When
· Naughties
· · 2005
· · · November
· · · · 08 (4 entries)
Canadian Politics — OK · Well, finally. As I wrote back in May, we’ve had a highly unstable political situation for the best part of a year, with the governing minority Liberals emitting a strong aroma of entrenched corruption, but the opposition not (quite) summoning the will to take ’em down. Well, now all three opposition parties have said that they won’t support the Liberals any more; while they’re squabbling messily, chances are we’re going to have an election in January. The NDP, who were supporting the government in order to win social-democratic legislative points, now say they aren’t happy with the Liberals’ health-care offers, but I suspect that they’ve decided that the general public is so mad at the the Liberals that the costs of being in bed with them outweigh any policy benefits. It should be an interesting election. On one hand, the Liberals were caught red-handed stealing millions. But on the other, they’ve actually been pretty competent; unemployment and the national debt are down, we’re not bogged down in any overseas wars; people feel pretty positive about our involvement in the Balkans and Afghanistan. Me, I think we have to dump the Liberals if only to preserve our self-respect, but I can’t imagine we’ll get a very long-lasting result. That’s OK, elections are cheap and bearable, compared to the alternative.
debian GNU/Solaris · Everyone’s posting their GNU/Solaris screenshots, so I will too. Here it is, courtesy of a LiveCD ISO from Nexenta. I don’t know if there’s a way to get screenshot of the Gnome startup splash screen, so I just whipped out my pocket camera and took a few snaps. This, I firmly believe, is the future of Solaris (er, except for I [blush] kinda lean to KDE myself; but you get the idea) ...
US Politics — Creepy · I see that in our southern neighbor, the President has promised to veto anti-torture legislation and the Vice-President is trying to get the CIA exempted from it. I hate jumping to conclusions, and I’m worried; I read a lot of news, and it makes me wonder whether the faction currently governing America is heavily populated with greedy vicious lying thieving sanctimonious underhanded heartless venial creeps. That is what the evidence suggests. But like I said, you wouldn’t want to jump to conclusions.
Vancouver Politics — Good · We’re having an election here in Vancouver on Nov. 19th. We have four parties in contention: the NPA, generally regarded as representing the interests of the West-siders who live in big houses, and sympathetic to the provincial government as long as it’s right-wing, which it currently is. Then there’s COPE, usually seen as a bunch of old-fashioned Lefties, the Greens, and a new thingie called Vision Vancouver. There are two candidates for mayor, the NPA’s Sam Sullivan and Jim Green from Vision. What happened was, we had a pretty good mayor called Larry Campbell, who ran on the COPE ticket but was never very comfy with its leftward fringes. He retired and COPE split, spinning off Vision; and Jim Green, who was kind of Larry’s sidekick, is running on that ticket. It’s unclear whether Vision is anything more than a one-time platform for Green; but COPE and Vision and the Greens are co-operating, somewhat. This is kind of a cheery election; both Sullivan and Green look like pretty plausible candidates for mayor, and they’re being reasonably civilized about it; their attacks on each other seem pretty well fact-based. I think we’ll do OK, whoever wins.
