Canada’s Debate

Today I came across yet another Warren Kinsella - Anonymous blogger spat (Mah nish ta’na…) and something amusing struck me regarding the following comment (emphasis mine):

Warren, I’m not mocking Uncle Donald’s demise. Poor Uncle Donald, may the saints preserve him. I might have liked to know more about the guy, but your blog wasn’t about Uncle Donald. The hero was, as usual, you. Poor departed Uncle Donald is barely mentioned in passing. We are left knowing two things about him: (1) He wore a fedora and (2) He’s dead. The rest of the post is all about your heroics. You are not proud of him. He is just a spectator. You are the show. That is typical Warren Kinsella.
So I’m mocking you. You are so mockworthy.
I’m mocking narcissists who use anything to hype themselves, including the deaths of relatives.

Now I’m not going to take a “side” here, but does anyone else find this last sentence ridiculous? What qualifies as “hyping themselves” I wonder? Every blogger who has a tangible connection to their intertube alias “hypes themselves” when they make any reference to their own thoughts, actions or experiences. Just yesterday I talked about my grandmother’s 89th birthday. If I had related a personal anecdote about my interactions with her, would that qualify as self-promotion? (Continue reading…)

“It is a paradoxical truth, that… the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the tax rates.” John Kennedy

I have taken this simple but elegant saying to heart on numerous occasions. I noted with more than a little amusement when Mr. Bush enacted his tax cuts a couple years ago he took in more gross revenues then any of his predecessors. Unfortunately he spent the surplus on a couple muddied wars.

The crux of the problem as I understood it was one cannot tax to prosperity. Politicians can merely regulate on a less destructive level. So when I read Joe’s Chinese Democracy Thread I was intrigued. Success is achieved when one is aware of the balance between economic freedom and political freedom.

More recently, I did not understand the full ramifications of the income-trust scandal or to put it another way, the potential loss of investment revenue which has dogged the loonie since the Flaherty’s announcement. link (Continue reading…)

Today is my grandmother’s 89th birthday, and I just want to take a moment to talk about her. My grandmother is a remarkable woman, not because she swam across Lake Ontario with her legs tied together or anything like that, but because she is one of those people who never breaks. She is who she is, and nothing that happens to her, and nothing that she does will change that.

Of course, who she is is a bit on the crazy side (she’s told my sister that she doesn’t need to be married to have children, she just wants another great-grandchild), but in a benign way. Tonight we are going out for Lobster to celebrate her birthday, and despite her advanced age and arthritis, she will still extract every morsel without a drop of waste, and without making a hint of a mess.

Bubby, Mazel tov!

I’ve enabled the comments function of the site now (with some handy third-party software called jreactions), which means that we now support feedback.

Since feedback was the final technical requirement I had before I would officially “launch” the project, I am now officially in promotion mode. I will be promoting this site everywhere and anywhere I can in the next ten days and I appreciate any help anyone can offer in this regard. The next step that I will take will be coming up with a formula for electing the first group or “Congress” (hopefully I can finish that tonight or tomorrow) and coming up with an open and honest mechanism for elections. In the meantime, tell your friends!

So far only two people have voted on the Blogging Congress name poll, which is a bit disappointing, although not entirely surprising. I will be going with Canadian Bloggers’ Congress if I don’t get any substantial feedback suggesting otherwise, and will register the domain soon thereafter.

There is still work to be done, but I hope to have the site’s “constitution” and rules done by the end of this weekend, so I can start building a pool of candidates for next week.

Actually, yesterday was quite possibly my best day in recent memory. I was offered (and took) an exciting new job in the Recruitment field, and the manner of my receiving the offer was incredibly flattering. I nailed the “Test the Nation” IQ test, got a bunch of personal shit resolved, joined Facebook, got my first member for The Bloggers’ Congress… the list goes on. If it seems unusually sunny outside today, it’s just me.

How transparent is the Conservative’s budget? Well not only is the National Post calling it for what it is, a blatant vote-grab, but even the Canadian Free Press is rejecting it. If you can’t win that crowd over, then you’re not doing a good job of being Conservative.

The federal government’s budget introduced by Finance Minister Jim Flaherty is a bald-faced attempt at buying a majority in Parliament, while it sells out the so-called Conservative principles that the Harper government espoused prior to becoming the government. It’s almost as if some disease afflicted whatever party might happen to gain the upper hand that causes them to become profligate taxers and spenders.

The first question people ask me when I get all worked up and start pestering them about the Bloggers’ Congress is usually, what is it? (Sometimes it’s “why are you bothering me?”)

This is a fair question, so I will endeavour to answer it here, and answer a few others along the way. The Bloggers’ Congress is designed to be a site where Canadian bloggers can come together and represent an organized and representative face to our larger community. It is not a Model-UN type organization. The site will provide original content along with newsfeeds and other resources for anyone interested in Canadian politics. Once the site is fully hosted a forum will be added to promote discussion. (Continue reading…)