Margaret Wente doesn't need me to publicize her, but since I haven't bothered to rant about global warming here's an article that comes to close to being where my head is at. Or at the very least represents a calm betwixt storms ideological and before those in the climate that may or may not come.
Andrea Bruce, who readers may remember as the artist who made my banner, started an interesting thread about postmodernist philosophy and its misuse of scientific terminology on her livejournal. I got involved. Others got involved. And I think it makes for interesting, if meandering, reading. Main thread involving me is a little lower down the page and involves KRK (Andrea's LJ name), Anonymous/Sarah, and me. Check the thread out here.
Postmodernist devotees can tell me why I'm full of logocentric hypermasculine metavistic signifiers qua signifiers vis-a-vis significance nee juristic patriarchalist crappydoodoo below in my comments.
This is a bit "inside baseball" but fun (at least for me).
The new Chair of the CRTC is Konrad Von Finckenstein. Konrad used to run the Competition Bureau where I thrice worked. The man is seen there as a force of nature . Big, imposing, brilliant, full of ideas and willing to pursue those ideas to fruition. Aggressively.
The CRTC and the Competition Bureau have, shall we say, mandates based on contrary philosophies. Konrad embodies the Competition Bureau philosohy not the CRTC philosophy.
This move by Harper, Bernier and Oda is best described as "putting the cat among the canaries."
I imagine it's a tough time to work at the CRTC.
I have rashly made a bunch of Oscar predictions over on the Livejournal.
Just for fun. :)
I know that most of my contemporaneous comments on Bush's State of the Union (see below) aren't particularly astute or inspired. They were really just musings of the moment. But here are my closing thoughts.
My first thought is that I always wonder how many of those long term "call upon" the administration actually believes are achievable. Mainly though, I thought the speech was a great reflection of where our neighbor to the south finds itself. Tired. Exhausted even. They feel like they need a break. There's a quote in a little movie called New Waterford Girl that is a propos. "If they are guilty, they fall down." People find it hard to win when they think they are wrong. The US is so introspective - that they kinda want to win. But they kinda want to lose a little too, I think. They are the good guys. They aren't supposed to go to war on false pretenses. They aren't supposed to suspend habeas corpus. This war is killing more than troops. It is killing the myths that make them Americans.
I don't think it had to be this way either. I think it is cost of electing a man who wasnt articulate enough or insightful enough to be a wartime President - a President elected in another era - an era that was like summer camp. The post-cold war era. I've said before - the problem wasn't going to Iraq. There were very good reasons to go to Iraq. The problem was the administrations belief that those reasons weren't good enough. Their impatience. Their duplicity. Their hubris.
History will say that invading Iraq was the mistake. I disagree. It was invading Iraq with the wrong man in charge.
(This is not to be confused with the original Iraq mistake, which was made by George H.W. Bush - not stopping the invasion of Kuwait in the first place. THAT was the real diplomatic blunder.)
