At the end of the Second World War, the Americans and their allies captured a pack of Nazis, an assortment of the most evil men on Earth. They could have lined them up against a wall and shot them and there would have been little argument. But, as the …
Continue readingAuthor: Bill Longstaff
When is bad financial management good financial management?
Consider two events and the responses to these events by two different governments. The events are remarkably similar. A party is elected to government at a time when the economy is healthy and then is blindsided by a recession referred to as the worst…
Continue readingFirst-past-the-post creates a conservative English Canada vs. a progressive Quebec
The NDP scored a number of firsts for itself in the 2011 election: the first time with seats in the triple digits, the first time as Official Opposition, the first time with strength in Quebec, and so on.
This is also the first time it has beaten the …
Continue readingMassive dual win for Harper—a majority and a Liberal Party in ruins
Stephen Harper has long had two goals, a short-term goal of winning a majority government and a long-term goal of destroying the Liberal Party. Last night he achieved the first and got a good start on the second, both in convincing fashion.
Of course …
Continue readingMeasuring democracy
It wouldn’t surprise anyone if they were told that the rich have more influence on government than the rest of us. Some scholars in the U.S. have gone further than assume this, they have actually measured it, and the results are intriguing.
Professor …
Continue readingAllan Blakeney … death of a statesman
As politicians of all sorts battle another election down to the wire, I’d like to pay my respects to one of the best. Allan Blakeney died April 16th leaving behind an impressive legacy.
Blakeney was an achiever from the beginning. He followed a gold m…
Continue readingMurdoch’s mischief … the excesses of freedom
If you were to suggest that the most powerful man in British political politics today was Prime Minister David Cameron, I would respectfully disagree. I would suggest it is Britain’s most powerful press lord, Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch’s News Internationa…
Continue readingOne man’s hero …
Two items in the news recently underlined the old difficulty of agreeing on who is a terrorist.
Last week a court in The Hague found Ante Gotovina, a Croatian commander in the 1990s war against the Serbs, guilty of waging a campaign of terror, bombing…
Continue readingPembina Institute evaluates party posltions on the environment
For a capsule look at the various parties’ environmental platforms from the perspective of an environmental research group focusing on energy, the Pembina Institute offers the following:
Bloc Québécois:
The party supports a science-based 2020 target…
Vermonters tackle corporations-as-citizens issue
According to a poll by ABC News, 76 per cent of Americans oppose their Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision to grant corporations the same rights as individuals when it comes to political speech and can therefore freely use their profits to support or oppose…
Continue readingBolivia calls on Pachamama to enshrine Nature’s rights in law
According to ancient Andean spirituality, the fertility goddess Pachamama is at the centre of all life. Pachamama has inspired the Bolivian government to pass legislation, entitled the Law of Mother Earth, which will grant all nature equal rights to h…
Continue readingHomo sapiens and the sixth great extinction
What kind of creature are we, we Homo sapiens?
According to a recent study by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, we may be among the half dozen most destructive forces ever to assault life on the planet Earth. Since life began on o…
Continue readingCanadians show compassion in straw poll on Bradley Manning
Whether you think Bradley Manning is a good guy or a bad guy will depend to a large extent on your political persuasion, those on the left opting for the former and those on the right for the latter. Manning is the American GI accused of providing Wiki…
Continue readingNo jasmine revolution for China—Pew survey
With revolution all the rage, so to speak, in the Middle East, pundits have been pondering the prospects of similar passions being sparked elsewhere. Inevitably China, the blossoming superpower on everyone’s mind, comes up for consideration. To examine…
Continue readingRepublicans wage war on the environment (with a little help from the Democrats)
If anyone still believes we are going to save ourselves from environmental catastrophe, the U.S. Congress is doing its best to disabuse us of our optimism. It has mounted a wholesale effort to preclude any serious efforts by the American government to …
Continue readingDaylight saving time year-round … If the Russians can do it, so can we
If George W. Bush did anything worthwhile as president, it was extending daylight saving time (DST) for an extra few weeks. Now the Russians have gone him one better—much better. They are extending DST for the whole year.On Sunday, Russian clocks spr…
Continue readingI’d like to vote, but my conscience objects
So we are to have yet another election. On May 2nd we will have the opportunity to exercise our democratic franchise. We will have the opportunity as free and equal citizens to elect representatives to govern us. Well, actually, we won’t. If I were to …
Continue readingBertrand Serlet (father of Mac OS X) leaves Apple
In one of those curious twists of fate, when Apple fired Steven Jobs in 1985, it couldn’t have know that this would lead to the salvation of the company. Jobs formed another company, NeXT, to build a new computer with which he hoped to beat Apple to de…
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