Politically incorrect

Joe SixPack for PM.

Almost anyone can stand for public office.   You don't need a college degree to qualify although most go through a party nomination tussle and all must battle on the hustings to pick a winner.  You wouldn't pick a random passerby to fix your air conditioner. The inference is you must pick a candidate from an elite.  The question becomes: Is good leadership a diploma skill or is it native ability the voters endorse and bureaucrats are charged to support?  (In the US, Trump has the get-it-done skill and Bush has the "diploma").

In Canada, public office is open to any citizen over 18 years of age. (To which rule about a dozen caveats are appended).  Thinking back to the Magna Carta, the first votes were extended to lesser warlords with large estates, to crimp the power of the top man who collected their tribute.   About six centuries later,  Canada enters the picture with male, propertied, British citizens having the vote. Then citizenship extended to the British Empire and then migrated to our own Canadian brand with residency defined. Then asian voters and finally native indian voters were counted.   The threshold vote was 21 but is now 18.  Voters were male but now also female.  There's another dozen housekeeping rules addressing felons sentenced to more than two years,  legislators who want to sit in both provincial and federal houses, and so on.    In truth, almost any adult can stand for office.

The House of Peers in England is upper crust.  In Canada, the peers are fellow voters, a humbler bunch numbered in the millions.   In practice, elites screen for elite candidates but the door is open to anyone who wins the confidence of their peers.  Joe Six Pack probably won't be PM but I'm awfully glad he can have a shot at it.

Before Steve Jobs

My kids had their own EyePhone back in the day and thought nothing of taking it everywhere.

When your business burns down.

A few quick lessons on insurance and accounting will be yours when your business burns down. 

Our lesson came August 17th.  You were warned that contents and small tools could add up but may have forgotten about built-ins like sub-panels, compressors, custom fabrications to make things work.  The word "small tools" didn't ring the right bells.   They weren't on the balance sheet any longer but cost plenty to replace.

You may think that naming a second-hand replacement value for major equipment means that's what you get when it's lost.  Correction, it's the lower of named value and what something sort of similar can be bought for.  Perhaps, like us, you hadn't heard of "aggregate value" meaning you can lump the major items together and make up on one what is lost on another.

Then you lose control of your books.  Your depreciation values mean almost nothing and the replacement values are unknown until you settle with the insurance people.  Your productivity may surge back with replacement equipment of lesser value but your equity that the bank wants to know about becomes a mystery.  One cheering thought is that the insurance proceeds are not taxable income.  Another is that you find out your neighbours care about you. We're bouncing back and expect the settlement to be just barely enough but it's a sobering squeaker.

"For service in English, Press1"

That's a quintessential Canadian experience.  In the South Okanagan, the second button should be Punjabi and the third, Portugese.   In Richmond BC, the second button, possibly even the first one, should be Chinese.   And in Ottawa, French is the first or second language.  Somehow Ottawa is the pattern for the whole country.

It's ridiculous.  Looking after customers comes first but politicking rules otherwise.   When federal policy stops being "Bilingualism" and becomes getting through to your customers in a language they understand, we'll have escaped the pox of bad policy.  No one needs to perdre la face if the fix is technical with a Google Voice thingy auto-translating.

DNA Transfer Apertures

Youth gets especially excited about sex.  How come sex is pleasurable?  Because YOU, the operating system , don't get it that the millions of cells want to reproduce and YOU are the only channel they have.  So we have data transfer apertures for DNA code and a kind of pleasant madness that seizes us to make sure we use them.    Manimals and feminals want into the future, even if you don't.

The longer we live, the less sex is actually needed to keep the species refreshed since each baby lives longer, and can have more wealth and influence than a big had family back in the day.

Personality, the Me-Myself-And-I, has leverage in the world but thinks itself above the humble system it populates.  That system keeps a couple billion cells and their organs fed and safe.  We Jacks and Jills can skip the priorities of reproduction but our body doesn't agree.  The humble system has fixed it so we get excited by touching near DNA transfer apertures, to lure us into doing something useful for the future.

Two life forms feed on the body politic

Citizens vote for reps but parties run by their own rules.  Both divide the spoils and compete for the upper hand.   Since parties are fed both by voters and power brokers, they have an edge over voters.  But we still have two different life forms, as it were, inhabiting the body politic.  I don't like it.  Parties have an internal voter structure and since motivated voters from the general population can join that,  the potential for outrage is defused. 

The party system captures the democratic spirit and allows insiders and hacks to turn Representatives of the public will into Representatives of the party will.   The leader of the party has the greatest ability to steer the party but this CEO is unelected in a sense because no one but his own riding voters get to advance him to the leadership.   Leaders of each party have made news in recent years for trying to rig nomination meetings.  So there you have it, two different life forms feeding on the body politic.  The party gets more food than the registered voter.

This isn't really news.  Insiders and power brokers have always been the top dogs. What we call democracy introduces a little more information about the governed, introduces better market information, if you will.   We don't want ever to lose the vote but it is not a very responsive system. Once every four years we influence the composition of the insider groups who choose their own leader.  McDonalds or Amazon.ca are far more responsive to their customers and they do it in real time.

A parallel occurs to me:  In our own bodies, there are at least two operating systems.  One is simple animal behaviour to feed and reproduce and the other is like an uploaded software called "me" that cohabits and does its own fascinating things most of the time.  "Me" has the upper hand.  Craziness occurs when both engage in the same activity.  This leads to all the comical things that men and women do that don't quite make sense but we all understand.

Trump explains that Hillary was bought and paid for.

Of course those foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation and gobs of money for talks were Pay to Play. Trump explains how that works with a chuckle: 

'With Hillary Clinton, I said "Come to my wedding" and she came to my wedding.  You know why? Because she had no choice, because I gave.'

This did the rounds as a Trump story but for me, it's a Clinton story.  A wealthy insider explains that she takes money and pays favours back.  Case closed.

From the Daily Caller.

National Post Headline explains Duffy frenzy.

From the National Post August 21st:
"It may be no sponsorship scandal, but in this tight election race the Duffy trial matters".
It matters alright because it helps the opposition to promote a feeding frenzy on Harper's popularity. Notice how deftly the Duffy tax deduction follies are associated with the liberals sponsorship scandal while denying the same.

As someone said earlier this week:  "Duffy trial - honestly, I don't get it. But what a hell does Duffy's greed and stupidity have to do with what Harper knew or did not know about it? How will the degree of Harper's knowledge of events become a measure of the magnitude of Duffy's breach of the laws?"

A similar story is playing out in the states as Obama, instead of yammering about Hillary's server, keeps silent while the hyenas nip at her ladyship.  I think he likes a Biden/Warren ticket and doesn't give a toot about the security issue.

From "transparencynow":
"It is obvious that discrediting attacks, whatever their motive, generally take place under heavy disguise. First, the attacker must portray his attack as an attempt to support the order of values of society by exposing a violator who deserves to be exposed, in essence enhancing his own image as he assaults another's. ... The disguise of motives is often supplemented by a far more insidious deception, one that masks the fact that an attack is taking place at all or that the journalist or attacker is the one making the attack. Journalists and other communicators often portray themselves as merely asking questions, reporting what others say or describing events, when everyone knows a verbal mugging is actually taking place that may leave the designated victim stripped of the self-defense provided by an effective image"  .

Laugh Out Loud Trump cartoon

Can anyone be president or are elections to validate the choice of competing elites?  The look on the Elephant's face is priceless. The GOP and Democrats believe the latter.  The rules are similar in Canada.

The seductions of money are revealing character.  I like Trump's punch line that they were begging me for money last year (and I gave them a wad) and now they're trying to trash me.

East Coast Cod Recovery: Hints in 2011, Facts Today.

Four years ago,  cod had rebounded to 37% of their pre-crash levels.  Now everyone is noticing as The Telegram reports:

Leo Hearn remembers fishing cod before 1992, and the sense of impending disaster, as the fish got smaller and more scarce. Hearn also remembers going fishing in the early years of the food fishery, and having a hard time finding fish.

Photo in Telegram story.

 Hearn, who’s been fishing out of Petty Harbour for decades, said he’s seeing fish show up in places that they haven’t been seen for a generation or more.These days, Hearn said that when he was out on the water over the past few weeks, the fish were everywhere.

“Last year was a pretty good sign of fish around, and this year was even better — more places, and a really good sign, places like Renews Rock. They hadn’t been there in 15 years, and the fish are back there now,” he said. “Ferryland right on down to Calvert, Bay Bulls, all those places are seeing a lot of fish.”

When over-fishing was the norm, small fish that adult cod were not eating began to prevail over all cod by eating cod juveniles.

h/t to Bourque for the story link.

Link to the early days.

Obama Lost Iraq on purpose. The Iraqis would have accepted a residual force SFA.

 Senator Lindsey Graham talking to Hugh Hewitt:

"You know, Maliki has got a lot of blame for Iraq falling apart, but I lay this at the foot of the President of the United States solely. The Iraqis to a person would’ve accepted a residual force, but he wanted to get to zero. He would never come forth with a number. They never had a number."

And the background to that statement:

 "So we had Ambassador Jeffrey – U.S. Ambassador to Iraq and Gen. Austin, the commander of Iraq forces at the time in the meeting with me, Maliki, and McCain. I asked Prime Minister Maliki, “Would you accept troops?” He says, “If other will, I will.” Then he turned to me and said, “How many troops are you talking about?” I turned to Gen. Austin and then Ambassador Jeffrey – “What’s the answer to the prime minister’s question?” Gen. Dreyfuss says, “We’re still working on the number.” The number went from 18,000 recommended by Austin down to 3,000 coming out of the White House."

Whitewashing the Mullahs to sell the Iran deal, hiding Bin Laden documents.

Kristol and Hayes at the Weekly Standard:

We have been told by six current or former intelligence officials that the collection of documents captured in the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound includes explosive information on Iran’s relationship with al Qaeda over the past two decades, including details of Iran’s support for al Qaeda’s attacks on Americans.

“There are letters about Iran’s role, influence, and acknowledgment of enabling al Qaeda operatives to pass through Iran as long as al Qaeda did their dirty work against the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, tells The Weekly Standard.