No, its not art. Its garbage

Critics trash environmental artwork

This definitely falls into the "don't piss on me and tell me its raining" category.

What an insult from our Visual Arts Placement Jury to a poorer neighbourhood, to put a couple of bales of plastic garbage on one of their streetcorners and then tell them its "art" and is meant to start "a discussion about waste".

Inner city Saskatoon neighbourhoods have had plenty of opportunity over the years to talk about waste -- the needle cleanup every spring, to start with.  They don't need any more.

I cannot imagine the "discussion" that the residents would have had with their councillors if this had been placed on a corner in the University district, or in Stonebridge -- neighbourhoods which produces volumes more plastic waste annually than Mayfair ever did.

In fact, that's what I support -- let's move this to the corner of University Drive and Clarence Avenue for the next six months, right on the riverbank.

What a beautiful sight!

Shorter

Shorter statement from the Weyburn restaurant at the centre of the Temporary Foreign Worker program controversy:

"It's all the employees' fault!"

Darn it, that "restructuring" will just trip you up sometimes.

Whale of a tale

Now, it could be that the Harper government's move to take humpback whales off the endangered species list  is just a routine change which echoes similar downgrades by environmental organizations like the International Union for Conservation of Nature and the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada.
And it could be that it is merely a happy coincidence such a downgrade means no protection of critical whale habitat will be required anymore if the Northern Gateway pipeline and Trans Mountain pipeline expansion just happen to be approved someday soon.
But this is a government that sends out press releases about the number of visitors Canada gets from the Philippines and how it has improved the internet in Ottawa Valley South, to name just two of the 21 press releases it sent out today.
And the whale news was just posted quietly on Easter Saturday in the Canada Gazette?  So who can possibly believe that they didn't intend to sneak this one past us all.
Luckily, the Harper Cons are about as sneaky as humpback whales themselves, so now everybody knows about it:

...if Ottawa approves the pipeline, it must still persuade Canadians that the highest environmental standards have been met. On that count, the Harper government’s recent decision to downgrade the protection of humpback whales off the B.C. coast ranks as an epic fail.
Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq’s recommendation to reclassify the humpbacks from “threatened” to a “species of special concern” removes a major hurdle for Gateway’s approval, just a couple of months before a decision is expected on the pipeline. Which is precisely why it should raise all sorts of red flags.

Kersplash!

Happy Easter!

I'm not sure how the Hallelujah Chorus became a Christmas song -- it's a much more logical as an Easter celebration.
Here is the Hallelujah Chorus by the 5th grade class in Quinhagak, Alaska:

Air travel woes

Air Canada apologizes for luggage toss caught on video - Toronto - CBC News:

In spite of Air Canada saying that tossing bags down the stairs isn't their policy, its pretty clear from the video that there is nothing unusual for either of the gate staff doing this.
Then again, on our recent trip to the coast, I was surprised at the size of some of the bags people were trying to carry on, particularly for the puddle-jumper jet we were on from Calgary to Saskatoon.
And the woman sitting in front of us was shocked SHOCKED that her loaded, bulging bag just would not fit in the overhead compartment!
 This video is a lot more fun:

But it isn't so much the airplanes that are awful these days, its the airports:

Our own trip was certainly better than this -- planes on time, no problems either way.

This is priceless!

Rich people are NOT just like the rest of us, only with money.
Sometimes they're just amazingly silly.

Case in point -- Josh Romney sends out a tweet with a photo of his dad, Mitt Romney supposedly standing in a line to mail in his income tax return -- just like the simple folk do!

Josh seemed to think his photo proved some sort of point -- I guess it never occurred to him that just because his dad files a tax return doesn't mean Harry Reid was wrong in saying Romney didn't pay taxes from 2000 to 2010 .  The only thing it proved to me is that Romney is too cheap to have his accountant file electronically.

Cautionary tale

Here's what employers supposedly like about temporary foreign workers:

Dan Kelly, president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, recently told CBC News that many Canadian employers feel that temporary foreign workers have a better work ethic than Canadians and that there are some jobs in some regions that Canadians do not want to do.

Better work ethic?  What tripe! Here's what I think employers actually like about those temporary foreign workers - they aren't likely to be talking to a union anytime soon.

Don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out

It couldn't have happened to a more deserving guy:

despite endorsements of Anders by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Calgary cabinet heavyweight Jason Kenney, Liepert’s message that the area deserved a better MP resonated with Conservative voters weary of Anders’ shoot from the lip style.

"He can’t point to one damn thing he can take credit for accomplishing in this riding.” A fitting epitaph for the creepy, undead Rob Anders.
— Dr.Dawg (@DrDawg) April 13, 2014

When Rob Anders wakes up from his nap he'll be pissed. #cdnpoli

— Steve V (@FarAndWide) April 13, 2014

Now Rob Anders has more time to follow his true passion: finding and fighting the ghost of Nelson Mandela.

— Charles Demers (@charliedemers) April 13, 2014

When his staffers finally succeeded in waking Anders to give him the bad news he was heard to exclaim but Mandela IS a terrorist

— trapdinawrpool (@trapdinawrpool) April 13, 2014

Great line of the day

From Thomas Walkom's column about Jim Flaherty and the CBC cuts -- CBC cuts show other side of Jim Flaherty:

Those who knew him say he was hard-working, loyal to his family and possessed of an engaging personality.
There is no evidence that I know of to suggest that his motives were anything but public-spirited.
But he was also an integral part of a government determined to smash or cripple much of what makes Canada a livable country.
His death is a reminder that good people can do bad things for the best of motives...
Flaherty was also a willing and active participant in Harper’s dark experiment to remake Canada along Conservative lines. The omnibus budget bills that, to the dismay of the opposition, allowed this experiment to proceed were his.

Yes, that pretty much sums up how I feel.

I'm back

And I think I'm just in time to watch the so-called Fair Elections Act go down in flames.

First, we find out that moving elections investigations to the AG department actually WAS because the Harper Cons are blaming the messenger, Elections Canada for the elections scandals which have plagued their party since 2006 -- instead of blaming their own colleagues and their own staff, those guys who actually, you know, broke the law and lied about it:

Mr. Aspin is the first Conservative to publicly voice suspicions within the party that, somehow, the two reporters who broke the robocalls story, Ottawa Citizen Glen McGregor and Postmedia News Stephen Maher, were the recipients of leaked information from Elections Canada.... Asked if he believes the Conservative suspicion about leaks to journalists from the Elections Canada investigation was the reason behind the government’s distrust of the agency and its decision to transfer investigative powers through Bill C-23, Mr. Aspin replied: “I’m sure it had an impact, because, I mean, the investigations I don’t think were handled professionally, and that’s a non-partisan comment.”

This accusation was echoed by a former Harper Communications Director, Geoff Norquay, who told CBC that the act is "vengeance" on the Chief Electoral Officer. As reported by Jason Koblovsky at Mind Bending Politics:

Norquay’s “vengeance” comments stunned all of the members of the Power Panel to which he was commenting on. Norquay later tried to retract.

I'll bet he did.

And finally today, we have the unprecedented and appalling spectacle of a government minister, Pierre Pollievre, launching a vicious personal attack against a civil servant, Marc Mayrand.

...Democratic Reform Minister Pierre Poilievre accused Marc Mayrand of opposing the proposed overhaul of election laws because he wants more power for himself. Poilievre told the Senate legal and constitutional affairs committee that Mayrand is making “astounding” and “amazing” allegations about the Fair Elections Act, or Bill-C23.
"He wants more power, a bigger budget and less accountability,” Poilievre said.

Personal attacks like this are the last refuge of scoundrels, and the surest sign yet that the Harper Cons know their terrible elections bill is flaming out.

Hello I must be going

So Dr. Dawg retweeted one of my tweets and a bunch of great people let me know they have decided to follow me on Twitter -- and so now I'm going out of town and likely won't be tweeting or posting for the next week.
So it goes.  La de da.
To all of my new followers, yes, I will be tweeting, just not for a little while.

Goodbye you must be going

I have usually dismissed as wishful thinking those recent stories about Harper's precarious position in the party.

But maybe it is true that Harper's control over the party is slipping, when one of Harper's favourites cannot bully through a nomination dispute:

Dimitri Soudas, Stephen Harper’s hand-picked executive director of the Conservative Party was dumped by the party Sunday night. The CBC reported just before 9 p.m. that the party’s national council was informed of the dismissal in a conference call. Soudas was at the centre of a storm after openly interfering in a nomination battle in Oakville-North Burlington, where his fiancée Eve Adams is in a tough competition to run for re-election in one of Toronto’s newly created ridings.

I'll bet there was more than one f-bomb dropped during that phone call.

Scorched earth

Lawrence Martin thinks just about everybody is reaching their gag limit on the Harper Cons:

The strategy of the PMO has been to subjugate the other powers bases in Ottawa, the checks and balances in the system, to the point where they offer little resistance. The record shows that major progress has been made. But evidence suggests resistance is growing in many quarters, including, if opinion polls are to be believed, from the people themselves.

And the polls are also consistently showing the Trudeau Liberals beating the Harper Cons in the next election, irregardless of how many anti-Trudeau smears they run.
So basically Harper has another year as Prime Minister and then he will most likely be gone.
Will Harper go quietly into that good night? Or he is going to adopt the kind of "scorched earth" policies that will incinerate the country behind his retreat?
Do I even need to ask?

What the War Nerd says about the Crimea

Over the years, whenever there is a war going on just about anywhere, it's The War Nerd, Gary Brecher, who seems to explain it better than anyone else.
So I've been wondering what he would say about the Crimea and here it is: basically, that the West is f**ked:

The two versions of Russia — McCain’s “gas station masquerading as a country” and Lake’s fearsome conqueror — both start from the same bitter knowledge . . . It’s a simple one: Russia will take Crimea, won’t pay a big price for it, and there’s not a thing anyone can do about it. . . . Russia is now the world’s #1 oil exporting nation, topping Saudi Arabia — that beacon of democracy and fine American ally — by more than a million barrels a day.
With reserves estimated at 80 billion barrels, Russia will have a stash of what everybody wants for a long, long time.
Which makes it kind of a big gas station . . . The crude must flow, no matter how crudely its Russian owners behave.
The only media that seem willing to acknowledge this are the finance sites. They can’t afford to let jingoism affect their bets, so they’ve been surprisingly clear-headed, saying outright that there’s nothing the West can do

Intentions and the U of R cheer team

The University of Regina Cheer Team posted a "cowboys and Indians" photo, hastily removed with the apology that they didn't intend to disrespect anyone.  

Well, of course not.  But as Hollie McKenzie points out ‘intention’ is not all that matters:

I believe that the U of R Cheer Team did not intend to disrespect anyone. As stereotypes of Indigenous people and a frontier narrative of white-settler ‘progress’ are part of our liberal ideology, it is possible to both have good intentions and act in racist ways within Canada and Saskatchewan. . . .  ‘good intentions’ do not undo the effects of our actions nor should they excuse them. Rather, our responsibility as a (white-settler) community needs to shift from a simple blind ‘good intentions’ (which justifies a continued ignorance of the effects of our practices) to critical reflection on our practices before we engage in them and reparations when we cause harm (whether unintentional or intentional). It needs to shift to relational accountability to and with Indigenous communities, on this land that we share. This comes through conversations and ongoing, non-crisis-driven relationships with Indigenous communities. This comes through offering reparations for our colonial past, through working with Indigenous people to change the colonial present and the racist and sexist nature of our society.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.