April 2011
March 2011
You'd probably know better than I do - why is everyone getting bent out of shape about The Weeknd? Is it all because of that Guardian article?
Who?
No seriously, I have no idea who they are.
Canada watches its democracy erode | The Australian →
theaustralian.com.au
Excellent read, with some good perspective from outside the country:
“A minister told parliament she did not know who had altered a document that cut funding to a foreign aid group. Later, she admitted to ordering the changes, but did not know who had carried out the order. Lying to parliament, a cardinal sin of Westminster-style democracy, has become a political tactic.
Following rulings by Speaker Peter Milliken, for the first time in Canadian history, the government and a minister have been found to be in contempt of parliament for withholding information and misleading the house.
The Integrity Commissioner was so inept that she failed to uphold a single one of more than 200 whistle-blowing complaints.
Forced out of office by the ensuing public outcry, she was awarded a $C500,000 severance package on condition that neither she nor the government talk about it.
That is, a public servant paid by the taxpayer was financially gagged by yet more taxpayer money to stop taxpayers finding out what was going on.
When a foreign service officer blew the whistle on the Canadian military handing over detainees to Afghan security forces, in likely violation of international humanitarian law, the government tried to destroy him and refused to give documents to a parliamentary inquiry. The Speaker reminded the government parliament controlled cabinet, not the other way round.
After the last elections, when the opposition parties were close to agreement on a coalition majority government, rather than face the house in a vote of confidence, Harper talked the governor-general into shuttering parliament for a month until he shored up his own support.
When the time came to choose a new governor-general, Harper opted for someone who had carefully drawn up terms of an inquiry commission to exclude the potentially most damaging aspects of a scandal involving a former conservative prime minister.
Four conservatives have been charged with exceeding campaign spending limits in the 2006 election that put Harper into power. A minister used public office and material to pursue party-political goals of courting ethnic vote banks for the conservatives.
Having come into office on campaign promises of greater transparency and accountability, Harper has silenced civil servants and diplomats, cynically published guidelines on how to disrupt hostile parliamentary committees, and suppressed research that contradicts ideologically-driven policy, for example data that show crime rates to be falling.
Judges who rule against the pet causes of the government’s ideological base are not immune to attacks from cabinet ministers.
Civil society groups that criticise any government policy or ideology risk loss of funding and hostile takeovers by boards stacked with pro-government ciphers.
Little wonder Globe and Mail columnist Lawrence Martin describes the government’s “arc of duplicity” as “remarkable to behold”. What remains unclear is whether this adds up to an indictment of Canadians’ indifference to democratic rights being curtailed or of the opposition parties, which have failed to harness the silent majority’s outrage.”
Dethroned Emperor
Celtic Frost
Dethroned Emperor - Celtic Frost
Hypnotic, classic churn.
Hard to believe that I’ve been enjoying this for how many years? Gettin’ old rules when certain albums you loved when you were 16 still stand up years later. And then there’s the bonus of being over the “I should have gotten over this punk/metal shit years ago” panic syndrome that came with hitting 30.
(Yes, it’s from Morbid Tales, the tapes don’t match.)
“The contrast between the local and foreign coverage of the crisis has been eye opening. Japanese news reports and government press conferences have had a measured, deliberate tone. Japan has its fair share of tabloid publications and conspiracy theorists. So why hasn’t the Japanese media sensationalized the situation as much as western media outlets have? For one thing, the stakes are too high. It’s easy to play up the downside when you’re sitting pretty in a television studio an ocean away from the reactors; not so much when you’re sitting a couple of hundred kilometers downwind. I assumed government officials—particularly Cabinet Minister Edano, whose constant television appearances throughout the crisis have elevated him to a sort of local superstardom—adopted a tone of restraint because they feared doing otherwise would have sent citizens into a panic. It’s easy for those used to the bombastic approach of foreign television to misread this as obfuscation or cover-up.”
—News Desk: Postcard From Japan: Why I Stayed : The New Yorker
Play
The truth about the Fukushima 'nuclear samurai' | World news | The Guardian →
guardian.co.uk
Japan’s ‘nuclear samurai’ are risking their lives to avert catastrophe, but many are manual labourers unequal to the task
And they’re still going in there, not you.
