Sunday, October 01, 2006

Liberal Super Weekend

The Liberal Party Super Weekend is turning out quite interesting. They have a delegate counter on their website.

Currently 335 out of 467 meetings have reported. The interesting thing is that Dion is behind Kennedy, who is neck and neck with Rae, and Ignatieff has the lead, as expected. Such a humble guy, I am not the front runner. Ha.


Anyways the losers are Findlay, Brison, Volpe and Dryden in that order. With only enough delegates each to do the right thing; lick their wounds and bow out.

However include the undeclared delegates and this group has 590 delegates. More than Kennedy or Dion. Those delgates will make a difference in the Anybody But Iggy campaign. Now who will get them? Rae? Kennedy? Dion? I suspect that Dion is out of it. The race to replace Iggy will be between Kennedy and Rae.

This could get exciting, cause its been a snore fest so far. And the position of the
three prime candidates in the lead are Pro-War, Mushy Middle and Anti-War.

Afghanistan will not be an issue come the Convention, the issue will be who can win the next election. Or failing that, the one after.

It's a lame duck Liberal Party that will arise from the ashes of the Leadership race, with a lame duck leader.

Also See

Liberal Leadership Race

Ignatieff



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Orwellian Marketing

When you have a lousy track record for safety what do you do? Fix the situation? Invest in safety? Nope you get the PR spinmeisters out and make safety your new motto for your corporate brand. Money well wasted.

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See

CN


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Infrastructure Imbalance

It's not a fiscal imbalance we face in Canada it is an infrastructure imbalance. Inquiry to probe overpass collapse Taxes on gas etc. which was supposed to go to infrastructure, roads, overpasses, etc. don't.

Taxes taken by the province and Federal governments are not passed on to municipalities, or if they are it is crudgingly. Yet it is municpal governments that are expected to provide the infrastructure.

Instead of worrying about provincial fiscal imablances lets look at the real results of the failure of all levels of government to fund our crumbling infrastructure. All the more reason to look at a new form of confederation that includes the municipalities at the table.

And no we don't need more P3's or toll roads that benefit privateers. We have the monies it's a matter of investing them in real physical infrastructure and on going maintenance


n a 2000 study done for the Canadian Federation of Municipalities by McGill University, it was identified that almost 70% of our municipal infrastructure is in need of repair. This includes roads, bridges, sewage collection and treatment, and water distribution and treatment. The study also estimates that it will take over $20 billion to rehabilitate these facilities to year 2000 standards. Between 2001 and 2003, according to their own reports, Infrastructure Canada, a federal department that you would think would address the crumbling infrastructure in Canada, paid out over $4 billion in grants. Of that $4 billion, not a single cent was allocated to fixing existing infrastructure. Of the funds, according to the report, 43% went to new public transit, 7% went to new urban roads, 12% went to tourism, 4% to expansion of broadband Internet, 22% for new highways, 11% for new water projects and 1% to new housing.editorial - Political opinion and review - Politics Canada




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Shameless Plug

Canadian Blog Awards

The
2006 Canadian Blog Awards are now open for nominations. Looking forward to all your votes.

See:

Blog Awards



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Catholics and Republicans

What does the Catholic Church and Republicans in Congress have in common?
They both cover up for pedophiles.

GOP leaders knew of Foley e-mail in '05

Pope 'led cover-up of child abuse by priests'

It is the crisis of the instrumentality of governance, authoritarian state structures like the Vatican and the American Political State are prone to psychotic paranoia over maintaining power, which means they cover up rather than admit the truth.

And the media usually acts as an abetting force as it did in the case of Foley.

Efforts to reach the boy were unsuccessful, but he told the St. Petersburg Times last November, "I thought it was very inappropriate. After the one about the picture, I decided to stop e-mailing him back." The Times didn't publish the comments until Friday.

In the U.S. it is considered child abuse for old men in political office to send sexual emails to pages. In Alberta it is ok for drunken abusive old men in political office to throw books at pages

See:

Child Abuse

Catholic Abuse


Pedophiles


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Literacy and Volunteerism Unproductive

As I said here the Harpocrites believe in compassionate conservatism, that is philanthropy and charity rather than social programs. In their slash and burn approach to cutting unproductive programs (that is Liberal initiated programs) they have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Two major programs they have cut into actually are essential one is volunteerism the other is literacy. Both have been cut across Canada. In Edmonton the cuts will mean the end of basic core programs. Core. Productive. And what does Edmonton Strathcona MP Rahim Jaffer have to say about the meanspirited ill advised cuts to these programs?

Jaffer also said he doesn't believe the funding cuts for Volunteer Alberta will affect volunteerism numbers in the province."We want to make sure the programs we're funding are actually having a positive effect, otherwise what's the use in funding those programs?"

Uh they are having a positive effect but won't have if you cut their core funding. The con-job is that the Harpocrites have not looked at what they are cutting, they just used a machete to get through the jungle of Liberal programs they love to hate.



See:

Tory Cuts For All

You Tell 'em Danny Boy

Harper



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Libertarian Communism Redux

A couple of comments on my posting of Kropotkin's 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica definition of Anarchism and Libertarian Communism decried my use of such outdated material. Why it was almost 100 hundred years old. Blow the dust off that.

So here is a more recent comment on what Libertarian Communism is and is not. It is the free association of producers and the unlimited distribution of the wealth of their labour.

But as we all do, this author too looks backwards to the origins of political economics from whence all such definitions come.


What is communism? - Anarkismo

One of the first people to critically engage with political economy and attempt to turn it around to defend the improvement of the condition of the working class and rural poor was the scion of an Anglo- Irish landowning family from West Cork by the name of William Thompson. Born in 1775 in Cork, the young Thompson had been an enthusiastic supporter of the enlightenment, republicanism and the French Revolution. He later became a leading figure in the Co-operative movement in radical opposition to Robert Owen.

Thompson moved to posit a system of "free exchange" where equal access to land and the means of production was guaranteed to all, but distribution was governed by the right to the produce of labour taking precedence over the right to subsistence. As the anarchist historian Max Nettlau noted "[Thompson's] book, however, discloses his own evolution; having started with a demand for the full product of labour as well as the regulation of distribution, he ended up with his own conversion to communism, that is to unlimited distribution".






See

Libertarian Communism




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Tortoise or Turtle


The U.S. contines to refuse to consider handing over control of the Internet to a UN style body like the International Telecommunications Union, because it might be too slow to implement rules and technology.

Well that's the excuse, the reality is of course the Americans need to maintain their monopoly over the Internet. Financial Times is reporting that the Department of Commerce is going to wait another three years before selling off the Internet (tm) (c) to ICANN the private corporate overseer of the Internet.

But irony of ironies ICANN has been accussed of being too slow to recognize new
Internet domain names in languages other than English. Which is why the EU and others want the UN to run the Internet like it does the ITU.

So which is slower the Tortoise or the Turtle.

Bottom line as I have said here before, we need the Internet to be organized based on something like the ITU which had the support of anarchists like Peter Kropotkin when it was formed.

Martin van Creveld, The Rise and Decline of the State, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999

- The foundation of the International Telegraph Union "which took place in 1865 marked the first time when states created an organization in which they themselves were members but which at the same time had a legal person of its own as well as a permanent staff and a permanent headquarters at which it could be reached." "... in 1932 the organization was transformed into the International Telecommunication Union." (p. 382)
- "Serving as a model for others to come, the ITU was followed by the International Postal Union (1874) and the International Bureau of Weights and Standards (1875)." (pp. 382-383)
- "By 1984 the number of intergovernmental organizations, which had stood at 123 in 1951 and 280 in 1972, reached 395." (p. 383)



Also See:

Internet

Monopoly

Telecos want to Monopolize the Net


NARUS Is Big Brother


The End of State Monopoly Internet


Big Brother Bush


Google Censorship China


Inclusive Internet



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Interview With A Flat Earther

As I reported here the BBC exposed Exxon Mobiles funding of Global Warming Deniers. The new flatearth lobby. The Competitive Enterprise Insititute promotes questioning the science of climate change. Unfortunately their spokespeople are less credible than those whom they question as a BBC TV interviewer caught one of them out. Something, of course, the U.S. Media fails to do.

BBC Reporter interviews Myron Ebell from the Competitive Enterprise Institute;

"Mr Ebell, you are not a scientist. It is clear that many people on your side of the fence are misrepresenting the arguments. You yourself described the government’s chief scientific advisor in this country of “knowing nothing about climate science”. He is at least a scientist. Now, do you see the problem that respectable scientists have with the sort of points made by organizations such as yours? "



See:

Global Warming



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