I really hadn't asked myself how things were going economically in India for a while. It is surprising given the global recession, then, to learn that India apparently exists on another globe:
Among the reforms suggested was the reform of subsidies for fuel, food and fertiliser, a privatisation programme and investment in infrastructure. Some analysts predict that the Congress Party's decisive election victory could speed up the economic reform programme. The previous government's power-sharing arrangement meant there was political opposition to calls for reform from the finance ministry. The Indian economy grew 6.7% in the year to the end of March 2009 but had grown by an average of 8.8% in the previous five years.
Holy moley. What do they sell and who are they selling it to? Apparently output is up though exports, 15% of GPD, are down. Coal production is to increase and potash demand is strong. The country’s current account swung into surplus in the three months ended March 31 for the first time in two years. Even their cricket players are trying to break into major league baseball.
I don't even know what I buy from India. I may not have a problem with that in a few years.
[Ed.:Four years ago in 2005, I was in the middle of writing the Tantrama City series of posts on the near future Canada of 2007 which is now in fact in the near past. One of the posts celebrated events on Canada Day just as Canada was devolving into a number of regional potentates. I wonder what is happening in Tantrama City now?]
Happy New Atlanticans Celebrate Canada Day 2007Despite concerns raised over large gatherings of the populace by authorities since the collapse of the regional health summit, Tantrama City joined the rest of New Atlantica and all of Canada celebrating the national holiday, except of course for Quebec which celebrated Jean Baptiste Day last week and the Congregation of Alberta since Deacon Harper's passing of The Declaration of the Four Humilities last spring.
Highlights of the great day in the new capital included:
The Saskatchewan Unicycle Team taking its one-wheeled call for national unity to the people of the nation's new eastern region, their message being summed up in their motto "one nation, one wheel" as provided in their alarmingly anti-Congregationalist anti-Lanarkist pamphlets.
The RCMP Auxillary Musical Ride which entertained and disappointed due to its last minute substitution for the actual RCMP Musical Ride. Children, however, laughed at the two legged horses while adults just laughed.
The Tatamagouch Colour Guard including the sole peace officer for much of the North Shore of Nova Scotia, leading to the unfortunate scenes of burning highway barriers, vandalism, celebratory gun-firing and public bootleggery there towards the end of the day of national celebration.
Irene Chisholm of Riverview, New Brunswick and her earnest but little understood personal "Plant a Tree" campaign, an annual event since her personal schism with the national Arbour Day campaign celebrated each April.
Kenny Lundrigan of Sheet Harbour, Nova Scotia and his rendition of "Pink Shorts for Canada", a real crowd pleaser if judged by the hoots and hollers of the crowd at the grand plaza.
The wrap-up to the day of fun, Federal Minister of Regional Affairs Graham's celemonial start to the fireworks display which included a dramatic and somewhat telling rendition of the traditional "burning school house" in the form of the House of Commons.
Cleatus Morris, left, First Admiral and Deputy First Minister Designate of the Tantrama City Provisional Government addressed the dwindling crowds after the last of the fireworks, thanking all the participants as well as Minister Graham, then bellowing something into the microphone to the effect of "Vive Canada! Vive New Atlantica! Vive New Altantic Leeeee-bra!!!" stumbling and falling near the end with glee as if intoxicated, before being caught in the arms of a clearly shocked Minister Graham.
Chris in China linked on Facebook to a BBC article about a 13 year old comparing a 1980s Walkman to an iPod and I was impressed by his observation about the state of technology:
Personally, I'm relieved I live in the digital age, with bigger choice, more functions and smaller devices. I'm relieved that the majority of technological advancement happened before I was born, as I can't imagine having to use such basic equipment every day.
No doubt I've posted this idea 12 times before but doesn't it strike you as odd that there haven't been that many new forms of personal technology over the last 20 years? Sure there have been advancements but most things we have a trinkets these days are simply advancements on the existing rather than new inventions. There were portable music, DVDs, digital music, mobile phones, bank machines, personal computers and any number of other devices back in the late 80s. I started using the internet in one form or another around 1990. Sure there are better visuals but a usenet forum is no different than a busy beer blog in terms of discussion and speed of information dissemination.
So two questions: (1) what is it that we lack and needs to be invented and (2) what is the reason for the focus on development rather than invention?
This is quite amazing. I wouldn't have imagined that someone has had a legal right to the rain that fell on your property but they are dealing with that sort of right in Colorado just now:
Who owns the sky, anyway? In most of the country, that is a question for philosophy class or bad poetry. In the West, lawyers parse it with straight faces and serious intent. The result, especially stark here in the Four Corners area of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah, is a crazy quilt of rules and regulations — and an entire subculture of people like Mr. Bartels who have been using the rain nature provided but laws forbade. The two Colorado laws allow perhaps a quarter-million residents with private wells to begin rainwater harvesting, as well as the setting up of a pilot program for larger scale rain-catching. Just 75 miles west of here, in Utah, collecting rainwater from the roof is still illegal unless the roof owner also owns water rights on the ground; the same rigid rules, with a few local exceptions, also apply in Washington State. Meanwhile, 20 miles south of here, in New Mexico, rainwater catchment, as the collecting is called, is mandatory for new dwellings in some places like Santa Fe.
I once know someone who had argued for the right to use of sea ice as a matter of property. The general idea is that a culture makes a legal right to property from that which is important, is limited and can be excluded from the possession of others in a reasonable fashion. Rain? I would have thought this would be an easy source of a black marketeering. And besides we don't really use water so much as delay it.
Too much to think about this morning. Never liked Ed McMahon. Never owned a Jack Michaelson album. Never had the Farrah poster. That Governor of South Carolina must be thanking his luck stars for short news cycle and Google's limitations as must be the Senators of New York. It's odd how we associate with celebrity, the true claims to fame in these cases. Liza (clearly verklempt) was just interviewed on CBS news from her bedside telephone. The moment of the day so far for me. People on TV are saying "We will go on" - I'm sure we will. Murder She Wrote went on (and on), didn't it?
- Google on trial. Why not?
- Of all the powers, the awesome powers are the best.
- Anti-Nazi blow darts.
- I have clearly not been paying sufficient attention to Vladimir Putin. "Why do your sausages cost 240 rubles? Do you call that normal?" Putin asked. "But they're good quality sausages..." Dyn-o-mote
- 528 visits yesterday to my post at A Good Beer Blog about the passing of Michael Jackson, the beer writer.
On the run again today. Too much of that. Need to be on the sofa more. That would be good. Nice to see Saturday looming.
Forget the fact of who the case involves. Forget the politics. The Federal government has made the most extraordinary statement as it relates to your rights under the Canadian constitution:
The federal government is telling the courts to back off when it comes to the Omar Khadr case and leave foreign affairs decisions to the Prime Minister and his cabinet. In a hearing yesterday, Justice Department lawyer Doreen Mueller urged the Federal Court of Appeal to reject the Federal Court's April ruling that the government should request Mr. Khadr's return from the United States. Ms. Mueller said the Crown rejects the view that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms applies when Canadians face charges outside the country. "There is clearly no duty to protect citizens under international law," Ms. Mueller told the court.
While it may be correct that the Charter does not apply in foreign courts where the Canadian state is not a participant, that second sentence is a bit wonky as is the limitation of the jurisdiction of the courts. Being a citizen means something. It affords you rights as against the state, the government. When the legislative or executive wings of the government does not respect your rights, you have recourse to the courts. Expensive recourse and slow moving recourse but at the end of the day the right to access power to assert that the state cannot to X or Y or Z to you.
In the statement above, the agent of the current Federal government seems to assert both that this right of recourse is not appropriate and that your recourse to the constitution only applies within the national boundaries. This is nuts. Find that in the constitution if you can. Section 32(1) states "This Charter applies to the Parliament and government of Canada in respect of all matters within the authority of Parliament" and section 24(1) states:
Anyone whose rights or freedoms, as guaranteed by this Charter, have been infringed or denied may apply to a court of competent jurisdiction to obtain such remedy as the court considers appropriate and just in the circumstances.
These words have meaning. "Anyone" means something like anyone gets access to court. But that is not what the position of the government in the Khadr case means. Could it mean that the state merely has to remove you from the national territory to undo the constitution? Or just find you out there to ignore you? It could also mean that they believe that the in that rights of a citizen as against the state differs according to the context of the subject matter in which those rights are affected by the state... and the degree to which the executive branch may determine itself to be the sole arbiter of what is due a citizen. This, of course, would leave the executive branch is also the sole arbiter of determining the contexts in which this absolute right to ignore the constitution arises. This is nuts.
This is why we have free and independent courts to fight back the temptation to assert the power of the tyrant. If the opposition leaders had a clue this would be the theme of the summer. Forget the case. Forget the politics. This is about what it means to be a citizen.
Simply unbelievable:
Kim Barker, public health adviser for the Assembly of First Nations, told the Senate committee on aboriginal peoples she was “devastated” when she first heard that health officials were spending precious time debating the wisdom of sending hand sanitizer – which can contain up to 70-per-cent alcohol – to the communities. “We heard that ... people were spending days discussing the pros and cons of a non-alcohol-based hand sanitizer versus an alcohol-based one because of the concerns about addictions in communities,” she said. “It was absolutely outrageous...One Manitoba chief, David Harper of Garden Hill First Nation, became so frustrated waiting for federal flu-fighting supplies he flew to Winnipeg to buy them himself.”
No doubt the virus also was aware of the opportunity, too, justifying the delay from a medical point of view. No doubt the same rules were applied in all remoter or more insular small towns across the country based on their alcohol sales or addiction in patient programs per population. No doubt they checked with the bar tabs at social clubs across the land.
It's not the Doctor Who aspect to the story that is so interesting but the reminder that what the electronic and digital ages have really provided is the archive and with it the repeats:
Overall, it's impossible to divorce the Target books from the period we are talking about. Scarcely anything was repeated on TV in those days, except last Christmas' Mike Yarwood Show so, if you missed something, you missed it. In an age before video and DVD, the Target novelsiations were a chance to re-live the television adventures. Many of the black and white 1960s stories had been wiped by the BBC altogether, so the books were the only record. Through them you could experience stories that had disappeared into the programme's folklore.
The archive is the thing but there are things I will never understand not being made available on DVD like Expos games and the complete history of The Beachcombers, the show that our UK cousins laughed about but secretly thought represented 97% of Canadian life. We should have had this for yoinks already yet, when cable TV expanded enough to generate TV channels dedicated to repeats (the dross of unwatched summer broadcasting prior to that point culturally) it was no representations of entire classic NHL playoffs that we got - it was Three's Company. Who are they holding the good stuff back for and when will we be able to control the archive ourselves? When you had the complete set - of books or comics or 8-tracks for that matter - that's what you got: control.
