I have never had a political lawn sign before, a phrase I realise is incorrect as I type it, as is apparently my spelling of realise, which is not a Canadian english thing at all it turns out, just something I must have caught during its “brief ascendancy in British English from the late 19th century through the early 20th,” proving that I am in fact over one hundred years old. I did make a lawn sign once, when we had built a lovely pumpkin family on our front lawn:
Not that lovely pumpkin family [if you look closely you can tell I am pregnant, which dates the photo to 1994] as I cannot seem to find a photo of the latter pumpkin family that decided to encourage people to Vote Pumpkin. The reason I have never had a sign before is that the secret ballot is a thing to be greatly treasured. To declare for whom one will vote is hazardous if your declared candidate doesn’t win and the victor knows you didn’t vote for them and fractious for a neighbourhood. The signs also create a visual eyesore, stuffed into every public place, and the environmental waste is disgusting. It is so primal also, trying to get people to vote for the colour they see most often so they will fit in, and it ostracizes the different creating a monolithic world.
So why have I finally fallen sway to this loathsome practice? For two reasons. Firstly, our current councillor is so in bed with the developers that even the City who loves developers is finding her overzealous, and her beloved LRT, that the Simpsons mocked so effectively over a decade ago
is going to cause massive disruption through the neighbourhood for over three years as it is built along the wrong route, going past houses and the river, rather than hospitals, businesses and malls. The alternate route would actually pass by two hospitals and two malls as well as many apartment buildings. But no, why service those people? It must bring in people from the suburbs to work in the government buildings downtown, bypassing the messy hoi polloi.
She was elected surprisingly, replacing a popular incumbent and an astonishing number of projects started getting approved and built all around. When I complained about the nonstop construction and what it meant for people living in the hood, she told me Ottawa had always been a mess of construction when she was growing up too. Well isn’t that a great attitude from a City Councillor: get used to the hideous mess, that’s what I’m aiming for. But her belief in some perfect future that never arrives is what really drives me insane. Will the city become liveable in 3 years? 5 years? 50 years?
Now running away from bad things instead of inching towards good things has always been something I have been aware of, because you really need to know where you are going, even running from a burning building. And we happen to have an excellent candidate running for City Council, who has lived one street over from me for as long as I can remember [last week, ed.?] has worked with and been President of the Hintonburg Community Association, our excellent and oftentimes functional community association. The work they have done to improve the neighbourhood for seniors and families is amazing, and on a shoe-string budget with indefatigable volunteers.
Jeff Leiper, the gentleman who has thrown his well-worn hat into the ring, has promised not to accept any donations from developers or those who are regulated by City Hall. While I fear for his soul, I hope he wins. And my hope in this case has allowed me to rise above principle, and declare my vote, consequences be damned. Go Jeff Go.
in my dream world, all tax collection would be local, just like this saying, which by the way we all know in the present political climate is bullshit, because, for example, i really don’t know anyone around here that wants to send troops to Iraq again…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_politics_is_local
but my idea is that taxes are collected at the bottom, and then distributed up. we all know that money floats to the top anyway, so by starting at the bottom maybe that “trickle up” tendency can be de”supplied” somewhat, thus slowing down the gutting of our local communities, (and the droning of distant ones) by a wealthy power hungry sociopathic elite.
but i ramble. good morning all!
You ramble but to a tune I am familiar with. Hubby has a dream scheme too, where all taxes are collected locally, and then distributed upwards. And then one can start to think about which branches of government should provide which kinds of service, something that is very muddy right now. I think we have too much government and too many levels, by which I don’t mean everything should be a free-for-all. I think we can have fewer government officials and more and better safety-net and health-care outcomes. And at least with bottoms up you get better accountability, especially when politicians actually live in the neighbourhoods they represent.
And war budgets would be cut dramatically I am sure so that we could stop poop from flowing into the Great Lakes. When Detroit’s sewer system breaks down, and at this rate it will, it will be horrendous. I used to be much more hawkish but this modern endless state of war is just like the war on drugs and how swat teams need things to swat … it grows into a self-reproducing borg.
your husband is pretty smart. but not just because he agrees with me. he used to write over at that other place, before it went the way of Detroit’s storm water and sewage infrastructure. (to shit) 😯 (pun).
but as luck would have it, i now see that your site has also gone to the dogs.
if my writing seems more than its usual disjointed ramble, or should i say less? … it may be from inhaling the fumes from a product known to cause cancer in California, and to likely cause sudden death if “huffed”… but i freely choose to use this product because all of the Earth friendly ones i tried first did not work! this cleverly disguised PR message brought to you by the committee still trying to elect Ron Paul!
i think i may really have inhaled too many fumes.
I thought you were going to say he was obviously smart because he married me!
The dogs were temporary. Something was different about the login widget it seemed, and I downloaded a new plugin that for some unknown reason turned the background grey and then I had trouble getting something the right size to work with the tiling, but eventually the penny dropped and I got it about right, and we are afloat again.
Good evening
OK, i’m back.
i quit the furniture stripping job right after my last post because the weather forecast became right. what i mean is that the sun really did come out. so my wife and i went on a “drive about”. now back home, i have rib-eye steaks in soaking in marinade, local sweet corn soaking in water, and soon my liver in Capital Dark, “our Original Garten Bräu”. the grill is staged, ready to light. life is good.
good evening Xty.
i need a longer window for editing. i am willing to kick in 10 bucks a month just for that.
i love it when a plan comes together.
Good morning
This would have been a good song for hoi polloi too:
And here is the answer to all problems:
Sorry to be a downer, but the tax-from-the-bottom idea sounds like a recipe for a true balkanization of the landscape, town by town by town, with the rich gathered together in gated, tax free hamlets while the rest of the plebes are left with proportionally larger share of the overall burden. And how do you get coordination on something like protection of an entire watershed? There’s always going to be someone saying no thanks we don’t want to pay, we’ll just sponge off of everyone else.
Wait…how is that different than what we have now? Maybe not much, but without a taxing authority from the top it would be magnitudes worse.
This is the problem with dreams of Utopia. There’s always a reason why it won’t work.
And good news DP! That stuff you were using only causes cancer in California, not in Wisconsin, lol.
Obviously any scheme that calls for a radical hundred percent restructuring is utopian, but that is taking an idea to its extreme to make it sound silly. That is why I mentioned the different responsibilities of different levels of government, so that there could be a mandatory federal amount worked out somehow. But we have swung too far to the top down model. There is lots of room for a better and louder voice from the
peasantrycitizens. In Canada, as in the States, the Federal government has used its taxing and spending powers to get claws into all sorts of things that were Provincial before. Decentralizing government does not mean getting rid of border controls, for example, or trade treaties. There is a massive gulf right now between rich and poor and it will right itself. I am for an incremental righting of the ship, but many voices are not being heard and accepting the status quo because I am relatively comfy makes me uncomfy.I think it wouldn’t even cost ten bucks a month to get better commenting experiences. I think I could just pay money for a better theme, once off. I have been meaning to look into it but have also thought that maybe it is limited by plugins, and last time I looked this was as good as it gets. Actually, even as I type, I wonder if I could just edit this window frame size. Hmnnn.
And hosting doesn’t cost very much a year at this moment, and we like having access to domains. Now, I am expensive and need to get cheaper, but that is something I will have to work out on my own. And so far no movie offers on the novel.
How do you like this vast blank space? It only took me 2 hours to figure out something simple and I still don’t understand it. But I can cut and paste code, and put it in the right place apparently. Maybe this is too big?
We forgot to leave our kitchen lights on shining through the corn last night, and so suffered another heavy attack. Screw it, I’m picking the corn today. The critters won’t get another chance.
I seem to have passed my physical with flying colors. So well in fact that we are going to do an experiment. I’ll go off the blood pressure pill for two months and see how it goes. If successful, I could drop it for good. I don’t think that happens very often. My feeling is that they tend to get you on these pills for life.
I’m not sure what you are referring to, as far as formatting changes, etc. It all looks the same to me.
How about those metals today? Gack.
Of course I’m celebrating my Phabulous Physical with some Whisky and Beef Brisket! (meat and booze, the two basic food groups)
i caused some confusion with my editing window comment. i only half seriously was complaining about the amount of time allowed for editing. you are all familiar with my two pronged shotgun style of typing. but somehow for me, going back to fix it is still quicker than writing everything out correctly the first time, and this method thoroughly captures my thoughts. crude but honest i suppose.
nice looking brisket. i splurged on some nice steak yesterday myself.
i saw this today, and i am pissed off about it. a “public service”. jfc! a public service to only the latest suckers, you know those that have not been financially ruined yet. Turd you are worse than the worst corporate shill or banker pig. kindly go to hell, and do it soon, while there is still room for your giant fucking ego. and on a day when silver breaks 4 year lows. good grief.
Reply to: Storm Clouds Gathering
As a public service by Turd Ferguson
1 hour 45 min ago
A snippet from today’s Vault post:
So here’s what you need to decide right now. You have three choices:
Do nothing. Shake your head at the schemed paper shenanigans and prepare to add to your stack by buying the dip at prices thought unimaginable three years ago. You’re preparing for The End of The Great Keynesian Experiment and the paper price of metal in September of 2014 is meaningless. (FWIW, this is what I’m doing.)
Hedge/trade/profit from this decline by buying some put options. You can do this through your online trading account. Puts on ETFs like the JNUG, the AGQ or the UGL might appreciate handsomely in the days ahead. Theoretically, you could then take these paper profits and buy yourself some deeply-discounted physical to add to your stack.
Fully hedge your physical position if you’re really bothered by the volatility. Call JimC or some other commodity broker and hedge your physical. Each gold futures put hedges 100 ounces of physical. Every silver futures put hedges 5,000 ounces of silver. It won’t take much “premium” to buy the “insurance” you need for peace of mind.
I’m not trying to freak you out nor am I trying to frighten you.This just is what it is and, as long as precious metal continues to be priced based off of the whims of a handful of HFT algos and Cartel monkeys, this is what we have to deal with.
Oh great, Turd. Invite your sheep to either stick their heads in the sand (meaningless? Holy fuck there is so much wrong with that comment one doesn’t even know where to start), or get skinned in the options and futures markets.
No, that is just a picture of brisket stolen off the web. I’ll go unwrap mine and take a real pic. Be back in a few…
There’s the brisket. The cob is one of our biggest, best cobs that we’ve been watching to see if the Hodag gets. Luckily he left most of it for me to examine. I think we can pick. The Whisky and Dew cup is a replica of the White Star Line regular cup, bought at a Titanic exhibition some years ago.
This is so wrong:
that one would be awestruck if he hadn’t minted a coin in his own honour, making hubris history.
That brisket looks fabulous – your own I mean,
Ah, that window. I think I can change it. How long do you want? I don’t want to leave it open forever, but I think I saw somewhere that it was set to only 5 minutes. I will investigate.
I think now you should have 30 minutes. Let’s see how that goes.
Well, that’s all there is. The long term range for my little patch has been 3-8 pounds of finished popcorn. All early indications were for a record crop this year of perhaps 9 pounds. My practiced “eye” on this batch is we’ll be lucky to hit 3 pounds, indicating losses to critters and wind of something like 66%. 🙁
I’m just thankful that this is just a frivolous hobby and I’m not some farmer on the prairie in the 1890’s, now wondering whether my children will starve over the winter for lack of food.
We NEVER had losses to critters like this before. Nothing even remotely like it.
EDIT: and yes, the timer is now indicating 30 minutes for editing.
You see a timer? I never knew. I can’t actually see what you see, unless I was an oddball and somehow created a fake me on a different ip address.
Yesterday I saw two chipmunks in our backyard, and the postman told me he has adopted a bunny. I have given up on feeding the birds, even the suet now, as the squirrels developed superpowers and leapt and flew to get to the cages and finally pulled them all down. I am going to devise something with a squirrel baffle and picture wire, but last time the red squirrel squeezed through the opening of the baffle near the wire so I need to make the opening smaller and also rodent proof.
I often try to imagine what I would be eating if I had to go out and forage for it right now in the wilderness. Crabapples?