Power, money and lies in Washington will be tested by this tumult of emergent crises. What leaders will now appear?

Richard Fernandez identifies ”Emergent events”:    The whole shebang is going critical, like a reactor running out of control.  ..   The next few weeks will feature an increasing spate of these things. Like a building in the process of collapse, first one beam goes, then two, then three, and before you know it the whole tower is gone.

If the Republicans come in on this — which they must — it will be as a way to avoid the scandal of saying nothing. And that suggests that trouble engulfing Capitol City will affect not just a party, but will go to the heart of business as usual. The insiders are discovering that something’s not quite right any more; something has backed up in the plumbing. Things are not going away like they should. Not for the administration. Maybe not for anybody.

A man for his time.

These headlines .. about pressure cookers, local crime in Philadelphia, a sideshow in Libya ... are proxy words.  The real subject is power, money, and lies, and they way these work together by the Potomac.

Different leaders will be coming forward when values realign.  Churchill is an example.  Oxygen is available for strong men and women whose voices were previously dismissed.

Rejected by the White House
Honoured by others.

The internet is rewiring everything. The costs of getting a public hearing are becoming vanishingly small. The costs of keeping secrets away from the governed are climbing rapidly. A dozen years have hardly scratched the surface of the change that is coming.  Who knows what shape it will take? This I know, what worked before will adapt or disappear.

NDP deserves to win in BC for remembering the Internet exists.

On all signs the NDP has internet contact and the Liberal has not.

I drive through a dozen BC electoral districts in the south-west each week and see the road sign war is a saw-off between Liberals and the NDP with two independents looking strong. (Vicki Huntington and John Van Dongen).  But look at the signs.  No Liberal signs have an internet link.  I parked the car and walked over to be sure a link wasn't hidden in the small print.  A recent PEW poll finds 39% get their news on-line.  How can a serious contender skip that?  I browse a lot of pages daily and often find one or two NDP on-line ads on a site but have yet to see a single one for the Libs.  What gives?

The other half of the political spectrum is pretty near empty. Near Langley on Zero Avenue I found a small sign for John Cummins, half the size of those above.  Other Langley candidates had a number of roadside ads in the same stretch.

Count your blessings at the ballot box

After 45 years as a Canadian voter, I've never been intimidated or even exposed to partisan information at a voting place, always felt the identification checks were sufficient to keep the voters honest and always been confident my vote was not just counted but also reported.  What's not to like?

The shenanigans inside Canadian political parties to register their own voters for conventions are a different story.  The bizarro stories from the US where entire precincts in Philadelphia voted 100% Democrat are a different story.   But here in British Columbia and speaking as a civic, provincial and national voter, we have sound procedures.




Maybe one exception: My vote went straight into a computer in one civic election. There was no whisper of fraud but there was no proof there wasn't. It's like when you buy gas with a credit card and the pump screen prompts, "Do you want a receipt?" I don't, but I always say I do, just to keep them honest. Old fashioned paper ballots work fine.

I like on-line polls and think they should be used publicly for every bill to get a sense of the electorate and keep it public. Tens of thousands would give opinions on some issues.  Naturally, groups will game the polls but counter-measures will limit the spin. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business has become a political force by simply polling their members in depth across the entire nation, reporting the results to their members and to all relevant legislative bodies. Just don't let on-line polling replace two accountable moments: My paper vote in the ballot box and my representative's votes in the House.

(Anyone interested in helping develop a web site for fraud-screened massive on-line polls of all bills before the House of Commons?)

Okanagan goodbye

Leaving the Okanagan in spring

I peopled your walks in my middle years

but  leave to make an end.

I won’t be afoot in your hills in a year’s turning

in a tear’s yearning,

though Ponderosa was a word warm on my lips as mother’s milk.

I’ll not  mis-hear again the speech of mountains,

Balsam root flowers that message the haste of spring and

the teaching of rabbit brush lecturing the hurry of fall.

I cannot forget what I never grasped.

I’m seeing absences –

The unanswered rings where fish ducks dove,

and ghosts of the kids who filled my life.

If rabbit brush and balsam root should know my name

they would call me back

to the Okanagan.

I forget with casual ease more beauty than wealth can buy.

It’s the privilege of an old man to cherish

and let slip, to forget and slip away.

I’ve a message for the spring screes, butter-cupped and

pierced with shooting star:

Remember me, a drunk who forgets his limit!

A man should make a poem to die.

BC: Turn the light on the Right back on.

If you don`t want left and centre-left politicians in BC, you are nearly out of luck this time round. The BC Conservatives left 40% of BC`s riding with no candidate at all and they have no party competing for that voice. BC Blue has reported on their squabbles.  Some of that unused energy has relocated to "Independent".

I spend time in two ridings:  Saanich North & The Islands has no candidate to the right of the Liberals.  Boundary Similkameen has one but he is a write-in candidate. See the picture.  He writes himself in as an Indpendent over top of the Conservative sign he made up first! (You will like his cattle-butting video clip).


In the list below you see gaps under "BC Conservative" but quite a few listed as "Others". There's a huge opportunity but not this election.  Hold your breath and mark your ballot.

What would I like to see? "If you care about freedom.."

Europe, we're going to eat your lunch.

From Powerline: "If you want to understand how the United States is suddenly eating everyone’s lunch when it comes to energy, see the chart below, from the Financial Times.  "


In Canada, we've got lots of gas too and it's not upsetting my digestion.  When the wheels of our industry can turn for a third the price of the overseas competition, what's not to like?  

Russia is getting indigestion too.  "A seismic shift in energy geopolitics .. is under way as Gazprom’s dominance fades. The company has long had a near-stranglehold on gas supplies to Western and Eastern Europe"

Poll for BC Voters: Is it ABCD for you?

Thanks to a smalldeadanimals report which struck a chord with me:
ABCD means you'd vote for Anyone But Christy or Dix.
Do you agree?

How will you vote if it's ABCD?

'Jay Leno: AP will replace "Illegal Immigrant" with "undocumented democrat".'

You'll never get that one out of your head.  Link is to video of Jay via Gateway Pundit site.

What's next after Bipartisan Abdication? Blame the Prez.

George Wills quotes Jim Webb:
“President Obama has arguably established the authority of the president to intervene militarily virtually anywhere without the consent or the approval of Congress, at his own discretion and for as long as he wishes.”

Wills further observes that an invertebrate congress and the current Imperial President point to more of the same.  When leaders duck responsibility, there will always be a scapegoat when trouble comes, as it surely will.  The much ballyhooed and even loved President Obama has been busy bypassing and ignoring congress but both parties will turn on him when it suits.  It will suit when the American public gets fed up and tells Congress to fix it or beat it.

excerpted from the Washington Post.

March 28 2013

Red Meat Primer on Canadian Politics from a US Observor.

This is pretty straightforward stuff.  Where have you read it all laid out so plainly before? A preamble on the bad (lots of red meat) and good in Canada and a summary of Mulcair, Shiny Pony and Harper's prospects in 2015.

"The forthcoming election in 2015 promises to be a watershed event. An NDP victory would propel Canada down the same ruinous slope charted by the U.S. under the suzerainty of Barack Obama. A Liberal ascendancy under Justin Trudeau would resurrect the same hackneyed policies of earlier Liberal administrations....The re-election of a majority Conservative government, with its emphasis on free enterprise, resource development, expanded markets, greater national homogeneity and fiscal viability, is indispensable to the health and resilience of the nation, so that Canada, unlike many other Western democracies, might remain a country still reasonably good to live in."

David Solway writing for PJMedia.com  Read the whole article.. 

That preamble on the "bad" takes a swing at the CBC, the Supreme Court, Indian leadership and more.

"(Canada) suffers from a growing Muslim demographic and the cultural tensions this brings in its wake; is home to a potent eco-constituency that has bought into the Global Warming canard; shelters a plethora of misnamed Human Rights Commissions that are nothing more than kangaroo courts designed to stifle honest debate. ... harbors a persistent secessionary movement in the province of Quebec; boasts a Supreme Court filled to the brim with superannuated, politically correct apparatchiks who have no compunction about unanimously legislating against both the theory and practice of free speech; tolerates an aboriginal racket that exploits the country’s bad conscience and whose band chiefs prosper obscenely at taxpayers’ expense, thanks to an obsolete Indian Act; subsidizes a left-leaning national broadcaster, the CBC, that can always be counted on to slant the news in favor of a “progressivist” agenda."  (David Solway, again).

Pro-choice hypocrisy. Their choice, not your choice is good.

See Charlie Brown style cartoon at Never Yet Melted
and weep.

Few Americans use prostitutes. Kinsey spin discounted.

From livescience.com

When the Kinsey report on male sexual behavior was published in 1948, it revealed among its then-scandalous findings that up to 69 percent of American men had paid for sex at some point in their lives.

(From a new large-sample study): About 14 percent of American men said they paid for sex at some point in their lives, but just 1 percent said they visited a prostitute in the past year (2010), according to the study, which is, in part, based on data collected as part of the General Social Survey by researchers at the National Opinion Research Center.

Kinsey

"While it is noteworthy to recognize that the 1 percent of adult men who paid for sex in 2010 still result in a large number of customers, there is no credible evidence to support the idea that hiring sex workers is a common or conventional aspect of masculine sexual behavior among men in the United States," study researcher Christine Milrod, of the University of Portland, said in a statement.

Added:  Kinsey's studies used prison populations (25%), male prostitutes (4%) and included filming sex in his own home.  Kinsey was "polyamorous and bisexual".   Don't discount his findings but don't believe the spin.

EU thieves being bested by Russian thieves in Cyprus

While the front door of the banks is locked in Cyprus, money is flying out the back door.  ZeroHedge discovered  the London branches of two big Cyprean banks remain open and permit unlimited withdrawals.  Since 20% of deposits came from Russia, I'm convinced that Russian money is heading out the back door.  Cyprus won't have to worry about angry oligarchs or mafia types.

Link 1:  Have the Russians already quietly withdrawn all their cash from Cyprus?

            Sourced from Reuters via ZeroHedge.  

            Second source:  "But unlike Cypriot banks, which have placed a €100-per-day on ATM withdrawals, a Laiki Bank spokesperson said yesterday that the bank’s London branches were open as normal and there were no limits on withdrawals and no change to conditions".

Link 2:  Russian Withdrawals Quantified As Cyprus Central Bank Set To Expand Emergency Credit By Up To €3 Billion

The surprised guy looks like
another banker.
Maybe not a surprise after all.

Remember Cyprus' financial system is worth about eight times the Cyprean GDP ($18 billion euros) and that Russians had placed about $31 billion euros in Cyprus, about 20% of the wealth under attack.  I don't care for oligarchs but it burns my butt thinking of money bureaucrats in the EU stealing from everyone's savings to cover for people like themselves who are in deep debt they can't pay back and "too big to fail".    Sometimes public policy is just wealth transfer from the weak to the strong.  If you punish savings and reward borrowing, less is saved and more is borrowed. This is not rocket science. As others have pointed out, if you risk your own money and fail, you are hurt but if you risk other people's money and fail, the whole system is wounded.  (OPM = other people's money).

This may be more smoke than fire if the London branches are limited in the funds they can access.

Tire store: Take your leaks here

Seen in town:

US and EURO area exports, twined like lovers.

US and EURO exports go up and down together like lovers.  It's not a zero-sum competition; they're riding the same global rollercoaster.  h/t  Instpundit, linking Goldman Sachs.

Blogging Tories survey.

What do Blogging Tories blog about?
A count of the last two pages shows:
57% Canada linked stories.
28% US linked stories
15% Various conservative or world viewpoints.
I counted all XP pipeline stories as Canadian.

My friend who blogs about finance told me,
"Canada is irrelevant."  (He was talking about world finance).

World map scaled to national wealth.
We're that pale blue bit at the upper left.

Our American neighbour is ten times our size and gets half the headline space BT gives to Canadian stories.  Maybe that's about right, a 20:1 reduction.  Are we that much different from the fans of US stardom who watch ET and the Oscars and read People Magazine?  I am tempted every day to read about US political figures and overlook what's happening at home unless someone raises a big stink.

Do you remember when Gzowski's Morningside radio show had a segment called, "The News From ....". Someone would phone in from Sauerkraut, Saskatchewan to report the big news in their neighbourhood that day.  It included flat tires, girl guide cookie drives, the wheat board, things large and small.  (I haven't the stomach to listen to CBC news any more but there was a time.).  Our news is always interesting even if the rest of the world doesn't tune in.

While serenading the CBC, let me add the great motto of The Vinyl Cafe:
"We may not be big,
but we're small!"

Footnote to "Canada is irrelevant". Did you know the Bank of Nova Scotia may be the best known bank in Chile, Peru and Jamaica, the three I know a smidgen about?

Why do Americans have to read The Daily Mail, The Canada Free Press and The Telegraph to know what’s happening in their own country?

Have you noticed how many US stories break first in the Daily Mail? And The Telegraph. And if you want trenchant analysis, try the Canada Free Press. American potentates featured in the stories have a press corps following them about, a strangely blind press core that sees little but wants to know if Obama beat Tiger Woods. Are the press all journolists, lickspittles and unpaid operatives of the Democratic party? Friends of good government will speak up and report as their eyes see and their ears hear.
Proverbs 27:17 “ As iron sharpens iron, so a friend sharpens a friend”. These are no friends.

Why The Daily Mail and The Telegraph?

They don't have special access.

I haven't attached examples.

Just watch for a few weeks and see where the surprise stories are coming from.

On a related note:

When a fraudster from "The Daily Currant" claimed Sarah Palin was joining Al Jazeera because she wanted to reach millions of devoutly religious people, it was swallowed hook line and sinker by an outraged Washington Post columnist.  One short week later, HuffPo blogger, Democrat Naomi Wolf, is

going to work for Al Jazeera, it's all business as usual.  I thought it was a spoof at first!