Month: March 2015
This is just a passing phase, one of my bad days.
Day after day, love turns grey
Like the skin of a dying man.
Night after night, we pretend its all right
But I have grown older and
You have grown colder and
Nothing is very much fun any more.
And I can feel one of my turns coming on.
I feel cold as a razor blade,
Tight as a tourniquet,
Dry as a funeral drum.
Letting my inner Floydian out to play
Please note that the small images link to full-sized, 7805×8700 90MB PNG files suitable for large-sized printing.
Trying to balance investment portfolio
To oil or not to oil? To US or to Euro? To growth or to bonds? Those are the questions….
Bean quote of the day
Trees fart pollen and that makes people sneeze.
Dilbertisms at work
Leadership
The Harry Potter
Perfect employee
Use as appropriate
Between what Harper government has done with muzzling publicly funded science and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, I’m now reassured that climate change doesn’t exist…
Kooza!
Auntie Nat comped us tickets to go see Kooza in Bern. It was Bean’s first show and he loved it :-) We went to see the bears in the old town, did a bit of window shopping, then went to the show. After that, we all had a late (in the case of Bean, very late) dinner at Da Carlo in Lausanne and headed home. All in all, a good but tiring day.
Canada’s image has changed on the international stage, and not for the better.
Canada’s image has changed on the international stage, and not for the better, believes former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien.
At a conference at Concordia University, Chrétien deplored the climate of fear fed by the Conservative government, who wants to pass its anti-terrorism bill as soon as possible.
He co-signed an open letter with other former first Canadian and former judges of the Supreme Court ministers to denounce C-51, which could undermine public protection and human rights. “It’s a slippery slope. And it’s easy to use the emotions and fear of the people to remove certain freedoms, that are sometimes difficult to regain,” he commented during a news briefing.
“When I travel, I am always asked, ‘What happened in Canada?’. We lost our image. We were an example to the world,” laments the former prime minister.
Chrétien recalled that he had refused to commit Canada to war in Iraq in 2003, when the fear of a terrorist attack after September 11 was indeed real. But the country is already at war against the Islamic state, he had said in an interview on CBC. “We were the guardians of peace, now we are the target!” he said Wednesday.
“We developed an image of Canada. We became a member of the G7. When we wanted a seat on the UN Security Council, there was no problem.” In 2010, Canada had to concede victory to Portugal to obtain a seat on the Security Council, which was a hard setback for the country on the international stage.
Chrétien has repeatedly touted the country’s ability to deliver equality for all, since Canada is an “example of diversity and unity.”
“Immigration has changed. We had a lot of immigrants from Europe, especially, and at one point, we had people from Asia, South America … Here is what Canada was and what he is today.”
“Avoid giving in to fear”, he said, “since the population is more likely to be struck by lightning than to die in a terrorist attack. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. There are 1.3 billion Muslims on the planet. They are not all terrorists!”
Ring ring ring ring ring ring ring, bananaphone!
