in office. Period. No Exceptions. It is my ironclad belief that the majority of the MPs are only in parliament now because they'd be incapable of holding down a REAL job.
Ever since I started listening to the news, I wondered who these idiots thought they were in Ottawa, expostulating and pontificating on what 'the average Canadian' thinks or feels or does. What the hell do they know about it?! The fat bastards get a mostly tax-free salary that the average person would KILL to be able to make, they get a platinum-electroplated pension (gold is too pedestrian) if they survive two terms as an elected official, and then they get perks and freebies on top of all of that. And then they've got the unmitigated gall to complain that they're underpaid, and deserve more.
PROVE IT!!! Show me that you actually do something USEFUL for us normal people, and maybe I'd be inclined to believe you! Stop acting like you're better than the rest of us and deserving of goodies that the average person will never ever see, stop expensing your bullshit purchases to the Canadian taxpayer, and stop carrying on like a pack of attention-challenged 5-year-olds in the House of Commons!! I've seen flocks of chickens scratching at a barnyard shitpile look more decorous and organized than any news coverage of the so-called question period in the last 5-10 years. The petulant whining, grandstanding, and personal slurs and insults has to stop. NOW. You people are *supposed* to be our duly-elected representatives - start acting like professional adults instead of spoiled argumentative brats who need a diaper change.
Oh yeah - and the other thing that really pisses me off is that these jackasses can just vote themselves a raise if they feel like it. And they've tried it, at least twice in recent years. We should all be so lucky that we can just arbitrarily decide that we're not being paid enough and change the rules. (Our provincial political hacks are no better - they've tried to do it too, and they also suffer from the foot-in-mouth disease that infests the federal levels...). Brian Mulroney and his gang of alleged thieves raised arrogance to an art form while they were in power; Chretien managed to raise the bar, which I didn't think was possible at first. You are NOT better than the rest of us, and you sure as hell are NOT entitled to stick your hands in our pockets just because you happen to be in charge.
To return to my earlier point, I think the biggest problem is that all of the decision-making going on in Ottawa is happening in an ivory-tower environment that's cut-off from the 'every day' life of 'normal' Canadians. All the power-brokers or decision makers in Ottawa seem to be already rich through various (presumably legal) avenues - as such they have no clue what it means to have to go month to month making the rent payments and worrying about unexpected bills. Therefore they are unqualified to be able to make intelligent decisions about what will or will not affect the average Canadian.
Until we can get some intelligent people into Ottawa who have even a partial clue about what the 'average' person's life is like, we won't get anything useful out of any level of our provincial or federal governments.
The state of news media coverage in recent months:
For the sake of sanity, is there nothing that can be reported in the news lately that doesn't involve deaths, maimings, shootings, muggings, etc. etc. etc.? I mean, come on - if you believe the official data from Statistics Canada, violent crime was actually down in 2005. If you look at a smattering of recent newspaper headlines, you'd think you should be sandbagging your front door and hunkering down in a flak jacket with a rifle.
The international news coverage is as bad or worse - just look at the Iraq reporting going on. Recently at Christmas time I had the opportunity to talk to somebody who'd been serving in Iraq as part of a U.S. Marines unit stationed there for several months, and after talking to him, it became apparent that the constant barrage of bombs, death and destruction we hear about in the news from over there is not an accurate depiction of what life is like over there. Yes, it's dangerous, often thankless work - but it's also not the constant hail of bullets that the media seems to like to expound upon in gory detail.
Maybe it's just me, but in the last year or so I've really gotten turned off of, well, any major broadcast news. I find CBC and the BBC the least offensive to my particular sensibilities, but even they've leaned to the sensationalist side at times in order to make things more marketable to the public and to compete with everyone else. I'll catch the news at supper time after work if I feel like it, and then I'm done - I don't care to hear the same stories regurgitated again at 11:00 PM. OR hashed over endlessly on talk/opinion/analysis shows by legions of 'experts'. (I won't even get into the topic of TV stations that are either overt or very thinly-veiled propaganda vehicles.)
If we're living in the Age of Information, then we have reached the point where the volume of information being generated is getting to be toxic. Water is essential to plants for survival, but if you over-water a plant, it dies. I think the same thing is happening to people - some information and commentary is needed on some subjects, but the flood we're being inundated with is numbing the listeners to the point that they're either just shutting down and tuning out everything, or else getting the WRONG information out of the cascade of data.
The fact that Canada is suffering through the second phase of an election campaign right now, with all the negative attack ads, pious declarations of honesty, photo ops, flung fistfuls of mud, and endless commentary and analysis is not helping my perceptions any. It's almost as if the politicians are incapable of any kind of higher thought process the minute you stick a camera or microphone in their face. I would tell them to shelve the rhetoric and just try to be honest for 5 minutes about ANYTHING, but not only are they chronically unable to do that anymore (whatever happened to responsibility for one's actions?), the Canadian public is so cynical now that they wouldn't believe it even if you could somehow prove that they were in fact being honest. (And they did that to themselves....)
Oh yeah, and piss off with presenting absolutely everything as entertainment. I want the facts when I watch the news, damn it, not some slickly packaged pile of biased tripe. (Can you tell that I despise Infomercials? >_< )

Canada vs. The United States
The tendency of our media (and certain politicians trying to score cheap political points in an election year) to start foaming at the mouth in nationalist fervor because the U.S. criticized us over something was tiresome months ago, and it's getting damn aggravating now. Canada and the U.S. have never seen eye-to-eye on every issue, and we probably never will. Like it or not, the two countries are joined at the hip geographically and economically - although the U.S. is admittedly the 800 pound gorilla of the two.
Canada has no business criticizing the U.S. about some of their policies when our own are no better - or sometimes worse. Case in point: our not-so-esteemed Prime Ministor hectoring the U.S. government over its failure to reduce greenhouse gases at an international conference, conveniently glossing over the fact that Canada has *increased* in output to the point that we can't make the Kyoto Accord targets. Hypocrisy, thy name is Paul Martin.
That being said, the U.S. government should not expect to escape criticism when it unilaterally decides to ignore trade rulings that were not in its favour and inflict punitive fines on the so-called 'offenders', and then scream and whine about it when somebody does it right back to them. The most-often spouted tagline I heard in last year's relevant speeches from the White House is "We are a nation of free traders!", which does not stand up to scrutiny. When you look at the facts, the U.S. usually slaps tariffs on goods being imported from their trading partners regardless of rulings from trade organizations or legal entities involved in a dispute (NAFTA, anyone?), and yet demands open and unfettered access with NO tariffs on their exports. Doesn't sound very free to me. Hypocrisy, thy name is also George Bush.
All the parties involved need to shut up, step back, sit down, and think things over very carefully. The US-bashing that seems to be in vogue right now in our current federal election needs to end now, and the U.S. administration needs to keep its loose change out of our affairs until after the election is over. (IMO, even though I happen to agree with some of what the U.S. Ambassador had to say recently, publicly threatening reprisals over perceived slights is the act of a petulant schoolyard bully. It is also politically maladroit to do so right now because it's guaranteed that somebody's going to try and make political hay of it during an election.)

More to follow later...: For the sake of sanity, is there nothing that can be reported in the news lately that doesn't involve deaths, maimings, shootings, muggings, etc. etc. etc.? I mean, come on - if you believe the official data from Statistics Canada, violent crime was actually down in 2005. If you look at a smattering of recent newspaper headlines, you'd think you should be sandbagging your front door and hunkering down in a flak jacket with a rifle.
The international news coverage is as bad or worse - just look at the Iraq reporting going on. Recently at Christmas time I had the opportunity to talk to somebody who'd been serving in Iraq as part of a U.S. Marines unit stationed there for several months, and after talking to him, it became apparent that the constant barrage of bombs, death and destruction we hear about in the news from over there is not an accurate depiction of what life is like over there. Yes, it's dangerous, often thankless work - but it's also not the constant hail of bullets that the media seems to like to expound upon in gory detail.
Maybe it's just me, but in the last year or so I've really gotten turned off of, well, any major broadcast news. I find CBC and the BBC the least offensive to my particular sensibilities, but even they've leaned to the sensationalist side at times in order to make things more marketable to the public and to compete with everyone else. I'll catch the news at supper time after work if I feel like it, and then I'm done - I don't care to hear the same stories regurgitated again at 11:00 PM. OR hashed over endlessly on talk/opinion/analysis shows by legions of 'experts'. (I won't even get into the topic of TV stations that are either overt or very thinly-veiled propaganda vehicles.)
If we're living in the Age of Information, then we have reached the point where the volume of information being generated is getting to be toxic. Water is essential to plants for survival, but if you over-water a plant, it dies. I think the same thing is happening to people - some information and commentary is needed on some subjects, but the flood we're being inundated with is numbing the listeners to the point that they're either just shutting down and tuning out everything, or else getting the WRONG information out of the cascade of data.
The fact that Canada is suffering through the second phase of an election campaign right now, with all the negative attack ads, pious declarations of honesty, photo ops, flung fistfuls of mud, and endless commentary and analysis is not helping my perceptions any. It's almost as if the politicians are incapable of any kind of higher thought process the minute you stick a camera or microphone in their face. I would tell them to shelve the rhetoric and just try to be honest for 5 minutes about ANYTHING, but not only are they chronically unable to do that anymore (whatever happened to responsibility for one's actions?), the Canadian public is so cynical now that they wouldn't believe it even if you could somehow prove that they were in fact being honest. (And they did that to themselves....)
Oh yeah, and piss off with presenting absolutely everything as entertainment. I want the facts when I watch the news, damn it, not some slickly packaged pile of biased tripe. (Can you tell that I despise Infomercials? >_< )
Canada vs. The United States
The tendency of our media (and certain politicians trying to score cheap political points in an election year) to start foaming at the mouth in nationalist fervor because the U.S. criticized us over something was tiresome months ago, and it's getting damn aggravating now. Canada and the U.S. have never seen eye-to-eye on every issue, and we probably never will. Like it or not, the two countries are joined at the hip geographically and economically - although the U.S. is admittedly the 800 pound gorilla of the two.
Canada has no business criticizing the U.S. about some of their policies when our own are no better - or sometimes worse. Case in point: our not-so-esteemed Prime Ministor hectoring the U.S. government over its failure to reduce greenhouse gases at an international conference, conveniently glossing over the fact that Canada has *increased* in output to the point that we can't make the Kyoto Accord targets. Hypocrisy, thy name is Paul Martin.
That being said, the U.S. government should not expect to escape criticism when it unilaterally decides to ignore trade rulings that were not in its favour and inflict punitive fines on the so-called 'offenders', and then scream and whine about it when somebody does it right back to them. The most-often spouted tagline I heard in last year's relevant speeches from the White House is "We are a nation of free traders!", which does not stand up to scrutiny. When you look at the facts, the U.S. usually slaps tariffs on goods being imported from their trading partners regardless of rulings from trade organizations or legal entities involved in a dispute (NAFTA, anyone?), and yet demands open and unfettered access with NO tariffs on their exports. Doesn't sound very free to me. Hypocrisy, thy name is also George Bush.
All the parties involved need to shut up, step back, sit down, and think things over very carefully. The US-bashing that seems to be in vogue right now in our current federal election needs to end now, and the U.S. administration needs to keep its loose change out of our affairs until after the election is over. (IMO, even though I happen to agree with some of what the U.S. Ambassador had to say recently, publicly threatening reprisals over perceived slights is the act of a petulant schoolyard bully. It is also politically maladroit to do so right now because it's guaranteed that somebody's going to try and make political hay of it during an election.)

More to follow later...: The tendency of our media (and certain politicians trying to score cheap political points in an election year) to start foaming at the mouth in nationalist fervor because the U.S. criticized us over something was tiresome months ago, and it's getting damn aggravating now. Canada and the U.S. have never seen eye-to-eye on every issue, and we probably never will. Like it or not, the two countries are joined at the hip geographically and economically - although the U.S. is admittedly the 800 pound gorilla of the two.
Canada has no business criticizing the U.S. about some of their policies when our own are no better - or sometimes worse. Case in point: our not-so-esteemed Prime Ministor hectoring the U.S. government over its failure to reduce greenhouse gases at an international conference, conveniently glossing over the fact that Canada has *increased* in output to the point that we can't make the Kyoto Accord targets. Hypocrisy, thy name is Paul Martin.
That being said, the U.S. government should not expect to escape criticism when it unilaterally decides to ignore trade rulings that were not in its favour and inflict punitive fines on the so-called 'offenders', and then scream and whine about it when somebody does it right back to them. The most-often spouted tagline I heard in last year's relevant speeches from the White House is "We are a nation of free traders!", which does not stand up to scrutiny. When you look at the facts, the U.S. usually slaps tariffs on goods being imported from their trading partners regardless of rulings from trade organizations or legal entities involved in a dispute (NAFTA, anyone?), and yet demands open and unfettered access with NO tariffs on their exports. Doesn't sound very free to me. Hypocrisy, thy name is also George Bush.
All the parties involved need to shut up, step back, sit down, and think things over very carefully. The US-bashing that seems to be in vogue right now in our current federal election needs to end now, and the U.S. administration needs to keep its loose change out of our affairs until after the election is over. (IMO, even though I happen to agree with some of what the U.S. Ambassador had to say recently, publicly threatening reprisals over perceived slights is the act of a petulant schoolyard bully. It is also politically maladroit to do so right now because it's guaranteed that somebody's going to try and make political hay of it during an election.)
More to follow later...

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