Picture of the day: Tory Skytrain Ads

NationalNewsWatch had a story up this morning about Tory ads on Go Trains in Toronto – $42,000 to promote the economic action plan.

So it wasn’t a surprise to see this on the way to work:

Two of the cars idling at the station had those ads.

Translink’s advertising is run by a company called ‘Lamar Transit Advertising’.  The ad you see in the picture is called a ‘Sky Wrap’, and cost $5,150 per car.  So sitting at that one station was at least $10,000.

Absolutely pointless – though it does kind of lead to an interesting comparisson.  Walk anywhere in Metro Vancouver, and within 2 or 3 blocks you’ll find a sign for the provincial stimulus plan – one of those “Every Job Counts” signs*.  The difference is, the provincial sign is on an actual construction site, or new homeless shelter, rebuilt seawall etc…  etc …

Can’t say I’ve seen a federal stimulus sign on anything other than a billboard, or in this case, a Skytrain.

Canada’s Top 25 Blogs October, 2009

… will not be appearing.

I’m too busy.  The system needs tinkering and I don’t have a minute to do it.  I’ve got a new business, it makes money, it’s fun, I just opened our downtown office etc… etc…

If I have a spare minute, I try and spend it at home with Cathy, catching up with old friends, or more likely than anything else – drumming up new business.

So until I do eventually find some time (or interest) to re-launch that list thing – it will be on indeffinite hiatus.  If you are wondering who was on the list for October – I don’t know.

Picture of the day: drug deal on Google Street View – Vancouver

Google picked what was easily the most boring day in the history of the city to do their street view photos.  There are some good views of the city – like this one of West Vancouver from the Lions Gate – but no prostitutes on the streets (excepting these Liberal candidates at a pr event), no heroin shooting galleries, most importantly, no one on the beaches.  The only “gem” I was able to find was this one photo of a drug deal behind the library at Main and Hastings (in the back by the pole).

If you’ve never been to Vancouver’s downtown eastside, now’s your chance to take a tour.  Just click on the photo:

A private word from the ‘Old Duff’

I’ve heard it said that politicians are like shit.  I.e. – a small minority of people are fascinated by them, but the vast majority would like to flush them down the toilet and never see them again.

When it comes to senators, I’m with the majority.

I don’t want to see those hacks, I don’t want to hear them, and most of all, I don’t want them popping up – Mr Hankey like – and saying ‘hiddey-ho’.

Case in point:

The new personalized Tory ads staring ‘The Old Duff’ (Senator Mike Duffy) are so totally creepy and cringe inducing.  First off, isn’t the party suppossed to be embarassed by the appointed senators?  As part of the disaffected base, I know I don’t like to be reminded that these people exist.  Second, the Romper Room antics of personalized messages is c-r-e-e-p-y.  Don’t you remember how all those Jewish people got freaked out when the PM sent them personalized Hannukkah cards?  Finally, ‘the Old Duff’?  Are you sh*tting me?  The Old Duff?  What were you* thinking?

As I’ve said before, death is too good for the Tory tech team.  Their lame pooping penguins, their yabbering senators and their embarassing party homepage.  You people suck so much.

You can see the full ad here.

[* FYI - I mean 'you' the idiot communications team, not 'you' the Senator, who had my favourite politics show.]

Yes, you can get drunk off of Purell

There was this series on the local CBC radio this week about ‘Concrete Indians’ or ‘Urban Indians’, something like that.  Indians who live in cities.  And they were asking why it is that natives move to town rather than stay on reserve.

Why?  Here’s a classic example of why – Yesterday, Health Canada admitted delaying delivery of Purell to swine-flu-ravaged native reserves because they were worried that the locals might drink it.

It’s something straight out of your (actually ‘my’) cracker aunt’s mouth.

Now the basic facts are true, you can get wrecked off of Purell – but it’s a safe drunk, or at least safer than huffing gasoline. And no doubt people on northern reserves want to drink – bad enough that it’s Manitoba, but tack on ‘northern’, ‘rural’, and ‘Indian reserve’ to the description and who could blame them?

But the premises are all wrong, first that hand sanitizer is going to do anything on an over-crowded reserve.  If swine flu were at the same rates here in the city as it is on the reserve, they wouldn’t be handing out purell, they’d be marching Hazmat teams down the streets and shouting at you to stay in your homes.

Take one reserve as an example :  Back on June 5th Manitoba’s St Theresa Point Reserve (pop. 2,700) had ‘over 100′ people infected with Swine Flu.  As of last week 27 of those people were in hospital.  What are the numbers of total infected now? I don’t think it would be far-fetched to imagine at least 10% of the population is down with swine flu (FYI: which would mean that there are more cases of Swine Flu on that single reserve than there are in all of British Columbia*).

If those numbers were extrapolated to Toronto, that would mean half a million people at home sick, 50,000 in hospitals.  In such a situation they wouldn’t just be handing out hand sanitizer (and they certainly wouldn’t be holding it back for fear of drunk Scarberians).  You see what I mean about the hazmat teams?

If they were anyone but Indians, the authorities would have panicked already and sent in troops.  I do mean that literally.  If it’s as bad as they say, they need federal soldiers, army doctors.  This is the kind of health care availability they have on St. Theresa Point – this is how they plan to deal with an epidemic:

• Doctor   -   Once a week (3days)
• Dentist   -  Once a week (3days)
• Optometrist   -  Once a year
• Pediatrician   -  Quarterly
• Psychologist   -  Every 2 weeks

I don’t put all of that on Indian Affairs, the chiefs are probably most to blame.  I have nothing in particular to base that on, but when in doubt, blame the chief.

Back to the point – the second faulty premise is that it’s any of the government’s business that citizens want to get drunk in the first place.

That second thing, that’s the main ‘livability’ problem with reserves, everyone’s always in your business.

St Theresa Point was in the news again this week because of a gang trial.  A bunch of gang-bangers murdered another gangster and one of them got sent up for 5 months.  The sentence is neither here nor there, or I guess it is, but that’s a whole other issue.  The point though is that one of the terms of his sentence is that the convicted murderer can’t return to his hometown ‘without the permission of the band chief‘. Think of how corrupting it must be to have that kind of power.  What other political figure in Canada has the power to exile citizens?

As a citizen, how could you want to live like that?  It’s like a post-nuclear dystopia – you live in a wasteland, you’ve got to deal with plagues (if it’s not swine flu, it’s tuberculosis), gang-bangers, you’ve got none of your basic needs taken care of, you get pushed around by an all powerful Chief, you’ve got to deal with the mother of all nanny states – Indian affairs – and on top of it you’ve got boredom.

The question the CBC should be asking, is why anyone is still on reserve.

Waking up Canadian – the video

cringe inducing …

De-baptisms spread to Canada

Technically – I’m a born-again Christian (circa age 7), a Sunni Muslim (drunken shahadah drinking game in an expat bar in Cairo), some sort of Salish animist, and I may still be on the Trotskyist mailing list.

At the end of the day though, I’m an athiest, an objectivist.  Born and raised as such too.  That should be enough.

The christian thing?  What do I care, the church burned down.  The muslim thing?  Allah would need beer goggles to accept that conversion.  And the rest?  Screw ‘em.  I can’t pretend to have respect for any of it.  And that’s the atheist party line.  Religion is a joke, we laugh at it.  I’m holding a Passover Seder this week for god’s sake.  The main dish is pork with a cream sauce.

If some Muslim thinks I’m part of the tribe because I slurred some ‘rasuuls’ over a pint of Sakkara lager, then the joke’s on them.

Why go through all the bother of begging these illegitimate fools to give me ‘backsies’ and de-christianise myself, or de-nativise etc… I couldn’t think of anything more Catholic.

But that’s what British athiests are doing – and now the church is obliging:

The Diocese of Croydon is where John Hunt went to demand that his name be removed from the baptismal records. The Archdeacon told him that if he got a suitable form of words from the National Secular Society and put it as an advertisement in the London Gazette, they would make the necessary annotation in the baptismal records. They wouldn’t remove his name entirely, they said, arguing that it was the record of an historical event and therefore could not be changed.

John Hunt duly put the advertisement in the London Gazette, sent a copy to the diocese and waited for confirmation that his record had been amended to show that he was no longer connected with a Church of which he heartily disapproved.

That confirmation didn’t come until the NSS went public with his story. Now Mr Hunt has received a communication from the Diocese of Croydon — where the original sprinkling was done — reading:

“I have spoken to the Archdeacon of Croydon and he has undertaken, in this particular case, to have it cross referenced with the baptismal entry and pasted into the back fly-leaf of the relevant register at St. Jude’s Church.”

So now John Hunt is the first person in Britain to be officially debaptised by the Church of England. But the “in this particular case” rider in the Church message seems to suggest that he might also be the last.

And it’s not just in Britain – it’s spread world wide, including to here in Canada:

The movement to leave the Catholic Church is spreading also to Canada, where last week 26 people wrote to the Quebec newspaper Le Devoir saying that they were applying to be taken off baptismal registers because of their disgust at the Church’s recent outrages. They were particularly horrified at the reaction of the Church to the case of the 9-year old Brazilian child who was given an abortion after being raped by her stepfather. Everyone involved in that act of compassion was excommunicated by the Church. The Pope’s recent remarks on condoms in Africa were also cited as a reason to leave the Church.

In the Quebec City region, the diocese reported 50 requests for apostasy in the past month; usually it receives about 20 such requests in an entire year.

The protestors acknowledge that these numbers are a drop in the ocean but hope that the movement will spread and become significant. Sylvie Drouin, one of the signatories to the letter to Le Devoir, said it is time for Quebecers to question their almost automatic identification as Catholics. “Religion in Quebec is cultural. We are Catholic by culture,” she said. “The Catholic religion has led our society. We don’t question it. It’s like having white skin.”

She said: “We are not trying to turn the planet upside down, just to say loud and clear what we think,” she said. “[The Church] does not respond to our aspirations at all, and what’s more it is embarrassing. Currently we are ashamed to be part of that.

You can read more on the Quebec apostates in the National Post here.

dumb quote from Canadian actor

Not that I doubt that it’s true – not for a second.  It’s just stupid.

Sarah Polley, actor and writer, also expressed concerns: “Much of what I learned about being Canadian was from the CBC,” said Ms. Polley, who presented the award for Achievement in Direction.

[source]

Top 25 blogs suggestions svp

Top 25 blogs rankings come out on Wednesday.  Blog suggestions are welcome.  I missed a couple good sites last month, so any help this month would be much appreciated.  If the blog is about Canadian politics, then I’d love to hear about it.  If you don’t see the ‘comments’ box below, then click here.

Unrelated-ish but kind of interesting – the money quote from Slate Magazine – Screw Newspapers:

The insistence on coupling newspapering to democracy irritates me not just because it overstates the quality and urgency of most of the work done by newspapers but because it inflates the capacity of newspapers to make us better citizens, wiser voters, and more enlightened taxpayers. I love news on newsprint, believe me, I do. But I hate seeing newspapers reduced to a compulsory cheat sheet for democracy. All this lovey-dovey about how essential newspapers are to civic life and the political process makes me nostalgic for the days, not all that long ago, when everybody hated them.

The Slate piece is the counter to Nick Cohen’s appeal to authority here.

Harper’s “Three ‘F’s”

This is the audio from a speech Stephen Harper gave last night.  The audio is from David Akin’s site, I’ve chopped it up to get to two important parts.

Part One – Stephen Harper on Libertarians

Part Two – Stephen Harper defines Conservative as “Faith, Family, Freedom”

I, like many people I’ve met, signed up for the Tories, and did countless hours of work for them because I believed in their published principles – the very Libertarian principles which you can see here on their website.

If I wanted ‘faith’ I’d join the Green Party.

Look again at the bit of Harper’s speech on the three ‘F’s:

Freedom must be tempered by faith – or more broadly, what faith in all its forms teaches … it teaches us that freedom is not an end in itself.  That how freedom is exercised, matters as much as freedom.  Freedom must be used well, and freedom can only be sustained if it is used well … the libertarian says let individuals exercise full freedom and take full responsibility for their actions … Conservatism cannot just be about freedom, it must be about policies which ensure freedom will lead to good choices, to responsible choices … with wider benefits to all of us.

It makes sense.  Or rather, it makes Harper’s actions over the last 6 months make sense.  If faith means anything, it means ’sacrifice’ – sacrifice of our free speech, our hopes for a democratic senate, sacrifice of western producers to eastern corporate welfare queens …

I’m inclined to get really pissed off and say that if I as an atheist am not welcome in the party, fine, I’ll go through my lot in with the Libertarians.

But then there’s another part of me that says ’screw Harper’, he can read the party principles the same as any of us, he definitely heard the party militants speak at the last convention – libertarian Tories and all their cash and effort were well represented.

The problem is not the libertarians or the neo-liberals in the party membership – the problem is the leader.

Pictures of the day: polar bear attack

It’s every Canadian’s greatest fear – below a sequence of graphic photos from an attack by a polar bear in Manitoba . . .

NY Times: Beware the crafty Mongolian pagans of British Columbia

This is what the modern New York Times is missing – sarcasm.  Gosh, I think that’s sarcasm.  From the NY Times – May 12, 1883:

A PANIC IN BRITISH COLUMBIA

Once more there is trepidation and uneasiness among the people of British Columbia.  The present panic arises from the fact that the British Columbians have been reminded by recent occurrences of their complete isolation from the rest of the empire to which they nominally belong.  Three foes are especially dreaded by the people of this remote appanage of the British Crown – Fenians, Indians, and Chinese.  Precisely why the liberators of Ireland should desire to set up their green flag and sunburst in the remote Province of British Columbia does not appear, unless it is that any portion of British soil, however distant from the seat of the empire, and however poor and mean, would be a conquest worthy of the dynamite of the Sons of Ireland.  British Columbia is so isolated, defenseless, and weak that it is a wonder that roving bands of Fenians have not before now swooped down upon the place and established a small conquest of British possession.  The moral effect of even this inconsiderable capture would be far more influential than the shooting of a dozen landlords from behind hedges, or even the blowing up of Westminster Palace, could possibly be.  It would be a great day for Ireland when the harp and sunburst should displace “the meteor flag,” even in far-off British Columbia.

The Indians and the Chinese, however, are more tangible and dreadful as foes than the bloody-minded and loquacious Fenians. The Indian population is divided into innumerable tribes, all of which are endowed with names wholly unpronounceable by English tongues, and who constitute a volcanic stratum in society whose eruption may occur at any moment.  The total population of the Province is about 10,500, exclusive of Indians, who are roughly numbered at anywhere from 35,000 to 40,000.  The Chinese are usually denominated by local writers as “Asiatic hordes,” but as this term is somewhat elastic, there is no reliable estimate which can be applied to reduce “hordes” to exact figures.  The latest statement of the Chinese population of British Columbia is to the effect that it exceeds 2,000.  In the hyperbolical language of the Pacific coast a horde may mean fifty, or fifty thousand.  So far as the light of mathematics has been shed upon the Asiatic hordes of British Columbia, we should say that the Province is cursed with the presence of not more than 2,500 of the Mongolian pagans.  That the Chinese are guilty of causing bloody riots is notorious.  On many recent occasions these bloodthirsty pagans have resisted the incursions of free-born subjects who have attempted to destroy Chinese villages popularly supposed to be infested with “opium joints” and infamous dens in which the noblest and best of white people of both sexes are reported to have been allured by weak-minded and crafty Chinese. The Indians, it is hardly necessary to say, are so strong numerically that they are an element of danger in themselves.  If the 35,000 Indians of British Columbia should rise against the handful of white people, they would make short work of the loyal subjects of the Queen.  The obstinacy with which the cowardly Chinese resist all attempts to burn their hovels and sweep them into the sea has provoked many riots and may at any moment plunge the Province into anarchy.

It was hoped that the visit of the Governor-General and his royal spouse would calm the perturbed spirits of the British Columbians.  This beautiful pageant did, for a time, serve as an anodyne to the exacerbated people of the Province.  But the normal condition of perturbation again manifests itself by a demand for a permanent garrison, an occasional man-of-war, and an early completion of the long-promised railroad.  the Dominion Government replies that the Imperial Government is reluctant to grant any special means of protection, and that the railroad is being built as rapidly as possible.  The only haven of security for isolated British Columbia is the embrace of the American Republic.  The Pacific Province is a neglected step-daughter.  In the course of nature she will come to us.

I love reading these old NY Times pieces.  You can find more of them by searching Google News.  They’re all of about the same calibre.  Another favourite: AN UNAPPRECIATED SPEECH.; THE PREMIER OF BRITISH COLUMBIA’S VIEWS OF AMERICA’S FUTURE.