The flu pandemic is here, guys!
The government of Ontario's pandemic website is here. The United States government's pandemic website is here. Take a look at this website for helpful information regarding your own individual preparations. You might also want to stock up on kimchi, just in case.
Showing posts with label Gloom and Doom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gloom and Doom. Show all posts
26 April 2009
Public Service Announcement
16 April 2009
14 April 2009
Incomprehensible
Across Canada, six federal prisons operate functioning farms. About 300 inmates take part, doing everything from milking cows to fixing equipment to producing food that’s fed to fellow offenders. This summer could be their last harvest: the government recently announced that Canada’s prison farms will be shut down over the next two years. “We determined very few ex-inmates were obtaining work in agriculture,” says Christa McGregor of the Correctional Service of Canada, adding that the CSC spends about $4 million annually on the program.Idiocy. Unmitigaged, ideological idiocy. Is anybody "obtaining work in agriculture"? Is that really the point? Is farming given so little respect by an ostensibly rural-friendly Conservative government that the skills and work ethic taught through working the land are not considered transferable?
This news is offensive in the worst way. The actions of the current government reach new heights of appaling, self-serving and short-sighted destructiveness on a weekly basis. Meanwhile, our putative PM-in-waiting is busy complimenting an erstwhile one - and it's not Trudeau.
07 April 2009
It's Tuesday! Time for the Apocalypse!
Several points in defense of the thesis that if the world isn't going to hell, it's not for lack of trying:
1. Members of the Washington Post op-ed staff - not only Bill Kristol, but Anne Applebaum too! - think that getting rid of nuclear weapons is...a waste of time? I won't bother with Kristol. Applebaum:...there is no evidence that U.S. nuclear arms reductions have ever inspired others to do the same. All of the world's more recent nuclear powers -- Israel, India, Pakistan -- acquired their weapons well after such talks began, more than 40 years ago.
Doesn't this strike you as both simplistic and a little sophistical? Yet even more bewildering:...nuclear weapons, while terrifying in the abstract, are not an immediate strategic threat to Europe or the United States.
Except if they go off accidentally - or someone gets the wrong idea. Never mind the creeping normalization of the concept of nuclear war in our cultural psyche. To criticize Obama for the most progressive stance on disarmament in the past twenty years seems laughable - as at least some WaPo columnists have pointed out.
2. Maclean's magazine's Andew Potter links to a post by Vancouver writer Terry Glavin inveighing darkly against l'affair Galloway (in case you haven't been following, a variety of perspectives can be found here, here and here). Glavin:The bigger story...is a kind of defining moment involves a phenomenon that is playing out on the same tectonic scale as the emergence of a distinctly Canadian democratic socialism in the 1930s, the Quiet Revolution in Quebec in the 1960s, and the rise of libertarian prairie populism in the 1990s. As is often the case in such upheavals, journalists are the last to notice.
Something wholly new is emerging in Canada, in all the spaces where the Left used to be, in its activist constituencies, its traditional institutions, and its lexicon. Whatever name you want to give the thing, its noticeable features include a betrayal of progressive internationalism, a pathetic weakness for conspiracy theories, and a routine apologetics for antisemitism and terror. Its outlook is generally parochial, but its global engagements tend to align with fascism’s contemporary Islamist variants, even to the point of objective support for the Taliban.
My sense is that Galloway is a smooth-talking, opportunistic rogue who adapts his popular demagogery to suit the times, and isn't worth all the fuss. I don't dismiss Glavin's broader point entirely out of hand because I have first-hand experience of the kind of attitudes he's talking about - when you're dressed down by a high-ranking person in an avowedly progressive student union for defending the free speech rights of a pro-life group (see Voltaire), you get a sense that the left can sometimes be as heedless of the means used to achieve their ends as the right. These particular battles have raged quietly at the University of Toronto and explosively at York U for at least a decade or more.
On the other hand, the very perpetuity of of these disputes makes me less concerned than Glavin that this sort of sea change is endemic on the left, or even exclusive to the left. I wish Glavin would explain what he meant by "a betrayal of progressive internationalism" -hasn't every Canadian government since Trudeau been variously guilty of that particular sin? As for apologists, they're rife it's true, on both sides of the political aisle. But the Quiet Revolution? I don't think so - in fact, cheering or fulminating against George Galloway is as good a recipe for long-term political irrelevance as I can come up with, and doing anything other than dismissing him quickly and neatly is a waste of time.
3. George Monbiot has an eye-popping piece in the Guardian about the criminally disingenuous favoritism inherent in the UK government's private finance initiatives (PFIs) or as we call them in Canada, public-private partnerships (PPPs). For a good Ontario example of what Monbiot's talking about, take a gander at this Auditor General of Ontario report on the construction of the William Osler Health Centre in Brampton - particularly page 113.
4. David Brooks declares philosophy dead.
Thoughts?
06 April 2009
The Criminalization of Poverty
As the NYT observes, it's almost Dickensian:Edwina Nowlin, a poor Michigan resident, was ordered to reimburse a juvenile detention center $104 a month for holding her 16-year-old son. When she explained to the court that she could not afford to pay, Ms. Nowlin was sent to prison. The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, which helped get her out last week after she spent 28 days behind bars, says it is seeing more people being sent to jail because they cannot make various court-ordered payments.
05 April 2009
Welcome to Asuncion! Yes, we have no bananas!
28 November 2008
Black Friday, No Matter What
Part of what's maddening about our Canadian parliamentary crisis is that in most respects, it's so damn trivial.
Particularly in relation to the actual crises blossoming like dismal, premature poinsettias. And other unpleasant happenings on this late November day.
Everybody hang on, and pray the weather doesn't get worse.
02 April 2008
Is that Imperial, or Metric?
It's been commented that my posts to Hoboken Group tend to be both overly long and overly serious. Hopefully this makes at least partial amends.
12 December 2007
Good news?
A week ago in Slate, Christopher Beam ("Have You Heard the Good News?") parodied three brief blurbs on the nonexistence of an Iranian nuclear threat (I'm willing to stick out my neck and call it that), the "ending" of the stem cell debate, and the slowing spread of the AIDS epidemic. Beam adds rosy predictions about: the end of socialism in Venezuela, the gross overstatement of genocide in Darfur, and so on.
Beyond the humor, the Iranian news is really the one bright spot in what is shaping up to be another, well, terrible month for, uhh, humanity.
From my morning headline browse:
- Of course, the new Balkan powderkeg. Explosion set for circa February 2008.
- The bombing in Algeria. "Al Qaeda" in Algeria is really nothing new, but this seems to represent at least a resurgence.
- The bombing in Beirut. They still don't have a proper government.
- The fiasco that is shaping up in Bali. I hope the governments at least understand that we basically have until 2015 to arrest greenhouse gas emissions increases.
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