Panglossian Notes

The Harper government's fumblings and bumblings - Oops Canada!

James Travers' has a nice piece in this morning's To Star - Blunders without borders -  on the Harper government's (should that be the Republican Party government of Canada?) latest set of fumblings and bumblings with matters outside our country's domestic borders.

The article would be funny if it wasn't, sorry to say so, now, both predictable for Harper and reminiscent of the old school fiascos inflicted on the US over the last 7 years by the Bush 43 regime (the latest inner look at the latter regime's concerned with politics, politics, more politics and still more and more politic, as opposed to serving the electorate, coming from the revelations of the workings of the WhiteHouse being trolled out to the media and book buying public about "What Happened", Scott McClellan's new book ).

Travers' piece blends mainly the Max Bernier hilarity with the bungled Harper government efforts to influence the US Democratic Party primary in Ohio:

"Friends also expect friends not to export partisan dirty tricks. But that's what Conservatives were playing at in turning a sensitive NAFTA memo into Ohio trouble for Barack Obama. Now they are trying to cover it up with an investigation so willfully inept that the most promising leads have never been fully explored.

That, too, makes strange sense. Conservatives would be horribly embarrassed by a probe as swift and thorough as the one that ended last year in a part-time worker being led away in RCMP handcuffs for leaking John Baird's draft environmental plan. Instead, this one took nearly three months and more than $143,000 in private detective fees only to miss what the Star found in a few phone calls over a single weekend – that the leak was from Harper's inner circle.

It wouldn't take much effort now for a determined administration to trace the leak from an official in the Prime Minister's Office to Republicans and then to the Associated Press. The names are known within government, as are the motives. But rather than speak truth to power, the report blames bureaucrats for a purely political act.

That investigation, along with the original meddling, wears the same blinders as the Bernier appointment. Partisan advantage is so aggressively pursued that national interests are put at risk.

Blunders without Borders
James Travers
May 29, 2008
The Toronto Star

Nice, eh.

The goofy investigation of the Harper government NAFTA (James Travers, again!) fiasco referred to in the clip above was supposedly carried out by Kevin,"I never take a weekend off, I just work, work work", Lynch, Clerk of the Privy Council least it was signed by him. I wonder when the media will publicly start calling him either a dupe - to be charitable maybe - or a dope.

Lynch is starting to look like Paul Tellier in the latter's famous role during the Al Mashat Case. In that case, it looked like Tellier, helped to cover-up interference, incompetence and a mad scrambles to hide from accountability on the part of Brian Mulroney, his Cabinet, certain Ministers in that Cabinet and ministerial political staff by blaming officials in the civil service for not forcing Ministers to take their responsibilities seriously.

A small excerpt from a short paper detailing that particular case and referring to some of the "facts" subsequently revealed in a parliamentary Committee following the government's attempts to cover-up and paper over the fiasco :

"But,  the  most  explosive  revelation  was  the  flat  denial  by  Raymond  Chrétien {the future Canadian Ambassador to the USA] that  he  had  even apologized to Mr. Clark [Joe Clark for 8 months the PM back in 1979] or anyone else over his actions.  In the evening of May 13^th  , after the cabinet meeting on how to handle the affair, both Mr. Chrétien and Mr. Daubney had been summoned to the office of Glen Shortliffe of the PCO who read them the PCO drafted press release that  ministers would  release  the  next  day,  which  highlighted  his  apology.    Mr.  Chrétien  refused  to  sign  the document  because  he  told  Shortliffle  he  had  nothing  to  apologize  for.

Chrétien  further  told  the committee, “if I had felt that I had to apologize for something, I would have gone to my minister and I would have apologized personally.”  As revealed by Chrétien, Shortliffe told him, “You are being asked to apologize.  The apology is being given to me.  I will convey it.”  Chrétien said it was clear “whether I liked it or not, I agreed with it or not, the declaration would be made the following day.” David Daubney added that he was named because Shortliffe “felt there should be a political person to get symmetry.”

It was never clear why the ministers and the PCO singled out Chrétien, the only official who had at least  attempted  to  inform  his  minister.  The  opposition  reasoned  that  it  was  because  Raymond Chrétien, a respected foreign policy professional, was the nephew of Jean Chrétien, the leader of the opposition.

Certainly the naming of Chrétien and the involvement of the Privy Council Office, the traditional defender of the public service, in claiming an apology had been given when it had not created a firestorm.

Al Johnson, a respected former Deputy Minister wrote in the Ottawa Citizen, that “the pick and choose approach to ministerial responsibility is lunacy.”

The most explosive moment in the hearings occurred with the testimony of Paul Tellier, the Clerk of the Privy Council.  Opposition members had lambasted what they called the “kangaroo court” of the PCO meeting on May 13^th  and questioned the role of the Clerk of the Privy Council in not defending members of the public service while helping the government shift blame.  John Nunziata told Tellier, “You are a disgrace to your predecessors.”  Tellier shot back, “if the member could shut up,” to which Nunziata replied, “who the hell do you think you are?”  Certainly it was unprecedented for Canada’s most senior civil servant to tell a member of parliament to be quiet during hearings of a parliamentary committee!

The Al-Mashat Affair: Canada debates accountability
Axworthy 2006 (pdf)

Way to go Kev, good job, buddy.

Technorati Tags: Accountability, Canada, Classic ClusterF''ks, Confusing?, Foreign Affairs, Harper government, Harper Party government of Canada, Harper Republican Party of Canada?, Politicians, Politics, The Toronto Star, Thugs, USA

Waiting for the Spin!

Yes, like Estragon and Vladimir, I'm waiting.

But I'm not waiting for Godot, I'm waiting for something much more pedestrian and unfortunately predictable.

You've guessed it?

I'm waiting for the Spin to spew out of the mouths of federal conservatives about Max Bernier's memory lapses. Seems the former up-and-comer forgot his briefing book someplace.

Our national clown, the prime minister Stevo, started the spin ball rolling last night before he escaped to the EU to pretend being a world leader on something or other - tomorrow he is to announce, proudly, Canada's great achievements in handing carbon emissions to some Germans.

Bernier late yesterday afternoon resigned because he left papers laying around his girlfriend's apartment.

The spin is that Bernier is an honourable man because he reported this paper leaving around lapse to Stevo and offered his resignation.

Stevie boy accepted, of course, and reminded reporters that the resignation had nothing to do with the character of Max's latest "mon amour". That's the spin.

The story is: Max is a stand up guy and we, the Harper government, do everything according to Hoyle.

No news story here, except maybe for the prurient interest of anyone not a new line conservative who has or will ask security related questions stemming, indirectly, from the character of the girlfriend and her former(?) associates.

I suspect Question Period today will see a repeat of the usual conservative hiding and reading from the Ottawa phone-book that we have seen over the last 3 weeks as they, in effect, entertain their supporters by ignoring real questions about Max and his memory lapses.

Meanwhile our corporate media, both the private and public owned ones, will whirl around in circles trying to be fair and balanced.

The real story is, of course, the spin and how journalist just keep getting suckered into the Harper traps set for them.

It should be entertaining for awhile.

Super secret Harper or is John Howard simply whispering in Steve's ear?

The TO Star is beginning a series, starting with this article about the Harper government and its endless, some might say mindless, attempts to control information from reaching Canadians regarding it, its policies and routine information Canadians pay to have collected.

This first article seems to be just an introduction or a teaser, as there is little new information in it regarding what Harper seems to be candestinely trying to accomplish.

My hopes are high that the series will have some "new" information regarding the super secret Harper and the increasingly ridiculous and cowed federal civil service.

The Canadian conservative authoritarian bent isn't new for conservatives in parliamentary systems world wide, whether the particular party runs under the banner of Liberal in AU or New Labour in the UK all seem to have a primordial need to control.

In the case, of the Liberals in AU and New Labour in the UK it seems to work for awhile, the control that is, but then it seemingly falls apart at some point and the party that attempted it is destroyed at least for a time while the PM under the strategy rushes off to large rewards from moneyed friends and cronies.

The whole matter, keeping everything, yes everything, secret, seems to have caught Canadian traditional media without their pencils or pocket recorders. Hard to appear balanced when there is only one side to a story so most journalist school grads would appear screwed as they stumble with having to actually ignite a modicum of curiosity and not simply take dictation from two opposing sources of information.

For Harper it would seem he is simply following his real father John Howard and trying to turn Canada into Australia, a bit of a bore but without the beaches.

Let's see if the Star does a comparison between Howard and Harper on this super secret anti-democratic trait. A quick search on Google turns up lots of articles and essays about the Howard approach I expect to see Harper moving more and more in this direction but wonder whether we'll see as much debate about it in either our press or supposed "big" thinkers groups.

For anyone interested about the AU situation under Howard, one article to start with would be the original silencing dissent (the link is to a html of the pdf, but the pdf can be had from this link) piece, then a review of the book that sprang from that article, Silencing Dissent and finally some Q&As about the book.

And, of course, there is the Quarterly Essay by David Marr: His Master’s Voice: The Corruption of Public Debate under Howard [finally, I think, available online from freelibrary] A quick review of this essay here and a short interview of Marr's which may, if it hasn't already, announce what we in Canada can expect from Harper et thugs.

================================

[Earlier, in this big gambit, as Harper et al clamped down, some indications were that the PCO & PMO approval would be required to access weather forecasts. This particular trial balloon was shot down when some brilliant soul within either the PCO or PMO realized that most air traffic would be shut down within Canada as pilots waited the required 30, 40 50, 60, 100 days for an answer out of "downtown" as to what the expected weather patterns might be in areas they were about to fly. The completely Kafkan like situation seemed even to be evident to Canada's best and brightest at the center of the civil service (sic). Baird the environment minister after a day or 2 of rumors was finally dispatched by Harper (PMO) and Lynch (chief scribe at PCO) to calm universal laughter.

You could conclude from this simply that political and civil servant conservatives of any stripe are anti-funny, humour and joy (ignoring the rapture type, of course) and not that they understood the policy implications of a truly inspired "wingnut" idea.]

Technorati Tags: Accountability, Australia, Canada, Harper government, Politicians, Politics, Spin, The Toronto Star, Thugs, writing

Technorati Tags: Accountability, Australia, Canada, Harper government, Politicians, Politics, Spin, The Toronto Star, Thugs, writing

Comment on the face of the day

An interesting picture over at the Atlantic, the Andrew Sullivan section of their blog entities.

I like the big fans in the background and the picture of the little girl below the right fan and just to the left of the chair.

I also wonder, fool I am, whether the picture am suppose to focus on was posed.

Awful, eh.

Is the little round faced beauty the father is mourning really his daughter or could his child be the little girl whose picture is by the chair.

Or could it all simply be a nicely staged fake?

What stories - Pearl Buck where are you?

Technorati Tags: Accountability, Andrew Sullivan, China, Shnoring?, The Atlantic, Useful idiots?, Wondering

A reality check for North America?

The Independent, following on the sharp increases in the future price for a barrel of crude oil, has an article in todays paper concerning worries about crude oil reserves. My favourite part of the article is below:

"Consumers are feeling the pinch in almost every area of their daily lives. The pain is felt most obviously at the pumps. In Britain, the price of petrol has risen to an average of 114p for a litre of unleaded – £5.15 per gallon. In the US, where drivers pay much lower prices, gasoline is more than $4 (£2) a gallon. Beyond that, energy bills are rising for households across the globe, hitting the poorest the hardest. British Gas, the nation's biggest gas and electricity supplier, is mulling further price rises, on top of the 15 per cent average increase it introduced in January.

Is the world about to be running on empty?
Stephen Foley
May 23, 2008
The Independent

Me, I like to keep things in perspective with this part of North America, so, based on the information in the bolded segment of the above paragraph and the latest exchange rate information from Bloomberg, I've converted the 114 pence price per litre of gasoline, in the U.K., to its Canadian and US dollar equivalents and then converted that into a price per imperial and US gallon.

I've done the latter because the US still operates in some by gone age, in terms of weights & measures, and because I'm sometime nostalgic for our own per-metric era. [Just a reminder 4.546 litres makes 1 imperial gallon while only 3.785 litres are required to fill a US gallon jerry can.]

So 114 pence per litre would be equal to:

$2.23 per litre Canadian, and
$2.26 per litre US.

Or

$10.14 per imperial gallon in Canada, and
$8.44 per US gallon in the states.

Compare the above to what the approximate average price of a litre of gasoline is right now in North America:

$1.31 per liter Canadian, and
$1.03 per litre US

I know that cars are more energy efficient in the U.K. and the EU in general, and relative distances are shorter, and Britons actually have public transit as an alternative to get to work. But, or better, given this, then maybe 2 and a quarter dollars for a litre of gasoline won't have a significant impact on people over there as they adjust their lives. Ah! Everything is relative right?

But in absolute terms it does look like energy from crude oil over here is really really cheap just now.

Technorati Tags: Britain, Canada, Crude oil, Energy, Price of gasoline, USA

Re-issuing: Those gd polar bears and that damned thin ice!. A sort of update.

I closed this post (below the double bar line), published originally about 1 year ago, with the question:

"So, where are we now? Who knows."

Well, we, the qallunaat**, do now know where we are. We Canadians have named the great bear a "species of special concern" and Americans for their part now consider it "threatened".

The Inuit, if an inuk is lucky to get a tag, will continue to hunt and eat it. Wildlife officers will continue to shoot it if it is starving and menacing a community.

The bear. I wonder how it will do now we qallunaat have sorted out our act and know it to be a species of concern or threatened.

The typical picture of the bear is either the cute little Knut snap-shots from the Berlin zoo or a mature healthy bear in its element surrounded by nothing but snow or ice. Rarely do you see pictures of bears in real distress like the one shown below:

I hope that more bears don't face the circumstances this bear faced last September in Nunavik - hunting for porcupine for godsakes.

The bear's distress, of course, was not caused by hunters either the big game trophy variety from the states or the traditional Inuit from Nunavut or Eskimos from Alaska. The bear simply could not find any of its usual food.

Why?

You guess.

====================================

March 13, 2007

The polar bear debate is on again.

The Government of Nunavut* contends that the big white bears are thriving while the World Wildlife Federation, and other environmental groups have been pushing the Bush administration to list the bears as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act because global warming is destroying their habitat.

There are two issues for the Inuit and the bears: one economic and the other cultural.

The economic issue is easy to explain. The polar bear makes a great trophy so actually hunting and killing one is an active business in the high Arctic. This activity goes on in places like Resolute Bay.

Now in the summer Resolute and Devon Island may look like Mars but Resolute, at least, does have some nice hotels by Arctic standards ( a b ). Wonder why? It's not because of the NASA people that show up in the summer months but because it is the usual jump off point for checking out the North Pole and for those seeking a white carnivore trophy.

"Polar bear sports hunters spend about $2.9 million a year in Nunavut. Of that, about $1.5 million goes to Inuit in small communities such as Grise Fiord, Resolute Bay and Arctic Bay."

Jim Bell
March 9, 2007
Nunatsiaq News

The dollars may not seem like much to a Southern qallunaat** (a non-Inuit person), but, in Canada's really only true subsistence jurisdiction, a million or 2 bucks is a significant injection into some of the communities.

The cultural matter is more confused. The Inuit, in Canada, want to control their surroundings and don't want others destroying what they may have known. This is one reason the Inuit Circumpolar Conference (Canada) (ICC) was in D.C. recently making a case, before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an arm of the Organization of American States, that climate change is a violation of Inuit human rights.

The ICCs petition to the Commission states:

"... the U.S. is violating the human rights of Inuit by refusing to sign any international treaties to cut its greenhouse gas emissions."

CBC
February 6, 2007

About the same time Watts-Cloutier, of the ICC, was laying out the case for human rights abuses for not implementing Kyoto, illustrated, partly, by detailing tales of shrinking and thinning ice, the government of Nunavut had a delegation in D.C. making a case that the white bear is not threatened and should not be considered an endangered species.

The Nunavut Minister of the Environment, in a statement on Friday, told the territorial Legislative Assembly:

"Mr. Speaker. We were in Washington, dealing with the Endangered Species Act with regard to polar bears.

They [the US] would like to put the polar bear on the endangered species list and we went down to talk with them and told them that they should not be put on the list. There were five of us that were against the States wanting to add them to [sic] the endangered species list. There were a lot of people that were against what we were trying to do down in Washington.

They don’t seem to understand what we’re trying to say, and they didn’t seem to want to pay any attention. Thank you."

Hon. Patterk Netser,
Nunavut's Minister of the Environment
Speaking in Inuktitut in the NU Legislative Assembly
March 8, 2007

The Canadian Inuit know their environment is changing and are concerned that what's left of their traditional way of life could be threatened and could disappear but they also don't want some outside government or organization to tell them what to do particularly in regard to their wildlife.

"Nancy Karetak-Lindell, an Inuit member of the House of Commons [representing Nunavut], called the effort by American environmentalists "a little intrusive and very disrespectful."

In an interview, she added that the bear hunt "is more than a way of life, it's a way of survival."

In Resolute, a snow-swept hamlet of shacks hugging a salty ice-packed Arctic channel, Inuit villagers hold an annual lottery to see who will get the permits to kill the local quota of 35 bears a year.

Fifteen of those bears will be consumed locally, as food and to make rugs, mattresses, wind pants and mittens. The 20 other permits are sold to American hunters.

Clifford Krauss
New York Times
May 27, 2006

It's an interesting dilemma, sort of, for the Inuit. One which could see Canadian Inuit allied with the oil industry in Alaska who also don't want to see the bears put on the endangered list as it will create development problems for them particularly if the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) is opened up for drilling.

This could also mean that Canadian Inuit may indirectly undermine:

"the Gwich’in, who include residents of Inuvik, Ft. McPherson and Tsiigehtchic in the Mackenzie River Delta, [who] fear oil drilling could imperil one of their key sources of country food: the Porcupine caribou herd.

The 200,000 caribou of the Porcupine herd roam across the Alaska-Canada border and constitute one of the largest remaining caribou populations in the world. In the summer, they calve in the narrow coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge — right where the proposed oil wells would be drilled."

Nunatsiaq News
January 19, 2001

The Board of Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated (NTI), the main birth right organization or the corporation that represents Nunavut Inuit under the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement, passed a resolution opposing the listing of the bears and

"... demanded the American government use Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit in an assessment of polar bears to determine their current standing."

NTI Press Release
March 7, 2007

Unfortunately their press release went on to show a hint of the now common global warming deniers, or delusionists, if you prefer John Quiggin's new terminology, standard approach to handling attempts to do something - "its only a forecast, nothing conclusive, yet".

Raymond Ningeocheak, NTIs 2nd Vice-President, said, in justifying their stance on the bears:

“Much of the justification for the listing [of the bears as endangered] is based on a forecasted prediction of climate change and the depletion of sea ice, and incomplete scientific information on the western Hudson Bay polar bear population. They are speculating that there is a decline in the polar bear population,” said Ningeocheak. “Polar bears in Canada have shown a steady increase in number over the past 50 years. Furthermore, scientists know that polar bear populations are cyclical and fluctuate.”

NTI Press Release
March 7, 2007

I wish NTI hadn't gone that way. But who reads NTI press release?

The government of Nunavut on the other hand has consistently used Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (known as IQ for the phonetically challenged) as a tool in its determination of polar bear stocks and in setting quotas for the number of bears that can be killed in any year by local hunters and trappers. IQ is traditional knowledge - here's my simple explanation of my understanding of the concept: awareness of the minutiae of local physical circumstances and how they interact to effect survival. Currently in Nunavut IQ is gathered by chit-chatting with elders.

Using Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit at the beginning of 2005 the government increased the polar bear kill by 28% explicitly indicating that the number of bears had been increasing and not diminishing as most other government and NGO wildlife services were saying. This sent alarm bells ringing around the Northern pole countries about what maybe going on in the new territory in terms of managing wildlife. Subsequently the US Fish & Wildlife Service indicated they'd be checking how the territory arrived at its numbers:

A year after Nunavut increased its hunting quotas for polar bears, the United States government is going to review the numbers to see if any changes should be made to its trophy hunt policy for the territory.

American officials will take a close look at Nunavut's polar bear hunting quotas in a meeting with representatives of government, Inuit organizations and the scientific community in St. John's, NL next week.

The U.S. will use information gathered at the annual Polar Bear Technical Committee meeting to determine if bear populations now approved for U.S. trophy hunts are being managed properly.

"The Marine Mammals Protection Act requires that they be taken from populations that are managed sustainably and scientifically," says Peter Thomas of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Virginia.

CBC
February 6, 2006

Fast forward now to December 27, 2006 as the current US administration starts to get a bit green, least around the edges:

"The Bush administration has decided to propose listing the polar bear as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, putting the U.S. government on record as saying that global warming could drive one of the world's most recognizable animals out of existence.

.....

Identifying polar bears as threatened with extinction could have an enormous political and practical impact. As the world's largest bear and as an object of children's affection as well as Christmastime Coca-Cola commercials, the polar bear occupies an important place in the American psyche.

"We've reviewed all the available data that leads us to believe the sea ice the polar bear depends on has been receding," said the Interior official, who added that U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials have concluded that polar bears could be endangered within 45 years.

WaPo
December 27, 2006

So, where are we now? Who knows.

______________

*So what is Nunavut?

It's Canada's newest territory. Not a province, so it is not specifically defined in the Constitution. A child of the federal government so-to-speak. All its powers and responsibilities are laid out in federal legislation. The new territory was split off from what remains of the Northwest Territories on April 1, 1999. The formation of the new territory stemmed from a land claims agreement between the federal government and the Inuit The territory is 85% Inuit but the government is public meaning there is no racial divide, everyone within the territory can vote and everyone can be an active participant in political life if they want, this is in contrasted to most First Nation (Indian) land claim agreements mainly implemented below the 60th parallel where membership in the racial group is an issue and voting rights are determined on a racial basis.

**qullunaat
As they met more foreigners, the Inuit began to see them as fellow humans, but different; the widely used Inuit word for white person is kabloona (derived from qallunaat), which means something like "eyebrow stomachs," probably a reaction to whites' hairy bodies by the almost hairless Inuit. Paul Theroux

______________

Technorati Tags: Arctic, Canada, Cultural clashes?, Global Warming, Inuit, Nunavut, Politics, USA, Utopia

A deadly boring news day - in the middle of the Victoria Day weekend.

You just know it is not going to be an exciting or even interesting day, in the activities of the the world, when the CBC's hourly radio news broadcast leads with Elvis Stojko huffing and puffing about the evil Chinese and the Tibetans. Old skaters should just go away, in Stojko's case he could, likely much more productively then pontificating on an issue which simply made him sound ridiculous, continue to massage his poor ankles.

With this great start to the day I perused the main Canadian organized media and glanced at their US counter parts - the Sunday UK press I'd read the night before to give me something to think about as I fell asleep. Not much of anything to get the blood boiling or to even spark mild interest.

I then tuned into CBC's Sunday Edition. I held my breath and rolled my eyes to get through the weekly self-righteous voice editorial by Michael Enright, while hoping they, the CBC, might have something scheduled this morning that could vaguely hold my attention. Enright indicated that Nicolson Baker would be on in the second hour - interesting. Baker's new non-fiction book - "Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization" - is reviewed, commented on, in this month's New York Review of Books and he was recently interviewed by Ramona Koval (the podcast is "pass its due date" and unfortunately not still available) on the ABC's The Book Show [Just a thought, does the CBC ever have an original thought any longer. The impression I have of it now, my impression wasn't always this, is that it trails behind other interesting public media sources in regard to stories they follow. Something to think about for later?]

I get half way through the CBC interview of Baker and decided I prefer Ramona's chit-chat with him, so I've given up reading and listening to the standard media and have turned to The First Post which still, as a regular feature, has stunning single still photographs and series of photos that tell stories (is that photo-journalism?) as part of its menu of interesting world activity.

Two photo series I've been viewing are,

Nursery Crimes; and

Don't have nightmares:

Technorati Tags: books, Canada, CBC, Celebrity, China, Media, Musings, Nicholson Baker, photo-journalism, Tibet, Writers, writing

Early morning gaging - Condi Rice's ironic pontification!

The aftermath of cyclone Nargis is the top story of the CBC radio news this morning, least the early news.

As such, I woke to the strains of a whiny pontification from Condoleezza Rice about the junta in Burma which is blocking, or delaying, international aid groups access to the country to assist the local population. And doing it maybe for political reasons.

Rice, just back from another non-event trip talking "peace" in the militarized Land of Nod, expounding about a government's poor response to a natural disaster and thinking politics could be involved. Do the fates know no bounds?

Is this an example of dramatic irony?

As I remember Condi was out shoe shopping in NYC when her fellow US citizens - large numbers of politically unimportant poor blacks - were hanging by their finger-nails from roofs or wallowing in filth in a sports dome in New Orleans just a short while ago. She must have forgotten, eh. The usual, on the job, corporate/oldline media hasn't mentioned this nice twist of fate - i.e. a comparison of the Bushies response to Katrina and this Burmese fiasco to Nargis.

Who on earth can take anything said by any US official seriously or without a snicker or outright guffaw after Bush?

I just love it but I'm not use to having the fates use this literary technique on me before my coffee.

Technorati Tags: Burma, Hot Air, Huh, what?, Illusions, Irony?, Politics, Righteous, Sarcasm, The Mission, Two faced

To farewell or the farewell?

I was starting to think that I may have lost my mind as I read a piece today in an Aussie newspaper. The piece was sad, about the downunder SAS type who has just been killed in Afghanistan being shipped home for burial.

A grim fact I detest, but that is not what had my interest.

What had my interest was the headline:

Fallen soldier farewelled in Afghanistan

I thought, oh shit it's Murdoch's clowns taking liberties with our shared mother-tongue again. And this one shows his new Americanisation because it is fing hard on the ear - another noun shifted to being a verb, JhC!

I found, however, after a Google search for "farewelled" other interesting uses of that, what I thought was a bastard, word and all related to sad events for people on the other side of the international dateline.

Wollongong Senior Constable Brett Wright was so determined to farewell his "perfect love" he attended her funeral in a hospital bed yesterday.

Policewoman farewelled
Illawarra Mercury
April 30, 2008

Button to be farewelled at state funeral

‘Fun-loving’ baby Grace farewelled

So what is it? Farewell that is.

My hard copy of the OED says it is a verb. But I think it is a noun and my online - within Mac's operating system - dictionary based on the New Oxford American Dictionary, 2nd Edition, says it agrees with me, it's a noun.

Turns out there is a particularity with New Zealand English (small pdf), adopted I guess also by the Australians which tries to run between British English and American English and "farewelled" is one of its outcomes.

To me it's funny just how harsh the word is on my ear, it's like the joual of "oui" but the latter is pronunciation and the former is, in my mind, a confused part of speech.

Technorati Tags: Curious, Interesting, New Zealand, Nothing in particular,eh!, Nouns?, Verbs?, Words