Stand By Me Ben E King 1961

More Debate

The argument about private vs. public sector continues in the comments section under "In Response to Michael."

Tammy Faye: Larry's King's Loss

Why did Larry King waste so much time with this foolish corrupt woman?

I know the answer, of course.

The only judgement King makes about people is their TVQ, and Tammy Faye had millions of sorry, lost followers.

JUMBLED POSTS

Please read the argument by my dear friend, "Michael" first...and then read my Response...

Some good, healthy agreement to disagree about public policy...

Please join the discussion.

In Response To Michael

Hi Michael,

Thank you for your comment.

I think it is an enormous stretch of the imagination to fear that a city garbage strike will lead to your home invasion by a totalitarian police force.

More importantly, at the heart of your argument is the admirable American love of liberty and the individual. So many Presidents, including the present dissembler, have made fools of the electorate by imposing bigger and more extensive government on them, while preaching Ermersonian ideals.

While I am largely sympathetic to those views, and in many an instant will still side with them, there is no question in my mind that government has an important role to play.Yes, it more often than not plays badly and makes us yearn again for the dictum "that government which governs least, governs best."

However, cities and sovereign states and provinces and countries do need policy and management.In the course of caring for the sewers and the fires and the public order, governments will employ workers. Yes, it is a sign of our unwillingness to care for ourselves that government is now the biggest employer in Canada, and no doubt the least effecient.

But, here we are. Postal workers, garbage collectors, park rangers and so on.

Now, all of these people deserve some reasonable kick at the cat. That is, within the range of their abilities and opportunities, they aught to be able to afgord some of the many extraordinary comforts of the current age.

The politicians and their managers can. Vancouver City Hall, for example is overrun with people we've never heard of who have been earning in a excess of $100,000 a year for many years.

(My own personal belief is that, if many of those were fired, the garbage men would do just fine, thank you, and so would you and I.)

So...strike on, I say. I will not be voting for ANY of the current City Council come next election. I may fear stinky garbage, but I don't expect the Boys in Blue to drop by, arms drawn, for breakfast.

Michael Looks at the Strike from Another Angle

Michael said...


Hi David-- I would like to disagree with you on your stance regarding the City workers strike. I am opposed to the very idea of "public sector unions' and I would like to tell you why.



If the workers in a company in the private sector elect to go on strike (say, Air Canada) the situation is quite different. If they reach a settlement that either raises the cost of travel on AC or results in a lower level of service, I can choose not to fly with them. If enough people make a similar decision, the company will fail and then both Robert Milton and his employees will be looking for work. In other words 1/ I, as an individual, can reject any settlement and 2/ any agreement must ultimately fly in the marketplace.



In the case of the public sector there are no similar checks and balances. If the city workers and the politicians reach a settlement I, as a homeowner, have no choice but to go along with it.



But let's assume I choose not to. Suppose I refuse to pay the additional taxes that the settlement requires. I will receive a series of polite (then increasingly threatening) letters from first the City--and subsequently from the legal system--telling me that I MUST pay these new taxes. If I continue to refuse then men with guns on their hips (policemen) will come to my home and tell me that I must either pay up or leave my home. If I protest and say "This is my home and I want you to get out of here" they will tell me that I must leave and will attempt to physically remove me. But suppose I am foolish enough to continue to resist them? At some point, these nice men with guns on their hips will draw their guns. If I should continue to resist even then, they may well use these guns (effectively bringing the matter--and perhaps my life--to a close.)



So, unlike the Air Canada example, the contract that public sector unions negotiate with the City is, in the last instance, extracted by the use of deadly force. I offer this for your consideration.

Onwards Strikers

Like you, I am dreading a summer of rotting garbage.

But let me say this before it all starts to get to me:

I am in total sympathy with the workers. Even more so with the forestry workers.

Life is simple.

The CEO's and mandarins live in Shaughnessy (Artist friends excepted.) The workers don't.

Strike till the bastards give you more of what they've got.

Billy Joel - Leningrad

My, my...the Piano Man is really so much more...

Clinton is Not a Black Boy

What the President became famous for a young man will be forever branded "a dangerous sex offender."

Such is the twisted, blind road of criminal justice in America.

Read the story here.

And face this fact. Oral sex has been around for a few hundred thousand years. A few million people have endulged. Someone is indulging as we speak. Lucky them.

There is an enormous difference between rape or coercion and consensual activity.

The only difference between this kid and the President is that the kid didn't have the big desk in the oval office to protect him.

Let's hope that this Georgia case clears this young man. If it doesn't serve Clinton with the papers now.

Lack of Vision TV

There is freedom of the press and freedom and speech and then there's are common sense and common decency.

Vision TV's airing of a Jihadists monologue is beyond the pale. Their license should be yanked, or at the least put into serious jeapardy until they can stop rationalizing the lazy airing of hate.

You can read the entire story here.

But here are some of the (low) highlights:

In the hour-long talk, Israr Ahmad said, "Jihad in the way of Allah, for the cause of Allah, can be pursued either with your financial resources or your bodily strength when you go to fight the enemy in the battlefield."

"So jihad, the highest form, is fighting in the cause of Allah."

Mr. Ahmad runs a seminary and bookstore in Lahore, Pakistan, and his writings foresee the "global domination of Islam," compare Jews to "parasites," describe the Holocaust as "divine punishment" and predict the "total extermination" of Jews.

His followers in Canada include terror suspect Qayyum Abdul Jamal, who was arrested last summer for his alleged role in a plot to detonate truck bombs in downtown Toronto.

According to Mr. Jamal's wife, Mr. Ahmad was her husband's teacher and mentor.

Mr. Ahmad is not just a religious scholar. He heads a self-described "revolutionary" organization called Tanzeem-e Islami, which wants to turn Pakistan into a fundamentalist Islamic state.

In his book Lessons From History, he writes that the revival of Islam will begin in Pakistan, because it is the only country that "has the potential for standing up against the nefarious designs of the global power-brokers and to resist the rising tides of the Jewish/Zionist hegemony."

Islam will come to rule in four stages, he claims: the Ultimate World War in the Middle East, the appearance of the anti-Christ, the extermination of the Jews and the "domination of Islam, over the entire globe."

Another Mistaken Judge

What is "family?"

It has been argued successfully in a number of court rooms over the years that a "family" is not necessarily consanguineous - blood related.

A family might be an assembly of like-minded idealists, people dedicated to some common vision or goal.

Why then do we have this social mantra that above all and at all other costs, "the family must be kept together."

I cannot tell you how many sensible, if heart-broken, children I know have prayed for their fractious, dysfunctional "families" to call it a day. The shrinks go on about the destructive force of divorce. But not often enough do they talk about the positive and healthy values of dissolving toxic and dangerous relationships.

All of which is to say how appalling it is to see yet another wrong-headed judge make another horrifying judgment in a local court.

A man beats up his wife and is given a conditional discharge.

The judge, quoting the accepted - and ignorant and blind - common wisdom, says, "Canadian society has an interest in promoting and keeping the family unit together."

Question for the good judge:

Does Canadian society have an interest in keeping family units together in which the father is an out-of-control brutalizing pig?

Next question:

Does the good judge read the papers? Does she have any idea about the rash of domestic violence against women in local "Indo-Canadian" families?

Has she heard of Paul Cheema?

The judge said that the man to whom she gave a conditional discharge after he attacked his wife has "suffered the embarrassment of having to discuss this matter..." in public.

Poor baby.

Last question (same question I asked last week in a similar circumstance):

How can we remove judges from their duties when they demonstrate with chilling clarity their inability to perform those duties responsibly?

What is Essential?

Choices.

Life - and acting - are always about choices.

So, explain if you can to this bewildered Alex in Wonderland the list of "essential services" the mayor assures us will continue through the stinky strike that looms ahead.

Along with police and fire, water and sewers are enshrined The Carnegie Centre, the Pride Parade and the Fireworks.

Huh?

The Carnegie Centre is a daily gathering place for Honduran Dope Dealers, Hookers and $100,000/year Poverty Pimps.

Less than one tenth of one per cent could care less what happens to the Carnegie Centre.

Sting - My One and Only Love

Now, here's a pretty good singer, his own true self, with the same song...

Bail Boy Black

Connie the Crook is not a flight risk.

O.K.

And cows can fly.

Light Up the Skies - One Bic at a Time

From the category of "Never underestimate the immaturity of the North American person, or the sneakiness of the human being, or the obsession of the addict" comes this classic from a New York Times piece about now allowing lighters on airplanes:

"Security officers have been collecting some 22,000 lighters a day nationwide, slowing down lines at check points. Even so, many smokers had found ways to sneak lighters through checkpoints, often by placing more than one in a carry-on bag."

For the whole bizarre story, try this.

Michael Vick - Another Wizard of Oz

We know nothing about people in public life.

We may know that they smile or have breasts or can hit a golf ball or throw a 50-yard spiralling football like a laser beam. We may know that they can sing or play the bass or win elections.

We may see every one of their marvelous movies.

The last thing we know or have a chance of ever knowing is their true natures.

After all, most of these famous people are masters of deception to begin with. And their entire enterprise - the Corporation of ME - is structured around the Illusion in which we, the desperate, gullible public, believe.

Thus...

If it is true that Michael Vick, the Atlanta Falcons gifted and very rich quarterback is guilty of running a pit bull farm and pit bull fighting games, why should we be surprised.?

Disappointed, yes. Horrified, absolutely. ("According to documents, losing dogs were sometimes put to death by drowning, strangulation, hanging, gunshot, electrocution, or body slamming them to the ground.")

But we have no right to be surprised.

Michael Vick, like Julia Roberts and Phil Mickleson, is a streaking phantom.

We pay him immense amounts of money to do supra-human things that we cannot do. We pay him so we can lie on the couch and dream.

Here is the entire disgusting story.

Read it, but don't say you're surprised. Confess only that you must now find a new hero.

The First Victim of Treaty Settlements is The Truth

Last night was the second evening of THE LANGARA DIALOGUES.

This is a monthly series held on Wednesday evenings in the Alice MacKay Room at the downtown branch of the Vancouver Public Library.

The event is a debate, followed by an audience Q&A, on a matter of urgent public policy.

Last night's resolution was: Resolved - The UBC Golf Course Property Should be Returned to the First Nation's Musqueam Band.

Arguing the Affirmative was former Musqueam Band Chief, Gail Sparrow.

Arguing the Negative was Marty Zlotnick, a petitioner with the Save the Course Group.

It was an amazing evening.

Both speakers were dynamic and well-informed.

But what made the evening so unusual and fascinating was a) that the debaters were largely in agreement that this is a stupid deal, and b) that Ms. Sparrow is the only Native Leader I have ever heard who denounced Treaty Settlements.

Referring again and again to her grandfather and her parents and the way she was taught to be self-reliant and conciliatory, Sparrow harshly labelled Treaties as Prisons that further enslave people in dependencies.

Without using the word "corrupt," she decried the back room deal between Premier Gordon Campbell and current Musqueam Chief Ernie Campbell as one shrouded in secrecy and motivated by the optics of 2010!

She said repeatedly that while the Musqueam urgently need more land for housing and economic development, there were other lands nearer that would be more appropriate. Zlotnick agreed, suggesting that a parcel from Pacific Spirit Park would be suitable.

The evening was really a revelation, largely because of Chief Sparrow's wonderful and thoughtful, and in many ways, radical presentation.

We are Robots

Welcome to the New World.

Here is raw footage of the gas main blast in NYC.

What is amazing is that someone bothered to take this instead of running the hell out of there, and that everyone else is taking pictures with their cell phones!

Natural instincts (survival, fear...) have been replaced by the Cyber People for the Cyber People of the Cyber People.

Let us All Pray

The only thing we need add to the Tim Stephenson drunk driving revelation is...why now?

Why, 16 months after the fact, has Stephenson chosen this moment to reveal that a middle-aged man in a committed partnership spends his spare time in Davie Street bars, drives home drunk, loses his license for a year, continues to sit on City Council, making, among other decisions, those that affect the police, and decides that, although he is still drinking "socially," (one of the first covers of all alcoholics) and that he has no intention of stepping down from office, he wants us to know about his crime?

The reason for the timing of this revelation is the heart and nugget of the story. What is it?

Big Bill Withers

How rich!