Well, it’s been a while. Life took over most of my time as of late. I got married a couple of weeks ago followed by a honeymoon in Mexico.
I didn’t mind not blogging during that time because it seemed there was very little going on that really moved me to say something that hadn’t already been said. Without the time to really follow those stories that did catch my eye, I figured it’d be better to say nothing at all as there are a lot of eloquent bloggers doing a much better job than I could.
It was the second day into my honeymoon when I turned on the TV in our room to see the beginning of the current conflict between Israel and Hizbullah. At the time, it didn’t really seem like much more than the typical violence seen in that area and I figured it would abate within a day or so.
I’m glad I didn’t put money on it.
In the beginning, as I first heard the story developing, I thought that Israel was doing what it needed to do to get back their kidnapped soldiers.
Then day after day I would turn on the TV to see the latest and I would see more and more civilian carnage and death tolls. Then seven (I have seen eight claimed as well) of them turn out to be Canadian.
Civilians fleeing to the north with white flags flying from their vehicles were not exempt either.
“Don’t go to sleep, Mama. Look at me!” Ali shouted, tears streaking his bloodied face. “Don’t die, please don’t die!”
An Israeli rocket, which Lebanese officials said probably had been fired from a helicopter, slammed into the center of the Shaitos’ van as it sped round a bend west of their village, and the van crashed into a hillside. Three occupants were killed: an uncle, Muhammad; the grandmother, Nazira; and a Syrian man who had guarded their home. The missile also critically wounded Muntaha Shaito and her sister, spattering blood and flesh throughout the van. Eleven others suffered less severe wounds.
“They said leave, and that’s what we did,” said Musbah Shaito, another uncle, as his niece, Heba, cried hysterically behind him for her dead father.
Paramedics struggled to remove the dead from the van, but soon gave up, as an Israeli drone hovered overhead.
“This is what we got for listening to them,” Musbah Shaito said, speaking of the Israelis.
I don’t know what to say anymore. The death toll is severely one-sided with the Lebanese being massacred (warning, the linked page is a very graphic and disturbing representation of the war from the Lebanese perspective).
I believe Israel has the right to attempt to retrieve their soldiers, but I also believe that the Lebanese civilians’ lives shouldn’t be the ends to Israel’s means. I would not call the response a measured one.
Where does it end?
I think the thing that moved me to write about this the most is a fear that this will snowball into something much bigger and much less controllable. Meanwhile, other countries of influence basically sit by and allow it to continue. Hopefully we’ve not passed a certain “point of no return” by the time somebody decides to do something about this.
That’s all I can say for now. This whole situation has made me sick.
It burns me that Harper has decided to return to the tradition of only lowering the Canadian flag on November 11th.
In the last week a Canadian soldier from a town in the county where I work (and that I work for) and I learned today that the maintenance staff at the building where my office is located raised the flag to half-mast.
It was then suggested to them that they fully raise the flag until some permission is given to do otherwise.
A young man of 23 years was killed in Afghanistan and the government buildings in his home county will (seemingly) not allow this small gesture of recognition and appreciation for him.
I guess the thing that really pisses me off is the NIMBYism of it all. Because you can damn well be sure that if he was the son of the county’s warden or one of the councillors that every goddamn government building in this county would be ordered to put those flags at half-mast.
All of this while people bitch and moan that children today don’t appreciate the sacrifices made by our vets. Remembrance Day is no longer a holiday for school.
Well, no shit. If you want kids today to appreciate, recognize and honour the deeds of the men and women who have died in war then why don’t we set an example and do so ourselves. If the government has decided that it’s better to put aside such remembrance for all but one day a year, how can you expect the kids to do any better?
My grandfather fought in both World Wars. Remembrance Day is a very important day for me, but I’ll be damned if I think that it’s the only day of the year that we should be showing our gratitude.
I won’t get started on the issue of the media ban with regards to the flag-draped coffins of fallen Canadians — suffice it to say its disgusting to me and Harper should be ashamed of himself for it.
I figure I should give credit where it’s due when it comes to a business doing the Right Thing.
Around mid-February I bought a Sony Handycam DCR-DVD403 from The Sony Store. It, along with the accessories and whatnot that I purchased, ran me about $1600.
It had worked wondefully since I bought it, though I had only used it a handful of times to actually record anything that I wanted to keep for posterity.
Until Saturday. I went home for a surprise party for my father’s 65th birthday (a week early - to ensure the “surprise” part of it) and the camera came with me. I recorded about an hour of footage in total and was pretty excited about getting back home to grab the video off the camera and start putting together a DVD of the event.
The sound was great (as usual) during the playback but there was intermittent crackling noise. It was like white noise but only a couple of blips at a time. I was pretty unimpressed that this happened on this day and decided that I would take my camera back into the shop the following day to get them to check it out.
Worse still, it occurred to me that they’d have to send the camera away to get fixed which would mean that I wouldn’t have it for this coming weekend for my girlfriend’s birthday celebration shenanigans.
Come Sunday, I packed the camera up and brought it into the store where the clerk/salesperson starts going through the process of sending my camera away to be checked out.
Fortunately, for me, he runs into a problem and calls the store manager over and explains the problem with my camera and the manager asks if there are any in stock in the back, and if there are, to just go grab me a new one.
The manager inspects my camera to make sure that it wasn’t obvious physical or water damage that has borked my toy, deems it fit for replacement and away I go with a brand new camera.
So I got a new camera instead of having mine shipped away for God knows how long and I’ll be able to bring it to my girlfriend’s party this coming weekend. I appreciate both of those very much and I was actually quite impressed with how they handled the situation. And when that happens, I think it’s best to pass information that on to other people.
First off, “love” isn’t the best descriptor. Perhaps “Tolerate” would be better. And it would have rhymed.
CBC is carrying a story about Harper laying the smack down on Ralph Klein over Klein’s infamous “Third Way”.
At issue is the ability for doctors to practice both in the public and private health care system and Harper, rightly, claims that it would create a conflict of interest with those doctors doing so.
“Dual practice creates conflict of interest for physicians as there would be financial incentive for them to stream patients into the private portion of their practice,” - Harper
That would seem like a rather obvious observation to make… yet it seems to have escaped Klein.
So good for Harper (*shudder* Oh how it pains me to say such things) for calling shenanigans on Klein and for standing up for the Canada Health Act.
If Harper’s environmental strategy is as negligent as it looks like it’s going to be, we’ll all be needing that universal health care!
Wow. I haven’t posted since the Olympics? That’s some serious slacking. Long story short… in the last while I’ve become a homeowner, been working a fair bit of overtime (Damn salaried employment! No OT pay!) and I’m getting married on July 8th. So things have been a fair bit busy here lately and I guess now’s as good a time as any to get back into the swing of things.
One thing of interest that I stumbled upon the other day was the news that Harper’s government has ceased funding the One Tonne Challenge.
Great environmental start for the new government.
I have and will be saving approximately 15 tonnes/year of CO2 per year with my smart car and that was information that I gathered from a calculator on the One Tonne Challenge homepage.
Other people I know have used that site to calculate their reductions as well as to learn about other ways to reduce their emissions.
Not only are they nixing the One Tonne Challenge program… they’re evaluating about 100 other Liberal climate-change programs for further cuts.
Every country that seems to have the money and ability to do anything about what is quite clearly a problem with our planet have all decided it’s better to just fuck off and let it keep spiraling out of control in favour of pandering to the corporations that are fueling the problem. Pun intended.
We’ve had the governments and corporate lobbyists denying global warming existed… then they couldn’t deny it any longer and they started to say that, while it was a reality, it wasn’t our fault. Now that there’s evidence that it is very possible that it’s our fault we’ve got governments leaning on those who are demonstrating as much to shut the fuck up and look the other way.
Is that really the plan? To just keep the status quo and let us dig our own fucking graves when we’ve given up opportunity after opportunity to fix (or being fixing) this? This is absolutely sickening to me.
Well, I just got done watching the Canadian men get eliminated from medal contention at the hands of Russia.
Not cool.
But I’m less upset than I thought I would be. I got to see the final period of the game and it was, frankly, pretty fucking sad. I don’t know how they played in the first two periods but if the third period was any indication then I’m glad they’ve not moved on. They didn’t deserve to be in medal contention.
Bertuzzi is a fucking twat. Fuck Bertuzzi. I would call his stupid ass penalty the turning point. The goal was scored on that penalty and from that point on the timeclock became Canada’s biggest enemy. Scoring a goal and having it waved off only killed morale further. That and the fact that we were constantly beat to the puck, we were molasses-slow, lacked any semblance of discipline and we were quite handily out-shot. We had absolutely no edge (save for raw talent which, sadly, could not be converted to a winning game plan) over Russia and consequently, no business being anywhere near any of the medals.
The bottom line is that Canada performed poorly. Russia and the other teams have been playing splendidly and we deserved to lose this.
We’re still proud of the team and hopefully they can take the lessons they’ve learned here today and get back to kicking the world’s ass in 2010.
And fuck you, Bertuzzi! Fuck you!
I was checking my referrer logs and a google search whose results brought up the post I made regarding U.S. women’s defense Angela Ruggiero’s whining that Canada was grossly outscoring their competition.
I noticed another result that caught my eye.
Yahoo! News - It’s no contest in women’s hockey: Canada, U.S. still dominant - Monday Feb 13, 2006
Intrigued, I clicked the link. Standard pre-today’s-stunning-Swedish-upset points were made throughout the article with more comments from the angel that is Angela Ruggiero:
Ruggiero also laments two games of “special-teams exhibitions.” Overzealous officiating crews have called 28 minor penalties on the North American teams and 31 on their opponents in the first two games.
Many of the whistles resulted from questionable judgment calls on body-checking, which is illegal — another object of derision both inside and outside the game — but highly subjective as a penalty.
“That’s women’s hockey. Some refs think that if somebody falls down, you’ve got to call it,” said Ruggiero, who did some hitting in an American men’s minor league last year. “Part of that is the talent differences, because things look different to the refs when two teams are playing at two different speeds. Hopefully they’re not doing that when we play Canada.“
I’m not going to harp on it. I just grew a little grin when I read that last sentence. On the plus side, that’s one less thing she’ll have to worry about. What a difference a week makes, eh?
Sweden just beat U.S.A’s women’s team in a shootout to advance to the gold medal game.
Someone at work said that if Sweden won that it would be the first time the U.S. team hasn’t made it to the gold medal final and Sweden’s first trip to a gold medal game.
Congratulations to the Swedish team. They were outshot something fierce but Martin kept them in the game right up to the shootout.
What an upset.
Canadians are also in first and second place in men’s skeleton after the morning’s first run. Canada won Gold and Silver in men’s skeleton! Go Canada Go!
The NDP in Ontario seem to have sparked quite a debate on organ donation this week.
I’ve not spent a whole lot of time looking into this yet, so this is me just blindly throwing out some thoughts based on what I’ve read and heard thus far which is, admittedly, fairly little.
To begin, I will state that I am a huge proponent of organ donation. However, we’ve got a system right now where upon renewing your Ontario Health card, you are asked to fill out a donation card and to state your intentions regarding such.
I know this because I just renewed several months ago. A few weeks after the renewal my new card arrived and on the back there is a clear identification of my intentions to be a donor.
Every Ontarian who has a health card will have to do the same thing. There’s your donor registry.
Why spend the time and money to enact this proposed legislation when we have a system in place where your intentions can be stated and re-stated (or changed) on a regular basis?
One hitch I could see is the fact that I have a new health card with the picture ID and there are likely still quite a few people without the new cards.
If that’s the case then make some moves to expediate the transition to the new cards for those who have not done so yet. That would seem like a better use of time and money in my books.
And I state again that I’m just working on a quick skimming of a couple of blogs and an article and these are just my initial thoughts on the topic.
Socialist Swine is right. Warren Kinsella could very well be the biggest douche in Canadian politics.
It seems that he’s decided to sue Mark Bourrie of Ottawa Watch for libel.
$600,000. That’s what Kinsella is looking for. It’s fucking ridiculous and Mark, being a doctoral student, could use some help fighting such a case. It has ramifications for all bloggers who may find themselves in a similar situation.
Follow the link above for the whole scoop. I just wanted to make it known and get this out there.
Mark has set up a PayPal account for donations to help him fight this. If you’ve got a PayPal account and have a few extra bucks in there, it’d be going to a good cause. Whatever proceeds Mark has left over after slaughtering Kinsella in court will be donated to Reporters Without Borders.
If you don’t have a PayPal account or don’t have anything in it to donate, at least make this issue known. Blog it. Get the word out so as many people as possible know about it and can, in turn, help Mark out.
Mark’s PayPal account to help with his legal fees is stopkinsella@hotmail.com. Do what you can.